Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 51, page 7
“How do they know if I’m fit enough for this job after all these years?”
“They’ve kept checks on you, no doubt.”
Arisón thought of tripping one and slugging two and doing a bolt, but the quickguns of the two were certainly trained upon him. Besides, what would that gain him? A few hours’ start, with unnecessary pain, disgrace, and ruin on Mihányo, his children, and himself, for he was sure to be caught.
“The automob,” he said ridiculously.
“A small matter. Your firm will deal with that.”
“How can I settle my children’s future?”
“Come on, no use arguing. You are coming now, alive or dead, fit or unfit.”
Speechless, Arisón let himself be marched off to a light military vehicle.
In five minutes he was in the mag-lev train, an armoured affair with strong windows. In ten more minutes, with the train moving off, he was stripped of his civilian clothes and possessions (to be returned later to his wife, he learnt), had his identity disc extracted and checked and its Relief tagend removed, and a medical checkup was begun on him. Apparently this was satisfactory to the military authorities. He was given military clothing.
He spent a sleepless night in the train trying to work out what he had done with this, what would be made of that, who Mihányo could call upon in need, who would be likely to help her, how she would manage with the children, what (as nearly as he could work it out) they would get from a pension which he was led to understand would be forthcoming from his firm, how far they could carry on with their expected future.
A grey predawn saw the train’s arrival at Veruam. Foodless (he had been unable to eat any of the rations) and without sleep, he gazed vacantly at the marshalling-yards. The body of men travelling on the train (apparently only a few were Remployees) were got into closed trucks and the long convoy set out for Emmel.
At this moment Hadolaris’ brain began to re-register the conceleration situation. About half a minute must have passed since his departure from Oluluetang, he supposed, in the Time of his top bunker. The journey to Emmel might take up another two minutes. The route from Emmel to that bunker might take a further two and a half minutes there, as far as one could work out the calculus. Add the twenty-years’ (and southward journey’s) sixteen to seventeen minutes, and he would find himself in that bunker not more than some twenty-two minutes after he had left it. (Mihan, Deres, and the other two would all be nearly ten years older and the children would have begun to forget him.) The blitz was unprecedentedly intense when he had left, and he could recall (indeed it had figured in several nightmares since) his prophecy to XN 1 that a breakthrough might be expected within the hour. If he survived the blitz, he was unlikely to survive a breakthrough; and a breakthrough of what? No one had ever seen the Enemy, this Enemy that for Time immemorial had been striving to get across the Frontier. If it got right over, the twilight of the race was at hand. No horror, it was believed at the Front, could equal the horror of that moment. After a hundred miles or so he slept, from pure exhaustion, sitting up in a cramped position, wedged against the next man. Stops and starts and swerves woke him at intervals. The convoy was driving at maximum speeds.
At Emmel he stumbled out to find a storm lashing down. The river was in spate. The column was marched to the depot. Hadolar was separated out and taken in to the terminal building where he was given inoculations, issued with “walker,” quickgun, em-kit, protsuit, and other impedimenta, and in a quarter of an hour (perhaps seven or eight seconds up at the top bunker) found himself entering a polyheli with thirty other men. This had barely topped the first rise and into sunlight when explosions and flarings were visible on all sides. The machine forged on, the sight-curtains gradually closing up behind and retreating grudgingly before it. The old Northern vertigo and somnambulism re-engulfed Had. To think of Kar and their offspring now was to tap the agony of a ghost who shared his brain and body. After twenty-five minutes they landed close to the foot of a mag-lev train line. The top-bunker lapse of “twenty-two minutes” was going, Had saw, to be something less. He was the third to be bundled into the mag-lev train compartments, and 190 seconds saw him emerging at the top and heading for bunker VV. XN 1 greeted his salute merely with a curt command to proceed by rocket to the top bunker. A few moments more and he was facing XN 2.
“Ah, here you are. Your Relief was killed so we sent back for you. You’d only left a few seconds.” A ragged hole in the bunker wall testified to the incident. The relief’s cadaver, stripped, was being carted off to the disposal machine.
“XN 2. Things are livelier than ever. They certainly are hot stuff. Every new offensive from here is pitched back at us in the same style within minutes, I notice. That new cannon had only just started up when back came the same shells—I never knew They had them. Tit for tat.”
Into H’s brain, seemingly clarified by hunger and exhaustion and much emotion, flashed an unspeakable suspicion, one that he could never prove or disprove, having too little knowledge and experience, too little overall view. No one had ever seen the Enemy. No one knew how or when the War had begun. Information and communication were paralysingly difficult up here. No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier, or beyond it. Could it be that the conceleration there became infinite and that there was nothing beyond the Frontier? Could all the supposed missiles of the Enemy be their own, somehow returning? Perhaps the war had started with a peasant explorer lightheartedly flinging a stone northwards, which returned and struck him? Perhaps there was, then, no Enemy?
“XN 3. Couldn’t that gun’s own shells be reflected back from the Frontier, then?”
“XN 2. Impossible. Now you are to try to reach that forward missile post by the surface—our tunnel is destroyed—at 15º 40’ East—you can just see the hump near the edge of the I/R viewer’s limit—with this message; and tell him verbally to treble output.”
The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on his “walker,” into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable supercrescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure, and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope …
© 1965 by David I. Masson.
Originally published in New Worlds.
Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Irvine Masson was born in Edinburgh from a distinguished family of academics and thinkers. Although his output was small and consisted entirely of short stories, he gained a reputation as a writer of vigorous experimental SF. All of his short science fiction is published in the collection The Caltraps of Time. He died in Leeds in 2007.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
FANTASY
State Change
Ken Liu
Every night, before going to bed, Rina checked the refrigerators.
There were two in the kitchen, on separate circuits, one with a fancy ice dispenser on the door. There was one in the living room holding up the TV, and one in the bedroom doubling as a nightstand. A small cubical unit meant for college dorm rooms was in the hallway, and a cooler that Rina refilled with fresh ice every night was in the bathroom, under the sink.
Rina opened the door of each refrigerator and looked in. Most of the refrigerators were empty most of the time. This didn’t bother Rina. She wasn’t interested in filling them. The checks were a matter of life and death. It was about the preservation of her soul.
What she was interested in were the freezer compartments. She liked to hold each door open for a few seconds, let the cold mist of condensation dissipate, and feel the chill on her fingers, breasts, face. She closed the door when the motor kicked in.
By the time she was done with all of the refrigerators, the apartment was filled with the bass chorus of all of the motors, a low, confident hum that to Rina was the sound of safety.
In her bedroom, Rina got into bed and pulled the covers over her. She had hung some pictures of glaciers and icebergs on the walls, and she looked at them as pictures of old friends. There was also a framed picture on the refrigerator by her bed, this one of Amy, her roommate in college. They had lost touch over the years, but Rina kept her picture there anyway.
Rina opened the refrigerator next to her bed. She stared into the glass dish that held her ice cube. Every time she looked, it seemed to get smaller.
Rina closed the refrigerator and picked up the book lying on top of it.
• • • •
Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Portrait in Letters by Friends, Foes, and Lovers—
New York, January 23, 1921
My Dearest Viv,—
Finally got up the courage to go see Vincent at her hotel today. She told me she wasn’t in love with me any more. I cried. She became angry and told me that if I couldn’t keep myself under control then I might as well leave. I asked her to make me some tea.
It’s that boy she’s been seen with. I knew that. Still, it was terrible to hear it from her own lips. The little savage.
She smoked two cigarettes and offered me the box. I couldn’t stand the bitterness so I stopped after one. Afterwards she gave me her lipstick so I could fix my lips, as if nothing had happened, as if we were still in our room at Vassar.
“Write a poem for me,” I said. She owed me at least that.
She looked as if she wanted to argue, but stopped herself. She took out her candle, put it in that candleholder I made for her and lit it at both ends. When she lit her soul like that she was at her most beautiful. Her face glowed. Her pale skin was lit from within like a Chinese paper lantern about to burst into flame. She paced around the room as if she would tear down the walls. I drew up my feet on the bed, and wrapped her scarlet shawl around me, staying out of her way.
Then she sat down at her desk and wrote out her poem. As soon as it was done she blew out her candle, stingy with what remained of it. The smell of hot wax made me all teary-eyed again. She made out a clean copy for herself and gave the original to me.
“I did love you, Elaine,” she said. “Now be a good girl and leave me alone.”
This is how her poem starts:
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh—
Viv, for a moment I wanted to take her candle and break it in half, to throw the pieces into the fireplace and melt her soul into nothing. I wanted to see her writhing at my feet, begging me to let her live.
But all I did was to throw that poem in her face, and I left.
I’ve been wandering around the streets of New York all day. I can’t keep her savage beauty out of my mind. I wish my soul was heavier, more solid, something that could weigh itself down. I wish my soul wasn’t this feather, this ugly wisp of goose down in my pocket, lifted up and buffeted about by the wind around her flame. I feel like a moth.
Your Elaine
• • • •
Rina put the book down.
To be able to set your soul afire, she thought, to be able to draw men and women to you at your will, to be brilliant, fearless of consequences, what would she not give to live a life like that?
Millay chose to light her candle at both ends, and lived an incandescent life. When her candle ran out, she died sick, addicted, and much too young. But each day of her life she could decide, “Am I going to be brilliant today?”
Rina imagined her ice cube in the dark, cold cocoon of the freezer. Stay calm, she thought. Block it out. This is your life. This bit of almost-death.
Rina turned out the light.
• • • •
When Rina’s soul finally materialized, the nurse in charge of watching the afterbirth almost missed it. All of a sudden, there, in the stainless steel pan, was an ice cube, the sort you would find clinking around in glasses at cocktail parties. A pool of water was already forming around it. The edges of the ice cube were becoming rounded, indistinct.
An emergency refrigeration unit was rushed in, and the ice cube was packed away.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said to Rina’s mother, who looked into the serene face of her baby daughter. No matter how careful they were, how long could they keep the ice cube from melting? It wasn’t as if they could just keep it in a freezer somewhere and forget about it. The soul had to be pretty close to the body; otherwise the body would die.
Nobody in the room said anything. The air around the baby was awkward, still, silent. Words froze in their throats.
• • • •
Rina worked in a large building downtown, next to the piers and docked yachts she had never been on. On each floor, there were offices with windows around the sides, the ones overlooking the harbor being bigger and better furnished than the others.
In the middle of the floor were the cubicles, one of which was Rina’s. Next to her were two printers. The hum of the printers was a bit like the hum of refrigerators. Lots of people passed by her cubicle on the way to pick up their printouts. Sometimes they stopped, thinking they would say hello to the quiet girl sitting there, with her pale skin and ice-blond hair, and always a sweater around her shoulders. Nobody knew what color her eyes were because she did not look up from her desk.
But there was a chill in the air around her, a fragile silence that did not want to be broken. Even though they saw her every day, most people did not know Rina’s name. After a while, it became too embarrassing to ask. While the chattering life of the office ebbed and flowed around her, people left her alone.
Under Rina’s desk was a small freezer that the firm had installed just for her. Each morning Rina would rush into her cubicle, unzip her insulated lunch bag, and from her thermos stuffed with ice cubes, she would carefully pull out the sandwich bag holding her one special ice cube and put it into the freezer. She would sigh, and sit in her chair, and wait for her heart to slow down.
The job of the people in the smaller offices away from the harbor was to look up, on their computers, the answers to questions asked by people in the offices facing the harbor. Rina’s job was to take those answers and use the right fonts to squeeze them into the right places on the right pieces of paper to be sent back to the people in the harbor offices. Sometimes the people in the smaller offices were too busy and they would dictate their answers onto cassette tapes. Rina would then type up the answers.
Rina ate her lunch at her cubicle. Even though one could go some distance away from one’s soul for short periods of time without getting sick, Rina liked to be as close to the freezer as possible. When she had to be away sometimes to deliver an envelope to some office on another floor, she had visions of sudden power failures. Out of breath, she would then hurry through the halls to get back to the safety of her freezer.
Rina tried not to think that life was unfair to her. Had she been born before the invention of Frigidaire she would not have survived. She didn’t want to be ungrateful. But sometimes it was difficult.
After work, instead of going dancing with the other girls or getting ready for a date, she spent her nights at home, reading biographies to lose herself in other lives.
• • • •
Morning Walks with T. S. Eliot: A Memoir—
Between 1958 and 1963, Eliot was a member of the Commission for the Revised Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer. He was rather frail by this time, and avoided tapping into his tin of coffee altogether.
One exception was when the Commission came to revise Psalm 23. Four centuries earlier, Bishop Coversdale had been rather free with his translation from the Hebrew. The correct English rendition for the central metaphor in the Psalm, the Commission agreed, was “the valley of deep darkness.”
At the meeting, for the first time in months, Eliot brewed a cup of his coffee. The rich, dark aroma was unforgettable to me.
Eliot took a sip of his coffee, and then, in that same mesmerizing voice he used to read The Wasteland, he recited the traditional version that had infused itself into the blood of every Englishman: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.”
The vote was unanimous to keep Coversdale’s version, embellished though it might have been.
I think it always surprised people how deep was Eliot’s devotion to tradition, to the Anglican Church, and also how thoroughly his soul had been imbibed by the English.
I believe that was the last time Eliot tasted his soul, and often since then I have wished that I could again smell that aroma: bitter, burnt, and restrained. It was not only the spirit of a true Englishman, but also that of the genius of poetry.
• • • •
To measure out a life with coffee spoons, Rina thought, must have seemed dreadful sometimes. Perhaps that was why Eliot had no sense of humor.
But a soul in a coffee tin was also lovely in its own way. It enlivened the air around him, made everyone who heard his voice alert, awake, open and receptive to the mysteries of his difficult, dense verse. Eliot could not have written, and the world would have understood, Four Quartets without the scent of Eliot’s soul, the edge it gave to every word, the sharp tang of having drunk something deeply significant.
I would love to have the mermaids sing to me, Rina thought. Was that what Eliot dreamed of after drinking his coffee before sleep?
Instead of mermaids, she dreamt of glaciers that night. Miles and miles of ice that would take a hundred years to melt. Though there was no life in sight, Rina smiled in her sleep. It was her life.
• • • •
On the first day the new man showed up at work, Rina could tell that he was not going to be in his office for long.
His shirt was a few years out of style, and he did not take care to polish his shoes that morning. He was not very tall, and his chin was not very sharp. His office was down the hall from Rina’s cubicle, and it was small, with only one window facing the building next to this one. The nametag outside the office said Jimmy Kesnow. By all signs he should have been just another one of the anonymous, ambitious, disappointed young men passing through the building every day.
