Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Despite his protests to the contrary, Skolits was our man. I didn’t know why yet, but I knew how, and my indignation at the miner’s histrionics soured my tongue in my mouth.

  **Lupozny let Skolits in,** Chaish told me, broadcasting phosphenes from across the room. **Approaching the station in his mining craft, Skolits used a private radio channel to request a confidential audience. The stationmaster was expecting him, Raymond.**

  “Of course he was,” I said aloud, toeing off first one boot and then the other. I stood and slipped out of my suit’s torso sheath. A moment later everyone in the room was watching me as if I were an unfamiliar variety of snake that had just shed last winter’s skin. I remembered something that Loraine Block had mentioned in passing.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, looking directly at Corcoran Skolits, “you were Frederick Lupozny’s lover.”

  He met this statement unflinchingly. “So what? His affection for me died six or seven years ago, and I never had a whit for him to begin with. I did the expedient. Any number of miners out here—male and female alike—have visited this room at his invitation.”

  “Or command,” I amended. “In any case, his preference was ordinarily isoclinic, wasn’t it?”

  “None of that was any of my business—”

  “But you knew his preferences, didn’t you? And on this occasion, requesting a confidential meeting, you let him know you wouldn’t be disturbed if your interview developed into a sort of commemorative tryst, say.”

  Skolits lifted his eyebrows, as if to suggest that they were in the presence of a madman. But Synnöva Helmuth was scrutinizing the miner’s face skeptically, and he could feel her gaze upon him. Nor was Toombs buying the man’s ambiguous nonchalance outright.

  “Lupozny had always liked you,” I bore on. “He respected your ability, and he was comfortable with the fact that of all those ever connected with the Anless operation, you had survived the longest. That’s why he was willing to renew the physical aspect of your early relationship. It pleased him that you had suggested its resumption yourself. He agreed to the secret ‘audience’ not because he was ashamed for others to know, but because he didn’t believe this final meeting was anybody else’s business. He was a sentimental ogre, this particular Lupozny.”

  “Damn it!” Skolits cried. “My visiting Lupozny had nothing to do with our early relationship! That was dead, completely dead!”

  These words hung in the air like a net. One beat. Two beats. Three. When they finally descended, Skolits was enmeshed. He looked from Helmuth to Toombs and back again. It was the assay officer’s affection and forgiveness he most seemed to crave, however, and she touched his arm sympathetically.

  “Then you really were in here,” she said. “Why?”

  Skolits’s eyes darted about among us—not in a pleading or even a self-pitying way, but like those of a captured animal comprehending the futility of further struggle. I think he was surprised to discover that no one in the room—not even Raymond Detchemendy, who had just pursued him to the cliff brink—appeared jubilant at the prospect of his fall. Lupozny, the man he had killed, had not been a popular figure.

  Then I looked at Chaish, my dyadmate.

  Her bodymail gleamed ferociously in the fluorescents, her eyes played upon Skolits like interrogation lamps, and her respiration ribbons fluttered audibly. She alone seemed to feel no sorrow for the miner, no inclination to forgive.

  I was frightened for Skolits. He was one of my own kind, even if he was a murderer, and to see him a helpless victim of my dyadmate’s terrible enmity profoundly disturbed me.

  The miner shook free of Helmuth’s touch and sat down in the empty chair behind Lupozny’s desk. “I didn’t come here to kill him,” he said softly. “I came here to ask him to release me from my contract a little early and let me go back to Greater Bethlehem aboard the Baidarka.”

  Sinclair Toombs strolled into the furry chalk outline of Lupozny’s corpse, now ensconced in a cold coffin next door. “He gave you a confidential audience for that? Why the secrecy?”

  “Well, it’s like Mr. Detchemendy implied,” Skolits confessed. “Coming in from The Rocks, I hinted to Lupozny that I wouldn’t mind a friendly sort of reunion—an intimate sort of reunion if he’d also give me a chance to talk a little friendly business.”

  “But why,” Toombs persisted, “did you have to meet in secret to discuss an early out from your contract?”

  “We didn’t, I suppose,” Skolits said, staring at the clasp in which Lupozny had kept the knife that had slain him. “I just thought I’d have a better chance to convince him to let me go if I made the meeting seem … well, like old times.” Lifting his head, he appealed to Helmuth. “You knew Lupozny, Synnöva. If you ever wanted anything from him, you had to bring out every weapon in your arsenal of persuasion to get it. It couldn’t hurt, I thought, even if it was a bald-faced lie, saying I still cared for him a little.” Anger had crept back into Skolits’s voice, and he flipped a metal stylus off the desk with his right forefinger.

  It landed at my feet. I picked it up and approached the desk with it. “And you murdered Lupozny because he wouldn’t let you leave the Anless 32 boonies a couple of months ahead of schedule? That’s crazy. You said yourself that two and a half months is a pretty swift sprinkle.”

  Skolits looked up at me bemusedly. Then he shut his eyes, clenched his teeth, and began swinging his head from side to side in impotent anguish. His right hand punctuated this rhythm with feeble karate chops to the edge of Lupozny’s desk. He was trying hard not to weep. No one spoke.

  **Show him the forty-ninth character,** Chaish commanded me, the phosphenes drifting into my vision like incandescent grains of sleet. **Put the necklace before him, Raymond, and let him explain it.**

  I glanced at Chaish. Still loitering near the room’s doorway, she gave me a peremptory nod but kept her eyes fixed mercilessly on Skolits. I had forgotten the strange artifact that Chaish had found in the miner’s spacesuit. I removed the necklace from my pocket, looked at the piece of stone or plastic on its chain, and then dangled the pendant before Skolits’s eyes.

  “Skolits,” I said. “Skolits, tell us what this is.”

  He refused to open his eyes. “I’ve been waiting for that,” he whispered. Aloud he said, “Dear God, even a decade didn’t put me in the clear.”

  “Of what?” Helmuth asked, putting her hand on his back.

  Skolits opened his eyes and blinked at the pendant hanging before him. “Synnöva,” he said, “I didn’t kill Lupozny because he wouldn’t let me out of my contract early. I killed him because he threatened to keep me here as long as he himself intended to stay—four more years; six; hell, maybe another ten. That’s why, seeing the knife on his desk, I grabbed it up and buried it in the bastard’s chest as deep as I could plunge the bloody thing.”

  Skolits let his eyes slide away from the pendant and mist over with the melancholy weather of recollection. “Even with his knife in him up to the hilt, he tottered after me a few steps. I was afraid he’d catch me, shake me to pieces before he fell—do something inhuman and terrible. He didn’t, though. I heard the telescope clatter to the floor as I struggled to open the first hatch in the lifeboat bay, and that told me he was probably done for. I came back and saw him dead and couldn’t believe that I had done it. Lupozny was the first man I’ve ever killed, Synnöva,” he concluded, glancing over his shoulder at the assay officer for commiseration.

  I dropped the chode pendant and its chain onto the desk. “This,” I said. “Lupozny was blackmailing you with this?”

  Skolits’s hand crept forward over the desk to pick up the necklace, but a shadow fell across him and he desisted. Chaish seemed almost evil in her flickering bodymail and her inscrutable self-possession. She scooped the chode necklace—with its Essencialist pendant forbidden the sight of unbelievers, of which she herself was self-confessedly one—away from the miner’s grasp. Then she donned the pendant and let it glisten against the platelets
of her breasts.

  **Tell him to explain how the forty-ninth character came into his possession, Raymond.**

  “You already know, don’t you, Chaish?”

  **I believe I do. Although Frederick Lupozny may have been this man’s first human victim, he has taken the life of an intelligent creature at least once before. Ask him what prompted him to kill one of my kind.**

  A few moments later I had Skolits unraveling, albeit jerkily, the ill-woven skein of his life before coming to Anless 32 with Lupozny. His story about bilking an Ecumos cargo master of a shipment of Lareina silk had been a cover for the real difficulties of his past. Those had begun nearly fourteen years ago on Greater Bethlehem.

  In fulfillment of a boyhood dream Skolits had achieved admission to a skategrace academy on his home world, eventually obtaining a chode partner of Essencialist background and then undertaking with this enigmatic creature the initial simulator tests designed to measure the apprentice dyad’s ability to navigate Black Ice. He and his partner had not done badly, although Skolits was slow to pick up on the semantic distinctions among various phosphenes, both singly and in combination. He didn’t seem to have the head for it, and the patterns broadcast at him by his Essencialist dyad mate began to take on for him the quality of a severe optical affliction. He suffered headaches and nausea. Because he was slow to learn the skategrace “language,” his dyad’s mentor suggested that sleep-screenings, in conjunction with recorded translations, might be one means of breaking through his block. The upshot was that for a two-month period—even when he took to his bed at the end of a day of chart work and simulator tests—Skolits had no reprieve from the disorienting flurry of his partner’s phosphene broadcasts. His sleep was disrupted, and his appetite failed.

  “Finally,” Skolits said, still perched on the forward edge of Lupozny’s chair, “I lost my sight altogether. Apparently it was an attack of hysterical blindness, but to me it was real and the darkness seemed impenetrable and terrifying. The only good thing about it was that it kept out those vicious, biting phosphenes. They’d been like poisonous flying insects, stinging and flashing, and I hadn’t been able to escape them even with my eyes shut. My ‘blindness’ kept them out, though. It also drove me crazy with fear that I’d live the rest of my life in that darkness. The thought that I might be blind forever …” His voice dovetailed to a sigh.

  “What happened?” Synnöva Helmuth asked.

  “A week was all it lasted. I came out of my blindness. They reintroduced me slowly to the skategrace training. Once I had cleared the hurdle of chode communication, everyone said my partner and I would be an extremely adaptable dyad. It’s just that I never cleared that hurdle. I thought my partner was secretly trying to blind me—prematurely, you know, and maliciously rather than simply in the natural course of our dyadship.”

  “It takes about twenty years,” I put in. “Sometimes longer. Maliciousness has nothing to do with it. Besides, you’re permitted to retire early if you’ve made the requisite number of Black Ice crossings. Your fears were groundless, Skolits.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” he barked, standing up and staring at me challengingly. Then, as if rebuking himself, he added, “Now.”

  **He killed his dyadmate,** Chaish broadcast, plainly uncomprehending, **because he feared his dyadmate was purposely trying to blind him?** Her gaze never left the miner’s face, and he recoiled from her scrutiny by turning one shoulder to her and staring at his hands.

  I relayed Chaish’s question.

  “Yes,” he said. “I killed him in his sleep, stopping his respiration ribbons, plugging the chambers with my hands. I held him to his board with the full weight of my body. My vision exploded with phosphenes as he struggled, but I didn’t let go and he was dead much sooner than I had expected him to be.” Skolits turned and pointed at the pendant hanging from Chaish’s neck. “I found that with my dyadmate’s personal belongings and took it as a keepsake. Then I fled, staying away from the main population centers of Greater Bethlehem and living off the countryside. That was when I became Corcoran Skolits, changing my real name to this one.”

  “But eventually you looked up Frederick Lupozny?”

  “He was related to me in some distant, oblique way, and during our first interview in Lake Iguana, the southern capital, he recognized my talisman for what it was—like an idiot, I was fiddling with it as we talked. He realized that seated before him was the notorious fugitive who had murdered his chode dyadmate four years ago. He said he’d give me a job and get me off-planet if I yielded the necklace to him and signed an initial two-and-a-half-year contract. Which I did.”

  “He used the necklace to ensure your loyalty,” I said. “You signed three more two-and-a-half-year contracts because he threatened to expose your crime.”

  “No,” Skolits said. “I signed those other contracts because I was content to stay out here until virtually no one on Greater Bethlehem remembered or gave a damn that the chode half of a skategrace had been murdered by his human partner many years ago. I was waiting until it was safe to go home. I was born on Greater Bethlehem, you see, and I thought I’d finally outrun my guilt and earned my passage home. I hadn’t even seen that thing—” Skolits gestured at the pendant “—for ten years. And then Lupozny—to keep me off the Baidarka and to bind me to him for another interminable decade—materializes that infernal piece of chode glass and tells me I’m going nowhere until it pleases his majesty for me to go. That was when—” He stopped.

  “You grabbed up the knife and killed him.”

  Skolits looked almost grateful that I had completed his thought for him. He sat back down in Lupozny’s chair and closed his eyes. Toombs and Helmuth exchanged a melancholy glance.

  “It wasn’t until Mr. Toombs asked me to come with him and Synnöva to see what was wrong with Lupozny that I thought about the depressurized remora. I realized then that it might incriminate me. So while they were cluck-clucking over the body, I sidled into the lifeboat bay and activated the remora’s compressor pumps. At the time, you know, I thought how lucky I was that they’re such silent operators, those pumps. And I thought that finally I was home free. If I could last another couple of months, I’d be saying hello again to Greater Bethlehem. The Baidarka wasn’t the only light-skater on The Ice.”

  **I want no more of this, Raymond. I’m going to join Françoise in the control center. Come when you’re ready.**

  These various phosphene patterns betrayed the depth of Chaish’s agitation; they were blurred and ephemeral, so swift I hardly had time to interpret them. Then, with phantomesque grace and disdain, she glided away from the moral ambiguities and the tangled interior lives of every human being in Lupozny’s room, including mine.

  Synnöva Helmuth crouched in front of Skolits, her hands on his knees. “Would you have let Loraine and Misha suffer the punishment for something you did, Corcoran? I can’t believe you’d let that happen.”

  Skolits’s response was quick and cold. “Believe it,” he said, not looking at the woman. “Don’t be a fool, Synnöva—believe it.”

  I intend to remain the human half of a skategrace until the onset of blindness disqualifies me. Maybe by that time I will have obtained a partial understanding of Chaish Qu’chosh, and she of me. And in my blindness, sight. Or so I hope. They say that the blindness of a chode’s superannuated human partner is not complete, that phosphene broadcasts still filter through. Good. I am hopeful that before I die my understanding of the chode and of the fallible species of which I am a member may unite in a single blinding, nonpareil phosphene. Then I will have become an Essencialist on my own terms, and my secret forty-ninth character will be forever proof against theft or misinterpretation.

  In the meantime, the story I have just told has a kind of satisfying parody of a happy ending. Corcoran Skolits, you see, achieved a portion of his desire: He was able to return to Greater Bethlehem aboard the Baidarka, two and a half months before the expiration of his contract.

  A Ta
pestry of Little Murders

  PETER MAZARAK LEFT HIS HOUSE AT TWO-THIRTY IN the morning. A pale, introspective young man, he drove away brooding on two separate but troublesome concerns—the fact that his bowel ached with a malignancy of at least two months’ tenure and the knowledge that he had just killed his wife.

  Navigating the asphalt lane around the country club, Mazarak looked out on the golf course and shaped disturbing chimeras from its moon-dappled straightaways and doglegs. Shadows from nearby loblolly pines played in the warp of his windshield; they resembled slender birds trapped in the crystal prison of the glass. But that was fancy, the confusion of his shredded sensibility. The birds were simply shadows: moonlight divided by pine boughs along County Club Drive at two-damn-thirty in the morning.

  Aloud, Mazarak said, You have to flee the pain you create as well as the pain inside you.

  A self-mocking epigram.

  Tonight—this morning—he fled the commission of pain that he had not meant to inflict. The argument had resulted from his arrival home long past a credible hour and his attempt to shift the blame to Ruth’s father. For, in menial bondage to his own father-in-law, he huckstered farm equipment, monstrous yellow harvesting machines. Usually these machines sat on the company lot beneath an incandescent Georgia sun, growing as untouchably hot as electric frying pans. That afternoon, though, Daddy Coy’s sales force had moved three units, and he, Mazarak told her, had stayed late in a beaverboard cubicle going over contracts and orders of delivery; hence, his tardiness.

  Surely, Ruth understood. As the daughter of a man who had built his fortune peddling farm equipment (Mazarak, when he said this, envisioned Daddy Coy astride a yellow tractor, pedaling), she must understand. If his tardiness angered her, she should blame Daddy Coy or those big yellow machines—all the expensive equipment providing the young Mazaraks with such a respectable, if ordinary, livelihood. She should blame the paperwork. But Ruth knew that he hadn’t worked late, as she always knew when he lied, and both pride and anxiety prevented him from speaking the truth.