Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I am a coachman!” he shouted to the thing that was not there. Body and mind gave out; laying his cheek against the frost, he closed his eyes.

  The coach, and the exhilarating rush of horses in the jeweled night, and the thlock-thlock dying away behind. But the thlock-thlock grew louder, and a shape catapulted out of the darkness.

  “Oh, no, no—”

  Meloria dismounted, all but falling off the borrowed ass, and lifted the coachman. He was nearly too heavy for even her strength and mass, but somehow—heaving, pushing, cursing, sweating—she wrestled him across the back of the mangy ass. She rubbed his hands and cheeks; she raged at his stupidity; she pried open his mouth and scalded his throat with hot soup. She wept and cursed and waddled along the road, leading the ass, carrying the coachman away from the embankment steep in the frozen moonlight.

  “It was you,” the coachman said when he finally woke again in the cottage, under piles of stifling blankets. Then he realized: slowly his fingers went to his lips where the words had appeared, and he looked at Meloria in hatred and fear.

  She took a step away from him and studied a crack in the hearth.

  “I can speak.”

  She said nothing, watching him from the corner of her eye.

  “Your doing.”

  “No.”

  “Then bits and pieces. Spillage. Like the other. ‘When they’re careless.’ That’s what you said.”

  “Yes,” Meloria answered, looking suddenly older, suddenly weary. In the one word the coachman heard again the breaking of the axle, the tearing of the brambles on the embankment.

  He turned his head away from her, and saw that he lay on the hearth, as close to the fire as possible. It burned too hot. He yanked the blankets down from his chin; under them, he discovered, he was naked.

  Suddenly he shouted, as he had on the road, “I am a coachman!”

  “Not before me, you were not.”

  He jerked his head around so quickly that the bones in his neck snapped. Meloria said it again, in a rougher voice:

  “Not before me, you were not. No more than she was . . . what she is.”

  He said, in a perfect rage, “She changes back! Without warning, without help, and then he can’t even find her!”

  “He always does.”

  “He—”

  “Would she have been better off without me, without any of it, as she was before? Without him or the child? Without even those dangerous bits and pieces. Just because the magic goes away sometimes—would she have been better off without it entirely?”

  He was tired. His knee was in pain, and his neck hurt where it had snapped, and a great listlessness came over him, as if the cold had claimed him on the road after all, as if Meloria had not come. He closed his eyes. After a while he could hear Meloria moving around the cottage preparing food, drawing water, clanking a pot down on a table with clumsy, heavy movements.

  She drew the blankets back up to his chin.

  The coachman opened his eyes and looked up at her. Meloria set her lips hard together. Her chin quivered.

  “None of us is that free of spillage. None. Not even . . . such as I.”

  The coachman nodded. He raised one hand and touched her cheek. It took all the strength he had, without and within, more strength even than not remembering what had hurled after him down the embankment. Then he closed his eyes, exhausted, and slept.

  IN MEMORIAM

  Sycamore Hill, an annual writers’ workshop attended by many of today’s most talented authors, has given this magazine a number of outstanding stories. We are told that one day at last summer’s workshop was known as “Triple K Day” because John Kessel’s “Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner,” James Patrick Kelly’s “Home Front,” and Nancy Kress’ moving tale, “In Memoriam,” were all critiqued at that meeting. That all three stories are to be found in the same issue of IAsfm is a coincidence; we doubt very much, though, that the high percentage of strong and publishable stories coming out of this workshop is at all coincidental.

  As soon as Aaron followed me into the garden, I knew he was angry. He pursed his mouth, that sweet exaggerated fullness of lips that hadn’t changed since he was two years old and that looked silly on the middle-aged man he had become. But he said nothing—in itself a sign of trouble. Oh, I knew him through and through. As well as I knew his father, as well as his father had known me.

  Aaron closed the door behind us and walked to the lawn chairs, skirting the tiny shrine as if it weren’t there. He lowered himself gingerly into a chair.

  “Be careful,” I said, pointlessly. “Your back again?”

  He waved this remark away; even as a little boy he had hated to have attention called to any physical problem. A skinned knee, a stiff neck, a broken wrist. I remembered. I remembered everything.

  “Coffee? A splash?”

  “Coffee. Come closer, I don’t want to shout. You don’t have your hearing field on, do you?”

  I didn’t. I poured him his coffee from the lawn bar and floated my chair close enough to hand it to him. Next door, Todd came out of his house, dressed in shorts and carrying a trowel. He waved cheerfully.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this,” Aaron began—he had never been one for small talk, never one for subtlety—” but I have to say it one more time. Listen to Dr. Lorsky about the operation.”

  “Sugar?”

  “Black. Mom—”

  “Be quiet,” I said, and he looked startled enough, but his surprise wasn’t followed by a scowl. Aaron, who always reacted to a direct order as if to assault. I sat up straighter and peered at him. No scowl.

  He took a long, deliberate sip of coffee, which was too hot for long sips. “Is there a reason you won’t listen to Dr. Lorsky? A real, rational reason?” He didn’t look at the shrine.

  “You know the reason,” I said. Thirty feet away in his side yard, Todd began to weed his flower beds, digging out the most stubborn weeds with the trowel, pulling the rest by hand. He never used a power hoe. The flowers, snapdragons and yarrow and azaleas and lemondrop marigolds, crowded together in the brief hot riot of midsummer.

  Aaron waggled his fingers at the shrine he still wouldn’t see. “That’s not a reason!”

  He was right, of course—the shrine was effect, not cause. I smiled at his perceptiveness, unable to help the sly, silly glow of a maternal pride thirty years out of date. But Aaron took the smile for something else: acquiesence, perhaps, or weakening. He put his cup on the grass and leaned forward. Earnestly—he had been such an earnest little boy, unsmiling in the face of jokes he didn’t understand, putting his toys away in the exact same spots each night, presenting his teenage demands in carefully numbered lists, lecturing the other boys on their routine childish brutality.

  A prig, actually.

  “Mom, listen to me. I’m asking you to reconsider. That’s all. For three reasons. First, because it’s getting dangerous for you to live out here all alone. Despite the electronic surveillance. What if you were robbed?”

  “Robbed,” I said dryly. Aaron didn’t catch it; I didn’t really expect him to. He knew why I had bought this house, why I stayed in it. I said gently, “Your coffee’s getting cold.” He ignored me, pressing doggedly on, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. On the back of the left hand were two liver spots. When had that happened?

  “Second, this business of ancestor worship or whatever it’s supposed to be. This shrine. You never believed in this nonsense before. You raised me to think rationally, without superstition, and here you are planting flowers to your dead forebears unto the nth generation and meditating to them like you were some teenaged wirehead split-brain.”

  “We used to meditate a lot when I was a girl, before wireheads were invented,” I said, to annoy him. His intensity was scaring me. “But Aaron, darling, that’s not what I do here.”

  “What do you do?” he said, and immediately, I could see, regretted it. The shrine shone lustrous in the sunlight. It was a triptych of black sla
bs two feet high. In the late afternoon heat, the black neo-nitonol had softened into featurelessness, but when night fell, the names would again spring into hard-etched clarity. Hundreds of tiny names, engraved close together in meticulous script, linked with the lines of generation. At the base of the triptych bloomed low flowers: violets and forget-me-nots and rosemary.

  “ ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,’ ” I said, but Aaron, being Aaron, didn’t recognize Ophelia’s line. Not a reader, my Aaron. Bytes not books. Oh, I remembered.

  In the other yard, Todd’s trowel clunked as it hit a buried stone.

  “It isn’t healthy,” Aaron said. “Shrines. Ancestor worship! And in the third place, time is running out for you to have the operation. I spoke to Dr. Lorsky yesterday—”

  “You spoke to my doctor without my permission—”

  “—and he said your temporal lobes still scan well but he can’t say how much longer that will be true. There’s that cut-off point where the body just can’t handle it anymore. And then the brain wipe wouldn’t do you any good. It would be too late. Mom—you know.”

  I knew. The sheer weight of memory reached some critical mass. All those memories: the shade of blue of a dress worn fifty years ago, the tilt of the head of someone long dead, the sudden sharp smell of a grandmother’s cabbage soup mingled with the dusty scent of an apartment razed for two decades. And each memory bringing on others, a rush of them, till the grandmother was there before you, whole. The burden and bulk of all those minute sensations over days and years and decades, triggering chemical changes in the brain which in turn trigger cellular changes, until the body cannot bear any more and breakdown accelerates. The cut-off point. It is our memories that kill us.

  Aaron groped with one hand for his coffee cup, beside his chair on the grass. The crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes were still tentative, like lines scratched in soft sand. He ducked his head and mumbled. “I just. . . I just don’t want you to die, Mom.”

  I looked away. It is always, somehow, a surprise to find that an adult child still loves you.

  Next door, Todd straightened from one flower bed and moved to the next. He pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it to the ground. Sweat gleamed on the muscles of his back, still hard and taut in his mid-thirties body. The shirt made a dark patch on the bright grass.

  A bee buzzed up from the flowers around the black triptych and circled by my ear. Glad of the distraction, I waved it away.

  “Aaron . . . I can’t. I just can’t. Be wiped.”

  “Even if you die for it? What point is there to that?”

  I stayed silent. We had discussed it before, all of it, the whole dreary topic. But Aaron had never before looked like that. And he had never begged.

  “Please, Mom. Please. You already get confused. Last week you thought that woman in the park was your dead sister. I know you’re going to say it was just for a second, but that’s the way it starts. Just for a second, then more and more, and then it’s too late for the wipe. You say you wouldn’t be ‘you’ anymore with a wipe—but if your memory goes and the body follows it, are you ‘you’ anyway? Feeble and senile? Are you still ‘you’ if you’re dead?”

  “That isn’t the point,” I began, but he must have seen on my face something which he thought was a softening, a wavering. He reached for my hand. His fingers were dry and hot.

  “It is the point! Death is the point! Your body can’t be made any younger, but it doesn’t have to become any older. You don’t. And you have the bodily strength, still, you have the money—Christ, it isn’t as if you would be a vegetable. You’d still remember language, routines—and you’d make new memories, start over. A new life. Life, not death!”

  I said nothing to that. Aaron could see the years of my life stretching behind me, years he wanted me to cut off as casually as paring a fingernail. He could not see the other, greater loss.

  “You’re wrong,” I said, as gently as I could, and took my fingers from his. “I’m not refusing the wipe because I want death. I’m refusing it because too much of me has already died.”

  He stared at me with incomprehension. The bee I had waved away buzzed around his left ear. I saw his blue eyes flick to it and then back to me, refusing to be distracted. Linear thinking, always: was it growing up with all those computers? Such blue eyes, such a handsome man, still.

  Next door Todd began to whistle. Aaron stiffened and half-turned to look for the first time over his shoulder; he had not realized Todd was there. He looked back at me. His eyes shadowed and dropped, and in that tiny sideways slide—not at all linear—I knew. I suddenly knew.

  He saw it. “Mom . . . Mother . . .”

  “You’re going to have the wipe.”

  He raised the coffee cup to his mouth and drank: an automatic covering gesture, the coffee must have been cold. Repulsive. Cold coffee is repulsive.

  I folded my arms across my belly and leaned forward.

  He said quietly, “My back is getting worse. The migraines are back, once or twice every week. Lorsky says I’m an old forty-two, you know how much people vary. I’m not the easy-living type who forgets easily. I take things hard, I don’t forget, and I don’t want to die.”

  I said nothing.

  “Mom?”

  I said nothing.

  “Please understand . . . please.” It came out in a whisper. I said nothing. Aaron put his cup on the table and eased himself from the chair, leaning heavily on its arm and webbed back. The movement attracted Todd’s attention. I saw, past the bulk of Aaron’s body, the moment Todd decided to walk over and be neighborly.

  “Hello, Mrs. Kinnian. Aaron.”

  I watched Aaron’s face clench. He turned slowly.

  Todd said, “Hot, isn’t it? I was away for a week and my weeds just ambushed everything.”

  “Sailing,” Aaron said carefully.

  “Yes, sailing.” Todd said, faintly surprised. He wiped the sweat from his eyes. “Do you sail?”

  “I did. Once. When I was a kid. My father used to take me.”

  “You should have kept it up. Great sport. Mrs. Kinnian, can I weed those flowers for you?”

  He pointed to the black triptych. I said, “No, thank you, Todd. The gardener will be around tomorrow.”

  “Well, if you . . . all right. Take care.”

  He smiled at us: a handsome blue-eyed man in his prime, ruddy with health and exercise, his face as open and clear as a child’s. Beside him,

  Aaron looked puffy, stiff, out of shape. The skin at the back of Aaron s neck formed ridges that worked up and down above his collar.

  “Take care,” I said to Todd. He walked back to his weeding. Aaron turned to me. I saw his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I am . . . sorry. But I’m going to have the wipe. I’m going to do it.”

  “To me.”

  “For me.”

  After that there was nothing else to say. I watched Aaron walk around the flowered shrine, open the door to the house, disappear in the cool interior. There was a brief hum from the air conditioner, cut off the moment the door closed. A second door slammed; Todd, too, had gone inside his house.

  I realized that I had not asked Aaron when Dr. Lorsky would do the wipe. He might not have told me. He had already been stretched as far as he would go, pulled off center by emotion and imagination, neither of which he wanted. He had never been an imaginative child, only a practical one. Coming to me in the garden with his math homework, worried about fractions, unconcerned with the flowers blooming and dying around him. I remembered.

  But he would not.

  Todd came back outside, carrying a cold drink, and returned to weeding. I watched him a while. I watched him an hour, two. I watched him after he had left and dusk began to fall over the garden. Then I struggled out of my chair—everything ached, I had been sitting too long—and picked some snapdragons. Purple, deepened by the shadows. I laid them in front of the black triptych.

  When Todd and I had been married,
I had carried roses: white with pink undertones at the tips of the petals, deep pink at the heart. I hadn’t seen such roses in years. Maybe the strain wasn’t grown anymore.

  The script on the shrine had sprung out clear and hard. I touched it with one finger, tracing the names. Then I went into the house to watch TV. A brain-wipe clinic had been bombed. Elderly activists crowded in front of the camera, yelling and waving gnarled fists. They were led away by police, strong youthful men and women trying to get the old people to behave like old people. The unlined faces beneath their helmets looked bewildered. They were bewildered. Misunderstanding everything; believing that remembrance is death; getting it all backwards. Trying to make us go away as if we didn’t exist. As if we never had.

  PHILIPPA’S HANDS

  Here’s the beginning of another group of thematically- linked stories. The following four pieces all relate in some way to alien contact, though each addresses the subject very, very differently.

  Nancy Kress is one of the truly fine writers to come into prominence during the ’80s. Her short fiction has appeared everywhere and she won a Nebula Award in 1985 for her short story “Out of All Them Bright Stars.” Her most recent novel, An Alien Light was published this year. Nancy is a senior copywriter for an advertising firm in Rochester, New York and occasionally teaches at the State University of New York at Brockport.

  “Philippe’s Hands” is a chilling story of contact with the unknown and of decisions that are nearly impossible to make.

  It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

  —David Hume

  They came again at dawn, like last time, distilling out of the washed-out gloom under the bedroom window. Or perhaps they came through the window, floating through the chilly glass and worn flowered curtains—how could you tell? They were crying again. They were always crying. Philippa thought, through her sleepy dread, I could see if the curtains are damp. Then I could tell.

  The bandage still covered her right middle finger from last time.