Strange Wine (13 page)

“I’m going to find a way out,” Noah said. “I can’t take any more of this.”

“You say that every time K comes. Then you take forever to make torches and you take one step outside, and the dark terrifies you and you come back with some weak excuse why the time isn’t right.”

“This time I’m going.”

“You’ll die out there.”

“What the hell do you care?”

“I care because it’ll be more difficult for me to fight him off if you get killed, that’s the only reason I care. I despise you, your weakness, your viciousness, your insensitive stupidity…but I can’t survive without you.”

He stared at her with that bruised look she had come to hate more than any of the others, even the teeth-bared killing rage expression. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said, very softly.

They did not talk for a long time. If there had been sun or moon or stars or dusk or dawn or light or absence of light it would have been days. There was nothing to say to each other. There was never anything to say. They knew everything there was to know about each other, and there was nothing about each other that was not, in some way, beyond articulation, distasteful to the other.

They found the great drying pieces of K on the floor and walls of the passage outside the chamber. They saw the shining trail, like that left by a slug, that disappeared down the second tunnel. And they knew they had wounded him. For the first time since they had begun trying to keep K from killing them, they had inflicted some of the pain on
him
.

And then, a long time later, they heard the song again.

Sooner than they had expected. The time between attacks was much shorter. And there had been no supplies for a time; so they knew things were changing.

The sound of winged reptiles on the wind.

And they set up their defenses, but the light came more slowly now. It came flickering, and dim, and they were able to watch it without turning away. The sound of the song did not cripple them.

It took a very long time for K to come.

And he came very near the entrance, indistinct but now discernible in his nimbus of light, and he lay on the rough-stone floor of the second tunnel, and they were not afraid of him. And they had been silent, without talking, without striking out at each other, for a long time.

So K died. There, in the passage.

And when the light flickered out and was gone, all that remained was a dark gray pulpy mass without feature or form or threat.

They stood staring at it. They said nothing; they knew all there was to know; all they would ever know of K. Then they went back into the chamber and sat silently. Much later, they warmed an ingot and ate.

It was not till
very
much later that they realized they were free.

And even longer for them to do something about it.

They had followed the shining trail K had left. It was a trail of bread crumbs through the forest. A ball of string unraveled through the passages.

They climbed upward and came into light. Real light. There was a sun in the sky. It was bright red. And then they were able to discern an even smaller sun beside it, bright yellow but dwarfed by the nearer red sun.

They had come out on a flat plain. In the distance to the left was an ocean, rolling green and forever toward a golden beach; to the right, far in the distance was a great forest that went on and on to the horizon.

They said nothing to each other. All they wanted, now that they had it, was the future. A future free of each other. Noah did not look back as he started toward the ocean. Claudia stood watching him for a moment, then turned right and went toward the forest.

The plain was flat as a sheet of glass.

They stopped. Not at the same time, but soon. They stopped, the one staring at the ocean, the other at the great trees. Then, without looking directly toward each other, their paths began to alter.

They met in a clear space between the ocean and the forest, at the end of the flat plain, and keeping their distance, they walked along toward the horizon.

No matter where they would go, beneath the red sun, beneath the yellow sun, they would never hear, nor understand the word karma.

Nor would they ever hear–though it was there–the sound of winged reptiles on the wind.

The other day Elizabeth asked me, in all seriousness, if I’d heard about how some Middle Eastern oil duchy had towed an iceberg down from the Arctic to water the desert. I told her that not only hadn’t I heard about it, but that I hadn’t heard about it because it wasn’t true. She assured me it
was
true; she’d been sitting around with some rock musicians, and one of them had mentioned it, and two or three others had confirmed their knowledge of the wondrous feat. No, I said again, it was bullshit; it hadn’t happened. Liz could not be unconvinced.

So I flew into one of my patented impatience rages, snarling that such a technological miracle was not only currently beyond our fiscal capabilities, but that common sense ought to inform her perception of its unlikelihood, even though they keep talking about trying it.

An iceberg, I told her, depending on its type, can have up to 83 percent of its mass hidden underwater, and unless it has already been calved (separated) from the larger ice mass and is floating toward the Equator, it would take so much explosive to detach a worthwhile chunk that it would probably rend the entire ice sheet or glacier. Not to mention what a hazard it would be to shipping, how enormous would have to be the cables to tow it because the momentum of icebergs is so great that once set in motion they keep going for hours after the wind has abated.

Sure, I screamed, over nineteen percent of the world’s water is tied up in icebergs and, if floated to Kuwait or Los Angeles, could solve irrigation problems handily; and it’s an idea that’s been considered for a long time. But factors of wind effect, breakup, grounding, accessible supply, and controlled melting on delivery have argued convincingly against such a project. Sure, icebergs drift down as far as the North Atlantic (and a few times as far as Ireland or England), but did she have any idea how far it was from the Arctic to the Middle East? Not to mention the small question of how they would get a berg of any unmelted (from the warm currents) size through the Straits of Gibralter.

And even if all of this
were
within our technological reach today, I shouted, and even if there were solid scientific answers to these problems, if anyone had done such a magnificent thing, it would have been in every newspaper, every scientific journal, every popular magazine, on every telecast, on everyone’s lips for months before they ever began towing the damned thing. But since I subscribe to
Science News, Time, Esquire, New York, New West, Playboy, Scientific American, Publishers Weekly, New Times, Analog, Natural History, Horizon
, and
The Comic Reader
, and since I hadn’t read a word in
anyoi
them about Anwar Sadat or Hafez Assad or Hussein or the United Arab Emirates or
anybody
shelling out the billions it would take to pull off such a caper, billions which might more easily be spent to the same effect if a desalinization plant were built in this mythical location to pump the wet stuff out of the Red Sea or wherever…since all of this was true, it was, therefore,
quod erat demonstrandum
, simply one of those bullshit stories told around the hookah by rock musicians and other scientific illiterates who also believe in Atlantis, green men in flying saucers who built Angkor Wat, Scientology, brown rice, the “fact” that James Dean didn’t really die in that car crash but is still alive, hideously disfigured, in an insane asylum somewhere, and other nutso theories mostly propounded by whackos whose names begin with V or Z.

All this I conveyed at one hundred and eighty decibels. (Yes, I know. A soft manner is usually more winning than rank browbeating. I don’t necessarily want to win, however, I merely want to express my animosity toward craziness.)

And finally Elizabeth looked at me prettily, not to mention sheepishly, and she said, “I guess I’m pretty gullible, huh?”

Yes, Elizabeth, you are. But don’t feel like The Lone Ranger. Most of the population of this country, in one way or another, subscribes to a plethora of freaky rumors and beliefs. Everything from Nazism and endless assassination conspiracies to faith healing and the “fact” that the gas companies have banded together to suppress the distribution of a tiny pill invented by some genius in Indiana which, if dropped into a gallon of water, turns the H
₂
O into hi-test. It is all detailed in a wonderful book titled
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
(Charles Mackay, LL.D.). It was first published in 1841 and with only a change of the players’ names, the gullibility of our ancestors in flat Earthery, the dancing sickness, and witch burning is not much different.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
.

People will believe the gah
damned
est nuttiness. And they don’t like to be bothered with facts. They prefer their delusions. And the massed belief of people in anything, in a crazy
de facto
way, makes it true. Whether there is any truth to the conspiracy theory of the death of John F. Kennedy, it
is
true because most people
believe
it’s true.

Dwelling on this dichotomy led me to consider poor Lizzie Borden. Ask any ten or twenty people in the street at random what they know about Lizzie Borden, and those who are capable of human speech will probably recite, “Lizzie Borden took an axe/And gave her mother forty whacks;/When she saw what she had done/She gave her father forty-one.” Add to that familiar rhyme the recent television special with Elizabeth Montgomery, in which blood covered the walls, and you have a mass belief that Lizzie Borden committed matricide and patricide.

In fact, she did no such thing. The jury acquitted her in just sixty-six minutes. She
couldn’t
have done it: She was under medical care at the time, and was knocked out with laudanum, a tincture of opium used widely as a medicine in those days. She was not guilty. But everyone
believes
she did it, and no doubt Lizzie Borden burns in Hell to this day.

That concept, and the injustice of it, were what prompted me to write “Hitler Painted Roses,” Elizabeth.

One additional note on how this story was written, omitted from the hardcover edition of this book by inexcusable oversight on the part of the Author. For many years a remarkable man named Mike Hodel hosted a Friday midnight science fiction program over radio station KPFK, the Pacifica outlet in Los Angeles. Until I was ripped-off by KPFK (but never by Mike), I frequently appeared on the
Hour 25
show, and made it a practice to read my latest stories. In August of 1976, Mike suggested that if I could write stories in the middle of parties, in bookstore windows, in busy restaurants…why couldn’t I write one over the radio, while the audience listened and I described what I was doing?

It seemed lik a wild and wonderful idea, and so on 13 August, I went to the station with my typewriter and copy of WORDS MOST OFTEN MISSPELLED AND MISPRONOUNCED and we began what turned out to be an exciting adventure. I had agreed before the broadcast that I would not make notes or begin the actual writing of the story. Further, I would not even think about it, would not devise a plot. It was to be entirely spontaneous.

To insure that I would maintain the terms of the project, and to reassure the listening audience that such was the case, it was agreed that the beginning of the program would be devoted to taking calls from listeners who would suggest words of phrases that would spark the conception of the plot. Those words and phrases—-as many as feasible—-would appear in the story as such integral parts that the listeners would know I could not possibly have planned what I was going to write.

Among the words called in and selected were: “autumnal equinox,” “megalith,” “gillyflowers,” “augury,” “Jack the Ripper,” and one young man proffered the phrase
Hitler painted roses
. (I was not to learn till much later that the young man had lifted the phrase from a published poem.)

The phrase clung, though when I began the story I titled it—-I always have a title before I begin to write—-“Through the Doorway of Hell.” Midway through the on-air writing, it was obvious the story would have to be called “Hitler Painted Roses.”

That first night I wrote and explained how and what I was writing…reading one and two page progressions as they came off the typewriter there in the tiny broadcast booth…for two hours. Then, exhausted, I asked for a break and we talked for an additional hour. The program ran over a full hour, till 3 A.M. During the priods when I was actually typing, the flow of the broadcast was carried by Mike and his co-host, Mitch Harding, in conversation with sf critic Richard Delap and the then-publisher of
Delap’s Review
, Frederick Patten.

As I had only gotten halfway through what was to be a 4000 word story, I agreed to come back to finish the work on a later broadcast. The following Friday night, 20 August, had been booked for something that could not be bumped, so I made my second hegira to KPFK on 27 August…having set aside the unfinished manuscript and putting all thought of the story from my mind…and completed it in another two-hour stint.

On 3 September 1976 I came back for a third time and read the completed story. With only the most minor revisions for grammar and syntax, what you read here is exactly what came off the typewriter in that crowded, pipe-smoke-filled booth, thanks to Mike Hodel and his cohorts.

“I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.”

Thomas Henry Huxley, 1854