Dodd once had a lover named Leslie whom he’d wanted to marry, who wanted children. She and Dodd saw things from the same point of view. It was like a female version of himself, and they were so natural together, so comfortable. He never told her he wanted to marry her, he never suggested they have a child – Dodd had no idea why, he just didn’t. She accepted a once-in-a-lifetime job offer and went away, and now she was married to some super-terranean that took her on cruises through the rings of Saturn and was wealthy beyond belief. Intelligence on her part, stupidity on his. She would have stayed if he had asked her too, but she would have been stuck with him and his normal little life.
He knew all along she was destined for more than that, and let her go. It was the hardest thing he had ever done.
I’m normal because of her. She helped me to make sense of the war, of the hell we toured. That was your part in my life, the good deed you did for me. I’ll always love you for that.
Salt breezes, sea gulls. The sails made small rippling-cloth sounds. Leslie was smiling at him. “I love you as much as you love me,” she told him. “I would have been just as happy in your ordinary little life. I would have loved to give birth to your children.”
“I would have felt guilty.”
“There’s no reason too.”
“You’ve already given me a life. I was suicide bound when you came to me. I was thinking of the euthanasia center.”
“I know. The war was hard.”
Images of the war drifted by like clouds. Nothing in his life had prepared him for the sight of a dead rain forest, the skeletons of immense trees and vines with all the leaves blackened, dead animals covering the ground like a carpet, birds and lizards and small frogs, snakes and pigs, billions of insects like the bottom of a bug zapper. In a clearing would stand the flimsiest little huts and shacks, made from old plywood and grass and branches; the bombs didn’t even knock them down. Blackened people bloating with internal gasses, but no decomposition. Killed by intense radiation that was gone four hours later, but all protein in the area was destroyed, there wasn’t even any bacteria left to break things down. No nutrients in the soil. The only life in the area was what Dodd and the other troops brought with them.
They dug holes and pushed bodies into them with Stiletto tanks fitted with bulldozer blades, covering the graves and paving them over for an airstrip, a copter pad, a basketball court. He carried an immense weapon that he fired occasionally at a tree trunk, just to watch the trunk explode and the tree fall over.
There was nothing else to shoot at. All the death-dealing blows were delivered from orbit. A bomb here, a scattering of beams over there. Backward 20th century enemies with 21st century weapons.
Their families, their children. Little babies, shielded by their mothers, not a scratch on them but stiff and dead in their ragged little diapers. Some of the men in Dodd’s unit showed nothing; others shot themselves. Dodd did a lot of crying and cursing, and was labeled a discipline problem. One of the officers criticized him constantly, and Dodd swung at him with a shovel, but missed.
The officer snatched the shovel away and swung it back–-
Dodd sat up suddenly, startling Sheila. He was sweating. “How long have I been asleep?” he asked.
“About a half-hour.”
“What time is it?”
“Five-thirty,” said the clock beside the bed.
“I’ve got to take a shower,” he said, feeling dirty. Dodd rolled off the bed and onto his feet, heading for the bathroom. In the shower he punched the recall for his favorite temperature and let the water spray over him, running down his arms and legs, intimate cleansing water massaging his muscles and scalp. It rinsed the sweat away, helped him to relax. There were two things he hated dreaming about, and he’d had both in the same dream.
After exiting and drying himself, Dodd slipped on a fresh set of California clothes, soft blue pants with a white stripe down the leg and a green and blue splotched shirt, and walked down the hall to find Sheila on the couch in front of the television. This annoyed him but he forced himself not to care, and standing in view of the screen found that Travels was, for some reason, particularly interesting this evening. He went into the kitchen, had the robot arms prepare some snack sandwiches, and he joined Sheila with a plate and two glasses of wine. The sphere was there, as always – planet-like, rolling its way through a sensuous and surrealistically lit crest of a sand dune.
The thick, rich scenery flowed past in slow motion, the ball rolling on endlessly, the only thing on the screen one could really see. Everything else was taken in with peripheral vision.
The winding, reeling music worked on Dodd, soothing him, carrying him along with the scenery, along with the rolling multi-colored sphere. Sometimes it did not seem like it was moving forward but merely spinning as the world moved beneath it. It was like a gear connected to a giant motor which spun the Earth around – then it would bounce through rocks, with the music rebounding on each collision, and suddenly the music swelled – tingling and spiraling – as the ball dropped straight over a bluff, twirling slowly in mid-air, the sky full of red and purple sunset clouds.
Dodd felt breathless, close to vertigo; a chill ran up and down his spine as the music reached a climax and the sphere, for a tantalizing split second, eclipsed perfectly the swollen red sun.
It hit the ground, touched down on surf-wet sand and continued a fast-paced bouncing roll down the beach parallel to the shore. The viewpoint changed, swinging around behind the sphere, following it, and ahead in the distance Dodd saw a pier and the seafront buildings of a quaint little town. The pier caught his attention, tore it away from the ball. He recognized this place. He grew up there.
“That’s Avilla Beach!” he exclaimed out loud.
“What?”
“That’s Avilla Beach,” he said again. “I had no idea they were making this down there.”
“Oh.” Sheila’s attention slipped away.
Dodd looked down at the plate of sandwiches, intent on taking a bite, but the plate was empty. So was his wineglass. He looked at a clock and found almost three hours had gone by since he’d sat down. This disgusted him, turned him off. He could see spending twenty minutes in front of the sphere, or maybe even an hour. But three–-? No! It was stealing time from him, taking it away without neither his knowledge nor permission. “Damn it,” he said angrily, and stood up.
Sheila didn’t notice.
“Damn it,” he said again, this time louder but with less anger.
She seemed to hear him, but the television had too strong a hold on her. There was a stupid expression on her face, and watching her Dodd realized she had never answered his question about having children. Kisses and fellatio had distracted him, but he never received a definite yes or no. Unless, of course, the fellatio itself had been a “yes.” Somehow he doubted this.
He looked from her to the pulsing scenery on the screen then back. “Damn it,” he said again, trying to get her attention.
“What?” she said vaguely.
“Let’s go see some real scenery.”
“What?” Total incomprehension.
“They’re supposed to be landing a new bank at around sunset, maybe we can catch a glimpse of it.”
“What?”
Dodd took her by her thin pale arm and pulled her up off the couch. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“To see Travels on a larger screen.”
“What? Really?” Her voice was still vague, stupid. He led her stumbling out of the room, out of the apartment, around to the stairs that lead up to the sun deck on the roof. When they stepped onto the sun deck there was still enough light in the sky to see a hulking square bulk surrounded by large construction fliers. It was about a mile and a half away, being lowered slowly into the skyline.
“Here’s the bigger screen,” Dodd said. “There’s Travels.”
“What?”
“That’s a new bank building.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at it with blinking eyes. She appeared to be waking up. “It’s so big,” she said with a hint of wonder in her voice. “How can they hold it up there?”
“It’s light,” Dodd told her. “It’s a metal made from hydrogen, they build the whole thing in space.”
“Oh.” She pulled close to him, hugging his left arm. The evening breeze was a little cool, and they were dressed for sunlight.