Morning Child and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  Wordlessly, she took the cup from him, put it into the microwave, and switched the device on.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Candy looked up suddenly. “How deep did you say it was out there?” She went to the window and pushed the curtain aside. “Oh, no!” she groaned. “How am I going to get home through all that?”

  “The plows will be by when the snow stops,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “But this isn’t a primary route, and while it’s falling they’re going to keep most of their machines out on the Interstate.”

  “My mom is going to have a cow! Where’s the telephone?”

  “In the hallway,” Desmond said, and she hurried off without even pausing to ask permission.

  A motion in the corner of her eye caught Alma Kingsley’s attention then, and she suddenly remembered the coffee in the microwave. Brown liquid was bulging ominously over the cup’s lip. Hurriedly she cut off the device, and it subsided. The cup was nice and warm; half the flavor was boiled out, but no need to mention that. She set it down in front of Desmond.

  The young woman returned, throwing herself down into the chair with a kind of heavy despair. “I can’t get through. There’s this static and a kind of whooping noise, and nothing goes through.”

  “More than likely something wrong at the switching facilities,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “The phone service here’s never been much to brag about.”

  Candy worried a pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter out of her disco bag and accusingly said, “Well, my mother is going to have a cow.”

  Mrs. Kingsley personally thought that the girl’s mother’s outrage was a day late and a dollar short, but she kept her opinion to herself. Aloud, she said, “No, my dear, I am afraid that I do not allow smoking at the breakfast table.”

  “Hah?” Candy looked down stupidly, lit the cigarette, and then hastily removed it from her mouth. “Oh—yeah, sure.” She made as if to stub out the cigarette on her plate. Mrs. Kingsley hastily reached into the cupboards for an ashtray.

  “Here.” She thrust it at the young woman. It was ironic, the tyranny that smokers exercised over their betters. She herself had never picked up the disgusting habit, and yet had of necessity, over the years, acquired any number of ashtrays to accommodate friends and guests. “You can smoke in the hallway,” she said. “Though it would be nice if you were to go outside when—”

  But an angry glance from Desmond told her that she had gone too far. “Well, that would be unreasonable, of course.”

  “Damn straight it would,” Desmond muttered. He was at the kitchen radio now, fiddling with it. It emitted an earsplitting, see-sawing howl of static, like a dying banshee. Wincing, he turned the knob from one end of the dial to the other, finding no stations, then grimaced and turned the radio off. He started to say “Shit!”, cast a quick look at his daughter, thought better of it, and settled for an exasperated “Damn!” He came back to the table. “I’d hoped to catch the news.”

  “War, and portents of war,” Mrs. Kingsley said sourly.

  Desmond grinned offensively at her. “Hey, sounds good to me!” he said. “That means I don’t have to worry about being out of work, right?” He knew that she disapproved of his work for military contractors—“war work” she’d called it bitterly once, in a monumental argument a few months after Stephanie’s death, correcting his euphemistic “defense work”—and he loved to bait her about it.

  “There’s a television in the living room,” she said stiffly. “We get CNN even out here in the boondocks. Just keep the volume down. I don’t care to hear it.”

  He shook his head. “You’d think you’d want to know what’s going on. There’s a crisis underway! Don’t you care what happens?”

  Mrs. Kingsley hesitated, and glanced toward Jennifer, but she and the roadhouse floozy were busy playing dolls together with the salt and pepper shakers; obviously Jennifer had found a companion on her own level of emotional development. “I don’t care what happens anymore,” she said, keeping her voice pitched low. “Let them have their war. Let them all kill each other. Unless they drop an H-bomb on Montpelier, I don’t intend to take any notice of it.”

  Desmond made a disgusted face. “You’ve got your head in the sand! You think the real world is going to go away just because you don’t like it? You have to deal with things as they are. Do something about them! If there weren’t so many people who think like you, maybe Stephanie would still be alive.”

  They glared at each other, locking gazes. He’d stepped over the line, though, and he knew it, for, after a moment, he had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. Her gaze, though, was unflinching and unforgiving.

  At that moment, opportunely, there was a scratching at the door, and she had to go let the dog back in.

  “O base Iago! O inhuman dog!” she declaimed as the mutt bounded in. Candy stared at her uncomprehendingly. The little chit had probably never even heard of Shakespeare.

  Iago was jumping up on her, panting and enthusiastically trying to wag his entire body. She looked deliberately at Desmond. “Let slip the dogs of War, eh?” she said, and smiled sweetly. She knew he’d heard of Shakespeare.

  It was weakening. Perhaps it held enough reserves for another day or so, if it husbanded its resources. But that way lay oblivion and slow death; to survive it needed to strike out, to forage away from the comforting shelter of the barn, out into the flat, horribly open countryside.

  It was hesitating by the door when the sound of trudging footsteps approached, heading straight for it.

  Jerking back as if struck, it rose up, mantle stiffening, ready to attack. Then caution took over, and it retreated swiftly to the shadows, hunkering down into the darkest corner, every sense on edge, waiting, observing.

  The door rattled, then flew open. Two sophonts stepped into the barn, accompanied by a wild skirl of snowflakes. They slammed the door shut noisily, and stamped their boots clear of snow.

  It listened carefully to words it could not comprehend.

  “I don’t think your mother-in-law likes me.”

  “Don’t take it personally. The old bat doesn’t like anyone.”

  Stealthily, slowly, it moved. Keeping to the shadows and edges, it made its way to a wide support beam beyond the direct perception of the sophonts. Swiftly, it flowed up the beam’s far side, up to the loft, and then to the rafters, just below the ridgepole. Given the choice, it was always best to strike from above.

  It moved cautiously, always conscious of the gentle tickle of the fire-of-life below.

  The shorter of the two produced fire. Smoke snarled through the cold air. It could not smell, of course, but it sensed the smoke as a flicker of ionized charges.

  “Whew—I really needed that!” the shorter one said. She sucked in the ions again, letting them damp down within her lungs. “Here, have a toke.”

  The taller one made a disgusted noise. “Is that what we came out here for? To get stoned?”

  Silently it moved among the rafters, flowing from brace to joist, and across the collar beams, until it was in position, directly above its prey. It rested invisibly over them, and prepared to strike.

  The shorter one laughed. “What did you expect? I hope you didn’t think I was going to screw you out in this weather!”

  But they were both sophonts and sophonts were dangerous. It would have to take both of them to be safe, and it wasn’t at all certain it could do that. Its reserves of strength were perilously low.

  “I thought you had something you wanted to tell me. Let’s go back inside, okay? It’s too cold to stand out here smoking that shit.”

  “Damnit, I’m going to need this to get me through the afternoon. Did you see the way she was eyeing me at lunch?”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got a daughter back there in the house and I’d like to preserve a few of her illusions about her old man for a while longer, okay? So if you’ll excuse me, I don’t see any reason why I should hang around out here in the cold.”

  And then, incredibly, there was
only one! The other sophont slammed out through the door, and his footsteps faded away rapidly in the falling snow.

  It gathered itself together to strike. The distance was not great, and it was starting from an ideal position. With effort, it suppressed a tremble of excitement in its stiffening mantle.

  The woman below huddled disconsolately in her parka. She sucked in a lungful of ions, and held them.

  It struck.

  “Gamma, where’s Candy?”

  The parlor was very quiet without the television or radio on—Alma Kingsley had tried them both (with Desmond coming right behind her and trying them again, as if she didn’t know how to turn a television set on properly), and they wouldn’t work right; sunspots or something—they had been very bad all this year, with the Northern Lights stronger and more frequent than she’d ever known them to be in all the years since she’d retired from the magazine—had scrambled all incoming signals. The phone still wasn’t working either, and Desmond had gotten quite agitated—uselessly—about not being able to get in touch with the office. The rest of the morning had, to say the least, been tense. Desmond had finally retreated into his work, getting lost in that annoying way that he had, going so deep into it that nobody, not even Jennifer, not even Stephanie when she’d been alive, could reach him.

  She put down her copy of Paris Match, and said, “I don’t know, child. Somewhere in the house, I should imagine. Why don’t you ask your father?”

  “She’s not in the house,” the child insisted. “I wanted her to play Barbie-doll with me, and I looked everywhere.”

  Desmond looked up from a briefcase full of flow charts and printouts and other tools of his arcane trade. “Hmmm?” he said. And when the problem was explained to him, “She ought to be back from the barn by now.” With a sigh, he switched off his calculator, set down his ballpoint pen, and stood. “Now where did I leave my coat?”

  Iago bounded up eagerly when Desmond opened the door, and insisted on following him out into the snow. The door slammed, and Iago’s excited barking faded as they headed toward the old barn.

  Five minutes later, Desmond returned, carrying Candy’s body.

  Mrs. Kingsley saw him coming from the kitchen window and—with a smothered exclamation of horror—hurried to throw open the door for him. Together they hurried into the parlor and laid Candy down on a couch.

  It was possible now to assess the damage that had been done the woman. Her features were unnaturally sunken, the cheeks collapsed in on themselves, drawing the lips back from the teeth, and her stomach was literally concave, looking as if someone had punched it in with his fist. An ugly purple flush was still spreading over her face as hundreds of ruptured capillaries lost blood.

  “She was just lying there!” Desmond said helplessly. “Like she’d had a heart attack or something. Is the phone still out? We need a doctor. Maybe I can…I could hike out to the road and flag down a car.”

  Alma Kingsley put a finger under the girl’s nostrils. She touched her wrists, forehead, chest. She pressed down a fingernail, looked at the color.

  “Desmond,” she said, “it’s too late.”

  She straightened, and her son-in-law did likewise, both involuntarily drawing away from the body, as if by so doing they could distance themselves from death. When she glanced away, Mrs. Kingsley saw that Jennifer was standing in the middle of the parlor rug, eyes wide and calm, staring at the corpse.

  “Daddy,” she said, “is Candy dead?”

  Her father got a sick expression on his face, as if he’d been called upon to explain sex and reproduction to the child right now, with no blushing and no preparation. But he answered, voice flat and superficially composed, “Yes.”

  “Like on TV?”

  Alma Kingsley regained control then, and gathered the two up. With a push here, a nudge there, she shooed father and daughter out of the parlor and into the kitchen. At her command, Iago followed. Then she closed the door.

  To survive, it had to get into the farmhouse. It knew that now, with a kind of animal cunning that came before reason and intellect. There were sophonts within, and it was practically suicidal to attack a sophont within its own lair. But they were few in number, and they were isolated from their own kind. And while they were danger, they were also nourishment.

  It hesitated at the doorway of the shed, baffled by the snow that had already drifted above the middle hinges. Then it flowed up the wall, climbing to the crack at the top of the doorway, and eased through. Halfway out it halted, stunned by how the world had been transformed. The falling snow formed complex, shifting patterns that disappeared the instant it got a fix on them. It was as if the world had been shredded and divided into component atoms, then instantly rearranged, again and again, a thousand times a second. All anew, it was struck by the sheer alienness of this world, where nothing was certain, where everything shifted and moved and changed. It wavered, flowed outward, flinched back again. Individual flakes of snow touched its surface, did not melt, slid off without sticking.

  Had anyone been watching from the house, they would have seen it then, carelessly, dangerously exposed. But occupied as they were with their own troubles, no one was looking.

  It advanced out onto the snow then, all in a rush, sudden and brave. Midway between barn and house, it halted. Nothing happened. It found it could partially filter out the flakes falling, though they disoriented and bewildered it still. Purposefully it set out for the farmhouse, a solid mass of potential shelter, unchanging, shot through with electrical fires and harboring at its heart the precious rumor of fire-of-life.

  But the task it had set for itself was not an easy one; the house had been winterized with typical Yankee thoroughness. Caulk had been applied around every window and door frame, and a long, even bead had been drawn at the juncture where clapboarding met foundation. Cracks in the masonry had been plastered over, and every window was double-paned and covered over with storm windows, every door had weatherstripping.

  It circled the house without finding entrance. The building was tight, invulnerable to it. There might be entrances up above—experience said it was likely to find chimney pots and furnace exhausts, gable vents, even the occasional hatchway—but it dared not climb the house side, up into the swirling, shifting snow, where matter and sky intermingled. It could not have been sure of maintaining its orientation, of knowing where the house left off and the air began. It was madness to even consider it.

  Time and again it lashed silently around the house, skimming the surface of the snow, leaving behind it the very thinnest layer of ice, a trail that disappeared almost instantaneously under the new falling snow. It was perilously exposed, and this added to its confusion and desperation, to its determination to try anything, no matter how rash or foolhardy, that might help it to survive.

  Even after Desmond had finally bowed to the inevitable and taken Candy’s corpse out to the El Dorado, where it could await the snowplows and the doctor and the coroner in the preserving cold, there was an eerie pall cast over the house. Jennifer had been put to bed early, and the adults had retired to the kitchen, to try to talk.

  But there was nothing to say. There was no way Candy could have died, and speculation would not explain the inexplicable—only the autopsy could do that. And she was a stranger, so there could be no reminiscences about her, none that Alma Kingsley would care to have Desmond share, anyway. So, in the end, they simply fell silent. Mrs. Kingsley began going through her cook-books, and Desmond fell to punching listlessly on the keys of his calculator.

  “What is wrong with that dog?” Alma Kingsley grumbled in exasperation. Iago was pacing the kitchen floor, infinitely restless, his claws going click-click-click on the linoleum. Now he was at the door again, pushing at the crack between door and sill with his nose, digging at it hopelessly with his claws, scratching and whining.

  “Sounds like he wants to be let out,” Desmond said without looking up.

  “Well, maybe I should,” she said at last. Throwing a w
rap over herself, she took hold of Iago’s collar, and led him to the door. Her intent was to shove his nose outside and give him a whiff of the cold, and then draw him back in again. That ought to have settled his restlessness. But when the door opened, he strained forward, barking furiously, even anxiously, and she saw something outlined on the snow in the rectangle of light cast by the open door. She squinted and said, “Desmond, come here. Take a look at this.”

  The dog’s feet scrabbled wildly on the floor, but her grip was firm. “Look at what?” Desmond said. He ambled up, calculator in hand, and peered over her shoulder. “That’s just a patch of shadow.”

  “There never was a patch of shadow shaped like that there before,” Mrs. Kingsley said dubiously. A momentary twinge of arthritis hit her then, and her hold on Iago’s collar loosened.

  All hell broke loose.

  It lay watching, not knowing that it did not blend in against the snow, assuming that the sophonts’ awareness would be as dazzled by the downfalling flakes as was its own.

  It had flattened against the snow’s surface the instant that the door opened with a great outrushing of warmth. The shifts of ionization and static charges in the air made the doorway a shimmering beacon, bright and inviting, and only the faint, almost undetectable flickers of fire-of-life within that wash of liquid warmth kept it from leaping forward at that very instant. Wary, it crouched, waiting.

  Then the dog came flying through the air to attack it.

  The beast was large and fierce, plowing through and scattering snow, howling and barking as it came. Terrified, the creature fled, but—cunning, desperate—it fled straight for the door, risking everything on a frontal attack, a savage, killing assault on whatever might lie in its path.

  In the doorway, the black beast ravening and almost upon it, its perception cleared, and it found that only two enemies stood between it and shelter. The first fell aside, shrinking back against the wall as it charged forward, and it could ignore her, making for the second who was just beyond her, and who was bigger, with more fire-of-life in him.