Strange Wine (15 page)

Doc was braced with a hand on either side of her semi-naked body, staring down at her.

“My mother was in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911,” she said. She spoke as if they had not been interrupted in their conversation, as if he had not made love to her again, as if they had not been discovered, as if Mr. Ramsdell had not looked at them with the burning eye of God, as if she had not been told to leave within minutes. “She always worked. That was where my dream came from.” Then she began to cry.

Henry Thomas rose from her body and from her bed. He looked down at her. Then he looked at the open door and the cardboard box. He had wondered about the cardboard box. It wasn’t strong enough or heavy enough to keep anyone out. He had wondered why she had placed it there. And now he knew what she meant by her warning that he not come to visit very
very
late some nights.

He seemed to shrink, then. To grow smaller. He was a tall man, a good and succoring height for a veterinarian who must reassure small children who came to him with the broken-winged hummingbird and the puppy with worms and the cat that had lost an eye in a fight. But he shrank. He withered. He fell in upon himself, making a terrible, heartbreaking, wounded sound.

And then he went mad.

He grabbed her from the bed by her long chestnut hair and threw her through the open door, across the linoleum floor of the pantry. He followed her, now suddenly growing large again, swelling as if filling with poison, and dragged her by the hair across the kitchen linoleum. She tried to turn over, and saw in his hand the cleaver from the rack on the wall. He had taken it, but she did not know when he had put his hand to it first.

And then they were in the dining room, and Doc was screaming about theft and valuables that had been stolen and defilement and other insane things that made no sense, and then he was blood all over, and his hand went up and down in movements too swift to see, and there was blood on the walls and across the damask tablecloth, and there were spots of thick, terrible color on the crystal prisms of the low-hanging chandelier. And there was screaming.

And then she was alone, lying in blood, half-naked, thirty-one years old, the only thing left alive in the dining room of the Octagon House.

Until they came and put her down the well.

Lava filled the Heavenly pool. It had seeped in through fissures at the bottom, and the pale golden water had been dissipated as steam. Now it boiled up, green and black and angry crimson just beneath the crackling, shifting crust.

Margaret Thrushwood clung to Henry Thomas and felt their bodies trembling in unison. “Why did you leave me?” she said, so softly he could barely hear her above the crackling of the lava.

Then she was pulling him to his feet, and she noticed that though his bare legs had been submerged in the pool, in the lava, they were untouched. In The Foul Place she had been sent to the lava baths. It was not the same. That was probably the chief difference between Heaven and Hell.

She took him away from the pool, and they stood near one of the pastel walls even as it developed jagged lightning-fork rents in its smooth face. The air was thick and charged.

Then God came to them and whatever else was sad or funny or according to legend or cleverly beyond anyone’s imagining, there was nothing humorous about God in Their multiplicity. They came to Margaret Thrushwood and the trembling shade that was Henry “Doc” Thomas, and They said, “You are an alien flesh here. You cannot stay.”

“I won’t go back,” said Margaret Thrushwood, speaking to Them more boldly than she had ever spoken before either in life or in death, speaking to Them as though They were not God at all, just speaking up boldly. “It was a mistake. I never did anything wrong. He did it all, and then he ran away and I never had a chance.
You
should know that! You keep records, don’t you?”

But God insisted, pointing back the way Margaret Thrushwood had crawled.

“Take him down there,” she said. Then she caught herself. “No, I didn’t mean that. Let him be. He couldn’t make it down there.”

God was pulling her by the arm. “All right, all right! Don’t pull me, I can go on my own, thank you.” And God let go of her arm and she said to Them, “Give me a second.” And God waited, but not patiently, because Heaven was fracturing at every juncture.

Margaret took Henry Thomas’ face in her hands, and looked into his eyes, and she realized he had grown shorter and she had grown taller, just as it had happened that night. She leaned in close to him and murmured, “They did it wrong, Doc. They made mistakes. And they’ll keep it this way, just because everyone wants to believe it. They don’t want to know the truth, Doc. It’s easier for everyone this way. If enough people believe the fantasy, well, then it becomes the reality. But we know, Doc.
We
know who belongs where, don’t we?”

And she kissed him gently, and patted his cheek, and shook her head at the stupidity of it all; she looked at God and They looked back at her impatiently. “There are some people who just shouldn’t be allowed to fool around with love,” she said to God. “He was irrational. What did Mr. Ramsdell matter? What did any of it matter?”

Then God led her away, back toward The Foul Place.

When they reached the doorway, God knocked, and after a little while the doorway opened, loosing a terrible smell. “I can make it by myself from here,” Margaret Thrushwood said, drawing herself up regally. She stepped across the threshold, but just as the door was closing, she turned to God and said, “When you see Mr. Ramsdell, give him my regards.”

Then she walked inside and the doorway closed again.

And the last thing God saw, as Margaret Thrushwood crawled down into crimson darkness, was a short, shadowy figure just inside the portal. The figure was naked, and smoldering, and held a paint brush and a palette.

Covering the walls of Hell, just inside the portal, was a fresco of roses so painfully beautiful to behold that They could not wait to get back to find Michelangelo, to tell him about the grandeur They had beheld, there in that most unlikely of places.

Because of the widespread intelligence of my intractability with publishers and editors who feel it is their god-given right to revise what an author puts on paper, because of this knowledge throughout the length and breadth of the publishing industry, when someone buys a story from me they know the contract will include a clause that forbids their altering even a comma without my written permission. If it’s wrong, I’ll no doubt change it when it’s pointed out to me. I’m not an amateur. But the indiscriminate and foolish meddling of self-important copyeditors and recent graduates of the Seven Sisters is a kind of literary vampirism I will not tolerate. If there are to be mistakes in a story, let them be mine, for which I assume full responsibility. And as for my style and syntax, well, they may not be Cyril Connolly or Jacques Barzun, but by Crom they’re
mine!

So, like the cranky child I am, as most of us can be from time to time, I get my way…or I don’t sell the story to that buyer. Which means I seldom write to order. I do a story with what Flaubert called “clean hands and composure” and
then
send it out to market. For the most exorbitant rate I can bleed out of a magazine or television network.

But Terry Carr is a friend of mine, and when he asked me for a story for an upcoming anthology, I amused myself by playing a little game. “What
kind
of story do you want, Terry?” I said over the long-distance phone.

“Whatever you want to write,” he replied.

“No, I’m serious,” I said. “Let me give you your heart’s desire. Tell me what kind of story you like to read, and I’ll do that thing.”

So Terry expressed a delight at Jack Vance-style stories in which many and variegated aliens appear, in a strange and alien setting, and with a happy ending, which he said I don’t often have in my work. He also said it should be the longest title I’d ever written (in a career that has featured some real doozies), because “long titles are in this year.”

So I wrote down the title “Out Near the Funicular Center of the Universe the Wine Has Been Left Open Too long and the Memory Has Gone Flat,” which was twenty-two words, beating my next closest by seven entire words. (The title was later shortened at Terry’s request to what now appears; I do not think this has anything to do with Mr. Carr and cowardice. However, when the manuscript arrived in Oakland, Mr. Carr’s place of residence, the horrified gulp of disbelief registered a full 6.8 on the Richter Scale.)

Serves him right for making me work my weary old brain to figure out a happy ending for a story about the heat death of the universe. Next time he’ll ask me for a soft pink-and-white bunny-rabbit story.

“Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Taking advantage of what he had heard with one limited pair of ears, in a single and isolated moment of recorded history, in the course of an infinitesimal fraction of conceivable time (which some say is the only time), he came to believe firmly that there was much that he could not hear, much that was constantly being spoken and indeed sung to teach him things he could never otherwise grasp, which if grasped would complete the fragmentary nature of his consciousness until it was whole at last–one tone both pure and entire floating in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence.”

W. S. MERWIN, “The Chart”

Ennui was the reason only one hundred and one thousand alien representatives came to the Sonority Gathering. One hundred and one thousand out of six hundred and eleven thousand possible delegates, one each from the inhabited worlds of the stellar community. Even so, counterbalancing the poor turnout was the essential fact that it had been ennui, in the first place, that had caused the Gathering to be organized. Ennui, utter boredom, oppressive worlds-weariness, deep heaving sighs, abstracted vacant stares, familiar thoughts and familiar views.

The dance of entropy was nearing its end.

The orchestration of the universe sounded thick and gravelly, a tune slowing down inexorably, being played at the wrong speed.

Chasm ruts had been worn in the dance floor.

The oscillating universe was fifty billion years old, and it was tired.

And the intelligent races of six hundred and eleven thousand worlds sought mere moments of amusement, pale beads of pastel hues strung on a dreary Möebius strip of dragging time. Mere moments, each one dearer than the last, for there were so few. Everything that could be done, had been done; every effort was ultimately the fuzzed echo of an earlier attempt.

Even the Sonority Gathering had been foreshadowed by the Vulpeculan Quadrivium in ’08, the tonal festival hosted by the Saturniidae of Whoung in ’76, and the abortive, ludicrous Rigellian Sodality “musical get-together” that had turned out to be merely another fraudulent attempt to purvey the artist Merle’s skiagrams to an already disenchanted audience.

Nonetheless (in a phrase exhumed and popularized by the Recidivists of Fornax 993-λ), it was “the only game in town.” And so, when the esteemed and shimmering DeilBo devised the Gathering, his reputation as an innovator and the crush of ennui combined to stir excitement of a sluggish sort…and one hundred and one thousand delegates came. To Vindemiatrix Σ in what had long ago been called, in the time of the heliocentric arrogance, the “constellation” of Virgo.

With the reddish-yellow eye of the giant Arcturus forever lighting the azure skies, forever vying with Spica’s first magnitude brilliance, Σ’s deserts and canyons seemed poor enough stage setting for the lesser glow of Vindemiatrix, forever taking third place in prominence to its brawny elders. But Σ, devoid of intelligent life, a patchwork-colored world arid and crumbling, had one thing to recommend it that DeilBo found compelling: the finest acoustics of any world in the universe.

The Malestrom Labyrinth. Remnant of volcanic upheavals and the retreat of oceans and the slow dripping of acid waters, Σ boasted a grand canyon of stalagmites that rose one hundred and sixty kilometers; stalactites that narrowed into spear-tip pendants plunging down over ninety kilometers into bottom-less crevasses; caverns and arroyos and tunnels that had never been plotted; the arching, golden stone walls had never been seen by the eyes of intelligent creatures; the Ephemeris called it the Maelstrom Labyrinth. No matter where one stood in the sixteen-hundred-kilometer sprawl of the Labyrinth, one could speak with a perfectly normal tone, never even raise one’s voice, and be assured that a listener crouching deep in a cave at the farthest point of the formation could hear what was said as if the speaker were right beside him. DeilBo selected the Maelstrom Labyrinth as the site for the Gathering.

And so they came. One hundred and one thousand alien life-forms. From what the primitives had once called the constellations of Indus and Pavo, from Sad al Bari in Pegasus, from Mizar and Phecda, from all the worlds of the stellar community they came, bearing with them the special sounds they hoped would be judged the most extraordinary, the most stirring, the most memorable: ultimate sounds. They came, because they were bored and there was nowhere else to go; they came, because they wanted to hear what they had never heard before. They came; and they heard.

“…he domesticated the elephant, the cat, the bear, the rat, and kept all the remaining whales in dark stalls, trying to hear through their ears the note made by the rocking of the axle of the earth.”

W. S. Merwin, “The Chart”

If she had one fear in this endless life, it was that she would be forced to be born again. Yes, of course, life was sacred, but how
long
, how ceaselessly, repetitiously long did it have to go on? Why were such terrible stigmas visited on the relatives and descendants of those who simply, merely, only wished to know the sweet sleep?