Universe 14 - [Anthology] Read online

  “What is it?” they keep asking. “What troubles you?”

  “I want to know what year this is.”

  They confer. It may be that their numbering system is so different from ours that they are unable to tell me. But there must be a way: diagrams, analogies, astronomical patterns. I am not so primitive that I am beyond understanding such things.

  Finally they say, “Your question has no meaning for us.”

  “No meaning? You speak my language well enough. I need to know what year this is.”

  “Its name is Eiligorda,” one of them says.

  “Its name? Years don’t have names. Years have numbers. My year is numbered 1983. Are we so far in my future that you don’t remember the years with numbers?” I begin stripping away my clothing. “Here, look at me. This hair on my body—do you have hair like that ? These teeth—see, I have thirty-two of them, arranged in an arc.” I hold up my hands. “Nails on my fingers! Have fingernails evolved away?” I tap my belly. “In here, an appendix dangling from my gut! Prehistoric, useless, preposterous! How long ago did that disappear? Look at me! See the ape-man, and tell me how ancient I am!”

  “Our bodies are just like yours,” comes the quiet reply. “Except that we are healthier and stronger and resistant to disease. But we have hair. We have fingernails. We have the appendix.” They are naked before me, and I see that it is true. Their bodies are lean and supple, and there is a weird and disconcerting similarity of physique about them all, but they are not alien in any way; these could be twentieth-century bodies.

  “I want you to tell me,” I say, “how distant in time your world is from mine.”

  “Not very,” someone answers. “But we lack the precise terminology for describing the interval.”

  “Not very,” I say. “Listen, does the Earth still go around the sun?”

  “Of course.”

  “The time it takes to make one circuit—has that changed?”

  “Not at all.”

  “How many times, then, do you think the Earth has circled the sun since my era?”

  They exchange glances. They make quick rippling gestures—a kind of counting, perhaps. But they seem unable to complete the calculation. They murmur, they smile, they shrug. At last I understand their problem, which is not one of communication but one of tact. They do not want to tell me the truth for the same reason that I yearn to know it. The truth will hurt me. The truth will split me with anguish.

  They are people of the epoch that immediately succeeds yours and mine. They are, quite possibly, the great-greatgrandchildren of some who live in our world of 1983; or it may be that they are only grandchildren. The future they inhabit is not the extremely distant future. I am positive of that. But time stands still for them, for they do not know death.

  Fury and frenzy return to me. I shake with rage; I taste burning bile; I explode with hatred, and launch myself upon them, scratching, punching, kicking, biting, trying in a single outpouring of bitter resentment to destroy the entire sleek epoch into which I have fallen.

  I harm several of them quite seriously.

  Then they recover from their astonishment and subdue me, without great effort, dropping me easily with a few delicate musical tones and holding me captive against the ground. The casualties are taken away.

  One of my captors kneels beside me and says, “Why do you show such hostility?”

  I glare at him. “Because I am so close to being one of you.”

  “Ah. I think I can comprehend. But why do you blame us for that?”

  The only answer I can give him is more fury; I tug against my invisible bonds and lunge as if to slaughter him with sheer energy of rage; from me pours such a blaze of madness as to sear the air, and so intense is my emotion that it seems to me I am actually breaking free, and seizing him, and clawing at him, and smashing him. But I am only clutching at phantoms. My arms move like those of a windmill, and I lose my balance and topple and topple and topple, and when I regain my balance I am in my own bed once more, striped sheets, blue coverlet, the red eye of the digital clock telling me that it is 4:36 a.m. So they have punished me by casting me from their midst. I suppose that is no more than I deserve. But do they comprehend, do they really comprehend, my torment? Do they understand what it is like to know that those who will come just a little way after us will have learned how to live forever and to live in paradise, and that one of us, at least, has had a glimpse of it, but that we will all be dead when it comes to pass? Why should we not rage against the generations to come, aware that we are nearly the last ones who will know death? Why not scratch and bite and kick? An awful iron door is closing on us, and they are on the far side, safe. Surely they will begin to understand that, when they have given more thought to my visit. Possibly they understood it even while I was there. I suspect they did, finally. And that when they returned me to my own time I was given a gift of grace by those gilded futurians: that their mantle of immortality has been cast over me, that I will be allowed to live on and on until time has come round again and I am once more in their era, but now as one of them. That is their gift to me, and perhaps that is their curse on me as well, that I must survive through all the years of terrible darkness that must befall before that golden dawn, that I will tarry here until they come again.

  <>

  * * * *

  Because artificial satellites in space will be totally planned environments, specifically designed to support human life, it follows that some of these could be further refined for particular kinds of human life . . . such as the medically designed colony in the following story. People who can no longer live in the uncontrolled environment of Earth—people who would have died if they didn’t have this colony as a refuge—make new lives in orbit around Earth.

  But altered living conditions inevitably cause changes in people and society; and a new world whose physical environment is safe might be hostile to some people in other ways.

  Sharon N. Farber is currently serving her internship in St. Louis, Missouri. Her stories have appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and elsewhere.

  PASSING AS A FLOWER IN THE CITY OF THE DEAD

  SHARON N. FARBER

  Henri hated parties; he was striding through the cocktail crowd, his massive head down, shoulders back. Watching her husband, Madeline wanted to laugh. This was “the pacing lion of the landscape”? What would that sycophantic art critic call him if she could see him now, skeletal after months of untreated leukemia, bald as a newborn from total body irradiation?

  The stalking scarecrow, Madeline thought.

  She lost sight of her husband as he pushed through into the house. Madeline put down her drink; it was adding to the steady-state nausea she’d felt from the aseptic food and from the sight of the colony ceiling far overhead. Her universe was a cylinder in space, the overhead view one of land and houses, while Earth and stars hid under her feet. Perhaps 180 degrees away another woman stood in another party and watched Madeline spin by. A treeless, grassless vista painted pastel blue.

  “I’m Bob. How do you like Blues?” A man grinned at her. He had finely coiled gray hair, held a drink in each hand, and seemed more alive than anyone else at the party.

  “It takes getting used to . .

  “Of course,” he boomed, and Madeline noticed that his presence had cleared an even wider space. They were alone, haloed by emptiness like a colony of hemolytic streptococci on a blood agar plate.

  “We’re pariahs, you ‘n’ I,” he said, setting down one empty paper cup, draping that hand about her shoulder, and steering her effortlessly to the refreshments table. “Moses parting the Red Sea,” he whispered, and Madeline laughed as the crowd melted away about them. He picked up a decanter, nestled in an arrangement of silk flowers, and poured full a pottery mug.

  “Drink this. It’ll settle your stomach and curdle your brain,” he commanded. “The amnestic waters of the river Styx across which the dead must pass.” He looked about with exaggerated
movements, then whispered sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ve had a classical education.”

  “You aren’t afraid?” she asked.

  “Afraid of what? Parsing verbs?”

  She giggled. “No, of me. I’m a newcomer.” She ran one hand through her crew-cut-length hair. “Some bacterium may have snuck in with me.

  “I’m a very dangerous woman,” she added in her best villainess voice.

  Bob chortled. “Not too observant, are we? Look at me!”

  Studying him, she realized why he had seemed so different, so alive. Of all those standing in the crowded patio, he alone lacked the pallor of the bloodless. He held his hand beside hers, allowing her to compare his rosy pink hue, the blue veins like ropes, with her own clear veins in cadaver flesh.

  “None of that fluorocarbon-soup artificial blood for me,” he said. “I’m the last of the red-blooded men. At least on Blues.”

  Madeline nodded. “Your immune system is intact. You can laugh in the face of any pathogen.”

  “Right.” He grinned, downing his drink. “I’m going to feel awful in the morning—I’ve got all my blood. Red, white, blue, you name it.”

  Madeline contrasted him to the others, to herself. A pale, bloodless lot. An O’Neill colony inhabited by those with leukemia, with autoimmune disease, with transplanted organs. They had all stood on the banks of the Styx, only to be saved by the killing of their every blood cell—the treacherous cells that multiplied erratically, or attacked their own organs, or fought the transplants. And the innocent blood cells had died as well, the cells that carried oxygen, fought invading microbes, stopped hemorrhages.

  They were alive, locked in a hermetically sealed, sterile tin can rotating in space.

  The man intruded on her thoughts. “Yes, I’m that fiend incarnate, that villain of stage and screen, the Outsider.”

  “But why ...”

  “Was I invited? Giselle works in my department. Even she isn’t rude enough not to invite me. She just never thought I’d be rude enough to come.” His grin widened. “I’ve seen you in the hospital. You’re in the lab? Come see me. Respiratory.” He put down his cup and left, swiveling at the gate to face the crowd. “I’m leaving. You can talk about me now,” he yelled.

  “Obnoxious, isn’t he.” Giselle was at Madeline’s side, small and dainty, with brown hair to her waist. Hair was a status symbol on Blues. The longer the hair, the longer the head had been on Blues. The longer the survival from the terminal disease.

  “Loud, but amusing.”

  “You don’t have to work with him.”

  The elderly man beside Giselle snarled. “Earthies. They come in, work their stint, and leave, acting like they’re so damn superior.”

  He gazed suspiciously at Madeline as if, she thought, he were smelling pseudomonas. Or smelling anything. She was a woman without colonizing bacteria—her sweat, her breath, even her feces were almost odorless.

  He suspects, she thought, panicking. No, he could not suspect. She was as much the Outsider as Bob, but she had the protective discoloration of the bloodless.

  Giselle clapped her hands. “Everybody!”

  “Damn,” the man said. “Must you go through with this?”

  “Father, stop acting like it’s indecent.”

  “You just like to shock people. It must be your genetics. It certainly wasn’t your upbringing.” He stormed into the house.

  Giselle shrugged at Madeline. “Father’s a bit traditional . . . Everybody! May I have your attention—you too, you wastrel ...” The revelers paused in their various pursuits and looked to their hostess. Henri, studying the flower bed with its plastic nasturtiums, glowered at Madeline.

  “During the party, many of you have met our newcomers, Henri and Madeline. Madeline, it happens, is an actual relative of mine. A blood relative.”

  The audience chuckled, to Madeline’s bewilderment. Henri merely looked as if he were trapped in an ethnographic film.

  “She was my genetic mother’s second cousin on Earth. Let’s welcome these newcomers to Blues.”

  The audience clapped politely, all the while scrutinizing the strangers like laboratory specimens. Then they returned to their interrupted pastimes. A young man with a braided beard began to flirt with Giselle. Madeline moved away, finding herself before the girl’s adoptive father.

  “You don’t approve of me.”

  He answered vehemently. “You had some nerve calling, introducing yourself.”

  Madeline sighed. It’s true, she thought. Civilization diminishes proportionally to the distance from Paris. She decided to try again, smiling ingratiatingly.

  “Giselle seems to have grown into a beautiful young lady—she looks just like her mother. Before I emigrated, Giselle’s mother begged me to find her, to see what sort of woman she’d become—”

  “Her mother! The woman who bore her? What claim has she? Who spent six months in quarantine with her, risking their lives to care for her? We did. Who raised her, taught her? We did, Hilda and me. And the whole time we’re getting her through the traumas of growing up, especially growing up in this place—the whole time she keeps getting letters from that earthside bitch.”

  Forcing down her anger, she replied, “It’s not easy for those who stay behind either. Giselle’s parents—”

  “Hilda was her mother! I am her father!” He stopped, shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’re new, you don’t understand yet.

  “To come to Blues is to die and be reborn. You get some awful disease—myeloma. You?”

  She paused a moment. “Lupus.”

  “You say good-bye to your family, write your will, dispose of all your belongings. You’re shot into space, to the quarantine station. Six months alone in tiny rooms, while radiation and chemicals kill every blood cell, every germ in your body. Then, when you’re positively bug free—because without our immune systems the common cold could wipe out the colony—when you’re safe, you enter Blues. Hairless, like a baby. Reincarnated into a new world.”

  He grabbed her left hand, holding it up. “You wore a ring for many years. Where is your husband now?”

  She barely choked back her answer.

  He nodded. “He stayed on Earth. Do you still write him? Don’t. You can never return to Earth. Let go of the past. ‘Until death do us part.’ Blues is a city of the dead.”

  Madeline asked hesitantly, “And if my husband had come with me?”

  “Come with you?” His face would have flushed livid, had he had any blood. “Fidoes. Faithful spouses following their loved ones into hell. Virtuous little toads. Don’t let me near one. I’d show him a bit of hell.”

  “I don’t understand. How can you hate someone so full of love for her husband—or wife—that she—they’d follow them here?”

  He snarled and stalked away.

  Giselle came up and put a hand on Madeline’s shoulder. Her other hand was resting loosely on Henri’s forearm. “God—what’s Father yelling about this time?”

  “Fidoes.”

  “Them again? Well, of course we all hate Fidoes.”

  “Why.” Henri always stated his questions.

  “Because they remind us of what we’ve lost. We’re under life sentences, unable to see Earth or relatives. (Not that I, personally, have any memories of either.) But we’re all unified in that respect. Then Fidoes come, like it’s a big joke, play the self-righteous martyr for a few years, then return to Earth. Father says the only way to survive here is to sever all ties with your past.”

  Madeline said, “And that’s why you don’t write your mother?”

  Giselle rolled her eyes at the mere thought.

  “Don’t judge. Annette is a lovely woman,” Henri said.

  Giselle pulled her hand away, regarding him with narrowed eyes. “How do you know? I thought you two met in quarantine.”

  Madeline said hastily, “We knew each other before, in art school.” She felt her entire past slipping away, negated by words that blithely tossed out me
mories of marriage, career, friends, love— Anything to avoid the truth. She was a Fido.

  “Henri and I, meeting again. It was quite a coincidence.”

  “Quite,” Giselle agreed.

  Henri slept with the corner of his mouth twitching, making an occasional soft moan. Madeline lay propped up on one arm. Despite the months, he still seemed alien to her, her now bald and thin husband merging in her mind’s eye with her grandfather. Even the venous catheter high on Henri’s chest, closed except during the bimonthly infusion of artificial blood, reminded her of Grandpere’s central-line venous access when his peripheral veins could no longer sustain an intravenous line.

  Her grandfather had been only fifty-six when they diagnosed lymphoma, and he’d refused the standard treatment.