Can and Can'tankerous (17 page)

The sickly-colored pink-gray-black-off-green-orange ball that was the Six minus one—Five, it would be—rolled in the sticky, humid air of the jungle world.

“Wh-what is this place?” Sarna asked, realizing for the first time that they had set down on a world new to man, for Earthmen had not penetrated beyond Pluto, and this world was obviously not of the Solar System.

“Do you not recognize this world?” asked the Six- minus-one.

“No…what…”

Then they revealed the truth to her, and it registered, and she was startled, for it was Earth itself. Earth, as it would be in another hundred years. Not crowded with level-cities and spires and the free commerce of the New System under Terra Central, but a stinking, steaming jungle, filled with weird beasts and slimy swamps.

“
What have you done?
”
she screamed at them.

“Nothing…yet,” the Six-minus-one chuckled, and withdrew her from the Earth of one hundred years hence.

“But we have Five to rescue first, before we decide what will be done in this universe,” said the almost-Six.

Then there was a snap, and a wrench, and they were back on the rubble-strewn street of the Mars Dome.

She looked around and saw the Esso Building, and the dead Earthmen lying in the gutters, and the bands of marties patrolling the streets. A huge, soft globular ball rolled and rolled in the air.

“Mars. You are back, we are back, we are nearly whole and Six!” screeched the high-whine voice of the almost-Six as it tumbled and hurled and spun in the air. “After millennia, I am almost myself.”

Sarna wanted to be sick. Now she knew what she had done; she had allowed herself to be deluded by this insane creature behind its mask of helpfulness. And so simply…so like a human!

Now she
knew
why the Six had been split apart by Time and Chance and the works of Man. For the Six was an insane creature; it was old, true. Over a million years old, but the moods it suffered were childish. No, the Six was not an infant—it was incredibly ancient.

And in its senility, it had reverted to a second childhood!

And yet…why was
she
involved? Sarna was confused, sick with misery and a sense of overwhelming tragedy. She was certain now that the Six would kill her once it had found its final segment, wherever it might be. The life she had led had been a shadowy thing, at core unpleasant and degrading, yet she had respected herself, and that had kept her from regretting too much. But to die like this; to have been the dupe of an insane creature beyond imagination, who would now rule the Universe like a crazyhouse, with Mars no fit place for Man or martie, who could alter Earth so billions died, and Terra Central was smashed, and only jungle left—jungle in which the time-flow would warp itself so that two segments of the Six could live there and not live there, out of time, waiting for a Terran prostitute named Sarna to come and bring them to the others.

It was all so hideous, such a travesty, and she wondered inside herself when they would kill her.

“Kill you?” asked almost-Six.

“Yes,” she said defiantly, and her mind was so filled with terror that she could barely keep from trembling. “You’ll kill me; you’ll kill everyone; you’re insane; when you have no further use for me!”

The almost-Six laughed and rolled about, and hurled itself at a martie, who died screeching as the ball that was the Six-minus-one passed through his body. “You still do not know! You still think we have tolerated your puny Terran self because you are a human, is that it?” asked the almost-Six.

“What are you talking about?” Sarna asked, suddenly confused. The radiation pains were gone from her arm; her head was suddenly clear.

“You are the last segment of my entity,” screamed the almost-Six insanely. “You are Five, the arms! You did not think this was your form, did you? Have not your racial memories been released from the crypt of your brain where they have lain unused for a million years? Do you not wish to return to your body, your actuality, your place as ruler of the Universe?”

Pain!

Sarna screamed. Her hands clawed at the sides of her face and ripped at her blonde hair, and then suddenly the barriers shattered in her mind and a flood of memories poured back.

A million years of memories.

A million years of changing and altering and being a tree and a starfish and an unnamed bit of dirt and a strange thought-pattern on one world and a light-cycle on yet another, and finally being Sarna the prostitute.

It all opened to her, and she screamed and screamed and screamed as she realized there had been nothing normal in all her life. That she was not under thirty years old, but was over a million. Senile and reeking with the decay that only age beyond Forever can bring…and she wanted death again, as violently as she could, and as completely.

“Yes! Yes! I will merge with you! I will join my brothers, my body, my one, my all!” she screamed, and then all the flaming cosmic power of her mind joined with theirs, and the joining was the last link in the mental armor that made the six into the Six. The ball rolled in the sky, for now its full potential had been reached and surpassed. It spun huge and sentient, the six separate parts as one being.

Inside the Six somewhere, the little section that had been the mind-matter of Sarna the imp from the Red Dog House plotted and schemed, and thought.

Duped?

Yes, easily, by an intellect as old as the stars and as mad as time rampant. As evil as the Coalsack and as self-centered as a sun.

A sun! That was the answer. The secret. The only way out. That was the way it had to be, the way she would make it!

For Sarna there was no future as a segment of an insane gestalt entity reliving its youth by decimating the Universe; that was no life, but an eternal death.

The answer lay in the Sun.

She willed the body of the Six to rise, to leave the atmosphere of Mars. She willed Three to mylite them into space, and once there she
set
the body revolving about the Sun with great speed and great verve.

“Oh, what a pleasure, to dive into the Sun—oh what great joy! To go that way all warm and bright!”

The other five heard, and the single soul that was the center of the Six concurred. How clever was Five, how very very clever to think of this new pleasure for our jaded soul.

Mars, Sarna thought to herself. How I let myself be led by emotion into believing it was Terran property; by what right does Earth rule the planet Mars…?

By what right does any race enslave another? To let Terra rule the marties—even if they
are
a decaying race and will bungle the job—would be as rotten as to let this creature of which I am part and soul rule the Universe. Let the marties die their own way, with nobility if they wish, or not, if they wish. That is their right. They were on Mars first, they are first to ruin it if they wish.

So it should be with Earth, and so it should be with any man or any world or any intelligence.

And then, without regret, yet sustaining a scintilla of love and pity for Sarna—whom she had been and who would be no more—she plunged with her Six into the Sun.

And was no more.

And they died happily ever after.

What happened was that my entire

right side had given out, and was paralyzed.

I didn’t know it. 

I lay there for exactly fifteen minutes. 

Then I heard Susan and my associate pull

up in the driveway, about twenty feet

behind me. The door was standing wide open

and I was lying in the front hall.

They came in and they stood over me. 

The first words I heard were

“Why are you lying on the floor?” 

To which I, in horribly Harlan-esque terms,

responded instantly—in the same words with which

Napoleon responded when asked why he’d invaded

Russia in the winter and gotten his ass whupped—

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Y
ou’ve asked me to file the report, so that’s what I’m doing. But this is also my resignation notice. It was a miserable, meanspirited job you stuck me with, and I hated even the
idea
of doing it. But I did it. I did as I was told, I suppose, because I’ve been with WorldSpan (formerly Blackstar Holdings [Pty.] [Ltd.]) since you recruited me out of the U. of Chicago twenty years ago, and like a good obedient dog I was part of that generation between the Baby Boomers and GenX that believed Daddy Corporation would take care of me all the way to senescence. And I
was
your good little running dog, did whatever you asked, didn’t weigh the ethical freight, swallowed hard sometimes as I watched the knives go in, but I just intoned the mantra
I don’t want to get involved
,
it ain’t none of my business.
I ate those fat paychecks and never got bulimic.

But this time, oh boy
this
time it couldn’t be swallowed. I particularly hated it, Howard, when you gave me the assignment and said it was apropos that
I
be the one to carry it out, seeing as how my name is Charles Trimbach. You laughed at that. You and Barry, both of you thought it was hilarious: “trim back” was a terrific play on words for such a puke job you wanted done. I couldn’t swallow hard this time; it made my gorge buoyant. And the lesson I learned, if it’s a lesson at all, is what prompts my resignation.

I quit, WorldSpan. Howard, Tom Jr., Kincaid, all the rest of you, on the 44
^th
floor. I’m done. Take the fat paycheck and stuff it. Done, fellahs. But I’m dogtrot trained; a lot of years; so here’s my last piece of work. The report. Pardon the casual tone. But you notice: I didn’t once use the eff-word.

The flight was late coming into Chicago Midway; and by the time the cab dropped me off in Old Town on the corner of N. Wells and Wieland it was coming up on late afternoon, early evening. Even with all the gentrification, it was still a sweetly raffish part of town. Jammed crisscross at the proper hemlines of Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, what was left of Old Town still sucked up all the light and breathed back disturbing shadows. In a few more years everything between N. La Salle and Larrabee would be so squeaky clean you’d have to clear it with the condo committee to import even a tiny sinful act. But on this bitter cold February afternoon, with the blade of wind slicing in off the lake, turning my bones to tundra, it was the old vengeful Chicago I’d grown up in.

And I got lost.

I
always
got lost in Old Town. Somewhere near Elm and Hill I turned the wrong way, got twisted, and wandered for the better part of an hour. Then, some dim memory of my childhood kicked in, and as I passed a sweep of vacant shops with the blind eyes of upstairs apartments reflecting the last tremor of setting sunlight, I saw the mouth of the dark alleyway that was my landing site. How I’d recalled it, over decades, I don’t know. But there it was; and I crossed the street and stepped into dim shadowed yesterday.

There was a paper flower shoppe, and a guitar repair joint, and an antiques/collectibles store; and wedged in between the guitar emporium—with a really cherry 1947 Les Paul “Broadcaster” hanging in the fly-specked front window—and the scentless dried brayera trying to look brave like a Victorian ruined garden…

There was the map shop. As neat and clean and brightly painted as a little red wagon on Christmas morning. The shop of maps in which labored a man named Abner Wonacott. The old guy you had sent me to fire. Charlie Trimbach, come to “trim back” that old cartographer in a store that shouldn’t have existed, but did. Maybe it always had.

In hundreds of adventure movies, there’s always a map of some strange, lost land. In Muslim mythology it’s Kaf, the mountain range that circles the earth. In THE ODYSSEY it was Ogygia, the island where Calypso kept Odysseus a captive. If you went looking for King Kong it was “2 south, 90 east, latitudes way west of Sumatra, southwest to Skull Island.” The Garden of Eden, Barsoom, Asgard and Midgard, Atlantis and Avalon, the Catacombs of Rome, Mount Olympus, Oz, Nepenthe, Lilliput, Islandia, Hy-Brasil, Lemuria. 

Did you never wonder where do these maps come from? 

Who makes these maps?

By what arcane mappery do these cartographs come to be? What nameless Mercator or Henry the Navigator, what astonishing Ptolemy or Kropotkin, beat the paths to Narnia and lost Hyperborea and the Fountain of Youth?

Who, did you ever ask yourself, who? What mapmaker sat and actually drew the lines and shapes? To all those
terra incognita
venues.

One of those things no one really thinks about. You hear a story about some expedition going to Mt. Everest—“Chomolungma” the Mother Goddess of the Earth—because they’ve got a highly reliable map of the terrain where the
yeti
mates; or Sotheby’s has auctioned off for two million five a map—highly reliable—that locates El Dorado; or the Seven Cities of Cíbola; or the fabulous sunken islands of Gunnbjorn Ulfson between Iceland and Greenland; the
real
Yoknapatawpha County; the
real
Grover’s Mill that changed its name and altered its city limits after that Sunday night radio broadcast on CBS in October of 1938; the
real
location of Noah’s ark at 17,000 feet above the Aras River plain but
not
atop Mount Ararat; you hear these stories, and you may wonder for an instant…

Where did such a map come from?

The last survivor of a Norwegian barque. The rambling mad foot-soldier who emerged from the jungle after six months missing. The withered septuageneric Cree by the side of the road selling potions and talismans. The gypsy fortune teller. The speaking-in-tongues child who has been blind since birth.

There’s always a chain of provenance; and it’s always bogus. Comes to as dead an end as
terra incognita
itself. Yet the maps do exist. They come into the hands of the L. Frank Baums and the Edgar Rice Burroughses and the Ponce de Leons, Samuel Butlers and St. Thomas Aquinases. But, do you ever ask yourself, where did
they
…how did
they…
come by these amazing—highly reliable—charts? Who draws the map that shows the entrance to the mountain where the children of Hamelin disappeared? Who describes latitude and longitude of the tropical island beyond Anacapa where Amelia Earhart came down safely and hid from the Japanese fleet? How does the singular cartographer get a highly reliable tracing of the rocky battered shore of Lemuria and the Kingdom of Prester John and the Well of Souls?

Did you ever ask that kind of question?

I never did, Howard, till that shadowy alleyway in Old Town on a bitter chill late afternoon in February.

What interior landscape I could see through the elegant gray-glass of the central pane of the ornately-carved teak front door of the map shop was inchoate, indeterminate, yes a
terra incognita
. Absolutely appropriate. The handsomely whittled wooden sign that hung by brass chains at 90° to the storefront read:

INCOGNITA, INC.

A. Wonacott, Prop.

I turned the bright shining gold handle of the front door, the handle in the shape of a sextant, and let the warmth from within flow out around me in the dark alley.

Then I stepped inside the curious map shop.

Understand something: I had been born and raised in Chicago, I had been away a long time, I had been married and widowed, I had a grown son and daughter who no longer needed my daily attention and who lived half a continent away, I had been a loyal corporate tool for most of my adult life, and I was solidly grounded in the pragmatic world, what they call the Real World, the continuum as received safely and sanely by those who renew their driver’s license regularly and who watch their saturated fat intake. I do not go off on flights of fancy.

Now let me describe Incognita, Inc. to you.

All I knew was that WorldSpan had acquired this enterprise, this supposedly “mom ’n’ pop” shop, line-item-buried on a Schedule of Assets & Liabilities, on the second-to-the-last page of a thick sheaf of wholly-owned subsidiaries of the mega-conglomerate WorldSpan had murdered in the takeover. Then had begun the pogrom, the flensing, the “de-accessioning” of properties that did not breathlessly contribute to the bottom line. The memo you e-mailed me, if you recall, Howard, used the phrase
cease and terminate this operation
.

But there had been no phone number, no fax number, no e-mail address, nothing but the shop number in a tiny commercial alleyway I couldn’t find on the most detailed city map of Chicago. And so you had me fly to Old Town.

To trim back one Abner Wonacott, who apparently had been the owner and sole employee of Incognita, Inc., at this odd location, for what seemed to be—in spotty records—sixty-five years. And now I stood inside the door, and now I looked upward, and now I looked around, and now I found myself unable to grasp what I was seeing, here, inside this tiny shop.

Outside. Very small.

Inside. Vast.

I don’t mean to tell you it was large. Large is the rotunda of Grand Central Station. Large is the St. Peter’s Basilica. Large is Hanging Rock in Australia. This was vast. Narrow, but vast. It stretched out beyond the logical, codifiable, eyesight-correct limit that Euclidean space acknowledged. The horizon line was invisible. There was no back wall to the shop. It all just stretched on out of sight, vast and deep, and going on and on till it came to a blurred point somewhere a million or so miles back there at the rear of the shop. On either side of me the walls rose straight up without break, and both walls were nothing but deep cubbyholes, hundreds of them, thousands of them, uncountable perhaps
millions
of them. Up and up and up into some sort of inexplicable ceilingless ionosphere, where clouds and chirruping creatures moved lazily. And in every cubbyhole there was a rolled map, or a group of rolled maps. Hundreds of maps, thousands of maps, uncountable perhaps…

And clambering all over those two walls of cubbyholes, were the tendrils of the most luxurious liana vines I’ve ever seen. Dark green and lustrous, the vines writhed upward and downward and from side to side, wrapping themselves about a map roll here, a pair of papyrus charts there, then extricating their tendril ends from the cubby and slithering swiftly across the face of the wall—sometimes hurling themselves full across the shop to the wall opposite—and then fled rearward, to extend their length to an unknown destination far away in the cloudy foggy misty backland of Incognita, Inc.

It was, truly, the jungle telegraph. Possibly a kind of fern FedEx. Delivery by botanical messenger.

And right in front of me, not ten steps inside the front door, was the (apparently) sole living employee of this soon-to-be-terminated establishment, Abner Wonacott. Prop.

He sat high up on a bookkeeper’s stool, something hugely Dickensian in appearance, like one of those old woodcuts by “Phiz” or Cruikshank from DOMBEY AND SON or A CHRISTMAS CAROL. The desk at which he worked was a very tall slant-top, tulip stenciled with tapering legs framed with cross stretchers. The grain identified it as a very old mahogany.