Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  “No,” I said, which was a lie. He was twenty-nine.

  “Twenty-seven,” he told me, “and going to be twenty-eight soon. Know where I’ve been?”

  “No.”

  “No place, that’s where! I was born and raised on this crummy world! And I married and I settled down here – and I’ve never been off it! Never could afford it when I was younger. Now I’ve got a family…”

  He leaned forward again, rested his elbows on his knees, like a kid. Chuck would look like a kid when he was fifty – blond hair, close-cropped, pug nose, kind of scrawny, takes a suntan quickly, and well. Maybe he’d act like a kid at fifty, too. I’ll never know.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have anything to say.

  He was quiet for a long while again.

  Then he said, “You’ve been around.”

  After a minute, he went on:

  “You were born on Earth. Earth! And you visited lots of other worlds too, before I was even born. Earth is only a name to me. And pictures. And all the others – they’re the same! Pictures. Names…”

  I waited, then after I grew tired of waiting I said, “‘Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn…’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s the beginning to an ancient poem. It’s an ancient poem now, but it wasn’t really ancient when I was a boy. Just old. I had friends, relatives, even in-laws, once myself. They are not just bones now. They are dust. Real dust, not metaphorical dust. The past fifteen years seem fifteen years to me, the same as to you, but they’re not. They are already many chapters back in the history books. Whenever you travel between the stars you automatically bury the past. The world you leave will be filled with strangers if you ever return – or caricatures of your friends, your relatives, even yourself. It’s no great trick to be a grandfather at sixty, a great-grandfather at seventy-five or eighty – but go away for three hundred years, and then come back and meet your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, who happens to be fifty-five years old, and puzzled, when you look him up. It shows you just how alone you really are. You are not simply a man without a country or without a world. You are a man without a time. You and the centuries do not belong to each other. You are like the rubbish that drifts between the stars.”

  “It would be worth it,” he said.

  I laughed. I’d had to listen to his gripes every month or two for over a year and a half. It had never bothered me so much before, so I guess it was a cumulative effect that day – the rain, and Saturday night next, and my recent library visits, and his complaining, that had set me off.

  His last comment had been too much. “It would be worth it.” What could I say to that?

  I laughed.

  He turned bright red.

  “You’re laughing at me!”

  He stood up and glared down.

  “No I’m not,” I said, “I’m laughing at me. I shouldn’t have been bothered by what you said, but I was. That tells me something funny about me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting sentimental in my old age, and that’s funny.”

  “Oh.” He turned his back on me and walked over to the window and stared out. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets and turned around and looked at me.

  “Aren’t you happy?” he asked. “Really, I mean? You’ve got money, and no strings on you. You could pick up and leave on the next I-V that passes, if you wanted to.”

  “Sure I’m happy,” I told him. “My coffee was cold. Forget it.”

  “Oh,” again. He turned back to the window in time to catch a bright flash full in the face, and to have to compete with thunder to get his next words out. “I’m sorry,” I heard him say, as in the distance. “It just seems to me that you should be one of the happiest guys around…”

  “I am. It’s the weather today. It’s got everybody down in the mouth, yourself included.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Look at it rain, will you? Haven’t seen any rain in months…”

  “They’ve been saving it all up for today.”

  He chuckled.

  “I’m going down for a cup of coffee and a sandwich before I sign on. Can I bring you anything?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Okay. See you in a little while.”

  He walked out whistling. He never stays depressed. Like a kid’s moods, his moods, up and down, up and down.… And he’s a Hell Cop. Probably the worst possible job for him, having to keep his attention in one place for so long. They say the job title comes from the name of an antique flying vehicle – a hellcopper, I think. We send our eyes on their appointed rounds, and they can hover or soar or back up, just like those old machines could. We patrol the city and the adjacent countryside. Law enforcement isn’t much of a problem on Cyg. We never peek in windows or send an eye into a building without an invitation. Our testimony is admissible in court – or, if we’re fast enough to press a couple buttons, the tape that we make does an even better job – and we can dispatch live or robot cops in a hurry, depending on which will do a better job.

  There isn’t much crime on Cyg, though, despite the fact that everybody carries a sidearm of some kind, even little kids. Everybody knows pretty much what their neighbors are up to, and there aren’t too many places for a fugitive to run. We’re mainly aerial traffic cops, with an eye out for local wildlife (which is the reason for all the sidearms).

  SPCU is what we call the latter function – Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Us – which is the reason each of my hundred-thirty eyes has six forty-five caliber eyelashes.

  There are things like the cute little panda-puppy – oh, about three feet high at the shoulder when it sits down on its rear like a teddy bear, and with big, square, silky ears, a curly pinto coat, large, limpid, brown eyes, pink tongue, button nose, powder puff tail, sharp little white teeth more poisonous than a Quemeda Island viper’s, and possessed of a way with mammal entrails like unto the way of an imaginative cat with a rope of catnip.

  Then there’s a snapper, which looks as mean as it sounds: a feathered reptile, with three horns on its armored head – one beneath each eye, like a tusk, and one curving skyward from the top of its nose – legs about eighteen inches long, and a four-foot tail which it raises straight into the air whenever it jogs along at greyhound speed, and which it swings like a sandbag – and a mouth full of long, sharp teeth.

  Also, there are amphibious things which come from the ocean by way of the river on occasion. I’d rather not speak of them. They’re kind of ugly and vicious.

  Anyway, those are some of the reasons why there are Hell Cops – not just on Cyg, but on many, many frontier worlds. I’ve been employed in that capacity on several of them, and I’ve found that an experienced HC can always find a job Out Here. It’s like being a professional clerk back home.

  Chuck took longer than I thought he would, came back after I was technically off duty, looked happy though, so I didn’t say anything. There was some pale lipstick on his collar and a grin on his face, so I bade him good morrow, picked up my cane, and departed in the direction of the big washing machine.

  It was coming down too hard for me to go the two blocks to my car on foot.

  I called a cab and waited another fifteen minutes. Eleanor had decided to keep Mayor’s Hours, and she’d departed shortly after lunch; and almost the entire staff had been released an hour early because of the weather. Consequently, Town Hall was full of dark offices and echoes. I waited in the hallway behind the main door, listening to the purr of the rain as it fell, and hearing its gurgle as it found its way into the gutters. It beat the street and shook the windowpanes and made the windows cold to touch.

  I’d planned on spending the evening at the library, but I changed my plans as I watched the weather happen – tomorrow, or the next day, I decided. It was an evening for a good meal, a hot bath, my own books and brandy, and early to bed. It was good sleeping weather, if nothing else. A
cab pulled up in front of the Hall and blew its horn.

  I ran.

  * * *

  The next day the rain let up for perhaps an hour in the morning. Then a slow drizzle began; and it did not stop again.

  It went on to become a steady downpour by afternoon.

  The following day was Friday, which I always have off, and I was glad that it was.

  Put dittoes under Thursday’s weather report. That’s Friday.

  But I decided to do something anyway.

  I lived down in that section of town near the river. The Noble was swollen, and the rains kept adding to it. Sewers had begun to clog and back up; water ran in the streets. The rain kept coming down and widening the puddles and lakelets, and it was accompanied by drum solos in the sky and the falling of bright forks and sawblades. Dead skytoads were washed along the gutters, like burnt-out fireworks. Ball lightning drifted across Town Square; Saint Elmo’s Fire clung to the flag pole, the Watch Tower, and the big statue of Wyeth trying to look heroic.

  I headed uptown to the library, pushing my car slowly through the countless beaded curtains. The big furniture movers in the sky were obviously non-union, because they weren’t taking any coffee breaks. Finally, I found a parking place and I umbrellaed my way to the library and entered.

  I have become something of a bibliophile in recent years. It is not so much that I hunger and thirst after knowledge, but that I am news-starved.

  It all goes back to my position in the big mixmaster. Admitted, there are some things faster than light, like the phase velocities of radio waves in ion plasma, or the tips of the ion-modulated light-beams of Duckbill, the comm-setup back in Sol System, whenever the hinges of the beak snap shut on Earth – but these are highly restricted instances, with no application whatsoever to the passage of shiploads of people and objects between the stars. You can’t exceed lightspeed when it comes to the movement of matter. You can edge up pretty close, but that’s about it.

  Life can be suspended though, that’s easy – it can be switched off and switched back on again with no trouble at all. This is why I have lasted so long. If we can’t speed up the ships, we can slow down the people – slow them until they stop – and let the vessel, moving at near-lightspeed, take half a century, or more if it needs it, to convey its passengers to where they are going. This is why I am very alone. Each little death means resurrection into both another land and another time. I have had several, and this is why I have become a bibliophile: news travels slowly, as slowly as the ships and the people. Buy a newspaper before you hop aboard ship and it will still be a newspaper when you reach your destination – but back where you bought it, it would be considered an historical document. Send a letter back to Earth and your correspondent’s grandson may be able to get an answer back to your great-grandson, if the message makes real good connections and both kids live long enough.

  All the little libraries Out Here are full of rare books – first editions of best sellers which people pick up before they leave Someplace Else, and which they often donate after they’ve finished. We assume that these books have entered the public domain by the time they reach here, and we reproduce them and circulate our own editions. No author has ever sued, and no reproducer has ever been around to be sued by representatives, designates, or assigns.

  We are completely autonomous and are always behind the times, because there is a transit-lag which cannot be overcome. Earth Central, therefore, exercises about as much control over us as a boy jiggling a broken string while looking up at his kite.

  Perhaps Yeats had something like this in mind when he wrote that fine line, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” I doubt it, but I still have to go to the library to read the news.

  * * *

  The day melted around me.

  The words flowed across the screen in my booth as I read newspapers and magazines, untouched by human hands, and the waters flowed across Betty’s acres, pouring down from the mountains now, washing the floors of the forest, churning our fields to peanut-butter, flooding basements, soaking its way through everything, and tracking our streets with mud.

  I hit the library cafeteria for lunch, where I learned from a girl in a green apron and yellow skirts (which swished pleasantly) that the sandbag crews were now hard at work and that there was no eastbound traffic past Town Square.

  After lunch I put on my slicker and boots and walked up that way.

  Sure enough, the sandbag wall was already waist high across Main Street; but then, the water was swirling around at ankle level, and more of it falling every minute.

  I looked up at old Wyeth’s statue. His halo had gone away now, which was sort of to be expected. It had made an honest mistake and realized it after a short time.

  He was holding a pair of glasses in his left hand and sort of glancing down at me, as though a bit apprehensive, wondering perhaps, there inside all that bronze, if I would tell on him now and ruin his hard, wet, greenish splendor. Tell…? I guess I was the only one left around who really remembered the man. He had wanted to be the father of this great new country, literally, and he’d tried awfully hard. Three months in office and I’d had to fill out the rest of the two-year term. The death certificate gave the cause as “heart stoppage,” but it didn’t mention the piece of lead which had helped slow things down a bit. Everybody involved is gone now: the irate husband, the frightened wife, the coroner. All but me. And I won’t tell anybody if Wyeth’s statue won’t, because he’s a hero now, and we need heroes’ statues Out Here even more than we do heroes. He did engineer a nice piece of relief work during the Butler Township floods, and he may as well be remembered for that.

  I winked at my old boss, and the rain dripped from his nose and fell into the puddle at my feet.

  I walked back to the library through loud sounds and bright flashes, hearing the splashing and the curses of the work crew as the men began to block off another street. Black, overhead, an eye drifted past. I waved, and the filter snapped up and back down again. I think H. C. John Keams was tending shop that afternoon, but I’m not sure.

  Suddenly the heavens opened up and it was like standing under a waterfall.

  I reached for a wall and there wasn’t one, slipped then, and managed to catch myself with my cane before I flopped. I found a doorway and huddled.

  Ten minutes of lightning and thunder followed. Then, after the blindness and the deafness passed away and the rains had eased a bit, I saw that the street (Second Avenue) had become a river. Bearing all sorts of garbage, papers, hats, sticks, mud, it sloshed past my niche, gurgling nastily. It looked to be over my boot tops, so I waited for it to subside.

  It didn’t.

  It got right up in there with me and started to play footsie.

  So, then seemed as good a time as any. Things certainly weren’t getting any better.

  I tried to run, but with filled boots the best you can manage is a fast wade, and my boots were filled after three steps.

  That shot the afternoon. How can you concentrate on anything with wet feet? I made it back to the parking lot, then churned my way homeward, feeling like a riverboat captain who really wanted to be a camel driver.

  It seemed more like evening than afternoon when I pulled up into my damp but unflooded garage. It seemed more like night than evening in the alley I cut through on the way to my apartment’s back entrance. I hadn’t seen the sun for several days, and it’s funny how much you can miss it when it takes a vacation. The sky was a sable dome, and the high brick walls of the alley were cleaner then I’d ever seen them, despite the shadows.

  I stayed close to the lefthand wall, in order to miss some of the rain. As I had driven along the river I’d noticed that it was already reaching after the high water marks on the sides of the piers. The Noble was a big, spoiled, blood sausage, ready to burst its skin. A lightning flash showed me the whole alley, and I slowed in order to avoid puddles.

  I moved ahead, thinking of dry socks and dry martinis, turned a corne
r to the right, and it struck at me: an org.

  Half of its segmented body was reared at a forty-five-degree angle above the pavement, which placed its wide head with the traffic-signed eyes saying “Stop” about three and a half feet off the ground, as it rolled toward me on all its pale little legs, with its mouthful of death aimed at my middle.

  I pause now in my narrative for a long digression concerning my childhood, which, if you will but consider the circumstances, I was obviously quite fresh on in an instant:

  Born, raised, educated on Earth, I had worked two summers in a stockyard while going to college. I still remember the smells and the noises of the cattle; I used to prod them out of the pens and on their way up the last mile. And I remember the smells and noises of the university: the formaldehyde in the Bio labs, the sounds of Freshmen slaughtering French verbs, the overpowering aroma of coffee mixed with cigarette smoke in the Student Union, the splash of the newly pinned frat man as his brothers tossed him into the lagoon down in front of the Art Museum, the sounds of ignored chapel bells and class bells, the smell of the lawn after the year’s first mowing (with big, black Andy perched on his grass-chewing monster, baseball cap down to his eyebrows, cigarette somehow not burning his left cheek), and always, always, the tick-tick-snick-stamp! as I moved up or down the strip. I had not wanted to take General Physical Education, but four semesters of it were required. The only out was to take a class in a special sport. I picked fencing because tennis, basketball, boxing, wrestling, handball, judo, all sounded too strenuous, and I couldn’t afford a set of golf clubs. Little did I suspect what would follow this choice. It was as strenuous as any of the others, and more than several. But I liked it. So I tried out for the team in my Sophomore year, made it on the épée squad, and picked up three varsity letters, because I stuck with it through my Senior year. Which all goes to show: cattle who persevere in looking for an easy way out still wind up in the abattoir, but they may enjoy the trip a little more.

  When I came out here on the raw frontier where people all carry weapons, I had my cane made. It combines the better features of the épée and the cattle prod. Only, it is the kind of prod which, if you were to prod cattle with, they would never move again.