They gave me a little office in their library building and opened their archive to me. I was shown Moshe’s early visionary essays, his letters to intimate friends, his sketches and manifestos insisting on the need for an Exodus far more ambitious than anything his ancient namesake could have imagined. I saw how he had assembled—secretly and with some uneasiness, for he knew that what he was doing was profoundly subversive and would bring the fullest wrath of the Republic down on him if he should be discovered—his cadre of young revolutionary scientists. I read furious memoranda from Eleazar, taking issue with his older brother’s fantastic scheme; and then I saw Eleazar gradually converting himself to the cause in letter after letter until he became more of a zealot than Moshe himself. I studied technical papers until my eyes grew bleary, not only those of Moshe and his associates but some by Romans nearly a century old, and even one by a Teuton, arguing for the historical necessity of space exploration and for its technical feasibility. I learned something more of the theory of the starship’s design and functioning.
My guide to all these documents was Miriam. We worked side by side, together in one small room. Her youth, her beauty, the dark glint of her eyes, made me tremble. Often I longed to reach toward her, to touch her arm, her shoulder, her cheek. But I was too timid. I feared that she would react with laughter, with anger, with disdain, even with revulsion. Certainly it was an aging man’s fear of rejection that inspired such caution. But also I reminded myself that she was the sister of those two fiery prophets, and that the blood that flowed in her veins must be as hot as theirs. What I feared was being scalded by her touch.
The day Moshe chose for the starship’s flight was the 23rd of Tishri, the joyful holiday of Simchat Torah in the year 5730 by our calendar, that is, 2723 of the Roman reckoning. It was a brilliant early autumn day, very dry, the sky cloudless, the sun still in its fullest blaze of heat. For three days preparations had been going on around the clock at the launch site and it had been closed to all but the inner circle of scientists; but now, at dawn, the whole village went out by truck and car and some even on foot to attend the great event.
The cables and support machinery had been cleared away. The starship stood by itself, solitary and somehow vulnerable-looking, in the center of the sandy clearing, a shining upright needle, slender, fragile. The area was roped off; we would watch from a distance, so that the searing flames of the engines would not harm us.
A crew of three men and two women had been selected: Judith, who was one of the rocket scientists, and Leonardo di Filippo, and Miriam’s friend Joseph, and a woman named Sarah whom I had never seen before. The fifth, of course, was Moshe. This was his chariot; this was his adventure, his dream; he must surely be the one to ride at the helm as the Exodus made its first leap toward the stars.
One by one they emerged from the blockhouse that was the control center for the flight. Moshe was the last. We watched in total silence, not a murmur, barely daring to draw breath. The five of them wore uniforms of white satin, brilliant in the morning sun, and curious glass helmets like diver’s bowls over their faces. They walked toward the ship, mounted the ladder, turned one by one to look back at us, and went up inside. Moshe hesitated for a moment before entering, as if in prayer, or perhaps simply to savor the fullness of his joy.
Then there was a long wait, interminable, unendurable. It might have been twenty minutes; it might have been an hour. No doubt there was some last-minute checking to do, or perhaps even some technical hitch. Still we maintained our silence. We could have been statues. After a time I saw Eleazar turn worriedly toward Miriam, and they conferred in whispers. Then he trotted across to the blockhouse and went inside. Five minutes went by, ten; then he emerged, smiling, nodding, and returned to Miriam’s side. Still nothing happened. We continued to wait.
Suddenly there was a sound like a thundercrack and a noise like the roaring of a thousand great bulls, and black smoke billowed from the ground around the ship, and there were flashes of dazzling red flame. The Exodus rose a few feet from the ground. There it hovered as though magically suspended, for what seemed to be forever.
And then it rose, jerkily at first, more smoothly then, and soared on a stunningly swift ascent toward the dazzling blue vault of the sky. I gasped; I grunted as though I had been struck; and I began to cheer. Tears of wonder and excitement flowed freely along my cheeks. All about me, people were cheering also, and weeping, and waving their arms, and the rocket, roaring, rose and rose, so high now that we could scarcely see it against the brilliance of the sky.
We were still cheering when a white flare of unbearable light, like a second sun more brilliant than the first, burst into the air high above us and struck us with overmastering force, making us drop to our knees in pain and terror, crying out, covering our faces with our hands.
When I dared look again, finally, that terrible point of ferocious illumination was gone, and in its place was a ghastly streak of black smoke that smeared halfway across the sky, trickling away in a dying trail somewhere to the north. I could not see the rocket. I could not hear the rocket.
“It’s gone!” someone cried.
“Moshe! Moshe!”
“It blew up! I saw it!”
“Moshe!”
“Judith—” said a quieter voice behind me.
I was too stunned to cry out. But all around me there was a steadily rising sound of horror and despair, which began as a low choking wail and mounted until it was a shriek of the greatest intensity coming from hundreds of throats at once. There was fearful panic, universal hysteria. People were running about as if they had gone mad. Some were rolling on the ground, some were beating their hands against the sand. “Moshe!” they were screaming. “Moshe! Moshe! Moshe!”
I looked toward Eleazar. He was white-faced and his eyes seemed wild. Yet even as I looked toward him I saw him draw in his breath, raise his hands, step forward to call for attention. Immediately all eyes turned toward him. He swelled until he appeared to be five cubits high.
“Where’s the ship?” someone cried. “Where’s Moshe?”
And Eleazar said, in a voice like the trumpet of the Lord, “He was the Son of God, and God has called him home.”
Screams. Wails. Hysterical shrieks.
“Dead!” came the cry. “Moshe is dead!”
“He will live forever,” Eleazar boomed.
“The Son of God!” came the cry, from three voices, five, a dozen. “The Son of God!”
I was aware of Miriam at my side, warm, pressing close, her arm through mine, her soft breast against my ribs, her lips at my ear. “You must write the book,” she whispered, and her voice held a terrible urgency. “His book, you must write. So that this day will never be forgotten. So that he will live forever.”
“Yes,” I heard myself saying. “Yes.”
In that moment of frenzy and terror I felt myself sway like a tree of the shore that has been assailed by the flooding of the Nile; and I was uprooted and swept away. The fireball of the Exodus blazed in my soul like a second sun indeed, with a brightness that could never fade. And I knew that I was engulfed, that I was conquered, that I would remain here to write and preach, that I would forge the gospel of the new Moshe in the smithy of my soul and send the word to all the lands. Out of these five today would come rebirth; and to the peoples of the Republic we would bring the message for which they had waited so long in their barrenness and their confusion, and when it came they would throw off the shackles of their masters; and out of the death of the Imperium would come a new order of things. Were there other worlds, and could we dwell upon them? Who could say? But there was a new truth that we could teach, which was the truth of the second Moshe who had given his life so that we might go to the stars, and I would not let that new truth die. I would write, and others of my people would go forth and carry the word that I had written to all the lands, and the lands would be changed. And some day, who knew how soon, we would build a new ship, and another, and another, and they would
carry us from this world of woe. God had sent His Son, and God had called Him home, and one day we would all follow him on wings of flame, up from the land of bondage into the heavens where He dwells eternally.
CHIP RUNNER
In the summer of 1987 the energetic publisher and book packager Byron Preiss, having produced a pair of magnificent illustrated anthologies to which I had been a contributor—The Planets and The Universe—now turned his attention the other way, to the world of the infinitely small. The Microverse was his new project, and Byron asked me to write something for this one too.
The scientific part of the story was easy enough to put together: required by the theme of the book to deal with the universe on the subatomic level, I rummaged about in my file of Scientific American to see what the current state of thinking about electrons and protons and such might be. In the course of my rummaging I stumbled upon something about microchip technology, and that led me to the fictional component of the story. All about me in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live are bright boys and girls with a deep, all-consuming, and spooky passion for computers. I happen to know something, also, about the prevalence of such eating disorders as anorexia and bulimia in Bay Area adolescents—disorders mainly involving girls, but not exclusively so. Everything fit together swiftly: an anorexic computer kid who has conceived the wild idea of entering the subatomic world by starving down to it. The rest was a matter of orchestrating theme and plot and style—of writing the story, that is. Byron had Ralph McQuarrie illustrate it with a fine, terrifying painting when he published it in The Microverse in 1989. Gardner Dozois bought the story also for the November, 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Donald A. Wollheim selected it for his annual World’s Best SF anthology.
He was fifteen, and looked about ninety, and a frail ninety at that. I knew his mother and his father, separately—they were Silicon Valley people, divorced, very important in their respective companies—and separately they had asked me to try to work with him. His skin was blue-gray and tight, drawn cruelly close over the jutting bones of his face. His eyes were gray too, and huge, and they lay deep within their sockets. His arms were like sticks. His thin lips were set in an angry grimace.
The chart before me on my desk told me that he was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 71 pounds. He was in his third year at one of the best private schools in the Palo Alto district. His I.Q. was 161. He crackled with intelligence and intensity. That was a novelty for me right at the outset. Most of my patients are depressed, withdrawn, uncertain of themselves, elusive, shy: virtual zombies. He wasn’t anything like that. There would be other surprises ahead.
“So you’re planning to go into the hardware end of the computer industry, your parents tell me,” I began. The usual let’s-build-a-relationship procedure.
He blew it away instantly with a single sour glare. “Is that your standard opening? ‘Tell me all about your favorite hobby, my boy’? If you don’t mind I’d rather skip all the bullshit, doctor, and then we can both get out of here faster. You’re supposed to ask me about my eating habits.”
It amazed me to see him taking control of the session this way within the first thirty seconds. I marveled at how different he was from most of the others, the poor sad wispy creatures who force me to fish for every word.
“Actually I do enjoy talking about the latest developments in the world of computers, too,” I said, still working hard at being genial.
“But my guess is you don’t talk about them very often, or you wouldn’t call it ‘the hardware end.’ Or ‘the computer industry.’ We don’t use mondo phrases like those any more.” His high thin voice sizzled with barely suppressed rage. “Come on, doctor. Let’s get right down to it. You think I’m anorexic, don’t you?”
“Well—”
“I know about anorexia. It’s a mental disease of girls, a vanity thing. They starve themselves because they want to look beautiful and they can’t bring themselves to realize that they’re not too fat. Vanity isn’t the issue for me. And I’m not a girl, doctor. Even you ought to be able to see that right away.”
“Timothy—”
“I want to let you know right out front that I don’t have an eating disorder and I don’t belong in a shrink’s office. I know exactly what I’m doing all the time. The only reason I came today is to get my mother off my back, because she’s taken it into her head that I’m trying to starve myself to death. She said I had to come here and see you. So I’m here. All right?”
“All right,” I said, and stood up. I am a tall man, deepchested, very broad through the shoulders. I can loom when necessary. A flicker of fear crossed Timothy’s face, which was the effect I wanted to produce. When it’s appropriate for the therapist to assert authority, simpleminded methods are often the most effective. “Let’s talk about eating, Timothy. What did you have for lunch today?”
He shrugged. “A piece of bread. Some lettuce.”
“That’s all?”
“A glass of water.”
“And for breakfast?”
“I don’t eat breakfast.”
“But you’ll have a substantial dinner, won’t you?”
“Maybe some fish. Maybe not. I think food is pretty gross.”
I nodded. “Could you operate your computer with the power turned off, Timothy?”
“Isn’t that a pretty condescending sort of question, doctor?”
“I suppose it is. Okay, I’ll be more direct. Do you think you can run your body without giving it any fuel?”
“My body runs just fine,” he said, with a defiant edge.
“Does it? What sports do you play?”
“Sports?” It might have been a Martian word.
“You know, the normal weight for someone of your age and height ought to be—”
“There’s nothing normal about me, doctor. Why should my weight be any more normal than the rest of me?”
“It was until last year, apparently. Then you stopped eating. Your family is worried about you, you know.”
“I’ll be okay,” he said sullenly.
“You want to stay healthy, don’t you?”
He stared at me for a long chilly moment. There was something close to hatred in his eyes, or so I imagined.
“What I want is to disappear,” he said.
That night I dreamed I was disappearing. I stood naked and alone on a slab of gray metal in the middle of a vast empty plain under a sinister coppery sky and I began steadily to shrink. There is often some carryover from the office to a therapist’s own unconscious life: we call it counter-transference. I grew smaller and smaller. Pores appeared on the surface of the metal slab and widened into jagged craters, and then into great crevices and gullies. A cloud of luminous dust shimmered about my head. Grains of sand, specks, mere motes, now took on the aspect of immense boulders. Down I drifted, gliding into the darkness of a fathomless chasm. Creatures I had not noticed before hovered about me, astonishing monsters, hairy, many-legged. They made menacing gestures, but I slipped away, downward, downward, and they were gone. The air was alive now with vibrating particles, inanimate, furious, that danced in frantic zigzag patterns, veering wildly past me, now and again crashing into me, knocking my breath from me, sending me ricocheting for what seemed like miles. I was floating, spinning, tumbling with no control. Pulsating waves of blinding light pounded me. I was falling into the infinitely small, and there was no halting my descent. I would shrink and shrink and shrink until I slipped through the realm of matter entirely and was lost. A mob of contemptuous glowing things—electrons and protons, maybe, but how could I tell?—crowded close around me, emitting fizzy sparks that seemed to me like jeers and laughter. They told me to keep moving along, to get myself out of their kingdom, or I would meet a terrible death. “To see a world in a grain of sand,” Blake wrote. Yes. And Eliot wrote, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” I went on downward, and downward still. And then I awoke gasping, drenched in sweat, terrified, alone.
Normally the patient is uncommunicative. You interview parents, siblings, teachers, friends, anyone who might provide a clue or an opening wedge. Anorexia is a life-threatening matter. The patients—girls, almost always, or young women in their twenties—have lost all sense of normal body-image and feel none of the food-deprivation prompts that a normal body gives its owner. Food is the enemy. Food must be resisted. They eat only when forced to, and then as little as possible. They are unaware that they are frighteningly gaunt. Strip them and put them in front of a mirror and they will pinch their sagging empty skin to show you imaginary fatty bulges. Sometimes the process of self-skeletonization is impossible to halt, even by therapy. When it reaches a certain point the degree of organic damage becomes irreversible and the death-spiral begins.
“He was always tremendously bright,” Timothy’s mother said. She was fifty, a striking woman, trim, elegant, almost radiant, vice president for finance at one of the biggest Valley companies. I knew her in that familiarly involuted California way: her present husband used to be married to my first wife. “A genius, his teachers all said. But strange, you know? Moody. Dreamy. I used to think he was on drugs, though of course none of the kids do that any more.” Timothy was her only child by her first marriage. “It scares me to death to watch him wasting away like that. When I see him I want to take him and shake him and force ice cream down his throat, pasta, milkshakes, anything. And then I want to hold him, and I want to cry.”
We Are for the Dark (1987-90) Page 11