(this is not certainly not the final edit . . . and, well, it hasn't really been proofbread ether !)
* * *
It was Spring when Veten saw him sitting at the bar in the Salty Dog.
He was driving near the waterfront in the VW bus, and saw his black Lincoln with a yellow and blue California license plate sitting out front. It was time to talk to him, Veten decided. He’d been thinking about if for a long time, ever since Sheryl mentioned him.
Veten parked the bus next to the Lincoln, and stepped on into the small dark bar he’d only been in a few times before. The Salty Dog had a low ceiling held up with iron beams, and round iron posts, and smelled like beer and feet. It had dim lights, a pool table with the white in the balls smoke stained, some of the neon signs that looked at first festive, Drink Bud, but as the year went on, Veten kind of felt the there was something sad about the signs, Genesee Beer, not sad like the way blues music felt, but sad like the party was over an no body was there anymore.
He was the only person at one end of the bar, there was a couple, the man with a long beard like Quizon’s at the other, “chatting it up” with a young blond woman in a short green dress and long boots.
Veten headed over to him, non-chalant plus cool-like, and reached for a cigarette himself, and then made a show of fumbling for his lighter that was in his left front jeans pocket. He noticed Rod had some matches near his drink, which looked like a tall glass of straight whiskey.
Rod saw this show, and picked up his matches and handed them to Veten.
“Here sir,” he said.
He didn’t look like he looked on TV, well, he did, but he didn’t. Veten struck the match, and lit the cig. “Thank you,” he handed the matches back. “I’ll have what our man is having,” he said to the bartender, a muscular guy with a military buzz of a haircut. The bartender nodded.
“Do I detect a Russian accent,” Rod said, smiling warmly.
Rod was tipsy, Veten could tell. He sat down next to him. He was a small man, with jet black hair, and bushy black eyebrows. His eyes twinkled, Veten noticed, more than when they were stuck in the tube. A tall glass of amber was plopped before him.
Veten sipped. Bourbon, not bad, a bit like paint thinner, and lemons. “Yes,” Veten said, rolling the word. “My accent is going away, I think, with my time here. That’s is what the people tell me. Sometimes they speak so fast, though, with the slang, and I’m confused a bit.”
Rod kept smiling. “I hear ya, Comrade. My students here are like this. More so in far out Cali, dude.”
“Ahh, yes.” Veten said. “The surf talk, Dude, regular guy, you know, stand up guy.”
And Rod laughed, and squashed his spent cigarette. “What other lines do you know?”
“Damn you all to hell, you blew it up.”
Rod winked at him, and went for another smoke. “I didn’t write that one. My name is on the credits, the script I wrote for that movie wasn’t even used.”
“How about the ending? That was a good idea, with a the Statue of Liberty.”
“I meant that as a joke. I think it came out, okay, I guess. Heston is so wooden. The whole production reminded me of an episode of the Flintstones.”
Veten wasn’t sure what he meant. The cartoon with the background that just kept repeating itself as a kind of statement on monotony. The rock buildings the lived in.
“But why am I complaining,” Rod said, perked up. “I guess I took the damn thing as far as I could with it all.”
“This is a good thing,” Veten said. “A rare thing.”
“So what movies did you grow up with in Russia?”
It was a legitimate question from an entertainment TV creator, but Veten didn’t have a clue. He tried to see every film that came out, and watched a great deal of television, but knew next to nothing about actual communist Russian film. All he could think of was “Eisenstein, and propaganda, really just rolled off my eyes, I can’t recall. Few, er, western films made it, over, certainly no television.”
Rod just nodded, going along.
Veten casted for more to say, there would be no fooling the extremely sharp man though completely drunk man. “We all read Dr. Zhivago, even though it was banned.”
Rod lit completely up, and pounded the bar. “Good will out!” he said. “This is a good thing to hear. I think there is hope. Hope for us all. In dark times I think the whole world will be annihilated, cooked, roasted, torched, burnt . . . but here we are, sitting here at this god forsaken bar, the Russian and the American Jew, and this could be anytime, anyplace, and any planet, even, that continues on after the petty squabbles are left to the dust of history.”
“Right,” Veten said. “So right.” Though he probably wasn’t, Veten saw a certain gloom lifting off the man, a gloom that he wasn’t aware was there, until he saw, suddenly, he had something to fight for.
Veten suddenly understood him.
He was a crusader.
His TV show, had an agenda.
This was a good thing for the Arth, really. It hadn’t made as much sense, in the field of MASH, and Archie Bunker, and Steve Austin and John Boy it was hard to discern the streak of cynicism in the face of anarchy, and cataclysm, was really designed to wake a person up a bit.
“Our friend here will have another,” he said.
In a few moments Veten’s empty bourbon glass was replaced with another. Veten sipped freely, and it did taste better because it really didn’t taste like anything at all.
“We all knew Stalin was a bad man,” Veten said, now, “lightweight” that he was, as Sheryl called it, we was intoxicated, and on his way to more of it. “Nobody who calls himself Joe Steel is going to be a good man.”
“Well shit,” Rod said. “That’s right. Joe Steel. What’s Lenin mean?”
“You know, Rod, I think it means cold ass river.”
“Well I’ll be damned.”
“I don’t think so, not you, but perhaps him.”
Rod pounded the bar again and laughed with clenched teeth, the cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth.
The couple down the way were looking at them, and grinning. Buzz cut bartender was fiddling with the little TV nearby.
“I always wanted to go to Russia,” Rod said. “Do you miss it?”
“Yes, and no.”
“That sure sounds Russian.”
“I, er, I have been here for just a few years, and I feel at home here. There are some things I miss.”
“I miss home too,” he said, suddenly wistful. Then looked into his glass. “I don’t know where the hell that is.”
“Oh,” Veten said. “You live in California, but here too?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid that’s not what I mean. You don’t know what you got until it’s gone.”
Veten thought that sounded like a song he heard on the radio in the bus. Paved paradise, put up a parking lot. Which made paradise in the past, presumably, instead of at the hand of building and construction, and them struggling with the whole idea of progress, and the loss of essential soul, which was behind them but should have been ahead of them.
“You have a family?” Rod said.
“Yes, I have a wife . . . back home,” and Veten didn’t say three of them, but not at the same time. “You call this ex, I think. We just say, wife, not wife. I have a grown son, and two grown daughters, all scientists.” Veten looked into his glass too. He’d never see them again, would he?
“I have two daughters,” Rod said. “One tolerates me, and one hates me.”
“Now how could one hate you?” Veten didn’t know. He liked him.
And then Veten said, in a what the hell. “Ahh, the one who hates you is just like you!”
Rod looked up, and squinted at him. Then nodded slowly. “I haven’t’ been the best dad, you know. I’m always working working working, and they grew and grew and I’ve been so damn self absorbed with all this.”
“And fame must be hard, then?”
“That too. That’s why we come back to this area, this lake. To reconnect with something that I lost.”
“Maybe you didn’t lose it, maybe you gave it away.” Veten said, the drunken philosopher, and he realized his self censor had been bourbon eroded.
“Now that’s an interesting thought.”
“I have not seen all of your shows, but the one where the man is dead and returns to his hometown, is this you now, where in fact you can’t even come back as a ghost because they’re telling you it’s time to move on.”
“Well, now, I think I’m beginning to be very glad I ran into you, I don’t even know your name.”
“Ahhh,” Veten said. “This is a name I made up,” and he shook his hand. “Ted Veten.”
“Ted, good enough. What’s Veten mean, in Russian?”
“It means philosopher.” Oh uh.
“Aptly named, as some such!”
Veten got out another smoke, and they were both chimney’s out the side of their mouths.
“Were you a good father, Ted?”
“You know, I could have been better. I was always busy . . .”
“. . . Philosophizing . . .” Rod said.
“Yes, and I do have regrets.”
“Any of them hate you?”
“Not that I know. Now the wives . . .”
“Oh no, don’t get me started . . .”
“Yes . . .”
“Wait, did you say wives?”
“Yes, well, there were three of them. But the one, here, that is to be my wife, she’s . . . she’s the soul mate, as you say.”
“I don’t say it,” Rod said. “I don’t believe that one.”
“Oh, perhaps I don’t really understand what it means.”
“It means God made your destiny, and hooked you up together.”
“Well, then, I’ll leave the jury out on that one.”
“Do you believe in God, Ted?”
“No . . . no I do not, Rod.”
“That a commie!”
Rod patted him on the back, and Ted laughed.
“Do you?”
“Well now . . .” Rod said. “I believe in a creative force, that for good or bad, made the world, the universe, and made us from some dust left over. That this God has any thing to do with our day to day lives, Lord of the Dust, sickens me, and even the idea robs us of the innate power we have to control our own destines.”
“Yes. This dust, the dust we are made of, comes from stars, or even exploded stars,” Veten said. “Not much more powerful in the universe than a star.”
At that moment, Rod Serling really peered into Veten’s eyes, and for a long, almost uncomfortable moment. Then suddenly “Ahhhhhhhh . . .” he said, and waved like he was shooing away an idea that had suddenly appeared between them.
Then “How about that Yuri Gregarin!”
“We are sending men into space in fucking tin cans!” Veten said loudly.
People were looking at them, a couple of others now in the Salty Dog, and even the bartender.
“Crack me a Genesee monkey,” Veten said to him.
Rod burst out laughing and the cig flew out of his mouth and onto the floor. He stumbled off his stool, and looked for it for a minute, then gave up.
“Oh,” Veten said. “Beer, not monkey.”
“I wonder if this fire trap will burn down, now, headline’s going to read “Rod Serling’s cigarette sends Salty Dog back to hell.”
“Yes, perhaps!”
A bottle of beer was clunked down before Veten by the scowling bartender. He took a sip.
“All you hoped for?” Rod said.
Veten put the bottle down. “Shark piss!”
Rod slapped his hands together. “You know Ted Veten, let’s blow this rat hole. We’re drawing a crowd like flies.”
“Bzzzzz,” Veten said looking around. They did have an audience, the couple from down the way, and about five others, one woman pointing at Rod.
Rod threw a $50 dollar bill onto the bar, and was heading out toward the door.
Veten stumbled behind him.
They stood peeing into the dark water of the flood control channel for a long time.
“You got a car, Ted?”
“I have the Vee Double U bus.” Ted thumbed behind them and zipped up.
“You seem okay to dive,” Rod said.
Veten thought he probably could manage. He’d been driving for four weeks, and was drunk, but maybe not as drunk as Rod. The first gear was the hardest.
“We can get some beer for the road. Ted, I’ve always wanted to go see Mark Twain’s grave.”
“Okay,” Veten said, game for an adventure like those he read from the fine writer, Huck and Joe, off to . . . ?
“Good, it’s settled!”
Veten pulled the bus up into the parking lot of the Short Stop 24 hour deli, the only place open that late at night. They sold beer and cigarettes and whatnot and this and that. Where they were going, still he had no idea.
Their duplex was a few blocks down the street. Sheryl was in Washington DC for research, and he did want to go, but he couldn’t get off work, but just in case, Veten decided, he’d leave her a note.
“Right back in a Flash Gordon,” Rod said and bounded off into the all night deli.
Veten got his note book that he’d been writing words down in that he stored in a pocked behind the seat, and wrote:
Dearest Sheryl, I am going off on and adventure with Rod Serling, I think things will turn out all right, but if you find this note and I don’t return, the . . . Veten crumpled it up. If anything happened to them, it would be on the news, Hollywood TV star and library worker die in Vee Double U bus crash.
Veten wasn’t worried. He wanted to do the right thing, but he wasn’t worried. And felt that he was doing the right thing.
He watched Rod in the store through the big glass window. He was joking to the poor sleep deprived teenager, saying something, and the teen looked at him in amazement, and Rod tipped his head back and laughed, and shook the kid’s hand, and he was out into the night with two six packs of beer and a red and white carton of Marlboros under his arm.
He hopped in.
“Ahhh, I think we are ready,” Veten said, and cracked a beer.
“I have the utmost certainty,” Rod said.
“So, which way out of town . . .” Veten buzzed the shifter into reverse, and let the clutch out slowly, but it still bucked.
Then he got them out on the street, floored it in second and it really didn’t go much.
“Furl the t'gallant-sails, and close-reef the top-sails, Starbuck, and head south along lucky 13.”
Veten laughed, recalling the Starbuck being on the Pequot of Moby Dick.
And Veten really wanted to tell him there were whales on other planets, but never as big as the ones on earth, and the earth whales seemed to talk more. “. . . that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Veten blurted out.
“Aye!” Rod said, and they chuckled.
“Mark Twain’s grave . . .” Rod said. “Did you ever go to Tolstoy’s grave?”
“I’m afraid I have not.”
“How about Tchaikovsky?”
“No.” It took him a minute to remember who that was. “I don’t even know where that is.”
“I don’t, either. Seen Lenin like a wax dummy mummy?”
Rod had lost him. A hill was coming up on the dark road, lines shooting up into the sky ahead, as they made their climb out of Ithaca, and Veten blew the shift down . . . Craaaaakkkkk!
“Atta baby,” Rod said, and opened another beer, and passed it to Veten. Veten slugged it, it had lost all taste, and it sort of felt like his body was fighting it for a moment, a bit sour in his stomach . . . he downed half the bottle and put it between his legs.
Rod puffed his cigarette out the side of his mouth in the dim light. “Permanence is what this sojourn is about, Ted. Permanence.”
“Oh, how so?” Veten said, knowing that’s what Rod wanted him to say.
“What you or I, though I don’t know what you do, what you or I leave behind on this rock floating at the edge of the galaxy, besides some genetic information in our children that is of no claim to us personally, what do we leave that matters?”
Veten did see two lines for a moment on the right side of the road, they faded back to one. He looked at the big, clock like speed dial, 45, not a highly dangerous speed at all compared to a chopper. “What it matters is in the heart of the beholder,” Veten said. “And this, we do not have claim to.”
Rod was silent for a moment. Veten looked over at him, and realized Rod was staring at him, that peering look again. Veten gave him the thumbs up.
“Ha!” Rod said. “Amazing. I guess you’re right. I never thought of it that way.”
He looked off into the night. A car flew up along the side of the bus in other lane, passed them, and pulled back in front of them. It had a long strip of red taillights. “Thunderbird,” Rod muttered. “A phoenix, and Charon’s ferry.”
Veten tried to piece it together, couldn’t. “Is this a dangerous car?” It didn’t seem like a police car.
“No no . . . just and old saw rambling.”
“You are not that old,” Veten said, and drank the rest of his beer.
“I feel it . . . what we were talking about?”
“Permanence,” Veten said.
“Oh yes. I’ve wasted a lot of effort this electronic frivolity called Television and hare brained scenarios disguising themselves as meaningful drama.”
“Only you can say that about your own work,” Veten said. “You will not find many others who say such.”
“So. Why didn’t I ever write a good book?”
“Perhaps you will.”
“I don’t think I will I never wanted to go that deep. It scares me.”
“Is that why we are going to see Mark Twain’s bones?”
“It is, they’re already lasting much longer than Monsters on Maple Street.”
“Ha, this is where you are wrong, Rod,” Veten squinted out into the giggling light before them, a truck streaked by the other way, and he heard a whale like “Arrrrrrrrrrr,” of it’s horn fading off into the darkness with it. “A printed book is not transmitted into space with the satellite, and beyond the satellite, and beyond the fine moon, toward Saturn, and out into the stars you call the Sagittarius constellation and toward the center of the galaxy called Milky Way . . .”
Veten realized he had, perhaps, just relayed too much.
Rod just nodded. “But what does it all mean? Will it make the least bit of sense, or will it be indistinguishable from soap commercials and weather reports, and that’s assuming there is intelligent life out there to even distinguish anything, and big leap of leaps . . . assuming they haven’t blown themselves to bits in the ascent to becoming a race of intelligent and advanced enough beings to make TV receptors to watch what me and Matheson and the crew cooked up about them coming to earth to harvest people . . .”
“Ahh, to serve man!” Veten said, grinning.
“Jesus wept,” Rod sad, shaking his head. “I should have never stepped in front of the camera.”
“I’m sure aliens eat people,” Veten said. “Why not?”
“Uhhhggg.”
“We’d eat aliens if they didn’t look like people, I bet.”
“I think you might be right. . . . so Ted, though not being nosy, I have been called a writer with curiosity . . . what is it you do?”
“I an adjunct professor in history at the university, and I also work in the library.”
“Oh, that’s a good one . . . why they have you doing two jobs?”
“I have one seminar I lecture a semester, so far, and first they hired me in the library, after I came here, so I keep working there. I’m helping set up some of the MARC, the computer catalog stuff, right now.”
“Now this is something,” Rod said. “Did you learn about computers in the Soviet Union.”
“I am pretty much self taught on things. This is fairly simple.”
“I’m sure it isn’t, Ted!”
Rod was right, but Veten couldn’t tell him actually why . . . the weren’t words in English for the cataloging terminal interface he invented.
“Then you were a professor in the USSR, that must have been . . . you defected, didn’t you!” Rod sat straight up, and pointed his cigarette around so it made flowing streaks waving it in the dark air of the Vee Double U bus.
“I did . . . I have.”
“That’s why the university is easing you into the system, no big hub ub, no big deal. You changed you name, then, Ted . . . Vetin . . . don’t tell me what it really is, they think I’m a commie, anyway, even though I fought for this place.”
It was good Veten didn’t need to he had completely forgotten the fake Russian name he was supposed to have had originally before he became the made up name Ted Veten, which, of course, translated as our Man Veten.
“You were in a war, Rod?” Veten said.
“I was, the War, 11th Airborne in the pacific, first they taught me how to fall out of planes without puking, then transferred me to the 511th, handed me an M1 Carbine to shoot some Japanese in the Philippines. Rough stuff. I was no good at it.”
“This calls for more beer!” Veten said just as an open one was handed to him. He realized Rod was talking about World War Two, or . . . WWII.
“I wanted to go to Germany and kill the Nazis, for what we heard they were doing to the Jews, among other things, but they sent me to the ass end of the world. Typical Army procedure. But, really, I realized I didn’t have the stomach for that. I could fall out of plane just great, though. I even tested ejector seats during college.”
“Ha, me too!” Veten said, something that was almost true. He suspected an ejector seat had to do with a rescue vessel of some kind, of which Veten had extensive training in during school, as any galactic crew member needed.
“Do you fly?” Rod said.
“I do, yes,” Veten lied, but didn’t. He thought about the Hapitan Foi, their surface ship, perhaps a little bit similar in controls to a Phantom fighter jet, but he’d only scanned a flight manual of that at the library, and never actually flew the Hapitan Foi. “I was more of a logistics man in the Red army, you know, there were so damn many of us, no match, no match for the Nazis . . .” Veten trailed off.
Rod seemed to buy the explanation, nodding.
He was reminded again of what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Gypsies, and anybody else they wanted erased from their super race. There were not any similar feats of such absolute horror in galactic history that he could recall. And the conflicts that came close were records in ancient history of planet over planet, never beings on one planet annihilating another.
But the Arth had it all. The genocide (no word in Ro) of the Native American Indians, the holocaust of the Jews of Europe, the napalm of children in Vietnam, the firebombing and atom bombing of innocents in World War II . . . it went on and on and that was only three hundred years worth, the core of their recorded history was chapter 1, war, chapter 2, the next war, chapter 3, war more war . . .
Veten sighed.
“Sorry to bring up the war, friend,” Rod said. “I betcha yours was worse than mine.”
Veten just sipped his beer, nodded, pretending he was a dead Russian soldier in the snow like he’s seen in Dr. Zhivago. “I was no good at killing, either, just staying alive.”
Rod held up his bottle, Veten looked at it for a moment, wondering what he was supposed to do, then clinked it.
“What to make of it,” Rod said. “We’re not going to make it, are we?”
It was curious in its bluntness, this question that was always on the tip of Veten’s mind . . . Veten realized he was aiming the bus so the middle line was underneath them, instead of a bit left of the left wheel.
“Make it to Mark Twain’s grave?”
“That too . . .”
“I’ll move it on over,” Veten said, and did.
Rod grinned wide in the glow of headlights coming at them. SWISH, the car was gone.
“Well, Rod, you made it this far,” Veten said, and instantly regretted it.
Did Rod catch it?
How many slip ups were there since it began?
Did he want to tell Rod he was Veten from . . . space. Why did Sheryl even suggest he track him down. It was suddenly seeming wrong, the idea of conferring with the sharp, funny, drunken man . . . what answer was there that he would have, personally, that he didn’t convey in his show. It was already established that many sensible Arth people readily believed in . . .
. . . aliens.
Did he want to let Rod know . . . is that what it was?
It wasn’t for him. It was for him. Proof to the believer . . .
“I guess,” Rod said, finally. “I guess I made it this far. I saw a buddy of mine’s head torn clean off, from a supply crate dropped from our own plane, no less. That could have easily been me. All of it could have.”
It was time.
“I will tell you a story, Rod. Much of it won’t make sense, right now, but when you think about it, later, it will make more.”
“I’m intrigued, Ted!”
“In my library there is a book called the Into the Mysterious Land of Quizon . . .”
“By Joseph Carpenter, I read it as a boy. Imaginative and opium induced, I believe . . .” Rod said.
Veten chuckled. “Well, this book in the library is a first edition, and it has some pages that were left out of the subsequent editions because they were too hard print . . . they looked like jibberish . . . the section with the runes.”
“Ahh . . . the runes,” Rod said. “Perhaps from the Vikings that came over before Columbus.”
“Yes yes . . . a text left behind in a different language waiting to be translated.”
“Oh, but were they jibberish, or Viking words? Or Sandscrit, even? I do see a similarity . . .”
“You are familiar with the runes?”
“I will sheepishly admit that I have first editions of all Carpenter’s books, first editions of Melville, a Moby Dick even with the last page mistakenly left out, making the entire story not make any sense, and one Huck Finn of Twain.”
“Oh, this is great,” Veten said.
“I was making a lot of money, for a while. Still, I got them off of Orson Welles for a bargain. Matheson, he’s one of my writers, bought his black Cadillac Eldorado cheap, too . . . Welles, poor misunderstood genius . . . I digress, go on with the runes . . . ”
“The question is, why would anybody write anything?”
“Oh, uh, well, shit Ted . . . you got me there . . I don’t know.” Rod said, and there was a long pause while he looked out the side window. “I do know. You want to make a mark on this earth, perhaps you know your time is limited, a procreation of sorts, a drive to leave something because . . . something is better than nothing.”
“What does it matter?”
“I’d like to think it does, but . . . one of my deepest fears, is it doesn’t.”
“That’s what the yogi swami guy said,” Veten said. “I went to India with my wife, and met the yogi swami guy, and he spouted the water can of bullshit.”
“Oh, Ted, good to hear it!”
“Let me put this rambling story this way, Rod. The idea that it doesn’t matter, that you are dust blowing back into space to be recycled in another supernova, is a selfish idea, a dangerous idea. A person’s job is actually to contribute, in a small way, but in a way, to the universe, and billions of people doing this make a civilization that will stand the test of time, and hold together for eons.”
“Is . . . is this an idea for a show, or, er . . .” Rod said, looking back out the window.
Veten looked right over at him. “It’s what you have all been working toward, it’s what you are all made of, it’s not ego, it’s survival. I just want to tell you this. It’s no show.”
“Oh, okay. I like it. But I’m going to have to think about it . . . It’s heavy. It’s big. So . . . what was Carpenter doing with the runes?”
“I’m going tell you in a little bit.”
“Okay.”
“You are right, not everyone makes it. To be called a civilization, there are certain criteria. The first is no killing other people, this ties into the second, absolute sharing of resources, which ties into . . . a very high standard of living brought on by phenomenal advances in technology that entirely removes the struggle over resources from human interaction.”
“Sounds like space communism.”
“It is!”
“This what they’re working toward in Russia, but we don’t know?”
“Of course not! Meet the new Tsar, same as the old Tsar!”
“Holy shit, Ted.”
“What I did not know, until this year or so, was the extent technology is advanced through war, the very same technology that will liberate you some day.”
Rod rubbed his chin, staring at Veten, the popped another smoke out of his pack, and lit it up. “That sounds like a conundrum of poor resolution.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Ironic, huh?”
“Yes.”
Rod just nodded. “Who’s going to launch the nukes first?”
“The Americans. It will always be the Americans. The world is afraid of the Americans, a lot of it has to do with the movies, I think. And, they’ve used them before.”
“Is America that suicidal, you think?”
“No, they will win.”
“How? There is no way to win, it’s mutually assured destruction.”
“But it isn’t, Rod, I’ll tell you why. America is the only country that I’ve seen that in some way models the beginnings of a civilization. At least in ideas, not in deed. The ideas will spread, and I think you will have a Russia that will more like America, a China, some day, and India, more like America. Contribution is rewarded, even it its crippled way, with the money and all that, but it is rewarded, and it has not been in the past. This is the key to the absolute phenomenal advancement in the last 200 years, simply put, contribution is rewarded.”
“What about forced labor, like Mao and their recent blast into the twentieth century.”
“A terrible bump in the road.”
“You know he grew alge on his teeth,” Rod said.
“Sour power.”
“Oh yeah!”
“And you have seen this good in some Native American Civilizations, African . . . Aboriginal, smaller units where no one is oppressed, but unfortunately always war to settle difference with others.”
“This is not a utopia,” Rod said. “You’re talking about something else . . . it feels like it makes sense.”
The bus droned on for a moment around them. Veten didn’t remember he was driving, seemed to be doing all right, and Steve McGarret wasn’t behind him or anywhere to be seen on the dark road.
“I never thought of it this way,” Rod said, finally. “A future so alien from the present the scars of the past have completely healed over, a past that we’re heading into right now.”
“Yes,” Veten said, so glad he was so smart.
“A future where it is expected people just do their thing, and no one tells them what to do.”
“No one is the boss, unless they are the ones agreed by most to hold the key decision in a situation, based on assessment of particular skills.”
“No universal agreement?”
“No universal nothing, except people don’t kill each other. Nothing else is ever universally agreed on.”
“People ever die?”
“Yes. They live a long time. People die in accidents, or situations that are out of the realm of control.”
“They explore other planets, of just stick close to home and be?”
“They explore other planets, and determine if the civilization warrants their help, or should be left alone. These left alone worlds almost always self destruct, or are thrown back to earlier phases of existence, or are hit by damaging space bodies, comets, asteroids, solar flares, if their technology hasn’t adapted to deflect the damaging etceteras.”
“That’s a downer. What’s God got to do with any of it?”
“God made the stars, and we’re made up from blown up stars, and that’s it.”
“Sounds just right. How about the soul?”
Veten paused for a moment. Then “The soul belongs to space.”
Rod smiled in the dim light. Then he said, quietly, “What were you going to tell me about the runes, Ted?”
“I knew Joseph Carpenter for many years, his name is Quizon, and he’s a scientist. The runes are actually in a language called Ro, and when it’s written down, it does look a bit like Sanskrit but it isn’t.”
There was a long pause of the bus’s straining engine.
“Oh, that didn’t make any sense . . . Go on, my friend.” Rod said.
“Quizon was very clever, he put a text of Ro in his book, and called it runes, hoping there was a slight chance someone would be able to read it, and if they could, they would realize it was Quizon, in the year 1820, the time he was lost to, and he had finally figured out what and how our accident happened . . . 1820 communicating with 1974, and hopefully 1984 or even 2006, for this is when we actually were heading to Arth, your time, before we had our first accident and were thrown back to what’s called 600 BC and our captain set our gigantic disabled transdimensional ship down on the surface of Seneca lake. We lived there for two years as we tried to get the ship going again, and it had another accident. This scattered every one of us through time. This is what I discovered in the library, one day a few months ago. And if I ended up here, they ended up there, and there, perhaps even in the very same spot, near some rail tracks at the edge for Truman Glen, but at different times.”
There was a long pause. The bus dogged on a big hill, Veten threw it down to second, CRACK! BONK! GRRRRRRRRRR. But then it was okay.
Rod just looked at him, no expression.
Of course . . . if it was going to go badly, there would be a great excuse.
Veten was trashed. Snookered. Blotto. Hammered. Plowed.
Rod was three sheets to the wind, cooked, baked, smashed, and he just sat there in the dim light for quite some time, puffing and staring at Veten.
Finally, in a strong voice, Rod said “Tapetum lucidum.”
“Mmmm?”
“When we were outside pissing in the inlet of Cayuga lake, your eyes lit up like a wolf’s from the light of a distant streetlight.”
“Oh, I . . . yes.” It was the first thing Sheryl noticed too.
“Human beings don’t have this reflective surface on the inside their retinas.”
“I’m a human being,” Veten said.
“Oh. Well then what’s with this story?”
“We’re all human beings.”
“How could that be?”
“We all have a common ancestor.”
“But offspring with slight variations, then.”
“Exactly!”
“And you are smarter.”
“Not by much.”
Rod grinned. “And you sought me out in the worst bar in town so you could tell me this.”
“Yes.”
“How many other people know?”
“A few.”
“Are . . . are you going to do anything . . . about it?”
“I was hoping you might have some ideas about finding the others . . .”
“. . . ahh, the others scattered through time!” Rod sat in the dim light, smoking. His eyes closed. Nodding. “Yes.”
Veten realized he was actually thinking. Thinking it through, drunk as they were, he could see wheels spinning above him, or how ever the saying went.
Finally “What was your job on the ship?” Rod said.
“I . . . well, I was the philosopher.”
“Well shit.” Rod whispered, and held his forehead in his hand, then, originally, looked straight up out the front windshield and up into the sky. “The philosopher. That’s a job. That’s a job where a civilization that isn’t falling apart.” The looked back at Veten. “It was a job here, once.”
“Still is, perhaps.”
“You must think our philosophy is trash.”
“Much like the Arth culture in general, some of it is genius, er . . . galaxy class, and some of it is trash.”
Rod laughed and whacked the dash. “Were you as well regarded as much as I like you?”
“I . . . perhaps.” It was a good question assuming Rod liked him. Veten reasoned there wasn’t many who didn’t like him, if any. This is what would be called blessed on Arth.
“Here is what I think, Ted . . .” Rod said. “If any of them came out ahead of you in time, they will find you. I feel this. I know this. You should do things, write things like Carpenter did, publish. Have articles in the paper, they’ll be archived on microfilm in libraries.”
This was sensible. Veten reasoned as much before, they would go into libraries and scan for him in archives. Or, assuming they’d continue in the direction they seemed to be going, they’d connect their computers together over radio waves or cables and create a mega archive that way. That could be a long way off, though.
They would find him. He was close. The would have to be closer. This confirmation was the exact thing he needed to hear.
He had to wait. It was only 32 years. He remembered 32 years ago like yesterday . . .
0 comments:
Post a Comment