by Pete Hautman
Lia hesitated. Was he another madman, intent on turning her into a ghost? She did not think so. He did not look like a Boggsian or a Medicant, and he was certainly not a Lah Sept priest. The cat was squirming in her arms, its yellow eyes fixed on the Klaatu.
The Gate buzzed and went from gray to orange. The Klaatu gathered in a ghostly clump and streamed back inside. The cat relaxed.
When the man beckoned to her again, Lia followed.
Early in the Digital Age, in a place known as Hopewell, several corporeal disk travelers were involved in notable occurrences, which made it a popular destination for Klaatu. Among the attractions were the Lah Sept girl Lah Lia and, of course, Tucker Feye.
The Gnomon Chayhim cited the events in Hopewell as a strong argument for dismantling the diskos. In an exchange with Iyl Rayn, the creator of the diskos, he said, “Any variation in Hopewell history is certain to influence later events.”
“All actions influence the future,” said Iyl Rayn. “If we accept your theory, the action of destroying the diskos would create its own paradoxes, not the least of which is that I myself would never have come to exist.”
“And how is that a bad thing?” Chayhim asked.
— E3
“THIS GIRL, LAHLIA . . . WHAT MADE YOU THINK SHE was from the future?” Dr. Arnay asked.
“She told me,” Tucker said. “Of course, I didn’t believe her. At first. I mean, at first she didn’t even talk. But later, after she went to live with the Beckers, I kind of got to know her. Me and Tom and Will, we sort of hung out with her.”
“Hung out? You talk like a beatnik.”
“What’s a beatnik?”
“Never mind. Was she your girlfriend?”
“No . . . not really. But I liked her. You know how sometimes you feel like you’re all alone and the world is a really strange place? Do you ever feel like that?”
“I’m in a submarine at the North Pole with a kid who claims to be from the future. It doesn’t get much stranger than that.”
Tucker thought maybe the doctor was smiling, but it was hard to tell with the mask covering half his face.
“I think Lahlia felt like that all the time. I mean, I spent my whole life in Hopewell, but to her it must have been like landing on another planet. Also . . . this sounds weird, but I think she might have come to Hopewell because of me, like I was responsible for her being there in the first place.”
“You must have a pretty high opinion of yourself,” Dr. Arnay said.
“It’s not that. It’s because she knew things about me. And I felt connected to her, like we had some kind of history together, only it was a history that hadn’t happened yet, you know what I mean?”
“Nope,” said the doctor, crossing his arms.
The arm crossing irritated Tucker. The guy was determined to not listen to him. And it bugged him that the doctor was wearing a mask.
“I’m not sick, you know,” he said. “You don’t need that thing on your face.”
“You’re probably right.” Dr. Arnay removed the mask. It left red stripes where the ties had crossed on his cheeks. “That better?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re still quarantined, until we can figure out what’s going on with you. Now, you were telling me about the girl?”
“Lahlia. I don’t know for sure that she came to Hopewell because of me, but it’s definitely on account of her that I ended up here.”
“She sent you to the North Pole?”
“Not exactly. But she was the reason I went through the disko on our house, and if I hadn’t done that . . . well, everything would be different.”
Dr. Arnay sighed, sat back in his chair, and made a circular motion with his hand, telling Tucker to continue. Tucker took a moment to reorganize his thoughts. If he told the doctor the literal truth, he would not be believed. Best to start out slow.
“I didn’t see much of her at first,” he said. “We were both living in Hopewell, but she pretty much stayed with the Beckers on their farm. I hardly saw her at all that whole first year. . . .”
“LAHLIA, COULD YOU FETCH THE WASH FROM THE LINE?”
Lia looked up at Maria Becker’s broad face and took a moment to process the words she had just heard.
Fetch the wash from the line?
Even after a year of living in this strange place, she had to translate from Maria’s English into inglés, then back into English. Fetch meant to gather or retrieve. Wash meant to cleanse. A line was a sequence of interconnected events, a row of objects, a string, a rope, a cord. The proper meanings of the words fell into place. It took only a fraction of a second but felt like longer.
“You wish me to remove the fabrics from the drying cord?”
Maria Becker smiled patiently. “Yes, dear.”
Dear as in affectionately regarded one, not deer, the animal of the woodlands, or Deere, the name of Arnold’s tractor.
“I will do that.” Lia took the empty laundry basket from Maria.
“Thank you, dear.”
“You are welcome,” Lia replied. She crossed the lawn to the clothesline, followed closely by the gray cat, whom she had named Bounce. As she unclipped and folded the dry sheets, towels, and other linens, Lia thought back over the past year.
When Lia had first arrived in Hopewell, last summer, the Reverend Feye had taken her to his home, where she met his wife and his son. The Reverend’s wife, Emily Feye, had red hair like the temple girl she had met in the garden, but she was older and thinner. Lia later learned that red hair was not uncommon here. The Reverend’s son looked like a younger version of the boy who had appeared on the pyramid, the one who distracted the priests, allowing her to escape.
The boy’s name was Tucker Feye. Tuckerfeye? Lia had been astonished to hear a name straight out of The Book of September. Was it possible that this ordinary-looking boy could be the prophet Tuckerfeye? The Tuckerfeye who would one day be sacrificed by his own father? Lia watched him carefully during the few days she lived with the Feyes, but the boy showed no signs of being exceptional.
The Reverend had then given her to Arnold and Maria Becker, and nearly all of her time since then had been spent on the farm. It was not so bad. She quickly learned to speak and read their archaic version of inglés. Arnold and Maria kept her busy with an endless chain of chores. Lia did not mind the work. Feeding the calves, working in the garden, doing the laundry — Lia pressed a clean pillowcase to her face and inhaled the fresh scent of air-dried cotton — each of these tasks provided its own small pleasures.
Arnold did not believe in schools, but every night, after the chores were done, Lia was expected to read books. In Romelas there had been only one book: The Book of September. Here there were many. According to Arnold, the most important of them all was the Holy Bible. The Bible was similar to The Book of September. It contained many of the same stories, but the stories were full of numbers. The Book of September had no numbers. Numbers were the reason the old books had been destroyed.
The Beckers’ other books were also riddled with numbers. Lia learned to let her eyes glide over the figures. She enjoyed reading about history, geography, and biology, but not mathematics. When Maria attempted to teach her about numbers, Lia let her eyes glaze over and blocked the sound of Maria’s voice from her head. After a few unsuccessful attempts, Maria concluded that Lia was dull-witted, and abandoned her efforts.
Lia’s favorite books were those she found on a shelf in the spare bedroom. Books for children, with clear, unambiguous writing and not so many numbers. One night, Lia read a book called A Wrinkle in Time. The next day, she asked Maria if she had ever met Meg, or Charles, or Mrs. Whatsit, or any of the other people in the book. Maria laughed and explained that the book was “fiction.”
“It’s just a silly story somebody made up,” Maria said. “I should throw those old books of Ronnie’s out.”
“Who is Ronnie?” Lia asked.
“Ronnie was our son,” she said, and would say no more. Lia assume
d that the boy had died or been given away to another family, as she had been given to the Beckers. Perhaps that was their custom here.
Every Sunday during those first few months, the Beckers attended the Church of the Holy Word. Tucker Feye was always there, in the front row with his mother. Lia would watch him. Occasionally she would catch him turning his head to look back at her.
He did not look like a prophet. Perhaps Tuckerfeye was simply a name used by many different people. If so, then this Tucker Feye might not be the Tuckerfeye in The Book of September. Or perhaps the Book was like A Wrinkle in Time — what Maria called fiction. Or what the Lait Pike had called the words of men.
The more she saw of him, the more Tucker Feye resembled the boy who had appeared on the pyramid. If he was that boy, then they were connected by events that had yet to happen for him.
As the leaves turned to gold and the air became crisp and cool, they made what would turn out to be their last visit to the Reverend Feye’s church. That Sunday, as the Reverend droned on from his pulpit, Lia, sitting between Arnold and Maria, was keeping herself awake by staring at the back of Tucker’s head. She wondered if he could feel her eyes on him, and what it would feel like to put her fingers in his hair, to touch his skin.
Arnold leaned across her, blocking her view. “Just look at her,” he whispered to Maria, “with her hair going to white. She has eyes like a scared cat.” He was talking about Emily Feye.
“Emily is going through a hard time,” Maria said.
“It’s not normal. She’s working number puzzles during service!”
Maria shushed him. Arnold sat back in the pew, his jaw set, and Lia went back to watching Tucker, willing him to turn and look at her. He never did.
On the ride home, Maria said, “Emily is taking a new medication, I heard. One of those antidepressants.”
Arnold snorted. “Well, it’s not working.”
Lia had not seen Tucker since that day. They moved their worship to a Baptist church in the nearby town of Ghentburg, where, as Arnold put it, “The preacher understands the importance of hellfire.”
Winter arrived on the heels of a knee-deep snowstorm. Lia had never seen snow before. In Romelas the climate had been much warmer.
The snow was breathtakingly beautiful, a blanket of pure white over the land. Arnold had to plow the driveway with his tractor. Lia and Maria helped by shoveling paths from the house to the chicken coop and the calf barn. It was fun at first, but the cold soon cut through Lia’s wool mittens and made her hands hurt. Her cheeks stung as if she had been slapped. By the time they finished, Lia decided that snow was not so beautiful after all.
In the winter there was less to do around the farm. Lia spent her days reading books, playing with Bounce, and staring moodily out the window. Neither Arnold nor Maria paid much attention to her. Other than the prayers with which they began every meal, there was little talk. Lia did not mind. As a Pure Girl, she had spent much time alone. Thinking back, she missed only her conversations with the Lait Pike, and her dojo sessions with Yar Song. She had traded one variety of loneliness for another. At least she was safe. There were no machine-wearing Medicants here, no mad Boggsians with imaginary horses or priests bearing batons. Arnold and Maria had never threatened to stab her in the heart or turn her into a Klaatu.
Even so, she was restless.
When spring came, she began taking long walks through the countryside. Bounce always accompanied her, like a shadow. She sometimes thought they were both shadows, here but not here, like the Klaatu.
Her walks often took her to nearby Hardy Lake, where she would sit with Bounce and look out over the water. One afternoon she saw a glimmer of light appear high above the surface of the lake. The glimmer became a disk. A Gate! As she watched, a Klaatu emerged and swooped down to hover a few feet before her. Bounce hissed, and his tail grew large.
“Go away,” Lia said to the Klaatu. She picked up a stick and threw it at the ghostly form. The Klaatu broke apart and disappeared. A few seconds later, the Gate flickered and was gone.
Lia thought about the Gates often. She was not a prisoner here — she could leave anytime she wanted through the Gate on top of the old hotel. But that Gate might return her to the half-completed pyramid in the city of the Medicants, and to Artur Zelig-Boggs, who would try to make her into a Klaatu. She had no desire to revisit that world.
There was another Gate, however, above Tucker Feye’s home. She had seen it during her first days in Hopewell; it came and went at random intervals, never staying for long. She suspected it was how the Reverend Feye had arrived on the pyramid. If so, that Gate might take her back to Romelas. She imagined herself stepping out of the Gate onto the frustum. She might be declared a Yar. Or the priests would simply stun her with their batons and complete the sacrifice.
Still, if she ever decided to leave this place, that was the way.
Lia draped Bounce across her shoulders and walked from Hardy Lake to the Feye house. She stopped on the road in front of the house and stared up at the roof, but saw no Gate.
A movement in the side garden caught her eye. She saw a hunched-over figure dressed all in white. Lia walked up the driveway and stopped at the edge of the garden. It was Tucker’s mother, on her hands and knees, wearing her nightgown, weeding.
“Hello?” Lia said.
Emily Feye looked up. Lia was shocked by how much she had changed. She had lost weight, her eyes were watery and fearful, and her mouth hung slack.
“Are you all right?” Lia asked.
“Weeds,” said Emily Feye in a querulous voice. Beside her was a pile of uprooted plant matter.
“Weeds,” Lia agreed, although she noticed that mixed in with the weeds was an equal quantity of flowers and bulbs. A large patch of the garden was completely bare. Emily Feye nodded sadly and returned to her work, pulling up whatever plant her hands touched.
“Is Tucker here?” Lia asked. Receiving no response, she went to the front door and knocked. No answer. She backed away from the house and looked again at the roof. No Gate.
Emily Feye had paused in her work and was watching Lia.
“Ghosts,” she said.
“Ghosts?” said Lia.
Emily pointed a shaking finger at the roof. “When it comes, it brings ghosts.” She kept her eyes on the roof for a few seconds, then returned to her weeding.
Lia asked, “Do the ghosts come often?”
“Weeds,” said Emily Feye as she uprooted a tulip bulb.
That had been months ago. Lia had not been back to the Feyes’ since. It was summer now, and she was still here, on the farm, taking sheets off the clothesline. With each blade of grass bent beneath her feet, with each breath of farm-scented air, with each molecule of oxygen that struck her arms and face, she could feel herself becoming more embedded in this world. That thought brought with it a wave of sadness. Was this her life now? As she pulled the last flapping sheet from the line, she was surprised to feel tears coursing down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes with the clean white sheet, folded it carefully, and placed it atop the full basket. She could hear the low-pitched complaints of the slave cattle coming from the barn, the faint hiss of wind passing through tasseled corn.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the rattle of an old pickup truck pulling into the driveway. Lia stopped what she was doing and watched as the truck juddered to a halt in front of the house. A man with long black hair hanging to his shoulders, tattered jeans, and a leather vest climbed out. He stretched, then put his hands on his hips and looked around. His eyes landed on Lia. He jerked up his chin in apparent surprise, then walked across the lawn to the clothesline.
“Hey there,” he said. He was a grown man, but not as old as Arnold and Maria.
“Hello,” said Lia.
The man looked around some more.
“Arnold and Maria still live here?” he asked.
Lia nodded.
“They okay?”
Lia wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so she said
nothing.
“They must be getting old,” the man said.
“Arnold says he is as old as the hills,” Lia said. “But I doubt it.”
The man frowned. “So, who are you?”
“Lah Lia.”
“You family? Maria didn’t go and make me a sister now, did she?”
That statement made no sense at all, so Lia did not reply.
The man shrugged. “I guess not. She was closing in on fifty when I took off.”
“Took off what?” Lia asked.
The man gave her a quizzical look. “You’re a pistol,” he said.
Lia picked up the basket of clean laundry and started for the house. The man was as mad as a Boggsian.
“So where’s Arnold at?” the man asked, following her.
“He is milking the slave cattle.” Lia inclined her head toward the milking barn, where Arnold was tending to his cows.
“And Maria?”
Before Lia could answer, Maria stepped outside, carrying a bucket of vegetable scraps for the compost heap. Maria looked at the man with a puzzled expression, then her mouth fell open and she dropped the bucket.
“Ronnie?”
“Hey, Mama,” said the man.
MARIA INVITED RONNIE INTO THE HOUSE. LIA followed them inside and stood in the next room to hear what they were saying. Most of it was confusing, but she understood that Ronnie had left a very long time ago and that it had not been a joyous occasion. Maria prepared a lunch for her son, and Ronnie told her of the many things he had been doing since she had last seen him. Several times, he told her he was sorry. Lia did not know what he was sorry for, but his apologies were welcomed by Maria.
Arnold returned from the barn and joined them. He, too, listened to Ronnie’s apologies, and after some negotiations, which Lia did not understand, it was agreed that Ronnie would stay with them. Maria cleared out the unused upstairs bedroom, while Ronnie and Arnold talked. Mostly, it was Arnold talking, telling his son of all the work that needed to be done. After a time, Lia entered the kitchen and stood silently by until Arnold noticed her.
