Alex Irvine
NORMAN CAMPBELL STOOD on a saddle of land between two mountain peaks on the Continental Divide and recited part of a poem.
But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Norman had once killed a man to avoid doing the very thing that he was going to do that morning It was his son Sasha's eighteenth birthday. Nobody understood Wordsworth who hadn't read him aloud from the top of a mountain.
I must make the right decision, he said to himself.
"Dad," Sasha said when Norman came back to the camp they'd set up three days before. A stream, swollen with snowmelt, rushed past them on its way down what the maps still called Herman Gulch. Two miles downstream, Interstate 70 still split the Rocky Mountains; Norman's stomach rolled over at being so close to civilization. Sixteen years, he thought.
"Son." Norman sat by the campfire and spooned himself a bowl of stew. "Happy birthday."
Sasha squatted by the stream to rinse his own bowl. Norman could see the kid wanting to ask a question. He ate stew and waited for Sasha to work himself up to it.
"Are we going down the mountain today?"
The right decision, Norman thought again. "Yes," he said.
Sasha didn't look at him. "Will they arrest you when we get there.?"
"I'd be real surprised if they didn't."
A little less than nineteen years before that morning, Norman Campbell had been, if not the happiest man in the world, certainly the most immediately content. It was Friday night. Norm's account was swollen with his week's wages, his head was perfectly fogged with Coors, and the balls on the scuffed and chalk-smeared pool table obeyed his every command. He was twenty-four years old, and there was no place in the world he would rather have been than the Valverde Country Club on West Alameda in Denver, Colorado.
"Hey, Crash," Terence called from the table. "You got this one.?"
"I got'em all," Norm said, and rolled the eight down the rail, slow and easy as a Cadillac in the mag-lane of the Valley Highway. It dropped into the corner and Norm came back to the table to pay the waitress for the fresh pitcher.
"Bet you wish you could drive like you shoot pool," Terence said. Beer foam clung to his bushy red Santa Claus-style beard.
"Shit," Norm said. The accident had been three months before, and he'd long since paid it off. "Bet you wish you could fuck like I shoot pool."
Matt and Bill Amidor, brothers who worked in the office-supply warehouse Norm and Terence drove out of, roared. Terence wiped at his beard to hide the fact that he was grinning too, then he said, "Hey. Look what just walked in the door."
They all looked. Bill whistled. Norm overfilled his mug and stepped back from the table to let the foam run onto the floor. "Good impression you're making there, Crash," Terence said. "You clip rental trucks in the yard, spill your drink whenever a pretty girl walks in . . . what's next, you gonna spit on the boss's shoes? Quote Shakespeare at him while you do it?"
"Fucking boss needs his shoes spit on," Norm said, but his attention stuck to the woman who now stood at the bar. Tall, long black hair, long black coat that cost more than Norm made in a month, face crying out to have a poem written about it. "Bet she's on the T," Norm said.
"Mm," Bill said. "A little too perfect, isn't she?"
Matt lit a cigarette. "What's she doing here?" It was a good question. The Country Club wasn't exactly dangerous, but even Norm -- since he'd never been in jail more than overnight and had a tendency to read books once in a while -- was a bit out of place there. This woman was a walking pearl in a pigpen. And, unless they'd all missed something, she was alone.
Oh, no she wasn't. Here came her friends: three equally perfect, perfectly beautiful, and beautifully incongruous young women. Like vid models after a day shooting, Norm thought, but the only place around here that used live vids was the porn shack around the corner, and no woman who looked like these would come anywhere near that place.
"Slumming," Matt grumbled. He liked to go to upper-class bars and light cigarettes just to get kicked out, but he hated it when his favorite dives were invaded by people who normally wouldn't look at him on the street. "Go talk 'em up, Crash," he said. "Recite poems, take 'em home, and piss all over 'em."
"Bitter, bitter," Norm said, but Matt had gotten it two-thirds right. Recite poems, take 'em home. It worked if you weren't too smarmy about the poems.
His next opponent called out from the pool table and he went back to win number fifteen. He won easily enough, but he could tell that his invincibility was ebbing; too much time looking at that first woman out of the corner of his eye. Norm decided that she was on the T for sure. She looked about twenty-five, but she didn't carry herself like she was fresh out of college. There was an assurance, a . . . he didn't know how to pin it down, but he would have bet his job that she was quite a bit older than she looked. Waiting for the next game to start, he debated asking the guys what they thought, but Matt would just start in on one of his eat-the-rich diatribes. Telomerase therapy was so expensive that practically nobody could afford it, and Matt wanted to be immortal as much as the next guy.
Except Norm. Live forever? Sounded like a nightmare to him. He'd probably see a hundred anyway, and that seemed like enough to him. As it was, he doubted he'd recognize the world in his old age.
But was that really true? Here it is, halfway through the twenty-first century, Norm thought, and all the old tensions are alive and well. It's amazing how nobody ever predicts that the future will be exactly like their present. He broke again, was lucky to sink a ball because of a rack loose enough that it sounded like maracas when he hit it, and was struck by the idea that a hundred years ago, bars were probably full of guys shooting pool after an evening of loading office furniture and paper onto box trucks. Like him, they probably didn't do their runs on Fridays, coming in on Sunday night instead when there were fewer drunks on the roads. It was snowing outside, and Norm was glad he didn't have to go to Cheyenne.
One difference, though, between the nineteen fifties and now -- let alone desegregation, VR, electric cars, the Water Crisis, and whatever else -- was that back then, young women who went slumming weren't immortal.
The Greek gods coming down to Earth, Norm thought. Zeus sowing his wild oats, Apollo chasing Daphne through the forest. He caught himself. Were they really that far apart, people on the T and the rest of the world?
The four women sat in a corner booth by the fire exit. They watched TV, joked with each other -- probably sniggering about a bar that doesn't have terminals at every table, Norm thought. He missed his next shot, pool invincibility clearly slipping away, and realized that deep down he was more sympathetic to Matt Amidor than he'd thought. He looked at his three friends, laughing and waving their arms, finishing the pitcher he'd just bought. Well into a Friday night.
This is not so bad, Norm thought. I like my job, I like my friends, I make enough money to have some fun, and the world is full of pretty women. Who needs immortality?
Still, when the brunette immortal bought him a beer, Norm found himself as much curious as horny.
Sasha stayed a little ahead of Norman as they followed the stream down Herman Gulch. No wonder he's excited, Norman thought. Eighteen years old, and for the first time he's about to go into a town during daylight. Norman experienced a flush of pride, thinking that in twenty-first-century America, a nation of three hundred eighty million people, he'd managed to raise a son who was completely at home in the real world of trees, stone, and water.
Not that he'd stunted the boy. The battered terminal with its solar attachment and VR headgear had been a pain in the ass to haul around --at least until he'd destroyed it when Sasha was six -- but Norman had done it so Sasha would be educated. So he would have some exposure to the world of cities and human society. So he would know about literature, history, government, politics. So he would be able to make an informed choice when the time came for the choice to be made.
They stopped at the last big bend in the trail before it terminated in a dirt parking lot. Sasha's eyes were wide like a deer's as he watched cars whirring up the slope to the Eisenhower Tunnel, and Norman wondered what he was feeling. I've created a real-life Victorian novel two hundred years late, Norman thought. The boy coming back to claim his birthright.
"There's a world up here, and a world down there," Norman said. "We're going back down there, but you have to take this world with you when you go. Cycles, Sasha. That's a world that's lost track of its cycles." Sasha nodded, his eyes still on the line of cars.
"You know why I did this, don't you, son?" Norman wished he hadn't said it. They'd been over this a million times. But a man had to make sure his son knew . . . what? Why he'd had to pretend he was just out backpacking on the few occasions they'd met other people in the Rocky Mountain wilderness? Why he'd seen his father stab a man to death when he was six years old? Why he'd never been able to play on a soccer team, take a vacation to California or the Moon, date girls?
Norman forced himself to calm down. Never mind what Sasha's thinking, he thought. You'd better take care that you don't have a heart attack when you walk down into Georgetown.
But that was ridiculous. He was forty-three years old, and in better physical shape than most Olympic athletes half his age. What Norman Campbell had to worry about was his mind. In sixteen years of living in the wilderness, he'd developed an aversion to civilization so profound that to call it pathological would be charitable. Even now, before he'd spoken to a soul or set foot on concrete, it was all he could do not to turn around and disappear.
"I know why you say you did it," Sasha said.
Norman sat next to him. "Sounds like there's more you have to say," he said, and was suddenly afraid.
"I was wondering when you'd come over to say hi," the brunette said. "Do you always ignore women who buy you drinks?"
"Well, I was kind of on a streak there," Norm said.
"Mm," she said, the beginnings of a smile in her eyes. This is a woman who likes to play games, Norm thought. "Superstitious?"
"It's pool," Norm said. "You get it going, you don't want to do anything to screw it up. Thanks for the beers." She'd bought him three.
"You're welcome." The brunette put her chin in her hands and looked up at him. "What's your name, pool shooter?"
"Norm. What's yours?"
"Melinda. And these are Licia, Quincy, and Michelle."
"My pleasure." Norm raised his beer to them and finished it off by way of a toast.
"Are you going to invite your friends over?"
Norm considered. "Well, I could, but Matt there has a problem with rich girls on the T."
Melinda smiled, and her friends laughed out loud. "Is that so?"
"'Fraid it is. And I doubt Terence would be able to speak in your presence. He's a bit shy around people who aren't as ugly as he is." Well, now, that wasn't very friendly, was it? Norm said to himself. It was true, though; Terence had said as much himself. But there was a difference between being self-deprecating and having someone else do it for you.
Norm stepped back from the table. "I'll get them over here anyway."
"She gonna take you out in daddy's suborbital?" Matt said when Norm came back.
"She just might," Norm said with a grin. "And one of her friends might take you. Come on, the ladies desire company. If your principles permit."
"Shit," Matt said. "It's only the big head has principles." They dragged their table over in front of the fire door. The four immortals already had another pitcher waiting.
"What I mean to say, Dad," Sasha said, hesitating over every word, "is . . . okay. You talk and talk about wanting me to be able to make decisions for myself, but you basically made all of my decisions for me, didn't you? I mean, when you took me off into the mountains. I didn't decide that. My mother didn't decide that. You did. You took away sixteen years' worth of decisions, and you want me to believe that this one moment when I can choose is worth it."
Norman was silent for a while. "We've had this discussion before," he said, mostly to buy time to gather his thoughts.
"And you say the same thing every time. I know, you did what you thought was right."
"It was right," Norman said. He floundered, mouth open, wondering what he could say that hadn't already been said. What he could say that would convince Sasha once and for all.
Remember, he told himself. When you have to move a skid of paper, and it's so cold and icy that the pallet jack's wheels won't grip, you break the skid down and horse the paper two boxes per trip. No man can move a ton at once, but just about anyone can do it a hundred pounds at a time. Norman looked at his son, so like himself. A little taller, a little leaner, framed more like his mother but with Norman's blond hair and Norman's face.
Sixteen years I've spent trying to teach you, he thought, and now the day my teaching stops, we're back to the very first lesson.
"Your mother," he began.
"No, Dad. I don't want to talk about her. I know her better than you do."
"You haven't -- " Norman broke off, unable to speak the question.
Had Sasha sent her a message, spoken to her? Left a note in some dumpster somewhere, during one of the winters when weather had forced them closer to the cities?
"No, I haven't talked to her. I haven't sent her Mother's Day cards. But I used to go back to places where you buried newspapers and dig them up to see if I could find the name MacTavish. You'd be surprised; it pops up a lot. I've kept up. I had to. Your only memories of her are older than I am."
"Okay. I see where this is going," Norman said. "You think I'm, what, poisoning your mind against your mother?"
Sasha said nothing.
"You think," Norman went on, growing angry as he always did when the conversation turned to Melinda MacTavish, "you think I would do that? Christ on crutches, kid, that's exactly the kind of thing that I did this to avoid. You better believe that if you'd grown up with her, she'd have made sure that you didn't even know who I was. She'd have had you believing that you were modeled in a lab and then turkey-basted into her, and your dear old dad would have gone on with his life not even knowing you existed."
Sasha was looking at him. Norman stopped. "See what I mean?" Sasha said.
Why doesn't he understand? Norman thought. He shrugged because it was either that or smack the kid down the hill, and after Ivan Klos he'd sworn never to lay a hand on his son. "Fine," he said. "You can't tell the difference between truth and sour' grapes, there's nothing I can do for you. We might as well stroll on down into. . . ." His voice caught, and Norman swallowed. "Into town. But understand this, Sasha my son: it was pure luck that I ever found out about you at all."
When the Country Club closed down, everyone paired off, Olympian woman with United Supply mortal. "Shall we head downtown?" Melinda said. "I know a place or two."
"Lead on," Matt said. Norm stifled a grin, knowing that wherever Melinda was going to take them at three in the morning, it wouldn't be a place where smoking cigarettes would cause an uproar. Like all the rich, Melinda and her friends knew places that tolerated vice, and tolerance aggravated Matt's sense of injustice more than anything else in the world.
They took the maglev downtown and ended up on the roof of the Republic Plaza, once Denver's tallest building but now just another in a double handful of glass-and-concrete fingers. Things unfolded pretty much the way Norm had figured. Everyone got a little more drunk, and Matt acted like an idiot while Bill tried to calm him down, and Terence sat in the corner all night watching Orion creep across the sky to impale himself on the invisible ridges of Mount Evans, and the girls passed around eyedroppers of something felonious and intensely pleasurable, no doubt formulated in the basement of some startup gentech concern. Norm rinsed his eyes but good, despite his normal reliance on alcohol and the occasional joint to improve his state of mind. After all, rich people could be counted on to have good drugs, couldn't they?
They could. Norm's sense of time, not to mention any and all misgivings he'd had about mingling with a crowd of immortals (everyone had heard the stories about them playing lethal jokes on those whom they'd come to call "short-timers," as if immortality was one long war and they were already envious about mortals' ability to get sent home, and even though you couldn't trust the Urban Legend nets Norm had no desire to wake up splattered on the pavement with parameds scraping him into a bag for transport to a T-therapy clinic to see just how good the process really was), evaporated like the predawn rain from Republic Plaza's rooftop dome.
"So," Norm said eventually, "what's it like knowing you'll never die?"
Melinda arched one of her perfect eyebrows. Reflected light from the holos playing across the dome glowed on her face. "What's it like knowing you will?"
Norm laughed. "Okay, right. I don't think about it all that much. But still, you must. . . ." he waved one hand, and beer spilled into a potted yucca plant, blooming like crazy even though it was already September outside the dome.
"Come on, Norm, it's not forever. Nobody knows how long. It's not immortality." Melinda smiled over her drink. "And don't ask how old I am."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Norm said, but having brought the subject up, he couldn't let it go. "'Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood,'" he quoted, "'than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.' Close enough, right?"
"Other than the fact that I'm not a child, sure. Who is it?"
"Wordsworth. He was -- "
"Please, Norm. I went to college. I know who Wordsworth was, and I'll bet that isn't actually a poem you quoted. Sounds too prosey." Norm nodded. "I'd even be willing to bet," Melinda went on, "that he was talking about," she tapped a finger on the edge of her glass, "either the Prelude or the 'Intimations' ode, right?"
"A literary woman," Norm said, surprised. "It's the 'Intimations' ode." Most of the filthy rich college students he'd known had gone out of their way not to learn anything, relying instead on net tutors and Norton subliminals. It was nice to find an exception.
Of course, then Melinda had to squash his sudden magnanimity toward the rich. "I wouldn't have figured a truck driver would quote Wordsworth."
"I wouldn't have figured a rich girl on the T would take a guy out just to remind him that he drives a truck," Norm said slowly.
Melinda laughed. "Look at yourself, so defensive. Insult me if you want to, Norm, but remember this: if you could get on the T, you would. It's not my fault the therapy's expensive."
"Two things," Norm said, getting angry even as he reminded himself that he didn't want to be any more like Matt Amidor than he had to. "First, no I wouldn't. And second, I don't care whose fault it is that the T is expensive; it still pisses me off."
Melinda had stopped listening after the first. "You wouldn't?" she said incredulously. "Come on. Of course you would."
"No," Norm said stubbornly, "I wouldn't."
"Well, then." Melinda plucked a drink from a passing waiter's tray. "Nothing more to say about that, is there? I think you're in a minority, though. I don't know anyone who's had the chance to get on the T and turned it down. I sure wouldn't."
She produced an eyedropper, incredibly, from her cleavage, drawing out the motion to be sure that Norm's gaze followed her hand. "Your grin is looking a little strained, driver man. Look, we both know why we're here. Do you really want to bog everything down in arguments about social injustice?"
Norm forced his attention away from her breasts' perfect dusting of freckles -- like a constellation really, or was her neckline a cipher drawing his attention down? -- long enough to take the eyedropper. Don't want to be Matt, he thought, but he did wonder: why, he wanted to ask her, are we here? Really?
But there was no point, and my, those freckles. "You win," he said, tilting his head back. "Let's have a good time."
And so it was that around sunrise, Norm found himself fifty thousand meters above the Continental Divide in a robot suborbital, Melinda's heels bruising his lumbar vertebrae while they cruised over the San Juans. He laughed out loud, both from residual eyedropper goodwill and at the realization that Matt Amidor's sour prophecy had come to pass, from poetry quoting to suborb ride. Matty, he thought as Melinda laughed with him, I hope you're doing the same. Just don't piss on anybody.
By noon, he was sitting in the old White Spot just south of the Golden Triangle, watching cars whine down Broadway and suffering an eyedropper hangover of apocalyptic intensity. His head hurt; his balls hurt; the inside of his cheek hurt where she'd sampled him just as the suborb hit a little bumpy air; and he'd done something to his neck earlier, so even swallowing bites of huevos rancheros hurt. I never did get her last name, Norm thought, and chuckled. He couldn't decide whether that was a good thing or not.
Sasha didn't understand. Norman could see it in the boy's expression, in the rigidity of his shoulders, in the way he looked at the gravel surface of the parking lot instead of the mountains and sky as he usually did. He didn't look at Norman as they waited by the side of the freeway, thumbs out. After a while a car stopped and they got in, Norman awkwardly shoving the unstrung bow in ahead of him.
"I can take you as far as Idaho Springs," the driver said. He was young, midway between Norman's age and Sasha's. Probably not a sales rep; the car was too clean. Did he work for one of the ski resorts? Could just be visiting family, Norman thought.
"Idaho Springs is great," he said.
"Name's Gavin Dix," the driver said. Sasha introduced himself and, when Norman didn't say anything, said, "Sorry. My dad gets carsick."
Well done, kid, Norman thought. He had to try very hard not to vomit once the car was moving. It was like you lost the skill of seeing the world go by so fast. He'd had Sasha take virtual rides in cars, trains, suborbs, whatever other machines moved people around the world, but Norman hadn't wanted to take them himself. When he'd left, he'd really left. And now, coming back, he fully expected his return to kill him. One way or another.
He closed his eyes and tried not to feel the concrete flying by under the car. Choices. I leave the mountains, Norman thought, for my son's sake. Just as I went to them for his sake. He remembered what Melinda had said to him, the last time they'd spoken: Your son will live for hundreds of years. He'll be a piece of you in the world long after you're gone. He hadn't been able to answer her then, eighteen years before, and the only solace he could find now was Wordsworth: We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind. Wordsworth had been wrong about that, though. What was left behind didn't always give strength. After Idaho Springs was just Floyd Hill, and then the long slope down to Denver and the plains. Eyes closed, weakening, he whispered to himself as the car whirred past the Route 40 exit. "O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves," he whispered, his voice like the muffled sound of tires on pavement, "Forebode not any severing of our loves."
Like Wordsworth, though, Norman knew that saying didn't make it true. It didn't even mean that the speaker believed it.
Gavin Dix pulled off at the western Idaho Springs interchange. "I'm headed up into the Mt. Evans wilderness. Meeting my girlfriend." He winked. "How far you going, anyway?"
Norman opened his mouth, but Sasha jumped in. "Denver, eventually. But this is probably far enough for today, right, Dad?"
"You can get the maglev from here right downtown," Gavin said. "Here, I'll drop you off at the station." He eased the connector pedal down and the car rolled forward.
"No," Norman rasped. Gavin looked back at him and he raised one hand. Saw that it was shaking. "What I mean to say is thanks. But I think I need to walk for a bit." He saw the look that Gavin gave Sasha -- the old man all right there? -- but he didn't care. All he wanted to do was get out of the car. Get the whole business over with.
"Yeah," Sasha said. "Like I said, he gets carsick. Thanks for the ride."
Then they were out of the car watching Gavin Dix charge up the road toward Mount Evans. Not a Victorian novel, Norm thought. At least not for me. More like Rip Van Winkle, or -- he chuckled bitterly -- Tarzan dragged off to London. Once he'd lived in a city, but those memories now seemed to have happened to someone else. His eyes no longer knew how to look at bricks and concrete; his nose had forgotten how to smell paint, rubber, the occasional whiff of propane or gasoline. And the memories were no consolation.
"What's funny?" Sasha said.
Norman shook his head. "Let's head into town."
Six months after he'd spent the night in the company of immortals, Norm sat at the White Spot's counter just before five-thirty in the morning. It had been a long night, heavy snow from Greeley all the way up to Cheyenne, and fatigue whined in his head as he paged through the Denver Post's print edition. Strikes on the asteroid colonies, resettlement of Water Crisis refugees, Kasparov beating Capablanca in the Inter-Era AI chess championship, qualifying for the 2054 World Cup. Coming to the back of the entertainment section, he dropped a forkful of potatoes and chili on a picture, wiped it away, and saw Melinda's face looking back at him. Next to her, the other three women from the night at the Country Club smiled their best society-immortal smiles. "Huh," he said, grinning as he remembered her freckles, and read the caption. And dropped another forkful of food.
Pregnant? Norm looked back at the picture. "I'll be goddamned," he said.
She'd done it on purpose, had to've. Synchronized her period or something, and gone out to piss off her dad.
But why? What kind of perverse fucking immortals' game was this?
Despite energetic speculation about the father's identity, no clear candidates have emerged, the accompanying article read. And Ms. -- soon to be Mrs.? -- MacTavish remains coy, saying only that she's giddy about prospective motherhood Sources place the due date sometime in the middle of June, just in time to celebrate wedding vows if any are in the offing.
"Unbelievable," Norm said. He counted back, and there it was. Arithmetic didn't lie.
He was going to be a father. Melinda MacTavish, of the MCT Research MacTavishes, the MCT Tower MacTavishes, the vids-taken-with-the-President MacTavishes, was going to bear his child.
Knowing her last name, Norm didn't have much trouble tracking Melinda down, and the next weekend he caught up with her outside a benefit for the Denver Dumb Friends League. "Hey," he said, and she looked right through him, walking on to a waiting limousine. He stepped in front of her, and a cluster of net stringers appeared from nowhere.
"Hey yourself," the limo driver said. He grabbed Norm's arm.
"It's okay, John," Melinda said. "Take a ride, Norm?"
The driver scowled at Norm, but stepped back and held the door while they got into the limo. Melinda moved carefully, scooting across the seat until she found a comfortable spot and sank back against the cushioned armrest. "How have you been?" she said.
Norm ignored the question. "Were you planning to tell me about this?" he asked, nodding at her belly.
"Why? So we could get married? Please, Norm." Melinda took a bottle of water from a small refrigerator set into the wall. "We had a good time. Leave it at that."
"That's -- that's my child there," Norm sputtered. "You can't just ignore me. We did that together."
She drank, set the bottle down. "Norm, we need to get some things straight'. First of all, you don't know the child is yours. How do you know what I did the night before we met, or the night after? How do you know I didn't just decide to bear a child and have something worked up in my dad's lab? 1 could, you know"
"Okay," Norm said. "Is it mine?"
"Yes, it is. Which brings us to the second thing. I can too ignore you, and I intend to do exactly that. You can make noise, go to the nets, do whatever your sense of injustice demands. But nothing will happen; you know that, don't you? Don't take this the wrong way, but my father is one of the richest men in the world. He decides who represents you in Congress, and he decides what the nets decide is news. You better believe they'll ask him whether or not to cover a truck driver's paternity claim against his only daughter. He'll make your claim disappear. He could make you disappear."
Sure, Norm thought. I won't take that the wrong way. They rode in silence for a while. Finally he said, "Why?"
"Why what? I should think you'd have lots of whys."
"Why did you do this? You go slumming for short-timers...
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