Tympani was sitting up, puzzled, but beginning to smile. Barnum wished Bailey could give him a report on her mental condition, but the connection was broken. Shock? He'd forgotten the symptoms.
“I'll have to find out for myself,” he told Bailey.
“She looks all right to me,” Bailey said. “I was calming her as the contact was breaking. She might not remember much.”
She didn't. Mercifully, she remembered the happiness but had only a vague impression of the fear at the end. She didn't want to look at it, which was just as well. There was no need for her to be tantalized or taunted by something she could never have.
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They made love there inside Bailey. It was quiet and deep, and lasted a long time. What lingering hurts there were found healing in that gentle silence, punctuated only by the music of their breathing.
Then Bailey slowly retracted around Barnum, contracting their universe down to man-size and forever excluding Tympani.
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It was an awkward time for them. Barnum and Bailey were due at the catapult in an hour. All three knew that Tympani could never follow them, but they didn't speak of it. They promised to remain friends, and knew it was empty.
Tympani had a financial statement which she handed to Barnum.
“Two thousand, minus nineteen ninety-five for the pills.” She dropped the dozen small pellets into his other hand. They contained the trace elements the pair could not obtain in the Rings, and constituted the only reason they ever needed to visit Janus.
“Is that enough?” Tympani asked, anxiously.
Barnum looked at the sheet of paper. He had to think hard to recall how important money was to single humans. He had little use for it. His bank balance would keep him in supplement pills for thousands of years if he could live that long, even if he never came back to sell another song. And he understood now why there was so little repeat business on Janus. Pairs and humans could not mix. The only common ground was art, and even there the single humans were driven by monetary pressures alien to pairs.
“Sure, that's fine,” he said, and tossed the paper aside. “It's more than I need.”
Tympani was relieved.
“I
know
that of course,” she said, feeling guilty. “But I always feel like an exploiter. It's not very much. Rag says this one could really take off and we could get rich. And that's all you'll ever get out of it.”
Barnum knew that, and didn't care. “It's really all we need,” he repeated. “I've already been paid in the only coin I value, which is the privilege of knowing you.”
They left it at that.
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The countdown wasn't a long one. The operators of the cannon tended to herd the pairs through the machine like cattle through a gate. But it was plenty of time for Barnum and Bailey, on stretched-time, to embed Tympani in amber.
“Why?” Barnum asked at one point. “Why her? Where does the fear come from?”
“I saw some things,” Bailey said, thoughtfully. “I was going to probe, but then I hated myself for it. I decided to leave her private traumas alone.”
The count was ticking slowly down to the firing signal, and a bass, mushy music began to play in Barnum's ears.
“Do you still love her?” Barnum asked.
“More than ever.”
“So do I. It feels good, and it hurts. I suppose we'll get over it. But from now on, we'd better keep our world down to a size we can handle. What is that music, anyway?”
“A send-off,” Bailey said. He accelerated them until they could hear it. “It's coming over the radio. A circus march.”
Barnum had no sooner recognized it than he felt the gentle but increasing push of the cannon accelerating him up the tube. He laughed, and the two of them shot out of the bulging brass pipe of the Pearly Gates calliope. They made a bull's-eye through a giant orange smoke ring, accompanied by the strains of “Thunder and Blazes.”
INTRODUCTION TO
“The Barbie Murders”
Damon Knight was living in Florida and publishing a series of hardcover anthologies called
Orbit
when I first started submitting stories to him. Damon had always been one of the best editors in the field, going all the way back to the 1950s, and the
Orbit
books were very good. It was considered a mark of prestige to appear in them. I sent him three stories and he bought two of them. (More about the one he didn't buy later.)
Shortly after I had established a written correspondence with Damon, he told me that he and his wife, Kate Wilhelm, were considering moving away from Florida to a smaller town. They were considering Eugene. I gathered it was for much the same reason I was living there; they had a young son named Jon, and the area they lived in was beginning to resemble a big city. They visited Eugene, liked it, and soon had bought a house. The small science fiction community in Oregon, including myself, couldn't believe our luck.
Damon turned out to be a quiet-spoken man with a beard almost as big as he was, and an incredible, dry wit. He was one of those rare people who never seemed to say anything unless it was really worth listening to. Kate Wilhelm was much like him in that sense, and not only is she one of the best writers I've ever known, she is one of the best human beings. On the very first meeting you just knew you were in the presence of someone special.
Damon and Kate soon initiated something they had been doing for some years in Florida, which was a sort of open house one night every month for writers and readers. It quickly became the place to be in Eugene.
Not long after their arrival they hosted the first Oregon edition of something they had begun in Pennsylvania and carried on in Florida: The Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference. This was one of the two best-known gatherings in the genre, the other being Clarion, held every year at Michigan State University, my old alma mater. Clarion goes on for six weeks and has a different guest writer each week. Milford lasted only one week. I was invited to attend, and thus got my first taste of “work-shopping” stories.
It turned out to be my only taste of it. Workshops didn't really agree with me. This is absolutely nothing against Milford. I know that many writers have benefited from this sort of thing, and that many writers are proud to be able to pass on some of the tricks of the trade to beginners, journeymen, and apprentices, as well as swapping tradecraft with other veterans. It just doesn't work for me. I am usually helpless to point out anything useful about someone else's story except to say that it works for me, or it doesn't work for me. Also, when I'm finished with a story, I'm done with it. I don't enjoy revisiting it, tinkering with it, and won't do so except to editorial order, and will fight that if it is given. Luckily, I have been very little edited in my career in books and magazines. (Movies are another story, and we'll get to that.)
The format of Milford was simple. Everyone submitted stories, everyone read them, and then we would all sit down together and go around the circle, tearing them apart. Most of the people there had published. Gene Wolfe was there, and so was Kim Stanley Robinson. There didn't seem to be any favoritism; everyone got savaged more or less equally.
This story is one that was workshopped. Maybe “savaged” is too strong a word. I remember that several people had some good things to say about this story, and some others, but without an exception I can remember
every
story got a few helpful hints that the reader felt could have improved it. Many of them were good hints.
Kate had what may have been the best critique of all . . . and it was of no use to me because of my stubbornness about rewriting. Central problem of the story: how do you find a murderer among a community who all look exactly the same? Kate found the premise fascinating, but thought it should have been the jumping-off point for a deeper examination of the idea of identity itself. Her disappointment was that I had avoided any of the deeper existential and moral questions and turned it into a “puzzle” story. This criticism was offered with no condescension or opprobrium at puzzle stories per se, as she had no problem with themâand in fact went on to write a great many wonderful detective novels later that, being Kate Wilhelm stories, were always much more than simply puzzlesâbut rather with the thought that the work could have been more significant than it was. I accepted it in that spirit . . . and moved on to the next. Tackling what Kate had suggested would have involved a total rethinking and complete rewrite, and I just don't do that. For me, it is better to apply the lessons learned and search for the opportunities missed in the next story I write, not the previous one. Not a flawless system, but mine own.
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A word about Anna-Louise Bach. She is not actually a part of the Eight Worlds stories. Some critics have assumed she is, and I suppose she might somehow fit in between today and the alien invasion, in a time when we have established large cities on
the moon but before the time, two hundred years or so from today, when the bulk of the Eight Worlds stories take place. But I never thought of her that way.
No, it was simply a matter of every once in a while I would come up with a darker story idea. A situation the police should handle. The Eight Worlds is a semi-utopian environmentâand by that, I mean not perfect, because I don't believe in such a thing, but a place and time that is better in many ways than the world we have today. So when I had a story that was too nasty for those rascals in the Eight Worlds, I handed it to the unfortunate Anna-Louise. Thus I created her career, in no particular order, through half a dozen stories from her days as a probationary patrolwoman up to the chief of police of the Lunar community of New Dresden. Several of them are in this book, including one rescued from a state of suspended animation.
THE BARBIE MURDERS
THE BODY CAME to the morgue at 2246 hours. No one paid much attention to it. It was a Saturday night, and the bodies were piling up like logs in a millpond. A harried attendant working her way down the row of stainless steel tables picked up the sheaf of papers that came with the body, peeling back the sheet over the face. She took a card from her pocket and scrawled on it, copying from the reports filed by the investigating officer and the hospital staff:
Ingraham, Leah Petrie. Female. Age: 35. Length: 2.1 meters. Mass: 59 Kilograms. Dead on arrival, Crisium Emergency Terminal. Cause of death: homicide. Next of kin: unknown.
She wrapped the wire attached to the card around the left big toe, slid the dead weight from the table and onto the wheeled carrier, took it to cubicle 659A, and rolled out the long tray.
The door slammed shut, and the attendant placed the paperwork in the out tray, never noticing that, in his report, the investigating officer had not specified the sex of the corpse.
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Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach had moved into her new office three days ago and already the paper on her desk was threatening to avalanche onto the floor.
To call it an office was almost a perversion of the term. It had a file cabinet for pending cases; she could open it only at severe risk to life and limb. The drawers had a tendency to spring out at her, pinning her in her chair in the corner. To reach “A” she had to stand on her chair; “Z” required her either to sit on her desk or to straddle the bottom drawer with one foot in the legwell and the other against the wall.
But the office had a door. True, it could only be opened if no one was occupying the single chair in front of the desk.
Bach was in no mood to gripe. She loved the place. It was ten times better than the squadroom, where she had spent ten years elbow-to-elbow with the other sergeants and corporals.
Jorge Weil stuck his head in the door.
“Hi. We're taking bids on a new case. What am I offered?”
“Put me down for half a Mark,” Bach said, without looking up from the report she was writing. “Can't you see I'm busy?”
“Not as busy as you're going to be.” Weil came in without an invitation and settled himself in the chair. Bach looked up, opened her mouth, then said nothing. She had the authority to order him to get his big feet out of her “cases completed” tray, but not the experience in exercising it. And she and Jorge had worked together for three years. Why should a stripe of gold paint on her shoulder change their relationship? She supposed the informality was Weil's way of saying he wouldn't let her promotion bother him as long as she didn't get snotty about it.
Weil deposited a folder on top of the teetering pile marked “For Immediate Action,” then leaned back again. Bach eyed the stack of paperâand the circular file mounted in the wall not half a meter from it, leading to the incineratorâand thought about having an accident. Just a careless nudge with an elbow . . .
“Aren't you even going to open it?” Weil asked, sounding disappointed. “It's not every day I'm going to hand-deliver a case.”
“You tell me about it, since you want to so badly.”
“All right. We've got a body, which is cut up pretty bad. We've got the murder weapon, which is a knife. We've got thirteen eyewitnesses who can describe the killer, but we don't really need them since the murder was committed in front of a television camera. We've got the tape.”
“You're talking about a case which has to have been solved ten minutes after the first report, untouched by human hands. Give it to the computer, idiot.” But she looked up. She didn't like the smell of it. “Why give it to me?”
“Because of the other thing we know. The scene of the crime. The murder was committed at the barbie colony.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
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The Temple of the Standardized Church in Luna was in the center of the Standardist Commune, Anytown, North Crisium. The best way to reach it, they found, was a local tube line which paralleled the Cross-Crisium Express Tube.