Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  “No, thank you,” Charles said. All around the parking lot, it seemed, little natives were trying to sell tourists rings and pipes and blouses and, for some reason, packs of playing cards. “Taxi?” he said. “Is there a taxi here?”

  The native shrugged and moved on to the next tourist.

  It was getting late. Charles went toward the nearest tour bus. The driver was leaning against the bus, smoking a small cigarette wrapped in a brown leaf. “Where can I find a taxi?” Charles asked him.

  “No taxis,” the driver said.

  “No—Why not?” Charles said. This country was impossible. He couldn’t wait to get out, to be on a plane drinking a margarita and heading back to the good old U.S.A. This was the worst vacation he’d ever had. “Can I make a phone call? I have to get to the airport.”

  A woman about to get on the bus heard him and stopped. “The airport?” she said. “The airport’s fifty miles from here. At least. You’ll never find a taxi to take you that far.”

  “Fifty miles?” Charles said. “They told me—At the hotel they told me it was fairly close.” For a moment his confidence left him. What do I do now? he thought. He sagged against the suitcases.

  “Listen,” the woman said. She turned to the bus driver. “We’ve got room. Can’t we take him back to the city with us? I think we’re the last bus to leave.”

  The driver shrugged. “For the tiraz, of course. Anything is possible.”

  If Charles hadn’t been so relieved at the ride he would have been annoyed. What did this word tiraz mean? Imbecile? Man with two suitcases? He followed the woman onto the bus.

  “I can’t believe you thought this was close to the airport,” the woman said. He sat across the aisle from her. “This is way out in the desert. There’s nothing here. No one would come out here if it wasn’t for the ruins.”

  “They told me at the hotel,” Charles said. He didn’t really want to discuss it. He was no longer the seasoned traveller, the man who had regaled the people around the pool with stories of Mexico, Greece, Hawaii. He would have to confess, have to go back to the hotel and tell someone the whole story. Maybe they would bring in the police to find Debbie. A day wasted and he had only gone around in a circle, back to where he started. He felt tired and very hungry.

  But when the bus stopped it was not at the brightly lit row of hotels. He strained to see in the oncoming dusk. “I thought you said—” He turned to the woman, hating to sound foolish again. “I thought we were going to the city.”

  “This is—” the woman said. Then she nodded in understanding. “You want the new city, the tourist city. That’s up the road about ten miles. Any cab’ll take you there.”

  Charles was the last off the bus again, slowed this time not so much by the suitcases as by the new idea. People actually stayed in the same cities that the natives lived. He had heard of it being done but he had thought only young people did it, students and drifters and hitchhikers like the one back at the hotel. This woman was not young and she had been fairly pleasant. He wished he had remembered to thank her.

  The first cab driver laughed when Charles showed him the five note and asked to be taken to the new city. The driver was not impressed by the traveller’s checks. The second and third drivers turned him down flat. The city smelled of motor oil and rancid fish. It was getting late, even a little chilly, and Charles began to feel nervous about being out so late. The two suitcases were an obvious target for some thief. And where would he go? What would he do?

  The panic that he had suppressed for so long took over now and he began to run. He dove deeper into the twisting maze of the city, not caring where he went so long as he was moving. Everything was closed, and there were few streetlamps. He heard the sounds of his footfalls echo off the shuttered buildings. A cat jumped out of his way, eyes flashing gold.

  After a long time of running he began to slow. “Tiraz!” someone whispered to him from an abandoned building. His heart pounded. He did not look back. Ahead was a lit storefront, a store filled with clutter. The door was open. A pawn shop.

  He went in with relief. He cleared a space for himself among the old magazines and rusty baking pans and child’s beads. The man behind the counter watched but made no comment. He took out everything from the two suitcases, sorted out what he needed and repacked it and gave the other suitcase to the man behind the counter. The man went to a small desk, unlocked a drawer and took out a steel box. He counted out some money and offered it to Charles. Charles accepted it wordlessly, not even bothering to count it.

  The money bought a meal tasting of sawdust and sesame oil, and a sagging bed in an old hotel. The overhead fan turned all night because Charles could not figure out how to turn it off. A cockroach watched impassively from the corner.

  The city looked different in daylight. Women in shawls and silver bracelets, men in clothes fashionable fifty years ago walked past the hotel as Charles looked out in the morning. The sun was shining. His heart rose. This was going to be the day he made it to the airport.

  He walked along the streets almost jauntily, ignoring the ache in his arms. His beard itched because last night, in a moment of panic, he had thrown his electric razor into the suitcase to be sold. He shrugged. There were still things he could sell. Today he would find a better pawn shop.

  He walked, passing run-down houses and outdoor markets, beggars and children, automobile garages and dim restaurants smelling of frying fish. “Excuse me,” he said to a man leaning against a horse-drawn carriage. “Do you know where I can find a pawn shop?”

  The man and horse both looked up. “Ride, yes?” the man said enthusiastically. “Famous monuments. Very cheap.”

  “No,” Charles said. “A pawn shop. Do you understand?”

  The man shrugged, pulled the horse’s mane. “No speak English,” he said finally.

  Another man had come up behind Charles. “Pawn shop?” he said.

  Charles turned quickly, relieved. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know—”

  “Two blocks down,” the man said. “Turn left, go five blocks. Across the hospital.”

  “What street is that?” Charles asked.

  “Street?” the man said. He frowned. “Two blocks down and turn left.”

  “The name,” Charles said. “The name of the street.”

  To Charles’s astonishment the man burst out laughing. The carriage driver laughed too, though he could not have possibly known what they were talking about. “Name?” the man said. “You tourists name your streets as though they were little children, yes?” He laughed again, wiping his eyes, and said something to the carriage-driver in another language, speaking rapidly.

  “Thank you,” Charles said. He walked the two blocks, turned left and went five blocks more. There was no hospital where the man had said there would be, and no pawn shop. A man who spoke a little English said something about a great fire, but whether it had been last week or several years ago Charles was unable to find out.

  He started back toward the man who had given him directions. In a few minutes he was hopelessly lost. The streets became dingier, and once he saw a rat run from a pile of newspapers. The fire had swept through this part of the city leaving buildings charred and water damaged, open to the passersby like museum exhibits. Two dirty children ran toward him, shouting, “Money, please, sor! Money for food!” He turned down a sidestreet to lose them.

  Ahead of him were three young men in grease-stained clothes. One of them hissed something at him, the words rushing by like a fork of lightning. Another held a length of chain which he played back and forth, whispering, between his hands. “I don’t speak—” Charles said, but it was too late. They were on him.

  One tore the suitcase from his hand, shouting “El amak! El amak!” Another knocked him down with a punch to his stomach that forced the wind out of him. The third was going through his pockets, taking his wallet and the little folder of traveller’s checks. Charles tried feebly to rise, and the second one thrust him back, hitting h
im once more in the stomach. The first one yelled something and they ran quickly down the street. Charles lay where they left him, gasping for breath.

  The two dirty children passed him, and an old woman balancing a basket of clothes on her head. After a few minutes he rolled over and sat up, leaning against a rusty car up on blocks. His pants were torn, he noticed dully, torn and smeared with oil. And his suitcase with the rest of his clothes was gone.

  He would go to the police, go and tell them that his suitcase was gone. He knew the word for suitcase because the young thief had shouted it. Amak. El amak. And suddenly he realized something that knocked the breath out of him as surely as a punch to the stomach. Every word in English, every word that he knew, had a corresponding word in this strange foreign language. Everything you could think of—hand, love, table, hot—was conveyed to these natives by another word, a word not English. Debbie had known that, and that was why she was good at languages. He hadn’t. He had expected everyone he met to drop this ridiculous charade and start speaking like normal people.

  He stood up gingerly, breathing shallowly to make the pain in his stomach go away. After a while he began walking again, following the maze of the city in deeper. At last he found a small park and sat on a bench to rest.

  A native came up to him almost immediately. “Cards?” the native said. “Look.” He opened his embroidered bag.

  Charles sighed. He was too tired to walk away. “I don’t want any cards,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”

  “Of course not,” the native said. “Look. They are beautiful, no?” He spread the brightly colored cards on the grass. Charles saw a baseball player, a fortune teller, a student, some designs he didn’t recognize. “Look,” the native said again and turned over the next card. “The tourist.”

  Charles had to laugh, looking at the card of the man carrying suitcases. These people had been visited by tourists for so long that the tourist had become an archetype, a part of everyone’s reality like kings and jokers. He looked closer at the card. Those suitcases were familiar. And the tourist—He jerked back as though shocked. It was him.

  He stood quickly and began to run, ignoring the pain in his stomach. The native did not follow.

  He noticed the card sellers on every corner after that. They called to him even if he crossed the street to avoid them. “Tiraz, tiraz!” they called after him. He knew what it meant now. Tourist.

  As the sun set he became ravenously hungry. He walked around a beggarwoman squatting in the street and saw, too late, a card seller waiting on the corner. The card seller held out something to him, some kind of pastry, and Charles took it, too hungry to refuse.

  The pastry was filled with meat and very good. As though that were the signal, the other card sellers he passed began to give him things—a skin of wine, a piece of fish wrapped in paper. One of them handed him money, far more money than a deck of cards would cost. It was growing dark. He took a room for the night with the money.

  A card seller was waiting for him at the corner the next day. “All right,” Charles said to him. Some of the belligerence had been knocked out of him. “I give up. What the hell’s going on around here?”

  “Look,” the card seller said. He took his cards out of the embroidered bag. “It is in here.” He squatted on the sidewalk, oblivious to the dirt, the people walking by, the fumes from the street. The street, Charles noticed as he sat next to him, seemed to be paved with bottle caps.

  The card seller spread the cards in front of him. “Look,” he said. “It is foretold. The cards are our oracle, our newspaper, our entertainment. All depends on how you read them.” Charles wondered where the man had learned to speak English, but he didn’t want to interrupt. “See,” the man said as he turned over a card. “Here you are. The tourist. It was foretold that you would come to the city.”

  “And then what?” Charles asked. “How do I get back?”

  “We have to ask the cards,” the man said. Idly he turned over another card, the ruins of Marmaz. “Maybe we wait for the next printing.”

  “Next—” Charles said. “You mean the cards don’t stay the same?”

  “No,” the man said. “Do your newspapers stay the same?”

  “But—Who prints them?”

  The man shrugged. “We do not know.” He turned over another card, a young blond woman.

  “Debbie!” Charles said, startled.

  “Yes,” the man said. “The woman you came with. We had to convince her to go, so that you would fulfill the prophecy and come to the city. And then we took your pieces of paper, the ones that are so important to the tiraz. That is a stupid way to travel, if I may say so. In the city the only papers that are important to us are the cards, and if a man loses his cards he can easily get more.”

  “You—you took my passport?” Charles said. He did not feel as angry as he would like. “My passport and my plane tickets? Where are they?”

  “Ah,” the man said. “For that you must ask the cards.” He took out another set of cards from his bag and gave them to Charles. Before Charles could answer he stood up and walked away.

  By midday Charles had found the small park again. He sat down and spread out the cards, wondering if there was anything to what the card seller had said. Debbie did not appear in his deck. Was his an earlier printing, then, or a later one?

  An American couple came up to him as he sat puzzling over the cards. “There are those cards again,” the woman said. “I just can’t get over how quaint they are. How much are you charging for yours?” she asked Charles. “The man down the street said he’d give them to us for ten.”

  “Eight,” Charles said without hesitation, gathering them up.

  The woman looked at her husband. “All right,” he said. He took a five and three ones from his wallet and gave them to Charles.

  “Thank you, sor,” Charles said.

  The man grunted. “I thought he spoke English very well,” the woman said as they walked away. “Didn’t you?”

  A card seller gave him three more decks of cards and an embroidered bag later that day. By evening he had sold two of the decks. A few nights later, he joined the sellers of cards as they waited in the small park for the new printing of the cards. Somewhere a bell tolled midnight. A woman with beautiful long dark hair and an embroidered shawl came out of the night and silently took out the decks of cards from her bag. Her silver bracelets flashed in the moonlight. She gave Charles twelve decks. The men around him were already tearing the boxes open and spreading the cards, reading the past, or the present, or the future.

  After about three years Charles got tired of selling the cards. His teeth had turned red from chewing the nut everyone chewed and he had learned to smoke the cigarettes wrapped in leaves. The other men had always told him that someone who spoke English as well as he did should be a tour guide, and finally he decided that they were right. Now he takes groups of tourists through the ruins of Marmaz, telling them about the god of the sun and the goddess of the moon and whatever else he chooses to make up that day. He has never found out what country he lives in.

  GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER

  One

  George Alec Effinger cites the theater of the absurd as a major influence on his writing and refers to his style of multilayered, free-ranging fiction as “surreal fantasy.” He first earned renown as a writer of stylish and challenging short stories in magazines and anthologies in the 1970s. His first novel, What Entropy Means to Me, is actually a quartet of linked stories that begin as a traditional quest fantasy but subtly transforms into a reflexive inquiry into family dynamics, political power struggles, and the act of artistic creation. Subsequent stories show a similar audacity of plotting and narrative structure. A number of his tales, notably “The Pinch-Hitters,” “Naked to the Invisible Eye,” “From Downtown at the Buzzer,” and “Breakaway,” draw on sports and games as their central metaphor. His novels Death in Florence, Those Gentle Voices: A Promethean Romance, and The Wolves of Memory evoke a se
nse of parallel realities and alternate worlds through their deployment of characters with the same names as those in short stories but with different personalities and motivations. Effinger has explored the intricate possibilities of time travel in his novels The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time and satirized heroic fantasy in Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Sword-person. His trilogy of novels featuring Marîd Audran ( When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss—all set in a future Middle East) is notable for its rendering of traditional Moslem culture receptive to the incursions of cyberpunk technology. Effinger’s numerous stories have been collected in Mixed Feelings, Irrational Numbers, Dirty Tricks, and Idle Pleasures. He has also written a number of film novelizations; a roundrobin novel, The Red Tape War; Nightmare Blue (with Gardner Dozois); and the mainstream novel Felicia.

  IT WAS YEAR 30, Day 1, the anniversary of Dr. Leslie Gillette’s leaving Earth. Standing alone at the port, he stared out at the empty expanse of null space. “At eight o’clock, the temperature in the interstellar void is a negative two hundred seventy-three degrees Celsius,” he said. “Even without the wind chill factor, that’s cold. That’s pretty damn cold.”

  A readout board had told him that morning that the ship and its lonely passenger would be reaching the vicinity of a star system before bedtime. Gillette didn’t recall the name of the star—it had only been a number in a catalogue. He had long since lost interest in them. In the beginning, in the first few years when Jessica had still been with him, he had eagerly asked the board to show them where in Earth’s night sky each star was located. They had taken a certain amount of pleasure in examining at close hand stars which they recognized as features of major constellations. That had passed. After they had visited a few thousand stars, they grew less interested. After they had discovered yet more planetary bodies, they almost became weary of the search. Almost. The Gillettes still had enough scientific curiosity to keep them going, farther and farther from their starting point.