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A SPECIAL KIND OF
MORNING
Gardner Dozois
The Doomsday Machine is the human race.
—QRAFFITO IN NEW YORK SUBWAY,
SEVENTY-NINTH STREET STATION
Did y'ever hear the one about the old man and the sea?
Halt a minute, lordling; stop and listen. It's a fine story, full of balance
and point and social pith; short and direct. It's not mine. Mine are long
and rambling and parenthetical and they corrode the moral fiber right out
of a man. Come to think, I won't tell you that one after all. A man of my
age has a right to prefer his own material, and let the critics be damned.
I've a prejudice now for webs of my own weaving.
Sit down, sit down: butt against pavement, yes; it's been done before.
Everything has, near about. Now that's not an expression of your black
pessimism, or your futility, or what have you. Pessimism's just the
commonsense knowledge that there's more ways for something to go
wrong than for it to go right, from our point of view anyway—which is not
necessarily that of the management, or of the mechanism, if you prefer
your cosmos depersonalized. As for futility, everybody dies the true death
eventually; even though executives may dodge it for a few hundred years,
the hole gets them all in the end, and I imagine that's futility enough for a
start. The philosophical man accepts both as constants and then doesn't
let them bother him any. Sit down, damn it; don't pretend you've
important business to be about. Young devil, you are in the enviable
position of having absolutely nothing to do because it's going to take you a
while to recover from what you've just done.
There. That's better. Comfortable? You don't look it; you look like
you've just sat in a puddle of piss and're wondering what the socially
appropriate reaction is. Hypocrisy's an art, boy; you'll improve with age.
 Now you're bemused, lordling, that you let an old soak chivy you around,
and now he's making fun of you. Well, the expression on your face is worth
a chuckle; if you could see it you'd laugh yourself. You will see it years
from now too, on some other young man's face—that's the only kind of
mirror that ever shows it clear. And
you'll
be an old soak by that time, and
you'll laugh and insult the young buck's dignity, but you'll be laughing
more at the reflection of the man you used to be than at that particular
stud himself. And you'll probably have to tell the buck just what I've told
you to cool him down, and there's a laugh in that too; listen for the echo of
a million and one laughs behind you. I hear a million now.
How do I get away with such insolence? What've I got to lose, for one
thing. That gives you a certain perspective. And I'm socially instructive in
spite of myself—I'm valuable as an object lesson. For that matter, why is
an arrogant young aristo like you sitting there and putting up with my
guff? Don't even bother to answer; I knew the minute you came whistling
down the street, full of steam and strut. Nobody gets up this early in the
morning anymore, unless they're old as I am and begrudge sleep's dry-run
of death—or unless they've never been to bed in the first place. The world's
your friend this morning, a toy for you to play with and examine and stuff
in your mouth to taste, and you're letting your benevolence slop over onto
the old degenerate you've met on the street. You're even happy enough to
listen, though you're being quizzical about it, and you're sitting over there
feeling benignly superior. And I'm sitting over
here
feeling benignly
superior. A nice arrangement, and everyone content. "Well, then,
mornings make you feel that way. Especially if you're fresh from a night at
the Towers, the musk of Lady Ni still warm on your flesh.
A blush—my buck, you
are
new-hatched. How did I know?
Boy, you'd be surprised what I know; I'm occasionally startled myself,
and I've been working longer to get it cataloged. Besides, hindsight is a
comfortable substitute for omnipotence. And I'm not blind yet. You have
the unmistakable look of a cub who's just found out he can do something
else with it besides piss. An incredible revelation, as I recall. The blazing
significance of it will wear a little with the years, though not all that much,
I suppose; until you get down to the brink of the Ultimate Cold, when you
stop worrying about the identity of warmth, or demanding that it pay toll
in pleasure. Any hand of clay, long's the blood still runs the tiny degree
that's just enough for difference. Warmth's the only definition between
you and graveyard dirt. But morning's not for graveyards, though it works
 the other way. Did y'know they also used to use that to make babies?
'S'fact, though few know it now. It's a versatile beast. Oh come—buck, cub,
young cocksman—stop being so damn surprised. People ate, slept, and
fornicated before you were born, some of them anyway, and a few will
probably even find the courage to keep on at it after you die. You don't
have to keep it secret; the thing's been circulated in this region once or
twice before. You weren't the first to learn how to make the beast do its
trick, though I
know
you don't believe that.
I
don't believe it concerning
myself, and I've had a long time to learn.
You make me think, sitting there innocent as an egg and twice as
vulnerable; yes, you are definitely about to make me think, and I believe
I'll have to think of some things I always regret having thought about, just
to keep me from growing maudlin. Damn it, boy, you
do
make me think.
Life's strange—wet-eared as you are, you've probably had that thought a
dozen times already, probably had it this morning as you tumbled out of
your fragrant bed to meet the rim of the sun; well, I've four times your age,
and a ream more experience, and I still can't think of anything better to
sum up the world: life's strange. 'S been said, yes. But
think
, boy, how
strange: the two of us talking, you coming, me going; me knowing where
you've got to go, you suspecting where I've been, and the same destination
for both. O strange, very strange! Damn it, you're a deader already if you
can't see the strangeness of that, if you can't sniff the poetry; it reeks of it,
as of blood. And I've smelt blood buck. It has a very distinct odor; you
know it when you smell it. You're bound for blood; for blood and passion
and high deeds and all the rest of the business, and maybe for a little
understanding if you're lucky and have eyes to see. Me, I'm bound for
nothing, literally. I've come to rest here in Kos, and while the Red Lady
spins her web of colors across the sky I sit and weave my own webs of
words and dreams and other spider stuff—
What? Yes I do talk too much; old men like to babble, and philosophy's
a cushion for old bones. But it's my profession now, isn't it, and I've
promised you a story. What happened to my leg? That's a bloody story,
but I said you're bound for blood; I know the mark. I'll tell it to you then:
perhaps it'll help you to understand when you reach the narrow place,
perhaps it'll even help you to think, although that's a horrible weight to
wish on any man. It's customary to notarize my card before I start, keep
you from running off at the end without paying. Thank you, young sir.
Beware of some of these beggars, buck; they have a credit tally at Central
greater than either of us will ever run up. They turn a tidy profit out of
 poverty. I'm an honest pauper, more's the pity, exist mostly on the
subsidy, if you call that existing—Yes, I know. The leg.
We'll have to go back to the Realignment for that, more than half a
century ago, and half a sector away, at World. This was before World was
a member of the Commonwealth. In fact, that's what the Realignment was
about, the old Combine overthrown by the Quaestors, who then opted for
amalgamation and forced World into the Commonwealth. That's where
and when the story starts.
Start it with waiting.
A lot of things start like that, waiting. And when the thing you're
waiting for is probable death, and you're lying there loving life and
suddenly noticing how pretty everything is and listening to the flint hooves
of darkness click closer, feeling the iron-shod boots strike relentless sparks
from the surface of your mind, knowing that death is about to fall out of
the sky and that there's no way to twist out from under—then, waiting can
take time. Minutes become hours, hours become unthinkable horrors. Add
enough horrors together, total the scaly snouts, and you've got a day and a
half I once spent laying up in a mountain valley in the Blackfriars on
World, almost the last day I ever spent anywhere.
This was just a few hours after D'kotta. Everything was a mess, nobody
really knew what was happening, everybody's communication lines cut. I
was just a buck myself then, working with the Quaestors in the field, a
hunted criminal. Nobody knew what the Combine would do next, we
didn't know what we'd do next, groups surging wildly from one place to
another at random, panic and riots all over the planet, even in the
Controlled Environments.
And D'kotta-on-the-Blackfriars was a seventy-mile swath of smoking
insanity, capped by boiling umbrellas of smoke that eddied ashes from the
ground to the stratosphere and back. At night it pulsed with molten scum,
ugly as a lanced blister, lighting up the cloud cover across the entire
horizon, visible for hundreds of miles. It was this ugly glow that finally
panicked even the zombies in the Environments, probably the first strong
emotion in their lives.
It'd been hard to sum up the effects of the battle. We thought that we
had the edge, that the Combine was close to breaking, but nobody knew
for sure. If they weren't as close to folding as we thought, then we were
 probably finished. The Quaestors had exhausted most of their hoarded
resources at D'kotta, and we certainly couldn't hit the Combine any
harder. If they could shrug off the blow, then they could wear us down.
Personally, I didn't see how anything could shrug
that
off. I'd watched
it all and it'd shaken me considerably. There's an old-time expression, "put
the fear of God into him." That's what D'kotta had done for me. There
wasn't any God anymore, but I'd seen fire vomit from the heavens and the
earth ripped wide for rape, and it'd been an impressive enough surrogate.
Few people ever realized how close the Combine and the Quaestors had
come to destroying World between them, there at D'kotta.
We'd crouched that night—the team and I—on the high stone ramparts
of the tallest of the Blackfriars, hopefully far away from anything that
could fall on us. There were twenty miles of low, gnarly foothills between
us and the rolling savannahland where the city of D'kotta had been
minutes before, but the ground under our bellies heaved and quivered like
a sick animal, and the rock was hot to the touch: feverish.
We could've gotten farther,away, should have gotten farther away, but
we had to watch. That'd been decided without anyone saying a word,
without any question about it. It was impossible
not
to watch. It never
even occurred to any of us to take another safer course of action. When
reality is being turned inside out like a dirty sock, you watch, or you are
less than human. So we watched it all from beginning to end: two hours
that became a single second lasting for eons. Like a still photograph of
time twisted into a scream—the scream reverberating on forever and yet
taking no duration at all to experience.
We didn't talk. We
couldn't
talk—the molecules of the air itself shrieked
too loudly, and the deep roar of explosions was a continual drumroll—but
we wouldn't have talked even if we'd been able. You don't speak in the
presence of an angry God. Sometimes we'd look briefly at each other. Our
faces were all nearly identical: ashen, waxy, eyes of glass, blank, and lost as
pale driftwood stranded on a beach by the tide. We'd been driven through
the gamut of expressions into
extremis
— rictus: faces so contorted and
strained they ached—and beyond to the quietus of shock: muscles too
slack and flaccid to respond anymore. We'd only look at each other for a
second, hardly focusing, almost not aware of what we were seeing, and
then our eyes would be dragged back as if by magnetism to the Fire.
At the beginning we'd clutched each other, but as the battle progressed
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