A Billion Days of Earth

by Piserchia, Doris

  “They’d die. They need the normal ones to take care of them. Do you think he’s planning on that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think he’s taking the good ones so the rest will starve?”

  “What about children?” said Rik.

  “Another interesting point. They aren’t interested in him, nor he in them, at least not the very young ones, but he goes after kids sixteen or seventeen years old.”

  “You know a lot about him.”

  “I’m retired from my job, so I have the time to watch him. I’ve sort of made him my hobby.”

  “Has he ever approached you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What made you come in here?”

  “You named him on your sign,” said Race. “What you said hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “I see.”

  “What made you decide to start this club?”

  “Would you understand if I said because of a nightmare?”

  “Sure,” said Race. “And you can’t get up on a soapbox and start preaching. Brog and the rest of the preachers have made that type of communication useless. Too much wax in people’s ears. You’ve done the only thing left, stuck it on a sign and placed it in plain sight. There’s a name for it now. There isn’t any excuse for people who say they’re giving away their souls because everyone is doing it.”

  Rik scratched his head. “I’m not a crusader.”

  “Who listens to crusaders?”

  “Would you care if nobody listened to us?”

  Race didn’t reply for a moment. Finally, he said, “I’d be stoned in the public square if I said this to just anyone: I don’t care if Sheen eats every human in the world as long as he doesn’t eat me and my friends and family.”

  “What about the species?”

  “The species ends for me when I die. If I had the choice, I’d say let the race continue, but it would be a living choice. Once I’m dead, I’m indifferent to everything.”

  “If you feel that way, why do you want to fight?”

  “Sheen is getting too close. I can feel the flames licking my tail feathers.”

  “You’re the man I want,” said Rik.

  “Fine. What do you want me to do?”

  “Find some more members.”

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Get the good ones,” said Rik. “I don’t know how you’re going to tell the difference, but you can give it a try.”

  “After we get a group together, then what?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “No,” said Race.

  chapter xii

  “But I’m offering you the job of Personnel Director,” said Miss Lune. “The only person in the whole plant who makes more money than the Personnel Director is myself.”

  “I understand that, but I don’t want the job,” said Rik.

  Miss Lune sat back in her chair. Perspiration shone on her forehead. “What can I offer you? How can I get you to take the job?”

  “You can’t.”

  “You have everything I want. I can’t believe you’ve been sitting behind a stupid machine all these years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I can give you money, position, power.”

  “No. I’ll explain, if you wish.”

  “All I wish is to save this plant from going under. Aside from Mister Spar and myself, you’re the only brain in the place. You show no indication of giving yourself to that blasted silver alien.”

  Rik shrugged. “You can’t really believe I can save your plant.”

  “I believe brainpower is the only thing worthwhile. I want you with me in the fight.”

  “Against the inevitable? It takes more than two people to run a corporation.”

  Miss Lune’s paws twisted in her lap. “Go on, get out of here.” As he stood up, she said, “Just for the record, why won’t you take the job?”

  “Because I qualified for it fifteen years ago.”

  Her eyebrows arched in a laconic salute. “The world is falling on its face and you won’t hold it up because a lot of stupid people ignored you.”

  “I’d hold it up if I could, but I can’t. Taking that job wouldn’t do anything for me and it would only buy you another month or week.”

  “What?”

  “You aren’t worried about the world or me or Mister Spar. You’re thinking of what you’ll have left when the plant is gone.” Rik leaned across the desk. “What will you have left?”

  Miss Lune heard him go out of the room, heard him walking down the hall, but she wasn’t seeing anything but herself—stripped of everything that meant anything to her.

  “Aren’t you tired of it all?” said the man. His eyes were dull, his shoulders slumped, his paws fluttered aimlessly across his bearded face.

  “Tired of what?” yelled Rik. He needed to be heard, had to be heard.

  The stranger made an exhausted gesture toward the landscape. “The crap in life; the indefiniteness. You know. No five people can agree on anything. You’re never sure, when you get up, whether the day will be worth it and nine times out of ten it isn’t. You see something pretty and you turn it over for a closer look and there are worms clinging to it. There isn’t anything in the world you dare examine too closely.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Rik said, as loud as he could.

  The man shrugged. “Then why are you bothering me? Why hold me back when you don’t understand? There’s something wrong with a man who has lived as long as you and who still doesn’t understand.”

  Rik closed his claw on the man’s arm. “If you can’t take it, why not kill yourself?”

  “It’s part of what you don’t see. I don’t want to kill myself.”

  “But you don’t want to live.”

  “Not like this; not with the uncertainty.”

  “Sheen gives death.”

  “Oh, no,” said the other, simply. “I know what he gives. Everybody knows, probably everybody but you.”

  Rik drew his claw back in rage and suddenly let it fall. “You’re all sick.”

  “You’re the sick one.” The man took a long look at the sunset. “That’s something I always liked. At least that was real.” He turned to the glittering pool at his feet. “I’m ready.”

  “Take my heart that we shall be one,” said Sheen.

  “One what?” yelled Rik. Whirling, he walked away. He arrived at the street where he lived, sat down on the curb.

  “It’s getting worse,” said a voice.

  He looked up at the face of Race. “Did you find any members?”

  “Not a one.” Race sat down on the curb. “Sheen is out to get them all.”

  “Us all.”

  “He’s barking up the wrong tree here. Listen, I went by the school this morning. Half the teachers didn’t show up and the kids were all outside, tearing up the grounds. There’s nobody at the library. Police are everywhere but they’re standing around doing nothing. Downtown it’s so quiet it’s like a cemetery. People are inside with their doors locked and their blinds down. I got no milk delivery this morning. The only thing that sounds normal is the radio, and that’s the most abnormal of all. The news reports are about the weather and the new sewage plant they’re building in the suburbs.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Race grunted and stood up. “It’s better to do it alone.”

  “Agreed. Our fancy club was a dumb idea.”

  “There’s danger in numbers. That son of a bitch knows us. I know what the battle is. Those other poor jerks don’t know what’s going on.” Race looked down at Rik with a wry smile. “So long, tough guy.”

  “So long.”

  Miss Lune was raking leaves in her small yard. “My employer went to Sheen this morning,” she said.

  Rik paused on the walk. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I didn’t like it either.” She regarded him silentl
y for a moment. “You were right,” she said. “After the plant was gone I had nothing left but myself. It turned out to be enough.”

  “I see.”

  She leaned on the rake. “It took all this chaos to make me realize I never had anything else. I think it’s a crime to sit back and watch your individuality go down the drain, but it’s much worse when you approve of it. I’m talking about people in general. You don’t get self-respect because someone respects you. Women couldn’t see that.”

  “They’ll see it now,” said Rik.

  “Only if they have guts. I don’t know if they can do it.”

  “Do you care?”

  “I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t, but I’ll tell you something more important than my caring what happens to them—their caring. If they don’t care, it doesn’t matter what I think. I’ll stand by and watch every one of them go to hell, and I’ll have a sneer on my face, because they’ll be deliberately throwing themselves away. They could escape so easily. All they have to do is say no.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve got my feet dug in. This is my world. If anyone asks me who gave it to me, I’ll tell them nobody had to—it was simply there and I took it.”

  “Does Sheen frighten you?”

  Miss Lune grinned. “Hell, yes! He taught me I’m my own worst enemy and if I want something to hang onto I’d better build it. And I’ve learned more. It’s a mistake to try and avoid him, so I don’t. He’s in my house right now, with his feet propped up on my best cushion, watching television. We’re going to have a philosophical discussion after dinner.”

  Rik started to walk on. Suddenly, he turned back. “There’s another enemy, or there soon will be.”

  “The looters. They’ll present a special kind of problem. I hate shooting animals. I hate that kind of fight. I have more respect for the creature relaxing in my living room than for any of the beasts who will come. At least Sheen presents me with a choice. The beasts won’t, so I’ll have to kill them.”

  “I saw her walking in the woods with Sheen.”

  Sentences again, cutting the guts to ribbons. Why did death always come in sentences?

  Rik was in his house. In dull wonder he saw that he was on his knees. He didn’t know how he had gotten there, didn’t remember coming home, remembered nothing that happened after he heard those terrible words from someone in the street. They put a period in his life, and he didn’t want to think about it. Examining it would bring pain, and he was growing too intimate with that. If he wasn’t careful he would never find his way back, never get home again, never be able to return to … what?

  His head jerked up at a slight sound and he stared into the sleepy eyes of Pug. The zizzy lay peacefully in his cage, not suspecting that his anchor had sunk into a bottomless ocean.

  Rik got up and opened the cage. “She’s gone. She forgot you. Get out of here.”

  Pug didn’t make his usual racket. Instead, he slowly sat up, shivered and shrank against the bars of his home.

  “Get out.”

  Pug’s tail drooped. He placed his front paws forward, as if to obey. Then he paused to look up at his executioner.

  “Never mind,” said Rik, and quickly closed the cage. His arms were trembling. He shoved his hands in his pockets. He went to the kitchen, poured milk in a bowl and took it back to Pug, who drank it and watched him with stricken eyes.

  He went outside and walked up the hill, stood by the graves without looking at them. He began to search through his pockets, slowly and methodically, and he didn’t stop until he realized what he was hunting for. It was there. A person didn’t carry that kind of thing in his pockets. The soul fit inside a living body but nowhere else.

  He looked at the hill and beyond it. Far across the city, someone was burning leaves. Or maybe they were burning their house. Smoke curled into the sky and made weird shapes. Overhead was the setting sun. The wind created sounds in the leaves at his feet. He suddenly remembered a day when he was little. He was ten years old and he stood on a street corner and screamed. Two men stopped and asked him why he was screaming, but he couldn’t tell them. They had both looked frightened, he remembered. One said he mustn’t scream without a reason, while the other said nobody screamed without a reason. They went away and left him standing on the corner, bellowing his lungs out.

  He shivered, brought his mind back to the world of leaves and wind and grayness and the absence of one woman.

  The house was empty as the world. He undressed without thinking about it. He was simply doing what people did when night came—disrobing and getting into bed. He lay down, pulled up the covers, rolled onto his side and lay staring at a mound in the bed next to his. The bed had been made up. Somehow, the pillow must have become misplaced. It looked like a body in the bed.

  It was too dark to see clearly, and he didn’t want to reach out and touch the pillow. His hand had a will of its own. It itched, jerked, throbbed, refused to do as he ordered it. Instead, it went stupidly inching across space toward the mound in the other bed, and he felt his heart trying to beat his mattress to shreds. He knew that when he finally touched the pillow, he would raise up and mangle it.

  His hand froze. If he let go now, he might not be able to stop the process. It might all come out like a broken dam, beginning with a destroyed pillow and leading to no one knew where. A sob leaked from his throat and he threw himself onto his back.

  “Is something wrong?” said Aril, from the other bed.

  His heart gave a violent slam against his ribs and then subsided to uneven little beats that matched the coming and going of wind in his throat.

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” he said, and he lay and thought of Sheen.

  “Vennavora, you must come down; my mission is urgent!”

  The cloud over Jak’s head lowered to the ground. The great brown God sprawled on it in indolent relaxation.

  “I already know your mission. You needn’t bore me by vocalizing.”

  Jak flushed. “I know you have no love for the things of Earth but how can you ignore what is going on?”

  “I ignore nothing, but the silvery one is without conscience.”

  “How well I know that. He consumes us all. How can we survive if this situation continues?”

  “Man will not survive. Accept the inevitable, Leng, and live your days as fully as you can. You were never guaranteed more.”

  Jak stifled a sob. “You look upon suffering with indifference! There’s no one to protect the children. Wild animals have them at their mercy.”

  “Where are their fathers and mothers?”

  “In the arms of Sheen.”

  “And there you have your explanation of the situation,” said Vennavora. “Ask me not. You see and you know. They wasted their lives. See that you don’t waste my time any more. Life calls to me.”

  “While we die! Tell me how to defeat Sheen!”

  “Say no,” whispered the God, with a chuckle.

  “I’ve said it!”

  Another chuckle, another whisper, “In what language?” The cloud soared into the sky and Vennavora was gone.

  The slaughterhouse that provided meat for the entire city of Osfar was a huge complex that covered a thousand acres. The killing and dressing of animals was a completely automated process. A cow was forced from a paddock, it ran up a ramp, was hit with such force by a descending steel ball that it died no matter which part of its body sustained the blow, after which it dropped onto another ramp and rolled toward the big saws.

  Today the paddock contained 20 or 30 human workers who had been driven there by Bebe and a squadron of zizzys. Brog, the prophet, stood beside a second ramp and alternately cried and prayed. He was free, not imprisoned by the zizzys. Bebe had always enjoyed watching Brog.

  The people in the paddock had a choice as to which ramp they would take. They could run up the one and die under the steel ball, or they could run down the second and jump into the huge living hill that slumped and pulsed and waited for its meal.
The living hill was silver.

  The back fence of the paddock began to roll, diminishing its own space. The workers were shoved toward the ramps.

  “Fight!” cried Brog. “Climb the fence!”

  The fence couldn’t be scaled by anything but a snake. It was made of slick steel and reared 15 feet from the ground. The foremost workers battled with one another, sought to clamber backward over those behind them. This wasn’t permitted. One or two were thrown onto the first ramp. Some had already decided on the second ramp, but in order to reach its entrance they had to get rid of the bodies blocking it. They surged forward and forced more people onto the first ramp, forced those in the lead to draw nearer to the doorway and the steel ball.

  A man found himself looking up at a dull, gray sphere. He was pushed another inch forward, his foot touched a metal strip on the floor, the dropping sphere disconnected his collarbone and drove it like a spear through his torso.

  Brog used his staff as a club. He beat on the living hill. He sobbed, cursed, begged, accomplished nothing. The workers—all but three who were neatly dressed and packed for meat counters in supermarkets—raced down the second ramp into Sheen’s hungry mouth.

  Bebe loathed inactivity, wasted no time, took his squadron and went on the hunt for more converts. He found an army of soldiers in the desert, on their way to Osfar to answer a summons of the Fillys. They were to lay siege to a section of the city where certain criminal elements lived.

  The zizzys drove the soldiers to the slaughterhouse.

  The house was quiet, but Rik knew Aril was there as soon as he walked in the door. He traced her aura to the back porch, stopped and stood glaring at her.

  “I forbid you to go to him again!”

  At least she responded to him, laughed and got out of the sun chair and went inside. He sat down in the chair she had occupied, felt the warmth she had left there. He brooded and thought about his weapon. It was a dangerous weapon because it could backfire on him at any time. Right now it was working. If Sheen intended to bring him down through her, she was safe as long as he stood fast. Sheen would kill her once he became convinced that Rik wasn’t going to give in.

  Filly Six was having a nightmare. He got out of bed. He had to, because his brother, One, was coming after him with a sword. It was the first nightmare Six had ever enjoyed. He danced beyond One’s swing, hopped all over the bed, screamed for assistance from his loyal followers, and pretty soon the room was full of servants who tied One to a chair and stood and saluted Six and swore to do anything he ordered.