Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

  a pleasant one. The people here were self-assured; they

  had been successful and now they could relax. It evidently was a myth that proximity to His Greatness produced neurotic anxiety: he saw no evidence here, at least, and

  felt little himself.

  A heavy-set elderly man, bald, halted him by the

  simple means of holding his drink glass against Chien’s

  chest. “That frably little one who asked you for a

  match,” the elderly man said, and sniggered. “The quig

  with the Christmas-tree breasts— that was a boy, in

  drag.” He giggled. “You have to be cautious around

  here.”

  “Where, if anywhere,” Chien said, “do I find authentic

  women? In the white ties and tails?”

  “Dam near,” the elderly man said, and departed with

  a throng of hyperactive guests, leaving Chien alone with

  his martini.

  A handsome, tall woman, well dressed, standing near

  Chien, suddenly put her hand on his arm; he felt her

  fingers tense and she said, “Here he comes. His Great­

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  ness. This is the first time for me; I’m a little scared.

  Does my hair look all right?”

  “Fine,” Chien said reflexively, and followed her gaze,

  seeking a glimpse— his first— of the Absolute Benefactor.

  What crossed the room toward the table in the center

  was not a man.

  And it was not, Chien realized, a mechanical construct

  either; it was not what he had seen on TV. That evidently

  was simply a device for speechmaking, as Mussolini had

  once used an artificial arm to salute long and tedious

  processions.

  God, he thought, and felt ill. Was this what Tanya Lee

  had called the “aquatic horror” shape? It had no shape.

  Nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal. It was, in a sense,

  not there at all; when he managed to look directly at it,

  the shape vanished; he saw through it, saw the people on

  the far side— but not it. Yet if he turned his head, caught

  it out of a sidelong glance, he could determine its

  boundaries.

  It was terrible; it blasted him with its awfulness. As it

  moved it drained the life from each person in turn; it ate

  the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate

  more with an endless appetite. It hated; he felt its hate. It

  loathed; he felt its loathing for everyone present— in fact

  he shared its loathing. All at once he and everyone else in

  the big villa were each a twisted slug, and over the fallen

  slug-carcasses the creature savored, lingered, but all the

  time coming directly toward him— or was that an illusion? If this is a hallucination, Chien thought, it is the worst I have ever had; if it is not, then it is evil reality;

  it’s an evil thing that kills and injures. He saw the trail

  of stepped-on, mashed men and women remnants behind it; he saw them trying to reassemble, to operate their crippled bodies; he heard them attempting speech.

  I know who you are, Tung Chien thought to himself.

  You, the supreme head of the worldwide Party structure.

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  93

  You, who destroy whatever living object you touch; I see

  that Arabic poem, the searching for the flowers of life to

  eat them— I see you astride the plain which to you is

  Earth, plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear any time, devour anything; you engineer life and then guzzle it, and you enjoy that.

  He thought, You are God.

  “Mr. Chien,” the voice said, but it came from inside

  his head, not from the mouthless spirit that fashioned

  itself directly before him. “It is good to meet you again.

  You know nothing. Go away. I have no interest in you.

  Why should I care about slime? Slime; I am mired in it, I

  must excrete it, and I choose to. I could break you; I can

  break even myself. Sharp stones are under me; I spread

  sharp pointed things upon the mire. I make the hiding

  places, the deep places, boil like a pot; to me the sea is

  like a pot of ointment. The flakes of my flesh are joined

  to everything. You are me. I am you. It makes no

  difference, just as it makes no difference whether the

  creature with ignited breasts is a girl or boy; you could

  learn to enjoy either.” It laughed.

  He could not believe it was speaking to him; he could

  not imagine— it was too terrible—that it had picked

  him out.

  “I have picked everybody out,” it said. “No one is too

  small; each falls and dies and I am there to watch. I don’t

  need to do anything but watch; it is automatic; it was

  arranged that way.” And then it ceased talking to him; it

  disjoined itself. But he still saw it; he felt its manifold

  presence. It was a globe which hung in the room, with

  fifty thousand eyes, with a million eyes—billions: an eye

  for each living thing as it waited for each thing to fall,

  and then stepped on the living thing as it lay in a broken

  state. Because of this it had created the things, and he

  knew; he understood. What had seemed in the Arabic

  poem to be death was not death but god; or rather God

  was death, it was one force, one hunter, one cannibal

  thing, and it missed again and again but, having all

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  eternity, it could afford to miss. Both poems, he realized;

  the Dryden one too. The crumbling; that is our world

  and you are doing it. Warping it to come out that way;

  bending us.

  But at least, he thought, I still have my dignity. With

  dignity he set down his drink glass, turned, walked

  toward the doors of the room. He passed through the

  doors. He walked down a long carpeted hall. A villa

  servant dressed in purple opened a door for him; he

  found himself standing out in the night darkness, on a

  veranda, alone.

  Not alone.

  It had followed after him. Or it had already been here

  before him; yes, it had been expecting. It was not really

  through with him.

  “Here I go,” he said, and made a dive for the railing; it

  was six stories down, and there below gleamed the river,

  and death, real death, not what the Arabic poem had

  seen.

  As he tumbled over, it put an extension of itself on his

  shoulder.

  “Why?” he said. But, in fact, he paused. Wondering.

  Not understanding, not at all.

  “Don’t fall on my account,” it said. He could not see it

  because it had moved behind him. But the piece of it on

  his shoulder— it had begun to look to him like a human

  hand.

  And then it laughed.

  “What’s funny?” he demanded, as he teetered on the

  railing, held back by its pseudo-hand.

  “You’re doing my task for me,” it said. “You aren’t

  waiting; don’t you have time to wait? I’ll select you out

  from among the others; you don’t need to speed the

  process up.”

  “What if I do?” he said. “Out of revulsion for you?”

  It laughed. And didn’t answer.

&
nbsp; “You won’t even say,” he said.

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  95

  Again no answer. He started to slide back, onto the

  veranda. And at once the pressure of its pseudo-hand

  lifted.

  “You founded the Party?” he asked.

  “ I founded everything. I founded the anti-Party and

  the Party that isn’t a Party, and those who are for it and

  those who are against, those that you call Yankee Imperialists, those in the camp of reaction, and so on endlessly.

  I founded it all. As if they were blades o f grass.”

  “And you’re here to enjoy it?” he said.

  “What I want,” it said, “is for you to see me, as I am,

  as you have seen me, and then trust me.”

  “What?” he said, quavering. “Trust you to what?”

  It said, “ Do you believe in me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can see you.”

  “Then go back to your job at the Ministry. Tell Tanya

  Lee that you saw an overworked, overweight, elderly

  man who drinks too much and likes to pinch girls’ rear

  ends.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said.

  “As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you,” it

  said. “I will deprive you, item by item, of everything you

  possess or want. And then when you are crushed to death

  I will unfold a mystery.”

  “What’s the mystery?”

  “The dead shall live, the living die. I kill what lives; I

  save what has died. And I will tell you this: there are

  things worse than /. But you won’t meet them because by

  then I will have killed you. Now walk back into the

  dining room and prepare for dinner. Don’t question

  what I’m doing; I did it long before there was a Tung

  Chien and I will do it long after.”

  He hit it as hard as he could.

  And experienced violent pain in his head.

  And darkness, with the sense of falling.

  After that, darkness again. He thought, I will get you. I

  will see that you die too. That you suffer, you’re going to

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  suffer, just like us, exactly in every way we do. I’ll

  dedicate my life to that; I’ll confront you again, and I’ll

  nail you; I swear to god I’ll nail you up somewhere. And

  it will hurt. As much as I hurt now.

  He shut his eyes.

  Roughly, he was shaken. And heard Mr. Kimo

  Okubara’s voice. “Get to your feet, common drunk.

  Come on!”

  Without opening his eyes he said, “Get me a cab.”

  “Cab already waiting. You go home. Disgrace. Make a

  violent scene out of yourself.”

  Getting shakily to his feet, he opened his eyes, examined himself. Our Leader whom we follow, he thought, is the One True God. And the enemy whom we fight and

  have fought is God too. They are right; he is everywhere.

  But I didn’t understand what that meant. Staring at the

  protocol officer, he thought, You are God too. So there is

  no getting away, probably not even by jumping. As I

  started, instinctively, to do. He shuddered.

  “Mix drinks with drugs,” Okubara said witheringly.

  “Ruin career. I see it happen many times. Get lost.”

  Unsteadily, he walked toward the great central door of

  the Yangtze River villa; two servants, dressed like medieval knights, with crested plumes, ceremoniously opened the door for him and one of them said, “Good night,

  sir.”

  “ Up yours,” Chien said, and passed out into the night.

  At a quarter to three in the morning, as he sat sleepless in

  the living room of his conapt, smoking one Cuesta Rey

  Astoria after another, a knock sounded at the door.

  When he opened it he found himself facing Tanya Lee

  in her trenchcoat, her face pinched with cold. Her eyes

  blazed, questioningly.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said roughly. His cigar

  had gone out; he relit it. “I’ve been looked at enough,” he

  said.

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  97

  “You saw it,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She seated herself on the arm of the couch and after a

  time she said, “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Go as far from here as possible,” he said. “Go a long

  way.” And then he remembered; no way was long

  enough. He remembered reading that too. “Forget it,” he

  said; rising to his feet, he walked clumsily into the

  kitchen to start up the coffee.

  Following after him, Tanya said, “Was— it that bad?”

  “We can’t win,” he said. “You can’t win; I don’t mean

  me. I’m not in this; I just want to do my job at the

  Ministry and forget about it. Forget the whole damned

  thing.”

  “Is it non-terrestrial?”

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  “Is it hostile to us?”

  “Yes,” he said. “No. Both. Mostly hostile.”

  “Then we have to— ”

  “Go home,” he said, “and go to bed.” He looked her

  over carefully; he had sat a long time and he had done a

  great deal of thinking. About a lot of things. “Are you

  married?” he said.

  “No. Not now. I used to be.”

  He said, “Stay with me tonight. The rest of tonight,

  anyhow. Until the sun comes up.” He added, “The night

  part is awful.”

  “I’ll stay,” Tanya said, unbuckling the belt of her

  raincoat, “but I have to have some answers.”

  “What did Dryden mean,” Chien said, “about music

  untuning the sky? I don’t get that. What does music do to

  the sky?”

  “All the celestial order of the universe ends,” she said

  as she hung her raincoat up in the closet of the bedroom;

  under it she wore an orange striped sweater and stretch-

  pants.

  He said, “And that’s bad.”

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  Pausing, she reflected. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “It’s a lot of power,” he said, “to assign to music.”

  “Well, you know that old Pythagorean business about

  the ‘music of the spheres.’ ” Matter-of-factly she seated

  herself on the bed and removed her slipperlike shoes.

  “ Do you believe in that?” he said. “Or do you believe

  in God?”

  “ ‘God’!” She laughed. “That went out with the donkey steam engine. What are you talking about? God, or god?” She came over close beside him, peering into his

  face.

  “Don’t look at me so closely,” he said sharply, drawing

  back. “ I don’t ever want to be looked at again.” He

  moved away, irritably.

  “ I think,” Tanya said, “that if there is a God He has

  very little interest in human affairs. That’s my theory,

  anyhow. I mean, He doesn’t seem to care if evil triumphs

  or people and animals get hurt and die. I frankly don’t

  see Him anywhere around. And the Party has always

  denied any form of— ”

  “Did you ever see Him?” he asked. “When you were a

  child?”

  “Oh, sure, as a child. But I also believed— ”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Chien said, “that good andr />
  evil are names for the same thing? That God could be

  both good and evil at the same time?”

  “I’ll fix you a drink,” Tanya said, and padded barefoot

  into the kitchen.

  Chien said, “The Crusher. The Clanker. The Gulper

  and the Bird and the Climbing Tube— plus other names,

  forms, I don’t know. I had a hallucination. At the stag

  dinner. A big one. A terrible one.”

  “But the stelazine— ”

  “It brought on a worse one,” he said.

  “Is there any way,” Tanya said somberly, “that we can

  fight this thing you saw? This apparition you call a

  hallucination but which very obviously was not?”

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  He said, “Believe in it.”

  “What will that do?”

  “Nothing,” he said wearily. “Nothing at all. I’m tired;

  I don’t want a drink— let’s just go to bed.”

  “Okay.” She padded back into the bedroom, began

  pulling her striped sweater over her head. “We’ll discuss

  it more thoroughly later.”

  “A hallucination,” Chien said, “is merciful. I wish I

  had it; I want mine back. I want to be before your

  peddler got to me with that phenothiazine.”

  “Just come to bed. It’ll be toasty. All warm and nice.”

  He removed his tie, his shirt— and saw, on his right

  shoulder, the mark, the stigma, which it had left when it

  stopped him from jumping. Livid marks which looked as

  if they would never go away. He put his pajama top on,

  then; it hid the marks.

  “Anyhow,” Tanya said as he got into the bed beside

  her, “your career is immeasurably advanced. Aren’t you

  glad about that?”

  “Sure,” he said, nodding sightlessly in the darkness.

  “Very glad.”

  “Come over against me,” Tanya said, putting her arms

  around him. “And forget everything else. At least for

  now.”

  He tugged her against him, then, doing what she asked

  and what he wanted to do. She was neat; she was swiftly

  active; she was successful and she did her part. They did

  not bother to speak until at last she said, “Oh!” And then

  she relaxed.

  “I wish,” he said, “that we could go on forever.”

  “We did,” Tanya said. “It’s outside of time; it’s

  boundless, like an ocean. It’s the way we were in Cambrian times, before we migrated up onto the land; it’s the ancient primary waters. This is the only time we get to go