Universe 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  “This is certainly the week of Thomas Rakestraw,” she said disgustedly, coming back down the steps.

  Rakestraw was standing in the foyer beneath the staircase. “I’ve plugged the phone in the den back in.”

  “Why?”

  Assuming a languid Craig Tiernan posture, Rakestraw aped the actor’s gestures and voice. “Because,” he said insouciantly, “it’s more than a tad likely we’re going to be getting a very important call, m’lady.”

  “Tom,” Nora said softly.

  “What?”

  “Knock it off, all right? Please just knock it off.”

  As well as he was able, Rakestraw knocked it off. “It’s just that I’m pretty sure Tiernan is going to try to get in touch,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “To let you have your face back?”

  “Probably to threaten to cut off our monthly compensation.”

  “That might be almost as good as the other.” Nora turned clumsily and went back up the stairs.

  * * * *

  Four calls and two and a half hours later, Rakestraw reached over from his easy chair and uncradled the telephone in response to its renewed ringing.

  “Thomas Rakestraw?” said a voice through the wire.

  “Yo.” Was this old army slang or Spanish? Rakestraw didn’t know. The word gave him a comfortable degree of distance from the apprehension he had begun to feel.

  “This is Edgar Macmillan. Am I speaking to the same Thomas Rakestraw whom I met several weeks ago?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. I—“

  “You’re speaking with a different Thomas Rakestraw—whom, however, you did indeed meet several weeks ago.”

  Macmillan, after a silence, said, “You probably know why I’m calling, Mr. Rakestraw. Craig Tiernan has directed me to get in touch with you to point out that because you’re presently in violation of the terms of our settlement, we intend to—”

  “Halt my compensation payments.”

  Macmillan chuckled, maybe in surprise. “Of course.”

  “Well, Mr. Macmillan”—Rakestraw spoke into the phone with the authority of a prosecutor—”it’s my opinion that you’re just trying to steamroller me. I’ve had occasion to read the Physiognomic Protection Act very carefully, as well as the terms of our settlement, and nowhere in either is there any mention of the illegality of my impersonating the former plaintiff if I don’t happen to resemble him facially. I no longer resemble him facially. My impersonations arise from an innate talent for mimicry that is exclusively my own, and Craig Tiernan has no lawful right to attempt to restrain the expression of that talent. Impersonators have long been a part of this business. Craig Tiernan himself is an impersonator, and if he denies my right to practice, he also denies his own.”

  Macmillan’s subsequent silence led Rakestraw to believe that Tiernan was perhaps in the same room with his attorney. Were the two conferring because he had put a hitch in their assessment of his likely response? He hoped so.

  “Mr. Rakestraw,” Macmillan tentatively resumed, “it still remains the case that you’re exploiting the talent, the work, and the personality of Craig Tiernan, and this infringement on his career is an actionable matter which may result in your having to pay damages rather than simply receiving them.”

  “Well, Mr. Macmillan, my ‘infringement’ on the career of Mr. Tiernan is a direct consequence of his infringement upon my life. I’d never even heard of the bastard before you came to Caracal. It’s an accident of his own making that I’m impersonating anyone. Please tell him that I started with Craig Tiernan for pretty straightforward reasons, and that if I wanted to, I could do just about anybody I damn well choose, including his own most recent mother-in-law.”

  “We intend to sue for—”

  “And I intend to countersue for unconscionable harassment after the indignity of having to forfeit the face I was born with.”

  “Mr. Rakestraw-”

  “And when I press suit, you might remind Mr. Tiernan, he’ll have to come to court. His plastic overlay photographs and my cranial measurements won’t be able to speak for him. Craig Tiernan and Tom Rakestraw will occupy the same courtroom, and the publicity generated will be more than he bargained for and quite distinctive in its thrust as far as he and I are concerned.”

  “Mr. Rakestraw, you’re . . . you’re whistling in the dark.”

  “How much hate mail has Tiernan received this week?”

  “Hate mail?”

  “How many people have written to tell him what a jerk he is for depriving an innocent man of his own face?”

  “I don’t read Craig Tiernan’s mail, Mr. Rakestraw.”

  “But it hasn’t all been sympathetic gushings this week, has it?”

  “No, it hasn’t,” Macmillan confessed. “But that’s neither here nor there when—”

  “It’s there, Mr. Macmillan. Here the mail and telephone calls are mostly favorable. That’s how I know what kind of communications your employer’s been receiving.”

  “What exactly do you want?” Macmillan asked, a trace of desperation in his voice. Michelle Boyer had asked very nearly the same question more than a week ago, but the only honest reply Rakestraw could frame was one he could not bring himself to voice.

  “I want to speak to Tiernan,” he said instead.

  “On the telephone?”

  “In person.”

  “Do you propose to fly out here for that purpose?”

  “Why doesn’t he come here? It’s all tax-deductible, after all. For him, anyway.”

  A silence, during which Rakestraw felt sure that Macmillan and Tiernan were discussing this turn of events. Maybe the attorney had a long-distance hookup with the actor, too, and maybe his, Rakestraw’s, voice was being broadcast to Tiernan over a speaker in the attorney’s office. If they were in the same room together, Rakestraw could hear none of their conversation.

  Finally Macmillan said, “Mr. Tiernan has directed me to tell you he’ll be happy to meet you at a neutral location within your own state. Maybe in a nearby community, if that’s all right.”

  “Neutral location? Are he and I football franchises? Why can’t he come here? We’ve got plenty of room.”

  “Think about that one a sec. or so, Mr. Rakestraw. You just might be able to come up with an answer.”

  “My family,” Rakestraw said suddenly. ‘The effect on my family— Tiernan’s worried about that.”

  Macmillan didn’t reply.

  “I’ll make the preparations for his visit,” Rakestraw said.

  * * * *

  The owner of a theater complex in Ladysmith agreed to open one of his auditoriums at ten-thirty on a weekday morning so that Tiernan and Rakestraw could meet in a setting both private and apropos. Having these two people in his establishment, one of them an up-and-coming local boy, was incentive enough for the owner, but Tiernan had also consented to kick in an honorarium.

  Rakestraw was the first to arrive. When he entered the drapery-lined theater, he found that Phaedrus was unraveling silently against the high, canted screen. The owner, ensconced in the projection booth, was paying homage to Tiernan with a showing of the most acclaimed and probably most neglected motion picture of the actor’s career. Perhaps this homage encompassed Rakestraw as well, for the film—the first of Tiernan’s that Rakestraw had ever seen—bore strangely on the terrible change in his life.

  Even without the aid of the soundtrack Rakestraw could recall every word of Tiernan’s voice-over narration for the dream sequence now unfolding. Halted midway down the left-hand aisle of the theater, he allowed himself to repeat these words under his breath: “‘My hands sink into something soft. ... It writhes, and I tighten the grip, as one holds a serpent. And now, holding it tighter and tighter, we’ll get it into the light. Here it comes!’”

  Aloud, at the dream sequence’s climactic moment, Rakestraw cried, ‘“Now we’ll see its face!’”

  Whereupon he heard the real Craig Tiernan say quietly, from
the aisle opposite his, “ ‘A mind divided against itself . . . me. . . . I’m the evil figure in the shadows. I’m the loathsome one. . . .’”

  Rakestraw turned to face the double whom he no longer resembled. Craig Tiernan was dressed from head to foot in white; a fine gold chain circled his neck and glinted in the diffuse illumination thrown by the movie projector. He hardly seemed real.

  “That’s been your basic assumption from the beginning, hasn’t it? That I’m the loathsome one.”

  His heart thudding wetly, Rakestraw stared across a row of shadowy seats into a face he had often seen in his own bathroom mirror.

  “Here I am, then. Direct to you from Oregon via Southern California. And this little tête-à-tête is holding up the production of a thirty-million-dollar epic. I’m supposed to be in Nairobi. Or Cairo. What do you have to say to me, Rakestraw?”

  Rakestraw continued to stare.

  “This is petty and self-indulgent,” Tiernan said. “But the surgery’s reversible. It’s designed to be that way in case anything happens to the owner of the physiognomic rights in question. If you’ll return to your own home and agree to stay there without any further infringement on me or my work, I’m prepared to grant you co-ownership of those rights. Macmillan will take care of the details. We’ll even continue your emotional-hardship compensation.”

  “What happened to me is irreversible,” Rakestraw finally said.

  Tiernan took a step down the seat aisle toward Rakestraw. “You’ll be all right when you get your face back. Some people just don’t adjust very well to that sort of surgery. Even money doesn’t help much. You’re one of those people, I guess.”

  “I don’t want my face back.”

  Almost as if dumbstruck, Tiernan halted. On the movie screen, Rakestraw noted peripherally, a man and a boy on motorcycles were climbing toward a stunning mountain lake. Crater Lake, probably. The man on the motorcycle was Craig Tiernan.

  “What, then?” the actor himself said. “Is it more money?”

  Rakestraw didn’t respond.

  “I’ll up the payments if that’s really the problem. Lord knows, I’ve brought this on myself. Just don’t push me too far, Mr. Rakestraw. You’re treading dangerous ground with these publicity-seeking impersonations.”

  “But I’m not breaking any law.” Rakestraw was conscious of a shift of settings on the screen. Now Tiernan and another actor in a coat and tie were arguing mutely in a university classroom. Outdoors, indoors. The film was schizophrenic “And it isn’t money,” Rakestraw added distractedly. “Not entirely, anyway.”

  “Goddamn it, man!” Tiernan suddenly raged. “What am I doing here, then? Did you have me come all this way just to show yourself you could do it? Just to prove you could get me in the same building with you?”

  Rakestraw returned his eyes to the real Tiernan. “I thought you ought to see me,” he said. “And vice versa.”

  “Why?”

  “Listen, when Macmillan arrived to tell me I was violating your rights, we had nothing in common. Absolutely nothing, despite your long-distance concern about my face. Well, now that I no longer resemble you facially, we have a great deal in common. I find that I like that. If I took my old face back, people outside of Caracal wouldn’t know who I was. They’d think I was you, and I’m not. We’re more alike today than we were before you had me altered, and although there remains a difference that’s important, I’d just like to . . .”

  Tiernan, gripping the back of a theater seat, waited for him to conclude.

  “I’d just like to thank you for opening up my life.”

  * * * *

  That night, in bed, he rehearsed for Nora for the fourth or fifth time the details of his meeting with Tiernan. Moonlight came into their bedroom from a dormer window, and Gabe, across the hall, moaned and twisted audibly in his bedding. The nights were growing warmer.

  “It frightens me,” Nora said when he was finished.

  “It should,” Rakestraw said, stroking his wife’s hair. “It’s always a little frightening, a new life. You never know where it’s going.”

  “Where is it going, Tom?”

  Rakestraw lay back and stared at the ceiling. When he closed his eyes, he seemed to see the ganglia of his own feverish brain, like roads branching in a hundred different directions.

  “Nora,” he said, without opening his eyes, “I feel filled with power. It came on me slowly, opening up inside me after the surrender that took my face. It’s been like climbing out of a well into the light. I still don’t recognize myself, but what I see isn’t displeasing.”

  There was a small hitch in Nora’s otherwise regular breathing.

  Turning toward her, Rakestraw said, “What would you think about leaving Caracal? About selling the farm and going somewhere else?”

  “This is all I’ve ever wanted, Tom.”

  “It was all I ever wanted, too—until Macmillan showed up and I surrendered to him. But I’m different now, for good or for ill. Something that was pent up has been set free, and I don’t think it’s going to go willingly back to where it came from.”

  “I’d have to think about it,” Nora said evenly, turning her own eyes to the ceiling. “Where do you want us to go?”

  “That’s something I still have to think about, I guess.”

  Conversation failed. They lay side by side in the familiar bed, their hands touching, thinking toward tomorrow.

  <>

  * * * *

  A spaceman home from the stars, haunted by Something he’s seen ... is this just a cliche, or perhaps an archetype? Maybe there’s something out there that we fear to find, even as we search; maybe we’ve always suspected this.

  It needn’t be anything awful. In fact, perhaps quite the opposite. . . .

  * * * *

  A SOURCE OF INNOCENT MERRIMENT

  James Tiptree, Jr.

  His eyes did not bear the look of eagles, his skin was not bronzed by the light of alien suns. Like most astro-explorers, he was a small, sallow, ordinary figure, compact and flexible, now sliding inconspicuously to paunch. His face, from the distance he had been pointed out to me, seemed ordinary too: boyish and a trifle petulant. He was sitting alone. As I came toward him through the haze and spotlights of Hal’s place, he glanced up, and the very bright blue of his eyes was striking even in the murk.

  “May I join you for a moment?”

  He started to say no, and then looked me over. I’m not young and I never was Miss Galaxy, but I still have a companionable smile.

  He shrugged. “If you want.”

  I sat down puzzled and wary. Clearly this was no situation to mention my being with GalNews. After what I hoped was a relaxed silence, I told him I was a historian—which was also true.

  “I’m collecting data that will be lost forever unless somebody preserves it now. The scouts, the men and women who are the first humans to set eyes on an alien planet, sometimes have experiences so bizarre or improbable that they never get into the official records. They have no witnesses. If they report honestly, it’s put down to cabin fever or nitrogen poisoning. Mostly they don’t report. And then if some of it comes out later, it becomes barroom gossip, and the facts are soon lost in hype and garble. You know? . . . Some of the stories may be nonsense, but some of them have to be true, and very important. I feel deeply that someone should get it all down straight, while there’s still time. I’m trying.”

  He grunted; not hostile, but not forthcoming either.

  “Hal said you had quite a story.”

  Instead of answering, he shot a blue gleam of fury at Hal behind the bar.

  “I use no names, by the way; I protect identities every way I can. My records are under numbers, which refer to other numbers, and the master set is in my safe on Pallas. Also I can disguise all the nonessential detail you want . . . You did experience something extraordinary, didn’t you?”

  He really looked at me then, and I saw in the depths of the blue eyes a pain eating at him, a
loss barely to be endured.

  “Hal says you don’t take the first runs anymore, after . . . whatever happened.”

  “No. I stick with the follow-up teams, where it’s safe.”

  He had a good, patient voice, underlaid with obscure self-mockery. I saw he was drinking Hal’s blue doubles, but they hadn’t affected him yet. I knew he didn’t mean physically safe; the teams going in to set up bases on Earth-type planets have an unpleasant casualty rate.