LITTLE PEOPLE!

by Gardner Dozois

  The fat cop said, “Kid, I can see why you want us to keep it quiet.”

  Tim said nothing. There was a paperweight on the desk—a baseball of white glass.

  “You probably think we’re out to get you, but we’re not. Tomorrow we’ll put out a missing persons report, but we don’t have to say anything about you or the senator in it, and we won’t.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “We got to wait twenty-four hours, in case she should show up. That’s the law. But kid—” The fat cop glanced at his notes.

  “Tim.”

  “Right. Tim. She ain’t going to show up. You got to get yourself used to that.”

  “She could be . . .” Without wanting to, he let it trail away.

  “Where? You think she snuck off and went home? She could walk out to the road and hitch, but you say her stuff’s still there. Kidnapped? Nobody could have pulled her out of bed without waking you up. Did you kill her?”

  “No!” Tears he could not hold back were streaming down his cheeks.

  “Right. I’ve talked to you and I don’t think you did. But you’re the only one that could have. If her body washes up, we’ll have to look into that.”

  Tim’s hands tightened on the wooden arms of the chair. The fat cop pushed a box of tissues across the desk.

  “Unless it washes up, though, it’s just a missing person, okay? But she’s dead, kid, and you’re going to have to get used to it. Let me tell you what happened.” He cleared his throat.

  “She got up while you were still asleep, probably about when it started to get light. She did just what you thought she did—went out for a nice refreshing swim before you woke up. She went out too far, and probably she got a cramp. The ocean’s cold as hell now. Maybe she yelled, but if she did she was too far out, and the waves covered it up. People think drowners holler like fire sirens, but they don’t—they don’t have that much air. Sometimes they don’t make any noise at all.”

  Tim stared at the gleaming paperweight.

  “The current here runs along the coast—you probably know that. Nobody ought to go swimming without somebody else around, but sometimes it seems like everybody does it. We lose a dozen or so a year. In maybe four or five cases we find them. That’s all.”

  ###

  The beach cottage looked abandoned when he returned. He parked the Triumph and went inside and found the stove still burning, his coffee perked to tar. He took the pot outside, dumped the coffee, scrubbed the pot with beach sand and rinsed it with salt water. The ship, which had been invisible through the window of the cottage, was almost plain when he stood waist deep. He heaved the coffee pot back to shore and swam out some distance, but when he straightened up in the water, the ship was gone.

  Back inside he made fresh coffee and packed Lissy’s things in her suitcase. When that was done, he drove into town again. Ryan was still in Washington, but Tim told his secretary where he was. “Just in case anybody reports me missing,” he said.

  She laughed. “It must be pretty cold for swimming.”

  “I like it,” he told her. “I want to have at least one more long swim.”

  “All right, Tim. When he calls, I’ll let him know. Have a good time.”

  “Wish me luck,” he said, and hung up. He got a hamburger and more coffee at a Jack-in-the-Box and went back to the cottage and walked a long way along the beach.

  He had intended to sleep that night, but he did not. From time to time he got up and looked out the window at the ship, sometimes visible by moonlight, sometimes only a dark presence in the lower night sky. When the first light of dawn came, he put on his trunks and went into the water.

  For a mile or more, as well as he could estimate the distance, he could not see it. Then it was abruptly close, the long oars like the legs of a water spider, the funnel belching sparks against the still-dim sky, sparks that seemed to become new stars.

  He swam faster then, knowing that if the ship vanished he would turn back and save himself, knowing too that if it only retreated before him, retreated forever, he would drown. It disappeared behind a cobalt wave, reappeared. He sprinted and grasped at the sea-slick shaft of an oar, and it was like touching a living being. Quite suddenly he stood on the deck, with no memory of how he came there.

  Bare feet pattered on the planks, but he saw no crew. A dark flag lettered with strange script flapped aft, and some vague recollection of a tour of a naval ship with his father years before made him touch his forehead. There was a sound that might have been laughter or many other things. The captain’s cabin would be aft too, he thought. He went there, bracing himself against the wild roll, and found a door.

  Inside, something black crouched upon a dais. “I’ve come for Lissy,” Tim said.

  There was no reply, but a question hung in the air. He answered it almost without intending to. “I’m Timothy Ryan Neal, and I’ve come for Lissy. Give her back to me.”

  A light, it seemed, dissolved the blackness. Cross-legged on the dais, a slender man in tweeds sucked at a long clay pipe. “It’s Irish, are ye?” he asked.

  “American,” Tim said.

  “With such a name? I don’t believe ye. Where’s yer feathers?”

  “I want her back,” Tim said again.

  “An’ if ye don’t get her?”

  “Then I’ll tear this ship apart. You’ll have to kill me or take me, too.”

  “Spoken like a true son of the ould sod,” said the man in tweeds. He scratched a kitchen match on the sole of his boot and lit his pipe. “Sit down, will ye? I don’t fancy lookin’ up like that. It hurts me neck. Sit down, and ’tis possible we can strike an agreement.”

  “This is crazy,” Tim said. “The whole thing is crazy.”

  “It is that,” the man in tweeds replied. “An’ there’s much, much more comin’. Ye’d best brace for it, Tim me lad. Now sit down.”

  There was a stout wooden chair behind Tim where the door had been. He sat. “Are you about to tell me you’re a leprechaun? I warn you, I won’t believe it.”

  “Me? One o’ them scamperin’, thievin’, cobblin’, little misers? I’d shoot meself. Me name’s Daniel O’Donoghue, King o’ Connaught. Do ye believe that, now?”

  “No,” Tim said.

  “What would ye believe then?”

  “That this is—some way, somehow—what people call a saucer. That you and your crew are from a planet of another sun.”

  Daniel laughed. “ ’Tis a close encounter you’re havin’, is it? Would ye like to see me as a tiny green man wi’ horns like a snail’s? I can do that, too.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “All right, I won’t, though ’tis a good shape. A man can take it and be whatever he wants, one o’ the People o’ Peace or a bit o’ a man from Mars. I’ve used it for both, and there’s nothin’ better.”

  “You took Lissy,” Tim said.

  “And how would ye be knowin’ that?”

  “I thought she’d drowned.”

  “Did ye now?”

  “And that this ship—or whatever it is—was just a sign, an omen. I talked to a policeman and he as good as told me, but I didn’t really think about what he said until last night, when I was trying to sleep.”

  “Is it a dream yer havin’? Did ye ever think on that?”

  “If it’s a dream, it’s still real,” Tim said doggedly. “And anyway, I saw your ship when I was awake, yesterday and the day before.”

  “Or yer dreamin’ now ye did. But go on wi’ it.”

  “He said Lissy couldn’t have been abducted because I was in the same bed, and that she’d gone out for a swim in the morning and drowned. But she could have been abducted, if she had gone out for the swim first. If someone had come for her with a boat. And she wouldn’t have drowned, because she didn’t swim good enough to drown. She was afraid of the water. We went in yesterday, and even with me there, she would hardly go in over her knees. So it was you.”

  “Yer right, ye know,” Daniel said. He formed a li
ttle steeple of his fingers. “ ’Twas us.”

  Tim was recalling stories that had been read to him when he was a child. “Fairies steal babies, don’t they? And brides. Is that why you do it? So we’ll think that’s who you are?”

  “Bless ye, ’tis true,” Daniel told him. “ ’Tis the Fair Folk we are. The jinn o’ the desert too, and the saucer riders ye say ye credit, and forty score more. Would ye be likin’ to see me wi’ me goatskin breeches and me panpipe?” He chuckled. “Have ye never wondered why we’re so much alike the world over? Or thought that we don’t always know just which shape’s the best for a place, so the naiads and the dryads might as well be the ladies o’ the Deeny Shee? Do ye know what the folk o’ the Barb’ry Coast call the hell that’s under their sea?”

  Tim shook his head.

  “Why, ’tis Domdaniel. I wonder why that is, now. Tim, ye say ye want this girl.”

  “That’s right.”

  “An’ ye say there’ll be trouble and plenty for us if ye don’t have her. But let me tell ye now that if ye don’t get her, wi’ our blessin’ to boot, ye’ll drown—Hold your tongue, can’t ye, for ’tis worse than that—If ye don’t get her wi’ our blessin’, ’twill be seen that ye were drownin’ now. Do ye take me meaning?”

  “I think so. Close enough.”

  “Ah, that’s good, that is. Now here’s me offer. Do ye remember how things stood before we took her?”

  “Of course.”

  “They’ll stand so again, if ye but do what I tell ye. ’Tis yerself that will remember, Tim Neal, but she’ll remember nothin’. An’ the truth of it is, there’ll be nothin’ to remember, for it’ll all be gone, every stick of it. This policeman ye spoke wi’, for instance. Ye’ve me word that ye will not have done it.”

  “What do I have to do?” Tim asked.

  “Service. Serve us. Do whatever we ask of ye. We’d sooner have a broth of a girl like yer Lissy than a great hulk of a lad like yerself, but then, too, we’d sooner be havin’ one that’s willin’, for the unwillin’ girls are everywhere—I don’t doubt but ye’ve seen it yerself. A hundred years, that’s all we ask of ye. ’Tis short enough, like Doyle’s wife. Will ye do it?”

  “And everything will be the same, at the end, as it was before you took Lissy?”

  “Not everythin’, I didn’t say that. Ye’ll remember, don’t ye remember me sayin’ so? But for her and all the country round, why ’twill be the same.”

  “All right,” Tim said. “I’ll do it.”

  “ ’Tis a brave lad ye are. Now I’ll tell ye what I’ll do. I said a hundred years, to which ye agreed—”

  Tim nodded.

  “—but I’ll have no unwillin’ hands about me boat, nor no ungrateful ones neither. I’ll make it twenty. How’s that? Sure and I couldn’t say fairer, could I?”

  Daniel’s figure was beginning to waver and fade; the image of the dark mass Tim had seen first hung about it like a cloud.

  “Lay yerself on yer belly, for I must put me foot upon yer head. Then the deal’s done.”

  ###

  The salt ocean was in his mouth and his eyes. His lungs burst for breath. He revolved in the blue chasm of water, tried to swim, at last exploded gasping into the air.

  The King had said he would remember, but the years were fading already. Drudging, dancing, buying, spying, prying, waylaying and betraying when he walked in the world of men. Serving something that he had never wholly understood. Sailing foggy seas that were sometimes of this earth. Floating among the constellations. The years and the slaps and the kicks were all fading, and with them (and he rejoiced in it) the days when he had begged.

  He lifted an arm, trying to regain his old stroke, and found that he was very tired. Perhaps he had never really rested in all those years. Certainly, he could not recall resting. Where was he? He paddled listlessly, not knowing if he were swimming away from land, if he were in the center of an ocean. A wave elevated him, a long, slow swell of blue under the gray sky. A glory—the rising or perhaps the setting sun—shone to his right. He swam toward it, caught sight of a low coast.

  He crawled onto the sand and lay there for a time, his back struck by drops of spray like rain. Near his eyes, the beach seemed nearly black. There were bits of charcoal, fragments of half-burned wood. He raised his head, pushing away the earth, and saw an empty bottle of greenish glass nearly buried in the wet sand.

  When he was able at last to rise, his limbs were stiff and cold. The dawnlight had become daylight, but there was no warmth in it. The beach cottage stood only about a hundred yards away, one window golden with sunshine that had entered from the other side, the walls in shadow. The red Triumph gleamed beside the road.

  At the top of a small dune he turned and looked back out to sea. A black freighter with a red and white stack was visible a mile or two out, but it was only a freighter. For a moment he felt a kind of regret, a longing for a part of his life that he had hated but that was now gone forever. I will never be able to tell her what happened, he thought. And then. Yes I will, if only I let her think I’m just making it up. And then. No wonder so many people tell so many stories. Goodbye to all that.

  The steps creaked under his weight, and he wiped the sand from his feet on the coco mat. Lissy was in bed. When she heard the door open she sat up, then drew up the sheet to cover her breasts.

  “Big Tim,” she said. “You did come. Tim and I were hoping you would.”

  When he did not answer, she added, “He’s out having a swim, I think. He should be around in a minute.”

  And when he still said nothing: “We’re—Tim and I—we’re going to be married.”

  Cargo

  By Theodore Sturgeon

  The late Theodore Sturgeon was one of the true giants of the field, producing stylish, innovative, and poetically intense fiction for more than forty years. Sturgeon’s stories such as “It,” “Microcosmic God,” “Killdozer,” “Bianca’s Hands,” “The Other Celia,” “Maturity,” “The Other Man,” and the brilliant “Baby Is Three”—which was eventually expanded into Sturgeon’s most famous novel, More Than Human—helped to expand the boundaries of the SF story, and push it in the direction of artistic maturity. Sturgeon’s other books include the novels Some of Your Blood, Venus Plus X, and The Dreaming Jewels, and the collection A Touch of Strange, Caviar, The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, and The Stars Are the Styx. His most recent book is the posthumously published Godbody.

  In the magical story that follows, he demonstrates that amidst the political turmoil and chaotic strife of the modern world, refugees can come in all shapes and sizes.

  * * *

  I heard somebody say she was haunted. She wasn’t haunted. There’s another name for what ailed her, and I’ll tell you about it if you like. I was aboard her when it started, and before. I knew every sheared rivet on her. I knew her when she was honest, a drab and prosaic member of our merchant marine. I saw what happened to her.

  She was one of those broad-shouldered old hulks built by the dozen during War I. Her sisters lay rotting and rusting and waiting for a national emergency to prove their unseaworthiness. O.K. They make good shrapnel. Her name was Dawnlight, she was seven thousand tons, a black oil tanker, limped like a three-legged dog, and was as beautiful as a wart. She could do nine knots downhill with a fair wind and an impossible current. When she was loaded she steered well until the loss of weight from burned fuel in the after bunkers threw her down by the head, and then she proceeded as will any tanker with a loss back aft; when she was light she drew seventeen feet aft and nothing forward, so that when the wind blew abeam she spun on her tail like a canoe.

  Yes, I knew her of old. She used to carry casing-head. That’s airplane gas that makes explosive vapors at around 40°F. So one day a fireman found casing-head seeping through the seams of No. 9 tank into the fire room and evaporating there. He fainted dead away, and the crew took to the boats during the night. The Old Man woke up at noon the next day screaming for his coffee, put two an
d two together, and with the help of two engineers and a messman, worked her into a cove in a small island off Cuba.

  It so happened that a very wealthy gentleman thereabouts turned up a nice offer, with the result that the Old Man and his three finks made for Havana in a lifeboat with their pockets full of large bills and the ship’s log, which contained an entry describing her explosion and sinking. After that she carried crude oil for the wealthy gentleman to war zones. Great sport.

  What made it such great sport was that not only did the Dawnlight have no business being afloat, but she had no business being in her particular business. Her nationality was determined by the contents of the flag locker, and her current log looked like a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They’d run up one flag or another, and pick a log to suit.

  But she paid well and she fed well, and if you could keep away from the ocean floor and the concentration camps, you’d find her good shipping. If you must commit suicide, you might as well get rich doing it.

  I caught her in a certain drydock that makes a good thing out of doing quick work and asking few questions. Her skipper was a leathery old squarehead whose viscera must have been a little brown jug. Salt cracked off his joints when he moved. He was all man back aft and all devil on the bridge, and he owned our souls. Not that that was much of a possession. The crew matched the ship, and they were the crummiest, crustiest, hard-bitten bunch of has-been human beings ever to bless the land by going to sea. Had to be that way.

  Any tanker is a five-hundred-foot stick of dynamite, even if she isn’t an outlaw. If she’s loaded, she’ll burn forever and a week; and if she’s light she’ll go sky-high and never come down. All she needs is a spark from somewhere. That can happen easily enough any time; but imagine dodging subs and pocket battleships on both sides of the martial fence—swift, deadly back-stabbers, carrying many and many a spark for our cargoes. We had nothing for protection but luck and the Old Man. We stuck to him.

  The Dawnlight was the only ship I’d have taken, feeling the way I was. Once in a while the world gangs up on a guy, and he wants an out. The Dawnlight was mine—she’d pulled me through a couple of dark spots in the past—once when a certain dope fell and cracked his silly skull in a brawl over a girl, and I had to disappear for a while, and once when I married the girl and she took to blackmailing me for a living. Aside from all this, though, the Dawnlight was the only ship I could get aboard. I carried an ordinary seaman’s certificate endorsed for wiper. The Department of Commerce was very lenient with me and let me keep those ratings after I ran a naval auxiliary tanker on the rocks. Passed out drunk on watch. Anyhow, the Old Man gave me the eight-to-twelve watch as third mate, papers or no papers. It was that kind of a ship. He was that kind of a skipper. He had the idea I was that kind of a sailor.