Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  I took them all into the hallway and I tried to open Celia’s door. The knob turned but the door didn’t come open. The Reginas lined up single file in the hallway, waiting for me to get the door open. I turned and pushed and Celia’s door. It didn’t have a lock. Why was it locked? It couldn’t have a lock. It couldn’t be locked.

  And it opened. I waved all the Reginas from all of history into Celia’s room. And I saw General Lee and General Grant riding from the bathroom on horseback and I guided them into Celia’s room. I did this with anyone I could. “She needs you more than I do. Talk to her.”

  But Celia kept on sleeping and we could hear the CD singing about Reginas, She believes you, yeah, yeah, yeah, Represents you, yeah, yeah, yeah, Understands you, yeah yeah yeah. You say she’s human too, and that’s the way to be-e-e…

  But the people did nothing.

  “Tell her who you are!” I yelled at them. “Make her remember you.”

  They looked at me like I was crazy. They wandered around her room looking for themselves in the timeline. And when they couldn’t find their names, they marked it with their fingers, a blue mark for every human being missing from the story of history. Soon they were busy making the timeline blue.

  “Get into her head! Please.” And I said please again and again, though they never responded. I woke up next to the door of my closet. I’d never made it into Celia’s room. It was dark outside, and I knew it wasn’t even midnight. I got up and walked to Celia’s room. I turned the knob and the door opened.

  Celia had her arms around a big tiger, but with just the moonlight from the window, it looked like a little Sybil. I walked to her bed softly, trying not to wake her. I looked down at her face like I was looking down at something I borrowed and really didn’t want to give back, something like stars that are gone in the morning.

  I kissed her on the forehead, praying, “Take everything I know.”

  On the way back to my room, when I was in-between, still in the dark hallway, I heard Mom and Dad talking from their room. Their voices came from the wall, from the family photographs. They must have been in bed.

  “I don’t want to do this,” Mom said. “Look what happened to Jeffrey.”

  Jeffrey was our cousin. His parents had sent him north when he wasn’t going to pass the tests. Sometimes parents did that. We never saw him again. Nobody knew if he’d been caught or just escaped. That was a couple of years ago. Were they thinking of sending Celia away?

  “Aunt Berry will tell her where she needs to go next. She’ll be fine,” I heard Dad say. “When I talked with her, she said she knew people along the way.”

  I felt the hallway grow blacker and the light behind me from my room pull back under my feet like a tide. I would lose Celia either way — whether through the gods, or my parents.

  In my room the gods stared at me from the walls. I was frightened of them. Would they turn Celia into a cloth store? They didn’t even know her. They stood around me like a bunch of bullies on the playground, with their hands on their hips, staring down at me.

  I stuck my hand underneath the corner of a poster and lifted it and pulled down the poster. I can do that. I can take down your poster, I thought. I took down the other posters, too, one after the other. And after the third one I was ripping them down. I ripped Independence to shreds. I couldn’t stop myself. I plucked the postcards of Lady Liberty off the wall. I threw them on the floor. I threw my action figures into the closet. I took off my Patriot bedsheets, the Patriot quilt, and I bundled them in a pile at the foot of my bed. I didn’t want to sleep on them or see them right now.

  I pulled out the quilt Celia made me a long time ago from the closet where it stayed folded. It had me holding our new puppy Toby. I pulled this quilt over my whole body. Her work was all around me, soft, dark, holding me.

  I hated myself for praying to Patriot. Please put all my education in Celia’s head. All the stupid facts about you, all the stupid things you did. Give them to Celia so she can stay human with us. Please, please, please. I prayed like I was choking, and my stomach got all churned up. I pushed the bed against the wall. I hated them all. Please, America, save my sister … the gods were all I had.

  A scrap of Patriot’s face was just under the quilt. How sure of himself he looked. When the Blitzkrieg had attacked, he’d risen like a fortress, spread open his arms like a shield around us all. I’d seen the footage from the warplanes. He’d become four hundred stories tall, inflated by all the belief of an entire nation. The German planes were like wasps to him, zapping against a buglamp. I remember his face — there was a moment where he turned his face away from the explosions against his cheek. He gritted his teeth and stood there.

  He had courage.

  I took the scrap that held his face and I shoved it in my pocket.

  I jumped up, ran to my closet and grabbed my backpack and stuffed clothes in it.

  In Celia’s room, I turned off the CD player, and the music stopped. I leaned over Celia and gently woke her. “We’re running away,” I whispered.

  “What?” she said. “No. I can do it, Danny. I can pass the Test.”

  She saw I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to hide that from her.

  “No, really. I think I can. I mean, it all came to me. I think all the music has been helping.” And she noticed the player was off. “I thought I turned that on.”

  “Celia.” What could I say? “Celia, what if you fail? There’s only one try. They don’t let you leave the school till the Test is graded.” I remember all the students packed into the gym, playing games, waiting, trying not to think about the test, or what might happen.

  “I’m telling you, I can do it,” she said firmly, sitting up in bed. “You aren’t even going to let me try.” She flipped back the covers, stood up, crossed the room, and turned on her desk lamp. “Well, you’re not going to stop me.”

  She used to guide me through the woods like that. She didn’t slow down. She remembered all the trails — every one of them. She knew where the raccoon tracks would be on the banks of the creek. She would know where to go.

  “Celia, remember the creek last summer?” Behind our house, behind all the other houses was a forest and a creek that we played around. It had some narrow places and some wide ones. She wouldn’t let me jump the wide one.

  “You were going to break your—,” she stopped. “That’s not the same.” She flipped randomly through history, her fingers darting in and out of the Civil War. “You don’t believe in me at all. You don’t believe I could ever, ever pass the Test,” her voice broke.

  “I don’t believe in the Test, Celia. They don’t know who you are. I always believed in you.”

  I opened her dresser drawers and gave her a knapsack, and I made sure she saw my eyes. “You know how to get us to Aunt Berry’s.”

  “I can’t leave Mom and Dad.”

  “Mom and Dad have already called Aunt Berry. They’re going to send you away tomorrow. I’ll never see you again. Jeffrey never came back,” I stopped, tried to look away like she did, to pull all my tears back in. But I wasn’t smart enough for that. “This is the only way — I can think of. We’ll be together.”

  At least she wouldn’t be lost like Jeffrey — she wouldn’t be alone. I would be there. I would know if she got somewhere safe. We would go north to Canada. I heard there were frost giants at the borders who stood toe to toe, but I was more worried about getting out of Kentucky.

  “You can do this, Celia. You’re smart. You know the woods. You know all the paths, the ways, even in the dark. You can guide us to Aunt Berry’s house. She’ll tell Mom and Dad where we are. She knows ways to get us out. She helped Jeffrey. She’ll help us. Celia, I don’t want to be alone.”

  She stared into the dark room for a moment, past the parts the lamp could reach.

  Finally she said, “I can do t
his. I can make it to Aunt Berry’s house. I know which streets to go down, which paths I can cut through. We’ll have Aunt Berry call Mom and Dad from there.” She looked at me. “Don’t worry, Danny.”

  I remembered what Sybil the mountain lion had said to me. “I’m not afraid,” I whispered to Celia.

  I helped her put things in the knapsack, and she grabbed her own quilt, one that was dark and full of children swatting at quilted stars, and some needle and thread and some yarn and other cloth—”Just in case,” she said — and we left through the backyard, where the moonlight trickled across our feet in the grass. I wondered where Lady Liberty was, which state she was in tonight. I asked Celia.

  “Oh, maybe she’s in Kentucky,” she said, looking around. She nearly stopped walking, and she smiled. “She’ll save us, Danny. Pray that she walks by.”

  I looked around the backyards we were crossing and the fields on the edge of town and I looked across the two rivers and I hoped she didn’t find us. I hoped no god did. I hoped we found ourselves with people, real people, somewhere. I was scared of seeing the lamp of Lady Liberty at any moment crest a hill, her ghost like body rise up like a cloud. I knew that if she came for us, I would hold Celia back, even if Celia looked up to be saved.

  The Transformed Man

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Space, The Final Frontier…

  I used to be called Robin. But when I was ten I discovered my legal name was Robert, so I switched. I was tired of getting invitations to join girls’ skating teams.

  Back then, Mississauga was farmland. Now I live in a high-rise there. But you can still see one farm out my window; the guy refuses to sell.

  We science-fiction writers talk a lot about the singularity, a coming moment during which the rate of technological progress will asymptotically approach infinity, and —whoosh!— plain old human beings will be left far behind. Charles Stross, a writer I know, calls this “the Rapture of the nerds.” Charlie has recently started shaving his head.

  On an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, guest star Stanley Kamel was supposed to say the word “asymptotically,” but he’d never heard of it, so he said “asymptomatically” instead. He died recently of a heart attack; he’d had no previous signs of heart disease.

  My favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke died recently, too. He lived long enough to see the actual 2001 come and go with none of the miracles he portrayed becoming reality.

  My editor claims science-fiction writers should never put dates in their books. “The future has a way of catching up with you,” he says. He has a Ph.D. in comparative medieval literature — so he should know.

  Battlestar Galactica used to be camp; now it’s serious. Ditto, Batman.

  The Presidency of the United States used to be serious. Now it’s camp.

  They remade Planet of the Apes. They shouldn’t have.

  Computers, The Ultimate Tools…

  I did a talk recently in Second Life. My name in that virtual world is S.F. Writer. I have hair there.

  SFWRITER is also my license plate, but I don’t drive. When I talk about the plate, I say, “Oh, the car vanity!” People younger than me don’t get the pun.

  My Canada includes Quebec — but its license plates no longer call it La belle province. I can’t remember what they say now.

  I went to the Yukon in the summer of 2007, on a writing retreat at Pierre Berton’s old house. It had been renovated the previous winter by the Designer Guys. They put diaphanous curtains on the windows. Dawson City gets 21 hours of daylight in the summer, but the Designer Guys hadn’t thought about that.

  I got to see the Northern Lights. The aurora changes moment by moment.

  Biotech, The Last Challenge…

  My father sold his vacation home last year. He’d had it since 1974. It was time, he said.

  I’d lost my virginity there.

  When I turned 40, I had a vasectomy. The Ontario Health Insurance Plan will pay for your vasectomy, and pay to have it reversed, and pay to give you another vasectomy. But they won’t pay to have that one reversed, because, you know, that’d be frivolous.

  I’ve had all my amalgam fillings replaced. What were they thinking, putting mercury in people’s mouths?

  I got my degree in Radio and Television Arts in 1982. I can edit audiotape with a razor blade.

  When I went to Ryerson, it was called Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. Then it became Ryerson Polytechnic University. Now it’s Ryerson University. But people still call it Rye High.

  After I graduated, Ryerson hired me to help teach TV production. My salary was $14,400 a year. Even then, it wasn’t much.

  Six million dollars used to be a lot of money, though. You could buy a cyborg with it. But the bionic woman didn’t cost quite six million. After all, said her boss, her parts were smaller. He always called her “babe.”

  I cringe when women today refer to themselves as “girls.” In the summer of 1980, I lived in Waterloo. The people I hung out with there always called Fischer-Hallman Road “Fischer-Hallperson.” No one does stuff like that anymore.

  Still, interstellar space used to be where no man has gone before. Now it’s where no one has gone before.

  William Shatner’s 1968 debut album — on which he mangles “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” —is called The Transformed Man. He won Emmy Awards for best supporting actor in 2004 and 2005, and was nominated again last year.

  Nanotech, The Next Big Thing…

  Ingrid Bergman calls Dooley Wilson “boy” in Casablanca, and no one cringes.

  The year I was born, Robert was the fifth-most-popular boy’s name; now it’s number 47. Robin has never cracked the top 100.

  My first freelance writing job was editing the CRTC license application for what became Vision TV, Canada’s multifaith television channel. Back then, we called it the Canadian Interfaith Network, or “CIN” with a soft C; that pissed some people off.

  Used to be my books were shelved in stores next to those by Hilbert Schenck. Hilbert has disappeared; I have no idea what happened to him.

  NASA has a sister organization called NOAA: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The acronym is pronounced “Noah.” A government agency couldn’t get away with a Biblical pun like that today, but everybody wants to know about the faith lives of presidential candidates. Joe Biden is the first-ever Roman Catholic to become veep. Tempus fugit.

  Here in Canada, we used to have Pierre Trudeaus. Now we have Stephen Harpers.

  I collect plastic dinosaurs. My one criterion: they must have been accurate portrayals at the time they were made. Brontosaurus used to drag its tail; it doesn’t now. And it’s no longer Brontosaurus.

  Oh, and Pluto used to be a planet. It isn’t anymore.

  Someday, the same thing will be said of Earth.

  Afterword

  Brett Alexander Savory

  No matter what project I’m editing — be it ChiZine (the webzine), ChiZine Publications (the small press), or a commissioned anthology — I can’t get away from leaning, quite heavily, toward the darker side of literature. Not that I want to get away from it, mind, but I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. And this anthology is no exception.

  Since you’re reading the Afterword, I’m going to assume you’ve read the stories, so I can say with confidence that you likely noticed a rather dark thread running through most, if not all, of them. That’s just the way I roll. What was surprising to me is that my co-editor, John Robert Colombo, rolls the same way. As he mentioned in his Foreword, we agreed on nearly every story in this volume. I assumed, since he traffics more in science fiction and I traffic more in horror, we’d be at odds far more often than we were. Happily, such was not the case, and I think you’ve just read a more qualitatively consistent anthology because of that.<
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  Now, speaking of surprises, I thought I’d relate the brief tale of how I came to be the co-editor of this book in the first place.

  A couple of years ago, Claude Lalumière asked me to write the Foreword to Tesseracts Twelve, which I gladly did. We got to talking about the series over lunch one afternoon in Toronto, and I decided I’d throw my hat in the ring to edit a future volume. I went home, typed up a query letter to Edge publisher Brian Hades, fired it off, and waited. And waited. And waited….

  And waited some more, but never heard a word in response.

  Fast forward two years to WorldCon 2009 in Montreal. I’d never met Brian before, but saw that Edge had a table not far from CZP’s table. On the first day there, Brian comes over, checks out our books, says he’s very impressed with them (he wound up buying a copy of every book we’d published to that point!), then says out of the blue, “Oh, by the way, I got your email about editing one of the Tesseracts anthologies. I have a co-editor in mind for you, if you still want to do it.”

  Remember, now, it’d been two years without even so much as a “Thanks for your email, am super-busy, but will get back to you soon about this,” so I just kind of stared at him for a while, trying to remember if I’d sent such an email.

  “Oh! Right,” I said. “I did ask about that, didn’t I. Well, um, yeah, sure, totally still up for it.”

  “Okay, I’ll drop you a line when I get home, introduce you to your co-editor, and send out the contracts.” And with that, he walked away.

  Done deal. So yeah, color me surprised.

  And I have to say, editing this book has been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had an as editor. The quality of the submissions was strong to the point that both John and I found it very difficult to keep the final word count down to anywhere near the 100,000-word mark. As John mentioned in his Foreword, we went over, but if we’d had our druthers, we’d have gone way over. There were enough good, fitting submissions to’ve filled close to a second volume.