Shatterday (17 page)

Wait: for energy to be brought forward to the end of time from all of the past that still lived in the megaflow. Wait: for those who had a stake in their revival to earn their freedom. Wait: for loved ones to journey into the dangerous past to steal minutes, hours, days. Wait: for the anti-entropic heat-energy to be generated by pivotal events that the nine thousand created in the past; events programmed by those who danced their dance here at Rubble Point, at the end of time.

Ahna slept, waiting.

And her erg counter was less than one-fourth filled.

He stood before the vault, staring in at her sleeping features. A sleep more than merely sleep; endless if he could not trade worthless trinkets for vital energy. The powerstone, for instance. A trinket. A child's plaything here at Rubble Point. But to a young man whose present was codified as March 21, 1967 … a heart's desire.

The ten thousand bartered at the very best rate of interest.
Caveat emptor.
They traded toys for time. Time against the onrush of nothingness; time as heat-energy; time as a weapon, the only weapon that could halt the Mad Conqueror, Entropy. What was it the young man had said?
What's in it for you?

Everything.

Survival. Existence. Life. Being. Everything.

Purchasable only in The Shoppe of Wonders.

"She'll be a long time coming out," said a voice beside him. Lhayne heard the voice, but was too overcome with the sight of Ahna, too mortified by what he had done, too sunk in his own thoughts of the past, the present, the hopelessness of a future without her to comprehend what had been said.

He looked the wrong way. Then he looked to his left and saw the old woman. She had obviously chosen to remain an old woman, had not bothered reassembling herself into a younger body. "I beg your pardon," he said.

"I see her counter's way down," the old woman said, moving closer to the erg counter and scrutinizing it very carefully. "My son's in the next vault. I come here every chance I get. I know he can't hear me but I come and stand and talk to him; I tell him it won't be much longer."

Lhayne looked around at the next vault. The erg counter was only a hair below full. How long had this old woman been working to buy her son's freedom? She looked five thousand years old.

"All he needs is one little boost and I can get him out," she said. There was a tone beneath the tone in her voice. "You know, such a little boost wouldn't make much difference to you, and your lady. She has such a long way to go… ."

He knew what she wanted. They hung around the vaults night and day. Beggars of time.

"Leave me alone," he said, turning back to Ahna's lovely sleeping face.

"You wouldn't keep a mother from her only son, would you? I can see what a good person you are, how much you love your lady… ."

"
Get away from me, you thug!
" he screamed.

The old woman snarled something obscene and her atoms began to shift. She re-formed. She was younger than Lhayne, and wickedly beautiful, with a hunger in her face that he knew could only be assuaged by the man in the vault.

"You'd better let me take that boost," she said, the hunger in her face distorting her beautiful features. "Or I'll make you sorry you ever lived!"

It was idle malevolence, utterly without possibility of being implemented. They were immortal, replenishable, inviolate against assault. But she had clearly gone mad, and the sight of the naked lunacy terrified Lhayne. He had seen other examples of this imprisoned madness. They were
all
going crazy, out here where time and space came to an end and the pressure from outside could be felt as filth on the skin. He wondered if what he had done with that foul little young man in the shoppe was
his
most recent manifestation of insanity.

He started to edge away from her.
Goodbye, Ahna.

This beggar of time had blighted his moment with Ahna. He hated her. But could do nothing to get even with her.

And why should be bother? Her misery was far greater than any he could impose.
Goodbye, Ahna. Goodbye.

He ran away from the screaming beggar, with her voice echoing foulnesses down the crystal corridors.

•

When he returned to the shoppe, one of the Supervisors was waiting for him.

"I've been looking through your ledger," the Supervisor said. Lhayne had no idea which one this was; it might have been Dorell or Keys or even Kathrhn with her atoms rearranged to form a blank mask without features. "Your last trip produced some variations in the megaflow that could not be ignored. Why did you do it? You certainly couldn't have thought you'd get away with it?"

"I read his mind. He was a filthy little scum."

"Nonetheless!"

"Don't yell at me."

"This isn't a game, friend Lhayne. This is survival."

"It's always survival. But not necessarily Art."

"Oh yes. I'd forgotten. You're still calling yourself an artist, aren't you?"

"That's what I am. It's the correct word."

The Supervisor snickered. There were no features to the mask, so it was impossible to tell how much of a sneer accompanied the sound. "Correct? Perhaps operable is what you mean. An Artist who is himself the Art. Standing in a public place and letting rain wash over you, and calling it 'Rebirth.' Crawling through broken glass till your body is torn and calling it 'The Eternal Apollonian-Dionysian Conflict.' I suppose that's Art."

"I don't tell you how to supervise."

"Art criticism is as old as Art."

"I rearrange the universe. That is the nature of my Art."

"No, friend Lhayne: we
all
rearrange the universe. What's left of it. The ten thousand of us, here at the end of time. That is the nature of survival."

"My
personal
universe, then. I rearrange that."

The Supervisor picked up the ledger. "But you may
not
rearrange it for the rest of us. We are all precariously balanced; we each pay our way; there is no room for self-indulgence."

"No room for freedom, you mean."

"There is no freedom in oblivion." The Supervisor shoved the ledger toward Lhayne. "
These
gave us our freedom."

The ledger was filled, page after page. Deals. Sales. Time bought with toys. The ability to mold a bear out of clay, the artistic eye, and the basis of god-worship … sold to a nameless australopithecene in South Africa. The "way of seeing" that turned a pointed stick used for scratching in the earth into the first spear … sold to a bright-eyed Neanderthaler in Pleistocene Prussia. The ultimate weapon, gunpowder, sold to a mandarin warlord in Choukoutien village. God-sight, sold to Joan of Arc. The concept of the assembly-line, sold to Henry Ford. Page after page, line after filled line, each one signed with a smeared name or illiterate mark of identification. Signed as if the quill had been dipped in some watery, vital fluid more binding than blood, some fluid that might serve as an energy conductor. Michelangelo, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Pasteur, Méliès, Freud, Jefferson, Roger Williams, Confucius. Names, thousands of names that meant nothing against the pull of the Infinite Dark Mass save as moments of rearranged time that bought survival.

Lhayne stared numbly at the ledger and knew he had been wrong. The madness he had seen in the beggar of time in the corridor of the vaults had possessed him, might soon possess them all. And then what point was there to survival?

He wanted to say
I'm sorry,
but the artist in him would not let the words emerge. It was stronger than the frail human being that contained the artistic spirit. It knew there was only one thing that stood between humanity and the engorgement of the Infinite Dark Mass. And it was not merely the frantic need to survive. There was survival … and there was something finer, greater beyond survival. What was existence without Art? Empty as the Infinite Dark Mass that gnawed at the perimeters of Rubble Point.

"Your trips are ended," the Supervisor said.

It was said without feeling, but a tone crept through from behind the mask.

"I'll find another way of buying her freedom. She deserves to live."

"No doubt."

"I'll find another way."

"I think not, friend Lhayne. Your own account will be overdrawn because of this." He pointed to the last entry … the young man who had bought the powerstone for two dollars and a measure of the past. "I'm afraid there's a vault waiting for you."

Lhayne wanted to beg him,
Put me in the vault beside her; there's one about to be emptied right beside Ahna
. But the Supervisor was already making a sign in the air. Lhayne's body began to bubble and scintillate. Then it was gone.

The shoppe was silent.

Pressure from outside came through the walls. Cancerous darkness lapped at the stasis field.

The Supervisor sighed. It was never easy. But neither was survival.

•

The grubby young man had taken only one more step when he heard the voice behind him. "Hey! You!"

He turned. The shoppe that had been gone a moment before, was back again. Appear, disappear, appear again …

He stopped. The young woman with the long blonde hair was standing in the open doorway, motioning to him urgently. "Hey, come on back. He sold you the wrong stone."

He hesitated. The powerstone was warm in his hand. Unnaturally warm. It was beginning to be uncomfortable.

He turned and walked back. She was extraordinarily beautiful. She held out the octagonal stone he had wanted to select before the old man made him buy the diamond-shaped one. "Better take this one," she said, smiling up at him with affection. Then a shadow came over her face, her eyes seemed to darken as though she saw something disturbing, and then the smile was strong again. "This is the one you want."

"Where's the old man?" he asked.

"He was just minding the place for me; just a replacement. He's always making some kind of stupid mistake. We want our customers to be satisfied; better take this one."

He handed her the diamond-shaped stone, now almost unbearably hot. He took the octagonal stone. It was cool and seemed to radiate power. Yes, this was the right one.

"I still want to know," he said, "what do you get out of this? Who are you, how do you make a living in a place like this?"

"Just serving the community and the commonweal, that's the only reward we get. A force for good in your time." Her smile was fixed, implacable, eternally sincere.
Caveat emptor.

She held the diamond-shaped stone that would have killed him the first time he tried to use it, and she stared at him with her alabaster smile, and she knew what forces had been set in motion by his ownership of the stone that would make people do what he wanted them to do. And she thought of the thousand in their vaults, now one thousand and one. She thought of friend Lhayne and his Ahna who would remain in their vaults perhaps until the universe was reborn, because there was no one who had the spare time to buy them
their
time. And she wanted the young man to go away and begin fulfilling the destiny that would produce antientropic energy by hastening the onrush of the Infinite Dark Mass.

"Is there anything else?" she asked.

"He wrote down my name."

"Yes. That's just company policy. So we have a record."

"Who sees that record?"

"No one, Mr. Manson. That's just for our files."

"He wrote Charles. That's not right. It's Charlie. Can you change it?"

"We won't have to. It's all right."

He started to walk away. "It's Charlie; don't forget."

There was Art, and there was survival, and sometimes they were mutually exclusive.

The voice came from a swirling matrix of white mist that twisted inside the shoppe.
We won't forget
. And the door slammed. And the shoppe was gone. And the grubby young man turned once more onto Jamshyd Avenue; and was, in a moment, a part of the crowd, and a part of the Infinite Dark Mass.

With a grateful nod to the writings
of Michael Moorcock.

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Art, someone said, is meant to clarify and elucidate complex experience.

This story is intended as clarification and elucidation. The topic under discussion is friendship. As I warned earlier in these pages, this is the long one that forms the core of the collection. It is 22,300 words in length, and it has taken me about twelve years to write it. No, I don't mean I've spent the last twelve years working on this piece to the exclusion of all others … I mean it's been perking and getting itself born for that long. I knew bits and pieces of it a long time ago; but other parts I simply wasn't old enough or self-aware enough to understand.

I'm not saying I'm any smarter now than when I first went at this idea. What I
am
saying is that some stories refuse to let you at them until they're sure you know what the hell you're doing.

(Later on in this book there's a story I wrote before it was ready to be written. I've included it because it's a recent work and I want it in print; but before this book makes the transition from copyedited manuscript to galleys I'll try to thrash the bejeezus out of that story in hopes I've learned enough in the last two years to make it come right. If not, you'll read a crippled thing. I don't have to tell you which one it is: you'll know.)

This is my most recent writing. It tries to deal with just what we mean when we say of someone else, "He's my friend."

One time I was arrested and canned for being an "outside agitator" in Valdosta, Georgia. I was not alone; there were quite a few other "outside agitators" who also get swept up by the Laws. But I suppose it was my assertion that I could not possibly be an "outside agitator" because I was a member of the human race, a citizen of the world, just another link in the chain, that prevented me from paying the fine like the others, and being carted to the state line for instant dispersal. They decided to hold me for a few days, just to teach me a lesson.