A, B, C: Three Short Novels

  “You know, sometimes I’ve thought that you and Hodge have a lot in common.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you are the only two people who aren’t allowed to choose mates and go to the Market and raise children.”

  “With the exception,” I reminded him, “that I can resign and play mother any time I want, where Hodge is stuck with his job for life.”

  Ralf nodded. “Then, also, you both are, in your ways, responsible for the entire ship, not just your sector. Even Judge Cartrite doesn’t have any real control over the One-Eyes, except when he catches us. But we’re bound to obey you as much as anyone else in the City.”

  “I know,” I said. Then I said, “The responsibility: Ralf, Merril, that’s what I really wanted to talk to you about. Somehow I feel that even by letting the rituals go on, I’m betraying that responsibility. Oh, a couple of times when we’ve argued, you’ve told me that we all have our rituals, from my duties as Captain to some poor creature who pushes a small steel ball up a metal ramp with his nose in honor of the Journey to the Stars, to your studies in Ancient Earth political sciences. But there has to be some way to distinguish between them. I look at the kids walking around the official sectors, and then I look at Timme. One-Arm and all, Timme is alive, alert; you can see it in his face. There’s a kid Parks is training in Market Research, a bright boy, but every response comes out in slow motion. Parks tells me the boy’s appalled at the lack of interest we show in the rituals—thinks we’re all oafish brutes with no interest in the higher things.”

  Ralf waited for me to go on as I turned in my seat.

  “What it all comes down to is that someday—and this seems to be the thing they’ve all forgotten—someday there won’t be any more Cities. There will be a bright new world hanging in the night before us, with natural forces to fight and food to be searched for, tracked, and hunted, not handed to us on a conveyor belt from the hydroponics garden. All right, you and I will never see it, but it’s not five or six hundred years from now anymore; it’s only a hundred and fifty, two hundred years away. And one and the other considered, I’d rather turn Timme out on a new world to struggle for his own than Parks’s little bright-eyed boy. If I let the City become a bunch of blank-faced ritual followers, then I’m not fulfilling my responsibility.”

  There was silence for seconds as Ralf thought. I wondered what answer he might make. Merril did not seem to have one.

  Just then Timme called in, “Here’s Hodge.”

  I turned as Hodge reached the door. He was tall, with high cheekbones and deep eyes. The black hood was pushed back from his face, and as he stopped on the threshold, the emblem of rope he carried over his shoulder swung around against his chest. His black uniform made me conscious of all the other colors in the room; even the paintings, which I had thought somber, now seemed very bright.

  We talked a little more, and when dinnertime came, I excused myself, and Timme took me through the hectic journey back to the mouth of the web. This time I kept my eyes open. I saw many of the One-Eyes making the fantastic leap onto the Ring, as though they were stepping off a curb.

  Timme, as he towed me along, guessed my thought. “You know Hodge can get around the web almost as well as a One-Eye,” he said. “But he still needs help over the jump. Just takes practice, though.”

  He cut me loose and gave me a shove into the corridor. Gravity returned, and I staggered forward. Then I turned, waved good-bye to Timme, and started back to my office.

  chapter eight

  Second entry:

  Parks woke me up at three thirty this morning to give me the first report. He was on Night Watch in the Market, so of course he noticed it first. I got out of my bed, went over and jammed the receive button on the emergency intercom. “What the hell’s the matter?” I said. “Has the sand count gone up again—”

  “Captain, this is Parks down in the Market.”

  “What in the world do you want at this hour of the morning?”

  “I just checked the sand count, Captain. It’s been steady. But there’s something else, even worse—”

  “Huh?”

  “The hard radiation all over the City has just tripled. It’s not enough to bother anyone where you are, but I’m worried about its effect on the fetuses down here. I’ve tried to shield the stalls off, but I don’t know how much good it’s doing.”

  “What’s gone wrong? Have you found out which one of the reactors is haywire?”

  “That’s just it. None of them. It’s coming from outside the City.”

  “Are you sure? Have you contacted any of the other Cities to see if they’ve registered the same thing?”

  “I wanted to call you first, Captain, and see what you said.”

  “Then I’ll call up Epsilon-6 and see what’s going on.”

  “Right, Captain. Can I listen in?”

  I got the Nine and waited for about five minutes for Riche to answer. Finally his voice came over: “Leela, well how’s my girl today?”

  “She’s puzzled,” I said. “We’ve got radiation flooding our City. As of yet it’s not very high, but it’s coming from outside, so they tell me.”

  “You too?” His voice grew a bit worried. “About twenty minutes ago somebody over here woke me up to tell me the same thing. I told him to go check everything from top to bottom and then went back to bed. I had a hard night over here arguing with Judge Philots. Somebody in one of the free-fall sectors pushed off too hard and smashed his head. Two One-Eyes found him and tried to help him, but he died. Now the good Judge wants to press charges on them for interfering with a citizen. So I yelled at him all evening till he got tired. But I’m bushed too. What about this radiation business? I knew we’d hit light sand yesterday—”

  Suddenly there was a burst of static in which I could detect voices that lasted for nearly a minute. Then it stopped and Captain Riche said, “Hey, what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Everything’s all right over there?” But in the middle of my sentence the static started again, and this time the attention lights all over my desk began to blink at me.

  I answered the closest one.

  Meeker from Communications answered, “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s happening on Epsilon-7. They’re trying to contact us, but something’s way the hell wrong.”

  “Switch me on, will you?”

  “Okay.”

  The static returned, and with it the unintelligible voices. Meeker overrode it once more with: “Turn on your video, Captain, and I’ll relay what I’m getting.”

  I switched on the large screen above my desk. It went from gray to black, and a handful of luminous disks appeared against the far speckling of stars. It was the radio view of all the cities.

  Somehow they cut through the static and the voices—which I now realized was one voice echoing back on itself again and again—were briefly intelligible:

  “…Epsilon-7; this is Epsilon-7, emergency red, emergency red, can anyone read me, can anyone read me…Epsilon-7—”

  The other Cities must have all been tuned in by now. Finally another voice came over, static-free: “This is Captain Vlyon of Alpha-8. I read you clearly. Go ahead.” Apparently Alpha-8 was having a lot less trouble with interference than we were.

  “Thank God. This is One-Eyed Pike, calling from the One-Eyed Quarter of Epsilon-7. The rest of them are dead, the whole official quarter. I don’t know, they went crazy or something. Someone came, or something, a man with green…” Static again, and when it cleared Captain Vlyon was saying: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand your story. Please calm down, Pike, and tell me again.”

  “The whole damn ship nearly exploded, I think. Maybe forty minutes ago. It was night cycle in the City, but there was a huge jerk—everybody woke up. A couple of people got hurt, and then they started to go crazy, because they didn’t know. And in the Concourse—I didn’t see, but they told me—a figure, all on fire, with green eyes began to walk. No, I don’t unde
rstand it. But they died. Twenty minutes ago, a group of us tried to get into the official sector, and there were corpses all over—just dead, all over, and a few screaming still, trying to tell us, and then we saw a light, and we fled back here.”

  “Now look a minute, Pike—”

  “Now you look! Goddamn it, you come here and get us out! We’re hiding out in the web, but you can take the shuttle boats across. For God’s sake, come over here and get us out of this—” Over Pike’s voice came a scream; then Pike cried out. Then I saw why Meeker had put me onto visual.

  One of the circles—Epsilon-7—wasn’t right. There was a nimbus around it and the ship was quivering. Then suddenly the radio went dead, and on the screen Epsilon-7 began to break up. First it crushed in; then five or six fragments sped off in different directions as though they had been hurled. What was left just cracked apart like an eggshell. Within five minutes the twelve-mile hunk of metal was torn to bits in front of my eyes and the pieces scattered through space.

  By now there must have been people on all eleven remaining Cities watching what I had just seen. For ten minutes there was silence. I was beyond speech.

  Finally Captain Alva’s voice came through. “Captain Vlyon, are you still there? What happened?”

  A very strained voice came back. “Yes. I’m…still here. I don’t…”

  He didn’t finish. I felt that perhaps Captain Vlyon was not the same man whose voice we had heard before; I don’t mean anything mysterious. Were any of us the same?

  “I don’t know…” he whispered.

  Third entry:

  The shock had worn off, and in the cessation, the rumor has fled over the City. Light sand continues, but compared to the destruction of a City, that’s no problem. There is a still panic, with no way to protect ourselves. Judge Cartrite greeted me affably this morning: “Well, at least one good thing has come out of this. A good many people have returned to the rituals.”

  I suppose he expected me to be overjoyed. Meeker and three other communication engineers in three other Cities had enough presence of mind to record everything that went on that evening. Communications was busy all morning making a detailed comparison, as well as trying to unscramble some of the staticked-out sections. They cleared up perhaps ten more words by the end of the afternoon, which added nothing to what we already know. There was a depressing intercity conference that afternoon, during which we were supposed to offer suggestions.

  First, five minutes of silence; then fifteen minutes of embarrassed, preposterous speculation. Finally the meeting was abandoned.

  It was nearly dinner hour when Captain Alva called me again.

  “What’s happened now?” I asked. “Something come up?”

  “Just more trouble. Somehow the rumor got out that the One-Eyes on Epsilon-7 had taken it over and managed to blow it up.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing serious, but there’s talk of putting rigid enforcement on the Norm again.”

  “Who came out with that idea?”

  “I don’t know. The idea that the City could just go up like that is too much for most of them. You can almost watch each person turning around and around, looking for someone to blame it on. The One-Eyes are the easiest.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh, the reasoning works something like this: the last report we got from Epsilon-7 came from a One-Eye, so therefore they were the last people in charge of the City; therefore they must have taken it over from the officers and so on and so forth.”

  “And managed to destroy the whole City?”

  “Don’t ask me. One of the ritual groups here has already incorporated it; they get themselves high on ether, then all stand around while their leader puts out the left eye of a large doll. Then everyone moans and has visions of destruction.”

  “Ether?” I asked. “I don’t like that at all.”

  “Neither do I. As far as I’m concerned, the rituals can get as involved as they want to, but I draw the line at the use of narcotics.”

  I agreed with him. “I just hope this ritual business doesn’t get completely out of hand. This afternoon I got a complaint from Parks—he’s my head Market Research man—about the kid he’s training to be his assistant. Parks told me that the kid always brought a little pad of paper and pencil to work with him and would take it out and doodle on it occasionally. Parks always thought the kid was using it to figure out something. But when the kid came in today, Parks couldn’t get any work out of him. He just sat there and doodled, and when Parks asked him why, he said that his ritual group always wrote down certain signs when certain categories of thoughts entered their heads. He wouldn’t say what they were, but apparently he was thinking them all the time and had to sit in the corner making circles, crosses, and parallelograms.”

  “I can believe it,” Captain Alva told me. “This whole business has me worried—which is the euphemism of the day.”

  Fourth entry:

  I had been at work in my office for perhaps fifteen minutes when Judge Cartrite sent through a request to see me.

  “Come right in,” I said into the intercom, and a moment later the judge entered.

  “Good morning, good morning. I just thought I would stop up and check through you before I got busy. There’ll be a lot of changes to be made now, a lot of lax laws will have to be enforced more strictly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, has it or hasn’t it been adopted as the official explanation of the catastrophe of Epsilon-7?”

  I put my fingers together and leaned back. “As far as I know, there has been no vaguely plausible explanation advanced.”

  “Oh, come now,” said Judge Cartrite. “You don’t mean you haven’t heard. That’s why I came to see if it was official. It’s all over the City.”

  “What’s all over the City?”

  “That the One-Eyed sector of Epsilon-7 tried to take over their City, slaughtered the population, and blew up the ship.”

  “Nothing of the kind has even been considered.”

  “Well then, perhaps you ought to—”

  “And it’s preposterous.”

  “Are you sure you can say that?”

  “I am. Here, I want you to listen to a transcription of everything that came across from Epsilon-7 the night she went.”

  I called Meeker and got him to pipe up the playback on both sound and video. The judge sat through it perfectly still. I’d seen it fifteen times, so I’d forgotten what a shock the first run-through could be. He was silent and his face was drawn. At last he muttered, “Well…”

  “Did that sound like a man who had just taken over a ship to you?”

  “Well,” he repeated. “Perhaps it…wasn’t real, or was fixed or something. After all, what did take over the ship, then? The green man with the flaming eyes, or whatever that nonsense was?”

  After the judge left, Parks gave me a ring. “You know, Captain, the radiation is still pretty high. The mutations that are going to come out of this will set the Norm jumping something awful.”

  “I’ll come down and take a look.”

  “Not that there’s anything anybody can actually do,” Parks said. Then he added, “But it would make us feel better.”

  The Market is bright with fluorescent fixtures, and stall after stall is sided with glittering tubes where infants are brought to term. The front of the Market holds the genealogical files, which have the chromosome pattern of every person in the City.

  Parks’s assistant sat at the desk, blond head down, absorbed in his pad. A moment later Parks came up. “Hello,” he said, smiling. He saw me glance at his assistant and made a hopeless gesture. “Ignore him. I’ll show you what I’ve done.”

  We went toward the back. “I’ve put lead foil around the early blastulas. They need it most. I don’t think anything over four months will be affected, but it’s still going to be nip and tuck.” One section of the glittering rack was dark where the tubes had been wrapped in lead.

/>   Looking at the dull, crinkled foil, I suddenly felt the heaviness of the responsibility to these born and unborn thousands hurtling between stars, lost somewhere in timelessness, sea and desert, life and catastrophe, spinning around one another like dots on dice.

  “Well,” I told Parks, “like you said, there’s not much I can do. This place is depressing. Or maybe it just brings out the mother in me.”

  Parks laughed. I left the Market and went back up to my cabin.

  Fifth entry:

  Captain Alva called this evening from Sigma-9, very upset. “Lee, what’s your situation with the One-Eyes.”

  “Cartrite’s been annoying the hell out of them,” I told him.

  I heard his breath whistle through the speaker. “It’s worse over here,” he said. “I’m going to ask something strange of you right now.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, question mark implied.

  “Will you join with me in an official request to the judicial offices of all the Cities not to persecute the One-Eyes. I’m asking all the captains to do the same. The way things are going here, they’ll be extinct in no time, and when their knowledge is gone, so is all humanity.”

  “We’re not supposed to meddle with the judicials,” I mused.

  “Lee—”

  “Shut up, Alva, I’m just thinking out loud. But we’re not that far away from where you are. If you already had the consent of the other captains, I’d feel better about the whole thing. Oh, hell, what am I, a woman or a mouse? Sure, you’ve got my consent, Captain Alva; just send a wording of the statement to me before you present it.”

  “Thanks, Lee.” The gratitude in his voice reflected the relief even I felt. “You’re the third captain who’s gone along with me.”

  “I think you’ll get us all,” I told him, “if the condition in this City is any indication.” Then I added, “I hope it does some good.”

  I heard Alva sigh. It was a long sigh; I bet it sent the stars outside shaking. “I hope so too, Lee.”

  Sixth entry:

  They’re gone. Must I cry, rage; the City of Delta-6 is destroyed. This time it took ten hours. It began with a blast of static that wiped out the broadcast of One-Eyed Jack’s trial, which we were all monitoring over in Sigma-9. Faint signals started coming through, panic had broken out on the ship, then a call for help from Communications. Then more static. Apparently the green-eyed being was back. It was fantastic. I don’t know how to take it seriously. It would be easier to think it some cosmic joke. But it’s real, and the lives of all the citizens of the City depend on perceiving that reality correctly. Toward the end, the only communication was from the One-Eyes. Help, help, and help again. Some green-eyed being who stole their sanity as well as their organization marched among the survivors on that ruined ship for ten hours, and at the end, there was destruction. At the end, I relayed to Captain Alva: “Can’t we do something? What if I go over there?”