by Janis Ian
"It left us weak. Old people who survived the attack all died in the first year; now people in their fifties and sixties are going the same way. Infections, pneumonia, bronchitis."
"Our immune systems are shot," Jain said. "If we don't get medical help, we'll all be dead in a few years."
"We don't really understand what's going on," Wally said. "They've got hundreds of us out at the Newton Center; we've seen them. You'd think by now they'd know that none of us are carrying the disease."
"Maybe they wouldn't know, if they're really strict about quarantine," I said.
"Not all of them are," Jain said. "The guards wear surgical masks, but we've seen some take them off to smoke, even when there were 'carriers' around."
"Could just be carelessness," Wally said. "We're trying to avoid a conspiracy mindset here."
I nodded. "Hard to see how it's to anybody's advantage to maintain the status quo. All of Boston shut down needlessly? Who profits?"
"Who set off the bomb?" Jain asked.
"Well, we assume—"
"But we don't know, right? Has anybody claimed responsibility?"
"No. Presumably they don't want to be nuked to glowing rubble."
"What if it wasn't 'them'? What if it was us?"
"Jain," Wally said.
"Well, the bomb didn't go off in the business district or Back Bay. It went off in Roxbury, and if it hadn't been for the wind reversing, you wouldn't have had one percent white casualties. You don't like what that implies, Wally, and neither do I, but a fact is a fact."
"I didn't know that," I said.
"Well, they did find what might have been the bomb casing," Wally said, "in the back of a blown-up truck down in Roxbury. Texas license plates. But there was a lot of that kind of damage in the riots, before everybody was too weak to riot."
"I can take you down to see it. Pretty safe. Army doesn't do much down there."
"Nightlights?"
"Go during the day. We only go out at night to attract attention.
~~~~~
We did go out to see it the next day, and I could have made a case for or against Jain's suspicions. The Texas truck did have a tank in the back that had exploded, but the part that remained attached was identified as LP gas, which it seemed to have been using for fuel. Of course that might have been camouflage for a tank full of the mystery virus; the engine was set up to switch between LP and gasoline.
The driver had died in the explosion. Jain's theory for that wasn't simple suicide, but rather that he had driven around the black neighborhoods for hours, maybe a whole day, releasing the stuff slowly, making sure it would get to its target. He himself would have been one of the first infected. He survived through the initial symptoms, and when he was sure it was working, destroyed the evidence, killing himself.
You would think a nutcase like that would want people to know who had done it, get his name in the history books, but they don't always. The Oklahoma City bombing when I was a kid, and the St. Louis Arch.
Anyhow, my job wasn't to explain anything, but just to demonstrate. For that, I only had to stay alive.
After the first symptomless day, I was pretty sure. They wanted me to stay with them for a couple of weeks, to prove their point beyond a shadow of a doubt, which was no problem. I moved in with Jain, and we sort of picked up where we'd left off. She looked a little different, but it wasn't her looks that had attracted me to her.
And instead of the walk-up in Roxbury, we were living in a $3 million suite overlooking the Charles. We could even have taken the 12th-floor penthouse, but under the circumstances that wouldn't be practical. Without elevators, it was still a walk-up, and we had to carry all our water up from the river.
It was not a typical lovers' reunion. So much of the catching up was about the horrors she had survived and my own less dramatic horror of watching martial law and paranoiac isolationism erode the American way of life.
Or maybe this nightmare was the real America, stripped of cosmetic civilization. What my mother had called the Reaganbush jungle, the moneyed few in control, protecting their fortunes at any social cost. That was Jain's party line, too.
But the people who owned this huge suite would probably like to have it back. The Brahmins who owned Boston would definitely like it back.
And every day I remained uninfected made the situation more mysterious. Who was profiting from this big lie?
We would find out. In a way.
The mechanics of the exposé had to be a little roundabout. We couldn't just go on television and do a tell-all show. There were plenty of stations in Boston, but nobody knew the equipment well enough to juryrig it to work with our low-voltage sun power, or even knew whether it was possible.
It was easy enough to make a disk, though, a home video of uninfected me surrounded by survivors, telling my story and theirs. Then we made about a hundred copies of the disk and had them tossed over the fence all around the border of the infected area. Even if no civilians found them, guards would, and it would be easy for them to verify from military records that I was who I said I was.
Four people died in the process of trying to distribute the disks. Well, they were weapons of a sort. Against the status quo.
A couple of days after that, Jain and I were sitting at home reading, when I heard the whining sound of a track decelerating outside. I looked through the dirty window and it was Track Number 7, my old one.
"Let's get out of here," Jain said. There was an escape route through a duct in the basement.
"You go," I said. "I think they want to talk."
"Yeah, they wanna talk." She grabbed my arm. "Go!"
I shook her off. "They know I'm here. If they wanted to hurt me they could have dropped one artillery round in our lap."
"You trust them?"
"They're just people, Jain." The doors of the track opened and three armored soldiers came out.
"People, shit." I heard her bare feet slapping down the stairs and fought the urge to follow her.
The three came up the outdoor steps and I opened the door for them. They filed inside without a word.
One had captain's bars. When they were all in the living room he said, "This is her?"
"Yeah. That's her."
"Mark," I said. He turned around and left.
The captain grabbed one arm and then the other, and pinioned me. "Let's do it."
The other had red crosses on each shoulder. He or she pulled a syringe out of a web-belt pocket.
There was a huge explosion and the medic went down, hard. The captain let go of me and spun around. Jain was standing at the top of the basement steps with an 11-mm. Glock. She and the captain fired at the same time. He hit her in the center of the chest. Her blood spattered the wall behind her and she was dead before she started to fall.
Her bullet staggered him, but the armor worked, and he recovered before I had time to do more than scream. He punched me in the side of the head and I collapsed.
He hauled me roughly to my feet. "Medic. Get the fuck up."
He moaned. "Jesus, man." He got up on one elbow. "Think she broke my sternum."
"I'll break more'n that. Do your job."
He got up slowly, painfully. Found the syringe on the floor.
"What's that?" Though I knew. He gave me an injection in the shoulder and threw the needle away.
The captain shoved me toward the door. "Let's go make another video."
~~~~~
I was in the Newton cell for about eight hours when I started to cough. By then I'd written most of this. Though I don't suppose anyone will ever see it. It will be burned with my clothes, with my body.
I'll never know whether Jain was completely right. She had at least part of the story.
My face is stiffening. The ridges don't show in the cell's dirty metal mirror, but I can feel them under the skin.
It's hard to make my jaw work to close my mouth. Before long it will stay a little bit open, then more, until it's wide as it can go. I k
now that from the pictures of the corpses. I wonder whether you die before the jaw breaks.
I'm isolated from everybody, but from the small window of my cell I can see the exercise yard, and I can see that Wally was right. There aren't any old people left among the survivors. Nobody over their mid-forties. Next year it might be mid-thirties. In a few years, Newton, like Boston, will be empty.
They can have their city back. Turn off the nightlights, repair the artillery damage. Scrub the dried blood off the walls, pick up the bones and throw them away.
Whenever I move, I can hear the little motors of the camera as it tracks me from the darkness of the corridor. Sometimes I see a glint of light from its lens.
I don't think there was any conspiracy. Just a status quo that perpetuated itself. Us versus them in a waiting game. With insignificant me poised for a few days in the middle: an us who was a them; a them who was an us.
Who lost and found and lost her shadow.
(Back to TOC)
Ride Me Like A Wave
Jane Yolen
Hide me in your hollows
Taste the salt that clings to me
shipwrecked your shallows
scented by the sea
Hide me in the wisdom of your thighs
Ride me like a wave…
~ from Ride Me Like A Wave by Janis Ian
There is no profit in fishing, less in building boats. Tam knew that. But still he loved the shape of the wood under his hand, rising into a prow, a stern, a long keel. No one could afford the boats he built, no one could pay him what they were worth. So he gave them away to the fishermen of his village for they made even less than he.
Each boat had an Eye painted on the prow, a red and blue and wide-open Eye, to prosper the catch. Then each boat was blessed by the priest, who gave away his blessings as well.
What they were all after—Tam, the priest, the fisherfolk—was food for the hungry of the village. And as they themselves were the hungry, it was an exchange that was, if not profit, at least something to keep their bellies from crying out, even in the winter after months of dried cod.
Tam did not begrudge the fishermen his boats. Indeed, he often went down to the shore to watch the fleet come in, knowing that every boat riding the white caps home was known to his hand.
There was pride in that knowing.
And a full creel of fish for him when they were docked and dry, left by the grateful sailors.
When the spring storms raged, and some of the boats came back bit by bit, board by board, Tam gathered the pieces on the shore below his cottage and shaped coffins for the sailors whose bodies were found, and for the handful of dirt and seafoam for those who were not.
To be honest, Tam was a lonely man, but he did not know it. His love was for the wood and the wave, the one to shape, the one to watch. Strangely for a man who had always lived by the seaside, he did not go out on the water himself. He feared the cold, green deep. It was enough that the salt clung to him, that he was well scented by its smell.
Can lives that are merely constant be happy?
If you asked Tam how he felt, he would have counted these out: Wood, wind, waves. Not happy, perhaps, but content.
Now one day, a day of great wind and water the color of flotsam, a day of foam as filthy as the guts of fish, something other than driftwood came to the shore below Tam's cottage.
He found the thing in the dawn, lying on his part of the beach.
Thing. Not human, not fish.
Thing. Not beautiful, not ugly.
Thing. A mer creature.
The hair on its head was a yellow-green, encrusted with broken shells and seadrift. Its breasts stuck up like two small teacups, the nipples inverted. There was a ridge of hard skin, like a scab, running between the breasts and down to a bifurcated gray-green tail. A darker green were the little cuticle-shaped scales that covered the tail. The creature's arms and its chest were scaled, too, but those scales were like feathers, so light-colored they all but disappeared into the green-gold skin.
Tam did not know what to do with it, the dead thing from the sea. He didn't want to touch it, half fish, half human, all horrible. It smelled, too, a heavy, musk, like something pulled up from the great deep. All he could do was stand over it and stare.
Then the mer gave a frothy cough and water and blood spilled out of the gill slits along the neck, slits Tam hadn't even noticed before. The creature's right hand, webbed with a lining like silk, reached up to its mouth. It coughed again and opened its eyes.
They were not a human's eyes, but more fishlike, dark, unfathomable. A shark's eyes. Turning its head, the mer stared at Tam with those black, mirrorless eyes.
He wondered what it saw.
Then drops of water began to fall from the mer's eyes, crawling down its cheeks, mixing with the seawater that puddled in its hair.
Suddenly Tam did not care that it was inhuman, alien, ghastly. She—for the creature was surely a she—was in distress. He took off his shirt, knelt beside her, wrapped her in it, and carried her to his home. There he placed her gently on a pallet by the hearth.
She refused fresh water cold or boiled into tea. She would not eat cress, salted or plain. The fish stew he'd made the night before caused her to moan and look away. She'd already torn off the shirt, once more exposing her tiny breasts with the odd inverted nipples. In the firelight the breasts seemed to shift color, from green to gray to gold.
He picked up the shirt and put it back on himself, buttoning it slowly, aware that it smelled of her, and was wet clear through. Then he squatted by her side and stared.
The problem was, Tam was a doer, and he did not know what to do. They might have stayed that way for hours, days, but she suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. At least it sounded like a song, though wordless, and without the kind of melody he was used to. Not a reel, not a ballad, not quite a lament.
The song caught him, pulled him to his knees, then propelled him toward her. He could not have stopped then had he wanted to.
And he did not want to.
He lay down by her side, carefully not to touch her, as the song went on.
She reached out and rested her strange webbed fingers on his face. The touch was not so much hesitant as searching. She seemed as repelled and as drawn as he.
Suddenly, she pulled at his shirt off, so hard the horn buttons broke apart. The wet linen ripped.
"Hey!" he cried, but it did not fright her.
Then she grabbed at his trousers, her touch oddly frantic, as if she had only now understood the clothes were not his skin. Her fingers raced across his waist, his thighs.
He pushed the trousers down to his ankles, taking no time to get out of his boots.
She made a funny, gasping sound, then cupped him between her hands, her touch both gentle and electric. He shuddered as if chilled, as if in cold water, as if shocked by an eel, then closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, she had spread herself, the tail forked as if two limbs, and then she reeled him in.
Not having done any such thing but once before, with a whore from the town, who had lain under him like a beached whale, he let himself come into her, riding her like a wave. It was a rising and a falling, a swelling and a cresting. When he put his mouth on hers, her lips were soft and slippery. Then he put his head in her hair and smelled the seaweed there.
He was, at last, more than content.
~~~~~
When Tam woke, the mer was gone, a trail of jingle shells out the door where she must have struggled alone. Pulling his pants up, he rose from the pallet, grabbed his Sunday shirt from the cupboard. He could see in the dirt floor where her tail had left a serpentine path and he followed it all the way down to the sea.
He wondered suddenly why she had come. A gift from some sea god for all the boats he had made? For all the sailors he had helped? For the ones he had buried?
Or was she instead a sea god's curse? He touched himself, fearing he would he find himself diseas
ed, changed. There was no electricity in his touch, and no comfort either.
Wading into the sea, up to his knees, he strained to see out across the now placid water for some sign of her.
"Come back. Come back," he called.
But no one—no thing—answered his cry.
~~~~~
Every few weeks there were gifts of fish left at his door. Not the kind of fish that the sailors gave him after a good catch—cod and ling and halibut. These were large-eyed, deep sea, hideous creatures he was afraid to eat. He used them to fertilize his vegetable garden.
After a while the gifts stopped.
~~~~~
The years passed. If he remembered the mer and the night he rode her like a wave, he thought it but a dream. Or a nightmare. Or a bit of both. He never spoke of it to anyone, except once in his cups after a long night gathering the bits of broken boats from the sea.
The sailors thought he was yarning, telling a tall tale, and they dragged him back to his house where, with grateful thanks, they put him to bed.
He never spoke of it again.
Nor did they.
~~~~~
One day, when Tam was very old, and the pain in his chest too strong to be ignored, he did what many of the sailors of that village did when they could no longer put out to sea. He got into his best clothes, left a note on the table, held down with his carving knife, and walked into the sea.
The sea wrapped him in its cold arms.
At first he trembled, like a boy with his first lover. Then he smiled for the cold had pushed away the pain. So, taking in a last gulp of air, he walked even further in.
The sea took away his breath and cradled him in green. Memories rushed in like a wave.
In the last moments, he saw the mer again, holding her hand out to him, drawing him in.
He went to her gladly, letting her touch him again, letting her kiss him with her slippery mouth until he died, content, surrounded by the green world and his dozens of mourning children.
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In Fading Suns And Dying Moons
John Varley
Within the memories of our lives gone by,
afraid to die, we learn to lie
