Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  DO YOU REMEMBER MICHAEL JONES?

  Carol Kincaid and her husband, whose name began with either J or K, stood across the room, drinks in hand, talking to Dave Bukowski. Dave had put on a lot of weight. Carol had lost a lot. Above their heads drooped the red-and-gold Mylar banner: WELCOME CLASS OF ’79! Tiny bits of Mylar hung from the sagging top like bird droppings sliding down a window. I forced myself to cross the room and talk to them, because what was the point of going to your high-school reunion if you didn’t talk to anybody. Carol looked up. “Jim! How nice to see you!”

  I hugged her, shook hands with Dave and either-J-or-K. Carol’s eyes were so sunken in her drawn face that they almost disappeared. She had been our prom queen. A year ago she’d been diagnosed with cancer. That was almost the last thing Maureen had told me before she left.

  “Good to see you, too, Carol. How are the kids?”

  “Gone. Like everybody’s kids. After they leave college, they all move to other states.”

  Dave smiled. “My sister’s son moved clear to another country.”

  We chatted for a while about kids, me trying not to remember the terrible conversation with Nicole when I’d told her that Maureen and I were separating. Nicole always sided with her mother, her whole life, but of course this time she had reason. Neither Carol nor Dave asked about Maureen, which told me that they’d already heard the whole sorry story. I wished I had stayed home with a glass of Lapharoaig and the last of my smuggled Havana cigars.

  Dave said, “Oh, there’s that girl from my chemistry class—will you excuse me? I’m going to ask her to dance.”

  “Sure,” Carol said. “Go for it.” As Dave hurried off, she shook her head and laughed. “We none of us change, do we? He couldn’t get girls to notice him in high school, and he’s still trying.”

  Carol’s husband—Jack? Keith?—said, “When I went to my thirty-fifth, none of the people I wanted to see showed up. It was a major disappointment.”

  “Oh, you,” Carol said, “you’d have been just as disappointed if they had. All those old nerds still wearing plaid pants and carrying calculators.”

  Jude-or-Kevin laughed, and at the glance of real and deep affection that went between them, my heart suddenly hurt as if I’d been kicked in the sternum. Maureen and I had that once, but no more.

  Carol said, “You know who I wanted to see here and don’t? Michael Jones. Do you remember him?”

  “Yes. He was . . . I think he was at my wedding.”

  “Really!” The sunken eyes sharpened. She had been so beautiful once, fresh as morning in a blue tulle prom gown. “Did you know that he saved my life once? Literally?”

  I shook my head. Carol’s husband frowned. “Sweetheart—”

  “No, Ken, I want to tell the story. I do.” She looked directly at me. “When you don’t have too much time left, the truth of things starts to really matter.”

  It was said without drama or self-pity. I nodded, not sure what else to do or say.

  “It was my junior year. My mother had just died. I was so depressed I’d dropped out of school. I was—well, I was contemplating suicide. You remember that I just disappeared from Honors English.”

  I didn’t remember, even though Carol and I had sat behind each other in class. The things that are so pivotal to one person don’t even make a dent on another.

  “I’d actually gotten hold of pills. What was I thinking? I’d have missed Ken and the kids and all the . . . Anyway, Michael Jones came to my house. He was bringing me my trig assignment, but instead we talked and talked. I cried for the first time about my mother. When he left, I felt so much better. The next week I went back to school. I never told him how much that meant to me—you know how easily kids get embarrassed. Then he moved to New York and I never got the chance.”

  “He didn’t move to—” I started to say, but Bad-Ass DiMonti came rushing up and threw his arms around Carol.

  “Babe! You look like hell!”

  “Let me go, you idiot!”

  He did. All through high school we called him “Bad-Ass” because he wasn’t. Inevitably he did the wrong thing, sometimes subtly wrong and sometimes so monumentally wrong that everyone was left blinking in sheer disbelief. He was our butt, our clown, our sacrifice to an ineptitude so deep that the rest of us felt competent by comparison. Bad-Ass flunked every course, although I suspected he was not stupid. Flunking so much and still knowing the smart kids gave him a weird distinction. He pissed off every girl who might have gone out with him. He let himself be bullied—no, he almost invited bullying. It was, after all, a form of attention.

  “Hey, Bad-Ass,” I said, to see if he would object, finally, to the ridiculous nickname. He beamed.

  Carol said, “We were just talking about Michael Jones. Do you remember him?”

  “Remember him!” Bad-Ass shouted, so that several dancing couples turned around, rolled their eyes, and went back to clutching and swaying to Donna Summer. “He got me through school!”

  I said, “What? I thought you weren’t allowed to graduate.”

  “Well, not with you losers,” Bad-Ass said. He pulled out and lit a cigarette, despite the clear NO SMOKING signs. Still trying to be cool. Still failing. Carol moved slightly away. Bad-Ass said, “I graduated in December the next year. Michael Jones, he really let me have it. Told me I could do it if I tried, and the only reason I didn’t try was that I couldn’t equal you grinds, but so what? And anyways all of you was gone. So I got a tutor and Michael called me up every week and yelled at me some more and I graduated and that’s why Harry Parker gave me that job at the Grease ’n Go, and now I got my own body shop.”

  “Good for you,” Ken said.

  “ ’Course, Michael moved away after that, to Atlanta. Sent me a postcard once.”

  Carol sagged against her husband, and instantly Kevin had his arm around her. “Tired, sweetheart?”

  “A little.”

  “Let’s go sit down.”

  They walked off. Bad-Ass said, “I forgot she’s going toes up. Hey, I hear you split from Maureen and got yourself a little tootsie.”

  “Fuck off, Bad-Ass,” I said again, and he grinned. I wish I’d called him “Rick” instead.

  The reunion was depressing. I had nothing to say to these people, who had known both Maureen and me and who now, apparently, knew about the middle-aged insanity that had led to the stupid, exciting whirlwind six months with Kayla. I had never known that much sheer, lustful excitement. Now that she’d dumped me, I hoped I never would again.

  I only stayed at the reunion because now my curiosity was piqued about Michael Jones. He hadn’t moved to New York or Atlanta; he’d been at my wedding. I asked several people about him, because at least it gave me a topic of conversation, “Do you remember Michael Jones?”

  They all did. Everybody had a story about some way he’d changed their lives. Mostly in good ways, although Cathy Parminter curled her scarlet lip and said, “That prick. Always sticking his nose in. He told me to break up with Paul before I got preggers. I didn’t, and I did, but that still don’t mean that smug-doll Michael had any business sticking his blond head in my business.”

  “Michael wasn’t blond,” I said. “Was he?”

  “Sure. Looked like Robert Redford. Don’t you remember? The one that got away.” Cathy laughed, short and bitter. Her skirt was too short for a woman in her fifties, her top too tight, her hair too yellow. She glanced at my left hand and eyed me speculatively. I decided it was time to go home.

  Just as I left to the strains of the Village People, the Mylar banner snapped loose at one end and fell into the bowl of non-alcoholic punch for those whose livers no longer let them drink.

  * * *

  At home, I looked for my high-school yearbook, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe Maureen had taken it. She wouldn’t have asked; Maureen always just did what she wanted. Our wedding day was the first time I discovered that we had a hundred guests, not the twenty I’d been told about. That we were footing
the bill, not Maureen’s parents. That Maureen carried goldenrod in her “autumn bouquet,” even though I was allergic to it. I sneezed all through the ceremony. My nose ran all night.

  In my study, which was where I spent most of my time since Maureen had taken all the living room furniture, I poured a glass of Scotch and lit my cigar. Bachelor freedom: smoking in the house. The Scotch smelled and tasted smoky, an October bonfire.

  On the top shelf of the closet, behind a box of golf trophies, I found our wedding album. Picture after picture of family, some of them now dead, and friends, most of them out of touch. In nearly the last picture, a big group outside on the lawn in front of the hotel where we’d had our reception, I found Michael Jones. He stood in the back between my cousins Jared and Fred, his face half-hidden and fuzzy—had he ducked his head at the last minute? Somehow I couldn’t even tell the color of his hair. At the reunion people had said red, or black, or blond.

  Maureen was clear, though, laughing in the front of the picture, her arm through mine. God, she looked happy. Her full white gown had blown partly across my leg. Her face looked as lovely as her roses.

  Roses?

  I squinted at the picture, and then looked back at the rest of the album. Yes, Maureen’s bouquet was white roses. No goldenrod. Nowhere was my nose running. And then I remembered: She had planned on carrying an autumn bouquet, until I told her about my allergy. That was the very morning of the wedding. She left the goldenrod and chrysanthemums and hydrangeas in the limo, tied up with their white ribbons, and instead she’d carried a few roses her cousin hastily stole from someone’s garden.

  And those hundred guests—did she really spring those on me that day, or had I agreed, however reluctantly, ahead of time? Did I pay for the wedding, or did she use money left her by her grandmother? Of course, that was “our” money, too, that we could have used for something else . . . but why did I remember, then, that I had resented and staggered under debt for a too-lavish wedding?

  I turned back to the picture of Michael Jones, whom everybody remembered and no one had seen since. Was he really there, or was he—oh, I don’t know, it sounds so vague—the idea of Michael Jones? Was that all he had ever been, an idea, sprung from somewhere deep in people’s best selves and—

  No. That was dumb. There stood Michael Jones at my wedding, head down and face fuzzy but undeniably solid in his dark suit and a glimpse of white shirt. As real as Maureen and I, both of us laughing and happy.

  I remembered, all at once, that it had been I who urged Maureen to take all the living room furniture. I’d hoped it would assuage my guilt about Kayla. It hadn’t.

  I finished my drink. I finished the forbidden, fragrant, it-will-kill-you-but-we’re-all-headed-for-Carol’s-fate-anyway Cuban cigar. I savored that cigar. Its taste, its smell, its simple richness right until the last ash. I made it last nearly another half hour.

  When I glanced down at the still open wedding album, I couldn’t remember why I’d hauled it down from the closet. Something about my cousins Jared and Fred, standing close together in the back row. I should call Fred. It had been too long since I’d seen him.

  Instead I picked up the phone, braced myself, and called Maureen.

  OUTMODED THINGS

  Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, SCI FICTION, and elsewhere. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, as well as The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Crossfire, Nothing Human, The Flowers of Aulit Prison, Crucible, Dogs, and the Space Opera trilogy Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, Beaker’s Dozen, and Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories. Her most recent book is the YA novel, Flash Point. In addition to the awards for Beggars in Spain, she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out Of All Them Bright Stars,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” and “Fountain of Age,” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2003 for her novel Probability Space, and another Hugo in 2009 for “The Erdmann Nexus.” She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.

  Here she takes us back to the frontier planet Roland, the setting for one of Poul Anderson’s most famous stories, “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” to examine the question of what happens to changelings stolen by the “fairies” when they return to human society. And are faced with a difficult choice of worlds.

  “People had moved starward in the hopes of preserving such outmoded things as their mother tongues or constitutional government or rational-technological civilization.”

  —Poul Anderson, “The Queen of Air and Darkness”

  It was difficult to hear over the barking. All the dogs—and there were so many dogs—seemed to have started howling all at once. The patient turned her head toward the window, which Luke had opaqued before the session began. He leaned toward the girl.

  “Anne?”

  “Something’s happening.”

  “Those dogs bark all the time.” He hadn’t yet told anyone how much he disliked dogs; a therapist was not supposed to have such silly weaknesses. And here at Christmas Landing, the animals were necessary. Maybe. Luke preferred to put his faith in the mind-shields.

  “That barking is different.” She rose, a pale, doughy, difficult girl that he was coming to like very much, even though she took time away from what was supposed to be his main duty here. “I want to go see.”

  The session was almost over. Luke said, “I’ll come with you,” and stood. For a moment, dizziness took him and he put a hand on the edge of the ugly, utilitarian table to steady himself, but Anne didn’t notice. That alone was a measure of her distraction; this was a girl who usually noticed everything, reacted intensely to everything, embroidered everything with the colors of her own over-romantic soul, all beneath a stolid exterior that misled nearly everyone about who she actually was.

  Anyway, very few sixteen-year-olds would notice the symptoms of an old man’s hidden disease.

  Anne moved lightly to the door—for such a big girl, she could move with surprising grace—and pulled it open. Luke followed her through the corridor, as ugly and utilitarian as his borrowed desk in his borrowed office.

  Most of Christmas Landing looked ugly to him. The entire planet had only hosted human settlements for a hundred years, and half of Roland’s scant million people were crowded into Portolondon. This pioneer outpost at the edge of civilization had not had much time to beautify itself, being too occupied with, first, survival. Next, with its business as a market town for the farmers and fur trappers and miners who labored in the open country to the east and west. And then, in the last months, with Project Recovery. Accustomed to the greater age and comfort of Portolondon, it had taken something special for Dr. Luke Silverstein to uproot himself in his present condition and come here.

  The something special ran past them.

  “Oh!” Anne gasped. “Shadow-of-a-Dream!” And Anne went after her, all grace gone in comparison with the other girl, who once again had shed, or forgotten to put on, her clothes. Luke followed more slowly, apprehension shifting in his chest like some emotional tectonic plates. The dogs’ barking grew hysterical.

  In the Arctic circle’s brief summer, hot and feverish, entire corridor walls were rolled open. Luke’s borrowed office, at the edge of the town farthest from the bars and brothels and clamorous equipment that received grain and ore and furs, gave onto a wide strip of bare dirt that, supposedly, would one day be planted as a park. Beyond the strip of dirt, the shield shimmered faintly, jamming all electromagnetic signals not aimed at the high tower rising above Christmas Landing. Beyond that shimmer, wending its way among the shiverleaf bushes and vivid sprays of fireth
orn, a figure moved. The dogs, kept inside by the restraints on their collars, dashed forward to throw themselves against the unseen barrier.

  Luke, like the two girls, watched the alien approach—but what did one of them see?

  When Luke had first arrived at Christmas Landing, Police Chief Halford had driven him from the spaceport to the city. “The port is shielded,” had been almost her first words to Luke, “and so is the entire perimeter of Christmas Landing. But this rover and the area in between is not. You probably won’t see anything, but just in case you do, be aware that the illusion is not real. Most of the Rollies can’t project farther than three or four feet, but a few can. The talented ones, if you call that talent.” She had snorted derisively and made a gesture considered filthy in Portolondon. That, plus the dismissive “Rollies,” made him dislike her. However, he kept an open mind. For one thing, the outlying settlements had been losing their children to the natives for nearly twenty years, and anger was to be expected. For another, he was paid to keep an open mind.

  So he said mildly, “What might I see?”

  She scowled. “I thought they briefed you.”

  “They did. I’d like to hear it from your perspective.”

  “My perspective is that the Rollies are kidnappers who used brain-washing to steal away our kids, less than half of which have been recovered. Your perspective is to straighten out the ones who have.” She jerked the rover into motion.

  Definitely dislikeable—and to call the aliens “brain-washers” was to call a tsunami a “beach wave.” Luke had turned his attention to the countryside, in case he might “see something.” He had not, except for the wild beauty of the largely unexplored and completely untamed northern wilderness. Such an alien wilderness, bright with strange summer colors, even though Luke Silverstein had been born in Portolondon, in the second generation of settlers on Roland. But Portolondon was far from any native sentience. Not even Christmas Landing had believed there was any native sentience on Roland, until recently. All the stories from outwayers had been dismissed as folk tales, superstitions, fanciful embroideries by humans living too much in isolation on their remote farms and ranches and trapping posts.