by Anthology
“Oh, it’s you, hi.” She says, then notices Dany and quietly adds, as if he’s not there, “My God, Marek, he looks just like you when we met. My god, he’s so beautiful.”
“Can we come in?”
She opens the door.
“Where’s Rick?”
“That bastard.”
Dany sweeps Max up from the corner and says, “Hello grubby-chubby.” Max grins, revealing a little tooth and letting out another big dribble to join the one connecting his chin and chest.
“I’m moving out of this place soon,” says Genie, sweeping back her limp mousy hair, only to have it fall back across her forehead, another symbol of the world’s resistance to her desires.
“I’m amazed you stayed so long,” I say, looking over to Dany and Max, who are playing with a toy that hovers in the air but avoids being caught when you reach out to it. Both have child-like expressions on their faces.
Genie looks over and says again, quietly, “amazing.”
“I’m thinking of going back and being a musician,” I say.
“Oh yeah.”
“No, really.”
Genie looks away from Dany and Max to me. “God, Marek. It would have been alright if you had really wanted to play music, but you always sat in that grey zone your whole life. You didn’t really try music, you always held onto it so you wouldn’t try anything else.”
“The openings were never there; you have to be lucky.”
“You were never ready, never good enough. You never wanted to work at it.”
“Jesus, Genie, you don’t understand how hard it is.”
She reaches over and takes my hand, and just looks at me.
After a moment I say, “I’ll try to come more often.”
“You won’t though, you know you won’t.”
There’s nothing else for me to say, standing there looking back and forth at the one real love of my life and the thin blond hair of my son, as he sits comfortably on Dany’s lap. Her hand feels soft in mine.
On Dany’s last day, before he shoots off to Centauri, I arrive at his penthouse and Christy the skip-girl is wandering about, topless, with a skirt that sits high enough to show her knickers underneath. “Where’s that top?” she asks no one in particular.
Dany is still in the shower and I can hear the running water above the soft sound of the ocean soundscape, carefully designed for relaxation but actually infuriating. Relaxation soundscapes make me want to smash something.
“Here it is.” Christy pulls the top out from under a couch, puts it straight on and then holds her stomach, looking down at it with curiosity.
Oh no, I think, not again.
Christy looks over at me, smiles, grabs her bag and heads for the door.
“Hey Christy?”
She turns.
“You . . .” My voice trails off with my confidence.
“Yeah?”
“Oh, it’s okay.”
She waits for a second to see if I have anything else to add, decides I don’t and then lets herself out.
A few moments later Dany comes in, drying his hair with a towel. “Turn that fucking sea-sound off would you?” he says. “It’s annoying.”
I smile, head to the panel and turn all the soundscapes off.
He throws the towel on the floor, sits down, and raises his eyebrows as if to say, well, there you go.
So I hit him with it: “So, you’re going to leave, just like that?”
A look of confusion crosses his face and he says, “Don’t.”
He gets up, walks across to the windows and looks over to the opposite Tower. “This place is so strange,” he adds.
I look at him, and he looks small and young and out of place. I know now, that it is time to let him go. I know who he is: He’s Dany; he’s my father.
“I came to say goodbye,” I say.
“Okay,” he says and continues to look out over to the mammoth structure, with its thousands of floors containing whole social ecosystems. Whole worlds even. And beyond that the suburbs: filled with people who fell short of their aims and now settle in the grey zone of their life, their quiet desperation muffled. And even further, beyond that, the tiny speck of the ruined city, the dead heart of things, where lights once flashed and people once gathered before everything slipped off track so subtly, so we didn’t notice and found ourselves in a world new and strange and hard to bear. That’s how I leave him, staring over the geographies of our lives, a man who should have looked older than me, but could have been my own son. He is gone the next day, back out to the stars where he belongs and a few days after that, as I sit in my chair at home, Mozart’s requiem surrounding me and filling me. Lord grant them eternal rest, the chorus sings, and let the perpetual light shine upon them. I know it’s time to call Leila. She is, after all, my sister.
When Genie opens the door she says, “Oh, it’s you.”
I shrug, as if to say, “well there you go.”
“Come in. Come in.”
The place is still a mess but I don’t mind. Max is in a high chair and waves his arms around. I stand awkwardly across from Genie as she starts picking clothes up from the ground. She always starts cleaning when I arrive.
“He’s gone,” I say.
“I know.”
I look over at Max, who has now stopped waving his arms and is examining me curiously. I walk over to him, pick him up and sit him on my hip. He stares impassively and I’m afraid he’ll cry.
“Hi Max,” I say quietly, and then turn to Genie, hoping that if I act naturally, he’ll feel comfortable. “Leila . . . she really should have talked to Dany.”
“Yeah, why didn’t she? I thought he was nice. And so pretty.” Her eyes sparkle mischievously.
“You’ll never guess what’s happened.”
“What?”
“One of the skip-girls that Dany was seeing—I think she’s pregnant.”
“No!”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. I nearly asked her but . . . it was awkward.”
Genie shakes her head: “He’ll never change, will he?”
“He’s okay,” I say, “He doesn’t really hurt . . .” I stop myself.
Max starts to cry and holds his arms out to Genie, who laughs. She takes him from me. Safe once more Max turns and frowns at me. I’m getting used to the frown.
“Don’t worry,” says Genie, “he’s like that with everyone.”
“Hey,” I say, “do you want to hear my new composition?”
“Sure,” she says.
“I got the idea from Mozart. It’s sort of a requiem.”
I walk over to the old computer in the corner of the room—my old computer. I start it up, touching its old keys lovingly.
Shortly afterwards the piece is playing, filling the room with the sound of deep voices and high strings. No complex beats but a few electronic noises fading in and out—I wanted to keep the classic feel. Genie and I sit on the couch together, Max on Genie’s lap, listening as the music fills the room around us. I close my eyes and listen as the voices come in, singing back at the past.
DOMINOES
C.M. Kornbluth
“Money!” his wife screamed at him. “You’re killing yourself, Will. Pull out of the market and let’s go some place where we can live like human—”
He slammed the apartment door on her reproaches and winced, standing in the carpeted corridor, as an ulcer twinge went through him. The elevator door rolled open and the elevator man said, beaming: “Good morning, Mr. Born. It’s a lovely day today.”
“I’m glad, Sam,” W.J. Born said sourly. “I just had a lovely, lovely breakfast.” Sam didn’t know how to take it, and compromised by giving him a meager smile.
“How’s the market look, Mr. Born?” he hinted as the car stopped on the first floor. “My cousin told me to switch from Lunar Entertainment, he’s studying to be a pilot, but the Journal has it listed for growth.”
W.J. Born grunted: “If I knew I wouldn’t tell you.
You’ve got no business in the market. Not if you think you can play it like a craps-table.”
He fumed all through his taxi ride to the office. Sam, a million Sams, had no business in the market. But they were in, and they had built up the Great Boom of 1975 on which W.J. Born Associates was coasting merrily along. For how long? His ulcer twinged again at the thought.
He arrived at 9:15. Already the office was a maelstrom. The clattering tickers, blinking boards and racing messengers spelled out the latest, hottest word from markets in London, Paris, Milan, Vienna. Soon New York would chime in, then Chicago, then San Francisco.
Maybe this would be the day. Maybe New York would open on a significant decline in Moon Mining and Smelting. Maybe Chicago would nervously respond with a slump in commodities and San Francisco’s Utah Uranium would plummet in sympathy. Maybe panic in the Tokyo Exchange on the heels of the alarming news from the States—panic relayed across Asia with the rising sun to Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, and crashing like a shock-wave into the opening New York market again.
Dominoes, W.J. Born thought. A row of dominoes. Flick one and they all topple in a heap. Maybe this would be the day.
Miss Illig had a dozen calls from his personal crash-priority clients penciled in on his desk pad already. He ignored them and said into her good-morning smile: “Get me Mr. Loring on the phone.”
Loring’s phone rang and rang while W.J. Born boiled inwardly. But the lab was a barn of a place, and when he was hard at work he was deaf and blind to distractions. You had to hand him that. He was screwy, he was insolent, he had an inferiority complex that stuck out a yard, but he was a worker.
Loring’s insolent voice said in his ear: “Who’s this?”
“Born,” he snapped. “How’s it going?”
There was a long pause, and Loring said casually: “I worked all night. I think I got it licked.”
“What do you mean?”
Very irritated: “I said I think I got it licked. I sent a clock and a cat and a cage of white mice out for two hours. They came back okay.”
“You mean—” W.J. Born began hoarsely, and moistened his lips. “How many years?” he asked evenly.
“The mice didn’t say, but I think they spent two hours in 1977.”
“I’m coming right over,” W.J. Born snapped, and hung up. His office staff stared as he strode out.
If the man was lying—! No; he didn’t lie. He’d been sopping up money for six months, ever since he bulled his way into Born’s office with his time machine project, but he hadn’t lied once. With brutal frankness he had admitted his own failures and his doubts that the thing ever would be made to work. But now, W.J. Born rejoiced, it had turned into the smartest gamble of his career. Six months and a quarter of a million dollars—a two-year forecast on the market was worth a billion! Four thousand to one, he gloated; four thousand to one! Two hours to learn when the Great Bull Market of 1975 would collapse and then back to his office armed with the information, ready to buy up to the very crest of the boom and then get out at the peak, wealthy forever, forever beyond the reach of fortune, good or bad!
He stumped upstairs to Loring’s loft in the West 70’s.
Loring was badly overplaying the role of casual roughneck. Gangling, redheaded and unshaved, he grinned at Born and said: “Watcha think of soy futures, W.J.? Hold or switch?”
W.J. Born began automatically: “If I knew I wouldn’t—oh, don’t be silly. Show me the confounded thing.”
Loring showed him. The whining generators were unchanged; the tall Van de Graaf accumulator still looked like something out of a third-rate horror movie. The thirty square feet of haywired vacuum tubes and resistences were still an incomprehensible tangle. But since his last visit a phone booth without a phone had been added. A sheet-copper disk set into its ceiling was connected to the machinery by a ponderous cable. Its floor was a slab of polished glass.
“That’s it,” Loring said. “I got it at a junkyard and fixed it up pretty. You want to watch a test on the mice?”
“No,” W.J. Born said. “I want to try it myself. What do you think I’ve been paying you for?” He paused. “Do you guarantee its safety?”
“Look, W.J.,” Loring said, “I guarantee nothing. I think this will send you two years into the future. I think if you’re back in it at the end of two hours you’ll snap back to the present. I’ll tell you this, though. If it does send you into the future, you had better be back in it at the end of two hours. Otherwise you may snap back into the same space as a strolling pedestrian or a moving car—and an H-bomb will be out of your league.”
W.J. Bora’s ulcer twinged. With difficulty he asked: “Is there anything else I ought to know?”
“Nope,” Loring said after considering for a moment “You’re just a paying passenger.”
“Then let’s go.” W.J. Born checked to make sure that he had his memorandum book and smooth-working pen in his pocket and stepped into the telephone booth.
Loring closed the door, grinned, waved and vanished—literally vanished, while Born was looking at him.
Born yanked the door open and said: “Loring! What the devil—” And then he saw that it was late afternoon instead of early morning. That Loring was nowhere in the loft. That the generators were silent and the tubes dark and cold. That there was a mantle of dust and a-faint musty smell.
He rushed from the big room and down the stairs. It was the same street in the West 70’s. Two hours, he thought, and looked at his watch. It said 9:55, but the sun unmistakably said it was late afternoon. Something had happened. He resisted an impulse to grab a passing high-school boy and ask him what year it was. There was a newsstand down the street, and Born went to it faster than he had moved in years. He threw down a dime and snatched a Post, dated—September 11th, 1977. He had done it.
Eagerly he riffled to the Post’s meager financial page. Moon Mining and Smelting had opened at 27. Uranium at 19. United Com at 24. Catastrophic lows! The crash had come!
He looked at his watch again, in panic. Nine-fifty-nine. It had said 9:55. He’d have to be back in the phone booth by 11:55 or—he shuddered. An H-bomb would be out of his league.
Now to pinpoint the crash. “Cab!” he yelled, waving his paper. It eased to the curb. “Public library,” W.J. Born grunted, and leaned back to read the Post with glee.
The headline said: 2500—RIOT HERE FOR UPPED JOBLESS DOLE. Naturally; naturally. He gasped as he saw who had won the 1976 presidential election. Lord, what odds he’d be able to get back in 1975 if he wanted to bet on the nomination! NO CRIME WAVE, SAYS COMMISSIONER. Things hadn’t changed very much after all. BLONDE MODEL HACKED IN TUB; MYSTERY BOYFRIEND SOUGHT. He read that one all the way through, caught by a two-column photo of the blonde model for a hosiery account. And then he noticed that the cab wasn’t moving. It was caught in a rock-solid traffic jam. The time was 10:05.
“Driver,” he said.
The man turned around, soothing and scared. A fare was a fare; there was a depression on. “It’s all right, mister. We’ll be out of here in a minute. They turn off the Drive and that blocks the avenue for a couple of minutes, that’s all. We’ll be rolling in a minute.”
They were rolling in a minute, but for a few seconds only. The cab inched agonizingly along while W.J. Bora twisted the newspaper in his hands. At 10:13 he threw a bill at the driver and jumped from the cab.
Panting, he reached the library at 10:46 by his watch. By the time that the rest of the world was keeping on that day it was quitting-time in the midtown offices. He had bucked a stream of girls in surprisingly short skirts and surprisingly big hats all the way.
He got lost in the marble immensities of the library and his own panic. When he found the newspaper room his watch said 11:03. W.J. Born panted to the girl at the desk: “File of theStock Exchange Journal for 1975, 1976 and 1977.”
“We have the microfilms for 1975 and 1976, sir, and loose copies for this year.”
“Tell me,” he said, “what ye
ar for the big crash? That’s what I want to look up.”
“That’s 1975, sir. Shall I get you that?”
“Wait,” he said. “Do you happen to remember the month?”
“I think it was March or August or something like that, sir.”
“Get me the whole file, please,” he said. Nineteen seventy-five. His year—his real year. Would he have a month? A week? Or—?
“Sign this card, mister,” the girl was saying patiently. “There’s a reading machine, you just go sit there and I’ll bring you the spool.”
He scribbled his name and went to the machine, the only one vacant in a row of a dozen. The time on his watch was 11:05. He had fifty minutes.
The girl dawdled over cards at her desk and chatted with a good-looking young page with a stack of books while sweat began to pop from Born’s brow. At last she disappeared into the stacks behind her desk.
Born waited. And waited. And waited. Eleven-ten. Eleven-fifteen. Eleven-twenty.
An H-bomb would be out of his league.
His ulcer stabbed him as the girl appeared again, daintily carrying a spool of 35-millimeter film between thumb and forefinger, smiling brightly at Born. “Here we are,” she said, and inserted the spool in the machine and snapped a switch. Nothing happened.
“Oh, dam,” she said. “The light’s out. I told the electrician.”
Born wanted to scream and then to explain, which would have been just as foolish.
“There’s a free reader,” she pointed down the line. W.J. Born’s knees tottered as they walked to it. He looked at his watch—11:27. Twenty-eight minutes to go. The ground-glass screen lit up with a shadow of the familiar format; January 1st, 1975. “You just turn the crank,” she said, and showed him. The shadows spun past on the screen at dizzying speed, and she went back to her desk.
Born cranked the film up to April, 1975, the month he had left 91 minutes ago, and to the sixteenth day of April, the very day he had left. The shadow on the ground glass was the same paper he had seen that morning:synthetics surge to new vienna peak.