Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  And not in the stores. Think about it -- who goes to Toys R Us? People with no money? Hardly. So going to the parking lot and taking things out of one shopping cart and putting them in another, what good is that going to do? We can't move things far anyway -- it just wipes us out even to jostle stuff. So none of this stuff about bags of toys going down chimneys. It's pretty rare for something to show up under the tree that Mom and Dad didn't know about in advance.

  Besides, we have to be really intense in order to move things, right? So here's what we do on Christmas patrol.

  We watch for people with more than they need to be out around poor people. Or for poor kids to be in a place where there's plenty of money changing hands. I'll be teamed up with one of the singing elves, and she'll distract the rich guy while he's handling his money, while I liberate a five-dollar bill or sometimes even a twenty and cause it to drift down to the floor. Then I stand watch over it, keeping it from being noticed by anyone until the singer is able to entice some poor kid to be close enough, and then I push the five or the twenty -- or, heck, the buck or the quarter, cause sometimes that's all I can get -- out into the open, where the kid can see it.

  You know the amazing thing? The number of kids who immediately try to give it to the store owner, or take it straight to their parents. Well, once we give it to them, it's theirs to dispose of. The gift has been given. And when you think about it, maybe the best gift is for the kid with no money to give that twenty to the store owner, to prove that he doesn't really need that money, that it's more important to be a decent person than to have what money can buy. Or if he gives it to his parents, well, maybe that's food on the table. Sure, maybe it's booze, too, and that's why they're poor, but it's not the kid's fault, the kid did the right thing. He contributed to the family.

  About half the kids, though, they hang on to the money, and that's fine, that's even better, because you know what? Almost every time, they use some of it to buy themselves a treat -- ice cream or a candy bar, maybe a cooky -- but then the rest of the money goes straight into buying a gift for somebody else. A little brother or sister. Mom or Dad. Sometimes a teacher who's been good to them. I even saw one kid who had four dollars and twenty-eight cents in his fist -- change from the ice cream bar -- and he sees a kid who looks even more poor than him, and he just walks up and gives it to him and says, "Merry Christmas." Right then I loved that kid so much. Because he got it. He understood. None of that stuff goes with you when you die. Only what you did for other people, or to them, and what they did for you, and to you. That's all you have with you when you're dead. That kid, when he dies, he's going to have so much cool stuff. Because he has a good heart. He won't be walking around the streets of hell, no place to stay. He'll fit right in with the light, he'll pass that entrance exam, they'll greet him with songs, you know? And I got him the fiver that he was able to mostly share. That's something.

  That's Christmas. We just use the season to get gifts into the hands of children who don't have anything. It's about hope, just like what we do the rest of the year. That's what Nick does -- he's in the hope business.

  *

  So it's the day after Christmas, and we're back on the regular schedule, but Nick, he comes to me -- and the red suit hasn't faded yet, so he really looks like Santa Claus -- he comes to me and says, "Want to take the long hike with me?"

  I don't know what he's talking about, but I say, "Sure," because he wants me to and it's only thanks to him that I feel like I'm worth the space I take up, even on the streets of hell. Whatever the long hike is, it's not like I'll get tired or have to carry a pup tent on my back. So I say sure and off we go.

  Straight up to the light.

  And it's not a very long hike at all, not heading there. It's like, no matter where you are on earth, once you decide to find the light, there it is, just a little out of reach, up and over your shoulder. Nick, he goes like he knows the way, and I guess he does. Every year after Christmas, he goes back to the light and tries to get in. That's what I was along for. The other elves, I guess most of them have gone with him, some of them more than once. And I guess they were just as happy to have the new guy go along.

  Because there goes Nick, straight into the light, and you think, "Man, this time he's going to make it. This time he's getting out of hell!"

  He's in there so long. You have so much hope for him.

  And then ... pop. He's right back out. He looks at you. Shrugs his shoulders. "Better luck next time," he says.

  Only I was new at this. And I'd been working on my sense of outrage all year, you know? And it's not like I was getting into heaven any time soon. I mean, if Nick can't pass the entrance exam, you think I stand a chance?

  So I stand there and yell -- not speaking loud, because it's not actually, sound, but I'm really intense, you know? -- and I know I'm not supposed to get ticked off at the light for heaven's sake, but anyway, I yell, "Did you ever think that your stupid requirements might be too high? What've you got in there anyway, a bunch of pious martyrs? A bunch of goody-two-shoes never broke a rule in their lives? Well take a look at Nick here, he's on the front line, dead though he may be, he's trying to do something about it! I don't see you down there on the streets trying to make life better for kids! So what aboutthat, huh? Ever think about how maybe some of the people in heaven aren't doing diddly-squat and maybe some of the people in hell are actually doing some good in the world?"

  Finally I say enough that the intensity wears off and I remember who I'm talking to and I think, Man, it's going to take, like, ten thousand years to work off the sheer blasphemy of what I just said.

  Only right then I hear something inside my mind, the way it must be when the singers do their lullabies for the suffering children. This voice, so soft, so kind, and all it says is, "Whatever you do for the least of my little ones, you've done it for me."

  And it about knocks me over. He sees. He knows. What we're doing. What our work is. He knows, and he loves us for it, and yet ...

  And yet Nick still can't get in.

  I look at him, and he shrugs again. "Yelling doesn't solve anything," he says.

  And then he leads me on the long hike back. Yeah, that's the "long" part of the long hike. Getting to the light is quick. Getting back, that's hard and slow, because every step hurts, coming away from that beauty and going back to the plain old world with all the dead people preaching or being cool, and all the living people going about their business as if life were really long and they had all the time in the world. And you can't help but think, when you look at the living, you think: It's so easy for them, they can justdo things, only they so rarely do anything that matters. So many children, all they need is a word and a smile, all they need is an act of kindness and generosity, something that any living person could give them, but so often they leave it up to the dead. But the ones who don't leave it up to us, the ones who are good to the kids, they're my friends, you know? They're my sisters and my brothers. I can't do anything to show them how I feel, but I'm glad they're alive. They're the only reason hell isn't more, well, hellish.

  Finally we got back, down on the streets of hell. And Nick says, "Another year to go."

  And I say, "Nick, thanks for letting me be part of it. Maybe it's not good enough for them, but it's good enough for me."

  And he grins and even though he doesn't move, it feels like he just clapped me on the shoulder, and he says, "Then it's good enough for me, too." And off he goes.

  Only there's something wrong with this picture. I'm seeing him but there's more to him than the red suit. There's a kind of jauntiness in his step, and even though that's probably my own mind creating the image that fits what I'm sensing about him, the fact is that it's still true. Nick just failed for the fifteen hundredth time to get into heaven, and he's almost dancing.

  "Hey!" says I. "Hey, Santa!"

  He turns around and there we are, face to face, and I say, "What are you so happy about?"

  "It was a good Christmas," he says, a
ll innocentlike, and I know he's not lying because you can't, but he's also not exactly answering me.

  "How come you didn't make it this year?" I demanded.

  "I don't think you get a list," he says.

  "Bull," says I. "I came out of that light knowing every little sin I ever committed. You got the whole inventory, Nick. And I want to know what it is that keeps you out."

  He turns around slowly, indicating the street around him. All the Christmas decorations are still up, of course, and there in every window, there's his face, Santa Claus, grinning and selling stuff. "It's all that," he says.

  "What, the Christmas decorations?"

  "The fact that it's my face and not his."

  "You don't paint those pictures! You don't hang them up!"

  "Yeah, but I like it that they're there. I like being famous. He never did."

  "And that's it? That's all?"

  "I don't even know if that's the reason," he says. "Because they don't give me a list of sins. But it's a story. Better than nothing, right?"

  And off he goes, this time for real, and it's time to get back on the bully patrol, but a thought crosses my mind. Maybe the reason they don't give him a list of sins is because there isn't one. Not for him. Because there aren't any sins. He was in the light an awfully long time before he bounced out. What if he didn't get bounced at all? What if, every year, he chooses to come back even though he doesn't have to? Because he'd rather be here, homeless in hell, doing the work he does, than to be happy in heaven. In fact, maybe heaven would be hell to him, knowing that he could be leading us in helping kids, only there he is with a harp or whatever. So the only way for him to be in heaven is not to be in heaven. He's got work to do, and he's doing it, and that'sheaven for him.

  And then this really strange thought comes to me. What if that's all heaven is for anybody? What if everybody gets bounced down to the streets of hell, but if you find the right things to do, it becomes heaven for you? Look what I've got: A job to do that matters in the world. Good friends to work with. Nick leading me, a man I can look up to. Tell me what heaven's got that's any better than that.

  Hey, it can't be true. I mean, if it were true, wouldn't St. Francis and St. Peter and all those guys be down here, working alongside us? No, heaven's heaven, and I'm in hell. Maybe Nick's an angel in disguise, and maybe he's just what he seems to be -- another homeless dead guy desperate to figure out a way to get off the streets. What difference does it make?

  I'm not in torment. In fact, I had a pretty merry Christmas. I saw a lot of sad things, but I saw some good things, and a few of those good things, I made them happen.

  And then I thought, maybe I could make even more good things happen if I could just tell the living about how it is here, about how it works. I can't do it like an angel with a trumpet, so that everybody would have to believe. But I can tell it like a story. Making letters appear on a computer screen, that's a piece of cake compared to getting a five-dollar bill out of a wallet and onto the street. So I found a guy who leaves his computer on day and night, and I wrote all this down, and now you're reading it, and you can take it as fiction or you can take it as truth, it doesn't matter to me. I don't care what you believe. I just care what you do.

  Well, I've taken just about as much time off as I can spare. Like the old joke says, "Back on your heads!" I'm up to my neck in it and there's only a few of us to shovel. Merry Christmas. God bless us every one. Suffer little children to come unto me. All that stuff.

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952) is an American science fiction writer, best known for his award-winning Mars trilogy. Robinson's work has been labeled by reviewers as literary science fiction.

  The Lucky Strike, by Kim Stanley Robinson

  War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch called. “Come have a shot.”

  January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practicing your bombing up here, eh, Professor?”

  “Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

  “That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practicing.”

  Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”

  January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed—a thug, in January’s opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain’s bossy roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn’t go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

  “There they are!” said Matthews. “They’re on the taxiing strip.”

  January located the 509th’s first plane. Today, the first of August, there was something more interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was out that General LeMay wanted to take the 509th’s mission away from it. Their commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and bitched to LeMay in person, and the general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: one of the general’s men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat over Japan. The general’s man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike plane, with Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view the takeoff with them.

  “Why don’t the strike plane have a name, though?” Haddock was saying.

  Fitch said, “Lewis won’t give it a name because it’s not his plane, and he knows it.” The others laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets’ favorites.

  “What do you think he’ll do to the general’s man?” Matthews asked.

  The others laughed at the very idea. “He’ll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you anything,” Fitch said. He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every runway, planes whose engines had given out on takeoff. “He’ll want to show that he wouldn’t go down if it happened to him.”

  “’Course he wouldn’t!” Matthews said.

  “You hope,” January said under his breath.

  “They let those Wright engines out too soon,” Haddock said seriously. “They keep busting under the takeoff load.”

  “Won’t matter to the old bull,” Matthews said. Then they all started in about Tibbets’ flying ability, even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January, on the other hand, liked Tibbets even less than he liked Fitch. That had started right after he was assigned to the 509th. He had been told he was part of the most important group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicks
burg a couple of fliers just back from England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several months stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk. The two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed vague on it and kept returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English nurse, for instance, whose flat had been bombed, family and neighbors killed…. But they had really wanted to know. So he had told them he was onto something special, and they had flipped out their badges and told him they were Army Intelligence, and that if he ever broke security like that again he’d be transferred to Alaska. It was a dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and Tibbets had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that. The upshot was that January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really played his favorites. January wasn’t sure he really minded, but during their year’s training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of showing the old bull he was wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear what was going on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January’s bombing got. Just thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop it.

  “Will you cut that out?” Fitch complained. “I swear you must hang from the ceiling when you take a shit so you can practice aiming for the toilet.” The men laughed.

  “Don’t I bunk over you?” January asked. Then he pointed. “They’re going.”

  Tibbets’ plane had taxied to runway Baker. Fitch passed the flask around again. The tropical sun beat on them, and the ocean surrounding the island blazed white. January put up a sweaty hand to aid the bill of his baseball cap.