FSF, October-November 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  I say I'm sorry I've scared her. She answers something in her language.

  I ask for water. All I know is their word for river, but she understands.

  There's a pump not far from her laundry lines. She gets the tin cup hanging there and brings me some and then another cupful after I finish that one.

  It's the best water I ever tasted. Proof yet again that this can't be reality.

  I want to tell her that I'm a teacher and that I must get back to my class. I try to ask all this with simple words and gestures, but I can't make her understand.

  I want to ask, A: Is there a doorway back into my world? B: Is there no war here? C: And if not, why not? And if no war, I surely don't belong in such a place. Why should I stay in a kind of heaven when what remains of my class is back in a dangerous world? And D: Besides, what could children ... or anyone ... learn here? One never learns when things go well.

  E: Though perhaps only I am left. In that case I could stay here and still be a moral person. But one must not be seduced by this place.

  I imagine everything here is as icy and sparkly as that water. I imagine the food as tasting of the earth. There, above her laundry, is the half-moon. The green of her dress is the color of pine trees.

  I say again, “I must get to war. Which way? The war?"

  Even with gestures she doesn't understand.

  Instead she helps me up and to her house. A solid stone house, looks to be more fortress than house. Or prison. I won't go in. I collapse on one of the chairs she has near her front door.

  I see why the chairs are here. One can get a good view of the hills and the forest beyond. At first I think it's a good place to watch and analyze a battle. And then I think, no, a good place to watch sunsets.

  There are two chairs. I presumed she had a husband to sit and watch with her, but out comes an even older woman. This woman is obviously scared of me. Easy to tell by her gestures and her voice.

  I used to depend on my bearing, my finely molded features, my well-trimmed beard, the neatness of my uniform ... but now, stooping in pain and covered with mud, I know I can't count on those.

  I get up and start hobbling away as best I can. I hold my side with both hands.

  "Fall, fall, defall,” the first woman says, and pulls me back into the chair.

  The older woman is still gesturing and talking. She obviously wants to get rid of me but the younger one seems to be arguing for me to stay. The older woman drags the other chair to the opposite side of the door so as to be farther away from me, plumps herself down in it, and frowns out at the view.

  In the distance, behind the fields and the forest, there are cliffs. Did I run through all that to get here? Did I cross those cliffs? Could I have climbed down ... through even A, B, and also C and not remembered?

  The younger woman goes inside and brings out tea. She sits on the ground in front of us as if it were the most natural thing for a grown woman to do.

  (I wish she'd sing again but I don't know how to ask.)

  One forgets how life might be led. How there can be moments of silence and serenity.

  The tea is strong—as if it's been sitting at the back of the stove all day—but it's exactly what I need. I feel my mind clearing and my strength coming back.

  I become more aware of how filthy I am and I'm suddenly embarrassed. Perhaps one can't even see that I'm a teacher.

  Then the older woman says a shocking swear word in my own language. Then, again in my language, “I will kill you first chance I get."

  I stand up again. I try to bow but it hurts too much. “Madam, I know I don't belong here. Show me which way, and I'll go back to the war."

  She points to those cliffs in the distance. Says, “Go."

  It makes sense that the cliffs are the demarcation between the world full of wars and this world of gentleness.

  I start staggering toward them. Again the other woman grabs me and pulls me back, but in a way that hurts my ribs. I yell. She jabbers away at the old woman, scolding.

  The pain takes my breath away. I have to sit and recover.

  The old woman says, “I was once taken by the enemy,” meaning my people. “I know your kind."

  "I'm a teacher. I always try to teach what's moral and real."

  But there's always the antithesis. What is moral for one may not be moral for the other. I have also taught that.

  But there are lessons to be learned here. One should listen. For many reasons, not least of which is that, as is often said, if the teacher isn't also a student then no one learns.

  I say, “I will listen. I'm never loath to learn."

  She says, “I learned your language as a slave. That's all there is to say."

  I can tell she won't say anything more, but it's a completely understandable syllogism: All slaves.... She, a slave, therefore....

  I don't want to see her naked back, though it might be a good lesson.

  This, I'm afraid is also a land of reality. Or, on the other hand, is this where you finally get to go to avoid it?

  * * * *

  But here comes a child just the age of those in my class. He wears armor and holds a sword. Do even the children take part in the battles? Perhaps this isn't as ideal a spot as I think. He must know a great deal more than my class did.

  The old woman says, “You killed his father."

  "Not I."

  He's heard the older woman talking in my language. He tries out his few words. “How are you? I am fine. Where is the book? Good morning."

  (The child has been well taught. He says his Rs as we do.)

  I think to answer in kind with, How do you do? but before I can he attacks me with his sword, which I now see is wooden and his armor is paper painted silver. My class has often dressed the same.

  I don't defend myself. He stabs and slashes at me. Even though the sword is blunt, it does do some damage. This is my lesson: To sit and absorb it.

  I let him go on until he's tired.

  The tea has spilled all over me, though what with the mud, it hardly matters.

  I see I've impressed the old woman with my forbearance. She looks as if she's even ready to pull the chair back to my side of the doorway. She says, “Thank you."

  The other woman says something to the child that sends him off inside. Then she insists that I take off my tunic.

  Easier said than done since I have to pull it up over my head. When she sees how it hurts me, she gets scissors and cuts it down the front before I realize what she's doing.

  Not only is my uniform as a teacher important to me (it is, in its own way, soldierly with its gold-fringed teaching epaulettes—and I do think of myself as soldiering on in the realms of learning. Fearlessly, I may say), but also I'm not used to being even only half-naked in front of anybody and especially not a woman. I'm thin and not well muscled. I sit all day. When not preparing for my teaching I'm studying. I always try to enrich myself so as to become a more enriching teacher. I have won several firsts, the ribbons for which have been sewn onto my tunic over my heart. I can't be without that tunic. I hesitated too long worrying about my nakedness. She's snatched it away and taken it inside.

  I get up and follow ... into that strange fortress of a house. First there's an empty hall of yellowish stucco. With one tiny, useless window. I find it ugly but I know tastes differ.

  I hurry though one of the doors in the far wall, hoping to find a warmer spot ... or my tunic.

  I find the child.

  He sits at a low table just his size and works on some writing or drawing.

  He says, carefully, slowly (and as if he's completely forgotten he had attacked me), “Hello. My name is Eppi. What is your name?"

  I begin to realize how sick I am. I sit down on the floor. I can't help it even though I know I especially shouldn't do it in front of a student.

  Or a woman, and I know she'll find me here. But I can't get up. I give up. I've sullied my uniform and my occupation. I'll give back my firsts.

  The chil
d has a cup of something. He brings it to me and holds it to my lips. I have no idea what it is but I drink it and thank him. I say, “You're a worthy young man."

  "What is worthy?"

  "You are good and kind."

  He gives me such a smile. I see my words have made him, yet another notch, good and kind.

  He brings me his drawing to admire. A battle drawing. I'm not in the mood even to look at it, but I admire.

  Then I begin to shake. I moan and lie back. All dignity, all decorum lost.

  The child calls, “Maaaaa."

  I'm thinking: Is this the one universal word?

  Then: Must find out if true.

  Then I'm thinking: firstly, secondly, and: A, B, and C, also D, and many others....

  * * * *

  Next I know I hear singing. I'm warm and clean. And yet again—or still—in love. I would stay forever where this singing goes on and on.

  Would I? Even if one's duty lies elsewhere?

  There she is. Moving about the kitchen with poise and grace as if a lady, and I'm in a corner on a sleeping shelf. She doesn't even need to stop and think as she does the rills and trills.

  I have never thought to marry and certainly never with a woman who cooks and does laundry, and not only that, is one of the enemy. Also with whom I can't converse. I've always though it unlikely that I would find someone suitable. There are few women who are my equal so I had decided never to marry. I would have wanted someone almost as knowledgeable as I am.

  But I've changed my mind since being here. I hadn't realized how important music is. And a voice so sweet and so clever at ornamentation. There's knowledge of a kind in that.

  Isn't there?

  But then, of my own love, I think, barbaric! And, How can I stoop so low? Perhaps I'm no longer fit to teach.

  And yet I've crossed a line into a pleasant unreal land. Perhaps there's not even any need for my kind of teacher here.

  * * * *

  Then broth and teas and a gentle hand, the boy and his drawings (all of battles and none of flowers.) And even the grandmother. She's now on my side. And best of all, singing every day. I take up Eppi's miniature oud—actually no more than a toy, but I learn to strum a few chords. I can make the younger woman, Lala (can it be that she's named for her singing?) ... I can make her sing whenever I want her to, just by strumming.

  Lala has washed and repaired my tunic. It doesn't look quite as nice as before, but at least I'll look like a teacher.

  But I'm going against everything I teach. I lie. I pretend. I say I'm sicker than I am. I groan when I have no pain. I have her arms around me helping me whenever I want them. I have tidbits to tempt my appetite.

  I'm coming close to doing what I've never done before. There never seemed to be time for it or a good opportunity. We've kissed. I've touched her breasts. I'm thinking, A: one more suitable word, or B: One more suitable gesture.... Conclusion: She'll be in bed with me within a few days.

  * * * *

  I'm up and around well before they realize it. I snoop. I want to find out about their way of life. I'm not thinking about finding secrets, I just want to know them ... her, Lala, that is.

  Does the enemy have marriage as we know it? Does she have keepsakes of her former man? I need to know. I think I'll ask her soon to marry me.

  * * * *

  But, in Grandma's room, I find a dagger and a map.

  I can't read the writing on it, but I know it's important. There are arrows and dates. I can see where their secret redoubts are.

  I change into my teacher's tunic. I take the dagger.... (Grandma has had plenty of chances to kill me should she have so desired.) I take the map. This time we won't be fooled by a trumpet call. I alone am left to warn my side of that treachery.

  All those songs have made me forget my duties.

  * * * *

  I climb the cliff and cross back over into the real world, with map, Grandma's dagger, and Eppi's wrapped-up lunch.

  At the top here's the line. I can feel it in the very air: war on one side, serenity on the other. A hot breeze. A smell of iron. The trees here, half-dead. The streams, few. Below, the streams are many. From up here, they're shining in the sun as if rivers of silver.

  But there are children up here. Even if only a few, isn't my duty to them? Not to Eppi?

  I take big breaths of the metallic air. My kind of air. It's just as well. I've managed to avoid a love both A: uncivilized, and B: unrefined. I've adhered to my principles and overcome my errors in judgment.

  I have taught my students discipline and most particularly self-discipline. I'll be a better teacher now than I've ever been before. I will teach them what I have learned about reality. A: That we will live with wars, and B: That there will always be wars.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: BLOCKED by Geoff Ryman

  INTRODUCTION

  I'd missed some schooling through illness and needed a maths tutor. From somewhere my mom found Mr. Van Phelan, a lovely older retired gentleman who loved maths, young people, and sf. He subscribed to F&SF, and it was with wonder and delight that I discovered an adult with whom it was okay to talk about sf. We'd sit and talk about the stories in each issue; sometimes he'd loan me a copy.

  Not that F&SF was hard to find. In those days, just across Wilshire Boulevard from the end of my street was a huge Market Basket supermarket. This was a perfectly ordinary purveyor of cabbages, old-fashioned, almost jelly-like yogurt, Coke, jars of Cheese Whiz, and cake mixes, but its magazine rack contained Time, Life, Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post, Look ... it was about twelve years after the advent of TV, but my folks still bought all of those titles every week. It seemed most people did. And in those groaning racks of magazines of all kinds you could probably find at the very least Amazing, Fantastic, If, Galaxy, Analog, and F&SF. Sf books were harder to come by, but the magazines were everywhere and with their wonderfully short, readable, varied tales. Even then the word I used for F&SF was “literary” and in a good way. Even at thirteen I knew I'd grow out of Fantastic and still stay with F&SF.

  At Uni High, the bright kids had a war. The science guys wrote on the blackboard, “It's not only necessary to interpret life, but to change it.” That's why, they said, they bought Analog. It totally foxed me why they thought showing us life or being political didn't change things as much as science. In the end I felt smug. I read Analog and enjoyed it but also read F&SF. The science guys didn't read F&SF. I nursed my feelings of broader taste and range.

  I remember, later in the UK, my tight little nest of fan friends waiting breathlessly for the issues of F&SF that were releasing, section by section, Thomas Disch's “On Wings of Song.” It gave a hint of what it must have been like in the days of Dickens, to be reading a great novel serially. I remember talking to Roz Kaveney over the mystery of the ending, its “delicious ambiguity.” Roz, if you're wondering where those issues went, well, I somehow managed to keep them.

  I remember the boost it gave all of sf fandom in the UK when we saw Chris Priest's tale “Palely Loitering” as the cover story of F&SF. Yes, Virginia, it is possible for British short fiction to even be published. (This was in the days before the arrival of Interzone.)

  For that reason, for many years, Interzone had my loyalty as a venue for my stories. But when I finally saw “Hero Kai” on the cover of the December 2005 issue, I remembered being young, some age like thirteen, and looking at the cover of F&SF and saying aloud, “I want to be one of those names."—Geoff Ryman

  * * * *

  I dreamed this in Sihanoukville, a town of new casinos, narrow beaches, hot bushes with flowers that look like daffodils, and even now after nine years of peace, stark ruined walls with gates that go nowhere.

  In the dream, I get myself a wife. She's beautiful, blonde, careworn. She is not used to having a serious man with good intentions present himself to her on a beach. Her name is Agnete and she speaks with a Danish accent. She has four Asian children.

  Th
eir father had been studying permanently in Europe, married Agnete, and then “left,” which in this world can mean several things. Agnete was an orphan herself and the only family she had was that of her Cambodian husband. So she came to Phnom Penh only to find that her in-laws did not want some strange woman they did not know and all those extra mouths to feed.

  I meet the children. The youngest is Gerda, who cannot speak a word of Khmer. She's tiny, as small as an infant though three years old, in a splotched pink dress and too much toy jewelery. She just stares, while her brothers play. She's been picked up from everything she knows and thrown down into this hot, strange world in which people speak nonsense and the food burns your mouth.

  I kneel down and try to say hello to her, first in German, and then in English. Hello, Gertie, hello, little girl. Hello. She blanks all language and sits like she's sedated.

  I feel so sad, I pick her up and hold her, and suddenly she buries her head in my shoulder. She falls asleep on me as I swing in a hammock and quietly explain myself to her mother. I am not married, I tell Agnete. I run the local casino.

  Real men are not hard, just unafraid. If you are a man you say what is true, and if someone acts like a monkey, then maybe you punish them. To be a crook, you have to be straight. I sold guns for my boss and bought policemen, so he trusted me, so I ran security for him for years. He was one of the first to Go, and he sold his shares in the casino to me. Now it's me who sits around the black lacquered table with the generals and Thai partners. I have a Lexus and a good income. I have ascended and become a man in every way but one. Now I need a family.

  Across from Sihanoukville, all about the bay are tiny islands. On those islands, safe from thieves, glow the roofs where the Big Men live in Soriya-chic amid minarets, windmills, and solar panels. Between the islands hang white suspension footbridges. Distant people on bicycles move across them.

  * * * *

  Somehow it's now after the wedding. The children are now mine. We loll shaded in palm-leaf panel huts. Two of the boys play on a heap of old rubber inner tubes. Tharum with his goofy smile and sticky-out ears is long legged enough to run among them, plonking his feet down into the donut holes. Not to be outdone, his brother Sampul clambers over the things. Rith, the oldest, looks cool in a hammock, away with his earphones, pretending not to know us.