We Are for the Dark (1987-90) Read online

  “It was only for the sake of the dis—” the lawyer said, but Frazier was gone already.

  He decided to change his face and settle down somewhere. The lawyer was right: all this compulsive traveling was wearing him down. But by staying in one place longer than a week or two he was multiplying the chances of being detected, so long as he went on looking like himself. He had always wanted a longer nose anyway, and not quite so obtrusive a chin, and thicker eyebrows. He fancied that he looked too Slavic, though he had no Eastern European ancestry at all. All one long rainy evening at the mellow old Addis Ababa Hilton he sketched a face for himself that he thought looked properly Swiss: rugged, passionate, with the right mix of French elegance, German stolidity, Italian passion. Then he went downstairs and showed the printout to the bartender, a supple little Portuguese.

  “Where would you say this man comes from?” Frazier asked.

  “Lisbon,” the bartender replied at once. “That long jaw, those lips—unmistakably Lisbon, though perhaps his grandmother on his mother’s side is of the Algarve. A man of considerable distinction, I would say. But I do not know him, Senhor Schmidt. He is no one I know. You would like your dry martini, as usual?”

  “Make it a double,” Frazier said.

  He had the work done in Vienna. Everyone agreed that the best people for that sort of surgery were in Geneva, but Switzerland was the one country in the world he dared not enter, so he used his Zurich banking connections to get him the name of the second-best people, who were said to be almost as good, remarkably good, he was told. That seemed high praise indeed, Frazier thought, considering it was a Swiss talking about Austrians. The head surgeon at the Vienna clinic, though, turned out to be Swiss himself, which provided Frazier with a moment of complete terror, pretending as he was to be a native of Zurich. But the surgeon had been at his trade long enough to know that a man who wants his perfectly good face transformed into something entirely different does not wish to talk about his personal affairs. He was a big, cheerful extravert named Randegger with a distinct limp. Skiing accident, the surgeon explained. Surely getting your leg fixed must be easier than getting your face changed, Frazier thought, but he decided that Randegger was simply waiting for the off season to undergo repair. “This will be no problem at all,” Randegger told him, studying Frazier’s printout. “I have just a few small suggestions.” He went deftly to work with a light-pen, broadening the cheekbones, moving the ears downward and forward. Frazier shrugged. Whatever you want, Dr. Randegger, he thought. Whatever you want. I’m putty in your hands.

  It took six weeks from first cut to final healing. The results seemed fine to him—suave, convincing, an authoritative face—though at the beginning he was afraid it would all come apart if he smiled, and it was hard to get used to looking in a mirror and seeing someone else. He stayed at the clinic the whole six weeks. One of the nurses wore the Marianne face, but the body was all wrong, wide hips, startling steatopygous rump, short muscular legs. Near the end of his stay she lured him into bed. He was sure he’d be impotent with her, but he was wrong. There was only one really bad moment, when she reared above him and he couldn’t see her body at all, only her beautiful, passionate, familiar face.

  Even now, he couldn’t stop running. Belgrade, Sydney, Rabat, Barcelona, Milan: they went by in a blur of identical airports, interchangeable hotels, baffling shifts of climate. Almost everywhere he went he saw Mariannes, and sometimes was puzzled that they never recognized him, until he remembered that he had altered his face: why should they know him now, even after the seven years of their marriage? As he traveled he began to see another ubiquitous face, dark and Latin and pixyish, and realized that Marianne’s vogue must be beginning to wane. He hoped that some of the Mariannes would soon be converting themselves to this newer look. He had never really felt at ease with all these simulacra of his wife, whom he still loved beyond all measure.

  That love, though, had become inextricably mixed with anger. He could not even now stop thinking about her incomprehensible, infuriating violation of the sanctity of their covenant. It had been the best of marriages, amiable, passionate, close, a true union on every level. He had never even thought of wanting another woman. She was everything he wanted; and he had every reason to think that his feelings were reciprocated. That was the worst of it, not the furtive little couplings she and Hurwitt must have enjoyed, but the deeper treason, the betrayal of their seeming harmony, her seemingly whimsical destruction of the hermetic seal that enclosed their perfect world.

  He had overreacted, he knew. He wished he could call back the one absurd impulsive act that had thrust him from his smooth and agreeable existence into this frantic wearisome fugitive life. And he felt sorry for Hurwitt, who probably had been caught up in emotions beyond his depth, swept away by the astonishment of finding himself in Marianne’s arms. How could he have stopped to worry, at such a time, about what he might be doing to someone else’s marriage? How ridiculous it had been to kill him! And to stare right into Hurwitt’s eyes, incontrovertibly incriminating himself, while he did! If he needed any proof of his temporary insanity, the utter foolishness of the murder would supply it.

  But there was no calling any of it back. Hurwitt was dead; he had lived on the run for—what, two years, three?—and Marianne was altogether lost to him. So much destruction achieved in a single crazy moment. He wondered what he would do if he ever saw Marianne again. Nothing violent, no, certainly not. He had a sudden image of himself in tears, hugging her knees, begging her forgiveness. For what? For killing her lover? For bringing all sorts of nasty mess and the wrong kind of publicity into her life? For disrupting the easy rhythms of their happy marriage? No, he thought, astonished, aghast. What do I have to be forgiven for? From her, nothing. She’s the one who should go down on her knees before me. I wasn’t the one who was fooling around. And then he thought, No, no, we must forgive each other. And after that he thought, Best of all, I must take care never to have anything to do with her for the rest of my life. And that thought cut through him like a blade, like Dr. Randegger’s fiery scalpel.

  Six months later he was walking through the cavernous, ornate lobby of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo when he saw a Marianne standing in front of a huge stack of suitcases against a marble pillar no more than twenty feet from him. He was inured to Mariannes by this time and at first the sight of her had no impact; but then he noticed the familiar monogram on the luggage, and recognized the intricate little bows of red plush cord with which the baggage tags were tied on, and he realized that this was the true Marianne at last. Nor was this any hallucination like the Connaught one. She was visibly older, with a vertical line in her left cheek that he had never seen before. Her hair was a darker shade and somehow more ordinary in its cut, and she was dressed simply, no radiance at all. Even so, people were staring at her and whispering. Frazier swayed, gripped a nearby pillar with his suddenly clammy hand, fought back the impulse to run. He took a deep breath and went toward her, walking slowly, impressively, his carefully cultivated distinguished-looking-Swiss-businessman walk.

  “Marianne?” he said.

  She turned her head slightly and stared at him without any show of recognition.

  “I do look different, yes,” he said, smiling.“I’m sorry, but I don’t—”

  A slender, agile-looking man five or six years younger than she, wearing sunglasses, appeared from somewhere as though conjured out of the floor. Smoothly he interpolated himself between Frazier and Marianne. A lover? A bodyguard? Simply part of her entourage? Pleasantly but forcefully he presented himself to Frazier as though saying, Let’s not have any trouble now, shall we?

  “Listen to my voice,” Frazier said. “You haven’t forgotten my voice. Only the face is different.”

  Sunglasses came a little closer. Looked a little less pleasant.

  Marianne stared.

  “You haven’t forgotten, have you, Marianne?” Frazier said.

  Sunglasses began to look definitely menacin
g.

  “Wait a minute,” Marianne said, as he glided into a nose-to-nose with Frazier. “Step back, Aurelio.” She peered through the shadows. “Loren?” she said.

  Frazier nodded. He went toward her. At a gesture from Marianne, Sunglasses faded away like a genie going back into the bottle. Frazier felt strangely calm now. He could see Marianne’s upper lip trembling, her nostrils flickering a little. “I thought I never wanted to see you again,” he said. “But I was wrong about that. The moment I saw you and knew it was really you, I realized that I had never stopped thinking about you, never stopped wanting you. Wanting to put it all back together.”

  Her eyes widened. “And you think you can?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What a damned fool you are,” she said, gently, almost lovingly, after a long moment.

  “I know. I really messed myself up, doing what I did.”

  “I don’t mean that,” she said. “You messed us both up with that. Not to mention him, the poor bastard. But that can’t be undone, can it? If you only knew how often I prayed to have it not have happened.” She shook her head. “It was nothing, what he and I were doing. Nothing. Just a silly fling, for Christ’s sake. How could you possibly have cared so much?”

  “What?”

  “To kill a man, for something like that? To wreck three lives in half a second? For that?”

  “What?” he said again. “What are you telling me?”

  Sunglasses suddenly was in the picture again. “We’re going to miss the car to the airport, Marianne.”

  “Yes. Yes. All right, let’s go.”

  Frazier watched, numb, immobile. Sunglasses beckoned and a swarm of porters materialized to carry the luggage outside. As she reached the vast doorway Marianne turned abruptly and looked back, and in the dimness of the great lobby her eyes suddenly seemed to shift in color, to take on the same strange topaz glint that he had imagined he had seen in Hurwitt’s. Then she swung around and was gone.

  An hour later he went down to the Consulate to turn himself in. They had a little trouble locating him in the list of wanted fugitives, but he told them to keep looking, going back a few years, and finally they came upon his entry. He was allowed half a day to clear up his business affairs, but he said he had none to clear up, so they set about the procedure of arranging his passage to the States, while he watched like a tourist who is trying to replace a lost passport.

  Coming home was like returning to a foreign country that he had visited a long time before. Everything was familiar, but in an unfamiliar way. There were endless hearings, conferences, psychological examinations. His lawyers were excessively polite, as if they feared that one wrong word would cause him to detonate, but behind their silkiness he saw the contempt that the orderly have for the self-destructive. Still, they did their job well. Eventually he drew a suspended sentence and two years of rehabilitation, after which, they told him, he’d need to move to some other city, find some appropriate line of work, and establish a stable new existence for himself. The rehabilitation people would help him. There would be a probation period of five years when he’d have to report for progress conferences every week.

  At the very end one of the rehab officers came to him and told him that his lawyers had filed a petition asking the court to let him have his original face back. That startled him. For a moment Frazier felt like a fugitive again, wearily stumbling from airport to airport, from hotel to hotel.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all. The man who had that face, he’s somebody else. I think I’m better off keeping this one. What do you say?”

  “I think so too,” said the rehab man.

  ENTER A SOLDIER. LATER: ENTER ANOTHER (1987)

  A curious phenomenon of American science-fiction publishing in the late 1980s, one which will probably not be dealt with in a kindly way by future historians of the field, was the “shared world” anthology. I use the past tense for it because the notion of assembling a group of writers to produce stories set in a common background defined by someone else has largely gone out of fashion today. But for a time in 1987 and thereabouts it began to seem as though everything in science fiction was becoming part of some shared-world project.

  I will concede that some excellent fiction came out of the various shared-world enterprises, though mainly they produced a mountain of junk. The idea itself was far from new in the 1980s; it goes back at least to 1952 and The Petrified Planet, a book in which the scientist John D. Clark devised specifications for an unusual planet and the writers Fletcher Pratt, H. Beam Piper, and Judith Merril wrote superb novellas set on that world. Several similar books followed in the next few years.

  In the late 1960s I revived the idea with a book called Three For Tomorrow—fiction by James Blish, Roger Zelazny, and myself, based on a theme proposed by Arthur C. Clarke—and I did three or four similar collections later on. In 1975 came Harlan Ellison’s Medea, an elaborate and brilliantly conceived colossus of a book that made use of the talents of Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, Frederik Pohl, and a whole galaxy of other writers of that stature. But the real deluge of shared-world projects began a few years afterward, in the wake of the vast commercial success of Robert Asprin’s fantasy series, Thieves’ World. Suddenly, every publisher in the business wanted to duplicate the Thieves’ World bonanza, and from all sides appeared platoons of hastily conceived imitators.

  I dabbled in a couple of these books myself—a story that I wrote for one of them won a Hugo, in fact—but my enthusiasm for the shared-world whirl cooled quickly once I perceived how shapeless and incoherent most of the anthologies were. The writers tended not to pay much attention to the specifications, and simply went off in their own directions; the editors, generally, were too lazy or too cynical or simply too incompetent to do anything about it; and the books became formless jumbles of incompatible work.

  Before I became fully aware of that, though, I let myself be seduced into editing one shared-world series myself. The initiator of this was Jim Baen, the publisher of Baen Books, whose idea centered around pitting computer-generated simulacra of historical figures against each other in intellectual conflict. That appealed to me considerably, and I agreed to work out the concept in detail and serve as the series’ general editor.

  I produced an elaborate prospectus outlining the historical background of the near-future world in which these simulacra would hold forth; I rounded up a group of capable writers; and to ensure that the book would unfold with consistency to my underlying vision, I wrote the first story myself in October of 1987, a 15,000-word opus for which I chose Socrates and Francisco Pizarro as my protagonists and which I called “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another.”

  The whole thing was, I have to admit, a matter of commerce rather than art: just a job of work, to fill somebody’s current publishing need. But a writer’s intention and the ultimate result of his work don’t bear any necessary relationship. In this case I was surprised and delighted to find the story taking on unanticipated life as I wrote, and what might have been a routine job of word-spinning turned out, unexpectedly, to be rather more than that when I was done with it.

  Gardner Dozois published it in the June, 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and then I used it as the lead story in the shared-world anthology, Time Gate. Dozois picked it for his 1989 Year’s Best Science Fiction Collection, and in 1990 it was a finalist on both the Nebula and Hugo ballots—one of my most widely liked stories in a long time. The Nebula eluded me, but at the World Science Fiction Convention in Holland in August, 1990, “Enter a Soldier” brought me a Hugo award, my fourth, as the year’s best novelette.

  Even so, I decided soon after to avoid further involvement in the shared-world milieu, and have done no work of that sort in many years. Perhaps it was always unrealistic to think that any team of gifted, independent-minded writers could produce what is in essence a successful collaborative novel that has been designed by someone else. But my brief sojourn
as editor of Time Gate did, at least, produce a story that I now see was one of the major achievements of my career.

  It might be heaven. Certainly it wasn’t Spain and he doubted it could be Peru. He seemed to be floating, suspended midway between nothing and nothing. There was a shimmering golden sky far above him and a misty, turbulent sea of white clouds boiling far below. When he looked down he saw his legs and his feet dangling like child’s toys above an unfathomable abyss, and the sight of it made him want to puke, but there was nothing in him for the puking. He was hollow. He was made of air. Even the old ache in his knee was gone, and so was the everlasting dull burning in the fleshy part of his arm where the Indian’s little arrow had taken him, long ago on the shore of that island of pearls, up by Panama.

  It was as if he had been born again, sixty years old but freed of all the harm that his body had experienced and all its myriad accumulated injuries: freed, one might almost say, of his body itself.

  “Gonzalo?” he called. “Hernando?”

  Blurred dreamy echoes answered him. And then silence.

  “Mother of God, am I dead?”

  No. No. He had never been able to imagine death. An end to all striving? A place where nothing moved? A great emptiness, a pit without a bottom? Was this place the place of death, then? He had no way of knowing. He needed to ask the holy fathers about this.

  “Boy, where are my priests? Boy?”

  He looked about for his page. But all he saw was blinding whorls of light coiling off to infinity on all sides. The sight was beautiful but troublesome. It was hard for him to deny that he had died, seeing himself afloat like this in a realm of air and light. Died and gone to heaven. This is heaven, yes, surely, surely. What else could it be?