Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (544 page)

“ ’Ave you eaten?” she asked, and before I could answer she told me she wasn’t hungry, there were some sandwiches, or I could do for myself, whatever I wanted, all in the most dispirited of tones. She was, as I have said, a pretty woman, with a feline cast of feature and sleek, muscular limbs; having too many interesting lines in her face, perhaps, to suit the prevailing standards of beauty, but sensual to a fault. Ordinarily, sexual potential surrounded her like an aura. That day, however, her face had settled into a dolorous mask, her shoulders had slumped and she seemed altogether drab.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nuffin’.”

“Nothing?” I said. “Right! You look like the Queen just died, and the place is fixed up like the death of philosophy. But everything’s just bloody marvellous, right?”

“Do you mind?” she snapped. “It’s personal!”

“Personal, is it? Well, excuse me. I certainly wouldn’t want to be getting
personal
with you. What the hell’s the matter? You been struck by the monthlies?”

She pinned me with a venomous stare. “God, you’re disgustin’! What is it? You ’aven’t broken any ’eads today, so you’ve decided to bash me around a bit?”

“All right, all right,” I said. I’m sorry.”

“Nao,” she said. “G’wan with it. Oi fuckin’ love it when you’re masterful. Really, Oi do!” She turned and started back along the tunnel. “Oi’ll just await your pleasure, shall Oi?” she called over her shoulder. “Oi mean, you will let me know what more Oi can do to serve?”

“Christ!” I said, watching her ass twitching beneath the white cloth, thinking that I would have to make a heartfelt act of contrition before I laid hands on it again. I knew, of course, why I had baited her. It was for the same reason that had brought on her depression, that provoked the vast majority of our aberrant behaviours. Frustration, anger, despair, all feelings that—no matter their immediate causes—in some way arose from the fact that Solitaire had proved to be an abject failure. Of the twenty-seven ships assembled and launched, three had thus far returned. Two of the ships had reported no hospitable environments found. The crew of the third ship had been unable to report anything, being every one of them dead, apparently by each other’s hands.

We had gotten a late start on the colonization of space, far too late to save the home planet, and it was unclear whether the piddling colonies on Mars and Europa and in the asteroids would allow us to survive. Perhaps it should have been clear, perhaps we should have realized that despite the horror and chaos of Earth, the brush wars, the almost weekly collapse of governments, our flimsy grasp of the new technologies, despite the failure of Solitaire and everything else…perhaps it should have been more than clear that our species possessed a root stubbornness capable of withstanding all but the most dire of cataclysms, and that eventually our colonies would thrive. But they would never be able to absorb the desperate population of Earth, and the knowledge that our brothers and sisters and parents were doomed to a life of diminishing expectations, to famines and wars and accidents of industry that would ultimately kill off millions, it caused those of us fortunate enough to have escaped to become dazed and badly weighted in our heads, too heavy with a sense of responsibility to comprehend the true moral requisites of our good fortune. Even if successful the lightship programme would only bleed off a tiny percentage of Earth’s population, and most, I assumed, would be personnel attached to the Seguin Corporation and those whom the corporation or else some corrupt government agency deemed worthy; yet we came to perceive ourselves as the common people’s last, best hope, and each successive failure struck at our hearts and left us so crucially dismayed, we developed astonishing talents for self-destruction. Like neurotic Prometheans, we gnawed at our own livers and sought to despoil every happy thing that fell to us. And when we grew too enervated to practise active self-destruction, we sank into clinical depression, as Arlie was doing now.

I sat thinking of these things for a long while, watching Bill rock back and forth, now and then popping a piece of hard candy into his mouth, muttering, and I reached no new conclusions, unless an evolution of distaste for the corporation and the world and the universe could be considered new and conclusive. At length, weary of the repetitive circuit of my thoughts, I decided it was time I tried to make my peace with Arlie. I doubted I had the energy for prolonged apology, but I hoped that intensity would do the trick.

“You can sleep on the couch,” I said to Bill, getting to my feet. “The bathroom”—I pointed off along the corridor—“is down there somewhere.”

He bobbed his head, but as he kept his eyes on the floor, I could not tell if it had been a response or simply a random movement.

“Did you hear me?” I asked.

“I gotta do somethin’,” he said.

“Down there.” I pointed again. “The bathroom.”

“They gonna kill me ’less I do somethin’.”

He was not, I realized, referring to his bodily functions.

“What do you mean?”

His eyes flicked up to me, then away. “ ’Less I do somethin’ good,
really
good, they gonna kill me.”

“Who’s going to kill you?”

“The men,” he said.

The men, I thought, sweet Jesus! I felt unutterably sad for him.

“I gotta find somethin’,” he said with increased emphasis. “Somethin’ good, somethin’ makes ’em like me.”

I had it now—he had seized on the notion that by some good deed or valuable service he could change people’s opinion of him.

“You can’t do anything, Bill. You just have to keep doing your job, and this will all wash away, I promise you.”

“Mmn-mn.” He shook his head vehemently like a child in denial. “I gotta find somethin’ good to do.”

“Look,” I said. “Anything you try is very likely to backfire. Do you understand me? If you do something and you bugger it, people are going to be more angry at you than ever.”

He tucked his lower lip beneath the upper and narrowed his eyes and maintained a stubborn silence.

“What does Mister C say about this?” I asked.

That was, apparently, a new thought. He blinked; the tightness left his face. “I don’t know.”

“Well, ask him. That’s what he’s there for…to help you with your problems.”

“He doesn’t always help. Sometimes he doesn’t know stuff.”

“Try, will you? Just give it a try.”

He did not seem sure of this tactic, but after a moment he pawed at his head, running his palm along the crewcut stubble, then squeezed his eyes shut and began to mumble, long, pattering phrases interrupted by pauses for breath, like a child saying his prayers as fast as he can. I guessed that he was outlining the entire situation for Mister C. After a minute his face went blank, the tip of his tongue pushed out between his lips, and I imagined the cartoonish voice—thus I had been told the implant’s voice would manifest—speaking to him in rhymes, in silly patter. Then, after another few seconds, his eyes snapped open and he beamed at me.

“Mister C says good deeds are always good,” he announced proudly, obviously satisfied that he had been proven right, and popped another piece of candy into his mouth.

I cursed the simplicity of the implant’s programming, sat back down, and for the next half-hour or so I attempted to persuade Bill that his best course lay in doing absolutely nothing, in keeping a low profile. If he did, I told him, eventually the dust would settle and things would return to normal. He nodded and said, yes, yes, uh-huh, yet I could not be certain that my words were having an effect. I knew how resistant he could be to logic, and it was quite possible that he was only humouring me. But as I stood to take my leave of him, he did something that went some way toward convincing me that I had made an impression: he reached out and caught my hand, held it for a second, only a second, but one during which I thought I felt the sorry hits of his life, the dim vibrations of all those sour, loveless nights and lonely ejaculations. When he released my hand he turned away, appearing to be embarrassed. I was embarrassed myself. Embarrassed and, I must admit, a bit repelled at having this ungainly lump display affection toward me. Yet I was also moved, and trapped between those two poles of feeling, I hovered above him, not sure what to do or say. There was, however, no need for me to deliberate the matter. Before I could summon speech he began mumbling once again, lost in a chat with Mister C.

“Good night, Bill,” I said.

He gave no response, as still as a Buddha on his cushion.

I stood beside him for a while, less observing him than cataloguing my emotions, then, puzzling more than a little over their complexity, I left him to his candy and his terror and his inner voices.

* * * *

Apology was not so prickly a chore as I had feared. Arlie knew as well as I the demons that possessed us, and once I had submitted to a token humiliation, she relented and we made love. She was demanding in the act, wild and noisy, her teeth marked my shoulder, my neck; but as we lay together afterward in the dark, some trivial, gentle music trickling in from the speakers above us, she was tender and calm and seemed genuinely interested in the concerns of my day.

“God ’elp us!” she said. “You don’t actually fink the Magnificence is at work ’ere, do you?”

“Christ, no!” I said. “Some miserable dwight’s actin’ on mad impulse, that’s all. Probably done it ’cause his nanny wiped his bum too hard when he’s a babe.”

“Oi ’ope not,” she said. “Oi’ve seen their work back ’ome too many toimes to ever want to see it again.”

“You never told me you’d had dealings with the Magnificence.”

“Oi never ’ad what you’d call dealin’s with ’em, but they was all over our piece of ’eaven, they were. ’Alf the bloody houses sported some kind of daft mark. It was a bleedin’ fertile field for ’em, with nobody ’avin’ a job and the lads just ’angin’ about on the corners and smokin’ gannie. ’Twas a rare day the Bills didn’t come ’round to scrape up some yobbo wearing his guts for a necktie and the mark of his crime carved into his fore’ead. Nights you’d hear ’em chantin’ down by the stadium. ’Orrid stuff they was singin’. Wearin’ that cheap black satin gear and those awrful masks. But it ’ad its appeal. All the senile old ’ooligans were diggin’ out their jackboots and razors, and wantin’ to go marchin’ again. And in the pubs the soaks would be sayin’, yes, they do the odd bad thing, the Magnificence, but they’ve got the public good to ’eart. The odd bad thing! Jesus! Oi’ve seen messages written on the pavement in ’uman bones. Coloured girls with their ’ips broken and their legs lashed back behind their necks. Still breathin’ and starin’ at you with them ’ollow eyes, loike they were mad to die. You were lucky, John, to be living up in Chelsea.”

“Lucky enough, I suppose,” I said stiffly, leery of drawing such distinctions; the old British class wars, though somewhat muted on Solitaire, were far from dormant, and even between lovers, class could be a dicey subject. “Chelsea’s not exactly the Elysian Fields.”

“Oi don’t mean nuffin’ by it, luv. You don’t have to tell me the ’ole damn world’s gone rotten long ago. Oi remember how just a black scrap of a life looked loike a brilliant career when Oi was livin’ there. Now Oi don’t know how Oi stood it.”

I pulled her close against me and we lay without speaking for a long while. Finally Arlie said, “You know, it’s ’alf nice ’avin’ ’im ’ere.”

“Bill, you mean?”

“Yeah, Bill.”

“I hope you’ll still feel that way if he can’t find the loo,” I said.

Arlie giggled. “Nao, I’m serious. It’s loike ’avin’ family again. The feel of somebody snorin’ away in the next room. That’s the thing we miss ’avin’ here. We’re all so bloody isolated. Two’s a crowd and all that. We’re missin’ the warmth.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

I touched her breasts, smoothed my hand along the swell of her hip, and soon we were involved again, more gently than before, more giving to the other, as if what Arlie had said about family had created a resonance in our bodies. Afterward I was so fatigued, the darkness seemed to be slowly circulating around us, pricked by tiny bursts of actinic light, the way a djinn must circulate within its prison bottle, a murky cloud of genius and magic. I was at peace lying there, yet I felt strangely excited to be so peaceful and my thoughts, too, were strange, soft, almost formless, the kind of thoughts I recalled having had as a child when it had not yet dawned on me that all my dreams would eventually be hammered flat and cut into steely dies so they could withstand the dreadful pressures of a dreamless world.

Arlie snuggled closer to me, her hand sought mine, clasped it tightly. “Ah, Johnny,” she said. “Toimes loike this, Oi fink Oi was born to forget it all.”

* * * *

The next day I was able to track down the villain who had painted the menacing symbol on Bill’s door. The cameras in the corridor outside his door had malfunctioned, permitting the act of vandalism to go unobserved; but this was hardly surprising—the damned things were always failing, and should they not fail on their own, it was no great feat to knock them out by using an electromagnet. Lacking a video record, I focused my attention on the personnel files. Only nine people on Solitaire proved to have had even minimal ties with the Strange Magnificence; by process of elimination I was able to reduce the number of possible culprits to three. The first of them I interviewed, Roger Thirwell, a pale, rabbity polymath in his mid-twenties who had emigrated from Manchester just the year before, admitted his guilt before I had scarcely begun his interrogation.