“I don’t know if it’s all of them. But I’ve never thought of a book that I haven’t read. If one book mentions another book, I’ve already read it. I know how they all end. I suppose it must be more fun to read, if you don’t already know every scene and every word.”
“No worse than the carousel,” said Cyril. “It just goes around and around.”
“But the face of the person riding it changes,” she said. “And I don’t always know what they’re going to say before they say it.”
“So you’re curious.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t really care. It just passes the time.”
Cyril rode in silence for a while.
“Why do you think he did it?” he finally asked.
“Who?” she asked. Then, “Oh, you mean the resurrection. Why did God, you know.”
“This is God’s anteroom, right? So it seems appropriate to wonder. Why now. Why everybody all at once. Why children came back as adults.”
“Everybody gets their perfect body,” she said. “And knowledge. Everything’s fair. God must be fair.”
Cyril pondered that. He couldn’t even argue with it. Very even-handed. He couldn’t feel that he had been singled out for some kind of torment. Many people had suffered worse. When his children had died, he was still able to talk to them. It had to feel much worse if they were simply gone.
“Maybe this is a good thing,” said Cyril.
“Nobody believes that,” she said.
“No,” said Cyril. “I can’t imagine that they do. When you wish—when your child dies, or your wife. Or husband, or whatever—you don’t really think of how they’d come back. You want them back just as they were. But then what? Then they’d just die again, later, under other circumstances.”
“At least they’d have had a life in between,” said Dorcas.
Cyril smiled. “You’re not the ordinary dead person,” he said. “You have opinions. You have regrets.”
“What can I regret? What did I ever do wrong?” she asked. “No, I’m just pissed off.”
Cyril laughed aloud. “You can’t be angry. My wife is dead, and she’s never angry.”
“So I’m not angry. But I know that it’s wrong. It’s supposed to make us happy and it doesn’t, so it’s wrong, and wrongness feels...”
“Wrong,” Cyril prompted.
“And that’s as close as I can come to being angry,” said Dorcas. “You too?”
“Oh, I can feel anger! I don’t have to be ‘close,’ I’ve got the real thing. Pissed off, that’s what I feel. Resentful. Spiteful. Whining. Self-pitying. And I don’t mind admitting it. My wife and children were resurrected and they’ll live forever and they seem perfectly content. But you’re not content.”
“I’m content,” she said. “What else is there to be? I’m pissed off, but I’m content.”
“I wish this really were God’s anteroom,” said Cyril. “I’d be asking the secretary to make me an appointment.”
“You want to talk to God?”
“I want to file a complaint,” said Cyril. “It doesn’t have to be, like, an interview with God himself. I’m sure he’s busy.”
“Not really,” said the voice of a man.
Cyril looked at the inner row, where a handsome young man sat in the throne. “You’re God?” Cyril asked.
“You don’t like the resurrection,” said God.
“You know everything, right?” asked Cyril.
“Yes,” said God. “Everybody hates this. They prayed for it, they wanted it, but when they got it, they complained, just like you.”
“I never asked for this.”
“But you would have,” said God, “as soon as somebody died.”
“I wouldn’t have asked for this,” said Cyril. “But what do you care?”
“I’m not resurrected,” said God. “Not like them. I still care about things.”
“Why didn’t you let them care, then?” asked Cyril.
“Billions of people on Earth again, healthy and strong, and I should make them care? Think of the wars. Think of the crimes. I didn’t bring them back to turn the world into hell.”
“What is it, if it isn’t hell?” asked Cyril.
“Purgatory,” said Dorcas.
“Limbo,” Cyril suggested back.
“Neither one exists,” said God. “I tried them for a while, but nobody liked them, either. Listen, it’s not really my fault. Once a soul exists, it can never be erased. Annihilated. I found them, I had to do something with them. I thought this world was a good way to use them. Let them have a life. Do things, feel things.”
“That worked fine,” said Cyril. “It was going fine till you did this.” He gestured toward Dorcas.
“But there were so many complaints,” said God. “Everybody hated death, but what else could I do? Do you have any idea how many souls I have that still haven’t been born?”
“So cycle through them all. Reincarnation, let them go around and around.”
“It’s a long time between turns,” said God. “Since the supply of souls is infinite.”
“You didn’t mention infinite,” said Cyril. “I thought you just meant there were a lot of us.”
“Infinite is kind of a lot,” said God.
“To me it is,” said Cyril. “I thought that to you—”
“I know, this whole resurrection didn’t work out like I hoped. Nothing does. I should never have taken responsibility for the souls I found.”
“Can’t you just...put some of us back?”
“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said God, shaking his head vehemently. “Never that. It’s—once you’ve had a body, once you’ve been part of creation, to take you back out of it—you’d remember all the power, and you’d feel the loss of it—like no suffering. Worst thing in the world. And it never ends.”
“So you’re saying it’s hell.”
“Yes,” said God. “There’s no fire, no sulfur and all that. Just endless agony over the loss of...of everything. I can’t do that to any of the souls. I like you. All of you. I hate it when you’re unhappy.”
“We’re unhappy,” said Cyril.
“No,” said God. “You’re sad, but you’re not really suffering.”
Cyril was in tears again. “Yes I am.”
“Suck it up,” said God. “It can be a hell of a lot worse than this.”
“You’re not really God,” said Cyril.
“I’m the guy in charge,” said God. “What is that, if not God? But no, there’s no omnipotent transcendental being who lives outside of time. No unmoved mover. That’s just stupid anyway. The things people say about me. I know you can’t help it. I’m doing my best, just like most of you. And I keep trying to make you happy. This is the best I’ve done so far.”
“It’s not very good,” said Cyril.
“I know,” said God. “But it’s the best so far.”
Dorcas spoke up from the ticket booth. “But I never really had a life.”
God sighed. “I know.”
“Look,” said Cyril. “Maybe this really is the best. But do you have to have everybody stay here? On Earth, I mean? Can’t you, like, create more worlds?”
“But people want to see their loved ones,” said God.
“Right,” said Cyril. “We’ve seen them. Now move them along and let the living go on with our lives.”
“So maybe a couple of conversations with the dead and they move on,” said God, apparently thinking about it. “What about you, Dorcas?”
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m dead, what do I care?”
“You care,” said God. “Not the cares of the body. But you have the caring of a soul. It’s a different kind of desire, but you all have it, and it never goes away.”
“My wife and children don’t care about anyth
ing,” said Cyril.
“They care about you.”
“I wish,” said Cyril.
“Why do you think they haven’t left? They see you’re unhappy.”
“I’m unhappy because they won’t go,” said Cyril.
“Why haven’t you told them that? They’d go if you did.”
Cyril said nothing. He had nothing to say.
“You don’t want them to go,” said Dorcas.
“I want my children back,” Cyril said. “I want my wife to love me.”
“I can’t make people love other people,” said God. “Then it wouldn’t be love.”
“You really have a limited skill set,” said Cyril.
“I really try not to do special favors,” said God. “I try to set up rules and then follow them equally for everybody. It seems more fair that way.”
“By definition,” said Dorcas. “That’s what fairness is. But who says fairness is always good?”
God shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I wish I did. But I’ll give it a shot, how about that? Maybe I can eventually fix this thing. Maybe the next thing will be a little better. And maybe I’ll never get it right. Who knows?”
And he was gone.
So was Dorcas.
Cyril got off the hippo. He was dizzy and had to cling to the pole. The carousel wasn’t going to stop. So he waited until he had a stretch of open floor and leapt off.
He stumbled, lurched against a wall, slid down, and lay on the floor. The quartet stopped playing. The carousel slowed down and stopped. Apparently it automatically knew when there were no passengers.
A baby cried.
Cyril walked to the ticket window and looked in. On the floor sat a toddler, a little girl, surrounded by a pile of women’s clothing. The toddler looked up at him. “Cyril,” she said in her baby voice.
“Do you remember being a grownup?” Cyril asked her.
The little girl looked puzzled.
“How do I get in there?”
“Hungry!” said the little girl and she cried again.
Cyril saw a door handle inside the ticket booth and eventually figured out where the door was in the outside wall. He got it open. He picked up little Dorcas and wrapped her in the dress she had been wearing. God was giving her a life.
Cyril carried her out of God’s anteroom and down the stoop. The crowds were gone. Just a few cars, with only the living inside them. Some of them were stopped, the drivers just sitting there. Some of them were crying. Some just had their eyes closed. But eventually somebody honked at somebody else and the cars in the middle of the road started going again.
Cyril took a cab home and carried the baby inside. Alice and Delia and Roland were gone. There was food in the fridge. Cyril got out the old high chair and fed Dorcas. When she was done, he set her in the living room and went in search of toys and clothes. He mentally talked to Alice as he did: So it’s stupid to keep children’s clothes and toys when we’re never going to have more children, is it? Well, I never said it, but I always thought it, Alice: Just because you decided not to have any more babies doesn’t mean I would never have any.
He got Dorcas dressed and she played with the toys until she fell asleep on the living room carpet. Then Cyril lay on the floor beside her and wept for his children and the wife he had loved far more than she loved him, and for the lost life; yet he also wept for joy, that God had actually listened to him, and given him this child, and given Dorcas the life she had longed for.
He wondered a little where God had sent the other souls, and he wondered if he should tell anybody about his conversation with God, but then he decided it was all none of his business. He had a job the next day, and he’d have to arrange for day care, and buy food that was more appropriate for the baby. And diapers. He definitely needed those.
He slept, and dreamed that he was on the carousel again, dizzy, but moving forward, and he didn’t mind at all that he would never get anywhere, because it was all about the ride.
Copyright © 2012 by Orson Scott Card
Jody Lynn Nye is the author of forty novels and more than one hundred stories, and has at various times collaborated with Anne McCaffrey and Robert Asprin. Her husband, Bill Fawcett, is a prolific author, editor and packager, and is also active in the gaming field.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
by Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye
The books we recommend in this issue bring to mind the Monty Python catchphrase: And now for something completely different. Through no fault of our own we have received a number of books that stand apart from the average novels.
The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume One
by Poul Anderson
Baen Books
October, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1481482844
This collection of stories and short novels is a veritable time machine. Though they date from the 1950s and 1960s, Poul Anderson has written them so well that they are good entertainment by any of today’s standards. Reading them is like traveling back to those times. (Yes, this reviewer is old enough to remember them.) The hero, and everyone else, lights up cigarettes; flying cars are everywhere; we have a colony on Mars; and computers are large enough to fill buildings. The Psychotechnic League presumes that, in the 1960s, after a disastrous nuclear war and the occupation of Europe by Russia, a new science develops: psychotechnics. With the use of that tool, scientists and sociologists are able to plot the best path for a peaceful and prosperous future, though less optimal actions and leaders can endanger this goal. The United Nations in the Psychotechnic world is democratic, benign, and a stabilizing force for society. Stories range from the early times, when a beloved but dictatorial European leader has to be displaced so that the plan can begin, to high-tech spy action over the next century. A fascinating note is that the agents, who all look alike, are modified clones of one man. Their sense of brotherhood and shared willingness to sacrifice themselves for one other and a better future make them a powerful, if hidden, secret.
If you are old enough to remember the sixties, read this series. If you want to better understand the worldview that gave us Star Trek and Heinlein’s novels, Poul Anderson’s stories will give you some real insight. If you are a fan of Poul Anderson’s writing, these stories, published in magazines half a century ago, have finally been collected in one place for your library.
* * *
Valiant Dust
by Richard Baker
TOR Books
November, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0765390721
This novel takes you into a very different far future. At first, Valiant Dust reads like a fairly normal, well-written space opera. The influence of the Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series and similar novels is apparent, but there is a second layer that makes Valiant Dust both more interesting and almost challenging than that world. The universe of Sikander Singh North, the hero, is based upon one very different and one fairly common element.
A thousand years after the collapse of a widespread Empire, the inhabited planets are just re-establishing wide contact with one another. A few multi-system empires have survived with their high level of technology intact. These jockey with each other for power and wealth. Sikander is a third son of the ruler of a less advanced planet whose settlers were originally from India. His father, an Aquilan vassal, has arranged for him to become an officer in the Aquilan Navy, a situation is parallel to an Indian nabob of the nineteenth century enlisting in the Royal Navy.
The universe has different assumptions to those that American readers are accustomed to in space adventure novels. The Earth that settled space was one on which a planet-wide Caliphate had taken power, so the dominant faith on hundreds of planets is a belief in some version of the Quran. Most adopt the very moderate version of Islam as defined by Martian Mullahs before the collapse. There is no more oppression or jihads than you would
expect to find, with half a dozen of the advanced Empires constantly trying to one up each other. Most of the strife is not religiously based. It may be less easy for readers of other philosophic backgrounds to just slip into this universe but it is worth it. The story moves quickly. Sikander is new to the navy. He already felt like an outsider on the Aquilan light cruiser when he joins a party landing on a planet whose technology is similar to his homeworld but antiquated, from two generations earlier. Even before he arrived, the Great Game, jockeying for colonies and control, is in full force. The planet erupts with a revolt and a coup in different regions. His cruiser finds itself taking on two enemy space ships. The ground action is well done, the story maintains a fast pace, and Sikander evokes your sympathy and interest. A good read for anyone who enjoys the Lost Fleet, Honor Harrington, or any of the Age of Sail novels. Valiant Dust is a most interesting read for those who want to see what a possible future might be where Islam is dominant when we burst into the stars.
* * *
Iron Angels
by Eric Flint and Alistair Kimble
Baen Books
September, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1481482561
We have reviewed and recommended novels from Eric Flint before, but we are happy to present this one because it is different from his previous publications. It still has what is familiar to Flint fans: a wry sense of humor, fascinating characters that feel like they could be your neighbors or local policemen, and a rich setting. The difference is the style; Iron Angels is a mystery novel, a police procedural, with a large infusion of contemporary horror added in. You’ll feel an absolute certainty that the investigation, into a murderous cult and the demons they are summoning, is spot-on real. This is hardly a surprise since Flint’s co-author, Alistair Kimble, is a special agent for the FBI. This verisimilitude adds a great deal to the story.
Bodies begin appearing in northern Indiana, mauled or drained in hideous ways. The scene of the investigation is a fascinating combination of diners, slums, warehouses and abandoned buildings. When two men are cornered after kidnapping a child, they commit most unusual suicides. This announces to the reader that things are just not normal, not at all. The local FBI agent finds himself recruited by Temple Black, the outspoken head of the Bureau’s clandestine Scientific Anomalies Group. The mystery gets further complicated when the duo finds a second cult who may or may not be opposed to the murderers. The clues are there, the investigation feels real even when its target is a demon-summoning maniac. The dank, dark setting of an industrially grimy northern Indiana fits the plot beautifully.
Galaxy's Edge Magazine Page 14
