Shuteye for the Timebroker (13 page)

Cindy Rose fingered the hem of her outfit with distaste.

They man and woman were dressed in authentically ill-cured skins from which bits of noisome gristle still hung. Hers was a cheetah shift; his a zebra loincloth. There were also fur capes provided against the evening chill. The barbaric clothes were theirs to keep afterward—at a price, of course—as souvenirs of their week in the prehistoric past.

Their only other adornments were transponder patches pasted to their skin behind their left ears.

Cindy Rose was grateful for the comforting steady throb emitted by the microcircuitry of her patch. It felt like civilization.

Brian faced his wife. “You look beautiful. Admit it. Doesn’t it feel good to leave all your makeup and pantyhose behind?”

Cindy Rose regarded Brian as if she had never seen him before. “Judging by the stupidity of that remark, the drug must’ve started working in you already.”

With a hurt look on his face, Brian said, “I’ve told you a dozen times. Devotemp doesn’t make you ‘stupid.’ And it’s not going to hit us all at once, either. Because it’s time-encapsulated, it’ll trickle into our systems slowly, so that we have a chance to adjust to it. The effect will be cumulative, until the last day. By then we should be thinking just like our remote ancestors.”

“I hope I’m not as dumb as your father was on the day he decided to have you.”

Brian scowled. “Our primitive ancestors were not exactly dumb, dear. They survived for hundreds of thousands of years under the challenging conditions we’re going to face. I admit that certain parts of their brain were less developed than ours. The so-called higher centers. Though I can’t say what good those extra bits really do, looking at the way we live today. But other parts of their brains were perhaps even more sophisticated than what we inherited. The parts for processing sensory input, or sensing the passage of time, for example. The reptilian brain dominated. All of this is what Devotemp is supposed to simulate in us.”

Cindy Rose curved her spine and scratched under an armpit, hopping and chittering like a chimp.

“Oh, just forget being sensible then.” Brian returned to unpacking their supplies. “They told us to make sure everything was out of the containers before we forgot how to open them.”

Straightening, Cindy Rose staggered a bit; she was off-balance and felt all at once all over odd. Her vision seemed to sparkle at the edges.

“Don’t worry,” she said, frowning. “I’m forgetting all right.”

* * *

Their patches woke them by dying.

That first night they had eaten a semicharred yet still tasty supper, watched a beautiful equatorial sunset, and seen the multitude of stars emerge. Brian had added the Everglo element to the fire to insure that it would remain permanently burning throughout their big forgetting, and they had retired to the hut.

Unfamiliar, majestic animal noises had provided an organic symphony to their satisfying lovemaking. Afterward, in the shelter, covered with the furs, holding Brian, Cindy Rose had almost felt inclined to forgive him, so pleasant had their evening been. Maybe it was just the drug washing away her modern worries. In any case, it had been almost impossible to remain disgusted with him. The steady pulse behind her ear lulled Cindy Rose into dreams.

But all those peaceful feelings suddenly vanished as their patches jolted them out of deep sleep.

The regular pulse from the little devices had gone crazy, hammering away like a palsied blacksmith. Then a shrill whistle erupted from the tiny speakers. Before they could react to rip the patches away, both the whistle and the hammering ceased.

At the same time, the repetitive crump of distant explosions could be heard.

Cindy Rose and Brian scrambled outside.

Things perceived as huge shadows that blocked the stars were zooming across the sky. Cindy Rose tried to think of the word for them, but couldn’t. Birds. Big birds.

As the big dark birds neared the northern horizon, fingers of light shot upward, like lightning in reverse, followed by flaring explosions both in the sky and on the ground.

“It’s—it’s fighting,” said Brian.

“Where are we?” asked Cindy Rose.

“You know. Away from home.”

“No. I mean—the name for the whole big place.”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell us, remember?”

“I was trying to think if I knew of trouble in this place before we came. But if we don’t know the name of the place …”

They watched the fighting for some time longer. Then Brian said, “It’s not coming near us. We should sleep. In the morning we can see more things.”

“Yes.”

As the couple huddled together in the shelter that suddenly seemed so flimsy, the chorus of animal voices, apparently irked by the distant human activity, resurged.

But far from being comforting now, the noises only made Brian and Cindy Rose squeeze closer together.

* * *

Three suns had come and gone.

When it was light, the two humans wandered around the neighborhood of their shelter, investigating the land and looking for others of their kind. Loping in a partial crouch, they appeared at ease amid the waving grasses and scrub, although at times they would pause and sniff the wind uneasily, nostrils flaring wide, as if smelling the death of something enormous and distant.

So far they had found none like themselves.

The man and woman dared not roam too far from their hut. Some instinct told them that they must return to it each night. When they did return, they cooked an evening meal from their mysterious but unquestioned cache of food over the undying fire they would not now be able to restart. They watched the sun fall and the twinkling lights in the sky emerge. Each night the big dark birds came and laid their fire eggs. This was a frightening time. The humans held each other. And they talked as best they could.

“When it stop?” asked the woman.

“Sometime.”

“I—you remember?”

“Our time before this?”

“Yes.”

“No. It feels like another person.”

“I still see pictures of strange things. Inside here.” She tapped her head. “But even those going.”

Silence, except for the cacophony of animal cries and coughs, screeches and screams, accompanied by the breaking of the faraway fire eggs.

The woman spoke. “Will others come for us? Once someone said something …”

“Yes. Yes. When bad birds are done.”

A killer howled his triumph then across the veldt. The humans huddled closer together. The male stoked the fire with twigs and limbs gathered from the oasis trees. It seemed to keep the beasts away. At least after dark.

When they grew tired of sitting and had said all that they could say, they moved inside, where they impulsively coupled. The bout lasted under a minute. Vigilance could not be abandoned for long. Then they dropped off into an uneasy sleep.

* * *

The Long Necks came to browse at the trees around the watering hole. The female saw them first and grunted for her mate.

Emerging from the hut with a strange thing he had been idly handling, he joined the female.

Together they watched, apprehensive at first, then more relaxed. A pleasant odor came from the droppings of the Long Necks. Seeing them eat, the humans thought also to eat. Raw meat from their supply satisfied them.

The male began to count the Long Necks.

“One, two, three—”

With an expression of frustration on his face, he stopped and turned to the female.

“Many,” she said.

* * *

The herd of Shaggy Manes came thundering across the plain. Many, many steps from the shelter, the male and female could see the huge dust cloud raised by the herd.

It was moving right across their camp.

The male bolted for the river of animals.

Chasing after him, the female caught up after a short distance. She grabbed him roughly, halting him.

She began to grunt. The sounds were simple but varied.

The male grunted back dispiritedly and hung his head, acknowledging defeat.

Together they sank to the ground to wait.

To pass the time they groomed each other, plucking parasites from scalp and groin.

When the sun was halfway down from its height, the last of the herd straggled by, and the pair of humans returned to their camp.

Their shelter and their supplies were trampled into the earth, pounded beyond recognition by myriad hooves. The fire pit was indistinguishable from the morass.

The female sank down and began to wail. Summoning up some remnant of courage, the male began to beat his chest. When this did not cause the female to cease her keening, the male reached down and cuffed her.

The blow sobered her. She began to search the ground where she was crouching. After a time, she grunted excitedly and lifted up a bright scrap of not-stone.

The male took the piece of debris and tested its edge on his thumb, drawing forth a line of bright blood. Grunting with satisfaction, he moved toward the muddied watering hole. The female followed.

Several Shaggy Manes had perished at the hole, crushed in the general melee. The male selected a carcass and began to saw meat off it.

As he worked, the female swiveled her gaze nervously around. The smell of death was thick in the air. So much meat issued a loud call—

Suddenly she screamed.

The tawny killer, moving low to the ground, had blended perfectly with the grasses until the last seconds before its leap. With unerring accuracy and grace it launched itself at the laboring male.

Somehow the female found herself up one of the thorn trees, her flesh torn by the spikes.

Below, the sleek killer had her mate by the neck.

Screaming, the female broke branches off and tossed them at the beast mauling her mate. Then she switched to hurling her own dung.

But it was no use.

Soon the watering hole was a churning mass of predators and scavengers, winged, clawed, and fanged.

In the tree, the female wept.

Around dusk, the frenzy subsided somewhat, as did her tears.

The female thought she could see the tattered naked ribs of her mate’s corpse, smaller than those of the Shaggy Manes. But it was hard to tell in the fading light.

Crouching in the fork of the tree, the female wrapped her arms tightly around herself and began to whimper.

The night would be long.

But the dawn of the seventh day and the chemical enlightenment it would bring would be even longer.

In those long-gone days before cyberpunk, when the SF field seemed moribund, my friend Scott Edelman decided to create a magazine to shake things up. Titled
Last Wave
, in homage to the New Wave of the 1960s, Scott’s zine succeeded in publishing several very provocative and/or experimental stories. I wrote “Distances” specifically to be a part of this scene, and Scott graciously accepted it. Of course, that’s also the point at which he ran out of the money and energy to produce another issue.

The orphaned story sat for many years until Ed McFadden asked me for a contribution to his zine,
Pirate Writings
, and I dug it out. Ed accepted it, and its long journey to print reached its end.

This history is not quite as recursive or metafictional as the story itself, but it’s sufficiently deep and tangled, I think, to have dissuaded me from writing another such tale. Who knows how long the next one would take to get published?

This story, by the way, owes a debt to Frederik Pohl’s great piece, “Day Million.”

Distances

One day in the future, seventy-five years from now, a man will sit down at his desk to write a science fiction story.

He will not be a professional writer. Neither money nor fame will spur him on to compose his tale. What will motivate him will be simple bafflement that will segue into fear, and a need to grapple with it.

Cleaning out a storage pod, he comes upon a simple object: a flat photo from the last century. The yellowed color snapshot shows the man’s grandparents, clad in the ridiculous clothes of their era, posed before an internal-combustion vehicle underneath a sunny spring sky. They are smiling heartily, oblivious to time’s swift passage, which has rendered them and their entire civilization into something almost incomprehensible, antique and quaint.

The man sits back on his haunches, studying the photo with sheer amazement. Now, he wonders, could people ever have lived this way? Wearing and eating raw organic by-products, racing about under the naked sky in the grip of indescribable urgings, believing all sorts of nonsense about so many things: sex, war, nature, the very future he now inhabits, their own undisciplined minds. He exerts his imagination and empathy in an attempt to understand their era. The mental straining does little good, however. No clear insights into their inner or outer lives can be won from out of the misty, locked-away past.