Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  It took me a moment to realize I’d made the shift, because as far as the quality of their minds went, there wasn’t too much difference—I’d never realized before how much of a cat Louella is. I spread my claws and clutched them tight on Isherwood Foster’s forearm; the poor dear was as rigid as a tight girdle, but that didn’t seem to bother me. “Isn’t this exciting, darling?” I purred into his ear. And all the while I was tautly aware of the deep masculine musk of him, and of the delectable way his stiff rough whiskers prickled me as I rubbed my cheek against his. I flexed my muscles, and part of me didn’t like what was on my mind—the me part of me, I mean; after all, I was male once, and I never went in for perversions. But the Louella part of me was positively aglow with excitement and brimming with a caldron of plans for poor Ishy that fell a long way short of what I would consider Creative Marriage Management. “I’m frightened, darling,” I whispered, lying through my false teeth. “Hold me close; I’m scared what might happen next” And Isherwood Foster held me close, in a land of death grip. I raked my claws down his forearm. “Oh, darling,” I said, “you’re so strong!”

  And then, thank God, I was free of Louella and exploding outward. For a moment I was coextensive with the whole of Rafferty’s, my consciousness multifaceted as if I had myriad eyes, like an insect Rafferty, I could see, was breasting the Storm, with Moira at his side; and the two whiz kids, Fischer and Spassky, were completely oblivious to it, immersed in their game. Byron Wilcox had been seized with what he saw fit to term inspiration, and was scribbling down a poem on the napkin that had come with his last drink. The others were more overtly affected. Soleful Susie had collapsed into the arms of old John Edgar Harding, who was stroking her hair and whispering to her something about the Fallacy of the Interminable Asymptote. Louella van Doren and Isherwood Foster . . . well, I already told you something of what was happening there, and I won’t go into any further details in case they might embarrass you. The Fat Man in his booth was quivering and twitching like a stuck pig, totally unable to cope with the force of the primal scream that was rising from the thin man trapped inside him. The outlines of the bar and the booths were all blurred, and dancing like a swarm of mayflies above a pond. And through the midst of it all stalked James Clerk Maxwell, his fur bristling, wailing like a banshee for all the loves he had lost and was currently engaged in seeking out again.

  There was more, of course, but there’s a limit to how much the human mind can assimilate in a single instant—even a deontologized human mind like mine. And I was fast approaching that limit. So with a determined spasm that spread spiraling outward to all the semidissociated parts of me, I pulled myself together. For a moment I found myself concentrated behind the bar, down near Moira’s feet I kind of huddled there, drinking solace and security from the sweet female presence of her. It really does mean something to be the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter; it gives one a kind of radiant selfhood that communicates itself like comfort to all those around one. I suppose I’m more or less in love with Moira because of that radiance of hers; I think everybody who’s ever met her is, a little, except maybe for The Fat Man. If I was still human I might try to make something of it—I used to have sufficient gall. But then, of course, there’s Rafferty, who’s not the sort to stand for any nonsense. And anyway, I’m no longer human, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, so there’s no point mooning over that particular impossibility.

  So anyway, there I was, bunched up and feeling all bittersweet sad and almost sorry for myself—about not being Rafferty, I mean, so I could have Moira for my very own—and then another wave of anomalies hit me, and all at once I was scattered every which way once again. I scrabbled to collect myself, and all of a sudden found myself half-materialized amongst the bottles behind the bar; but I caught myself in time to keep from knocking them down from the shelf, and managed to waver into somewhat indistinct materiality on top of the bar, directly in front of John Edgar Harding and Soleful Susie.

  Susie let out a kind of half-shriek and shrank back, but John Edgar just looked unperturbedly up at me and said: “Well, my good man, you’re here in the flesh, I see.”

  “More or less,” I said, panting. “I’ll have to be going soon.”

  “When we must go, we must go,” said John Edgar sagely. “That is the way of the world; but we might as well make the best use of the little time available to us. Let me see, now—the last time we met face to face we were conversing about Barnabas Tobin, were we not?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Perhaps we could continue with that conversation,” said John Edgar, “for the duration of this brief span that has been vouchsafed to us. The subject is one of professional interest to me, as you doubtless are cognizant.”

  “I am,” I said. But perhaps at this point I should stop a moment and explain that, back in my corporeal existence, I, Quintus MacDonald, was Barnabas Tobin’s leading financial backer. That’s what got me into the spot I’m in now; and it’s also why I’m such an authority on the Exopsychic Deontologizer and its untoward effects.

  “Well,” I said to John Edgar, “after the Duly Constituted Authorities cracked down, old Barnabas went kind of off his head, as I’m sure you remember.”

  “I remember it well,” said John Edgar, nodding.

  “He was convinced people were plotting against him,” I said. “Behind his back, as he put it. Which wasn’t true; they were being quite open about it, actually. But it didn’t make any difference; it just made him feel all the more certain that universal deontologization was the only solution to all the world’s problems. So he came to me and begged my support to help him continue his experiments in secret” I shook my head wryly. “And I was fool enough to agree.”

  “Foolish indeed,” said John Edgar. “I would have expected that a person of your acumen would have learned his lesson by that point.”

  “Well, I hadn’t,” I said, put on the defensive. “I was merely the twelfth richest man in the world, remember; I’d never developed a head for anything more recondite than making money. And I’ve got to confess that the idea of deontologization still appealed to me. So it went against the cosmic grain-so what? I was always a contrary-minded sort; it was contrariness that got me where I was then, Lord help me.”

  “And He did, did He not?” said John Edgar. “He finally demonstrated to you the error of your ways, which was all you ever had any right to ask of Him. But continue, please.”

  “I’m trying to,” I said—a trifle impatiently, because I could already feel the prickling sensation that indicated I was on the edge of dematerializing again. “So anyway, to cut it short, we built another Exopsychic Deontologizer—in secret, of course. It was a small model, distinctly underpowered—it ran on two Eveready dry cells, as I remember—but Barnabas got old Ludwig Kleinsdorfer to check over his calculations, and they both agreed that it would be just barely strong enough to turn the cosmic tide.”

  “Fascinating,” said John Edgar. “Absolutely fascinating. I had never realized that Kleinsdorfer himself was involved . . .” He broke off, perhaps because I was frowning impatiently at him. “But continue.”

  “So I was there in person,” I said, “when Barnabas turned it on. As his backer I’d insisted—the more fool I. It might’ve worked, too, if we hadn’t both of us been overenthusiastic. I insisted that he try it at the top setting—Kleinsdorfer had warned us against that, but we both of us forgot it in the heat of the moment. That was what saved the world, I guess—our overenthusiasm—because the photon tube blew as soon as he threw the switch. So Barnabas and I were the only persons caught in the field during the one brief moment it existed; and of course we were deontologized immediately, and shot straight off to opposite statistical poles, Barnabas off in the Andromeda Galaxy somewhere, and me ...” I shrugged. “Well, here I am.” I was going to say more, but with my shrug a shudder passed through me, and I felt myself starting to disintegrate. I had just time to shout: “Gotta go—”bye fo
r now”—and then I was dematerialized once again, spreading in a wave front that pulsed briefly outward to take in the whole of Rafferty’s, the whole continent, the whole world, the whole cosmos.

  Infinitely attenuated, I was aware of John Edgar saying: “Farewell, my friend; we must resume our conversation on some more propitious occasion.” Simultaneously, I was aware of myriad statistical anomalies taking place throughout the cosmos: a mass outbreak of the screaming meemies in a department store in Newark, New Jersey; a convocation of several hundred laughing hyenas around a half-dry waterhole in Central Africa; a whole rookery of penguins dancing the barcarole in the Falkland Islands; a sudden subsidence of the outermost fringes of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot; an indescribably vivid auroral display above the northern hemisphere of the variform planet, Organon; thirty million Casseflavian jub-jubs all sporulating at the identical instant on a world somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud; further out yet, in an uncharted galaxy well beyond the range of Earth’s most powerful telescopes, ten thousand synchronized supernovae spelling out the Velantian ideogram for Mystic Happiness—and countless more, enough so that I could fill a dozen books simply listing them all. Then, with a swirl, I contracted again, and found myself back in Rafferty’s.

  This time I had locked into the consciousness of Byron Wilcox. He had just completed his poem, and was sitting gazing bemusedly down at it. Along with him I read it over once again:

  It happened one frosty look of trees

  waving gracefully against the wall:

  the cat, the king and I there found surcease

  in conscience bound to weary seneschal.

  I forget whether he went on and on,

  yet go he did; and in the morning spoke

  briefly of love and pity—there were none

  who mourned for him, and few cared where he woke.

  He said her head shook vertically aligned

  in sequences he could not comprehend,

  but joy it was to kneel here unconfined

  and flex his wings and call his God his friend.

  Eve loved intensely all men who must die,

  and bowed her hands and closed one weeping eye.

  Well, I thought, it rhymes and scans, so it isn’t exactly Neo-Dadaist. But I liked it anyway, in spite of the fact that it almost made sense. Briefly I contemplated submitting it to The New Yorker, who had been begging for a new Byron Wilcox poem recently; but then I decided against it. Uris was the kind of verse that could ruin my carefully maintained reputation as the nation’s foremost Neo-Dadaist. The critics would unanimously accuse me of deserting The Cause—and they might well be right, at that. Rhyme, meter, and sense—those were the three things that I, Byron Wilcox, had sworn to stand foursquare against. Reluctantly I scrumpled up the napkin on which the poem was written and dropped it onto the floor, where I ground it determinedly beneath my feet.

  The other part of me—the me part—was trying to calculate the stupendous improbability of Byron Wilcox’s ever coming up with a poem that even verged on comprehensibility. But there was no way of figuring the odds against it, so presently I gave up.

  And then I was free of Byron Wilcox, and temporarily pretty much in control of myself. The eye of the storm must have just reached us, I figured, so that there was a brief lull going on. I decided to drop over to the whiz kids’ booth and see how their game was developing.

  It was as I’d expected: Fischer had made the right counter-move to Spassky’s shift of the queen a dozen or so turns back, and now the game was developing into a very interesting contest that represented a situation which could rise only once in a trillion games between even the most masterly players. Every conceivable move had an indefinite number of potentially interesting game situations branching out from it, and there was no way of telling which player had the advantage. Gremlins apart, I suspected it would lead ultimately to a stalemate; but there was no way to know for sure.

  I expanded my consciousness outward, to take in the general situation. For the time being, it seemed, everything had settled down: Rafferty and Moira were ensconced firmly behind the bar, Byron Wilcox was at work on another poem, Soleful Susie had detached herself from John Edgar Harding and got out her compact and was engaged in fixing up her tear-streaked face, Louella van Doren was gently stroking the arm of the still-rigid Isherwood Foster and whispering sweet nothings into his flushing ear, James Clerk Maxwell had given up on his love quest and returned to his booth and was curled up there licking himself, and The Fat Man was collapsed across his table and muttering obscurely to himself something about “Gimpy” and how he should have listened to him while he still had the chance. Even the gremlins were resting, for the moment; but I knew that wouldn’t keep up for long.

  It didn’t. Pretty soon one of them swooped over in the direction of The Fat Man, and the others followed—there must have been a dozen of them or more. They amused themselves by resuming their torment of him. Suddenly he sat back with a yelp and all his buttons popped off, to clatter down on the table in front of him in the shape of a neat exclamation mark. His jacket and shirt bulged open, to reveal a hairless pink expanse of flabby chest underneath. He grabbed at it and started scratching himself furiously, as if he’d just contracted the hives.

  Then all the bottles behind the bar started dancing again— this time to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda.” The second installment of the Storm was upon us.

  I felt everything waver and go hazy, as it had before. Then, before it even had a chance to clarify, a wave picked me up from behind and hurled me straight into the consciousness of Soleful Susie. All at once I found myself decidedly down in the dumps about some bastard named Sam, who’d cut out three years ago and left me in the lurch. I hated Sam; and at the same time, in that particular moment, I couldn’t help loving him, because marching across my mind, arm-in-arm with myriad smiling avatars of me, were all the Sams-that-might-have-been, kind, generous, and above all lovingly warm. I realized that I wanted from the bottom of my heart to have Sam back, and to forgive him for everything he had ever done to me. But at the same time I didn’t want to feel this way, because I knew damn well that the real-life Sam was an unmitigated bastard—and if I needed proof of that, all I had to do was remember all the filthy things he’d done to me before he finally turned tail and ran out. Thinking of Sam brought tears to my eyes, and I reached up and tried to blot them away before they ran and spoiled my makeup. And then old John Edgar Harding was alongside me, and he put his arm around my shoulders and said: “There, there, my dear girl, there’s no need to cry; just remember what Plotinus said . . .” And I couldn’t care less about Plotinus, whoever in the hell he was; but at the same time I was grateful to the old man for at least trying to comfort me—and above all for calling me a “girl,” because I knew damn well that I was getting close to the wrong side of forty.

  And meanwhile I—the Quintus MacDonald I—was feeling very embarrassed about all this, because I liked Susie and felt somewhat guilty about this forceful sharing of those innermost secrets she never shared with anybody. I struggled to extricate myself before my embarrassment got worse, and finally I succeeded. I flew out of Susie’s mind like a cork from a champagne bottle—and fetched up, of course, exactly where I’d least wanted to go, back in the consciousness of The Fat Man.

  It was just as slimy as ever, if not more so—like half-coagulated grease in a frying pan. Sinking into it, I could feel the thin man inside screaming at me to let go of him, and I knew a kind of vicious joy in holding him squeezed off. I hated him: he was a pretty decent sort, really, and I hated anything right and decent on principle, because that kind of thing was always standing in my way.

  All this was just the general tone of me—by which I mean The Fat Man, from whom I wish to dissociate myself just as far as I possibly can. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible, not at that moment. Like it or not, I was The Fat Man, and that meant I was one of the medium-big wheels in something I’m going to call The Syndicate—you know what I
mean, and you also know that if you dig too deeply into the subject it’s not likely to be good for you. Just look at what happened to Francis Ford O’Donnell and Efirem Z. Weaver . . . but I’m digressing again, aren’t I? That’s because this particular part of the story is one I don’t feel too happy telling; I’d rather not remember it at all. Being inside The Fat Man isn’t the kind of thing you want to write home about: I felt like I was going to be swallowed up in slime at any moment.

  But anyway, there I was; and right now I was lost in a land of gibbering terror, shot through with flashes of memory of a talk I’d had this afternoon with a little squirt called Gimpy. Gimpy, I gathered, had warned me against coming to this place, and like a fool I hadn’t paid him any heed. It’s haunted, he’d told me; and I’d sat there quivering with laughter at him because he was superstitious enough to believe in ghosts. I didn’t believe in them myself, you see; I was an incorrigible skeptic about anything I couldn’t buy or latch onto by my own nefarious means. And this Rafferty’s joint was in a good location—I was mad as hell at Gimpy and my stooges for never even mentioning it before—because if we set up a connection there we could use it to move in on the lucrative trade in grimoires and such with the students at the North American Institute of Parapsychic Technology, who must be ripe for the picking if they were fool enough to fall for the crap peddled in a nuthouse like that. I saw money in it, big money, if it could be handled right Just get an in with the owner, and pretty soon I’d have him eating out of the palm of my hand—I knew all the tricks; I could do it in my sleep if need be. And here was this meek little milksop of a Gimpy, and he had the nerve to argue with me and say it wasn’t worth it, not if it meant going inside that Rafferty’s joint again; and I sat there laughing and told him that if he was that yellow he didn’t have to come with me, I was smart enough to look after myself and I’d like to see the ghost that was smart enough to hold me back from what promised to be a pretty hot deal.