“Yes,” she said, smiling and nodding. “They’re quite harmless. But what little pests they are! Spoiling books, and licking envelopes, and snuggling in the bed!”
“Snuggling in the bed?”
“Yes, yes. They were pets, you see.”
Her husband leaned forward to talk to me around her. He was a rosy gentleman. “Teddy bears,” he said in English, smiling. “Yes.”
“Teddy bears?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, and then had to resort to his own language—“teddy bears are little animal pets for children, isn’t that right?”
“But they’re not live animals.”
He looked dismayed. “Dead animals?”
“No—stuffed animals—toys—”
“Yes, yes. Toys, pets,” he said, smiling and nodding.
He wanted to talk about his visit to my plane; he had been to San Francisco and liked it very much, and we talked about earthquakes instead of teddy bears. He had found a 5.6 earthquake “a very charming experience, very enjoyable,” and he and his wife and I laughed a great deal as he told about it. They were certainly a nice couple, with a positive outlook.
When I went back to my room I shoved my suitcase up against the bookend that blocked the hole in the wall, and lay in bed hoping that the teddy bears did not have a back door.
Nothing snuggled into the bed with me that night. I woke very early, being jet-lagged by flying from London to Chicago, where my westbound flight had been delayed, allowing me this vacation. It was a lovely warm morning, the sun just rising. I got up and went out to take the air and see the city of Slas on the Islac plane.
It might have been a big city on my plane, nothing exotic to my eye, except the buildings were more mixed in style and in size than ours. That is, we put the big imposing buildings at the center and on the nice streets, and the small humble ones in the neighborhoods or barrios or slums or shantytowns. In this residential quarter of Slas, big houses were all jumbled up together with tiny cottages, some of them hardly bigger than hutches. When I went the other direction, downtown, I found the same wild variation of scale in the office buildings. A massive old four-story granite block towered over a ten-story building ten feet wide, with floors only five or six feet apart—a doll’s skyscraper. By then, however, enough Islai were out and about that the buildings didn’t puzzle me as much as the people did.
They were amazingly various in size, in color, in shape. A woman who must have been eight feet tall swept past me, literally: she was a street sweeper, busily and gracefully clearing the sidewalk of dust. She had what I took to be a spare broom or duster, a great spray of feathers, tucked into her waistband in back like an ostrich’s tail. Next came a businessman striding along, hooked up to the computer network via a plug in his ear, a mouthpiece, and the left frame of his spectacles, talking away as he studied the market report. He came up about to my waist. Four young men passed on the other side of the street; there was nothing odd about them except that they all looked exactly alike. Then came a child trotting to school with his little backpack. He trotted on all fours, neatly, his hands in leather mitts or boots that protected them from the pavement; he was pale, with small eyes, and a snout, but he was adorable.
A sidewalk café had just opened up beside a park downtown. Though ignorant of what the Islai ate for breakfast, I was ravenous, ready to dare anything edible. I held out my translatomat to the waitress, a worn-looking woman of forty or so with nothing unusual about her, to my eye, but the beauty of her thick, yellow, fancifully braided hair. “Please tell me what a foreigner eats for breakfast,” I said.
She laughed, then smiled a beautiful, kind smile, and said, via the translatomat, “Well, you have to tell me that. We eat cledif, or fruit with cledif.”
“Fruit with cledif, please,” I said, and presently she brought me a plate of delicious-looking fruits and a large bowl of pale yellow gruel, smooth, about as thick as very heavy cream, lukewarm. It sounds ghastly, but it was delicious—mild but subtle, lightly filling and slightly stimulating, like café au lait. She waited to see if I liked it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think to ask if you were a carnivore,” she said. “Carnivores have raw cullis for breakfast, or cledif with offal.”
“This is fine,” I said.
Nobody else was in the place, and she had taken a liking to me, as I had to her. “May I ask where you come from?” she asked, and so we got to talking. Her name was Ai Li A Le. I soon realised she was not only an intelligent person but a highly educated one. She had a degree in plant pathology—but was lucky, she said, to have a job as a waitress. “Since the Ban,” she said, shrugging. When she saw that I didn’t know what the Ban was, she was about to tell me; but several customers were sitting down now, a great bull of a man at one table, two mousy girls at another, and she had to go wait on them.
“I wish we could go on talking,” I said, and she said, with her kind smile, “Well, if you come back at sixteen, I can sit and talk with you.”
“I will,” I said, and I did. After wandering around the park and the city I went back to the hotel for lunch and a nap, then took the monorail back downtown. I never saw such a variety of people as were in that car—all shapes, sizes, colors, degrees of hairiness, furriness, featheriness (the street sweeper’s tail had indeed been a tail), and, I thought, looking at one long, greenish youth, even leafiness. Surely those were fronds over his ears? He was whispering to himself as the warm wind swept through the car from the open windows.
The only thing the Islai seemed to have in common, unfortunately, was poverty. The city certainly had been prosperous once, not very long ago. The monorail was a snazzy bit of engineering, but it was showing wear and tear. The surviving old buildings—which were on a scale I found familiar—were grand but run-down, and crowded by the more recent giant’s houses and doll’s houses and buildings like stables or mews or rabbit hutches—a terrible hodgepodge, all of it cheaply built, rickety-looking, shabby. The Islai themselves were shabby, when they weren’t downright ragged. Some of the furrier and featherier ones were clothed only by their fur and feathers. The green boy wore a modesty apron, but his rough trunk and limbs were bare. This was a country in deep, hard economic trouble.
Ai Li A Le was sitting at one of the outside tables at the café (the cledifac) next door to the one where she waited tables. She smiled and beckoned to me, and I sat down with her. She had a small bowl of chilled cledif with sweet spices, and I ordered the same. “Please tell me about the Ban,” I asked her.
“We used to look like you,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Well,” she said, and hesitated. “We like science. We like engineering. We are good engineers. But perhaps we are not very good scientists.”
To summarise her story: the Islai had been strong on practical physics, agriculture, architecture, urban development, engineering, invention, but weak in the life sciences, history, and theory. They had their Edisons and Fords but no Darwin, no Mendel. When their airports got to be just like ours, if not worse, they began to travel between planes; and on some plane, about a hundred years ago, one of their scientists discovered applied genetics. He brought it home. It fascinated them. They promptly mastered its principles. Or perhaps they had not quite mastered them before they started applying them to every life-form within reach.
“First,” she said, “to plants. Altering food plants to be more fruitful, or to resist bacteria and viruses, or to kill insects, and so on.”
I nodded. “We’re doing a good deal of that too,” I said.
“Really? Are you...” She seemed not to know how to ask the question she wanted to ask. “I’m corn, myself,” she said at last, shyly.
I checked the translatomat. Uslu: corn, maize. I checked the dictionary, and it said that uslu on Islac and maize on my plane were the same plant.
I knew that the odd thing about corn is that it has no wild form, only a distant wild ancestor that you’d never recognise as corn. It’s entirely a construct of lon
g-term breeding by ancient gatherers and farmers. An early genetic miracle. But what did it have to do with Ai Li A Le?
Ai Li A Le with her wonderful, thick, gold-colored, corn-colored hair cascading in braids from a topknot...
“Only four percent of my genome,” she said. “There’s about half a percent of parrot, too, but it’s recessive. Thank God.”
I was still trying to absorb what she had told me. I think she felt her question had been answered by my astonished silence.
“They were utterly irresponsible,” she said severely. “With all their programs and policies and making everything better, they were fools. They let all kinds of things get loose and interbreed. Wiped out rice in one decade. The improved breech went sterile. The famines were terrible...Butterflies, we used to have butterflies, do you have them?”
“Some, still,” I said.
“And deletu?” A kind of singing firefly, now extinct, said my translatomat.
I shook my head wistfully.
She shook her head wistfully.
“I never saw a butterfly or a deletu. Only pictures...The insecticidal clones got them...But the scientists learned nothing—nothing! They set about improving the animals. Improving us! Dogs that could talk, cats that could play chess! Human beings who were going to be all geniuses and never get sick and live five hundred years! They did all that, oh yes, they did all that. There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me. I can’t stand talking dogs. My big poodle Rover, he never says a word, the dear good soul. And then the humans! We’ll never, ever get rid of the Premier. He’s a Healthy, a bloody GAPA. He’s ninety now and looks thirty and he’ll go on looking thirty and being premier for four more centuries. He’s a pious hypocrite and a greedy, petty, stupid, mean-minded crook. Just the kind of man who ought to be siring children for five centuries...The Ban doesn’t apply to him...But still, I’m not saying the Ban was wrong. They had to do something. Things were really awful, fifty years ago. When they realised that genetic hackers had infiltrated all the laboratories, and half the techs were Bioist fanatics, and the Godsone Church had all those secret factories in the eastern hemisphere deliberately turning out genetic melds...Of course most of those products weren’t viable. But a lot of them were...The hackers were so good at it. The chicken people, you’ve seen them?”
As soon as she asked, I realised that I had: short, squat people who ran around in intersections squawking, so that all the traffic gridlocked in an effort not to run them over. “They just make me want to cry,” Ai Li A Le said, looking as if she wanted to cry.
“So the Ban forbade further experimentation?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Actually, they blew up the laboratories. And sent the Bioists for reeducation in the Gubi. And jailed all the Godsone Fathers. And most of the Mothers too, I guess. And shot the geneticists. And destroyed all the experiments in progress. And the products, if they were”—she shrugged—“too far from the norm. The norm!” She scowled, though her sunny face was not made for scowling. “We don’t have a norm any more. We don’t have species any more. We’re a genetic porridge. When we plant maize, it comes up weevil-repellent clover that smells like chlorine. When we plant an oak, it comes up poison oak fifty feet high with a ten-foot-thick trunk. And when we make love we don’t know if we’re going to have a baby, or a foal, or a cygnet, or a sapling. My daughter—” and she paused. Her face worked and she had to compress her lips before she could go on. “My daughter lives in the North Sea. On raw fish. She’s very beautiful. Dark and silky and beautiful. But—I had to take her to the seacoast when she was two years old. I had to put her in that cold water, those big waves. I had to let her swim away, let her go be what she is. But she is human too! She is, she is human too!”
She was crying, and so was I.
After a while, Ai Li A Le went on to tell me how the Genome Collapse had led to profound economic depression, only worsened by the Purity Clauses of the Ban, which restricted jobs in the professions and government to those who tested 99.44% human—with exceptions for Healthies, Righteous Ones, and other GAPAs (Genetically Altered Products Approved by the Emergency Government). This was why she was working as a waitress. She was four percent maize.
“Maize was once the holy plant of many people, where I come from,” I said, hardly knowing what I said. “It is such a beautiful plant. I love everything made out of corn—polenta, hoecake, cornbread, tortillas, canned corn, creamed corn, hominy, grits, corn whiskey, corn chowder, on the cob, tamales—it’s all good. All good, all kind, all sacred. I hope you don’t mind if I talk about eating it!”
“Heavens no,” said Ai Li A Le, smiling. “What did you think cledif was made from?”
After a while I asked her about teddy bears. That phrase of course meant nothing to her, but when I described the creature in my bookcase she nodded—“Oh yes! Bookbears. Early on, when the genetic designers were making everything better, you know, they dwarfed bears way down for children’s pets. Like toys, stuffed animals, only they were alive. Programmed to be passive and affectionate. But some of the genes they used for dwarfing came from insects—springtails and earwigs. And the bears began to eat the children’s books. At night, while they were supposed to be cuddling in bed with the children, they’d go eat their books. They like paper and glue. And when they bred, the offspring had long tails, like wires, and a sort of insect jaw, so they weren’t much good for the children any more. But by then they’d escaped into the woodwork, between the walls...Some people call them bearwigs.”
I have been back to Islac several times to see Ai Li A Le. It is not a happy plane, or a reassuring one, but I would go to worse places than Islac to see so kind a smile, such a topknot of gold, and to drink maize with the woman who is maize.
MRS. TODD’S SHORTCUT
STEPHEN KING
Stephen King is the bestselling, award-winning author of innumerable classics, such as The Shining, Carrie, Cujo, and The Dead Zone—all of which have been adapted to film, as have many of King’s other novels and stories. Other projects include editing Best American Short Stories 2007, writing a pop culture column for Entertainment Weekly, scripting for the Vertigo comic American Vampire, and a collaboration on a musical with rocker John Mellencamp called Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. His most recent books are the novels 11/22/63 and The Wind Through the Keyhole. Another recent book, Full Dark, No Stars, is a short fiction collection of four all-new, previously unpublished stories. His other work includes classics such as The Stand, The Dark Tower, Salem’s Lot, among others.
“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.
Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.
This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and wa
tching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.
“She don’t drive as fast as ’Phelia,” Homer said. “I swan I used to think what an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces like she could.”
Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk prefer their own love stories and hate stories and scandals and rumors of scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia Corbridge found that after a week or so she couldn’t even get invited to lunch on her story of how she found him with the pistol still in one stiffening hand. But folks are still not done talking about Joe Camber, who got killed by his own dog.
Well, it don’t matter. It’s just that they are different racecourses we run on. Summer people are trotters; us others that don’t put on ties to do our week’s work are just pacers. Even so there was quite a lot of local interest when Ophelia Todd disappeared back in 1973. Ophelia was a genuinely nice woman, and she had done a lot of things in town. She worked to raise money for the Sloan Library, helped to refurbish the war memorial, and that sort of thing. But all the summer people like the idea of raising money. You mention raising money and their eyes light up and commence to gleam. You mention raising money and they can get a committee together and appoint a secretary and keep an agenda. They like that. But you mention time (beyond, that is, one big long walloper of a combined cocktail party and committee meeting) and you’re out of luck. Time seems to be what summer people mostly set a store by. They lay it by, and if they could put it up in Ball jars like preserves, why, they would. But ’Phelia Todd seemed willing to spend time—to do desk duty in the library as well as to raise money for it. When it got down to using scouring pads and elbow grease on the war memorial, ’Phelia was right out there with town women who had lost sons in three different wars, wearing an overall with her hair done up in a kerchief. And when kids needed ferrying to a summer swim program, you’d be as apt to see her as anyone headed down Landing Road with the back of Worth Todd’s big shiny pickup full of kids. A good woman. Not a town woman, but a good woman. And when she disappeared, there was concern. Not grieving, exactly, because a disappearance is not exactly like a death. It’s not like chopping something off with a cleaver; more like something running down the sink so slow you don’t know it’s all gone until long after it is.
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