Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Somewhere near the barns a cow lowed. Casey tramped up to his old flat rock, knocked the snow off it, and sat down. Overhead the stars blazed. He willed himself to concentrate on the stars, to forget the depressing mechanics of attending Rizzo’s wedding, the self-kept scoresheets. He just wouldn’t think about it. Above him glittered Thekala, aka Aldebaran, aka The Red Terror. To the south and east shone Rigel, Sirius, Betelguese, Pollux, Procyon. The Orion Nebula, spawn ground of new stars. They used to pretend it was alive, like a queen bee. Only the southwest looked subdued, empty of all but the faint stars of Cetus. The sky there was a soft, even black, lustrous with reflected light, like . . .

  Like shoe polish.

  In January the ground froze so hard that no graves could be dug. People continued to die anyway, and their caskets were stacked, carefully labeled, in a brick vault to await a thaw. Casey was laid off. Nothing else seemed to be opening up in the cemetery line. So he took a job as a part-time janitor in a high school, nightly scrubbing anatomical impossibilities off lavatory walls with industrial-strength cleanser. He wrote.

  In February it snowed 52 inches, a century’s record. During the entire month the sky remained cloudy; if the stars had all simultaneously winked out, their light spent like so many weary philanderers, Casey wouldn’t have known it. He caught the flu and spent six days in bed, feverishly watching the barber pole revolve against the gray snow. He wrote.

  In March Dr. James Randall Stine, Chairman of the Graduate Committee and a widower for two years, announced his engagement to Miss Kara Phillips, a kindergarten teacher in the local public schools. Casey’s father called to just pass on the information that Marty Hillek’s father was looking around for someone with business sense to help him run the Holiday Inn. He wrote.

  In April, a week before Rizzo’s wedding, Casey’s third attempt at a novel sold to a major publisher. It was about a galactic empire.

  He leaped through the dark April woods, the letter in his hand, the ground inches below his feet. He was Pan with scriptorial pipes, Orpheus with graphic lyre, Caesar of the literary spaceways. He was the god-child of intergalactic muses. He was the first person in the universe to publish a novel. He was the Pied Piper with hordes at his singing back, Circe with spells to drive men mad. He was drunk, but only partly on California champagne.

  Running wildly through springtime smells unseen in the darkness, he held the letter before him and a little to one side, like a spear, brandishing it upward.

  “See! See!” he called up between the trees, drunkenly flaunting his own theatricality. “See! See what I did about you! Look! Look!”

  The stars glittered.

  Casey stopped running and stood panting beneath a sugar maple, holding his side. He was Shakespeare, he was Tolstoy, he was Dreiser, he was a definite A. He could walk on spangle-colored planets forever, just as soon as his stomach lay still.

  The stars glittered.

  Across the sky the branches of the sugar maple slanted like bars. Gemini sliced in half, Dubhe divided from Merak. Through the bars the Milky Way looked broken, fitful, about to sever and recede even more, and it was already so far away, so high . . . so high . . . they were all so high. . . . For a dizzy second Casey put his hand on the tree trunk, searching for a foothold. But the second passed and he stood on the ground, half-trampled fern shoots under his worn boots.

  The stars glittered.

  OK, so the universe doesn’t notice, hardly an original observation, Casey ol’ boy, got to do better than that. What’d you expect—a supernova? No romantic despair; cosmic self-pity strictly forbidden in moments of drunken triumph, on pain of triviality. No brooding, no self-indulgent self-incrimination. “A man’s reach should exceed. . . .” so you’ve got a hell of a reach, kudos to you ol’ Jer, good to have a hell of a reach. Supposed to have a hell of a reach. Reach for a star a star is born born to boogie . . . oh, hell. I am not Prufrock, nor was meant to be—

  Meant to be what?

  Abruptly, he saw that he was not alone. Under the sugar maple, at the edge of the wide circle of branches, stood a child. A skinny, grubby boy, ten years old, gazing upward. Casey lurched forward, but the boy ignored him. Motionless except for his eyes, he was conquering distant, spangle-colored planets, and in his shining look, Casey saw, there was no longing; no one longs for what he already possesses. He was still, complete, but as Casey grabbed wildly to throttle the unbearable wholeness in the rapt face that he knew perfectly well was not there, the champagne heaved and he threw up into the trampled fern shoots. When he could finally wipe his mouth on his shirt tail, the boy was gone.

  The stars glittered.

  Casey stumbled back through the woods. In one small clearing he smelled lilacs, barely budded but sweet in the dark, and he turned his head away. Somewhere he lost the path. Scratched by brambles, scuffing the decay of last year’s leaves, he thrashed forward until the moon rose. It was easier, then, to walk, but the moonlit pattern of dark branches on the white letter made him squeeze his eyes shut, and it was thus that he tripped over the spaceship.

  It wasn’t really, of course. The ship itself was a hundred feet away, dully black in the moonlight, circled with birch branches that had been pushed aside by its landing and had snapped back. Casey, sprawled on the ground over a foot-long, log-shaped . . . whatever it was, could almost feel the crack of those returning birch limbs on his back and shoulders. He reached under himself to feel the Whatever; it was hard and smooth, faintly vibrating. Unlike the boy, it did not vanish.

  Unsuspected additional champagne churned in his stomach.

  The ship was small; it could hardly be more than some sort of shuttle. Curved into flowing lines and embraced by budding trees, it looked weirdly beautiful in the night woods, weirdly right. Moonlight slid off the black surface, a deep rich black the color of loam. Leaves and ferns grew right up to where the ship rested on the forest floor. There was no burned patch, no sign that the ship had not always been there, would not always be there, a part of the ferns and birches, surrounded by the usual night rustlings and scamperings. An owl hooted.

  Under Casey’s belly, the Whatever began to hum.

  He rolled off it and scrambled to his feet. A section of the ship slid upward, sending a shaft of blue light over the ground. Slowly, a ramp descended until it met the dead leaves, which sighed softly.

  Casey closed his eyes. He was drunk, he told himself. He was drunk, he was emotionally exhausted, he was hallucinating in some bizarre, wish-fulfillment fantasy. He was insane, he was schizophrenic, he was dead. He was a grown man with a more-or-less job, aging parents, and his own copy of the ten-volume Oxford English Dictionary. He was afraid, but not of the ship.

  When he opened his eyes, it was still there. The “door” was still open. Nothing was visible inside except the bright blue light. The log-shaped Whatever rose into the air as high as Casey’s chest and floated towards the ship. Ten feet away it stopped, floated back to Casey’s chest, then again toward the ship. When Casey didn’t follow, it repeated the whole sequence. Casey took one step forward.

  He was on the flat rock under the twilight sky. Would You Go? they asked each other, sprawled on concave stomachs. Nah, said Marty Hillek—too dangerous. Chicken! said Carl Nielsen, chicken! I’d go, said Billy DeTine, I wouldn’t care, I’m not afraid, I’d go. Me too, whispered little Jerry Casey, youngest of the lot. Me too. What if you never got back? said Marty Hillek, and no one said anything.

  “The probability,” lectured the professor to Astronomy 101, “of intelligent life visiting earth covertly is very small. Even if we generously suppose a 50-50 chance of life developing on any planet within a 25-light-year radius of Earth, the next calculation would—”

  “You don’t know,” insisted Kara Stine, nee Phillips. “Nobody really knows.”

  Casey took another step forward. Wet leaves squished under his boot. The letter rustled in his hand:

  Dear Mr. Casey:

  We are happy to inform you that our editoria
l staff is very impressed with your book, and that we are interested in publishing it. First, however, it is necessary . . .

  The Whatever floated back to Casey a third time. It was humming more loudly now, and in the humming Casey heard a soft urgency.

  Moonlight shone on the letter, crumpled where his fist had tightened, fouled at one corner with vomited champagne.

  Would You Go? asked Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine. What if you never got back? Nights on the cemetary tombs: Regulus Formalhaut Betelguese Ri-i-gel. Days at his desk, struggling with stars on the head of a pin. “If Jerry Casey, great unpublished novelist, hasn’t personally seen one. . . .” Me too, whispered little Jerry Casey. We are happy to inform you . . . “What are you doing now? I mean your, uh, plans?” Me too. Oh, me too. Happy to inform you . . . “Escapist improbabilities, Mr. Casey. You must see . . . ‘galactic empire’ !” Happy to inform you . . .

  Casey, battlefield for two warring empires, hiccupped in anguish.

  Carefully, as if he might break, he took three steps backward. Then three more.

  The Whatever followed him, then reversed direction and floated towards the ship, but only once. It floated inside, and the curved section of hull lowered slowly. The ship started to rise, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment the dark hull stood poised above the birches, blotting out the stars.

  Then it blurred and was gone. The birch branches snapped back. Something small and fury scuttled away through the leaves, startled by the sudden sharp sobbing that went on and on, the unchecked tearless sobbing of a ten-year-old-boy.

  You know the rest. All but Casey’s name, which is not Casey. You can read in any standard reference work about the first official UN contact with the Beta Hydrans, fifteen years ago last May. You can read the pages and pages of testimony from the Des Moines dentist and the Portugese fisherman and the Australian housewife who visited the Beta Hydran spacecraft during their reconnaissance landings. You can read about the shifts of global power and the scientific boons and the interstellar promises of good faith and speedy return by the Beta Hydrans, who were not part of a galactic empire and who seemed bewildered by the entire concept. You can’t not read it; it’s everywhere.

  You can look up Casey, too, in the reference works, and read about how he became the most famous “name” in SF before he was forty-five. You can look up his awards, his honorary this-and-thats, his movie credits, the alimony he pays both wives, his bout with alcoholism. If your mind runs that way, you can look up his biographies—written, all, by impoverished Ph.D.’s weary of Keats—which will analyze for you all the early environmental influences on Casey’s writing. You can look up the academic critics, also impoverished Ph.D.’s, who have concerned themselves with Casey’s novels. They find in all of them, except the first, a “lost, human yearning, a quality almost mythic in the scope of its cosmic rootlessness” (Glasser, Richard J., “Rockets and Wanderjahr: Another Look at SF.” PMLA, 122 (1992), 48-76). You can look it all up, or could if you knew Casey’s name. You’d recognize it, even if you don’t read “that space stuff.”

  But what you don’t know, can’t look up, is the loss of Casey’s galactic empire. What it was, what it meant, how it felt. You don’t know. Unless it has happened to you, you don’t know. You can’t ever know.

  1982

  WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST

  In the summer of 1998 Gregory Whitten was rehearsing a seventy-fifth-year revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and Barbara Bishop abruptly called to ask me to fly back from Denver and attend a few rehearsals with her. She was playing Shaw’s magnificent teen-aged fanatic, a role she had not done for twenty years and never on Broadway. Still, it was an extraordinary request; she had never specifically asked for my presence before, and I wound up my business for Gorer-Redding Solar and caught the next shuttle with uncharacteristic hope. At noon I landed in New York and coptered directly to the theater. Barbara met me in the lobby.

  “Austin! You came!”

  “Did you doubt it?” I kissed her, and she laughed softly.

  “It was so splendid of you to drop everything and rush home.”

  “Well—I didn’t exactly drop it. Lay it down gently, perhaps.”

  “Could Carl spare you? Did you succeed in blocking that coalition, or can they still stop Carl from installing the new Battery?”

  “They have one chance in a billion,” I said lightly. Barbara always asks; she manages to sound as interested in Gorer-Redding Solar as in Shakespeare and ESIR, although I don’t suppose she really is. Of late neither am I, although Carl Gorer is my brother and the speculative risks of finance, including Gorer-Redding, is my profession. It was a certain faint boredom with seriously behaved money that had driven me in the first place to take wildcat risks backing legitimate theater. In the beginning Gorer-Redding Solar was itself a wildcat risk: one chance in a hundred that solar energy could be made cheap and plentiful enough to replace the exhausted petrofields. But that was years ago. Now solar prosperity is a reality; speculations lie elsewhere.

  “I do appreciate your coming, you know,” Barbara said. She tilted her head to one side, and a curve of shining dark hair, still without gray, slanted across one cheek.

  “All appreciation gratefully accepted. Is there something wrong with the play?”

  “No, of course not. What could be wrong with Shaw? Oh, Gregory’s a little edgy, but then you know Gregory.”

  “Then you called me back solely to marry me.”

  “Austin, not again,” she said, without coyness. “Not now.”

  “Then something is wrong.”

  She pulled a little away from me, shaking her head. “Only the usual new-play nerves.”

  “Rue-day nerves.”

  “Through-the-day swerves.”

  “Your point,” I said. “But, Barbara, you’ve played Joan of Arc before.”

  “Twenty years ago,” she said, and I glimpsed the strain on her face a second before it vanished under her publicity-photo smile, luminous and cool as polished crystal. Then the smile disappeared, and she put her cheek next to mine and whispered, “I do thank you for coming. And you look so splendid,” and she was yet another Barbara, the Barbara I saw only in glimpses through her self-contained poise, despite having pursued her for half a year now with my marriage proposals, all gracefully rejected. I, Austin Gorer, who until now had never ever pursued anything very fast or very far. Nor ever had to.

  “Nervous, love?”

  “Terrified,” she said lightly, the very lightness turning the word into a denial of itself, a delicate stage mockery.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “That’s half your charm. You never believe me.”

  “Your Joan was a wild success.”

  “My God, that was even before ESIR, can you believe it?”

  “I believe it.”

  “So do I,” she said, laughing, and began to relate anecdotes about casting that play, then this one, jumping between the two with witty, effortless bridges, her famous voice rising and falling with the melodious control that was as much a part of the public’s image of her as the shining helmet of dark hair and the cool grace.

  She has never had good press. She is too much of a paradox to reduce easily to tabloid slogans, and the stupider journalists have called her mannered and artificial. She is neither. Eager animation and conscious taste are two qualities the press usually holds to be opposites, patronizing the first and feeling defensive in the presence of the second. But in Barbara Bishop, animation and control have melded into a grace that owes nothing to nature and everything to a civilized respect for willed illusion. When she walks across a stage or through a bedroom, when she speaks Shaw’s words or her own, when she hands Macbeth a dagger or a dinner guest a glass of wine, every movement is both free of artifice and perfectly controlled. Because she will not rage at press conferences, or wail colorfully at lost roles, or wrinkle her nose in professional cuteness, the press has decided that she is cold an
d lacks spontaneity. But for Barbara, what is spontaneous is control. She was born with it. She’ll always have it.

  “—and so now Gregory’s still casting for the crowd scenes. He’s tested what has to be every ESIR actor in New York, and now he’s scraping up fledglings straight out of the hospital. Their scalp scars are barely healed and the ink on their historian’s certificates is still wet. We’re two weeks behind already, and rehearsals have barely begun, would you believe it? He can’t find enough actors with an ESIR in fifteenth-century France, and he’s not willing to go even fifty years off on either side.”

  “Then you must have been French in Joan’s time,” I said, “or he wouldn’t have cast you? Even you?”

  “Quite right. Even me.” She moved away from me toward the theater doors. Again I sensed in her some unusual strain.

  An actor is always reluctant to discuss his ESIR with an outsider (bad form), but this was something more.

  “As it happens,” Barbara continued, “I was not only French, I was even in Rouen when Joan was burned at the stake in 1431.1 didn’t see the burning, and I never laid eyes on her—I was only a barmaid in a country tavern—but, still, it’s rather an interesting coincidence.”

  “Yes.”

  “One chance in a million,” she said, smiling. “Or, no—what would be the odds, Austin? That’s really your field.”

  I didn’t know. It would depend, of course, on just how many people in the world had undergone ESIR. There were very few. Electronically Stimulated Incarnation Recall involves painful, repeated electrochemical jolts through the cortex, through the limbic brain, directly into the R-Complex, containing racial and genetic memory. Biological shields are ripped away; defense mechanisms designed to aid survival by streamlining the vast load of memory are deliberately tom. The long-term effects are not yet known. ESIR is risky, confusing, morally disorienting, painful, and expensive. Most people want nothing to do with it. Those who do are mostly historians, scientists, freaks, mystics, poets—or actors, who must be a little of each. A stage full of players who believe totally that they are in Hamlet’s Denmark or Sir Thomas More’s England or Blanche DuBois’s South because they have been there and feel it in every gesture, every cadence, every authentic cast of mind—such a stage is out of time entirely. It can seduce even a philistine financier. Since ESIR, the glamour of the theater has risen, the number of would-be actors have dropped, and only the history departments of the world’s universities have been so in love with historically authentic style.