Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  When it gets dark, since I have no seat, I stay where I am sitting by the door of the train. I am so tired, but in the darkness all I can think of is my mother's face in the crowd and her hopeless open mouth. I don't want to think of my mother, but I am in a delirium of fatigue, surrounded by the dark and the rumble of the train and the distant murmur of voices. I sleep sitting by the door of the train, fitful and rocked. I have dreams like fever dreams. In my dream I am in a strange house, but it is supposed to be my own house, but nothing is where it should be, and I begin to believe that I have actually entered a stranger's house, and that they'll return and find me here. When I wake up and go back to sleep, I am back in this strange house, looking through things.

  I wake before dawn, only a little rested. My shoulders and hips and back all ache from the way I am leaning but I have no energy to get up. I have no energy to do anything but endure. Elizabeth nods, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, but neither of us speak.

  Finally the train slows. We come in through a town, but the town seems to go on and on. It must be St. Louis. We stop and sit. The sun comes up and heats the car like an oven. There is no movement of the air. There are so many buildings in St. Louis, and so many of them are tall, two stories, that I wonder if they cut off the wind and that is why it's so still. But finally the train lurches and we crawl into the station.

  I am one of the first off the train by virtue of my position near the door. A soldier unlocks it and shouts for all of us to disembark, but he need not have bothered for there is a rush. I am borne ahead at its beginning but I can stop at the back of the platform. I am afraid that I have lost Elizabeth, but I see her in the crowd. She is on the arm of a younger man in a bowler. There is something about his air that marks him as different -- he is sprightly and apparently fresh even after the long ride.

  I almost let them pass, but the prospect of being alone makes me reach out and touch her shoulder.

  "There you are," she says.

  We join a queue of people waiting to use a trench. The smell is appalling ammonia acrid and eye-watering. There is a wall to separate the men from the women, but the women are all together. I crouch, trying not to notice anyone and trying to keep my skirts out of the filth. It is so awful. It's worse than anything. I feel so awful.

  What if my mother were here? What would I do? I think maybe it was better, maybe it was God's hand. But that is an awful thought, too.

  "Child," Elizabeth says when I come out, "what's the matter?"

  "It's so awful," I say. I shouldn't cry, but I just want to be home and clean. I want to go to bed and sleep.

  She offers me a biscuit.

  "You should save your food," I say.

  "Don't worry," Elizabeth says, "We have enough."

  I shouldn't accept it, but I am so hungry. And when I have a little to eat, I feel a little better.

  I try to imagine what the fort will be like where we will be going. Will we have a place to sleep, or will it be barracks? Or worse yet, tents? Although after the night I spent on the train I can't imagine anything that could be worse. I imagine if I have to stay awhile in a tent then I'll make the best of it.

  "I think this being in limbo is perhaps worse than anything we can expect at the end," I say to Elizabeth. She smiles.

  She introduces her companion, Michael. He is enough like her to be her brother, but I don't think that they are. I am resolved not to ask, if they want to tell me they can.

  We are standing together, not saying anything, when there is some commotion farther up the platform. It is a woman, her black dress is like smoke. She is running down the platform, coming toward us. There are all of these people and yet it is as if there is no obstacle for her. "NO NO NO NO, DON'T TOUCH ME! FILTHY HANDS! DON'T LET THEM TOUCH YOU! DON'T GET ON THE TRAINS!"

  People are getting out of her way. Where are the soldiers? The fabric of her dress is so threadbare it is rotten and torn at the seams. Her skirt is greasy black and matted and stained. Her face is so thin. "ANIMALS! THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE! PEOPLE DON'T HAVE FOOD! THERE IS NOTHING THERE BUT INDIANS! THEY SENT US OUT TO SETTLE BUT THERE WAS NOTHING THERE!"

  I expect she will run past me but she grabs my arm and stops and looks into my face. She has light eyes, pale eyes in her dark face. She is mad.

  "WE WERE ALL STARVING, SO WE WENT TO THE FORT BUT THE FORT HAD NOTHING. YOU WILL ALL STARVE, THE WAY THEY ARE STARVING THE INDIANS! THEY WILL LET US ALL DIE! THEY DON'T CARE!" She is screaming in my face, and her spittle sprays me, warm as her breath. Her hand is all tendons and twigs, but she's so strong I can't escape.

  The soldiers grab her and yank her away from me. My arm aches where she was holding it. I can't stand up.

  Elizabeth pulls me upright. "Stay close to me," she says and starts to walk the other way down the platform. People are looking up following the screaming woman.

  She pulls me along with her. I keep thinking of the woman's hand and wrist turned black with grime. I remember my mother's face was black when she lay on the platform. Black like something rotted.

  "Here," Elizabeth says at an old door, painted green but now weathered. The door opens and we pass inside.

  "What?" I say. My eyes are accustomed to the morning brightness and I can't see.

  "Her name is Clara," Elizabeth says. "She has people in Tennessee."

  "Come with me," says another woman. She sounds older. "Step this way. Where are her things?"

  I am being kidnapped. Oh merciful God, I'll die. I let out a moan.

  "Her things were lost, her mother was killed in a crush on the platform."

  The woman in the dark clucks sympathetically. "Poor dear. Does Michael have his passenger yet?"

  "In a moment," Elizabeth says. "We were lucky for the commotion."

  I am beginning to be able to see. It is a storage room, full of abandoned things. The woman holding my arm is older. There are some broken chairs and a stool. She sits me in the chair. Is Elizabeth some kind of adventuress?

  "Who are you?" I ask.

  "We are friends," Elizabeth says. "We will help you get to your sister."

  I don:t believe them. I will end up in New Orleans. Elizabeth is some kind of adventuress.

  After a moment the door opens and this time it is Michael with a young man. "This is Andrew," he says.

  A man? What do they want with a man? That is what stops me from saying, "Run!" Andrew is blinded by the change in light, and I can see the astonishment working on his face, the way it must be working on mine. "What is this?" he asks.

  "You are with Friends," Michael says, and maybe he has said it differently than Elizabeth, or maybe it is just that this time I have had the wit to hear it.

  "Quakers" Andrew says. "Abolitionists?"

  Michael smiles, I can see his teeth white in the darkness. "Just Friends," he says.

  Abolitionists. Crazy people who steal slaves to set them free. Have they come to kidnap us? We are recalcitrant southerners, I have never heard of Quakers seeking revenge, but everyone knows the Abolitionists are crazy and they are liable to do anything.

  "We'll have to wait here until they begin to move people out, it will be evening before we can leave," says the older woman.

  I am so frightened, I just want to be home. Maybe I should try to break free and run out to the platform, there are northern soldiers out there. Would they protect me? And then what, go to a fort in Oklahoma?

  The older woman asks Michael how they could get past the guards so early and he tells her about the madwoman. A "refugee" he calls her.

  "They'll just take her back," Elizabeth says, sighing.

  Take her back, do they mean that she really came from Oklahoma? They talk about how bad it will be this winter. Michael says there are Wisconsin Indians re-settled down there, but they've got no food, and they've been starving on government handouts for a couple of years. Now there will be more people. They're not prepared for winter.

  There can't have been much handout during the war. It was hard enoug
h to feed the armies.

  They explain to Andrew and to me that we will sneak out of the train station this evening, after dark. We will spend a day with a Quaker family in St. Louis, and then they will send us on to the next family. And so we will be passed hand to hand, like a bucket in a brigade, until we get to our families.

  They call it the underground railroad.

  But we are slave owners.

  "Wrong is wrong," says Elizabeth. "Some of us can't stand and watch people starve."

  "But only two out of the whole train," Andrew says.

  Michael sighs.

  The old woman nods. "It isn't right."

  Elizabeth picked me because my mother died. If my mother had not died, I would be out there, on my way to starve with the rest of them.

  I can't help it but I start to cry. I should not profit from my mother's death. I should have kept her safe.

  "Hush, now," says Elizabeth. "Hush, you'll be okay."

  "It's not right," I whisper. I'm trying not to be loud, we mustn't be discovered.

  "What, child?"

  "You shouldn't have picked me," I say. But I am crying so hard I don't think they can understand me. Elizabeth strokes my hair and wipes my face. It may be the last time someone will do these things for me. My sister has three children of her own, and she won't need another child. I'll have to work hard to make up my keep.

  There are blankets there and we lie down on the hard floor, all except Michael, who sits in a chair and sleeps. I sleep this time with fewer dreams. But when I wake up, although I can't remember what they were, I have the feeling that I have been dreaming restless dreams.

  The stars are bright when we finally creep out of the station. A night full of stars. The stars will be the same in Tennessee. The platform is empty, the train and the people are gone. The Lincoln Train has gone back south while we slept, to take more people out of Mississippi.

  "Will you come back and save more people?" I ask Elizabeth.

  The stars are a banner behind her quiet head. "We will save what we can," she says.

  It isn't fair that I was picked. "I want to help," I tell her.

  She is silent for a moment. "We only work with our own," she says. There is something in her voice that has not been there before. A sharpness.

  "What do you mean?" I ask.

  "There are no slavers in our ranks," she says and her voice is cold.

  I feel as if I have had a fever; tired, but clear of mind. I have never walked so far and not walked beyond a town. The streets of St. Louis are empty. There are few lights. Far off a woman is singing, and her voice is clear and carries easily in the night. A beautiful voice.

  "Elizabeth," Michael says, "she is just a girl."

  "She needs to know," Elizabeth says.

  "Why did you save me then?" I ask.

  "One does not fight evil with evil," Elizabeth says.

  "I'm not evil!" I say.

  But no one answers.

  GONE

  John Crowley

  Elmers again.

  You waited in a sort of exasperated amusement for yours, thinking that if you had been missed last time yours would likely be among the households selected this time, though how that process of selection went on no one knew, you only knew that a new capsule had been detected entering the atmosphere (caught by one of the thousand spy satellites and listening-and-peering devices that had been trained on the big Mother Ship in orbit around the moon for the past year) and though the capsule had apparently burned up in the atmosphere, that’s just what had happened the time before, and then elmers everywhere. You could hope that you’d be skipped or passed over—there were people who had been skipped last time when all around them neighbors and friends had been visited or afflicted, and who would appear now and then and be interviewed on the news, though having nothing, after all, to say, it was the rest of us who had the stories—but in any case you started looking out the windows, down the drive, listening for the doorbell to ring in the middle of the day.

  Pat Poynton didn’t need to look out the window of the kid’s bedroom where she was changing the beds, the only window from which the front door could be seen, when her doorbell rang in the middle of the day. She could almost hear, subliminally, every second doorbell on Ponader Drive, every second doorbell in South Bend go off just at that moment. She thought: Here’s mine.

  They had come to be called elmers (or Elmers) all over this country at least after David Brinkley had told a story on a talk show about how when they built the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, it was thought that people out in the country, people in places like Dubuque and Rapid City and South Bend, wouldn’t think of making a trip east and paying five dollars to see all the wonders, that maybe the great show wasn’t for the likes of them; and so the fair’s promoters hired a bunch of people, ordinary-looking men with ordinary clothes wearing ordinary glasses and bow ties, to fan out to places like Vincennes and Austin and Brattleboro and just talk it up. Pretend to be ordinary folks who had been to the fair, and hadn’t been high-hatted, no sirree, had a wonderful time, the wife too, and b’gosh had Seen the Future and could tell you the sight was worth the five dollars they were asking, which wasn’t so much since it included tickets to all the shows and lunch. And all these men, whatever their real names were, were all called Elmer by the promoters who sent them out.

  Pat wondered what would happen if she just didn’t open the door. Would it eventually go away? It surely wouldn’t push its way in, mild and blobby as it was (from the upstairs window she could see that it was the same as the last ones) and that made her wonder how after all they had all got inside—as far as she knew there weren’t many who had failed to get at least a hearing. Some chemical hypnotic maybe that they projected, calming fear. What Pat felt standing at the top of the stair and listening to the doorbell pressed again (timidly, she thought, tentatively, hopefully) was amused exasperation, just like everyone else’s: a sort of oh-Christ-no with a burble of wonderment just below it, and even expectation: for who wouldn’t be at least intrigued by the prospect of his, or her, own lawn mower, snow shoveler, hewer of wood, and drawer of water, for as long as it lasted?

  “Mow your lawn?” it said when Pat opened the door. “Take out trash? Mrs. Poynton?”

  Now actually in its presence, looking at it through the screen door, Pat felt most strongly a new part of the elmer feeling: a giddy revulsion she had not expected. It was so not human. It seemed to have been constructed to resemble a human being by other sorts of beings who were not human and did not understand very well what would count as human with other humans. When it spoke its mouth moved (mouth hole must move when speech is produced) but the sound seemed to come from somewhere else, or from nowhere.

  “Wash your dishes? Mrs. Poynton?”

  “No,” she said, as citizens had been instructed to say. “Please go away. Thank you very much.”

  Of course the elmer didn’t go away, only stood bobbing slightly on the doorstep like a foolish child whose White Rose salve or Girl Scout cookies haven’t been bought.

  “Thank you very much,” it said, in tones like her own. “Chop wood? Draw water?”

  “Well gee,” Pat said, and, helplessly, smiled.

  What everyone knew, besides the right response to give to the elmer, which everyone gave and almost no one was able to stick to, was that these weren’t the creatures or beings from the Mother Ship itself up above (so big you could see it, pinhead sized, crossing the face of the affronted moon) but some kind of creation of theirs, sent down in advance. An artifact, the official word was; some sort of protein, it was guessed; some sort of chemical process at the heart of it or head of it, maybe a DNA-based computer or something equally outlandish, but no one knew because of the way the first wave of them, flawed maybe, fell apart so quickly, sinking and melting like the snowmen they sort of resembled after a week or two of mowing lawns and washing dishes and pestering people with their Good Will Ticket, shriveling into a sort of dry flocked matt
er and then into nearly nothing at all, like cotton candy in the mouth.

  “Good Will Ticket?” said the elmer at Pat Poynton’s door, holding out to her a tablet of something not paper, on which was written or printed or anyway somehow indited a little message. Pat didn’t read it, didn’t need to, you had the message memorized by the time you opened your door to a second-wave elmer like Pat’s. Sometimes lying in bed in the morning in the bad hour before the kids had to be got up for school Pat would repeat like a prayer the little message that everybody in the world it seemed was going to be presented with sooner or later:

  GOOD WILL

  YOU MARK BELOW

  ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS

  WHY NOT SAY YES

  YES

  And no space for No, which meant—if it was a sort of vote (and experts and officials, though how such a thing could have been determined Pat didn’t know, were guessing that’s what it was), a vote to allow or to accept the arrival or descent of the Mother Ship and its unimaginable occupants or passengers—that you could only refuse to take it from the elmer: shaking your head firmly and saying No clearly but politely, because even taking a Good Will Ticket might be the equivalent of a Yes, and though what it would be a Yes to exactly no one knew, there was at least a ground swell of opinion in the think tanks that it meant acceding to or at least not resisting World Domination.

  You weren’t, however, supposed to shoot your elmer. In places like Idaho and Siberia that’s what they were doing, you heard, though a bullet or two didn’t seem to make any difference to them, they went on pierced with holes like characters in the Dick Tracy comics of long ago, smiling shyly in at your windows, Rake your leaves? Yard work? Pat Poynton was sure that Lloyd would not hesitate to shoot, would be pretty glad that at last something living or at least moving and a certified threat to freedom had at last got before him to be aimed at. In the hall-table drawer Pat still had Lloyd’s 9mm Glock pistol; he had let her know he wanted to come get it but he wasn’t getting back into this house, she’d use it on him herself if he got close enough.