Just Over the Horizon (The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear Book 1)

by Greg Bear

  Karen called from the porch and he looked north. Richie was striding toward the rocks at the opposite end of the cove. “I see him,” Thomas said as he passed the cabin. “Be back in a few minutes.”

  He walked briskly to the base of the rocks and looked for Richie. The boy stood on a boulder, pretending to ignore him. Hesitant, not knowing exactly how to say it, Thomas told him what they were going to do.

  The boy looked down from the rock. “You mean, you want to be my folks?” A smile, broad and toothy, slowly spread across his face. Everything was going to be okay.

  “That’s it, I think,” Thomas said. “If your parents don’t contest the matter.”

  “Oh, I don’t have any folks,” Richie said.

  Thomas looked at the sea-colored eyes and felt sudden misgivings. “Might be easier, then,” he said softly.

  “Hey, Tom? I found something in the pools. Come look with me? Come on!” Richie was pure small-boy then, up from his seat and down the rock and vanishing from view like a bird taking wing.

  “Richie!” Thomas cried. “I haven’t time right now. Wait!”

  He climbed up the rock with his hands and feet slipping on the slick surface. At the top he looked across the quarter-mile stretch of pools, irritated. “Richie!”

  The boy ran on all fours over the jagged terrain. He turned and shouted back, “In the big pool! Come on!” Then he ran on.

  Tom followed, eyes lowered to keep his footing. “Slow down!” He looked up for a moment and saw a small flail of arms, a face turned toward him with the smile frozen in surprise, and the boy disappearing. There was a small cry and a splash.

  “Richie!” Thomas shouted, his voice cracking. The boy had fallen into the pool, the circular pool where the whale had been. Thomas gave up all thought of his own safety and ran across the rocks, slipping twice and cracking his knees against a sharp ridge of granite. Agony shot up his legs and fogged his vision. Cursing, pushing hair out of his eyes, he crawled to his feet and shakily hobbled over the loose pebbles and sand to the edge of the round pool.

  With his hands on the smooth rock rim, he blinked and saw the boy floating in the middle of the pool, face down. Thomas groaned and shut his eyes, dizzy. There was a rank odor in the air; he wanted to get up and run. This was not the way rescuers were supposed to feel. His stomach twisted. There was no time to waste, however. He forced himself over the rim into the cold water, slipping and plunging head first. His brow touched the bottom. The sand was hard and compact, crusted. He stood with the water streaming off his head and torso. It was slick like oil and came up to his groin, deepening as he splashed to the middle. It would be up to his chest where Richie floated.

  Richie’s t-shirt clung damply, outlining the odd hump on his back. We’ll get that fixed, Thomas told himself. Oh, God, we’ll get that fixed, let him be alive and it’ll work out fine.

  Then he wondered what happened to the better shirt they had given him.

  The water splashed across his chest. Some of it entered his mouth and he gagged at the fishy taste. He reached out for the boy’s closest foot but couldn’t quite reach it. The sand shifted beneath him and he ducked under the surface, swallowing more water. Bobbing up again, kicking to keep his mouth clear, he wiped his eyes with one hand and saw the boy’s arms making small, sinuous motions, like the fins of a fish.

  Swimming away from Thomas.

  “Richie!” Thomas shouted. His wet tennis shoes, tapping against the bottom, seemed to make it resound, as if it were hollow. Then he felt the bottom lift slightly until his feet pressed flat against it, fall away until he tread water, lift again …

  He looked down. The sand, distorted by ripples in the pool, was receding. Thomas struggled with his hands, trying to swim to the edge. Beneath him waited black water like a pool of crude oil, and in it something long and white, insistent. His feet kicked furiously to keep him from ducking under again, but the water swirled.

  Thomas shut his mouth after taking a deep breath. The water throbbed like a bell, drawing him deeper, still struggling. He looked up and saw the sky, gray-blue above the ripples. There was still a chance. He kicked his shoes off, watching them spiral down. Heavy shoes, wet, gone now, he could swim better.

  He spun with the water and the surface darkened. His lungs ached. He clenched his teeth to keep his mouth shut. There seemed to be progress. The surface seemed brighter. But three hazy-edged triangles converged and he could not fool himself any more, the surface was black and he had to let his breath out, hands straining up.

  He touched a hard rasping shell.

  The pool rippled for a few minutes, then grew still. Richie let loose of the pool’s side and climbed up the edge, out of the water. His skin was pale, eyes almost milky.

  The hunger had been bad for a few months. Now they were almost content. The meals were more frequent and larger—but who knew about the months to come? Best to take advantage of the good times. He pulled the limp dummy from its hiding place beneath the flat boulder and dragged it to the pool’s edge, dumping it over and jumping in after. For a brief moment he smiled and hugged it; it was so much like himself, a final lure to make things more certain. Most of the time, it was all the human-shaped company he needed. He arranged its arms and legs in a natural position, spread out, and adjusted the­ drift of the Mackinaw in the water.

  The dummy drifted to the center of the pool and stayed there.

  A fleshy ribbon thick as his arm waved in the water and he pulled up the back of the t-shirt to let it touch him and fasten. This was the best time. His limbs shrank and his face sunk inward. His skin became the color of the rocks and his eyes grew large and golden. Energy—food—pulsed into him and he felt a great love for this clever other part of him, so adaptable.

  It was mother and brother at once, and if there were times when Richie felt there might be a life beyond it, an existence like that of the people he mimicked, it was only because the mimicry was so fine.

  He would never actually leave.

  He couldn’t. Eventually he would starve; he wasn’t very good at digesting.

  He wriggled until he fit smooth and tight against the rim, with only his head sticking out of the water.

  He waited.

  “Tom!” a voice called, not very far away. It was Karen.

  “Mrs. Harker!” Richie screamed. “Help!”

  Sleepside Story

  Jan O’Nale, of Cheap Street Press, requested that I write a novella for her series of custom-designed and illustrated limited editions. This was a real honor—Cheap Street published the loveliest editions of any small press associated with science fiction. I wrote a fantasy based on the photographic negative of a fairy tale—“Beauty and the Beast.” One early title, in fact, was “Handsome and the Whore,” but that was deemed too overt, and perhaps too judgmental.

  Every element in Sleepside Story is familiar, but reversed, white to black, female to male, with appropriate adjustments reflecting these changes. It was printed in a hardcover anthology, Full Spectrum 2, after the publication of the Cheap Street edition, and was selected by Terry Windling and Ellen Datlow as one of the best fantasy stories of the year. It’s still one of my all-time favorites.

  “Sleepside Story,” along with The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage, comprise my early contributions to the genre of gritty urban fantasy—with a tip of the hat, of course, to Peter Beagle.

  The original illustrations to the Cheap Street Edition were by Judy King Reinitz, and they were lovely. Unfortunately, I doubt the illustrations and the story will ever be paired again, as O’Nale and I had a falling out even before the book was published. If you can find the original Cheap Street Edition—it’s quite rare—take a look at both the production and the illustrations. Magnificent.

  Oliver Jones differed from his brothers as wheat from chaff. He didn’t grudge them their blind wildness; he loaned them money until h
e had none, and regretted it, but not deeply. His needs were not simple, but they did not hang on the sharp signs of dollars. He worked at the jobs of youth without complaining, knowing there was something better wait­ing for him. Sometimes it seemed he was the only one in the family able to take cares away from his momma, now that Poppa was gone and she was lonely even with the two babies sitting on her lap, and his younger sister Yolanda gabbing about the neighbors.

  The city was a puzzle to him. His older brothers Denver and Reggie believed it was a place to be conquered, but Oliver did not share their philosophy. He wanted to make the city part of him, sucked in with his breath, built into bones and brains. If he could dance with the city’s music, he’d have it made, even though Denver and Reggie said the city was wide and cruel and had no end; that its four quarters ate young men alive, and spat back old people. Look at Poppa, they said; he was only forty-three when he went to the fifth quarter, Darkside, a bag of wearied bones; they said, take what you can get while you can get it.

  This was not what Oliver saw, though he knew the city was cruel and hungry. His brothers and even Yolanda kidded him about his faith. It was more than just his going to church that made them rag him, because they went to church, too, sitting upright and superior beside Mom­ma. Reggie and Denver knew there was advantage in being seen at devotions.

  It wasn’t Oliver’s music that made them laugh, for he could play the piano hard and fast as well as soft and tender, and they all liked to dance, even Momma sometimes. It was his damned sweetness. It was his taste in girls, quiet and studious; and his honesty.

  On the last day of school, before Christmas vacation, Oliver made his way home in a fall of light snow, stopping in the old St. John’s churchyard for a moment’s reflection by his father’s grave. Surrounded by the crisp, ancient slate grave­stones and the newer white marble, worn by the city’s acid tears, he thought he might now be considered grown-up, might have to become the sole support of his family.

  He left the churchyard in a somber mood and walked between the tall brick and brownstone tenements, along the dirty, wet black streets, his shadow lost in Sleepside’s greater shade, eyes on the sidewalk.

  Denver and Reggie could not bring in good money, money that Momma would accept; Yolanda was too young and not likely to get a job anytime soon, and that left him, the only one who would finish school. He might take in more piano students, but he’d have to move out to do that, and how could he find another place to live without losing all he made to rent? Sleepside was crowded.

  From half a block down the street, Oliver heard the loud noises from the old apartment. He ran up the five dark, trash-littered flights of stairs and pulled out his key to open the three locks on the door. Swinging the door wide, he stood with hand pressed to a wall, lungs too greedy to let him speak.

  The flat was in an uproar. Yolanda, rail-skinny, stood in the kitchen doorway, wringing her big hands and wailing. The two babies lurched down the hall, diapers drooping and fists stuck in their mouths. The neighbor widow Mrs. Diamond Freeland bustled back and forth in a useless dither. Something was terribly wrong.

  “What is it?” he asked Yolanda with his first free breath. She just moaned and shook her head. “Where’s Reggie and Denver?” She shook her head less vigorously, meaning they weren’t home. “Where’s Momma?” This sent Yolanda into hysterics. She bumped back against the wall and clenched her fists to her mouth, tears flying. “Something happen to Momma?”

  “Your momma went uptown,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland said, standing flatfooted before Oliver, flower print dress distended over a generous stomach. “What you going to do? You’re her son.”

  “Where uptown?” Oliver asked, working to steady his voice. He wanted to slap everybody in the apartment. He was scared and they weren’t being any help at all.

  “She we-went sh-sh-shopping!” Yolanda wailed. “She got her check today and it’s Ch-Christmas and she went to get the babies new clothes and some f-food.”

  Oliver’s hands clenched. Momma had asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he had said, “Nothing, Momma. Not really.” She had chided him, saying all would be well when the check came, and what good was Christmas if she couldn’t find a little something special for her children?

  “All right,” he had said. “I’d like sheet music. Something I’ve never played before.”

  “She must of taken the wrong stop,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland said, staring at Oliver from the corners of her wide eyes. “That’s all I can figure.”

  “What happened?”

  Yolanda pulled a letter out of her blouse and handed it to him: fancy purple paper with a delicate flower design around the borders, the message handwritten prettily in gold ink fountain pen—and signed.

  He read it carefully, then read it again.

  To the Joneses.

  Your momma is uptown in My care. She came here lost and I tried to help her but she stole something valuable to Me she shouldn’t have. She says you’ll come and get her. By you she means her youngest son Oliver Jones and if not him then Yolanda Jones her eldest daughter. I will keep one or the other here in exchange for your momma and one or the other must stay here and work for Me.

  Miss Belle Parkhurst

  969 33rd Street

  “Who’s she, and why does she have Momma?” Oliver asked.

  “I’m not going!” Yolanda screamed.

  “Hush up,” said Mrs. Diamond Freeland. “Miss Belle is that whoor. She’s that uptown whoor used to run the biggest cathouse back when I was a girl.”

  Oliver looked from face to face in disbelief.

  “Your momma must of taken the wrong stop and got lost,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland reiterated. “That’s all I can figure. She went to that whoor’s house and got herself in trouble.”

  “I’m not going!” Yolanda insisted, shaking her head. She avoided Oliver’s eyes. “You know what she’d make me do.”

  “Yeah,” Oliver said softly. “But what’ll she make me do?”

  Reggie and Denver, he learned from Mrs. Freeland, had come home and then left just before the messenger danced whistling up the outside hall. Oliver sighed. His brothers were almost never home; they thought they’d pulled the wool over Momma’s eyes, but they hadn’t.

  Reggie and Denver fancied themselves the slickest dudes on the street. They claimed they had women all over Sleepside and Snowside; Oliver was almost too shy to ask a woman out. He was small, slender, almost pretty, but strong for his size. Reggie and Denver were cowards. Oliver had never run from a true and worthwhile fight in his life, but neither had he started one. The thought of going to Miss Belle Parkhurst’s establish­ment scared him, but he remembered what his father had told him just a week before dying. “Oliver, when I’m gone—that’s soon now, you know it—Yolanda’s flaky as a bowl of cereal and your brothers … well, I’ll be kind and just say your momma, she’s going to need you. You got to turn out right so as she can lean on you.”

  The babies hadn’t been born then.

  “Which train did she take?”

  “Down to Snowside,” Mrs. Freeland said. “But she must of gotten off in Sunside. That’s near Thirty-third.”

  “It’s getting dark soon,” Oliver said.

  Yolanda sniffed and wiped her eyes. Off the hook. “You going?”

  “Have to,” Oliver said. “It’s Momma.”

  Said Mrs. Diamond Freeland, “I think that whoor got something on her mind.”

  As dusk settled over the city, Oliver descended the four flights of concrete steps, grind­ing his teeth at the thought of the danger his momma was in. He halted at the bottom, grimaced at the muscles knotting along his back, and repeated over and over, “It’s Mom­ma. It’s Momma. No one can save her but me.”

  On the line between dusk and dark, down underground where it shouldn’t have mattered, the Metro emptied out the day’s passengers and sucked in
the night’s. Sometimes day folks went in tight-packed groups on the Night Metro, but not if they could avoid it. Night Metro was transport for the lost and the wasted. Night Metro also carried the zeroes—people who lived their lives and when they died no one could look back and say they remembered them. Everyone ashamed or afraid to come out during the day came out to ride at night.

  Some said the dead used the Night Metro, and that after midnight it went all the way to Darkside. Oliver didn’t know what to believe. Night Metro was a bad way to travel, but it was the quickest way to get from Sleepside to Sunside.

  He dropped his bronze cat’s head token into the turnstile, clunk-chunking through, and crossed the empty platform. Two indistinct figures waited trackside, heavy-coated, though it was a warm evening. Oliver kept a wary eye on them as he paced a figure eight on the grimy, foot-scrubbed concrete.

  Into the station’s smudged white tile back wall was set a gold mosaic trumpet and the number 7. The trumpet was for folks who couldn’t read to let them know where to get off. All Sleepside stations had musical instruments.

  He stopped near the edge of the platform and stared down at the puddles and filth around the rails. Nothing but muck. Yet when his train arrived, it was clean and silver-sleek, without a spot of graffiti or a stain of tarnish. Night Metro was run by a proud and powerful crew. Oliver caught a glimpse of the operator under the SLEEPSIDE/CHASTE RIVER/SUNSIDE-46TH destination sign. The operator wore or had a big bull’s head and carried a prominent pair of long, gleaming silver scissors on his Sam Browne belt.

  Oliver entered through the open doors and grabbed a smooth handgrip even though the seats were mostly empty. Somebody standing was somebody quicker to run. There were four people in Oliver’s car: two women, one young, vacant, and very pale, the other old and muddy-eyed, clutching a plastic daisy-flowered shop­ping bag. Two men, both chunky and greenish-blond, wore identical dark brown business suits with shiny elbows. Nobody looked at anybody.

  The doors slid shut and the train grumbled on, gathering speed until the noise of its wheels on the tracks drowned out all other sound and almost all thought. Beyond I-beams and barricades, single orange service lamps and cracked and chipped tiled walls rushed by.