Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Look at what happened last time. I say again. Afterwards. Anything loo organized will defeat its own purpose. That’s the treacherous genius of their minds: to codify.

  Uriel murmurs assent; I can tell he agrees with what I am doing.

  But the time, Gabriel says. There isn’t much time. Look at the physical state of the little world, even now. What if you can’t do whatever it is you hope to do with all this furtive sneaking about . . . in time?

  For answer I slip on the bracelet. It starts to glow, and I feel the power fill me.

  • • •

  The middle-aged woman in black stands alone by the flowerless grave, staring-down at the raw earth. A shopping bag with string handles rests on the ground next to her; it bulges with the disparately shaped outlines of powdered milk, cat food, and day-old sweet rolls. The woman is hot crying.

  Her face is set in the sagging lines of resigned defeat, curving troughs from nose to mouth, like wobbly parentheses. She stands motionless, her wide knees a little apart, not even waiting. Just standing. The tombstone says “John Alfred Reznicki.”

  I climb from behind the tombstone to on top of it and gaze down at her I, too, am middle-aged—or would be if I were totally corporeal, which I am not. It is very hard to hold the state between here and not here, a state intended only as transition, not prolonged exercise. My bracelet glows frantically and I put my right arm behind my almost-back. It is doubtful that John Alfred would have worn a bracelet.

  The woman looks at me with steady eyes.

  They are dead-leaf brown, and they don’t widen or close or shift away I watch her closely. Nothing.

  “Rosa,” I say gently.

  She continues to watch the tombstone with detached, calm. It is not the calm of shock; she is not in shock, but I nearly am.

  She knows there is nothing after death, knows it beyond needing to doubt, knows it with every undeviating cell of her gray mind, and so is literally incapable of seeing what she knows does not exist. She looks through me levelly, straightforward, utterly unshaken. In her unwondering certainty Gabriel is right. There is not much time.

  • • •

  Carruthers turned his chair to face the window. The skyline was impressive even through fog, but he didn’t see it Absently his fingertraced the line of coast on Poole’s map, up and down and up again. Out the window he saw ocean, ocean in sunset, and the impossible flash of a green-scaled tail above bare breasts ringed with flailing blond hair and sea foam.

  But how could it be impossible if he had seen it?

  Carruthers knew he was not going mad, was not a man who stood in danger of madness. He might easily stand in danger of sudden coronary hypertension, kidnapping, stroke, emphysema, gangland murder, or lung cancer—but not madness. He trusted his judgment; it had proved too good too often not to trust. In his judgment, he had seen the impossible. Therefore, it was not impossible. He had seen it.

  But what else might then be possible? Jesus H, Christ—what else might be possible?

  • • •

  Uriel murmurs again about the power drain, but not very seriously He knows that I know he will manage, somehow. And we both know that this, however bizarre the procedure, is a Major Project.

  Salvation is expensive.

  AGAINST A CROOKED STILE

  Ms. Kress’s first appearance in these pages was her “A Delicate Shade of Kipney” in our Jan/Feb 1978 issue.

  Down under the new cast, somewhere near the immobile crook of his elbow, Jorry’s arm itched. Surreptitiously he tried to fidget his cramped muscles against the inside of the heavy plaster, but the itchy prickling only grew worse, and the sudden pain that shot through his broken elbow was sharp enough to bring tears to his eyes. Quickly, before his father could notice, Jorry raised his eyes and gazed across the heat-shimmered field, trying to make it look as though the tears had come from staring unblinkingly into the sun. Neither of the two men facing each other in the thigh-deep, uncut hay noticed him.

  “Two days,” his father growled in his heavy, rusty voice, a voice that scraped across the words like an unused file. Tiny drops of perspiration rolled from the black eyebrows that were joined in a single fierce line, and down onto the bridge of his nose. Jorry took a step backward, away from them both.

  “Two days she just sat there, now. Hay only halfways cut, burning up in this sun—who’s gonna cut it?” He spat, the spittle sticking to a stalk of hay in a wet glob. “Not me. So you just tell me that, you that’s got all the answers—who’s gonna get up on that there death trap and cut the hay before the crop’s lost for good?”

  The power-company man gazed at the tractor squatting in the middle of the field. Sunlight reflected blindlingly off the tarnished yellow metal, and he put up one plump, pale hand to shield his eyes. Bits of hay clung to his dark suit where it bulged outward at the waist.

  “But I’ve told you several times, Mr. Whitfield, there’s no danger now that we’ve grounded the machinery and the other—”

  “I know you told me. I heard you.” Whitfield spat again and the stranger hopped back a little, glancing down at his shoes. “You come in here and put chains on my barn and my tractor and even on my boy’s swing, and that’s supposed to fix everything, trade it all out nice and even. It don’t mister. Not by a goddam sight. How’d you like to be the one who—”

  “Look, Whitfield,” the stranger said. He leaned forward a little, and Jorry saw a hard line of bone suddenly jut forward under his soft jowls, as unexpected as the teeth in the pink baby possums Jorry had once found in the woods. The boy almost whimpered, but caught himself: trading silence for not being noticed.

  “I’ve spent all the time here that this situation calls for. Minor shocks such as you experienced are common near 1,000 kV lines; we get ’em all the time. But if conducting objects near the right of way are properly grounded, there’s no danger. No one has ever demonstrated—”

  “Now see here, you can’t—”

  “—ever demonstrated, I said, harmful effects from exposure to electrostatic fields—”

  “I’ll sue you bastards for—”

  “—of any strength; and, believe me, the power company will dismiss your threats of a court suit with nothing more than ‘exposure’ to trade on as so much nonsense. Have I made our position clear to you? Because I’ve heard all I intend to!”

  Whitfield took a step forward, his fists clenched at his sides. The stranger stood his ground squarely; and suddenly it seemed to Jorry that the man grew as tall and black as the line towers themselves, thrusting darkly 150 feet above the baking field, like menacing giants stalking the sky. In sudden terror Jorry moved to jerk his right arm up to cover his face, but the sling held the cast immobile and pain again tore through the shattered elbow. Giants—

  “All you’re going to hear, eh?” his father was shouting. “You think so? Well, listen a goddamn minute to that!” He thrust a trembling arm backward.

  Caught off guard, the stranger blinked stupidly in the fierce sunlight before turning and looking over the hay. The scrubby pine at the edge of the field seemed to waver a little in the blanket of heat, but the girders of black metal slicing the sky above it were etched hard and clear. For a moment the two men were still, bent slightly forward, straining to listen. Over the drone of summer insects came a low crackling hum, fitful and unceasing, punctuated with an occasional louder snap that fizzled out slowly. The sound was insistent, edgy, like the mutter of buried embers under a banked fire.

  “And that’s prett’ near 400 feet away,” Whitfield said grimly. “You walk closer with a fluroescent light from the bathroom, the bulb lights up. I know. I did it myself.” Suddenly he shivered, a quick unexpected spasm shaking his thick body but not rippling the stained denim overalls covering it. “And I ain’t gonna do it again. You say that’s not dangerous?”

  “I do,” the stranger said. His intent stare had vanished; and now he appeared bored, amused, and impatient. “People are not light bulbs. I’ll find my own way b
ack to the car.”

  A few steps into the uncut hay, however, he stopped, paused, and then turned with obvious reluctance, his plump face annoyed. “Uh . . . just one more thing, Whitfield. You don’t wear a pacemaker, do you? From heart surgery? The company is . . . uh . . . advising all residents with demand-type cardiac pacemakers to remain outside the right of way. Purely as a precautionary measure.”

  Before Whitfield could answer, the stranger turned again and hurried across the field, the stalks closing behind him with a soft swish. Jorry took another step backward, his eyes too big as he watched his father’s face go from red to a dull mottled purple. Jagged red lines sprang out around the nose and mouth. Holding his breath, unable to move, the boy cowered dumbly in the tall hay, waiting.

  —the belt falling and he threw up his arms to shield—for the moment his father would turn and the fierce blue eyes with their watery, red-lined whites would fall on him, fall on him and then . . .

  But Whitfield didn’t turn around. He kept staring across the hay at the dwindling black spot that was the power-company man, and slowly his hands curled into fists. Behind him the line crackled in the empty hot sky.

  If you lay with your eyes half-closed, Jorry thought, and sort of squinted up the left one, you could make the clouds change shape even faster than the wind could. If you squinted up both eyes, the shapes dissolved and ran together and you could start all over again, make a new world all over again . . .

  Lying on his back with the shoulder-to-knuckle cast propped up on his stomach, breathing in the dry warm smell of the Sandersons’ hay, Jorry made shapes out of clouds. The Sanderson farm joined the Whitfields’, but was much larger; and in its back field already dense with the second hay crop of the summer, Jorry was seldom disturbed. He had left off the sling because he couldn’t figure out how to tie it around his neck with only one hand; the laces on his dirty blue sneakers were untied for the same reason. A grasshopper bounded onto the cast, watched the boy from shiny multi-faceted eyes, and leaped off again. Jorry didn’t stir.

  Small shapes, that’s what you wanted—nothing too large, nothing too dangerous. Rabbits, and marbles, and over there one of those fluffy white dogs, the kind that looked like a mop, like old Mrs. Reynolds used to have with all that shaggy hair all over its—

  “You’re scaring the mice,” a voice said above him. Jorry’s eyes flew open and he scrambled to his feet, already backing away, hastily cradling the cast in his good arm. The flapping sneaker laces tangled in the hay and he pitched forward, throwing up his

  —arm to shield his face from the buckle coming down and the smell of whiskey and—

  “Hey,” the voice said. “There, I’ve got you—take it easy, fella. Hey, it’s O.K.—I’m not rabid. Really. Haven’t been for years.”

  Caught by his shoulders, Jorry stopped struggling and tried desperately to blink away his panicky tears and get a clear look at his captor. The man wavered, watery at the edges and streaked with blurred silver, then came into focus as the pain in Jorry’s elbow subsided and the tears rolled out of his eyes and down his thin cheeks.

  The man was wearing jeans, a blue cotton work shirt, and boots—a new hand at the Sandersons’, then. But no—the jeans were patched and clean, not whole and dirty, and there were no traces of manure on the boots. So not a farm hand. His leather belt was foreign-looking, intricately worked, with some sort of silver buckle

  —coming down and the smell of whiskey and his own voice screaming just before—shaped like the sun.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” the man said, releasing Jorry’s shoulders. “I didn’t mean to scare you. You all right? I just wanted to ask you if you’d mind moving, because you’re scaring the mice. That’s all.”

  Jorry wrenched his eyes upward from the buckle, and then it was better. Above an untidy beard were good eyes, warm and young and brown, the color of fresh toast. Some of Jorry’s panic ebbed, sliding away in long slow waves; and he sniffed and swiped at his nose with his good hand.

  “What mice?”

  The man rocked back and squatted on his heels. “Up there—under the line. You’re upwind of them, and they smell you. Makes ’em jumpy. Jumpier.”

  Jorry craned his neck; he couldn’t see over the low ridge swelling with half-grown hay.

  “Come on up and look,” the man said, and started off in such an off-hand matter that after a moment Jorry found himself following.

  Under the line, on the uneven stubble of weeds that had remained after the power company had mowed its right-of-way, was a jumble of equipment. Four large glass boxes, elevated on wooden blocks and screened on two sides with plastic mesh, held piles of shredded newspaper full of burrowing mice. Two of the glass boxes were surrounded by a double shell of parallel wires, one inside the other, which were joined together and anchored firmly into the ground. Squares of metal standing on edge and facing each other in pairs had been placed on the grass, or on high poles. The metal squares had been hooked up to odd-looking meters and to dials that looked to Jorry like plastic warts. Parked over the ridge was a small, sturdy red truck near the remains of a ham sandwich already being carried away by the boldest of a watchful flock of crows. On the warm air rode the nose-wrinkling smell of mice.

  “What’s that?” Jorry asked, in spite of himself. “Around the mice?”

  “Faraday cages,” the man said promptly. “Keep the mice in that box from being exposed to the electrostatic field from the line.”

  Involuntarily Jorry glanced upward. The cable above him stretched like a long black road, a road curving and diminishing over the far horizon. A road for giants . . .

  “What about these other mice?”

  “They’re exposed to the field. The idea is to see if they behave any differently after a long while near the line.” Slowly, his brown eyes never leaving Jorry’s face, he came around the boxes of mice and held out his hand. “My name’s Tom Crowell.”

  Jorry took a step backward. “You from the power company?”

  “No—no, I’m not.” He lowered his empty hand. “I work for the Environmental Study Association. We want to see if these new 1,000 kV lines affect the wildlife hereabouts. Want to hold one of the mice, son?”

  “I can’t,” Jorry mumbled, looking down at his untied sneakers. He could feel the back of his neck growing hot. “ ’Cause of my arm.”

  “I broke my arm once,” Tom said cheerfully. “Healed clean as a whistle. Before the cast came off, I’d collected the autographs of the whole fifth grade.” He glanced at Jorry’s cast, bare except for a rubbed-in catsup stain. “ ’Course, school’s out just now. What’s your name, son?”

  “Jorry.”

  “Well, Jorry, I’ve seen you before, walking in the fields. You’re about the only kid that does come up here. You interested in electronics? Is that why you like it here?”

  Jorry kept his eyes fastened on a glass box behind a Faraday cage. Two bright eyes peered out from beneath a pile of shredded Sunday comics. Finally, as though it were an answer, he said, “My pa doesn’t like the line.”

  “And who’s your pa?”

  “Clayte Whitfield.”

  “Oh,” Tom said. “Oh—yes.” He looked at the boy more closely, a sudden sharpness in his brown eyes. “He know you’re up here, Jorry?”

  Jorry traced a circle on the grass with the toe of his sneaker. “Pa never comes up here.” After a long pause he added reluctantly, “He says the line’s dangerous.”

  “Well, he’s probably right,” Tom said. The boy looked up quickly, his eyes wide with astonishment in his hollowed face.

  “There’s enough of a field up here to cause all sorts of body currents in a human being and set off God-knows-what trigger phenomenon—especially in the brain organelles. Not to even mention the geophysical effects. Just smell the air—go ahead, move away from the mice and take a deep breath.”

  Jorry had been going to ask what brain organelles and trigger fins on men were, but instead he obediently moved away from the glass box
es and sniffed. The air smelled faintly acrid, a dry elusive odor that reminded him vaguely of freshly-ironed cotton.

  “Ozone,” Tom said. “If we get a storm, you watch the line during the thunder, Jorry. It’ll glow reddish-blue.”

  Again Jorry glanced at the huge metal towers. Giants . . . “But Mr. Crowell, if—”

  “Tom.”

  “Well—Tom.” He stumbled over the name, not used to this freedom. “If you think the line’s so dangerous, why are you up here? Why aren’t you joined up with the folk who stay away and want the line tore down and write letters and talk about . . .” Jorry trailed off. Talk? Talk was cheap, Pa said, and Jorry had watched while Pa carried in the tightly-sealed box from the Country Agricultural Agency, the box that was so heavy in the big hands that trembled all the time now except when they held the bottle steady to pour . . .

  “Why am I up here?” Tom was saying. “Because I think the line’s dangerous, but I don’t know. Do you know where the line comes from, Jorry?”

  He shook his head. No one ever said; they just wanted it gone.

  “From the lignite coal mines up north. Energy is a valuable thing for everyone, Jorry, although not if the cost is too high in other valuable things. You have to weigh both sides, make the best trade-off. The people here want the line down because it’s a scary unknown. But I think it’s a better idea to get to know it, and then decide. What do you think?”

  Jorry shook his head, embarrassed again. That wasn’t the sort of thing adults asked him, except in school; and even then they didn’t talk to him the way this Tom did. It didn’t seem right, somehow. Not fitting. He was only Jorry Whitfield, Clayte Whitfield’s kid, and everybody knew the Whitfield farm hadn’t had a decent cash crop in three years, couldn’t even bring much produce to town to trade anymore. And you had to trade for things, Jorry knew; even this Tom talked about the line as a trade-off. You didn’t get things for free. Not hay, not chicken feed, not canned stew, not friendship.