Beyond the Farthest Suns (8 page)

Jerk crawled up from the blankets and squatted on Alista's chest, examining his face carefully with extended eyes.

“I don't want to die either,” Karen said.

Alista smiled in agreement. “I'll trade you places, little girl,” he said. “I'll take your loneliness for my quick end.”

“Maybe I'll be saved,” she said. “Maybe we can pass through the ring without hitting anything.”

She didn't cry for the old spaceman when he was gone. She walked to the lounge, taking the orange animal with her. She didn't have the strength to write any­thing, and it didn't much matter anyway, so she spoke out loud. She stroked the orange lump and talked of all the places and things she wanted to see again, and do again, all the people she wanted to meet again.

“There's my parents,” she said. Silence. “And Allen. And my friends at school. I would like to dance some more, but I'd probably never be any good. I'd like to …”

She was going to say “have children,” but that was too much to even begin to understand.

“I'll miss not seeing things again. There's the lake where we swam at Ankhar, with its snaky blue fish. And my room at—”

The Fall of the House of Escher

J
anet Berliner Gluckman asked me to contribute to a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories, to be selected and approved by David Copperfield, the magician. Each story would touch upon magic in some form or another. While I could easily imagine writing a fantasy story about magic, a science fiction story presented a bigger challenge. I grabbed up a few books about the history of legerdemain and stage magic, and soon had an idea.

A rather wealthy and powerful acquaintance, discussing the future of mass entertainment, once shook me by declaring, at the end of a conversation, “A hundred million people can't be wrong.”

I wasn't so sure.

I wondered whether an entertainer could ever possibly satisfy a hundred million people on a regular basis, without undergoing some sort of undesirable transformation.

I then upped the ante; how about a hundred billion people, all mesmerized by centuries of cleverly designed, spiritually empty corporate amusement. What would it take to satisfy them?

Edgar Allan Poe was, I thought, an appropriate inspiration for such a tale of illusion, show business, and fear. Connecting Poe to a charge of something like Cyberpunk makes this one of my most chilling and effective stories, I think.

 

“
Hoc est corpus,
” said the licorice voice. “Lich, arise.”

The void behind my eyes filled. Subtle colors pinwheeled against velvet. Oiled thoughts raced, unable to grab.

The voice slid like black syrup into my ears.

“Once dead, now quick. Arise.”

I opened my eyes. My fingers curled across palm, thumb touched pinkie, tack of prints on skin, twist and pull of muscles in wrist, the first things necessary. No pain in my joints. Hands agile and strong.

Tremors gone.

I shivered.

“I'm back,” I said.

“Quick and quick,” the voice said

I turned to see who spoke in such lovely black tones. My eyes focused on a brown oval like rich fine wood, ivory eyes with ruby pupils, face square and stern but untouched by age.

“How does it feel to be inside again, and whole? I am a doctor. You can tell.”

I opened my mouth. “No pain,” I said. “I feel … oily, inside. Smooth and slick.”

“Young,” the face said. I saw the face in profile and decided, from the timbre of the voice and general features, that this was a woman. The smoothness of her skin reminded me of the unlined surface of a painting. She wore long black robes from neck to below where I lay on an elevated bed or table. “Do you have memories?”

I swallowed. My throat felt cool. I thought of eating and remembered one last painful meal, when swallowing had been difficult. “Yes. Eating. Hurting.”

“Your name?”

“Something. Cardino.”

“Cardino, that's all?”

“My stage name. My real name. Is. Robert … Falucci.”

“That is right. When you are ready, you may stand and join them for dinner. Roderick invites you.”

“Them?”

“Roderick suggested you, and the five voted to bring you back. You may thank them, if you wish, at dinner.”

The face smiled.

“Your name?” I asked.

“Ont. O-N-T.”

The face departed, robes swishing like waves. Lights came up. I rolled and propped myself on one elbow, expecting pain, feeling only an easeful smoothness. I suspected that I had died. I surmised I had been frozen, as I had paid them to do, the Nitrogen Fixers, and that…

Lich,
she had called me. Body, corpse. In one of my flashier shows I had reanimated a headless woman. Spark coils and strobes and a big van de Graaf generator had made the hair on her severed head stand on end.

I slipped my naked legs down from the table, found the coolness of a tessellated tile floor. My fumbling fingers found the robe on the table as I stared at the ornate floor tiles: men and women, each perfectly joined in a flow of completion advancing to the far wall: courtship, embracing, copulation, birth.

I felt a sudden floating happiness.

I've made it
.

On a heavy black oak table, I found clothes set out that might have come from a studio costume department—black stiffly formal suit out of a 1930s society movie, something for Fred Astaire. To my chagrin, I tended to corpulence even in this resurrected state. I put the robe aside and stuffed myself into the outfit and poured a glass of water from a nearby pitcher. A watercress sandwich appeared and I nibbled it while exploring the room.

I should be terrified. I'm not. Roderick…

The table on which I had been reborn occupied the center of the room, spare and black and shiny, like a stone altar. It felt cold to my touch. A yard to the right, the heavy oak table supported my sandwich plate, the pitcher and glass of water, the discarded robe, and a pair of shoes.

Lich,
she had called me.

I stood in bright if diffuse illumination. No lights were visible. The room's corners lay in shadow. Armless chairs lined the wall behind me. A door opened in the next wall. Paintings covered the wall before me. The room seemed square and complete, but I could not find a fourth wall. No matter which direction, as I made a complete turn, I counted only three walls. The decor seemed rich and fashionable, William Morris and the restrained lines of classic Japanese furniture.

Obviously, not the next decade,
I thought
. Maybe centuries in the future.

I walked forward and the illumination followed. Expertly painted portraits covered the wall, precise, cold renderings of five people, three pale males and two dark females, all in extravagant dress. None of them were Roderick—if Roderick was who I thought he might be—and Ont did not appear, either. The men wore tights and seemed ridiculously well endowed, with feathers puffed on their shoulders and immense fan-shaped hats rising from the crowns of their close-cropped heads. The women wore tight-fitting black gowns, their reddish hair spread like sunbursts, skin the color and sheen of rubbed maple.

I wondered if I would ever find employment in this future world. “Do you like illusions?” I asked the portraits rhetorically.

“They are life's blood,” answered the male on the left, smiling at me.

The portrait resumed its old, painted appearance.

Assume nothing,
I told myself.

Startling patterns decorated the wall behind the portraits. Flowers surrounded and gave form to skull-shapes, eyes like holograms of black olives floating within petaled sockets.

“Where is dinner?” I asked.

This time, the portraits did not answer.

The room's only door opened onto a straight corridor that extended for a few yards, then sent me back to the room where I had been reborn. I scowled at the unresponsive portraits, then looked for intercoms, doorbells, hidden telephones. Odd that I should still feel happy and at ease, for I might be stuck like a mouse in a cage.

“I would like to go to dinner,” I said in my stage voice, precise and commanding. The door swung shut and opened again. When I stepped through, I faced another corridor, and this one led to a larger double door, half ajar.

I opened the door and stepped outside to an immense ruined garden and orchard, ranks of great squat thick trees barren of leaves and overgrown with brown creepers and tall, sere thistles spotted with patches of crusty black. Hundreds of acres spread over low desolate hills, and on the highest hill stood an edifice that would have seemed unlikely in a dream. It rose above the ruined gardens, white and yellow-gray, like ancient chalk—what must have once been a splendid mansion, its lowest level simple and elegant. An architectural cancer had set in, however, and tumorous wings and floors and towers and bridges thrust from the first floor with malign genius, twisting and joining in ways I could not make sense of. These extrusions reflected the condition of the garden: the house was overgrown, thick with its own weeds.

Beyond the house and land rose a sky gray and dull and threatening. Coils of cloud dropped from the scudding, ash-colored overcast like incipient tornadoes, and the air smelled of frustrated electricity and stale ocean.

A slender spike of alarm rose in me, then faded back into my euphoria at simply being alive and free of pain. It did not matter that everything in this place seemed nightmarish or out of balance. All would be explained, I told myself.

Roderick
would explain.

If anyone besides me could have survived into this puzzling and perhaps far future, it was the resourceful and clever friend of my youth, the only Roderick of my acquaintance: Roderick Escher. I could imagine no other.

I let go of the door and stepped out on a stone pathway, then turned to look back at the building where I had been reborn. It was small and square, simply and solidly constructed of smooth pieces of yellow-gray stone, without ornament, like a dignified tomb. Frost covered the stones, and ice rime caked the soil around the building, yet the interior had not been noticeably cooler.

I squared my shoulders, examined my hands one more time, flexed the fingers, and spread them at arm's length. I then swiped both of my hands before my face, as if to pass an imaginary coin, and smiled at the ease of movement. That established, I set out on the path through the trees of the ruined garden, toward the encrusted and cancerous-looking house.

The trees and thistles consented to my passage, seeming to listen to my footfalls with silent reservation. I did not so much feel watched as measured, as if all the numbers of my life, my new body, were being recorded and analyzed. I noticed as I approached the barren trunks, or the dry, lifeless wall of some past hedge, that all the branches and dry leaves were gripped by tiny strands of white fiber.
Spiders, mites,
I hypothesized, but saw no evidence of anything moving.

When I stumbled and kicked aside a clod of dry dirt, I saw the soil was laden with even thicker white fibers, some of which released sparkles like buried stars where tiny rocks had cut or scratched them.

As I walked, I dug with my toe into more patches, and wherever I investigated, strands underlay the topsoil like fine human hairs, a few inches beneath the dusty gray surface. I bent down to feel them. They broke under my fingers and the severed ends sparkled, but then reassembled.

The closer I approached, the house on the hill appeared even more diseased and outlandish. Among its many peculiarities, one struck me forcibly: with the exception of the ground floor, there were no windows. All the walls and towers rose in blind disregard of each other and of the desolation beyond. Moreover, as I approached the broad verandah and the stone steps leading to a large bronze door, I noticed that the house itself was layered with tiny white threads, some of which had been cut and sparkled faintly. What might have seemed cheerful—a house pricked along its intricate surfaces and lines by a myriad of stars, as if portrayed on a Christmas card—became instead flatly dreadful, dreadful in my inner estimation, yet flatly so because of my artificial and inappropriate
calm
.

Another wave of concern swept outward from my core, and was just as swiftly damped.
Part of me wants to feel fear, but I don't. Something in me desires to turn around and find peace again…

A
lich
would feel this way … Still half-dead.

From the porch, the house did not appear solid. Fine cracks spread through the stones, and to one side—the northern side, to judge from the angle of the sun—a long crack reached from the foundation to the top of the first floor, where it climbed the side of a short, stubby tower. I could easily imagine the stones crumbling. Perhaps all that held the house together were the white threads covering it like the fine webs of a silkworm or tent caterpillar.

I walked up the steps, my feet kicking aside dust and windblown fragments of desiccated leaves and twigs. The bronze door rose over my head, splotched with black and green. In its center panel, a bas relief of two hands had been cast. These hands reached out to clasp each other, desire apparent in the tension and arc of the phalanges and strain of tendons—yet the beseeching fingers did not touch.

I could not equate any of this with the Roderick I had known for so many years, beginning in university. I remembered a thin but energetic man, tall and handsome in an ascetic way, his hair flyaway fine and combed back from a high forehead, double-lobed with a crease between, above his nose, that gave him an air of intense concern and concentration. Roderick's most remarkable feature had always been his eyes, set low and deep beneath straight brows, eyes great and absorbing, sympathetic and sad and yet enlivened by a twist and glitter of sensuous humor.

The Roderick I remembered had always been excessively neat, and concerned about money and possessions, and would have never allowed such an estate to go to ruin … Or lived in such a twisted and forbidding house.

Perhaps, then, I was going to meet another of the same name, not my friend. Perhaps my frozen body had become an item of curiosity among strangers, and resurrection could be accomplished by whimsical dilettantes. Why would the doctor suddenly abandon me, if I had any importance?

The bronze door swung open silently. Along its edges and hinges, the fine white threads parted and sparkled. The door seemed surrounded by tiny embers, which faded to orange and died, silent and unexplained.

Within, a rich darkness gradually filled with a dour luminosity, and I stepped into a long hallway. The hallway twisted along its length, corkscrewing until wall became floor, and then wall again, and finally ceiling. Smells of food and sounds of tableware and clinking glasses came through doors at the end of the twisted hall.

I followed the smells and the sounds. I had expected to have to scramble up the sloping floor, to crawl down the twisted hall, but up and down redefined themselves, and I simply walked along what remained, to my senses, the floor, making a dizzy rotation, to a dining room at the very end. Doors swung open at my approach. I expected at any moment to meet my friend Roderick—expected and hoped, but was disappointed.