"If I don't, Pela, will you sit toahmecu after now?"
She shook her head and sighed. “When God'n strong we go to village. Pela go home.” A great sadness crept into her voice. “Toahmecu done. Pela go home.” She cocked her head toward the shadows beyond the fire, her expression querying him regarding his creature search.
He shook his head.
* * * *
That night Gordon watched Pela sleep. His gaze traced her eyelashes, the line of her lips, the turn of her nose. Dr. Taleghani had been correct. She was very beautiful. Pela: daughter of Cualu and Tahm of the Black Mountain Clan. Pela Sleih: Pela of the Furs. He caught himself thinking what it would be like awakening in this existence without that face as his first sight, her voice removed from his day.
He settled back and stared at the night sky above the dying fire. Gordon had been with women before. There was that psych major in Arizona when he had gone to college for a brief period after the Army. Before her was the high school English teacher in Columbus when he had been in sniper school at Benning. In between was that watercolor artist in Port Elizabeth in the Namibian Containment that crisped a third of southern Africa. They were all emotional parking places, though. The romantic love thing—commitment, attachment—had always eluded him. He'd never felt a sense of belonging anywhere with anyone—except through a sniper scope.
Over his life he had seen men who said they were in love. Some acted very silly about it. Some had been very dangerous. The sanest ones had been married. So too had been the most miserable.
Hosteen Ahiga had outlived three wives. He had loved, he said, the first and the last. The second he had married out of obligation. “She was a Christian woman,” he had said. “She talked with scorn about spirits I walk with. I must go to church and believe as she believes if I want to be saved and have her love.” He shook his head. “I don't listen to her when she talked like that. I walk in beauty, my heart is calm. So then she wants a divorce. That's best and I agree. Before she goes to the lawyer, though, she come down with sickness. All over in a few days. Her heart, says the Bilagana doctor down in Albuquerque. She had a Christian ceremony. I went to her church one time for that.” He turned his unwavering gaze toward Gordon. “They tell me, ‘Take off your hat.’ I went home."
Gordon looked at Pela's face again, uncomfortably reflecting that the most intimate relationships in his life had been with those images in the crosshairs just before squeezing a trigger. Pela had saved Gordon's life, she cared for him, she had buried his comrades, she'd dressed his wounds; she was, as Dr. Taleghani said, very beautiful. Pela wanted him, she was a woman of substance who knew her way around in this world, and Gordon wouldn't hurt her even for a ticket back to his own time. And there might still exist just such a ticket. In the future her God'n might just pick up and vanish. There would be no way he could bring her back with him. The Timespan chiefs would eat off their own faces first.
The future—Gordon reached to his pack, found the locater, and looked at the readout. Pela's future was going to end in one hundred and ninety suns. Certainly simplified things. What if the marriage doesn't work out? Six months. You can do anything for six months. Besides, he thought, what might it be to have an actual home? Aside from the insanity of Nascha's hogan and the rough comradeship of Army barracks, he'd never had a home. Romantic love. Perhaps he could learn how to do that before the mountain vaporized. “That would be a gift,” he whispered to himself.
Pela wasn't looking for a proposal. The custom, as he understood it, was to think about it. The Black Mountain Clan's way of having a prospective suitor “think about it,” though, involved a number of things from qualifications, relationships, and ceremonies that had both man and woman think “for” each other, which was something more than thinking about someone. In thinking for, one considers the step one is contemplating—turning over the possible future relationship like a gemologist examining a rough stone from all angles, noting the flaws, attempting to see what could be made of it.
Gordon looked into the shadows past the fire, knowing that Yellow Eyes was keeping watch. There is the path, Coyote was saying with a wink of his eye. It's beautiful, fur-lined, and chock full of healing promises. Gordon Redcliff could live happily ever after, maybe—or at least until those fellows from the future come looking for him or the floods come for him—
The reset alarm on the shockcomb invaded his thoughts, beginning as a low whine and increasing in pitch and volume until it achieved an ear-splitting magnitude. Gordon quickly reached in and hit the reset. He looked at the indicator. Another four seconds and it would have puckered itself, the locater, and Gordon's change of underwear out of existence, not to mention a good bit of his right thigh.
"Pela hear scream, God'n."
He looked at her. Pela's eyes were open and they were very clear, very deep. “A thing of mine. I need to fix it sooner. Feel bad to wake Pela,” he apologized. Gordon studied Pela's eyes seeing in them a strange mix of fear and longing. Something more, as well. Belonging. He felt as though he belonged with this woman.
This moment had been coming at him for a lifetime, it seemed. His surroundings couldn't be more strange, yet he had a sense of belonging he had never before felt. He knew that when—or if—they came in a Timespan can to get him, they could either bring Pela back with him or leave him there with her.
"Perhaps I am your gift, Pela,” he said at last as he placed a hand on her cheek, surprised to be comfortable in meaning what his words said. “Perhaps, Pela, you are my gift. Gordon is thinking for Pela. Does Pela still think for Gordon?"
As her eyes welled with tears, Gordon wondered if Coyote was revealing yet another turn in his elaborate trick. Pela suddenly turned her head and buried her mouth in Gordon's open palm, holding it to her lips, kissing it as she nodded. “Pela thinking for God'n,” she said, then whispered it again, “Pela thinking for God'n."
There was a tender feeling in his heart, affection, a tiny crystal of joy and love that was instantly shattered as Pela turned her lips from his palm and let out an eardrum-shattering combination of screams and hollers in the direction of the village, the echoes bouncing off the cliff and facing hills.
A moment of silence, then more screaming calls came from the village below. Pela screamed back. The phrasing and pronunciation were different than Gordon had learned up to that point. It was a kind of yodeling. Gordon pieced some of it together: Pela was announcing to her clan sisters in the village that Tana had granted Pela's wish. Pela had been gifted with a fine, strong, big, dark man from a strange place. Really big. Really dark. Reallystrange. He was thinking for her now and she was thinking for him.
Her sisters yodeled back their congratulations, their thanks to Tana for their sister, and their prayers and good wishes. Then they yodeled the news on to the ends of the village and beyond. The calls went on and were relayed for almost an hour. Long after Pela slept, Gordon remained sitting before the fire, catching occasional glimpses of the shimmering images, waiting for the secret visit from the village he was sure was coming.
Copyright © 2009 Barry B. Longyear
TO BE CONCLUDED.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
When I was a mere slip of a lad in my first year of college, I naturally signed up for the one and only class in science fiction and fantasy. I liked the professor so much that I took the next class she offered, and the next, and so on ... which is how I wound up with a minor in English literature to go with my major in math (thank you, Sue Abromaitis).
In one of the early classes, probably Eighteenth Century Novels, our first assignment was Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I plunged into it expecting a dull, turgid classic; instead, I found tiny people, giants, alien races and societies, and an aerial city populated by advanced scientists and held aloft by antigravity.
I raced off to the professor's office, determined that she was alone, and said, “I just finished Gulliver's Travels. D
oes the rest of the class know that we're reading science fiction?"
She smiled and held a finger to her lips. “Don't tell them, otherwise they'll decide they have to hate it."
The point of this whole dreary story is to illustrate the uneasy tension that exists between the universe of Science Fiction and the world of Literature.
When the Earth was young and there was no such thing as genre, what passed for SF was just another part of Literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh was the first post-apocalyptic story on record, and Daedalus the first scientist-hero. Lucian of Samosata wrote space opera in the second century, Dante meticulously built worlds according to the best medieval science, Shakespeare penned the preliminary screenplay for Forbidden Planet, and Cyrano de Bergerac talked about sending rockets into space in the 1600s ... all well before Dean Swift sent Gulliver off on his adventures. Mary Shelley's speculations about the uses of electricity paved the way for the careers of Great-Grandpappys Verne and Wells. And every one of those authors is undeniably a part of Literature, published in respectable Penguin Classics editions available at the nearest college bookstore.
Then Grandaddy Hugo came along and gave Science Fiction its own separate playground, and Father-of-Us-All John Campbell refined it into a thriving genre. And so it happened that Science Fiction waved goodbye to Literature, and the two went their separate ways.
Ever since then, stuffy old Literature has turned up its nose at its younger sibling ... while upstart Science Fiction, for its part, has often delighted in tweaking the nose of its big brother. But underneath, each has always envied the other, if only a little bit.
Every once in a while, Literature takes a hold of the conventions of Science Fiction, and produces a minor masterpiece. Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 are well-known examples. In later years, ultra-Literary authors such as Margaret Atwood, Caleb Carr, P. D. James, Doris Lessing, and even John Updike tried their hands at SF-type books, with varied degrees of success. Recently, even Philip Roth ventured into SF territory, with an alternate history novel called The Plot Against America. (Although poor Mr. Roth, in a poignant author's note, begs his reader's indulgence for this queer notion of a story in which history went off in a different direction—a notion that he seems to think he invented himself. As Professor Abromaitis might say, don't tell him that Murray Leinster was there seventy years before.)
To be sure, when Literature plays with Science Fiction's toys, it doesn't dig too deeply into the toy box. You're not likely to see Barbara Kingsolver exploring post-Singularity AIs, Ann Tyler writing the definitive First Contact novel, or Iain Pears writing of murder on a generation ship.
No, what's popular in Literature these days is a touch of environmentalism (like T. C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth) or good old dystopian futures. In fact, since Cormac McCarthy's The Road was published in 2006, Literary dystopias (also known as “post-apocalyptics") have been all the rage.
If you want to get a sense of what Literature has been up to lately, here are two recent dystopian novels that even hardcore SF readers can find worthwhile.
* * * *
The Pesthouse
Jim Crace
Vintage, 272 pages, $13.95 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-307-27895-1
Genre: Dystopian Futures
* * * *
The medieval post-apocalyptic America of The Pesthouse will be familiar to anyone familiar with SF of the 1960s and 1970s. Technology has regressed to the level of subsistence farming, transportation is by foot or horseback, and the sword and bow-and-arrow are the height of weaponry. No one remembers the exact nature of the long-ago catastrophe that left the world so changed.
When disaster destroys his village, farmboy Franklin heads off for the East, where rumor tells of ships bound for Europe, the land of milk and honey. Along the way, Franklin hooks up with Margaret, who is recovering from “the flux,” a feared disease that has left her shunned and outcast.
On their journey, Franklin and Margaret fall in love and acquire a child. There are adventures: slave-traders kidnap Franklin, and Margaret spends some time with the obligatory anti-technology religious sect. Eventually they come to the East Coast to find disappointment ... but also hope.
Crace does a good job of portraying various aspects of this future, and the characters are compelling. Margaret and Franklin are worth spending time with. And in the end, if the whole thing is just a little over-familiar to SF readers, it's still a rewarding journey.
* * * *
Jamestown
Matthew Sharpe
Mariner, 416 pages, $14.00 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-933368-60-3
Genre: Dystopian Futures
* * * *
More Thomas M. Disch than Walter M. Miller, Jr., Jamestown is a delightfully quirky and anachronistic dystopia.
In this post-apocalytpic near future, Captain John Smith leads a band of settlers out of a poison-choked Manhattan in an armored bus. They head down ruined Interstate 95 in search of the promised land, Virginia. Once they arrive, there's this woman named Pocahontas ... but if you think you know where the story is going, guess again.
The best part of this fun novel is Sharpe's invented language, which is easily fit to stand beside those in A Clockwork Orange and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. A mixture of Elizabethan and modern slang, with a good bit of Sharpe's own weirdness thrown in, it's refreshingly SF-like.
Fair warning: Sharpe's future world is a violent and vulgar place, definitely not for the easily offended. If that's not to your taste, give this one a miss.
* * * *
So there are some examples of what Literature has been up to lately. But let's not forget that for every bit as long as Literature's been messing around in Science Fiction's playground, SF has been sneaking into the house and putting its feet up on Literature's furniture.
There have always been the Brits. In England, the split between Literature and SF was never as serious as in the States. John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard ... all were more-or-less accepted as at least literary-with-a-small-l. Even among the Campbell stable there was Arthur C. Clarke—I am far from the only one to have noticed that some passages in Sir Arthur's work are sheer poetry.
The whole New Wave Movement of the 1960s, a British import to begin with, was largely an attempt to move SF closer to the Literature side of the yard (and further away from the disreputable neighbors like Westerns and other pulp fiction).
But still, even pulpy American SF had its Literary lights ... and still has them today. True, some of the usual names have lately been having out-of-genre experiences: Ursula K. LeGuin in ancient Italy (Lavinia); Norman Spinrad exploring the halls of Montezuma (Mexica); and Samuel R. Delany experimenting in alternative autobiography (Dark Reflections). But that still leaves a few SF writers to proudly carry the banner into Literary territory.
* * * *
We'll Always Have Paris
Ray Bradbury
William Morrow, 224 pages, $24.95
(hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-06-171977-6
Genres: Short Story Collections, Literary SF
* * * *
Ray Bradbury can hold his head up high in any Literary circles ... indeed, in any circles. We'll Always Have Paris is a collection of previously unpublished Bradbury stories. That alone should be enough to convince you to rush out and snag a copy. But perhaps you're unconvinced.
Let me make a confession here: I didn't always like Bradbury. In my salad days, even before Professor Abromaitis and Jonathan Swift, I didn't consider Bradbury to be a real science fiction writer. He wasn't rigorous about his science. Just look at The Martian Chronicles (especially when compared to Red Planet or The Sands of Mars): you just know that Bradbury never calculated the intensity of solar radiation on Mars, or the heat of fusion of ice in the thin Martian atmosphere—heck, he had people walking around on Mars without breathing gear. Fantasy, yes; horror, even—but not science fiction.
It wasn't un
til much later, when I'd been exposed to a lot more different types of fiction and a lot more experience of life, that I came to realize that Bradbury was his own thing, independent of narrow genre definitions. And I came to understand that if Bradbury were willing to allow Science Fiction to claim him as part of the family, then Science Fiction would be smart to accept the honor. Especially in an era in which Certain Writers made it a rite of passage to loudly and conspicuously reject Science Fiction.
So I'm not going to tell you that some of the stories in We'll Always Have Paris are mainstream, others are fantasy, still others science fiction, and one is a poem. I'm not even going to tell you that one story, “Fly Away Home,” is a Martian Chronicle. No, I'm just going to tell you that they are all Bradbury, and that should be enough. There are 22 tales in this volume, so if you read one a day and take weekends off, you can stretch it out for a whole month. Except you won't, nobody could. So it will be over all that much sooner, and you'll be out of brand-new Bradbury, and you'll have only yourself to blame.
Needless to say, this book would also be a nice present for anyone who likes good stories, SF or not.
* * * *
The Best of Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe
Tor, 544 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2135-0
Genres: Short Story Collections, Literary SF
* * * *
Gene Wolfe is another one of those writers who stretches the boundaries of SF. Fantasy? Satire? Horror? Absurdity? A single Gene Wolfe story can be all of these, and SF as well, and at the same time it can be something else entirely.
There is no denying that Wolfe is an Important writer: all you have to do is look at the awards, the reviews, the literary analyses, the esteem in which he is held around the world. Less known, perhaps, than Bradbury (but who isn't?), he nonetheless commands as much respect from the world of Literature as he does in the SF field.
The Best of Gene Wolfe is subtitled “A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction,” and that just about sums it up. Now, one could quibble that this isn't “the best” of Gene Wolfe, for “the best” certainly includes some of his longer works as well—but it's certainly the best of Gene Wolfe that will fit in 544 pages.
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