Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  —Inner life. Spontaneity. Rain, gloom, and chill. Is it not a portent that the best recording of the month is a mere unrelated collection of bits and pieces from a man of eighty? Where is the vivacity, the joy, the gusto, in any younger person? Where is the life they seek to record?

  The multibillion-dollar life-recording industry is in no danger; it will continue to show a profit and will outlive this century. But the art! The art!

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  * * * *

  “What is reality?” is a question that’s been explored frequently in science fantasy, but somehow it has remained for George Alec Effinger, in this eerily quiet story, to suggest its logical reply: “Does it matter?”

  George Alec Effinger s science fiction books include the novels What Entropy Means to Me and Relatives, and a short story collection, Irrational Numbers.

  * * * *

  Ibid.

  George Alec Effinger

  Cathy Schumacher dismissed the nine o’clock class and gathered up her notes. It had stopped raining during her lecture, and she was thankful. The air outside was chilly and damp, and the Old Quad was an ugly marsh, stripped by the March rains of all the charm that often lured the freshmen to the university. Her stylish boots were providing a minimum of protection, and by the time she had crossed to Krummer Hall she was in a foul mood.

  She hated being caught in the jostling crowds of students, on the way from one class to another. She did not hurry across the Old Quad, despite the weather. When she got to Krummer it was already a quarter past ten; everyone else was in class, and the narrow, dim halls were empty. She went to the English Department offices to get her mail. Of course, there was nothing of any interest: a couple of advertising letters from publishers, selling textbooks to any and all instructors, whether they were in the right department or not; two papers from her sophomore seminar, both overdue by two weeks; a notice from the Department Head concerning the locking of offices after five p.m.; a notice from a radical student organization; an exhortation to give blood; a copy of the Journal of the Institute for Early English Studies. Cathy took this bundle of paper and went to her little cubicle.

  According to her schedule she was required to be in her office in Krummer from ten until noon. Cathy wanted nothing more than to go home and go back to bed, and nothing less than to listen to disappointed pupils chiseling points on an old exam. But her office hours were essential to the educational process; she knew that someday, perhaps, a real student might want to see her. She often wondered if there might not be a genuine serious young man or woman in one of her classes, hiding in the back of the room, burning with a love for Anglo-Saxon poetry. The idea was too absurd, and Cathy dismissed it with a skeptical laugh.

  She put on the light in her office, tossed the mail on her desk, hung up her coat, and sighed. She went to the window, which looked out from the back of Krummer, onto College Street and the old city common of New Aulis. It was difficult to picture Ivy University in the old days, the days of straw boaters and football legends. Teaching in the university, she was forever surrounded by its heritage, never far from paintings and statues from its snobbish past. But now College Street was lined with parking meters and litter baskets, and the city common sheltered drunks and dropouts, just as in any other city. The proud statue of the Ivy Patriot that guarded the Main Gate was used by the early-arriving undergraduates as a hitching-post for bicycles. Cathy sighed again; whenever she got her feet wet she began questioning her profession.

  The top of her desk was well hidden. Cathy sat down and shoved some of the books from the middle. She scooped up a handful of pens and markers and put them into an ugly white mug. The mug had a picture of the Taft Hotel on it, with the words Greetings from New Aulis! beneath it in gold script. Letters from department officials and university officers stuck out among the books, typed on university stationery, with the bright-blue seal catching her eye again and again. Cathy arranged the day’s mail in the little cleared space. She thought about sweeping the rest of the stuff to the floor, but she picked up one of the tardy papers instead and tried to concentrate.

  She read three pages and stopped. The paper was about “The Battle of Maldon,” written in a marginally literate manner. No paragraph in the paper had any ideas in common with any other. The small informational content was stolen either from Cathy’s own lectures or boldly from the textbook. Ragged, thoughtless style and typographical errors had long ago ceased to amuse her, and this morning Cathy just didn’t have the courage to finish reading. She put the paper down and tried the other. It seemed worse. It was Tuesday; the owners of the papers surely wouldn’t ask about them after class on Thursday. After all, they were the ones who had submitted them late. Cathy had a good week to grade them. She certainly wasn’t in any hurry now.

  The advertising letters, the notice from the Department Chairman, the student organization broadside, and the blood bulletin she crumpled together and threw into the waste-basket. “How quickly I could clean this desk,” she thought, “if only the wastebasket were larger.” That left only the Journal. It might afford some amusement, at least until the first pupil knocked on her door. Cathy opened the magazine, to see who was publishing and who was perishing.

  At ten twenty-five the Sueza Tower carillon played a familiar theme from Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony. Cathy had read the “Letters to the Editor.” By ten forty-five she had finished an article by one of her former professors at Delta University. The bells were exercising on a scrap of Parsifal. Still no one had interrupted her. Cathy pushed her chair further from the desk and slouched down, searching for a comfortable position. She paged through the rest of the magazine, finding the “About People” and “News and Views” pages and looking for familiar names. The bells stopped their serenade, and for several seconds there was silence. Cathy looked up, a bit uncomfortably; the tower chimes struck the hour. She began an article that, for the millionth time, attempted to compare the kennings of Beowulf with Homeric metaphor. She read rapidly, absorbed in the article. The message was minimal, but the beauty of the quoted kennings, and the lesser, badly translated phrases of Homer, carried her through the tedious academic exposition. Abruptly, too quickly for her pleasure, she came to the last line of the essay:

  —many times before. The beauty of the work will never tarnish.17

  In a habitual motion, Cathy glanced down at the bottom of the page to check the footnote. It read:

  17Hello, Mrs. Cathy Schumacher!

  Cathy stared at it for a moment, feeling an unpleasant surprise. She turned back to the first page of the article. No, the author’s name was completely unfamiliar, some associate professor who had gone to Southwestern Utah State and was now teaching at Culpden College. Who could it be? Certainly the Journal wasn’t the sort of periodical that would permit that kind of horseplay. None of the other notes in the piece had been out of the ordinary. Cathy looked through the rest of the magazine, but the contents were as staid and dry as usual.

  The tower chimes struck the quarter hour. Cathy stood and looked out the window. It was drizzling again; people were running along College Street, ducking into doorways to get out of the cold rain. It was darker now. The sounds from the street seemed louder to her, they seemed to intrude aggressively on her attention. While she stared through the window she felt herself becoming sick, with a tightness in her stomach that might never again go away. Cathy forced herself to turn away, to look at the Journal still resting on the desk. She picked it up and walked out of her office.

  Her small cubicle was only one in a series along a hallway in the English Department. Two offices down was Wally Chance, an instructor with a Milton course, a Chaucer course, and a freshman survey course. Wally was a good friend, one of the few Cathy had within the university. Though his door was closed, light shone through the frosted-glass panel. She knocked, and he called permission to enter.

  “Hi, Wally, it’s just me,” she said, taking the chair by his desk.

  “Hello, Cathy. I was just
going through these freshman papers. Thanks for coming by. Another couple of pages and I might have done something evil.”

  Cathy laughed. “What we have to do is find some other thing for the kids to do. Lord, I get tired reading those papers.”

  “Just being tired I could handle,” said Wally, throwing the paper he was reading back on the pile. “I don’t know. I get so angry sometimes. How is it that every one of them can read a book and not even know what they’re reading? I mean, somehow they’ve each managed to avoid realizing that Pride and Prejudice is a funny book.”

  “Where grades are concerned, there’s nothing funny.”

  “Well,” said Wally, “that’s a shame, then. It makes my job harder. I can’t imagine how it must be in their place.”

  “You were there once, remember?”

  Wally looked up and smiled. “Yes, maybe, but I was unconscious most of the time.”

  “You stay that way until graduation. It’s a defense mechanism.”

  Wally stood and came around his desk. “You want to see a real first-class defense mechanism?” he asked. He took her arm and led her to the door. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

  “I’ve got another thirty minutes of office hours left,” she said, not really protesting, mentioning the fact out of a slight responsibility to form.

  “No, don’t worry,” said Wally. “The kids don’t come to see you until after midterms. Anyway, you came here to see me, right? Any reason?”

  Cathy went through the door, followed by Wally. She watched him lock his office. She took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, “sort of. Nothing important, though.” They walked back to her office to fetch her coat

  “Fine,” said Wally. “Lunch-type conversation. If we were going to talk about something important, we ought to stay here in your luxuriously appointed headquarters. For the official atmosphere.”

  “No, Wally, just let me lock up.” She picked up the Journal, with one finger marking the page that had so unaccountably frightened her. She took her coat from the hook and flicked off the lights. As a sudden afterthought, she put the Journal back on her desk. She would feel foolish carrying it all around the campus with her; surely no one else would see the disturbing side of the incident. Wally would tell her that it was funny, and flattering, and a surprisingly free thing for the Journal’s editors to allow. She didn’t want to see the article. She didn’t want to think about the greeting, or where it had come from.

  They went to lunch at one of New Aulis’ more popular hamburger-and-french-fry counters, rather than one of the university’s dining rooms. Cathy explained that she really wanted to get away from the school for a little while. It didn’t matter that the hamburger place was filled completely and only with university students, some of whom she recognized from her classes. She was grateful just to sit at the noisy counter, concentrate on the cheap food, and forget everything that had to do with her job. At least, that was what she consciously wanted; somewhere deeper in her mind, something wouldn’t let her get away that easily.

  Halfway through the lunch, Cathy looked at Wally and said, “Do you ever have things happen to you that you can’t explain, even when you know that there has to be a good explanation?”

  “What?” said Wally, his mouth full of food, his expression a little startled.

  “You know,” said Cathy, uncomfortable now that she had begun the subject. “Something strange will happen, and you’ll look at it and say, ‘Okay, it may look odd, but here are the reasons.’ But the reasons just don’t satisfy you on an emotional level.”

  “All the time. I’ve got three kids, remember?”

  “No, no,” said Cathy, a little annoyed. “Intellectually I can accept it fine. Emotionally, though, I don’t know what to feel.”

  “I’ll bite,” said Wally, sighing. “What happened?”

  Cathy hesitated. “I shouldn’t even have brought the whole thing up. I mean, if I tell you exactly what happened, it will sound awfully trivial to you. But it isn’t trivial to me. That’s what I mean. Just forget it.”

  “Nothing easier,” said Wally, smiling. “But if I can do anything . . .”

  “It’s not desperate or anything,” said Cathy. “At least there’s that. I’m not forced into any kind of action. I just don’t know what to think about it.”

  “You know, I’m not even curious. Someday, though, why don’t you lay the whole thing out for me. After you’ve figured out the meanings, though. I’ve never been very good at deduction. My experience with my kids proves that. I can never tell when they’re lying. My wife can, she can spot it in a minute. All I can do is spot when their reasoning is fallacious. That comes from grading too many papers. I think I’ve lost a valuable defense mechanism.”

  “Then so have I,” said Cathy. They paid the check, got up, and went to the door. From there, Wally was going back to his office, but Cathy had decided to go home. “I shouldn’t let little things like this bother me,” she said, “but right now that’s all there is in my life. Little things. Mostly like you said, grading papers, listening to stupid kids begging for grades. And going home to hear about Victor’s hard day at the microfilm and Leslie’s hard day at elementary school.”

  “It’s really true,” said Wally. “It’s true, really true. I’m not mystified.” He smiled and pressed Cathy’s hand. Then he turned and started to walk back toward the campus. Cathy went in the opposite direction, toward her small apartment.

  It would be a few hours before Victor came home, and still quite a while before Leslie banged through the front door. Cathy dropped off her coat on the kitchen table, checked the refrigerator and the bathroom to see what she had to get at the supermarket, picked up her purse, made certain that she had her keys and money, and went back out. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still an ashen-gray color. All the way to the supermarket, she wondered if it would be worth the effort to call the editorial offices of the Journal of the Institute for Early English Studies. Maybe someone there could explain the footnote to her. She shook her head. The whole thing was stupid, in a way, and the only problem seemed to be the superfluous emotional importance she was attaching to it. She shook her head once more, to clear it of those thoughts, and tried to think about shopping. She succeeded only partially.

  She had to wait by a checkout counter for a grocery cart. The store was crowded and noisy; in a way, Cathy was grateful. She could give her full attention to the petty annoyances of people idly clogging up the aisles of the supermarket. When she got a cart, she steered it along the far wall, making a quick inspection of produce. Victor wouldn’t eat any vegetables but corn and green beans. Leslie would okay the corn, but she wouldn’t eat the green beans. The Schumacher household ate a lot of corn. Cathy spent an irritating half hour roaming up and down the aisles, trying to plan a dinner, trying to avoid the other people in the store, all of whom seemed not to know what they were doing. At the checkout counter, while waiting for the cashier to total the purchases of the woman ahead of Cathy in line, Cathy started to read a magazine from the small display rack. She turned idly through the pages of a movie fan magazine. How different it was from the things she usually read! The content, the style, the whole attitude . . .

  Cathy realized what she was doing and stopped herself abruptly. It was pure intellectual snobbery to try to criticize the fan magazine on the same grounds as she evaluated her colleagues’ articles. It was also a very unattractive trait, one she despised in other people. She began to read an article titled “Jamison Hawke—His Fear of Animals.” Cathy knew from Leslie’s recitations of movie matinees that Jamison Hawke starred in a series of inexpensively produced movies about Gror, the Wild Man. The first sentence in the article made her catch her breath. It said:

  Cathy Schumacher, you have to listen! It’s important!

  She stared at the magazine page for a while, until she numbly realized that the checkout girl was totaling Cathy’s purchases, many of which were still in the shopping cart Cathy finished unloading the
cart, and added the movie magazine. She felt lightheaded and dizzy, she felt panicked, and she didn’t know why. All she wanted was to understand. That didn’t seem like such an unreasonable request. The checkout girl told her how much the bill came to; Cathy took the money from her purse and paid it, then carried the bag of groceries out of the supermarket and back to the apartment The movie magazine was sitting on top; Cathy didn’t look at it the whole way home.

  After Cathy opened the front door to her apartment, she carried the bag of groceries into the kitchen. She pretended she was just going to put everything away, just like always, just like normal. She started humming, all the while knowing that she was being absurd, that there was no one else to fool except herself, and she wasn’t doing a very good job of that She put the magazine face down on a counter and sorted out the rest of the groceries. When they had all been put away and the bag folded and stored beneath the kitchen sink, Cathy picked up the movie magazine and carried it into the living room. She sat down on her chair and began riffling idly through the pages of the magazine. At once she saw the Jamison Hawke article, and she saw the message directed to her. Not even in a footnote this time . . . How many thousands of other readers will wonder what it means . . .