In the Deadlands

by David Gerrold

  THIS BRINGS TO A TOTAL OF FORTY-THREE THE NUMBER OF COMPLAINTS REGISTERED WITH THE U.N. MINORITY PROCREATION CONTROL OFFICE.

  MAY 19, 2041

  TO: THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  FROM: WARREN J. HINDLER, HOOVER CENTER

  Mr. President,

  The situation is becoming more and more serious every day. I have reports coming across my desk to indicate that the activists are planning to step up the number of urban disturbances within the next two months. This nation is headed for civil war unless some way is found to take the steam out of the Anti-Enzyme movement.

  I recommend immediate action along the following lines....

  MAY 20, 2041

  POLICE REPORT, MANWEATHER COMPLEX

  At 7:45 pm, Officers J.G. and. R.F. investigated a complaint at 1456 Rafferty Avenue, Block 12, Apt 56789. Investigating Officers found Donald Ruddigore in process of assaulting his, wife, Alice. Woman had already sustained minor injuries.

  Ruddigore explained that his wife had told him she was pregnant As he had been infected with the Ledgerton Virus some years earlier, he knew that he could not be the father of the child, and he had only begun beating her when she refused to tell him who the real father was.

  When questioned, Mrs. Ruddigore insisted that she has never copulated with anyone but her husband. Officer G. Suggested that both Ruddigores see a County Clinician before the week was over.

  Mr. Ruddigore became abusive at this and had to be forcibly restrained. He was booked at Station 12 (preventive detention) and released the following morning on his own recognizance. Mrs. Ruddigore spent the night at her sister’s after being released from the Emergency Hospital, where she was treated for minor scalp injuries.

  As he was being taken into custody, Mr. Ruddigore noted that he was “glad that whoever the bastard is, now he’s got it too!”

  MAY 38, 2041

  TO: DR. JOYCE FREMM

  FROM: DR. CARLOS WAN-LEE

  Joyce,

  I’ve had four physicians call me in the past two days wanting to know if someone is bootlegging enzyme or something. All of them report a number of women (with previously infected husbands) turning up unexpectedly pregnant. Yes, I know it sounds like adultery, but I suspect it is something more. I’d like to talk to you about it in detail. I think we should investigate this. Are you free for lunch?

  2042.05.14/DATELINE:BRAZIL. IN RIO TODAY, A CROWD OF MORE THAN TEN THOUSAND FORMED IN FRONT OF THE LEDGERTON GALLOWS TO HOLD A MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR DANA LEDGERTON, WHO DIED FIVE YEARS AGO ON THIS SPOT. WHILE LEDGERTON’S NAME IS STILL REVILED IN MANY PARTS OF THE GLOBE, A GROWING NUMBER OF PEOPLE ARE BEGINNING TO REALIZE THAT NOT EVERY EFFECT OF THE LEDGERTON VIRUS IS NECESSARILY EVIL. THE BRAZILIAN BIRTH RATE, FOR EXAMPLE, HAS DROPPED TO A COMFORTABLE...

  MAY 20, 2042

  REPORT TO THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION BY DR. JOYCE FREMM

  TRANSCRIPTION OF REMARKS—FOR PUBLIC RELEASE

  ...what has happened is this: The virus has mutated. It wasn’t stable. Few viruses are.

  We have, in the laboratories, taken the virus through a total of seven different mutations, each of which has a different effect on human fertility. At present, we have no way of stopping the virus completely, but if our early tests hold true, the human race will be able to stop worrying about its birth rate.

  Ledgerton Virus sub-one reduces fertility to a scant 7%. Variety sub-two, which is currently sweeping the globe, raises that percentage to 53%. Certainly not what it was before, but high enough for two very determined people to start a baby, if they wish. The other varieties, which we’ve produced through careful bombardment of radiation (and other techniques), produce fertility levels ranging from 89% normal to 17%.

  We can expect the virus to keep mutating at least once every four years. This is often enough to keep humanity from developing any kind of immunity to it. Also, it will hold the birth rate down, without keeping it dangerously depressed.

  Gentlemen, without knowing it, Dr. Ledgerton seems to have stopped the population explosion.

  MAY 43, 2045

  TO: THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  FROM: THE SECRETARY OF INFORMATION

  Mr. President,

  Enclosed are samples of the publicity releases you requested.

  You will note that we have taken great pains to minimize Ledgerton’s homosexuality. As you said, “It wouldn’t do to have an effeminate American hero.”

  Motivational Research indicates that the need for a new American hero is greater than ever now, especially since the recent Mexican defeat. For that reason, I urge that we initiate this program as soon as possible.

  MAY 49, 2045

  MINISTRY OF INFORMATION PAMPHLET #354657-098

  …Single-handedly, this determined little man stopped the population explosion, stopped it dead with a biological brake—then he set that same brake so that it would release gently, allowing the race to maintain itself, but to cease its cancerous growth. When the death rates level off in the next few generations to match the new birth rates, the Earth will enjoy an era of peace and prosperity such as it has never known before….

  MAY 4, 2046

  TO: THE SECRETARY OF FINANCE

  FROM: THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  Dear Jase,

  Sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to quash your economic report on the primary causes of the current depression.

  You’re probably correct that the economy’s continued growth is a direct factor of the nation’s population spiral—but we can’t suggest that fact publicly without starting a minor panic. (Besides, anything which would reflect negatively on the Ledgerton Program would not be welcome in certain circles.)

  I agree with your recommendations though, and if you will circulate copies of your report (privately) to the Vice President and to the Secretary of Commerce, and also to the Secretary of the Treasury, between us we can initiate some of the steps you recommend to keep our financial heads above water.

  And the sooner the better. This is an election year and we want to retain control of the House.

  MAY 19, 2049

  EXCERPT FROM TODAY’S PSYCHOLOGY

  ...one of the effects is the disappearance of the term “unwanted child” from the language. There is no such thing anymore as an unwanted child. All children are wanted. Just look at the crowd of adults standing by the fence at any playground today.

  Of course, not all the cultural changes are so beneficent. For instance, in the past, the pregnancy of an unmarried girl could quite likely have been the result of a mistake. Today, it can only be the result of several nights of steady “mistakes.”

  However, now that the onus of pregnancy has been removed from intercourse, certain other moral conventions are vanishing. Women are enjoying a sexual freedom even greater than that of the late twentieth century when use of oral contraceptives first became widespread.

  In general, the population of the nation is more birth conscious than ever before, and one of the side effects has been a reduced tolerance for social and sexual deviants. Homosexuals have been driven out of several cities, and there is reason to believe that this trend will continue for some time....

  2050.05.06/TIMEFAX

  ...FOUND BEATEN TO DEATH IN AN ALLEY. THE MAN WAS LATER IDENTIFIED AS PAUL-JOHN MURDOCK, A VAGRANT. POLICE SUSPECT THE BEATING DEATH IS JUST ONE MORE IN A SERIES OF “ANTI-FAGGOT” INCIDENTS THAT HAVE RACKED URBANA IN RECENT, MONTHS.

  2053.05.10/TIMEFAX

  ...THE PRESIDENT ANNOUNCED TODAY A NEW STAMP COMMEMORATING THE WORK OF DR. DANA LEDGERTON, CONSTRUCTOR OF THE FERTILITY VIRUS. THE STAMP WILL GO ON SALE IN FOUR DAYS, TIMED TO COINCIDE WITH THE SIXTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH....

  AFTERWORD:

  I overestimated the number of people who would be living on this planet by the middle of this century. At least I hope I did.

  If I had written a longer version of this story, it would have been about the demographic upheavals between affected and unaffe
cted racial and cultural groups. It would have been about China and India taking over the world economy….

  This Crystal Castle

  For the first two years of my college career, I was an art major. I got just good enough to recognize that I would never be as good as I wanted to be.

  In one class, we would study a different artist’s style every week—Seurat, Rouault, Picasso, Henry Miller. On Monday we would look at the specific elements that characterized the style—then on Wednesday and Friday, we would draw or paint our own piece, using those same elements of that style.

  The intention was not to have us imitate any particular way of creating, but to understand it as a way of assaulting the canvas. (Well, in my case, it was an assault.) It wasn’t about mastering any specific style—it was about having a foundation on which to develop our own.

  The cumulative effect of that semester was profound.

  Later, as I started exercising my writing muscles, I found myself doing the same thing again, but this time at the keyboard instead of the easel. I looked at the stories of my favorite authors and studied how they handled mood and setting, language and description. What feelings did they evoke and how? Why did their words work so well?

  In the SF genre, several authors had established themselves as masters of style—they wrote with distinctly recognizable voices. Theodore Sturgeon was a master of the liquid paragraph; Jack Vance could sketch a marvelous landscape in handful of sentences; and Samuel R. Delaney took the reader sailing through luminance in a glorious flight of language.

  As I had done in class, I would put myself into (what I perceived) the mode of the creator in my own attempt to evoke a similar mood. Where Seurat had worked with tiny points of color, I worked with little bits of language. I tried on the Heinlein hat, of course—but I also tried on the Sturgeon hat, the Delaney hat, the Ellison hat, and others.

  Each time, I learned something new—until one day, I discovered my own hat. It had been on top of my head the whole time.

  This story wasn’t written to evoke the flavor of any specific author, but when it was finished I did recognize a smidge of this and a dollop of that.

  It is night, and the plants are scratching at the walls of the castle, a horrible sibilant sound. And the vampires are out. I can hear them cawing their insatiable craving. During the day they sleep somewhere in the dark valley below; at night, the scent of fresh blood draws them up the mountain and they circle ceaselessly about the castle. With the first pink and yellow rays of the sun they will shrink back down into their unholy valley; but for now, they circle and moan.

  The plants too are moaning. By day they take in oxygen, storing it in great flaccid sacs. In the cold night the sacs leak; the air seeps out in long meaningless groans, echoing the hunger of the vampires.

  I stand before the great bronze doors of the castle and listen to the incessant scrabbling of the plants. Sometimes I want to throw back those heavy doors and open myself to the night and the creatures that inhabit it. I could if I wanted to. I could; I know I could. I think the servants might even let me.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t. Someday I’ll find out.

  At last morning comes bright through the castle windows, and I rush eagerly down the stairs leading from my chambers and burst out into the world. The morning is a blue and white color. Always there is a breeze. If there is any warmth from the sun, the wind will wash it away. The star is a hole in the sky, a yellow-white glare; bright and cold, it cannot banish the chill of this great looming mountain.

  Today the flowers are red and yellow and they sparkle with little crystal droplets. Lovely they are, but lethal to touch. By noon they will have begun to wilt, and by afternoon they will be dead. By the time the sun nears the west there will be nothing left but shriveled wisps of meaningless ash.

  I stay on the walks of glass; they sparkle too, but not with the dampness. Lovely they are too, but not lethal. Here and there are delicate black designs, like trapped insects imbedded in the crystal layers of the walk; the light is broken into sparkling shards. Beautiful.

  Somewhere in the castle the servants are busying themselves with tasks of iron and crystal. I do not seek them, nor will they bother me. Here, high on the mountain, I am alone. I can see for miles. Down into a valley, deep carpeted with trees of tall green and gold. At the bottom is a river, winding through the canyon—narrow looking from here, but actually wide to cross.

  Then, up the other side of the rift, almost a solid straight wall of living green, at last giving way to the rocky tops across. And beyond are other mountains, sometimes shrouded in clouds, but more often with purpling peaks crisp against the sky.

  The distance must be miles. There are no castles on the other peaks. I am alone, the lord of this land, the lonely lord of this land. This beautiful and empty land.

  Like a grim dragon perched upon its towering aerie, the castle looms behind me. It looks over its world and broods, this great crystal and stone monster, glittering and glimmering in the light with sparks of white and gold and shimmery green.

  Parapets and arching towers, lofty terraces and balconies—all perch delicately atop those forbidding walls. Too high, too high, all too high. The walls below remain unbroken. Not a window, not a chink in their crystal surfaces. Every night I can hear the plants scrabbling and scratching as they strain for purchase. But the walls are good walls. They separate things—the plants from me and me from the world.

  The castle is carved out of the mountain itself. Great stones have been cut from the heart and raised to form walls around the summit. It is as if the whole of the mountain is only the base of the spire and the castle its pinnacle. It must be beautiful from a distance.

  My table is set, as always, in the garden—the garden that blooms at night and dies in the day. The service is crystal, as is everything in my world, even down to the utensils. The same type of crystal that walls the castle.

  The bread is fresh. As always. The meat is red and spicy beneath its crystal cover, and a goblet glitters with promises of icy sweet and tartness.

  When I finish, a servant comes, gleaming like bronze, golden in the sunlight. Without blemish and without expression. They are all like that; I cannot tell one from another. They provide for my needs, all of them.

  He does not look at me, he never does, but goes about his tasks with a familiar efficiency. He handles the emptied dishes with no sign of either obeisance or distaste, no emotion at all; and placing them on his tray, he goes. His footfall leaves the crystal walk ringing like bells.

  It is the same every morning.

  I wander about the grounds, but a complete circuit takes less than ten minutes.

  There are places where balconies pause like afterthoughts, overlooking the steep sides of the mountain—places where a piece of wall and floor and perhaps a crystal bench have been put so as to keep the castle from having an unfinished look. I could throw myself off from one of these places.

  But they would stop me. They always do.

  Every day it is the same.

  I note how the flowers are already losing their glimmer. The luster of life is fading and their creepers are shriveling off the edge of the walk. In the darkness of night those same creepers will return to scrape and scratch at my unyielding surfaces.

  Finally, even though they are watching me, they know and I know it is inevitable. I follow the walk down to where it touches the edge of the creeping forest. And I stare hungrily into that aching and uneasy mass of green and black. Deep shimmering buds cluster up and down the tall trunks. I imagine I can see past them—past their sluggish tendrils, far past—down to where the tall trees give way to the lesser ones, the twisted ones, where convoluted vines twist and wind among the dark grasping limbs at the bottom.

  I find myself longing for the sight of just one living thing. Anything. An animal, any animal; a small one would do—just a squirrel or even a bird. An insect perhaps. Something alive. I mean really alive, not the half-alive, leechlike creatures that infes
t the forest. I mean something really alive. Anything.

  I can stand it no longer; I turn away and back toward the castle looming dark above me. It is haloed by its own shimmering outline. The crystal walls glitter with the light of the yellow sun, which from here is hidden behind that great bulk. The sky is aching and empty blue behind it.

  Just one living thing, I ask. Just one living thing.

  I am possessed by frenzy. I run screaming through the castle in madness.

  But the chairs are too heavy to throw, the draperies too strong to tear, the windows too thick to shatter. And of objects that might be used as weapons, there are none. The servants saw to that a long time ago.

  I run screaming through the castle; hoarse cries echo blankly off impassive faces. “How can you let me go on like this?!! This is madness! I must escape! I must be free of this! I must!”

  I scrape at the glittering walls until my nails are bloody and useless. I hammer and claw at them, all the time sobbing, sobbing, and collapsing in a heap. When I am through, the servants tend my wounds. Every day it is the same.

  Except—

  —once. He was young. Innocent. The freshness of spring was still on his cheeks. His eyes were closed, his skin was pale, and his hair was plastered wetly on his forehead.

  The servants ran their silent hands across his frame. Minimal injuries. He had suffered no broken bones in the crash; only the shock, nothing more. Somewhere out in the night, pieces of a steel needle still smoldered across a gashed hillside.