Tales of Old Earth (29 page)

A dozen flashes of light flickered in and out of existence, like a badly out of synch strobe. The reflected brilliance off the walls dazzled both Gail and Rob; clearly there had been an escalation in megatonnage. Gail slammed the door shut.

Rob sighed. “Well, I guess it was too much to expect them to outgrow war over the course of two minutes.” He looked helplessly at Gail. “But what do we do now?”

“Send out for a pizza?” she suggested.

The sun had set, leaving only a faint golden smear in the sky by the time they had finished the pizza. Rob ate the last, nearly-cold piece, and Gail dumped box and crusts in the cardboard box under the sink.

“It's been over two hours,” Rob said. “They must've had time to rebuild by now.”

Gail touched his arm, squeezed tenderly. “They may have killed themselves off, Rob. We have to face up to that possibility.”

“Yeah.” Rob pushed back his chair and stood. Feeling like John Wayne, he advanced on the refrigerator. “Let's go for it,” he said, and jerked the door open a sliver. Nothing happened. He opened it all the way.

The freezer was still intact. There was a black smear across one corner of the ice, but that was all. Cautiously, they stared in.

The city was still there, between glacier and icy river. It had not been destroyed in the nuclear spasm wars of late afternoon. But it had changed.

The skyscrapers had continued to grow and to evolve. They had become tall, delicate fronds that gleamed soft gold and green. Skywalks appeared between the fairy towers. “Look.” Rob pointed to threadlike structures that wove intricate patterns through the city. “Monorails!”

Flickermotes appeared in the air between the towers. Were they flying cars, Rob wondered, or possibly personal jetpacks? There was no way of knowing. And what were those shimmering domes that sprang up like mushrooms after a rain on the outskirts of town?

“It looks like the Emerald City of Oz,” Gail said. “Only not just green.” Rob nodded agreement. Some new technology was invented then, and the city changed again. Now the buildings seemed to be made of curdled light, or possibly crystals of glowing fog. Whatever they were, they weren't entirely solid. They receded into dimensions that weren't there.

“I think the time rate is accelerating,” Gail said in a small voice.

The city pulsed and danced to some unearthly syncopation. It sent out blossoms and shoots, and exploded into the sky in firework structures of color and essence, and joyous, whimsical light. It was a strangely
playful
city.

There was some kind of leakage from the freezer too. Some kind of broadcast. Rob and Gail picked up flashes of color and quick, incomprehensible messages, broadcast directly to their brains, maybe, or their nerve webs or possibly even to each individual cell of their bodies. They could understand none of it. Then there was another shift of technology, and the impressions cut off.

But the city was still changing, and the rate of change still accelerating. Now the unsubstantial towers swayed like fronds of seaweed lashed by a hurricane. Faster. Now the radius of the city exploded outward and imploded inward again. Again it happened and again, like circles of light pulsing outward. Giant machines throbbed in the air and were gone. Highways of light moved out and up into the night. Too quick to be seen, leaving behind only an impression of incredible bulk,
something
stooped over the city.

The changes were coming still faster now—as if the city were searching for something, trying out and rejecting alternate configurations in pursuit of some specific goal. The buildings became piles of orange diamonds, matrixes of multicolored spheres, a vast tangle of organic vines. The city was a honeycomb, a featureless monolith, a surrealistic birthday cake.

This search lasted a full five minutes. Then, for an instant, the city reached a kind of crystalline perfection, and all change, all motion ceased. It stood poised on the numinous edge between instant and infinity. For that brief, eternal second, nothing happened.

Then the city exploded.

Beams and lattices of light, like playful twisted lasers, shot into the air, between the masses of ice and out into the kitchen. Massively ornate constructs of color and nothing else flickered into existence over the sink and oven. They phased out of being, then halfway in again, and then were gone. The city rose into the air, and separated out into component planes and solids. Very briefly, it
sang
. Very briefly, it existed both in the refrigerator and in the kitchen, as if its presence were too large for any one location.

And then it went away. It did not move in any direction they could comprehend. It just went … away.

They stood blinking. After the lights and bright colors of the city, the freezer compartment seemed dark and still. Gail shook her head wonderingly. Rob gently touched the ice. Where the city had stood was nothing but a few dead walls, a handful of ancient ruins half-buried in drifting snow.

Even as they watched, these last traces of civilization crumbled into dust, destroyed by the relentless onslaught of time.

“I wonder where they've gone to.” Rob closed the refrigerator door. “Some other dimension?”

Gail did not respond immediately. Then she said, “I doubt that
we
could understand.” She was wide-eyed and solemn.

Nevertheless, she didn't object when Rob went around to the back of the refrigerator and pulled the plug. They stood looking at it in silence for a while.

“We'll clean it out with ammonia before we turn it on again,” Rob said.

Gail took his hand. “C'mon, kid. Let's go to bed.”

Rob woke up the next morning, sleepy-eyed and sunburnt. He stumbled to the kitchen and, after brewing coffee, automatically pulled open the refrigerator to get some milk.

The inside of the refrigerator smelled rich and moist, with the acrid tang of food starting to rot. Rob wrinkled his nose and started to close the door. But on impulse—just to be safe—he peered into the freezer compartment.

The interior of the freezer was green and steamy. A brontosaurus no longer than his thumb raised its head ponderously above the jungle growth and blinked.

15

Walking Out

Terry Bissel woke up one morning knowing he had to get out of the city. Take a jitney up Broadway and keep on going forever. Travel so far and so fast that if someone were to shine a flashlight after him, by the time the beam caught up it would've dissipated to nothingness. “I don't want to live here anymore,” he said aloud without opening his eyes. It was true. For a long time he lay motionless, simply savoring the thought. A strange elation dawned within him. “I want to live in the country.”

His wife was in the kitchen, humming to herself. The blender growled briefly. She was grinding beans for coffee. There was the sizzle of eggs and ham in the skillet. Kris was a lark. Eight months pregnant, and she still got up first.

He pulled on his slacks and rolled up the futon. In the doorway, he paused briefly to watch Kris waft lightly from sink to counter. Then he said, “Let's move to New England.”

Kris stood very still at the counter. She didn't turn around.

“C'mon, babe, you know you hate it here. Too much noise, too many people, hardly enough room to fucking turn around in. I want to live in Connecticut—no, Vermont! I want a big, rambling house where you can see meadows out the kitchen window and woods beyond them. And mountains! Snow in the winter and fresh apples in the fall. I want the kind of place where sometimes you get up before dawn to watch the deer crossing the lawn.”

“Terry,” Kris said warningly.

Down on the street, the recyclers were rattling the bins of cans and bottles, slamming bales of paper and bags of digestibles into the various bellies of their truck. They were in a good mood, to judge by the loud, yakyakking sound of their voices. “Yo, Nee-C! You still seeing that old fool, Benjy?” And: “He got better stuff than you do, Maaaalcolm.” And: “You don't know till you try, babe! I got stuff I ain't never used.” The crew was laughing uproariously at this exchange. “I heard that,” said the woman. “Fact is, I heard you ain't had the opportunity to use none of it!”

“Listen to that.” Terry snorted. “That's exactly the kind of crap I'm talking about. Hey—you ever see a moose?”

“No.”

“I did once when I was young. My folks took us kids to this little bed-and-breakfast outside of Montpelier and—hey, the woman that runs it must be getting pretty old by now. Maybe she'd like to sell. What do you think? Wanna run a B and B? It couldn't hurt to ask.”

Kris whirled abruptly. “We need more coffee,” she said in a choked voice. “We're out.”

“I thought I heard the grinder.”

“That was … decaffeinated. I put it in by accident.” With harsh, choppy motions, she unscrewed the grinder and slammed its contents into the disposal. “Go across the street, why don't you, and get us some beans?”

“You're the boss.” He grabbed up Kris in both arms, lifted her to the ceiling and whirled her around. “You and the little Creature from the Black Lagoon.” He kissed her belly, set her down, and ducked into the cubby to throw on robe and slippers. Then he headed out, leaving his wife weeping behind him.

It was a wonderful morning!

On the elevator, Mrs. Jacinto from two floors up smiled and said hello. Her husband, Herb, was a municipal gardener, as tall as she was fat, and a dab hand at cribbage. Terry had played him a few times and the man was definitely a shark. “How are you doing this lovely morning, Mr. Bissel?”

“Couldn't be better—we're going to move.”

“Well, isn't that nice? I expected you children would, now that you have the little one on the way. Oh, and that reminds me. Tell that pretty wife of yours I have some morning sickness tea that I'm bringing up later on; I know you'll think it's foolishness, but tell her to give it a try, it really does work. Are you moving Downtown?”

“We're leaving the city altogether, Mrs. Jacinto. We're moving to the country.”

The smile froze on her face. “Well,” she said. “Well, well.”

The doors opened for the ground floor and she skittered away.

It was a quick hop-skip-and-jump across the street to the Java Tree. On the way back, Terry plucked a daisy—perhaps one of Herb's—from the street turf. He opened the top of the coffee sack and buried the stem in the beans.

“You'll be going to the Housing Authority today, won't you?” Kris asked when he got back. She accepted the coffee, filled a glass with water for the daisy, and put it up on the window sill without comment. Ignoring their earlier conversation entirely, pretending it had never happened. “Like you promised?”

Well, getting out was a new idea. It would probably take her a while to adjust to it. “Why not?” Terry said, playing along. “If we want a bigger apartment, we'll have to move, right? And if we want to move, one of us is going to have to go stand in line. That's just the way it is. Doesn't matter what you want, you've got to stand in line.” He winked jauntily.

“I'd go myself,” Kris said in a strained voice. “I don't mind. It's just that—” She looked down at the Creature.

“Hey, hey. I didn't say I wouldn't, did I?”

Tight-lipped, she shook her head.

“Then it's settled.” Terry ducked into the bedroom and opened the closet. Silk jacket, snakeclone shoes. On the way out, he paused in the doorway. “Hey. What about Maine? Maybe we could find a place outside of Portland, nice and convenient to your Mom, wouldn't that be nice?”

As he left, he heard Kris beginning to cry again. Pregnant women were emotional. He understood that.

Their flat was in the heart of Midtown, at the foot of one of the giant condenser stacks that drew current out of the flux and into the power grid. The building was wrapped around the tower's anchor pier, and even though the engineers swore it was perfectly shielded from any harmful radiation, this fact had kept the rents low. No question but a new flat was going to give them sticker shock. Maybe that was all to the good, though. When Krissie saw the bottom line, she might well change her mind about New England. The law gave them a three-month cooling off period; it would be easy to break the lease.

Kris wanted to move Downtown to be closer to her sister. Maybe he could talk Robin into moving as well. They could get adjacent farms and raise llamas.

It was another beautiful morning. The Municipal Weather Authority had programmed a crisp autumnal tang into the air. Light breezes stirred the little trees on the building tops. They looked just fine outlined against the dome.

A paper bag blew past Terry's feet and automatically he started after it. But then a street urchin appeared out of nowhere, a skinny black kid in an oversized basketball jersey, and snatched it up. He leaped high, tucking in his knees for a double somersault, and slam-dunked the bag into a recycling can. With a flourish, he swiped his bank card through the slot to pick up the credit.

Terry applauded lightly.

“Watches!” the shabby man sang. He was only a step away from being a beggar. His jacket was shiny and his shoes weren't. One side of his face was scarred from old radiation burns. That and a blackwork Luna Rangers tattoo marked him as a vet. The watches flew in great loops and figure eights, blinking and goggling whimsically.

“This sort of post-capitalist consumer faddism is only a form of denial, you know,” Terry told him.

“Hah? What're you talking about?”

“Think about it. Your devices consume three times their own weight in time and labor for their design, manufacture, and—now—sales. But what do they accomplish? A moment's diversion from the sad fact of existence. It's a measure of our desperation that we'd devote so much energy in order to generate a respite, however brief, from our very real problems.”

“What are you, some kinda nut? Get out of here!” the vendor said angrily.