by Hank Davis
“You only take the things nobody cares about,” she would say. “If you take the gold or jewels, it brings you terrible bad luck.”
“I got a charm against bad luck and I’ll let you have it too,” I said once. “It’s the biggest, strongest charm in the whole world.”
“No. It all turns into trash. It turns into goat beans and dead snakes and things,” she said crossly. “Owen told me. It’s a rule, in fairyland.”
Another time we talked about it as we sat in a gloomy ravine near a waterfall. We had to keep our voices low or we would wake up the giant. The waterfall was really the giant snoring and it was also the wind that blew forever across that desert.
“Doesn’t Owen ever take anything?” I asked.
I had learned by then that I must always speak of Owen in the present tense.
“Sometimes he has to,” she said. “Once right here the witch had me enchanted into an ugly toad. Owen put a flower on my head and that made me be Helen again.”
“A really truly flower? That you could take home with you?”
“A red and yellow flower bigger than my two hands,” she said. “I tried to take it home, but all the petals came off.”
“Does Owen ever take anything home?”
“Rocks, sometimes,” she said. “We keep them in a secret nest in the shed. We think they might be magic eggs.”
I stood up. “Come and show me.”
She shook her head vigorously and drew back. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “Not ever.”
She squirmed and pouted, but I pulled her to her feet.
“Please, Helen, for me,” I said. “Just for one little minute.”
I pulled her back to the Jeep and we drove to the old Price place. I had never seen her look at it when we passed it and she did not look now. She was freezing fast back into Office Helen. But she led me around the sagging old house with its broken windows and into a tumbledown shed. She scratched away some straw in one corner, and there were the rocks. I did not realize how excited I was until disappointment hit me like a blow in the stomach.They were worthless waterworn pebbles of quartz and rosy granite. The only thing special about them was that they could never have originated on that basalt desert.
After a few weeks we dropped the pretense of field notes and simply went into the desert to play. I had Helen’s fairyland almost completely mapped. It seemed to be a recent fault block mountain with a river parallel to its base and a gently sloping plain across the river. The scarp face was wooded and cut by deep ravines and it had castles perched on its truncated spurs. I kept checking Helen on it and never found her inconsistent. Several times when she was in doubt I was able to tell her where she was, and that let me even more deeply into her secret life. One morning I discovered just how deeply.
She was sitting on a log in the forest and plaiting a little basket out of fern fronds. I stood beside her. She looked up at me and smiled.
“What shall we play today, Owen?” she asked.
I had not expected that, and I was proud of how quickly I rose to it. I capered and bounded away and then back to her and crouched at her feet.
“Little sister, little sister. I’m enchanted,” I said. “Only you in all the world can uncharm me.”
“I’ll uncharm you,” she said, in that little girl voice. “What are you, brother?”
“A big, black dog,” I said. “A wicked giant named Lewis Rawbones keeps me chained up behind his castle while he takes all the other dogs out hunting.”
She smoothed her gray skirt over her knees. Her mouth drooped.
“You’re lonesome and you howl all day and you howl all night,” she said. “Poor doggie.”
I threw back my head and howled.
“He’s a terrible, wicked giant and he’s got all kinds of terrible magic,” I said. “You mustn’t be afraid, little sister. As soon as you uncharm me I’ll be a handsome prince and I’ll cut off his head.”
“I’m not afraid.” Her eyes sparkled. “I’m not afraid of fire or snakes or pins or needles or anything.”
“I’ll take you away to my kingdom and we’ll live happily ever afterward. You’ll be the most beautiful queen in the world and everybody will love you.”
I wagged my tail and laid my head on her knees. She stroked my silky head and pulled my long black ears.
“Everybody will love me,” she was very serious now. “Will magic water uncharm you, poor old doggie?”
“You have to touch my forehead with a piece of the giant’s treasure,” I said. “That’s the only onliest way to uncharm me.”
I felt her shrink away from me. She stood up, her face suddenly crumpled with grief and anger.
“You’re not Owen, you’re just a man! Owen’s enchanted and I’m enchanted too and nobody will ever uncharm us!”
She ran away from me and she was already Office Helen by the time she reached the Jeep.
After that day she refused flatly to go into the desert with me. It looked as if my game was played out. But I gambled that Desert Helen could still hear me, underneath somewhere, and I tried a new strategy. The office was an upstairs room over the old dance hall and, I suppose, in frontier days skirmishing had gone on there between men and women. I doubt anything went on as strange as my new game with Helen.
I always had paced and talked while Helen worked. Now I began mixing common-sense talk with fairyland talk and I kept coming back to the wicked giant, Lewis Rawbones.
Office Helen tried not to pay attention, but now and then I caught Desert Helen peeping at me out of her eyes. I spoke of my blighted career as a geologist and how it would be restored to me if I found the lode. I mused on how I would live and work in exotic places and how I would need a wife to keep house for me and help with my paper work. It disturbed Office Helen. She made typing mistakes and dropped things. I kept it up for days, trying for just the right mixture of fact and fantasy, and it was hard on Office Helen.
One night old Dave warned me again.
“Helen’s looking peaked, and there’s talk around. Miz Fowler says Helen don’t sleep and she cries at night and she won’t tell Miz Fowler what’s wrong. You don’t happen to know what’s bothering her, do you?”
“I only talk business stuff to her,” I said. “Maybe she’s homesick. I’ll ask her if she wants a vacation.” I did not like the way Dave looked at me. “I haven’t hurt her. I don’t mean her any harm, Dave,” I said.
“People get killed for what they do, not for what they mean,” he said. “Son, there’s men in this here town would kill you quick as a coyote, if you hurt Helen Price.”
I worked on Helen all the next day and in the afternoon I hit just the right note and I broke her defenses. I was not prepared for the way it worked out. I had just said, “All life is a kind of playing. If you think about it right, everything we do is a game.” She poised her pencil and looked straight at me, as she had never done in that office, and I felt my heart speed up.
“You taught me how to play, Helen. I was so serious that I didn’t know how to play.”
“Owen taught me to play. He had magic. My sisters couldn’t play anything but dolls and rich husbands and I hated them.”
Her eyes opened wide and her lips trembled and she was almost Desert Helen right there in the office.
“There’s magic and enchantment in regular life, if you look at it right,” I said. “Don’t you think so, Helen?”
“I know it!” she said. She turned pale and dropped her pencil. “Owen was enchanted into having a wife and three daughters and he was just a boy. But he was the only man we had and all of them but me hated him because we were so poor.” She began to tremble and her voice went flat. “He couldn’t stand it. He took the treasure and it killed him.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “I tried to think he was only enchanted into play-dead and if I didn’t speak or laugh for seven years, I’d uncharm him.”
She dropped her head on her hands. I was alarmed. I came over and put my hand on her shoulder.
I bent and put my arm across her shoulders.
“Don’t cry, Helen. He’ll come back,” I said. “There are other magics to bring him back.”
I hardly knew what I was saying. I was afraid of what I had done, and I wanted to comfort her. She jumped up and threw off my arm.
“I can’t stand it! I’m going home!”
She ran out into the hall and down the stairs and from the window I saw her run down the street, still crying. All of a sudden my game seemed cruel and stupid to me and right that moment I stopped it. I tore up my map of fairyland and my letters to Colonel Lewis and I wondered how in the world I could ever have done all that.
After dinner that night old Dave motioned me out to one end of the veranda. His face looked carved out of wood.
“I don’t know what happened in your office today, and for your sake I better not find out. But you send Helen back to her mother on the morning stage, you hear me?”
“All right, if she wants to go,” I said. “I can’t just fire her.”
“I’m speaking for the boys. You better put her on that morning stage, or we’ll be around to talk to you.”
“All right, I will, Dave.”
I wanted to tell him how the game was stopped now and how I wanted a chance to make things up with Helen, but I thought I had better not. Dave’s voice was flat and savage with contempt and, old as he was, he frightened me.
Helen did not come to work in the morning. At nine o’clock I went out myself for the mail. I brought a large mailing tube and some letters back to the office. The first letter I opened was from Dr. Lewis, and almost like magic it solved all my problems.
On the basis of his preliminary structure contour maps Dr. Lewis had gotten permission to close out the field phase. Copies of the maps were in the mailing tube, for my information. I was to hold an inventory and be ready to turn everything over to an army quartermaster team coming in a few days. There was still a great mass of data to be worked up in refining the maps. I was to join the group again and I would have a chance at the lab work after all.
I felt pretty good. I paced and whistled and snapped my fingers. I wished Helen would come, to help on the inventory. Then I opened the tube and looked idly at the maps. There were a lot of them, featureless bed after bed of basalt, like layers of a cake ten miles across. But when I came to the bottom map, of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape, the hair on my neck stood up.
I had made that map myself. It was Helen’s fairyland. The topography was point by point the same.
I clenched my fists and stopped breathing. Then it hit me a second time, and the skin crawled up my back.
The game was real. I couldn’t end it. All the time the game had been playing me. It was still playing me.
I ran out and down the street and overtook old Dave hurrying toward the feedyard. He had a holstered gun on each hip.
“Dave, I’ve got to find Helen,” I said.
“Somebody seen her hiking into the desert just at daylight,” he said. “I’m on my way for a horse.” He did not slow his stride. “You better get out there in your stinkwagon. If you don’t find her before we do, you better just keep on going, son.”
I ran back and got the Jeep and roared it out across the scrubby sagebrush. I hit rocks and I do not know why I did not break something. I knew where to go and feared what I would find there. I knew I loved Helen Price more than my own life and I knew I had driven her to her death.
I saw her far off, running and dodging, I headed the Jeep to intercept her and I shouted, but she neither saw me nor heard me. I stopped and jumped out and ran after her and the world darkened. Helen was all I could see, and I could not catch up with her.
“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and we were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the Jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun. I saw a knot of horsemen on the horizon. They were heading for where Owen had been found. That boy had run a long way, alone and hurt and burdened.
I got Helen up to the office. She sat at her desk with her head down on her hands and she quivered violently. I kept my arm around her.
“It was only a storm inside our two heads, Helen,” I said, over and over. “Something black blew away out of us. The game is finished and we’re free and I love you.”
Over and over I said that, for my sake as well as hers. I meant and believed it. I said she was my wife and we would marry and go a thousand miles away from that desert to raise our children. She quieted to a trembling, but she would not speak. Then I heard hoofbeats and the creak of leather in the street below and then I heard slow footsteps on the stairs.
Old Dave stood in the doorway. His two guns looked as natural on him as hands and feet. He looked at Helen, bowed over the desk, and then at me, standing beside her.
“Come on down, son. The boys want to talk to you,” he said.
I followed him into the hall and stopped.
“She isn’t hurt,” I said. “The lode is really out there, Dave, but nobody is ever going to find it.”
“Tell that to the boys.”
“We’re closing out the project in a few more days,” I said. “I’m going to marry Helen and take her away with me.”
“Come down or we’ll drag you down!” he said harshly. “We’ll send Helen back to her mother.”
I was afraid. I did not know what to do,
“No, you won’t send me back to my mother!”
It was Helen beside me in the hall. She was Desert Helen, but grown up and wonderful. She was pale, pretty, aware and sure of herself.
“I’m going with Duard,” she said. “Nobody in the world is ever going to send me around like a package again.”
Dave rubbed his jaw and squinted his eyes at her.
“I love her, Dave,” I said. “I’ll take care of her all my life.”
I put my left arm around her and she nestled against me. The tautness went out of old Dave and he smiled. He kept his eyes on Helen.
“Little Helen Price,” he said, wonderingly. “Who ever would’ve thought it?” He reached out and shook us both gently. “Bless you youngsters,” he said, and blinked his eyes.
“I’ll tell the boys it’s all right.”
He turned and went slowly down the stairs. Helen and I looked at each other, and I think she saw a new face too.
That was sixteen years ago. I am a professor myself now, graying a bit at the temples. I am as positivistic a scientist as you will find anywhere in the Mississippi drainage basin. When I tell a seminar student “That assertion is operationally meaningless,” I can make it sound downright obscene. The students blush and hate me, but it is for their own good. Science is the only safe game, and it’s safe only if it is kept pure. I work hard at that, I have yet to meet the student I cannot handle.
My son is another matter. We named him Owen Lewis, and he has Helen’s eyes and hair and complexion. He learned to read on the modern sane and sterile children’s books. We haven’t a fairy tale in the house but I have a science library. And Owen makes fairy tales out of science. He is taking the measure of space and time now, with Jeans and Eddington. He cannot possibly understand a tenth of what he reads, in the way I understand it. But he understands all of it in some other way privately his own.
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br /> Not long ago he said to me, “You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”
And I have to tell him just what I did in the war. I know I found manhood and a wife. The how and why of it I think and hope I am incapable of fully understanding. But Owen has, through Helen, that strangely curious heart. I’m afraid. I’m afraid he will understand.
Palely Loitering
INTRODUCTION
Here’s a very unusual park, where one can take a walk on a time-bridge and end up one day in the past or future. But youngsters don’t always follow the rules, and when the story’s narrator jumped off the bridge, something definitely not to be done, he began a chain of events that would affect the rest of his life. This story won the British Science Fiction Association 1979 award for best short fiction, and also was a runner-up for the 1980 Hugo and Locus awards in the novelette and novella categories.
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Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He has published thirteen novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction. His novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award. In 1996 Priest won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige. He has been nominated four times for the Hugo award. He has won several awards abroad, including the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany), the Eurocon Award (Yugoslavia), the Ditmar Award (Australia), and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France). In 2001 he was awarded the Prix Utopia (France) for lifetime achievement. He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was filmed by director Christopher Nolan, went to number one U.S. box office in its first week, and received two Academy Award nominations. Another novel, The Glamour, is soon to be filmed in the UK by director Gerald McMorrow. Chris Priest’s most recent novel, The Adjacent, was published by Gollancz in 2013, and in the USA by Titan Books in April 2014. He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London. As a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.