You go up to the abandoned house to see if a hawk or, more likely, an owl is nesting inside. You give your eyes a chance to get used to the darkness inside, but you don’t see anything. Reluctantly, you decide there’s nothing to see.
Your daughter points. "There’s the truck, Dad!"
"Where?" you say, not spotting it. Then you do. "Boy, that’s about as abandoned as it gets."
How many years has it squatted there? Long enough for rain and snow and ice to have had their way with its paint. Rust covers every inch of the chassis. The dark red-brown blends perfectly with the dirt and with the green and brown of the willows growing alongside. You and your daughter fight through the shrubby willows for a closer look. The side windows are either rolled down all the way or long gone. Cracks craze the windshield and smaller rear window.
Mosquitoes hum all around. You breathe in another one. By now, you have practice at this-you spit it out without your daughter’s even noticing.
"Past the dead truck. That’s what’s on the map." Excitement brightens her voice. The map might point toward buried treasure on the Spanish Main, not bluethroat nests in the middle of the Seward Peninsula.
A lot of maps that said they pointed toward treasure on the Spanish Main really pointed toward nothing. You have to hope this one won’t be like that. People have more incentive to lie about doubloons and pieces of eight than about little thrushes from Asia… don’t they?
You’ll find out. You follow the creek another couple of hundred yards. You stop in a small clearing. "If they’re anywhere, they’re here," you say.
"Sure." Your daughter still sounds more confident than you feel. If she can still believe things will work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds, more power to her.
She raises her binoculars and slowly scans the closer willows, then the more distant ones. You do the same. You’ve come all this way. Long odds you’ll ever get here again. You’d be an idiot not to give it your best shot.
Which doesn’t mean you’ll get what you’re after. Your wife gave it her best shot, God knows. So did your daughter. So did her ex, even if she so doesn’t want to hear that.
You lower the binoculars and look around. Something’s perched in a willow up near the edge of the valley. Your daughter’s already spotted it. You raise the field glasses again and aim them that way. "What do you think?" you ask her.
She sighs. "It’s an American tree sparrow. Right size, wrong bird."
You take a longer look. You sigh, too, because she’s right. She usually is. The cinnamon crown, the dark spot on the breast, the bill that’s dark above and yellowish below… American tree sparrow, all right. The first time you saw one here, it was a life bird for both of you, because it’s rare along the West Coast. But it’s common here in the summertime, and in the upper Midwest and East during the winter. Not a bluethroat. Not even close.
You scan some more. You spot a Wilson’s warbler: a little yellow bird with a black cap. The last one you saw was hopping around the magnolia in your own back yard.
After a while, you say, "We ought to head back to the car."
"I know." Your daughter doesn’t budge. "I hate to give up, though."
"So do I. Still, if we were going to find anything…"
"Pish! Pish! Pish!" Your daughter doesn’t say that to you. It’s a noise birders make to lure shy birds out of cover. Sometimes- not very often, in your experience-it works. Birders who do it too much are called pishers. For anyone with even a little Yiddish, that’s funny. "Pish! Pish! Pish!" Your daughter isn’t a pisher, but she’ll try whatever she can.
Nothing comes out of the willows. Only mosquitoes fly around you. You take a couple of steps in the direction of the car. Your daughter’s stiff back says she doesn’t want to see you.
"Come on," you say. "We’ll bird all the way there. Maybe we’ll find one."
"Maybe." She closes up with you. Then she leans toward the willows again. "Pish! Pish! Pish!"
"Pish! Pish! Pish!" You even try it yourself. Why not? What have you got to lose? "Pish! Pish! Pish!" A fighting retreat.
Stop and pish. Stop and scan. Back past the truck carcass. Past the buildings. Through the mosquitoes. Despite the repellent, they do land. How many bites will you end up with? You won’t feel them till later.
You see another redpoll, or maybe the same one again. A golden-crowned sparrow is bathing in the creek, fluttering its wings to flip water onto its back.
"Stupid thing." Your daughter is mad at it for not being a bluethroat.
"We tried our best," you say. You remember your wife. Sometimes it just isn’t good enough.
There’s the rental car. You look around one more time. The bluethroats aren’t supposed to be here, so close to the main road. But they aren’t where they’re supposed to be, so what the hell? A bird in the willows… is another American tree sparrow. You don’t need your daughter to identify this one for you.
She sees it, too, and what it is. She shakes her head and lowers her binoculars.
You open the door and quickly slide in. Your daughter does the same thing on the passenger side. You both kill some of the mosquitoes that got in with you. Then you start the car. You turn around carefully on the narrow track. Back toward the road. Back toward Nome.
Maybe, behind you now, the bluethroats flit through the willow branches. Maybe they snatch mosquitoes out of the air and carry them back to hungry hatchlings in their nests. Maybe they were never there at all.
WORLDS ENOUGH, AND TIME
I’ve been interested in ecological invasions and in what people call the Cambrian explosion for a long time. This little piece originally appeared as a "Probability Zero" in Analog. Zero? I don’t know. Have you got a better explanation?
So Many Worlds, So Little Time, said the slightly scorched sticker on the side of the starship
This one had an oxygen atmosphere, but not much else going for it. The oxygen meant there were plants in the seas. The ship’s database said those seas held animals, too: wormy things crawling on the mud, maybe digging into it; blobby things floating in the water. That was about it.
On land? Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Bare rock. The chewed-up bare rock that’s called dirt. No trees. No flowers. No grass. No ferny things. No mossy things, even. No nothing. Certainly nothing scurrying over the ground or buzzing through the air.
Sometimes planets like this had a stark beauty. The father liked such worlds, which was why they’d stopped at this one. But he’d flitted here, and he’d flitted there, and he had to say he was disappointed.
The mother wasn’t. She hadn’t much wanted to come here in the first place. But they’d been married a long time. If you expected him to give a little, you had to do the same.
They stood side by side, watching the ocean lap against a tropical-but bare, utterly bare-beach. He sighed. "I’ve seen about enough," he said. "It… just isn’t quite what I hoped for."
Told you so. But she didn’t say it. They had been married a long time. All she said was, "I wouldn’t mind seeing something different."
"We’ll do that, then," he said.
He was just turning back toward the ship when the kids swarmed down the ladder and ran toward him. That was a prodigy of sorts. The kids cared more about their games and the aquarium than about seeing what they thought of as a dull old planet. Well, by now he thought of it the same way, which was the problem.
"What’s up?" he asked.
"Aquarium’s in trouble," the girl said.
"Environmental unit crapped out," the boy agreed. He’d head off to the university after they got home. Where did time go?
"Well, plug in the replacement," the father said. They both looked shamefaced. "We forgot to pack one," the girl said.
"Oh, dear," the mother said.
"Without an environmental unit, everything’ll die." By the way the boy looked at the father, it was somehow his fault.
"I like the critters in there. I really like them." The girl sounded hea
rtbroken.
"I don’t know what to tell you." The father knew damn well it wasn’t his fault.
The girl pointed toward the sea that seemed to stretch forever. "Could we… give them a chance, anyway? Not just watch them die?"
"It’s against the rules," the father said doubtfully.
"Please!" the kids chorused.
"I’ll never tell," the mother added. "Who’s to know?" "Well…" He thought a minute, then shrugged. "Okay- go ahead. But keep your mouths shut after we get home, you hear?"
"You’re the greatest, Dad!" the boy said. He and the girl ran back toward the ship.
Jack Conway fired up his Mac and started the Power-Point presentation. A projector put one weird creature after another up on the big screen. "This is a trilobite-an early arthropod. Some of you probably recognize it," Jack told his class. "This is Selkirkia, a priapulid worm. It lived in the mud, as they still do…This is Aysheia, a lobopod. Looks something like a worm and something like a bug, doesn’t it?.. Hallucigenia- great name-is probably another lobopod, with protective spines… Canadia is an annelid, related to earthworms… And this little fishy thing with eyestalks or antennae or whatever they are is Pikaia, an early chordate- -somebody from our own phylum."
He paused. "Nobody quite knows why there was such an explosion of metazoan body plans at the beginning of the Cambrian, 543 million years ago. Some of the more interesting theories include…"
HE WOKE IN DARKNESS
I don’t quite know what you’d call this story. Dark fantasy? Horror? Something in there. Not a place I seem to go very often, but I did this time. The other line that occurs to me is from Marlow: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.
It shouldn’t have ended this way. He knew that, though he couldn’t say how or why. He couldn’t even say what this way was, not for sure. He just knew it was wrong. He’d always understood about right and wrong, as far back as he could remember.
How far back was that? Why, it was… as far as it was. He didn’t know exactly how far. That seemed wrong, too, but he couldn’t say why.
Darkness lay heavily on him, unpierced, unpierceable. It wasn’t the dark of night, nor even the dark of a closed and shuttered room at midnight. No light had ever come here. No light ever would, or could. Not the darkness of a mineshaft. The darkness of… the tomb?
Realizing he must be dead made a lot of things fall together. A lot, but not enough. As far back as he could remember… He couldn’t remember dying, dammit. Absurdly, that made him angry. Something so important in a man’s life, you’d think he would remember it. But he didn’t, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.
He would have laughed, there in the darkness, if only he could. He hadn’t expected Afterwards to be like this. He didn’t know how he’d expected it to be, but not like this. Again, though, what could he do about it?
I can remember. I can try to remember, anyways. Again, he would have laughed if he could. Why the hell not? I’ve got all the time in the world.
Light. An explosion of light. Afternoon sunshine blasting through the dirty, streaky windshield of the beat-up old Ford station wagon bouncing west down Highway 16 toward Philadelphia.
A bigger explosion of light inside his mind. A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. He knew it like… like a man knows his name, that’s how. That time without light, without self? A dream, he told himself. Must have been a dream.
Those were his hands on the wheel, pink and square and hard from years of labor in the fields. He was only twenty-seven, but he’d already done a lifetime’s worth of hard work. It felt like a long lifetime’s worth, too.
He took one hand off the wheel for a second to run it through his brown hair, already falling back at the temples. Had he dozed for a second while he was driving? He didn’t think so, but what else could it have been? Lucky he didn’t drive the wagon off the road into the cotton fields, into the red dirt.
They would love that. They would laugh their asses off. Well, they weren’t going to get the chance.
Sweat ran down his face. His clothes felt welded to him. The air was thick with water, damn near thick enough to slice. The start of summer in Mississippi. It would stay like this for months.
He had the window open to give himself a breeze. It didn’t help much. When it got this hot and sticky, nothing helped much. He ran his hand through his hair again, to try to keep it out of his eyes.
"You all right, Cecil?" That was Muhammad Shabazz. Along with Tariq Abdul-Rashid, he crouched down in the back seat. The two young Black Muslims didn’t want the law, or what passed for the law in Mississippi in 1964, spotting them. They’d come down from the North to give the oppressed and disenfranchised whites in the state a helping hand, and the powers that be hated them worse than anybody.
"I’m okay," Cecil Price answered. I’m okay now, he thought. I know who I am. Hell, I know that I am. He shook his head. That moment of lightless namelessness was fading, and a good thing, too.
"We get to Meridian, everything’ll be fine," Muhammad Shabazz said.
"Sure," Cecil said. "Sure." The night before, the locals had torched a white church over by Longdale. He’d taken the Northern blacks over there to do what they could for the congregation. Now…
Now they had to get through Neshoba County. They had to get past Philadelphia. They had to run the gauntlet of lawmen who hated white people and Black Knights of Voodoo who hated whites even more-and of lawmen who were Black Knights of Voodoo and hated whites most of all. And they had to do it in the Racial Alliance for Complete Equality’s beat-up station wagon. If RACE’s old blue Ford wasn’t the best-known car in eastern Mississippi, Price was damned if he knew another one that would be.
Of course, he might be damned any which way. So might the two idealistic young Negroes who’d come down from New York and Ohio to give his downtrodden race a hand. If the law spotted this much too spottable car…
Cecil Price wished he hadn’t had that thought right then, in the instant before he saw the flashing red light in his rear-view mirror, in the instant before he heard the siren’s scream. Panic stabbed at him. "What do I do?" he said hoarsely. He wanted to floor the gas pedal. He wanted to, but he didn’t. The main thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that the old wagon couldn’t break sixty unless you flung it off a cliff.
"Pull over." Muhammad Shabazz’s voice was calm. "Don’t let ‘em get us for evading arrest or any real charge. We haven’t done anything wrong, so they can’t do anything to us."
"You sure of that, man?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid sounded nervous.
"This is all about the rule of law," Muhammad Shabazz said patiently. "For us, for them, for everybody."
He respected the rule of law. It meant more to him than anything else. Cecil Price could only hope it meant something to the man in the car with the light and the siren. He could hope so, yeah. Could he believe it? That was a different story.
But Price didn’t see that he had any choice here. He pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as he brought the blue Ford to a stop. Pebbles rattled against the car’s underpanels. Red dust swirled up around it.
The black-and-white pulled up behind the Ford. A great big Negro in a deputy sheriff’s uniform got out and swaggered up toward the station wagon. Cecil Price watched him in the mirror, not wanting to turn around. That arrogant strut-and the pistol in the lawman’s hand-spoke volumes about the way things in Mississippi had been since time out of mind.
Coming up to the driver’s-side door, the sheriff peered in through sunglasses that made him look more like a machine, a hate-driven machine, than a man. "Son of a bitch!" he exploded. "You ain’t Larry Rainey!"
"No, sir," Price said. Part of that deference was RACE training-don’t give the authorities an excuse to beat on you. And part of it was drilled into whites in the South from the time they could toddle and lisp. If they
didn’t show respect, they often didn’t live to get a whole lot older than that.
Larry Rainey was older than Cecil Price and smarter than Cecil and tougher than Cecil, too. He’d been in RACE a lot longer than Cecil had. The Black Knights of Voodoo probably hated him more than any other white man from this part of the state.
But the way they hated Larry Rainey was like nothing next to the way they hated what they called the black agitators from the North. Even behind the deputy sheriff’s shades, Cecil could see his eyes widen when he got a look at Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. "Well, well!" he boomed, the way a man with a shotgun will when a couple of big, fat ducks fly right over his blind. "Looky what we got here! We got us a couple of buckra-lovin’ ragheads!"
"Sheriff," Muhammad Shabazz said tightly. He didn’t wear a turban, and never had. Neither did Tariq Abdul-Rashid, who nodded like somebody trying hard not to show how scared he was. Cecil Price was scared, too, damn near scared shitless, and hoped the black man with the gun and the Smokey-the-Bear hat couldn’t tell.
The deputy went on as if the Black Muslim hadn’t spoken: "We got us a couple of Northern radicals who reckon they’re better’n other folks their color, so they can hop on a bus and come down here and tell us how to live. And we got us one uppity buckra, too, sneakin’ around and stirrin’ up what oughta be damn well left alone. Well, I got news for y’all. That don’t fly, not in Neshoba County it don’t. What the hell you doin’ here, anyway?"
"We were looking at what’s left of Mount Zion Church in Longdale," Muhammad Shabazz answered.
"Yeah, I just bet you were. Fat lot your kind cares about churches," the big black deputy jeered.
"We care about justice, sir." Muhammad Shabazz spoke with respect that didn’t come close to hiding the anger underneath. "I do, and Mr. Abdul-Rashid does, and Mr. Price does, too. Do you, sir? Does justice mean anything to you at all?"
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