And now he plants the holy seed, That grows in Mommo’s womb, And now a little sibling comes—
There is an unpleasant and unscheduled interruption. A woman rushes toward Mattern and Gortman in the corridor. She is young, untidy, wearing only a flimsy gray wrap; her hair is loose; she is well along in pregnancy. “Help!” she shrieks. “My husband’s gone flippo!” She hurls herself, trembling, into Gortman’s arms. The visitor looks bewildered.
Behind her there runs a man in his early twenties, haggard, bloodshot eyes. He carries a fabricator torch whose tip glows with heat. “Goddamn bitch,” he mumbles. “Allatime babies! Seven babies already and now number eight and I gonna go off my head!” Mattern is appalled. He pulls the woman away from Gortman and shoves the visitor through the door of the school.
“Tell them there’s a flippo out here,” Mattern says. “Get help, fast!” He is furious that Gortman should witness so atypical a scene, and wishes to get him away from it.
The trembling girl cowers behind Mattern. Quietly Mattern says, “Let’s be reasonable, young man. You’ve spent your whole life in urbmons, haven’t you? You understand that it’s blessed to create. Why do you suddenly repudiate the principles on which—“
“Get the hell away from her or I gonna burn you too!”
The young man feints with the torch, straight at Mattern’s face. Mattern feels the heat and flinches. The young man swipes past him at the woman. She leaps away, but she is clumsy with girth, and the torch slices her garment. Pale white flesh is exposed with a brilliant bum-streak down it. She cups her jutting belly and falls, screaming. The young man jostles Mattern aside and prepares to thrust the torch into her side. Mattern tries to seize his arm. He deflects the torch; it chars the floor. The young man, cursing, drops it and throws himself on Mattern, pounding in frenzy with his fists. “Help me!” Mattern calls. “Help!”
Into the corridor erupt dozens of schoolchildren. They are between eight and eleven years old, and they continue to sing their hymn as they pour forth. They pull Mattern’s assailant away. Swiftly, smoothly, they cover him with their bodies. He can dimly be seen beneath the flailing, thrashing mass. Dozens more pour from the schoolroom and join the heap. A siren wails. A whistle blows. The teacher’s amplified voice booms, “The police are here! Everyone off!”
Four men in uniform have arrived. They survey the situation. The injured woman lies groaning, rubbing her burn. The insane man is unconscious; his face is bloody and one eye appears to be destroyed. “What happened?” a policeman asks. “Who are you?”
“Charles Mattern, sociocomputator, 799th level, Shanghai. The man’s a flippo. Attacked his pregnant wife with the torch. Attempted to attack me.”
The policemen haul the flippo to his feet. He sags in their midst. The police leader says, rattling the words into one another, “Guilty of atrocious assault on woman of childbearing years currently carrying unborn life, dangerous antisocial tendencies, by virtue of authority vested in me I pronounce sentence of erasure, carry out immediately. Down the chute with the bastard, boys!” They haul the flippo away. Medics arrive to care for the woman. The children, once again singing, return to the classroom. Nicanor Gortman looks dazed and shaken. Mattern seizes his arm and whispers fiercely, “All right, those things happen sometime. But it was a billion to one against having it happen where you’d see it! It isn’t typical! It isn’t typical!”
They enter the classroom.
The sun is setting. The western face of the neighboring urban monad is streaked with red. Nicanor Gortman sits quietly at dinner with the members of the Mattern family. The children, voices tumbling one over another, talk of their day at school. The evening news comes on the screen; the announcer mentions the unfortunate event on the 108th floor. “The mother was not seriously injured,” he says, “and no harm came to her unborn child.” Principessa murmurs, “Bless God.” After dinner Mattern requests copies of his most recent technical papers from the data terminal and gives them to Gortman to read at his leisure. Gortman thanks him.
“You look tired,” Mattern says.
“It was a busy day. And a rewarding one.”
“Yes. We really traveled, didn’t we?”
Mattern is tired too. They have visited nearly three dozen levels already; he has shown Gortman town meetings, fertility clinics, religious services, business offices. Tomorrow there will be much more to see. Urban Monad 116 is a varied, complex community. And a happy one, Mattern tells himself firmly. We have a few little incidents from time to time, but we’re happy.
The children, one by one, go to sleep, charmingly kissing Daddo and Mommo and the visitor good night and running across the room, sweet nude little pixies, to their cots. The lights automatically dim. Mattern feels faintly depressed; the unpleasantness on 108 has spoiled what was otherwise an excellent day. Yet he still thinks that he has succeeded in helping Gortman see past the superficialities to the innate harmony and serenity of the urbmon way. And now he will allow the guest to experience for himself one of their techniques for minimizing the interpersonal conflicts that could be so destructive to their kind of society. Mattern rises.
“It’s nightwalking time,” he says. “I’ll go. You stay here . . . with Principessa.” He suspects that the visitor would appreciate some privacy.
Gortman looks uneasy.
“Go on,” Mattern says. “Enjoy yourself. People don’t deny happiness to people here. We weed the selfish ones out early. Please. What I have is yours. Isn’t that so, Principessa?”
“Certainly,” she says.
Mattern steps out of the room, walks quickly down the corridor, enters the dropshaft and descends to the 770th floor. As he steps out he hears sudden angry shouts, and he stiffens, fearing that he will become involved in another nasty episode, but no one appears. He walks on. He passes the black door of a chute access door and shivers a little, and suddenly he thinks of the young man with the fabricator torch, and where that young man probably is now. And then, without warning, there swims up from memory the face of the brother he had once had who had gone down that same chute, the brother one year his senior, Jeffrey, the whiner, the stealer, Jeffrey the selfish, Jeffrey the unadaptable, Jeffrey who had had to be given to the chute. For an instant Mattern is stunned and sickened, and he seizes a doorknob in his dizziness.
The door opens. He goes in. He has never been a nightwalker on this floor before. Five children lie asleep in their cots, and on the sleeping platform are a man and a woman, both younger than he is, both asleep. Mattern removes his clothing and lies down on the woman’s left side. He touches her thigh, then her breast. She opens her eyes and he says, “Hello. Charles Mattern, 799.”
“Gina Burke,” she says. “My husband, Lenny.”
Lenny awakens. He sees Mattern, nods, turns over and returns to sleep. Mattern kisses Gina Burke lightly on the lips. She opens her arms to him. He shivers a little in his need, and sighs as she receives him. God bless, he thinks. It has been a happy day in 2381, and now it is over.
THIS MOMENT OF THE STORM
Roger Zelazny
* * *
It has become a cliché to say, “You can’t go home again.” But, like most clichés, it also happens to be absolutely true—which is why people said it often enough to metamorphose it into a cliché. You can’t ever go home to anything. Not even to yourself. The second that just ticked past while you read the previous line is forever out of your reach. You may think of a thousand things that you would rather have done with that second, but there is only one thing that you did do with it, regret it as you may. This is the heart of tragedy: that time is all blood under the bridge. We are like coral reefs, eaten away by the sea, recreated, eaten again, never the same, never static, a thing never repeated exactly once it is gone, though you may be mocked endlessly by a million near echoes that are never near enough. Try to trace a single drop of water through that sea, try to keep track of a favorite cell inside the multitudinous living reef of your body. Try to find home.
Here Roger Zelazny examines some of the basic elements that affect everyone’s life—the indifference of the universe, the alienation of distance, the inevitability of time—all dissected by his usual deft scalpel touch, wrapped in his feeling for humanity and distinguished by some of the most alive and atmospheric writing in the genre.
G.D.
* * *
Back on Earth, my old philosophy prof—possibly because he’d misplaced his lecture notes—came into the classroom one day and scrutinized his sixteen victims for the space of half a minute. Satisfied, then, that a sufficiently profound tone had been established, he asked:
“What is a man?”
He had known exactly what he was doing. He’d had an hour and a half to kill, and eleven of the sixteen were coeds (nine of them in liberal arts, and the other two stuck with an Area Requirement).
One of the other two, who was in the pre-med program, proceeded to provide a strict biological classification.
The prof (McNitt was his name, I suddenly recall) nodded then, and asked:
“Is that all?”
And there was his hour and a half.
I learned that Man is the reasoning animal, Man is the one who laughs, Man is greater than beasts but less than angels, Man is the one who watches himself watch himself doing things he knows are absurd (this from a Comparative Lit gal), Man is the culture-transmitting animal, Man is the spirit which aspires, affirms, loves, the one who uses tools, buries his dead, devises religions, and the one who tries to define himself. (That last from Paul Schwartz, my roommate—which I thought pretty good, on the spur of the moment. Wonder what ever became of Paul?)
Anyhow, to most of these I say “perhaps” or “partly, but—” or just plain “crap!” I still think mine was the best, because I had a chance to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan. . . .
I’d said, “Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn’t.”
Stop and think about it for a minute. It’s purposely as general as the others, but it’s got room in it for the biology and the laughing and the aspiring, as well as the culture-transmitting, the love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining. I even left the door open for religion, you’ll note. But it’s limiting too. Ever met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?
Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name.
Delightful place too, for quite a while . . .
It was there that I saw the definitions of Man, one by one, wiped off the big blackboard, until only mine was left.
My radio had been playing more static than usual. That’s all. For several hours there was no other indication of what was to come.
My hundred thirty eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that clear, cool spring day with the sun pouring down its honey and lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the streets, invading western storefronts, drying curbstones, and washing the olive and umber buds that speared the skin of the trees there by the roadway; and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made orange mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across the shoulders of Saint Stephen’s Range, some thirty miles distant, and came down upon the forest at its feet like some supernatural madman with a million buckets of paint—each of a different shade of green, yellow, orange, blue and red—to daub with miles-wide brushes at its heaving sea of growth.
Mornings the sky is cobalt, midday turquoise, and sunset emeralds and rubies, hard and flashing. It was halfway between cobalt and sea mist at 1100 hours, when I watched Betty with my hundred thirty eyes and saw nothing to indicate what was about to be. There was only that persistent piece of static, accompanying the piano and strings within my portable.
It’s funny how the mind personifies, engenders. Ships are always women. You say, “She’s a good old tub,” or “She’s a fast, tough number, this one,” slapping a bulwark and feeling the aura of femininity that clings to the vessel’s curves; or; conversely, “He’s a bastard to start, that little Sam!” as you kick the auxiliary engine in an inland transport vehicle; and hurricanes are always women, and moons, and seas. Cities, though are different. Generally they’re neuter. Nobody calls New York or San Francisco “he” or “she.” Mostly cities are just “it.”
Sometimes, however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex. Usually this is in the case of small cities near the Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps it is because of the sex-ridden nouns of the languages that prevail in that vicinity, in which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does about the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.
Betty was Beta Station for less than ten years. After two decades she was Betty officially, by act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt at the time (ninety-some years ago), and still feel, that it was because she was what she was—a place of rest and repair, of surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes, weather, and natural light again, after that long haul through the big night, with its casting away of so much. She is not home, she is seldom destination, but she is like unto both. When you come upon light and warmth and music after darkness and cold and silence, it is Woman. The old-time Mediterranean sailor must have felt it when he first spied port at the end of a voyage. I felt it when I first saw Beta Station—Betty—and the second time I saw her, also.
I am her Hell Cop.
When six or seven of my hundred thirty eyes flickered, then saw again, and the music was suddenly washed away by a wave of static, it was then that I began to feel uneasy.
I called Weather Central for a report, and the recorded girl-voice told me that seasonal rains were expected in the afternoon or early evening. I hung up and switched an eye from ventral to dorsal vision.
Not a cloud. Not a ripple. Only a formation of green-winged sky toads, heading north, crossed the field of the lens.
I switched it back, and I watched the traffic flow, slowly, and without congestion, along Betty’s prim, well-tended streets. Three men were leaving the bank and two more were entering. I recognized the three who were leaving, and in my mind I waved as I passed by. All was still at the post office, and patterns of normal activity lay upon the steel mills, the stockyard, the plast-synth plants, the airport, the spacer pads and the surfaces of all the shopping complexes; vehicles came and went at the Inland Transport Vehicle garages, crawling from the rainbow forest and the mountains beyond like dark slugs, leaving tread trails to mark their comings and goings through wilderness; and the fields of the countryside were still yellow and brown, with occasional patches of green and pink; the country houses, mainly simple A-frame affairs, were chisel blade, spike tooth, spire and steeple, each with a big lightning rod, and dipped in many colors and scooped up in the cups of my seeing and dumped out again, as I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my gallery of one hundred thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall.
The static came and went until I had to shut off the radio. Fragments of music are worse than no music at all.
My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.
I knew then that we were in for something.
I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen’s at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another I sent straight up, skyward, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.
I entered the mayor’s outer office, winked at Lottie, the receptionist, and glanced at the inner door.
“Mayor in?” I asked.
I got an occasional smile from Lottie, a slightly heavy but well-rounded girl of indeterminate age and intermittent acne, but this wasn’t one of the occasions.
“Yes,” she said, returning to the papers on her desk.
“Alone?”
She nodded, and her earrings da
nced. Dark eyes and dark complexion, she could have been kind of sharp, if only she’d fix her hair and use more makeup. Well . . .
I crossed to the door and knocked.
“Who?” asked the mayor.
“Me,” I said, opening it, “Godfrey Justin Holmes—‘God’ for short. I want someone to drink coffee with, and you’re elected.”
She turned in her swivel chair, away from the window she had been studying, and her blond-hair-white-hair-fused, short and parted in the middle, gave a little stir as she turned—like a sun-shot snowdrift struck by sudden winds.
She smiled and said, “I’m busy.”
“Eyes green, chin small, cute little ears: I love them all”—from an anonymous Valentine I’d sent her two months previous, and true.
“. . . But not too busy to have coffee with Cod,” she stated. “Have a throne, and I’ll make us some instant.”
I did, and she did.
While she was doing it, I leaned back, lit a cigarette I’d borrowed from her canister and remarked, “Looks like rain.”
“Uh huh,” she said.
“Not just making conversation,” I told her. “There’s a bad storm brewing somewhere—over Saint Stephen’s, I think. I’ll know real soon.”
“Yes, grandfather,” she said, bringing me my coffee. “You oldtimers with all your aches and pains are often better than Weather Central; it’s an established fact. I won’t argue.”
She smiled, frowned, then smiled again.
I set my cup on the edge of her desk.
“Just wait and see,” I said. “If it makes it over the mountains, it’ll be a nasty high-voltage job. It’s already jazzing up reception.”
A Day in the Life Page 13