by Terry Carr
“Evita. Eva Péron.”
I gave a start. I almost laughed out loud as relief swept over me. It sounded so grandiose, so pompous, that I couldn’t take it seriously. Then I looked into her eyes again. Suddenly everything I had learned about her that night fell into place, suddenly the idea wasn’t nearly so preposterous.
“What makes you think so?”
“Why, I was born at the precise moment she died. July 26, 1952, at five thirty-five in the afternoon. Central Standard Time, of course. That’s eight-thirty at night in Buenos Aires.”
I shivered again. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I felt as if some smothering realization were about to dawn on me. I wanted to run away.
She opened her purse and put a bill on the table. “Come across the street with me to the library,” she said. “It should be open, if it’s finals time. I’ll show you pictures.”
She stood up. “No, let’s don’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
I stood up, too. “I was born just one day after you, Martha. I don’t want to find out any more.”
She gave me a measuring, penetrating look. “Don’t be a coward.”
It was an order. I followed her out of the cafe, shamefaced and meek, feeling as if I’d followed along in the wake of her life many times before.
We didn’t speak until we reached the library and found, buried in the stacks, bound volumes of magazines from that not so distant time. She pulled out copies of Life, Time, and Newsweek; as she opened them, I tried not to look but I couldn’t help myself.
I’d heard of Eva Péron. I’d seen pictures of her once or twice before, but I really hadn’t paid much attention to them. Now as Martha turned page after page, I drank them in. I began to remember; I lost touch with the library around me.
I am standing in a rainstorm in the middle of Buenos Aires, hearing a mass for her recovery. I worship Evita, and she is dying, and I am weeping as I stand there wet and miserable. Every man, woman, and child in the street is joined together in prayer, and I keep hoping that somehow, some way, Our Lord will turn away his hand from her.
Now it is dark. The streets are still filled with rain. Great crowds of her descamisados, her beloved peasants, keep vigil around me. Women are weeping, and around me some people are kneeling in prayer on the rain-soaked pavement.
Then we hear, at last, that she is dead. A hush falls over the crowd; some leave the plaza to grieve in solitude at home, others stay through the night to be near her and mourn.
The next day, I hear they have taken her body to the Ministry of Labor to lie in state. They have given her a white mahogany casket with a glass cover, so that we can see her, and put the casket on a bier blanketed with white orchids. They cannot bury her for days; endless lines of mourners come from all over Argentina to file past her, and outside the Ministry of Labor, the street around the statue of Julio Argentino Roca is covered with flowers.
I hear she is to be buried August 10. When the news is announced, the people go wild with grief. They fling themselves onto her casket and try to kiss her through the glass, they scream, they forget themselves.
The army has been called out, for the government fears it cannot maintain order. Colahore con la policia, proclaim signs at every street corner, but no one pays attention. They are crazy with grief.
At last I make up my mind to go home. She is dead, and there is no more that I can do. But I cannot move. I am hemmed in on every side by people. Everywhere I turn, there are people and more people.
Someone shoves someone else, and there is a scream. I tense, fearful that the mob will stampede. All around, the police and the army are shouting for order, for quiet, but no one pays attention. It happens then: the mob begins to move like a great animal. I run with it. Ahead of me, an old woman slips and falls; pressed on by the sea of flesh, I cannot stop. I fall, too, and go under. The mob sweeps over us with scarcely a ripple, grinds us under its many feet, and moves on.
I came back to myself. Somehow I was sitting in a library chair, a magazine before me open to a picture of the plaza where I had died. The memories faded as the moments passed—I could no more hold on to them than I could bring back a dream once I had woken. All that remained were the feet crushing me into the Argentine pavement—that, and the cold, sticky sweat that had broken out across my body. I never knew just who I had been; all that stayed with me was my death.
My eyes focused on a paragraph in the middle of the page. “Several persons were trampled to death,” it read, “thousands injured in wild demonstrations of grief. The army had to be called out to help the police maintain order. Flowers covered the street, piled up against the walls of the building… flowers had to be flown in from as far away as Chile.”
But there had been no flowers for me. I closed the volume and got to my feet, sickened. “I believe you,” I said to Martha. “Now let’s go back to Houston.”
She protested, of course. She had hoped I would amuse her that weekend, and she could not really empathize with the feelings that were sweeping through me now.
After what I’d just been through, I couldn’t have touched her. We went back to the city. I remained her loyal supporter for the next five years, working for her, loving her always from a distance, putting my department at her disposal.
At last she challenged Rod for control of the company. She lost and was thrown out; in the purge that followed, so was I. You might say that, once again, I was trampled following her demise. But in this incarnation she weathered such setbacks as well as she ever had in Argentina—and this time she did not fall ill and die. She found another, smaller company, rose to the top in a matter of months, and within another five years had swallowed Rod’s business whole. He went back to India.
I didn’t ask her for a job. I had learned by then that I wasn’t cut out for her world at all.
I don’t make much money nowadays. I live in Austin and teach a freelance course in English poetry at a little community college there, and of course I write, too. I try to keep my mind open in the hope I’ll remember my life in a certain Latin American country. I always think that if I try hard enough, then someday, somehow, the memories will come back and I will make my peace with them.
Scientists have been among the most enthusiastic readers of science fiction since the genre began, and that’s not at all surprising, for sf speculates about the kinds of knowledge we may gain in the future. Non-scientists are fascinated enough to read about such things; scientists themselves actually spend their lives working on new discoveries, so we may assume that their interest is even higher. Here’s a story about such a man, a physicist, and the hard choice he had to make because of his passion for knowledge.
Jack McDevitt’s stories have been appearing in sf magazines for the past few years, and he has quickly established himself as a writer of great skill: one of his first stories, “Cryptic,” was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1984. A novel is forthcoming.
JACK McDEVITT - TIDAL EFFECTS
“I never walk on the beach anymore.” The physicist, Gambini, stood near the window, looking out across the illuminated lawns of the Seaside Condo. Rain sparkled in the flood lamps. The Atlantic was hidden by a screen of poplars; but the two men could hear its sullen roar. “During that summer,” he continued, “while we waited for the launch, and expected so much, I went out every evening. I was too excited to work.”
Harmon rotated his wine between thumb and forefinger, but said nothing.
Headlights flickered across Gambini’s rigid features. “I grew up in a small town in Ohio, and I was in high school before I ever saw an ocean. But I can still remember the first time. I’ve loved the Atlantic ever since.” He gazed thoughtfully through the rain-streaked window. “Even now.” Harmon drained his glass and surveyed the room. It was oppressive: heavy, drab furniture; bulging bookcases; neutral, steely colors everywhere. A computer terminal beside a recliner trailed several feet of printout. “I know you’re surprised to see me,” he said apologetically.
“But I had to come.”
Gambini moved away from the drapes, back into the yellow light of an ugly seashell table lamp. A shapeless gray sweater hung from his thin shoulders. “I knew that eventually you would,” he said.
Harmon held out his glass. Gambini filled it, and his own. They were drinking port, a vintage bottle that the physicist had been saving for a special occasion. “It must be a magnificent time for you,” Harmon said, “now that the data has begun to come in. There seems so little that you and your colleagues have not touched. Perhaps, in the end, only the Creation itself will prove elusive.”
“Ah,” said Gambini, brightening, “we have some ideas about that.”
“I’m not surprised. What does Tennyson say? To pursue knowledge like a sinking star. ”
“Sometimes,” observed Gambini, “the price is high.”
“You are thinking of the beach again?” He watched the physicist circle the coffee table and settle stiffly into a wingback chair. “You did what you could,” he said.
A gust of wind blew the rain hissing against the windows. Outside, somewhere, an automobile engine roared into life. The air smelled of salt and ozone. “How much do you know about Skynet?” Gambini asked.
Harmon shrugged. “Only what I read in the papers.”
The lines around Gambini’s mouth tightened. “Odd,” he remarked. “If it were not for Skynet, you would not be here; there would be no need for this meeting.” He laid a peculiar emphasis on the last word. “Skynet,” he continued, adapting a professorial tone, “is an array, twenty-two infrared receptors, in Earth orbit. Capable of seeing damn near anything. They were putting it in place last summer. And I was waiting here, as Ryan was at Princeton, Hakluyt at Greenbelt, and others…” He set his glass down. It was empty. “We knew that, after it became operational, the world would never be the same again.”
“No doubt,” said Harmon. “It sounds very important.”
Gambini got up and inquired, tolerantly, whether his guest had ever heard of Fred Hoyle.
Harmon’s puzzlement was evident. “I don’t believe I have,” he said impatiently.
Gambini crossed the room and took a thick volume from an upper shelf. “Hoyle,” he said, “is best known as a cosmologist, a defender of outworn theories on the nature of the universe itself: what it is, where it came from, where it’s going. Trivial matters, really, when contrasted with the question that really absorbed him, that absorbs all of us and knits us together,”
“And what,” asked Harmon, wondering where all this was leading, “might that be?”
“Simply stated,” said Gambini, “it is this: With whom do we share the stars? It is a question with the profoundest philosophical implications. It is the great enigma. Shapley never knew. Nor Lowell. Nor Einstein. They grew old with no hope, and went to their graves with no answer.”
“And then we got Skynet.” Harmon sounded bored. Irritated. Well, thought Gambini, he has a right to be.
“While they were assembling it, during the late summer, we knew that, by Christmas, we would use it to see other solar systems, planetary bodies out to a distance of more than a hundred light-years. We would be able to perform spectroscopic analyses of their atmospheres. My God, Harmon, we could look for oxygen, the infallible mark of life!”
Harmon nodded.
“I neither ate nor slept during those final weeks. They’d already begun testing the system, and success appeared very likely. I gave up trying to read or work.”
Harmon examined the Hoyle volume. It was Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars. “And you,” he said, raising his eyes to Gambini’s, “walked the beaches.”
“Yes. But only at sunset. When the air was cool.”
Harmon leaned forward.
“Each evening there was a group of swimmers. Boys. They were young, thirteen perhaps, no more than that. There were three of them usually, sometimes four, and they were always out beyond the breaker line. One in particular…”
“Yes,” said Harmon, “he was like that.” His voice sounded strange.
Gambini seemed not to have heard. “He was taller than the others. Awkward. With light sandy hair.” He got up, slowly, and pushed his fists into the pockets of the gray sweater. “The current can be treacherous, and every night they went farther into the sea. I warned them. They weren’t local kids. Locals would have known better.”
“We were,” said Harmon, “from Alexandria.”
“I told them it was dangerous.” Gambini hesitated. “But that meant nothing to them, of course. They laughed and, if anything, retreated farther beyond the breakers. The tall one, he was almost as tall as I: the night before we lost him, he stood as close to me as you are now, sunburned, preoccupied, with all his life before him. He was inspecting tidal pools, for stranded guppies, I suppose. He saw me, and smiled self-consciously as though he’d been caught doing something foolish.” Gambini’s eyes clouded. He fell silent.
“Did he say anything to you?”
“No. We faced each other for a moment. Then he was gone, up the beach with his friends, snapping towels at each other.”
For a long time there was only the sound of the sea, and of water dripping into foliage. Harmon’s chair creaked. When Gambini spoke again, he was barely audible. “It happened, as I knew it would. Hakluyt had called me that morning to discuss the latest test results, and I was strolling engrossed across the sand. It was cold and damp, after an all-day rain.” He glanced accusingly at his visitor. “They should never have been there. But they were.
“The first indication I had that something was wrong came when a fat middle-aged man ran past me. He hurried along the shoreline to join two of the boys, who were standing hip-deep, anxiously watching the sea; beyond them, desperately far out, a head floated over the top of a swell, and arms thrashed.
“One of the boys turned toward me and screamed (though I could not hear him over the roar of the ocean). I looked along the beach for help: the only other person visible was an elderly woman with two dogs.
“I broke into a run, and was already breathing hard before I even got into the water. The boy sank: he was down a long time while I struggled toward him. Then he came up, coughing and choking. I got through the breakers into calmer water and began to swim. The water was cold, and the drag toward the open sea was very strong.
“Although I was moving quickly (assisted by the current), the distance between us shortened only very gradually. The boy’s struggles grew weaker, but whenever I thought he was about to go down, he seemed to find new strength.
“I realized quite suddenly that my own life was in danger. I knew I could reach him, and I also knew that we would probably not get back. It was odd; the possibility of my own drowning raised only a single emotion: the stiletto sensation that it was too soon. By a few weeks, or a few months it was too soon!
“And I hated the child!”
Harmon’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing.
“He fought stubbornly for his life. Time after time, the sea rolled over him, but he would not stay down. And though the tide pushed me rapidly in his direction, the distance between us did not grow noticeably shorter. And finally, while I lost headway in a swirl of currents, our eyes locked.” Gambini’s voice had been rising; but now he stopped to refill his glass. His hand shook so violently that Harmon had to help him. “He must have seen something in my face,” he continued, “because I read the sudden, swift terror in his as he realized, I think for the first time, what was going to happen…”
“So you turned back,” Harmon said, uncertainly. “No one can blame you for that. No one could expect more.”
Gambini threw the full glass of port against a wall. “Who are you,” he demanded, “to make that judgment? I left him to drown!”
“No!” Harmon said desperately. “You tried! His life was not thrown away…”
Gambini’s eyes were cold. “I did not abandon him,” he said, “because I was afraid. I did it because I was curious. I sold his life for some trac
ings on a few hundred pieces of paper.”
(On the veranda below his apartment, they could hear people talking. Someone laughed.)
“I should not have come,” said Harmon.
“Is that all you can say?” snapped Gambini. “You’re his father.”
Harmon rose. His features were calm, but there was something of the drowning boy in his eyes. “What do you want me to tell you, Gambini?” he asked angrily. “That you too should have drowned? That nothing less is decent?”
Gambini slid his fingers under his bifocals and rubbed his eyes. “Why are you here? After all this time.”
“I don’t know.” Harmon exhaled. “I thought they were safe. Out here, away from Alexandria, I didn’t think anything could happen. We were always grateful that you tried. I wrote you a letter.”
“I know. I threw it away.”
“Yes,” said Harmon. “Under the circumstances, it must have been painful.”
Gambini stared a long time at his visitor. “He was in your care at the time?”
Harmon nodded.
“You are right to feel guilty,” he rasped. “Your son and I, we were both your victims.” Gambini’s smile trembled on his thin lips. “Do you know what we found when we looked beyond the solar system? (No: don’t turn away. This concerns your boy.) We examined several thousand stars, Harmon. Of which about a quarter have planets. Most are Jovian in nature: nothing more, really, than enormous sacks of cold hydrogen. It was, of course, the terrestrial worlds in which we were especially interested: those Earthlike planets orbiting stable suns at temperate distances.” A nerve near Gambini’s jugular had begun to throb. “I assume I need not tell you that we found no oxygen. Oh, there were traces here and there. But everywhere we looked, among the terrestrial worlds, we saw carbon dioxide. In vast quantities. Do you understand what I’m saying, Harmon?”
Harmon’s eyes blazed, but he did not reply.
