Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  We turned.

  He’d sat cross-legged near the hedge.

  “Look…” he whispered.

  Now people’s gazes followed his. He was looking at Lewis and Ann. She, tall and blonde, he, dark and taller, were standing very quietly, a little nervously, eyes closed (Lewis’ lips were apart).

  “Oh,” whispered someone who should have known better, “they’re going to…”

  I watched Hawk because I’d never had a chance to observe one Singer at another’s performance. He put the soles of his feet together, grasped his toes and leaned forward, veins making blue rivers on his neck. The top button of his jacket had come loose. Two scar ends showed over his collarbone. Maybe nobody noticed but me.

  I saw Edna put her glass down with a look of beaming anticipatory pride. Alex, who had pressed the autobar (odd how automation has become the upper crust’s way of flaunting the labor surplus) for more crushed ice, looked up, saw what was about to happen, and pushed the cut-off button. The autobar hummed to silence. A breeze (artificial or real, I couldn’t tell you) came by and the trees gave us a final shush.

  One at a time, then in duet, then singly again, Lewis and Ann sang.

  Singers are people who look at things, then go and tell people what they’ve seen. What makes them Singers is their ability to make people listen. That is the most magnificent over-simplification I can give. Eighty-six-year-old El Posado, in Rio de Janeiro, saw a block of tenements collapse, ran to the Avenida del Sol and began improvising, in rhyme and meter (not all that hard in rhyme-rich Portuguese), tears runneling his dusty cheeks, his voice clashing with the palm swards above the sunny street. Hundreds of people stopped to listen; a hundred more; and another hundred. And they told hundreds more what they had heard. Three hours later, hundreds from among them had arrived at the scene with blankets, food, money, shovels and, more incredibly, the willingness and ability to organize themselves and work within that organization. No Tri-D report of a disaster has ever produced that sort of reaction. El Posado is historically considered the first Singer. The second was Miriamne in the roofed city of Lux, who for thirty years walked through the metal streets singing the glories of the rings of Saturn—the colonists can’t look at them without aid because of the ultraviolet the rings set up. But Miriamne, with her strange cataracts, each dawn, walked to the edge of the city, looked, saw and came back to sing of what she saw. All of which would have meant nothing except that during the days she did not sing—through illness, or once she was on a visit to another city to which her fame had spread—the Lux Stock Exchange would go down, the number of violent crimes rise. Nobody could explain it. All they could do was proclaim her Singer. Why did the institution of Singers come about, springing up in just about every urban center throughout the system? Some have speculated that it was a spontaneous reaction to the mass media which blanket our lives. While Tri-D and radio and newstapes disperse information all over the worlds, they also spread a sense of alienation from first-hand experience. (How many people still go to sports events or a political rally with their little receivers plugged to their ears to let them know that what they see is really happening?) The first Singers were proclaimed by the people around them. Then, there was a period where anyone could proclaim himself who wanted to, and people either responded to him, or laughed him into oblivion. But by the time I was left on the doorstep of somebody who didn’t want me, most cities had more or less established an unofficial quota. When a position is left open today, the remaining Singers choose who is going to fill it. The required talents are poetic, theatrical, as well as a certain charisma that is generated in the tensions between the personality and the publicity web a Singer is immediately snared in. Before he became a Singer, Hawk had gained something of a prodigious reputation with a book of poems published when he was fifteen. He was touring universities and giving readings, but the reputation was still small enough so that he was amazed that I had ever heard of him, that evening we encountered in Central Park (I had just spent a pleasant thirty days as a guest of the city and it’s amazing what you find in the Tombs Library). It was a few weeks after his sixteenth birthday. His Singership was to be announced in four days, though he had been informed already. We sat by the lake till dawn, while he weighed and pondered and agonized over the coming responsibility. Two years later, he’s still the youngest Singer in six worlds by half a dozen years. Before becoming a Singer, a person need not have been a poet, but most are either that or actors. But the roster through the system includes a longshoreman, two university professors, an heiress to the Silitax millions (Tack it down with Silitacks), and at least two persons of such dubious background that the ever-hungry-for-sensation Publicity Machine itself has agreed not to let any of it past the copy-editors. But wherever their origins, these diverse and flamboyant living myths sang of love, of death, the changing of seasons, social classes, governments and the palace guard. They sang before large crowds, small ones, to an individual laborer coming home from the city’s docks, on slum street corners, in club cars of commuter trains, in the elegant gardens atop Twelve Towers, to Alex Spinnel’s select soiree. But it has been illegal to reproduce the “Songs” of the Singers by mechanical means (including publishing the lyrics) since the institution arose, and I respect the law, I do, as only a man in my profession can. I offer the explanation then in place of Lewis’ and Ann’s song.

  They finished, opened their eyes, stared about with expressions that could have been embarrassment, could have been contempt.

  Hawk was leaning forward with a look of rapt approval. Edna was smiling politely. I had the sort of grin on my face that breaks out when you’ve been vastly moved and vastly pleased. Lewis and Ann had sung superbly.

  Alex began to breathe again, glanced around to see what state everybody else was in, saw, and pressed the autobar, which began to hum and crush ice. No clapping, but the appreciative sounds began; people were nodding, commenting, whispering. Regina Abolafia went over to Lewis to say something. I tried to listen until Alex shoved a glass into my elbow.

  “Oh, I’m sorry…”

  I transferred my briefcase to the other hand and took the drink smiling. When Senator Abolafia left the two Singers, they were holding hands and looking at one another a little sheepishly. They sat down again.

  The party drifted in conversational groups through the gardens, through the groves. Overhead clouds the color of old chamois folded and unfolded across the moon.

  For a while I stood alone in a circle of trees listening to the music: a de Lassus two-part canon, programmed for audio-generators. Recalled: an article in one of last week’s large-circulation literaries stating that it was the only way to remove the feel of the bar lines imposed by five centuries of meter on modern musicians. For another two weeks this would be acceptable entertainment. The trees circled a rock pool; but no water. Below the plastic surface, abstract lights wove and threaded in a shifting lumia.

  “Excuse me… ?”

  I turned to see Alexis, who had no drink now or idea what to do with his hands. He was nervous.

  “… but our young friend has told me you have something I might be interested in.”

  I started to lift my briefcase, but Alex’s hand came down from his ear (it had gone by belt to hair to collar already) to halt me. Nouveau riche.

  “That’s all right. I don’t need to see them yet. In fact, I’d rather not. I have something to propose to you. I would certainly be interested in what you have if they are, indeed, as Hawk has described them. But I have a guest here who would be even more curious.”

  That sounded odd.

  “I know that sounds odd,” Alexis assessed, “but I thought you might be interested simply because of the finances involved. I am an eccentric collector who would offer you a price concomitant with what I would use them for: eccentric conversation pieces—and because of the nature of the purchase I would have to limit severely the people with whom I could converse.”

  I nodded.

  “My
guest, however, would have a great deal more use for them.”

  “Could you tell me who this guest is?”

  “I asked Hawk, finally, who you were and he led me to believe I was on the verge of a grave social indiscretion. It would be equally indiscreet to reveal my guest’s name to you.” He smiled. “But indiscretion is the better part of the fuel that keeps the social machine turning, Mr. Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson…” He smiled knowingly.

  I have never been Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson, but then, Hawk was always an inventive child. Then a second thought went by, vid., the tungsten magnates, the Cadwaliter-Ericksons of Tythis on Triton. Hawk was not only inventive, he was as brilliant as all the magazines and newspapers are always saying he is.

  “I assume your second indiscretion will be to tell me who this mysterious guest is?”

  “Well,” Alex said with the smile of the canary-fattened cat, “Hawk agreed with me that the Hawk might well be curious as to what you have in there,” (he pointed) “as indeed he is.”

  I frowned. Then I thought lots of small, rapid thoughts I’ll articulate in due time. “The Hawk?”

  Alex nodded.

  I don’t think I was actually scowling. “Would you send our young friend up here for a moment?”

  “If you’d like.” Alex bowed, turned. Perhaps a minute later, Hawk came up over the rocks and through the trees, grinning. When I didn’t grin back, he stopped.

  “Mmmm…” I began.

  His head cocked.

  I scratched my chin with a knuckle. “… Hawk,” I said, “are you aware of a department of the police called Special Services?”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “They’ve suddenly gotten very interested in me.”

  “Gee,” he said with honest amazement. “They’re supposed to be effective.”

  “Mmmm,” I reiterated.

  “Say,” Hawk announced, “how do you like that? My namesake is here tonight. Wouldn’t you know.”

  “Alex doesn’t miss a trick. Have you any idea why he’s here?”

  “Probably trying to make some deal with Abolafia. Her investigation starts tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” I thought over some of those things I had thought before. “Do you know a Maud Hinkle?”

  His puzzled look said “no” pretty convincingly.

  “She bills herself as one of the upper echelon in the arcane organization of which I spoke.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She ended our interview earlier this evening with a little homily about hawks and helicopters. I took our subsequent encounter as a fillip of coincidence. But now I discover that the evening has confirmed her intimations of plurality.” I shook my head. “Hawk, I am suddenly catapulted into a paranoid world where the walls not only have ears, but probably eyes, and long, claw-tipped fingers. Anyone about me—yea, even very you—could turn out to be a spy. I suspect every sewer grating and second-story window conceals binoculars, a tommygun, or worse. What I just can’t figure out is how these insidious forces, ubiquitous and omnipresent though they be, induced you to lure me into this intricate and diabolical—”

  “Oh, cut it out!” He shook back his hair. “I didn’t lure—”

  “Perhaps not consciously, but Special Services has Hologramic Information Storage, and their methods are insidious and cruel—”

  “I said cut it put.” And all sorts of hard little things happened again. “Do you think I’d—” Then he realized how scared I was, I guess. “Look, the Hawk isn’t some small time snatchpurse. He lives in just as paranoid a world as you’re in now, only all the time. If he’s here, you can be sure there are just as many of his men—eyes and ears and fingers— as there are of Maud Hickenlooper.”

  “Hinkle.”

  “Anyway, it works both ways. No Singer’s going to— Look, do you really think I would—”

  And even though I knew all those hard little things were scabs over pain, I said, “Yes.”

  “You did something for me once, and I—”

  “I gave you some more welts. That’s all.”

  All the scabs pulled off.

  “Hawk,” I said. “Let me see.”

  He took a breath. Then he began to open the brass buttons. The flaps of his jacket fell back. The lumia colored his chest with pastel shiftings.

  I felt my face wrinkle. I didn’t want to look away. I drew a hissing breath instead, which was just as bad.

  He looked up. “There’re a lot more than when you were here last aren’t there?”

  “You’re going to kill yourself, Hawk.”

  He shrugged.

  “I can’t even tell which are the ones I put there anymore.”

  He started to point them out.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, too sharply. And for the length of three breaths, he grew more and more uncomfortable, till I saw him start to reach for the bottom button. “Boy,” I said, trying to keep despair out of my voice, “why do you do it?” and ended up keeping out everything. There is nothing more despairing than a voice empty.

  He shrugged, saw I didn’t want that, and for a moment anger flickered in his green eyes. I didn’t want that either. So he said: “Look… you touch a person, softly, gently, and maybe you even do it with love. And, well, I guess a piece of information goes on up to the brain where something interprets it as pleasure. Maybe something up there in my head interprets the information all wrong…”

  I shook my head. “You’re a Singer. Singers are supposed to be eccentric, sure; but—”

  Now he was shaking his head. Then the anger opened up. And I saw an expression move from all those spots that had communicated pain through the rest of his features, and vanish without ever becoming a word. Once more he looked down at the wounds that webbed his thin body.

  “Button it up, boy. I’m sorry I said anything.”

  Halfway up the lapels his hands stopped. “You really think I’d turn you in?”

  “Button it up.”

  He did. Then he said, “Oh.” And then, “You know, it’s midnight.”

  “Edna just gave me the Word.”

  “Which is?”

  “Agate.”

  I nodded.

  He finished closing his collar. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Cows.”

  “Cows?” Hawk asked. “What about them?”

  “You ever been on a dairy farm?”

  He shook his head.

  “To get the most milk, you keep the cows practically in suspended animation. They’re fed intravenously from a big tank that pipes nutrients out and down, branching into smaller and smaller pipes until it gets to all those high yield semi-corpses.”

  “I’ve seen pictures.”

  “People.”

  “… and cows?”

  “You’ve given me the Word. And now it begins to funnel down, branching out, with me telling others, and them telling still others, till by midnight tomorrow…”

  “I’ll go get the-”

  “Hawk?”

  He turned back. “What?”

  “You say you don’t think I’m going to be the victim of any hanky-panky with the mysterious forces that know more than we— Okay, that’s your opinion. But as soon as I get rid of this stuff, I’m going to make the most distracting exit you’ve ever seen.”

  Two little lines bit down Hawk’s forehead. “Are you sure I haven’t seen this one before?”

  “As a matter of fact I think you have.” Now I grinned.

  “Oh,” Hawk said, then made a sound that had the structure of laughter but was all breath. “I’ll get the Hawk.”

  He ducked out between the trees.

  I glanced up at the lozenges of moonlight in the leaves.

  I looked down at my briefcase.

  Up between the rocks, stepping around the long grass, came the Hawk. He wore a gray evening suit; a gray silk turtleneck. Above his craggy face his head was completely shaved.

  “Mr. Cadwaliter-Erickson?” He held out his hand.
r />   I shook: small sharp bones in loose skin. “Does one call you Mr… ?”

  “Arty.”

  “Arty the Hawk.” I tried to look like I wasn’t giving his gray attire the once-over.

  He smiled. “Arty the Hawk. Yeah. I picked that name up when I was younger than our friend down there. Alex says you got… well, some things that are not exactly yours. That don’t belong to you.”

  I nodded.

  “Show them to me.”

  “You were told what—”

  He brushed away the end of my sentence. “Come on, let me see.”

  He extended his hand, smiling affably as a bank clerk. I ran my thumb around the pressure-zip. The cover went tsk. “Tell me,” I said, looking up at his head still lowered to see what I had, “what does one do about Special Services? They seem to be after me.”

  The head came up. Surprise changed slowly to a craggy leer. “Why, Mr. Cadwaliter-Erickson!” He gave me the up and down openly. “Keep your income steady. Keep it steady, that’s one thing you can do.”

  “If you buy these for anything like what they’re worth, that’s going to be a little difficult.”

  “I would imagine. I could always give you less money—”

  The cover went tsk again.

  “—or, barring that, you could try to use your head and outwit them.”

  “You must have outwitted them at one time or another. You may be on an even keel now, but you had to get there from somewhere else.”

  Arty the Hawk’s nod was downright sly. “I guess you’ve had a run-in with Maud. Well, I suppose congratulations are in order. And condolences. I always like to do what’s in order.”

  “You seem to know how to take care of yourself. I mean I notice you’re not out there mingling with the guests.”

  “There are two parties going on here tonight,” Arty said. “Where do you think Alex disappears off to every five minutes?”

  I frowned.

  “That lumia down in the rocks”—he pointed towards my feet—“is a mandala of shifting hues on our ceiling. Alex,” he chuckled, “goes scuttling off under the rocks where there is a pavilion of Oriental splendor—”

  “—and a separate guest list at the door?”