Ten Tomorrows

by Roger Elwood

  CAPTAIN: Hmm. [He looks around; then, in a lower voice] I had the impression that we strung him up.

  SERGEANT [a little sullenly]: You gave the orders, sir. I strung him up, sir.

  CAPTAIN: You should have knocked my damn block off instead.

  SERGEANT: I didn’t get all these hash-marks for hitting superior officers—sir. And I’ll tell you this, sir; that one up on the hill ain’t the first god I knocked off, and he won’t be the last. Maybe some day I’ll see a real god, and he’ll knock me off before I can get to him. A real god ought to be able to keep his chin covered. I bayoneted this joker like a sheep; what kind of a god is that?

  CAPTAIN: What kind do you want?

  SERGEANT: One that’d knock me down and read the Articles of War to me when I step out of line. Not a sheep.

  CAPTAIN: And what about the baby?

  SERGEANT: What? I don’t get you, sir.

  CAPTAIN: The son you’re waiting for. How’ll he manage without a father? Or suppose your tough god decided to kill him off, too? Some gods eat them.

  SERGEANT [stiffly]: Excuse me, sir, but I don’t think that’s very damn funny.

  MARY : My child. Oh dear my child.

  MINISTER [from audience]: Bury the dead.

  MARCHER [from audience]: Justice is love!

  DOCTOR [from audience]: A clear case of bad toilet training.

  LAWYER [from audience]: The end justifies the means.

  TEEN-AGE GIRL [from audience]: It’s only a racket.

  TEEN-AGE BOY [from audience]: Don’t blow your cool, baby.

  COLONIAL [from audience]: Stop this travesty!

  HOUSEWIFE [from audience]: Lower food prices.

  CORPORAL [from his post]: Break it up now down there! Break it up!

  MAGDA [from audience]: He made me whole.

  SCIENTIST [from audience]: What are the facts?

  POET [from audience]: An end to killing!

  CORPORAL: Shaddap, all of you!

  [As before, the offstage voices mount to a tumult; they should repeat their lines from both this scene and their preceding scene, ad lib. At the climax there is a full fortissimo diapason chord from the organ, and the JUDGE reenters.

  [The noise at once dies down to silence. The JUDGE resumes the pulpit. He seems a good deal taller, more sure of himself, more imposing than before.

  [MARY raises her head and looks up at him.]

  MARY : I bore him. I nursed him. I warmed him. I housed him. And now they have taken him away.

  I covered him. I sang to him. I petted him. I fled with him. And now they have taken him away.

  [This speech gradually takes on the quality of a church solo, chanted rather than rang.]

  Deep in the desert, I cherished him. I listened to him lisp, to him talk, to him stammer, to him preach, to him make blasphemies, in the very House of God, and oh, I was terrified, and oh, I loved him! And they hated him, and I was so afraid.

  [Organ continuo rises softly under.]

  I tried to hinder him, I got in his way, I was ashamed. I thought he would disgrace me—he would speak to anybody, even those loose women who followed him—and then, and then, they hung him! Oh living God, they hung him! What had he done? What had he ever done? Even the sheep and the cattle breathed on him when he was little! Kings came to him in his dreams! And oh, you should have seen the stars staring down from the cold!

  But step by step, word by word, he went from me, because he wanted to be a king. Someone had told him he would be a king. I—felt in my womb that he would be a king, but no, no, not a king on a gallows-tree!

  [Reprise.]

  I bore him. I cherished him. I bowed down to him when he left me; and all my mighty masters, I weep for him, and for you, who have taken him away. . . .

  [The CAPTAIN and the SERGEANT listen, entirely oblivious to the judge.]

  CORPORAL [from his post]: Ah, the hell with that. He got what was coming to him.

  SERGEANT [taking one step, as if against his will, toward MARY]: Uh . . . excuse me, ma’am . . .

  MARY [turning to look at him]: Who are you?

  SERGEANT: Nobody. I killed your son.

  CAPTAIN [shooting a swift glance at the judge]: You’re talking out of turn, Sergeant.

  SERGEANT [ignoring him]: I killed your son. Myself.

  MARY : Why?

  SERGEANT: That’s my trade. It’s my career. It’s what I was brought up to do. I’m a professional. I’m good at it.

  MARY : At murder?

  CAPTAIN: Sergeant, shut up. That’s an order.

  SERGEANT: In a minute. I’ve got a question. I want to know, did I kill a god?

  MARY : No. Only my son.

  SERGEANT: But—he was a god. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he? Didn’t I help turn him into a god? Tell me I did!

  MARY : He was a man.

  SERGEANT: Didn’t I help him sacrifice himself? All these year-kings have to die. I seen it happen in all kinds of countries. They have to die so they can become gods. Didn’t I help? Didn’t I? Please, didn’t I?

  MARY : No. He was only my son. He was not proud. He was not rich. He was not scholarly. He was not a king. He was made of dust and blood, the same dust and blood that I was made of. If there is a god, that’s what he’s like. And if there are people who can love and obey him, they too are dust and blood. That’s all I know. If my lovely son was a king, then . . . you are a king, soldier. And Captain, so are you. And . . . [in sudden terrible sorrow] and everyone, except my son up there on the gallows-tree.

  CAPTAIN: We are all murderers.

  SERGEANT: I know . . . but I keep hoping—

  JUDGE: Is that your verdict?

  CAPTAIN [looking up, startled]: I beg your pardon?

  JUDGE: It is not mine to give. I asked: Is that your verdict?

  CAPTAIN: Your honor, it’s not up to me to reach a verdict. This is your court.

  JUDGE: No more my court than yours, and everyone’s. I can only return the verdict that you give.

  CAPTAIN: I don’t understand.

  JUDGE: Mary . . . are you through?

  MARY : My life has just begun.

  JUDGE: Sergeant, help her out.

  [The SERGEANT gently helps MARY to her feet.

  She stands at last, tall and dignified.]

  CORPORAL [from his post]: Hey, Sarge, where the hell are you?

  SERGEANT [guiding MARY slowly down the aisles]: I dunno. But I’m on my way.

  CORPORAL: Well, hurry the hell up. It’s getting dark. sergeant: That’s funny. It looks like dawn to me.

  [They exit slowly; the other members of the cast in the audience watch them go. The captain, too, looks after them, and then backs up to the judge, puzzled and half angry.]

  CAPTAIN: Is that all?

  JUDGE: It is all that counts.

  [The CAPTAIN and the JUDGE exchange a long look. Then the JUDGE leaves the pulpit and exits slowly. The captain starts after him, then changes his mind and goes back to the bench, where he pauses to think. Then, shaking his head, he mounts the pulpit and retrieves the gavel and the papers he had put up there in the first place. He sits down at the bench and mechanically begins to stuff everything back into his briefcase. He pauses almost immediately, however, and looks blindly out at the congregation.]

  CAPTAIN: Tm never going to be able to explain this to the people back home. Is there nothing else to say? Doesn’t anybody have anything to say?

  [There is quite a long silence. The CAPTAIN puts his head into his hands.

  [Off stage, a long, heavy rolling sound begins, becomes louder and louder. The members of the cast remaining in the audience look up and around, trying to locate its source, finally focusing at the back of the church. The CORPORAL, too, is looking around; finally he is staring out the exit.

  [Belatedly, the CAPTAIN looks up, alarmed.

  The CORPORAL lifts his hands as if to ward off a blow.

  [The sound ends in an apocalyptic crash.]

  CORPORAL: The stone! [He claps his hands to h
is face.

  His voice breaks.] The stone, THE STONE!

  [Ten-second blackout. As the lights all come on at once, the organ bursts fortissimo into the “Et resurrexit” from the B Minor Mass and continues it more softly as a postlude.]

  IN A CROOKED YEAR

  by

  Gardner R. Dozois

  Why call out or cry

  when the generals I’ve fought with

  all my life

  are similarly attacked.

  —Aram Boyajian

  Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,

  But here the thing’s best left at home with friends.

  —Wilfred Owen

  “They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.

  “No one’s trying’to kill you,” Clevinger cried.

  “Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.

  “They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered.

  “They’re trying to kill everyone.”

  “And what difference does that make?”

  —Joseph Heller

  In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year

  —Dylan Thomas

  I

  Spring-Winter

  The valley was aflame behind him. Behind him, his companions burned and smouldered like fitful tallow candles, and the flames of their burning stained the night sky with dancing scarlet and molten gold, ghostly chemical green and white-hot blue, blotting out the stars. The smoke cloud straddled the valley like a shroud, writhing and churning, welling up in great silent bubble-bursts of explosions, lanced with sudden flame and held together by a shifting web of silver fire. Wind whooped and howled by him as the night was sucked into the blazing heart of the fire-storm. He took another step, wincing as pain slashed up through his shattered leg—clumsily splinted three days ago in a shabby field hospital filled with dying men and desperate medics, somewhere near where Pittsburgh used to be—and stopped to gasp for breath, swaying and fighting unconsciousness. The harsh light of the fire-storm washed and wavered across his face, alternately lighting it brilliantly and plunging it into deep shadow, like the fickle glow of a great neon sign.

  It is almost beautiful, I think, swaying, feeling the sick, dogged pounding of my heart, hearing the labored rasping hiss of my breathing. The light of the fire-storm dances and dazzles, forming tumbling, shifting patterns of light and dark, sending liquid, humped shadows jigging around the steep mountain walls of the valley. I squint my eyes to slits against the glare. The metal crutch bites into the soft flesh of my armpit as I lean my weight against it. How many days? Pittsburgh was what, two, three, surely not as long as four days ago? No, no more than three, but we walked so long to get here, and I counted every breath in every mile. Three days? I shake my head slowly, feeling the soggy night air resist the motion like water or thick molasses. There are thick silver cobwebs being wrapped around my brain, layer by smothering layer, and someone’s packing my eyes with cotton batting so that I see fuzzy. I draw my hand across my forehead, trying to brush away the cobwebs, but they are curling and fluttering like injured moths inside my skull, and the motion makes me ill. My time sense is shot. Three days? What after Pittsburgh? Walking and flames, ruined buildings like shattered teeth, bodies, and there was a fog that killed two men. Cows lying bloated and black, mottled with curdled purple. Sirens, and a great sound of people wailing—or did I dream that? The silver chalice with the wine, but I dreamed that too I think, huddled into myself at night for warmth, and the cool woman of mist who touched my face with ice—I dreamed that too. There are no women anymore. Three days! The commander says there’s an enemy paratroop unit in this area, but the lieutenant says how do you know since there’s been no communications with headquarters for three days maybe they’re dead up there maybe the enemy’s dead and he starts to scream they’re dead they’re all dead we’re dead and the commander tells him to shut up. We’re going to stay and fight, he tells us as we walk, because that’s our duty as fighting men whether the rest of the goddamn world is there or not. But there was mud, too much mud; it wanted to suck me down; it wanted to absorb me, flow over my eyes and close them. And there was blood and I couldn’t stay. Three days. My head nods and I nearly fall, recovering myself with difficulty.

  The fire-storm rolls and surges across the valley battlefield below. I did not want to run away, but I am tired and the moths won’t get out of my head. I didn’t want to run away. Believe me, I shout, but the noise is lost in the roar and dull cough of flames. What did you do in the atom war, Daddy? I say, and snicker weakly, my rib cage rising and falling with the strain of breathing. Someday, as I sit in my someday-house with my sweet someday-wife by my side, my someday-children will ask me that question, and I will draw on my pipe (Pipe-smoking is more distinguished than cigarette puffing. Must remember to cultivate it; someday.), and I will nod my head wisely and I will say, why, I did nothing, nothing but try to survive as best I could and try to keep out from under. The bastards can’t make us do this, it’ll be our decision to make if the time comes, we used to say to ourselves late at night, we secret pacifists, we barracks intellectuals, trying to compromise ourselves as little as possible, only just enough to keep us out of the prison camps, but not an iota more, no sir. So what if we pretended to go along with the others, so what if we obeyed orders and kept our mouths shut, we still had our minds, didn’t we, and we were still us deep inside, weren’t we, and at the final moment, when it came right down to it with no return, the decision was still ours, wasn’t it? Nobody could make us do it, the decision is ours, we said, not knowing that there was no decision to make, that any such elemental decision had been made for us a long long time ago.

  So I left. Goddamn it, I shout, swaying. So I ran away while you stayed to fight. So you’re dead and I’m alive. Does that make me a coward? Does that make me some kind of leper? Goddamn it, you’re dead. You’ve no right to censure me anymore. The echos of my weak shout die, and I turn away choking, swallowing a sob. The flames laugh at me with a high, saw-toothed snickering.

  Anger cleared his brain, enabled him to turn, put one foot in front of another, stumble weakly through the night. Somewhere ahead there was a cave; he had found it late this afternoon as he fled from the gathering battle in the valley, only to be drawn back after nightfall by the final cataclysmic volley of low-yield tactical nukes. Somewhere there was a cave. He focused on that thought, narrowing his consciousness to concentrate on only that one idea, banishing all else from his mind. There is a cave ahead. Take a step. There is a cave ahead. Take another step. Keep the leg muscles pulling and pumping and don’t think. Just keep moving, always keep moving, never stop. Never stop for a second. And never think of anything but your foot lifting, moving ahead for another step and another step. He sagged against the crutch and dragged himself away until the fire-storm sank behind the hill and was only a red glow tickling the underbellies of the fat storm clouds that had gathered overhead.

  The night hooted joyously around him, superheated air baking his skin. Take a step—swish, foot through tangled tall grass; crackle-snap, twigs and small branches breaking under the metal toe of the crutch; snatch a breath, take a step, breathe. Gradually it became automatic, a mindless rhythm, so that when the cave mouth did finally yawn from the shadows, the shock of sudden discovery pulled him sickeningly awake out of a walking doze, and he stumbled and fell on the sharp gravel of the cave floor.

  He floundered for a moment, trying to push himself back up from the ground with the syrupy dream motions of a slow-motion ballet, and then he relaxed and let his head sink back into the dirt. He breathed in great shallow rattles, too weak to twitch, and felt the world slip away. After the long nightmare of effort, sleep was almost an anticlimax.

  In sleep, he found himself on the battlefield, groping through fire-lanced smoke, through oily, grittily-churning darkness. Sparks and yellow flame vomited into the air from every side, swirling into nightmare dervishes. A crescent wave of pale fire
swept through the billowing smoke toward him, devouring as it came. He cowered back, but the fire passed through him without harm, without warming his skin, as if he were protected by an invisible wall of insulating glass.

  The ground shook and bucked underfoot, rolling and groaning as it was raped by continuous barrages. He fought for balance against the nauseous heaving of the land, straining to see through chaos. He knew that there was something here he had to look for, something that he had to find. He knew that it was vital that he find it, but somehow he couldn’t remember just what it was. He stumbled foreward, searching, and not knowing what he searched for of why.

  It was no longer day or night on the battlefield, but a sort of hellish twilight. It was impossible to see the sky; the sky was now a churning mass of bloody smoke a few feet overhead, laced by the smell of hot iron and the permeating reek of burning flesh. He passed a shattered vehicle, armor plates curling and blackening like withering leaves. Smoke swirled away like a curtain, giving him a glimpse of a man lying on his back, one hand spread wide near the knee that he didn’t have anymore, his eyes wide open and staring, although he was undoubtedly, irreparably dead. This wasn’t what he was looking for, he realized, and he hurried away.

  More explosion ripped and stabbed through the roaring, red dark. Everybody is dead now, he thought calmly, and it’s only the atomatic machines that continue to fight, mindlessly. It’s a war of machines now, and the machines are fighting each other relentlessly through the fiery night, like tinker-toys that are slowly running down but cannot stop until they do run down. There was a roaring whistle overhead, like a berserk freight train in the sky, growing louder, growing nearer: a homing nuke.

  It landed close, beyond the ruined vehicle, and the concussion wave blew him away like a feather in a jetstream, sent him rolling away over and over again across the scattered ashes of his friends, but he felt no pain. The flash of the fireball fused the sky to quartz, but he was not burned. Death wailed around him like an evil whispering rain, but he was not touched. He began to cry, weeping as a child weeps and not knowing why. Ashes pattered down over him, burying him, wrapping him in the security of the tomb. But he knew that he had to keep looking until he found it, so he shrugged himself free. He floated to his feet and started off again, leaving no footprints in the debris and ashes.