To Ian Ballantine
1
From Istanbul to the Stars
I
On Stan's seventeenth birthday the Wrath of God came again, as it had been doing every six weeks or so. At the time Stan was alone in the apartment, cutting up vegetables for his birthday dinner. When he felt that familiar, sudden, overwhelming, disorienting, horny rush of vertigo he knew that it was what everybody he knew called "the Wrath of God" and nobody understood at all. Screams and sirens from outside the building told him that everybody else in that part of Istanbul was feeling it, too. Stan managed to drop the paring knife to the floor so he wouldn't cut himself. Then he staggered to a kitchen chair to wait it out.
People said the Wrath was a terrible thing. Well, that was true enough. Whatever the Wrath of God really was, it struck everyone in the world at once—and not just the people still living on Earth, either. Ships in space, the colonies on Mars and Venus, as long as human beings were still within the confines of the Solar System, they all were caught up in its madness at the same moment, and the Wrath's costs in accidents and disasters were enormous. Personally, Stan didn't mind it all that much. What it felt like to him was like suddenly being overwhelmed by a vast, lonely, erotic nightmare. Like, Stan thought, probably what it would be like to get good and drunk. The erotic part was not very different from some of the yearnings Stan himself felt often enough.
It didn't last very long. When it passed, Stan shook himself, picked up the things he had knocked to the floor and turned on the local IV news to see how it had gone this time.
It had gone badly enough. Fires, car smashes—Istanbul's aggressive drivers relied on their split-second reflexes to avert disaster, and when the Wrath took away their skill the crashes came fast. The single worst thing that happened this time was an oil tanker that had been coming into the Golden Horn. With everyone on both the tanker's tugs and its own bridge suddenly incapacitated, the vessel had plowed, dead slow and irresistible, into one of the cruise-ship docks on the Old City side, and there it had exploded into flame.
That was a really bad accident. Like any teenager, however, Stan had a high tolerance for other people's misfortunes. He yawned and got back to his chores, hoping only that the commotion wouldn't make his father too late in getting back home with the saffron and mussels for the birthday stew. When Stan finished with the vegetables he put them in a pot of cold water, and put a couple of his precious old disks on to play. This time it was Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Teagarden and the Firehouse Five Plus Three. Then he sat down to wait as he listened, thumbing through some of his comics and wondering if, this time, his father would have stayed sober long enough to get him some kind of a present for his birthday.
That was the moment at which the polis came to the door.
There were two of them, male and female, and they looked around the shabby apartment suspiciously. "Is this where the American citizen Walter Avery lived?" the woman demanded, and the past tense of the verb told Stan the whole story.
It didn't take the polis long to tell Stan just how it was that the Wrath had made a statistic of his father. Walter Avery had fallen down while crossing the street and a spellbound taksi driver ran right over him. There was no hope of holding the driver responsible, the woman said at once; the Wrath, you know. Anyway, the driver had long since disappeared. And, besides, witnesses said that Stan's father had been drunk at the time. Of course.
The male polis took pity on Stan's wretched stare. "At least he didn't suffer," he said gruffly. "He died right away. There was no pain."
The woman was impatient. "Yes, I suppose that is possible," she said, and then: "So you've been notified. You have to come to the morgue to collect the body before midnight, otherwise there'll be a charge for holding it an extra day. Good-bye."
And they left.
II
Since there would be neither mussels nor saffron for his birthday meal, Stan found a few scraps of leftover ham and tossed them into the pot with the vegetables. While they were simmering he sat down with his head in his hands, to think about what it meant to be an American—well, half American—orphan, alone in the city of Istanbul.
Two facts presented themselves. First, that long dreamed-of day when his father would sober up, take him back to America and there make a new life for the two of them—that day, always unlikely, was now definitely never going to come. From that fact it followed that, second, there was never going to be the money to pay for his college, much less to indulge his dream of flying to the Gateway asteroid and its wondrous adventure. He wasn't ever going to become one of those colorful and heroic Gateway prospectors who flew to strange parts of the Galaxy. He wasn't going to discover a hoard of priceless artifacts left by the vanished old race of Heechee. And he wasn't going to become both famous and rich.
Neither of these new facts was a total surprise to Stan. His faith in either had been steadily eroding since skepticism and the first dawn of puberty arrived simultaneously, when he was thirteen. Still, they had seemed at least theoretically possible. Now, nothing seemed possible at all.
That was when Stan at last allowed himself to cry.
While Stan was drearily cleaning up the kitchen after his flavorless birthday meal, Mr. Ozden knocked on the door.
Mr. Ozden was probably around seventy years old. To Stan he looked more like a hundred—a shriveled, ugly old man, hairless on the top of his head, but with his mustache still bristly black. He was the richest man Stan had ever met. He owned the ramshackle tenement where Stan lived, and the two others that flanked it, as well as the brothel that took up two floors of one of them. Mr. Ozden was a deeply religious man, so devout in his observances that he did not allow alcohol on his premises anywhere except in the brothel, and there only for the use of non-Islamic tourists. "My deepest sympathies to you on your loss, young Stanley," he boomed in his surprisingly loud voice, automatically scanning everything in sight for traces of a forbidden bottle of whiskey. (He never found any; Stan's father had been clever about that.) "It is a terrible tragedy, but we may not question the ways of God. What are your plans, may I ask?"
Stan was already serving him tea, as his father always did. "I don't exactly know yet, Mr. Ozden. I guess I'll have to get a job."
"Yes, that is so," Mr. Ozden agreed. He nibbled at a crumb of the macaroon Stan had put on a saucer for him, eyeing the boy. "Perhaps working at the consulate of the Americans, like your father?"
"Perhaps." Stan knew that wasn't going to happen, though. It had already been discussed. The Americans weren't going to hire any translator under the age of twenty-one.
"That would be excellent," Mr. Ozden announced. "Especially if it were to happen quickly. As you know, the rent is due tomorrow, in addition to last week's, which has not been paid, as well as the week's before. Would they pay you well at the consulate, do you think?"
"As God wills," Stan said, as piously as though he meant it. The old man nodded, studying Stan in a way that made the boy uneasy.
"Or," he said, with a smile that revealed his expensive teeth, "I could speak to my cousin for you, if you like."
Stan sat up straight; Mr. Ozden's cousin was also his brothel keeper. "You mean to work for him? Doing what?"
"Doing what pays well," Mr. Ozden said severely. "You are young, and I believe in good health? You could have the luck to earn a considerable sum, I think."
Something was churning, not pleasantly, in Stan's belly and groin. From time to time he had seen the whores in Mr. Ozden's cousin's employ as they sunned themselves on the rooftop when business was slow, often with one or two boys among them. The boys were generally even younger than himself, mostly Kurds or hill-country Anatolians, when they weren't from Algeria or Morocco. The boys didn't last long. Stan and his friend Tan had enjoyed calling insults at them from a distance. None of them had seemed very lucky.