Allen Steele - A King of Infinite Space.pdf - Allen Steele - margozap

Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space

King of Infinite Space

Allen Steele

Scanned by MNQ

v0.9 by Dajala. This is a pre-proof release. Page numbers removed, paragraphs joined, partially

formatted and common OCR errors have been largely removed.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Steele,%20Allen%20-%20[Nea...0of%20Infinite%20Space%20(v0.9)%20[MMQ]%20[html].htm (1 of 263)25-12-2006 0:51:28

Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space

Full formatting, spell check and read through still required.

CHAPTER

ONE

LIVE THROUGH THIS

"Why? Why not?" —Timothy Leary; last words

The night sky always looks the same, no matter where you go: look up, and the universe opens before

you. The constellations may be different, the stars in new positions, but it's always the same cosmos: a

seemingly endless darkness, broken only by tiny lights that could be planets, suns, nebulae, even entire

galaxies. No one really knows how large this universe is, where its true limits are, or how long it may

last....

But nothing lasts forever. Not even eternity.

This is the story of the last day of my life, and everything that happened after that.

To say that it's hot is an understatement. St. Louis in mid-July is a perpetual sauna; the temperature only

dips below eighty for a few hours between midnight and dawn, and by early afternoon you could

probably get a good lunch by scooping the brains out of your skull, dropping them on the sidewalk, and

cracking open an egg on top. Downtown, yuppies scurry from air-conditioned offices to air-conditioned

bistros, their business suits and knee-length dresses clinging to their skin like fifty-percent cotton rags,

while out in the 'burbs their spouses sit in stalled traffic as they crawl to the shopping mall, there to seek

respite from the heat and humidity by buying more stuff they really don't need. At home, little kids stare

at cartoons on the tube and chase each other with Super Soakers, while their teenage siblings hang out in

the park and smoke the pot they stole from Dad's secret bedroom stash.

It's July 11, 1995, and it's hot all over. The Una-bomber has mailed a deranged screed to the New York

Times and the Washington Post, demanding that Western civilization grind to a halt; Western

civilization yawns and flips to the funny pages. A NASA space shuttle has just returned to Cape

Canaveral after docking with the Russian space station; most people are more interested in catching the

new Tom Hanks movie about another space mission twenty-five years ago. Ten Republicans claim that

they can do a better job of ruining the country than one Democrat, and no one really doubts their word.

Right-wing militia nuts are saying that the United Nations is conspiring to take over the United States,

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Steele,%20Allen%20-%20[Nea...0of%20Infinite%20Space%20(v0.9)%20[MMQ]%20[html].htm (2 of 263)25-12-2006 0:51:28

Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space

which is a hoot because UN peacekeepers can't prevent Serbs from wiping out Croats in a plot of

European real estate little larger than Pennsylvania. The major-league baseball strike has been settled,

which means that it's okay to come back to the ballpark and watch your team get stomped by the

Cleveland Indians—pardon me, the Cleveland Native Americans. Richard Gere is in Camelot, Clint

Eastwood is in Meryl Streep's pants, and Denzel Washington is in a sub; Ben Kingsley battles aliens

while Sylvester Stallone fights giant robots, and the best babes in the Cineplex are Batman's new

girlfriend and Disney's idea of how Pocahontas might have looked if she had worked out on a Nautilus

machine and shaved her pits. Calvin talks to Hobbes, Rush talks to Newt, O.J. talks to his lawyers, and

every moron who has worn his wife's clothes, screwed her son's girlfriend, or been kidnapped by aliens

is talking to Oprah, Sally, Geraldo, and/or Ricki. Just between you and me, I'd rather have my brains

fried on the sidewalk and eaten with a poached egg.

As it turned out, fate has other plans for my gray matter. Fate, my father, and a man named Mister

Chicago who hasn't even been born yet, and it begins with a trip out to Riverport for Lolla-palooza.

I leave early from my job at a second-hand record store and return to the Central West End apartment

Erin and I share, a two-bedroom flat furnished with Pier One wicker stuff, cement-block-and-plank

shelves filled with paperbacks and comic books, a queen-sized waterbed, and a life-sized cardboard

figure of Captain Kirk adorned with cheap Mardi Gras beads and an earring in his left ear. We watch

Animaniacs while we roll a few joints and fill our daypacks with bottles of Evian water, sunscreen, spare

rolls of toilet paper (in case some kid throws all the asswipe in the toilets), Tylenol (for heat headaches),

and extra packs of cigarettes. Shemp arrives around about four o'clock, and then we pile into my '93

Saturn SC2 and head for the show. A long summer afternoon of rock 'n' roll with my girl and my best

friend.

I need to tell you about Erin and Shemp.

First, Erin. She's been my girlfriend for the past two years, after we met at the recording studio where

she worked as an office manager when the band Shemp and I belong to, the Belly Bombers, came in to

record our first and only demo. The Bombers never got a label interested in signing us, but Erin came

home with me the night we cut the final track. Shemp was splitting the rent with me at the time, but six

months later he moved out and Erin moved in.

It isn't enough to say that Erin Westphall is a babe. She's outright beautiful: twenty-three years old, very

slim, small-breasted, with chestnut hair that flows down to the center of her back. Chicago's her

hometown, but she moved to St. Louis after graduating from Stephens College in Columbia and kicked

around the city before landing a job at the studio. As with my part-time job at Dino Tracks, she really

doesn't need to work; like Shemp and me, Erin's a trust-fund kid from a wealthy Lake Forest family

who's impatiently waiting for her to get over her dreams of becoming a novelist so she can return to

Chicago, marry some dude with an MBA, and settle down in the 'burbs to become a baby machine. That

might happen once she gets tired of waterbeds, cinder-block furniture, and cold pizza for breakfast, but

for the time being she's cohabiting with a rich kid who works part-time at a record store while working

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Steele,%20Allen%20-%20[Nea...0of%20Infinite%20Space%20(v0.9)%20[MMQ]%20[html].htm (3 of 263)25-12-2006 0:51:28

Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space

on a novel about cohabiting with a rich kid who works part-time at a record store.

And then there's Shemp, whose seldom-used proper name is Christopher Meyer: twenty-four years old,

six-feet-one, overweight by about fifty pounds, with buzz-cut dark hair and a soul patch under his lower

lip. I've known Shemp ever since eighth grade at Country Day School; his German-American genes had

been unkind to him, because when puberty hit us Shemp became a teenage reincarnation of one of the

Three Stooges, and thus the nickname, which somebody gave him in the locker room after gym class.

Our families both live in Ladue, and since the Meyers own the Big Bee Supermarket chain, his dad is

constantly on his case about joining the family business.

Shemp aspires to be a comic book artist, though, and after one summer of wearing an apron with a

grinning bee on it and asking old ladies if they had any coupons, he decided that he'd rather work on his

indie comics creation, The Slack, which he eventually hopes to sell to Dark Horse, while playing drums

with the Bombers on the weekends. He's a lot smarter than he looks; when Erin started staying over at

our apartment every night, he realized that it was time for him to find his own place. Erin and Shemp

never really hit it off, but after I made it clear to Erin that Shemp's my best friend and to Shemp that I'd

rather see Erin getting out of the shower every morning, they've learned to tolerate one another. Sort of.

Getting reserved seat tickets for Lollapalooza for the three of us is one more attempt on my part to get

them to be pals.

And then there's William Alec Tucker HI... but we'll get to him later.

So now it's quarter to five, the sun still high in the sky, and the thermometer standing at ninety-two in

the shade. We park the Saturn in the back of the Riverport lot and join the line at the turnstiles as it

shuffles through the usual daypack searches and metal detector sweeps by the rent-a-cops before we get

our tickets ripped. No one finds the joints I've hidden in my cigarette pack, and Erin manages to get

through the pat-down without being groped by some cop, and in another minute we're through the gate

and in the middle of thirty thousand other members of Gen-X and Gen-Y.

Riverport Amphitheater is an artificial hill in front of an enormous open-sided shed, with long asphalt

walkways circling the hill to plazas on either side of the stage. You've got your punks, your ravers, your

frat boys, your stoners, your teeners, your slackers, your over-the-hill hippies looking for one more

summer of love before they finally cut their hair and get a job. Up on the hill, they stand, sit, or sprawl

on blankets trampled by countless sneakers and hiking boots, listening to Jesus Lizard thudding from

distant speakers; down on the walkways, even more shuffle past tents set up by hucksters touring with

the show. T-shirts, jewelry, window stickers, incense, dope paraphernalia, CDs by bands no one has ever

heard of, sunglasses, cheap dresses and parachute pants, underground comic books, hemp hats: an open-

air mall of the hip and hip-five-minutes-ago, mobbed by kids in search of something that won't look

stupid three months from now. It's all loud and crowded and sweaty and hot, just the way I like it.

Closer to the shed, food vendors have set up their tents; our noses are assaulted by the odors of a dozen

different kinds of ethnic cuisine. Shemp's hungry, so he heads straight for a Thai concession, where he

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Steele,%20Allen%20-%20[Nea...0of%20Infinite%20Space%20(v0.9)%20[MMQ]%20[html].htm (4 of 263)25-12-2006 0:51:28

Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space

buys a paper plate of raman noodles and stir-fried yeti. Two places sell overpriced fruit juices—they

can't call them smart drinks anymore, because the FDA determined that you'll still be just as stupid as

you were before you had one—but Erin joins the line in front of the Budweiser stand, unhip as it may

be. I wander around the plaza while I wait for them, catching a little of this and that. Under a large tent,

a San Francisco theater troupe stages a performance in which a gray-wigged, business-suited Republican

auctions off the Bill of Rights. Thirty feet away, teenagers impatiently wait their turn to try out the free

videogames set up under the Sega pavilion. A fifteen-year-old kid climbs into a Spaceball; after a minute

of spinning upsiderdown and inside-out, he's spewing chunky green stuff all over the transparent plastic

sphere. I spot Shemp watching the gastronomic fireworks from the other side of the crowd: he takes his

plate of raman-and-yeti to the nearest garbage can.

We find our seats under the shed just in time for Sinead O'Connor. She's let her hair grow out a little

since the time she tore up the pope's picture on Saturday Night Live, and she's got a four-piece band that

backs her up as she does a rap version of the Beatles' "All The Lonely People" (or whatever the hell it's

called) and a song about the Irish potato famine. It's really very pretty and Erin is transfixed because she

loves Sinead, but Shemp is talking to two dudes sitting behind us. I can't hear what they are saying, but

the three of them get up and leave before her performance is half over.

Erin and I wander over to the Art Tent. It's a little cooler in here, but no less humid. There're strange

sculptures—a spiked armchair raised on a nine-foot throne, an altar of jeweled skulls illuminated by

automobile taillights—but the only thing I wish I had is a signed lithograph of Big Daddy Roth's Rat

Fink. We find Shemp staring fixedly at a Robert Williams silk-screened tapestry of a bare-breasted angel

wearing a space helmet floating above a junkyard filled with thirties-style spaceships. He babbles at us

for several minutes about the obvious correlation between Stephen Hawking, Gene Roddenberry, Jack

Kirby, and God-knows-what; his pupils have expanded into tiny planets. Shemp's found some acid; we

make sure that he still has his ticket stub and knows that he can't return to his seat without it, then we go

get some more beer.

For dinner music, we get power-grunge by Pavement. The mosh pit on the hill, placid during Sinead,

briefly comes alive with flailing arms and legs; everyone else is bowed by the oppressive burden of the

sun. Erin and I smoke a joint—the ushers don't give a shit, they're on the lookout for people throwing

junk at the stage—then go out for more beer. We find the mist tent and stand fully clothed under the

sprayers. Several Deadheads are talking about what happened at a campground in St. Charles after a

Grateful Dead show at Riverport last week. A hundred kids were taken to the hospital when a deck at the

campground lodge collapsed during a thunderstorm. Everyone agrees that it was a bummer, but at least

Jerry put on a good show. Doesn't mean much to me; I'm not into the Dead. The cool spray plasters

Erin's shirt against her breasts; I'm beginning to look forward to going home after the show.

I hit the men's room on the way back to the shed. Guys in shorts and sticky T-shirts are lined up in front

of the urinals, letting go of all the beer and fruit juice they've been sucking down. The tile floor is

slippery with water jetting out from a sink faucet that's been jammed open; an old black janitor in

uniform tries to monkey-wrench the spigot shut. I can't get to a urinal and I've got to take a major leak,

so I piss in the next sink over. The janitor yells at me to cut it out, but I ignore him. This is what you're

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Steele,%20Allen%20-%20[Nea...0of%20Infinite%20Space%20(v0.9)%20[MMQ]%20[html].htm (5 of 263)25-12-2006 0:51:28

Allen Steele - A King of Infinite Space.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: