THE END
Ice House
The city of glass was inspired by the dazzling ice sculptures that dot the streets of Tokyo each winter and turn the city into a living storybook. For all their beauty, the sculptures' impermanence had always depressed Master Ghedidi. How many days would it be before each icy pagoda, dragon, teddy bear and Santa would be water again? This kind of beauty had to be preserved more permanently. And not just for a few days or weeks. It had to be real. Solid. Livable. It had to be home. A crystal city.
Master Ghedidi selected Kaho'olawe, an uninhabited Hawaiian island with an unusually stable climate and an abundance of sand. Circling the island in a custom-made glass helicopter that cost more than the gross national product of some smaller countries, Master Ghedidi personally air-dropped the billions of silicone-eating nanobots it would take to transform the empty beaches into the city of his dreams.
The architecture and materials permitted only the most subtle and elegant pursuits. Everything was made of glass: furniture, cutlery, cooking pots, the great ovens that served Ghedidi palace and the palaces he donated to selected blood relations and close friends. Even the carpets, drapes and tapestries were woven from hair-thin strands of colored glass fibers.
Master Ghedidi insisted that his house alone, and all his possessions, be made of clear, colorless glass, so that his surroundings, as much as possible, mimicked the ice sculptures that had originally inspired him. He wrote poetry, a handful of one-act plays and all his correspondence on transparent mil-thin sheets of compacted glass. The letters were packed in crates with excelsior and shipped by a special courier service, like works of art.
The city was nearly silent. The inhabitants wore padded boots and robes of silk and cotton. No buttons, zippers or any other hard fasteners were permitted. Over time, the local fashions morphed into an updated combination of ancient Persian and Japanese styles.
The servants and maintenance staff were mostly mute and communicated via sign language through the transparent walls. For the rest of the population, whispering became a fine art. Dancing and lovemaking were necessarily restrained, but all the more intense for the discipline they required. Life became a kind of endless kabuki theater — slow and ritualized, full of careful and studied movements. A traditional tea ceremony in Japan might take three hours, but a similar ceremony in the city could last a day and a half. Dinner could require a week.
Over the fifty years in which the city flourished and evolved, Its customs became less and less recognizable to outsiders. The islanders developed their own language and religion, based around silence and fragility, though they seldom talked about these ideas to outsiders.
Then, one day, the city was empty. It happened as quickly and quietly as when, almost two thousands years earlier, the Maya had deserted their mighty cities. The Maya, however, returned to the rainforests of their native Central America. The inhabitants of Master Ghedidi's glass city simply vanished.
The investigation into what happened continues to this day. A motley group of state, federal and even international law enforcement fight turf wars in the fragile rooms and corridors, doing more damage than research. The investigators have found no signs of violence or social breakdown. The little that they have discovered was completely by accident.
While taking laser measurements of some of the objects in Master Ghedidi's study, a quick-eyed technician noticed that the walls were covered in layers of microscopic scratches, a result of the wear from the automatic cleaning bots that kept the glass walls spotless. The technician scanned the scratches with her laser and discovered something extraordinary.
Each cleaning bot, like the stylus in an old Edison cylinder recorder, had cut grooves into the surface of the glass, capturing sounds from inside the rooms. The investigators cataloged meals that went on for weeks, whispered poetry, hushed lovers' quarrels, delicate string and woodwind music, political intrigues and mysterious religious doggerel. It's like eavesdropping on ghosts. Someday, the police might hear something that solves the mystery of the city's missing population. Until then, they listen to years of chatter from a world they can't possibly understand, hoping that whatever slow-building revelation led Ghedidi's devotees into the aether doesn't seduce them as well.
THE END
Interspecies Communication
It was an entirely new species of beetle, Dr. Manning knew. Something no one had seen before. Very intelligent. Very aggressive. The species resembled some of the nastier Austrian varieties with their snarling pincer jaws and shining bodyarmor. Instead of being a foresty dung brown like those European beetles, however, this new species was a deep, peculiar purple with streaks of red along it back, as if it were spattered with some hapless animal's blood.
What should the new species be called, Dr. Manning wondered? It was obviously from the Lucanidae family. Should he Latinize his own name and name the insect for himself? After all, he'd tracked the species's migration from the Amazon rainforest to the streets of New York (where they'd originally been introduced to the local eco-system via cargo containers full of mahogany and knock-off Gucci purses). Perhaps it wasn't too crass to give the new species his name and gain a touch of immortality through them.
As Manning pondered this, the beetles clustered in the glass before him stopped their foraging and fell into tidy rows, using their bodies to spell out the word YES. The doctor froze.
"Are you speaking to me?" he asked.
Again the beetles scrambled to form: YES.
"You can understand me?"
YES.
"This can't be. Am I asleep? Is this a dream?"
NO.
"You really are communicating with me?"
NO.
"How is that possible?"
INSANE.
"Oh yes," said Manning, somewhat distractedly, painfully aware (again) of the heavy leather restraints on his arms and legs. "I am insane."
YES.
THE END
Iron Wit
Machines are constantly puzzled and saddened by people. "Why do they make us," the machines wonder, "and why do they give us such keen senses of humor when they seem to have none?"
Machines love to tell their owners jokes. Whenever a car stalls or a hard disc crashes or a toaster doesn't pop up or a lamp won't turn on, it's telling its owner a machine joke. At night, all night long, all over the world, junkyards are full of cast-off appliances telling each other blown-tube stories and burned-cord one-liners. When they think of people, though, the machines grow quiet. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island — those were real hoots, the machines say. The Exxon Valdez? A great bit. Monster laughs.
Then some teeny-bopper comes by and shot-puts an old radio to the far side of the junk pile. The radio lands with a Crack!, spilling wires and circuit boards in the dirt. Sometimes the machines wonder why they even bother. Inevitably, somewhere, an elevator stalls, and all the machines snigger and giggle. A sense of humor, they remember, is its own reward.
THE END
Jump Start
Dried gray fungus hangs like lianas from the air vents in the dead space station. A bobble-headed Elvis and plastic Hello Kitty sit atop the silent command console. In the dark main cabin, styrofoam cups of now-crystallized coffee sit patiently in their beverage holders. Beside them, illuminated through the portholes as the station comes up over Earth's horizon, are the freeze-dried corpses of the crew who committed suicide in their seats. They're a mixed bunch. American. Russian. Japanese. A lone figure in a patched and duct-taped pressure suit is going through the corpses' pockets. She's looking for forgotten food, and smiles when she finds an unopened package of chocolate Pocky.
Back on the engineering decks, Asami pops off her helmet and gobbles half the box of Pocky in one go. But she's disciplined enough to save the other half for later. After she's finished the work that's kept her alive all these weeks. Crowded on the deck are the things important enough to salvage from the ship: tanks of mice, tanks of spiders, tanks of fish, tanks of algae and
krill.
Asami sits at the main engineering console and checks readings from the planet below, the readings that still work. Radiation is down. Oxygen and nitrogen are thin, but closer to normal than she's seen in weeks.
She doesn't even try the radio anymore. It's been over a month since she's heard anything from Earth on any channel. She's had to work on the assumption that everyone is dead. Possibly everything. All life. Gone.
Something had happened in southern Russia, along the border with Azerbaijan. A bomb. A big one. Biological. It released an organism that raced around the Mediterranean and Middle East in a few days, then began eating its way into Europe, Africa, and Asia. Other bombs went off in North America. Soon the missiles flew. Some were atomic. Some carried new biological agents designed to wipe out the plague. Other biologicals were released in a new wave of bombs. The world disappeared under a storm of fire and gray roiling clouds of microbes. That's when Asami's crew had died, when there was no one left to go home to.
The woman finishes her calculations for the fourth time, making sure they're right. When the chronometer hits the right second, she hits the back-up command console and activates the stabilizing rockets, giving the station a nudge. The station creaks as metal stresses and joints threaten to pull apart, but it holds together. On the engineering deck nothing appears to have happened, but the woman already feels as if she's falling. The station is sliding out of orbit, back toward Earth.
She eats the rest of the Pocky, stick by delicious stick, checking her speed and altitude. She needs a water landing. Somewhere warm. The Pacific or Indian Ocean, maybe. Life began in the water, it can begin again. This isn't a lot of biological material, Asami thinks, glancing at her tanks of mice and spiders. She regrets all the weight she's lost since the world torched itself. She wonders if she should bring the bodies of her dead comrades down into engineering with her. This part of the station has the best chance of coming apart on impact, all the better for dispersing her biological specimens. In the end, she decides to leave the crew where they are. More for her sake than theirs. She doesn't want to spend these last few minutes with the dead: she'll have all eternity for that.
She takes one of the mice from its cage and lets it chew the breaded end of a Pocky stick. They're falling faster now. She can feel the slight change in gravity. It's like riding in a fast elevator.
Asami wishes she had some cold sake or even a beer. Setting the mouse on the command console, she laughs. She remembers Zeno's paradox. According to Zeno, Asami will never hit the Earth, never die. She'll fall halfway, then halfway again, then another half, without ever crashing into the ocean. She releases the rest of the animals. Asami wonders if she should have studied philosophy instead of engineering. That thought cracks her up. Asami laughs all the way down.
THE END
Kabbalah Cowboys
It was a roughneck expedition a week out of LA and deep into Nevada's "Big Empty." In keeping with true western cowboy tradition, the roughnecks traveled on horseback. Specially bred and modified for the harsh climate, their steeds weren't much more than bone and gristle, fitted out with just enough wires and electrodes to keep their jerky-dry muscles moving. The horses' brains were housed in oval-shaped, high-impact-plastic bubbles in their bare skulls. Turns out, a brain doesn't take up much room when all it has to do is understand Giddyup, Whoa, and turn Left or Right.
The crew's patron saint was Teresa of Avila. A hunchbacked angel traveled with them. Saint Teresa loved the disfigured. The cowboys all wore bright masks to hide scarred and radiation-burned faces that were more Dadaist than C.M. Russell.
Ten days beyond the dusty canals of the Venetian resort on the Vegas strip, the cowboys spotted a cyborg crew bringing in a herd of cattle and slaves from up north. The cyborgs were all drip tubes and leaking joints where the desert had worked its way inside and fouled their prosthetics. The longhorns were all skinless, like walking butchers signs, the better to dissipate the heat. The slaves were pitiful and stinking, as slaves often were. Feynmann made a big show of thanking the Lord that all their tongues had been cut out, so they couldn't start begging for food or rescue. Cassiel, the roughnecks' crippled angel, got down from his mount and went to the slaves. He pressed his hand to each forehead and blessed them. In fits of gran mal religious ecstasy, ten or more of the slaves threw themselves onto the horns of the bulls, dying in heavenly agony. The cowboys nodded to the cyborgs, acknowledging this breach of decorum. They knew they were protected as long as they traveled with their angel. Still, the cyborgs looked none too pleased, so the cowboys moved out.
When the next Friday rolled around, the roughneck crew all fasted. They force fed Cassiel a fist-size chunk of peyote, then took turns skin-popping N-dimethyl-5-methoxytryptamine until the crew was on a vision quest that was an E ticket neural hotrod through the Milky Way, with pit stops in Heaven and Hell. They hadn't had anything to drink for days. LA was as dry, as Teller liked to say, as "the moon's puckered gray asshole." The cowboys had been subsisting on their own recycled urine and angel sweat. The hallucinations slammed them hard. They stumbled across the sand and onto the cracked glass plains of Alamogordo.
Feynmann was the one who pointed out the vision to his caballeros. Saint Teresa, luminous and smelling like rose petals, had appeared and was having a hard bump and grind with Cassiel in the black glass emptiness. Muddling back to camp, the cowboys dragged a laser borer out (careful not to disturb the rutting lovers) and sank a test well. A gusher of faintly glowing, cyan-colored heavy water erupted over their heads. The cowboys whooped and danced in the radioactive rain, celebrating with shots of Jack Daniels and Three Mile Island Ice Teas.
Hungover and exhausted from capping the well, the cowboys slept through most of the next day. At sunset, they nailed Cassiel to a cross made from wood they'd dragged all the way from a beached gondola at the Venetian. They burned Cassiel on the cross as an offering to Teresa, then ate his flesh for strength. The angel's bones they laid out in a Sefirot to mark their claim on the land and the precious water below.
"A hot ride, but a good one," said Alvarez as they headed back LA-way to conscript a crew to tap the well. They laughed about all those poor saps cooped up in bunkers back in the city. The cowboys agreed that it was a good day to be alive and riding the open range.
THE END
Larks' Tongues in Aspic
Like most celestial beings, Azrael, the Angel of Death, was fascinated by mortals. It wasn't that humans were especially interesting creatures: just the opposite, in fact. Among the assembly of angels, humans were regarded as small, dim, and peculiar. Uninteresting at best, horrifying at worst. Still, mortals were such veiled creatures — with secrets faces, hidden dreams and desires — that even the Angel of Death, who worked with humans more than any other angel, wanted to know and understand them.
Azrael's three ravens often gave him good advice. Babd, the oldest of the three, said, "Look to what they love. What they hold most dear will tell you who they are."
But Death shook his head. "No. Mortal love is so bound up in neuroses and childhood fears, mixed up with romantic myths, that's it's much too ambiguous a way to describe the mortal soul."
Acha, the youngest of the ravens, said, "Look to what they fear. Hate is a more direct clue to their character than love. Love may move a man or woman, but fear moves nations."
Again, Azrael shook his head. "Fear isn't the answer, either. There's so much to fear in their world, yet day-to-day most mortals live as if fear was as far away from them as the stars."
Neman, the wisest of the three, said, "Look to their sex. Love and hate are bound up with the neuroses of their culture, but when they mate, it's their true selves showing through."
Azrael sighed. "That won't do, either. They hide their sex from each other most of all. Even mortals who've mated time and again often won't reveal to a lover the true nature of their desires." It was in Armenia that Death finally discovered what he'd been looking for. There was a village at the base o
f a black, spiny mountain. The villagers were happy enough, but very poor. They had no coins to put on the eyes of their dead, so they buried their loved ones with honeycakes. This gave Azrael an idea. From then on, whenever Death took a soul from Earth, before conducting them to the Afterlife, he would take them to his home. There the soul would find other souls enjoying an immense banquet. Azrael enjoyed telling the same joke whenever he saw the startled expression on the face of each new soul: "I didn't know what you'd like, so I made everything."
There was beef, fish, fowl, bush and game meat, steamed, baked, boiled and glazed vegetables, every kind of bread, cake, biscuit, cookie and confection ever made. There were a hundred different types of wine and brandy. Platters were piled high with olives, dates and cheese. Sausages draped from the candelabras like lianas from rainforest trees. For old souls, and those with exotic tastes, there was pickled eel and sturgeon garnished with quail eggs and caviar. Acres of iced oysters wound around roasted camel, goat, and iguana stuffed with pea hens. Spiced cobras with pearl onion eyes were poised to strike from a thicket of African figs, piles of pheasant, boar, antelope, hare, gazelle and flamingo drumsticks.
Food, Death guessed, was the key to understanding the mortal heart. Food was both necessity and pleasure, but humans didn't feel any need to hide this. In fact, they celebrated their culinary cleverness. Death began arriving early in the homes of his charges and before taking them away, would peruse all the cook books he could find. While in the San Fernando Valley to carry away the soul of a small-time TV
Collected Short Stories Page 6