Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

by Edmund R. Schubert

  Tommy’s lips moved. I’m waiting for my daddy.

  “I said, come.”

  Tommy screamed. Something black and crawling was eating away at his feet, creeping up to his thighs, a slick darkness that devoured him. Just a moment, then it was gone, leaving the boy whole but whimpering.

  “Come to me, Tommy.” The creature gestured, and the black spider on its hand quivered.

  I am waiting for my daddy.

  The black goop appeared again, moving slower now, creeping up Tommy’s feet, hissing up his ankles. Tommy gurgled and screamed and cried, and writhed on the hard, cold ground.

  Rick struggled to speak. “It’s just pain, Tommy.” The metal on his arms flashed hotter suddenly, splashing onto his chest. “Like shots! Remember how your butt hurt after the shots for kindergarten? It’s just pain, Tommy, and pain goes away. It isn’t like losing Grandma, right? It won’t hurt forever, it isn’t misery! Dammit, Quincy Umble, leave him alone, he’s a child!”

  The metal on Rick’s arms surged upward, searing through his eyes, filling his nasal cavity, burning through his eardrums. Rick tried to scream, would have screamed, but he choked on hot metal as it poured over his tongue and down his throat, into his lungs.

  “Touch your son, Rick Manchester. Touch him, just lay one little finger on his leg, and I will release you. No more pain. No more misery. One touch, Rick.”

  He burned and burned and burned, but Rick didn’t move. He endured. And deep in his chest, something burst. Everything that had gone before was nothing, was just a little burn, compared to this. This was Sergeant Davies suffering on the end of a punji stick, Rosas and Timmons eviscerated by shrapnel, and they all looked at him, Private Rick Manchester cowering in the bushes, and he didn’t move to help them. This was Marie screaming for thirty minutes until the ambulance came to take Tommy’s body away while Rick stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at her anguish and Tommy’s broken neck, afraid to move a muscle. This was living every day of eternity with Tommy’s ghost, never able to touch him. This was the failure and shame of his whole life, and it seared him more deeply and more horribly than molten metal.

  “Touch your boy, Rick.”

  Jagged words, softly spoken.

  “He is right there, your sweet boy. You can hold him close now, Rick. Let him share your misery.”

  But Rick lay still beneath his shame and agony. His misery would never be Tommy’s.

  The wheat field shook with a warm wind. Everything spun.

  Rick was in the chute. His chest burned madly within him, his heart seizing. The left side of his body was completely numb.

  Emancipation.

  He lifted one foot and then let it fall hard on the top of the dumbwaiter. Fall, he prayed above the pain in his chest and the misery in his mind. Fall and free my boy.

  It fell.

  Rick gulped his last breath and closed his eyes.

  And opened them.

  The world exploded into butterflies. They came from all directions at once as the chute dissolved. On his arms, on his hands, between his legs, under his feet, a wash of every color, every size—they swarmed and floated all over him.

  Far away, something dark and jagged squealed and was broken on their wings.

  “Daddy. You came.”

  A small hand on his neck. A warm little hand, as tender and welcome as sunlight.

  Rick took a breath, and the air was full of Tommy-scent. That unique, peculiar boy-smell, like grass and good earth, and sweat. And he felt Tommy’s face on his face, smooth and warm. Eyes brown as honey looked into his eyes, and Rick lifted his hands to stroke Tommy’s hair and touch his cheek.

  They settled down in that field of rushing, hushing wheat. The moon set; the wind grew warmer. And they talked. They talked about Rick’s war, and they talked about how Tommy had died. They talked about pain, and misery. They wept together, as fathers and sons should do, and do not often enough. And when the moon rose again, they settled against one another, Tommy’s head on Rick’s chest, Rick’s arm snug around his son’s waist.

  And they slept.

  And they both dreamed good dreams.

  Afterword by Scott M. Roberts

  The old man wore a maroon cap with a battleship’s name on it, and a denim jacket in the dead heat of summer. The jacket was pocked with pins proclaiming the validity of this conspiracy or that political stance—often at odds with each other. He was short and scrawny, and the skin on his face was peculiarly loose. He seemed an odd duck to be sitting in a trendy coffee shop just outside the campus of a small southern college—but then, I’m not a big patron of coffee shops, or small colleges, so what do I know?

  We struck up a conversation. We talked about the Korean War (he was a veteran; I’d seen a couple of episodes of M*A*S*H), bees (I’m an amateur beekeeper; he thought insects would eventually unite to destroy humanity), and science fiction (he, a fan of the genre; me, an aspiring writer). He offered me advice on what to write about; I offered to pay for his coffee.

  He mentioned that he was about to be evicted from the apartment he rented from his son. “I’m drunk all the time” was his approximate explanation.

  That old man was the seed for “Eviction Notice.”

  Stories come from strange places. “Eviction Notice” was germinated in a trendy coffee shop, by talking with an old man. It also came from my understanding of fathers and sons (having been both) and of misery (having once been a teenager). Stephen Vincent Benét’s butterflies from The Devil and Daniel Webster make an appearance here, and so do a few late-night memories of the television series China Beach (as viewed through a crack in my bedroom door, when my parents were sure I was asleep). Not that I plotted these things into the story—and not that anyone else would ever recognize them on paper.

  A day after I met that old man, I was typing out “Eviction Notice” on a borrowed laptop in a dorm room at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I finished in about eight hours of typing. To date, that’s the fastest I’ve ever completed a story. It is also, to date, the most traumatic writing experience I’ve ever had. My oldest son was two at the time “Eviction Notice” was written, and…well, it was difficult for me to keep a professional, clinical distance. I think that the only reason I was able to get through it at all was because, writing it, I knew how it was going to end.

  I can’t guess how you made it through…

  To Know All Things That Are in the Earth

  BY JAMES MAXEY

  Allen Frost assumed the first cherub he spotted was part of the restaurant’s Valentine’s decorations. He and Mary sat on the enclosed patio at Zorba’s. He’d taken a pause to sip his wine when he first saw the cherub behind the string of red foil hearts that hung in the window. The cherub was outside, looking like a baby doll with pasted-on wings.

  A second cherub fluttered down, wings flapping. A third descended to join them, then a fourth. Allen thought it was a little late in the evening to still be putting up decorations, but he appreciated the work someone had put into the dolls. Their wings moved in a way that struck him as quite realistic, if “realistic” was a word that could be used to describe a flying baby.

  Then the first cherub punched the window and the glass shattered. Everyone in the room started screaming. The cherubs darted into the restaurant, followed by a half dozen more swooping from the sky. Mary jumped up, her chair falling. Before it clattered against the tile floor, a cherub had grabbed her arm. She shrieked, hitting it with her free hand, trying to knock it loose, until another cherub grabbed her by the wrist.

  Allen lunged forward, grabbing one of the cherubs by the leg, trying to pull it free. He felt insane—the higher parts of his brain protested that this couldn’t be happening. Nonetheless, his sensory, animal self knew what was real. His fingers were wrapped around the warm, soft skin of a baby’s leg. White swan wings held the infant aloft. A ring of golden light the size of a coffee-cup rim hovered above the angel’s wispy locks. The whole room smelled o
f ozone and honeysuckle. The cherub’s fat baby belly jiggled as Allen punched it.

  The angel cast a disapproving gaze at Allen, its dark blue eyes looking right down to Allen’s soul. Allen suddenly stopped struggling. He felt inexplicably naked and ashamed in the face of this creature. He averted his eyes, only to find himself staring at the angel’s penis, the tiny organ simultaneously mundane and divine and rude. He still had a death grip on the cherub’s leg. Gently, the cherub’s stubby hands wrapped around Allen’s middle and ring fingers. The cherub jerked Allen’s fingers back with a snap, leaving his fingernails flat against the back of his wrist.

  Allen fell to his knees in pain. Mary disappeared behind a rush of angels, a flurry of wings white as the cotton in a bottle of aspirin. Her screams vanished beneath the flapping cacophony. Somewhere far in the distance, a trumpet sounded.

  The Rapture was badly timed for Allen Frost. He taught biology at the local community college while working on his doctorate. This semester, he had a girl in his class, Rachael Young, who wouldn’t shut up about intelligent design. She monopolized his classroom time. Her leading questions were thinly disguised arguments trying to prove Darwin was crap. He’d been blowing off steam about Rachael when he’d said something really stupid, in retrospect.

  “People who believe in intelligent design are mush-brained idiots,” he said. “The idea that some God—”

  “I believe in God,” Mary said.

  “But, you know, not in God God,” Allen explained. “You’re open-minded. You’re spiritual, but not religious.”

  Mary’s eyes narrowed into little slits. “I have very strong beliefs. You just never take the time to listen to them.”

  Allen sighed. “Don’t be like this,” he said. “I’m only saying you’re not a fundamentalist.”

  Mary still looked wounded.

  Allen felt trapped. Most of the time, he and Mary enjoyed a good relationship. They agreed on so much. But when talk turned to religion, he felt, deep in his heart, they were doomed. Their most sincere beliefs could never be reconciled.

  Allen lifted his wineglass to his lips and took a long sip, not so much to taste the wine as to shut up before he dug his hole any deeper. He turned his attention to the cherubs outside the window. Then his brains turned to mush.

  Because, when you’re wrestling an angel—its powerful wings beating the air, its dark, all-knowing eyes looking right through you—you can’t help but notice evolution really doesn’t explain such a creature. The most die-hard atheist must swallow his pride and admit the obvious. An angel is the product of intelligent design.

  A year after the Rapture, Allen tossed his grandmother’s living room furniture onto the lawn, then whitewashed the floor.

  When he was done, Allen went out to the porch to read while the floor dried. It had been four hours, eleven minutes since he’d put his current book down. He’d grown addicted to reading, feeling as uncomfortable without a book in hand as a smoker without a cigarette. He purchased his reading material, and the occasional groceries, with income he made reading tarot cards; he was well known to his neighbors as a magician. He always informed his hopeful visitors he didn’t know any real magic. They came anyway. The arcane symbols painted all over the house gave people certain ideas about him.

  The books that lined the shelves of his library only added to his reputation for mysticism. He was forever studying some new system of magic—from voodoo to alchemy to cabala. Much of the global economy had collapsed after the Rapture, but supernatural literature experienced a boom.

  He did most of his trading over the Internet. The world, for the most part, was intact. It wasn’t as if the angels came down and ripped out power lines or burned cities. They had simply dragged off God’s chosen. No one was even certain how many people were gone—some said a billion, but the official UN estimate was a comically understated one hundred thousand. The real hit to the economy came in the aftermath of the Rapture; a lot of people didn’t show up for work the next day. Allen suspected he could have found a reason to do his job if he’d been a fireman or a cop or a doctor. But a biology teacher? There was no reason for him to get out of bed. He’d spent the day hugging Mary’s pillow, wondering how he’d been so wrong. He spent the day after that reading her Bible.

  He hadn’t understood it. Even in the aftermath of the Rapture, it didn’t make sense to him. So he’d begun reading books written to explain the symbolic language of the Bible, which led him to study cabala, which set him on his quest to understand the world he lived in by understanding its underlying magical foundations.

  Jobless, unable to pay his rent, he’d moved into his grandmother’s abandoned house, where he’d studied every book he could buy, trade, or borrow to learn magic. So far, every book was crap. Alchemy, astrology, chaos magic, witchcraft—bullshit of the highest order. Yet he kept reading. He tested the various theories, chanting spells, mixing potions, and divining tea leaves. He was hungry for answers. How did the world really work? Pre-Rapture, science answered that question.

  But science, quite bluntly, had been falsified. The army of angels had carried away his understanding of the world.

  Allen now lived in a universe unbounded by natural laws. He lived in a reality where everything was possible. Books were his only maps into this terra incognita.

  The whitewash dried, leaving a blank sheet twenty feet across. It was pristine as angel wings. Allen crept carefully across it, having bathed his feet in rainwater. He wore pale, threadbare cotton. He’d shaved his head, even his eyebrows. The only dark things in the room were his eyes and the shaft of charcoal he carried. He crouched, recited the prayer he’d studied, then used his left hand to trace the outer arc of the summoning circle. The last rays of daylight faded from the window. His goal was to speak with an angel before dawn.

  With the circle complete, he started scribing arcane glyphs around its edges. This part was nerve-wracking; a single misplaced stroke could ruin the spell. When the glyphs were done, Allen filled the ring with questions. Where was Mary? Would he see her again? Was there hope of reunion? These and a dozen other queries were marked in shaky, scrawled letters. His hand ached. His legs cramped from crouching. He pushed through the pain to craft graceful angelic script.

  It was past midnight when he finished. He placed seven cones of incense along the edge of the circle and lit them. The air smelled like cheap aftershave.

  He retrieved the polished sword from his bedroom and carried it into the circle, along with Solomon’s Manual. He opened to the bookmarked incantation. Almost immediately, a bright light approached the house. Shadows danced on the wall. A low bass rumble rattled the windows.

  A large truck with no muffler was clawing its way up the gravel driveway.

  Disgusted by the interruption, Allen stepped outside the circle and went to the front porch, book and sword still in hand. The air was bracing—the kind of chill February night where every last bit of moisture has frozen out of the sky, leaving the stars crisp. The bright moon cast stark shadows over the couch, end tables, and lamps cluttering the lawn.

  Allen lived in the mountains of southern Virginia, miles from the nearest town. His remote location let him know all his neighbors—and the vehicle in his driveway didn’t belong to any of them. It was a flatbed truck. Like many vehicles these days, it was heavily armed. A gunner sat on the back, manning a giant machine gun bolted to the truck bed. The fact that the gunner sat in a rocking chair took an edge from the menace a gun this large should have projected. Gear and luggage were stacked on the truck bed precariously. A giant, wolfish dog stood next to the gunner, its eyes golden in the moonlight.

  The truck shuddered to a halt, the motor sputtering into silence. Loud bluegrass music seeped through the cab windows. It clicked off and the passenger door opened. A woman got out, dressed in camouflage fatigues. She looked toward the porch, where Allen stood in shadows, then said, “Mr. Frost?”

  Allen assumed they were asking about his grandfather. The mailbox
down at the road still bore his name—his grandmother never changed it after he died, nor had Allen bothered with it after his grandmother had vanished.

  “If you’re looking for Nathan Frost, he died years ago.”

  “No,” the woman said, in a vaguely familiar voice. “Allen Frost.”

  “Why do you want him? Who are you?”

  “My name is Rachael Young,” she answered.

  The voice and face clicked. The intelligent-design girl from his last class. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. You’ve found me.”

  The driver’s door opened and closed. A long-haired man with a white beard down to his waist came around the front of the truck. “Well now,” the old man said, in a thick Kentucky accent. “You’re the famous science fella.”

  “Famous?” asked Allen.

  “My granddaughter’s been talking you up for nigh on a year,” said Old Man Young. “Says you’re gonna have answers.”

  “We looked all over for you,” said Rachael. “The college said you’d gone to live with your grandmother in Texas.”

  “Texas? I don’t have any relatives in Texas.”

  “No shit,” the gunner on the flatbed said. “Been all over this damn country, chasin’ one wild goose after another. You better not be a waste of our time.” The dog beside him began to snarl as it studied Allen.

  “Luke,” said Old Man Young. “Mind your language. Haul down the ice chest.”

  “Sorry we got here so late, Mr. Frost,” Rachael said, walking toward him. She was looking at the sword and book. “Have we, uh, interrupted something?”

  “Maybe,” Allen said. “Look, I’m a little confused. Why, exactly, have you been looking for me?”

  “You’re the only scientist I trust,” she said. “When we used to have our conversations in class, you always impressed me. I really respected you. You knew your stuff. Since your specialty is biology, we want you to look at what we’ve got in the cooler and tell us what it is.”

  Allen wasn’t sure what struck him as harder to swallow—that she’d spent a year tracking him down, or that she remembered the tedious cross-examinations she’d subjected him to as conversations.