Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Nor do I know who is that man in the picture that Tina and Karen keep showing me, the picture of the thin blond man they say was my father. He is dead, they say, long ago, on another world. He is a stranger.

  Even the brother is strange when he is being Davey, squinting at his tutor and calling Big Moon “Ramses.” He is different, wavery. I do not know who he is in this wavery now, and I don’t think he knows, either. Davey and Karen—they neither of them know what talp they are following. They track it everyday, and never ask if it is the right one.

  But I ask. I must know what talp I follow, and if I smash the wrong ones in the following—then that can’t be helped. I will smash them. I will go away from Karen and Davey and Carl and Tina—watchful Tina—and I will take whatever risks are necessary, do whatever is necessary to find Alea and Alea’s green-lit room and Alea’s black-bearded man, because they are somewhere. Not now, perhaps, but somewhere.

  They must be there.

  A LITTLE MATTER OF TIMING

  Nancy Kress wrote “Casey’s Empire,” November 1981. Her new story is about a baffling evolutionary mental process known as “Peekback.”

  So I see by the newspapers that they caught him, holed up in some hick town in Wisconsin. Serves the punk right, to get nailed in a dead prairie burg. Hadn’t of been for him, I’d still be where I should be, in the middle of the discarded popcorn boxes and the smell of the cat dens and the spread of the ferns neons against a night sky, with Lefty one tent down on the razzle-dazzle and Dora hoofing over from the hootch tent with a cold beer when it’s time to do the Box bit. Course, all that’s probably not the same now; everything’s probably already changed.

  But not as much as it’s going to.

  It had been a slow morning. I loitered outside the tent, trying to work up enough energy to do the old barker bit and maybe draw in a few more of the gawkers shuffling up and down the midway. There was enough of a breeze to stir the icecream wrappers and candy-apple sticks not yet fused into the melting tar. Behind me the tent glistened in minty greens—I had pumped in fresh fluid this morning, filling the thin space between the double tempaplas domes with swirls of the coolest colors I could mix—but inside it was already hot as hell. Who can afford to run ‘ditioners on what a peekback show pulls? And no matter what the bastards in advertising say, tempaplas is just as hot as canvas ever was. Oh, yeah, I can remember canvas tents—I’m older than I look. Don’t ask by how much.

  A fat woman in an acid-yellow jumpsuit waddled by, dragging a kid by the hand. The kid was sticky with cotton candy and catsup.

  “Peekback show, wonder of the ages,” I called out half-heartedly. God, it was hot. “Try your skill, win fabulous exotic prizes! Or gasp with amazement as you watch death-defying competition among courageous men and women living on borrowed time!”

  The instant the pitch was out, I regretted it. The fat dame didn’t seem the type to want the thrill of maybe seeing some guy die on the spot from peekback overload. You get to know the look, a sort of ferret clamminess, and she didn’t have it. I was losing my touch.

  Sure enough, she pursed up her fat little mouth and tugged harder at the kid’s arm. He braced his heels on the sticky tar and started to whine.

  “I wanna see the peekback show! I wanna see the peekback show!”

  “No! Come on!”

  “Please, Ma! Puh-leeese! I wanna see the show!”

  “I said no!”

  “But they got a real contest, with real prizes! I wanna see the loser’s head split open and his brains ooze out!”

  She stopped dead—the kid almost fell over backwards—and hissed at him through her pursed lips like some enormous yellow pickle-sucking cobra.

  “Where’d you learn talk like that? Where? Randall, I asked you a question!”

  The kid had the sense to keep quiet. She glared at him, then at me. “See what your so-called shows do to innocent little children? Corrupt them with blood-lust and callousness! Making a spectacle for profit out of men ruining their minds! You should be ashamed of yourself!” She yanked again at the kid and he dragged after her down the midway, looking back over his corrupted shoulder.

  I shrugged. Some mornings are like that.

  After a while, though, thinking about her began to get to me, so I peekbacked so’s I could give her—or her image, anyway—a piece of my mind. It had been maybe six minutes, but I pride myself on being pretty good—a lot better than most of the marks that try the show. I got a clear image focused on the pavement, hardly any fuzziness, of the dame ranting there six minutes ago. Fat yellow can and all. But once I had her peekbacked, I couldn’t think of a really good put-down, and besides the telltale pressure was already starting up behind my eyeballs. Like I said, I’m older than I look. Once I could peekback nine and a half minutes—damn near a record—with hardly any pain at all, even in an unfamiliar room. I dissolved the image and went inside.

  A head count turned up two marks, not counting Harry, nineteen gawkers, and a fed. Clem had already registered the marks and collected their entrance fees, and they stood up on the rickety wooden ballyhoo stand, shuffling back and forth and trying to ignore the gawkers on the tempaplas benches below. The fed stood out like a panther in a tiger cage, mostly because he was trying so hard not to look like a fed. Poison-green jumpsuit a shade too poisonous, long hair in careful holiday disarray, more phony-spark jewelry than even the panty peelers in the hootch tent wear. I passed, went to the john, and then started behind the curtain to tell Dora she should get dressed and leave. The fed nodded to me as I went by, and I realized it was the same one I’d had hanging around the last town back. Some cover!

  Lately, though, they don’t seem to try much for a real cover, at least not one that works for carnies as well as gawkers. They’re supposed to be there to see that the show is “honest,” that no one knows beforehand the order of the objects in the Box, and at first it was a real pain in the ass because it meant I had to hire a different shill for every show. I thought that otherwise they’d slough the joint. But now the feds and I have sort of silently decided that Harry can be the permanent shill, when he’s not busy doing his own pretty-boy muscleman gig, so long as the marks don’t lose too much money and so long as we don’t seem to be rooking any widows or orphans. Anyway, it would be pretty stupid for the feds to pretend we don’t all know why they’re really haunting a penny-ante peekback show. Not since Varysburg.

  Varysburg was another hick town, a real struggle spot notable only because a mark pushed his peekback too far and ruptured his brain at the 9:00 p.m. show. In two minutes a fed had the dead joe’s woman’s signature on a “medical research autopsy release form,” and the poor sucker had been rushed to a peekback-research foundation to have a bunch of scientists take apart his brain and move “one step closer to a true understanding of this baffling evolutionary mental process.”

  And the fat dame called me bloodthirsty.

  Dora was still at work in the Box, her long naked body twitching in all the right places, but her make-up was melting in the heat. I motioned her out of the empty Box, and with a last bump and grind she sashayed out and behind the curtain.

  “Jesus, what kept you? I gotta piss bad, and the show in the hootch tent starts in five minutes!”

  “Sorry, Dora. The john won’t open for a while. I just used it.” I got a ten-minute lock on the john door. Not many can peekback that far, but I don’t take a chance. The image of me pissing is nobody’s business.

  “Jesus, what an old lady,” she snarled. I laughed, slapped her playfully on her bare rump, and went out front to start the clock and my spiel.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen—your attention puh-leese! The thrilling and dangerous Art of the Peekback is about to begin! Before you on the stage are three—no, four! Pardon me, Ladies and Gents, four intrepid contestants standing under the clock, four men sure enough of their skill to risk life and mind in competition for the fabulous prizes you see displayed to the left of the stage! A hand to salute the courage
of these brave folk!”

  Ragged clapping; an old farm-type in the first row sniffed and stared, hands not moving from his knees.

  “Tour silence is requested, Ladies and Gentlemen, during these fabulous feats of concentration. In addition, would you please give each contestant every advantage by putting out your smokes.” Actually, smoke makes no difference to a peekback and the gawkers would realize it if they gave it half a brain’s thought, but the request sounds impressive. While they ground out their cigarettes and tokes, I took a few seconds to study the fourth contestant, the kid that Clem must have registered and read-the-risks to while I was in the john.

  He stood out as much as the fed did. Expensive truleather jumpsuit, with tailoring quality you don’t see in your average dumb gawker. His jewelry had a wicked gleam that looked real, and there was a lot of it. But the kid himself didn’t look like a slumming joedough. His pimply face had the hooded, restless look of a street punk willing to score for a good meal and an ugly broad. I could see the fed standing in the back, watching the kid with an intent casualness, and I didn’t like the whole set-up. But the timing in a peekback show doesn’t leave room for questions.

  “And so with no further ado, Ladies and Gents—the first test!”

  Dramatically I flung open the front of the empty Box. There was a moment of silence, and then a snicker rippled through the tent as the marks—and most of the gawkers, who always play along until it starts to hurt—peekbacked Dora going through her bit.

  “Time,” called Clem. “Hold up youse slates.”

  All four had it right, of course. Hell, even a baby can peekback one and a half minutes. Two had written “woman,” the kid had scrawled “dame,” and Harry had done one of his lightning sketches of Dora with her tits filling the whole slate. That drew the usual laugh.

  “She’s not the prize, boys!” I called, rolling my eyes, in mock anger. Another laugh. “Second test—three minutes!”

  Most of the gawkers got this one, too: a huge banana “sweating” water. A few got the gag and guffawed while the rest eyed them resentfully, wondering if the joke was somehow on them. As we worked back through the objects Clem had placed in the Box and then removed seven minutes ago, I could see the gawkers give up trying to peekback along with the marks. One by one they got that bulgy-eyed, wincing look that means the pressure and pain are building up in whatever part of the brain does peekback, and then they gave up straining before they keeled over.

  One of the marks missed an object and stormed out of the tent, muttering about fraud. So he lost a pretty stiff entry fee—the sucker chose to play, and it so happened this wasn’t even Harry’s turn to win. Takes all kinds.

  Harry dropped out at seven and a half minutes, after hysterically identifying a coiled rope as a cobra. He slumped sheepishly in a seat in the front row, grinning like an idiot, while the crowd heckled him. All except the fed; he never took his eyes off the punk kid.

  “And now, Ladies and Gentlemen,” I said, dropping my voice to a heavy whisper, but a fast one, “A true test, a sorting of the boys from the men. A worthy vision, but a dangerous one, my friends—men have been known to not return from the heroic effort to see nine minutes into the past—a past, that, let me remind you, was sealed to all only three short generations ago! So, let us salute these brave men with a reverential ten seconds of silence.”

  Most of the gawkers looked confused, then dropped their eyes to the ground. Before the drama could turn to embarrassed shuffling, I yanked open the Box, and all eyes snapped to its empty interior. The kid and his opponent, a local farmhand with hands like slabs of raw beef, stared until their eyes bulged and their foreheads knotted into sweaty ridges.

  I knew what they were seeing. Nine minutes ago Clem had removed an overripe peach from the Box. The kid and the yokel would be straining to focus a blurry, fist-sized mass, probably round but wavering in outline as the peekback slipped and jumped, of no definite color. Color was always the first to go at anything over eight minutes. The thing could be a baseball, an orange, an ostrich egg, a rock, even a wheel if you were one of those that lost depth-perception over seven minutes. As the seconds ticked by, the image would blur even more, while the pain tore through your overloaded brain until you could hardly see and it felt like the top of your head would blow off . . .

  The yokel groaned and the gawkers went “aaahhh,” and leaned toward him. His eyes were watery red where the little blood vessels had burst; the rest of his face was almost purple. He fell to his knees, clawing at the air in front of him with feeble swipes of his huge flabby hands.

  “Aaaaahhh,” they all went again.

  Something—I swear I’ll never know what—made me look from him to the kid. He wasn’t looking at the Box at all. While everyone else watched the collapsing yokel, he dropped the straining peekback look and swung his gaze to the prize board, furrowing up his pimples and sucking in his cheeks. After a long moment he smiled with one side of his mouth, then wrote something on his slate. Only then did he look at the gasping man next to him on the bally stand.

  The yokel was still on his knees, but his face was pink again, and he was drawing in great draughts of air. His eyes crossed, then uncrossed, and his forehead began to look less like somebody had tied it in knots. After a minute he staggered to his feet.

  “Ooooohhh,” said the gawkers, disappointed, and settled back onto their benches.

  “A death-defying exhibition, sir!” I called, and flourished my hat to the sap who was stupid enough to fry his brain for some gaudy carny prize. “A true study in courage! And now, Gentlemen, if you’ll write your answers . . . there. . . the moment we’ve all been waiting for! The moment of victory or defeat, of triumph or failure . . . your slates, please!”

  The yokel had written “ball” in wobbly letters that trailed off at the end into a smear of chalkdust. On the kid’s slate, in heavy block letters, was “peech.”

  “A winner!” I shouted, as Clem came out from behind the curtain with a rotten peach dribbling juice all over his jumpsuit. I grabbed the kid’s hand and raised it above his head, then led him over to the prize board. The gawkers shouted as though they had actually won something themselves, and then turned to gather up their stuff and leave. None of them made it, though, because the punk and I hadn’t been standing in front of the prize board for thirty seconds when all hell broke loose.

  The fed leaped forward with gun drawn and shouted, “Stop, police!” The kid took one look, hit the ground already rolling, and came up with a snub-nosed special that he started firing even before he grabbed some shrieking dame for cover. Gawkers screamed, the shots echoed in the tent, and I heard the tempaplas shatter overhead; a second later green rain gushed down on the scrambling bodies and fallen benches and overturned picnic baskets. I had the sense to dive for the ground and creep behind the Box, crawling over cigarette butts soaked with green tempaplas fluid and sour peach juice.

  In less than a minute it was all over. The kid made it out of the tent with the fed scrambling after him, both of them plugging away while the screaming spread in concentric circles down the midway. Inside the tent nobody was actually hurt except the yokel still on the bally stand, who was clutching his arm where a slug had grazed across the flesh and left a pulpy red smear. The red was streaked with the green rain like some kind of bloody Christmas card, and the yokel was staring at the arm like he never saw it before. It definitely wasn’t his day.

  That afternoon I sold out of the carny.

  The kid’s picture looks back at me from every newspaper, and the legal shouting could scorch your ears. Nobody ever called me to testify. No need—the fed knew even before I did that the punk was peekbacking not at the past when the damn peach was still in the Box, but at the future, when I was holding up his hand in front of the prize board. But they’re not calling it peekbacking; no name has really stuck yet. Forepeek, peekahead, prepeek, preproph. I hear some magazine is holding a contest.

  The scientists are all panting to get t
heir hands on that brain, of course. But you can’t execute a man for attempted homicide. Not for fraud, either, even if he had been getting rich looking one minute into the future of poker hands, roulette wheels, arid crap games. One minute—that’s all he can manage, they say. But, then, the punk’s stupid, or he wouldn’t have felt the need to strut his stuff at the crummy peekback shows where he first discovered he could do it. Maybe the others, the other kids in the “second evolutionary wave” I keep reading about—maybe they’ll do it better. One minute is pretty thin.

  I got a good price tor the show, even with the hole in the tent. The sucker I sold it to didn’t realize yet that if forepeek—hell, I have to call it something—spreads the way peekback did a few generations ago, games of chance are finished. A minute counts in more than humping.

  But I miss it, the set-up and the ballyhoos and the shimmy shakers and the sound of Lefty’s pitch one tent down. I liked the life. Hell, I didn’t sell out because every gawker who walked in the door might be able to forepeek and swindle some other gawker who can’t. So the house losses go up; there wasn’t all that much to lose.

  It wasn’t even getting left behind with the ones too old to forepeek. I can remember the way my parents looked the first time I told them I had peekbacked in their bedroom—they could never do it at all. If my old lady could live with being left behind, I could too. No, it’s something else.

  I saw that punk’s face as he twisted up his pimples to stare at the prize board. I saw the panicked confusion in his eyes, and the sudden queasy spasm at the comer of his mouth. It was the same disoriented look gawkers have when they get off the Dervo-Whirl, don’t know which way is up, and go staggering around the midway knocking people over. And if I’m right, the kids coming up are gonna be a scary bunch.

  What must it be like to stare at a spot, straining and grunting, looking farther and farther into the past or the future—and not know which?