Approaching Oblivion Part 5

"I knitted real well. Who are you? Where did you come from?"

She waved toward the end of the world, and around the street, and shrugged. "I don't know. I just sort of woke up here. Everybody else's gone, is that right?"

"That's right. They've been gone for about a year. Well, uh, where did you wake up?" "Right here. I've been sitting here for about an hour. I was just starting to get my bearings. I thought I might be all alone here."

"Do you remember your name?"

She seemed annoyed at that. "Yes, of course, I remember my name. It's Opal Sellers. I'm from Boston."

"This was Hanover, New Hampshire."

"Who are you?"

"Eugene Harrison. From White Sulphur Springs."

She looked very pale. I didn't say it, but that was the first thing about her I noticed. It wasn't the dress I could see through, really; it was the paleness. Just very white, as if she had been left out too long in the snow. I thought I could see the blood rushing along under the skin, but that was probably my imagination.

Now I know someone is going to think she was a ghost, or a vampire, or some alien creature dressed up to look like a human being, but as Nero Wolfe says in the mysteries, that is just flummery. She was a person, nothing more than that, and you can forget that sort of stuff, even with what comes next. She was as real as I was.

"How did you know I'd been sick?" I asked.

She shrugged again. "I don't know, I suppose I just knew, that's all. But I saw you coming out of the hospital up the street."

"I live there. But how could you know I was sick? Actually, I almost died. Well, that's not accurate: I did die, but I'm all right now."

"What do we do here?"

"Nothing much, just take it easy. The rest of the world is gone, and I don't know where, so we just sort of take it easy, I guess. There used to be a lot of crazy invasions, about a year ago, but they stopped pretty suddenly."

"I'll need a place to live," she said. "How about the hospital?"

"Well, that's fine with me," I said, "but actually, I was going to take over one of those little houses over there. If you like, you can move into the one next door."

So she did, and I did, and it was nice for a few weeks. I always went very slowly with women. Or maybe it's that they went slow with me. I'm a big believer that women give off radiation or something, that keeps a man from moving in on them if they don't want him to. I don't know much about it, if you want the truth.

We had a cordial relationship, Opal and I. She kept up her yard and I kept up mine. We ate dinner together a lot, and we saw each other frequently through the day. Once-when she realized I was spending time at the Post Office-she came in with a letter and came up to my window and asked me for an air mail stamp. She had money. I sold it to her. She took it and said, "Thank you for removing those little white borders; I always have trouble with them and usually rip the stamp or leave some on the edge. That was very nice of you, sir." And she left.

I was too stunned and pleased to even consider where she was mailing the letter to.

Or to whom she was writing.

One night we had dinner together and she made fried chicken. The grocery store had a large supply of food, more than enough for us for a long time. It did bother me, of course, why the milk was always fresh, and the meat was always freshly cut, but I a.s.sumed it was part of the scheme of things that kept the lights and water working, that took away the garbage and kept the streets clean. I never saw anyone who did it, but it got done, so I didn't worry about it.

Look: before I died, when the world was here, I drove a mail truck and I rode a Ronda. I didn't know how either of those things worked, I mean aside from cleaning the spark plugs once in a while or filling the gas tanks, or superficial repairs like that. I never worried about it, because it got done, and that was the long and short of it. No one was any different. It was the same after everything vanished. As long as it worked, I didn't have to think about the logic of it, and if it had started going sour I would have; but it didn't, and that's all I want to say about that. You'd have done the same.

Anyhow. We had this fried chicken dinner, which I liked a lot because she made it just the way I like it, very dark and golden and crunchy on the surface and dry underneath, without that thin oily film that makes your teeth feel greasy. And we had some wine.

Now I don't drink much. I won't apologize. I can't hold it. But we had wine.

And I got, well, a little drunk, just a little. And I tried to touch her. And she was cold. Very cold. Very very cold. And she yelled at me, "Don't ever touch me!"

Now that was just two weeks before she told me she loved me and wanted to be mine. I asked her what she meant by that, "be mine." I never wanted to own anybody. And I certainly had the idea she didn't want to be anybody's possession, but there it was.

"I love you, and I want to stay with you."

"There's no place to go."

"That isn't what I meant. We could still live here together and not see each other. I mean, I love you and want to share the world with you."

"I don't know if that's a good idea," I said. I really wanted what she wanted, but I was afraid she'd get tired of me, and then what? Our situation wasn't too normal, at least by the usual standards I'd grown up with, if you catch my meaning.

So. She got angry, and went stalking out the door. I waited a few minutes to let her cool off, and then I went looking for her.

She had walked straight out to the edge of the world, and kept right on going. I don't think she knew I was following her.

I went back to my house and laid down.

When she came back, about two hours later I guess, I sat up and said, "Just who the d.i.c.kens are you?"

She was furious, still furious. "Who the d.i.c.kens are you?"

"I know who I am," I said, getting angry too, "and I want to know who you are. I saw you walking out there off the edge. I can't do that!"

"Some of us are talented, some aren't. Learn to live with it." Really a snotty answer, boy!

"I was here first! "

"That's what the Indians said and look what happened to them!"

"Dammit, are you responsible for all of this, for every crazy thing that happened?"

Then she really blew her stack and shouted at me. "Yes, you silly, irresponsible clown, I'm responsible. I did it all. I destroyed the world. Now what the h.e.l.l are you going to do about it?"

I was too stunned to do anything. I hadn't really thought she was responsible, but when she admitted it, I didn't know what to say. I went over and tried to grab her by the shoulders, and I could feel that cold coming right off her. "You're not human," I said.

"Oh, go to h.e.l.l, you idiot. I'm as human as you are. Humaner."

"You'd better tell me," I said, with a threatening tone, "or else"

"Or else what, you nerd? Or else I'll wipe out this last little chunk and you and everything else and I'll be all alone the way I was before I did it!"

"Did it?"

"Yes, did it. Blew it all away. Just sat back and put my thumb in my mouth and said, 'Vanish everything but Eugene Harrison, wherever he is, and me, and a little town where I can be with him.' And when I took my thumb out of my mouth, everything was gone. Boston was gone, and the sky and the earth and every other thing, and I had to go walking through that glop out there till I found you."

"Why?!"

"You don't even recognize me, do you, you idiot? You don't even remember Opal Sellers, do you?"

I stared at her.

"Dope!"

I continued staring.

"I was in your graduating cla.s.s in high school. You were right behind me when we went up for our diplomas. I was wearing a white gown, and you were standing behind me during the invocation, and I was having my period, and I was spotting, and it had gone through the white gown, and you leaned over and told me and I was embarra.s.sed to death, but you gave me your mortarboard and I held it across my backside and I thought it was the kindest, nicest thing anyone had ever done. And I loved you, you simple stupid insensitive sonofab.i.t.c.h!"

And she let down the screen or the image or the mask or whatever it was that she'd put up over herself, which was why she was cold to the touch, and inside there was Opal Sellers, who was one of the ugliest girls I'd ever seen, and she knew that was what I thought, and she didn't wait a minute, but put her thumb in her mouth and started mumbling around it... but nothing happened.

Then she went completely out of her head and started screaming that she'd pa.s.sed on the power to me, and she couldn't do a thing about me, and she ran out the door.

I took off after her, and she went off the edge and kept going straight away like the Viking and the Stuka and the Hun and all the rest of them, which I guess she'd sent to liven things up for me so I'd feel heroic.

And that's it.

Gone. Just went. Where, I have no idea. I'm not leaving here, that's for sure, but I don't know what to do about it. Somebody ought to say I'm sorry to her, I mean she's a nice girl and all.

It's just I'm here and I'm comfortable, and who can ask for more than that. She was always talking about love. Well, d.a.m.n, that wasn't love.

I don't think.

But what do I know? Girls always got tired of me very quickly.

I'm going to teach myself how to make pizza.

Gull Lake, Hickory Corners, Michigan/1973

3 KISS OF FIRE.

He drank ice crystals laced with midnight and watched their world burn. A greenperson floated up beside him, and touched his sleeve. There was static electricity in the compartment; a tiny spark. "Mister Redditch, when you have a moment, the Designer would like to disturb air with you."

Redditch looked down. The greenperson's eye was watering. "Tell him I'll be along." The greenperson's flaccid skin went to an ivory-gray hue, capturing the disquiet and weariness in Redditch's voice. He floated away, adjusting his hue exactly, so the message could be transmitted without the slightest semantic misinterpretation.

Redditch turned back to the teleidoscope, the tanger, the sensu, the catcheye and the straight black tunnel that showed him their world burning. The solar prominences had died away to self-satisfied blandness; unctuous. There was little out there now but smoldering ash, but the sensu was still getting a reading high into the nines and the teleidoscope was turning it, turning it, combining colors and sending them back in some new spectral spectrum. He raised the drink to his lips, but he could not taste it. The tanger overrode, even in the control compartment. It was the smack of salt-rising bread and salamanders.

A rolling checker came out of its bay and made its way through the coils of readout sheets littering the deck. Redditch had designed and combined and set up the nova with great care, and the sheets had endlessly tongued out of the aesthetikon and he had let them lie. The checker got through the tangle and palmed open the hookup compartment and re-attached the feed to stateroom 611. But it hardly mattered: the clients in 611 had played gin rummy straight through the program. The checker returned to its bay.

Redditch downed the last of his drink, ran his tongue around the rim of the hollow crystal, and set it down on the console. He sighed and rubbed his weary, itching eyes. He was tired from the inside-out to the very tips of his fingers. And now, the Designer...

When he emerged from the dropshaft and walked through the theater lounge, a bl.u.s.tery purple- cla.s.s voyager and a fat d.u.c.h.ess with sausage fingers and noisy rings greeted him, congratulated him on the performance, offered him social congress. The man was probably a salesman of myth-sticks, and the woman was clearly a remittance relative. He smiled and thanked them and hurried on through the theater. A clique still plugged into their tunnel applauded him, and he acknowledged their appreciation with a vague gesture of his sensor hand. It sparkled with reflected light from the overhead inkys.

Wh.o.r.es were busily trying to drum up some business, trying to catch a few voyagers who had absorbed the empathy of the programmed death and who were, at least for the moment, "alive."

They were having a rough time of it. One lithe creature with a charged ring through the lips of her v.a.g.i.n.a, was trying with all the powers at her command to get a thin, salivating messenger to buy her favors.

She was bent over him, her hand inside his chiton, ma.s.saging his privates. But his eyes were rolled up in their sockets and Redditch would have taken odds her till and her ring would go empty.

A tag-team, two black-and-ochre Sedalians, had a suety emissary trapped deep in his formfit. One of them had pulled off his emba.s.sy pouch and sash, and had lowered herself onto his body. It seemed unlikely she would be able to get him erect enough for insertion, and her sister was tonguing one of the several underarm v.a.g.i.n.as the man had had surgically added to his grotesque bulk. While they worked over him, Redditch pa.s.sed and heard the man mumbling, "Don't be ridiculous, this is ridiculous, my sperm brings a thousand a decaliter, I'm certainly not going to give it away and pay you for the privilege."

Redditch quite agreed. He wondered why the ship's comptrollers continued to hire on wh.o.r.es; they were virtually an anachronism, holdover from centuries before. They certainly couldn't be doing enough business to warrant their continued employment.

He kept walking. Once, after a long programming, he had pa.s.sed through the theater and one of the new wh.o.r.es, a lanky young man with pustules, had propositioned him. Redditch had laughed and there'd been some repercussions with the Guild, until the Designer had straightened out the matter.

He saw her sitting alone, and when she looked up at him as he approached, the singular beauty contained in her face, particularly her slanted eyes, made him slow his pace. Her right arm was lying along the rest, and she bent it at the elbow, raising the slim-fingered hand. It was enough to stop him.

"You programmed the death?" she said, with no rising inflection. He nodded, smiling in a sudden rush of antic.i.p.ation of her congratulations. She looked away.

He felt as though something had been stolen from him.

The Designer was lying out in a leaf chair that moved idly in its free-fall nimbus. Every eye in his forehead row was closed, but Redditch could tell he was perceiving his surroundings by the fibrillation of root threads that spiked his cheek-pouches. Crystals of ergonovine sparkled amid the threads. The Designer's backers were seated around the observatory suite.

"Come in," the Designer said. The leaf chair moved.

"I'm in." He slumped into a composeat and punched out tranquilizers and an antacid. He wanted to stay calm through it all. Outside the observatory cycle ports the nova phased through from yellow ochre to gold as he watched. '.Something on your mind, Keltin?"

The Designer opened three yes eyes.

"Where must your mind be?" He said it with carefully chilled contempt. A greenperson hovered just beyond the nimbus, unnecessarily translating the tone in colors.

Redditch yawned. "Madison Square Garden, a 1932 Paramount Pictures release starring Jack Oakie, Marian Nixon, Zasu Pitts, William Boyd and Lew Cody. 'A romantic, dramatic story of three men and two girls fighting desperately to rout the mechanism of unseen forces.' Running time, seventy-six minutes."

One of the backers threw his drink at the bulkhead. He started to shout something, but a checker emerged from its bay and caught the crystal before it hit, sucking up every drop of fluid before it could stain the gra.s.s. The backer turned away in frustration.

The Designer opened a no eye. "There are clauses in your contract, Redditch."

Redditch nodded. "But you won't use them."

He only wished Keltin would relieve him. Far chance.

Another of the backers, a florid man with a thrilled and dyed topknot, hunched forward. "You can't possibly call that death viable? Sparks, man, there were actually paying guests sleeping through it. I saw a monitor estimate that had thirty-two per cent, that's thirty-two per cent of the audience into the sevens with boredom! How the h.e.l.l do you expect us to drain off enough empathy to syndicate this...this abort you call a death?"

Redditch sighed. "Stop inviting your relatives to the premieres and perhaps we'll get a few guests...o...b..ard who can still feel something."

"I don't have to take this!" the backer shouted.

"That's true," Redditch said. The tranquilizers were holding.

"That's true," said the Designer, meaning something else entirely. "Let me handle this, Mr. Nym.