Tales of Old Earth (30 page)

Terry stuck his hands in his pockets. “The truth hurts, eh?”

Without answering, the shabby man called his watches in. They came swooping down on him, finding safe harbor in his many pockets. He turned and hobbled away.

“It's called denial!” Terry shouted after him. “Therapists have known about it for centuries!”

It was rush hour in the subway. The crowds were so thick that people were constantly losing their hold on the platform grab bars and being jostled up in the air. If it weren't for friendly hands to pull them down, they'd be in serious trouble.

The peoplemover “Spirit of Leningrad” pulled in. Seats filled up fast, and there were six or seven people left standing when it left the station. A teenager in an orange leather jacket studded with video pins sat down next to Terry, then offered his chair to an old woman. A dozen pop songs clashed faintly from his pins. The crone smiled at him, sat down, adjusted her seat.

“I'm moving to New England,” Terry told her. “Maybe this month.”

She glared at him and turned her chair away.

City dwellers were rude. Terry was used to it. He sighed, and flicked on his paper.

HOUSING SHORTAGE SHAKES CITY said the
Times
. Just another reason to get out. WORST SITUATION SINCE WAR. There were people, it seemed, who'd been waiting weeks for a suitable upgrade. Of course the
Times
was an opposition paper—it had to put a bad face on everything. JOBLESS RATE HITS 35% said the
News
. The
News
was an establishment rag; somewhere in the article would be statistics justifying the situation. But the way Terry saw it, the figures spoke for themselves. With a third of the working population on sabbatical at any given time, that meant almost three percent were between jobs, pounding the pavement, making do with three-quarters normal salary and benefits. Times were tough.

Terry hit Midtown before the Authority office opened, so he stopped in a diner for brunch. It was a Polynesian joint with thatched roofs over the tables and white sand covering the floor. He ordered the papaya-breadfruit surprise and two eggs that had never been inside a chicken. He didn't bother with the orange juice. It never tasted like the stuff he used to drink when he was a kid. The way he figured it, if they didn't have it down by now, they never would. You simply couldn't get oranges like they had back then anymore.

He picked at his food, thinking about Krissie. Pregnancy was tough. Kris had less than a year's leave for it. And the neighborhood maternity center—well, he guessed it was okay. Just last night the nurse-midwife had come by for the weekly and she'd said Krissie was doing fine. Still, you couldn't help but worry.

What kind of a place was this to bring up a kid in, anyway? Children needed to run wild, enough room so they could stretch out and grow, woods they could disappear into for hours and days at a time.

“A penny for your thoughts,” the waitress said when she brought the bill and a thumbpad.

Terry waved a hand toward the dugout canoe that hung from the rafters in the back of the diner over a small turquoise waterfall. “That thing's Malaysian, you know that? This whole place is about as Polynesian as I am. I mean, you can talk about cultural preservation all you want, but let's be honest here. It's pointless to pretend you can preserve a culture you've never experienced first-hand. You wind up with the MGM-Disney fantasy version of something that never existed in the first place. You get where I'm coming from?”

He jabbed his thumb on the pad and left without even picking up his complimentary breath mint.

Downtown wasn't so bad as Midtown if you had kids. But of course—all this urban bureaucracy!—you couldn't do anything so simple as just
move
there. You had to stand in line. Flats were assigned according to a complicated formula. So many points from the monthly lottery (one ticket for paying rent; extra for civic service or orbital work) and so many for need (about one room per family member, plus kitchen and bath). Plug in the neighborhood stats—quality-of-life, environmental health, access to schools, clinics, entertainment—and out pops the number. They'd drawn a high number last month, thanks in part to the Black Lagooner being on its way, so they'd decided it was now or never.

He spent half an hour sitting on a gut-sprung sofa before the government lady called him in. She rose to shake his hand. “Mr. Bissel. Thank you for your patience.” He took a chair and she sank back down behind her desk. “Where exactly were you thinking of moving?”

“New Hampshire.”

She looked up.

Terry laughed. “Just a joke. Right now, today, I'm interested in something Downtown. Quiet. Spacious. Suitable for a newborn.”

“I—see.” The government lady touched three spots on her desk and it spat out a hardcopy of three addresses. But she didn't hand them over. “Mr. Bissel, I note that you're monolingual.”

“Yeah? So?”

“No crafts or hobbies. You don't play any musical instruments.” She frowned. “Your cultural preservation ratings are distinctly below the mean.”

“Aw, c'mon, you know as well as I do, that stuff's all bullshit.”

The woman's eyes flared. “I most certainly do
not!
Multidiversity—”

“—is a crock. Look, if you want to preserve our goddamn priceless ethnic and cultural heritages, then just hand out rifles. What do you think ethnicity is all about, if it's not hating the people in the next county? Molotov cocktails for everybody in the bar! Kill the lot and let God sort ‘em out! The plain and simple truth is that instead of trying to preserve our tribal identifications, we ought to be doing everything we can to obliterate them. You want to prevent the next war? Burn the family albums!”

Her mouth opened and shut. She said nothing.

Terry picked up the hardcopy. On the way out, he grinned and said, “Never mind me. I'm Irish on my mother's side, and ‘tis like me Mither always sez: The only thing the Irish like better than an argument is a good fight.”

The first apartment was in Chinatown, overlooking the Canal. There were some kids jigging crabs on the stairs out front. Little goats were running around on the roof. Terry liked water well enough, but he didn't like sky goats all that much. Supposedly they helped keep the city clean by eating trash. He couldn't see it.

The manager of the building was a fat Mongolian who was more interested in his saxophone than in showing the flat. Terry stood, hands behind his back, looking at the Buddhist woodcuts on the wall while the man finished a snatch from
Rhapsody in Blue
. Then he sighed and put down his instrument. Lumbering, he led the way to the fourth floor.

The present tenant was, according to the hardcopy, a high-wire artist who was joining an Uptown circus. He squatted on the floor, greasing parts of a disassembled unicycle. He didn't even look up from his work, but just grunted.

“Most of building is squatters,” the super said, with an expansive gesture. “Only this guy is movers. No face canal, si? No face canal.”

“No face canal is right,” Terry muttered. He stared out the window into a filthy airshaft with a few vegetable gardens down below. Some kids were playing wall ball. They had those garish knee and elbow grips that were all the craze nowadays, and were swarming up the walls three and four floors. One of them made a face at him.

He smiled back at her. I'm leaving the city, little girl, and you're
not
.

One look was enough, though. The super was obviously glad to get back to his music. He called an absentminded “Adios, good buddy amigo” after Terry. There was a strong Hispanic component in this neighborhood; he probably thought he was speaking English.

Off to prospect number two in Little America.

Little America was as motley a place as its namesake. The prospect was a two-bedroom flat that had been created by knocking out the walls between two pre-War flats. It faced the street, and between the clash of bicycle bells and street musicians, fishmongers, vegetable-carvers, poetry slammings (Terry had signed a petition against slamming once, but the Street Poets Union had power and a popular argument that they were a “humanizing influence” on the city), and people laughing, he would never've gotten any sleep.

The super was ethnic Kenyan, with skin as purple as a plum. She had an overprecise New Oxford accent and said she was working on an interactive software history cycle. “You and half the universe,” Terry said, and she cheerily agreed. But when he suggested she look into someplace outside the city, where rents were cheaper, her expression changed to one of offended
hauteur
. “Look at the apartment. Rent it or don't,” she snapped. “Be quick about it. I haven't the time for any nonsense from the likes of you.”

In the actual case, there wasn't any real choice. The baby would never get any sleep in this bedlam. And Krissie might like this sort of neigborhood, but as far as Terry was concerned it was exactly the sort of overcrowded chaos that he wanted to get away from.

“I'll pass,” he said.

Third time was the charm. The apartment was on the top floor, windows on three sides, with solid oak floors. They hadn't learned how to grow oak by the plank until ten years ago, so he could only imagine how much it had cost new. There was a modern kitchen with a tap-line to the local shops so he wouldn't have to be trotting all the way across the street whenever the wife got one of her cravings. There were kids playing wall ball outside, but they weren't going any higher than the third floor, so the noise was tolerable.

The clincher was that the surrounding buildings opened up in a way that gave him a completely unobstructed view of Jupiter through the city dome. Terry was a sucker for cloudgazing. He could sit and watch the planet's slow-swirling weather fronts endlessly shifting from pattern to pattern for hours.

It was evening when Terry finally got home, and all the city lights were blue-shifting into twilight. He felt weary but virtuous. Krissie, he knew, would be pleased, and that was all that really mattered.

There were two strangers in the flat when he came in. A slender woman and a real bruiser of a man. From the quiet neutrality of their dress, Terry guessed they were counselors or therapists of some sort.

“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “What's going on?”

“Terry,” his wife said. “A woman called from the Housing Authority. She told me how you behaved and I—” She looked helplessly about her. “And I—”

“Mr. Bissel,” the woman said. “You've been telling people that you plan to move out of the city.”

“Yeah, so? That's not a crime. I mean, look around you. It's a perfectly rational response to an intolerable situation.” Krissie was crying again.

“You want to move to … New England, is it?”

“Look.” He spread his hands in bafflement. “What is all this?”

Kris stepped close to him. Through angry tears she said, “The War, Terry—remember the War? There
is
no New England, not anymore. Three weeks the asteroids fell. Three weeks! The clouds covered the skies for years!” She was hysterical now, babbling. “Everything was destroyed—Earth, Mars, all the colonies. The cities. My mother. All of them.” She began punching him on the chest. “My brother Allen! Mrs. Kressner! Jamal Hardessy! Angela Hughes!”

The burly man slid himself between them. Gently he placed his enormous hands on Terry's arms. It was like being gripped by a mountain. “Don't bother, Mrs. Bissel,” he said. “We get a lot of these cases. More every year. They never listen.”

The woman opened the door. “He'll be taken care of,” she said.

“Where are you taking him?” Kris asked fearfully.

“Someplace pleasant,” the man said. “You'll be informed when he's ready for visitors.”

“But you can't. I need him here. My God, there's a baby on the way!”

“Mrs. Bissel. We cannot allow your husband to wander about loose. His illness—it's like a virus. It could infect others. He's a threat to the survival of the city.”

“Oh, not my husband. You don't know Terry. He's a good man. He—”

Harshly, the woman said, “It may not show ordinarily. But we're all precariously balanced. This exaggerated kindness we show each other, our horror of conflict, the cult of preservation—these are signs of denial. All our society is an extreme reaction to … to what happened. We're none of us totally sane, you know. We're all of us at risk.”

They escorted him into the hall.

“Terry!” his wife cried. “Try to concentrate. Try to concentrate. You can't leave the city. We're the only surviving colony—the last habitat that humanity has left. There is nowhere else to go.”

“Oh no,” Terry said happily as they shut the door behind him. “I know where I'm going. I'm going to the country!”

16

The Changeling's Tale

Fill the pipe again. If I'm to tell this story properly, I'll need its help. That's good. No, the fire doesn't need a new log. Let it die. There are worse things than darkness.

How the tavern creaks and groans in its sleep! 'Tis naught but the settling of its bones and stones, and yet never a wraith made so lonesome a sound. It's late, the door is bolted, and the gates to either end of the Bridge are closed. The fire burns low. In all the world only you and I are awake. This is no fit tale for such young ears as yours, but—oh, don't scowl so! You'll make me laugh, and that's no fit beginning to so sad a tale as mine. All right, then.

Let us pull our stools closer to the embers and I'll tell you all.

I must begin twenty years ago, on a day in early summer. The Ogre was dead. Our armies had returned, much shrunken, from their desperate adventures in the south and the survivors were once again plying their trades. The land was at peace at last, and trade was good. The tavern was often full.