by Jerry
“The waters yet rise,” she shouted. “See? And the lightning . . . you can see the lightning breaking the Alps to dust. It’s the end, child. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found . . . the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living thing died in the sea.” On and on she spoke, her voice mingling with the sound of the gale and the boom of the waves, just carrying over it all . . . until Carlo, cold and tired, filled with pity and a black anguish like the clouds rolling over them, put his arm around her thin shoulders and turned her around. They descended to the floor below, picked up the extinguished lantern, and descended to her chamber, which was still lit. It seemed warm, a refuge. He could hear her still speaking. He was shivering without pause.
“You must be cold,” she said in a practical tone. She pulled a few blankets from her bed. “Here, take these.” He sat down in the big heavy chair, put the blankets around his legs, put his head back. He was tired. The old woman sat in her chair and wound thread onto a spool. After a few minutes of silence she began talking again, and as Carlo dozed and shifted position and nodded off again, she talked and talked, of storms, and drownings, and the world’s end, and lost love . . .
In the morning when he woke up, she was gone. Her room stood revealed in the dim morning light: shabby, the furniture battered, the blankets worn, the knickknacks of Venetian glass ugly, as Venetian glass always was . . . but it was clean. Carlo got up and stretched his stiff muscles. He went up to the roof; she wasn’t there. It was a sunny morning. Over the east wait he saw that his boat was still there, still floating. He grinned—the first one in a few days; he could feel that in his face.
The woman was not on the floors below, either. The lowest one served as her boathouse, he could see. In it were a pair of decrepit rowboats and some lobster pots. The biggest “boatslip” was empty. She was probably out checking pots.
Or perhaps she hadn’t wanted to talk with him in the light of day.
From the boathouse he could walk around to his craft, through water only knee-deep. He sat in the stern, reliving the previous afternoon, and grinned again at being alive.
He took off the decking and bailed out the water on the keel with his bailing can, keeping an eye out for the old woman. Then he remembered the boat hook and went back upstairs for it. When he returned there was still no sight of her. He shrugged. He’d come back and say good-bye another time. He rowed around the campanile and off the Lido, pulled up the sail, and headed northwest, where he presumed Venice was.
The Lagoon was as flat as a pond this morning, the sky cloudless, like the blue dome of a great basilica. It was amazing, but Carlo was not surprised. The weather was like that these days. Last night’s storm, however, had been something else. That was the mother of all squalls, those were the biggest waves in the Lagoon ever, without a doubt. He began rehearsing his tale in his mind, for wife and friends.
Venice appeared over the horizon right off his bow, just where he thought it would be: first the great campanile, then San Marco and the other spires. The campanile . . . Thank God his ancestors had wanted to get up there so close to God—or so far off the water—the urge had saved his life. In the rain-washed air, the sea approach to the city was more beautiful than ever, and it didn’t even bother him as it usually did that no matter how close you got to it, it still seemed to be over the horizon. That was just the way it was, now. The Serenissima. He was happy to see it.
He was hungry, and still very tired. When he pulled into the Grand Canal and took down the sail, he found he could barely row. The rain was pouring off the land into the Lagoon, and the Grand Canal was running like a mountain river, it was tough going. At the fire station where the canal bent back, some of his friends working on a new roof-house waved at him, looking surprised to see him going upstream so early in the day. “You’re going the wrong way!” one shouted.
Carlo waved an oar weakly before plopping it back in. “Don’t I know it!” he replied.
Over the Rialto, back into the little courtyard of San Giacometta. Onto the sturdy dock he and his neighbors had built, staggering a bit—careful there, Carlo.
“Carlo!” his wife shrieked from above. “Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!” She flew down the ladder from the roof.
He stood on the dock. He was home.
“Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!” his wife cried as she ran onto the dock.
“Jesus,” be pleaded. “shut up.” And pulled her into a rough hug.
“Where have you been, I was so worried about you because of the storm, you said you’d be back yesterday, oh, Carlo. I’m so glad to see you . . .” She tried to help him up the ladder. The baby was crying. Carlo sat down in the kitchen chair and looked around the little makeshift room with satisfaction. In between chewing down bites of a loaf of bread he told Luisa of his adventure: the two Japanese and their vandalism, the wild ride across the Lagoon, the madwoman on the campanile. When he had finished the story and the loaf of bread, he began to fall asleep.
“But Carlo, you have to go back and pick up those Japanese.”
“To hell with them,” he said slurrily. Creepy little bastards . . . They’re tearing the Madonna apart, didn’t I tell you? They’ll take everything in Venice, every last painting and statue and carving and mosaic and all . . . I can’t stand it.”
“Oh. Carlo. It’s all right. They take those things all over the world and put them up and say this is from Venice, the greatest city in the world.”
“They should be here.”
“Here, here, come in and lie down for a few hours. I’ll go see if Giuseppe will go to Torcello with you to bring back those bricks.” She arranged him on their bed. “Let them have what’s under the water, Carlo. Let them have it.” He slept.
He sat up struggling, his arm shaken by his wife.
“Wake up, it’s late. You’ve got to go to Torcello to get those men. Besides, they’ve got your scuba gear.”
Carlo groaned.
“Maria says Giuseppe will go with you. He’ll meet you with his boat on the Fundamente.”
“Damn.”
“Come on, Carlo, we need that money.”
“All right, all right.” The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. “I’ll do it. Don’t pester me.”
He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa’s instructions and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.
Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had kneeled behind one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weightbelts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling, somewhat foolish—but not entirely—he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone. Around This Temple Let the Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom . . .
The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.
Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.
MAKING LIGHT
James P. Hogan
In his spacious office atop the Headquarters Building of the Celestial Construction Company Inc., the General Operations Director hummed to himself as he sat at his desk and scanned over Contract 13,700,000,000 B.C. The contract document was brief and straightforward and called for the creation of a standard Mark IV universe—plenty of light; the usual suns, planets, and moons; a few firma
ments here and there with birds and animals on the land; fish-filled waters around the land. There was an attached schedule for accessories, spares for renewable resources, and some supporting services. Deadline for the contract was seven days—a piece of cake, the GOD told himself. Design Engineering Department’s final proposal for the bid lay to one side of the desk in the form of a bulky folder that constituted the Works Order Review Document. Until final approvals were granted, the W.O.R.D. would be all that existed of the universe . . . but it was a beginning.
What promised to make this project a little different from the previous Mark IV’s, and somewhat more interesting, was the optional extra that Design Engineering had tagged on in the Appendix section of the proposal: “people.” Unlike the species that made up the usual mix of Mark IV animal forms, which simply consumed resources and multiplied until they achieved a balance with the environment, the people would have the capacity to harness fire, make tools, and generally think about how they could be better off. This would produce an awareness of needs and the motivation to do something about satisfying them. Eventually the people would discover that, as their numbers and their demands increased, they would no longer be able to satisfy their needs with the resources that came readily to hand. At that point, the reasoning went, they could simply give up; they could fight over what they had until it ran out, and then be obliged to give up anyway; or they could develop the intellectual potential inherent in their design and apply it to discovering the progression of new resources hidden around them like the successively more challenging, but at the same time more rewarding, clues of a treasure hunt. The way out of the maze lay in the third alternative.
Wood, growing all over the surface of the planets, would be the most obvious fuel following the taming of fire, but it wouldn’t prove adequate for long. It would, however, enable the more easily mined metal ores—conveniently scattered on top of the crusts or not very far below—to be smelted and exploited to make the tools necessary for digging deeper to the coal. Coal would enable an industrial base to be set up for producing machines suitable for drilling and processing oil, which in turn would yield the more highly concentrated fuels essential for aircraft and rudimentary space vehicles. The scientific expertise that would emerge during this phase would be the key to unlocking nuclear energy, and the fission technologies thus brought into being would pave the way into fusion—initially using the deuterium from the special-formula oceans premixed for the purpose—and hence out to the stars and on to the advanced methods that would render resources effectively infinite for the lifetime of the universe. On planets set up for them in that way, and with brains that ought to be capable of figuring the rest out for themselves, the people would have a fair chance of winning the game.
What the purpose of the game was, Design Engineering hadn’t said. The GOD suspected that it was more for their own amusement than anything else, but he hadn’t objected since he was quite curious himself to find out how the people would handle the situation. A modicum of applied precognition could no doubt have revealed that . . . But somehow it would have spoiled things.
He was still browsing over the last page of the contract when the phone rang with a peal of rising and falling chimes. It was Gabriel, the Vice President of Manufacturing. He sounded worried. “It’s proposal number thirteen point seven billion B.C.,” he said. “I think we might have problems.”
The GOD frowned. “I was just going through it. Looks fine to me. What’s the problem?”
“Somebody from Equal Employment Opportunities Creation has been onto the Legal Department. They’re objecting to DE’s proposal for the people on the grounds that it would discriminate unfairly against the animals. I think we ought to get the department heads together to talk about it. How are you fixed?”
“Pretty clear for the next few millennia. When did you want to do it?”
“How about right now, while the large conference and congregation room’s free?”
“Sure. Get the others over and I’ll see you there in, say, ten minutes.”
“Leave it to me.”
The GOD replaced the phone, slipped the contract document inside the WORD folder, tucked the folder under his arm as he stood up from the desk, and began walking toward the door. Outside in the corridor he paused to pat the pockets of his suit and found he was out of holy smokes, so he made a slight detour to get a pack from the machine by the ascension and descension elevators.
“The EEOC says that we can’t endow one species with that kind of intelligence,” the Head of the Legal Department explained across the gilt-edged conference table a quarter of an hour later. “Doing so would confer such an advantage that the animals would be guaranteed permanent second-class status with no opportunity to compete, which would constitute an infringement of rights.”
“And we’ve been looking into some of the other implications,” another of the lawyers added. “The people would eventually assume a uniquely dominant role. That could set us up for an antitrust suit.”
All heads turned toward the Chief Design Engineer. “Well, we can’t take the intelligence away from the people,” he objected. “The physiques that we’ve specified don’t give them any other means of survival. They’d have no chance. Then we’d still be in trouble with EEOC but with everything the other way around.” He threw his hands out impatiently. “And besides, it would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise. It was the addition of intelligence that was going to make this project more interesting.”
“Why not make all the species equally intelligent?” somebody suggested.
The CDE shook his head. “We planned the ecology so that the animals would do most of the work for the people in the early phases and provide a lot of their food. If we made them equally intelligent, the situation would qualify as slavery and exploitation. We’d never get it past the Justice Department.”
“And on top of that they’d all become eligible for education, sickness benefits, and retirement pensions,” the CDE’s assistant pointed out. “HHS would never accept the commitment. They couldn’t handle the load.”
That was true, the GOD admitted as he thought about it. Already, the Department of Harps, Hallelujahs, and Salvation, had insisted that all guarantees of benefits be deleted from the proposal. And that had been just on account of the projected numbers of people, never mind all the animals. “So why can’t we change things so the people don’t have to depend on the animals at all?” he asked, at last looking up. “Let’s make them strong enough to do all the work themselves, and have them just eat plants.”
“Not that easy,” the CDE answered, shaking his head dubiously. “They’d have to be at least the size of elephants on an input of vegetable protein. Then food-gathering would become such a problem that they’d never have any time left over for mental development, which puts us back to square one.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Though it might work if we redesigned the food chain somehow.”
The GOD looked over at the Head of Research. “What do you say to that?” he asked.
The scientist didn’t appear too happy. He pinched his nose and reflected upon the question. “We’d have to figure it out again all the way down to the bacteria,” he replied after a while. “You’re talking about a complete redesign, not just a few modifications. Setting up a whole new ecology and running it through the simulator is a long job. I don’t think we could finish before the closing date on the bid, and that doesn’t allow for having to rewrite the proposal from scratch. If we could use the new Infallible Biological Modeler we might have had a chance, but we can’t. It’s not up and running yet.”
“I thought the IBM was supposed to have been installed last week,” the GOD said, sounding surprised.
“It was, but the systems angelists haven’t handed it over yet,” the Research Chief replied. “They’re not through exorcizing the bugs.”
The GOD frowned down at the table in front of him. “Hell,” he muttered irritably.
“Er . . . we don
’t say that here,” Gabriel reminded him politely.
“Oh, of course.” The GOD made an apologetic gesture and then cast his eyes around the table. “Does anyone else have any suggestions?” he invited. No one had. He sighed in resignation, then looked at the Chief Design Engineer. “I’m sorry, Chief, but it sounds as if we’re stuck. I guess there’s no choice but to drop the extras and revert to a standard Mark IV.”
“No people?” The CDE sounded disappointed.
“No people,” the GOD confirmed. “It was a nice thought, but it’s out of the question on the timescale of this contract. Keep working on it with Research, and maybe you’ll have it all figured out in time for the next bid, huh?” The CDE nodded glumly.
The meeting ended shortly thereafter, and the Vice President of Sales went back to his office to begin drafting a revised Appendix section to be delivered to the customer by winged messenger. So the project wasn’t going to be so interesting after all, the GOD reflected with a pang of regret as he collected his papers. But at least that meant there was less risk of overrunning on time and incurring penance clauses.
The Chief Design Engineer was on the phone shortly after lunch the following day. “Have you heard?” he asked. He sounded distressed.
“Heard what?” the GOD answered.
“Feathers, Aviation, and Aquatics have been onto our legal people. They’re trying to tell us that our birds and fish aren’t safe.”