Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (522 page)

When I reached the field, my son had just missed the bull’s-eye by less than an inch.

“Nice shooting, Toby, old buddy!”

He maintained his bowman’s stance, transfixed not only by the fact of my arrival but also, no doubt, by the content of my greeting. “Dad, what are
you
doing here?”

I hadn’t seen him in a month. He seemed taller, leaner, swarthier—older—standing there in his grimy yellow T-shirt and the blue jeans he’d shredded into shorts last spring.

“I’ve come for you,” I told him, moving as close as I could without making it obvious I was scanning him for symptoms. His hair was as thick, dark, and healthy-looking as ever. His eyes sparkled, his frame looked firm, his tanned skin held no trace of blue.

“No, I’m taking the bus Sunday.” He nocked an arrow. “Mom’s picking me up.”

“The plan’s been changed. She had to go out of town—there’s a big UFO story breaking in the Hegelian Desert.” I experienced a small but irrefutable pleasure, the sweet taste of truth bending in my mouth. “We’d better get your stuff packed. Where’s your cabin?”

Toby unnocked the arrow and used it to indicate a cluster of yurts about twenty yards from the targets.

The archery instructor approached, a woodsy, weathered fellow with a mild limp. Toby introduced me as the best father a boy’d ever had. He said he loved me. So strange, I thought, the spontaneous little notions that run through the heads of pre-burn children.

My son turned in his bow, and we started toward his cupcake-shaped cabin.

“You’ve got a nice tan, Toby. You look real healthy. Gosh, it’s good to see you.”

“Dad, you’re talking
so funny.”

“I’ll bet you
feel
healthy too.”

“Lately I’ve been getting headaches.”

I gritted my teeth. “I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about.”

“Wish I wasn’t leaving so soon,” he said as we climbed the crooked wooden steps to his room. “Barry Maxwell and I were supposed to hunt snakes tomorrow.”

“Listen, Toby, this is a better deal than you think. You’re going to get an entire second vacation.” The space was only slightly more chaotic than I’d anticipated— clothes in ragged heaps,
Encyclopedia Britannica
comics in amorphous piles. “We’re going to live in a magic kingdom under the ground. Just you and me.”

“What sort of magic kingdom?” he asked skeptically.

“Oh, you’ll love it, Toby. We’ll go fishing and eat ice cream.”

Toby smiled hugely, brightly—a Satirevian smile. “That sounds neat.” He opened his footlocker and started cramming it full: crafts projects, T-shirts, dungarees, poncho, comics, flashlight, canteen, mess kit. “Will Mom be coming?”

“No.”

“She’ll miss all the fun.”

“She’ll miss all the fun,” I agreed.

My son held up a hideous and lopsided battleship, proudly announcing that he’d made it in woodworking class.

“How do you like it, Dad?”

“Why, Toby,” I told him, “it’s absolutely beautiful.”

Six

Twelve gates lead to the City of Lies. Every year, as his commitment to mendacity becomes increasingly clear, his dishonesty more manifestly reliable, the Satirevian convert is told the secret location of yet another entrance. Mere novitiates like myself knew only one: the storm drainage tunnel near the corner of Third and Hume in Nietzsche Borough.

So many ways to descend, I thought as Toby and I negotiated the dank, mossy labyrinth beneath Veritas. Ladders, sloping sewer pipes, narrow stone stairways—we used them all, our flashlights cutting through the darkness like machetes clearing away underbrush. My son loved every minute of it. “Wow!” he exclaimed whenever some disgusting wonder appeared—a slug the size of a banana, a subterranean lake filled with frogs, a spider’s web as large and sturdy as a trampoline. “Neat!”

Reaching our destination, we settled into the Hotel Paradise. Unlike my previous accommodations, our assigned suite was sunny and spacious, with glass doors opening onto a wrought-iron balcony from which one could readily glimpse the local fauna. “Dad, the horses around here have six legs!” Toby hopped up and down with excitement. “The rats chase the cats! The pigs have wings! This really is a magic kingdom!”

It soon became obvious that the whole of Satirev had been anticipating our arrival. We were the men of the hour. The Paradise guards immediately learned our faces, letting us come and go as we pleased. Franz and Lucky gushed over Toby as if he were a long-lost brother. Whenever we strolled around the community, total strangers would come up to us and, confirming our identities, give Satirev’s tragic child a candy bar or a small toy, his father a hug of encouragement and affirmation.

Even Felicia Krakower was prepared. After drawing a sample of Toby’s blood—we told him the kingdom had to make certain the tourists weren’t carrying germs—she retired to her office and came back holding a stuffed animal, an astonishingly comical baboon with acrobatic eyes and a squarish, doglike snout.

“This is for you, Rainbow Boy,” she said.

Toby’s face grew knotted and tense; he gulped audibly. He was not too old for stuffed animals, merely too old to enjoy them without shame.

“He needs a name, don’t you think?” said Dr. Krakower. “Not a silly name, I’d say. Something dignified.”

I performed my survey, the one I took every hour. The facts were becoming irrefutable—the bluish cast of his skin, the thinness of his hair.

Toby relaxed, smiled. “Dignified,” he said. “Not silly. Oh, yes.” Clearly, he’d sensed the truth of his new home: in Satirev everything was permitted; in Satirev no boy grew up before his time. “His name is Barnaby. Barnaby Baboon.” Frowning, Toby rammed the tip of his tongue into the corner of his mouth. “I think he might be carrying some germs.”

“Rainbow Boy, you’re absolutely right.” Dr. Krakower pried a wad of cotton batting out of Barnabys arm with her syringe. “We’d better take a stuffing sample.”

That night, the minute my son fell asleep, I ran to the phone booth outside the Paradise and called the Center for Creative Wellness. Krakower told me exactly what I expected to hear: the Xavier’s test was positive.

“There’s still plenty of hope,” she insisted.

“I know what you mean,” I said, shivering in the hot summer darkness. Positive.
Positive.
“If we give Toby the right outlook, his immune system will kick in and
bang
—remission.”

“Exactly.”

“How many years might a remission last?”

“You can’t tell about remissions, Jack. Some of them last a long, long time.”

I placed a call to Veritas.

“Hi, Helen.”

“Jack?
Now
you call?
Now,
after ten whole days?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Your curator sent a get-well card. Are you sick?”

“I’m feeling better.”

“This is a bad time to talk,” she said. “I’m due at the bus station.”

“No, you’re not. I picked up Toby on Sunday.”

“You
what?
”

“He’s got to be with
me
now. I can give him the right outlook.”

“You mean—you’re one of them?”

“Dogs can talk, Helen.”

I pictured her turning white, cringing. “Shut up!” she screamed. “I want my son back! Bring me my son, you tropological shithead!”

“I
love
him.”

“Bring him back!”

“I can cure him.”

“Jack!”

* * * *

As the hot, soggy July melded into a hotter, soggier August, my son and I began spending long hours in the outdoors—or, rather, in those open spaces that in Satirev functioned as the outdoors. Together we explored the community’s swampy frontiers, collecting bugs and amphibians for Toby’s scale-model zoo. The money orchards, meanwhile, proved excellent for archery—we would nock our arrows and aim at the five-dollar bills—while the broiling snowfields soon became littered with the results of our sculpting efforts: snowmen, snowdogs, snowcows, snowbaboons. It was all a matter of having a good pair of insulated gloves.

Finally there was the Jordan, perfect for swimming and, when we could borrow a gondola, fishing. “Do you like this place?” I asked Toby as I threaded my line with a double-barbed hook.

“It’s pretty weird.” Furiously he worked his reel, hauling an aquatic armadillo on board.

“You’re having a terrific time, though, aren’t you, buddy? You’re feeling cheerful.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said evenly.

“What do you like? Do you like making snowmen?”

“The snowmen are great.”

“And the fishing?”

“I like the fishing.” Placing his boot on the armadillo’s left gill, Toby yanked the hook out of its mouth.

“And you like our archery tournaments too, don’t you?” I marveled at the armadillo’s design—its lozenge-shaped body, sleek scales, dynamic fins. “And the swimming?”

“Uh-huh. I wish Mom were here.”

I baited my own hook with a Satirevian snail. “So do I. What else do you like?”

“I don’t know.” In a spasmodic act of mercy, he tossed the armadillo overboard. “I like the way strangers give me candy.”

“And you like the fishing too, right?”

“I already said that,” Toby replied patiently. “Dad, why is my hair falling out?”

“W-what?”

“My hair. And my skin looks funny too.”

I shuddered, pricking my thumb with the fishhook. “Buddy, there’s something we should talk about. Remember that blood sample Dr. Krakower took? It seems you’ve got a few germs in you. Nothing serious—Xavier’s Plague, it’s called.”

“Whose plague?”

“Xavier’s.”

“Then how come
I
got it instead of Mr. Xavier?”

“Lots of people get it.”

Toby impaled a snail on his fishhook. “Is that why my hair…?”

“Probably. They might have to give you some medicine. You’re not really sick.” God, how I loved being able to say that. Such power. “The thing is to stay cheerful. Just say to yourself, ‘Those bad old Xavier’s germs can’t hurt
me.
My immune system’s too strong.’”

“My what?”

“Immune system. Say it, Toby. Say, ‘Those bad old Xavier’s germs can’t hurt
me.’
Go ahead.”

“‘Those bad old Xavier’s germs can’t hurt me,’” he repeated haltingly. “Is that true, Dad?”

“You bet. You aren’t worried, are you?”

Toby rubbed his blue forehead. “I guess not.”

“That’s my buddy.”

* * * *

If my son wasn’t too old for stuffed animals, then he wasn’t too old for bedtime stories. We read together every night, snuggling amid the Paradise’s soft buttery sheets and smooth cotton blankets, working our way through a stack of volumes that had somehow escaped the Wittgenstein’s predations—
Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Corbeau the Pirate,
and, best of all, a leatherbound, gilt-edged collection of fairy tales. Perusing the Brothers Grimm, I trembled not only with the thrill of forbidden fruit—how daring I felt, acting out material I’d normally be reading only in prelude to burning it—but with the odd amoralities and psychosexual insights of the stories themselves. Toby’s favorite was “Rumpelstiltskin,” with its unexpected theme of an old man’s hunger for a baby. My own preference was “Sleeping Beauty.” I roundly identified with the father—with his mad, Herodlike campaign to circumvent his daughter’s destiny by destroying every spinning wheel in the kingdom. I thought him heroic.

“Why did Rumpelstiltskin want a baby?” Toby asked.

“A baby is the best thing there is,” I replied. I felt I was telling the truth. “Rumpelstiltskin knew what he needed.”

Whenever Martina was in Satirev, she joined our expeditions—hiking, swimming, fishing, bug collecting— and I couldn’t quite decide what Toby made of her. They got along famously, even to the point of scatalogical private jokes involving Barnaby Baboon, but occasionally I caught a glimmer of unease in my son’s eyes. Were he a post-burn kid, of course, he would have been frank. Dad, is Martina your mistress? Dad, do you and Martina have sex?

To which the truthful answer would have been: no. Since Toby’s arrival, I had lost my urge for erotic adventures. Martina did not protest; like me, she rather regretted our romp on the billiard table: adultery was wrong, after all—even a dissembler knew that. Thus had Martina and I entered that vast population of men and women whose friendship has crossed the copulation barrier but once, followed by retrenchment and retreat, an entire affair compacted into one memorable screw.