Anyhow, to most of these I say “perhaps” or “partly, but –” or just plain “crap!” I still think mine was the best, because I had a chance to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan …
I’d said, “Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn’t.”
Stop and think about it for a minute. It’s purposely as general as the others, but it’s got room in it for the biology and the laughing and the aspiring, as well as the culture-transmitting, the love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining. I even left the door open for religion, you’ll note. But it’s limiting too. Ever met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?
Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan – delightful name.
Delightful place too, for quite awhile …
It was there that I saw Man’s definitions, one by one, wiped from off the big blackboard, until only mine was left.
… My radio had been playing more static than usual. That’s all.
For several hours there was no other indication of what was to come.
My hundred-thirty eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that clear, cool spring day with the sun pouring down its honey and lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the streets, invading western store-fronts, drying curbstones, and washing the olive and umber buds that spread the skin of the trees there by the roadway; and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made orange mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across the shoulders of Saint Stephen’s Range, some thirty miles distant, and came down upon the forest at its feet like some supernatural madman with a million buckets of paint – each of a different shade of green, yellow, orange, blue and red – to daub with miles-wide brushes at its heaving sea of growth.
Mornings the sky is cobalt, midday is turquoise, and sunset is emeralds and rubies, hard and flashing. It was halfway between cobalt and seamist at eleven hundred hours, when I watched Betty with my hundred-thirty eyes and saw nothing to indicate what was about to be. There was only that persistent piece of static, accompanying the piano and strings within my portable.
It’s funny how the mind personifies, engenders. Ships are always women: You say, “She’s a good old tub,” or, “She’s a fast, tough number, this one,” slapping a bulwark and feeling the aura of feminity that clings to the vessel’s curves; or, conversely, “He’s a bastard to start, that little Sam!” as you kick the auxiliary engine in an inland transport-vehicle; and hurricanes are always women, and moons, and seas. Cities, though, are different. Generally, they’re neuter. Nobody calls New York or San Francisco “he” or “she.” Usually, cities are just “it.”
Sometimes, however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex. Usually, this is in the case of small cities near to the Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps this is because of the sex-ridden nouns of the languages which prevail in that vicinity, in which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does about the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.
Betty was Beta Station for less than ten years. After two decades she was Betty officially, by act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt at the time (ninety-some years ago), and still feel, that it was because she was what she was – a place of rest and repair, of surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes, weather, and natural light again, after that long haul through the big night, with its casting away of so much. She is not home, she is seldom destination, but she is like unto both. When you come upon light and warmth and music after darkness and cold silence, it is Woman. The old-time Mediterranean sailor must have felt it when he first spied port at the end of a voyage. I felt it when I first saw Beta Station – Betty – and the second time I saw her, also.
I am her Hell Cop.
… When six or seven of my hundred-thirty eyes flickered, then saw again, and the music was suddenly washed away by a wave of static, it was then that I began to feel uneasy.
I called Weather Central for a report, and the recorded girlvoice told me that seasonal rains were expected in the afternoon or early evening. I hung up and switched an eye from ventral to dorsal-vision.
Not a cloud. Not a ripple. Only a formation of green-winged skytoads, heading north, crossed the field of the lens.
I switched it back, and I watched the traffic flow, slowly, and without congestion, along Betty’s prim, well-tended streets. Three men were leaving the bank and two more were entering. I recognized the three who were leaving, and in my mind I waved as I passed by. All was still at the post office, and patterns of normal activity lay upon the steel mills, the stockyard, the plast-synth plants, the airport, the spacer pads, and the surfaces of all the shopping complexes; vehicles came and went at the Inland Transport-Vehicle garages crawling from the rainbow forest and the mountains beyond like dark slugs, leaving tread-trails to mark their comings and goings through wilderness; and the fields of the countryside were still yellow and brown, with occasional patches of green and pink; the country houses, mainly simple, A-frame affairs, were chisel blade, spike-tooth, spire and steeple, each with a big lightning rod and dipped in many colors and scooped up in the cups of my seeing and dumped out again, as I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my gallery of one hundred-thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall.
The static came and went until I had to shut off the radio. Fragments of music are worse than no music at all.
My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.
I knew then that we were in for something.
I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen’s at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another, I sent straight up, skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.
* * *
I entered the Mayor’s outer office, winked at Lottie, the receptionist, and glanced at the inner door.
“Mayor in?” I asked.
I got an occasional smile from Lottie, a slightly heavy, but well-rounded girl of indeterminate age and intermittent acne, but this wasn’t one of the occasions.
“Yes,” she said, returning to the papers on her desk.
“Alone?”
She nodded, and her earrings danced. Dark eyes and dark complexion, she could have been kind of sharp, if only she’d fix her hair and use more makeup. Well …
I crossed to the door and knocked.
“Who?” asked the Mayor.
“Me,” I said, opening it, “Godfrey Justin Holmes – ‘God’ for short. I want someone to drink coffee with, and you’re elected.”
She turned in her swivel chair, away from the window she had been studying, and her blonde-hair-white-hair-fused, short and parted in the middle, gave a little stir as she turned – like a sunshot snowdrift struck by sudden winds.
She smiled and said, “I’m busy.”
Eyes green, chin small, cute little ears – I love them all – from an anonymous Valentine I’d sent her two months previous, and true.
“… But not too busy to have coffee with God,” she stated. “Have a throne, and I’ll make us some instant.”
I did, and she did.
While she was doing it, I leaned back, lit a cigarette I’d borrowed from her canister, and remarked, “Looks like rain.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Not just making conversation,” I told her. “There’s a bad storm brewing somewhere – over Saint Stephen’s, I think. I’ll know real soon.”
“Yes, grandfather,” she said, bringing me my coffee. “You old-timers with all your aches and pains are often better than Weather Central, it’s an established fact. I won’t argue.”
She smiled, frowned, then smiled again.
I set my cup on the edge of her desk.
“Just wait and see,” I said.
“If it makes it over the mountains, it’ll be a nasty high-voltage job. It’s already jazzing up reception.”
Big-bowed white blouse, and black skirt around a well-kept figure. She’d be forty in the fall, but she’d never completely tamed her facial reflexes – which was most engaging, so far as I was concerned. Spontaneity of expression so often vanishes so soon. I could see the sort of child she’d been by looking at her, listening to her now. The thought of being forty was bothering her again, too, I could tell. She always kids me about age when age is bothering her.
See, I’m around thirty-five, actually, which makes me her junior by a bit, but she’d heard her grandfather speak of me when she was a kid, before I came back again this last time. I’d filled out the balance of his two-year term, back when Betty-Beta’s first mayor, Wyeth, had died after two months in office. I was born five hundred ninety-seven years ago, on Earth, but I spent about five hundred sixty-two of those years sleeping, during my long jaunts between the stars. I’ve made a few more trips than a few others; consequently, I am an anachronism. I am really, of course, only as old as I look – but still, people always seem to feel that I’ve cheated somehow, especially women in their middle years. Sometimes it is most disconcerting …
“Eleanor,” said I, “your term will be up in November. Are you still thinking of running again?”
She took off her narrow, elegantly trimmed glasses and brushed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Then she took a sip of coffee.
“I haven’t made up my mind.”
“I ask not for press-release purposes,” I said, “but for my own.”
“Really, I haven’t decided,” she told me. “I don’t know…”
“Okay, just checking. Let me know if you do.”
I drank some coffee.
After a time, she said, “Dinner Saturday? As usual?”
“Yes, good.”
“I’ll tell you then.”
“Fine – capital.”
As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both.
She smiled at whatever it was she finally saw.
“A bad storm?” she asked me.
“Yep. Feel it in my bones.”
“Tell it to go away?”
“Tried. Don’t think it will, though.”
“Better batten some hatches, then.”
“It wouldn’t hurt and it might help.”
“The weather satellite will be overhead in another half hour. You’ll have something sooner?”
“Think so. Probably any minute.”
I finished my coffee, washed out the cup.
“Let me know right away what it is.”
“Check. Thanks for the coffee.”
Lottie was still working and did not look up as I passed.
* * *
Upstairs again, my highest eye was now high enough. I stood it on its tail and collected a view of the distance: Fleecy mobs of clouds boiled and frothed on the other side of Saint Stephen’s. The mountain range seemed a breakwall, a dam, a ricky shoreline. Beyond it, the waters were troubled.
My other eye was almost in position. I waited the space of half a cigarette, then it delivered me a sight:
Gray, and wet and impenetrable, a curtain across the countryside, that’s what I saw.
… And advancing.
I called Eleanor.
“It’s gonna rain, chillun,” I said.
“Worth some sandbags?”
“Possibly.”
“Better be ready then. Okay. Thanks.”
I returned to my watching.
Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan – delightful name. It refers to both the planet and its sole continent.
How to describe the world, like quick? Well, roughly Earth-size; actually, a bit smaller, and more watery. As for the main land-mass, first hold a mirror up to South America, to get the big bump from the right side over to the left, then rotate it ninety degrees in a counter-clockwise direction and push it up into the northern hemisphere. Got that? Good. Now grab it by the tail and pull. Stretch it another six or seven hundred miles, slimming down the middle as you do, and let the last five or six hundred fall across the equator. There you have Cygnus, its big gulf partly in the tropics, partly not. Just for the sake of thoroughness, while you’re about it, break Australia into eight pieces and drop them about at random down in the southern hemisphere, calling them after the first eight letters in the Greek alphabet. Put a big scoop of vanilla at each pole, and don’t forget to tilt the globe about eighteen degrees before you leave. Thanks.
I recalled my wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others turned toward Saint Stephen’s until the cloudbanks breasted the range about an hour later. By then, though, the weather satellite had passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported quite an extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse just as quickly, after an hour or so of heaven’s artillery. But then there are the bad ones – sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing more thunderbolts in their quivers than any Earth storm.
Betty’s position, too, is occasionally precarious, though its advantages, in general, offset its liabilities. We are located on the gulf about twenty miles inland, and are approximately three miles removed (in the main) from a major river, the Noble; part of Betty does extend down to its banks, but this is a smaller part. We are almost a strip city, falling mainly into an area some seven miles in length and two miles wide, stretching inland, east from the river, and running roughly parallel to the distant seacoast. Around eighty percent of the one hundred thousand population is concentrated about the business district, five miles in from the river.
We are not the lowest land about, but we are far from being the highest. We are certainly the most level in the area. This latter feature, as well as our nearness to the equator, was a deciding factor in the establishment of Beta Station. Some other things were our proximity both to the ocean and to a large river. There are nine other cities on the continent, all of them younger and smaller, and three of them located upriver from us. We are the potential capital of a potential country.
We’re a good, smooth, easy landing site for drop-boats from orbiting interstellar vehicles, and we have major assets for future growth and coordination when it comes to expanding across the continent. Our original raison d’être, though, was Stopover, repair-point, supply depot, and refreshment stand, physical and psychological, on the way out to other, more settled worlds, further along the line. Cyg was discovered later than many others – it just happened that way – and the others got off to earlier starts. Hence, the others generally attract more colonists. We are still quite primitive. Self-sufficiency, in order to work on our population:land scale, demanded a society on the order of that of the mid-nineteenth century in the American southwest – at least for purposes of getting started. Even now, Cyg is still partly on a natural economy system, although Earth Central technically determines the coin of the realm.
Why Stopover, if you sleep most of the time between the stars?
Think about it awhile, and I’ll tell you later if you’re right.
The thunderheads rose in the east, sending billows and streamers this way and that, until it seemed from the formations that Saint Stephen’s was a balcony full of monsters, leaning and craning their necks over the rail in the direction of the stage, us. Cloud piled upon slate-colored cloud, and then the wall slowly began to topple.
I heard the first rumbles of thunder almost half an hour after lunch, so I knew it wasn’t my stomach.
Despite all my eyes, I moved to a window to watch. It was like a big, gray, aerial glacier plowing the sky.
There was a wind now, for I saw the trees suddenly quiver and bow down. This would be our first storm of the season. The turquoise fell back before it, and finally it smothered the sun itself. Then there were drops
upon the windowpane, then rivulets.
Flint-like, the highest peaks of Saint Stephen’s scraped its belly and were showered with sparks. After a moment it bumped into something with a terrible crash, and the rivulets on the quartz panes turned into rivers.
I went back to my gallery, to smile at dozens of views of people scurrying for shelter. A smart few had umbrellas and raincoats. The rest ran like blazes. People never pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man’s psychological makeup, stemming probably from an ancient tribal distrust of the shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they’re right, then they’re somehow superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet.
I remembered then that I had forgotten my raincoat, umbrella and rubbers. But it had been a beautiful morning, and WC could have been wrong …
Well, I had another cigarette and leaned back in my big chair. No storm in the world could knock my eyes out of the sky.
I switched on the filters and sat and watched the rain pour past.
* * *
Five hours later it was still raining, and rumbling and dark.
I’d had hopes that it would let up by quitting time, but when Chuck Fuller came around the picture still hadn’t changed any. Chuck was my relief that night, the evening Hell Cop.
He seated himself beside my desk.
“You’re early,” I said. “They don’t start paying you for another hour.”
“Too wet to do anything but sit. Rather sit here than at home.”
“Leaky roof?”
He shook his head.
“Mother-in-law. Visiting again.”
I nodded.
“One of the disadvantages of a small world.”
He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back in the chair, staring off in the direction of the window. I could feel one of his outbursts coming.
“You know how old I am?” he asked, after awhile.
Modern Classics of Science Fiction Page 28
