Engelbrecht had bared his teeth. He was a terrier. "So can I get in, is "what I suppose I"m asking?"
"Of course you can."
"Though I"m not Jewish."
"You don"t have to be Jewish. I can"t stress this too often. Think about it. I haven"t actually favored the main ma.s.s of Jews lately, have I? I mean, take the twentieth century alone. I"m not talking about dress codes and tribal loyalties."
G.o.d spread his legs a little wide and hefted his gown to let the glow get to his divine b.u.t.tocks. If we had not known it to be a noise from the fire, we might have thought he farted softly. He sighed. "When I first got into this calling there were all kinds of other deities about, many of mem far superior to me in almost every way. More attractive. More eloquent. More easygoing. Elegant powers of creativity. Even the Celts and the Norse G.o.ds had a bit of style.
But I had ambition. Bit by bit I took over the trade until, bingo, one day there was only me. I am, after all, the living symbol of corporate aggression, tolerating no compet.i.tion and favoring only my own family and its clients. What do you want me to do? Identify with some b.l.o.o.d.y oikof an East Timorese who can hardly tell the difference between himself and a tree? Sierra Leone? Listen, you get yourselves into these messes, you get yourselves out."
"Well it"s a good world for overpaid CEOs . . . ," mused Lizard.
"In this world and the next," confirmed G.o.d. "And it"s a good world for overpaid comedians, too, for that matter."
"So Ben Elton and Woody Allen . . ."
G.o.d raised an omnipotent hand. "I said comedians."
"Um." Engelbrecht was having difficulties phrasing something. "Um ..." He was aware of Death hovering around and ticking like a showcase full of Timexes. "What about it?"
"What?"
"You know," murmured Engelbrecht, deeply embarra.s.sed by now, "the meaning of existence? The point."
"Point?" G.o.d frowned. "I don"t follow."
"Well you"ve issued a few predictions in your time. . . ."
Death was clearing his throat. "Just to remind you about that policy subcommittee," he murmured. "I think we told them half-eight."
G.o.d seemed mystified for a moment. Then he began to straighten up. Oh, yes. Important committee. Might be some good news for you. Hush, hush. Can"t say any more."
Lizard was now almost falling over himself to get his questions in. "Did you have anything to do with global warming?"
Death uttered a cold sigh. He almost put the fire out. We all glared at him, but he was unrepentant. G.o.d remained tolerant of a question he might have heard a thousand times at least.
He spread his hands. "Look. I plant a planet with sustainable wealth, OK? n.o.body tells you to breed like rabbits and gobble it all up at once."
"Well, actually, you did encourage us to breed like rabbits," Jillian Burnes murmured reasonably.
"Fair enough," said G.o.d. "I have to agree corporate expansion depends on a perpetually growing population. We found that out. Demographics are the friend of business, right?"
"Well, up to a point, I should have thought," said Lizard, aware that G.o.d had already as good as told him a line had been drawn under the whole project. "I mean it"s a finite planet and we"re getting close to exhausting it."
"That"s right." G.o.d glanced at the soft Dali watches over the bar, then darted an inquiry at Death. "So?"
"So how can we stop the world from ending?" asked Englebrecht.
"Well," said G.o.d, genuinely embarra.s.sed, "you can"t."
"Can"t? The end of the world is inevitable? "
"I thought I"d answered that one already. In fact, it"s getting closer all the time." He began to move toward the cloakroom. G.o.d, I understood, couldn"t lie. Which didn"t mean he always liked telling the truth. And he knew anything he added would probably sound patronizing or unnecessarily accusatory. Then the taxi had turned up, and Death was bustling G.o.d off into it.
And that was that. As we gathered round the fire, Lizard Bayliss said he thought it was a rum do altogether and G.o.d must be pretty desperate to seek out company like ours, especially on a wet Sat.u.r.day night. What did everyone else make of it?We decided that n.o.body present was really qualified to judge, so we"d wait until Monday, when Monsignor Cornelius returned from Las Vegas. The famous Cowboy Jesuit had an unmatched grasp of contemporary doctrine.
But this wasn"t good enough for Engelbrecht, who seemed to have taken against our visitor in a big way.
"I could sort this out," he insisted. If G.o.d had a timepiece of any weight he"d like to back, Engelbrecht would cheerfully show it the gloves.
That, admitted Jillian Burnes with new admiration, was the true existential hero, forever battling against Fate, and forever doomed to lose.
Engelbrecht, scenting an opportunity he hadn"t previously even considered, became almost egregious, slicking back his hair and offering the great novelist an engaging leer.
When the two had gone off, back to Jillian"s Tufnell Hill eyrie, Lizard Bayliss offered to buy the drinks, adding that it had been a b.l.o.o.d.y awful Friday and Sat.u.r.day so far, and he hoped Sunday cheered up because if it didn"t the whole weekend would have been a rotten write-off.
I"m pleased to say it was Taffy Sinclair who proposed we all go down to the Woods of Westermaine for some goblin shooting, so we rang up Count Dracula to tell him we were coming over to Dunsuckin, then all jumped onto our large black Fly and headed for fresher fields, agreeing that it had been one of the most depressing Sat.u.r.days any of us had enjoyed in centuries and the sooner it was behind us, the better.
In the late sixties, Tom Disch, along with John Sladek, was, in a I sense, the U.S. Amba.s.sador to the British New Wave movement. His novel Camp Concentration, written in that period, should be on every reading list of cla.s.sic sf.
Over the years Disch has been, besides a great novelist in and out of sf, a poet, playwright, critic, children"s author (his Brave Little Toaster was even Disney-ized), teacher, and, of course, short-story writer.
I"ve considered him a mentor for more than twenty-five years and am proud to present his latest fiction, which recalls a bit his New Wave days.
In Xanadu.
thomas M. disch.
In memory of John Sladek, who died March 10, 2000 And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
PART ONE.
xanadu.
H.
is awareness was quite limited during the first so-long. A popup screen said WELCOME TO XANADU, [Cook, Fran].
YOUR AFTERLIFE BEGINS NOW! BROUGHT TO YOU BY DISNEY-MITSUBISHI PRODUCTIONS of quebec! a votre sante toujours! Then there was a choice of b.u.t.tons to click on, Okay or Cancel. He didn"t have an actual physical mouse, but there was an equivalent in his mind, in much the way that amputees have ghostly limbs, but when he clicked on Okay with his mental mouse there was a dull Dong! and nothing happened. When he clicked on Cancel there was a trembling and the smallest flicker of darkness and then the pop-up screen greeted him with the original message.
This went on for an unknowable amount of time, there being no means by which elapsed time could be measured.
After he"d Dong!ed on Okay enough times, he stopped bothering. The part of him that would have been motivated, back when, to express impatience or to feel resentment or to worry just wasn"t connected. He felt an almost supernatural pa.s.sivity. Maybe this is what people were after when they took up meditation. Or maybe it was supernatural, though it seemed more likely, from the few clues he"d been given, that it was cybernetic in some way. He had become lodged (he theorized) in a faulty software program, like a monad in a game of JezzBall banging around inside its little square cage, ricocheting off the same four points on the same four walls forever. Or as they say in Quebec, toujours.
And oddly enough that was Okay. If he were just a molecule bouncing about, a lifer rattling his bars, there was a kind of comfort in doing so, each bounce a proof of the ma.s.s and motion of the molecule, each rattle an SOS dispatched to someone who might think, Ah-ha, there"s someone there!
state pleasure-dome 1 And then-or, as it might be, once upon a time-Cancel produced a different result than it had on countless earlier trials, and he found himself back in some kind of real world. There was theme music ("Wichita Lineman") and scudding clouds high overhead and the smell of leaf mold, as though he"d been doing push-ups out behind the garage, with his nose grazing the dirt. He had his old body back, and it seemed reasonably trim. Better than he"d left it, certainly.
"Welcome," said his new neighbor, a blond woman in a blouse of blue polka dots on a silvery rayonlike ground. "My name is Debora. You must be Fran Cook. We"ve been expecting you."
He suspected that Debora was a construct of some sort, and it occurred to him that he might be another. But whatever she was, she seemed to expect a response from him beyond his stare of mild surmise. "You"ll have to fill me in a little more, Debora. I don"t really know where we are."
"This is Xanadu," she said with a smile that literally flashed, like the light on top of a police car, with distinct, pointed sparkles.
"But does Xanadu exist anywhere except in the poem?"
This yielded a blank look but then another dazzling smile. "You could ask the same of us."
"Okay. To be blunt: Am I dead? Are you?"
Her smile diminished, as though connected to a rheostat. "I think that might be the case, but I don"t know for sure. There"s a sign at the entrance to the pleasure-dome that says "Welcome to Eternity."
But there"s no one to ask, there or anywhere else. No one who knows anything. Different people have different ideas. I don"t have any recollection of dying, myself. Do you?"
"I have no recollections, period," he admitted. "Or none that occur to me at this moment. Maybe if I tried to remember something in particular ..."
"It"s the same with me. I can remember the plots of a few movies. And the odd quotation. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." ""Eisenhower?" he hazarded.
"I guess. It"s all pretty fuzzy. Maybe I just wasn"t paying attention back then. Or it gets erased when you come here. I think there"s a myth to that effect. Or maybe it"s so blurry because it never happened in the first place. Which makes me wonder, are we really people here, or what? And where is here? This isn"t anyone"s idea of heaven that I ever heard of. It"s kind of like Disney World, only there"s no food, no rides, no movies. Nothing to do, really. You can meet people, talk to them, like with us, but that"s about it.
Don"t think I"m complaining. They don"t call it a pleasure-dome for nothing. That part"s okay, though it"s not any big deal. More like those Magic Finger beds in old motels."
He knew just what she meant, though he couldn"t remember ever having been to an old motel or lain down on a Magic Fingers bed. When he tried to reach for a memory of his earlier life, any detail he could use as an ID tag, it was like drawing a blank to a clue in a crossword. Some very simple word that just wouldn"t come into focus.
Then there was a fade to black and a final, abject Dong! that didn"t leave time for a single further thought.
alph "I"m sorry," Debora said, with a silvery shimmer of rayon, "that was my fault for having doubted.
Doubt"s the last thing either of us needs right now. I love the little dimple in your chin."
"I"m not aware that I had a dimple in my chin."
"Well, you do now, and it"s right-" She traced a line up the center of his chin with her finger, digging into the flesh with the enamaled tip as it reached. "-here."
"Was I conked out long?"
She flipped her hair as though to rid herself of a fly, and smiled in a forgiving way, and placed her hand atop his. At that touch he felt a strange la.s.situde steal over him, a deep calm tinged somehow with mirth, as though he"d remembered some sweet, dumb joke from his vanished childhood. Not the joke itself but the laughter that had greeted it, the laughter of children captured on a home video, silvery and chill.
"If we suppose," she said thoughtfully, tracing the line of a vein on the back of his hand with her red fingertip, "that our senses can deceive us, then what is there that can"t?" She raised her eyebrows italic-wise. "I mean," she insisted, "my body might be an illusion, and the world I think surrounds me might be another. But what of that "I think"? The very act of doubting is a proof of existence, right? I think therefore I am."
"Descartes," he footnoted.
She nodded. "And who would ever have supposed that that old doorstop would be relevant to real life, so-called? Except I think it would be just as true with any other verb: I love therefore I am."
"Why not?" he agreed.
She squirmed closer to him until she could let the weight of her upper body rest on his as he lay there sprawled on the lawn, or the illusion of a lawn. The theme music had segued, unnoticed, to a sinuous trill of clarinets and viola that might have served for the orchestration of a Strauss opera, and the landscape was its visual correlative, a perfect Pu-vis de Chavannes-the same chalky pastels in thick impas...o...b..ocks and splotches, but never with too painterly panache. There were no visible brush strokes.
The only tactile element was the light pressure of her fingers across his skin, making each least hair in its follicle an antenna to register pleasure.
A pleasure that need never, could never cloy, a temperate pleasure suited to its pastoral source, a woodwind pleasure, a fruity wine. Lavender, canary yellow. The green of distant mountains. The ripple of the river.
caverns measureless to man The water that buoyed the little skiff was luminescent, and so their progress through the cave was not a matter of mere conjecture or kines-thesia. They could see where they were going. Even so, their speed could only be guessed at, for the water"s inward light was not enough to illumine either the ice high overhead or either sh.o.r.e of the river. They were borne along into some more unfathomable darkness far ahead as though across an ideal frictionless plane, and it made him think of s.p.a.ceships doing thesame thing, or of his favorite screen saver, which simulated the white swirl-by of snowflakes when driving through a blizzard. One is reduced at such moments (he was now) to an elemental condition, as near to being a particle in physics as a clumsy, complex mammal will ever come.
"I shall call you Dynamo," she confided in a throaty whisper. "Would you like that as a nickname? The Dynamo of Xanadu."
"You"re too kind," he said unthinkingly. He had become careless in their conversations. Not a conjugal carelessness: he had not talked with her so very often that all her riffs and vamps were second nature to him. This was the plain unadorned carelessness of not caring.
"I used to think," she said, "that we were all heading for h.e.l.l in a handbasket. Is that how the saying goes?"
"Meaning, hastening to extinction?"
"Yes, meaning that. It wasn"t my original idea. I guess everyone has their own vision of the end. Some people take it straight from the Bible, which is sweet and pastoral, but maybe a little dumb, though one oughtn"t to say so, not where they are likely to overhear you. Because is that really so different from worrying about the hole in the ozone layer? That was my apocalypse of choice, how we"d all get terrible sunburns and cancer, and then the sea level would rise, and everyone in Calcutta would drown."
"You think this is Calcutta?"
"Can"t you ever be serious?"
"So, what"s your point, Debora?" When he wanted to be nice, he would use her name, but she never used his. She would invent nicknames for him, and then forget them and have to invent others.
It was thanks to such idiosyncrasies that he"d come to believe in her objective existence as something other than his mental mirror. If she were no more than the forest pool in which Narcissus gazed adoringly, their minds would malfunction in similar ways. Were they mere mirror constructs, he would have known by now.
"It"s not," she went on, "that I worry that the end is near. I suppose the end is always near. Relative to Eternity. And it"s not that I"m terribly curious how it will end. I suppose we"ll hurtle over the edge of some immense waterfall, like Columbus and his crew."
"Listen!" he said, breaking in. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"The music. It"s the score for Koyaanisqatsi. G.o.d, I used to watch the tape of that over and over."
She gave a sigh of polite disapproval. "I can"t bear Philip Gla.s.s. It"s just as you say, the same thing over and over."
"There was this one incredible pan. It must have been taken by a helicopter flying above this endless high-rise apartment complex. But it had been abandoned."