Lightspeed Magazine Issue 35

by Nina Allan

  “An infusion clinic. I’ll pay.”

  “Not even you have that much money.”

  “I have a new job offer. I’ll take care of you. I’ll sell my apartment—it’s worth a lot. We can live in the centenarian house—beautiful—interesting people. You’ll love it—”

  “Don’t tell me what I’ll love.”

  She sees a sheen of sweat on his forehead. She is a bit ashamed, but not enough to stop. She shouts, “You’re a foolish old man!”

  He smiles. “I hope so.” He waves. “Keep talking, everybody, she’s just my daughter.” Chatter resumes. He says, quietly, “You might think that I don’t know you, Ellie, but I do. Remember that summer you spent with me after college, when you were deciding what to do with your life? Yes, too brief, but I know you like I know myself.” He pauses for a breath. “You have to do what moves you, and what moves you is your job. As it is. Whatever you’re doing, however crazy it looks to me, it works. Don’t sacrifice that job to help me. I don’t want it.

  “Second point—don’t interrupt. I’m getting tired. I’ve had a great life. Despite our … tragedy. I don’t want to live anywhere but on my boat. If you do anything without my consent, I will never forgive you. I’m serious. And I don’t ever again want the kind of pain I’ve had the past six months.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you have that pain!” To her surprise, Ellie begins to cry. “You hid it from me. You didn’t want my help. What has my life been about if I can’t even help my own father? You’d rather die than have my help.” She drops to the bed, covers her face, and sobs.

  “Ellie, look at me.”

  She wipes her face on her sleeve. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I haven’t seen you cry since your mother died.”

  “You haven’t seen me much. Holidays. Birthdays.” She hears the 10-year-old in her voice, her two annual summer weeks at sea with her father ending once again.

  “Fair shot.” He pauses. “It’s over. The oceans are polluted beyond repair.”

  “You can help restore them! You—”

  “This place that seems so awful to you, this is what it’s like everywhere now. Even worse. I’ve been all around the world. I’ve done my part. I’m proud that a worm is named after me.” He draws a deep breath, coughs, looks at her squarely. “I’m proud of you. Your mother would be so proud of you.” Another long pause while she grabs a tissue, blows her nose, wipes her face. “You can do one thing for me.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s move this party to my boat. I was kidnapped. I don’t want to die here. Order somebody to bring a piano to the dock and you can play me out. I haven’t heard you play in a long, long time. It’s like heaven to me. It always reminds me of the first time I went diving.”

  “But—”

  “That’s all I want of you. We can’t get back the years I wasted. Do this for me, please.”

  She waits for the old anger, the old rage, to bubble up and spew out. Her hand moves toward her phone, then stops.

  You know how to improvise.

  Instead of the ambulance call, there is a memory, one of many she has hugged to herself all these years, refusing to release it. It’s the new infusion that allows it to surface, she knows, but that does not make it any less valuable.

  A winter day at her grandmother’s. The holidays. She is playing the piano. She begins with one learned set piece, Bach.

  Then there is a shift. She hears her mother as if she were music, Coltrane, jazz. She threads new notes to Bach, adjusts cadence, moves into new space. Improvises. Loses herself in sound, falling snow, her father, leaning on the piano as tears roll down his face.

  She remembers that she played for hours.

  She looks directly at him, seeing him as if for the first time: a person separate from herself, from her needs, from her ways of making her own life small and safe.

  She nods. “All right, Dad. Let’s go.”

  © 2012 by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

  Originally published in Discover Magazine.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Kathleen Ann Goonan is the author of seven novels, the most recent being This Shared Dream (Tor, July 2011). In War Times (Tor, 2007) won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007; it was also the American Library Association’s Best SF Novel of 2007. Previous novels were finalists for the Nebula, Clarke, and BSFA Awards. Angels and You Dogs, a short story collection, will be published by PS Publishing in 2012. She is working on her eighth novel, Hemingway’s Hurricane, and is a Visiting Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

  Schwartz Between the Galaxies

  Robert Silverberg

  This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned—passive, suspended—in a first-class passenger rack aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.

  There are no starships. Probably there never will be any. Here we are, a dozen decades after the flight of Apollo 11, and no human being goes anywhere except back and forth across the face of the little O, the Earth, for the planets are barren and the stars are beyond reach. That little O is too small for Schwartz. Too often it glazes for him; it turns to a nugget of dead porcelain; and lately he has formed the habit, when the world glazes, of taking refuge aboard that interstellar ship. So what JAL Flight 411 holds is merely his physical self, his shell, occupying a costly private cubicle on a slender 200-passenger vessel which, leaving Buenos Aires shortly after breakfast, has sliced westward along the Tropic of Capricorn for a couple of hours and will soon be landing at Papua’s Torres Skyport. But his consciousness, his anima,the essential Schwartzness of him, soars between the galaxies.

  What a starship it is! How marvelous its myriad passengers! Down its crowded corridors swarms a vast gaudy heterogeny of galactic creatures, natives of the worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Altair, Canopus, Polaris, Antares, beings both intelligent and articulate, methane-breathing or nitrogen-breathing or argon-breathing, spiny-skinned or skinless, many-armed or many-headed or altogether incorporeal, each a product of a distinct and distinctly unique and alien cultural heritage. Among these varied folk moves Schwartz, that superstar of anthropologists, that true heir to Kroeber and Morgan and Malinowski and Mead, delightedly devouring their delicious diversity. Whereas aboard this prosaic rocket, this planet-locked stratosphere needle, one cannot tell the Canadians from the Portuguese, the Portuguese from the Romanians, the Romanians from the Irish, unless they open their mouths, and sometimes not always then.

  In his reveries he confers with creatures from the Fomalhaut system about digital circumcision; he tapes the melodies of the Achernarnian eye-flute; he learns of the sneeze-magic of Acrux, the sleep-ecstasies of Aldebaran, the asteroid-sculptors of Thuban. Then a smiling JAL stewardess parts the curtain of his cubicle and peers in at him, jolting him from one reality to another. She is blue-eyed, frizzy-haired, straight-nosed, thin-lipped, bronze-skinned, a genetic mishmash, your standard twenty-first-century-model mongrel human, perhaps Melanesian-Swedish-Turkish-Bolivian, perhaps Polish-Berber-Tatar-Welsh. Cheap intercontinental transit has done its deadly work: All Earth is a crucible, all the gene pools have melted into one indistinguishable fluid. Schwartz wonders about the recessivity of those blue eyes and arrives at no satisfactory solution. She is beautiful, at any rate. Her name is Dawn—O sweet neutral nonculture-bound cognomen!—and they have played at a flirtation, he and she, Dawn and Schwartz, at occasional moments of this short flight. Twinkling, she says softly, “We’re getting ready for our landing, Dr. Schwartz. Are your restrictors in polarity?”

  “I never unfastened them.”

  “Good.” The blue eyes, warm, interested, meet his. “I ha
ve a layover in Papua tonight,” she says.

  “That’s nice.”

  “Let’s have a drink while we’re waiting for them to unload the baggage,” she suggests with cheerful bluntness. “All right?”

  “I suppose,” he says casually. “Why not?” Her availability bores him: Somehow, he enjoys the obsolete pleasures of the chase. Once, such easiness in a woman like this would have excited him, but no longer. Schwartz is forty years old, tall, square-shouldered, sturdy, a showcase for the peasant genes of his rugged Irish mother. His close-cropped black hair is flecked with gray; many women find that interesting. One rarely sees gray hair now. He dresses simply but well, in sandals and Socratic tunic. Predictably, his physical attractiveness, both within his domestic sixness and without, has increased with his professional success. He is confident, sure of his powers, and he radiates an infectious assurance. This month alone, eighty million people have heard his lectures.

  She picks up the faint weariness in his voice. “You don’t sound eager. Not interested?”

  “Hardly that.”

  “What’s wrong, then? Feeling sub, Professor?”

  Schwartz shrugs. “Dreadfully sub. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes.” He smiles, full force depriving his words of all their weight.

  She registers mock anguish. “That sounds bad,” she says. “That sounds awful!”

  “I’m only quoting Chuang Tzu. Pay no attention to me. Actually, I feel fine, just a little stale.”

  “Too many skyports?”

  He nods. “Too much of a sameness wherever I go.” He thinks of a star-bright, top-deck bubble dome where three boneless Spicans do a twining dance of propitiation to while away the slow hours of nine-light travel. “I’ll be all right,” he tells her. “It’s a date.”

  Her hybrid face flows with relief and anticipation. “See you in Papua,” she tells him, and winks, and moves jauntily down the aisle.

  Papua. By cocktail time Schwartz will be in Port Moresby. Tonight he lectures at the University of Papua; yesterday it was Montevideo; the day after tomorrow it will be Bangkok. He is making the grand academic circuit. This is his year: He is very big, suddenly, in anthropological circles, since the publication of The Mask Beneath the Skin. From continent to continent he flashes, sharing his wisdom, Monday in Montreal, Tuesday Veracruz, Wednesday Montevideo, Thursday—Thursday? He crossed the international date line this morning, and he does not remember whether he has entered Thursday or Tuesday, though yesterday was surely Wednesday. Schwartz is certain only that this is July and the year is 2083, and there are moments when he is not even sure of that.

  The JAL rocket enters the final phase of its landward plunge. Papua waits, sleek, vitrescent. The world has a glassy sheen again. He lets his spirit drift happily back to the gleaming starship making its swift way across the whirling constellations.

  He found himself in the starship’s busy lower-deck lounge, having a drink with his traveling companion, Pitkin, the Yale economist. Why Pitkin, that coarse, florid little man? With all of real and imaginary humanity to choose from, why had his unconscious elected to make him share this fantasy with such a boor?

  “Look,” Pitkin said, winking and leering. “There’s your girlfriend.”

  The entry-iris had opened and the Antarean not-male had come in.

  “Quit it,” Schwartz snapped. “You know there’s no such thing going on.”

  “Haven’t you been chasing her for days?”

  “She’s not a ‘her,’” Schwartz said.

  Pitkin guffawed. “Such precision! Such scholarship! She’s not a her, he says!” He gave Schwartz a broad nudge. “To you she’s a she, friend, and don’t try to kid me.”

  Schwartz had to admit there was some justice to Pitkin’s vulgar innuendos. He did find the Antarean—a slim, yellow-eyed, ebony-skinned upright humanoid, sinuous and glossy, with tapering elongated limbs and a seal’s fluid grace—powerfully attractive. Nor could he help thinking of the Antarean as feminine. That attitude was hopelessly culture-bound and species-bound, he knew; in fact the alien had cautioned him that terrestrial sexual distinctions were irrelevant in the Antares system, that if Schwartz insisted on thinking of “her” in genders, “she” could be considered only the negative of male, with no implication of biological femaleness.

  He said patiently, “I’ve told you. The Antarean’s neither male nor female as we understand those concepts. If we happen to perceive the Antarean as feminine, that’s the result of our own cultural conditioning. If you want to believe that my interest in this being is sexual, go ahead, but I assure you that it’s purely professional.”

  “Sure. You’re only studying her.”

  “In a sense I am. And she’s studying me. On her native world she has the status-frame of ‘watcher-of-life,’ which seems to translate into the Antarean equivalent of an anthropologist.”

  “How lovely for you both. She’s your first alien and you’re her first Jew.”

  “Stop calling her her,” Schwartz hissed.

  “But you’ve been doing it!”

  Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”

  “Next trip travel with your grandmother instead.”

  “Go away,” Schwartz said. “Stop lousing up my fantasies. Go peddle your dismal science somewhere else. You see those Delta Aurigans over there? Climb into their bottle and tell them all about the Gross Global Product.” Schwartz smiled at the Antarean, who had purchased a drink, something that glittered an iridescent blue, and was approaching them. “Go on,” Schwartz murmured.

  “Don’t worry,” Pitkin said. “I wouldn’t want to crowd you.” He vanished into the motley crowd.

  The Antarean said, “The Capellans are dancing, Schwartz.”

  “I’d like to see that. Too damned noisy in here anyway.” Schwartz stared into the alien’s vertical-slitted citreous eyes. Cat’s eyes, he thought. Panther’s eyes. The Antarean’s gaze was focused, as usual, on Schwartz’s mouth: other worlds, other customs. He felt a strange, unsettling tremor of desire. Desire for what, though? It was a sensation of pure need, nonspecific, certainly nonsexual. “I think I’ll take a look. Will you come with me?”

  The Papua rocket has landed. Schwartz, leaning across the narrow table in the skyport’s lounge, says to the stewardess in a low, intense tone, “My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—playing chess.”

  “How awful,” Dawn whispers gently.

  “You can see why. You go all over the world, you see a thousand skyports a year. Everything the same everywhere. The same clothes, the same slang, the same magazines, the same styles of architecture and décor.”

  “Yes.”

  “International homogeneity. Worldwide uniformity. Can you understand what it’s like to be an anthropologist in a world where there are no primitives left, Dawn? Here we sit on the island of Papua—you know, headhunters, animism, body-paint, the drums at sunset, the bone through the nose—and look at the Papuans in their business robes all around us. Listen to them exchanging stock-market tips, talking baseball, recommending restaurants in Paris and barbers in Johannesburg. It’s no different anywhere else. In a single century we’ve transformed the planet into one huge sophisticated plastic western industrial state. The TV relay satellites, the two-hour intercontinental rockets, the breakdown of religious exclusivism and genetic taboo have mongrelized every culture, don’t you see? You visit the Zuni and they have plastic African masks on the wall. You visit the Bushmen and they have Japanese-made Hopi-motif ashtrays. It’s all just so much interior decoration, and underneath the carefully selected primitive motifs there’s the s
ame universal pseudo-American sensibility, whether you’re in the Kalahari or the Amazon rain forest. Do you comprehend what’s happened, Dawn?”

  “It’s such a terrible loss,” she says sadly. She is trying very hard to be sympathetic, but he senses she is waiting for him to finish his sermon and invite her to share his hotel room. He will invite her, but there is no stopping him once he has launched into his one great theme.

  “Cultural diversity is gone from the world,” he says. “Religion is dead; true poetry is dead; inventiveness is dead; individuality is dead. Poetry. Listen to this.” In a high monotone he chants:

  In beauty I walk

  With beauty before me I walk

  With beauty behind me I walk

  With beauty above me I walk

  With beauty above and about me I walk

  It is finished in beauty

  It is finished in beauty

  He has begun to perspire heavily. His chanting has created an odd sphere of silence in his immediate vicinity; heads are turning, eyes are squinting. “Navaho,” he says. “The Night Way, a nine-day chant, a vision, a spell. Where are the Navaho now? Go to Arizona and they’ll chant for you, yes, for a price, but they don’t know what the words mean, and chances are the singers are only one-fourth Navaho, or one-eighth, or maybe just Hopi hired to dress in Navaho costumes, because the real Navaho, if any are left, are off in Mexico City hired to be Aztecs. So much is gone. Listen.” He chants again, more piercingly even than before:

  The animal runs, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.

  It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

  The bird flies, it passes, it dies. And it is—

  “JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE IS NOW UNLOADING ON CONCOURSE FOUR,” a mighty mechanical voice cries.

  —the great cold.

  It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

  “JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE…”

  The fish flees, it passes, it dies. And—

  “People are staring,” Dawn says uncomfortably.

  “—ON CONCOURSE FOUR.”