Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  He sat down, soaking wet with sweat, and leaned back against the scored, moldy wall. Leaned his head back and looked up at the orange-white clouds, lit by the city.

  After a while he stumbled downstairs to the first floor and stood on the filthy concrete, among the shadows and the discarded bottles. He went and picked up a whiskey bottle, sniffed it. Going from bottle to bottle he poured whatever drops remained in them into the whiskey bottle. When he was done he had a finger or so of liquor, which he downed in one long pull. He coughed. Threw the bottle against the wall. Picked up each bottle and threw it against the wall. Then he went outside and sat on the curb, and watched the traffic pass by.

  He decided that some of his old teammates from Charlie’s Baseball Club must have followed him around and discovered his spots, which would explain why they had looked at him so funny the other day. He went over to check it out immediately. But when he got there he found the place closed, shut down, a big new padlock on the door.

  “What happened?” he asked one of the men hanging out on the corner, someone from this year’s team.

  “They busted Charlie this morning. Got him for selling speed, first thing this morning. Now the club be gone for good, and the team too.”

  When he got back to the apartment building it was late, after midnight. He went to Rochelle’s door and tapped lightly.

  “Who is it?”

  “Leroy.” Rochelle opened the door and looked out. Leroy explained what had happened. “Can I borrow a can of soup for Debra for tonight? I’ll get it back to you.”

  “Okay. But I want one back soon, you hear?”

  Back in his room Debra was awake. “Where you been, Leroy?” she asked weakly. “I was worried about you.”

  He sat down at the hot plate, exhausted.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “That’s a good sign. Some cream of mushroom soup, coming right up.” He began to cook, feeling dizzy and sick. When Debra finished eating he had to force the remaining soup down him.

  Clearly, he realized, someone he knew had ripped him off—one of his neighbors, or a park acquaintance. They must have guessed his source of weed, then followed him as he made his rounds. Someone he knew. One of his friends.

  Early the next day he fished a newspaper out of a trashcan and looked through the short column of want ads for dishwashing work and the like. There was a busboy job at the Dupont Hotel and he walked over and asked about it. The man turned him away after a single look: “Sorry, man, we looking for people who can walk out into the restaurant, you know.” Staring in one of the big silvered windows as he walked up New Hampshire, Leroy saw what the man saw: his hair spiked out everywhere as if he would be a Rasta in five or ten years, his clothes were torn and dirty, his eyes wild…. With a deep stab of fear he realized he was too poor to be able to get any job—beyond the point where he could turn it around.

  He walked the shimmery black streets, checking phone booths for change. He walked down to M Street and over to 12th, stopping in at all the grills and little Asian restaurants, he went up to Pill Park and tried to get some of his old buddies to front him, he kept looking in pay phones and puzzling through blown scraps of newspaper, desperately hoping that one of them might list a job for him…and with each footsore step the fear spiked up in him like the pain lancing up his legs, until it soared into a thoughtless panic. Around noon he got so shaky and sick-feeling he had to stop, and despite his fear he slept flat on his back in Dupont Circle park through the hottest hours of the day.

  In the late afternoon he picked it up again, wandering almost aimlessly. He stuck his fingers in every phone booth for blocks around, but other fingers had been there before his. The change boxes of the old farecard machines in the Metro would have yielded more, but with the subway system closed, all those holes into the earth were gated off, and slowly filing with trash. Nothing but big trash pits.

  Back at Dupont Circle he tried a pay phone coin return and got a dime. “Yeah,” he said aloud; that got him over a dollar. He looked up and saw that a man had stopped to watch him: one of the fucking lawyers, in loosened tie and long-sleeved shirt and slacks and leather shoes, staring at him open-mouthed as his group and his bodyguard crossed the street, Leroy held up the coin between thumb and forefinger and glared at the man, trying to impress on him the reality of a dime.

  He stopped at the Vietnamese market. “Huang, can I buy some soup from you and pay you tomorrow?”

  The old man shook his head sadly. “I can’t do that, Robbie. I do that even once, and”—he wiggled his hands—“the whole house come down. You know that.”

  “Yeah. Listen, what can I get for—” he pulled the day’s change from his pocket and counted it again. “A dollar ten.”

  Huang shrugged. “Candy bar? No?” He studied Leroy. “Potatoes. Here two potatoes from the back. Dollar ten.”

  “I didn’t think you had any potatoes.”

  “Keep them for family, you see. But I sell these to you.”

  “Thanks, Huang.” Leroy took the potatoes and left. There was a trash dumpster behind the store; he considered it, opened it, looked in. There was a half-eaten hot dog—but the stench overwhelmed him, and he remembered the poisonous taste of the discarded liquor he had punished himself with. He let the lid of the dumpster slam down and went home.

  After the potatoes were boiled and mashed and Debra was fed, he went to the bathroom and showered until someone hammered on the door. Back in his room he still felt hot, and he had trouble catching his breath. Debra rolled from side to side, moaning. Sometimes he was sure she was getting sicker, and at the thought his fear spiked up and through him again, he got so scared he couldn’t breathe at all…. “I’m hungry, Leroy. Can’t I have nothing more to eat?”

  “Tomorrow, Deb, tomorrow. We ain’t got nothing now.”

  She fell into an uneasy sleep. Leroy sat on his mattress and stared out the window. White-orange clouds sat overhead, unmoving. He felt a bit dizzy, even feverish, as if he was coming down with whatever Debra had. He remembered how poor he had felt even back when he had had his crops to sell, when each month ended with such a desperate push to make rent. But now…He sat and watched the shadowy figure of Debra, the walls, the hotplate and utensils in the corner, the clouds out the window. Nothing changed. It was only an hour or two before dawn when he fell asleep, still sitting against the wall.

  Next day he battled fever to seek out potato money from the pay phones and the gutters, but he only had thirty-five cents when he had to quit. He drank as much water as he could hold, slept in the park, and then went to see Victor.

  “Vic, let me borrow your harmonica tonight.”

  Victor’s face squinted with distress. “I can’t, Robbie. I need it myself. You know—” pleading with him to understand.

  “I know,” Leroy said, staring off into space. He tried to think. The two friends looked at each other.

  “Hey, man, you can use my kazoo.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, man, I got a good kazoo here, I mean a big metal one with a good buzz to it. It sounds kind of like a harmonica, and it’s easier to play it. You just hum notes.” Leroy tried it. “No, hum, man. Hum in it.”

  Leroy tried again, and the kazoo buzzed a long crazy note.

  “See? Hum a tune, now.”

  Leroy hummed around for a bit.

  “And then you can practice on my harmonica till you get good on it, and get your own. You ain’t going to make anything with a harmonica till you can play it, anyway.”

  “But this—” Leroy said, looking at the kazoo.

  Victor shrugged. “Worth a try.”

  Leroy nodded. “Yeah.” He clapped Victor on the shoulder, squeezed it. Pointed at Victor’s sign, which said Help a musician! “You think that helps?”

  Victor shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’m going to get far enough away so’s I don’t cut into your business.”

  “You do that. Come back and tell me how you do.”

&n
bsp; “I will.”

  So Leroy walked south to Connecticut and M, where the sidewalks were wide and there were lots of banks and restaurants. It was just after sunset, the heat as oppressive as at midday. He had a piece of cardboard taken from a trashcan, and now he tore it straight, took his ballpoint from his pocket and copied Delmont’s message. PLEASE HELP—HUNGRY. He had always admired its economy, how it cut right to the main point.

  But when he got to what appeared to be a good corner, he couldn’t make himself sit down. He stood there, started to leave, returned. He pounded his fist against his thigh, stared about wildly, walked to the curb and sat on it to think things over.

  Finally he stepped to a bank pillar mid-sidewalk and leaned back against it. He put the sign against the pillar face-out, and put his old baseball cap upside-down on the ground in front of him. Put his thirty-five cents in it as seed money. He took the kazoo from his pocket, fingered it. “Goddamn it,” he said at the sidewalk between clenched teeth. “If you’re going to make me live this way, you’re going to have to pay for it.” And he started to play.

  He blew so hard that the kazoo squealed, and his face puffed up till it hurt. “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” blasted into all the passing faces, louder and louder—

  When he had blown his fury out he stopped to consider it. He wasn’t going to make any money that way. The loose-ties and the career women in dresses and running shoes were staring at him and moving out toward the curb as they passed, huddling closer together in their little flocks as their bodyguards got between him and them. No money in that.

  He took a deep breath, started again. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” It really was like singing. And what a song. How you could put your heart into that one, your whole body. Just like singing.

  One of the flocks had paused off to the side; they had a red light to wait for. It was as he had observed with Delmont: the lawyers looked right through beggars, they didn’t want to think about them. He played louder, and one young man glanced over briefly. Sharp face, wire-rims—with a start Leroy recognized the man as the one he had harassed out of Fish Park a couple days before. The guy wouldn’t look at Leroy directly, and so he didn’t recognize him back. Maybe he wouldn’t have anyway. But he was hearing the kazoo. He turned to his companions, student types gathered to the lawyer flock for the temporary protection of the bodyguard. He said something to them—“I love street music,” or something like that—and took a dollar from his pocket. He hurried over and put the folded bill in Leroy’s baseball cap, without looking up at Leroy. The Walk light came on, they all scurried away. Leroy played on.

  That night after feeding Debra her potato, and eating two himself, he washed the pot in the bathroom sink, and then took a can of mushroom soup up to Rochelle, who gave him a big smile.

  Walking down the stairs he beeped the kazoo, listening to the stairwell’s echoes. Ramon passed him and grinned. “Just call you Robinson Caruso.” he said, and cackled.

  “Yeah.”

  Leroy returned to his room. He and Debra talked for a while, and then she fell into a half-sleep, and fretted as if in a dream.

  “No, that’s all right,” Leroy said softly. He was sitting on his mattress, leaning back against the wall. The cardboard sign was face down on the floor. The kazoo was in his mouth, and it half buzzed with his words. “We’ll be all right. I’ll get some seeds from Delmont, and take the pots to new hideouts, better ones.” It occurred to him that rent would be due in a couple of weeks; he banished the thought. “Maybe start some gardens in no-man’s-land. And I’ll practice on Vic’s harmonica, and buy one from the pawn shop later.” He took the kazoo from his mouth, stared at it. “It’s strange what will make money.”

  He kneeled at the window, stuck his head out, hummed through the kazoo. Tune after tune buzzed the still, hot air. From the floor below Ramon stuck his head out his window to object: “Hey, Robinson Caruso! Ha! Ha! Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to sleep!” But Leroy only played quieter. “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”—

  Angel Baby

  by Rachel Pollack

  Introduction

  I read “Angel Baby” in the first Interzone anthology. Interzone, Britain’s one remaining professional science fiction magazine, serves in the eighties the role that Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology performed for the sixties—it publishes writers whose works are so bizzarre or painful that it is inconceivable they could be published anywhere else. I knew nothing of the magazine except its name, however, when I picked up the hardcover American edition of the first anthology. It was not an evening of light reading.

  But it was an evening of enlightenment, and Pollack’s story was one of the most dazzling. For a moment I thought this was just another Rosemary’s Baby inversion of the story of the birth of Christ, but I quickly learned otherwise. There is an angry intelligence at work here that, like a river in flood, resists the well-channeled ways, cutting its own channel through the fictional terrain.

  Beyond what you read in this story I know nothing whatever about Rachel Pollack. This story is enough for me to know she belongs in this anthology—she is one of the writers of the 1980s.

  The angel came at me in the IBM parking lot, the huge double football field of concrete behind the long grey factory. Like I did every day in summer I’d gone there to pick up my mother’s car. Every afternoon she would drive to work, and an hour or two later, after I’d cleaned up my dinner, I could go get the car and visit my friends or go to the shopping centers or the movies. At a quarter to twelve Mrs. Jacobi, who lived across the street and worked a couple of departments down from my mother, would take Mom home, telling the same old pumpkin jokes year after year. My mother could have gone to work with Mrs. Jacobi too, and saved me the twenty-minute walk to the parking lot down by the river, but my mother claimed Mrs. Jacobi sometimes came late and it made her nervous that her work record should depend on someone else.

  The angel came over the river away from the mountains. I remember thinking, crazylike, that it must have come from one of the Catskill hotels, one of the resorts where rich people went to get away from the city.

  I saw the eyes first. I don’t know how, but I did. You’d think I’d see the wings before anything, but no, I looked up, I don’t know why, it wasn’t like anything called me or anything, I just looked up with the car keys in my hand, and I saw—they looked like small shiny bits of metal floating towards me. I stared at them. I didn’t feel faint or nauseous, just weird, like my skin or something was sliding off into those horrible cold eyes.

  Then I saw the wings. I guess he was coming straight toward me, because I first saw a wavy line of white, dipping down in the center, then coming up again. I squinted and shook my head, and then he must have shifted, because suddenly the wings filled the whole sky, like a long white cloud pointed at both ends, and narrow in the middle. Very slowly it moved, up and down, up and down. Christ, how slowly those wings beat, they took over my breath, forcing my lungs to open and close so slow that my chest burned. They made me want to cover myself, like I was somehow naked, and not him.

  I managed to look around in the parking lot, and I saw, I guess maybe five or six or seven people, walking to their cars and looking tired, like they’d worked overtime and hadn’t finished whatever they had to do. A couple were running and checking the big clock over the door, some guy with a big black leather briefcase. And none of them saw. I didn’t cry out, I didn’t even think of it. My eyes went back to the angel.

  The wings looked like they could cover the whole parking lot, like they’d sweep the cars right off the concrete and just smash the whole row of trees separating the front and back lots. And in between, the legs sticking out, the arms hanging down, his hard naked body.

  He was very thin, kind of stretched out, I even thought I could see his ribs. His skin shone. Not much, not as much as the wings. It made me think of the radium watch my father had had when I was a little kid and he let me take it in the closet and shut the door so I
could see it glow. The angel’s skin shone a lot like that, except it wasn’t green but white, like watery milk, so that for a moment I thought of an old movie I’d seen on TV, where they’ve got this radioactive milk and the scientists are trying to find it and they keep showing it moving around until it ends up on someone’s table, pale and glowing. But of course I only thought that for a moment. Later, when I tried to remember his skin, I thought of the way snow looks under a full moon. Even now, I sometimes can’t stand to look at snow at night, and I won’t even let Jimmy out of the house after dark in winter.

  I don’t think I realized the angel was coming for me until the last moment. He just came closer and closer, getting larger, and in a funny way smaller, as I could see he wasn’t really so big, his body no longer, I mean no taller than Bobby Beauhawk, the basketball player who kept breaking things in my bio class. (I wrote ‘longer’ because once my mother took me on a vacation, she said we could both use a rest, but she meant me, and we went to Florida and I saw this alligator lying in the mud, and I started to scream because it was just as long, exactly as long as the angel.) The wings weren’t short, they could have stretched over two or three cars easy, but nothing like as long as I thought when I saw them far away.

  I never saw—his thing. I know that sounds really crazy, but I just didn’t see it. I have some picture of it in my head as bright red and pointy, so maybe I saw it unconsciously or something, but I don’t remember anything about it. Even as I realized he was coming right at me and I should run or something, I went back to looking at his eyes. I felt like I could look inside them, not into his head, but into all the things he’d seen, his own world. I saw it like a place where the sky filled up with lightning all the time, where nothing ever stayed in one piece, where the ground kept melting and turning into water, or even huge fires that jumped up—Except it always stayed cold. Cold like you can’t possibly imagine, like no one ever even thought of heat, even knew what it was.