Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

The ten thousand bartered at the very best rate of interest. Caveat emptor. They traded toys for time. Time against the onrush of nothingness; time as heat-energy; time as a weapon, the only weapon that could halt the Mad Conqueror, Entropy. What was it the young man had said? What’s in it for you?

Everything.

Survival. Existence. Life. Being. Everything.

Purchasable only in The Shoppe of Wonders.

“She’ll be a long time coming out,” said a voice beside him. Lhayne heard the voice, but was too overcome with the sight of Ahna, too mortified by what he had done, too sunk in his own thoughts of the past, the present, the hopelessness of a future without her to comprehend what had been said.

He looked the wrong way. Then he looked to his left and saw the old woman. She had obviously chosen to remain an old woman, had not bothered reassembling herself into a younger body. “I beg your pardon,” he said.

“I see her counter’s way down,” the old woman said, moving closer to the erg counter and scrutinizing it very carefully. “My son’s in the next vault. I come here every chance I get. I know he can’t hear me but I come and stand and talk to him; I tell him it won’t be much longer.”

Lhayne looked around at the next vault. The erg counter was only a hair below full. How long had this old woman been working to buy her son’s freedom? She looked five thousand years old.

“All he needs is one little boost and I can get him out,” she said. There was a tone beneath the tone in her voice. “You know, such a little boost wouldn’t make much difference to you, and your lady. She has such a long way to go….”

He knew what she wanted. They hung around the vaults night and day. Beggars of time.

“Leave me alone,” he said, turning back to Ahna’s lovely sleeping face.

“You wouldn’t keep a mother from her only son, would you? I can see what a good person you are, how much you love your lady….”

“Get away from me, you thug!” he screamed.

The old woman snarled something obscene and her atoms began to shift. She re-formed. She was younger than Lhayne, and wickedly beautiful, with a hunger in her face that he knew could only be assuaged by the man in the vault.

“You’d better let me take that boost,” she said, the hunger in her face distorting her beautiful features. “Or I’ll make you sorry you ever lived!”

It was idle malevolence, utterly without possibility of being implemented. They were immortal, replenishable, inviolate against assault. But she had clearly gone mad, and the sight of the naked lunacy terrified Lhayne. He had seen other examples of this imprisoned madness. They were all going crazy, out here where time and space came to an end and the pressure from outside could be felt as filth on the skin. He wondered if what he had done with that foul little young man in the shoppe was his most recent manifestation of insanity.

He started to edge away from her. Goodbye. Ahna.

This beggar of time had blighted his moment with Ahna. He hated her. But could do nothing to get even with her.

And why should he bother? Her misery was far greater than any he could impose. Goodbye. Ahna. Goodbye.

He ran away from the screaming beggar, with her voice echoing foulnesses down the crystal corridors.

When he returned to the shoppe, one of the Supervisors was waiting for him.

“I’ve been looking through your ledger,” the Supervisor said. Lhayne had no idea which one this was; it might have been Dorell or Keys or even Kathrhn with her atoms rearranged to form a blank mask without features. “Your last trip produced some variations in the megaflow that could not be ignored. Why did you do it? You certainly couldn’t have thought you’d get away with it?”

“I read his mind. He was a filthy little scum.”

“Nonetheless!”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“This isn’t a game, friend Lhayne. This is survival.”

“It’s always survival. But not necessarily Art.”

“Oh yes. I’d forgotten. You’re still calling yourself an artist, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I am. It’s the correct word.”

The Supervisor snickered. There were no features to the mask, so it was impossible to tell how much of a sneer accompanied the sound. “Correct? Perhaps operable is what you mean. An Artist who is himself the Art. Standing in a public place and letting rain wash over you, and calling it ‘Rebirth.’ Crawling through broken glass till your. body is torn and calling it ‘The Eternal Apollonian-Dionysian Conflict.’ I suppose that’s Art.”

“I don’t tell you how to supervise.”

“Art criticism is as old as Art.”

“I rearrange the universe. That is the nature of my Art.”

“No, friend Lhayne. We all rearrange the universe. What’s left of it. The ten thousand of us, here at the end of time. That is the nature of survival.”

“My personal universe, then. I rearrange that.”

The Supervisor picked up the ledger. “But you may not rearrange it for the rest of us. We are all precariously balanced; we each pay our way; there is no room for self-indulgence.”

“No room for freedom, you mean.”

“There is no freedom in oblivion.” The Supervisor shoved the ledger toward Lhayne. “These gave us our freedom.”

The ledger was filled, page after page. Deals. Sales. Time bought with toys. The ability to mold a bear out of clay, the artistic eye, and the basis of god-worship… sold to a nameless australopithecene in South Africa. The “way of seeing” that turned a pointed stick used for scratching in the earth into the first spear… sold to a bright-eyed Neanderthaler in Pleistocene Prussia. The ultimate weapon, gunpowder, sold to a mandarin warlord in Choukoutien village. Godsight, sold to Joan of Arc. The concept of the assembly-line, sold to Henry Ford. Page after page, line after filled line, each one signed with a smeared name or illiterate mark of identification. Signed as if the quill had been dipped in some watery, vital fluid more binding than blood, some fluid that might serve as an energy conductor. Michelangelo, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Pasteur, Méliès, Freud, Jefferson, Roger Williams, Confucius. Names, thousands of names that meant nothing against the pull of the Infinite Dark Mass save as moments of rearranged time that bought survival.

Lhayne stared numbly at the ledger and knew he had been wrong. The madness he had seen in the beggar of time in the corridor of the vaults had possessed him, might soon possess them all. And then what point was there to survival?

He wanted to say I’m sorry. but the artist in him would not let the words emerge. It was stronger than the frail human being that contained the artistic spirit. It knew there was only one thing that stood between humanity and the engorgement of the Infinite Dark Mass. And it was not merely the frantic need to survive. There was survival… and there was something finer, greater beyond survival. What was existence without Art? Empty as the Infinite Dark Mass that gnawed at the perimeters of Rubble Point.

“Your trips are ended,” the Supervisor said.

It was said without feeling, but a tone crept through from behind the mask.

“I’ll find another way of buying her freedom. She deserves to live.”

“No doubt.”

“I’ll find another way.”

“I think not, friend Lhayne. Your own account will be overdrawn because of this.” He pointed to the last entry… the young man who had bought the powerstone for two dollars and a measure of the past. “I’m afraid there’s a vault waiting for you.”

Lhayne wanted to beg him, Put me in the vault beside her ; there’s one about to be emptied right beside Ahna. But the Supervisor was already making a sign in the air. Lhayne’s body began to bubble and scintillate. Then it was gone.