In the Distance, and Ahead in Time

by George Zebrowski

  He was going to do something else, and soon. In two weeks, he estimated, he would be ready to take the computer tests for a technical rating. He would have to tell Uruba and Blue Chip that he wanted out, but he wasn’t sure how he would say it to them.

  He turned around and went down the stairs to his apartment.

  Uruba squinted at him in the dim light of the basement room. Blue Chip had gone to get a bulb for the shaded light hanging darkly over the old card table where they were sitting.

  “You cost me money, man. Why you going to quit?”

  Blue Chip came back with a bulb and screwed it into the socket. The lamp swung back and forth for a moment and stopped when Uruba pulled the switch cord. Yellow light filled the dusty cellar room.

  “Yellow’s all I could find,” Blue Chip said.

  Praeger looked at Uruba. His black face looked strange in the light. Uruba smiled at him grotesquely, showing him his one gold tooth.

  “Chris here wants out,” Uruba said. “What do you think, Blue Chip?”

  Blue Chip giggled nervously and leaned his chair back on its hind legs.

  “I know,” Blue Chip said, “he’s been going to school on the sly to them PLATO lessons.”

  Uruba grinned. “You tryin’ to be better than us, is that right?” he asked. And he left a big silence for Praeger to drown in.

  Finally he answered. “I just want other kinds of things, that’s all,” he said.

  “The honko always goes back,” Blue Chip said. “How much have you stashed?”

  “Where you going, Chris, to the Moon resorts with all the rich cats?” asked Uruba. “Where’s all your bread? Have you been cheating on us?”

  “I just want a tech rating to work in the new air plants. The money’s good,” Praeger said.

  Uruba leaned forward and knocked the card table into the air, breaking the yellow light. “What the rest of us going to breathe?” he asked in the darkness. “Who you think can move into those air-control apartments? Chris, you’re a fool.”

  “Things may get better,” Praeger managed to say.

  “Like hell,” Blue Chip announced from a dark corner of the room. The only light in the room now came in through the small window near the door.

  Praeger went to the door quickly, opened it and ran up the old steps to the street. He was out of breath when he reached the sidewalk. He stopped, and from below he heard the sound of Uruba’s laughter, mocking his fear.

  It stopped. Then Uruba screamed after him from below the pavement. “Chris, I helped you, I got you started, I taught you, boy—and this is what I get? I’m gonna get you, man. You better hide your money, you hear!” The voice died away, and Praeger stood perfectly still in front of the old brownstone. Then he was shaking and his body was covered with sweat. He looked up at the sky, at all the old buildings in this sealed-off part of old Harlem. He looked downtown where the light construction on New York’s second level looked like a huge diamond-studded spider devouring the city in the night. Slowly, he began walking home.

  Eyes watched him when he went to his PLATO lessons and when he came home. On Tuesdays and Thursdays when he stayed home he felt them on the windows of his fifth-floor apartment on 10th Street, and he was afraid to go near the windows; but when he tried to see if anyone was following him, he could find no one.

  In the middle of the night on a Monday a crash of glass woke him in bed. He got up and went into the living room, turning on the light. He saw a large rock lying on the floor, then checked the front-door police lock. It was still firm. Then he got some cardboard and tape from the kitchen and began taping up the broken window.

  As he worked he told himself that he understood all this. Uruba wanted one thing: to rend and tear and hurt him. He was an easy target, easier to hurt than the cops in their air-conditioned tank cars, easier to destroy than a car. And to hurt him meant more than money, that’s how Uruba was thinking. Praeger was a deserter, and Uruba could not accept that. For Blue Chip it was recreation to hound him, and Blue Chip also thought Praeger was hiding money.

  He had just put a final piece of tape on the window when two shots came through the cardboard. Praeger fell to the floor and lay still. He lay there for an hour, afraid to move. Finally he crawled behind the sofa, where he fell into a nervous sleep just before morning.

  He was going to have to leave town. Uruba was crazy and it would get worse. His exams and PLATO would have to wait.

  He packed a knapsack and went down into the basement, where he kept his old motorcycle. He wheeled it out into the yard, which was connected to the street by a concrete ramp. He looked at his watch. The glowing numbers told him it was an hour to dawn.

  He started the bike with a shove of his foot and rolled down the ramp slowly. He turned into the street and started in the direction of Riverside Drive. The streets were deserted at this hour.

  After a few minutes he noticed the lights of the car behind him. He gunned the bike and shot up the entrance to Riverside and out onto the highway. Traffic was light and he continued accelerating.

  A few minutes later the car was still behind him and gaining. To his left the river was covered by fog, but the lights on the Jersey shore were coming through. Praeger gunned his engine and the bike carried him forward, past two Wankel safety-tanks moving slowly to their destination. He looked at his speedometer and saw that he was doing 115. He knew that the new-looking car behind him could catch him, but he had a head start. He thought, I have a right to try to better myself, go to school. The money came from Uruba’s world, he knew that, but there was no other way. Food was given out free, just enough, but more than that could be bought only with skills. You could go to school if you paid for it, but you could live without it. It was a luxury for those who had a hunger for it. Uruba hated him for wanting it.

  As he rushed through the night, Praeger felt tears in his eyes blurring the highway and the sight of the river with its lights on the far shore. The air was damp on his face, and the road was an unyielding hardness under the bike’s rubber wheels.

  The car was still in his mirror, its lights on bright to annoy him. It was winding its way past the occasional electrics and steamers on the road, coming closer. He pushed forward on the black road, trying to move beyond the light beams on his back.

  The car disappeared from his mirror. Praeger accelerated, eager to press his momentary advantage. He had the road to himself for the next few minutes. Then the road curved upward and to the right, and he was rushing over the small bridge into the Bronx. He saw the car in his mirror again when he took the Grand Concourse entrance, and it kept pace with him along the entire six miles of the wide avenue. Ten minutes later he was on the edges of the old city, fleeing upstate.

  Here he was among the dying trees northwest of New York, dark outlines against the night sky, thousands of acres of lifeless woodland, a buckled carpet of hills and gullies. He had taken the old two-way asphalt roadway in the hope of losing Uruba’s shiny antique.

  Praeger felt a strange sensation on the back of his neck when he saw the car in his mirror again. It wasn’t Uruba following him in the car, hating him; it was the car, fixing him with its burning eyes, ready to come forward and crush him under its wheels. The car was trying to hold him back, getting even for all of its kind he had killed with Uruba. It was trying to stop him from escaping to another kind of life, just as it had stopped his parents. The car hated the soft creatures living in the world with it, hated the parasites who were slowly taking away its weapons, taming it, making it an unpoisonous and powerless domestic vehicle.

  Around him in the night stood the naked trees, the stripped victims of the car’s excretions. He listened to the thick drone of the motorcycle engine. He was riding a powered insect that was brother to the wheeled beast pursuing it, jaw open to swallow. The Moon brushed out from behind the thinning clouds on his left, riding low over the trees, its white light
frighteningly pale.

  He went around a wide curve in the road, holding closely to the right shoulder, momentarily escaping the car’s lights. He came out into a short straightaway and suddenly the road curved again, and the car was still out of sight behind him.

  He gunned the engine to the limit, hoping to stay ahead for good.

  Suddenly his headlight failed, leaving him to rush forward alone in the darkness. The Moon slid behind some clouds. There was some kind of small bridge ahead. He had glimpsed it in the Moonlight; now he could barely see its latticework against the sky. In a moment he knew what he was going to do. He braked the cycle and jumped at the last moment.

  He hit the road shoulder and rolled to a stop. The bike rushed over the bridge to the other side and into some trees, where it stopped with a crunch.

  Praeger saw that he was lying near an old roadblock horse that had a detour sign nailed to it. He got up and dragged it to block the road to the bridge and to direct traffic to the right, directly onto the slope that ran down to the river.

  He sprinted into the deadwood forest and hid behind a tree. In a moment he heard Uruba’s wheels screeching in the turns. The headlights came around the bend, ghostly rays cutting through the darkness. There was not time for the car to do anything but follow the detour arrow. He heard the brakes go on but it was too late. The left headlight shattered against the roadblock and the car flew over the edge, turning over on its front end when it hit bottom and landing in the river top down.

  It burst into a fireball and burned in its own bleedings, which set the river on fire, the dark-flowing river filled with sludge and acid and slaughterhouse blood, flammable chemicals and the vitals of all Earth’s creatures. The fire spread quickly under the bridge, and the old wooden structure started to catch fire.

  Praeger left his hiding place and ran across the bridge, hoping to find his cycle in working order. The stench from the river was enough to make him gasp as he went across. From the other side he looked down at the burning hulk, a dark beast engulfed by flames, and the river, which would burn up- and downstream until the fire reached areas free of flammable materials.

  Praeger sat down on the far bank and watched the burning. It wasn’t Uruba who was dying, not just Uruba or Blue Chip. It was a creature dying there in the dirty waters—the same waters that a few years ago had threatened the East with a new pollution-fed microorganismic plague. For a few months it had looked as if a new killer, much like bubonic plague, would be loosed on the land; fortunately by that time many rivers could be burned, or easily helped to catch fire, and the threat of epidemic had passed away in a cleansing flame.

  Uruba had been a scavenger living off the just laws and man’s efforts to reclaim nature for himself. Praeger felt as if he were coming out of a strange confusion, a living dream that had held him in its grasp. A slight wind blew the stifling fumes from the river toward him, making his eyes water, oppressing him with a sadness too settled for tears, even though they were present on his face.

  Later the flames died to a flicker on the waters. The sky cleared in the east and the morning star came out, brilliant before the sun, still hiding below the horizon. As the sun came up, Praeger could see the towers of the city to the south, their glassy facets catching the sun’s shout.

  He got up and looked around at the stricken forest land in the morning light, patched here and there with new greenery struggling out of the ground and along tree branches. The bridge at his right was a cinder, still slowly collapsing into the river. He decided to make his way along the bank on foot until he found another bridge where he could cross to the other side and return to the city.

  The Soft Terrible Music

  Each of Castle Silverstone’s one hundred windows looked out on the landscape of a different country.

  The iron drawbridge opened on Mars.

  A stainless steel side gate led out into a neighborhood in Luna City. A small bronze gate opened in a small public place aboard Odalisque, the largest of the Venusian floating islands drifting high above the hot, dry desert of the planet.

  A sliding double door opened through the sheer face of a cliff overlooking Rio de Janiero, where one could stand before an uncrossable threshold.

  There was also a door that led nowhere. It was no different in function than the other doors, except that it was not set to any destination. This castle, like any true home, was the expression of a man’s insides, desolate places included.

  When the castle was not powered-up for full extension, it stood on a rocky hillside in Antarctica’s single warm valley, where it had been built in the early twenty-second century by Wolfgang Silverstone, who rented it out occasionally for political summits. In design it was a bouquet of tall, gleaming cylinders, topped with turrets from a variety of castle building periods. The cylinders surrounded a central courtyard, and the brief connecting walls were faced with gray stone that had been quarried from the valley.

  The castle got its name as much from the flecks of fool’s silver in the stone as from the name of its builder. The castle also differed from other extended homes, because it was not linked to the houses of friends and relatives, or to apartments and pieds-à-terre in major cities. The castle had its vistas, and one could step out into them, but its exits were private. Some of them even looped back into chambers within the castle.

  Few homes had ever been built with as much care and attention to a human being’s future needs, to his own future failings. Deep within himself, Silverstone knew what would happen, had accepted it, and had made provisions for his fate.

  Halfway through construction, he altered some of the keep’s plans to attract a single woman—Gailla, the woman with the perfect memory, who by age eighty had read and retained every novel written since the eighteenth century. Silverstone, in a fit of fibbing, told her that his castle had a library of one thousand previously lost and unknown works, that he found her irresistible, and that if she married him for the minimum allowable term he would give her the key to the library.

  As he waited for Gailla’s answer, his nights trembled with odd dreams, in which he felt that he had always known her, even though he was certain that they had never met—at least not physically. Upon waking, he would conclude that he must have seen her image somewhere; or, more simply, that he wanted her so desperately that his unconscious was inventing an unbroken history of romance, to convince him that they had always been together in their love.

  What was five years of a term marriage, he told her; another century of life waited. He was not unattractive for a child of fifty, even if he said so himself. The prize of books he offered seemed to draw her curiosity. Its very existence intrigued her. But secret libraries were not unknown. The Vatican still had much of one locked away, and the history of the Middle East and North Africa was filled with stories of vanished libraries waiting under the sands along ancient, dried-up waterways. One more lost library was not an impossibility.

  Fearful that she would leave him if he did not make good on his original boast, he told her that his treasure was a library of books that had been saved from the great “paper loss” of 1850-2050, when most acid paper books had crumbled to dust because there had been no money or will to preserve them; the world had been too busy dealing with global warming and rising ocean levels. He had found the books on his forays into various abandoned Antarctic bases, where the dry cold had preserved the paper. They were mostly mysteries, science fiction, adventure, suspense, bestsellers, and romance novels brought by the base personnel for amusement. Only about a thousand volumes.

  As it turned out, she soon discovered that the books were a fraud. Silverstone confessed that he had found only a few; the rest were written to complete extant scraps, cover designs and jacket blurbs, by paid specialists who did not know for whom they were working or that they were part of a larger effort. But fraud or not, it was at least an echo of a newly discovered library, and given enough time, it w
ould become interesting in itself, he assured her, and it seemed to him that she appreciated the compliment of his ploy.

  He told her how paper had been made and aged, covers painted, fingerprints of the dead scattered through the volumes. Gailla seemed delighted—for about a month—until she saw how bad the books were, how trite and poorly written. Silverstone was delighted by her bedroom habits—also for about a month. She lost interest in him at about the same time she was able to prove that the books, from internal anachronisms, were fakes.

  “How dare you!” she screamed, careful to put on a convincing show. “Why did you do it?”

  “To attract you,” he answered, astonished by her perfectly controlled bitterness, which seemed to hide another purpose. “Are you sorry? Would you have bonded with me for myself?”

  “You never gave me the chance!” she sang out in a voice that began as a low grumble and ended in a high soprano.

  “But you would have,” he demanded, “in other circumstances?”

  The question seemed to upset her greatly, and she gave no answer; but Silverstone was convinced that she was holding back a no, and he began to wonder why he had ever been attracted to her. It had seemed to him at the beginning that she would alter the course of his life, change the unknown fate that lay hidden in the back of his mind; and now it seemed to him that nothing could save him from it. It was as if she had known all along about the abyss that threatened to open before him, and was waiting for the right moment to push him into it—after she had tormented him with doubt for a sufficient period of time.