“It’s not that I don’t trust you. If you’re telling the truth, I’ll escort you to a room for the night. Unfortunately, I’m afraid you’ll never get back to your own time. There are too many people who would pay to talk to you. Get some of your DNA . . . the possibilities are limitless. But if your companions really are at the old cheese stand, I’ll treat you very well. Promise.
“But if you are lying,” and she sank down right next to me and looked so hard at me that I had to look at the ground, “I will not be so kind.”
“I promise,” I said, voice quavering.
My parents had taught me never to lie. It was a cardinal sin in our household. But I stared at the dirt and tried to lie even to myself. I imagined a group of scared kids standing where they thought they would find Wisconsin Cheese, lying with every fiber of my being. Because Dave had told me to do it, and I had to trust him. I did trust him. When I looked back up, straight into her clear blue eyes, I knew the lie was strong, and I saw her believe me.
“Okay,” she said, straightening. “I’ll just go check on that. My friend here is gonna stay with you.”
She turned and left the tent. This time, I was watching. As soon as she stepped out and closed the zipper, Archie tapped the top button on the device on his hip. I heard that metallic click again.
“Your name is Archie, is that right?” Dave asked. The Carnie did not reply. “Are you also curious about this kind of history?”
“The Engineer’s my boss,” Archie said begrudgingly. “Not my boss directly. But we were all told if anything weird happens around the Village, go get her.”
I started edging away from Lyra.
“Ah!” Dave said. “So you don’t take a personal interest.”
“Couldn’t care less about ancient human assholes,” Archie responded.
“Understood. I’m just wondering how much of what we considered history survives today. How much you know about ancient Rome, for instance.”
I tried to step lightly. I crept closer to the wall, making a wide arc from the horse to the carnie. I was maybe a third of the way there.
“Did your people investigate human history when you arrived?” Dave continued. “You would have easily discovered Rome if so.”
Archie seemed unsure of himself. “Heard about it,” he mumbled, scratching the back of his neck. I was past the halfway point, getting closer and closer, slowly.
“I would certainly hope so,” Dave said.
“You callin’ me stupid?” Archie said angrily, taking a step forward—and just slightly changing my path. I shuffled and quick-stepped and was three-quarters of the way there.
“Not at all,” Dave responded. “But it would be a pity if you missed learning about Rome. It’s fascinating. I’m most curious about how the literature survived. Did you ever learn any Catullus?”
I wasn’t there, not quite, but I knew it was coming as soon as he said literature. I leapt forward and reached out my small hand as far as it would go, my eyes and my arm and my whole being aimed toward that little silver disc, and it worked: I grabbed it, and as I was falling to the ground, I pressed the buttons and heard two clicks.
Archie reacted fast, roaring in fury and reaching down for me. A slimy hand grabbed my waist. But Dave was just as fast. I heard human footsteps and the hand tore away from me as Dave crashed into the carnie. I saw Dave grab at that blunt object on Archie’s side belt before I heard him yell, “Don’t look!”
So I rolled into a ball and hid my head under my arms, and I listened to Dave beat the guy into submission. I heard groans and punches and then, after a few seconds of nothing, the sound of a zipper. I peeked and saw Dave had opened the tent flap. Before I knew it, he scooped me up and placed me on top of Lyra, who had become severely concerned. Dave jumped up behind me, yelled, “Go!” and slapped the horse on her rump, hard.
To this day, I don’t know whether Dave killed the guy or just knocked him out. I have no idea how he was able to get onto the horse safely, with no saddle, having so little experience. I’m not sure how Lyra knew how to get out of the tent, trampling Archie’s limp body before running straight through the flap, but of course she did.
At first, she ran frantically down the middle of the dirt roads, green people leaping out of her way with shouts of alarm. I just held on tight, pinned between Dave and the horse. The sky was dark now and it was cold, and the sharp wind brought tears to my eyes.
“Keep an eye out for the Village!” Dave yelled in my ear, and I did, but we saw nothing familiar: strange food stands and whirling rides and freak shows, yes, but not that carousel. The horse got tired after a while and slowed down, trotting from street to street, pausing to nose at frightened passersby.
Suddenly, Dave turned his head back with a sharp twist. “Shit,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I looked behind us anyway. Dave had heard something I’d missed. Far back—way up the hill, just within our eyesight—I saw an army of security guards, big green guys dressed in black. Right in front was the Engineer. And she looked pissed.
Lyra turned a corner and they vanished. But ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of a glowing fence.
“Dave!” I shouted, pointing. “Is that the Village?”
“I can only see the fence,” he said, squinting.
“But it looks like the same one, right?”
“It does. Giddy-up, cow.” He dug his heels into Lyra’s side and she reluctantly trotted a little faster. I craned my neck to get the first glimpse of whatever was behind that fence. And sure enough, after long seconds of waiting, I saw the edge of the carousel.
Dave saw it too, and we both let out a yell of delight.
“Come on, Lyra, go faster,” I urged.
“Time to leave her,” Dave said. “We need to move fast.” He jumped off the horse and held out his arms for me.
“Thanks, Lyra,” I whispered. I kissed her warm, dirty mane and fell into Dave’s arms.
We took off running immediately. Dave went in front, brutally shoving people out of his way, and I followed him, running in the path he created or sometimes dodging wide green legs to keep up. From the ground, I couldn’t see what was ahead of us. I just followed Dave.
I was starting to flag when we made a sharp right turn, and just a few seconds later, we were there: the crowd thinned and we bolted through the open, arched gates of the Village of Yesteryear. I paused for a moment to catch my breath. Green people stared at me. There was no one on the carousel—it was roped off, with a sign saying “Show at 19:00”—but the Village wasn’t empty anymore. Several people were resting on benches around the area or inspecting the ticket booth. And they had all turned to look at us.
“Come on,” Dave urged, grabbing my hand. “They’re not far.”
We ran up onto the carousel, under the dirty velvet rope. Dave scuttled between animals.
“What are you doing?” I called out. Everyone was staring. I didn’t like their eyes without Dave to protect me.
“Finding the starting switch,” he yelled from the opposite side of the carousel. “Get in the spinny thing. The one we used before.”
I frantically looked around. Two booths were within sight. I closed my eyes and tried to remember, and long moments passed before an image flashed into my head: two boys, climbing onto a goat and a unicorn. I dashed to the one to my right and climbed in, the shadow of the goat falling over the red velour seats.
At that moment, two things happened.
First, Dave came into view just a few yards away from me. He’d made almost a full circle before finding the switch. Now, in an instant, he pressed a button and pulled a lever and the carousel sprang to life.
Second, the Engineer and her squad of goons flooded into the Village. Her eyes met mine and her pupils dilated, eyelids sliding back into her head as she yelled, “Get them!”
I screamed in terror. To my left, Dave spun and stumbled through wooden animals to get to the booth. To my right, a
n enormous green thing was running at me.
The carousel started to turn.
The alien adjusted its course.
Dave fell into the seat next to me and gasped, “Spin! Clockwise, opposite from earlier!” So I put my hands on the bar, and he took the other side, and we started to turn it with all our strength.
The carousel moved faster, the music speeding up and lights growing bright. But the alien sped up, too, getting closer and closer, under the barrier now. We spun and spun, and the carousel moved faster, and the alien might have been closer now, but I couldn’t tell because the world outside was spinning so fast, and my heart was in my hands on that golden bar moving over and over, spinning as fast as I could.
I didn’t dare stop, even when my hands got numb with cold and my arms started to ache. I didn’t know where we were, when we were, where the thing was that had been chasing us. I was so focused that I didn’t even notice when the music stopped and the carousel started to slow. I only noticed when Dave took his hands off the bar and began to laugh.
Dave has, to this day, a mountain-sized laugh that fills every atom of air in the room. When I was little and my parents had him and Jo over for dinner, it used to start me awake at night. It was and is a deeply comforting sound, joyful and delighted, a sound that can’t help but make you smile.
“What is it?” I said, letting my hands slow for a moment.
“We are back,” he said with an air of finality.
I took my hands off the bar and sat back in my seat. The world was still spinning, the colors blurry, but already I could tell a difference. The sound was right, little kids giggling and shoes kicking up dust. As my dizziness abated, the carousel made its last slow twist, and there in the distance I saw my family.
I shrieked. “Dave, come on come on come on come on,” I said, grabbing his hand and pulling him out of the booth. I was a little wobbly and I might have knocked over some smaller children, but I didn’t stop until I had reached them, hugging every single one of them to make sure they were real.
“We’re back,” I whispered, sagging in relief into my mom’s hip.
“Are you okay, Sarah?” my dad asked with some alarm. “That’s usually one of your favorite rides.”
I looked helplessly at him and then up at Dave.
“You tell,” I said. “I want to get ice cream.”
Dave chuckled.
“An odd thing happened,” he began. “You see, I’ve always known the asteroid would come, but I never thought it would have passengers . . .”
Sarah Van Name lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she works as a marketing writer and spends weekends perfecting her focaccia recipe. She has been published in Mission at Tenth and on The Toast. In her senior year at Duke University, her thesis of short stories and photography won her the Bascom Headen Palmer Literary Prize and the Louis Sudler Prize in the Creative and Performing Arts. At the age of four, she helped create the papier-mâché pig’s head that now haunts Dave’s back porch.
At my request, she offered this afterword.
I do not remember a time without Dave. His wife, Jo, was my nanny until I was four; I remember making banana muffins and finger-painting with her. Dave was there when I went to her house, and on our family beach vacations, and in my parents’ living room when they had folks over for dinner. My childhood fear of the dark meant that I kept my bedroom door open even when they were hosting parties, so sound filtered in unimpeded. Everyone would be talking quietly, trying not to wake me and my brother, and then someone would make a joke and Dave would burst suddenly into laughter. As I mention in the story, that’s the first thing I remember of Dave—not his writing, not his bizarre non sequiturs, but his laugh.
I know Dave as family, and he is good family. He and Jo host Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, and a yearly pig-pickin’ that is as much of a tradition for me as any holiday. He always remembers the last conversation he had with me, even if it’s been months since we’ve talked. He is unfailingly, sometimes painfully honest. Though Dave is above all a character, as a child I knew him as just another familiar weirdo in a big, strange household.
This perspective is the one I was trying to communicate in “The Village of Yesteryear.” The story I tell there is partially true. He really did go on the carousel with me, and I really did make him lose his lunch. But as I remember it, he never got mad. He just stood up, wiped his mouth, and said, “Well. I wasn’t expecting that.” And then we wandered on, him and Jo and the rest of my family, to see that year’s largest blue-ribbon pumpkin.
The Trouble with Telepaths
Hank Davis
The trouble with telepaths is that they’re all officers.
That’ll do for starters.
At least, they’re mostly not serious officers, or there’d be even more trouble. Most of the peepers are just second or first louies. A few make captain. They tend to be unstable, and don’t really make good officers, and a lot of them wash out for mental reasons after a couple of years.
The highest ranking one I ever saw was a lieutenant colonel. That was a few years ago when I was a buck sergeant, but I doubt that he ever made full bird, since at the time he was talking about retiring. It was common knowledge that he wasn’t much of a peeper, barely scoring above the minimum on the Rhines. His main thing was being an officer with all the usual officer stuff; maybe an officer with a little extra. Very little. Being good at poker might have been as useful to his career.
Not that anybody plays poker with a telepath. Even other telepaths don’t.
Fortunately, I don’t have a trace of telepathic ability. Back when I joined and was run through a day’s worth of tests, I scored random noise on the Rhines. Pure chance on the nose. The score was so dead on, that one of the testers suspected I was cheating, trying to hide being a peeper, so he called in a card-carrying, officially certified peeper to buzz around in my skull and see if I had cheated. I hadn’t, of course.
It was the first time I had been this close . . .
“You’ve never been this close to a telepath, Zinman,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
He was a captain, so . . .
“Yes, I’m very good at it,” he said.
I had been wondering if . . .
“No, you can’t feel me reading you. You’d have to be another telepath, and you still might not notice anything unusual.”
I was getting a little worried . . .
“No need to worry, Zinman, what you’re thinking doesn’t count as insubordination.”
I had heard that . . .
“You heard right. It’s covered by the Revised Code of Military Justice. Like the song you just thought about says.”
I’d thought of a line from an old song: You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking. Or even if I’m thinking . . .
“Not that either. You might even be right that I wouldn’t be giving you the creeps if I weren’t commenting on things going through your mind. Ask me if I give a shit. You know that telepaths aren’t volunteers.” Again, it was a statement, not a question. “We’re drafted as valuable weapons. Or valuable something. But you can think the word ‘peeper’ with impunity. Just don’t say it out loud where a telepath can hear you. Saying it is still insubordination.” He stood up, said to the test administrator, “He didn’t cheat. He’s a complete post.”
“Post” was what the peepers called non-telepaths. It came from the phrase “deaf as a post.”
He turned to leave, muttering, “Damned waste of my time. Damned . . .”
And then I flickered.
The captain turned around and walked back to me. “What did you just do?” he said.
“It’s—”
“Never mind, I see that you don’t have any control over it. I just asked you to bring the subject to the surface of your mind. That really felt weird. Yes, I know, you think telepaths are weird. But for an instant, your mind wasn’t there anymore, and the place where it had been felt funny. Like I had stepped ou
t of daylight, into an enormous dark cave, with odd noises echoing. Just for an instant, then you were back, just a regular post again.”
That’s how he described it. To me, it was like something dark passed over my eyes and was gone again in a fraction of a second. Doctors who had examined me had no idea of the cause—no sign of brain abnormalities—but it didn’t prevent me from doing anything. Even the U.S. Army didn’t think it was anything serious.
The peeper turned to the tester and said, “So that’s the mini-seizures you were thinking about. Are you sure he belongs in the Army?”
“He’s been examined—” the tester started to say, then the captain cut him off.
“I see. They’re too short to worry about, and they have no after-effects. Not a problem unless they get longer or have side effects. No worse than an occasional sneeze.” Then he did leave, muttering, “Good enough for government work,” as he walked off.
The whole thing gave me a weird feeling. A damned peeper calling me a post, as if there was something wrong with me.
That was several years, two more stripes, and a couple of rockers ago, and I’d gotten used to peepers, and wasn’t nervous anymore. There aren’t a lot of them, they’re not really around much, and since they’re kicked up to officer rank automatically, they don’t fraternize with the enlisted troops and NCOs. In fact they don’t fraternize with officers any more than they can help.
So I was as used to peepers as a non-peeper (or post, if you insist) can get, and wasn’t thinking about them the day that I got the odd assignment.
I should have guessed that something was up when I saw the First Sergeant standing nearby, watching the morning formation, obviously waiting for it to be over. Actually, I did figure that something was up—I just didn’t figure that the something had anything to do with me.
As soon as the word “Dismissed” echoed across the field, the First Sergeant headed over to me.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” she said.
“Good morning, Top. Something up?”
“Something’s up, all right. Tell Malone to take your platoon today, then report to Lieutenant Minteer at the chopper pad at oh-eight hundred.”
Onward, Drake! Page 20