“Dogs can talk,” said Dixon.
And it truly was a wonderful party. All four of Dixon’s grandparents showed up, along with his teacher and twelve of his friends, half of whom had been cured in recent months, one on the previous day. Dixon marched around Room 117 displaying the evidence of his burn like war medals. The brand, of course – performed under local anesthesia immediately after his cure – plus copies of his initial cerebroscan, voicegram, and fingerprint set.
Brand, scan, gram, prints: Sherry Urquist’s had all been in perfect order. She had definitely been burned. And yet there was fiction in her garbage.
The gift-opening ceremony contained one bleak moment. Pulling the train from its wrapping, Dixon blanched, garroted by panic, and Gloria had to rush him into the bathroom, where he spent several minutes throwing up. I felt like a fool. To a boy who’s just been through a brainburn, an electric train has gruesome connotations.
“Thanks for coming,” said Gloria. She meant it.
“I do like my present,” Dixon averred. “A freight train would have been nicer,” he added. A citizen now.
I apologized for leaving early. A big case, I explained. Very hot, very political. “Good-bye, Uncle Orville.”
Uncle. Great stuff.
I spent the rest of the day tracking my adorable Dissembler, never letting her get more than a mile from me or closer than two blocks. What agonizing hopes that dot on the map inspired, what rampant expectations. With each flash my longing intensified. Oh, Sherry, Sherry, you pulsing red angel, you stroboscope of my desire. No mere adolescent infatuation this. I dared to speak its name. “Neurotic obsession,” I gushed, kissing the dot as it crossed Aquinas Avenue. “Mixed with bald romantic fantasy and lust,” I added. The radio shouted at me: a hot-blooded evangelist no less enraptured than I. “Does faith tempt you, my friends? Fear not! Look into your metaphoric hearts, and you will discover how subconscious human needs project themselves onto putative revelations!”
For someone facing a wide variety of deadlines, my quarry didn’t push herself particularly hard. Sherry spent the hour from four to five at the Museum of Secondary Fossil Finds. From five to six she did the Imprisoned Animals Garden. From six to seven she treated herself to dinner at Danny’s Digestibles, after which she went down to the waterfront.
I cruised along Third Street, twenty yards from the Pathogen River. This was the city’s frankest district, a gray mass of warehouses and abandoned stores jammed together like dead cells waiting to be sloughed off. Sherry walked slowly, aimlessly, as if. . . could it be? Yes, damn, as if arm-in-arm with another person, as if meshing her movements with those of a second, intertwined body. Probably she had met the guy at Danny’s, a conceited pile of muscles named Guido or something, and now they were having a cozy stroll along the Pathogen. I pressed the dot, as if to draw Sherry away. What if she spent the night in another apartment? That would pretty much cinch it. I wondered how their passion would register. I pictured the dot going wild, love’s red fibrillation.
After pausing for several seconds on the bank, the dot suddenly began prancing across the river. Odd. I fixed on the map. The Saint Joan Tunnel was half a mile away, the Thomas More Bridge even farther. I doubted that she was swimming – not in this weather, and not in the Pathogen, where the diseases of the future were born. Flying, then? The dot moved too slowly to signify an airplane. A hot-air balloon? Probably she was in a boat. Sherry and Guido, off on a romantic cruise.
I hung a left on Beach Street and sped down to the docks. Moonlight coated the Pathogen, settling into the waves, figuratively bronzing a lone, swiftly moving tugboat. I checked the map. The dot placed Sherry at least ten yards from the tug, in the exact middle of the river and heading for the opposite shore. I studied her presumed location. Nothing. Submerged, then? I knew she hadn’t committed suicide; the dot’s progress was too resolute. Was she in scuba gear?
I abandoned the car and attempted to find where she had entered the water, a quest that took me down concrete steps to a pier hemmed by pylons smeared with gull dung. Jagged odors shot from the dead and rotting river; water lapped over the landing with a harsh sucking sound, as if a pride of invisible lions was drinking here. My gaze settled on a metal grate, barred like the ribcage of some promethean robot. It seemed slightly askew . . . Oh, great, Orville, let’s go traipsing through the sewers, with rats nipping at our heels and slugs the size of bagels falling on our shoulders. Terrific idea.
The grate yielded readily to my reluctant hands. Had she truly gone down there? Should I follow? A demented notion, but duty called, using its shrillest voice, and, besides, this was Sherry Urquist, this was irrational need. I secured a flashlight from the car and proceeded down the ladder. It was like entering a lung. Steamy, warm. The flashlight blazed through the blackness. A weapon, I decided. Look out, all you rats and slugs. Make way. Here comes Orville Prawn, the fastest flashlight in Veritas.
I moved through a multilayered maze of soggy holes and dripping catacombs. So many ways to descend: ladders, sloping tunnels, crooked little stairways – I used them all, soon moving beyond the riverbed into other territories, places not on the OIA map.
All around me Veritas’s guts were spread: its concrete intestines, gushing lead veins, buzzing nerves of steel and gutta-percha. Much to my surprise, the city even had its parasites – shacks of corrugated tin leaned against the wet brick walls, sucking secretly on the power cables and water mains. This would not do. No, to live below Veritas like this, appropriating its juices, was little more than piracy. Overt Intelligence would hear of it.
My astonishment deepened as I advanced. I could understand a few hobos setting up a shantytown down here, but how might I explain these odd chunks of civilization? These blazing streetlamps, these freshly painted picket fences, these tidy grids of rose bushes, these fountains with their stone dolphins spewing water? Paint, flowers, sculpture: so many lies in one place! Peel back the streets of any city and do you find its warped reflection, its doppelgänger mirrored in distorting glass? Or did Veritas alone harbor such anarchy, this tumor spreading beneath her unsuspecting flesh?
A sleek white cat shot out of the rose bushes and disappeared down an open manhole. At first I thought that its pursuer was a dog, but no. Wrong shape. And that tail.
The shudder began in my lower spine and expanded.
A rat.
A rat the size of an armadillo.
Chasing a cat.
I moved on. Vegetable gardens now. Two bright yellow privies. Cottages defaced with gardenia plots and strings of clematis scurrying up trellises. A building that looked suspiciously like a chapel. A park of some kind, with flagstone paths and a duck pond. Ruddy puffs of vapor bumped against the treetops.
Rain is red . . .
I entered the park.
A pig glided over my head like a miniature dirigible, wheeling across the sky on cherub wings. At first I assumed it was a machine, but its squeal was disconcertingly organic.
“You!”
A low, liquid voice. I dropped my gaze.
Sherry shared the bench with an enormous dog, some grotesque variation on the malamute, his chin snugged into her lap. “You!” she said again, erecting the word like a barrier, a spiked vocable stopping my approach. The dog lifted his head and growled.
“Correct,” I said, stock still.
“You followed me?”
“I cannot tell a lie.” I examined the nearest tree. No fruit, of course, only worms and paper money.
“Dirty spy.”
“Half true. I am not dirty.”
She wore a buttercup dress, decorated with lace. Her thick braid lay on her shoulder like a loaf of challah. Her eyes had become cartoons of themselves, starkly outlined and richly shaded. “If you try to return” – she patted the malamute – “Max will eat you alive.”
“You bet your sweet ass,” said the dog.
She massaged Max’s head, as if searching for the trigger that would release his attack. “I expect
ed better of you, Mr. Prawn.”
We were in a contest. Who could act the more betrayed, the more disgusted? “I’d always assumed the Dissemblage was just a group.” Spit dripped off my words. “I didn’t know it was . . . all this.”
“Two cities,” muttered Sherry, launching her index finger upward. “Truth above, dignity below.” The finger descended. Her nails, I noticed, were a fluorescent green.
“Her father built it,” explained the dog.
“His life’s work,” added Sherry.
“Are there many of you?” I asked.
“I’m the first to reach adulthood,” said Sherry.
“The prototype liar?”
Her sneer evolved into a grin. “Others are hatching.”
“How can you betray your city like this?” I drilled her with my stare. “Veritas, who nurtured you, suckled you?”
“Shall I kill him now?” asked the dog.
Sherry chucked Max under the chin, told him to be patient. “Veritas did not suckle me.” Her gesture encompassed the entire park and, by extension, the whole of Veritas’s twisted double. “This was my cradle – my nursery.” She took a lipstick from her purse. “It’s not hard to make a lie. The money trees are props. The rats and pigs trace to avant-garde microbiology.”
“All I needed were vocal cords,” said the dog.
She began touching up her lips. “Thanks to my father, I reached my eighth birthday knowing that pigs had wings, that snow was hot, that two and two equaled five, that worms tasted like honey . . . all of it. So when my burn came – ”
“You were incurable,” I said. “You walked away from the hospital ready to swindle and cheat and – ”
“Write fiction. Four novels so far. Maybe you’d like to read them. You might be a bureaucratic drudge, but I’m fond of you, Orville.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t. And when my cadre takes over and the burn ends – it won’t be hard, we’ll lie our way to the top – when that happens, you won’t know when anybody’s telling the truth.”
“Right,” said the dog, leaping off the bench.
“Truth is beauty,” I said.
Sherry winced. “My father did not mind telling the truth.” Here she became an actress, that consummate species of liar, dragging out her lines. “But he hated his inability to do otherwise. Honesty without choice, he said, is slavery with a smile.”
A glorious adolescent girl rode through the park astride a six-legged horse, her skin dark despite her troglodytic upbringing, her eyes alive with deceit. The gift of deceit, as Sherry would have it. I wondered whether Dixon was playing with his electric train just then. Probably not. Past his bedtime. I kept envisioning his cerebrum, brocaded with necessary scars.
Sherry patted the spot where the dog had been, and I sat down cautiously. “Care for one?” she asked, plucking a worm off a money tree.
“No.”
“Go ahead. Try it.”
“Well . . .”
“Open your mouth and close your eyes.”
The creature wriggled on my tongue, and I bit down. Pure honey. Sweet, smooth, but I did not enjoy it.
Truth above, dignity below. My index finger throbbed, prickly with that irrevocable little tug of the switch in Room 145. Five hundred volts was a lot, but what was the alternative? To restore the age of thievery and fraud?
History has it I joined Sherry’s city that very night. A lie, but what do you expect – all the books are written by Dissemblers. True, sometime before dawn I did push my car into the river, the better to elude Overt Intelligence. But fully a week went by before I told Sherry about her internal transmitter. She was furious. She vowed to have the thing cut out. Go ahead, I told her, do it – but don’t expect my blessing. That’s another thing the historians got wrong. They say I paid for the surgery.
Call me a traitor. Call me a coward. Call me love’s captive. I have called myself all these things. But – really – I did not join Sherry’s city that night. That night I merely sat on a park bench staring into her exotically adorned eyes, fixing on her bright lips, holding her fluorescent fingertips.
“I want to believe whatever you tell me,” I said.
“Then you’ll need to have faith in me,” she said.
“It’s raining,” noted the dog, and then he launched into a talking-dog joke.
“My cottage is over there.” Sherry replaced her lipstick in her purse. She tossed her wondrous braid over her shoulder.
We rose and started across the park, hand in hand, lost in the sweet uncertainty of the moment, oblivious to the chattering dog and the lashing wind and bright red rain dancing on the purple grass.
Enchanted Village
A. E. VAN VOGT
A. E. van Vogt (1912– ) is one of the giants of the Golden Age of science fiction, specifically, the flowering of modern science fiction in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s magazine, Astounding, between 1939 and 1949. A Canadian writer, he moved to the U.S. after World War II and spent the 1950s deeply involved in his friend L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics (later Scientology). He is one of the most influential SF writers of that period, in some ways the dominant SF writer of the 1940s. His novel, Slan (1946, appearing first as a serial in Astounding in 1940) metaphorically represented the previously unarticulated attitude in the SF field that SF readers and writers were somehow the next stage in human evolution. “Fans are Slans” became a motto of 1940s science fiction, and van Vogt was a hero of the evolution and his influence on the next generation of SF writers, ncluding Philip Jose Farmer, Philip K. Dick, and Charles Harness, was profound. The World of Null-A (1948) was the first work of modern science fiction to be published by a respectable hardcover house and it was a worldwide success. His fiction is filled with powerful imagery and strange ideas, often presented in dreamlike sequence, not a rational flow. His critical reputation was demolished in the U.S. in the the 1950s by Damon Knight’s essay, “Cosmic Jerrybuilder: A. E. van Vogt.” But van Vogt’s popularity did not decrease for decades. In the 1980s Leslie A. Fiedler (in his essay “The Criticism of Science Fiction,” 1983) put it succinctly: “Any bright high school sophomore can identify all the things that are wrong about van Vogt . . . But the challenge to criticism which pretends to do justice to science fiction is to say what is right about him: to identify his mythopoeic power, his ability to evoke primordial images, his gift for redeeming the marvelous in a world in which technology has preempted the province of magic and God is dead.”
This story is one of his most memorable. Ray Bradbury’s later stories of the desert planet Mars, with its hidden survivals of a once-great technological civilization, are strikingly similar in atmosphere. This is van Vogt’s “Martian chronicle.” In this case it is easy to understand van Vogt’s appeal.
———————————
“Explorers of a new frontier” they had been called before they left for Mars.
For a while, after the ship crashed into a Martian desert, killing all on board except – miraculously – this one man, Bill Jenner spat the words occasionally into the constant, sand-laden wind. He despised himself for the pride he had felt when he first heard them.
His fury faded with each mile that he walked, and his black grief for his friends became a gray ache. Slowly he realized that he had made a ruinous misjudgment.
He had underestimated the speed at which the rocketship had been traveling. He’d guessed that he would have to walk three hundred miles to reach the shallow, polar sea he and the others had observed as they glided in from outer space. Actually, the ship must have flashed an immensely greater distance before it hurtled down out of control.
The days stretched behind him, seemingly as numberless as the hot, red, alien sand that scorched through his tattered clothes. A huge scarecrow of a man, he kept moving across the endless, arid waste – he would not give up.
By the time he came to the mountain, his food had long been gone. Of his four water bags, only one remai
ned, and that was so close to being empty that he merely wet his cracked lips and swollen tongue whenever his thirst became unbearable.
Jenner climbed high before he realized that it was not just another dune that had barred his way. He paused, and as he gazed up at the mountain that towered above him, he cringed a little. For an instant he felt the hopelessness of this mad race he was making to nowhere – but he reached the top. He saw that below him was a depression surrounded by hills as high as, or higher than, the one on which he stood. Nestled in the valley they made was a village.
He could see trees and the marble floor of a courtyard. A score of buildings was clustered around what seemed to be a central square. They were mostly low-constructed, but there were four towers pointing gracefully into the sky. They shone in the sunlight with a marble luster.
Faintly, there came to Jenner’s ears a thin, high-pitched whistling sound. It rose, fell, faded completely, then came up again clearly and unpleasantly. Even as Jenner ran toward it, the noise grated on his ears, eerie and unnatural.
He kept slipping on smooth rock, and bruised himself when he fell. He rolled halfway down into the valley. The buildings remained new and bright when seen from nearby. Their walls flashed with reflections. On every side was vegetation – reddish-green shrubbery, yellow-green trees laden with purple and red fruit.
With ravenous intent, Jenner headed for the nearest fruit tree. Close up, the tree looked dry and brittle. The large red fruit he tore from the lowest branch, however, was plump and juicy.
As he lifted it to his mouth, he remembered that he had been warned during his training period to taste nothing on Mars until it had been chemically examined. But that was meaningless advice to a man whose only chemical equipment was in his own body.
Nevertheless, the possibility of danger made him cautious. He took his first bite gingerly. It was bitter to his tongue, and he spat it out hastily. Some of the juice which remained in his mouth seared his gums. He felt the fire on it, and he reeled from nausea. His muscles began to jerk, and he lay down on the marble to keep himself from falling. After what seemed like hours to Jenner, the awful trembling finally went out of his body and he could see again. He looked up despisingly at the tree.
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 21