The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II

by David G. Hartwell

  “What brings you here?” She had one of those rare brands in which every digit is the same. 9999W, her forehead said. “You playboys are never responsible enough for parenthood.”

  “A fair assessment. You have kids?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “It figures. My nephew’s getting burned today.”

  “And you’re waiting till the last minute to buy him a gift?”

  “Right.”

  “Electric trains are popular. We sold eleven sets last week. Two were returned as defective.”

  She led me to a raised platform overrun by a kind of Veritas in miniature and kicked up the juice on the power-pack. A streamlined locomotive whisked a string of gleaming coaches past a factory belching an impressive facsimile of smoke.

  “I wonder – is this thing a lie?” I opened the throttle, and the locomotive nearly jumped the track.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It claims to be a train. But it’s not.”

  “It claims to be a model of a train, which it is.”

  I eased the locomotive into the station. “Is your price as good as anybody else’s?”

  “You can get the same thing for six dollars less at Marquand’s.”

  “Don’t have the time. Can you gift-wrap it?”

  “Not skillfully.”

  “Anything will do. I’m in a hurry.”

  The downtown traffic was light, the lull before lunch hour, so I arrived early at Sherry Urquist’s Washington Park apartment, a crumbling glass-and-steel ziggurat surmounted by a billboard that said, ASSUMING THAT GOD EXISTS, JESUS MAY HAVE BEEN HIS SON. I rode the elevator to the twentieth floor, exiting into a foyer where a handsome display of old military recruitment posters covered the fissured plaster. It was nice when somebody took the trouble to decorate a place. One could never use paint, of course. Paint was a lie. But with a little imagination . . .

  I rang the bell. Nothing. Had I gotten the time wrong? CHANNEL YOUR VIOLENT IMPULSES IN A SALUTARY DIRECTION, the nearest poster said. BECOME A MARINE.

  The door swung open, and there stood our presumed subversive, a figurative cloud of confusion hovering about her heavy face, darkening her soft-boiled eyes and pulpy lips, features somewhat more attractive than the agency’s photos suggested. “Did I wake you?” I asked. Her thermal pajamas barely managed to hold their contents in check, and I gave her an honest ogle. “I’m two minutes early.”

  “You woke me,” she said. Frankness. A truth-teller, then? No, if there was one thing a Dissembler could do, it was deceive.

  “Sorry,” I said. I remembered the old documentary films of the oil paintings being burned. Rubens, that was the kind of sensual plumpness Sherry had going for her. Good old Peter Paul Rubens. Sneaking the Greek army inside Troy might be more entertaining than I’d thought.

  She frowned, stretching her forehead brand into El Greco numerals. No one down at headquarters doubted its authenticity. Ditto her cerebroscan, voicegram, fingerprints . . .

  A citizen, and yet she had written fiction.

  Maybe.

  “Who are you?” Her voice was wet and deep.

  “Orville Prawn,” I said. A permanent truth. “I work for Tolerable Distortions.” A more transient one; the agency had arranged for the magazine to hire me – payroll, medical plan, pension fund, the works – for the next forty-eight hours. “Our interview . . .” I took out a pad and pencil.

  Her pained expression seemed like the real thing. “Oh, damn, I’m sorry.” She snapped her fingers. “It’s on my calendar, but I’ve been up against a dozen deadlines, and I – ”

  “Forgot?”

  “Yeah.” She patted my forearm and guided me into her sparsely appointed living room. “Excuse me. These pajamas are probably driving you crazy.”

  “Not the pajamas per se.”

  She disappeared, returning shortly in a dingy yellow blouse and a red skirt circumscribed by a cracked and blistered leather belt.

  The interview went well, which is to say she never asked whether I worked for Overt Intelligence, whereupon the whole show would have abruptly ended. She did not wish to discuss her old books, only her current project, a popular explanation of psychoanalytic theory to be called From Misery to Unhappiness. My shame was like a fever, threading my body with sharp, chilled wires. A toy train was not a lie, that clerk believed. Then maybe my little transmitter wasn’t one either . . .

  And maybe wishes were horses.

  And maybe pigs had wings.

  There was also this: Sherry Urquist was charming me. No doubt about it. A manufacturer of bestsellers is naturally stuffed with vapid thoughts and ready-made opinions, right? But instead I found myself sitting next to a first-rate mind (oh, the premier eroticism of intellect intersecting Rubens), one that could be severe with Freud for his lapses of integrity while still grasping his essential genius.

  “You seem to love your work, Ms. Urquist.”

  “Writing is my life.”

  “Tell me, honestly – do you ever get any ideas for . . . fiction?”

  “Fiction?”

  “Short stories. Novels.”

  “That would be suicidal, wouldn’t it?”

  A blind alley, but I expected as much.

  The diciest moment occurred when Sherry asked in which issue the interview would be published, and I replied that I didn’t know. True enough, I told myself. Since the thing would never see print at all, it was accurate to profess ignorance of the corresponding date. Still, there came a sudden, mercifully brief surge of unease, the tides of an ancient nausea . . .

  “All this sexual tension,” I said, returning the pad and pencil to my suit jacket. “Alone with a sensually plump woman in her apartment, and your face is appealing too, now that I see the logic of it. You probably even have a bedroom. I can hardly stand it.”

  “Sensually plump, Mr. Prawn? I’m fat.”

  “Eye of the beholder.”

  “You’d have to go through a lot of beholders in my case.”

  “I find you very attractive.” I did.

  She raised her eyebrows, corrugating her brand. “It’s only fair to give warning – you try anything funny, I’ll knock you flat.”

  I cupped her left breast, full employment for any hand, and asked, “Is this funny?”

  “On one level, your action offends me deeply.” She brushed my knee. “I find it presumptuous, adolescent, and symptomatic of the worst kind of male arrogance.” If faking her candor, she was certainly doing a good job. “On another level . . . well, you are quite handsome.”

  “An Adonis analogue.”

  We kissed. She went for my belt buckle. Reaching under her blouse, I sent her bra on a well-deserved sabbatical.

  “Any sexually-transmittable diseases?” she asked.

  “None.” I stroked her dry, stringy hair. The Trojan horse was poised to change history. “You?”

  “No,” she said.

  The truth? I couldn’t know.

  To bed, then. Time to plant her and, concomitantly, the transmitter. Nice work if you can get it. I slowed myself down with irrelevant thoughts – dogs can talk, rain is red – and left her a satisfied woman.

  Full of Greeks.

  I had promised Gloria that I wouldn’t just come to the party, I would attend the burn as well. Normally both parents were present, but Dixon’s tropological scum-bucket of a father couldn’t be bothered. It will only take an hour, Gloria had told me. I’d rather not, I replied. He’s your nephew, for Christ’s sake, she pointed out. All right, I said.

  Burn hospitals were in practically every neighborhood, but Gloria insisted on the best, Veteran’s Shock Institute. Taking Dixon’s badly wrapped gift from the back seat, I started toward the building, a smoke-stained pile of bricks overlooking the Thomas More Bridge. I paused. Business first. In theory the transmitter was part of Sherry now, forever fixed to her uterine wall. Snug as a bug in a . . . I went back to my Adequate and slid the sensorchart out of the dash. Yes, there she
was, my fine Dissembler, a flashing red dot floating near Washington Park. I wished for greater detail, so I could know exactly when she was in her kitchen, her bathroom, her bedroom. Peeping Tom goes high tech. No matter. The thing worked. We could stalk her from here to Satan’s backyard. As it were.

  Inside the hospital, the day’s collection of burn patients was everywhere, hugging dads, clinging tearfully to moms’ skirts. I’d never understood this child-worship nonsense our culture wallows in, but, even so, the whole thing started getting to me. Every eight-year-old had to do it, of course, and the disease was certainly worse than the cure. Still . . .

  I punished myself by biting my inner cheeks. Sympathy was fine, but sentimentality was wasteful. If I wanted to pity somebody, I should go up to Ward Six. Cystic fibrosis. Cancer. Am I going to die, Mommy?

  Yes, dear.

  Soon?

  Yes, dear.

  Will I see you in heaven?

  Nobody knows.

  I went to the front desk, where I learned that Dixon had been admitted half an hour earlier. “Room one-forty-five,” said the nurse, a rotund man with a warty face. “The party will be in one-seventeen.”

  My nephew was already in the glass cubicle, dressed in a green smock and bound to the chair via leather thongs, one electrode strapped to his left arm, another to his right leg. Black wires trailed from the copper terminals like threads spun by a carnivorous spider. He welcomed me with a brave smile, and I held up his gift, hefting it to show that it had substance, it wasn’t clothes. A nice enough kid – what I knew of him. Cute freckles, a wide, apple face. I remembered that for somebody his age, Dixon understood a great deal of symbolic logic.

  A young, willowy, female nurse entered the cubicle and began snugging the helmet over his cranium. I gave Dixon a thumbs-up signal. (Soon it will be over, kid. Pigs have wings, rats chase cats, all of it.)

  “Thanks for coming.” Drifting out of her chair, Gloria took my arm. She was an attractive woman – same genes as me – but today she looked lousy: the anticipation, the fear. Sweat collected in her forehead brand. I had stopped proposing incest years ago. Not her game. “You’re his favorite uncle, you know.”

  Uncle Orville. God help me. I was actually present when Gloria’s marriage collapsed. The three of us were sitting in a Reconstituted Burgers when suddenly she said, I sometimes worry that you’re having an affair – are you? And Tom said, yes, he was. And Gloria said, you fucker. And Tom said, right. And Gloria asked how many. And Tom said lots. And Gloria asked why. Did he do it to strengthen the marriage? And Tom said no, he just liked to screw other women.

  Clipboard in hand, a small, homely doctor with MERRICK affixed to his tunic waddled into the room. “Good afternoon, folks,” he said, his cheer a precarious mix of the genuine and the forced. “Bitter cold day out, huh? How are we doing here?”

  “Do you care?” my sister asked.

  “Hard to say.” Dr. Merrick fanned me with his clipboard. “Friend of the family?”

  “My brother,” Gloria explained.

  “He has halitosis. Glad there are two of you.” Merrick smiled at the boy in the cubicle. “With just one, the kid’ll sometimes go into clinical depression on us.” He pressed the clipboard toward Gloria. “Informed consent, right?”

  “They told me all the possibilities.” She studied the clipboard. “Cardiac – ”

  “Cardiac arrest, cerebral hemorrhage, respiratory failure, kidney damage,” Merrick recited.

  “When was the last time anything like that happened?”

  “They killed a little girl down at Mount Sinai on Tuesday. A freak thing, but now and then we really screw up.”

  After patting Dixon on his straw-colored bangs, the nurse left the cubicle and told Dr. Merrick that she was going to get some coffee.

  “Be back in ten minutes,” he ordered.

  “Oh, but of course.” Such sarcasm from one so young. “We mustn’t have a doctor cleaning up, not when we can get some underpaid nurse to do it.”

  Gloria scrawled her signature.

  The nurse edged out of the room.

  Dr. Merrick went to the control panel.

  And then it began. This bar mitzvah of the human conscience, this electroconvulsive rite of passage. A hallowed tradition. An unvarying text. Today I am a man . . . We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ . . . I pledge allegiance to the flag . . . Why is this night different from all other nights . . . Dogs can talk . . . Pigs have wings. To tell you the truth, I was not really thinking about Dixon’s cure just then. My mind was abloom with Sherry Urquist.

  Merrick pushed a button, and PIGS HAVE WINGS appeared before my nephew on a lucite tachistoscope screen. “Can you hear me, lad?” the doctor called into the microphone.

  Dixon opened his mouth, and a feeble “Yes” dribbled out of the loudspeaker.

  “You see those words?” Merrick asked. The lurid red characters hovered in the air like lethargic butterflies.

  “Y-yes.”

  “When I give the order, read them aloud. Okay?”

  “Is it going to hurt?” my nephew quavered.

  “It’s going to hurt a lot. Will you read the words when I say so?”

  “I’m scared. Do I have to?”

  “You have to.” Merrick rested a pudgy finger on the switch. “Now!”

  “P-pigs have wings.” The volts ripped through Dixon. He yelped and burst into tears. “But they don’t,” he moaned. “Pigs don’t . . .”

  My own burn flooded back. The pain. The anger.

  “You’re right, lad – they don’t.” Merrick gave the voltage regulator a subtle twist, and Gloria flinched. “You did reasonably well, boy,” the doctor continued. “We’re not yet disappointed in you.” He handed the mike to Gloria.

  “Oh, yes, Dixon,” she said. “Keep up the awfully good work.”

  “It’s not fair.” Sweat speckled Dixon’s forehead. “I want to go home.”

  As Gloria surrendered the mike, TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE materialized.

  “Now, lad! Read it!”

  “T-t-two and two make . . . f-five.” Lightning struck. The boy shuddered, howled. Blood rolled over his lower lip. During my own burn, I had practically bitten my tongue off. “I don’t want this any more,” he wailed.

  “It’s not a choice, lad.”

  “Two and two make four.” Tears threaded Dixon’s freckles together. “Please stop hurting me.”

  “Four. Right. Smart lad.” Merrick cranked up the voltage. “Ready, Dixon? Here it comes.”

  HORSES HAVE SIX LEGS.

  “Why do I have to do this? Why?”

  “Everybody does it. All your friends.”

  “H-h-horses have . . . have . . . They have four legs, Dr. Merrick.”

  “Read the words, Dixon!”

  “I hate you! I hate all of you!”

  “Dixon!”

  He raced through it. Zap. Two hundred volts. The boy began to cough and retch, and a string of white mucus shot from his mouth like a lizard’s tongue. Nothing followed: burn patients fasted for sixteen hours prior to therapy.

  “Too much!” cried Gloria. “Isn’t that too much?”

  “The goal is five hundred,” said Merrick. “It’s all been worked out. You want the treatment to take, don’t you?”

  “Mommy! Where’s my Mommy?”

  Gloria tore the mike away. “Right here, dear!”

  “Mommy, make them stop!”

  “I can’t, dear. You must try to be brave.”

  The fourth lie appeared. Merrick upped the voltage. “Read it, lad!”

  “No!”

  “Read it!”

  “Uncle Orville! I want Uncle Orville!”

  My throat constricted, my stomach went sour. Uncle: such a strange sound. I really was one, wasn’t I? “You’re doing pretty swell, Dixon,” I said, taking the mike. “I think you’ll like your present.”

  “Uncle Orville, I want to go home!”

  “I got you a fine toy.”

  “W
hat is it?”

  “Here’s a hint. It has – ”

  “Dixon!” Merrick grabbed the mike. “Dixon, if you don’t do this, you’ll never get well. They’ll take you away from your mother.” A threat, but wholly accurate. “Understand? They’ll take you away.”

  Dixon balled his face into a mass of wrinkles. “Grass!” he screamed, spitting blood. “Is!” he persisted. “Purple!” He jerked like a gaffed flounder, spasm after spasm. A broad urine stain blossomed on his crotch, and despite the obligatory enema a brown fluid dripped from the hem of his smock.

  “Excellent!” Merrick increased the punishment to four hundred volts. “Your cure’s in sight, lad!”

  “No! Please! Please! Enough!” Sweat encased Dixon’s face. Foam leaked from his mouth.

  “You’re almost halfway there!”

  “Please!”

  The war continued, five more pain-tipped rockets shooting through Dixon’s nerves and veins, detonating inside his mind. He asserted that rats chase cats. He lied about money, saying that it grew on trees. Worms taste like honey, he said. Snow is hot. Rain is red.

  He fainted just as the final lie arrived. Even before Gloria could scream, Merrick was inside the cubicle, checking the boy’s heartbeat. A begrudging admiration seeped through me. The doctor had a job, and he did it.

  A single dose of smelling salts brought Dixon around.

  Guiding the boy’s face toward the screen, Merrick turned to me. “Ready with the switch?”

  “Huh? You want me – ” Ridiculous.

  “Let’s just get it over with. Hit the switch when I tell you.”

  “I’d rather not.” But already my finger rested on the damn thing. Doctor’s orders.

  “Read, Dixon,” muttered Merrick.

  “I c-can’t.”

  “One more, Dixon. Just one more and you’ll be a citizen.”

  Blood and spittle mingled on Dixon’s chin. “You all hate me! Mommy hates me!”

  “I love you as much as myself,” said Gloria, leaning over my shoulder. “You’re going to have a wonderful party. Almost certainly.”

  “Really?”

  “Highly likely.”

  “Presumably wonderful,” I said. The switch burned my finger. “I love you too.”