Chronocules

by D. G. Compton

  Was it not to be expected, expected from the child of a dotard, a man they’d thought beyond fertility, beyond the need for precautions? Was it not to be expected from the child of a senile lust? All Karl’s life this thought had been in her mind, and all his life she had fought it. He was her son. If he was not what she needed him to be, then the failure was hers also.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. Of course not.” He turned away, wiped his hand, and sat down stylishly on one of the velvet seats. “What are you proposing to do with him?”

  “Do with him? He’s worthless.” A sudden decision. “We shall hang him as a spy.”

  Had he always been worthless? The day when she’d paced his reentry, had he been worthless then? If he had been worthless, why the irresponsible safety factor, the pacing that had brought him back fifty-seven years too late? As the time passed the things that got muddled most were motives.

  “We’ll have a trial, Karl. Obviously he comes from beyond the Provinces—you’ve only got to look at him. A trial here in the capital, and then an execution. The people will demand it.”

  “Brilliant. There won’t be a single witness to be found in his defense. Brilliant. -. . . And the guards in the city who already know he’s a reentry?”

  “How many? Three at the most. Quietly inadmissible.”

  “I’ll go and see to it at once.” He stood up and stretched. “A cause celebre . . . it’s just what we need. Some of the Outlands are becoming distinctly disaffected.”

  “No, Karl. I shall go. You should be here in case he

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  is violent. Allow me half an hour for the guards, then give the alarm. Say you found him down outside the cells, and that he ran up here.” She went to the door. “Remember he’s like an animal. He will respond with violence to the slightest sign of weakness or fear.”

  She looked back at Roses. He was staring at the floor, hearing nothing, seeing perhaps the tiles worn by a hundred thousand visitors. It had been her place once, the range of her ambition. As for a, few days he had been. And now he was an animal, and she would never again be alone with him. She would see him again across t^e courtroom and then at his execution ritual. She must be rid of him as she had long ago been rid of the girl she now saw standing beside him. It was he who had taught her violence. There was a pleasant justice in his animal end.

  “Can you believe it,” she said as she went through die door, “that I was once in love with that?”

  Karl waited till her footsteps had faded to silence. Then he sat down, nodded to Roses to sit beside him. Roses didn’t move.

  “She’s lived under this dome too long,” Karl said. “She thinks we don’t see through her. As if our psychiatry were still stuck in the 1980s. You mayn’t be very bright, Varco, but you’re certainly no animal. Though it may be necessary for her to believe you are.”

  Roses began to move his arms, feeling the release of pressure. He moved his feet too, walked a few paces for no other reason than that he dared to. Liza’s son, the man who had struck him, was wanting to be his friend. He had struck him because (but why?) of Liza.

  “Do you realize she’s eighty-three?” Karl said. “Eighty- three. ... She doesn’t look it, of course—that’s one thing we’ve found my father’s de-buffering techniques really are good for. It’s the present that needs attending to,

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  not ways of jaunting off into the future. Even after the

  disbandment she came back here to sweat on her precious s.b. technique. It took them years to see that their real opportunity was here, in the one surviving block of adequate technology for hundreds of miles around. I was sixteen before they started serious colonizing. She was slow to adapt. And now she’s old, she’s even slower.” He looked across at Roses, and laughed. “D’you understand anything that I’m saying?”

  “You’m sayin’ Miss Liza’s all gone old. Load of rummage. Her’s no more’n—”

  “I’m saying I want you to escape, Varco.”

  “Escape? Where from?”

  “I’d have thought that was obvious.”

  Roses looked around him, then out at "Hie fine tall trees. “Escape where to?” he said.

  “Now that’s a good question.” Karl eyed him. “Go twenty or thirty miles and there’s plenty of homesteads where the police would never find you. . . . But I doubt if you’re all that adaptable.”

  “I bain’t goin’ nowheres out there. Her said my home was gone. Can’t go out there, not with no place to go to.” “Understand this, Varco. I don’t want a trial. I’ve plans. There are a lot of people involved, and a trial just at this moment would be the worst thing possible.” Roses was lost. When he’d first seen Liza he’d thought everything would be all right. But she . . . wasn’t the same. And now this man, her son, was saying he must go away.

  “I bain’t goin’ nowheres.” And then, to change the subject, “What’s all this scribble say?” he asked, pointing at one of the metal plaques.

  “I’m sorry, Varco, but you have no alternative. Perhaps I can hide you somewhere. It’ll be difficult to arrange at such short notice, but—”

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  “All this scribble—what's it say then?”

  “Are you really so dim, man? Don’t you see that I'm trying to save you from . . . ?” He broke off. A simple alternative to escape had occurred to him. A far surer way of preventing the trial he wanted so much to avoid. “That scribble?” He talked while he thought. “It’s computer-compatible spelling. We teach it in all the schools. It saves a lot of everybody’s time.”

  “Spellin’s daft. Did un at school, I did. Daft.”

  “You’d find the new way a whole lot easier.” He came to a decision and stood up. “Now Varco, I’m going to fetch you a couple of pills.” Pills were the easiest. He could say Varco had brought them with him. “I'll fetch you a couple of pills. You’ve been having a very worrying time. A couple of these pills will make you feel a whole lot better.”

  “Won’ take ’em. Don’ hold with pills. Don’ never know what’s gone in ’em. Never took a pill in he’s life, didn’ my dad. Chopped hisself up in the woods. Died like a fox in a trap.”

  It was ludicrous, self-parody, a script straight out of the book. Karl kept his temper. “You’ve taken pills, Varco. Lots of them. I know you have.”

  “Never a one. Don’ intend to start, neither.”

  It seemed as if he was determined to be perverse. Karl strode up to him, caught him by both shoulders. “Don’t lie to me, Varco. I know you’ve taken them. Those ones in the hospital now—they never did you any harm, did they?”

  “Hospital?”

  He saw Roses’ face settle into a careful blank. “Hospital? What hospital was that, then?”

  “You know damn well what hospital.”

  “Oh ... you mean that hospital. Well now..."

  Karl had been denying the obvious. And the implica

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  tion of the obvious. Karl could deny the obvious no long* er.

  “You never took them.”

  “Put un down the bog. Never came to look, her didn’.” “Perhaps . . .” A slower realization. What had she said as she left the laboratory? “Perhaps she didn’t want to know. Perhaps she hoped you would.”

  “That’d be daft, wouldn it? Givin’ I they things, then hopin’ I’d put them down the bog?”

  No, not daft Feminine. No, not feminine. Human. He lifted his hands from Roses’ shoulders as if they were suddenly burning him. He retreated a few paces, still staring at the amiable, unpredictable oaf his mother had loved. This man, in the night’s fury? This man, or the quavering, forty second professor? This man, surely. This man, whom his mother had loved.

  And Roses was a young man, while he, Karl, was a treatment-preserved fifty-six. It was impossible. A young man. His father.

 
“Like I said, pills idn’ things I go for. Like my dad. Never took a pill in his life, didn’ my dad....”

  Roses stopped talking Mostly he could spot times when he wasn’t going down well, and then he’d stop. One of those times was now. He scratched his chin, shuffled his feet, flapped his arms at his sides. Then he moved away, humming on three notes, embarrassed. He went back to where the book lay on the table and picked it up for comfort, took it away to a seat in a comer where he could feel less exposed. Clutched against his chest it made his toes quiver even as he walked.

  “Varco—” How could he call him anything else? "Varco —we must get you out of here.”

  “Not goin’ nowheres. And no pills neither.'” "

  “No. You’re quite right” Sentimental and weak. “No, Varco, no pills.”

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  He had stood not thinking, not thinking, for a long time. The minutes of his half hour were ticking away. Varco was still on his seat in the comer. Karl could see the back of his head. Occasionally he turned a page in the book, but it was doubtful if he read any of them. His head was on one side, as if listening. He was feeling the book, lost in the simple electronic joy. As soon as Karl had discovered who Varco was he had known what must be done. Since that moment Karl had done nothing, paralyzed by the confused, frightening intensity of his emotion.

  Mostly he was astonished. Fatherhood was a cheat, an accident, a spasm. He had been told this all his life, and he had naturally believed it. What then was a father? And what then could be a son s feeling toward such a man? Whatever grew up between father and son grew up later, was created, was mutually earned. And Roses Varco, who had created, who had earned nothing, whose achievement of fatherhood—if the book, and therefore his mother, was to be believed—had been even more animal and random than most, Roses Varco (simple, poignantly simple, why not repellantly simple?) stirred in his son’s heart emotion beyond measure, beyond comprehension. Therefore Karl, intellectualizing by way of refuge, was astonished.

  But he knew what must be done. He knew the philosophical objections. His mother had evolved them herself—ironically side by side with the final stages of her research, so that the ultimate experiment had never been made. And only then had David Silberstein, old and virgin and ashamed, admitted the fifteen years’ concealment that had made his private hopes possible. S.b. theory had been diverted to problems of aging. And David Silberstein had, as he should have done on the

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  evidence years before, killed himself. Messily, as he had lived.

  The philosophical objections remained. But Karl reasoned desperately that the present situation—a thirty- eight-year-old man in the same room with his fifty-six- year-old son—was hardly less philosophically improbable And he knew what must be done.

  History taught that there had once been a golden age Even through the distorted writings of the period (how bitter, how deviant artists could be when their destructive leanings went unchecked by State or Church), even through the carping newspapers and books the truth was discernible. There had once been a golden age, a time when human nature had come nearest to winning its battle with itself. A golden age, a period by definition brief, half a lifetime long, the more exquisite for being poised on the edge of chaos. And Karl had known from the very beginning that he must send his father there. Back out of the reach of his own lifetime. Back where he would be safe. Back where he belonged.

  Karl forced himself to act “Varco,” he said, offering reasoning his father would understand, “Varco, things appear to have gone wrong for you.”

  “That’s right enough.”

  “I think they started going wrong when you sat on that chair up on the take-out platform. I think if you sat up there again we could make them go right. . . .”

  It was so easy, so pathetically easy. He saw that, with patience, Roses Varco could be talked into anything at all. With the book to keep him warm and safe he would have gone anywhere, done anything. He sat on the chair and fondled the book, uninterestedly watching Karl set up the complicated machinery. Outside the laboratory the rain still fell: it was scheduled to fall for another fifty minutes. And the capital, fortified, domed, im

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  pregnable, went about its quiet business. Which business included the inadmissibility of guards. The rule of violence that balanced everything.

  Karl allowed his father the book. He would have allowed his father anything, but the book he could spare most easily of all. It was his mother’s immortality.

  Liza, silent in the doorway, watched the final stages of take-out. She did nothing to stop it The years of her son’s life had resulted in this. Pity. It could be nothing else. Pity before the demands of State. She had educated him to understand, to find different satisfactions. And the way he had finally chosen to defy her was this. So she let him, retaining her power to the last.

  From where she was standing she could not see the book, only Roses’ back, broad and strong and sexual, bowed in its typical attitude of submission. It was a false attitude, masking something unbreakable. In fifty- seven years she felt she had grown out of hatred. Out of love. Her son was sending Roses to destruction. But a vanished spy could be used. A vanished spy, under certain manufactured conditions, could be better than a live spy brought to trial. A vanished spy, even if it was her lover, her lover, could be found guilty of more.

  So she waited until take-out was complete. She waited until the machines had whined down to silence and the platform was empty, so empty as never to have been occupied. Then she called to her son, so that he should turn around to see her, and have time to be afraid.

  “Karl... Karl...”

  But he defied her even in that, and found dignity from somewhere not to be afraid. After he was dead she went back out onto the tops of the steps. The drizzle fell on her face.

  “Guards,” she called. Not loudly: she had not shouted

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  in years. “Guards, there is an enemy in our city. He has killed our son. He has killed the future President.”

  For a time no one heard her. But when they did hear her, and when they came, they did not believe her, for she had nothing else she was capable of saying, and the gun was still warm in her hand.

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  EPILOG

  Immediately after this story ends—and, come to that, at the moment of its beginning—Roses Varco, eighteen years old, was sitting on a ramshackle wooden jetty, reading the adventures of the Incredible Expanding Man. Around him dusk was gathering, and behind him the deserted, roofless houses of Penheniot settled their ancient stones for another night. On the shore below him the gray water of the Pill lapped minutely, leaving little silent folds of scum as it retreated. And away to his right, in the end house of the row, not quite as roofless as the rest, four cats were rolling an empty tin of pilchards to and fro on the floor, occasionally getting fish-oil on their whiskers, and bickering.

  These cats were the only living things to suffer as a result of the arrival (non-arrival?) of Roses Varco II. He came with a roar like that of an express train, mistimed sadly by his son and only marginally golden-aged, and was immediately found to be philosophically impossible. He ceased. He ceased to exist. Ceased to be. He had time, in the agony of ceasing, for but one scream, cut off so short as to have been almost without duration, like a geometrical point that has position but not magnitude. Then he was gone.

  Such a violent disruption of the chronos generated a brisk and unaccustomed chronocular activity, so that the cats involved in it made their various departures all missing large and useful areas of fur. And when Roses Varco, the first Roses Varco, the only Roses Varco for

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  there could never have been two, when Roses Varco had heaved himself out of the mud, had grieved for the loss of Spider Woman and then decided to go home and take off
his trousers, there was still enough of this activity left for him to smell in his dirty little kitehen a distinct odor of hot wireless sets, aspirin tablets, the sandpaper sides of used matchboxes, and something that might have been castor oil. What he was really smelling— though I never told him so, doubting if there’d be much point—what he was really smelling was his own cessation.

  In the thirty-eighth year of his life, a man traveling back from a time when the calendar said he would have been ninety-five died a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday.

  I will repeat that.

  In the thirty-eighth year of his life, a man traveling back from a time when the calendar said he would have been ninety-five died a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday.

  And the book? As a true history of what hasn’t yet happened, presumably it is no more and no less philosophically impossible than Roses Varco II was. So it should by rights not have survived the forces that caused Roses Varco II—together with his worn blue sneakers, his threadbare trousers, his baggy shirt and earnest red face—to cease. One can only assume that its remarkable indestructibility was proof against those forces.

  Or else that it was decided, by whoever (Whoever?) makes such highly philosophical decisions, that nobody would take any notice of it anyway, and everybody would carry on just as if it had never been going to be written.

  Which, on the face of it, is a fairly reasonable assumption. .

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