The Very Best of F & SF v1 (19 page)

Inside, I
listened to the thunder and the rain, and I watched the apocalypse off in the
distance.

Delirium of city
under storm—

The buildings
across the way were quite clear in the pulsing light of the thing. The lamps
were turned off in my apartment so that I could better appreciate the vision.
All of the shadows seemed incredibly black and inky, lying right beside glowing
stairways, pediments, windowsills, balconies; and all of that which was
illuminated seemed to burn as though with an internal light. Overhead, the
living/not living insect-thing of fire stalked, and an eye wearing a blue halo
was moving across the tops of nearby buildings. The fires pulsed and the clouds
burnt like the hills of Gehenna; the thunders burbled and banged; and the white
rain drilled into the roadway which had erupted into a steaming lather. Then a
snapper
, tri-horned,
wet-feathered, demon-faced, sword-tailed, and green, raced from around a
corner, a moment after I’d heard a sound which I had thought to be a part of
the thunder. The creature ran, at an incredible speed, along the smoky
pavement. The eye swooped after it, adding a hail of lead to the falling
raindrops. Both vanished up another street. It had taken but an instant, but in
that instant it had resolved a question in my mind as to who should do the
painting. Not El Greco, not Blake; no: Bosch. Without any question, Bosch—with
his nightmare visions of the streets of Hell. He would be the one to do justice
to this moment of the storm.

I watched until
the sizzlecloud drew its legs up into itself, hung like a burning cocoon, then
died like an ember retreating into ash. Suddenly, it was very dark and there
was only the rain.

Sunday was the
day of chaos.

Candles burned,
churches burned, people drowned, beasts ran wild in the streets (or swam
there), houses were torn up by the roots and bounced like paper boats along the
waterways, the great wind came down upon us, and after that the madness.

I was not able
to drive to Town Hall, so Eleanor sent her flyer after me.

The basement was
filled with water, and the ground floor was like Neptune’s waiting room. All
previous high-water marks had been passed.

We were in the
middle of the worst storm in Betty’s history.

Operations had
been transferred up onto the third floor. There was no way to stop things now.
It was just a matter of riding it out and giving what relief we could. I sat
before my gallery and watched.

It rained
buckets, it rained vats; it rained swimming pools and lakes and rivers. For a
while it seemed that it rained oceans upon us. This was partly because of the
wind which came in from the gulf and suddenly made it seem to rain sideways
with the force of its blasts. It began at about noon and was gone in a few
hours, but when it left our town was broken and bleeding. Wyeth lay on his
bronze side, the flagpole was gone, there was no building without broken
windows and water inside, we were suddenly suffering lapses of electrical
power, and one of my eyes showed three panda-puppies devouring a dead child.
Cursing, I killed them across the rain and the distance. Eleanor wept at my
side. There was a report later of a pregnant woman who could only deliver by
Caesarean section, trapped on a hilltop with her family, and in labor. We were
still trying to get through to her with a flyer, but the winds... I saw burnt
buildings and the corpses of people and animals. I saw half-buried cars and
splintered homes. I saw waterfalls where there had been no waterfalls before. I
fired many rounds that day, and not just at beasts from the forest.

Sixteen of my
eyes had been shot out by looters. I hope that I never again see some of the
films I made that day.

When the worst
Sunday night in my life began, and the rains did not cease, I knew the meaning
of despair for the third time in my life.

Eleanor and I
were in the Trouble Center. The lights had just gone out for the eighth time.
The rest of the staff was down on the third floor. We sat there in the dark
without moving, without being able to do a single thing to halt the course of
chaos. We couldn’t even watch it until the power came back on.

So we talked.

Whether it was
for five minutes or an hour, I don’t really know. I remember telling her,
though, about the girl buried on another world, whose death had set me to
running. Two trips to two worlds and I had broken my bond with the times. But a
hundred years of travel do not bring a century of forgetfulness— not when you
cheat time with the
petite mort
of
the
cold sleep. Time’s vengeance is memory, and though for an age you plunder the
eye of seeing and empty the ear of sound, when you awaken your past is still
with you. The worst thing to do then is to return to visit your wife’s nameless
grave in a changed land, to come back as a stranger to the place you had made
your home. You run again then, and after a time you
do
forget, some, because a
certain amount of actual time must pass for you also. But by then you are
alone, all by yourself: completely alone. That was the
first
time in my life that
I knew the meaning of despair. I read, I worked, I drank, I whored, but came
the morning after and I was always me, by myself. I jumped from world to world,
hoping things would be different, but with each change I was further away from
all the things I had known.

Then another
feeling gradually came upon me, and a really terrible feeling it was: There
must
be a time and a place
best suited for each person who has ever lived. After the worst of my grief had
left me and I had come to terms with the vanished past, I wondered about a man’s
place in time and in space. Where, and
when
in the cosmos would I most like to live out the balance of my days?
—To live at my fullest potential? The past
was
dead, but perhaps a better time waited on some as yet undiscovered
world, waited at one yet-to-be-recorded moment in its history. How could I
ever
know? How could I ever
be sure that my Golden Age did not lay but one more world away, and that I
might be struggling in a Dark Era while the Renaissance of my days was but a
ticket, a visa, and a diary-page removed? That was my
second
despair. I did not
know
the answer until I came to the Land of the Swan. I do not know why I loved you,
Eleanor, but I did, and that was my answer. Then the rains came.

When the lights
returned we sat there and smoked. She had told me of her husband, who had died
a hero’s death in time to save him from the delirium tremens which would have
ended his days. Died as the bravest die—not knowing why—because of a reflex,
which after all had been a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast
himself into the path of a pack of wolf-like creatures attacking the exploring
party he was with—off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen’s—to fight
them with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companions fled to
the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Such is the essence of
valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along the spinal nerves, predetermined by
the sum total of everything you have ever done, wished to do or not to do, and
wish you had done, or hadn’t, and then comes the pain.

We watched the
gallery on the wall. Man is the reasoning animal? Greater than beasts but less
than angels? Not the murderer I shot that night. He wasn’t even the one who
uses tools or buries his dead. —Laughs, aspires, affirms? I didn’t see any of
those going on. —Watches himself watch himself doing what he knows is absurd?
Too sophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like running back
into a burning house after his favorite pipe and a can of tobacco. —Devises
religions? I saw people praying, but they weren’t devising. They were making last-ditch
efforts at saving themselves, after they’d exhausted everything else they knew
to do. Reflex.

The creature who
loves?

That’s the only
one I might not be able to gainsay.

I saw a mother
holding her daughter up on her shoulders while the water swirled about her
armpits, and the little girl was holding her doll up above
her
shoulders, in the same
way. But isn’t that—the love—a part of the total? Of everything you have ever
done, or wished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave my post,
running, and what made me climb into Eleanor’s flyer and what made me fight my
way through the storm and out to that particular scene.

I didn’t get
there in time.

I shall never
forget how glad I was that someone else did. Johnny Keams blinked his lights
above me as he rose, and he radioed down:

“It’s all right.
They’re okay. Even the doll.”

“Good,” I said,
and headed back.

As I set the
ship down on its balcony landing, one figure came toward me. As I stepped down,
a gun appeared in Chuck’s hand.

“I wouldn’t kill
you, Juss,” he began, “but I’d wound you. Face that wall. I’m taking the flyer.”

“Are you crazy?”
I asked him.

“I know what I’m
doing. I need it, Juss.”

“Well, if you
need it, there it is. You don’t have to point a gun at me. I just got through
needing it myself. Take it.”

“Lottie and I
both need it,” he said. “Turn around!”

I turned toward
the wall.

“What do you
mean?” I asked.

“We’re going
away, together—now!”

“You
are
crazy,” I said. “This
is no time...”

“C’mon, Lottie,”
he called, and there was a rush of feet behind me and I heard the flyer’s door
open.

“Chuck!” I said.
“We need you now! You can settle this thing peacefully, in a week, in a month,
after some order has been restored. There
are
such things as divorces, you know.”

“That won’t get
me off this world, Juss.”

“So how is
this
going to?”

I turned, and I
saw that he had picked up a large canvas bag from somewhere and had it slung
over his left shoulder, like Santa Claus.

“Turn back
around! I don’t want to shoot you,” he warned.

The suspicion
came, grew stronger.

“Chuck, have you
been looting?” I asked him.

“Turn around!”

“All right, I’ll
turn around. How far do you think you’ll get?”

“Far enough,” he
said. “Far enough so that no one will find us—and when the time comes, we’ll
leave this world.”

“No,” I said. “I
don’t think you will, because I know you.”

“We’ll see.” His
voice was further away then.

I heard three
rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door. I turned then, in time to see the
flyer rising from the balcony.

I watched it go.
I never saw either of them again.

Inside, two men
were unconscious on the floor. It turned out that they were not seriously hurt.
After I saw them cared for, I rejoined Eleanor in the Tower.

All that night
did we wait, emptied, for morning.

Somehow, it
came.

We sat and
watched the light flow through the rain. So much had happened so quickly. So
many things had occurred during the past week that we were unprepared for
morning.

It brought an
end to the rains.

A good wind came
from out of the north and fought with the clouds, like En-ki with the serpent
Tiamat. Suddenly, there was a canyon of cobalt.

A cloudquake
shook the heavens and chasms of light opened across its dark landscape.

It was coming
apart as we watched.

I heard a cheer,
and I croaked in unison with it as the sun appeared.

The good, warm,
drying, beneficial sun drew the highest peak of Saint Stephen’s to its face and
kissed both its cheeks.

There was a
crowd before each window. I joined one and stared, perhaps for ten minutes.

When you awaken
from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruins lying about your bedroom.
This is one way of telling whether or not something was only a bad dream, or
whether or not you are really awake.

We walked the
streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was in basements and in
machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes closets. It was on buildings
and on cars and on people and on the branches of trees. It was broken brown
blisters drying and waiting to be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of
skytoads rose into the air when we approached, hovered like dragon-flies,
returned to spoiling food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a
heyday, too. Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or
fallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets. The dead
had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but sluggish and foul. A
stench was beginning to rise across the city. There were smashed-in store
fronts and there was glass everywhere, and bridges fallen down and holes in the
streets... But why go on? If you don’t get the picture by now, you never will.
It was the big morning after, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the
lot of mortal man always to clean up their leavings or to be buried beneath
them.