Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

“That won’t help much,” she said. She wasn’t surly, but neither was there much succor in her tone.

He looked at her, and immediately stopped crying.

“Probably just got sucked in here,” she said. It was not quite a question, though it had something of query in it. She knew, and was going carefully.

He continued to look at her, hoping she could tell him what had happened to him. And to her? She was here, too.

“Could be worse,” she said, crossing her arms and shifting her weight off her twisted left leg. “I could’ve been a Saracen or a ribbon clerk or even one of those hairy prehumans.” He didn’t respond. He didn’t know what she was talking about. She smiled wryly, remembering. “First person I met was some kind of a retard, a little boy about fifteen or so. Must have spent what there’ d been of his life in some padded cell or a hospital bed, something like that. He just sat there and stared at me, drooled a little, couldn’t tell me a thing. I was scared out of my mind, ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. Wasn’t till a long time after that before I met someone spoke English.”

He tried to speak and found his throat was dry. His voice came out in a croak. He swallowed and wet his lips. “Are there many other, uh, other people… we’re not all alone… ?”

“Lots of others. Hundreds, thousands, God only knows; maybe whole countries full of people here. No animals, though. They don’t waste it the way we do.”

“Waste it? What?”

“Time, son. Precious, lovely time. That’s all there is, just time. Sweet, flowing time. Animals don’t know about time.”

As she spoke, a slipping shadow of some wild scene whirled past and through them. It was a great city in flames. It seemed more substantial than the vagrant wisps of countryside or sea-scenes that had been ribboning past them as they spoke. The wooden buildings and city towers seemed almost solid enough to crush anything in their path. Flames leaped toward the gray, dead skin sky; enormous tongues of crackling flame that ate the city’s gut and chewed the phantom image, leaving ash. (But even the dead ashes had more life than the grayness through which the vision swirled.)

Ian Ross ducked, frightened. Then it was gone.

“Don’t worry about it, son,” the old woman said. “Looked a lot like London during the big fire. First the plague, then the fire. I’ve seen its like before. Can’t hurt you. None of it can hurt you.”

He tried to stand, found himself still weak. “But what is it?”

She shrugged. “No one’s ever been able to tell me for sure. Bet there’s some around in here who can, though. One day I’ll run into one of them. If I find out and we ever meet again I’ll be sure to let you know. Bound to happen.” But her face grew infinitely sad and there was desolation in her expression. “Maybe. Maybe we’ll meet again. Never happens, but it might. Never saw that retarded boy again. But it might happen.”

She started to walk away, hobbling awkwardly. Ian got to his feet with difficulty, but as quickly as he could. “Hey, wait! Where are you going? Please, lady, don’t leave me here all alone. I’m scared to be here by myself.”

She stopped and turned, tilting oddly on her bad leg. “Got to keep moving. Keep going, you know? If you stay in one place you don’t get anywhere; there’s a way out… you’ve just got to keep moving till you find it.” She started again, saying, over her shoulder, “I guess I won’t be seeing you again; I don’t think it’s likely.”

He ran after her and grabbed her arm. She seemed very startled. As if no one had ever touched her in this place during all the time she had been. here.

“Listen, you’ve got to tell me some things, whatever you know. I’m awfully scared, don’t you understand? You have to have some understanding.”

She looked at him carefully. “ All right, as much as I can, then you’ll let me go?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what happened to me… or to you. Did it all fade away and just disappear, and everything that was left was this, just this gray nothing?”

He nodded.

She sighed. “How old are you, son?”

“I’m thirty-seven. My name is Ian—”

She waved his name away with an impatient gesture. “That doesn’t matter. I can see you don’t know any better than I do. So I don’t have the time to waste on you. You’ll learn that, too. Just keep walking, just keep looking for a way out.”

He made fists. “That doesn’t tell me anything! What was that burning city, what are these shadows that go past all the time?” As if to mark his question a vagrant filmy phantom caravan of cassowarylike animals drifted through them.

She shrugged and sighed. “I think it’s history. I’m not sure… I’m guessing, you understand. But I think it’s all the bits and pieces of the past, going through on its way somewhere.”

He waited. She shrugged again, and her silence indicated—with a kind of helpless appeal to be let go—that she could tell him nothing further.

He nodded resignedly. “All right. Thank you.”

She turned with her bad leg trembling: she had stood with her weight on it for too long. And she started to walk off into the gray limbo. When she was almost out of sight, he found himself able to speak again, and he said… too softly to reach her… “Goodbye, lady. Thank you.”

He wondered how old she was. How long she had been here. If he would one time far from now be like her. If it was allover and if he would wander in shadows forever.

He wondered if people died here.

Before he met Catherine, a long time before he met her, he met the lunatic who told him where he was, what had happened to him, and why it had happened.

They saw each other standing on opposite sides of a particularly vivid phantom of the Battle of Waterloo. The battle raged past them, and through the clash and slaughter of Napoleon’s and Wellington’s forces they waved to each other.

When the sliding vision had rushed by, leaving emptiness between them, the lunatic rushed forward, clapping his hands as if preparing himself for a long, arduous, but pleasurable chore. He was of indeterminate age, but clearly past his middle years. His hair was long and wild, he wore a pair of rimless antique spectacles, and his suit was turn-of-the-eighteenth-century. “Well, well, well,” he called, across the narrowing space between them, “so good to see you, sir!”

Ian Ross was startled. In the timeless time he had wandered through this limbo, he had encountered coolies and Berbers and Thracian traders and silent Goths… an endless stream of hurrying humanity that would neither speak nor stop. This man was something different. Immediately, Ian knew he was insane. But he wanted to talk!

The older man reached Ian and extended his hand. “Cowper, sir. Justinian Cowper. Alchemist, metaphysician, consultant to the forces of time and space, ah yes, time! Do I perceive in you, sir, one only recently come to our little Valhalla, one in need of illumination? Certainly! Definitely, I can see that is the case.”

Ian began to say something, almost anything, in response, but the wildly gesticulating old man pressed on without drawing a breath. “This most recent manifestation, the one we were both privileged to witness was, I’m certain you’re aware, the pivotal moment at Waterloo in which the Little Corporal had his fat chewed good and proper. Fascinating piece of recent history, wouldn’t you say?”

Recent history? Ian started to ask him how long he had been in this gray place, but the old man barely paused before a fresh torrent of words spilled out.

“Stunningly reminiscent of that marvelous scene in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma in which Fabrizio, young, innocent, fresh to that environ, found himself walking across a large meadow on which men were running in all directions, noise, shouts, confusion… and he knew not what was happening, and not till several chapters later do we learn—ah, marvelous!—that it was, in fact, the Battle of Waterloo through which he moved, totally unaware of history in the shaping all around him. He was there, while not there. Precisely our situation, wouldn’t you say?”