Tales of Old Earth (13 page)

“I want you naked,” Betelheimer growled. He was only dimly visible in the gloom. The springs groaned when he fell onto the bed. He pulled off his clothes quickly, angrily, throwing his boots noisily across the room. The Lady Nakashima undressed more slowly, more deliberately.

“May I retain my mask?”

“I don't give a shit if I never see your face again.”

With a whisper of silk, the last of her clothing slipped to the floor. Against Security's objections, she put the cloak aside. She powered down her mask; it was only a mask now. Betelheimer grinned nastily as she knelt down on the bed.

“That's more like—” Reaching for her, he clumsily knocked a framed picture from the end table. Petit bourgeois reflexes kicked in and he leaned over to retrieve it. It was a steelpoint portrait of Dante Alighieri.

Betelheimer's brows knitted. “It's that damned allegorist again. His fucking picture is everywhere in this town. Why?” She said nothing. “I asked you a question, whore! He never lived here—he was a goddamned Florentine. What is he to you?”

“He was a
fuoruscito
,” the Lady Nakashima said quietly. “An exile. His political enemies had expelled him from his own city. He was a man who understood the pain of loss. Like us.”

Something in her voice burned through the German's haze of alcohol and self-pity. Brusquely, he swung up a hand to trip a switch beam.

Light flared.

The Lady Nakashima was of a height with the Lady Christiaana, but that was all. The light revealed her ten-years-older breasts, her softening belly, her heavier thighs, her shorter legs. Sober, Gerhardt Betelheimer could never have confused the two.

He stared up in horror. “You're not her!”

“So I told you.”

She looked down at his stocky torso, his round and pinkish stomach, with mingled compassion and disdain. His face was a parody of remorse; he was capable only of the extremes of emotion, it seemed, anger or anguish but nothing in between. His hands tried to cover his erect penis. It bounced free of them, like a ridiculous rubber toy. “You're not her,” he repeated. “Oh God. Oh God. Forgive me, I—I mistook you for somebody else.”

She touched his lips with one cool finger.

“Your lady made a promise. I will keep it for her.” A gesture dimmed the lights, returning the mask of twilight to the room. Reaching into darkness, she moved his hands to her hips.

“But why?” he asked.

“What binds one of us,” she said, “binds us all.”

And she did for him as had been promised.

For this was the Lady Nakashima honored in the boardrooms and palazzos, and by her husband as well. Gerhardt Betelheimer found work with the Bache-Rockefeller Commune, and in later years rose high in the councils of Venice. The Lady Christiaana was censured for her part in the affair, a setback that took her most of a decade to recover from.

This is a story the
fuorisoli
tell and here is the lesson they wish you to take away from it: They lost Manhattan; they lost Japan; they lost Britain and Hong Kong and Taiwan out of the folly of their arrogance. When anticorporate ideologies first swept the globe they relied entirely on hirelings and employees to fight their battles. They did not accept responsibility. They enjoyed the fruit that others had planted and thus it was taken away from them. But this final island they would not lose.

Here they would make their stand.

7

Mother Grasshopper

In the Year One, we came in an armada of a million spacecraft to settle upon, colonize, and claim for our homeland this giant grasshopper on which we now dwell.

We dared not land upon the wings for, though the cube-square rule held true and their most rapid motions would be imperceptible on a historic scale, random nerve firings resulted in pre-movement tremors measured at Richter 11. So we opted to build in the eyes, in the faceted mirrorlands that reflected infinities of flatness, a shimmering Iowa, the architecture of home.

It was an impossible project and one, perhaps, that was doomed from the start. But such things are obvious only in retrospect. We were a young and vigorous race then. Everything seemed possible.

Using shaped temporal fields, we force-grew trees which we cut down to build our cabins. We planted sod and wheat and buffalo. In one vivid and unforgettable night of technology we created a layer of limestone bedrock half a mile deep upon which to build our towns. And when our work was done, we held hoe-downs in a thousand county seats all across the eye-lands.

We created new seasons, including Snow, after the patterns of those we had known in antiquity, but the night sky we left unaltered, for this was to be our home … now and forever. The unfamiliar constellations would grow their own legends over the ages; there would be time. Generations passed, and cities grew with whorls of suburbs like the arms of spiral galaxies around them, for we were lonely, as were the thousands and millions we decanted who grew like the trees of the cisocellar plains that were as thick as the ancient Black Forest.

I was a young man, newly bearded, hardly much more than a shirt-tail child, on that Harvest day when the stranger walked into town.

This was so unusual an event (and for you to whom a town of ten thousand necessarily means that there
will be strangers
, I despair of explaining) that children came out to shout and run at his heels, while we older citizens, conscious of our dignity, stood in the doorways of our shops, factories, and co-ops to gaze ponderously in his general direction. Not quite
at
him, you understand, but over his shoulder, into the flat, mesmeric plains and the infinite white skies beyond.

He claimed to have come all the way from the equatorial abdomen, where gravity is three times eye-normal, and this was easy enough to believe, for he was ungodly strong. With my own eyes I once saw him take a dollar coin between thumb and forefinger and bend it in half—and a steel dollar at that! He also claimed to have walked the entire distance, which nobody believed, not even me.

“If you'd walked even half that far,” I said, “I reckon you'd be the most remarkable man as ever lived.”

He laughed at that and ruffled my hair. “Well, maybe I am,” he said. “Maybe I am.”

I flushed and took a step backwards, hand on the bandersnatch-skin hilt of my fighting knife. I was as feisty as a bantam rooster in those days, and twice as quick to take offense. “Mister, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to step outside.”

The stranger looked at me. Then he reached out and, without the slightest hint of fear or anger or even regret, touched my arm just below the shoulder. He did it with no particular speed and yet somehow I could not react fast enough to stop him. And that touch, light though it was, paralyzed my arm, leaving it withered and useless, even as it is today.

He put his drink down on the bar, and said, “Pick up my knapsack.”

I did.

“Follow me.”

So it was that without a word of farewell to my family or even a backward glance, I left New Auschwitz forever.

That night, over a campfire of eel grass and dried buffalo chips, we ate a dinner of refried beans and fatback bacon. It was a new and clumsy experience for me, eating one-handed. For a long time, neither one of us spoke. Finally I said, “Are you a magician?”

The stranger sighed. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe I am.”

“You have a name?”

“No.”

“What do we do now?”

“Business.” He pushed his plate toward me. “I cooked. It's your turn to wash.”

Our business entailed constant travel. We went to Brinkerton with cholera and to Roxborough with typhus. We passed through Denver and Venice and Saint Petersburg and left behind fleas, rats, and plague. In Upper Black Eddy, it was ebola. We never stayed long enough to see the results of our work, but I read the newspapers afterwards, and it was about what you would expect.

Still,
on the whole
, humanity prospered. Where one city was decimated, another was expanding. The overspilling hospitals of one county created a market for the goods of a dozen others. The survivors had babies.

We walked to Tylersburg, Rutledge, and Union town and took wagons to Shoemakersville, Confluence, and South Gibson. Booked onto steam trains for Mount Lebanon, Mount Bethel, Mount Aetna, and Mount Nebo and diesel trains to McKeesport, Reinholds Station, and Broomall. Boarded buses to Carbondale, Feasterville. June Bug, and Lincoln Falls. Caught commuter flights to Paradise, Nickel Mines, Niantic, and Zion. The time passed quickly.

Then one shocking day my magician announced that he was going home.

“Home?” I said. “What about your work?”

“
Our
work, Daniel,” he said gently. “I expect you'll do as good a job as ever I did.” He finished packing his few possessions into a carpet bag.

“You can't!” I cried.

With a wink and a sad smile, he slipped out the door.

For a time—long or short, I don't know—I sat motionless, unthinking, unseeing. Then I leaped to my feet, threw open the door, and looked up and down the empty street. Blocks away, toward the train station, was a scurrying black speck.

Leaving the door open behind me, I ran after it.

I just missed the afternoon express to Lackawanna. I asked the stationmaster when was the next train after it. He said tomorrow. Had he seen a tall man carrying a carpetbag, looking thus and so? Yes, he had. Where was he? On the train to Lackawanna. Nothing more heading that way today. Did he know where I could rent a car? Yes, he did. Place just down the road.

Maybe I'd've caught the magician if I hadn't gone back to the room to pick up my bags. Most likely not. At Lackawanna station I found he'd taken the bus to Johnstown. In Johnstown, he'd moved on to Erie and there the trail ran cold. It took me three days' hard questioning to pick it up again.

For a week I pursued him thus, like a man possessed.

Then I awoke one morning and my panic was gone. I knew I wasn't going to catch my magician anytime soon. I took stock of my resources, counted up what little cash-money I had, and laid out a strategy. Then I went shopping. Finally, I hit the road. I'd have to be patient, dogged, wily, but I knew that, given enough time, I'd find him.

Find him, and kill him too.

The trail led me to Harper's Ferry, at the very edge of the oculus. Behind was civilization. Ahead was nothing but thousands of miles of empty chitin-lands.

People said he'd gone south, off the lens entirely.

Back at my boarding house, I was approached by one of the lodgers. He was a skinny man with a big mustache and sleeveless white t-shirt that hung from his skinny shoulders like wet laundry on a muggy Sunday.

“What you got in that bag?”

“Black death,” I said, “infectious meningitis, tuberculosis. You name it.”

He thought for a bit. “I got this wife,” he said at last. “I don't suppose you could …”

“I'll take a look at her,” I said, and hoisted the bag.

We went upstairs to his room.

She lay in the bed, eyes closed. There was an IV needle in her arm, hooked up to a drip feed. She looked young, but of course that meant nothing. Her hair, neatly brushed and combed, lay across the coverlet almost to her waist, was white—white as snow, as death, as finest bone china.

“How long has she been like this?” I asked.

“Ohhhh …” He blew out his cheeks. “Forty-seven, maybe fifty years?”

“You her father?”

“Husband. Was, anyhow. Not sure how long the vows were meant to hold up under these conditions: can't say I've kept 'em any too well. You got something that bag for her?” He said it as casual as he could, but his eyes were big and spooked-looking.

I made my decision. “Tell you what,” I said. “I'll give you forty dollars for her.”

“The sheriff wouldn't think much of what you just said,” the man said low and quiet.

“No. But then, I suppose I'll be off of the eye-lands entirely before he knows a word of it.”

I picked up my syringe.

“Well? Is it a deal or not?”

Her name was Victoria. We were a good three days march into the chitin before she came out of the trance state characteristic of the interim zombie stage of Recovery. I'd fitted her with a pack, walking shoes, and a good stout stick, and she strode along head up, eyes blank, speaking in the tongues of angels afloat between the stars.

“—cisgalactic phase intercept,” she said. “Do you read? Das Uberraumboot zuruckgegenerinnernte. Verstehen? Anadaemonic mesotechnological conflict strategizing. Drei tausenden Affen mit Laseren! Hello? Is anybody—”

Then she stumbled over a rock, cried out in pain, and said, “Where am I?”

I stopped, spread a map on the ground, and got out my pocket gravitometer. It was a simple thing: a glass cylinder filled with aerogel and a bright orange ceramic bead. The casing was tin, with a compressor screw at the top, a calibrated scale along the side, and the words “Flynn & Co.” at the bottom. I flipped it over, watched the bead slowly fall. I tightened the screw a notch, then two, then three, increasing the aerogel's density. At five, the bead stopped. I read the gauge, squinted up at the sun, and then jabbed a finger on an isobar to one edge of the map.

“Right here,” I said. “Just off the lens. See?”

“I don't—” She was trembling with panic. Her dilated eyes shifted wildly from one part of the empty horizon to another. Then suddenly, sourcelessly, she burst into tears.

Embarrassed, I looked away. When she was done crying, I patted the ground. “Sit.” Sniffling, she obeyed. “How old are you, Victoria?”

“How old am …? Sixteen?” she said tentatively. “Seventeen?” Then, “Is that really my name?”

“It was. The woman you were grew tired of life, and injected herself with a drug that destroys the ego and with it all trace of personal history.” I sighed. “So in one sense you're still Victoria, and in another sense you're not. What she did was illegal, though; you can never go back to the oculus. You'd be locked into jail for the rest of your life.”