by Rich Horton
“What is it?” asked Pip, holding up what she had tripped over: a piece of brown leather, rather like a purse.
“It’s Jack Feather’s Wallet of Dreams, which he doesn’t know I’ve taken. I was just going to look at the dreams—their wings are so lovely in the sunlight—and then return it. But ‘What You Find You May Keep.’ That’s the law.” And the girl wept bitterly into her hands.
“But I don’t want it,” said Pip. “I’d like to look at the dreams, if they’re as nice as you say they are, but I certainly don’t want to keep them. Who is Jack Feather, and how can we return his wallet?”
“How considerate you are,” said the girl. “Let me kiss you on both cheeks—that’s the fairy way. Then you’ll be able to walk through the door in the wall, and we’ll return the wallet together. You can call me Hyacinth.”
Why couldn’t she walk through the door by herself? Pip wondered. It seemed an ordinary enough door, opening from one of the overgrown rooms to another. And what was the fairy way? She was just starting to wonder why the girl in the white dress had green hair when Hyacinth opened the door and pulled her through.
On the other side was a country she had never seen before. A forest stretched away into the distance, until it reached a river that shone like a snake in the sunlight, and then again until it reached the mountains.
Standing under the trees at the edge of the forest was a boy, not much taller than she was, in trousers made of gray fur, with a birch-bark hat on his head. As soon as he saw them, he said, “Hyacinth, if you don’t give me my Wallet of Dreams in the clap of a hummingbird’s wing, I’ll turn you into a snail and present you to Mother Hedgehog, who’ll stick you into her supper pot!”
—From Pip and the Fairies, by Susan Lawson
How clearly the memories are coming back to her now, of fishing at night with Jack Feather, searching for the Wishing Stone with Hyacinth and Thimble, listening to stories at Mother Hedgehog’s house while eating her toadstool omelet. There was always an emphasis on food, perhaps a reflection of the toaster and crock-pot that so invariably turned out toast and soup. The May Queen’s cake, for example, or Jeremy Toad’s cricket cutlets, which neither she nor Hyacinth could bear to eat.
“I hope you like crickets,” said Jeremy Toad. Pip and Hyacinth looked at one another in distress. “Eat What You Are Offered,” was the Thorn King’s law. Would they dare to break it? That was in Jeremy Toad’s Birthday Party.
She can see, really, where it all came from.
“I think the feud between the Thorn King and the May Queen represented her anger at my father’s death. It was an accident, of course. But she blamed him for leaving her, for going to Vietnam. She wanted him to be a conscientious objector. Especially with no money and a daughter to care for. I don’t think she ever got over that anger.”
“But the Thorn King and the May Queen were reconciled.”
“Only by one of Pip’s wishes. The other—let me see if I remember. It was a fine wool shawl for Thimble so she would never be cold again.”
“Weren’t there three? What was the third wish?”
“Oh, that was the one Pip kept for herself. I don’t think my mother ever revealed it. Probably something to do with Jack Feather. She— I—was rather in love with him, you know.”
The third wish had been about the electric bill, and it had come true several days later when the advance from the publisher arrived.
Here it is, the room where she found Jack Feather’s wallet. Once, in Pip Meets the Thorn King, he allowed her to look into it. She saw herself, but considerably older, in a dress that sparkled like stars. Years later, she recognized it as the dress she would wear to the Daytime Emmys.
And now what? Because there is the door, and after all the Carp did tell her, in Pip Says Goodbye, “You will come back some day.”
But if she opens the door now, will she see the fields behind Payne House, which are mown for hay in September? That is the question around which everything revolves. Has she been a fool, to give up California, and the house with the pool, and a steady paycheck?
“What happened, Pip?” her mother asked her, lying in the hospital bed, her head wrapped in the scarf without which it looked as fragile as an eggshell. “You were such an imaginative child. What made you care so much about money?”
“You did,” she wanted to and could not say. And now she has taken that money out of the bank to buy Payne House.
If she opens the door and sees only the unmown fields, it will have been for nothing. No, not nothing. There is Payne House, after all. And her memories. What will she do, now she is no longer Jessica Pendleton? Perhaps she will write, like her mother. There is a certain irony in that.
The rain on the grass begins to soak through her shoes. She should remember not to wear city shoes in the country.
But it’s no use standing here. That is, she has always told herself, the difference between her and her mother: she can face facts.
Philippa grasps the doorknob, breathes in once, quickly, and opens the door.
“I’ve been waiting forever and a day,” said Hyacinth, yawning. She had fallen asleep beneath an oak tree, and while she slept the squirrels who lived in the tree had made her a blanket of leaves.
“I promised I would come back if I could,” said Pip, “and now I have.”
“I’m as glad as can be,” said Hyacinth. “The Thorn King’s been so sad since you went away. When I tell him you’re back, he’ll prepare a feast just for you.”
“Will Jack Feather be there?” asked Pip.
“I don’t know,” said Hyacinth, looking uncomfortable. “He went away to the mountains, and hasn’t come back. I didn’t want to tell you yet, but—the May Queen’s disappeared! Jack Feather went to look for her with Jeremy Toad, and now they’ve disappeared too.”
“Then we’ll have to go find them,” said Pip.
—From Pip Returns to Fairyland, by Philippa Lawson
COMBER, by Gene Wolfe
The news whispered by his radio this morning was the same as the news when he and Mona had gone to bed: the city had topped the crest, and everything was flat and wonderful—if only for a day or two. “You’re flat yourselves,” he told it softly, and switched it off.
Mona was still asleep when he had shaved and dressed, her swollen belly at rest on the mattress, her face full of peace, and her slow inhalations loud to his acute hearing. He grabbed a breakfast bar on his way through the kitchen and wondered how the hell he could start the car without waking her up.
There was a ball on the driveway, a chewed-up rubber ball some dog had stopped chasing when it had stopped running. He picked it up and bounced it off the concrete. It bounced a few more times and settled down to rest again, as round as Mona, though not quite as happy. He tossed it into the car and followed it.
Press the accelerator, let it up, twist the key. The little engine purred to life as if it knew its work would be easy today. The suburb passed in a familiar blur.
From the tollway, he eyed the tall buildings that marked the center of the city. The last crest had come before he was born (the crest of a wholly different wave, something he found hard to imagine) but he knew that not one of those spumecatchers had been built then. Now the city might have to pay for its pride and the convenience of having so many offices close together. Pay with its very existence, perhaps.
The brass inclinometer he had bought when he had foreseen the danger the year before was waiting for him when he reached his desk, solidly screwed to the desktop, its long axis coinciding exactly with the direction of motion of the plate. He squinted at the needle, and at last got out a magnifying glass. Zero. It seemed supernatural: a portent.
A memo taped to his monitor warned him that the new angle “which will soon grow steep” would be the reverse of what it called “the accustomed angle.” Everything was to be secured a second time with that new angle in mind. Workmen would make the rounds of all offices. He was asked to cooperate for the good of th
e company. He tossed the memo, woke his processor, and opened Mona’s private dream house instead. His design was waiting there to be tinkered with, as it would not have been if anyone in authority had found it.
“Okay if I look at your gadget?” It was Phil, and Phil looked without waiting for his permission. “Flat,” Phil said happily, and laughed. “The plate’s flat. First time in my life.”
“The last time, too.” He closed Mona’s dream-house. “For either one of us.”
Phil rubbed his hands. “It will all be different. Entirely different. A new slant on everything. Want to go up to the roof, ol’ buddy? Should be a great view.”
He shook his head.
It would be very different indeed, he reflected when Phil had left, if the plate overturned. As it very well might. If the building did not break up when it hit the water, it would point down and would be submerged. Water would short out the electrical equipment, probably at once; and in any event, the elevators would no longer operate. Rooms and corridors might (or might not) hold some air for a few hours— most it down on what were now the lower floors. He might, perhaps, break a window and so escape; if he lived long enough to rise to street level, the edge of the plate, and air, would be what? Thirty miles away? Forty?
Back home, Mona would have drowned. If the plate were going to turn over, he decided, it would be better if it did it while he was at home with her. Better if they died together with their unborn child.
* * * *
Next day the inclinometer was no longer on zero, and the chewed ball he had left on his desk had rolled to one side; as he wrote letters and called contacts, as he began to sketch the outline of his next project, he watched the space between the end of the needle and the hair-thin zero line grow.
By Friday the needle was no longer near zero, and there were intervening marks which he did not trouble to read. Because on Friday, at not-quite eleven o’clock of that bright and still almost-level morning, Edith Benson called to say that Mona had gone into labor while they chatted across the fence, and that she had driven Mona to the hospital.
He took some time off. By the time he returned to his desk, the needle was no more than a pencil’s width from the peg. It seemed to him to tremble there, and he was reminded of his conversation with the proprietor of the little shop in which he had bought the inclinometer. He had asked why the scale went no further; and the proprietor had grinned, showing beautifully regular teeth that had certainly been false. “Because you won’t be there to look at it if she goes farther than that,” the proprietor had told him.
A note taped to his desk informed him that he had neglected to set the brake on his swivel chair. It had pushed open the door of his office and crashed into Mrs. Patterson’s desk. He apologized to her in person.
At quitting time, the space between the point of the needle and the peg would admit three of his business cards, but not four.
That evening he and Mona sat up until their son’s next feeding, talking about colleges and professions. It would be up to Adrian to choose, they agreed on that. But would not their own attitudes, the training the gave him, and their very table-talk, influence Adrian’s choices? At ten they kissed, looked in on Adrian, and kissed again.
“Goodnight, honey,” Mona said; and he, knowing that she did not want him to watch, “Goodnight, darling.”
* * * *
As he combed his hair the next morning, he found that his thoughts, which should have been focused on work, were full of Adrian—and the plate. More and taller buildings would go up when this was over. More and taller building would be built, that was to say, if there was anyone left alive to plan and build them. His firm would have a part of that, and would profit by it. Those profits would contribute to his profit-sharing plan.
He shrugged, rinsed his comb, and put it away. The new and wonderful house that he himself had designed—with a den and a sewing room, and enough bedrooms for five children—would not be quite so far off then.
At work, he found the needle not quite so near the peg as it had been. Three business cards slipped into the opening easily. Four would just clear.
Up on the roof, a little knot of his coworkers were marveling at the vastness of the tossing green waters that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The secretary with the gold pince-nez gripped his arm. “I come up here every morning. We’ll never be able to see anything like this again, and today will be the last day we’re this high up.”
He nodded, trying to look serious and pleased. The secretary with the gold pince-nez was the CEO’s, and although he had seen her often he had never spoken to her—much less been spoken to.
An executive vice president laid large soft hands on his shoulders. “Take a good long look, young man. If it sticks with you, you’ll think big. We always need people who think big.”
He said, “I will, sir.”
Yet he found himself looking at the people who looked, and not at the boundless ocean. There was the freckled kid from the mailroom who whistled, and over there the pretty blonde who never smiled.
All alone at the very edge of the gently slanting roof, was old Parsons. Hadn’t Parsons retired? Clearly Parsons had not; and Parsons had set up a tarnished brass telescope on a tripod—a telescope through which he peered down into the watery abyss that had opened before the city, not out at the grandeur of the horizon.
“Something in the water?”
Parsons straightened up. “Sure is.”
“What is it?”
Gnarled fingers stroked bristling, almost invisible white whiskers. “That,” Parsons said slowly, “is what I’m trying to figure, young feller.”
“A whale?” he asked.
Parsons shook his head. “Nope. “’Tain’t that. You might think it’d be easy to figure, with a good glass. But ’tain’t.” Parsons stepped aside. “You want to look?”
He bent as Parsons had and made a slight adjustment to the focus.
It was a city, or a town at least, nestled now in the trough. Narrow streets, roofs that seemed to be largely of red tiles. A white spire rose above its houses and shops, and for an instant—only an instant, it seemed to him that he had caught the gleam of the gold cross atop the spire.
He straightened up, swallowed as though his throat and stomach had some part in absorbing what he had just seen, and bent to look again.
Something white fluttered and vanished above one red roof. A pigeon, he felt certain. There were pigeons as well as gulls there, circling above the houses and shops; pigeons that no doubt nested in the eaves and scavenged the town’s streets for whatever food might be found in them.
“Been lookin’ on my old computer at home,” Parsons said. “There’s views of various places on there, if you know where to look. My guess is Les Sables-d’Olonne. Mind now, I’m not sayin’ I’m right. Just my guess, I said. You got one?”
He shook his head. “If—It’ll be out of the way, won’t it? By the time we get there? The next wave will pick it up first, won’t it?” As he spoke, he discovered that he did not believe a word of it.
“Can’t say.” Parsons scratched his bristling jaw. “Pretty slow, generally, goin’ up. Slidin’ down’s faster ’n blazes, and you go a long way.” Turning his head, he spat. “We’re heading right at it.”
“If it wasn’t, if it was still in the way… And we hit—”
“Might bust our plate. I dunno. I phoned up one of them geologists. They’re s’posed to know all about all that. He said he didn’t know neither. Depend on how fast each was goin’. Only you ought to think ’bout this, young feller—ain’t a buildin’ on ours that could stand it if we bump with much speed a-tall. Knock ’em flat, ever’ last one of ’em.”
Reluctantly he nodded. “You’re right, it will. May I ask who you called, sir?”
“Doctor Lantz, his name was. Said don’t talk about it, only he don’t have any right to give me orders.” Old Parsons appeared to hesitate. “Won’t matter to me. I’ll be gone long before. You migh
t still be around, though, a healthy young feller like you.”
“Yes,” he said. Images of the baby, of Adrian, filled his mind; he continued to talk almost by reflex. “I asked about the geologist because I know a geologist. Slightly. I’ve gotten to know him slightly. His name isn’t Lantz, though. It’s Sutton. Martin Sutton. He lives one street over from us.”
He had debated the matter with himself for more than an hour before telephoning Sutton. “You know some things I need to know, Marty,” he said when the preliminaries were complete, “and I’m going to pick your brain, if you’ll let me. This city or town or whatever it is in the trough—are we going to hit it?”
There was a lengthy silence before Sutton said, “You know about it, too.”
“Correct.”
“They’ve kept it off TV. They’ll keep it out of the papers, if they can. I wonder how many people know.”
“I have no idea. Are we, Marty?”
“That’s not my field. I’m a geologist, okay? I study the plate.”
“But you know. Are we?”
Sutton sighed. “Probably. How’d you find out?”
“I looked though a telescope, that’s all. There’s a town down there. Or a small city—take your pick. It’s got fields and gardens around it. What are the odds?”
Sutton’s shrug was almost audible. “One in ten, maybe.”
“One in ten of hitting?”
“No. One in ten of missing. They were calling it one in five yesterday. You mustn’t tell anybody I’ve told you, okay?”
“I won’t. But they told you. So you could tell them whether our plate would break?”
Another silence, this one nearly as long as the first. Then: “Yeah.”
“They did, but that wasn’t the main reason. What’s the other thing? It might help if you’d tell me.”
“For God’s sake keep it under your hat.” Even over the phone, Sutton sounded desperate.
“I will, I swear. What is it?”