by Glenn Grant
* * *
Soon after she was eleven, in Darkening, two events came almost upon one another: her mothers got sick and the Fa took them back to the city. These events were not connected, yet seemed so. For days her mothers had lain slow and feverish in the house. Mamar told her how to care for their body, which seemed to be leaking, diminishing. “Are you trying to become pregnant?” she asked, wondering. She has an idea, suddenly, of another like her, another deformity—
“No, we cannot.”
“You could, the Fa have been with you. You said what happened to me would not happen again anywhere—”
“We are sure that it would not. But we are unable to bear more children. No, this is just a sadness in our body, an infection—”
“Did the Fa make you sick?”
“No, Tasman—”
By the time the Fa came with their news, her mothers were well enough to receive it happily, though they had become very thin and weak—they looked old now, Tasman thought, seeing them with the eyes of the Fa, who were still young and whose faces were less beautiful today in complexity—perhaps the Fa wanted them closer, but not their sickness, and perhaps they would desert them, as her real fathers had done. But she misinterpreted this.
“It is a dispensation and amnesty,” said Fadel, after they had embraced and lain down. “We have a letter to say to you, and you can hear this for yourselves. It is for you, and there is a temporary one for Tasman. Medical Book has arranged it. Do not be worried that Tasman’s is temporary. It is a victory.”
“She is too old for your Book now, surely,” said Mamar. Tears shone on her cheekbones.
“We do not know what will happen. There are changes in medical Book. They may want to test her again.”
Tasman knelt between them where they lay talking, and placed her hands adult-fashion one on the Fa’s chest and one on her mothers’ breasts.
“I do not want to go to medical Book for tests, or live in the city unless I can go to a real Book. I will wear a new Pillowmarie if I have to, Mamel will make them again, but I need to go to Book.”
“We do not know what is going to happen to you. We do not believe you have any choice.” The Fa Twar placed his hand over hers. “Your mothers need to go home.”
* * *
Whoever had lived in their house had taken good care of it. Much of it had been renewed. The streets looked smaller. The dykes had been raised again and the sea was no longer visible from the roof. Tasman realized how happy her mothers were to be back: they touched everything welcome, as she had touched the leaves and sand and stream and low, fronded doorway in the north farewell. Here, though larger, the rooms seemed cramped and dull. The lights of the city seemed less magical than she remembered them, and far less lovely than the stars she had watched from the beach. Worse, it was not possible to go about freely. She wore the new Pillowmarie and tried, but the looks she got shrivelled her courage. And her mothers did not encourage her, they were uneasy unless she was at home. It was best to be indoors or on the roof, and she put Pillowmarie aside. The Fa came very often to see her mothers but they looked restless; it was as if they came with rumours rather than news. “There is no news,” she was told, and this was to reassure her, she felt. It was obviously out of the question to think about going to Book, and she no longer asked. She became apprehensive whenever she saw them: would she be forced to go into medical Book, and be tested? What did that mean? Past the roof, the city shone and changed colour and sounded. She waited.
One day she came in off the roof when the Fa had been and gone and had not called her. Her mothers were on the pallet. Mamar was caressing Mamel’s face, which was streaked with tired tears. Mamel’s eyes were closed.
“Is she asleep?” asked Tasman, but it was Mamel who answered, “Almost,” and the hand gently pushed itself away. Mamar lay back, and gestured for Tasman to sit down. She turned her face from Mamel.
“It has been worked out. You are going away, to live in a city called Uppsal, and do Book,” she said in a level voice.
Tasman stared. “Is this decided?”
“Yes” (the emphatic).
Mamar went on: “It is in the Savannahs. Good men have told us in a letter brought by a Traveller, that you can live there. It is a great Book, and a very old one.”
“It is their Book then, and will not be mine,” said Tasman, and burst into tears.
“Tasman, it is true it will be their Book, but it is not medical, the Fa have also assured us of this. Medical Book is not happy that you are going, but they have been overruled. It is a place where you can learn much and be protected. Do you understand this?”
Tasman was silent.
“If you stay here, you cannot remain with us and you cannot perhaps live. This is how it is for you.”
“I would wish to be treated as an adult, even if my teeth are white as milk. I would wish to hear the letters.”
“We have not yet learned them. The Fa will tell you them, surely, word for word. We will give a good farewell. We will finish with it, I promise you.”
They sat up suddenly and Mamel, jerked awake, stared at Tasman with wide, frightened eyes that suddenly swam with tears. “It is not finished but it will be finished,” said Mamar. They pulled Tasman in against their breasts. She shut her eyes against their warmth but she could still see the incompleteness in Mamel’s face.
“The old will be finished before the new is allowed to begin,” quoted Mamar, her voice breaking. “Good men will come for you.
“It will be within the year, quite soon,” she went on more calmly. “Before it is too hot to travel.”
* * *
They came at Lightening, the Sorud, standing very tall in the doorway, and she thought this was how her fathers must have looked—so distant and courteous and upright, with their blackened teeth and long, widely-spaced eyes. Their hair was long and thick and loosely twined, hanging down their chest between their heads in a single braid whose end-strands were bleached almost white, as she had heard the hair of Savannah-dwellers can be. Sorud Twel had a much broader face, the muscles masseter and orbicularis mundi were thick and mobile, and it was he who spoke and laughed and smiled. Sorud Twar was silent, his face rather gaunt and inward, yet she felt him inviting her to come to him, and sat on the floor close to his hand. But it did not move, only the Twel’s caresses of courtesy acknowledged her as he spoke with her mothers, and touched her almost absentmindedly in the way of men caressing female children, light strokes, up and down her back and arms and sides.
The private leave-taking and the formal one were both over. Tasman had no more crying left to do, nor did her mothers; they saw each other expressionlessly, grief had wrung them well. And she had said good-bye to the Fa as well, forgiving them in tears of rage; no longer jealous, she could see clearly their love-bond to her mothers as she put it behind her. And she had touched the house intimately in all its particulars, so that now as she passed the rooms for the last time she sensed them as familiar but withdrawn. She was ready.
The trip to the south terminus took most of the day. She lay against the Sorud in the cars in a kind of exhaustion of spirit, but did not sleep. The Twel again caressed her, his hand moving slowly the length of her gloved foot, the arch and ankle, then up and down her legs, sides, arms.
Then she felt the Twar hand move very gently to her shoulder and across her throat to the meeting of her clavicles, the “salt cellars” there, his narrow adult fingers very gently pressing and touching. “Are you of medical Book?” she asked, but not afraid, because there was a difference in his touch.
“No,” he said, using the emphatic, that broached no argument. “Historical, it is called.” She had never heard that word.
“It was I who named you, Tasman,” he said. “I sent that name in a letter eleven years ago, in answer to a request from the Namers in your city. I saw you once again, when you were six. I have never forgotten you.”
Later, he was to tell her, “I believe you are a true Barbarian. A
nd I do not believe they were terrible savages, even though they did their best to destroy us, and nearly succeeded. They were also people, their race walked, and you will learn this. We have archives that tell good Tales about them, they lived and did Book under this very place where we live. When we become less afraid of our past, we will be able to remember these things. And sometimes, Tasman, when I have had my head in Book for many days, and thought only of these things, and I look up and see you, I see what you really are.”
He did not say these things now, but they were contained in the strange word he had used, and in his touch, which was curious but not like the medical Book which had touched her there and measured her and made her feel even more deformed under their proddings and stares.
His fingers moved around her naked neck, her throat so small in the far too loose single sleeve Mamel had sewn her, frail and exposed like a stem without leaves, a stripped branch. They slid behind her ears, and reaching down seemed to draw and gather her narrow shoulders upward, joining her sad, simple head to her body by their large and gentle stroke—a completion and together-sensing. Her nape tingled, and the surface muscles of her face; she felt them changing at the edges of her eyes, like sadness acknowledged. He is making me beautiful, she thought; his touch was different than anyone else’s had ever been, even her mothers’.
* * *
The Uppsal terminal lay far across the northern Savannah. The Sorud stretched, and lifted her out of the cars, and then the provisions, strapping them across their upper arms and thighs. They stepped out of their cumbersome footgloves, and Tasman did the same, and felt on the soles of her feet the heat of the world. She stared about her. There was not even scrub forest here, only low bushes, and sand that in places was freshly blown across the path. They began to walk southeastward. Tasman saw and saw again the place where surely her fathers had fallen. The dry earth reached between her toes, and smelled sweet, some herb she seemed to recall, but could not name. The sun was low over the long smooth slopes to the northwest.
Sorud Twar was silent, but the Twel told her about Uppsal, and where she would live, just as he had told her mothers—with them, eating out of their bowls and drinking from their cups. He told her about Book, but she could not imagine it; it was deep, he said, and cool, there were real things in it, as well as screens and copies, it was like the Tales of the ruins, but it was not ruins, it was a modern city.
She did not ask, but she did not think there were children at the Uppsal Book, certainly not where she would be with the Sorud, and this was good, because she had never felt like children, and did not now. She walked taller at the Sorud’s side.
The Twel told her also about the Savannahs, and Tasman knew it was he who loved to go there, away from the city, it was because of him that their hair was bleached white.
“There is a great plain to the east, and they say it is an old sea bed, at least, Twar says so, and he is called a Great Authority.” He laughed softly. “There are wells there, and yeast farms, it is not all wild. But farther east it is wild. We have gone farther, making fires and paths, it is not so dark at Darkening, we can see by the stars and moon, and it is cooler then. Twar sleeps, but there is a ruin we will go to soon, and he dreams of this place, because it was a great Barbarian city, and it is accessible, we have been told. It is farther than the ruin Len.”
“I have never been to World,” said Tasman, “but I have played on the shore all the time we lived north of the city.”
“Then you will go to World with me.” His voice was warm and joyous.
She walked until Darkening, holding the Twel’s large hand and listening to him, and then they lifted her up and carried her, baby-fashion, her legs straddling their hip-bundles on either side, and what she guessed was not the bundles but their own, darker burden, alive and comfortable between her thighs as they strode forward. She remembered part of an old song: When our teeth are made black / When we are touched in the new / old places. Her bare feet hung free.
Weary, she pressed her face into their braided hair, that smelled stale and good, like wood smoke. The air was cooling. The Twel’s hand caressed her back and shoulder blades, up and down, but she kept herself awake, until at last it stayed, supporting her; and she felt the Twar hand, harmonious, release its support and move to her vestigial seventh cervical, and cover her nape and rest there. Then, she allowed herself to fall asleep.
THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE WRITER
Lesley Choyce
Lesley Choyce is an energetic force in Canadian SF. He teaches part-time at Dalhousie University in Halifax and runs Pottersfield Press in Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia (which published, among other titles, Terence M. Green’s The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind). He coedited, with John Bell, Visions from the Edge (1981), a (mostly?) reprint anthology of SF stories from Atlantic Canada. His own collection of SF stories, The Dream Auditor, (“science fiction short stories that accurately describe alternate worlds not at all unlike the one we live in”) was published in 1986. Perhaps his most significant recent achievement is in editing the anthology Ark of Ice (Pottersfield Press, 1992) a mixture of reprint and original fiction that includes both a majority of the best contemporary Canadian SF writers and a carefully chosen selection of work by fine Canadian writers not normally associated with the genre, such as Timothy Findlay, W. P. Kinsella, Tom Marshall, and Geoffrey Ursell, on the theme of the future of Canada.
“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer” is reprinted from his collection. It is perhaps reminiscent of nothing so much as Ray Bradbury’s fiction, which uses the tropes and figures of science fiction to acute moral purpose.
* * *
Even now I sometimes have my doubts about being a writer. I mean, it’s not like I have a big audience.
There is a grand total of four readers in this solar system who see my work. Dolph Tonkins for one—but then he was the devil that planted the seed in me to begin with. Sister Theresa McCullough in her home for aging nuns in Dunvegan is the second. And then there’s Tess, also cloistered away, but under different circumstances. And, of course, she’s much younger. Without her I would have given up long ago.
As far as I know, no one else in the solar system can read. Reading is such an ancient custom that no one (including me sometimes) can see for what conceivable purpose it stands. The university keeps me alive here out of some sort of respect for the prehistorics, I suppose. I think old farts like Mellaghy and Bustrom teaching in the Ancient Cultures Department still feel that there was something more to writing than just whimsical foppery. That it might have had something to do with communication. But certainly not in any way related to the way it is known today.
“How can you communicate, if you can’t be there?” they all argue. “You’d be missing all the bloody parts.” Meaning of course arms, legs, facial expression. “No one could possibly take it seriously. It was just a fashionable mclune, a form of stand-up comedy.”
So that makes me a sort of court jester, and way the hell out of my century at that. Thanks a lot, Dolph.
But then it was Dolph who saved my life. When I was a kid, you see, my old man had us living in a condovillage just east of Darkday City. Unlike other lucky families we were stuck on the moon instead of somewhere more interesting farther out. The only thing appealing about the place was that I could take a dustbike out for a spin as often as I wanted once I had passed the driving test. My father, however, was always warning me: “Dammit, Rick, don’t go spookin’ around on the dark side or I swear, I won’t let you ride that friggin’ thing for the rest of your life.”
Of course, the dark side, only about twenty kilometres away, was what interested me most. So off I went. Ten miles in I burned out a light. The auxiliary package was weak, no doubt because I hadn’t recharged it since I bought the thing. I tried to navigate my way back to the line with about two and a half watts against eternal night. Just my luck, I wiped out in an overly ambitious dust pit, flipped over the rig and landed on a sharp piece o
f pure nickel which put a tiny crescent rip in my suit. I started to get dizzy and kept trying to focus on the light line, way the hell off and just before I passed out I had the good sense to flip on the SOS blaster.
Dolph was the guy who found me. He was probably the only living creature within five kilometres. He had himself a comfy little geocell tucked under a ledge at the bottom of a crater. A true recluse. And talk about your weird ideas. He showed me piles of paper with stuff written all over. Words.
“So?” I asked.
“So, I want you to learn how to do it,” he told me, as I lay there still recovering.
“What the Murphy for?” I said, beginning to worry if this was all part of some weirdo religion like the Cosmic Church of Carnal Knowledge or something.
“Because you owe it to me, bud. I saved your life.”
“Oh.” I was beginning to see his point. Besides, I was getting used to learning totally useless skills. It seemed to be what civilization was all about.
I sat through the first of many lessons concerning writing, certain that the old turkey was whacked out of his gourd, but nonetheless I owed it to him.
Dolph was totally opposed to holovision and refused to ever allow a single holoversion of himself made. “It saps your soul, Rick, I’m sure of it. A fake light image of you that looks exactly like you in every respect travelling off somewhere and doing your talking for you.”