The Children of Hamelin
Page 36
Behind the armor of her glasses, her eyes were misty, forlorn, somehow terrified. But her jaw was a tight line of resolution.
“No,” she said. “I was hoping you would... It’s not too late... Harvey would understand... He’s beyond vindictiveness...”
“He’s beyond anything human,” I said bitterly. Then, more savagely: “What the fuck’s the matter with you, girl? You’re not stupid! You’re not crazy! You know what he is. How can you still go through with it?”
“I know what I am too,” she said wanly. “Yes, I know what Harvey is... but I also know what I need him to be. What we all need him to be. And he’s willing to try being that. Don’t you need something greater than yourself to believe in?”
“Maybe I do... sure I do! But I’ll be damned if I build me an idol out of shit and worship it for lack of anything better. And so will you, baby, so will you...”
“Maybe you’re right,” she whispered. “But I don’t have any choice...”
I reached into my pocket and fished out my apartment key. I held it front of her face silently, like a priest thrusting his crucifix at a vampire.
And like a vampire confronted with that image of its own unfaceable, Arlene gasped, sobbed, began to cry, hid her face in her hands, and fled back into her cave.
I didn’t follow her.
Instead, I descended the stairs, opened the door, and stopped outside. As I closed the door behind me, bitter cold hit me like a solid wall of chill—a chill that went through my coat, my clothes, my flesh, a chill in the center of my being, the marrow of my bones.
It had started to snow lightly. Though in a matter of hours the snow would be transmuted by New York’s fetid alchemy into a filthy black sludge, at this moment the flakes drifting down were white and clean and cold and pure.
24 - Hadj
The midaftemoon thaw had turned the snow covering the city into a morass of thick black sludge. Now, as the sun began to go down, the slush was starting to freeze into a turgid gray jelly; in a few hours it would be a treacherous sheen of gun-metal colored ice. I remembered the clean white snow that had fallen nearly a month ago, on the night I had put the Foundation behind me forever. Even then, I had known it would come to this—the clean white promise of new-falling snow always fated to become gray sludge, frozen into deadly city-ice, thawed, refrozen, thawed again, like a junkie’s dreams; and spring a lifetime away.
I stood shivering in my coat outside Ted and Doris’ place—or the gray-brown tenement that had been Ted and Doris’ place—watching Ted load the last of their stuff into the old VW bus he had bought for the trek to San Francisco, waiting to say goodbye.
Ted stuffed one last cardboard box into the bus, closed the big side door. Arlene and Doris, huddled in the building’s doorway against the cold, stepped out onto the sludgy sidewalk and stood by Ted at the front door to the bus.
The three of them stared awkwardly at me; I stared at them. They were already ghosts out of my past; I was certain I would never see any of them again. Our world-lines were diverging forever. And I knew they were thinking the same thoughts about me. I knew they knew and they knew I knew.
A long, terribly long, moment of silence.
“I... I wish you were coming along,” Ted finally said, his breath a plume of cold smoke from the heat-death of a universe.
“And I wish you were staying,” I said.
“I wish I could stay...” Arlene said.
“You—” I started to give her the same old argument I had given her the half-dozen times I had seen her since the Foundation vote. I gave up before I had started. It was all so pointless, so fucking pointless.
“Well... goodbye...” I said. “And... good luck. I hope... I hope you all wake up someday...”
“Don’t make it sound like a funeral,” Doris said, trying to force a ghost of the old Earth-mother smile and not making it.
I tried to smile too, but I didn’t do any better. From where I stood, it was a funeral; they were already dead. All that had made them human had been devoured by a Thing. Corpses. Zombies. Shadows. Perhaps they were thinking the same thing about me.
Maybe they were right.
Worst of all, maybe we were all right.
“Well...”
“Well...”
There was everything to say and no way to say it. There was nothing to say and a million ways to say it.
Ted opened the curb-side front door of the bus. Arlene climbed aboard, Doris after her. Ted walked around to the street-side of the bus, got in.
The motor whirred, coughed twice, and caught. Ted edged the bus away from the curb. He waved. Doris waved.
And then the bus pulled away from the curb and started off down the street, down the long street into the west. As the bus drove down the street and began to dwindle in the distance, I saw Arlene’s face staring back at me. She was too far away for me to guess at her expression; she was like a little lost doll.
Then the bus turned the corner and they were gone from sight forever.
And I was left behind. I was free. I grovelled at the feet of nothing greater than myself. I was free. I was alone.
Was it worth it?
As I stood there with the city’s filthy sludge freezing to obscene ice around me while Ted and Doris and Arlene drove off into the Foundation sunset, I felt as if everything I had ever been had been reduced to a single pinpoint of me-ness, the essence of Tom Hollander and nothing more, no past, no future, no excess baggage, no illusions. There was me and there was the universe. That was all. I owned nothing and nothing owned me.
It was cold solace.
But as I stood there feeling sorry for myself, I saw myself feeling sorry for myself, and it pissed me off. Asshole that you are to think you get something like freedom without paying dues!
Yeah, maybe I had something after all: I was free. Free to take the real trip, the real leap, without a parachute, the leap from the prison of the past into the unknown future—the real way, maybe the only way to break on through to the other side. You gotta die to be born again...?
Well, maybe the old Tom Hollander had died and the new Tom Hollander still waited in the womb of time to be born.
And quite suddenly, but with no surprise at the revelation, I knew what I had to do.
All I had to do was make the Big Leap. And now there was no rationalization to hold me back.
Nothing at all...
Walking down the futuristic white-walled corridor—crowded with pink-scrubbed cats in suits, expensive chicks in expensive clothes, college students from Harvard and Vassar, Army officers, who knows, rock stars, politicians, star surgeons, nuclear physicists, novelists, minor movie stars, spies, diplomats—I felt myself melting into the airport scene and really grooving behind it.
I felt almost stoned—Kennedy Airport was like another reality, or maybe a kind of anteroom between realities, a place where all the world-lines converged and then spread out again.
I had never flown before, but now, as I entered the huge, high-ceilinged embarkation room and saw the 707 waiting outside the glass wall of the terminal to whisk me off to LA, dug the people waiting to board the plane—Alabama hicks, Hollywood directors, senators, sausage salesmen, whores, Californians on the way home, emigrants, con-men, important dope-pushers—I understood why all airports have futuristic architecture.
Because for me (and for how may of the others?) Kennedy was the nexus-point between the known present and the unknown future, was therefore part of the future already. The unknown future... Unknown?
Yeah, unknown. I mean, I knew I was on my way to Los Angeles to take the slush-pile job at Slick, but that was just a reason to get on a plane in New York and get off in Los Angeles instead of San Francisco or Timbuktu. As a matter of fact, for all the reality LA had for me, it might as well be Timbuktu. And Timbuktu might as well be LA. They were both nothing more than cities of the mind and I knew dead-certain that LA would be a reality as different from New York and everything I had ever known as Ti
mbuktu or the dark side of the moon. On the way to the airport, I had picked up the Times and seen that yesterday’s high temperature in New York had been 30°. Yesterday’s low in LA had been 52°. High had been 73°. 73° in December! Palm trees! Hollywood! Sunset Strip! Movie stars!
I checked in at the ticket desk, got a seat number written on my ticket, went and looked out the huge window at my 707. From this close, it seemed much smaller than I had imagined it, and the aluminum skin was dull and gray and grainy, as ordinary as a subway car. Somehow only now, looking at the weathered old plane, did the whole thing become really real.
But tell me it wasn’t all a magic carpet ride! Within five hours, I’d be somewhere where the sun was shining and the temperature was forty degrees warmer, palm trees, movie studios, and yours truly met at the airport by a flunky (no doubt a very low-level flunky) from Slick, and off to play a new game which could end up with me as editor of a crotch-mag, and after that, who knows, there are lots of other airports around...
Yeah, airports had to have futuristic architecture. The future passes through them every minute of every day.
The tourist-class section of the plane was jammed. Three seats to each side of the aisle and a lot smaller inside than those TV commercials would have you believe. Not much different from being on a bus. I had lucked into a window seat. Beside me was some old bat who looked like an Iowa farmwife and beside her a cat who looked like an aging brassiere salesman. I had no urge to say one word to either of them. Yeah, a lot like a bus, or the subway.
Even the endless hurry-up-and-wait. Ticket desk. Wait. Board the plane. Wait. Plastic blond stewardess does her seat-belts and oxygen number. Wait. Ramp pulls back into the terminal like a hard-on wilting. Wait. Feeling of excitement as the plane as last starts to move. Building and building as the plane taxis further and further. Then stops. And I look out the little scratchy window and see that there are five other jets ahead of us, like a line waiting to take off. So we wait. Whoosh! The lead jet suddenly roars down the runway from a dead stop and I get a thrill and a chill as it belches gray smoke and bolts into the air. We move up a slot. And wait. Another plane takes off. Another short taxi. Wait...
I feel almost as if I’m watching a stripper do her thing. As each plane ahead of us takes off and we move one step closer to the Big Moment, the tension building in me is almost sexual, almost like waiting for acid to hit, like holding a spike above your vein, like sticking it in and feeling that little pain, and your finger on the plunger anticipating the Surge...
And then finally, FINALLY, we’re on the line. The engines rev up to a tremendous roar and the whole plane is vibrating and I feel as if I’m inside some huge beast chomping at the bit, as if the power of the universe is being held back by a halter...
Then suddenly, the plane is moving, moving, faster and faster, a huge metal beast charging down the runway, faster and faster, the world flashing by, faster and faster and faster—
And then—the Big Surge! Something groovy seems to kick me in the base of the spine, like smack suddenly hitting, like an orgasm, like breaking on through to the other side, and like a great bird the plane leaps into the air like a thing alive, and there’s nothing to see but the wild blue yonder, the pure blue blankness of the sky unfolding.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norman Spinrad is the author of over twenty novels, including the acclaimed
BUG JACK BARRON.
He is a multiple nominee for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction achievement, an American Book Award Nominee writer, and winner of the Prix Apollo. He has written scripts for Star Trek and produced two feature films. He has also published over 60 short stories collected in half a dozen volumes, and his novels and stories have been published in over a dozen languages.
He has been President of Science Fiction Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA) three times.
He is a tireless campaigner for authors’ rights and is the creator of the “model contract” now in use by several writers’ organizations. He’s been a literary agent, President of World SF, briefly a radio phone show host, has appeared as a vocal artist on three albums, and occassionally performs live. He is a long time literary critic, sometime film critic, perpetual political analyst, and sometime songwriter.
He grew up in New York, has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and travelled widely in Europe and rather less so in Latin America, Asia, and Oceania.
More ebooks you’ll enjoy from ReAnimus Press :
Bug Jack Barron, by Norman Spinrad [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
Experiment Perilous: The 'Bug Jack Barron' Papers, by Norman Spinrad [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, by Norman Spinrad [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
Staying Alive - A Writer's Guide, by Norman Spinrad [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
Passing Through the Flame, by Norman Spinrad [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
Fragments of America, by Norman Spinrad [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
The Craft of Writing Science Fiction that Sells, by Ben Bova [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
How To Improve Your Speculative Fiction Openings, by Robert Qualkinbush [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
Shadrach in the Furnace, by Robert Silverberg [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
American Goliath, by Harvey Jacobs [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
The Weathermakers, by Ben Bova [Amazon] [ReAnimus Store]
Table of Contents
1 - Junk
2 - The Girl In The Rain
3 - “Do Me Like You Did the Night Before...”
4 - “Take Me On A Trip Upon Your Magic Swirling Ship...”
5 - The Big Game
6 - Belly to Belly
7 - Room 101
8 - “Have a Whiff, Have a Whiff, Have a Whiff On Me—”
9 - The Unmoved Mover
10 - Naked To My Friends
11 - Mano a Mano
12 - “...and Trust Your Fate to the Hand of God—”
13 - The Man in Black
14 - The Cuckoo-clock Revisited
15 - “...but I Would Not Feel So All Alone...”
16 - “...You May Take Two Giant Steps...”
17 - A Meeting of the Brotherhood
18 - Into the Briar Patch
19 - Which Side Are You On?
20 - Dues
21 - “Break on Through to the Other Side...”
22 - The Path to Consciousness
23 - The Emperor’s Tailors
24 - Hadj
ABOUT THE AUTHOR