Mary JSoon Lee: Monstrosity
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GOODKIND
Nationally bestselling author of The Sword of Truth series
WIZARD’S STONE BLOOD OF
FIRST RULE OF TEARS THE FOLD
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Praise for the Sword of Truth series
“A phenomenal fantasy, endlessly inventive, that surely marks the commencement of one of the major careers in the genre.”
— Piers Anthony
“Goodkind delivers a rousing, original, and rewarding story.”
— Science Fiction Chronicle
“I really think it’s going to sweep the country as Tolkien’s work did in the sixties.’^ — Marion Zimmer Bradley f
Coming In October TEMPLE OF THE WINDS
THE MAGAZINE OF
August • 48th Year of Publication
NOVELETS
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THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER |
32 |
Jonathan Lethem and Angus MacDonald |
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HOOKS, NETS, AND TIME |
139 |
Linda Nagata |
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SHORT STORIES |
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MONSTROSITY |
11 |
Mary Soon Lee |
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ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE |
52 |
Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg |
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HALLS OF BURNING |
64 |
Jake West |
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THE GREEN MAN |
76 |
Rand B. Lee |
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MOSQUITO LEAGUE |
97 |
Michael Libling |
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GIANTS IN THE EARTH |
108 |
Michael A. Martin |
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MUSTARD SEED |
129 |
Mark Bourne |
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DEPARTMENTS |
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THE INFINITE CAREER |
4 |
Jack Williamson |
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BOOKS TO LOOK FOR |
20 |
Charles de Lint |
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BOOKS |
24 |
Elizabeth Hand |
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EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS |
30 |
Gordon Van Gelder |
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FILMS |
90 |
Kathi Maio |
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SCIENCE: THE SCIENCE OF INVISIBILITY |
121 |
Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty |
CARTOONS: Benita Epstein 129, 160); Bill Long (63, 96); S. Harris (120, 128); John Jonik (138). COVER BY THOMAS CANTY FOR "MONSTROSITY."
EDWARD L. FERMAN, Publisher GORDON VAN GELDER, Editor
CHERYL CASS, Circulation Manager AUDREY FERMAN, Assistant Publisher
ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor
The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction (ISSN 0024-984X), Volume 93, No. 2, Whole No. 554, August 1997, Published monthly except for a combined October/November issue by Mercury Press, Inc. at $2.95 per copy. Annual subscription $33.97; S38.97 outside of the U.S. (Canadian subscribers: please remit in U.S. dollars.) Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, 143 Cream Hill Rd., West Cornwall, CT 06796. Publication office, 143 Cream Hill Rd., West Cornwall, CT 06796. Periodical postage paid at West Cornwall, CT 06796, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S. A. Copyright © 1997 by Mercury Press, Inc. All rights, including translations into other languages, reserved.
GENERAL OFFICE: 143 CREAM HILL RD., WEST CORNWALL, CT 06796 EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 1806, MADISON SQUARE STATION, NEW YORK, NY 10159
The Infinite Career
JACK WILLIAMSON
Arthur ciarke
once told me that if I lived another twenty years, I could live forever. That was some- thing like forty years ago. We're both still alive and writing. People ask how we do it. I don't share his secrets, and I've never had any mas- ter plan for my own immortality. I've never been able to see much beyond the novel in progress. Yet, with my own first story published in 1928, 1 still enjoy life and work. I've been wondering if there is any- thing I might try to explain.
First of all, thanks are due my parents for good genes. My father lived to age ninety-six, active to the end and with a lively interest in the world. I owe a good deal to modern medicine. Looking back, I recall times enough when sheer chance and more times when my own stupidities might have done me in with a different fall of the dice. I've been helped by a lot of gener- ous friends, as well as a remark-
able run of great good luck.
I enjoy writing. For me, it has always filled an urgent need. The eldest sibling, I grew up on isolated farms and ranches, taught at home through the first few years, or more often allowed to teach myself by reading. With no social life, I turned to my own imagination, a habit I have never tried to break.
When I was about to begin analysis at the Menninger Clinic back in 1936, one of the psycholo- gists suggested that writing fantasy was a symptom that analysis might relieve. Nothing I wanted, of course; it became one more problem for my own analyst, Charles W. Tidd, who came to understand me more hu- manely.
Half my life is still lived in fantasy. My recent novel. Demon Moon, was invented to brighten the tedium of long flights and long bus rides and long nights in strange hotel rooms on a tour of China. I'm far happier when I have a story going than when I don't.
THE INFINITE CAREER
5
The writer's first need, of course, is some command of lan- guage and the craft. Though En- glish is my only tongue. I've picked up smatterings of half a dozen oth- ers and learned linguistics enough to sharpen my perspective on lan- guage in general. The best way to learn, I think, is to teach. A profes- sor of English for a good many years. I've taught grammar and linguis- tics and my share of freshman comp — and generally enjoyed it, though reading too many papers can be- come a chore.
The craft has always been a challenge. Home from the South Pacific after World War II, I found so many bright new writers pub- lishing bright new fiction in bright new magazines that my own career seemed about to end. I spent the middle fifties writing a comic strip for the New York Sunday News, and went back to college when it expired.
Armed with degrees in English, I returned to Portales in 1960 to teach at Eastern New Mexico Uni- versity, my hometown school. I had five comp classes through the first year or two. A deadly stint, but the college is small and people came to trust me. I was presently allowed to teach a panorama of courses that ranged from types of lit and the
history of literary criticism to mod- em linguistics and one of the early academic courses in science fiction.
Hard work, but I enjoyed my students, my colleagues, and the chance to learn. Best of all was a course in literary figures that en- abled me to collect a shelf of works and criticism and spend a semester with one or two great writers. We ranged from Melville and Mark Twain to Faulker and Hemingway, to James Joyce and Ibsen, to Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. Joyce was my fa- vorite; I visited his martello tower in Dublin and looked for his grave in Zurich. I can't claim that I mas- tered his art, or any other, but surely I was learning something.
Courses in film and modem mystery fiction were on the list before I retired. I rented classic films for a historic survey, discussed cin- ematography, bought an 8 mm cam- era and film for it. The students were divided into teams that wrote and produced their own short films. I enjoyed it. The class seemed to. I think we all learned something.
My wife and I used to travel every summer. I've seen all the con- tinents and learned what I could of the histories and cultures of Russia and China, stories more fascinating than any fiction and good grist for more.
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BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR Todd Crimson
Life’s a bitch. Now meet Lisa.
Embark on an exotic thrill-ride in Todd Crimson's latest novel. In this wicked tale Lisa Nova takes Hollywood by storm. Lisa wants revenge, and she goes to any extreme to get it, even black magic. This is a dark fable about evil, paybacks and Tinseltown. It's as entertaining as it is frightening. Discover why Crimson is one of the most compelling writers of edg>" fiction operating today.
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ACORN A Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball
The Unicom Girl.
Enter a world created by two monumental writers of fantasy and science fiction. Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball beckon you with a fantastic new series. This enchanting tale brings you to a magical place where the last of the unicorn exist. Now the hope of an entire species rests with one beautiful unicorn girl, Acoma. McCaffrey and Ball create a breathtaking mystical landscape that's teeming with adventure, suspense and magic!
ISBN 0-06-105296-5 • $22.00 US/S29.95 CAN • Hardcover/July 1997
‘48 James Herbert
The War may be over, but will the nightmare ever end?
In his startling new work, world-renowned author James Herbert creates an alternate history. WWII is over, no one has won, and barely anyone survived. The Nazis unleashed a plague on Europe, annihilating most and turning some into vampirish monsters. An unHkely group of survivors band together for a battle that will lead them through the bowels of hell to the gates of redemption - if they can live through it. ISBN 0-06-105293-0 • $22.00 US/NCR • Hardcover/July 1997
PORTENT
This well-loved tale of good and evil is now available in paperback! Journey with Herbert as he leads you into a worldwide cataclysm.
With each natural disaster comes an ethereal warning in the form of lights, "The Portents." Get ready to plunge into the abyss.
ISBN 0-06-105432-1 • $5.99 US/NCR • Paperback/July 1997
WINTERLONG Elizabeth Hand
"Sensual, darkly resonant, finely imagined..."
-Wilham Gibson, author of Idoru Elizabeth Hand, winner of the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards, exploded onto the scene with this remarkable debut novel. Winterlong explores a society destroyed by science, and left a biological wasteland filled with genetic half breeds. The fate of the world rests with Hand's compelling yet dangerous characters. Now available in a trade paperback edition.
ISBN 0-06-105730-4 • $10.00 US/$14.00 CAN • Trade Paperback/July 1997
BYZANTIUM Stephen R. Lawhead A quest is about the journey and not solely the destination. Bestselhng author Stephen R. Lawhead has spun another rich historical tale of discovery and heroism. A young monk is about to embark on the journey of a Ufetime. In his attempt to manage his own fate, he will affect the future of an entire civilization. In the tradition of C. S. Lewis, this is a fantastic voyage to the core of the ancient world, and to one man's soul.
ISBN 0-06-105754-1 • $6.99 US/$8.99 CAN • Paperback/August 1997
iSHarperPrism
A Division of HarperCollinsPuWishers http;// WWW. harpercollins.com
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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
With little time or energy left for writing, I did manage to stay in print through those college years, thanks to foreign sales, collabora- tions with Jim Gvmn and Fred Pohl, and what I could write during sum- mers and breaks. Retired as overage in 1977 — rd turned sixty-nine, and I wanted to teach another year — I was once again a full-time writer.
Early in the game, when I re- garded a story as a magical mass of words on paper, I tried desperately to master the magic. My model was Max Brand — a pen name of Frederick Faust, who published fine pulp fiction under a score of names. He was reputed to write 4000 words a day and sell them in first draft. I tried to follow his examples, and in fact did sell a good many of the stories.
Trying to make a system of authorship, I learned Leo Margules' formula for the Thrilling group, but formulas are no fun. I set up a file of ideas for plot, character, setting, story ideas. The file became a graveyard. Nothingthat went into it ever came out again. The stories I sold came from ideas never hoarded; they had stayed alive and grown in my mind.
The greatest lesson I've ever learned is simply that technique is not enough. Language and tech- nique are merely useful tools that
enable you to say whatever you want to say, to share emotion and experience worth sharing. If the story doesn't matter to you, it won't matter to the reader.
My most successful novel has been The Humanoids, written after I got home from the Northern Solomons in 1 945, where I had been forecasting tropical weather for Marine air groups. Before the war, most science fiction had been opti- mistic about the advance of tech- nology and the human future. The atomic bomb cast its mushroom shadow over that.
My humanoids were man- shaped robots created in the after- math of a terrible war, designed by men of good will to prevent an- other. They obey the Prime Direc- tive, "To serve and obey, and guard man from harm." The complica- tion is that they do it too well. Our best-meant technology, so the story says, can trip us. Though I myself was and am a hard-pressed optimist a story must be free to speak for itself.
Interests keep shifting, and most of my stories have come out of what concerned me at the time. Theories of history once obsessed me. I read several volumes of Arnold Toynbee's vast Study of History. He saw cultures as giant organisms
THE INFINITE CAREER
9
that mature, age, and die. "Breakown'' and Star Bridge, writ- ten with Jim Gunn, grew out of that notion.
Walter Prescott Webb outlined a more hopeful theory in The Great Frontier. His great frontier lay in the Americas and other new lands opened by the voyages of da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan. Their opening let Europeans escape their restrictive home societies to de- velop democracy in politics, Prot- estantism in religion, and private capitalism. In The Starchild Tril- ogy, with Fred Pohl, we opened our own future frontiers in space.
The idea of genetic engineering has excited me ever since I read Wells' First Men in the Moon and Huxley's Brave New World. The New Collegiate and the OED have promised to give me credit for in- troducing the term in the epigraph to Dragon's Island. That appeared in 1951, a few years before Watson and Crick broke the genetic code. Later, as the actual science ad- vanced, I returned to the idea in Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods and again in Firechild.
The OED has also given me credit for inventing "terraforming, " a word for the art of transforming new planets for human habitation, in Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock.
By great good luck, 1 was with the press at NASA in Pasadena for most of the Voyager flybys. The Voyager is a wonderful robot, which made us vicarious explorers of the solar system. We cruised by the major planets and close to icy moons that had never been more than points of light in telescopes. Our guides were the teams of scientists who presented and discussed the findings, day by day.
A thrilling experience for the sf writer. I learned about the Oort Cloud, the swarm of dirty snow- balls that become comets when they drift near the sun, and found two novels there, Lifeburst and Mazeway. Later, after a tour of the unfinished Biosphere, I wrote Beachhead, a novel about the first flight to Mars and the effort to build a habitat and plant a colony.
The idea for The Singers of Time came from Stephen Hawking, who has the imagination of a top-rank science fiction writer. Reading his Brief History of Time, Fred Pohl and I decided to set a novel in his expanded universe.
Beyond the solar system, the frontiers of astronomers and cos- mology are expanding faster than the universe. The Black Sun came from the mysteries of the galaxies in motion. They spin faster than
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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
the gravitation of their visible stars could make them spin. Much of their matter must be dark. Its na- ture is not yet known, but in the novel a quantum-driven spacecraft lands on the frozen planet of a dead sun, which no longer shines.
The Silicon Dagger, still in progress, springs from concerns closer to home. Out of discontent with current politics, I voted Liber- tarian in the last election and re- solved to write a Libertarian novel. The Oklahoma City bomb and the militants on TV crystallized the idea. It's set in a nearly contempo- rary Kentucky county inhabited by people who declare and defend their independence.
Even a short story must have a reason to be. "The Fractal Man," in VB Tech, expands on an article in Scientific American suggesting that other space-time universes may be as numerous as the stars in our own. "The Hole in the World, " com- ing up in FetlSF, was done in a writ- ing class I taught with my colleague, Patrice Caldwell. "The Story Roger
Never Told," to appear in an an- thology in honor of Zelazny, came from knowinghim and teachinghis work.
One great attraction of science fiction has always been its freedom. There are no taboos. You can say nearly anything you like, so long as you can hold the reader's interest. That takes skill but also empathy. That's a sense for the feelings of others, the feelings of your charac- ters, the gift for sharing those feel- ings with the reader.
Fred Pohl has said that writers share themselves. I think it's true, and perhaps the final secret of a long career. A good story becomes a bridge of identity, a way of sharing emotion and the illusion of signifi- cant experience between writer, character, and reader. Or so it seems to me.
In spite of all the contrary evi- dence that keeps piling up year by year, I'd like to hope that Arthur Clarke was right. Even if he wasn't, it has been a great game. I mean to keep at it as long as I can.
Maiy Soon Lee's last appearance in these pages was one of her SF stories, ''Universal Grammar," just a few months ago. Now she proves herself to he equally adept with fantasy. The gentle tale that follows grew out of the writing workshop that she attends in Pittsburgh, where she lives.
Monstrosity
By Mary Soon Lee
SEAGULL FLEW THROUGH
Fera's dreams all that night. Its wings stirred the air over her head; its cry stirred a yearning she could not name.
Fera woke with that yearning, a wild, irrational thing that she thrust aside impatiently. Today would be as yesterday, and the day before, and the many years before that. Wishing wouldn't change that. She stood up from her bed, her claws clicking on the marble floor. Standing hurt her back. After a minute, she sank down onto four legs and padded into the bathroom.
Gold and silver fittings winked at her in the winter sunlight. The mosaic floor showed lilies and yellow roses, and the amethyst of the royal insignia. Only in the cobwebbed splinters of the fractured mirror did Fera see ugliness. She made herself stare at her shaggy, brutish reflection, as she had every day but the first — that long-ago day when she had tom through the castle, saliva slobbering down the matted fur of her face as she yowled in madness.
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Fera twisted the tap on with one awkward paw, and bent forward to let the water stream over her head. The chill water braced her, but something was wrong, an emptiness lurking inside her. With dripping wet fur, she paced out to the garden. Snow crusted the lawn, iced every twig and branch, frosted the edges of the winding paths.
At her coming, the birds flew away, calling out warnings to each other: Alarm! Alarm! The monster approaches!
Fera stalked across the snowy lawn, her damp fur clotting with frost in the piercing cold. She understood the birds' speech, and every warning call bit into her, hard though she tried to ignore them. But there was one friend who would listen to her without running away. She left the garden and entered the wood where Wolf lived.
"Wolf!" called Fera, her tail wagging in anticipation.
No answer.
"Wolf!" Still no answer. Fera stopped and sniffed the wind, scenting for Wolf. There, to the east. But there was another smell too, a human smell, and an iron undercurrent flavoring the air. Blood. She raced toward the smells. Intruder: there was a human intruder.
She came to a glade where a silver-gray carcass lay gutted on the ground, where an old man crouched over Wolf's body, the warm blood coating his fingers, a knife in his hand.
The man had not heard her approach. In a great leap Fera knocked him over. The knife dropped soundless into the snow. She opened her jaws over the wrinkled folds of the old man's thin neck.
"Please," croaked the old man. "Spare me."
And Fera paused, her teeth dimpling his skin. Maybe because he didn't struggle underneath her, maybe because it had been so long since a human had spoken to her, she raised her head and let the old man free. She covered the fallen knife with one heavy paw. "Why? Why should I spare you?"
The old man started as he heard her speak. He pushed himself into a sitting position, shivering. "I beg your forgiveness. I lost my way in the snowstorm. I was cold, I — "
"You trespassed on my lands and murdered my friend." Fera looked at Wolf's still body. Her throat closed up, and she could not speak.
The old man fumbled and pulled a leather bag from under his coat. "I have money I can give you in compensation — "
MONSTROSITY
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Fera growled. "I don't want your money. You will come to my castle. If you are civil company, I shall let you live. If not — " She bared her teeth.
"But my sons," said the old man, "my sons are waiting for me. They will think me killed."
"I care not what they think," said Fera. With one claw, she ripped the gold chain that was all she wore from around her neck. Gently, she laid the chain on Wolf's open chest. Gently, she pressed her nose against his cold nose, and for the last time breathed in his deep, comforting odor.
Then she turned to the old man and bared her teeth again. "To the castle."
At supper that night, the old man sat at the opposite end of the banquet table. His eyes widened as he studied the crystal goblets, the green jade bowls resting on the jade plates. He didn't ask why the goblets were empty, the plates bare of food.
"Supper," said Fera. The banquet hall darkened for a moment, shadows appearing and disappearing in a heart's beat. When the light steadied, soup steamed in the bowls, roast beef waited on the plates, and raspberries and tangerines lay heaped beside jugs full of cream.
"That's a useful trick," the old man said dryly.
Fera grunted in reply. The old man was trying so hard not to show his discomfort with her, nor surprise at his surroundings. He had said nothing when he first entered the castle, but she had watched his gnarled fingers rub at the silks and jeweled ornaments, as if he didn't quite believe they were real.
Now she watched as he lifted his soup spoon and sipped at it. Lowering her own head, she licked up the soup from her bowl. Over the rim of her bowl, she eyed the old man. He looked at her, looked back at his soup, looked at her again, and then picked up his bowl and drank from it directly.
Fera raised her head, soup dribbling down her chin. "I won't be offended if you use the silverware."
"Perhaps not, but I'd feel awkward," said the old man. And when he'd finished the soup, he picked the meat and vegetables up in his fingers.
Neither of them spoke again until the meal was over. Then the old man said softly, "The wolf that I killed, could it speak too?"
"Aye." Fera stared fixedly at the white expanse of the tablecloth.
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FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTIOxN
''I am sorry/' said the old man. "I would give much to undo that slaying."
Fera looked up from the tablecloth and met his gaze. "I would know your name."
"Petrov. And yours?"
"Fera."
"And your friend the wolf's?"
"I called him Wolf, nothing more." Silence fell between them again.
The silence stretched into the second day, and the third day, and the fourth, broken only when Fera ordered supper, or Petrov asked a simple question — where the towels were kept, or how he should clean his shirt. They spent most of the time in the library. Fera paged clumsily through book after book. Sometimes she was distracted by Petrov shifting in his chair, and she would glare at him, all the more irritated if he was too absorbed in his reading to notice. Sometimes she stared out the tall narrow windows at the snow, remembering how Wolf tossed his head when he was amused, the way the coarse hairs of his coat had shaded from red- brown to silver-gray over the years.
On the fifth evening, Petrov looked up from a history book and asked quietly, "When may I go home?"
Fera growled deep in her throat but said nothing.
Firelight played in the hearth behind Petrov. He looked old and shrunken against the bright flames. "May I leave here in the spring?"
"No," said Fera. She gazed into the flames, seeing a silver-gray carcass spread-eagled in the snow.
"May I leave in the summer?"
"No," said Fera. "You killed my companion. Now you will keep me company."
Petrov raised his eyebrows. "Well, that makes perfect sense, seeing how much pleasure you're deriving from my company."
His tone was dry, but when he turned back to his book something in the set of his shoulders, in the way the lines pulled in around his eyes made him look sad. Fera shook her head impatiently: why should she care how
MONSTROSITY
15
the old man felt? She picked up her own book, but her muscles ached, and she couldn't find a comfortable position in the chair.
With a growl, she set the book down, "Do you play chess?"
Petrov nodded slowly.
"Will you play a game with me?"
Petrov nodded again. "I'd like that."
Fera showed him where the chess set was. Without any fuss Petrov set the pieces up, his gnarled hands still better suited to the task than Fera's paws. They played in silence, but Petrov smiled as he laid down his king at the end. "Good game. Do I get a return match?"
And so they played another game, and played again the next day. A week later they were varying chess with backgammon and cards; a week after that they discovered a mutual interest in mathematical digressions. On dry days they shared brief walks outside, Petrov cocooned in a ridiculous abundance of scarves and sweaters. When it snowed they wandered inside the castle.
Petrov liked to visit the art gallery on the second floor best. Each time the paintings were different, save for the one at the end of the first hallway: a portrait of a young girl with ivory-smooth skin, red lips curved in a smile, gold-bright hair. Petrov often paused there, and raised his eyebrows in question to Fera.
But the spell held Fera silent: she knew that once she had been the girl in the portrait, but she could not speak of it, could not say anything of her life before the curse was laid upon her.
In the third month of Petrov's stay, they were walking together in the garden. The lawn was mostly clear of snow, the air full of smells and growth and green. Fera sniffed busily, and pointed out the first crocuses, not yet in bloom.
Petrov beamed, his mouth crinkling at the comers. He sat down on a bench, and rubbed at his left knee. "Spring's my second favorite season. Do you have a favorite?"
"Summer." Fera growled softly, remembering warm nights spent in the woods, rolling over in the long sweet-scented grass.
"Summer's too hot and proud," said Petrov. "I liked it best when I was a child. Then when I was a young man, I switched to preferring winter, just because no one else liked it. My wife..." He stopped, and for a moment he
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looked frail and lost. "'My wife liked autumn most, and now I do too, from harvest through to first snow. Crisp apples, the colors of the leaves, bonfire days. I remember her best in autumn."
Fera scowled, her insides knotting up. Petrov was unhappy and she, she felt guilty. But she shouldn't — he was the trespasser, the murderer. She thought of Wolf and tried to summon anger, but it twisted into grief. "I'll be back soon."
She left Petrov alone, and ran for the cover of the trees. There in the shadowy gloom, where the snow still lay on the ground, she paced back and forth. She'd take Petrov to the gallery again this afternoon. He'd put this mood behind him soon enough. She turned it over and over in her mind, but it was useless. Guilt still ate at her.
Finally, furious with herself, she galloped back to Petrov. "Go," she growled. A burning, prickling sensation tore at her insides. "You're free to leave. Take what you need from the castle — boots, food."
"My thanks." Petrov stood up. His face was stiff, unreadable. He laid one hand on her shaggy back. "I'll go home to my sons."
"Aye," said Fera. "Do that."
Petrov's hand tightened on her fur. "I'll miss you."
Fera stared at him, but none of what she wanted to say would emerge. In the end, she just muttered, "Go."
"I'll come back," said Petrov.
"There's no need." Fera turned and walked away.
In the weeks after Petrov departed, Fera stayed in the woods. She ate grubs and squirrels, mice and rabbits, taking fierce pleasure in their squeals as she caught them, savoring the blood-scent as she trapped small creatures in her claws.
She did not speak. She tried not to think in words. Words were sharp- edged, the broken halves of conversations. At night she slept in the glade with Wolf's body, by now a cage of bones open to the rain and wind, the two of them silent.
Gradually she lost track of time. It might have been a month later, it might have been two when she heard a distant clattering, the faint boom of the bell at the gate to her grounds.
Petrov. Fera raced for the gates, muscles pumping the long mile till she reached the iron gates.
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Outside stood a young, exquisitely handsome man. His full lips curled in disgust as he looked at Fera, then altered to a forced smile. He held out one smooth white hand in greeting. '"Good day, milady. My name is Omegon, son of Petrov.'' He pulled his hand back after barely brushing Fera's extended paw.
"Petrov's son/' said Fera, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. "Come in."
"Why, thank you. I was passing by, and, since my father has told me so much about you, I thought I should pass on his good wishes." Omegon gestured behind him at a black horse and two saddlebags. "If you would see that my belongings are taken care of."
Fera stepped toward the horse, and watched it skitter backward. "Maybe Petrov forgot to mention that most animals are scared of me. You will have to take the horse to the stables yourself."
"Very well," said Omegon, but two spots of high color stood out beneath his elegant cheekbones, and Fera didn't like his peevish tone. Indeed, apart from his appearance, she wasn't sure that she liked this young man at all. But she thought of his father and tried to stay civil.
"The stables are over there," she said. "I'll be waiting for you at the main entrance to the castle."
Ten minutes later, Omegon joined her at the castle doors. His mouth opened to a red "O" as he took in the marble hallway rising to the wide curve of the mahogany stairs. He swiveled his head to study the ornate ceilings, the details picked out in gold and silver, the sculptures and paintings, and the fifteen-foot tall crystal windows.
His delicate pink tongue licked his lips once. "I see my father did not exaggerate the beauty of your castle." After a moment's hesitation, he added, "Or of your gracious ladyship, of course."
Fera snorted before she could control herself. Petrov would never have described her as beautiful: sturdy, maybe, or muscular. Recovering some of her manners, she asked, "Have you journeyed far? Are you hungry?"
"Two days' ride, and I confess I am a little hungry."
Fera led him to the dining hall. Her feet left muddy tracks on the floor, and she was acutely aware that she must smell like a barnyard. She noticed Omegon's nose wrinkle once or twice, but when he was seated at the far end of the banquet table, he seemed to relax. Indeed his eyes
18
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
positively sparkled after Fera had said ''Dinner'" and the dishes had filled with food. He took out a thin leather book from his pocket and flicked through the pages.
"What is that?" asked Fera.
He flushed. "Nothing, just a hobby of mine. I, ah, study the lore of enchantments."
"I've studied the. history of enchantments, too, though I have been unable to find any texts that contain much more than hearsay." Fera leaned forward in her eagerness, a chunk of meat dangling forgotten from her claw. She caught a glimpse of the cover — illustrated with something that looked like a frog — before Omegon thrust the book away.
"I'm sure my humble book wouldn't interest you, milady." His knuckles whitened on his silverware, and he sliced one neat portion of meat. He lifted the meat on his fork, and elegantly swallowed it. Taking a sip of wine, he added, "Has anyone ever told your ladyship how eloquent your eyes are?"
Fera snorted. "I wouldn't have guessed that Petrov would teach his sons to be flatterers. Or did you come by it naturally?"
Omegon had the grace to look discomfited. "It's not, that is, I do realize your ladyship's appearance is unusual. But there can be much beauty in the unexpected."
Fera blinked. In the long-ago, men had whispered to her such sweet things as this young man did. But now, now either he had too much wine, or he was shortsighted, or he was a liar. She found herself hoping it was one of the first two. Even if only for one evening, she would like to be able to pretend that she was beautiful again.
Omegon stood up, and rested his arms on the back of his chair. Smiling at her, he started to sing. "A flower in a garden, a jewel in a crown, ten thousand look for beauty where they know it will be found."
His voice was pure and rich, taking the simple tune and giving it depth. Fera closed her eyes and listened.
"A princess in a palace, a rainbow in the sky, let thousands look for beauty where they know it will be found. But I would see the cactus bloom, and I would see you smile, and know your love I'd found."
Warm, sweet breath wafted over her face. Fera opened her eyes just in time to see Omegon lower his lips to hers, and she believed, yes, she
MONSTROSITY
19
believed that he loved her, as youth must surely sometimes love, wildly and without rational cause.
For one moment his mouth pressed against hers, and then he stepped backward, his expression darkening. "You look just the same!"
Fera touched her lips with the edge of one paw, probing the spot where he had touched her. There was a huskiness to her voice that she didn't recognize. "How else would I look?"
The young man sank into a chair, and buried his face in his hands. "Beautiful, like a princess. My father was right. Tm nothing but a fool."
The thin book slipped onto the table, and Fera saw the title "On Enchantments to Recover Ensorceled Princesses. From Frog Princesses to Beasts."
She laughed, because anything else would have been too painful, and because she had been as much of a fool as this young man. More so, since she was old enough to know better. Not every curse can be lifted, even by a young man's kiss. "At least," said Fera finally, "you sing well."
Face still hidden in his hands, Omegon muttered, "I am sorry, Fera, for lying to you. I, I think I'd like to leave now."
And he ran from the hall without another word.
Fera waited for him at the main gate, the book clutched tight in one paw. "I believe you forgot this."
"Thank you." He hesitated. "That song, my father made it up when he came home. He thinks you found him too old and too boring. He thinks that's why you sent him away, but he never stops talking about you, on and on and on." The peevish note had returned to Omegon's voice, but Fera barely noticed.
Something stirred in her, wildly and without rational cause. "Tell him I miss him. Tell him I would like it if he came to visit."
And on a day in early summer, not so many weeks later, Petrov came riding to the castle. His hair was gray and his skin was wrinkled, and his knuckles were swollen with arthritis. But Fera found him beautiful enough. And if, in the darkness of some night, they held each other close for comfort, it is none of our concern.
Books To Look For
CHARLES DE LINT
OMETHING
a little different this time. Usually I pick the books rll review for this column from among all of those that show up in my P.O. box throughout the month up until my deadline. But this time — simply as an exercise in forestall- ing my own biases, if nothing else — I decided to review the first three books to come in after turning in my last column (the deadline for which was February 21st). The only caveat was that they couldn't be media-based or series books.
This isn't because I'm particu- larly against either of the latter, though I do have reservations with them. What troubles me about me- dia-based books is that there is no character growth — there can't be. If the character changes, the fran- chise will no longer have its recog- nizable icon for further books, mov- ies, etc. So what normally propels a novel is absent and we are left with a story that is solely event-driven.
This can be entertaining, cer- tainly, but I would be no more happy with a steady diet of them than I would be eating the same thing ev- ery day.
Series books present another problem. While they can have character growth, too often they begin with a bang, and then fizzle out after a book or two. They might have a great opening premise, an extraordinary character, a fascinat- ing new world, sometimes all of the above, but the appeal is in the origi- nality. Once familiarity sets in, what seemed so fresh has become old hat, and this reader, at least, quickly grows tired. The series that keep my interest are usually those where the setting itself is the con- tinuing thread (Norton's Witch- world, Holdstock's Mythago Wood) and the stories concern a new cast each time out. When old faces reap- pear, it's more often only as second- ary characters.
Be that as it may, I don't think any less of the authors writing either.
BOOKS TO LOOK FOR
21
or of the readers who enjoy the end result of that authorial labor. And for our present purposes it struck me as unfair to judge a series on only one book, while let's face it, the media-based material is going to sell regardless of what any re- viewer or critic might have to say about them, and the point of this column is to bring to your attention something that you might other- wise miss.
But I've digressed enough. Let's have a look at those three books.
As She Climbed Across the Table, by Jonathan Lethem, Doubleday, 1997, $22.95
This is, without question, one of the oddest books I've read in a while. Two threads run through it. In one, a physicist, while trying to create a secondary universe, has succeeded instead in making a hole in this universe, a "Lack" through which items can be passed, but not reclaimed. The other thread con- cerns the viewpoint character, Philip Engstrand, a professor who studies other professors, and his obsessive fixation on Alice Coombs, one of the physicists involved in the Lack project. What Engstrand has to deal with is that his erst- while lover Coombs has left him
for her own obsessive fixation on the Lack.
It's a great opening premise and Lethem goes on to introduce a num- ber of potentially fascinating char- acters and humorous situations, setting them up so that they should bounce off each other like balls in a pinball machine. Yet for all the po- tential, the characters come off flat, which in turn renders both the hu- morous and more poignant mo- ments less effective than they might be. The characters' reactions are distanced and cerebral — even in what should be highly charged, emotional situations — and while this coolness says something about contemporary society, and the mi- crocosm of it as found in a univer- sity setting, it grows tiresome expe- riencing it at novel length.
The book's saving grace is the fascinating discussion that arises from time to time on the nature of reality and the dynamics of couples, but mostly I found the novel con- fusing.
Or perhaps I simply didn't get it.
The Duke of Sumava, by Sarah J. Wrench, Baen Books, 1997, $5.99
Set in Eastern Europe during the Thirty Years War, The Duke of Sumava initially appears to be part
22
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
of that subgenre of folklore in which mortals make a deal with faerie and/or the leader of the Wild Hunt.
Unhorsed and close to death in the wild forest that makes up much of his small dukedom of Sumava, Duke Ottokar sends out a call for help to anything that will listen. Much to his surprise, his summon- ing is answered by the leader of the Wild Hunt, a faerie healer, and the forest itself. The enemy is tempo- rarily driven off and Ottokar is healed of his wounds, but then Ottokar realizes he might have traded away his mortal soul in de- fense of his beloved homeland. And he still has two immense invading armies to drive off.
At this point it seems rather obvious what will happen next, but happily the author proves more in- ventive. Wrench quickly deals with the '"sold one's soul to the devil" plot line and, while much of the book does concern Ottokar's struggle to keep his country free from outside invaders, the book's overall focus is more on Ottokar's interaction with Faerie — not merely to solve his immediate prob- lems, but over the long term.
In fact. The Duke of Sumava doesn't read so much like a novel as it does a fictional biography, which is a good thing since Wrench's mat-
ter-of-fact prose style and fairly ba- sic characterization lends itself well to the latter. This isn't to say that the book reads like some dry his- torical treatise. There is much here to engage the reader — a cumula- tive effect of incidents and effects, rather than a tightly focused single plot thread — and Wrench also pre- sents some intriguing takes on vari- ous elements of folklore, religion, and how her characters view them.
Three in Time: Classic Novels of Time Travel, edited by Jack Dann, Pamela Sargent George
Zebrowski, White Wolf, 1997, $14.99
I'm a sucker for time travel stories, from H.G. Wells, through Jack Finney, to Terence Green's Shadow of Ashland, discussed here at this time last year. So I'm de- lighted to see the first of this new "Rediscovery" series of classic nov- els from White Wolf focusing on time travel. The omnibus features three complete novels along with introductions by the series editors to give some background on the authors and to help put the books in context of the times when they were originally published.
The lead offering is The Winds of Time, by Chad Oliver, and at this
BOOKS TO LOOK FOR
23
point I have to shamefully admit to being unfamiliar with his work. Judging by the quality of this novel, Tm hard-pressed to understand how I missed him when his books were first coming out.
The Winds of Time is both a time travel and a first contact novel. While on a fishing vacation, Wes Chase takes shelter in a cave only to be kidnapped by a gaunt, white- faced stranger who renders him immobile with a stun gun. Chase is dragged into a deeper part of the cave, blocked off from the outside world by a metal door with a com- plex locking mechanism. There he sees that his captor is not alone. There are five niches carved out of the stone wall of the cave, with apparently sleeping figures in four of them.
Over the course of his lengthy captivity. Chase is forced to teach his captor English and eventually discovers that not only are the man and his companions extraterrestri- als, but they first arrived on this planet over fifteen thousand years ago. The story-within-a-story re- lated by Chase's captor is a fasci- nating read and makes for a nice turnabout on the usual plot of an earthman landing on some distant
planet peopled by primitives. Here, our ancestors,are the primitives.
The Winds of Time has all the ingredients of a solid sf novel: a riveting story, quality prose, believ- able characters, and solid extrapo- lation of its scientific speculation. And except for some quaint man- nerisms of its protagonist, it's as readable and immediate today as it was when it was first published in 1957.
Published by itself, it would be well worth picking up. When com- bined with Wilson Tucker's classic The Year of the Quiet Sun and Poul Anderson's equally engrossing There Will Be Time, as it is here, the resulting omnibus is a treasure trove of classic gems that unques- tionably deserve to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.
Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K 1 G 3V2.'=g'
To order these books, (24hrs, 365 days) please call (800) 962-6651 (Ext. 9500) or visit us at http://www.booksnow.com
Books
ELIZABETH HAND
Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey, Tor Books, $22.95
The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, St. Martin's Press, $24.95
Burning Your Boats, The Col- lected Short Stories of Angela Carter, Henry Holt Company, $30.00, Penguin Books, $14.00
ERIODICALLY,
like mournful wolves in full cry at a moon they can never bring to bay, reviewers or academics will lament the death of the Novel of Ideas, that literary nostrum so be- loved of the critical establishment. In fact, the Novel of Ideas never died; merely underwent the laser surgery and verbal liposuction nec- essary to transform it from a late Victorian and early-twentieth-cen- tury lady of manners — refined, exquisitely put-together, and rather (shhh!) dull — into her millenary counterpart: sleek and sexually
savvy, sporting the elastic gear and pop exuberance of science fiction, her Higher Education safely hidden beneath a veneer tattooed with the century's intellectual watermarks: Marxism, structuralism, feminism, post-modernism.
It ain't news that when it comes to acceptance (or even acknowledg- ment) by the critical mainstream, science fiction sucks hind tit (and fantasy pretty much dies stillborn). An exception is speculative fiction willing to fight for a cause — what cause doesn't really matter, so long as the banner is colorful and held high for all to see. 1984, The Dis- possessed, The Left Hand of Dark- ness, The Handmaid's Tale, Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon books — all are didactic novels given the impri- matur "classic" and kept in print by virtue of becoming part of that ambiguous literary canon, novels taught in high school and college English classes. All are fine novels, and 1 984 is one of the great books of the century; but are they in fact
BOOKS
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more deserving of attention than The Book of the New Sun, Engine Summer, Sarah Canary, The Course of the Heart! What of Delany's bril- liant, unfinished diptych that be- gan with Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand! Or the linked no- vellas Le Guin published as Four Ways to Forgiveness!
Ah well. Acceptance into the canon carries both reward and pun- ishment — yesterday a young man complained to me about having to read The Fellowship of the Ring for credit — and we should probably be grateful that anyone is having ideas these days, let alone writing about them. Which brings me to Candas Jane Dorsey's exceptional, and ex- ceptionally ambitious, first novel, Black Wine. It is a novel of ideas, deftly woven and quite beautifully written, very much in the mode of Ursula Le Guin's early books, and should not go begging for readers.
In a tirelessly anachronistic future world that is probably our own, an amnesiac woman named Essa stitches together her own his- tory from the fragments she recalls of her earlier life, as well as those of her mother, grandmother, and daughter. Essa's history is intricate — she is the fugitive daughter of the melancholic queen of an unhappy land where power runs through the
distaff line — and made even more convoluted by her amnesia (nasty fall from a dirigible, subsequent clumsy trepanning, and finally some decent laser surgery), which results in the creation of a secondary per- sonality named Fierce-frightened. Fierce-frightened is a slave, not be- cause her nature is slavish (now, that might have been a nice trope on Sybil], but because, post-head- trauma, Essa has been captured and sold as a slave in the very palace where she was born to rule, the very palace she fled as a girl years before. There, Fierce-frightened ends up serving the wicked regent who was betrothed to the infant Essa. In true fairy-tale fashion, his kiss awakens princess Essa's consciousness where it sleeps within the slave Fierce-frightened, and the reborn monarch must determine how best to rule the land which is hers — if, indeed, she chooses to become its ruler at all.
Dorsey (who is a poet and edi- tor as well as novelist) writes a lovely, fluid, dreamlike prose. The shifts in point-of-view, from Essa to Fierce-frightened to the older Essa (among others), are beautifully done, and amount to a tour de force of narrative voices. But they are also confusing, and the confusion is heightened by Dorsey's choice of
26
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
character names: Essa, Ea, Elta, F., XX. Her intent, as with Black Wine's generic science fantasy backdrop, is no doubt to invoke a sense of timelessness, a hallmark of the sf novel of ideas. Instead it undercuts the immediacy of her world, makes it seem a mere playing-board where XX and Essa and the rest are moved about, brightly colored representa- tions of Ideas: Slavery, Democracy, Fascism, Child Neglect and Abuse, Freedom.
Dorsey herself seems aware of this: at one point, a character la- ments, "''Oh, expository lump !. . .WeVe been talking about it too long. When you write your book about it, this is thepart that isgoingtosoundreally boring.'" And while Dorsey is, ulti- mately, preaching to the choir (Sla- very, Fascism, Abuse: BAD. VERY BAD. Care to offer a dissenting view?), she ends her book with a heartbreaking scene of individual liberation: Essa embracing her other selves, as well as the wicked regent, the mother who abandoned her and the abusive grandmother who is the novel's demonic materfamil- ias. In this ultimate vision of tran- scendence and forgiveness. Black Wine becomes strong stuff, indeed.
Christopher Priest's The Pres- tige is another novel that derives
much of its narrative fire from shift- ing points of view — in this case, the voices of two professional ma- gicians whose bitter, almost insane, rivalry poisons not only their own lives but those of their descen- dents.
Alfred Borden, son of a wheel- wright, is Le Professeur de la Magie; the aristocrat Rupert Angier is his nemesis. The Great Danton. Their careers form parallel arcs across Victorian England — a wonderful staging ground for magicians, spiri- tualists, mesmerists, scientists, hypocrites. To varying degrees, Borden and Angier are all of the above, as well as cozy adulterers (each keeps a mistress, as well as a wife and children). But mostly, Borden and Angier are adversaries, their mutual rivalry honed to a fatal edge through a series of mishaps, misplaced efforts at reconciliation, professional jealousies, and pure spleen.
A tragic accident spurs the fledgling illusionists into lifelong battle. In their ceaseless profes- sional struggle for pre-eminence, the magicians over time begin to mirror each other, stealing tricks and repartee, lovers and lovely as- sistants, all the while attempting to create a stage illusion that will trump all that have come before. So
BOOKS
27
it is that Borden develops first The Transported Man and then The New Transported Man, illusions in which the magician is instanta- neously transmitted from one onstage cabinet to another thirty feet away. Angier is baffled and in- furiated by the trick, and his own popularity begins to slide in the wake of Le Professeur de Magie's grand success with The New Trans- ported Man. It is not until Borden meets up with that pioneering elec- trical genius, Nikola Tesla (Edison got all the glory, but the maverick Tesla is beloved of contemporary novelists), that he finally comes up with his own ultimate illusion, an extrapolation of The New Trans- ported Man which Angier calls In A Flash. Ah, but there is a horrific price to pay for Tesla's sublime de- vice, and Angier finds himself pay- ing it, onstage for sell-out crowds, night after night after night.
There is a certain amount of grim humor to The Prestige, the blatant Can-You-Top-This? career- ism of dueling prestidigitators whose feud is carried out against the lush backdrop of fin-de-siecle London. And the novel provides the pleasures of a mystery as well, as the reader attempts to find the man (or men) behind the curtain, and discover the true parentage of An-
drew Westley, who may or may not be related to Borden.
But at its core The Prestige is a horror novel, and a particularly ter- rifying one because its secret is re- vealed so slowly, and in such splen- did language. Priest traces the moral decay of these two demonic crea- tures with the precision and in- tensely focused intelligence of a surgeon baring a diseased corpus to an intern: See? here is the twisted cell that poisoned its fellow organs, and here is the heart laid waste by neglect and deceit, and here the damaged brain that gave shape to such monstrous thoughts. And there is a particularly nightmarish scene that may leave sensitive par- ents extremely reluctant to patch up any differences between warring families. Priest is a superb writer (the book won both the James Tait Black and World Fantasy Awards). His prose is elegant and exquisitely understated, and leaves one with the very real impression of having witnessed the bravura illusions he describes with such economy. There are a few minor flaws, lapses of logic and continuity that are mildly distracting, on a par with the illusionist's doves losing a few feath- ers in flight. But ultimately. The Prestige is both disturbing and ex- hilarating — one closes the book
28
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
shaken, wondering how it was done; and eager to see what the master illusionist will produce for his next trick.
Finally, there is Burning Your Boats, a posthumous collection of Angela Carter's short stories. If Tolkien introduced fantastic litera- ture to the twentieth century on a grand scale, then Carter gave it an education and made it respectable, but without sacrificing the supreme and occasionally scatological au- dacity that distinguished her work from the beginning. Sexy, garish, fiercely intelligent, and often con- tentious, Carter's tales are at once sophisticated and earthy — one thinks of those highly colored aris- tocrats beloved of Carnaby Street in the 1960s, dropping ashes from a spliff onto the priceless Pucci tu- nic, sipping electric Kool-Aid from a gold-rimmed Limoges tea-cup. Judging from "The Man Who Loved a Double Bass," published in Story- teller Contest in 1962, Carter seems to have sprung full-blown from the head of some mythical, sometimes pixilated raconteur, the spiritual godchild of Isak Dinesen and P. T. Barnum. Her later works are so well known as to almost not need intro- ducing: the erotic memoirs of Fire- works, the gothic Black Venus, and
most of all the groundbreaking re- cidivist fairy tales of The Bloody Chamber, which opened the door for countless stories, novels, plays, and films by other writers who set out to remake classic folktales in their own image.
In his moving introduction to Burning Your Boats, Carter's long- time friend Salman Rushdie notes that she is at present "the contem- porary writer most studied at Brit- ish universities." She is well-repre- sented within the academy here also, largely by virtue of the unre- pentant feminism that colors her writing. But Carter is no tyro vi- rago. In her acidly lubricious sci- ence fiction novel The Passion of New Eve, one sees the author as Equal Opportunity Destroyer, lay- ing waste to sexism, cinema, and serial killers with a glee I don't think I've ever encountered in an- other book: I swear you can hear her whooping as you read.
Her short stories are wonderful — better than her novels, some people think, because more con- trolled and far-ranging, from the hushed delirium of "The Loves of Lady Purple" to the elegiacal (and hilarious) "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream." The tales in The Bloody Chamber have become modern
BOOKS
29
classics: the title story ''Bluebeard, " with an unexpected ending cour- tesy of The Mother to End All Moth- ers,* the sexually charged "The Tiger's Bride," with its gorgeous final sentences; "The Company of Wolves," which became the Neil Jordan film. One of the joys of Burn- ing Your Boats is seeing how, in her later stories, Carter amuses herself, as in "John Ford's Tis a Pity She*s a Whore'*} "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost," a three-tiered trope upon "Cinderella" and "The Juniper Tree"; and "In Pantoland," a loving and irreverent paean to traditional English pantomime, with its dancing cows and valiant
cats and Principal Boys whose jos- tling breasts betray them.
If there is any lament to be made about this collection, it is the obvious one: that Angela Carter died far too young, in 1992 at the age of fifty-one. She casts a long, long shadow, both for those of us who love to read the literature of the fantastic, and those who strive to write it. It is still too sad to think, even now, that there will be no more books, no more tales by our century's Scheherazade. So one imagines her somewhere in Pantoheaven, gleefully blowing sparks upon all those dissertations being written in her name.*^
Editor’s Recommendations
Maybe it's
a sign of the en- croaching mil- lennium. This month's reading pile has a lot of apocalypses in it.
Most of them can be found in Revelations (HarperPrism), Douglas E. Winter's terrific new anthology. This one clearly is inspired by the approach of the year 2000, as the stories count down the twentieth century decade by decade, from Joe Lansdale's look at the early days of boxing to Richard Christian Matheson's 1970s rock scene through to Clive Barker's vision of the second coming. Revelations is one of the rare theme anthologies in which the theme amplifies the individual stories (rather than lim- iting them) and with such good sto- ries to start with, it's saying a lot to call this book more than the sum of its parts.
The other big apocalypse of this month coincidentally comes from our other new book reviewer, Eliza-
beth Hand. In Glimmering (HarperPrism), her finest novel to date, she envisions a future nearly upon us in which global warming and solar storms produce the Glim- mering.
The third apocalyptic vision is one of this century's major ones: J. G. Ballard's Crash (Noonday Press) brilliantly blurred the distinctions between human and machine a de- cade before the cyberpunk move- ment arrived. Read the book and see David Cronenberg's powerful film adaptation. ..and then observe the people around you and see where their machines stop and they begin.
Speaking of machines and hu- mans, Rudy Rucker's Freeware (Avon Books) takes even further the wild extrapolations of Software (1982) and Wetware (1988). This time out, Rucker imagines "moldies" — evolved robots made of algae and soft plastics — and warps through some wild scenarios Mother would never approve of.
EDITOR’S RECOMMENDATIONS
31
While the book stands on its own, you'll do best to read the first two books in order to follow the chro- nology, and as always with Rucker's novels, you'll do well if you're ready to accept almost any- thing.
Those of you who enjoyed R. Garcia y Robertson's "The Moon Maid" last year will be pleased to see he has worked it into a new novel, Atlantis Found (AvoNova), which takes moderns back through time for a first-rate tale of men who would be gods.
Among the annual anthologies, the Nebula volume always offers an interesting counterpoint to the "Year's Best" collections. Nebula Awards 31 (Harcourt Brace), edited by Pamela Sargent, deftly mixes Nebula winners and nominees with
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essays and articles into a rewarding volume.
And returning to the theme of humanity and machines, Geoff Ryman's 253 (www.ryman- novel.com) is a fascinating internet work that should wear the word "novel" loosely. 253 tells the sto- ries of each of the 253 passengers (well, 252 and the operator) on the
ephant and Castle. Each character portrait is itself comprised of 253 words, so they make for quick read- ing (a real virtue on the screen). Clever and far less static than the idea of it sounds, 253 is a terrific verbal tapestry of life in the early days of the Electronic Age. And readers are welcome to contribute to the next two cars. Hop on.
Jonathan Lethem was recently picked by Newsweek magazine to be one of the 100 Americans to watch for in the next century. His most recent novel is As She Climbed Across the Table. Angus MacDonald is the editor of California Entertain- ment Review and has published criticism and articles in the Whole Earth Review, Music Poll 5000, and elsewhere. They note that a previous draft of this story bore the title ^'Chopping Broccoli." (Don't ask me why — / just work here.)
The Edge of the Bed of Forever
By Jonathan Lethem and Angus MacDonald
TRAND KNEW HIS WIFE
would soon notice how terribly old he was getting. It was only a matter of time. Lingering before his bathroom
mirror, he catalogued the ravages. The yellow of his eyes, the white stubble growing up under, and out of, his nose, the saggy pouches of skin accumulating around his jaw. There was no mistaking it. He was pulling away from his wife, agewise. And soon it would be obvious to her.
Using the time platform had been a dirty little secret from the beginning, but at the beginning he had had it under control. Now he was spending as much time in no-time with Angela as he was back here in realtime with his wife. And it was turning him into an old man. He had no right to call himself forty-five anymore. He had lost track long before, but he was surely at least fifty by now, biologically.
He opened the medicine cabinet and took out his bottle of dye — disguised as a solution for remetabolizing corns — and began combing it into his hair. A new irony occurred to him. His wife could save him. By
THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER
33
noticing his aging, and accusing him of the adultery, she would put the stop to it that he couldn't himself. His lover, youthful, life-giving Angela, was killing him, and only his wife could save him.
He finished, mussing his hair so it wouldn't look too combed. Downstairs his wife waited for him to join her in the large kitchen. He heard her. She was working already, piling the cotton shirts she and Strand would decorate with commercial logos today. All would be spotlessly clean, ready for the inking microbes they'd prepared the afternoon before. She would keep stacking them, silently reproachful, while he read his newsclod.
Finally, dressed, showered, every hair in or out of place as required, he descended the stairs.
"Good morning," she said, too brightly. The further apart they grew the more blandly cheerful she acted. She turned at the waist, without removing her hands from the long workbench. "How long have you been up?"
Strand glanced at his watch, resisting the impulse to tell a meaning- less lie. "fust half an hour," he said. "Here, there's plenty of time. Come and sit."
"In a minute." She continued stacking shirts.
Strand opened the front door, picked up the newsclod lying on the welcome mat, and brought it inside. He emptied it from its packet into the basin hidden under the table and leaned back in his seat, waiting for the enzymes to decode the day's events and display the front page on the screen above the counter. The image that appeared, however, was unintel- ligible, shot through with colored streaks and abbreviated words. Strand picked up the packet and examined it. A muddy claw mark pierced the back. A cat or raccoon had eaten part of the news. Strand would have to go without his usual dose of headlines. He was surprised to find he didn't care. He felt something like relief, in fact, as he dumped the spoiled news into a house plant's soil.
"Angela," he said, "did you make any coffee?"
He winced in pain. He had called Miriam "Angela." The name hung in the air, irretrievable. A disaster.
Amazing. He switched labels on bottles, spent thousands of dollars renting a room in no-time, and hid a time machine around the house. All
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this, all the subterfuge and contortion, only to call his wife by his mistress's name.
"Yes/' she said distantly. "Here you go." Strand fought to keep his features from simply melting into a lump on his face as she set coffee in front of him. Would she throw the cup in his lap? Or had she somehow not heard?
"Thanks, " he said, gulping, struggling to return her slight smile. "Uh, milk?" He rose to get the creamer from the appliance alcove.
"Yes, of course." Another smile. She really hadn't noticed.
He'd gotten away with it. "No news?"
He allowed himself a small lie — just an omission, really — as reward for getting through the crisis. "I wasn't in the mood," he said.
Strand had only been to the offices of NoTime, Inc,, once, years before, to set up the account when he and Angela began their affair. He'd arranged then to have the daily code updates delivered to a storefront maildrop so Miriam wouldn't see them. When he left the house today Miriam showed little curiosity. His painstakingly rehearsed speech about a visit to the podiatrist had done the trick.
Since his first visit to NoTime, the company had grown. The offices were newly plush, the receptionist newly professional, her short dark hair styled and lacquered. Strand had flirted with her on his first visit. Today she was almost icy. She directed Strand to a waiting area across the room, and he sat across from the only other client there, a young man with a fashionable slush hat and heavy, tired eyes. A sagging rucksack took up the seat beside him.
The man was drawing a diagram on a scrap of paper on the table between them. Strand leaned forward to catch a glimpse. A problem in Radial Bowls. It looked like the man — little more than a boy — was sketching alternate aiming strategies, based on which of the 4,320 target regions his opponent seized.
"I used to play a little Radial," Strand said, as cheerily as possible.
"I'm the regional NCAA champion," came the reply, in a distracted monotone. His voice was quiet.
"No."
"Yes," said the man, a little defensively. "I'm Zip Lignorelli." He
THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER
35
looked up and stared at Strand. "'Fve been playing for State since I was a freshman. Youngest champion ever.'"
Strand recognized the boy's face. "You were on the newsclod yester- day. You won — no, you lost a pasture."
"I lost. Tm losing four pastures to one."
"What are you doing here?"
Zip took a deep breath and leaned back. "It's kinda stupid. Maybe I shouldn't be talking to you — "
"You rent no-time," said Strand. The logic of it was obvious. "You work on your moves for Radial. You beat the time clock."
"You — you a reporter?"
"Relax. Your secret's safe with me. Where do you hide the — "
Zip put a finger to his lips and smiled painfully. "Shhh. In the bathroom of the stadium." He sighed deeply and looked at the ceiling, then back at Strand. "It's not for the game, though. I got orals, for the baccalaureate, y'know? Coming up. During the nationals for Radial." He looked at his shoes and laughed. "Something had to give, right?"
"That's brilliant," said Strand. "What's the matter?"
Zip sighed again, and cast his eyes down.
"You're losing," said Strand. "The other one, what's her name, Andreyeva, she's better." He marveled at Lignorelli. So young, so wrapped up in sport. He wanted to urge him to forget the game and find himself a warm, loving female, but he wasn't sure the student, with his flip manner and self-absorption, would know how.
"I'll lose. I think you're right. It's either that or put my full attention to it and flunk the orals."
"Does anyone know you come here? What — "
Zip shook his head slightly and lowered his voice. "I'm by myself. Came in today 'cause I wanna different room."
Strand started to ask: what room? Then he saw that Zip meant his room in the no-time hotel.
What a funny idea. The rooms, as everyone knew, were all alike.
" — I kinda want one with a window, right?" The kid presented his case as though Strand worked for NoTime, Inc. "The room's so plain, y'know? No window, can't think. Going crazy. I could use just a little view. Even a fence or an access road or something..."
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"'You poor guy/' said Strand gently. "The hotel is what they call a time-station, like a space station. It's just hanging there, you see. Adjacent to our world."
He took the paper and pen away from Zip and drew a little diagram: a building suspended in space. "It's hanging out in no-time. There's no view. If it were in the world, with a view, then time would be passing. Understand?"
"Oh," said Zip. He looked down, then clapped his hands to his knees. "Well, that's that."
"Mr. Lignorelli," the receptionist called out. "Mr. Axelrod will see you now."
Zip looked at Strand with panic in his eyes, then obediently rose from his seat and stepped over to the desk. Strand, feeling protective, followed.
"I gotta, I mean, you can cancel my appointment," said Zip. The woman narrowed her eyes. Strand remembered again how bubbly she'd been when NoTime was a new operation.
"It's okay, " he said. "I helped him with a question he was going to ask Axelrod. It's all cleared up."
The receptionist paused long enough to make sure Strand knew she thought this was improper. "I guess that makes it your turn, Mr. Strand. You've saved yourself some waiting."
Strand turned to shake hands with Zip. "Good luck," he said.
"Thanks," said Zip. "Uh, good luck to you too." He moved toward the elevators as Strand was ushered into Axelrod's office.
"I had the idea," said Strand, after he and Axelrod introduced them- selves, "that I could somehow lure my wife, unawares, into a room in the hotel — perhaps in a sleep-state, or hypnotized — and get her to pass a couple of years. Do you follow me?"
"You're concerned with the age differential," said Axelrod with a tight smile. "I understand you perfectly." He passed a hand smoothly over his thinning hair. "It's a very exciting suggestion, Mr. Strand. It also, if I read you correctly, constitutes kidnapping." He looked down at his desk, then back up at Strand. "No, worse, I think. It's really a variant of murder."
"Oh," said Strand, stupefied.
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37
Axelrod pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Please — don't feel I've accused — "
"Oh, no," said Strand. "You're absolutely right. I just hadn't thought — it was a stupid idea." Silent panic coated his nerves with ice.
Axelrod regained his poise. "It's far from — " He coughed, then went on. "The ramifications often escape the layman, Mr. Strand. That's what we're here for." He smiled again, this time with something like warmth. "Richard — may I call you Richard? — you're one of our oldest non- commercial accounts. We're quite aware of your consistent use of your room in the hotel, and we want to help. I'm surprised, frankly, that we didn't hear from you sooner. This type of thing is our third-ranking customer concern."
"Oh," said Strand again. The cold subsided, leaving lukewarm sweat.
"I'm sure you realize that the effects you're concerned with are irreversible. My counsel to you is going to be very simple, and you may find it disappointing." Axelrod folded his hands. "Just because you're keeping the room doesn't mean you've got to use it every day, Richard. Ease up. Spend less time there when you go. Because otherwise — "
Axelrod turned his palms outward in a gesture of helplessness. Strand realized now that he had been counting on Axelrod's providing some answer, some counter-spell to NoTime's original magic. He wanted a refund on his lost time, wanted everyone but him to spend ten years in the hotel while he caught up. He wanted to be young again, even young and stupid, like Zip Lignorelli, instead of old and stupid, like himself.
He was suddenly aware that his face was covered with tears. Axelrod was sympathetic now. "Here," he said. He opened a desk drawer, brought out a mirror strewn with chamomile and handed Strand a slip of paper rolled into a tube.
Strand tried to snort, but his nose was clogged from weeping. He mimed satisfaction for Axelrod's sake and slid the tray back across the desk.
The waiting room was empty as Strand went to the elevator. He stopped at the table, hoping to retrieve the Radial Bowls diagram as a memento of his encounter with Zip. Instead he found a booklet with code updates for the NoTime hotel. It was the first Strand had ever seen besides
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his own. Apart from an unfamiliar account number at the top, it could have been his own.
Zip had left it behind. With a guilty look over his shoulder — the receptionist was busy with papers on her desk — Strand slipped it into his pocket, then hurried to the elevator.
STRAND ENDURED a lengthy dinner with
Miriam, the whole time glancing surreptitiously at his watch. He and Angela had a date this evening, in the hotel, and he was eager for relief from the pressures of the day. Miriam wouldn't stop talking, either about new commercial clients they'd already snared or about the comic strip panels that had turned up on some of the house plants' leaves.
Before dessert, he carried the dishes into the kitchen. After arranging them on the dishwasher's tongue, he picked up the compost bag and went out back. Once he'd dropped the bag in the bin by the back fence, he crept into the storage shed, laid his wristwatch across the hibernating lawnmower's muzzle, and unfolded the time platform hidden in an old box of automobile parts. He took the code update from his pocket and was about to punch in the figures when he noticed the strange number at the top of the printout. It was Zip's.
Odd, he thought. What would have happened?
Strand conceived uneasily that he would have traveled into the student champion's past, or rather, dragged Zip into his future. For while Strand would have been perfectly able to jump back to his original point of departure and finish his meal with Miriam, Zip would have been forced to jump ahead to that point too. The computer that regulated the jumping enforced this rule. You couldn't use the hotel to go back in time. Zip would have walked into the bathroom of the contest hall and vanished for days. Strand would have destroyed the kid's careers, both athletic and aca- demic.
And it had nearly happened.
Strand repocketed Zip's code, found his own, fresh from his maildrop, and entered the numerals.
He was transported instantly. But the room was empty. No Angela. There was no being late for a rendezvous in the NoTime hotel, by
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39
definition. Angela's absence meant she hadn't used this code in the past and would not use it in the future — if she had she would be here with him at the start of the booking.
The day was a double loss, this new disappointment punctuating the earlier one. Strand felt profoundly old and tired.
He knew to return immediately, to avoid logging any useless time here at the hotel. When he materialized in the shed, his mood lifted slightly. He always felt relief at returning to "normal" life after a clandestine sojourn in the hotel. His watch was warm from the lawnmower's breath. He strapped it onto his wrist and went inside to have dessert with Miriam.
The next day Strand caught a bus to Zip's college. His newsclod had said the match was suspended for a day at the request of the Lignorelli's handlers. It was widely interpreted as a sign of growing desperation on the part of the beleaguered young champion.
Strand found Zip alone in his room, bent over a small replica of a Radial Bowls green.
"Why aren't you in no-time?" asked Strand. He felt paternal toward Zip, as he had the day before. "You shouldn't have called time-out. It's making a bad impression."
"Doesn't matter," said the student, "I'm not gonna be the youngest champion much longer. I'll lose the match or end up older than Andreyeva. Or both."
"My trouble exactly, " said Strand, "If I stayed in no- time long enough to solve my problem I'd be an old man."
Zip seemed confused, "Your problem? Huh?"
Strand smiled. "My problem is I spend too much time in the hotel trying to solve my problem, which is the hotel. Forget it. Here." He pulled out Zip's code update. "You shouldn't leave this lying around."
He explained how close he'd come to doing something disastrous with the code.
"No," said Zip, shaking his head. "We wouldn't be trapped going back together. I could've jumped to another room, and from there come back to my own time — "
"Uh-uh," said Strand. "No one can go from room to room in the hotel. It causes time paradoxes. Screw-ups, the future meeting the past."
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'"Axelrod can/' insisted Zip. "He left from my room. He had a call on his beeper. I saw him do it. He said it was him only."
"What was Axelrod doing in your room?"
Zip shrugged. "Told me he visited all new clients. He wanted to talk about Radial." The student snorted mirthfully. "I told him my problem, but he couldn't even comprehend, let alone help find the answer."
Strand felt suddenly self-conscious. Axelrod must have been drawn to the young man, much as Strand himself was. Strand pictured Axelrod showing off forbidden tricks with the time system, trying to impress the kid.
"Axelrod could have helped you, then," said Strand. "He could have gone up the line, found someone who knew the outcome of the match. Told you what your opponent's throws were."
And he could help me. Strand thought. He could have gone into the future and found out whether Angela and I stayed together. Whether it was worth all this, in the end.
"I don't think that would work," said Zip. "Probably the outcome is I lose. I think there isn't any right throw at this point."
"Well, it doesn't matter," said Strand. "Axelrod would never do it. He's very unimaginative about the whole no-time setup. I'd do it, but of course I don't know the codes." Strand recognized that he was vying jealously for Zip's affections.
"I remember the number," said Zip idly, as though it wasn't impor- tant.
"What?"
"Photographic memory. In grade school I was on TV for memorizing the entire Wichita telephone directory. I saw Axelrod type the code into the console."
"What are you saying?"
"The picture's still in my mind. Five-four-six-two-zero-zero. A prefix, for overriding the computer. Then he types the code he wants — "
Strand felt a sudden thirst to know the hotel, to possess it as fully as Axelrod did. He'd spent enough time there, after all. It was his turf, as much as Axelrod's.
"Let's go," he said.
"What?" said Zip.
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41
''Let's go together/' said Strand, his excitement mounting. "We'll find out about that Radial move. Who knows what we'll find? Hell, we might even find a room with a view for you."
Zip raised an eyebrow, and didn't say anything.
"Come on," said Strand. More than anything, he wanted to guide the boy to victory. He wanted almost as badly to put no-time to some other use, now that Angela had stood him up; he wanted to renew his use of the hotel, make it mean more than just the affair.
Zip opened up the drawer of the desk and lifted out his time platform.
Strand had his in his briefcase. He'd been thinking of taking it to NoTime Inc. and turning it in.
The room looked the same as Strand's. But the bed was stripped, the blankets and sheets in a pile at the foot, and from the bathroom came the sound of running water, and someone humming a meandering tune. On the dresser was a smoldering hand-rolled cigarette, and the room was filled with the sweet stink of marijuana smoke.
Strand and Zip turned and looked at one another, but neither spoke.
An elderly black man came out of the bathroom, holding a sponge and a sprayer bottle. He would have been fairly short if he had been standing up straight; bent, as he was, like a question mark, he barely stood five feet tall. He opened his mouth in cartoonishly exaggerated surprise at seeing Strand and Zip in the room.
"You ain't supposed to come in like that, now. This is one of the in- between times. I ain't got the place made up."
"I'm sorry," blurted Strand, marveling. They'd discovered staff.
Suddenly the man's eyes narrowed. "You checkin' up on me?"
"Oh, no," said Strand.
"You could be lyin'," said the man. "Lots of people lyin'." He looked at Zip, who shook his head in wide-eyed fear.
"But we're not," protested Strand. "Listen, do you recognize this man? He's a famous Radial Bowls player. He's involved in a very impor- tant match — "
"I don't know nothin' about Radial," said the man suspiciously. He went to the dresser and stubbed out the smoldering joint.
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"'It's on the front page of the newsclods, ” said Strand. ''Everyone reads about it — "
"Oh yeah? Well I ain't seen any newsclod either."
"What/' said Strand. "Do you and the other — the others who clean the rooms stay in the hotel all the time?"
"Ain't no others/' grumbled the man.
"Are you saying you clean the whole place yourself? There couldn't possibly be time enough — "
"Time? There's plenty of time. And for every time there is, there's a between time, like right now. Me 'n' Yaller just clean it up when we ready." He indicated the aging scrubhound that had shambled out of the bathroom after licking the fixtures. "Ain't no hurry."
"Where do you live?" said Strand, confused.
"Oh, ho." For some reason this was amusing. "Way do I live? I live down the line a bit." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Same as all the rest, but I do like it back there. Feels clean and new. Ain't no one sleepin' in the bed before I sleep in it."
"Uh, Strand?" said Zip, strain evident in his voice.
"Yes." Strand tried not to appear flustered. He felt mildly affected by the marijuana fumes. "Well, I'm sorry we intruded. We'll just go and come back later. Some kind of slip-up, I suppose."
"Okay," said the janitor, shrugging. "I get it all clean up in a bit. Heh heh. So long."
Strand realized the man took him and Zip for a couple. "Here," said Zip. He'd scribbled a new number onto a sheet of the hotel's stationery.
It was the first time Strand had jumped from room to room within the hotel, and for a moment he thought Zip and the janitor had simulta- neously vanished. But the bed was made. It was another identical room.
At that moment Zip appeared.
"Where are we?" said Strand. "How did you get this code?"
"It's easy for me to extrapolate the numbers," said Zip. "But I dunno where they wind up." He looked around. "At least no one's here."
Strand was impatient. How could they learn anything in an empty room? "Let's jump again — "
"No," said Zip, his voice high and squeaky. "I can't stay here anymore. This is getting too weird."
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43
"You don't want to see the rest of the hotel?"
"I never wanted to see the hotel. That's your bag. Besides, I have a Radial move to make." The student suddenly relaxed.
Strand felt bereft. He'd secretly wanted Zip's dilemma to be perma- nent, insoluble, like his own. To lead further into the hotel, not out of it. "You have a throw?"
"More: a strategy. It came to me while I was working with the codes, instead of thinking of the game. It happens like that."
"I understand," said Strand, hiding his disappointment. "Go and win the game."
"No," said Zip. "I'm going to draw."
Strand felt betrayed. "Shouldn't you try to win?" Wasn't that the point? But he knew he was naive about Radial.
Zip smiled. "I'm at the top of my game. Or maybe I'm fading; same thing." He shrugged. "Even if I won this match. I'd lose the next, y'know? I should just get on with my life."
Strand began to see. "So if you draw, you retire without losing?"
"In a sense. And," here Zip actually grinned, the first time Strand had seen him truly happy, "you helped me. Since you told me before that all the rooms are identical, right? Like the Radial slices, where we move from pasture to pasture, but they're all really the same. The way the balls lie now — it's like this: I can make a particular throw, a short easy roll, that she'll have to defend against. And her only possible roll will put me in the same jeopardy, so I'll be forced into one of two throws. One is ordinary, and after that I'd need a new strategy — and there just isn't one. But the other will force her into the same defense. And then it'll be a closed cycle, unless one of us aims badly on purpose: we'll have no choice but to chase each other around the green, through all the slices, forever. Movement, but no true change. So I won't win, but I'll have made my mark."
Strand understood. It was something entirely new for the sport. He could even share some satisfaction at the idea. "And they'll name the maneuver after you, I guess."
"Probably. So thanks, y'know? Maybe you'll be famous with Radial fans, too."
"Don't," said Strand. "You can't use my name."
Understanding lit the boy's face. "Sorry. I didn't wanna — I mean, I
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guess you got enough troubles, right?"
Strand relaxed.
"What will I do?" he said.
"Here." Zip went to the desk, and began scribbling out codes. "I can extrapolate codes from the pattern — "
"They can't all work," said Strand. "The hotel can't go on forever."
Zip shrugged. "Maybe it'll reject the useless codes." He continued writing. "Here's a few dozen. And here, if you want to go back, the return code, to my room." He circled it twice. "Where you left your platform."
Strand felt exhilarated and dumbfounded at once. He was free to roam the hotel. After years of jumping to a single room he was going to possess the territory, plumb its depths.
But he was to do it alone. Zip was punching in his return code at the wall console.
"Good luck," said the young man.
"Yes," said Strand, but by then he was alone. He felt a moment of sadness, but it passed. There wasn't any reason to sit in the hotel, moping.
He went to the wall console and punched in the topmost code on the
list.
It was very much the same room again, with just one difference, a big one: two people sat on the edge of the bed, which was unmade, and neither of them wore any clothes. Most oddly, Strand knew who the two people were.
Angela and Axelrod.
"Richard!" blurted Angela. She didn't make any move to cover herself. Axelrod, on the other hand, grabbed his pants from beside the bed and leapt to his feet.
"I don't understand," said Strand numbly.
"You don't have to understand," said Axelrod. "You're in a lot of trouble. Where'd you get this code? " He sucked in his gut and fastened his trousers.
"Code, code," said Strand. "Uh, it was on that rolled-up paper you gave me in your office. For snorting the chamomile." Strand wanted to protect Zip, and this seemed an opportunity for a vicious lie. He wondered if it was vicious enough.
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45
''That's nonsense/' snarled Axelrod. "You shouldn't trifle with me, Dick. You're under quarantine as of right now."
"Quarantine?"
"Time quarantine, Dick. What do you think you're achieving by blundering into the hotel like this?"
"Stop calling me Dick."
Axelrod hurriedly buttoned his shirt and tucked it into his pants. "Listen, old man," he said, stepping up to poke a finger at Strand's chest, "you don't seem to understand — "
Strand reared back, uncorking his hostility, and, from some unprec- edented inner wellspring, delivered a championship-caliber punch to Axelrod's midsection. The younger man fell in a heap at Strand's feet. Strand noted with satisfaction Axelrod's bald spot, now quickly flushing pink. Old man.
"Oh, Jesus, Richard," said Angela.
"Motherfucker," gasped Axelrod from the floor.
Angela got up, still naked, and helped Axelrod to the bed. Strand watched, furious. It seemed to him that Angela ought to rush to him and plead out an explanation. But apparently she didn't agree.
"Okay," croaked Axelrod, his arms wrapped protectively around his middle. "Now listen. You can run if you like, deeper into the hotel — it doesn't matter. When you come out I'll catch you and hang you by the balls. Understand?"
"What if I never come out? " said Strand. "What if I just roam the hotel for a while? Kick everybody out, take it over."
Axelrod shook his head. "You'll come out. Trust me. You can get it over with fast, or play it out. Either way I'll get you."
"What are you talking about?"
"This is the future, Dicky-boy. You wanted to learn about the future — fine. But the future gets to learn about you, too. You fucked up, and you've got about, ah, about two weeks before we catch you."
"Two weeks?"
"Tell him, Angela."
Angela looked up from the bed guiltily. "I — I broke it off, Richard. Remember when I didn't come to the room?"
"Yesterday," said Strand firmly.
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Angela shook her head. '"Two weeks ago. We've talked about it, only I guess you don't know yet. I'm sorry."
"You — you don't want to be with me anymore?" Strand ignored Axelrod's red-faced sneer.
Angela simply looked down at the floor, and now, only now, grew modest, reaching for a sheet to cover her breasts.
"What happened?" said Strand.
She looked up, her expression pleading. "Oh, Richard. I went to Daniel's office, about our problem." She glanced at Axelrod, who nodded, then went on. "fust as you did. You knew as well as I did that we needed a way to stop. A way out."
"And Daniel here offered you one."
She nodded silently.
"You're a married man, Dick," said Axelrod.
Strand sagged. The air had gone out of his universe. "How could you tell I didn't know about the breakup yet?"
"You turned in your platform two weeks ago," said Axelrod. "Right after the breakup. Renounced no-time. So this bouncing around, this intrusion — it had to be before. There's no way you can return to a time after you turn in your platform. We've got you pinned. We're later than you."
"So now I go back. To have Angela break it off. And then I wait around for the arrest."
Axelrod smiled. "It certainly looks that way."
"But no. That can't be right." Strand realized how little Axelrod knew about the situation. "You're only learning now. You don't know what you'll find when you jump back. Perhaps I'll have vanished. Or perhaps — " He kept himself from mentioning Lignorelli's platform. "Maybe by the time you come back I'll own NoTime, Inc. I'll have your job. You can't possibly know."
"Not exactly," said Axelrod. "Think it through. We've seen you around and about the last two weeks — Angela had to have someone to break up with, didn't she? You came back. So the only indeterminacy is what you did this afternoon before I pinned down your location, which I'll do as soon as we go back. In fact, I have a much better sense of how you spent the last two weeks than you do. Because for you they're the future — unknown."
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47
"It's true, Richard," said Angela.
"So go ahead, Dick. Do your worst." Axelrod was able to sit up straight now; he shrugged Angela away and pointed an accusing finger. "Maybe you're right, maybe you'll own NoTime. All I know is you didn't own shit this morning when I left. You weren't even man enough to come up to the offices and confront me about Angela. You'd been avoiding me."
Strand looked to Angela. She softened her eyes and nodded sadly. Was she communicating something, offering some hope? Or merely urging him to follow Axelrod's sneering orders?
"Go back, Dick," said Axelrod. "Don't make a mess of it."
Instead Strand punched in the next code from Zip's list, and jumped.
T
HE FIRST THING he noticed was the banner stretched out over the bed, a fading printout that read: STRAND GO HOME. Then he saw the poker game: five grizzled, middle-aged men sitting around a card table. The table was littered with cigarette butts and disarrayed piles of poker chips; behind it, the bed was strewn with delicatessen sandwiches. Strand felt something under his foot. He looked down. He was standing on a hat. The men turned to face him. "Can we help you with something?" said
one.
"We're all paid up for the room," said another.
Strand was struck dumb.
"Hey," said one of the others, in an exaggerated tone of wonderment, "you're that guy — you know, the one Danny Axelrod used to talk about — the one who went crazy and got lost in the hotel — "
"Where you been, man?" said another. "They gave up on you a long time ago."
"I'm not lost," said Strand. "I've been in the hotel less than an hour."
"You ought to get in touch with Axelrod," said the first man. "He doesn't even know you're still here."
Strand took his foot off the hat. "Tell Axelrod to go fuck himself," he said. "Tell him to stop playing games with me." He turned and punched a new number into the console.
He jumped to the sound of laughter at his back.
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The next room was empty. Apart from the banner again: STRAND GO HOME.
Strand saw now that Axelrod had jumped ahead and spoiled the hotel. There wasn't anywhere Axelrod hadn't already been. Strand had a sheet with twenty-some-odd codes, but Axelrod had access to the formula that generated codes to begin with.
And suddenly he understood something else: there wasn't any hotel. There was only a room, because that was all there needed to be. One room, extended endlessly through no-time. Suddenly the janitor's talk made sense. All the various liaisons and retreats were played out not side by side in some vast, drifting hotel, but one after another in the same little room, the same little desk and bed. With an elderly janitor and a scrubhound to swab it out after each visit.
It rendered Strand's desperation absurd. He'd been struggling to inhabit a single room.
He suddenly felt a terror of isolation there, alone, a thin shell of cheap wallboard between him and the no-time. It was the loneliest place there could possibly be.
He couldn't think of what to do.
Like Zip, he couldn't go back until he came up with a move. His opponent, like Zip's, sat and waited across from an empty chair. Only in Strand's case his opponent was ruin, abandonment, and death. And Strand lacked even the option to draw.
He punched another code into the console.
A woman was standing on the bed, taping the new GO HOME banner to the wall. One end draped over a pillow onto the floor.
Securing one corner with tape, she turned and smiled. "Good to see you again." She swayed slightly where she stood on the mattress, towering over Strand.
After a moment he recognized her. "You're the receptionist. You work for Axelrod."
She snorted mirthfully. "Axelrod thinks so. I mean, I do. But I was also waiting for you, and I'm doing that for myself. And for you."
Strand wondered how she could know he'd be there now, then blurted, "You got the list from Zip."
"I know Zip made you a list, and I know what codes he had to use as
THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER
49
bases. It's the same thing." She shifted her weight and slid a drooping lock of hair from her forehead. "I needed to use a calculator^ though. Couldn't do it in my head, the way he does."
Strand sagged in relief that the boy wasn't in league with Axelrod.
She spoke again. "Axelrod's a stooge. He has nothing to do with your real problem. He doesn't even know what it is."
"He told me he couldn't help me. And he wants to kill me."
"Danny couldn't kill a sick puppy. And he wouldn't need to help you even if he wanted. You're not aging in no-time, baby, not like you think."
He gaped.
"Think about it. How much time do you think you've lost?"
"Five years, I figure."
She laughed again. "You figure, or you feel? Look, you've been a client for less than ten years, and you didn't start using the hotel a whole lot until the last few weeks. I can give you your real count: it adds up to about six months."
Strand felt dizzy with bafflement and relief. "But my hair, the..."
"Listen. You're forty-five years old. Or maybe forty-five and a half. But that's it."
He sat on the edge of the bed, not caring if she looked down on him. "I feel so stupid."
"Don't. You're not the only one to worry about that. It's our third- ranking customer concern."
"I guess I knew I was losing Angela, and couldn't face it." He started to cry. "I was using her for so long, and she never asked me to leave Miriam, and — "
The receptionist sat down on the mattress suddenly and pressed herself against his side. "She didn't want you to leave Miriam. If she wanted a man all to herself she wouldn't ever have been with you." She snorted again. "And she sure wouldn't be with Danny Axelrod."
"I'll miss her, though."
She grabbed his arm tightly. Strand felt her breath chilling the tear streaks on his face. "Maybe, but you'll miss the rest of it a lot more. Did Angela herself need anywhere near the care you had to give to the planning, the slipping away?" His tears had dried and her breath was hot
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on his eyes. ''Didn't you panic the first time you noticed your watch was hours fast? Did your wife notice it before you did, and ask you about it? Didn't it feel great after you lied your way out of it? And doesn't it feel great now, every time that you take the watch off first, that rush of competence and secrecy? " She breathed, "Some people just need that, and you got it with a woman instead of with, say, shoplifting like I used to." She stopped, her chest heaving against his sleeve.
Strand recalled the disappointment he felt over Miriam not noticing when he called her by the wrong name, "It did take a lot of effort to keep her from finding out,"
She got a pinched look around her mouth and inhaled sharply. After a moment he realized that she'd succeeded at not laughing in his face.
"Oh," he said. "Oh."
"You're not the only one to think that, either." She smiled and released his arm, "So you don't really have a problem, not like you thought. You just need to find another secret to play chase-me with." She stood and pulled him to his feet, then kissed him quickly on the lips, pressing the length of her body up against him. She smelled lightly of sweat and hair lacquer.
"You'll go back now, won't you?" she said.
"I suppose so," said Strand. Then he felt wary. "So you've done your job — I'll return, and Axelrod will nab me."
She laughed. "You should be more trusting. You and Axelrod are exactly the same, thinking everything's cops and robbers."
She stepped away and looked at him, "If you want, you can phone me at NoTime, It's always me answering, or the service. Now get going; I need to finish this," She grabbed the loose end of the banner and stepped back up on the mattress.
He hesitated. Her warmth lingered on his chest and legs. "But if I call you now, won't it be too early?"
She faced him, laughing and swaying. "What do you mean by 'now'? What do you mean by 'early'?" She turned back to fussing with the banner.
Strand went to the console.
He started to punch in the return code, then paused, and substituted another code from the list.
A woman lay fully clothed atop the bed, turned on her side away from
THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER
51
him. He felt a surprising surge of attraction toward her before recognizing her dress. It was Miriam.
His nerves iced over, just as when Axelrod had teased him with the murder accusation. How could she know I'd be here? he asked himself. He tensed as he waited for her to turn and confront him.
As the seconds passed, however, she remained still, showing no sign of turning. He saw that she didn't know anyone had entered the room; at the same time he saw her ribs heaving in noiseless sobs. On the bedspread beyond her sat several boxes of tissues. He knew the brand from her stockpile in the closet. He'd never thought to wonder why she bought in bulk.
Used tissues littered the floor. He felt a brief twinge of sympathy for the janitor, before reflecting that Miriam probably was one of the easiest clients to clean up after. She'd even brought her own towel to catch her tears on the pillow. The towel was in a color he hadn't seen around the house in months, that he'd assumed had been thrown out.
Then he noticed that it was nearly new.
He punched in the code for Zip's room, back in realtime. The eye of the world blinked and he was home.
The room was empty. Strand looked outside and saw Zip rushing away through the parking lot, off to make his throw.
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Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg have collaborated in recent years on dozens of stylish stories such as the following vision of how some people truly represent timeless aspects of humanity.
Orleans, Rheims, Friction: Fire
By Kathe Koja &
Barry N, Malzberg
IN THE CELL: AND THE
Dauphin close to her, wet breath, odor of teeth and robes the odor of death itself: is this what she wanted? France, yes, a kind of salvation she had called it but was it not extinction in another dress, reek of loam and excrescence to bury her along with the prayers? and now her death was the Dauphin, leaning against her, taking her small hand in his fist.
"It is not too late," that breath, those hands. "You must pray, you may find remission, you must ask by all the tokens of light for the grace of the Saviour Himself — "
The Saviour himself? and what does this clownish, duped and poi- soned man, sunk into an indifference so profound it masks as faith know of the Saviour? She herself knows nothing but feels, ah, feels like sun on the skin the search and bum of those eyes, that dense and bloody forehead: at every step, every station betrayal seeps through the centuries, death is always death and screams are screams are the screams of disbelief and
ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE
53
hatred as the true Saviour, stripped now of all radiance, shrieks from the vault of his emptiness Why have you forsaken me?
It is finished.
Yes, finished: finished for Jeanne too, all these hours in the dark have brought to her a bleak and blacker light and, preparing to present to the Dauphin that inextinguishable truth — that in giving herself to what she thought was France she has only rehearsed the last, disastrous discovery of Christ, that He had sacrificed Himself — oh God forgive but it is so, every instant, every dull dead beat of her dying heart knows it is so — given Himself to nothing and she as well: as here in this place, boxed nave become not only her cell but the shape of her heart she feels the Dauphin's hands upon her, the two of them grasping, small and rhythmic squeezing and through the establishing rhythm of that grasp the flutter and beat of his pulse, counterpoint upon her wrist and as she stares at him then, pale with blasphemy unuttered, she tumbles trapdoor to another understand- ing: beyond France, beyond the stations, beyond the bereaved and apostasaic Jesus Himself she sees the receding glow of what had come upon her in the fields, small terrible radiance which had seized her just as she fears in the next reflexive movement of his hands the Dauphin will seize her and take her station by station past the portals of her own damage, into the lie of light which had so enpooled her,
"Pray," says the Dauphin to Jeanne, "let us pray."
On the porch, caught not in prayer but some attitude of distant witness, ironic supplication: on the porch, tilting on the boards, feeling the liquor rise inside and Joan on this false veranda too high for the house, blurred, drizzling dark and she alone, all alone in T-shirt and silk skirt blowing white smoke at the rain. How could she have come here? what did she want? Silver light on the distant comer, street light and inside the party reeling on, stupid role-playing party, stupid game: L' Histoire Concrete or who am I? Perhaps the real question ought to be Who was I? but not here, not now because the game must be played: ask of others the questions, find out who you are and each guest assigned their little roles, a piece of paper slapped on her back as she walked in the door: gotcha, gotcha now. She had cheated, calmly cheated in front of everyone and not for the first time: JEANNE D'ARC plucked from behind to stare and then replace and the man in the black jacket, put on a collar and he could have been a priest.
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smirking and defrocked and asking archly "Don't you believe in fair play? "
Foreplay, did you sayl smartass Joan in her school play might have asked but that was a long time ago, she did not say things like that now, said nothing at all because anyone could see he meant to pick her up, would more than likely make his move as soon as he knew for certain she was here alone but soon is as good as never because St. Joan of the Flowers, St. Joan of Chavez Ravine is not going to let him do it, is not in fact even listening to his pitch. What can he say — even given a collar — worth the time it takes to hear it? Despite the stupid jacket (and maybe he meant it to be stupid, maybe he's smarter than he looks, than she thinks) he could almost be attractive but not to her, not tonight, not ever; she is not going to fuck him or anybody, not up or down, not in or out: tonight she is definitely going home alone.
Nothing like an ashtray on the porch, fenced by walls from the house but part of the screen curls outward, faint mesh unglued from its nails, hanging in the drizzle and she bends to stuff the cigarette butt through that hole, send it falling into the wet black below, no sound, no hiss, no nothing but the dark and she is tired, tired and chilled from that rain and the dark, barely midnight but the thought of going home exhausts as surely as the thought of going back in. True name: why bother? Jeanne d'Arc had visions but this Joan of Chavez Ravine has only glimmerings, snapshots of embarrassment or anguish; this Joan has no terror of blasphemy because this Joan knows she has been fucked good and proper forever and long ago and so in defeat, in silence she lights another cigarette, procession of tapers leading her toward her indistinguishable night and she smokes and thinks of nothing, of everything: of the stretch and curl of time escaped, chronology sprinkled like stars through her memory, rhistoire concrete as concrete as an animal's gaze, a broken body, the drip and slip and slither of water down a warped and broken screen to pool like blood in her own empty abscess of memory and of loss.
The walls of the prison are always wet here, wet like the fields in stricken autumn, ribbons and droplets, prisoners' tears. Witch's sweat, says the old warder, a pious man unable to look her clearly in the eye: he wears his keys like a churchman wears a cross and "See?" he says, gesturing to the water, "see how it shines? It shines like blood, like your tears, like your stinking heart, witch, soon enough." And then into his
ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE
55
prayers, all night she can hear him chanting, sometimes affixing broken pieces of the Mass to his misquotation and in the pater nosier of his murmurs she can hear the ripe curses of Orleans. Her soul will burn as brightly within his piety as it will in the center of the Dauphin's disbelief, her soul will bum everywhere, all the flames and fires of France leaping from her windowed self: witch: soon enough.
And she says nothing, adding the warder's name to that long list which lives within her, the ones for whom she must pray: the indifferent, the evil, the liars, the silent, the ones who say this thing and mean another, the sheep and the sheep and the goats. A sheep's wool smells musty in moisture like this, rain like the rain she hears falling outside: death all around her from the skies and inward from the fire, a long, long time since she has walked thus, wet grass to hiss in motion like the gown of a fine lady, fine Joan, elegant Joan with a sound of silk and arch of bosom. Not my lady soldier in her boots and gauntlets, leading her weary horse, her weary men, how did it happen so? Witch, witch, the tower warder's laughter or perhaps it is she who makes the sound, uneven breath the rachet whisper of that laugh. Oh, go back, make the journey, think again: one day crouched small amidst hummocks and gray skies, counting her beads on her fingers, here Mary, here Michael, here the lower blessed saints and the muted grumble of the flock entrusted and the next the center of men who followed as simply, as singly as the sheep, her name their ave, her living flesh their standard: oh how had such a thing ever happened to her? Voices, they said, she hears voices, she hears the voice of God Himself telling her what to do: but that was wrong: the voices were one thing, instructions, directions, those she had been eager to follow, obey the light behind their light: but not God, never God, never that unmediated ave, the cry of God resounding but instead — and what had she done, what evil made manifest in her own clumsy work for good that she should be so persecuted — instead to her the stricken, the betrayed, the slowly evaporating Christ stumbling on the stones and whispering his frightened cries into her heart, cries then to pass through the filters of her own station and become instead a claim for France, salve Franco, salve Gaul and it was this, the whimpers of the betrayed Jesus, which had at last so fully told her exactly not what she must do but what she was, had become, had always been even there in the fields and the water no less than here in the water and the stone: there might as well have been no God
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at all, God hung somewhere behind the shroud of sky and his disciples as unquestioning as her own, her followers his, his Son her passport to this abandonment, the rest only brute forms of men surrounding her, carrying her to her own place, the place inside the fire.
And yet the rain, slow and steady on the walls to press upon her as did the pressure of prayer inside her head, that unvoiced cry, that voiced desire, blood in the bone, bone in the body, body a prison of bones made of terror and desire, the same desire which had nailed Christ to the cross of wood: to escape the void and the darkness, to do the work of the Lord.
''Hi again," near-silent hiss of the screen door, beside her now on the porch the unfrocked priest with a drink for her, a glass of pink champagne. "Oh, you should hear them," he says, handing her the glass which she accepts to set at once upon the porch, between her feet without comment or thanks. "They're going nuts in there, Martin Luther's arguing free will with Marilyn Monroe."
"Marilyn Monroe's not a real person," she says. ''Image concrete, no?"
"Well," he says after a pause, "she's supposed to be real. Anyway there they are, the two of them, made for each other." His smile a supplicant's slyness, churchman's smile, warder's wink: "I think he's trying to score off her," he says. "Nail her to the wall."
"Better that than a cross."
"Well," and another pause. "It's just a game, right?" He smiles at her,- her nipples are hard from the rain and the chill, she sees, feels him staring and "Stop looking at my tits," not bothering to turn away, to hide herself: why hide from him, what does he know? "Women hate that; / hate it. Stop it."
Stillness: the sound of the rain: does he like the acknowledgement that he has disturbed her, reached her, or is all of this simply beyond him? "They've got everyone almost figured out, concrete," he says calmly, a little subdued, looking out as does she at the darkness. "Martin Luther, Henry Ford, Marie Antoinette — "
"Marilyn Monroe."
"Marilyn Monroe, right," and grateful he nods, smiles, forgiven, "and Bette Davis and Edgar Allan Poe and foe DiMaggio," gently tapping his own chest, "and Joan of Arc." Looking at her, making the little smile big. "I thought it was, was intriguing, what you did," touching the piece of
ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE
57
paper, yellow note still stuck to her back, replaced. "'That you looked, you know, at who you were."
More rain, tiny breeze to move her skirt, port-wine color, the color of blood. How late is it now? is it late enough? is it time to go home, can she leave now? Is it over? From his jacket, that ugly jacket the odor of cigarette smoke and perfume, his own odor, skin-smell ubiquitous as the flesh itself, fleshly priest, carnal priest among his lost congregation, warm meat to carry the oldest smell of all, that cold, bold retention amidst the stones of night but: no, that other Joan died a virgin, bride only to the fire and this Joan knows secrets of another kind.
"It's important," she says, looking straight at him, all eyes, one stare as reflexively he retreats, one step back and two and "It's important," again, insistent, "to know who you are. People forget. Who knows about Joan of Arc today? How many knew who she was at the time?" And what is it to you? she thinks, old knowledge, old fire, who knows where all the bodies are buried and burned? "We can only forget," she says, eyes wider now, "the movement of life is toward forgetfulness and the failure of memory. That's how it's meant to be. That's how it has to be, " forward the march into the darkness, the light one dies reflecting consumed as well to darkness by that fire, it is all she knows, all she needs to know and he says something about this, false priest, priest of folly murmuring against the rising rain, mutter like a voice between her eyes,- the offering hand, the pink champagne and this time she takes it, holds it, stem and circle in her hand, leaping streaming bubbles like angels dancing in the night, halo and firmament as he leans a little closer, just a little closer still, just close enough so she can hear the murmur of the echo of the memory of the heat, dark and concealed, meat on the bone to rise like sparks in the center of his own supplicating fire.
O THEY FEED her but only a little: weeviled bread but not much, a watery drink they call with heavy laughter the Dauphin's toast. After a long wait during which she tries to think of nothing, no Golgotha, no Saviour, no blasphemy, no loss, they come to take her before the tribunal, men wrapped in deep cloaks against the ruinous cold, it is very cold yet the water on the walls continues to flow, beads to drip and run, witch's sweat. You are a witch, they tell her.
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No,
You hear the voice of the Devil speaking to you. You hear many voices because the Devil speaks in all tongues. It is Satan who has driven you on.
No.
You are a tool and accompanist of Satan, you bear the wound of evil in your soul, you have incited to treason and death men whose lives by those deaths have been made evil, whose deaths first describe and then damn them eternally: their blood is on your hands.
No. You do not understand —
You have called to Satan in the fields and he has possessed you totally and you have in turn possessed those men.
No, no, no.
This continues. Scholars all their attempt is to distort and debate, twist her own words to make confusion, trap her, trip her, make her lie; she will not lie. Mary and Michael, the water on the walls, she could no more lie than could the sheep. You are going to burn, they tell her and that at least is true: that is what one does with a witch, a sorceress, no? You crucify a God, stone a saint, burn a witch. They call her a witch; very well then, she will burn.
The Dauphin at one time might have been expected to help her, might have been relied upon, watched for and awaited if he were more of a ruler and less of a child but inside he will always be a child. Some men are like this, has she not found this to be so? Tell them what is to be done and in their empty spaces, from their absence they will offer only assent: not so? Of course. Yes. Yes. There will be no aid from the Dauphin, no aid from the men in the cloaks who at any rate are bent on burning, no aid from the jailers or the other prisoners or the men who live or the men who died, died in battle, died in blood and fire, shrieks and prayers and at last in a kind of suppressed fury the questioning ends and she is allowed to leave, to be taken back to her cell where she is pushed to fall on hands and knees, where she keeps that posture to pray, head low, on all fours like an animal who does not raise its eyes to the master, who crawls across the stones, snaffling and breathing the water of its own sweat, who waits for the master's hand to bring punishment or pleasure, death or life, the water or the fire.
" — but without her deposit they wouldn't refund it," he says, "and I, I was going to try to make it up but I just couldn't, you know, at that time
ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE
59
I couldn't really afford it." Touching her arm with the green lip of the champagne bottle, bare arm, wet glass; so cold, so bold, so old. "You want some of this?"
"No. I don't want any of it."
"But anyway, " pouring for himself, elbow nudging hers, "she and I are friends again now, at least I think we are, I think it's good to stay friends. Don't you? To be friends, to try to — "
"Garbage," she says. "No. None of it."
"Not good to be friends?"
"No," she says, "there are no friends. Only the concrete, and phan- toms all around it."
"Mmm," he says, "thoughtful," and lights another cigarette for her, uses the motion to put that arm around her, lightly, oh so lightly but she feels it like iron, iron warm from the body enslaved and she knows she should turn to him, stare at him, tell him to get his stupid arm away.. .but oh the cold, the rain and that cold, dark passage of time so heavy all around her and he keeps talking, warm body, flickering heat seen only through closed eyes and his moving lips, talking and telling her all sorts of things. Ex-girlfriends, ex-wife, all the women who are all still his friends and "Don't you think," he says, arm so firm and steady, so soft that murmur in the brain it could be her own voice conflated, "don't you think that making love, really making love is the best way to know a person? I mean really know them, know them all the way down; know what they're like, what they want, what they need? This is the way we touch, the way we communicate and I say when — "
"No," at once and brutal, "no, I don't. I don't believe in any of that. That's just another kind of scrap you're trying to put on my back, just another stupid note, that's all." Oh, what they need, what they need: fire and water, water running from the gutters, beading on the screen, is there enough fire in all the world to quench that water now? Her voice again but more quietly, as if her mouth has frozen, her lips so stiff and cold and "You want to know what I think? I think your making love is just a cheap euphemism for fucking and I don't think fucking solves anything or changes anything or makes anything happen but fucking and I think pretending anything else is just a lie, just a soft or hard lie depending on whether you're moving in or moving out because it's friction, it's all just friction." Shaking now, little hurt in her chest, big hurt from something
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else echoed and echoing and '"It's all a lie/' she says, "you're just a voice in my head. You're a voice in your own head, and none of it means anything at all to you, all you want is the heat, that's what I think. It's all a lie," she repeats pointlessly.
He says nothing. His hands are very warm.
She hears the voice as light in her head.
Nothing.
"You see," says the monsignor, his mouth still greasy from the medianoche, chicken grease, chicken bone, "you see, my daughter. Our Lord is very good to you. He has blessed you after all and beyond what you deserve: He has taken those voices from you. He has given you this silence in which to contemplate your repentance. He has freed you from the grip of the devil so that you might recant your evil and name your collabora- tors. Come, my daughter, make full and free confession," hands wiping quickly, fingers shiny on his robe, "come back to the arms of the Lord and it will be as if you had never left."
"I want a dress, " she says, pulling with stiff fingers at her clothing, the same filthy breeches and white shirt gone gray worn when last she battled for God and St. Michael, for the ruined and ruinous Dauphin, for betraying France. "I want to wash myself, I want to be clean." Let me stand in the rain, she thinks. Let me stand in the rain as I stood in the fields with my sheep, hearing the voices for the first time: they were so sure, she was so sure then. Her head feels so light and hot but to the touch of her palms it is cool, almost cold, cold like the dead and "Let me," she says, "let me stand in that rain until I am clean, until I cannot smell my own body like some dead sheep lost from the sheepfold, until the heat is gone and the body shrinks and all the fire dies."
The monsignor says nothing more to her then or at least she does not hear it but they do bring women's clothing, not that shift and apron with which she is familiar but such as she has never seen. Oh how complicated and magnificent these garments, the garments of a proud woman and she has never worn anything like this in all her life and besides she will not strip there in front of the guards, she will not do this. "Go away," she says to the monsignor who has returned, "make them all go away. I want to be with my God and with myself."
"But my daughter," says the monsignor, "this should not be neces-
ORLEANS, RHEIMS, FRICTION: FIRE
61
sary. In the field they say you ate and slept and relieved yourself in full view of your men, you lived the life of a soldier yourself, is that not so? Why now is it different?"
How can she tell them? How can she talk of the arc of the empty field and the cries of the men, the standard flowing before her, how can she tell them when there is only silence in her head, her hot and aching brain; why should the voices leave her now, now when she is trying so hard like the sweet, damaged Christ lurching from stone to stone, begging for remis- sion, for absolution, for meaning on the cross, trying so hard to be good, to do what is right: why now? and the monsignor's stare, the warders beyond and at last, crouched like a child with the clothing in her arms at last she breaks, weeping mouth open like an urchin in the streets, huge wet sobs so her body shakes, vagrant lump of flesh shuddering and trembling like a standard in the wind and one of the warders makes a sound, chuffing cough of disgust or dismay and "Let her be," he says, "let her be. She is only a child, " and they all withdraw, the monsignor defeated, the warders perhaps in shame, how can she know? She is only a child: she is not yet eighteen, she has forgotten that, sometimes it seems as if she has lived forever.
They are all gone now, gone away and she alone, all alone, all alone in the black vast cathedral of the scream, of her empty heart, of her silent body burning now, burning from the inside out and after the weeping comes a state of voicelessness, comes then a silence so enormous it seems it will crush her to death where she lies against the stones, crush her to rags to lie beside those other rags.
Rags and distemper, brackish water and renunciation, forgive, Father, it is finished: those lady's clothes the assumption of which is beyond her, those lady's clothes that after some time a warder comes to take away, remove from beside her as if a cross too heavy for her frailty, her sickness, her narrowed sorrow to bear.
At least she thinks it is a warder but as it had been in the fields when first they spoke to her, it could have been God Himself.
"You're so cold," he says, he whispers,- her T-shirt is damp, damp silk below, everything wet and cold and time brings nothing but the pressure of chronology to crush the living into the dead, the dead into the dead, Marilyn Monroe into Martin Luther, Jeanne into Joan into France into fire,
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everything smashed at last to silent fossils, small detritus, little chunks of bone and stone and rock over which that tricked and suffering Saviour can crawl, the defrocked priest can stroke, those places that no heat can ever conquer nor God resurrect: his hands are on her breasts but she can barely feel them, his clumsy mouth against her neck and '"Let me," he says, "oh let me, let me — " like the rags on the pile, heat the cold and curtain, pile the wood around her like a temple or a home: let it go, her own voice and no other's inside her head, let it burn, let it go.
S SHE BURNS the rains continue to fall. Breeches and stained shirt and oh, see her smiling; someone in the crowd is screaming We have burned a saintl but most of them just watch, too stunned by their own wretched- ness yet laved by the burning, finding less than a moment's true diversion in her death. Away they will turn as soon as she is gone, they will resume like a rucksack their own unhappiness and it seems to her that the pain — which is worse, even, than the voices advised her, those voices at last returned like water in the desert, like manna in the mouth, honey in the horn of self, warm hands to hold hers in the terror and the cold, cold as the body on the stones of Gethsemane, the waters running out, the casting of lots, the dark and the noise of the soldiers: that pain is for all its magnitude a kindly figure as it strokes and strokes her body with iron claws, claws as clear as water, bright and hopeful claws to claim her and make her their own: just she and the shape of God itself, hammered to the stones and flying wood.
"What's your real name? " that closed-in voice, eyes closed as her own are open to watch: see: feel that rhythm against her thigh, rubbing and butting, heat against rock against cold and "What's your real name, your true name?" as he plucks at her nipples, as inside the house — shielded from them by walls, three silent walls and a silent door — something, a bottle, a body falls to shatter and somebody laughs, oh laughs so loudly as the rain becomes words in her mind, voices an endless ribbon like the ribbon of time turning back, helix, on itself, turning and twisting like the flesh to the fire and "What's your real name?" but oh, not now, not again, the fire next time but this time only the rubbing, the inflation, the
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murmur insidious of that voice and "That's me/' she says into the sound of the water, her own voice a little cough, a croak, death's welcoming peep in the terror and the cold, cold as the body on the stones of Gethsemane, the waters running out, the casting of lots, the dark and the noise of the soldiers and "That's me, it was always me," as his fingers stroke her, as she pushes her body against his, seeking the friction that brings the motion that brings, might bring, must bring at last as the bowl of heaven inverts, as the cauldron of mind empties to fill again with the blood inexorable of the inescapable self: must bring at last the fire.
/ have seen it all before, said the Dauphin, and held high the flag from
School may be out for the summer, but that doesn’t mean that the problems we have with our educational systems are going away. Far from it...
fake West is a new writer living in Torrance. California. He and his partner are finishing up their first novel while also working on some screenplays.
Halls of Burning
By Jake West
T
Arrival:
HE UV DOME OVER THE
parking lot is in sight.
Merely a block away, Roger Stenner sits in his car at a dead-stop, clenching and unclenching the steering wheel in much the same way that the ghostly fingers of his frustrations squeeze the pit of his stomach. He is very late for work again, so late that he is now caught by a seemingly endless river of students converging on Rodney King Memorial High School. For a teacher, getting caught in the last-minute rush would have guaranteed his own tardiness once upon a time, but now he has some slim hope: the metal-detectors and the epidermal drug-scanners slow them down these days. If he can make a simple left turn into the gated staff-only access street, he can still beat his First Period English students to the classroom.
Bemie waves to him from inside the transparent Security booth, obviously recognizing his aging '98 Quark. Stenner would be willing to bet that any parking lot frequented by high-school teachers harbors a much
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higher percentage of old, ex-gas-burners like his than, say, a comparable garage used by bank executives. Or School Board politicians. It still costs a lot less to install batteries than to buy a brand new electric.
There was a time when Bernie would have stepped out of the booth to halt the flow of kids for a second and give him a chance to drive through, but that time belongs to the past. Bemie is even less likely to unseal his locks than Roger is to try nosing the car forward through the crosswalk, even with a standard feature like bulletproof glass in his windows.
So, instead, he waits through the five-minute warning buzzer and the shrill echo of the final bell in the distance. Even then, it takes a few more minutes for the exodus to dry up, allowing Bemie to trigger the barricade. It rolls aside, and Roger Stenner finally makes his simple left turn, quickly, almost furtively, pulling into the side-street before some juvenile straggler can sneak through. He thinks, as he does so, that tomorrow he will be here early. That tomorrow will be different.
The problem is, he thinks that every day.
The Parking Lot:
Most people keep their mirrorshades on until they get inside the building. They do this as a safety precaution — after all, the old parking lot is exposed to the sun, despite the filter dome that the school district put over it — but it also gives them a kind of uniform anonymity as they arrive and file in through the security-locks. Most of the staff have noticed, consciously or unconsciously, and without really discussing it amongst themselves, that lately there is an advantage to maintaining a low profile. Specifically, since the recent change in administrative re- gimes. Since long-time Vice-Principal and Dean of Students Phillip Ligotti ascended to the Papal Throne behind the Principal's desk.
Today Stenner has lost that advantage since, reflective visor or not, he is the last teacher left in the parking lot. And newly ordained Principal Ligotti walks up behind him while he is fumbling with his briefcase in the back seat. Stenner flinches and hesitates: Ligotti is a person he would recognize without even turning around and whether he was wearing mirrorshades or not, because Ligotti has an artificial servo-motor implant in his right knee, and it makes a tiny but perceptible whirring sound when he walks, sort of like C-3PO in the old Star Wars movies. Stories vary
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wildly as to the origin of his injury, all the way from a Purple Heart in the Ukraine Action to a student riot during the South Central Secession to a really lurid one involving a bad divorce and a flight of stairs. Also, the implant causes him to throw his leg oddly when he walks, and other stories speculate that he doesn't get the gyro fixed because he likes the psychological effect of the limp — slow, deliberate, remorseless. Intimi- dating to staff and students alike.
All of this flashes through Stenner's mind in that split-second when he knows that he is caught and he decides on his strategy. Apology? Excuses? The hell with it. He goes for the bluff.
"Oh, hi, Phillip," he tosses off casually while finally retrieving the briefcase. He straightens up and turns to face Ligotti's perpetually flat, unreadable expression: not quite a scowl and never a smile. "Kind of smoggy for a walk, though. Campus quiet this morning?"
"You don't have time for small talk. Mister Stenner." Ligotti has a voice like a foghorn that smokes too much. "Second bell rang ten minutes ago."
"Sorry, sir. I didn't realize." Mister Stenner, huh? Okay. Message received.
Ligotti grunts noncommittally and starts to turn away. As he does so, Stenner looks past him and catches a glimpse of another person hurrying toward the building. From the back, it appears to be the slender shape of Dana Alexander, the new Social Studies teacher whom, so far, he has only seen from afar. In another moment, Principal Ligotti will see her, and, on impulse, Stenner frowns and points in the opposite direction.
"Damn! There goes another one, Mr. Ligotti."
"Huh? What — ?" Awkwardly, the older man swerves around, nearly losing his balance.
"Behind those cars. Right through there — see him? " Stenner plays it carefully now that he has Ligotti's attention, not too overdone.
"Another streaker?"
Stenner nods. "Well, on rollerblades, at least. And it looked like he had a spray can to me. How do these kids keep getting in here, anyway?"
He starts after the imaginary trespasser, but Ligotti waves him back. "Take your class, Mr. Stenner. I'll handle this."
"Okay, sir. Good luck." Stenner grins to himself as he hurries after
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the elusive Ms. Alexander, who has already cycled through the outer lock. It occurs to him that if he catches up, he can use the favor he just did for her as a great opening line.
Behind him, the whine of Principal Ligotti's knee increases in pitch as he lumbers away. Like a juggernaut starting to roll downhill into the enemy, accelerating as he goes.
The Access Corridor:
"I always feel like a rat in here.'" This is certainly not the first thing that Stenner means to say to her, and he even surprises himself when it slips out.
No less surprised, apparently, is Dana Alexander. "I beg your par- don?'' she replies, her eyes wide and her eyebrows raised apprehensively. He can see her taking a mental step back from him.
"You know what I mean." Flustered, but hiding it, he tries to recover his poise. "They built these damn tunnels so narrow, there's hardly enough room for two people to walk side by side in here." He drops his voice to a sinister pitch. "Or maybe it's the way you can hear the muffled voices from the classrooms as you scurry along behind the walls..." He grins to let her know that he is joking.
"Well, I heard this old place was built clear back in the Sixties," she says.
"Yeah, about four decades and three name-changes ago." Meaning that, unlike the newer campuses, which are designed and built with the teacher-only access policies firmly in mind. King Memorial had to be converted over when the Isolation Principle went into effect. In this case, they had to move walls and shave a few feet from existing classrooms to create these claustrophobic passageways. "By the way. I'm Roger Stenner, " he says, extending his hand.
"Dana Alexander." She juggles a couple of books to return his handshake as they rush along. Her grip is remarkably firm.
"You owe me a cup of coffee, Dana."
"Oh, really? Why?" He can't quite tell if she is annoyed or amused with him, although he is fairly certain that's a smile she is trying to suppress. Either way, he's getting a reaction.
"A word to the wise, since you're new here. Our beloved Principal
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Ligotti likes to take these little inspection tours' around the school, especially first thing in the morning. You know, on the lookout for really Big Stuff. Like drug deals and vandalism and teachers who are running late..."
"Oh, hell. Was he out there this morning?"
"Don't worry. I distracted him."
"My hero."
"Not really. He was just too busy chewing out my butt to notice you were there."
She laughs as they reach the T-junction where they will separate toward their respective classrooms. "Seriously, Roger — thanks. I didn't need a slap on the wrist my second week here." She flashes a smile at him over her shoulder as she walks away. "Nice to meet you."
"So, about that cup of coffee — " he calls after her.
"Roger! Tm late." She sounds exasperated.
"Hey, I'm just as late as you are. How about meeting me in the staff lounge after Seventh Period?"
She stops and gives him a quizzical look. "Are you sure about this?"
"My God, it's not a marriage proposal."
"Okay, then." She is still giving him that enigmatic appraisal, as if suddenly recognizing him as a celebrity she cannot quite place. "After school." And she takes off.
Down the opposite end of the corridor, Stenner reaches the spiral metal staircase that leads to his second-floor classroom. Halfway up the rungs, he pauses to give her a last appreciative glance, and a voice directly below him says: "I've seen that look before. Is it true love or just lust?"
"What are you, McNeill? Hall monitor?" He looks down at the Math teacher's balding and sunburned scalp. It annoys Stenner that a person who has his prep time during First Period — and thus, who could be late every morning — is the only teacher in the whole school who is chroni- cally early.
"Sorry." McNeill holds up his hands as he walks away. "You just didn't seem like the type."
Before he has a chance to ask what that strange comment means (the type for what?), Stenner reaches the top of the stairs.
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69
The Classroom:
These days, teachers make theatrical entrances: stepping through the wall from hidden passages, rising up through the floor from trapdoors behind desks. Stenner has sometimes thought of appearing in a puff of smoke as he ascends into his classroom, but this current generation, raised on virtual reality and spazzjazz, probably wouldn't even understand the reference. Besides, the smoke would fill up the tiny plastic cubicle that contains his workspace — desk and computer terminal — with a choking cloud that would keep him from seeing their reactions.
Not that he can see them much better this morning: some smartass has sprayed his booth on the studentside with ugly and incoherent decorations, leaving a few gaps here and there for him to see through. Tagging; they used to call it. Now it's called scars, and this example seems to consist mostly of gang signs and other territorial posturing — the human equivalent of dogs pissing on trees to mark their territories, in his opinion — with a few choice obscenities written backwards for his benefit so that he can read them from inside the booth and thus enjoy their sentiments.
"Very funny," he says through his speakers to the rising wave of hysteria in the room. Stenner can feel his lips compressing into a thin, angry line, but he carefully wipes all expression off his face as he drops his mirrorshades and briefcase on the desk and assesses the damage. Actually, he is surprised that the paint hasn't already sloughed off the nearly- frictionless surface that was developed to cope with this decades-old problem. Thinking that maybe it is still fresh, he touches the keyboard command that will fire an electrostatic pulse through the bulletproof polymer and speed up the process of repelling the graffiti.
And nothing happens.
"It's monobond, you jerk!" a nasal voice shouts anonymously from the back, and the laughter explodes again, this time with an especially nasty undertone. Great. Stenner remembers reading somewhere about this new stuff, a molecule-thin paint guaranteed to cover in a single coat, that works by literally becoming the surface to which it is applied. Neither cheap nor easily available, it certainly wasn't bought at the local hardware store. Looks like somebody has jacked a construction site recently.
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Why is it that every improvement in life just seems to give the punks a nevsr weapon? A sudden wave of disgust for a world where elaborate countermeasures are both necessary and so increasingly pointless threat- ens to sweep him away. Instead of surrendering to it, however, he sits down at his terminal, enters his suspicions in Security's database and puts a red flag on it. Then he E-mails Maintenance regarding the ruined cubicle, though he will never lay eyes on a work crew during school hours. Only the Security chops would come in with students present, so he resigns himself to a day with limited visibility. In fact, he will be lucky if what is popularly known among teachers as "the shark cage" is replaced by tomorrow.
"Very clever, whoever's responsible. Very articulate, too. By the way, there's no 'u' in mother." Sarcasm is lost on most of this audience, but it makes him feel better anyway. "Now, I want all of you to access page 134 in the textbook and do the interactive with me at the end, when you've finished reading the chapter — All right, that's ENOUGH!" Suddenly, he thunders at them by cranking up the volume to a technically illegal level, cutting through all the noise and chaos. Instantly, the room quiets down into a sort of shocked, grudging silence.
He glares at them through the broken arms of a crudely drawn swastika. "Everybody in their seats — now," he says at a more normal level, and most of them comply. "This means you, too. Mister Gorman."
"Hey, I still got business to conduct here. Do you mind?"
"Tell it to the chops. Mister Gorman. Or sit down. Your choice." Stenner makes himself sound bored, but his hand hovers over the call- button, and the kid knows it. Finally, he struts back to his terminal and slouches defiantly in his seat, smirking and making comments under his breath that cause a ripple of smirks around him.
His point made, Stenner ignores them, and, realizing that the show's over, the group regains some resemblance to an English class, though, as he slides into the rhythm of moving electronically from terminal to terminal, remotely checking each student's work, correcting and com- menting in real-time as he goes, Stenner feels an ongoing residue of emotions in the room, compounded of anger and unfocused hatred from some of them, frustration and boredom from others, contempt or amuse- ment and especially much embarrassment over what happened. And fear.
HALLS OF BURNING
71
It is an intoxicating mix, almost a palpable odor to him. It fades as the period draws to a close but is reflected in the quality of the work, all the way from the kids who did nothing to the sincere efforts, like LaWanda Siddons at Terminal 17, who made some genuinely insightful observa- tions on Stephen Crane's use of simile and metaphor. Stenner types a few, quick lines of feedback to her, wishing that he had time to give her more.
Wishing that he could talk to her face-to-face. Stenner only had one year of teaching at the beginning of his career before Isolation. Today he misses the freedom of that year more acutely than ever: the freedom to lecture without pacing back and forth behind a barricade, to walk among his students and ignite a rousing discussion, or to be close enough to actually see that lightning bolt of understanding in their eyes when they suddenly grasp an elusive concept. When they've been struggling to understand something, and suddenly they Get It.
But that won't happen. The mechanics of the job are much different now, and the rewards are proportionately less. So the period ends, and he goes on with his day, which turns out to be a fairly commonplace day otherwise. Oh, during Third Period, they hear shots fired down the hall, and Security slaps a computer-lock on their door, but nothing significant comes of it. Just to be safe, Stenner keeps a closer eye than usual on the system-wide updates, but no deaths are reported on campus, and Intelli- gence assigns a low probability to the Violence Index.
In short, other than the graffiti in his classroom, a quiet day.
The Incident:
Until the graffiti saves his life.
He never finds out what causes the battle. Perhaps it is related to those earlier gunshots, or possibly somebody is offended by the gang-signs that prevent his clear view of the room. Maybe he would have been able to see it coming with better visibility. Instead, all he knows is that open warfare erupts between two students during Fourth Period, the kind that often results in gunplay, accompanied by the usual screaming, ducking and panicked stampede — with an important difference. One of the combat- ants is armed with something much worse than a 9mm popper, something that proves Stenner's earlier suspicions about stolen construction gear.
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The kid has a laser spot-welder, modified for the street. It is a hand- held job, pumped to deliver its entire charge in a single pulse, burning out the emitter in the process.
In other words, it only fires once, but that one shot can be lethal as hell.
If it connects, that is. The intended target flings himself over a desk, and the shot misses him completely. It scores a direct hit on the front panel of Stenner's security-booth, however, which is directly in the line of fire.
Under other circumstances, Stenner would have been dead instantly. Instead, the monobond paint splashed across the plastic in front of him stops the beam for a heartbeat. He looks up in time to see a hot-spot flash incandescent in the paint a split-second before it bums through at chest level. What he does next has nothing to do with conscious reasoning, or even an awareness of what the flash means. It is an action born of pure instinct, and it is exactly the right thing to do to save his own life.
He grabs his mirrorshades off the desk and holds them up. Before they melt, their reflective surface scatters the laser back into the room, dazzling the students left in the front row.
The shooter gets the worst of it, though. Much of the coherent light bounces straight back at him, badly scorching his face. His hair bursts into flame, and he stumbles out the door, blinded and shrieking. He is already gone by the time the fire-control system kicks in, dousing everyone else and shorting out most of the terminals.
Excluding Stenner's there in the cage. The general announcement it displays a few minutes later — that his classes are cancelled for the rest of the day — is overridden on his screen by an urgent personal message from Administration.
Stenner gets an old, funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. It has been many years since he was last summoned to:
The Principal's Office:
"If the lawsuits don't ruin us, the publicity will."
The damage control party in Ligotti's office surrounds him like a tribunal of the Inquisition. Except that the clerics have been replaced by law-clerks and dogma by spin-doctors. Instead of heresy, they are looking
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73
for liability these days. And violations of political correctness, which is just a modem kind of dogma.
For a couple of hours, now, he has answered all their questions: Who started — ? When did you — ? What if you had — ? While throughout the interrogation — because that is exactly what it is — Principal Ligotti sits tilted back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Listening to the frenzied debate with his feet up on the desk, legs crossed. Slowly, he wiggles his right foot back and forth, causing the artificial knee to make a scratchy, insect sound, rhythmic as a cricket. This twitch is the only barometer of the principal's true agitation.
Stenner sees this as a bad sign. Generally speaking, the quieter Phillip Ligotti becomes, the worse it is.
'T was only defending myself," Stenner says mechanically for the umpteenth time. "My God, it isn't like I planned to hurt the kid," he adds this time around, but it is only a half-hearted protest. He is realizing that facts will have nothing to do with the outcome of this.
"You don't understand our exposure, " the District rep tells him. He's probably right. The political climate has been much different since the Crip Party won their majority in the State Legislature.
"You're suspended, pending further investigation," Ligotti says abruptly, dropping his chair legs back to the wooden floor with a thunk! as final as a judge's gavel. "I'm sorry, Mr. Stenner, but I don't see that we have any choice."
Stenner doesn't argue. Seventh Period has long since come and gone, and he excuses himself more with relief than with righteous indignation. Even though he should be worrying about how he is going to pay the rent or pay for his own attorney, the only thing he can worry about right now is whether or not Dana Alexander waited for him.
The Teacher's Lounge:
Apparently not.
The only person in the lounge is a man that he doesn't recognize: blond guy, slender, narrow features. Who can keep up with the turnover in this place?
Then the guy says: "Roger?"
"That's right." Stenner looks at him hard, wondering how he knows
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his name, wondering if he should recognize him, and then the light dawns. ''Did Dana Alexander leave a message for me? I guess she couldn't stay, huh?"
The blond gives him a quizzical look that is somehow oddly familiar, as if he has seen it before, just recently. Just today, in fact. On another face.
"Oh, shit, Roger. You didn't know."
Stenner feels the blood drain from his own face. "Danal But — but — you're a Social Studies teacher!" He blurts out the first stupid thing that enters his mind.
"Alternative Lifestyles Specialist, actually." The other man smiles sadly. "I thought this was too good to be true."
Stenner grins back sheepishly. "These things happen, I guess."
"Are you disappointed?"
"Oh, I'm okay." Stenner takes a step back, frantically searching for a graceful exit line from an embarrassing situation. "Trust me. After the day I've already had, things couldn't possibly get any worse."
Departure;
The police are waiting for him in the parking lot.
Late afternoon sun glints off the light-bar of the cruiser parked next to his old Quark. A few staff people stare as they go past, then hurry a little faster to their own cars.
One of the two officers — the older one — asks him his name and informs him that he is under arrest. "For Reckless Endangerment of a Minor and Irresponsible Response to Violence," he says and quotes the penal codes, though Stenner senses his reluctance with what he is doing.
"Officer, you know this is wrong." Stenner is surprised at how calm his voice sounds. "The kid took a shot at me"
The cop takes his arm and walks him a few steps away from the car. "Look, I'm sorry, Mr. Stenner, but the boy's parents filed charges. We don't have any choice."
"Christ, Vm the one who should be filing charges." But it goes without saying that he can't. They both know that Stenner signed the same waiver that every other public school teacher does when they take the job.
"All I can tell you, sir, is that it will look better for you if you
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75
cooperate. Personally, I would advise you to think about all the implica- tions." The cop jerks a thumb meaningfully at the audio pin-recorder attached to his collar: That ’s all I can say on the record, pal. So what is he really trying to tell him?
Stenner follows the officer's gaze down to the motorized barricade at the end of the access street, and it all becomes clear to him.
Suddenly, he is very aware of what might be waiting for him on the other side of that barrier — of how many friends the gang-banger in his class might have, and what they might be planning in retaliation. And where. And how leaving here in the company of armed policemen is, quite possibly, the only way he might leave here alive.
"I see what you mean," he says and humbly, almost eagerly, extends his arms for the handcuffs.
Unlike his students, Roger Stenner learns his lessons.*^
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Rand B. Lee is a freelance writer and lecturer specializing in horticulture and "New Age" topics. He lives with his blind husky mix, Moon-Pie, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he serves as co-editor of The American Cottage Gardener and president of The American Dianthus Society. He is also a wonderful fantasist who writes fiction much too infrequently, so it's a real pleasure to introduce this new story from him, which he notes is dedicated to his younger brother feffrey, who died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 35.
The Green Man
By Rand B. Lee
WHEN JEFFREY ANDREW
Russell needed to escape his mother, he hid in the old black Buick on the edge of the far pasture, where the woods began. The Buick had small dark windows and doors as heavy as coffin lids. Long ago, the family had ridden around in it, but before feffrey was seven someone had left it to sag into the soft Connecticut green. The Buick's name was Vi, because its upholstery was gray-violet. His family named all their cars, the way some people name their boats, or their children. Except when he needed somewhere to hide, he avoided the Buick, in part because dreaded spiders had come to live in the glove compartment, but also because he had always thought of Vi as a sort of person and now she was dead, which made him feel sad and desirous of showing respect.
On the summer day the Green Man appeared to him for the first time, it was very hot in the car. In deference to the spiders, he crouched in the rotting back seat, making himself small, breathing shallowly and softly.
THE GREEN MAN
77
listening for the sound of his father's car horn in the driveway, which would signal that it was safe to go back into the house. In a corner of the windshield, a spindly-legged yellow jacket mumbled to itself. Outside, the cicadas practiced their scales. The path through the pasture, which was overgrown with black raspberry and thistle, remained empty, but this was not to be trusted. He fought to stay awake and alert.
The heat was palpable. He began to nod and drowse, jerking upright at imagined sounds of movement, then drowsing and nodding again. Having drowsed once too often, he woke in a panic from a deep sizzling sleep to find Vi darkened with the slant of late day. Cautiously he opened the door, got out, and stood up directly under the gaze of a tall, broad- shouldered figure standing not ten feet away in the forest fringe.
His first panicked thought was, Momf, but almost instantly he realized that it was not his mother: it was a very dirty, very hairy bearded man. His hair was black, and it grew all over him: long and matted on his head, a tangle of beard hanging below the big nipples of his broad furry chest, his penis and testicles dangling pale between the dark-pelted columns of his legs. Late light spilling through the birches cast a green glow over his shoulders and belly. His eyes were holes of shadow. Jeffrey stared, not daring to twitch, but in the end he had to, and the instant he did, the green man was gone, without a rustle of brush.
Jeffrey blinked, moved forward into the forest fringe, and listened, the way he listened at the door of his bedroom for his mother's footstep on the landing. "Hello?" he said, in what his mother would have called a stage whisper. "I know you're there." He listened some more. The woods were like lungs breathing in and out. Jeffrey had always steered clear of the woods. He was afraid of the snakes which sunned themselves on the summer trails, and he had heard somewhere that there were old bear traps under the loam that could take your foot off at the ankle before you knew what was happening. He was still standing there, undecided, when he heard a car toot twice across the meadow.
He returned to the house with careful haste by the front door facing the street, which only he and the Jehovah's Witnesses ever used. The mountain laurel growing to one side was out of flower by now, its tiny white sticky maroon-banded grails of blossom withered and fallen to the sterile acid loam. From the foyer, he ascended the staircase which led to
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the landing separating his bedroom from his parents'. He could hear the clatter of dishes from the kitchen which meant that his mother was preparing dinner. The clatter did not sound particularly quick or harsh; he relaxed a bit. This meant she was not too angry at him for running away from her. The television gabbled from the living room: the war in Vietnam, as usual; Jeffrey's father, catching a few minutes of the early news before dinner.
Jeffrey went into his bedroom with the Star Trek models suspended by wires from the ceiling and lay on the blue corduroy cover of his bed. He thought of the green man and felt excited in a way he could not name. The man had felt wild to him, somehow, much wilder than the raccoons who thudded every night from the pine tree onto the roof. Jeffrey had seen a wild deer once. It had jumped into his father's headlights when they were coming home from the movies in New Milford. His father had cursed and slammed on the brakes. The deer had just stood there, and then it had vanished, with no more sound than a goldfish makes in the goldfish bowl. But the green man had seemed wilder even than this.
When his father called him to come down for dinner, he descended to the kitchen by the second staircase on the other end of the house. His mother was putting the finishing touches to a platter of cold roast beef and sliced tomatoes, her broad back turned to him. His father was not there. He felt a moment of panic. She had thick hair the color of field-mouse fur. She always claimed she had eyes in the back of her head, and once again she demonstrated the reasonableness of this: the moment he entered the room she said in a quick rich quiet voice, "Honey, Mama was just funning; she would never hurt you, you know that." She did not pause in her work and she did not turn to look at him. He took his seat at the kitchen table, thinking of the green man's invisible eyes.
At dinner under the kitchen fan, Jeffrey's father announced his intention to go on a lecture tour. "Scott thinks it's the ideal way to promote the new book," he said. Scott was their agent in New York. Jeffrey's father wore a gray beard nothing like the green man's beard, and he was so fat he had no waist, only a belt across the middle of his bulge, like Humpty-Dumpty. He mopped his brow with his napkin every few minutes.
"That's a marvelous idea," said Jeffrey's mother. Her yellow shift
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clung to her in the heat, showing the outline of her big breasts and her slender waist. She put a slice of cold roast beef on Jeffrey's plate, next to his salad. "There you are, love," she said, smiling at him, as though nothing whatever had happened.
"Thank you," Jeffrey said.
"Thank you whom?" growled his mother, doing her Captain Hook
face.
"Thank you. Mom."
"That's better. Give Mama a kiss," she said. She pursed her lips. He screwed up his face and sacrificed it to her. She took his chin in her hand and mashed her mouth against his. She smelled like tobacco, cows, and wine. She released him with a satisfied smack of her lips. "Umm, gum," she said. Dropping his gaze to his plate, he noted with alarm the Italian salad dressing running into his meat. "When would you be leaving?" his mother said to his father.
"Around January first," said Jeffrey's father, forking roast beef.
"Can I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.
"May I come with you," said his mother.
"May I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.
His father scowled. "No, son. You've got school. This meat is a little well done, Rae."
"I'm so sorry," Jeffrey's mother replied smoothly. She had been about to transfer a slice of beef from the platter to her plate. Inspecting it, she lifted it into the air and held it out to her husband instead. "Here, Simon. This is as rare as can be."
Jeffrey's father proffered his plate. "What are you going to have?"
"Why, there's enough here to feed the Russian army," said Jeffrey's mother. She took another piece of meat from the serving platter.
"For God's sake, Rae, that's an end piece. There's no red in it at all."
"It's perfectly delicious," said Jeffrey's mother with finality. She cut a piece of dry brown meat, chewed it, then took a sip from her third glass of white Gallo. Jeffrey watched his father watch her wrap her big fingers around the glass, raise it, tilt it, suck up the pale liquid into her full, sensual mouth.
Jeffrey's mother had been a radio actress in Hollywood in the Thirties, known for her dramatic voice. She had met Jeffrey's father on the set of a
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show where he was one of the head writers. Hanging in the upstairs dressing room was a picture of her as she had looked then, a black-and- white studio still. In the photograph, her hair was shoulder-length and gently waved. Her chin rested on white-gloved hands. Around her neck twined a choker of big round ceramic beads. She gazed straight out at the photographer, fearless and subtly challenging. Jeffrey thought it was the most beautiful picture he had ever seen.
They ate in silence for a while. Then his mother stood up and poured herself another glass of wine from the counter. Jeffrey drank some milk. His father said to him, "Don't fill your belly up with milk. You haven't touched your salad." Jeffrey searched his salad for something without much dressing on it. He settled on three cherry tomatoes. He ate them slowly, one at a time, clamping down on them hard with his teeth so they exploded into wet sweetness, like little bombs. Sitting again, his mother took a few more bites of meat, then put her fork and knife in "finished" position. She lit a Camel cigarette, blowing smoke up toward the ceiling. "Is that all you're going to eat?" Jeffrey's father asked her.
She looked over her men. Her eyes twinkled. "I am so full I could not pull a-no-ther blade of grass, baa, baa," she replied.
VERY DAY after that Jeffrey looked for the green man. Sometimes he thought he saw him out of the comers of his eyes, but when he turned, there was never anything there. When his father took him shopping in New Milford, the next big town over, Jeffrey scanned the clusters of hippies on the Green. His father said, "If they'd bathe occasionally people would take them more seriously." None of them looked like the green man. As trees flashed by on their homeward drive, groves of slim trunks misted green, Jeffrey searched their dappled depths for signs of dark thigh and hairy shoulder, but they were just trees.
One evening, remembering the stories his mother had told him about leaving food for the Little People, Jeffrey spirited a chicken leg and a cup of milk out of the fridge and left them on the hood of the Buick. The next morning, the chicken leg was gone and the cup was overturned in the grass. Encouraged, he tried the experiment again, but abandoned it after he stole out one night with a flashlight and surprised a raccoon mother and
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her babies consuming the offerings. He stayed on the alert, and more than once spent the day in the far pasture, hoping that the green man would appear, but he did not.
One night Jeffrey's parents had a big fight. It was a Friday. They went out to dinner and came home after Jeffrey was in bed. Jeffrey was glad when they went out to dinner, though he could not have explained why,- it made him feel safe, the way it made him feel safe on the rare occasions when he walked into the kitchen and found them standing by the sink kissing. Lying in bed, he thought about the green man while the old house creaked around him in the dark. The house had been built in 1792. There was a huge stone fireplace downstairs with a Dutch oven built into it, and there was an attic full of cobwebs and old steamer trunks. The driveway gravel had garnets in it; you could pick them up like rubies and hold them to the light. The first spring after his parents had moved to the house, only white flowers had come up in the front gardens. His mother had pulled them all out because, she said, they reminded her of funerals. She had replaced them with color: slashing red tulips, like her lipstick; foaming beds of yellow, purple, blue, wine, rose, and brown irises; geysers of pink phlox which she complained always ran to magenta after a few years.
When he was very little she had given him a little bed of his own to plant, out near the well-house off the driveway. He had liked pansies, with their foolish gold and black faces; bachelor's buttons, particularly the dark reddish-purple kind; and four o'clocks, which opened only in the late afternoon and always amazed him because they had flowers of different colors on the same bush. His mother said to him, "You have a green thumb." She always took care of the flowers but gave him the credit. When he got older, he helped her weed among the corn and tomatoes. She told him wonderful stories, about Wol the owl and Eeyore the donkey and a green garter snake that had visited her one summer in the garden they had had before they had moved to this place, when he was still in the baby carriage. "He came right up and sat in my lap," she told him. "He would go away when the sun went down and be back the next day." After a while he got tired of gardening, and she eventually stopped asking him to help her.
He fell asleep and was awakened by the car crunching on the driveway. Doors opened and slammed shut. He heard raised voices, his mother's loud and contemptuous, his father's loud and defensive. A long
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while passed before the voices stopped, then another long while during which he heard his father's heavy ascension of the stairs, his bathroom garglings and flushings, and finally silence. He lay in the dark, alert. His chest and stomach felt heavy.
He thought, quite suddenly, of a day when he was four and his parents had taken him down to the lake with some of their grown-up city friends. There were water-lilies in the lake, which was very shallow, and perch, and a dam at one end which the water slid over in slow glassy sheets every spring thaw. That day the dam had been dry. The visitors had stood on the concrete in their New York clothes, chatting and puffing on cigarettes, admiring the scenery. Forgotten, Jeffrey had squatted at the edge of the dam and looked out over the water. He had been able to see his reflection in the surface of the lake, darkened and ripply,- then, as his eyes had adjusted to the play of light and shadow on the water, he had found he could look through his reflection and see the bottom of the lakebed.
Up on the dam the air was full of chattering voices and an odd tension. Down in the water it was still and calm, lake-weed hanging immobile, each pebble distinct. A yearning had swept over him, a yearning to be part of that tranquility, to sink down deep into it; he had found himself falling forward toward his reflection. His father had caught him and pulled him back with an oath of concern. They had made much of his near-mishap, which had pleased him. But now, lying in the dark, he remembered the stillness at the bottom of the lake and longed for it again.
He had just begun to doze off for a second time when he heard his bedroom door opening. Yellow hallway light jabbed his eyes. He smelled his mother's cigarette and her Blue Grass cologne. He closed his eyes and lay still, his heart pounding. The cigarette and cologne smells increased. He felt her breathing above the bed. "Baby, " she said. She touched his hair. He thought of the lake and sank down, down.
The next morning, his parents would only talk to one another in monosyllables, and his father took the car into New Milford to have breakfast there. Jeffrey sat at the big kitchen table with his mother. Her cigarette burned in an ashtray. She looked tired, and drank several cups of fragrant black coffee while he ate the buttered waffles she had made him. "Are they good, baby?" she asked him. He nodded. After a silence, she
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took a drag on her Camel and added, '"Your father's being a bastard. " When he glanced up at her face, she blew smoke, blinked rapidly and smiled. "Well, enough of that nonsense." She patted his small hand with her big ugly one. "You're my precious baby. Finish your breakfast; Mama's got chores to do."
She drained her coffee, got up from the table, and started sweeping the floor. By the time he had eaten the last of his waffle and deposited his dishes in the sink, she was on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum with a brush. He went upstairs to his room, got out the Science Officer tunic his mother had made for him and the Spock ears his father had bought for him, put them on, grabbed a phaser, and went downstairs again. His mother was still scrubbing the kitchen floor. Her cigarette was in her mouth. He left the house by the mountain laurel door and made for the vegetable garden.
The garden was south of the far pasture where he had hidden in the Buick and seen the green man for the first time. His mother had had one of the young neighbor farmers till up the ground for her, and she had planted tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, squash, beans, sweet peppers, cucum- bers for pickles, dill for pickles (she made them herself in a big tub in a nook off the kitchen next to the dishwasher), glads, which he thought really looked glad with their bright colors, and sweet corn. He crawled through the sweet corn, trying to circle around the party of Klingons who had devastated the Federation outpost. The soft manured earth gave under his knees and hands, rich as chocolate cake. Though the day was already sweltering, the ground was still wet under the corn.
The Klingons were proving difficult to evade. They had spread out in a wide scan of the area, searching for him. Jeffrey changed direction and headed at top speed toward the old asparagus patch, which marked the eastern edge of the tilled ground. Beyond it lay meadow, then a near arm of the same woods which bordered the far pasture a quarter mile away. Jeffrey reasoned that if he could make it to the meadow, he would be out of the Klingons' phaser range, and the Enterprise could beam him up before the Klingons knew what was happening. In the heat, his Spock ears felt heavy. The asparagus, long gone to plume, waved before him. He broke from the garden and made a dash for the cover of a clump of black raspberry.
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The green man was standing in the meadow halfway between the forest edge and Jeffrey's raspberry clump. He looked exactly as Jeffrey remembered him: naked as night, hairy, powerful. He raised his left arm, muscle-bunched, in greeting, palm held flat and upright. For a moment Jeffrey thought he was going to open the two middle fingers, the way Mr. Spock did. Then the green man dropped his arm and began moving slowly toward the woods. At the fringe, he stopped and looked over his hairy shoulder at Jeffrey, waiting, smiling a white smile like the Pepsodent man, though Jeffrey knew the green man probably did not brush regularly after every meal. The smile hit Jeffrey like a baseball in the face, but in a good way. It was a smile for him alone, like Mr. Halloran's smile at school when he got an "E" on his spelling test. But before he could move or say something, the green man had turned again and melted into the trees.
This time Jeffrey ran right up to the woods and a few steps in. "Come back," he said. He took a few more steps. Sweet green sunlight dappled his Science Officer tunic. It was cool in the shade. He looked carefully around and could see no tracks the green man might have left. "Hello?" he said again, raising his voice. Some birds thrashed and dropped and rose, chittering. In the distance, tree-trunks leaned, half-fallen, in heavy slants. There was moss on them. He took another few steps forward. No trap snapped around his ankle, but the green man did not reappear.
At breakfast a week later, when his parents were eating at the same table again but still not talking much, Jeffrey said to his father's newspa- per, "I saw a man in the woods."
"Christ almighty!" his father exclaimed, lowering the paper. He had dripped yellow egg yolk down his rotund plaid front. "I can't wear a clean shirt for five minutes!"
"Oh, Simon; it's nothing." Jeffrey's mother put down her coffee cup, stood up, went to the counter, picked up a washcloth, rinsed it under the tap, walked back to the table, and began wiping off her husband. Impa- tiently he took the cloth from her and wiped himself. She said, "Jeffrey Andrew Russell, did you go into those woods by yourself?"
"No, Mama. I just went to the edge."
"Jeffrey?" She turned her all-knowing, undeceivable gaze upon him. "Are you sure you're not fibbing to Mama?"
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''That's all I did. Mama. I just saw him on the edge." He shut his mouth. He had almost added, Of the far pasture.
His father put the washcloth aside. "Did he have a gun?"
"No." Jeffrey had been warned many times that hunters were always creeping on to the property and shooting animals illegally, another reason why he was forbidden to go into the woods alone, because hunters could think you were a deer and shoot you before they knew you were a boy.
"What did he look like?"
"Simon," said Jeffrey's mother, "you don't have to grill him that way."
"Will you please let me talk to the boy?"
"The boy?" Her tone was amused. Jeffrey shrank. "I believe your son has a name.'" She lit a cigarette and blew smoke elaborately. Jeffrey's father turned red.
"I am simply endeavoring to determine the facts of the matter, Rae," he snapped.
Jeffrey's mother shook her head and smiled to herself. To Jeffrey she said, "What did the man look like, darling?"
"Like one of those hippies on the Green in New Milford," Jeffrey said. "He didn't have any clothes on." His parents stiffened in unison and exchanged meaningful looks.
His father said to his mother over his head, "Those damn kids. I'd better call Harley Marsden." Harley Marsden was the town constable.
"Oh, Simon, they don't mean any harm."
Jeffrey's father pushed his chair back violently. Jeffrey shut his eyes. He heard the swinging door from the kitchen to the foyer open and shut; heavy steps; the telephone being dialed. His mother said to him, "I never want you going near those woods again. Not without Mama. Do you understand, Jeffrey?"
"Yes." He heard his father's grim voice talking into the receiver, but he could not hear the words clearly.
"Yes, whom?"
"Yes, Mother." He opened his eyes again and gave her a reassuring look. He was shocked to see tears on her cheeks. She looked away from him, blinking, and took another drag on her cigarette. Guilt doused him like cold rain water off a fir branch. "I'm sorry. Mama. I won't do it again. "
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course you won't, darling/' she said. She gave him a brave smile and patted his arm. "Mama loves you, that's all. She loves you more than tongue can tell. She wouldn't want anything to happen to her precious Jeffie."
"He didn't do anything," Jeffrey whispered. She shushed him and stroked his arm, then his hair. His father shoved through the swinging door.
"Harley said he'd bring Rob over to look around," said Mr. Russell. "Those damn kids! I spend a fortune on 'No Trespassing' signs and I might as well be putting out a welcome mat." To Jeffrey he said, "When did this happen?"
"Last Saturday," Jeffrey said. His mother stood silently and turned to the dishes in the kitchen sink.
"Did you hear any shots from the woods that afternoon?"
"No." Clink went the dishes.
"Did he do anything or say anything to you?"
"No." Suddenly, he was afraid, not for himself, but for the green man.
"Do you think you could show Mr. Marsden where you saw the man?"
"Yes," he said. Later that day Harley and Rob, his beefy blond deputy, arrived. Jeffrey led them and his father to the far pasture where Vi was. Forbidden to accompany them, he watched the three tramp off into the woods, like two bowling pins taking a bowling ball on a hike. They came back in three hours, Jeffrey's father puffing and the two policemen shaking their heads. They had found the dead remains of a campfire and something else, something odd in a tree which they would not talk about in front of Jeffrey.
His mother put him to bed early after a dinner of thick ham sand- wiches and chocolate chip cookies, which she had spent all day making, sheet after sheet of them, perfect and gleaming and fragrant. He lay upstairs in his bedroom, trying to translate the adult drones from the kitchen into language. He thought. He'll never come back now. I'll never see him again. He felt a great desolation.
Nothing happened for many days. School came, a new grade with all his old friends. He almost forgot the green man in his joy over the crackly and perfumed new books and the wonderful stacks of empty lined writing
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paper. He got E's in Spelling and Arithmetic and Reading, and he had a part in the Thanksgiving pageant, a pilgrim with a big round white cardboard collar. Hard frost killed all the flowers in the garden. Men came with a truck to fill the oil-burning furnace in the cellar. One night he woke up while it was still dark and saw snow drifting down like feathers through the porch light.
He got out of bed, padded to his bedroom window, and looked out. He had on his slip-slops, but his feet were still cold. At first he could only think of Christmas: snow meant Christmas was coming. He loved Christ- mas. He watched as the snow buried the back yard, the swing set, his mother's dead roses, the dark eaves of the Little House where his father's forbidden study was. He thought of the cow and the horse asleep in the barn. The cow slept lying down, but the horse slept standing up. His mother had told him that. He thought of snow falling over the silent woods. He wondered if the green man was still out there, somewhere. He must have gone back to his commune, he thought. But what if he didn't^ What if he didn't have a commune to go back to^
He felt a pang like the pang he felt when his mother looked sad and lonely. He got back into bed and pulled the quilt up to his neck. He fell asleep and dreamed he was wading through a river of hot dry green cornstalks while his mother shouted to him from the kitchen door to come back, come back, come back. The next morning was Saturday. He rose early to smothered blank brightness. He got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. His mother was at the counter with her red and green Christmas apron on, Fanny Farmer Cookbook open, peering down her bifocals with flour and sugar in sacks around her. He said to her, "May I go out and play?"
"Don't I get a kiss first?" He went over to her and let her mash him again. Her lips tasted like vanilla extract. She smiled at him, her world, her joy, her own. "You put on your boots and your hood," she commanded him. "And your snow-pants."
"Yes, Mama," he said.
"And your gloves."
"I will." He smiled back at her and went out of the kitchen and into the hallway. In the hall he sat on the bottom of the stairs near the telephone stand and pulled on his red snow-pants, then his red rubber
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boots. They were hard to get on, but he did it. From the long coat-rack he took down his stuffed coat with the hood. He put it on and buttoned it up. He waddled back into the kitchen. His mother turned hurriedly from the spice cupboard to the sink and opened the tap. He watched her wash out a glass and put it on the drainboard. She turned smiling to him. ''You look as snug as a bug in a rug," she said. "Are you going to make snow angels? "
"Yes," he said. After a moment he said, "Bye," and went outside into the snow.
It was a completely different world at once. The morning sun was bright and the morning sky was cloudless blue. The back yard stretched away, a flat unbroken expanse of dazzling white. He walked away from the house and onto the snow-covered lawn, leaving tracks with his red boots. He climbed the slick ladder of the jungle gym, paused at the top to wave at his mother, who was watching him through the kitchen door, then shot down the slide on his rump. He landed in a heap of snow and laughed. The metal of the slide gleamed clean behind him. He stood up, batted at his snow-pants with his gloves; snow powdered the air and went up his nose. He slid down the slide three more times, then wandered on through the yard, taking his time lest she be watching still, past his father's Little House, until he came to the lilac hedge with its hard brown sleeping buds. He walked through the opening in the hedge and out of sight of the kitchen door.
He began to run. It was awkward, in his leggings and boots; he slid a little and fell down once. There was no snow under the pine trees at the back of the Little House. He paused there on the needles to catch his breath. His father was already hard at work, typing. Smoke trickled from the Little House chimney. Jeffrey looked up at the brown-lit windows. Inside, he knew, there were walls and walls of books, and silence like the calm at the bottom of the lake. He hurried on.
He passed the cow barn and the horse stall and the ghostly rhubarb patch. He passed the corral, which in spring and summer was calf-deep manure. Even now, in places, the snow had melted into hoof-prints. On the far side of the corral, a low fieldstone wall marked the edge of the far pasture, but he did not head that way. He walked to the edge of what had been the vegetable garden. Snow had softened its hard lumps and ridges. Here and there grasses raised white plumes into the cold air, their
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undersides pale brown. There were no more cornstalks; his mother had them tilled under every fall. He stepped forward into the frozen furrows.
His head was buzzing, as though there were bees in his hair. This is where the tomatoes were, he thought. This is where the potatoes were. He had played one-potato, two-potato with his brother, who was in Vietnam. He came to the edge of the garden and the asparagus trench. A few old stiff spiny stalks still remained, dotted with dessicated red berries. His mother had always said never to eat anything without asking her first; it might be poisonous. He picked one of the asparagus berries and put it in his mouth. It tasted bitter, so he spit it out.
He crossed the asparagus trench and entered the meadow. The white trees of the woods lay waiting for him on the other side. The Klingons did not fire upon him. He passed the snowy hump of a black faspberry bush, and another. When he was close enough to see the green man's eyes, he stopped.
They were dark and fierce and full of love. They made him want to chase cows with a stick, to shout his name in church. The man was holding out his furred hand. Jeffrey thought of his mother's smell of tobacco and wine in the dark, of her mouth mashing his, of her precise knife-cuts at the kitchen counter. He thought of his fat father asking, "What are you going to have, Rae?" at the kitchen table, as though it was food she needed. He thought of Vi rotting in silence while wasps knocked themselves stupid against the windshield. He looked into the green man's eyes and said, "Could you please show me where the raccoons go when they go away and you don't see them?" The man nodded, very seriously. Jeffrey reached up and took his hand, and together the two of them turned and walked into the forest.
Films
KATHI MAIO
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MAMA’S BOY
Screenwriters
aren't as dumb as they look. ..in most movie reviews. I mean, if they were as unimaginative and self-in- dulgent as the critics of America have proclaimed them, they would do the natural write-what-you- know thing and make a writer the hero of their screenplays much more often then they do. But they have accepted the sad truth: The writer's life is a less than fascinating spec- tacle.
So, when a screenwriter shows up in a movie at all, he is more likely to be an embittered — if cru- cial — cameo (e.g., The Player) than the central character (as in the little seen, but oddly endearing, The Big Picture). Of all writers, journalists {His Girl Friday, All the President's Men) have certainly fared the best on screen, because their role is seen
as an active one. They can be val- iant investigators chasing down a life-saving or President-toppling exclusive.
Other types of authors rarely get the star treatment. And when they do, it's usually only as un- avoidable remnants of the original novel upon which a movie is based. (Novelists can indulge their self- referential tendencies much more freely than scripters.) Even then, the writer is little more than, as in Sophie's Choice, the witness/scribe of the high drama of other people's lives.
Being a "serious" writer helps. If you're a Hemingway, they might even make a movie about your cal- low youth. But if you're a master of pop. cult., chances are you'll get no respect — and even less screen time. Outside of oddities like Misery (wherein, let's face it, Kathy Bates's
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backwoods psycho was much more compelling than James Caan's writer hero), and the occasional dangerous-to-know detective story writer hero (a figure much more common on television than on the big screen), those who write for the masses have been largely ignored.
But maybe that's changing. Two — count them, two — movies this past winter focused on Science Fiction/Fantasy writers as protago- nists. That's the good news. The bad is that both were romantically challenged, socially inept mama's boys.
Sad-sack auteur Albert Brooks made it to most major cineplexes with his latest movie. Mother. In it, he plays an L.A.-based science fiction writer named John Henderson. Never a best-seller as an author, John has also been less than successful as a lover and hus- band. After his second marriage ends in an acrimonious divorce (that strips his suburban house of all fur- niture but a single chair), he com- plains to a friend that the one thing all of his five major relationships have had in common is that the women in his life never believed in him.
Not content to simply blame his old girlfriends for his vicissi- tudes, John contemplates the root
cause of all his problems. And who better to blame for his miserable life than the woman who gave birth to him, mother Beatrice (Debbie Reynolds)? Henderson decides that if he is ever to achieve any happi- ness, he must first come to terms with dear old mom. So he packs a few belongings into his convertible and heads for the Bay Area to return to the nest of his mildly alarmed mother.
The writing here, by Brooks and his long-time collaborator, Monica Johnson, is often funny, but generally sitcom-predictable. There are gags about the old food in mom's refrigerator and recurring bits about her technophobia and her cheer>^ willingness to discuss her son's pri- vate life with total strangers. There is even an easily anticipated sub- plot about John's sibling rivalry with his younger brother, Jeff (Rob Mor- row).
Beatrice Henderson offers more affection to her second son, a suc- cessful sports agent with a wife and kids. At least that's the way Brooks's hero perceives it — and there is never any doubt that the viewpoint of the film is his. For her firstborn, she serves up (besides ancient sher- bet and wilted iceberg) a steady dose of disapproval and doubt. "This is my son. ..the other one," she tells
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acquaintances. And when John tells her that he's working on a sequel to what she refers to as "the space thing," she questions the wisdom of bringing back "those charac- ters."
At times, Mother plays like a rather tedious exercise in mother- bashing. (And, at 49, isn't Brooks/ Henderson a little old to disrupt an adult life completely to run home to mommy and obsess on approval issues with her?) What makes the film enjoyable is that, although Brooks and Johnson do dump on her, they nonetheless take their Mothera step beyond the castrating shrew stereotype. Beatrice is a com- plex woman with talents and dreams her son was unaware of. She has a life — and a sex life, to boot. And although she knows how un- just her son is being, she is mag- nanimous (and, yes, loving) enough to let him get away with it. When Mother works — and it does much of the time — it has as much to do with casting as it does scripting, however. For I don't believe Mother would be half as successful without the sly, smart performance of Debbie Reynolds in the title role. Albert Brooks deserves consider- able credit for coaxing Debbie Reynolds out of her Vegas retire- ment from the movie biz. Those
who remember Reynolds as a perky song-and-dance star (Singing in the Rain, etc.) or an All-American sweetheart {Tammy and the Bach- elor, etc.) may find her nuanced performance here a bit of a revela- tion. And it's just that element of surprise that makes movie-going such a joy.
Watch Mother for the pleasure of seeing Albert Brooks at his kvetching, self-pitying best as a writer-director-performer. Better yet, see it for Debbie Reynolds's triumphant return as a movie star aftera twenty-five-year absence. But don't see it for any insights into the sf/fantasy writer's life. There aren't any.
Although it's important to the plot that John Henderson be a writer, it is immaterial that he is in the sf field. It merely allows for a few jokes about book titles and strange characters. And it provides an ex- cuse for him to re-decorate his boy- hood bedroom with interesting pop artifacts like robot toys and posters for Planet of the Apes and Barbarella, Reason enough? Why not. It's rather nice to see sf writers getting a little on-screen attention, no matter what the motivation.
But for those looking for a movie that actually tries to say something about a man's life as a
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writer, a much more interesting movie is one that will be — natch — a lot harder to find. And that is the debut feature directed by Dan Ire- land entitled The Whole Wide World.
The film is adapted from a memoir, One Who Walked Alone, written by Novalyne Price Ellis. The book recounts her friendship (and abortive romance) with pulp- master Robert E. Howard. Howard is best known, of course, as the creator of Conan the Barbarian. And although he experimented in po- etry, as well as a variety of pulp formulas and series characters, Howard will always be remembered as the father of Conan, and, thereby, one of the founders of the sub-genre that would be called, variously, epic fantasy, heroic fantasy, and sword and sorcery.
Conan has lived on, since his creator's death in 1 936, in a plethora of bastardized product lines that includes stories, novels, comic books, feature films, and (soon)