Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  If you see this happening and are tempted to interfere on behalf of the cicada I suggest that you think again. This species of wasp is said to have the most painful sting of any insect—and that refers to its effect on a human, a hundred pounds or more in weight. What it must feel like to a tiny cicada is beyond our power to imagine.

  But I couldn’t help trying.

  Millennium

  PORTENTS ARE TRICKY things. You have to know how to look for them.

  I saw the last one as soon as I came out of my house after morning prayers. I went across to where my neighbor, Newberry, was digging his fool garden.

  “See that?”

  He peered in the wrong direction.

  “Nope.”

  “Not there. There. The sun—it has a ring around it. Take a look.”

  “Without sunglasses? You crazy?” But he stared anyway, shielding his eyes with his hand. He shook his head. “Can’t see a thing. Should I?”

  “You should. This is the last day of December, 1999. The last day of the last week of the last year before Judgment Day. Are you ready for that, Newberry?”

  He didn’t answer. Just shook his head and went back to digging up parsnips, or whatever them white carrot things are. He was a gardening maniac.

  At least his hobby was an innocent one. Newberry and I were bachelors, and he might go to Heaven. But the woman in the house the other side of his wouldn’t. She was married. Her husband worked weekends. There was a delivery truck in Maggie Milner’s drive, and no doubt what was being delivered. It was the same every Saturday. One more day, though, and Maggie would be roasting in Hell with a white-hot you-know-what.

  Serve her right.

  And Joe Sotter on the other side of her. He was out in his yard, too, waiting for his dog to sniff its way all along the fence. Joe must have tipped the scale at over five-fifty. He had a triple-decker sandwich in one hand, his chins were covered with grease, and his jaws never stopped moving. It would take a year of rendering on Lucifer’s griddle just to bring him to normal size.

  I went back indoors. The thing that I couldn’t understand was that last Sunday they’d all been in church—the same church as me. But not one of them seemed to realize that if they didn’t shape up quick, in another week the Millennium would arrive and it would be too late. Then they’d all be writhing and wriggling for eternity on the tines of the Devil’s Fork.

  And serve them right. I went to my basement and set to work again. I was almost finished.

  What I was doing was a bit different, but I’d checked and checked and it wasn’t forbidden by any Scripture. A man couldn’t survive Judgment Day, but there was nothing to say he couldn’t last just long enough to take a peek around after the final trump sounded. And Charbonneau, the little faggy Frenchman at the factory, swore that Neutrite, the material he had made in his lab, could stand anything: heat and pressures that were out of this world.

  Well, I was going to put that statement to the test—not that he would be around to know the result. No doubt where he was going, with his earring and perfume and curled hair. Serve him right.

  It took the rest of the day to put the finishing touches on the big coffin I had built from the Neutrite smuggled home from the factory.

  Finally…

  Eleven o’clock. One hour to go to the Millennium. I climb in the coffin and fix the seal. Against all the odds, I fall into a sound sleep.

  Morning. Judgment Day. And the world is still here.

  Or some of it. I climb up out of the basement, and my house is sheared off at the foundations. So is Newberry’s, next door, and Maggie Milner’s, and Joe Sotter’s, and on down the row. Gone, all of them. Sotter’s dog is still there, though, sniffing around the flat, fenceless yard.

  And along the empty street, ten doors down as it used to be, one house still stands complete and untouched.

  My legs don’t want to move, but I manage to walk to it. Unbelievably, I see a man standing in the open doorway.

  But I am the last man in the world. He can’t exist.

  “What are you doing here?” I wonder if I am addressing an angel.

  He gives me that polite-but-insolent look you get from foreigners.

  “Excuse me?” he says. His eyes stray back down the street. Now I can see that other isolated houses are still standing. “Excuse me, sir,” he says again, “but can you please explain to me what has happened?”

  Arab, from his voice. I had been right.

  “The end of the world, boy, that’s what’s happened. Exactly as I expected. Yesterday was the last day. Judgment Day. The final day, in the final month, in the final year of the millennium. December 31st, 1999.”

  He shakes his head. “With all respect, sir, that is not so.”

  “Huh? What’s not so?”

  “This is not the millennium.”

  “It sure is.”

  “No, sir. Not for me. Like all good Moslems, I date events from the flight of Mohammed from Mecca. According to your calendar, that took place in your year 622. So according to my calendar, we are now in the year 1378.”

  1378! I take another glance down the street. Now I can identify the few houses that still stand. There’s where that fat Chinese lived, the one who ran the fast food store. There’s the Jew’s house, the one who worked at the bank. And that’s the home of the skinny little Indian from the dry cleaner’s.

  They are coming out of their scattered houses, one by one, staring up and down the near-empty road. And they are coming this way, godless heathens all who measure the passage of the years with their nonsensical non-Christian calendars.

  The Christian Millennium.

  Left behind, Chinese, Egyptians, Japanese, Algerians, Burmese, Pakistanis, Indians, Jews. Millions and billions of them, crawling all over the world.

  And me.

  It is going to be a bad day. A bad year, a bad forever.

  What a fool to think I might postpone Judgment Day. This is Hell, and I am in it.

  Afterword to “Millennium”

  According to Sheffield’s Law, stories of less than 2,000 words are excused Afterwords.

  Fifteen-Love on the Dead Man’s Chest

  “EVERYTHING,” WALDO SAID morosely, “is relative.”

  He slumped low in his office chair, a man bearing the weight of the whole world.

  I nodded in mute sympathy. He was right, and there was little that I could do to console him.

  “It’s ridiculous,” he added. “I mean, it’s not as though I was dead.”

  I could only nod again and reflect, not for the first time, that there ought to be a collective noun to describe the group of relatives who, unseen and unheard from since early childhood, rush in after a family death to attend the reading of the will and to fight over the best bits of furniture. A concupiscence of nephews? A grab of grandsons? A covet of cousins?

  Except that in Waldo’s case, none of these applied. He was merely the victim of circumstance. As he rightly remarked, he was not dead, and nothing but pure coincidence had decreed that, in the same month of the same year, a major tennis tournament and the solar system’s largest morticians’ convention would be held in Luna City. And long before that, nothing but blind fate had persuaded his maternal aunts, Ruth and Ruby, to choose for their soulmates a wealthy tennis fanatic, Pharaoh Potter, and a leading undertaker, Mortimer C. Wilberforce.

  The four had moved far away, to Mars in the case of Pharaoh and Ruth, to the Venus Domes for Mortimer and Ruby. But now they were back. Pharaoh, after many years of talking about winning a tennis tournament, had actually entered as a player in the Luna Senior Doubles; and Mortimer C., still obliged to work for a living, was enrolled in a Do-It-Yourself embalming course on the other side of the city, while also taking in the convention, plus the occasional funeral, for entertainment.

  Simple pleasures, you might say. The bad news was that both wives and husbands were staying with Waldo; and by their attitude the four members of the Potter and Wilberforce party were making
him most unhappy. As he complained to me, they pushed him around all the time. He didn’t know how to argue with them.

  It’s a baffling thing. You have one man who spends his whole life hitting a little ball so some other half-wit can hit it back to him, and another who paints up dead bodies so they’ll look nice and healthy when they’re burned or buried. You have their two wives, who do nothing at all. Yet all of them look down on Waldo, because he is a lawyer.

  And it’s not as though Waldo had plenty of time to entertain his odious relatives. Quite the opposite. He and I, after several slow months, had just become busy with what could well be the biggest case of our careers.

  It had begun with no more than a rumor. There are certain words that will start one, anytime or anywhere that they are whispered or even breathed.

  Try this word: immortality.

  But to Waldo and me it had been no more than a rumor. In Luna City rumors are as common as cockroaches, and about as fast-moving.

  All that had changed, though, with the late night arrival of Imre Munsen at the offices of Burmeister and Carver, Attorneys-at-Law.

  Imre Munsen, Special Investigator for the United Space Federation; Imre Munsen, my nemesis, convinced despite much evidence to the contrary that I was, like him, a starry-eyed, patriotic hero with nerves of steel. Imre Munsen, with the authority to force anyone to do anything that he asked.

  Imre Munsen, idiot. I never wanted to see him again. But there he was, sitting in Waldo’s favorite chair and shaking his rugged-jawed head at us.

  “Perhaps not a mere rumor, gentlemen. There may be a lot more to it than that. Here’s what we know, for certain sure. Carlo Moolman flew to Luna last week, from Oberon. He claimed, and he wasn’t bashful about it, that an inventor out there had discovered an ‘immortality serum.’ Moolman said he actually had a sample with him, a little phial of liquid. He didn’t claim it would let a person live forever, but he did insist that it would increase your life expectancy to a thousand years. He wanted to sell shares in its development and marketing. What does that suggest to you?”

  Waldo and I exchanged glances.

  “A confidence trickster,” Waldo said firmly. “Looking for suckers. Everybody knows there’s no capital available on Oberon.”

  “True.” Munsen leaned forward, and gave us his patented steely-eyed glare. “And Carlo Moolman does happen to have a criminal record. But suppose this time it’s different. Suppose this time he’s telling the truth?”

  “I wouldn’t put any money on it if I were you,” I said.

  “Maybe not. But the USF has to take the possibility seriously. Can you imagine what an immortality serum would do to the solar system?”

  Waldo suddenly took on a mournful air. I think he was imagining Ruth, Ruby, Pharaoh, and Mortimer staying with him forever.

  “I don’t understand this,” I said. “Carlo Moolman came to Luna, and presumably, since you didn’t say he left, he’s still here. Why not take him in for direct questioning? If it comes to that, why not go to Oberon and question the inventor of the serum?”

  “Excellent thinking, Mr. Carver.” Munsen favored me with a flash of white teeth. “We can’t do that, for two very good reasons. The inventor is dead; and so is Carlo Moolman.”

  It was not difficult to spot a certain weakness in Imre’s argument. “Two men with an immortality serum,” I began, “and both are dead—”

  “But not of natural causes, Mr. Carver. I don’t know about the fellow back on Oberon, but I saw Moolman’s body. Somebody blew a hole in his belly, big enough to put your whole head through.”

  A less appealing course of action was difficult to imagine. I suggested as much.

  “And of course,” Munsen went on, as though he had not heard me, “there was no sign of the immortality serum on his body.”

  “Might he have drunk it himself, or hidden it somewhere on or in his body?”

  “Not according to the autopsy. No.” Munsen stood up and began to pace around the office. “I think that if it existed at all, he hid it. But where? There must be a clue, somewhere. We’re looking, you can be sure of that. Meanwhile, his funeral is the day after tomorrow. And of course, his enemies may attend—the people who killed him. They’re as keen to get their hands on the serum as we are. It’s important for us to know what they are up to.”

  “So you and your men will be there,” I said slowly. I didn’t know what was doing it, but I felt an uneasy creepy sensation up my back, as though a Hidalgan centipede was ascending under my shirt.

  “Me and my crew can’t do that.” Munsen shook his head firmly. “We’re too well known; we’d be recognized in a minute. Anyway, we’d have to more or less force our way in. What we need is someone who can be invited to the funeral in a natural way. Someone like Mr. Burmeister—whose uncle, as I understand it, is a big wheel in mortician circles and could get him invited into almost anything connected with funerals.”

  I felt a giddy sense of relief. The Angel of Death, dive-bombing in on me, had suddenly veered aside and picked the next man in line.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Of course not,” said Waldo.

  “Actually, Mr. Burmeister is correct,” Munsen agreed. “He won’t quite do. He is—with all due respect, Mr. Burmeister—rather too conspicuous because of his size. We need someone less noticeable, someone who can keep a low profile, blend into the background. Someone like—”

  “I don’t know Uncle Mortimer. I’d never get invited to the funeral.”

  “Mr. Burmeister could invite you to dinner at his home.”

  “I don’t have the right clothes for a funeral.”

  “They will be provided. Black top hat, dark cutaway coat, black polished shoes, everything.”

  “And if you just let Uncle Mort talk corpses to you for an hour or so, Henry,” Waldo said cheerfully, “he’ll be so tickled he’ll get you invited to any funeral on the Moon. He’s been trying to drag me to one for days. What a pity, as Mr. Munsen says, that I’m too conspicuous.” Waldo stared down happily at his ample belly, and hugged his fat to him like a protective shield.

  I wondered, in a hopeless sort of way, how much fat a human being could put on in a couple of days. Not enough, I felt sure, to save me.

  Waldo had described the family dinners to me, but I had discounted much of what he said. Having seen Waldo’s own prowess with a knife and fork, I deemed it remotely improbable that anyone at a meal table could deprive him of his rightful share of sustenance.

  That, of course, was before I met the Potter and Wilberforce wives.

  I arrived a few minutes late. Waldo was busy in the kitchen, and at my first sight of his living room when I entered, it seemed totally filled with aunts. A second look revealed just one massive pair, trampling and trumpeting like angry mastodons over the mangled ruins of trays of hors d’oeuvres.

  Ruth and Ruby were a year apart in age, and perhaps two kilos apart in bulk. There was less difference between them than the mass of any one of their many chins.

  I used to blame Waldo for being fat, but after I saw his aunts I vowed never to accuse him again. With such genes, he didn’t stand a chance. In fact, it was a tribute to the size of Ruby and Ruth that Pharaoh Potter was not himself a noticeable landmark. He was a big-framed man, well run to seed now but still possessing plenty of muscle on arms like a gorilla. He shook my hand, in a grip that mashed my bones together.

  “Play any tennis?” he said.

  “Haven’t for a while. I used to.” It seemed the safest answer: express interest, but don’t let yourself get dragged into any possibility of playing. I did not know it at the time, but my reply exhibited an uncanny prescience. “I never was much good,” I added.

  “Because you’re little and weedy,” Pharaoh replied. “A person needs some weight to make decent tennis shots.” He went off to sit in the corner with his head bowed. He was a man apparently in the grip of some great sorrow.

  I turned to Mortimer C. Wilberforce, just as Wal
do called us through for dinner. Mort was the odd man out in the group, a function I suppose of his job. It’s probably a sort of professional requirement among morticians, that if you can’t actually be a corpse, you ought to look as much like one as you can. Mortimer did his best. If he had been the right height for his weight, he would have been about four-foot-two. As it was he was six-five, and pale as a well-blanched stalk of celery.

  I suppose he ate, but in this he was rather like a government official working. No matter how long and hard you looked, you would never see it happen.

  From my point of view, his behavior at the dinner table had one great disadvantage. I wanted to talk to him, but like a mute at a funeral he had no conversation and no apparent interest in anything. He seemed half-asleep. It was left to the others, and Pharaoh in particular, to make the running in the talk department.

  Which he certainly did. According to Waldo the dinner table conversation usually consisted of a catalog of deficiencies, Waldo’s personal ones and that of the free food that he was providing. Tonight, however, another concern predominated.

  Pharaoh Potter’s tennis partner had become disabled, and would be unable to play the next day. Pharaoh seemed to regard this as an Act of God, although he admitted that the other’s injury had occurred when Pharaoh knocked him flat and ran right over him.

  “It was actually his own fault,” Pharaoh explained. “He was poaching. The ball was clearly in my territory on the court. He should never have been there at all.”

  “But now, my love,” said Aunt Ruth, “you have a problem. You need a partner.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Pharaoh glanced along the table. I could see him dismissing me.