A tight dark group of men had been following them—fellows who had somehow been insulted during the day and night of carousing. The intrepid pair turned and faced the men from a distance. McSkee finished the last bottle and threw it into the midst of the group. The men were bad-natured; they flamed up instantly, and the man who was struck by the flying bottle swore.
So they joined battle.
For a while it seemed, that the forces of righteousness would prevail. McSkee was a glorious fighter, and Sour John was competent. They spread those angry men out on the sand like a bunch of beached flounder fish. It was one of those great battles—always to be remembered.
But there were too many of those men, as McSkee had known there would be; he had made an outlandish number of enemies in a day and a night.
The wild fight climaxed, crested, and shattered, like a high wave thunderously breaking under. And McSkee, having touched top glory and pleasure, suddenly ceased to battle.
He gave one wild whoop of joy that echoed the length of the island. Then he drew a grand breath and held it. He closed his eyes and stood like a grinning rigid statue.
The angry men toppled him and swarmed him; they stomped him into the sand and kicked the very life out of the McSkee.
Sour John had battled as long as there was a battle. He understood now that McSkee had withdrawn for reasons that were not clear. He did likewise. He broke and ran, not from cowardice, but from private inclination.
* * * *
An hour later, just at the first touch of dawn, Sour John returned. He found that McSkee was dead—with no breath, no pulse, no heat. And there was something else. McSkee had said, in one of his rambling tales, that he got a pretty high shine on him. John knew what he meant now. That man got ripe real fast. By the test of the nose, McSkee was dead.
With a child’s shovel that he found there, Sour John dug a hole in the side of one of the sand cliffs. He buried his friend McSkee there. He knew that McSkee still had the twenty-dollar bill in his pants. He left it with him. It isn’t so bad to be one or the other, but to be both dead and broke at the same time is an ignominy almost past enduring.
Then Sour John walked into town to get some breakfast, and quickly forgot about the whole thing.
He followed his avocation of knocking around the world and meeting interesting people. The chances are that he met you, if there’s anything interesting about you at all; he doesn’t miss any of them.
* * * *
Twelve years went by, and some weeks. Sour John was back in one of the interesting port cities, but with a difference. There had come the day as it comes, to many (and pray it may not come to you!) when Sour John was not flush. He was as broke as a man can be, with nothing in his pockets or in his stomach, and with very little on his back. He was on the beach in every sense.
Then he bethought himself of the previous times he had been in this city. There had been benders here; there had been antics and enjoyments. They came back to him in a rush—a dozen happy times, and then one in particular.
“He was an Odd One, a real juicy cove,” Sour John grinned as he remembered. “He knew a trick, how to die just when he wanted to. He said that it took a lot of practice, but I don’t see the point in practicing a thing that you do but once.”
Then Sour John remembered a twenty-dollar bill that he had buried with that juicy cove. The memory of the incandescent McSkee came back to Sour John as he walked down the empty beach.
“He said that you could jam a lot of living into a day and a night,” John said. “You can. I do. He said something else that I forget.”
Sour John found the old sand cliff. In half an hour he had dug out the body of McSkee. It still had a high old shine on it, but it was better preserved than the clothes. The twenty-dollar bill was still there, disreputable but spendable.
“I’ll take it now, when I have the need,” Sour John said softly. “And later, when I am flush again, I will bring it back here.”
“Yes. You do that,” said McSkee.
* * * *
There are men in the world who would be startled if a thing like that happened to them. Some of them would have gasped and staggered back. The meaner ones would have cried out. John Sourwine, of course, was not a man like that. But he was human, and he did a human thing:
He blinked.
“I had no idea that you were in such a state,” he said to McSkee. “So that’s the way you do it?”
“That’s the way, John. One day at a time! And I space them far enough apart that they don’t pall on me.”
“Are you ready to get up again, McSkee?”
“I sure am not, John. I had just barely died. It’ll be another fifty years before I have a really good appetite worked up.”
“Don’t you think it’s cheating?”
“Nobody’s told me that it’s disallowed. And only the days that I live count. I stretch them out a long while this way, and every one of them is memorable. I tell you that I have no dull days in my life.”
“I’m still not sure how you do it, McSkee. Is it suspended animation?”
“No, no! More men have run afoul on that phrase than on any other. You think of it like that and you’ve already missed it. You die, John, or else you’re just kidding yourself. Watch me this time and you’ll see. Then bury me again and leave me in peace. Nobody likes to be resurrected before he’s had time to get comfortable in his grave.”
So McSkee put himself carefully to death once more, and Sour John buried him again in the side of the sand cliff.
McSkee—which in hedge Irish is Son of Slumber—the master of suspended animation (no, no, if you think of it that way you’ve already missed it, it’s death, it’s death), who lived his life one day at a time, and those days separated by decades.
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* * * *
The title of this story might seem to suggest Longfellow'sElizabeth: So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, / Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence. And indeed this is part of its meaning; the other part, which is less pleasant, I leave you to discover.
* * * *
PASSENGERS
By Robert Silverberg
There are only fragments of me left now. Chunks of memory have broken free and drifted away like calved glaciers. It is always like that when a Passenger leaves us. We can never be sure of all the things our borrowed bodies did. We have only the lingering traces, the imprints.
Like sand clinging to an ocean-tossed bottle. Like the throbbings of amputated legs.
I rise. I collect myself. My hair is rumpled; I comb it. My face is creased from too little sleep. There is sourness in my mouth. Has my Passenger been eating dung with my mouth? They do that. They do anything.
It is morning.
A grey, uncertain morning. I stare at it for a while, and then, shuddering, I opaque the window and confront instead the grey, uncertain surface of the inner panel. My room looks untidy. Did I have a woman here? There are ashes in the trays. Searching for butts, I find several with lipstick stains. Yes, a woman was here.
I touch the bedsheets. Still warm with shared warmth. Both pillows tousled. She has gone, though, and the Passenger is gone, and I am alone.
How long did it last, this time?
I pick up the phone and ring Central. “What is the date?”
The computer’s bland feminine voice replies, “Friday, December 4th, 1987.”
“The time?”
“Nine fifty-one, Eastern Standard Time.”
“The weather forecast?”
“Predicted temperature range for today thirty to thirty-eight. Current temperature, thirty-one. Wind from the north, sixteen miles an hour. Chances of precipitation slight.”
“What do you recommend for a hangover?”
“Food or medication?”
“Anything you like,” I say.
The computer mulls that one over for a while. Then it decides on both, and activates my kitchen. The spigot yields c
old tomato juice. Eggs begin to fry. From the medicine slot comes a purplish liquid. The Central Computer is always so thoughtful. Do the Passengers ever ride it, I wonder? What thrills could that hold for them? Surely it must be more exciting to borrow the million minds of Central than to live a while in the faulty, short-circuited soul of a corroded human being!
December 4th, Central said. Friday. So the Passenger had me for three nights.
I drink the purplish stuff and probe my memories in a gingerly way, as one might probe a festering sore.
I remember Tuesday morning. A bad time at work. None of the charts will come out right. The section manager irritable; he has been taken by a Passenger three times in five weeks, and his section is in disarray as a result, and his Christmas bonus is jeopardised. Even though it is customary not to penalise a person for lapses due to Passengers, according to the system, the section manager seems to feel he will be treated unfairly. We have a hard time. Revise the charts, fiddle with the program, check the fundamentals ten times over. Out they come: the detailed forecasts for price variations of public utility securities, February-April, 1988. That afternoon we are to meet and discuss the charts and what they tell us.
I do not remember Tuesday afternoon.
That must have been when the Passenger took me. Perhaps at work; perhaps in the mahogany-panelled boardroom itself, during the conference. Pink concerned faces all about me; I cough, I lurch, I stumble from my seat. They shake their heads sadly. No one reaches for me. No one stops me. It is too dangerous to interfere with one who has a Passenger. The chances are great that a second Passenger lurks nearby in the discorporate state, looking for a mount. So I am avoided. I leave the building.
After that, what?
Sitting in my room on bleak Friday morning, I eat my scrambled eggs and try to reconstruct the three lost nights.
Of course it is impossible. The conscious mind functions during the period of captivity, but upon withdrawal of the Passenger nearly every recollection goes too. There is only a slight residue, a gritty film of faint and ghostly memories. The mount is never precisely the same person afterwards; though he cannot recall the details of his experience, he is subtly changed by it.
I try to recall.
A girl? Yes: lipstick on the butts. Sex, then, here in my room. Young? Old? Blonde? Dark? Everything is hazy. How did my borrowed body behave? Was I a good lover? I try to be, when I am myself. I keep in shape. At thirty-eight, I can handle three sets of tennis on a summer afternoon without collapsing. I can make a woman glow as a woman is meant to glow. Not boasting; just categorising. We have our skills. These are mine.
But Passengers, I am told, take wry amusement in controverting our skills. So would it have given my rider a kind of delight to find me a woman and force me to fail repeatedly with her?
I dislike that thought.
The fog is going from my mind now. The medicine prescribed by Central works rapidly. I eat, I shave, I stand under the vibrator until my skin is clean. I do my exercises. Did the Passenger exercise my body Wednesday and Thursday mornings? Probably not. I must make up for that. I am close to middle age, now; tonus lost is not easily regained.
I touch my toes twenty times, knees stiff.
I kick my legs in the air.
I lie flat and lift myself on pumping elbows.
The body responds, maltreated though it has been. It is the first bright moment of my awakening: to feel the inner tingling, to know that I still have vigour.
Fresh air is what I want next. Quickly I slip into my clothes and leave. There is no need for me to report to work today. They are aware that since Tuesday afternoon I have had a Passenger; they need not be aware that before dawn on Friday the Passenger departed. I will have a free day. I will walk the city’s streets, stretching my limbs, repaying my body for the abuse it has suffered.
I enter the elevator. I drop fifty stories to the ground. I step out into the December dreariness.
The towers of New York rise about me.
In the street the cars stream forward. Drivers sit edgily at their wheels. One never knows when the driver of a nearby car will be borrowed, and there is always a moment of lapsed co-ordination as the Passenger takes over. Many lives are lost that way on our streets and highways; but never the life of a Passenger.
I began to walk without purpose. I cross Fourteenth Street, heading north, listening to the soft violent purr of the electric engines. I see a boy jigging in the street and know he is being ridden. At Fifth and Twenty-Second a prosperous-looking paunchy man approaches, his necktie askew, this morning’s Wall Street Journal jutting from an overcoat pocket. He giggles. He thrusts out his tongue. Ridden. Ridden. I avoid him. Moving briskly, I come to the underpass that carries traffic below Thirty-Fourth Street towards Queens, and pause for a moment to watch two adolescent girls quarrelling at the rim of the pedestrian walk. One is a Negro. Her eyes are rolling in terror. The other pushes her closer to the railing. Ridden. But the Passenger does not have murder on its mind, merely pleasure. The Negro girl is released and falls in a huddled heap, trembling. Then she rises and runs. The other girl draws a long strand of gleaming hair into her mouth, chews on it, seems to awaken. She looks dazed.
I avert my eyes. One does not watch while a fellow sufferer is awakening. There is a morality of the ridden; we have so many new tribal mores in these dark days.
I hurry on.
Where am I going so hurriedly? Already I have walked more than a mile. I seem to be moving toward some goal, as though my Passenger still hunches in my skull, urging me about. But I know that is not so. For the moment, at least, I am free.
Can I be sure of that?
Cogito ergo sum no longer applies. We go on thinking even while we are ridden, and we live in quiet desperation, unable to halt our courses no matter how ghastly, no matter how self-destructive. I am certain that I can distinguish between the condition of bearing a Passenger and the condition of being free. But perhaps not. Perhaps I bear a particularly devilish Passenger which has not quitted me at all, but which merely has receded to the cerebellum, leaving me the illusion of freedom while all the time surreptitiously driving me onward to some purpose of its own.
Did we ever have more than that: the illusion of freedom?
But this is disturbing, the thought that I may be ridden without realising it. I burst out in heavy perspiration, not merely from the exertion of walking. Stop. Stop here. Why must you walk? You are at Forty-Second Street. There is the library. Nothing forces you onward. Stop a while, I tell myself. Rest on the library steps.
I sit on the cold stone and tell myself that I have made this decision for myself.
Have I? It is the old problem, free will versus determinism, translated into the foulest of forms. Determinism is no longer a philosopher’s abstraction; it is cold alien tendrils sliding between the cranial sutures. The Passengers arrived three years ago. I have been ridden five times since then. Our world is quite different now. But we have adjusted even to this. We have adjusted. We have our mores. Life goes on. Our governments rule, our legislatures meet, our stock exchanges transact business as usual, and we have methods for compensating for the random havoc. It is the only way. What else can we do? Shrivel in defeat? We have an enemy we cannot fight; at best we can resist through endurance. So we endure.
The stone steps are cold against my body. In December few people sit here.
I tell myself that I made this long walk of my own free will, that I halted of my own free will, that no Passenger rides my brain now. Perhaps. Perhaps. I cannot let myself believe that I am not free.
Can it be, I wonder, that the Passenger left some lingering command in me? Walk to this place, halt at this place? That is possible too.
I look about me at the others on the library steps.
An old man, eyes vacant, sitting on newspaper. A boy of thirteen or so with flaring nostrils. A plump woman. Are all of them ridden? Passengers seem to cluster about me today. The more I study the ridden ones th
e more convinced I become that I am, for the moment, free. The last time, I had three months of freedom between rides. Some people, they say, are scarcely ever free. Their bodies are in great demand, and they know only scattered bursts of freedom, a day here, a week there, an hour. We have never been able to determine how many Passengers infest our world. Millions, maybe. Or maybe five. Who can tell?
A wisp of snow curls down out of the grey sky. Central had said the chance of precipitation was slight. Are they riding Central this morning too?
I see the girl.
She sits diagonally across from me, five steps up and a hundred feet away, her black skirt pulled up on her knees to reveal handsome legs. She is young. Her hair is deep, rich auburn. Her eyes are pale; at this distance, I cannot make out the precise colour. She is dressed simply. She is younger than thirty. She wears a dark green coat and her lipstick has a purplish tinge. Her lips are full, her nose slender, high-bridged, her eyebrows carefully plucked.
Orbit 4 - Anthology Page 17