Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Karate was a good business to be in. You could get to meet some influential people, people with class, like the Dr. Hammad who had come in and patched Fred’s scalp today. Afterward Fred had watched the doctor go through his private lesson, and George had used Fred to demonstrate a point or two, and had Fred spar freestyle with the doctor a little bit, taking it easy.

  Now Fred made a karate blade of his hand and chopped delicately, silently, at the edge of the bar. Then he stopped. Who cared? What was the use? George probably could tell without even checking that he had been lying about having a brown belt. Sorry, George had said, no job now. Practice every day and we’ll see. George hadn’t said every day for how long, but Fred knew it wouldn’t be for just a week or two. Months or maybe even a year before he got his stance and his control and everything else up to the standards George wanted in a brown or black belt, in a paid instructor. There was not much fun in grunting and sweating and working like a machine for that length of time. And there was no guarantee that he would ever make it, so what was the sense in putting out that kind of effort?

  Up to the bar beside Fred there stepped a young man who looked like one who knew his way around. He was of average height, but so broad-shouldered that he appeared squat. Around his shoulders he wore the pelt, doubtless artificial, of what Fred supposed was a wolf; anyway it was a shaggy animal, with pointy little stick-up ears, beady glittering glass eyes, and sharp-looking sizable white teeth in a pink open plastic mouth.

  Fred hadn’t yet made contact with anyone who knew where he might buy some glad-rags.

  “Hey,” he called quietly.

  The wolf-man turned, properly casual, and looked Fred over. “Hey,” he answered coolly. “You buyin’?”

  Fred waited long enough to show that he wasn’t being pushed into anything. “Got my check today, why not?”

  Fred and Wolf (“Call me Wolf, man”) sat at a table, where they were soon joined by a friend of Wolf´s called Lewandowski, who was drinking herb tea spiked with vodka. Fred bought another round for the three of them and decided it was the last he was going to buy. He sounded out Wolf and Lewandowski about gladrags, and they assured him that a man who sold such things would be around later.

  Wolf said he came from New York City. He let it be known that he had led a gang there and the New York police were looking for him so he had come west for his health. Fred could believe this about halfway. Lewandowski, a fat, strong-looking youth with empty eyes, was a native Chicagoan. Once he started talking it was hard to get him to shut up. He said he was looking for a job with one of the policy wheels, legal or illegal made no difference to him; his old man was a compulsive gambler and he knew there was no money to be made on the sucker’s side of the operation.

  Neither of them asked Fred about his bandage, but he faked a little more headache than he actually felt and managed to reveal casually that he was a karate expert, working hard for his black belt. He saw the others hardening their faces slightly to keep from showing that they were impressed. Probably they believed him about halfway as he did them. Well, he was telling them about half the truth. If only there was someone he could talk to.

  Finally Fred gave up waiting and bought yet another round, for neither of the other two seemed-to have any money. They both said they had been on BI for about a year, since abandoning school. And Wolf said he couldn’t even collect his checks these days or the New York police would find out where he was and have him extradited.

  Fred began to feel a little drunk and sick, and his wounded head ached in earnest. The gladrag man finally arrived and was pointed out to him, and as soon as he had the little carton in his pocket Fred went back to the Y. Marjorie wasn’t in, or else she wouldn’t answer his tapping at the door. Without her unlatching her side of the bed, he couldn’t even let his down, and so was restricted to slouching on his spine in a chair with his feet up on his tiny table. He sat there in dizzy silence for a while, staring into the hot eyes of the Y’s founder, whose portrait decorated one wall. On another wall was the predictable print of Love Conquers All, the naked urchin wearing wings and pretending to be Eros, climbing out of bed and knocking down books and mathematical instruments and trampling a violin. That Caravaggio had certainly known how to paint. That picture would be something to try to carve in wood.

  He wanted Marjorie to come back, and to hurry up about it. But maybe she had checked out, and tonight he would have to sleep with some real old-fashioned sex kitten, some real dog who studied an erotic manual every day. He didn’t know if he could take that now.

  One thing he sure wasn’t going to be able to take for very long tonight was sitting here alone. It was only about eight o’clock, not yet dark outside, and he was neither sober nor yet really high on the spiked coffee. He got up and went out, and had nowhere to go. In a little while he was heading back to the Megiddo.

  VII

  THE phone call got Art up from the Parrs’ dinner table. When Art had let the caller see him, a man’s voice spoke briefly through a blanked screen, giving him directions. “The corner of Belmont and Halsted. Be there in an hour. Don’t forget to come alone.”

  “How will I know—?” but the connection had already been broken.

  George, who had been listening in the background, now looked worried, which did not help Art’s nerves at all. Ann, smiling though she was worried too, came up to Art. “You’re going, then? Give Rita our love if you do get to see her. And listen to what she says. And don’t do anything foolish. You won’t get lost now, will you?”

  “No. No, I won’t. Well then, I’m off.” He left the house before they could change their minds completely and begin to argue with him not to go. He had prepared himself somewhat by purchasing a map of the city’s slidewalk system from an autovendor, and to pick out a good route to Belmont and Halsted was no trouble at all. He even detoured through a busy shopping center with the idea of shaking off anybody who might be trying to follow him.

  Chicago was a place where people walked, or at least rode standing on their moving walkways. In this it was unlike most of mid-California, where a man trying to move any distance on foot soon found himself a helpless alien in a world that had been planned and built and paved and spaced for surface vehicles. By night out there a walking man was a blind alien once the particular slidewalk or statwalk he was on had taken him out of the particular region where he lived. The tall islands of glittering buildings seen in the distance all looked pretty much alike, and the daytime mountains were gone. A walking man could think that the passing tides and torrents of headlights and taillights went on forever.

  Here in Chicago things were closer together and more reachable, more on a human scale, save for the towers that clustered in the center of the city, the place a few Chicagoans still called the Loop. Here signs named the streets at every corner, address numbers were consistent where they could be seen, and the city was covered by the vast slidewalk grid. But now at sunset most of the walks were only thinly occupied. The crowded shopping center had evidently been fed most of its customers by surface vehicle, for its large parking lots looked nearly full. The people Art saw on the walks kept looking at one another in mutual wariness as they passed.

  Art kept to the main thoroughfares, which Ann had said were fairly well patroled by the police. Plenty of artificial light fell on the faintly whispering slidewalks, and on the new, high, blind walls that now made up so much of the city’s face. Next to the vehicle lanes of the street there usually came a strip of grass, then the whispering walk, a wider strip of grass and trees (no shrubbery, though, wherein a man might lurk), and then the walls, high and un-scaleable. Walls of workerless, humming factories, or walls of defended blockhouses like George’s. Art, searching out his path tonight between the walls, was reminded of a maze he had once seen in the laboratory of a psychologist who had been experimenting with rats. With the going of the sun, the trees growing in the tended spots and strips of grass took on an unreal, misplaced look. Their June leaves were as green as s
ignals in the streetlights brightness. And the streets steady vehicular traffic, dipping or rising as the streets passed under or over the moving walks, was also quite unreal to a slidewalking man; the people in the cars were like fish in an aquarium, dim sliding shapes bound into their own world.

  “See that one there?” the psychologist who ran the rats had said. “Looks fine and healthy, doesn’t he? Fat and sleek and bright-eyed compared with most of the others.”

  “How do you keep some of ‘em that way, with so many crowded in?”

  “They’re supposed to be crowded in. I’m studying the effects of overpopulation. And he’s really no healthier than the others are.

  He’s like a sleepwalker, passive, nonsexual . . .”

  “What about the others?”

  “Various reactions. See the shabby one with all the energy? He’s what we call a ‘prober’. Hyper and homo-sexual. Hyperactive altogether, often turns cannibal. Only good point is he’s not a status-seeker as most of the males are.”

  THUNDER rumbled somewhere. Or was it thunder? Close above the streetlights the night pressed down, opaque and prematurely black. Above the brilliant lights there might be stars or clouds or watching eyes, nothing could be seen.

  Art ran his maze. After leaving the shopping center he changed slidewalk directions twice, navigating with his map. He was sliding east along Belmont Avenue, calculating the distance to Halsted Street, when a passing police car slowed, keeping pace with him for ten or fifteen seconds. Art threw one half-scowling glance toward the car and just kept on walking, until it pulled away.

  A minute later he wished it back. Glancing down a comparatively dim side street as he crossed an intersection, he saw a group of four or five male figures walking together two long blocks away. They were shouting in rough voices and waving their arms. Fortunately they were a little too far off to be concerned with Art. He would bet that they meant trouble for someone, though.

  Thunder rolled again. Hyperactive, and they often turned cannibal. But the psychologist with his crowding studies had been too wise to offer any cure-all for human nastiness. Certainly not the simple absence of crowding. There was still plenty of violence on farms.

  Art’s nerves relaxed a little when the band of toughs passed out of sight, then tightened again as he arrived at the intersection to which he had been told to come. It was a busy place, the center of a small vending district. He alighted on a statwalk bathed in the rippling noon of a barred display window. People moved around him, shopping or aimlessly walking. No one moved at once to approach Art, and as far as he could tell no one was watching him.

  Another police car, or perhaps the same one, came easing around a corner, and Art turned away from it, pretending to study the contents of the vendor’s window. He heard the car halt just a little distance off, and wait there, turbines idling with a muffled whine. Maybe they were just keeping a protective watch over the pedestrians in sight. If they were trying to follow him to Rita, surely they would be more subtle about it than this. But now it seemed to Art that the police and Family Planning probably knew already where she was. He pictured Hall conferring with cool and crafty agents, all of them agreeing to wait until the crime had been irrevocably committed before they sprang their trap. We’re not out to get her, Hall had said.

  Art inventoried the window until he heard the police car pull away. A few seconds later another car drove up to the curb beside him, one of its windows lowered. A man’s voice called softly: “Are you Rodney?”

  “Yes.” Art skipped across the slidewalk to the curb.

  A rear door opened for him. “Get in.”

  He got in and pulled the door shut and the car moved out. There were two men with him in the car, one driving and the other beside Art in the rear. As soon as the auto had turned out of the busy intersection, the man, in back took Art by the neck and pushed him impersonally down to the floor.

  “We don’t wancha see where we’re going. Get under this.” A musty-smelling, opaque blanket of some kind was thrown over his head.

  Opaque blankets like this one were not commonly found in the possession of proper people. Suddenly all the possibilities of evil began to open. Art could fear that he was not being taken to Rita at all, he was being gotten rid of as a troublemaker. Meanwhile the car purred on, no one in it having anything to say. It stopped and started and turned in traffic. Art no longer had the faintest idea of the direction in which he was moving. There was a faint odor of perfume, or perhaps some kind of drug, in the car or clinging to the blanket. He told himself firmly that his new fears were ridiculous. Anyway, it was too late now to start having them.

  He crouched awkwardly beneath the blanket, breathing uncomfortably and pulling at his beard. Just let him have one chance to talk with Rita, face to face. She would not be able to stick to her mad plan. She had always gone along with him on the few occasions when he had really insisted on having something his own way. If she were able to face him with this decision, she would not simply have left him a note and fled. He had to believe that he would be able to make her change her mind.

  How could he have lived with her for more than three years and not know her any better than he did? But Rita didn’t know him, either, if she thought he would simply let her wreck her life this way. That was the important thing. The number of children and the legal problems were secondary. To save her was what he was really fighting for.

  The car turned, slowed, turned once more, crept ahead, and shortly stopped.

  “We get out here. Don’t look around, just go straight into the building.”

  The blanket was pulled away and Art saw that they were parked in an alley. Anonymous rough brick walls were close on either hand. As he got out of the car one of his escorts turned him toward an open doorway, some kind of unmarked service entrance, in the rear of a sizable, dimly lighted building.

  One of his guides, a graying, tough-looking man, came along, walking a pace or two ahead of Art to show him the way. Art followed down a long shabby passage between walls of painted concrete block and up a narrow flight of stairs whose carpet had begun to wear. The place was a run-down apartment building, or perhaps a hotel. This impression was strengthened as they traversed another passage, that twisted past closed and numbered doors. The building was certainly old, but reasonably clean and well-maintained.

  At last Art’s guide stopped and pointed to a door. “She’s in here. I’ll come back in fifteen, twenty minutes, and we’ll take ya back where we picked ya up.” The man turned his back indifferently and walked away.

  Art tapped on the door, then turned the old knob and pushed it open. Rita was sitting with her back to him, in a worn plastic armchair, wearing a silvery bikini that sparkled in the light of the small room’s single lamp, and staring out through the one small window at the night. She looked around, startled, at Art’s entrance, and he saw that above the bikini bottom her belly still bulged slightly with three months’ illegitimate pregnancy—he was not too late. As she recognized him, love and fear and defiance came into her face, and she jumped up from the chair. A second later she opened her arms.

  “COME home with me now,” Art murmured, almost sleepily, about ten minutes later. His voice was half muffled by the single pillow on the small bed. Rita’s hair, spread artlessly on the same pillow, was silver and gold in the light of the cheap lamp, as it would be in the best light anywhere. A gleam of almost the same color came from the plastic armchair, where her discarded bikini lay.

  “No, I can’t.” Her voice was small but did not hesitate. “They’ll kill my baby if I do.” Unable to lie still after saying those unsettling words, she got up from the cot and went to close the window, against which rain was just starting to splash.

  Art also sat up and put his feet on the floor. He had suddenly realized that a good many minutes had passed, that his escort would soon be back for him, and that so far Rita and he had talked very little, and that mainly about how they loved and missed each other and whether Timmy and Paula
might be much upset by what was going on.

  He stood up and reached for his codpiece, which had been thrown onto the armchair too. “You’re coming home with me, so don’t argue about it. You haven’t committed any real crime as yet, and there isn’t any reason why you can’t just walk out of here. A man from Family Planning came to see me, and from what he said I’m sure they won’t place any charges, if we just turn in this fetus as we’re required to do.”

  “I can’t, I can’t. I wish you would try to understand. I wish you could stand by me.” Her tender body turned in the lamplight, naked and unprotected. His heart turned over.

  “Why can’t you do it, for sex’s sake?” he demanded, more savagely than he had meant.

  “B-because it’s living. It’s my baby, and it’s part of you I have inside me. It would be like killing you. Oh, Art.” Even slight pregnancy always made women look ridiculous and she would look more so when she put the bikini on again. Why couldn’t anybody make clothes in which a pregnant girl looked less grotesque? Maybe such clothes were made somewhere. But then, Art realized abruptly, Rita’s pregnancy was probably going to be ended in one or two more days. One way or another.

  Now she got her bikini from the chair and did start to put it on. She looked fragile and vulnerable and ridiculous and he loved her tremendously. Her breasts wefe fuller than usual; that would be the pregnancy, too, of course.

  “I can’t go through this again,” she told him grimly, meanwhile working on a strap. “I’m g-going to have myself sterilized when this is over, even if the government doesn’t make me. But I can’t give up this baby who’s already here.” When Rita got very tired or upset she sometimes stuttered.