“All of them are gone now,” she told Van disconsolately.
“I know. I’ve been watching it happen.”
“Is there anything we can do? Should I go back to Burkhalter?”
She saw the pain in his eyes. “It won’t do any good,” he said. “He told me the chances were about three to one this would happen. A month, he figured; that was about the best we could hope for. And we’ve had our month.”
“I’d better go, Van.”
“Don’t say that.”
“No?”
“I love you, Cleo.”
“You won’t. Not for much longer.”
He tried to argue with her, to tell her that it didn’t matter to him that she was a singleton, that one Cleo was worth a whole raft of alters, that he would learn to adapt to life with a singleton woman. He could not bear the thought of her leaving now. So she stayed: a week, two weeks, three. They ate at their favorite restaurants. They strolled hand in hand through the cool evenings. They talked of Chomsky and Whorf and even of shopping centers. When he was gone and Paul or Chuck or Hal or Dave was there she went places with them if they wanted her to. Once she went to a movie with Ned, and when towards the end he felt himself starting to switch she put her arm around him and held him until he regained control so that he could see how the movie finished.
But it was no good. He wanted something richer than she could offer him: the switching, the doubling, the complex undertones and overtones of other personalities resonating beyond the shores of consciousness. She could not give him that. He was like one who has voluntarily blindfolded himself in order to keep a blind woman company. She knew she could not ask him to live like that forever.
And so one afternoon when Van was somewhere else she packed her things and said good-bye to Paul, who gave her a hug and wept a little with her, and she went back to Sacramento. “Tell him not to call,” she said. “A clean break’s the best.” She had been in San Francisco two months, and it was as though those two months were the only months of her life that had had any color in them, and all the rest had been lived in tones of grey.
There had been a man in the real-estate office who had been telling her for a couple of years that they were meant for each other. Cleo had always been friendly enough to him: They had done a few skiing weekends in Tahoe the winter before; they had gone to Hawaii once; they had driven down to San Diego. But she had never felt anything particular when she was with him. A week after her return she phoned him and suggested that they drive out up north to the redwood country for a few days. When they came back she moved into the condominium he had just outside town.
It was hard to find anything wrong with him. He was good-natured and attractive, he was successful, he read books and liked good movies, he enjoyed hiking, rafting, and backpacking, he even talked of driving down into the city during the opera season to take in a performance or two. He was getting towards the age where he was thinking about marriage and a family. He seemed very fond of her.
But he was flat, she thought. Flat as a cardboard cutout: a singleton, a one-brain, a no-switch. There was only one of him, and there always would be. It was hardly his fault, she knew. But she couldn’t settle for someone who had only two dimensions. A terrible restlessness went roaring through her every evening, and she could not possibly tell him what was troubling her.
On a drizzly afternoon in early November she packed a suitcase and drove down to San Francisco. She checked into one of the Lombard Street motels, showered, changed, and walked over to Fillmore Street. Cautiously she explored the strip from Chestnut down to Union, from Union back to Chestnut. The thought of running into Van terrified her. Not tonight, she prayed. Not tonight. She went past Skits, did not go in, stopped outside a club called Big Mama, shook her head, finally entered one called The Side Effect. Mostly women inside, as usual, but a few men at the bar, not too bad-looking. No sign of Van.
She bought herself a drink and casually struck up a conversation with a short, curly-haired, artistic-looking type.
“You come here often?” he asked.
“First time. I’ve usually gone to Skits.”
“I think I remember seeing you there. Or maybe not.”
She smiled. “What’s your now-name?”
“Sandy. Yours?”
Cleo drew her breath down deep into her lungs. She felt a kind of light-headedness beginning to swirl behind her eyes. Is this what you want? she asked herself. Yes. Yes. This is what you want.
“Melinda,” she said.
AGAINST BABYLON
Another easy one. (The gods owed me a few, after the wearying months of “Tourist Trade” and Pontifex.)
Though Northern California is where I live—and the distance that separates San Francisco in the north from Los Angeles in the south is four hundred miles, which is about the distance from Rome to Budapest—I’ve carried on an intense love-hate relationship with the southern half of my immense state for nearly forty years. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, when I was stocking my garden with plants from Southern California’s abundant nurseries, I must have made a hundred trips to Los Angeles; I know the place better than most Northern Californians, and go blithely buzzing around on routes unknown even to some of the locals to horticultural sites in outlying towns like San Marino and San Gabriel. Yet I’ve never wanted to live there, despite my envy of the warm winters and my admiration for the districts of astonishing beauty that one finds interspersed among the parts that are of astonishing ugliness. If I’m away from Los Angeles too long, I miss it in a way that is the next thing to homesickness; if I’m down there for more than three or four days at a stretch, I yearn for the blue skies and sweet air of my own region. And so I oscillate from one end of the pendulum to the other, and probably always will.
“Against Babylon” reflects my close-range observations of the colossus of the south over many decades, my horrified fascination for the place, and my uneasiness over certain of the tawdrier aspects of the California mentality, both southern and northern. Once again, as with the previous California stories in this series, the work, which I did after the onset of the rainy season in November, 1983, went swiftly and relatively easily—I had had a long holiday from writing during August, September, and October, which helped—and acceptance (from Ellen Datlow again, at Omni) came without complications. She had such a backlog of my work by now that she didn’t publish it until the May, 1986 issue. The story made it into the Dozois Year’s Best SF 1986 volume, and was picked as well for Don Wollheim’s anthology covering the same year. A decade later, I used it, in slightly modified form, as the opening chapter of my novel The Alien Years, but it stands on its own perfectly well, which is why I include it here.
——————
Carmichael flew in from New Mexico that morning, and the first thing they told him when he put his little plane down at Burbank was that fires were burning out of control all around the Los Angeles basin. He was needed bad, they told him. It was late October, the height of the brushfire season in Southern California, and a hot, hard, dry wind was blowing out of the desert, and the last time it had rained was the fifth of April. He phoned the district supervisor right away, and the district supervisor told him, “Get your ass out here on the line double fast, Mike.”
“Where do you want me?”
“The worst one’s just above Chatsworth. We’ve got planes loaded and ready to go out of Van Nuys Airport.”
“I need time to pee and to phone my wife. I’ll be in Van Nuys in fifteen, okay?”
He was so tired that he could feel it in his teeth. It was nine in the morning, and he’d been flying since half past four, and it had been rough all the way, getting pushed around by that same fierce wind out of the heart of the continent that was threatening now to fan the flames in L.A. At this moment all he wanted was home and shower and Cindy and bed. But Carmichael didn’t regard fire-fighting work as optional. This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big fire storm. There were times he alm
ost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy, tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick, choking, glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him. He came from the Valley, and what he meant by the Valley was the great San Joaquin, out behind Bakersfield, and not the little cluttered San Fernando Valley they had here. But L.A. was Cindy’s city, and Cindy loved L.A. and he loved Cindy, and for Cindy’s sake he had lived here seven years, up in Laurel Canyon amidst the lush, green shrubbery, and for seven Octobers in a row he had gone out to dump chemical retardants on the annual brushfires, to save the Angelenos from their own idiotic carelessness. You had to accept your responsibilities, Carmichael believed.
The phone rang seven times at the home number before he hung up. Then he tried the little studio where Cindy made her jewelry, but she didn’t answer there either, and it was too early to call her at the gallery. That bothered him, not being able to say hello to her right away after his three-day absence and no likely chance for it now for another eight or ten hours. But there was nothing he could do about that.
As soon as he was aloft again he could see the fire not far to the northwest, a greasy black column against the pale sky. And when he stepped from his plane a few minutes later at Van Nuys he felt the blast of sudden heat. The temperature had been in the mid-eighties at Burbank, damned well hot enough for nine in the morning, but here it was over a hundred. He heard the distant roar of flames, the popping and crackling of burning underbrush, the peculiar whistling sound of dry grass catching fire.
The airport looked like a combat center. Planes were coming and going with lunatic frenzy, and they were lunatic planes, too, antiques of every sort, forty and fifty years old and even older, converted B-17 Flying Fortresses and DC-3’s and a Douglas Invader and, to Carmichael’s astonishment, a Ford Trimotor from the 1930’s that had been hauled, maybe, out of some movie studio’s collection. Some were equipped with tanks that held fire-retardant chemicals, some were water pumpers, some were mappers with infrared and electronic scanning equipment glistening on their snouts. Harried-looking men and women ran back and forth, shouting into CB handsets, supervising the loading process. Carmichael found his way to Operations HQ, which was full of haggard people staring into computer screens. He knew most of them from other years.
One of the dispatchers said, “We’ve got a DC-3 waiting for you. You’ll dump retardants along this arc, from Ybarra Canyon eastward to Horse Flats. The fire’s in the Santa Susana foothills, and so far the wind’s from the east, but if it shifts to northerly it’s going to take out everything from Chatsworth to Granada Hills and right on down to Ventura Boulevard. And that’s only this fire.”
“How many are there?”
The dispatcher tapped his keyboard. The map of the San Fernando Valley that had been showing disappeared and was replaced by one of the entire Los Angeles basin. Carmichael stared. Three great scarlet streaks indicated fire zones: this one along the Santa Susanas, another nearly as big way off to the east in the grasslands north of the 210 Freeway around Glendora or San Dimas, and a third down in eastern Orange County, back of Anaheim Hills. “Ours is the big one so far,” the dispatcher said. “But these other two are only about forty miles apart, and if they should join up somehow—”
“Yeah,” Carmichael said. A single wall of fire running along the whole eastern rim of the basin, maybe—with Santa Ana winds blowing, carrying sparks westward across Pasadena, across downtown L.A., across Hollywood, Beverly Hills, all the way to the coast, to Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu. He shivered. Laurel Canyon would go. Everything would go. Worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, worse than the fall of Nineveh. Nothing but ashes for hundreds of miles. “Everybody scared silly of Russian nukes, and a carload of dumb kids tossing cigarettes can do the job just as easily,” he said.
“But this wasn’t cigarettes, Mike,” the dispatcher said.
“No? What then, arson?”
“You haven’t heard.”
“I’ve been in New Mexico the last three days.”
“You’re the only one in the world who hasn’t heard, then.”
“For Christ’s sake, heard what?”
“About the E.T.’s,” said the dispatcher wearily. “They started the fires. Three spaceships landing at six this morning in three different corners of the L.A. basin. The heat of their engines ignited the dry grass.”
Carmichael did not smile. “You’ve got one weird sense of humor, man.”
The dispatcher said, “I’m not joking.”
“Spaceships? From another world?”
“With critters fifteen feet high on board,” the dispatcher at the next computer said. “They’re walking around on the freeways right this minute. Fifteen feet high, Mike.”
“Men from Mars?”
“Nobody knows where the hell they’re from.”
“Jesus Christ God,” Carmichael said.
Wild updrafts from the blaze buffeted the plane as he took it aloft and gave him a few bad moments. But he moved easily and automatically to gain control, pulling the moves out of the underground territories of his nervous system. It was essential, he believed, to have the moves in your fingers, your shoulders, your thighs, rather than in the conscious realms of your brain. Consciousness could get you a long way, but ultimately you had to work out of the underground territories or you were dead.
He felt the plane responding and managed a grin. DC-3’s were tough old birds. He loved flying them, though the youngest of them had been manufactured before he was born. He loved flying anything. Flying wasn’t what Carmichael did for a living—he didn’t actually do anything for a living, not any more—but flying was what he did. There were months when he spent more time in the air than on the ground, or so it seemed to him, because the hours he spent on the ground often slid by unnoticed, while time in the air was intensified, magnified.
He swung south over Encino and Tarzana before heading up across Canoga Park and Chatsworth into the fire zone. A fine haze of ash masked the sun. Looking down, he could see the tiny houses, the tiny blue swimming pools, the tiny people scurrying about, desperately trying to hose down their roofs before the flames arrived. So many houses, so many people, filling every inch of space between the sea and the desert, and now it was all in jeopardy. The southbound lanes of Topanga Canyon Boulevard were as jammed with cars, here in midmorning, as the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour. Where were they all going? Away from the fire, yes. Toward the coast, it seemed. Maybe some television preacher had told them there was an ark sitting out there in the Pacific, waiting to carry them to safety while God rained brimstone down on Los Angeles. Maybe there really was. In Los Angeles anything was possible. Invaders from space walking around on the freeways even. Jesus. Jesus. Carmichael hardly knew how to begin thinking about that.
He wondered where Cindy was, what she was thinking about it. Most likely she found it very funny. Cindy had a wonderful ability to be amused by things. There was a line of poetry she liked to quote, from that Roman, Virgil: A storm is rising, the ship has sprung a leak, there’s a whirlpool to one side and sea monsters on the other, and the captain turns to his men and says, “One day perhaps we’ll look back and laugh even at all this.” That was Cindy’s way, Carmichael thought. The Santa Anas are blowing and three big brushfires are burning and invaders from space have arrived at the same time, a
nd one day perhaps we’ll look back and laugh even at all this. His heart overflowed with love for her, and longing. He had never known anything about poetry before he had met her. He closed his eyes a moment and brought her onto the screen of his mind. Thick cascades of jet-black hair; quick, dazzling smile; long, slender, tanned body all aglitter with those amazing rings and necklaces and pendants she designed and fashioned. And her eyes. No one else he knew had eyes like hers, bright with strange mischief, with that altogether original way of seeing that was the thing he most loved about her. Damn this fire, just when he’d been away three days! Damn the stupid men from Mars!
Where the neat rows and circles of suburban streets ended there was a great open stretch of grassy land, parched by the long summer to the color of a lion’s hide, and beyond that were the mountains, and between the grassland and the mountains lay the fire, an enormous, lateral red crest topped by a plume of foul black smoke. It seemed to already cover hundreds of acres, maybe thousands. A hundred acres of burning brush, Carmichael had heard once, creates as much heat energy as the atomic bomb they dropped on Hiroshima.
Through the crackle of radio static came the voice of the line boss, directing operations from a helicopter hovering at about four o’clock. “DC-3, who are you?”
“Carmichael.”
“We’re trying to contain it on three sides, Carmichael. You work on the east, Limekiln Canyon, down the flank of Porter Ranch Park. Got it?”
“Got it,” Carmichael said.
He flew low, less than a thousand feet. That gave him a good view of all the action: sawyers in hard hats and orange shirts chopping burning trees to make them fall toward the fire, bulldozer crews clearing brush ahead of the blaze, shovelers carving firebreaks, helicopters pumping water into isolated tongues of flame. He climbed five hundred feet to avoid a single-engine observer plane, then went up five hundred more to avoid the smoke and air turbulence of the fire itself. From that altitude he had a clear picture of it, running like a bloody gash from west to east, wider at its western end. Just east of the fire’s far tip he saw a circular zone of grassland perhaps a hundred acres in diameter that had already burned out, and precisely at the center of that zone stood something that looked like an aluminum silo, the size of a ten story building, surrounded at a considerable distance by a cordon of military vehicles. He felt a wave of dizziness rock through his mind. That thing, he realized, had to be the E.T. spaceship.