by Anthology
“Good evening. This is Irvin Conley with the Friday edition of the Ten O’Clock Report. I’ll have news for you from around the state of California right after this word from Enerco, the kerosene fuel that keeps your turbine humming like a top . . .”
DISSOLVE TO:
The dim light from the monitors washed the color out of De La Ree’s face. His gaunt features evoked the image of a specter crouched over scenes from hell.
“Two, pull back to cover the whole crowd by the bar. Now pan up to the broken windows. One, get ready to cut in with a close shot of the looters.” De La Ree’s voice was level and professional. “Three, move to the east edge of your position. Look for an alley below and to your left. There should be some action soon. Switch in your starlight scope; I don’t think there’ll be enough available light from the burning stores.”
Three was the designation for Barney Chandler’s SonoVid unit. Parker and Barney crossed to the east edge of the roof. The Farmer’s Bank of Carroll was solidly constructed of brick—it wouldn’t burn. Barney looked down and to the left as De La Ree had ordered.
“Dark as sin,” Barney said. “I’ll switch on the scope.” The four figures in the alley below sprang into sharp relief in the starlight scope’s eyepiece. Barney violently drew in his breath.
“Mike,” he whispered into the throat-mike. “You sure you want us to shoot this bit in the alley?”
“Hell yes,” returned De La Ree from the KNBS copter. “Shoot everything—they’ll edit it back at the studio.”
DIRECT CUT TO:
Calvin Randall, one-time KNBS News Director, nursed his drink in morose silence. He had been conserving a steady procession of drinks for almost a day now. Calvin Randall was worried about his future.
You should have gone along with Carmine, he thought wryly. Stayed with a young station on the make. Stayed on the make yourself. In six months that station will be the highest-rated channel in L.A.
The TV above the bar was tuned to KNBS. So were most of the television sets in the Los Angeles area. Other stations had rushed teams to Carroll; millions of feet of tape had whirred through cameras and recorders. Everyone had beautiful shots of the aftermath. But only KNBS had footage of the real thing; the actual events as they were occurring. The fires, murders, lootings, rapes.
The men and women seated on either side of Randall watched the screen as though hypnotized. Their eyes reflected the flickering shadows of the television. KNBS was running an in-depth report on the rape of Carroll, California.
“My God,” the man on Randall’s left hoarsely whispered. “How can they show pictures like that?”
Inside Randall a delayed explosion found release. He jumped to his feet. His arm flailed against his glass, smashed it to diamond tears scattered across the bar.
“Because you bastards watch them!” he screamed. He turned and rushed blindly for the door.
DISSOLVE TO:
CLOSE SHOT—IRVIN CONLEY
“. . . and now the news.
“One of the most brutal dramas in the history of California was played out tonight in the sleepy little town of Carroll, high in the Santa Mira Hills west of Barstow. Carroll is customarily a quiet agricultural community of a thousand inhabitants. This evening the summer calm was shattered when a roving gang of black-jacketed motorcycle toughs, estimated to number at least three hundred, invaded Carroll. Preliminary reports from the scene indicate extensive looting and bloodshed. KNBS airlifted a complete news team to Carroll tonight and is on the scene. Here now is correspondent David Parker with an exclusive report videotaped earlier this evening . . .”
SHOCK CUT TO:
They finally left her there in the alley. She didn’t note their leaving. She was incapable of that now. The girl never saw the monitor light of the distant SonoVid wink out, never heard the mechanical purr click off. She lay motionless in a swell of pain, hardly breathing. For a brief minute her mind swam close to consciousness. She moved her hand and was vaguely aware of the blood dappling her legs.
DIRECT CUT TO:
CLIPPING (YELLOWED) FROM LOS ANGELES TRIBUNE-OBSERVER, JULY 28, 1966
SET ON BROAD MAHOGANY DESK-TOP
CAMERA MOVES IN:
Rumbles for Rent?
Los Angeles (UniPress) An unidentified spokesman for a major television network today revealed his organization last week was offered “the inside track” in covering the activities of a notorious California motorcycle gang. A man purporting to be the gang’s “press officer” approached Hollywood representatives of the network July 13 with the proposal that in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money, the gang would create a “rumble” in any small town the network chose. For its money the network would receive exclusive photographic coverage of the event.
The unidentified network spokesman stated: “We turned down the offer, of course. It was never treated as a serious proposal by any of the network management personnel. If the self-appointed “press officer” were quite sincere in proffering his offer, then his proposition is a deplorable commentary on our times. If he were attempting some sort of hoax, then his effort was in the worst possible taste.”
The network spokesman stated further that the man’s description has been turned over to Los Angeles County authorities for possible investigation.
DIRECT CUT TO:
MONTAGE:
The Personnel Director was kind, but firm. “I’m sorry, Mr. Randall, but I’m afraid that KNBS cannot see fit to rehire you in any capacity.” The Network was not, however, without a sense of largesse. Don’t rock the boat, Cal. We’d hate to put your name on a blacklist.
“Tell your brother to shove his car-peddling job,” Barney told his wife in the morning. “I’m sticking with KNBS. News reporting’s gonna be a job with a future.”
A still form, white against the darkness of the alley. Not dead yet, but waiting. Hoping.
MATCH DISSOLVE TO:
The plastic flash of capped teeth. Feral, somehow. The television-blue shirt. The pleasantly deep baritone.
“. . . and those are the latest stories currently making headlines in the Golden State. From behind the Enerco News Desk, this is Irvin Conley saying good night, and have a good weekend.”
FADE OUT:
Afterword
“Ten O’Clock Report” is a story about prostitution. I was angry when I wrote it and I become angry each time I read it again. I am angry with the vast majority of good citizens who sell out their souls for their particular messes of pottage, be they money, prestige, emotional titillation, or whatever. I am angry with everyone who submits peacefully to having his mind seduced by the vast-scaled rotten things that pervade our society. Further, I am angry with all you people who don’t even attempt to do anything about those aforementioned rotten things. And that includes me. After all, all I did was to write the story.
No, I don’t have a thick, black beard and dwell sullenly back in the hills in a cave. My beard is brown and scraggly and I live out in the world, just like the rest of you. But I have worked as a broadcast newsman and have had experiences with events such as described in “Ten O’Clock Report,” although on a much less spectacular scale. And I have grown up as a member of the generation which has seen America adopt violence as a spectator sport second in popularity only to sex (sex as a spectator activity doesn’t turn me on either, but that’s a theme for another story . . . ).
One June evening in 1968 I was seated in a grubby pizza parlor in a small western Pennsylvania town with a little group of both established and would-be SF writers. At the time I was still luxuriating in the warm glow of having made my first professional sale. SF author Chip Delany then intruded into that pleasant glow with an uncomfortably pointed question. “Ed,” he asked. “Just why do you want to write?” That was a tough question. It still is. The answer I gave then, after a lot of desperate thinking, was: “I write because I want to tell people something.” I think that answer still holds true for me. This story is an embodiment of that thought; it
contains elements of both commentary and warning. Beyond that, it is designed to be entertainment.
I never intended to become a preacher.
THE FUNERAL
Kate Wilhelm
Introduction
It is so easy to be charmed by the total womanness of Kate Wilhelm, so easy to lose one’s perspective of her as a human being in pure affection and admiration, that I sometimes forget for a moment that she is one of the very finest writers in America today. She is certainly the very best we have working in the field of speculative fiction. I will not defend that statement, nor elaborate upon it. Her work speaks most eloquently to the point.
Kate is a very private sort of woman, and so the background data I have at hand is skimpy. She was born in Toledo, Ohio on June 8th, 1928; she has two semi-adult sons by her first marriage and a third—Jonathan the Loud—by her current spouse, Damon Knight. She is on the Visiting Lecturer staff of the Tulane University Workshop in SF & Fantasy, as she was on the staff of the original Clarion College Workshop. She is the author of The Mile Long Spaceship, The Nevermore Affair, The Downstairs Room, Let the Fire Fall, More Bitter Than Death, The Killer Thing and Abyss. With Ted Thomas she is the author of The Clone and The Year of the Cloud. Her big new novel, Margaret and I is a marvel, despite the uninformed and bestial review in Newsweek.
She is not only a writer sui generis, but a student of the English language and as sure and incisive a critic as any writer could be blessed to have appraising his manuscript. She is also one of the gentlest, toughest creatures God ever put on this Earth.
“The Funeral” is so good, it hurts. I hope I have not invaded her privacy with these brief comments.
The Funeral
No one could say exactly how old Madam Westfall was when she finally died. At least one hundred twenty, it was estimated. At the very least. For twenty years Madam Westfall had been a shell containing the very latest products of advances made in gerontology, and now she was dead. What lay on the viewing dais was merely a painted, funereally garbed husk.
“She isn’t real,” Carla said to herself. “It’s a doll, or something. It isn’t really Madam Westfall.” She kept her head bowed, and didn’t move her lips, but she said the words over and over. She was afraid to look at a dead person. The second time they slaughtered all those who bore arms, unguided, mindless now, but lethal with the arms caches that they used indiscriminately. Carla felt goose bumps along her arms and legs. She wondered if anyone else had been hearing the old Teacher’s words.
The line moved slowly, all the girls in their long gray skirts had their heads bowed, their hands clasped. The only sound down the corridor was the sush-sush of slippers on plastic flooring, the occasional rustle of a skirt.
The Viewing Room had a pale green, plastic floor, frosted-green plastic walls, and floor to ceiling windows that were now slits of brilliant light from a westering sun. All the furniture had been taken from the room, all the ornamentation. There were no flowers, nothing but the dais, and the bedlike box covered by a transparent shield. And the Teachers. Two at the dais, others between the light strips, at the doors. Their white hands clasped against black garb, heads bowed, hair slicked against each head, straight parts emphasizing bilateral symmetry. The Teachers didn’t move, didn’t look at the dais, at the girls parading past it.
Carla kept her head bowed, her chin tucked almost inside the V of her collarbone. The serpentine line moved steadily, very slowly. “She isn’t real,” Carla said to herself, desperately now.
She crossed the line that was the cue to raise her head; it felt too heavy to lift, her neck seemed paralyzed. When she did move, she heard a joint crack, and although her jaws suddenly ached, she couldn’t relax.
The second green line. She turned her eyes to the right and looked at the incredibly shrunken, hardly human mummy. She felt her stomach lurch and for a moment she thought she was going to vomit. “She isn’t real. It’s a doll. She isn’t real!” The third line. She bowed her head, pressed her chin hard against her collarbone, making it hurt. She couldn’t swallow now, could hardly breathe. The line proceeded to the South Door and through it into the corridor.
She turned left at the South Door, and with her eyes downcast, started the walk back to her genetics class. She looked neither right nor left, but she could hear others moving in the same direction, slippers on plastic, the swish of a skirt, and when she passed by the door to the garden she heard laughter of some Ladies who had come to observe the viewing. She slowed down.
She felt the late sun hot on her skin at the open door and with a sideways glance, not moving her head, she looked quickly into the glaring greenery, but could not see them. Their laughter sounded like music as she went past the opening.
“That one, the one with the blue eyes and straw-colored hair. Stand up, girl.”
Carla didn’t move, didn’t realize she was being addressed until a Teacher pulled her from her seat.
“Don’t hurt her! Turn around, girl. Raise your skirts, higher. Look at me, child. Look up, let me see your face . . .”
“She’s too young for choosing,” said the Teacher, examining Carla’s bracelet. “Another year, Lady.”
“A pity. She’ll coarsen in a year’s time. The fuzz is so soft right now, the flesh so tender. Oh, well . . .” She moved away, flicking a red skirt about her thighs, her red-clad legs narrowing to tiny ankles, flashing silver slippers with heels that were like icicles. She smelled . . . Carla didn’t know any words to describe how she smelled. She drank in the fragrance hungrily.
“Look at me, child. Look up, let me see your face . . .” The words sang through her mind over and over. At night, falling asleep she thought of the face, drawing it up from the deep black, trying to hold it in focus: white skin, pink cheek ridges, silver eyelids, black lashes longer than she had known lashes could be, silver-pink lips, three silver spots—one at the corner of her left eye, another at the corner of her mouth, the third like a dimple in the satiny cheek. Silver hair that was loose, in waves about her face, that rippled with life of its own when she moved. If only she had been allowed to touch the hair, to run her finger over that cheek . . . The dream that began with the music of the Lady’s laughter, ended with the nightmare of her other words: “She’ll coarsen in a year’s time . . .”
After that Carla had watched the changes take place on and within her body, and she understood what the Lady had meant. Her once smooth legs began to develop hair; it grew under her arms, and, most shameful, it sprouted as a dark, coarse bush under her belly. She wept. She tried to pull the hairs out, but it hurt too much, and made her skin sore and raw. Then she started to bleed, and she lay down and waited to die, and was happy that she would die. Instead, she was ordered to the infirmary and was forced to attend a lecture on feminine hygiene. She watched in stony-faced silence while the Doctor added the new information to her bracelet. The Doctor’s face was smooth and pink, her eyebrows pale, her lashes so colorless and stubby that they were almost invisible. On her chin was a brown mole with two long hairs. She wore a straight blue-gray gown that hung from her shoulders to the floor. Her drab hair was pulled back tightly from her face, fastened in a hard bun at the back of her neck. Carla hated her. She hated the Teachers. Most of all she hated herself. She yearned for maturity.
Madam Westfall had written: Maturity brings grace, beauty, wisdom, happiness. Immaturity means ugliness, unfinished beings with potential only, wholly dependent upon and subservient to the mature citizens.
There was a True-False quiz on the master screen in front of the classroom. Carla took her place quickly and touch-typed her ID number on the small screen of her machine.
She scanned the questions, and saw that they were all simple declarative statements of truth. Her stylus ran down the True column of her answer screen and it was done. She wondered why they were killing time like this, what they were waiting for. Madam Westfall’s death had thrown everything off schedule.
Paperlike brown skin, wrinkled and hard
, with lines crossing lines, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, leaving little islands of flesh, hardly enough to coat the bones. Cracked voice, incomprehensible: they took away the music from the air . . . voices from the skies . . . erased pictures that move . . . boxes that sing and sob . . . Crazy talk. And, . . . only one left that knows. Only one.
Madam Trudeau entered the classroom and Carla understood why the class had been personalized that period. The Teacher had been waiting for Madam Trudeau’s appearance. The girls rose hurriedly. Madam Trudeau motioned for them to be seated once more.
“The following girls attended Madam Westfall during the past five years.” She read from a list. Carla’s name was included on her list. On finishing it, she asked, “Is there anyone who attended Madam Westfall whose name I did not read?”
There was a rustle from behind Carla. She kept her gaze fastened on Madam Trudeau. “Name?” the Teacher asked.
“Luella, Madam.”
“You attended Madam Westfall? When?”
“Two years ago, Madam. I was a relief for Sonya, who became ill suddenly.”
“Very well.” Madam Trudeau added Luella’s name to her list. “You will all report to my office at 8 A.M. tomorrow morning. You will be excused from classes and duties at that time. Dismissed.” With a bow she excused herself to the class Teacher and left the room.
Carla’s legs twitched and ached. Her swim class was at eight each morning and she had missed it, had been sitting on the straight chair for almost two hours, when finally she was told to go into Madam Trudeau’s office. None of the other waiting girls looked up when she rose and followed the attendant from the anteroom. Madam Trudeau was seated at an oversized desk that was completely bare, with a mirrorlike finish. Carla stood before it with her eyes downcast, and she could see Madam Trudeau’s face reflected from the surface of the desk. Madam Trudeau was looking at a point over Carla’s head, unaware that the girl was examining her features.