The House of Rumour (39 page)

Time for medication, says Mom. She squeezes my hand and I turn to look at her. She shakes her head. Medication is for sick people, Martin, she tells me.

A table is being set up at the front. A big tub with the punch is being brought out. Mothers and babies go first. They are lining up on the wooden walkway. They have syringes without needles to squirt the poison into the children’s mouths. Everyone get behind the table and back this way, okay? Everyone keep calm and try to keep your children calm. They’re not crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting.

Everyone can see that this is for real now. Not just another White Night loyalty test. Death is coming for us.

Mom whispers in my ear. You’ve got to get out of here, Martin.

Somebody has the microphone and is talking about how they used to be a therapist, and the kind of therapy they did had to do with reincarnation and past life situations. Whenever people had an experience of past life all the way through death, everybody was so happy when they made that step to the other side.

Mom shakes her head again. No, no, no, she mutters.

The Red Brigade have taken up positions around the Pavilion. I look around to see if there’s a way out. How are we gonna escape, Momma? I whisper.

Not we, she says. You, Martin. I’m ready to go.

And I squeeze her hand tighter.

Listen, she says. I see her try to concentrate. It’s like she is trying to make sense of things.

More and more people are going up and taking the potion. There is crying and screaming but also people testifying. This is nothing to cry about. This is something we could all rejoice about. They always told us that we can cry when we’re coming into this world. So when we’re leaving, we’re going to leave it peaceful.

I’m sorry, Martin, Mom is saying. I’ve always had trouble in my head. I know that hasn’t been easy for you.

Mom, I say. Please.

But I know now, she tells me. You see, I know what madness is. I always have done.

Die with a degree of dignity, lay down your life with dignity, Dad is calling out. There’s nothing to death. It’s just stepping over into another plane. Stop these hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die. We must die with some dignity.

You see, says Mom. Dad is God.

She points up at him.

God is Dad.

Yes.

She nods.

But, Martin, you see, Dad is mad.

God is mad.

Death, death, Dad is saying, death is common to people. Let’s be dignified. If you adults would stop some of this nonsense. I call on you to quit exciting your children when all they’re doing is going to a quiet rest. Hurry, hurry, hurry, my children. Hurry. There are seniors out here that I’m concerned about. Quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly. No more pain now.

Come on, Martin, Mom tells me. I’m ready. You pretend.

What? I ask her.

You got to play dead. You can do that, can’t you? Play dead.

And Dad is calling for another vat to be brought out. The vat with a green C marked on it. Bring it here so the adults can begin.

We’re in the queue and they’re moving us quickly now. Mom finds it hard to keep up so I put my arm around her waist and let her rest an arm on my shoulder. Take care of her, someone says. Yes. That’s a good boy. They are giving paper cups to the adults now. Someone hands one to me. I’ve only got one arm free so I take one cup and Mom reaches out to it.

Help me, Martin, she says. It’s at that moment that I realise that if I help to kill my mom, I might just get out of this alive. And that makes me feel bad. Like I’m a traitor. But I want to live. We’re walking away from the vat and I’m holding up Mom as she takes a drink of the potion. She coughs and drops the cup on the floor. She’s going to die. Part of me wants to get another cup for myself and go with her. Everyone is going together. Most people die on their own but now they are all going together. Mom is choking and shuddering but all the time leading me away from where people are taking the poison. And nobody has noticed that I haven’t taken mine. Mom starts to stumble and I stumble with her. All around us people are dropping to the ground, holding on to each other. Choking and coughing, crying and wailing. Calling out for the last time. Calling out to each other. Calling out to a God that has gone mad. I help Mom down gently and lie next to her. The sun is sinking. The sky is red like blood. Mom tries to say something to me but a froth comes out of her mouth. I hold on to her as she shakes and shakes. Then I feel the life go from her. And I’m on my own now. All around me people are dying and I’m lying among them, pretending to be dead, like Mom told me to. I’m on my own now.

It’s getting dark and there is some shouting up at the Pavilion. Gunshots. One. One, two, three. Somebody calling out. One more shot then silence. Just the sounds of night. The chirp of insects and the sad calling of the birds. I raise my head to look around. I can’t see anybody left standing. No Red Brigade standing guard no more. I look down and see Mom dead next to me. I look across all the bodies lying all over the ground as far as I can see through the gloom. I feel like I’m the last person left alive on the whole earth. I get up and start to run. Run towards the bush.

In the bush it’s dark. Pitch black. It’s hard to make my way through the tangle of branches but I just want to find a place to hide. I find a place where I can curl up. I just want to sleep. For my mind to go black like the jungle. I feel so sad and alone and my mind is racing, racing. I close my eyes and try to think of sleep. All I can think of is Death.

Then I hear something rustling in the bush. At first I think that it’s somebody come after me. I curl myself up even tighter. Try not to move, not even breathe. Then I realise that it’s not a person. It’s an animal of some sort. It comes closer and I feel the presence of it, like it can feel me too. I don’t know what it is. I think maybe I’ve taken myself to see the tiger and I’ll finally know what that means. I think that now I’ll die in the bush anyway. All on my own. The animal is sniffing, like it’s sniffing me. Then I think this is Death itself come to get me. And I shout out and the thing rushes off. And I start to sob all alone in the jungle, crying for Mom and everybody else.

And that’s when I get to sleep.

I wake up and see the sun burning green and yellow through the bush. I make my way back, not really believing what has happened the night before. Somehow thinking that it was just another White Night and everybody will be back to life in the morning. Then I see all the bodies in the daylight. And I know that it’s true even though I still don’t believe it. Mom was right. God must have gone mad for this to happen. Everybody is gone. Passed. There’s an awful stink in the air and the low buzz of flies. Like Death is a crazy child humming to himself.

Then I see a lone woman walking with a cane. A black senior limping and trying to make her way through all of the dead bodies. I hid under the bed, she tells me. I never, I never thought, she starts to say then stops. Looking all around then back to me. Mercy. Are we all there is?

16

the tower

The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.

Jorge Luis Borges,
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Larry Zagorski is a prolific author who has enjoyed intermittent commercial success and some critical acclaim (mostly in Europe and Japan) but owing to his chosen field remains largely unrecognised by the American literary establishment. ‘I always looked for the obscure, for something hidden from view,’ he said in 1989. ‘It’s little wonder that I was claimed by what I sought.’1

Born in Los Angeles in 1922 to estranged parents of Polish descent (Zagorski is a topographic name meaning ‘one who lives on the other side of the hill’), he found refuge in fantasy and speculative writing from early childhood. When at the age of seven he was isolated and bedridden for three weeks with a severe case of mumps, his constant companion was a copy of Joseph Jacobs’
English Fairy Tales
with full plate illustrations. Later influences were the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the pulp magazines
Weird Tales
and
Wonder Stories
.

By his own account he was a sickly child who lived mostly in his own imagination. The young Zagorski’s search for the unknown was also a quest for an absent father. Zagorski senior left the family home when Larry was barely three years old with a chaotic trail of rumour and hearsay in his wake. ‘I was told variously by my mother that he was a private detective, a gold prospector, a circus horseman, and God knows what else. I eventually learnt that he was none of these things, merely a cheap conman, but as a child to me he was some kind of totem, a mysterious monolith. I looked for him in comic books and adventure stories.’2

His first published story, ‘The Tower’ (printed in
Amazing Stories
in 1939 when he was seventeen), is a reworking of ‘Childe Rowland’ from the Jacobs stories of his childhood. A fatherless group of children find themselves trapped in a dark tower, the enchanted domain of the elfish ones. The interior is described (as in the original) as a wondrous fretwork of precious stones, magical lamps and illuminated crystals. It becomes clear (in Zagorski’s version) that this is the control panel of a spacecraft and the elfish inhabitants are visiting aliens, physically weak but able to bewitch with drugs and hypnotism. The children overcome the elfish extraterrestrials and escape as the tower blasts off into the firmament.

‘Childe Larry to a dark tower came,’ Zagorski writes in a later author’s note on this story, linking it to his fruitless attempts at understanding his relationship with a lost parent. It was a process that transformed Larry’s attitude so that from then on, rather than identifying his missing father as the hero of pulp stories, he instead becomes the strange creature, the alien. This liberated his creative sense, launching it into outer space. He joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society and began to sell stories regularly to
Amazing Stories
and
Fabulous Tales
, replete with ray guns and bug-eyed monsters. But science fiction was itself undergoing a transformation, and was about to enter what some were to call its ‘Golden Age’.

Generally agreed to have commenced when MIT physics major John W. Campbell Jnr assumed editorship of
Astounding
magazine in the late 1930s, the Golden Age3 brought about what came to be known as the ‘hard science’ school of speculative fiction. While recognising the need for some background logic in SF, Zagorski was never entirely at ease with the tendency towards pseudo-rationality and technology fetishism, or a new orthodoxy with strict rules for robots and regulations on how to solve faster-than-light travel. To focus on scientific feasibility rather than the potential of the imagination went against his instincts as a writer. As Jorge Luis Borges observes, the fiction of Jules Verne speculates only on future probability (the submarine, the trip to the moon, the talking picture), while the work of H.G. Wells surpasses it by conceiving ‘mere possibility, if not impossibility (the invisible man, a crystal egg that reflects the events on Mars, a man who returns from the future with a flower from the future, a man who returns from the other life with his heart on the right side, because he has been completely inverted, as in a mirror)’.4

Zagorski, however, was intrigued by the opportunities that quantum mechanics offered SF at this time. The first of two great inspirations for him in this period was Jack Williamson’s
The Legion of Time
, serialised in
Astounding
in 1938. Though heavily freighted with all the clichés of the pulp era,
The Legion of Time
breaks new ground in SF in its treatment of the Uncertainty Principle, alternate futures and parallel worlds. Other authors have cited its importance (Brian Aldiss declared that ‘its influence of later time stories has been strong’5) and it created a new term in the SF world, the ‘jonbar point’ – a point of divergence where history can go either way, in this case towards utopia or dystopia.

The possibility of a dystopic future was, of course, a very real danger at this time and Zagorski’s second big influence in the late 1930s was the novel
Swastika Night
, first published in 1937 under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. Reclaimed as a lost feminist classic in 1985 when it was revealed that it had been written by Katharine Burdekin,
Swastika Night
is probably the first and certainly the most frightening of the many novels based on the premise of a Nazi victory. Zagorski acknowledges that it inspired him to write his first successful full-length work,
Lords of the Black Sun
(serialised in
Fabulous Tales
in 1940, first reprinted as a novel in 1948). ‘It might seem a fairly crass attempt at this now familiar conceit,’ he wrote in the introduction to the 1978 reissue, ‘but bear in mind that at the time of writing this was neither an alternate history nor a counter-factual exercise; this was the possible future.’