The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - August 1980 Read online

  "He does not believe you," the redhead says to me. "He thinks that you are talking through a cocked hat. He has not read the papers nor apprehended the realities. Such people are not worth your time and effort."

  It is purgative to hear this, particularly from a person of large secondary sexual characteristics. "You are right," I say. I arrest the little man in midflight by a shirt cuff. "You may stay," I say. "You may remain here unharassed. I will waste no more time. In fact, I will concentrate on the game of fascination now. I would like to win at least one game of fascination before I die." I pull him back to his seat; despite what I know behind his mask to be his enormous size, he comes easily, like a small person. "Sit," I say. "You will not be bothered."

  "You are not bothering him even now," the redhead says. "And he is not worth your concern."

  Confused, the little guy rearranges himself in his seat. "There are no aliens," he says.

  "I will not discuss this any more. I will not say a single word."

  "There is no alien contact," he says desperately. "There are no UFO sightings nor seven hundred and sixteen missing. If there were I would have read of it."

  "The press lies all the time," I say with superb calm. The redhead nods. "They cannot be trusted on any level."

  "There are no aliens."

  "You may think that and in your mind it may even be true but there are lots of people who feel otherwise and the number of disappearances is increasing all the time, to say nothing of thousands walking around with clouded minds. It is all part of the great scheme," I say, "but I will not discuss it any more."

  "No more," the redhead says. "Let the world be a fascination parlor."

  "And I will be a bouncing ball," I say to her merrily.

  "Exactly," she says. "Would you like to switch seats, honey? That way I'll be sitting next to him and you next to me, one seat apart. I will thus insulate you from his presence."

  "That is gracious of you," I say, "but I feel I must stay here. I must accept my responsibilities. I am a desperately responsible person and will deal with the cards, so to speak, as they are dealt."

  The man with the microphone says that the double bonus is now beginning. I am glad to hear this because double bonus games pay exactly twice as much, and I have decided to make a conscientious effort to win this one game. If there is one thing I can do it is to prevail when I really put my mind to it. "I will deal with the situation myself," I say to the redhead." I am not intimidated even by six-feet-six young guys no matter how strong and punishing their frame and malevolent their manner."

  "Five four," the little guy says, "and I am sixty-one years old with slight crippling arthritis of the hands. Damn it, you will not play fascination, will you? You simply refuse to accept the situation."

  "He will," the redhead says. "He is a strong man."

  "I am," I say, "she is right." My voice, like the little guy's, is quite loud and I realize that we have brought matters to something of a halt. We are being stared at. Quickly, cleverly, as the bell rings just then, I seize the ball and roll it. It goes in swift for once, one off dead-center. Two in a row. It returns quickly and I roll it again. It meditates on the board, then scuttles in line. Three. I take the return bounce and roll it skillfully toward the upper right. It goes in.

  "See?" I say to my left, waiting for the return. "It is all a matter of mind control."

  "You have utterly distracted me," the little guy says, "and you have manipulated this game with your talk of aliens."

  "Leave him alone," the redhead says. "Can't you see that he is on the verge of a winning game?"

  The ball is back in my hand. Getting excited despite myself, feeling an involvement that I had sought to deny, I roll it frantically. It would be nice to win a double bonus, if only to prove that my mind is relatively unclouded.

  "Aha!" I say as it almost dumps in for a fifth but it does not; it goes off center, drops in for a repeat and comes dribbling back to me reluctantly. Salivating, I wait for it. "Don't panic, honey," the redhead says. "Nice and easy." The little guy kicks my shin.

  The ball back in my hand, I center myself for what I know will be the big five and the double-bonus coupons returnable for ten dollars worth of needed merchandise...and at that precise moment, deus-ex, the alien walks in.

  I believe in the aliens, I accept as do few others, their circumstance and purposes, and yet it is shocking to see one come walking calmly into the Forty-second Street fascination parlor just as I am about to embark on the pitch that will give me big five in a row. He is a small alien, about four foot three, which is how I know right away that he is an alien because all of the reported sightings have had them listed at around four feet three, give or take an inch. Otherwise, he looked like a human being. Or almost like a human being; part of his tail was showing at the bottom of his modest herringbone sports jacket.

  No one, not even the redhead, noticed him of course. It is a well-known fact that the aliens are invisible except to the very few who actually see them and who of course are scorned or mocked if they make the sightings public, which so many of them unfortunately have. I maintain my demeanor, trying to think of my missing big five, and then the alien walks over to me with utter determination, much as if I were the only person in the parlor. He removes a piece of paper from the inner pocket of his neat, rather dapper herringbone jacket and says, "It is all over and you are to come with me at once."

  "You must have the wrong party," I say with amazing calm.

  "I have the right party," the alien says, "and no time to negotiate. You are to come peaceably or it will be necessary to cloud your mind even further, render you totally unconscious and take you by force. You may be permanently damaged in that case, but it is all the same to us. We regard you as a form of wildlife."

  "Let me finish my game," I say. The redhead meanwhile is looking at me with great attention, even if the little guy is not. I have the aspect of course of a wild-eyed man talking to himself. "I have a right to finish the game anyway," I say, and the redhead gives me the softest and most sympathetic of smiles.

  "Not here," she says.

  "Come along," the alien says and clamps a delicate, fast-moving little hand on my shoulder. I feel electric currents of tension beginning to pass between us in an almost electric way, which come to think of it is the way that electric contact would be manifested by the aliens, advanced species technologically as they must be. "It is all over, "the alien says again. "These dialogues have been meaningless time-wasting, and your perceptions do you no good. Come now."

  I turn to the small guy and the redhead, who to my amazement are grouped together, in earnest conference. They must have known each other all the time or at least have gotten to know one another swiftly because their posture is intimate, their whisperings of the most confidential kind. I understand then what has been done to me. I have been set up. "For God's sake," I say, "if you won't help me, at least let me get my five in a row." I grip the ball with sticky hand. "Now," I say, "now." I flail it forward. The alien tugs me warningly.

  "Sock it to 'em, honey," the redhead says indolently as the ball skips under shattered glass. "Give them hell, Mr. President."

  The little guy, blushing says, "I'm sorry, I couldn't do it any other way," and we all watch as the ball skips down the deadly center for a fault, rolling all the way down and down the corridors of the Oval Office, and it is at that moment as the insistent alien drags me into the chambers of Forty-second Street and to his rocket that the selective but brutal and terrible Occupation of Earth reaches, one might say, its high point.

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  ARBOR HOUSE

  Bruce McAllister's most recent F&SF stories were "Missionary Work," (December 1978) and "Victor," (July 1977). This new novelet is a striking tale about a man with amnesia who searches for a lost art, the art of performing miracles....

  What He Wore For Them

  BY

  BRUCE McALLISTER

  He awoke before dawn, struggling up out of a nightmare of endless fire and screams of despair, into the darkness of a room he did not understand, into a body he did not recognize.

  He lay there terrified, unable to move, trying desperately to shape himself from memories that just weren't there. The darkness, the total blindness to the world and what he was, was as horrible as the fires; but when he tried to flee, to regain the oblivion of sleep, the fires returned to prevent his passage, forcing him back into the room, back to the darkness, where he lay clenched until dawn.

  When the first light touched the room, he made himself try. He made himself move. He got up, he turned on the light, he checked the dresser drawers, the wallet he found in one of them, and the closet. What he found told him nothing: three linen suits and a dozen white shirts in the closet, underwear in the drawers, no reading material of any kind. In the wallet ten thousand lire in small bills, no traveler's checks, no identification of any kind. He was in a foreign country; that was all he knew.

  He glanced in the dresser mirror and stopped.

  It was an alien face that looked back at him. Gaunt, pale, the blue eyes circled with periorbital shadows. (Periorbital? Why that word?) Despite the blue eyes, the physiognomy was Near Eastern or Mediterranean. The face was long; the nose, aquiline. The dark hair was oily, unwashed, flattened to his head and uncut, coiling almost to his shoulders. The dark beard was feral but not full.

  The face held him.

  It was a kind face, yes, but agonized. It was forceful, yet gentle. And primitive, yet enlightened. The effect was powerful...and calculated. The calculation bothered him, but he could not look away.

  There was, he realized, something familiar, hauntingly so, about the face. But the familiarity was not that of one's own face—not at all. Was it a face from a dream? From a painting? From someone else's memory...?

  The face upset him. It upset him very much. The whites of the eyes seemed to glow below the irises. It was the look of sorcery, or of illness of the body, or soul....

  He pulled himself away. He walked to the door, made himself open it, and peered outside cautiously.

  What he saw was a corridor. A hotel hallway. This was something he could understand.

  He dressed—made himself dress— in one of the three suits, and went downstairs. Perhaps someone would address him by name, on the way, or in the lobby when he reached it.

  No one did.

  The hallways were empty this early, and the only figure in the lobby, the concierge, refused to look up from a newspaper.

  He could have approached him, but did not. For some reason the figure, so still there behind the counter, frightened him. It was silly, but it frightened him.

  The Hotel Byron. He remembered this as he stood in the lobby. And when he stepped outside, onto the travertine patio that overlooked an almost tideless beach, he remembered the name of the village, too.

  Lerici. L'Erici. The city of Eric.

  He tried to calm himself with what he could remember.

  The poet Shelley and his young wife Mary had lived here long ago, not far from this hotel, in a great morbid villa that had long since crumbled. And the older poet Byron—decadent and hedonistic—had been their good friend until Shelley left in a small boat before a storm, and his body washed up near Viarreggio, and their romantic sojourn ended.

  All of this he remembered. Facts about the world were flooding back to him now.

  Of himself he still could remember nothing, and it made him tremble.

  There were images, yes—whole scenes—that felt like memories: A childhood spent on a long flowing lake in the Northwest, playing "Green Mountain Boys" with friends among the cedars and three kinds of birch. And high school years—suntans and cars and first love—in a big sun-washed city on a great bay....

  But these visions were sad and distant, as though read from a book, as though borrowed from another's life. Someone—he himself, or someone else—wanted him to believe they were his.

  They were not.

  Still shaking, he took the sidewalk that curved toward the little bay, toward the mall, the jetty, the fishing boats, the castle that overlooked them, and the apartment buildings—pastel, ancient and tacky—that clustered below.

  The castle—a youth hostel now, he remembered—was a relic from that endless era when the little bay was a minor possession juggled between the city-states of Pisa and Genoa. Another relic of that era was the little church, whose image came to him suddenly, disturbingly, the tiny church further into town and dwarfed by the stucco apartments and the baroque civil buildings.

  These were the kinds of things he could remember.

  And wasn't this typical of amnesia—tropic-hysteric amnesia as well as the other forms? One lost oneself, but retained the world?

  The vision of the church persisted. It was up Via San Sebastiano, yes? Beyond the bend where the largest produce market sat. A tiny church... dark and damp....

  The church called to him. He could not see its interior clearly, but it called to him.

  When he reached the umbrella pines where Via San Sebastiano emptied from the hills above and ended at the cement promenade by the bay, he stopped and looked around him. All of it was familiar. He knew this village well; he had been here for weeks.

  From where he stood he still could not see the church. The street curved too much. But it was there, he knew.

  He felt eyes on him then.

  He turned slowly but found no eyes.

  The old man seated on the new cement bench looking out to sea—at the hazy skyline of La Spezia perhaps— was not looking at him. And the middle-aged man, scoliotic, a little drunk, and fishing with a bright-red bobber from the new clean rocks, wasn't looking at him. And the two women in tight black dresses—one a degenerative-arthritic, the other diabetic-retinopathic—weren't looking at him either. Wobbling under the weight of the full shopping bags, they were paying no attention at all—

  Or was that true?

  Hadn't one of them whispered to the other a minute ago? Hadn't she glanced at him quickly right before that?

  He just hadn't made the connection before.

  And hadn't the other woman then made a gesture at her chest, a gesture which he now realized had probably been the sign of the cross. He could not be sure. But he began to tremble.

  The voice entered him then.

  It split his skull. It weakened his knees. And it was so familiar.

  Dominus illuminatio! it shrieked, echoing, falling. By this sign-ing, it shrieked, I beseech you-you—

  He stumbled, stopped, and stood there.

  The church. He must get to the church.

  He took a step and the voice screamed: Domine refugium! Sparest thou he who is penitent, restorest thou he who—

  He had braced himself and taken another step, but the only thing he heard now was the who fading like a bone falling into the darkest well.

  He took another step, and another. Slowly he made his way across the street, to the sidewalk, up the via.

  As he approached the eroded face of the tiny church, he kept his eyes on it. He could feel so many of the villagers around him, and he did not want to look at them. He could hear their steps, catch their forms in the corners of his eyes. H
e could feel dozens of heads turn to look at him. He could hear dozens of voices whispering in awe, nurturing the rumors, the stories about him.

  But what were the rumors, the stories?

  He could discern dozens of hands moving through the air over chests, drawing crosses, and he could hear the silent invocations.

  They all wanted miracles, he remembered suddenly, and the realization horrified him.

  And they believed he could give them those miracles.

  He must keep his eyes on the church and on it alone. He must not look away, even for a second, for in a second someone's eyes might capture and hold him, demanding one of the miracles that he had somehow—God help him—led them to believe he could bring about.

  One figure began toward him, but when he kept his eyes on the church, the figure stopped and returned to the shadows.

  Another figure did the same, following him for a while but eventually giving up.

  And another, and another.

  When it finally happened, he couldn't help it.

  The footsteps sounded loudly, loud as gunshots, to his left, and without thinking he turned.

  Out of the alley a boy of ten had appeared at a run, shoes slapping hard, almost to him now. The boy was not smiling. He was not embarrassed. He was panting and afraid, burning with a fear.

  The boy had, he realized, been waiting for him there in the alley near the church. He had known the foreigner would come there today. All of the villagers seemed to know it. They lined the streets as though waiting.

  The boy was babbling, gesturing frantically, and almost touching him.

  He found himself reaching out, touching the boy, taking the thin arm firmly in his own long fingers.

  The boy stiffened, paled, but then relaxed. He still was not smiling, but he was not trying to break away.

  Slowly the boy led him down the alley, and the man found himself submitting. At the alley's end, the boy took him up a hundred or more steps to a gravel road—across that road—up a steep olive-shaded hill toward...Pozzuoli?—yes, Pozzuoli. He knew where they were heading.