“How can I keep on growing?” Bekh asked gently. “The dead don’t grow.”
Her tirade swept on, as if she hadn’t heard. Telling him over and over how despicable he was, what a counterfeit of greatness. And then she halted in midsentence. Blinking, reddening, putting hands to lips. “Oh,” she murmured, abashed, starting to weep. “Oh. Oh!”
She went silent.
It lasted a long time. She looked away, studied the walls, the mirror, her hands, her shoes. He watched her. Then, finally, she said, “What an arrogant little snot I am. What a cruel foolish bitch. I never stopped to think that you—that maybe—I just didn’t think—” He thought she would run from him. “And you won’t forgive me, will you? Why should you? I break in, I turn you on, I scream a lot of cruel nonsense at you—”
“It wasn’t nonsense. It was all quite true, you know. Absolutely true.” Then, softly, he said, “Break the machinery.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t cause any more trouble for you. I’ll go, now. I can’t tell you how foolish I feel, haranguing you like that. A dumb little puritan puffed up with pride in her own art. Telling you that you don’t measure up to my ideals. When I—”
“You didn’t hear me. I asked you to break the machinery.”
She looked at him in a new way, slightly out of focus. “What are you talking about?”
“To stop me. I want to be gone. Is that so hard to understand? You, of all people, should understand that. What you say is true, very very true. Can you put yourself where I am? A thing, not alive, not dead, just a thing, a tool, an implement that unfortunately thinks and remembers and wishes for release. Yes, a player piano. My life stopped and my art stopped, and I have nothing to belong to now, not even the art. For it’s always the same. Always the same tones, the same reaches, the same heights. Pretending to make music, as you say. Pretending.”
“But I can’t—”
“Of course you can. Come, sit down, we’ll discuss it. And you’ll play for me.”
“Play for you?”
He reached out his hand and she started to take it, then drew her hand back. “You’ll have to play for me,” he said quietly. “I can’t let just anyone end me. That’s a big, important thing, you see. Not just anyone. So you’ll play for me.” He got heavily to his feet. Thinking of Lisbeth, Sharon, Dorothea. Gone, all gone now. Only he, Bekh, left behind, some of him left behind, old bones, dried meat. Breath as stale as Egypt. Blood the color of pumice. Sounds devoid of tears and laughter. Just sounds.
He led the way, and she followed him, out onto the stage, where the console still stood uncrated. He gave her his gloves, saying. “I know they aren’t yours. I’ll take that into account. Do the best you can.” She drew them on slowly, smoothing them.
She sat down at the console. He saw the fear in her face, and the ecstasy, also. Her fingers hovering over the keys. Pouncing. God, Timi’s Ninth! The tones swelling and rising, and the fear going from her face. Yes. Yes. He would not have played it that way, but yes, just so. Timi’s notes filtered through her soul. A striking interpretation. Perhaps she falters a little, but why not? The wrong gloves, no preparation, strange circumstances. And how beautifully she plays. The hall fills with sound. He ceases to listen as a critic might; he becomes part of the music. His own fingers moving, his muscles quivering, reaching for pedals and stops, activating the pressors. As if he plays through her. She goes on, soaring higher, losing the last of her nervousness. In full command. Not yet a finished artist but so good, so wonderfully good! Making the mighty instrument sing. Draining its full resources. Underscoring this, making that leaner. Oh, yes! He is in the music. It engulfs him. Can he cry? Do the tearducts still function? He can hardly bear it, it is so beautiful. He has forgotten, in all these years. He has not heard anyone else play for so long. Seven hundred four days. Out of the tomb. Bound up in his own meaningless performances. And now this. The rebirth of music. It was once like this all the time, the union of composer and instrument and performer, soul-wrenching, all-encompassing. For him. No longer. Eyes closed, he plays the movement through to its close by way of her body, her hands, her soul. When the sound dies away, he feels the good exhaustion that comes from total submission to the art.
“That’s fine,” he said, when the last silence was gone. “That was very lovely.” A catch in his voice. His hands were still trembling; he was afraid to applaud.
He reached for her, and this time she took his hand. For a moment he held her cool fingers. Then he tugged gently, and she followed him back into the dressing room, and he lay down on the sofa, and he told her which mechanisms to break, after she turned him off, so he would feel no pain. Then he closed his eyes and waited.
“You’ll just—go?” she asked.
“Quickly. Peacefully.”
“I’m afraid. It’s like murder.”
“I’m dead,” he said. “But not dead enough. You won’t be killing anything. Do you remember how my playing sounded to you? Do you remember why I came here? Is there life in me?”
“I’m still afraid.”
“I’ve earned my rest,” he said. He opened his eyes and smiled. “It’s all right. I like you.” And, as she moved toward him, he said, “Thank you.”
Then he closed his eyes again.
She turned him off.
Then she did as he had instructed her.
Picking her way past the wreckage of the sustaining chamber, she left the dressing room. She found her way out of the Music Center—out onto the glass landscape, under the singing stars, and she was crying for him.
Laddy. She wanted very much to find Laddy now. To talk to him. To tell him he was almost right about what he’d told her. Not entirely, but more than she had believed…before. She went away from there. Smoothly, with songs yet to be sung.
And behind her, a great peace had settled. Unfinished, at last the symphony had wrung its last measure of strength and sorrow.
It did not matter what Weatherex said was the proper time for mist or rain or fog. Night, the stars, the songs were forever.
INTRODUCTION
Keith Laumer and Harlan Ellison
STREET SCENE
It was in a hot and sticky little room at the Tom Quick Inn, in Milford, Pennsylvania, several years ago, that Keith and I wrote this story. We mutually love it. It is a Marx Bros. slugfest, with very little rhyme and less reason. It is intended as a guffaw, and if you laugh even once, we’ll have done what we set out to do.
Keith and I were attendees, at the time, at the Milford SF Writers’ Conference, and we did this story between sessions. I started it, and we wrote in alternate sections, much like the majority of stories in this book. But there was one major disagreement.
When we got to what I thought should be the place to taper the story off, neither Keith nor I could agree on an ending. I had one idea for a satisfactory solution, Keith had another. So we fought and argued and raged for hours, and finally…we compromised.
This story has two complete endings.
The first is mine, the second is Keith’s. You can have either, neither or both. Or none of the above.
Galaxy published it with my ending, Knight published it with Keith’s, and herewith are presented both, for the first time anywhere.
Street Scene
Very much like a dead bird, the pteranodon fell out of the sky at 4:18 of a Wednesday, fell whistling, end-over-end, landing squarely in the middle of Sixth Avenue and 47th Street. It fell flat-out, wings spread, and crushed a Mustang, two Cadillacs, a Buick Riviera, three VW’s, the front end of a Peugeot, and a Greyline Tours sightseeing bus.
The fall of the beast killed eighty-seven people, but it was not that, precisely, that caught the attention of Will Kiley as he emerged from one of the small smut bookshops dotting Sixth Avenue, his parcel of paperbacks and photo sets showing Puerto Rican girls with unshaved armpits and spread thighs clutched to his side. Riley’s attention was initially caught by the crashing shape as it shadowed the street, then by the cr
ashing sound as the extinct creature impacted, and then by his recognition of the beast as not merely a pterodactyl, but specifically as a pteranodon, genus ornithostoma. Kiley, a third year student at Columbia University, majoring in Historical Geology, instantly recognized the osseous crest extending the skull to the rear in an effective counterweight, balancing the mass of the immense, bony. toothless beak.
Kiley observed this aspect of the beast in the dust-settling instant after the pteranodon, crashing, bounced, rose into the air amid a welter of automobile parts and crushed humans, hung there as though observing its own handiwork, and then slammed down again very near its original ground zero. One vast wing lay spread like a dusty, olive-gray tarpaulin over the still feebly struggling bodies of victims trapped beneath it; an edge fluttered as pocketed air escaped, bearing a pungent reek of reptilian juices. The other extended across 47th Street, sagging, warty leather stretched on thin bones like collapsed aluminum tubing, the fingered tip caressing a tarnished brick front adorned by a clustered trio of brazen spheres.
Sirens began keening everywhere. Screams rose up in the intersection as half-pinned, maimed survivors of the beast’s tumble struggled to free themselves. From his doorway, Kiley noted at once that the beast was incredibly heavy, much heavier by a fantastic overage than any pterodactyl had a right to be. Aerodynamically a sport, the creatures had never weighed more than a hundred pounds, and eighty was closer to the average. But this thing had crushed a sight-seeing bus and something over a half dozen cars. It was many times longer and had a far greater wingspread than any pterodactyl ever exhumed as fossil. It was lying almost like an immense crucifix, its shaft of body heading uptown on Sixth Avenue, the beak pointing toward the Radio City Music Hall, its wings outspread as though waiting for Pilate’s men to come and drive in the spikes, crosstown on 47th.
Kiley was torn between staying to watch what was certainly going to happen, or running back uptown to his mingy little room, to put the contents of his parcel to use.
At that moment, a group of fifteen Chassidic Rabbinical Seminary students adorned with payess, beards, long black overcoats so out-of-line for mid-August, and faintly redolent of the scent of Rappaport’s gefilte fish, emerged from one of the diamond exchange shops, and seeing the dead beast lying in the street, began a loud and incomprehensible argument as to whether or not pteranodon was kosher.
“It flies…it’s a chicken,” said one.
“That makes it kosher,” confirmed a second.
“Snake. It’s a reptile,” countered a third.
“Then most definitely, there should be no argument on this point, it’s trayf!” concluded a fourth.
A florid, large-boned police officer of the midtown precinct, ran up from 45th Street, blowing his whistle, readying his book of parking tickets, and looking around for the owner of the dead beast. Spying an old man lounging against the side of a papaya juice stand, the cop hustled over and pointed an accusing finger.
“That your pterodactyl?”
The old man shook his head.
“You’re sure?”
The old man began to tremble. “Honest to God. It ain’t mine. Why’djoo always pick on me?”
“’Cause you were the guy owned that big monkey we caught climbin’ up the Empire State, that’s why!”
“They never proved it!”
“I don’t give a damn if they didn’t. I knew you were the guy. I knew that big ape belonged to you!”
“Oh yeah, fuzz? How’d you know?”
“You were the only guy on the street with a seventy-five foot tambourine.”
The lean, corsetted, hatted, rouge-on-bones young woman standing au dessus the soot-flecked plate-glass display window of the truss and artificial limb shop on the southwest corner of the blocked intersection compared the watch strapped to her narrow wrist with the oversized timepiece dangling over the sidewalk across the street. Her lips compressed into a hard line like a surgery scar; for the tenth time in thirty seconds she scanned the pavement to left and right, strode a few impatient steps to peer past the upjutting elbow of the pteranodon blocking her view. Still no Melville. Melville wasn’t coming. Stood up. Her. Lilya. Stood up. By a creep like Melville, which she was doing him the biggest favor of his life just to go out with him, the slob, and he’s got the undiluted crust to not show, and after she skipped lunch just to have room for a lousy dinner which he probably would’ve suggested Nedick’s anyway—
A large, slow-moving middle-aged man with moist eyes and a mouth like a prune pit was hesitating, looking at her; Lilya had seen a Museum of Modern Art Film Retrospective of Films of Depravity in 1966; the persistent image of Peter Lorre as “M” kept oozing into her mind; this was probably an out-of-town rapist. She’d been staring right at him: probably in another second he’ll make the pass; I can always spot them, yechh; why me? Why always me? If I ride in a car with someone down the Major Deegan Expressway, they always yell, hey looka that, and I always look and it’s always a legless cripple or some drunk lady whose thing is collecting cardboard flats what it is she’s puking into a litter basket, or a cat run over across the head by a sanitation truck. Why always me? A flasher, this one is. I can tell. Runs around in the park with nothing on but a long overcoat and pants cut off below the knees and tied with twine. A freako-devo-pervo, I can always yechhh spot! Stands on the BMT platform, just before the doors close, zing! he flashes!
Lilya stiffened her face, let her gaze slide past him, turned her back, but not so rapidly as to appear really, like rude. She gasped as the old man tottered, wheezed, lunged past her, hand outstretched for the door of the hole-in-corner public house next to the prosthetics display. A gush of beer-laden air, the door closed behind him. Lilya jerked as though struck by a wetmop. Her eyes fell on the clock. Twelve minutes late. She’d give him exactly two more minutes, or possibly five, that would make it four-thirty on the nose, and besides you couldn’t expect her to climb over that flying crocodile, which somebody ought to call the zoo and tell them a few things about letting the inmates go falling all over the street.
Will Kiley decided he’d had quite enough morphology of flying reptiles for one day. The parcel beneath his arm grew warm even as he thought of it. Within the parcel: Rolling Sin House, a novel dealing with six young prostitutes who buy a house trailer and flout the laws of interstate commerce; Lust Whip Madam, a stinging tale of cruelty and unbridled passions among the silken-limbed houris of the bondage set, locale Scarsdale; Teeny Slut, an adventure into the sexual psychology of the amoral young. These three, and a seventeen-picture set of maybe a Rosita or Consuelo or Guadalupe (he would settle for a Dolores), were the spurs to his rapidly returning uptown to a student-dingy room.
He started past the head of the beast, when he saw the edge of the artifact hanging from its neck. It seemed to be a large golden disc, hanging from a thick link chain. Will Kiley’s instant thoughts were not of rich rewards from the archeological society. They were of ready cash for old gold in any one of the Second Avenue antique shops. Ready cash that could buy important things like regular meals, more books, possibly even a young woman’s affections. (Will Kiley, having emerged from a cocoon of poverty spun about him by his parents in Three Bridges, New Jersey, was inclined to accept the philosophy that money may not be the only thing in life, but the other thing won’t go out with you if you don’t have it.)
He jammed the package of stiffeners into his jacket pocket, and began hauling at the golden chain, in an attempt—hearty but hardly surreptitious—to get the disc off the dead pteranodon.
From a doorway across Sixth Avenue, a group of youths belonging to a Bronx-based organization titled The Pelham Privateers—what in days of pre-protest picketing would have been called a juvenile delinquent gang, now referred to as “a minority youth group”—observed Will Kiley’s struggles, and continued their own observations.
“But it don’t look like it got hubcaps,” Angie said.
“Hey, shtoomie, if it is lyin’ inna street, it is
gotta have hubcaps. The question’s where?” The gang’s leader, George (“The Pot”) Lukovich dealt with matters in a realistic fashion.
“Maybe they’re unnerneat,’” suggested Vimmy.
“Could be,” George mused, “could very well be.”
He pondered a moment longer, then made his mind and the gang’s collective mind, up. “We gotta jack up its ass. Get unnerneat’. Get the hubcaps off. Vimmy, I want you should take t’ree boys and go over to the building they’re building onna corner Madison an’ 48th. Steal a pneumatic hoist or somethin’.”
Vimmy gave a quick one-finger salute, and dodged out of the doorway, tapping three of the gang members on their chests as he passed them. They followed, at a dead run.
A hook and ladder approaching from the direction of Fifth Avenue swerved to avoid the quartet and skidded to a halt in the lee of the dead ornithosaurian. Big Louis Morono, wearing a Texaco hat and black rubber boots and slicker, leaped down, dragging a foot-long brass nozzle trailing a flat gray constrictor of hose. Assessing the situation at a glance, he set off at a heavy-footed trot toward the stern of the beast, assisted by fellow fire fighters each supporting his half dozen yards of tubing. A second team launched itself with silent efficiency in the opposite direction, toward the giant maloccluded jaws. They rounded the head, continued parallel with the scaly neck, paused only momentarily before trampling ahead across the leather carpet of the wing. They met Big Louis and his crew at a point abaft the fourth thoracic vertabra.
“Anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Smoke?”
“Not a wisp.”
Big Louis sighed. His hose drooped. “It figures.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, boys, reel it in.” Muttering, Big Louis headed back for the trembling truck. Before he had taken more than three steps, however, one of the members of the second team yelled, “Hey, Cap! It’s a, uh, you know what, a dragon. Maybe it breathes fire. Could be, y’know!”
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