Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  I sit down to rest with a cup of tea, two cats on my lap and one across my shoulders. All the cats seem fat and happy, and I really feel pretty happy too . . . considering.

  The telephone rings again and this time I answer it. It’s a love call. I think I recognize Klimp’s voice, but he won’t say if it’s him and they do all sound a lot alike, sort of muffled and slurred. Anyway, he says he wants to do all those things with me, things, actually, he already did. I suppose this call is part of a new campaign. I don’t think much of it and I tell him so. “How about breaking school windows and stealing library books?” I say. But whose side am I on now? “Listen,” I say, “I know of a nice wet place devoid of cats. It’s called The Love Canal and you’ll love it. Lots of empty houses. And there’s another place in New Jersey that I know of. Call me back and I’ll have the exact address for you.” I think he believes me. (Evidently they haven’t read all the books about women.)

  ~ * ~

  Political appointees. I’ll bet that’s what they are. Makes a lot of sense. I could do as well myself. And who was it sent them out with spray-paint cans? Who told them how to cause static on TV? Who had thousands of stickers made up reading: NO DANGER, NONTOXIC, and GENERALLY REGARDED AS SAFE?

  We can do all this by ourselves. Let’s see: number 1, day-care-aquarium centers; number 2, separate cat-breeding facilities; number 3, the takeover proper; number 4, the lying-fallow period. And we have time . . . plenty of time. Our numbers keep increasing, too, though slowly . . . the rejected, the divorced, the growing older, the left out. . . . Maybe they’ve already started it. I can’t be the only one thinking this way. Maybe they’re out there just waiting for my call, kitchens all warmed up. I’ll dial my old friend. “Include me in,” I’ll say.

  Everything perfect, and I even have Charles. We don’t need them. Bunch of bureaucrats. That wasn’t flying.

  <>

  * * * *

  The possibility, or even probability, of a major disaster in a nuclear energy plant has been discussed by nearly every major columnist or opinionator for years. (Yes, long before the “event’’ at Three Mile Island.) In the following suspenseful story, Michael Swanwick shows us a future in which a meltdown at Three Mile Island has occurred…and the results nearly a century from now.

  Michael Swanwick is a new writer whose other sales have been to Destinies, New Dimensions, TriQuarterly, and Penthouse. He lives in Philadelphia, where he works for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center at the Franklin Institute.

  ~ * ~

  MUMMER KISS

  Michael Swanwick

  It was Mummers Eve morning, and a cold north wind was blowing out of the Drift. Keith Piotrowicz eased the tanker truck through the blockade, his nucleopore mask hanging loosely around his neck. Jimmy Bowles dozed lightly in the seat beside him, dark face at ease.

  The guard waved his clipboard overhead. Keith nodded, fed the engine more alcohol, shifted gears. With a low growl, the truck surged forward. The guard, stationhouse, and red-and-white signs marked DRIFT with radiation logos went bounce, bounce and were gone from the rearview mirror.

  “Hey!” Keith jabbed his co-worker’s shoulder. “Get out that map; tell me where we’re supposed to be going.”

  Bowles snorted, and his eyes jerked open. He fumbled out a map, unfolded it across two-thirds of the cab, and said: “Out past King of Prussia. You’ve been that way before, right?” The truck jolted roughly over untended highway.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then don’t wake me up again till we get there.”

  ~ * ~

  They back-ended the truck to the edge of a short cliff, a drop of perhaps ten feet, and, donning protective garb, climbed out.

  Keith undogged the hose and pulled it loose while Bowles took a wrench and started to mate the connectors. He stood near the lip of the cliff, feet wide, bracing himself. A century-old division of tract houses lay below, silent among small patches of snow. Gently rolling hills slowly rose to the horizon, covered with a black stubble of stunted, sometimes twisted, trees.

  Bowles cursed as the cold hindered his efforts to open the master valve.

  The hose was thick and filled Keith’s gloved hands; together they barely circled it. There was a sharp clank as the valve unfroze under Bowles’ wrench. The hose throbbed and moved. Keith staggered and quickly recovered as milky-white industrial waste spurted from the nozzle.

  The liquid flew out in a long shallow arc to the frozen ground. It flowed sluggishly, covering sere brown grasses in an ever-widening puddle. Yellowish crystals formed, then were partially redissolved as new liquid overran them. They were supposed to find a new site each time out; it was usually easier to reuse the old dumps.

  The land was bleak and dreary. It depressed Keith, left him feeling dull and nihilistic. He remembered stories told of how sometimes the toxic chemical wastes from one dumping would combine with those from previous dumps, and strange alchemical interactions would take place. The ground would burst into flames or weird orange worms crawl out of the earth. There was a site he had seen in upper Bucks County where the ground actually crawled, boiling and bubbling year-round.

  Burst into flames, he thought at the ground. But nothing happened. The last lucid drops of waste fell from the hose.

  He shook it, then started to reel it back up.

  ~ * ~

  Back in the cab, Bowles had pulled down his cleansuit’s orange hood, and slipped off his nucleopore before Keith could get the air-recycler going. Like most old-timers, he didn’t wear his mask much, didn’t believe that something he couldn’t smell, taste, feel, or see could possibly hurt him. Bowles, taking his turn at the wheel, eased the tanker onto the highway.

  “Looking forward to the parade, hey, boy?” Bowles asked.

  “I guess. Hey, watch the road.” The cab lurched as they ran full-tilt over a mudslide that had obliterated twenty yards of roadway. Bowles cackled.

  Bowles was the only black on Quaker City Industrial Disposal’s payroll. Politics had gotten him the job, and it was politics that kept it for him; he was out “sick” more often than any man Keith knew. But Bowles played for a second-rate North Philly string band, and even a black man could swing a job with that kind of pull. “Don’t start talking like my maiden aunt,” he said. “Not much traffic out here, is there?”

  “Yeah, well. I’d still feel better if. . .” Bowles swung the truck through a figure-S, grazing both sides of the road, and Keith shut up. They roared past the ruins of a bank, and the wind kicked up a white spume of powder from a mound of asbestos tailings that had been dumped in its parking lot.

  “There’s some nice land out back, away from the dump sites,” Bowles said reflectively. “If I was young like you, I’d take over an old farmhouse, do a little homesteading. You don’t really believe it’s dangerous out here, do you, son?”

  I’ve heard this rap before, Keith thought. That was the trouble with Philadelphia: it was all Irish and Italian. So naturally the Mick dispatcher always puts the Nigger and the Polack together. Gives you a chance to learn how tired you can get of one man.

  “You set up a farm out here and your privates will mutate into green fungus,” he said, instantly hating himself for the words, for playing down to Bowles’ level.

  Bowles laughed, showing a meager scattering of eroded yellow teeth. He swerved to avoid the trunk of a mutated tree that crawled along the ground like a vine, intruding onto the highway. “Then you should join the Mummers. Good thing for an ambitious young man to do.”

  If he pointed out that he didn’t have the pull to get into the Mummers, Bowles would sneer and lecture him that if a black boy could join, then a white boy certainly could, having natural advantages of skin tone and ancestry. Instead he said, “I don’t have the money, and I’d look funny wearing feathers. Anyway, I’m not interested in politics.”

  Keith’s father had been in the Mummers, the bottom rung anyway, more gofer than marcher, and much good it had don
e him. Kept him poor paying for the costumes, and all the medical benefits hadn’t stopped his wife from dying of leukemia. It had probably killed him in the end, too. The old man had died of something funny, anyway, which Keith had always suspected he’d picked up on the job the Mummers had gotten him. The job that was all he’d had to leave to his son. . . .

  Bowles, swinging wide around a blind corner, turned and said, “I’m talking serious. If you—”

  “Jesus, look out!”

  Bowles, startled, cut the wheel hard. The front wheels hit a patch of ice, and the truck skidded out of control. Keith was slammed against the door, his nucleopore swinging wildly.

  Something flashed by the windshield, a woman riding a dirt bike. She had been cutting across the road when the truck rounded the corner and its tires lost traction. She leaned over the handlebars, coaxing the last bit of speed from her machine. “Dear God,” Keith prayed as the bike slipped past the front fender, barely evading collision.

  Before the motorcyclist could clear the road, the tank slewed around, catching the bike a glancing blow on its rear tire. There was a sickeningly loud crunch. Keith caught a glimpse of something flying through the air.

  Bowles was all elbows and motion, braking the truck and simultaneously trying to keep it on the road. He fought it to a halt, tires screeching, truck still upright, one wheel resting on the shoulder.

  Bowles leaped from the truck, his door swinging loosely on its hinges behind him. Keith automatically cut the motor, pulled on his mask, and followed.

  The woman’s fall had been broken by a tangle of dead brush. She lay still and crumpled, looking like a bundle of discarded clothing. Some way beyond her lay the dirt bike, bent and twisted, clearly beyond repair.

  “You know any first aid?” Bowles asked.

  “A little,” Keith said. “Jesus.” He stared at a trickle of blood creeping out of the woman’s nostril. It was paralyzing, this livid, glistening red. He shook off the feeling, bent to examine her.

  “First we look for any obvious broken bones, um, severe bleeding—it’s been a long time since I learned this stuff.” She was a lean muscular woman, somewhere in her late thirties or early forties. Slavic cheekbones, a fierce set to her face, even unconscious. A heavy kaftan-like robe had fallen partially open, revealing khaki fatigues, the light green kind that the Northern Liberation Front had worn two decades ago. Her nucleopore was knocked half off her face. He checked to see that she was still breathing, reset it. “Well, I don’t see anything.”

  “What next?”

  “Um, we treat her for shock. Cushion the head, raise the feet.” He started to take off his jacket to form a pillow, stopped. “This is no good. We’ve got to get her into town.”

  They carried her to the cab, awkwardly distributing her weight across their laps. Keith took the wheel, carefully started the truck rolling.

  “What’s this tangled around her neck?” Bowles asked. He unstrapped a leather case, looked inside. “Binoculars.” He set them carefully on the dashboard, began going through her pockets. “Passport here, stamped in Philadelphia. Occupation: Scholar.” He paused. “Didn’t know you could make a living at that. Special Drift clearance to visit Souderton.”

  “Souderton’s nowhere near here,” Keith said. “It’s hardly in the Drift at all.”

  “Do tell.” Bowles replaced the document, continued rummaging. “Hello. She’s got two of them.” He pulled a second passport from an inner pocket.

  “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t be going through her things like that,” Keith said uneasily. Bowles ignored him.

  “Says Suzette Fletcher on both of them. Same name, same height. Age: Forty-two. That’s the same. Occupation: Reporter. Now isn’t that funny? She’s a reporter for the Boston Globe, up north. And it’s not stamped in Philadelphia at all.”

  “Hey, really, man. I’d feel a lot better if you didn’t do that.”

  “Yeah, okay, okay.” Bowles replaced the passport, smoothed the kaftan shut again. He studied the woman’s face, nested in a mass of dirty blond hair in Keith’s lap. “This is one damn handsome woman,” he said. “How’s it feel, having that face in your crotch?”

  Keith slowed to negotiate a tricky patch of road, where a careless dumping had let a frozen chemical slick form on the concrete. “Aw come on,” he mumbled, involuntarily embarrassed. “She’s old enough to be my mother.”

  “Looks like she’s still got bright eyes, though,” Bowles said cheerily. “Bet she’s got a bushy tail, too. A young man like you could learn something from an older woman.”

  ~ * ~

  The woman stirred and groaned as the truck crossed Two Street. The sun was a red smear against the horizon, weakly echoed in the rearview mirror’s grimy streaks. Scattered sweepers cleaning the streets for tomorrow’s parade brushed the ancient asphalt free of any lingering hot particles blown in from the Drift. They were the hard-core unemployed, unable to pay the Mummers Gift in cash, with only their services to offer. They had been working all day and would go on working until the job was done. Then they would be given a hot meal, with maybe a cup of alky-laced hot cider, and the stupid asses would be grateful.

  The woman opened her eyes, painfully drew herself into a sitting position. “Philadelphia,” Bowles said. “My name’s Jimmy Bowles, and my partner’s Keith Piotrowicz.”

  She bent forward, gingerly touched her forehead. “God that smarts.” She snuffled slightly, accepted a handkerchief from Bowles, held it to her nose.

  “Jimmy’s the first man ever to create a traffic accident in the Drift,” Keith said with a touch of malice. Bowles glared at him wordlessly.

  The woman straightened a bit. A corner of her faded blond hair caught the sun, glinted red. “Oh yes, it all comes back to me now.” She forced a grin. “S. J. Fletcher. Everybody calls me Fletch.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Fletch,” Keith said. Almost simultaneously, Bowles asked, “What were you doing out in the Drift?”

  Fletch watched the tall buildings of Philadelphia glide by. In an abstracted tone, she said, “Some private genealogy. I was researching the records in Souderton—they’re almost untouched, you know—and I found my grandmother’s marriage license. It said she was born in King of Prussia, so . . . .” She shrugged. “I was hoping for the family Bible, but it looks like a lost cause. Hey, you guys did pick up my stuff, didn’t you?”

  “On the ledge,’’ Bowles said. They had slowed to a crawl as Keith eased it through the narrow riverfront streets. It was a tight turn into the company parking lot, and he nearly scraped two buildings negotiating it.

  “Not that!” Fletch snapped. “My goddamn saddlebags. They’ve got all my . . . supplies and stuff. All my money.”

  All but a handful of drivers had come in ahead of Keith and his partner. The lot was choked, all the good slots gone. He eased the truck into Slot 97. “Must be with the bike,” Bowie said. “We didn’t go look at it.”

  She slammed a fist into her thigh. “Damn damn damn,” she muttered to herself. Then, abruptly authoritative, “You’ll just have to take me back there to get them.”

  “Hey now,” Bowles objected.

  “Look around you,” Keith said. The trucks stretched in long, even rows, their biohazard logos dull in the failing sunset. “The Company isn’t going to let us take this thing out into the Drift again tonight.” He cut the engine, yanked the key.

  Bowles hopped out of the cab. “Keith, you come out back and read the meters for me,’’ he said. “Then I’ll go log us in, and you two can hash this thing out between yourselves.”

  “Okay.” Keith pulled his door open, inhaled deeply, savoring the clean city air. He strolled around to the back of the truck, wondering what Bowles wanted to say. There were no meters, of course; either the truck was empty or it was full. He opened his jacket, letting in a hit of cold air.

  “Listen,” Bowles hissed fiercely. “You can do what you want with that woman; tell her anything you like. But you will keep your mouth shut about
me looking at her papers. You got that? This is Mummer business, boy, and you’d best keep that in mind.” He waited for Keith’s nod, then began the long walk to the dispatcher’s shed.

  Keith shrugged to himself, returned to the cab. If Bowles wanted to play secret agent, that was nothing to him.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said to Fletch. “We can take you out the day after tomorrow, if you’re willing to spend the day in the truck. The dispatcher won’t like it, but Jimmy can work it for you. He’s got influence.”

  “Why not tomorrow?”

  “It’s the first of January,” Keith explained. “Mummers Day. Everything will be closed down.”

  “And just what the hell am I supposed to do with myself between then and now? Sleep in the gutter?”

  “I’ll put you up,” Keith said unhappily. “I’ve got a spare couch.” He wasn’t sure he liked this woman, and he had a sick feeling he was going to regret the offer. But for the life of him he couldn’t see any alternative.