Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Gaspard hopped through the crowds, steadying himself with his crutch. Boys in uniforms too big for them, old men from battles nobody remembered—the National Guard prepared to defend the city. Artillery thundered closer.

  Crossing a half-built square beside the Seine, where the paving stones were uneven, Gaspard fell.

  For a moment, dazed on the ground, he thought he was back in Russia. Then his head cleared and he tried to rise. Some boys, thirteen or fourteen years old, rushed past, knocking him over again. A few yards away they stopped.

  “Dis donc! A soldier of the Emperor!”

  “You mean, of the upstart who stole the throne!”

  “My papa says—”

  Royalists. Coming now out of their holes. No, not Royalists but children, in another year they would be conscripted to the army, the nonsense knocked out of them. There would not be another year.

  “Into the Seine with him, the swine, the traitor—”

  They rolled him across the square like a barrel, over and over, the sword clanking at his side each time it struck the cobblestones. At the river three of them, one at each limb, hoisted him to the railing and toppled him over. He splashed into the water and sank.

  Amalie. As his lungs grew hot and the current bore him along underwater, he thought, This is how she feels dancing. Weightless. Then his lungs burst and he gulped water. A second later his head broke the surface and he sputtered, only to go down again.

  This time he saw her, there on the mud and rocks and green-slimed stone wall of the embankment. She was dancing. A slow pirouette while her filmy skirt drifted among the water plants. Retiré into attitude croisée, the left leg lifted behind, then opening flowerlike into arabesque. Gaspard reached a hand toward her, but she bourréed away, her smile enchanting. He smiled back. The moment was perfect. They were one.

  He was seized from behind and pulled above water. Pain burst his lungs; water streamed out of his mouth and nose.

  “Get him aboard, non, non, careful—”

  “He is dead!”

  “He is not.”

  Amalie—

  Two men dumped him onto the deck of the fishing boat. “Lame, poor fellow. There, get him aboard.”

  “We will take him with us out of Paris. A loyal soldier of the Empire . . . the Prussians shall not have him. Paaaw, but he stinks.”

  “The river stinks.”

  “I wonder how he fell?”

  Let us talk about the extraordinary reception your dancing received.

  Long ago, you mean.

  It was said—and I quote from Le Journal de Paris—that you “dance as if pursued by wolves. Savagely, relentlessly.” Was that so?

  Not wolves. Fire. Fire and blood.

  I beg your pardon?

  You do not have it.

  You make no sense, Mademoiselle. Dancing is not war.

  It took Gaspard a year to get back to Paris. A fever came on him from breathing the river water; it left him very weak. He recuperated at home, in his village near the Pyrenees. There, nothing had changed. But in Paris the city had fallen, the Emperor been forced into exile. He will come back, old soldiers said, he will return with the violets.

  And he did, escaping Elba, the loyal rallying to his march home. Paris cheered and laughed and danced. In a thousand places the Bourbon lilies were torn down, ripped out, painted over with the Imperial bees.

  Gaspard went immediately to the Opéra. Ink on the handbills was still wet:

  AMALIE DUMONT dance ORPHEUS ET EURIDICE

  He caught her leaving her dressing room, dressed for the street in pelisse and bonnet, carrying a silk muff. The dressing room behind her overflowed with flowers and shawls and perfume and fans and small enameled boxes the pink of new skin, the white of exposed bone.

  “Amalie. I have come home.”

  She whirled on him. “What has that to do with me!”

  “Everything.” He looked at her steadily. She would never dance for him again, he knew. It didn’t matter. He would watch her from the stalls, from the pit, from the wings. She could not escape him. He would send her flowers every night. He would wait for her at the alley door, and hobble after her carriage, and wipe the blood from her slippers off stone steps.

  “Leave me alone, damn you! Stop haunting me!”

  “Never. I will never desert you. I have given you all that I am.”

  “I didn’t want it!”

  “That doesn’t matter.” It was not to be expected that she would comprehend. She was not a soldier.

  “Please, please leave me alone.”

  “Never.”

  “I can dance now! I never wanted to make my life as a dancer, it was only a means to . . . I wanted to wear silk dresses and drive in carriages and be . . . but now I am a dancer. You have done this to me! Now go away!”

  He gazed at her, unswerving, without pretending he did not understand. “No.”

  “Please . . .”

  Gaspard said, “One cannot desert blood.” She could not be expected to know that either. Blood was not tin. Once blood was shed, it was shed. One could only remain steadfast to the cause of its shedding.

  “But I don’t want you!” Amalie cried, and hid her face in her long slender hands. She sobbed aloud. Dancers and stagehands stopped in astonishment to look at her. Gaspard looked, too, drinking her in, his fond gaze never wavering until she rushed away into the foyer and then the street, where with his one leg he could not swiftly follow.

  Dancing is not war, Mademoiselle. Dancing is . . . art.

  Art is no more than whatever animates it, drives it. And what animates us but blood?

  Many things. Honor. Courage. Loyalty.

  That is what I have just said. Loyalty. It has a terrible life of its own.

  Everywhere she went, he was there. He watched her laughing at the Théâtre-Français, strolling on the new Champs-Élysées, shopping for slippers or gloves, stepping down from her carriage for a ball in the rue Chantereine. All of Paris seemed Bonapartist now, the few Royalists gone, or shuttered in their houses, or silent. Gaspard wore his uniform proudly as he watched Amalie. Watched her walk, watched her talk, watched her eat, watched her drive. Watched her dance, one leg kicking high in a grand battement. He never tired of watching. He never got enough.

  “Go away,” she whispered, or shrieked, or whimpered. “Leave me alone. For the love of God . . .”

  God had nothing to do with it. He would love her unfailingly, always.

  She danced Les Pommes d’Or, and the crowds almost tore the theater apart. She danced La Triomphe de la France, the music ink still wet, and the Emperor’s brother attended, Prince Lucien. She danced La Vengeance d’une Mère, and Le Journal de Paris called her “a jewel of the Empire. On stage, she is not merely woman, but becomes something infinitely more powerful, infinitely more French. Amalie Dumont becomes the steadfast spirit of France herself.”

  The only time Gaspard lowered his eyes from her face was when her feet bled, the blood soaking through the soft-toed slippers.

  One night in June she danced Medea et Jason, the night all the bells of Paris rang for the victory at Ligny. Gaspard stood outside her house in the rue Sainte Marie when the news came, two days later, of the defeat at Waterloo. The coalition marched toward Paris. Many of the rich were evacuating. Gaspard watched the footman fling open the door of her carriage.

  “You have waited too long to leave the city, Amalie. The roads are blocked.” They were the first words he had spoken aloud in a month.

  She stopped, one delicate foot set on the carriage step, and looked at him with hatred so pure it shone, like silver. “Do not try to stop me!”

  “You will be back.”

  She was, by evening. Looters and roving mobs roamed the streets just ahead of the invaders. The mobs plundered houses, fought quick sharp skirmishes, set fires. Smoke rose above the city, and sometimes screams. Gaspard stood stiffly on guard at Amalie’s gate, unmoving.

  She jumped from the carriage, carrying he
r valise in one hand and silk muff in the other. Her black hair straggled from its chignon; her pelisse was dirty and torn. The foamy sides of the horses heaved and labored. Blood smeared her left cheek.

  “Amalie.”

  She whirled on him, a move so smooth and quick it might have been a pirouette. Gaspard smiled to see it. At his smile, something shifted in Amalie’s face. She began to breathe in quick sharp pants, and in her eyes leaped something that Gaspard seemed to recognize. He said, “Yes . . . from blood—” and had time for no more before she raised the pistol from her muff and shot him through the heart.

  “Mademoiselle!” the coachman gasped. “Mademoiselle—!”

  “Inside. Get inside now.” She ran into her house just as a burning brand was hurled at the house opposite, landed, and set the wooden structure aflame.

  Gaspard never moved as the fire swept toward him. His one good leg stuck out straight, and his hand covered his heart. His eyes looked toward Amalie’s house, and never wavered, not even once.

  Loyalty has “a terrible life of its own”? I do not understand you, Mademoiselle.

  No, probably not. I do not think ghosts are romantic, Monsieur. Not beautiful ethereal maidens floating over graveyards. Not tenderhearted Wilis, bloodless sylphides. Our dead are not beyond loyalty—nor beyond revenge. Their blood imprisons us.

  Mademoiselle?

  Do you know that I have danced every day since my retirement? Every last day?

  Really? Danced every day, for no one?

  I did not say that.

  I don’t understand . . .

  You don’t need to. But this will be my last performance, thank God. And soon, I think . . .

  Yes?

  I shall see for myself how much revenge the dead are owed for their loyalty.

  Mademoiselle?

  We shall see.

  1998

  STATE OF NATURE

  Liz had been told that there were only two ways to reach Quinn Tower: the underground train or two days’ hard hike through the mountains. She chose the train.

  She boarded in Denver, forty-six miles away, after a security check that was unbelievable. Finger prints, retina scan—as far as she knew, Liz didn’t even have either of these on police file, which may have been what security was trying to determine—vidphone check with Jenny. Liz supposed she was lucky they hadn’t done a DNA match. Probably omitted only because it took two days. Her backpack was searched, X-rayed, computersniffed.

  “Don’t you want to cut my hair and tattoo my arm?” Liz said to the stiff-jawed guard, who didn’t even deign to glance at her. QUINN SECURITY said the patch on the guard’s uniform, and Liz saw that it was more than identification. A flag, maybe. I pledge allegiance . . .

  She was not in a good mood when she was finally allowed to board the train. Sleek, comfortable, fast—she would beat the Tower in less than fifteen minutes, incredible even for maglev—the train did nothing to calm her. Wrong It was all wrong. Wrong for Jenny, wrong for all of them.

  Still, when the train briefly emerged above ground just inside the electrofenced edge of Quinn’s land, Liz caught her breath. The Rocky Mountains, thrusting imperiously into the clouds, white-crowned but lush green below. A lake, glass-clear, bluer even than the sky. All of it untouched, pristine, a forty-nine-square-mile state of nature as pure as the day God created it.

  Or Stephen Quinn recreated it.

  And from the middle of this primitive and organic Eden, fifty stories high but still dwarfed by the surrounding mountains, rose Quinn Tower, faced with mirrors that reflected the sky. Neither primitive nor organic, and not pretending to be. But shimmeringly beautiful.

  Wrong. Wrong.

  The train ran above ground only long enough for passengers to appreciate the view. But Liz glimpsed something else before she was plunged back underground: a black bear with two cubs, startled by the sudden appearance of a hurtling metal monster from beneath the earth. The cubs scurried away, roly-poly unsteady fluff. The mother snarled protectively over her retreating shoulder at the already-disappearing train. Liz looked away.

  The maglev stayed under ground until the subterranean station directly under Quinn Tower. Well, of course, that was the point, wasn’t it? Keep all signs of human occupation confined to the Tower itself. Jenny had sent her pictures. No parking lots, dumpsters, roads, industrial plants, shopping malls, storage sheds, tennis courts, redwood decks. Not so much as a picnic bench. Pine and aspen forest pushed right up to the Tower walls, thick with shade-loving wildflowers, alive with small rustling animals. Everything moved in and out of the Tower by buried maglev.

  Liz got off the train and followed the crowd to a bank of glass-fronted elevators. Slowly she rose past the shopping level, the restaurant level, the pool and exercise floor, the lounges and meeting rooms. Then more quickly to the thirty-seventh floor.

  Jenny opened the door to the apartment before Liz even rang. Probably the building had tracked her movements. “Lizzie! You look wonderful!”

  “Fast train. No time to get travel-stained,” Liz said. But it was Jenny who looked wonderful. Her hair was redder, and longer. She wore a jumpsuit the same bright blue as her eyes. Judging from the fine lines on her beautiful face, she had’t had any rejuvenation injections, but her skin nonetheless glowed with health. Liz remembered how ravaged Jenny had looked the last time Liz had seen her, on the first anniversary of the funeral, when Jenny had told her about the move to Quinn. About Sarah. Liz squashed the memory and made herself smile.

  Jenny said, “Would you like a drink?”

  “Please. Vodka, with—”

  “I know,” Jenny said. There was an awkward pause. They didn’t look at each other.

  Liz looked instead at the apartment. A huge glass wall with spectacular view of mountains and meadows. Pale rugs and furniture, soft-rounded—Jenny’s choice, Liz would bet anything on it—combined tastefully with books and plants and arresting sculpture from around the world. And on the coffee table, a battered carved wooden decoy duck. Sarah, Liz remembered, had come originally from Boston.

  “Nice place,” Liz said, and hoped her voice didn’t sound snide.

  “Yes,” Jenny said. “Aren’t the mountains something? I hike almost every day.”

  “If everybody hikes every day, doesn’t that mess up nature, along with the whole point of this place?”

  “Oh, no,” Jenny said brightly. “No one who lives here would be anything less than scrupulously careful about the mountains.”

  “Or they just don’t live here anymore, right?”

  Jenny handed her a vodka with tonic and lime. “That’s right.”

  “A superconsiderate group of people, as carefully protected as the environment,” Liz said, and they were into it already, two minutes after she’d arrived. Her fault. No, damn it, not fault—this was what she’d come for, after all. Why delay?

  Jenny drained her drink, whatever it was. “Liz, I’m not going to argue with you.”

  “Fine. I’ll just argue with you, then. It’s wrong, Jenny.”

  “It’s not wrong for me.”

  “Do you know who I came up with in the elevator? Two black executive types, one male and one female, who probably work in Denver but wouldn’t dream of living among poor blacks who might ask them for help or time or protection. A Latino woman in a five-thousanddollar Jil Sanders coat who looked terrified until she could scurry into her own apartment and lock it behind her. Two men, holding hands and arguing about what to watch on TV tonight. And three teenagers who looked like they own the world and all the peons in it. And come to think of it, they probably do. Arrogant fifteen-year-old snots who never ever feel like part of the vast human race out there struggling and working and starving and trying desperately to stay alive. Insulated, the whole lot of you. An untouchable elite.”

  Jenny poured herself another drink. Liz saw that it was only cola. “All right, Liz, let’s have this out. Do you know who you really saw out there?”

  “I saw—”<
br />
  “You saw Darryl Johnson, who works for Mitsubishi California and commutes home every day, exhausted, to his family. You saw Naomi Foster, who has four-year-old twins she doesn’t want perforated in a drive-by shooting. You saw Mrs. Fernandez, who’s agoraphobic, poor lady, and havened here by—”

  “Havened’? That’s a verb now?”

  “—by her children, because it’s the only place she feels safe. You saw Walter Follett and Billy Tarver, the sweetest and most faithful couple you’d ever want to meet. You saw young Molly Burdick, who’s a Merit Scholarship winner, and a few of her friends. You saw real people, Liz, living real lives. Not stereotypes of some spoiled superior upper caste. Just real people who choose to live in a beautiful place where they can walk around safely, and who are lucky enough to have a little money to afford it.”

  “ ‘A little money,’ ” Liz said. “Jesus, Jenny, what’s the rent here now? You’re lucky the woman you fell in love with while we were still together just happened to be so rich.”

  Jenny just looked at her. After a minute Liz said, “I’m sorry. I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” Jenny said, “You’re doing this all wrong.”

  Liz took a deep breath. It hadn’t always been like this. Once she and Jenny could have said anything to each other. Anything. Talking, laughing, making dinner, making love . . .

  Jenny had put down her drink. She crossed to the spectacular view, her back to Liz. Liz tensed. When Jenny spoke over her shoulder like this, it always meant she was going to drop a bombshell. “I want to tell you something, Liz. I was going to write you, but then you called and said you were coming by anyway . . . Sarah and I are going to adopt. We want to bring up our child in a safe place. Where she can’t be . . .” She couldn’t finish.