“Which?”
“The Bible. Any last questions?”
“Just what the hell is this tripwire thing?”
“Again, part of the program. Contact with Earth could not be established until you went and tripped that wire. Which you did on June nine: the day I buzzed Incarnacion here.”
“What was it about June nine?” asked Montgomery Gruber (geophysiology). “We looked into it and nothing happened.”
“You mean you looked into it and you think nothing happened. Plenty happened. Some asshole of an otter or a beaver sealed off a minor tributary of the River Lee in Washington State… along certain latitudes a critical fraction of microbal life committed itself to significant changes in its respiratory metabolism… the forty-seven billionth self-cooling cola can burped out its hydrocarbons… and there was that mild forest fire in Albania. And there you have it. You wouldn’t know how these things are connected, but connected they are. All this against a background of mobilized phosphorus, carbon burial, and hydrogen escape. The necessary synergies are all locked in.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the amount of oxygen in your atmosphere is starting to climb. At last irreversibly. It won’t feel any different for a while. But by the end of the Sixties it’ll hit twenty-seven percent. Yes I know: a pity about that.”
Incarnacion and Miss World turned to each other sharply. Because the scientists were now shouting out, gesturing, interjecting. Miss World said, “Please, sir. I don’t understand.”
“Well. It means you’ll have to be very, very careful with your heat sources, Miss World. At such a concentration, to light a cigarette and throw a match over your shoulder would spark a holocaust. It’s all a great shame, because this is the kind of problem that’s easy to fix if you catch it early on. In the coming years you’ll have to work awful hard on volcano-capping and storm control. To no avail, alas. Here’s another thing. It seems, anyway, that the solar system is shutting down. There’s a planetesimal out there with your name written on it. An asteroid the size of Greenland is due to ground zero on the Iberian peninsular in the unseasonably torrid summer of 2069. At ninety miles a second. Now. There might have been a window of a couple of days or so at the beginning of the decade: you could have duplicated your feat of 2037 when you saw off Spielberg-Robb. But the thing is you’ll need your nuclear weapons this time. A mass-driver won’t do the trick, not with the English this asteroid’s got on it. Unfortunately, though, there’s now a tritium hitch with your nukes that you’d have needed to start work on much earlier to have any hope of rearming them in time. Obviously a body this size moving at sixteen times the speed of sound will have considerable kinetic energy: to be released as heat. And it’ll rip through the mantle and the crust, disgorging trillions of tons of magma. It’s all very unfortunate. Mars itself may be lightly damaged in the blast.”
Zendovich said, “That was the tripwire? You’re saying you couldn’t act until it was already too late to make any difference?”
“Affirmative. That was the lock.”
“Sir?” asked Miss World. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s something I have to say. I think you’re a despicable person.”
“Nugatory. I’m not a person, lady. I’m a machine obeying a program.”
Zendovich got to his feet. So did the janitor on Mars, who leaned forward and cocked his beak at him.
“Then God curse whoever put you together.”
“Oh come on. What did you expect? This is Mars, pal,” said the janitor as the lights began to fade. “The Red One. You hear that? Nergaclass="underline" Star of Death. Now get the hell out. Yeah. Go. Walk out of here with your eyes on the fucking floor. Exit through the left hall. Follow the goddamned signs.”
Pop Jones slipped into the conservatory and opened the back door. Dusk was coming. Across the lawn were the lit windows of the Common Room (he could see Kidd and Davidge, staring out). The children wouldn’t return from the beach for another hour. Later, after they’d been fed, Pop Jones would make his rounds with his bucket and his keys. Make his rounds? Pop shrugged, then nodded. Yes, it would be important to try to go on just as before. But could you do that?
The star was dropping over the steep green. Starset! Stardown! And already a generous, a forgiving moon; it carved a penumbra of golden grime in the cirrus, and the face saying, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Pop Jones turned.
“Floor.”
“Timmy?”
He could see the moisture in the child’s eyes.
“Timmy, Timmy. Who did this to you, Timmy?”
At one remove, it seemed, Pop Jones felt astonishment gathering in him. How entirely different his own voice sounded: thick, mechanical. In this new time, when he, in common with everyone else on Earth, was submitting to an obscure and yet disgustingly luminous reaffiliation, Pop Jones found that thing in himself that had never been there before: the necessary species of self-love.
“Day,” said Timmy clearly. And he said it again, quite clearly, like an English teacher. “Day… Day done it.”
Darkness increased its hold on the room of glass. Pop Jones’s new voice said that night was now coming. He moved toward the boy. Hush there. Hush.
1997
STRAIGHT FICTION
IT ALL BEGAN that day in the bookstore coffee shop—when Cleve saw the young woman reading a magazine called Straight News. Or was it Straight Times? Straight News or Straight Times: one or the other. Take your pick.
Now Cleve liked to think of himself as a reasonably civilized guy. Live and let live, he’d say. He didn’t have any kind of problem with straights. Unlike that little brute Kico, for instance. Or unlike Grainge, who always… Cleve checked himself. Every chance he got, he was still thinking about Grainge. Grainge—oh, Grainge! “It’s over,” he murmured, for the ten-thousandth time; and then he obediently reminded himself that he was very happy with his current lover—a talented young muralist called Orv.
The young woman reached for her short espresso. Cleve proceeded with his Sumatra Lingtong. (Low acidity: Cleve was careful about such things.) He found that he was staring at her—found also that she was staring back, with intelligent defiance. Automatically Cleve bade his face to suffuse itself with tolerance and congeniality. And it worked out: there they sat, a table away, smiling at each other.
“Who would have thought it?” he said lightly. To strike up a conversation, hereabouts, was no big thing. This was the coffee shop of the Idle Hour bookstore. A bookstore coffee shop committed to good coffee (Coffee Boiled Is Coffee Spoiled). People were always striking up conversations. “Burton Else,” Cleve went on. “Burton. Burton Else for Christ’s sake.”
It took her a second to get his meaning. She pressed the magazine to her bosom and peeked down, reacquainting herself with its front cover. There was the tabloid-size photograph of Burton Else, the movie star, sashed with the diagonal caption: TOTALLY HET.
“You find it hard to believe?” she said.
“I guess not.”
“You’re surprised? Disappointed?”
“Nah,” said Cleve. Which wasn’t true. He was scandalized. “I saw his new one just last night,” he went on. That was true enough: Cleve and Orv, at the movies, with their popcorn and their Perriers. And up on the screen—Burton Else, your regular join-the-dots romantic lead. The usual kind of thing. Burton taking his young feature star Cyril Baudrillard to a disco opening. Burton and Cyril attending a yard sale, and encountering Burton’s ex. Burton cradling Cyril’s sweat-soaked nudity in the marmalade glow of the log fire, after that fight about the flower catalogs. “There he was up there,” said Cleve, “doing his dreamboat routine.”