Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  The woman stumbled out of the elevator car, looked blankly around, and then walked uncertainly back toward where the bunks were hanging, and Sullivan paused as if to stop her or warn her; but Elizalde grabbed his arm and pulled him into the car.

  “Tumble a bunch of old books together,” she said. “Books so old and fragile that nobody can read them anymore. The pages will break off and get mixed up. Does it matter?”

  Sullivan was sweating as he stepped into the car, crowding the wall to make room for Elizalde and Kootie. These limitless dim lower decks, with all their forgotten alcoves and doors and passageways, were suddenly potent, and darkly inviting, and he pushed the up button hard. “Let’s go all the way to the top,” he said hoarsely.

  “Amen,” said Elizalde.

  J. Francis Strube had found a carpeted hallway and he had started running downhill along it, past silent doors recessed in the wood-paneled walls. The hallway curved up ahead of him to disappear behind the gentle bulge of the glossy ivory ceiling, as if he were sprinting around the perimeter ring of a very elegant space station, and he had assured himself that somewhere between here and the eventual bow he must run across someone who could help him.

  But a grinding roar had started up under the carpet and the whole ship had moved slightly, as if flexing itself, and he had lost his footing and fallen headlong; his hands had still been cuffed behind him, and though he had managed to take the first hard impact on his shoulder, his chin and cheekbone had bounced solidly off the carpeted floor.

  Now he was up again, and walking, but he had to step carefully. Perhaps it was some Coriolis effect that made walking so difficult; he had to plant his feet flat, with the toes pointed outward, to keep from rolling against the close walls.

  Over the droning vibration from below the deck he could presently hear children laughing, and when he came to a gleaming wooden staircase he saw a little girl with blond braids come flying down the banister; she rebounded from the floor and the wall like a big beach ball, and her long white dress spread out in an air-filled bell to let her sink gently to the carpeted landing.

  Another girl came zooming down right behind her to do the same trick, and a third simply spun swan-diving down through the vertical space of the stairwell, graceful as a leaf.

  “Up, up!” cried girl voices from the landing above, and when Strube stepped forward to tilt his head back and peer in that direction, he saw three more blond little girls stamping their feet with impatience.

  All six of the girls seemed to be identical—sextuplets?—and to be about seven years old. How could they be doing these impossible acrobatics? They were a little higher up than he was—was the gravity weaker up in that ring? When he counted them all again, he got seven; then five; then eight.

  “Girls,” he said dizzily; but the three or four on his level were holding hands and dancing in a ring, chanting, “When the sky began to roar, ’twas like a lion at the door!” and the three or four above went on calling, “Up, up!”

  “Girls!” he said, more loudly.

  The several who had been dancing dropped their hands now and stared at him wide-eyed. “He can see us!” said one to another.

  Strube was dizzy. His neck was wet, and he couldn’t shake the notion that it was wet with blood rather than sweat, but with his hands cuffed behind him he couldn’t reach up to find out.

  “Of course I can see you,” he said. “Listen to me. I need to find a grownup. Where’s your mother?”

  “We don’t think we have a mother,” said one of the girls in front of him. “Where is your mother, please?”

  This was getting him nowhere. “What are your names?”

  One of the girls at the landing above called down, “We’re each named Kelley. We all became friends because of that, and because we couldn’t sleep, even though it was pitch dark.”

  “In most gardens,” spoke up a girl in front of Strube, “they make the beds too soft, so the flowers are always asleep.”

  “We came from a hard, noisy garden,” put in one who was sliding slowly down the banister. “We’ve got to go up,” she told her companions. “If there isn’t the sun, there’ll be the moon.”

  “Who is taking care of you?” Strube insisted. “Who did you come here with?”

  “We were thrown out of a dark place,” said one of the girls above. The four or five below were climbing the stairs now with graceful spinning hops. “Again,” put in another.

  At least they seem to be well cared for, Strube thought. Then he looked more closely at a couple of them and noticed their pallor and their sunken cheeks, and he saw that their dresses were made of some coarsely woven white stuff that looked like matted cobwebs.

  “Where do you live?” asked Strube, speaking more shrilly than he had meant to. His heart was pounding and his breath was fast and shallow; he realized that he was frightened, though not of these girls, directly.

  “We live in Hell,” one of the Kelleys told him in a matter-of-fact tone. “But we’re climbing out,” one of her companions added.

  Strube wasn’t able to think clearly, and he knew it was because of the bang his head had taken against the floor back up the hallway. His stomach felt inverted; he would have to find a men’s room soon and throw up. But he felt that he couldn’t leave these defenseless, demented children down here in these roaring, flexing catacombs.

  “I’ll lead you out of here,” he said, stepping up the stairs after them. He had to hunch his left shoulder up and stretch his right arm to hold on to the banister, for the ship was rolling ponderously. “We’ve all got to get out of here.”

  The girls looked down at him doubtfully from the landing. One of them said, “Would you know the sun, or the moon, if you saw either of them?”

  Jesus, thought Strube. “Yes. Definitely.”

  “What if it’s just another painted canvas?” one of the girls asked.

  “I’ll tear it down,” Strube said desperately. “The real one’ll be up there, trust me.”

  “Come on, then,” a Kelley told him, and the girls whirled and leaped around him as he climbed on up the stairs. The gravity did seem to be weaker as one ascended higher, and he had to restrain himself from dancing with them.

  A lift attendant had abruptly appeared in the elevator, cramping things terribly. He was an elderly man in a white shirt and black tie, and in a fretful English accent he demanded to know what class of accommodations Sullivan and Kootie and Elizalde had booked.

  Sullivan glanced bewilderedly at Elizalde, and then said heartily, “Oh, first-class!”

  “All the way!” added Kootie.

  The old man stared at their dirty jeans and disordered hair, and he said, “I think not.” He pushed the button for R Deck, and a moment later the elevator car rocked to a stop. “The Tourist Class Dining Saloon is down the hall ahead of you,” he said sternly as he leaned between Sullivan and Kootie to slide open the gate, “just past the stairs. See that you go no higher up.”

  Sullivan hesitated, and considered just throwing the old man out of the car and resuming their upward course; but he and Kootie and Elizalde were deep in the ghost world now, and they might well find the solid ghosts of security guards from the 1930s waiting for them on the higher decks.

  “I think we’d better play along,” he said quietly to Elizalde. “We’re in good cover so far, and I doubt that Edison’s field shows up at all in this chaos.” He stepped out of the car onto a carpeted hallway.

  After an agonized, tooth-baring whine, Elizalde followed him out, tugging Kootie along by the hand.

  Behind them the gate slid closed, and the car began to sink away down the shaft.

  The ship was alive with voices now, and Sullivan and his companions seemed to have left the rumble of the screws below them.

  Many of the room doors were open, and laughter and excited shouting shook the tobacco-scented air, but when they peeked into the lighted staterooms they passed, they could see only empty couches, and mirrored vanity tables, and paneled wal
ls with motionless curtains over the portholes.

  At the open, polished burl walnut stairway they could hear children’s voices ascending from below; but the dining-room doors were ahead of them, and a steamy beef smell and a clatter of cutlery on china was accompanying the voices from beyond the closed doors, and Sullivan led the way around the stairs and pushed the doors open.

  The noises were loud now, but the tables and chairs set across the ship’s-width hardwood floor were empty; though a chair here and there did occasionally shift, as if invisible diners were turning their attentions from one companion to another.

  Sullivan took Elizalde’s cold hand, while she took Kootie’s, and he led them between the noisy tables toward the service doors in the far bulkhead; and though there were no diners visible, Sullivan tried to thread his way exactly between the tables, and not violate the body spaces of any ghosts.

  They exited the dining room through the starboard service door, and now, among the kitchens, they saw people.

  Nearly solid men in white chef’s hats were pushing carts in and out of open kitchen doorways, apparently oblivious of the unauthorized intruders; the dishes on the carts were covered with steel domes, and, since the kitchen staff didn’t seem able to see Sullivan and he hadn’t eaten at all today, he reached out and touched one of the covers on a cart that had been momentarily left against the hallway bulkhead. The cover handle was warmly solid, and he lifted the dome away.

  From a bed of baby carrots and asparagus, a woman’s face was smiling up at him. Her eyes were looking directly into his, and when her lips opened to puff out a bourbon-scented whisper of “Hi, Pete,” he recognized her as Sukie.

  Elizalde tugged at his arm, but he pulled her back, feeling the relayed shake as Kootie was stopped too.

  “Hi, Sukie,” he said; his voice was level, but he was distantly surprised that his legs were still holding him up. He glanced sideways at Elizalde’s face, but she was looking down at the plate, and then at him, in frowning puzzlement.

  “I guess she can’t see me,” said Sukie’s face. “You’ve spilled it all out onto the floor, haven’t you? How long can this magnetic charge last? Who’s your chick, anyway? She’s the one who was on the phone last night, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Sullivan squeezed Elizalde’s hand. “The charge—I don’t know. An hour?”

  “When I consider how my light was spent! And then I’ll be gone, and you’ll probably be sorry, but not near sorry enough. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? How do I look in a halo of vegetables? I’ll see if I can’t wish you something besides misery with her; no promises, but I’ll see what I can muster up. Haul your ass—and hers, too, I guess—and you got a kid already?—up to the Moon Deck. We also serve who only stand and gaff.”

  Elizalde barked a quick scream and her hand tightened on Sullivan’s, and then the face was gone, and all that was on the plate was steaming vegetables.

  “You saw her, didn’t you?” said Sullivan as he hurried on down the kitchen corridor, pulling Elizalde and Kootie along.

  “Just for a second,” said Elizalde, having to nearly shout to be heard over the feverish clatter of pots and pans, “I saw a woman’s face on that plate! No, Kootie, we’re not going back!” To Sullivan, she added, “You were … speaking to her …?”

  “It was my sister.” Sullivan saw a door in the white bulkhead at the end of the corridor, and he tugged Elizalde along more quickly. “She says I’m in love with you. And she says she’ll try to wish us something besides misery.”

  “Well,” said Elizalde with a bewildered and frightened grin, “this is your family, after all—I hope she tries hard.”

  “Yeah, me too, in spite of everything.” They had reached the door. “Catch up, Kootie, I think we’ve got another dining room to pass through.” He pushed open the door.

  This dining room too was as wide as the ship, but the ornate rowed mahogany ceiling was fully three deck-heights overhead; ornate planters and huge, freestanding Art Deco lamps punctuated the middle height—and there were visible diners here.

  All the men at the tables were wearing black ties and all the women were in off-the-shoulder evening dresses. The conversation was quieter in this vast hall, and the air was sharp with the effervescence of champagne. On the high wall facing them across the length of the dining room, a vast mural dominated the whole cathedral chamber; even from way over here Sullivan could see that it was a stylized map of the North Atlantic, with a clock in the top of it indicated by radiating gold bars surrounding the gold hands, which stood at five minutes to twelve.

  “I’m not dressed for this,” said Elizalde in a small voice.

  Sullivan looked back at her, and grinned at how humble she looked, framed in the glossy elm burl doorway, in her jeans and grimy Graceland sweatshirt. Kootie, peering big-eyed from behind her, looked no better in his bloodstained polo shirt, and Sullivan found that he himself was sorry he hadn’t found time to shave yesterday or today.

  “Probably they can’t see us,” he told her. “Come on, it’s not that far.”

  But as they strode out across the broad parquet floor, a white-haired gentleman at one of the nearer tables caught Sullivan’s glance, and raised an eyebrow; and then the man was pushing back his chair and slowly standing up.

  Sullivan looked away as he hurried past the table and pulled Elizalde along, glad to hear Kootie’s footsteps scuffing right behind her.

  Men were standing up at other tables, though, all looking gravely at Sullivan and his two companions as they trotted through the amber-lit vista of white tablecloths and crystal wineglasses, and now the women were getting to their feet too, and anxiously eyeing the shabby intruders.

  “Halfway there,” gritted Sullivan between his teeth. He was staring doggedly at the mural above and ahead of them. Two nearly parallel tracks curved across the golden clouds that represented the Atlantic, but only one track had anything on it—one miniature crystal ship, all by itself out in the middle of the metallic sea.

  How could there be a room this big in a ship? he thought as he strode between the tables, tugging Elizalde’s hand. Polished wooden pillars, the vaulted ceiling so far away up there, and it must be a hundred tables spread out on every side across the floor to the distant dark walls recessed at the lowest level …

  Someone among the standing ghosts began clapping; and more of them took it up, and from somewhere the full-orchestra strains of “I’ll Be Seeing You” began to play. All the elegantly dressed ghosts were standing and applauding now, and every face that Sullivan could see was smiling, though many were blinking back tears and many others openly let the tears run down their cheeks as they clapped their hands.

  When he was close to the far doors, a crystal goblet of champagne was pressed into Sullivan’s hand, and when he glanced back, his face chilly with sweat, he saw that Elizalde and Kootie each held a glass as well. The applause was growing louder, nearly drowning all the old familiar music.

  Elizalde hurried up alongside Sullivan and turned her head to whisper in his ear: “Do you think it’s poison?”

  “No.” Sullivan slowed to a walk, and he lifted the glass and sipped the icy, golden wine. He wished he were a connoisseur of champagnes, for this certainly seemed to be first-rate. He blinked, and realized that he had tears in his own eyes. “I think they’re grateful at being released.”

  At the door, on an impulse, he turned back to the resplendent dining room and raised his glass. The applause ceased as every ghost raised a glass of its own; and then the rich tawny light faded as the lamps on the Art Deco pillars lost power, and the music ceased (with, he thought, a dying fall), and finally even the background rustle of breathing and the shifting of shoes on the parquet floor diminished away to silence.

  The dining hall was dark and empty now. The tables were gone, and a lot of convention-hotel chairs were nested in stacks against the bulkheads.

  Sullivan’s lifted hand was empty, and he curled it slowly into a fist. “The field is b
eginning to fail already,” he said to Elizalde. “We’d better get upstairs fast.” He pushed open the door at his back.

  Across a broad foyer was a semicircular bronze portal like the entry to a 1930s department store. Its two doors were open wide, and on the broad mother-of-pearl ceiling within Sullivan could see the rippling reflection of brightly lit water, and hear splashing and laughter; these doors apparently led to a balcony over the actual pool, which must have been one deck-level below. Sullivan thought the swimmers must be real people, and not ghosts.

  Elizalde looked in the same direction and whispered, “Good Lord, stacked like a slave ship!”

  An imposingly broad mahogany stairway opened onto the foyer to their left, and Sullivan waved Elizalde and Kootie up—the stairs were wide enough for all three of them to trot up abreast, though Kootie was stumbling.

  “Did you see some bathing beauty in there?” Sullivan asked Elizalde as he hurried up the stairs, pulling Kootie along by the upper arm. “ ‘Stacked’ I get, but ‘like a slave ship’—is that good or bad?”

  “I meant those bunks,” she panted, “you pig. Stacked to the ceiling in there, with soldiers all crammed in, trying to sleep. I didn’t notice any—damn ‘bathing beauty.’ ”

  “Oh …? What I saw was a balcony over a swimming pool,” he told her. Apparently the field hadn’t yet collapsed, but was out of phase. “What did you see, Kootie?”

  “I’m looking nowhere but straight ahead,” said the boy, and Sullivan wondered which of the personalities in Kootie’s head had spoken.

  Maybe one or more of the degaussing coils have been disconnected, Sullivan thought uneasily, at the substations along the length of the ship. I’ve got a big wheel spinning—is it missing some spokes? Is it going to fly apart?

  “All we can do is get out of here,” he said. “Come on.”