A dotted signature line appeared on the postcard.
Judy stared at it, her face haggard, and then slowly, hesitantly, reluctantly, with many a stop and start, she picked up a pen and leaned forward.
She signed her name.
After a moment, the card vanished, disappearing with a smug little pop.
Everything was quiet. Everything was still.
Judy held her breath for a few moments, then slowly let it out. She wiped her brow. Slowly, she began to smile.
She had had her tubes tied two years ago because it was the cheapest and surest form of birth control. It was a good thing that the Wee Folk didn’t really keep up with the times . . .
Whistling cheerfully, she strolled into the kitchen and finished making breakfast.
AFTERWORD TO SEND NO MONEY
Susan thought up the idea for this story, worked on it as a solo piece for a while, got stuck on it, and asked me if I wanted to collaborate on it with her. I was the most intrigued here by the idea of a junk-mail come-on that actually talked to you, interactively, changing its printed message to fit the situation and your response, and I had fun helping her come up with the chiding, somewhat scornful “dialogue” of the card. I started work on the story on February 29,1984, a few days after Susan had started it, and we finished work on it on March 2, 1984.
This is one of several stories that I’ve worked—“Golden Apples of the Sun” and “Afternoon At Schrafft’s” are two others—that strike me as legitimate modern updates of Unknown-style fantasies—that is, as stories that might have fit in to the famous fantasy magazine Unknown if it had survived the wartime paper shortage that killed it and was instead still publishing today, in the ‘90s. I like this kind of story; Jack and I frequently reprint Unknown stories in our fantasy anthologies for Ace, and I buy good new stories of this type for IAsfm when I can find them. It says something, I think, that people are still producing recognizable Unknown-style fantasies nearly forty years after the magazine died—many of them by writers who weren’t even born yet when the magazine was on the newsstands!
We sold this story to Shawna McCarthy, very nearly the last thing she bought before relinquishing her editorship of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and it appeared there in the mid-December 1985 issue.
PLAYING THE GAME
GARDNER DOZOIS & JACK DANN
The woods that edged the north side of Leistershire belonged to the cemetery, and if you looked westward toward Owego, you could see marble mausoleums and expensive monuments atop the hills. The cemetery took up several acres of carefully mown hillside, and bordered Jefferson Avenue, where well-kept wood-frame houses faced the rococo, painted headstones of the Italian section.
West of the cemetery there had once been a district of brownstone buildings and small shops, but for some time now there had been a shopping mall there instead; east of the cemetery, the row of dormer-windowed old mansions that Jimmy remembered had been replaced by an ugly brick school building and a fenced-in schoolyard where kids never played. The cemetery itself, though—that never changed; that had always been there, exactly the same for as far back as he could remember, and that made the cemetery a pleasant place to Jimmy Rodgers, a refuge, a welcome island of stability in a rapidly changing world where change itself was often unpleasant and sometimes menacing.
Jimmy Rodgers lived in Old Town most of the time, just down the hill from the cemetery, although sometimes they lived in Passdale or Southside or even Durham. Old Town was a quiet residential neighborhood of whitewashed narrow-fronted houses and steep cobbled streets that were lined with oak and maple trees; things changed slowly there also, unlike the newer districts downtown, where it seemed that new parking garages or civic buildings popped out of the ground like mushrooms after a rain—only rarely did a new building appear in Old Town, or an old building vanish. For this reason alone, Jimmy much preferred Old Town to Passdale or Southside, and was always relieved to be living there once again. True, he usually had no friends or school chums in the neighborhood, which consisted mostly of first- and second-generation Poles who worked for the Leistershire shoe factories, which had recently begun to fail; sometimes when they lived in Old Town, Jimmy got to play with a lame Italian boy who was almost as much of an outcast in the neighborhood as Jimmy was, but the Italian boy had been gone for the last few days, and Jimmy was left alone again. He didn’t really mind being alone all that much, most of the time, anyway—he was a solitary boy by nature.
The whole Rodgers family tended to be solitary, and usually had little to do with the close-knit, church-centered life of Old Town, although sometimes his mother belonged to the PTA or the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and once Jimmy had been amazed to discover that his father had joined the Rotary Club. Jimmy’s father usually worked for Weston Computers in Owego, although Jimmy could remember times, unhappier times, when his father had worked as a CPA in Endicott or even as a shoe salesman in Manningtown. Jimmy’s father had always been interested in history, that was another constant in Jimmy’s life, and sometimes he did volunteer work for the Catholic Integration League. He never had much time to spend with Jimmy, wherever they lived, wherever he worked—that was another thing that didn’t change. Jimmy’s mother usually taught at the elementary school, although sometimes she worked as a typist at home, and other times, the bad times again, she stayed at home and took “medicine” and didn’t work at all.
That morning when Jimmy woke up, the first thing he realized was that it was summer, a fact testified to by the brightness of the sunshine and the balminess of the air that came in through the open window, making up for his memory of yesterday, which had been gray and cold and dour. He rolled out of bed, surprised for a moment to find himself on the top tier of a bunk bed, and plumped down to the floor hard enough to make the soles of his feet tingle; at the last few places they had lived, he hadn’t had a bunk bed, and he wasn’t used to waking up that high off the ground. Sometimes he had trouble finding his clothes in the morning, but this time it seemed that he had been conscientious enough to hang them all up the night before, and he came across a blue shirt with a zigzag green stripe that he had not seen in a long time. That seemed like a good omen to him, and cheered him. He put on the blue shirt, puzzled out the knots he could not remember leaving in his shoelaces. Still blinking sleep out of his eyes, he hunted futilely for his toothbrush—it always took a while for his mind to clear in the morning, and he could be confused and disoriented until it did, but eventually memories began to seep back in, as they always did, and he sorted through them, trying to keep straight which house this was out of all the ones he had lived in, and where he kept things here.
Of course. But who would ever have thought that he’d keep it in an old coffee can under his desk!
Downstairs, his mother was making French toast, and he stopped in the archway to watch her as she cooked. She was a short, plump, dark-eyed, olive-complexioned woman who wore her oily black hair pulled back in a tight bun. He watched her intently as she fussed over the hot griddle, noticing her quick nervous motions, the irritable way she patted at loose strands of her hair; her features were tightly drawn, her nose was long and straight and sharp, as though you could cut yourself on it, and she seemed all angles and edges today. Jimmy’s father had been sitting sullenly over his third cup of coffee, but as Jimmy hesitated in the archway, he got to his feet and began to get ready for work. He was a thin man with a pale complexion and a shock of wiry red hair, and Jimmy bit his lip in disappointment as he watched him, keeping well back and hoping not to be noticed—he could tell from the insignia on his father’s briefcase that his father was working in Endicott today, and those times when his father’s job was in Endicott were among the times when both of his parents would be at their most snappish in the morning.
He slipped silently into his chair at the table as his father stalked wordlessly from the room, and his mother served him his French toast, also wordlessly, except for a slight sullen grunt of acknowledgment. Th
is was going to be a bad day—not as bad as those times when his father worked in Manningtown and his mother took her “medicine,” not as bad as some other times that he had no intention of thinking about at all, but unpleasant enough, right on the edge of acceptability. He shouldn’t have given in to tiredness and come inside yesterday, he should have kept playing the Game . . . Fortunately, he had no intention of spending much time here today.
Jimmy got through his breakfast with little real difficulty, except that his mother started in on her routine about why didn’t he call Tommy Melkonian, why didn’t he go swimming or bike riding, he was daydreaming his summer away, it wasn’t natural for him to be by himself all the time, he needed friends, it hurt her and made her feel guilty to see him moping around by himself all the time . . . and so on. He made the appropriate noises in response, but he had no intention of calling Tommy Melkonian today, or of letting her call him for him. He had only played with Tommy once or twice before, the last time being when they lived over on Clinton Street. Tommy hadn’t been around before that, but he didn’t even like Tommy all that much, and he certainly wasn’t going to waste the day on him. Sometimes Jimmy had given in to temptation and wasted whole days playing jacks or kick-the-can with other kids or going swimming or flipping baseball cards, sometimes he’d frittered away a week like that without once playing the Game, but in the end he always returned dutifully to playing the Game again, however tired of it all he sometimes became, and the Game had to be played alone.
Yes, he was definitely going to play the Game today—there was certainly no incentive to hang around here, and the Game seemed to be easier to play on fine warm days anyway, for some reason.
So as soon as he could, Jimmy slipped away. For a moment, he confused this place with the house they sometimes lived in on Ash Street, which was very similar in layout and where he had a different secret escape route to the outside, but at last he got his memories straightened out. He snuck into the cellar while his mother was busy elsewhere, and through the back cellar window, under which he had placed a chair so that he could reach the cement overhang and climb out onto the lawn. He cut across the neighbors’ yards to Charles Street, and then over to Floral Avenue, a steep macadam dead-end road. Beyond was the start of the woods that belonged to the cemetery. Sometimes the mudhills below the woods would be guarded by a mangy black-and-brown dog that would bark and snarl at him and chase him, and he walked faster, dreading the possibility.
But once in the woods, in the cool brown and green shade of bole and leaf, he knew he was safe, safe from everything, and his pace slowed. The first tombstone appeared, half-buried in mulch and stained with green moss, and he patted it fondly, as if it were a dog. He was in the cemetery now, where it had all begun so long ago. Where he had first played the Game.
Moving easily, he climbed up toward the crown of woods, a grassy knoll that poked up above the surrounding trees, the highest point in the cemetery. Even after all he had been through, this was still a magic place for him—never had he feared spooks or ghouls while he was here, even at night, although often as he walked along, as now, he would peer up at the gum-gray sky through branches that interlocked like the fingers of witches and pretend that monsters and secret agents and dinosaurs were moving through the woods around him, that the stunted azalea bushes concealed pirates or ores . . . but these were only small games, mood-setting exercises to prepare him for the playing of the Game itself, and they fell away from him like a shed skin as he came out onto the grassy knoll and the landscape opened up below.
Jimmy stood entranced, feeling the warm hand of the sun on the back of his head, hardly breathing, listening to the chirruping of birds, the scratching of katydids, the long sighing rush of wind through oak and evergreen. The sky was blue and high and cloudless, and the Susquehanna River gleamed below like a mirror snake, burning silver as it wound through the rolling, hilly country. Slowly, he began to play the Game. How had it been, that first time that he had played the Game, inadvertently, not realizing what he was doing, not understanding that he was playing the Game or what Game he was playing until after he had already started playing . . . ? How had it been? Had everything looked like this? He decided that the sun had been lower in the sky that day, that the air had been hazier, that there had been a mass of clouds on the eastern horizon, and he flicked through mental pictures of the landscape as if he were riffling through a deck of cards with his thumb, until he found one that seemed to be right. Obediently, the sky grew darker, but the shape and texture of the clouds were not right, and he searched until he found a better match. It had been somewhat colder, and there had been a slight breeze . . . So far it had been easy, but there were more subtle adjustments to be made. Had there been four smokestacks or five down in Southside? Four, he decided, and took one away. Had that radio tower been on the crest of that particular distant hill? Or on that one? Had the bridge over the Susquehanna been nearer or further away? Had that EXXON sign been there, at the corner of Cedar Road? Or had it been an ESSO sign? His green shirt had changed to a brown shirt by now, and he changed it further, to a red pinstriped shirt, trying to remember. Had that ice cream stand been there? He decided that it had not been. His skin was dark again now, although his hair was still too straight . . .
Had the cemetery fence been a wrought-iron fence or a hurricane fence? Had there been the sound of a factory whistle blowing? Or the smell of sulphur in the air? Or the smell of pine . . . ?
He worked at it until dusk, and then, drained, he came back down the hill again.
The shopping-mall was still there, but the school and schoolyard had vanished this time, to be replaced by the familiar row of stately, dormer-windowed old mansions. That usually meant that he was at least close. The house was on Schubert Street this evening, several blocks over from where it had been this morning, and it was a two-story, not a three-story house, closer to his memories of how things had been before he’d started playing the Game. The car outside the house was a ‘78 Volvo—not what he remembered, but closer than the ‘73 Buick from this morning. The windshield bore an Owego parking sticker, and there was some Weston Computer literature tucked under the eyeshade, all of which meant that it was probably safe to go in; his father wouldn’t be a murderous drunk this particular evening.
Inside the parlor, Jimmy’s father looked up from his armchair, where he was reading Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World, and winked. “Hi, sport,” he said, and Jimmy replied “Hi, Dad.” At least his father was a black man this time, as he should be, although he was much fatter than Jimmy ever remembered him being, and still had this morning’s kinky red hair, instead of the kinky black hair he should have. Jimmy’s mother came out of the kitchen, and she was thin enough now, but much too tall, with a tiny upturned nose, blue eyes instead of hazel, hair more blond than auburn . . .
“Wash up for dinner, Jimmy,” his mother said, and Jimmy turned slowly for the stairs, feeling exhaustion wash through him like a bitter tide. She wasn’t really his mother, they weren’t really his parents . . .
He had come a lot closer than this before, lots of other times . . . But always there was some small detail that was wrong, that proved that that particular probability-world out of the billions of probability-worlds was not the one he had started from, was not home. Still, he had done much worse than this before, too . . . At least this wasn’t a world where his father was dead, or an atomic war had happened, or his mother had cancer or was a drug-addict, or his father was a brutal drunk, or a Nazi, or a child molester . . . This would do, for the night. He would settle for this, for tonight . . .
He was so tired . . .
In the morning, he would start searching again.
Someday, he would find them.
AFTERWORD TO PLAYING THE GAME
This started off as a story by Jack called “The Alpha Tree,” about a boy who could see into alternate universes. Jack had gotten stalled on it after a few pages, and passed it along to me to see what I could do with
it. I started work on it on May 12, 1981, only a few days after having finished working on “Down Among The Dead Men.” I skewed Jack’s idea somewhat, building the story instead around a concept that had long fascinated me—an intuition of how easy it would be to become lost among the billions of probability-worlds that are born and die around us every second of every day. Once you had started travelling among them, could you ever really be sure that you had returned home again? Quantum uncertainty would seem to indicate that you could never really be certain that you were really back where you’d started from, no matter how close a match it seemed. What would be the emotional consequences of that for the traveler?
The work went quickly. I took Jack’s incomplete draft to pieces and built it into the new framework of the story (it survives most nearly intact in the opening two pages, and in the description of Jimmy’s journey to the grassy knoll in the cemetery), added about twice again as much material of my own interstitially, and then did a smoothing and homogenizing draft to blend his pages and mine together as seamlessly as possible.
I had the most fun here playing with seemingly innocuous statements that the reader would take at face value while reading the story initially—“only rarely did a new building appear in Old Town, or an old building vanish”; “Jimmy’s father usually worked for Weston Computers in Owego, although Jimmy could remember times when his father had worked as a CPA in Endicott or even as a shoe-salesman in Manningtown”; “but the Italian boy had been gone for the last few days”—but that would have a very different and literal meaning when he went back and looked at them again, this time knowing what the story was about. This technique—giving the reader the information he needs to figure out the real situation, but distracting him from examining it closely enough to tumble before he’s supposed to tumble; hiding things in plain sight—is a favorite of mine, and I’ve used it to one degree or another in many different stories.
Slow Dancing Through Time Page 20
