by John Varley
She pointed a finger at him and made a Donald Duck sound as her thumb worked back and forth. He put his hand to his heart and fell over sideways, and she dissolved in laughter. She was careful, however, to keep her weapon firmly trained on him.
“And you’d better give me that candy or I’ll shoot you again.”
The playground was darker now, and not so crowded. She sat beside him on the bench, swinging her legs. Her bare feet did not quite touch the dirt.
She was going to be quite beautiful. He could see it clearly in her face. As for the body . . . who could tell?
Not that he really gave a damn.
She was dressed in a little of this and a little of that, worn here and there without much regard for his concepts of modesty. Many of the children wore nothing. It had been something of a shock when he arrived. Now he was almost used to it, but he still thought it incautious on the part of her parents. Did they really think the world was that safe, to let an eleven-year-old girl go practically naked in a public place?
He sat there listening to her prattle about her friends—the ones she hated and the one or two she simply adored—with only part of his attention.
He inserted um’s and uh-huh’s in the right places.
She was cute, there was no denying it. She seemed as sweet as a child that age ever gets, which can be very sweet and as poisonous as a rattlesnake, almost at the same moment. She had the capacity to be warm, but it was on the surface. Underneath, she cared mostly about herself. Her loyalty would be a transitory thing, bestowed easily, just as easily forgotten.
And why not? She was young. It was perfectly healthy for her to be that way.
But did he dare try to touch her?
It was crazy. It was insane as they all told him it was. It worked so seldom. Why would it work with her? He felt a weight of defeat.
“Are you okay?”
“Huh? Me? Oh, sure, I’m all right. Isn’t your mother going to be worried about you?”
“I don’t have to be in for hours and hours yet.” For a moment she looked so grown up he almost believed the lie.
“Well, I’m getting tired of sitting here. And the candy’s all gone.” He looked at her face. Most of the chocolate had ended up in a big circle around her mouth, except where she had wiped it daintily on her shoulder or forearm. “What’s back there?”
She turned.
“That? That’s the swimming hole.”
“Why don’t we go over there? I’ll tell you a story.”
The promise of a story was not enough to keep her out of the water. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. He knew she was smart, a reader, and she had an imagination. But she was also active. That pull was too strong for him. He sat far from the water, under some bushes, and watched her swim with the three other children still in the park this late in the evening.
Maybe she would come back to him, and maybe she wouldn’t. It wouldn’t change his life either way, but it might change hers.
She emerged dripping and infinitely cleaner from the murky water. She dressed again in her random scraps, for whatever good it did her, and came to him shivering.
“I’m cold,” she said.
“Here.” He took off his jacket. She looked at his hands as he wrapped it around her, and once she reached out and touched the hardness of his shoulder.
“You sure must be strong,” she commented.
“Pretty strong. I work hard, being a pusher.”
“Just what is a pusher?” she said, and stifled a yawn.
“Come sit on my lap, and I’ll tell you.”
He did tell her, and it was a very good story that no adventurous child could resist. He had practiced that story, refined it, told it many times into a recorder until he had the rhythms and cadences just right, until he found just the right words—not too difficult words, but words with some fire and juice in them.
And once more he grew encouraged. She had been tired when he started, but he gradually caught her attention. It was possible no one had ever told her a story in quite that way. She was used to sitting before the screen and having a story shoved into her eyes and ears. It was something new to be able to interrupt with questions and get answers. Even reading was not like that. It was the oral tradition of storytelling, and it could still mesmerize the nth generation of the electronic age.
“That sounds great,” she said, when she was sure he was through.
“You liked it?”
“I really truly did. I think I want to be a pusher when I grow up. That was a really neat story.”
“Well, that’s not actually the story I was going to tell you. That’s just what it’s like to be a pusher.”
“You mean you have another story?”
“Sure.” He looked at his watch. “But I’m afraid it’s getting late. It’s almost dark, and everybody’s gone home. You’d probably better go, too.”
She was in agony, torn between what she was supposed to do and what she wanted. It really should be no contest, if she was who he thought she was.
“Well . . . but—but I’ll come back here tomorrow and you—”
He was shaking his head.
“My ship leaves in the morning,” he said. “There’s no time.”
“Then tell me now! I can stay out. Tell me now. Please please please?”
He coyly resisted, harrumphed, protested, but in the end allowed himself to be seduced. He felt very good. He had her like a five-pound trout on a twenty-pound line. It wasn’t sporting. But then, he wasn’t playing a game.
So at last he got to his specialty.
He sometimes wished he could claim the story for his own, but the fact was he could not make up stories. He no longer tried to. Instead, he cribbed from every fairy tale and fantasy story he could find. If he had a genius, it was in adapting some of the elements to fit the world she knew—while keeping it strange enough to enthrall her—and in ad-libbing the end to personalize it.
It was a wonderful tale he told. It had enchanted castles sitting on mountains of glass, moist caverns beneath the sea, fleets of starships and shining riders astride horses that flew the galaxy. There were evil alien creatures, and others with much good in them. There were drugged potions. Scaled beasts roared out of hyperspace to devour planets.
Amid all the turmoil strode the Prince and Princess. They got into frightful jams and helped each other out of them.
The story was never quite the same. He watched her eyes. When they wandered, he threw away whole chunks of story. When they widened, he knew what parts to plug in later. He tailored it to her reactions.
The child was sleepy. Sooner or later she would surrender. He needed her in a trance state, neither awake nor asleep. That is when the story would end.
“. . . and though the healers labored long and hard, they could not save the Princess. She died that night, far from her Prince.”
Her mouth was a little round o. Stories were not supposed to end that way.
“Is that all? She died, and she never saw the Prince again?”
“Well, not quite all. But the rest of it probably isn’t true, and I shouldn’t tell it to you.” Ian felt pleasantly tired. His throat was a little raw, making him hoarse. Radiant was a warm weight on his lap.
“You have to tell me, you know,” she said, reasonably. He supposed she was right. He took a deep breath.
“All right. At the funeral, all the greatest people from that part of the galaxy were in attendance. Among them was the greatest Sorcerer who ever lived. His name . . . but I really shouldn’t tell you his name. I’m sure he’d be very cross if I did.
“This Sorcerer passed by the Princess’s bier . . . that’s a—”
“I know, I know, Ian. Go on!”
“Suddenly he frowned, and leaned over her pale form. ‘What is this?’ he thundered. ‘Why was I not told?’ Everyone was very concerned. This Sorcerer was a dangerous man. One time when someone insulted him he made a spell that turned everyone’s head backwards so they h
ad to walk around with rearview mirrors. No one knew what he would do if he got really angry.
“‘This Princess is wearing the Starstone,’ he said, and drew himself up and frowned all around as if he were surrounded by idiots. I’m sure he thought he was, and maybe he was right. Because he went on to tell them just what the Starstone was, and what it did, something no one there had ever heard before. And this is the part I’m not sure of. Because, though everyone knew the Sorcerer was a wise and powerful man, he was also known as a great liar.
“He said that the Starstone was capable of capturing the essence of a person at the moment of her death. All her wisdom, all her power, all her knowledge and beauty and strength would flow into the stone and be held there, timelessly.”
“In suspended animation,” Radiant breathed.
“Precisely. When they heard this, the people were amazed. They buffeted the Sorcerer with questions, to which he gave few answers, and those only grudgingly. Finally he left in a huff. When he was gone everyone talked long into the night about the things he had said. Some felt the Sorcerer had held out hope that the Princess might yet live on. That if her body were frozen, the Prince, upon his return, might somehow infuse her essence back within her. Others thought the Sorcerer had said that was impossible, that the Princess was doomed to a half-life, locked in the stone.
“But the opinion that prevailed was this:
“The Princess would probably never come fully back to life. But her essence might flow from the Starstone and into another, if the right person could be found. All agreed this person must be a young maiden. She must be beautiful, very smart, swift of foot, loving, kind . . . oh, my, the list was very long. Everyone doubted such a person could be found. Many did not even want to try.
“But at last it was decided the Starstone should be given to a faithful friend of the Prince. He would search the galaxy for this maiden. If she existed, he would find her.
“So he departed with the blessings of many worlds behind him, vowing to find the maiden and give her the Starstone.”
He stopped again, cleared his throat, and let the silence grow.
“Is that all?” she said, at last, in a whisper.
“Not quite all,” he admitted. “I’m afraid I tricked you.”
“Tricked me?”
He opened the front of his coat, which was still draped around her shoulders. He reached in past her bony chest and down into an inner pocket of the coat. He came up with the crystal. It was oval, with one side flat. It pulsed ruby light as it sat in the palm of his hand.
“It shines,” she said, looking at it wide-eyed and openmouthed.
“Yes, it does. And that means you’re the one.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Take it.” He handed it to her, and as he did so, he nicked it with his thumbnail. Red light spilled into her hands, flowed between her fingers, seemed to soak into her skin. When it was over, the crystal still pulsed, but dimmed. Her hands were trembling.
“It felt very, very hot,” she said.
“That was the essence of the Princess.”
“And the Prince? Is he still looking for her?”
“No one knows. I think he’s still out there, and someday he will come back for her.”
“And what then?”
He looked away from her. “I can’t say. I think, even though you are lovely, and even though you have the Starstone, that he will just pine away. He loved her very much.”
“I’d take care of him,” she promised.
“Maybe that would help. But I have a problem now. I don’t have the heart to tell the Prince that she is dead. Yet I feel that the Starstone will draw him to it one day. If he comes and finds you, I fear for him. I think perhaps I should take the stone to a far part of the galaxy, some place he could never find it. Then at least he would never know. It might be better that way.”
“But I’d help him,” she said, earnestly. “I promise. I’d wait for him, and when he came, I’d take her place. You’ll see.”
He studied her. Perhaps she would. He looked into her eyes for a long time, and at last let her see his satisfaction.
“Very well. You can keep it then.”
“I’ll wait for him,” she said. “You’ll see.”
She was very tired; almost asleep.
“You should go home now,” he suggested.
“Maybe I could just lie down for a moment,” she said.
“All right.” He lifted her gently and placed her prone on the ground. He stood looking down at her, then knelt beside her and began to gently stroke her forehead. She opened her eyes with no alarm, then closed them again. He continued to stroke her.
Twenty minutes later he left the playground, alone.
He was always depressed afterwards. It was worse than usual this time. She had been much nicer than he had imagined at first. Who could have guessed such a romantic heart beat beneath all that dirt?
He found a phone booth several blocks away. Punching her name into information yielded a fifteen-digit number, which he called. He held his hand over the camera eye.
A woman’s face appeared on his screen.
“Your daughter is in the playground, at the south end by the pool, under the bushes,” he said. He gave the address of the playground.
“We were so worried! What . . . is she . . . who is—”
He hung up and hurried away.
Most of the other pushers thought he was sick. Not that it mattered. Pushers were a tolerant group when it came to other pushers, and especially when it came to anything a pusher might care to do to a puller. He wished he had never told anyone how he spent his leave time, but he had, and now he had to live with it.
So, while they didn’t care if he amused himself by pulling the legs and arms off infant puller pups, they were all just back from ground leave and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to get on each other’s nerves. They ragged him mercilessly.
“How were the swing-sets this trip, Ian?”
“Did you bring me those dirty knickers I asked for?”
“Was it good for you, honey? Did she pant and slobber?”
“‘My ten-year-old baby, she’s a pullin’ me back home . . . ’”
Ian bore it stoically. It was in extremely bad taste and he was the brunt of it, but it really didn’t matter. It would end as soon as they lifted again. They would never understand what he sought, but he felt he understood them. They hated coming to Earth. There was nothing for them there, and perhaps they wished there was.
And he was a pusher himself. He didn’t care for pullers. He agreed with the sentiment expressed by Marian, shortly after lift-off. Marian had just finished her first ground leave after her first voyage, so naturally she was the drunkest of them all.
“Gravity sucks,” she said, and threw up.
It was three months to Amity, and three months back. He hadn’t the foggiest idea of how far it was in miles; after the tenth or eleventh zero his mind clicked off.
Amity. Shit City. He didn’t even get off the ship. Why bother? The planet was peopled with things that looked a little like ten-ton caterpillars and a little like sentient green turds. Toilets were a revolutionary idea to the Amiti; so were ice cream bars, sherbets, sugar donuts, and peppermint. Plumbing had never caught on, but sweets had, so the ship was laden with plain and fancy desserts from every nation on Earth. In addition, there was a pouch of reassuring mail for the forlorn human embassy. The cargo for the return trip was some grayish sludge that Ian supposed someone on Earth found tremendously valuable, and a packet of desperate mail for the folks back home. Ian didn’t need to read the letters to know what was in them. They could all be summed up as “Get me out of here!”
He sat at the viewport and watched an Amiti family lumbering and farting its way down the spaceport road. They paused every so often to do something that looked like an alien cluster-fuck. The road was brown. The land was brown, and in the distance were brown, unremarkable hills. There was a brown haze in the air
, and the sun was yellow-brown.
He thought of castles perched on mountains of glass, of Princes and Princesses, of shining white horses galloping among the stars.
He spent the return trip just as he had on the way out: sweating down in the gargantuan pipes of the stardrive. Just beyond the metal walls unimaginable energies pulsed. And on the walls themselves, tiny plasmoids grew into bigger plasmoids. The process was too slow to see, but if left unchecked the encrustations would soon impair the engines. His job was to scrape them off.
Not everyone was cut out to be an astrogator.
And what of it? It was honest work. He had made his choices long ago. You spent your life either pulling gees or pushing c. And when you got tired, you grabbed some z’s. If there was a pushers’ code, that was it.
The plasmoids were red and crystalline, teardrop-shaped. When he broke them free of the walls they had one flat side. They were full of a liquid light that felt as hot as the center of the sun.
It was always hard to get off the ship. A lot of pushers never did. One day, he wouldn’t either.
He stood for a few moments looking at it all. It was necessary to soak it in passively at first, get used to the changes. Big changes didn’t bother him. Buildings were just the world’s furniture and he didn’t care how it was arranged. Small changes worried the shit out of him. Ears, for instance. Very few of the people he saw had earlobes. Each time he returned he felt a little more like an ape who has fallen from his tree. One day he’d return to find everybody had three eyes or six fingers, or that little girls no longer cared to hear stories of adventure.
He stood there, dithering, getting used to the way people were painting their faces, listening to what sounded like Spanish being spoken all around him. Occasional English or Arabic words seasoned it. He grabbed a crewmate’s arm and asked him where they were. The man didn’t know so he asked the Captain, and she said it was Argentina, or it had been when they left.
