Deathbird Stories (10 page)

And in their mutual concern, something deeper had passed between them. There was a chance, for the first time in Niven’s life, that he might cleave to someone and find not disillusionment, derangement and disaster, but reality and a little peace.

She had arranged the abortion, he had paid for it, and now they were together here, as she waited for him to speak. Voiceless, imprisoned in his past and his sense of the reality of the world in which he had been
forced
to live, Niven knew he was letting her slip away.

But could not help himself.

“Jerry.” He wanted to pretend she had not spoken, knowing she was trying to help him get started. But he found himself looking up. She wasn’t beautiful, but he liked the face very much. It was a face he could live with. She smiled. “Where are we going, Jerry?”

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means: there’s nothing artificial or unwanted holding us together any more.
Or
holding us apart. What do we do now?”

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “We do whatever we want to do. Don’t push on me too hard.”

Her eyes flashed for an instant. “I’m not
pushing,
Jerry, I’m inquiring. I’m thirty-five and I’m unattached and it’s getting frightening going to bed alone without a future. Does that seem rational to you?”

“Rational, but unnecessary. You’ve got a few good weeks left in you.”

“It isn’t funny time for me, Jerry. I have to know. Have you got room in your world for me?”

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “There’s barely room enough in my world for
me,
baby. And if you knew what my world was like, you wouldn’t want to come into it. You see before you the last of the cynics, the last of the misogynists, the last of the bitter men. I look out on a landscape littered with the refuse of a misspent youth. All my gods and goddesses had feet of shit, and there they lie, like Etruscan statuary, the noses bashed off. Believe me, Berta, you don’t want into my world.”

Her face was lined in resignation now. “Unraveling the charming syntax, what you’re telling me is: we had a good time and we made a small mistake, but it’s corrected now, so get lost.”

“No, I’m saying—”

But she was up from the curbside table and stalking across the street. He threw a bill down on the tablecloth and went after her.

She managed to keep ahead of him. Mostly because he wanted to give her time to cool off. As they passed a narrow side alley he pulled abreast of her, taking her arm gently, and she allowed him to draw her into its shadowed coolness. “All it takes is believing, Jerry! Is that so much to ask?”

“Believe,” he snapped, the instant fury that always lay beneath the surface of his charm boiling up. “Believe. The same stupid mealy-mouth crap they tell the rednecks in the boondocks. Believe in this, and believe in that, and have faith, and holy holy you’ll get your ass saved. Well, I
don’t
believe.”

“Then how can any woman believe in
you?”

It was more than anger that forced the words from him. It was a helplessness that translated itself into cynical ruthlessness. “I’d say that was
her
problem. “

She pulled her arm free and, turning without really seeing where she was going, she plunged down the alley. Down a flight of dim steps, and on again, a lower level of the same alley. “Berta!” he called after her.

Huaraches,
the sign had said, and
Serapes.

A shop in a dingy back alley in a seedy border town more noted for street-corner whores than for wrinkled and leathery tellers-of-the-future who sold
Huaraches
and
Serapes
in their spare time. But he had quickly followed her, trying to find a way out of his own inarticulateness, to settle the senseless quarrel they were having and salvage this one good thing from a past filled with broken glass. He wanted to tell her his need was not a temporary thing, not a matter of good times only, of transitory bodies reaching and never quite finding one another. He wanted to tell her that he had lost all belief in his world, a world that seemed incapable of bringing to him any richness, any meaning, any vitality. But his words—if they came at all—he knew would come with ill-restrained fury, with anger and sharpness, insulting her, forcing her to walk away as she now walked away.

He had followed her, down the alley.

And the old, wizened, papyrus-tough Mexican had limped out of his shop, bent almost double with age, like a blue-belly lizard, all alertness and cunning, and had offered to tell them of the future.

“No thanks,” Niven had said, catching up to her at that moment.

But she had tossed her head, defiance, and had entered the shop, leaving him standing in the alley. Niven had followed her, hoping she would turn in an instant, and come out again, and he would find the words. But she had gone deeper into the musky dimness of the shop, and the old prognosticator had begun casting the runes, had begun mixing the herbs and bits of offal and vileness he averred were necessary for truth and brightness in the visions. A bit of wild dog hair. A strip of flesh from the instep of a drowned child. Three drops of menstrual blood from a whore. The circular sucker from the underside of a polyp’s tentacle. Other things. Unspeakable, nameless, foul-smelling, terrible.

And then, strangely, he had said he would not tell the future of Berta...but of Niven.

There in the fetid closeness of a shop whose dimensions were lost in dusk, the old Mexican said Niven was a man without belief, without faith, without trust, and so was damned; a man doomed and forsaken. He said all the dark and tongueless things Niven had never been able to say of himself. And Niven, in fury, in frenzy brought on by a hurricane of truth, smashed the old man, swung across the little round table with all the strength in his big body, clubbed the old man, and in the same movement swept the strange mixed ingredients from the filthy table, as Berta: screamed—from somewhere far away.

And in that instant, a silent explosion. A force and impact that had hurled him out of himself. In that timeless, breathless instant Niven had been there/not-there. He had somehow inexplicably been moved
elsewhere.
In a bowl, in a valley, in a land, in a time or place or somewhere facing a minotaur. A creature of mythology, a creature from the past of man’s fables.

Huaraches,
the sign had said, and
Serapes.

Facing a live minotaur just a moment ago. Facing the creature that had left the world before there had been a name to fit the men that Niven had become. A god without worshippers, this minotaur. In a world that did not believe, facing a man who did not believe.

And in that instant—like the previous instant of truth—Niven was
all
the men who had forsaken their gods. Who had allowed the world to tell them they were alone; and believed it. Now he had to face one of the lost gods. A god who now sought revenge on the race of Men who had devised machines that would banish them from the real world.

Down and down and down into the waters of nowhere Niven plunged, all thoughts simply one thought, all memories crashing and jarring, all merged and melded and impinging upon a dense tapestry of seaweed images.

His breath seemed to clog in his throat. His stomach bulged with the amount of water he had swallowed, with the pressure on his temples, with the blackness that deluged him behind his eyes. Niven felt memory depart and consciousness at once returning—and leaving. He was coming back from the past to awareness, only to let it slip away finally as he drowned.

He made feeble swimming motions, overhand movements of arms that had sensation only by recall, not by his own volition. He moved erratically in the water, as thick as gelatin, and his movement toward the bottomless bottom was arrested. He moved upward through the water now, and saw a dim light, far ahead and above him.

An eternity. There. Toward it he struggled, and when he thought it was ended, he reached a ledge. He pulled himself toward it, and the dark water seeped through him till he was limp and dying. Then his head broke water. He was in an underground cavern. He spewed out mouthfuls of warm, evil-tasting water.

For a very long time he lay half on the ledge, half in the water, till someone came and pulled him up. Niven lay there on his stomach, learning to live again, while the one who had saved him stood silently waiting. Niven tried to get to his feet, and he was helped. He could not see who the man was, though he could feel a long robe in the dimness, and there was a light, a sort of corona that seemed to come dimly from the man. Then together, with the man supporting him, Niven went away from there, and they climbed for a long while between walls of stone, to the world that was outside.

He stood in the light, and was tired and sad and blinded by things he did not believe. Then the man left him, and as he walked slowly away. Niven recognized the beard and the infinitely sad eyes and the way he was dressed, and even the light.

And Jesus left him, with a sad smile, and Niven stood alone, for another time that was long. and empty.

Once, late that night, he thought he heard the bull-ram horn of Odin, ringing across this dim, shadowed land, but he could not be sure. And once he heard a sound of something passing, and when he opened his eyes to look it was a cat-headed woman, and he thought
Bast,
and she slipped smoothly away into the darkness without saying a word to him. And toward morning there was a light in the sky that seemed to be a burning chariot, Phaëthon the charioteer. Helios’s burning chariot, but that was probably the effects of the drowning, the hunger, the sorrow. He could not be certain.

So he wandered. And time passed without ever moving. In the land without a name; and
his
name was Niven; but it was no more important a name than Apollo or Vishnu or Baal, for it was not a name men believed in. It was only the name of a man who had not believed. And if gods cannot be called back, when their names have been known, then how can a man whose name was
never
known be called back?

For him, his god had been Berta, but he had not given her an opportunity to believe in him. He had prevented her from having faith in him, and so there were no believers for a man named Niven, as there were no true believers for Serapis or Perseus or Mummu.

Very late the next night, Niven realized he would always,
always
live in this terrible Coventry where old gods went to die; gods who would never speak to him; and with no hope of return.

For as he had believed in no god...

No god believed in him.

Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson

wrote, “Maybe God’s gone away,

forgetting His promise He made that day:

and we’re lost out here in the stars.”
And

maybe He/She’s just waiting for the right

signal to come back, whaddaya think?

Truly concerned whether or not he would live, the surgeons labored for many hours over Roger Charna. They cryogenically removed the pain areas in his anterior hypothalamic nucleus, and froze parts of him to be worked on later. Finally, it seemed they would be successful, and he would live. They bestowed on him three special gifts to this end: a collapsible metal finger, the little finger of the left hand; a vortex spiral of neon tubing in his chest, it glowed bright red when activated; and a right eye that came equipped with sensors that fed informational load from both the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum.

He was discharged from the hospital and tried to reestablish the life-pattern he’d known before the accident, but it was useless. Ruth’s family had sent her abroad, and he had the feeling she had been more than anxious to go. She could not have helped seeing the Sunday supplement piece on the operation. His employers at the apartment house had been pleasant, but they made good sense when they said as a doorman he was useless to them. They gave him a month’s termination wages.