Nothing is impossible for him.
He will be blowing his horn before
The ramparts of Heaven and shouting for
The Moon as hostage, the Virgin as wife,
And demanding a cut on the profits
From the Great Whore of Babylon.”
“Stop that son of a bitch!” the Festival Director shouts. “He’ll cause a riot like he did last year!”
The bolgani begin to move in. Chib watches Luscus, who is talking to the fido man. Chib can’t hear Luscus, but he’s sure Luscus is not saying complimentary things about him.
“Melville wrote of me long before I was born.
I’m the man who wants to comprehend
The Universe but comprehend on my terms.
I am Ahab whose hate must pierce, shatter,
All impediment of Time, Space, or Subject
Mortality and hurl my fierce
Incandescence into the Womb of Creation,
Disturbing in its Lair whatever Force or
Unknown Thing-in-Itself crouches there,
Remote, removed, unrevealed.”
The Director gestures at the police to remove Runic. Ruskinson is still shouting, although the cameras are pointing at Runic or Luscus. One of the Young Radishes, Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury, the science-fiction authoress, is shaking with hysteria generated by Runic’s voice and with a lust for revenge. She is sneaking up on a Time fido man. Time has long ago ceased to be a magazine, since there are no magazines, but became a government-supported communications bureau. Time is an example of Uncle Sam’s left-hand, right-hand, hands-off policy of providing communications bureaus with all they need and at the same time permitting the bureau executives to determine the bureau policies. Thus, government provision and free speech are united. This is fine, in theory, anyway.
Time has preserved several of its original policies, that is, truth and objectivity must be sacrificed for the sake of a witticism and science-fiction must be put down. Time has sneered at every one of Heinsturbury’s works, and so she is out to get some personal satisfaction for the hurt caused by the unfair reviews.
“Quid nunc? Cui bono?
Time? Space? Substance? Accident?
When you die—Hell? Nirvana?
Nothing is nothing to think about.
The canons of philosophy boom.
Their projectiles are duds.
The ammo heaps of theology blow up,
Set off by the saboteur Reason.
“Call me Ephraim, for I was halted
At the Ford of God and could not tongue
The sibilance to let me pass.
Well, I can’t pronounce shibboleth,
But I can say shit!”
Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury kicks the Time fido man in the balls. He throws up his hands, and the football-shaped, football-sized camera sails from his hands and strikes a youth on the head. The youth is a Young Radish, Ludwig Euterpe Mahlzart. He is smoldering with rage because of the damnation of his tone poem, Jetting The Stuff Of Future Hells, and the camera is the extra fuel needed to make him blaze up uncontrollably. He punches the chief musical critic in his fat belly.
Huga, not the Time man, is screaming with pain. Her bare toes have struck the hard plastic armor with which the Time man, recipient of many such a kick, protects his genitals. Huga hops around on one foot while holding the injured foot in her hands. She twirls into a girl, and there is a chain effect. A man falls against the Time man, who is stooping over to pick up his camera.
“Ahaaa!” Huga screams and tears off the Time man’s helmet and straddles him and beats him over the head with the optical end of the camera. Since the solid-state camera is still working, it is sending to billions of viewers some very intriguing, if dizzying, pictures. Blood obscures one side of the picture, but not so much that the viewers are wholly cheated. And then they get another novel shot as the camera flies into the air again, turning over and over.
A bolgan has shoved his shock-stick against her back, causing her to stiffen and propel the camera in a high arc behind her. Huga’s current lover grapples with the bolgan; they roll on the floor; a Westwood juvenile picks up the shock-stick and has a fine time goosing the adults around him until a local youth jumps him.
“Riots are the opium of the people,” the police chief groans. He calls in all units and puts in a call to the chief of police of Westwood, who is, however, having his own troubles.
Runic beats his breast and howls.
“Sir, I exist! And don’t tell me,
As you did Crane, that that creates
No obligation in you towards me.
I am a man; I am unique.
I’ve thrown the Bread out the window,
Pissed in the Wine, pulled the plug
From the bottom of the Ark, cut the Tree
For firewood, and if there were a Holy
Ghost, I’d goose him.
But I know that it all does not mean
A God damned thing.
That nothing means nothing,
That is is is and not-is not is is-not
That a rose is a rose is a
That we are here and will not be
And that is all we can know!”
Ruskinson sees Chib coming towards him, squawks, and tries to escape. Chib seizes the canvas of Dogmas from a Dog and batters Ruskinson over the head with it. Luscus protests in horror, not because of the damage done to Ruskinson but because the painting might be damaged. Chib turns around and batters Luscus in the stomach with the oval’s edge.
“The earth lurches like a ship going down,
Its back almost broken by the flood of
Excrement from the heavens and the deeps,
What God in His terrible munificence
Has granted on hearing Ahab cry,
Bullshit! Bullshit!
“I weep to think that this is Man
And this his end. But wait!
On the crest of the flood, a three-master
Of antique shape. The Flying Dutchman!
And Ahab is astride a ship’s deck once more.
Laugh, you Fates, and mock, you Norns!
For I am Ahab and I am Man,
And though 1 cannot break a hole
through the wall of What Seems
To grab a handful of What Is,
Yet, I will keep on punching.
And I and my crew will not give up,
Though the timbers split beneath our feet
And we sink to become indistinguishable
From the general excrement.
“For a moment that will burn on the
Eye of God forever, Ahab stands
Outlined against the blaze of Orion,
Fist clenched, a bloody phallus,
Like Zeus exhibiting the trophy of
The unmanning of his father Cronus.
And then he and his crew and ship
Dip and hurtle headlong over
The edge of the world.
And from what I hear, they are still
F
a
l
l
i
n
g”
Chib is shocked into a quivering mass by a jolt from a bolgan’s electrical riot stick. While he is recovering, he hears his Grandpa’s voice issuing from the transceiver in his hat.
“Chib, come quick! Accipiter has broken in and is trying to get through the door of my room!”
Chib gets up and fights and shoves his way to the exit. When he arrives, panting, at his home he finds that the door to Grandpa’s room has been opened. The IRB men and electronic technicians are standing in the hallway. Chib bursts into Grandpa’s room. Accipiter is standing in its middle and is quivering and pale. Nervous stone. He sees Chib and shrinks back, saying, “It wasn’t my fault. I had to break in. It was the only way I could find out for sure. It wasn’t my fault; I didn’t touch him.”
Chib’s throat is closing in on itself. He cannot speak. He kneels down and takes Grandpa??
?s hand. Grandpa has a slight smile on his blue lips. Once and for all, he has eluded Accipiter. In his hand is the latest sheet of his Ms.:
THROUGH BALAKLAVAS OF HATE, THEY CHARGE TOWARDS GOD
For most of my life, I have seen only a truly devout few and a great majority of truly indifferent. But there is a new spirit abroad. So many young men and women have revived, not a love for God, but a violent antipathy towards Him. This excites and restores me. Youths like my grandson and Runic shout blasphemies and so worship Him. If they did not believe, they would never think about Him. I now have some confidence in the future.
TO THE STICKS VIA THE STYX
Dressed in black, Chib and his mother go down the tube entrance to level 13B. It’s luminous-walled, spacious, and the fare is free. Chib tells the ticket-fido his destination. Behind the wall, the protein computer, no larger than a human brain, calculates. A coded ticket slides out of a slot. Chib takes the ticket, and they go to the bay, a great incurve, where he sticks the ticket into a slot. Another ticket protrudes, and a mechanical voice repeats the information on the ticket in World and LA English, in case they can’t read.
Gondolas shoot into the bay and decelerate to a stop. Wheelless, they float in a continually rebalancing graviton field. Sections of the bay slide back to make ports for the gondolas. Passengers step into the cages designated for them. The cages move forward; their doors open automatically. The passengers step into the gondolas. They sit down and wait while the safety meshmold closes over them. From the recesses of the chassis, transparent plastic curves rise and meet to form a dome.
Automatically timed, monitored by redundant protein computers for safety, the gondolas wait until the coast is clear. On receiving the go-ahead, they move slowly out of the bay to the tube. They pause while getting another affirmation, trebly checked in microseconds. Then they move swiftly into the tube.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Other gondolas pass them. The tube glows yellowly as if filled with electrified gas. The gondola accelerates rapidly. A few are still passing it, but Chib’s speeds up and soon none can catch up with it. The round posterior of a gondola ahead is a glimmering quarry that will not be caught until it slows before mooring at its destined bay. There are not many gondolas in the tube. Despite a 100-million population, there is little traffic on the north-south route. Most LAers stay in the self-sufficient walls of their clutches. There is more traffic on the east-west tubes, since a small percentage prefer the public ocean beaches to the municipality swimming pools.
The vehicle screams southward. After a few minutes, the tube begins to slope down and suddenly it is at a 45-degree angle to the horizontal. They flash by level after level.
Through the transparent walls, Chib glimpses the people and architecture of other cities. Level 8, Long Beach, is interesting. Its homes look like two cut-quartz pie plates, one on top of another, open end on open end, and the unit mounted on a column of carved figures, the exit-entrance ramp a flying buttress.
At level 3A, the tube straightens out. Now the gondola races past establishments the sight of which causes Mama to shut her eyes. Chib squeezes his mother’s hand and thinks of the half-brother and cousin who are behind the yellowish plastic. This level contains fifteen per cent of the population, the retarded, the incurable insane, the too-ugly, the monstrous, the senile aged. They swarm here, the vacant or twisted faces pressed against the tube wall to watch the pretty cars float by.
“Humanitarian” medical science keeps alive the babies that should—by Nature’s imperative—have died. Ever since the 20th century, humans with defective genes have been saved from death. Hence, the continual spreading of these genes. The tragic thing is that science can now detect and correct defective genes in the ovum and sperm. Theoretically, all human beings could be blessed with totally healthy bodies and physically perfect brains. But the rub is that we don’t have near enough doctors and facilities to keep up with the births. This despite the ever decreasing drop in the birth rate.
Medical science keeps people living so long that senility strikes. So, more and more slobbering mindless decrepits. And also an accelerating addition of the mentally addled. There are therapies and drugs to restore most of them to “normalcy,” but not enough doctors and facilities. Some day there may be, but that doesn’t help the contemporary unfortunate.
What to do now? The ancient Greeks placed defective babies in the fields to die. The Eskimos shipped out their old people on ice floes. Should we gas our abnormal infants and seniles? Sometimes, I think it’s the merciful thing to do. But I can’t ask somebody else to pull the switch when I won’t.
I would shoot the first man to reach for It.
—from Grandfa’s Private Ejaculations
The gondola approaches one of the rare intersections. Its passengers see down the broad-mouthed tube to their right. An express flies towards them; it looms. Collision course. They know better, but they can’t keep from gripping the mesh, gritting their teeth, and bracing their legs. Mama gives a small shriek. The fliers hurtles over them and disappears, the flapping scream of air a soul on its way to underworld judgment.
The tube dips again until it levels out on 1. They see the ground below and the massive self-adjusting pillars supporting the megalopolis. They whiz by over a little town, quaint, early 21st century LA preserved as a museum, one of many beneath the cube.
Fifteen minutes after embarking, the Winnegans reach the end of the line. An elevator takes them to the ground, where they enter a big black limousine. This is furnished by a private-enterprise mortuary, since Unde Sam or the LA government will pay for cremation but not for burial. The Church no longer insists on interment, leaving it to the religionists to choose between being wind-blown ashes or underground corpses.
The sun is halfway towards the zenith. Mama begins to have trouble breathing and her arms and neck redden and swell. The three times she’s been outside the walls, she’s been attacked with this allergy despite the air conditioning of the limousine. Chib pats her hand while they’re riding over a roughly patched road. The archaic eighty-year-old, fuel-cell-powered, electric-motor-driven vehicle is, however, rough-riding only by comparison with the gondola. It covers the ten kilometers to the cemetery speedily, stopping once to let deer cross the road.
Father Fellini greets them. He is distressed because he is forced to tell them that the Church feels that Grandpa has committed sacrilege. To substitute another man’s body for his corpse, to have mass said over it, to have it buried in sacred ground is to blaspheme. Moreover, Grandpa died an unrepentant criminal. At least, to the knowledge of the Church, he made no contrition just before he died.
Chib expects this refusal. St. Mary’s of BH-14 has declined to perform services for Grandpa within its walls. But Grandpa has often told Chib that he wants to be buried beside his ancestors, and Chib is determined that Grandpa will get his wish.
Chib says, “I’ll bury him myself! Right on the edge of the graveyard!”
“You can’t do that!” the priest, mortuary officials, and a federal agent say simultaneously.
“The Hell I can’t! Where’s the shovel?”
It is then that he sees the thin dark face and falciform nose of Accipiter. The agent is supervising the digging up of Grandpa’s (first) coffin. Nearby are at least fifty fido men shooting with their minicameras, the transceivers floating a few decameters near them. Grandpa is getting full coverage, as befits the Last Of The Billionaires and The Greatest Criminal Of The Century.
Fido interviewer: “Mr. Accipiter, could we have a few words from you? I’m not exaggerating when I say that there are probably at least ten billion people watching this historic event. After all, even the grade-school kids know of Win-again Winnegan.
“How do you feel about this? You’ve been on the case for 26 years. The successful conclusion must give you great satisfaction.”
Accipiter, unsmiling as the essence of diorite: “Well, actually, I’ve not devoted full time to this case. Only about three years of accumulat
ive time. But since I’ve spent at least several days each month on it, you might say I’ve been on Winnegan’s trail for 26 years.”
Interviewer: “It’s been said that the ending of this case also means the end of the IRB. If we’ve not been misinformed, the IRB was only kept functioning because of Winnegan. You had other business, of course, during this time, but the tracking down of counterfeiters and gamblers who don’t report their income has been turned over to other bureaus. Is this true? If so, what do you plan to do?”
Accipiter, voice flashing a crystal of emotion: “Yes, the IRB is being disbanded. But not until after the case against Winnegan’s grand-daughter and her son is finished. They harbored him and are, therefore, accessories after the fact.
“In fact, almost the entire population of Beverly Hills, level 14, should be on trial. I know, but can’t prove it as yet, that everybody, including the municipal Chief of Police, was well aware that Winnegan was hiding in that house. Even Winnegan’s priest knew it, since Winnegan frequently went to mass and to confession. His priest claims that he urged Winnegan to turn himself in and also refused to give him absolution unless he did so.
“But Winnegan, a hardened ‘mouse’—I mean, criminal, if ever I saw one, refused to follow the priest’s urgings. He claimed that he had not committed a crime, that, believe it or not, Uncle Sam was the criminal. Imagine the effrontery, the depravity, of the man!”
Interviewer: “Surely you don’t plan to arrest the entire population of Beverly Hills 14?”
Accipiter: “I have been advised not to.”
Interviewer: “Do you plan on retiring after this case is wound up?”
Accipiter: “No. I intend to transfer to the Greater LA Homicide Bureau. Murder for profit hardly exists any more, but there are still crimes of passion, thank God!”
Interviewer: “Of course, if young Winnegan should win his case against you—he has charged you with invasion of domestic privacy, illegal housebreaking, and directly causing his great-great-grandfather’s death—then you won’t be able to work for the Homicide Bureau or any police department.”