by Jerry
“I’m afraid there’s been a rather serious accident,” he said. “The ship has been badly damaged. You had best get into your warmest clothes and your lifebelt. They’ll soon be loading the boats with women and children.”
The girl stared at him blankly. “I don’t believe this ship is in any serious trouble.”
“Please do as I say, miss.” Rhodes used his most authoritative manner. “I’m not in the habit of alarming young women. If I tell you to get dressed and go to the boats, there’s a good reason for it. Please hurry.”
She looked hard at him. “As you wish, sir. If this is a joke, I shall surely report you to the captain.” She closed the door.
Rhodes pressed his ear to the door. He heard a trunk being opened and the rustling of clothing. He was satisfied that she would do as he asked.
“Always a big heart where the ladies are concerned. Still, what you did might be what saved her.” She pulled a key out of her handbag. “My cabin is right down here.”
She was only a few doors down from him. How could he have missed her?
“Why now? Here?” he asked when they were inside. “Because I knew what it would do to you. You couldn’t spend three days on this ship, knowing what was going to happen, and not be affected by it. The company works hard at building up that emotional block. I had to make sure it was broken down. That’s why I couldn’t see you until tonight. You would have paid too much attention to me and not enough to the people around you. They are people, Rhodes, just like you and me.”
“It worked. My training is shot to hell.”
She pulled a medkit out from under the bed. “Okay, this is how it’s going to work. I’m going to pop out your company chip and replace it with the one from inside me. It’s an easy procedure, won’t take more than fifteen minutes.” She opened the kit and began removing the necessary instruments. “Vikashmo doesn’t know you don’t really look like Phillips. The company will figure you’re dead. You can go back to real time and take over my operation.”
“But that means you’re staying here. Why the fuck would you want to do that? I need you. You know that.”
She began removing her clothing. “You want me around, but you don’t need me. I’m old. I deserve a rest. This is the perfect era for a wealthy woman to live out her final years.”
“Do it for me. Please.” He wasn’t above begging at this point.
“I can’t. There’s only one chip. I knew you’d react this way.” She turned around. “Now help me get out of these things.”
“Damn. I haven’t seen you for years. Now you go to all this trouble just to spend a couple of hours with me.” He undid the laces. They left red welts on her aging skin. “Why?”
“Two reasons. I want you to take over for me. And I wanted to say goodbye.” She patted him on the arm. “Besides, I needed somebody who gives a shit about these people. We don’t implant ghosts anymore.”
“What then?”
She raised her hand as if to slap him, then placed it against his forehead and pushed. “Don’t play stupid. We rig ourselves. Works fine. My techs will wire you up when you get back. Doesn’t hurt at all.”
Rhodes thought of all the people he’d implanted. “I’m not crazy about the idea.”
“Free ride’s over. We don’t have the right to do it the company way. It’s rape. No, it’s even worse. What could be more personal and private than someone’s thoughts and senses? You’re suffering from the company’s sick indoctrination techniques. Imagine a playback of how you’re feeling right now as a mere commercial property. These people have their own lives. They’re not a recording medium for jerks back in real time who’re too afraid to live their own lives.”
“No shit.” He removed his coat.
Flawn worked quickly. Rhodes felt like she was drawing on his skin with a marker. There was only a faint tingling. He heard his chip land on the floor and bounce away.
She opened the closet and handed him a lifebelt. “This is for you. It’s a kind of miniature lighter-than-air balloon. You activate it by pressing this button and sliding it to the right.”
Rhodes took the belt. It was slick and lightweight and smelled of her perfume. “How long will it keep me up?”
“Long enough. You get pulled back at 2:35. So you’ll see everything.”
He tied on the lifebelt and tugged on the straps, testing the knots. “Let’s go.”
As they walked toward the elevator the doors opened. The boy operating the lift was pale. He stared at their lifebelts. “What deck, sir?”
“Boat deck, please,” he replied.
The elevator stopped. The boy opened the door and tried to smile. Flawn put a hand on his arm. “I shouldn’t stay too long, if I were you.”
“It’s my post, ma’am. I’ll be here until the next shift. I’m sure everything will be all right.”
The ship was slightly down in the bow. Sailors were removing the canvas covers from the lifeboats. Rhodes walked to the railing and looked down. The icy water slapped against the hull seventy-five feet below.
“It’s a long way down,” Flawn said.
“Yeah.” He looked into her eyes. “Time for you to go.”
“Yes.” She pulled a recording globe from her handbag. “When you miss me, this might help some.” She rubbed her eyes with a gloved hand. “Damn. Damn. Damn. I knew this wouldn’t be easy.”
Rhodes closed his hand around the globe. He hugged her as tightly as he thought she could stand. “I don’t have anything to give you. Nothing at all.”
“Peace of mind.” She kissed him. Rhodes bit her lip softly and sucked on her tongue as she put it in his mouth. He wanted her. Wanted her more than Vikashmo or any other woman he had ever known. And he would never have her.
“I blew it,” he said as she pulled away. “Seven years ago. I blew it big time.”
“No, you didn’t. You did what was right.” She traced his eyebrows with her finger. “Now go and kick the company’s ass for me.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Goodbye.” She backed slowly away from him.
“Goodbye.”
She walked down the deck to where the sailors were cranking out lifeboat number 6.
Rhodes stood by the railing and watched as Flawn and several others, mostly women and children, were loaded into the boat. He felt dead and empty, and stared in silence as the craft was slowly lowered out of his sight. Flawn was the best part of him and she was gone forever. Only the burden of her trust in him was left.
“Ahem.” The voice behind him was female. Rhodes turned to face her. “I must apologize for my earlier behavior. It appears you are not the prankster I suspected you of being.” The young woman gave him a nod and a slight smile.
Something in Rhodes warmed and began to come back to life. He offered her his elbow. She took it and he walked her down the deck to where the next lifeboat was being filled.
The stars were as bright as he had ever seen them. The sea was dark and deadly cold, dotted with pinpricks of human life. The bow of the Titanic was down by at least twenty degrees now. The lifeboats, except for the collapsibles, were gone.
Many of the passengers had begun to panic, scrambling for the stem. The polished wooden deck made movement dangerous. Those still aboard fought the sea and one another for another few moments of life.
The baker, eyes dilated, walked slowly up the deck toward him, His drunken state seemed to benefit his progress.
The band played Songe d’Automne as the water hissed up the ship’s wooden deck.
Rhodes locked his arms around the railing. The stem was coming up abruptly as she sank by the bow. People were beginning to scream. Some were jumping overboard.
The sea was calm and smooth. He could not see any of the lifeboats or hear their oars in the water.
The ship was almost perpendicular to the water. Rhodes hauled himself over the railing and switched on his lifebelt. The superstructure sprang out fifteen feet from either shoulder. The batwing balloo
n shape filled with gas and lifted him slowly upward.
The boilers came loose and crashed through the ship, sounding like thunder. The ship groaned. Metal screamed and snapped as the front section of the Titanic broke away. It disappeared into a cloud of steam. The stem, still covered with people, righted itself. After a minute it began its slow descent into the water. Rhodes watched it below his dangling feet. The sea was foaming around it, a shimmering halo. There was a grating noise and the ocean closed over the ship’s stem, sending out only the smallest of ripples.
Rhodes saw the light of another ship to the north. He knew it would remain there until morning.
He felt in his vest pocket for the young girl’s recording globe. He looked at it briefly. His internals pulsed with warmth and he felt the familiar disembodied tugging. He dropped the globe.
He was gone before it disappeared into the water.
1989
ATTITUDE OF THE EARTH TOWARD OTHER BODIES
James Sallis
BECAUSE SHE IS GONE.
Each morning, still, he rises at five and puts on coffee. For an hour he studies—languages, usually—then takes the wireless terminal into the kitchen and with breakfast (grapefruit, one piece of wheat toast, a single scrambled egg or bowl of oatmeal) reviews news aspects of the project. All these are habits acquired in college and never given up. He showers then, dresses, and stands for a moment at the door, his apartment still and quiet as the sky.
He arrives, as always, before the others. “Good morning, Doctor,” the guard says to him. He inserts his card into the slot, places his palm briefly against the glass plate. He goes through the door and repeats the clearance routine at another door, then down a long, narrow corridor. Here he says simply, “Good morning, Margaret.”
“Good morning, John.” The door opens for him. “I hope you slept well.”
“Not very.”
“Then I am sorry, John.” A polite pause. “Where will we start this morning?”
“Program Aussie for a sweep of sector A-456/F, I think. Logarithm tables, continuous transmission.”
“Duration?”
“Until redirected. And at whatever power levels we’ve been using in that sector.”
All is quiet for a moment until Margaret says, “It is done. Transmission is beginning. You wish Granada to continue broadcasting geometrical theorems?”
“Yes, though maybe we could boost levels a little. Paris is still sending out the Brandenburgs. Leave her on that. But let’s switch Nevsky over to something new.”
After a moment Margaret says, “Yes?”
“I don’t know—poetry, maybe.”
“What poetry did you have in mind, John?”
“Milton, maybe? Or Shakespeare, Dante—Pushkin?”
“Might I suggest Rilke?”
“Yes, Rilke by all means. The Elegies. Of course.”
Margaret’s voice fills the room:
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his
stronger existence
And he thinks how cruel it is now, though often before it had filled his days with joy, that Margaret should have her voice.
“Leave all the others on current transmissions.”
“Yes, John. Will there be something else?”
“Anything unusual incoming?”
“Some interesting variable emissions from Dresden’s sector. A possible new black hole in Paris’s.”
“You’ve notified astronomy, of course.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, just run off some copy for me and I’ll have a look. The rest of the morning’s your own.”
Daisywheels begin spitting out thickly printed sheets of numbers and symbols.
“You’ll call me, John, if there’s anything else?”
“Certainly, Margaret. Thank you.”
“It is my pleasure, John. Au revoir
And he is alone in the lab, without even her voice now. He looks up through hanging plants and the skylight to a bright day with no cloud in sight. There should be rain, he thinks, torrents of rain: il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut dans la ville. Then he bends over the serrated sheets, peering into them as one looks into a friend’s face and knows instantly, without analysis, his thoughts and mood, entering into them as one exists in one’s language, beyond particulates or grammar. The emissions from C-389/G-B were indeed most interesting, but (alas) still random.
Random as two people coming together in a sea of others. Random as the chances (they were, after all, so different) they’d fall in love.
She was a musician, working as a secretary to try and make ends meet. For two hours each day after work she practiced oboe. Most of the remaining time she bicycled or read, usually in the bathtub or curled up against the bed’s headboard with a glass of wine close to hand. She had a mane of thick brown hair, a narrow waist, and worked at her desk in shirtsleeves, arms alarmingly soft and bare. From her first day she’d always smiled at him.
He watched her for a time, aware of her presence halfway across the building even as he worked, and finally began speaking to her, mostly in the stairwells or halls at first, a couple of times in the lunch line. Then they started coming across one another more often. One day she asked if he’d had lunch yet (he had) and the next day they went together. On the stairs he asked her to dinner. She sat cross-legged in the car with her feet tucked under and slid her hand, at the restaurant, up inside and around his arm. That night, Sunday, he could not sleep and went to the lab at three in the morning. Monday night she went back with him to his apartment. It was her birthday. Neither of them was at work on Tuesday.
They were both so wary, so afraid of being hurt, and yet they seemed unable to stop themselves, to control, whatever its source, the attraction they felt. Verbally, they circled one another like dancers: But what if it happened that . . . I couldn’t stand it if . . . I don’t want any more surprises. They were two moons circling that central attraction, trying desperately not to collide, knowing they would. Once Margaret spoke to him four times before he surfaced from his thoughts of her to respond. Later there would be an interfering sister, not a villainess, nothing is that simple, that easy, just a sister concerned, a sister afraid things were going too fast, suspicious (as well she might be) of his intentions. But none of it mattered.
Her name was Kim. She’d been through two awful marriages and much abused by the men in her life; she had difficulty believing that a man could be kind to her, could be giving, could truly care. She did not recognize that there was anything within her a man would be drawn to. She kept asking him Why me? And he truly did not know. Perhaps her sister was right; perhaps he only wanted her, wanted her youth, her beauty, her obeisance.
Perhaps he was just afraid to be alone any longer under this sky pressing down on him.
And so he said, I will not lie to you. I want to be with you. If the time comes that I want to back away, I will tell you so.
You don’t want to?
No. No, I don’t. You must know that.
I thought you did, maybe. I was afraid.
He runs his hand up her spine, along the soft line of her arm. She leans her head against his chest. To be so wanted.
You should be getting home, he says.
Yes.
But they do not move. Carlights wash over them, the guard’s flashlight washes over them, they are flooded in moonlight. And still she holds him close against her. From the heave of her chest he realizes she is crying. He asks if she is all right. Yes, she says, I’m fine, but this will all change, you know. It has to, she says. Someday we won’t have it anymore. He looks down at the pale coarse skin of her hands and knows he has come too far now ever to be safe again.
He stands at the door of his apartment as though he’d just entered, trying to imagine how another, seeing this for the first time, how she, would perceive it. It has charac
ter, of course; it’s a bit out of the ordinary. And comfortable, like the corduroy coat he wears most days. In fact the apartment is a fairly precise graph of his inmost life. His solitude, his passion for knowledge, the kenning of order and intuition so important to his work—all are there; there in the orderly stacks of books where Chomsky is sandwiched by Tolstoy and Tom Paine, in the bathroom where the medicine cabinet is stuffed with index cards, in the kitchen where he keeps most of the computer and electronic equipment, even in the series of small rugs thrown about seemingly at random over the carpets. He decides that he would like the person who lived here. He would trust this person, somehow.
Listen to this, she tells him one night as they sit side by side reading, hands locking from time to time and (from time to time) reaching for wineglasses. It is by Flaubert, she says, then reads it aloud: Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
“That is for us, John,” she says. “That was written for us, for the two of us alone.”
He moves a hand towards her face and she bows her head to touch it. From far off they hear sirens, the sounds of traffic and slamming doors, the whine of wind, a babble of unintelligible voices.
Everything depends upon our interpretation of the noise surrounding us and the silence at our centers.
By the late-middle twentieth century (and he found this as beautiful as a kite looping into May sky, as the order in a closed system of numbers or the sudden flight of birds) science had advanced sufficiently that it ceased being merely descriptive—that is, narrative—and became almost lyrical. There is, after all, not much distance between William James’s insight that reality is relative and multiple, that the human mind (and therefore the world) is a fluid shimmering of consciousness, and Schrodinger’s cat. Science had become Wallace Steven’s blue guitar, a fecund reservoir of our attempts to understand, to contrive order. Trying to explain the world to me, Camus wrote, you are reduced to poetry. Perhaps he was right.
