Stop it! she whispered, and tried to wrench herself from the inarticulate terror which Buddy, cast back by pain and the rhythm of a song to a time when he was only twice her age, remembered. Oh, stop it! But no one could hear her, the way she could hear Buddy, her mother, Mrs. Lowery in the schoolroom.
She had to stop the fear.
Perhaps it was the music. Perhaps it was because she had exhausted every other way. Perhaps it was because the only place left to look for a way out was back inside Buddy's mind—
—When he wanted to sneak out of the cell at night to join a card game down in the digs where they played for cigarettes, he would take a piece of chewing gum and the bottle cap from a Dr. Pepper and stick it over the bolt in the top of the door. When they closed the doors after free-time, it still fitted into place, but the bolt couldn't slide in—
Lee looked at the locked door of her room. She could get the chewing gum in the afternoon period when they let her walk around her own floor. But the soft drink machine by the elevator only dispensed in cups. Suddenly she sat up and looked at the bottom of her shoe. On the toe and heel were the metal taps that her mother had made the shoemaker put there so they wouldn't wear so fast. She had to stop the fear. If they wouldn't let her do it by killing herself, she'd do it another way. She went to the cot, and began to work the tap loose on the frame.
Buddy lay on his back, afraid. After they had drugged him, they had brought him into the city. He didn't know where he was. He couldn't see, and he was afraid.
Something fingered his face. He rocked his head to get away from the spoon—
"Shhh! It's all right …"
Light struck one eye. There was still something wrong with the other. He blinked.
"You're all right," she—it was a she voice, though he still couldn't make out a face—told him again. "You're not in jail. You're not in the … joint any more. You're in New York. In a hospital. Something's happened to your eye. That's all."
"My eye … ?"
"Don't be afraid any more. Please. Because I can't stand it."
It was a kid's voice. He blinked again, reached up to rub his vision clear.
"Watch out," she said. "You'll get—"
His eye itched and he wanted to scratch it. So he shoved at the voice.
"Hey!"
Something stung him and he clutched at his thumb with his other hand.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to bite your finger. But you'll hurt the bandage. I've pulled the one away from your right eye. There's nothing wrong with that. Just a moment." Something cool swabbed his blurred vision.
It came away.
The cutest little colored girl was kneeling on the edge of the bed with a piece of wet cotton in her hand. The light was nowhere near as bright as it had seemed: just a nightlight glowed over the mirror above the basin. "You've got to stop being so frightened," she whispered. "You've got to."
Buddy had spent a good deal of his life doing what people told him, when he wasn't doing the opposite on purpose.
The girl sat back on her heels. "That's better."
He pushed himself up in the bed. There were no straps. Sheets hissed over his knees. He looked at his chest. Blue pajamas: the buttons were in the wrong holes by one. He reached down to fix them, and his fingers closed on air.
"You've only got one eye working so there's no parallax for depth perception."
"Huh?" He looked up again.
She wore shorts and a red and white polo shirt.
He frowned, "Who are you?"
"Dianne Lee Morris," she said. "And you're—" Then she frowned too. She scrambled from the bed, took the mirror from over the basin and brought it back to the bed. "Look. Now who are you?"
He reached up to touch with grease-crusted nails the bandage that sloped over his left eye. Short, yellow hair lapped the gauze. His forefinger went on to the familiar scar through the tow hedge of his right eyebrow.
"Who are you?"
"Buddy Magowan."
"Where do you live?"
"St. Gab—" He stopped. "A hun' ni'tee' stree' 'tween Se'on and Thir' A'nue."
"Say it again."
"A hundred an' nineteenth street between Second an' Third Avenue." The consonants his night school teacher at P. S. 125 had laboriously inserted into his speech this part year returned.
"Good. And you work?"
"Out at Kennedy. Service assistant."
"And there's nothing to be afraid of."
He shook his head, "Naw," and grinned. His broken tooth reflected in the mirror. "Naw. I was just having a bad … dream."
She put the mirror back. As she turned, suddenly she closed her eyes and sighed.
"What'sa matter?"
She opened them again. "It's stopped. I can't hear inside your head any more. It's been going on all day."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Maybe you read about me in the magazine. There was a big article about me in New Times, a couple of years ago. I'm in the hospital too. Over on the other side, in the psychiatric division. Did you read the article?"
"Didn't do much magazine reading back then. Don't do too much now either. What'd they write about?"
"I can hear and see what other people are thinking. I'm one of the three they're studying. I do it best of all of them. But it only comes in spurts. The other one, Eddy, is an idiot. I met him when we were getting all the tests. He's older than you and even dumber. Then there's Mrs. Lowery. She doesn't hear. She just sees. And sometimes she can make other people hear her. She works in the school here at the hospital. She can came and go as she pleases. But I have to stay locked up."
Buddy squinted. "You can hear what's in my head?"
"Not now. But I could. And it was …" Her lip began to quiver; her brown eyes brightened. "… I mean when that man tried to … with the …" And overflowed. She put her fingers on her chin and twisted. "… when he … cutting in your …"
Buddy saw her tears, wondered at them. "Aw, honey—" he said, reached to take her shoulder—
Her face struck his chest and she clutched his pajama jacket. "It hurt so much!"
Her grief at his agony shook her.
"I had to stop you from hurting! Yours was just a dream, so I could sneak out of my room, get down here, and wake you up. But the others, the girl in the fire, or the man in the flooded mine … those weren't dreams! I couldn't do anything about them. I couldn't stop the hurting there. I couldn't stop it at all, Buddy! I wanted to. But one was in Australia and the other in Costa Rica!" She sobbed against his chest. "And one was on Mars! And I couldn't get to Mars. I couldn't!"
"It's all right," he whispered, uncomprehending, and rubbed her rough hair. Then, as she shook in his arms, understanding swelled. "You came … down here to wake me up?" he asked.
She nodded against his pajama jacket.
"Why?"
She shrugged against his belly. "I … I don't … maybe the music."
After a moment he asked, "Is this the first time you ever done something about what you heard?"
"It's not the first time I ever tried. But it's the first time it ever … worked."
"Then why did you try again?"
"Because …" She was stiller now. "… I hoped maybe it would hurt less if I could get—through." He felt her jaw moving as she spoke. "It does." Something in her face began to quiver. "It does hurt less." He put his hand on her hand, and she took his thumb.
"You knew I was … was awful scared?"
She nodded. "I knew, so I was scared just the same."
Buddy remembered the dream. The back of his neck grew cold, and the flesh under his thighs began to tingle. He remembered the reality behind the dream—and held her more tightly and pressed his cheek to her hair. "Thank you." He couldn't say it any other way, but it didn't seem enough. So he said it again more slowly. "Thank you."
A little later she pushed away, and he watched her sniffling face with depthless vision.
"Do you like the song?"
; He blinked. And realized the insistent music still worked through his head. "You can—hear what I'm thinking again?"
"No. But you were thinking about it before. I just wanted to find out."
Buddy thought awhile. "Yeah." He cocked his head. "Yeah. I like it a lot. It makes me feel … good."
She hesitated, then let out: "Me too! I think it's beautiful. I think Faust's music is so," and she whispered the next word as though it might offend, "alive! But with life the way it should be. Not without pain, but with pain contained, ordered, given form and meaning, so that it's almost all right again. Don't you feel that way?"
"I … don't know. I like it …"
"I suppose," Lee said a little sadly, "people like things for different reasons."
"You like it a lot." He looked down and tried to understand how she liked it. And failed. Tears had darkened his pajamas. Not wanting her to cry again, he grinned when he looked up. "You know, I almost saw him this morning."
"Faust? You mean you saw Bryan Faust?"
He nodded. "Almost. I'm on the service crew out at Kennedy. We were working on his liner when …" He pointed to his eye.
"His ship? You were?" The wonder in her voice was perfectly childish, and enchanting.
"I'll probably see him when he leaves," Buddy boasted. "I can get in where they won't let anybody else go. Except people who work at the port."
"I'd give—" she remembered to take a breath "—anything to see him. Just anything in the world!"
"There was a hell of a crowd out there this morning. They almost broke through the police. But I could've just walked up and stood at the bottom of the ramp when he came down. If I'd thought about it."
Her hands made little fists on the edge of the bed as she gazed at him.
"Course I'll probably see him when he goes." This time he found his buttons and began to put them into the proper holes.
"I wish I could see him too!"
"I suppose Bim—he's foreman of the service crew—he'd let us through the gate, if I said you were my sister." He looked back up at her brown face. "Well, my cousin."
"Would you take me? Would you really take me?"
"Sure." Buddy reached out to tweak her nose, missed. "You did something for me. I don't see why not, if they'd let you leave—"
"Mrs. Lowery!" Lee whispered and stepped back from the bed.
"—the hospital. Huh?"
"They know I'm gone! Mrs. Lowery is calling for me. She says she's seen me, and Dr. Gross is on his way. They want to take me back to my room!" She ran to the door.
"Lee, there you are! Are you all right?" In the doorway Dr. Gross grabbed her arm as she tried to twist away.
"Let me go!"
"Hey!" bellowed Buddy. "What are you doin' with that little girl!" He bounded up in the middle of the bed, shedding sheets.
Dr. Gross's eyes widened. "I'm taking her back to her room. She's a patient in the hospital. She should be in another wing."
"She wanna go?" Buddy demanded, swaying over the blankets.
"She's very disturbed!" Dr. Gross countered at Buddy, towering on the bed. "We're trying to help her, don't you understand? I don't know who you are, but we're trying to keep here alive. She has to go back!"
Lee shook here head against the doctor's hip. "Oh, Buddy …"
He leapt over the foot of the bed, swinging. Or at any rate, he swung once. He missed wildly because of the parallax. Also because he pulled the punch in, half completed, to make it seem a floundering gesture. He was not in the Louisiana State Penal Correction Institute: the realization had come the way one only realized the tune playing in the back of the mind when it stops. "Wait!" Buddy said.
Outside the door the doctor was saying, "Mrs. Lowery, take Lee back up to her room. The night nurse knows the medication she should have."
"Yes, Doctor."
"Wait!" Buddy called. "Please!"
"Excuse me," Dr. Gross said, stepping back through the door. Without Lee. "But we have to get her upstairs and under a sedative, immediately. Believe me, I'm sorry for this inconvenience."
Buddy sat down on the bed and twisted his face. "What's … the matter with her?"
Dr. Gross was silent a moment. "I suppose I do have to give you an explanation. That's difficult, because I don't know exactly. Of the three proven telepaths that have been discovered since a concerted effort has been made to study them, Lee is the most powerful. She's a brilliant, incredibly creative child. But her mind has suffered so much trauma—from all the lives telepathy exposes her to—she's become hopelessly suicidal. We're trying to help her. But if she's left alone for any length of time, sometimes weeks, sometimes hours, she'll try to kill herself.
"Then when's she gonna be better?"
Dr. Gross put his hands in his pockets and looked at his sandals. "I'm afraid to cure someone of a mental disturbance, the first thing you have to do is isolate them from the trauma. With Lee that's impossible. We don't even know which part of the brain controls the telepathy, so we couldn't even try lobotomy. We haven't found a drug that affects it yet." He shrugged. "I wish we could help her. But when I'm being objective, I can't see her ever getting better. She'll be like this the rest of her life. The quicker you can forget about her, the less likely you are to hurt her. Good night. Again, I'm very sorry this had to happen."
"G'night." Buddy sat in his bed a little while. Finally he turned off the light and lay down. He had to masturbate three times before he finally fell asleep. In the morning, though, he still had not forgotten the little black girl who had come to him and awakened—so much in him.
The doctors were very upset about the bandage and talked of sympathetic ophthalmia. They searched his left cornea for any last bits of metal dust. They kept him in the hospital three more days, adjusting the pressure between his vitreous and aqueous humors to prevent his till now undiscovered tendency toward glaucoma. They told him that the thing that had occasionally blurred the vision in his left eye was a vitreous floater and not to worry about it. Stay home at least two weeks, they said. And wear your eye patch until two days before you go back to work. They gave him a hassle with his workmen's compensation papers too. But he got it straightened out—he'd filled in a date wrong. He never saw the little girl again.
And the radios and jukeboxes and Scopitones in New York and Buenos Aires, Paris and Istanbul, in Melbourne and Bangkok, played the music of Bryan Faust.
The day Faust was supposed to leave Earth for Venus, Buddy went back to the spaceport. It was three days before he was supposed to report to work, and he still wore the flesh colored eye patch.
"Jesus," he said to Bim as they leaned at the railing of the observation deck on the roof of the hanger, "just look at all them people."
Bim spat down at the hot macadam. The liner stood on the takeoff pad under the August sun.
"He's going to sing before he goes," Bim said. "I hope they don't have a riot."
"Sing?"
"See that wooden platform out there and all them loudspeakers? With all those kids, I sure hope they don't have a riot."
"Bim, can I get down onto the field, up near the platform?"
"What for?"
"So I can see him up real close."
"You were the one talking about all the people."
Buddy, holding the rail, worked his thumb on the brass. The muscles in his forearm rolled beneath the tattoo: To Mars I Would Go for Dolores-jo, inscribed on Saturn's rings. "But I got to!"
"I don't see why the hell—"
"There's this little nigger girl, Bim—"
"Huh?"
"Bim!"
"Okay. Okay. Get into a coverall and go down with the clocker crew. You'll be right up with the reporters. But don't tell anybody I sent you. You know how many people want to get up there? Why you want to get so close for anyway?"
"For a …" He turned in the doorway. "For a friend." He ran down the stairs to the lockers.
Bryan Faust walked across the platform to the microphones. Comets soare
d over his shoulders and disappeared under his arms. Suns novaed on his chest. Meteors flashed around his elbows. Shirts of polarized cloth with incandescent, shifting designs were now being called Fausts. Others flashed in the crowd. He pushed back his hair, grinned, and behind the police block hundreds of children screamed. He laughed into the microphone; they quieted. Behind him a bank of electronic instruments glittered. The controls were in the many jeweled rings hanging bright and heavy on his fingers. He raised his hands, flicked his thumbs across the gems, and the instruments, programmed to respond, began the cascading introduction to Corona. Bryan Faust sang. Across Kennedy, thousands—Buddy among them—heard.
And on her cot, Lee listened. "Thank you, Buddy," she whispered. "Thank you." And felt a little less like dying.
The End
© 1968 by Samuel R. Delany. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Belling Martha
Leigh Kennedy
Martha was looking for her daddy.
By the time she saw the lights of the cabins on the stark hillsides outside the gates of Austin, she'd nearly forgotten her goal. Especially as she knew not to travel by road, it had been enough to survive one hill, the next, and then another …
She sniffed the frigid wind blowing toward her from the notorious stove vents of those who lived just outside the city.
Someone was roasting human flesh in their fire.
The thin leather boots issued by the Central Texas Christian Reform Camp were scant protection for slogging through two feet of snow. Breaking the icy crust had made her shins sore, even through her jeans. Wind flapped her sleeves and collar and battered her ears until a dull ache throbbed through her skull. She'd stopped three times on the way from Smithville to build a fire and revive her feet, and sleep a bit.
The aroma quickened her progress. It had been a long time since Martha had smelled that particular odor. The biscuits and apples she'd carried with her—stolen from the camp kitchen—had long ago been eaten.
The closer she struggled toward home and warmth, the more stinging the dry snow felt. Gradually, she could discern details of the cabin she'd spent most of her life in—the heavy drapes at the window, the flat boulder that she used to perch on while she watched her father chop wood, the daub patches on the east wall.
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 1 Page 23
