Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  ~ * ~

  “Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” Susan said, before I had closed the apartment door. “I just hope you’re satisfied.”

  “And it’s nice to see you, too,” I said wearily.

  “Mother—”

  “Look, do you think I could at least get my coat off before you start in, Susan? At least?”

  She folded her arms and waited, boulder silence under downy brows. Her shoulders were trembling. The sofa overflowed with crumbled paper, her recorder, cassettes, books, and tissues. I hung up my coat very slowly.

  “All right, Susan. What is it?”

  “Mr. Blake is back. He’s back, and he saw my D that substitute gave me on my oral history project, and he said I could do it over to raise my grade. Only my grade won’t raise, because I know it won’t be any different this time; I still don’t know enough stuff to do it right, and I’ll end up with two D’s, and it’ll junk my whole quarter’s grade! I hope you’re satisfied!”

  She scowled horribly, and I saw the insane effort not to cry in front of me, the enemy. Had grades mattered so much to me, at ten? Had the handsome Mr. Blakes? No, of course not; both had been lost in bigger nightmares. But Susan was not me.

  “You don’t care. You just don’t care,” she said. “Lya’s mother told her heaps. Cassettes and cassettes worth!”

  Not me, and not in my version of pain. But she was in pain, however trivial it might look to me. What is art for? Garber had asked, and I had thought I’d known the answer: to transform and justify pain. If we can. But not all of us can. What if the alchemy is missing?

  “Mr. Blake looked at me like he was so surprised, and so disappointed in me. And he asked me what happened because I never get D’s, and I started to cry. ...”

  What is art for? To order human experience, to reach toward some ultimate expression of what we are. And if that ultimate expression has already been reached?

  “... all the other kids looking at me bawling, and Mr. Blake just standing ...”

  So it’s been reached. What then? Or, rather, what before— long before, when pain was the daily expectation, and language too crude for the transformation to beauty. The base of Jameson’s pinnacle, before the long climb to the dizzying top. When shadows on cave walls was not a metaphor, but the real thing, flickering with hidden menace all night long. All the way back.

  “. . .so embarrassed I wanted to die, and you just treat me like a child anyway, and—”

  All the way back.

  “Susan, honey—no, I know you don’t like to be called ‘honey’—Susan, then—Susan, come here. Sit down. No, there on the sofa—sit next to me. Listen. I know you’re not a child anymore, even if you ... I know it. You’re old enough to ... I know. I’ll help you with your history project. Sit down.”

  Susan glared at me, eyes mutinous through a sheen of tears, but she sat.

  “Wait right here, Susan. I have to get something, something I want you to see, want you to read. I have to get—”

  I remembered the key flushed down the toilet. What I would have to get was a crowbar. Pry open the desk drawer, or see if I could break the lock—but that part could wait, after all. The written manuscript could come later, had always come later. Susan would have to read it, yes, it would make it easier for her to understand if she read it, easier to see where I had changed things, reaching for…but later.

  All the way back.

  I drew a deep breath.

  “Listen, Susan. I’m going to tell you something that happened to me, when I was your age. It’s part of our family. It happened. Listen.

  “Let me tell you a story. ...”

  <>

  * * * *

  Science fiction has a long tradition of fascinating stories about “alternative time-streams,“ or worlds in which events small or large changed the course of history. Methods of visiting or perceiving these worlds have varied greatly. In “The Gernsback Continuum,“ William Gibson suggests that it might be accomplished by the increased concentration of psychological fixation. His alternative world is a peculiar one, but one that you’re likely to find oddly familiar.

  This story of William Gibson’s second sale, the first having been to the semiprofessional magazine UnEarth; subsequently he’s sold stories to New Worlds, Omni, and (in collaboration with John Shirley) Shadows. Born in the United States, he now lives in Canada with his wife and one child.

  ~ * ~

  THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM

  William Gibson

  Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

  I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy “trade” paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky day-glow jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St. John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bee. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.

  Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she called “American Streamlined Modern.” Cohen called it “raygun Gothic.” Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

  There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the fifties.

  Sometimes they’d run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local station. You’d sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around with this big old Nash with wings, and you’d see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downes’s never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” thirties and forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dream world, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.

  The thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—you
r basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theatre designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.

  Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp Utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and lucite sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat symmetrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

  “This thing couldn’t have flown . . . ?” I looked at Dialta Downes.

  “Oh, no, quite impossible, even with the twelve giant props; but they loved the look, don’t you see? New York to London in less than two days, first-class dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz in the evening . . . The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.”

  ~ * ~

  I’d been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent. While I’m not bad at it, I’m not exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my Nikon’s credibility. I got out, depressed because I do like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because I did make sure I’d gotten the check for the job, and I decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me some books on thirties design, more photos of streamlined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes’s fifty favorite examples of the style in California.

  Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought myself into Dialta Downes’s America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas stations in a big way.

  During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo, he cruised up and down the coast erecting ray gun emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator-flanges that were a signature motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived and drove right through the structural truth of plaster and lathing and cheap concrete.

  “Think of it,” Dialta Downes had said, “as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams.’’

  And that was my frame of mind as I made the stations of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my red Toyota —as I gradually tuned in to her image of a shadowy America-that-wasn’t, of Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in. The thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone held a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal. . . .

  And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of Ming’s martial architecture, I penetrated a fine membrane, a membrane of probability. . . .

  Ever so gently, I went over the Edge—

  And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear—maybe—the echo of jazz.

  ~ * ~

  I took it to Kihn.

  Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind.

  “It’s good,” said Kihn, polishing his yellow Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian shirt, “but it’s not mental; lacks the true quill.”

  “But I saw it, Mervyn.” We were seated poolside in brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader received messages from Them on her microwave oven. I’d driven all night and was feeling it.

  “Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You’ve read my stuff; haven’t you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It’s simple, plain and country simple: people”—he settled the glasses carefully on his long hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare—”see . . . things. People see these things. Nothing’s there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably. You’ve read Jung, you should know the score. ... In your case, it’s so obvious: you admit you were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having fantasies. . . . Look, I’m sure you’ve taken your share of drugs, right? How many people survived the sixties in California without having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian heiroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when—”

  “But it wasn’t like that.”

  “Of course not. It wasn’t like that at all; it was ‘in a setting of clear reality,’ right? Everything normal, and then there’s the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar. In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all the time. You aren’t even crazy. You know that, don’t you?” He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler beside his deck chair.

  “Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.”

  “A what?”

  “A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.” He burped.

  “It assaulted her? How?”

  “You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’ “—he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—” ‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s just no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the Devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on ‘
The Bionic Man’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with polygraph.’’

  I must have looked pained, because he set his beer down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.

  “If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that’s all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it.”

  I did worry about it, though.

  Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off to hear what They had had to say over the radar range lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor (“muties,” he called them; another of his journalistic specialties).