Shortly after dark, Mathis began to chatter again, regaling Quinn with anecdote and opinion, and by the satisfaction in his voice, Quinn knew he had reached the island. Twenty minutes passed, each of them ebbing away, leaking out of Quinn’s store of time like blood dripping from an old wound. Then a burst of white incandescence to the south, throwing vines and bushes into skeletal silhouette…and with it a scream. Quinn smiled. The scream had been a dandy imitation of pain, but he wasn’t buying it. He eased a flare from his hip pouch. It wouldn’t take long for Mathis to give this up.
The white fire died, muffled by the rain-soaked foliage, and finally Mathis said, “You a cautious fella, Quinn Edward.”
Quinn popped two ampules.
“I doubt you can keep it up, though,” Mathis went on. “I mean, sooner or later you gotta throw caution to the winds.”
Quinn barely heard him. He felt he was soaring, that the island was soaring, arrowing through a void whose sole feature it was and approaching the moment for which he had been waiting: a moment of brilliant violence to illuminate the flaws at the heart of the stone, to reveal the shadow play. The first burn of the drugs subsided, and he fixed his eyes on the shadows south of the ceiba tree.
Tension began to creep into Mathis’ voice, and Quinn was not surprised when—perhaps five minutes later—he heard the stutter of AR-18: Mathis firing at some movement in the brush. He caught sight of a muzzle flash, lifted his gun. But the next instant he was struck by an overpowering sense of the Queen, one that shocked him with its suddenness.
She was in pain. Wounded by Mathis’ fire.
In his mind’s eye, Quinn saw a female figure slumped against a boulder, holding her lower leg. The wound wasn’t serious, but he could tell she wanted the battle to end before worse could happen.
He was mesmerized by her pervasiveness—it seemed if he were to flip up his visor, he would breathe her in—and by what appeared to be a new specificity of knowledge about her. Bits of memory were surfacing in his thoughts; though he didn’t quite believe it, he could have sworn they were hers: a shanty with a tin roof amid fields of tilled red dirt; someone walking on a beach; a shady place overhung by a branch dripping with orchids, with insects scuttling in and out of the blooms, mining some vein of sweetness. That last memory was associated with the idea that it was a place where she went to daydream, and Quinn felt an intimate resonance with her, with the fact that she—like him—relied on that kind of retreat.
Confused, afraid for her yet half-convinced that he had slipped over the edge of sanity, he detonated his flare, aiming it at the opening in the canopy. An umbrella of white light bloomed overhead. He tracked his gun across eerily lit bushes and…there! Standing in the clearing to the south, a man wearing combat gear. Before the man could move, Quinn blew him up into marbled smoke and flame. Then, his mind ablaze with victory, he began to shinny down the branch. But as he descended, he realized that something was wrong. The man had just stood there, made no attempt to duck or hide. And his gun. It had been like Quinn’s own, not an AR-18.
He had shot a dummy or a man already dead!
Bullets pounded his back, not penetrating but knocking him out of the tree. Arms flailing, he fell into a bush. Branches tore the gun from his grasp. The armor deadened the impact, but he was dazed, his head throbbing. He clawed free of the bush just as Mathis’ helmeted shadow—looking huge in the dying light of the flare—crashed through the brush and drove a rifle stock into his faceplate. The plastic didn’t shatter, webbing over with cracks; but by the time Quinn had recovered, Mathis was straddling him, knees pinning his shoulders.
“How ’bout that?” said Mathis, breathing hard.
A knife glinted in his hand, arced downward and thudded into Quinn’s neck, deflected by the armor. Quinn heaved, but Mathis forced him back and this time punched at the faceplate with the hilt of the knife. Punched again, and again. Bits of plastic sprayed Quinn’s face, and the faceplate was now so thoroughly cracked, it was like looking up through a crust of glittering rime. It wouldn’t take many more blows. Desperate, Quinn managed to roll Mathis onto his side and they grappled silently. His teeth bit down on a sharp plastic chip and he tasted blood. Still grappling, they struggled to their knees, then to their feet. Their helmets slammed together. The impact came as a hollow click over Quinn’s radio, and that click seemed to switch on a part of his mind that was as distant as a flare, calm and observing; he pictured the two of them to be black giants with whirling galaxies for hearts and stars articulating their joints, doing battle over the female half of everything. Seeing it that way gave him renewed strength. He wrangled Mathis off-balance, and they reeled clumsily through the brush. They fetched up against the trunk of the ceiba tree, and for a few seconds they were frozen like wrestlers muscling for an advantage. Sweat poured down Quinn’s face; his arms quivered. Then Mathis tried to butt his faceplate, to finish the job he had begun with the hilt of the knife. Quinn ducked, slipped his hold, planted a shoulder in Mathis’ stomach and drove him backward. Mathis twisted as he fell, and Quinn turned him onto his stomach. He wrenched Mathis’ knife-arm behind his back, pried the knife loose. Probed with the blade, searching for a seam between the plates of neck armor. Then he pressed it in just deep enough to prick the skin. Mathis went limp. Silent.
“Where’s all the folksy chit-chat, man?” said Quinn, excited.
Mathis maintained his silent immobility, and Quinn wondered if he had snapped, gone catatonic. Maybe he wouldn’t have to kill him. The light from the flare had faded, and the moon-dappled darkness that had filled in reminded Quinn of the patterns of blight on the island leaves: an infection at whose heart they were clamped together like chitinous bugs.
“Bitch!” said Mathis, suddenly straining against Quinn’s hold. “You lied, goddamn you!”
“Shut up,” said Quinn, annoyed.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” Mathis bellowed. “You tricked me!”
“I said to shut up!” Quinn gave him a little jab, but Mathis began to thrash wildly, nearly impaling himself, shouting, “Bitch!”
“Shut the fuck up!” said Quinn, growing angrier but also trying to avoid stabbing Mathis, beginning to feel helpless, to feel that he would have to stab him, that it was all beyond his control.
“I’ll kill you bitch!” screamed Mathis. “I’ll…”
“Stop it!” Quinn shouted, not sure to whom he was crying out. Inside his chest, a fuming cell of anger was ready to explode.
Mathis writhed and kicked. “I’ll cut out your fuckin’…”
Poisonous burst of rage. Mandibles snipping shut, Quinn shoved the knife home. Blood guttered in Mathis’ throat. One gauntleted hand scrabbled in the dirt, but that was all reflexes.
Quinn sat up feeling sluggish. There was no glory. It had been a contest essentially decided by a gross stupidity: Mathis’ momentary forgetfulness about the armor. But how could he have forgotten? He’d seen what little effects bullets had. Quinn took off his helmet and sucked in hits of the humid air. Watched a slice of moonlight jiggle on Mathis’ faceplate. Then a blast of static from his helmet radio, a voice saying, “…you copy?”
“Ain’t no friendlies in Emerald,” said another radio voice. “Musta been beaners sent up that flare. It’s a trap.”
“Yeah, but I got a reading like infantry gear back there. We should do a sweep over that lake.”
Chopper pilots, Quinn realized. But he stared at the helmet with the mute awe of a savage, as if they had been alien voices speaking from a stone. He picked up the helmet, unsure what to say.
Please, no…
The words had been audible, and he realized that she had made him hear them in the sighing of the breeze.
Static fizzling. “…get the hell outta here.”
The first pilot again. “Do you copy? I repeat, do you copy?”
What, Quinn thought, if this had all been the Queen’s way of getting rid of Mathis, even down to that last flash of anger, and now, now that he had done the job, wou
ldn’t she get rid of him?
Please, stay…
Quinn imagined himself back in Dakota, years spent watching cattle die, reading mail order catalogues, drinking and drinking, comparing the Queen to the dowdy farmgirl he’d have married, and one night getting a little too morbidly weary of that nothing life and driving out onto the flats and riding the forty-five caliber express to nowhere. But at least that was proven, whereas this…
Please…
A wave of her emotion swept over him, seeding him with her loneliness and longing. He was truly beginning to know her now, to sense the precise configurations of her moods, the stoicism underlying her strength, the…
“Fuck it!” said one of the pilots.
The static from Quinn’s radio smoothed to a hiss, and the night closed down around him. His feeling of isolation nailed him to the spot. Wind seethed in the massy crown of the ceiba, and he thought he heard again the whispered word Please. An icy fluid mounted in his spine. To shore up his confidence, he popped an ampule, and soon the isolation no longer troubled him, but rather seemed to fit about him like a cloak. This was the path he had been meant to take, the way of courage and character. He got to his feet, unsteady on his injured legs, and eased past Mathis, slipping between two bushes. Ahead of him, the night looked to be a floating puzzle of shadow and golden light: no matter how careful he was, he’d never be able to locate all his mines and flares.
But she would guide him.
Or would she? Hadn’t she tricked Mathis? Lied to him?
More wind poured through the leaves of the ceiba tree, gusting its word of entreaty, and intimations of pleasure, of sweet green mornings and soft nights, eddied up in the torrent of her thoughts. She surrounded him, undeniable, as real as perfume, as certain as the ground beneath his feet.
For a moment he was assailed by a new doubt. God, he said to himself. Please don’t let me be crazy. Not just ordinary crazy.
Please…
Then, suffering mutinies of the heart at every step, repelling them with a warrior’s conviction, he moved through the darkness at the center of the island toward the rocky point, where—her tiger crouched by her feet, a ripe jungle moon hanging above like the emblem of her mystique—either love or fate might be waiting.
Down and Out in the Year 2000
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Introduction
Kim Stanley Robinson even looks like a writing professor. He fairly oozes education. He gazes at you through soft and thoughtful eyes that have been hooded by years of meditation and contemplation—or of wearing glasses. But, unlike most college writing teachers, Robinson actually knows how to teach writing. Many former students attest it; the fact that Campbell Award winner Karen Joy Fowler was one of his students proves it.
Telling you that Robinson is a professor, though, might lead you to certain expectations. Some will be correct: his writing is full of symbol and allusion; the pacing of his stories is often slow; some of his stories are virtually essays, leading to the apprehension of an idea rather than the release of causal tension.
But he will also surprise you. His stories do not take place in some academic never-never land, full of mid-life crises and blocked writers and contempt for the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, he deals with immediate experience, not by describing it, but by making you experience it. Some of his finest works have evoked his beloved sport of mountain climbing with the sort of breathtaking reality that Melville brought to whaling. And his work shows a constant awareness of the wider political, economic, and cultural worlds of his characters.
Many science fiction writers who have literary pretensions quickly abandon the very things that make science fiction worth doing—the creation of strange milieus, the intensity of romantic characterization, the primacy of event over character. Robinson seems to move in the other direction—he is a literary writer who is gradually bringing more and more of science fiction to his work. The result is that as I have tracked Robinson’s work over time, I have been delighted with the way he constantly broadens the appeal of his work, never losing the intelligence, sensibility, and awareness of literary tradition that have been with him from the start.
“Down and Out in the Year 2000” seems at first to be extrapolative satire: if we keep on the way we’re going, look at the mess we’re going to get into. It can also be read as analogue, asserting that we’re already doing, subtly, what goes on in the story’s future. But such decoding, I think, misses the most fundamental aspect of all of Robinson’s work: the deep humaneness of the man. When you live in his world, when you see events through his eyes, you soon realize the deep admiration he had for those who have the strength to remain civilized when there is no longer profit in it—and the compassion he also has for those too weak.
It was going to be hot again. Summer in Washington, D.C.—Leroy Robinson woke and rolled on his mattress, broke into a sweat. That kind of a day. He got up and kneeled over the other mattress in the small room. Debra shifted as he shaded her from the sun angling in the open window. The corners of her mouth were caked white and her forehead was still hot and dry, but her breathing was regular and she appeared to be sleeping well. Quietly Leroy slipped on his jeans and walked down the hall to the bathroom. Locked. He waited; Ramon came out wet and groggy. “Morning, Robbie.” Into the bathroom, where he hung his pants on the hook and did his morning ritual. One bloodshot eye, staring back at him from the splinter of mirror still in the frame. The dirt around the toilet base. The shower curtain blotched with black algae, as if it had a fatal disease. That kind of morning.
Out of the shower he dried off with his jeans and started to sweat again. Back in his room Debra was still sleeping. Worried, he watched her for a while, then filled his pockets and went into the hall to put on sneakers and tank-top. Debra slept light these days, and the strangest things would rouse her. He jogged down the four flights of stairs to the street, and sweating freely stepped out into the steamy air.
He walked down 16th Street, with its curious alternation of condo fortresses and abandoned buildings, to the Mall. There, big khaki tanks dominated the broad field of dirt and trash and tents and the odd patch of grass. Most of the protesters were still asleep in their scattered tent villages, but there was an active crowd around the Washington Monument, and Leroy walked on over, ignoring the soldiers by the tanks.
The crowd surrounded a slingshot as tall as a man, made of a forked tree branch. Inner tubes formed the sling, and the base was buried in the ground. Excited protesters placed balloons filled with red paint into the sling, and fired them up at the monument. If a balloon hit above the red that already covered the tower, splashing clean white—a rare event, as the monument was pure red up a good third of it—the protesters cheered crazily. Leroy watched them as they danced around the sling after a successful shot. He approached some of the calmer seated spectators.
“Want to buy a joint?”
“How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“Too much, man! You must be kidding! How about a dollar?”
Leroy walked on.
“Hey, wait! One joint, then. Five dollars…shit.”
“Going rate, man.”
The protester pushed long blond hair out of his eyes and pulled a five from a thick clip of bills. Leroy got the battered Marlboro box from his pocket and took the smallest joint from it. “Here you go. Have fun. Why don’t you fire one of them paint bombs at those tanks, huh?”
The kids on the ground laughed. “We will when you get them stoned!”
He walked on. Only five joints left. It took him less than an hour to sell them. That meant thirty dollars, but that was it. Nothing left to sell. As he left the Mall he looked back at the monument; under its wash of paint it looked like a bone sticking out of raw flesh.
Anxious about coming to the end of his supply, Leroy hoofed it up to Dupont Circle and sat on the perimeter bench in the shade of one of the big trees, footsore and hot. In the muggy air it was hard to catch his b
reath. He ran the water from the drinking fountain over his hands until someone got in line for a drink. He crossed the circle, giving a wide berth to a bunch of lawyers in long-sleeved shirts and loosened ties, lunching on wine and cheese under the watchful eye of their bodyguard. On the other side of the park Delmont Briggs sat by his cup, almost asleep, his sign propped on his lap. The wasted man. Delmont’s sign—and a little side business—provided him with just enough money to get by on the street. The sign, a battered square of cardboard, said PLEASE HELP—HUNGRY. People still looked through Delmont like he wasn’t there, but every once in a while it got to somebody. Leroy shook his head distastefully at the idea.
“Delmont, you know any weed I can buy? I need a finger baggie for twenty.”
“Not so easy to do, Robbie.” Delmont hemmed and hawed and they dickered for a while, then he sent Leroy over to Jim Johnson, who made the sale under a cheery exchange of the day’s news, over by the chess tables. After that Leroy bought a pack of cigarettes in a liquor store, and went up to the little triangular park between 17th, S, and New Hampshire, where no police or strangers ever came. They called it Fish Park for the incongruous cement whale sitting by one of the trash cans. He sat down on the long broken bench, among his acquaintances who were hanging out there, and fended them off while he carefully emptied the Marlboros, cut some tobacco into the weed, and refilled the cigarette papers with the new mix. With their ends twisted he had a dozen more joints. They smoked one and he sold two more for a dollar each before he got out of the park.
Future on Fire Page 14