“Will you mourn in my behalf?” he asked Silvera seriously, using the accepted colloquial form of the ancient Mourner phrases.
Silvera’s dark eyes widened momentarily at the words…
He had thought this was a pleasure visit. He responded instantly, however, following the prescribed rune.
“We mourn for anyone.”
“Will you convey my heart?”
“We will share your sorrow.”
“Will you save my agony?”
“We will shed your tears.”
They both sat down, and Vernon continued: “How will you mourn my lost one?”
Silvera answered in tones of utter sincerity, though he must have spoken this formula a thousand times. “With the honor of the dead, with the love and sincerity of the living, with the sorrow of the bereaved, with the glory of the upraised.”
He pressed a stud on the tabletop beside his relaxer, and a cigarette came up through a tube, already alight.
He took it, and drew deeply, watching Gordon Vernon carefully, tensing for the answer to his next question.
Vernon asked, “What must I pay for your services?”
“Who has died?” Silvera tensed, hoping.
Vernon licked his lips. “My wife has died.”
There was no indication of changing mood on the Mourner’s placid face, but he took a sharp stinging drag on the cigarette.
“I’ll have to emote you.”
Vernon’s eyes narrowed…this was a departure from the Ritual. “Is that necessary?”
The Mourner spread his hands. “In cases where there is a close tie to the deceased, the only way we can gauge our rates, provide the very best service, is to emote you.”
Vernon knew how the Mourners worked. They used their emotion-counter on the bereaved, and gauged exactly how much sorrow he held. If it was substantially lower than what decorum might demand for a widow or widowers, the Mourner made up in added effort what the bereaved lacked in reality.
And they charged accordingly.
There didn’t seem to be any other way, so Vernon agreed.
Silvera led him from the music cubicle, walking stiffly erect, and they went into the office portion of the Mourner’s combined office home.
He pressed the stud on his deskonsole, and the emoter slid free from its hidden cubicle in the wall. It was a large ball-shaped chair, with a special sensitive pad covering it. The pad was sticky, and adhered to the body of the subject. It connected itself with the nerve ends in the body, giving a true reading on the dials and meters set into the control panel.
“Strip,” Silvera said.
Gordon Vernon hurriedly shucked his clothing, piling it unceremoniously on the deskonsole. His one piece suit unstuck in a second, and he removed his jump boots with equal ease. The insulating layer under his clothing came off next, and he stood naked in the office.
“Sit down, please,” Silvera said, adding in a friendly tone, “Gordon.”
Vernon slumped into the chair, and instantly he could feel the sticky pad clamp itself to his flesh. It made goose pimples rise on his skin, but he sat very still, while the machine hummed softly beneath him. In a few moments Silvera slapped him on the shoulder.
“That’s it. I’ve gotten a good reading.”
Vernon stood up, the pad unsticking sharply with a vague sucking sound, and redressed. He pulled a fresh cigar from his pouch, and drew it to a red coal at its tip.
“Well, what’s the reading?” he inquired curiously.
“Let’s go back into the music room,” Silvera suggested lightly. “We can be more comfortable out of this air of business. After all, we are friends.”
“But…business is business,” Vernon reminded with a grin.
Silvera’s smile was strained, but Vernon did not notice. “Yes, that’s right. Business certainly is business.”
They returned to the music cubicle, and sank back into their relaxers.
“Well…?” Vernon inquired.
“You must pay me standard Mourner rates, plus two hundred dollars an hour overtime.”
Vernon sat up abruptly. “What? That’s the most exorbitant price I’ve ever…”
Silvera leaned forward, stared intently into Vernon’s face. “Gordon, my patient and polite manner extends far outside these walls. What happens in here goes no further. But let’s be perfectly frank with one another.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gordon, I’ve been reading emotion charts for thirteen years now as a licensed and practicing Mo.D. In all that time, I’ve never seen an emoter reading lower than yours.”
“Well…what—what does that signify?” Vernon was nervous now. He twisted the cigar between unsteady fingers.
“It means you aren’t sorry Liz is gone.”
Vernon’s face flushed, and he sputtered. “Why—why that’s, that’s just ridiculous! Of course I’m sorry Liz is…why, I’ve never heard anything…you may be a great Mourner, Silvera, but this is…”
Silvera remained calm and steady. “Gordon, I know my business. To handle this funeral, I’d really have to generate, to make up for your total lack of bereavement. That means a considerable drain on my emotion drugs, a great deal of time and preparation, the hiring of a good sorrowriter, and a lot of incidentals the average man knows nothing about.
“My price is quite fair, Gordon. If you had a bit more sorrow in you, the price would have been lower.” He was finished, and it was obvious that arguing would get nowhere. These Mourners were not fish peddlers, to be talked down in price. What they said was what they said. And since they had tied up the field with the Guild, what they said, stuck.
It wasn’t the usual procedure, and much more than Vernon had considered putting into the funeral, but since he had decided it was safest to throw a big funeral for Liz—those belligerent Sellmans would have to be pacified—the total would come close to four thousand dollars. But it would be worth the outrageous fee, if the mourning was done properly.
Vernon agreed inside himself, and reluctantly fell back into the ritual:
“I agree to your terms, Mourner.
“Then mourn for me.”
The ritual was concluded, and they settled back in their relaxers. The conversation lost its echo of authority, and settled into a more relaxed—but still tense—tone.
“Look, Maurice,” Vernon began, “perhaps I’d better explain about Liz and myself…”
Silvera tried to stop him with, “That isn’t necessary at all, Gordon. My professional standing doesn’t demand a thing, and as a friend of the family, you don’t have to tell me unless you want to.”
“No, no, I want to tell you,” Vernon resumed hurriedly, “so you’ll understand why my emoter reading was low.”
Silvera listened intently.
“Liz was keeping time with someone else…she’d been cheating on me for quite a while now.”
Silvera asked carefully, “Have you any idea who the man was?” He waited tightly.
“None,” Vernon replied, shaking his head. “But that’s why Liz and I weren’t close at all, why I have no sorrow at her going. We’ve been like strangers to one another for over a year.” He looked sad, but Silvera knew there was no sorrow in the man.
Silvera looked concerned. “How did she die, Gordon?”
Gordon Vernon looked infinitely sad for a moment, then replied, “She was holding a luncheon party for her club on the roof garden. I was out at the time…one of the women at the inquest testified she was carrying a tray past the parapet wall…it’s very low and ornamental right around the tables there, you know…and she screamed and fell over.”
“How horrible!”
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said with weariness. “Even though she wasn’t true, and we had our fights, I’m afraid I’ll miss Liz a great deal. Basically, Maurice, she was a fine woman.” A dirty tramp cheat is more like it, he added bitterly.
They talked a while longer, Silvera through his pleasant conversation overcoming Vernon’s
annoyance at the extra-high tariff on his services. Then Vernon begged leave, paid Silvera by scriptocheck, and allowed the door to louvre open for him.
“Well, pip-ho, Maurice, and do your very best at the funeral.”
“Pip, Gordon. And I certainly will.”
Vernon dropshafted up to the roof, where he flagged a flitcab, while down Building M, down in apartments 554-559, Maurice Silvera, Mo.D. was sitting with eyes dark and clouded. He bit the flesh of his fist, till the marks were left there in sharp relief.
Then he rose, carefully tore the scriptocheck into a hundred pieces, and systematically fed the shredded bits of paper to his incintray. Cursing Gordon Vernon for the murder of Liz Vernon…the woman he had loved in secret.
And swearing he would even the score with Vernon.
Yes, he would certainly do the best he could at the funeral.
No one would tell Gordon Vernon, for it would be a mark of social inelegance to bring a thing like that to a man’s attention. No one would tell him that the Mourner—masked and caped—had done a rotten, a shameful job of grieving. No one would tell him of the scene Liz’s relatives—the duel-crazy Sellmans—had made. No one would tell him how they had raved at the Mourner’s show of no sorrow, how they had stamped about, and thrown down the bowers of flowers, calling, “Sacrilege! Sacrilege! Duel!” No one would tell him because it was obvious: the Mourner had no personal interest in the funeral. He was merely doing a job, he was merely reflecting the sorrow—by proportion—of the surviving family. If he had done a rotten job, it was obvious the reason was because Gordon himself had no sorrow at Liz’s passing.
It was an accepted thing: When a Mourner did a bad job (for weren’t they impartial and merely hired to do the job of spewing emotions) it was evident, there had been no sorrow with which to work, basically. And no Mourner would falsify his emoting. There had to be a point where they emoted truth.
So the Mourner did a bad, bad job, and the Sellman’s guns were out.
No one would tell Gordon Vernon, but he knew something had gone wrong in his scheme. He knew it soon, and suddenly.
“We all knew Liz never shoulda married you, Vernon. All of us knew you were a fortune-hunter. Now she’s dead, and you’re gonna pay for it!”
The Sellmans had come from Upper Pittsburg, and there was still a Nyork State twang in their voices. They were an unpleasant family, who had gotten rich quickly on ferrami-no-oxides found on otherwise worthless property they owned. Gordon Vernon had never cared for them, for they had bought their family’s prestige, while the Vernon standard had been much-respected for decades.
“But I was nowhere near her when she fell, so why are you challenging me?”
Rance Sellman, the youngest son, stepped forward. His fame with flamer and jag-knife was written up in all the cheap Duelist periodicals, and Gordon Vernon prayed deep inside himself that the boy would not offer the challenge as a personal stand. He had seen too many hasty stands, such as the one the other day on Silvera’s roof, and he knew he’d never have a chance in a fast draw contest.
The boy’s hand came up and around swiftly, cracking into Vernon’s jaw, snapping the man’s head around. Tears came to his eyes, and he stared as through a film at the tense-faced Sellman boy. “Vernon, I’m callin’ it at you. I’m challengin’ you. When, where, what weapons?”
Vernon swallowed, heard himself answering, “The Mall, tomorrow morning at ten…flamers.”
“And by God you be there,” the boy snapped, turning.
As the Sellmans left, there was the tell-tale hip-movement of the boy that marked an accomplished gunsman, a crack-shot duelist.
Vernon was dead…and he knew it.
“Maurice, what happened at the funeral? What happened, Maurice? I’ve been challenged. The Sellmans want to kill me. What happened, Maurice?”
Vernon’s face was a motley of sweat, and his hands shook as they wound in Maurice Silvera’s velvet collar.
Silvera brought his hands up sharply, knocking Vernon’s clutching fingers away.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t very convincing, Vernon, old man. They don’t think you regret Liz’s death enough. They don’t think you’re sorrowful enough, so they want to increase your sorrow.” A faint tinge of smile gleamed on Silvera’s handsome face. “I just wasn’t very convincing.”
“You weren’t what? You weren’t con…you weren’t convincing? Good God, Silvera, I paid you enough!”
“Yes, but you murdered Liz.”
Vernon’s mouth slid open, and his eyes suddenly glazed over with huntedness. He stammered something unintelligible.
“Yes. Yes, that’s right,” Silvera answered in a perfectly normal, conversational tone. “I sentenced you to death. Liz and I talked about it many times. She was certain you’d try to kill her if you found out about us.”
“You! Then it was…”
“That’s right, Gordon. That’s right.”
“You planned it all—”
Silvera was nodding his head in assent. He was just a moment in time to knock the flamer from Vernon’s hand. He slapped Vernon twice, quickly, back and forth, and the sandy-haired man slumped down to a hassock, his breath beginning to come raggedly, a sob mounting in his chest.
“My God, my God, what will I do…what’ll I do…he’ll kill me…they’ll be watching the areaways, I won’t be able to get away…he’ll burn me down…what’ll I do…”
Silvera smiled down at the murderer, his handsome face washed by unnamed emotions. Then he said something; without waiting for the beginning of the ritual, he said:
“We mourn for anyone…”
This is a recent piece, written strictly as a one-liner at the famous Milford, Pennsylvania Science Fiction Writers Conference, last year about this time. Anything more than this brief word would be gilding inordinately what is, essentially, the final twist on the ultimate version of the end of the world story. And the next voice you hear will be
The Voice in the Garden
AFTER THE BOMB, the last man on Earth wandered through the rubble of Cleveland, Ohio. It had never been a particularly jaunty town, nor even remotely appealing to esthetes. But now, like Detroit and Rangoon and Minsk and Yokohama, it had been reduced to a petulantly shattered tinkertoy of lathe and brickwork, twisted steel girders and melted glass.
As he picked his way around the dust heaps that had been the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in what had been Public Square, his eyes red-rimmed from crying at the loss of mankind, he saw something he had not seen in Beirut or Venice or London. He saw the movement of another human being.
Celestial choruses sang in his head as he broke into a run across the pitted and blasted remnants of Euclid Avenue. It was a woman!
She saw him, and in the very posture of her body, he knew she was filled with the same glory he felt. She knew! She began running toward him, her arms outstretched. They seemed to swim toward one another in a ballet of slow motion. He stumbled once, but got to his feet quickly and went on. They detoured around the crumpled tin of tortured metal that had once been automobiles, and met in front of the shattered carcass that was, in a time seemingly eons before, The May Co.
“I’m the last man!” he blurted. He could not keep the words inside, they frothed to emerge. “I’m the last, the very last. They’re all dead, everyone but us. I’m the last man, and you’re the last woman, and we’ll have to mate and start the race again, and this time we’ll do it right. No war, no hate, no bigotry, nothing but goodness…we’ll do it, you’ll see, it’ll be fine, a bright new shining world from all this death and terror.”
Her face lighted with an ethereal beauty, even beneath the soot and deprivation. “Yes, yes,” she said. “It’ll be just like that. I love you, because we’re all there is left to love, one another.”
He touched her hand. “I love you. What is your name?”
She flushed slightly. “Eve,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“George,” he said.
Two versions of th
e same story. One as the printed page, the other as shadow images across a television screen. When I first came out to The Coast in 1962, many of my friends mourned, “That’s the last we see of him in print.” They had swallowed the cliche myths hook, line and stinker. But as anyone can tell, from the 120,000 words I’ve written in just short stories alone in the past five years, it is not the town, nor its opulence, nor living well, nor working in a different medium, that ruins a writer. It is his own inability to get a handle on life. It killed Fitzgerald and Horace McCoy out here, but the town had very little to do with it. In fact, Hollywood offers some very special and invaluable assistance for a writer who works in the marketplace. It provides sufficient funds so he can live not merely well, but very well. (I do not think there is anything particularly noble, uplifiting or artistically enriching about being dirt-poor past a certain point. At first, it helps, because it brings a writer into close contact with his subject matter, with the world, and with the exigencies of reality. But by the time you hit thirty, you had better damned well be living like a mensch or you cannot in all good conscience call yourself a Bohemian. You are merely a seedy bum. As a corollary, it goes hand in hand: the better a writer gets at his craft, the more he sells; the more he sells, the better-known his name becomes; the better-known he becomes, the more money they give you, and the better you live. It isn’t always a yardstick for quality, but it helps.) Hollywood also brings recognition. I co-scripted a dreadful motion picture whose name I will not mention here, and if you saw it and were as nauseated as I was, then I extend my sincerest apologies for having contributed to something as dishonest and cheapjack as the epic in question. But even when the work is bad, the Great Unwashed learns about it, and a writer may find himself confronted—as I was—by the singular spectacle of his name ten feet high in Times Square. It is a heady wine. But the most important benefit Hollywood offers is an association with the visual medium, as exciting and demanding an arena as any open to a writer in our times. Many of my stories in magazines have been translated into scripts. Some of them work very nicely. The one that follows is an example. It was a statement of anti-war sentiments on my part, and when Hans Stefan Santesson originally bought it for Fantastic Universe in 1957, he gave me ninety-one dollars for it. That was a pile of money for me at the time. In 1964 when I rewrote and adapted the story for television, I received five thousand dollars. Times change, media change, but my beliefs about the senseless stupidity of war remain unchanged. Though I served my two years in the Army, were I to be called up now, I would refuse to serve. I’m afraid I would have to go to jail like Tommy Rodd, a boy I’ve never met, but for whom I feel great brotherhood. He literally follows the philosophy of Thoreau that “he serves the State best who opposes it the most.” Were I in his position, I would try to be as heroic, as brave. But as I am not, the best I can do is sit on my fat ass, write my stories, take their five grand, and hope that out there in Knobtwiddlesville The Great Unwashed who would shriek in horror if two lovely people fornicated with pleasure on their TV screen, but who purr with patriotic delight when their sons are decorated in Viet Nam for miscalculating and dropping “a little defoliation” on US troops or amber-skinned babies in schoolyards, will one day soon come to their senses, rise up in their wrath, and send all the face-saving politicians scuttling to their holes rather than allow them to continue senseless warfare in remote corners of a globe that has come to think of us in terms of atrocities and aggression. Some of this I tried to say in the story and teleplay that follow. But for those who need ready categorizations to ignore the unsettling remarks of others, I am not now nor have I ever been anything Robert Welch and his Birchies would consider subversive. I’m just a guy like many out there, who has come to maturity realizing God ain’t necessarily on our side. In point of fact, I don’t think he can ever be on the side of the
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