Approaching Oblivion

by Harlan Ellison

  Anyhow. We had this fried chicken dinner, which I liked a lot because she made it just the way I like it, very dark and golden and crunchy on the surface and dry underneath, without that thin oily film that makes your teeth feel greasy. And we had some wine.

  Now I don’t drink much. I won’t apologize. I can’t hold it. But we had wine.

  And I got, well, a little drunk, just a little. And I tried to touch her. And she was cold. Very cold. Very very cold. And she yelled at me, “Don’t ever touch me!”

  Now that was just two weeks before she told me she loved me and wanted to be mine. I asked her what she meant by that, “be mine.” I never wanted to own anybody. And I certainly had the idea she didn’t want to be anybody’s possession, but there it was.

  “I love you, and I want to stay with you.”

  “There’s no place to go.”

  “That isn’t what I meant. We could still live here together and not see each other. I mean, I love you and want to share the world with you.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said. I really wanted what she wanted, but I was afraid she’d get tired of me, and then what? Our situation wasn’t too normal, at least by the usual standards I’d grown up with, if you catch my meaning.

  So. She got angry, and went stalking out the door. I waited a few minutes to let her cool off, and then I went looking for her.

  She had walked straight out to the edge of the world, and kept right on going. I don’t think she knew I was following her.

  I went back to my house and lay down.

  When she came back, about two hours later I guess, I sat up and said, “Just who the dickens are you?”

  She was furious, still furious. “Who the dickens are you?!”

  “I know who I am,” I said, getting angry too, “and I want to know who you are. I saw you walking out there off the edge. I can’t do that!”

  “Some of us are talented, some aren’t. Learn to live with it.” Really a snotty answer, boy!

  “I was here first!”

  “That’s what the Indians said and look what happened to them!”

  “Dammit, are you responsible for all of this, for every crazy thing that happened?”

  Then she really blew her stack and shouted at me. “Yes, you silly, irresponsible clown, I’m responsible. I did it all. I destroyed the world. Now what the hell are you going to do about it?”

  I was too stunned to do anything. I hadn’t really thought she was responsible, but when she admitted it, I didn’t know what to say. I went over and tried to grab her by the shoulders, and I could feel that cold coming right off her. “You’re not human,” I said.

  “Oh, go to hell, you idiot. I’m as human as you are. Humaner.”

  “You’d better tell me,” I said, with a threatening tone, “or else—”

  “Or else what, you nerd? Or else I’ll wipe out this last little chunk and you and everything else and I’ll be all alone the way I was before I did it!”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes, did it. Blew it all away. Just sat back and put my thumb in my mouth and said, ‘Vanish everything but Eugene Harrison, wherever he is, and me, and a little town where I can be with him.’ And when I took my thumb out of my mouth, everything was gone. Boston was gone, and the sky and the earth and every other thing, and I had to go walking through that glop out there till I found you.”

  “Why?!”

  “You don’t even recognize me, do you, you idiot? You don’t even remember Opal Sellers, do you?”

  I stared at her.

  “Dope!”

  I continued staring.

  “I was in your graduating class in high school. You were right behind me when we went up for our diplomas. I was wearing a white gown, and you were standing behind me during the invocation, and I was having my period, and I was spotting, and it had gone through the white gown, and you leaned over and told me and I was embarrassed to death, but you gave me your mortarboard and I held it across my backside and I thought it was the kindest, nicest thing anyone had ever done. And I loved you, you simple stupid insensitive sonofabitch!”

  And she let down the screen or the image or the mask or whatever it was that she’d put up over herself, which was why she was cold to the touch, and inside there was Opal Sellers, who was one of the ugliest girls I’d ever seen, and she knew that was what I thought, and she didn’t wait a minute, but put her thumb in her mouth and started mumbling around…but nothing happened.

  Then she went completely out of her head and started screaming that she’d passed on the power to me, and she couldn’t do a thing about me, and she ran out the door. I took off after her, and she went off the edge and kept going straight away like the Viking and the Stuka and the Hun and all the rest of them, which I guess she’d sent to liven things up for me so I’d feel heroic.

  And that’s it.

  Gone. Just went. Where, I have no idea. I’m not leaving here, that’s for sure, but I don’t know what to do about it. Somebody ought to say I’m sorry to her, I mean she’s a nice girl and all.

  It’s just I’m here and I’m comfortable, and who can ask for more than that. She was always talking about love. Well, damn, that wasn’t love.

  I don’t think.

  But what do I know? Girls always got tired of me very quickly.

  I’m going to teach myself how to make pizza.

  Gull Lake, Hickory Corners, Michigan! 1973

  3.

  Kiss of Fire

  He drank ice crystals laced with midnight and watched their world burn. A greenperson floated up beside him, and touched his sleeve. There was static electricity in the compartment; a tiny spark. “Mister Redditch, when you have a moment, the Designer would like to disturb air with you.”

  Redditch looked down. The greenperson’s eye was watering. “Tell him I’ll be along.” The greenperson’s flaccid skin went to an ivory-gray hue, capturing the disquiet and weariness in Redditch’s voice. He floated away, adjusting his hue exactly, so the message could be transmitted without the slightest semantic misinterpretation.

  Redditch turned back to the teleidoscope, the tanger, the sensu, the catcheye and the straight black tunnel that showed him their world burning. The solar prominences had died away to self-satisfied blandness; unctuous. There was little out there now but smoldering ash, but the sensu was still getting a reading high into the nines and the teleidoscope was turning it, turning it, combining colors and sending them back in some new spectral spectrum. He raised the drink to his lips, but he could not taste it. The tanger overrode, even in the control compartment. It was the smack of salt-rising bread and salamanders.

  A rolling checker came out of its bay and made its way through the coils of readout sheets littering the deck. Redditch had designed and combined and set up the nova with great care, and the sheets had endlessly tongued out of the aesthetikon and he had let them lie. The checker got through the tangle and palmed open the hookup compartment and re-attached the feed to stateroom 611. But it hardly mattered: the clients in 611 had played gin rummy straight through the program. The checker returned to its bay.

  Redditch downed the last of his drink, ran his tongue around the rim of the hollow crystal, and set it down on the console. He sighed and rubbed his weary, itching eyes. He was tired from the inside—out to the very tips of his fingers. And now, the Designer…

  When he emerged from the dropshaft and walked through the theater lounge, a blustery purple-class voyager and a fat duchess with sausage fingers and noisy rings greeted him, congratulated him on the performance, offered him social congress. The man was probably a salesman of myth-sticks, and the woman was clearly a remittance relative. He smiled and thanked them and hurried on through the theater. A clique still plugged into their tunnel applauded him, and he acknowledged their appreciation with a vague gesture of his sensor hand. It sparkled with reflected light from the overhead inkys.

  Whores were busily trying to drum up some business, trying to catch a f
ew voyagers who had absorbed the empathy of the programmed death and who were, at least for the moment, “alive.”

  They were having a rough time of it. One lithe creature with a charged ring through the lips of her vagina was trying with all the powers at her command to get a thin, salivating messenger to buy her favors. She was bent over him, her hand inside his chiton, massaging his privates. But his eyes were rolled up in their sockets and Redditch would have taken odds her till and her ring would go empty.

  A tag-team, two black-and-ocher Sedalians, had a suety emissary trapped deep in his formfit. One of them had pulled off his embassy pouch and sash, and had lowered herself onto his body. It seemed unlikely she would be able to get him erect enough for insertion, and her sister was tonguing one of the several underarm vaginas the man had had surgically added to his grotesque bulk. While they worked over him, Redditch passed and heard the man mumbling, “Don’t be ridiculous, this is ridiculous, my sperm brings a thousand a decaliter, I’m certainly not going to give it away and pay you for the privilege.” Redditch quite agreed. He wondered why the ship’s comptrollers continued to hire on whores; they were virtually an anachronism, holdover from centuries before. They certainly couldn’t be doing enough business to warrant their continued employment.

  He kept walking. Once, after a long programming, he had passed through the theater and one of the new whores, a lanky young man with pustules, had propositioned him. Redditch had laughed and there’d been some repercussions with the Guild, until the Designer had straightened out the matter.

  He saw her sitting alone, and when she looked up at him as he approached, the singular beauty contained in her face, particularly her slanted eyes, made him slow his pace. Her right arm was lying along the rest, and she bent it at the elbow, raising the slim-fingered hand. It was enough to stop him.

  “You programmed the death?” she said, with no rising inflection. He nodded, smiling in a sudden rush of anticipation of her congratulations. She looked away.

  He felt as though something had been stolen from him.

  The Designer was lying out in a leaf chair that moved idly in its free-fall nimbus. Every eye in his forehead row was closed, but Redditch could tell he was perceiving his surroundings by the fibrillation of root threads that spiked his cheek-pouches. Crystals of ergonovine sparkled amid the threads. The Designer’s backers were seated around the observatory suite.

  “Come in,” the Designer said. The leaf chair moved.

  “I’m in.” He slumped into a composeat and punched out tranquilizers and an antacid. He wanted to stay calm through it all. Outside the observatory cycle ports the nova phased through from yellow-ocher to gold as he watched. “Something on your mind, Keltin?”

  The Designer opened three yes eyes.

  “Where must your mind be?” He said it with carefully chilled contempt. A greenperson hovered just beyond the nimbus, unnecessarily translating the tone in colors.

  Redditch yawned. “Madison Square Garden, a 1932 Paramount Pictures release starring Jack Oakie, Marian Nixon, Zasu Pitts, William Boyd and Lew Cody. ‘A romantic, dramatic story of three men and two girls fighting desperately to rout the mechanism of unseen forces.’ Running time, seventy-six minutes.”

  One of the backers threw his drink at the bulkhead. He started to shout something, but a checker emerged from its bay and caught the crystal before it hit, sucking up every drop of fluid before it could stain the grass. The backer turned away in frustration.

  The Designer opened a no eye. “There are clauses in your contract, Redditch.”

  Reddith nodded. “But you won’t use them.”

  He only wished Keltin would relieve him. Far chance.

  Another of the backers, a florid man with a thrilled and dyed topknot, hunched forward. “You can’t possibly call that death viable? Sparks, man, there were actually paying guests sleeping through it. I saw a monitor estimate that had thirty-two percent, that’s thirty-two percent of the audience into the sevens with boredom! How the hell do you expect us to drain off enough empathy to syndicate this…this abort you call a death?”

  Redditch sighed. “Stop inviting your relatives to the premieres and perhaps we’ll get a few guests onboard who can still feel something.”

  “I don’t have to take this!” the backer shouted.

  “That’s true,” Redditch said. The tranquilizers were holding.

  “That’s true,” said the Designer, meaning something else entirely. “Let me handle this, Mr. Nym. If you please.”

  “Stars!” Mr. Nym said. He turned away. Now there were two looking out the cycle ports.

  “Redditch, this isn’t the first inadequate job you’ve programmed. The Faraway Forever program. The Rightful Loss program. Others.”

  “Maybe I’m bored.”

  “We’re all bored, dammit,” said a third backer. He had his hands clasped in his lap.

  “I spend considerable time designing these deaths,” the Designer continued, “and I cannot permit my work to be underdone this way. These gentlemen have very legitimate complaints. Their audiences are waiting for the syndication of what we mount out here; their business is providing their audiences with top-grade empathy material. When it goes to you from my workshop, it’s right. When it’s actualized it lacks verve, pace, timing. There are clauses in your contract. I won’t tell you again.”

  Redditch rose. “Don’t. Refer it to my Guild.” He turned and left.

  Behind him, all three backers were staring out the cycle ports as the nova phased to deep purple. His soul was quiet.

  He strode through the theater lounge quickly, no glance left, no glance right. If he was going to sedate and blot, he would do it alone.

  She wasn’t in her seat. The formfit still held the shape of her body. Glance right.

  He floated lazily in the nimbus, his spine like water, his thoughts relaxed. He was talking to the memory box that contained his wife, dead these last sixty-three years—since his most recent anti-agathic rejuvenation.

  “It’s the end of summer, Annie.”

  “How did the children take it, Rai?”

  They had had no children. It was an old memory box, the synthesizing channels were worn: the responses were frequently imprecise or non sequitur. The bead in which her voice had been cored had become microscopically crusted; Annie now spoke with a slur and sometimes-drawl.

  “I look about thirty now. They even fixed the prostate. I’m taller, and they lengthened the fingers on my sensor hand. I’m much faster at the console now, wider reach. But the work isn’t any better.”

  “Why don’t you speak to the Designer about it, darling?”

  “That sententious lemming. I may be undertalented, but at least I don’t try to sustain a miserable existence by deluding myself I’m creating great works of art.”

  He turned onto his stomach, staring out the port. It was dark out there. “And while we float here talking, outside this great space-going vessel cut in the shape of a moonstone, the universe whirls past at millions of light-years an hour, doo-wah-diddy mop-mop.”

  “Isn’t that parsecs, dear?”

  “How should I know. I’m a sensu programmer, not an astrophysicist.”

  “Is it chilly in here, Rai?”

  “Oh, Annie, forget it. Say something I haven’t heard. I’m dying, Annie, dying of ennui and the stupids. I don’t want, I don’t need, I haven’t anything, don’t care!”

  “What do you want me to say, dear? I miss you, I’m sorry you’re lonely—”

  “It’s not even that I’m lonely. Annie, you went through three rejuvenations with me. You were the lucky one.”

  “Lucky? Lucky that I died during the fourth? How do you get lucky out that, Rai?”

  “Because I’ve had to live sixty-three more years, and in another ten or fifteen I’m scheduled for a fifth, long-dead baby wife of mine, and I tell you three times—one two three—it’s the end of summer, love. Gone. Done. All the birds has flewed south for the final flutter. I’
m going to give it a pass when rejuve comes around. I’m going to settle into dust. Summer ends, goodbye, Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

  “What sensu is that from, Rai?”

  “Not sensu, Annie. Movie. Movie film. All-singing, all-dancing, all-talking. I’ve told you a million times, by direct count. Movie. Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson, Warner Bros. Oh to hell with it, there was a woman in the lounge tonight, Annie…”

  “That’s nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”

  “God help me, Annie, I wanted her! Do you know what that means to me? To want a woman again? I don’t know what it was about her…I think she hated me…I could feel it, something deep and ugly when she stopped me…”

  “That’s nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”

  “She was bloody gorgeous, you ghost of Christmas Past. She was so unbelievably unreal I wanted to crawl inside her and live there. Annie…Annie…I’m going crazy with it all, with what I do, with the novae, with programming death for indolent swine who need their cheap death thrills to make it through the day just to make it through a day…God, Annie, speak to me, come out of that awful square coffin and save me, Annie! I want night, my baby, I want night and sleep and an end to summer…”

  The suite door hummed and a holograph of the one seeking entrance appeared in the tank. It was the woman from the theater lounge.

  “That’s nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”

  He swam out of the nimbus and whistled the door open. She came in and smiled at him.

  “You were always like that when I was alive, Rai; you simply never talked to me; you never listened…”

  He lurched sidewise and palmed the memory box to silence.

  “Yes?” She stared at him with curiosity and he said it again, “Yes?”

  “A little conversation, Mr. Redditch.”