Redshift Part 10

So then what? she said.So nothing, he said. We left the field and that was the end of it for thirty years. It's thirty years tonight, you want to know, he said. So it's an anniversary. I'm telling you on the anniversary. That was a decision John and I made, that with what we knew and what had happened we'd wait twenty-five years and then tell. Maybe that sounds dumb, but there's a lot of dumb stuff around. The whole thing, I figure, was pretty much dumb from the start; that's another iron law of the universe.

Twenty-five years, she said, or thirty? Make up your mind.

It's thirty tonight, he said.

So what's the point? she said. Are you going to tell me that John died and now you're going to? Is that the payoff, that on the thirtieth anniversary of the guy without a c.o.c.k telling you you had to pay, you cash in? That's a bunch of c.r.a.p, she said. You were always full of c.r.a.p. In bed, out of bed, you told more lies than any man I ever knew. Enough, she said, and stood, picked up the beer cans. I've heard enough for now.

You're not getting any ever again, anniversary or no anniversary, c.o.c.k or no c.o.c.k. Just go home.

John didn't die just now, he said. He was staring up at her without any true expression, as if his features could not form the picture his mind wanted to show. John died a long time ago, six, seven years, he got hit by a bus. In Fayetteville. I thought you knew that, didn't you know that?

No, she said, I didn't know. I don't keep up with things so good anymore, I live in a shack and try to stay away from all of that stuff. I was never much for news. So John is dead, all right.

And where does that leave you?

The iron law, he said, I had to tell you about that because of the anniversary. I would have told John, we would have told each other but he was dead, he got the bus up his behind first and there was n.o.body to tell. Maybe he took the bus up his behind, who knows? Look at me, he said. He reached for her, touched her face, dragged her face to attention. Do you see me? he said. Do you know what I got? Do you know what really went on there in that field, what it came to?

Crazy, she thought, he was crazy like the rest of them, they'd tell you one thing, anything to get inside you and then they'd yank that one gob of come out, barking and moaning and then go back to being cute until the next time. Except that this one had always been crazy, with his cowboy boots and his bondage stories and his divorce from Deborah, always mooning around, it was different for him, she knew, an entirely different thing.

They let us do everything, he said. Everything we wanted. But everything means everything, it means all of it, do you understand? He seemed very sad, as if he might begin to curse or cry.

Like you used to be, he said. Just like you.

I never was, she said, simply, without heat or cruelty. I never was anything you wanted, don't you know that? Don't you know that by now?

You take, he said, you take and take and take and then it's all inside you and you have to give it back. I'm not talking about one squirt, he said, not j.i.s.m. This is something else.

Take and take, so what else is new? she said. Just don't give it to me. The beer cans were still in her hands; her hands were sweating. I don't want it. Don't you give it to me. She felt if she looked too closely at him she would see inside his skull, see his brain, the soft and desperate jelly within the cage: see the memories and thoughts, foaming, dead foam like sc.u.m on the water, polluted sc.u.m at the beach that burns your ankles when you walk too close, burnsyour skin like the field, burning, burning.

So now we have to give it back, he said. John's dead. If you take, you give, if you give you take. His breathing was ragged, uneven; I want to show you, he said through that breathing like a gag against his mouth, like gauze. I want you to see what I mean. What I got.

I don't want to see anything, she said, get out of here now, but it was too late, he was pulling at his pants, pulling at himself and for one moment she thought in simple terror: They took it, it's all gone, it's all going to be smooth there like the guy in the story but it was not smooth, it was a general circulation c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s just like she remembered except somewhat looser and wrinkled, half-erect there in his hand, his hand was shaking as if in some vast vibration. As if his body existed in some other room than this.

What comes out, he said, breathing, shaking. You have to see. I want you to see this thing. It was not s.p.u.n.k of which he was speaking, he had warned her of that, and she knew it was true.

Take and take, he said, give and give. Give and take. He was getting it harder, the c.o.c.k springing straight; in the empty place where the aliens had marked him the iron law was working, clamping, squeezing as his hand squeezed, as he wheezed and breathed, as he lazed and hazed, as he shook and took. She backed against the sink, turned her face away. His breath in crescendo, the refrigerator buzz, her own heart; oh, boy, you have to see this, he said. Turn around and look at this. She said nothing.

Turn around and look, he said. Look at me.

The cracked edge of the counter pressed her belly, her hip. Around her the field was burning; the air was filled with the smell of scorching gra.s.s. Awaiting landfall, awaiting the impact of metal on earth she put up one alien hand to shield her face from the sight of him, from the worst of what was to come: the mounting boys, their simple, screaming, wondering faces, the stink of gra.s.s, the fiery closure of her thighs: all their detritus poured into her cup of reparation. Alien she fell, alien she waited: alien the great locks of the ship slammed open. In that riveting metal clutch: nothing. The clinging contact, the groans of the boys. The heart in his hand: but nothing.

I could go on for hours about Michael Moorc.o.c.k's contributions to this whole mess we call science fiction-and dwell for even more hours on the marvelous things he's done for the fantasy field. He was also the guy who took over the editorial reins of New Worlds magazine in 1964, publishing stories by Aldiss, Ballard, Disch, Sladek, and the other progenitors of the New Wave.

Please: look it all up; I haven't got the room here to list it all properly, and, frankly, the man's achievements make me feel like a dust mote.

It's all out there, The Eternal Champion, Elric, Cornelius-find it and read it.

But not before you read what follows.

A Slow Sat.u.r.day Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club: Being a Further Account of Engelbrecht the Boxing Dwarf and His Fellow Members.

Michael Moorc.o.c.k (after Maurice Richardson).

I happened to be sitting in the snug of the Strangers' Bar at the Surrealist Sporting Club on a rainy Sat.u.r.day night, enjoying a well-mixed Existential Fizz (2 parts Vortex Water to 1 part Sweet Gin) and desperate to meet a diverting visitor, when Death slipped unostentatiously intothe big chair opposite, warming his bones at the fire and remarking on the unseasonable weather. There was sure to be a lot of flu about. It made you hate to get the tube but the buses were worse and had I seen what cabs were charging these days? He began to drone on as usual about the ozone layer and the melting pole, how we were poisoning ourselves on GM foods and feeding cows to cows and getting all that pollution and cigarette smoke in our lungs and those other gloomy topics he seems to relish, which I suppose makes you appreciate it when he puts you out of your misery.

I had to choose between nodding off or changing the subject. The evening being what it was, I made the effort and changed the subject. Or at least, had a stab at it.

"So what's new?" It was feeble, I admit. But, as it happened, it stopped him in midmoan.

"Thanks for reminding me," he said, and glanced at one of his many watches. "G.o.d's dropping in-oh, in about twelve minutes, twenty-five seconds. He doesn't have a lot of time, but if you've any questions to ask him, I suggest you canva.s.s the other members present and think up some good ones in a hurry. And he's not very fond of jokers, if you know what I mean. So stick to substantial questions or he won't be pleased."

"I thought he usually sent seraphim ahead for this sort of visit?" I queried mildly. "Are you all having to double up or something? Is it overpopulation?" I didn't like this drift, either. It suggested a finite universe, for a start.

Our Ever-Present Friend rose smoothly. He looked around the room with a distressed sigh, as if suspecting the whole structure to be infected with dry rot and carpenter ants. He couldn't as much as produce a grim brotherly smile for the deathwatch beetle that had come out especially to greet him. "Well, once more into the breach. Have you noticed what it's like out there? Worst on record, they say. Mind you, they don't remember the megalithic. Those were the days, eh? See you later." "Be sure of it." I knew a moment of existential angst. Sensitively, Death hesitated, seemed about to apologize, then thought better of it. He shrugged. "See you in a minute," he said. "I've got to look out for G.o.d in the foyer and sign him in. You know." He had the air of one who had given up worrying about minor embarra.s.sments and was sticking to the protocol, come h.e.l.l or high water. He was certainly more laconic than he had been. I wondered if the extra work, and doubling as a seraph, had changed his character.

With Death gone, the Strangers' was warming up rapidly again, and I enjoyed a quiet moment with my fizz before rising to amble through the usual warped and shrieking corridors to the Members' Bar, which appeared empty.

"Are you thinking of dinner?" Lizard Bayliss, looking like an undis-infected dishrag, strolled over from where he had been hanging up his obnoxious cape. Never far behind, out of the WC, bustled Englebrecht the Dwarf Clock Boxer, who had gone ten rounds with the Greenwich Atom before that overrefined chronometer went down to an iffy punch in the eleventh. His great, mad eyes flashed from under a simian hedge of eyebrow. As usual he wore a three-piece suit a size too small for him, in the belief it made him seem taller. He was effing and blinding about some imagined insult offered by the taxi driver who had brought them back from the not altogether successful Endangered Sea Monsters angling contest in which, I was to learn later, Engelbrecht had caught his hook in a tangle of timeweed and wound up dragging down the t.i.tanic, which explained that mystery. Mind you, he still had to come clean about the R101. There was some feeling in the club concerning the airship, since he'd clearly taken betsagainst himself. Challenged, he'd muttered some conventional nonsense about the Maelstrom and the Inner World, but we'd heard that one too often to be convinced. He also resented our recent rule limiting all aerial angling to firedrakes and larger species of pterodactyls.

Lizard Bayliss had oddly colored bags under his eyes, giving an even more downcast appearance to his normally dissolute features. He was a little drained from dragging the Dwarf in by his collar. It appeared that, seeing the big rods, the driver had asked Bayliss if that was his bait on the seat beside him. The irony was, of course, that the Dwarf had been known to use himself as bait more than once, and there was still some argument over interpretation of the rules in that area, too. The Dwarf had taken the cabbie's remark to be specific not because of his dimuni-tive stockiness, but because of his sensitivity over the rules issue. He stood to lose a few months, even years, if they reversed the result.

He was still spitting on about "nitpicking fascist anoraks with severe a.n.a.l-retention problems" when I raised my gla.s.s and yelled: "If you've an important question for G.o.d, you'd better work out how to phrase it. He's due in any second now. And he's only got a few minutes.

At the Strangers' Bar. We could invite him in here, but that would involve a lot of time-consuming ritual and so forth. Any objection to meeting him back there?"

The Dwarf wasn't sure he had anything to say that wouldn't get taken the wrong way.

Then, noticing how low the fire was, opined that the Strangers' was bound to offer better hospitality. "I can face my maker any time," he pointed out, "but I'd rather do it with a substantial drink in my hand and a good blaze warming my b.u.m." He seemed unusually oblivious to any symbolism, given that the air was writhing with it. I think the t.i.tanic was still on his mind. He was trying to work out how to get his hook back.

By the time we had collected up Oneway Ballard and Taffy Sinclair from the dining room and returned to the Strangers', G.o.d had already arrived. Any plans the Dwarf had instantly went out the window, because G.o.d was standing with his back to the fire, blocking everyone's heat. With a word to Taffy not to overtax the Lord of Creation, Death hurried off on some urgent business and disappeared back through the swing doors.

"I am thy One True G.o.d," said Jehovah, making the gla.s.ses and bottles rattle. He cleared his throat and dropped his tone to what must for him have been a whisper. But it was unnatural, almost false, like a TV presenter trying to express concern while keeping full attention on the autoprompt. Still, there was something totally convincing about G.o.d as a presence. You knew you were in his aura, and you knew you had Grace, even if you weren't too impressed by his stereotypical form. G.o.d added: "I am Jehovah, the Almighty. Ask of me what ye will."

Lizard knew sudden inspiration. "Do you plan to send Jesus back to Earth, and have you any thoughts about the 2:30 at Aintree tomorrow?"

"He is back," said G.o.d, "and I wouldn't touch those races, these days.

Believe me, they're all bent, one way or another. If you like the horses, do the National. . . .

Take a chance. Have a gamble. It's anybody's race, the National."

"But being omniscent," said Lizard slowly, "wouldn't you know the outcome anyway?"

"If I stuck by all the rules of omniscience, it wouldn't exactly be sporting, would it?" G.o.d was staring over at the bar, checking out the Corona-Coronas and the melting marine chronometer above them.

"You don't think it's hard on the horses?" asked Jillian Burnes, the trans.e.xual novelist, whocould be relied upon for a touch of compa.s.sion. Being almost seven feet tall in her spike heels, she was also useful for getting books down from the higher shelves and sorting out those bottles at the top of the bar that looked so temptingly dangerous.

"b.u.g.g.e.r the horses," said G.o.d, "it's the race that counts. And anyway, the horses love it.

They love it."

I was a little puzzled. "I thought we had to ask only substantial questions?"

"That's right?" G.o.d drew his mighty brows together in inquiry.

I fell into an untypical silence. I was experiencing a mild revelation concerning the head of the Church of England and her own favorite pasatiempi, but it seemed inappropriate to run with it at that moment.

"What I'd like to know is," said Engelbrecht, cutting suddenly to the chase, "who gets into Heaven and why?"

There was a bit of a pause in the air, as if everyone felt perhaps he'd pushed the boat out a little too far, but G.o.d was nodding. "Fair question," he said. "Well, it's cats, then dogs, but there's quite a few human beings, really. But mostly it's pets."

Lizard Bayliss had begun to grin. It wasn't a pretty sight with all those teeth that he swore weren't filed. "You mean you like animals better than people? Is that what you're saying, Lord?"

"I wouldn't generalize." G.o.d lifted his robe a little to let the fire get at his legs. "It's mostly cats. Some dogs. Then a few people. All a matter of proportion, of course. I mean, it's millions at least, probably billions, because I'd forgotten about the rats and mice."

"You like those, too?"

"No. Can't stand their hairless tails. Sorry, but it's just me. They can, I understand, be affectionate little creatures. No, they're for the cats. Cats are perfectly adapted for hanging out in heaven. But they still need a bit of a hunt occasionally. They get bored. Well, you know cats.

You can't change their nature."

"I thought you could," said Oneway Ballard, limping up to the bar and ringing the bell. He was staying the night because someone had put a Denver boot on his Granada, and he'd torn the wheel off, trying to re-verse out of it. He was in poor spirits because he and the car had been due to be married at Saint James's, Spanish Place, next morning and there was no way he was going to get the wheel back on and the car spruced up in time for the ceremony. He'd already called the vicar. Igor was on tonight and had trouble responding. We watched him struggle to get his hump under the low doorway. "Coming, Master," he said. It was too much like Young Frankenstein to be very amusing.

"I can change nature, yes," G.o.d continued. "I said you couldn't. Am I right?"

"Always," said Oneway, turning to order a couple of pints of Ackroyd's. He wasn't exactly looking on Fate with any favor at that moment. "But if you can..."

"There are a lot of things I could do," G.o.d pointed out. "You might have noticed. I could stop babies dying and famines and earthquakes. But I don't, do I?"

"Well, we wouldn't know about the ones you'd stopped," Engelbrecht pointed out, a bit donnishly for him. "So when the heavens open on the day of resurrection, it really will rain cats and dogs. And who else? Jews?"

"Some Jews, yes." In another being, G.o.d's att.i.tude might have seemed defensive. "Butlisten, I want to get off the race issue. I don't judge people on their race, color, or creed. I never have. Wealth," he added a little sententiously, "has no color. If I've said who I favor and some purse-mouthed prophet decides to put his name in instead of the bloke I chose, then so it goes. It's free will in a free market. And you can't accuse me of not supporting the free market.

Economic liberalism combined with conservative bigotry is the finest weapon I ever gave the chosen people. One thing you can't accuse me of being and that's a control freak."

"See," said Lizard, then blushed. "Sorry, G.o.d. But you just said it yourself-chosen people."

"Those are the people I choose," said G.o.d with a tinge of impatience. "Yes."

"So-the Jews."

"No. The moneylenders are mostly wasps. The usurers. Oil people. Big players in Threadneedle Street and Wall Street. Or, at least, a good many of them. Very few Jews, as it happens. And most of them, in Heaven, are from show business. Look around you and tell me who are the chosen ones. It's simple. They're the people in the limousines with great s.e.x lives and private jets. Not cats, of course, who don't like travel. Otherwise, the chosen are very popular with the public or aggressively wealthy, the ones who have helped themselves. And those who help themselves G.o.d helps."

"You're a Yank!" Engelbrecht was struck by a revelation. "There are rules in this club about Yanks."

"Because Americans happen to have a handle on the realities, doesn't mean I'm American,"

G.o.d was a little offended. Then he softened. "It's probably an easy mistake to make. I mean, strictly speaking, I'm prehistoric. But, yes, America has come up trumps where religious worship is concerned. No old-fashioned iconography cluttering up their vision. There's scarcely a church in the nation that isn't a sort of glorified business seminar nowadays. G.o.d will help you, but you have to prove you're serious about wanting help. He'll at least match everything you make, but you have to make a little for yourself first, to show you can. It's all there. Getting people out of the welfare trap."

"Aren't they all a bit narrow-minded?" asked Taffy Sinclair, the metatemporal pathologist, who had so successfully dissected the Hess quints. "They are where I come from, I know." His stern good looks demanded our attention. "Baptists!" He took a long introspective pull of his shant. The ma.s.sive dome of his forehead glared in the firelight.

G.o.d was unmoved by Sinclair's point. "Those Baptists are absolute wizards. They're spot on about me. And all good Old Testament boys. They use the Son of G.o.d as a source of authority, not as an example. The economic liberalism they vote for destroys everything of value worth conserving! It drives them nuts, but it makes them more dysfunctional and therefore more aggressive and therefore richer. Deeply unhappy, they turn increasingly to the source of their misery for a comfort that never comes. Compa.s.sionate consumption? None of your peace-and-love religions down there. Scientology has nothing on that little lot. Amateur, that Hubbard. But a b.l.o.o.d.y good one." He chuckled affectionately. "I look with special favor on the Southern Baptist Convention. So there does happen to be a preponderance of Americans in paradise, as it happens. But ironically no Scientologists. Hubbard's as fond of cats as I am, but he won't have Scientologists. I'll admit, too, that not all the chosen are entirely happy with the situation, because of being pretty thoroughly outnumbered, just by the Oriental shorthairs.

And they do like to be in control. And many of them are bigots, so they're forever whiningabout the others being favored over them.

"Of course, once they get to Heaven, I'm in control. It takes a bit of adjustment for some of them. Some of them, in fact, opt for h.e.l.l, preferring to rule there than serve in Heaven, as it were. Milton was on the money, really, if a bit melodramatic and fanciful. Not so much a war in Heaven as a renegotiated contract. A pending paradise."

"I thought you sent Jesus down as the Prince of Peace," said Lizard a little dimly. The black bombers were wearing off, and he was beginning to feel the effects of the past few hours.

"Well, in those days," said G.o.d, "I have to admit, I had a different agenda. Looking back, of course, it was a bit unrealistic. It could never have worked. But I wouldn't take no for an answer, and you know the rest. New Testament and so on? Even then Paul kept trying to talk to me and I wouldn't listen. Another temporary fix-up as it turned out. He was right. I admitted it.

The problem is not in the creating of mankind, say, but in getting the self-reproducing software right. Do that and you have a human race with real potential. But that's always been the hurdle, hasn't it? Now l.u.s.t and greed are all very well, but they do tend to involve a lot of messy side effects. And, of course, I tried to modify those with my ten commandments. Everyone was very excited about them at the time. A bit of fine-tuning I should have tried earlier. But we all know where that led. It's a ramshackle world at best, I have to admit. The least I can do is sh.o.r.e a few things up. I tried a few other belief systems. All ended the same way. So the alternative was to bless the world with sudden rationality. Yet once you give people a chance to think about it, they stop reproducing altogether. l.u.s.t is a totally inefficient engine for running a reproductive program. It means you have to modify the rational processes so that they switch off at certain times. And we all know where that leads. So, all in all, while the fiercest get to the top, the top isn't worth getting to and if it wasn't for the cats, I'd wind the whole miserable failure up. In fact I was going to until Jesus talked me into offering cloning as an alternative. I'd already sent them H. G. Wells and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The United Nations and all the rest of it. I'm too soft, I know, but Jesus was always my favorite, and he's never short of a reason for giving you all another chance. So every time I start to wipe you out, along he comes with that b.l.o.o.d.y charm of his and he twists me round his little finger. Well, you know the rest. One world war interrupted. Started again. Stopped again. Couple more genocides. Try again. No good. So far, as you've probably noticed, you haven't exactly taken the best options offered. Even Jesus is running out of excuses for you. So I'm giving it a few years and then, no matter what, I'm sending a giant comet. Or I might send a giant cat. It'll be a giant something anyway. And it'll be over with in an instant. Nothing cruel. No chance to change my mind."

Death was hovering about in the shadows, glancing meaningfully at his watches.

"That's it, then, is it?" Jillian Burnes seemed a bit crestfallen. "You've come to warn us that the world has every chance of ending. And you offer us no chance to repent, to change, to make our peace?" She tightened her lips. G.o.d could tell how she felt.

"I didn't offer," G.o.d reminded her. "Somebody asked. Look, I am not the Prince of Lies. I am the Lord of Truth. Not a very successful G.o.d of Love, though I must say I tried. More a G.o.d of, well, profit, I suppose. I mean everyone complains that these great religious books written in my name are incoherent, so they blame the writers. Never occurs to them that I might not be entirely coherent myself. On account of being-well, the supreme being. If I am existence, partsof existence are incoherent. Or, at least, apparently incoherent. . ." He realized he'd lost us.

"So there's no chance for redemption?" said Engelbrecht, looking about him. "For, say, the bohemian sporting fancy?"

"I didn't say that. Who knows what I'll feel like next week? But I'll always get on famously with cats. Can't resist the little beggars. There are some humans who are absolutely satisfied with the status quo in Heaven. But all cats get a kick out of the whole thing. The humans, on the quiet, are often only there to look after the cats."

"And the rest?"

"I don't follow you," said G.o.d. "Well, of course, being omniscient, I could follow you.

What I should have said was 'I'm not following you.' "

"The rest of the people. What happens to them. The discards. The souls who don't make it through the pearly gates, as it were?" Engelbrecht seemed to be showing unusual concern for others.

"Recycled," said G.o.d. "You know-thrown back in the pot-what do the Celts call it?-the Mother Sea? After all, they're indistinguishable in life, especially the politicians. They probably hardly notice the change."

"Is that the only people who get to stay?" asked the Dwarf. "Rich people?"

"Oh, no," said G.o.d. "Though the others do tend to be funny. Wits and comics mostly. I love Benny Hill, don't you? He's often seated on my right side, you might say. You need a lot of cheering up in my job."

Jillian Burnes was becoming sympathetic. She loved to mother power. "I always thought you were a matron. I felt ashamed of you. It's such a relief to find out you're male." There was a sort of honeyed criticism in her voice, an almost flirtatious quality.

"Not strictly speaking male," said G.o.d, "being divine, sublime, and, ha, ha, all things, including woman, the eternal mime."

"Well, you sound very masculine," she said. "White and privileged."

"Absolutely!" G.o.d rea.s.sured her. "I approve of your method. That's exactly who I am and that's who I like to spend my time with, if I have to spend it with human beings at all."