Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

With the fall of evening, however, the wail that during the day had subsided into a whine began to reverberate again with its first full burden of grief. If the noise was not quite so loud as it had been that morning, Lawson thought, it was probably because the city contained fewer people. Many had died, and a great many more, unmindful of the distances involved, had set out to return to their homelands.

  Lawson chewed a piece of adobo and washed this down with a swig of the vaguely bitter Cruz del Campo beer.

  “Isn’t this fine?” Secombe said, his butt on the tiles of the room’s one windowsill. “Dinner over a rubber shop. And this a Catholic country, too.”

  “I was raised a Baptist,” Lawson said, realizing at once that his confession was a non sequitur.

  “Oh,” Secombe put in immediately. “Then I imagine you could get ail the rubbers you wanted.”

  “Sure. For a quarter. In almost any gas-station restroom.”

  “Sorry,” Secombe said.

  They ate for a while in silence. Lawson’s back was to a cool plaster wall; he leaned his head against it, too, and released a sharp moan from his chest. Then, sustaining the sound, he moaned again, adding his own strand of grief to the cacophonous harmonies already afloat over the city. He was no different from all the bereaved others who shared his pain by concentrating on their own.

  “What did you do in . . . in Lynchburg?” Secombe suddenly asked.

  “Campus liaison for the Veterans Administration. I traveled to four different colleges in the area, straightening out people’s problems with the GI Bill. I tried to see to it that Sweet Jesus, Secombe, who cares? I miss my wife. I’m afraid my girls are dead.”

  “Karen and Hannah?”

  “They’re three and five. I’ve taught them to play chess. Karen’s good enough to beat me occasionally if I spot her my queen. Hannah knows the moves, but she hasn’t got her sister’s patience-she’s only three, you know. Yeah. Sometimes she sweeps the pieces off the board and folds her arms, and we play hell trying to find them all. There’ll be pawns under the sofa, horsemen upside down in the shag-” Lawson stopped.

  “She levels them,” Secombe said. “As we’ve all been leveled. The knight’s no more than the pawn, the king no more than the bishop.”

  Lawson could tell that the Welshman was trying to turn aside the ruinous thrust of his grief. But he brushed the metaphor aside: “I don’t think we’ve been `leveled,’ Secombe.”

  “Certainly we have. Guess who 1 saw this morning near the cathedral when I first woke up.”

  “God only knows.”

  “God and Dai Secombe, sir. 1 saw the Marxist dictator of . . . oh, you know, that little African country where there’s just been a coup. I recognized the bastard from the telly broadcasts during the purge trials there. There he was, though, in white ducks and a ribbed T-shirt- terrified, Lawson. and as powerless as you or 1. He’d been quite decidedly leveled; you’d better believe he had.”

  “I’ll bet he’s alive tonight, Secombe.”

  The Welshman’s eyes flickered with a sudden insight. He extended the greasy cone of newspaper from the pescaderia. “Another piece of fish, Lawson? Come on, then, there’s only one more.”

  “To be leveled, Secombe, is to be put on a par with everyone else. Your dictator, even deprived of office, is a grown man. What about infant children? Toddlers and preadolescents? And what about people like that Eskimo woman who haven’t got a chance in an unfamiliar environment, even if its inhabitants don’t happen to be hostile? 1 saw a man knock his brains out on a stone wall this morning because he took a look around and knew he couldn’t make it here. Maybe he thought he was in Hell, Secombe. I don’t know. But his chance certainly wasn’t ours!

  “He knew he couldn’t adjust.”

  “Of course he couldn’t adjust. Don’t give me that bullshit about leveling!”

  Secombe turned the cone of newspaper around and withdrew the last piece of fish. “I’m going to eat this myself, if you don’t mind.” He ate. As he was chewing, he said, “I didn’t think that Virginia Baptists were so free with their tongues, Lawson. Tsk, tsk. Undercuts my preconceptions.”

  “I’ve fallen away.”

  “Haven’t we all.”

  Lawson took a final swig of warm beer. Then he hurled the bottle across the room. Fragments of amber glass went everywhere. “God!” he cried. “God, God, God!” Weeping, he was no different from three quarters of Seville’s new citizens by-chance. Why, then, as he sobbed, did he shoot such guilty and threatening glances at the Welshman?

  “Go ahead,” Secombe advised him, waving the empty cone of newspaper. “I feel a little that way myself.”

  IV

  In the morning an oddly blithe woman of forty-five or so accosted them in the alley outside the contraceptive shop. A military pistol in a patent-leather holster was strapped about her skirt. Her seeming airiness, Lawson quickly realized, was a function of her appearance and her movements; her eyes were as grim and frightened as everyone else’s. But, as soon as they came out of the shop onto the cobblestones, she approached them fearlessly, hailing Secombe almost as if he were an old friend.

  “You left us yesterday, Mr. Secombe. Why?”

  “I saw everything dissolving into cliques.”

  “Dissolving? Coming together, don’t you mean?”

  Secombe smiled noncommittally, then introduced the woman to Lawson as Mrs. Alexander. “She’s one of your own, Lawson. She’s from Wyoming or some such place. I met her outside the cathedral yesterday morning when the first self-appointed muezzins started calling their language-mates together. She didn’t have a pistol then.”

  “I got it from one of the Guardia Civil stations,” Mrs. Alexander said. “And I feel lots better just having it, let me tell you.” She looked at Lawson. “Are you in the Air Force?”

  “Not anymore. These are the clothes I woke up in.”

  “My husband’s in the Air Force. Or was. We were stationed at Warren in Cheyenne. I’m originally from upstate New York. And these are the clothes I woke up in.” A riding skirt, a blouse, low-cut rubber-soled shoes. “I think they tried to give us the most serviceable clothes we had in our wardrobes-but they succeeded better in some cases than in others.”

  “ `They’?” Secombe asked.

  “Whoever’s done this. It’s just a manner of speaking.”

  “What do you want?” Secombe asked Mrs. Alexander. His brusqueness of tone surprised Lawson.

  Smiling, she replied, “The word for today is Exportadora. We’re trying to get as many English-speaking people as we can to Exportadora. That’s where the commercial center for American servicemen and their families in Seville is located, and it’s just off one of the major boulevards to the south of here.”

  On a piece of paper sack Mrs. Alexander drew them a crude map and explained that her husband had once been stationed in Zaragoza in the north of Spain. Yesterday she had recalled that Seville was one of the four Spanish cities supporting the American military presence, and with persistence and a little luck a pair of carefully briefed English-speaking DPs (the abbreviation was Mrs. Alexander’s) had discovered the site of the American PX and commissary just before nightfall. Looting the place when they arrived had been an impossibly mixed crew of foreigners, busily hauling American merchandise out of the ancient buildings. But Mrs. Alexander’s DPs had run off the looters by the simple expedient of revving the engine of their commandeered taxicab and blowing its horn as if to announce Armageddon. In ten minutes the little American enclave had emptied of all human beings but the two men in the cab. After that, as English-speaking DPs and ‘entertainment magazines, and a variety of tabloids, including the military paper Stars and Stripes. No one knew how old these publications were, because no one knew over what length of time the redistribution of the world’s population had taken place. How long had everyone slept? And what about the discrepancies among time zones and the differences among people’s waking hours within the same time zones? These questions were academic
now, it seemed to Lawson, because the agency of transfer had apparently encompassed every single human being alive on Earth.

  Thumbing desultorily through a copy of Stars and Stripes, he encountered an article on the problems of military hospitals and wondered how many of the world’s sick had awakened in the open, doomed to immediate death because the care they required was nowhere at hand. The smell of spilled tobacco and melted Life Savers made the newsstand a pleasant place to contemplate these horrors; and even as his conscience nagged and a contingent of impatient DPs awaited him, Lawson perversely continued to flip through the newspaper.

  Secombe’s squat form appeared in the doorway. “I thought you were looking for a local roadmap.”

  “Found it already, just skimmin’ the news.”

  “Come on, if you would. The folks’re ready to be off.”

  Reluctantly, Lawson followed Secombe outside, where the raw Andalusian sunlight broke like invisible surf against the pavement and the fragile-seeming shell of the Air Force bus. It was of the Bluebird shuttle variety, and Lawson remembered summer camp at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and bus rides from his squadron’s minimum-maintenance ROTC barracks to the survival-training camps near the swamp. That had been a long time ago, but this Bluebird might have hailed from an even more distant era. It was as boxy and sheepish-looking as if it had come off a 1954 assembly line, and it appeared to be made out of warped tin rather than steel. The people inside the bus had opened all its windows, and many of those on the driver’s side were watching Secombe and Lawson approach.

  “Move your asses!” a man shouted at them. “Let’s get some wind blowing through this thing before we all suffodamn-cate.”

  “Just keep talking,” Secombe advised him. “That should do fine.”

  Aboard the bus was a motley lot of Americans, Britishers, and Australians, with two or three English-speaking Europeans and an Oxford-educated native of India to lend the group ballast. Lawson took up a window seat over the hump of one of the bus’s rear tires, and Secombe squeezed in beside him. A few people introduced themselves; others, lost in fitful reveries, ignored them altogether. To Lawson, the most unsettling thing about the contingent was the absence of children. Although about equally divided between men and women, the group contained no boys or girls any younger than their early teens.

  Lawson opened the map of southern Spain he had found in the newsstand and traced his finger along a highway route leading out of Seville to two small American enclaves outside the city, Santa Clara and San Pablo. Farther to the south were Jerez and the port city of Cadiz. Lawson’s heart misgave him; the names were all so foreign, so formidable in what they evoked, and he felt this entire enterprise to be hopeless ....

  About midway along the right-hand side of the bus, a black woman was sobbing into the hem of her blouse, and a man perched on the Bluebird’s long rear seat had his hands clasped to his ears and his head canted forward to touch his knees. Lawson folded up the map and stuck it into the crevice between the seat and the side of the bus.

  “The bottom-line common denominator here isn’t our all speaking English,” Secombe whispered. “It’s what we’re suffering.”

  Driven by one of Mrs. Alexander’s original explorers, a doctor from Ivanhoe, New South Wales, the Bluebird shuddered and lurched forward. In a moment it had left Exportadora and begun banging along one of the wide avenues that would lead it out of town.

  “And our suffering,” Secombe went on, still whispering, “unites us with all those poor souls raving in the streets and sleeping facedown in their own vomit. You felt that the other night above the condom shop, Lawson. I know you did, talking of your daughters. So why are you so quick to go looking for what you aren’t likely to find? Why are you so ready to unite yourself with this artificial family born out of catastrophe? Do you really think you’re going to catch a flight home to Lynchburg? Do you really think the bird driving this sardine can-who ought to be out in the streets plying his trade instead of running a shuttle service-d’you really think he’s ever going to get back to Australia?”

  “Secom be-”

  “Do you, Lawson?”

  Lawson clapped a hand over the Welshman’s knee and wobbled it back and forth. “You wouldn’t be badgering me like this if you had a family of your own. What the hell do you want us to do? Stay here forever?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.” He removed Lawson’s hand from his knee. “But I do have a father, sir, and I happen to be fond of him . . . . All I know for certain is that things are .supposed to be different now. We shouldn’t be rushing to restore what we already had.”

  “Shit,” Lawson murmured. He leaned his head against the bottom edge of the open window beside him.

  From deep within the city came the brittle noise of gunshots. The Bluebird’s driver, in response to this sound and to the vegetable carts and automobiles that had been moved into the streets as obstacles, began wheeling and cornering like a stock-car jockey. The bus clanked and stuttered alarmingly. It growled through an intersection below a stone bridge, leapt over that bridge like something living, and roared down into a semi-industrial suburb of Seville, where a Coca-Cola bottling factory and a local brewery lifted huge competing signs.

  On top of one of these buildings Lawson saw a man with a rifle taking unhurried potshots at anyone who came into his sights. Several people already lay dead.

  And a moment later the Bluebird’s windshield shattered, another bullet ricocheted off its flank, and everyone in the bus was either shouting or weeping. The next time Lawson looked, the bus’s windshield appeared to have woven inside it a large and exceedingly intricate spider’s web.

  The Bluebird careened madly, but the doctor from Ivanhoe kept it upright and turned it with considerable skill onto the highway to San Pablo. Here the bus eased into a quiet and rhythmic cruising that made this final incident in Seville except for the evidence of the windshield-seem only the cottony aftertaste of nightmare. At last they were on their way. Maybe.

  “Another good reason for trying to get home,” Lawson said.

  “What makes you think it’s going to be different there?” -

  Irritably, Lawson turned on the Welshman. “1 thought your idea was that this change was some kind of improvement.”

  “Perhaps it will be. Eventually.”

  Lawson made a dismissive noise and looked at the olive . orchard spinning by on his left. Who would harvest the crop? Who would set the aircraft factories, the distilleries, the chemical and textile plants running again? Who would see to it that J seed was sown in the empty fields?

  Maybe Secombe had something. Maybe, when you ran for home, you ran from the new reality at hand. The effects of . this new reality’s advent were not going to go away very soon, no matter what you did-but seeking to reestablish yesterday’s order would probably create an even nastier entropic pattern 1 than would accepting the present chaos and working to rein it in. How, though, did you best rein it in? Maybe by trying to get back home . . .

  Lawson shook his head and thought of Marlena, Karen, Hannah; of the distant, mist-softened cradle of the Blue Ridge. Lord. That was country much easier to get in tune with than the harsh, white-sky bleakness of this Andalusian valley. If you stay here, Lawson told himself, the pain will never go away.

  They passed Santa Clara, which was a housing area for the officers and senior NCOs who had been stationed at Moron. With its neatly trimmed hedgerows, tall aluminum streetlamps, and low-roofed houses with carports and picture windows, Santa Clara resembled a middle-class exurbia in New Jersey or Ohio. Black smoke was curling over the area, however, and the people on the streets and lawns were definitely not Americans-they were transplanted Dutch South Africans, Amazonian tribesmen, Poles, Ethiopians, God only knew what. All Lawson could accurately deduce was that a few of these people had moved into the vacant houses maybe they had awakened in them-and that others had aimlessly set bonfires about the area’s neighborhoods. These fires, because there was no wind, burned
with a maddening slowness and lack of urgency.

  “Little America,” Secombe said aloud.

  “That’s in Antarctica,” Lawson responded sarcastically.

  “Right. No matter where it happens to be.”

  “Up yours.”

  Their destination was now San Pablo, where the Americans had hospital facilities, a library, a movie theater, a snack bar, a commissary, and, in conjunction with the Spaniards, a small commercial and military airfield. San Pablo lay only a few more miles down the road, and Lawson contemplated the idea of a flight to Portugal. What would be the chances. supposing you actually reached Lisbon, of crossing the Atlantic, either by sea or air, and reaching one of the United States’ coastal cities? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? Less than that?

  A couple of seats behind the driver, an Englishman with a crisp-looking mustache and an American woman with a distinct Southwestern accent were arguing the merits of bypassing San Pablo and heading on to Gibraltar, a British possession. The Englishman seemed to feel that Gibraltar would have escaped the upheaval to which the remainder of the world had fallen victim, whereas the American woman thought he was crazy. A shouting match involving five or six other passengers ensued. Finally, his patience at an end, the Bluebird’s driver put his elbow on the horn and held it there until everyone had shut up.