Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Clarke says.

  “I’ve tried to be friendly,” Ballard says. “I’ve tried to get along with you, but you’re so cold, you won’t even admit — I mean, you couldn’t like it down here, nobody could, why can’t you just admit—”

  “But I don’t, I — I hate it in here. It’s like Beebe’s going to — to clench around me. And all I can do is wait for it to happen.”

  Ballard nods in the darkness. “Yes, yes, I know what you mean.” She seems somehow encouraged by Clarke’s admission. “And no matter how much you tell yourself—” She stops. “You hate it in here?”

  Did I say something wrong? Clarke wonders.

  “Outside is hardly any better, you know,” Ballard says. “Outside is even worse! There’s mudslides and smokers and giant fish trying to eat you all the time, you can’t possibly — but — you don’t mind all that, do you?”

  Somehow, her tone has turned accusing. Clarke shrugs.

  “No, you don’t,” Ballard is speaking slowly now. Her voice drops to a whisper: “You actually like it out there. Don’t you?”

  Reluctantly, Clarke nods. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “But it’s so — the rift can kill you, Lenie. It can kill us. A hundred different ways. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think about it much. I guess it does, sort of.”

  “Then why are you so happy out there?” Ballard cries. “It doesn’t make any sense…”

  I’m not exactly ‘happy’, Clarke thinks. “I don’t know. It’s not that weird, lots of people do dangerous things. What about freefallers? What about mountain climbers?”

  But Ballard doesn’t answer. Her silhouette has grown rigid on the bed. Suddenly, she reaches over and turns on the cubby light.

  Lenie Clarke blinks against the sudden brightness. Then the room dims as her eyecaps darken.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ballard shouts at her. “You sleep in that fucking costume now?”

  It’s something else Clarke hasn’t thought about. It just seems easier.

  “All this time I’ve been pouring my heart out to you and you’ve been wearing that machine’s face! You don’t even have the decency to show me your goddamned eyes!”

  Clarke steps back, startled. Ballard rises from the bed and takes a single step forward. “To think you could actually pass for human before they gave you that suit! Why don’t you go find something to play with out in your fucking ocean!” And slams the hatch in Clarke’s face.

  Lenie Clarke stares at the sealed bulkhead for a few moments. Her face, she knows, is calm. Her face is usually calm. But she stands there, unmoving, until the cringing thing inside of her unfolds a little.

  “Okay,” she says at last, very softly. “I guess I will.”

  Ballard is waiting for her as she emerges from the airlock.

  “Lenie,” she says quietly, “we have to talk. It’s important.”

  Clarke bends over and removes her fins. “Go ahead.”

  “ Not here. In my cubby.” Clarke looks at her.

  “Please.”

  Clarke starts up the ladder.

  “Aren’t you going to take—” Ballard stops as Clarke looks down. “Never mind. It’s okay.”

  They ascend into the lounge. Ballard takes the lead. Clarke follows her down the corridor and into her cabin. Ballard dogs the hatch and sits on her bunk, leaving room for Clarke.

  Clarke looks around the cramped space. Ballard has curtained over the mirrored bulkhead with a spare sheet.

  Ballard pats the bed beside her. “Come on, Lenie. Sit down.”

  Reluctantly, Clarke sits. Ballard’s sudden kindness confuses her. Ballard hasn’t acted this way since…

  …Since she had the upper hand.

  “—might not be easy for you to hear,” Ballard is saying, “but we have to get you off the rift. They shouldn’t have put you down here in the first place.”

  Clarke doesn’t reply.

  “Remember the tests they gave us?” Ballard continues. “They measured our tolerance to stress; confinement, prolonged isolation, chronic physical danger, that sort of thing.”

  Clarke nods slightly. “So?”

  “So,” says Ballard, “Did you think for a moment they’d test for those qualities without knowing what sort of person would have them? Or how they got to be that way?”

  Inside, Clarke goes very still. Outside, nothing changes.

  Ballard leans forward a bit. “Remember what you said? About mountain climbers, and free-fallers, and why people deliberately do dangerous things? I’ve been reading up, Lenie. Ever since I got to know you I’ve been reading up—” Got to know me?

  “—and do you know what thrillseekers have in common? They all say that you haven’t lived until you’ve nearly died. They need the danger. It gives them a rush.”

  You don’t know me at all—

  “Some of them are combat veterans, some were hostages for long periods, some just spent a lot of time in dead zones for one reason or another. And a lot of the really compulsive ones—” Nobody knows me.

  “—the ones who can’t be happy unless they’re on the edge, all the time — a lot of them got started early, Lenie. When they were just children. And you, I bet— you don’t even like being touched—”

  Go away. Go away.

  Ballard puts her hand on Clarke’s shoulder. “How long were you abused, Lenie?” she asks gently. “How many years?”

  Clarke shrugs off the hand and does not answer. He didn’t mean any harm. She shifts on the bunk, turning away slightly.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t just have a tolerance to trauma, Lenie. You’ve got an addiction to it. Don’t you?”

  It only takes Clarke a moment to recover. The ‘skin, the eyecaps make it easier. She turns calmly back to Ballard. She even smiles a little.

  “Abused,” she says. “Now there’s a quaint term. Thought it died out after the Saskatchewan witch-hunts. You some sort of history buff, Jeanette?”

  “There’s a mechanism,” Ballard tells her. “I’ve been reading about it. Do you know how the brain handles stress, Lenie? It dumps all sorts of addictive stimulants into the bloodstream. Betaendorphins, opioids. If it happens often enough, for long enough, you get hooked. You can’t help it.”

  Clarke feels a sound in her throat, a jagged coughing noise a bit like tearing metal. After a moment, she recognizes it as laughter.

  “I’m not making it up!” Ballard insists. “You can look it up yourself if you don’t believe me! Don’t you know how many abused children spend their whole lives hooked on wife beaters or self-mutilation or free-fall—”

  “And it makes them happy, is that it?” Clarke says, still smiling. “They enjoy getting raped, or punched out, or—”

  “No, of course you’re not happy! But what you feel, that’s probably the closest you’ve ever come. So you confuse the two, you look for stress anywhere you can find it. It’s physiological addiction, Lenie. You ask for it. You always asked for it.”

  I ask for it. Ballard’s been reading, and Ballard knows: Life is pure electrochemistry. No use explaining how it feels. No use explaining that there are far worse things than being beaten up. There are even worse things than being held down and raped by your own father. There are the times between, when nothing happens at all. When he leaves you alone, and you don’t know for how long. You sit across the table from him, forcing yourself to eat while your bruised insides try to knit themselves back together; and he pats you on the head and smiles at you, and you know the reprieve’s already lasted too long, he’s going to come for you tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe the next day.

  Of course I asked for it. How else could I get it over with?

  “Listen.” Clarke shakes her head. “I—” But it’s hard to talk, suddenly. She knows what she wants to say; Ballard’s not the only one who reads. Ballard can’t see it through a lifetime of fulfilled expectations, but there’s nothing special about w
hat happened to Lenie Clarke. Baboons and lions kill their own young. Male sticklebacks beat up their mates. Even insects rape. It’s not abuse, really, it’s just— biology.

  But she can’t say it aloud, for some reason. She tries, and she tries, but in the end all that comes out is a challenge that sounds almost childish:

  “Don’t you know anything?”

  “Sure I do, Lenie. I know you’re hooked on your own pain, and so you go out there and keep daring the rift to kill you, and eventually it will, don’t you see? That’s why you shouldn’t be here.

  That’s why we have to get you back.”

  Clarke stands up. “I’m not going back.” She turns to the hatch.

  Ballard reaches out toward her. “Listen, you’ve got to stay and hear me out. There’s more.”

  Clarke looks down at her with complete indifference. “Thanks for your concern. But I don’t have to stay. I can leave any time I want to.”

  “You go out there now and you’ll give everything away, they’re watching us! Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Ballard’s voice is rising. “Listen, they knew about you! They were looking for someone like you! They’ve been testing us, they don’t know yet what kind of person works out better down here, so they’re watching and waiting to see who cracks first! This whole program is still experimental, can’t you see that? Everyone they’ve sent down — you, me, Ken Lubin and Lana Cheung, it’s all part of some cold-blooded test—”

  “And you’re failing it,” Clarke says softly. “I see.”

  “They’re using us, Lenie—don’t go out there!”

  Ballard’s fingers grasp at Clarke like the suckers of an octopus. Clarke pushes them away. She undogs the hatch and pushes it open. She hears Ballard rising behind her.

  “You’re sick!” Ballard screams. Something smashes into the back of Clarke’s head. She goes sprawling out into the corridor. One arm smacks painfully against a cluster of pipes as she falls.

  She rolls to one side and raises her arms to protect herself. But Ballard just steps over her and stalks into the lounge.

  I’m not afraid, Clarke notes, getting to her feet. She hit me, and I’m not afraid. Isn’t that odd—

  From somewhere nearby, the sound of shattering glass.

  Ballard’s shouting in the lounge. “The experiment’s over! Come on out, you fucking ghouls!”

  Clarke follows the corridor, steps out of it. Pieces of the lounge mirror hang like great jagged stalactites in their frame.

  Splashes of glass litter the floor.

  On the wall, behind the broken mirror, a fisheye lens takes in every corner of the room.

  Ballard is staring into it. “Did you hear me? I’m not playing your stupid games any more! I’m through performing!” The quartzite lens stares back impassively.

  So you were right, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard’s cubby. You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn’t tell me.

  How long have you known?

  Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. “You’ve got her fooled, all right,” she snarls at the fisheye, “but she’s a goddamned basket case! She’s not even sane! Your little tests don’t impress me one fucking bit!”

  Clarke steps toward her.

  “Don’t call me a basket case,” she says, her voice absolutely level.

  “That’s what you are!” Ballard shouts. “You’re sick! That’s why you’re down here! They need you sick, they depend on it, and you’re so far gone you can’t see it! You hide everything behind that — that mask of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you ask for it—”

  That used to be true, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists. That’s the strange thing. Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step. It wasn’t until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back. That I could win. The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too—

  “Thank you,” Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.

  Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.

  “Oh Jesus,” Ballard whimpers. “Lenie, I’m sorry.”

  Clarke stands over her. “Don’t be,” she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labeled. So much anger in here, she thinks. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.

  She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.

  “I think,” Clarke says, “I’ll start with you.”

  But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.

  Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.

  • • •

  JEANETTE BALLARD IS GOING HOME TODAY.

  For half an hour the ‘scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Comm monitor shows it settling like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe’s docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.

  Ballard’s replacement climbs down, already mostly ‘skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his ‘skin is open up to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.

  Was there another Ballard up there, waiting, she wonders, in case I had been the one who didn’t work out?

  Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch hisses open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the ‘scaphe without a word.

  Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they’ve figured it out on their own. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the ‘scaphe disengages.

  Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.

  We don’t need this any more, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.

  She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.

  “I’m Lubin,” he says at last.

  Ballard was right again, she realizes. Untwisted, we’d be of no use at all…

  But she doesn’t really mind. She won’t be going back. ■

  Firebrand

  IT HAD TAKEN A WHILE, but the voters were finally getting used to the idea of spontaneous human combustion.

  It wasn’t, after all, as if it were really anything new. Anecdotal reports of people bursting into flame dated back to the Middle Ages at least. And if it seemed to be happening a bit more often in recent years, it was doubtless because—as the pundits pointed out—the new administration’s policy of scrupulous and transparent record-keeping was simply more efficient at detecting those events when they occurred.

  Here for example was Ryan Fletcher, igniting in front of his whole family while watching an after-dinner episode of Death Row Death Match on his recliner. According to eyewitness reports he had lit up the single Benson-and-Hedges Gold he permitted himself each day, brought it to his lips, and breathed a sudden surprising jet of fire into the room—“just like a dragon!”, as eight-year-old Sheldon Fletcher had put it to the police not twenty minutes later. He must have belched. There was no explicit mention of that in the report, but it was the only way that oxygen could have backwashed into Fletcher’s GI tract where an estimated two-and-a-half liters of dodecane was sloshing around with the usual mix of bile, methane, and prefecal lumps.

  The resulting explosion had occurred in two stages. The first had blown open the stomach and exposed the anaerobic environs of the intestine to oxygen, catalyzing
a secondary detonation that left cauterized bits of Ryan Fletcher stuck to the mirror at the end of the hall, five meters away.

  Fletcher had had no professional connection with the biofuel industry. He had, however—according to the GPS log recovered from his Subaru—passed downwind of a GreenHex facility two weeks earlier, during the time when a gasket had failed on one of their bioreactors. Fortunately, no one would ever make that connection.

  Instead, Dora Skilette decided, people would the blame the Poles.

  • • •

  ACCORDING TO MEDIA REPORTS, the Polish alcohol-industrial complex had experienced an unexpected renaissance of late. It was impossible to regulate. The EU had tried, with their ever-widening definitions of “toxic waste”. Exorbitant licensing fees made it all but impossible to purchase the product even in the restaurants and hotels of Poland itself—and yet it persisted, wound inextricably through the very DNA of the culture. Meaderies plied a hundred types of hooch on rickety tables in town squares; unmarked crates crossed national boundaries in search of more-forgiving environmental standards; homemade stills bubbled and dripped in every basement. Alcohol even played a prominent role in Polish justice; a traditional form of capital punishment back in Medieval times had involved forcing wine down the condemned’s throat through a tube until his guts exploded. (Some whispered that the practice persisted even now, in the remote woodlands of Lubelskie.)

  Over the past couple of years the win and the wódkakawa had been making inroads into North America, and its devastating effects were showing up in the most graphic PSAs the Bureau could muster. It hooked those you’d least expect, real family-values types who’d never touch a chemical that didn’t come from a pharmacy or a tobacconist. Then one day you’d find their feet, still clad in socks and shoes like a couple of smoldering galoshes on the living room carpet. Maybe a bit of carbonized tibia poking through those cauterized stumps. After the funeral you’d go downstairs to pack up their tools for Goodwill and there you’d find it, back behind the water heater where no one would ever think to look: the box with the bottles inside, still half full of that mysterious pink liquid, viscous as machine oil. The labels with the funny accents over the Cs and the strange little slashes through the Ls and all those words ending in ski. And you would curse the vile Poles and their vile killer moonshine, and you would rage at the injustice of bad things happening to good people, and words like plasmid and lateral transfer would never even cross your mind.