“I got no interest in that,” Marge said. “What he be telling I be not wanting.” But when the tour guide began to speak, she stood in place anyway, partnership being a matter of bearing up. Or under.
“The program was abandoned in the early twenty-fours,” the tour guide said. He be a young fellow who know nothing about history, but those mnemonic devices mean they can tell you everything, just like the simulators can take Dink to Phobos. “The utter inhospitability of the environment to stellar exploration was confirmed by the findings of Vieter and Loeb, whose bio-mechanical researches did confirm that the organism could not stand the period of time necessary to reach even the Centauris. Faced with the prospect of becoming a race of planet-hoppers and dilettantes eternally confined to our solar system, authorities made the decision instead to dismantle the program except for the transfer voyages among the settlements. Hence the establishment of Rocket City so that replications and originals of the real devices of travel could be preserved for all time.”
“It all sounds very sad to me,” Marge said. “Why give up planet-hopping?”
“The stars they be a suicide mission,” I said. “This very discouraging in terms of high expectations; continued flight within the solar system then be perceived as decadent, am I right?”
“Right,” the guide said. “Psychotronic control’s perception was that the non-abandonment of rocketry in the context of limitation to the solar system would have led to deadly warfare by the middle of the twenty-fours. Hence the devices were dismantled except for Rocket City, which was established in San Diego in 2453 so that our heritage should not be forgotten.” The guide stared past us. “I got that right,” he said.
“You,” Marge said to me, “let us be looking for Dink. O-two-hundred hours in that simulator be addling his brain; he come out and not know he be Dink himself.”
“In just a moment,” I say. “This is very interesting.” We only go down to Rocket City once a year, and Marge, she be hurrying to leave from the moment we hit the gate; but I think these visits an important part of preserving our human history and try to get as much from them as possible. With Dink scrambling off to the simulators since he be ten years old already, it be difficult for him to learn anything, and Marge has no interest in rocketry. “Talk about the stars as a suicide mission,” I said.
“That’s what they were. Certain aspects of the radiation that could not be kept out of the craft, no system being utterly self-enclosed, would have driven the crews insane and have caused them to destroy the mission. Vieter and Loeb proved this, and it was decided that it would be the most humane decision not to subject their theories to proof.”
“I think that’s a pretty good thing,” Marge said. “It would have been cruel. They were pioneers and heroes.”
“That is true,” the guide said and went into a long speech on the background, but I be thinking of Dink again. Pioneer and hero, that what he wanted to be; that is why he crawls off to the simulators and dreams of stars every time in Rocket City. He would have been very good if it had not been for Vieter and Loeb. But then I can be telling from the look on Marge’s face that she not want to listen anymore, and I cannot say that I blame her. Maybe she be thinking of Dink too. I nod at the guide, and we walk away. There is not to worry about hurting feelings, because the guides be close to simulators themselves, filled with penalyazyne and other concoctions from an early age to make good passageway for the mnemonics: obliteration and suppression of the personality from an early age, in other words. When they off duty, they swim in the tanks or lie in the barrows.
Marge and me, we walk through the gate and into the section where the thrust chambers and multi-leveled rockets be poised in rows against the dome. The arena be almost empty on this slow afternoon, and I look at the steel and circuitry and think how sad it is that most of us, we are now so uninterested in our heritage that this place be almost empty. Year by year there are fewer at Rocket City, and I am pretty sure that by the end of the twenty-fives it will be closed, leveled for more occupation. But while it be still around, it is important to pay our heritage respect.
I stare at the multi-levels and think of the men who centuries ago locked themselves into steel, surrounded themselves with filters, and hurled themselves toward Ganymede. They must have been strange and courageous, informed by the knowledge that they were going to the stars; even though that did not quite work, one can respect their dedication. Dink be the same way.
Marge had had enough. “We be getting that boy and out of here,” she said. “O-three-hundred hours now in the simulators, and you know what it was like the last time.”
I know what it was like. We begin to walk that way. “This an impressive place, though, Marge,” I said. “This a memorial to the time when we be spacebound.”
“We not spacebound,” Marge said. “That be put away.”
I do not argue. What is there to argue? She is right, and I have had enough of Rocket City myself; every time the crowds be less and the space between the ships greater. We stroll in our usual way to the simulator barn and pipe in the message for Dink. We wait and we wait. Finally he be coming out in that stunned way they emerge from the simulators, his eyes looking like the guide’s. “Who be you?” he said.
Disorientation on release be common. “The engines be shutting down; we ready for Ganymede contact.”
“Come along,” Marge said, taking his hand. “Ganymede takedown come next time.” He stumbled along with her, still weak and confused. The simulators, they do one good job.
“Ganymede touchdown,” Dink say. “Big Jovian landscape.
Moons as big as worlds. Oh, the darkness.” They talk like that for some hundred hours after release, even longer before they throttle down. “Oh, the darkness,” Dink, he say again, and Marge look at me over his little round head. I shrug, I be taking his other hand. We walk quick and fast out of Rocket City then, the night hard over San Diego outside the dome and the lights winking on the tastehouses and the slaughtering bins as clutching his strong spaceman’s hands.
Marge and me, we take our twenty-eight-year-old son all the way, all the way, all the way home. His round head a spacer’s. His cold eyes the stars.
Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life, etc.
HE came out of the hedges with an angrily uncertain expression, a hesitancy in his gestures. The gun, however, looked quite positive as he shoved it in my ribs. “Give me all your money,” he said, “right now.”
“This isn’t very nurturing of you, Cecil,” I said. “It also isn’t legal.”
“Don’t give me ‘nurturing,’” he said in a tortured whine.
“Just give me the money.”
Carefully I put my hand in my pocket, fumbled for my wallet. “You’ll regret this, Cecil,” I said. “I know your parents.
They’ll be ashamed of you —”
He reversed the gun and slammed me across the face with the butt. I do not mind saying that it hurt, but I took it with frozen expression, resolved not to show emotion. As he shifted the gun back to firing position, I could feel the blood crawling down a cheekbone. How humiliating, I thought. But of course, humiliation is part of the package here.
“Just shut up and hand it over now,” he said. The gun shook in his hand. Overhead a helicopter prowled, rattling the sky. I could smell the gasoline fumes, leaching onto the pastoral, deserted suburban street. This civilization guards at all times against the illusion of beauty.
I opened the wallet and stroked the bills, took out the clumped hundreds. “Now,” I said, “you should understand remorse —”
“Fool!” he said, snatching the wallet from my hand. “The whole thing!” He backed away two paces, clawed through it.
“Three thousand dollars,” he said at length. “You’re holding out on me. Where’s the rest of it?”
“I gave you all I had, Cecil —”
“You’re a liar!” he said. His face clutched in petulance, he looked as if he were going to cry, a most emb
arrassing posture for a man of his age and history. “I want it all!” He seized me by the throat, squeezed. The impact made me groan, and I could feel a fresh wave of blood cascading. “Give it to me!” he said.
I struggled in my pocket, removed the ten hundreds I had folded away separately. “Here,” I said, suffocating in his grasp, barely able to articulate. “As if it will do you any good.”
He released me, pushed me away, counted the money frantically. “There’s still another hundred,” he said. “You’re holding out on me.”
“That’s all of it,” I said. I stood shaking by the fence, the helicopter clattering overhead, feeling the pain now. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Cecil. A man of your background, your opportunities. Your parents will be horrified when I tell them—”
He looked at me with fury, and then, suddenly, centered the gun. “I told you to shut up!” he said. “You mention my name or my parents again, and I’ll blow you away!”
“It’s the truth, Cecil!” I said angrily, touched, felt the pain in my injured throat. “You’re a disgrace to your heritage, and everyone should know about it. I’ll tell—”
He fired the gun.
The bullet caught me squarely in the forehead, and I fell.
His receding footsteps mingled with the sound overhead.
I lay near the tangled bushes for a good fifteen or twenty minutes this time. I must have been dead when they finally pulled me up with the ropes, took me inside, returned me to the all-purpose institute, and performed the standard procedures. At length, cleaned up and given fresh clothing—the cuts on the face were superficial, but they had to do painstaking work on a bruised larynx—I was hauled in front of them and roundly chastised. “I know,” I said, hoping to forestall more of it after the initial onslaught. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“You’re a fool,” the examiner said. “You did everything wrong. You were even worse than the first time.”
“Sometimes I have to be given a little more time,” I said—rather sullenly, I suppose. “I may not be the quickest learner, but once I know, I really know—”
“You mentioned his name, you invoked a personal relationship, you mentioned his parents. You held out on him, not once but twice. That’s really stupid—”
“I got angry,” I said.
“You can’t get angry if you want to survive, you fool. How many times must you be told that?”
“I’ll be better,” I said. The cut still stung. I ran a finger over it lightly. “I don’t want to go through much more of this.”
“Then get it right,” the examiner said. “We have only so much time for each of you, you understand.”
“All right,” I said. I knew that I should be submissive, cooperative, but a tiny core of revulsion still persisted. “These are our streets, you know. It was my neighborhood.”
“You cannot get ideological. That is the last thing—”
“All right,” I said. “I know.” I sat there quietly, nodded with agreement to everything that was subsequently said to me, and at length they let me go. It was agreed to run the circumstance immediately: the best lessons are not assimilated to be reenacted in the morning.
As soon as he came from the hedges, I knew I was in trouble. His eyes looked desperate, and the gun was shaking in his hand—probably because this was his first robbery. “Oh my God,” I said, “please don’t shoot! I’ll give you everything.”
“Give me the money,” he said. With the cap pulled over much of his head and with the huge gun, he was a menacing figure, if one could look past the facts that I knew all so well.
I allowed the terror to fill me. “Here,” I said, handing him my wallet. “Oh, here it is, just don’t shoot me.”
He clawed rapidly through the contents. “They told me you were carrying five thousand,” he said. “Where is it?”
“It’s all there,” I said, “just count it again.”
The clatter of the helicopter rattled the street; a shadow passed across us. I was careful not to look up, not to acknowledge the observation in any way.
He jammed the wallet into his pocket. “All right,” he said, “turn around and start walking. Don’t look back.”
“Can’t I just stay here?” I said. “You’ll shoot me in the back—”
“Stop complaining! Just turn around and start walking.”
“Oh Cecil,” I said, “these cheap theatrics, these little scenarios of intimidation—”
He stared at me. “Don’t use my name!” he said. “I hate my name!”
“Maybe if you stopped hating yourself, Cecil, you wouldn’t do things like this—”
The gun began to waver in his hand. “Goddamn you!” he said. “Start walking. Get away.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” I said. “What your parents will say when I tell them—”
I never saw him aim and fire this time. But I do remember the impact of the stones as, most heavily, I went down.
They must have been furious this time. It was hours later before I found myself restored, and then they had left both bruises I had taken on the knees when I went down so rapidly. The examiner stared at me with loathing. “You’ll never learn,” he said. “You just never learn!”
“I’m trying,” I said. “He got me angry. The business of turning my back to him and walking, it was humiliating—”
“Don’t tell me about humiliation!” the examiner yelled. He stood, only five and a half feet but intimidating on the podium, his mustaches flaring, his face diffused. “You people infuriate me. You don’t understand, you’ll never learn. But I’m going to make you learn because that’s our responsibility here.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll say nothing. Whatever he says, I’ll accept. Whatever he orders, I’ll do.” I felt a sudden twist of pain coming from my legs. “I’m sick of being killed and killed, pistol-whipped and beaten up, you know.”
“Not sick enough,” the examiner said firmly. “We’re running out of chances, you know. One more failure and you’re going to fail altogether, we’ll have to send you back.”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t want that.”
“Think of what your parents will say.”
“All right,” I said. I meant it, I could feel my own features flushing. “I’ll shut up. I won’t say anything.”
“It’s in your hands,” the examiner said. He was breathing hard, almost as hard as Cecil when he fired the gun.
“Ultimately you have to accept the responsibility, don’t you see that?”
Stumbling down the street, I thought I did. I thought that I saw his point. His point was well taken, urban existence is impossible, one must learn at all costs how to survive. The sound of the observing helicopter, tracking me, made me ill; the fumes started me gagging. I was sick of it. The examiner was right: there was a time for student folly, but there was also a time to grow up. I had to grow up. He came from the hedges, extending the gun. “Give me all the money,” he said.
He was nervous and uncertain, but the gun was convincing.
Enormously convincing. I knew what it could do now. I handed him the wallet, the money protruding from it. He snatched it from me, backed away, clawed through it in both hands. “All right,” he said, “it’s all there. Now lie down and close your eyes and count to 250. Slow. Don’t move.”
I pointed to the sidewalk. “Right here?”
“No dummy. In the goddamned mud. Over there.”
I looked to the right, at the slimy substance, still drenched from the recent rain. “There?” I said. “It’s dirty—”
He waved the gun at me, his control breaking. “Down!” he said. “Down, down, down in the mud!”
The helicopter’s sound seemed to overwhelm us as it approached. We were completely in its shadow. Of course he never acknowledged its presence; he is programmed not to.
“Down!” he screamed.
I looked at the filth, at the gun, toward the invisible, implacable observing eyes in the cop
ter. “Oh, the hell with it,”
I said. “Screw you, Cecil,” I said. “I won’t do it! I won’t cooperate.” I spat in his face. Even at distance, it landed solidly. He stared at me with fury, wiped at it, then raised the gun. You fool, I thought to myself. “Your parents will cry at your execution, Cecil!” I hurled at him.
He fired the gun. Flame from the muzzle, et cetera. Quite accustomed to the consequences by this time, I died quite neatly.
I wondered if they’d even bother to revive me this time. It seemed unlikely; I was hardly worth it to them. I’d never be able to live in their cities.
I just couldn’t be a victim.
Coursing
THERE was this woman and her name was Maria. She lived in a console of the great ship Broadway and whispered to Hawkins in the night, promises of love and fealty, warmth and connection. Hawkins could not touch her, could not consummate the promise because she was a simulacrum, a collection of electrons and impulses in the bottle but she made dark periods lively indeed and they had promised that at the end of the voyage, if Hawkins were to do what he meant to, she would be waiting for him, the real Maria; and she would make all these things true. Hawkins did not really believe this, did not believe any of it but the light years were vast, the ship was vacant and full of the stink of antiseptic, and if he were not able to converse with Maria there would have been nothing at all. So he thanked them in his heart for their time and trouble, their cruelty and their manipulativeness, and let it go by. He let everything go by.
The twenty-fourth century was all accommodation.
Hawkins, a felon interred on Titan, had been given a conditional release to go to the Pleiades System and negotiate with the King of the Universe. The King of the Universe, through pulsar, had advised the inner clusters that he would destroy them greatly unless every knee bent and every tongue did give homage. The King of the Universe might have been insane, but very little was known of the Pleiades Cluster and it was assumed that any culture with technology advanced enough to make possible this kind of communication could not be dismissed out of hand. Half a hand yes—send them a felon to do the negotiating—but the last time an alien threat had been entirely ignored brought about the Slaughtering Hutch of a hundred years. The King might have been a child given access to powerful communications matériel or a lunatic acting out for therapy; on the other hand he might be exactly what he said, in which case the inner clusters had a problem. Hawkins, a failure, was half a hedge against riot. Keep a civil tongue, the Advisors had said, evaluate the situation, and try to buy him off; if he refuses to negotiate or turns out to be what he seems then you know where the self-destructs are. Try to get near enough to take the King down. There’s enough armament on the Broadway to take down the Pleiades themselves. And have a good time; after all, the Advisors concluded, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Thirty-three Earth days is nothing for a man who has done half a lifetime; think of it as front-loading.
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 22