Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (468 page)

I’m sure the Big Eye will understand. I cannot afford music.

The blessed numbness returns in force. I open my eyes to look at my hands. They seem miles away. Yet I can make out every wrinkle, every pore and crevice. I glance at Elise. She drives slowly, her expression stony.

My hands fall on something cool and smooth. I look down and see the notebook that I had forgotten.

* * * *

There have been times in my life when the Big Eye has come down off my shoulder to actually meddle around. Strange things have happened which I could not explain, like finding a live black rabbit on my doorstep at midnight, the evening I finished reading Watership Down. Or when I was considering giving up flying, and found that a sparrow hawk was perched on my windowsill, looking at me, staring at me until I found my confidence again.

I’ve been a scientist, too. But science doesn’t welcome the Big Surprises. Only little ones that can be comfortably chewed and swallowed. When the unknown comes in out of the borderline and grabs you by the jewels, that is when the Universe has chosen to gently remind you that a change of perspective is due. It is showing you who is boss.

Science tells us not to expect personal messages from the Cosmos, either. But they happen, sometimes.

The notebook is smooth and cool.

Are you friend or foe? What shall I do with you, symbol in my lap?

In a rush the panicky commands go out to my body. Get up! Throw the cursed book down. Open the door and jump out. Start running. Start another lie…life in another town.

MOVE!

My treasonous body does not obey. The mutiny is shocking.

Okay…we’ll try something else. I command these hands to open this book so that I can look inside.

With a sense of betrayal I watch as they obey. The scratchy paper riffles as my fingers pick a place at random.

By the moonlight there is no mistake. She wrote this. There’s no mythical “friend” who left a notebook in her car. I never noticed before,but Elise has lovely penmanship, even if the lines do waver a bit, trembling across the page.

* * * *

It’s ridiculous, really. I moved out here to get some peace and quiet. To get a summer job that didn’t feel like a Summer Job—and to get away from that crazy rat race of briefs, moot courts, and exams. I thought it would be amusing to live in the hicks for a while.

I realize now that I hated law school! Oh, not the learning. That was wonderful. But all the rest—the backbiting, the atmosphere of cynicism and suspicion. Ideals got you nothing but derisive laughter.

All those using, abusing men, so glib about respecting modern women, then turning and cutting them first chance. As if we “modern women” were any more kind, of course.

I’m never going back. Here it’s peaceful and quiet. I’ve landed a job I wanted more than that damned clerkship. Can you imagine? It’s tending and selling plants! I’m beginning to see why some Eastern peoples put gardening on a higher level than politics. I love it.

These are real people, not money- and status-grubbing yuppies. I’m terrified they’ll reject me if they find out I’m a refugee from the world of polyester and gold chains.

Especially my new man. He doesn’t talk much. I still haven’t been able to define what it is that draws me so to him. But I’m desperate not to drive him off.

I think, maybe, he’s the most real thing I’ve ever had to hold on to.

* * * *

Two minutes ago I was surprised. Now it’s as if I’ve known this all along. I flip to a later entry…

* * * *

When am I going to learn? How many women have ruined their lives trying to change their men into something they’re not?

He is gentle and kind and strong—such a lovable grouch. So what if he hates just about everything artistic or scientific. What has art and science ever done for me, anyway?

Oh, I’m so confused! What is this indefinable feeling I have about him? Why do I keep risking it all by trying to change him?

I think I’m actually starting to relax, sometimes. Whatever he’s doing for me, I can’t surrender it now. Better to give up this journal, the other hidden indulgences, rather than take any more chances…

* * * *

So. Another refugee, albeit from a more mundane sort of crisis. Oh, Elise, I’m sorry I never knew.

I’m glad I never knew, for I would have run away.

I understand now why she encouraged that bright young idiot Alan Fowler to hang around. Her patient probing worked better than she’ll ever know. Along with a series of incredible coincidences. And time.

The car is slowing down, coming to a stop. I look up and see we’re on a side street a few blocks from home.

She is looking at me, shaking her head slowly, hopelessly. Her lips tremble and there are thin pulsing rivulets on her cheeks.

I let the book slip from my hands and close my eyes to breathe deeply of the night. I can smell her from a few feet away. She comes to me as musk and perfumes and sawdust from the Yankee.

I can also smell the dampness of the streets, and the pine forest south of town.

What else? Ah, yes. There is salt water. I swear. I can even smell the ocean from here.

She is crying silently, head lowered.

What am I going to do with you, Elise? How can I thank you, now that Chuck is gone, for taking care of him while I healed? How can I make you understand when I go away, as I must very soon.

I reach over and pull her to me.

It doesn’t matter, Lise. It doesn’t matter because I knew it all along. From the very first, I suppose, a part of me knew you’d be trying, without knowing exactly what you were doing, to summon me back. Don’t cry because you succeeded!

I must spend a long time comforting her—holding her and gentling away the fear. I can see Andromeda faintly through the open window behind her, a stroke of light against the sparkling of the stars. I whisper to her and can feel the planet turn slowly beneath us.

* * * *

I think I’m finished subvocalizing, this evening. It’s not necessary anymore. Doors are opening. Long unused feelings and ideas are stepping out.

The opening traces of a plan are forming. They must have been gestating for months…designs for a lockpick for a very large cage. Lessons to be taught to Old Joe Clark.

There’s a lot of work ahead, some of it quite dangerous. I’m not sure exactly how to get started and it may wind up taking me a long, long way from here.

But I promise you, Lise—if you want me to—I’ll take you with me when I go.

* * * *

Copyright © 1986 by David Brin.

(1949– )

While raising her (then-small) children, Lois McMaster Bujold turned first to writing fanfiction and then to writing SF and fantasy. The result has been five Hugo Awards, three Nebulas, and a string of genre best-sellers. Bujold is best known for her Barrayar stories, featuring a disabled young nobleman, Miles Vorkosigan, living in a warrior culture. The blend of military-tinged SF with a host of issues that don’t normally appear in military fiction (and an appealing character who
definitely
isn’t the norm for military fiction) has led to both critical and commercial success.

Born in Ohio, Bujold dabbled with writing while at the Ohio State University, but moved away from it; she became a pharmacy technician at the Ohio State University Hospitals, until she quit to start her family. At that point she began writing seriously, selling a few stories to magazines before Jim Baen bought her first three novels, her first novel,
Shards of Honor
(the first Barrayar novel),
The Warrior’s Apprentice
(Miles Vorkosigan’s first appearance), and
Ethan of Athos
, publishing all three in 1986. She won a Nebula for her fourth novel,
Falling Free
(1988), and “The Mountains of Mourning” won both the Hugo and Nebula. Since then she’s written both SF and an ongoing fantasy series, both dealing with nontraditional themes such as disability. She co-edited the anthology
Women at War (1995) with Roland Green, and has also written nonfiction related to SF.

She now lives in Minnesota, where she won the 1999 Minnesota Book Award.

First published in
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
, May 1989

Miles heard the woman weeping as he was climbing the hill from the long lake. He hadn’t dried himself after his swim, as the morning already promised shimmering heat. Lake water trickled cool from his hair onto his naked chest and back, more annoyingly down his legs from his ragged shorts. His leg braces chafed on his damp skin as he pistoned up the faint trail through the scrub, military double-time. His feet squished in his old wet shoes. He slowed curiously as he became conscious of the voices.

The woman’s voice grated with grief and exhaustion. “Please, lord, please. All I want is m’justice.…”

The front gate guard’s voice was irritated and embarrassed. “I’m no lord. C’mon, get up, woman. Go back to the village and report it at the district magistrate’s office.”

“I tell you, I just came from there!” The woman did not move from her knees as Miles emerged from the bushes and paused to take in the tableau across the paved road. “The magistrate’s not to return for weeks, weeks. I walked four days to get here. I only have a little money.…” A desperate hope rose in her voice, and her spine bent and straightened as she scrabbled in her skirt pocket and held out her cupped hands to the guard. “A mark and twenty pence, it’s all I have, but—”

The exasperated guard’s eye fell on Miles, and he straightened abruptly, as if afraid Miles might suspect him of being tempted by so pitiful a bribe. “Be off, woman!” he snapped.

Miles quirked an eyebrow, and limped across the road to the main gate. “What’s all this about, Corporal?” he inquired easily.

The guard corporal was on loan from Imperial Security, and wore the high-necked dress greens of the Barrayaran Service. He was sweating and uncomfortable in the bright morning light of this southern district, but Miles fancied he’d be boiled before he’d undo his collar on this post. His accent was not local; he was a city man from the capital, where a more-or-less efficient bureaucracy absorbed such problems as the one on her knees before him.

The woman, now, was local and more than local—she had backcountry written all over her. She was younger than her strained voice had at first suggested. Tall, fever-red from her weeping, with stringy blond hair hanging down across a ferret-thin face and protuberant gray eyes. If she were cleaned up, fed, rested, happy and confident, she might achieve a near-prettiness, but she was far from that now, despite her remarkable figure. Lean but full-breasted—no, Miles revised himself as he crossed the road and came up to the gate. Her bodice was all blotched with dried milk leaks, though there was no baby in sight. Only temporarily full-breasted. Her worn dress was factory-woven cloth, but handsewn, crude and simple. Her feet were bare, thickly callused, cracked and sore.

“No problem,” the guard assured Miles. “Go away,” he hissed to the woman.

She lurched off her knees and sat stonily.

“I’ll call my sergeant”—the guard eyed her, wary—“and have her removed.”

“Wait a moment,” said Miles.

She stared up at Miles from her cross-legged position, clearly not knowing whether to identify him as hope or not. His clothing, what there was of it, offered her no clue as to what he might be. The rest of him was all too plainly displayed. He jerked up his chin and smiled thinly. Too-large head, too-short neck, back thickened with its crooked spine, crooked legs with their brittle bones too-often broken, drawing the eye in their gleaming chromium braces. Were the hill woman standing, the top of his head would barely be even with the top of her shoulder. He waited in boredom for her hand to make the backcountry hex sign against evil mutations, but it only jerked and clenched into a fist.

“I must see my lord Count,” she said to an uncertain point halfway between Miles and the guard. “It’s my right. My daddy, he died in the Service. It’s my right.”

“Prime Minister Count Vorkosigan,” said the guard stiffly, “is on his country estate to rest. If he were working, he’d be back in Vorbarr Sultana.” The guard looked as if he wished he were back in Vorbarr Sultana.

The woman seized the pause. “You’re only a city man. He’s
my
count. My right.”

“What do you want to see Count Vorkosigan for?” asked Miles patiently.

“Murder,” growled the girl/woman. The security guard spasmed slightly. “I want to report a murder.”

“Shouldn’t you report to your village speaker first?” inquired Miles, with a hand-down gesture to calm the twitching guard.

“I did. He’ll do
nothing.
” Rage and frustration cracked her voice. “He says it’s over and done. He won’t write down my accusation, says it’s nonsense. It would only make trouble for everybody, he says. I don’t care! I want my justice!”

Miles frowned in thought, looking the woman over. The details checked, corroborated her claimed identity, added up to a solid if subliminal sense of authenticity which perhaps escaped the professionally paranoid security man. “It’s true, Corporal,” Miles said. “She has a right to appeal, first to the district magistrate, then to the Count’s Court. And the district magistrate won’t be back for two weeks.”

This sector of Count Vorkosigan’s native district had only one overworked district magistrate, who rode a circuit that included the lakeside village of Vorkosigan Surleau but one day a month. Since the region of the Prime Minister’s country estate was crawling with Imperial Security when the great lord was in residence, and loosely monitored even when he was not, prudent troublemakers took their troubles elsewhere.

“Scan her, and let her in,” said Miles. “On my authority.”

The guard was one of Imperial Security’s best, trained to look for assassins in his own shadow. He now looked scandalized, and lowered his voice to Miles. “Sir, if I let every country lunatic wander the estate at will—”

“I’ll take her up. I’m going that way.”

The guard shrugged helplessly, but stopped short of saluting; Miles was decidedly not in uniform. The gate guard pulled a scanner from his belt and made a great show of going over the woman. Miles wondered if he’d have been inspired to harass her with a strip-search without Miles’s inhibiting presence. When the guard finished demonstrating how alert, conscientious, and loyal he was, he palmed open the gate’s lock, entered the transaction, including the woman’s retina scan, into the computer monitor, and stood aside in a pose of rather pointed parade rest. Miles grinned at the silent editorial, and steered the bedraggled woman by the elbow through the gates and up the winding drive.

She twitched away from his touch at the earliest opportunity, yet still refrained from superstitious gestures, eyeing him with a strange and hungry curiosity. Time was, such openly repelled fascination with the peculiarities of his body had driven Miles to grind his teeth; now he could take it with a serene amusement only slightly tinged with acid. They would learn, all of them. They would learn.

“Do you serve Count Vorkosigan, little man?” she asked cautiously.

Miles thought about that one a moment. “Yes,” he answered finally. The answer was, after all, true on every level of meaning but the one she’d asked it. He quelled the temptation to tell her he was the court jester. From the look of her, this one’s troubles were much worse than his own.

She had apparently not quite believed in her own rightful destiny, despite her mulish determination at the gate, for as they climbed unimpeded toward her goal a nascent panic made her face even more drawn and pale, almost ill. “How—how do I talk to him?” she choked. “Should I curtsey…?” She glanced down at herself as if conscious for the first time of her own dirt and sweat and squalor.

Miles suppressed a facetious set-up starting with,
Kneel and knock your forehead three times on the floor before speaking; that’s what the General Staff does,
and said instead, “Just stand up straight and speak the truth. Try to be clear. He’ll take it from there. He does not, after all”—Miles’s lip twitched—“lack experience.”

She swallowed.

A hundred years ago, the Vorkosigans’ summer retreat had been a guard barracks, part of the outlying fortifications of the great castle on the bluff above the village of Vorkosigan Surleau. The castle was now a burnt-out ruin, and the barracks transformed into a comfortable low stone residence, modernized and re-modernized, artistically landscaped and bright with flowers. The arrow slits had been widened into big glass windows overlooking the lake, and comlink antennae bristled from the roof. There was a new guard barracks concealed in the trees downslope, but it had no arrow slits.

A man in the brown-and-silver livery of the Count’s personal retainers exited the residence’s front door as Miles approached with the strange woman in tow. It was the new man, what was his name? Pym, that was it.

“Where’s m’lord Count?” Miles asked him.

“In the upper pavilion, taking breakfast with m’lady.” Pym glanced at the woman, waited on Miles in a posture of polite inquiry.

“Ah. Well, this woman has walked four days to lay an appeal before the district magistrate’s court. The court’s not here, but the Count is, so she now proposes to skip the middlemen and go straight to the top. I like her style. Take her up, will you?”

“During
breakfast?
” said Pym.

Miles cocked his head at the woman. “Have you had breakfast?”

She shook her head mutely.

“I thought not.” Miles turned his hands palm-out, dumping her, symbolically, on the retainer. “Now, yes.”

“My daddy, he died in the Service,” the woman repeated faintly. “It’s my right.” The phrase seemed as much to convince herself as anyone else, now.

Pym was, if not a hill man, district-born. “So it is.” He sighed, gesturing her to follow him without further ado. Her eyes widened, as she trailed him around the house, and she glanced back nervously over her shoulder at Miles. “Little man…?”

“Just stand straight,” he called to her. He watched her round the corner, grinned, and took the steps two at a time into the residence’s main entrance.

* * * *

A
fter a shave and cold shower, Miles dressed in his own room overlooking the long lake. He dressed with great care, as great as he’d expended on the Service Academy ceremonies and Imperial Review two days ago. Clean underwear, long-sleeved cream shirt, dark green trousers with the side piping. High-collared green tunic tailor-cut to his own difficult fit. New pale blue plastic ensign’s rectangles aligned precisely on the collar and poking most uncomfortably into his jaw. He dispensed with the leg braces and pulled on mirror-polished boots to the knee, and swiped a bit of dust from them with his pajama pants, ready-to-hand on the floor where he’d dropped them before going swimming.

He straightened and checked himself in the mirror. His dark hair hadn’t even begun to recover from that last cut before the graduation ceremonies. A pale, sharp-featured face, not too much dissipated bag under the gray eyes, nor too bloodshot—alas, the limits of his body compelled him to stop celebrating well before he could hurt himself.

Echoes of the late celebration still boiled up silently in his head, crooking his mouth into a grin. He was on his way now, had his hand clamped firmly around the lowest rung of the highest ladder on Barrayar, Imperial Service itself. There were no giveaways in the Service even for sons of the Old Vor. You got what you earned. His brother-officers could be relied on to know that, even if outsiders wondered. He was in position at last to prove himself to all doubters. Up and away and never look down, never look back.

One last look back. As carefully as he’d dressed, Miles gathered up the necessary objects for his task. The white cloth rectangles of his former Academy cadet’s rank. The hand-calligraphied second copy, purchased for this purpose, of his new officer’s commission in the Barrayaran Imperial Service. A copy of his Academy three-year scholastic transcript on paper, with all its commendations (and demerits). No point in anything but honesty in this next transaction. In a cupboard downstairs he found the brass brazier and tripod, wrapped in its polishing cloth, and a plastic bag of very dry juniper bark. Chemical firesticks.

Out the back door and up the hill. The landscaped path split, right going up to the pavilion overlooking it all, left forking sideways to a garden-like area surrounded by a low fieldstone wall. Miles let himself in by the gate. “Good morning, crazy ancestors,” he called, then quelled his humor. It might be true, but lacked the respect due the occasion.