Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  ON THE walls of Grill’s office the computer-drawn curves of the world demographic charts showed the danger in the form of the ever-worsening pressure of population. More people inevitably ate more food, and while around the world the food suppliers struggled to get ahead, sometimes they could not even manage to keep up. There were now laws restricting births in every country on the planet. It was mathematically, physically, inevitable that at some future time, by some combination of peaceful or violent forces, the world’s population growth would finally be stopped—obviously it could not continue until human beings stood jammed shoulder to shoulder on every square meter of solid land. The approximately eight billion people who inhabited the world today could all, in theory, probably be stored within Chicago’s borders, standing indoors and out, leaving the rest of the earth on which to grow their food.

  Frighteningly many of the eight billion were hungry and sick today, and more would be tomorrow. Science had boosted the world’s supply of available energy beyond all foreseeable needs by achieving controlled atomic fusion; by harnessing, as the popularizers of science put it, the power of the H-bomb and of the sun itself. The problems of producing and distributing adequate food, and providing medical care, were not so amenable to research and engineering. The leaders of the have-not nations spent their time in power in states of chronic desperation, weighing and selecting gamblers’ moves to keep themselves in power and—sometimes this came first—to help their countrymen.

  One aid toward staying in power was to point out a scapegoat or two on which the people could vent their hate and dissatisfaction. If there were any justification for the choice of scapegoat, so much the better. Another gamblers move was the utterance of overt or implied threats. Often the threats were, serious, even when spoken by the leader of a poor but desperate nation against a wealthy and much more powerful one. Today at least eighty nations Were theoretically capable of producing atomic weapons, and fifteen or twenty of these had technologies sufficiently sophisticated to perhaps enable them to hide such outlawed weapons from the UN inspection teams. Delivery of a nuclear bomb could be accomplished by stealth if not by missile or aircraft. Biological weapons were easier to make, conceal, and deliver, and could be just as deadly if not as quick as nuclear blasts. Thus the voices of the have-nots must be heard in all the greatest capitals of the world. Thus if a new-born baby in Chicago consumed, statistically, three times the food of one new-born in India, it was considered only just and decent to limit the number of newborn Chicagoans, and the same with Londoners, Muscovites, babies of Peking and Tokyo. The starving child in the Indian village might never see a bite of the food thus theoretically saved for him, but who could say it was not just to offer him at least a chance? Thus, even among the haves, compulsory sterilization and abortion for women who could not limit their fertility in any other way. Thus, the illegitimacy of the third child. We may not feed the world, we may lack the knowledge or the will or the material wealth for that, but we will not let it watch us overeat.

  Again, as he looked now at the charts, there darted across Grill’s mind the question of why the latest population forecast had been delayed. He felt a foreboding chill.

  “It seems to me,” Barnaby was saying to him, “that in fact you owe us a real debt. Very few of the League’s members have brought any children at all into the world—as yet.”

  Something in Barnaby’s tone brought Grill’s thoughts back firmly to his office. “As yet? Why do you put it that way?”

  Barnaby did not answer at once. An alien hardness had come into his face. He continued to stand beside the window, watching Grill.

  As Grill stood waiting beside his desk his mind started to relate that odd phrase “as yet” to the chain of Barnaby’s odd visits, and to certain other terrible hints that Grill had lately received from other sources, the hints concerned recent advances in surgery, and in hormonal chemistry; until now, Grill had managed to avoid confronting their implications face to face.

  Barnaby, as if reading the director’s mind, was nodding slowly and solemnly now. “Maybe you’ve heard something about it? True male to female sex reversal is going to be possible. There’ve been doctors working on it in Sweden, and lately in Japan, and both groups seem to have been successful.”

  “Well. That’s fine. I suppose many members of the League will want to avail themselves of the operation, to become practically complete women.”

  “Not just practically, Oscar. Truly complete. I want that. Does that surprise you?” Paradoxically, as he spoke of becoming a woman, Barnaby looked more normal than before, a male trapped in a masquerade costume he could not shed, a man grown weary and desperate beyond all words. “Does it make you laugh, to hear that I will want to bear a child? Two children, if I can.”

  Grill was far from laughter. “This is— beyond belief.”

  “Not to me.” Barnaby’s husky voice quavered. He spoke now as if confessing some terrible crime. “All my life, since I was a child myself, the thought has been in my mind that somehow—if I could have a son—what do you know about me, anyway?”

  Like the first thunder of an unexpected storm, the sounds of rioting burst up abruptly from the street outside; Director Grill hardly noticed them. He moved behind his desk and sank slowly into his chair, without taking his eyes off Barnaby. “So,” Grill said in a faint voice. “Today you have come here on business.”

  ART, while inside the building and knotted in his own problems, had forgotten completely about the demonstrations being organized outside. When he emerged from the lobby, practically at a run, he was at once caught up between chanting swirls of picketers and counter-picketers. When he pushed his way free he had been turned around, and stood still for a moment, disoriented, in the middle of the statwalk.

  A short fat man carrying an armload of cheaply made, stick-mounted signs appeared at once beside Art, haranguing him. “Get yer sign, get yer placard here! Do yer part, sir, only a dollar.” STOP MORAL FREE FALL, said the signs, or some of them at least. Others, interleaved, bore the proud legend LOVE CONQUERS ALL.

  “I’m not involved in this,” Art muttered, trying to get free of the peddler, not knowing which side the man thought he was on, or even what the two contending forces were. As soon as Art spotted a small gap between the picket lines he made for it. The pickets were chanting louder and louder, faster and faster, mouthing unintelligible rioters’ warcries. The peddler would not give up but stayed at Art’s side like a stubborn conscience, trying to sell him a sign. Moving together they were too big to get through the gap, and they, or Art at least, collided with one of the lines as it writhed snakelike toward him. A shout of anger went up from those he had bumped, followed by a cheer from the opposing ranks.

  “Filthy censor! Bluenose!”

  “Smear the queers! Smear the queers! Smear—”

  A tall male figure loomed up in front of Art. Above the words STUDENTS FOR A CHASTE SOCIETY, handpainted on a dirty, opaque sweatshirt, the young man’s face was clean-shaven, angry, florid, shouting. Someone bawling a song about love pushed Art from behind, whereupon the young man in front struck Art on the head with his flimsy sign.

  Something was wrong, the blow should not have hurt so much. It was a great deadening bash that dented a vacuum into his skull, into which a tremendous pain was now about to rush . . .

  There was a policeman in view. And other people, he could not tell who . . . Art was down, but somebody had him under the arms and was dragging him along . . . the blow from the flimsy sign should not have been so hard . . . now he was dying, or else . . .

  IX

  AFTER Art hurried out of the house, George and Ann remained seated at the breakfast table, alone now in the silent house, facing each other with glum expressions.

  “I wonder what’s happened to Fred,” said Ann distantly, turning her head to look out through her window at the patio vines. “And I wonder if Rita has her baby yet.” Then she gave up making conversation and brought her hands up to cover her fac
e. “Oh, if Art turns us in today it’s going to be all my fault.”

  “He won’t,” said George, putting into his voice a lot more certainty than he felt. “He doesn’t want to get Rita in trouble. Anyway, there’s no use blaming yourself if he does.”

  “He might.” Ann spoke through her muffling hands, around her silver wedding ring. “You and Rita will be the ones who go to jail for conspiracy, but it’ll be all my fault. Why did I have to tell her you had a student who could arrange things? Some criminal doctor.” George was irritated. “Hammad’s no criminal, or I wouldn’t have him as a student. I don’t consider arranging births, to be a crime, and you don’t either. I don’t know of anything else he does that’s outside the law.”

  “He arranges births and breaks the law just for money. I don’t like that. Why couldn’t we have waited until I heard from the Order of St. Joseph people?”

  “You might have waited a long time, with their monastery burned down. Anyway, it might even be one of them who’s doing the operation. I think it was smart for Hammad to farm it out.”

  “Someone else is doing it, while he gets paid. Hammad, I don’t trust Hammad.”

  “Now’s a fine time to tell me that,” George grumbled. “Anyway, Rita’s no Christian, she won’t care who does it or why.” As long as it’s done competently. If it isn’t—but there was nothing he could do.

  Ann was silent behind her hands.

  “Art won’t turn us in,” George repeated, trying to be comforting. To himself he thought that he could hardly blame Art for anything he did today. Art was the one they hadn’t allowed for in their plans.

  Still silent.

  He reached across the table, pried one of Ann’s hands down from its job of eye-hiding, and held it softly in his own. “Hey, things aren’t that bad,” he said. “Hey, lady, do you need some help?”

  THE first time he had made that offer to Ann they had both been aboad a bus cruising at eighteen miles an hour along the sixty-lane freeway that ran from Bear Canyon to Pasadena, near the middle of Los Angeles.

  Five apish young men had also boarded at Bear Canyon, though George had not paid much attention to them then. Perhaps they had gotten on to follow Ann. She had five or six small children with her that day.

  The five young men had taken seats just a little forward in the bus from Ann and her brood, and once the bus was isolated from the world in the flow of traffic they had begun talking loudly among themselves, boasting in obscene language of their skills at stealing, fighting, and sublimating. Ann was pretty good at ignoring them, but then one of the apes began to toss little wads of something or other in her direction. “Hey, lady, those all yours? Quintuplets! Looks like you waited too long, decidin’ which two to keep.”

  By now most of the other passengers had congealed in their seats, seeing and hearing nothing, feeling safer behind pretended walls.

  “Hey, girly?” called the youth who had been tossing the spitballs. “Anyone ever tell you you’d look nice wrapped in a blanket down to your toenails?” He turned to a friend. “Red, you got some gladrags with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Break ‘em out. Girly’s gonna gaze at the stars with us.”

  An old women sitting beside George muttered something to the effect that girls who dressed that way were just asking for trouble —and true enough, Ann had on an opaque blouse, and an opaque skirt that came down nearly to her knees. Maybe her dress was one reason why George had noticed her as early as he did. But that was irrelevant now.

  “Do you need some help, lady?” he called to Ann politely, as he got up to stand in the narrow aisle, swaying there slightly with the motion of the bus. George was then twenty-one, half trained in karate, proud owner of a purple belt. He stood up with a feeling of necessity, without either much fear or sense of heroism. Vaguely he wished that he could have a chance to limber up.

  “Yes, I believe I do.” Ann’s voice was as calm as if she had dropped a package in an awkward place and a presentable young man had offered to pick it up.

  So George cleared his throat like a nervous orator and faced forward. He met the eyes of the five troublemakers, one after another, and wondered if there were any words that he might stop them with. A wise old instructor had once told George that if you were really ready for street trouble the readiness showed somehow and trouble never came, not unless you went out of your way to make it, which wise people in or out of karate never did. What words would have stopped me, George wondered, when I was just a kid and up to something wild? But he had never been as wild and apey as these five were acting now, and magic words eluded him. At the same time he was reassuring himself on a comforting point he had already noticed: the narrowness of the aisle. There might be five of them, but they could only come in reach of him one at a time.

  If they were going to come at all. He could see in their faces that he had frightened them just by getting up to face them, and he hoped that his continued calm and that of the girl might be enough to keep them paralyzed. He raised his eyes toward the front of the bus, and met the driver’s eyes in a mirror behind the driver’s personal shield of armored glass. All around the bus the sixty-lane river of vehicles crept on, cutting it off from the rest of humanity and bearing it along. The driver was already trying to maneuver the bus into an outer lane and reach an emergency stopping bay, but to accomplish the maneuver might easily take ten minutes or so.

  Meanwhile, maintaining a calm silence was not going to be enough, perhaps because the five had nowhere to retreat. Now their faces were hardening again; they were more afraid of something else, something that drove them on, than they were of him. They looked at one another and got to their feet and started after George. The old woman screamed.

  The eyes of the first youth to come at George changed again when he realized he was in a narrow aisle, and could expect no immediate help. He was a boy of average size and strength, a little taller than George, sixteen or seventeen years old. His face was just a bit too broad to be called handsome, and his red hair was cut so short the top of his head looked bald. His cohort, mumbling obscenities, shoved forward behind him, pushing him to the attack, until there was nothing he could do but lunge at George, swinging his fists in clumsy desperation.

  The bus driver was thinking, as well as watching in the mirror. At that moment he tapped his brakes firmly, risking a bang from the vehicle following, but stalling the momentum of the single-file attack.

  George saw the first blow of the fight coming at him, and ducked just enough to catch it on the top of the head, where an enemy knuckle was likely to be cracked. Then he leaned forward counterpunching, just as the sudden slowing of the bus rocked the enemy back on their heels. George could already crack two centimeters of pine with either hand. The foe went down like helpless dummies, tangled with one another as they fell. George pressed forward, hammering at the face and body of the unfortunate youth who had led the attack, getting him down and keeping him down so that the rest were jammed and pinned behind him and beneath him.

  WHEN the police came aboard, only a couple of minutes after the bus had reached an emergency bay, they found George still leaning on the pile of inept apes, punching anything that dared to move. The police heard Ann’s matter-of-fact story, and the driver’s, and the stories of the passengers who had noticed anything happening. George was identified and allowed to go his way; the five were removed to a police copter. The red-bald youth had to be carried, and his face was now far from handsome. George had a moment of sick regret, but no more than a moment, on seeing the damage he had done.

  As soon as the police had departed with their catch the bus got rolling again and Ann’s reaction started to set in. Her hands were trembling and she had to fight back tears. She understood, probably from experience, that they would have done more than just wrap her in a plastic sheet. And the children riding with her were still in a slight state of shock, sitting quietly and staring at her and George.

  George sat down at her side and acknow
ledged her choking thanks. He now felt ten feet tall, and at the same time shaky with relief. “Relax, it’s all over now,” he said to Ann. He patted her arm, and slid a hand beneath her long skirt, gently squeezing her thigh.

  “Please don’t,” she murmured, shifting away from him, pressing her knees firmly together.

  His quieting pulse speeded up again at her withdrawal. But he couldn’t believe she had meant that just the way it sounded. Probably it wasn’t really the open invitation it sounded like, but just a nervous reaction from the danger she had been in. A lot of people just didn’t feel like sex when they were frightened or upset, and under the circumstances her lack of even a polite pretense was quite forgive-able.

  So he restricted himself to holding Ann’s hand, and lightly stroking her arm, which attentions she accepted and seemed to find comforting. “I think I know you,” he said with sudden mild surprise. “At least I know who you are. Your name’s Ann something, and you’re in my sister’s high school class. You were there at school one day with a bunch of girls when I went to pick her up. She’s Rita Parr. Oh, excuse me, my name is George.”

  “Yes, I heard you giving it to the police. I’m Ann Lohmann. Oh, why must I start blubbering now, when the trouble’s all over?” She was certainly not blubbering, just a little tense and swollen-looking about the eyes. “Thanks to you.” Getting herself completely under control, Ann looked around to her children, giving them a smile and a few cheerful words, snapping at a boy to get his feet down off the seat.

  “Where are you taking them?” George asked.

  “We’re just coming back from Bear Canyon Park. I took them out there because so many never see anything but pavement and little strips of grass.” The kids all had a BI look. “They’re from my Sunday School class.”