by Jeff Carlson
Somehow he shook all the gases and carbon whatever out of the atmosphere.
At the same time, he was also talking up a storm. Albert was in a unique position to change things. People loved or feared him, but he always had everyone's attention.
Because he talked with everyone, he knew everything about those few who hid from him. He personally visited the fat cats who'd been sitting on clean technology because their fortunes came from dirty energy. He visited them again and again with the eyes of global television staring over his shoulder. "You've already got more money than you know what to do with," he said. It was practically that simple. Albert started things going and the new economies proved stronger than the old. Hydro-what's-it engines aren't any faster than oil-driven, but they don't pollute, which saved billions of dollars in health and clean-up costs. That didn't happen overnight, but the benefits were as obvious and dizzying as a stack of presents under a Christmas tree.
He visited warlords and dictators, too, especially the Chinese leaders, probably because they controlled so much land and so many people that he couldn't avoid their policies for more than a day at a time. Albert even brought several of these hard men with him around the globe, pushing them in heavy-duty wheelchairs he'd had designed for exactly this purpose. We don't know what they talked about, but he showed them a borderless world. He showed them their real size.
Meanwhile the weather in Oklahoma had become like I remembered it as a boy. It was steady and predictable. We sent our crop surpluses to places where they couldn't shake their trouble, countries where civil war or famine had held sway for generations.
There were some things he couldn't fix. Africa had reached the peak of its AIDS plague and something like seven out of every ten people were dying or seriously ill. Murderers and rapists still walked among us. Several endangered species had dwindled to such small numbers that they were doomed regardless of any new rescue effort, no matter how well funded or stocked with volunteers.
None of that ruined the sense of hope and cooperation sweeping the planet. Some people said he was an incarnation of Earth itself sent to scare us into taking responsibility before it was too late, but Albert didn't want to be worshipped. He just wanted to stop seeing so much pain.
He hadn't quite turned eleven yet when he took on that crazy bastard up north.
#
Empathy and trust are not universal traits. Albert taught us that we were poorer because of it. He taught us to pity, but he also believed in taking action.
That madman in Korea had ruled his miserable half-frozen hunk of land for twenty years, building nukes, selling nukes, starving his own people so he could put more money into the walls and guns that kept them in and everyone else out.
Albert attempted to meet with this man for years but was rebuffed. He sent messages and was met with silence. At last he issued commands. More silence.
He stopped the world. Albert put that bastard's territory in eternal darkness even as he managed to bring sunshine to neighboring countries on a regular basis. It must have felt like God himself cursed them.
Weeks passed and our son exhausted himself, only catnapping, taking a bite or two when folks pleaded with him. It seemed to be working. The TV and the net were abuzz with praise from the leaders of the world, issuing the madman terms, promising relief to his beleaguered people. But that sick bastard had hunkered down in his luxurious shelters more than once before. He must have been used to the dark. I think it was pride that drove him to such extremes.
They call it ABC war: atomic, biological, chemical. The missiles were duds that got no further than Hawaii and often went wide or fell short into Japan, but the madman's agents had spread worldwide with three low-grade fission devices and more vials and test tubes than anyone could count.
Albert tried to keep the airborne diseases from spreading. He ran for days, stumbling, cutting his leg on the Himalayas, twisting an ankle in the Amazon delta.
It just wasn't enough.
Three days of massive retaliation from the U.S. and Britain demanded even more effort from our son or else another hundred million souls might have been killed by fallout.
Revenge was no consolation to Albert or to the billions of wounded survivors. He was stoned in the Philippines and shot at twice in New York, two areas that had taken the brunt of it. Albert renounced his political agenda and every good work he'd done in a terrified, sobbing message that was almost lost in the chorus of outrage.
He retreated to the oceans and the cold night-side of the planet. He denied himself sunshine and human companionship for two years, running whenever planes and ships came after him. There were sightings during this self-exile, some of which must have been real. Many more were surely hoaxes and lies like that woman in South Dakota and those German cults. He wouldn't have visited landlocked areas.
I still have nightmares for my son. The loneliness he must have experienced isn't something I can put into words.
Albert snuck across the narrowest stretches of Central America, picked his way through the densely laid islands of Malaysia and sprinted across Africa, but the chance of running into people on that broad continent was frequently too much for him. Most days the world shifted wildly as he ran south around Africa's horn.
What he ate, we don't know. Fish, I guess. Bugs and fruit. He needed fresh water, too, like any human being. Maybe he conjured it up from the sea somehow. I think too often he did without.
Hiding for seven hundred days would have been a sad existence for any boy, but it must have been a form of death for someone whose only home had been the crowd. Finally he tried to come back. He was smart enough to pull off the trick of resurrection, but I guess we were too dumb to let him.
#
Many people had yet to lose hold of their grieving. A hundred million lives was a heavy price to pay to get some sense knocked into us, but in a lot of ways the world was much improved. The big war had put a stop to border conflicts and most ethnic strife. Africa was still suffering its AIDS die-off, and China wasn't having a smooth time with its new Cultural Revolution, but we had clean industry and transportation. The global economy was roaring like crazy. There were also quite a few less people to share this wealth, although we were well into a worldwide baby boom.
Even Margie and me were trying. At least she thought we were. I'd had myself a vasectomy years before, paying thirty times the regular fee to buy the doctor's silence.
Margie was doing better. Her TVs and computers weren't exactly dusty but now she only spent an hour or two following her dramas. After the war, she'd found the chance to mother someone at last. We spent our fortune on an orphanage/soup kitchen and she became a part of more lives than I could count. Somehow she always knew their first names. She often came home humming.
I was doing better, too. I had a job again, good, hard, paying work at a dairy farm on top of helping out around the soup kitchen. The labor shortage was so bad there was even room for Albert's father. The cows didn't care who I was and I pulled overtime without complaining. It even got to point where my boss would offer me a beer at the end of the day and we'd talk some, no big questions or personal stuff, though he must have been tempted. I was an ordinary joe again and I liked that just fine.
Everything changed when Albert came ashore near Washington.
It's important to know why Margie acted the way she did. The reporters and the crazies ate up our small lives again. Having everything taken from her a second time, having her new life destroyed — they shoved her right off the fine edge she'd been walking. Suddenly we were right back in our cage. She couldn't call her friends because our lines were jammed. Even her TV shows were canceled for Albert Albert Albert. There was nothing to do but worry. A body can only sleep so many hours and it was impossible go about any kind of business without fighting off fifty shouting maniacs. On the third day she tried baking pies but burst into tears when she spilled a cup of sugar. I put my arms around her and kissed her neck, but she pushed me away like she never w
anted to be touched again. She retreated to her couch and stayed there playing old movies.
Albert was wicked pale on TV, taller and skinnier now. He was practically wasted away — but it wasn't food that brought him back.
He begged for an audience with the President as he was swarmed by passersby. A few hugged him, rejoicing that their messiah had returned. Others pelted him with soda bottles and hunks of asphalt. Amateur video shows him bleeding from his head but never using his awesome powers to knock down the people assaulting him.
He was small for a thirteen-year-old, stunted by malnutrition. He was obviously sick, too, with spots of fever burning through that fish-pale skin. How sick, nobody knew.
The President granted Albert's request. I don't suppose it matters that the boy's attitude was submissive or that he looked so fragile and lost. You can't say no to someone who's stopped the sun dead overhead.
Albert had an idea how he could make amends.
#
Not every desert can bloom. Albert explained it like this: Energy flows in patterns rather than existing as a blanket. Snow and sand, grassland and jungle, all of these things balance each other, but he thought he could improve on nature's work and turn every inch of the planet into a garden. The politicians agreed. No doubt they hoped to take credit for it.
He tried. Oh, how he tried, leaping valleys, fighting swamps, always running and running and running. He didn't have anything else, you see, and his spectacular plan did seem to be slowly coming true. Maintaining this delicate new balance would have become his life's work.
Unfortunately he'd picked up the HIV virus somewhere and he had scurvy and other vitamin deficiencies. Worse, people kicked at him or threw things as he passed. It was like some awful game of global whipping boy. He was a reminder of the war, an easy scapegoat, plus there were plenty of folks who'd always said he was evil for not fitting into their small religions.
Albert ran and bled and sweated and ran more until the pneumonia hit.
He was as ugly as a rabid stray when he came home for the last time. I've seen the replays now of Margie and me peeking out as he approached. I wish we hadn't looked so scared.
At first I didn't even think it was him because he'd stopped. I mean he was walking — stumbling, really — but other than that he was motionless. The world wasn't turning under his feet anymore. He was that far gone.
"Mother," he whispered and Margie screamed, a long high shriek like a horse would make if it broke all four legs. She ran back inside. After that, whatever bit of hope was left in him seemed to fade.
I did my best to say the right things, holding Albert as he died. It was important to him to share everything he'd seen and felt. His words weren't so much a confession as a confiding.
All he'd ever wanted was to be one of us.
If we're lucky, the world will never see anything like him again. We didn't deserve him. We never knew what to do with Albert, and some debts are so great you can only reject what's been given to you.
END
Afterword
"Damned" may be the only fantasy story I ever write. I enjoy a good sword-and-sorcery, but most of them are too long for me. That shouldn't surprise anyone. My own writing tends to be minimalist. I like it lean and mean, and I don't always have the patience for a 750-page doorstopper. Girth is intrinsic to the subgenre. The fans expect and even demand it, and that's fine, but I also have a problem with magic.
Magic is slippery. Most of the time, to me, it seems like the writer is simply imposing whatever powers or limitations work best at the moment, only to change the rules again. There's no consistency, and I'm too high-strung to go with that, man!
When I do read fantasy, I like fantasy-with-sf-guts such as Tim Power's The Anubis Gates, Ken Grimwood's Replay, or the classic series The Gandalara Cycle by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron.
Like "Pressure," "Damned" originated from a dream. In my sleep, I was the one trotting around the globe, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, dodging through alleyways, ducking power lines and tree branches and freeways... and yet I wasn't only trying to keep up with Earth's revolution so I wasn't carried helplessly away. At the same time, I was also spinning the world beneath my feet.
Dream logic is illogical, but the image stayed with me. A speck-sized human being rolling the planet with each step? I knew I had to do something with it. And how could that person be anything but a messiah?
From there, it was easy to give Albert his blue-collar parents — my Joseph and Mary.
What wasn't so easy was watching him die.
MEME
There is no such thing as a part time job that is both meaningful and well paid. Most aren't either. Including his stints as a gas jockey during high school, Alan Lilly has held nineteen positions in at least seven separate fields, so his expectations are as low as mud. Driver, pressman, salesman, waiter, phone rep, cashier — he rarely stays more than twelve months and several times he's quit after one shift.
He is not a slacker, thief or trouble-maker. He's a musician. He has better things to do.
Processing overflow and night-drops at FastFoto offered neither purpose nor money. What it did provide was the opportunity to listen to his iPod and think, alone, while earning enough to cover his rent. He bought groceries and beer with the money he made off his music, all themes for corporate presentation videos and CD-ROMs so far, at no better than three hundred dollars a shot, but Alan believes that cream inevitably rises to the top and that he is cream. He's only thirty-two.
The 100 prints wouldn't normally have caught his eye. Most people who use cheap film take shots of their friends standing in a row and smiling. The rest snap pictures of their cats or cars.
These photographs are of a computer print-out marked only in one narrow vertical column.
Two days ago, Alan underbid an iGames.net spec assignment and he's spent every spare moment since then reworking Mozart into heavy metal for their new Blammer sequel. Typical crap, not much of a challenge. But the IVS-550 photo processor is an incredibly diligent percussionist, and the endless four-four beat of its print stacker disrupts his concentration again and again. He's staring at the ceiling when the glare of white turns his head. Even black-and-white photos aren't typically so bleak. He strides over, drumming his pen against his leg, to make certain the 550 is operating correctly.
It is. The entire roll of thirty-six prints is close-up after close-up of the strange text.
Alan thinks it looks like music.
#
The nudie pictures on the next roll do not distract him as he stands right there at the processor, wondering over handfuls of the unusual shots. For the first few nights on the job, he considered skin shots a perk, but it's a rare set of jugs that hold his attention now. Most people are too fat or pale or hairy, and everyone seems to use the same four poses.
Every job has its unique benefits and tortures, of course — often they are one and the same.
Working phones in the Classified Ads department, it was the idiots who wanted to complain about the delivery boy. Why are you calling me? Alan asked them, at first with a smile, at last with deadly boredom. Running a cash register at 7-Eleven and the bus station, it was the lonely folks who stayed to chat, sometimes even through a wall of security glass. At first he thought he found gems of wisdom in their late-night ramblings. At last he realized it was all desperate clichés.
Alan is not a people person. Human beings are mean and stupid and greedy too much of the time. He prefers the clean evocative world of music. All that Alan has ever wanted is to own and be owned by that beauty, to wield the magic.
Plus it would be nice to be neck deep in money and chicks.
Or even ankle deep. It wouldn't take much to free him from the crappy jobs that are wasting half of his life — one big break, one hit, one catchy original combination of sound.
#
The bizarre text in the photographs consists of just two spidery shapes, one stout, the other slim, but the
y're arranged in no less than seven angles as well as three left-middle-right positions. Like chords. Sharp, normal, flat.
But if the text is music, it's composed in two-five time as best he can tell, which is almost meaningless.
Is it an opera score? It's definitely the length of a mega-ballad, running thirty-plus pages, although at least two of those are repetitions. A chorus. The bass line is sporadic but Alan's starting to hear it in his head, which makes up for the lack.
Why is it in code? And given that it must be stored on a computer, why take pictures rather than printing out more copies?
The illogic of it is compelling and Alan shuts down the IVS-550 so its chatter won't distract him as he sketches out the beginnings of a translation. He knows he'll fall behind and hear about it from his boss if he leaves the processor off for more than a few minutes, but so what?
#
By his count, he's quit five times as often as he's been fired. When the hourly wage is just a buck or three over minimum, there's always something better.
His last girlfriend complained that he had the attention-span of a gerbil, and Alan agreed at least that each new job hunt was tedious and painful, but he's learned that it's important to stay positive in order to stay productive. When he starts worrying (when he's forced to borrow money from his folks), he finds that his music abandons him, which only deepens his depression — a wicked feedback cycle.
Alan tries to take pride in his checkered resume. It's proof that he's not just a cog in the nine-to-five machine, that he's using it rather than being used.
