João stood up in the boat and shouted. The other fishermen shouted too, and somebody perched on the prow of a boat flung a rope and someone in the water caught it.
Then fish and Tork and me and a dozen amphimen all went underwater at once.
They dropped in a corona of bubbles. The fish struck the end of another line, and shook himself. Tork was thrown free, but he doubled back.
Then the lines began to haul the beast up again, quivering, whipping, quivering again.
Six lines from six boats had him. For one moment he was still in the submarine moonlight. I could see his wound tossing scarves of blood.
When he (and we) broke surface, he was thrashing again, near João’s boat. I was holding onto the side when suddenly Tork, glistening, came out of the water beside me and went over into the dinghy.
“Here you go,” he said, turning to kneel at the bobbing rim, and pulled me up while João leaned against the far side to keep balance.
Wet rope slopped on the prow. “Hey, Cal!” Tork laughed, grabbed it up and began to haul.
The fish prized wave from white wave in the white water.
The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her arm. She peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her.
João and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me.
The fish came up and was flopped into Ariel’s boat, tail out, head up, chewing air.
I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulders with his wet arms. “Look at our fish, Tio Cal! Look!” He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. “Look at our fish there, Cal!”
João, grinning white and gold, pulled us back in to shore. The fire, the singing, hands beating hands—and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottle and was shaking them to the music. The guitars spiraled around us as we carried the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit.
“Watch it!” Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist.
We turned the fish over.
“Here, Cal?”
He prodded two fingers into the white flesh six inches back from the bony lip.
“Fine.”
Tork jammed the spit in.
We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum.
“Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Slept all afternoon.” He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. “That’s my breakfast.”
But when the dancing grew violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the lifeboat shell we had sat on earlier. It was three-quarters flooded.
Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, the gills at the back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floated boat.
“Where’s Tork?” Ariel asked me at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish.
“Taking a nap.”
“Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!”
“He’s got a lot of work coming up. Sure you want to wake him up?”
“No, I’ll let him sleep.”
But Tork was coming up from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead.
He grinned at us, then went to carve. I remember him standing on the table, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife (details—yes, those are the things you remember), stopping to hand down the portions, then hauling his arm back to cut again.
That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea.
IV
The eight-thirty bus was more or less on time.
“I don’t think they want to go,” João’s sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia.
“They are just tired,” João said. “They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say good-bye to Tio Cal.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may just have been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning.
I bent down and gave them a clumsy hug. “When you come back on your first weekend off, I’ll take you exploring down below at the point. You’ll be able to gather your own coral now.”
João’s sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, João, then got on the bus.
Someone was shouting out the window for someone else at the bus stop not to forget something. They trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the café owners were putting out canvas chairs.
“I will miss them,” he said, like a long-considered admission.
“You and me both.” At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. “I wonder if they had any trouble laying the—“
A woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She began to pull her hair and shriek. (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her.
A clutch of men broke off and ran into the streets of the town. I grabbed a running amphiman, who whirled to face me.
“What in hell is going on?”
For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish.
“From the explosion—” he began. “They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!”
I grabbed his other shoulder. “What happened!”
“About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a goddamn underwater volcano for half an hour. They’re still getting seismic disturbances.”
João was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after him, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas and green scales.
They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a canvas spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly molten silicon.
Three of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there; from their bloated faces (one still bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. But several of the bodies were almost totally encased in dull, black glass.
“Tork—” I kept asking. “Is one of them Tork?”
It took me forty-five minutes, asking first the guys who were carrying the bodies, then going into the launch and asking some guy with a clipboard, and then going back on the dock and into the office to find out that one of the more unrecognizable bodies, yes, was Tork.
João brought me a glass of buttermilk in a café on the square. He sat still a long time, then finally rubbed away his white mustache, released the chair rung with his toes, put his hands on his knees.
“What are you thinking about?”
“That it’s time to go fix the nets. Tomorrow morning I will fish.” He regarded me a moment. “Where should I fish tomorrow, Cal?”
“Are you wondering about—well—sending the kids off today?”
He shrugged. “Fishermen from this village have drowned. Still it is a village of fishermen. Where should I fish?”
I finished my buttermilk. “The mineral content over the Slash should be high as the devil. Lots of algae will gather tonight. Lots of small fish down deep. Big fish hovering over.”
He nodded. “Good. I will take the boat out there tomorrow.”
We got up.
“See you, João.”
I limped back to the beach.
V
The fog had unsheathed the sand by ten. I walked around, poking in dumps of weeds with a stick, banging the same stick on my numb leg. When I lurched up to the top of the rocks, I stopped in the still grass. “Ariel?”
She was kneeling in the water, head down, red hair breaking over sealed gills. Her shoulders shook, stopped, shook again.
“Ariel?” I came down over the blistered stones.
She turned away to look at the ocean.
The attachments of children are so important and so brittle. “How long have you been sitting here?”
She looked at me now, the varied waters of her face stilled on drawn cheeks. And her face was exhausted. She shook her head.
Sixteen? Who was the psychologist a hundred years back, in the seventies, who decided that “adolescents” were just physical and mental adults with no useful work? “You want to come up to the house?”
The head-shaking got faster, then stopped.
After a while I said, “I guess they’ll be sending Tork’s body back to Manila.”
“He didn’t have a family,” she explained. “He’ll be buried here, at sea.”
“Oh,” I said.
And the rough volcanic glass, pulled across the ocean’s sands, changing shape, dulling.
“You were—you liked Tork a lot, didn’t you? You kids looked like you were pretty fond of each other.”
“Yes. He was an awfully nice—” Then she caught my meaning and blinked. “No,” she said. “Oh, no. I was—I was engaged to Jonni . . . the brown-haired boy from California? Did you meet him at the party last night? We’re both from Los Angeles, but we only met down here. And now . . . they’re sending his body back this evening.” Her eyes got very wide, then closed.
“I’m sorry.”
That’s it, you clumsy cripple, step all over everybody’s emotions. You look in that mirror and you’re too busy looking at what might have been to see what is.
“I’m sorry, Ariel.”
She opened her eyes and began to look around her.
“Come on up to the house and have an avocado. I mean, they have avocados in now, not at the supermarket. But at the old town market on the other side. And they’re better than any they grow in California.”
She kept looking around.
“None of the amphimen get over there. It’s a shame, because soon the market will probably close, and some of their fresh foods are really great. Oil and vinegar is all you need on them.” I leaned back on the rocks. “Or a cup of tea?”
“Okay.” She remembered to smile. I know the poor kid didn’t feel like it. “Thank you. I won’t be able to stay long, though.”
We walked back up the rocks toward the house, the sea on our left. Just as we reached the patio, she turned and looked back. “Cal?”
“Yes? What is it?”
“Those clouds over there, across the water. Those are the only ones in the sky. Are they from-the eruption in the Slash?”
I squinted. “I think so. Come on inside.”
A HAPPY DAY IN 2381
Robert Silverberg
* * *
More land, more people, manifest destiny, “always more room somewhere,” the frontier pressing outward, translating forests into lumber, land into real estate, topsoil into crops, rivers into inland waterways, meadows into settlements, settlements into villages, villages into towns, towns into cities. “A big family—I always wanted a big family.” And always more people. And more people. And more. Five million in 8000 B.C., two hundred million at the birth of Christ, five hundred million in A.D. 1650, one billion in A.D. 1800, three billion in 1960, six billion by the year 2000. And the cities swelling like toads. And Atlanta into Baltimore into Washington into New York into Boston. And there is always more room somewhere.
Robert Silverberg—one of SF’s most able all-round practitioners—takes us on the kind of skilled and witty tour into the future that he does best, here escorting us into a happy world filled to bursting with Man and dedicated to growth, where there is always plenty for everybody and always plenty of everybody to partake of it—and also into one of the most quietly effective horror stories I know.
G.D.
* * *
Here is a happy day in 2381. The morning sun is high enough to reach the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad 116. Soon the building’s entire eastern face will glitter like the sea at dawn. Charles Mattern’s window, activated by the dawn’s early photons, deopaques. He stirs. God bless, he thinks. His wife stirs. His four children, who have been up for hours, now can officially begin the day. They rise and parade around the bedroom, singing:
God bless, God bless, God bless!
God bless us every one!
God bless Daddo, God bless Mommo, God bless you and me!
God bless us all, the short and tall,
Give us fer-til-i-tee!
They rush toward their parents’ sleeping platform. Mattern rises and embraces them. Indra is eight, Sandor is seven, Marx is five, Cleo is three. It is Charles Mattern’s secret shame that his family is so small. Can a man with only four children truly be said to have reverence for life? But Principessa’s womb no longer flowers. The medics have said she will not bear again. At twenty-seven she is sterile. Mattern is thinking of taking in a second woman. He longs to hear the yowls of an infant again; in any case, a man must do his duty to God.
Sandor says, “Daddo, Siegmund is still here. He came in the middle of the night to be with Mommo.”
The child points. Mattern sees. On Principessa’s side of the sleeping platform, curled against the inflation pedal, lies fourteen-year-old Siegmund Kluver, who had entered the Mattern home several hours after midnight to exercise his rights of propinquity. Siegmund is fond of older women. Now he snores; he has had a good workout. Mattern nudges him. “Siegmund? Siegmund, it’s morning!” The young man’s eyes open. He smiles at Mattern, sits up, reaches for his wrap. He is quite handsome. He lives on the 787th floor and already has one child and another on the way.
“Sorry,” says Siegmund. “I overslept. Principessa really drains me. A savage, she is!”
“Yes, she’s quite passionate,” Mattern agrees. So is Siegmund’s wife, Mattern has heard. When she is a little older, Mattern plans to try her. Next spring, perhaps.
Siegmund sticks his head under the molecular cleanser. Principessa now has risen from bed. She kicks the pedal and the platform deflates swiftly. She begins to program breakfast. Indra switches on the screen. The wall blossoms with light and color. “Good morning,” says the screen. “The external temperature, if anybody’s interested, is 280. Today’s population figures at Urbmon 116 are 881,115, which is +102 since yesterday and +14,187 since the first of the year. God bless, but we’re slowing down! Across the way at Urbmon 117 they added 131 since yesterday, including quads for Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky. She’s eighteen and has had seven previous. A servant of God, isn’t she? The time is now 0600. In exactly forty minutes Urbmon 116 will be honored by the presence of Nicanor Gortman, the visiting sociocomputator from Hell, who can be recognized by his outbuilding costume in crimson and ultraviolet. Dr. Gortman will be the guest of the Charles Matterns of the 799th floor. Of course, we’ll treat him with the same friendly blessmanship we show one another. God bless Nicanor Gortman! Turning now to news from the lower levels of Urbmon 116—“
Principessa says, “Hear that, children? We’ll have a guest, and we must be blessworthy toward him. Come and eat.”
When he has cleansed himself, dressed and eaten, Charles Mattern goes to the thousandth-floor landing stage to meet Nicanor Gortman. Mattern passes the floors on which his brothers and sisters and their families live. Three brothers, three sisters. Four of them younger than he, two older. One brother died, unpleasantly, young. Jeffrey. Mattern rarely thinks of Jeffrey
. He rises through the building to the summit. Gortman has been touring the tropics and now is going to visit a typical urban monad in the temperate zone. Mattern is honored to have been named the official host. He steps out on the landing stage, which is at the very tip of Urbmon 116. A force field shields him from the fierce winds that sweep the lofty spire. He looks to his left and sees the western face of Urban Monad 115 still in darkness. To his right, Urbmon 117’s eastern windows sparkle. Bless Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky and her eleven littles, Mattern thinks. Mattern can see other urbmons in the row, stretching on and on toward the horizon, towers of superstressed concrete three kilometers high, tapering ever so gracefully. It is as always a thrilling sight. God bless, he thinks. God bless, God bless, God bless!
He hears a cheerful hum of rotors. A quickboat is landing. Out steps a tall, sturdy man dressed in high-spectrum garb. He must be the visiting sociocomputator from Hell.
“Nicanor Gortman?” Mattern asks.
“Bless God. Charles Mattern?”
“God bless, yes. Come.”
Hell is one of the eleven cities of Venus, which man has reshaped to suit himself. Gortman has never been on Earth before. He speaks in a slow, stolid way, no lilt in his voice at all; the inflection reminds Mattern of the way they talk in Urbmon 84, which Mattern once visited on a field trip. He has read Gortman’s papers: solid stuff, closely reasoned. “I particularly liked ‘Dynamics of the Hunting Ethic,’” Mattern tells him while they are in the dropshaft. “Remarkable. A revelation.”
“You really mean that?” Gortman asks, flattered.
“Of course. I try to keep up with a lot of the Venusian journals. It’s so fascinatingly alien to read about hunting wild animals.”
“There are none on Earth?”
“God bless, no,” Mattern says. “We couldn’t allow that! But I love reading about such a different way of life as you have.”
“It is escape literature for you?” asks Gortman.
Mattern looks at him strangely. “I don’t understand the reference.”
A Day in the Life Page 11
