“Listen,” she said, putting an edge on her voice to make it cut through the roar coming from overhead, “I’ve got a proposition for you, now that you know the truth.” She leaned close to him. “Let’s stay together, you and me. Despite all the problems. I like you, Nick.”
He peered at her, utterly astounded.
“I really think we can work something out,” she went on. Another horde of winged things shot by just above them, making raspy tearing sounds as they flailed the air, and a new gush of color stained the sky. “Seriously, Nick. We can stay in Spook City if you want to, but I don’t suppose you do. If you don’t, I’ll go back across the border with you and live with you in Free Country.”
“Are you crazy?” Demeris asked.
“No. Not in the least, I swear. Can you believe me? Can you?”
“I’ve got to go inside,” he said. He was trembling. “It isn’t smart to be standing out here while the hunt is going on.”
“What do you say, Nick? Answer.”
“It isn’t possible for us to be together. You know it isn’t.”
“You want to. Some part of you does.”
“Maybe so,” he said, amazed at what he was saying, but unable to deny it despite himself. “One fraction of me. But it isn’t possible, all the same. I don’t want to live here among the Spooks, and if I take you back with me, some bastard with a sharp nose will sniff you out sooner or later. I’m not going to take that risk. I’m just not, Jill.”
“That’s your absolute decision.”
“My absolute decision, yes.”
Something was coming down the street now, some vast hopping thing with a head the size of a cow and teeth like spears. A dozen or so humans ran along beside it, practically within reach of the creature’s clashing jaws, and a covey of Spooks hovered over it, bombarding it with flashes of light. Demeris took a step or two toward the door of the hotel.
He turned in the doorway. She was still standing there. The hunters and their prey sped right past her, but she took no notice. She waved to him.
Sure, he thought. He waved back. Goodbye, Jill.
He went inside. There was a clatter on the stairs, people running down, a woman and some men, the ones who had mocked him in the bar when he had first arrived. Two of the men ran past him and out the door, but the woman halted and caught him by the crook of the arm.
“Hey, Abblecricky!”
Demeris stared at her.
She leaned into his face and grinned. She was flushed and wild-looking, like the ones who had been running through the streets. “Come on, man! It’s the hunt! You’re heading the wrong way. Don’t you want to be there?”
He had no answer for that.
She was tugging at him. “Come on! Live it up! Kill yourself a dragon.”
“Ella!” one of the men called back.
She gave Demeris a wink and ran out the door.
He swayed uncertainly, torn between curiosity about what was going on out there and a profound wish to go upstairs and shut the door behind him. But the street had the stronger pull. He took a step or two after the woman, and then another, and then he was outside again. Jill was gone. The scene in the street was wilder: People ran back and forth yelling incoherently, colliding with one another in their frenzy. Overhead, streams of winged creatures swarmed, with Spooks like beams of pure light moving among them. In the distance, he heard the sounds of bellowing animals, thunderous explosions and high keening cries of what he took to be Spook pleasure. Far off to the south he saw a winged something the size of a small hill circle desperately in the sky, surrounded by implacable flaring pinpoints of Spook light, and halt and plummet like a falling moon. He could smell charred flesh, with a salty underflavor of what he suspected was the blood of alien beasts.
At a sleepwalker’s dreamy pace, Demeris went to the corner and turned left. Abruptly he found himself confronted with a thing so huge and hideous that it was almost funny—a massive long-snouted frog-shaped thing, sloping upward from a squat base, with a moist-looking greenish-black hide pocked with red craters and a broad, gaping, yellow-rimmed mouth. It was advancing slowly and clumsily down the middle of the street, toward the intersection, with its shoulders practically touching the buildings at either side.
Demeris drew his knife. What the hell, he thought. He was here at hunt time, he might as well join the fun. The creature was immense, but it didn’t have any visible fangs or talons and he figured he could move in at an angle and slash upward through the great baggy throat, and then step back fast before the thing fell on him. And if it turned out to be more dangerous than it looked, he didn’t give a damn. Not now.
He moved forward, knife already arcing upward.
“Hey!” someone cried behind him. “You out of your mind, fellow?”
Demeris glanced around. The bartender had come out of the hotel and was staring at him.
“That critter’s just a big sack of acid,” he said. “You cut it open, it’ll pour all over you.”
The frog thing made a sound like a burp, or perhaps a sardonic chuckle. Demeris backed away.
“You want to cut something,” the bartender said, “you better know what you’re cutting.”
“Yeah,” Demeris said. “I suppose so.” He returned the knife to its sheath and headed back across the street, feeling the craziness of the moment ebb from him like air from a balloon. This hunt was no business of his. Let the people who live here get mixed up in it.
As he reached the hotel entrance, he saw Spook light shimmering in the air at the corner—hunters hovering above—and then there was a soft sighing sound and a torrent of bluish fluid came rolling out of the side street, foaming and hissing as it edged along the gutter.
Demeris shuddered. He went into the building.
Quickly he mounted the stairs and entered his room and sat for a long while on the edge of the cot, gradually growing calm, while the din of the hunt went on and on.
Tom was gone, that was the basic thing he had to deal with. OK. He faced that and grappled with it. It was bitter news, but at least it was a resolution of sorts.
And Jill.
Doing masks. Taking humans as lovers. The whole matter went round and round in his mind, all that they had done together, everything that had passed between them. And how he had always felt about Spooks and how—somehow, he had no idea how—his time with Jill had changed that a little.
He remembered what she had said: “I want to be one of you.”
What did that mean? A tourist in the human race? A sightseer?
They are softening, then. They are starting to whore after strange amusements. And if that’s so, he thought, then we are beginning to win. The aliens had infiltrated earth in the first place; but now earth was infiltrating them. This yearning to do masks, to look and act like humans, to experience human feelings and human practices and human follies: It meant the end for them. There were too many humans on earth and not enough Spooks, and the Spooks would eventually be swallowed up. One by one, they would succumb to the temptation of giving up their chilly godliness and trying to imitate the messy, contradictory, troublesome creatures that humans are. And, Demeris thought, over the course of time—500 years, 1000, who could say?—earth would complete the job of absorbing the invaders and something new would emerge from the mixture of the species. That was an interesting thing to consider.
But then something clicked in his mind and he felt himself being flooded by a strange interior light, a light as weird and intense as the Spook light over the city. There was another way of looking at these things altogether. Jill dropped suddenly into a new perspective. If she were not a mere sightseer looking for forbidden thrills, she might be…a pioneer, an explorer, a border jumper; a defiant enemy of boundaries and limitations and rules. The same for Tom. They were two of a kind.
Demeris recognized now how little he understood his youngest brother. To him, Tom was a disturbed kid. To Ben Gorton, he was a contemptible sellout. But the real Tom, Tom’s own Tom,
might be something entirely different. He might be someone ready to jump deep and far into otherness to find out what it was like. Like Jill, this alien, this Spook—she was of that kind too, but coming from the other direction.
And she had wanted his help. She had needed it all along, right from the start. She had missed her chance with Tom, but maybe she thought that Tom’s brother might be the same sort of person, someone who lived on the edge, who pushed the walls.
Well, well, well. How wrong she was.
He couldn’t do it. Tom might have done it, but Tom was gone, and he wasn’t Tom or anything like him.
Too bad, he thought. Too damned bad, Jill.
He walked to the window, raised the oilcloth and peered out. The hunt was reaching a peak. The street was more crowded than ever with frantic monsters. The sky was full of Spooks. Scattered bands of Spook City humans, looking half-crazed or more than half, ran back and forth. There was noise everywhere, sharp, percussive, discordant. Jill was nowhere to be seen. He let the oilcloth flap drop back in place and lay down on his cot and closed his eyes.
Three days later, when the hunt was over and it was safe to go out again, Demeris set out for home. For the first ten blocks or so, a glow that might have been a Spook hovered above him, keeping pace. He wondered if it was Jill.
She had given him a second chance once, he remembered. Maybe she was doing it again.
“Jill?” he called up to it. “That you?”
No answer came.
“Listen,” he called to the hovering glow. “Forget it. It isn’t going to work out, you and me. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. You hear me?”
A little change in the intensity of the flicker overhead. Or perhaps not.
He looked upward and said, “And listen, Jill—if that’s you—Jill, I want to tell you: Thanks for everything, OK?” It was strange, talking to the sky this way. But he didn’t care. “And good luck. You hear? Good luck, Jill! I hope you get what you want.”
The glow bobbed for a moment, up, down. Then it was gone.
Demeris, shading his eyes, looked up again, but there was nothing there to see. He felt a sharp momentary pang, thinking of the possibilities. But what could he have done? She had wanted something from him that he wasn’t able to give. If he had been somebody else, things might have been different. But he was who he was. He could go only so far toward becoming someone else and then he had to pull back and return to being who he really was, and that was all there was to it.
No one gave him any trouble at all on his way out, and the return trip through the western fringe of the Occupied Zone was just as smooth. Everything was quiet, all was peaceful, clear to the border.
The border crossing itself was equally uncomplicated. The fizzing lights and the weird hallucinatory effects of the barrier were visible, but they had no impact from this side. Demeris passed through them as though they were so much smoke, and kept on walking. In hardly any time he was across the border and back in Free Country again.
THE RED BLAZE IS THE MORNING
I didn’t write any science-fiction short stories at all in 1992, the first time in many years that was the case, and I wrote only two in 1993 and one in 1994—a sign, I suspect, of the increasing difficulties I’ve been experiencing in working in the shorter forms.
The themes of these few-and-far-between latter-day stories may reflect some of that difficulty. Here, written in April, 1993 for Greg Bear’s New Legends anthology and centering in my long-held passion for archaeology, is a tale of a veteran professional whose career, as it enters its later years, has become much more of a struggle than he ever could have anticipated in his younger days.
——————
The Red—Blaze—is the Morning
The Violet—is Noon—
The Yellow—Day—is falling
And after that—is none—
—Emily Dickinson
Day by blazing day Halvorsen stretches himself across a blistering abyss, patiently searching in recalcitrant rock and hot sand for morsels of the useless past, even though he has begun to doubt the meaning and value of his own work. By chilly night, soaking his damaged and aching leg in a shallow basin of tepid sea-water—in this arid part of Turkey, fresh water is a luxury—he feels seductive fingers tickling the membranes of his mind. Something is trying to get in: perhaps already has. Something keeps nestling down alongside his consciousness and whispering fantastic, tempting things to him, visions of far-off times, mighty civilizations yet unborn. Or so it often seems.
What is actually going on, Halvorsen suspects, is that he is beginning to go crazy. The fascination of what’s difficult, he thinks, has not merely dried the sap out of his veins, as old Yeats feared it would, but has parched his brain beyond the bounds of sanity. And yet he can still speak six languages, including Turkish and Hebrew and modern Greek, and he can read Latin and classical Greek besides. He can recite the names of the Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus without missing one. Yes, his mind still functions well enough. Something else, something equally intangible and even harder to define, is what has become impaired. And then there is the sore leg, too, which mended inadequately after last summer’s accident on the rocky slope and is painful all the time. The leg is really in very bad shape. He ought not to be out here on the summit of the hill with a pick and shovel. He should be sitting in his tent, supervising the work of others. But Halvorsen has always been a hands-on kind of archaeologist: a point of great pride for him.
This is the fifth week of the third season of the dig. It is high summer, when the blue cloudless sky reflects the light of the swollen sun like a hot metal plate, and the meltem, the dry, hot, unrelenting wind out of the inland plateau, sends fifty-mile-an-hour blasts of brown dust into your nostrils and eyes and mouth and every cranny of your clothing for four or five days without halting. Halvorsen’s site is on a ragged little peninsula in southwest Turkey, overlooking the Mediterranean coast. It is an unimportant place that does not even have a paved road running to it, nor running water or electricity, and yet it has a long history. There is a tiny fishing village here now; before that, there was a Byzantine naval base; before that, Romans; before them, a Greek trading outpost; before that, a Minoan trading outpost; before that, Halvorsen thinks, a proto-Hittite encampment. And before that—ah, nobody knows what was here before that. But Halvorsen has a hypothesis, based on a few scattered and questionable bits of evidence. For three summers, now, he has been trying to find more satisfactory proof to support that hypothesis.
At mid-morning on this blazingly hot day Halvorsen is working alone on high, extending the trench that runs along the proto-Hittite side of the hill. Nobody he knows believes that the Hittites ever lived here, or anywhere else along this coast; and he himself has nothing to go by in that direction except the presence at the highest point of the site of a double line of mud-brick walls, two courses high, that feel more or less Hittite to him. But he is not particularly concerned with the Hittites, anyway: they are a Bronze Age folk, and he is looking for something much more ancient. Still, it would be helpful to prove that the Hittites had passed this way, too. And this is his dig. He can call this wall proto-Hittite if he feels like it, at least for the time being.
The site where he is working is a difficult one, steep and precarious. A rainstorm of unprecedented ferocity for this dry coast, six winters back, had carved away half the western face of the hill, laying bare the very finds that had brought Halvorsen here in the first place; but the angle of the lie is practically vertical, the soil crumbles easily, and Halvorsen’s budget will not allow him to put proper bridging across the worst of the gaps. So he hobbles around up here, walking lopsided as it is because of his torn-up leg, testing the ground as he goes in order to make sure it will bear his weight, and fearing at every moment that he will hit a weak spot and go tumbling down in a black cloud to land on the fanged rocks below.
He knows that he ought to be letting his Turks extend this trench for him. But he fee
ls that he is on the brink of a major discovery. How would the workmen be able to detect the place where the terrain changes, and the proto-Hittite stratum gives way to an even older one?
“They’ll know,” Jane Sparmann says. She’s the graduate student from Columbia who has been working with him out here for three years, now. “They may be illiterate laborers, but they’ve spent their whole lives digging in these mounds and they have a sixth sense about any kind of shift in the matrix.”
“Even so,” Halverson has replied whenever this comes up. “I want to do this myself. I have a seventh sense.”
Sparmann laughs. Halvorsen knows that she thinks he is stubborn to the point of irrationality. Very likely Sparmann believes that too many summers under the Mediterranean sun have addled his brain, grand old figure of the field that he is. Well, so be it: she’s probably right. But he intends to do his own digging up here, even so. Moving slowly along the stone base of the mud wall, looking for the precise spot at the end of the proto-Hittite wall where the soil darkens into virginity and then the place just beyond it where, he hopes, the Neolithic occupants of this site had erected their primordial acropolis.
It’s a fine place for an acropolis. No enemies can come upon you unaware, if you have watchmen posted up here. The hill runs athwart the peninsula for five hundred meters, a sharp rocky ridge. Look to the west and you see the smooth blue sea. To the east, you have a long view of the baking dusty plain.
Halvorsen pokes with his pick, scrapes, peers, brushes the dirt aside, pokes again. Nothing. It’s dull work, but he’s used to it. Steady toil, unrelieved boredom, sweat and dust, one clump of dirt and rock after another, poke and sift, move along. He thinks enviously of Schliemann unearthing rooms of golden treasure, Howard Carter shining his flashlight beam into the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen. But of course they had put in their months and years of dusty boredom too.
“Müdür Bey!” calls a loud rasping voice from below. “Müdür Bey!” His title: “Mr. Director.” The Turks can’t or won’t learn to pronounce his name. With difficulty Halvorsen levers himself upright, leaning on his shovel, and peers down the eastern slope of the hill to the place where Sparmann and three of the diggers are working, over at the edge of the Greek settlement. Ibrahim, his foreman, is standing in the trench, triumphantly holding up a crude buff-colored pot.
Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95 Page 28
