“Got fire,” he said. “Got fire right here!"
“Don't want fire,” Mr. Donaldson told him, looking deliberately at the sidewalk and pushing his broom, making that act an eloquent editorial.
The Stranger laughed, and kept on down the street. He greeted the Widow Collins, the pet shop lady. He hailed Frau Wein, who'd come to town to get away from something that had happened in Germany that she never spoke about.
“Got fire!” he told each one. “Fire!"
Frau Wein turned her back, stepped sharply into her shop, and dropped the blinds. Mrs. Collins hissed something polite, but firm.
“Right down from Heaven this very morning, and may I point out what a fine morning it is?” the Stranger observed reasonably. “Gift of the Gods, good woman."
“Not the gift of any God worth worshipping,” Widow Collins snapped, and her eyes snapped too, and her knuckles rapped on the iron railing. “Now be off."
He made a great, sweeping obeisance, the Stranger, then skipped off down the street. He ambled up Adams for a couple of blocks, then worked his way along Oak, calling out to milkmen, paperboys, and householders putting out the garbage. “Got fire!” he called. “Pure fire! Clean, warm, sparkling, regenerating, energizing, ever-oxidizing Fire!"
No one wanted fire on Oak, or on Monroe or Elm or back down on Railroad. They laughed him off Fillmore, they were rude on Monkey-Puzzle. On Harrison they called the police, who suggested filing a complaint if the Stranger did anything actually hostile.
Chortling with good feeling or its cousin, jaunty of step, almost dancing, the Stranger had circled back and nearly returned to the end of town when he came upon a young lad of whom nothing important had been asked that day, a lad footloose and at loose ends, loose of limb and loose of his parents for the morning, midway between some vague point of origin and an equally questionable goal.
“Got fire!” the Stranger shouted, as though for the first time that day.
“Yeah?” the lad replied, intrigued but cautious.
“Fire with your name on it, if you're half the boy I think.” The Stranger stopped then, as though brought short by a scruple. “You're not asthmatic, are you? Consumptive?"
“Nope."
“Not prone to chondritic syphilis, or thrombosis of the pituitary process?"
“Never."
“Never had a touch of the galloping carborundum, or the Type E Dushanbe peripatetic palsy?"
The boy shook his head.
“Well, that's all right, then,” smiled the Stranger. “Let's go!"
And follow him the thoughtless boy did, as well I know, for that young lad was myself.
The Stranger rattled on about Aldebaran and Khartoum, fearsome races with fantastic names, and untold glories awaiting “the right kind of adventurer.” I knew I would be that right kind of adventurer, even though I couldn't follow a tenth of what he said. Details just didn't seem to matter in the world the Stranger represented. Fine print, I sensed, was for fools and church ladies. The stuck-up brown-nosers in school, the geeks and the nerds, they would have balked. They would have missed their chance to master fire.
We went along a quarter of a mile to Conyer's Meadow, where the Stranger had landed. His ship was BIG. Great flaring tail fins held it up, and the ruby-colored nose seemed about to poke the clouds, it soared so high. A red carpet lay spilled across the clover, ending at our feet. At the far end of the carpet a staircase with gold railings and polished electrum steps swept up to the open portal. Ivory statues of mythical beasts with emerald eyes lined the way.
My heart pounded and my imagination reeled. This was what life should be like! This beat doing homework and feeding the cat. This topped sneaking a chaw of tobacco behind a school friend's garage, or hanging out with the glue-heads. Spaceships on the meadow were what the universe should be about.
“Right this way, young sir. Right this way.” He waved a walking stick that seemed to have come from nowhere, and suddenly the stairs moved, became an escalator, and just as suddenly I knew that this was fitting, that an adventurer like myself shouldn't have to climb stairs under his own power. Not without a beautiful woman collapsed in his arms, anyway.
The Stranger had fire, all right. Cases of it, walls hung with it, probably crates of it stacked in the hold. The forms of fire lay all about, glorious and tempting. Ceremonial laser maces, chased with platinum and encrusted with jewels. Enameled thunderbolts that could bring down a castle with a single wish, and could level a city in an afternoon. Two display cases were filled with every kind of tornado-caster ever made in our end of the galaxy, and I knew what they were and how they could be employed without reading the little gold-lettered labels they each had. I knew, because I must be meant to know.
“That's right, lad, these are the tools you must have to protect your people from the dreadful dangers that await them outside this petty solar system. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice system, a sweet system. Worth the trouble of defending. But it's a limited field of action. Quite limiting, in certain ways."
I couldn't have agreed more. I'd felt the limitations all my life, the pointlessness of it, the stupidity. Life, especially my life, should be filled with power, glory, honor and its just rewards; but everybody in my town thought in terms of chores and rules and detention sessions. And, worse, the same old boring chores and rules and detention sessions day after day after day.
“Contemplate the subtle charm of this personal moon-crusher.” The Stranger held up a device that reminded me of an ancient dirk, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Somehow I knew that whole kingdoms had been ransomed to own this weapon. Twice. “And let us not overlook the real treasures of this collection: the Star Strummers."
He led the way into a second room, deeper inside the rocket, and gestured to the far bulkhead, hung with great staffs carved from the teeth of creatures who could swallow small steamboats and wrestle battleships into submission. One end of each bulged with a ruby the size of my head, the other with a beryl even larger. “With these you can tune a star to any resonance you desire, and play it like a pipe organ,” the Stranger beamed. “The destructive potential is unimaginable."
“Chalmer!” a voice called from the first room. My mother's voice. “Chalmer Andrew Ginesson! I know you're in here!"
“Delightful!” said the Stranger. “A family moment."
He turned to the door just as my mother came in, with my two sisters in tow. “So nice you could join us, madam. And are these lovely things your daughters, or your sisters? But I should introduce myself. I'm—"
“I'm sure you are,” my mother said, but her eyes swept past him and fastened on me. “Did you ask permission to come out here, young man?"
My Aunt Garnet came through the door at that minute, followed by Mrs. Fripperson, the town librarian. Their walk radiated determination. Aunt Garnet's face was pinched with disapproval. Mrs. Fripperson's brimmed with righteous self-congratulation, making it clear who had followed me to the rocket, who had telephoned my mother with the news.
“Forgive me, madam,” the Stranger was saying, “but I instigated—"
“I'm sure you did,” my mother snapped. “My son is capable of thinking for himself, thank you very much, and responsible for his own actions. Aren't you, Chalmer?"
But I wasn't paying enough attention to her to answer right then, because of something in my younger sister's eyes. Jillian was staring at the case full of sea scorchers and shoulder-mounted Planet-Buster-grade quake cannon. There was a smirk I didn't like on her face—but then, I'd never liked her smirks very much. But Jillian had always been my nice sister, and that look in her eyes wasn't nice. It wasn't nice at all.
“Chalmer.” My mother's voice rang with menace, with the threat of punishments more stern than the Spanish Inquisition, applied with a will more adamant than Stalin's and a technical facility that would be the envy of our finest engineers. That tone, if it could be packaged, would make any totalitarian regime invincible. That tone, I now know, has of
ten saved the world.
“Right, Mom,” I said. “Time to be going."
I thanked my host, grabbed Jillian's arm quite firmly, and whisked her out the door. True, the escalatoring stairs kept trying to pull us back up to the ship, but we managed to get away.
At home my mother discovered a hundred pressing chores, all urgent, all my responsibility. I did each one in turn, only insisting that my sisters be kept just as busy. In a spare moment I took care to glue Jillian's bedroom window shut on the outside, and all that night I sat by my half-open door to keep an eye on the hall. Daydreams of heroic deeds on distant battlefields threatened to lull me into sleep, but I fought them off with spoonfuls of coffee crystals that burned my mouth, with pinches that left my arms mottled with small bruises, and with a score of other strategies.
By morning the Stranger had gone in search of greener planets, leaving the meadow a smoking, blasted ruin.
Copyright © 2002 Timons Esaias
* * * *
Tim's stories have appeared in nine languages and twelve countries. He was a finalist for the 1999 British Science Fiction Award. His SF poetry has been translated into Chinese and Spanish, and he's had over fifty sales to such markets as Asimov's, Terra Incognita, and Strange Horizons. For more about him, see his Web site.
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Dream the Moon
By Linda J. Dunn
7/15/02
A cloud of lint hovered over the seamstresses and their sewing machines like a multicolored fog over a river. To the right of each worker rose a bank of shirt pieces, stacked on wobbly pine shelving units. On the left bank were wheeled bins, where the seamstresses tossed their finished work. When a bin was full, an expediter rolled it away, a tugboat captain steering a vessel across the channel to the banks of the next assembly line, where the collars would be attached to the shirts.
Sharon Wilson sat at a serger sewing machine in the middle of the first river of workers, working on a batch of red shirts and sending red lint swirling up to join the cloud hovering above her, and never slowing, never stopping, because time was money and money was important.
Sharon was joining shoulder seams today. Yesterday she had hemmed, and tomorrow she might be back in the screen printing section, printing the popular image of the moon's first lunar base on hundreds of shirt fronts.
On wintry days like this one, Sharon shivered from the cold wind seeping in through the cracked windows, and her chapped fingers ached as she kept them moving: gripping, turning, and pulling at the separate pieces until they were joined at the shoulder. Pay was based on production and she needed money, as much money as she could possibly earn in a nine-hour day with a half-hour break for lunch. Pick up a single back from her lapful of shirt backs. Drop it atop the stack of shirt fronts stacked on the board to the left of the serger. Lift the entire shirt. Feed the material across the needle plate. Press the foot pedal. Keep going. Don't stop. Pull the other shoulder together and feed through. Wrap the threads around to cut. Toss the completed shirt onto the board behind the serger with shoulders toward the machine. Repeat. Her fingers moved faster than she could think, and she rocked back and then forward rhythmically, with the hum of the sewing machine motor fading to a blur of music within her mind.
She paused occasionally to brush material into the table's fist-sized hole, so the raw edges would slide down the chute's opening into the box beside her left leg. Sometimes she waved her hand above her head and the expediter hurried over with more work or a few more cones of thread to replace the empties. But Sharon never slowed. She couldn't afford to. A broken thread meant stopping work to rethread the needle and she could sew a dozen shirts in the time it took for that effort. Piecework employees don't watch the clock; they count their pieces. Sharon coughed the dry, hacking cough of someone who has spent too much time in a lint-filled factory and not enough time outside breathing fresh air; but she never once paused to cover her mouth, even when her body jerked with coughing spasms. Time was money and she was afraid to lose even a moment's production.
High above her head, but occasionally within her line of sight as she stood up to tie a bundle of shirts, she could see a sparrow flying through the rafters above the cloud of lint. It crashed from one age-tinted blue window to another, desperate to escape.
Just like me.
She removed the tag for shoulder seaming from the bundle's work ticket and added it to the rows of tags already attached to her daily worksheet. Each tag represented a small amount of money. Too small.
I've got to get out of here.
At quitting time, the workers lined up by the air hose to await the opportunity to blow away the dusting of lint from their hair, their arms, and their clothing. Sharon moved the air hose over her graying blonde ponytail, down the factory-second shirt she'd bought in the company store last Wednesday, over the faded blue jeans worn thin, and a brief, final blast at her scuffed tennis shoes. She sneezed and blew her nose into her faded white handkerchief. Every color of fabric she'd worked with today was on that cloth.
This cannot be good for me.
Sharon dropped her daily worksheet into the bin and stepped out into the biting, fume-filled winter air. Above, she could barely find the pale moon in the grayness of the early evening sky. It ducked behind the clouds, vanishing as thoroughly as her own lost dreams.
I do not want to be here. I want to be up there with Marcia.
Sharon pulled her gray wool coat tighter and walked across the gravel parking lot to her rusting Chevy. She started the engine and waited for the car to warm up while others drove off in their nightly race to depart. A single route led to their escape: up the hill, past the stop sign where only a few people turned left or right, and over the railroad track to Greenfield's main road. She waited for everyone else to leave and stared up at the moon with its hint of betrayed promise that was really her own failure to prevail.
* * * *
“I'm going to be an astronaut when I grow up,” she had proclaimed on her tenth birthday.
“That's stupid!” Jimmy never did let her keep her enthusiasm about anything for long.
“Is not!"
“Is so.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Only boys can be astronauts."
Sharon felt her dream slipping through her fingers and fought to keep it from escaping like so many others had before. “Mom! Jimmy says girls can't be astronauts."
“Course they can't.” He picked up their copy of LIFE magazine. “Look at the pictures. They're all men. Besides, it's one step for mankind, not womankind."
Tears welled up in her eyes.
“I guess maybe you could marry an astronaut someday,” he added. He looked up and pretended to study her. “Nah. No one would ever want to marry a dog-face like you."
Their mom grounded her for a week after they got back from the doctor's office. Jimmy said it was just a lucky punch and he knew it wasn't really broken even before the doctor saw it; Sharon was just a girl and girls couldn't really hit hard enough to break a boy's nose.
Their mother made Jimmy wash the dishes that evening. Sharon got to sit in her bedroom, listening to her mom explain the true facts of life.
Girls couldn't be astronauts or doctors or anything interesting. Yes, there was old Miss Mitchell, but look what happened to her.
Sharon could go to a nice church-sponsored college if she didn't change her mind and get married before then, but she shouldn't think about going to one of those sinful co-educational colleges where she'd meet people of different races and beliefs and all sorts of other dreadful things.
Sharon could find all she could possibly want at one of the better church colleges. After all, that was where her parents had met.
Now off to bed.
* * * *
“I hope you're happy now, Mother.” Sharon spoke the words aloud and turned the radio on to drown out the sound of her own thoughts.
The car was just beginning to warm up when she reached the lone remaining grocery store
in their little town and checked in for her shift on her second job, working one of the three checkout lanes of Schultz's Market.
Ellen was waiting when Sharon arrived and her voice was as fatigued as her expression. “Can you work an extra hour tonight?"
Sharon managed a tired smile. “Yes.” The kids were grown and gone; her husband, the necessity her mother had insisted no woman could live without, had traded her in for a younger model without so much as a thought about how a full-time homemaker like herself could survive without any job skills.
The children had drifted away like deadwood floating downstream in Brandywine Creek. They had no dreams. No ambitions. Just like her husband that way.
Maybe it's better never to dream. You don't have to live with failure.
Sharon spent the next five hours keying in items on the store's antique system, telling the customers the totals, resolving disputes over sale items, putting things back that people had changed their minds about buying, bagging up their purchases, and then sending customers off with a smile no matter what they had said to her earlier.
She didn't mind standing after nine hours of sitting and rocking to and fro with the rhythm of the assembly line; but the hours grew long and the people more irritable with each request until her time ended and she could finally escape into the night air.
She stared up past wisps of feathery clouds to see the moon still glowing impossibly far away. Beyond the reach of mortal men; certainly beyond the reach of this mortal woman.
She remembered her high school counselor, Mr. Carrico, whose bald head shone as brightly as the moon above.
“Calculus? But you don't need that to get into college."
“Wouldn't I be better prepared for college if I took a calculus course?"
She hated the look of bewilderment that spread across his face. It reminded her so much of her own relatives’ reactions to her interests.
Strange Horizons, July 2002 Page 10