Vanishing Acts: A Science Fiction Anthology Read online

  Everybody was very understanding. Walter Drake stayed on board with me.

  “We have fixed up a nice hotel where you can all be together,” she told me, “like the honored guests that you are.”

  I finally got off and went with the others when she gave me the music recordings to take with me. She got me a playback machine. I left the Mozart clarinet quintet behind, and she found it and brought it after me. But I won’t listen to it. The clarinet sound was made by somebody’s living breath, somebody who’s dead now, like all of them. I can’t stand to hear that sound.

  The hotel was in a suburb of a city, which looked a little like LA, though not as much as I had expected. Later sometime I should try to describe the city. There’s a hilly part, something like San Francisco, by the sea. We asked to go over there instead. They found us a sort of rooming house of painted wood with a basement. Morris and Chu have taken the top floor, though I don’t think they sleep together anymore.

  Ross has the apartment next door to me. She’s got her own problems. She threw up when she first set foot on Kondra. She throws up almost every day, says she can’t help it.

  There are invitations for us to go meet the locals and participate in this and that, but the lizards do not push. They are so damned considerate and respectful. I don’t go anywhere. I stay in my room and listen to music. Handel helps me sleep.

  Entry 12: Four and a half K-years have passed. I stopped doing this log because Chandler showed me his. He was keeping a detailed record of what was happening to us, what had happened, what he thought was going to happen. Then Beamish circulated her version, and Dr. Birgit Nilson, the lizard in charge of our mental health, started encouraging us all to contribute what we could to a “living history” project.

  I was embarrassed to show anybody my comments. I am not a writer or an artist like Myers has turned out to be. (His pictures are in huge demand here, and he has a whole flock of Kondran students.) If Chandler and Beamish were writing everything down, why should I waste my time doing the same thing?

  Living history of what, for whom?

  Also I didn’t like what Chandler wrote about me and Walter Drake. Yes, I slept with her. One of us would have tried it, sooner or later, with one lizard or another. I just happened to be the one who did. I had better reasons than any of the others. Walter Drake had been very kind to me.

  I was capable all right (still am). But the thought of going to bed with Lily or Sue Anne made my skin creep, though I couldn’t have said why. On the Kondran ship I used to jerk off and look at the stuff in my hand and wonder what the hell it was doing there: Didn’t my body know that my world is gone, my race, my species?

  Sex with Walter Drake is different from sex with a woman. That’s part of what I like about it. And another thing. Walter Drake doesn’t cry in her sleep.

  Walter and I did all right. For a couple of years I went traveling alone, at the government’s expense—like everything we do here—all over Kondra. Walter was waiting when I got back. So we went to live together away from the rooming house. The time passed like a story or a dream. Not much sticks in my head now from that period. We listened to a lot of music together. Nothing with flutes or clarinet, though. String music, percussion, piano music, horns only if they’re blended with other sounds—that’s what I like. Lots of light stuff, Dukas and Vivaldi and Milhaud.

  Anyway, that period is over. After all this time Chu and Morris have committed suicide together. They used a huge old pistol one of them must have smuggled all this way. Morris, probably. He always had a macho hang-up.

  Beamish goes around saying, “Why? Why?” At first I thought this was the stupidest question I’d ever heard. I was seriously worried that maybe these years on Kondran food and water had addled her mind through some weird allergic reaction.

  Then she said, “We’re so close, Flynn. Why couldn’t they have waited? I wouldn’t have let them down.”

  I keep forgetting about her in vitro project. It’s going well, she says. She works very hard with a whole team of Kondrai under Dr. Boleslav Singh, preparing a cultural surround for the babies she’s developing. She comes in exhausted from long discussions with Dr. Boleslav Singh and Dr. Birgit Nilson and others about the balance of Earth information and Kondran information to be given to the human babies. Beamish wants to make little visitors out of the babies. She says it’s providential that we were found by the Kondrai—a race that has neatly caught and preserved everything transmitted by us about our own culture and our past. So now all that stuff is just waiting to be used, she says, to bridge the gap in our race’s history. “The gap,” that’s what she calls it. She has a long-range plan of getting a ship for the in vitros to use when they grow up and want to go find a planet they can turn into another Earth. This seems crazy to me. But she is entitled. We all are.

  I’ve moved back into the rooming house. I feel it’s my duty, now that we’re so few. Walter has come with me.

  Entry 13: Mozart’s piano concertos, especially Alfred Brendel’s renditions, all afternoon. I have carried out my mission after all—to answer the question: What does a frozen Earthman eat for breakfast? The answer is music. For lunch? Music. Dinner? Music. This frozen Earthman stays alive on music.

  Entry 14: A year and a half together in the rooming house, and Walter Drake and I have split up. Maybe it has nothing to do with being in the rooming house with the other humans. Divorce is becoming very common among young Kondrai. So is something like hair. They used to wear wigs. Now they have developed a means of growing featherlike down on their heads and in their armpits, etc.

  When Walter came in with a fine dusting of pale fuzz on her pate, I told her to pack up and get out. She says she understands, she’s not bitter. She doesn’t understand one goddamned thing.

  Entry 15: Beamish’s babies, which I never went to see, have died of an infection that whipped through the whole lot of them in three days. The Kondran medical team taking care of them caught it, too, though none of them died. A few are blind from it, perhaps permanently.

  Myers took pictures of the little corpses. He is making paintings from his photos. Did I put it in here that swallowing a chess piece did not kill Myers? Maybe it should have, but it seems nothing can kill Myers. He is as tough as rawhide. But he doesn’t play chess, not since Morris killed himself. There are Kondrai who play very well, but Myers refuses their invitations. You can say that for him at least.

  He just takes photographs and paints.

  I’m not really too sorry about the babies. I don’t know which would be worse, seeing them grow up as a little clutch of homeless aliens among the lizards or seeing them adapt and become pseudo-Kondrai. I don’t like to think about explaining to them how the world they really belong to blew itself to hell. (Lily Chu is the one who went over the signals the Kondrai salvaged about that and sorted out the sequence of events. That was right before she killed herself.) We slept through the end of our world. Bad enough to do it, worse to have to talk about it. I never talk about it now, not even with the Kondrai. With Dr. Birgit Nilson I discuss food, of course, and health. I find these boring and absurd subjects, though I cooperate out of politeness. I also don’t want to get stuck on health problems, like Chandler, who has gone through one hypochondriacal frenzy after another in the past few years.

  Beamish says she will try again. Nothing will stop her. She confided to Ross that she thinks the Kondrai deliberately let the babies die, maybe even infected them on purpose. “They don’t want us to revive our race,” she said to Ross. “They’re trying to take our place. Why should they encourage the return of the real thing?”

  Ross told me Beamish wants her to help arrange some kind of escape from Kondra, God knows to where. Ross is worried about Beamish. “What,” she says, “if she goes off the deep end and knifes some innocent lizard medico? They might lock us all up permanently.”

  Ross does not want, to be locked up. She plays the cello all the time, which used to be a hobby of hers. The lizards were only to
o pleased to furnish her an instrument. A damn good one, too, she says. What’s more, she now has three Kondrai studying with her.

  I don’t care what she does. I walk around watching the Kondrai behave like us.

  I have terrible dreams, still.

  Symphonic music doesn’t do it for me anymore, not even Sibelius. I can’t hear enough of the music itself; there are too many voices. I listen to chamber pieces. There you can hear each sound, everything that happens between each sound and each other sound near it.

  They gave me a free pass to the Library of the Retrieval Project. I spend a lot of time there, listening.

  Entry 16: Fourteen K-years later. Beamish eventually did get three viable Earth-style children out of her last lot. Two of them drowned in a freak accident at the beach a week ago. The third one, a girl named Melissa, ran away. They haven’t been able to find her.

  Our tissue contributions no longer respond, though Beamish keeps trying. She calls the Kondrai “Snakefaces” behind their backs.

  Her hair is gray. So is mine.

  Kondran news is all about the growing tensions between Kondra and the neighbor world it does most of its trading with. I don’t know how that used to work in economic terms, but apparently it’s begun to break down. I never saw any of the inhabitants of that world, called Chadondal, except in pictures and Kondran TV news reports. Now I guess I never will. I don’t care.

  Something funny happened with the flu that killed all of Beamish’s first babies. It seems to have mutated into something that afflicts the Kondrai the way cancer used to afflict human beings. This disease doesn’t respond to the cure human researchers developed once they figured out that our cancer was actually a set of symptoms of an underlying disease. Kondran cancer is something all their own.

  They are welcome to it.

  Entry 17: I went up into the sandhills to have a look at a few of the Old Kondrai, the ones who never did buy into imitation Earth ways. Most of them don’t talk English (they don’t even talk much Kondran to each other), but they don’t seem to mind if you hang around and watch them a while.

  They live alone or else in very small settlements on a very primitive level, pared down to basics. Your individual Old Kondran will have a small, roundish stone house or even a burrow or cave and will go fetch water every day and cook on a little cell-powered stove or a wood fire. They usually don’t even have TV. They walk around looking at things or sit and meditate or dig in their flower gardens or carve things out of the local wood. Once in a while they’ll get together for a dance or a sort of mass bask in the sun or to put on plays and skits and so on. These performances can go on for days. They have a sort of swap economy, which is honored elsewhere when they travel. You sometimes see these pilgrims in the city streets, just wandering around. They never stay long.

  Some of the younger Kondrai have begun harking back to this sort of life, trying to create the same conditions in the cities, which is ridiculous. These youngsters act as if it’s something absolutely basic they have to try to hang on to in the face of an invasion of alien ways. Earth ways.

  This is obviously a backlash against the effects of the Retrieval Project. I keep an eye on developments. It’s all fascinating and actually creepy. To me the backlash is uncannily reminiscent of those fundamentalist-nationalist movements—Christian American or Middle-Eastern Muslim or whatever—that made life such hell for so many people toward the end of our planet’s life. But if you point this resemblance out, the anti-Retrieval Kondrai get furious because, after all, anything Earth-like is what they’re reacting against.

  I sometimes bring this up in conversation just to get a rise out of them.

  If I’m talking to Kondrai who are part of the backlash, they invariably get furious. “No,” they say, “we’re just trying to turn back to our old, native ways!” They don’t recognize this passion itself as something that humans, not Kondrai, were prone to. From what I can gather and observe, fervor, either reactionary or progressive, is something alien to native Kondran culture as it was before they started retrieving our signals. Their life was very quiet and individualized and pretty dull, as a matter of fact.

  Sometimes I wish we’d found it like that instead of the way it had already become by the time we got here. Of course the Old Kondrai never would have sent us an embassy in the first place.

  I talk to Dr. Birgit Nilson about all this a lot. We aren’t exactly friends, but we communicate pretty well for a man and a lizard.

  She says they have simply used human culture to revitalize themselves.

  I think about the Old Kondrai I saw poking around, growing the kind of flowers that attract the flying grazers they eat, or just sitting. I like that better. If they were a dying culture, they should have just gone ahead and died.

  Entry 18: Ross has roped Chandler into her music making. Turns out he played the violin as a kid. They practice a lot in the rooming house. Sometimes Ross plays the piano, too. She’s better on the cello. I sit on my porch, looking at the bay, and I listen.

  Ross says the Kondrai as a group are fascinated by performance. Certainly they perform being human better and better all the time. They think of Earth’s twentieth century as the Golden Age of Human Performance. How would they know? It’s all secondhand here, everything.

  I’ve been asked to join a nutritional-study team heading for Kondra-South, where some trouble spots are developing. I have declined. I don’t care if they starve or why they starve. I had enough of looking at images of starvation on Earth, where we did it on a terrific scale. What a performance that was!

  Also I don’t want to leave here because then I wouldn’t get to hear Ross and Chandler play. They do sonatas and duets and they experiment, not always very successfully, with adapting music written for other instruments. It’s very interesting. Now that Ross is working on playing the piano as well as the cello, their repertoire has been greatly expanded.

  They aren’t nearly as good as the great musical performers of the Golden Age, of course. But I listen to them anyway whenever I can. There’s something about live music. You get a hunger for it.

  Entry 19: Myers has gone on a world tour. He is so famous as an artist that he has rivals, and there are rival schools led by artists he himself has trained. He spends all his time with the snakes now, the ones masquerading as artists and critics and aesthetes. He hardly ever stops at the rooming house or comes by here to visit.

  Sue Anne Beamish and I have set up house together across the bay from the rooming house. She’s needed somebody around her ever since they found the desiccated corpse of little Melissa in the rubbish dump and worked out what had been done to her.

  The Kondran authorities say they think some of the Kondrachalikipon (as the anti-Retrieval-backlash members call themselves now, meaning “return to Kondran essence”) were responsible. The idea is that these Kondracha meant what they did as a symbolic rejection of everything the Retrieval Project has retrieved and a warning that Kondra will not be turned into an imitation Earth without a fight.

  When Dr. Birgit Nilson and I talked about this, I pointed out that the Kondracha, if it was them, didn’t get it right. They should have dumped the kid’s body on the Center House steps and then called a press conference. Next time they’ll do it better, though, being such devoted students of our ways.

  “I know that,” she said. “What is becoming of us?”

  Us meant “us Kondrai,” of course, not her and me. She likes to think that we Earth guests have a special wisdom that comes from our loss and from a mystical blood connection with the culture that the Kondrai are absorbing. As if I spend my time thinking about that kind of thing. Dr. Birgit Nilson is a romantic.

  I don’t talk to Sue Anne about Melissa’s death. I don’t feel it enough, and she would know that. So many died before, what’s one more kid’s death now? A kid who could never have been human anyway because a human being is born on Earth and raised in a human society, like Sue Anne and me.

  “We should have bl
own their ship up and us with it,” she says, “on the way here.”

  She won’t come with me to the rooming house to listen to Ross and Chandler play. They give informal concert evenings now. I go, even though the audience is 98 percent lizard, because by now I know every recording of chamber music in the Retrieval Library down to the last scrape of somebody’s chair during a live recital. The recordings are too faithful. I can just about tolerate the breath intake you hear sometimes when the first violinist cues a phrase. It’s different with Ross and Chandler. Their live music makes the live sounds all right. Concerts are given by Kondran “artists” all the time, but I won’t go to those.

  For one thing, I know perfectly well that we don’t hear sounds, we human beings, not sounds from outside. Our inner ear vibrates to the sound from outside, and we hear the sound that our own ear creates inside the head in response to that vibration. Now, how can the Kondran ear be exactly the same as ours? No matter how closely they’ve learned to mimic the sounds that our musicians produced, Kondran ears can’t be hearing what human ears do when human music is played. A Kondran concert of human music is a farce.

  Poor Myers. He missed the chance to take pictures of Melissa’s dead body so he could make paintings of it later.

  Entry 20: They are saying that the reason there’s so much crime and violence now on Kondra isn’t because of the population explosion at all. Some snake who calls himself Swami Nanda has worked out how the demographic growth is only a sign of the underlying situation.

  According to him Kondra made an “astral agreement” to take in not only us living human survivors but the souls of all the dead of Earth. Earth souls on the astral plane, seeing that there were soon going to be no more human bodies on Earth to get born into, sent out a call for new bodies and a new world to inhabit. The Kondran souls on the astral plane, having pretty much finished their work on the material world of Kondra, agreed to let human souls take over the physical plant here, as it were. Now the younger generation is all Earth souls reborn as Kondrai on this planet, and they’re re-creating conditions familiar to them from Earth.