“What was it?” van den Burg demanded.
“I scraped a little salsa scum from the inside of the disposal. It made a fine culture. What did you think I gave you?”
“I’d rather not answer that,” van den Burg said weakly.
1959
The Misfit
Evidence of Mr. Edmonson’s talent for compression has appeared here before. This time he covers the ground between the years 570 and 2461, in a little tale of plagues, fires, and historical discussions-and he winds up with a most surprising twist with disturbing connotations.
AFTER A POINTLESS DISCUSSION OF mushrooms which the waitress called champiñóns and I thought should have been hongos, my mad friend returned to the subject.
“Theology has nothing to do with it,” he said, waving a forkful of filet mignon. “The Church has never voiced an opinion on time travel.” Viajes temporales was the term he used, which carried unfortunate connotations of Renaissance diplomacy and the endless intrigues of Borgia popes.
From across the narrow room a gentleman who dined on pancakes gazed covertly at us with an eagerness in odd contrast to the splendor of his many starred tunic.
“What’s his rank?” my friend asked sotto voce and in English. “I never can keep track of all the stars.”
“I think he’s a major,” I said in the same language, I was trying to remember where I’d seen him before.
There was a keening of sirens, a clanging of bells, and an antiquated fire engine roared to a stop practically next door. Our waitress dashed out to watch. Our cook shot from the kitchen, abandoning priceless filets to cremation. Our wives stopped talking about whatever it is wives talk about and rushed out into the chill, November evening.
When firemen and a feeble stream of water were silhouetted in dancing outlines on the shopfront across the street, my mad friend also ran out. The magnificent major got up, bowed, and muttered the complicated ronde of gallant apology with which strangers approach in Latin lands.
“One cannot help admiring the sang-froid of the Manxman,” he said.
I shrugged. “Picture postcards to the contrary, Sonora is cold in winter. I shouldn’t be surprised if those unhappy bomberos became covered with icicles. Besides,” I added, “a fire, I can see any day. But a good filet mignon—”
My friend returned with our wives and they sat amid a great chattering of teeth. The major brought his plate of pancakes and joined us. “We were wondering about your rank,” my friend said with his usual directness.
But I wondered about something else. The major knew I was Manx and most majors have never heard of the Isle of Man. Then I remembered the Princess Elizabeth last summer. Not a luxurious transatlantic liner, but an ancient, coal-burning bucket which transports tourists and their automobiles between Vancouver Island and Port Angeles.
“You wore a different uniform and a different accent the last time I saw you.”
“Also you,” the major said with a smile. I had come unprepared for the frigidity of a Thanksgiving in Nogales and was wearing my friend’s loden coat.
“I was interested in your theories about viajes temporalis,” the major said, turning his dazzling smile on my friend.
My friend muttered something rude in Arabic acquired during the stay in North Africa which contributed so much toward his madness. One of his redeeming qualities was the virulent hatred he felt for anything which remotely approached science-fiction. “Time travel stories divide themselves into two classes,” he pontificated. He sang a few bars of “I’m My Own Grampaw.”
“In the others we’re overrun by spear-toting hordes of our own ancestors—as if any modern couldn’t defeat his ancestors practically by definition! You’re not Mexican, are you?” he shot at the major.
“He had a Sephardic accent the last time I ran across him,” I said.
“Also you,” the major smiled.
It was true that my first Spanish had been learned from Sephardim, a colony of the confused in Constantinople whose Friday evenings were spent wailing not for Zion but for the happy land from which Their Catholic Majesties expelled them in that same year which had seen royal money finance a Genoese mapmaker’s impossible scheme for reaching the Indies. Small enclaves of Sephardim survive in the carved up remains of the Ottoman Empire, still speaking a Spanish barely understandable to modem Latin-Americans. Apart from florid archaisms of an almost Shakespearean quality, its main characteristics is a tendency to turn every “s” into an “esh.”
“Are you from Istanbul or Rhodes?” I asked the major.
“I’m from New Rome,” he said sadly.
“That would make you approximately 1600 years old,” my friend said equably. “When did they stop calling it that?”
I riffled a mental file cabinet for a moment. “I think Justinian still said New Rome in 550. But Byzantium, New Rome, or Constantinople, it’s all Istanbul now.”
“Then you are familiar with the history of the Eastern Empire?” the major asked.
“Superficially,” I shrugged, “Everybody’s heard of Theodora, the whore empress.”
“Would you like to hear a story about time travel?”
“My own grampaw or barbarian hordes?” my mad friend asked.
While I was searching for an indirect, Latin way to say ‘no’ the major made cabalistic signs. The waitress disappeared into the adjoining bar and returned with small glasses of cognac bearing a carefully separate layer of cream. My mad friend eyed his with an air of ineffable sadness and took another sip of coffee, which was all he drank nowadays.
“In the year of Our Lord 2461,” the major began, “two students sat in the courtyard before the restored ruins of the Hagia Sofia. “What do you suppose it looked like in the days of Justinian?’ the physicist asked.
“The historian shrugged. ‘Probably less magnificent than our modern version. Still, I’d willingly give several years of my life to see the Emperor Belisarius at the head of his armies.’ ”
“Wait a minute,” I protested to the magnificent major. “After he reconquered the empire, Count Belisarius was blinded by the emperor he’d faithfully served.”
“Like a certain general of our own time,” my mad friend added parenthetically.
“In my story,” the major replied, “Belisarius overthrew Justinian, and the whore empress went back to her brothel.”
I glanced out to where firemen still squirted their ineffectual streams at a blazing licoreŕia.
The major sipped at his creamed cognac and continued, “ ‘How much would you really give to see him in person?’ the physics student asked.”
“Another minute,” my friend protested, “If this is an alternate time track story, you’re beginning it all wrong. What kind of world do these students live in whenever it was or will be?”
“Ah,” the major said with no trace of thinness in his smile. “As you know, Constantine abandoned Rome to the Barbarians and established a new capital which he called New Rome or Constantinople. In 570, Count Belisarius, after retaking Old Rome from the Goths and Africa from the Vandals, overthrew Justinian and became emperor of the Eastern Empire. The fabulous corruption of Justinian’s court vanished with Belisarius. Through his reforms, religious controversy disappeared. Nestorians, Romans, and Coptics were reunited into one central church. Due to this revitalized Christianity there was no Islam. In this time track, a certain Mohammed was Bishop of Mecca and Medina.”
My friend nodded his thanks. “And what was the status in your time?”
“New Rome ruled the world” the major said. “Or more specifically, the world’s elected representatives convened at an assembly over which a Belisarian emperor presided.”
“The whole world?” I asked.
“Japanese Christians, sailing from Hawaii, discovered this continent in 1361. Since the immigrants hit California first, the rest of the United States never became very heavily populated.”
My friend gave me that special smirk which Arizonans save for residents of San Diego
.
The major gave a quick glance at our wives, who were lost in a discussion of the botch look—or whatever it was women were wearing last November. “Returning to the story,” he said, speaking English for the first time, “the physics student produces his machine and overpowers the ohs, ahs, and it-can’t-be-dones of his friend. Eventually the historian prepares for a trip back to 550 A.D.”
“How?” my friend asked.
The major snapped his fingers and our waitress brought more cognac. “First, by running a representative assortment of drachmae and obols through the duplicator. After this, a trip to the museum where costumes appropriate to the period were duplicated. Fortunately, the historian was conversant with Byzantine Greek and even knew Latin, should the occasion rise to use it. He took the usual immunizations which any traveller takes before going to a strange planet.”
“Oh, you had interplanetary travel?”
The major nodded and snapped his fingers again. This time the waitress brought the bottle. “The Moon, Mars, and one of Jupiter’s satellites,” he said shortly. “Sounding rockets had given very discouraging information about other parts of the solar system.”
Across the street, more than lifesized silhouettes still squirted futile streams of water. I nibbled at the strip of bacon which had been toothpicked around my filet mignon and noticed that the major’s voice had thickened. After another drink he abandoned English. The “esh” became more frequent in his archaic Spanish.
“Now,” he continued, “arrive we at the true heart of the story: Our historian steps into the machine, a strange affair of gleaming coils and heavy insulators—”
“With sparks flying and much fluorescence,” my friend added, straight-faced.
“Exactmente” the major nodded. “An instant later he stands rather dazed by a waterfront which I soon recognized as the Golden Horn.”
I had wondered how long it would take the major to slip into first person and now he’d done it.
“It was early evening and as I wandered along the dock a great many things crossed my mind. Was I in the proper period? Was my clothing correct? What tricks had time and research played on my accent? I entered a tavern and sat in the corner beneath a smoky light which smelled of rancid olive oil. ‘Wine,’ I said, limiting myself to one word.
“The fat innkeeper’s wife waddled away with a nod which gave no clue to pronunciation. The wine was sweet and sirupy—the kind the Ancients had drunk well-watered, but around me, swarthy men with a vague seafaring look drank it neat. Across the room one played kottobos, trying to splash the dregs of his bowl in a regular pattern on the floor. The general stickiness and sour smell told me many games of kottobos had been played since the floor last saw water.
“ ‘What news of Belisarius?’ I asked the innkeeper’s wife. I wanted to ask what year this was but was afraid the question would sound odd. They might be having one of their periodic spy scares.
“The fat woman looked at me strangely. ‘Africa, Italy, who knows?’ She shrugged. I paid for my wine and left. There might be danger after dark but with my shield and weapon I felt secure. I didn’t know the year, but if Belisarius rated only a shrug I was much too early.
“I returned where I’d first landed on the waterfront and felt about until I blundered into the time machine. My physicist friend had explained that anyone but myself was out of phase and would walk right through it. I set the controls for a year ahead and threw the switch—into blinding sunlight and facing a haggard wisp of a man who started at my sudden appearance. He gave a wild scream and fell backward. In the instant before disappearing another year into the future, I saw little except bodies stacked like firewood along the mole.
“It was early morning at my next stop, and a trireme waited for guards to open the floating chain which barred entrance to the Golden Horn. After several minutes the kybemetes abandoned his steering oar and sprang from the trireme’s high stern to the end of the boom. He opened it himself. The trireme approached the mole, backed oars smartly, and tied bow and stem lines. As several important looking men in half armor stepped ashore, I saw my chance.
“Been asea a long time,” I said, stepping into the nearest tavern, What year is this and why does everyone look so dead?”
“The tavemkeeper looked at me with dull eyes. ‘I don’t know whence you come, sailor,’ he mumbled, ‘But if plague’s not struck your city yet, the smartest thing you can do is get out quick.’
“Plague! I’d read of it but never seen it. As I wandered about the city that day I felt a great affection for the peaceful and sanitary era in which I was born. It’s one thing to read ancient accounts and another thing entirely, I learned, to watch an emaciated city die. My own immunity could not overcome the revulsion I felt for piles of corpses and apathetic, suppurating survivors with neither strength nor will to bury them.
“What year is this?” I asked an emaciated, yellow skinned man who squatted in the atrium of the Hagia Sofia.
“ ‘563’ he mumbled, ‘Are your wits gone too?’
“ ‘When did the plague start?’
“ ‘Last year,’ he said.
“I hurried on, fighting down a prickle of horror. For in my histories there had been no plague in the time of Justinian. I returned to the time machine and moved ahead twenty years.
‘“What news of Belisarius?’ I asked the young man who now ran the tavern where I’d first drunk wine and watched sailors play kottobos.
“ ‘Who?’
“ ‘Belisarius,’ I said, ‘Who’s emperor of all Christendom?’
‘The young man gave a sour laugh. ‘All Christendom’s undergone several divisions since Belisarius was scragged. Surely you don’t believe in that old jazz any more, do you?’ ”
The major sighed and poured himself another drink from the almost empty bottle.
“Good penny-a-word stuff,” my mad friend said, “But I fail to see anything new or different about it. Why don’t you take him back to his own time and straighten the mess out?”
“That’s just it,” the major said sadly. The Sephardic accent was growing stronger. “I came back slowly, in twenty, year jumps, recording and photographing each time I stopped. There are no multiple time tracks. There’s only one.”
“What’s the point?” my friend insisted. “You can’t sell a story nowadays without a message.”
The major glanced up from his empty glass with an expression of mild exasperation. “At the present time,” he said with an air of ludicrous pedantry, “You have a strain of flies which grows fat on DDT. There also exist pneumococci, gonococci, staphylococci, and a great many other microbes which laugh at penicillin. On the other hand, those of us alive today are invariably descended from the survivors of every plague and epidemic which has ever afflicted our ancestors. Do you begin to get the picture?”
I did. “Then it was your historian who started the plague of 562?”
“And another one in 1348,” he said with a sad smile, “The one which culminated in Wat Tylers rebellion.”
“Well, it’s certainly a novel theory for epidemics,” I said thoughtfully, “Do you happen to know who started the 1918 flu epidemic, or virus X, or the Asiatic?”
The major shook his head. “Whoever did it came not from my future.” He was back in first person again.
My friend was somewhat restless, for he alone still drank coffee. “But this historian,” he said, striving to get the whole business back on an impersonal third person plane, “came from a time considerably ahead of ours. Why not go ahead in our time to where he’d be more at home?”
The major poured the last drops of cognac in his glass and gulped them down. “Another fable of these times,” he said irrelevantly. “Statistics would have us believe mankind lives longer each year.
Can you guess the average lifespan of our historians era?”
We waited.
“Forty years,” the major said. “Oh, you can lower infant mortality. Get all those babies over the first year and
you raise the average. But Cicero and a great many other ancients lived into their 80’s and 90s.
“And what are we all but children of the misfits—the marginals who should have died before they reached the age of reproduction? With every step forward medical science shortens the lifespan. In two more years I will be forty.”
My wife had been nudging me for some time. “¿Nos vamos?” he asked.
As we paid the check I saw the firemen were making no progress next door. If anything, the fire seemed to be spreading. “Well, it’s a good story,” I told the major in what I hoped was a sincere tone. “But I don’t think much of the ending.
“In 1960 I shall be dead,” the major said to no one in particular.
As we walked toward the car our wives still discussed the botch look in that fall’s styles. Suddenly mine turned. “I don’t believe they’re ever going to put it out,” she said, pointing at the firemen who now looked very tired.
And suddenly, the chill Thanksgiving wind seemed colder.
“From Caribou to Carry Nation”
The witty Mr. Edmondson once mere demonstrates his talent for compression, in a story which at first seems to have no point and then, unsettlingly, does.
“Reincarnation and transmigration! From caribou to Carry Nation!” my mad friend strophed.
A llama spat, scoring a hit on my No. 3 boy. A wife performed prophylaxy and we returned to the subject. “I don’t care if St. Catherine was a Buddhist,” my mad friend said, “the whole ideas in direct opposition to the doctrine of free will.”
I sighed and we moved on before the llama could score again. It was spring and my mad friend was retaliating for the incident of several months ago when I and mine had descended in visitation upon him and his. With his arrival, we had immediately faced the Great American Problem: What shall we do with the children?
An always resourceful wife came up with the standby: Why not take them to the zoo?
No sooner said than, two and one-half hours and many face-washings later, it was done. The Berlin zoo was larger, someone said. But bombed out and much farther, someone answered, so we went to San Diegos which was now the world’s largest. And only four miles away. Here, overlooking die Galápagos tortoises, I had vocally wondered what sort of sin could penalize a transmigrationist into several centuries of amphibian exile.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 12