It takes the rest of the day and a night to get to St. Louis, and Elizabeth and I talk. It’s as if we talk in ciphers, instead of talking about home we talk about gardening, and I can see the garden at home, lazy with bees. She is a quilter. I don’t quilt, but I used to do petit pointe, so we can talk sewing and about how hard it has been to get colors. And we talk about mending and making do, we have all been making do for so long.
When it gets dark, since I have no seat, I stay where I am sitting by the door of the train. I am so tired, but in the darkness all I can think of is my mother’s face in the crowd and her hopeless open mouth. I don’t want to think of my mother, but I am in a delirium of fatigue, surrounded by the dark and the rumble of the train and the distant murmur of voices. I sleep sitting by the door of the train, fitful and rocked. I have dreams like fever dreams. In my dream I am in a strange house, but it is supposed to be my own house, but nothing is where it should be, and I begin to believe that I have actually entered a stranger’s house, and that they’ll return and find me here. When I wake up and go back to sleep, I am back in this strange house, looking through things.
I wake before dawn, only a little rested. My shoulders and hips and back all ache from the way I am leaning, but I have no energy to get up. I have no energy to do anything but endure. Elizabeth nods, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, but neither of us speak.
Finally the train slows. We come in through a town, but the town seems to go on and on. It must be St. Louis. We stop and sit. The sun comes up and heats the car like an oven. There is no movement of the air. There are so many buildings in St. Louis, and so many of them are tall, two stories, that I wonder if they cut off the wind and that is why it’s so still. But finally the train lurches and we crawl into the station.
I am one of the first off the train by virtue of my position near the door. A soldier unlocks it and shouts for all of us to disembark, but he need not have bothered for there is a rush. I am borne ahead at its beginning but I can stop at the back of the platform. I am afraid that I have lost Elizabeth, but I see her in the crowd. She is on the arm of a younger man in a bowler. There is something about his air that marks him as different – he is sprightly and apparently fresh even after the long ride.
I almost let them pass, but the prospect of being alone makes me reach out and touch her shoulder.
“There you are,” she says.
We join a queue of people waiting to use a trench. The smell is appalling, ammonia acrid and eye-watering. There is a wall to separate the men from the women, but the women are all together. I crouch, trying not to notice anyone and trying to keep my skirts out of the filth. It is so awful. It’s worse than anything. I feel so awful.
What if my mother were here? What would I do? I think maybe it was better, maybe it was God’s hand. But that is an awful thought, too.
“Child,” Elizabeth says when I come out, “what’s the matter?”
“It’s so awful,” I say. I shouldn’t cry, but I just want to be home and clean. I want to go to bed and sleep.
She offers me a biscuit.
“You should save your food,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” Elizabeth says. “We have enough.”
I shouldn’t accept it, but I am so hungry. And when I have a little to eat, I feel a little better.
I try to imagine what the fort will be like where we will be going. Will we have a place to sleep, or will it be barracks? Or worse yet, tents? Although after the night I spent on the train I can’t imagine anything that could be worse. I imagine if I have to stay awhile in a tent then I’ll make the best of it.
“I think this being in limbo is perhaps worse than anything we can expect at the end,” I say to Elizabeth. She smiles.
She introduces her companion, Michael. He is enough like her to be her brother, but I don’t think that they are. I am resolved not to ask, if they want to tell me they can.
We are standing together, not saying anything, when there is some commotion farther up the platform. It is a woman, her black dress is like smoke. She is running down the platform, coming toward us. There are all of these people and yet it is as if there is no obstacle for her. “NO NO NO NO, DON’T TOUCH ME! FILTHY HANDS! DON’T LET THEM TOUCH YOU! DON’T GET ON THE TRAINS!”
People are getting out of her way. Where are the soldiers? The fabric of her dress is so threadbare it is rotten and torn at the seams. Her skirt is greasy black and matted and stained. Her face is so thin. “ANIMALS! THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE! PEOPLE DON’T HAVE FOOD! THERE IS NOTHING THERE BUT INDIANS! THEY SENT US OUT TO SETTLE BUT THERE WAS NOTHING THERE!”
I expect she will run past me but she grabs my arm and stops and looks into my face. She has light eyes, pale eyes in her dark face. She is mad.
“WE WERE ALL STARVING, SO WE WENT TO THE FORT BUT THE FORT HAD NOTHING. YOU WILL ALL STARVE, THE WAY THEY ARE STARVING THE INDIANS! THEY WILL LET US ALL DIE! THEY DON’T CARE!” She is screaming in my face, and her spittle sprays me, warm as her breath. Her hand is all tendons and twigs, but she’s so strong I can’t escape.
The soldiers grab her and yank her away from me. My arm aches where she was holding it. I can’t stand up.
Elizabeth pulls me upright. “Stay close to me,” she says and starts to walk the other way down the platform. People are looking up following the screaming woman.
She pulls me along with her. I keep thinking of the woman’s hand and wrist turned black with grime. I remember my mother’s face was black when she lay on the platform. Black like something rotted.
“Here,” Elizabeth says at an old door, painted green but now weathered. The door opens and we pass inside.
“What?” I say. My eyes are accustomed to the morning brightness and I can’t see.
“Her name is Clara,” Elizabeth says. “She has people in Tennessee.”
“Come with me,” says another woman. She sounds older. “Step this way. Where are her things?”
I am being kidnapped. Oh merciful God, I’ll die. I let out a moan.
“Her things were lost, her mother was killed in a crush on the platform.”
The woman in the dark clucks sympathetically. “Poor dear. Does Michael have his passenger yet?”
“In a moment,” Elizabeth says. “We were lucky for the commotion.”
I am beginning to be able to see. It is a storage room, full of abandoned things. The woman holding my arm is older. There are some broken chairs and a stool. She sits me in the chair. Is Elizabeth some kind of adventuress?
“Who are you?” I ask.
“We are friends,” Elizabeth says. “We will help you get to your sister.”
I don’t believe them. I will end up in New Orleans. Elizabeth is some kind of adventuress.
After a moment the door opens and this time it is Michael with a young man. “This is Andrew,” he says.
A man? What do they want with a man? That is what stops me from saying, “Run!” Andrew is blinded by the change in light, and I can see the astonishment working on his face, the way it must be working on mine. “What is this?” he asks.
“You are with Friends,” Michael says, and maybe he has said it differently than Elizabeth, or maybe it is just that this time I have had the wit to hear it.
“Quakers?” Andrew says. “Abolitionists?”
Michael smiles, I can see his teeth white in the darkness. “Just Friends,” he says.
Abolitionists. Crazy people who steal slaves to set them free. Have they come to kidnap us? We are recalcitrant southerners, I have never heard of Quakers seeking revenge, but everyone knows the Abolitionists are crazy and they are liable to do anything.
“We’ll have to wait here until they begin to move people out, it will be evening before we can leave,” says the older woman.
I am so frightened, I just want to be home. Maybe I should try to break free and run out to the platform, there are northern soldiers out there. Would they protect me? And then what, go to a fort in Oklahoma?
The older woman asks Michael how they could get past the guards so early and he tells her about the madwoman. A “refugee” he calls her.
“They’ll just take her back,” Elizabeth says, sighing.
Take her back, do they mean that she really came from Oklahoma? They talk about how bad it will be this winter. Michael says there are Wisconsin Indians resettled down there, but they’ve got no food, and they’ve been starving on government handouts for a couple of years. Now there will be more people. They’re not prepared for winter.
There can’t have been much handout during the war. It was hard enough to feed the armies.
They explain to Andrew and to me that we will sneak out of the train station this evening, after dark. We will spend a day with a Quaker family in St. Louis, and then they will send us on to the next family. And so we will be passed hand to hand, like a bucket in a brigade, until we get to our families.
They call it the underground railroad.
But we are slave owners.
“Wrong is wrong,” says Elizabeth. “Some of us can’t stand and watch people starve.”
“But only two out of the whole train,” Andrew says.
Michael sighs.
The old woman nods. “It isn’t right.”
Elizabeth picked me because my mother died. If my mother had not died, I would be out there, on my way to starve with the rest of them.
I can’t help it but I start to cry. I should not profit from my mother’s death. I should have kept her safe.
“Hush, now,” says Elizabeth. “Hush, you’ll be okay.”
“It’s not right,” I whisper. I’m trying not to be loud, we mustn’t be discovered.
“What, child?”
“You shouldn’t have picked me,” I say. But I am crying so hard I don’t think they can understand me. Elizabeth strokes my hair and wipes my face. It may be the last time someone will do these things for me. My sister has three children of her own, and she won’t need another child. I’ll have to work hard to make up my keep.
There are blankets there and we lie down on the hard floor, all except Michael, who sits in a chair and sleeps. I sleep this time with fewer dreams. But when I wake up, although I can’t remember what they were, I have the feeling that I have been dreaming restless dreams.
The stars are bright when we finally creep out of the station. A night full of stars. The stars will be the same in Tennessee. The platform is empty, the train and the people are gone. The Lincoln Train has gone back south while we slept, to take more people out of Mississippi.
“Will you come back and save more people?” I ask Elizabeth.
The stars are a banner behind her quiet head. “We will save what we can,” she says.
It isn’t fair that I was picked. “I want to help,” I tell her.
She is silent for a moment. “We only work with our own,” she says. There is something in her voice that has not been there before. A sharpness.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“There are no slavers in our ranks,” she says and her voice is cold.
I feel as if I have had a fever; tired, but clear of mind. I have never walked so far and not walked beyond a town. The streets of St. Louis are empty. There are few lights. Far off a woman is singing, and her voice is clear and carries easily in the night. A beautiful voice.
“Elizabeth,” Michael says, “she is just a girl.”
“She needs to know,” Elizabeth says.
“Why did you save me then?” I ask.
“One does not fight evil with evil,” Elizabeth says.
“I’m not evil!” I say.
But no one answers.
WANG’S CARPETS
Greg Egan
Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the big new names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic.” His stories have appeared in our Fifth through Ninth and our Twelfth through Fifteenth annual collections. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels Distress, Diaspora, and Teranesia, and three collections of his short fiction: Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. His most recent book is a new novel, Schild’s Ladder. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.netau/^gregegan/.
Like Bear’s “Blood Music,” like Stross’s “Lobsters,” the story that follows was one of those seminal stories that change the history of SF by changing the way that other science fiction writers think about the future. In it, in a story unmatched for the bravura sweep and pure originality of its conceptualization, Egan basically reinvents the space-travel story for a new generation, as well as providing us with a first-contact story unlike any you’ve ever read before. . . .
WAITING TO BE CLONED one thousand times and scattered across ten million cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in an instant, by decree – but the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical cause and effect.
As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the surrounding vineyards. The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles – decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of viewpoints. Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it or not.
The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless, isotropic. Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen possible fates.
An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed, delighted.
One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anticlimax, certainly – but there would have been advantages to compensate for that. Everyone who really mattered to him lived in the Carter-Zimmerman polis, but not all of them had chosen to take part in the diaspora to the same degree; his Earth-self would have lost no one. Helping to ensure that the thousand ships were safely dispatched would have been satisfying, too. And remaining a member of the wider Earth-based community, plugged into the entire global culture in real-time, would have been an attraction in itself.
Two chimes would have meant that this clone of Carter-Zimmerman had reached a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a sophisticated – but non-sapient – self-predictive model before deciding to wake under those conditions. Exploring a handful of alien worlds, however barren, had seemed likely to be an enriching experience for him – with the distinct advantage that the whole endeavor would be untrammeled by the kind of elaborate precautions necessary in the presence of alien life. C-Z’s population would have fallen by more than half – and many of
his closest friends would have been absent – but he would have forged new friendships, he was sure.
Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent aliens. Five, a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.
Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had detected unambiguous signs of life – and that was reason enough for jubilation. Up until the moment of the pre-launch cloning – a subjective instant before the chimes had sounded – no reports of alien life had ever reached Earth. There’d been no guarantee that any part of the diaspora would find it.
Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly rewired the declarative memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the information he was likely to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity. This clone of C-Z had arrived at Vega, the second closest of the thousand target stars, twenty-seven light-years from Earth. Paolo closed his eyes and visualized a star map with a thousand lines radiating out from the sun, then zoomed in on the trajectory which described his own journey. It had taken three centuries to reach Vega – but the vast majority of the polis’s twenty thousand inhabitants had programmed their exoselves to suspend them prior to the cloning, and to wake them only if and when they arrived at a suitable destination. Ninety-two citizens had chosen the alternative: experiencing every voyage of the diaspora from start to finish, risking disappointment, and even death. Paolo now knew that the ship aimed at Fomalhaut, the target nearest Earth, had been struck by debris and annihilated en route. He mourned the ninety-two, briefly. He hadn’t been close to any of them, prior to the cloning, and the particular versions who’d willfully perished two centuries ago in interstellar space seemed as remote as the victims of some ancient calamity from the era of flesh.
Paolo examined his new home star through the cameras of one of the scout probes – and the strange filters of the ancestral visual system. In traditional colors, Vega was a fierce blue-white disk, laced with prominences. Three times the mass of the sun, twice the size and twice as hot, sixty times as luminous. Burning hydrogen fast – and already halfway through its allotted five hundred million years on the main sequence.
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF Page 51