F&SF July/August 2011

by Fantasy; Science Fiction

  Closest were the faces he knew. His mother and Mr. Rightly were there, and the scientists and that blond girl whose name he still didn't know. And the camel had been saved, and the rest of the surviving zoo animals, and two hundred thousand humans who in the end were pulled from their basements and off their front porc should aTorhes. The penguins hadn't made it to town in time, and the leopard was still dead, and Matt eventually died in the Pacific—an honored fighter doing what he loved.

  Billions of people were lost. They had been gone for so long that the universe scarcely remembered them, and nobody ever marked their tragic passing. But inside this contrived, highly compressed volume, his species persisted. The adventure continued. Another passenger asked to hear Simon Bloch's story, and he told it from the beginning until now, stopping when he had nothing to add, enjoying the stares and the respectful silence.

  Then he turned, throwing his gaze in a better direction.

  Their starship was born while a great world died, and the chaos and rage of a solar flare had thrown it out into deepest space. Onboard were the survivors of many worlds, many tragedies, collected as a redoubt against the inevitable. The galaxy had finally fallen into that ultimate war, but Bloch preferred to look ahead.

  In the gloom and cold between galaxies, a little thread of gas and weak suns beckoned—an island where clever survivors could make a second stab at perfection.

  It made a man think hard about his future, knowing that he was bound for such a place.

  A different man might be scared.

  But not Bloch, no.

  * * *

  Bronsky's Dates with Death

  By Peter David | 8988 words

  Peter David is the author of roughly six dozen novels, including Knight Life, Howling Mad, and Sir Apropos of Nothing. He recently received a Grandmaster Scribe award from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers for his work, which includes Star Trek novels, Babylon 5 novels, and novelizations of films such as Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. He is also a prolific scripter of comic books, including Fallen Angel and Stephen King's Dark Tower.

  His new F&SF story (his first in more than a decade) doesn't deal with taxes. It's about the other certain thing in life. There might be only those two certainties, but our staff is pretty confident you're going to enjoy this tale.

  I.

  THE FIRST THING YOU NEED to understand about Bronsky is that he was a talker, which is probably why he kept talking about death.

  The second thing you need to understand is that he couldn't help himself. But we'll go back to the first thing first.

  There's nothing wrong with being a talker. In Bronsky's case, his tendency to talk and talk and talk had served him well in a formidable career as a salesman. In his life, Bronsky had bounded from one company to the next to the next, and at various times it was women's clothing, women's underwear, cosmetics, medical supplies, plumbing supplies, office supplies, books, auto parts, body parts (artificial), body parts (genuine; don't ask), and so on and so on. There was not a part of the country that Bronsky had not flown over or walked upon or driven across or ridden by bus or by rail.

  Bronsky's salesmanship was so comprehensive that he was able to sell himself as still being a salesman even as his years crept upward along with the mileage, both geographical and physical. Eventually the years caught up with him, and the companies told him as politely as they could that it was time to hang it up, and not even Bronsky's famed gift could talk the bosses out of it. So he gracefully, if noisily, eased himself into retirement.

  But he didn't stop talking.

  He talked about everything and anything that was on his mind. And when he did, he spoke with absolute honesty and candor. That is doubtless what contributed to his superb salesmanship. People typically don't trust salesmen because they figure that salesmen will say whatever is necessary to move the product, whether they believe it or not. Bronsky was psycholog| talkingacHth of the ically incapable of that. He sold things because he believed in them, and because he believed in them, they sold. There's something about the truth that is irresistible. The look in the eye, the tone in the voice. It's unmistakable; it's captivating. George Burns once said that ninety percent of acting is sincerity, and once you could fake that, you had it made. Bronsky didn't have to fake it. He told the truth. He had to.

  The reason for that, so the family said, lay during the time when he fought in the war (which one? Pick one. There's always one). He took a bullet to the head and the doctors removed it (the bullet, not the head), and it was pretty much touch and go for a while. But he recovered, and at first there didn't seem to be any brain damage to young Bronsky. (He was always addressed by his surname. He claimed to have been called Bronsky since he was six months old. He had a first name, but it had atrophied from lack of use.)

  But then Bronsky slowly began to discover that whatever part of a person's brain it is that screens out the things he shouldn't be talking about... wasn't there anymore. He talked with relentless earnestness about all the things you shouldn't talk about. Politics, religion, whether that dress makes you look too fat, anything and everything, nothing was off-limits for Bronsky, especially if someone asked him. He was incapable of dissembling. This was something of a trial for his young wife, who was just so happy to have him back alive that she resolved to live with it and learned to avoid certain questions or, if at all possible, change the subject to something less inflammatory. She salvaged more than one dinner party that way.

  Time passed, and Bronsky didn't change, aside from getting older, which his wife was considerate enough to do as well. And as he reached the advanced point in his life where his dates with death commenced, it seemed—at least to his wife and daughter and to his friends, as few as there were—that the thing he talked about the most was his impending demise.

  Bronsky wasn't actually dying, per se. He had a lot of the things that could lead him to die. He had type 2 diabetes. He had high blood pressure. He had an extra thirty or so pounds that he was carrying around his gut, the type that didn't go away no matter how much you exercised and ate right, which would have been a factor had Bronsky been eating right and exercising, except he did neither, so, you know, not so much. He had arthritis in the right knee and hip which made it hard for him to sleep and even harder to get out of bed in the morning. He took so many different types of colored pills in the morning that it was like having a bag of M&Ms for breakfast.

  But actually dying ? The kind of thing where the doctor looks at you gravely, shakes his head, and tells you that you have six months to get your affairs in order? No. Not as such, no.

  That didn't stop Bronsky from talking about it. Endlessly. Incessantly. Without cess did Bronsky talk about it.

  "You're not dying, Bronsky," his wife said. (Yes, she called him Bronsky, too. Only one person in the world didn't call him Bronsky.) "Stop talking about it. You're upsetting yourself."

  "You're not dying, Dad," his daughter said (she's the one person, obviously). "Stop talking about it. You're upsetting me."

  His daughter, Penny—grown-up, smart, an account executive for some company he couldn't remember, but it didn't make him any less proud—was the light of his life. He tried to explain: "I'm not talking about dying. I never say 'dying.'"

  "You've been getting all your affairs in order, consolidating bank accounts, making sure everything is paid off. I call you, I ask how you are, you say, 'I'm winding down.' You say, 'I'm not going to be here much longer.' What are you talking about, if not dying?"

  "That's how you always talk when you're planning to go on a trip," Bronsky said.

  "What trip? Mom didn't say anything about a trip."

  "Well...." for hundreds of years. c. She h Bronsky shifted uncomfortably in his chair, the phone pressed against his ear. Penny lived in Minnesota. He hated that she lived in Minnesota. He wished like hell she was with him. "It's... kind of a one way trip, without her—"

  " Dad! "

  "Look, honey, I'm just not afraid
of death, that's all," Bronsky said. "I've seen a lot, I've done a lot. I have no regrets. It'll be fine. Death is fine."

  There was a pitiful pause over the phone, and then, with a little tremble in her voice, his daughter said, "Don't you love me, Daddy?"

  "Certainly I do!" Outrage shook his body. "How can you think otherwise?"

  "Because I don't want to think about being without you, and Mom doesn't either. Are you that anxious to leave us?"

  "No! Of course not!"

  "Well, we don't want you to leave us, and we don't want to think about it happening, so stop talking about it and acting like it's no big deal."

  Except, to Bronsky, it wasn't. Obviously, though, that wasn't the case for his daughter or his wife. So, to appease them both, he promised he'd stop talking about it. And then he said to his daughter, his Penny: "By the way... can I interest you in a time-share?"

  She laughed. She always laughed, because it was a family joke, left over from when Bronsky had a job selling time-shares and he'd practice on Penny, who was six years old at the time. She'd looked at him blankly and then said, "Maybe later," because she didn't know what the hell he was talking about and wanted to get back to important things, like her stuffed toys that she was busy arranging into a zoo. It had become a running gag, and it was how he signed off most of their conversations. "Maybe later," she would say in the same patient tone she always used, and then remind him one more time not to talk so blithely about death. He would promise one more time.

  And he would mean it.

  But within a day or so, he'd go right back to talking about it, and he and his wife and/or daughter would tolerate it until they couldn't and they'd have the exact same discussion or some variation thereof.

  And so it went. And it didn't bother Bronsky because he knew that time was on his side and it would be settled sooner or later by death. Probably sooner.

  II.

  BRONSKY'S FIRST DATE with Death began one autumn morning when he discovered the note. A mouse was standing on his desk when he came into his study, upright on its little feet, holding the note in its mouth, standing so perfectly still that at first Bronsky thought it was some sort of tiny porcelain statue. When he noticed it was breathing, he started to reach for his shoe to hit the thing. Before he could do so, the mouse put the note down on his desk, bounded to the open window and out. Bronsky, who didn't remember leaving the window open, slammed it firmly and then picked up the paper. He was almost about to throw it out, assuming it to be some random scrap the creature had picked up somewhere, but then he noticed that his name was on it. As you know, your name tends to pop out at you if you hear it said in passing or it's written down somewhere, and so it was here. The note read quite simply:

  " BRONSKY: We have a date today. The park. The bench by the playground. 11:37 precisely." And it was signed " Death. "

  Curiously, Bronsky never once thought it might be a joke of some sort. Instead all he said was, "Morning or evening?"

  The letters "AM" were suddenly next to the 11:37 where they hadn't been before.

  "Uh-kay," said Bronsky, which seemed the reasonable thing to say under the circumstance.

  His wife had gone out shopping, which meant the car wasn't an option, but the park wasn't all that far a walk, despite the pain in Bronsky's knee and hip. He was a proud man, was Bronsky, and didn't use a cane. He preferred to limp. He felt it made him look more willing to bear up under the eternal series of miseries that life tended to toss at you. So limp to the parI pick up the corner of the net... I pick up the corner of the netacnostb hk he did. It was certainly a decent enough day for it.

  There was one bench near the playground, where children were actively bounding around in various play structures. They were all plastic, and the ground was covered with some sort of rubbery material to cushion the impact from a falling child.

  A gray cat with haunting yellow eyes hopped up onto the bench and looked at Bronsky quizzically as Bronsky harrumphed at the playground. "They coddle children nowadays," he said to the cat. "When I was a kid, the playground had this big log structure made of rotting wood. The ground was blacktop. We got splinters from what we crawled on, and if we fell off, we cracked our heads open good. You know what it taught us to do? Watch where we crawled and not fall off. Anyone who couldn't learn that, pbthh, " he blew a raspberry. "Better off with them taken out of the gene pool when they're children, 'cause they're not going to get any smarter. Instead now the dumb ones survive and grow up to make even more stupid ones, and that's why the government is the way it is."

  "What way is that?" said the cat.

  "Stupid," said Bronsky, before it dawned on him that the cat had spoken.

  The cat was grooming itself.

  "Death?" said Bronsky.

  Death licked its genitals and then nodded. "Yes."

  "This isn't exactly how I pictured you."

  "Let me guess: Cloak? Skeletal face? Black wings? A scythe?" said the cat. "I figured this form is going to make it easier for you to understand."

  Bronsky stared at Death. "Except I'm not sure I do understand. Is it my time?"

  "Yes," said Death.

  Bronsky had wondered whether all his talk about accepting death had been some sort of defense mechanism. That when the time actually did come, he would cry and beg and plead for one more month, one more day, one more minute of life. When he opened his mouth to respond, he truly wasn't sure what was going to come out.

  "Uh-kay," said Bronsky, which for some odd reason he found comforting. It was nice to know he had the consistency of his convictions. "So... are we doing it right here? Because that might upset the children. Maybe—"

  "Shut up. We're not doing it here," said Death. "We're not doing it at all."

  Bronsky was now completely lost. "I don't understand. You just said—"

  "I'm not taking you because you keep waiting for me to take you."

  "That does not clarify matters to the degree that you might have hoped," said Bronsky.

  People were walking past and not giving Bronsky or the cat the slightest glance. The fact that they weren't paying attention to Bronsky wasn't particularly strange. They probably just assumed he was speaking on a Bluetooth in his ear. Nobody was glancing at the cat either, though, which led Bronsky to believe that he was the only one who was hearing the cat speak.

  "I don't do well with expectations," said Death. He licked his paws delicately for a bit. "It is my nature to be contrary. Why else would good, sinless people die before they've experienced life, while evil people with tons of bad habits live to a ripe old age?"

  "'The Rum Tum Tugger is a terrible bore: When you let him in, then he wants to be out; He's always on the wrong side of every door.'"

  Death stopped licking himself and looked up at Bronsky with interest. "You know your T. S. Eliot."

  "I read," said Bronsky with a shrug. "Sitting around waiting for you, there isn't all that much else to occupy me."

  "There you go again."

  "I'm sorry," said Bronsky, genuinely apologetic. "Seriously? You can't take someone if they keep talking about accepting death?"

  "Not can't. Won't. As I said," and Death's tail twitched, "it's my nature."

  "Why not just take me in my sleep?"

  "Because your thoughts are still present when you sleep. Where do you think dreams come from? You carry your attitudes with you while you slumber."

  "People die in comas," Bronsky pointed out. "All the time."|up orTor

  "I know that. I invented comas. When you've slipped into a coma and you're there long enough, eventually you stop being you. That's when I step in."

  "What about suicides? They want you. They embrace you."

  "That's not me," said Death, and his voice filled with disgust. His body pulsed, his neck stretched, and he coughed up a hairball onto the bench. Where it struck, some paint sizzled and then chipped away. "That's a different Death. You wouldn't want to meet him ; trust me. He takes you places you wouldn't want to go."

/>   "Well... uh-kay, then," said Bronsky. "So... what do you want from me?"

  "Just stop talking about me and saying you're ready and winding down and all of that. It's putting me off and causing me to run behind schedule. That would be bad for everyone."

  "Bad as in the different Death bad?"

  "Not that bad. But pretty bad."

  Death glanced upward at a bird, a robin, that was twittering in its nest. Death licked its chops. The robin suddenly went stone stiff and toppled from its nest. Death caught it neatly in his jaws, hopped off the bench, and strolled away from Bronsky. A growling dog approached until Death glanced at it, and then the dog turned tail and ran.

  "Uh-kay," said Bronsky. He swore to himself that he would heed Death's command and stop talking about him. If nothing else, his wife and daughter would be grateful. Not a word would he say. Nothing.

  III.

  MRS. BRONSKY STARED DOWN the dinner table at him. "You had a date with Death?"

  Bronsky hadn't intended to tell her. It had just slipped out somewhere between the salad and the meat loaf. He had tried to keep it to himself, he really had, but as mentioned earlier, he just wasn't terribly good at not talking about things.

  "Yes," said Bronsky.

  "And what does that mean, exactly? You went to a candlelit dinner? A show? Did you have sex with Death?" She didn't sound upset, which actually disturbed Bronsky a bit. Instead she just sounded curious.

  "Maybe 'date' is the wrong word. It was more like a meeting." He then, as quickly as he could, told his wife everything that had transpired that morning. Even as he did, he mentally scolded himself because this was exactly what he wasn't supposed to be doing, talking about the whole thing. But he couldn't help himself. He was never able to help himself. The old salesmanship instincts kicked in and he had to try and sell her on the idea that everything he was saying was one hundred percent genuine.