I resisted the urge to tell him he was wrong. Apparently he did not accept John Martindale’s unshakable confidence in the idea that with better technology came increase in capability and decrease in size. I stood up and leaned on my cane. My left hip was a little dodgy and became tired if I walked too far. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Not at all.” He stood up, too, and said, “Actually, I’m going to be giving a lecture at the institute on these subjects in a couple of weeks. If you’d like to come . . .”
I noted down the time and place, but I knew I would not be there. It was three months to the day since John Martindale, Helga, and I had climbed the rock face and walked behind the waterfall. Time—my time—was short. I had to head south again.
The flight to Argentina was uneventful. Comodoro Rivadavia was the same as always. Now I am sitting in Alberto McShane’s bar, drinking one last beer (all that my digestion today will permit) and waiting for the pilot. McShane did not recognize me, but the armadillo did. It trundled to my table, and sat looking up at me. Where’s my friend John Martindale, it was saying.
Where indeed? I will tell you soon. The plane is ready. We are going to Trapalanda.
It will take all my strength, but I think I can do it. I have added equipment that will help me to cross that icy field of boulders and ascend the rock face. It is September. The weather will be warmer, and the going easier. If I close my eyes I can see the portal now, behind the waterfall, its black depths and shimmering blue streaks rushing away toward the vanishing point.
Thirty-five years. That is what the portal owes me. It sucked them out of my body as I struggled back against the gravity gradient. Maybe it is impossible to get them back. I don’t know. My young mathematician friend insisted that time is infinitely fluid, with no more constraints on movement through it than there are on travel through space. I don’t know, but I want my thirty-five years. If I die in the attempt, I will be losing little.
I am terrified of that open gate, with its alien twisting of the world’s geometry. I am more afraid of it than I have ever been of anything. Last time I failed, and I could not go through it. But I will go through it now.
This time I have something more than Martindale’s scientific curiosity to drive me on. It is not thoughts of danger or death that fill my mind as I sit here. I have that final image of Helga, reaching out and taking John Martindale’s hand in hers. Reaching out, to grasp his hand, voluntarily. I love Helga, I am sure of that, but I cannot make sense of my other emotions; fear, jealousy, resentment, hope, excitement. She was touching him. Did she do it because she wanted to go through the portal, wanted it so much that every fear was insignificant? Or had she, after thirty years, finally found someone whom she could touch without cringing and loathing?
The pilot has arrived. My glass is empty. Tomorrow I will know.
NANCY KRESS
Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-one books: thirteen novels of science fiction or fantasy, one young-adult novel, two thrillers, three story collections, and two books on writing. Her books include Probability Space—the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Probability Moon and Probability Sun—and Crossfire. The trilogy concerns quantum physics, a space war, and the nature of reality. Crossfire, set in a different universe, explores various ways humanity might coexist with aliens, even though mankind never understands either them or itself very well. Her latest novel, Nothing Human, is set on a bleak future earth, where children have to be genetically engineered and the arrival of an alien race brings with it the frightening thought that humanity’s next generation may not be human at all.
Her short fiction has won three Nebulas: in 1985 for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” in 1991 for the novella version of “Beggars in Spain” (which also won a Hugo), and in 1998 for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.” Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, and Russian. She is also the monthly Fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine, and is a regular teacher at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
In “The Price of Oranges,” the epitome of a humanist science-fiction story, time travel isn’t through hundreds or thousands of years—it begins and ends in the twentieth century. And yet it is easy to understand the poor traveler’s bewilderment at the events that have happened in the time that is skipped during his travels, events that are yet to come in his own time, which may be the most fearful idea of all.
THE PRICE OF ORANGES
NANCY KRESS
“I’M WORRIED ABOUT my granddaughter,” Harry Kramer said, passing half of his sandwich to Manny Feldman. Manny took it eagerly. The sandwich was huge, thick slices of beef and horseradish between fresh slabs of crusty bread. Pigeons watched the park bench hopefully.
“Jackie. The granddaughter who writes books,” Manny said. Harry watched to see that Manny ate. You couldn’t trust Manny to eat enough; he stayed too skinny. At least in Harry’s opinion. Manny, Jackie—the world, Harry sometimes thought, had all grown too skinny when he somehow hadn’t been looking. Skimpy. Stretch-feeling. Harry nodded to see horseradish spurt in a satisfying stream down Manny’s scraggly beard.
“Jackie. Yes,” Harry said.
“So what’s wrong with her? She’s sick?” Manny eyed Harry’s strudel, cherry with real yeast bread. Harry passed it to him. “Harry, the whole thing? I couldn’t.”
“Take it, take it, I don’t want it. You should eat. No, she’s not sick. She’s miserable.” When Manny, his mouth full of strudel, didn’t answer, Harry put a hand on Manny’s arm. “Miserable.”
Manny swallowed hastily. “How do you know? You saw her this week?”
“No. Next Tuesday. She’s bringing me a book by a friend of hers. I know from this.” He drew a magazine from an inner pocket of his coat. The coat was thick tweed, almost new, with wooden buttons. On the cover of the glossy magazine a woman smiled contemptuously. A woman with hollow, starved-looking cheeks who obviously didn’t get enough to eat either.
“That’s not a book,” Manny pointed out.
“So she writes stories, too. Listen to this. Just listen. ‘I stood in my backyard, surrounded by the false bright toxin-fed green, and realized that the earth was dead. What else could it be, since we humans swarmed upon it like maggots on carrion, growing our hectic gleaming molds, leaving our slime trails across the senseless surface?’ Does that sound like a happy woman?”
“Hoo boy,” Manny said.
“It’s all like that. ‘Don’t read my things, Popsy,’ she says. ‘You’re not in the audience for my things.’ Then she smiles without ever once showing her teeth.” Harry flung both arms wide. “Who else should be in the audience but her own grandfather?”
Manny swallowed the last of the strudel. Pigeons fluttered angrily. “She never shows her teeth when she smiles? Never?”
“Never.”
“Hoo boy,” Manny said. “Did you want all of that orange?”
“No, I brought it for you, to take home. But did you finish that whole half a sandwich already?”
“I thought I’d take it home,” Manny said humbly. He showed Harry the tip of the sandwich, wrapped in the thick brown butcher paper, protruding from the pocket of his old coat.
Harry nodded approvingly. “Good, good. Take the orange, too. I brought it for you.”
Manny took the orange. Three teenagers carrying huge shrieking radios sauntered past. Manny started to put his hands over his ears, received a look of dangerous contempt from the teenager with green hair, and put his hands on his lap. The kid tossed an empty beer bottle onto the pavement before their feet. It shattered. Harry scowled fiercely but Manny stared straight ahead. When the cacophony had passed, Manny said, “Thank you for the orange. Fruit, it costs so much this time of year.”
Harry still scowled. “Not in 1937.”
“Don’t start that again, Harry.”
Harry said sadly, “Why won’t you ever b
elieve me? Could I afford to bring all this food if I got it at 1988 prices? Could I afford this coat? Have you seen buttons like this in 1988, on a new coat? Have you seen sandwiches wrapped in that kind of paper since we were young? Have you? Why won’t you believe me?”
Manny slowly peeled his orange. The rind was pale, and the orange had seeds. “Harry. Don’t start.”
“But why won’t you just come to my room and see?”
Manny sectioned the orange. “Your room. A cheap furnished room in a Social Security hotel. Why should I go? I know what will be there. What will be there is the same thing in my room. A bed, a chair, a table, a hot plate, some cans of food. Better I should meet you here in the park, get at least a little fresh air.” He looked at Harry meekly, the orange clutched in one hand. “Don’t misunderstand. It’s not from a lack of friendship I say this. You’re good to me, you’re the best friend I have. You bring me things from a great deli, you talk to me, you share with me the family I don’t have. It’s enough, Harry. It’s more than enough. I don’t need to see where you live like I live.”
Harry gave it up. There were moods, times, when it was just impossible to budge Manny. He dug in, and in he stayed. “Eat your orange.”
“It’s a good orange. So tell me more about Jackie.”
“Jackie.” Harry shook his head. Two kids on bikes tore along the path. One of them swerved towards Manny and snatched the orange from his hand. “Aw riggghhhtttt!”
Harry scowled after the child. It had been a girl. Manny just wiped the orange juice off his fingers onto the knee of his pants. “Is everything she writes so depressing?”
“Everything,” Harry said. “Listen to this one.” He drew out another magazine, smaller, bound in rough paper with a stylized linen drawing of a woman’s private parts on the cover. On the cover! Harry held the magazine with one palm spread wide over the drawing, which made it difficult to keep the pages open while he read. “ ‘She looked at her mother in the only way possible: with contempt, contempt for all the betrayals and compromises that had been her mother’s life, for the sad soft lines of defeat around her mother’s mouth, for the bright artificial dress too young for her wasted years, for even the leather handbag, Gucci of course, filled with blood money for having sold her life to a man who had long since ceased to want it.’ ”
“Hoo boy,” Manny said. “About a mother she wrote that?”
“About everybody. All the time.”
“And where is Barbara?”
“Reno again. Another divorce.” How many had that been? After two, did anybody count? Harry didn’t count. He imagined Barbara’s life as a large roulette wheel like the ones on TV, little silver men bouncing in and out of red and black pockets. Why didn’t she get dizzy?
Manny said slowly, “I always thought there was a lot of love in her.”
“A lot of that she’s got,” Harry said dryly.
“Not Barbara—Jackie. A lot of . . . I don’t know. Sweetness. Under the way she is.”
“The way she is,” Harry said gloomily. “Prickly. A cactus. But you’re right, Manny, I know what you mean. She just needs someone to soften her up. Love her back, maybe. Although I love her.”
The two old men looked at each other. Manny said, “Harry. . . .”
“I know, I know. I’m only a grandfather, my love doesn’t count, I’m just there. Like air. ‘You’re wonderful, Popsy,’ she says, and still no teeth when she smiles. But you know, Manny—you are right!” Harry jumped up from the bench. “You are! What she needs is a young man to love her!”
Manny looked alarmed. “I didn’t say—”
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!”
“Harry—”
“And her stories, too! Full of ugly murders, ugly places, unhappy endings. What she needs is something to show her that writing could be about sweetness, too.”
Manny was staring at him hard. Harry felt a rush of affection. That Manny should have the answer! Skinny wonderful Manny!
Manny said slowly, “Jackie said to me, ‘I write about reality.’ That’s what she said, Harry.”
“So there’s no sweetness in reality? Put sweetness in her life, her writing will go sweet. She needs this, Manny. A really nice fellow!”
Two men in jogging suits ran past. One of their Reeboks came down on a shard of beer bottle. “Every fucking time!” he screamed, bending over to inspect his shoe. “Fucking park!”
“Well, what do you expect?” the other drawled, looking at Manny and Harry. “Although you’d think that if we could clean up Lake Erie. . . .”
“Fucking derelicts!” the other snarled. They jogged away.
“Of course,” Harry said, “it might not be easy to find the sort of guy to convince Jackie.”
“Harry, I think you should maybe think—”
“Not here,” Harry said suddenly. “Not here. There. In 1937.”
“Harry. . . .”
“Yeah,” Harry said, nodding several times. Excitement filled him like light, like electricity. What an idea! “It was different then.”
Manny said nothing. When he stood up, the sleeve of his coat exposed the number tattooed on his wrist. He said quietly, “It was no paradise in 1937 either, Harry.”
Harry seized Manny’s hand. “I’m going to do it, Manny. Find someone for her there. Bring him here.”
Manny sighed. “Tomorrow at the chess club, Harry? At one o’clock? It’s Tuesday.”
“I’ll tell you then how I’m coming with this.”
“Fine, Harry. Fine. All my wishes go with you. You know that.”
Harry stood up too, still holding Manny’s hand. A middle-aged man staggered to the bench and slumped onto it. The smell of whiskey rose from him in waves. He eyed Manny and Harry with scorn. “Fucking fags.”
“Good night, Harry.”
“Manny—if you’d only come . . . money goes so much farther there. . . .”
“Tomorrow at one. At the chess club.”
Harry watched his friend walk away. Manny’s foot dragged a little; the knee must be bothering him again. Harry wished Manny would see a doctor. Maybe a doctor would know why Manny stayed so skinny.
———
Harry walked back to his hotel. In the lobby, old men slumped in upholstery thin from wear, burned from cigarettes, shiny in the seat from long sitting. Sitting and sitting, Harry thought—life measured by the seat of the pants. And now it was getting dark. No one would go out from here until the next daylight. Harry shook his head.
The elevator wasn’t working again. He climbed the stairs to the third floor. Halfway there, he stopped, felt in his pocket, counted five quarters, six dimes, two nickels, and eight pennies. He returned to the lobby. “Could I have two dollar bills for this change, please? Maybe old bills?”
The clerk looked at him suspiciously. “Your rent paid up?”
“Certainly,” Harry said. The woman grudgingly gave him the money.
“Thank you. You look very lovely today, Mrs. Raduski.” Mrs. Raduski snorted.
In his room, Harry looked for his hat. He finally found it under his bed—how had it gotten under his bed? He dusted it off and put it on. It had cost him $3.25. He opened the closet door, parted the clothes hanging from their metal pole—like Moses parting the sea, he always thought, a Moses come again—and stepped to the back of the closet, remembering with his body rather than his mind the sharp little twist to the right just past the far gray sleeve of his good wool suit.
He stepped out into the bare corner of a warehouse. Cobwebs brushed his hat; he had stepped a little too far right. Harry crossed the empty concrete space to where the lumber stacks started, and threaded his way through them. The lumber, too, was covered with cobwebs; not much building going on. On his way out the warehouse door, Harry passed the night watchman coming on duty.
“Quiet all day, Harry?”
“As a church, Rudy,” Harry said. Rudy laughed. He laughed a lot. He was also indisposed to question very much.
The first time he had seen Harry coming out of the warehouse in a bemused daze, he must have assumed that Harry had been hired to work there. Peering at Rudy’s round, vacant face, Harry realized that he must hold this job because he was someone’s uncle, someone’s cousin, someone’s something. Harry had felt a small glow of approval; families should take care of their own. He had told Rudy that he had lost his key and asked him for another.
Outside it was late afternoon. Harry began walking. Eventually there were people walking past him, beside him, across the street from him. Everybody wore hats. The women wore bits of velvet or wool with dotted veils across their noses and long, graceful dresses in small prints. The men wore fedoras with suits as baggy as Harry’s. When he reached the park there were children, girls in long black tights and hard shoes, boys in buttoned shirts. Everyone looked like it was Sunday morning.
Pushcarts and shops lined the sidewalks. Harry bought a pair of socks, thick gray wool, for 89 cents. When the man took his dollar, Harry held his breath: each first time made a little pip in his stomach. But no one ever looked at the dates of old bills. He bought two oranges for five cents each, and then, thinking of Manny, bought a third. At a candystore he bought G-8 And His Battle Aces for fifteen cents. At The Collector’s Cozy in the other time they would gladly give him thirty dollars for it. Finally, he bought a cherry Coke for a nickel and headed towards the park.
“Oh, excuse me,” said a young man who bumped into Harry on the sidewalk. “I’m so sorry!” Harry looked at him hard: but, no. Too young. Jackie was twenty-eight.
Some children ran past, making for the movie theater. Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous. Harry sat down on a green-painted wooden bench under a pair of magnificent Dutch elms. On the bench lay a news-magazine. Harry glanced at it to see when in September this was: the 28th. The cover pictured a young blond Nazi soldier standing at stiff salute. Harry thought again of Manny, frowned, and turned the magazine cover down.
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