Freyga forced the corpse to bend over the altar, and cut and tore the thick gown away till he could slash the belly open. Blood and entrails gushed out over the dry stones of the altar and smoked on the dry snow. The gutted corpse fell forward over the stones like an empty coat, the arms dangling.
The living man sank down on the thin, wind-scoured snow beside the Barrow, sword still in hand. The earth rocked and heaved, and voices went crying past him in the darkness.
When he lifted his head and looked about him everything had changed. The sky, starless, rose in a high pale vault. Hills and far mountains stood distinct, unshadowed. The shapeless corpse slumped over the altar was black, the snow at the foot of the Barrow was black, Freyga’s hands and sword-blade were black. He tried to wash his hands with snow, and the sting of it woke him. He got up, his head swimming, and stumbled back to Vermare on numb legs. As he went he felt the west wind, soft and damp, rising with the day around him, bringing the thaw.
Ranni was standing by the great hearth while the boy Gilbert built up the fire. Her face was puffy and grey. She spoke to Freyga with a sneer: “Well, count, high time you’re back!”
He stood breathing heavily, slack-faced, and did not speak.
“Come along, then,” said the midwife. He followed her up the twisting stairs. The straw that had covered the floor was swept aside into the fireplace. Galla lay again in the wide box-like bed, the marriage bed. Her closed eyes were deep-sunken. She was snoring faintly. “Shh!” the midwife said, as he started to her. “Be quiet! Look here.”
She was holding up a tightly wrapped bundle.
After some while, as he still said nothing, she whispered sharply, “A boy. Fine, big.”
Freyga put out one hand towards the bundle. His fingernails were caked and checked with brown.
The midwife drew the bundle closer to herself. “You’re cold,” she said in the sharp, contemptuous whisper. “Here.” She drew back a fold to show for a moment a very tiny, purplish human face in the bundle, then rewrapped it.
Freyga went to the foot of the bed and knelt on the floor there, bending till his head was on the stones of the floor. He murmured, “Lord Christ, be praised, be thanked…”
The Bishop of Solariy never found out what had become of his envoy to the northwest. Probably, being a zealous man, he had ventured too far into the mountains where heathen folk still lived, and had suffered martyrdom.
Count Freyga’s name lived long in the history of his province. During his lifetime the Benedictine monastery on the mountain above Lake Malafrena was established. Count Freyga’s flocks and Count Freyga’s sword fed and defended the monks in their first hard winters there. In the bad Latin of their chronicles, in black ink on the lasting vellum, he and his son after him are named with gratitude, staunch defenders of the Church of God.
EDWARD BRYANT
Particle Theory
Edward Bryant became a full-time writer in 1969, at the tag-end of the New Wave days, and over the last twenty years has established himself as one of the most respected writers of his generation … something not easy to do without publishing novels, for Bryant is a consummate short-story writer, and has devoted himself almost entirely to that form, rarely writing anything even at novella length. A number of writers in the field are far better known for their short fiction than for their novels – Tiptree, Knight, Bradbury, and so on – but Bryant is almost unique in having written no real solo novels at all … in this, he resembles his mentor, Harlan Ellison (who wrote some early mainstream novels, but has so far produced no SF novels). It says something for Bryant’s mastery of the form that he has managed to secure a solid reputation anyway, without novels (also like Ellison). You’ll see something of that mastery in the story that follows, Bryant’s best, in my opinion, and perhaps one of the best stories written by anyone in the ’70s, a dazzling exploration of the interface between the vast, inimical cosmos and one man’s private reality.
Bryant has won two Nebula Awards for his short fiction, which has appeared in almost all of the well-known magazines and anthologies, as well as in markets outside the genre such as Penthouse and National Lampoon. Bryant is also well-known as a critic, his reviews appearing regularly in such places as Mile-High Futures and Locus. His books include the acclaimed short-story collections Particle Theory, Cinnabar, Among the Dead, and Wyoming Sun, a novelization of a television script by Harlan Ellison, Phoenix Without Ashes, and, as editor, the anthology 2076: The American Tricentennial. Bryant lives in Denver, Colorado.
I see my shadow flung like black iron against the wall. My sundeck blazes with untimely summer. Eliot was wrong: Frost, right.
Nanoseconds …
Death is as relativistic as any other apparent constant. I wonder: Am I dying?
* * *
I thought it was a cliché with no underlying truth.
“Lives do flash in a compressed instant before dying eyes,” said Amanda. She poured me another glass of Burgundy the color of her hair. The fire highlighted both. “A psychologist named Noyes –” She broke off and smiled at me. “You really want to hear this?”
“Sure.” The fireplace light softened the taut planes of her face. I saw a flicker of the gentler beauty she had possessed thirty years before.
“Noyes catalogued testimonial evidence for death’s-door phenomena in the early seventies. He termed it ‘life review,’ the second of three clearly definable steps in the process of dying; like a movie, and not necessarily linear.”
I drink, I have a low threshold of intoxication, I ramble. “Why does it happen? How?” I didn’t like the desperation in my voice. We were suddenly much farther apart than the geography of the table separating us; I looked in Amanda’s eyes for some memory of Lisa. “Life goes shooting off – or we recede from it – like Earth and an inter-stellar probe irrevocably severed. Mutual recession at light-speed, and the dark fills in the gap.” I held my glass by the stem, rotated it, peered through the distorting bowl.
Pine logs crackled. Amanda turned her head and her eyes’ image shattered in the flames.
* * *
The glare, the glare –
* * *
When I was thirty I made aggrieved noises because I’d screwed around for the past ten years and not accomplished nearly as much as I should. Lisa only laughed, which sent me into a transient rage and a longer-lasting sulk before I realized hers was the only appropriate response.
“Silly, silly,” she said. “A watered-down Byronic character, full of self-pity and sloppy self-adulation.” She blocked my exit from the kitchen and said, millimeters from my face, “It’s not as though you’re waking up at thirty to discover that only fifty-six people have heard of you.”
I stuttered over a weak retort.
“Fifty-seven?” She laughed; I laughed.
Then I was forty and went through the same pseudo-menopausal trauma. Admittedly, I hadn’t done any work at all for nearly a year, and any good work for two. Lisa didn’t laugh this time; she did what she could, which was mainly to stay out of my way while I alternately moped and raged around the coast house southwest of Portland. Royalties from the book I’d done on the fusion break-through kept us in groceries and mortgage payments.
“Listen, maybe if I’d go away for a while –” she said. “Maybe it would help for you to be alone.” Temporary separations weren’t alien to our marriage: we’d once figured that our relationship got measurably rockier if we spent more than about sixty percent of our time together. It had been a long winter and we were overdue; but then Lisa looked intently at my face and decided not to leave. Two months later I worked through the problems in my skull, and asked her for solitude. She knew me well – well enough to laugh again because she knew I was waking out of another mental hibernation.
She got onto a jetliner on a gray winter day and headed east for my parents’ old place in southern Colorado. The jetway for the flight was out of commission that afternoon, so the airline people had to roll out one of the old whee
led stairways. Just before she stepped into the cabin, Lisa paused and waved back from the head of the stairs; her dark hair curled about her face in the wind.
Two months later I’d roughed out most of the first draft for my initial book about the reproduction revolution. At least once a week I would call Lisa and she’d tell me about the photos she was taking river-running on an icy Colorado or Platte. Then I’d use her as a sounding board for speculations about ectogenesis heterogynes, or the imminent emergence of an exploited human host-mother class.
“So what’ll we do when you finish the first draft, Nick?”
“Maybe we’ll take a leisurely month on the Trans-Canadian Railroad.”
“Spring in the provinces…”
Then the initial draft was completed and so was Lisa’s Colorado adventure. “Do you know how badly I want to see you?” she said.
“Almost as badly as I want to see you.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Let me tell you –”
What she told me no doubt violated state and federal laws and probably telephone-company tariffs as well. The frustration of only hearing her voice through the wire made me twine my legs like a contortionist.
“Nick, I’ll book a flight out of Denver. I’ll let you know.”
I think she wanted to surprise me. Lisa didn’t tell me when she booked the flight. The airline let me know.
* * *
And now I’m fifty-one. The pendulum has swung and I again bitterly resent not having achieved more. There is so much work left undone; should I live for centuries, I still could not complete it all. That, however, will not be a problem.
I am told that the goddamned level of acid phosphatase in my goddamned blood is elevated. How banal that single fact sounds, how sterile; and how self-pitying the phraseology. Can’t I afford a luxurious tear, Lisa?
Lisa?
Death: I wish to determine my own time.
* * *
“Charming,” I had said. “End of the world.”
My friend Denton, the young radio astronomer, said, “Christ almighty! Your damned jokes. How can you make a pun about this?”
“It keeps me from crying,” I said quietly. “Wailing and breast-beating won’t make a difference.”
“Calm, so calm.” She looked at me peculiarly.
“I’ve seen the enemy,” I said. “I’ve had time to consider it.”
Her face was thoughtful, eyes focused somewhere beyond this cluttered office. “If you’re right,” she said, “it could be the most fantastic event a scientist could observe and record.” Her eyes refocused and met mine. “Or it might be the most frightening; a final horror.”
“Choose one,” I said.
“If I believed you at all.”
“I’m dealing in speculations.”
“Fantasies,” she said.
“However you want to term it.” I got up and moved to the door. “I don’t think there’s much time. You’ve never seen where I live. Come” – I hesitated – “visit me if you care to. I’d like that – to have you there.”
“Maybe,” she said.
I should not have left the situation ambiguous.
I didn’t know that in another hour, after I had left her office, pulled my car out of the Gamow Peak parking lot, and driven down to the valley, Denton would settle herself behind the wheel of her sports car and gun it onto the Peak road. Tourists saw her go off the switchback. A Highway Department crew pried her loose from the embrace of Lotus and lodgepole.
When I got the news I grieved for her, wondering if this were the price of belief. I drove to the hospital and, because no next of kin had been found and Amanda intervened, the doctors let me stand beside the bed.
I had never seen such still features, never such stasis short of actual death. I waited an hour, seconds sweeping silently from the wall clock, until the urge to return home was overpowering.
I could wait no longer because daylight was coming and I would tell no one.
* * *
Toward the beginning:
I’ve tolerated doctors as individuals; as a class they terrify me. It’s a dread like that of shark attacks or dying by fire. But eventually I made the appointment for an examination, drove to the sparkling white clinic on the appointed day, and spent a surly half hour reading a year-old issue of Popular Science in the waiting room.
“Mr Richmond?” the smiling nurse finally said. I followed her back to the examination room. “Doctor will be here in just a minute.” She left, I sat apprehensively on the edge of the examination table. After two minutes I heard the rustling of my file being removed from the outside rack. Then the door opened.
“How’s it going?” said my doctor. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Can’t complain,” I said, reverting to accustomed medical ritual. “No flu so far this winter. The shot must have been soon enough.”
Amanda watched me patiently. “You’re not a hypochondriac. You don’t need continual reassurance – or sleeping pills, anymore. You’re not a medical groupie, God knows. So what is it?”
“Uh,” I said. I spread my hands helplessly.
“Nicholas.” Get-on-with-it-I’m-busy-today sharpness edged her voice.
“Don’t imitate my maiden aunt.”
“All right. Nick,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m having trouble urinating.”
She jotted something down. Without looking up: “What kind of trouble?”
“Straining.”
“For how long?”
“Six, maybe seven months. It’s been a gradual thing.”
“Anything else you’ve noticed?”
“Increased frequency.”
“That’s all?”
“Well,” I said, “afterwards, I, uh, dribble.”
She listed, as though by rote: “Pain, burning, urgency, hesitancy, change in stream of urine? Incontinence, change of size of stream, change in appearance of urine?”
“What?”
“Darker, lighter, cloudy, blood discharge from penis, VD exposure, fever, night sweats?”
I answered with a variety of nods and monosyllables.
“Mmh.” She continued to write on the pad, then snapped it shut. “Okay, Nick, would you get your clothes off?” And when I had stripped: “Please lie on the table. On your stomach.”
“The greased finger?” I said. “Oh, shit.”
Amanda tore a disposable glove off the roll. It crackled as she put it on. “You think I get a thrill out of this?” She’s been my GP for a long time.
When it was over and I sat gingerly and uncomfortably on the edge of the examining table, I said, “Well?”
Amanda again scribbled on a sheet. “I’m sending you to a urologist. He’s just a couple of blocks away. I’ll phone over. Try to get an appointment in – oh, inside of a week.”
“Give me something better,” I said, “or I’ll go to the library and check out a handbook of symptoms.”
She met my eyes with a candid blue gaze. “I want a specialist to check out the obstruction.”
“You found something when you stuck your finger in?”
“Crude, Nicholas.” She half-smiled. “Your prostate is hard – stony. There could be a number of reasons.”
“What John Wayne used to call the Big C?”
“Prostatic cancer,” she said, “is relatively infrequent in a man of your age.” She glanced down at my records. “Fifty.”
“Fifty-one,” I said, wanting to shift the tone, trying, failing. “You didn’t send me a card on my birthday.”
“But it’s not impossible,” Amanda said. She stood. “Come on up to the front desk. I want an appointment with you after the urology results come back.” As always, she patted me on the shoulder as she followed me out of the examination room. But this time there was slightly too much tension in her fingers.
* * *
I was seeing grassy hummocks and marble slabs in my mind and didn’t pay attention to my surroundings as
I exited the waiting room.
“Nick?” A soft Oklahoma accent.
I turned back from the outer door, looked down, saw tousled hair. Jackie Denton, one of the bright young minds out at the Gamow Peak Observatory, held the well-thumbed copy of Popular Science loosely in her lap. She honked and snuffled into a deteriorating Kleenex. “Don’t get too close. Probably doesn’t matter at this point. Flu. You?” Her green irises were red-rimmed.
I fluttered my hands vaguely. “I had my shots.”
“Yeah.” She snuffled again. “I was going to call you later on from work. See the show last night?”
I must have looked blank.
“Some science writer,” she said. “Rigel went supernova.”
“Supernova,” I repeated stupidly.
“Blam, you know? Blooie.” She illustrated with her hands and the magazine flipped onto the carpet. “Not that you missed anything. It’ll be around for a few weeks – biggest show in the skies.”
A sudden ugly image of red and white aircraft warning lights merging in an actinic flare sprayed my retinas. I shook my head. After a moment I said, “First one in our galaxy in – how long? Three hundred and fifty years? I wish you’d called me.”
“A little longer. Kepler’s star was in 1604. Sorry about not calling – we were all a little busy, you know?”
“I can imagine. When did it happen?”
She bent to retrieve the magazine. “Just about midnight. Spooky. I was just coming off shift.” She smiled. “Nothing like a little cosmic cataclysm to take my mind off jammed sinuses. Just as well; no sick leave tonight. That’s why I’m here at the clinic. Kris says no excuses.”
Krishnamurthi was the Gamow director. “You’ll be going back up to the peak soon?” She nodded. “Tell Kris I’ll be in to visit. I want to pick up a lot of material.”
“For sure.”
The nurse walked up to us. “Ms Denton?”
“Mmph.” She nodded and wiped her nose a final time. Struggling up from the soft chair, she said, “How come you didn’t read about Rigel in the papers? It made every morning edition.”
Modern Classics of Science Fiction Page 51
