“Women always want something,” his father said to him again, in a voice clear and strong out of the abyss. “They don’t know what they want, even when they get it, but it doesn’t matter, because their bodies know.” His voice was clear of drink, speaking as Benek had never heard it. “A man comes before a woman like a beggar, hoping that she’ll smile and find him worthy, or even show mercy and give him what he’s been wound up like a toy to need. It’s a woman who is a man’s first judge—the mother who can’t help but see whether her boy will succeed with her kind. In his young manhood, women push a man to fulfill the purpose of an ancient relay race. In his last years, when he is no longer necessary, they tolerate him, and finally bury him...”
In his father’s voice Benek understood Dierdre. She was a souped-up deployment of a normal human being’s needs. Ignorance, lies, and malign animus were already present and waiting to be amplified in a species that pointed all its weapons at itself.
She had gone to Reddy now, and the captain would not have the slightest chance of comprehending the power of uniquely enabled impulses that had come for him. Her ability tempted her constantly, but she had only the wildest ideas of how to benefit from it.
She might have secured a research stipend for the rest of her life if she were willing to submit to study. He imagined her trying to play academic politics. As a subject of research she would be imprisoned behind one-way mirrors and closed-circuit cameras. She would be a constant threat, no matter what assurances she gave. Her power implied all sorts of things about physical laws and the human mind, but she would never permit herself to be studied for long, no matter how luxurious a prison might be built to hold her. She would never be able to contribute to human betterment. She would dream of armies falling before her, nations bowing to her throne; she would be held helpless by her own corruption, and welcome it as one takes for granted the air one breathes, because she was a heaven and hell unto herself.
It would be just too difficult to capture her. The only safe way would be if she gave herself up, or revealed herself to trained observers, and that was unlikely. But no matter how often he thought about it, he could see no alternative to killing her; and there was no one to help him; no one to say that it was the right thing to do; and there would be no one later to help him live with it by telling him that he had done the right thing, that he had acted for a greater good than his own. He could not even warn Reddy, because the tally of dead would simply add up in another way. He had to wait, and kill her in a dream...
None of this had happened. He was trapped in someone else’s nightmare, unable to control it or wake up. He got up and started to dress, distantly aware that some part of him still knew what it was doing, reminding him that he had survived to finish his job, whatever the cost. The job did not care if he lived, did not find it necessary that he survive to finish it...
It did not matter that she had gone to empty Reddy. The captain’s death was a waiting distraction. Now was the time, he realized behind his softness, when she would not expect him to come after her.
He would have liked it better if he had planned it in another, more heroic way; but instead he had fallen apart in the crucial confrontation and failed to kill her. Now he was telling himself that here was the moment, the true moment he had been waiting for to redeem the lost ones. He would at least go through the motions.
He put on his jacket, took the gun out from the right hand pocket, checked it, then looked out the window and saw that it was a beautiful late autumn day. She had probably walked to the precinct, and might be coming back along the river walkway. He might be able to spot her before she saw him. Someone else would have to collect the rents.
He would be arrested, of course, and the bullet would match his gun, but he would tell them to open dead Reddy’s skull, and be saved by the emptiness inside his captain’s head. For a moment he imagined that he would bludgeon her to death. He might have killed her while she was sleeping, having awakened first. No, the truth was that he might fail to kill her at every opportunity. The only way was to try again. She had spared him for reasons that he didn’t understand, and neither did she, it seemed; all the world’s seeming was nothing to what hid behind it...
He was insane, he told himself as he went out the door. This was how it felt, and that was what it had to be, convincing, to be insanity; nothing was as convincing. In the last weeks he had slipped back and forth across the line several times without noticing that his delusions seemed too reasonable. He was quite sane, given his bizarre circumstances. Sanity or insanity was always a matter of circumstances that matched reality—but who was making the comparison?
He came to the front door, opened it, and hurried down the front steps, breathing in the fresh, cool air that seemed suddenly capable of making him clean again. The sky was a breathtaking blue ceiling, solid and close enough that he could reach up and touch it. Sunshine sparkled in the windows of the brownstone buildings, imprisoned by the glass. He grasped the gun in his pocket and sought his resolve, fearing that he would not find it because something had been broken irrevocably deep within him. Too many constraints had been loosened for him to care what happened to him. A good cop thinks about the people he has to protect. That still mattered. That was why he had abased himself before her, half planning it, half unable to control his fear, so he might make good on his failures, even if he had to sleepwalk to salvation.
For a moment she was beautiful in his mind, the dark-haired, porcelain princess whose love he would never win because she did not know that she had it to give. She had come to him from a lost kingdom to judge him and his kind—but she had taken too much away and he would judge her in kind.
He pitied her. What could be expected of her? That she not use her skill? A life of restraint, just like everyone else? For her to know others like her would not help. That was the way of the powerless. Some got along, and far too many killed each other. Why had he expected it to be different with her?
It would be a mercy to finish her off. He almost laughed. Keats’s woman without mercy knew enough not to expect much from her loitering knight, or he from her.
24
Dierdre saw him coming up the river walkway. He walked with his hands pushed down into his jacket pockets, unsteady on his feet, but she found the sight of him suddenly pleasing. He smiled shyly as he came toward her. She liked the lie.
“Sit down here on the bench,” he said, taking her arm. “What’s in the bag?”
“Vitamins and some stuff,” she said, smiling as she sat down and put the bag down next to her.
“Where’s your handbag?” he asked, putting his arm around her.
“I don’t... know,” she said, remembering how it had arced toward the river after she had thrown it, how the water had bubbled around it as it sank. “Maybe I left it at the drugstore. There wasn’t anything important in it.”
“What did Reddy say?” he asked, putting his cheek against hers and holding her close. His voice was soft and pleasant, his breath warm in her ear as if he were still inside her.
“It’s all up to you now,” she said. “Your job’s still there if you want it. I fixed it with Reddy.”
“I’m grateful,” he said as the sun slipped behind a cloud, and she felt something hard press against her side. “Don’t look at me,” he continued, “or I’ll squeeze the trigger. Look straight ahead at that barge on the river.”
“I think I’m pregnant,” she lied softly, and felt him hide his face in her shoulder—affectionately, it seemed to her, but the gun did not leave her ribs.
His breath was moist on her neck as he said, “There’s no one else to stop you now that Reddy’s dead. He is dead, isn’t he?”
She said, “I took him out in my handbag. He’s in the river.”
“Him,” he said. “Three pounds was all of him. Seems there should have been more, should be more of anyone.”
She started to look toward him, but he pushed the gun harder against her ribs. “What was he to you anyw
ay?” she asked.
“My boss, and a human being, but that means nothing to you.”
“It wouldn’t mean much to you either,” she said, “if you could do what I do. You’ll be my helper, remember?”
“To terrify people?”
“Control them, make them pay money, which will give us influence over the right people, make them do anything we want. And there may be other things I can do, maybe with inanimate objects— but at the very least take three pounds of flesh here and there and make the world dance for us.”
“There’s nothing good about you,” he said, and for the first time she felt his disgust.
“I’m learning,” she whispered. Fearless, she would win him over.
He was silent, but she felt his breathing quicken with her own. “Is it that redhead?” she asked. “You want that bimbo?”
He took a deep breath.
“She was the last on my list.”
“You sick bitch, you’re lying,” he said with a pained laugh.
She turned her head, looked into his unblinking eyes, and twisted wildly within herself, but his brains were slow in coming out. His eyes fluttered as he gazed at her, and she knew that in a moment she would have no time or strength left to reach him.
She twisted and knotted herself.
His brain sliced through the walkway fence and the pieces dropped into the dirty river below. He slumped against her, blood in his ears, eyes rolling back—and his gun fired with a muffled thud, as if two blocks of wood had been struck together somewhere beyond the world.
She tensed from the pain and clutched at him, knowing that he had held back until she had lied about Carla.
“Bill...” she said, staring into the shadows of his open mouth as the sun hid behind white clouds.
She held him.
After an age, the sun glared at her. She looked down and saw blood staining her blouse and skirt, and wondered if she could get up and walk home. A couple strolled by, and she held Benek close to hide her wound. A boy and his dog ran past. The dog stopped for a moment and looked back at her, sniffing, then ran after the boy.
She looked at her wound again. It was not pumping out blood.
She willed her fortress self to stand up. There wasn’t a lot of blood after all.
She took a few steps, stopped and looked back at Benek, then went back and pried the gun out of his hand and threw it into the river after his brains. Then she picked up the pharmacy bag and stuffed it into her pocket. Buttoning her jacket tightly, she looked back at him again, struggling against pity. How had he dared turn against her? It had been a delusion for her to believe that he could change, that he could love her and be her partner.
But now, finally, no one was left who knew about her, or would ever know about her, she told herself, and realized that this was what she had been working toward—her own survival, and the acceptance of herself.
She had made mistakes in discovering herself, but they had not been fatal, and there was still so much to learn and do...
She felt a sudden dizziness along with her relief, and realized that her injury might be fatal. She staggered forward and sat down with a jolt on the next bench. The dark crept up through her body, blacking her vision...
When light returned, she looked over at Benek. He seemed so small on his bench, and she remembered when she had been a prisoner inside herself, unable to reach out to anyone. Her next helper would be more appreciative, she told herself through her pain. After all, she had a lot to offer, and nothing would keep them apart...
Her pain insisted.
She stood up and staggered back toward Benek.
Her pain went with her.
She nearly fell over in the last few steps, but finally sat down next to him. Jaw clenched, he seemed to be gazing intently across the river. The barge had moved on, leaving a clear view of the far shore.
Angry at her pain, she worked to purge it from her body; but the harm was stubborn. She let her head down on Benek’s peaceful shoulder, and saw the blackness around her...
There will be no you and me, my love, she thought, then sat up, gasping for breath in the bright flickering daylight.
No you and me.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Only me.
Fritz Leiber,
A Remembrance
Personal histories are lost unless written down; for a time they persist in the living, who may fail to pass them on. Families often do not retain even verbal histories, but sometimes there is one member who speaks out and records them, to the dismay and delight of the living, who tend to judge plausibility by seemings and unlikelihoods without recourse to testimony or evidence.
As you can see from my dedication to this novel, which you have either read or just turned to this afterword out of curiosity, I thought highly of Fritz Leiber and felt deeply about his work; I was also persuaded by his methods, as was noted in recent years by Howard Waldrop and others.
This was especially brought home to me after I finished Empties and reread Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife. Long before Stephen King called it his favorite horror novel, I had admired its seamless segues from drama to thoughts about life and living, as one might find much later in the highly praised novels of Robert Stone; but this was in a 1943 novel first published in John W. Campbell’s Unknown Worlds, which gave impetus to what we now call modern or urban fantasy. Open the yellowing pages of what was a commercial “pulp” magazine and find serious insights into life and gender conflicts, in a magazine from an editor more noted for so-called hard, realistic science fiction? Yes, and yes. This same editor was also a one man “new wave” of literary SF as the writer Don A. Stuart, where he was an example of the ambitiously written SF that he sought for his magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, later Analog.
Fritz Leiber was my mentor at the first Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop in 1968, held in the misty hills of Pennsylvania, at Clarion State College, a fact I have rarely emphasized because I doubt the consensus fiction tendencies of workshops.
But Fritz, a master who taught by example and by encouragement, made you feel more like an apprentice. I asked him during private walks why he so rarely said anything negative about the stories presented in the sessions, and he answered that every writer there had already shown skill and some dedication through the acceptance process and would get enough discouragement later, so why not be encouraging. The basic-training military method was not for him.
He shared practical advice. I write novels, he said, by typing out a synopsis that is not very complete, then cutting out each line and pasting it at the top of a page, and that becomes the first page of a chapter. Later he would rewrite it all anyway, but he refused to bore himself with “complete” outlines. The best was to be discovered, but some overview could be helpful. Plan, but not too much, lest you strangle spontaneity and abandon the work. He had described the careful balance between fiction by the numbers and artfulness. He did not say art, but artfulness, which may be found in all kinds of work, even in the maligned pulp magazines of fantasy and science fiction, and today’s commercially aimed fictions. Art, in its true sense of artfulness, draws us with meanings, with elegance, even if they are only the delights of a great adventure plot; add human character and longing, and you are on your way to ambitious work, not through mere intent but by doing what it takes.
Fritz took us on walks filled with conversation about science, writing, the ambivalent evidence for the supernatural in human experience; we even hunted a ghost in the college theater, where someone had once hanged himself. A tall, graying man who was a near twin of his father, the actor seen in many films of the 1930s and ’40s, A Tale of Two Cities for one, Fritz demonstrated swordsmanship to us in graceful style. He also held private discussions with each student and asked questions about specific works that we had in mind, the ones we wished for, longed to write. I described my first two novels, The Omega Point and Macrolife, both of which were later published, as he assured me they would be. He c
ouldn’t know, of course, but he knew that self-fulfilling prophecies also needed encouragement. The first was a genre entertainment, owing to the works of Charles Harness and A. E. van Vogt, which became more serious as it became the central part of The Omega Point Trilogy; my second novel, Macrolife, was entirely serious; both are still in print.
We talked about how short stories might well be a writer’s best work, and I have had that possibility brought home to me in the enthusiastic receptions afforded the three hardcover collections of my short fiction published since 2000. Fritz, of course, did it all, and had all the awards of a master of science fiction, fantasy, and horror; he was the finest writer of his generation, equaled perhaps but never surpassed in his versatility in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and in the many award winning short fictions within all these categories. A short list must include The Wanderer (1964), The Big Time (1961), The Swords of Lankhmar (1968), Our Lady of Darkness (1977), and the horror stories “A Bit of the Dark World” (1962), “Smoke Ghost” (1941), and “You’re All Alone” (1950). A complete list of stories and novels would be longer than this afterword.
Thinking about Empties long past its completion, I began to consider the “separateness” between human minds, and how necessary it seems. Yet people, men and women, are more alike than different, so they can guess about each other, and guess rightly, however isolated they are, even as much remains opaque. They not only flow into each other socially, they invade. Tip the balance with wealth and the power it buys, or with the power that appears in my Dierdre of this novel, and the temptations begin to play.
Empties Page 18