Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  Oh, yeah. Curiouser and curiouser. I look up and see that the light has changed and nod at the road ahead. She turns to start the car rolling again, woodenly staring ahead of her.

  As Elise drives I sit there with the incriminating items on my lap. It’s a bit embarrassing. I’m tempted to put the recorder and notebook back under the seat, despite my curiosity.

  She’s driving slowly now, concentrating on the road. At this rate it will be a while before we arrive. Elise doesn’t appear to be watching so I slip on the headphones and start the player. There is a faint hissing as the tape leader passes the heads. I settle down and close my eyes. After months of avoiding anything that even vaguely resembles “highbrow” music, it might be nice to hear anything Elise might choose to call classical, even if it’s just a violin rendition of “Yellow Submarine.”

  There is the sound of a phonograph needle coming down. Then gently, a piano begins to play. Before the third note is struck my back is a mass of goose bumps and my breath is frozen in my chest…a wave of alienation overwhelms me…I cannot move, even to turn the machine off.

  The Fourth Concerto.

  Beethoven.

  It’s the von Karajan production I’ve listened to a thousand times.

  The Fourth Concerto. It was the last piece performed by the group orchestra just before we broke up to board the Arks. Parmin had specifically requested it.

  I protested. I was out of practice. But he would have his way, always. And Janie…(Gray eyes laughing over a silver flute …) she insisted as well. During those last two weeks, while we waited for the last ship parts, we practiced.

  I can feel them now, the keys. The crafty idiosyncracies of that old Steinway. The loving clarity that could be coaxed from her. And in the orchestra, Janie’s flute was like a soft unjealous wind, forgiving me the infidelity of this other great love…

  Out of practice or not, it was like nothing else—that last night on Earth—except, perhaps, the glory of flying.

  Parmin was very kind afterward, though I don’t imagine I’ll ever know what our benefactor really thought of the performance. His was the Ark that rose first. The one bound for far Andromeda. The only one, I think, that got away.

  The others? Three I know were tracked and destroyed. Two others They claimed to have found. I believe them.

  Did any other survivors make it back here, to hide like rats among people who have no idea what happened in secret in their own skies?

  We left after a night of Beethoven, a fleet. We won a battle in space and then I watched the Arks veer off, one by one, like seeds blown free from a stem, scattered by the wind.

  I returned alone, like the Ancient Mariner, with a ship filled with corpses and an albatross of terror and guilt dragging at my neck.

  * * * *

  “… Human pilot! Surrender, please! We have already killed far more than we can bear! Do not force us to add to the toll! The traitors who aided Parmin have been rounded up. All the other blockade runners are captured or destroyed!”

  The voice lists the colonies besides Canaan they have captured. A voice filled with compassion and sensitivity, so similar to Parmin’s that I almost cry…

  But the bridge is filled with the stench of burning wiring and decaying bodies…I send the ship into a screaming dive Earthward, evading their best interceptors with tricks that I had learned far too late…My seat buckles underneath me, but somehow I hold on to the controls…My nostrils are filled with the odors of death.

  “We realize that your conspiracy was kept secret from the vast majority of Earthlings. That is good. Can you not agree that, having failed, you don’t want to see your fellows suffer prematurely? They don’t have to find out about their quarantine for another two hundred years! Let them dream on, of an infinite playground in space! Surrender now, and spare the children below their dream!”

  So compassionate! The murdering alien hypocrite! Jailor! Zookeeper!

  I shout the hateful words and his image on the screen recoils…until the ionization trail of my reentry vaporizes the picture in a cloud of static.

  The Ark screams…I scream…

  * * * *

  They tried to shoot me down, like They shot down Walter in his modified F-15 that afternoon on Canaan, when I was so late getting the Ark into the air.

  There were too many of Them anyway. I told myself that a thousand times as the fight ravelled all the way back to Earth. It took time to get the Ark warmed up, and when They did what we never had expected—bombed the noncombatants in the settlement—I tarried to take on gassed and wounded survivors.

  I watched Them fry the house I had just built. Janie had been in the cellar, packing preserves for the winter…

  How did they find us so soon? We had counted on more time. How did it happen?

  * * * *

  Smoldering wreckage steams within a new-crater on an Oregon mountainside. Fires spread through the forest in all directions from a reawakened volcano.

  I set charges in what remains and run…and run and run and run, but I cannot outrun the wind. It envelopes me from behind and chokes me with the stench of burning flesh…I run from the smell…I run…

  * * * *

  There is a tear on my cheek. The soloist enters his cadenza and it is more sweet and sad than I can bear. The headphones slip off and slide from my lap to the floor, followed by the tape player. The sounds of the Fourth Concerto die away into muffled silence.

  I’m sure the Big Eye will understand. I cannot afford music.

  The blessed numbness returns in force. I open my eyes to look at my hands. They seem miles away. Yet I can make out every wrinkle, every pore and crevice. I glance at Elise. She drives slowly, her expression stony.

  My hands fall on something cool and smooth. I look down and see the notebook that I had forgotten.

  * * * *

  There have been times in my life when the Big Eye has come down off my shoulder to actually meddle around. Strange things have happened which I could not explain, like finding a live black rabbit on my doorstep at midnight, the evening I finished reading Watership Down. Or when I was considering giving up flying, and found that a sparrow hawk was perched on my windowsill, looking at me, staring at me until I found my confidence again.

  I’ve been a scientist, too. But science doesn’t welcome the Big Surprises. Only little ones that can be comfortably chewed and swallowed. When the unknown comes in out of the borderline and grabs you by the jewels, that is when the Universe has chosen to gently remind you that a change of perspective is due. It is showing you who is boss.

  Science tells us not to expect personal messages from the Cosmos, either. But they happen, sometimes.

  The notebook is smooth and cool.

  Are you friend or foe? What shall I do with you, symbol in my lap?

  In a rush the panicky commands go out to my body. Get up! Throw the cursed book down. Open the door and jump out. Start running. Start another lie…life in another town.

  MOVE!

  My treasonous body does not obey. The mutiny is shocking.

  Okay…we’ll try something else. I command these hands to open this book so that I can look inside.

  With a sense of betrayal I watch as they obey. The scratchy paper riffles as my fingers pick a place at random.

  By the moonlight there is no mistake. She wrote this. There’s no mythical “friend” who left a notebook in her car. I never noticed before,but Elise has lovely penmanship, even if the lines do waver a bit, trembling across the page.

  * * * *

  It’s ridiculous, really. I moved out here to get some peace and quiet. To get a summer job that didn’t feel like a Summer Job—and to get away from that crazy rat race of briefs, moot courts, and exams. I thought it would be amusing to live in the hicks for a while.

  I realize now that I hated law school! Oh, not the learning. That was wonderful. But all the rest—the backbiting, the atmosphere of cynicism and suspicion. Ideals got you nothing but derisive laughter.
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  All those using, abusing men, so glib about respecting modern women, then turning and cutting them first chance. As if we “modern women” were any more kind, of course.

  I’m never going back. Here it’s peaceful and quiet. I’ve landed a job I wanted more than that damned clerkship. Can you imagine? It’s tending and selling plants! I’m beginning to see why some Eastern peoples put gardening on a higher level than politics. I love it.

  These are real people, not money- and status-grubbing yuppies. I’m terrified they’ll reject me if they find out I’m a refugee from the world of polyester and gold chains.

  Especially my new man. He doesn’t talk much. I still haven’t been able to define what it is that draws me so to him. But I’m desperate not to drive him off.

  I think, maybe, he’s the most real thing I’ve ever had to hold on to.

  * * * *

  Two minutes ago I was surprised. Now it’s as if I’ve known this all along. I flip to a later entry…

  * * * *

  When am I going to learn? How many women have ruined their lives trying to change their men into something they’re not?

  He is gentle and kind and strong—such a lovable grouch. So what if he hates just about everything artistic or scientific. What has art and science ever done for me, anyway?

  Oh, I’m so confused! What is this indefinable feeling I have about him? Why do I keep risking it all by trying to change him?

  I think I’m actually starting to relax, sometimes. Whatever he’s doing for me, I can’t surrender it now. Better to give up this journal, the other hidden indulgences, rather than take any more chances…

  * * * *

  So. Another refugee, albeit from a more mundane sort of crisis. Oh, Elise, I’m sorry I never knew.

  I’m glad I never knew, for I would have run away.

  I understand now why she encouraged that bright young idiot Alan Fowler to hang around. Her patient probing worked better than she’ll ever know. Along with a series of incredible coincidences. And time.

  The car is slowing down, coming to a stop. I look up and see we’re on a side street a few blocks from home.

  She is looking at me, shaking her head slowly, hopelessly. Her lips tremble and there are thin pulsing rivulets on her cheeks.

  I let the book slip from my hands and close my eyes to breathe deeply of the night. I can smell her from a few feet away. She comes to me as musk and perfumes and sawdust from the Yankee.

  I can also smell the dampness of the streets, and the pine forest south of town.

  What else? Ah, yes. There is salt water. I swear. I can even smell the ocean from here.

  She is crying silently, head lowered.

  What am I going to do with you, Elise? How can I thank you, now that Chuck is gone, for taking care of him while I healed? How can I make you understand when I go away, as I must very soon.

  I reach over and pull her to me.

  It doesn’t matter, Lise. It doesn’t matter because I knew it all along. From the very first, I suppose, a part of me knew you’d be trying, without knowing exactly what you were doing, to summon me back. Don’t cry because you succeeded!

  I must spend a long time comforting her—holding her and gentling away the fear. I can see Andromeda faintly through the open window behind her, a stroke of light against the sparkling of the stars. I whisper to her and can feel the planet turn slowly beneath us.

  * * * *

  I think I’m finished subvocalizing, this evening. It’s not necessary anymore. Doors are opening. Long unused feelings and ideas are stepping out.

  The opening traces of a plan are forming. They must have been gestating for months…designs for a lockpick for a very large cage. Lessons to be taught to Old Joe Clark.

  There’s a lot of work ahead, some of it quite dangerous. I’m not sure exactly how to get started and it may wind up taking me a long, long way from here.

  But I promise you, Lise—if you want me to—I’ll take you with me when I go.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1986 by David Brin.

  LOIS McMASTER BUJOLD

  (1949– )

  While raising her (then-small) children, Lois McMaster Bujold turned first to writing fanfiction and then to writing SF and fantasy. The result has been five Hugo Awards, three Nebulas, and a string of genre best-sellers. Bujold is best known for her Barrayar stories, featuring a disabled young nobleman, Miles Vorkosigan, living in a warrior culture. The blend of military-tinged SF with a host of issues that don’t normally appear in military fiction (and an appealing character who definitely isn’t the norm for military fiction) has led to both critical and commercial success.

  Born in Ohio, Bujold dabbled with writing while at the Ohio State University, but moved away from it; she became a pharmacy technician at the Ohio State University Hospitals, until she quit to start her family. At that point she began writing seriously, selling a few stories to magazines before Jim Baen bought her first three novels, her first novel, Shards of Honor (the first Barrayar novel), The Warrior’s Apprentice (Miles Vorkosigan’s first appearance), and Ethan of Athos, publishing all three in 1986. She won a Nebula for her fourth novel, Falling Free (1988), and “The Mountains of Mourning” won both the Hugo and Nebula. Since then she’s written both SF and an ongoing fantasy series, both dealing with nontraditional themes such as disability. She co-edited the anthology Women at War (1995) with Roland Green, and has also written nonfiction related to SF.

  She now lives in Minnesota, where she won the 1999 Minnesota Book Award.

  THE MOUNTAINS OF MOURNING, by Lois McMaster Bujold

  First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 1989

  Miles heard the woman weeping as he was climbing the hill from the long lake. He hadn’t dried himself after his swim, as the morning already promised shimmering heat. Lake water trickled cool from his hair onto his naked chest and back, more annoyingly down his legs from his ragged shorts. His leg braces chafed on his damp skin as he pistoned up the faint trail through the scrub, military double-time. His feet squished in his old wet shoes. He slowed curiously as he became conscious of the voices.

  The woman’s voice grated with grief and exhaustion. “Please, lord, please. All I want is m’justice.…”

  The front gate guard’s voice was irritated and embarrassed. “I’m no lord. C’mon, get up, woman. Go back to the village and report it at the district magistrate’s office.”

  “I tell you, I just came from there!” The woman did not move from her knees as Miles emerged from the bushes and paused to take in the tableau across the paved road. “The magistrate’s not to return for weeks, weeks. I walked four days to get here. I only have a little money.…” A desperate hope rose in her voice, and her spine bent and straightened as she scrabbled in her skirt pocket and held out her cupped hands to the guard. “A mark and twenty pence, it’s all I have, but—”

  The exasperated guard’s eye fell on Miles, and he straightened abruptly, as if afraid Miles might suspect him of being tempted by so pitiful a bribe. “Be off, woman!” he snapped.

  Miles quirked an eyebrow, and limped across the road to the main gate. “What’s all this about, Corporal?” he inquired easily.

  The guard corporal was on loan from Imperial Security, and wore the high-necked dress greens of the Barrayaran Service. He was sweating and uncomfortable in the bright morning light of this southern district, but Miles fancied he’d be boiled before he’d undo his collar on this post. His accent was not local; he was a city man from the capital, where a more-or-less efficient bureaucracy absorbed such problems as the one on her knees before him.

  The woman, now, was local and more than local—she had backcountry written all over her. She was younger than her strained voice had at first suggested. Tall, fever-red from her weeping, with stringy blond hair hanging down across a ferret-thin face and protuberant gray eyes. If she were cleaned up, fed, rested, happy and confident, she might achieve a near-prettiness, but she
was far from that now, despite her remarkable figure. Lean but full-breasted—no, Miles revised himself as he crossed the road and came up to the gate. Her bodice was all blotched with dried milk leaks, though there was no baby in sight. Only temporarily full-breasted. Her worn dress was factory-woven cloth, but handsewn, crude and simple. Her feet were bare, thickly callused, cracked and sore.

  “No problem,” the guard assured Miles. “Go away,” he hissed to the woman.

  She lurched off her knees and sat stonily.

  “I’ll call my sergeant”—the guard eyed her, wary—“and have her removed.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Miles.

  She stared up at Miles from her cross-legged position, clearly not knowing whether to identify him as hope or not. His clothing, what there was of it, offered her no clue as to what he might be. The rest of him was all too plainly displayed. He jerked up his chin and smiled thinly. Too-large head, too-short neck, back thickened with its crooked spine, crooked legs with their brittle bones too-often broken, drawing the eye in their gleaming chromium braces. Were the hill woman standing, the top of his head would barely be even with the top of her shoulder. He waited in boredom for her hand to make the backcountry hex sign against evil mutations, but it only jerked and clenched into a fist.

  “I must see my lord Count,” she said to an uncertain point halfway between Miles and the guard. “It’s my right. My daddy, he died in the Service. It’s my right.”

  “Prime Minister Count Vorkosigan,” said the guard stiffly, “is on his country estate to rest. If he were working, he’d be back in Vorbarr Sultana.” The guard looked as if he wished he were back in Vorbarr Sultana.

  The woman seized the pause. “You’re only a city man. He’s my count. My right.”

  “What do you want to see Count Vorkosigan for?” asked Miles patiently.

  “Murder,” growled the girl/woman. The security guard spasmed slightly. “I want to report a murder.”