Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (467 page)

Parmin suggests the group’s orchestra hold a farewell concert for the entire Cabal. He asks specifically for a Beethoven concerto.

Then it is time.

The Arks lift in battle formation, and take the picket ships completely by surprise, high above the jagged highlands of the moon’s limb. The jailers barely get out a distress call before they are annihilated.

One Ark developed engine trouble, didn’t it? Its crew and supplies were transhipped and it was buried in a cave…Then, one by one, the Arks peeled off to seek their diverse destinations…

* * * *

Imagine a young pilot who locks his controls, then rises to face the woman standing behind his chair.

“Marry me, pretty lady. Will you? I’ll put the stars in your ring. You shall have a galaxy for a tiara.” He takes her by the waist and raises her high, to the cheers of his crewmates.

Laughing gray eyes…She strokes his hair and bends over to kiss him. “Silly boy. We’re already married. Besides, I don’t want galaxies. Just one planet. That’s all.”

He lowers her and holds her close.

“Then a planet you shall have …”

* * * *

Her breath against my neck is very warm. Her breast rolls silkily against my side.

I chose Elise because she seemed the antithesis of my former life. No one would expect to find me—to find my former self—with her, just as They would not look for someone fixing motorcycles in his living room and watching pimply kids in a country bar.

Yet she is life to me now, is she not? Where would I be without you, Elise, to anchor me to this world?

By their own laws They are sworn not to harm the innocent, though they would kill me on sight. Perhaps, though, when the manhunt ends and I am found, they may find it expedient to bend their rules and eliminate her as well, in case I had talked.

I shudder at the thought. That was one of the reasons for Chuck’s antiintellectualism in the first place, to keep from letting even a word slip. Perhaps the best thing to do, the most honorable thing, would be simply to leave.

I seem to be oscillating between flashes of painful memory and numbing calmness. Right now the pendulum is swinging back again. Suddenly everything is stark and shimmering. My head feels light, like crystal.

Over the night sounds of the suburbs I can hear horns of the boats on the distant river. I can feel Elise’s heartbeats as I hold her. The textures that I see, in the car, in the brick wall outside my window, are vivid and intricate…like a pattern of hieroglyphs whose meanings dance at the edges of understanding.

Would reliving the past help Janie? Or Parmin or Walter, or any of the others? How would it help to remember a terrible, useless, one-sided battle that stretched over kiloparsecs and climaxed in smoke and stench and roiling flames under a lonely mountain?

Calmness settles in for real. The unwelcome acuity drifts away, unlamented. Holding Elise in the dark, I hardly sense the passage of time.

* * * *

After a nameless interval I return, cursed still with this compulsion to narrate. It is getting a bit chilly in here, and I long for sleep.

Gently I disengage Elise and fumble the keys into the ignition lock. She, with her eyes far away, straightens her clothes. “We ought to get some of the other bikers together and throw some kind of going-away party for Alan,” she suggests. I nod and grunt amiably as I turn the keys.

Nothing. “What the …?”

Check neutral, try again.

Zilch.

My gaze drops to the headlights switch. They were left on six hours ago, when I came in for work. Now, why did I do a fool thing like that?

There’s Elise’s old Peugeot across the lot. Typically on Fridays we come to the Yankee separately and go home together. The Yankee’s lot is safe.

“Come on, we’ll have to use your car tonight, Elise.” I open my door.

She looks up with a sleepy smile, then her eyes widen. “But…but my car is a mess!”

For as long as I’ve known her she’s always been reluctant to let me near her car. When we use it she always has to “straighten it up” first. She finds excuses to keep me from driving it.

Can you beat that? She’d give me her entire bank account if I asked for it, but I don’t have a key to her frigging car. She stands up to me there, though while she’s making excuses her voice quavers. I can’t figure it, but I recognize guts when I see it. Maybe that’s why I went along with it until now. For standing up to Chuck on this one small point I think I love her a little.

But tonight has been hell and I’m in no mood to walk six miles.

“Come on, Elise. You can drive but we’ve got to use your car. I’m exhausted and I want to got to bed.”

She hesitates. Her brown eyes dart from me to the Peugeot. Then she jumps out with a forced laugh. “I’ll race you there!”

Hell, she knows I always let her win. Except when we’re playing “catch me and ravish me.” But this isn’t one of those times.

When I arrive she’s already behind the wheel. “Beat you again!” She giggles.

I shrug and get in, much too numb to try figuring her out. I’ll make this as painless as possible for her by slumping down and pretending to go to sleep.

Unfortunately, the images await me. Nowhere can I find peace.

* * * *

Clouds part on greens and blues and browns…a lake-speckled forest that almost stings with beauty…creatures of a million shapes, all strange and new, fill the air and land and seas…

Like a bubble blown across light-years, a ship settles down—gently, as if loath to disturb the loveliness.

It is a good omen, to be arriving in peace…

* * * *

There is a feeling I used to get quite often when I was young, that I was being watched by omniscient beings.

It wasn’t the same as the shadow I have lived under in recent times. Though powerful, my enemies are not all-seeing.

No. Back then, when I was a boy, it seemed as if the universe possessed a Big Eye, and a distinct taste for drama. Always I felt as if I were the central character in a great play.

To the Big Eye it wasn’t important that you actually did anything. Even standing still watching the seagulls could be dramatic. Noble thoughts and grand unseen gestures were what it valued most of all—the secret unrewarded honesties—the anonymous charities and the unrequited loves.

For a time, when I was a kid, it was very clear to me that the proverbial tree falling in the unpeopled forest was, indeed, heard.

Maybe it was crap like that that got me into this mess. Hell, Freud took the whole thing apart long ago.

But long after I’d dismissed the Big Eye as an ego-displacement dream—a pseudo-Jamesian experience—I found it still beside me, hovering nearby as I agonized over every major decision in my life.

Where has it gone? I wonder. Did it leave me before the Breakout? Or did it follow me to Canaan, and experience with us our lovely doomed joy?

The rumble of the car massages my back as we pull out of the lot and onto the damp streets. I’m feeling sad, but peaceful. Maybe I would go to sleep if only Elise would drive less erratically. She seems to be in a godawful hurry to get home. I sense a shift from green to amber through my closed lids, and the brakes suddenly come on.

I have to put my hand to the dashboard as several items tumble out from beneath my seat.

“Hey! Take it easy!”

She laughs. But there seems to be a new level of panic in her eyes. “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust an expert driver?”

“Ha ha. Just try not to kill us within a mile of home, okay?” I look down at the junk that came out from under the seat. There’s a little stereo playback and headphones, and a small bound notebook. I look up. The light is still red. Elise faces ahead, her face pale.

“What are these?”

She jerks her head, half looking at me. “What are what?”

“This tape player. Is this your deep, dark secret?” I smile, trying to put her at ease.

“N—no. It—it belongs to a friend. She left it in the car when we went to lunch. I’ve got to get them back to her on Monday.”

“What has she got on the tape?”

“Nothing. Just some classical music, I guess. She likes that sort of thing.”

Oh, yeah. Curiouser and curiouser. I look up and see that the light has changed and nod at the road ahead. She turns to start the car rolling again, woodenly staring ahead of her.

As Elise drives I sit there with the incriminating items on my lap. It’s a bit embarrassing. I’m tempted to put the recorder and notebook back under the seat, despite my curiosity.

She’s driving slowly now, concentrating on the road. At this rate it will be a while before we arrive. Elise doesn’t appear to be watching so I slip on the headphones and start the player. There is a faint hissing as the tape leader passes the heads. I settle down and close my eyes. After months of avoiding anything that even vaguely resembles “highbrow” music, it might be nice to hear anything Elise might choose to call classical, even if it’s just a violin rendition of “Yellow Submarine.”

There is the sound of a phonograph needle coming down. Then gently, a piano begins to play. Before the third note is struck my back is a mass of goose bumps and my breath is frozen in my chest…a wave of alienation overwhelms me…I cannot move, even to turn the machine off.

The Fourth Concerto.

Beethoven.

It’s the von Karajan production I’ve listened to a thousand times.

The Fourth Concerto. It was the last piece performed by the group orchestra just before we broke up to board the Arks. Parmin had specifically requested it.

I protested. I was out of practice. But he would have his way, always. And Janie…(Gray eyes laughing over a silver flute …) she insisted as well. During those last two weeks, while we waited for the last ship parts, we practiced.

I can feel them now, the keys. The crafty idiosyncracies of that old Steinway. The loving clarity that could be coaxed from her. And in the orchestra, Janie’s flute was like a soft unjealous wind, forgiving me the infidelity of this other great love…

Out of practice or not, it was like nothing else—that last night on Earth—except, perhaps, the glory of flying.

Parmin was very kind afterward, though I don’t imagine I’ll ever know what our benefactor really thought of the performance. His was the Ark that rose first. The one bound for far Andromeda. The only one, I think, that got away.

The others? Three I know were tracked and destroyed. Two others They claimed to have found. I believe them.

Did any other survivors make it back here, to hide like rats among people who have no idea what happened in secret in their own skies?

We left after a night of Beethoven, a fleet. We won a battle in space and then I watched the Arks veer off, one by one, like seeds blown free from a stem, scattered by the wind.

I returned alone, like the Ancient Mariner, with a ship filled with corpses and an albatross of terror and guilt dragging at my neck.

* * * *

“… Human pilot! Surrender, please! We have already killed far more than we can bear! Do not force us to add to the toll! The traitors who aided Parmin have been rounded up. All the other blockade runners are captured or destroyed!”

The voice lists the colonies besides Canaan they have captured. A voice filled with compassion and sensitivity, so similar to Parmin’s that I almost cry…

But the bridge is filled with the stench of burning wiring and decaying bodies…I send the ship into a screaming dive Earthward, evading their best interceptors with tricks that I had learned far too late…My seat buckles underneath me, but somehow I hold on to the controls…My nostrils are filled with the odors of death.

“We realize that your conspiracy was kept secret from the vast majority of Earthlings. That is good. Can you not agree that, having failed, you don’t want to see your fellows suffer prematurely? They don’t have to find out about their quarantine for another two hundred years! Let them dream on, of an infinite playground in space! Surrender now, and spare the children below their dream!”

So compassionate! The murdering alien hypocrite! Jailor! Zookeeper!

I shout the hateful words and his image on the screen recoils…until the ionization trail of my reentry vaporizes the picture in a cloud of static.

The Ark screams…I scream…

* * * *

They tried to shoot me down, like They shot down Walter in his modified F-15 that afternoon on Canaan, when I was so late getting the Ark into the air.

There were too many of Them anyway. I told myself that a thousand times as the fight ravelled all the way back to Earth. It took time to get the Ark warmed up, and when They did what we never had expected—bombed the noncombatants in the settlement—I tarried to take on gassed and wounded survivors.

I watched Them fry the house I had just built. Janie had been in the cellar, packing preserves for the winter…

How did they find us so soon? We had counted on more time. How did it happen?

* * * *

Smoldering wreckage steams within a new-crater on an Oregon mountainside. Fires spread through the forest in all directions from a reawakened volcano.

I set charges in what remains and run…and run and run and run, but I cannot outrun the wind. It envelopes me from behind and chokes me with the stench of burning flesh…I run from the smell…I run…

* * * *

There is a tear on my cheek. The soloist enters his cadenza and it is more sweet and sad than I can bear. The headphones slip off and slide from my lap to the floor, followed by the tape player. The sounds of the Fourth Concerto die away into muffled silence.