Member

by Michael Cisco

  He lowers his gaze now, takes out a metal instrument, a penknife maybe, and begins cleaning his fingernails with it. His hands are beautiful.

  “The Doctor, the others,” I say, “they decided—”

  “They are free to decide such things,” he breaks in, studying his hands dejectedly. “I just have to adjust the work schedules. And bury used-up Operationals.”

  “Why be sore at me? I did the shovelling.”

  “Yes, didn’t you.”

  From the side, I see his eyebrow go up.

  “Isn’t this their country club? Why don’t you take it up with them?”

  He shakes his head, cleans his nails. Not liable to give me much to go on unless I can get a rise out of him.

  “The Doctor sent me to 7A,” I say.

  “What for?”

  “Deliver a note. A little billet-doux, by the look of things.”

  Guerrero shakes his head.

  “That’s a pretty cozy spot. The High Rationals don’t kid around when it comes to having fun—”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “I saw the place—”

  “That’s impossible! High Rationals don’t carry on that way!”

  “All right, OK,” I say skeptically, raising my hands. “Have it your way. They’re innocent as angels—”

  “What do you know about it!” Guerrero barks. “You’re always lying, pretending you know everything there is to know. Well the High Rationals don’t stand in need of that kind of stimulation, you’re so stupid. They get an orgasm from adding two plus two! Why do you think they’re called High Rationals? They just sit and do their times tables and see stars,” Guerrero says, smiling a little sadly and settling back into his former posture with a creak of springs.

  “Oh,” he groans, with a deliberate break in his voice, “what’s the use trying to explain such things to an ape like you?”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry chief. I must say it is nice of them to provide so well for us lower orders of irrationals—”

  Guerrero smirks at this.

  “—especially considering their glorious innocence of this vulgar need for stimulation. Too bad we all can’t do without the occasional moon in June... but us earthier natures, eh?”

  Guerrero looks at me sharply. This wasn’t a waste of time. I hadn’t expected such piety about the High Rationals.

  “I wouldn’t have expected your wife to be so forgiving.”

  To my surprise, he relaxes, allows his head to roll until he is looking out the window again, but at a thoughtful angle. He sighs, folding his hands across his midsection.

  “Clare is only severe about things that matter to her,” he says.

  With a quick, sheepish grin, he gestures at his outstretched leg.

  “It’s not the injury that bothers her, it’s the dressing. She doesn’t like the bandages. She doesn’t approve of them.”

  The cast on Guerrero’s leg is more beat-up than ever. It’s grey and dingy even in this weak light, and a mane of shredded gauze hangs down from it like fringe. There’s a burnt spot, the size of a man’s hand with outspread fingers, on the thigh. Patches of mold spot the calf, and mushrooms, gills of mold, are growing there. It looks like a fallen tree.

  “I broke this,” he taps the cast with his finger, then glances up at me, “six weeks or so after I got here. I don’t allow it to get better. You hear me? I don’t want it to heal. The Operationals respect me more while I’m in this chair. And the energy I would have wasted fixing this leg, instead I can use for other things.

  “Of course, I did use it. Then something else comes up, and I have to deal with it, so there’s no vitality left to give back to my leg, apart from the minimum, to keep it alive, keep it from withering altogether. And so on. There has never been a chance to spare the vitality since. Now, with the greater worry, with the new rearrangements that this... spell makes necessary, I may not be able to spare it even that little bit I save up to keep it from withering in there. There are years of pent-up withering I have been staving off but... ”

  He tosses his hands up resignedly.

  “...do I have to lose my leg for good?”

  “You seemed energetic enough with...”

  For a few minutes, he falls silent. Then he perks up again.

  “So, I get it from June,” he growls, smiling nastily. “She has so much to offer—but then, why am I telling you? Or you only like to spy?”

  I shrug.

  “I was looking for a certain room. Doing my duty. I was obeying the order—the direct order, of a High Rational—wasn’t I? Is this wrong? Can I help it if you can’t be bothered to find a more discreet place to give wheelchair rides?”

  Guerrero actually laughs at this, a couple or three jerks of the head.

  “June is not particular,” he says. “She doesn’t give a damn about bandages. And Clare... Clare doesn’t give a damn about it. They’re there, you know, at her order. She requisitioned them.”

  “What, the women?”

  “Yes, the women.”

  “Just for you?”

  “Interested?”

  I just stare at him.

  “...No. Not just for me. She thinks a lot about sex. But mainly for me, mainly. Only don’t take yours off—” he breaks in irrelevantly. “Or... do what you like, but be careful...”

  “What?”

  “Your bandages,” he says. “Unless you want her, too.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t think you saw her naked by accident, do you?”

  He looks at me with a creepy, brotherly sort of expression on his face.

  “June?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Clare!”

  “What?”

  “She likes you,” he says.

  Don’t fall for this, I tell myself, and almost laugh. Like that was probable anyway.

  “She made sure you saw her.”

  “Didn’t act like she wanted to be seen.”

  “Of course not. She wants you to go for her.”

  Not a mole, not a hair, not a freckle, not a scar. She was new-fallen snow. Facing me as I came into the room, she turned completely around as she hurried to cover.

  Is this why she watched me, that time?

  Had she needed to turn completely around?

  “She hasn’t exactly been approachable.”

  “Her desire embarrasses her. I think it makes her get angry at herself.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “She isn’t angry every moment.”

  “No, other times she’s worse.”

  “Wait till you talk to her. You’ll notice it. You won’t be able to miss it.”

  “I just did talk to her and all I noticed was venom.”

  “Where was that?”

  “At the burial.”

  “What burial?”

  “Is this an everyday thing?... Nine graves. Loring was there, hanging crepe. She stood there staring daggers at space and time and then stormed off when I spoke to her.”

  Guerrero shakes his head.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t Loring that prompted her to go? She hates Loring,” he says. “Especially after that business with the Newest, but she hated him before.”

  She did turn away when he came up to me, that’s true. But this is such an obvious trap—get me to pull something with Mrs. Guerrero, alienate her, give him a pretext to toss me.

  But couldn’t he do that anyway?

  He needs a reason.

  But a reason that needlessly humiliates him? Or is this why June...?

  Why did she turn all the way around? Is this her way of evening the scales, considering she spied on me? I can’t remember what happened first.

  “Look, Mr. Guerrero—”

  His head bobs once.

  “Mister Guerrero, eh? You go ahead. Go ahead, do what you want to do. She and I are compressed. Like the immoveable object and the unstoppable force.”

  He holds out one hand for each.

 
“We don’t try to win. At least, I don’t. She, I believe, doesn’t try either. We aim for the draw. So we can both keep drawing.”

  Guerrero lets his hands drop into his lap and lets his head drop back a little, and to the side, looking up at me steadily. A long, appraising look.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, as if he expects me to be reasonable and to realize I’m wrong for being here, and should leave.

  “Is this what you really want to know? Isn’t it more like, what am I doing in your world?”

  “What does anyone want to know? Why in any world?”

  “Where else is there for me to be?”

  The artifact is a big black lump, but lights down in the trench or hidden from view some other way toward the top are shining up, illuminating spots on the low-hanging clouds. Beyond those clouds is outer space. Also beneath me, after a relatively brief intervention of rock and magma, and on all sides, and the Earth out there.

  “I’m not getting out of Chorncendantra. I want to understand it,” I say.

  “What for?” Guerrero asks, as though I were asking a seriously unreasonable thing.

  “To get something out of it, or to get more into it, I don’t know. If I’d simply learned about it or had a glimpse of it and gone on living like always then that would be fine, I could have wondered about it now and then and that’d be that. But I got in, and now I want to go as far in as I can.”

  A qualm goes through me as I say that.

  “I want to get bigger, or stop being what I am.”

  Guerrero looks at me, thoughtfully.

  “I don’t have a wife—”

  “You don’t want one.”

  “—a brother, a position, family or religion or money—”

  “There is none of that here, no money here, nobody has money.”

  “—No, nobody has money, not even those terrifying well-behaved slaves of yours, but back on Earth nothing else matters or ever happens, and people don’t get to live in prebalanced utopias, where we come from—where I come from if I don’t have any money I just drop dead and that’s too bad, and as far as anyone’s concerned nothing has gone out of the world any more than anything came into the world when I turned up. Is this the kind of a place anybody’d want to stay in?”

  I stand over Guerrero.

  “You think I’m here because I want to be some sort of a big deal back there?”

  “What do you think you’re going to get out of hanging around here?”

  “I’ll get myself out of it, because I’d rather be lost out here with the bandages and the no food, this crazy bag, believe me!”

  I’m already well on the way to shame at this outburst. It’s all an act. But still I have to do my part, and you can’t act without giving things away about yourself. And that’s nobody’s business. I wish, fervently wish, that it weren’t even my business.

  The words have stopped. Guerrero points out the window and says:

  “Look out there.”

  The sky is dazzling white, a hazy white day in summer. My eyes contract sharply and I have to keep blinking, feeling the light lean into me. For the first time, I see the artifact and the camp, the roofs of the barracks, streaked with daylight, throw dark shadows. Figures doubled with long shadows walk by the window, their bodies half vaporized by the glare.

  “Understand?” Guerrero asks, turning to me a face more starkly ravaged in this light than I could have imagined. “Now, do you see any better?”

  The day disappears so quickly I tilt, nearly pitching into the vacuum it left. Through the strobing after image of the window I can see the same barracks, artifact, walking figures, all in the same places, but wan and vague and drained of color. I see both, like overlapping transparencies, but every time I’m about to get the outlines to lock they dance joylessly away from each other.

  “I can’t mess with this,” I say, grabbing my eyes. “It doesn’t matter how much of a mess I make.”

  “Not to it,” Guerrero says, while I’m still rubbing my eyes. “To us, though, it matters. Don’t forget that.”

  *

  The artifact seems to stand at the end of every street. It seems to be there every time I lift my gaze from the ground. It’s as though it were expecting something from me. Foreboding. A fate machine about to make a decision in my case, one way or another. And all the little things are going wrong. I reach for my bag and miss, snatch at it and knock it over. My shoe comes untied and the knot is half unravelled again less than five minutes later. Reach down to tie it yet again and the cuff slit in my shirt sleeve snags a nail that’s protruding from the wooden steps beside me—I manage to stop my arm before the nail tears the fabric too badly. On it goes like this.

  The work crews are busy, divided in sections up and down the artifact’s length, but nothing disrupts the impression of its ageless sameness. It’s as if the frenzied activity of the workers is part of it, the way a roaring fire can seem tranquil. There’s a chord coming from it... I don’t know how to describe it. What I need is a word that describes a noise that is released almost passively from its source, and whose force comes from a kind of lateral tension across the sound rather than from any push behind it. I suppose I could call it “resonance.” The artifact resonates in a way that convinces me that all my hunches about it are right, all of them. It says ‘yes’ to them all: immeasurably old and too new, a wall that encircles the whole planet and that’s exactly the same at every point along its length.

  My eye follows its mass as it dwindles off toward the horizon, and I imagine waves smashing against this wall in the middle of the ocean. You could walk around the world on the top of it, but you’d probably only go on seeing the same barracks, the same brambly hills and trees on the one side. And then there is always the other side. It can’t have only one. Would the ocean be water on one side and smoke on the other? Are there floating work camps, with barracks on rafts or anchored platforms? Maybe the artifact goes under the water, and the Operationals live in thousand-year-old pressurized tanks.

  The rattle of the tools comes out to me now and then, and mixes with the ancient hum without taking anything away from it. The sound spreads over the roofs of the barracks, and the artifact glowers down at the camp like a dragon.

  I’ve spent too much time here. It’s starting to get to me—being dwarfed and stared at by this thing. The camp has too many exposed places in it. I can always be seen. It’s better, much better, when I can get into the narrow alleyways between the barracks, or inside them, but I worry about seeming furtive. That’s the kind of impression that draws even more attention, when as always what I really want is invisibility.

  “You! Messenger!”

  I start and spin around. Clare is pointing at me. She stands a few dozen feet away, arm stretched out at full length. The pink hollows of her eyesockets are lit aslant by a lamp on the post next to her.

  “There’s another courier here, and she’s only going to be in camp for an hour or so. Go find her and give her this!”

  Clare extracts a little packet wrapped in plum-colored sack from her purse and flings it at me. I try to catch it. The packet passes between my hands and strikes my chest with a thump. Clumsily hugging myself, I keep it from dropping to the ground.

  “Don’t open it!” Clare shouts. “Just deliver it!”

  She’s squeezed herself into an anomalously glamourous outfit, complete with a hat and a veil, dignified shoes, gloves, a stole around her bare shoulders. A short, bent old woman stands nearby, smiling daffily at the undulating foliage that lines the strip of boardwalk, and engulfed in a coat of shimmering golden fabric. The material seems too rich for the dowdy cut of the coat; it’s like she’s got on a cardigan made of emeralds and bald eagle feathers. Clare takes this woman by the hand and the two of them walk away, their legs shifting to and fro inside the hems of their clothes. As she goes, Clare darts a fierce look in my direction before finally giving the old woman all her attention.

  I’m examining the packet—it�
��s about the size of a bar of soap, feels solid, the sack is actually stitched shut—when Guerrero wheels into view on the boardwalk. He’s all smartened up, too, in a stiff, formal high collar and tie, with a red oriental rug covering his leg, and his hair slicked-back. He’s better shevilled than I’ve ever seen him before, but it’s obvious he’s had a bad night.

  “Is she gone?” he says, looking up at me with eyes underlined in red.

  “Clare? Or the old woman?”

  He looks down at the boardwalk.

  “Her mother,” he says, his voice low.

  I study the space they occupied, since the old woman and Clare aren’t there anymore to gawk at.

  “I’ll be damned,” I say. “I didn’t think she had one.”

  “She’s younger than you think,” Guerrero says morosely.

  I can’t imagine Clare being young at all. Or old. Or being anything but that fierce creature with the eyeless eyes who was just bellowing orders at me with what was at least the appearance of rage.

  “So is this a party? You having a reunion?”

  “A wedding,” Guerrero croaks, leaning back and lightly rubbing his forehead with the edge of his thumb. “Did Clare tell you about the new courier?”

  I hold out the packet.

  “I’m supposed to give her this.”

  Guerrero doesn’t bother to look. He keeps his eyes shut and allows his hand to drop into his lap. A moment more, and he abruptly wheels after them.

  “She brought orders. Nuptials must be held right away. You’d better get over there.”

  “Where?” I ask his back.

  Guerrero waves his hand in the direction of the camp to my left and keeps wheeling.

  “Well, whose nuptials?”

  He goes on waving, but his hand gets a bit firmer for a moment, renewing the motion.

  “Where do I send the card?”

  The klaxon goes off. I wonder who ordered that, with Guerrero busy over here. Operationals are hurrying to the artifact, while others limp dazedly back to their barracks, perspiration dripping from their hands and faces onto dry soil.

  After not much hunting around, I find the other messenger chatting with the detective, or, no, someone very like the detective. I know her by the bag she has slung over her shoulder. The bag is flatter than mine, and less beat up. I excuse myself.