by Roger Elwood
“No,” she says, tightening her grasp on the arm, leading me toward the one voluminous couch which in shades of orange and yellow dominates the lobby of her residence, “it cannot be. You’ve equivocated too much. I can’t waste these important years of my life on someone who doesn’t even know his identity!” She raises a fist to her face, dabs at her eyes. “And besides that, I sometimes think that you don’t even really want me,” she says, “that when you’re with me you’re already thinking about how you’ll remember me. I tell you, this is no way for a relationship to function. I have a great deal to offer you but it must be within the terms of the present. You’ve got to be here with me now.”
“You don’t understand, Elvira,” I say, guiding her to the couch, gently easing down and at last her terrible grip eases and I run a fervid hand over my joint, relocating the source of circulation and bringing the blood to clear surge yet again. “The past is fixed, the present incomprehensible, the future without control. If we repudiate our past, well then, what are we? And if we do not cherish the past, that only immutable part of us, well, then, Elvira, what will we make of the present and the future?” but even as I am saying this I feel the hopelessness of the argument overwhelm me. Her little face is set tight, her little breasts jut with argumentation; if I touched her body my hands would recoil, I am sure, with a metallic spang. She does not understand. Slowly I disengage myself from her, stand, walk back through the lobby, gesticulating.
“I’m not ready to make a commitment,” I say, “how can we know where we’re going until we know where we’ve been? you’ve got to understand history, otherwise the sheer accumulation of data overwhelms,” and so on and so forth, now I am beyond the doors themselves, the cool, dense glaze of air hitting me, ruffling my cheeks and still Elvira sits on the couch, unmoving, her hands closeting her pocketbook, her eyes fixed straight ahead. She seems to be speaking but I cannot hear a word which she is saying. She mouthes polysyllables, I concentrate, but all is beyond me. "I’m sorry,” I say, "truly sorry,” and walking back to the car feel a fine, true instant of regret; I could come back to her, vault against her on the couch and confess my sin: that dark, unspeakable stain which radiates from the heart through all the tendrils of the body, that stain which begins in loss and ends in acceptance but what good would it do me? Or her? No, our relationship is obviously finished, I restore myself to the seat cushions of my car, hurriedly start the motor and drive away, the radio, caught in the gears, booming.
The Four Knights, ’59, THE TEARS OF YOUR HEART. ’59 was a year of great transition just as this has been; everything hurt in ’59, I let the music run over me like blood and for an instant it is that year again and I twenty years old trying to come to terms with matters which I do not even remember. In retrospect I glimpse Elvira; she remains on the couch, she is sunk on the couch like stone: already a perfect artifact nestled in mucilage, on display for the tourista of recollection which in little fibers I shall send on their way in all of the years to come.
III
A man with all of his limbs torn off by an automobile accident was denied compensation when I was able to establish through delicate interviewing and piecing together of evidence that the accident was self-caused and therefore not covered under the terms of his particular policy. For this I was given praise by my supervisor and a small bonus but I cannot get over an unreasonable feeling of guilt even now as if somehow it would have been better if I had falsified the interviews and documentation and allowed the quadruple amputee to slip a false claim through the company.
IV
A Festival of Revival is held at the large municipal auditorium which I attend. All of the great performers of the '50's excepting only those who have died or have gone on to better things are there: the Chryslers and the Flyers, Lightnin’ Joe and the Band, the Little Black Saddle, Tony Annunzio. Seated in the third row orchestra, surrounded by stolid citizenry who have carried forward the menacing expressions of their youth and little else, I am stunned again by the energy of that decade, its fervor and wildness, the way in which it anticipated and sowed the seeds of so much else to come, but I am also humbled because in a critical way I have come such a short distance from that time; my responses to the Little Black Saddle are as they were when I was thirteen, no difference, this is no Festival of Changes. Of course the ’GO’s were even more significant than the ’50’s, I must remember that, and that is to take nothing away from the ’40’s which prefigured both of these decades to say nothing of the ’70’s, fast receding from us and likely to be remembered as the most moving decade of all. Tony Annunzio takes off his jacket and tie to sing his final numbers, just as he did in the old days, and I am shocked at how round he has become although, of course, my memories of him are unreliable. His great hit, BROKEN CHAIN OF CIRCUMSTANCE, is the finale of the show and while standing in tribute with the rest of the audience I find myself thinking of Elvira. If only we had been able to share this moment together! but she declined my invitation, of course, hanging up the phone on me nastily but not before saying that in her opinion my unusual attachment to certain elements of the past only showed a childish inability to face the future.
How could I have explained to her that the past is the future? and what difference would it have made, the spotlight on Tony Annunzio winking off, the houselights surging on and all five thousand of us rising as one to cheer the voice of his generation, and Tony, standing on the bare stage to take those cheers with the same grace and offhandedness with which, more than twenty years ago, he bowed to ns at the old Orpheus, now the new Orpheus and also the site of many great revivals?
V
Coming home I find Elvira lying naked in my bed, the covers below her waist, her eyes bright with malice. Try as she may, it seems that she simply cannot leave me alone. I know the feeling well although I have never had it with Elvira. ‘Til tell you about the nostalgia craze and your golden oldies,” she says with a mad wink, “I’ve been thinking this through carefully and now I’ll tell you the truth.” She is thirty-one years old, attractive but not exceptional and from the beginning of our relationship she might have regarded me as her last chance. This has led to much bitterness in the breakup.
“Let me tell you what I think it is,” she says, her voice wavering, her little breasts shaking, the nipples pursed as if for a kiss, “the nostalgia craze, this constant digging up of the past for people like you who can't face the future; it's all a government plot. It comes from the capital. They're manipulating everything by digging up the past so that people aren't able to bridge the distance between the present and the future. They think that they can keep people from seeing what’s really been done to them if they feed them the past like a drug to keep on reminding them of what they used to be. They're going to keep us all locked in the past so that we won't really ever see what's going on now but I won’t fall for it and I won't let you fall for it.” She leaps from the bed, breasts shaking, and seizes me around the neck, gathers me in. “Please,” she says, “you must face your life, must face what you've become and where you're going, you can't live in the past,” moving her body like a lever against mine, bone to bone, flesh to flesh and for all of my embarrassment and rage it is difficult to suppress desire—Elvira and I always did have a good sexual relationship, I have saved certain memories of it and bring them out now one by one in privacy to masturbate—but suppress desire I do, hurling her from me.
"Don’t you ever say that,” I say to her, "the past is immutable, the past is strong and beautiful, the past is the only thing we have ever known,” and resist as she may, I convey her shrieking from bed to wall to door, pausing to guide her fallen clothes with little kicks toward the exit. At the door, I pull the knob with enormous speed and strength and then throw her, weeping, into the hall, kicking her clothes after her. "Get out of here, get out of my life, get out of my way,” I say to her and not bothering to gauge the effect which these words have had, slam the door closed and lock it, turn my back to it trembling and th
en stride toward the radio.
Turning it on to the station of the golden forever* I hope that I will find some music of the ’60’s which will galvanize me with energy and help me find emotional equivalent in events of the past but something is wrong with the radio; the dial is somehow set toward the only station in the area which plays current hits and in palpitation and dread I find myself listening to the Number Two maker on the charts, something about Meanies and Beanies, the tune confusingly disordered to me.
It is too much. I simply cannot cope with it; not this on top of Elvira. I sit on the bed wracked with sobs for a while, whimpering like a dog against the strange music and then in the hall I hear the softest and strangest of noises, as if Elvira had somehow found a key and was insinuating herself within . . . and then as the music tumbles cheerfully on I have a vision and the vision is that not only she but the quadruple amputee who I have serviced have somehow managed to get into my room.
They sing along with the radio, I watch them, the vision turns and I shriek like wind out the other side of that tube. From a far distance then I hear Meanies and
Beanies for what it always was; an artifact of that forgotten decade, as the nineties overtake me in sound and the amputee and Elvira roll against one another on the floor, their defeat accomplished as the smooth, dense wax of the embalmer pours from the tubes of the radio to cover them like lava on volcanic ash.
Univac: 2200
CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
He came home along a country lane, with grass growing between the dust-powdered cart tracks, with low stone walls to either side, erected long ago and now crumbling with the years, but with their crumbling hidden by the growth of creeping vines and screened by the bushes that grew along their bases. A verdant countryside stretched on every hand, with sleek cattle in the pastures and the smoke of cottage chimneys trailing up the sky. Larks sang in the grasses and a rabbit popped out of its hiding place along one of the stone fences and went bobbing up the road.
The corridor cyber, Andrew Harrison told himself, had knocked itself out on this one. He hoped it would be allowed to stay for a while, for it was most restful. But he knew it wouldn’t stay. They never did. It was as if the cyber had so many patterns that it was in a hurry to get them all used up. Tomorrow, or maybe just a few hours from now, it would be the main street of a sleepy old historic village or a woodland trail or an old Paris boulevard, or perhaps some far-space fantasy. Although he doubted the patterns would ever all be used. He’d lived here—how long?—more than fifty years, and before that more than thirty years on one of the lower levels, and in all that time there had not been a repetition, close approximation perhaps, but never a repetition in the corridors.
He did not hurry. He strolled along sedately. He must be getting close to home and when he got there and had to leave it, he’d miss this country lane. He considered stopping for a while to sit upon one of the crumbling walls and listen to the meadow larks and watch the cloud patterns in the deep blue sky, but today he had no time to sit—today was a busy day.
Up ahead of him he saw the signpost that would have his name upon it and that was as far as he would go, for it marked the door of home. Someone else traveling this lane homeward would see another signpost, but no one else would see it, as no one else would see the one meant for his eyes alone.
He slackened his pace, loitering, reluctant to leave the road he traveled. But slow as he might go, he finally reached the signpost and turned off into the little footpath.
A door opened before him and beyond the door was home.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said the cyber, Harley. “I hope you had a pleasant walk. Did you get the tobacco?”
“Very pleasant, Harley, thank you.”
“And now . . .” said Harley.
“No,” said Harrison. “Absolutely not. No drink, no conversation. Forget your role of the gracious servant. I have work to do.”
“But, sir . . .”
“And no ski slope, no fishing stream, no beach, no nothing. Just leave me alone.”
"If you wish it, sir,” said Harley, considerably offended, Til leave you quite alone.”
"Some other time,” said Harrison, Til be quite grateful for your services.”
"I am always at your service, sir.”
"Where are the others?”
"You have forgotten, sir. They went out to the country.”
"Yes,” he said. "I had forgotten.”
He walked from the entry into the living room and, for the first time in many months, realized, with something of a shock, how small the living quarters were.
"There is no need of size,” said Harley. "No need of space.”
"That’s right,” said Harrison, "and even if we needed it, or wanted it, we haven’t got the space. And I wish, if it is all the same to you, you’d cut out monitoring me.”
"I must monitor you,” said Harley, primly. "That is my job and as a functioning, conscientious cybernetic system, I must do my job. For if I did not monitor you, then how might I best serve you?”
"All right, monitor,” said Harrison, "but keep it to yourself. Can’t you, for the next few hours, manage to be somewhat unobtrusive.”
"I would suspect,” said Harley, "that there must be something wrong with you, but my medical components come up with nothing more than normal and from that I must conclude that you have no illness. But I must confess to being puzzled. You have never been quite this way before. You reject me and my service and I am disturbed.”
"I am sorry, Harley. I have something to decide.”
He walked to the window and looked out. The country stretched away, far below—a bit more, he remembered now, than a mile below. A great belt of parkland lay around the tower and beyond the parkland wilderness— recreational space for all who wished to use it. For the land was no longer used, or very little used. A few mines, a few tracts of carefully harvested timber and that was all. After all of this was over, he decided, he and Mary would go west to the mountains, for a holiday.
"Why go?” asked Harley. "I can send you there, or to a place that is equivalent to mountains. It would be the same. You would not know the difference.”
"I thought I told you to shut up.”
"I am sorry, sir. It is just that my only thought is of your welfare.”
"That,” said Harrison, “is most commendable of you.”
"I am glad you think so, sir.”
Harrison turned from the window and went into his workroom. The room was small and crammed with equipment and a desk. The windowless walls closed in on him, but he felt comfortable. Here was his work and life.
Here, for years, he had worked. And was his work now coming to an end? Was that the reason, he asked himself, that he had delayed so long, to hold onto work and purpose until the very end? But he was not, he knew, being honest with himself; it was because he must be certain and on that trip down to the retail levels to buy himself a tin of tobacco, it had come to him that he was as certain now as he would ever be.
He grinned, remembering that trip—a hookey trip. There had been no need to go. He could have simply dialed his purchase and a moment later picked it out of the delivery chute. A man, at times, he told himself, will practice self-deceit. If he had wanted to take a walk, there would have been nothing in the world to prevent his taking it. If he had wanted to get away from these small, cramped rooms and Harley, there would have been nothing that could stop him. There had been no need to concoct an excuse to do so.
"I must remind you, sir,” said Harley, "that there is never any reason for you to remain in what you think of as these small, cramped rooms. If you would but allow me, sir, I could place you on a lonely mountaintop, all alone upon it, with all the world to see and no one else about, with as much space and freedom as any man might wish. It is because of such as I that humans require little living space. Granted, without the cybers these kind of quarters would be intolerable, but you need not live within them, no need to live within them, for the entire wo
rld and more is yours. Anything that a cyber can dream is yours and I really do believe . ..”
“Cut it out,” said Harrison, sharply. “Another word from you and Y\ phone replacement. Perhaps you have been too long in operation and . . .”
“I'll be silent, sir,” said Harley. “You have my promise on it.”
“See you do,” said Harrison.
He sat easy in the chair behind his desk and the questions hammered at him: Could he be entirely certain? Had he overlooked some factor that should be considered? Had he carried his simulations into the future as deeply as he should? There was no doubt at all that the process would work. He had checked the process and the theory step by step, not once, but many times, and there was no question that the procedure and the theory were correct. Now it was no longer a matter of procedure, but a matter of effect. Could he be certain that he could chart the future course of mankind, with this new factor introduced, with enough precision to be sure that it would not produce social aberrations that might not be evident for centuries?
Future history, he reminded himself, could be changed by such unlikely items that one could take no chance at all.
Take the present world, he thought, take the mile-high cities and all the vacant acres, and one could trace it back to so short a time as two centuries before. A man could put his finger on the time when it began, marking the break with a cultural pattern that man had laboriously put together in five millennia of effort. Two hundred years ago man had lived in noisome cities that had stretched across mile on mile of land; today he lived in towers that scraped the very sky. Now, instead of industrial centers and power plants belching smoke and gobbling up the dwindling resources of the earth, man got his energy from fusion and needed only a fraction of the power he had needed then because he did with very little.