The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (82 page)

“You do have on hell of a memory,” he noted “That’s almost verbatim.”

“Of course.”

“You had Sigmund worried today, too.”

“Sig? How?”

The dog stirred uneasily, opened one eye.

“Yes,” he growled, glaring up at Render. “He needs, a ride, home.”

“Have you been driving the car again?”

“Yes.”

“After I told you not to?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was a, fraid. You would, not, answer me, when I talked.”

“I was
very
tired – and if you ever take the car again, I’m going to have the door fixed so you can’t come and go as you please.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“I, see.”

“You are
never
to do it again.”

“Sorry.” His eye never left Render; it was like a burning lens.

Render looked away.

“Don’t be too hard on the poor fellow,” he said. “After all, he thought you were ill and he went for the doctor. Suppose he’d been right? You’d owe him
thanks, not a scolding.”

Unmollified, Sigmund glared a moment longer and closed his eye.

“He has to be told when he does wrong,” she finished.

“I suppose,” he said, drinking his coffee. “No harm done, anyhow. Since I’m here, let’s talk shop. I’m writing something and I’d like an
opinion.”

“Great. Give me a footnote?”

“Two or three. – In your opinion, do the general underlying motivations that lead to suicide differ in different periods of history or in different cultures?”

“My well-considered opinion is no, they don’t,” she said. “Frustrations can lead to depressions or frenzies; and if these are severe enough, they can lead to
self-destruction. You ask me about motivations and I think they stay pretty much the same. I feel this is a cross-cultural, cross-temporal aspect of the human condition. I don’t think it
could be changed without changing the basic nature of man.”

“Okay. Check. Now, what of the inciting element?” he asked. “Let man be a constant, his environment is still a variable. If he is placed in an overprotective life-situation, do
you feel it would take more or less to depress him – or stimulate him to frenzy – than it would take in a not so protective environment?”

“Hm. Being case-oriented, I’d say it would depend on the man. But I see what you’re driving at: a mass predisposition to jump out windows at the drop of a hat – the
window even opening itself for you, because you asked it to – the revolt of the bored masses. I don’t like the notion. I hope it’s wrong.”

“So do I, but I was thinking of symbolic suicides too – functional disorders that occur for pretty flimsy reasons.”

“Aha! Your lecture last month: autopsychomimesis. I have the tape. Well-told, but I can’t agree.”

“Neither can I, now. I’m rewriting that whole section – ‘Thanatos in Cloud-cuckooland,’ I’m calling it. It’s really the death-instinct moved nearer the
surface.”

“If I get you a scalpel and a cadaver, will you cut out the death-instinct and let me touch it?”

“Couldn’t,” he put the grin into his voice, “it would be all used up in a cadaver. Find me a volunteer though, and he’ll prove my case by volunteering.”

“Your logic is unassailable,” she smiled. “Get us some more coffee, okay?”

Render went to the kitchen, spiked and filled the cups, drank a glass of water and returned to the living room. Eileen had not moved; neither had Sigmund.

“What do you do when you’re not busy being a Shaper?” she asked him.

“The same things most people do – eat, drink, sleep, talk, visit friends and not-friends, visit places, read . . .”

“Are you a forgiving man?”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“Then forgive me. I argued with a woman today, a woman named De Ville.”

“What about?”

“You – and she accused me of such things it were better my mother had not born me. Are you going to marry her?”

“No, marriage is like alchemy. It served an important purpose once, but I hardly feel it’s here to stay.”

“Good.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I gave her a clinic referral card that said, ‘Diagnosis: Bitch. Prescription: Drug therapy and a tight gag.’”

“Oh,” said Render, showing interest.

“She tore it up and threw it in my face.”

“I wonder why?”

She shrugged, smiled, made a gridwork on the tablecloth.

“‘Fathers and elders, I ponder,’” sighed Render, “‘what is hell?’”

“‘I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love,’ ” she finished. “Was Dostoevsky right?”

“I doubt it. I’d put him into group therapy myself. That’d be
real
hell for him – with all those people acting like his characters and enjoying it so.”

Render put down his cup and pushed his chair away from the table.

“I suppose you must be going now?”

“I really should,” said Render.

“And I can’t interest you in food?”

“No.”

She stood.

“Okay, I’ll get my coat.”

“I could drive back myself and just set the car to return.”

“No! I’m frightened by the notion of empty cars driving around the city. I’d feel the thing was haunted for the next two and a half weeks.

“Besides,” she said, passing through the archway, “you promised me Winchester Cathedral.”

“You want to do it today?”

“If you can be persuaded.”

As Render stood deciding, Sigmund rose to his feet. He stood directly before him and stared upward into his eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it, several times, but no sounds emerged. Then he
turned away and left the room.

“No,” Eileen’s voice came back, “you will stay here until I return.”

Render picked up his coat and put it on, stuffing the medkit into the far pocket.

As they walked up the hall toward the elevator Render thought he heard a very faint and very distant howling sound.

In this place, of all places, Render knew he was the master of all things.

He was at home on those alien worlds, without time, those worlds where flowers copulate and the stars do battle in the heavens, falling at last to the ground, bleeding, like so many split and
shattered chalices, and the seas part to reveal stairways leading down, and arms emerge from caverns, waving torches that flame like liquid faces – a midwinter night’s nightmare, summer
go a-begging, Render knew – for he had visited those worlds on a professional basis for the better part of a decade. With the crooking of a finger he could isolate the sorcerers, bring them
to trial for treason against the realm – aye, and he could execute them, could appoint their successors.

Fortunately, this trip was only a courtesy call . . .

He moved forward through the glade, seeking her.

He could feel her awakening presence all about him.

He pushed through the branches, stood beside the lake. It was cold, blue, and bottomless, the lake, reflecting that slender willow which had become the station of her arrival.

“Eileen!”

The willow swayed toward him, swayed away.

“Eileen! Come forth!”

Leaves fell, floated upon the lake, disturbed its mirror-like placidity, distorted the reflections.

“Eileen?”

All the leaves yellowed at once then dropped down into the water. The tree ceased its swaying. There was a strange sound in the darkening sky, like the humming of high wires on a cold day.

Suddenly there was a double file of moons passing through the heavens.

Render selected one, reached up and pressed it. The others vanished as he did so, and the world brightened, the humming went out of the air.

He circled the lake to gain a subjective respite from the rejection-action and his counter to it. He moved up along an aisle of pines toward the place where he wanted the cathedral to occur.
Birds sang now in the trees. The wind came softly by him. He felt her presence quite strongly.

“Here, Eileen. Here.”

She walked beside him then, green silk, hair of bronze, eyes of molten emerald; she wore an emerald in her forehead. She walked in green slippers over the pine needles, saying: “What
happened?”

“You were afraid.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps you fear the cathedral. Are you a witch?” he smiled.

“Yes, but it’s my day off.”

He laughed, and he took her arm, and they rounded an island of foliage, and there was the cathedral reconstructed on a grassy rise, pushing its way above them and above the trees, climbing into
the middle air, breathing out organ notes, reflecting a stray ray of sunlight from a plane of glass.

“Hold tight to the world,” he said. “Here comes the guided tour.” They moved forward and entered.

“‘. . . With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge tree trunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces,’” he said. “ – Got that from the
guidebook. This is the north transept . . .”

“‘Greensleeves,’ ” she said, “the organ is playing ‘Greensleeves.’”

“So it is. You can’t blame me for that though. – Observe the scalloped capitals – ”

“I want to go nearer to the music.”

“Very well. This way then.”

Render felt that something was wrong. He could not put his finger on it.

Everything retained its solidity . . .

Something passed rapidly then, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render smiled at that, remembering now; it was like a slip of the tongue: for a moment he had confused Eileen with
Jill – yes, that was what had happened.

Why, then . . .

A burst of white was the altar. He had never seen it before, anywhere. All the walls were dark and cold about them. Candles flickered in corners and high niches. The organ chorded thunder under
invisible hands.

Render knew that something was wrong.

He turned to Eileen Shallot, whose hat was a green cone towering up into the darkness, trailing wisps of green veiling. Her throat was in shadow, but . . .

“That necklace – Where?”

“I don’t know,” she smiled.

The goblet she held radiated a rosy light. It was reflected from her emerald. It washed him like a draft of cool air.

“Drink?” she asked.

“Stand still,” he ordered.

He willed the walls to fall down. They swam in shadow.

“Stand still!” he repeated urgently. “Don’t do anything. Try not even to think.

“Fall down!” he cried. And the walls were blasted in all directions and the roof was flung over the top of the world, and they stood amid ruins lighted by a single taper. The night
was black as pitch.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, still holding the goblet out toward him.

“Don’t think. Don’t think anything,” he said. “Relax. You are very tired. As that candle flickers and wanes so does your consciousness. You can barely keep awake.
You can hardly stay on your feet. Your eyes are closing. There is nothing to see here anyway.”

He willed the candle to go out. It continued to burn.

“I’m not tired. Please have a drink.”

He heard organ music through the night. A different tune, one he did not recognize at first.

“I need your cooperation.”

“All right. Anything.”

“Look! The moon!” he pointed

She looked upward and the moon appeared from behind an inky cloud.

“. . . And another, and another.”

Moons, like strung pearls, proceeded across the blackness.

“The last one will be red,” he stated.

It was.

He reached out then with his right index finger, slid his arm sideways along his field of vision, then tried to touch the red moon.

His arm ached, it burned. He could not move it.

“Wake up!” he screamed.

The red moon vanished, and the white ones.

“Please take a drink.”

He dashed the goblet from her hand and turned away. When he turned back she was still holding it before him.

“A drink?”

He turned and fled into the night.

It was like running through a waist-high snowdrift. It was wrong. He was compounding the error by running – he was minimizing his strength, maximizing hers. It was sapping his energies,
draining him.

He stood still in the midst of the blackness.

“The world around me moves,” he said. “I am its center.”

“Please have a drink,” she said, and he was standing in the glade beside their table set beside the lake. The lake was black and the moon was silver, and high, and out of his reach.
A single candle flickered on the table, making her hair as silver as her dress. She wore the moon on her brow. A bottle of Romanee-Conti stood on the white cloth beside a wide-brimmed wine glass.
It was filled to overflowing, that glass, and rosy beads clung to its lip. He was very thirsty, and she was lovelier than anyone he had ever seen before, and her necklace sparkled, and the breeze
came cool off the lake, and there was something – something he should remember . . .

He took a step toward her and his armor clinked lightly as he moved. He reached toward the glass and his right arm stiffened with pain and fell back to his side.

“You are wounded!”

Slowly, he turned his head. The blood flowed from the open wound in his biceps and ran down his arm and dripped from his fingertips. His armor had been breached. He forced himself to look
away.

“Drink this, love. It will heal you.”

She stood.

Nancy Kress (1948– ) entered science fiction in the early 1980s but flowered by the early 90s. Kress’s early novels were genre fantasy, but her
short fiction, which gained her initial recognition, was SF, collected in
Trinity and Other Stories
(1985). Her most ambitious work, in which it became clear that she was determined to
develop both character and science in her fiction, began with the novel
An Alien Light
(1988), and then
Brain Rose
(1990). Meanwhile, she continued to write an impressive body of
short fiction, much of it collected in
The Aliens of Earth
(1993). With the publication of her Beggars novels
(Beggars in Spain
[1993],
Beggars and Choosers
[1994], and
Beggars Ride
[1996]), and in the techno-thriller
Oaths and Miracles
(1996), she showed the full strength of her powers.