Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (542 page)

“Wait a minute,” Forest said. “You’re saying you didn’t see anything? There wasn’t a malfunction?”

“That’s right,” January said, and cleared his throat. “It wasn’t
necessary,
do you understand?”

Forest was looking at Colonel Dray. Dray gave him a disgusted shrug. “He told me he saw evidence of sabotage.”

“I want you to go back and ask the scientists to intercede for me,” January said, raising his voice to get the man’s attention. “I haven’t got a chance in that court-martial. But if the scientists defend me then maybe they’ll let me live, see? I don’t want to get shot for doing something every one of you scientists would have done.”

Dr. Forest had backed away. Color rising, he said, “What makes you think that’s what we would have done? Don’t you think we considered it? Don’t you think men better qualified than you made the decision?” He waved a hand—“God damn it—what made you think you were competent to decide something as important as that!”

January was appalled at the man’s reaction; in his plan it had gone differently. Angrily he jabbed a finger at Forest. “Because
I
was the man doing it,
Doctor
Forest. You take even one step back from that and suddenly you can pretend it’s not your doing. Fine for you, but
I was there.”

At every word the man’s color was rising. It looked like he might pop a vein in his neck. January tried once more. “Have you ever tried to imagine what one of your bombs would do to a city full of people?”

“I’ve had enough!” the man exploded. He turned to Dray. “I’m under no obligation to keep what I’ve heard here confidential. You can be sure it will be used as evidence in Captain January’s court-martial.” He turned and gave January a look of such blazing hatred that January understood it. For these men to admit he was right would mean admitting
that they were wrong—that every one of them was responsible for his part in the construction of the weapon January had refused to use. Understanding that, January knew he was doomed.

The bang of Dr. Forest’s departure still shook the little office. January sat on his cot, got out a smoke. Under Colonel Dray’s cold gaze he lit one shakily, took a drag. He looked up at the colonel, shrugged. “It was my best chance,” he explained. That did something—for the first and only time the cold disdain in the colonel’s eyes shifted to a little, hard, lawyerly gleam of respect.

* * * *

The court-martial lasted two days. The verdict was guilty of disobeying orders in combat and of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The sentence was death by firing squad.

* * * *

For most of his remaining days January rarely spoke, drawing ever further behind the mask that had hidden him for so long. A clergyman came to see him, but it was the 509th’s chaplain, the one who had said the prayer blessing the Lucky Strike’s mission before they took off. Angrily January sent him packing.

Later, however, a young Catholic priest dropped by. His name was Patrick Getty. He was a little pudgy man, bespectacled and, it seemed, somewhat afraid of January. January let the man talk to him. When he returned the next day January talked back a bit, and on the day after that he talked some more. It became a habit.

Usually January talked about his childhood. He talked of plowing mucky black bottom land behind a mule. Of running down the lane to the mailbox. Of reading books by the light of the moon after he had been ordered to sleep, and of being beaten by his mother for it with a high-heeled shoe. He told the priest the story of the time his arm had been burnt, and about the car crash at the bottom of Fourth Street. “It’s the truck driver’s face I remember, do you see, Father?”

“Yes,” the young priest said. “Yes.”

And he told him about the game he had played in which every action he took tipped the balance of world affairs. “When I remembered that game I thought it was dumb. Step on a sidewalk crack and cause an earthquake—you know, it’s stupid. Kids are like that.” The priest nodded. “But now I’ve been thinking that if everybody were to live their whole lives like that, thinking that every move they made really was important, then…it might make a difference.” He waved a hand vaguely, expelled cigarette smoke. “You’re accountable for what you do.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “Yes, you are.”

“And if you’re given orders to do something wrong, you’re still accountable, right? The orders don’t change it.”

“That’s right.”

“Hmph.” January smoked a while. “So they say, anyway. But look what happens.” He waved at the office. “I’m like the guy in a story I read—he thought everything in books was true, and after reading a bunch of westerns he tried to rob a train. They tossed him in jail.” He laughed shortly. “Books are full of crap.”

“Not all of them,” the priest said. “Besides, you weren’t trying to rob a train.”

They laughed at the notion. “Did you read that story?”

“No.”

“It was the strangest book—there were two stories in it, and they alternated chapter by chapter, but they didn’t have a thing to do with each other! I didn’t get it.”

“…Maybe the writer was trying to say that everything connects to everything else.”

“Maybe. But it’s a funny way to say it.”

“I like it.”

And so they passed the time, talking.

* * * *

So it was the priest who was the one to come by and tell January that his request for a Presidential pardon had been refused. Getty said awkwardly, “It seems the President approves the sentence.”

“That bastard,” January said weakly. He sat on his cot.

Time passed. It was another hot, humid day.

“Well,” the priest said. “Let me give you some better news. Given your situation I don’t think telling you matters, though I’ve been told not to. The second mission—you know there was a second strike?’’

“Yes.”

“Well, they missed too.”

“What?” January cried, and bounced to his feet. “You’re kidding!”

“No. They flew to Kokura, but found it covered by clouds. It was the same over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so they flew back to Kokura and tried to drop the bomb using radar to guide it, but apparently there was a—a genuine equipment failure this time, and the bomb fell on an island.”

January was hopping up and down, mouth hanging open,

“So we n-never—”

“We never dropped an atom bomb on a Japanese city. That’s right.” Getty grinned. “And get this—I heard this from my superior—they sent a message to the Japanese government tellng them that the two explosions were warnings, and that if they didn’t surrender by September first we would drop bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo, and then wherever else we had to. Word is that the Emperor went to Hiroshima to survey the damage, and when he saw it he ordered the Cabinet to surrender. So…”

“So it worked,” January said. He hopped around, “It worked, it worked!”

“Yes.”

“Just like I said it would!” he cried, and hopping before the priest he laughed.

Getty was jumping around a little too, and the sight of the priest bouncing was too much for January. He sat on his cot and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

“So—” he sobered quickly. “So Truman’s going to shoot me anyway, eh?”

“Yes,” the priest said unhappily. “I guess that’s right.”

This time January’s laugh was bitter. “He’s a bastard, all right. And proud of being a bastard, which makes it worse.” He shook his head. “If Roosevelt had lived…”

“It would have been different,” Getty finished. “Yes. Maybe so. But he didn’t.” He sat beside January. “Cigarette?” He held out a pack, and January noticed the white wartime wrapper. He frowned. “You haven’t got a Camel?”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Oh well. That’s all right.” January took one of the Lucky Strikes, lit up. “That’s awfully good news.” He breathed out. “I never believed Truman would pardon me anyway, so mostly you’ve brought good news. Ha. They
missed.
You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.”

“I think I do.”

January smoked the cigarette.

“…So I’m a good American after all. I am a good American,” he insisted, “no matter what Truman says.”

“Yes,” Getty replied, and coughed. “You’re better than Truman any day.”

“Better watch what you say, Father.” He looked into the eyes behind the glasses, and the expression he saw there gave him pause. Since the drop every look directed at him had been filled with contempt. He’d seen it so often during the court-martial that he’d learned to stop looking; and now he had to teach himself to see again. The priest looked at him as
if he were…as if he were some kind of hero. That wasn’t exactly right. But seeing it…

January would not live to see the years that followed, so he would never know what came of his action. He had given up casting his mind forward and imagining possibilities, because there was no point to it. His planning was ended. In any case he would not have been able to imagine the course of the post-war years. That the world would quickly become an armed camp pitched on the edge of atomic war, he might have predicted. But he never would have guessed that so many people would join a January Society. He would never know of the effect the Society had on Dewey during the Korean crisis, never know of the Society’s successful campaign for the test ban treaty, and never learn that thanks in part to the Society and its allies, a treaty would be signed by the great powers that would reduce the number of atomic bombs year by year, until there were none left.

Frank January would never know any of that. But in that moment on his cot looking into the eyes of young Patrick Getty, he guessed an inkling of it—he felt, just for an instant, the impact on history.

And with that he relaxed. In his last week everyone who met him carried away the same impression, that of a calm, quiet man, angry at Truman and others, but in a withdrawn, matter-of-fact way. Patrick Getty, a strong force in the January Society ever after, said January was talkative for some time after he learned of the missed attack on Kokura. Then he became quieter and quieter, as the day approached. On the morning that they woke him at dawn to march him out to a hastily constructed execution shed, his MPs shook his hand. The priest was with him as he smoked a final cigarette, and they prepared to put the hood over his head. January looked at him calmly. “They load one of the guns with a blank cartridge, right?”

“Yes, “Getty said.

“So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

A tight, unhumorous smile was January’s last expression. He threw down the cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. “But I
know.”
Then the mask slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.

* * * *

Copyright © 1984 by Terry Carr.

(1947– )

No matter who you are, Lucius Shepard has a more interesting life than you do. He lives in Portland, Oregon, these days, but I’m never surprised to see a Facebook post from, say, Australia or a jungle in Guatemala, brilliantly discussing a film that I wish I’d seen. As a teenager, Shepard went to Ireland in a freighter, then bounced around Europe, North Africa, and Asia, supporting himself by working in (for instance) a cigarette factory in Germany, a black market bazaar in Egypt, and a nightclub in Spain. After returning to the U.S., Shepard sporadically attended the University of North Carolina (between various international adventures) where he met his wife, Joy Wolf. A cross-country drive in the 1970s left them stranded in the Midwest, where Shepard supported them in part by joining a rock and roll band. In the early 1980s he worked as a freelance journalist covering civil war in Honduras.

Shepard’s poetry was first published in the late 1960s, but he didn’t publish prose SF until after he attended Clarion in 1980. He was already well-known as a short story writer by 1984 when his first novel,
Green Eyes
(about zombies created by bacterial injection), was published. He won a Campbell Award for best new writer in 1985, and since then has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Nebula, and many other awards. “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” won a best novella Hugo, while “White Trains” won the Rhysling Award for SF poetry.

First published in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, July 1992

The way things happen, not the great movements of time but the ordinary things that make us what we are, the savage accidents of our births, the simple lusts that because of whimsy or a challenge to one’s pride become transformed into complex tragedies of love, the heartless operations of change, the wild sweetness of other souls that intersect the orbits of our lives, travel along the same course for a while, then angle off into oblivion, leaving no formal shape for us to consider, no easily comprehensible pattern from which we may derive enlightenment…I often wonder why it is when stories are contrived from such materials as these, the storyteller is generally persuaded to perfume the raw stink of life, to replace bloody loss with talk of noble sacrifice, to reduce the grievous to the wistfully sad. Most people, I suppose, want their truth served with a side of sentiment; the perilous uncertainty of the world dismays them, and they wish to avoid being brought hard against it. Yet by this act of avoidance they neglect the profound sadness that can arise from a contemplation of the human spirit
in extremis
and blind themselves to beauty. That beauty, I mean, which is the iron of our existence. The beauty that enters through a wound, that whispers a black word in our ears at funerals, a word that causes us to shrug off our griever’s weakness and say, No more, never again. The beauty that inspires anger, not regret, and provokes struggle, not the idle aesthetic of a beholder. That, to my mind, lies at the core of the only stories worth telling. And that is the fundamental purpose of the storyteller’s art, to illumine such beauty, to declare its central importance and make it shine forth from the inevitable wreckage of our hopes and the sorry matter of our decline.

This, then, is the most beautiful story I know.

* * * *

It all happened not so along ago on Solitaire Station, out beyond the orbit of Mars, where the lightships are assembled and launched, vanishing in thousand-mile-long shatterings, and it happened to a man by the name of William Stamey, otherwise known as Barnacle Bill.

Wait now, many of you are saying, I’ve heard that story. It’s been told and retold and told again. What use could there be in repeating it?

But what have you heard, really?

That Bill was a sweet, balmy lad, I would imagine. That he was a carefree sort with a special golden spark of the Creator in his breast and the fey look of the hereafter in his eye, a friend to all who knew him. That he was touched not retarded, moonstruck and not sick at heart, ill-fated rather than violated, tormented, sinned against.

If that’s the case, then you would do well to give a listen, for there were both man and boy in Bill, neither of them in the least carefree, and the things he did and how he did them are ultimately of less consequence than why he was so moved and how this reflects upon the spiritual paucity and desperation of our age.

Of all that, I would suspect, you have heard next to nothing.

Bill was thirty-two years old at the time of my story, a shambling, sour-smelling unkempt fellow with a receding hairline and a daft, moony face whose features—weak-looking blue eyes and Cupid’s bow mouth and snub nose—were much too small for it, leaving the better part of a vast round area unexploited. His hands were always dirty, his station jumpsuit mapped with stains, and he was rarely without a little cloth bag in which he carried, among other items, a trove of candy and pornographic VR crystals. It was his taste for candy and pornography that frequently brought us together—the woman with whom I lived, Arlie Quires, operated the commissary outlet where Bill would go to replenish his supplies, and on occasion, when my duties with Security Section permitted, I would help Arlie out at the counter. Whenever Bill came in he would prefer to have me wait on him; he was, you understand, intimidated by everyone he encountered, but by pretty women most of all. And Arlie, lithe and brown and clever of feature, was not only pretty but had a sharp mouth that put him off even more.

There was one instance in particular that should both serve to illustrate Bill’s basic circumstance and provide a background for all that later transpired. It happened one day about six months before the return of the lightship Perseverance. The shift had just changed over on the assembly platforms, and the commissary bar was filled with workers. Arlie had run off somewhere, leaving me in charge, and from my vantage behind the counter, located in an ante-room whose walls were covered by a holographic photomural of a blue-sky day in the now-defunct Alaskan wilderness, and furnished with metal tables and chairs, all empty at that juncture, I could see coloured lights playing back and forth within the bar, and hear the insistent rhythms of a pulse group. Bill, as was his habit, peeked in from the corridor to make sure none of his enemies were about, then shuffled on in, glancing left and right, ducking his head, hunching his shoulders, the very image of a guilty party. He shoved his moneymaker at me, three green telltales winking on the slim metal cylinder, signifying the amount of credit he was releasing to the commissary, and demanded in that grating, adenoidal voice of his that I give him “new stuff,” meaning by this new VR crystals.

“I’ve nothing new for you,” I told him.

“A ship came in.” He gave me a look of fierce suspicion. “I saw it. I was outside, and I saw it!”

Arlie and I had been quarrelling that morning, a petty difference concerning whose turn it was to use the priority lines to speak with relatives in London that had subsequently built into a major battle; I was in no mood for this sort of exchange. “Don’t be an ass,” I said. “You know they won’t have unloaded the cargo yet.”

His suspicious look flickered, but did not fade. They unloaded already,” he said. “Sleds were going back and forth.” His eyes went a bit dreamy and his head wobbled, as if he were imagining himself back out on the skin of the station, watching the sleds drifting in and out of the cargo bays; but he was, I realized, fixed upon a section of the holographic mural in which a brown bear had just ambled out of the woods and was sniffing about a pile of branches and sapling trunks at the edge of a stream that might have been a beaver dam. Though he had never seen a real one, the notion of animals fascinated Bill, and when unable to think of anything salient to say, he would recite facts about giraffes and elephants, kangaroos and whales, and beasts even more exotic, all now receded into legend.

“Bloody hell!” I said. “Even if they’ve unloaded, with processing and inventory, it’ll be a week or more before we see anything from it. If you want something, give me a specific order. Don’t just stroll in here and say”—I tried to imitate his delivery—“‘Gimme some new stuff.’”

Two men and a woman stepped in from the corridor as I was speaking; they fell into line, keeping a good distance between themselves and Bill, and on hearing me berating him, they established eye contact with me, letting me know by their complicitors’ grins that they supported my harsh response. That made me ashamed of having yelled at him.

“Look here,” I said, knowing that he would never be able to manage the specific. “Shall I pick you out something? I can probably find one or two you haven’t done.”

He hung his great head and nodded, bulled into submissiveness. I could tell by his body language that he wanted to turn and see whether the people behind him had witnessed his humiliation, but he could not bring himself to do so. He twitched and quivered as if their stares were pricking him, and his hands gripped the edge of the counter, fingers kneading the slick surface.

By the time I returned from the stockroom several more people had filtered in from the corridor, and half a dozen men and women were lounging about the entrance to the bar, laughing and talking, among them Braulio Menzies, perhaps the most dedicated of Bill’s tormentors, a big, balding, sallow man with sleek black hair and thick shoulders and immense forearms and a Mephistophelean salt-and-pepper goatee that lent his generous features a thoroughly menacing aspect. He had left seven children, a wife and a mother behind in Sao Paolo to take a position as foreman in charge of a metalworkers’ unit, and the better part of his wages were sent directly to his family, leaving him little to spend on entertainment; if he was drinking, and it was apparent he had been, I could think of nothing that would have moved him to this end other than news from home. As he did not look to be in a cheerful mood, chances were the news had not been good.

Hostility was thick as cheap perfume in the room. Bill was still standing with his head hung down, hands gripping the counter, but he was no longer passively maintaining that attitude—he had gone rigid, his neck was corded, his fingers squeezed the plastic, recognizing himself to be the target of every disparaging whisper and snide laugh. He seemed about to explode, he was so tightly held. Braulio stared at him with undisguised loathing, and as I set Bill’s goods down on the counter, the skinny blonde girl who was clinging to Braulio’s arm sang, “He can’t get no woman, least not one that’s human, he’s Barnacle Bill the Spacer.”

There was a general outburst of laughter, and Bill’s face grew flushed; an ugly, broken noise issued from his throat. The girl, her smallish breasts half-spilling out from a skimpy dress of bright blue plastic, began to sing more of her cruel song.

“Oh, that’s brilliant, that is!” I said. “The creative mind never ceases to amaze!” But my sarcasm had no effect upon her.

I pushed three VR crystals and a double handful of hard candy, Bill’s favourite, across to him. “There you are,” I said, doing my best to speak in a kindly tone, yet at the same time hoping to convey the urgency of the situation. “Don’t be hanging about, now.”

He gave a start. His eyelids fluttered open, and he lifted his gaze to meet mine. Anger crept into his expression, hardening the simple terrain of his face. He needed anger, I suppose, to maintain some fleeting sense of dignity, to hide from the terror growing inside him, and there was no one else whom he dared confront.

“No!” he said, swatting at the candy, scattering much of it on to the floor. “You cheated! I want more!”

“Gon’ mek you a pathway, boog man!” said a gangly black man, leaning in over Bill’s shoulder. “Den you best travel!” Others echoed him, and one gave Bill a push toward the corridor.

Bill’s eyes were locked on mine. “You cheated me, you give me some more! You owe me more!”

“Right!” I said, my temper fraying. “I’m a thoroughly dishonest human being. I live to swindle gits like yourself.” I added a few pieces of candy to his pile and made to shoo him away. Braulio came forward, swaying, his eyes none too clear.

“Let the son’beetch stay, man,” he said, his voice burred with rage. “I wan’ talk to heem.”

I came out from behind the counter and took a stand between Braulio and Bill. My actions were not due to any affection for Bill—though I did not wish him ill, neither did I wish him well; I suppose, I perceived him as less a person than an unwholesome problem. In part, I was still motivated by the residue of anger from my argument with Arlie, and of course it was my duty as an officer in the Security Section to maintain order. But I think the actual reason I came to his defence was that I was bored. We were all of us bored on Solitaire. Bored and bad-tempered and despairing, afflicted with the sort of feverish malaise that springs from a sense of futility.

“That’s it,” I said wearily to Braulio. “That’s enough from all of you. Bugger off.”

“I don’t wan’ hort you, John,” said Braulio, weaving a bit as he tried to focus on me. “Joos’ you step aside.”

A couple of his co-workers came to stand beside him. Jammers with silver nubs protruding from their crewcut scalps, the tips of receivers that channelled radio waves, solar energy, any type of signal, into their various brain centres, producing a euphoric kinaesthesia. I had a philosophical bias against jamming, no doubt partially the result of some vestigial Christian reflex. The sight of them refined my annoyance.

“You poor sods are tuned to a dark channel,” I said. “No saved by the bell. Not today. No happy endings.”

The jammers smiled at one another. God only knows what insane jangle was responsible for their sense of well-being. I smiled, too. Then I kicked the nearer one in the head, aiming at but missing his silver stub; I did for his friend with a smartly delivered backfist. They lay motionless, their smiles still in place. Perhaps, I thought, the jamming had turned the beating into a stroll through the park. Braulio faded a step and adopted a defensive posture. The onlookers edged away. The throb of music from the bar seemed to be giving a readout of the tension in the room.

There remained a need in me for violent release, but I was not eager to mix it with Braulio; even drunk, he would be formidable, and in any case, no matter how compelling my urge to do injury, I was required by duty to make a show of restraint.

“Violence,” I said, affecting a comical lower-class accent, hoping to defuse the situation. “The wine of the fucking underclass. It’s like me father used to say, son, ’e’d say, when you’re bereft of reason and the wife’s sucked up all the cooking sherry, just amble on down to the pub and have a piss in somebody’s face. There’s nothing so sweetly logical as an elbow to the throat, no argument so poignant as that made by grinding somebody’s teeth beneath your heel. The very cracking of bones is in itself a philosophical language. And when you’ve captioned someone’s beezer with a nice scar, it provides them a pleasant ’omily to read each time they look in the mirror. Aristotle, Plato, Einstein. All the great minds got their start brawling in the pubs. Groin punches. Elbows to the throat. These are often a first step toward the expression of the most subtle mathematical concepts. It’s a fantastic intellectual experience we’re embarking upon ’ere, and I for one, ladies and gents, am exhilarated by the challenge.”