A Billion Days of Earth

by Piserchia, Doris

  “My husband was sure it would amuse me.”

  “He wanted you to have your fortune told?”

  “He only suggested, and I obeyed.”

  “I see.” Mr. Omega released her. “Well, I haven’t told you anything and I can’t, unless I look at the creases in the palm of your right paw. Stick it out, please, and I’ll scan it.”

  Arda saw a man who revealed nothing to her other than his physical dimensions. Height and breadth were not a person. “You’re silver,” she said. “That’s all, and it isn’t enough to constitute a man.”

  “Who is telling whose fortune?”

  “I told you I wasn’t a believer.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of all.”

  “Ah,” he said gravely, “if you had said ‘of anything,’ I might have held out some hope for you.”

  “You’re a soul saver?” Her tone matched his—grave, slow and low, even glum.

  He didn’t smile. “I’m an observer.”

  She gave him her right paw. “So am I. Tell me something that will make me suspect the world is an illusion.”

  “There are drugs that can do that.”

  “I tried them but they didn’t work. I didn’t want them to work.”

  Mr. Omega drew her palm up to his eyes. “The perfume of a lady is light, fragrant, and almost not there. Exactly right.”

  “I don’t like you. I watched you—”

  “Yes, I know. Since you first came into this room, but you couldn’t make up your mind between me and my two associates. It really didn’t matter which of us you approached because we have everything in common.”

  “I realized that and so I came to this table. Now do what you’re being paid to do and tell my fortune and stop squeezing my paw.”

  “Your husband will object?”

  “Don’t be foolish.”

  “Commoners are that way without trying.” He squeezed her hard enough to make her wince. “Pain is an old thing with you. You’re aware, of course, that masochists are a lure to sadists, draw them like zizzys to honey, and as long as you wander—”

  “You’ve decided to be rude. You can’t tell fortunes, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The shadows under your eyes aren’t from ill health, though you’re delicate enough. You bear children in sorrow, not because it hurts but because you never wanted them in the first place. What you want is to leave this—”

  “World,” she said coldly. “You’re the first human—excuse me, I mean commoner—I’ve ever talked to. We’ve had these parties twice a year for ages and we’ve always had fortunetellers, but this is the first time they haven’t been Fillys in disguise. How did you and your friends manage to get hired?”

  “A man named Kream works for a lackey of your husband’s. I persuaded him that I could enliven the party.”

  “How?”

  “By existing. He means to kill me, though I’m completely harmless.”

  Pulling free from him, Arda sat back in her chair and eyed him in disbelief. “Such things are common, and One would never allow bodyguards into the ballroom.”

  “There are no bodyguards. I told you I’m completely harmless. Your husband is well aware of that. He’s interested in me. He likes to look at me because he thinks I’m going to do something important for him.”

  “What?”

  “Kill the Gods.”

  “And are you?”

  “Haven’t you heard? I’m going to kill everybody.”

  “You said you were harmless.”

  “Yes, and I’m also euthanasia. That never hurt anyone. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  “When will you kill me?” she said.

  “I don’t care to think about it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Would you like to dance?”

  The silver eyes behind the mask narrowed. “Why?”

  With a little smile, she said, “Maybe today I’m a careless degenerate.”

  “You’re telling me what you think of the grandness around us?”

  “I want to dance with a living human being.” She stood up and waited, smiled down at him. “You’ve found your weak link in me. That’s why you came. Here am I. What are you waiting for?”

  Slowly, Omega arose from his chair. “I was looking for a strong link. I’m always looking for that.”

  “Not today,” she said shortly.

  They moved about the floor, the silver cloak and the filmy skirt entwining, billowing, parting, meeting again.

  chapter x

  Brog went to see Mrs. Ploke. He wasn’t naked today, nor drunk. His pants and shirt had been taken from a charity bag, likewise his shoes. He wore no socks. As had most people, Brog descended from the rat family, but he looked more like a bloodhound. His ears drooped, the lower lids of his eyes were red and sagging, his mouth was full and wrinkled. The schizophrenia that normally plagued him had receded today. He could make it do that when he had an important errand to run, so perhaps he wasn’t genuinely afflicted, as was claimed.

  Mrs. Ploke was blind, poverty-stricken and hungry, and she would have been dirty, too, if Brog hadn’t come by once a week. Sometimes he kicked the neighbor women and made them fetch and carry for her, but they were also poor and very apathetic and utterly undependable.

  “How is that son of yours?” said the shepherd, throwing up the blind in the single window in the dark little dungeon. The house was actually a shed stuck onto the end of a garage. It had been intended for tool storage.

  “Do open the blind, sir. The dark doesn’t bother me. If I’d known you were coming I’d have done it already.”

  Mrs. Ploke was short, dumpy and wheezy but she had pink skin and good teeth. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun, tightly, to help keep her cheeks from sagging. She sat in a rotting chair and gripped an old shawl as if it were a live thing.

  “Today is the day I always come by, so don’t tell me any lies,” said Brog. He dropped a sack of food in her lap. “Has your son sent you any money?”

  “The poor creature has none to send, not with his new wife and all his expenses. But he will, don’t worry, and very soon. Won’t you share the food with me?”

  Brog belched, hitched his belt tighter across his skinny stomach. “Later, later, sweetheart.”

  There were chores to be done and he did them. He chopped wood and added it to the stack so the blind woman would have fuel for her stove when winter came. The slop pails were emptied into a ravine and rinsed in a creek. He straightened the furnishings in the shack, wrote an unfriendly letter to Mrs. Ploke’s son, shared a lunch of bread and soup with her, heated water on the stove and bathed her with perfumed soap, and when she was dry and comfortable, he bedded her on the small cot beside the back door. She took him gratefully and eagerly, and was more appreciative of this thing that he did than for any of his other generosities. He, in turn, enjoyed the coupling, not that he desired her old plumpness, but compassion had a way of making a slave of its originator. Brog’s pity for this particular member of his flock impelled him to do his utmost to ease her misery. He was a servant, was he not, and what greater need had an unloved old woman than to receive a few moments of love?

  Jak sat on the curb in front of the house, his blind gaze directed at the empty street. “You don’t seem surprised that so many are going to Sheen. You make no comments, you don’t talk about what can be done to stop it.”

  “There’s nothing I can do to stop it,” said Rik. He whittled on a stick.

  “You’re simply standing back and calmly observing. The world could file by you toward a cliff and you wouldn’t warn them.”

  “What’s the good of warning someone who sees and knows his danger and keeps heading for it? They see Sheen. They know.”

  “That many people don’t commit suicide.”

  “Do you think they believe he’s offering them a two weeks’ vacation?”

  His back stiff, his face angry, Jak kept looking down the street. “They’re
confused. They can’t possibly know.”

  “There are no blindfolds on their eyes,” said Rik. “They’ve made their choice not to be confused any more, not to decide, not to live.”

  “It isn’t that! Everyone wants to live.”

  “Go and tell them. Tell everybody you see. Tell them to want to live.”

  Jak’s eyes were hot and his cheeks were pale. “The truth is that you just don’t care. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Rik gave him a quick glance. “Does what I think make a bit of difference to a man or woman who goes to Sheen?”

  “Why do you always have to think things out? Why can’t you be motivated by feeling, just once in your life?”

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  With a little snort, Jak said, “You’re not driven by so common a thing as emotion.”

  “You mean I’m not my own victim?”

  Jak had his mouth open for a ready retort. Now he closed it with a click. Quietly, desperately, he said, “Damn you, why can’t you be human?”

  Rik looked at the setting sun, radiant comet preparing to plunge into the mountains. “I won’t tell a person what he already knows, won’t remind him that his life is all he has. I won’t encourage him to live, when that is his only alternative.”

  “What if he doesn’t understand? What if he needs to be told?”

  “I don’t know the words.”

  “You tell him in plain language.”

  “How do you teach something so fundamental that nobody could have failed to learn it?”

  “But they haven’t learned it,” said Jak. “They’re giving it away without even thinking about it.”

  “How much is a thing worth if you give it away without thinking about it?”

  The Leng gasped. “Worth isn’t relative!”

  “The hell it isn’t.”

  Jak’s expression was one of horror. “You think a human life is only worth what its owner thinks it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about what I think it is?”

  “Will what you think keep a man from going to Sheen? Will your measure of his value make him value himself accordingly? Will your pure respect for his soul make his soul worth a damn to him? Can you say ‘no’ for him? Can you get into his brain and tell Sheen to go fly a kite? And if you can, who is answering Sheen?”

  “You’re not human!” cried Jak. “You’re some kind of monster who doesn’t care if the human race disappears.”

  “I’m not the human race.”

  “You don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

  Rik threw away his whittling stick. “I can’t make someone else want to be responsible for his life.”

  “You don’t want to save anyone.”

  “I can’t.”

  Jak leaped to his feet, glared down at Rik. “You don’t want to make the effort.”

  “How do you reason with a fog?”

  “You think you’ve got this all figured out, don’t you? I’m telling you you’re wrong.”

  “Why?” said Rik.

  “It’s too complicated.”

  “The decision to live is too complicated?”

  “There’s more,” Jak said with a snarl. “There’s all the rest of it—all the frightening, terrible things, the loneliness, the doubt—”

  “What have those things got to do with it? If I committed suicide by jumping off a cliff, the only significant thing to me would be that I was dead.”

  Jak sat down on the curb again and squeezed his temples. “Who’s talking about jumping off a cliff? Oh, God, why can’t people be reasonable? Why are they insane?”

  “Are they?”

  Jak shuddered. “They have to be. No one dies for nothing.” Again he rubbed his temples. “If I could only see what one of them is thinking. If I could only follow their thought processes to the conclusion.”

  “The conclusion is plain.”

  The Leng’s reply was angry. “Humanity isn’t like you.”

  “Or you?”

  “You think I don’t feel it? You think I ignore Sheen that easily?”

  “Who said anything about that?”

  “The decision to ignore him is made up of so many things.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Jak said, his voice uneven. “To you it’s either black or white. That isn’t how the human race is.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you call me, it doesn’t matter what you think the race is or what its destiny is, because its destiny is what it chooses. If it all goes to Sheen except for a few who are out of step—”

  “No!” yelled Jak. “That isn’t destiny. Sheen isn’t the end of the human race.”

  “Then what is?”

  Jak leaped up. “I know what you’re doing. You’re putting words in my mouth. You’re trying to get me to think the species is a mindless collection of insane impulses—”

  “I’m not trying to get you to think anything.”

  “You think you’re the man of tomorrow?”

  Rik shook his head. “I’m living today.”

  “Then why don’t you go to Sheen?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Everyone else is!” cried Jak.

  “Let them.”

  “You don’t care!”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Nothing can insult you.”

  “Everything insults me.”

  “You’d stand by and watch them die!”

  “I’d rather go fishing,” said Rik.

  “Why?”

  “Because I hate to see someone throw his life away.”

  “You lie! If you didn’t like it you’d try to stop it.”

  “Not if I knew I couldn’t.”

  Blankly, the Leng regarded the dark head below him. “I’ll find the reason. I’ll discover what makes you tick.”

  Rik sighed wearily. “Go ahead.”

  “And don’t pretend you mind my trying.”

  “I don’t mind. While you’re busy trying to find out what makes me tick, you’re staying away from Sheen.”

  “That isn’t the reason. It’s more complex.”

  Rik gave a half grin. “Why do you insist on seeing a mystery in something simple?”

  “Humanity isn’t simple.”

  “He’d better be, if he expects to survive.”

  “He might have a chance if Sheen weren’t so fascinating.”

  Rik frowned. “You talk too much about Sheen.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re worried!”

  “Maybe I’m just human enough to do that.”

  His expression stony, Jak said, “You needn’t. I’m not a weakling. I can resist him. He isn’t as powerful as he seems.”

  Rik lowered his head.

  “Really, he isn’t,” Jak said quickly. “All those people didn’t have to give up. I won’t. I mean I can’t see any point in your wondering if I might.”

  “Don’t talk about it so much.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. The only reason I do it—”

  “I know why you do it,” said Rik.

  “I don’t think so. If it’s an indication of weakness, that’s just your interpretation. My own is what’s important. I’ll never give in to him.”

  “Then don’t talk about it,” said Rik.

  “I can’t see why my talking bothers you. What’s wrong with an open discussion of a problem? But that’s beside the point. The world is the real problem. There has to be a solution.”

  “There is. People have to say no.”

  “Oh, God, that’s asking the impossible. What do you think he offers them?”

  “Abdication from thinking,” said Rik.

  “Is that all?”

  “Happiness without effort.”

  “Is that so bad? Maybe Sheen’s purpose is simply to make people happy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you’re wrong about everything?”

  “No
,” said Rik.

  Jak snorted. “You think you’re infallible?”

  “Where Sheen is concerned, yes.”

  “You’re narrow-minded. You already have your mind made up.”

  “Tell me something better.”

  The Leng pounced. “You can leave your mind open to suggestion.”

  “Whose?”

  “Anyone with a good one to make.”

  “Okay, when I hear a good one I’ll open my mind,” said Rik.

  Jak stalked away. Suddenly, he wheeled and came back. “Sheen has no conscience.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Who gave you the idea?”

  “For God’s sake, you sound as if you think I can’t create an original idea.”

  “That one isn’t original, and even if it’s true it makes no difference.”

  Jak looked uneasy. “A conscience makes no difference?”

  “If my enemy’s conscience won’t keep him from my throat, it doesn’t.”

  “What if maybe you can give him one?”

  Rik scowled. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just woolgathering.”

  “Do it out loud.”

  “Okay. I think Sheen becomes that which he possesses. He behaves according to the dictates of his victims.”

  Rik looked startled. “I can’t remember ever hearing a statement so full of contradictions.”

  Jak flushed. “Why?”

  “In the first place, a victim of Sheen’s doesn’t dictate a damned thing.”

  “That isn’t true. Sheen fulfills his every desire.”

  “Is that what ‘dictates’ means to you?”

  Looking down at his shoes, Jak muttered, “Anyhow, the rest of what I said is correct.”

  “If his victims don’t dictate to him—and they don’t—I can’t see how they can give him an order, and if they do, I see no reason why he should obey.”

  “You’ve got me all mixed up!”

  “That happened without my help.”

  Through his teeth, Jak said, “The trouble with me is that I think too much, while you don’t think at all.”

  “Drop it,” said Rik.

  “You’re so goddamn sure. I’m sick of you. Why should I listen to you?”

  “Because I’m an enigma, remember?”

  “You’re so obvious it’s disgusting.”