On Day 38 he began laying foundations for a new sty, to replace the pen in which the pigs now lived. He spent most of the morning digging holes at the four corners of the new structure, right down through the soil to the matted substrate of dense tangled roots, as he had seen local builders do. (Jennifer laughed at this and reminded him it was a pigsty he was building, and not a two-story house). Then in the afternoon he bought some bags of cement from one of Jennifer's neighbors, and mixed it up with gravel in batches and poured it in. There was still time after that, while the cement was setting, to go into the edge of the forest to fetch some fuel for Jennifer's stove.
After dinner, he helped Jennifer wash up the dishes (it was Lucia's day off), and then sat with her on her bench while she had her evening smoke.
“It's a shame I may not remember any of this,” he told her, “because I honestly don't think I've ever been happier in my life.”
She beamed at him proudly and patted his knee.
“Well, write it in your diary if that bothers you so much. And I'll write down that it's true. We can see the change in you. It's like you've become a different man.”
* * * *
Day 30 came, the day that he had an 87.3% chance of forgetting. He fed the pigs in their new sty. He let the chickens out of their new coop. He went and checked the wind pump with its new and improved wooden mechanism. He was walking over to the yard where he planned to repair and repaint the wall, when something shifted inside him, and he admitted to himself for the first time that he was beginning to feel a little bored. It wasn't severe, it wasn't something that he couldn't easily shake off, but deep within him a tiny worm of boredom balked for a moment at the idea of another day of chores, another day of Jennifer and Lucia proudly clucking over him as if they personally had saved his soul, another day of inhabiting this humble and dependent new persona.
“What did they think I was going to do if I went off on my own?” he muttered crossly as he began to chip loose cement out of the wall. “What did they think they were rescuing me from?”
And why was he letting them rule his life anyway? They were delightful people, of course, but they knew next to nothing. Neither of them had been further than Porto or New Settlement. Neither had a reading age of more than seven.
“And let's face it,” he muttered, “they're so pig ignorant here they worship a goblin and don't even know it.”
He laughed, but then he checked himself.
“Come on,” he distinctly heard himself say, “it's still only Day 30. All this is for later.”
* * * *
That scared him. The rest of the day, he worked hard, and reminded himself regularly how kind Jennifer and Lucia had been to him, and how unusually content he had been these last nine days, and how much better and more rewarding (and how much less boring) this Day 30 had turned out compared with the one he'd spent back in that wretched seaside resort, playing screen games and watching movies alone in his room.
That evening, while Lucia and Jennifer were washing up the dinner, he took a bottle of beer and went over to the bench to wait for them.
The village was settling into evening. The sun had sunk once again below the treetops, electric lights shone here and there across the settlement, and the sights and sounds of the village took on a completely different quality from the sights and sounds of daytime. Things were closer, more intimate, more self-contained.
A cockerel crowed. Someone banged on a metal pan. A mother shouted to her children. Mr. and Mrs. Roberti ate out in their yard, silent but for the chink of cutlery on plates. Mad Gretel called something out and laughed. Mr. Zorrona and his sons hacked and chipped away stubbornly at a new irrigation channel, though they were only vague silhouettes in the dusk. A dog barked. A moped emerged into the clearing. Its headlights swept across the wooden wall of a barn on which “YAVA SEES ALL” was painted in Luto in large red and white letters, and then lit up the shiny satellite dish. The dog barked again . . .
It was all so familiar and so small.
“Mummy's boy,” said his own voice suddenly inside his head.
Stephen started. It took him a few seconds to locate the grey-skinned indigene in the dark, but the creature was actually directly behind him, just outside the boundary fence. It was squatting with its left shoulder pressed up against the chain link, absorbed with some object it was holding right up close to its face and turning this way and that in its hands.
“Go away, you nosy thing,” growled Jennifer, coming over to join him on the bench. “Get away with you!”
She chucked handfuls of dirt at the creature. When that didn't shift it, she went up and kicked the fence.
The goblin stood up. Smiling, or seeming to smile, it held out the object it had been playing with, almost as if it intended to taunt them with a treasure that it possessed and they didn't. But the object itself was a small empty pod, such as could be found all over the forest floor, and perhaps the gesture had no real meaning at all.
“Mummy's boy. Tee hee.”
“Horrid creatures,” muttered Jennifer as it skipped off into the forest.
She settled herself onto the bench with a weary but contented sigh, and took out her tobacco and papers from her apron pocket. Then she turned to him and smiled.
“All well with you, Mr. Kohl?”
It was odd. He had to force himself to meet her friendly gaze.
* * * *
On Day 29, Jennifer and Lucia held a party for Stephen to mark the last day that he might possibly still remember after he returned home. Everyone came to eat their food and to drink to Stephen's health: Mr. and Mrs. Zorrona and their boys, Mr. and Mrs. Roberti, Lucia's handsome husband Luis and their children, Jorge Cervantes and his two wives, the other lodgers, even Mad Gretel, who the villagers thought was possessed . . . Everyone in the village came, and everyone listened to Lucia and Jennifer telling the tale yet again of how they'd persuaded Stephen to stay on and help them rather than go away and be alone during his final days in Lutania.
“He's never been so happy in his life,” they told everyone proudly, after they'd made the traditional chicken sacrifice to Yava, “he's told us so himself.”
The villagers had heard this before, many times over in fact, in various versions both at first and second hand, but they gladly heard it again, and gladly repeated it yet again to one another, for it gloriously vindicated the simple peasant way of life that the Agency was always nagging them to change, and from which their own young people were increasingly prone to flee.
Stephen was not at ease. He hated the way the villagers prodded him and poked him and plied him with drinks. He hated the sense of himself as a prized exhibit.
“I'm very tired,” he told Jennifer and Lucia toward midnight. “I think I'll head off to bed.”
The three of them were sitting on the yard wall under the stars, Stephen beside the two woman. Neighbors sat around them on kitchen chairs and wooden boxes, watching and listening minutely.
Stephen cleared his throat.
“I've decided to go away for a bit in the morning,” he told the two of them, feeling the hot blood prickling round the roots of his hair. “I think I'll go over to Balos. May as well check that out before I say goodbye to Lutania, even if I won't be able to remember it.”
There was an audible collective sigh of surprise and disappointment, and then the neighbors all turned to Jennifer or Lucia to observe how they received this news
“But we thought you were going to stay until the time for your transmission!” said Jennifer.
“Yes, but, like my boss said, when you think about it, it's really not such a bad idea to grab the chance of a vacation.”
“You can take your vacation here. Stop work and put your feet up here in Lisoba. That's fine with us.”
“Balos is a big bad place, Mr. Kohl,” said Jorge Cervantes. “It's not somewhere to go for a rest.”
The rest of the little audience agreed. People began to tell stories about folk from Lisoba and th
e neighboring villages who'd gone to Balos and come to harm. Mr. Roberti told of a girl who became a drug addict and ended up in prison. Mrs. Zorrona told of a boy who'd worked for a whole year on an Agency building site, and then lost everything he'd earned in a single night's gambling in Balos. And two or three people mentioned the well-known case of a young woman called Susan from Porto who had gone to Balos less than a year ago, and ended up being raped and killed.
“She was all cut up apparently,” said Mr. Zorrona.
“Cut wide open,” said Mrs. Roberti with a certain grim satisfaction, “and all her insides taken out. And it wasn't done by foreigners. They were village boys, as Lutanian as she was.”
(The stories might be exaggerated, but, in spite of its University and its Academy of Science, Balos really was a lawless place, full of bewildered Lutanians trying to be city people when their whole culture had evolved for small villages like Lisoba, where everyone knew everyone else, and countless iterations of Yava were always present to watch over those few moments that neighbors overlooked.)
“I appreciate your concern,” Stephen interrupted after the sixth or seventh story, “but you do need to remember I'm not some naive peasant. I grew up in a big city. Really big. You've no idea. Balos might seem big and scary to you but it's a quiet little backwater to me.”
They all stared at him. If Balos was a backwater, what did that make Lisoba?
Stephen rubbed his hands over his burning face.
“I know I should have given you notice,” he told Jennifer, “and of course I'll pay you the full rent up to the day of my transmission.”
He made himself meet her eyes for just one moment. He could see how hurt she was, how humiliated in front of the village. Then he turned quickly away.
None of this really mattered, he told himself. It was past midnight. Day 29 had gone.
He looked out into the dark, away from all of them, and smiled.
Copyright © 2011 Chris Beckett
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* * *
Short Story: PUG
by Theodora Goss
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards. Her gentle SF story about a group of Victorian girls and “Pug” is her first tale for Asimov's.
"Pug is flat, like most animals in fiction. He is once represented as straying into a rosebed in a cardboard kind of way, but that is all . . . “
—E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
* * * *
You don't know how lonely I was, until I met Pug.
In summer, tourists come to Rosings. The coaches are filled with them. They want to see where Roger de Bourgh murdered Lady Alice, or where Lady Alice's grand-niece Matilda de Bourgh hid King Charles, in the cellar behind a cask of port, from the Roundheads. There has always been a rumor that her son, from her hasty marriage to Walter d'Arcy, resembled the king more than his father. The de Bourghs have never been known for acting with sober propriety. Miss Jenkinson relishes the details. “And here,” she says, “you will see the bloodstains where Lady Alice fell. This floor has been polished every day for a hundred years, but those stains have never come out!” And indeed there are, just there, discolorations in the wood. Whether they are the bloodstains of Lady Alice, I can't tell you.
When the tourists come, I go to my room, in the modern wing of the house where even Miss Jenkinson's ingenuity will find no bloodstains, or out into the garden. If, by chance, they happen upon me, I admire the roses, or the fountain with its spitting triton, and they assume I am one of them. Of course, if Miss Jenkinson sees me, she scolds me. “Miss Anne, what will your mother think! Outside on a day like this, and without a shawl.” With the fog rolling over the garden. We are in a valley, at Rosings. We are almost always in a sea of fog.
I could hear them that day, the tourists. In the fog, their voices seemed to come from far away, and then suddenly from just beside me, so I ducked into the maze. It is not a real maze: for that, the tourists must go to Allingham or Trenton. It is only a series of paths between the courtyard, with its triton perpetually spitting water, while stone fish leap around him in rococo profusion, and the rose garden. But the paths are edged with privet that has grown higher than I, at any rate, can see. I have called that place the maze since I was a child. When I am in the maze, I can pretend, for a moment, that I am somewhere else.
So there I was, among the privets, and there he was, sitting on his haunches, panting with his pink tongue hanging out. Pug.
Of course I did not learn his name until later, when he showed me the door. The door: inconsistent, irritating, never there when you want it. And at the best of times, difficult to summon, like a recalcitrant housemaid.
But there was Pug. I assumed he had come from Huntsford, from the parsonage or one of the tradesmen's houses. He was so obviously cared for, so confident as he sat there, so complacent, even fat. And he had a quality that made him particularly attractive. When he looked at you with his brown eyes, and panted with his pink tongue hanging out, he looked as though he were smiling.
“Here, doggie,” I said. He came to me and licked my hand. I knew, of course, that Mother would never allow it. Not for me, not in, as she called it, my “condition.” But as I said, I was lonely. “Come on, then.” And he followed me, through the courtyard, into the kitchen garden with its cabbages and turnips, and through the kitchen door.
I had no friends at Rosings, but Cook disliked Miss Jenkinson, and the enemy of my enemy was at least my provisional ally. I knew she would give me a scrap of something for Pug. He gobbled a bowl of bread and milk, and looked up at me again with that smile of his.
“If Lady Catherine finds him in your room, there will be I don't know what to pay,” Cook said, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Mother never comes into my room,” I said.
“Well, I'll tell Susan to hold her tongue. Only yesterday I said to her, you're here to clean the bedrooms, not to talk. Someday that tongue of yours is going to fall off from all the talking you do. And won't your husband be grateful!”
“All right, Cook,” I said. “I'll take him up, and could you have Susan bring me a box with wood shavings, just in case, you know.”
“Certainly, Miss.” She patted Pug on the head. “You're a friendly one, aren't you? I do like dogs. They're dirty creatures, but they make a house more friendly.”
And that's how Pug came to Rosings. I carried him, as quietly as I could, past the gallery. “Every night,” Miss Jenkinson was saying, “Sir Fitzwilliam d'Arcy walks down the length of this hall and stands before the portrait of his brother, Jonathan d'Arcy, who chopped off his head with an axe right there in the courtyard and married his wife, Lady Margaret de Bourgh. Visitors who have seen him say that he carries his severed head in his arms.” I heard gasps, and a “Well, I never!” The de Bourghs and the d'Arcys. We have been marrying and killing each other since the Conquest.
* * * *
Later, when I had learned something of how the door works, I discussed it with the Miss Martins.
“Mary had a thought,” said Eliza. “She did want to tell you, although I told her, Miss, that you might not like hearing it.”
“Please call me Anne,” I said. “We share a secret, the three of us—and Pug. So we should have no distinctions between us. We know about the door. Surely that should make us friends.”
We were sitting in t
he Martins’ garden, at Abbey-Mill Farm. I could smell the roses that were blooming in the hedge, and the cows on the other side of the hedge, in the pasture. Eliza had folded her apron on the grass beside her. She was fair and freckled, although she used Gower twice a day. She looked what she was, the perfect English farm girl, with sunlit hair and a placid disposition. Mary was still wearing her apron, as though about to go in and finish her cleaning, but she had woven herself a crown of white clover. She was darker than her sister, with a liveliness, like a gypsy girl from Sir Walter Scott. An inquisitiveness. She had been the scholar, and regretted leaving school.
“Well,” said Mary, “this is what I've been thinking, Miss—Anne. Eliza and me, we're the ones to whom nothing happens. There's Robert marrying Harriet, and all the high and mighty folks of Highbury marrying among themselves, and even the servants seem to have their doings. But us—we just milk the cows, and clean the house with Mother, and take care of the garden, day after day, no different. And begging your pardon, Anne, but nothing happens to you either. You read and you go out riding in your carriage, that's all. And what could happen to Pug?” Who was lying contentedly on the grass beside us. At Abbey-Mill Farm, the sun almost always shone. I was glad to escape, for a while, the fogs of Rosings.
“You're right,” I said. “Nothing ever does happen to me. I don't think anything ever will.”
“Well then,” said Eliza, “here's what Mary thinks. She thinks the door is for us. That it was put there just so we could find each other. Do you think that could be true?”
I put a clover flower on Pug's nose, and he stared at me reproachfully before shaking his head so that it fell onto the grass. “We are told there is providence in the fall of a sparrow. Why not in the opening of a door?”
“That's lovely, Miss,” said Eliza. “Just like Mr. Elton in church.”
* * * *
When I was a child, I was not allowed to have toys. I slept on a bare bed, in a bare room. Those were the days of Dr. Templeton. He believed in strengthening. If I could be strengthened, I would no longer be sick or small. So there were cold baths, and porridge for breakfast, and nothing but toast for tea. Then came Dr. Bransby, who believed in supporting. If my constitution could be supported, then I would be well. Those were the days of baths so hot that I turned as red as a lobster, fires in July and draperies to keep out drafts, and rare roast beef. I have been on a diet of mashed turnips, I have been to Bath more times than I remember, I have even, once, been bled. Nothing has ever helped. I have always been sick and small. When I walk up stairs, I am always out of breath; when I look in the mirror, there are always blue circles under my eyes, blue veins running over my forehead. I always remind myself of a corpse.
Asimov's SF, July 2011 Page 5