The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series
Page 4
“It’s like this,” said the dark man. “I’ll tell you the truth. This whole universe isn’t real, get me? It’s just a figment of your imagination, but you got powers you don’t know how to control, and we been trying to keep you confused, see, because otherwise—”
“Then you don’t care if I do this!” said Johnny, and he made a fist around the leather purse and slammed it on his knee.
Zip!
A wind thundered in his ears, snatched the breath from his mouth. He could barely see the dark man, through a cloud of flying sleet, hunkered like himself on a ledge next to nowhere. “We’re observers from the Galactic Union,” the dark man shouted. “We’re stationed here to keep an eye on you people on account of all them A-bomb explosions, because—”
“Or this!” Johnny howled, and jerked his fist again.
Zip!
They were sprawled on a freezing plain, staring at each other in the icy glitter of starlight. “I’ll tell you!” said the dark man. “We’re time travelers, and we got to make sure you never marry Piper Laurie, because—”
Gently, Johnny told himself.
Zip!
They were sliding side by side down the giant chute in the fun house at Jantzen’s Beach in Portland, Oregon. “Listen!” said the dark man. “You’re a mutant superman, see? Don’t get sore—we had to test you before we could lead you into your glorious heritage of—”
As Johnny started to get to his feet, the movement jarred the thing in his hand, and—
Zip!
They were standing on the observation platform on top of the Empire State. It was a cold, raw day. The dark man was shivering—cold, or frightened enough to talk, to too frightened to stay drunk? His voice, trembled: “Okay, this is it, friend. You aren’t human—you’re an android, but such a good imitation, you don’t even know it. But we’re your inventors, see—”
Gently: it was the little jumps that were dangerous, Johnny reminded himself.
Zip! They were in a revolving door, and zip! Johnny was on the staircase of his own rooming house, looking down at the dark man who was goggling up at him, trying to say something, and zip! they were standing beside a disordered banana cart while a cold chill ran up Johnny’s spine, and—
“All right!” the dark man shouted. There was raw sincerity in his voice. “I’ll tell you the truth, but please—”
Johnny’s hand tilted in spite of himself.
Zip!
They were on the top deck of a Fifth Avenue bus parked at the curb, waiting for a load. Johnny lowered his hand with infinite care to the shiny rail top of the seat ahead. “Tell,” he said.
The dark man swallowed. “Give me a chance,” he said in an undertone. “I can’t tell you—if I do, they’ll break me, I’ll never get a post again—”
“Last chance,” said Johnny, looking straight ahead. “One . . . Two …”
“It’s a livie,” the dark man said, pronouncing the first i long. His voice was resigned and dull.
“A what?”
“Livie. Like movies. You know. You’re an actor.”
“What is this now?” said Johnny uneasily. “I’m a painter. What do you mean, I’m an ac—”
“You’re an actor, playing a painter!” said the dark man. “You actors! Dumb cows! You’re an actor! Understand? It’s a livie.”
“What is the livie about?” Johnny asked carefully.
“It’s a musical tragedy. All about poor people in the slums.”
“I don’t live in the slums,” said Johnny indignantly.
“In the slums. You want to tell me, or should I tell you? It’s a big dramatic show. You’re the comic relief. Later on you die.” The dark man stopped short, and looked as if he wished he had stopped shorter. “A detail,” he said. “Not important. We’ll fix it up, next script conference.” He put his hands to his temples suddenly. “Oh, why was I decanted?” he muttered. “Glorm will split me up the middle. He’ll pulverize me. He’ll shove me back into the—”
“You’re serious?” said Johnny. His voice cracked. “What is this, I die? I die how?” He twitched uncontrollably.
Zip!
The Fifth Avenue bus was gone. They were sitting in the second row of a movie theater. The house lights had just gone up; the audience was shuffling out. Johnny seized the dark man by the shirt front.
“I forget,” said the dark man sullenly. “You fall off something, I think. Right before the end of the livie, when the hero gets to bed with the girl. You want to know who’s the hero? Somebody you know. Duke—”
“Fall off what?” said Johnny, tightening his grip.
“Off a building. Into a trash can. Half.”
“Comic relief?” said Johnny with an effort.
“Sure. Pratfalls! You’ll steal the livie! The lookers’ll have heart attacks laughing!”
~ * ~
The sounds of the departing audience abruptly stopped. The walls and ceiling flickered alarmingly; when they steadied, Johnny saw with total bewilderment that they were in a different room altogether. It was nowhere he had ever been before—nowhere, he realized abruptly, with his heart racing, that he ever could have been before.
Out across the great silvery bowl, under a cloud-high ceiling, men were floating in the air like gnats, some drifting, some moving quickly around a bulbous metal shape that hung over the center of the huge room. Down below, twenty feet lower than the balcony on which they sat, there was a little puff of light and exploding shape—a brilliant unfolding that lasted only an instant, leaving a crazy memory of moving trees and buildings. After a moment, it happened again.
Johnny was aware that the dark man, beside him, had stiffened and somehow shrunk into himself.
He turned. Behind them, in the eerie stillness, a silvery man came striding through a doorway.
“Glorm,” said the dark man, gasping, “ne estis mia kulpo. Li—”
Glorm said, “Fermu man truon.” He was slender and sinewy, dressed in something that looked like tinfoil. He had bulging eyes under a broad shelf of brow. He turned them on Johnny. “Now you vill give me d’inrtrwment,” he said.
Johnny found his breath. The bit of leather in his hand, he discovered, was now as rigid as if it were part of an invisible pillar in the air; but he tightened his grip on it, anyhow. “Why should I give it to you?” he demanded.
Glorm gestured impatiently. “Vait.” He turned to look out over the enormous sunken bowl, and his voice suddenly echoed everywhere, somehow a hundred times magnified: “Gi spinu!”
Again came that flowering of color and movement under the hanging bulge of metal: but this time it sprang into full life, and didn’t collapse again.
Fascinated, Johnny stared down over the balcony rim. The floor of the bowl was gone now, buried by a glittering marble street. On either side were white buildings, all porticoes and pillars, and down at the end loomed something that looked like the Parthenon, only as big as the main UN building in New York.
The street was aboil with people, drawfed by distance. They scattered as a four-horse chariot came hurtling past, then flowed together again. Johnny could hear them muttering angrily, like so many bees. There was a curious acrid scent in the air.
Puzzled, he glanced at Glorm and the dark man. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing.
Glorm made a gesture. “Rome,” said the dark man, shaking as if with a chill. “They’re making a spectacle back in 44 B.C. This here’s the scene where Julius Caesar burns the place down because they won’t make him Emperor.”
Sure enough; the acrid scent was stronger; down below, a thin veil of gray-black smoke was beginning to arise. . . .
“But he didn’t,” Johnny protested, stung. “That isn’t even Rome—the Parthenon’s in Athens.”
“It used to be,” said the dark man. His teeth were chattering. “We changed it. The last outfit that made livies there, they were okay on the little scenes, but they didn’t understand spectacle. Glorm”—he cast a furtive glance at the silver man,
and raised his voice slightly—”he understands spectacle.”
“Let me get this straight now,” said Johnny with a thick tongue. “You went to all the trouble of building that phony set, with that crazy Parthenon and all, when you could just go back in time and shoot the real thing?”
“Bona!” shouted Glorm’s amplified voice. “Gi estu pressata!” The scene down below whirled in upon itself and winked out.
Glorm turned impatiently to Johnny. “Now,” he said. “You not understand. Dat vich you see dere is vat you call d’real ding. Ve not built set—built not set—no set—Kiel oni gi diras?”
“ “We din’t build no set,’ “ said the dark man.
“Futra lingvo! Ve din’ build no set. Ve made dat Romans build it. Dey din build no set—dey build Rome, different Understand? Nobody din build no set! Real Rome! Real fire! Real dead! Real history!”
Johnny gaped at him. “You mean—you’re changing history, just to make movies?”
“Livies,” the dark man muttered.
“Livies, then. You must all be loopies. Where does that leave the people up in the future? Look—where are we now? What time?”
“Your calendar, uh, 4400-something. About twenty-five hundred years from your time.”
“Twenty-five hundred— Well, what does it do to you, when you change the Romans all around?”
“Noddin’,” said Glorm emphatically.
“Noddin’?” said Johnny, obtusely.
“Noddin’ at all. Vat happens to dog veri you cut off his modder’s tail?”
Johnny thought about it. “Noddin’.”
“Korekti. You dink it is big job?”
Johnny nodded.
“It is a big job. But ve do it tventy, forty times every year. You know how many people live on d’planet now?” Without pausing, he answered himself. “Tirty billion. You know how many go to Iivies? Half. Fifteen billion. Seven times more people dan live on d’planet in your time. Old, young. Stupid, smart. Livies got to entertain dem all. Not like your Hollyvood. Dat vas not art, not spectacle. Ven d’people tink, deep down”—he tapped his head—”something is true, den I make it true, and it is true! Dat is art! Dat is spectacle!”
“You haven’t changed New York much, anyway,” said Johnny in self-defense.
Glorm’s bulging eyes grew bulgier. “Not change!” He snorted, turned. His amplified voice rang out again: “Donu all me flugantan kvieton de Nov-Jorko natural”
There was a stirring of floating figures out around the hanging bulge of metal. Glorm cracked his knuckles impatiently. After a long moment the floor of the bowl blossomed again.
Johnny caught his breath.
The illusion was so perfect that the floor seemed to have dropped away: a thousand feet down, Manhattan Island lay spread in the morning sunlight; he could see ships at anchor in the harbor, and the clear glints of the Hudson and the East River running up northward into the mists over the Bronx.
The first thing he noticed was that the chaotic checkerboard of low buildings spread over the whole island: the cluster of skyscrapers at the southern tip, and the scattering at midtown, were missing.
“Guess vat year,” said Glorm’s voice.
He frowned. “About 1900?” But that couldn’t be right, he thought uneasily—there were too many bridges: more, even than in his own time.
Glorm laughed heartily. “Dat vich you see-is Nov-York, 1956—before ve change it. You dink you invent skyscrapers? Oh, no. Me invent it.”
“For Wage Slaves of Broadway,” said the dark man reverently. “That was his first livie. What a spectacle!”
“Now you understand?” Glorm asked patronizingly. “Long time I vanted to tell dis to actor, see his face. Good—you understand now.” His lean face was shining. “You are actor— I am producer, director. Producer, director is everything. Actor is dirt! So you vill give me d’inrfrument.”
“Won’t,” said Johnny weakly.
“You vill,” Glorm said. “In a minute you have to let go.”
Johnny discovered with shock that his hand was growing numb. So this was what they had all been stalling for, all this time. And now they’d got it. He was about to let go; he could feel it. So—
“Listen!” he said desperately. “What about the people in the future?—I mean your future. Do they make livies, too? If they do, are you an actor to them?”
Glorm’s face tautened with fury. “Kracajo!” he said. “Vait until—” He stared at the thing in Johnny’s hand, and his fingers clenched.
Johnny’s grip loosened. He was going to let go, and then what? Back to his own time, and more pratfalls, leading inexorably to—
His whole arm was tired. He was going to have to let go.
. . . And there was nothing he could do about it. That endless chain of tinkerers, Glorms standing on each other’s shoulders, all the way up into the unguessable future—that was too big to change. It was, he supposed, no more frightening or terrible than other kinds of macrocosmic tyranny the human mind had imagined; it would be possible to live with it, if only his part weren’t so unpleasant. . . .
His hand dropped.
Smiling, Glorm reached out to the suspended bit of leather. His fingers did something to it that Johnny couldn’t follow, and abruptly it sagged into his palm.
It shuddered and flickered there for a moment like a top running down. All at once it split into a brown coin and a pair of pince-nez. The flickering came again—a blur of bright shapes: fountain pen, notebook, watch, cigarette lighter —then both objects came to rest, tiny and metallic and dead.
Glorm put them into a fold of his clothing.
“Bona,” he said indifferently over his shoulder. “Resendution al Nov-Jorkon.”
Desperation limbered Johnny’s tongue. He started talking before he even knew what he was going to say. “What if I don’t stay in New York?”
Glorm paused, looking annoyed. “Kio?”
“You’ve got your gadget back,” said Johnny, as the idea took shape in his head. “All right, but what are you going to do if I decide to move to Chicago, or someplace? Or get myself arrested and sent to jail? I mean, you can shuffle the probabilities around—but if I try hard enough, I can put myself where it’s impossible to have what you want to have happen, happen.” He took a deep breath. “See what I mean?”
“Plejmalpuro,” said Glorm. From his expression, he saw.
“Listen,” Johnny said. “Let me get the picture. This Duke you say is the hero—that’s the Duke I know?” He got a nod from Glorm. “And that was part of the script, when he helped me get out of town?”
“Dress rehearsal,” said the dark man. “You fall in a swamp in Florida—come up all over mud and leeches. A real boff.”
Johnny shuddered, and turned his mind resolutely away from leeches and falls from high buildings. . . . “What I want to know is, what was Duke’s angle? Why did he think he wanted to get me out of town?”
They told him. The answer was brutally simple, and Johnny had been half afraid that he knew it already.
He waited until his nails unclenched from his palms, and he felt able to talk sensibly again. And even then, he found he had nothing to say. How could you talk to people who would do a thing like that and call it art, or entertainment? It was logical, he supposed, that a culture whose taste demanded Glorm’s ruthless spectacles should have such a concept of a “hero.” It was also terrifying.
His time was running out again. But the answer to that one occurred to him, too.
If Duke were here, what would he say?
“Okay, look,” Johnny said rapidly, “I’m just spitballing, you understand, talking off the top of my head—”
Glorm and the dark man leaned forward with interested, wary expressions.
“—but here’s how I see it. Instead of this clown type for your comedy relief, we have this suave man-of-the-world type. It’s a switch. A really great, uh, producer-director could put it over. I can really see it. Take for instance—here, show me w
here it says in the script. .
~ * ~
Johnny materialized on the quiet side street a few steps from his door. He felt heavy and tired. The sun was still high over the tops of the old buildings; it was about two thirty—an hour and a half after Duke had left him at the airport.
He leaned against a railing and waited. Sure enough, here came Mary Finigan across the street, her hair uncombed, dark circles under her eyes.