Universe 8 - [Anthology] Read online

  And what else? Well, the Phoenix had given her a still camera, and for the first time in ten or fifteen years she had begun taking pictures again. The camera was an old but still beautifully operable Double-utility Polaroid, and the first project Zoe undertook was the capturing in stark black and white of the faces of her new family. Posed photographs, candid ones, miniatures, darkroom enlargements: group portraits, singles, double-exposure collages, meditative semiabstracts. The best of these went up in the rec center. The Wall of the Phoenix, this gallery became, and it was framed on both sides by bright, quilted wall banners.

  Paul and Toodles both grew quite vain about certain of these portraits and occasionally got caught staring at their favorites: teen-agers ogling themselves in a mirror. Vanity, vanity, saith somebody or other, Zoe remembered. But Helen never donned her little binoculars to look at her own photographed image, even though she had more justification than either Paul or Toodles. One day Zoe asked her why. “I haven’t looked at my own face since I was thirty,” she said, “because I am quite content with the self-deluding vision of my thirty-year-old one that still resides up here.” She tapped her head. Then she showed Zoe an old photograph of herself, one that glinted in the common room’s fluorescents and revealed a woman of disgusting, not-to-be-gainsaid beauty. “I can feel what I look like now,” Helen said. “I don’t have to look.” Even so, Zoe’s portraits of Helen did her no disservice; in fact, they launched a thousand tiresome accolades from the men, Paul in particular—when, that is, he wasn’t mesmerized by his own amber-eyed, celluloidally distanced self. Well, why not? Zoe’s pitchurs were damn good, if she did say so herself, just by way of echoing the others.

  The month Spring was coming on. What else could she recall about Winter in the hostel? Visits by Melanie and Sanders. The prospect of a grandchild. This last excited her, tickled her like air on her naked body, and for it alone did she anticipate the biweekly drop-ins of her daughter and son-in-law. No, that wasn’t true. Lannie she always had a hankering to see, whether a baby was growing in her womb or not. Her daughter Lannie was, her own flesh and that of dead Rabon: her daughter. Only fatuous Sanders did she have difficulty tolerating, and he had never once called her anything as brutal as a mummified witch, not ever in his life. So what did you do?

  Zoe, for her part, never visited them in their Level 3 cubicle, and when they came to see her, thereby perfunctorily carry out their filial duty, she always greeted them in the quadrangle where they had first put her on the block. That made Sanders uncomfortable: he scuffed his street slippers in the gravel and craned his neck around as if looking for the one mean old codger in the hostel who would use his balcony advantage to shoot him, Paul, with a blowgun or pellet rifle. Minor sport for Zoe, watching her son-in-law sidelong as she asked Melanie how she felt—if the morning sickness had gone away yet (“There are pills for that, Mother!”)—what sex the Jastov-Hunter test had said the child would be—other things that Lannie was at last willing to talk about.

  But she never used her freedom to visit them on Level 3, and they never extended her such an invitation. No, sir. Not once.

  Zoe tilted her head back and saw that the girder-car she had been following was nowhere in sight. My sweet lord, hadn’t she been up on the Tower roof a long time? And hadn’t the time flown by? They were reaching a decision on her, the Phoenix were. That was it.

  Was the outcome in doubt? Would Mr. Leland send her into another incomplete septigamoklan (if one existed) because of a single person’s snide, blackballing veto? As Mr. Leland had explained it, they could easily do that, blackball her. How would she feel if they did? As far as that went, did she herself want to marry with the Phoenix, to join with them in a new covenant?

  Well, the answer to that was an easy one. The answer was yes; yes, she wanted to marry with Luther, Parthena, Toodles, Paul, Helen, and Jerry. And her reason for wanting to was a simple one, too: she was in love.

  * * * *

  9 spending the afternoon with luther

  On her first Sunday among the Phoenix, Toodles told Zoe that although it was her, Toodles’, turn to spend the afternoon with Luther, she would be happy to yield to Zoe. “I don’t feel all that good,” she explained, “and, besides, it’s the only really hospitable way for me to behave, don’t you think?” Propped up in bed, Yuichan’s awful Fujiyama robe bundled about her shoulders, Toodles was eating a breakfast roll that a cartlike servo-mechanism had wheeled into the common room from the galley. A hairline smear of artificial-peach jelly rode Toodles’ upper lip like a candied mustache, and Zoe wanted to take a tissue and daub it away.

  “If you don’t feel well, should you be eating jelly rolls?”

  Toodles winked. “You know the ole saying: jelly rolls is medicine. But I’m having mine this morning and don’t need a dose this afternoon.”

  “Does ‘spend the afternoon’ mean what the young drakes and duckies call ‘bodyburning’?” Why was she asking? She already knew the answer. Parthena and Helen were off to an Ortho-Urban service somewhere on West Peachtree, Paul was asleep across the room from them, and Jerry and Luther had both got up early and gone down the hall toward the rec center. Zoe had declined an invitation to attend services with Parthena and Helen. Now she wished she were with them.

  “You ain’t slow, Zoe,” Toodles said. “I’da been blunter, but it embarrasses Errol.”

  “Errol?”

  Flipping up the bed linen and extending a heavy leg, Toodles put one bunion-afflicted foot on the tray of the servo-cart. “Errol,” she reiterated. The cart hummed and backed up, but Toodles got her leg off the tray in time to avoid a nasty spill. A doughnut did drop to the floor, though. “Temperamental, Errol is. . . . You’re not thinking of saving yourself for after the covenant ceremony, are you?”

  “Well, if I am, I been saving myself so long that my interest’s now a whole lot greater than my principles.” That was the punch line of a joke Rabon used to tell. It didn’t suit Zoe’s mood, which was cautious and a bit skeptical, but it perfectly suited Toodles’—she was delighted. I always play to my audience, Zoe thought; can’t seem to help it. Aloud, attempting to recover, “I never was one to kiss on the first date, Toodles; just not the sort.”

  “Oh, I always said that, too. Anyhow, you’ve already slept in the same room with the Phoenix, you know. It’s not like you’d be sacking out with some bulgy-britches thugboy.” And at last she wiped the peach-jelly mustache off her upper lip. “Please say yes. Luther’s liable to be hurt.” And with her little, gold remote-con box Toodles beckoned Errol (who, Zoe noted with some annoyance, was something of a whiner) closer to the bed so that she could pick up another breakfast pastry.

  “OK,” Zoe answered, almost as if it were someone else: not her.

  So that afternoon she and Luther walked through the pedestrian courts outside the Geriatrics Hostel and stopped to eat lunch at a little restaurant that seemed to be made entirely of plate glass; it was nestled under the stone eaves of a much taller building, though, and had green, reed-woven window shades to keep out the glare of the dome’s day lamps. Atmosphere, Rabon would have said the shades gave the place.

  They sat in a simulated-leather booth with potted ferns on both sides of them to cut off their view to the front door and drank scotch and water while waiting for the steward to bring them their meal. A Sunday drink. Well, that was something the Retrenchment Edicts hadn’t outlawed. You could get one right after your favorite Ortho-Urban services, which was what half the people in this place, it looked like, were doing. The other half were sharing table hookahs and letting the thin smoke coil away from them through the decorative ferns.

  “Good food,” Luther said. “They do know how to throw together good food here.” He was a little nervous, Zoe could see. He kept putting his malletlike hands on the table, dropping them to his lap, taking a sip of his drink, then sticking those heavy purplish hands back on the table. “You ain’t disturbed that Toodles pushed you into this, are you now?” he said, his br
ow comically corrugating.

  “Luther, my daughter and son-in-law pushed me into this, not Toodles. And they don’t even know when they’re doing me a favor.”

  That loosened him, more than the scotch even. He asked her questions about her family, he told her about himself. Their meal came—a vegetable dinner featuring hydroponically grown snapbeans, zucchini, tomatoes (stewed), and some sort of hybrid greens—and Luther, between bites, kept on talking. A warm rumble.

  “I was born the same year Dr. King was assassinated,” he said at one point. “That’s how I got my name. The shame of it is, I lived to see that sort of business over and over before the cities went undercover—and then after the doming, too. I wasn’t quite six when I saw a young man shoot Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr., and several other people right in the old man’s own church. My church, too. Then. More died after the dome was up. That young Bitler he was the last one, and it’s been eleven years since we’ve had to walk our hungry-children miles to some good man’s grave.

  “You know, I was so sick I almost shot myself that year, I almost took a razor to my wrists. Back when you could breathe, when you could look up and see a sun or a moon, some men used to be born in the year a comet come through and wait their whole lives till it come back again so that they could die. That year, I was so down I knew it had been written that Luther Battle was supposed to come in and go out with another man’s assassination.

  “But I was in my thirty-second year with McAlpine Company in ‘29, and we had a lot of work that year. Bitler had done made a lot of people angry, he had got a lot of ole dead asses movin’. After he was shot, there was all kind of uproar to tear down the surfaceside slums and stick up some kind of halfway decent housing on top of the streets instead of under ‘em. I was on McAlpine’s demolition crews, not the construction ones. Sixty years old and I was workin’ off my anger and grief by wreckin’ ole tenements; it was the only way they let us make anything of our own. I bossed the demolition of fifteen buildings that year, workin’ it all out so that walls come down clean and the guts got hauled off neat. Cranes, cats, tractors, trucks, all of ‘em doin’ this and doin’ that ‘cause of how I told ‘em to go. Only thing that kep’ me sane, Zoe: tearin’ down another century’s toilets and doin’ it with that century’s equipment. Then the uproar quieted off, the work contracts run out, and the Urban Council didn’t do nothin’ to start ‘em up again. We still got some damn ghettos in Atlanta, no matter what the ward reps say. Bondville, one of the worst. Parthena’s boy and her gran’chillun still live there. . . . But that bad year was over, and I had survived it, Zoe.

  “Retired, then. Lived alone on 7, under, just like I had all the years I was with McAlpine. The company had been my family since all the way back to ‘97. My mama and daddy was lucky: they died before they had to see a dome go up over their heads. Me, I wasn’t lucky: I had to sign on with McAlpine and help build that damn thing up there.”

  “You helped build the dome?” Zoe said. She’d never met anyone who had, not anybody who’d admit to it at least.

  “I did. They were twelve different outfits, different companies, workin’ to do it, everybody goin’ from blueprints they had run off a computer somewhere up East or maybe in California. We were a year behind New York and Los Angeles, McAlpine told us, and we had to catch up. He was still sayin’ this in ‘97, the year I come on, three after the Dome Projec’ started; and no one ever asked why the hell we had to catch up with this foolishness that New York and L.A. was pursuin’. Most of us hadn’t had any kinds of jobs at all before the projec’, so we shut up and did what all of a sudden the city was givin’ us money to do. Yessir, Zoe. We started in a-buildin’ a pyramid, a great ole tomb to seal ourselves into and never come out of again. Slaves in Egypt might have to work twenty years to build a House of the Dead for Pharaoh, but they didn’t have to lie down in it themselves. We was more advanced. We done ours in ten and managed it so we could put the lid on ourselves from the inside. No Moses anywhere to say, ‘Hey! wait a minute, you don’t want to live in this place forever!’ But we were pullin’ down some decent cash, even if they was UrNu dollars, and didn’t think there’d ever be a day you couldn’t see at least a little square of sky somewhere, at least enough blue to make denim for a workingman’s britches. It was an adventure. Nobody thought he was just another one of Pharaoh’s slavin’ niggers. I didn’t, anyhow. Even when I first come on with McAlpine, I felt like I was the chief mucketymuck myself.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, we had to go up to the sections of the dome’s gridwork that we’d completed, and we always went up in girder-cars, just like the ones you see comb-crawlin’ along after dark with their torches alight. You worked on platforms or from harnesses on the girder-car, and you was always right out there over the whole damn state, you could see everything—even when the wind was streamin’ by you like it wanted to shake all your hard labor into rubble and scrap. Stone Mountain. All kinds of lakes. The mountains up by Gainesville.

  “And kudzu, Zoe, kudzu like you’ve never seen or can even remember. That ole madman vine ran itself over everything, telephone poles and broken-down barns and even some of them cheapjack townhouses and condo-minny-ums they hammered up all las’ century. The whole world was green, dyin’ maybe ‘cause of that kudzu but so green it made your eyes ache. And up there above the whole world Luther Battle felt like Kheops himself, or King Tut, or whichever one of them mean bastards built the bigges’ tomb. And I never did say, ‘Hoooi! Luther, why are we doin’ this?’ “

  After their meal, Zoe and Luther went back to the hostel and rode the Tower lift-tube up to the fourth floor. Although she hadn’t let him do it in the pedestrian courts on the walk home, in the lift-tube she gave him her hand to hold. Ten years after retiring from the McAlpine Company, he still had calluses on his palms, or the scars of old calluses. In the lift-tube he didn’t talk. He was embarrassed again, as if his talking at lunch had been a spiritual bleeding which had left him weak and uncertain of his ground. Well, she was embarrassed too. Only Luther had an advantage: a blush on him wasn’t so all-fired conspicuous as it was on her.

  In the common room, which was unoccupied by group design and agreement, Luther took her to his bed and made the automatic room dividers roll into place. Body-burning, the young people called it now. That’s what it was for her, too, though not in the way the term was supposed to suggest and not because Luther was a snorting dragon in the act. No, it had been a long time. Rabon was the last, of course, and this ready compliance to the rule of the Phoenix surprised her a little. For years she had been (what was Melanie’s amusing vulgarity?) mummifying, and you couldn’t expect to throw off the cerements, vaporize the balms and preservatives, and come back from your ages-long limbo in one afternoon.

  So that afternoon Zoe experienced only the dull excitement of pain; that, and Luther’s solicitude. But each Sunday—the next one with Paul, the one after with Luther, the following one with Paul, and so on, depending on inclination and a very loose schedule—it got better. Since she had never really been dead, it didn’t take so long as might the hypothetical, attempted resurrection of a Pharaoh. Not anywhere near so long as that. For she was Zoe, Zoe Breedlove, and she no longer remembered her maiden name.

  * * * *

  10 jerry at his tricks

  What did Jerry do in that mysterious alcove between the rec center and the dining room? Zoe wondered because whenever Jerry had a moment of free time—after dinner, before bed, Sunday morning—his wheel chair, humming subsonically, circled about and went rolling off to that little room. And Jerry would be gone for fifteen minutes, or thirty, of maybe an hour, whatever he could spare. What provoked her curiosity was the midnight vision of his puffball hairdo and his sad hollow eyes floating out of the corridor’s brightness and into the darkened common room after one of these recurrent disappearances.

  On the Sunday night (more properly, the Monday morning) after her conversations, both social and carnal, with Luther,
Zoe had this vision again and heard the crippled man unmindfully whistling to himself as he returned from that room: “Zippity-Doo-Dah,” it sounded like. And up to his unmade bed Jerry rolled.

  Jerry rolls in at night, Zoe thought, and jelly rolls in the afternoon. A muddled, word-fuzzy head she had. It all had something to do with Toodles. And Helen, Parthena, and Luther. Only Paul left out, to date anyway. But these members of the Phoenix were all sleeping.

  Sitting up and lowering her feet to the floor she said, “Jerry?”

  “Who is it?” She couldn’t see his eyes any more, but the macrocephalic helmet of his silhouette turned toward her, dubiously. “Is it Zoe?”

  “Yep,” she said. “It’s me. Can’t sleep.” She pulled on her dressing gown (Sanders had brought most of her things to the hostel on Saturday afternoon, but had not come up to see her) and walked barefooted on the cold floor over to Jerry’s territory.

  The Phoenix could certainly saw wood. No danger of these buzz saws waking up; it was enough to make you wish for impaired hearing. Except that each one of the sounds was different, and interesting: an orchestra of snorers. There, a tin whistle. There, a snoogle-horn. Over there, a tubaphone. That one, a pair of castanets. And . ..

  Jerry grinned quizzically at her and scratched his nose with one finger. “Can’t sleep, heh? Would you like to go to the galley for a drink? Maybe some wine. Wine’s pretty good for insomnia.”