In case the inaccuracy of peripheral pacing should cause him to overshoot, a label was hastily prepared and hung around his neck, i come from 1988. I am not
REPRESENTATIVE. IF YOU CAN, PLEASE SEND ME BACK. AND WRITE ON THE BACK OF THIS IF MORE OF US WOULD BE WELCOME, AND WHAT CONDITIONS WE MAY EXPECT TO FIND. IN ANY CASE I OFFER NO THREAT, SO PLEASE TREAT ME kindly. Nobody showed him the text—explaining it to him would have taken too long. The label was signed, after a brief dispute over protocol between him and Manny Littlejohn, by Professor Igor Kravchensky, Scientific Director of the Penheniot Experimental Research Village. The label stuck out under one ear and was scratchy. But he was spoken to very sharply when he tried to remove it.
Liza was busy at the computer, calculating die charge necessary for the peripheral pacing. She was not pleased with herself. She had vehemently protested outrage, had defended the inviolable rights of the individual, while all the time urging Roses across the laboratory and up onto the take-out platform, and she knew what she had done. That David Silberstein had done the same thing only worsened the situation. And now she was calculating the pacing charge. . . . She juggled weight and density coefficients, and added the usual
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fifty percent safety margin? She looked at the figures, and then up at Roses, solid and sweating on the takeout platform. He was twisting his neck, trying to read the writing on his label. She crossed out the fifty percent and substituted seventy-five. It was important, now that it was too late, that he should come to no harm. So she added eighty percent, just to be sure. Or just because he looked so vulnerable. Or just because she was ashamed. Should he not at least have been told what was being asked of him? Only through him could she ever resolve her fascination with fear. She added a safety margin of eighty-five percent, secretly, by way of propitiation.
When Professor Kravchensky looked at Roses Varco he saw skin and clothes and hair, and within these the structure of flesh and bones, and within these the ten thousand million atoms that were his real concern. Manny Littlejohn, on the other hand, saw through the skin and clothes and hair to the dream within, to the apotheosis of Manny Littlejohn. And David Silberstein . . . when David Silberstein looked at Roses Varco he saw straight through all the irrelevancies to a silken bed wherein he and Liza would lie and sex the long day through. He believed, and was invigorated by the belief, that he was committing murder. That Roses Varco would die as all the professor’s subjects would die. That he, David Silberstein, in his willingness for her sake to bear the knowledge of this, was showing himself strong, no longer a spectator, fully worthy of her, of Liza, of the only woman he had ever loved. The sexing won by such means would be exquisite, transcendental, beyond the powers of his imagination. From the pain of Roses’ death he would hack for himself a future, a golden succession of days and nights with Liza. The bloody
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man had always been more trouble than he was worth, anyway.
Roses stopped trying to read his label and leaned foiward to arrange his toes more decently under the gaping holes in the canvas of his sneakers. If he’d known he was going to be stuck up there with everybody gawping at him, he’d have—
“Lean back please, Mr. Varco.” Bellowed through his soggy, ear-plugged pulsing. “Just lean back in the chair and keep still, will you?”
“Like at the barber’s?”
“That’s right. Just like at the barber’s.”
He knew all about the barber’s. It had been a struggle to get him there—he’d cut his own hair well enough for all those years—but once he’d been made to go a couple of times he found he loved it. He felt important. And the barber had a far better mirror than the spotty little thing that had been his dad’s at home. So he sat back in the chair on the take-out platform and twiddled his thumbs the way his mother had taught him, the way he always did while waiting for the barber to begin.
He had no views on what was going to be done to him, and had need of none. When he finally made the connection between himself and spotty dog, between himself and the old black tom, between himself and the girl in the red dress who had talked all that rummage, as if she was mad or something, it was too late. There was a wall of light, a wall of sound about him. And his reflection in all the different lenses. He covered his face with his hands, curled up in a tight ball on the chair. He rocked slightly to and fro, moaning point- lessly against the increasing scream of the accelerators. The scream was in his head, part of the act of connection. It became so intense that when it ended, connec
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tion ended also. He waited in the silence for someone to speak, for someone to come and bring him back to life. He quivered on the seat of the chair, his legs against his chest, his face still pressed close between his knees. And no one came.
236
(About the brief episode that now follows, the book understandably has nothing to say, for it happened after the book was written. So “imaginative reconstruction” is replaced by “intelligent speculation.” Knowing how the story ends, I can’t see how it could happen in any other way.)
TEN
Eventually Roses uncurled, opened his eyes, peered through his fingers. The laboratory was deserted. All the people who had been in it a moment before were gone. The lights were off, and outside the window a fine rain was falling. Roses sat up. The silence seemed to have been there for a long time and he moved slowly, feeling himself an intruder. You closed your eyes on people and noise, on electric lights and brilliant sunshine: you opened your eyes on this. It wasn’t right. He stood up, testing the floor, ready to be afraid. The boards of the platform creaked. His label tickled his ear, and he moved it around under his chin.
He began to notice small differences even in the laboratory itself: the equipment had been moved around, new pieces added, and little posts had been put up with silver rope strung between them, making a sort of gangway. Metal plaques were fixed here and there, with
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writing on them that he couldn’t read. And there were new, velvet-covered benches. He left the platform, stepped over the silver rope, and walked carefully to the window. He had a strong sense of being forbidden to touch.
The view of the Pill was almost obscured by enormous trees. He moved his head to see between the branches: the Pill was his territory, he needed its presence. He moved his head and saw water, sections of bank, little oak trees . . . all familiar, all safe. He moved his head and saw the stem of a boat, an odd craft such as he had never seen before. He moved his head again and saw the familiar wooded promontory around which the Pill curved. But across the surface of the water there was an inexplicable dark line. Beyond the line the water was rough, this side of it the water was smooth, pitted with rain drops. And the sky from which the rain fell, which should have been gray, was bright, bright blue.
Not yet fully afraid, puzzled more, but no longer so careful, Roses went to the laboratory door. Through the glass panel in it he saw strange buildings, vehicles, no sign of anything he knew. He backed away from the door, then mshed at it to tear it open. It was locked. He beat on the toughened glass, shouting, kicking the door with his worn blue sneakers. He was afraid, even more afraid than he would have been in a place that was totally alien. The place he was in was both known and unknown, like a nightmare, and he beat and shouted to get out.
When he was almost past seeing, a face appeared at the glass door. A man’s face. A man in a strange black hat. The man outside the laboratory had to shout for some time before Roses could make himself quiet enough to hear.
“The door is locked,” he was saying. “I must go and
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fetch the key. Don’t worry, I must go and fetch the key. I’ll be back in a minute. You mustn’t worry.”
He stayed repeating such things till Roses understood. Then he went away.
r /> With one cause for panic—the locked door—removed, the others were less distressing. Roses had someone who cared, someone who told him not to worry. And the valley was still the valley—they’d done things to it once before, but it stayed the same old valley, underneath. He turned away from the laboratory door, from the threatening unfamiliarity outside. He moved uncertainly. His fear was barely out of sight and he sought the security of the known. He fingered the bullet hole in his shirt, his eyes seeking anxiously around the room, not wanting to find new horrors. There was a table in front of one of the computer consoles. And on it, under a glass case, was a book.
He approached the table, filled with apprehension and unreasonable joy. A twenty year old memory flooded in. It was the book he had tried to destroy, the book he had last seen floating away in the dusk on Penheniot Pill. He leaned on the glass, and stared down. There was a notice on the table in writing he could read: An Immortal History of Penheniot and its People. He opened the glass case with trembling fingers. He touched the book, experienced the same remembered thrill. He took the book out, opened it, found the same remembered solitary word.
NAKEDNESS
An evening when he was only a lad. Rooks in the high trees, drifting smoke from his chimney,- an owl across the silence. Vivid, the time when Penheniot had
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been his. No, the time when Penheniot had been nobody’s, and he had used it. He turned the page.
NAKEDNESS
The word still shocked him. On the page it was still sly, exciting, delightful—nothing at all to do with people walking around shamelessly showing everything God had given them. It meant secret, private, hoarded joy. He felt his body respond. To the dream, to the imagined glimpse. And again, on the facing page—
NAKEDNESS
There had been, there must have been, a time when he was young and free and everything in life was golden. He stood and dreamed of such a tune, the pleasure seeping through his fingers.
Behind him Liza Simmons unlocked the laboratory door and opened it so quietly that he did not hear. She stared at him as at a ghost.
“Roses?”
She had rehearsed the meeting. She had believed in it. For fifty-seven years. Now he was here none of her prepared speeches was remotely possible. She watched him turn to her, dreading his uncertainty, his partial recognition, even his shock at what he saw.
“Miss Liza?”
“More or less.” Her public manner, her President’s
voice, was the best defense. And a change of subject from herself. “I see you’ve found our book. What do you think of it?”
“I seen her once before. Proper job.”
“Nonsense. You couldn’t have. It’s only just completed. It will last a thousand years, Roses. People who
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find it long after all our clevernesses and idiocies are forgotten will read it and understand.” It was her lecturing voice, the voice she used in the Courtroom. Roses was too immediate, too much part of a girl who was dead, for anything else. “There’s an entire way of life in it, Roses. Sometimes I think we’ve tried to make it do too much. But once these young linguistics experts get the bit between their teeth . . . They grew up after books, you see.” She saw Roses had lost her. She had forgotten how he was.
“What’s all the li’l posties for?” he said. “And where’s all them trees come from?”
“It’s been a long time. Trees grow. The laboratory is now a state museum.”
He found in all this no trace of an answer.
“And where’s the people, then? Mr. Silberstein, thacky dratted old professor, the other old un, where’s they all to?”
She sighed. There was no use telling him they were , all dead: Professor Kravchensky in a riot six months after disbandment, before the birth of his child; the other old one, the Founder, surviving till they all returned to Penheniot only to be killed a few weeks later with a pair of scissors by his wife; and the O.S. dead by his own hand sometime, she could not remember when, in the years that followed. In the book Liza had claimed that Roses hadn’t, even till the very end, known what was being done to him. Sometimes, privately, in private self-defense, she’d told herself it had not been so—he must have known. She saw now that he hadn’t.
“They’re . . . not here,” she said. “I’m the one in charge now.”
He wandered away to the window. There were too many incomprehensibles. He stared out at the trees, at the glimpses of rain^smoothed water. They were fine
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trees, thick with the pale green leaves of spring. But the woman behind him worried him. Nothing about her was right Certainly it was Miss Liza. . . . But her face was plumped out, and smooth like a cushion. Her voice was like a wireless voice. He responded to tone far more than to meaning, and her voice reminded him of no one so much as of that other old one, that Mr. Littlejohn. Not that she was old like him. She just . . . wasn’t right He didn’t move when he felt her hands on the back of his neck, untying the string to his labeL “I knew I’d remembered the wording,” she said. Dr. Meyer, the only other surviver at the time (himself now five years dead) had tried for the book to make it something wiser, less patronizing. She had insisted on the unpleasant truth. She was great enough now to be able to stand it. And the others were dead. She tore the label into small pieces, then saw the pieces in her hand. She was getting too emotional. It was not a time, and she was not a person, for petty triumphs. She looked at his big hands, his broad shoulders, and remembered the violence he had taught her. Its fascination. His hair was still ruffled from his encounter with the hovercraft attackers fifty-seven years before.
“The people will want to see you,” she said. “They’ve read about you in the book. Now they’ll want to see you.” “Read about me? What book’s that, then?”
“The book in the case on the table.”
He turned to her. Obviously he liked the idea of being in a book. “Show me,” he said.
She took him back to the table. He’d been holding it when she came in, and now he wouldn’t. “That was always your trouble,” she said, “being ashamed of pleasure. We’ve made the book that way so people will want to read it.”
“Show me a bit then.” It irritated her, how petulant
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he was with his new fame. “Show me a bit that says about me.”
She slammed the book shut. “People don’t speak to me like that,” she said. “You’ll have to learn.” And then, as he cowered, as she was powerful, a sensation that never palled, “I have soldiers to teach you. You’ll have to learn that things have changed. You, everybody, got away with far too much. It made for great unhappiness.”
Roses’ fear was not of her, but of the strangeness: of the trees, of the little posts, of the people not there. The girl in front of him he could ignore or flatten, as he had done once before. Her talk of soldiers meant nothing to him. But the boat down on the Pill was like no boat he had ever seen, and the blue sky should have been gray. Before these things he was very afraid.
“I’ll be getting down home,” he said. “Missed my lunch, what with thacky cat. Must be gettin’ late if my guts be anything to go by.”
“Your home isn’t there, Varco.” Not a time, not a person, for petty triumphs? “In the early days, when we were subduing the Outlands, we weren’t sentimental. We turned it into cells. It was always damp and smelly enough.”
He followed her no further than her first words. He believed her. His home was gone. He knew now that everything was gone. He ran whimpering to the open door, saw a man coming up the wet steps toward him, turned back, huddled himself down on one of the velvet couches. He wasn’t there. He was nowhere. He heard the man come in through the laboratory door.
“Mother? They told me there’d been a new reentry. A human one. No trouble, I hope?”
“None at all. He’s over there.” Liza’s voice sharpened. “Stand up, Varco. In the presence of the Heir Apparent you stand.”
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“He couldn’t know that, Mother.”
“He knows it now. Stand up at once, Varco.”
Roses stood, saw for the first time Liza’s son. Son? How could she have a son who was a grown man? People with grown sons were old.
“Karl, this is Roses Varco. You remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
He looked Roses up and down: worn blue sneakers, faded jeans, baggy shirt, red earnest face. It was not an impressive assembly.
“You’ve been a long time getting here. Most people have given you up. I suppose I should congratulate you on your safe arrival.” The words were meaningless, but the tone insulted. Roses said nothing before such inbuilt superiority. Karl spoke to his mother, his eyes still on Roses. “I often wondered if you hadn’t exaggerated him, Mother. In the material you supplied for the book, I mean. I see now that your descriptions were totally accurate.”
He struck Roses across the face, a cold gesture, denying the possibility of retaliation. In the presence of such authority Roses clenched his fists but did nothing. He had no precedents, no point of contact. He did nothing.
“That was for what you did to my mother. A beginning. Only a beginning.”
“That’s enough, Karl.”
“But I’ve read the book. Are you really going to let him go unpunished?”
“I said enough, Karl. Don’t argue with me.”
She would not think about why she had stopped him. In her presence he had beaten men unconscious. Men from the Outlands, better, wiser men than Roses. Men who had had to be shaped, just as Roses had. . . . She thought instead about her son, and waited—as she always waited—for him to challenge her. Don’t argue
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with me, please argue with me. She’d brought him up to be a man. Ruling, she’d brought him up to rule. And still, at fifty-six, he was her sycophant.
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