FSF, September 2008 Read online

  "I just asked,” the boy said, looking a bit amused, “if you remembered us."

  "Oh,” I said.

  Behind the boy, on the other side of the gravel road, there was a young girl running bare legged, leaping through the field. She had a handful of clover, or something blurred and purple, and she was shrieking. I watched her for a few moments, and then, as if she'd slipped into a hole in the earth, both she and her shrieks were gone.

  I looked back down at the boy and his dog. Yes, I thought, there was certainly something familiar here. The boy's chipped front tooth. But also that dog.

  "We were in the neighborhood,” the boy said, “and we remembered your house, and wondered if you wanted to come out, if you could come out and play."

  I snorted a little, of course. Come out and play. I supposed this was supposed to bring it all back—those childhood years, those carefree summer days! I supposed this boy was supposed to be some hallucinated version of me. I supposed that dog was supposed to be my dog, way back when, and here was Death at my door, beckoning me outside “to play,” and I was supposed to step out there and follow the boy into the field, and maybe later he'd get me to take his hand, and we'd find ourselves back at my mother's table with a big ham at the center and all my dead relatives would be shiny-eyed and happy to see me, and in a startling epiphanic moment of ambivalence and ecstasy I'd suddenly understand that the boy, who was me, was dead. But I'd never had a dog.

  And my mother had packed me up by the age of four and sent me to live with Aunt Elizabeth, who was an all-out drunk. The kind of drunk who'd manage to get dinner on the table every few nights, and then would stumble into the table and knock it all onto the floor, then chase me and that girl, Francine, and that other orphan, whose name I'm not sure I ever even knew, around with a broken bottle screaming that she was going to kill us all. When Uncle Ernest would get home, he'd sock her in the mouth, and we'd all go salvage whatever we could from the floor for supper. If there was ever a dog, it would have run off.

  "I'm busy,” I said to the boy, and the dog sat down then, as if on cue, on its haunches. The boy narrowed his eyes. Yes, there was certainly something sinister about the kid. Anyone could see that, even a confused old man. I knew right away that he wouldn't be taking no for an answer.

  "That's too bad,” the boy said. His voice was lower this time around. Overhead, a plane came barreling out of a cloud, crashing in only seconds somewhere over the horizon, never making a sound. He hooked a thumb over his belt buckle as if he might yank his pants down. As if he was planning to take a piss or a shit right there on my stoop. The little dog curled his lip a bit, like he was thinking about growling.

  "Now, look,” I said. “I do know you. I know all about you, and you can stand out here on my stoop all day and do whatever foul thing you can think up to do, but I'm not coming out...” and then I added, sarcastically, “to play,” so he'd know I wasn't quite the sentimental old doddering fool he'd taken me for.

  He frowned. And then he shrugged. He started to turn around. “Fine,” he said. “Have it your way."

  He headed back down the steps. The dog turned to follow him.

  I couldn't help it. I'd been expecting trouble. All my life, there it had been, every time I opened the god-damned door. First Aunt Elizabeth, of course. And then the disastrous marriage. Anne with hands like claws within two years of the honeymoon, twisted up like a crabapple tree in the rollaway bed, the whole house smelling of death, and still a hundred chores dawn to dusk to be done. And the children. A limb now and then. A shovel brought down accidentally on some neighbor kid's head. “You just wait a minute, you little bastard,” I said.

  He turned around, slowly, and this time he had a whole new face. The face of an angel! His voice was as sweet as a girl's. The dog had cocked its head sweetly. And then it vanished. Just a blank space on a limp leash. The angel said, “Yes, Mr. Rentz? Yes?"

  It was hard not to give right in. But I knew what this was about. I hadn't avoided this encounter for eighty years just to walk straight into its boobytrap now. I hadn't forgotten the way Duke and Erma had signed over that insurance policy to their son just before the thing in the ravine. Duke with his foot in a coyote trap and a plastic bag over his face. Erma—and them making it look like a rape, but nobody would have raped poor crippled Erma. The devil, maybe.

  No. Not even the devil.

  I took a step backward. I raised up both fists. I said, “I know you know I can fight. I know you've fought me before. And you remember what happened then."

  "Oh, Mr. Rentz.” He said it as if he were tired of this particular fight. Yes, yes, yes. Those nurses with their pockets full of pills. Those prostitutes down on Division Avenue, tapping on the window of your car. I'd fallen for this once or twice, but whoever that poor fellow was, I was not him anymore. The farmer on the tractor came chugging by again, but he came from the same direction he'd come the last time. They couldn't even get this part right. They were just running the same film twice. Trying to save money, I supposed, thinking an old man wouldn't notice. This time, when he waved, I didn't bother to raise my hand.

  The boy seemed to be trying to stifle a laugh.

  I'd always had a bad temper.

  Of course, it made me mad.

  And then the girl again. The clover, the bare legs, the hole. I was shaking. It was like that copy of the copy of the copy of the letter my mother had written to me, dug up out of the trunk by my daughter, which she'd mailed off to everybody and their cousin before she thought to bring it over to me. Daddy, I found this in the attic, and I thought you'd want a copy.

  And my own mother's handwriting, like a retarded child's.

  And she couldn't even spell the name of the month.

  Which was February.

  And something about when I get you back I'm going to get you that little dog.

  That little dog.

  It was back. But it was behind me. It was smiling up at me from my own rug. And then it was on the couch. And then it was under the coffee table. Pissing on the leg of it. Taking a crap on the carpet. Then lunging in my direction. Then snapping at my heels. Then tearing at the cuffs of my trousers with its teeth. Get outta here, get outta here. I was kicking at it, and the girl was screaming, Help help, someone get him offa me. But I didn't care about that. I was going to have her if it was the last thing I ever had. My pants were down around my ankles, and I was sure as hell going to stick it inside her, and then some fat woman in white stepped out into the waiting room and said, only her eyebrow twitching a little, I'm sorry to tell ya the baby has died. I shrugged. I said, D'ya tell my wife?

  Soon enough, I'd stumbled out the door, just as I'm sure they'd planned it. The dog sobered up and started whining to be petted. The little boy said, “I knew you'd come out to play, Mr. Rentz. I knew it! I knew it!” The tractor and the farmer and the little girl, as if someone up there just kept hitting rewind rewind. That girl stood up and I could see my seed trickling down her thigh. I stifled a laugh, chuckling behind my hand, How stupid do you think I am?

  Well, that's how stupid I am.

  And then I heard the door slam behind me.

  And then the boy turned to look at me with those big serious eyes and said, “I'm sorry to have had to mislead you, Mr. Rentz."

  And I said, “Oh, kid, forget it. I understand."

  And we shuffled off into the dust, the two of us—the beautiful boy I might have been and the dog I might have had—in search of the old lost man I had become.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novella: Arkfall by Carolyn Ives Gilman

  Carolyn Gilman's latest book is a collection of short stories, Aliens of the Heart. Her latest story is a tale of a planet that's mostly water and of a woman who's not sure she fits in on this world.

  1. Golconda Station

  Normally, the liquid sky over Golconda was oblivion black: no motion, no beacons to clock the passage of time. But at Arkfall the abyss kindled briefly with drifting lights. Fro
m a distance, they looked like a rain of photisms, those false lights that swim in darkened eyes. First a mere smudge of light, then a globe, and finally a pockmarked little world floating toward the seafloor station.

  The arks were coming home.

  From the luminous surface of the ark Cormorin, Osaji felt the opacity that had oppressed her for months lifting. All around her, arks floated like wayward thoughts piercing the deep unconsciousness of the sea. The sight was worth having put on the wetsuit and squeezed out to see. She was oblivious to the pressure of the deep water, having been born and bred to it. Even the chill, only a few degrees above freezing, seemed mild to her, warmed by the volcanic exhalations of the Cleft of Golconda on the seafloor below.

  After months of drifting through the Saltese Sea, the arkswarm had come for respite to the station of Golconda, the place where their rounds began and ended. Osaji's light-starved eyes, accustomed to seeing only the glowing surface of her own ark and any others that happened to be drifting nearby, savored the sense of space and scale that the glowing domes and refinery lights below her created. There was palpable distance here, an actual landscape.

  It would have looked hellish enough to other eyes. A chain of seafloor vents snaked along the valley floor, glowing in places with reddish rock-heat. Downstream, black smokers belched out a filthy brew loaded with minerals from deep under the planet's gravity-tortured crust. Tall chimneys encased the older vents. Everywhere the seafloor was covered with thick, mucky vegetation feeding on the dissolved nutrients: fields of tubeworms, blind white crabs, brine shrimp, clams, eels, seagrass, tiny translucent fish. The carefully nurtured ecosystem had been transported from faraway Earth to this watery planet of Ben. To Osaji, the slimy brown jungle looked like the richest crop, the most fertile field, a welcoming abundance of life. Patient generations had created it.

  Beside her, a pore in the lipid membrane of the ark released a jet of bubbles, making the vessel sink slowly toward the floodlit harbor where a dozen other arks already clustered, docked to flexible tube chutes that radiated from the domes like glowing starfish arms. It was time for Osaji to go inside, but still she lingered. All her problems lay inside Cormorin's membrane, neatly packaged. Once she went inside, they would immerse her again.

  A voice sputtered over her ear radio, “Will she be coming in soon?” It was the Bennite idiom: tentative, nonconfrontational. But no less coercive for that. Osaji sighed, making her breather mask balloon out, and answered, “She will be pleased to."

  Pushing off, she dived downward past the equator of the ark's globe, gliding over its silvery surface. The top portion of the ark was filled with bladders of gas that controlled buoyancy and atmosphere, along with the tanks of bacteria and algae that processed seawater into usable components. Only at the bottom did the humans live, like little mitochondria in their massive host.

  On the ark's underbelly Osaji found a pore, tickled its edges till it expanded, then thrust her arms and head in, pulling herself though the soft, clinging lips of the opening. Inside, she shook the water off her short black hair and removed her facemask and fins. She was in a soft-walled, gently glowing tube leading upward to the living quarters. As she walked, her feet bounded back from the rubbery floor.

  The quarters seemed brightly lit by the snaking vapor-tubes on the ceiling. As soon as Osaji entered the bustling corridor, Dori's two children crowded around her, asking questions. Their mother peered out the aperture of her room and called to them, “Is it polite to bother her when she has so much packing to do?” The comment was really aimed at Osaji. Dori's family had left her in no doubt that she and her baggage would be leaving the ark at Golconda.

  Osaji ran her finger along the sensitive lip of the aperture into her own small rooms, and the membrane retracted to let her through. The first cavity inside, where Osaji had lived for the last round, was stripped bare, all her belongings packed into sacks and duffels. She paused at the aperture to the adjoining vacuole and called out, “Mota?"

  "Saji?” came a thin voice from within. Osaji coaxed the membrane open and had to suppress a groan of dismay. Inside, a frail, white-haired woman sat amid a disorganized heap of belongings. She had not packed a thing since Osaji had left her. If anything, she had emptied out some of the duffels already packed.

  The old woman's mild face lit up. “Thank goodness you're back! I was getting worried. Where did you go?"

  "Outside. I told you I was going outside."

  "Did you.” She was not contradicting, just commenting. No argument or reproach ever came from Mota. She was the sweetest-tempered aged on the planet. It sometimes drove her granddaughter to distraction.

  "Time is short now,” Osaji said, seizing a sack and starting to shove clothes in it. “Cormorin docks at Golconda in a few minutes."

  "I remember Golconda,” Mota said reflectively.

  "I know you do. You must have been there sixty times."

  "Your mother, Manuko, got off there one round and tried going barnacle. She could never get used to it. But your sister—she actually married a barnacle.” She said it as if Osaji had never heard the news.

  "Yes, we're going to see her in a few minutes."

  "Oh, good,” Mota said. “That will be nice."

  Osaji didn't say: And you are going to stay with her from now on, and set me free.

  The gentle jostle of docking came before Osaji was ready. Dori poked her head in the aperture to say, “We've arrived. Everyone can leave now."

  Seething inside, Osaji said pleasantly, “In a moment."

  Cormorin had not been a happy ark this round. When joining, Osaji had mistaken Dori's conventional expressions of respect for real tolerance of the aged. Once under way, Dori had voiced one sweetly phrased complaint after another, and it had become obvious that she resented Mota's presence. The old lady should not walk the corridors alone, because she might fall. She shouldn't be allowed in the kitchen, because she might put on a burner and forget it. She shouldn't help with the cleaning, because her eyes were too poor to see dirt. Once, Dori had said to Osaji, “Caring for an aged is so much responsibility. I already have as much as I can bear.” So she had taken no responsibility at all for Mota. Everything had landed on Osaji, making Dori hint with false sympathy that she wasn't pulling her weight around the ark. Mota had ended the round a virtual prisoner in her room, because just seeing her seemed to give Dori a fresh case of martyrdom.

  The corridors of Golconda station were a shock to anyone fresh from floatabout. A floater's world was a yielding womb of liquid where there was never a raised voice, never a command given; floaters all went their lone ways, within the elaborate choreography of their shared mission. The barnacles’ world was a gray, industrial place of hard floors, angles, crowds, and noise. Barnacles had to move in coordinated lockstep—cooperative obedience, they called it. They were packed in too close to survive any other way. The two ways of life were the yin and yang of Ben: each needed the other, but neither partook of the other's nature.

  A line of porters stood by with electric carts in the hallway, so Osaji approached one, trying to conceal her diffidence. Codes of courtesy were abrupt here, because barnacles always thought time for interaction was short. The porter named an outrageous price. When she attempted to tell her story, he said the Authority set the amount, and there was nothing he could do about it. She gave in, feeling diminished.

  Mota's baggage filled the cart, so Osaji gave the porter the address, saw the old lady safely seated beside him, and hefted her own bags to walk, more to avoid dealing with another driver than to save the money. Soon she was feeling jostled and invaded-upon. The corridor was half blocked off by some noisy construction, and the moving crowd was compressed into a narrow chute made dingy with too many passing feet and too much human exhalation. When she emerged into one of the domes, she looked for a spot out of traffic to gaze at the wonder of wide space. The brightly lit geodesic framework spanned a parklike area of greenery ringed with company shops and Authority offices. A gro
ve of trees soared a breathtaking twenty feet over her head. They lifted her heart on their branches: she, too, had the potential to grow lofty. If only she could worm past this stricture in her life, she would be able to reach up again.

  And yet, above the trees, the weight of a frigid planetary ocean pressed down. It was a Quixotic gesture of the builders, really, to have nurtured a form of life so unsuited to the environment. Perhaps the human genome was coded for this urge to put things where they didn't belong. Osaji knew floaters who spoke of the trees with hauteur, for they were symbols of inadaptibility. The floaters were the ones who had pioneered a truly Bennite way of life, not this transplanted impossibility of a habitat. Osaji caught her breath in wonder as a bright bird winged overhead.

  The impulse to act on her long-laid plans grew strong in her. Why not now, before she saw her family, so it would be an accomplished fact? She knew the proper place to go, for she had sought it out last round, but without enough resolve. This time would be different.

  * * * *

  The Immigration Authority was a neatly aligned place. The agents sat behind a row of plain desks, and the clients sat in three straight lines of chairs facing them, waiting for their numbers to be called. No one looked at anyone else. The agents’ soft voices filled the room with a background of sibilant word-sounds that made no words.

  When Osaji's turn came to face an agent, she dropped her bags in an untidy heap on the floor around her chair. She had barely sat down before she blurted out, “Your client wishes to leave the planet."

  The agent was a young woman about Osaji's age, but much prettier, wearing a blue uniform with a crisp white collar. Calm and competent, she said, “Why would that be?"

  Osaji had not come prepared to answer this question. She swam in a sea of reasons, drowning in them. She was afraid to open her mouth for fear she would choke on them. At last she chose one that seemed least dangerous. “To see new places."

  "So it is a tourism desire?” the young woman asked politely. Her hands were folded on the desktop.