by Ellen Datlow
One afternoon years later, during her final semester at the women’s college in Milledgeville, Mary O’Connor sat at her desk in the Corinthian office, leafing through the Atlanta paper, wondering whether the new copy of the McMurray Hatchery catalog (“All Flocks Blood Tested”) would be waiting in the mailbox when she got home. Then an article deep inside the paper arrested her attention.
Datelined Colorado, it was about a headless chicken named Mike. Mike had survived a Sunday-morning beheading two months previous. Each evening Mike’s owners plopped pellets of feed down his stumpy neck with an eyedropper and went to bed with few illusions, and each morning Mike once again gurgled up the dawn.
She read and reread the clipping with the deepest satisfaction. It reminded her of her childhood, and in particular of the day she first learned the nature of grace.
She folded the clipping in half and in half and in half again until it was furled like Aunt Pittypat’s fan and sheathed it in an envelope that she addressed to Father Leggett, care of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah. Teaching a headless chicken to walk backward: that would be real evangelism. On a fresh sheet of the stationery her grandmother had given her two Christmases ago, she crossed out the ornate engraved “M” at the top and wrote in an even more ornate “F,” as if she were flunking herself with elegance. Beneath it she wrote:
Dear Father Leggett,
I saw this and thought of you.
Happy Easter,
Flannery (nee Mary) O’Connor
When Miss Ingrid’s successor brought him the letter, Father Leggett was sitting in his office, eating a spinach salad and reading the Vegetarian News. He was considered a good priest though an eccentric one, and no longer was invited to so many parishioners’ homes at mealtime. He glanced at the note, then at the clipping. The photo alone made him upset his glass of carrot juice. He threw clipping, note and envelope into the trash can, mopped up the spill with a napkin, fisted the damp cloth and took deep chest-expanding breaths until he felt calmer. He allowed himself a glance around the room, half-expecting the flutter of wings, the brush of the thing with feathers.
ANDY DUNCAN
For years I had known that one of my favorite fiction writers had a brief celebrity as a child when she taught a pet chicken to walk backward, a feat that was captured by newsreel cameras. After she achieved more lasting fame as an adult, she liked to joke that everything since the chicken had been downhill. (I think she was joking.) I knew I’d use this in a story one day, but the premise didn’t occur to me until Michael Bishop was putting together A Cross of Centuries, a fiction anthology about alternate Jesuses. Mike asked whether I had a Jesus story, and immediately into my head popped this author’s childhood chicken, which I hadn’t thought about in years, and with it came the realization that the chicken was, of course, Jesus Christ—in some sense. I therefore owe thanks to Mike for the existence of this story, though I didn’t finish it in time to make his book (which was published in 2007 by Thunder’s Mouth Press, and is excellent).
I also owe thanks to Penny Crall, a seminarian who mentioned Matthew 23:37 in passing one day during our book-discussion group at the Osborne Newman Center in Frostburg, Maryland, not realizing how badly I needed a poultry-related scripture at that point; to Gwenda Bond, Gavin Grant, Kelly Link, and Christopher Rowe, whose group reaction to my title on a Glasgow bridge gave me the courage to go on; to Jonathan Strahan, for selecting this as the first story in the first volume of his Eclipse series; to my wonderful audience at Capclave 2007, who first heard the finished version; to John Kessel, who taught me that the really serious stories are the funniest, and vice versa; and to my wife, Sydney, as always my first and best reader.
And now, too much information: What happens to the priest at the climax, in the chicken yard, happened to me as a child, on my last venture into my grandmother’s chicken yard in Batesburg, South Carolina. Writing that scene enabled me to relive the experience from the safe remove of thirty-five years, and as a result, I’m over it now, I think.
NEBULA AWARD, BEST NOVELLA
FOUNTAIN OF AGE
NANCY KRESS
Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve SF novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain. The novel was based on a Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name; the series then continued with Beggars and Choosers and Beggars Ride. The trilogy explores questions of genetic engineering, social structure, and what society’s “haves” owe its “have-nots.” In 2008 three new Kress books appeared: a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press), and two novels, Steal Across the Sky (Tor) and Dogs (Tachyon).
Kress’s short fiction has won four Nebulas and a Hugo, and her novel Probability Space won the 2003 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her work has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Rochester, New York, with the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
I had her in a ring. In those days, you carried around pieces of a person. Not like today.
A strand of hair, a drop of blood, a lipsticked kiss on paper—those things were real. You could put them in a locket or pocket case or ring, you could carry them around, you could 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 347 ½3/09 1:19:44 AM fondle them. None of this hologram stuff. Who can treasure laser shadows? Or the nanotech “re-creations”—even worse. Fah. Did the Master of the Universe “re-create” the world after it got banged up a little? Never. He made do with the original, like a sensible person.
So I had her in a ring. And I had the ring for forty-two years before it was eaten by the modern world. Literally eaten, so tell me where is the justice in that?
And oh, she was so beautiful! Not genemod misshapen like these modern girls, with their waists so skinny and their behinds huge and those repulsive breasts. No, she was natural, a real woman, a goddess. Black hair wild as stormy water, olive skin, green eyes. I remember the exact shade of green. Not grass, not emerald, not moss. Her own shade. I remember. I—
“Grampops?”
—met her while I was on shore leave on Cyprus. The Mid-East war had just ended, one of the wars, who can keep them all straight? I met Daria in a taverna and we had a week together. Nobody will ever know what glory that week was. She was a nice girl, too, even if she was a . . . People do what they must to survive. Nobody knows that better than me. Daria—
“Grampops!”
—gave me a lock of hair and a kiss pressed on paper. Back then I kept them in a cheap plastolux bubble, all I could afford, but later I had the hair and tiny folded paper set into a ring. Much later, when I had money and Miriam had died and—
“Dad!”
And that’s how it started up again. With my son, my grand-children. Life just never knows when enough is enough.
“Dad, the kids spoke to you. Twice.”
“So this creates an obligation for me to answer?”
My son Geoffrey sighs. The boys—six and eight, what business does a fifty-five-year-old man have with such young kids, but Gloria is his second wife—have vanished into the hall. They come, they go. We sit on a Sunday afternoon in my room—a nice room, it should be for what I pay—in the Silver Star Retirement Home. Every Sunday Geoff comes, we sit, we stare at each other. Sometimes Gloria comes, sometimes the boys, sometimes not. The whole thing is a strain.
Then the kids burst back through the doorway, and this time something follows them in.
“Reuven, what the shit is that?”
Geoffrey says, irritated, “Don’t curse in front of the children, and—”
“ ‘Shit’ is cursing? Since when?”
“—and it’s ‘Bobby,’ not ‘Reuven.’ ”
“It’s ‘zaydeh,’ not ‘Grampops,’ and I could show you what cursing is. Get that thing away from me!”
“Isn’t it astronomical?” Reuven says. “I
just got it!”
The thing is trying to climb onto my lap. It’s not like their last pet, the pink cat that could jump to the ceiling. Kangaroo genes in it, such foolishness. This one isn’t even real, it’s a ’bot of some kind, like those retro metal dogs the Japanese were so fascinated with seventy years ago. Only this one just sort of suggests a dog, with sleek silver lines that sometimes seem to disappear.
“It’s got stealth coating!” Eric shouts. “You can’t see it!”
I can see it, but only in flashes when the light hits the right way. The thing leaps onto my lap and I flap my arms at it and try to push it off, except that by then it’s not there. Maybe.
Reuven yells, like this is an explanation, “It’s got microprocessors!”
Geoff says in his stiff way, “The ’bot takes digital images of whatever is behind it and continuously transmits them in holo to the front, so that at any distance greater than—”
“This is what you spend my money on?”
He says stiffly, “My money now. Some of it, anyway.”
“Not because you earned it, boychik.”
Geoffrey’s thin lips go thinner. He hates it when I remind him who made the money. I hate it when he forgets.
“Dad, why do you have to talk like that? All that affected folksy stuff—you never talked it when I was growing up, and it’s hardly your actual background, is it? So why?”
For Geoffrey, this is a daring attack. I could tell him the reason, but he wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t understand. Not how this “folksy” speech started, or why, or what use it was to me. Not even how a habit can settle in after it’s no use, and you cling to it because otherwise you might lose who you were, even if who you were wasn’t so great. How could Geoff understand a thing like that? He’s only fifty-five.
Suddenly Eric shouts, “Rex is gone!” Both boys barrel out the door of my room. I see Mrs. Petrillo inching down the hall beside her robo-walker. She shrieks as they run past her, but at least they don’t knock her over.
“Go after them, Geoff, before somebody gets hurt!”
“They won’t hurt anybody, and neither will Rex.”
“And you know this how? A building full of old people, tottering around like cranes on extra stilts, and you think—”
“Calm down, Dad, Rex has built-in object avoidance and—”
“You’re telling me about software? Me, boychik?”
Now he’s really mad. I know because he goes quiet and stiff. Stiffer, if that’s possible. The man is a carbon-fiber rod.
“It’s not like you actually developed any software, Dad. You only stole it. It was I who took the company legitimate and furthermore—”
But that’s when I notice that my ring is gone.
Daria was Persian, not Greek or Turkish or Arab. If you think that made it any easier for me to look for her, you’re crazy. I went back after my last tour of duty ended and I searched, how I searched. Nobody in Cyprus knew her, had ever seen her, would admit she existed. No records: “destroyed in the war.”
Our last morning we’d gone down to a rocky little beach. We’d left Nicosia the day after we met to go to this tiny coastal town that the war hadn’t ruined too much. On the beach we made love with the smooth pebbles pocking our tushes, first hers and then mine. Daria cut a lock of her wild hair and pressed a kiss onto paper. Little pink wildflowers grew in the scrub grass. We both cried. I swore I’d come back.
And I did, but I couldn’t find her. One more prostitute on Cyprus—who tracked such people? Eventually I had to give up. I went back to Brooklyn, put the hair and kiss—such red lipstick, today they all wear gold, they look like flaking lamps—in the plastolux. Later, I hid the bubble with my Army uniform, where Miriam couldn’t find it. Poor Miriam—by her own lights, she was a good wife, a good mother. It’s not her fault she wasn’t Daria. Nobody was Daria.
Until now, of course, when hundreds of people are, or at least partly her. Hundreds? Probably thousands. Anybody who can afford it.
“My ring! My ring is gone!”
“Your ring?”
“My ring!” Surely even Geoffrey has noticed that I’ve worn a ring day and night for the last forty-two years?
He noticed. “It must have fallen off when you were flapping your arms at Rex.”
This makes sense. I’m skinnier now, arms like coat hangers, and the ring is—was—loose. I feel around on my chair: nothing. Slowly I lower myself to the floor to search.
“Careful, Dad!” Geoffrey says and there’s something bad in his voice. I peer up at him, and I know. I just know.
“It’s that . . . that dybbuk! That ’bot!”
He says, “It vacuums up small objects. But don’t worry, it keeps them in an internal depository. . . . Dad, what is that ring? Why is it so important?”
Now his voice is suspicious. Forty-two years it takes for him to become suspicious, a good show of why he could never have succeeded in my business. But I knew that when he was seven. And why should I care now? I’m a very old man, I can do what I want.
I say, “Help me up . . . no, not like that, you want me to tear something? The ring is mine, is all. I want it back. Now, Geoffrey.”
He sets me in my chair and leaves, shaking his head. It’s a long time before he comes back. I watch Tony DiParia pass by in his powerchair. I wave at Jennifer Tamlin, who is waiting for a visit from her kids. They spare her twenty minutes every other month. I study Nurse Kate’s ass, which is round and firm as a good pumpkin. When Geoffrey comes back with Eric and Reuven, I take one look at his face and I know.
“The boys found the incinerator chute,” Geoffrey says, guilty and already resenting me for it, “and they thought it would be fun to empty Rex’s depository in it. . . . Eric! Bobby! Tell Grampops you’re sorry!”
They both mumble something. Me, I’m devastated—and then I’m not.
“It’s all right,” I say to the boys, waving my hand like I’m Queen Monica of England. “Don’t worry about it!”
They look confused. Geoffrey looks suddenly wary. Me, I feel like my heart might split down the seam. Because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get another lock of hair and another kiss from Daria. Because now, of course, I know where she is. The entire world knows where she is.
“Down, Rex!” Eric shouts, but I don’t see the stupid ’bot. I’m not looking. I see just the past, and the future, and all at once and for the first time in decades, they even look like there’s a tie, a bright cord, between them.
The Silver Star Retirement Home is for people who have given up. You want to go on actually living, you go to a renewal center. Or to Sequene. But if you’ve outlived everything and everybody that matters to you and you’re ready to check out, or you don’t have the money for a renewal center, you go to Silver Star and wait to die.
I’m there because I figured it’s time for me to go, enough is enough already, only Geoffrey left for me and I never liked him all that much. But I have lots of money. Tons of money. So much money that the second I put one foot out the door of the Home, the day after Geoffrey’s visit, the feds are on me like cold on space. Just like the old days, almost it makes me nostalgic.
“Max Feder,” one says, and it isn’t a question. He’s built with serious augments, I haven’t forgotten how to tell. Like he needs them against an old man like me. “I’m Agent Joseph Alcozer and this is Agent Shawna Blair.” She would have been a beauty if she didn’t have that deformed genemod figure, like a wasp, and the wasp’s sting in her eyes.
I breathe in the artificially sweet reconstituted air of a Brooklyn Dome summer. Genemod flowers bloom sedately in manicured beds. Well-behaved flowers, they remind me of Geoffrey. From my powerchair I say, “What can I do for you, Agent Alcozer?” while Nurse Kate, who’s not the deepest carrot in the garden, looks baffled, glancing back and forth from me to the fed.
“You can explain to us the recent large deposits of money from the Feder Group into your personal account.”
“And
I should do this why?”
“Just to satisfy my curiosity,” Alcozer says, and it’s pretty much the truth. They have the right to monitor all my finances in perpetuity as a result of that unfortunate little misstep back in my forties. Six-to-ten, of which I served not quite five in Themis Federal Justice Center. Also as a result of the Economic Security Act, which kicked in even earlier, right after the Change-Over. And I have the right to tell them to go to hell.
Almost I get a taste of the old thrill, the hunt-and-evade, but not really. I’m too old, and I have something else on my mind. Besides, Alcozer doesn’t really expect answers. He just wants me to know they’re looking in my direction.
“Talk to my lawyer. I’m sure you know where to find him,” I say and power on down to the waiting car.