Chronocules

by D. G. Compton

  “Sorry I took off,” he said, casually smoothing his SF strips on his knee. “But there’s no talking, not to some folk. They ties you up, has you saying what you never did. Then, all of a sudden, they got you. You know how it is, miss. You know how it is.”

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  Liza, who on her own level watched all the time against being “got,” knew how it was. She nodded. She reached for the spoon in his mug—a gesture of returning confidence—and took it to stir her own. When she risked her lips against the rim of her mug the cocoa was surprisingly drinkable. He watched, as if she were a child or a kitten, while she drank.

  “Do you good,” he said. “Put lead in your pencil.” Language learned from his father, to be used in set situations, conveying relationship rather than meaning. “Then well get off where we was going. Up in the woods. Show you them rabbits.”

  He finished his own cocoa in one gulp in spite of its heat. Scarcely human . . . as was the belch that followed. She suppressed the thought. Her genteel distaste must be her mothers—it hung around her neck like an albatross. Perhaps he noticed.

  “My little place,” he said. “D’you like it?”

  “It’s very nice.”

  “Tidn’ what you’m used to, I reckon, but it do’s me fine.”

  Had he suddenly seen, become pained by, her isolation in the midst of all his ancient, greasy comforts? She sat down, hoping to put his mind at rest. But—

  “Do’s me fine, I tell you. Fine. It do’s me fine. Everything a man could want.”

  He began striding about, in a dim room already violently over-full of his presence.

  “Did my dad fine too. Till he chopped hisself, up in the woods.”

  “I told you, Roses, it’s very nice.”

  “That’s what you say. Her out there—her’d’ve said that too. Nice. Very nice....”

  Such an inadequate phrase. Insulting. He glared at her, challenged her to make it real. Totally reckless.

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  Challenged her to distinguish herself from the Mrs. Lamptons.

  He was his room and his room was he. In a manner she, on her own ground, probably never was. Pushed (and caring), she did the only thing possible: left her mug on the table, got up, went to where he stood by the wood-ashed stove, put her arms around his waist, laid her head on his shirt front. His warmth was enormous, and his breadth, and his smell, and the beating of his heart.

  She felt him tremble. She realized, so that she almost cried, that he was holding his breath. Waiting in agony for her to release him. She did so.

  Though she could turn, and go back to her seat, and finish her cocoa, she couldn’t save him from the next few minutes, didn’t know how to. Perhaps he would run again.

  “Wadn’ no call to do that, miss.” He stayed. “Wadn’ no call at all.”

  “Couldn’t you call me Liza?”

  “What for?”

  A good question. Nothing with him was possible. He was shut away behind thirty-eight years of protective idiocy, thirty-eight years of dirt, of shame in his dealings with people and masturbation in his dealings with himself. Were the riches she had to offer suitable even? She controlled a considerable irritation, knowing its true target to be herself. At least her errors must not be Mrs. Lampton’s.

  “It doesn’t matter. Thank you for the cocoa. Shall we go and look at the rabbits?”

  On their way out they regrettably encountered David and Mrs. Lampton coming in to inspect the laboratory. Roses would have sidled past, but Mrs. Lampton stood firmly in his path.

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  “Mr. Varco,” she said, “I was hoping I’d meet you again. I wanted to say”—he tried in vain to squeeze between her and the garden wall—“I just wanted to say I was sorry to have upset you. You must find life worrying enough, as it is.”

  Unlike Roses, Liza was uncowed by professional good intentions.

  “May we get by, please?”

  “I was just talking to Mr. Varco, dear. I don’t think—” “He doesn’t want to be talked to, Mrs. Lampton. Surely you can see that.”

  “I’d rather he told me that himself, dear.”

  But she faltered before Liza’s cold hostility, and Roses edged by. Liza followed him. Mrs. Lampton called after him, restraining him in the gateway with a neat little lasso of expected obedience.

  “Mr. Varco, stop a minute.” Roses stopped. “You’re not a Jew by any chance, are you?”

  Roses stared at the garden around. Before he could answer—and with Liza now to protect him he wouldn’t have minded answering—he’d have to ask Mrs. Lampton what a Jew was. Words were necessary, sentences. And in his head only an induced dazzle of flowers and sky.

  “I thought not,” said Mrs. Lampton. “I want you to know you don’t have to worry. You have a friend on the outside now. You don’t have to worry.”

  He continued to stand, not realizing he had been dismissed. Liza led him away. She ignored the peculiar gaze of David Silberstein. She was occupied with rescuing Roses from Mrs. Lampton, whom she hated with a maternal intensity.

  And Mrs. Lampton . . . Mrs. Lampton was, for the rest of her visit, chatting with Professor Kravchensky, laughing at his funny clock, being escorted on down to

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  the quay, as smooth and gentle and charming as a cat’s sheathed claw.

  The hills above Penheniot were steep, forested with straggly dwarf oak trees. Following Roses, Liza often had to bend almost double under the branches, her hands deep in the rustling leaf-mold slope. Even beneath the trees the ground was dry now, after seven rainless weeks. Moss dusted off the tree-trunks as they passed. Flies followed them, thirsty for their sweat. It was not the nature study ramble Liza had anticipated.

  Near the top of the hill, past the hidden electronic sensors, a wide strip of woodland had been cleared, forming an airless corridor under the baking sun on either side of the electric fence. Here grass had grown, and tiny gorse bushes. Roses pointed to scattered rabbit pellets, and to a section of steep earthy bank pitted with little burrows.

  “Heard us coming. Sit long enough and they’ll be out again. There’s a li’l spring along a bit.”

  Away to the right a tracery of small tracks wove between the standing gorse. And down the middle stalked the fence, deceptively silent and still.

  “They knows about the fence now,” Roses said. “Keeps well away.”

  Liza was out of breath. “Could we wait and see if they come out?”

  “Idn’ that what I brung you for?” He sat down. “Have to be quiet, mind. They hears up through the earth. Eyes bad, noses not much better, ears sharp as foxes.”

  She chose a piece of ground carefully, and sat down. The flies gathered. She watched how Roses endured them, moving his hands occasionally, twitching his cheek like the flank of a horse. The silence, apart from the flies, was total, a weight as tangible as the heat of the sun. Last year she remembered there had been a pair

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  of buzzards circling endlessly in the high air, mewing. This year the sky was empty.

  She shifted her position to lie sideways on one elbow: the rustling she made was huge. Roses frowned and shook his head. She wondered why she was there. Some of the insects crawling over her would certainly sting. When Roses had made the suggestion it had seemed a good idea, and hard to turn down unhurtfully. She ought to be interested in rabbits, anybody ought. But could she really be? She whose every activity as long as she could remember had been conceptual, numerical, theoretical? Dear little bunny rabbits, what could she hope to gain by staring at them except an unreasonable sense of loss? If only Roses were wiser. If only he could reason her into simplicity. . . . She settled, without noticing it, into thinking about Roses.

  Eventually the rabbits came out. The older ones sat for a long time scanning the ground with
their ears, sometimes staring straight at the watchers and seeing nothing to fear. The younger ones bundled out more heedlessly. They jogged around in their awkward rabbit lope, chasing each other, eating grass, lying in the sun to pant. Many were imperfect, mostly without a leg and managing—in the absence of stoats and weasels and foxes—adequately enough on three. Those more imperfect died no doubt on being weaned, unable to move far enough to find food. Dioxin from the farmer’s sprays, as inadvertent, as randomly deformative as thalidomide once had been. Liza wondered how the parents coped with so many corpses. Sealed them in, perhaps, and moved on. . . . Roses hadn’t warned her. Perhaps he was showing her something, perhaps it wasn’t worth mention. So this was rabbit watching.

  Suddenly, in a moment when her attention had wandered, considering the particular, unreasonable pathos of

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  a crippled animal’s self-unawareness, suddenly all the rabbits disappeared. Under the shadow of the fence the grass was clear and still, had always been clear and still. Roses touched her arm, and pointed down the passage between the dusty, stunted trees. A man, the chrononauts’ Training Supervisor, Sir Edwin, in his cool gray diplomatic suit, was walking slowly toward them. He was whistling softly as he approached. Liza could try to hide, she could wait to be discovered, or she could shout to him at once, in order that she should not appear to be feeling guilty. (Guilty? What should she be feeling guilty of?)

  Nevertheless, she chose the last. “Inspecting the defenses, Sir Edwin?” she said.

  “What a disconcerting person you are, Liza Simmons.” His head turned toward them slowly, with a careful lack of surprise. “You turn up in the most unexpected places.” “We were rabbit watching,” Liza said. “Roses brought me up here rabbit watching.”

  “Which is so improbable, my dear, that it must certainly be true.”

  Why should it not be true? And why had she felt obliged to offer it? What pressure (that her education had been directed toward rejecting) did his age or his sex put on her? She stood up, handed Roses up beside her. The Village had inserted a sophisticated knife between them. She was uneasy again.

  "You yourself, Sir Edwin. You’re a long way from the Crew Room or the saloon bar at the local.”

  He took her rudeness very mildly. “Not only disconcerting, but also prickly,” he said. “Commuting from bar to bar—is that really how you see me?”

  Of course it wasn’t. He was elegant, perhaps, but no fool. Yet she couldn’t retract completely.

  “Isn’t it the classic diplomatic way?” she said.

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  He shrugged his shoulders, not pressing things, accepting her apology. It was an incongruous conversation, there between the dusty trees, in the shadow of the silent fence.

  “There’s a woman down in the Village,” he said, implying maybe that he was up in the woods to escape. “She’d like to make trouble. I’m surprised the O.S. let her in.”

  “Trouble? What trouble could she make?”

  “She’s in a difficult position. Intelligent enough to see the general mess, stupid enough to be looking for scapegoats. I wouldn’t trust her an inch.”

  Roses knew whsit they were talking about. In front of Sir Edwin he felt free; they’d talked, though he couldn’t imagine why, many times while he sat fishing on the quay.

  “Bloody bitch,” he said, kicking the ground.

  “More than that,” said Sir Edwin. “She has a distressing amount of power. We shall all have to be a lot more careful.”

  But the fence was there to keep the Mrs. Lamptons out. Suddenly Liza found its shadow comforting. The fence, and the sensors down among the trees, and other lines of defense she hadn’t been told about. As a subject for conversation, Mrs. Lampton was not only odious but boring. The trip to watch rabbits had gone wrong. Whatever Liza had expected of it—and this she didn’t know, her relationship with Roses being so undefined—had simply not happened. This wasn’t Sir Edwin’s fault: whatever it was hadn’t happened, hadn’t been going to happen, long before he had appeared between them.

  “We always are careful.” She was dismissive. “I’m sure we don’t have to worry.”

  Sir Edwin observed her for half a minute. Not to reply

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  was an economical, scornful way of begging to differ. He turned away.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m spoiling your back-to-nature. I’ll be on my way. Goodbye to you both. And good luck with your rabbit watching.”

  At least, seeing a man and a woman alone together in a secret clearing, he could still say this without innuendo. An assimilator by profession, he had assimilated the new freedoms till they were genuinely his own. Not like the professor. Not like David Silberstein. He nodded to Liza and Roses, and went on his way. Still he hadn’t told her—as if he should—what he was doing up there on the hillside. He might, as she might, be seeing security in the fence, or the bars of a cage.

  The passage between the trees curved, and he was out of sight. Liza could be no more bothered with him than she could with Mrs. Lampton.

  “We’ve seen the rabbits now,” she said. “If you’ve nothing else you want to do I’d better be getting back to the laboratory.”

  Roses noticed her irritation. There was no possible reason for it In future he’d stick to his swans.

  Down on the quay David Silberstein had just finished getting rid of his visitor. She was so eager to go that he foresaw trouble. She insisted on sitting in the bow of the boat that took her back to St. Kinnow, heroically busted, her departing tresses streaming out behind her like wood. He waved to her from the shore, wishing— as many people did—that he could like her more.

  The day’s work over, people were swimming in the deep water off Penheniot quay. They dived and shouted and splashed. In spite of the heat, David Silberstein felt no urge to join them. He liked water: he liked to look at it, to listen to it, to sail on it, even to dabble his

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  fingers in it. But he had no liking whatsoever for the shocks to his person, the popping ears, the sheer uncontrolled wetness that seemed necessarily to result from swimming in it.

  And paddling, which he might have enjoyed, was unsuitable to his position. So he sat on a bench where he could not quite see the swimmers, and enjoyed the sounds of their enjoyment.

  Presently Daniel came up out of the water, leaving dark marks where he stamped about on the pale, sun- hot cobbles. David didn’t like him, with his body paint and his dandified pubic hair. He stood up and toweled his back vigorously, letting himself flap like a scratching dog. Then he put on his sandals and his pen shoulder- holster and, dressed, sat himself expansively down on the bench beside David. His beard was still set and he ruffled it, pinging water in David’s direction. The O.S. was large-minded, and told himself it was accidental.

  “First time I’ve been cool all day.” Daniel stretched his legs, watched his toes waggle. “Glorious feeling. You ought to try it.”

  David, as athletic as the next man, said he was going to. Later.

  “Never known such a summer,” Daniel said. “Marvelous. And the forecasters say it’s here for another month at least.”

  David thought it wouldn’t be too stuffy to mention the serious drought, the sedimented reservoirs, the sewage problem.

  “This country’s like that,” Daniel said. “Two inches of snow and the roads are blocked. Two days of sunshine and the taps run dry. Why can’t we cope with our climate, instead of pretending it isn’t really there?”

  David didn’t point out that the two days of sunshine

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  were not forty-nine. He tried something a bit more lively, all boys together, about learning to drink beer instead.

  “Yes indeed,” said Daniel drearily, perhaps because he wasn’t quite that sort of boy. He observed his toes aga
in, then fidgeted, blew his nose on his towel, glanced at his watch, might have been mercifully about to go, finally didn’t.

  “Seen anything of Liza Simmons?” he said. Disinterestedly—what right had Daniel to ask such a question?—David said the last time he’d seen her she’d been going off with Roses Varco.

  “She’s with that nut too much. I smell trouble.”

  “I don’t know why you should say that.” Disinterest wearing very thin.

  “Why? Well, the odds on his children turning out like him are pretty high. I hate to think what a moron in the family would do to little Liza.”

  “There won’t be a family. He’s been issued with pills the same as the rest of us.”

  “Does anyone see he takes them?”

  “We ... didn’t think it all that important.”

  Daniel laughed, pretending it was the funniest thing he’d heard for months. David pursed his lips. It was a problem in personnel management; an administrative detail, nothing whatever to do with Liza (his Liza?) sexing with that stinking oaf Varco.

  “Liza’s sensible. She’d never run a risk like that.”

  “It won’t even enter her head. It’s a thing women no longer think about. Besides, she’s got a healthy appetite. If she were hungry enough she wouldn’t stop to consider.”

  The O.S. was sure he detected a note of bitchiness. “Why are you saying all this?” He looked away. “Isn’t she sexing with you anymore?”

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  “You think I’m jealous? Do me a favor. Why the hell should you think I’m jealous? We sex with whom we please. Orgasm’s orgasm. . . . You’re showing your age, O.S. Life just isn’t that complicated anymore.” He stood up. “Life just isn’t that complicated anymore,” he said again for reassurance. “We don’t want a little moron, that’s all.” He’d said that also. “I hate to think what it would do to a girl like Liza.” That too. “I think you ought to speak to her.”

  That was new. That was where Daniel had been going all along. David sighed.