He drank ice crystals laced with midnight and watched their world burn. A greenperson floated up beside him, and touched his sleeve. There was static electricity in the compartment; a tiny spark. “Mister Redditch, when you have a moment, the Designer would like to disturb air with you.”
Redditch looked down. The greenperson's eye was watering. “Tell him I'll be along.” The greenperson's flaccid skin went to an ivory-gray hue, capturing the disquiet and weariness in Redditch's voice. He floated away, adjusting his hue exactly, so the message could be transmitted without the slightest semantic misinterpretation.
Redditch turned back to the teleidoscope, the tanger, the sensu, the catcheye and the straight black tunnel that showed him their world burning. The solar prominences had died away to self-satisfied blandness; unctuous. There was little out there now but smoldering ash, but the sensu was still getting a reading high into the nines and the teleidoscope was turning it, turning it, combining colors and sending them back in some new spectral spectrum. He raised the drink to his lips, but he could not taste it. The tanger overrode, even in the control compartment. It was the smack of salt-rising bread and salamanders.
A rolling checker came out of its bay and made its way through the coils of readout sheets littering the deck. Redditch had designed and combined and set up the nova with great care, and the sheets had endlessly tongued out of the aesthetikon and he had let them lie. The checker got through the tangle and palmed open the hookup compartment and re-attached the feed to stateroom 611. But it hardly mattered: the clients in 611 had played gin rummy straight through the program. The checker returned to its bay.
Redditch downed the last of his drink, ran his tongue around the rim of the hollow crystal, and set it down on the console. He sighed and rubbed his weary, itching eyes. He was tired from the inside-out to the very tips of his fingers. And now, the Designer…
When he emerged from the dropshaft and walked through the theater lounge, a blustery purple-class voyager and a fat duchess with sausage fingers and noisy rings greeted him, congratulated him on the performance, offered him social congress. The man was probably a salesman of myth-sticks, and the woman was clearly a remittance relative. He smiled and thanked them and hurried on through the theater. A clique still plugged into their tunnel applauded him, and he acknowledged their appreciation with a vague gesture of his sensor hand. It sparkled with reflected light from the overhead inkys.
Whores were busily trying to drum up some business, trying to catch a few voyagers who had absorbed the empathy of the programmed death and who were, at least for the moment, “alive.”
They were having a rough time of it. One lithe creature with a charged ring through the lips of her vagina, was trying with all the powers at her command to get a thin, salivating messenger to buy her favors. She was bent over him, her hand inside his chiton, massaging his privates. But his eyes were rolled up in their sockets and Redditch would have taken odds her till and her ring would go empty.
A tag-team, two black-and-ochre Sedalians, had a suety emissary trapped deep in his formfit. One of them had pulled off his embassy pouch and sash, and had lowered herself onto his body. It seemed unlikely she would be able to get him erect enough for insertion, and her sister was tonguing one of the several underarm vaginas the man had had surgically added to his grotesque bulk. While they worked over him, Redditch passed and heard the man mumbling, “Don't be ridiculous, this is ridiculous, my sperm brings a thousand a decaliter, I'm certainly not going to give it away and pay you for the privilege.” Redditch quite agreed. He wondered why the ship's comptrollers continued to hire on whores; they were virtually an anachronism, holdover from centuries before. They certainly couldn't be doing enough business to warrant their continued employment.
He kept walking. Once, after a long programming, he had passed through the theater and one of the new whores, a lanky young man with pustules, had propositioned him. Redditch had laughed and there'd been some repercussions with the Guild, until the Designer had straightened out the matter.
He saw her sitting alone, and when she looked up at him as he approached, the singular beauty contained in her face, particularly her slanted eyes, made him slow his pace. Her right arm was lying along the rest, and she bent it at the elbow, raising the slim-fingered hand. It was enough to stop him.
“You programmed the death?” she said, with no rising inflection. He nodded, smiling in a sudden rush of anticipation of her congratulations. She looked away.
He felt as though something had been stolen from him.
The Designer was lying out in a leaf chair that moved idly in its free-fall nimbus. Every eye in his forehead row was closed, but Redditch could tell he was perceiving his surroundings by the fibrillation of root threads that spiked his cheek-pouches. Crystals of ergonovine sparkled amid the threads. The Designer's backers were seated around the observatory suite.
“Come in,” the Designer said. The leaf chair moved.
“I'm in.” He slumped into a composeat and punched out tranquilizers and an antacid. He wanted to stay calm through it all. Outside the observatory cycle ports the nova phased through from yellow ochre to gold as he watched. '.Something on your mind, Keltin?”
The Designer opened three yes eyes.
“Where must your mind be?” He said it with carefully chilled contempt. A greenperson hovered just beyond the nimbus, unnecessarily translating the tone in colors.
Redditch yawned. “Madison Square Garden, a 1932 Paramount Pictures release starring Jack Oakie, Marian Nixon, Zasu Pitts, William Boyd and Lew Cody. ‘A romantic, dramatic story of three men and two girls fighting desperately to rout the mechanism of unseen forces.' Running time, seventy-six minutes.”
One of the backers threw his drink at the bulkhead. He started to shout something, but a checker emerged from its bay and caught the crystal before it hit, sucking up every drop of fluid before it could stain the grass. The backer turned away in frustration.
The Designer opened a no eye. “There are clauses in your contract, Redditch.”
Redditch nodded. “But you won't use them.”
He only wished Keltin would relieve him. Far chance.
Another of the backers, a florid man with a thrilled and dyed topknot, hunched forward. “You can't possibly call that death viable? Sparks, man, there were actually paying guests sleeping through it. I saw a monitor estimate that had thirty-two per cent, that's thirty-two per cent of the audience into the sevens with boredom! How the hell do you expect us to drain off enough empathy to syndicate this…this abort you call a death?”
Redditch sighed. “Stop inviting your relatives to the premieres and perhaps we'll get a few guests onboard who can still feel something.”
“I don't have to take this!” the backer shouted.
“That's true,” Redditch said. The tranquilizers were holding.
“That's true,” said the Designer, meaning something else entirely. “Let me handle this, Mr. Nym. If you please.”
“Stars!” Mr. Nym said. He turned away. Now there were two looking out the cycle ports.
“Redditch, this isn't the first inadequate job you've programmed. The Faraway Forever program. The Rightful Loss program. Others.”
“Maybe I'm bored.”
“We're all bored, dammit,” said a third backer. He had his hands clasped in his lap.
“I spend considerable time designing these deaths,” the Designer continued, “and I cannot permit my work to be underdone this way. These gentlemen have very legitimate complaints. Their audiences are waiting for the syndication of what we mount out here; their business is providing their audiences with top-grade empathy material. When it goes to you from my workshop, it's right. When it's actualized it lacks verve, pace, timing. There are clauses in your contract. I won't tell you again.”
Redditch rose. “Don't. Refer it to my Guild.” He turned and left.
Behind him, all three backers were staring out the cycle ports as the nova phased to deep purple. His soul was quiet.
He strode through the theater lounge quickly, no glance left, no glance right. If he was going to sedate and blot, he would do it alone.
She wasn't in her seat. The formfit still held the shape of her body. Glance right.
He floated lazily in the nimbus, his spine like water, his thoughts relaxed. He was talking to the memory box that contained his wife, dead these last sixty-three years-since his most recent anti-agapic rejuvenation.
“It's the end of summer, Annie.”
“How did the children take it, Rai?”
They had had no children. It was an old memory box, the synthesizing channels were worn; the responses were frequently imprecise or non sequitur. The bead in which her voice had been cored, had become microscopically crusted; Annie now spoke with a slur and sometimes-drawl.
“I look about thirty now. They even fixed the prostate. I'm taller, and they lengthened the fingers on my sensor hand. I'm much faster at the console now, wider reach. But the work isn't any better.”
“Why don't you speak to the Designer about it, darling?”
“That sententious lemming. I may be undertalented,
but at least I don't try to sustain a miserable existence by deluding myself I'm creating great works of art.”
He turned onto his stomach, staring out the port. It was dark out there. “ And while we float here talking, outside this great space-going vessel cut in the shape of a moonstone, the universe whirls past at millions of light-years an hour, doo-wah-diddy mop-mop.”
“Isn't that parsecs, dear?”
“How should I know. I'm a sensu programmer, not an astrophysicist.”
“Is it chilly in here, Rai?”
“Oh, Annie, forget it. Say something I haven't heard. I'm dying, Annie, dying of ennui and the stupids. I don't want, I don't need, I haven't anything, don't care!”
“What do you want me to say, dear? I miss you, I'm sorry you're lonely-”
“It's not even that I'm lonely. Annie, you went through three rejuvenations with me. You were the lucky one.”
“Lucky? Lucky that I died during the fourth? How do you get lucky out of that, Rai?”
“Because I've had to live sixty-three more years, and in another ten or fifteen I'm scheduled for a fifth, long-dead baby wife of mine, and I tell you three times — one two three — it's the end of summer, love. Gone. Done. All the birds has flowed south for the final flutter. I'm going to give it a pass when rejuve comes around. I'm going to settle into dust. Summer ends, goodbye. Mother of God, is this how Rico dies?”
“What sensu is that from, Rai?”
“Not sensu, Annie. Movie. Movie film. All-singing, all-dancing, all-talking. I've told you a million times, by direct count. Movie. Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson, Warner Bros. Oh to hell with it, there was a woman in the lounge tonight, Annie.”
“That's nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”
“God help me, Annie, I wanted her! Do you know what that means to me? To want a woman again? I don't know what it was about her…I think she hated me…I could feel it, something deep and ugly when she stopped me…”
“That's nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”
“She was bloody gorgeous, you ghost of Christmas Past. She was so unbelievably unreal I wanted to crawl inside her and live there. Annie…Annie…I'm going crazy with it all, with what I do, with the novae, with programming death for indolent swine who need their cheap death thrills to make it through the day just to make it through a day…God, Annie, speak to me, come out of that awful square coffin and save me, Annie! I want night, my baby, I want night and sleep and end to summer…”
The suite door hummed and a holograph of the one seeking entrance appeared in the tank. It was the woman from the theater lounge.
“That's nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”
He swam out of the nimbus and whistled the door open. She came in and smiled at him.
“You were always like that when I was alive, Rai; you simply never talked to me; you never listened…”
He lurched sidewise and palmed the memory box to stillness.
“Yes?” She stared at him with curiosity and he said it again, “Yes?”
“A little conversation, Mr. Redditch.”
“I was just talking about you.”
“To your little black box?”
“To what's left of my wife.”
“I didn't mean to be flippant. It's very personal and dear to many people, I know.”
“Not to me. Annie's gone. I'm still here…and it's getting to be the end of summer.”
He motioned to the nimbus, and she walked to it with her eyes still on his face. “You're a very attractive human,” she said, removing her clothes and sliding into the free-fall glow.
“Can I get you something? A crystal? Something to eat?”
“Perhaps some water.”
He whistled up the dispenser. It rose from the grass-rugged deck, and revolved. “Fresh water, three sparkles of (seed) in it,” he said. The checker in the dispenser mixed up the drink and set it out for him to remove.
He carried it to her and she took it, giving him a faint look of amusement. “I seem to entertain you.”
She drank from the crystal, barely moving her lips. “You do.”
“You aren't from the Near Colony.”
“I'm not a Terrestrial.”
“I didn't want to say that; I thought it might offend.”
“We needn't circle each other, Mr. Redditch. Clearly, I sought you out, I want something from you, we can be straightline with one another.”
“Apart from sex, what do you want from me?”
“My, you're taking the initiative.”
“If you don't care for me, you can move out now. I'm frankly not up to badinage.” He turned sharply and went back to the dispenser. “It's the end of summer,” he said, softly.
She sipped at the cool water in the crystal. He turned back to her, a melt in its helical container warm against his hand, and caught her unguarded expression: there was so much amusement in her face, in every line of her languid body, he felt like an adolescent again. “Oh, Mr. Redditch!” Her chiding was as deep and meaningful as that of a mommy's suitor, feigning concern for the offspring of the ex-husband. He turned back a second time, feeling violence in him for the first time in years; furious at her for playing him like a puppet; furious at himself for being furious.
“That's all…get out.”
“The end of summer, Mr. Redditch?” She made no move to go. “What do you mean by the end of summer?”
“I said out. I mean out.”
“You're going to ignore the rejuvenation next time? You must want something on the other side very badly.”
“Who the hell are you? What do you want from me? It's been a bad day, a bad week, a rotten year and a stinking cycle, so why don't you just put an egg in your shoe and beat it.”
“My name is Jeen.”
He shook his head, totally bewildered. “What?”
“If we're going to touch, you should at least know my name,” she said, and held out the crystal for him to take it away. But when he reached out, she laid her other hand on his wrist and drew him into the nimbus. It had been a very long time since he had wanted a woman this way, but his body betrayed him the moment her lips touched his naked chest. He lay back and closed his eyes and she made it all silk.
“Talk to me,” she said.
The things he said were not love matters.
He spoke of what it was to live as something like a man for over two hundred years, and to grow weary of it because its infinite variety did grow stale. He spoke of what he did to send emotion and dreams of conflict to a race that ruled whole galaxies, entire nations of planets, great sectors of space. He was a programmer of death. A practitioner of one of the last occupations left to humans. And he spoke of ennui, of jaded appetites, of nights and days aboard a moonstone vessel as large as a city. Roaming through emptiness till worlds were pinpointed. And then they were surveyed with sophisticated equipment that told them the peoples who had lived there were gone, but their racial memories were still preserved in the stones and soil and silted river bottoms of the planet. Like ghosts of alien dreams, the remembrances of all times past were still there, contained forever, immolated in the soulskins of worlds, like haunted houses that had soaked up the terrible events that had transpired within and retained them as ambience. He spoke of Designers and their special talents-those peculiar alien empaths-and how they designed the demise of whole solar systems.
How the endless sleeping memories of the peoples who had lived there were gathered up as the sun went nova; how they streamed into the sensu and the tanger and the other empathy machines, to be codified and stored and then taken back to the human worlds, to the New Colony, to sustain the weary existences of those who had no fresh dreams of their own.
And he closed with words about how he hated it.
“But the worlds are empty, aren't they?” she asked, and then put her face once more to his tensing flesh.
He could not speak. Not then.
But later he said, yes, they were empty.
Always empty, she asked.
Yes, always empty.
You're a very humane race.
I don't think there's anything left of humanity to us. We do it because it's for a greater good. And he laughed at the words, greater good. His fingers roamed over her body. He grew excited once more. It had been so long ago.
“On my world,” she said, “we live much warmer than you. In times past, my race had the power of flight. We have a heritage of sky. Closed in like this makes me uneasy.” He held her in the circle of his arms, his thigh between her long legs, and he drew his fingers down through her thick, deep blue hair.
“I know words and songs from four hundred years of myself and my race,” he said, “and I wish to God I could think of something more potent to use, but '1 love you' and 'Thank you' are the only ones that come to mind…those, and 'The Earth moved,' but I'd better not use it, or I'll start to laugh, and I don't want to laugh.”
He slid his hand down to her stomach. She had no navel. Very small breasts. Extra ribs. She was very beautiful.
“I'm happy.”
“When we care, we have a way of making it last much longer. Would you?”
He nodded and her head lay at his shoulder and she felt him move. She sat up, kneeling before him in the nimbus. Her earring was hollow, and from it she took a tiny jewel that pulsed with pale light. She crushed it under his nose and leaned forward so she could inhale the pale light mist that sprang up from the dead jewel. Then she lay down again, precisely fitting in to the waiting space.
And in a moment they began again…
…as she took him with her to her world.
A warm world, all sky, with a single sun that held the same pale light as the jewel she had used to drug him. They flew, and he saw her people as they had been ten thousand years before. Lovely with wings, bright with the expectation of a thousand years of life.
Then she let him see how they died. In the night.
They fell from the sky like tracers of light, brilliant, burning. Onto the great dust deserts already filled with the ashes of their ancestors.
Her voice was warm and soft in his mind. “My people live with the sky for a thousand years; when their time comes, they go to rest with all those who came before them.
“The deserts of dust are the resting places of my race, generation upon generation, returned to their primal dust… waiting for the ten thousand years to pass until they are reborn.”
The world of sky and dust swam in his mind and as though it were captured in the catch eye it faded back and back; he was looking down on the world of the phoenix creatures from deep space, and he knew why she had drugged him, why she had taken him into her mind's memory, why she had come to him.
The death he had programmed had been the death of her sun, her world. Her people.
They came back to the nimbus within the suite in the moonstone vessel. He could not move, but she turned him so he could stare out through the cycle port at the emptiness where her world had been. Only dust remained. And she let him hear one last trailing scream from that world, at the moment of its death; the wail of her race that would never rise from its own dust and ashes.
The ten thousand years might pass, but the phoenix people would never again soar through their skies.
“Can you hear me? Can you speak? I want you to know why.”
His mouth was thick and his speech was clumsy, but he heard her and he could speak and he said he understood. She bent to him and took his face in her cool hands. “Centuries ago, my ancestors were sent away. They were…” her hesitation was filled with pain and loneliness, “…imperfect.” She turned away for a moment and he saw high on her back two knots of atrophied muscle, and the vision of winged men and women came to him as it had in the vision she'd let him see, and he understood that, too. Then she turned back, stronger. “There were a few like them in every generation, and they gave birth to others who gave birth to us. But no more. Now we are so few, so very few. Now almost all the people are gone.”
“It was a mistake,” he said. She could not tell what he had said through the drug, and he repeated it. She looked at him and nodded gently; but she was stronger.
“You said there was very little left of humanity in your race. That is the truest thing you could have said. What I do is what will be done to all of you. There are a few more of my race, and when they are gone there will be others, of other races. And they will finish the job. You may not be the first, but you will certainly not be the last. Your time is past. You had your chance and turned it against every race you ever met. And now that your time is done, you think you'll take everyone with you.”
He could not regret dying, as he knew he would die. She was right. The time for men had come and gone, and what they did now was useless, but more than useless…it was senseless.
Unlike her people, men did not have the good grace to go off alone and die. They tried, in their deranged way, to drag the universe into the grave with them. Not just the leaching off of preserved memories for the momentary amusement of the jaded and corrupt, but everything men did, now that they owned the universe. It was better that the human race be aided in its slovenly demise than to be allowed to leave nothing but ashes when it vanished at last.
He had killed her race, lying sleeping, waiting to be reborn in flames. So he could not hate her. Nor did she need to know that she brought him the dearest gift he had ever received. It was the end of summer and he was content knowing he would not have to wait for the chill of winter to descend on his race.
“I'm happy,” he said.
She may have known what he meant. He thought she knew: her eyes were moist as she bent to him for the final time, and kissed him.
There were flames and heat as great as a nova and then there was nothing but ash that floated freely in the nimbus.
When they came to the suite of the sensu programmer, none of them knew they were looking at the last days of men. Only Keltin, the Designer, seemed to understand, in some deep racial way, and he said nothing.
But he smiled in expectation as the moonstone ship sailed away into the eternal night.
Palatine, Illinois; Los Angeles, California/1972