michael Swanwick - Radio Waves

I was walking the telephone wires upside-down, the sky underfoot cold and fiatwith a few hard bright stars sparsely scattered about it, when I thought how itwould take only an instant's weakness to step off to the side and fall upforever 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 thecurving snake of rowhouses that went the full quarter mile up to the Ridge.Twice I overtook pedestrians, hunched and bundled, heads doggedly down, out onincomprehensible errands. They didn't notice me, of course. They never do. Theantenna farm was visible from here. I could see the Seven Sisters spangled withred 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 wasHegemone.

"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 ofthe road, too steep and rocky for development, was given over to trees andgarbage. Ham.burger wrappings and white plastic trash bags rustled in theirwake. I was running full-out now.

About a block or so from the Ridge, I stumbled and almost fell. I slapped an armacross a telephone pole and just managed to catch myself in time. Aghast at myown carelessness, I hung there, dizzy and alarmed. The ground overhead was blackas 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 withsilver 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 aquilled head, and raised a howl that bounced off the Heaviside layer. Mynonexistent blood chilled.In a panic, I scrambled up and ran toward the Ridgeand safety. I had a squat in the old Roxy, and once I was through the wall, theCorpsegrinder would not follow. Why this should be so, I did not know. But youlearn the rules if you want to survive.

I ran. In the back of my head I could hear the Seven Sisters clucking andgossiping to each other, radiating television and radio over a few dozenfrequencies. Indifferent to my plight.

The Corpsegrinder churned up the wires on a hundred needle-sharp legs. I couldfeel the ion surge it kicked up pushing against me as I reached the intersectionof Ridge and Leverington. Cars were pulling up to the pumps at the Atlanticstation. Teenagers stood in front of the A-Plus Mini Market, flickinghalf-smoked cigarettes into the street, stamping their feet like colts, andwaiting for something to happen. I couldn't help feeling a great longing disdainfor them. Every last one worried about grades and drugs and zits, and all thewhile snugly barricaded within hulking fortresses of flesh.

I was scant yards from home. The Roxy was a big old movie palace, fallen intodisrepair and semiconverted to a skateboarding rink which had gone out ofbusiness almost immediately. But it had been a wonderful place once, and theterra-cotta trim was still there: ribbons and river-gods, great puffing faceswith panpipes, guitars, flowers, wyverns. I crossed the Ridge on a deadtelephone wire, spider-web delicate but still usable.

Almost there.

Then the creature was upon me, with a howl of electromagnetic rage that silencedeven the Sisters for an instant. It slammed into my side, a storm of razors anddiamond-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 Ilost the name of my second daughter, an April morning when the world was new andI was five, a smoky string of all-nighters in Rensselaer Polytech, the jowlygrin of Old Whatsisface the German who lived on LaFountain Street, the freshpain of a sprained ankle out back of a Banana Republic warehouse, fishing off ayellow rubber raft with my old man on Lake Champlain. All gone, these and athousand things more, sucked away, crushed to nothing, beyond retrieval.

Furious as any wounded animal, I fought back. Foul bits of substance splatteredunder my fist. The Corpse-grinder reared up to smash me down, and I scrabbleddesperately 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 thebrick walls with limbs and teeth, as restless as a March wind, as unpredictableas ball lightning.

For the moment I was safe. But it had seized a part of me, tortured it, and madeit a part of itself. I could no longer delude myself into thinking it was simplygoing to go away. "Cahawahawbb!" It broke my name down to a chord of overlappingtones. 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 Ifound 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 myflight across the high-tension lines left a trail of some kind? Maybe. Thenagain, it might have some special connection with me. To follow me here it musthave passed by easier prey. Which implied it had a grudge against me. Maybe I'dknown the Corpse-grinder back when it was human. We could once have beenimportant to each other. We might have been lovers. It was possible. The worldis a stranger place than I used to believe.

The horror of my existence overtook me then, an acute awareness of the squalorin which I dwelt, the danger which surrounded me, and the dark mystery informingmy universe. I wept for all that I had lost.

Eventually, the sun rose up like God's own Peterbilt and with a triumphant blareof 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 quitepain as the last strands connecting you to your body part, and then you slip outof physical being and fall from the planet.

As you fall, you attenuate. Your substance expands and thins, glowing more andmore faintly as you pick up speed. So far as can be told, it's a process thatdoesn't ever stop. Fainter, thinner, colder ... until you've merged into thesubstance of everyone else who's ever died, spread perfectly uniformly throughthe 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 maintaina tenuous hold on earthly existence. I was one of the lucky ones. I was workinglate 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. Igaped up at the floor where my body had fallen and would lie undiscovered untilmorning. My own corpse, pale and bloodless, wearing a corporate tie andsleeveless gray Angora sweater. Gold Rolex, Sharper Image desk accessories, andof course I also thought: I died for this? By which of course I meant my entirelife.

So it was in a state of personal and ontological crisis that I wandered acrossthe ceiling to the location of an old pneumatic message tube, removed andplastered over some 50 years be-fore. I fell from the seventeenth to thetwenty-fifth floor, and I learned a lot in the process. Shaken, startled, andalready beginning to assume the wariness that the afterlife requires, I went toa 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 thatmy head stuck out into the night.