The Very Best of F & SF v1 (54 page)

The antenna.

Even driving the
pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach its base.

On the morning
of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her breakfast and ran for
the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to be had for hundreds
of miles around.

I listened to
her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.

She came back,
pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag. “Pee into this,”
I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up positive.

“Victoria,” I
said. “I’ve got an admission to make. I haven’t been exactly straight with you
about the medical consequences of your... condition.”

It was the only
time I ever saw her afraid. “My God,” she said, “What is it? Tell me! What’s
happening to me?”

“Well, to begin
with, you’re pregnant.”

There were no
roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off. It lay
nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and trackless
plains about it, you’d think there was neither reason for its existence nor
possibility of any significant traffic there.

Yet the closer
we got, the more people we saw approaching it. They appeared out of the
everywhere and nothingness like hydrogen atoms being pulled into existence in
the stressed spaces between galaxies, or like shards of ice crystallizing at
random in supercooled superpure water. You’d see one far to your left, maybe
strolling along with a walking stick slung casually over one shoulder and a
gait that just told you she was whistling. Then beyond her in the distance a
puff of dust from what could only be a half-track. And to the right, a man in a
wide-brimmed hat sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle of a native parasite
larger than any elephant. With every hour a different configuration, and all
converging.

Roads
materialized underfoot. By the time we arrived at the terminus, they were
thronged with people.

The terminal
building itself was as large as a city, all gleaming white marble arches and
colonnades and parapets and towers. Pennants snapped in the wind. Welcoming
musicians played at the feet of the columns. An enormous holographic banner
dopplering slowly through the rainbow from infrared to ultraviolet and back
again, read:

BYZANTIUM PORT AUTHORITY

MAGNETIC-LEVITATION MASS TRANSIT DIVISION

GROUND TERMINUS

Somebody later
told me it provided employment for a hundred thousand people, and I believed
him.

Victoria and I
parked the truck by the front steps. I opened the door for her and helped her
gingerly out. Her belly was enormous by then, and her sense of balance was off.
We started up the steps. Behind us, a uniformed lackey got in the pickup and
drove it away.

The space within
was grander than could have been supported had the terminus not been located at
the cusp of antenna and forehead, where the proximate masses each canceled out
much of the other’s attraction. There were countless ticket windows, all of
carved mahogany. I settled Victoria down on a bench— her feet were tender—and
went to stand in line. When I got to the front, the ticket-taker glanced at a
computer screen and said, “May I help you, sir?”

“Two tickets,
first-class. Up.”

He tapped at the
keyboard and a little device spat out two crisp pasteboard tickets. He slid
them across the polished brass counter, and I reached for my wallet. “How much?”
I said.

He glanced at
his computer and shook his head. “No charge for you, Mister Daniel.
Professional courtesy.”

“How did you
know my name?”

“You’re expected.”
Then, before I could ask any more questions, “That’s all I can tell you, sir. I
can neither speak nor understand your language. It is impossible for me to
converse with you.”

“Then what the
hell,” I said testily, “are we doing now?”

He flipped the
screen around for me to see. On it was a verbatim transcript of our
conversation. The last line was: I SIMPLY READ WHAT’S ON THE SCREEN, SIR.

Then he turned
it back toward himself and said, “I simply read what’s—”

“Yeah, yeah, I
know,” I said. And went back to Victoria.

Even at mag-lev
speeds, it took two days to travel the full length of the antenna. To amuse
myself, I periodically took out my gravitometer and made readings. You’d think
the figures would diminish exponentially as we climbed out of the gravity well.
But because the antennae swept backward, over the bulk of the grasshopper,
rather than forward and away, the gravitational gradient of our journey was
quite complex. It lessened rapidly at first, grew temporarily stronger, and
then lessened again, in the complex and lovely flattening sine-wave known as a
Sheffield curve. You could see it reflected in the size of the magnetic rings
we flashed through, three per minute, how they grew skinnier then fatter and
finally skinnier still as we flew upward.

On the second
day, Victoria gave birth. It was a beautiful child, a boy. I wanted to name him
Hector, after my father, but Victoria was set on Jonathan, and as usual I gave
in to her.

Afterward,
though, I studied her features. There were crow’s-feet at the corners of her
eyes, or maybe “laugh lines” was more appropriate, given Victoria’s
personality. The lines to either side of her mouth had deepened. Her whole face
had a haggard cast to it. Looking at her, I felt a sadness so large and
pervasive it seemed to fill the universe.

She was aging
along her own exponential curve. The process was accelerating now, and I was
not at all certain she would make it to Sky Terminus. It would be a close thing
in either case.

I could see that
Victoria knew it too. But she was happy as she hugged our child. “It’s been a
good life,” she said. “I wish you could have grown with me—don’t pout, you’re
so solemn, Daniel!—but other than that I have no complaints.”

I looked out the
window for a minute. I had known her for only—what?—a week, maybe. But in that
brief time she had picked me up, shaken me off, and turned my life around. She
had changed everything. When I looked back, I was crying.

“Death is the
price we pay for children, isn’t it?” she said. “Down below, they’ve made death
illegal. But they’re only fooling themselves. They think it’s possible to live
forever. They think there are no limits to growth. But everything dies— people,
stars, the universe. And once it’s over, all lives are the same length.”

“I guess I’m
just not so philosophical as you. It’s a damned hard thing to lose your wife.”

“Well, at least
you figured that one out.”

“What one?

“That I’m your
wife.” She was silent a moment. Then she said, “I had another dream. About your
magician. And he explained about the drug. The one he called mortality.”

“Huh,” I said.
Not really caring.

“The drug I
took, you wake up and you burn through your life in a matter of days. With the
new version, you wake up with a normal human lifespan, the length people had
before the immortality treatments. One hundred fifty, two hundred years—that’s
not so immediate. The suicides are kept alive because their deaths come on so
soon; it’s too shocking to the survivors’ sensibilities. The new version shows
its effects too slowly to be stopped.”

I stroked her
long white hair. So fine. So very, very brittle. “Let’s not talk about any of
this.”

Her eyes blazed “Let’s
do!
Don’t pretend to be a
fool, Daniel. People multiply. There’s only so much food, water, space. If
nobody dies, there’ll come a time when everybody dies.” Then she smiled again,
fondly, the way you might at a petulant but still promising child. “You know
what’s required of you, Daniel. And I’m proud of you for being worthy of it.”

Sky Terminus was
enormous, dazzling, beyond description. It was exactly like in Vickie’s dream.
I helped her out onto the platform. She could barely stand by then, but her
eyes were bright and curious. Jonathan was asleep against my chest in a
baby-sling.

Whatever held
the atmosphere to the platform, it offered no resistance to the glittering, brilliantly
articulated ships that rose and descended from all parts. Strange cargoes were
unloaded by even stranger longshoremen.

“I’m not as
excited by all this as I would’ve been when I was younger,” Victoria murmured. “But
somehow I find it more satisfying. Does that make sense to you?”

I began to say
something. But then, abruptly, the light went out of her eyes. Stiffening, she
stared straight ahead of herself into nothing that I could see. There was no
emotion in her face whatsoever.

“Vickie?” I
said.

Slowly, she
tumbled to the ground.

It was then,
while I stood stunned and unbelieving, that the magician came walking up to me.

In my
imagination I’d run through this scene a thousand times: Leaving my bag behind,
I stumbled off the train, toward him. He made no move to escape. I flipped open
my jacket with a shrug of the shoulder, drew out the revolver with my good
hand, and fired.

Now, though...

He looked sadly
down at Victoria’s body and put an arm around my shoulders.

“God,” he said, “don’t
they just break your heart?”

I stayed on a
month at the Sky Terminus to watch my son grow up. Jonathan died without
offspring and was given an orbital burial. His coffin circled the grasshopper
seven times before the orbit decayed and it scratched a bright meteoric line
down into the night. The flare lasted about as long as would a struck sulfur
match.

He’d been a good
man, with a wicked sense of humor that never came from my side of the family.

So now I wander
the world. Civilizations rise and fall about me. Only I remain unchanged. Where
things haven’t gotten too bad, I scatter mortality. Where they have I unleash
disease.

I go where I go
and I do my job. The generations rise up like wheat before me, and like a
harvester I mow them down. Sometimes—not often—I go off
by
myself, to think and remember. Then I stare up into the night, into the
colonized universe, until the tears rise up in my sight and drown the swarming
stars.

I am Death and
this is my story.

Return to Table of
Contents

Terry Bisson
is the author of
Voyage to the Red Planet, Talking Man,
and
another dozen novels and works of nonfiction. He is also a prodigious
short-story writer, and we’ve had the good fortune to publish some of his best
stories in
F&SF.
“macs” is obviously inspired by the
1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but it takes the material to another level.

What
did
I
think
? Same thing I think today. I thought it
was slightly weird even if it was legal. But I guess I agreed with the families
that there had to be Closure. Look out that window there. I can guarantee you,
it’s unusual to be so high in Oklahoma City. Ever since it happened, this town
has had a thing about tall buildings. It’s almost like that son of a bitch
leveled this town.

Hell, we wanted
Closure too, but they had a court order all the way from the Supreme Court. I
thought it was about politics at first, and I admit I was a little pissed. Don’t
use the word pissed. What paper did you say you were with?

Never heard of
it, but that’s me. Anyway, I was miffed—is that a word? miffed?—until I understood
it was about Victims’ Rights. So we canceled the execution, and built the vats,
and you know the rest.

Well, if you
want to know the details you should start with my assistant warden at the time,
who handled the details. He’s now the warden. Tell him I sent you. Give him my
regards.

I thought it
opened a Pandora’s box, and I said so at the time. It turns out of course that
there haven’t been that many, and none on that scale. The ones that there are,
we get them all. We’re the sort of Sloan-Ketterings of the thing.

See that scum on
the vats? You’re looking at eleven of the guy who abducted the little girls in
Ohio, the genital mutilation thing, remember? Even eleven’s unusual. We usually
build four, maybe five tops. And never anything on the scale of the macs.

Build, grow,
whatever. If you’re interested in the technology, you’ll have to talk with the
vat vet himself. That’s what we call him, he’s a good old boy. He came in from
the ag school for the macs and he’s been here in Corrections ever since. He was
an exchange student, but he met a girl from MacAlester and never went home. Isn’t
it funny how that stuff works? She was my second cousin, so now I have a Hindu
second cousin-in-law. Of course he’s not actually a Hindu.

A Unitarian,
actually. There are several of us here in MacAlester, but I’m the only one from
the prison. I was fresh out of Ag and it was my first assignment. How would one
describe such an assignment? In my country, we had no such... well, you know.
It was repellent and fascinating at the same time.

Everyone has the
cloning technology. It’s the growth rate that gives difficulty. Animals grow to
maturity so much faster, and we had done significant work. Six-week cattle,
ten-day ducks. Gene tweaking. Enzyme accelerators. They wanted full-grown macs
in two and a half years; we gave them 168 thirty-year-old men in eleven months!
I used to come down here and watch them grow. Don’t tell anyone, especially my
wife, Jean, but I grew sort of fond of them.

Hard? It was
hard, I suppose, but farming is hard too if you think about it. A farmer may
love his hogs but he ships them off, and we all know what for.

You should ask
legal services about that. That wasn’t part of my operation. We had already
grown 168 and I had to destroy one before he was even big enough to walk, just
so they could include the real one. Ask me if I appreciated that!

It was a second
court order. It came through after the macs were in the vats. Somebody’s bright
idea in Justice. I suppose they figured it would legitimize the whole operation
to include the real McCoy, so to speak, but then somebody has to decide who
gets him. Justice didn’t want any part of that and neither did we, so we
brought in one of those outfits that run lotteries, because that’s what it was,
a lottery, but kind of a strange one, if you know what I mean.

Strange in that
the winner wasn’t supposed to know if he won or not. He or she. It’s like the
firing squad, where nobody knows who has the live bullets.

Nobody is
supposed to know who gets the real one. I’m sure it’s in the records somewhere,
but that stuff’s all sealed. What magazine did you say you were with?

Sealed? It’s
destroyed. That was part of the contract. I guess whoever numbered the macs
would know, but that was five years ago and it was done by lot anyway. It could
probably be figured out by talking to the drivers who did the deliveries, or
the drivers who picked up the remains, or even the families themselves. But it
would be illegal, wouldn’t it? Unethical, too, if you ask me, since it would interfere
with what the whole thing was about, which was Closure. Victims’ Rights. That’s
why we were hired, to keep it secret, and that’s what we did. End of story.

UPS was a
natural because we had just acquired Con Tran and were about to go into the
detainee delivery business under contract with the BOP. The macs were mostly
local, of course, but not all. Several went out of state; two to California,
for example. It wasn’t a security problem since the macs were all sort of
docile. I figured they were engineered that way. Is engineered the word?
Anyway, the problem was public relations. Appearances, to be frank. You can’t
drive around with a busload of macs. And most families don’t want the TV and
papers at the door, like Publishers Clearing House. (Though some do!) So we
delivered them in vans, two and three at a time, mostly in the morning, sort of
on the sly. We told the press we were still working out the details until it
was all done. Some people videotaped their delivery. I suspect they’re the ones
that also videotaped their executions.

I’m not one of
those who had a problem with the whole thing. No sirree. I went along with my
drivers, at first especially, and met quite a few of the loved ones, and I wish
you could have seen the grateful expressions on their faces. You get your own
mac to kill any way you want to. That’s Closure. It made me proud to be an
American even though it came out of a terrible tragedy. An unspeakable tragedy.

Talk to the
drivers all you want to. What channel did you say you were with?

You wouldn’t
have believed the publicity at the time. It was a big triumph for Victims’
Rights, which is now in the Constitution, isn’t it? Maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, it
wasn’t a particularly what you might call a pleasant job, even though I was all
for the families and Closure and stuff and still am.

Looked like
anybody. Looked like you except for the beard. None of them were different.
They were all the same. One of them was supposedly the real McCoy, but so what?
Isn’t the whole point of cloning supposed to be that each one is the same as
the first one? Nobody’s ever brought this up before. You’re not from one of
those talk shows, are you?

They couldn’t
have talked to us if they had wanted to, and we weren’t about to talk to them.
They were all taped up except for the eyes, and you should have seen those
eyes. You tried to avoid it. I had one that threw up all over my truck even
though theoretically you can’t throw up through that tape. I told the
dispatcher my truck needed a theoretical cleaning.

They all seemed
the same to me. Sort of panicked and gloomy. I had a hard time hating them, in
spite of what they done, or their daddy done, or however you want to put it.
They say they could only live five years anyway before their insides turned to
mush. That was no problem of course. Under the Victims’ Rights settlement it
had to be done in thirty days, that was from date of delivery.

I delivered
thirty-four macs, of 168 altogether. I met thirty-four fine families, and they
were a fine cross-section of American life, black and white, Catholic and
Protestant. Not so many Jews.

I’ve heard that
rumor. You’re going to have rumors like that when one of them is supposedly the
real McCoy. There were other rumors too, like that one of the macs was pardoned
by its family and sent away to school somewhere. That would have been hard. I
mean, if you got a mac you had to return a body within thirty days. One story I
heard was that they switched bodies after a car wreck. Another was that they
burned another body at the stake and turned it in. But that one’s hard to
believe too. Only one of the macs was burned at the stake, and they had to get
a special clearance to do that. Hell, you can’t even burn leaves in Oklahoma
anymore.

SaniMed
collected, they’re a medical waste outfit, since we’re not allowed to handle
remains. They’re not going to be able to tell you much. What did they pick up?
Bones and ashes. Meat.

Some of it was
pretty gruesome but in this business you get used to that. We weren’t supposed
to have to bag them, but you know how it is. The only one that really got to me
was the crucifixion. That sent the wrong message, if you ask me.

There was no way
we could tell which one of them was the real McCoy, not from what we picked up.
You should talk to the loved ones. Nice people, maybe a little impatient
sometimes. The third week was the hardest in terms of scheduling. People had
been looking forward to Closure for so long, they played with their macs for a
week or so, but then it got old. Played is not the word, but you know what I
mean. Then it’s bang bang and honey call SaniMed. They want them out of the
house ASAP.

It’s not that we
were slow, but the schedule was heavy. In terms of what we were picking up,
none of it was that hard for me. These were not people. Some of them were
pretty chewed up. Some of them were chewed up pretty bad.

I’m not allowed
to discuss individual families. I can say this: the ceremony, the settlement,
the execution, whatever you want to call it, wasn’t always exactly what
everybody had expected or wanted. One family even wanted to let their mac go.
Since they couldn’t do that, they wanted a funeral. A funeral for toxic waste!

I can’t give you
their name or tell you their number.

I guess I can
tell you that. It was between 103 and 105.

I’m not ashamed
of it. We’re Christians. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
trespass against us. We tried to make it legal, but the state wouldn’t hear of
it, since the execution order had already been signed. We had thirty days, so
we waited till the last week and then used one of those Kevorkian kits, the
lethal objection thing. Injection, I mean. The doctor came with it but we had
to push the plunger thing. It seems to me like one of the rights of Victims’
Rights should be—but I guess not.

There was a
rumor that another family forgave and got away with it, but we never met them.
They supposedly switched bodies in a car wreck and sent their mac to forestry
school in Canada. Even if it was true, which I doubt, he would be almost five
now, and that’s half their life span. Supposedly their internal organs harden
after ten years. What agency did you say you were with?

We dropped ours
out of an airplane. My uncle has a big ranch out past Mayfield with his own
airstrip and everything. Cessna 172. It was illegal, but what are they going to
do? C’est la vie, or rather c’est la mort. Or whatever.

They made us
kill him. Wasn’t he ours to do with as we liked? Wasn’t that the idea? He
killed my daddy like a dog and if I wanted to tie him up like a dog, isn’t that
my business? Aren’t you a little long in the tooth to be in college, boy?

An electric
chair. It’s out in the garage. Want to see it? Still got the shit stain on the
seat.

My daddy came
home with a mac, and took my mother and me out back and made us watch while he
shot him. Shot him all over, from the feet up. The whole thing took ten
minutes. It didn’t seem to do anybody any good, my aunt is still dead. They
never found most of her, only the bottom of a leg. Would you like some
chocolates? They’re from England.

Era? It was only
like five years ago. I never took delivery. I thought I was the only one but I
found out later there were eight others. I guess they just put them back in the
vat. They couldn’t live more than five years anyway. Their insides turned hard.
All their DNA switches were shut off or something.

I got my own
Closure my own way. That’s my daughter’s picture there. As for the macs, they
are all dead. Period. They lived a while, suffered and died. Is it any
different for the rest of us? What church did you say you were with?

I don’t mind
telling you our real name, but you should call us 49 if you quote us. That’s
the number we had in the lottery. We got our mac on a Wednesday, kept him for a
week, then set him in a kitchen chair and shot him in the head. We didn’t have
any idea how messy that would be. The state should have given some instructions
or guidelines.