Slippage

by Harlan Ellison

  He looked across the crimson lake and saw ships.

  Hundreds, perhaps thousands of ships. Boats, craft, vessels of all sizes and periods and origins. Arab dhows and Gallic currachs, Greek triremes and balsa-wood PT boats, Canton delta lorcha and lateen-sailed Portuguese trawlers. Whalers, warships, feluccas and frigates; hydrofoils, hagboats, pinnaces and Pechili junks. Siamese lug-sails, brigantines, galeasses, Hanseatic League cogs, sixty-oared papyrus galleys, Norse drakkars and dragon-prowed Viking longships called the Oseberg ship. Barques, yawls, packet boats, cigarettes, freighters, cabin cruisers, sampans, windjammers and luxury liners; Turkish tchektirme, Greek sacoleva, Venetian trabaccoli, Levantine caïque, and the German U-1065 pigboat alleged to have been sunk by R.A.F. Mosquitos in the Kattegat. Sailing ships that were little more than rough-hewn logs lashed into the shape of a raft with lianas, and twin-hulled catamarans of titanium and PVC pipe. The lake pool, harbor of last resort, Sargasso of lost ships, was filled with the oceangoing detritus of ten thousand years.

  Yet it was hardly jammed. It seemed endless in its capacity to hold the castaways of the shipping lanes, but the lake was spacious and only dotted with a shape here, a bobbing four-masted brigantine there. Dennis Lanfear, treading water, turned slowly, looking and looking, amazed at the bizarre optical illusion made by a storehouse overflowing...that remained capacious and expectant.

  He turned and turned...and saw the city.

  It rose from the very edge of the lake pool. Slanting up as softly blue and gray as psalms ascending to Heaven, it was massive, enthralling, breathtaking in the complexity of its segmented faces. Walls so high they dizzyingly ran to a sky that could not be seen in the misty upper reaches. Walls that abutted at right angles—yet formed no central square. Walls that seemed ancient, yet downy with the breath of first birth. The cave dwellings of the Anasazi, the prehistorical hive dwellings of slope-browed pre-men, the filing cabinets for gothamites gone eternally condo...this was the City indeed, the City supreme. It towered over the harbor, and at first Lanfear saw no hint of human movement.

  But as he stroked toward the quay, toward the low lip of polished blue-gray stone that would allow him to climb up to the walkway fronting the Great Walls, he saw one small figure, just one. No, there was a second person. Man or woman, he could not be sure...either of them.

  He breast-stroked through the lovely crimson water, softly lapping at the stones of the quay, and paddled in to shelter. He pulled himself along till he reached something like a hemp cargo net hanging into the water, anchored out of sight on the walkway above. He pulled himself up, and stood, dripping heavy pink moisture, dwarfed by the immensity of the cyclopean walls that slanted away above him. He craned to see the sky, even to see a ceiling, but all was mist and the reborn antiquity of structures ageless and ever new.

  He marveled that, if he were indeed somewhere beneath the Bermuda Triangle, in some impossible sub-oceanic world that could exist in defiance of the rigors of physics and plate tectonics and magma certainties, then this subterranean edifice was certainly the most colossal structure ever built on the planet. A holy sunken cathedral built by gods.

  He stood there dripping pink, thick water, sanctifying himself in the first moment of true religion he had ever known.

  And one of the two figures who had been walking beside the quay came toward him, and it was a man in his very late thirties or early forties, wearing a gray chambray shirt and casual chino slacks. He was a pleasant-looking man, and he walked toward Dennis Lanfear and, as he drew near, he smiled and said, "Dennis? Is that you, son?"

  Dennis Lanfear came back from abstract visions of the City of God, the holy sunken cathedral, and looked at the man. Then he stared at the man. Then he saw the man.

  Then he knew the man.

  He had not seen his father since he had been ten months old. Now he was just over forty. He was older than the man in front of him, but he knew the face from his mother's photographs—the picnic at Crystal Beach, the wedding, the shot of him leaning against the Packard, the snapshot on the dock when he came back from the War. Dennis Lanfear stared into, and knew, the smile of his father dead four decades; the loving face of George DeVore Lanfear, come to beam upon, and pridefully acknowledge, the son he had never been allowed to see grow to manhood.

  Dennis stood silent, the pain swelling up from his stomach to his chest and into his eyes. As his father embraced him, he began to cry. His father's arms went around him, the tough, corded arms that had worked so diligently until death in the auto assembly plant; and that strength bound Dennis as securely as had the arms of the mermaid who had brought him here, beyond midnight, to the sunken cathedral.

  "Where are you? Who am I? What is this place?"

  His father sat with him in one of the great rooms of the submerged city. They had eaten, they had talked endlessly, they had swapped stories of the past before Dennis had been born, and of the world since George DeVore Lanfear had died. They had caught up. They were father and son. And now was the moment of explanations, and of decisions about the future...because the journey was only half the destination.

  "Atlantis," his father said gently. "You're in Atlantis."

  Dennis shook his head in pleasant, startled incredulity. "The legend?" he said. "The great sunken continent, Plato, Minoan Crete, all that...is that what you mean?"

  "Welcome to Mars," his father said, grinning widely.

  "You said Atlantis."

  "Welcome to Atlantis."

  "I, I don't seem to..."

  "The Atlanteans went to Mars, son. You were brought here the way millions of others have been brought here, for thousands of years, because you got too near one of the drains. Our recycling system. Hadn't you noticed the red water?"

  "I—I—" He stopped. He held his head comically, and waggled it back and forth. "I'm not up to this, dad. You've given me too much to—"

  "All right, more slowly, then. The Atlanteans absolutely commanded time and space, just as the tall tales tell. They looked ahead, and they saw what was coming, what the human race was heading toward becoming, and they left. They went to Mars."

  "But there's no life on Mars, we can see that from the probes we've sent. It's desolate, unlivable. Are you telling me that we're under Mars?"

  "Exactly. But not the Mars that hangs in the night sky of Earth's telescopes. They, the ones who will build the ships, they'll never reach Mars. Whatever red planet in their sky that they land upon...whatever it's called...it will not be Mars. Command of time and space, remember? Come on, tell me you remember, don't fall behind."

  Dennis laughed, a mild amusement. "I remember."

  "Excellent. It's almost as if either one of us is smart enough to understand this. What it is, son, is that even if the human race reaches 'Mars' it won't be this place. To some Mars, perhaps; but never to this Mars, this Atlantis, to which we fled. In fairness, they left the legend. Just to tantalize. It was a debt they felt, a debt we still feel. An even break, if you get what I mean. If the world changes—it hasn't, has it?—"

  Dennis sighed and shook his head.

  "Ah. Well, then...if the world does change, and people change, and the legend draws them to us, we'll take them in. We took you in, didn't we?" Dennis smiled. "But not otherwise.

  "Otherwise...they'll have to shoulder their own destiny. If we could do it, why shouldn't they? We all come from the same egg."

  He stared at his father, knowing all was not as it seemed.

  The explanations were shimmering, insubstantial, missed a beat here and there.

  His father looked at him with unbent affection, and said gently, "And I? Am I your father? Well, perhaps and perhaps not exactly. But I'll do. I am—really and truly—one of the many possible men your father would have become, had he been accorded the chance. I'm a good chance at your father."

  "Am I dead?"

  "Ah. That question. You ask it a little less quickly than most of the cargo she brings us. But... yes, that question again."

  "Am
I? Am I dead?"

  "Not an important consideration. Probably not. But maybe you are. So what? Does it really matter a hoot in hell? Live, dead, you're in a warm place with wonderful things happening. We've got the opportunity denied us back where you came from, the opportunity to get to know each other. Isn't that something you've always wanted? Haven't you always cried in your heart that we never got to talk about everything that mattered?"

  "Yes. But—"

  His father spread his hands and gave him that spiffy smile. "Buts keep coming, Dennis. They never stop. And let me tell you a thing: even if you knew someone you loved, like your father, for instance, knew he was dying, and you sat by his bedside for six months before he passed on, and you said everything you'd ever wanted to say, tied off all the loose ends, made all the little wry observations, shared every experience you'd ever had, the both of you...and you got said every last thing there was to say, about love and family and how much you'd miss me...I promise you that the moment I'd closed my eyes and gone away, you'd think of something you left out, something desperate to be said, and you'd rue the moment for the rest of your life.

  "But here, now, the two of us, father and son together at last, here on Mars, in Atlantis. We can talk as long as we wish. It's really fortuitous Dennis. Or do you prefer Denny?"

  And there, in the sunken cathedral, far away in another sky, beneath a broiling sun, under a crimson ocean, inside a triangle that opened onto misty reaches, father and son walked and talked together. As it had been ordained. As it had never been ordained. By chance. By choice. By design. Happenstance.

  At last Dennis Lanfear had all the time he would ever need to realize his dearest wish: to share, amazingly, all the aspects of the father he had never known. Never knowing this: that at the final moment of George DeVore Lanfear's life, as death plunged toward him from above, his last fleeting thought was that he would never see his kid grow up, never know what sort of man he was to become.

  By chance. By choice.

  Somewhere in the North Atlantic, a body bobbed face-down in warm waters, but that body might not have once been Dennis Lanfear.

  Nor was there, for any reason, a howl in the halls of hell; not even in the halls of the gods.

  ___

  When I got mustered out, on April Fool’s Day 1959, and was going to make tracks for Chicago to work for Hamling at Rogue, I literally had to pull Charlotte into the car. She was high on busting my chops, pretending she wanted to stay in that crummy trailer, in E-town. Yeah, that’d happen. But after driving me buggywhipcrazy she came along. We got a nice apartment on Dempster Street in Evanston, I steamed the wallpaper and repainted, and we moved in all the new furniture. When Hamling and I went to New York for a distributors’ convention, I asked her to open the new bank account with my salary advance of a thousand bucks. When I got back three day slater, the apartment was cleaned to the walls. I filed two days later. It took eighteen months for the divorce to be final. Now it’s thirty-seven years later. She’s a real bad, sun-faded memory. But it was, significantly, the first or second big slippage I had to deal with. And how’s everything with you?

  ___

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Introduction: “The Fault in My Lines” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  The stories in this collection originally appeared in the following anthologies or magazines: The Best American Short Stories: 1993, Best New Horror #5 & #6, Borderlands, Dante's Disciples, Dark Destiny, Night And The Enemy, Ten Tales, The Ultimate Dragon and The Year's Best Horror Stories: xvii; Aboriginal Science Fiction, Eidolon, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Harlan Ellison Dream Corridor series, Interzone, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Lore, Literal Latte, Midnight Graffiti, New Rave, Omni, Omni Online, Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, The Twilight Zone Magazine and The 17th Annual World Fantasy Program Book.

  “Mefisto in Onyx” was also published in book form by Mark V. Ziesing, Publisher. “The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams” originally appeared as an audio cassette (narrated by the Author) accompanying Cyberdreams's “H.R. Giger Screensaver.” “Go Toward the Light” was originally broadcast as a segment of Chanukah Lights, a National Public Radio presentation recorded on 15 November 1994 and electronically fed to satellite uplink on 23 November 1994 for broadcast in November and December 1994. “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich” was first telecast as an episode of The Twilight Zone on 2 April 1989.

  The stories, essays and teleplays are variously copyright © 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “The Dragon On the Bookshelf” written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg; copyright © 1995 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation and Agberg, Ltd.

  “Nackles” by Donald E. Westlake (as by “Curt Clark”). Copyright © 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc. Renewed, copyright ©1991 by Donald E. Westlake. Reprinted by permission of the Author.

  Copyright © 1997 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  ISBN 978-1-4976-0432-2

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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