Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  He had hold of Pareti’s sleeve with a tourisnag, a rubber-lined clamp on the end of a telescoping rod; it was used to snag tourists passing through the Odd Services Arcade, to drag them closer to specific facilities.

  “Thanks, I’ll think it over,” Pareti said, trying without much success to get the tourisnag off his sleeve.

  “Wait, hey, Jim, dig! We got a special bargain rate, a real cheapo. It’s only on for the next hour! Suppose we fix you up with pedophilia, a really high-class desire which has not as yet been over-exploited? Or take bestiality . . . or take both for the special giveaway price—”

  Pared managed to pull the snag from his sleeve, and hurried on down the Arcade without looking back. He knew that one should never get Impulse Implantation from boiler-shop operators. A friend of his had made that mistake while on leave from a TexasTower, had been stuck with a passion for gravel, and had died after three admittedly enjoyable hours.

  The arcade was teeming, the screams and laughter of weekend freakoffs and smutters rising up toward the central dome of ever changing light patterns, crapout kliegs, and grass-jets emitting their pleasant, ceaseless streams of thin blue marijuana smoke. He needed quiet; he needed aloneness.

  He slid into a Spook Booth. Intercourse with ghosts was outlawed in some states, but most doctors agreed that it was not harmful if one made certain to wash off the ectoplasmic residue afterward with a thirty per cent alcohol solution. Of course, it was more risky for women (he saw a Douche & Bidet Rest Stop just across the arcade concourse, and marveled momentarily at the thoroughness of the East Pyrites Better Business Bureau; they took care of every exigency).

  He leaned back in the darkness, heard the beginning of a thin, eerie wail . . .

  Then the Booth door was opened. A uniformed attendant asked, “Mr. Joseph Pareti?”

  Pareti nodded. “What is it?”

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir. A call for you.” She handed him a telephone, caressed his thigh, and left, closing the door. Pareti held the phone and it buzzed. He put it to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Hi there.”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is your telephone, stupid. Who did you think it was?”

  “I can’t take all this! Stop talking!”

  “It’s not talking that’s difficult,” the telephone said. “The tough thing is finding something to say.”

  “Well, what do you want to say?”

  “Nothing much. I just wanted you to know that somewhere, somehow, Bird lives.”

  “Bird? Bird who? What in hell are you talking about?”

  There was no answer. The telephone had hung up.

  He put the telephone down on the comfort ledge, and sank back, hoping to God he could make it in peace and quiet. The phone rang again, almost immediately. He did not pick it up, and it went from ring to buzz. He put it to his ear again.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi there,” a silky voice said. “Who is this?”

  “This is your telephone, Joe baby. I called before. I thought you might like this voice better.”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” Joe almost sobbed.

  “How can I, Joe?” the telephone asked. “I love you! Oh Joe, Joe, I’ve tried so hard to please you. But you’re so moody, baby, I just don’t understand. I was a really pretty Dogwood, and you barely glanced at me! I became a newspaper, and you didn’t even read what I wrote about you, you ungrateful thing!”

  “You’re my disease,” Pareti said unsteadily. “Leave me alone!”

  “Me? A disease?” the telephone asked, a hurt note in the silken voice. “Oh, Joe, darling, how can you call me that? How can you pretend indifference after all we’ve been to each other?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pareti said.

  “You do too know! You came to me every day, Joe, out on the warm sea. I was sort of young and silly then; I didn’t understand; I tried to hide from you. But you lifted me up out of the water; you brought me close to you; you were patient and kind, and little by little I grew up. Sometimes I’d even try to wriggle up the pole handle to kiss your fingers . . .”

  “Stop it!” Pareti felt his senses reeling, this was insanity, everything was becoming something else, the world and the booth were whirling around. “You’ve got it all wrong—”

  “I have not!” the telephone said indignantly. “You called me pet names, I was your screwin’ goo! I’ll admit, I had tried other men before you, Joe. But then, you’d been with women before we met, so we mustn’t throw the past up to one another. But even with the other five I tried, I was never able to become what I wanted to be. Can you understand how frustrating that was for me, Joe? Can you? I had my whole life before me and I didn’t know what to do with it. One’s shape is one’s career, you know, and I was confused, until I met you . . . excuse me if I babble, darling, but this is the first chance we’ve had for a real talk.”

  Through the gibbering madness of it all, Pareti saw it now, and understood it. They had underestimated the goo. It had been a young organism, mute but not unintelligent, shaped by the powerful desires it possessed like every other living creature. To have form. It was evolving—Into what?

  “Joe, what do you think? What would you like me to become?”

  “Could you turn into a girl?” Pareti asked, timorously.

  “I’m afraid not,” the telephone said. “I tried that a few times, and I tried being a nice collie, too, and a horse. But I guess I did a pretty sloppy job, and anyhow, it felt all wrong. I mean, it’s just not me. But name anything else!”

  “No!” Pareti bellowed. For a moment, he had been going along with it. The lunacy was catching.

  “I could become a rug under your feet, or if you wouldn’t think it was too daring, I could become your underwear—”

  “Goddamn it, I don’t love you!” Pareti shrieked. “You’re nothing but gray ugly goo! I hate your guts! You’re a disease . . . why don’t you go love something like yourself?”

  “There’s nothing like me except me,” the telephone sobbed. “And besides, it’s you I love.”

  “Well, I don’t give a damn for you!”

  “You’re cruel!”

  “You stink, you’re ugly, I don’t love you, I’ve never loved you!”

  “Don’t say that, Joe,” the telephone warned.

  “I’m saying it! I never loved you, I only used you! I don’t want your love, your love nauseates me, do you understand?”

  He waited for an answer, but there was suddenly only an ominous, surly silence on the telephone. Then he heard the dial tone. The telephone had hung up.

  Now. Pareti has returned to his hotel. He sits in his embroidered room, which has been cunningly constructed for the mechanical equivalents of love. Doubtless he is lovable, but he feels no love. That is obvious to the chair, to the bed, and to the flighty overhead lamp. Even the bureau, not normally observant, realizes that Pareti is loveless.

  It is more than sad; it is annoying. It goes beyond mere annoyance; it is maddening. To love is a mandate, to be unloved is insupportable. Can it be true? Yes, it can; Joe Pareti does not love his loveless lover.

  Joe Pareti is a man. He is the sixth man to spurn the loving lover’s lovely love. Man does not love: can one argue the syllogism? Can frustrated passion be expected to defer judgment any longer?

  Pareti looks up and sees the gilded mirror on the facing wall. He remembers that a mirror led Alice to Looking-Glass Land, and Orpheus to hell; that Cocteau called mirrors the gateways to hell.

  He asks himself what a mirror is. He answers himself that a mirror is an eye waiting to be looked through.

  He looks into the mirror and finds himself looking out of the mirror.

  Joe Pareti has five new eyes. Two on the bedroom walls, one on the bedroom ceiling, one in the bathroom, one in the hall. He looks through his new eyes and sees new things. There is the couch, sad lovelorn creature. Half visible is the standing lamp, its curved neck denoting fury. Over h
ere is the closet door, stiff-backed, mute with rage.

  Love is always a risk; but hate is a deadly peril.

  Joe Pareti looks out through the mirrors, and he says to himself, I see a man sitting on a chair, and the chair is biting his leg.

  STREET OF DREAMS, FEET OF CLAY

  What a lovely city! It cared for every need—endlessly!

  I

  Carmody had never really planned to leave New York. Why he did so is inexplicable. A born urbanite, he had grown accustomed to the minor inconveniences of metropolitan life. His snug apartment on the 290th floor of Levitfrack Towers on West Ninety-Ninth Street was nicely equipped in the current “Spaceship” motif. The windows were double-sealed in tinted lifetime plexiglass, and the air ducts worked through a blind baffle filtration system which sealed automatically when the Combined Atmosphere Pollution Index reached 999.8 on the Con Ed scale. True, his oxygen-nitrogen air recirculation system was old, but it was reliable. His water purification cells were obsolete and ineffective; but then, nobody drank water anyhow.

  Noise was a continual annoyance, unstoppable and inescapable. But Carmody knew that there was no cure for this, since the ancient art of soundproofing had been lost. It was urban man’s lot to listen, a captive audience, to the arguments, music and watery gurglings of his adjacent neighbors. Even this torture could be alleviated, however, by producing similar sounds of one’s own.

  Going to work each day entailed certain dangers; but these were more apparent than real. Disadvantaged snipers continued to make their ineffectual protests from rooftops and occasionally succeeded in potting an unwary out-of-towner. But as a rule, their aim was abominable. Additionally, the general acceptance of lightweight personal armor had taken away most of their sting, and the sternly administered State law forbidding the personal possession of surplus cannon had rendered them, ineffectual.

  Thus, no single factor can be adduced for Carmody’s sudden decision to leave what was generally considered the world’s most exciting megapolitan agglomeration. (Blame it on a vagrant impulse, a pastoral fantasy, or on sheer, perversity) The simple, irreducible fact is, one day Carmody opened his copy of the Daily Times-News and saw an advertisement for a model city in New Jersey.

  “Come live in Bellwether, the city that cares,” the advertisement proclaimed. There followed a list of utopian claims which need not be reproduced here.

  “Huh,” said Carmody, and read on.

  Bellwether was within easy commuting distance. One simply drove through the Ulysses S. Grant Tunnel at 43rd Street, took the Hoboken Shunt Sub-road to the Palisades Interstate Crossover, followed that for 3.2 miles on the Blue-Charlie Sorter Loop that led onto U.S. 5 (The Hague Memorial Tollway), proceeded along that a distance of 6.1 miles to the Garden State Supplementary Access Service Road (Provisional), upon which one tended west to Exit 1731 A, which was King’s Highbridge Gate Road, and then continued along that for a distance of 1.6 miles. And there you were.

  “By jingo,” said Carmody, I’ll do it.”

  And he did.

  II

  King’s Highbridge Gate Road ended on a neatly trimmed plain. Carmody got out of his car and looked around. Half a mile ahead of him he saw a small city. A single modest signpost identified it as Bellwether.

  This city was not constructed in the traditional manner of American cities, with outliers of gas stations, tentacles of hot-dog stands, fringes of motels and a protective carapace of junkyards; but rather, as some Italian hill towns are fashioned, it rose abruptly, without physical preamble, the main body of the town presenting itself at once and without amelioration.

  Carmody found this appealing. He advanced into the city itself.

  Bellwether had a warm and open look. Its streets were laid out generously, and there was a frankness about the wide bay windows of its store-fronts. As he penetrated deeper, Carmody found other delights. Just within the city he entered a piazza, like a Roman piazza, only smaller; and in the center of the piazza there was a fountain, and standing in the fountain was a marble representation of a boy with a dolphin, and from the dolphin’s mouth a stream of clear water issued.

  “I do hope you like it,” a voice said from behind Carmody’s left shoulder.

  “It’s nice,” Carmody said.

  “I constructed it and put it there myself,” the voice told him. “It seemed to me that a fountain, despite the antiquity of its concept, is esthetically functional. And this piazza, with its benches and shady chestnut trees, is copied from a Bolognese model. Again, I did not inhibit myself with the fear of seeming old-fashioned. The true artist uses What is necessary, be it a thousand years old or one second new.”

  “I applaud your sentiment,” Carmody said. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Edward Carmody.” He turned, smiling.

  But there was no one behind his left shoulder, or behind his right shoulder, either. There was no one in the piazza, nobody at all in sight.

  “Forgive me,” the voice said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?” Carmody asked. “Knew about me.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Carmody said. “Who are you and where are you speaking from?”

  “I am the voice of the city,” the voice said. “Or to put it another way, I am the city itself, Bellwether, the actual and veritable city, speaking to you.”

  “Is that a fact?” Carmody said sardonically. “Yes,” he answered himself, “I suppose it is a fact. So all right, you’re a city. Big deal!”

  He turned away from the fountain and strolled across the piazza like a man who conversed with cities every day of his life, and who was slightly bored with the whole thing. He walked down various streets and up certain avenues. He glanced into store windows and noted houses. He paused in front of statuary, but only briefly.

  “Well?” the city of Bellwether asked after a while.

  “Well what?” Carmody answered at once.

  “What do you think of me?”

  “You’re okay,” Carmody said.

  “Only okay? Is that all?”

  “Look,” Carmody said, “a city is a city. When you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all.”

  “That’s untrue!” the city said, with some show of pique. “I am distinctly different from other cities. I am unique.”

  “Are you indeed?” Carmody said scornfully. “To me you look like a conglomeration of badly assembled parts. You’ve got an Italian piazza, a couple of Greek-type buildings, a row of Tudor houses, an old-style New York tenement, a California hot-dog stand shaped like a tugboat and God knows what else. What’s so unique about that?”

  “The combination of those forms into a meaningful entity is unique,” the city said. “These older forms are not anchronisms, you understand. They are representative styles of living, and as such are appropriate in a well wrought machine for living. Would you care for some coffee and perhaps a sandwich or some fresh fruit?””

  “Coffee sounds good,” Carmody said. He allowed Bellwether to guide him around the comer to an open-air cafe. The cafe was called O You Kid and was a replica of a Gay Nineties saloon, right down to the tiffany lamps and the cutglass chandlier and the player piano. Like everything else that Carmody had seen in the city, it was spotlessly clean, but without people.

  “Nice atmosphere, don’t you think?” Bellwether asked.

  “Campy,” Carmody pronounced. “Okay if you like that sort of thing.”

  A foaming mug of cappucino was lowered to his table on a stainless steel tray. Carmody sipped.

  “Good?” Bellwether asked.

  “Yes, very good.”

  “I rather pride myself on my coffee,” the city said quietly. “And on my cooking. Wouldn’t you care for a little something? An omelette, perhaps, or a souffle?”

  “Nothing,” Carmody said firmly. He leaned back in his chair and said, “So you’re a model city, huh?””

  “Yes, that is that I have the honor to be,” Bellwether said. “I am the
most recent of all model cities; and, I believe, the most satisfactory. I was conceived by a joint study group from Yale and the University of Chicago, who were working on a Rockefeller fellowship. Most of my practical details were devised by M.I.T., although some special sections of me came from Princeton and from the RAND Corporation. My actual construction was a General Electric project, and the money was procured by grants from the Ford and Carnegie Foundations, as well as several other institutions I am not at liberty to mention.”

  “Interesting sort of history,” Carmody said, with hateful nonchalance. “That’s a Gothic cathedral across the street, isn’t it?”

  “Modified Romanesque,” the city said. “Also interdenominational and open to all faiths, with a designed seating capacity for three hundred people.”

  “That doesn’t seem like many for a building of that size.”

  “It’s not, of course. Designedly. My idea was to combine awesomeness with coziness.”

  “Where are the inhabitants of this town, by the way?” Carmody asked.

  “They have left,” Bellwether said mournfully. “They have all departed.”

  “Why?”

  The city was silent for a while, then said. “There was a breakdown in city-community relations. A misunderstanding, really. Or perhaps I should say, an unfortunate series of misunderstandings. I suspect that rabble-rousers played their part.”

  “But what happened, precisely?”

  “I don’t know,” the city said. “I really don’t know. One day 84 they simply all left. Just like that! But I’m sure they’ll be back.”

  “I wonder,” Carmody said.

  “I am convinced of it,” the city said. “But putting that aside; why don’t you stay here, Mr. Carmody?”

  “I haven’t really had time to consider it,” Carmody said.

  “How could you help but like it?” Bellwether said. “Just think—you would have the most modem, up-to-date city in the world at your beck and call.”

  “That does sound interesting,” Carmody said.

  “So give it a try, how could it hurt you?” the city asked.