Universe 8 - [Anthology] Read online

  “ ‘By,” and he strode through the whipping shag, saluted at the sliding glass doors, and went out into the quadrangle. In only a moment he was lost to Zoe on one of the foliage-sheltered paths, and the calm, curious ginkgo trees held her amazed interact until an inner door opened and a thin woman with close-cropped gray hair came in to her.

  “Zoe Breedlove?” A Manila envelope clasped in front of her, the newcomer looked toward the wingback but not exactly at it. A handsome, frail woman with silverly opaque eyes and an off-center smile.

  “That’s me,” Zoe said. The other’s eyes focused on her then, and the smile firmed up. The woman navigated through waves of carpet to a chair opposite Zoe’s, and they faced each other across the tea service.

  “I’m Helen,” the woman said. “Helen Phoenix. Parthena and Toodles wanted another man, I think, but I’m happy Leland found somebody who won’t have to compete with our memories of Yuichan. That would have been unfair to you.”

  “Yui-chan?” The word sounded foreign, particularly to a dome-dwelling Georgia girl. Whereas Helen’s accent marked her as no native to Atlanta. New York? Something cosmopolitan, anyhow: once.

  “Yuichan Kurimoto-Phoenix. He was born in Kyoto, but he behaved like a raving Italian. Had execrable taste in everything; not a bit subtle. There’s an unpainted plaster-of-Paris squirrel on the bole of one of the trees in the garden: Yuichan’s doing.” Helen lowered her head. “A lovely man; just lovely.”

  “Well, I hope the others don’t think I’m even going to try to take Yoo-chi’s place. I don’t even know anything about China.”

  The woman’s smile died at the corners of her mouth, then slowly grew back. “Nevertheless,” she said, “you may be more like Yuichan than you know. Which is all to the good: a bonus for us. And the question of your competing with Yuichan’s memory won’t enter into our appreciation of you at all. I’m sure of that. Toodles only favored another man, I’m sure, because she’s a voluptuary and thinks Paul and Luther inadequate for our servicing.”

  Servicing: that probably meant exactly what she thought it did. Zoe leaned over the coffee table. “Would you like some of this tea Mr. Leland left with me?”

  “Please. And if you’ll push the service to one side, Zoe—may I call you Zoe?—I’ll introduce you to the others even before we go upstairs. That’s an advantage you’ll have over them, but probably the only one. We hardly begrudge it.”

  “Good. I could use an evener.” And it was after pushing the tea service aside and while watching Helen take the photographs and printouts out of the Manila envelope that Zoe realized Helen was blind. The opaque eyes worked independently of her smile and her hands: the eyes were beautiful, somehow weightless ball bearings. Mechanical moving parts in a body that was all Siamese cat and animal silver. Without fumbling, Helen’s small hands laid out the pictures and the data sheets. Reminiscently, Zoe touched one of the photographs.

  “You can examine it all while I drink my tea, Zoe. I won’t bother you.”

  The top sheet on the pile was neatly computer-typed. Zoe held it up and tilted it so that she could read it.

  THE PHOENIX SEPTIGAMOKLAN

  Covenant Ceremony:

  Day 7 of Spring, 2035, New Calendar designation.

  Septigamoklanners:

  M. L. K. Battle (Luther). Born July 11, 1968, Old Calendar designation.

  No surviving family. Last employer: McAlpine Construction and Demolition Company. Septigamoklan jack-o-trades and activity-planner. Ortho-Urbanist, lapsed, age-exempted. Black.

  Parthena Cawthom. Born November 4, 1964, o.c.; Madison, Georgia. A

  son Maynard, a daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren: enfranchised UrNu citizens. Last employer: Inner Earth Industries. Sgk artisan and folk-lorist. Ortho-Urbanist, semiactive. Black.

  Paul Erik Ferrand. Born October 23, 1959, o.c.; Bakersfield, California.

  Family members (children, grandchildren, great-children) in the Urban Nuclei of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Last employer: (?). Unclassifiable Mystic, age-exempted. White.

  Yuichi Kurimoto (Yuichan). Born May 27, 1968, o.c.; Kyoto, Japan.

  Children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren alive in Kyoto and Tokyo. Last employer: Visicomputer Enterprises, Atlanta branch. Sgk legislator. Neo-Buddhist, lapsed, nationality-exempted. Oriental.

  Joyce Malins (Toodles). Born February 14, 1971, o.c.; Savannah,

  Georgia. No surviving family. Last employer: Malins Music, Voice, and Dance. Sgk musician. Ortho-Urbanist, lapsed, age-exempted. White.

  Helen Mitchell. Born July 11, 1967, o.c.; Norfolk, Virginia. A son in the

  Washington UrNu, a daughter in the Philadelphia UrNu. Last employer: UrNu Civil Service, Atlanta branch. Sgk mediator. Ortho-Urbanist, semiactive. White.

  Jeremy Zitelman (Jerry). Born December- 9, 1970, o.c.; No surviving

  family. Last employer: University of Georgia, Urban Extension, Astronomy Department. Sgk historian. Recidivist Jew, age-exempted. White.

  A mixed lot, Zoe decided: a party assortment. Over the capsule-biography of Yuichi Kurimoto the word DECEASED was stamped in large, double-lined red letters which did not conceal the information under them. Zoe looked at the photographs and tried to match them up with the resumes (they weren’t very good photographs); she got them all matched up, but it was pretty apparent that some of the pictures had been taken years ago. For instance, Paul Erik Ferrand, supposedly just over eighty, was a rakish, lupine man wearing a style of cravat that hadn’t been fashionable in two decades. Before their names and faces meant anything Zoe would have to meet these people: in the flesh.

  “Is that what I’ll be—a septigamoklanner—if y’all like me?”

  “That’s an institute word, Zoe, made up by someone who didn’t know what to call a family like ours. Don’t worry. None of us use it. You see, these information sheets contain only passed-upon, UrNu-validated ‘facts’: impersonal and bureaucratic. Jerry or I, either one, could have put a little pizzazz into the sketches. . . . Unfortunately, civil service sachems frown on pizzazz. . . .” Helen’s voice trailed off.

  “Well, that’s encouraging—’cause I think I’d have a hard time thinking of myself as a . . . septigamoklansperson.” A mouthful, that “But in Yoo-chi’s biography here, it says he was the family legislator. Does that mean, since I’m coming in for him, I have to put on his shoes and be a legislator?”

  “No, no. On these official data sheets everyone’s given a position, as if we were baseball players or chess pieces. Really, though, we do whatever we do best, and by defining ourselves in that way we become ourselves to the others. Later, someone will probably put a label on what you are. It won’t be a Phoenix who does it, though.”

  “Mr. Leland?”

  “Perhaps. A study is going on here, though we’re mostly oblivious to it, and studies demand statistics and labels. A cosmic law, like gravitation and magnetism and whatnot.”

  “Well, if it was age-exempted, even an apple might not have to fall.”

  Helen’s opaque eyes locked on her face. “An appropriate observation. But we do have a chance to do some naming of our own. Phoenix was our own choice, you know. Some of the other families in the Tower are Cherokee, Piedmont, O’Possum, and Sweetheart.”

  “Oh, those are good ones, too.” They were, too; had what Helen would probably call pizzazz.

  “Yes,” Helen said, pleased. “Yes, they are.”

  * * * *

  4 climbing jacob’s ladder

  Zoe met them all at supper that evening. They ate in a room decorated with a quilted wall banner, and with several potted plants that Joyce Malins (Toodles) said she had bought from a slum-area florist in a place called the Kudzu Shop.

  The Phoenix family had an entire suite of rooms, including a kitchen, on the Geriatrics Hostel’s fourth floor, and this evening Luther, Toodles, and Paul had shared the cooking: corn bread, frozen vegetables, and pasta with a sauce of meat substitutes. Better than Lannie managed after two hours of sloozying
around in new clothes for the lechers at Consolidated Rich’s; better than Zoe usually did for herself, come to that. The table was round, and wooden, and big enough for seven people, a metal pitcher of cold, sweetened tea, and several china serving dishes. No attendants waited on them, Zoe noted, no nurses, no white-smocked young men with pursed lips. A biomonitor cabinet, to which they were all linked by means of pulse-cued silver bracelets, was the only alien presence in the dining room, and it kept quiet. (The people downstairs had a hookup to the monitor, though, she was sure of that.) Zoe self-consciously turned her own new bracelet, a handsome thing in spite of its being, also, a piece of medical equipment. Plugged in already she was, a rookie Phoenix.

  Helen had introduced her. She was sitting between Helen and Jerry. Then clockwise beyond Helen: Parthena, Paul, Luther, and Toodles. Jerry was sitting in a wheel chair, a lap robe over his knees. The others, like Helen, looked pretty mobile—even the eighty-year-old Paul, whose eyes resembled a Weimaraner dog’s and whose mouth still knew how to leer.

  “How old are you, Zoe?” he asked, after the opening small talk had faded off into mumbles and spoon-rattling.

  Helen said, “Paul!” Like Lannie shushing her, Zoe; only nicer.

  “Bet she ain’t as old as me. Three-to-one odds. Place your bets.” He smacked his lips.

  “No one’s so old as that,” Jerry said. Jerry’s hair was a dandelion puffball: just that round, that gray, that delicate. His face was red.

  “I’m sixty-seven,” Zoe said. Second time today. But saying so didn’t age you, just worrying about it.

  “Young blood,” the wide-faced black man said: Luther. His hair (she was comparing now) was the kind of white you see on a photograph negative, a darkness turned inside out. His hands, on either side of his plate, looked like the mallets on sledgehammers. “Hooooi! Old folks, we’re being transfused, we’re gettin’ new blood.”

  “Toodles ain’ the baby no mo’,” Parthena said out of a tall, stern Zulu mask of a face. Plantation accent, Zoe noticed. Luther sounded more like Paul or Toodles than he did Parthena; except for that Hooooi! Except for that.

  “How ‘bout that, Toodles?” Paul said. “Puttin’ your foot on the bottom rung of Jacob’s ladder at last. I’m up the highest, but you’ve finally climbed on.” Toodles, whose mouth was a red smear, a candy heart (even though no one wore lip ices or eye blacking any more), lowered a forkful of squash to reply, but crazy old Paul turned to Zoe again: “I’m up the highest, but I’m never gonna die. I was born in California.”

  “Which is your typical Ferrand-Phoenix non sequitur,” Jerry said.

  “I’ve never made an issue of being the youngest one here,” Toodles interjected. “And I’m not disturbed by losing that position, either.” Her jowly face swung toward Zoe. “Zoe, I bought that fuchsia and the coleus for your arrival today. Parthena and I walked into that jungle off New Peachtree and haggled with the little Eurasian shopkeeper over prices. Then we carried our purchases back, pots and all, no help from these noble gentlemen.”

  “Course,” Parthena said, “that ‘fo’ she knew how old you was.” Her Zulu mask smiled: perfect dentures. Taller than anyone else in the room, Parthena, even seated, loomed.

  “Parthena, damn your black hide, you know that wouldn’t’ve made any difference! It wouldn’t’ve!” Toodles dropped her fork, her mouth silently working itself into a multiplex variety of lopsided O’s.

  “Joke,” Parthena said. “Jes’ funnin’.”

  “Well, what the hell’s funny about my being younger than you old cadavers?” Her mascara, tear-moistened, was making crater holes out of her eyes. “What’s so damn funny about that?!”

  “What’s she takin’ on like this for?” Luther asked the table.

  “Humor her,” Jerry said, winking at Zoe from under his puffball. “She thinks she’s in her period.”

  Which brought guffaws from Paul and Luther and pulled the roof down on everyone else. Rearing back as if bee-stung, Toodles knocked her chair over and stood glaring at each member of her family in turn. Not counting Zoe.

  “Jackasses!” she managed. Then, more vehemently: “Limp ole noodles!” Her mouth had begun to look like a pattern on an oscilloscope. Zoe, in fact, saw that one of the miniature screens on the biomonitor cabinet was sending delicate, pale comets back and forth across its surface: Toodles pulsing into the hysterical.

  In person, Toodles left off glaring and, without looking back, moved painfully, heavily, out of the dining room. A minute or two after her exit, the pale comets stopped whizzing. Not dead, Toodles wasn’t; just out of range. Another cabinet would pick her up shortly.

  “Silly biddy,” Paul announced, chewing.

  “Jerry’s last remark was crude,” Helen said. “A sort of crudity, Zoe, that he usually doesn’t permit himself.”

  “Please believe that,” the crimson-faced man said, wheeling himself back from the table. “Lately she’s been upset. That she was on the verge, though, I didn’t think. I’m sorry, I’m honestly sorry, you know.” The chair powered him out the door.

  “Hot damn,” Zoe said. “Some debut.”

  “Ain’ yo’ fault,” Parthena said. “She been eggcited. Las’ two week, she knew we was gonna fine a ‘placement for Yuichan, that’s all.”

  “That’s true,” Helen said. “We argue like young married couples do sometimes, Zoe, but usually not before company and not very often. Ordinarily Toodles is a lovely woman. And the only explanations I can give for her behavior are the menfolk’s bad manners and her excitement. Courting’s always made her nervous; always.”

  “As for the sort of crudity you heard from her,” Luther said, “that’s her style. She don’t mean nothin’ by it, though, even when she’s mad.”

  “Silly biddy,” the time-blotched old Frenchman (or whatever he was) said. “Carry on like that, die before I will ... I ain’t gonna die.” He was the only one who finished eating what was on his plate. Once finished, long lips glistening, he let a red, translucent eyelid drop lasciviously over an amber eye: a wink. For Zoe.

  * * * *

  5 rotational reminiscence

  Two hours later. The roof court of the UrNu Human Development Tower, geriatrics wing. Temperature holding steady at 21° C. Night had risen as the city’s fluorescent suns had been gradually dialed down.

  The Phoenix had patched things up among themselves and now sat in a semicircle at a tower railing overlooking the Biomonitor Agency on West Peachtree and, ten floors down, a floodlit pedestrian park. All the Phoenix but that oddie, Paul: he still hadn’t come up. Zoe put that old codger out of her mind, though. The rooftop was open and serene, and she had never seen such a pretty simulated twilight. Not much chance on Level 3, under. Now, winking on across the city’s dying-into-the-violet skyscape, a thousand faint points of light. The breath sucked away just at the glory of it.

  Jerry Zitelman-Phoenix maneuvered his wheel chair into position beside her. (Ramps and lift-tubes made it possible for him to go anywhere at all inside the complex.) “I want to apologize, Zoe, for my uncalled-for remark in your presence.”

  “I always try to apologize to the person who needs it.”

  “Me, too. Look, you can see she’s back.” And she was, Toodles: sitting with Luther, Parthena, and Helen and animatedly narrating another episode of her afternoon’s shopping. “But you, too, need an apology for the disruption I made,” Jerry said, “so to you also I say, ‘Sorry.’ “

  Zoe accepted this apology, and Jerry began talking. He told her that on Thursday nights—alternate ones, anyhow, and it was Thursday night that night—the Phoenix clan had this screened section of the rooftop for whatever purpose they wished. He told her that tonight it was a game they called “rotational reminiscence” and that they were waiting for Paul, who never participated but who insisted on attending every session. The rules, Jerry said, were simple and would become clear once they started. Then, pointing to the darkened, concave hollow overhead, the honeycombed shell in which they
all lived, he told her that in his youth he had been an astronomer.

  “Even now,” he said, “I can look up there at night and imagine the constellations rolling by. Oh, Zoe, it’s just as plain as day—which is one more of your typical Ferrand non sequiturs, Zitelman version thereof. But it’s true, I can. There’s Cassiopeia, there’s Ursa Major, there’s Camelopardalis. . . . Oh, all of them I can see. The dome is no impediment to me, Zoe, but it’s certainly no joyous boon either. That it isn’t.”

  He went on. He told her that the only advantage the dome offered him was that he could just as easily imagine the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere passing in procession across its face. Sometimes he so imagined: Canis Minor, Hydra, Monoceros. There they all were, so dizzying in their splendor that he felt sure he would one day power his wheel chair right up into their diamond-dusted nets and connect the dots among them with the burning tip of a raunchy, green cigar. “Cigars I’m not allowed any more,” he said. “Not even the neutered ones with no tobacco, no tar, and no taste. And stars . . . ?” He pointed at the doom.