“But not this, not down here, son…”
But the thief was gone. The air twittered with bright scintillas of fading light.
The first jump brought him back to the world imbedded in the earth a quarter of a mile beneath the arroyo. Had he made such a teleportational error earlier, he would have died. But mating with the machine had altered him. The love-partner had never known a teleport, and in the exchange of modes he had been made less than machine but more than mortal. He expanded his personal space and vanished again. The second jump took him to the surface, and he winked in, out in an instant-seen by no living thing, for even the guards were dead, having been pounded by Mr. Robert Mossman.
The night welcomed him, accepted his mote-outlined shadow, and took no further notice as he vanished again, reappeared, vanished, and in seconds materialized in his mother's bedroom high in London.
He leaned over and grasped her by the wrist, and wrenched her from the doze cocoon where she lay, supple and naked, the powder-white marks of the plasticwork making longitudinal lines on her breasts that glowed faintly in the night light. Her eyes snapped open as he dragged her free.
“Come along, Mom. We have to go now.”
Then, clutching her naked body to his naked body, he vanished.
Before merging with the machine, he could not have carried someone with him. But everything was changed now. Vastly changed.
The Catman was high on the ledge leading to the elevator when the thief reappeared with his mother. The cheetahs padded alongside and the falcon was on the wing. The climb was a difficult one for a man that age, even with unnumbered rejuvenations. The Catman was too far away to do anything to stop him.
“Neil!”
“You're free, Dad. You're free now. Don't waste it!”
The Catman was frozen for only a moment. And in that moment Neil Leipzig carried the semi-conscious body of his mother to the love-partner. The Catman screamed, a high and desolate scream because he knew what was happening. He began running down the ledge, screaming to his falcon to intercept, screaming to his cheetahs to get there before him, screaming because he could never make it in time.
The thief plugged himself in, his mother pressed flat between his naked metalflesh body and the fleshmetal north flank of his love-partner.
He flexed his thigh muscles, closed the contacts,..
…and offered himself and the suddenly howling woman as the ultimate troilism.
The machine flowed, the oscilloscope formed a design no living creature had ever seen in more than three dimensions, and then, in an instant, it was over. The machine absorbed what it could not refuse, and there was only the single point of green light on the screen, and endless silence once more beneath the earth.
The Catman reached the machine, saw the beads of sweat mixed with blood that dotted the north flank, and heard fading moans of brutality that repeated soundlessly.
The Catman sits alone in a room, remembering.
The child never knew. It was not the mother. The mother always loved, but had no way of showing it. The father had never loved, and had every way of reinforcing it, day after day.
The Catman sits and mourns. Not for the child, gone and without sorrow, For the woman.
For the bond of circumstances that held them together through days and nights of a special kind of love forged in a cauldron of hate.
He will never forgive the child for having destroyed that love out of hate.
He will sit alone now. He has nothing left to live for. He hopes the child burns in a terrible Hell, even as he burns in his own. And after a while, there is always the conversing waterfall.
Los Angeles, California;
Hanover, New Hampshire;
New York City;
Gull Lake, Hickory Corners, Michigan/1972
HINDSIGHT: 480 SECONDS
Haddon Brooks, a poet, stood in the last city of the Earth, waiting for the word impact to come from space. He was being recorded. What he saw, how he felt, all the sounds and smells and smallest touches of the death of his world went up and out to the ships as they began the final journey to new homes somewhere in the stars. His vital signs were being monitored, thalamic taps carried his thoughts and transmitted an the colors of what lay around him, to be stored in memory cassettes aboard the ships. Someone to report the death of the Earth, had been the short of it, and from that can for a volunteer he had been winnowed from the ten thousand applicants.
Ten thousand masochists, voyeurs, harbingers of destruction, possessors of the death-wish, psychotics, chill analytical thinkers, fanatics, true believers and those who thought they were cameras. From ten thousand he had been chosen, because he was a poet and on this occasion perhaps only the eyes of a certain dreamer could be depended upon to relay the event with enough magic for the generations of children who would be born in space or on distant worlds circling unknown suns. He had volunteered not because he was a man bereft of sense or survivors but because he was a man with too much to live for. He had a wife whom he loved, he had children who adored him, he had peace and genius and was content with his gifts. Such a man could feel the anguish of losing the racial home. So he had volunteered, knowing he was correct for the task, and they had chosen him from the ten thousand because it was clear that he could sum up final moments with order and beauty.
The city was still alive. It had been kept so for him. All the others had been melted down for their fissionable materials. The cities had become the great Orion ships, three million tons each, shaped like the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, with slightly conical pusher-plates under them.
The cities, taken to the stars by hydrogen bomb explosions under the pusher-plates, one per second for seven minutes to achieve Earth orbit…and then the Orions sent to all points of the astrolabe, to seed Man through the dark. The cities were gone, and their going had contaminated the Earth's atmosphere beyond purification. But it did not matter: the Earth would die within the hour.
He stood in the center of the arts rotunda, the last works of Konstantin Xenakis forming and re-forming across the dome, silver and gold threads patterning a hundred times a minute, and the small-but very clear, very distinct-voice of the Orion fleet flagship spoke in his head.
“It's on the way. An hour, perhaps.”
Brooks found himself looking up when answering. “Have you been getting what I'm sending?”
“Copying.”
“Yes, I'm sorry. That's what I meant. Copying.”
The voice from space grew milder. “No, ]'m sorry. So used to techtalk…you just put it any way you want, Mr. Brooks.
“We're getting it all. Very clearly. It's fine, just fine. I didn't mean to interrupt you, just wanted you to know there was no change.”
“Thank you.”
The voice, and any whisper of its presence, vanished from his head, and he knew he was alone once more. Alone-with the entire population of the Earth listening, watching.
He strolled out of the rotunda and stood on the speakers' shelf overlooking the pastel gardens.
“The sky is very blue,” he said. “I've never seen it so blue. Water, all the way to Heaven. But there are no birds.” His eyes recorded everything: the swaying trees that picked up the breeze and passed it on. Their colors, merging one into another with delicate softness.
“Here is a poem for you, whomever.”
He composed swiftly, the lines falling into place in his mind an instant before he spoke them.