Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  As I say, it could have been worse.

  The trip to Columbus took three times longer than scheduled. Only two trains a year took the eastern loop and we were exten sively briefed on disaster plans. We were held up more than once by angry citizens. As we zipped across North America at 200 kph, I drank in golden prairies, red rock towers I had climbed in virtual, the ghost towns and ghost cities of our great and former nation. In the club car we dined on farm oysters and vat-grown beef. As we sipped wine from crystal which did not shiver, we exchanged rumors that the engineer had run over more than one protester; it was routine. What were they protesting, I won dered? An explosion shook the train just out of Denver. I felt the tremor in my bunk because it was foreign to the so-smooth ride. I found later that they simply shed the last seven cars, which had been damaged (I heard that we were a hundred cars in all, and it was certainly a daunting journey to try and get from one end of the train to the other; after awhile the cars began to repeat themselves and it became boring) and swept on through the diamond-starred night. I lay on my back in my bunk and saw the stars undomed for the first time, with only a thin layer of glass between myself and the night sky. Perhaps you might understand why I would never want to try and find my way back to a dome, somewhere. Here the stars burn for me every night, and surpass any of the wonders civilization has to offer, for me at least.

  The rails did not click they were all of a piece; grown; but my mind clicked, my heart clicked as if a new kind of blood surged through it. I was heading toward You and I felt it even then and I was young. But not as young as I am now.

  Another log. I put on a glove to shield my hand as I shove it in among the other disintegrating logs; I step out onto the front porch for a bit and G.E. nudges my thigh wishing for a run. Silly dog I think no I am busy and she wags her tail and sits, lifts her nose and samples the air for You. Yes, even she knows You. I have told her about You in the pheromonal language she understands. And I have you indelibly lodged pheromonally in my DNA, one of those small benefits left from the Flower Cities which you distrusted and despised, more's the pity. Frigid wind ruffles G.E.'s brown fur, and freezes what face I've left avail able after wrapping a scarf around it. The ridges are like waves, all around me, varying shades of black in the night, and the stars remind me of You. I love the view of space here more than just about anything.

  Are you coming? I'm afraid You will not, if I tell You more, but I must; the sheets infused me with dread Midwestern honesty, really the source of all my troubles let me tell you. No doubt you will be confused on wakening. I cross my arms over my breasts and cannot help remaining on the porch though my nose burns with cold, waiting for You possibly threading up the dirt road, my voice immediate in your mind I did tell you purple did I not, and give you the numbers? Please. At least for a night or two; don't turn back no matter what for it is dangerous once you are past Banff, the weather is uncertain, there are golden moun tain lions and grizzlies, stupendously enough, and you will need rest. I will not keep you if you do not want to stay. I am not kidding about the animals but you know as well as I that they are the least of your worries. Injury and plague would do you in first, statistically speaking, if my antidotes did not take and it has been so very long I suspect that they did not. But there are other reasons you might not come, I suppose.

  On the wooden porch I turn and look inside: see? A red plaid blanket flung over the couch, I can be concrete if you so insist, a teal-green chair the color of Passo Lake, two hundred feet below (a favored color at the Pointed Fir). Fire flickers orange and blue inside the arched glass window of the cast-iron stove, and I am cooking soybean soup upon it. Don't wrinkle your nose. It's delicious. Cedar planks with staring golden eyes warm and complete me, almost. So easy to find, precision itself, if you know how to read so to speak. And I have the cure for all Plagues, and for many of the things which cause aging (they even seem to work on G.E. and Mildred, which surprises the heck out of me), which I will administer if you are kind, but it cannot make you kind, that is something only the cocoons could do which is why I must be careful. Please make sure you are kind before you come all this way. One of you will feel kindness as a great change, a lifting of darkness. The other will feel unchanged. You knew that I had the cures long ago, so long ago, more's the pity. If things worked out, though, you have them now. I tried to administer them before I sheeted you, amidst the panic of the dam breaking, but as you may or may not remember, you destroyed whatever you could of them. Out of simple pique. One of you did, and you know which one of course. I'm not trying to start an argument here. I'm apologizing for not understanding the dynamics better. But I don't think that either of you understood them so why should I?

  I have plenty of coffee, by the way, from the Pointed Fir Lodge. The supply will run out eventually, but Alice was ready for a blockbuster season.

  #

  And so the train reached Columbus. We stopped in Cincinnati dome and left fifteen cars but I did not get off the train; I had been warned against it as Cincinnati was on a slightly different system than L.A. which might kill me or at the very least make me sick. I heard rumors that their dome would not be there much longer; they had thought out an undomed system. Bravo, I said, not believing. But I had been immunized for undomed Columbus and Columbus only, though I had 6 clearance which meant protection for me--if it held, which was doubtful. The 6 guaranteed immuni zation wherever I went it was only a matter of verification and then the proper sheets supplied by local authorities. But that presupposed, of course, the existence of local authorities, and the definition of proper sheets had become by that time loose, had most likely drifted. I was out in the wilderness on my own and I relished that.

  What a joke all that folderol was! For in Columbus--but why complain about what happened there? You gave me the maps which brought me here, beneath the diamond skies I bonded to once I got far enough north, have you seen the Pleiades? They are my favor ite the Seven Sisters my very Sisters though I know well enough they are just radio waves, glowing gas, the artifacts of our birth whose light only exists. The stars toward which You may travel, any one of you, if you wake and stretch in some other age, and if you are so misguided as to travel through space instead of coming here, may well have not been born. Or may have died long ago.

  How strange.

  But then my heart is as well, to You, glowing and perhaps in an unborn wave, in radio wave fibrillation. Yet I selfishly hope you don't doubt that I am really here, let me tell you more, let me tell you how I bend in the brief spring and yank fledgling weeds from among the soybean rows. Lettuce and peas grow well here because it is so cool; I eat the lettuce before it gets to the house and the peas which survive my greed for sweet green things dry on large screens. The soybeans have furry green pods; I boil them whole then squeeze out the beans, which are utterly delicious. Someone else built this cabin, not I; his name was Peter Johnson and I often thank him. His virtual life is here though it does not interest me much; still I do not wipe him but leave him compressed out of respect. Sometimes he leaps from the walls to join Grandfather and we discuss the deep structure of spacetime and forget that they are both dead as I stir the soup and tend the fire. Perhaps they are not. Dead that is, for what is death? You must tell me sometime if you think you know, for you will have been the same place they are, more or less, except that I had the foresight to see that you had a body when you woke. They do come in handy. Grandfather and Peter often complain bitterly about being limited to this cabin.

  Some summers have been far too cold, and I think I must leave my glorious paradise and cease waiting here for You, but there have never been two bad summers in a row and when I get depressed about the vegetables not growing I travel to little Flin Flon, quite cautiously, and the most life I detect with infrared are wild animals and not humans. I take what I need from the hotel's inexhaustible freeze-dried stores in a cart pulled by Mildred. Are You convinced? I am lonely, that is all. The rush of wind, which we never experienced in the dome, which m
akes me feel so alive, is more than enough to keep me here. This beauty is sharp. I ache to share it.

  #

  So. In Columbus the train door slid open and I was the only one debarking there, the only one properly initialized, the other passengers braving on toward Toronto, NYC, D.C. I stepped off the train.

  After my first astonished gasp I reeled beneath the blue sky, I danced, I laughed, then I rushed right across many empty tracks and here is concrete for you, here is actual:

  Mildred. I love my water buffalo and depend upon her, but not as much as I depended upon my original Mildred, who hurried after me, laughing. Are You her? I will talk about You as if you are not listening, because the odds are very much against it. Someone else entirely might be listening, which is why I am a bit cryptic. Or, and this is most likely, no one.

  Mildred's hair was blonde and waist-long, fine as corn silk. That day it was loose, and the wind caught it. Her eyes were wide, the curious shade of blue which I saw that summer matched the delphiniums in her mother's garden. She said she was Norwe gian, when I asked her, over coffee, in a small shop which disap pointed with no mozzarella but which fulfilled my expectations with cappuccino, which I still miss, the ceremony of it. Once in awhile I rummage through the huge kitchen of the Pointed Fir Lodge to try and find a stovetop steamer, but there is only a massive ornate machine in the dining room, electric.

  Mildred did not like Don her husband very much, by that time, though she did not quite realize it yet. It was he who prepared the wrong sheets for me, and it was Mildred who helped me into them. But it rather backfired.

  "Hello Dr. Chang," Don said, stumbling after me across the tracks. When he stopped he stared at me for a very long minute as if surprised. Well, apparently he was. He had expected a man, I'm not sure why nor why that would make a bit of difference to him. Communication was not terribly good in those times, though it was much better than now. He had very short red hair and was partly bald. On his long face was a small mustache which struck me as being rather unpleasant. His brown eyes were as closed as Mildred's were open. I tried to feel enthusiastic about my new colleague. Give him time, I thought.

  "We have been waiting for you. Your train is very late," he said, after recovering from his staring fit, then laughed in a way which frightened me, but Mildred's calm blue eyes caught and settled me. Standing next to Don in a bright green thin parka, unzipped as it was March and warming, she reached out to shake hands with me after a brief odd hesitation during which I had the strange feeling that she was going to hug me, tight.

  "We will have your trunks taken to our house, for now," said Mildred.

  "Thank you," I said, unworried about all the nan inside, all of my research materials. They had been packed in anticipation of any number of catastrophes, anything else would have been terribly irresponsible.

  "Are you hungry?" asked Mildred.

  I shook my head. "We just had breakfast," I said.

  "Well, then," said Don, obviously pleased. "It's just a few blocks to the hospital, and you can have your sheets there."

  "Yes, might as well get that over with," I said, excited. I wanted to know all about this new place, about my new patients; I wanted to find out how many of the local population had survived each plague wave, and how the survivors had been affected. That, and more, would all be in the sheets.

  They walked very fast along the sidewalks. On the streets I saw all manner of vehicles--horses, horse-drawn carriages, and many bikes. I saw only one electric car, tiny and battered and yellow, and found later that it was owned by Tolliver Townsby, the man who also owned the Ice Cream Parlor. I was suddenly in another age, the one which I so craved.

  "Where are all the people?" I asked, used to dome satura tion. On either side of me, Don and Mildred looked at each other. "Our population, including the county, is fifteen thou sand," said Mildred gently.

  "Oh," I said. Much less than I had expected. The sheets toward which we were heading would prevent me from asking such silly questions.

  We passed many stores on the ancient main street, with huge plate glass windows, and a requisite amount of patrons. Thomp son's Feed and Seed, Elya's Organic Feast, The Snyder Cafe, it was a community of farmers, really, a completely self-sufficient organism which I now admire enormously. Above the storefronts rose tall, old-fashioned skyscrapers, completely empty. At the time I was stunned. Where are the Italians, I wondered, but was too shy to ask. Don and Mildred received nods and greetings from every person they passed on that five block walk.

  Then we arrived at the hospital where they kept the cocoons and that's where I picked up Thurber, with his funny drawings of blunt angry women and cowed men with big noses and tiny eyes. His grandmother who believed that electricity leaked from outlets I could identify with in a way for when I actually saw the co coons after walking through a building which I thought could simply not exist any more in this day and age I stopped. Did a slight chill envelope my heart? It should have, but I don't really remember. I do remember trepidation.

  The cocoons were old, on the top floor of the nearly- deserted hospital, at the end of old dun-colored halls which had not been grown but built, probably fifty years before. The sociologists in L.A. had told me that I probably couldn't under stand the pride involved and at that point, staring at the co coons which Don and Mildred showed me with decorum and reverence, I realized the sociologists had been right and wondered what other good advice I might have ignored. Though the hospital smelled of disinfectant the walls were grubby and this room did not quietly gleam with nan cleaners as I was used to. It was lit with a bare bulb and pipes mazed the ceiling with an old fire- protection system. The cocoons themselves filled me with a strange poignancy, for at the instant I saw them I realized how far in time I actually was from L.A. There were four. They looked like one of the original models, and probably the city had purchased them during the initial surge of faith, when it was thought that nan could cure everything. The style was unmistak able, the curve of the cocoons, the oldstyle computers which regulated them visible, small crystals set on shelves above, connected to the cocoons with cables. An antiquer's delight, the kind of thing you see campily displayed in lofts, or even mu seums. I wondered what long-abandoned programming might lurk within those crystals. I should have wondered harder. As for the hospital itself, it simply staggered me with its age.

  One of the things I had learned was how much the natives would dislike me. Though I looked at Don and wondered, I had been carefully programmed to be nonjudgemental about that. Well, that part worked a bit too well, I must say. The natives had good reasons for rejection. Nan had laid waste to most of the country through all sorts of vectors.

  "Are you sure . . . ?" I asked and Don looked at me in an exasperated fashion with veed eyebrows dark and shaggy, Mildred behind him a bit more anxious. "Our population is--different from that of L.A., Dr. Chang," he said, still scowling. "I would be the first to acknowledge how rural we truly are, how backward. But I personally ran the checks . . . "

  "Fine, fine," I said, too hastily, please remember and stop laughing at my idiocy that I had never been out of the city and knew nothing, directly. Inforam does not come into play until your hands, as it were, touch. To put it simply, you may not even know that you are filled with the works of Bach, until you sit down in front of an organ and then it all floods out, per fect. No, I knew nothing of Thurber, the Great Plains, or Don's particular fears. I didn't even know how to suspect or infer them, or that I ought to. Mildred was married to Don and did, but did not suspect him of perfidy; I was to learn that was not an emotional possibility for her. And his action sprang from pride, from anger at having some hotshot newdoc sent out with all that authority, jurisdiction, though I was ten years younger than he was, and from fear that I knew a lot more than he did, which was absolutely true. If I had had some sort of background in schlepping delicately among the egos of those who had more--or less--at stake than the mere salvation of humankind, I might have been more cautious.
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br />   Don left, and Mildred made a few adjustments to the crys tals, silent with a technician's concentration. She smiled and squeezed my shoulder, then I was alone in the warm dry room and I stripped off my skinsuit and stepped into the cocoon. I lay down and felt the familiar clasp as it molded itself around me and was satisfied via the fuzzy logic code which flashed within my retina that this cocoon, Don's sheets, and my internalized system were compatible. It required a standard suppressant of various pre-set biochemical barriers, and I complied. The slight blip of yellow light gave me to know that though something was minutely off, parity was very close, close enough to function, and I put it down to lack of sophistication on the part of the cocoon. Ha!

  The next day I opened my eyes enormously changed, in a very good humor. I stared at the pipes above me and knew that one day in Columbus around 1910 or so, the erroneous rumor that the dam had burst spread, and saw Thurber's swift line drawings of stubby rounded Columbus citizens hoofing it out of the city in droves. I knew that his family had an Airedale named Matt who bit a lot of people. That story really made me howl, no pun intended, for I'd always longed to have a dog (and now I have you, wonderful G.E. and very strong jaws you have too! and one or two yous--the wrong ones--may have been bitten by them, far down the road where I couldn't see). All those delicious Thurber stories, which so lovingly described Columbus, hovered in my mind, in my vision, and I began to laugh.