"Who is it?" she shouted through the door.
"Ukraine."
"Who???" she screamed.
"Hugh Crane," came the voice, louder. "We met at a Wildeblood party last December…"
"Go away. I don't know you and I'm busy."
"This is important. The novel we're in is coming to a horrible conclusion…"
"You're nuts. Go away." Jo turned away from the door and went to the closet for her Saturday Night Special, in case this maniac did have an ax.
"Listen to me, please, we've only got a few minutes," the voice shouted through the door. "Maybe you can almost remember the name Hagbard Celine. That's the name I had in the last quantum etgenstate, the last novel, when we worked together…"
Jo went to the phone. "Give me the police!" she shouted, forgetting that she wasn't yelling through a door anymore.
It was the last sentence she ever spoke.
At that moment Manhattan Island became a nuclear furnace.
President Lousewart, guided by Intelligence Agencies that had collectively listened to enough "private" conversations to be stone-paranoid, had acted within minutes after the POE letter arrived in the White House. The Unistat government would not be blackmailed. Even before TV could broadcast the story of the threat, over 10,000,000 "radicals" and possible "radicals" had been placed under arrest coast to coast. One of them, more or less accidentally, had been Sylvia Goldfarb of POE.
All 1,700 POE bombs detonated at once. Unistat as an entity ceased to exist. Nihilist Anarchist Hordes roamed what was left of the landscape.
Twenty-three hundred nuclear missiles, computer-guided to fire if Unistat were nuked, took off at the first blast and decimated Russia. The Beast had been programmed by Intelligence Agencies who were all convinced that any nuclear attack would come from there.
Twenty-three hundred Russian missiles took off the moment the first Unistat missile entered Russian airspace. They all went to China. The Russian computer had also been programmed by very dogmatic, very inflexible primates; it "knew" that any nuclear attack would come from China.
Starhawk was coming out of a bar on Geary when Frisco went. He was incinerated before his brain could register that anything was happening.
Lionel Eacher, long since returned to Contract Law, outlived the blast. He had been on vacation in Upper Michigan and was well armed, since he had been hunting. He survived by hunting and eating other mammals, including formerly domesticated primates, for nearly twenty years.
Then another formerly domesticated primate, even quicker and slicker, hunted and ate Lionel.
Markoff Chaney also survived. He was on a Greyhound in Florida, between Miami and Hollywood, when the bombs went off. He took to the Everglades and eventually even found a mate-a Seminole woman who didn't think he was absurd at all.
Their tribe increased.
The tribal stage endured 100,000 years, as it had before.
Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technology advanced.
Nuclear energy was rediscovered, and misused again.
The tribal age endured 12,000,000 years the next time.
Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technology advanced…
The six-legged majority knew little and cared less about all this primate activity. They had solved all their social problems three billion years earlier, and saw no need to change. They followed their own DNA cycles, just as monotonously as the primates followed primate cycles.
PART ONE
THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR
We doctors know a hopeless case when-listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go
–E. E. CUMMINGS, "pity this busy monster, manunkind"
TO CROSS AGAIN
The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid; real and insurmountable… Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both.
–ralph waldo emerson
Mary Margaret Wildeblood had been born or reborn in November 1983 in Johns Hopkins Hospital. The very first sound she heard was a radio in the next ward playing:
Localization was gradually determined: this universe, this galaxy, this solar system, this planet, this hospital. They were sawing off his penis.
Yes indisputably no doubt about it they were sawing off his penis. Seven dwarfs with evil grins were doing it. Then coming all the way out of the ether, this hospital, this bed, this morning in November 1983, Epicene Wildeblood knew at last who SHe really was. The radio sang cheerfully:
SHe was still giddy from the ether, but that would pass; meanwhile the Voice of Dream was still talking, a fussy old professor lecturing: "One quantum jump away the ideal pretence is Real Presence. An S-T transformation. The English language limerick is restricted so that a cross carried up a hill is anisogamous but the essence remains the Body and Blood of the first amoeba. Consider the following example which some consider Donne and others describe as overdone:
"It doesn't scan," Wildeblood protested feebly.
A gay swish of starched cloth moved queerly and a nurse's bland blond face appeared looking down at hir. "Anything the matter, dearie?" in a Brooklyn accent.
"What day is it?"
"Wednesday. Still Wednesday." The nurse spoke, as they always do after surgery, as if talking to an idiot.
The doctor recrossed on his peg leg (but that was slipping back into the dream again).
"Circumcision is a Jewish conspiracy. He bit it off, one great CHOMP!!!-and off it came," Dr. Ahab was ranting. "I am the feet's lieutenant. Sprechen Sie Joysbrick?"
A dangling "e" fell past from another book.
They were opening the curtains to let in sunlight. The white wall was a hospital wall. A hand at his wrist told hir that now her pulse was being taken.
Epicene Wildeblood awakened again. "I'm Mary Margaret, " he gasped happily, beached on the shore of reality, cast up from the ocean of dream.
"Yes," said the real doctor's voice (his name was Glopberger, not Ahab), "the operation was um 100 percent successful. You are most certainly Mary Margaret now." He beamed, an artist proud of his work, yet tentative, waiting for the Work's first live movement.
Mary Margaret Wildeblood looked about her at the New World. This is Johns Hopkins Hospital. This is 1983. Everything that went before was just a nightmare. I am alive. I am me. I am free.
"How soon do I get the Curse?" she cried. "When do I become a real woman?" Thinking: the Blood of the Lamb. Glopberger's pink face, agape, was yet another Disney caricature, the waters of unconsciousness calling hir home. Home: back to the stars. And SHe went, she went, into the great ether drift, into the cosmic void again, from dina shaur to turban bay in a michaelsonmorley regurgitation to the Hawkfouledest Convention in Elveron. Yes a forty-four-year-old male rising like Venus on fours out of the waves but aglow gleaming as in Botticelli: hir Self surprised at this astonishingly female body a really successful crossing and one hand crept as she slept toward the crypt rested there happy yes: it was true. A female body. She snored hoarsely.