Puss in D.C. and Other Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  She knew he was right. But she did not want to stay.

  * * * *

  As Elaine rose, her family seemed to sink. A scholarship had taken her out of the small valley town where she had grown up; her degrees had placed her on a pedestal, from which she could descend only with difficulty. Objectively, she had measured the degree of her alienation from those she had once loved while her father ranted about book-learning and people who got above themselves. She had watched as his coffin was lowered into the ground, and had never returned to the valley after that, the valley on the banks of two rivers which had cut their way through the surrounding hills.

  She was falling. She stood on her balcony, looking down at the lawn. People were curled like shrimps in bedding and sleeping bags, afraid to stay inside. A television reporter and cameraman wandered among them, sinking even as they spoke to one group. Everything was sinking more rapidly, yet the air remained still and the railing steady. The absence of any visual sign of the falling was giving her vertigo.

  Elaine turned away and went back inside. She was alone, as she usually was in the evening, having developed that habit during the years of consultations with the deluded and the unhappy. The ceiling stretched out above her, and she had the feeling that it was about to collapse, cover her in rubble. She was trapped in a room which would grow smaller, pressing her down to the floor as the walls slowly crushed her.

  The telephone rang, shattering the illusion. She hurried to the bedroom and picked it up. “Hello?”

  It was George. “Did you see the evening news?”

  “No, I usually watch the late news. What is it?”

  “It’s out. Some astronomer at Cambridge leaked it. Some of the nearer stars have shifted position ever so slightly.” Elaine clutched the receiver; her, hands were cold. “They’ve measured it. But that’s not how it’s being reported. The stars are falling.” He laughed. “The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Call for Chicken Little.” George cleared his throat.

  “Oh, God.” She sank to the bed. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then it isn’t a delusion.”

  “We’re going to send up a team of cosmologists.” He paused. “I’ll try to squeeze you in.” Her heart leaped, free for a moment before being pulled back. “They might need you up there, after all. And besides, we should try to keep things going as we planned—no use panicking. That’s my argument, anyway.”

  “Can you—will you be able to send us up?”

  “I don’t see why not. Everything’s working, it’s just—well, we’ll—”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She hung up and closed her eyes; a mistake. She was dropping more rapidly than ever; the sensation was growing stronger. She seemed to feel the air rush past her ears. She opened her eyes and focused on the curtain rod, staring at it for a long time. Depression draped itself over her.

  The telephone’s ring made her jump. She clung to the edge of the bed, afraid she would slide off and fall through the floor.

  “Burkhart just called,” George said. “You can go. Day after tomorrow. Get ready.”

  * * * *

  Elaine had to get outside. She took two blankets out of the closet and went downstairs. She settled herself in an empty spot under a palm tree near the sidewalk. Near her, several dark shapes were bent over the gutter, and she heard the sound of retching.

  The sky was black and clear; the stars twinkled, as they always had. Gradually, she became aware of how quiet it was. No one spoke; she could hear a few muffled sobs. Someone turned on a radio. “Repent,” a tinny voice cried into the night. “God has given us a sign.” The listener switched to another station which was playing The Planets by Holst, and she heard the thundering, threatening sounds of the Mars theme. Elaine pulled up her blanket and stretched out; the blanket was too heavy and she finally pushed it off, exposing herself to the thick, humid, heavy air. Her body was tense. She was still falling, waiting to hit bottom, ready for the earth to rush up and crush her.

  * * * *

  Earth fell away; the wheel of the space laboratory swelled. Elaine was weightless, but still massive, still falling.

  Her fellow passengers kept to their seats, then began to introduce themselves to those nearest them. The man next to Elaine was silent; his gray eyes probed her and then he sank back in his seat, as if dismissing her. His hands gripped the armrests as his legs floated up.

  When they reached the wheel, they were greeted by a lean, gray-haired man and ushered through the curving pale corridor to their rooms. Elaine was abandoned by her roommate, a small, short-haired woman named Connie who waved at her bunk and muttered something about going to a meeting before leaving her alone.

  Elaine slept uneasily. No one came for her when she awoke; the corridor was empty. She wandered aimlessly around the wheel until Connie emerged from one of the rooms.

  “Elaine.” Connie brushed the bangs back from her face; there were dark circles under her eyes.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  “You’d better talk to Colonel Ward,” the smaller woman answered, pointing to another door.

  Colonel Ward turned out to be the gray-haired man who had greeted the visitors. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Lantz. Make yourself at home.” He waved at his desk before departing for yet another meeting.

  Elaine spent the day looking at dossiers, which told her little about the laboratory’s inhabitants she hadn’t already known. They don’t need me here, she thought: they probably don’t want me here at all. She was just a ruse, George’s way of pretending that nothing had really changed.

  She was still falling; the wheel was pulling her down. She was growing used to the sick feeling in her stomach, the constant uneasiness. Words and letters danced before her eyes. She was falling so quickly now that she was afraid of what would happen when she stopped. If she stopped.

  She spent a very long time scanning the small screen, gazing at data, and was startled when she looked at the clock; only two hours had passed.

  * * * *

  Elaine had filled the day with wandering, poking her head into rooms only to be waved away. She knew that she should have been planning her interviews, or observing the people on the spacelab; instead, she drifted.

  Connie reappeared in their room after supper, throwing herself across her bunk. “Long day,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Elaine glanced at her. “Have you noticed that, too?”

  “Noticed what?”

  “How long everything seems to take. My time sense is completely gone. Is that normal here?”

  Connie shook her head. “Not like this. We all feel it. It’s been like this ever since—ever since the falling feeling started. We’ve been thinking. What if everything’s slowing down?”

  “But it isn’t,” Elaine replied. “It can’t be. The clocks—”

  “How would we know? If everything’s slowing down, there’d be no way to measure it, no way to tell. We’d never know. We’re falling, and we can’t measure that, either.”

  Connie was silent for a moment. “I had a message from home,” she went on. “My mother’s really sick. She can’t keep anything down, she’s always had inner ear troubles, and now—my father’s trying to get her into a hospital. She might have a chance if they could keep her sedated and on intravenous feedings. But all the hospitals are so crowded now, what with accidents and people who are just going mad…”

  Elaine lay on her bed for a long time, staring into the darkness. She was falling; she was running down. The universe would freeze around her; the air would become solid. The wheel would slow and stick. And she might never know. Would she feel it when everything stopped, or would she be trapped, unknowing, in one timeless moment? Could everything stop, or would they keep falling, slowing eternally, never reaching stillness? Terror presse
d into her, threatening to break through her chest.

  * * * *

  Elaine wandered the wheel, a functionless cog. She scheduled interviews only to see them cancelled. Colonel Ward, with other things on his mind, was avoiding her.

  Soon she was trailing after Connie, sitting quietly at the small woman’s side as Connie scanned astronomical photographs, shaking her head as she did so. The universe had become a beast of some kind, and she was examining its entrails.

  Connie peered at one photograph, then glanced at Elaine. “The stars in the whole southern sky are red-shifting and disappearing, as if they were exceeding the speed of light, leaving our universe.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Connie shook her head and put her hand on her brow. “I don’t know. It’s nonsense—complete garbage.”

  Elaine sensed that the day of revelation was at hand. She fell faster as she waited.

  * * * *

  Everyone was crowding around the viewscreen. Voices rose, fell, and then grew silent.

  Elaine felt dizzy as she held her stomach and tried to trust what her brain was telling her—that she would not hit a hard surface below and splatter her brains, break her bones, and die at any moment.

  A flat, black plain, blacker than space, as opaque as nothingness, stretched out below the plane of the ecliptic. They were falling toward it rapidly. Red-shifted stars were disappearing below them, winking out on the infinite plain. Was the plain flat, or did it curve?

  “All our ideas are wrong,” a man near her said. His chubby face seemed frozen. “It’s all wrong—our whole cosmology is wrong. We’ll have to start reasoning from scratch.”

  She gazed at the blackness, wondering if they would ever get the chance. She had grown up out of the unconsciousness of childhood, hoping to push back the boundaries of ignorance, only to fall into the morass of unknowns that was the human mind. Scientists in other fields had seemed to be rising to ever more comprehensive explanations of nature, leaving her trapped below in a maze of increasingly inadequate theories. Now their work was also collapsing, and something inside her cheered.

  “It must have taken eons for the universe to fall this far,” the chubby man said as he looked toward Connie. “I think we began to feel it as we neared the floor.”

  “What’ll happen when we reach bottom?” a bearded man asked.

  The chubby man shrugged; Elaine saw that he was on the verge of breaking down. “Who knows? We can’t say. Our sense of time is obviously affected by the acceleration as we near the blackness. Who knows what’ll happen? I’m not sure of anything.” His brown eyes glistened. “Five centuries of careful, cumulative science—all that effort to know, for nothing.”

  Elaine stared at the plain, where the galaxies were sinking away like chandeliers thrown into a lake of pitch. A wild new freedom soared within her.

  The man next to her covered his eyes and moaned. She realized that she had deceived herself. Reality was not metamorphosing into something new; all vastness was dying, dissolving into chaos.

  The falling was very fast now. They hit the black plain and sank into its thickness.

  The room glowed red.

  “We’ll start over,” Connie was saying to the chubby man. “We’ll learn different laws.” Her voice seemed far away.

  Cave eyes stared at the screen. Coal-bright bodies drifted nearby.

  Elaine’s mind raced in a slowing body. She struggled to move her hand.

  “Where—are—we?” someone whispered endlessly.

  She strained against the bonds of slowing time.

  “Maybe it’s a barrier,” Connie said, “and things will be normal on the other side.” She did not sound convinced. “We may not be able to exist there,” she added, “if the laws are different, not with the way our minds see…”

  “We can adjust,” Elaine suggested.

  “How?” Connie asked after an eternity, her mouth a black o in the redness.

  “An effort…of perception,” Elaine sang, resisting the chaos which had reached into the known universe, into each human being, stirring stars and souls alike. She wondered if the earth was anywhere nearby, also sinking through the event horizon into a sea of chaos.

  The falling slowed, continuing at an infinitesimal pace. Their minds were refusing to enter the alien reality. Elaine cradled her familiar self, the human inside which she had tried to understand all her life.

  The slow sinking would never end, she thought. They would stare at each other forever, yearning to move as they fell into their private hells.

  Light pierced the screen, filling her eyes with nameless hues and shifting shapes. There was nothing to see in the unfolding, alien space. We haven’t evolved in this reality, she thought. No effort of perception would fit their minds to its strangeness, however much they hungered.

  A river of stars poured out of Connie’s mouth as she tried to speak.

  The chubby man expanded like a balloon.

  Colonel Ward lengthened into a slender pillar.

  The man next to Elaine released massive tears. Each watery bladder contained tiny human shapes, mingling like bacteria.

  Elaine saw terror in Connie’s disembodied eyes. The unknown was no longer the knowable in disguise; it was naked and tyrannical.

  They would not die and be buried in the earth; they would dissolve slowly, passing through madness before arriving at chaos.

  The control room was gone. She was locked in a red solidity. Solid beams of light bored into her eyes from somewhere outside. The silence played a ghostly music in her inner ear. The familiar universe was a withered leaf, alive only in the barrens of memory.

  Her heart slowed.

  One beat.

  She waited for the next.

  Something walked through her mind.

  Afterword to “The Falling”

  My partner in writing and in life, George Zebrowski, had the original idea for this story, but we ended up writing it together. During our first years as writers, we’d gone out of our way not to collaborate with each other, partly because we didn’t want any personal disputes to surface under the guise of editorial disagreements. I was also trying to find my own voice as a writer and had my own way of working that was quite different from his. George is a “putter-inner,” somebody who writes sketchy drafts and then fills out his story; I was, and remain, a “taker-outer,” the kind of writer who writes long, overly detailed and sometimes redundant prose and then has to cut the text without mercy.

  In “The Falling,” we were able to combine these approaches. George had done a first draft but remained dissatisfied with it; I read that draft and got intrigued. As I recall, we passed successive drafts back and forth, with my putting stuff in and George taking things out, and eventually ended up with this story, which Shawna McCarthy bought for Asimov’s SF Magazine.

  Years later, we collaborated in the same way, with George doing a first draft, my writing the next, and so on when we wrote four Star Trek novels together (one a Next Generation novel and three others featuring Captain Kirk and the crew of the original series). There again, it was George who came up with the ideas for the novels, all of them based on episodes of the series he would have liked to see; the last one we wrote centered on the character of Garth of Izar, a legendary Starfleet officer who had ended up going mad and being confined to an institution for the criminally insane. What if, George wondered, a cure had been found for Garth’s mental illness? Wouldn’t Starfleet have had to give him back command of a starship in order not to violate its principles? Garth of Izar was published in 2003 with a cover bearing a portrait of Steve Ihnat, the actor who played Garth in the original Star Trek episode, who sadly died of a heart attack in his late thirties. George had recommended such a cover, and both of us were moved when we received a letter from a member of Steve Ihnat’s family in Canada, telling us how gratified his
friends and relatives were to see his face on our book and know that he was still remembered.

  STRIP-RUNNER

  The three boys caught up with Amy just as she reached the strips. “Barone-Stein,” one boy shouted to her. She did not recognize any of them, but they obviously knew who she was.

  “We want a run,” the smallest boy said, speaking softly so that the people passing them could not hear the challenge. “You can lead and pick the point.”

  “Done,” she said quickly. “C-254th, Riverdale localway intersection.”

  The boys frowned. Maybe they had expected a longer run. They seemed young; the tallest one could not be more than eleven. Amy leaned over and rolled up the cuffs of her pants a little. She could shake all of them before they reached the destination she had named.

  More people passed and stepped onto the nearest strip. The moving gray bands stretched endlessly to either side of her, carrying their human cargo through the City. The strip closest to her was moving at a bit over three kilometers an hour; most of its passengers at the moment were elderly people or small children practicing a few dance steps where there was space. Next to it, another strip moved at over five kilometers an hour; in the distance, on the fastest strip, the passengers were a multicolored blur. All the strips carried a steady stream of people, but the evening rush hour would not start for a couple of hours. The boys had challenged her during a slower period, which meant they weren’t that sure of themselves; they would not risk a run through mobs of commuters.

  “Let’s go,” Amy said. She stepped on the strip; the boys got on behind her. Ahead, people were stepping to the adjoining strip, slowly making their way toward the fastest-moving strip that ran alongside the localway platform. Advertisements flashed around her through the even, phosphorescent light, offering clothing, the latest book-films, exotic beverages, and yet another hyperwave drama about a Spacer’s adventures on Earth. Above her, light-worms and bright arrows gleamed steadily with directions for the City’s millions: THIS WAY TO JERSEY SECTIONS; FOLLOW ARROW TO LONG ISLAND. The noise was constant. Voices rose and fell around her as the strip hummed softly under her feet; she could dimly hear the whistle of the localway.