Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Dan and two other guards greeted me with smiles of the kind that people wear when things that are clearly not their fault are going wrong for their employer. They told me that the pseudo-prowler had once more visited gallery twofifteen, had vanished as usual from the panel just as a guard approached that room, and then had several times appeared on the indicators for gallery two-twentyseven. I went to two-twenty-seven, making a show of carrying in tools and equipment, and settled myself on a bench in a dim corner, to wait.

  The contentment I had known for twenty-four hours became impatience, and with slowly passing time the tension of impatience made me uncontrollably restless. I felt sure that she could somehow watch me waiting; she must know I was waiting for her; she must be able to see that I meant her no harm. Beyond meeting her, I had no plan at all.

  Not even a guard came to disturb me. Around me, in paint and bronze and stone and welded steel, crowded the tortured visions of the Twentieth Century. I got up at last in desperation and found that not everything was torture. There on the wall were Monet’s water lilies; at first nothing but vague flat shapes of paint, then the surface of a pond and a deep curve of reflected sky. I grew dizzy staring into that water, a dizziness of relief that made me laugh. When I looked away at last, the walls and ceiling were shimmering as if the glare of the night lights was reflected from Monet’s pond.

  I understood then that something was awry, something was being done to me, but I could not care. Giggling at the world, I stood there breathing air that seemed to sparkle in my lungs. The auburn-haired girl came to my side and took my arm and guided me to the bench where my unused equipment lay.

  Her voice had the beauty I had expected, though with a strange strong accent. “Oh, I am sorry to make you weak and sick. But you insist to stay here and span much time, the time in which I must do my work.”

  For the moment I could say nothing. She made me sit on the bench, and bent over me with concern, turning her head with something of the same questioning look as the girl in the Rembrandt painting. Again she said, “Oh, I am sorry.”

  “Sail right.” My tongue was heavy, and I still wanted to laugh.

  She smiled and hurried away, flowed away. Again she was dressed in a green stretch suit, setting off the color of her hair. This time she vanished from my sight in normal fashion, going around one of the gallery’s low partitions. Coming from behind that partition were flashes of light.

  I got unsteadily to my feet and went after her. Rounding the corner, I saw three devices set up on tripods, the tripods spaced evenly around the Reclining Figure. From the three devices, which I could not begin to identify, little lances of light flicked like stings or brushes at the sculpture. And whirling around it like dancers, on silent rubbery feet, moved another pair of machine-shapes, busy with some purpose that was totally beyond me.

  The girl reached to support me as I swayed. Her hands were strong, her eyes were darkly blue, and she was tall in slender curves. Smiling, she said, “It is all right, I do no harm.”

  “I don’t care about that,” I said. “I want only—not to tangle things with you.”

  “What?” She smiled, as if at someone raving. She had drugged me, with subtle gasses in the air that sparkled in my lungs. I knew that but I did not care.

  “I always hold back,” I said, “and tangle things with people. Not this time. I want to love you without any of that. This is a simple miracle, and I just want it to go on. Now tell me your name.”

  She was so silent and solemn for a moment, watching me, that I feared that I had angered her. But then she shook her head and smiled again. “My name is Day-ell. Now don’t fall down!” and she took her supporting arm away.

  For the moment I was content without her touching me. I leaned against the partition and looked at her busy machines. “Will you steal our Reclining Figure?” I asked, giggling again as I wondered who would want it.

  “Steal?” she was thoughtful. “The two greatest works of this house I must save. I will replace them with copies so well made that no one will ever know, before—” She broke off. After a moment she added, “Only you will know.” And then she turned away to give closer attention to her silent and ragingly busy machines. When she made an adjustment on a tiny thing she held in her hand, there were suddenly two Reclining Figures visible, one of them smaller and transparent but growing larger, moving toward us from some dark and distant space that was temporarily within the gallery.

  I was thinking over and over what Day-ell had said. Addled and joyful, I plotted what seemed to me a clever compliment, and announced, “I know what the two greatest works in this house are.”

  “Oh?” The word in her voice was a soft bell. But she was still busy.

  “One is Rembrandts girl.”

  “You are right!” Day-ell, pleased, turned to me. “Last night I took that one to safety. Where I take them, the originals, they will be safe forever.”

  “But the best—is you.” I pushed away from the partition. “I make you my girl. My love. Forever, if it can be. But how long doesn’t matter.”

  Her face changed and her eyes went wide, as if she truly understood how marvelous were such words, from anyone, from grim Joe Ricci in particular. She took a step toward me.

  “If you could mean that,” she whispered, “then I would stay with you, in spite of everything.”

  My arms went round her and I could feel forever passing. “Stay, of course I mean it, stay with me.”

  “Come, Day-ell, come,” intoned a voice, soft, but still having metal in its timbre. Looking over her shoulder, I saw the machine-shapes waiting, balancing motionless now on their silent feet. There was again only one Reclining Figure.

  My thoughts were clearing and I said to her, “You’re leaving copies, you said, and no one will know the difference, before. Before what? What’s going to happen?”

  When my girl did not answer, I held her at arms’ length. She was shaking her head slowly, and tears had come into her eyes. She said, “It does not matter what happens, since I have found here a man of life who will love me. In my world there is no one like that. If you will hold me, I can stay.”

  My hands holding her began to shake. I said, “I won’t keep you here, to die in some disaster. I’ll go with you instead.”

  “Come, Day-ell, come.” It was a terrible steel whisper.

  And she stepped back, compelled by the machine-voice now that I had let her go. She said to me, “You must not come. My world is safe for paint, safe for bronze, not safe for men who love. Why do you think that we must steal—?” She was gone, the machines and lights gone with her.

  The Reclining Figure stands massive and immobile as ever, bronze blobs and curved holes, with a face like something scratched on by a child. Thump it with a knuckle, and it sounds hollowly. Maybe three hundred years’ perspective is needed to see it as one of the two greatest in this house. Maybe eyes are needed, accustomed to more dimensions than ours; eyes of those who sent Day-ell diving down through time to save choice fragments from the murky wreckage of the New Renaissance, plunged in the mud of the ignorant and boastful Twentieth Century.

  Not that her world is better. Safe for paint, safe for bronze, not safe for men who love. I could not live there now.

  The painting looks unchanged. A girl of seventeen still waits, frozen warmly in Rembrandt’s light, three hundred years and more on the verge of smiling, secure that long from age and death and disappointment. But will a war incinerate her next week, or an earthquake swallow her next month? Or will our city convulse and die in mass rioting madness, a witches’ Sabbath come true? What warning can I give? When they found me alone and weeping in the empty gallery that night, they talked about a nervous breakdown. The indicators on the Security panel are always quiet now, and I have let myself be argued out of the little of my story that I told.

  No world is safe for those who love.

  1974

  CALENDARS

  He wanted to die, but couldn’t find the time—u
ntil too late!

  “I HAVE decided to die,” Matthew Pandareus announced to his wife on their first evening together after their long vacation trip to Mars. Actually they had been back on Earth for a week, but Iris had begun an evening class in the history of paperweights and they had not had a real chance to talk since their return. Tonight they had just finished dinner tete-a-tete in their condominium apartment and he had strolled from the dining alcove to look out through the living room’s glass wall at the fantastic complexities of city lights extending below, around and above their middle-class, middle-level dwelling.

  “Dear, you had a similar idea once before, thirty years ago.” Iris’s clinging gown swished faintly about her shapely legs as she followed to stand slightly behind him at the window. “Here, you forgot your brandy.”

  “Thank you. Closer on forty,” he amended, turning to accept the glass from her hand. She turned away busily again as soon as she had passed it on and Pandareus had no very clear look at her face.

  Iris switched on the fireplace with a wave of her hand and adjusted the mood of the background music to something a little more capricious. “Thirty,” she said firmly, coming back to face him. The communication screen chimed then and she was off to answer it. Maintaining his stance in the living room Pandareus heard the short conversation—just some friends calling to welcome them back and ask how their voyage had been. Iris invited them over a week from Tuesday but they were busy that night. They would call again tomorrow or the next day and some date for a get-together would be worked out.

  Now she was back in the living room again, wearing an expression he knew well, that of being firmly in the right though without animosity for those who weren’t.

  “Thirty,” she said firmly. “It was right after you won the golf tournament.” If it was time to argue, Iris was ready. Even studying her familiar face at close range, he could neither see nor remember which parts of it were synthetic skin and which her own, rejuvenated. There were no actual wrinkles on it anywhere, only the ghost of a line or two at the corners of the eyes. Even under close inspection she could be taken for a youthful twenty-eight. Her face and body were changing no more over the decades than were his golf or bowling score. He and Iris took long vacations from each other sometimes, but stayed married. He had found no one with whom he would rather live.

  “It’s nearly a hundred years since we were married,” he recalled aloud and tasted his brandy. “Will you miss me very much?”

  “I shall miss you, of course. Our relationship has been—very nearly perfect. But if it will make you happy, Matthew, go ahead and die. What is it? Boredom?”

  “Not really.” He indicated with the most minimal inclination of his head, which Iris instantly interpreted correctly, that they might go and seat themselves near the fire. Stretching out his legs there in front of his chair, Pandareus continued: “I think you know me well enough to believe that I am not trying to appear altruistic when I say that the time has come for me to move on and make room for someone else.”

  “Of course, dearest.”

  “There are—what?—maybe eleven billion people on the planet now, and I think the number has hardly changed in the last few centuries. Fortunately starvation and disease are no longer problems. But it is a mixed blessing that practically no one dies unintentionally any more—how can new lives be lived if the old will not make way? When was the last time you saw a child? If every—”

  “Speaking of children,” Iris interrupted. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but speaking of children, I hope you’re not planning to have yourself terminated before the nineteenth.”

  “Of what? This month?” Automatically he looked for a calendar but could not see one. “Why?”

  “Janet called.” His previous wife. “I mean, she left a message while we were on vacation. Things have been so hectic I forgot to tell you. Your five-great grandson is making his bar mitzvah on that date, you’re to be sure to attend.”

  “Bar mitzvah?” He rehearsed in his mind the names and generations comprising the straight unbranching line of his descendants. “I didn’t think Liang was Jewish.”

  “Perhaps what Janet meant was his confirmation. At any rate—”

  “—be sure to be there. Yes. Well, I had hoped to get away soon, having decided that it was the right move to make. But Janet would really feel hurt—if I know her. Is there any way we could get together with her, maybe this week or next week, and discuss it face to face? Let’s see, when—”

  The communications screen chimed. Another set of friends, these just back from their own vacation.

  THE NEXT day in his office on the upper floor of the duplex apartment he consulted his business calendar as soon as he could find the time. He discovered there was no use after all in trying to get in touch with Janet and see her, because even if the nineteenth were clear he had made commitments for important business meetings on the twenty-first and twenty-second. The firm in which he was a partner—dealers in antiques and folk art—was a small one and no great wealth hung on his decisions, but still an obligation was an obligation.

  He switched his calendar to the following month. Studying the new pattern of appointments and memoranda displayed electronically on the glowing glass screen he at first found nothing in it that could not in good conscience be entrusted to his heirs and assigns. But wait, there was the antique furniture auction in Minneapolis. Of course, he and Iris had gone to a great deal of trouble to plan their vacation so he would be sure to be back in time for that. The auction would be an ideal chance for him to train one or two of the younger people in the firm as buyers and he supposed he owed it to his partners to carry on that far.

  Now, the month after that . . . of course, he was supposed to be in Europe for the round of trade show’s. Again, the feeling that he would be letting others down if he bowed out. His wife might have a chance to go along. She also wanted to take part of the history study group that she was heading—all adults, of course—to Europe.

  The next month, now, was all clear, except for trivia that he could disregard if he put his mind to it. He did put his mind to it. Then with his electronic stylus he wrote termination across that month on the calendar screen.

  That evening, however, after helping Iris grade papers from her drama group before some friends came over, he paused suddenly with a foodbar halfway to his mouth, staring after his wife who had just vanished into the kitchen to start preparing the drinks and smokes and slices and dip. He had just been struck by the realization that the month he had tentatively chosen for his demise was the month of their hundredth anniversary. He had been deliberately keeping his calendar for that month clear of other major events, never dreaming that he could forget the big one.

  Of course, they could have some worthy celebration (was it on the fifteenth or the sixteenth?) and then he could terminate a few days later—but no. The scene would be very awkward. He could hear the questions now: And what are you and your husband doing to celebrate, my dear? And the good wishes: May the next hundred years be as happy as the first. No, any time that month would definitely be too close.

  He would have to ask Iris how she felt about it. But there was the door and the bridge club was starting to arrive.

  THE NEXT day Pandareus had his lawyer on the screen—they were locked in a time-consuming squabble with another art dealer over the correct attribution of an early-American painting—and he took the opportunity to discuss the legal aspects of dying.

  The lawyer shook his head. “Haven’t time to go into the whole thing right now. But it’s not advisable for you to terminate at present. You’d do much better to wait until after the first of the year. The tax structure . . .” Pandareus had to cut the call short a minute later and hurry out to meet a potential big customer for lunch—so he managed to gain no very clear understanding of the tax structure. But he had become convinced that dying before the first of the year was financially inadvisable.

  His first feeling was actually one of relief. This e
nforced delay would give him a breathing space in which to plan calmly for an exit that would have some dignity and perhaps even a touch of ceremony about it. But in his heart he knew that if you let projects slide long enough it was difficult to get back to them. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would try to set up a termination date as soon after the first of the year as possible.

  When he came down from the office that night—later than he had planned—he found Iris sprawled on the sofa, her shoes off.

  She greeted him with a faint welcoming cry. “Ahh! Come rub my feet. I have had a day, Matthew, the story of which you will hardly be inclined to believe.”

  “That conference on endangered virus species?”

  “That was yesterday. No, I went shopping this morning and this afternoon I had to go see that place where we were planning to store our boat next winter—remember, you were too busy to go?”

  “Oh, yes.” He sat on the sofa and began to rub a foot, squeezing the arch and instep with an expert touch. “Join me in a drink?”

  “Gladly. And that was only the start. From the boat storage establishment I had to go—”

  The communicator screen chimed. The caller was the computer service company, reminding them that their home terminals were to be disconnected for a day’s maintenance tomorrow.

  AFTER dinner—and after Iris had gone wearily to bed—he dragged himself with proud determination up the stairs to his office again. Jaw outthrust, he set himself to decide firmly once and for all—insofar as such decision might be possible for one man aided by computer—the year, month and day upon which his life would end. He dropped into the chair before his desk with a sigh, brushed aside the printouts, accumulated during dinner, of Antique Dealer’s Bulletin and five other periodicals he never had time to read. He punched for a combined full printout, on microtape, of his business and social calendars for the next twelve months. Next year’s vacation, for example, had been arranged that far in advance. He and Iris were planning to go back to Indonesia, where they had not visited for sixty years. He took his tired mind firmly in hand. Forget about seeing Indonesia again.