If Toro misses, I’ll kill myself, I swear it.
Two minutes to go. One hundred and twenty seconds. The big room is silent except for kids like me praying or talking quietly into our recs or praying and talking and sobbing.
The TV says the bombs have quit exploding. No more flashes until Toro hits The Ball—if it does. Oh, God, let it hit, let it hit!
The unmanned satellites are going to open their camera lenses at the exact second of impact and take a quick shot. The cameras are encased in lead, the shutters are lead, and the equipment is special, mostly mechanical, not electrical, almost like a human eyeball. If the cameras see the big flash, they’ll send an electrical impulse through circuits, also encased in lead, to a mechanism that’ll shoot a big thin-shelled ball out. This is crammed with flashpowder, the same stuff photographers use, and mixed with oxygen pellets so the powder will ignite. There’s to be three of the biggest flashes you ever saw. Three. Three for Victory.
If Toro misses, then only one flashball’ll be set off.
Oh, Lord, don’t let it happen!
Planes with automatic pilots’ll be cruising above the clouds, and their equipment will see the flashes and transmit them to the ground TV equipment.
One minute to go.
Come on, God!
Don’t let it happen, please don’t let it happen, that some place way out there, some thousands of years from now, some weird-looking character reads this and finds out to his horror what his people have done to us. Will he feel bad about it? Lot of good that’ll do. You, out there, I hate you! God, how I hate you!
Our Father which art in Heaven, fifteen seconds, Hallowed be Thy name, ten seconds, Thy will be done, five seconds, Thy will be done, but if it’s thumbs down, God, why? Why? What did I ever do to You?
The screen’s blank! Oh, my God, the screen’s blank! What happened, Transmission trouble? Or they’re afraid to tell us the truth?
It’s on! It’s on!
YAAAAAAY!
13
July 4, A.D. 2002
I may erase this. If I have any sense, I will. If I had any sense, I wouldn’t make it in the first place.
Independence Day, and we’re still under an iron rule. But old Dick the Dictator insists that when there’s no longer a need for strict control, the Constitution will be restored, and we’ll be a democracy again. He’s ninety-five years old and can’t last much longer. The vice-president is only eighty, but he’s as tough an octogenarian as ever lived. And he’s even more of a totalitarian than Dick. And when have men ever voluntarily relinquished power?
I’m one of the elite, so I don’t have it so bad. Just being fifty-seven years old makes me a candidate for that class. In addition, I have my Ph.D. in education and I’m a part-time minister. I don’t know why I say part-time, since there aren’t any full-time ministers outside of the executives of the North American Council of Churches. The People can’t afford full-time divines. Everybody had to work at least ten hours a day. But I’m better off than many. I’ve been eating fresh beef and pork for three years now. I have a nice house I don’t have to share with another family. The house isn’t the one my recs say I once owned. The People took it over to pay for back taxes. It did me no good to protest that property taxes had been canceled during The Interim. That, say the People, ended when The Ball was destroyed.
But how could I pay taxes on it when I was only eleven years old, in effect?
I went out this afternoon, it being a holiday, with Leona to Springdale. We put flowers on her parents’ and sisters’ graves, none of whom she remembers, and on my parents’ and Carole’s and the children’s graves, whom I know only through the recs. I prayed for the forgiveness of Carole and the boys.
Near Carole’s grave was Stinky Davis’s. Poor fellow, he went berserk the night The Ball was destroyed and had to be put in a padded cell. Still mad, he died five years later.
I sometimes wonder why I didn’t go mad, too. The daily shocks and jars of memloss should have made everyone fall apart. But a certain number of us were very tough, tougher than we deserved. Even so, the day-to-day attack by alarm syndromes did its damage. I’m sure that years of life were cut off the hardiest of us. We’re the shattered generation. And this is bad for the younger ones, who’ll have no older people to lead them in the next ten years or so.
Or is it such a bad thing?
At least, those who were in their early twenties or younger when The Ball was smashed are coming along fine. Leona herself was twenty then. She became one of my students in high school. She’s thirty-five physically but only fifteen in what the kids call “intage” or internal age. But since education goes faster for adults, and all those humanities courses have been eliminated, she graduated from high school last June. She still wants to be a doctor of medicine, and God knows we need M.D.’s. She’ll be forty-two before she gets her degree. We’re planning on having two children, the maximum allowed, and it’s going to be tough raising them while she’s in school. But God will see us through.
As we were leaving the cemetery, Margie Oleander, a very pretty girl of twenty-five, approached us. She asked me if she could speak privately to me. Leona didn’t like that, but I told her that Margie probably wanted to talk to me about her grades in my geometry class.
Margie did talk somewhat about her troubles with her lessons. But then she began to ask some questions about the political system. Yes, I’d better erase this, and if it weren’t for old habits, I’d not be doing this now.
After a few minutes, I became uneasy. She sounded as if she were trying to get me to show some resentment about the current situation.
Is she an agent provocateur or was she testing me for potential membership in the underground?
Whatever she was doing, she was in dangerous waters. So was 1.1 told her to ask her political philosophy teacher for answers. She said she’d read the textbook, which is provided by the government. I muttered something about, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and walked away.
But she came after me and asked if I could talk to her in my office tomorrow. I hesitated and then said I would.
I wonder if I would have agreed if she weren’t so beautiful?
When we got home, Leona made a scene. She accused me of chasing after the younger girls because she was too old to stimulate me. I told her that I was no senile King David, which she should be well aware of, and she said she’s listened to my recs and she knew what kind of man I was. I told her I’d learned from my mistakes. I’ve gone over the recs of the missing years many times.
“Yes,” she said, “you know about them intellectually. But you don’t feel them!”
Which is true.
I’m outside now and looking up into the night. Up there, out there, loose atoms and molecules float around, cold and alone, debris of the memory records of The Ball, atoms and molecules of what were once incredibly complex patterns, the memories of thirty-two years of the lives of four and a half billion human beings. Forever lost, except in the mind of One.
Oh, Lord, I started all over again as an eleven-year-old. Don’t let me make the same mistakes again.
You’ve given us tomorrow again, but we’ve very little past to guide us.
Tomorrow I’ll be very cool and very professional with Margie. Not too much, of course, since there should be a certain warmth between teacher and pupil.
If only she did not remind me of . . . whom?
But that’s impossible. I can remember nothing from The Interim. Absolutely nothing.
But what if there are different kinds of memory?
Elephant’s Ear
JOAN AIKEN
“The fleas,” said Miss Printer, “are not so bad here as they were at Sreb.”
“Maybe not,” said Mr. Humphreys, “but they are a lot worse than they were at Prijepolje. Have you finished buying wine?”
“I have plenty of slivovitz and riesling. But I’d like a few dozen more proseks and some retsina if we go home through Greece. How
are you getting on?”
“I’ve bought a lot of hors-d’oeuvres and twenty tapestries.”
“We could do with some silver jewellery.”
“We shall never be home by Christmas at this rate,” grumbled Mr. Humphreys, a thin, dark, and irascible young man.
Miss Printer raised her fine brows and gazed at him reproachfully with enormous grey eyes, clear as November lochs. They were her best feature. She had passed her first youth, though she was still in her second; indeed there was a quality about the famous London store of Rampadges which seemed to preserve its employees, flavour and body, like the best ginger. Miss Printer had been with the firm no more than twenty years, since she was seventeen, but already, thin, smooth-skinned, pale-haired, she was touched with agelessness.
“Haven’t you any loyalty to the firm?” she suggested.
When they set sail together on their buying excursion she had been on the verge of falling in love with Mr. Humphreys. Now she was over the brink, helpless and hopeless, and finding it an uphill emotion in the face of their differences.
“Surely we’ve bought enough for the Christmas market?”
“Enough staples,” she said, considering their list. “French plums, Swiss cuckoo clocks, Czech embroidery, German toys. Not enough novelties. I’d like to go down to Galicnik and buy some stonework.”
“Stonework?”
“People like it for ornamental gardens. And I do wish we could get hold of an elephant or a kangaroo.”
Mr, Humphreys had exhausted his capacity for expressing surprise. He just gaped at her and said at length rather feebly, “Surely it’s not very probable in the Balkans?”
“Not very, but it’s possible,” said Miss Printer. “I have done so before. There are many travelling menageries in these parts. And since we are limited to Europe, the Balkans are our best bet.”
“Why do you want elephants and kangaroos?”
“In Mr. Tybalt’s day they always had an elephant at Rampadges for Christmas,” she said wistfully. “Or a camel or a zebra.”
“He’s dead now.”
“I know.” No need to say more. Mr. Tybalt had been the nephew of the original Rampadge who started the magnificent store, and his ideas had been as lavish and imperial as those of his Victorian forebear.
The two travellers got back into their car, having finished their frugal picnic of prsut, borak, ratluk lokum, and Cvicek drunk from plastic beakers—although she was a discerning and intrepid buyer, Miss Printer did not believe in wasting the firm’s money—and continued on their way, Mr. Humphreys driving.
They were bound for a small Montenegrin town called Grksik, where Miss Printer hoped to buy some pairs of the famous local slippers embroidered with gold thread and heavily jewelled, which should sell like hot cakes at Christmas.
The bleak, wild Balkan scenery rose about them in tarnished autumnal colours. It made Mr. Humphreys shiver, but Miss Printer surveyed it affectionately.
“I had such a nice picnic here in 1947,” she said. Her tone of comfortable reminiscence somehow annoyed Mr. Humphreys and he trod incautiously on the accelerator. Their powerful car zipped round a sharp turn in the road, and became disastrously entangled with the rear ection of a procession which had been concealed from them by a spur of the mountain.
“Zalvaro!”
“Molim, molim?”
“Oh dear.”
“Au secours!”
“Oimoi!”
Shouts, bellow, bray, and polyglot exclamations volleyed from the ramshackle cornice of men, animals, and rudimentary vehicles which had toppled backwards over the bonnet of their car.
“Oh dear,” said Miss Printer again, “you seem to have bumped into a circus.”
By now it was nearly dark.
Miss Printer knew that in some European countries the adjective Balkan is used to describe something uncouth, wild, savage.
Balkan, she thought to herself with satisfaction, gazing at the crazy torchlit mass that seethed over and round the front portion of their sedate car. Goats formed a kind of fringe to it; there were bearded, tarbushed men with staves, like Old Testament illustrations; two apes, apparently chained together; and a zebra, neat and dainty as a fairytale convict. The whole scene gave Miss Printer a deep and inexplicable pleasure.
Mr. Humphreys was standing commandingly in the midst of it all trying to make some sense out of the business. Her heart ached with love at the sight of him. He was so tall and well-cut and impeccable, his head was such a good shape, the curl on the bowler that he wore even in the Balkans was exactly right. He looked what he was, a young English businessman who would make good.
The best of his kind in the world, thought Miss Printer sorrowfully. If he had been an article for sale in the market she would have bought him unhesitatingly for Rampadges, whatever his price. But he belonged to Rampadges already, and whatever his price, he was not for her; she knew that she filled him with alarm and a vague resentment.
He came angrily back to the car. “I can’t get what they are saying,” he said. “Can you make it out?”
Miss Printer uncoiled her slender length from the other front seat. She had fluent French, German, Italian, Turkish, and a smattering of Greek, Russian, and Spanish, but none of these proved effective in the present case, so she fell back on the Serbo-Croat phrase book.
“Molin rezervirati jednu sobu sa dva kreveta i kupatilom, Please reserve one double room with a bathroom,” hardly seemed to meet the situation, but she tried, “Dobro vece, Good evening. Ne razumen, I do not understand. Zao mi je, I am sorry,” and followed it up with, “Mogu li imati racun, molim? Can I have the bill, please?”
This produced a hush. The chorus sorted themselves out, and the goats were dragged offstage. A small boy led the zebra away into the dark, while the monkeys were tidied back into a sort of wicker perambulator.
“Racun,” she repeated hopefully.
An enormous smiling man with moustaches like brackets shouldered his way into the flaring light and burst into a torrent of explanation which Mr. Humphrey listened to in bewildered non-comprehension.
Miss Printer attended, nodding. A boy squatting beside them held a torch, so that she looked like a small cream-coloured witch interviewing an affable devil. At length the man bowed, bringing down his arms in a sweeping gesture of acceptance. Some money changed hands.
The procession disentangled itself with almost magical speed and whirled off into the darkness.
“Well! You settled that very easily,” said Mr. Humphreys with unwilling respect. “How much did you have to give him?”
“Oh, only about four and six.” Miss Printer spoke absently. She was straining her eyes, searching for something in the engulfing dark. “There was a condition attached, you see. We have injured one of the men and the condition was that we take him and his animal to the nearest monastery.”
“Injured a man?” said Mr. Humphreys, aghast.
“He fainted from fright so far as I could gather.”
“And they just went off like that and left him? Where is he?”
“Somewhere around. The ringmaster, or whatever he was, said this man, Iskandar, was a weakling. He seemed rather glad to be rid of him. Yes, there he is. ” Her eye had caught a gleam of white and she moved away. When Mr. Humphreys caught up with her she was kneeling by the side of what at first appeared to be a bundle of rags.
“He’s still in a faint,” she said, “we’d better get him into the back of the car before he comes to.”
“Most extraordinary,” Mr. Humphreys muttered, helping her lift the little man, who was piteously thin and light, no more than skin and bone. “What language were you talking to the ring-master?”
“Turkish. But I think he said this man was a Russian.”
Iskandar came to as they put him in and uttered a loud groan. At the same moment Mr. Humphreys felt himself suddenly plucked backwards into the air as if a space-ship had lowered a grapnel and removed him, dangling, from the earth. He had not
even time to yell, could not believe in his predicament, but the gasp he gave as he left all his breath behind was enough to attract Miss Printer’s attention.
“Oh, good gracious,” she said, “what a coincidence. Though I suppose one might have expected it in the circumstances.”
“Expected what?”
“An elephant. Just the same it does seem like a miracle.” With a characteristically irrelevant flight she added, “Isn’t there a ballet called Miracle in the Balkans?”
“In the Gorbals,” snapped Mr. Humphreys, who was something of an expert on ballet. “If you speak any elephant language, will you tell it to put me down?”
Miss Printer did not speak elephant language, but she rummaged among the remnants of the picnic for pieces of turkish delight and with these persuaded the elephant to relinquish Mr. Humphreys, who climbed, fuming and rubbing himself, into the car.
“It’s a very nice little elephant,” Miss Printer said acquisitively. “I believe it’s a female. I wonder how we can get it to the monastery. Do you suppose Iskandar would sell it?”
The night was cool and smelt of dew and rock, and the mountainside was totally silent. They might have been all alone on the southern slopes of Europe. The elephant evidently felt lonely, for it drew nearer to the car and let out a plaintive sound somewhere between a gurgle and a hoot. The sick man in the car stirred and muttered an unintelligible answer.
“What language is that?” said Mr. Humphreys uneasily.
“Russian. Where did I put that bottle of Cvicek?” She delved once more among the picnic debris and found the wine and a beaker.
“Probably the worst thing for him if he’s suffering from shock,” Mr. Humphreys pointed out gloomily. However, Iskander came to sufficiently under the influence of the wine to direct them to the nearest monastery, and also to assure them that Chloe, the elephant, would follow peaceably behind the car if she might be allowed to put her trunk in at the window and feel her master sitting inside.
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