Harlan Ellison - Approaching Oblivion - Road Signs On the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow

Redditch turned back to the teleidoscope, the tanger, the sensu, the catcheye and the straight black tunnel that showed him their world burning. The solar prominences had died away to self-satisfied blandness; unctuous. There was little out there now but smoldering ash, but the sensu was still getting a reading high into the nines and the teleidoscope was turning it, turning it, combining colors and sending them back in some new spectral spectrum. He raised the drink to his lips, but he could not taste it. The tanger overrode, even in the control compartment. It was the smack of salt-rising bread and salamanders.

A rolling checker came out of its bay and made its way through the coils of readout sheets littering the deck. Redditch had designed and combined and set up the nova with great care, and the sheets had endlessly tongued out of the aesthetikon and he had let them lie. The checker got through the tangle and palmed open the hookup compartment and re-attached the feed to stateroom 611. But it hardly mattered: the clients in 611 had played gin rummy straight through the program. The checker returned to its bay.

Redditch downed the last of his drink, ran his tongue around the rim of the hollow crystal, and set it down on the console. He sighed and rubbed his weary, itching eyes. He was tired from the inside-out to the very tips of his fingers. And now, the Designer…

When he emerged from the dropshaft and walked through the theater lounge, a blustery purple-class voyager and a fat duchess with sausage fingers and noisy rings greeted him, congratulated him on the performance, offered him social congress. The man was probably a salesman of myth-sticks, and the woman was clearly a remittance relative. He smiled and thanked them and hurried on through the theater. A clique still plugged into their tunnel applauded him, and he acknowledged their appreciation with a vague gesture of his sensor hand. It sparkled with reflected light from the overhead inkys.

Whores were busily trying to drum up some business, trying to catch a few voyagers who had absorbed the empathy of the programmed death and who were, at least for the moment, “alive.”

They were having a rough time of it. One lithe creature with a charged ring through the lips of her vagina, was trying with all the powers at her command to get a thin, salivating messenger to buy her favors. She was bent over him, her hand inside his chiton, massaging his privates. But his eyes were rolled up in their sockets and Redditch would have taken odds her till and her ring would go empty.

A tag-team, two black-and-ochre Sedalians, had a suety emissary trapped deep in his formfit. One of them had pulled off his embassy pouch and sash, and had lowered herself onto his body. It seemed unlikely she would be able to get him erect enough for insertion, and her sister was tonguing one of the several underarm vaginas the man had had surgically added to his grotesque bulk. While they worked over him, Redditch passed and heard the man mumbling, “Don't be ridiculous, this is ridiculous, my sperm brings a thousand a decaliter, I'm certainly not going to give it away and pay you for the privilege.” Redditch quite agreed. He wondered why the ship's comptrollers continued to hire on whores; they were virtually an anachronism, holdover from centuries before. They certainly couldn't be doing enough business to warrant their continued employment.

He kept walking. Once, after a long programming, he had passed through the theater and one of the new whores, a lanky young man with pustules, had propositioned him. Redditch had laughed and there'd been some repercussions with the Guild, until the Designer had straightened out the matter.

He saw her sitting alone, and when she looked up at him as he approached, the singular beauty contained in her face, particularly her slanted eyes, made him slow his pace. Her right arm was lying along the rest, and she bent it at the elbow, raising the slim-fingered hand. It was enough to stop him.

“You programmed the death?” she said, with no rising inflection. He nodded, smiling in a sudden rush of anticipation of her congratulations. She looked away.

He felt as though something had been stolen from him.

The Designer was lying out in a leaf chair that moved idly in its free-fall nimbus. Every eye in his forehead row was closed, but Redditch could tell he was perceiving his surroundings by the fibrillation of root threads that spiked his cheek-pouches. Crystals of ergonovine sparkled amid the threads. The Designer's backers were seated around the observatory suite.

“Come in,” the Designer said. The leaf chair moved.

“I'm in.” He slumped into a composeat and punched out tranquilizers and an antacid. He wanted to stay calm through it all. Outside the observatory cycle ports the nova phased through from yellow ochre to gold as he watched. '.Something on your mind, Keltin?”

The Designer opened three yes eyes.

“Where must your mind be?” He said it with carefully chilled contempt. A greenperson hovered just beyond the nimbus, unnecessarily translating the tone in colors.

Redditch yawned. “Madison Square Garden, a 1932 Paramount Pictures release starring Jack Oakie, Marian Nixon, Zasu Pitts, William Boyd and Lew Cody. ‘A romantic, dramatic story of three men and two girls fighting desperately to rout the mechanism of unseen forces.' Running time, seventy-six minutes.”

One of the backers threw his drink at the bulkhead. He started to shout something, but a checker emerged from its bay and caught the crystal before it hit, sucking up every drop of fluid before it could stain the grass. The backer turned away in frustration.

The Designer opened a no eye. “There are clauses in your contract, Redditch.”

Redditch nodded. “But you won't use them.”

He only wished Keltin would relieve him. Far chance.

Another of the backers, a florid man with a thrilled and dyed topknot, hunched forward. “You can't possibly call that death viable? Sparks, man, there were actually paying guests sleeping through it. I saw a monitor estimate that had thirty-two per cent, that's thirty-two per cent of the audience into the sevens with boredom! How the hell do you expect us to drain off enough empathy to syndicate this…this abort you call a death?”

Redditch sighed. “Stop inviting your relatives to the premieres and perhaps we'll get a few guests onboard who can still feel something.”

“I don't have to take this!” the backer shouted.

“That's true,” Redditch said. The tranquilizers were holding.

“That's true,” said the Designer, meaning something else entirely. “Let me handle this, Mr. Nym. If you please.”

“Stars!” Mr. Nym said. He turned away. Now there were two looking out the cycle ports.

“Redditch, this isn't the first inadequate job you've programmed. The Faraway Forever program. The Rightful Loss program. Others.”

“Maybe I'm bored.”

“We're all bored, dammit,” said a third backer. He had his hands clasped in his lap.

“I spend considerable time designing these deaths,” the Designer continued, “and I cannot permit my work to be underdone this way. These gentlemen have very legitimate complaints. Their audiences are waiting for the syndication of what we mount out here; their business is providing their audiences with top-grade empathy material. When it goes to you from my workshop, it's right. When it's actualized it lacks verve, pace, timing. There are clauses in your contract. I won't tell you again.”

Redditch rose. “Don't. Refer it to my Guild.” He turned and left.

Behind him, all three backers were staring out the cycle ports as the nova phased to deep purple. His soul was quiet.

He strode through the theater lounge quickly, no glance left, no glance right. If he was going to sedate and blot, he would do it alone.