Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (13 page)

When I finally came back here, there was a message waiting. Weems,
grinning out at me half-bombed from the screen— "Congratulations,"
he cried, "on this historic occasion! Emmylou, we're having a little
celebration here at the lab; mind if we join you in yours, one thousand
astronomical units from home—?" I've never seen him drunk. They
really must have meant to do something nice for me, planning it all six
days ahead …

To celebrate I shouted obscenities I didn't even know I knew at him, until
my voice was broken and my throat was raw.

Then I sat at my desk for a long time with my jackknife lying open in my
hand. Not wanting to die—I've always been too afraid of death for
that—but wanting to hurt myself. I wanted to make a fresh hurt, to
take my attention off the terrible thing that is sucking me into my self
like an imploding star. Or maybe just to punish myself, I don't know. But
I considered the possibility of actually cutting myself quite calmly;
while some separate part of me looked on in horror. I even pressed the
knife against my flesh … and then I stopped and put it away. It
hurts too much.

I can't go on like this. I have duties, obligations, and I can't face
them. What would I do without the emergency automechs? … But it's
the rest of my life, and they can't go on doing my job for me forever—

Later.

I just had a visitor. Strange as that sounds. Stranger yet—it was
Donald Duck. I picked up half of a children's cartoon show today, the
first coherent piece of nondirectional, unbeamed television broadcast I've
recorded in months. And I don't think I've ever been happier to see anyone
in my life. What a nice surprise, so glad you could drop by …
Ozymandias loves him; he hangs upside down from his swing under the
cabinet with a cracker in one foot, cackling away and saying, "Give us a
kiss,
smack-smack-smack
" … We watched it three times. I even
smiled, for a while; until I remembered myself. It helps. Maybe I'll watch
it again until bedtime.

FRIDAY, THE 13
^TH

Friday the Thirteenth. Amusing. Poor Friday the Thirteenth, what did it
ever do to deserve its reputation? Even if it had any power to make my
life miserable, it couldn't hold a candle to the rest of this week. It
seems like an eternity since last weekend.

I repaired the scope today; replaced the burned-out parts. Had to suit up
and go outside for part of the work … I haven't done any outside
maintenance for quite a while. Odd how both exhilarating and terrifying it
always is when I first step out of the airlock, utterly alone, into space.
You're entirely on your own, so far away from any possibility of help, so
far away from anything at all. And at that moment you doubt yourself,
suddenly, terribly … just for a moment.

But then you drag your umbilical out behind you and clank along the hull
in your magnetized boots that feel so reassuringly like lead ballast. You
turn on the lights and look for the trouble, find it and get to work; it
doesn't bother you anymore … When your life seems to have torn
loose and be drifting free, it creates a kind of sea anchor to work with
your hands; whether it's doing some mindless routine chore or the most
intricate of repairs.

There was a moment of panic, when I actually saw charred wires and melted
metal, when I imagined the damage was so bad that I couldn't repair it
again. It looked so final, so—masterful. I clung there by my feet
and whimpered and clenched my hands inside my gloves, like a great shining
baby, for a while. But then I pulled myself down and began to pry here and
unscrew there and twist a component free … and little by little I
replaced everything. One step at a time; the way we get through life.

By the time I'd finished I felt quite calm, for the first time in days;
the thing that's been trying to choke me to death this past week seemed to
falter a little at my demonstration of competence. I've been breathing
easier since then; but I still don't have much strength. I used up all I
had just overcoming my own inertia.

But I shut off the lights and hiked around the hull for a while, afterward—I
couldn't face going back inside just then: looking at the black convex
dish of the solar sail I'm embedded in, up at the radio antenna's smaller
dish occluding stars as the observatory's cylinder wheels endlessly at the
hub of the spinning parasol …

That made me dizzy, and so I looked out into the starfields that lie on
every side. Even with my own poor, unaugmented senses there's so much more
to see out here, unimpeded by atmosphere or dust, undominated by any sun's
glare. The brilliance of the Milky Way, the depths of star and nebula and
farthest galaxy breathlessly suspended … as I am. The realization
that I'm lost for eternity in an uncharted sea.

Strangely, although that thought aroused a very powerful emotion when it
struck me, it wasn't a negative one at all: It was from another scale of
values entirely; like the universe itself. It was as if the universe
itself stretched out its finger to touch me. And in touching me, singling
me out, it only heightened my awareness of my own insignificance.

That was somehow very comforting. When you confront the absolute
indifference of magnitudes and vistas so overwhelming, the swollen ego of
your self-important suffering is diminished …

And I remembered one of the things that was always so important to me
about space—that here
any
one has to put on a spacesuit before
they step outside. We're all aliens, no one better equipped to survive
than another. I am as normal as anyone else, out here.

I must hold onto that thought.

SATURDAY, THE 14
^TH

There is a reason for my being here. There is a reason.

I was able to meditate earlier today. Not in the old way, the usual way,
by emptying my mind. Rather by letting the questions fill up the space,
not fighting them; letting them merge with my memories of all that's gone
before. I put on music, that great mnemonic stimulator; letting the images
that each tape evoked free-associate and interact.

And in the end I could believe again that my being here was the result of
a free choice. No one forced me into this. My motives for volunteering
were entirely my own. And I was given this position because NASA believed
that I was more likely to be successful in it than anyone else they could
have chosen.

It doesn't matter that some of my motives happened to be unresolved fear
or wanting to escape from things I couldn't cope with. It really doesn't
matter. Sometimes retreat is the only alternative to destruction, and only
a madman can't recognize the truth of that. Only a madman … Is
there anyone "sane" on Earth who isn't secretly a fugitive from something
unbearable somewhere in their life? And yet they function normally.

If they ran, they ran toward something, too, not just away. And so did I.
I had already chosen a career as an astrophysicist before I ever dreamed
of being a part of this project. I could have become a medical researcher
instead, worked on my own to find a cure for my condition. I could have
grown up hating the whole idea of space and "spacemen," stumbling through
life in my damned ugly sterile suit …

But I remember when I was six years old, the first time I saw a film of
suited astronauts at work in space … they looked just like me! And
no one was laughing. How could I help but love space, then?

(And how could I help but love Jeffrey, with his night-black hair, and his
blue flightsuit with the starry patch on the shoulder. Poor Jeffrey, poor
Jeffrey, who never even realized his own dream of space before they cut
the program out from under him … I will not talk about Jeffrey. I
will not.)

Yes, I could have stayed on Earth, and waited for a cure! I knew even then
there would have to be one, someday. It was both easier and harder to
choose space, instead of staying.

And I think the thing that really decided me was that those people had
faith enough in me and my abilities to believe that I could run this
observatory and my own life smoothly for as long as I lived. Billions of
dollars and a thousand tons of equipment resting on me; like Atlas holding
up his world.

Even Atlas tried to get rid of his burden; because no matter how vital his
function was, the responsibility was still a burden to him. But he took
his burden back again too, didn't he; for better or worse …

I worked today. I worked my butt off getting caught up on a week's worth
of data processing and maintenance, and I'm still not finished. Discovered
while I was at it that Ozymandias had used those missing five pages just
like the daily news: crapped all over them. My sentiments exactly! I
laughed and laughed.

I think I may live.

SUNDAY, THE 15
^TH

The clouds have parted.

That's not rhetorical—among my fresh processed data is a series of
photo reconstructions in the ultra-long wavelengths. And there's a gap in
the obscuring gas up ahead of me, a break in the clouds that extends
thirty or forty light-years. Maybe fifty! Fantastic. What a view. What a
view I have from here of everything, with my infinitely extended vision:
of the way ahead, of the passing scene—or looking back toward Earth.

Looking back. I'll never stop looking back, and wishing it could have been
different. That at least there could have been two of me, one to be here,
one who could have been normal, back on Earth; so I wouldn't have to be
forever torn in two by regrets—

(
"Hello. What's up, doc? Avast!"
)

("Hey, watch it! If you drink, don't fly.")

Damn bird … If I'm getting maudlin, it's because I had a party
today. Drank a whole bottle of champagne. Yes; I had
the
party
… we did. Ozymandias and I. Our private 1000 AU celebration. Better
late than never, I guess. At least we did have something concrete to
celebrate—the photos. And if the celebration wasn't quite as merry
as it could have been, still I guess it will probably seem like it was
when I look back on it from the next one, at 2000 AUs. They'll be coming
faster now, the celebrations. I may even live to celebrate 8000. What the
hell, I'll shoot for 10,000 …

After we finished the champagne … Ozymandias thinks '98 was a great
year, thank God he can't drink as fast as I can … I put on my
Strauss waltzes, and the
Barcarolle
: Oh, the Berliner Philharmonic;
their touch is what a lover's kiss must be. I threw the view outside onto
the big screen, a ballroom of stars, and danced with my shadow. And part
of the time I wasn't dancing above the abyss in a jumpsuit and headphones,
but waltzing in yards of satin and lace across a ballroom floor in
nineteenth-century Vienna. What I wouldn't give to be
there
for a
moment out of time. Not for a lifetime, or even a year, but just for an
evening; just for one waltz.

Another thing I shall never do. There are so many things we can't do, any
of us, for whatever the reasons—time, talent, life's callous whims.
We're all on a one-way trip into infinity. If we're lucky we're given some
life's work we care about, or some person. Or both, if we're very lucky.

And I do have Weems. Sometimes I see us like an old married couple who
have grown to a tolerant understanding over the years. We've never been
soul mates, God knows, but we're comfortable with each other's silences
…

I guess it's about time I answered him.

The End

© 1978 by the Condé Nast Publications, Inc. First appeared in
ANALOG
Science Fiction-Science Fact,
June, 1978.

Gardner Dozois

Every day, Mason would stand with his hammer and kill cows. The place was
big—a long, high-ceilinged room, one end open to daylight, the other
end stretching back into the depths of the plant. It had white,
featureless walls—painted concrete—that were swabbed down
twice a day, once before lunch and once after work. The floor could be
swabbed too—it was stone, and there was a faucet you could use to
flood the floor with water. Then you used a stiff-bristled broom to swish
the water around and get up the stains. That was known as GIing a floor in
the Army. Mason had been in the Army. He called it GIing. So did the three
or four other veterans who worked that shift, and they always got a laugh
out of explaining to the college boys the plant hired as temporary help
why the work they'd signed up to do was called that. The college boys
never knew what GIing was until they'd been shown, and they never
understood the joke either, or why it was called that. They were usually
pretty dumb.

There was a drain in the floor to let all the water out after the place
had been GIed. In spite of everything, though, the room would never scrub
up quite clean; there'd always be some amount of blood left staining the
walls and floor at the end of the day. About the best you could hope to do
was grind it into the stone so it became unrecognizable. After a little of
this, the white began to get dingy, dulling finally to a dirty, dishwater
gray. Then they'd paint the room white again and start all over.

The cycle took a little longer than a year, and they were about halfway
through it this time. The men who worked the shift didn't really give a
shit whether the walls were white or not, but it was a company regulation.
The regs insisted that the place be kept as clean as possible for health
reasons, and also because that was supposed to make it a psychologically
more attractive environment to function in. The workmen wouldn't have
given a shit about their psychological environment either, even if they'd
known what one was. It was inevitable that the place would get a little
messy during a working day.

It was a slaughterhouse, although the company literature always referred
to it as a meat-packing plant.

The man who did the actual killing was Mason: the focal point of the
company, of all the meat lockers and trucks and canning sections and
secretaries and stockholders; their lowest common denominator. It all
started with him.