Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

“You know,” she said, “I had always figured that, when all the stats were totted up and the final games were flown, you and I would find a shared understanding in our common enthusiasm for human-controlled — ”

All in an instant, she pushed forward, wrapped her arms around her opponent, and let their shared momentum carry them over the edge.

Radio instantly fell to the deck again and found herself scrambling across it to the edge on all fours. Gripping the rim of the flight decking with spasmodic strength, she forced herself to look over. Far below, two conjoined specks tumbled in a final flight to the earth.

She heard a distant scream — no, she heard laughter.

Radio managed to hold herself together through the endless ceremonies of a military funeral. To tell the truth, the pomp and ceremony of it — the horse-drawn hearse, the autogyro fly-by, the lines of dignitaries and endlessly droning eulogies in the Cathedral — simply bored her to distraction. There were a couple of times when Mack had to nudge her because she was falling asleep. Also, she had to wear a dress and, sure as shooting, any of her friends who saw her in it were going to give her a royal ribbing about it when next they met.

But then came the burial. As soon as the first shovel of dirt rattled down on the coffin, Radio began blubbering like a punk. Fat Edna passed her a lace hanky — who’d even known she had such a thing? — and she mopped at her eyes and wailed.

When the last of the earth had been tamped down on the grave, and the priest turned away, and the mourners began to break up, Radio felt a hand on her shoulder. It was, of all people, Rudy the Red. He looked none the worse for his weeklong vacation from the flesh.

“Rudy,” she said, “is that a suit you’re wearing?”

“It is not the uniform of the oppressor anymore. A new age has begun, Radio, an age not of hierarchic rule by an oligarchy of detached, unfeeling intellects, but of horizontally structured human cooperation. No longer will workers and managers be kept apart and treated differently from one another. Thanks to the selfless sacrifice of — ”

“Yeah, I heard the speech you gave in the Cathedral.”

“You did?” Rudy looked strangely pleased.

“Well, mostly. I mighta slept through some of it. Listen, Rudy, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but people are still gonna be people, you know. You’re all wound up to create this Big Rock Candy Mountain of a society, and good for you. Only — you gotta be prepared for the possibility that it won’t work. I mean, ask any engineer, that’s just the way things are. They don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.”

“Then I guess we’ll just have to wing it, huh?” Rudy flashed a wry grin. Then, abruptly, his expression turned serious, and he said the very last thing in the world she would have expected to come out of his mouth: “How are you doing?”

“Not so good. I feel like a ton of bricks was dropped on me.” She felt around for Edna’s hanky, but she’d lost it somewhere. So she wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “You want to know what’s the real kicker? I hardly knew Amelia. So I don’t even know why I should feel so bad.”

Rudy took her arm. “Come with me a minute. Let me show you something.”

He led her to a gravestone that was laid down to one side of the grave, to be erected when everyone was gone. It took a second for Radio to read the inscription. “Hey! It’s just a quotation. Amelia’s name ain’t even on it. That’s crazy.”

“She left instructions for what it would say quite some time ago. I gather that’s not uncommon for flyers. But I can’t help feeling it’s a message.”

Radio stared at the words on the stone for very long time. Then she said, “Yeah, I see what you mean. But, ya know, I think it’s a different message than what she thought it would be.”

The rain, which had been drizzling off and on during the burial, began in earnest. Rudy shook out his umbrella and opened it over them both. They joined the other mourners, who were scurrying away in streams and rivulets, pouring from the cemetery exits and into the slidewalk stations and the vacuum trains, going back home to their lives and families, to boiled cabbage and schooners of pilsner, to their jobs, and their hopes, and their heartbreaks, to the vast, unknowable, and perfectly ordinary continent of the future. It followed that the victory would belong to him who was calmest, who shot best, and who had the cleverest brain in a moment of danger. — Baron Manfred von Richthofen (1892–1918)

He was in the library. It was quiet. No guns. No mud. He could crawl in peace, as long as he didn’t make any noise. Mrs. Dientz, the librarian, wouldn’t allow noise.

Ed was worried that he would get dirt in his wound, and it would get infected. The library is full of fungus, like a locker room: you can get athlete’s foot in places you would never put your feet. Wet, too. It was raining, a hot tropical rain, but he was cold and it didn’t warm him. In the library, there was a bamboo umbrella stand that always had a couple of umbrellas in it, no matter what the weather, and a mahogany rack with a pair of rubbers. Maybe he could borrow them. He’d return them. He needed them right now, that was all. The jungle was always so wet. He had forgotten his rubbers, and he needed to get home.

The rain stopped, and steam rose from the dirt. He kept crawling. The mud, thick as peanut butter, smelled like chocolate and skunk cabbage. Large, leathery leaves brushed wet against his head and shoulders as he pushed through them.

His leg was broken, he knew it, and it was chewed all to hell. Bullets from their own gun, captured by the Japs, in one leg, shrapnel from somebody’s mortar — Jap? Yank? Who knew whose? — in the other. His fatigues were torn up and soaked with blood, and there were little ants crawling on them. The jungle wouldn’t even wait for him to die.

The library was cool and quiet, and Ed was talking to Katie. He was whispering, because they were in the library, but he was all muddy because they were in the jungle. He was asking her a question. Had she ever wondered what it would be like to have all the money she could imagine? Just squander it, spend it wildly on everything she wanted? He used to wonder about money, before he joined the Marines, before he shipped out. How did you ever get enough, and what did you do when you got it? Katie was looking at him very seriously, and she nodded her head a little, not like she had ever wondered such a thing, but like she was encouraging him to keep talking. “Well, darling,” he said to her, “this leave I have is our fortune. Let’s spend it like we’ve never spent thirty days before, and just as though we’ll never have thirty days to spend again.”

Did he make that up himself, or did he hear it in a movie? It didn’t sound like a movie with a happy ending. In movies, the soldiers who said things like that always got shot. He hadn’t even said that to Katie, but he got shot anyway. If he ever got another leave, he would be spending it in Australia or New Zealand with a bunch of other leathernecks, not in the South Weymouth public library with his girl.

He sure wanted to see Katie again. He wanted to see his dad and his sister and his librarian. He wanted to tell Katie the things he had never told her except in letters from halfway around the world. He hadn’t even told her that he loved her. It’s the kind of thing you want to say in person.

Ed wouldn’t have gotten shot, except that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t his job to carry ammunition to the guns, but sometimes there’s things that have to be done, and you do them. The day before, the company had cleared an area of underbrush, leaving the tall trees as cover against air attack, and dug themselves in for their first night on the island. It was raining, of course. It rained and rained in this place. Ed dug himself a hole, shared rations with the guys in the holes on either side of him, hunched under his poncho, and managed to get some shut-eye before his watch.