“Ellen—” he said, and realized that it was the first time he’d spoken her name aloud in thirty years, and faltered into silence. He sighed, and began again. “You’re asking me to betray my principles, to betray everything I’ve ever stood for, to tear down everything I’ve ever built . . .”
“Oh, fuck your principles!” she said exasperatedly. “Get over it! We can’t afford principles! We’re talking about life here. If you’re still alive, anything can happen! Who knows what role you may still have to play in our destiny, you stupid fucking moron? Who knows, you could make all the difference. If you’re alive, that is. If you’re dead, you’re nothing but a corpse with principles. Nothing else is going to happen, nothing else can happen. End of story!”
“Ellen—” he said, but she impatiently waved away the rest of what he was going to say. “There’s nothing noble about being dead, Charlie,” she said fiercely. “There’s nothing romantic about it. There’s no statement you can make by dying that’s worth the potential of what you might be able to do with the rest of your life. You think you’re proving some kind of point by dying, by refusing to choose life instead, it enables you to see yourself as all noble and principled and high-minded, you can feel a warm virtuous glow about yourself, while you last.” She leaned closer, her lips in a tight line. “Well, you look like shit, Charlie. You’re wearing out, you’re falling apart. You’re dying. There’s nothing noble about it. The meat is rotting on the bone, your muscles are sagging, your hair is falling out, your juices are drying up. You smell bad.”
He flushed with embarrassment and turned away, but she leaned in closer after him, relentlessly. “There’s nothing noble about it. It’s just stupid. You don’t refuse to refurbish a car because it has a lot of miles on it—you re-tune it, refresh it, tinker with it, replace a faulty part here and there, strip the goddamn thing down to the chassis and rebuild it if necessary. You keep it running. Because otherwise, you can’t go anywhere with it. And who knows where it could still take you?”
He turned further away from her, squirming around in his chair, partially turning his back on her. After a moment, she said, “You keep casting yourself as Faust, and Bucky Bug as Mephistopheles. Or is your ego big enough to make it Jesus and the Devil, up on that mountain? But it’s just not that simple. It’s just not that simple anymore. If it ever was. Maybe the right choice, the moral choice, is to give in to temptation, not fight it! We don’t have to play by the old rules. Being human can mean whatever we want it to mean!”
Another lake of silence filled up around them, and they at the bottom of it, deep enough to drown. At last, quietly, she said, “Do you ever hear from Sam?”
He stirred, sighed, rubbed his hand over his face. “Not for years. Not a word. I don’t even know whether he’s still alive.”
She made a small noise, not quite a sigh. “That poor kid! We threw him back and forth between us until he broke. I suppose that I always had to be right, too, didn’t I? We made quite a pair. No wonder he rejected both of us as soon as he got the chance!”
Czudak said nothing. After a moment, as if carrying on a conversation already in progress that only he could hear, he said, “You made your choices long ago. You burnt your bridges behind you when you took that job with the Company and went up to work in space, against my wishes. You knew I didn’t want you to go, that I didn’t approve, but you went anyway, in spite of all the political embarrassment it caused me! You didn’t care so much about our marriage then, did you? You’d already left me by the time the AI Revolt happened!”
She stirred, as if she was going to blaze at him again, but instead only said quietly, “But I came back for you too, didn’t I? Afterward. I didn’t have to do that, but I did. I stuck my neck way out to come back for you. You were the one who refused to come with me, when I gave you the chance. Who was burning bridges then?”
He grunted, massaged his face with both hands. God, he was so tired! Who had been right then, who was right now—he didn’t know anymore. Truth be told, he only dimly remembered what the issues had been in the first place. He was so tired. His vision blurred, and he rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said dully. “I don’t know anymore.”
He could feel her eyes on him again, intently, but he refused to turn his head to look at her. “When the AIs took over the Orbital Towns,” she said, “and offered every one of us there immortality if we’d join them, did you really expect me to turn them down?”
Now he turned his head to look at her, meeting her gaze levelly. “I would have,” he said. “If it meant losing you.”
“You really believe that, don’t you, you sanctimonious bastard?” she said sadly. She laughed quietly, and shook her head. Czudak continued to stare at her. After a moment of silence, she reached out and took him by the arm. He could feel the warmth of her hand there, fingers pressing into his flesh, the first time she had touched him in thirty years. “I miss you,” she said. “Come back to me.”
He looked away. When he looked around again, she was gone, without even a stirring of the air to mark her passage. Had she ever been there at all?
The places where she had touched his arm burned faintly, tingling, as if he had been touched by fire, or the sun.
He sat there, in silence, for what seemed like a very long time, geological aeons, time enough for continents to move and mountains flow like water, while the shadows shifted and afternoon gathered toward evening around him. Ellen’s scent hung in the room for a long time and then slowly faded, like a distant regret. The clock was running, he knew—in more ways than one.
He had to make up his mind. He had to decide. Now. One way or the other. This was the sticking point.
He had to make up his mind.
Had it ever been so quiet, anywhere, at any time in the fretful, grinding, bloody history of the world? When he was young, he would often seek out lonely places full of holy silence, remote stretches of desert, mountaintops, a deserted beach at dawn, places where you could be contemplative, places where you could just be, drinking in the world, pores open . . . but now he would have welcomed the most mundane and commonplace of sounds, a dog barking, the sound of passing traffic, a bird singing, someone—a human voice!—yelling out in the street—anything to show that he was still connected to the world, still capable of bringing in the broadcast signal of reality with his deteriorating receiving set. Still alive. Still here. Sometimes, in the cold dead middle of the night, the shadows at his throat like razors, he would speak some inane net show on, talking heads gabbing earnestly about things he didn’t care about at all, and let it babble away unheeded in the background all night long, until the sun came up to chase the graveyard shadows away, just for the illusion of company. You needed something, some kind of noise, to counter the silences and lonelinesses that were filling up your life, and to help distract you from thinking about what waited ahead, the ultimate, unbreakable silence of death. He remembered how his mother, in the last few decades of her life, after his father was gone, would fall asleep on the couch every night with the TV set running. She never slept in the bed, even though it was only a few feet away across her small apartment, not even closed off by a door. She said that she liked having the TV set on, “for the noise.” Now he understood this. Deep contemplative silence is not necessarily your friend when you’re old. It allows you to listen too closely to the disorder in your veins and the labored beating of your heart.
God, it was quiet!
He found himself remembering a trip he’d taken with Ellen a lifetime ago, the honeymoon trip they’d spent driving up the California coast on old Route 1, and how somewhere, after dark, just north of Big Sur, on the way to spend the night in a B&B in Monterey (where they would fuck so vigorously on the narrow bed that they’d tip it over, and the guy in the room below would pound on the ceiling to complain, making them laugh uncontrollably in spite of attempts to shoosh each other, as they sprawled on the floor in a tangle of bedclothes, drenched in each other’s sweat), they pulle
d over for a moment at a vista-point. He remembered getting out of the car in the dark, with the invisible ocean breathing on their left, and, looking up, being amazed by how many stars you could see in the sky here, a closely-packed bowl of stars surrounding you on all sides except where the darker-black against black silhouette of the hills took a bite out of it. Stars all around you, millions of them, coldly flaming, indifferent, majestic, remote. If you watched the night sky too long, he’d realized then, feeling the cold salt wind blow in off the unseen ocean and listening to the hollow boom and crash of waves against the base of the cliff far below, the chill of the stars began to seep into you, and you began to get an uneasy reminder of how vast the universe really was—or how small you were. It was knowledge you had to turn away from eventually, before that chill sank too deeply into your bones; you had to pull back from it, shrug it off, try to immerse yourself again in your tiny human life, do your best to once more wrap yourself in the conviction that the great wheel of the universe revolved around you instead, and that everyone else and everything else around you, the mountains, the vast breathing sea, the sky itself, were merely spear-carriers or theatrical backdrops in the unique drama of your life, a vitally important drama unlike anything that had ever gone before . . . But once faced with the true vastness of the universe, once you’d had that chill insight, alone under the stars, it was hard to shake the realization that you were only a miniscule fleck of matter, that existed for a span of time so infinitely, vanishingly short that it couldn’t even be measured on the clock of geologic time, by the birth and death of mountains and seas, let alone on the vastly greater clock that ticks away how long it takes the great flaming wheel of the Galaxy to whirl around itself, or one galaxy to wheel around another. That the shortest blink of the cosmic Eye would still be aeons too long to notice your little life at all.
Against that kind of immensity, what did “immortality” mean, for either human or machine? A million years, a day—from that perspective, they were much the same.
There was a throb of pain in his temple now. A tension headache starting? Or a stroke? It would be ironic if a blood vessel burst in his brain and killed him before he even had a chance to make up his mind.
One way or the other, time was almost up. Either his corporeal life or his terrestrial one ended today. Either way, he wouldn’t be back here again. He looked slowly around the room, examining every detail, things that had been there for so long that they’d faded into the background and he didn’t really see them anymore: a set of bronze door-chimes, hung over the back door, that he and Ellen had bought in Big Sur; an ornamental glass ball in a woven net; a big brown-and-cream vase from a cluttered craft shop in Seattle; a crockery sun-face they’d gotten in Albuquerque; a wind-up toy carousel that played “The Carousel Waltz.” Familiar mugs and cups and bowls, worn smooth with age. A framed Cirque Du Soleil poster, decades old now. One of Sam’s old stuffed animals, a battered tiger with one ear drooping, tucked away on a shelf of the high kitchen cabinet, and never touched or moved again.
Strange that he had gotten rid of Ellen’s photograph, ostentatiously made a point of not displaying it, but kept all the rest of these things, all the memorabilia of their years together—as though subconsciously he was expecting her to come back, to step back into his life as simply as she’d stepped out it, and pick up where they’d left off. But that wasn’t going to happen. If they were to have any life together, it would be very far away from here, and under conditions that were unimaginably strange. Would he have the courage to face that, would he have the strength to deal with starting a new life? Or was his soul too old, too tired, too tarnished, no matter what nanomagic tricks the Mechanicals could play with his physical body?
Joseph was gesturing urgently to him again, waving both arms over his head from the middle of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. He released the valet from reserve-mode, and Joseph immediately appeared beside the kitchen table, contriving somehow to look flustered. “I have this Highest Priority message for you, sir, although I don’t know where it came from or how it was placed in my system. All it says is, ‘You don’t have much time.’”
“I know, Joseph,” Czudak said, cutting him off. “It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to tell you—” Czudak paused, suddenly uncertain what to say. “I just wanted to tell you that, whichever way things go, you’ve been a good friend to me, and I appreciate it.”
Joseph looked at him oddly. “Of course, sir,” he said. How much of this could he really understand? It was way outside of his programming parameters, even with adaptable learning-algorithms. “But the message—”
Czudak spoke him off, and he was gone. Just like that. Vanished. Gone. And if he was never spoken on again, would it make any difference to him? Even if Joseph had known in advance that he’d never be spoken on again, that there would be nothing from this moment on but non-existence, blankness, blackness, nothingness, would he have cared?
Czudak stood up.
As he started across the room, he realized that the time-travelers were still there. Rank on rank of them, filling the room with jostling ghosts, thousands of them, millions of them perhaps, a vast insubstantial crowd of them that he couldn’t see, but that he could feel were there. Waiting. Watching. Watching him. He stopped, stunned, for the first time beginning to believe in the presence of the time-travelers as a real phenomenon, and not just a half-senile fancy of his decaying brain.
This is what they were here to see. This moment. His decision.
But why? Were they students of obscure old-recescension political scandals, here to witness his betrayal of his old principles, the way you might go back to witness Benedict Arnold sealing his pact with the British or Nixon giving the orders for Watergate? Were they triumphant future descendants of the Meats, here to watch the heroic moment when he threw the Mechanicals’ offer of immortality defiantly back in their teflon faces, perhaps inspiring some sort of human resistance movement? Or were they here to witness the birth of his new life after he accepted that offer, because of something he had yet to do, something he would go on to do centuries or thousands of years from now? And who were they? Were they his own human descendants, from millions of years in the future, evolved into strange beings with godlike powers?
Or were they the descendants of the Mechanicals, grown to a ghostly discorporate strangeness of their own?
He walked forward, feeling the watching shadows part around him, close in again close behind. He still didn’t know what he was going to do. It would have been so easy to make this decision when he was young. Young and strong and self-righteous, full of pride and determination and integrity. He would have turned the Mechanicals down flat, indignantly, with loathing, not hesitating for a moment, knowing what was right. He already had done that once, in fact, long before, teaching them that they couldn’t buy him, no matter what coin they offered to pay in! He wasn’t for sale!
Now, he wasn’t so sure.
Now, hobbling painfully toward the front door, feeling pain lance through his head at every step, feeling his knee throb, he was struck by a sudden sense of what it would be like to be young again—to suddenly be young again, all at once, in a second! To put all the infirmities and indignities of age aside, like shedding a useless skin. To feel life again, really feel it, in a hot hormonal rush of whirling emotions, a maelstrom of scents, sounds, sights, tastes, touch, all at full strength rather than behind an insulating wall of glass, life loud and vulgar and blaring at top volume rather than whispering in the slowly diminishing voice of a dying radio, life where you could touch it, all your nerves jumping just under your skin, rather than feeling the world pulling slowly away from you, withdrawing, fading away with a sullen murmur, like a tide that has gone miles out from the beach . . .
Czudak opened his front door, and stepped out onto the high white marble stoop.
The Meats had moved their demonstration over from the park, and were now camped out in front of his house, filling the street in their hundreds, blocking t
raffic. They were still beating their drums and blowing on their horns and whistles, although he hadn’t heard anything inside the house; the Mechanical’s doing, perhaps. A great wave of sound puffed in to greet him when he opened the door, though, blaring and vivid, smacking into his face with almost physical force. When he stepped out onto the stoop, the drums and horns began to falter and fall silent one by one, and a startled hush spread out over the crowd, like ripples spreading out over the surface of a pond from a thrown stone, until there was instead of noise an expectant silence made up of murmurs and whispers, noises not quite heard. And then even that almost-noise stopped, as if the world had taken a deep breath and held it, waiting, and he looked out over a sea of expectant faces, looking back at him, turned up toward him like flowers turned toward the sun.
A warm breeze came up, blowing across the park, blowing from the distant corners of the Earth, tugging at his hair. It smelled of magnolias and hyacinths and new-mown grass, and it stirred the branches of the trees around him, making them lift and shrug. The horizon to the west was a glory of clouds, hot gold, orange, lime, scarlet, coral, fiery purple, with the sun a gleaming orange coin balanced on the very rim of the world, ready to teeter and fall off. The rest of the sky was a delicate pale blue, fading to plum and ash to the East, out toward the distant ocean. The full moon was already out, a pale perfect disk, like a bone-white face peering with languid curiosity down on the ancient earth. A bird began to sing, trilling liquidly, somewhere out in the gathering darkness.
Exultation opened hotly inside him, like a wound. God, he loved the world!
Throwing his head back, he began to speak.
The Storm
Introduction to The Storm
“The Storm” comes from a time in Gardner Dozois’ career when I only knew him as a name, usually seen in the Orbit anthologies. I grouped him with Wolfe, Wilhelm, Lafferty and others as one of the powerful new New Wave talents Damon Knight was showcasing in his series, in an all-out effort to change and improve science fiction yet again. Each decade from the 1930’s on, science fiction had grown in leaps and bounds, as if the years with zeroes in them were cliffs that the genre was nimbly bounding up; and now, in the early 1970’s, it was happening again. Dozois was a slinky and exotic name, and the stories under the name were similar: beautifully written, strange and powerful. Sharing all these qualities, “The Storm” fits right in with the other stories of that era (indeed in many ways it is a reversal of “The Last Day of July”), but as it first appeared in a Roger Elwood anthology, I did not see it at that time. Now it is good to have it reappear before me, as if out of a time capsule. For one thing, I like recalling that paper Dozois of the early ‘70’s, unknown to me. Not that the real person is any kind of let-down; on the contrary; but now that Gardner is a friend, and functions so ably as the mayor of science fiction, performing the crucial community task of Most Important SF Editor, perhaps the single most knowledgeable and powerful person in terms of shaping the field, it is harder to remember just how dark and singular his own fiction has been. Like several other New Wave writers, his was often a poetry of entropy, and while stories like “The Storm” evoke memories of Bradbury’s tales of childhood, I think the more accurate reference would be to Edgar Allan Poe: there is the same economy of means, the same kind of simple, memorable central idea, expressed in vivid prose, and focusing on chaos, defeat, and the dark parts of the mind. These are aspects of the work that the presence of the person we know and love can obscure.
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Page 38
