Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  That’s where the angel came for me, right in front of a gray brick split-level with a Cadillac in the driveway and probably another one in the garage. Maybe the angel liked Cadillacs. I didn’t see it coming at all this time. I was looking at some flowers with really pretty colors and little colored rocks spread all through them.

  Suddenly I turned—maybe I heard the wings—and saw him, almost right up against me, his blank eyes, the huge wings, one of them almost brushing the house’s picture window. His mouth hung open, really wide, but I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see any teeth, only a long tongue that kept flicking back and forth. Then he pushed me to the ground.

  I had trouble getting off my clothes. I was only wearing a light jacket, but his claws kept getting in the way until I almost shouted at him to let me do it. Then I lay back, trying to stare in his eyes, see his world again, while I waited for his claws to stroke me, for my voice to explode in his sounds, his perfect language.

  Instead, he just shoved himself at me, pushing me into the wet dirt, his wings thumping the lawn and the street, his tongue slapping my cheek, my neck, my forehead, burning the skin. I wanted to scream, or cry, or beg, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. If he wouldn’t let me speak angel language, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of hearing anything human coming out of me.

  At the same time I thought, it’s my fault, I betrayed him. I ruined myself. I became too human. But now, I wonder, maybe it just happened that way and would have been the same if I’d never gone with Allen or Jo or anyone.

  I didn’t watch him leave. I just lay there on the ground, curled up and hitting the grass with my fist. Finally, I got scared someone would see me, naked and crazy like that, and lock me up. I got my clothes and ran home.

  Five times the next week I almost tore up the picture, the one Jo had left. Ten times in the next month I almost tried to call Jo herself and ask if the angel had come back to her too. I ended up doing nothing. What difference could any of it make now that the angel had come back and shut me out?

  When I found out I was pregnant I didn’t know what to do. I almost went for an abortion. I didn’t know if I could, if whatever they did would work any better than the pills had. I was wild. I walked up and down the streets in midtown, waving my arms in a pouring rain and stopping every now and then to make a noise like a roar or a shriek. I couldn’t figure out if I was afraid or angry or thrilled, but all the choices sounded pretty rotten, all of them feelings, talk. I wanted to see the angel world and all I could see was my goddamn belly getting bigger and bigger.

  One thing I knew. I didn’t want any doctor to deliver the baby. I wanted to do it myself. I’d never even seen a baby being born, outside of the movies they showed the girls in high school, and of course they only showed ordinary babies. This one I didn’t even know how long it would take, the regular nine months, or ten, or six, or what. But I just decided if the angel was using a human woman then probably it wouldn’t run that different from a regular birth. And I didn’t want any doctors near me.

  So I read books and took courses and did exercises, and when I figured the time was getting close I rented a house by a lake—it was someone’s summer house but they had it insulated for winter too—and stocked it with lots of food and any medicine I could get without a prescription. Then I set everything up—I’d gotten some books on midwifing so I knew pretty much what I needed. And I waited.

  It was horrible. The pain filled the whole room, it rolled off the walls at me, it went on for hours and hours so that I thought the kid must have braced itself inside and would never come out. I was scared I was going to die. The angel was killing me because I’d betrayed it. If only I could phone a hospital, tell them I needed a caesarean. But I’d torn out the wires in case I’d get scared and want an ambulance, and now, when I really needed one, I couldn’t call anywhere. I wondered if I could somehow drive my car, at least down to the snowmobile center down the road. But when I tried to walk I couldn’t even get out of bed.

  It went on for so long I started seeing things. I imagined myself outside, with snow all around, and the angel circling way over my head.

  When the baby did come out it came so quickly I didn’t know it had happened. I went on pushing, with the kid lying there on the soaking wet sheets. When I realized I’d done it I lay back, shaking so much the whole bed made this awful squeaking noise. Probably it had squeaked like that for hours, and I was cursing and crying so much I never noticed. I picked up the kid and cut the cord and cleaned him off as best as I could. I had to get rid of the afterbirth and get him breathing and everything, and I knew I better do it all at once, because if I stopped I’d just fall asleep. At last I held him up so I could look at him.

  A haze or something must have covered my eyes because it took awhile before I could actually see him, what he really looked like. When I did see I just stared at him. Wings grew on his back, small, dirty white, not feathers but sort of rough, almost like cheap leather, the kind you get on pocketbooks bought at one of those downtown discount stores. For the first time I realized the angel’s wings were like that, leather and not feathers at all. Even while I stared at him his sad little wings fluttered a couple of times and then came right off. They fell on my leg. I screamed and knocked them onto the floor. When I looked for them a couple of days later they were gone. Crumbled right into dust, maybe.

  His hands did the same thing. I don’t mean they fell off, but they changed, from claws to ordinary baby hands, the hard curved claw fingers shrinking to stubby human ones.

  There’s nothing left, I thought. All that pain for nothing. But I was wrong. He had his father’s eyes, cold, very hard, and empty. Even now you can see it, not all the time, but sometimes he’ll put down his truck or his cap gun, or else he’ll just stand there when some other kid throws the ball to him. Then you can see that metal coldness take over his eyes, and you know he’s looking right past you, into a world of lightning, and fire that jumps into the sky, a world where the sounds say everything, and not just words.

  He’s going to find it hard, much harder than I ever did. I only saw it, only spoke to it once. But he’s got to look at that world all the time. And live in this one.

  The Neighbor’s Wife

  by Susan Palwick

  Introduction

  This introduction is longer than the story. It could hardly be otherwise, since the story is only a few lines of verse.

  Verse? Then it’s a poem, not a story!

  That attitude reflects one of the sad failures of twentieth-century English-language literature. Because of the triumph of lyric over narrative verse, we honestly think that a poem is somehow the opposite of a story, that if something is a poem it cannot be a story.

  Today I sat in conversation with a screenwriting professor at a major university, discussing the problems that English majors have when they attempt to write screenplays. “They come into class with long screenplays full of pretty language with lots of feelings and symbols in which nothing happens,” he said. “They don’t understand that films require stories; that other stuff is for poems.”

  I couldn’t argue with his point—that writing for the screen still demands what the academic-literary community has long since abandoned: the tale. But it made me sad that he simply took it for granted that it was all right for poems to have no story content at all—for them to be “pretty language with lots of feelings and symbols.” Most of us do these days.

  Most, but not all. Judson Jerome, a fine poet and a longtime poetry columnist for Writer’s Digest, has made it his personal crusade in recent years to get poets to stop writing self-indulgent sniveling (my term—he is much less impolite about it) and start using the techniques of verse to tell more powerful, memorable, and beautiful stories than can possibly be told in prose. There is a reason why the great stories of the ancient world were all in verse—and it isn’t just because verse is easier to memorize. Or rather, the reasons that verse is easier to memorize are also the reasons why stor
ytellers used to use verse: because the verse sets up an incantatory rhythm in the mind; because the music becomes part of the experience and memory of the story; because a story in verse feels more important than one in prose; and because all of this carries the story to the center of the listener’s mind.

  The listener, not the reader. Even if you read silently to yourself—even if you don’t move your lips—verse demands to be heard. You play it out with a voice inside your head; the storyteller is more immediately present in a story told in verse than in a story told in prose.

  Some of us use verse in disguise. I do it often, ever since my days as a playwright. I had come to love the way Shakespeare would lapse into rhymed verse to give a sense of closure and completion to a play or scene; in my fiction, I often write closures in highly rhythmic verse. Though the lines are run in like prose, in order not to call attention to the structure, the effect is there. Verse works—and it works better in stories than it does in the rhapsodic or symbolic lyrics we now call “poetry.”

  Years ago, in graduate school, I fell in love with Spenser, and so admired The Faerie Queene that I resolved to duplicate, not Spenser’s subject or style, but his technique. I set out to write a verse hero-poem in the American frontier vernacular. The result was a fragment called “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow.” I felt that the story, the pseudo-vernacular narrative voice, and the verse all succeeded in doing what I wanted. But I lost faith in the verse—I eventually abandoned it, saving only the story and the voice for the novels that make up my Tales of Alvin Maker series.

  Others have had more courage. Frederick Turner’s The New World is a full-length epic poem in contemporary vernacular English; it is also a fine science fiction novel. In a world where talentless writers serve up warmed-over Joyce and Faulkner and call what results “experimental,” I must pronounce Turner’s work truly experimental, for he is doing what few others even realize is worth attempting. And, unlike the excesses of Joyce and Faulkner, Turner’s experiment works. His accomplishment teaches us a way to write better and clearer and more powerful stories.

  Judson Jerome has also written several stories in verse. One, I heard him read at a writers conference in Cape Cod. It was the tale of a man whose job was to give tuberculosis tests to monkeys just shipped to a lab for medical experiments. On a Friday night, a monkey tests positive. The people who normally destroy the monkeys with tuberculosis have already gone home, so the tester and his co-worker set out to kill the diseased monkey themselves. The story is one of the most haunting, terrible, glorious literary experiences I’ve ever had. Even as I was remade by the story itself, the exploitative writer inside my head was saying, “Ah! So that is possible! So that’s what verse can do with a tale!”

  Since then, I have heard Jerome read a marvelous science fiction short story called “Jaguars.” I asked him to let me submit it to the science fiction magazines. He readily agreed, in part because he expected it to have no chance of publication elsewhere. After all, he has a devil of a time getting “poetry” magazines to publish anything as long as narrative poems have to be; that the story is also science fiction is the kiss of death. I assured him that things were different in the field of science fiction.

  And things are different, though perhaps not yet different enough. Gardner Dozois, for instance, agreed with me that “Jaguars” was a fine story, well worth publishing. But he could not, in the real world, justify devoting that many pages of Asimov’s to a poem. The readers would not stand for it. And he’s right. American readers simply are not trained to read poems any longer than a few lines—it’s daring when a magazine publishes a poem that takes up more than a page.

  Yet, even if length keeps “Jaguars” out of the magazines (watch for it in a forthcoming original anthology), the science fiction editors are open to poems that tell stories—or, as I prefer to think of it, stories told in verse. Indeed, the very concept of “science fiction poetry” almost demands an abandonment of lyric and a turn to either discursive poetry—not often seen since Pope—or narrative poetry, like Susan Palwick’s “The Neighbor’s Wife.”

  This story is deceptively short. Like the stable in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, it is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside. With astonishing economy, Palwick implies a whole community, full of varied characters who are bound together by one thing: their loyalty to one of their own, who has found a way to assuage his grief and loss. If I had dared to tackle such a provocative story, I would have taken three hundred pages to do it, and yet I could have accomplished no more than Palwick achieves in these few lines. Like a spider’s web, which is most visible at the center, where the strands are close-strung, you’ll find that this story hangs on threads that connect in all directions, reaching much farther than you notice at first glance, implying and containing a novel’s worth of story in a few perfectly chosen words.

  It’s short. You can read it many times.

  I met Susan Palwick at the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop. I was appalled, having already found such depth and brilliance and understanding in her poem, to discover that she was a mere child. Well, she was barely in her twenties, anyway, so young and frail-looking that it makes a man feel protective despite his best efforts to overcome his biological imperatives. But we all quickly learned that Palwick doesn’t need protection. Young as she is, she held her own with as powerful a group of egos as you are likely to find in the absence of Donald Trump, Edward Koch, and Lee Iacocca.

  Best of all, she has barely begun to write. We have fifty or sixty years of Susan Palwick’s stories ahead of us—that’s good news, and not just for science fiction.

  It sprouts wings every few weeks

  but as yet has flown no further

  than the woodpile in the yard

  where we found it six months ago.

  Colin Wilcox thought it was his wife

  returned as an angel. It still wore

  its headset then, lying trapped

  in a crushed metal basket; Colin freed it,

  muttering something about harps and haloes,

  and the rest of us stayed quiet. Colin carried it

  into the house and for three weeks nursed it

  in his bed, on the side unwarmed since Marella,

  the old Marella, had her heart attack.

  When it could walk on six legs Colin taught

  it to fry bacon, weed the garden, milk

  the goats, which cower at its touch.

  “Reminding her what she forgot in Heaven,”

  he tells us, but she has not remembered speech,

  this new Marella who is purple and croaks

  like bullfrogs on the hottest summer nights,

  who surely came from somewhere, if not from God.

  Lately it uses those stubby wings to carry

  the heaviest logs from the woodpile. For Colin’s sake

  no one has tried to frighten it away.

  I Am the Burning Bush

  by Gregg Keizer

  Introduction

  The first writing class I ever taught was for the evening school at the University of Utah. It was billed as a science fiction writing course, and each semester I got an array of talented, hardworking students. It was a good class. Most made progress, and some produced truly remarkable work. Unfortunately, I could only teach them as much about the writing process as I understood at the time. In years since, I have learned a great deal more, and nowadays I’m able to help my students make far more progress; back then, however, if it wasn’t the blind leading the blind, then it was the blind being led by a guy with a squint.

  Into this exuberant but confusing environment came Gregg Keizer, a junior high school English teacher who thought he might be a writer. From his first story it was clear that I had little to teach him. He already knew how. He had mastered the skillful use of point of view, so that his work felt professional; just as important, his stories were infused with strangeness and pain, so that reading them was never comfortable, but always memorabl
e.

  I remember making a foolish bet about one story he turned in. “If you haven’t sold this within a year, I’ll run naked through the halls of Orson Spencer Hall” (the building where the class met). Well, I have since learned never to underestimate the ability of editors to resist a startling new voice. It took more than a year. Gregg reminded me of the bet and offered to get his camera to record my streak. I told him to go to hell. Instead, he sent the story to Ellen Datlow, the new fiction editor at Omni. Bingo. “I Am the Burning Bush” at last found its way into print.

  Like many new writers, he just had to wait until an editor came along who was in sympathy with the stories he had to tell. Some writers wait for many painful years; some give up and stop trying. Gregg was lucky to find a sympathetic editor fairly early. But when he did, luck had nothing to do with the fact that his stories were full of searing light.

  So why haven’t you heard more about him? Because it’s a fact of life in the field of science fiction that it usually takes a certain volume of work before you get widely noticed. Your short fiction also has to appear in the magazines than other writers read the most—which in those days meant Asimov’s and F&SF—but not Omni, where Gregg’s strongest work appeared. And it helps if you put out a novel or two.

  Gregg’s career did not follow the necessary track. After an initial spate of sales, to Omni and elsewhere, Gregg began to work on a novel. It was tough going—it’s a wrenching transition for most short story writers. At the same time, he was starting a new job as a book editor at Compute! Books (one more statistic in the American education system’s effort to drive out its finest teachers). He became so thoroughly and successfully involved in his job, eventually becoming editor of Compute! Magazine, and the birth of his and Lori’s daughter Emily gave him such wonderful and time-consuming distractions at home, that his vacation from fiction stretched to months, then to years.