Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (42 page)

Not until Joseph approached his teenage years did the few wayward teachers begin telling him and his first-generation peers unfiltered tales of nighttime torture in the Old World’s facilities, incarcerated dark men screaming at blue eclipse, pain often wrought by their own possessed hands. How the mystery of eleven shackled and mutilated brown youths washed up on waterfront sands on one bloody night spurred protests first, and then the Riots of 2015. “Willful Fury,” the teachers had called the events. No one established responsibility for what appeared mass imprisonment and murder, but it did not much matter. The appearance of the brutalized corpses afforded teeming hordes ninety summer days to set fire to the last remains of those wards and woods dark souls had called their corners of the American cities. Their flames burned even blight to embers, smoldering with a bitter black smoke that would have consumed the old cities whole had the Great Society not foreseen those urban margins emblazoned fifty years earlier and girded their towers accordingly.

That was what the young protesters called what they were doing in Reagan Square: commemorating the compounds’ history, demanding the realization of dreams and unfulfilled promises that reached back to settlement. As back in the summer of Joseph’s own birth in July 2015, just as mass rage engulfed the city and the birth of a child convinced Joseph’s parents that they could no longer cotton to the way of things in their Detroit home, America had conceived of a solution to the peculiar problem to which its people clung in their struggle for exceptional identification. Recompense had through separation, by choice: reconciliation effected behind steel that was imported from China.

“Joseph Charles?”

The Federals were not foolish enough to remove the cities’ colored populations all alone: too much Old World history in such a policy. The initial calls for migration included all those with cumulative credit scores below 650, recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, the aged and infirm, dwellers with histories of eviction, foreclosure, or personal bankruptcy, alien immigrants, sex offenders, social workers, and evangelical preachers. Before the academic mavens and identity warriors could claim such stipulations as mere code for the Old World’s dark, disenfranchised hordes, the Federals invited willing citizens, too—those looking for a “reboot on living circumstance”—to join the compounds as volunteer “mentor settlers.”

“Mr. Charlie . . .”

Joseph angled the power hose high to blast the protest graffiti loose from tile siding. Chemically treated water sprayed his goggles and gloves as he yanked the hose free from the eighth rung of his strapped security ladder. The tile siding chipped slightly around the defacing—yet the spiraling blue symbols remained in splayed place. Joseph recalled how shiny the compound’s structures had seemed on the surface, not so long before. Back when he was a child certainly, but even later, when young Chevy was still a wide-smiling toddler with brown pupils glimmering wonder.

Joseph knew that he wouldn’t be spraying the dawdle of adolescent rage till half past eleven every other night if the administration still forced the feral youths of his son’s lot to read old America’s founding constitution. If they knew the compact the people had originally made with their history (with its drafters and amenders, its appendices and its funny 60 percent math), knew that the free mass had been bound to an agreement with their appointed rulers for their own good, then they could appreciate the audacious hope afforded by their lives in the compound. Appreciate compound life as superior to any clamoring alternatives. Yet once their madness was let loose without history’s insight, it was amok, emboldening juveniles to mime tales of theatrical rebellion in a walled-off square. Rattling cages for old freedoms and emptied democracy in a rebellion spent up by bankrupted history—especially given that such insanity was all that the people were brought there, all that they’d come there to conquer.

“You are Joseph Charles, father of the one whom they call Ché, no?” The woman’s face hovered before each of the flat screens high above Joseph’s work ladder. Taut gray skin pulled into creases between her eyes and the corners of her lips, then stretched along her throat where her neck and skull met. White-blond hair hung warrior short, chopped just beneath earlobes, behind insistent chlorine-pool eyes.

Governor Westgrove cleared her narrow throat and pursed lips, waiting for the center square’s cleaning man to pause spraying the commodities building and stand at something like attention upon his municipal ladder. Her voice trembled staccato, the angels and judges of her stern tribe forever beaming down from black mountain sky over Joseph and the square, in plasma hologram.

“Chevrolet,” Joseph said, correcting the five faces. “My son is Chevrolet Charles. After the car brand, from the Old World. Not Ché, no; we call him Chevy for short.”

“Have you seen the young man?” The sound of the woman’s voice was not as curt as her glare led him to expect. Joseph heard something like an apology in her tone, or so he convinced himself in the moment. If not an apology, then at least unexpected compassion.

“No, not at all,” Joseph answered quickly, hoping not to betray anything in the way of emotion himself. “Not he, not his mother.”

“But you do know where they are?”

Joseph straightened himself up on the ladder and looked directly into the third hologram to his right. “Detroit, I suppose,” he said, before blinking away her eyewitness gaze.

The lines along the right side of Westgrove’s face lifted upward. “This is important, Joseph, critical for all of us. We may need Chevy here.”

“He won’t come back. The boy earned his pass from the last administration. With his mother.”

“Just in case. Good to know where to find him, if he is needed.” Westgrove straightened the pearls at her exposed neck. “It is an important thing you can do for us, Joseph. I have children of my own, two girls—may I call you Joe?”

The street cleaner looked away from the middle hologram before answering. “It’s fine.”

“Joe, I know how difficult it is to raise them; all we can do is hope that they choose the proper paths in this life. Even when we have circumscribed—uhm, circled—contained—”

“I get you.”

“—their paths. We do what we can, as long as we can. And then, when they go too far, we try to rein them back in as best as possible. It ain’t pretty. Order and authority. That’s what the Old World lost before we left it, brother—the settlers faced similar circumstances back with the violence of the gangs destroying their cities.”

“No need to convince me.” Joseph latched the cleaning hose to his ladder and descended backward along the rungs, peeking over his shoulder at the damp sidewalk stone. Westgrove had pronounced
violence
as if it were a musical instrument, stringing dated and elegant melody through tightly wound lips. “I blame it on his mother. Always was an ingrate radical—got worse as the years went on. Thought the opposite would be. Don’t most calm down as the years pass? Well, hers went the other way. How could the boy not show effects?”

Westgrove’s right hand reached toward Joseph, as if she intended to take hold of his shaved dome and bring him to her comforting, translucent bosom. “It is difficult. But we march forward. Know that this path is superior to the other. The walls keep us safe.”

“Forty-foot steel walls all around.” Joseph heard the agitation in his words, even as he could not place its source. “Safe from what?”

Westgrove’s eyes wagged and her tongue clicked softly along ivory upper dentures. “Your son was a brilliant student, something like a
wunderkind
from what I hear. He earned his pass. But therein lies the problem: They go beyond the walls, and you can’t tell what notions infest their minds.”

“It was the mother,” Joseph insisted.

“Who knows beyond the walls?” the governor repeated. “He hasn’t gone too far just yet; he has time to reboot. We believe that he can be brought back home.”

“If you want him to come back here to the compound, told you, he won’t. Or are you asking that I lead you people to him? Which is it?”

“I was speaking of home in the figurative sense, Joe—I’m sorry. If you can point us to your son, I believe we can help him. We can rectify this.” Westgrove’s hologram stiffened and her arms disappeared from the projection. “You’ve heard all about this terrorist threatening to attack our compound. Plotting against our people: innocents, children, for some shrill, nonsense cause.”

“Chevy has nothing to do with that,” Joseph said, careful to balance his tone. “I don’t care what these ninnies chant in the square. All the boy did is put some words on a screen. Not his fault where anybody else took it. Blame the mother for that, too. Always posed herself as some kind of artist.”

“We’re not looking to indict your son necessarily, Joe. We know what he’s capable of.” The pause between the governor’s words were clips of hurried breath. “We think we know what he was intending in his messages. Correction is all that we’re after. Correction and rectification.”

Joseph laughed and shrugged at once. “Before last week, I hadn’t heard that word
terrorist
since I was a boy. Since my father—”

“You will lead us to him, then?” Westgrove’s withered hand reached toward her projector’s power button. “Think of this administration as extended family, and connecting us to your son as our collective intervention.”

“Everything ends in
-tion
,
-ive
, or
-ist
to you. Words mean more when they’re longer? Is that a rule, Governor?” He chuckled at the pallid gray woman. “So, we’re family: I should call you Big Mother Governor?”

“ Sister, just sister, Joe, my brother. History is behind us. This is for the best.”

Westgrove’s faces disappeared from Reagan Square’s skyline, and the center returned to its soft silver nighttime haze. Joseph climbed the municipal safety ladder, stopping at the fifth of two dozen rungs, just high enough to take hold of the water hose, and he looked up at the blue graffiti marking the commodities building. From that height, the circles appeared drawn in letters that spoke through fresh cracks in the building edifice. Each spiral painted in turning phrases, repeating their vandalism on the skyscraper’s alley side—
REVOLUTION TURNS, BACK TO THE BEGINNING, THE ONLY WAY, SANS CHANGE, VIVA CHEVY—
flushing into empty tile before repeating from the first.

About “Reservation 2020”

“Reservation 2020” wells up from themes treated in Ray Bradbury’s longer works,
Fahrenheit 451
and
Something Wicked This Way Comes
in particular. I read
Fahrenheit
as using its futuristic landscape to comment on profound social change observed in the America (United States) in which Bradbury crafted the novel—change wrought by post–World War II technological advancement, the altered political climate partially born from that advance, and the presumptuous winds of progress blowing all about the author’s hinterland home. While
Fahrenheit
looks forward in time with wary eyes,
Something Wicked
looks back to childhood through a nostalgic lens cast upon an idyllic place no longer to be, both within the context of that novel and within the author’s own living narrative: Bradbury’s prose had taken up Green Town before
Something Wicked
, and he would come back to that place of lost innocence again. On each fictive visit, the plates beneath the village’s reality had shifted.

Essential to Ray Bradbury’s fiction are his love for the beauty of words and his recognition of history’s prevailing sway. The horror at the core of
Fahrenheit 451
seems to me the human tragedy had when words bound by historic context smolder in readerless ruins at a bonfire set by those appointed to safeguard social progress. How could Bradbury the writer not ponder the coming of such a future as he beheld the beginning and end of all-out wars, the expediting of life all about him, and the arrival of the graphic babble-box screen in just about every living room in every village strewn across the landscape that he called home?

Today Ray Bradbury seems a prophet, foretelling a time in which the narrative of change is told not in books but in clipped tweets, ticker tapes, and graffiti blurbs, reiterated ad nauseam by plasma-screen heads spouting words ripped of meaning. At his finest, the author uses poignant language and foreboding setting to warn of this carnival lurking at the edge of town.

—Bayo Ojikutu

TWO HOUSES

Kelly Link

S
oft music woke the sleepers in the spaceship
The House of Secrets
. They opened their eyes to soft pink light, crept like vampires from their narrow beds. They gathered in the antechamber. Outside the world was night, the dawn a hundred years away.

The sleepers floated gracelessly in the recycled air, bumped softly against one another. They clasped hands, as if to reassure one another that they were real, then pushed off again. Their heads were heavy with dreams. There were three of them, two women and one man.

There was the ship as well. Her name was Maureen. She was monitoring the risen sleepers, their heart rates, the dilation of their pupils, each flare of their nostrils.

“Maureen, you goddess! Bread, fresh from the oven! Sourdough!” Gwenda said. “Oh, and old books. A library? It was in a library that I decided I would go to space one day. I was twelve.”

They inhaled. Stretched, then slowly somersaulted.

“Something brackish,” said Sullivan. “A tidal smell. Mangrove roots washed by the sea. I spent a summer in a place like that. Arrived with one girl and left with her sister.”

“Oranges, now. A whole grove of orange trees, all warm from the sun, and someone’s just picked one. I can smell the peel, coming away.” That was Mei. “Oh, and coffee! With cinnamon in it!”

“Maureen?” said Gwenda. “Who else is awake?”

There were twelve aboard
The
House of Secrets
. Ten women and one man, and the ship, Maureen. It was a bit like a girls’ summer camp, Gwenda had said, early on. Aune said, Or an asylum.

They were fourteen years into their mission. They had longer still to go.

“Portia is awake, and Aune, and Sisi,” Maureen said. “For two months now. Aune and Portia will go back to sleep in a day or two. Sisi has agreed to stay awake awhile yet. She wants to see Gwenda. They’re all in the Great Room. They’re throwing a surprise party for you.”

There was always a surprise party. Sullivan said, “I’ll go and put my best surprised face on.”

They threw off sleep. Each rose or sank toward the curved bulkhead, opened cunning drawers and disappeared into them to make their toilets, to be poked and prodded and examined and massaged. The smell of cinnamon went away. The pink light grew brighter.

Long-limbed Sisi poked her head into the antechamber and waited until Gwenda swung out of a drawer. “Has Maureen told you?” Sisi said.

“Told what?” Gwenda said. Her hair and her eyebrows had grown back in her sleep.

“Never mind,” Sisi said. She looked older; thinner. “Dinner first, then all the gossip.”

Gwenda wriggled through the air toward her, leaned her face against Sisi’s neck. “Howdy, stranger.” She’d checked the ship log while making her toilet. The date was March 12, 2073. It had been two years since she’d last been awake with her good friend Sisi.

“Is that a new tattoo?” Sisi said.

It was an old joke between them.

Head to toes Gwenda was covered in the most extraordinary pictures. A sunflower, a phoenix, a star map, and a whole pack of wolves running across the ice. There was a man holding a baby, a young girl with red hair on a playground rocket, the Statue of Liberty and the state flag of Illinois, passages from the Book of Revelations, and a hundred other things as well. There was the ship
The House of Secrets
on the back of one hand, and its sister,
The House of Mystery
, on the other. You only told them apart by the legend scrolled beneath each tattoo.

You didn’t get to take much with you when you went into space. Maureen could upload all of your music, all of your books and movies, letters and videos and photographs of your family, but how real was any of that? What of it had any weight? What could you hold in your hand? Sisi had a tarot deck. Her mother had given it to her. Sullivan had a copy of
Moby-Dick
, and Portia had a four-carat diamond in a platinum setting. Mei had her knitting needles.

Gwenda had her tattoos. She’d left everything else behind.

T
here was the Control Room. There were the Berths, and the Antechamber. There was the Engine Room, and the Long Gallery, where Maureen grew their food, maintained their stores, and cooked for them. The Great Room was neither, strictly speaking, Great nor a Room, but with the considerable talents of Maureen at their disposal, it was a place where anything that could be imagined could be seen, felt, heard, savored.

The sleepers staggered under the onslaught.

“Dear God,” Mei said. “You’ve outdone yourself.”

“We each picked a theme! Maureen, too!” Portia said, shouting to be heard above the music. “You have to guess!”

“Easy,” Sullivan said. White petals eddied around them, chased by well-groomed dogs. “Westminster dog show, cherry blossom season, and, um, that’s Shakespeare over there, right? Little pointy beard?”

“Perhaps you noticed the strobe lights,” Gwenda said. “And the terrible music, the kind of music only Aune could love. A Finnish disco. Is that everything?”

Portia said, “Except Sully didn’t say which year, for the dog show.”

“Oh, come on,” Sullivan said.

“Fine,” Portia said. “2009. Clussex 3-D Grinchy Glee wins. The Sussex spaniel.”

There was dancing, and lots of yelling, barking, and declaiming of poetry. Sisi and Sullivan and Gwenda danced, the way you could dance only in low gravity, while Mei swam over to talk with Shakespeare. It was a pretty good party. Then dinner was ready, and Maureen sent away the Finnish dance music, the dogs, the cherry blossoms. You could hear Shakespeare say to Mei, “I always dreamed of being an astronaut.” And then he vanished.

O
nce there had been two ships. It was considered cost-effective, in the Third Age of Space Travel, to build more than one ship at a time, to send companion ships out on their long voyages. Redundancy enhances resilience, or so the theory goes. Sister ships
Light House
and
Leap Year
had left Earth on a summer day in the year 2059. Only some tech, some comic-book fan, had given them nicknames for reasons of his own:
The House of Secrets
and
The
House of Mystery
.

The
House of Secrets
had lost contact with her sister five years earlier. Space was full of mysteries. Space was full of secrets. Gwenda still dreamed, sometimes, about the twelve women aboard
The
House of Mystery
.

D
inner was Beef Wellington (fake) with asparagus and new potatoes (both real) and sourdough rolls (realish). The chickens were laying again, and so there was chocolate soufflé for dessert. Maureen increased gravity, because it was a special occasion and in any case, even fake Beef Wellington requires suitable gravity. Mei threw rolls across the table at Gwenda. “What?” she said. “It’s so nice to watch things
fall
.”

Aune supplied bulbs of something alcoholic. No one asked what it was. Aune worked with eukaryotes and Archaea. “Because,” she said, “it is not just a party, Sullivan, Mei, Gwenda. It’s Portia’s birthday party.”

“Here’s to me,” Portia said.

“To Portia,” Aune said.

“To Proxima Centauri,” Sullivan said.

“To Maureen,” Sisi said. “And old friends.” She squeezed Gwenda’s hand.

“To
The House of Secrets
,” Mei said.

“To
The House of Secrets
and
The House of Mystery
,” Gwenda said. They all turned and looked at her. Sisi squeezed her hand again. And they all drank.

“But we didn’t get you anything, Portia,” Sullivan said.

Portia said, “I’ll take a foot rub. Or wait, I know. You can all tell me stories.”

“We ought to be going over the log,” Aune said.

“The log can lie there!” Portia said. “Damn the log. It’s my birthday party.” There was something shrill about her voice.

“The log can wait,” Mei said. “Let’s sit here a while longer, and talk about nothing.”

“There’s just one thing,” Sisi said. “We ought to tell them the one thing.”

“You’ll ruin my party,” Portia said sulkily.

“What is it?” Gwenda asked Sisi.

“It’s nothing,” Sisi said. “It’s nothing at all. It was only the mind playing tricks. You know what it’s like.”

“Maureen?” Sullivan said. “What are they talking about, please?”

“Approximately thirty-one hours ago Sisi was in the Control Room. She asked me to bring up our immediate course. I did so. Several minutes later, I observed that her heart rate had gone up. She said something I couldn’t understand, and then she said, ‘You see it, too, Maureen? You see it?’ I asked Sisi to describe what she was seeing. Sisi said, ‘
The House of Mystery
. Over to starboard. It was there. Then it was gone.’ I told Sisi that I had not seen it. We called up the charts, but there was nothing recorded there. I broadcast on all channels, but no one answered. No one has seen
The House of Mystery
in the intervening time.”

“Sisi?” Gwenda said.

“It was there,” Sisi said. “Swear to God, I saw it. Whole and bright and shining. So near I could almost touch it. Like looking in a mirror.”

They all began to talk at once.

“Do you think—”

“Just a trick of the imagination—”

“It might have been, but it disappeared like that.” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Why couldn’t it come back again the same way?”

“No!” Portia said. She slammed her hand down on the table. “It’s my birthday! I don’t want to talk about this, to rehash this all again. What happened to poor old
Mystery
? Where do you think they went? Do you think somebody,
something
, did it? Will they do it to us too? Did it fall into some kind of cosmic pothole or stumble over some galactic anomaly? Did it travel back in time? Get eaten by a monster? Could it happen to us? Don’t you remember? We talked and talked and talked, and it didn’t make any difference!”

“I remember,” Sisi said. “I’m sorry, Portia. I wish I hadn’t seen it.” There were tears in her eyes. It was Gwenda’s turn to squeeze her hand.

“Had you been drinking?” Sullivan said. “One of Aune’s concoctions? Maureen, what did you find in Sisi’s blood?”

“Nothing that shouldn’t have been there,” Maureen said.

“I wasn’t high, and I hadn’t had anything to drink,” Sisi said.

“But we haven’t stopped drinking since,” Aune said. She tossed back another bulb. “Cheers.”

Mei said, “I don’t want to talk about it either.”

“That’s settled,” Portia said. “Bring up the lights again, Maureen, please. Make it something cozy. Something cheerful. How about a nice old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, big picture windows full of green fields, bluebells, sheep, detectives in deerstalkers, hounds, moors, Cathy scratching at the windows. You know. That sort of thing. I turned twenty-eight today, and tomorrow or sometime soon I’m going to go back to sleep again and sleep for another year or until Maureen decides to decant me. So tonight I want to get drunk and gossip. I want someone to rub my feet, and I want everyone to tell a story we haven’t heard before. I want to have a good time.”

The walls extruded furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They sat in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. The floor beneath them was flagstones, a fire crackled in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, and through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.

“Less gravity, Maureen,” Portia said. “I always wanted to float around like a ghost in an old English manor.”

“I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”

“Funny old Aune,” Portia said. “Funny old all of us.” She somersaulted in the suddenly buoyant air. Her seaweedy hair seethed around her face in the way that Gwenda hated.

“Let’s each pick one of Gwenda’s tattoos,” Sisi said. “And make up a story about it.”

“Dibs on the phoenix,” Sullivan said. “You can never go wrong with a phoenix.”

“No,” Portia said. “Let’s tell ghost stories. Aune, you start. Maureen, you can do the special effects.”

“I don’t know any ghost stories,” Aune said slowly. “I know stories about trolls. No. Wait. I have one ghost story. It was a story that my grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”

The gardeners and the rosebushes disappeared. Now, through the windows, you could see a farm, and rocky fields beyond it. In the distance, the land sloped up and became coniferous trees.

“Yes,” Aune said. “Like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins then. Now the world has changed again. The forest will have swallowed it up.” She paused for a moment, so that they all could imagine it. “My grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My grandmother’s work was to take the cows to one particular meadow, where the pasturage was supposed to be better. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them! What she would think of me now, of this path we are on! In the evening she brought the herd home again. The cattle path went along a ridge. On one side there was a meadow that her family did not use even though the grass looked very fine to my grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked something like a table.”