The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  But, against that, the look of rapture on Hope’s face as Alice chased the White Rabbit, the pictures of Birds of India and Asia, Jane Eyre battling Mrs. Reed…Hope and I destroyed nothing ourselves. Is it so wrong, then, to enjoy another’s sin?

  “We sinned,” Hope repeats, mourning, and it is her tone that hardens my heart.

  “No, child. We didn’t.”

  “We didn’t?” Her eyes, one still swollen, grow wide.

  “We didn’t make the books. They already were. We just read them. Reading isn’t sinful.”

  “Nooooo,” she says reluctantly. “Not reading the altar scriptures. But Alice is—”

  Gloria enters the house. She says to me, “Services tonight.”

  I say, “I’m not going.”

  Gloria stops dead halfway to the wash bucket, her field hat suspended in her hand. For the briefest moment I see something like panic on her face, before it vanishes into her usual anger. “Not going? To services?”

  “No.”

  Hope, frightened, looks from her mother to me. Bill comes in.

  Gloria snaps, with distinct emphasis, “Your mother says she’s not going to services tonight.”

  Bill says, “Mama?”

  “No,” I say, and watch his face go from puzzlement to the dread of a weak man who will do anything to avoid argument. I hobble to my alcove and close the door. Later, from my window, I watch them leave for the Grove, Hope holding her father’s hand.

  Gloria must have given him silent permission to do that.

  My son.

  Painfully I lower myself to the floor, reach under my cot, and pull out the white plastic bubble. For a while I gaze at the pictures of the gorgeous birds of India and Asia. Then I read Jane Eyre. When my family returns at dusk, I keep reading as long as the light holds, not bothering to hide any of the books, knowing that no one will come in.

  One heavy afternoon, when the clouds steadily darken and I can no longer see enough to make out words, a huge bolt of lightning shrieks through the sky—crack! For a long moment my head vibrates. Then silence, followed by a shout: “Fire!”

  I haul myself to my knees and grasp the bottom of the window. The lightning hit one of the trees in the Grove. As I watch, numb, the fire leaps on the ceaseless wind to a second tree.

  People scream and run, throwing buckets of muddy water from the spring. I can see that it will do no good—too much dry timber, too much wind. A third tree catches, a fourth, and then the grass too is on fire. Smoke and ash rise into the sky.

  I sink back onto my cot. I planted one of those trees, nursed it as I’d once nursed Bill. But there is nothing I can do. Nothing.

  By the light of the terrible flames I pick up Jane Eyre and, desperately, I read.

  And then Hope bursts in, smeared with ash, sweat and tears on her face.

  “Hope—no! Don’t!”

  “Give it to me!”

  “No!”

  We struggle, but she is stronger. Hope yanks Jane Eyre out of my hands and hurls it to the floor. She drops on top of it and crawls under my cot. Frantically I try to press down the sagging ropes so that she can’t get past them, but I don’t weigh enough. Hope backs out with the other books in their plastic bubble. She scrambles to her feet.

  “We did this! You and me! Our sin made God burn the trees!”

  “No! Hope—”

  “Yes! We did this, just like the people before the Crash!”

  We will never forget.

  I reach for her, for the books, for everything I’ve lost or am about to lose. But Hope is already gone. From my window I see her silhouetted against the flames, running toward the grass. The village beats the grass with water-soaked cloths. I let go of the sill and fall back onto the cot before I can see Hope throw the books onto the fire.

  Gloria beats Hope again, harder and longer this time. She and Bill might have put me out of the house, except that I have no place to go. So they settle for keeping me away from Hope, so that I cannot lead her further into sin.

  Bill speaks to me only once about what happened. Bringing me my meal—meager, so meager—he averts his eyes from my face and says haltingly, “Mama…I…”

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “I have to…you…Gloria…” All at once he finds words. “A little bit of sin is just as bad a big sin. That’s what you taught me. What all those people thought before the Crash—that their cars and machines and books each only destroyed a little air so it didn’t matter. And look what happened! The Crash was—”

  “Do you really think you’re telling me something I don’t know? Telling me?”

  Bill turns away. But as he closes the door behind him, he mumbles over his shoulder, “A little bit of sin is as bad as a big sin.”

  I sit in my room, alone.

  Bill is not right. Nor is Gloria, who told him what to say. Nor is Hope, who is after all a child, with a child’s uncompromising, black-and-white faith. They are all wrong, but I can’t find the arguments to tell them so. I’m too ignorant. The arguments must exist, they must—but I can’t find them. And my family wouldn’t listen anyway.

  Listen, Anna, that’s a—

  A nightingale.

  The whole memory flashes like lightning in my head: my father, bending over me in a walled garden, laughing, trying to distract me from some childish fall. Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that’s a nightingale! A cube of frozen water pulled with strong fingers from his amber drink. Flowers everywhere, flowers of scarcely believable colors, crimson and gold and blue and emerald. And a burst of glorious unseen music, high and sweet. A bird, maybe one from Birds of India and Asia.

  But I don’t know, can’t remember, what a nightingale looks like. And now I never will.

  Afterword to “By Fools Like Me”

  When I teach writing classes aimed at aspiring science fiction authors, one question I ask my students to consider is this: What is a crime in your invented society? Actions considered criminal, plus punishments considered appropriate, are dead give-aways to what a society values most. The rigid religiosity of the Inquisition made Protestantism a crime and burning at the stake its punishment. The low value put on peasants’ lives made hunting them for sport not a crime in rural Czarist Russia. Adultery was once treason in a queen, punishable by death, because it violated beliefs about sacred royal bloodlines.

  I wanted to write a society that is a plausible, if extreme, extension of our own, in which something normal to us is criminal to them. What better to choose than owning books? To us they represent pleasure, enlightenment, communication. To a society barely hanging onto a ruined ecology, they might well represent a wanton destruction of precious trees, the only hope for restoring the planet. We see the world as we are, not as it is—change the lens and you change the meaning.

  I also wanted to write about an old person, as I later did in both “Fountain of Age” and “The Erdmann Nexus” (both, alas, too long to be included in this volume). Our society tends to consider old people largely irrelevant and uninteresting. So does Anna’s. Both are wrong. The older I become—ahem!—the surer I am of that.

  CASEY'S EMPIRE

  This is the story of Jerry Casey, who lost a galactic empire. Oho, you sneer to yourself—one of those. You know, of course, from your vast reading, what a trivial and hackneyed idea a galactic empire is—even now. You know, of course, from your vast reading, about the convoluted, melodramatic machinations by which a hero loses an empire, and what that feels like. Go suck an egg; you wouldn’t know a galactic empire if you tripped over it, which Casey did. Tripped over it and lost it. You think you know how that feels? You don’t know. Unless it has happened to you, you don’t know. You can’t ever know.

  He was born in the 1950’s in Montana, but he didn’t let it bother him. To his child’s eyes, the big, lonely, empty plains were within the sound of the sea, within a hard day’s climb of the Himalayas, within touch of the hibiscus-smelling rain forest. He walked on desert sands or ancient glaciers o
r the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At night the wide sky was impossibly full of stars, and he named them all and walked on their spangle-colored planets. Part of it, of course, was his reading, which he did so constantly that he failed the fifth grade. But not all of it. There was something else, something extra, something his own. His parents were puzzled but tolerant. They bought a new car every three years, new drapes every five, and saved up for yearly vacations in Las Vegas. Older people—he was a late, only child. Kind, decent, stupid people. Casey loved them.

  His high school years were no more hellish than anyone else’s; his college years were an anonymous marathon of beer blasts, rock concerts, and overdue term papers; his decision to enter graduate school was complicated by his advisor’s doubt that any graduate school would enter him. But enrollment was falling, programs were being cut if too few live bodies registered for thesis seminar, and Casey found himself a teaching fellow in a small undistinguished college that was part of a large undistinguished state university system in the Northeast. He also found himself scorned. Politely, judiciously, even indulgently—he was in the Humanities, and indulgence was encouraged—but scorned is scorned.

  “What’s your area?” asked Paul Rizzo, the stocky, bearded teaching fellow with whom Casey shared an office. Rizzo was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and Frye boots. All the male teaching fellows, Casey had noticed, wore plaid flannel shirts, jeans, and Frye boots. So did some of the females. Casey wore a sports jacket.

  “Area?”

  “For your thesis.”

  “I’m doing the option—the creative-writing thesis. A novel.”

  “A novel?”

  “Yeah, you know,” Casey said, “a fiction narrative over 40,000 words. You’ve heard of them.”

  Rizzo’s eyes narrowed. “Have you started this, uh, novel?”

  “Yes.”

  Rizzo seemed surprised. He stopped in the middle of changing his plaid flannel shirt for a football jersey, arms suspended in midair. Twice a week he scrimmaged to keep in shape, playing on a team limited to grad students and captained by a third-year fellow in the biology department who had his own grant from the federal government.

  “What’s it about?”

  Casey smiled. “In twenty-five words or less?”

  “All right, then, what’s it like? Who would you say your writing was closest to, if you had to name an influence, a mentor? Barth? Hemingway? Dickens? Faulkner?”

  Casey took a deep breath. “Burroughs.”

  “Naked Lunch?”

  “No, not William.”

  “Then who—”

  “Edgar.”

  “Edgar Burroughs? You write…”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  Rizzo finished sliding into his football jersey and picked up his helmet, rubbing a finger over a jagged nick. Then he smiled. Politely, judiciously.

  “Well, chacun à sa gout, right?”

  “Son gout,” Casey said.

  “My thesis is on Keats. The psycho-sexual relation of the ‘Hyperion’ fragment to his later work. You probably don’t like Keats, though?”

  “Why not?”

  “If you write that…do you like Keats?”

  Casey picked up Rizzo’s football shoe and fingered the cleats. He tried each one in turn, pressing lightly with the end of his index finger. They were all dull. Rizzo waited. Indulgently.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Paul. I really think Keats is some kind of poet. Not too commercial, you know, but a strong sensory receiver, quick on the end line. Some kind of poet. But, overall I guess I have to go with Edgar Guest. Enjambment-wise, that is.”

  Rizzo turned maroon. Casey smiled. Politely, judiciously, indulgently.

  “Who you got for frosh comp?”

  “Some flake in a striped sports jacket. Young. He talked about semicolons.”

  “Must be the new guy. Casey.”

  Casey, the new guy, ducked behind the gray bulk of the candy-and-pastries vending machine. The Styrofoam cup he was carrying sloshed coffee onto his striped sports jacket. The student on the other side of the vendor kicked it.

  “Took my quarter again!”

  “Here, have half my Babe Ruth.”

  “Effing machine. Any frat files on his assignments?”

  “Not yet. He’s new.”

  “Just my luck.”

  “It’ll be all right. The new ones don’t like to flunk anybody. Just go to class. The new ones take attendance.”

  “He wants us to write a paper for Friday.”

  “Get Sue to do it. She’s an English major.”

  “Yeah. Jesus—semicolons!”

  “Yeah.”

  He got used to teaching freshmen. He made truce with Rizzo. What he couldn’t get used to or make truce with, what led him to discover why a university was a bad place to write, was the faculty.

  His professors spoke blithely of Shakespeare’s “minor plays,” Shaw’s “failed efforts,” Dickens’ “unsuccessful pieces.” Stories that Casey, stretched out on a flat rock under the blank Montana sky, had thrilled to and wondered at and anguished over, were assigned grades like so many frosh comp papers. B+ to Somerset Maugham and Jane Austen. B- to C.S. Lewis and Timon of Athens. His own half-finished stories, Casey figured, the stories sweated and bled and wept over in the $83-a-month hole above a barber shop, were about an H-. On a good day.

  His thesis advisor was a Dreiser man. If you are a Dreiser man, Casey learned, if you champion Dreiser and the American realists for 25 years (including six articles in PMLA), if you dissect and evaluate and explore Dreiser, you can be Dreiser. You know what he wrote in the margins of his books, how he wore his hair and who cut it. You have his/your position in belles-lettres to defend, and you fight for it ferociously. When a prestigious Eastern university has a sudden unfortunate death among its existing faculty and so needs to acquire another American realist, you throw your hat into the academic ring and play politics with dead candidates. You win, and jolly well you should. Dreiser is a definite A. And then so, of course, are you.

  Casey walked. He walked on village streets at noon, over snowy athletic fields before dawn, in night woods where one clumsy step could break his unwary neck. While he walked, he agonized. He agonized because he was not Tolstoy or Shakespeare or even Maugham. He agonized because he was honest enough to know that he never would be Tolstoy or Shakespeare or Maugham, complimented himself on being “at least” that honest with himself, and agonized that his self-compliments showed a lack of artistic passion. When he wasn’t walking and agonizing, he wrote. It was all H-. When he wasn’t writing, he read Dreiser. It was a definite A.

  “But I had my advisor’s approval for the thesis before I began!” Casey said. He tried to sound indignant rather than desperate, and knew he failed. “Both Dr. Jensen and Dr. Schorer signed the approval form!”

  “I know that,” said Dr. Stine, Chairman of the Graduate Committee. He sat behind his book-cluttered desk in his book-lined office and looked distressed. Beyond the open window three students, exhilarated by the spring, were tossing a blue Frisbee; occasionally it hit the building with a soft clunk muffled by budding ivy.

  “They both knew my novel was going to be s—”

  “I know that, too, Mr. Casey.” The chairman’s distress was genuine. Casey didn’t care. “We are not narrow in our academic outlook, Mr. Casey. There is room for many different types of writing in our creative thesis option. The graduate committee is perfectly aware that a lot of exciting research is being carried out right now in your field and that there is much literary merit in selected examples of sci-fi.”

  Casey winced. Dr. Stine didn’t notice. The Frisbee hit the wall.

  “We’re also aware that Ph.D.’s are being granted by very prestigious universities for scholarly work in sci-fi. But both the writing and the research ends that are worthy of serious attention concern the best sci-fi, the work concerned with social insight and human verities. Hawthorne’s ‘truth of the human heart,’ you know,” t
he chairman said, and smiled, obviously pleased with this reference. The Frisbee hit the wall.

  “Your novel, on the other hand, is just…just adventure. Escapist improbabilities. Surely you see—‘galactic empire’!”

  “It’s a realistic interpretation of a possible technological—”

  “Precisely. Technological, not humane. You don’t deal with psychological or social themes at all. When your protagonist meets those aliens in the blue UFO—I’m sorry, Mr. Casey. It’s not that your novel is badly written. In fact, it shows some commercial promise; it’s colorful and fast-paced. But it doesn’t measure up to the standards of serious literature. And serious literature is what a thesis-novel acceptable to the English department must at least try to be.”

  “It could very well happen just the way I—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Casey. I wish you would believe that.”

  Casey did believe it. He uttered a short expletive that he hoped made the chairman even sorrier, and left the book-lined office just as the Frisbee missed the wall altogether and sailed through the window, a miniature blue UFO.

  He resigned from the university, regretted it as pretentiously self-indulgent, and stayed resigned. To fill his time, he wrote, waited on tables at a local pizzeria, brooded over his rejection slips, and walked. The walking, he figured, was the best thing he did. He could walk for hours, could walk all night. After a while he no longer needed to look down at his own feet in even the darkest, most unfamiliar woods; his feet developed such sure sensing of the dead twigs and leaf-covered rabbit holes that he never stumbled. He could walk looking upward at the stars which, in some way, he couldn’t say just exactly how, had betrayed him. He could walk on desert sands, on ancient glaciers, on the bottom of the Mariana Trench. His walking was a definite A.

  “Hey, Casey!”

  “Hello, Rizzo. What’ll you have?”