Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  I slid into the driver’s couch of a roadster, abandoned like many others with its motor still whirring, and sang “Ain’t We Got Fun” at the top of my voice until I could rip the wires from the dashboard speaker. I saw no traffic as I sped north.

  I m not sure why I stopped for the hitcher; maybe because he was the only person I’d seen in an hour. Maybe because he was a good-looking hunky specimen. But when I say he acted altogether too goddamn familiar, I’m understating. He talked as if he were my alter ego. “Free choice have you. No one’s going to force you to listen, Justine.” Those were his first words as he settled in.

  I was already accelerating. “How did you know my name?”

  “I listened,” he said with the ghost of a wry grin. “To give it a try you ought before the machines run down,” he went on. “You wouldn’t want stranded to be.”

  “It’s you who gets stranded,” I said with finality and braked hard. “Out, buster.”

  He shrugged. “Losing interest I’m, anyway. Like Prior Howard,” he said, stepping out.

  It seemed perfectly natural that this total stranger knew all about Howie. “That one’s lost interest in everything,” I said.

  “Did you think that you Howard killed?” His hand described a capricious fillip in the air. “Howard translated.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Expiation. I’m-was-the Omaha Ripper. Mind never, you don’t want the details.”

  I already knew them. Who didn’t know about the manhunt in Omaha? “Got it,” I said; “you’re a hallucination. Why aren’t you in Nebraska?”

  “Good question,” he said, and winked from existence without even a pop of displaced air. I drove on, a bit more slowly. My odds-on favorite explanation was that my mind had begun playing tricks. To punish itself, maybe? “Nice try,” I told it.

  Near Harrisburg I was running low on fuel when Cabot Hawke flagged me down. I was quite cool; I’d half-expected something of the sort. I switched off the motor and lounged back, very much in the driver’s seat.

  “I’m expiating too,” Hawke said with no previous greeting. “I’ll even try to speak this ridiculous language in a way that won’t spook you.”

  “Spook is the operative word,” I said. “I’ll settle down, Hawke. And then I’ll be flying high in the number one slot, and with all your motivations peeled away, where will all you poor bastards be?”

  “Everywhenandwhere. The Eocene. The Crab Nebula. What’s the point of being number one, Jus’, when there’s no number two?”

  “Plenty of folks who don’t speak CanAm,” I said.

  “They don’t have to,” Hawke said gently. “The message is perfectly clear if you only listen, whether you speak Tagalog or Croatian. Or Hohokam. Or if you’re newborn or deaf,” he said in afterthought. “The vibrations, you see.”

  I’d never heard of a Hohokam, and that bothered me. How could something be dredged from my subconscious if I’d never heard of it? Oh: I’d simply invented it, like the whole conversation. Simple. “You’ll come around,” I said pleasantly. “And I’ll be waiting.”

  “I wish you were all that interesting,” Hawke said mildly. “Anything I can do to convince you? You’re starting to bore me.”

  My tummy rumbled. “Sure. I could use a ham and cheese on rye, and a cola. Oh, and some fuel.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” he said, and turned away. And vanished. In the seat beside me was a thick juicy sandwich and a cola; my fuel gauge read full.

  I stayed at an inn on the Susquehanna where the machines had already stopped, and spent a few days unwinding in the Executive Suite. That got to be tiresome; no maid service.

  Finally I drove back to Baltimore. My fuel tank is always full, and there’s always a sandwich and a cola when I want one.

  No one else roams the Delphium complex to keep me from clearing out Hawke’s desk for myself, reading his private journals, learning how trivial the sonofabitch thought I was before I showed them all. I keep in shape with a fire ax whenever I find a locked door in Delphium. Or anywhere else in Baltimore. Now and then I see a shimmer of something down a silent hallway, or against a moonlit sky, and it makes me think of great shadowbirds at play.

  I keep reminding myself that they’ll get tired of it pretty soon. Then they’ll have to start all over again at square one. Bottom rung of the ladder. That’s my most comforting thought, so I think it a lot. At other times, I reflect on the truth of one of Hawke’s old phrases.

  It’s lonely at the top.

  MILLENNIAL

  POSTSCRIPT

  Every New York editor who read the previous story rejected it. The first one I asked who lived far from the madding status ladder and had a casual view of it, bought the piece. Recently there’s been a gradually accelerating move from the rat race in many cities though, to take everybody’s favorite example, Manhattan is a more friendly town today than it has been for fifty years. One of my favorite New York editors now works from home-in Arizona. There are several good reasons, including computers. Now that our homes are wired we’re sliding toward a true post-metropolitan culture.

  With two architects in the family, I see evidence of this process almost daily. Some of it is encouraging, and some not. The long-term outcomes aren’t so clear but, to take examples dear to my heart, what’s to happen in ballet and classical music? Some things may, for the foreseeable future, always need close physical proximity by a bevy of artists. If we don’t fund those artists decently, many of them will seek other joys, and few small towns boast a Bolshoi or a London Symphony Orchestra. The trend in this country is to remove tax support from the arts. Does this mean we are kicking the cornerstones from the foundations of fine arts? During the past decade the symphony orchestras of both Denver and San Diego have fought to recover from receivership.

  What we need is some way to make telepresence work among many artists. Then one day we may enjoy the musical and balletic splendor of The Rite of Spring by artists who are performing simultaneously from a hundred and fifty different locations. As long as we’re after improved quality of life, we can’t afford to ignore the things that flourish at their very best only in cities. Meanwhile, if government won’t support the fine arts, it’s up to us individually.

  EVILEYE

  Dr. Victoire Lorenz stood in the shadowed twilight silence of the visitor display room, cradling her kitten, and studied her enemy in the big floor tank. The light from high windows above the aquarium displays was scarcely enough illumination for human eyes. It was more than enough for the nocturnal vision of Evileye. Prowling rocky sea-bottom haunts, his kind had fed in darkness for ten times a million years. Crowded up against the heavy clear plastic of his circular tank, clearly aware of her scrutiny, her enemy stared back. Though the tank was over twenty feet across, its acrylic wall waist-high to a woman of Vicki’s small size, it was barely enough for Evileye to move about freely.

  It had been Gary Matthews, mate of the Yaquina, who’d suggested adding the inward-curving tank lip with sharp edges. The angular, rawboned Matthews had shown interest in Vicki from the first, despite the fact that her responses were barely civil. Gary had taken her turndowns with an easy grace that irritated her, yet he could still take an interest in her work. That acrylic lip idea had, at least, stopped Evileye from prowling.

  Now and then, when some idiot visitor tossed popcorn or a candy wrapper into his open pool of sea water, Evileye might move off in a sidelong crawl, sand and tons of water roiling in his wake. At such times he used a lidlike structure to squint. But at other times he could open his eyes round as a barracuda’s. When at rest, for example; or occasionally when studying prey.

  He was doing that now. Think I don’t know what goes on behind that pitiless gaze? she thought. But this concrete floor is my turf. And I know you, mister . . .

  In fact, most marine biologists knew him-or his kind. Proper name: O. dofleini. At her last research station across the Pacific in Queensland, they’d pronounced it “doe-f
lain-eye.” Here in Newport at the Oregon State marine science center they said “doe-fleen-eye.” But he’d earned his private nickname from Vicki by destroying a month’s painstaking work with his insatiable lust for crab flesh.

  A lab assistant had walked in one morning, horrified to find Vicki Lorenz’s experimental tanks overturned, one smashed, with bits of Cancer magister, Dungeness crab, strewn on the concrete and too many carapace fragments in the octopus tank. Though the dofleini was again in his tank, the seawater trail was plain and the vast brute sported a cut on his mantle. Much of Vicki’s salary came from a sea grant to study the diminished commercial crab catch. The ravenous dofleini, in one midnight foray, had wasted a third of her grant money and forced her to start anew. It would be a male! And afterward, to Vicki, he was Evileye.

  His common name: Pacific Giant, the colossus of octopi. Larger specimens existed, but his body was the size of a medicine ball and at full span, those leathery tentacles could reach nine feet in any direction for the food, bits of crab or squid, introduced into the big display tank. Depending on his mood, Evileye might adopt a rusty hue or a grayish brown to match the sand. Few visitors appreciated his most subtle camouflage trick, the change of his surface texture from smooth to rough or even to nodular, as it suited this subtle hunter of the deep. He was a great favorite of the visitors.

  “Oh yes,” Vicki murmured, “they love a good safe scare. But what if they were your size, Scrapper?” At the sound of her name, the dozing tiger-stripe kitten waked for a languid glance at her mistress and, lying on her back in the crook of Vicki’s arm, flexed tiny orange furred paws.

  “Think you’re a predator, huh?” Vicki freed her left hand; moved it above Scrapper’s face to tempt playful claws. “Well, that smart sonofabitch in the tank has two hundred pounds, and a lot of brain-power, and a few million years of evolution on you. You’d last about as long as a hermit crab.” Her mind flashed in an unwelcome hallucination of the great beast plucking little Scrapper from her arms, encircling the tiny spitting ball of fur with a sucker-lined tentacle, plunging the kitten below to his own watery turf, pulling the pathetic sodden prey toward the beaklike jaws, lethal toxin from his salivary glands flooding the small body-She felt an unprofessional shudder; turned away toward her office and the experimental equipment it held. Acrylic lip or no, she would never again leave her tanks of gravid female C. magister specimens in the display room with Evileye.

  Scrapper yawned and closed her eyes. “Yeah, me too,” Vicki said. “And if I don’t get those egg counts done tonight I’ll be in a cock-up.” While setting her desk in order she smiled to herself at the Aussie slang, an old habit of hers that grad students sometimes gently mocked.

  Though Vicki was American, she’d found the peak of her life during her thirties after she and Korff landed jobs in Australia. Birding on unspoiled Heron Island near the small exclusive marine labs there, listening as Korff recited his latest poem-his “most recent literary offense,” as he put it-and making love on the Tropic of Capricorn. When his tiny knockabout day-sailer was found capsized on the barrier reef, she could not believe at first that her best years were over.

  The memory brought a familiar grief and, with it, a reaction that experience had caught her unaware. Anger, at least, she could handle. “Goddammit, get away from that,” she muttered as Scrapper showed interest in the multicolored bottles of recording pen ink. The bottles were secure and the kitten had committed no offense but: “Make my desk a sack of arseholes, would you,” Vicki said, lifting Scrapper by her scruff. She dropped the kitten a few inches to the waterproof carpet and resumed setting her notes in order for the morrow.

  She knew that her anger was really at Korff, who’d betrayed her by dying. She’d learned from her mother that males weren’t to be trusted, but she’d made herself deeply vulnerable to one, bedazzled by his mind, enraptured with his body. He should’ve been more careful for my sake! But he wasn’t. Korff had been a gambler. And when he’d lost, she had lost. She sent the savage thought back across the years and the pelagic deeps to her long-dead lover: Thanks for a valuable lesson, mate.

  Vicki slammed the upper left desk drawer too hard; heard a hard thump, probably the little nickel-plated Smith & Wesson she used to dispatch a thrashing shark when working at sea from one of the research vessels. An empty Nansen bottle, its heavy brass hidden with white epoxy paint, nearly toppled to the floor but Vicki caught it just above Scrapper’s head. The massive specimen collection bottle would have obliterated her only friend. Certainly the only one she slept with. “Eight lives to go,” she said with a shaky laugh, and swept the kitten up again.

  A quick look at her wrist: past seven P.M. She hurried to lock up, thrust Scrapper beneath her frayed pea-jacket, and headed for her rusted-out Datsun. The rules against dogs or cats at the marine center were supposedly strict. But because they had a problem with ants, the joke went, aardvarks were okay. One of these days an undergrad would show up with a real anteater, and then the joke would be ruined.

  She took Bay Boulevard, ignoring the lingering Pacific glow that outlined Yaquina Bay Bridge, now a series of sinister spans arching against the bloody palette of the evening sky. Vicki hadn’t time to drive to her cottage halfway to Waldport. But neither could she afford dinner at the nearby seaside places, so she turned toward The Anchor in Newport’s heart. The food was good and, because they knew her, they’d ignore Scrapper so long as she stayed inside that pea-jacket. They offered other advantages too; when times were as hard as these, pride was your enemy.

  She took a rear corner booth; made an effort to produce a smile because she knew the waitress slightly. “No menu, Fran; we’re not all that hungry so, uh, a hamburger steak and iced tea. Make it a child’s portion,” she added, more defiant than pleading.

  “You could eat a horse and chase the driver, honey,” Fran accused, adding, “and child’s portion it is.”

  Vicki nodded her thanks, knowing the finely drawn lines in her own face were more from overwork than from undereating. Besides, Fran obviously took pride in curves as exaggerated as an overstuffed sofa. Fran made no secret of her view: if you weren’t blowsy, you were sickly. For a moment, Vicki’s smile became genuine as she watched Fran’s ample behind. By most standards, Fran was twenty pounds too healthy.

  Then Vicki leaned back and closed her eyes, her hand stroking the fidgety kitten inside the jacket. She couldn’t blame Scrapper; the restaurant smells had her juices flowing, too. It was probably the shadow across her eyelids that made her jerk them open.

  “I bet you eat in bed, too.” Gary Matthews’s voice was husky but light for a man of his size. He saw the spark kindle in her face and raised his hands, drawing back. “Cancel that. I mean, if you sleep in restaurants, why then, ah-”

  “Ho,” she said gravely, “ho. And I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Minor surgery on your navel, then?”

  She realized she was still stroking Scrapper and jerked her hand from the jacket. One tiny paw shot out, answering the challenge of quick movement, and by mischance caught Vicki’s forefinger. “Damn,” said Vicki, and put the finger in her mouth.

  Matthews had seen the kitten. Still, “Ah; minor surgery from your navel. It’s little differences like this that make you so intriguing, Lorenz.”

  He was still standing, because she was gauche, because she needed to think about her grant work, because it was all she had, because-“You’re in Fran’s way,” she said, “Sit.” He did.

  After an interminable pause of perhaps two minutes he leaned his chin on his knuckles. “You don’t talk me to death either. That’s good.”

  “Maybe I just don’t have much to say to you.

  “Sure you do. How’s the larvae count coming?”

  The man had an unerring knack for divining what was uppermost in her mind. Like Korff. One strike against him. “Beg pardon?”

  “Those Nansen bottles we brought you from the escarpment. You know, planktonic larvae? From Cancer magister? Basis of th
e local econ-”

  “So I’ve heard,” she replied dryly. “It’s too early to tell, and thanks for doing your job, Matthews. There’s lots more lab work to do, mostly at night. I wish I knew why you cared.”

  “I’ve got friends in Newport, Lorenz. If the crabbing doesn’t improve, a lot of furniture gets repossessed.” His own job, of course, would be secure in any event; yet he spoke as if he really cared about people. Again, like Korff; strike two.

  “Not about the crabbing. About me. I don’t want to be bitchy, but why me?”

  Fran was beside them, sliding a small plate with a suspiciously large aromatic meat pattie onto the table. She cast an appreciative eye toward the newcomer with his wide-set gray eyes and sun-bleached hair. “Something for you?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” he grinned up at her. He waited, watching Fran move off, amused at the cats-in-a-sack movement of her rump, and caught Vicki’s glance before answering. “Why you? Well, you’re dedicated; students claim you’re tough, but fair. And you’re a loner like me. You stay in shape. You don’t party a lot.” He paused to watch her separate a bite-sized piece of meat, saw Scrapper devour it from her hand. “And you read damned fine poetry, and you take in strays.” He spread his hands again for her.

  “Scrapper happens to be a female. No, I’m not lezzo,” she added quickly.

  “I never dreamed you were. I know about Korff,” he said softly.

  Now he was riding sidelong on a dangerous Pacific swell. “Then leave me alone with him!” She hadn’t intended to say it that way, or that sharply. More subdued: “I really just need to be left alone, Matthews. I really, really-” Momentarily, without knowing why, she was near tears with frustration.

  “Forgive me,” he said, rising. “You don’t need this. I just thought you might enjoy hunting agates on the beach sometime, or a steak at The Moorage now and then.”

  “I can’t afford it.”