Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

He passed a beautiful woman with pale yellow hair and almost white eyebrows who was sitting in company with two nondescript men at a table for four. As Moth came abreast of her, she reached out and touched his arm. “I feel more sorrow for you than animosity,” she said, in a gentle and deep voice. Her words were filled with rich tones.

Moth sat down in the empty chair. The two men seemed not to see him, though they listened to the conversation between Moth and the beautiful woman.

“No one should ever be judged heartless because he tended to his own personal survival,” she said. She held an unlit cigarette in a short holder. One of the men in attendance moved to light it, but she waved him away sharply. Her attention was solidly with Moth.

“I could have saved one of them,” Moth responded. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, as though seeing again a terrible vision from the past. “The fire, the Home ballooning with flames from the windows, the sound of their screams. They were so old, so helpless.”

The pale yellow hair shimmered as the beautiful woman shook her head. “You were only the caretaker of their lives; it wasn’t written on stone that you had to die for them. You were conscientious, you were a good administrator; there was never the slightest impropriety in the Home. But what could you do? You were afraid! Everyone has a secret fear. For some it’s growing old, for others it’s snakes or spiders or being buried alive. Drowning, being laughed at in public, closed-in spaces, being rejected. Everyone has something.”

“I didn’t know it was fire. I swear to God I didn’t realize. But when I came down the hall that night and smelled the smoke, I was paralyzed. I stood there in the hall, just staring at the wire-screen door to the dormitory section. We always kept it locked at night. It wasn’t a jail… it was for their own protection: they were so old, and some of them roamed at night. We couldn’t keep watch all the time, it just wasn’t feasible.”

“I know, I know,” the beautiful woman said, soothing him. “It was for their own protection. They had their television in the dorm, and bathroom facilities. It was lovely up there, just the same as the private rooms on the lower floors. But they roamed, they walked at night; they might fall down stairs or have an attack and there would be no one to help them, no call button for you or an orderly nearby. I understand why you kept the screen locked.”

Moth spread his hands helplessly. He looked this way and that, as if seeking a white light that would release him from the pain of memory. “I smelled the smoke, and as I stood there, not knowing what to do, almost ready to rush forward and unlock the door and go inside, a blast of heat and flame came right through the screen! The heat was so intense I fell back. But even then… even then I would have done something, but the cat…”

The beautiful woman nodded. “It was the sight of the cat that terrified you, that made you suddenly realize it was rue that hid down there in your mind, waiting to possess you. I understand, anyone would understand!”

“I don’t know how it got through the screen. It… it strained itself through, and it was on rue, burning, one of the old woman’s cats. It was on fire. The smell of the fur, the crackling, it was burning like fat in a rue. It screamed, oh God the sound of the screaming, the tail all black and the parts of it bubbling…”

“Don’t!” the beautiful woman said, feeling Moth’s pain. “Don’t torment yourself. You ran. I understand why you ran. There was nothing you could do.”

“No one knew I had had the choice. I stood outside and watched, and once I saw a face at one of the windows. It was wrapped in flames, an old man, his long hair burning. It was ghastly, terrible, I couldn’t bear it. I cried and screamed up at them, and the ones who had escaped, some of the orderlies tried to get back up there, and one of them was killed, when the ceiling fell in. But no one knew I had had a chance to save them, I might have saved them, perhaps only one of them, but I could have done something.”

“No,” the woman with the pale hair reassured him, “no. You would have been burned alive, too. And there had been the cat. No one ever need know.”

“But I know!”

“You survived. That’s what counts.”

“The pain. The knowledge, the pain.”

“It will pass.”

“No. Never.”

One of the two men moved again to light her cigarette. She put the cigarette and the holder on the table. Moth shook himself as if awakening from a nightmare, and stood up. He turned away from the woman and her silent companions. The light in her eyes faded.

Moth walked through the lounge.

The gigantic vessel plowed on through the roiling megaflow jelly, bound for the end of appreciable space, asymptotically struggling toward the verge of time, pulling itself forward inexorably to the precipice of measurable thought. The voyage included only three stops: embarkation, principal debarkation and over the edge. The voyagers sat dull and silent, occasionally sipping off drinks that had been ordered through the punchbutton system on each chair. The only sounds in the lounge were the susurrations as the panels in the tables opened to allow drinks to rise to the surface, the random sounds of fingernails or teeth on glass, and the ever-present hiss of the megaflow as it rampaged past the vessel. Voices could be heard in the boiling jelly, carried through the hull of the vessel, like voices of the dead, whispering for their final hearing, their day in the court of judgment. But no coherent thoughts came with those voices, no actual words, no messages from the beyond that could be of any use to the voyagers within.

Entombed outside time and space and thought, the voyagers sat silently within their trip ship, facing in any direction they chose. Direction did not matter. The vessel only traveled in one direction. And they, within, entombed.

Moth wandered through the lounge, sitting here for a few moments to tell a fat man of how he had taken a girl who worked for him as a secretary away from her husband and children, had set her up in an expensive apartment, and then, weary of her, had left her with the unbreakable lease and no funds, even without a job because it simply isn’t good business to be having an affair with someone who works for you. particularly not with a woman who is so suicide-prone. And he told the fat man how he had set up a trust fund for the children after it was over, after the girl who had worked for him as a secretary had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wandered through the lounge, sitting there for a long time confessing to an old woman with many rings how he had mercilessly used his’ age and illness to bind his sons and daughters to him till long past the time when they could find joyful lives for themselves, with no intention of ever signing over his wealth to them. Wandered through the lounge sitting over there for a time to reveal to a tall, thin chocolate-colored man how he had betrayed the other members of a group to which he had belonged, naming names and, from the dark interior of the back seat of a large automobile, pointing out the ones who had led the movement, and watching as they had been battered to their knees in the rain and the mud, and wincing as the thugs with the lead pipes had smashed in the back of each head, very professionally, very smoothly, only one solid downstroke for each man. Wandered through the lounge and talked to a pretty young girl about the devious mind games he had played with lovers, unnerving them and unsettling them and forcing them to spend all their time trying to dance and sing their dances and songs of life for his amusement, until their dances had degenerated into feeble tremblings and their songs had died away to rattles. Wandered through the lounge being penitent, remorseful, contrite. Sat and recanted, rued, confessed, humbled himself and wept occasionally.