Michael Bishop - The Quickening

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The Quickening

Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop seems to be that rare creature, a modest writer. In response to a request for

biographical information, he responds only that this Nebula is the first fiction award he has won,

though he has been on the final ballot for both Nebula and Hugo awards in the past, and that his

most recent books are No Enemy but Time, from Timescape, One Winter in Eden, a short-story

collection, and What Made Stevie Crye? his first horror novel, both from Arkham House.

Lawson came out of his sleep feeling drugged and disoriented. Instead of the susurrus of traffic

on Rivermont and the early morning barking of dogs, he heard running feet and an unsettling

orchestration of moans and cries. No curtains screened or softened the sun that beat down on his

face, and an incandescent blueness had replaced their ceiling. "Marlena," Lawson said doubtfully.

He wondered if one of the children was

sick and told himself that he ought to get up to help.

But when he tried to rise, scraping the back of his hand on a stone set firmly in mortar,

he found that his bed had become a parapet beside a river flowing through an unfamiliar city. He

was wearing, instead of the green Chinese-peasant pajamas that Marlena had given him for

Christmas, a suit of khaki 1505s from his days in the Air Force and a pair of ragged Converse

sneakers. Clumsily, as if deserting a mortuary slab, Lawson leapt away from the wall. In his

sleep, the world had turned over. The forms of a bewildered anarchy had begun to assert

themselves.

The city-and Lawson knew that it sure as hell wasn't Lynchburg, that the river running

through it wasn't the James-was full of people. A few, their expressions terrified and their

postures defensive, were padding past Lawson on the boulevard beside the parapet. Many shrieked or

babbled as they ran. Other human shapes, dressed not even remotely alike, were lifting themselves

bemusedly from paving stones, or riverside benches, or the gutter beyond the sidewalk. Their

grogginess and their swiftly congealing fear, Lawson realized, mirrored his own: like him, these

people were awakening to nightmare.

Because the terrible fact of his displacement seemed more important than the myriad

physical details confronting him, it was hard to take in everything at once-but Lawson tried to

balance and integrate what he saw.

The city was foreign. Its architecture was a clash of the Gothic and the sterile, pseudo-

adobe Modern, one style to either side of the river. On this side, palm trees waved their dreamy

fronds at precise intervals along the boulevard, and toward the city's interior an intricate

cathedral tower defined by its great height nearly everything beneath it. Already the sun crackled

off the rose-colored tower with an arid fierceness that struck Lawson, who had never been abroad,

as Mediterranean .... Off to his left was a bridge leading into a more modern quarter of the city,

where beige and brick-red high-

rises clustered like tombstones. On both sides of the bridge buses, taxicabs, and other sorts of

motorized vehicles were stalled or abandoned in the thoroughfares.

Unfamiliar, Lawson reflected, but not unearthly-he recognized things, saw the imprint of a

culture somewhat akin to his own. And, for a moment, he let the inanimate bulk of the city and the

languor of its palms and bougainvillea crowd out of his vision the human horror show taking place

in the streets.

A dark woman in a sari hurried past. Lawson lifted his hand to her. Dredging up a remnant

of a high-school language course, he shouted, "iHabla Espanol?" The woman quickened her pace,

crossed the street, recrossed it, crossed it again; her movements were random, motivated, it

seemed, by panic and the complicated need to do something.

At a black man in a loincloth farther down the parapet, Law son shouted, "This is Spain!

We're somewhere in Spain! That's all I know! Do you speak English? Spanish? Do you know what's

happened to us?"

The black man, grimacing so that his skin went taut across his cheekbones, flattened

himself atop the wall like a lizard. His elbows jutted, his eyes narrowed to slits. Watching him,

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Lawson perceived that the man was listening intently to a sound that had been steadily rising in

volume ever since Lawson had opened his eyes: the city was wailing. From courtyards, apartment

buildings, taverns, and plazas, an eerie and discordant wail was rising into the bland blue

indifference of the day. It consisted of many strains. The Negro in the loincloth seemed

determined to separate these and pick out the ones that spoke most directly to him. He tilted his

head.

"Spain!" Lawson yelled against this uproar. "i Espana!"

The black man looked at Lawson, but the hieroglyph of recognition was not among those that

glinted in his eyes. As if to dislodge the wailing of the city, he shook his head. Then, still

crouching lizard-fashion on the wall, he began methodically banging his head against its stones.

Lawson, helplessly

aghast, watched him until he had knocked himself insensible

in a sickening, repetitive spattering of blood.

But Lawson was the only one who watched. When he approached the man to see if he had

killed himself, Lawson's eyes were seduced away from the African by a movement in the river. A

bundle of some sort was floating in the greasy waters below the wall-an infant, clad only in a

shirt. The tiestrings on the shirt trailed out behind the child like the severed, wavering legs of

a water-walker. Lawson wondered if, in Spain, they even had water-walkers ....

Meanwhile, still growing in volume, there crooned above the high-rises and Moorish gardens

the impotent air-raid siren of 400,000 human voices. Lawson cursed the sound. Then he covered his

face and wept.

The city was Seville. The river was the Guadalquivir. Lynchburg and the James River, around which

Lawson had grown up as the eldest child of an itinerant fundamentalist preacher, were several

thousand miles and one helluva big ocean away. You couldn't get there by swimming, and if you

imagined that your loved ones would be waiting for you when you got back, you were probably

fantasizing the nature of the world's changed reality. No one was where he or she belonged

anymore, and Lawson knew himself lucky even to realize where he was. Most of the dispossessed,

displaced people inhabiting Seville today didn't know that much; all they knew was the intolerable

cruelty of their uprooting, the pain of separation from husbands, wives, children, lovers,

friends. These things, and fear.

The bodies of infants floated in the Guadalquivir; and Lawson, from his early

reconnoiterings of the city on a motor scooter that he had found near the Jardines de Cristina

park, knew that thousands of adults already lay dead on streets and in apartment buildings-victims

of panic-inspired beatings on

their own traumatized hearts. Who knew exactly what was going on in the morning's chaos? Babel had

come again and with it, as part of the package, the utter dissolution of all family and societal

ties. You couldn't go around a corner without encountering a child of some exotic ethnic caste,

her face snot-glazed, sobbing loudly or maybe running through a crush of bodies calling out names

in an alien tongue.

What were you supposed to do? Wheeling by on his motor scooter, Lawson either ignored

these children or searched their faces to see how much they resembled his daughters.

Where was Marlena now? Where were Karen and Hannah? Just as he played deaf to the cries of

the children in the boulevards, Lawson had to harden himself against the implications of these

questions. As dialects of German, Chinese, Bantu, Russian, Celtic, and a hundred other languages

rattled in his ears, his scooter rattled .past a host of cars and buses with uncertain-seeming

drivers at their wheels. Probably he too should have chosen an enclosed vehicle. If these

frustrated and angry drivers, raging in polyglot defiance, decided to run over him, they could do

so with impunity. Who would stop them?

Maybe-in Istanbul, or La Paz, or Mangalore, or Jonkoping, or Boise City, or Kaesong-his

own wife and children had already lost their lives to people made murderous by fear or the absence

of helmeted men with pistols and billy sticks. Maybe Marlena and his children were dead ....

I'm in Seville, Lawson told himself, cruising. He had determined the name of the city soon

after mounting the motor scooter and going by a sign that said Plaza de Toros de Sevilla. A

circular stadium of considerable size near the river. The bullring. Lawson's Spanish was just good

enough to decipher the signs and posters plastered on its walls. Corrida a las cinco de la tarde.

(Garcia Lorca, he thought, unsure of where the name had come from.) Sombra y sol. That morning,

then, he took the scooter around the stadium three or four times and then shot off toward the

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Michael Bishop - The Quickening

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