"That's not fair," she said. "You didn't have us . . ." She hiccupped. "The way you did, because you thought there would be risks. You talk as if there's something wrong with these . . . people."
"Isn't there?" Donald asked, eyes suddenly flinty. "They're defective."
"They're my friends!" Letitia shouted.
"Please," Donald said, flinching.
She got to her knees on the bed, tears coming again. "There's nothing wrong with them! They're people! They're just sick, that's all."
"You're not making sense," Donald said.
"I talked to her," Letitia said. "She must have known. You can't just say there's something wrong with them. That isn't enough."
"Their parents should have known," Donald pursued, voice rising. "Letitia . . ."
"Leave me alone," she demanded. He stood up hastily, confused, and walked out, closing the door behind him. She lay back on the bed, wondering what Reena had wanted her to say, and to whom.
"I'll do it," she whispered.
In the morning, breakfast was silent. Roald ate his cereal with caution, glancing at the others with wide, concerned eyes. Letitia ate little, pushed away from the table, said, "I'm going to her funeral."
"We don't know—" Jane said.
"I'm going."
* * *
Letitia went to only one funeral: Reena's. With a puzzled expression, she watched Reena's parents from across the grave, wondering about them, comparing them to Jane and Donald. She did not cry. She came home and wrote down the things she had thought.
That school year was the worst. One hundred and twelve students from the school died. Another two hundred became very ill.
John Fayette died.
The drama class continued, but no plays were presented. The school was quiet. Many students had been withdrawn from classes; Letitia watched the hysteria mount, listened to rumors that it was a plague, not a PPC error.
It was not a plague.
Across the nation, two million children became ill. one million died.
Letitia read, without really absorbing the truth all at once, that it was the worst disaster in the history of the United States. Riots destroyed PPC centers. Women carrying PPC babies demanded abortions. The Rifkin Society became a political force of considerable influence.
Each day, after school, listening to the news, everything about her existence seemed trivial. Their family was healthy. They were growing up normally.
Edna Corman approached her in school at the end of one day, two weeks before graduation. "Can we talk?" she asked. "Someplace quiet."
"Sure," Letitia said. They had not become close friends, but she found Edna Corman tolerable. Letitia took her into the old bathroom and they stood surrounded by the echoing white tiles.
"You know, everybody, I mean the older people, they stare at me, at us," Edna said. "Like we're going to fall over any minute. It's really bad. I don't think I'm going to get sick, but . . .It's like people are afraid to touch me."
"I know," Letitia said.
"Why is that?" Edna said, voice trembling.
"I don't know," Letitia said. Edna just stood before her, hands limp.
"Was it our fault?" she asked.
"No. You know that."
"Please tell me."
"Tell you what?"
"What we can do to make it right."
Letitia looked at her for a moment, and then extended her arms, took her by the shoulders, drew her closer, and hugged her. "Remember," she said.
Five days before graduation, Letitia asked Rutger if she could give a speech at the ceremonies. Rutger sat behind his desk, folded his hands, and said, "Why?"
"Because there are some things nobody's saying," Letitia told him. "And they should be said. If nobody else will say them, then . . ." She swallowed hard. "Maybe I can."
He regarded her dubiously for a moment. "You really think there's something important that you can say?"
She faced him down. Nodded.
"Write the speech," he said. "Show it to me."
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. He read it carefully, shook his head—she thought at first in denial—and then handed it back to her.
* * *
Waiting in the wings to go on stage, Letitia Blakely listened to the low murmur of the young crowd in the auditorium. She avoided the spot near the curtain.
Rutger acted as master of ceremonies. The proceedings were somber, low-energy. She began to feel as if she were making a terrible mistake. She was too young to say these things; it would sound horribly awkward, even childish.
Rutger made his opening remarks, then introduced her and motioned for her to come on stage. Letitia deliberately walked through the spot near the curtain, paused briefly, closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if to infuse herself with whatever remained there of Reena. She walked past Miss Darcy, who seemed to glare at her.
Her throat seized. She rubbed her neck quickly, blinked at the bright lights on the catwalk overhead, tried to see the faces beyond the lights. They were just smudges in great darkness. She glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw Miss Darcy nodding, Go ahead.
"This has been a bad time for all of us," she began, voice high and scratchy. She cleared her throat. "I've lost a lot a friends, and so have you. Maybe you've lost sons and daughters. I think, even from there, looking at me, you can tell I'm not . . .designed. I'm natural. I don't have to wonder whether I'll get sick and die. But I . . ." She cleared her throat again. It wasn't getting easier. "I thought someone like me could tell you something important.
"People have made mistakes, bad mistakes. But you are not the mistakes. I mean . . .they weren't mistaken to make you. I can only dream about doing some of the things you'll do. Some of you are made to live in space for a long time, and I can't do that. Some of you will think things I can't, and go places I won't . . .travel to see the stars. We're different in a lot of ways, but I just thought it was important to tell you . . ." She wasn't following the prepared speech. She couldn't. "I love you. I don't care what the others say. We love you. you are very important. Please don't forget that."
The silence was complete. She felt like slinking away. Instead, she straightened, thanked them, hearing not a word, not a restless whisper, then bowed her head from the catwalk glare and the interstellar darkness beyond.
Miss Darcy, stiff and formal, reached her arm out as Letitia passed by. They shook hands firmly, and Letitia saw, for the first time, that Miss Darcy looked upon her as an equal.
Letitia stood backstage while the ceremonies continued, examining the old wood floor, the curtains, counterweights, and flies, the catwalk.
It seemed very long ago, she had dreamed what she felt now, this unspecified love, not for family, not for herself. Love for something she could not have known back then; love for children not her own, yet hers none the less. Brothers.
Sisters.
Family.
* * *
Originally published in Tangents (author collection), Warner Books, © Greg Bear 1989.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
Orson Scott Card (born August 24, 1951) is an American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist and columnist. He writes in several genres but is known best for science fiction. His novel Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the only author to win both science fiction's top U.S. prizes in consecutive years. A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card co-produced, was released in late October 2013 in Europe and on November 1, 2013, in North America.
Card is a professor of English at Southern Virginia University, has written two books on the subject of creative writing, hosts writing bootcamps and workshops, and serves as a judge in the Writers of the Future contest. A great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, Card is a practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). In addition to producing a large body of fiction works, he has also offered political, religious, and social c
ommentary in his columns and other writing.
Homeless in Hell, by Orson Scott Card
A Christmas Story
This is a rather dark tale in places, not meant for children. (So for heaven's sake, don't read this to your family on Christmas Eve.) For the rest of you, we hope you enjoy it, and have a merry Christmas.
If you don't get into heaven, you go to hell, right? That's what I'd always been taught. Heaven is Harvard, and hell a county technical college. If you finished high school, they've got to take you. Except that with hell, dying is the only diploma you're supposed to need.
I read those near-death-experience books, where they talked about how "the light" was full of warmth and love. Well, it was nice, but it sort of sets you up for disappointment, because when you're really dead and not just straying in there by accident, you getpast that feel-good stage and suddenly you're at the light, and either it sucks you in or it shunts you away, like a magnet, and it all depends on how you're polarized.
I got pushed away.
Well, what did I expect, anyway? I used to go to church and all, but I wasn't much of a stickler on, like, telling the truth and helping my neighbor. And office supplies from work had a way of ending up at home. Not a lot, but I wasn't exactly perfect. Lots of looking upon women to lust after them. Just at the Victoria's Secret level. Quarreled with my wife a lot but I never hit her, though I did compare her to her mother way too often. Kind of the normal sins. I was sort of hoping they graded on the curve -- I figured I was bound to make the top half. But no, it's straight percentage, you get one question wrong and you're out.
So what's the other choice? Hell, right? I start looking around, wondering if Dante was just making it all up and if not, which circle would I get into?
The answer is, Dante didn't know squat, there are no circles. You just find yourself on a street in hell and you go up to a door (and it's always the same door, no matter what the street is) and you see people going in and out, dressed to the nines, and you think, Cool, there are good clothes in hell, which stands to reason, really, and you go up to the door and you knock and the guy looks at you like you're a worm and he says, "Name?"
So I say my name and he makes this moue with his mouth like you sort of passed your expiration date about a month ago and he says, "Please, don't waste my time," and he starts to close the door in your face.
"Wait a minute," you say, "this is hell, right?"
"Hades," he says, and you can taste the contempt.
"Well I didn't make heaven, so you've got to let me in."
"No," he says, and then with a kind of faux patience he explains, "The place where, when you go there, they have to take you in, that's home. Not hell. We don't have to take just anybody. We're all about class here, nobody wants to look around and seeyou. There are real celebs inside. Stalin. Hitler. Caligula, for heaven's sake -- oops, did I say that?"
"I'm not asking for the best seat in the house."
"There is no table insignificant enough for you."
I did a quick calculation -- how many people ever lived on earth, how many would likely fail the entrance exam for heaven, and how many first-rank sinners would be ahead of me in line. "But ... what do I do?"
"You bogey off and stop blocking the door."
"What do you think this is? Studio 54?"
He laughs. "Oh, no, it's much worse. It's like junior high. And you ... ain't ... cool."
And you get a big hand planted in your chest and when he pushes you don't fall, you flyacross the street and smash into a building only it doesn't hurt -- you're dead, remember? -- and you're not injured and it begins to dawn on you, you're stuck in hell but you can't get in. You try a few other doors and the same guy is waiting behind every one of them to bounce you. And it's starting to rain. A thin cold drizzle, and even though you can't actually get injured, you can get cold and damp, or at least you feel like you've been left out in the cold, which in fact you have. You're not going to get sick, you're not going to starve, but you're also not going to get in.
Not that I was alone out there. There are a lot of streets in hell, and lots of homeless people wandering around. And they seem just about as crazy as the normal mix of homeless people. A few who look like they're waiting for a drug deal to go down, only I knew it was a fake, because what is there to buy or sell, and even if they're carrying -- because you pretty much look the way you see yourself, so some people are armed -- they aren't dangerous. If they had ever been truly dangerous, they'd be inside watching the strippers, or whatever they did inside Club Styx. These guys think if they look bad enough, if they say enough rude things to passersby, maybe someday they'll get by the bouncer. Ditto with the ones who look like hookers. They've got nothing to sell. But let's face it. Not everybody in hell is bright.
Then there are the crazies, shouting and preaching about Jesus and the end of the world, only it dawned on me pretty quickly that they aren't crazy -- I mean, after you die there's no schizophrenia because there's no brain to malfunction. They're preaching because they're trying to tip the balance the other way, to show how righteous they are, denouncing sin, calling out the name of Jesus -- or whoever, depending, but most of the shouters were, like, born again, only it apparently didn't take the way they thought.
I stood there watching them, and walked around watching them, and sat down and watched them, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't bring myself to care. It began to dawn on me just how long eternity was going to be, stuck on the streets of hell. I tried street after street, only nothing changed except the faces. The language didn't even change, because after you're dead all the languages become the same. They speak, and they think they're speaking Arabic or Tagalog, only what you hear is English, or at least you think it is. If you speak English. Anyway, you can understand everybody, and that's the worst, because you can't even go to a place where you don't understand the words people are saying so you can tune them out. You're always tuned in and it's soboring.
Daytime comes and goes, just like on earth, and gradually it began to dawn on me that this was earth. In fact, it was Washington DC, which is where I happened to buy the farm, hit by a car trying to cross Wisconsin in Georgetown on New Year's Eve 1999, which meant that whether the world ended that night the way everybody said it might, it definitely ended for me. I knew the streets. I could walk down the mall. Only everybody I saw was dead.
I thought for a while that the whole world must have died or something, but then you'd think there'd be more newly dead people like me, you know, the whole government thing, if the world ended surely some significant percentage of them would go to hell, and surely they couldn't all qualify to get into Studio 666, so where were they? No, the world hadn't ended, just my little oxygen-consuming, carbon-dioxide-expelling bag of blood and bone.
And now that I was looking for it, I began to see the signs that life was going on. Things changed position. Garbage cans were in one place and then they were in another. Cars were parked somewhere and then they weren't. But you never actually saw them move. Nothing moved. It was like when they were in motion, they disappeared. And it occurred to me that it was like long-exposure photography. You set the exposure time really long, the aperture very small, and the only things you get are the things that don't move. Pedestrians, cars, anything that moves is gone.
It's like in hell time passes so slowly that living people are invisible to us. I had it figured out!
"You think you've got it figured out," said a fat man.
I looked at him, a little puzzled by why he was fat. I mean, surely when you die, you don't have to be fat anymore.
"It's how you see yourself," said the fat man. "You know how people said, 'inside every fat person there's a thin person struggling to get out'? Not true. It's just another fat guy in there. In fact, usually a fatter guy."
"Can you lose weight?" I asked, because at least it was a conversation with somebody who wasn't trying to get wafted up into heaven or deeper into hell. And also it was kind of funny.
"You can look thinner," said the fat guy, "if you start to think of yourself as thin."
"So why can't you think of yourself as good, and get on up into heaven?"
He shook his head. "Those street preachers, they aren't thinking of themselves as good. They're thinking of themselves as righteous. Saved. Chosen."
"Better than everybody else."
"Bingo. Ditto with the bad dudes and the tough girls. They're needy, all of them, and needy doesn't get you off the street. Needy is what gets you on the street."
"If you've got it all figured out," says I, "what are you still doing here?"
"I'm conflicted," he said. "A common problem. Whenever I start going one direction, I do something to send me back the other." He grinned. "While you, you're talented."
Talented? "I'm not the one reading minds here. I mean, you've been answering stuff I didn't say."
"Yeah, I've got good hearing. I don't have to wait for you to speak. Because, you know, it's not like we actually have voices. We just sort of wish our thoughts to be heard, and then people close by can hear them. But your thoughts are actually just as loud, so to speak. So yeah, I can hear stuff. But you, you can see things."
I looked around. "No more than anybody else."
"Nope, nope, not so. I watched you. Crossing the street. You waited for the light."
"I did not. The lights don't change."
"And you dodged the pedestrians."
"There are no pedestrians."
"Nevertheless."
"I don't see them, so how can I dodge them?"
"Oh, you philosopher, you."
"What possible difference could it make to you?"
"I want to see how useful you are. What you can do."
"This is a job interview?"
"I've got an opening for an elf."
I looked him over, this time more carefully. No pipe clenched between his teeth, but his stomach was rather like a bowlful of jelly. "Am I supposed to laugh when I see you in spite of myself?"
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 168