“None?” Katterson asked dully.
“Nothing at all.” North smiled faintly. Katterson felt the emptiness stirring in his stomach, and leaned back, closing his eyes.
Neither of them ate at all the next day. The snow continued to filter lightly down. Katterson spent most of the time staring out the little window, and he saw a light, clean blanket of snow covering everything in sight. The snow was unbroken.
The next morning Katterson arose and found North busily tearing the binding from his copy of the Greek plays. With a sort of amazement Katterson watched North put the soiled red binding into a pot of boiling water.
“Oh, you’re up? I’m just preparing breakfast.”
The binding was hardly palatable, but they chewed it to a soft pulp anyway, and swallowed the pulp just to give their tortured stomachs something to work on. Katterson retched as he swallowed his final mouthful.
One day of eating bookbindings.
“The city is dead,” Katterson said from the window without turning around. “I haven’t seen anyone come down this street yet. The snow is everywhere.”
North said nothing.
“This is crazy, Hal,” Katterson said suddenly. “I’m going out to get some food.”
“Where?”
“I’ll walk down Broadway and see what I can find. Maybe there’ll be a stray dog. I’ll look. We can’t hold out forever up here.”
“Don’t go, Paul.”
Katterson turned savagely. “Why? Is it better to starve up here without trying than to go down and hunt? You’re a little man; you don’t need food as much as I do. I’ll go down to Broadway; maybe there’ll be something. At least we can’t be any worse off than now.”
North smiled. “Go ahead, then.”
“I’m going.”
He buckled on his knife, put on all the warm clothes he could find, and made his way down the stairs. He seemed to float down, so lightheaded was he from hunger. His stomach was a tight hard knot.
The streets were deserted. A light blanket of snow lay everywhere, mantling the twisted ruins of the city. Katterson headed for Broadway, leaving tracks in the unbroken snow, and began to walk downtown.
At 96th Street and Broadway he saw his first sign of life, some people at the following corner. With mounting excitement he headed for 95th Street, but pulled up short.
There was a body sprawled over the snow, newly dead. And two boys of about twelve were having a duel to the death for its possession, while a third circled warily around them. Katterson watched them for a moment, and then crossed the street and walked on.
He no longer minded the snow and the solitude of the empty city. He maintained a steady, even pace, almost the tread of a machine. The world was crumbling fast around him, and his recourse lay in his solitary trek.
He turned back for a moment and looked behind him. There were his footsteps, the long trail stretching back and out of sight, the only marks breaking the even whiteness. He ticked off the empty blocks.
90th. 87th. 85th. At 84th he saw a blotch of color on the next block, and quickened his pace. When he got to close range, he saw it was a man lying on the snow. Katterson trotted lightly to him and stood over him.
He was lying face-down. Katterson bent and carefully rolled him over. His cheeks were still red; evidently he had rounded the corner and died just a few minutes before. Katterson stood up and looked around. In the window of the house nearest him, two pale faces were pressed against the pane, watching greedily.
He whirled suddenly to face a small, swarthy man standing on the other side of the corpse. They stared for a moment, the little man and the giant. Katterson noted dimly the other’s burning eyes and set expression. Two more people appeared, a ragged woman and a boy of eight or nine. Katterson moved closer to the corpse and made a show of examining it for identification, keeping a wary eye on the little tableau facing him.
Another man joined the group, and another. Now there were five, all standing silently in a semi-circle. The first man beckoned, and from the nearest house came two women and still another man. Katterson frowned; something unpleasant was going to happen.
A trickle of snow fluttered down. The hunger bit into Katterson like a red-hot knife as he stood there uneasily waiting for something to happen. The body lay fence-like between them.
The tableau dissolved into action in an instant. The small swarthy man made a gesture and reached for the corpse; Katterson quickly bent and scooped the dead man up. Then they were all around him, screaming and pulling at the body.
The swarthy man grabbed the corpse’s arm and started to tug, and a woman reached up for Katterson’s hair. Katterson drew up his arm and swung as hard as he could, and the small man left the ground and flew a few feet, collapsing into a huddled heap in the snow.
All of them were around him now, snatching at the corpse and at Katterson. He fought them off with his one free hand, with his feet, with his shoulders. Weak as he was and outnumbered, his size remained as a powerful factor. His fist connected with someone’s jaw and there was a rewarding crack; at the same time he lashed back with his foot and felt contact with breaking ribs.
“Get away!” he shouted. “Get away! This is mine! Away!” the first woman leaped at him, and he kicked at her and sent her reeling into the snowdrifts. “Mine! This is mine!”
They were even more weakened by hunger than he was. In a few moments all of them were scattered in the snow except the little boy, who came at Katterson determinedly, made a sudden dash, and leaped on Katterson’s back.
He hung there, unable to do anything more than cling. Katterson ignored him and took a few steps, carrying both the corpse and the boy, while the heat of battle slowly cooled inside him. He would take the corpse back uptown to North; they could cut it in pieces without much trouble. They would live on it for days, he thought. They would—
He realized what had happened. He dropped the corpse and staggered a few steps away, and sank down into the snow, bowing his head. The boy slipped off his back, and the little knot of people timidly converged on the corpse and bore it off triumphantly, leaving Katterson alone.
“Forgive me,” he muttered hoarsely. He licked his lips nervously, shaking his head. He remained there kneeling for a long time, unable to get up.
“No, no forgiveness. I can’t fool myself; I’m one of them now,” he said. He arose and stared at his hands, and then began to walk. Slowly, methodically, he trudged along, fumbling with the folded piece of paper in his pocket, knowing now that he had lost everything.
The snow had frozen in his hair, and he knew his head was white from snow—the head of an old man. His face was white too. He followed Broadway for a while, then cut to Central Park West. The snow was unbroken before him. It lay covering everything, a sign of the long winter setting in.
“North was right,” he said quietly to the ocean of white that was Central Park. He looked at the heaps of rubble seeking cover beneath the snow. “I can’t hold out any longer.” He looked at the address—Malory, 218 West 42nd Street—and continued onward, almost numb with the cold.
His eyes were narrowed to slits, and lashes and head were frosted and white. Katterson’s throat throbbed in his mouth, and his lips were clamped together by hunger. 70th Street, 65th. He zigzagged and wandered, following Columbus Avenue, Amsterdam Avenue for a while. Columbus, Amsterdam—the names were echoes from a past that had never been.
What must have been an hour passed, and another. The streets were empty. Those who were left stayed safe and starving inside, and watched from their windows the strange giant stalking alone through the snow. The sun had almost dropped from the sky as he reached 50th Street. His hunger had all but abated now; he felt nothing, knew just that his goal lay ahead. He faced forward, unable to go anywhere but ahead.
Finally 42nd Street, and he turned down towards where he knew Malory was to be found. He
came to the building. Up the stairs, now, as the darkness of night came to flood the streets. Up the stairs, up another flight, another. Each step was a mountain, but he pulled himself higher and higher.
At the fifth floor Katterson reeled and sat down on the edge of the steps, gasping. A liveried footman passed, his nose in the air, his green coat shimmering in the half-light. He was carrying a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth on a silver tray. Katterson lurched forward to seize the pig. His groping hands passed through it, and pig and footman exploded like bubbles and drifted off through the silent halls.
Just one more flight. Sizzling meat on a stove, hot, juicy, tender meat filling the hole where his stomach had once been. He picked up his legs carefully and set them down, and came to the top at last. He balanced for a moment at the top of the stairs, nearly toppled backwards but seized the banister at the last second, and then pressed forward.
There was the door. He saw it, heard loud noises coming from behind it. A feast was going on, a banquet, and he ached to join in. Down the hall, turn left, pound on the door.
Noise growing louder.
“Malory! Malory! It’s me, Katterson, big Katterson! I’ve come to you! Open up, Malory!”
The handle began to turn.
“Malory! Malory!”
Katterson sank to his knees in the hall and fell forward on his face when the door opened at last.
Multiples
No heartrending sagas of the torments of creation with this one. It was July of 1983; I had finished Valentine Pontifex, which had turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to write (the first half of 1983 was one of those periods of my life that I’d just as soon not repeat); a few days after the novel was done I sat down and wrote “Multiples” in what was essentially one long take, did a little minor editing, and sent it off to Ellen Datlow of Omni, who accepted it right away. They should all be that easy. But in this case I was making use of my own home turf as the setting instead of having to invent some alien world, and the theme of multiple personalities was one I had been thinking about for some time. Characters and plot fell into place in that magical way that makes writers want to get down on their knees and offer thanks.
The story felt like a winner to me right away. Ellen published it in her October 1983 issue. It was chosen for the first volume (1983) of Gardner Dozois’s annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, and has had a healthy reprint existence ever since. For a dizzying moment in the late 1990s it looked as though Stephen Spielberg was going to make it into a major motion picture, too, but that deal went away as most Hollywood deals go away, leaving nothing but a conspicuous residue of cash on my doorstep. The story also gets me occasional letters from actual multiple-personality people, who want to know if I’m one myself, or married to one. (The answers are No and No—so far as I know.)
And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to append a little bragging here. Having “Multiples” chosen for one of the best-science-fiction-of-the-year anthologies completed an unusual sweep for me, one of which I’m immensely proud. There were then three such anthologies, edited by Dozois, Donald A. Wollheim, and Terry Carr. I had stories in all three of them for the year of 1983. Other writers have achieved that now and then, when some particularly strong story was picked by all three editors—but I had a different story in each book. I don’t think anyone had ever managed that trick before. (I did it again in 1989. That time, though, I managed to get five stories into the three anthologies. Go ahead, top it if you can!)
There were mirrors everywhere, making the place a crazyhouse of dizzying refraction: mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the walls, mirrors in the angles where the walls met the ceiling and the floor, even little eddies of mirror-dust periodically blown on gusts of air through the room, so that all the bizarre distortions, fracturings, and dislocations of image that were bouncing around the place would from time to time coalesce in a shimmering haze of chaos right before your eyes. Colored globes spun round and round overhead, creating patterns of ricocheting light. It was exactly the way Cleo had expected a multiples club to look.
She had walked up and down the whole Fillmore Street strip from Union to Chestnut and back again for half an hour, peering at this club and that, before finding the courage to go inside one that called itself Skits. Though she had been planning this night for months, she found herself paralyzed by fear at the last minute: afraid they would spot her as a fraud the moment she walked in, afraid they would drive her out with jeers and curses and cold mocking laughter. But now that she was within, she felt fine—calm, confident, ready for the time of her life.
There were more women than men in the club, something like a seven-to-three ratio. Hardly anyone seemed to be talking to anyone else: most stood alone in the middle of the floor, staring into the mirrors as though in trance. Their eyes were slits, their jaws were slack, their shoulders slumped forward, their arms dangled. Now and then as some combination of reflections sluiced across their consciousnesses with particular impact they would go taut and jerk and wince as if they had been struck. Their faces would flush, their lips would pull back, their eyes would roll, they would mutter and whisper to themselves; and then after a moment they would slip back into stillness.
Cleo knew what they were doing. They were switching and doubling. Maybe some of the adepts were tripling. Her heart rate picked up. Her throat was very dry. What was the routine here, she wondered? Did you just walk right out on to the floor and plug into the light-patterns, or were you supposed to go to the bar first for a shot or a snort?
She looked towards the bar. A dozen or so customers sitting there, mostly men, a couple of them openly studying her, giving her that new-girl-in-town stare. Cleo returned their gaze evenly, coolly, blankly. Standard-looking men, reasonably attractive, thirtyish or early fortyish, business suits, conventional hairstyles: young lawyers, executives, maybe stockbrokers, successful sorts out for a night’s fun, the kind you might run into anywhere. Look at that one, tall, athletic, curly hair, glasses. Faint ironic smile, easy inquiring eyes. Almost professorial. And yet, and yet—behind that smooth intelligent forehead, what strangenesses must teem and boil! How many hidden souls must lurk and jostle! Scary. Tempting.
Irresistible.
Cleo resisted. Take it slow, take it slow. Instead of going to the bar she moved out serenely among the switchers on the floor, found an open space, centered herself, looked towards the mirrors on the far side of the room. Legs apart, feet planted flat, shoulders forward. A turning globe splashed waves of red and violet light, splintered a thousand times over, into her face. Go. Go. Go. Go. You are Cleo. You are Judy. You are Vixen. You are Lisa. Go. Go. Go. Go. Cascades of iridescence sweeping over the rim of her soul, battering at the walls of her identity. Come, enter, drown me, split me, switch me. You are Cleo and Judy. You are Vixen and Lisa. You are Cleo and Judy and Vixen and Lisa. Go. Go. Go.
Her head was spinning. Her eyes were blurring. The room gyrated around her.
Was this it? Was she splitting? Was she switching? Maybe so. Maybe the capacity was there in everyone, even her, and all it took was the lights, the mirror, the ambience, the will. I am many. I am multiple. I am Cleo switching to Vixen. I am Judy and Lisa. I am—
No.
I am Cleo.
I am Cleo.
I am very dizzy and I am getting sick, and I am Cleo and only Cleo, as I have always been.
I am Cleo and only Cleo and I am going to fall down.
“Easy,” he said. “You OK?”
“Steadying up, I think. Whew!”
“Out-of-towner, eh?”
“Sacramento. How’d you know?”
“Too quick on the floor. Locals all know better. This place has the fastest mirrors in the west. They’ll blow you away if you’re not careful. You can’t just go out there and grab for the big one—you’ve got to phase yourself in slowly. You sure you’re going to be OK?”
“I think so.”
He was the tall man from the bar, the athletic professorial one. She supposed he had caught her before she had actually fallen, since she felt no bruises. His hand rested now against her elbow as he lightly steered her towards a table along the wall.
“What’s your now-name?” he asked.
“Judy.”
“I’m Van.”
“Hello, Van.”
“What about a brandy? Steady you up a little more.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Never?”
“Vixen does the drinking,” she said. “Not me.”
“Ah. The old story. She gets the bubbles, you get her hangovers. I have one like that too, only with him it’s Hunan food. He absolutely doesn’t give a damn what lobster in hot and sour sauce does to my digestive system. I hope you pay her back the way she deserves.”
Cleo smiled and said nothing.
He was watching her closely. Was he interested, or just being polite to someone who was obviously out of her depth in a strange milieu? Interested, she decided. He seemed to have accepted that Vixen stuff at face value.
Be careful now, Cleo warned herself. Trying to pile on convincing-sounding details when you don’t really know what you’re talking about is a sure way to give yourself away, sooner or later. The thing to do, she knew, was to establish her credentials without working too hard at it, sit back, listen, learn how things really operate among these people.
“What do you do, up there in Sacramento?”
“Nothing fascinating.”
“Poor Judy. Real-estate broker?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Every other woman I meet is a real-estate broker these days. What’s Vixen?”
“A lush.”
“Not much of a livelihood in that.”
Cleo shrugged. “She doesn’t need one. The rest of us support her.”
“Real estate and what else?”
Needle in a Timestack Page 28