Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Ordell? Ordell, honey, is that really you? I can’t believe ’tis.” Ahead, the last danger, the threebrained sentry of the outer gate, rose to block their way, under orders to prevent escape. Ordell sang of the freedom in living in a human body, of running over unfenced grass through sunlit air. The gatekeeper bowed aside again, to let them pass.

  “Honey? Turn an’ look at me, tell me this is not some other trick they’re playin’. Honey, if y’love me, turn?”

  Turning, he saw her clearly for the first time since he had entered Hell. To Ordell her beauty was such that it stopped time, stopped even the song in his throat and his fingers on the keys of music. A moment free of the strange influence that had perverted all its creatures was all the time that the berserker needed to re-establish something close to complete control. The threeheaded shape seized Eury and bore her away from her husband, carried her back through doorway after doorway of darkness, so fast that her last scream of farewell could scarcely reach the ears of her man. “Good-bye . . . love . . .”

  He cried out and ran after her, beating uselessly on a massive door that slammed in his face. He hung there on the door for a long time, screaming and pleading for one more chance to get his wife away. He sang again, but the berserker had reestablished its icy control too firmly—it had not entirely regained power, however, for though the halfliving overseers no longer obeyed Ordell, neither did they molest him. They left the way open for him to depart.

  He lingered for about seven days there at the gate, in his small ship and out of it, without food or sleep, singing uselessly until no voice was left him. Then he collapsed inside his ship. Then he, or more likely his autopilot, drove the racer away from the berserker and back toward freedom.

  The berserker defenses did not, any more than the human, question a small ship coming out. Probably they assumed it to be one of their own scouts or raiders. There were never any escapes from Hell.

  Back on the planet Zitz his managers greeted him as one risen from the dead. In a few days’ time he was to give a live concert, which had long been scheduled and sold out. In another day the managers and promoters would have had to begin returning money.

  He did not really co-operate with the doctors who worked to restore his strength, but neither did he oppose them. As soon as his voice came back he began to sing again; he sang most of the time, except when they drugged him to sleep. And it did not matter to him whether they sent him onto a stage to do his singing again.

  The live performance was billed as one of his pop concerts, which in practice meant a hall overflowing with ten thousand adolescent girls, who were elevated even beyond their usual level of excitement by the miracles of Ordell’s bereavement, resurrection and ghastly appearance.

  During the first song or two the girls were awed and relatively silent, quiet enough so that Ordell’s voice could be heard. Then—well, one girl in ten thousand would scream it aloud: “You’re ours again!” There was a sense in which his marriage had been resented.

  Casually and indifferently looking out over them all, he smiled out of habit and began to sing how much he hated them and scorned them, seeing in them nothing but hopeless ugliness.

  For a few moments the currents of emotion in the great hall balanced against one another to produce the illusion of calm. Ordell’s deadly voice was clear. But then the storm of reaction broke, and he could no longer be heard. The powers of hate and lust, rage and demand bore all before them. The ushers who always labored to form a barricade at a Callison conceit were swept away at once by ten thousand girls.

  The riot was over in a minute, ended by the police.

  Ordell himself was nearly dead. Medical help arrived only just in time to save the life in the tissues of his brain.

  Next day the leading cyberneticpsychologist on Zitz was called in by Ordell Callison’s doctors. They were saving what remained of Ordell’s life, but they had not been able to open any bridge of communication with him.

  Ercul, the psychologist, sank probes directly into Ordell’s brain, so that this information could be given him. Next he connected the speech centers to a voder device loaded with recordings of Or dell’s own voice, so that the tones that issued were the same as had once come from his throat. And—in response to the crippled man’s first request—to the motor-centers that had controlled Ordell’s fingers went probes connected to a music box.

  After that he at once began to sing.

  They took him to the spaceport. With his life-support system of tubes and nourishment and electricity, they put him aboard his racer. And with the autopilot programmed as he commanded, they sent him out, fired along the course that he had chosen.

  Ercul knew Ordell and Eury when he found them, together in the same experimental case. Recognizing his own work on Ordell, he felt certain even before the electroencephalogram patterns matched with his old records.

  There was little left of either of them.

  “Dols only two points above normal bias level,” chanted the psychologist’s assistant, taking routine readings, not guessing whose pain it was he was attempting to judge. “Neither of them seems to be hurting. At the moment, anyway.”

  In a heavy hand, Ercul lifted his stamp and marked the case. I certify that in this container there is no human life.

  The assistant looked up in mild surprise at this quick decision. “There is some mutual awareness here, I would say, between the two subjects.” He spoke in a businesslike, almost cheerful voice. He had been enough hours on the job now to start getting used to it.

  But Ercul never would. END

  YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR

  Fred Saberhagen sold his first story in 1961 and has added about 20 since then, plus five books. “In an autobiog blurb I wrote about four years ago, I stated that my leisure activities included chess, karate, and looking out for the right girl. To update this, let me say that I am playing in the Greater Chicago Open (chess); that I have temporarily forsworn karate (which is a lot of hard work for non-fictional people); and that, having found the Right Girl at last, I am displaying uncharacteristic good sense and marrying her.” His first story for us concerns a man who finds another Right Girl-but at the wrong time . . .

  THAT FIRST NIGHT THERE WAS A police vehicle, what I think they call a K-9 unit, in the little employees’ lot behind the Institute. I parked my car beside it and got out. The summer moon was dull above the city’s air, but floodlights glared at a small door set in the granite flank of the great building. I carried my toolbox there, pushed a button, and stood waiting.

  Within half a minute, a uniformed guard appeared inside the reinforced glass of the door. Before he had finished unlocking, two uniformed policemen were standing beside him, and beside them a powerful leashed dog whose ears were aimed my way.

  The door opened. “Electronic Watch,” I said, holding out my identification. The dog inspected me, while the three uniformed men peered at my symbols and were satisfied.

  With a few words and nods the police admitted me to fellowship. In the next moment they were saying goodbye to the guard. “It’s clean here, Dan, we’re gonna shove off.”

  The guard agreed they might as well. He gave them a jovial farewell and locked them out, and then turned back to me, still smiling, an old and heavy man, now adopting a fatherly attitude. He squinted with the effort of remembering what he had read on my identification card. “Your name Joe?”

  “Joe Ricci.”

  “Well, Joe, our systems acting up.” He pointed. “The control room’s up this way.”

  “I know, I helped install it.” I walked beside the guard named Dan through silent passages and silent marble galleries, all carved by night lights into one-third brilliance and two-thirds shadow. We passed through new glass doors that were opened for us by photocells. Maintenance men in green uniforms were cleaning the glass; the white men among them were calling back and forth in Polish.

  Dan whistled cheerfully as we went up the wide four-branched central stair, passing under
a great skylight holding out the night. From the top landing of the stair, a plain door, little noticed in the daytime, opens through classical marble into a science-fiction room of fluorescent lights and electronic consoles. In that room are three large wall panels, marked Security, Fire, and Interior Climate. As we entered, another guard was alone in the room, seated before the huge security panel.

  “Gallery two-fifteen showed again,” the seated guard said in a faintly triumphant voice, turning to us and pointing to one of the indicator lights on the panel. The little panel lights were laid out within an outline of the building’s floor plan. “You’d swear it was someone in there.”

  I set down my kit and stood looking at the panel, mentally reviewing the general layout of the security circuitry. Electronic Watch has not for a long time used anything as primitive as photocells, which are relegated to such prosaic jobs as opening doors. After closing hours in the Institute, when the security system is switched on, invisible electric fields permeate the space of every room where there is anything of value. A cat cannot prowl the building without leaving a track of disturbances across the Security panel.

  At the moment all its indicators were dim and quiet. I opened my kit, took out a multimeter and a set of probes, and began a preliminary check of the panel itself.

  “You’d swear someone’s in twofifteen when it happens,” said the guard named Dan. Standing close and watching me, he gave a little laugh. “And then a man starts over to investigate, and before he can get there it stops.”

  Of course there was nothing nice and obvious wrong with the panel. I had not expected there would be; neat simple troubles arc too much to expect from the complexities of modern electronic gear. I tapped die indicator marked 215 but its glow remained dim and steady. “You get the signal from just the one gallery?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said die guard in the chair. “Flashing a couple times, real quick, on and off. Then it stays on steady for a while, like someone’s just standing in the middle of the room over there. Then like he said, it goes off while a man’s trying to get over there. We called the officers and then we called you.”

  I put the things back in my kit and closed it up and lifted it. “I’ll walk over there and look around.”

  “You know where two-fifteen is?” Dan had just unwrapped a sandwich. “I can walk over with you.”

  “That’s all right, I can find it.” I delayed on my way out of the room, smiling back at the two guards. “I’ve been here in the daytime, looking at the pictures.”

  “Oh. You bring your girl here, hey?” The guards laughed, a little relieved that I had broken my air of grim intentness. I know I often strike people that way.

  Walking alone through the half lit halls, I found it pleasant to think of myself as a man who came there in two such different capacities. Electronics and art were both in my grasp. I had a good start at knowing everything of importance. Renaissance Man, I thought, of the New Renaissance of the Space Age.

  Finding the gallery I wanted was no problem, for all of them are numbered plainly, more or less in sequence. Through rising numbers, I traversed the Thirteenth Century, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth. A multitude of Christs and virgins, saints and noblemen, watched my passage from their walls of glare and shadow.

  From several rooms away I saw the girl, through a real doorway framing the painted one she stands in. My steps slowed as I entered gallery two-fifteen. About twenty other paintings hang there, but for me it was empty of any presence but hers.

  That night I had not thought of her until I saw her, which struck me then as odd, because on my occasional daytime visits I had always stopped before her door. I had no girl of the kind to take to an art gallery, whatever the guards might surmise.

  The painter’s light is full only on her face, and on her left hand, which rests on the closed bottom panel of a divided door. She is leaning very slightly out through the half-open doorway, her head of auburn curls turned just an inch to her left but her eyes looking the other way. She watches and listens, that much is certain. To me it has always seemed that she is expecting someone. Her full, vital body is chaste in a plain dark dress. Consider her attitude, her face, and wonder that so much is made of the smile of Mona Lisa.

  The card on the wall beside the painting reads:

  REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

  DUTCH 1606-1669 dated 1645

  YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR

  She might have been seventeen when Rembrandt saw her, and seventeen she has remained, while the faces passing her doorway have grown up and grown old and disappeared, wave after wave of them.

  She waits.

  I broke out of my reverie, at last, with an effort. My eye was caught by the next painting, Saftleven’s Witches Sabbath, which once in the daylight had struck me as amusing. When I had freed my eyes from that I looked into the adjoining galleries, trying to put down the sudden feeling of being watched. I squinted up at the skylight ceiling of gallery two-fifteen, through which a single glaring spotlight shone.

  Holding firmly to thoughts of electronics, I peered in comers and under benches, where a forgotten transistor radio might lurk to interfere, conceivably, with the electric field of the alarm. There was none.

  From my kit I took a small fieldstrength meter, and like a priest swinging a censer I moved it gently through the air around me. The needle swayed, as it should have, with the invisible presence of the field.

  There was a light gasp, as of surprise. A sighing momentary movement in the air, something nearby come and gone in a moment, and in that moment the meter needle jumped over violently, pegging so that with a technician’s reflex my hand flew to switch it to a less sensitive scale.

  I waited there alone for ten more minutes, but nothing further happened.

  “It’s working now; I could follow you everywhere you moved,” said the guard in the chair, turning with assurance to speak to me just as I re-entered the science-fiction room. Dan and his sandwich were gone.

  “Something’s causing interference,” I said, in my voice the false authority of the expert at a loss. “So. You never have any trouble with any other gallery, hey?”

  “No, least I’ve never seen any—well, look at that now. Make a liar out of me.” The guard chuckled without humor. “Something showing in two-twenty-seven now. That’s Modern Art.”

  Half an hour later I was creeping on a catwalk through a clean crawl space above gallery twotwenty-seven, tracing a perfectly healthy microwave system. The reflected glare of night lights below filtered up into the crawl space, through a million holes in acoustical ceiling panels.

  A small bright auburn movement, almost directly below me, caught my eye. I crouched lower on the catwalk, putting my eyes close to the holes in one thin panel, bringing into my view almost the whole of the enormous room under the false ceiling.

  The auburn was in a girl’s hair. It came near matching the hair of the girl in the painting, but that could only have been coincidence, if such a thing exists. The girl below me was alive in the same sense I am, solid and fleshly and threedimensional. She wore a kind of stretch suit, of a green shade that set off her hair, and she held a shiny object raised like a camera in her hands.

  From my position almost directly above her, I could not see her face, only the curved grace of her body as she took a step forward, holding the shiny thing high. Then she began another step, and halfway through it she was gone, vanished in an instant from the center of an open floor.

  Some time passed before I eased up from the strain of my bent position. All the world was silent and ordinary, so that alarm and astonishment would have seemed out of place. I inched back through the crawl space to my borrowed ladder, climbed down, walked along a corridor and turned a corner into the vast shadow-and-glare of gallery two-two-seven.

  Standing in the brightly lit spot where I had seen the girl, I realized she had been raising her camera at a sculpture—a huge, flowing mass of bronze blobs and curved holes, on the topmost blob a face that looked
like something scratched there by a child. I went up to it and thumped my knuckles on the nearest bulge of bronze, and the great thing sounded hollowly. Looking at the card on its marble base I had begun to read—RECLINING FIGURE, 1957—when a sound behind me made me spin round.

  Dan asked benignly: “Was that you raising a ruckus in here about five minutes ago? Looked like a whole mob of people was running around.”

  I nodded, feeling the beginning of a strange contentment.

  Next day I awoke at the usual time, to afternoon sunlight pushing at the closed yellow shades of my furnished apartment, to the endless street noises coming in. I had slept well and felt alert at once, and I began thinking about the girl.

  Even if I had not seen her vanish, it would have been obvious that her comings and goings at the Institute were accomplished by no ordinary prowlers’ or burglars’ methods. Nor was she there on any ordinary purpose; if she had stolen or vandalized, I would most certainly have been awakened early.

  I ate an ordinary breakfast, not noticing much or being noticed, sitting at the counter in the restaurant on the ground floor of the converted hotel where I rented my apartment. The waitress wore green, although her hair was black. Once I had tried half-heartedly to talk to her, to know her, to make out, but she had kept on working and loafing, talking to me and everyone else alike.

  When the sun was near going down, I started for work as usual. I bought the usual newspaper to take along, but did not read it when I saw the headline PEACE TALKS FAILING. That evening I felt the way I supposed a lover should feel, going to his beloved.