Tales of Old Earth (23 page)

In silence they rode back uptown.

Rockefeller Center was clogged with people. The cabbie leaned on his horn and tried to force a way through, without success. So Ellen paid and got out.

“What's going on?” she asked a stranger.

“They're dedicating a statue.” He pointed to where Prometheus used to be. It had been replaced by a new sculpture. Down the avenue she could see parts of the old statue being hauled away, the head, a leg, an enormous bronze hand.

From this angle, the new statue looked like a cutaway model of New York City. Ellen could see all the tiny buildings lining its interior, the skyscrapers like stalactites and stalagmites pointing toward the central axis. Looked at from the outside and seen all at once, it was obviously in the shape of a human figure, legs together and arms outflung. The torso, she supposed, was Manhattan, with the Village down in the crotch.

A vertiginous wave of unreality washed through Ellen. It was true, she thought. The city
was
formed in the shape of a person. It was so obvious. How could she have never noticed it before?

“Well?” Dog said. “Aren't you going to go around to the front and see who it's of?”

With a bound, it was running ahead of her, barking joyfully. People hurried out of its way, making a path through the crowd which she followed effortlessly around to the front of the statue.

It was her. It was a statue of Ellen Gillespie in a space suit.

Ellen shivered. “This is bizarre.”

“Think of it as a wake-up call.”

“Hah?” Ellen stared down at the shaggy creature beside her. “What do you mean?”

“How obvious do I have to be?” asked Dog. There was a distinct edge in its voice. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”

Ellen looked directly into the animal's eyes. They were hard and cold. Suddenly she was afraid. Suddenly it didn't seem a soft and fluffy and lovable Dog at all.

As casually as she could—and continually fighting the urge to run—Ellen pushed her way out of the crowd and across Forty-eighth to Fifth Avenue, and stuck out her arm. A cab pulled up and she leaped inside, slamming the door before Dog could follow her.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked.

“I don't know—out. Away. Queens.”

“Closed.”

“The Bronx Zoo.”

“Not there any more.”

“The Whitney!”

The cabbie flipped the flag on the meter.

Behind her, she saw Dog raise a paw to hail another cab.

The Whitney was holding a Bill Viola retrospective. The place should have been thronged. But it was so completely deserted that there wasn't even anybody there to take her money. Her footsteps echoed noisily in the empty galleries. She was pretty sure she'd given her canine pursuer the slip. Now that she had, however, she had no idea what her next move should be.

In bleak desolation, Ellen wandered from installation to installation. In one room she saw her own image, reflected upside down in a drop of water and thrown up on a wall, shimmer and swell and then disappear as the drop fell with a soft
boom
onto a miked tambourine. Under ordinary circumstances, it was exactly the kind of art she liked best. Now it only filled her with dread.

A new drop of water was projected upon the wall. Within it, she saw Dog loom up behind her.

Briefly, she closed her eyes. Then she turned.

“All right,” she said. “What's going on?”

“New York City is being deconstructed.”

“Why?”

“You've been living in the past,” Dog said. “Now it's time to pull yourself together and resume your real life.”

With a pedantic wave of a paw, it directed her attention to the wall.

The projected water drop was gone, replaced by a space suit caught up in a tangle of machinery adrift in vacuum. Alongside the suit floated a featureless black sphere. Tendrils of energy flowed between suit and sphere. “The year is 2870. A starfreighter was ferrying a singularity engine to Beta Comae Berenices for the colony on New Amsterdam when the engines blew. Everybody died except for one person. The supercargo. You.”

“I'm blue collar?” Ellen cried, horrified.

“Supercargo is a perfectly respectable profession.” Dog turned toward the screen again. Now it showed a starship breaking up. Atomic fires flared. Bulkheads peeled away. “And you were a good spacer. You kept your head. With only seconds in which to act, you accessed the singularity and gave it a series of commands.”

Words flowed across the wall: SEND FOR HELP. KEEP ME ALIVE. KEEP ME SAFE. KEEP ME HEALTHY AND SANE.

“The singularity did what it could. It disassembled what bits of the ship remained to build the sub-space distress beacon. That didn't leave much to keep you alive with. So it used what it had: Your suit. And your body.

“It took you apart, and with your elements built a microscopic version of ancient Manhattan inside your space suit. Then it reconstructed you, with appropriate memories, inside that environment. I think you'll agree that it interpreted your commands well.”

“I don't have to listen to this,” Ellen said wildly. “I won't!”

She turned her back and walked away. Dog did not follow.

But there was no exit.

There was nothing but the Whitney, with its two and a half floors of video installations, its half-floor of abstract expressionism, its gift shop, and its rather basic ground-floor
patisserie
. The doors no longer existed, and all the windows looked out upon anymore was human blood and tissue.

All that was left of New York City was this one small bubble of space suspended within a world of her own flesh.

She found Dog waiting for her in the
patisserie
. Almost in tears, she demanded, “Why are you
doing
this to me?”

“The rescue ship has come,” it replied. “New York is no longer needed, so it's being dismantled.”

“That's what's become of Stasi, then? And Rudolfo and Gregor and everybody else? They've been destroyed?”

“They never were real. Only you were real. And now it's time for you to rejoin the outer world.” Dog lowered its voice persuasively. “That's why I'm here. To ease the way for you.”

“Ease the way?”

“It's your turn now.” Where a pastry cart had been was now a couch with brocaded red-and-green roses. “I want you to lie down and close your eyes. This won't take a minute.”

“Hey, wait. Hold on here. What if I don't want to?”

“Relax. This won't hurt a bit. You have my word on it.”

Ellen thought she detected a trace of unctuousness in Dog's voice. But she wasn't sure. To focus herself, she picked up a bread stick and carefully buttered it on one side, thinking only of the task at hand and how good it would taste. She was about to eat it, in spite of her diet, when a thought came to her.

She put the bread stick, untasted, down on a plate.

“Not so fast,” Ellen said slowly. “I said to keep me safe, and I said to call for help, but I didn't say anything about what to do when help came. Your orders didn't say anything about reconstructing me. So if I don't cooperate, I don't have to leave.”

For a long moment Dog was silent. Finally it said, “I was hoping you wouldn't realize that.”

“Well, I do. And I'm not cooperating!”

“Ellen, the singularity can't look after you and serve the needs of the New Amsterdam colony as well. It's needed there. They've reached the critical population mass where human beings alone can't run the society without wars and economic disasters. There are people dying for lack of what you're selfishly refusing to share.”

“I don't care,” Ellen said harshly. “Put it back. I want my life just the way it was—Rudy, the Village, my job, everything. You have to keep me healthy and sane, right? Well, this is making me feel distinctly unhealthy. I am definitely having unbalanced thoughts.”

Dog sighed. “As you wish,” it said. “So be it.”

Everything was back to normal.

To celebrate, Ellen held a party. She told the caterers from Too Cute to Cook to set out beluga on crackers, raw tuna wrapped in kelp, and crudites for the vegetarians, and to keep the Perignon flowing. Then she invited all her very best friends, and a few celebrities from the literary world, with a seasoning of strangers just to keep the mix from getting predictable.

It was fun. For a while.

But there came a moment … when Stasi was doing her impression of Richard Nixon voguing at the Rubber Club, and Rudolfo and Gregor were camping it up and exchanging desperate little kisses in the guise of making fun of themselves, and Tom Disch and Joyce Carol Oates were analyzing the latest John Grisham novel with delicate mockery, and a handsome stranger—a stockbroker who had come in with Esme and then high-handedly abandoned her—was giving Ellen the eye from the far side of the room … that she realized how empty it all felt.

None of it really mattered. None of them was real.

It was like finding herself trapped inside a television sitcom. Everybody was manic. Everybody was funny. They were all doing their damnedest to amuse her. And it had all the charm of canned laughter.

Meat puppets, she thought. They're all nothing more than meat puppets.

The handsome young stockbroker chose that moment to make his move. He strolled over to Ellen's chair and, putting one hand on its back, leaned over to murmur a cynical witticism in her ear. As he did, the other hand lightly clenched her knee.

Revolted, she pushed him away.

She shoved him so hard that the stockbroker fell over backward, right on his Armani-clad ass. Then Ellen stood and shouted, “Get out!”

The party fell silent. Everybody looked at her, shocked.

“Get out, get out, get out! You're not real, any of you! Why should I pretend you are?” And then, as mouths opened in protest, “Don't look hurt either!”

Mouths closed. Faces blank, her guests obediently filed out. In less than a minute the room was empty.

Ellen began to cry.

“Hell,” somebody said, “is no other people.”

Ellen looked up. Dog stood in the doorway. “Had enough?” it asked.

She nodded wearily.

“Good.” Taking her by the hand, Dog gently led Ellen to her bedroom. It sat her down on the bed. Through the open window, she could hear the city noises—traffic, sirens, saxophones—one by one shut themselves off.

Silence enfolded the universe.

At Dog's direction, Ellen kicked off her shoes and lay on her back. The mattress was soft and comforting. She crossed her hands on her chest. “What do I do now?”

“Close your eyes,” Dog said.

“I'm afraid.”

“There'll be an instant of darkness. Then you'll wake up in the larger world—the real world.”

A sudden spasm of doubt hit Ellen then, as cold and hard as a cupronickel asteroid in a decades-long orbit around a dead star. “Suppose I don't wake up? What if I just cease to be like all my fr—all the people I thought were my friends? I don't want that to happen to me.”

“Your rescuers are scrambling out of their airlock,” Dog said soothingly. “They're desperate to save you. They're coming just as fast as they can.”

“But I only have your word for that!”

“Now they can see your suit. Their hearts are filled with joy and hope. They're flying toward you with arms extended.”

A silk-soft paw brushed lightly over her face from forehead to chin. Reflexively, her eyelids fluttered shut.

“Have faith,” Dog said.

The darkness closed about her like a mouth.

12

In Concert

The posters had been plastered all over Sevastopol for a month, huge black-and-red things with only two words on them:

IN CONCERT

Nothing else. Just those two words and the harsh profile of a face so familiar to Tex that it sometimes seemed hard-wired into his neural structure, the outward expression of a truth encoded in his genes from birth. Time, place, and price had been omitted so the same posters could be used in every city of the tour. Everybody knew no tickets would ever reach the box office. Favors would be called in, backs scratched, envelopes stuffed with American currency exchanged. For weeks, the pasteboards had described complex orbits between the black market and the highest reaches of the Party hierarchy, each one being traded again and again, multiplying in value, greasing the wheels, the perfect bribe, the surest way of getting anything from a new Sony Walkman to a preferred position on the waiting lists for a bigger apartment.

Tonight they would all—tickets, favors, bribes—come to rest.

“Get up, you hooligan!”

Tex squinted up into the face of the squattest, ugliest woman he had ever seen. Shapeless dress, shapeless body, a red babushka from which dry wisps of grey hair struggled to escape. Twin lines from the corners of her mouth framed her chin, giving her the jaws of a turtle. Maybe she was a gnome.

“Hah?” He had been sitting at the bottom of a long flight of public steps, staring idly through the fumes and traffic at a lot across the prospekt. A makeshift market had been built there, where vendors sold vegetables, hot coffee, and flowers from small kiosks. He was working on a song. Trying to come up with a rhyme for “oblivion.”

“Don't sprawl like that! Shame on you! Who do you think you are to block everybody's passage?”

The steps rose past the white-walled city offices, and though it was not yet quitting time all the apparatchiks had left early to avoid the weekend crush of traffic to their country dachas. The buildings were empty and so were the stairs. Without saying a word, Tex put his guitar back into its case and closed the snaps. Swiping at the seat of his cheap Bulgarian jeans, he stood and smiled at her. She sniffed and turned away.

The No. 10 trolleybus arrived then, and Tex got on. A couple of people were ahead of him at the punch, so he didn't bother to cancel his ticket. He found a seat near the back and, gripping his guitar case between his knees, stared glumly out a scratched and dirty window, trying to imagine himself on stage, electric guitar slung low at the hip, and in the audience girls in punk leather screaming ecstatically. The old woman perversely took the seat beside him, though there were others available.