Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  That afternoon Cunningham sounded out a couple of mining companies, making preliminary arrangements.

  But his dream that night had nothing to do with copper, or, as far as he could tell, with wealth of any kind. He was standing in darkness, paralyzed, attacked by some kind of tiny vermin that gnawed their way through his skin and then scuttled in and out through the holes they had made. He tried to move, but could only sway stiffly, his joints creaking. He could only endure, well past the point where any ordinary nightmare should have ended. Managing at last to get a clear mental image of one of his tiny tormentors, he saw that it had the face of a cartoon comedy rat, a discovery that for some reason added a sharp stab of horror. Cunningham woke up, in a cold sweat.

  Shirley was standing beside his bed. “Ben, you were . . . calling. Are you all right?”

  “I was dreaming. Yes, I’m all right.” He wiped his lace. Looking for his cigarettes, he switched on the bedside light, and became abstractedly aware of the worried expression on his wife’s face. “Don’t be upset about the car, Shirley. Those things happen.”

  Surprise registered in Shirley’s eyes, then guilt. “No one was hurt. Ben, I, I wanted to tell you about the accident, but you’ve had so much else on your mind.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. The damage to the prized sports car was not severe; it amounted to some banged-up sheet metal, and a slight hidden strain on the frame, that not even the mechanic had yet detected . . .

  But how did he, Ben Cunningham, know that?

  The answer, of course, was that he felt it, in the same way he would know if his ankle had been wrenched slightly. The discomfort he felt now was not in his ankle, not anywhere in his body, but he felt it. While he slept, a part of himself had been pulled into the car.

  There had been a bad dream too, a dream now fading rapidly, a dream that had had nothing to do with cars . . .

  Shirley, her voice hesitant, was speaking again. “Ben, I’ve never interfered in anything regarding business.”

  He grunted something.

  “This time I would have, if I’d known when you went into the hospital what you really meant to do.”

  “Go back to bed, Shirley,” he told her, crushing out his cigarette. “Everything’s all right.”

  “Are you sure, Ben?”

  “I’m just tired now; let me rest.” He smiled at his wife, the smile that always reassured her, and then lay back and closed his eyes. She put out the light, and a few moments later he heard the door between their rooms close softly. A great woman. He would tire himself out, use himself up, go through nightmares, for her and the two boys who were away at school. Even if he never got to see much of them . . .

  Tired, but he wasn’t going to be able to go right back to sleep. He lay in his bed alone—he would never have been able to get the rest he needed, had he given up half his bed to another body’s weight and movements and breath—staring up into darkness. He was now able to feel the twenty pairs of shoes racked in his bedroom closets (nothing like dressing right to make exactly the right impression) and with a little effort he could even tell which pairs needed polishing. Lying there motionless, he could feel himself being drawn, slowly, inescapably, into all the things that were in and about and of his house. The fireplace downstairs with its fading warmth, the Picasso print on the wall, the garbage in the undersink disposal. The concrete of the outdoor pool, drained for winter. The growing grass and trees.

  One by one, all the things he owned were coming forward, each demanding its own portion of his being. He had the feeling that there was not going to be enough of himself to go around. His things were absorbing him into their own substances. He had told the doctor he would get used to feeling diffused, but the sensation was only getting worse.

  He put his hands over his face in the darkness. He fiercely willed his own coherence and survival. What was attacking him was illusion; he still functioned. To build for his sons and his sons’ sons he would find a way to come to terms with his new power. He had to. At last he dozed.

  In his office next day Ben Cunningham began to feel burning and amputation and scarring; the sensations were not localizable to any part of his human body, nor were they generalized throughout it. He felt them, though, and they were real, physically real. He traced them to their origin in a part of his newly extended identity, and he knew before the phone message came that his new Idaho timberland was ablaze. The first copper-hunting expedition sent by the mining company had managed to start a forest fire.

  That night he again stood wooden and swaying, infested by rat-faced mites. (Also moving about inside him were other, much larger creatures, but these were doing no damage at the moment and he could ignore them.) It was the tiny beasts with their tiny gnawings that were terrible. This time the image of the vermin stayed with him after he awakened, and he understood that they were rats, real rats. When one hungry rat found food in the form of one of the larger living things, Cunningham’s nerves did not feel the bitten baby’s pain, for the baby was not his property. He felt only the baby’s scream, reverberating in the shaky wood of the tenement.

  “Hullo? Whatsamatter?”

  “This is Benedict Cunningham. I want you to get busy and sell any building I own that could be called a slum. I know it’s four in the morning. I don’t want arguments and I don’t want any delay. Start on it right now.”

  “What’s Mr. Cunningham? Sell buildings, you say?”

  “And don’t haggle about prices. Get rid of them.”

  The hurried sale of the slum buildings relieved him of pain; but it did not free him. He was still gripped by the money from the sale, as by ail the other money that was his. Parts of him stretched out, and then tied down, confined, in cage-boxes made of bars like the ruled lines in an old-fashioned ledger.

  For another day or so he continued forcing himself grimly on along the road to greater profits. More cage-compartments and more bars. Making money had always been something he could do, and it was almost no trick at all now that he was wired into the Board. The connection was everything that he had hoped it would be, and more.

  And more.

  For Shirley and the boys, he clung to his determination to endure and adapt. But with every passing day, with every hour, he could feel himself going. Losing what tenuous contact he had ever had with people and music and food and sunsets. He inexorably diffused, becoming machinery and oil wells and expensive shoes.

  The forest fire was out now and he had got out of the reach of the rats’ teeth. But he could feel himself dying of diffusion. His body walked on, planning daily tasks, smiling when required, keeping socially active and presentable, but soon his shrinking core of self might be altogether gone, and against that fate his ego at last rebelled.

  He tried first to save himself without really giving up any of his wealth. He switched off, by remote control, the unit implanted at the Exchange. It didn’t help. He tried putting vast properties in his wife’s name. But the pen marks and the electronic transfer of symbols that had got the rats out of gnawing range proved in this case ineffective. This time the things of his wealth maintained their grip on him, as if they understood that they were in every real sense still his.

  “I believe I understand, sir. You want the books physically spread out on the table, opened?”

  “Yes. And the discs from the computer.” The symbols of wealth were concentrated even more intensely there. “And then move the table over to the windows, let the sunlight fall on it.” He no longer cared a great deal if subordinates thought him eccentric or even insane.

  He could feel the sunlight falling on the rigid records of his wealth. But not even the sun could thaw him loose from them.

  These days he never worked late at the office. And when he came home, Shirley was always waiting for him, peering at him anxiously. Today she said: “Ben, if you don’t make an appointment with a doctor right away, I’m going to make one for you.”

  “Don’t bother, I’ve just made one.”

&
nbsp; “You couldn’t remove it,” was almost the first thing that Cunningham said on coming out of the anesthetic.

  “Oh, I removed the device.” The doctor’s voice was weary, his face grim. “There was some involvement of brain tissue that I hadn’t expected. How do you feel?”

  “You might as well have left it in. I’m still being pulled apart.”

  By next morning, the doctor had a theory ready: some of the nine-tenths of Cunningham’s brain that he had never used, that no one ever uses, had been stimulated to new activity by the cybernetic device. The components of the device were very small and subtle and new, and no one yet understood them very well.

  “I’m not going to try to do anything more to your brain,” he told Cunningham flatly. “What’s going on may right itself in time. It probably will. That’s all I can say.”

  The surgery hadn’t been the doctor’s idea in the first place. Cunningham didn’t really want the doctor to say anything more now. He put on his wig again and left the hospital again, knowing that he had only a little time left. Whatever elastic might be left in his tough soul was failing now. There were moments, with his wealth stretching him in every direction, when a black cavity appeared in the center of his being. The cavity was nothingness, and that was his future.

  Since surgery had failed, he could think of only one more course open to him that was (a little, at least) less desperate than suicide. As soon as Cunningham got home he called his lawyers and with their help began to give things away. At first they worked at the job enthusiastically, eager to learn what the trick was going to turn out to be. Putting things in Shirley’s name hadn’t worked, and now Cunningham stayed clear of her and other relatives and chose charities.

  At last, success. He could tell that this time he had found a method that was going to work for him. Each gift eased the strain, allowing a bit of humanity to return. The trouble was that partial relief was no longer enough, he had been too badly stretched. A tug on even one finger or toe is unendurable to a man who has been for days on the rack.

  When his lawyers, puzzled by the continued absence of any tricks, pressed for explanations, and he told them that he planned to give it all away, down to the last penny, they called his doctor. For a while Cunningham feared there would be an effort to have him committed. But the last thing the doctor wanted was fuss, possible investigations. He backed up his patient as sane and competent, and the lawyers eventually went along.

  Not before they had spoken to Shirley, enough to give her some idea of what was going on.

  Naturally, when Cunningham confirmed that he was giving everything away, she was stunned.

  “Of course,” he reassured her, “you’re not going to have to worry personally. You’ll come out of it with a fine settlement.”

  “A what?”

  “Understand, this is business,” said Cunningham, using the magic word that would always forestall any more questions from his wife. “You have to divorce me if you want to keep anything at all for yourself or for the boys. I can’t bear to own the least thing any longer.” And even as he spoke, in the back of Cunningham’s mind was the faint, terribly fragile hope that Shirley might elect to stay with him, even existing as he saw himself about to do on the charity of some distant relatives. He could still own a bite of food and put it into his mouth and not feel real pain; that was about the feasible extent of his net worth right now. But it would be unthinkable to come right out and ask Shirley or his sons to exist like that.

  “Divorce you, keep anything,” she repeated vacantly, in extreme horror. “But Ben, I’ll never leave you. I don’t care that much about money.” He hadn’t really dared to hope . . . with shaking, tearful tenderness he reached for Shirley’s hand. “Think carefully, dear,” Cunningham murmured honorably. “Everything I’ve done has been for you and the boys.”

  “For us?” Astoundingly, her love exploded into wrath. He could not have been more surprised if she had shattered like a bomb. “For me? Don’t tell me that. In the beginning, maybe, but not when you had a hole drilled in your brain to make more money. Not then! Go on, kill yourself, or give it all away to ease yourself, but never say that it’s for me!”

  “I . . .” Just then the phone began to ring. Cunningham answered it mechanically, and the voice of one of his lawyers said: “Ben, the last things are ready for your signature. But I still can’t see a man like you going through with this.”

  “I’ll call you back,” said Cunningham slowly, and hung up. Meeting Shirley’s angry, wondering eyes, he felt a touch of new terror. The power of self-extension was still his, in a form he had not thought of until now.

  It came to him that there were treasures he had not yet dreamed of knowing.

  It came to him also that the cage-bars of the ledgers, the prison domains of the magnetic discs, had just this moment eased their strain.

  “Mr. Cunningham? You said two hours ago you’d call us back. You didn’t, so I took the liberty of calling . . . the papers are ready as you requested. We’re all waiting.”

  “The papers.” Cunningham sounded impatient and happy at the same time. His voice was that of a man being disturbed while at some joyful occupation. “Oh, the rest of the giveaway papers, yes. I think you might as well tear those up.”

  The pain, as in memory, of a rat bite came and went. It hurt, yes, but . . . Cunningham turned off the phone and rolled on his other side to look at Shirley. He found that now he could look through her eyes at himself as well. He wasn’t handsome any longer, if he had ever been handsome, and certainly he was no longer young. But her eyes seemed content to rest on him.

  “It’s all right now?” Shirley asked.

  “It’s all right,” Cunningham assured her. “How long have you had this backache?”

  Shirley’s eyes widened. He could feel the change in her eyes as well as see it. The accompanying thoughts, however, had to be deduced. Until she said: “You’re spreading out again.”

  “Mark,” he said with closed eyes, “is playing baseball. Just got a good hit, he’s running the bases hard. It feels really good to be fifteen and run full speed.”

  “Mark is—? Oh, my God. You’re going the same way again, only now with people.”

  “Not the same. And Luke, he’s talking to a girl.”

  Cunningham was inside his older son, seeing the girl, and—yes, dimly, in foreshadowing of a future clear reality, he could go as far as looking through the girl’s eyes back at Luke. Cunningham was spreading out again, slowly, farther and farther. But it was not the same as it had been with money and with things. Now more, vastly more, than went out was coming in.

  “With people. Oh, my God, what are you going to do? You can’t give us away.”

  “Fat chance. Forgive me, Shirl for trying to do that once.”

  “Ben. Where are you now?”

  “Right here, Shirl.” He opened his eyes. “I’m in bed with my wife.”

  EARTHSHADE

  When Zalazar saw the lenticular cloud decapitate the mountain, he knew that the old magic in the world was not yet dead. The conviction struck him all in an instant, and with overwhelming force, even as the cloud itself had struck the rock. Dazed by the psychic impact, he turned around shakily on the steep hillside to gaze at the countenance of the youth who was standing beside him. For a long moment then, even as the shock wave of the crash came through the earth beneath their feet and then blasted the air about their ears, Zalazar seemed truly stunned. His old eyes and mind were vacant alike, as if he might never before have seen this young man’s face.

  “Grandfather.” The voice of the youth was hushed, and filled with awe. His gaze went past Zalazar’s shoulder, and on up the mountain. “What was that?”

  “You saw,” said Zalazar shortly. With a hobbling motion on the incline, he turned his attention back to the miracle. “How it came down from the sky. You heard and felt it when it hit. You know as much about it as I do.”

  Zalazar himself had not particularly noticed one small
round cloud, among other clouds of various shape around what was, in general, an ordinary summer sky. Not until a comparatively rapid relative movement, of something small, unnaturally round, and very white against the high deep blue had happened to catch the corner of his eye. He had looked up directly at the cloud then, and the moment he did that he felt the magic. That distant disk-shape, trailing small patches of ivory fur, had come down in an angled, silent glide that somehow gave the impression of heaviness, of being on the verge of a complete loss of buoyancy and control. The cloud slid, or fell, with a deceptive speed, a speed that became fully apparent to Zalazar only when the long path of its descent at last intersected age-old rock.

  “Grandfather, I can feel the magic.”

  “I’m sure you can. Not that you’ve ever had the chance to feel anything like it before. But it’s something everyone is able to recognize at once.” The old man took a step higher on the slope, staring at the mountain fiercely. “You were born to live with magic. We all were—the whole human race. We’re never more than half alive unless we have it.” He paused for a moment, savoring his own sensations. “Well, I’ve felt many a great spell in my time. There’s no harm in this one—not for us, at least. In fact, I think it may possibly bring us some great good.”

  With that Zalazar paused again, experiencing something new, or maybe something long-forgotten. Was it only that the perceived aura of great spells near at hand brought back memories of his youth? It was more than that, probably. Old wellsprings of divination, caked over by the years, were proving to be still capable of stir and bubble. “All right. Whatever that cloud is, it took the whole top of the mountain with it over into the next valley. I think we should climb up there and take a look.” All above was silent now, and apparently tranquil—except that a large, vague plume of gray dust had become visible above the truncated mountain, where it drifted fitfully in an uncertain wind.