by Bill Fawcett
“Okay. What year do you think it is?”
“Twelve. The twelfth year of King Bader’s reign.”
“The hell it is! It’s 2094, all over two worlds, and this”—she indi- cated the whole of our surround—“is sure as hell not Luna!”
“Luna,” I said. “You’re from the moon?”
“Duh. So we’ve got a caped crusader and a moron.” She made a disgusted face at the rough woman. “And a lez- bo from Hell and an accordion geezer. A sword-wielding Swedish masseur and two fine specimens from New York City: a used-car dealer and a whore.”
“Escort,” the naked woman said calmly. “What planet are you from?”
“The moon! Like I said! The thing up in the sky?”
“You’re as crazy as you look. No one lives on the moon. There’s no air.”
“We make our own air.”
“Yeah. Bet I know how you do it, too.” They stepped toward each other, but the man with the sword was suddenly between them. Built like a weightlifter but swift as a dancer.
“Now please,” he said. “We have to get along.”
“Or what? You’ll chop my head off?” the naked woman said.
“It would quiet things down.” He turned back to me. “We’re on an island. Jim here followed a stream uphill and saw that the ocean is all around us.”
“Probably the Pacific,” the grandfatherly one said. “At least it looks like the South Pacific, where I fought the Japs.”
“But actually,” the naked woman said, “we don’t even know that it’s Earth.”
“Well, your moon was in the sky this morning,” he said. “Though I suppose that just narrows it down. Could be a million years in the past or future.”
“So what story are you from?” the young boy asked me. “I’m from a treasured island.”
“Your name is Jim?” I said.
“Aye, sir. Jim Hawkins. Most here know my story, unless they’re from way back.”
“Everybody here is from a work of fiction?”
“They say I’m in some goddam book,” said the teenager who was turning the fish. “It sure as hell ain’t some dream. I dream about naked women all the time, who doesn’t? But Jesus, this one really is naked, and she’s got stuff I never thought of, you know?”
She cupped a hand over her pubis and pulled up. “Want some?”
“Are you Holden Caulfield?” I said.
“Jesus, you too. Yeah, I’m from Catcher Walking Through the Fucking Wheat Field or some goddamn crap.”
“Hell, even I know about you,” said an old blind guy with an accordion, whose eyes were covered with a faded bandana. “It sounds like we’re all from made-up stories, complete with made-up memories. If your book says you’re from 1950, you won’t have read about any characters written after that.”
“It’s like we all have two memories,” the nude woman said, “one here on the island and one from some other place and time. A fictional one.”
“Two, for me,” I said. “I lived in a modern time, with airplanes and space travel. But I think I got there from the seventeenth century.” My head felt funny, and I sat to keep from falling down. “But before that, I was in modern times, too. I went from the twenty-first century to the seventeenth.”
“How did you get there?” the man in the wig asked.
“I think I walked. And rode in a cart.” The memory was clear enough, but choppy, like a sequence of strobe shots. “I left a monastery in rural Cuba and walked to Havana. When I got there the harbor was full of tall sailing ships. But there weren’t any cars or airplanes.”
“Old Havana,” the nude woman said. “I saw that movie. But you’re a time traveler in your own story! You go back to olden times and grow up to be a pirate. And then at the end of the movie, you’re going back to Cuba on an airplane to . . . meet yourself? Meet your younger self and make sure you do the right thing.”
“But no,” I said. “I really am a pirate.” I held up the back of my hand, with its festering wound. “This is from a sword fight, a couple of days ago. Nobody ever made a movie about me.”
“Sure they did,” she said. “A book before the movie, too.”
“You are all so fucking crazy,” the drunk said. “What movie? We was just dropped here.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t pay any attention to him.”
“But he’s right, isn’t he? We were all dropped here. Literally dropped, in my case, and in Severian’s.”
“I was asleep,” she said. “In my crèche outside Luna City. It’s like I rolled out of bed and onto this island. Where the gravity stinks, incidentally.”
Something began to crystallize. “I think I read about you, too, in a science fiction book. Though I suppose you were wearing clothes.”
“I normally am. But not while I’m sleeping. Maybe I’ll buy some pajamas, now.” She heaved a sigh and looked around. “I guess you never know what kind of a world you’re going to wake up in.”
“Suppose we are all from books. Has anybody here read all of them?”
An older man who had been watching the proceedings with interest raised a finger. “Most of them. Including yours . . . Ignacio.”
No one had used that name here. “You have read about my life?”
“Oh, yes; more than once.” He patted his generous mustache, eyes dancing. “And most of the books all of our friends here inhabit. The mystery to me are the ones I can’t identify. Did I read them and forget?”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s good. I would hate to be upstaged by one of my own creations. I don’t understand, either.”
Another lunatic, but a harmless one. “You think we all came from books you wrote?”
“Oh, no; not all of you. You and Severian did. But most of you do seem to be from books I’ve read.”
“So we’re figments of your imagination?”
“Or memory, or dreams. I wonder if you’ll disappear when I wake up.”
Severian drew his sword back out in a long hiss. “I wonder what would happen to us if you died. Here in this supposed dream world.”
“Not an experiment I would care to try.”
“Or dare to,” Severian said. He picked up a coconut off the ground, tossed it up, and split it with a one-handed swing of the heavy blade. One hemisphere rolled to my feet.
Had the coconut been there before? I picked it up. Some dirt adhered to the edges of the cut. It smelled right.
“So you just willed us into being,” I said to the man with the mustache. “You’re God.”
“No, not at all. God made me, and then through me made you. I don’t pretend to know how or why.”
“But I’m real,” I said, feeling foolish.
“As I am,” Severian said.
“Me, too,” the nude woman said, hands on her hips. “Why don’t you try to erase one of us?”
The man stared at her. “All right. Go away.”
“No,” she said. “What’s happening?” Slowly she started to fade. I could see the forest through her. She looked around wildly and then disappeared with a quiet pop.
“My God,” I said. “Could you do that to any of us?”
He was still looking at the place where she had been. “I don’t know. I don’t want to get rid of anybody. But I don’t know how long I can stay asleep.”
“You aren’t asleep,” I said.
“Not here,” he said. “No one is ever asleep inside a dream; certainly not one he makes up himself. But what is going to happen to all of this when I wake up? To all of you?”
“But look,” I said. “I can remember back dozens of years. You couldn’t have made up all of that.”
“Maybe it’s not about ‘making up.’ I wouldn’t have made up that poor girl, stuck here without any clothes. Or the unpleasant modern woman.”
“I’ll give you unpleasant,” she said.
“I don’t think you will,” he said. “But please try. Take Severian’s weapon and try.”
She walk
ed toward Severian with her hand out, but he just looked through her.
“Try Ignacio,” the man said.
She came toward me and held out her hand. I wasn’t able to pull my sword out of its scabbard. It was as if it were welded there.
“I haven’t imagined any one of you dead. Until I do—or until the authors of these other characters do—I think you’ll just have to live forever.”
“On this island?” I said.
He closed his eyes and everything around us shimmered and faded, dark and then gray light. There was a thunderous roar and the El roared by overhead as grit sifted down. Boxy old automobiles all around, shiny black. People dressed like flappers and gangsters. I wore a light flannel zoot suit and the girl was in a yellow pearlstudded chemise that came down almost to her knees.
“This is also an island, of a kind,” the man with the mustache said. “There are islands of time as well as space. I think that all of you live or die according to whether I need you.”
He closed his eyes again and we were floating over a surreal futuristic city, an Art Deco fantasy of pastel buildings with streamlined aircars flitting around. He closed his eyes again and we were back on the island.
He looked at me. “Shall I need you, Christopher? Which would you like to be?”
“Do you mean would I rather be a character in a story, or, as a real person, cease to exist?”
“Not ‘cease,’ ” he said gently. “If you are just a character in a story, you never have been real.”
“It’s not a story, though. It’s your story.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “What do you think?”
I heard the sea, then voices. Not too close. Smelled the sea to the left, and then wood smoke, from another direction. Blinked away crust, and rubbed my eyes, and the green dapple became dense overhead foliage, restless in the breeze. I didn’t hurt, but my legs and arms were like heavy wood, and sunburned the color of mahogany. I couldn’t recall my name.
Have I have been here before?
The youngest writer to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Joe Haldeman has earned steady awards over his forty- three-year career: His novels The Forever War and Forever Peace both made clean sweeps of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he has won three more Hugos and Nebulas for other novels and shorter works. Three times he’s won the Rhysling Award for best science fiction poem of the year. In 2012 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. The final novel in a trilogy, Earthbound, is just out (after Marsbound in 2008 and Starbound in 2009). Ridley Scott has bought the movie rights to The Forever War. Joe’s next novel is Work Done for Hire. When he’s not writing or teaching—a professor at MIT, he has taught every fall semester since 1983—he paints and bicycles and spends as much time as he can out under the stars as an amateur astronomer. He’s been married for forty-seven years to Mary Gay Potter Haldeman.
A Touch of Rosemary
TIMOTHY ZAHN
On Gene Wolfe: Many years ago, I was at a convention where Linda, the wife of the chairman, handled registration. She was something of a “mundane,” but loved meeting people.
Gene had sent in his preregistration for him and his son. Linda, not recognizing his name, pro cessed the memberships like everyone else’s. She was working the registration table when a gentleman walked up to her and said, “I’m Gene Wolfe, and I’m preregistered.”
Linda calmly pointed to a table to her right and said, “Please pick up your registration over there.” Gene dutifully went over to the table and picked up the registration. Then he asked about a friend of his, Walt, and Linda said that she thought he was in the consuite and pointed him in that direction.
About ten minutes later Walt came out, slightly aghast, and asked Linda, “Do you know who Gene Wolfe is?”
Linda looked up and said, “Yes, he registered just a short while ago.”
When Linda’s husband found out about it, he hurriedly tracked down Gene, apologized profusely, and promised to get him his registration money back. Gene refused, saying he hadn’t had such a good laugh at a convention in years.
The tavern didn’t have a name. It didn’t need one. The village was small, and it was the only tavern inside the long log walls that guarded against the dangers of the outside world.
Most of the villagers, even the poorest, ate at the tavern at least once a month. A few, the wealthier ones who could afford it, sometimes came in as often as once a week.
The wizard ate there every day.
There were fewer patrons than usual today, he noted as he sat at his table by the window. Normally the midday hour was bustling with activity, with only the farmers and hunters who labored beyond the walls unable to take the necessary time for a good meal.
But today only one other table was occupied. The four men seated there were leaning forward, their heads close to each other, talking together in low, nervous tones.
The server hurried to the wizard’s table. “Good midday, master,” the boy said. He seemed nervous, too. “How may we serve?”
“One portion,” the wizard said, drawing a small pouch from inside his threadbare tunic. He’d seen more of the outside world than anyone else in the village, and knew that most taverns had several food items to choose from each day. But not here. Here, the cook chose each morning what she would prepare, and that was what was served.
“Yes, master.” The boy hesitated. “You’re certain you wouldn’t prefer one and a half?”
“One will do,” the wizard said. The weaving of spells required extra sustenance, but he had no such activities planned for today. “Here’s my payment,” he added, opening the pouch.
The boy flicked the contents a distracted glance. “Tarragon?”
“Rosemary,” the wizard said, frowning. The boy knew his spices better than that. “From my window box. Is something wrong?”
The boy’s eyes shifted to the occupied table. The wizard followed his gaze, to find that the quiet conversation had ceased and all four men were staring at him.
“Is something wrong?” he repeated, raising his voice to include them as well as the boy.
One of the men, the village tanner, cleared his throat. “If the elders haven’t yet chosen to speak with you—”
“The elders move at their own pace,” the wizard said. “I move at mine. Tell me the problem.”
The tanner glanced at the others. “It’s the witch king,” he said grimly. “The wizard whose army has been sweeping through the lowlands—”
“I know who he is,” the wizard said. “What does this have to do with us?”
“He’s decided he wants to conquer the Tarnholm across the mountains.” The tanner’s throat worked. “And he’s just made the decision to bypass the main road and bring his army instead through our valley.”
The wizard looked out the window at the log wall. Beyond it, the dark forest that pressed up against the village seemed itself to be listening. “When?”
“He’ll be here in two days.”
Two days. The wizard looked at the server, still standing nervously beside the table. Closing the pouch, he handed it to the boy. “Here,” he said. “You’d best make it two portions.”
The first task was to reinforce the wall.
The wizard had woven this same spell many times over the thirty years since he’d first erected the barrier. But for most of those years the spell had been geared toward defense against moss, rot, or damage from scratching deer horns and wolf claws. Now, the spell would be called upon to strengthen the wood against spears, swords, axes, and the witch king’s own spells.
The elders thanked him when he was done. But he could tell by their pinched expressions that they weren’t expecting the spell to stop anyone for long. On that count, he knew they were right.
Beyond that, there was little he could do. Diverting a portion of the river to encircle the village would take too long, and would accomplish nothing except announce to the approaching invaders that
the village had something its inhabitants thought especially worth protecting. Spells used for removing brambles and tangleweed from the farmers’ fields could be reversed to seed the army’s path with obstacles, but such ploys were childish and would only irritate the soldiers instead of turning them away onto a different route. A thorn hedge was possible, but having such convenient kindling pressed up against a log wall would be an invitation for the witch king to reduce the village to smoldering ash and continue on his way.
In the end, the wizard knew there was only one way the village could be saved.
The rest of the two days was spent gathering the people together and sending them into the forest. Not the dark forest directly behind the village, the one no one ever entered, but the cleaner forest on the far side of the valley.
“You don’t need to stay,” the wizard told the tanner as they stood together, watching the distant line of people cross the bridge and make their way through the trees into the foothills of the snowy mountains that towered over the valley.
“You may need me,” the tanner said. “I know a few spells myself, you know. I may be able to help out a little.”
“You realize he probably won’t bother with us himself,” the wizard warned. “Not at first. He has his own phalanx of mages to throw against his enemies.”
“So much the better,” the tanner said with grim humor. “I’ll last longer against lesser minds.”
“You may die.”
“I may,” the tanner acknowledged. “But I may surprise you. Who can tell?” He gave the wizard a sideways look. “Besides, you’ll need someone to serve.”
The wizard sighed deep within his soul. So the tanner knew what he had planned. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I will.”
The witch king’s usual pattern, the wizard had heard, was to approach his objectives at dawn, when the defenders were weary from a night of staring fearfully into the darkness.
But the various small towns and villages along the army’s path weren’t objectives. They were little more than diversions, not even for the witch king himself, but for whichever group of soldiers had the time and inclination for an hour or so of looting and casual destruction.