Tales of Old Earth (15 page)

The antenna.

Even driving the pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach its base.

On the morning of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her breakfast and ran for the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to be had for hundreds of miles around.

I listened to her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.

She came back, pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag. “Pee into this,” I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up positive.

“Victoria,” I said. “I've got an admission to make. I haven't been exactly straight with you about the medical consequences of your … condition.”

It was the only time I ever saw her afraid. “My God,” she said, “What is it? Tell me! What's happening to me?”

“Well, to begin with, you're pregnant.”

There were no roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off. It lay nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and trackless plains about it, you'd think there was neither reason for its existence nor possibility of any significant traffic there.

Yet the closer we got, the more people we saw approaching it. They appeared out of the everywhere and nothingness like hydrogen atoms being pulled into existence in the stressed spaces between galaxies, or like shards of ice crystallizing at random in supercooled superpure water. You'd see one far to your left, maybe strolling along with a walking stick slung casually over one shoulder and a gait that just told you she was whistling. Then beyond her in the distance a puff of dust from what could only be a half-track. And to the right, a man in a wide-brimmed hat sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle of a native parasite larger than any elephant. With every hour a different configuration, and all converging.

Roads materialized underfoot. By the time we arrived at the terminus, they were thronged with people.

The terminal building itself was as large as a city, all gleaming white marble arches and colonnades and parapets and towers. Pennants snapped in the wind. Welcoming musicians played at the feet of the columns. An enormous holographic banner dopplering slowly through the rainbow from infrared to ultraviolet and back again, read:

B
YZANTIUM
P
ORT
A
UTHORITY

M
AGNETIC
-L
EVITATION
M
ASS
T
RANSIT
D
IVISION

G
ROUND
T
ERMINUS

Somebody later told me it provided employment for a hundred thousand people, and I believed him.

Victoria and I parked the truck by the front steps. I opened the door for her and helped her gingerly out. Her belly was enormous by then, and her sense of balance was off. We started up the steps. Behind us, a uniformed lackey got in the pickup and drove it away.

The space within was grander than could have been supported had the terminus not been located at the cusp of antenna and forehead, where the proximate masses each canceled out much of the other's attraction. There were countless ticket windows, all of carved mahogany. I settled Victoria down on a bench—her feet were tender—and went to stand in line. When I got to the front, the ticket-taker glanced at a computer screen and said, “May I help you, sir?”

“Two tickets, first-class. Up.”

He tapped at the keyboard and a little device spat out two crisp pasteboard tickets. He slid them across the polished brass counter, and I reached for my wallet. “How much?” I said.

He glanced at his computer and shook his head. “No charge for you, Mister Daniel. Professional courtesy.”

“How did you know my name?”

“You're expected.” Then, before I could ask any more questions, “That's all I can tell you, sir. I can neither speak nor understand your language. It is impossible for me to converse with you.”

“Then what the hell,” I said testily, “are we doing now?”

He flipped the screen around for me to see. On it was a verbatim transcript of our conversation. The last line was: I SIMPLY READ WHAT'S ON THE SCREEN, SIR.

Then he turned it back toward himself and said, “I simply read what's—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said. And went back to Victoria.

Even at mag-lev speeds, it took two days to travel the full length of the antenna. To amuse myself, I periodically took out my gravitometer and made readings. You'd think the figures would diminish exponentially as we climbed out of the gravity well. But because the antennae swept backward, over the bulk of the grasshopper, rather than forward and away, the gravitational gradient of our journey was quite complex. It lessened rapidly at first, grew temporarily stronger, and then lessened again, in the complex and lovely flattening sine-wave known as a Sheffield curve. You could see it reflected in the size of the magnetic rings we flashed through, three per minute, how they grew skinnier then fatter and finally skinnier still as we flew upward.

On the second day, Victoria gave birth. It was a beautiful child, a boy. I wanted to name him Hector, after my father, but Victoria was set on Jonathan, and as usual I gave in to her.

Afterwards, though, I studied her features. There were crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes, or maybe “laugh lines” is more appropriate, given Victoria's personality. The lines to either side of her mouth had deepened. Her whole face had a haggard cast to it. Looking at her, I felt a sadness so large and pervasive it seemed to fill the universe.

She was aging along her own exponential curve. The process was accelerating now, and I was not at all certain she would make it to Sky Terminus. It would be a close thing in either case.

I could see that Victoria knew it too. But she was happy as she hugged our child. “It's been a good life,” she said. “I wish you could have grown with me—don't pout, you're so solemn, Daniel!—but other than that I have no complaints.”

I looked out the window for a minute. I had known her for only—what?—a week, maybe. But in that brief time she had picked me up, shaken me off, and turned my life around. She had changed everything. When I looked back, I was crying.

“Death is the price we pay for children, isn't it?” she said. “Down below, they've made death illegal. But they're only fooling themselves. They think it's possible to live forever. They think there are no limits to growth. But everything dies—people, stars, the universe. And once it's over, all lives are the same length.”

“I guess I'm just not so philosophical as you. It's a damned hard thing to lose your wife.”

“Well, at least you figured that one out.”

“What one?

“That I'm your wife.” She was silent a moment. Then she said, “I had another dream. About your magician. And he explained about the drug. The one he called mortality.”

“Huh,” I said. Not really caring.

“The drug I took, you wake up and you burn through your life in a matter of days. With the new version, you wake up with a normal human lifespan, the length people had before the immortality treatments. One hundred fifty, two hundred years—that's not so immediate. The suicides are kept alive because their deaths come on so soon; it's too shocking to the survivors' sensibilities. The new version shows its effects too slowly to be stopped.”

I stroked her long white hair. So fine. So very, very brittle. “Let's not talk about any of this.”

Her eyes blazed “Let's
do!
Don't pretend to be a fool, Daniel. People multiply. There's only so much food, water, space. If nobody dies, there'll come a time when everybody dies.” Then she smiled again, fondly, the way you might at a petulant but still promising child. “You know what's required of you, Daniel. And I'm proud of you for being worthy of it.”

Sky Terminus was enormous, dazzling, beyond description. It was exactly like in Vickie's dream. I helped her out onto the platform. She could barely stand by then, but her eyes were bright and curious. Jonathan was asleep against my chest in a baby-sling.

Whatever held the atmosphere to the platform, it offered no resistance to the glittering, brilliantly articulated ships that rose and descended from all parts. Strange cargoes were unloaded by even stranger longshoremen.

“I'm not as excited by all this as I would've been when I was younger,” Victoria murmured. “But somehow I find it more satisfying. Does that make sense to you?”

I began to say something. But then, abruptly, the light went out of her eyes. Stiffening, she stared straight ahead of herself into nothing that I could see. There was no emotion in her face whatsoever.

“Vickie?” I said.

Slowly, she tumbled to the ground.

It was then, while I stood stunned and unbelieving, that the magician came walking up to me.

In my imagination I'd run through this scene a thousand times: Leaving my bag behind, I stumbled off the train, toward him. He made no move to escape. I flipped open my jacket with a shrug of the shoulder, drew out the revolver with my good hand, and fired.

Now, though …

He looked sadly down at Victoria's body and put an arm around my shoulders.

“God,” he said, “don't they just break your heart?”

I stayed on a month at the Sky Terminus to watch my son grow up. Jonathan died without offspring and was given an orbital burial. His coffin circled the grasshopper seven times before the orbit decayed and it scratched a bright meteoric line down into the night. The flare lasted about as long as would a struck sulfur match.

He'd been a good man, with a wicked sense of humor that never came from my side of the family.

So now I wander the world. Civilizations rise and fall about me. Only I remain unchanged. Where things haven't gotten too bad, I scatter mortality. Where they have I unleash disease.

I go where I go and I do my job. The generations rise up like wheat before me, and like a harvester I mow them down. Sometimes—not often—I go off by myself, to think and remember. Then I stare up into the night, into the colonized universe, until the tears rise up in my sight and drown the swarming stars.

I am Death and this is my story.

8

Riding the Giganotosaur

“How does it feel?”

“It feels
great
!”

The physical therapist lifted one of George Weskowski's arms and flexed it, to check its range of motion. It took all of her strength to do so, even though George wasn't resisting. She frowned. “No need to roar,” she chided.

“Sorry.”

“There's a transmitter chip connected to your speech centers. Just subvocalize, and I can pick up what you're saying on this radio. Tell me how your head feels.”

He considered. “Fine. Just fine.”

“No aches, itches, irritation around the sutures?”

“No.”

“Dizziness, nausea, hallucinations, phantom sounds or smells, mood swings, loss of appetite?”

“I could eat a horse!”

The therapist held up a mirror. “Now look at yourself.”

His skin was green, mottled with yellow, and covered with pebbly scales. His eyes were small, beady, homicidal. His arms, massive compared to what he had once possessed but puny compared to the rest of his new body, ended in three scimitar-taloned fingers. His legs were enormous. So was his tail. Opening his mouth revealed a murderous array of razor-sharp teeth.

“Oh yes,” he cried rapturously. “Yes, oh my goodness, yes, absolutely, yes, yes.”

“You like it?”

“It's everything I ever dreamed of being.”

“The appearance doesn't bother you?”

“I look terrific!”

He did, too.
Giganotosaurus
was the biggest, baddest predator ever to walk the Earth—larger, heavier, and more fearsome even than the old record-holder,
Tyrannosaurus rex
. “The king is dead,” George whispered to himself. “Long live the king.”

“What was that?”

“I said I'm eager to begin therapy, Dr. Alvarez.”

“Good. Then let's try standing up.”

This, however, was nowhere near so satisfactory. George lurched eagerly to his knees and promptly overbalanced. He leaned against the side of the barn, making the wood creak, to ease his descent to the straw-covered ground. “Damn!”

“Careful—you weigh over eight tons now. And your leg bones are hollow—like a bird's. You could easily break one doing that.”

“I'll remember.”

“Good. Now your problem is that you're
pushing
it. It's only your forebrain we've grafted atop the existing brain, remember, and it isn't familiar with the body. However, the hindbrain knows what to do. All the motor skills are already fully functional. Don't intellectualize. Just picture what you want. The original brain has no defenses against you; it accepts your thoughts as its own. What you have to do is learn to
ride
it.”

“I'll try,” he said humbly.

“Excellent. We'll begin by …”

Six hours later, George was walking easily around and around the corral. He had even essayed a few brief sprints, with varied results. As he walked, he breathed deeply of the Cretaceous air, savoring the intoxicating mix of greenery and resins, the dark, heady undersmell of decay.

Old Patagonia Station was located on a flood plain, with a fern prairie to one side, and a forest of towering conifers to the other. There was a stream nearby—he could smell it—and the glint of a lake far off in the distance. It was a fresh, wondrous, unexplored world, and he was anxious to be off and into it.

“When can I begin field work?” he asked.

Dr. Alvarez pursed her lips. “You're still recovering from the surgery. We won't be making that decision for a few weeks.”

“But …” He waved a futile little paw outward, toward the lands that stretched to a misty blue horizon and beyond, unspoiled, virginal, his for the taking. He'd have to travel clear around the world to encounter a man-made structure. All the way back to the time station and its out-buildings behind him—and once they were gone, there wouldn't be anything more like them for another ninety million years. “I thought I could get in some hunting before nightfall.”