Against the Day (28 page)

 
“I say, ’Wood, isn’t there a story about you out there,
dispatching a coolie or something with a Borchardt? “

“He was looking at me strangely,” I
said. It is as far as I have ever gone with that story.

“How’s that, ’Wood? ‘strangely’?
What’s that?”

“Well I didn’t exactly ask him what
it meant, did I? He was Chinese.”

The company, fitful, uneasy, half of
them down with fever of some kind, shrugged and went jittering on to other
topics.

“Back in ’95, Nansen’s plan on his
final northward journey was eventually, as the total load grew lighter, to kill
sled dogs one by one and feed them to the rest. At first, he reported, the
other dogs refused to eat dogflesh, but slowly they came to accept it.

“Suppose it were to happen to us, in
the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for
similar purposes, and being out on
a mission of comparable desperation,
as
its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be
slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat
their flesh.”

“Oh, dear.” The General’s wife put
down her utensils and gazed at her plate.

“Sir, that is disgusting.”

“Not literally, then
. . .
but we do use one another, often
mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience
. . .
each of us knowing that at some
point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless
waste.”

“You refer to present world
conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”

“There appears to be little
difference. How else could we have come to it?”

“Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well,
what’s the next step—human to what? Some
compound organism,
the
American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has
recognized legal personhood—a new living species, one that can outperform
most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful
he is.”

“If that brings you comfort, believe
it. I believe in incursion from elsewhere. They’ve swept upon us along a broad
front, we don’t know ‘when’ they first came, Time itself was disrupted, a
thoroughgoing and merciless forswearing of Time as we had known it, as it had
gone safely ticking for us moment into moment, with an innocence they knew how
to circumvent
. . . .
”

It was understood at some point by
all the company that they were speaking of the unfortunate events to the north,
the bad dream I still try to wake from, the great city brought to sorrow and
ruin.
eaving the Arctic wastes,
Inconvenience
pressed southward, using as much fuel as they dared, jettisoning all the
weight they could afford to, in a desperate attempt to reach the city before
the steamer
EtienneLouis Malus.

“I cannot but wonder what is to
become of those unfortunate devils,” brooded Chick Counterfly.

The sombre brown landscape of north
Canada, perforated with lakes by the uncountable thousands, sped by, a league
below them. “Great place to buy lakefront property!” cried Miles.

The scientists of the Vormance
Expedition had continued to believe it was a meteorite they were bringing back,
like Peary and other recent heroes of science. Given the long history of meteor
strikes in the Northern regions, more than one reputation had been made with
rented ships and deferred payrolls, and a few wishfully stormfree weeks up
there cruising some likely iceblink. Just before the discovery, the Vormance
team, scrutinizing the sky, had certainly been shown signs enough. But who
could have foreseen that the farfallen object would prove to harbor not merely
a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well, and a plan for carrying it out?

“It deceived us into
classifying
it
as a meteorite, you see
. . . .
”

“The object?”

“The visitor.”

“Your whole Expedition got hypnotized
by a rock? that what you’re asking us to believe?” The Board of Inquiry was
meeting in upper rooms of the Museum of Museumology, dedicated to the history
of institutional collecting, classifying, and exhibiting. A decision to ration
the whiskey supply had managed only to hasten a descent into incivility, which
all the newspapers, whatever their arrangements with power, would comment upon
in days to follow. From these turret windows, one might view some goodsize wedges
of the city, here and there all the way to the horizon—charred trees
still quietly smoking, flanged steelwork fallen or leaning perilously, streets
near the bridges and ferry slips jammed with the entangled carriages, wagons,
and streetcars which the population had at first tried to flee in, then
abandoned, and which even now lay unclaimed, overturned, damaged by collision
and fire, hitched to animals months dead and yet unremoved.

Before the disaster the whiskered
faces at this long curved table, expressing such offended righteousness,
belonged merely to appointees of a Mayor no more dishonest than the standards
of the time provided for—Tammanoid creatures, able to deliver votes when
required on a scale suitable to membership on this upstart museum’s Board of
Overseers. Unlike those who sat on the boards of more exalted institutions,
none here possessed a fortune or a family pedigree—city folk, few of them
had observed so much as a stationary star, let alone one of the falling sort.
Eminent scientific witnesses, who before the Events might have held these
politicos in light regard, now could not meet their steady, and from time to
time inquisitorial, gazes. Today to a man they were become Archangels of
municipal vengeance, chiefly because no one else was available for the
task—the Mayor and most of the City Council having been among the
incendiary Figure’s first victims, the great banks and trading houses in severe
disarray even yet, the National Guard broken in spirit and fled, vowing to
regroup, into New Jersey. The only organized units to brave the immediate
aftermath were the White Wings, who with exemplary grit continued to go wading
into the inconceivable cleanup job with never less than their usual cheer and
discipline. Today, in fact, the only signs of human movement in all the
desolate posturban tract one could see from here were a small party of the
pithhelmeted warriors, accompanied by a refuse wagon and one of the last live
horses in the Metropolitan area.

Sometimes this inquiry board held
night sessions, striding in the side entrance, where the enfeebled and
unprotected had learned to come and wait for as long as they must. The Museum
at night presented a vista of earthbound buttresses, unlighted and towering,
secret doorways between bays, several miniature streetlevel beer gardens
within, remaining open until late, through the kindness and wisdom of the
precinct police—block after block of sloping masonry, a sooty yellow in
this growing dark, indistinct, as if printed out of register.

“The Eskimo believe that every object
in their surroundings has its invisible ruler—in general not
friendly—an enforcer of ancient, indeed prehuman,laws, and thus a Power
that must be induced not to harm men, through various forms of bribery.” At
mention of the timehonored practice, Commissional ears were observed to develop
sharp points and to tilt forward. “It was thus not so much the visible object
we sought and wished to deliver to the Museum as its invisible
ruling
component.
In the Eskimo view, someone of our party, by failing to perform
the due observances, showed deep disrespect, causing the Power to follow its
nature, in exacting an appropriate vengeance.”

“Appropriate? given the great loss of
property, not to mention innocent life
. . .
appropriate to what, sir?”

“To urban civilization. Because we
took the creature out of its home territory. The usual sanctions—bad ice,
blizzards, malevolent ghosts—were no longer available. So the terms of
retribution assumed a character more suitable to the new surroundings—fire,
damage to structures, crowd panic, disruption to common services.”

It had become quite unpleasant that
night. This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its
background rumble of anxiety. Anyone who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily
that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one
consultation with somebody—that “there would always be time,” as citizens
liked to put it. But that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast
even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of
anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed. That’s about as
closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most
inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. Down the years of
boom and corruption, they’d been warned, repeatedly, about just such a
possibility. The city more and more vertical, the population growing in
density, all hostages to just such an incursion
. . . .
Who outside the city would have imagined them as victims
taken by surprise—who, for that matter, inside it? though many in the
aftermath did profit briefly by assuming just that affecting pose.

They had established few facts. Deep
downtown, where a narrow waterway from long ago still ran up into the city, a
cargo ship had arrived, in whose hold, kept in restraints more hopeful than
effective, stirred a Figure with supernatural powers, which no one in its
asyetunwritten history had ever known how to stop. Everyone in town seemed to
know what the creature was—to have known all along, a story taken so for
granted that its comingtrue was the last thing anybody expected—including
what its pitiless gifts would mean for any populace they might be unleashed
upon—whereas, oddly, none of the men of science who had brought it here,
the old polar hands, living only a few metal corridors away, all of its journey
south, had so much as guessed.

Now, knowing perfectly the instant of
arrival, having willed itself up to the necessary temperature, it began,
methodical and unrelenting, to burn its way out of its enclosure. Those who had
chosen to stay aboard ship for as long as possible, one by one, as in a kind of
moral exhaustion, let go, tumled into flight, up the ladders, out the hatches,
away over the brow and down into the thoroughfares of the city. But with only
dwindling moments of normal history remaining, where could any of them have
found refuge in time? No escort of Tenderloin toughs, no chamber of privilege
however deep within the anchors of any of the great bridges, no trainor
watertunnel could have preserved even one of these impure refugees from what
was to come.

Fire and blood were about to roll
like fate upon the complacent multitudes. Just at the peak of the evening
rushhour, electric power failed everywhere throughout the city, and as the gas
mains began to ignite and the thousand local winds, distinct at every
streetcorner, to confound prediction, cobblestones erupted skyward, to descend
blocks away in seldom observed yet beautiful patterns. All attempts to
counterattack or even to avoid the Figure would be defeated. Later, fire alarms
would go unanswered and the firemen on the front lines find themselves too soon
without reinforcement, or the hope of any. The noise would be horrific and
unrelenting, as it grew clear even to the willfully careless that there was no
refuge.

The mobilization was citywide as
reports flew of negotiations with visitors unnamed, military leaves canceled,
opera performances cut in half—arias, even famous ones, omitted altogether—to
allow for early audience dismissal, railway stations echoing with troop
movement, card and dice games up Tenderloin alleyways rudely interrupted and
usually at critical moments, fear among the populace of twilight hours too
abruptly extended, of indistinct faces, of high windows and what might, for the
first time in civic memory, plausibly enter there
. . . .

There was debate in the aftermath
about what had happened to the Mayor. Fled, dead, not right in the head, the
theories proliferated in his absence. His face appeared on bills posted all
over the wood fences around vacant lots, the rear ends of streetcars, its
alltoofamiliar bone structure shining with the unforgiving simplicity of a
skull. “Remain indoors,” warned bulletins posted on the carbonized walls over
his signature. “This night you will not be welcome in my streets, whether there
be too many of you or too few.”

As the daylight left the city that
night, the streetlamps were not up to anything like their usual candlepower. It
was difficult to make out anything clearly. Ordinary social restraints were apt
to be defective or not there at all. The screaming that went on all night,
ignored as background murmur during the day, now, absent the clamor of street
traffic, had taken on urgency and despair—a chorale of pain just about to
pass from its realm of the invisible into something that might actually have to
be dealt with. Figures which late at night appeared only in levels of gray were
now seen to possess color, not the fashionable shades of daytime but blood
reds, morgue yellows, poison greens.