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Universe 11
Ed by Terry Carr
Proofed By MadMaxAU
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CONTENTS
The Quickening
MICHAEL BISHOP
The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky
JOSEPHINE SAXTON
Shadows on the Cave Wall
NANCY KRESS
The Gernsback Continuum
WILLIAM GIBSON
Venice Drowned
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
In Reticulum
CARTER SCHOLZ
Jean Sandwich, the Sponsor, and I
IAN WATSON
The Start of the End of the World
CAROL EMSHWILLER
Mummer Kiss
MICHAEL SWANWICK
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Civilizations are the products of historical continuity: knowledge, traditions, and technology develop over many centuries and are strongly influenced by local climates and topology. Today, of course, we’re approaching the reality of the “global village” via greatly increased ease of travel and communications . . . but we still speak many different languages, literally and figuratively. What if all the people in the world woke up one morning and found themselves in a different country? Would they be able to deal with the situation well enough to continue civilization as we know it? Would they even want to?
Michael Bishop, whose most recent novel is Transfigurations, has appeared twice before in Universe, with “Old Folks at Home” in #8 and “Saving Face” in #10.
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THE QUICKENING
Michael Bishop
I
Lawson came out of his sleep feeling drugged and disoriented. Instead of the susurrus of traffic on Rivermont and the early morning barking of dogs, he heard running feet and an unsettling orchestration of moans and cries. No curtains screened or softened the sun that beat down on his face, and an incandescent blueness had replaced their ceiling. “Marlena,” Lawson said doubtfully. He wondered if one of the children was sick and told himself that he ought to get up to help.
But when he tried to rise, scraping the back of his hand on a stone set firmly in mortar, he found that his bed had become a parapet beside a river flowing through an unfamiliar city. He was wearing, instead of the green Chinese-peasant pajamas that Marlena had given him for Christmas, a suit of khaki 1505s from his days in the Air Force and a pair of ragged Converse sneakers. Clumsily, as if deserting a mortuary slab, Lawson leapt away from the wall. In his sleep, the world had turned over. The forms of a bewildered anarchy had begun to assert themselves.
The city-and Lawson knew that it sure as hell wasn’t Lynchburg, that the river running through it wasn’t the James-was full of people. A few, their expressions terrified and their postures defensive, were padding past Lawson on the boulevard beside the parapet. Many shrieked or babbled as they ran. Other human shapes, dressed not even remotely alike, were lifting themselves bemusedly from paving stones, or riverside benches, or the gutter beyond the sidewalk. Their grogginess and their swiftly congealing fear, Lawson realized, mirrored his own: like him, these people were awakening to nightmare.
Because the terrible fact of his displacement seemed more important than the myriad physical details confronting him, it was hard to take in everything at once-but Lawson tried to balance and integrate what he saw.
The city was foreign. Its architecture was a clash of the Gothic and the sterile, pseudo-adobe Modern, one style to either side of the river. On this side, palm trees waved their dreamy fronds at precise intervals along the boulevard, and toward the city’s interior an intricate cathedral tower defined by its great height nearly everything beneath it. Already the sun crackled off the rose-colored tower with an arid fierceness that struck Lawson, who had never been abroad, as Mediterranean .... Off to his left was a bridge leading into a more modern quarter of the city, where beige and brick-red high-rises clustered like tombstones. On both sides of the bridge buses, taxicabs, and other sorts of motorized vehicles were stalled or abandoned in the thoroughfares.
Unfamiliar, Lawson reflected, but not unearthly-he recognized things, saw the imprint of a culture somewhat akin to his own. And, for a moment, he let the inanimate bulk of the city and the languor of its palms and bougainvillea crowd out of his vision the human horror show taking place in the streets.
A dark woman in a sari hurried past. Lawson lifted his hand to her. Dredging up a remnant of a high-school language course, he shouted, “iHabla Espanol?” The woman quickened her pace, crossed the street, recrossed it, crossed it again; her movements were random, motivated, it seemed, by panic and the complicated need to do something.
At a black man in a loincloth farther down the parapet, Law son shouted, “This is Spain! We’re somewhere in Spain! That’s all I know! Do you speak English? Spanish? Do you know what’s happened to us?”
The black man, grimacing so that his skin went taut across his cheekbones, flattened himself atop the wall like a lizard. His elbows jutted, his eyes narrowed to slits. Watching him, Lawson perceived that the man was listening intently to a sound that had been steadily rising in volume ever since Lawson had opened his eyes: the city was wailing. From courtyards, apartment buildings, taverns, and plazas, an eerie and discordant wail was rising into the bland blue indifference of the day. It consisted of many strains. The Negro in the loincloth seemed determined to separate these and pick out the ones that spoke most directly to him. He tilted his head.
“Spain!” Lawson yelled against this uproar. “Espana!”
The black man looked at Lawson, but the hieroglyph of recognition was not among those that glinted in his eyes. As if to dislodge the wailing of the city, he shook his head. Then, still crouching lizard-fashion on the wall, he began methodically banging his head against its stones. Lawson, helplessly aghast, watched him until he had knocked himself insensible in a sickening, repetitive spattering of blood.
But Lawson was the only one who watched. When he approached the man to see if he had killed himself, Lawson’s eyes were seduced away from the African by a movement in the river. A bundle of some sort was floating in the greasy waters below the wall-an infant, clad only in a shirt. The tie-strings on the shirt trailed out behind the child like the severed, wavering legs of a water-walker. Lawson wondered if, in Spain, they even had water-walkers ....
Meanwhile, still growing in volume, there crooned above the high-rises and Moorish gardens the impotent air-raid siren of 400,000 human voices. Lawson cursed the sound. Then he covered his face and wept.
II
The city was Seville. The river was the Guadalquivir. Lynchburg and the James River, around which Lawson had grown up as the eldest child of an itinerant fundamentalist preacher, were several thousand miles and one helluva big ocean away. You couldn’t get there by swimming, and if you imagined that your loved ones would be waiting for you when you got back, you were probably fantasizing the nature of the world’s changed reality. No one was where he or she belonged anymore, and Lawson knew himself lucky even to realize where he was. Most of the dispossessed, displaced people inhabiting Seville today didn’t know that much; all they knew was the intolerable cruelty of their uprooting, the pain of separation from husbands, wives, children, lovers, friends. These things, and fear.
The bodies of infants floated in the Guadalquivir; and Lawson, from his early reconnoiterings of the city on a motor scooter that he had found near the Jardines de Cristina park, knew that thousands of adults already lay dead on streets and in apartment buildings-victims of panic-inspired beatings on their own traumatized hearts. Who knew exactly what was going on in the morning’s chaos? Babel had come again and with it, as part of the package, the utter di
ssolution of all family and societal ties. You couldn’t go around a corner without encountering a child of some exotic ethnic caste, her face snot-glazed, sobbing loudly or maybe running through a crush of bodies calling out names in an alien tongue.
What were you supposed to do? Wheeling by on his motor scooter, Lawson either ignored these children or searched their faces to see how much they resembled his daughters.
Where was Marlena now? Where were Karen and Hannah? Just as he played deaf to the cries of the children in the boulevards, Lawson had to harden himself against the implications of these questions. As dialects of German, Chinese, Bantu, Russian, Celtic, and a hundred other languages rattled in his ears, his scooter rattled .past a host of cars and buses with uncertain-seeming drivers at their wheels. Probably he too should have chosen an enclosed vehicle. If these frustrated and angry drivers, raging in polyglot defiance, decided to run over him, they could do so with impunity. Who would stop them?
Maybe-in Istanbul, or La Paz, or Mangalore, or Jonkoping, or Boise City, or Kaesong-his own wife and children had already lost their lives to people made murderous by fear or the absence of helmeted men with pistols and billy sticks. Maybe Marlena and his children were dead ....
I’m in Seville, Lawson told himself, cruising. He had determined the name of the city soon after mounting the motor scooter and going by a sign that said Plaza de Toros de Sevilla. A circular stadium of considerable size near the river. The bullring. Lawson’s Spanish was just good enough to decipher the signs and posters plastered on its walls. Corrida a las cinco de la tarde. (Garcia Lorca, he thought, unsure of where the name had come from.) Sombra y sol. That morning, then, he took the scooter around the stadium three or four times and then shot off toward the center of the city.
Lawson wanted nothing to do with the nondescript highrises across the Guadalquivir, but had no real idea what he was going to do on the Moorish and Gothic side of the river, either. All he knew was that the empty bullring, with its dormant potential for death, frightened him. On the other hand. how did you go about establishing order in a city whose population had not willingly chosen to be there’’
Seville’s population. Lawson felt sure, had been redistributed across the face of the globe. like chess pieces flung from a height. The population of every other human community on Earth had undergone similar displacements. The result, as if by malevolent design, was chaos and suffering. Your ears eventually tried to shut out the audible manifestations of this pain, but your eyes held you accountable and you hated yourself for ignoring the wailing Arab child, the assaulted Polynesian woman, the blue-eyed old man bleeding from the palms as he prayed in the shadow of a department-store awning. Very nearly, you hated yourself for surviving.
Early in the afternoon, at the entrance to the Calle de las Sierpes, Lawson got off his scooter and propped it against a wall. Then he waded into the crowd and lifted his right arm above his head.
“I speak English!” he called. “i Y hablo un poco Espanol! Any who speak English or Spanish please come to me!”
A man who might have been Vietnamese or Kampuchean, or even Malaysian, stole Lawson’s motor scooter and rode it in a wobbling zigzag down the Street of the Serpents. A heavyset blond woman with red cheeks glared at Lawson from a doorway, and a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy who appeared to be Italian clutched hungrily at Lawson’s belt, seeking purchase on an adult, hoping for commiseration. Although he did not try to brush the boy’s hand away, Lawson avoided his eyes.
“English! English here! i Un poco Espanol lambien!”
Farther down Sierpes, Lawson saw another man with his hand in the air; he was calling aloud in a crisp but melodic Slavic dialect, and already he had succeeded in attracting two , or three other people to him. In fact, pockets of like-speaking people seemed to be forming in the crowded commercial avenue, causing Lawson to fear that he had put up his hand too late to end his own isolation. What if those who spoke either . English or Spanish had already gathered into survival- ` conscious groups? What if they had already made their way -’ into the countryside. where the competition for food and drink might be a little less predatory? If they had, he would be a lost, solitary Virginian in this Babel. Reduced to sign language and guttural noises to make his wants known, he would die a cipher ....
“Signore, “ the boy hanging on his belt cried. “Signore. “
Lawson let his eyes drift to the boy’s face. “Ciao,” he said. It was the only word of Italian he knew, or the only word that came immediately to mind, and he spoke it much louder than he meant.
The boy shook his head vehemently, pulled harder on Lawson’s belt. His words tumbled out like the contents of an unburdened closet into a darkened room, not a single one of them distinct or recognizable.
“English!” Lawson shouted. “English here!”-
“English here too, man!” a voice responded from the , milling crush of people at the mouth of Sierpes. “Hang on a minute, I’m coming to you!”
A small muscular man with a large head and not much chin stepped daintily through an opening in the crowd and put out his hand to Lawson. His grip was firm. As he shook hands, he placed his left arm over the shoulder of the Italian boy hanging on to Lawson’s belt. The boy stopped talking and gaped at the newcomer.
“Dai Secombe,” the man said. “I went to bed in Aberystwyth, where I teach philosophy, and I woke up in Spain. Pleased to meet you, Mr.-”
“Lawson,” Lawson said.
The boy began babbling again, his hand shifting from -
Lawson’s belt to the Welshman’s flannel shirt facing. Secombe took the boy’s hands in his own. “I’ve got you, lad. There’s a ragged crew of your compatriots in a pool-hall pub right down this lane. Come on, then, I’ll take you.” He glanced at Lawson. “Wait for me, sir. I’ll be right back.”
Secombe and the boy disappeared, but in less than five minutes the Welshman had returned. He introduced himself all over again. “To go to bed in Aberystwyth and to wake up in Seville,” he said, “is pretty damn harrowing. I’m glad to be alive, sir.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Only my father. He’s eighty-four.”
“You’re lucky. Not to have anyone else to worry about, I mean.”
“Perhaps,” Dai Secombe said, a sudden trace of sharpness in his voice. “Yesterday I would not’ve thought so.”
The two men stared at each other as the wail of the city modulated into a less hysterical but still inhuman drone. People surged around them, scrutinized them from foyers and balconies, took their measure. Out of the corner of his eye Lawson was aware of a moonfaced woman in summer deerskins slumping abruptly and probably painfully to the street. An Eskimo woman-the conceit was almost comic, but the woman herself was dying and a child with a Swedish-steel switchblade was already freeing a necklace of teeth and shells from her throat.
Lawson turned away from Secombe to watch the plundering of the Eskimo woman’s body. Enraged, he took off his wristwatch and threw it at the boy’s head, scoring a glancing sort of hit on his ear.
“You little jackal, get away from there!”
The red-cheeked woman who had been glaring at Lawson applied her foot to the rump of the boy with the switchblade and pushed him over. Then she retrieved the thrown watch, hoisted her skirts, and retreated into the dim interior of the cafe whose door she had been haunting.
“In this climate, in this environment,” Dai Secombe told Lawson, “an Eskimo is doomed. It’s as much psychological and emotional as it is physical. There may be a few others who’ve already died for similar reasons. Not much we can do, sir.”
Lawson turned back to the Welshman with a mixture of awe and disdain. How had this curly-haired lump of a man, in the space of no more than three or four hours, come to respond so lackadaisically to the deaths of his fellows? Was it merely because the sky was still blue and the edifices of another age still stood?
Pointedly, Secombe said, “That was a needless forfeiture of your watch. La
wson.”
“How the hell did that poor woman get here?” Lawson demanded, his gesture taking in the entire city. “How the hell did any of us get here?” The stench of open wounds and the first sweet hints of decomposition mocked the luxury of his ardor.
“Good questions,” the Welshman responded, taking Lawson’s arm and leading him out of the Calle de las Sierpes. “It’s a pity I can’t answer ‘em.”
III
That night they ate fried fish and drank beer together in a dirty little apartment over a shop whose glass display cases were filled with a variety of latex contraceptives. They had obtained the fish from a pescaderia voluntarily tended by men and women of Greek and Yugoslavian citizenship, people who had run similar shops in their own countries. The beer they had taken from one of the classier bars on the Street of the Serpents. Both the fish and the beer were at room temperature, but tasted none the worse for that.
Universe 11 - [Anthology] Page 1