Timegates

by Jack Dann

  One night old Dave warned me again.

  "Helen's looking peaked, and there's talk around. Miz Fowler says Helen don't sleep and she cries at night and she won't tell Miz Fowler what's wrong. You don't happen to know what's bothering her, do you?"

  "I only talk business stuff to her," I said. "Maybe she's homesick. I'll ask her if she wants a vacation." I did not like the way Dave looked at me. "I haven't hurt her. I don't mean her any harm, Dave," I said.

  "People get killed for what they do, not for what they mean," he said. "Son, there's men in this here town would kill you quick as a coyote, if you hurt Helen Price."

  I worked on Helen all the next day and in the afternoon I hit just the right note and I broke her defenses. I was not prepared for the way it worked out. I had just said, "All life is a kind of playing. If you think about it right, everything we do is a game." She poised her pencil and looked straight at me, as she had never done in that office, and I felt my heart speed up.

  "You taught me how to play, Helen. I was so serious that I didn't know how to play."

  "Owen taught me to play. He had magic. My sisters couldn't play anything but dolls and rich husbands and I hated them."

  Her eyes opened wide and her lips trembled and she was almost Desert Helen right there in the office.

  "There's magic and enchantment in regular life, if you look at it right," I said. "Don't you think so, Helen?"

  "I know it!" she said. She turned pale and dropped her pencil. "Owen was enchanted into having a wife and three daughters and he was just a boy. But he was the only man we had and all of them but me hated him because we were so poor." She began to tremble and her voice went flat. "He couldn't stand it. He took the treasure and it killed him." Tears ran down her cheeks. "I tried to think he was only enchanted into play-dead and if I didn't speak or laugh for seven years, I'd uncharm him."

  She dropped her head on her hands. I was alarmed. I came over and put my hand on her shoulder.

  "I did speak." Her shoulders heaved with sobs. "They made me speak, and now Owen won't ever come back." I bent and put my arm across her shoulders.

  "Don't cry, Helen. He'll come back," I said. "There are other magics to bring him back."

  I hardly knew what I was saying. I was afraid of what I had done, and I wanted to comfort her. She jumped up and threw off my arm.

  "I can't stand it! I'm going home!"

  She ran out into the hall and down the stairs and from the window I saw her run down the street, still crying. All of a sudden my game seemed cruel and stupid to me and right that moment I stopped it. I tore up my map of fairyland and my letters to Colonel Lewis and I wondered how in the world I could ever have done all that.

  After dinner that night old Dave motioned me out to one end of the veranda. His face looked carved out of wood.

  "I don't know what happened in your office today, and for your sake I better not find out. But you send Helen back to her mother on the morning stage, you hear me?"

  "All right, if she wants to go," I said. "I can't just fire her."

  "I'm speaking for the boys. You better put her on that morning stage, or we'll be around to talk to you." "All right, I will, Dave."

  I wanted to tell him how the game was stopped now and how I wanted a chance to make things up with Helen, but I thought I had better not. Dave's voice was flat and savage with contempt and, old as he was, he frightened me.

  Helen did not come to work in the morning. At nine o'clock I went out myself for the mail. I brought a large mailing tube and some letters back to the office. The first letter I opened was from Dr. Lewis, and almost like magic it solved all my problems.

  On the basis of his preliminary structure contour maps Dr. Lewis had gotten permission to close out the field phase. Copies of the maps were in the mailing tube, for my information. I was to hold an inventory and be ready to turn everything over to an army quartermaster team coming in a few days. There was still a great mass of data to be worked up in refining the map. I was to join the group again and I would have a chance at the lab work after all.

  I felt pretty good. I paced and whistled and snapped my fingers. I wished Helen would come, to help on the inventory. Then I opened the tube and looked idly at the maps. There were a lot of them, featureless bed after bed of basalt, like layers of a cake ten miles across. But when I came to the bottom map, of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape, the hair on my neck stood up.

  I had made that map myself. It was Helen's fairytale. The topography was point by point the same.

  I clenched my fists and stopped breathing. Then it hit me a second time, and the skin crawled up my back.

  The game was real. I couldn't end it. All the time the game had been playing me. It was still playing me.

  I ran out and down the street and overtook old Dave hurrying toward the feedyard. He had a holstered gun on each hip.

  "Dave, I've got to find Helen," I said.

  "Somebody seen her hiking into the desert just at daylight," he said. "I'm on my way for a horse." He did not slow his stride. "You better get out of there in your stinkwagon. If you don't find her before we do, you better just keep on going, son."

  I ran back and got the jeep and roared it out across the scrubby sagebrush. I hit rocks and I do not know why I did not break something. I knew where to go and feared what I would find there. I knew I loved Helen Price more than my own life and I knew I had driven her to her death.

  I saw her far off, running and dodging. I headed the jeep to intercept her and I shouted, but she neither saw me nor heard me. I stopped and jumped out and ran after her and the world darkened. Helen was all I could see, and I could not catch up with her.

  "Wait for me, little sister!" I screamed after her. "I love you, Helen! Wait for me!"

  She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.

  They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.

  Then the world had shape again under a bright sun. I saw a knot of horsemen on the horizon. They were heading for where Owen had been found. That boy had run a long way, alone and hurt and burdened.

  I got Helen up to the office. She sat at her desk with her head down on her hands and she quivered violently. I kept my arm around her.

  "It was only a storm inside our two heads, Helen," I said, over and over. "Something black blew away out of us. The game is finished and we're free and I love you."

  Over and over I said that, for my sake as well as hers. I meant and believed it. I said she was my wife and we would marry and go a thousand miles away from that desert to raise our children. She quieted to a trembling, but she would not speak. Then I heard hoofbeats and the creak of leather in the street below and then I heard slow footsteps on the stairs.

  Old Dave stood in the doorway. His two guns looked as natural on him as hands and feet. He looked at Helen, bowed over the desk, and then at me, standing beside her.

  "Come on down, son. The boys want to talk to you," he said.

  I followed him into the hall and stopped.

  "She isn't hurt," I said. "The lode is really out there, Dave, but nobody is ever going to find it."

  "Tell that to the boys."

  "We're closing out the project in a few more days," I said. "I'm going to marry Helen and take her away with me."

  "Come down or we'll drag you down!" he said harshly. "We'll send Helen back to her mother."

  I was afraid. I did not know what to do.

  "No, you won't send me back to my mother!"

  It was Helen be
side me in the hall. She was Desert Helen, but grown up and wonderful. She was pale, pretty, aware and sure of herself.

  "I'm going with Duard," she said. "Nobody in the world is ever going to send me around like a package again." Dave rubbed his jaw and squinted his eyes at her.

  "I love her, Dave," I said. "I'll take care of her all my life."

  I put my left arm around her and she nestled against me. The tautness went out of old Dave and he smiled. He kept his eyes on Helen.

  "Little Helen Price," he said, wonderingly. "Who ever would've thought it?" He reached out and shook us both gently. "Bless you youngsters," he said, and blinked his eyes. "I'll tell the boys it's all right."

  He turned and went slowly down the stairs. Helen and I looked at each other, and I think she saw a new face too.

  That was sixteen years ago. I am a professor myself now, graying a bit at the temples. I am as positivistic a scientist as you will find anywhere in the Mississippi drainage basin. When I tell a seminary student "That assertion is operationally meaningless," I can make it sound downright obscene. The students blush and hate me, but it is for their own good. Science is the only safe game, and it's safe only if it is kept pure. I work hard at that, I have yet to meet the student I can not handle.

  My son is another matter. We named him Owen Lewis, and he has Helen's eyes and hair and complexion. He learned to read on the modern sane and sterile children's books. We haven't a fairy tale in the house—but I have a science library. And Owen makes fairy tales out of science. He is taking the measure of space and time now, with Jeans and Eddington. He cannot possibly understand a tenth of what he reads, in the way I understand it. But he understands all of it in some other way privately his own.

  Not long ago he said to me, "You know, Dad, it isn't only space that's expanding. Time's expanding too, and that's what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be."

  And I have to tell him just what I did in the war. I know I found manhood and a wife. The how and why of it I think and hope I am incapable of fully understanding. But Owen has, through Helen, that strangely curious heart. I'm afraid. I'm afraid he will understand.

  THE PRICE OF ORANGES

  Nancy Kress

  Here's a funny, bittersweet, and deeply moving study of friendship, faith, love ... and some very hard choices.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Nancy Kress now lives in Brockport, New York. She began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid seventies and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, and elsewhere. Her books include the novels The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, and Brain Rose, the collection Trinity And Other Stories, the novel version of her Hugo and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers. Her most recent books include a new collection, The Aliens of Earth, and a new novel, Oaths & Miracles. She has also won a Nebula Award for her story "Out Of All Them Bright Stars."

  I'm worried about my granddaughter," Henry Kramer said, passing half of his sandwich to Manny Feldman. Manny took it eagerly. The sandwich was huge, thick slices of beef and horseradish between fresh slabs of crusty bread. Pigeons watched the park bench hopefully.

  "Jackie. The granddaughter who writes books," Manny said. Harry watched to see that Manny ate. You couldn't trust Manny to eat enough; he stayed too skinny. At least in Harry's opinion. Manny, Jackie—the world, Harry sometimes thought, had all grown too skinny when he somehow hadn't been looking. Skimpy. Stretch-feeling. Harry nodded to see horseradish spurt in a satisfying stream down Manny's scraggly beard.

  "Jackie. Yes," Harry said.

  "So what's wrong with her? She's sick?" Manny eyed Harry's strudel, cherry with real yeast bread. Harry passed it to him. "Harry, the whole thing? I couldn't."

  "Take it, take it, I don't want it. You should eat. No, she's not sick. She's miserable." When Manny, his mouth full of strudel, didn't answer, Harry put a hand on Manny's arm. "Miserable."

  Manny swallowed hastily. "How do you know? You saw her this week?"

  "No. Next Tuesday. She's bringing me a book by a friend of hers. I know from this." He drew a magazine from an inner pocket of his coat. The coat was thick tweed, almost new, with wooden buttons. On the cover of the glossy magazine a woman smiled contemptuously. A woman with hollow, starved-looking cheeks who obviously didn't get enough to eat either.

  "That's not a book," Manny pointed out.

  "So she writes stories, too. Listen to this. Just listen. `I stood in my backyard, surrounded by the false bright toxin-fed green, and realized that the earth was dead. What else could it be, since we humans swarmed upon it like maggots on carrion, growing our hectic gleaming molds, leaving our slime trails across the senseless surface?' Does that sound like a happy woman?"

  "Hoo boy," Manny said.

  "It's all like that. `Don't read my things, Popsy,' she says. `You're not in the audience for my things.' Then she smiles without ever once showing her teeth." Harry flung both arms wide. "Who else should be in the audience but her own grandfather?"

  Manny swallowed the last of the strudel. Pigeons fluttered angrily. "She never shows her teeth when she smiles? Never?"

  "Never."

  "Hoo boy," Manny said. Did you want all of that orange?"

  "No, I bought it for you, to take home. But did you finish that whole half a sandwich already?"

  "I thought I'd take it home," Manny said humbly. He showed Harry the tip of the sandwich, wrapped in the thick brown butcher paper, protruding from the pocket of his old coat.

  Harry nodded approvingly. "Good, good. Take the orange, too. I bought it for you."

  Manny took the orange. Three teenagers carrying huge shrieking radios sauntered past. Manny started to put his hands over his ears, received a look of dangerous contempt from the teenager with green hair, and put his hands on his lap. The kid tossed an empty beer bottle onto the pavement before their feet. It shattered. Harry scowled fiercely but Manny stared straight ahead. When the cacophony had passed, Manny said, "Thank you for the orange. Fruit, it costs so much this time of year."

  Harry still scowled. "Not in 1937."

  "Don't start that again, Harry."

  Harry said sadly, "Why won't you ever believe me? Could I afford to bring all this food if I got it at 1988 prices? Could I afford this coat? Have you seen buttons like this in 1988, on a new coat? Have you seen sandwiches wrapped in that kind of paper since we were young? Have you? Why won't you believe me?"

  Manny slowly peeled his orange. The rind was pale, and the orange had seeds. "Harry. Don't start."

  "But why won't you just come to my room and see?"

  Manny sectioned the orange. "Your room. A cheap furnished room in a Social Security hotel. Why should I go? I know what will be there. What will be there is the same thing in my room. A bed, a chair, a table, a hot plate, some cans of food. Better I should meet you here in the park, get at least a little fresh air." He looked at Harry meekly, the orange clutched in one hand. "Don't misunderstand. It's not from a lack of friendship I say this. You're good to me, you're the best friend I have. You bring me things from a great deli, you talk to me, you share with me the family I don't have. It's enough, Harry. It's more than enough. I don't need to see where you live like I live."

  Harry gave it up. There were moods, times, when it was just impossible to budge Manny. He dug in, and in he stayed. "Eat your orange."

  "It's a good orange. So tell me more about Jackie."

  "Jackie." Harry shook his head. Two kids on bikes tore along the path. One of them swerved towards Manny and snatched the orange from his hand. "Aw riggghhhttt!"

  Harry scowled after the child. It had been a girl. Manny just wiped the orange juice off his fingers onto the knee of his pants. "Is everything she writes so depressing?"

  "Everything," Harry said. "Listen to this one." He drew out another magazine, smaller, bound in rough paper with a stylized li
nen drawing of a woman's private parts on the cover. On the cover! Harry held the magazine with one palm spread wide over the drawing, which made it difficult to keep the pages open while he read. " `She looked at her mother in the only way possible: with contempt, contempt for all the betrayals and compromises that had been her mother's life, for the sad soft lines of defeat around her mother's mouth, for the bright artificial dress too young for her wasted years, for even the leather handbag, Gucci of course, filled with blood money for having sold her life to a man who had long since ceased to want it.—

  "Hoo boy," Manny said. "About a mother she wrote that?"

  "About everybody. All the time."

  "And where is Barbara?"

  "Reno again. Another divorce." How many had that been? After two, did anybody count? Harry didn't count. He imagined Barbara's life as a large roulette wheel like the ones on TV, little silver men bouncing in and out of red and black pockets. Why didn't she get dizzy?

  Manny said slowly, "I always thought there was a lot of love in her."

  "A lot of that she's got," Harry said dryly.

  "Not Barbara—Jackie. A lot of . . . I don't know. Sweetness. Under the way she is."

  "The way she is," Harry said gloomily. "Prickly. A cactus. But you're right, Manny, I know what you mean. She just needs someone to soften her up. Love her back, maybe. Although I love her."

  The two old men looked at each other. Manny said,

  "Harry..."

  "I know, I know. I'm only a grandfather, my love doesn't count, I'm just there. Like air. `You're wonderful, Popsy,' she says, and still no teeth when she smiles. But you know, Manny—you are right!" Harry jumped up from the bench. "You are! What she needs is a young man to love her!"

  Manny looked alarmed. "I didn't say—"

  "I don't know why I didn't think of it before!"