“You were a Party member? A Nazi?”
“Yes. Even before I cam to Metropolis. We prided ourselves in Bavaria on seeing the future well before the decadents of the cities.”
“They say it was the woman who brought you into the Party?”
“Luise? No, if anything, she followed me. The real me, that is. Not Curt. She always despised Curt Kessler.”
“Was that difficult for you?”
“It was impossible,” Kessler smiled. “Poor Luise. She was born to be a heroine, Avram. She might not have been blonde, but she had everything else. The eyes, the face, the limbs, the hips. She was born to make babies for the Führer. Goebbels was fond of her. She wrote many of his scripts before she began broadcasting herself. She was our Valkyrie then, an inspiration to the nation. She committed suicide in 1945. When the Russians were coming. Like many German women.”
“Luise Lang would have faced a War Crimes tribunal.”
“True. Her other Aryan quality was that she wasn’t very bright. She was too silly to refuse the corruptions that came with privilege. She didn’t mean any of the things she did, because she never thought them through.”
“Unlike you?”
“By then I was thinking too much. We stopped speaking during the war. I could foresee thousands of differing futures, and was not inclined to do anything to make any of them come to pass. Goring asked me to forestall the Allies in Normandy, you know.”
“Your failure to comply was extensively documented at your own trial.”
“I could have done it. I could have changed the course of history. But I didn’t.”
Avram applauded, slowly.
“You are right to be cynical, Avram. It’s easier to do nothing than to change history. You could have given Truman the K-Bomb, but you went ghost-hunting in Paraguay.”
“I’m not like you,” he said, surprised by his own vehemence.
“No one is.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
Kessler looked surprised. “There’ve been other visitors? No, of course not. I’d have known. I scan the skies. Sometimes things move, but galaxies away. There were no other darts, no tests with dogs or little girls. Since Professor Ten Brincken passed away, no one has even tried to duplicate me as a homunculus. That, I admit, was a battle. The distorted, bottle-grown image of me wore me out more than any of the others. More than Mackie Messer’s green knives, more than Nosferatu’s rat hordes, more even than Ten Brincken’s artificial whore Alraune.”
Ten Brincken had been second only to Rotwang as the premier scientific genius of Metropolis. Either could have been the equal of Einstein if they had had the heart to go with their minds.
“I am reminded more and more of the twenties and thirties,” Kessler said. “I understand they want to get the underground factories working again. Microchip technology could revive Rotwang’s robots. Vorsprung durch technik, as they say. The future is finally arriving. Fifty years too late.”
“You could be released to see it.”
The suggestion gave the prisoner pause. “These glowing walls don’t keep me in, Avram, they keep you out. I need my shell. I couldn’t soar into the air anymore. A missile would stop me as an arrow downs a hawk. The little men who rule the world wouldn’t like me as competition.”
Avram had no doubt this man could make the world his own. If he chose to lead instead of follow.
“I’ve seen swastikas in this city,” Avram said. “I’ve heard Germans say Hitler was right about the Jewish problem. I’ve seen Israelis invoke Hitler’s holocaust to excuse their own exterminations. The world could be ready for you again.”
“Strength, Purity and the Aryan Way?”
“It could happen again.”
Kessler shook his head. “No one eats worms twice, Avram. I was at the torchlight processions, and the pogroms. I wrestled the nosferatu beyond the sunrise, and I saw shopkeepers machine-gunned by Stormtroopers. I was at Berchtesgaden, and Auschwitz. I lost my taste for National Socialism when the stench of ovens was all I could smell. Even if I went to China or Saturn, I could still taste the human smoke. I surrendered, remember? To Eisenhower personally. And I’ve shut myself up here. Buried myself. Even the human race has learned its lesson.”
Avram understood how out of date the man of tomorrow’s understanding was. “You’re an old man, Kessler. Like me. Only old men remember. In America, seventy-five per cent of high school children don’t know Russia and the United States fought on the same side in the Second World War. The lesson has faded. Germany is whole again, and Germans are grumbling about the Jews, the gypsies, the Japanese even. It’s not just Germany. In Hungary, in Russia, in the Moslem countries, in America and Britain, in Israel, I see the same things happening. There’s a terrible glamour to it. And you’re that glamour. The children who chalk swastikas don’t know what the symbol means. They don’t remember the swastika from the flag, but from your chest. They make television mini-series about you.”
Kessler sat back, still as a steel statue. He could not read minds, but he could understand.
“When I was a boy, a little Jewish boy in Metropolis, I, too, looked up at the skies. I didn’t know you hated me because of my religion, because of the religion my parents practised no more than I did. I wore a black blanket as a cloak, and wished I could fly, wished I could outrace a streamlined train, wished I could catch Mackie Messer. Do you remember the golem?”
Kessler did. “Your rabbi Judah ben Bezalel raised the creature from clay in Prague, then brought it to Metropolis to kill the Führer. I smashed it.”
The echo of that blow still sounded in Avram’s head.
“I saw you do it. I cheered you, and my playmates beat me. The golem was the monster, and you were the hero. Later, I learned different.”
He rolled up his shirtsleeve, to show the tattoo.
“I had already seen that,” Kessler said, tapping his eyes. “I can see through clothing. It was always an amusing pastime. It was useful at the cabarets. I saw the singer, Lola…”
“After you killed the golem,” Avram continued, “all the children took fragments of the clay. They became our totems. And the brownshirts came into the Jewish quarter and burned us out. They were looking for monsters, and found only us. My parents, my sisters, my friends. They’re all dead. You had gone on to Nuremberg, to present Hitler with the scroll you snatched from the monster’s chest.”
“I won’t insult you by apologising.”
Avram’s heart was beating twice its normal race. Kessler looked concerned for him. He could look into another’s chest, of course.
“There’s nothing I could do to make reparation. Your family is dead, but so is my whole planet. I have to live with the guilt. That’s why I’m here.”
“But you are here, and as long as you remain you’re a living swastika. The fools out there who don’t remember raise your image high, venerate you. I know you’ve been offered freedom by the Allies on six separate occasions. You could have flown out of here if you’d consented to topple Chairman Mao or Saddam Hussein, or become a living weather satellite, flitting here and there to avert floods and hurricanes. Some say the world needs its heroes. I say they’re wrong.”
Kessler sat still for a long time, then finally admitted, “As do I.”
Avram took the heavy metal slug from his cigarette case, and set it on the table between them.
“I’ve had this since I was at Oak Ridge. You wouldn’t believe how much of the stuff Rotwang collected, even before they found a way to synthesise it. The shell is lead.”
The prisoner played with his glasses. His face was too open, too honest. His thoughts were never guarded. Sometimes, for all his intelligence, he could seem simple-minded.
“You can bite through lead,” Avram said.
“Bullets can’t hurt me,” Kessler replied, a little of the old spark in his eyes.
“So you have a way out.”
Kessler picked up the slug, and rolled it in his hand.
“Without you in the world, maybe the fire won’t start again.”
“But maybe it will. It started without me last time.”
“I admit that. That’s why it’s your decision, Curt.”
Kessler nodded, and popped the slug into his mouth. It distended his cheek like a boiled sweet.
“Was I really your hero?”
Avram nodded. “You were.”
“I’m sorry,” Kessler said, biting through the lead, swallowing.
He did not fade away to mist like the nosferatu, nor fragment into shards like the golem. He did not even grow old and wither to a skeleton. He just died.
Guards rushed in, confused and concerned. There must have been a monitor in the room. They pointed guns at Avram, even though their beams couldn’t hurt him. Doctors were summoned, with enough bizarre machinery to revive a broken doll or resurrect a homunculus from the chemical stew. They could do nothing.
Avram remembered the destruction of the golem. Afterwards, the brown streak had paused to wave at the children before leaping up, up and away into the skies of Metropolis. They had all been young then, and expected to live forever.
Captain Siegel was upset, and couldn’t understand. Doubtless, his career would be wrecked because this had happened during his watch. The Russians would insist an American take the blame. Siegel kept asking questions.
“How did he die?”
“He died like a man,” Avram said. “Which, all considered, was quite an achievement.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE REVOLUTION
Pat Cadigan
Here’s a powerful story that demonstrates that, in spite of the troubled and troubling times we’ve suffered through in the last few decades, things could always have been worse.…
Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in Overland Park, Kansas. She made her first professional sale in 1980, and has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the best new writers in SF. She was the co-editor, along with husband Arnie Fenner, of Shayol, perhaps the best of the semiprozines of the late seventies; it was honored with a World Fantasy Award in the “Special Achievement, Non-Professional” category in 1981. She has also served as Chairman of the Nebula Award Jury and as a World Fantasy Award Judge. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her second novel, Synners, appeared in 1991 to even better response, being widely recognized as one of the year’s top novels. Her story “Pretty Boy Crossover”—which was in our Fourth Annual Collection—has recently appeared on several critics’ lists as being among the best science fiction stories of the 1980s, and her story “Angel”—which was in our Fifth Annual Collection—was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award—one of the few stories ever to earn that rather unusual distinction. Her story “Nearly Departed” was in our First Annual Collection; “Rock On” was in our Second Annual Collection; “Roadside Rescue” was in our Third Annual Collection; and “It Was the Heat” was in our Sixth Annual Collection. Her most recent book is the landmark collection Patterns, and she has just turned in a new novel called Fools.
Dylan was coming to Chicago.
The summer air, already electric with the violence of the war, the assassination attempts successful and unsuccessful, the anti-war riots, became super-charged with the rumor. Feeling was running high, any feeling about anything, real high, way up high, eight miles high and rising, brothers and sisters. And to top it all off, there was a madman in the White House.
Johnson, pull out like your father should have! The graffito of choice for anyone even semi-literate; spray paint sales must have been phenomenal that summer. The old bastard with a face like the dogs he lifted up by their ears would not give it up, step aside, and graciously bow to the inevitable. He wuz the President, the gaw-damned Prezident, hear that, muh fellow Amurricans? Dump Johnson, my ass, don’t even think about it, boys, the one we ought to dump is that candy-assed Humphrey. Gaw-damned embarrassment is what he is.
And the President’s crazy, that’s what he is, went the whispers all around Capitol Hill, radiating outward until they became shouts. Madman in the White House—the crazy way with LBJ! If you couldn’t tell he was deranged by the way he was stepping up the bombing and the number of troops in Vietnam, his conviction that he could actually stand against Bobby Kennedy clinched it. Robert F. Kennedy, sainted brother to martyred Jack, canonized in his own lifetime by an assassination attempt. Made by the only man in America who was obviously crazier than LBJ, frothed-up Arab with a name like automatic weapons fire, Sirhan Sirhan, ka-boom, ka-boom. The Golden Kennedy had actually assisted in the crazed gunman’s capture, shoulder to shoulder with security guards and the Secret Service as they all wrestled him to the floor Pity about the busboy taking that bullet right in the eye, but the Kennedys had given him a positively lovely funeral with RFK himself doing the eulogy. And, needless to say, the family would never want for anything again in this life.
But Johnson the Madman was going to run! Without a doubt he was a dangerous psychotic Madman in the White House-damned straight yon didn’t need a Weatherman to know the way the wind blew.
Nonetheless, there was one-after all, hadn’t Dylan said the answer was blowin’ in the wind? And if he was coming to Chicago to support the brothers and sisters, that proved the wind was about to blow gale force. Storm coming batten down the hatches, fasten your seatbelts, and grab yourself a helmet’ or steal a hardhat from some redneck construction worker.
Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement already had their riot gear. Seven years after the first freedom ride stalled out in Birmingham, the feelings of humdiation and defeat at having to let the Justice Department scoop them up and spirit them away to New Orleans for their own protection had been renewed in the violent death of the man who had preached victory through non-violence. He’d had a dream; the wake-up call had come as a gunshot Dreaming was for when you were asleep. Now it was time to be wide-awake in America.…
Annie Phillips
* * *
“There were plenty of us already wide-awake in America by that late date. I’d been to Chicago back in ’66, two years to the month in Marquette Park. If I was never awake any other day in my life before April ’68, I was awake that day. Surrounded by a thousand of the meanest white people in America waving those Confederate flags and those swastikas, screaming at us. And then they let fly with rocks and bricks and bottles, and I saw when Dr. King took one in the head. I’d thought he was gonna die that day and all the rest of us with him. Well, he didn’t and we didn’t, but it was a near thing. After, the buses were pulling away and they were chasing us and I looked back at those faces and I thought, ‘There’s no hope. There’s really no hope.’
“When Daley got the court order against large groups marching in the city, I breathed a sigh of relief, I can tell you. I felt like that man had saved my life. And then Dr. King says okay, we’ll march in Cicero, it’s a suburb, the order doesn’t cover Cicero. Cicero. I didn’t want to do it, I knew they’d kill us, shoot us, burn us, tear us up with their bare hands and teeth. Some of us were ready to meet them head-on. I truly believe that Martin Luther King would have died that day if Daley hadn’t wised up in a hurry and said he’d go for the meeting at the Palmer House.
“Summit Agreement, yeah. Sell-Out Agreement, we called it, a lot of us. I think even Dr. King knew it. And so a whole bunch of us marched in Cicero anyway. I wasn’t there, but I know what happened, just like everybody else. Two hundred dead, most of them black, property damage in the millions though I can’t say I could ever find it in me to grieve for property damage over people damage. Even though I wasn’t there, something of me died that day in Cicero and was reborn in anger. By ’68, I had a good-sized bone to pick with good old Chi-town, old Daley-ville. I don’t regret what I did. All I regret is that the bomb didn’t get Daley. It had his name on it, I put it on there myself, on the side of the pipe. ‘Richard Daley’s ticket to hell, coach class.’
&n
bsp; “Looking back on it, I think I might have had better luck as a sniper.”
* * *
Excerpt from an interview conducted covertly.
at Sybil Brand, published in
The Whole Samizdat Catalog, 1972?
exact date unknown
Veterans of the Free Speech Movement at Berkley also knew what they were up against. Reagan’s tear-gas campaign against campus protestors drew praise from a surprising number of people who felt the Great Society was seriously threatened by the disorder promoted by campus dissidents. The suggestion that the excessive force used by the police caused more problems rather than solving any was rejected by the Reagan administration and its growing blue-collar following alike.
By the time Reagan assumed the governorship, he had already made up his mind to challenge Nixon in ’68. But what he needed for a serious bid was the southern vote, which was divided between Kennedy and Wallace. Cleverly, the ex-movie actor managed to suggest strong parallels between campus unrest and racial unrest, implying that both groups were seeking the violent overthrow and destruction of the government of the United States. Some of the more radical rhetoric that came out of both the student left and the civil rights movement, and the fact that the student anti-war movement aligned itself with the civil rights movement, only seemed to validate Reagan’s position.
That the southern vote would be divided between two individuals as disparate as Robert F. Kennedy and George C. Wallace seems bizarre to us in the present. But both men appealed to the working class, who felt left out of the American dream. Despite the inevitable trouble that Wallace’s appearances resulted in, his message did reach the audience for which it was intended—the common man who had little to show for years, sometimes decades of hard work beyond a small piece of property and a paycheck taxed to the breaking point, and, as far as the common man could tell, to someone else’s benefit. Wallace understood that the common man felt pushed around by the government and exploited this feeling. In a quieter era, he would have come off as a bigoted buffoon; but in a time when blacks and students were demonstrating, rioting, and spouting unthinkable statements against the government, the war, and the system in general, Wallace seemed to be one of the few, if not the only political leader who had the energy to meet this new threat to the American way of life and wrestle it into submission.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 37