The Very Best of F & SF v1 (15 page)

Diana Moon
Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they
had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that
the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to
comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen
for a can of beer.

George came back
in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat
down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel, watching her wipe her tears. “Yup,”
she said. “What about?” he said.

“I forget,” she
said. “Something real sad on television.”

“What was it?”
he said.

“It’s all kind
of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.

“Forget sad
things,” said George.

“I always do,” said
Hazel.

“That’s my girl,”
said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.

“Gee—I could
tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.

“You can say
that again,” said George.

“Gee—” said
Hazel— “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

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Although he didn’t even publish a dozen
stories in
F&SF,
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) was a
major contributor to our magazine in the 1960s, with two serialized novels and
several other stories that emblazoned themselves on our minds, including “A
Rose for Ecclesiastes,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” and
two Buddha stories that went on to form part of his novel
Lord of Light.
I decided to include this story in this book partly because I think
it’s overlooked too often and partly because this story left a huge impression
on me when I was thirteen.

Back
on Earth
, my old philosophy prof—possibly
because he’d misplaced his lecture notes—came into the classroom one day and
scrutinized his sixteen victims for the space of half a minute. Satisfied then,
that a sufficiently profound tone had been established, he asked:

“What is a man?”

He had known
exactly what he was doing. He’d had an hour and a half to kill, and eleven of
the sixteen were coeds (nine of them in liberal arts, and the other two stuck
with an Area Requirement).

One of the other
two, who was in the pre-med program, proceeded to provide a strict biological
classification.

The prof (McNitt
was his name, I suddenly recall) nodded then, and asked:

“Is that all?”

And there was
his hour and a half.

I learned that
Man is the Reasoning Animal, Man is the One Who Laughs, Man is greater than
beasts but less than angels, Man is the one who watches himself watch himself
doing things he knows are absurd (this from a Comparative Lit gal), Man is the
culture-transmitting animal, Man is the spirit which aspires, affirms, loves,
the one who uses tools, buries his dead, devises religions, and the one who
tries to define himself. (That last from Paul Schwartz, my roommate—which I
thought pretty good, on the spur of the moment. Wonder whatever became of
Paul?)

Anyhow, to most
of these I say “perhaps” or “partly, but—” or just plain “crap!” I still think
mine was the best, because I had a chance to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus,
Land of the Swan...

I’d said, “Man
is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes
he had done, or hadn’t.”

Stop and think
about it for a minute. It’s purposely as general as the others, but it’s got
room in it for the biology and the laughing and the aspiring, as well as the
culture-transmitting, the love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining.
I even left the door open for religion, you’ll note. But it’s limiting, too.
Ever met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?

Tierra del
Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name.

Delightful place
too, for quite a while...

It was there
that I saw Man’s definitions, one by one, wiped from off the big blackboard,
until only mine was left.

... My radio had
been playing more static than usual. That’s all.

For several
hours there was no other indication of what was to come.

My hundred-thirty
eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that clear, cool spring day with the sun
pouring down its honey and lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the
streets, invading western store-fronts, drying curbstones, and washing the
olive and umber buds that speared the skin of the trees there by the roadway;
and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made orange
mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across the shoulders
of Saint Stephen’s Range, some thirty miles distant, and came down upon the
forest at its feet like some supernatural madman with a million buckets of
paint—each of a different shade of green, yellow, orange, blue and red—to daub
with miles-wide brushes at its heaving sea of growth.

Mornings the sky
is cobalt, midday is turquoise, and sunset is emeralds and rubies, hard and
flashing. It was halfway between cobalt and seamist at
1100
hours,
when I watched Betty with my hundred-thirty eyes and saw nothing to indicate
what was about to be. There was only that persistent piece of static,
accompanying the piano and strings within my portable.

It’s funny how
the mind personifies, engenders. Ships are always women: You say, “She’s a good
old tub,” or, “She’s a fast, tough number, this one,” slapping a bulwark and
feeling the aura of femininity that clings to the vessel’s curves; or,
conversely, “He’s a bastard to start, that Sam!” as you kick the auxiliary
engine in an inland transport-vehicle; and hurricanes are always women, and
moons, and seas. Cities, though, are different. Generally, they’re neuter.
Nobody calls New York or San Francisco “he” or “she.” Usually, cities are just “it.”

Sometimes,
however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex. Usually, this is in the
case of small cities near to the Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps this is
because of the sex-ridden nouns of the languages which prevail in that
vicinity, in which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does
about the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.

Betty was Beta
Station for less than ten years. After two decades she was Betty officially, by
act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt at the time (ninety-some years ago), and
still feel, that it was because she was what she was—a place of rest and repair,
of surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes, weather,
and natural light again, after that long haul through the big night, with its
casting away of so much. She is not home, she is seldom destination, but she is
like unto both. When you come upon light and warmth and music after darkness
and cold and silence, it is Woman. The oldtime Mediterranean sailor must have
felt it when he first spied port at the end of a voyage.
I
felt it when
I first saw Beta Station—Betty—and the second time I saw her, also.

I am her Hell
Cop.

... When six or
seven of my hundred-thirty eyes flickered, then saw again, and the music was
suddenly washed away by a wave of static, it was then that I began to feel
uneasy.

I called Weather
Central for a report, and the recorded girlvoice told me that seasonal rains
were expected in the afternoon or early evening. I hung up and switched an eye
from ventral to dorsal-vision.

Not a cloud. Not
a ripple. Only a formation of green-winged skytoads, heading north, crossed the
field of the lens.

I switched it
back, and I watched the traffic flow, slowly, and without congestion, along
Betty’s prim, well-tended streets. Three men were leaving the bank and two more
were entering. I recognized the three who were leaving, and in my mind I waved
as I passed by. All was still at the post office, and patterns of normal
activity lay upon the steel mills, the stockyard, the plast-synth plants, the
airport, the spacer pads, and the surfaces of all the shopping complexes;
vehicles came and went at the Inland Transport-Vehicle garages, crawling from
the rainbow forest and the mountains beyond like dark slugs, leaving
tread-trails to mark their comings and goings through wilderness; and the
fields of the countryside were still yellow and brown, with occasional patches
of green and pink; the country houses, mainly simple
A-frame
affairs, were chisel blade, spike-tooth, spire and steeple, each with a big
lightning rod, and dipped in many colors and scooped up in the cups of my
seeing and dumped out again, as I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my
gallery of one hundred-thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble
Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall.

The static came
and went until I had to shut off the radio. Fragments of music are worse than
no music at all.

My eyes,
coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.

I knew then that
we were in for something.

I sent an eye
scurrying off toward Saint Stephen’s at full speed, which meant a wait of about
twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another, I sent straight up,
skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene.
Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a
cup of coffee.

I entered the
Mayor’s outer office, winked at Lottie, the receptionist, and glanced at the
inner door.

“Mayor in?” I
asked.

I got an
occasional smile from Lottie, a slightly heavy, but well-rounded girl of
indeterminate age and intermittent acne, but this wasn’t one of the occasions.

“Yes,” she said,
returning to the papers on her desk.

“Alone?”

She nodded, and
her earrings danced. Dark eyes and dark complexion, she could have been kind of
sharp, if only she’d fix her hair and use more makeup. Well...

I crossed to the
door and knocked.

“Who?” asked the
Mayor.

“Me,” I said,
opening it, “Godfrey Justin Holmes—’God’ for short. I want someone to drink
coffee with, and you’re elected.”

She turned in
her swivel chair, away from the window she had been studying, and her blonde-hair-white-hair-fused,
short and parted in the middle, gave a little stir as she turned—like a sunshot
snowdrift struck by sudden winds.

She smiled and
said, “I’m busy.”

“Eyes green,
chin small, cute little ears—I love them all”—from an anonymous Valentine I’d
sent her two months previous, and true.

“... But not too
busy to have coffee with God,” she stated. “Have a throne, and I’ll make us
some instant.”

I did, and she
did.

While she was
doing it, I leaned back, lit a cigarette I’d borrowed from her canister, and
remarked, “Looks like rain.”

“Uh-huh,” she
said.

“Not just making
conversation,” I told her. “There’s a bad storm brewing somewhere—over Saint
Stephen’s, I think. I’ll know real soon.”

“Yes,
Grandfather,” she said, bringing me my coffee. “You old timers with all your
aches and pains are often better than Weather Central, it’s an established
fact. I won’t argue.”

She smiled,
frowned, then smiled again.

I set my cup on
the edge of her desk.

“Just wait and
see,” I said. “If it makes it over the mountains, it’ll be a nasty high-voltage
job. It’s already jazzing up reception.”

Big-bowed white
blouse, and black skirt around a well-kept figure. She’d be forty in the fall,
but she’d never completely tamed her facial reflexes—which was most engaging,
so far as I was concerned. Spontaneity of expression so often vanishes so soon.
I could see the sort of child she’d been by looking at her, listening to her
now. The thought of being forty was bothering her again, too, I could tell. She
always kids me about age when age is bothering her.

See, I’m around
thirty-five, actually, which makes me her junior by a bit, but she’d heard her
grandfather speak of me when she was a kid, before I came back again this last
time. I’d filled out the balance of his two-year term, back when Betty-Beta’s
first mayor, Wyeth, had died after two months in office. I was born five
hundred ninety-seven years ago, on Earth, but I spent about five hundred
sixty-two of those years sleeping, during my long jaunts between the stars. I’ve
made a few more trips than a few others; consequently, I am an anachronism. I
am really, of course, only as old as I look—but still, people always seem to
feel that I’ve cheated somehow, especially women in their middle years.
Sometimes it is most disconcerting...

“Eleanor,” said
I, “your term will be up in November. Are you still thinking of running again?”

She took off her
narrow, elegantly trimmed glasses and brushed her eyelids with thumb and
forefinger. Then she took a sip of coffee.

“I haven’t made
up my mind.”

“I ask not for
press-release purposes,” I said, “but for my own.”

“Really, I haven’t
decided,” she told me. “I don’t know...”

“Okay, just
checking. Let me know if you do.”

I drank some
coffee.

After a time,
she said, “Dinner Saturday? As usual?”

“Yes, good.”

“I’ll tell you
then.”

“Fine—capital.”

As she looked
down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it
to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps
both.

She smiled at
whatever it was she finally saw.

“A bad storm?”
she asked me.

“Yep. Feel it in
my bones.”

“Tell it to go
away?”

“Tried. Don’t
think it will, though.”

“Better batten
some hatches, then.”

“It wouldn’t
hurt and it might help.”

“The weather
satellite will be overhead in another half hour. You’ll have something sooner?”