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Masterpieces Page 21

by Orson Scott Card


  “Linnl. Isn’t that a good name? Can I use it? Can’t I, please?”

  Mr. Bittering put his hand to his head. He thought of the silly rocket, himself working alone, himself alone even among his family, so alone.

  He heard his wife say, “Why not?”

  He heard himself say, “Yes, you can use it.”

  “Yaaa!” screamed the boy. “I’m Linnl, Linnl!”

  Racing down the meadowlands, he danced and shouted.

  Mr. Bittering looked at his wife. “Why did we do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just seemed like a good idea.”

  They walked into the hills. They strolled on old mosaic paths, beside still pumping fountains. The paths were covered with a thin film of cool water all summer long. You kept your bare feet cool all the day, splashing as in a creek, wading.

  They came to a small deserted Martian villa with a good view of the valley. It was on top of a hill. Blue marble halls, large murals, a swimming pool. It was refreshing in this hot summertime. The Martians hadn’t believed in large cities.

  “How nice,” said Mrs. Bittering, “if we could move up here to this villa for the summer.”

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re going back to town. There’s work to be done on the rocket.”

  But as he worked that night, the thought of the cool blue marble villa entered his mind. As the hours passed, the rocket seemed less important.

  In the flow of days and weeks, the rocket receded and dwindled. The old fever was gone. It frightened him to think he had let it slip this way. But somehow the heat, the air, the working conditions—

  He heard the men murmuring on the porch of his metal shop.

  “Everyone’s going. You heard?”

  “All going. That’s right.”

  Bittering came out. “Going where?” He saw a couple of trucks, loaded with children and furniture, drive down the dusty street.

  “Up to the villas,” said the man.

  “Yeah, Harry. I’m going. So is Sam. Aren’t you, Sam?”

  “That’s right, Harry. What about you?”

  “I’ve got work to do here.”

  “Work! You can finish that rocket in the autumn, when it’s cooler.”

  He took a breath. “I got the frame all set up.”

  “In the autumn is better.” Their voices were lazy in the heat.

  “Got to work,” he said.

  “Autumn,” they reasoned. And they sounded so sensible, so right.

  Autumn would be best, he thought. Plenty of time, then.

  No! cried part of himself, deep down, put away, locked tight, suffocating. No! No!

  “In the autumn,” he said.

  “Come on, Harry,” they all said.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling his flesh melt in the hot liquid air. “Yes, in the autumn. I’ll begin work again then.”

  “I got a villa near the Tirra Canal,” said someone.

  “You mean the Roosevelt Canal, don’t you?”

  “Tirra. The old Martian name.”

  “But on the map—”

  “Forget the map. It’s Tirra now. Now I found a place in the Pillan mountains—”

  “You mean the Rockefeller Range,” said Bittering.

  “I mean the Pillan mountains,” said Sam.

  “Yes,” said Bittering, buried in the hot, swarming air. “The Pillan mountains.”

  Everyone worked at loading the truck in the hot, still afternoon of the next day.

  Laura, Dan, and David carried packages. Or, as they preferred to be known, Ttil, Linnl, and Werr carried packages.

  The furniture was abandoned in the little white cottage.

  “It looked just fine in Boston,” said the mother. “And here in the cottage. But up at the villa? No. We’ll get it when we come back in the autumn.”

  Bittering himself was quiet.

  “I’ve some ideas on furniture for the villa,” he said after a time. “Big, lazy furniture.”

  “What about your encyclopedia? You’re taking it along, surely?”

  Mr. Bittering glanced away. “I’ll come and get it next week.”

  They turned to their daughter. “What about your New York dresses?”

  The bewildered girl stared. “Why, I don’t want them any more.”

  They shut off the gas, the water, they locked the doors and walked away. Father peered into the truck.

  “Gosh, we’re not taking much,” he said. “Considering all we brought to Mars, this is only a handful!”

  He started the truck.

  Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say good-by to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.

  Just then Sam and his family drove by in another truck.

  “Hi, Bittering! Here we go!”

  The truck swung down the ancient highway out of town. There were sixty others traveling the same direction. The town filled with a silent, heavy dust from their passage. The canal waters lay blue in the sun, and a quiet wind moved in the strange trees.

  “Good-by, town!” said Mr. Bittering.

  “Good-by, good-by,” said the family, waving to it.

  They did not look back again.

  SUMMER BURNED THE canals dry. Summer moved like flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tires upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.

  At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.

  In the quiet autumn Mr. Bittering stood, very dark now, very golden-eyed, upon the slope above his villa, looking at the valley.

  “It’s time to go back,” said Cora.

  “Yes, but we’re not going,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing there any more.”

  “Your books,” she said. “Your fine clothes.

  “Your Illes and your fine ior uele rre,” she said.

  “The town’s empty. No one’s going back,” he said. “There’s no reason to, none at all.”

  The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.

  Mr. Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. “Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built.”

  “They didn’t know any better,” his wife mused. “Such ugly people. I’m glad they’ve gone.”

  They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.

  “Where did they go?” he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “We’ll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that,” he said, calmly. “Now—I’m warm. How about taking a swim?”

  They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear-running spring water.

  FIVE YEARS LATER a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.

  “We won the war on Earth! We’re here to rescue you! Hey!”

  But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theaters was silent. They found a flimsy rocket frame rusting in an empty shop.

  The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.

  “The town’s empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I’m sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir.”

  “Dark, eh?” mused the captain. “How many?”

  “Six, eight hundred, I’d say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women.”

&
nbsp; “Did they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth-settlement, Lieutenant?”

  “They hadn’t the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people.”

  “Strange. You think those Martians killed them?”

  “They look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir.”

  “Perhaps. I suppose this is one of those mysteries we’ll never solve. One of those mysteries you read about.”

  The captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air. He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumbtacked to the top of an empty table.

  “Lots to be done, Lieutenant.” His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank behind the blue hills. “New settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work. And the old records were lost. We’ll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination.

  “What do you think of naming those mountains the Lincoln Mountains, this canal the Washington Canal, those hills—we can name those hills for you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favor, might name a town for me. Polishing the apple. And why not make this the Einstein Valley, and further over . . . are you listening, Lieutenant?”

  The lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue color and the quiet mist of the hills far beyond the town.

  “What? Oh, yes, sir!”

  The New Wave

  HARLAN ELLISON

  “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman

  Harlan Ellison is a genre unto himself. One of the most controversial and provocative writers of science fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, he is known for impassioned, outspoken stories that mix humor, horror, pathos, and rage in inimitably personal proportions. Though his work has been embraced by the science fiction community, little of it conforms to science fiction conventions. Ellison was a seasoned writing professional who for a decade had turned out quantities of competent commercial fiction for a variety of markets—science fiction, fantasy, crime, juvenile delinquent—when he began publishing speculative tales that challenged taboos and broke prevailing conventions in science fiction. “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” is a Kafkaesque parable about the dangers of individuality in a conformist society. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a prescient tale of future shock in which computers become the masters of human beings. “A Boy and His Dog” has become one of the best-known stories of a postapocalyptic future, owing to its unflinching treatment of the ethics of survival. Ellison’s fiction resonated with the work of science fiction’s New Wave writers, who sought to break down the walls separating science fiction from the literary mainstream. His stories were often stylistically experimental, deeply humanist, and leavened with a social consciousness that made them important documents of their time without diminishing their power to endure. Many stories from these years were collected in Ellison Wonderland, Paingod and Other Delusions, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, and Alone against Tomorrow. Death-bird Stories, which culled considerably from these collections, is Ellison’s definitive short-fiction volume, a blend of light and dark fantasies, cynical quest stories, science fiction allegories, and surrealist parables all presented as invocations to the gods that define the contemporary culture. Ellison’s reputation as a renegade enhanced his editorial work on Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, award-winning anthologies built on stories by fellow writers that had been rejected by other markets as too controversial. Some of his most important fiction of the 1980s and ’90s is collected in Strange Wine, Shatterday, Angry Candy, and Slippage. He is a multiple winner of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards and an award-winning screenwriter whose television credits include The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and the new Twilight Zone. His collections The Glass Teat, The Other Glass Teat, An Edge in My Voice, and Harlan Ellison’s Watching all feature essays and commentaries on film, television, and modern society.

  THERE ARE ALWAYS those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know “where it’s at,” this:

  The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Civil Disobedience

  That is the heart of it. Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.

  BUT BECAUSE IT was the very world it was, the very world they had allowed it to become, for months his activities did not come to the alarmed attention of The Ones Who Kept the Machine Functioning Smoothly, the ones who poured the very best butter over the cams and mainsprings of the culture. Not until it had become obvious that somehow, someway, he had become a notoriety, a celebrity, perhaps even a hero for (what Officialdom inescapably tagged) “an emotionally disturbed segment of the populace,” did they turn it over to the Ticktockman and his legal machinery. But by then, because it was the very world it was, and they had no way to predict he would happen—possibly a strain of disease long-defunct, now, suddenly, reborn in a system where immunity had been forgotten, had lapsed—he had been allowed to become too real. Now he had form and substance.

  He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades before. But there it was, and there he was, a very definitely imposing personality. In certain circles—middle-class circles—it was thought disgusting. Vulgar ostentation. Anarchistic. Shameful. In others, there was only sniggering: those strata where thought is subjugated to form and ritual, niceties, proprieties. But down below, ah, down below, where the people always needed their saints and sinners, their bread and circuses, their heroes and villains, he was considered a Bolivar; a Napoleon; a Robin Hood; a Dick Bong (Ace of Aces); a Jesus; a Jomo Kenyatta.

  And at the top—where, like socially-attuned Shipwreck Kellys, every tremor and vibration threatened to dislodge the wealthy, powerful and titled from their flagpoles—he was considered a menace; a heretic; a rebel; a disgrace; a peril. He was known down the line, to the very heart-meat core, but the important reactions were high above and far below. At the very top, at the very bottom.

  So his file was turned over, along with his time-card and his cardioplate, to the office of the Ticktockman.

  The Ticktockman: very much over six feet tall, often silent, a soft purring man when things went timewise. The Ticktockman.

  Even in the cubicles of the hierarchy, where fear was generated, seldom suffered, he was called the Ticktockman. But no one called him that to his mask.

  You don’t call a man a hated name, not when that man, behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours, the days and nights, the years of your life. He was called the Master Timekeeper to his mask. It was safer that way.

  “This is what he is,” said the Ticktockman with genuine softness, “but not who he is. This time-card I’m holding in my left hand has a
name on it, but it is the name of what he is, not who he is. The cardioplate here in my right hand is also named, but not whom named, merely what named. Before I can exercise proper revocation, I have to know who this what is.”

  To his staff, all the ferrets, all the loggers, all the finks, all the commex, even the mineez, he said, “Who is this Harlequin?”

  He was not purring smoothly. Timewise, it was jangle.

  However, it was the longest speech they had ever heard him utter at one time, the staff, the ferrets, the loggers, the finks, the commex, but not the mineez, who usually weren’t around to know, in any case. But even they scurried to find out.

  Who is the Harlequin?

  HIGH ABOVE THE third level of the city, he crouched on the humming aluminum-frame platform of the air-boat (foof! air-boat, indeed! swizzleskid is what it was, with a tow-rack jerry-rigged) and he stared down at the neat Mondrian arrangement of the buildings.

  Somewhere nearby, he could hear the metronomic left-right-left of the 2:47 P.M shift, entering the Timkin roller-bearing plant in their sneakers. A minute later, precisely, he heard the softer right-left-right of the 5:00 A.M. formation, going home.

  An elfin grin spread across his tanned features, and his dimples appeared for a moment. Then, scratching at his thatch of auburn hair, he shrugged within his motley, as though girding himself for what came next, and threw the joystick forward, and bent into the wind as the air-boat dropped. He skimmed over a slidewalk, purposely dropping a few feet to crease the tassels of the ladies of fashion, and—inserting thumbs in large ears—he stuck out his tongue, rolled his eyes and went wugga-wugga-wugga. It was a minor diversion. One pedestrian skittered and tumbled, sending parcels everywhichway, another wet herself, a third keeled slantwise and the walk was stopped automatically by the servitors till she could be resuscitated. It was a minor diversion.

  Then he swirled away on a vagrant breeze, and was gone. Hi-ho. As he rounded the cornice of the Time-Motion Study Building, he saw the shift, just boarding the slidewalk. With practiced motion and an absolute conservation of movement, they sidestepped up onto the slow-strip and (in a chorus line reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley film of the antediluvian 1930s) advanced across the strips ostrich-walking till they were lined up on the expresstrip.

 

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