Challenging Destiny #24: August 2007

by Crystalline Sphere Authors

  But that didn't last long. I remember driving down to Trumps to put a bet on it—in a month, it would fall apart. Good odds, I recall. Within the week, the prisons and highways emptied. After ten days, people got bored of their jobs and vanished whenever they wanted. Things started to stutter, and as they did, the ones who tried to keep it going lost hope or were seduced by the change and then everything pretty much ran down. About that time I fell off the roof trying to help Mrs Leygues and did my hip in. Trumps agreed that I'd won my bet the day that TV had been off air for 24 hours straight—Day 26, but of course, I never collected my bet.

  I kept the chit though. I can always dream.

  * * * *

  March 9 (later)

  Chang again.

  "No bread left,” I told her.

  "Not here for food."

  Oh yes, I thought, but she said, “I need to ask you something."

  I didn't respond, but to my amazement, Chang picked up the other scraper and started stripping the wallpaper on the opposite wall. “What was Banteay Srey like?"

  "Dancing elephants. I told you."

  "No—when I went. What did I tell you. The other day."

  I looked at her. “You've forgotten?"

  "It's difficult,” she said, a little bashful, but only a little. “There are so many places to remember. We have to concentrate so hard to remember."

  "Why don't you write it down then? Or sketch?"

  "I can read a little,” she admitted. “But not write."

  She said it without embarrassment, as if writing was as outlandish a skill as playing the tuba. Her fidgetiness got the better of her and the scraper clattered on the floor as she jaunted over to the couch. “And I guess you don't have the patience for art."

  Wilson had said that the younger ones had given up on reading and writing. He'd kept a diary and a sketchbook somewhere private, but that was beyond a new generation which could barely remember a world before the change.

  "Orange front, green awning,” I told her. “You and Delphine and all the other sweethearts carved into the bar."

  "No, no. Can't imagine it like that. I need you to tell it to me—like a story. See—I tell you and you remember it for me and you can tell it back to me."

  Why didn't it happen to me?

  So we can tell you our stories, Abigail.

  Then find someone else to listen to your little adventures, you freaks! I'm not your captive audience!

  But I didn't snap at Chang the way I had at Wilson that last time. I didn't want to drive her away as well. I don't know why—maybe Mark's just not enough anymore.

  Chang must have watched all of this on my face, and she jaunted from one side to the other to see if it was the same expression from both angles. “But you like stories? You like to hear them. You like to tell them. Yes?"

  Abi, you should never have let her into your home. But after a while, I put down the scraper too. “There's a little bread left. You can have it."

  * * * *

  March 10

  "Where's the soup?"

  "Story first."

  Chang told me about someone in sub-Faster finding Polaroids of the southern island of the Galapagos in a garage in Anchorage. She described the giant turtles sinking into the mud and I could almost see their perpetual air of surprise and resignation as if I was there myself. What if they could jaunt? I imagined an alternate world where turtles moved faster than us. Turtles in my bathtub, turtles flying through the air, turtles chuckling.

  "Your turn."

  But before she could put in her request, I brought out the Ansel Adams. Chang frowned. “That's not one of my places."

  "Trust me, you'll like it."

  Reluctantly, she closed her eyes. I stretched my arms, filled my lungs and took in the view of the Half Dome—and she was away again.

  * * * *

  March 11

  It took a while to find it in my atlas. My breath caught, as we both closed our eyes, as Chang talked, and we were both watching the giant glacier at Moreno break into blue plaster, tumbling into the water below. I heard the long cracking noise that went on forever.

  "Did you go up on the glacier?"

  "No, Delphine wanted to play tag with Batchu. We lost them in Père Lachaise!” She pulled a photograph out of my album. “There. Please."

  This is good. Chang's warming to the idea. So I described the bar in Ho Chi Minh City, but I was up on top of the glacier, looking for the source of that cracking.

  * * * *

  March 11 (pm)

  Poppies carpeting the fields on the road to the Dune de Pilat outside Bordeaux. “But did you go onto the Dune?"

  Chang shrugged. This was nothing to her. I gritted my teeth—with this hip, I'll never go to France.

  She wanted somewhere else with flowers, so I told her about a picture near Nijmegen I'd seen in one of the Craytown apartments—a windmill, an old church, a sea of tulips.

  Nearly told her daffodils instead.

  * * * *

  March 12 (am)

  "Banteay Srey."

  "You're kidding. I told you that on Saturday."

  Chang knew my kitchen well enough to find the soup (plenty of it—Mark hasn't come back yet), which she started spooning cold right from the pot.

  "What about Nijmegen? Aren't you going to tell me?"

  "Hide and seek. Not much fun.” Something about the soup she didn't like, so Chang put it aside and began rummaging in the larder. “Delphine wants to drink those funny—you know."

  "Pepsis."

  "Yes!"

  Bits of old wallpaper were all around me. Ignoring the pain in my hip, I was sweeping them into small piles and the small piles into larger piles and everything into something that was going to be thrown out. “But three days? I found a fantastic book on Madagascar last night. Lots of great pictures. You'll love it, they've got spider monkeys and—"

  "No. Tired of new places. And anyway—I don't want to get lost."

  No food—she slammed the cupboard door. “What do you mean lost?” I asked her.

  Chang jaunted outside, then came back in again. “No more cabbages?"

  "You said lost."

  She jaunted upstairs for some reason—I could hear her rummaging for a few seconds—and then back to the couch. “Tribes are getting smaller. They're getting lost."

  Part of me knew I shouldn't be pushing. She started jaunting around the front room faster and faster—Chang was scared.

  But I thought: what I'd give to be scared like that.

  "Well, maybe they're out exploring. And maybe you should be too."

  "Why? Delphine wants to go to Banteay Srey."

  I swept, she kicked her feet. The front room was barely big enough for the thunderstorm.

  Then Chang did a thing she hadn't done before. She snapped her fingers. “Story! Banteay Srey!"

  So I put on my straight face, which I do very well. And I told her the story. The stall with the front painted orange, the hanging green canvas. Can you feel the heat? I asked her. Can you hear the old laughter? Can you see the bar beneath your fingers? Fresh, unmarked wood, as if it had just been varnished.

  Can you imagine what it would be like?

  No thank you this time. Just—pop.

  I'm looking at the walls now. Shouldn't take long to put the new strips of paper up. Sal promised he'd move up the trip to Parchers Crossing. Curtains on the window and I won't be bothered again.

  Sal—

  Uh oh.

  That's today.

  * * * *

  March 12 (afterwards)

  Well, it hasn't changed.

  The Memory Circle arrived all together, as if they can't trust themselves to be on their own—and to be honest, maybe that's why the numbers haven't gone down. The same gang as before—lovely Mona, the General and his ghostly wife, who hardly speaks and whose name I can never remember, Gunther, Pico, the rest. Sal, of course. No one had dropped out, not since Mona and I had that humdinger.

  "I s
ee you've made the effort, Abi."

  I smiled and gave Mona a seat close to the biggest pile of wall droppings. “And how's the house, Mona? Lose anything valuable when the roof caved in? Your broken Game-Boy? What about that fantastic collection of DVDs you can't play?"

  "At least some of us are working towards the future."

  "By living in the past."

  "Abi, Mona. Please."

  Another of Sal's Judgement Day looks. I wanted to laugh, but I did want that wallpaper badly. I wanted to laugh at how they all looked as well. Carefully researched from old copies of Cosmo or Rolling Stone or whatever they used to read in the old days: Mona in black lace and kohl, the others in skater punk wear, crop tops and combats. I'd seen their homes—museum pieces they kept clean for visitors that never came. I felt like I'd dropped into that old movie where the apes had evolved and taken over the world and the only humans left worshipped vestiges of the past, artefacts that didn't make sense anymore.

  And what if apes did rule the world? Or intelligent elephants and turtles? I wanted to close my eyes and imagine other worlds. But Sal wanted to talk about this one.

  Sal got out the Book—his huge leatherbound bible, the Memory Circle's archive, every meeting meticulously written down. “We've talked a lot about our memories of the past over the last few months, keeping a record of how things used to be."

  "And will be, again."

  "That's right, Mona. One day. But there's one group of memories we've never talked about."

  "The Rapture."

  "The Last Day in November."

  "When everything changed."

  "Yes.” Sal opened the Book to the first blank page. “Pico, you want to start?"

  Pico got out his bit of paper and read it out in his faltering, flat English. When he was done, he gave his paper to Sal for writing out in the Book later. They moved around the circle—Mona, the General. Mona had been on a freeway in Atlanta when dozens of cars suddenly swerved, driverless. The General was at a soccer game in Guatemala, when the goalie disappeared and the ball went into the back of the net—the crowd started cheering, until people realized only half of them were still there. The General's wife didn't know until the next day because she was out of it on heroin, when her mother had jaunted past her locked front and bedroom doors to see how she was doing. All incredible stories, but already I could see that their memories were covered in concrete, the details rehearsed, the punchlines the same. They'd be telling each other these stories for the next thirty years.

  "Abi?"

  "I'm looking forward to this."

  "Be nice, Mona. Did you write something, Abi?"

  "What, you think I keep a diary, Sal? Why would I bother?” That shut them all up. “OK. This is mine. I was giving Mark a bath at the time—not this place, but my old one over on Maine. Mark hated baths, and he was being a real pain in the ass that day. He was splashing water all over the bathroom, soaking me, and I was getting pretty pissed off. I remember looking at the sparkle of the water, and how the water looked on the Cam Ranh Bay coast."

  I closed my eyes.

  "And suddenly, my hands weren't just in the water, all of me was. Splashing around in the sea. The sun was overhead, not the light bulb, the bathtub was as big as the whole horizon, and Mark was gone—"

  "Abi?"

  "But fortunately, I could see the beach, so I swam towards the shore. Jesus, I can't tell you how good it felt to have sand under my toes—"

  "I told you this would happen, Sal."

  "Shut up, Mona. Abi—you can't jaunt."

  "Course I can, Sal. Didn't you know?"

  "She can jaunt?"

  "She can lie. She's always ruining things."

  "Abi, you're not one of them."

  "No, I'm one of me, Sal. I can jaunt. I can go anywhere I want. I can leave anytime I want. I can—"

  "You lied!"

  And suddenly, right in the middle of our little circle of nostalgia, naked Chang appeared, six inches from my face and spitting fury. Chairs kicked back, cups of soup sprayed the walls, Sal dropped the Book, everyone yelled.

  "Who is that?"

  "Is she going to hurt us?"

  Chang was so angry that she didn't notice them—which, given how jumpy visitors are, must have meant she was pretty damned angry.

  "You lied to me."

  "About what?"

  "Banteay Srey. It wasn't—” She popped all around the room, unable to express how she felt, and members of the Memory Circle tried swatting at the fuzzy figure. “I can't remember. But it was different."

  "You asked for a story."

  "The bar! That was it. The bar was different. It was—new! But you were so convincing when you told me!"

  I smiled, but I felt twinges down my right side.

  "Everything was the same—but different,” Chang continued. “There were people all around, wearing clothes, but they couldn't—jaunt? And they looked at me as if they'd never seen anything like me in their life. They had—cameras? But they were pointing them as if they worked. And I was so frightened—I didn't want to be lost like the others. So I went to Père Lachaise but Delphine wasn't there and—I don't understand. Where was that?"

  Sal was staring at her. He's got his blind spots, but he can be quick when he has to. “Not where. Not—where. That was from—before. I don't believe this. You travelled back in time."

  He picked up his big, useless book. “Or at least, sideways."

  So—parallel worlds after all. I win, Wilson.

  Chang was in front of me again. “But I could have been lost!” she yelled.

  "Lost? Lost? You should get down on your knees and thank God or random cosmic chance that you know how to get lost!"

  She backed away from me. I remember looking around—they were all backing away from me. “I get into my bed every night and I worry about whether my Jet Stars are going to fail this year and maybe there really are gangs of killers loose in the countryside and what's going to happen to me if my hip gets worse. And I close my eyes, and I think, I beg myself, let me get lost. And I dream of all the places in the world I could get lost in, and when I've gone through all of them, I make up new places beyond the world I can get lost in."

  I was on my feet. The room was just too damned small with all these people looking for shelter. “You can sit around here remembering the good old days. You can find somewhere neat and comfortable and go there again and again. Or you can get lost. Just like Mark. Just like my son."

  "Her son? What's she talking about, Sal?"

  "An old story, Mona. Abi—Mark's not—That first time, that first time for everyone—he never came back, did he?"

  I was having trouble breathing, so I walked out of the room, the house, ignoring the Chieftains under my feet, the cramp in my hip, and I was running as hard as I could. But eventually the pain was so sharp that the tears were all over my face, and I thought, they'll think that I'm crying for little baby Mark or poor poor pitiful me, and I'm not, it just hurts. It just hurts.

  But I felt a hand against my face and it was Chang's. “Tell me a story."

  "I don't know anymore.” It just sounded like a whimper.

  She whispered in my ear. “Yes, you do."

  * * * *

  September 23

  The pumpkins are coming along nicely. Another few weeks and the house will be heaving with the big orange balls—just as well, since I promised Mayor Santos I'd make the pies for his new Halloween festival.

  Chang came by later while I was finishing the last touches of painting along the ceiling—she'd brought Delphine, so I was a little stiff with them at first. I'm still not used to the company. But they shouted “Let us help!” so eagerly and they were so excited by everything, that I couldn't not give brushes to them.

  "So—tell me."

  "The turtles were great, Abi!” Chang babbled, and I tried not to worry about their paint splatters ruining the wallpaper below. Oh well—an excuse for another adventure up to Parchers Crossing. “Whole fo
rmations of them—the shadows on the ground were huge!"

  "But all that shit falling out of the sky.” Delphine made a face. “And the smell."

  So they want their worlds to smell of roses every time? But I hold my tongue and just put out plates for the two of them.

  "But it's just a story,” Delphine continued. “It's not real."

  I remembered Sal's latest theory—he spins them all the time down at the farmers market, where he'll argue with any visitor who drops by, but I liked this one. Every time someone jaunts, our universe tries to accommodate. But if it can't, a new one will appear, summoned from all possibilities.

  So jaunting's creating worlds? I asked him.

  No, Abi—your stories are.

  "They've always been real to me,” I said and served the stew. When we were done, I brought out the cake and asked them to help me blow out the candle.

  "Whose birthday is it?” Delphine asked.

  I didn't say, but Chang knew. After they did the washing up, she found me on the couch and kissed my forehead. For once, I didn't shy away.

  "What's that for?"

  "That's your gift to him,” she said. “I'll kiss his forehead for you. Just tell me when."

  I closed my eyes and told her a story.

  * * * *

  Stories by Philip Raines and Harvey Welles have also appeared in Albedo One, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, New Genre, On Spec and two recent anthologies, Nova Scotia (modern Scottish stories of the fantastic, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew Wilson) and Extended Play (stories about music, edited by Gary Couzens). Stories have appeared in successive editions of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant and Kelly Link) and have won the UK's Bridport Prize for Best Short Story. Philip Raines is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Latest in Canadian SF by James Schellenberg

  Tesseracts Ten, edited Robert Charles Wilson and Edo van Belkom, Edge, 2006, 301 pp.