“And what if I don’t want to leave?”
The Vice-President laughed good-naturedly. “We could make that difficult too. It’s a beautiful spring day, son. Could be your day … if you don’t go screwing yourself into the wrong socket. Ah, Senator!” Abruptly Wing was staring at the great man’s back.
“What is the matter with you?” Laporte appeared beside Daisy and he was hot, a shimmering blotch of rage and four-alarm ambition. “You think you can just stagger in, twisted out of your mind, insult the Vice-President—no, don’t say anything. Once more, once more, Wing, and you’ll be watching the Cloud from the ground, understand? This is my project now; I’ve worked too hard to let you screw it up again.”
Wing did not care; he was too busy being pleased with himself for mustering the courage to confront the Vice-President. He had been certain that the Secret Service would whisk him away the moment he opened his mouth. Maybe it had not done any immediate good but if people kept pestering it might have a cumulative effect. Besides it had been fun. The crowd swirled; like a scene-change in a dream Laporte was gone and Daisy was steering him across the room. He knew any moment someone would step aside and he would be looking down at Ndavu in his wheelchair. He glanced at Daisy; her mouth was set in a grim line, like a fresh knife wound across her face. He wondered if she were having fun, if she would ever have fun again. What was the philosophical status of fun vis-a-vis the message? A local condition of increased entropy …
“I must have your consent today, Phillip,” said Ndavu, “or I will have to assume that your answer is no.” His face looked as if it had just been waxed.
Wing had stopped worrying about the slithery thing that lived inside the Messenger. It was easier on the digestion to pretend that this human shell was Ndavu. He picked a glass of champagne off a tray carried by a passing waiter, pulled up a folding chair and sat. “You leaked my name to telelink. Told them about the project.”
“There is no more time.”
Wing nodded absently as he looked around the room. “I’ll have to get back to you.” The Governor’s husband was wearing a kilt with a pattern that seemed to tumble into itself kaleidoscopically.
Ndavu touched his arm to get his attention. “It must be now, Phillip.”
Wing knocked back the champagne: ersatz. “Today, Ndavu.” The glass seemed to melt through his fingers; it hit the floor and bounced. More plastic. “I promise.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a little green man wearing a bow tie, gray morning coat, roll-collar waistcoat, and striped trousers, “if I may have your attention please.”
A woman from the mission whispered to Ndavu, “The Vice-President’s chief of protocol.”
“We are opening the doors now and I want to take this opportunity to remind you once again: red invitations sit in the north stands, blue invitations to the south, and gold invitations on the platform. We are scheduled to start at two-fifteen so if you would please begin to find your seats. Thank you.”
Daisy and Wing were sitting in the back row on the platform. On one side was Luis Benalcazar, whose company had designed both the Cloud’s ferroplastic structure and the computer program that ran it; on the other was Fred Alz, the construction super. Laporte, as official representative of the Foundation and Solon Petropolus, sat up front with the Vice-President, the Secretary of the Interior, the Governor, the junior Senator and both of New Hampshire’s congresspeople, the chief selectman of North Conway, a Hampton fourth-grader who had won an essay contest, the Bishop of Manchester, and a famous poet whom Wing had never heard of. Ndavu’s wheelchair was off to one side.
The introductions, benedictions, acknowledgements and appreciations took the better part of an hour.… A technological marvel which is at one with the natural environment … The afternoon seemed to get hotter with every word, a nightmare of rhetoric as hell.… the world will come to appreciate what we have known all along, that the Granite State is the greatest … On a whim he tried to look into the dazzling sun but the colors nearly blinded him.… their rugged grandeur cloaked in coniferous cloaks … When Wing closed his eyes he could see a bright web of pulsing arteries and veins.… this magnificent work of art balanced on a knife edge of electromagnetic energy … Daisy kept squeezing his hand as if she were trying to pump appropriate reactions out of him. Meanwhile Benalcazar, whose English was not very good, fell asleep and started to snore.… Reminds me of a story that the Speaker of the House used to tell … When they mentioned Wing’s name he stood up and bowed.
He could hear the applause for the Cloud several moments before it drifted over the hangar and settled toward the landing platform. It cast a cool shadow over the proceedings. Wing had imagined that he would feel something profound at this dramatic moment in his career but his first reaction was relief that the speeches were over and he was getting out of the sun.
The Cloud was designed to look like a cumulus puff but the illusion was only sustained for the distant viewer. Close up, anyone could see that it was an artifact. It moved with the ponderous grace of an enormous hover, to which it was a technological cousin. But while a hover was a rigid aerobody designed for powered flight, the Cloud was amorphous and a creature of the wind. Wing liked to call it a building that sailed. Its opaline outer envelope was ultrathin Stresslar, laminated to a ferroplastic grid based on an octagonal module. When Benalcazar’s computer program directed current through the grid, some ferroplastic fibers went slack while others stiffened to form the Cloud’s undulating structure. The size of the envelope could be increased or decreased depending on load factors and wind velocity; in effect it could be reefed like a sail. It used the magnetic track as a combination of rudder and keel or, when landing, as an anchor. Like a hover its envelope enclosed a volume of pressurized helium for lift: 20,000 cubic meters.
The Cloud slowly settled to within two meters of the ground, bottom flattening, the upper envelope billowing into the blue sky. Wing realized that people had stopped applauding and an awed hush had settled onto the platform. The Hampton schoolgirl climbed onto a folding chair and stood twisting her prize-winning essay into an irretrievable tatter. Wing himself could feel the gooseflesh stippling his arms now; the chill of the Cloud’s shadow was strangely sobering. The Secretary of the Interior sank slowly onto his chair, shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand and stared up like a coal miner in Manhattan. Pictures would never do the Cloud justice. The Governor whispered something to the Bishop, who did not seem to be paying attention. Wing shivered. Like some miracle out of the Old Testament, the Cloud had swollen into a pillar that was at least twenty stories tall. It had accomplished this transformation without making a sound.
Fred Alz nudged Wing in the ribs. “Guess we got their attention, eh Phil?” The slouch-backed old man stood straight. Wing supposed it was pride puffing Alz up; he could not quite bring himself to share it.
Daisy squeezed his hand. “It’s so quiet.”
“Ssshh!” The Governor’s husband turned and glared.
The silence was the one element of the design that Wing had never fully imagined. In fact, he had been willing to compromise on a noisier reefing mechanism to hold down costs but Laporte, of all people, had talked him out of it. Not until he had seen the first tests of the completed Cloud did Wing realize the enormous psychological impact of silence when applied to large bodies in motion. It gave the Cloud a surreal, slightly ominous power, as if it were the ghost of a great building. It certainly helped to compensate for the distressing way the Stresslar envelope changed from pearl to cheapjack plastic iridescence in certain angles of light. The engineers, technicians, and fabricators had worked technological wonders to create a quiet Cloud; although Wing approved, it had not been part of his original vision. The reaction of the crowd was another bittersweet reminder that this was not his Cloud, that he had lost his Cloud the day he had begun to draw it.
The octagonal geometry of the structural grid came clear as the pilot hardened the Cloud in preparation for boarding. Ndav
u wheeled up noiselessly and offered his hand in congratulations. They shook but Wing avoided eye contact for fear that the alien might detect Wing’s estrangement from his masterpiece. A hole opened in the envelope and a tube snaked out; the ground crew coupled it to the landing platform. Ndavu shook hands with Alz and spoke to Luis Benalcazar in Spanish. Smiling and nodding, Benalcazar stooped toward the Messenger to reply. “He says,” Ndavu translated, “that this is the culmination of his career. For him, there will never be another project like it.”
“For all of us,” said Alz.
“Thank you,” Benalcazar hugged Wing. “Phillip. So much.” A woman with a microcam came to the edge of the platform to record the embrace. Wing pulled away from Benalcazar. “You, Luis,” he tapped the engineer on the chest and then pointed at the Cloud. “It’s your baby. Without you, it’s a flying tent.” “Big goddamn tent yes,” said Benalcazar, laughing uncertainly. Laporte was shaking hands with the congressman from the First District. The chief of protocol stood near the entrance of the tube and began motioning for people to climb through to the passenger car suspended within the envelope. Before anyone could board, however, Ndavu backed away from Wing, Benalcazar, and Alz and began to clap. Daisy stepped to the Messenger’s side and joined in, raising hands over her head like a cheerleader. People turned to see what was going on and then everyone was applauding.
It felt wrong to Wing—like an attack, as if each clap were a blow he had to withstand. He thought it was too late to clap now. Perhaps if the applause could echo backward through the years, so that a nervous young man on a stony path might hear it and take sustenance from it, things might have been different. But that man’s ears were stopped by time and he was forever alienated from these people. These people who did not realize how they were being manipulated by Ndavu. These people who were clapping for the wrong cloud. Wing’s cloud was not this glorified special effect. His cloud was forever lonely, lost as it wandered, windborne, past sheer walls of granite: a daydream. You can’t build a dream out of Stresslar and ferroplastic, he told himself. You can’t share your dreams. He thought that Daisy looked very pretty, clapping for him. She was wearing the blue dress that he had bought for her in Boston. She had been mad at him for spending so much money; they had fought over it. The glowing clearwater blue of the material picked up the blue in her eyes; it had always been his favorite. Daisy had taken five years of his life away and he was back now to where he had been before he met her. She was not his wife. This was not his cloud. These were not his people. He found himself thinking then about the alien goddess Teaqua, a creature of such transcendent luminosity that she could order Messengers to run her errands. He wondered if she could look into the sun.
“Tell him to stop it,” Wing said to Daisy. “Tell him I’ll go.”
The applause ended. Several hours later on Infoline’s evening report, Hubert Fields noted in passing that the architect was not among those who boarded the Glass Cloud for its maiden voyage.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
The Evening and the Morning and the Night
Octavia E. Butler sold her first novel in 1976, and has subsequently emerged as one of the foremost novelists of her generation. Her critically acclaimed books include Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, and Clay’s Ark. Her most recent novel is Dawn. Her short stories appear infrequently, but are well worth the wait. In 1984, she won a Hugo Award for her story “Speech Sounds”; in 1985, she won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award for her famous story “Bloodchild,” which was reprinted in our Second Annual Collection. Born in Pasadena, California, she now lives and works in Los Angeles.
Here she spins a chill and chilling tale of despair, resignation, and, most painfully, hope.
THE EVENING AND THE MORNING AND THE NIGHT
Octavia E. Butler
When I was fifteen and trying to show my independence by getting careless with my diet, my parents took me to a Duryea-Gode disease ward. They wanted me to see, they said, where I was headed if I wasn’t careful. In fact, it was where I was headed no matter what. It was only a matter of when: now or later. My parents were putting in their vote for later.
I won’t describe the ward. It’s enough to say that when they brought me home, I cut my wrists. I did a thorough job of it, old Roman style in a bathtub of warm water. Almost made it. My father dislocated his shoulder breaking down the bathroom door. He and I never forgave each other for that day.
The disease got him almost three years later—just before I went off to college. It was sudden. It doesn’t happen that way often. Most people notice themselves beginning to drift—or their relatives notice—and they make arrangements with their chosen institution. People who are noticed and who resist going in can be locked up for a week’s observation. I don’t doubt that that observation period breaks up a few families. Sending someone away for what turns out to be a false alarm.… Well, it isn’t the sort of thing the victim is likely to forgive or forget. On the other hand, not sending someone away in time—missing the signs or having a person go off suddenly without signs—is inevitably dangerous for the victim. I’ve never heard of it going as badly, though, as it did in my family. People normally injure only themselves when their time comes—unless someone is stupid enough to try to handle them without the necessary drugs or restraints.
My father … killed my mother, then killed himself. I wasn’t home when it happened. I had stayed at school later than usual, rehearsing graduation exercises. By the time I got home, there were cops everywhere. There was an ambulance, and two attendants were wheeling someone out on a stretcher—someone covered. More than covered. Almost … bagged.
The cops wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t find out until later exactly what had happened. I wish I’d never found out. Dad had killed Mom, then skinned her completely. At least, that’s how I hope it happened. I mean I hope he killed her first. He broke some of her ribs, damaged her heart. Digging.
Then he began tearing at himself, through skin and bone, digging. He had managed to reach his own heart before he died. It was an especially bad example of the kind of thing that makes people afraid of us. It gets some of us into trouble for picking at a pimple or even for daydreaming. It has inspired restrictive laws, created problems with jobs, housing, schools.… The Duryea-Gode Disease Foundation has spent millions telling the world that people like my father don’t exist.
A long time later, when I had gotten myself together as best I could, I went to college—to the University of Southern California—on a Dilg scholarship. Dilg is the retreat you try to send your out-of-control DGD relatives to. It’s run by controlled DGDs like me, like my parents while they lived. God knows how any controlled DGD stands it. Anyway, the place has a waiting list miles long. My parents put me on it after my suicide attempt, but chances were, I’d be dead by the time my name came up.
I can’t say why I went to college—except that I had been going to school all my life and I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t go with any particular hope. Hell, I knew what I was in for eventually. I was just marking time. Whatever I did was just marking time. If people were willing to pay me to go to school and mark time, why not do it?
The weird part was, I worked hard, got top grades. If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.
Sometimes I thought about trying suicide again. How was it I’d had the courage when I was fifteen but didn’t have it now? Two DGD parents—both religious, both as opposed to abortion as they were to suicide. So they had trusted God and the promises of modern medicine and had a child. But how could I look at what had happened to them and trust anything?
I majored in biology. Non-DGDs say something about our disease makes us good at the sciences—genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry.… That something was terror. Terror and a kind of driving hopelessness. Some of us went bad and became destructive before we had to—yes, we did produce more than our share of criminals. And some
of us went good—spectacularly—and made scientific and medical history. These last kept the doors at least partly open for the rest of us. They made discoveries in genetics, found cures for a couple of rare diseases, made advances in the fight against other diseases that weren’t so rare—including, ironically, some forms of cancer. But they’d found nothing to help themselves. There had been nothing since the latest improvements in the diet, and those came just before I was born. They, like the original diet, gave more DGDs the courage to have children. They were supposed to do for DGDs what insulin had done for diabetics—give us a normal or nearly normal life span. Maybe they had worked for someone somewhere. They hadn’t worked for anyone I knew.
Biology. School was a pain in the usual ways. I didn’t eat in public anymore, didn’t like the way people stared at my biscuits—cleverly dubbed “dog biscuits” in every school I’d ever attended. You’d think university students would be more creative. I didn’t like the way people edged away from me when they caught sight of my emblem. I’d begun wearing it on a chain around my neck and putting it down inside my blouse, but people managed to notice it anyway. People who don’t eat in public, who drink nothing more interesting than water, who smoke nothing at all—people like that are suspicious. Or rather, they make others suspicious. Sooner or later, one of those others, finding my fingers and wrists bare, would fake an interest in my chain. That would be that. I couldn’t hide the emblem in my purse. If anything happened to me, medical people had to see it in time to avoid giving me the medications they might use on a normal person. It isn’t just ordinary food we have to avoid, but about a quarter of a Physicians’ Desk Reference of widely used drugs. Every now and then there are news stories about people who stopped carrying their emblems—probably trying to pass as normal. Then they have an accident. By the time anyone realizes there is anything wrong, it’s too late. So I wore my emblem. And one way or another, people got a look at it or got the word from someone who had. “She is!” Yeah.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 39