Angry Candy Page 21

  He considered taking trips to other lands, to vote in elections so the terrorist strongmen in the Middle East would be deposed. He contemplated voting for little-known men and women he would seek out and research and assure himself would make the world a better place.

  But the enormity of his lack of expertise in such matters stopped him. How would he know if they were the right people, honest and courageous? And what if they did things he didn't like?

  Eugene Keeton had caught no fish in six hours. He had, in fact, been caught himself: by the terrible dread certainty that he had been selected as God . . . and was impotent.

  Flora was waiting up for him. She was in the yellow terrycloth bathrobe, sitting in his chair in the rec room, in the dark, holding a mug of cold tea in both hands. She spoke out of the darkness as he came limping down the stairs. "The arthritis again?"

  "A little. It's not bad."

  She waited till he had sunk into the old sofa they had put down here after they'd bought the new suite for the living room. He had not turned on the lights.

  "Honey?"

  He made an acknowledging sound. She could barely see him.

  "I didn't mean to make light."

  "That's all right. I know how it sounded."

  "Even so. I should have listened to you."

  They sat silently for a time. Finally, he sighed and said, "Flora, I never knew how hard it is. The electrical bill goes up and we swear at the Arabs. Half my crew gets laid off at the Studio and we blame Carter, or Reagan, or whoever's at the top. People get assassinated, crime all over the place, the Dinettis down the street get broken into and we say it's the Mexicans or the blacks . . . but we don't really know. And when you get a chance to do something, to take a hand, maybe to vote for someone you think'll change it . . . it's just more of the same."

  He was quiet again. Then he said:

  "God ought to be able to do something. But there's nothing to do. He can't get a handle on it."

  "You shouldn't say that, Gene."

  "But I know! I'm sure He's just like we are. Just sitting in the dark and hoping something'll happen. But it won't."

  "Yes, it will. It has to, Gene. God or someone else has to take a hand. If you think you're the one, well, maybe you've been touched by Him. Maybe He's working through you."

  Silence. For a long time. Then, "Maybe."

  He resolved at least to try.

  It wasn't right to have this power and not do something with it. So he resolved at least to try.

  The union had an election coming up. There had been problems. Talk. Just idle talk about featherbedding and more layoffs. About some tie-in with people under indictment in Chicago and Detroit. Kickbacks. Just talk, idle talk. But Eugene had been disturbed by it.

  He studied the background of the men running for office. He made his selections after careful consideration. He voted and they won, all of them, down to the last dark horse who had been on the stump for sweeping changes. They all seemed honest.

  Within a month, six more of his crew were laid off; and the dues were raised.

  Flora came home from volunteer work at the hospital to find him sitting at the kitchen table with an open, full bottle of beer. It had grown warm.

  "Did you heat the casserole?"

  He shook his head.

  "Bad day?"

  "Hersh and Ken Toland and four others were laid off today."

  "How did it happen? Didn't the union make a fuss?"

  He looked at her. In twenty-two years she had never seen such desperation on his face. He was always ready with a silly riddle — why is a chicken sitting on a fence like a new penny? — but these days he seldom had anything silly to say. "How did it happen?" he said softly. "I made it happen."

  She started to say, don't be silly, Gene, but his eyes were sad and she laid down her purse and put her arms around him and kissed his hair.

  After a while they went to bed. She lay awake hearing him breathe. She pretended to be asleep, not wanting him to know she was so worried about him. But he didn't fall off till almost morning.

  And the next day he called in sick. He wandered around the house in Toluca Lake that now seemed too large for an aging couple whose children had lives of their own in far places called Seattle and Rapid City. She found him, during one empty hour, standing in the middle of the living room, staring into the blank wall. She spoke his name gently but he didn't respond; so she went back into the kitchen and after a while found herself washing the same tumbler over and over.

  Late that afternoon she found him in the backyard, sitting on the grass under the loquat tree, staring at the remains of a dead bird. He sat like a child, his legs out straight in front of him, his hands folded, staring unblinkingly at the rotted thing that had once danced through sunlight. She stood waiting for him to notice her, and when he failed to look up, as if he were willing himself into the shapeless mass, she said, "I think that was the jay we heard hit the window last week. Mrs. Carmichael's angora mustVe been at it, you think?"

  He didn't answer for a long time. Then he looked up at her and she realized he had been crying. He said something that clogged up in his throat.

  "I didn't hear you, dear," she said.

  He repeated it, and she could not bear to let him see the effect his words had on her. She turned away and went back to the kitchen, hearing him say it again and again in her terror:

  I should ought to be able to do something for it.

  She waited in the kitchen, waited for the fall of darkness and waited for the sound of his footsteps coming into the house asking what was for dinner; but he sat out there in the evening and she sat inside in the darkness, fearing even to turn on the television.

  Finally, he came in and after a while they went to bed. Again he lay awake all night, and so did Flora, until close to dawn, when she drifted off into troubled dreams.

  And the next morning he was gone.

  She stayed in bed. He had gone away. She knew he would never come back. She just knew it. And there would be ever so much time for crying during all the later that lay ahead.

  He went away.

  God, helpless as those He had created, wandered forlorn through the machine that had assumed a life of its own; that would run, and continue to run, until there was no one left to notice.

  The Author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Lance A. Diemback in the creation of this piece of fiction.

  Dedicated to the genius of Sam Rodia

  THE DAY HE CRAWLED out of the dead cold Icelands, the glaciers creepings down the great cliff were sea-green: endless rivers of tinted, faceted emeralds lit from within. Memories of crippled chances shone in the ice. That was a day, and I remember this clearly, during which the purple sky of Hotlands was filled with the downdrifting balloon spores that had died rushing through the beams of the UV lamps in the peanut fields of the silver crescent. That was a day — remembering clearly — with Argo squatting on the horizon of Hot-lands, an enormous inverted tureen of ruby glass.

  He crawled toward me and the ancient fux I called Amos the Wise; crawled, literally crawled, up the land-bridge of Westspit onto Meditation Island. Through the slush and sludge and amber mud of the Terminator's largest island.

  His heat-envelope was filthy and already cracking, and he tore open the velcro mouthflap without regard for saving the garment as he crawled toward a rotting clump of spillweed.

  When I realized that he intended to eat it, I moved to him quickly and crouched in front of him so he couldn't get to it.

  "I wouldn't put that in your mouth," I said. "It'll kill you."

  He didn't say anything, but he looked up at me from down there on his hands and knees with an expression that said it all. He was starving, and if I didn't come up with some immediate alternative to the spillweed, he was going to eat it anyhow, even if it killed him.

  This was only one hundred and nineteen years after we had brought the wonders of the human race to Medea, and though I was serving a term of penitence on
Meditation Island, I wasn't so sure I wanted to make friends with another human being. I was having a hard enough time just communicating with fuxes. I certainly didn't want to take charge of his life . . . even in as small a way as being responsible for saving it.

  Funny the things that flash through your mind. I remember at that moment, with him looking at me so desperately, recalling a cartoon I'd once seen: it was one of those standard thirsty-man-crawling-out-of-the-desert cartoons, with a long line of crawl-marks stretching to the horizon behind an emaciated, bearded wanderer. And in the foreground is a man on a horse, looking down at this poor dying devil with one clawed hand lifted in a begging gesture, and the guy on the horse is smiling and saying to the thirsty man, "Peanut butter sandwich?"

  I didn't think he'd find it too funny.

  So I pulled up the spillweed, so he wouldn't go for it before I got back, and I trotted over to my wickyup and got him a ball of peanut cheese and a nip-off bulb of water, and came back and helped him sit up to eat.

  It took him a while, and of course we were covered with pink and white spores by the time he finished. The smell was awful.

  I helped him to his feet. Pretty unsteady. And he leaned on me walking back to the wickyup. I laid him down on my air-mattress and he closed his eyes and fell asleep immediately. Maybe he fainted, I don't know.

  His name was Virgil Oddum; but I didn't know that, either, at the time.

  I didn't ever know much about him. Not then, not later, not even now. It's funny how everybody knows what he did, but not why he did it, or even who he was; and until recently, not so much as his name, nothing.

  In a way, I really resent it. The only reason anybody knows me is because I knew him, Virgil Oddum. But they don't care about me or what I was going through, just him, because of what he did. My name is Pogue. William Ronald Pogue, like rogue; and I'm important, too. You should know names.

  Jason was chasing Theseus through the twilight sky directly over the Terminator when he woke up. The clouds of dead balloon spores had passed over and the sky was amber again, with bands of color washing across the bulk of Argo. I was trying to talk with Amos the Wise.

  I was usually trying to talk with Amos the Wise.

  The xenoanthropologists at the main station at Perdue Farm in the silver crescent call communication with the fuxes ekstasis — literally, "to stand outside oneself." A kind of enriched empathy that conveys concepts and emotional sets, but nothing like words or pictures. I would sit and stare at one of the fuxes, and he would crouch there on his hindquarters and stare back at me; and we'd both fill up with what the other was thinking. Sort of. More or less overcome with vague feelings, general tones of emotion . . . memories of when the fux had been a hunter; when he had had the extra hindquarters he'd dropped when he was female; the vision of a kilometer-high tidal wave once seen near the Seven Pillars on the Ring; chasing females and endlessly mating. It was all there, every moment of what was a long life for a fux: fifteen Medean years.

  But it was all flat. Like a drama done with enormous expertise and no soul. The arrangement of thoughts was random, without continuity, without flow. There was no color, no interpretation, no sense of what it all meant for the dromids.

  It was artless and graceless; it was merely data.

  And so trying to "talk" to Amos was like trying to get a computer to create original, deeply meaningful poetry. Sometimes I had the feeling he had been "assigned" to me, to humor me; to keep me busy.

  At the moment the man came out of my wickyup, I was trying to get Amos to codify the visual nature of the fuxes' religious relationship to Castor C, the binary star that Amos and his race thought of as Maternal Grandfather and Paternal Grandfather. For the human colony they were Phrixus and Helle.

  I was trying to get Amos to understand flow and the emotional load in changing colors when the double shadow fell between us and I looked up to see the man standing behind me. At the same moment I felt a lessening of the ekstasis between the fux and me. As though some other receiving station was leaching off power.

  The man stood there, unsteadily, weaving and trying to keep his balance, staring at Amos. The fux was staring back. They were communicating, but what was passing between them I didn't know. Then Amos got up and walked away, with that liquid rolling gait old male fuxes affect after they've dropped their hindquarters. I got up with some difficulty: since coming to Medea I'd developed mild arthritis in my knees and sitting cross-legged stiffened me.

  As I stood up, he started to fall over, still too weak from crawling out of Icelands. He fell into my arms, and I confess my first thought was annoyance because now I knew he'd be another thing I'd have to worry about.

  "Hey, hey," I said, "take it easy."

  I helped him to the wickyup, and put him on his back on the air-mattress. "Listen, fellah," I said, "I don't want to be cold about this, but I'm out here all alone, paying my time. I don't get another shipment of rations for about four months and I can't keep you here."

  He didn't say anything. Just stared at me.

  "Who the hell are you? Where'd you come from?"

  Watching me. I used to be able to read expression very accurately. Watching me, with hatred.

  I didn't even know him. He didn't have any idea what was what, why I was out there on Meditation Island; there wasn't any reason he should hate me.

  "How'd you get here?"

  Watching. Not a word out of him.

  "Listen, mister: here's the long and short of it. There isn't any way I can get in touch with anybody to come and get you. And I can't keep you here because there just isn't enough ration. And I'm not going to let you stay here and starve in front of me, because after a while you're sure as hell going to go for my food and I'm going to fight you for it, and one of us is going to get killed. And I am not about to have that kind of a situation, understand? Now I know this is chill, but you've got to go. Take a few days, get some strength. If you hike straight across Eastspit and keep going through Hotlands, you might get spotted by someone out spraying the fields. I doubt it, but maybe."

  Not a sound. Just watching me and hating me.

  "Where'd you come from? Not out there in Icelands. Nothing can live out there. It's minus thirty Celsius. Out there." Silence. "Just glaciers. Out there."

  Silence. I felt that uncontrollable anger rising in me.

  "Look, jamook, I'm not having this. Understand me? I'm just not having any of it. You've got to go. I don't give a damn if you're the Count of Monte Crespo or the lost Dauphin of Threx: you're getting the hell out of here as soon as you can crawl." He stared up at me and I wanted to hit the bastard as hard as I could. I had to control myself. This was the kind of thing that had driven me to Meditation Island.

  Instead, I squatted there watching him for a long time. He never blinked. Just watched me. Finally, I said, very softly, "What'd you say to the fux?"

  A double shadow fell through the door and I looked up. It was Amos the Wise. He'd peeled back the entrance flap with his tail because his hands were full. Impaled on the three long, sinewy fingers of each hand were six freshly caught dartfish. He stood there in the doorway, bloody light from the sky forming a corona that lit his blue, furry shape; and he extended the skewered fish.

  I'd been six months on Meditation Island. Every day of that time I'd tried to spear a dartfish. Flashfreeze and peanut cheese and box-ration, they can pall on you pretty fast. You want to gag at the sight of silvr wrap. I'd wanted fresh food. Every day for six months I'd tried to catch something live. They were too fast. That's why they weren't called slowfish. The fuxes had watched me. Not one had ever moved to show me how they did it. Now this old neuter Amos was offering me half a dozen. I knew what the guy had said to him.

  "Who the hell are you?" I was about as skewed as I could be. I wanted to pound him out a little, delete that hateful look on his face, put him in a way so I wouldn't have to care for him. He didn't say a word, just kept looking at me; but the fux came inside the wickyup — first time he'
d ever done that, damn his slanty eyes! — and he moved around between us, the dartfish extended.

  This guy had some kind of hold over the aborigine! He didn't say a thing, but the fux knew enough to get between us and insist I take the fish. So I did it, cursing both of them under my breath.

  And as I pried off the six dartfish I felt the old fux pull me into a flow with him, and stronger than I'd ever been able to do it when we'd done ekstasis, Amos the Wise let me know that this was a very holy creature, this thing that had crawled out of the Icelands, and I'd better treat him pretty fine, or else. There wasn't even a hint of a picture of what or else might be, but it was a strong flow, a strong flow.

  So I took the fish and put them in the larder, and I let the fux know how grateful I was, and he didn't pay me enough attention to mesmerize a gnat; and the flow was gone; and he was doing ekstasis withmy guest lying out as nice and comfy as you please; and then he turned and slid out of the wickyup and was gone.

  I sat there through most of the night watching him, and one moment he was staring at me, and the next he was asleep; and I went on through that first night just sitting there looking at him gonked-in like that, where I would have been sleeping if he hadn't showed up. Even asleep he hated me. But he was too weak to stay awake and enjoy it.

  So I looked at him, wondering who the hell he was, most of that night. Until I couldn't take it any more, and near to morning I just beat the crap out of him.

  They kept bringing food. Not just fish, but plants I'd never seen before, things that grew out there in Hotlands east of us, out there where it always stank like rotting garbage. Some of the plants needed to be cooked, and some of them were delicious just eaten raw. But I knew they'd never have showed me any of that if it hadn't been for him.

  He never spoke to me, and he never told the fuxes that I'd beaten him the first night he was in camp; and his manner never changed. Oh, I knew he could talk all right, because when he slept he tossed and thrashed and shouted things in his sleep. I never understood any of it; some offworld language. But whatever it was, it made him feel sick to remember it. Even asleep he was in torment.