Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (42 page)

God, it was quiet!

He found himself remembering a trip he’d taken with Ellen a lifetime ago, the honeymoon trip they’d spent driving up the California coast on old Route 1, and how somewhere, after dark, just north of Big Sur, on the way to spend the night in a B&B in Monterey (where they would fuck so vigorously on the narrow bed that they’d tip it over, and the guy in the room below would pound on the ceiling to complain, making them laugh uncontrollably in spite of attempts to shoosh each other, as they sprawled on the floor in a tangle of bedclothes, drenched in each other’s sweat), they pulled over for a moment at a vista-point. He remembered getting out of the car in the dark, with the invisible ocean breathing on their left, and, looking up, being amazed by how many stars you could see in the sky here, a closely-packed bowl of stars surrounding you on all sides except where the darker-black against black silhouette of the hills took a bite out of it. Stars all around you, millions of them, coldly flaming, indifferent, majestic, remote. If you watched the night sky too long, he’d realized then, feeling the cold salt wind blow in off the unseen ocean and listening to the hollow boom and crash of waves against the base of the cliff far below, the chill of the stars began to seep into you, and you began to get an uneasy reminder of how vast the universe really
was—
or how small
you
were. It was knowledge you had to turn away from eventually, before that chill sank too deeply into your bones; you had to pull back from it, shrug it off, try to immerse yourself again in your tiny human life, do your best to once more wrap yourself in the conviction that the great wheel of the universe revolved around
you
instead, and that everyone else and everything else around you, the mountains, the vast breathing sea, the sky itself, were merely spear-carriers or theatrical backdrops in the unique drama of your life, a vitally important drama unlike anything that had ever gone before . . . But once faced with the true vastness of the universe, once you’d had that chill insight, alone under the stars, it was hard to shake the realization that you were only a miniscule fleck of matter, that existed for a span of time so infinitely, vanishingly short that it couldn’t even be measured on the clock of geologic time, by the birth and death of mountains and seas, let alone on the vastly greater clock that ticks away how long it takes the great flaming wheel of the Galaxy to whirl around itself, or one galaxy to wheel around another. That the shortest blink of the cosmic Eye would still be aeons too long to notice your little life at all.

Against that kind of immensity, what did “immortality” mean, for either human or machine? A million years, a day—from that perspective, they were much the same.

There was a throb of pain in his temple now. A tension headache starting? Or a stroke? It would be ironic if a blood vessel burst in his brain and killed him before he even had a chance to make up his mind.

One way or the other, time was almost up. Either his corporeal life or his terrestrial one ended today. Either way, he wouldn’t be back here again. He looked slowly around the room, examining every detail, things that had been there for so long that they’d faded into the background and he didn’t really
see
them anymore: a set of bronze door-chimes, hung over the back door, that he and Ellen had bought in Big Sur; an ornamental glass ball in a woven net; a big brown-and-cream vase from a cluttered craft shop in Seattle; a crockery sun-face they’d gotten in Albuquerque; a wind-up toy carousel that played “The Carousel Waltz.” Familiar mugs and cups and bowls, worn smooth with age. A framed
Cirque Du Soleil
poster, decades old now. One of Sam’s old stuffed animals, a battered tiger with one ear drooping, tucked away on a shelf of the high kitchen cabinet, and never touched or moved again.

Strange that he had gotten rid of Ellen’s photograph, ostentatiously made a point of
not
displaying it, but kept all the rest of these things, all the memorabilia of their years together—as though subconsciously he was expecting her to come back, to step back into his life as simply as she’d stepped out it, and pick up where they’d left off. But that wasn’t going to happen. If they were to have any life together, it would be very far away from here, and under conditions that were unimaginably strange. Would he have the courage to face that, would he have the strength to deal with starting a new life? Or was his soul too old, too tired, too tarnished, no matter what nanomagic tricks the Mechanicals could play with his physical body?

Joseph was gesturing urgently to him again, waving both arms over his head from the middle of Rembrandt’s
The Night Watch.
He released the valet from reserve-mode, and Joseph immediately appeared beside the kitchen table, contriving somehow to look flustered. “I have this Highest Priority message for you, sir, although I don’t know where it came from or how it was placed in my system. All it says is, ‘You don’t have much time.’”

“I know, Joseph,” Czudak said, cutting him off. “It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to tell you—” Czudak paused, suddenly uncertain what to say. “I just wanted to tell you that, whichever way things go, you’ve been a good friend to me, and I appreciate it.”

Joseph looked at him oddly. “Of course, sir,” he said. How much of this could he really understand? It was way outside of his programming parameters, even with adaptable learning-algorithms. “But the message—”

Czudak spoke him off, and he was gone. Just like that. Vanished. Gone. And if he was never spoken on again, would it make any difference to him? Even if Joseph had known in advance that he’d never be spoken on again, that there would be nothing from this moment on but non-existence, blankness, blackness, nothingness, would he have cared?

Czudak stood up.

As he started across the room, he realized that the time-travelers were still there. Rank on rank of them, filling the room with jostling ghosts, thousands of them, millions of them perhaps, a vast insubstantial crowd of them that he couldn’t see, but that he could
feel
were there. Waiting. Watching. Watching
him.
He stopped, stunned, for the first time beginning to believe in the presence of the time-travelers as a real phenomenon, and not just a half-senile fancy of his decaying brain.

This
is what they were here to see. This moment. His decision.

But why? Were they students of obscure old-recescension political scandals, here to witness his betrayal of his old principles, the way you might go back to witness Benedict Arnold sealing his pact with the British or Nixon giving the orders for Watergate? Were they triumphant future descendants of the Meats, here to watch the heroic moment when he threw the Mechanicals’ offer of immortality defiantly back in their teflon faces, perhaps inspiring some sort of human resistance movement? Or were they here to witness the birth of his new life after he
accepted
that offer, because of something he had
yet
to do, something he would go on to do centuries or thousands of years from now? And who
were
they? Were they his own human descendants, from millions of years in the future, evolved into strange beings with godlike powers?

Or were they the descendants of the Mechanicals, grown to a ghostly discorporate strangeness of their own?

He walked forward, feeling the watching shadows part around him, close in again close behind. He still didn’t know what he was going to do. It would have been so easy to make this decision when he was young. Young and strong and self-righteous, full of pride and determination and integrity. He would have turned the Mechanicals down flat, indignantly, with loathing, not hesitating for a moment,
knowing
what was right. He already
had
done that once, in fact, long before, teaching them that they couldn’t buy
him,
no matter what coin they offered to pay in! He wasn’t for sale!

Now, he wasn’t so sure.

Now, hobbling painfully toward the front door, feeling pain lance through his head at every step, feeling his knee throb, he was struck by a sudden sense of what it would be like to be young again—to suddenly be
young
again, all at once, in a second! To put all the infirmities and indignities of age aside, like shedding a useless skin. To feel life again, really feel it, in a hot hormonal rush of whirling emotions, a maelstrom of scents, sounds, sights, tastes, touch, all at full strength rather than behind an insulating wall of glass, life loud and vulgar and blaring at top volume rather than whispering in the slowly diminishing voice of a dying radio, life where you could touch it, all your nerves jumping just under your skin, rather than feeling the world pulling slowly away from you, withdrawing, fading away with a sullen murmur, like a tide that has gone miles out from the beach . . .

Czudak opened his front door, and stepped out onto the high white marble stoop.

The Meats had moved their demonstration over from the park, and were now camped out in front of his house, filling the street in their hundreds, blocking traffic. They were still beating their drums and blowing on their horns and whistles, although he hadn’t heard anything inside the house; the Mechanical’s doing, perhaps. A great wave of sound puffed in to greet him when he opened the door, though, blaring and vivid, smacking into his face with almost physical force. When he stepped out onto the stoop, the drums and horns began to falter and fall silent one by one, and a startled hush spread out over the crowd, like ripples spreading out over the surface of a pond from a thrown stone, until there was instead of noise an expectant silence made up of murmurs and whispers, noises not quite heard. And then even that almost-noise stopped, as if the world had taken a deep breath and held it, waiting, and he looked out over a sea of expectant faces, looking back at him, turned up toward him like flowers turned toward the sun.

A warm breeze came up, blowing across the park, blowing from the distant corners of the Earth, tugging at his hair. It smelled of magnolias and hyacinths and new-mown grass, and it stirred the branches of the trees around him, making them lift and shrug. The horizon to the west was a glory of clouds, hot gold, orange, lime, scarlet, coral, fiery purple, with the sun a gleaming orange coin balanced on the very rim of the world, ready to teeter and fall off. The rest of the sky was a delicate pale blue, fading to plum and ash to the East, out toward the distant ocean. The full moon was already out, a pale perfect disk, like a bone-white face peering with languid curiosity down on the ancient earth. A bird began to sing, trilling liquidly, somewhere out in the gathering darkness.

Exultation opened hotly inside him, like a wound. God, he loved the world!

Throwing his head back, he began to speak.

The Storm

Introduction to The Storm

“The Storm” comes from a time in Gardner Dozois’ career when I only knew him as a name, usually seen in the
Orbit
anthologies. I grouped him with Wolfe, Wilhelm, Lafferty and others as one of the powerful new New Wave talents Damon Knight was showcasing in his series, in an all-out effort to change and improve science fiction yet again. Each decade from the 1930’s on, science fiction had grown in leaps and bounds, as if the years with zeroes in them were cliffs that the genre was nimbly bounding up; and now, in the early 1970’s, it was happening again. Dozois was a slinky and exotic name, and the stories under the name were similar: beautifully written, strange and powerful. Sharing all these qualities, “The Storm” fits right in with the other stories of that era (indeed in many ways it is a reversal of “The Last Day of July”), but as it first appeared in a Roger Elwood anthology, I did not see it at that time. Now it is good to have it reappear before me, as if out of a time capsule. For one thing, I like recalling that paper Dozois of the early ‘70’s, unknown to me. Not that the real person is any kind of let-down; on the contrary; but now that Gardner is a friend, and functions so ably as the mayor of science fiction, performing the crucial community task of Most Important SF Editor, perhaps the single most knowledgeable and powerful person in terms of shaping the field, it is harder to remember just how dark and singular his own fiction has been. Like several other New Wave writers, his was often a poetry of entropy, and while stories like “The Storm” evoke memories of Bradbury’s tales of childhood, I think the more accurate reference would be to Edgar Allan Poe: there is the same economy of means, the same kind of simple, memorable central idea, expressed in vivid prose, and focusing on chaos, defeat, and the dark parts of the mind. These are aspects of the work that the presence of the person we know and love can obscure.

Now, I don’t think it is revealing too many plot secrets of this story to tell you that it is about a storm. And what a storm it is. People who do not live on the East Coast of the United States may think that it has been exaggerated for fictional purposes, but I have seen storms there for which the descriptions in this story would be perfectly apt—in fact there is an admirable accuracy to the details of Gardner’s physical descriptions. I have spent a good deal of time outdoors, in many places, and seen some big storms, including winter blizzards while snow-camping, when they really meant something, and yet still, in the mere four years I lived on the East Coast I saw perhaps ten storms more violent than almost any I have seen anywhere else. They are the most striking part of that forested and claustrophobic landscape, and so among other good things, this is a story about a particular place and its climate. The beauty of the story comes in large part from Gardner’s perhaps overlooked abilities as a nature writer!

One of these awesome East Coast storms I was privileged to witness in the company of Gardner himself. We were with a group in a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia—already a questionable proposition, the margaritas served in martini glasses and so on—and a violent thunderstorm broke out, as if to rebuke us for being there; so violent that eventually lightning struck a power pole outside and the restaurant went dark, and rushing to a window we saw a transformer on the pole burning furiously. By the lurid blue light of the spitting flames I saw Gardner’s happy face, feasting on the sight, enjoying yet another of those special moments that had managed to match the intensity of his fiction.

Kim Stanley Robinson