Galaxy's Edge Magazine

by Orson Scott Card

  Then he poled his empty boat back across the river. It was always empty on the return trip, for no one ever came back from hell. And then he waited for the next boatload of dead souls to accumulate on the shore, silently holding out their pitiful coins, their mournful eyes as dead and dim as their souls. He took their coins, loaded them into his boat, and delivered them to hell. They meant as little to him as their coins. And then he returned alone, back across the dark rolling river, his life as empty as his boat, and he prepared to do it all again.

  In some rare moments the dead did not crowd the shore, pleading for passage. In those rare moments Charon scratched his long white beard, which he seemed to have always had, as he could not remember ever having been young and beardless, and he thought about his eternal present. But for the shades, about whom he never thought, he was alone on the river. Had he always been so alone? Had he never had a family? Parents? A companion?

  What would it be like to have a companion, he wondered? Would a companion be welcome, or would a companion be simply another version of hell? And would it be different if the companion were a man or a woman? Charon ferried just as many female shades across the river as male. What would it mean to have a female companion?

  Charon had no way of knowing, and he shook his head to banish such thoughts from his addled mind. Such thoughts did no good. They only reminded him of his silent and solitary life, a life that had always been silent and solitary, and would always remain so, for all of eternity.

  Charon looked up from his dark and lonely thoughts and realized that a shade stood on the shore, awaiting passage across the river. This shade, however, was not some dim shadow. It pulsed with a luminous glow Charon had never before seen. The glow emanated from a handsome young man, and the ever-present darkness retreated from the light. And then Charon did something he never did. He broke the eternal silence and spoke. “You are not a shade, you are yet alive.”

  “Yes, I am alive.”

  “How did you get here? Only the dead pass Cerebus, the living he warns away.”

  The young man smiled. “I was able to sooth the savage beast. And now I wish passage across the river to the other side.”

  Charon was confused. He had only ferried the dead across the river. Was he allowed to ferry the living across? But who was there to give or withhold permission? Was this a decision he could make? It was a new idea, and a new experience, and Charon had little of either. “Why would one of the living wish to enter the realm of the dead?”

  “To find the woman I love,” the young man replied.

  Charon almost laughed, another new experience. “You will find her soon enough when you become a shade yourself, and join her.”

  “I don’t wish to join her, I wish to bring her back from the depths of hell.”

  This time Charon did laugh, a loud cackle that echoed in the darkness. Startled by the unfamiliar sound, he abruptly stopped, and grimaced at the young man. “In all the time I have ferried dead souls across this river, which is all the time I can remember, I have never ferried anyone back across the river from the farther shore of Hades. No one comes back from hell. Cease your nonsense and be gone. Return to the living, where you belong, and leave me to my silence and my solitude.”

  “I will not return to the living, not alone,” the young man replied. “I will stand here forever, if need be, until you take me to the other side.”

  Charon growled. “You begin to anger me.” Another new experience.

  The young man smiled at him. “Then perhaps, as with the savage Cerebus, I may sooth your anger.”

  And the young man began to sing. He lifted his voice into the darkness, and it echoed back a thousand fold, beautiful, lovely, exquisite. Charon gaped at the sound in stunned silence. If he had ever heard a song before, he had never heard one such as this. It was a song filled with emotions that Charon thought had died within him eons before, if they had ever existed at all. The young man sang of happiness and joy, of warmth and companionship, of love neverending. And then he sang of loss and loneliness, and of death neverending. And then he sang of a love stronger than death, of a love that would conquer death and rob the tomb of its trophy.

  As Charon listened to the song, strange emotions surged through him. At first his heart leaped with unknown feelings of love, a love beyond all comprehension and understanding, a love such as he had never before experienced. And then his heart was torn asunder and he was plunged into despair, and he experienced the loss and the loneliness and the horror of death neverending. Charon had always been surrounded by the dead, untold numbers of the dead, countless dim shades of the dead that he had ferried for eternity across the river. He never gave them any thought. They meant nothing to him. They were just the freight he ferried. Now, for the first time in his existence, he realized the horror in which he participated, he realized the sorrow and the loss of those he conveyed to the boundary of hell. So many of them, perhaps most, perhaps all, were loved by someone left behind among the living. Each one of them represented a heart-wrenching loss that Charon had never before wondered about or felt.

  But now Charon felt the untold enormity of the loss and the sorrow each one of his trips represented. And, for the first time that he could remember, he felt yet another new experience. He cried. Tears, strange tears, flooded down over his cheeks and soaked into his scraggly white beard. He bent over, wracked with body shaking sobs; he fell to his knees in the bottom of his boat, and howled with the pain and sorrow of loss that each and every soul he had carried to hell represented.

  The young man ceased singing, and Charon looked up at him through his tears. “Get into my boat,” he said. “I will ferry you across the river.”

  The young man climbed in, seated himself, and looked eagerly with yearning eyes toward the further shore of hell.

  Charon’s boat crunched up on the shoreline of hell and the youth stepped out. He turned to Charon and said, “Wait for me until I return.”

  “No one returns from death’s dark dominion,” Charon replied.

  “I will return, and I will not return alone.”

  Charon stared at the luminous young man, and believed him. And he asked a question he had never asked of any passenger. “What is your name?”

  The young man smiled at him. “Orpheus,” he said.

  Charon nodded at that, and said what he had never said before. “I will wait for you.”

  Copyright © 2018 by Eric Leif Davin

  Orson Scott Card is a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner, and the author of an acknowledged classic (Ender’s Game). We’re proud to welcome him to the pages of Galaxy’s Edge.

  CAROUSEL

  by Orson Scott Card

  Cyril’s relationship with his wife really went downhill after she died. Though, if he was honest with himself—something he generally tried, with some success, to avoid—things hadn’t been going all that well while Alice was alive. Everything he did seemed to irritate her, and when he didn’t do anything at all, that irritated her too.

  “It’s not your fault,” Alice explained to him. “You try, I can see that you try, but you just...you’re just wrong about everything. Not very wrong. Not oblivious or negligent or unconcerned. Just a little bit mistaken.”

  “About what? Tell me and I’ll get better.”

  “About what people want, who they are, what they need.”

  “What do you need?” Cyril asked.

  “I need you to stop asking what I need,” she said. “I need you to know. The children need you to know. You never know.”

  “Because you won’t tell me.”

  “See?” she said. “You have to make it my fault. Why should people always have to tell you, Cyril? It’s like you go through life in a well-meaning fog. You can’t help it. Nobody blames you.”

  But she blamed him. He knew that. He tried to get better, to notice more. To remember. But there was that note of
impatience—in her voice, the children’s voices, his boss’s voice. As if they were thinking, I’m having to explain this to you?

  Then Alice was hit by a car driven by a resurrected Han dynasty Chinese man who had no business behind the wheel—he plowed into a crowd on a bustling sidewalk and then got out and walked away as nonchalantly as if he had successfully parallel parked a large car in a small space. It was the most annoying thing about the dead—how they thought killing total strangers was no big deal, as long as they didn’t mean to do it. And since the crowd only had two living people in it, the number of deaths was actually quite low. Alice’s death barely rose to the level of a statistic, in the greater scheme of things.

  She was thoughtful enough to clean up and change clothes before she came home that night—resurrection restored every body part as it should be at the peak of mature health, but it did nothing for the wardrobe. Still, the change in her attitude was immediate. She didn’t even try to start dinner.

  “What’s for dinner, Mom?” asked Delia.

  “Whatever your father fixes,” said Alice.

  “Am I fixing dinner?” asked Cyril. He liked to cook, but it usually took some planning and he wasn’t sure what Alice would let him use to put together a meal.

  “Go out to eat, have cold cereal, I really don’t care,” said Alice.

  This was not like her. Alice controlled everybody’s diet scrupulously, which is why she almost never allowed Cyril to cook. He realized at once what it meant, and the kids weren’t far behind.

  “Oh, Mom,” said Roland softly. “You’re not dead, are you?”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “But don’t worry, it only hurt for about a minute while I bled out.”

  “Did the resurrection feel good?” asked Delia, always curious.

  “The angel was right there, breathed in my mouth—very sweet. A bit of a tingle everywhere. But really not such a great feeling that it’s worth dying for, so you shouldn’t be in a hurry to join me, dear.”

  “So you won’t be eating with us,” said Cyril.

  She shook her head a little, eyes closed. “‘Dead’ means I don’t eat, Cyril. Everyone knows that the dead don’t eat. We don’t breathe except so we can talk. We don’t drink and if we do, it’s just to keep company with the living, and the liquids all evaporate from our skins so we also don’t pee. We also don’t want sex anymore, Cyril. Not with each other and not with you.”

  She had never mentioned sex in front of the children before, except for the talk with Delia when she turned ten, and that was all about time-of-the-month things. If Delia had any idea what sex was, Cyril didn’t think she got it from her mother. So the children blanched and recoiled when she mentioned it.

  “Oh, don’t be such big babies, you know your father and I had sex, or you wouldn’t look so much like him. Which is fine for you, Roland, your father’s a good-looking man, in his way. But a bit of a drag for you, Delia, with that jaw. And the resurrection won’t fix that. Resurrection isn’t cosmetic surgery. Which is really unfair, when you think about it. People who are genetically retarded or crippled or sick have their DNA repaired to some optimum state, but girls with overly mannish features or tiny breasts or huge ones, for that matter, their DNA is left completely alone, they’re stuck like that for eternity.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Delia. “I love having my confidence destroyed once again, and I haven’t even begun doing my homework yet.”

  “So you aren’t going to eat with us?” asked Roland.

  “Oh, of course I’ll sit at table with you,” said Alice. “For the company.”

  In the event, Cyril got out everything in the fridge that looked like it might go on a sandwich and everybody made their own. Except Alice, of course. She just sat at the table and made comments, without even a pause to take a bite or chew.

  “The way I see it,” said Alice, “is that it’s all poop. Nothing you’re putting on sandwiches even looks appetizing any more, because I see that poopiness of it all. You’re going to eat it and digest it and poop it out. The nutrients will decay and eventually end up in some farmer’s field where it will become more future-poop, which he’ll harvest and it’ll get processed into a more poopable state, so you can heat it or freeze it or thaw it or whatever, chew it up or drink it, and then turn it into poop again. Life is poop.”

  “Mom,” said Delia. “It’s usually Roland who makes us sick while we’re eating.”

  “I thought you’d want to hear my new perspective as a post-living person.” She sounded miffed.

  “Please speak more respectfully to your mother,” said Cyril to Delia.

  “Cyril, really,” said Alice. “I don’t need you to protect me from Delia’s snippy comments. It’s not going to kill me to hear her judgmentalness directed at the woman who gave birth to her.”

  “Feel free to criticize your mother’s defecatory comments,” said Cyril. “Or ignore them, as you choose.”

  “I know, Dad,” said Delia. There was that familiar hint of eye-rolling in her tone of voice. Once again Cyril must have guessed wrong about what to say, or leave unsaid. He had never really gotten it right when Alice was alive, and now that she was dead-and-resurrected, he’d have no chance, because he was no longer dealing with a wife, or even, strictly speaking, a woman. She was a visitor with a key to the house.

  Within a few weeks, Cyril found himself remembering the awful night of Alice’s death as a particularly lovely time, because she actually sat with them during dinner and wasn’t trying to lead the children off into some kind of utterly bizarre activity.

  She showed up at any hour of the day and expected to be able to take Delia or Roland with her on whatever adventure she’d gotten it into her head to try with them.

  “No, Alice, you may not take Roland out of school so he can go scuba diving with you.”

  “It’s really not your place to say what I can or cannot do,” said Alice.

  “The law is clear, Alice—when you die you become, in a word, deceased. You no longer have any custody over the children. Thousands of years of legal precedent make that clear. Not to mention tons of recent case law in which the resurrected are found to be unfit parents in every case.”

  “Aren’t you lucky that the dead can’t get angry,” said Alice.

  “I suppose that I am,” said Cyril. “But I’m not dead, and I was furious when I found you practically forcing Roland to walk along the top of a very high fence.”

  “It’s exhilarating,” said Alice.

  “He was terrified.”

  “Oh, Cyril, are you really going to let a child’s fears—”

  “He was right to be terrified. He could have broken his neck.”

  “And would it have been such a tragedy if he did?” asked Alice. “I was run over by a car and I turned out OK.”

  “You think you’re OK?” asked Cyril.

  Alice held up her hands and twisted her wrists as if to prove that her parts worked.

  “Here’s how I know you’re not OK, Alice,” said Cyril. “You keep trying to put the kids in high-risk situations. You’re trying to kill them, Alice.”

  “Don’t think of it as death. I’m not dead. How is it death?”

  “How can I put this kindly?” said Cyril, who by this point had actually stopped trying to be kind. “You’re dead to me.”

  “Just because I’m no longer available for empty reproductive gestures does not mean I’m not here for you, Cyril.”

  “I’m going to get a restraining order if you don’t stop taking the kids on dangerous activities. You don’t have any guardianship rights over these children.”

  “My fingerprints say I’m still their mother!”

  “Alice, when you were their mother, you wanted them to relish every stage of their life. Now you’re trying to get them to skip all the rest of the stages.”

  “You can’t
manipulate me with guilt,” said Alice. “I’m beyond human emotions and needs.”

  “Then why do you still need the children with you?”

  “I’m their mother.”

  “You were their mother,” said Cyril.

  “I was and I am,” said Alice.

  “Alice, I may have been a disappointment as a husband.”

  “And as a father, Cyril. The children are often disappointed in you.”

  “But I meet a basic minimum, Alice. I’m alive. I’m human. Of their species. I want them to be alive. I’d like them to live to adulthood, to marry, to have children.”

  Alice shook her head incredulously. “Go outside and look at the street, Cyril. Hundreds of people lie down and sleep in the streets or on the lawns every night, because the world has no shortage of people.”

  “Just because you’ve lost all your biological imperatives doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t have them.”

  “Cyril, your reasoning is backward. The children will be much happier without biological imperatives.”

  “So you admit you’re trying to kill them.”

  “I’m trying to awaken them from the slumber of mortality.”

  “I don’t want to waken them from that slumber,” said Cyril sharply. “If it’s a dream, then let them finish the dream and come out of it in their own time.”