Swanwick, Michael - Radio Waves

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RADIO WAVES

by MICHAEL SWANWICK

[VERSION 1.1 (Apr 22 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version

number by 0.1 and redistribute.]

First published in Omni, Winter 1995.

I was walking the telephone wires upside-down, the sky underfoot cold and flat with a few

hard bright stars sparsely scattered about it, when I thought how it would take only an instant's

weakness to step off to the side and fall up forever into the night. A kind of wildness entered me

then and I began to run.

Electric Motors-Controls-Parts. Then, where the slope steepened, along the curving snake of

rowhouses that went the full quarter mile up to the Ridge. Twice I overtook pedestrians, hunched

and bundled, heads doggedly down, out on incomprehensible errands. They didn't notice me, of

course. They never do. The antenna farm was visible from here. I could see the Seven Sisters

spangled with red lights, dependent on the earth like stalactites. "Where are you running to,

little one?" one tower whispered in a crackling, staticky voice. I think it was Hegemone.

"Fuck off," I said without slackening my pace, and they all chuckled.

Cars mumbled by. This was ravine country, however built up, and the far side of the road, too

steep and rocky for development, was given over to trees and garbage. Hamburger wrappings and

white plastic trash bags rustled in their wake. I was running full-out now.

About a block or so from the Ridge, I stumbled and almost fell. I slapped an arm across a

telephone pole and just managed to catch myself in time. Aghast at my own carelessness, I hung

there, dizzy and alarmed. The ground overhead was black as black, an iron roof, yet somehow was as

anxious as a hound to leap upon me, crush me flat, smear me to nothingness. I stared up at it,

horrified.

Somebody screamed my name.

I turned. A faint blue figure clung to a television antenna atop a small, stuccoed brick

duplex. Charlie's Widow. She pointed an arm that flickered with silver fire down Ripka Street. I

slewed about to see what was coming after me.

It was the Corpsegrinder.

When it saw that I'd spotted it, it put out several more legs, extended a quilled head, and

raised a howl that bounced off the Heaviside layer. My nonexistent blood chilled. In a panic, I

scrambled up and ran toward the Ridge and safety. I had a squat in the old Roxy, and once I was

through the wall, the Corpsegrinder would not follow. Why this should be so, I did not know. But

you learn the rules if you want to survive.

I ran. In the back of my head I could hear the Seven Sisters clucking and gossiping to each

other, radiating television and radio over a few dozen frequencies. Indifferent to my plight.

The Corpsegrinder churned up the wires on a hundred needle-sharp legs. I could feel the ion

surge it kicked up pushing against me as I reached the intersection of Ridge and Leverington. Cars

were pulling up to the pumps at the Atlantic station. Teenagers stood in front of the A-Plus Mini

Market, flicking half-smoked cigarettes into the street, stamping their feet like colts, and

waiting for something to happen. I couldn't help feeling a great longing disdain for them. Every

last one worried about grades and drugs and zits, and all the while snugly barricaded within

hulking fortresses of flesh.

I was scant yards from home. The Roxy was a big old movie palace, fallen into disrepair and

semiconverted to a skateboarding rink which had gone out of business almost immediately. But it

had been a wonderful place once, and the terra-cotta trim was still there: ribbons and river-gods,

great puffing faces with panpipes, guitars, flowers, wyverns. I crossed the Ridge on a dead

telephone wire, spider-web delicate but still usable.

Almost there.

Then the creature was upon me, with a howl of electromagnetic rage that silenced even the

Sisters for an instant. It slammed into my side, a storm of razors and diamond-edged fury, hooks

and claws extended.

I grabbed at a rusty flange on the side of the Roxy.

Too late! Pain exploded within me, a sheet of white nausea. All in an instant I lost the name

of my second daughter, an April morning when the world was new and I was five, a smoky string of

all-nighters in Rensselaer Polytech, the jowly grin of Old Whatsisface the German who lived on

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LaFountain Street, the fresh pain of a sprained ankle out back of a Banana Republic warehouse,

fishing off a yellow rubber raft with my old man on Lake Champlain. All gone, these and a thousand

things more, sucked away, crushed to nothing, beyond retrieval.

Furious as any wounded animal, I fought back. Foul bits of substance splattered under my

fist. The Corpsegrinder reared up to smash me down, and I scrabbled desperately away. Something

tore and gave.

Then I was through the wall and safe and among the bats and gloom.

"Cobb!" the Corpsegrinder shouted. It lashed wildly back and forth, scouring the brick walls

with limbs and teeth, as restless as a March wind, as unpredictable as ball lightning.

For the moment I was safe. But it had seized a part of me, tortured it, and made it a part of

itself. I could no longer delude myself into thinking it was simply going to go away.

"Cahawahawbb!" It broke my name down to a chord of overlapping tones. It had an ugly, muddy voice.

I felt dirtied just listening to it. "Caw--" A pause. "--awbb!"

In a horrified daze I stumbled up the Roxy's curving patterned-tin roof until I found a

section free of bats. Exhausted and dispirited, I slumped down.

"Caw aw aw awb buh buh!"

How had the thing found me? I'd thought I'd left it behind in Manhattan. Had my flight across

the high-tension lines left a trail of some kind? Maybe. Then again, it might have some special

connection with me. To follow me here it must have passed by easier prey. Which implied it had a

grudge against me. Maybe I'd known the Corpsegrinder back when it was human. We could once have

been important to each other. We might have been lovers. It was possible. The world is a stranger

place than I used to believe.

The horror of my existence overtook me then, an acute awareness of the squalor in which I

dwelt, the danger which surrounded me, and the dark mystery informing my universe. I wept for all

that I had lost.

Eventually, the sun rose up like God's own Peterbilt and with a triumphant blare of chromed

trumpets, gently sent all of us creatures of the night to sleep.

When you die, the first thing that happens is that the world turns upside-down. You feel an

overwhelming disorientation and a strange sensation that's not quite pain as the last strands

connecting you to your body part, and then you slip out of physical being and fall from the

planet.

As you fall, you attenuate. Your substance expands and thins, glowing more and more faintly

as you pick up speed. So far as can be told, it's a process that doesn't ever stop. Fainter,

thinner, colder... until you've merged into the substance of everyone else who's ever died, spread

perfectly uniformly through the universal vacuum forever moving toward but never arriving at

absolute zero. Look hard, and the sky is full of the Dead.

Not everyone falls away. Some few are fast-thinking or lucky enough to maintain a tenuous

hold on earthly existence. I was one of the lucky ones. I was working late one night on a proposal

when I had my heart attack. The office was empty. The ceiling had a wire mesh within the plaster

and that's what saved me.

The first response to death is denial. This can't be happening, I thought. I gaped up at the

floor where my body had fallen and would lie undiscovered until morning. My own corpse, pale and

bloodless, wearing a corporate tie and sleeveless gray Angora sweater. Gold Rolex, Sharper Image

desk accessories, and of course I also thought: I died for this? By which of course I meant my

entire life.

So it was in a state of personal and ontological crisis that I wandered across the ceiling to

the location of an old pneumatic message tube, removed and plastered over some 50 years before. I

fell from the seventeenth to the twenty-fifth floor, and I learned a lot in the process. Shaken,

startled, and already beginning to assume the wariness that the afterlife requires, I went to a

window to get a glimpse of the outer world. When I tried to touch the glass, my hand went right

through. I jerked back. Cautiously, I leaned forward so that my head stuck out into the night.

What a wonderful experience Times Square is when you're dead! There is ten times the light a

living being sees. All metal things vibrate with inner life. Electric wires are thin scratches in

the air. Neon sings. The world is filled with strange sights and cries. Everything shifts from

beauty to beauty.

Something that looked like a cross between a dragon and a wisp of smoke was feeding in the

Square. But it was lost among so many wonders that I gave it no particular thought.

Night again. I awoke with Led Zeppelin playing in the back of my head. Stairway to Heaven.

Again. It can be a long wait between Dead Milkmen cuts.

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