Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  —Cat got your tongue? she purred.

  He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither . . . A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood.

  He lost it. She was giving him everything he wanted, and it was a terrible thing. All that physical pleasure, tricking him into feeling on top of the world, feeling powerful and invulnerable and joyous. And then—And then—

  He heard the music.

  Villagers all, this frosty tide,

  Let your doors swing open wide

  Linton at the harpsichord, the book in front of him so he could improvise right there as the little mice came to the door in the snow, and the lamps were held high, and they sang their carol:

  Though wind may follow, and snow beside,

  Yet draw us in by your fire to bide;

  Joy shall be yours in the morning!

  The very first year, Linton just spoke the words, fiddling around with underscoring as he read. The second year, though, he had composed a tune, secretly, to surprise them, and when he got to the field-mice he put the book down and went to his instrument, and rattled it off on the keyboard, singing with gusto.

  They made him sing it again, in falsetto, to sound like mice. And after that they copied him, learned the tune, made harmonies. Every year since then, as Kay changed from treble to baritone, and Eloise’s soprano grew from piping to rich, it was the song they sang on Christmas Eve.

  Were they singing it now? He doubted it. He doubted it very much. If they were, he would be there. He would be there, singing, instead of right here, howling, as his pleasure refused to be staved off another measure.

  “Oh, Ratty!” he cried dismally, “why ever did I do it? Why did I bring you to this poor, cold little place, on a night like this, when you might have been at River Bank by this time, toasting your toes before a blazing fire, with all your own nice things about you!”

  Oh, and he knew he should be there now. He should be there with them. Even if they weren’t singing. Especially if they weren’t singing.

  Omne animal triste post coitum.

  All animals are sad after sex.

  She nuzzled his neck. They were stuck together, the sheet wrapped around their legs, soaking up sweat and come. He started to shake.

  He didn’t know which he hated more, the idea that they weren’t, despite what had happened, or the idea that they were: that somehow Linton was sitting gamely at the keyboard, pale and shaky—unless he was flushed, yeah, maybe he was flushed with a recent feeding from the bags in the fridge, for which Graham had called in every favor that years on the Board of the Sloan-Kettering could bring him—Linton sitting at the keyboard, eyes glittering with pleasure, young and strong and sure of himself for a few hours, until the daylight rolled around again and he had to go back in the—oh, no, it wasn’t funny, but you had to laugh—the dark little place with the door where no light entered, where the bad kids were shut up in Victorian novels, the place where old coats were stored, fur coats that parted to reveal another kingdom, the dark place where hungry young men hid the truth until we all got enlightened and everything changed . . . and now his dad was back in there again because the light was so bad for him, he cried and he burned when it touched him—

  —What is it? she said. —You’re shaking. What’s the matter?

  —Nothing, he said. —I’m okay.

  She rubbed some of the wet off him with an edge of the sheet, and reached down for a quilt, and pulled it over them both.

  —I don’t think you’re feverish, she said. She felt his forehead with her wrist, and he couldn’t help smiling, it was such a Wendy thing to do. —You’re kind of cold, really.

  —Omne animal triste post coitum. Only in my case, it’s chilly, not sad.

  —You’re chilly and sad.

  —It’ll pass.

  —OK.

  She didn’t say anything, just held him.

  I want you to be here, his father had said. I want to see you. We both do.

  I don’t want to see him. He didn’t say that. He’d never say that. He just wouldn’t show up. It wasn’t even that he didn’t want to see him. He didn’t want to hear the voice.

  —Did you ever have a tree? he asked. —Or a Chanukah Bush or something?

  She squeezed him in mild protest. —Tacky. If you want a tree, have a tree, I say. Don’t try to whitewash it. Don’t, like, frigging lie about it.

  —So you wanted one.

  —Well, yeah. Of course. A tree in your house? Come on.

  —I like that you don’t have one.

  —Good. I’m glad. She stroked his hair. —But you know what? For you . . . for you, Kay, I might get one. If you wanted it.

  —You would?

  —And when my mother visited, I’d say that it was all your fault.

  —You would?

  —I would. You’d back me up, though, wouldn’t you?

  —I would. For you, I’d lie to a nice old lady who probably marched against the Pentagon and won’t drink coffee that isn’t Fair Trade certified.

  —Hey, when did you meet my mom?

  —So how is she?

  —Fine. But I was just kidding.

  —I know, he said. —But your family. Are they all right?

  —Yeah. Sure. I just saw them last week. We always have this Chanukah party. Is there something—

  —No. It’s just . . . you never know. You never know when something’s going to happen. I mean, one day you’re all fine, and the next—the next —you just can’t believe it. It’s literally incredible. Like something you read in a book. Not something that could really happen. Not to anyone real. Not to anyone at all. Let alone someone you know. You see it, you know it, but you just cannot believe it. She told me, she even showed me, and I didn’t believe her.

  —Is she okay? Your sister, I mean.

  —Eloise? She’s fine.

  —What about your dad?

  —Graham’s a busy man. A very busy man, these days. Calling in favors. Calling up doctors. Calling on one-eyed gypsies from Transylvania . . . No, they’re fine. They’re both fine. They don’t know what happened, but they’re sure it isn’t catching.

  She understood, at last, or thought she did. —Your other dad, she said. Is he . . . sick?

  He made a little noise into her breast.

  —Like, really, really sick? And you just can’t face it?

  He thought of the syringes on the table, the plastic bags in the fridge and in the microwave, heating to 98.6.

  —You couldn’t either, believe me.

  —I know, she said. —I know. I hear about stuff, and I—I feel so lucky, sometimes.

  —It’s like—I can’t go home. Home isn’t even there anymore.

  —I know. She tightened her hold. She waited, then said, —Is he all . . . different?

  —Yeah. He used to be so—well, civilized. Disciplined. Controlled. And now —Now I wouldn’t trust him with anything. Not the book, not anything. You can’t turn your back on him. He’s hungry all the time.

  —He is?

  —He’ll eat anyone if he doesn’t stop himself. He’d eat the fucking field-mice if he could!

  —I thought it was supposed to make you not eat much, she said gently.

  —He doesn’t eat much. He doesn’t eat anything. He used to like broccoli rabe and anchovies and crème caramel. He can’t take real food at all, now.

  She touched his wrist. —I’m really, really sorry.

  —Yeah, well.

  —I’m glad you’re here.

  —Yeah. Her warm fingers slipped around his wrist, soft against his pulse, like life holding onto life. She’d know if anything happened to him. She’d know . . . The radiator clanked, and, on the edge of sleep, he jumped.

  “Sii-lent night . . . ”

  The sound drifted up from the radiator, no, from the window it was under, which rattled in a gust of wind, covering for a moment the words, the silly happy people out there s
inging in the street, and then it was, “Allllll is calm . . . Alllll is bright . . . ”

  “Yes, come along, field-mice,” cried the Mole eagerly. “This is quite like old times! Shut the door after you. Pull up that settle to the fire.”

  She said, —I’ll be your home, tonight.

  —Dulce Domum, Kay said quietly.

  —Dulce? Is that, like, ice cream?

  —It’s the chapter in the book, stupid. Latin for “Home, sweet home.”

  —I’ve got half a jar of dulce de leche from the corner bodega. When’s the last time you ate?

  —Breakfast, I guess.

  —Get up, she said. —In my home, we make fried eggs and toast in the middle of the night when we’re especially happy. It’s a tradition.

  And they braced themselves for the last long stretch, the home stretch, the stretch that we know is bound to end, sometime, in the rattle of the door-latch, the sudden firelight, and the sight of familiar things greeting us as long-absent travellers from far overseas.

  In this Hugo-nominated novella, there has been a worldwide collapse of technology. The Dominion—a portion of what was once the United States—is a place where science is scorned and a form of narrow-minded, bigoted Christianity rules. Christmas survives as one of four Universal Christian Holidays recognized by the Dominion; the others are Easter, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving. Which, despite the religious and patriotic trappings of this imagined future society, roughly parallel the other ancient pre-Christian seasonal festivals: spring (vernal) equinox, summer solstice, and autumnal equinox/harvest.

  Julian: A Christmas Story

  Robert Charles Wilson

  1

  This is a story about Julian Comstock, better known as Julian the Agnostic or (after his uncle) Julian Conqueror. But it is not about his conquests, such as they were, or his betrayals, or about the War in Labrador, or Julian’s quarrels with the Church of the Dominion. I witnessed many of those events—and will no doubt write about them, ultimately—but this narrative concerns Julian when he was young, and I was young, and neither of us was famous.

  2

  In late October of 2172—an election year—Julian and I, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, rode to the Tip east of the town of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and Julian tutored me in one of his heresies.

  It was a brisk, sunny day. There was a certain resolute promptness to the seasons in that part of Athabaska, in those days. Our summers were long, languid, and hot. Spring and fall were brief, mere custodial functions between the extremes of weather. Winters were short but biting. Snow set in around the end of December, and the River Pine generally thawed by late March.

  Today might be the best we would get of autumn. It was a day we should have spent under Sam Godwin’s tutelage, perhaps sparring, or target-shooting, or reading chapters from the Dominion History of the Union. But Sam was not a heartless overseer, and the kindness of the weather had suggested the possibility of an Outing, and so we had gone to the stables, where my father worked, and drawn horses, and ridden out of the Estate with lunches of black bread and salt ham in our back-satchels.

  We rode east, away from the hills and the town. Julian and I rode ahead; Sam rode behind, a watchful presence, his Pittsburgh rifle ready in the saddle holster at his side. There was no immediate threat of trouble, but Sam Godwin believed in perpetual preparedness; if he had a gospel, it was BE PREPARED; also, SHOOT FIRST; and probably, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES. Sam, who was old (nearly fifty), wore a dense brown beard stippled with wiry white hairs, and was dressed in what remained presentable of his tan-and-green Army of the Californias uniform, and a cloak to keep the wind off. He was like a father to Julian, Julian’s own true father having performed a gallows dance some years before. Lately he had been more vigilant than ever, for reasons he had not discussed, at least with me.

  Julian was my age (seventeen), and we were approximately the same height, but there the resemblance ended. Julian had been born an aristo; my family was of the leasing class. His skin was clear and pale where mine was dark and lunar. (I was marked by the same Pox that took my sister Flaxie to her grave in ’63.) His hair was long and almost femininely clean; mine was black and wiry, cut to stubble by my mother with her sewing scissors, and I washed it once a week or so—more often in summer, when the brook behind the cottage ran clean and cool. His clothes were linen and, in places, silk, brass-buttoned, cut to fit; my shirt and pants were course hempen cloth, sewn to a good approximation but obviously not the work of a New York tailor.

  And yet we were friends, and had been friends for three years, since we met by chance in the forested hills west of the Duncan and Crowley Estate, where we had gone to hunt, Julian with his fine Porter & Earle cassette rifle and me with a simple muzzle-loader. We both loved books, especially the boys’ books written in those days by an author named Charles Curtis Easton.[1] I had been carrying a copy of Easton’s Against the Brazilians, illicitly borrowed from the Estate library; Julian had recognized the title, but refrained from ratting on me, since he loved the book as much as I did and longed to discuss it with a fellow enthusiast (of which there were precious few among his aristo relations)—in short, he did me an unbegged favor, and we became fast friends despite our differences.

  In those early days I had not known how fond he was of blasphemy. But I had learned since, and it had not deterred me. Much.

  We had not set out with the specific aim of visiting the Tip; but at the nearest crossroad Julian turned west, riding past cornfields and gourdfields already harvested and sun-whitened split-rail fences on which dense blackberry gnarls had grown up. The air was cool but the sun was fiercely bright. Julian and Sam wore broad-brimmed hats to protect their faces; I wore a plain linen pakool hat, sweat-stained, rolled about my ears. Before long we passed the last rude shacks of the indentured laborers, whose near-naked children gawked at us from the roadside, and it became obvious we were going to the Tip, because where else on this road was there to go?—unless we continued east for many hours, all the way to the ruins of the old towns, from the days of the False Tribulation.

  The Tip was located far from Williams Ford to prevent poaching and disorder. There was a strict pecking order to the Tip. This is how it worked: professional scavengers hired by the Estate brought their pickings from the ruined places to the Tip, which was a pine-fenced enclosure (a sort of stockade) in a patch of grassland and prairie flowers. There the newly-arrived goods were roughly sorted, and riders were dispatched to the Estate to make the highborn aware of the latest acquisitions, and various aristos (or their trusted servants) would ride out to claim the prime gleanings. The next day, the leasing class would be allowed to sort through what was left; after that, if anything remained, indentured laborers could rummage among it, if they calculated it worthwhile to make the journey.

  Every prosperous town had a Tip; though in the east it was sometimes called a Till, a Dump, or an Eebay.

  Today we were fortunate: several wagonloads of scrounge had lately arrived, and riders had not yet been sent to notify the Estate. The gate was manned by a Home Guard, who looked at us suspiciously until Sam announced the name of Julian Comstock; then the guard briskly stepped aside, and we went inside the enclosure.

  Many of the wagons were still unloading, and a chubby Tipman, eager to show off his bounty, hurried toward us as we dismounted and moored our horses. “Happy coincidence!” he cried. “Gentlemen!” Addressing mostly Sam by this remark, with a cautious smile for Julian and a disdainful sidelong glance at me. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  “Books,” Julian said promptly, before Sam or I could answer.

  “Books! Ordinarily, I set aside books for the Dominion Conservator . . . ”

  “The boy is a Comstock,” Sam said. “I don’t suppose you mean to balk him.”

  The Tipman reddened. “No, not at all . . . in fact we came across something in our digging . . . a sort of library in miniature . . . I’ll show you, if you lik
e.”

  This was intriguing, especially to Julian, who beamed as if he had been invited to a Christmas party. We followed the stout Tipman to a freshly-arrived canvasback wagon, from which a laborer was tossing bundled piles into a stack beside a tent.

  These twine-wrapped bales were books . . . old, tattered, and wholly free of the Dominion Stamp of Approval. They must have been more than a century old; for although they were faded they had obviously once been colorful and expensively printed, not made of stiff brown paper like the Charles Curtis Easton books of modern times. They had not even rotted much. Their smell, under the cleansing Athabaska sunlight, was inoffensive.

  “Sam!” Julian whispered. He had already drawn his knife and was slicing through the twine.

  “Calm down,” suggested Sam, who was not an enthusiast like Julian.

  “Oh, but—Sam! We should have brought a cart!”

  “We can’t carry away armloads, Julian, nor would we ever have been allowed to. The Dominion scholars will have all this. Though perhaps you can get away with a volume or two.”

  The Tipman said, “These are from Lundsford.” Lundsford was the name of a ruined town thirty or so miles to the southeast. The Tipman leaned toward Sam Godwin, who was his own age, and said: “We thought Lundsford had been mined out a decade ago. But even a dry well may freshen. One of my workers spotted a low place off the main excavations—a sort of sink-hole: the recent rain had cut it through. Once a basement or warehouse of some kind. Oh, sir, we found good china there, and glasswork, and many more books than this . . . most were mildewed, but some had been protected under a kind of stiff oilcoth, and were lodged beneath a partially-collapsed ceiling . . . there had been a fire, but they survived it . . . ”

  “Good work, Tipman,” Sam Godwin said.

  “Thank you, sir! Perhaps you could remember me to the great men of the Estate?” And he gave his name (which I have forgotten).

  Julian had fallen to his knees amidst the compacted clay and rubble of the Tip, lifting up each book in turn and examining it with wide eyes. I joined him in his exploration.