Complete Stories (12 page)

Harry and I went upstairs then to get one of the sandbags from the radiation lab. It was a good fifty kilos, and it took the two of us to get it down the stairs. Neither one of us is getting any younger.

Rosie was gone when we got back downstairs. “You shouldn’t have said that about the mind of a secretary,” I told Harry.

He sighed. “Ah, she’s always talking about that fantasy-land stuff. If only I could get her to take a night-school physics course. There’s wonder enough in pure science without going in for a lot of malarkey. And she still won’t give up on that trip business.”

We heaved the sandbag onto the chute and it slid down to rest by the cardboard box. Then Harry tossed a cap-shaped titaniplast hatch-cover in place. The gravitational field slammed it on tight. We stood clear and he tripped the release.

The enormously heavy sphere rumbled down the incline, past the middle and back up to the other wall. Then it came back. I thought of a bubble wand waving back and forth. I thought I could feel the gravity waves in the pit of my stomach.

“It’s not moving very fast, Harry.”

“Doesn’t have too. The dodecahedral field configuration is inherently unstable, especially with that space mix-master going. I bet it has pinched off five hyperspheres by now. Hear the air rushing in?”

Indeed there was a hissing to be heard over the rumble of the track. As the space inside the neutronium sphere was blown away, new space and new air had to seep in. I actually felt myself drawn towards the sphere again, but this time from across the room.

It took about ten minutes for the oscillations to dampen, for the sphere to stop rolling back and forth. When we slid the hatch-door over with a long stick there was nothing inside.

“We ought to send a radio-beacon through the next time,” Harry remarked. “Then we could hear if it resurfaced somewhere in our space.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Right now I want to celebrate. What do you say I take you and Rosie out for the best meal of your lives?”

But we couldn’t find Rosie anywhere. In fact, she never showed up at the office again.

It’s funny about a girl like that. I never noticed her much when she worked for me, but now…now I dream about her every night. So does Harry.

============

Written in Fall, 1979.

Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact
, September, 1980.

“Faraway Eyes” was the first story I sold to a mainline SF magazine, although by this time I’d serialized
Spacetime Donuts
in
Unearth
and I’d sold my novel
White Light
to both Virgin and Ace. But “Faraway Eyes” was my first “real” magazine sale.

“Faraway Eyes” introduces Joe Fletcher’s partner Harry Gerber. These are a very traditional SF pair of characters, whose roots go back to Robert Sheckley’s AAA Ace stories, to Henry Kuttner and beyond. Fletcher and Harry reappear in the stories “The Man Who Ate Himself,” “Inertia,” and in my novel
Master of Space and Time
.

I have the uneasy feeling that the various mass and size numbers in this tale are scientifically inaccurate. In later years I often had my engineer friend John Walker check the science in my writings.

20 January 1981
.

Pain again, deep in the left side of my face. At some point in the night I gave up pretending to sleep and sat by the window, staring down at the blind land-street and the deaf river.

The impossibility of connected thought. Several times I thought I heard the new body moving in the long basin.

It began snowing during the night. I opened both windows and hunched myself forward with my mouth open, drawing in deep, aching breaths. My hope: a perfect snowflake, if sucked down wholly and rapidly, might reach the black center of my lungs and freeze them solid. Imagine breathing water, breathing ice. Later, hearing the bells toll, I wept.

After Mema brought me my breakfast, she went out to clean away the melting snow. I stood well back from the window lest she see my cheers and gloating grimaces.

After clearing the sidewalk, she had not yet had enough of wielding her scrub-broom, and stepped, repeatedly and at great risk, into the heavy land-street traffic, trying to clear off
our half
. She has, in the years since I dissolved the marriage, become an automaton. I realize this with finality when I see her stare uncomprehendingly after the splashing motorwagons, which again and again cover
our half
of the street, and splatter her apron and her thick legs with the grey, crystalline frosting.

The suppressed laughter hurts my chest. I begin to cough and have to sit down on my bed. Here I sit, words crawling off my pen-point.

There are only four more pages left in this, the last volume of my fifty-seventh series of diaries. I must write less.

23 January 1981.

Three days of fever. Straightening my wet bedclothes, Mema found my special pictures, the Fast-Night groupings, and took them away.
What if Felice were to see them?

I have more pictures hidden in the attic, pictures I press to my ribs while I pour all my food out into the long basin. The new body is not so far along as I had hoped. There are still only the clotted fibers. It is strange that I could have thought otherwise.

25 January 1981.

Last night the worst yet. Dream: again Reb Pessin showing me the Book of Qlippoth, the secrets of immortality. A high buzzing, as of a tremendous propeller, drowns out his voice. The surprising weight of the little book. He makes a false gesture, and I spread out in space instead of time. A whole city where everyone wears my face, streets of women, the offices. A street-car conductor leaning over me, shaking with laughter, “If I were you …”

Awake before dawn. For the first time real fear that the new body will not be ready. But going into the attic with a candle, I see that all is well. Even the skin is finished.

26 January 1981.

Real sleep at last. Waking up, an unnatural feeling of lightness. So many memories are gone already, gone over.

I drank two cups of black tea with breakfast. Mema had to go back down to the kitchen for the second. When she brought it up, I had forgotten the first breakfast already, and asked her where it was. This is all as it should be. Soon I can begin again.

Yesterday, in a mood of wild exaltation, I mailed my remaining special pictures to Felice, first scribbling her real name on some of the women’s faces.

Now, cheerful and whistling from my sound sleep and my two cups of tea, I take pen in hand and compose another letter to her father:

-----

Honored Herr B!

I am not surprised that you have failed to answer my letters of 24.XII.80, 26.XII.80, and 15.I.81. You need not apologize! It is only right and natural that a man in your position must take thought,
in the interests of his daughter
, before moving to bind a marriage contract. The questions of my finances, age and health are undoubtedly your unspoken concerns.

As regards the question of age: I am forty-one, and
will remain so
. Although your daughter is now but twenty, she will in the course of time become sixty. Until that age, I vow to have and hold her as sole love-object. Frau Mema, my housekeeper and ex-wife, can attest to this.

My financial security is assured by certain interlocking fixed-interest annuities. I do not need to work, and I despise to do so. My
brutto
yearly income is in the excess of fifteen thousand thalers…not a figure to conjure with, but surely adequate for your little mouse’s needs.

The state of my health is a predictable matter. At present it is bad, and it will grow a bit worse. But next month, and in the summer, I will once again be fresh and strong. There can be no doubt of this.

Would a marriage date of February 30 be acceptable to you?

With high respect,

Franz K. LVII

-----

29 January 1981.

All evening, Mema watched television in the parlor, directly under my bedroom. The police were here yesterday, sent by Felice’s father.

They did not dare come up to me, and spoke only to Mema. I stood naked at the head of the stairs, baring my teeth and trembling with a fierce joy each time I glimpsed their green peaked caps. It struck me that the caps were living beings which
wear policemen
.

The excitement made me very weak, and all day I left the bed only to empty my cavities into the long basin. It is time to complete the task, to open my veins. Mema knows that today is the day, and under my feet she rocks and watches green, peaked caps move across the television screen.

30 January 1981.

LVIII is still waiting in the long basin behind the thin attic wall.

Last night I took candle and long knife and leaned over the basin, staring down through the thick, gathered fluids. The candle-wax dripped and sprung into little saucers, white disks that drifted down to rest on Franz LVIII’s closed eyelids. His mouth is set in a smile, as always.

I am not frightened of death, not after fifty-six times. But when my new body walks, the green, peaked caps will take it away. Herr B. must pay for this.

I have resolved to make him murder me. The exquisite uncertainty of
how he will do it
. I feel like a virgin bride.

Mema has gone to the butcher to buy two kilograms of blood-sausage. Tonight I will chew the sausage up for LVIII. My true blood must belong to Herr B.

31 January 1981.

The blood-sausage was everything I had ever dreamed it to be. Thick and dark, with the texture of excrement, the congealed pigs’ blood is stuffed into a greasy casing made of the animals’ own small intestines.

Leaning over the long basin, chewing and spitting up, I felt a disgust purer and more complete than anything I have experienced since the time of the camps.

The sausage-casing is stamped with repeated pictures of a pig wearing a crown and making obeisances. I have stretched the casing enough to wrap it around my waist, like the little tailor who killed seven with one blow.

The chewing of the sausage took a long time, and I fell asleep in a sort of ecstasy, with my forehead resting on the rim of the long basin. I awakened to a touch of LVIII’s hand, tugging petulantly at my hair. I started back, uncertain where I was, and heard the church tower toll three.

Filled with an implacable strength, I descended the stairs. Mema lay sleeping on her cot in the kitchen. I unplugged the phone and brought it upstairs. Then I crawled under my bed to muffle the sound, and dialed Felice’s number over and over.

The shining love-words dripped off my lips that still glistened with blood-sausage. My tongue felt slender, magically flexible, as if it could pierce the phone wires and the shell of her ear. After my second call, her father answered, and I gibbered like a golem, ever-new inspirations striking me with each call. I continued calling for two hours. They answered less and less often, and finally not at all. Now I have left my phone off the hook to keep theirs ringing.

Franz K. LVIII is sloshing about in the long basin, impatient for the final spark. The dawn strikes through my window and gilds this page, the last of this volume. Now, before Mema awakes, I must go to pound on Felice’s door, a long knife in my hand.

============

Written in Spring, 1980.

The Little Magazine
, Vol. 13, Nos. 3 & 4, 1982.

In Heidelberg I read and reread the Penguin Modern Classics edition of
The Diaries of Franz Kafka
. The physical setting of this story was the house of my Heidelberg friend Imre Molnar who lived down the hill from us on the Schlierbacher Landstrasse. Imre himself appears as Huba in
The Sex Sphere
, but he had nothing to do with the character in “The 57th Franz Kafka.”

The name for the story comes from the fact that the story is set in 1981, which was fifty-seven years after Kafka’s 1924 death. I used this story’s name for my first story anthology because I had the fantasy that people would like my stories so much that I would be considered a “new Franz Kafka”— certainly not the first “new Franz Kafka,” but maybe the fifty-seventh.

The Little Magazine
at that time was co-edited by David Hartwell, who’d eventually become my editor at Tor Books.

(With excerpts from Revell Gibson’s “Transdimensional Avatar.”)

Paris was backwards. Charlie Raumer sat on a patch of grass near the Louvre trying to straighten it out. The kids were fighting, Cybele wasn’t speaking to him, and all around was the mirror-image of the Paris he remembered from twelve years ago.

He buried his face in his hands, pushing at the misty red memories. He imagined a Paris made of glass, a relief map. If you looked at it from the wrong side, everything would be backwards, inside-out. He began tugging at the surfaces in his image to put them right. Something began…there was a heavy thud on his back.

It was Iris, the ten-year-old. “What’s the matter, Daddy, are you
drunk
?” She broke into a wild giggle at this sally, and her two little brothers joined in, pigs at the party. They piled onto his back with a confused squealing. Someone shrieked, “POKE!” and little Jimmy fell crying to the ground.

Raumer’s teeth clenched. “Iris, you stop it or …”

“It was Howard,” she yelled with a grimace at the larger of her two little brothers. Distrusting speech, Howard charged her, arms windmilling. Raumer seized the two and shook them hard. Their little faces looked crooked and ugly.

“Stop, stop, stop!” It was Cybele, back with a precious paper bag of postcards. When she was a girl she had spent every Sunday in the Louvre. But now that she was finally here again, her family had refused to come inside.

“Mine, Mama. Me.” Jimmy took an uncertain step forwards. Howard snaked past him and snatched the cards from his mother. Iris cross-checked Howard and they hit the ground together.

Raumer dealt out two back-handed slaps and recovered the cards. The printing on the museum shop bag was reversed. He wished he had never started fooling with the Hinton hypercube models.