Harlan Ellison: Shatterday

People moved in the darkness, rearranging themselves. He could not tell if they were carrying on conversations in the darkness, he could hear no voices, only the faint sound of fog whispering around the shadowed shapes. Were they coupling, was this some bizarre orgy? No, there was no frenetic energy being expended, no special writhing that one knew as sexual activity, even in darkness.

But they were all watching him now. He felt utterly alone among them. He was not one of them, they had not been waiting for him, their eyes did not shine.

She was still watching him, still smiling.

“Did you touch me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No one touched you.”

“I’m sure someone—”

“No one touched you.” She watched him, the smile more than an answer, considerably less than a question. “No one here touched you. No one here wants anything from you.”

A man spoke from behind him, saying something Brubaker could not make out. He turned away from the woman with the serious smile, trying to locate the man in the darkness. His light fell on a man lying in the fog, resting back on his elbows. There was something familiar about him, but Brubaker could not place it; something from the past, like a specific word for a specific thing that just fitted perfectly and could be recalled if he thought of nothing else.

“Did you say something?”

The man looked at him with what seemed to be concern. “I said: you deserve better.”

“If you say so.”

“No, if you say so. That’s one of the three things you most need to understand.”

“Three things?”

“You deserve better. Everyone deserves better.”

Brubaker did not understand. He was here in a place that seemed without substance or attachment to real time, speaking plainly to people who were—he now realized—naked—and why had he not realized it before?—and he did not wonder about it; neither did he understand what they were saying to him.

“What are the other two things I need to know?” he asked the man.

But it was a woman in the darkness who answered. Yet another woman than the one with the smile. “No one should live in fear,” she said, from the fog, and he skimmed his light around to find her. She had a harelip.

“Do you mean me? That I live in fear?”

“No one should live like that,” she said. “It isn’t necessary. It can be overcome. Courage is as easy to replicate as cowardice. You need only practice. Do it once, then twice, and the third time it’s easier, and the fourth time a matter of course, and after that it’s done without even consideration. Fear washes away and everything is possible.”

He wanted to settle down among them. He felt one with them now. But they made no move to invite him in. He was something they did not want among them.

“Who are you all?”

“We thought you knew,” said the woman with the smile. He recognized her voice. It came and went in rises and falls of tone, as though speaking over a bad telephone connection, incomplete, partial. He felt he might be missing parts of the conversation.

“No, I have no idea,” he said.

“You’ll be leaving now,” she said. He shone the light on her. Her eyes were milky with cataracts.

His light swept across them. They were all malformed in some way or other. Hairless, blind, atrophied, ruined. But he did not know who they were.

His light went out.

The dark shape seemed to be withdrawing from around him. The fog and mist swarmed and swirled away, and he was left standing in darkness on the East River. A vagrant whisper of one of their voices came to him as the dark shape moved off downriver: “You’d better hurry.”

He felt water lapping at his ankles, and he hurried back toward the concrete breakwall. By the time he reached it, he was swimming. The wind had died away, but he shivered with the chill of the water that soaked his clothes.

He pulled himself up the face of the wall and lay on the ledge gasping for breath.

“May I help you?” he heard someone say.

A hand touched his shoulder. He looked up and saw a woman in a long beige duster coat. She was kneeling down, deeply concerned.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself, “ he heard himself say.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I just thought you might need a hand up out of the water.”

“Yes,” he said, “I could use a hand.”

She helped him up. The headache seemed to be leaving him. He heard someone speak, far out on the river, and he looked at her. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes,” she said, “someone spoke. It must be one of those tricks of echo.”

“I’m sure that’s what it was,” he said.

“Do you need something to warm you up?” she asked. “I live right over there in that building. Some coffee?”

“Yes,” he said, allowing her to help him up the slope. “I need something to warm me up.”

Whatever you need in life you must go and get, had been the words from out there on the river where the lost bits of himself were doomed to sail forever. Damaged, forlorn; but no longer bound to him. He seemed to be able to see more clearly now.

And he went with her, for a while, for a long while or a short while; but he went to get something to warm him; he went to get what he needed.

I have nothing to say about this story.

D-12 IN BIN 39.

M-1 in Bin 85.

00-87 in Bin 506.

We stand here tonight paying our last respects to him. One of those who committed their bodies at birth to our defense. One of those who had no hope for the future, no hope for real or lasting joy; one of those who said, with every breath he ever drew, “I’ll stand between.” Of what use are words from me? Words, mere words, mean nothing. He served. Again: he served. And died for it. So we meet to pay last respects, to conduct a funeral for someone who denied himself all his life that we might live. What is there to say in behalf of someone like Alan Pryor that hasn’t been said of his like since the brave first died? What is there to say about an Alan Pryor that won’t sound stupid and mawkish and ridiculously melodramatic? He knew what lay ahead of him and not once, at no point of decision when he might have freely chosen to live like everyone else, did he turn away and give up the task of being paladin to us all. There aren’t enough thanks in the world for Alan Pryor. But still we meet here for this polite ceremony, and hope it will suffice. It won’t, of course, but we still hope.

L-4 in Bin 55.

He was seven years old when it really began for him. When he was born the hospital ran the tests required by the government security agency, and his dossier fiche had been flagged potential sensitive. But his mother and father had been horrified at the suggestion he be sold to the training school, and refused to release him. So the government had politely thanked them for their time, apologized for having inconvenienced them in any smallest way, and put Alan’s name in the wait file.

And when Alan reached age seven, things changed radically. His parents had come on hard times. What had been a promising career for Alan’s father had somehow, inexplicably, gone sour at every little juncture where it might have led to better things. There was no reason for it; not even Alan’s mother’s frequent paranoid delusions that the government was behind it made any sense. Things just went sour. And they were constantly pressed.

And he was seven years old when he had the accident.

On the school playground, positioned as far left seeker in a sandlot game of kinneys-and-trespass, he had not seen the great birdlike shadow that had swiftly fallen over him, and even as his friends had screamed look out, Al, one of those senseless freak accidents had occurred. The pak on a jitney had failed, the craft had fallen out of the sky, and crushed the child beneath its rotors at impact.