That was where Aunt Rebecca came in. Her husband, Uncle Alwyn, had taken the Euthanasia Option three years before, and since then she had been rootless, drifting around from one lot of relatives to another. At the moment she was staying with Cousin Netty, who lived in Vancouver, and Mandy had arranged for us to be her next hosts.
* * * *
We’re fortunate in having a pleasant three bedroomed house in the suburbs, and she settled in with us very comfortably. Too comfortably, in fact, because in no time at all she became part of the family. It would have made matters a lot easier if she had been more difficult to please, some querulous old biddy with a mean temper and a sharp tongue. But she wasn’t. She was a big, jolly woman with a ready laugh and such human warmth that I couldn’t help liking her from the start. Apart from that, she played darned good chess - one passion which Mandy and I had never shared.
She was delighted to hear about Mandy’s pregnancy. We had to tell her about that, but not of course about the problem it presented. We let her assume that we had been selected in the BureauPop lottery.
‘How marvellous!’ she exclaimed. ‘And after only three years! Poor Cousin Netty has been waiting for nearly ten, you know. Both she and Victor would make such ideal parents, but they’ve had no luck at all so far, poor things.’
If I’d had any sense I would have killed her on the first day, before she had time to become so much part of our lives. I don’t really mean to criticize, but Mandy’s conversation at the time had become rather dull and one track. She seemed to spend most of her waking hours dreaming about the future of Young Tom - as she had already christened the embryo - going around with a fulfilled half-smile on her face and knitting tiny garments with the mindless concentration of a bird building its nest.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve no time for the immature type of father who has a tendency to look on his own child as a rival for his wife’s affections. But there are limits... and even at that stage I began to have a feeling that Mandy might go beyond them.
In the meantime there was Aunt Becky - a load of fun, the sort of person it’s a real pleasure to have around, appreciative, cheerful, always willing to help unobtrusively about the house. Perhaps above all, so easy to entertain.
‘I’ve had a good life on the whole, Tom,’ she used to say with a smile. ‘There’ll be no regrets when my time comes to pass over. I can’t think why everyone is so kind to me. Cousin Netty and Victor - and now you and Mandy. Despite what they say, it can’t be such a bad old world when that kind of consideration and affection still exists.’
I must have missed at least a dozen opportunities during the first couple of weeks. Aunt Becky was pretty active for a woman of her age and size, and she seemed to take the most ridiculous chances, hanging over the parapets of tall buildings, jay-walking like a teenager and insisting on enjoying the view from the very edge of each cliff-top.
At nights, in the privacy of our bedroom, Mandy was becoming impatient. ‘You’re too soft! Why don’t you get it over with? Think about Young Tom. You’re not being fair to him.’
But it wasn’t that easy for me. Young Tom wasn’t real to me in the sense that he was to Mandy. Nowhere nearly as real as Aunt Becky, whom I regarded with increasing affection.
Thursday at the lake was the final straw for Mandy. Despite the fact that it was cold and windy, with a near-gale blowing, she insisted that I should take Aunt Becky out in our sailing dinghy, whilst she stayed on in the cabin to prepare lunch. Aunt Becky agreed, of course. The old girl was game for anything. So off we went, neither of us wearing life-jackets, despite the previously established fact that she couldn’t swim a stroke. End of season and mid-week there were none of the usual crowd about. It should have been the easiest thing in the world, an unforeseen swing of the boom, whipped by the gale force wind, the old lady overboard before anything could be done...
Mandy had difficulty in concealing her fury when we both turned up to eat a hearty lunch.
‘You realize how much time you’ve wasted?’ she hissed at me that night. Her face had a touch of the Lady Macbeth’s in the pale moonlight. ‘If we don’t get that Life Credit by next Thursday Young Tom will be terminated. Don’t you care about that?’
‘Of course I care, darling,’ I said. ‘It’s just... Well, she’s so darned nice and trusting.’
‘And you are a weak-kneed fool!’ she said, angrily flouncing off into the spare room, where she spent the rest of the night, the first time we had been separated since our marriage. It really upset me to think that this thing which should have been such a blessing to us was driving us apart. I blamed myself to a large extent. Mandy was right. I had been indecisive. Both she and Young Tom deserved better of me.
By the end of a sleepless and lonely night I had hardened my heart, determined not to allow any affection for Aunt Becky to stand in the way of doing my duty as a father and husband.
But Mandy was ahead of me. With time getting so short, she must have decided that the only thing for her to do was to take the matter into her own hands. Very capable hands too. She is, as I mentioned earlier, quite a big girl, easily capable of administering a hefty shove of the type that sent poor old Aunt Becky hurtling to her death down that ultramodern, but rather dangerous, staircase.
I didn’t actually see it happen, of course. I was in my study, checking through some work I’d brought home from the office when I heard the clattering rumble and that final dreadful thud which seemed to shake the very foundations of the house. By the time I arrived in the hallway Mandy was already standing over the silent body.
‘There - you see how simple?’ she said, and burst into tears.
* * * *
That was when we called the police; and settled down afterwards to wait for the envelope from BureauPop. There were only three days to go before the thirteen week deadline, but we weren’t really worried now. BureauPop have a reputation for swiftness in such matters, and even if there should be some delay it could be ironed out when Mandy went to the local office on Thursday for Young Tom’s validation.
As it happened they were even more efficient than usual, and the envelope arrived before breakfast this morning. Mandy was full of smiles when she opened it up, but her face melted like a July snowfall as she read the letter. She passed the single sheet over to me without a word.
It seemed that dear old Aunt Becky - with her usual kind thoughtfulness - had pledged her Life Credit in advance to Cousin Netty in Vancouver. After all, we’d not told her that we were in need of it, whereas she knew that Netty and Victor bad been waiting for ten long years. Young Tom’s future looked very bleak at that point.
Naturally we were both upset, but there didn’t seem a lot we could do at that stage other than go to our jobs as usual -Mandy to the laboratory, and me to my office. Anything was better than sitting at home brooding.
* * * *
When I arrived back tonight I was delighted to find that Mandy was in a much brighter mood. She appeared to have accepted the inevitable and be determined to put a brave face on her disappointment. Poor darling! My heart went out to her, but I deliberately didn’t say anything about Young Tom, and she made no mention of the subject.
She’s always been a pretty good cook, but at dinner this evening she really excelled herself, and I guessed that she was probably sublimating her suffering. The prawn cocktail was just the way I love it, with lots of beautiful pink, piquant sauce. She’s allergic to shellfish, but occasionally when she wants to make a real fuss of me she prepares something like that and watches me eat it. Afterwards we had a couple of charcoal broiled steaks, followed by fresh fruit and coffee.
It had been a meal fit for a king, and afterwards I relaxed contentedly on the sofa, listening to the sound of Mandy doing the dishes and thinking to myself that a really considerate husband would go in there and offer to help with the drying up at least. It was only when I finally tried to obey that virtuous urge that I found out I couldn’t move my legs. Try as I might, they just la
y there numb and unfeeling on the sofa ahead of me, as if they didn’t belong to me at all.
Naturally I panicked, calling for Mandy. She came running in from the kitchen.
‘Don’t just stand there!’ I howled. ‘Call Doctor Meldrum. It must have been those damned prawns!’
‘No, darling,’ she said quietly. ‘It was the sauce. I’m sorry, but you must see that there was nothing else I could do. Time is getting so short, and I had to protect Young Tom, didn’t I? One thing I can promise you is that it won’t hurt in the least. I was very careful to make absolutely sure of that.’ She took her apron off and began to move towards the front hall.
‘Mandy! - Where are you going?’
She turned to me with that gentle half-smile that had become so much a trademark of her pregnancy. ‘I think it would be a good idea if I went out for an hour or so,’ she said. ‘I’d like to stay with you to the end, of course, but the sight of your dying might not be good for Young Tom.’ She blew me a kiss and walked out of the room. A couple of minutes later I heard the front door close.
So here I am. The numbness has crept up to my neck now, and I’m finding it more and more difficult to speak. I can’t turn off the recorder either, because my arms and hands have been useless for some time. I suppose when the numbness reaches my brain that will be the end. Curiously enough I don’t feel too badly about dying. Maybe that’s part of the effect of the drug, or maybe it’s because I can see now what old Aunt Becky was getting at when she said that the future belongs to the children, not to us. There’s something oddly satisfying in the idea that tomorrow Mandy will be able to go along to BureauPop and claim my Life Credit.
She’ll miss me, of course, but Young Tom will be there to keep her company, and after all, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t...
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* * * *
IN THE COMA CONDITION
Charles Partington
How fortunate for Massner that he happened to be in the underwater city of Tethys when all life on the surface of the Earth was destroyed! His work in Gestalt Behaviourism warned him that such a colossal disaster must find echoes within the enclosed world of the underwater complex, that no man is an island. What apocalypse might be found if human minds linked in the final investigation?
* * * *
One
Massner’s inability to register dismay over the corpse of a decimated humanity stemmed not from moral neglect but from an intense personal commitment.
Massner was haunted by a girl’s face, tormented by an expression that found echoes in the shattered rhythms of his existence. His life had been revitalized in the complex ambiguities of her eyes. If there was meaning to existence, Massner would find it here in the Coma Colosseum in Tethys. This was where he had twice glimpsed the girl in television broadcasts. If not here it would be found nowhere else. There could be no alternative.
* * * *
Massner and Lynda, his wife, had been in the ocean city of Tethys for slightly over six months now, Massner having secured a position as one of a visiting team of observational psychologists on the assumption it would facilitate his research into practical Gestalt Behaviourism, which only an enclosed and isolated community like Tethys could provide on sufficient scale.
He had been the first of the team to arrive at Tethys. The rest were scheduled to follow at the end of the month. They never made it. Within a week of Massner setting foot in the underwater complex the fungoidal infections had decimated the surface area of the planet. It was unbelievable; but final. As a viable species, mankind was finished. Unfortunately, he took the other mammals with him.
For hours Massner had listened in silence to playbacks of the deathsongs of the huge whales, their sighings echoing half-way round the oceans of the world. He experienced more sorrow in their extinction than in man’s. Even in death the whales achieved nobility.
Obviously no-one could fail to be emotionally disturbed on some level by the virtual extinction of the mammalian species. Massner attempted to study the anticipated culture shock of such a widespread disaster on so small a community with as much professional detachment as the situation would allow. But increasingly her face, the girl in the Coma Colosseum broadcasts, invaded his thoughts to distraction. His feelings towards her were beyond analysis at this stage, almost asexual; based more on a subconscious recognition of the chaos she threatened. Yet even though he was aware of the danger, Massner was fascinated.
He smiled, glancing at the signature on the letter of admission to the Coma Colosseum. His presence there went beyond that subtle invitation. There were other forces at work in Tethys.
Massner had accepted that he would be under surveillance from the moment he entered Tethys. His work in the area of Gestalt Behaviourism and psychology explored the limits allowed by the Church in the ocean city. His two recently published papers had been designed as critical vehicles, containing submerged, almost subliminal, indications of the doubts he entertained. That he had been granted permission to visit Tethys had come as a surprise, the opportunity was not one to be missed. Yet surely the unease he felt about Tethys was mirrored in other minds? But where were they? Public dissenters were apparently non-vocal in the undersea complex.
If his detention in the Coma Colosseum, if such it turned out to be, was an indication of a repressive backlash instigated by the Church as it now existed within Tethys, Massner would not be surprised. After the recent fiasco of the Second Coming, the Church had almost been compelled to introduce protective measures.
* * * *
Massner had first become aware of the rumours circulating amongst the twelve thousand inhabitants of Tethys concerning the reappearance of Christ less than two months ago. The growing wave of expectancy was frowned upon; but despite calls for restraint from the Church, speculation increased to the point where self-appointed leaders, latterday prophets emerging too rapidly and occupying positions too close to the public nervecentre to be removed, were predicting the actual date of Christ’s advent in Tethys.
The prescribed day came and passed in a breathless hiatus. Towards evening a woman in one of the two hospitals had an emergency Caesarian. The child died. Their fervour and hopes unrealized, the reaction of Tethys’ inhabitants transcended all extrapolated indications.
No riots; but a rapid sinking into apathy, a dreadful sense of rejection. There was an atmosphere of defeat in the city. The recurring crises had taken their inevitable toll.
Though, possibly, there were other surviving remnants of humanity scattered in isolated fragments across the surface - though no radio transmissions disturbed the ether to suggest this - the people of Tethys now felt utterly alone, physically and spiritually adrift. It seemed as if for the first time they were aware of the waters above Tethys, of the relentless crushing pressure waiting to engulf them. Existence had never seemed more precarious or pointless. It was a psychological horror which could not fail eventually to contaminate every mind in the city.
For Massner the state of mind of the inhabitants of Tethys under such conditions should have represented a challenge demanding total application of his knowledge. He reflected upon what Ostier and Kircher would have thought of the situation. They would have been fascinated with the dilemma it posed.
But Massner could not work. She was too much in his thoughts.
He walked over to the tiny window and looked down upon the almost empty walkways. Was it really for her that he had entered the Coma Colosseum? He had no answer. He stood at the window for what seemed hours.
When they came for him, Massner followed, vaguely frightened and perplexed; wholly intrigued. His eyes never rested. The girl was somewhere in this building.
* * * *
The interior of the mysterious Coma Colosseum complex was as unknown to the majority of the inhabitants of Tethys as it had been to those on the surface before the fungoid infections struck. However, the surface area of the huge bowl with its seating capacity of fifteen thousand people, more than the tota
l population of the ocean city, had been familiar to everyone, if only from the occasional television programmes concerning the enigmatic Anglesomne. The actual details of what went on inside the vast building amounted to speculation and rumour which after almost forty years had begun to take on the elements of myth.
Yet Tethys still retained obvious attractions for those fortunate enough to secure a position there before the catastrophe. Population levels were strictly enforced, eliminating the frantic overcrowding that had reduced life on the surface to mere existence. Apart from the usual mental and physical requirements, the only other condition demanded of would-be inhabitants was a record of Christian observance. Even considering the presence of the Coma Colosseum, there had been more applications for citizenship than could ever be accepted.
New Writings in SF 29 - [Anthology] Page 17