Okay! Right! Let goddamn Black Bolt open his mouth and sing an aria—he couldn’t halt the Plath Sheep in its deadly spiral of despair!
The Dystopianist suddenly had a vision of the Plath Sheep wandering its way into the background of one of the Dire One’s tales. It would go unremarked at first, a bucolic detail. Unwrapping its bleak gift of global animal suicide only after it had been taken entirely for granted, just as the Dire One’s own little nuggets of despair were smuggled innocuously into his Utopias. The Plath Sheep was a bullet of pure dystopian intention. The Dystopianist wanted to fire it in the Dire Utopianist’s direction. Maybe he’d send this story to Encouraging.
Even better, he’d like it if he could send the Plath Sheep itself to the door of the Dire One’s writing room. Here’s your tragic mute Black Bolt, you bastard! Touch its somber muzzle, dry its moist obsidian eyes, runny with sleep-goo. Try to talk it down from the parapet, if you have the courage of your ostensibly rosy convictions. Explain to the Sylvia Plath Sheep why life is worth living. Or, failing that, let the sheep convince you to follow it up to the brink, and go. You and the sheep, pal, take a fall.
There was a knock on the door.
The Dystopianist went to the door and opened it. Standing in the corridor was a sheep. The Dystopianist checked his watch—9:45. He wasn’t sure why it mattered to him what time it was, but it did. He found it reassuring. The day still stretched before him; he’d have plenty of time to resume work after this interruption. He still heard the children’s voices leaking in through the front window from the street below. The children arriving now were late for school. There were always hundreds who were late. He wondered if the sheep had waited with the children for the crossing guard to wave it on. He wondered if the sheep had crossed at the green, or recklessly dared the traffic to kill it.
He’d persuaded himself that the sheep was voiceless. So it was a shock when it spoke. “May I come in?” said the sheep.
“Yeah, sure,” said the Dystopianist, fumbling his words. Should he offer the sheep the couch, or a drink of something? The sheep stepped into the apartment, just far enough to allow the door to be closed behind it, then stood quietly working its nifty little jaw back and forth, and blinking. Its eyes were not watery at all.
“So,” said the sheep, nodding its head at the Dystopianist’s desk, the mass of yellow legal pads, the sharpened pencils bunched in their holder, the typewriter. “This is where the magic happens.” The sheep’s tone was wearily sarcastic.
“It isn’t usually magic,” said the Dystopianist, then immediately regretted the remark.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said the sheep, apparently unruffled. “You’ve got a few things to answer for.”
“Is that what this is?” said the Dystopianist. “Some kind of reckoning?”
“Reckoning?” The sheep blinked as though confused. “Who said anything about a reckoning?”
“Never mind,” said the Dystopianist. He didn’t want to put words into the sheep’s mouth. Not now. He’d let it represent itself, and try to be patient.
But the sheep didn’t speak, only moved in tiny, faltering steps on the carpet, advancing very slightly into the room. The Dystopianist wondered if the sheep might be scouting for sharp corners on the furniture, for chances to do itself harm by butting with great force against his fixtures.
“Are you—very depressed?” asked the Dystopianist.
The sheep considered the question for a moment. “I’ve had better days, let’s put it that way.”
Finishing the thought, it stared up at him, eyes still dry. The Dystopianist met its gaze, then broke away. A terrible thought occurred to him: the sheep might be expecting him to relieve it of its life.
The silence was ponderous. The Dystopianist considered another possibility. Might his rival have come to him in disguised form?
He cleared his throat before speaking. “You’re not, ah, the Dire One, by any chance?” The Dystopianist was going to be awfully embarrassed if the sheep didn’t know what he was talking about.
The sheep made a solemn, wheezing sound, like “Hurrrrhh.” Then it said, “I’m dire all right. But I’m hardly the only one.”
“Who?” blurted the Dystopianist.
“Take a look in the mirror, friend.”
“What’s your point?” The Dystopianist was sore now. If the sheep thought he was going to be manipulated into suicide it had another think coming.
“Just this: how many sheep have to die to assuage your childish resentments?” Now the sheep had assumed an odd false tone, plummy like that of a commercial pitchman: “They laughed when I sat down at the Dystopiano! But when I began to play—”
“Very funny.”
“We try, we try. Look, could you at least offer me a dish of water or something? I had to take the stairs—couldn’t reach the button for the elevator.”
Silenced, the Dystopianist hurried into the kitchen and filled a shallow bowl with water from the tap. Then, thinking twice, he poured it back into the sink and replaced it with mineral water from the bottle in the door of his refrigerator. When he set it out the sheep lapped gratefully, steadily, seeming to the Dystopianist an animal at last.
“Okay.” It licked its lips. “That’s it, Doctor Doom. I’m out of here. Sorry for the intrusion, next time I’ll call. I just wanted, you know—a look at you.”
The Dystopianist couldn’t keep from saying, “You don’t want to die?”
“Not today,” was the sheep’s simple reply. The Dystopianist stepped carefully around the sheep to open the door, and the sheep trotted out. The Dystopianist trailed it into the corridor and summoned the elevator. When the cab arrived and the door opened the Dystopianist leaned in and punched the button for the lobby.
“Thanks,” said the sheep. “It’s the little things that count.”
The Dystopianist tried to think of a proper farewell, but couldn’t before the elevator door shut. The sheep was facing the rear of the elevator cab, another instance of its poor grasp of etiquette.
Still, the sheep’s visit wasn’t the worst the Dystopianist could imagine. It could have attacked him, or tried to gore itself on his kitchen knives. The Dystopianist was still proud of the Plath Sheep, and rather glad to have met it, even if the Plath Sheep wasn’t proud of him. Besides, the entire episode had only cost the Dystopianist an hour or so of his time. He was back at work, eagerly scribbling out implications, extrapolations, another illustrious downfall, well before the yelping children reoccupied the schoolyard at lunchtime.
From Guardian
Joe Haldeman
THE WORST STORM OF the year piled snow on ice while I taught the last day of class before Christmas. On the way home, I fell several times and arrived at the cabin sore and soaked and freezing.
I bolted the door behind me and crossed the room slowly, groping to the table where I felt candle and matches. With one match I lit the candle and a couple of peg lamps, and then the main kerosene lamp, for its smoky warmth. When I went back to snuff the peg lamps, I saw that I’d trod upon a letter that had been slid under the door.
It was from the Yukon Territory, the address barely legible, a pencil scrawl unlike my son Daniel’s schoolboy hand.
With curiosity rather than premonition, I took a paring knife and slit open the worn foolscap and carried its scrawled message back to the lamp. It was from Daniel’s friend Chuck. The letter is long since gone, but I think I have the wording set in my memory:
“Mrs. Flammarian both my Pa and your son are murdered. A drunkard fell upon Pa on the street in Dawson City, thinking him someone else, and when Dan went to his aid the drunk shot them both with a pistol. When he seen what he had done he shot his own self, but not to much effect, and he will be hung this week. But my Pa and Dan died right there, shot in the heart and the head, while I was out at the claim, and by the time someone got me the terrible news and I got me into the town, they was both froze solid in back of the corner office. I don’t know no way to tell this
to make it gentle. It’s the worst thing that ever happened.”
I didn’t burst into tears or scream or rend my garments. I sat there in the sputtering light and read the note again, sure that must be some cruel trick or stupid joke. I had sure knowledge that Chuck could not write much beyond signing his name. But then I turned over the paper and found a note in the same hand:
“Writ this 14th day of December year of our Lord 1898 by Morris Chambers, for the hand of Chuck Coleman, his mark here.” And there was Chuck’s scrawl with this note appended beneath: “I was not there at the time but here tell that your son was very brave. My gravest condolences in your loss. MC.”
Then I was blinded by tears and collapsed, striking my head on the pine floor, and then striking it again and again, hard bright sparks in my eyes. I rolled on the floor weeping, and lost my water, beyond care.
I remembered the moment in Skagway when Dan handed me the Pinkerton man’s revolver, agreeing with some reluctance that he should never need it.
I needed it now.
I staggered to the dresser by the bed and jerked open the top drawer. There it was in a corner, wrapped in blue muslin. I unwrapped it, sudden oil smell, and verified that it was loaded, and raised it to my temple. Then I thought about the horrible mess that would be made, and lowered the muzzle to where I thought my heart was, beneath my left breast, and a large raven came through the door.
The door didn’t open. He walked through it as if it were made of air. “Rosa,” he said in a clear voice, “you can’t do that. Your God would not approve.”
He stalked across the floor in that determined way that ravens have. “One Corinthians, chapter 6: ‘know thee not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you … and ye are not your own?’”
With a clatter of feathers, he hopped up onto the dresser. “Chapter 20 of Exodus. Verse 13. You must know that one.”
“What are you?”
“A raven, dummy. Exodus 20:13. Give it to me.”
“You’re the one who kept telling me ‘no gold’?”
“Yes. Exodus 20:13?”
“‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“Let’s get that straight. It doesn’t say ‘thou shalt not kill anybody but yourself.’”
I turned the gun on him. “It does tell us that the Devil quotes scripture.”
“Luke. And you’re gonna kill the Devil with an eggbeater.” The gun was suddenly light in my hand. I looked down and it was an eggbeater. I dropped it and it hit the floor with a loud thump, and formed back into a revolver.
“Not that I’m actually the Devil. I’m not actually even a raven.” He hopped to the floor, impossibly slow, and for an instant turned into old Gordon. He had his huge nest of hair let down, all the way to his knees, and was wearing nothing else. He turned back into the raven.
“You’re the Tlingit Shaman Gordon, aren’t you?”
“No and yes. You know what the Tlingit raven is.”
“A shape-changer. But—”
“And a creature who can talk to all animals, including humans. Leave it at that, for the time being.”
I picked up the letter and turned it over to the terrible message. “You have something to do with this?”
“I didn’t cause it. I’m here because of it, of course.”
“To save me … from myself?”
“I haven’t saved you yet.”
I groped for the chair behind me, and sat down. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even think. “What do you really look like, if you aren’t a bird or Gordon?”
He flickered, like a candle flame, but didn’t change.
“In a sense, the question is meaningless; I take whatever form is appropriate. I do have a shape for resting, but I think it would disturb you.”
“Demonic?”
“No. Forget demons and gods. It’s as plain and natural as changing clothes. Stand up.”
I did, and suddenly the room changed. I could see three walls at once, in sharp detail, even though the light was low and flickering. My eyes were only about three feet off the ground. Effortlessly, I turned my head completely around, and saw on the wall behind me the shadow of a large bird.
“What?” came out both as a word and a squawk.
“You’re a bald eagle,” he said. “Come over to the mirror.”
Walking was strange, bobbing talons scraping along the wood. In the full-length mirror by the wardrobe, the image of a magnificent eagle, cocking its head when I cocked mine, raising and lowering its feet. I raised my arm and spread my fingers; it raised a wing and the end-feathers spread out. My mind and body knew exactly how that would change my course of flight, scooping air to slow and drop.
It was a strange mental state, simple and beautiful. I tried to say something about that, but all that came out was another squawk: “I am!”
“You certainly are.” The eagle in the mirror stretched impossibly tall and with a little “pop” turned back into me, nude. I covered myself reflexively, as if a crow or demon would care, and clothes appeared on my flesh.
Nothing like normal clothing, though. I looked at my strange image in the mirror: it looked as if I had been dipped in wax, a garment like a second skin, covering everything but my head, hands, and feet. Slippers appeared on my feet.
“That will keep you warm. Follow me.” He walked through the door, again without opening it.
“But …” I blew out the lights and pushed open the door. It had stopped snowing, and the raven was standing there in the moonlight. It was bitter cold, but the suit of clothes warmed up automatically. It also warmed my face and hands somehow. I touched my face and it felt slippery.
“This way.” He hopped and fluttered down the path at the rate of a fast walk. We went away from town, up the hill toward Mount Verstovaia.
I followed him without question, numb and confused. We walked down a game trail for a few hundred yards—I was starting to worry about bears—and then picked our way through undergrowth for a few minutes.
The raven said something in a language neither bird nor human, and a door opened in the middle of the air. I stepped sideways and saw that there was nothing behind it. The door was a rectangle of soft golden light that led into a room that was manifestly not there. But the raven walked in, and I cautiously followed him.
The floor of the room was soft, the air warm with a trace of something like cinnamon. As if someone had been baking rolls. The door closed and the raven disappeared. I think I did, too. At least I had no sense of being in any one place—all of the room seemed equally close. Perhaps I became the room, in some sense.
“I want to go a few places,” the raven said in my mind, “and show you a few things. You’ve read Gulliver’s Travels.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Wasn’t a question. This is not that. But there may be some aspects of it you will find amusing, or educational.”
A rush of anxiety finally caught up with me. “I don’t want to go anyplace. I want to go home, and sort things out.”
“You’ll get home. Right now I want to put some distance between you and that revolver.”
“That was a rash impulse. I won’t do it.” As I said that, I wondered whether it was a lie.
“You’ll be home in less than no time. Close your eyes until I tell you to open them.”
I obeyed for a couple of minutes, though it was extremely uncomfortable—as if I were being rotated slowly about one axis, like a leisurely figure skater, and revolved about a different one, cartwheeling.
I opened my eyes for one blink and regretted it. Colors I couldn’t put a name to, and unearthly shapes that seemed to pass through my body. I started to vomit and choked it back.
“Don’t look!” the bird shrieked, and I squeezed my eyes shut, hard, the acid taste burning my throat and soft palate, anxiety rising. “Only a few minutes more. Calm down.” Maybe this was hell, I thought. Maybe I did pull the trigger, and this was my punishment—not imps and flames, but an eternity of confusion
and nausea.
It was shorter than eternity, though. Eventually the sensation subsided, and the bird told me to open my eyes. Once more I had the sense of “being” the room, and then the raven materialized, and so did I. I sat down on the soft floor, exhausted.
“You’ve read Mars as the Abode of Life,” he said, “by Percival Lowell.”
“You know everything I read?”
“That, and more. You also read your namesake’s book, of course.”
“Have we … have you gone all the way to Mars?”
“No. Lowell was wrong. Mars never had anything more interesting than moss. But there are living creatures elsewhere.”
“Venus?”
“You know what a Bessemer converter is.”
I remembered the flame- and smoke-belching refineries of Pittsburgh. “Venus is like that?”
“Worse. No place in your solar system, other than Earth, has life that’s at all interesting. There’s some wildlife on satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, but they’re less intelligent than a congressman, as Mark Twain would say. Dumber than a snail, actually.
“We’ve gone farther than that. Ten million times farther.” The door opened and a soft reddish glow came in, like the end of sunset.
I stepped to the door. The sun was not setting; it was two hand spans above the horizon. There was enough mist or smoke in the air that I could look at it directly. It was much larger than our sun, and it looked like a piece of coal in a cooling stove, bright red with crusts of black.
Perhaps I had gone to hell. The landscape was Dantean, treeless chalk cliffs with precipitous overhangs. We stepped outside and were on such an overhang ourselves, facing a drop of a hundred yards down to a brown trickle of water. The air was hot and chalky, like a schoolroom in summer after the boards are cleaned.
There was vegetation on our side of the gorge, weeds and gnarled bushes that were purple rather than green. They all stuck out of the cliff at the same angle, pointing toward the sun.
“The sun never moves,” the raven said. “This planet always keeps one face to it, as often happens given enough time.”
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