The Long Twilight (47 page)

"Florin—I've been a fool, an utter fool! I see now that all along you've been drawing on another source, one I never suspected! The woman—Miss Regis—she's linked to you by a bond of such power as could shift Galaxies in their courses!"

"Yeah, the kid likes me; that's what makes the world go round . . ." I levered again, and heard boulders rumble. Diss gave a shriek.

"Florin—what avails victory if you leave only ruins behind you?"

He was just a cricket chirping in a desert. I levered again and the whole gigantic boulder split with a noise like thunder and fell apart carrying the earth and the sky with it, exposing the velvet blackness of absolute nothingness.

"Nice," I called into the emptiness, "but a trifle stark for my taste. Let there be light!"

And there was light.

And I saw that it was good, and I divided the light from the darkness. It still looked a little empty, so I added a firmament, and divided the waters under it from the waters above it. That gave me an ocean with a lot of wet clouds looking down on it.

"Kind of monotonous," I said. "Let the waters be gathered together off to the side and let's see a little dry land around here."

And it was so.

"Better," I said. "But still dead looking. Let there be life."

Slime spread across the water and elaborated into seaweed and clumps floated ashore and lodged there and put out new shoots and crawled up on the bare rocks and sunned itself; and the earth brought forth grass and herbs yielding seeds, and fruit trees and lawns and jungles and flower boxes and herbaceous borders and moss and celery and a lot of other green stuff.

"Too static," I announced. "Let's have some animals."

And the earth brought forth whales and cattle and fowl and creeping things, and they splashed and mooed and clucked and crept, livening things up a little, but not enough.

"The trouble is, it's too quiet," I pointed out to me. "Nothing's happening."

The earth trembled underfoot and the ground heaved and the top of a mountain blew off and lava belched out and set the forested slopes afire, and the black clouds of smoke and pumice came rolling down on me. I coughed and changed my mind and everything was peaceful again.

"What I meant was something pleasant," I said, "like a gorgeous sunset, with music."

The sky jerked and the sun sank in the south in a glory of purple and green and pink, while chords boomed down from an unseen source in the sky, or inside my head. After it had set I cranked it back up and set it again a few times. Something about it didn't seem quite right. Then I noticed it was the same each time. I varied it and ran through half a dozen more dusks before I acknowledged that there was still a certain sameness to the spectacle.

"It's hard work making up a new one each time," I conceded. "It gives me a headache. How about just the concert, without the light show?"

I played through what I could remember of the various symphonies, laments, concerti, ballads, madrigals, and singing commercials. After a while I ran out. I tried to make up one of my own, but nothing came. That was an area I would have to look into—later. Right now I wanted fun.

"Skiing," I specified. "Healthful exercise in the open air, the thrill of speed!" I was rushing down a slope, out of control, went head over insteps and broke both legs.

"Not like that," I complained, reassembling myself. "No falling down."

I whizzed down the slope, gripped in a sort of invisible padded frame that wrenched me this way and that, insulating me from all shocks.

"Talk about taking a bath in your BVDs," I cried, "I might as well be watching it on TV."

I tried surfing, riding the waves in like the rabbit at a dogtrack, locked to the rails. The surf was all around, but it had nothing to do with me.

"No good. You have to learn how—and that's hard work. Skydiving, maybe?" I gripped the open door frame and stepped out. Wind screamed past me as I hung motionless, watching a pastel-toned tapestry a few feet below grow steadily larger. Suddenly it turned into trees and fields rushing up at me; I grabbed for the ring, yanked—

The jolt almost broke my back. I spun dizzily, swinging like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, and slammed into solid rock.

. . . I was being dragged by the chute. I managed to unbuckle the harness and crawl under a bush to recuperate.

"There's tricks to every trade," I reminded myself, "including being God. What's the point in doing something if I don't enjoy it?" That started me thinking about what I did enjoy.

"It's all yours, old man," I pointed out. "How about a million dollars to start with?"

The bills were neatly stacked, in bundles of $1,000, in tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds. There were quite a lot of them.

"That's not quite it. What good is money per se? It's what you can buy with it. Like for example, a brand-new 1936 Auburn boat-tailed Speedster, with green leather upholstery."

It was there, parked on the drive. It smelled good. The doors had a nice slam. I cranked up, gunned it up to 50 along the road that I caused to appear in front of it. I went faster and faster: 90 . . . 110 . . .

200 . . . After a while I got tired of buffeting wind and dust in my eyes, and eliminated them. That left the roar and the jouncing.

"You're earthbound," I accused. So I added wings and a prop and was climbing steeply in my Gee Bee Sportster, the wind whipping back past my face bearing a heartening reek of castor oil and high octane. But quite suddenly the stubby racer whip-stalled and crashed in a ploughed field near Peoria. There wasn't enough left of me to pick up with a spoon. I got it together and was in a T-33, going straight up as smooth as silk. 30,000 feet . . . 40,000 feet . . . 50,000 feet. I leveled off and did snap rolls and loops and chandelles and started getting airsick. I sailed between heaped clouds, and got sicker. I came in low over the fence, holding her off for a perfect touchdown and barely made it before I urped.

The trouble is, chum, wherever you go, you're still stuck with yourself. How about a quieter pastime?

I produced a desert isle, furnished it with orchids and palm trees, a gentle breeze, white surf edging the blue lagoon. I built a house of red padauk wood and glass and rough stone high on the side of the central mountain, and set it about with tropical gardens and ponds and a waterfall, and strolled out on my patio to take my ease beside my pool with a tall drink ready to hand. The drink gave me an appetite. I summoned up a table groaning under roast fowl and cold melon and chocolate éclairs and white wine. I ate for a long time; when my appetite began to flag, I whipped it along with shrimp and roast beef and chef salad and fresh pineapple and rice with chicken and sweet-and-sour pork and cold beer. I felt urpy again.

I took a nap in my nine-foot square bed with silken sheets. After fourteen hours' sleep it wasn't comfortable anymore. I ate again, hot dogs and jelly doughnuts this time. It was very filling. I went for a dip in the lagoon. The water was cold and I cut my foot on the coral. Then I got a cramp, luckily in shallow water so that I didn't actually drown. Drowning, I decided, was one of the most unpleasant ways to go.

I limped back up and sat on the beach and thought about my 5,000-tape automatic music system, my 10,000-book library, my antique gun and coin collections, my closets full of hand-woven suits and hand-tooled shoes, my polo ponies, my yacht—

"Nuts," I said. "I get seasick, and don't know how to ride. And what can you do with old coins but look at them? And it'll take me forty years to get through the books. And—"

I suddenly felt tired. But I didn't want to sleep. Or eat. Or swim. Or anything.

"What good is it?" I wanted to know, "if you're alone? If there's nobody to show off to, or share it with, or impress, or have envy me? Or even play games with?" I addressed these poignant queries to the sky, but nobody answered, because I had neglected to put anybody up there for the purpose. I thought about doing it, but it seemed like too much effort.

"The trouble with this place is no people," I admitted glumly. "Let there be Man," I said, and created Him in my own image.

"It was Van Wouk's scheme," he said. "Once you'd decided to go ahead with the simulator project he said it was only justice that you should be the one to test it. I swear I didn't know he planned to drop you. I was just along for the ride, I was victimized as much as you—"

"My mistake," I said. "Go back where you came from." He disappeared without a backward glance.

"What I really want," I said, "is strangers. People I never saw before, people who won't start in telling me all the things I did wrong."

A small band of Neanderthals emerged from a copse, so intent on turning over logs looking for succulent grubs that they didn't see me at first. Then an old boy with grizzled hair all over him spotted me and barked like a dog and they all ran away.

"I had in mind something a bit more sophisticated," I carped. "Let's have a town, with streets and shops and places where a fellow can get in out of the rain."

The town was there, a straggle of mud-and-wattle huts, bleak under leaden skies. I ordered sunshine, and it broke through the clouds and I made a few improvements in the village, not many or important, just enough to make it homey, and it was Lower Manhattan on a bright afternoon. The Neanderthals were still there, shaved and wearing clothes, many of them driving cabs, others jostling me on the sidewalk. I went into a bar and took a table on the right side, facing the door, as if I were expecting someone. A fat waitress in a soiled dress two sizes too small came over and sneered at me and fetched her pencil down from behind an ear like a bagel.

I said, "Skip it," and waved the whole thing away and pictured a cozy little fire on the beach with people sitting around it cross-legged, toasting wieners and marshmallows.

"Ah, the simple life," I said, and moved up to join them and they looked up and a big fellow with a mat of black hair on his chest stood up and said, "Beat it, Jack. Private party."

"I just want to join the fun," I said. "Look, I brought my own weenie."

A girl screamed and Blackie came in fast throwing lefts and rights most of which I deftly intercepted with my chin. I went down on my back and got a mouthful of calloused foot before I whisked the little group out of existence. I spat sand and tried to appreciate the solitude and the quiet slap of the surf and the big moon hanging over the water and might have been making some headway when an insect sank his fangs into that spot under the shoulder blades, the one you can't reach. I eliminated animal life for the moment, and paused for thought.

"I've been going about it wrong. What I want is a spot I fit into; a spot where life is simpler and sweeter, and has a place for me. What better spot than my own past?"

I let my thoughts slide back down the trail to the memory of a little frame schoolhouse on a dirt road on a summer day, long ago. I was there, eight years old, wearing knickers and sneakers and a shirt and tie, sitting at a desk with an inkwell full of dried ink, and covered with carved initials, my hands folded, waiting for the bell to ring. It did, and I jumped up and ran outside into the glorious sunshine of youth and a kid three sizes bigger, with bristly red hair and little eyes like a pig grabbed me by the hair and scrubbed his knuckles rapidly back and forth across my scalp and threw me down and jumped on me, and I felt my nose start to bleed.

So I wrapped him in chains and dropped a seventeen-ton triphammer on him and was alone again.

"That was all wrong," I said. "That wasn't the idea at all. That wasn't facing real life, with all its joys and sorrows. That was a copout. To mean anything, the other guy has to have a chance; it has to be man to man, the free interplay of personality, that's what makes for the rich, full life."

I made myself six feet three and magnificently muscled, with crisp golden curls and a square jaw, and Pig Eyes came out of an alley with a length of pipe and smashed the side of my head in. I dressed myself in armor with a steel helmet and he came up behind me and slipped a dirk in through the chink where my gorget joined my
epauliere
. I threw the armor away and slipped into my black belt and went into a
neko-ashi-dashi
stance and ducked his slash and he shot me through the left eye.

I blanked it all out and was back on the beach, just me and the skeeters.

"That's enough acting on impulse," I told myself sternly. "Handto-hand combat isn't really your idea of fun; if you lose, it's unpleasant; and if you always win, why bother?"

I didn't have a good answer for that one. That encouraged me so I went on: "What you really want is companionship, not rivalry. Just the warmth of human society on a non-competitive basis."

At once, I was the center of a throng. They weren't doing anything much, just thronging. Warm, panting bodies, pressed close to me. I could smell them. That was perfectly normal, bodies do have smells. Someone stepped on my foot and said, "Excuse me." Somebody else stepped on my other foot and didn't say excuse me. A man fell down and died. Nobody paid any attention. I might not have either, except that the man was me. I cleared the stage and sat on the curb and watched the sad city sunlight shine down on the scrap paper blowing along the sidewalk. It was a dead, dirty city. On impulse, I cleaned it up, even to removing the grime from the building fronts.

That made it a dead, clean city.

"The ultimate in human companionship," I thought to myself, "is that of a desirable and affectionate female of nubile years and willing disposition."

Accordingly, I was in my penthouse apartment, the hi-fi turned low, the wine chilled, and she was reclining at ease on the commodious and cushion-scattered chaise lounge. She was tall, shapely, with abundant reddish-brown hair, smooth skin, large eyes, a small nose.

I poured. She wrinkled her nose at the wine and yawned. She had nice teeth.

"Golly, haven't you got any groovy records?" she asked. Her voice was high, thin, and self-indulgent.

"What would you prefer?" I asked.

"I dunno. Something catchy." She yawned again and looked at the heavy emerald and diamond bracelet on her wrist.