Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  He hooks up with Hawk, a young poet living on the edge. Hawk is also a Singer, a kind of public poet with the ability to improvise a song to celebrate or memorialize a major event. Singers are highly prized in society. They are much sought after as guests at fashionable parties. Hawk offers to get HCE into one such party after seeing his "property", since some underworld characters are bound to be there.

  Reaching the party in a swanky penthouse, HCE meets Arty the Hawk, an established crime boss who attracts no interest from Special Services. HCE tells him about meeting Maud, and Arty recognizes her but refuses to help. He tells HCE that she can hurt him, but he can learn to think like her and possibly advance his own career despite her efforts. Just after Arty buys the stolen goods from him, there is a commotion as the police raid the penthouse using helicopters. HCE stages an elaborate diversion involving two of his disguises (Henrietta, Countess of Effingham and the Honorable Clement Effingham) to cover Arty's escape, and then flees with him and Hawk the Singer in the elevator. They arrive at ground level where the police have the exits sealed. Hawk is persuaded to Sing in order to create another diversion. He throws a large oil-burning lamp into a large ornamental pool, setting it ablaze, and then improvises a tale of the night's happenings. This draws a large crowd through which the other two can carefully leave the building.

  Using his new money as a stake, HCE builds his career. The Word changes month to month, and occasionally he uses it, as in one case where he arranges the murder of a man. He eventually sets up the first ever ice cream parlor on a moon of Neptune, as an investment and a cover for his activities. He encounters Maud while taking a tourist trip. She is not there to arrest him, she explains, and in any case she's out of her jurisdiction. She is simply going about her life, and thanks to HCE's upward mobility, both move in social circles that are getting smaller. She explains that she mixes with the criminal fraternity to do her job, just as a narcotics cop mixes with drug users. It's inevitable that she and HCE will meet from time to time. Once he stops rising and settles down, she will have no professional interest in him. They might even become friends.

  During their conversation, she tells him how Hawk the Singer had dived back into the blazing pool once his song was over, being near death when he was fished out. Hawk is severely emotionally disturbed, prone to self-injury, and not above asking others to inflict injury on him to satisfy his needs. HCE was one of those people, and he has deeply suppressed guilt about Hawk's situation.

  Later HCE finds Arty the Hawk on his doorstep. Arty explains that he sought him out because their relationship was about to undergo a change. HCE is puzzled, but eventually realizes that Arty and he are about to become rivals. Arty will try to buy him out, then to kill him, because that is the way the world works. If he survives and prospers, he and Arty will eventually become friends because there will be more profit in cooperating than in competing. He tells Arty this, and Arty wholeheartedly agrees. He responds that HCE is starting to think holographically, just like Maud and Special Services. He departs, leaving HCE to contemplate his future.

  The story uses a conversational first person style, occasionally indulging in word play for its own sake. Partly this serves to involve the reader in the thought processes of the narrator, but it also points out how the narrator uses word play, circumlocution and obfuscation to keep a threatening world at arm's length. When threatened by Maud Hinkle he becomes evasive, plays "dumb", or adopts a semi-comic persona to put her off, acting out the part of psychiatrist describing her view of him as a clinically interesting fantasy.

  Even when expressing a sense of fear and dread to others, he cannot help but dress it up in word play, as follows:

  “ I am suddenly catapulted into a paranoid world where walls not only have ears, but probably eyes, and long, claw-tipped fingers... I suspect every sewer grate or second-story window conceals binoculars, a tommy-gun, or worse. ”

  The narrator is also painfully aware of his own neuroses, and equally aware that as he moves up in criminal society they can only get worse.

  The story does little with science fiction themes. Cheap space travel, along with the technology to live comfortably anywhere in the Solar System, is taken for granted and not central to the core of the story. The world in which this story happens is the one inside the narrator's head, as it is affected by his need to enrich himself while dealing with threats both real and imagined.

  The story appears to take place over a little more than a year, as shown by the list of stones which are used as the Word: opal, jasper, agate, malachite, tourmaline, beryl, porphyry, sapphire, cinnabar, turquoise, tiger's eye, garnet, topaz, taafite, and pyrite. The narrator celebrates his twenty-sixth birthday during "beryl", and buys the ice cream bar during "sapphire". He causes a murder to occur using "topaz". The final events take place just as pyrite replaces taafite.

  Lay ordinate and abscissa on the century. Now cut me a quadrant. Third quadrant if you please. I was born in ’fifty. Here it’s ’seventy-five.

  At sixteen they let me leave the orphanage. Dragging the name they’d hung me with (Harold Clancy Everet, and me a mere lad—how many monickers have I had since; but don’t worry, you’ll recognize my smoke) over the hills of East Vermont, I came to a decision:

  Me and Pa Michaels, who had belligerently given me a job at the request of The Official looking Document with which the orphanage sends you packing, were running Pa Michaels’ dairy farm, i.e., thirteen thousand three hundred sixty-two piebald Guernseys all asleep in their stainless coffins, nourished and drugged by pink liquid flowing in clear plastic veins (stuff is sticky and messes up your hands), exercised with electric pulsers that make their muscles quiver, them not half awake, and the milk just a-pouring down into stainless cisterns. Anyway. The Decision (as I stood there in the fields one afternoon like the Man with the Hoe, exhausted with three hard hours of physical labor, contemplating the machinery of the universe through the fog of fatigue): With all of Earth, and Mars, and the Outer Satellites filled up with people and what-all, there had to be something more than this. I decided to get some.

  So I stole a couple of Pa’s credit cards, one of his helicopters and a bottle of white lightning the geezer made himself, and took off. Ever try to land a stolen helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building, drunk? Jail, schmail, and some hard knocks later I had attained to wisdom. But remember this oh best beloved: I have done three honest hours on a dairy farm less than ten years back. And nobody has ever called me Harold Clancy Everet again.

  Hank Culafroy Eckles (red-headed, a bit vague, six foot two) strolled out of the baggage room at the spaceport carrying a lot of things that weren’t his in a small briefcase.

  Beside him the Business Man was saying, “You young fellows today upset me. Go back to Bellona, I say. Just because you got into trouble with that little blonde you were telling me about is no reason to leap worlds, come on all glum. Even quit your job!”

  Hank stops and grins weakly: “Well…”

  “Now I admit, you have your real needs, which maybe we older folks don’t understand, but you have to show some responsibility towards…” He notices Hank has stopped in front of a door marked men. “Oh. Well. Eh.” He grins strongly. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Hank. It’s always nice when you meet somebody worth talking to on these damn crossings. So long.”

  Out same door, ten minutes later, comes Harmony C. Eventide, six foot even (one of the false heels was cracked, so I stuck both of them under a lot of paper towels), brown hair (not even my hairdresser knows for sure), oh so dapper and of his time, attired in the bad taste that is oh so tasteful, a sort of man with whom no Business Men would start a conversation. Took the regulation ’copter from the port over to the Pan Am building (Yeah. Really. Drunk), came out of Grand Central Station, and strode along Forty-second towards Eighth Avenue, with a lot of things that weren’t mine in a small briefcase.

  The evening is carved from light.

  Crossed the plastiplex pavement of the Great
White Way—I think it makes people look weird, all that white light under their chins—and skirted the crowds coming up in elevators from the sub-way, the sub-sub-way, and the sub-sub-sub (eighteen and first week out of jail I hung around here, snatching stuff from people—but daintily, daintily, so they never knew they’d been snatched), bulled my way through a crowd of giggling, goo-chewing school girls with flashing lights in their hair, all very embarrassed at wearing transparent plastic blouses which had just been made legal again (I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century) so I stared appreciatively; they giggled some more. I thought, Christ, when I was that age, I was on a God damn dairy farm, and took the thought no further.

  The ribbon of news lights looping the triangular structure of Communication, Inc., explained in Basic English how Senator Regina Abolafia was preparing to begin her investigation of Organized Crime in the City. Days I’m so happy I’m disorganized I couldn’t begin to tell.

  Near Ninth Avenue I took my briefcase into a long, crowded bar. I hadn’t been in New York for two years, but on my last trip through ofttimes a man used to hang out here who had real talent for getting rid of things that weren’t mine profitably, safely, fast. No idea what the chances were I’d find him. I pushed among a lot of guys drinking beer. Here and there were a number of well escorted old bags wearing last month’s latest. Scarfs of smoke gentled through the noise. I don’t like such places. Those there younger than me were all morphadine heads or feeble minded. Those older only wished more younger ones would come. I pried my way to the bar and tried to get the attention of one of the little men in white coats.

  The lack of noise behind me made me glance back-She wore a sheath of veiling closed at the neck and wrists with huge brass pins (oh so tastefully on the border of taste); her left arm was bare, her right covered with chiffon like wine. She had it down a lot better than I did. But such an ostentatious demonstration of one’s understanding of the fine points was absolutely out of place in a place like this. People were making a great show of not noticing.

  She pointed to her wrist, blood-colored nail indexing a yellow-orange fragment in the brass claw of her wristlet. “Do you know what this is, Mr. Eldrich?” she asked; at the same time the veil across her face cleared, and her eyes were ice; her brows, black.

  Three thoughts: (One) She is a lady of fashion, because coming in from Bellona I’d read the Delta coverage of the “fading fabrics” whose hue and opacity were controlled by cunning jewels at the wrist. (Two) During my last trip through, when I was younger and Harry Calamine Eldrich, I didn’t do anything too illegal (though one loses track of these things); still I didn’t believe I could be dragged off to the calaboose for anything more than thirty days under that name. (Three) The stone she pointed to…

  “… Jasper?” I asked.

  She waited for me to say more; I waited for her to give me reason to let on I knew what she was waiting for (when I was in jail Henry James was my favorite author. He really was.)

  “Jasper,” she confirmed.

  “—Jasper…” I reopened the ambiguity she had tried so hard to dispel.

  “… Jasper—” But she was already faltering, suspecting I suspected her certainty to be ill-founded.

  “Okay. Jasper.” But from her face I knew she had seen in my face a look that had finally revealed I knew she knew I knew.

  “Just whom have you got me confused with, Ma’am?”

  Jasper, this month, is the Word.

  Jasper is the pass/code/warning that the Singers of the Cities (who, last month, sang “Opal” from their divine injuries; and on Mars I’d heard the Word and used it thrice, along with devious imitations, to fix possession of what was not rightfully my own; and even there I pondered Singers and their wounds) relay by word of mouth for that loose and roguish fraternity with which I have been involved (in various guises) these nine years. It goes out new every thirty days; and within hours every brother knows it, throughout six worlds and worldlets. Usually it’s grunted at you by some blood-soaked bastard staggering into your arms from a dark doorway; hissed at you as you pass a shadowed alley; scrawled on a paper scrap pressed into your palm by some nasty-grimy moving too fast through the crowd. And this month, it was: Jasper.

  Here are some alternate translations:

  Help!

  or

  I need help!

  or

  I can help you!

  or

  You are being watched!

  or

  They’re not watching now, so wove!

  Final point of syntax: If the Word is used properly, you should never have to think twice about what it means in a given situation. Fine point of usage: Never trust anyone who uses it improperly.

  I waited for her to finish waiting.

  She opened a wallet in front of me. “Chief of Special Services Department Maudline Hinkle,” she read without looking what it said below the silver badge.

  “You have that very well,” I said, “Maud.” Then I frowned. “Hinkle?”

  “Me.”

  “I know you’re not going to believe this, Maud. You look like a woman who has no patience with her mistakes. But my name is Eventide. Not Eldrich. Harmony C. Eventide. And isn’t it lucky for all and sundry that the Word changes tonight?” Passed the way it is, the Word is no big secret to the cops. But I’ve met policemen up to a week after change date who were not privy.

  “Well, then: Harmony. I want to talk to you.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  She raised one back and said, “Look, if you want to be called Henrietta, it’s all right by me. But you listen.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Crime, Mr… ?”

  “Eventide. I’m going to call you Maud, so you might as well call me Harmony. It really is my name.”

  Maud smiled. She wasn’t a young woman. I think she even had a few years on Business Man. But she used make-up better than he did. “I probably know more about crime than you do,” she said. “In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t even heard of my branch of the police department. What does Special Services mean to you?”

  “That’s right, I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You’ve been more or less avoiding the Regular Service with alacrity for the past seven years.”

  “Oh, Maud, really-”

  “Special Services is reserved for people whose nuisance value has suddenly taken a sharp rise… a sharp enough rise to make our little lights start blinking.”

  “Surely I haven’t done anything so dreadful that—”

  “We don’t look at what you do. A computer does that for us. We simply keep checking the first derivative of the graphed out curve that bears your number. Your slope is rising sharply.”

  “Not even the dignity of a name—”

  “We’re the most efficient department in the Police Organization. Take it as bragging if you wish. Or just a piece of information.”

  “Well, well, well,” I said. “Have a drink?” The little man in the white coat left us two, looked puzzled at Maud’s finery, then went to do something else.

  “Thanks.” She downed half her glass like someone stauncher than that wrist would indicate. “It doesn’t pay to go after most criminals. Take your big-time racketeers, Farnesworth, The Hawk, Blavatskia. Take your little snatch-purses, small-time pushers, housebreakers or vice-impresarios. Both at the top and the bottom of the scale, their incomes are pretty stable. They don’t really upset the social boat. Regular Services handles them both. They think they do a good job. We’re not going to argue. But say a little pusher starts to become a big-time pusher; a medium-sized vice-impresario sets his sights on becoming a full-fledged racketeer; that’s when you get problems with socially unpleasant repercussions. That’s when Special Services arrive. We have a couple of techniques that work remarkably well.”

  “You’re going to tell me about them, aren’t you.”

  “They work b
etter that way,” she said. “One of them is hologramic information storage. Do you know what happens when you cut a hologram plate in half?”

  “The three dimensional image is… cut in half?”

  She shook her head. “You get the whole image, only fuzzier, slightly out of focus.”

  “Now I didn’t know that.”

  “And if you cut it in half again, it just gets fuzzier still. But even if you have a square centimeter of the original hologram you still have the whole image—unrecognizable, but complete.”

  I mumbled some appreciative m’s.

  “Each pinpoint of photographic emulsion on a hologram plate, unlike a photograph, gives information about the entire scene being hologrammed. By analogy, hologramic information storage simply means that each bit of information we have—about you, let us say-relates to your entire career, your overall situation, the complete set of tensions between you and your environment. Specific facts about specific misdemeanors or felonies we leave to Regular Services. As soon as we have enough of our kind of data, our method is vastly more efficient for keeping track—even predicting—where you are or what you may be up to.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “One of the most amazing paranoid syndromes I’ve ever run up against. I mean just starting a conversation with someone in a bar. Often, in a hospital situation, I’ve encountered stranger—”