by Jerry
“We are doing all we can.”
Wheeler felt afterwards that he had repeated nothing but this phrase throughout his visit. Raoul, on the other hand, talked a good deal about ways and means. Judi came forward once, white-faced, and sent love to her mother. Before the time was up Raoul said to him earnestly:
“Mr Wheeler . . . Griff . . . what I told you earlier was true . . .”
“What . . .?”
“I have no religion except perhaps the Work, you know, the Cause, but I have received a message of hope. I can’t explain . . . I feel . . . something coming through . . .”
Wheeler could see Judi slumped in her chair, hopeless, stricken with the fear of death. As Wheeler turned to go Raoul held up a hand with two fingers spread in a V. In Wheeler’s lifetime this had meant a couple of things and he knew it must have an even longer history. Raoul said with the firmness of habit:
“Canada Separe!”
Wheeler was alone in his pearl-grey official auto this time and he had the driver set him down on the top of a long, spiral ramp about half a kilometer from the apartment block. It was late afternoon, not unbearably hot; the ramp was so high that he felt a breeze as he walked down. Foreigners were perfectly safe in the clean, uncrowded streets of Deskar.
He felt no anger after this visit but the beginnings of a sickening resignation. A long, silver shadow crept up beside him and Wheeler drew back against a whitewashed wall. Then he noticed the diplomatic plates.
“I’m off!” called Herr Schwalbe, nursing his hand luggage. “Auf Wiedersehn, Mr Wheeler!”
“Wait!” said Wheeler. “Before you go . . . what is Hirondel?”
“Ssst!” said the prospector. “It is . . . was . . . a fast-breeder up the country. Out of commission for months after an accident with the disposal of atomic waste. Top secret. The desert has blossomed . . . given the game away. Several new varieties of trees and plants. Does that answer your question?”
“Very well indeed!”
Wheeler stood waving until the auto whirled up to the top of the spiral. He walked on, brisk and gloomy, feeling the afternoon sun on the back of his neck. Three swallows darted into his line of vision above the curve of a roof and were joined by a fourth.
His revelation occurred when he was inside the white apartment block, inhaling its ill-conditioned air. He was on the stairs; he had passed Dupont, the manager, in the lobby, wiping his face with what appeared to be a checked dish-towel. Wheeler steadied himself against the stair rail in case he fell down, then ran reeling along the hazy corridor to his four rooms.
He did not dare put it into words but the message was one of hope. There was a joyful synchronicity in everything that he did, in everything that happened. He laid out all his books on the low table of glass and imitation ebony and opened the new Pegasoid Press edition of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury at random:
“O swallow, swallow, flying south . . .”
He opened the well-thumbed Pegasoid catalogue at random, in fact at Ransom, Arthur: Swallows and Amazons. He shut his eyes and felt a warm intelligence all about him. He took up Herr Schwalbe’s book: an English paperback of Anna Karenina, rubber stamped “Book Exchange for Cultural Freedom, 1957”. It was a relic of the Empire’s long infiltration by the Communist front, enough to bring him five years in prison. The yellowed pages had to be pried apart. He opened the book at page 180 and read on the facing page: “Four shots rang out and the snipe turned swiftly like swallows and vanished from sight”.
Wheeler stepped out onto the balcony and gulped the smoky air of sunset. The feeling of joyous certainty was sharpened, it was like chords of music . . . Something coming through. Suddenly the air before him was filled by clouds of swallows; they dipped and circled. If he narrowed his eyes the birds seemed to weave bright patterns in the air. Several birds flew right in under the roof of the balcony and out again, in sweet erratic flight, so close that he could see their plumage, darkest blue and black, and the creamy flash of their underbodies.
He went indoors again and switched on the television set. It had not been used for days; he had given up even on the news broadcasts. He found himself staring into the bearded face of the Emperor, leaving some public ceremony. He searched the face fora sign but this was not enough. He directed all his own hope, his own certainty at the young man.
The Emperor raised a hand in salute; he wore a sky-blue uniform of antique cut, heavily laced with gold and silver. Wheeler sat back on his heels on the carpet as the Emperor entered his palace gates; he felt drained of power. The newsreel ended with a filler, a few frames of the palace gardens; a string orchestra began to play and he recognised the melody. La Golondrina . . . the swallow.
Wheeler lay down on his bed still in his crumpled white prison visitor’s suit. He slept deeply. He felt himself sinking swiftly down through layers of downy unaccustomed sleep. He slept, exhausted, for hours, then dreamed sweetly, without pain, of Sara and Jon. He experienced with delight the garish colours and sounds of that ugly section of the great metropolitan seaboard where they spent their holidays. In his dream he looked with aching relief upon hamburger stands and the grimy, sluggish ocean.
He remained asleep and presently he saw in his dream the city of Deskar, still and silent under the moon. The whorled streets were empty; the glass bubble that carried the Muezzin to his perch hung glittering on its tower. Yet he knew that the citizens were merely sleeping; the domes and ziggurats were packed with sleepers. In the Imperial Prison Judi and Raoul slept in each other’s arms. As he watched from some vantage point a mist arose; planes of blue vapour unfolded among the night-cooled walls.
Soon after this dream Wheeler woke up; it was three o’clock in the morning. His euphoria had receded; it was a remembered warmth, like the dream of home. He wandered through the apartment, ate a banana, and stepped meditatively onto the balcony again. The image of the city from his dream was so strong that he was surprised to see no mist reaching through the streets.
Wheeler looked up and saw the stars. The sky fell down on him, it sank into his brain. The old certainty, that feeling of absurd good news grew and blossomed in and around him. He understood everything; he understood space and time; he understood and was absorbed into the totality of mankind. He saw that between the earth and the stars there stretched a web of intelligence, rarely perceived, benevolent and not impersonal. They were there. He personalised them as female. He felt his thoughts and the thoughts of countless billions of human beings living and dying and still living since the world began rising up to be absorbed into the net. He had no need to concentrate, to make any plea or supplication. Their understanding was complete. He hardly remembered going back to bed and falling asleep again.
He slept until nine o’clock and had to shower and shave and hide his copy of Anna Karenina in a hurry before the young cleaner arrived to do his rooms. He gave the boy Imperial currency and went down to the terrace to escape the roar of the vacuum cleaner. He breakfasted, as he often did, on half a melon and a can of mineral water. The morning had not become too hot; there was no wind; the view from the terrace was of the suburbs. Hectares of low, flat-roofed white houses, sprawled over low hills; there were trees . . . spindly palms and acacias . . . and rolling clumps of vines growing on to the roof-tops.
Wheeler did not know what to make of his mystical experience. He could not discount it but he could not discount the notion that it was a defence against the fear and stress he lived with in Deskar. He walked to the end of the terrace to throw his melon rind . . . but not his drink-can . . . into the tangle of vines below the iron railing. He stared, like a sidewalk superintendent, at the contruction work on the new wing.
There were a great many earthen ramps that put him in mind of the building of the pyramids; the three upper floors were coming along slowly; the completed ground floor, somewhere below the level of the terrace was the base for operations. The noise and clatter had not built up to its mid-morning crescendo which stopped abruptly about half-past eleve
n. Siesta lasted from this time until fifteen hundred hours; the workers withdrew to the shade of tents and awnings perched all over the site; the foremen slept in the roofed shell of the ground floor.
Coffee-breaks or their equivalent went on all the time; in shady places, under the awnings, there were always little groups of workers or hangers-on tending fires, cooking, offering pieces of fruit to the men toiling up the ramps with their barrows. In accord with the reformed religion of the Empire there were a few women with swaythed heads who formed a workgroup of their own; there were two female welders who worked in overalls like the other welders but seldom removed their helmets.
Wheeler stared at the busy scene; he realised that he didn’t know enough about construction work to be shocked by primitive methods. The workers seemed happy and, in their own way, well-organised. Wheeler stared and felt his stomach lurch; he felt as if a tight band were being twisted around his forehead. He looked again, walking to the very edge of the terrace and leaning over the rail. He sighed and exhaled and began to laugh.
At every one of the small camp fires a man or a boy was feeding the iron brazier or cut-down oil-drum with bundles of half-dried leafy twigs. He could see no other fuel being burnt. Many of these small fires were close to the shady wall of the completed section of the building, the section where he lived. A haze of bluish smoke blanketed this wall; thicker puffs and tendrils were actually curling into the cracks and interstices of the wall. At two, three of the campsites he could see the faggots being prepared. He was so close to the lower level that he could see an old woman pluck off a still-green leaf and chew it before making a bundle of new green and prodding it into her fire. A rickety housing that was surely the air conditioning plant was half invisible in a cloud of the smoke.
Wheeler chuckled to himself; he felt bereft and lonely. He had his reasonable explanation. He remembered his dream of the city. An apartment house, a whole city zonked out. He suddenly knew the smell of new-green: a stale, resinous odour . . . the apartment block reeked of it. He wondered what the other residents had hallucinated, what feelings of strength and hope and certainty it had brought them. Raoul had had the same experience. Something coming through. Damn stuff must be dangerous to health. Smoke pollution could kill you! He turned, ready to find M. Dupont, drag him out on to the terrace if necessary and show that he managed a houseful of new-green heads.
“Mr Wheeler!”
It was an urgent, joyous shout. Madame Nyass came on to the terrace with her draperies flowing and her arms outstretched. She bore down on him and folded him into an embrace.
“Mr Wheeler! Mr Wheeler! They are free!”
“Judi and Raoul?”
“General amnesty,” she panted. “They were turned loose at eight o’clock!”
“Good heavens . . .” was all that Wheeler could find to say. “But why . . . where are they? Can I see . . .?”
“General amnesty,” she repeated. “You had better leave at once, this minute. The young people are waiting for you over the border at Checkpoint South.”
“Which border?”
“Checkpoint South gives on to the International Zone surrounding the Highway . . .”
“My plane ticket . . .” stammered Wheeler.
“No,” she said firmly. “For God’s sake go with them in their safari wagon, Mr Wheeler. I cannot guarantee your visa any longer. Go with the children and drive back to the beaches of Namibia Free State where they came from in the first place. Stick to the Highway this time.”
She helped him pack; they were out of the apartment in twenty minutes. Instead of an official car Madame Nyass was driving her own battered BMW Electra wagon; Wheeler gave her his Imperial currency to change for him. He sat in the back seat and wrote away twenty thousand dollars in travellers’ checks for his attorney’s fee. M. Dupont had been nowhere about when they left; Wheeler had given no warning about the new-green pollution. Selfish, he reflected coldly, selfish to the last. But the kids were free, free.
They went swiftly spiralling up and down on the ramps and overpasses of the city, drove for some time on the long, beautiful avenue that led to the airport, then turned off through meaner streets. There was the border, complete with striped poles, pillboxes, and, at ten thirty in the morning, a trickle of incoming traffic. African women with handcarts, boys on bicycles, several rattle-trap gas-burning trucks, packed with passengers, were entering as they approached. He realised that these folk were in fact Imperial citizens who had to cross the international zone surrounding the Highway in order to reach Deskar. The Imperial guards, in magenta battledress, with machine guns easily balanced, seemed friendly and obliging. Wheeler stared past them and saw a sight that pleased him beyond words. Three tall black men strode up and down with their machine guns easily balanced; they wore Khaki battledress and the blue helmets of the United Nations.
While Madame Nyass fixed things up, as she put it, at the guard house, Wheeler tried to catch sight of Judi and Raoul in their safari wagon. There were a few beehive huts and prefabricated sheds on both sides of the border. A party of children were playing with slingshots; a skinny cow, towed behind a bicycle, suddenly kicked up its heels, hit by a stone. Wheeler remained in a daze watching this peaceful third-world scene until Madame Nyass hustled him out of the car, pressed a few dollars upon him, and festooned him with his hand-luggage.
They walked forward, ducked under the corner of the raised, striped pole and passed into No-Man’s Land. Wheeler was already stammering out his thanks, uttering farewells. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a little cloud of birds twisting around the vane of a silver windmill, the tallest structure beyond the border. At the same time he saw the wagon, parked in the shade of a beehive hut . . . yes, they were there, extravagantly waving to him. Judi sat on the half-raised canopy of the wagon; Raoul, still in his maple-leaf T-shirt, was in the driver’s seat. They were calling but he could not make out their voices. He wondered, seriously, if he were dreaming, if he would wake up in the apartment again.
“There they are!” said Madame Nyass. “Goodbye again, Mr Wheeler.”
“But was there a reason?” he asked, trying to pull himself together. “Why was there an amnesty?”
“Didn’t I mention that? The Emperor had a dream.” Wheeler could not speak; he looked back towards the city of Deskar, rising fantastic, dreamlike, in a haze of heat. He clutched his valise and strode out of the Empire; the smiling guard in his blue helmet stamped his documents and waved to Madame Nyass. Ahead Judi and Raoul still waved and shouted. He felt a smile grow on his face; the rule of reason was being reestablished. As Wheeler passed beside the silver windmill he heard the voices of the children raised in a cry of triumph and a swallow fell dead at his feet.
BLOOD MUSIC
Greg Bear
A lot has been speculated about the next step in evolution. But there may come a time when even the evolutionary mechanism undersoes a drastic mutation . . .
There is a principle in nature I don’t think anyone has pointed out before. Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things—bacteria, microbes, “animalcules”—are born and die, not counting for much except in the bulk of their existence and the accumulation of their tiny effects. They do not perceive deeply. They do not suffer much. A hundred billion, dying, would not begin to have the same importance as a single human death.
Within the ranks of magnitude of all creatures, small as microbes or great as humans, there is an equality of “elan,” just as the branches of a tall tree, gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal the bulk of the trunk.
That, at least, is the principle. I believe Vergil Ulam was the first to violate it.
It had been two years since I’d last seen Vergil. My memory of him hardly matched the tan, smiling, well-dressed gentleman standing before me. We had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employees’ cafeteria at the Mount Freedom Medical Center.
“Vergil?” I asked. “My God, Vergil!”
“Good to see you, Edward.” He shook my hand firmly. He had lost ten or twelve kilos and what remained seemed tighter, better proportioned. At university, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock-haired, snaggle-toothed whiz kid who hot-wired doorknobs, gave us punch that turned our piss blue, and never got a date except with Eileen Termagent, who shared many of his physical characteristics.
“You look fantastic,” I said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”
We stood in line at the counter and chose our food. “The tan,” he said, picking out a carton of chocolate milk, “is from spending three months under a sunlamp. My teeth were straightened just after I last saw you. I’ll explain the rest, but we need a place to talk where no one will listen close.”
I steered him to the smoker’s corner, where three diehard puffers were scattered among six tables.
“Listen, I mean it,” I said as we unloaded our trays. “You’ve changed. You’re looking good.”
“I’ve changed more than you know.” His tone was motion-picture ominous, and he delivered the line with a theatrical lift of his brows. “How’s Gail?”
Gail was doing well, I told him, teaching nursery school. We’d married the year before. His gaze shifted down to his food—pineapple slice and cottage cheese, piece of banana cream pie—and he said, his voice almost cracking, “Notice something else?”
I squinted in concentration. “Uh.”
“Look closer.”
“I’m not sure. Well, yes, you’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”
“No, I don’t need them anymore.”
“And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”
“Candice isn’t—wasn’t responsible for the improvement in my clothes,” he said. “I just got a better job, more money to throw around. My taste in clothes is better than my taste in food, as it happens.” He grinned the Vergil self-deprecating grin, but ended it with a peculiar leer. “At any rate, she’s left me, I’ve been fired from my job, I’m living on savings.”