I shook my head. “Lord Fassaw always destroyed the application forms when they were sent to his office. If any of us had tried to apply…”
“You would have been punished. Tortured, I suppose. Yes. Well, from the little I know of your colleges, I think your life there would be better than it is here, but not altogether pleasant. You will have work to do, a place to be; but you will be made to feel marginal, inferior. Even highly educated, enlightened women have difficulty accepting men as their intellectual equals. Believe me, I have experienced it myself! And because you were trained at the Castle to compete, to want to excel, you may find it hard to be among people who either believe you incapable of excellence, or to whom the concept of competition, of winning and defeating, is valueless. But just there, there is where you will find air to breathe.”
Noem recommended me to women he knew on the faculty of Hagka College, and I was enrolled on probation. My family were delighted to pay my tuition. I was the first of us to go to college, and they were genuinely proud of me.
As Noem had predicted, it was not always easy, but there were enough other men there that I found friends and was not caught in the paralysing isolation of the motherhouse. And as I took courage, I made friends among the women students, finding many of them unprejudiced and companionable. In my third year, one of them and I managed, tentatively and warily, to fall in love. It did not work very well or last very long, yet it was a great liberation for both of us, our liberation from the belief that the only communication or commonalty possible between us was sexual, that an adult man and woman had nothing to join them but their genitals. Emadr loathed the professionalism of the fuckery as I did, and our lovemaking was always shy and brief. Its true significance was not as a consummation of desire, but as proof that we could trust each other. Where our real passion broke loose was when we lay together talking, telling each other what our lives had been, how we felt about men and women and each other and ourselves, what our nightmares were, what our dreams were. We talked endlessly, in a communion that I will cherish and honor all my life, two young souls finding their wings, flying together, not for long, but high. The first flight is the highest.
Emadr has been dead two hundred years; she stayed on Seggri, married into a motherhouse, bore two children, taught at Hagka, and died in her seventies. I went to Hain, to the Ekumenical Schools, and later to Werel and Yeowe as part of the Mobile’s staff; my record is herewith enclosed. I have written this sketch of my life as part of my application to return to Seggri as a Mobile of the Ekumen. I want very much to live among my people, to learn who they are, now that I know with at least an uncertain certainty who I am.
YLEM
Eliot Fintushel
Here’s a funny, pyrotechnic, and fast-paced tale, packed with bizarre new ideas and even stranger characters, that takes us back through time to the Beginning of Everything—which turns out to be a very peculiar place indeed …
New writer Eliot Fintushel made his first sale just last year, to Tomorrow magazine. Since then, he has appeared in Tomorrow again, made a number of sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and is beginning to attract attention from cognoscenti as a writer who is definitely worth keeping an eye on in years to come. Fintushel, a baker’s son from Rochester, New York, has won the National Endowment for the Arts’ Solo Performer Award twice, and now lives in Glen Ellen, California, with his wife and young daughter.
The Manhattan Muthuhs were a Puerto Rican street gang that fled New York City to become hippies in Santa Fe. They used to sit outside El Centro, the crash pad run by an eccentric Catholic priest, and watch the sun set over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. As the sky colored and darkened, they would drum wildly on anything a man or woman could hit. Then they would spread their army rolls and crash.
One night, hitching through, I shared a ratty sofa with one of the gang leader’s girlfriends, while a dozen Muthuhs snored on the floor. If we rolled off the sofa, we’d fall on two or three of them. I heaved and pressed and jammed and ground, unable to make an end of it with Sunshine’s girl, while she sleepily let me poke. Nobody seemed to mind. Over and over and over, the whole time we were at it, a scratched record (I presumed) was playing this phrase:
“Is that boy still climbing up the mountain?
Has he faltered, or has he fallen down SCREEE!
Is that boy…”
And we humped and we humped. I still have a urinary tract infection that reappears from time to time, a penicillin-resistant strain of clap, which I got, indirectly, from the head of the Manhattan Muthuhs!
That night, I had my first revelatory headache. I was wedged in a crevice narrower than my skull. Iron was melting and streaming red hot into my eyes, my ears, my mouth and nose. An avalanche thundered around me, and the sky swarmed with snakes, noxious flowers, and searing lights.
My second headache came in 1966, as I walked along the Susquehanna, thinking how nice it would be at the bottom, dead. When the big blackout hit New York, I thought it was me. Then came the news of a mechanical failure at the generating plant in Niagara Falls.
I had a headache like a mine cave-in. Phantasms and fireballs burned the sky all over Broome County. Again I was deafened as if by an avalanche, and I couldn’t shake the smell of rock dust—lime and sulfur.
Now, twenty-seven years later, I know—
1. The blackout: it wasn’t caused by a power plant breakdown.
2. The song: it wasn’t from a skipping record.
3. My “symptoms”: they were a perception of reality.
Now I know, because I just had the headache again, like an earthquake demolishing a rock wall, and the wall is down, and I see the truth.
* * *
The occasion for my third headache was a visit from an old college friend with whom I once shared an A-frame in the hills above the Susquehanna. Siggy was passing through Sonoma, where I now live, on business. In college, he and I used to talk the way some people dance, cutting incredible figures in the mind, staying up late and planning great works, right up to the day the ambulance came and took him away, babbling and shrieking, to the state hospital; that was a few days before the big blackout. They eventually gave him shock treatment, and his parents, immigrants, concentration camp survivors, took him home to Long Island to recover, while they got worse.
It had been a sort of contest between us, which of us would crumble first, he in his mania, or I in my depression. Siggy won.
He seemed okay now, by and large, if somewhat dried out. He had a beer belly and a family and a gold Bulova that he frequently consulted. The wallet photos of his wife and kids could have been cut from an ad for home insurance. He chain-smoked, however, and ate everything in my refrigerator without tasting a morsel. Every pocket in his brown sports jacket had a pack of Luckies in it, except for one with a bag of Bull Durham and papers—for emergencies.
At about two in the morning, he lit a cigarette scavenged from one of his ashtrays and said, “So tell me, Eliot, how long have you been with us?”
I laughed, and he laughed back.
“No, really,” he said. “How long?” Pinching the butt between his knuckles, he stretched and yawned, allowing himself to make a grotesque, sleepy face while he waited for me to answer.
“What do you mean?” I said. My head was starting to throb. I looked out the window, alarmed to hear someone start to mow their lawn at two in the morning; then I realized it wasn’t a lawn mower.
“You’ve never given me any reason to doubt your loyalty in all these years,” Siggy said. I’d seen reversible jackets before, but this was the first time I’d seen one reverse itself. Now it was red and gold. But the light was changing—maybe that was it. “And your supervisors tell me they can always depend on you, Elly, even when the other guys are frigging the dog.”
“Supervisors?” I said. “What is this? A scene from some movie? I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“Just say thank you, my boy. I’m sending you on a very important mission.
” How had he turned the cigarette into a fresh cigar? I was sure it was one of Siggy’s old mind games, and I worried that he was taking it too far, that he would go off the deep end, as he had back in ’66. “You’re gonna be one big man when you get back, Elly.”
I said, “I like my job the way it is.” Where did that come from? I just found myself saying it. “I like everything, really. I am grateful, Mr. Duba, but couldn’t you get someone else?” My head hurt so bad I had to squint to keep the light from stabbing me.
“Duba?” Siggy said. “Who’s Duba?” The cigar was back to a cigarette butt. His jacket had again reversed itself. “Have you got anything else to eat in this place?”
Two A.M., and it was already light outside. I looked out the window at the brilliant, blue sky, filled with dirigibles; I could make out the figure of a bull painted on the hull of each one. When I looked back, Duba was peering at me through a thick cloud of cigar smoke. “Come on,” he said, “don’t put me on. What are you doing, trying to wheedle more dough out of me? I’ll give you dough, believe me. You must have a little ambition, a guy like you. You weren’t cut out to be a now lubber.”
“I don’t got any ambitions,” I said.
“What about Topsy? You could take her along, you know. In fact, I want you to take her along. She knows the route, Elly.”
There were the flowers in the air, the snakes and the exploding lights, the thunder, and the pain so sharp I could see it, like fissures wedged open in the bones of my face. “Topsy?” I said. “Please don’t talk about Topsy.”
“Your little secret, huh? Look. Let’s level. She’s not gonna stay with you, Elly. They never do.” Topsy was a chrono-anomaly. She had just shown up in my apt one day when I got home from work. That was about the same time that the helium ratios changed and the dirigibles started showing up—retroactively.
Look, I know it—if not for Topsy, I never would have had a woman at all. I’m a good chess player though. Some people think I’m a great chess player, only I don’t like to beat everybody all the time, because of how it makes them feel bad.
“On the other hand, Elly,” Mr. Duba told me, “if you take her along on this mission, see, she’ll love it. She’ll love you, boy, because you know where you’re going? You know where I’m sending you?”
“No, Mr. Duba. Where?” Gee, my head hurt something awful. I was ready to get out of there and go back to the basement offices and sort the rest of the guys’ tools. What do I know about missions and stuff? That was hot air, if you ask me, except if I could get to keep Topsy that way.
“Ylem, Elly. Right back to the ylem! And that’s where Topsy comes from, you know. That’s her home, boy. If you take her there, believe you me, she’ll love you to pieces!”
“I know it,” I said. “You’re right. I’m gonna do it.” Something happened to me then that I don’t like to talk about, but my eyes kind of went out of focus, and I thought for a second that Mr. Duba was somebody else. I thought he was an old pal of mine from college. But I never went to college. Then he was Mr. Duba again, and I felt better.
* * *
Topsy was lying in the corner, listening between the stations, like she always done, to radio static. She had a name for it: “relic background radiation.” But I could beat her at chess. I could hardly see her, black as the shadow the way she is, even her gums and teeth and the “whites” of her eyes. I told her, wear white at night, but she didn’t care about nothing but static. She said, “It’s telegrams from home.”
How come she remembers stuff that never happened? How come she knows the colors and sizes of stuff that don’t exist and the dates of birthdays for people that never was born? It’s all on account of how she got here straight out of nowhere from Mr. Bull screwing in the deep past.
When I told her about our mission, she turned off the radio for the first time since a month, day and night, day and night, and she put her arms around me and pulled me close till I went inside of her. Then we did it, like she showed me.
After, she says to me: “That bastard Duba is up to some bad shit, Elly, but maybe it’ll get me home.” She knows me pretty good. She can see what I’m thinking. She gives me a peck and says, “Elly, you dear, it’ll be a home for you too. Nobody’ll take advantage of you there, we’ll be together forever, and when you win at chess, you won’t have to be afraid of making people angry.” So I smile big.
My face above it, the breeze from the flushing toilet revived me a little. Siggy laid both hands on my shoulders. “Can I get you anything?” he said. Just the sound of his voice was excruciating, but I had stopped heaving.
“No,” I said. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” I pushed my head and shoulders, a leaden mantle, up from the toilet seat. “Siggy, what’s ylem?”
He laughed, “It’s Greek to me, partner.” I started to close my eyes and let my head slide back down, when he said, “Hey, I was just kidding. It really is Greek … no, Latin! Don’t you remember? We used to toss that word around back in the A-frame days. It’s supposed to be before the Big Bang, when everything was in one place the size of a pinhead.”
“Does it send out radio signals?”
“Sure, Doubleyew Big Bang FM. Actually, it does, in a way. Some guys working for Ma Bell found it in the sixties. Very faint. Very cool. A few degrees above absolute zero. Static. The afterglow of the Big Bang. Very funky. You want some water?”
“Relic background radiation?”
“That’s it. So what are you asking me for?”
And then we were sitting, Topsy and I, in harsh sunlight, on a barren salt flat a few hundred yards from the base of a rocky cliff, and I really was okay. The only thing was, I was having some trouble making one thought follow the last pretty good, and Topsy was in the middle of jabbering at me like no tomorrow, which I don’t like, and she knows it too, so why do it is what I want to know, huh? Also, some Zeppelins were grouping up on the other side of us from the cliff, and it made me nervous, and I think they were making Topsy talk fast like that too.
She was showing me some stuff from her pockets, which she had two of, one on either hip, with stuff in them, but I didn’t get to have but one. She was saying, “This is a Doppler gauge. This dial sets the scale factor. Yours is exactly the same as mine, and we have to make sure they’re always set the same, Elly, or things will get very confusing very fast. Are you listening to me?”
“Sure I am, Topsy,” I say, “but them dirigibles aren’t Mr. Duba’s, and I think we should get out of here fast.”
“I’m keeping track of them, Elly,” she said. “You just concentrate on what I’m saying. Remember the hypodyne?”
“My head feels like it’s cracking open,” I said to Siggy. “I know this sounds stupid, but I have to ask you: Are my eyes open?”
“No, they’re not,” he said.
“Well, I can see,” I said.
“Tell me what you see, Eliot.”
“I’m not here. I mean, I’m not in California. I’m not in this house. I’m not even in this time, I think. I’m in a dark tube. It’s like a CAT scan, but the rays are doing something to me. I think they’re killing me, Siggy.”
“You’re fine, Elly. They’re not killing you.”
Then Topsy’s voice: “Listen to Mr. Duba, Elly. It’s the hypodyne. I’m next, Elly. I’m right after you. The hypodyne will make you into thoughts, Elly—that’s one way to say it. Don’t be scared. I’ll be with you soon.”
“That’s right, my boy,” Mr. Duba said. “Then you and Topsy here will be hypostatized into the timeship.”
“I’m scared.” That’s what I wanted to say, but nothing come out. I couldn’t even find my mouth. I was all hypodyned, I guess. Then when Mr. Duba talked some more, I couldn’t even tell if maybe it was me thinking it instead.…
“Don’t you worry, son. I know exactly how you feel. Like air in a popped balloon, right? It’ll only be a minute. Topsy’s getting hers right now. She’ll be with you before you can say Duba Enterprises, Eenk! Then we’ll st
at you into the timeship. I know you’re going to do us real proud, kiddo. Just look out for Zeppelins, heh, heh!
“No, really, Elly, I know you’re going to really give those helium boys something to think about. Do what Topsy tells you, now! I know you will! This is the Second Bull!”
(“Second Bull?” Siggy asked me. “He said, ‘This is the Second Bull?’” Siggy dug his fingers into my shoulders, anchoring me on Sonoma Mountain.
“Yeah,” I said, “like the Zen Bulls, I guess:
The Bull is sought. The Bull is tracked.
The Bull is glimpsed. The Bull is caught.
The Bull is tamed. The bull is ridden …
… and so on. We were tracking Bull. It’s a joke.”)
Then I felt like I was dishwater going around and around down the drain, like, and when I was all dripped down into the pipes, then I was out cold, and when I woke up, me and Topsy was standing in the shadow of some dirigibles, and she was showing me stuff, and she was saying: “Remember the hypodyne?” and I remembered it.
She said, “We’re in the timeship now, Elly. This landscape is a hypostat of the whole history of the universe. See how it looks flat for a ways and then, about two hundred yards from here, it starts sloping up, and then it’s a quarter mile or so straight up? Now watch what I do with my Doppler gauge, and you do exactly the same thing, you hear?”
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 78
