Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Girl,” says a man in rough brown wool, “Get ye to yer work!”

  I do, while the knights argue and the ladies weep and the king keeps saying, “Gawaine, Gawaine, ye have set me in great sorrow.”

  I am there eleven days. One hundred and fifty knights leave on the quest for the Holy Grail. A religious prophet turns up to say that no lady may go on the quest because all women are unclean, which puts the ladies in a more foul mood than they already were by the departure of their men. And I am left behind with them. Guenevere is the worst, alternately crying and raging at Arthur, at her women, at the servants.

  Not that I see much of her. I thought servants’ lives in David Copperfield and Middlemarch were hard—but this! Only Les Misérables had been worse.

  Rough labor from way before dawn to after dark. Sleeping huddled on dirty straw in an unheated room, packed together for warmth in a cold winter. I get chilblains on my hands, which fester and burst, making it an agony to touch anything. The food is ample enough, but very poor: gruel with the dead insects from the grain bins still in it, bread so hard I chip a tooth. I lose weight, am cuffed alongside the head by the kitchen women, am screamed at by a lady who smells almost as bad as I do. One evening, a male servant is flogged bloody in the outer ward. I never learn what he did.

  Almost, I am glad to return to the library, although I stare at the books on their orderly shelves with hatred.

  “Welcome back,” Grandmother says, polishing a brass tray inlaid with silver. She and my mother brought it back from their summer trip to Morocco.

  “It isn’t right to punish me like this,” I gasp. “It was an accident!”

  She doesn’t answer.

  I begin to think about suicide.

  The next time, I don’t recognize the place, or the people. I stand on the wide veranda of a house perched on rocks above a cold sea, dull green-gray and restless. The house, weathered gray, looms four stories above me. I shiver, not knowing what to do, until a young, handsome man in Levis comes out of the front door, holding a coffee cup. He has strong shoulders and a weak chin.

  “Oh—you the girl from the village? To help clean for the party?” And then I know that I am. “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, go on inside, you’re shivering. Tackie’s in the kitchen and he’ll tell you what needs doing.” He drains his coffee cup, sets it on the veranda railing, and bounds down the steps toward a sporty red Jaguar. I take the coffee cup into the kitchen. It’s warmed by an oldfashioned stove. A boy sits at the table, eating sugary cereal. The boy looks up.

  “Are you Tackie? I’m the girl from the village here to—”

  “Clean, I know.” He smiles, an unhappy smile. “Mama said you should first clean the bedrooms on the second floor for Aunt May and Aunt Julia. They’re coming here to help with the party.”

  “Okay. Will you show me which rooms they are? And where the cleaning supplies are?”

  “Sure.” When he gets up, I see how thin he is. “What’s your name?”

  “Katie.”

  “I’m Tackman Babcock.”

  He brings a book with him, a thick and heavy book, old looking. I can’t see the title. The rooms I’m supposed to clean are thick with dust, as if no one has been in them for months. They smell musty. I throw open the windows, dust and mop and find linens for the beds, remove old ashes from the fireplaces. The stationery on the desk is headed “HOUSE of 31 FEBRUARY,” which makes no sense. I take the small rag rugs outside to shake them, since there seems to be no vacuum cleaner. Tackie is on the front porch, huddled in a sheepskin jacket, reading.

  I say, “Aren’t you cold?”

  He looks up vaguely, snapped too suddenly from the world of his book, uncertain for a moment where he is. I recognize that feeling, from back when books were a delight to me. He says, “Oh. Katie. Did you talk to Mama?”

  “No. Where is she?”

  “In the kitchen. She wants to see you.”

  Mrs. Babcock is there with the handsome young man named Jason, and his hand is on her breast. When I come in he removes it, but not very fast. She is pretty, dressed in a silk bathrobe too light for the weather. I know immediately that she is on something. Her pupils are big as dimes, and she has that bright, jerky way of talking.

  “Oh, Katie! There you are! If you could start with the bedrooms for my sister and sister-in-law, who—”

  “I already did those, ma’am.”

  “Oh! Of course you did—silly me! Tackie told me. Well, then, the other rooms. Whatever looks like it needs doing.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jason ignores me. I’m not surprised; I’m not pretty. Jason is just as transparent to me as Mrs. Babcock is.

  I spend the rest of the day cleaning. The work is easy. Hot running water! Toilet brushes! Windex! Grandmother must be slipping.

  In the late afternoon I go back downstairs. Mrs. Babcock and Jason have disappeared into her bedroom. Tackie has reclaimed the kitchen, reading at the table.

  I say, “What about dinner?”

  “Dinner?” he says, as if the word is Sanskrit.

  “Yes . . . dinner. Who usually cooks it?”

  “Nobody.”

  I find the pantry and old-fashioned refrigerator well stocked. Tackie actually looks up from his book as I fry lamb chops, fix mashed potatoes, cook frozen green beans. His little mouth hangs open in astonishment and anticipation. I take a tray up to Mrs. Babcock and Jason. She, too, is astonished.

  “Well, damn,” Jason says, eyes on the lamb chops.

  Tackie and I eat in the kitchen. He is a very silent child. Outside, the sea surges rhythmically in a rising wind. Finally I say, “What are you reading?”

  He pauses, fork halfway to his mouth, as if this is a dangerous question. He says, “A book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Can I see?”

  Obediently, reluctantly, he hands it over. The pages are tinted yellow, a few dog-eared. The Island of Doctor Death. I hold back my snort; this is a long way from Anna Karenina. I glance at a random paragraph, and the kitchen disappears.

  I am in another castle, standing in a stone corridor beside an open door. Inside the room a man in evening clothes stands beside another man strapped onto a table. The second man is naked; the first looks over him and straight at me. I run; there is no shout to halt, no pursuit. At the end of the corridor something comes around the corner and I scream.

  It doesn’t seem to hear. Huge, shaggy, half man and half beast, it lumbers past as if I don’t exist, heading for the room I just fled. What the fuck?

  Cautiously I tiptoe back down the stone corridor. Condensation drips from the walls. Standing outside the room, I hear the book’s dialogue.

  “Do you mean that you made these monsters?”

  “Made them? Did God make Eve, Captain, when he took her from Adam’s rib? Or did Adam make the bone and God alter it to become what he wished? Look at it this way, Captain. I am God and Nature is Adam.”

  A hunchbacked . . . thing ambles past me and into the room. It doesn’t see me any more than the first monster had, or the naked man, or the crazy torturer. Here, I am invisible. Pure observer.

  So I observe. I watch Bruno, the former St. Bernard, free Captain Ransom. I watch Ransom in turn rescue the impossibly gorgeous girl Talar: Gisele Bündchen crossed with a Barbie doll. I watch her tell him about “a city older than civilization, buried in the jungle here on this little island,” and I laugh aloud at the sheer exuberant schlockiness of Tackie’s book. I watch them escape the castle of Dr. Death and set out for Lemuria.

  Am I stuck in this book?

  For a while, I don’t care. I’m not hungry, not used like a slave, not beaten. Not even seen. Most of all, and for the first time since my mother died, I’m not afraid—until I realize I might be trapped here for good. Will my grandmother’s black arts work if I am in a book within a book? Can I get out?

  The moment I think that, I’m back in the kitchen of the House of 31 Febr
uary, and Tackie has just started on his third lamb chop. I had chosen the moment of return, willing myself out of the story.

  “Tackie,” I say shakily, “do . . . do you ever go inside your book? Go where Captain Ransom and Bruno and Talar and the others are?”

  He picks up a forkful of mashed potatoes drenched in too much butter. “No,” he says, not looking at me, his thin little face flushed, “but sometimes the book people come out to me. I don’t go in.” But I had. Ransom hadn’t come into the tale of the House of February 31; I had gone into his. Maybe because Tackie is already a character in a story, and I am not? Before I can ask Tackie anything else, I’m back in Grandmother’s library.

  She is rearranging the collection of ivory and jade figurines that she and my mother bought in Thailand. Fabulously expensive, they sit on the library mantel, flanked by tall cherry bookshelves of leather-bound classics. “Welcome back, Caitlin,” Grandmother says.

  I am not as innocent as Tackie. I am experienced with this evil old woman. More important, I have had days of calm, safe invisibility: time to think and plan.

  “No,” I scream as if in pain, writhing on the floor. “No, please, Grandmother . . . not there, not again!” I burst into tears. It is surprisingly easy. “Send me to Les Misérables rather than there!”

  She pauses, an exquisite carved Kinnaree goddess statue in her hand, her face first surprised and then sly. “It was difficult?” she says with mock, razored sympathy.

  I sob louder.

  I knew there was no chance she would ever have read The Island of Doctor Death.

  My mother died when I was not quite thirteen. She had taken me downtown to shop for school clothes, a once-a-year expedition I always looked forward to with hungry longing. For one whole glorious afternoon I would have her complete attention. Me, not Grandmother, with whom Mother spent most days talking, laughing, and traveling, always traveling on Grandmother’s trust fund while I stayed home with a succession of uncaring maids and a picture of the dead father I couldn’t remember.

  We picked out boots at Nordstrom, skirts at Saks, tops at a trendy place for teens. “After all,” Mother said gaily, “you’re going into junior high!” We stepped off the curb, both of us laden with packages. A silver Lexus sped around the corner, going too fast. Mother dropped her packages and shoved me out of the way. She was killed instantly.

  At the wake I clutched a book, my only escape from grief, and my grandmother stared at me across the open coffin. That was the first time the icy wind blew into my mind.

  What if entering Tackie’s novel was a freak occurrence, something that never happens again?

  The next day, I attack Grandmother with a fireplace poker. I can’t reach her, of course; it’s not like I haven’t tried before. She shoots me a look of contempt, the summons comes, and I’m back on the veranda of the House of 31 February. But Tackie, clutching his book, is leaving. He’s climbing into a car with a middle-aged woman and a gray-haired man, who carries his suitcase. The drug-addicted mother and slimy boyfriend are already gone. Only a pair of Tackie’s aunts are left, May and Julie, and they don’t stay long, either.

  There are no other books anywhere in that huge, once majestic house. Only a stack of girlie magazines and a crushed cigarette pack in what I assume was Jason’s bedroom. And I can’t leave the house. I wander it, a ghost in a story that’s already over, for three long days before Grandmother yanks me back.

  This time I smile, stretch, and go to shower without speaking to her.

  Next time it will not be The Island of Doctor Death.

  I don’t know what it will be. But Tackie Babcock is not the only fictional character who reads. I think of Marianne Dashwood praising Cowper, reading Shakespeare with Colonel Brandon. Of Anna Karenina, bending over book after book at Vozdvizhenskoe. Of Jane Eyre, reading away her loneliness at Gateshead Hall and Lowood Institute and Thornfield. Even in Les Misérables, although Fantine could not read, Cosette did. All I would have to do was find Cosette and dive into her book. Or anyone else’s.

  And then I would climb out when I chose, after staying as long as I chose. Because now I understand fully what I have always known in my guts and bones: The only escape from the illusion of stories is to go deeper into the story, beneath the story, where you yourself disappear and only the tale remains.

  So I will hide in the stories under the stories, and there I will be safe.

  MIGRATION

  Welcome to Freedom, a Libertarian society, the only planet in the Coalition where genetic engineering is not only allowed but common. But that hasn’t changed things for the pupcats, with their drive to migrate yearly back to the ice from which they came. Shipped off planet, captured, sold, many suffer and die each year from being kept away, so Lukas has come to put a stop to it. Only his own connection to them and their suffering is far more personal than anyone else could imagine . . .

  The night before the Far Sun Princess made orbit around Freedom, First Officer David Bridges knocked on the door of Lukas’s cabin. Bridges, who had spent thirty years ferrying colonists and visitors to unimportant, hard-scrabble planets, had fantastically wrinkled skin, solitary habits, and kind eyes. Lukas puzzled him.

  “May I come in?”

  “Please, sir.” The boy, quiet and polite, stood aside to let him enter. Even with the bed folded up against the wall, most of the small space was filled with a miniscule table, one chair, and Lukas’s half-packed bag. He and Bridges filled the rest of it.

  “Son, it may not be my place to say anything, but . . . you have family waiting for you on Freedom?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then you’ve picked an odd place to emigrate to.”

  The boy looked down at the deck and said nothing. Twenty or twenty-one, skinny, he had work-roughened hands and a sweet smile, which he was unaware of.

  “I don’t mean just the planet itself. Is there a job waiting for you?” Lukas looked an unlikely candidate for the types of jobs on a pioneer planet.

  “No, sir.”

  “You understand that they don’t take care of indigents down there? That the Three Settlements are completely Libertarian?”

  “I understand.”

  “Is anyone going to meet you at the spaceport?”

  “No, sir.”

  A note of impatience crept into Bridges’s voice. “Well, do you even know where you’re going?”

  Lukas raised his eyes to the officer’s. All at once he looked much older, and so much less sweet that Bridges was startled. “Yes, sir,” Lukas said. “I know exactly where I’m going.”

  Only four people took the shuttle from the Far Sun Princess down to Freedom. The other three were immediately claimed by people awaiting them and whisked away in rovers. Lukas picked up his duffle and started walking. Just inside the door of the spaceport terminal, he stopped to stare at a cage of pupcats waiting export.

  The animals, the largest native species on Freedom, were the size of Airedales and vaguely resembled a cross between the two Earth creatures for which they’d been named. Lukas studied their large heads, rounded bodies, huge dark eyes. It was an accident of evolution that their proportions echoed those of kittens even into adulthood. That large head held a specialized, though non-sentient brain. Those rounded bodies stored fat for life on the Ice. The big eyes evolved to see on Freedom’s dim farside. Popular as pets on the nearest Coalition worlds, they looked so cute that humans inevitably broke into smiles around them.

  Lukas did not smile.

  He picked up his duffle, left the building, and started walking toward Deoxy. The gravity, slightly higher than one gee, did not slow him down. A warm wind from the desert blew through his hair.

  Freedom lay close to its red-dwarf sun. Tidally locked, one face lay in perpetual, baking sunshine; the other was the Ice. Constant winds blew from the warmth to the Ice, and a permanent rainstorm raged at the equator. Along the northern-hemisphere terminator, with its comparatively milder weather, lay Freedom’s three major settleme
nts: Deoxy, Ribo, and Nucleic. Tourists thought the names were whimsical. They were not. Freedom, founded by serious Libertarians and so without government or laws, was the only planet in the Coalition where genetic engineering of humans, or the humans who resulted, was allowed. If you were born genemod on Freedom, you stayed on Freedom. There was no way to pass Purity Control at any spaceport on any other world.

  Lukas trudged along the unpaved rover path, through scrub bushes of dull purple, and then among the foamcast buildings and bright holo signs of Deoxy. The glossy tourist hotels lay along the river; here was the frontier combination of crude structures and sophisticated technology. Without zoning laws, people built as they chose on land purchased from the Coalition charter company, which afterward left them alone. Capitalism on Freedom was a pure thing, even if genes were not.

  An hour and a half later, Lukas pushed through the heavy door of Rosen’s Bar on the western edge of town. Rosen’s, whose door was supposed to keep out blowing grit and did not, was barely furnished with uncushioned foamcast chairs, plain tables, and unpainted concrete walls. The local color all came from the patrons.

  “What’ll you have?” growled the bartender. His skin, light purple, might have been a genetic mistake or the fanciful genemod wish of a parent. Either way, he had obscured most of it with inlaid metals. The result looked like a robot with leprosy.

  “Local beer,” Lukas said, and received a mug of some reddish liquid he didn’t drink. His back to the bar—usually the safest stance in a place like this—he surveyed the room.