She heard the groan of the crowd more clearly, an explosive sigh heavy with frustration, and immediately after, the voices: “Twice in a row.” “She’s lucky tonight.” “I never win.” “N-32; that’s all I needed!” “She always wins.” The last was the voice of Betty, from twenty feet away as clear as if she were whispering in Martha’s ear.
Kelly came by and paid out the forty dollars. Forty dollars would keep her for a week. She could buy a new dress, get the toilet fixed, buy a pound of sirloin. “Looks like your night,” Kelly said. “Or maybe it’s just this table.”
“I never won like this before,” she said.
“Don’t act too guilty,” Kelly said, and winked at her.
She started to protest, but he was gone. There was something wrong with her hearing. She heard the people around her in too much detail, could pick out individual voices. The next game began. Martha tried to concentrate. She could feel the tension, and every sigh she heard as a number was called that was on her board and not on that of the sigher was like a needle in her chest. When the last number came, the one that both completed the outer square on her upper game panel and covered the entire panel, it was a moment before she could muster the breath to shout, “Bingo!”
The groan that came was full of barely repressed jealousy. Despair. Even hatred. It boomed hollowly in Martha’s altered hearing. She looked up and saw envious faces turned to her. From across the room she saw Betty’s peevish squint. The crowd buzzed. Kelly read the numbers off her board. Someone shushed someone else. Shiffman announced that this was indeed, miraculously, a valid bingo. Someone laughed. Kelly paid out the combined prize of $120, an amount that would see some of these people through a month. She smiled sickly up at him. He counted out the bills without comment.
It was all she could do to cover the free squares for the next game. Shiffman, so nervous now that his smile had faded for the first time in Martha’s memory, began. The first four numbers he called, like a dream turning into a nightmare, ran a diagonal winner across Martha’s board. When she stammered out “bingo,” it was with half the force that she had managed before.
The cries of dismay were crushing. The hall seemed filled with envious voices. A worm of pain moved in her chest. She tried not to take the money, but Kelly insisted. Each bill as it was counted out was like a blow, and when he was at last done she could not find breath to thank him.
When, in the next game, she saw that she had won again, she realized that she could not stand it. She didn’t even put chips on the squares, until at last another woman in the room shouted “Bingo!” The woman’s triumphant screech was greeted by cheers.
Martha tried to leave, but her legs were too weak. She sat through the last games, watching her card, silent, as the pain climbed from her chest to her throat. Had she been able to face the rest, she could have taken every dollar. At last it was over. She gathered up her chips and markers and stumbled toward the door. Friends tried to talk to her. Betty Alcyk called her name. But the memory of Betty’s voice among the others silenced her. She couldn’t talk to Betty. Their friendship had been only a pact of losers, unable to stand the strain of one of them winning. But there was worse. If someone else had had the magic card, even if that person was the dearest one in the world to Martha—Betty—Sam, her lost husband—even her beautiful, lost son, David—would her own voice have held that same hatred?
The people filed out. Their voices rang in her head. She had nothing to say to them.
She wondered if she ever would.
STEPHEN KRAUS
Emissary
Here new writer Stephen Kraus, a frequent contributor to Analog, gives us an entertaining and provocative look at a Close Encounter of a very odd kind …
Stephen Kraus lives in Menlo Park, California.
EMISSARY
Stephen Kraus
Roger shed his backpack and collapsed into one of my dining room chairs. He looked dilapidated—long hair tangled, face sunken and colorless. But he was alive, anyway. After months without a word from him I had begun to think otherwise.
He dug through his backpack and produced a worn, leather-bound book.
“What do you make of this?” he asked.
A brief phone call from the airport excepted, those were his first words to me in three months.
Roger was like that.
I played along. I opened the book to the flyleaf, which was inscribed “Capn Jn Knowles,” in an assertive hand. The surname was the same as Roger’s.
“A relative of yours?”
He nodded. “My three-times-great-grandfather.”
The text was written in a faint, crabbed hand clearly not that of its owner. The legend was self-explanatory:
Memoryes of the Parish of Birwood
Written by: Dnl. Meese, Rector
Anno scriv. 1781
“A parish history?”
Roger nodded again.
The writing was old-fashioned—quaint abbreviations, misspellings, curly f’s where s’s ought to be. Heavy going. I picked my way through the introduction:
Birwood stands at the crossing of the Peirce Highwaye and the Marle Brooke in the Countye of Salop. Marle Brooke, which hath its rise head near Marton, forms the boundrye of our Parish with Onslow, and there a stone bridge passes across this brooke at whose foote our Church stands. The bridge is now sorely ruinous, but repairs cannot be made because the parishioniers of Onslow saye the bridge is on our lande and we saye it is on theirs.
There was quite a bit more in that vein, alternately pedantic and catty.
“Where did you get this?” I asked. “It looks valuable.”
“From my uncle Claude. He died, I ended up with it. I found it in a cookie tin, along with a bunch of papers and photographs—genealogical stuff. The photographs were all of these somber, dark-suited fellows with identical beaked noses.” Roger felt his own nose. “Quite a lot like mine, actually.
“The papers were certificates, clippings—that sort of thing. They traced my family back ten generations to a tiny village in the English midlands.”
“Birwood?” I guessed.
“Right. That’s where I’ve been.” He brushed his hair back nervously. “Thanks for putting me up on such short notice, by the way.” He hesitated. “I really need to talk to you.”
“No problem.”
He looked past me to the window and the quiet street that ran past my house. “This could take a while.”
“I’m not in a hurry.”
Roger gave me a tired smile. When he started speaking again his voice was low and measured, as if he were afraid of running out of words too soon.
“I got a letter from the National Science Foundation last August,” he began, “pulling my grant. I suppose you heard about that—everyone else in the department seemed to know within hours. I couldn’t believe it. One sheet of cheap government stationery and all my soft money was gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.
“I sat in my office all afternoon, staring at the letter. That project was my life.” He stopped for a moment and shook his head. “That must sound really stupid, but it’s true.
“I went home after a while, passed out on my couch. When I woke up the next morning I found three suitcases waiting on my front step. There was a note from an attorney taped to one explaining that my uncle had died and naming me as his next of kin.
“I started going through his stuff. I was pretty clinical about it―I hadn’t seen Uncle Claude in ten years. I ended up giving almost everything to Goodwill. None of it had any personal flavor. It was just stuff. Useful to him, I suppose, useless to me.
“Then I found the cookie tin with the book and the photographs. Beneath that were a locket, some pressed flowers, and an odd sort of plastic part—black, with a disk at one end and four hollow tubes at the other. Heirlooms, I guessed, though the plastic part certainly didn’t fit.
“I ended up reading the Birwood manuscript all the way through that night. I’d never been much
interested in history, but that old Reverend Meese had a nasty streak in him that kept me turning those brittle pages.
“He had it in for my family in particular. There’s a chapter devoted to us near the end—see if you can find it.”
I did, after a few minutes of squinting at the gnarled script. The section began:
The Familye of Wm. Knowles of the Mill Farme.
Wm. Knowles was the first of his lineage to dwell at Birwood, living verie poorely at the outset in the ruines of Blanthorne Castel.
While still a younge man, Wm. Knowles left the countrye to fight with the Duke of Marlborough and did not return to the Parish until some yeares later. He then built a mill by the Marle Brooke and a goode house with monies he had got somewhere.
Then followed a long account of a lawsuit between William Knowles and a Mr. Oakely. They were fighting about the right to sit in a particular church “piew,” of all things. Roger’s ancestor won. Then events became more dramatic:
Wm. Knowles begat manye other disputes, but his last was with a Thomas Norris, who was an alehouse companion. They finallye brawled (over a woman, witnesses saye) and Mr. Norris was cut on the arme, which he lost the use of, but Mr. Knowles was stabbed to the harte.
Roger grinned. The effect was a bit cadaverous. “I never would have believed my family started out that way. I mean, look at us now—we’re all accountants or chemists or whatever. Keep going, it gets better.”
The next section read:
W. Knowles had isshue by Anne Newcombe, a son Martin, who inherited the Mill Farme. Martin Knowles styled himself a gentleman and went down to Cambridge to reade the classicks, but he returned on his father’s death with two fingers missynge on his right hand from some mischiefe he had played.
A short time later Martin Knowles found a vein of a goode ore of leade (called Galena) at the bottom of a marle pit on his propertye. This was accompted strange (if fortunate) for leade is otherwise only known in Wales and manye leagues distant. Mr. Knowles hired men from Birwood and elsewhere to work the myne and proffited greatlye.
But in the ende the myne led to a dispute with one Jn. Bender, who worked it on Martin Knowles’s behalf. Mr. Bender, who is a stout and able man even today, broke a picke of Mr. Knowles’s. Mr. Bender saide he would not paye for the toole, maintaining that it broke because it was not adequate to the taske rather than through any fault of his owne (he still says that there was something in the ore too harde for the toole).
The two men fell to fighting over this difference, with the result that Mr. Bender cracked his hip and now walks onlye with a sticke. He later tooke up the trade of wheelwright, and so is more fortunate than manye of his fellowes who lost their livelihoods when Martin Knowles closed down the mynes soon after.
That incident seemed to end Martin Knowles’s career. I found only one more reference to him:
Martin Knowles is now little seen in publick, nor at the alehouses he used to frequent. Those who visit the Mill Farme says he sits by a window with a small object in his ruined hand and tosses it repeatedly into the aire. I have seen him do this myself and asked him where he got the thing (which is the color of coale and has four small projections on it) and he will onlye saye he got it in the mynes.
I looked up, startled.
Roger nodded. “The same thing occurred to me when I read that section. I dug through the cookie tin until I found that plastic part. Black, four projections—there was no mistaking it. My class ring had a small diamond set in it. I dragged the ring across the part’s surface, and the diamond ground itself into dust.”
Roger leaned across the table and looked straight into my eyes.
“I put the part in my pocket and drove down to my lab. I tried to grind off a bit to analyze. No luck. Finally I was able to boil away a few molecules with a dye laser and blow them through my mass spectrometer.
“The material turned out to be a boron ceramic with some molybdenum and a few rare earths mixed in. Somehow that added up to a substance so hard I had no way of measuring just how hard.
“I looked up the Welsh lead deposits the manuscript referred to. They were Cretaceous in age; presumably the Birwood deposits were similar. If Martin Knowles really found the artifact in his mine, the material had to be tough enough to survive beneath the earth for a hundred million years.
“I wasn’t quite ready to believe that, but I kept running the facts back and forth in my head. I could safely assume that Martin Knowles found the thing—he couldn’t have made it, the technology to make it doesn’t exist now. I could further assume that it was part of something larger, something an unfortunate miner named John Bender broke one of his employer’s picks on.
“Then, a short time later, Martin Knowles shut down a profitable mine, throwing half the town out of work, and for the rest of his life he stayed scrupulously clear of his beloved alehouses. Why? To assure his own silence? Or was it just superstition?
“I did some more checking. I found Birwood on a contemporary map, and I talked to the local tourist bureau, one Irene Adams. She was only too glad to tell me about the town, but she had never heard about any old lead mines—seemed horrified at the idea, actually.
“Right about then the chairman called into his office. He told me that I’d have to leave the department at the end of the summer. I’d been expecting that; I didn’t say anything. We discussed what would happen to my equipment, and so on. Then he asked about my immediate plans.
“I told him that I was about to take a short trip to England to complete a side project. The idea just sort of popped into my head as I answered.
“I wasn’t planning to be gone long, maybe two or three weeks. But I took the precaution of putting all my stuff in storage and giving notice on my apartment. I really should have told you where I was going—I almost called you three or four times. But I wouldn’t have known what to say if you’d asked why.
“I left the next day. I only spent one night in London before heading north by train. I didn’t want to stop moving. I bought an old bicycle in Shrewsbury, and pedaled the rest of the way. Very pleasant, really. Lovely countryside: thatched cottages, rolling green hills with hedgerows and sheep.
“I reached Birwood in a couple of hours, and Irene found me a bed and breakfast in the middle of town. I told my landlady that I was a naturalist.
“I had this curious sense of déjà vu about the town. Besides the single paved road and a few row houses, I don’t think anything has changed there since 1781. The church is still standing by the Marle Brook, and the stone bridge still hasn’t been repaired.
“I looked up some records of my family at the church and the town hall. The minister was very helpful once he found out who I was: tenth generation descendent of Birwood stock and all that.
“William Knowles—the first Knowles mentioned in the manuscript—died in 1734. I never found any record of his birth. Martin Knowles lived from 1713 to 1788. And Captain John—the owner of the book—was his great-great-grandson. Everything checked, right down to the pew William Knowles and Mr. Oakley fought over. I sat there during a Sunday service at the minister’s insistence.
“Locating the Knowles property was more of a problem. I had to dig a century deep into the town records. I finally found the surveyor’s boundaries of the Mill Farm on an old tract chart: ‘In longitude from the Meridian of the Isles of the Azores (or Fortunate Islands) 21 deg. 37 min. 12 sec. and in latitude 52 deg. 53 min. 14 sec. northwards from the world’s equator.’
“The area is completely wild now; even sheep don’t graze there. But I recognized the remnants of the farm easily enough. The mill used to straddle the brook—the stone tower on the Birwood side is still standing. And behind the charred foundations of one of the outbuilding I found a small plot with half a dozen tilted headstones. One of them belonged to Martin Knowles, died in 1788, aged seventy-five years.
“I spent the rest of the afternoon down by the brook, knee deep in marle. I looked up the word in my landlady’s dictionar
y afterwards: it’s a crumbly soil with a high carbonate content, used for fertilizer and bricks. Good stuff to have on a farm, I suppose. Dreadful to walk through. After an hour I felt as if someone had poured concrete on my boots. But the manuscript said that Martin Knowles had found his vein of lead at the bottom of a marle pit, so I kept looking.
“I located the mine on the third day. Nothing dramatic. I slogged across another marsh and through another patch of thistles, and suddenly, right in front of me, was a pit with an obvious tailing pile on the side nearest the brook.
“Rusted equipment was piled in front, but the entrance was unguarded. What stopped me was the darkness. Light just wouldn’t penetrate more than a foot or two past the timbers that bracketed the opening. There were no signs of recent exploration, no bottles or empty beer cans. The place just seemed to have been forgotten.
“I took a train to Birmingham that afternoon and spent a small fortune on rock-climbing gear. I was back at the mine the next morning, hammering in expansion bolts for anchors and rigging carabiners and abrasion pads. I hadn’t used stuff like that in years, but the skills came back quickly.
“The rappel was easy enough—maybe fifty feet of descent through cobwebs and bat droppings before the shaft flattened out. After that I could walk, sort of, bent in half at the waist.
“The books tell you not to fool around in old mine shafts, but this one seemed solid enough. I checked the roof and supporting pillars frequently, but I never found anything to worry about.
“I moved as quickly as I could at first—whatever John Bender found, I figured it would be near the end of the shaft. But my back began to ache after a few hundred yards, and I kept hitting my head against the low ceiling. Half an hour later I had to drop to my hands and knees.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection Page 66
