Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Sam Weller (WEARINESS Harlan Ellison ®) #28

WEARINESS Harlan Ellison^®

Very near the final thaw of the Universe, the last of them left behind, the last three of the most perfect beings who had ever existed, stood waiting for the transitional moment. The neap tide of all time. The eternal helix sang its silent song in stone; and the glow of What Was to Come had bruised itself to a ripe plumness.

The ostren fanned itself. Melancholia had shortened it; one entire set of faculties could do nothing but sigh. And it had grown uncommonly warm for her, in sight of the end.

The velv could not contain his trepidation, peering out around the perplexing curvature of space.

But the tismess, that being who had summoned the helix, knew boldness was required, here and now at the final moments. And it stood boldly forth, waiting for the inevitable. All three—there were no others—were at the terminus of uncountable multiple trillions of aeons, and weary.

Heaviness hung, a dire swaddling.

“What is there to fear?” the tismess said, rather more nastily than it had intended. Reify, it had thought, urgently.

Heaviness hung, undiminished.

“What is there to fear?” Again, trying to flense the tone of nastiness, chagrined at its incivility, the velv whimpered and stared at the great helix, receptors clouding as the brightness fattened. The point of alarm had been reached and abandoned long since. “I am the last,” it said.

“As is each of us,” thought the ostren. “We are, each of us, you and you each, we are, each of us, the end of the line. Out of time, all time, the last. But why are you frightened?”

“Because… it is the end. The question at last answered. There will be no more. No more I, no more you, no more of any living species. Does that not terrify you?”

“Yes,” thought the ostren. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

The tismess was silent.

And the great helix solidified, its colors steadied, and the last three stared as only they were able, looking into the future, for the past and present were now gone, looking to see what would overwhelm them as they were vaporized, gone like their kind, gone forever, not even motes, not even memories. And they saw, the three last, absolutely perfect beings; they saw what was to come.

“Oh, how good,” whispered the velv, her tissues roiling most golden. “How wonderful. And I’m not afraid… not now.”

The ostren made the sound that very little children had once made when they had truly learned where the puppy farm is. But there was no fear, either, in the ostren.

For the tismess, as it was all coming to an end, suddenly there was what there was to be seen.

What was on the other side.

Before him, immediately before him, was the darkness. Heavy, breathing yet silent, it seemed to go on forever. But that was the other side. And beyond that darkness was something: something he could call the “other side.” Could he see it, could he even imagine it, there had to be another side beyond this side. He reveled in the moment of knowledge that all there had ever been would go on, would start anew perhaps, would roll on through the final night, no matter how long. There was an “other side.”

But of course, in truth, what he was seeing was only another aspect of the only darkness—and not even darkness; nothing.

What he was seeing was every thought he had ever had, every song he had ever sung, everyone he had ever known, every moment of his trillion aeons never knowing he had nowhere else to go, all and everything of memory; where he had stood, what he had done and what had been done around him, what there was and what there could ever have been.

In that instant, he saw backward into memory, backward into the night that had preceded the first thought.

Far away, a galaxy became as dust and vanished, leaving no print, no recollection, no residue. Then, one by one, in correct stately procession, the solitary stars went blind.

The question was answered: Sat çi sat bene.

“A painting is a sum of destructions.”

—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

About “Weariness”

Running the unacceptable risk of writing an afterword oh by the way “note” a thousand times longer than the story itself, I sit down to explicate the “Bradbury connection” to this, perhaps my last-published story. Like Ray, I am now old, and there is an infinitude more to recollect and savor of links between Bradbury and Ellison. Truly, it should suffice for even the most marrow-sucking obsessive fan that Ray and I have known each other close on forever.

Ray contends that in very short order he and I will be sitting down together cutting up touches with Dickens and Dorothy Parker, shuckin’ ’n’ jivin’ with Aesop and Melville.

Uh… well, okay, Ray, if you say so.

(I am rather less condolent with that Hereafter stuff than is Ray. As has averred Nat Hentoff, I come from, and remain as one with, a grand and glorious tradition of stiff-necked Jewish atheists. Ray and I have a long-standing wager on this one, which of us is on the money and which is betting on a lame pony. Sadly, the winner will never collect.)

La dee dah. Back where we began. Too many words, yet I’ll attempt that undanceable rigadoon.

These days of the electronic babble, every doofus with some handheld device calls every other male he knows brother.

“Hey, Bro! Whussup, Bro? Howzit goin’, Bro?”

Strangers: brother. Casual acquaintances: brother. Same-skin-color supermarket bagger: brother. Other-skin-colored guy who tipped you when you parked his Beamer: brother. Much like the oafishly careless, empty, and repetitious whomping of the once-specific, cherished, and singular word awesome, the sacred word BROTHER has become, in inept mouths, a dull and wearisome trope. (Awesome is the word one uses for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mount Kilimanjaro, and pitching a no-hit no-run ball game. Not available for the crappy cheese quesadilla you had this afternoon, or for anybody who Dances with the Stars. With or without a wooden leg.) Same goes for yo bruth-thuh.

I had only one sib, my late sister. The men of my lifelong existence whom I would countenance as my brother are less than the number of dactyls on my left hand, and they know who they are.

Apparently, Ray Bradbury and I are brothers.

Not in some absurd catchall absurdity of vacuous gibber, but actually and really, “we are brothers.”

Whence cometh this assertion?

From Ray Bradbury. That’s whence.

“You know, Harlan,” he said to me, leaning in and grinning that Midwestern just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck grin, “we are brothers, y’know. You and I, together.”

I grinned back at him with my hayseed Midwestern mien, onaccounta we are both paid liars, one from Waukegan and one from Cleveland, and I played his straight man by responding, “How’s that, Ray?”

(The players freeze in situ as the Bloviating Narrator fills in the background data, thus slowing the movie and thus shamefacedly doing the necessary bricklaying.)

The table across which Ray was leaning was in a booth at one of my and Ray’s all-time favorite restaurants, the Pacific Dining Car in downtown Los Angeles. The night was in 1965. Our dining companions had both gone off to the toilets. That is to say, she had gone off to one; her husband had gone off to another. Her name was Leigh Bracket; his name was Edmond Hamilton. The queen of fantasy writing. Great movies based on Hammett and Chandler. A legend in this life. The Eric John Stark stories. A kind and imperially gracious woman. One of the best people ever known to me. Ed looked like something out of American Gothic. They called him Galaxy Smasher—the true creator of the space opera. Dozens and dozens of stories all the way back to the advent of Gernsbach: The Star Kings series. All those great comic books, and the Captain Future pulp novelettes. Droll, cosmically smart, one helluva plotter, and kind to tots like me and Ray. They were the Strophe and Antistrophe of our literary infancy.

So, they’re gone, Bradbury and I are alone, grinnin’ & schmoozin’, and he proceeds to explain to me that he and I are brothers. Not my word, his word. (Not to make this too clear, but I have a chasmlike abomination of bloviating sf fans who, upon the death of someone they once met in an elevator, begin to leak like WikiAnything, just to buy themselves the face time at a memorial. “Oh, yes, I knew Isaac as if he were my brother…” “Oh, lawdy, I pluckt up rootabuggas with Cliff Simak in de fields…” “Yes, Octavia Butler and I were ever so close…”) This unlikely story I tell actually happened. Go ask Bradbury if you think I’m fudging it. But better hurry…

Anyhow, I says back to him, “How’s that, Ray?”

And he says back to me, “Them.”

And I says to him, “Ed and Leigh?”

And he says back to me, “Our father and mother. They raised us.” I have no memory of the rest of the actual verbiage.

Well, Sir, wasn’t that a keen moment!

You see, I was working at Paramount at the time, on one or another of the crippled creations Rouse and Greene had hired me to do for vast sums of money (I was in my “hot 15” at the time). And Leigh, whom I’d known since my teens in Ohio, was writing a dog for Howard Hawks called

Red Line 7000, starring James Caan (who, coincidentally, played the role of Harlan Ellison in an Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on my Memos from Purgatory only a year or so earlier). Also at Paramount.

Our offices were near to hand.

Ray doesn’t drive. I drive. Every time we both got booked into the same lecture gig at some jerkwater literary potlatch, I drove. Bradbury lectured.

Me, he lectured. (Our politics are about as close as our faiths.)

So, I was always the wheelman on the caper.

Leigh didn’t have (what she used to call, to mock James M. Cain) a “short” that night, and I can’t remember what Ed’s story was. But I wound up doing the driving down to the Pacific Dining Car, and we left straight from the studio. Ray must’ve come by cab; he met us at the Bronson Gate, and I did my thing downtown for a good big T-bone dinner. Also Bermuda onion, Rondo Hatton’s jaw-sized tomatoes with Roquefort dressing, and Zucchini Florentine. Ray drank; I never touch the stuff. We had an absolutely nova-squooshing dinner.

Thus, before I run on at greater length, the answer to the question “Can you reminisce a bit about your Ray Bradbury connection?” is frozen in Ray’s asserveration: We’re brothers.

He said so.

But, not to make a big foofaraw of it, Ray has trouble remembering who I am, and who Harlan Ellison is. And then he’ll remember, howl “Live Forever!” or some such impossibility at me, and recall me as “Ah, yes, the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.” And I’ll smile wanly, and scream back at him, “Nothing lives forever, Ray, you crazy old coot! Not the Great Pyramid of Giza, not the polar ice caps, not a single blade of green grass, you nut-bag!”

And that is the link between us, the “connection.” Nobody ever writ it large on the northern massif of Mount Shazam… you gotta agree with your brother.

You just got to love him.

—Harlan Ellison