Piggy turned pink and began stuttering.
Russ reached a hand into his pocket, pulled out a chunk of foil-wrapped hash, and a native tin pipe with a carved coral bowl. The kind of thing the local beggar kids sold for twenty-nine cents. “Anybody want to get stoned?” he asked suavely.
“You bastard!” Piggy laughed. “You told me you were out!”
Russ shrugged. “I lied.” He lit the pipe carefully, drew in, passed it to Donna. She took it from his fingers, felt how cold they were to her touch, looked up over the pipe and saw his face, thin and ascetic, eyelids closed, pale and Christlike through the blue smoke. She loved him intensely in that instant and wished she could sacrifice herself for his happiness. The pipe’s stem was overwarm, almost hot, between her lips. She drew in deep.
The smoke was raspy in her throat, then tight and swirling in her lungs. It shot up into her head, filled it with buzzing harmonics: the air, the sky, the rock behind her back all buzzing, ballooning her skull outward in a visionary rush that forced wide open first her eyes and then her mouth. She choked and spasmodically coughed. More smoke than she could imagine possibly holding in her lungs gushed out into the universe.
“Hey, watch that pipe!” Piggy snatched it from her distant fingers. They tingled with pinpricks of pain like tiny stars in the darkness of her flesh. “You were spilling the hash!” The evening light was abuzz with energy, the sky swarming up into her eyes. Staring out into the darkening air, the moon rising below her and the stars as close and friendly as those in a children’s book illustration, she felt at peace, detached from worldly cares. “Tell us about the monastery, Russ,” she said, in the same voice she might have used a decade before to ask her father for a story.
“Yeah, tell us about the monastery, Unca Russ,” Piggy said, but with jeering undertones. Piggy was always sucking up to Russ, but there was tension there too, and his sarcastic little challenges were far from rare. It was classic beta male jealousy, straight out of Primate Psychology 101.
“It’s very old,” Russ said. “Before the sufis, before Mohammed, even before the Zoroastrians crossed the gulf, the native mystics would renounce the world and go to live in cliffs on the Edge of the World. They cut the steps down, and once down, they never went back up again.”
“How did they eat then?” Piggy asked skeptically.
“They wished their food into existence. No, really! It was all in their creation myth: In the beginning all was Chaos and Desire. The world was brought out of Chaos—by which they meant unformed matter—by Desire, or Will. It gets a little inconsistent after that, because it wasn’t really a religion, but more like a system of magic. They believed that the world wasn’t complete yet, that for some complicated reason it could never be complete. So there’s still traces of the old Chaos lingering just beyond the Edge, and it can be tapped by those who desire it strongly enough, if they have distanced themselves from the things of the world. These mystics used to come down here to meditate against the moon and work miracles.
“This wasn’t sophisticated stuff like the Tantric monks in Tibet or anything, remember. It was like a primitive form of animism, a way to force the universe to give you what you wanted. So the holy men would come down here and they’d wish for . . . like riches, you know? Filigreed silver goblets with rubies, mounds of moonstones, elfinbone daggers sharper than Damascene steel. Only once they got them they weren’t supposed to want them. They’d just throw them over the Edge. There were these monasteries all along the cliffs. The farther from the world they were, the more spiritually advanced.”
“So what happened to the monks?”
“There was a king—Althazar? I forget his name. He was this real greedhead, started sending his tax collectors down to gather up everything the monks brought into existence. Must’ve figured, hey, the monks weren’t using them. Which as it turned out was like a real major blasphemy, and the monks got pissed. The boss mystics, all the real spiritual heavies, got together for this big confab. Nobody knows how. There’s one of the classics claims they could run sideways on the cliff just like it was the ground, but I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. So one night they all of them, every monk in the world, meditated at the same time. They chanted together, they said, It is not enough that Althazar should die, for he has blasphemed. He must suffer a doom such as has been visited on no man before. He must be unmade, uncreated, reduced to less than has ever been. And they prayed that there be no such king as Althazar, that his life and history be unmade, so that there never had been such king as Althazar.
“And he was no more.
“But so great was their yearning for oblivion that when Althazar ceased to be, his history and family as well, they were left feeling embittered and did not know why. And not knowing why, their hatred turned upon themselves, and their wish for destruction, and they too all of a single night, ceased to be.” He fell silent.
At last Piggy said, “You believe that crap?” Then, when there was no answer, “It’s none of it true, man! Got that? There’s no magic, and there never was.” Donna could see that he was really angry, threatened on some primal level by the possibility that someone he respected could even begin to believe in magic. His face got pink, the way it always did when he lost control.
“No, it’s all bullshit,” Russ said bitterly. “Like everything else.”
They passed the pipe around again. Then Donna leaned back, stared straight out, and said, “If I could wish for anything, you know what I’d wish for?”
“Bigger tits?”
She was so weary now, so pleasantly washed out, that it was easy to ignore Piggy. “I’d wish I knew what the situation was.”
“What situation?” Piggy asked. Donna was feeling langorous, not at all eager to explain herself, and she waved away the question. But he persisted. “What situation?”
“Any situation. I mean, all the time, I find myself talking with people and I don’t know what’s really going on. What games they’re playing. Why they’re acting the way they are. I wish I knew what the situation was.”
The moon floated before her, big and fat and round as a griffin’s egg, shining with power. She could feel that power washing through her, the background radiation of decayed chaos spread across the sky at a uniform three degrees Kelvin. Even now, spent and respent, a coin fingered and thinned to the worn edge of nonexistence, there was power out there, enough to flatten planets.
Staring out at that great fat boojum snark of a moon, she felt the flow of potential worlds, and within the cold silver disk of that jester’s skull, rank with magic, sensed the invisible presence of Russ’s primitive monks, men whose minds were nowhere near comprehensible to her, yet vibrated with power, existing as matrices of patterned stress, no more actual than Donald Duck, but no less powerful either. She was caught in a waking fantasy, in which the sky was full of power and all of it accessible to her. Monks sat empty handed over their wishing bowls, separated from her by the least fictions of time and reality. For an eternal instant all possibilities fanned out to either side, equally valid, no one more real than any other. Then the world turned under her, and her brain shifted back to realtime.
“Me,” Piggy said, “I just wish I knew how to get back up the stairs.”
They were silent for a moment. Then it occurred to Donna that here was the perfect opportunity to find out what was bugging Russ. If she asked cautiously enough, if the question hit him just right, if she were just plain lucky, he might tell her everything. She cleared her throat. “Russ? What do you wish?”
In the bleakest voice imaginable, Russ said, “I wish I’d never been born.”
She turned to ask him why, and he wasn’t there.
“Hey,” Donna said. “Where’d Russ go?”
Piggy looked at her oddly. “Who’s Russ?”
* * * *
It was a long trip back up. They carried the length of wooden railing between them, and every now and then Piggy said, “Hey, wasn’t this a great idea of mine? This’ll make
a swell ladder.”
“Yeah, great,” Donna would say, because he got mad when she didn’t respond. He got mad too, whenever she started to cry, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. She couldn’t even explain why she was crying, because in all the world—of all his friends, acquaintances, teachers, even his parents—she was the only one who remembered that Russ had ever existed.
The horrible thing was that she had no specific memories of him, only a vague feeling of what his presence had been like, and a lingering sense of longing and frustration.
She no longer even remembered his face.
“Do you want to go first or last?” Piggy had asked her.
When she’d replied, “Last. If I go first, you’ll stare at my ass all the way up,” he’d actually blushed. Without Russ to show off in front of, Piggy was a completely different person, quiet and not at all abusive. He even kept his language clean.
But that didn’t help, for just being in his presence was enough to force understanding on her: That his bravado was fueled by his insecurities and aspirations, that he masturbated nightly and with self-loathing, that he despised his parents and longed in vain for the least sign of love from them. That the way he treated her was the sum and total of all of this and more.
She knew exactly what the situation was.
Dear God, she prayed, let it be that I won’t have this kind of understanding when I reach the top. Or else make it so that situations won’t be so painful up there, that knowledge won’t hurt like this, that horrible secrets won’t lie under the most innocent word.
They carried their wooden burden upward, back toward the world.
* * * *
Copyright © 1989 by Michael Swanwick; this story first appeared in Full Spectrum 2.
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
(1949– )
Harry Turtledove’s first two novels, the fantasies Wereblood (1979) and Wereknight (1979), were published under the pseudonym Eric G. Iverson, since his editor didn’t think readers would believe Turtledove was his real name. Since then, things have changed a bit, with Turtledove’s alternate history novels becoming regular best-sellers. He’s also won a Hugo (for “Down in the Bottomlands,” 1994), two Sidewase Awards for alternate history, and other honors including the Italia award and the Prometheus Award.
After failing out of Cal Tech his first year, Turtledove ended up at UCLA, where he earned a PhD in Byzantine history in 1977. He supported himself as a technical writer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education while his writing career got going, finally leaving to write full-time in 1991. His skills as a Byzantine historian are very much in evidence in Turtledove’s writing, whether directly as in the fantasy Videssos Cycle (in which a Roman legion goes to a world with magic) and Basil Argyros stories (alternate histories where Muhammad became a Christian saint, preserving the Byzantine empire) or indirectly in alternate histories based on the American Civil War or set in a world where the American Revolution was averted through diplomacy. He’s also used his historical skills on hybrids of alternate history and other subgenres, such as the the best-selling Guns of the South (where racist time travelers supply the South with AK-47s and other modern weapons that allow them to win the Civil War) and WorldWar (where World War II is interrupted by an alien invasion) series.
Turtledove is married to mystery writer Laura Frankos. They have three daughters.
Although he’s best known for his alternate history, when I contacted him about a contribution for this book, Turtledove correctly pointed out that I already had plenty of alternate history in the book, but sorely needed a baseball story.
THE STAR AND THE ROCKETS, by Harry Turtledove
First published at Tor.com, November 2009
A chilly January night in Roswell. Joe Bauman has discovered that’s normal for eastern New Mexico. It gets hot here in the summer, but winters can be a son of a bitch. That Roswell’s high up—3,600 feet—only makes the cold colder. Makes the sky clearer, too. A million stars shine down on Joe.
One of those stars is his: the big red one marking the Texaco station at 1200 West Second Street. He nods to himself in slow satisfaction. He’s had a good run, a hell of a good run, here in Roswell. The way it looks right now, he’ll settle down here and run the gas station full time when his playing days are done.
Won’t be long, either. He’ll turn thirty-two in April, about when the season starts. Ballplayers, even ones like him who never come within miles of the big time, know how sharply mortal their careers are. If he doesn’t, the ache in his knees when he turns on a fastball will remind him.
He glances down at his watch, which he wears on his right wrist—he’s a lefty all the way. It’s getting close to nine o’clock. He looks up Second Street. Then he looks down the street. No traffic either way. People here make jokes about rolling up the sidewalks after the sun goes down. With maybe 20,000 people, Roswell seems plenty big and bustling to Joe. It’s a damn sight bigger than Welch, Oklahoma, the pissant village where he was born, that’s for sure.
He could close up and go home. Chances that he’ll have any more business are pretty slim. But the sign in the rectangular iron frame says open ’til midnight. He’ll stick around. You never can tell.
And it’s not as if he’s never done this before. Dorothy will be amazed if he does come home early. He’s got a TV set—a Packard Bell, just a year old—in a back room, and a beat-up rocking chair she was glad to see the last of, and a shelf with a few books in case he doesn’t feel like staring at the television. He’s got an old, humming refrigerator in there, too (he thinks of it as an icebox more often than not), with some beer. Except for a bed, all the comforts of home.
When he goes in there, he ducks to make sure he doesn’t bang his head. He’s a great big buy—six-five, maybe 235. Maybe more like 250 now, when he’s not in playing shape. Lots and lots of afternoons in the sun have weathered the skin on his face and his forearms and especially his hands.
He leaves the door to the back room open so headlights will warn him in case anybody does come in. When he turns on the TV, the picture is snowy. He needs a tall antenna to bring it in at all, because Roswell doesn’t have a station of its own, though there’s talk of getting one. It isn’t nine yet. Milton Berle isn’t on. Joe can’t stand the program that runs ahead of him. He turns the sound down to nothing. He doesn’t turn the set off: then it would have to warm up again, and he might miss something. But he does ignore it for the time being.
To kill time till Uncle Miltie’s inspired lunacy, he pulls a book off the shelf. “Oh, yeah—the weird one,” he mutters. Something called The Supernatural Reader, a bunch of stories put together by Groff and Lucy Conklin. Groff—there’s a handle for you.
Brand-new book, or near enough. Copyright 1953. He found it in a Salvation Army store. Cost him a dime. How can you go wrong?
Story he’s reading is called “Pickup from Olympus,” by a fellow named Pangborn. The guy in the story runs a gas station, which makes it extra interesting for Joe. And there’s a ’37 Chevy pickup in it, and damned if he didn’t learn to drive on one of those before he went into the Navy.
But the people, if that’s what you’d call them, in the pickup…Joe shakes his head. “Weird,” he says again. “Really weird.” He’s the kind of guy who likes things nailed down tight.
He puts The Supernatural Reader back on the shelf. With a grunt, he heaves his bulk out of the rocker, walks over to the television, and twists the volume knob to the right. When he plops himself down in the chair once more, it creaks and kind of shudders. One of these days, it’ll fall apart when he does that, and leave him with his ass on the floor. But not yet. Not yet.
A chorus of men dressed the way he would be if he really spiffed himself up—dressed like actors playing service-station jockeys instead of real ones, in other words—bursts into staticky song:
“Oh, we’re the men of Texaco.
We work from Maine to Mexico.
There’s nothing like this
Texaco of ours;
Our show tonight is powerful,
We’ll wow you with an hourful
of howls from a showerful of stars;
We’re the merry Texaco-men!
Tonight we may be showmen;
Tomorrow we’ll be servicing your cars!”
Joe sings along, even if he can’t carry a tune in a pail. Texaco is his outfit, too, even more than the Roswell Rockets are. If you’re not a big-leaguer—and sometimes even if you are—baseball is only a part-time job. He’ll get six hundred dollars a month to swing the bat this year, and a grand as a signing bonus. For a guy in a Class C league, that’s great money. But a gas station, now, a gas station is a living for the rest of his life. You get into your thirties, you start worrying about stuff like that. You’d goddamn well better, anyhow.
Out comes Milton Berle. He’s in a dress. Joe guffaws. Christ on His crutch, but Milton Berle makes an ugly broad. Joe remembers how horny he got when he was in the Navy and didn’t even see a woman for months at a time. If he’d seen one who looked like that, he would have kept right on being horny.
Or maybe not. When you’re twenty years old, what the hell are you but a hard-on with legs?
Uncle Miltie starts strumming a ukulele. If that’s not scary, his singing is. It’s way worse than Joe’s. Joe laughs fit to bust a gut. He hope the picture stays halfway decent. This is gonna be a great show.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 485