Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (14 page)

And then I would climb out when I chose, after staying as long as I chose. Because now I understand fully what I have always known in my guts and bones: The only escape from the illusion of stories is to go deeper into the story, beneath the story, where you yourself disappear and only the tale remains.

So I will hide in the stories under the stories, and there I will be safe.

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty books, including fantasy and science fiction novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. For sixteen years she was also the fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain. Her work has won four Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Award. Her most recent books are a collection, Fountain of Age: Stories (Small Beer Press, 2012); a YA fantasy written under the name Anna Kendall, Crossing Over (Viking, 2010); and a short novel of eco- terror, Before the Fall, During the Fall, After the Fall (Tachyon, 2012). Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, science fiction writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

JACK DANN

On Gene Wolfe:
I know two Gene Wolfes. One is an affable, taciturn, witty convention companion, whom I can’t resist hugging every time I see him. The other Gene Wolfe scares the living hell out of me. He’s the one who writes science fiction and fantasy with the skill and depth of a Nabokov, Borges, or Joyce, a literary genius ferociously bending and twisting genre tropes into high art. A blessing on both your heads, Gene Wolfe!

Y
our name is John Carter—Captain John Carter of Foster, Victoria—and you’re twelve years old. Actually, you’re twelve and three quarters, almost a teenager. It’s a June night, and the Australian winter cold has settled deep into your bones, making you shiver as you stand in the sunken garden, just as you shiver when you’re in your own bedroom: You’re not allowed to keep the space heater on because it uses too much electricity.

Above you, an impossible eternity of distance above you, the gauzy span of the Milky Way is almost as bright as the moon. You’ve turned your head upside down to see the face in the moon before, but not tonight. Tonight you are desperate to become the real you . . . the grown-up you. Tonight you must focus; and so you stand under the starry sky, staring as hard as you can at the black expanse of the Southern Ocean until you sight the island landmass known as Barsoom. Although Barsoom can’t be seen during the day, you know it’s green and lush; the great gold and crystal spires of the city Helium on the river Iss reflect so much light that it’s hard to look at them. You know that because you’ve seen them. Now, as you raise your arms and concentrate, as you silently call to the real you to come and help, to transform you, you can see the faraway city’s lights twinkling and spinning. Your outstretched arms begin to ache as you shiver in the moonlight and await an answer to your call.

But there will be no answer.

Not tonight.

“Stop that, Jonathan!”

The lights of Helium blink out.

You lower your arms and turn around. “Stop what? I’m not doing nothin’.”

Your sister Julia is wearing torn jeans and the navy blue sweater that your grandmother, may she rest in peace, knitted for her. Her blond-streaked hair is pulled back tightly into a ponytail, and her ring-pierced lips look swollen and bruised. She’s two years older than you and has breasts—you’ve seen them— but you would never know it by looking at her in that sweater.

“You know what,” she says, poking you in the ribs. “You’ve just got to stop it. I heard Mother talking with the Dickhead about taking you to see a shrink. Is that what you want?”

You shrug. “How would I know? I’ve never seen one, and you know as well as I do that the Dickhead wouldn’t never allow it, anyway. He’d be afraid that—”

Your sister gets that closed, dangerous look. “Go back to the housebefore—”

You know you shouldn’t argue with her, not after she’s been hurt; but you can’t help yourself. “Before what?”

She pushes you with both hands. “Before I—” And then she just walks away. You want to go after her, but she’s all closed up. Angry and sad and somehow a little dead. So you take one last look out over the sea (but all you can see now are the ruddy lights of the drilling rigs off the coast of Barrie’s Beach); and then you climb the stone perron, cross the manicured lawn with all its silly fluted topiaries, and quietly sneak back into the Dickhead’s faux–Greek Revival mansion. The rooms on the first floor all have high ceilings and chandeliers and marble fireplaces, which always impress guests, and, as the Dickhead is so fond of repeating: “It’s good for business.” But the maroon carpets are threadbare in spots, and you once heard someone say that all of the really good furniture and paintings had been sold long ago. Nevertheless, it’s the most impressive house you’ve ever seen.

You take the stairs that lead into the servant’s quarters. You skip certain steps because you know which treads creak; you know every inch of this part of the house, which is always “closed off,” probably because your mother hates housecleaning and probably because it saves on fuel bills. Although your mother thinks that the Dickhead is rich—which is probably why she married him—he claims that all he’s got left is the house and the cars and a small annuity, which will keep them all going until he sells his first novel for seven figures. You don’t quite know what seven figures means, but you figure you’ll find that out eventually.

When you reach the third floor, you duck under a low archway and carefully open the door so it doesn’t squeak; then down the hall to your room, to safety . . . except that the Dickhead has been watching you all along. Watching you from your own window. Waiting for you in your room.

“What in God’s good name are you doing out there at this hour?” he asks in his conversational voice, as if he were saying “Good morning.”

He’s wearing a heavy white bathrobe with his initials embossed on the chest pocket; your mother has one just like it. His bristly gray hair is neatly combed and still damp. Your mother tells you that he’s very good-looking and his cleft chin is a sign of strength and resolve, but he reminds you of a silly, gangly guy you used to watch on television when you were a kid. His name was Mr. Cracker, and he lived in a house that was painted like a barber’s pole. However, you suppose that the Dickhead looks nice. He has an old, crinkly, and happy kind of face, which makes you hate him all the more.

“Well, are you going to answer me?”

“Yessir.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, call me Dick . . . or Dad.”

You already have a father, and he’s not dead, just gone away, so you say, “Okay . . . Dick.”

“Now, tell me, what were you doing out in the sunken garden at this ungodly hour?”

“Nothin’. Just looking out, you know.”

“Without a jacket? You’re shivering even now.”

You can’t tell him that it won’t work if you have too many clothes on. By rights you should be naked when you make what Tars Tarkas calls the sak of transformation. (Sak means jump in the language of Barsoom’s green men; more about all that later.) But the sak of transformation works sometimes, even when you’re just wearing pants and a shirt: no socks or underwear.

“Well?”

“Yeah,” you say, sloping your shoulders, “it was pretty dumb.”

“But why on earth would you go outside like that to freeze your butt off in the middle of the night?” He’s earnest now, earnest and caring; and you know just what to say. But as you say it, you hope that your mother is awake, so he won’t . . . linger.

“I dunno, sometimes I wake up thinking about my dad, and I get scared and then I find myself outside and—”

“Well, get undressed and try to get some sleep,” he says in what you think of as his forgiving voice. But he’s sly. You know that about him.

“You’ll have to be up in a few hours for school.”

You try not to wince as he gentles your hair and pats your face. He sees you into bed and pats you again. You pretend to fall asleep and don’t open your eyes until he leaves, and then you listen to the floorboards creak as he slowly walks through the hallway. You hold your breath as he passes your sister’s room, because you know she’s not in there. You hear the doorknob squeak like a mouse as he opens her bedroom door, then silence—the silence of the stars; one beat, the silence of the moon; two beats, the silence of deep black you’re- dead-forever water; three beats—and finally you hear the door close and the creak of footsteps fading down the hallway. You exhale.

“Darling?” It’s your mother calling the Dickhead. “Are the kids all right?”

“Yeah,” says the Dickhead, his voice soft but clear in the echoic darkness. “Jonnie couldn’t sleep, poor kid. But he’s all tucked up now.”

“And Julia?”

You wait for it . . .

“She’s fine, honey,” he says with a chuckle, and you hear the sticky sound of their bedroom door closing.

Although you can’t hear anything now, you know what he’s saying.

“That little girl of yours is pretty near a grown woman.”

“Pretty near,” you whisper guiltily. The Dickhead was pretty near, but he’s gone now.

You squeeze your eyes closed and dream of Tars Tarkas and the real you.

Tars Tarkas is three hundred and seventeen years old and weighs about four hundred pounds. He stands fifteen feet tall, has a vertical slit for a nose, a fanged mouth framed by four enamel-white tusks the length of your arms, and two crimson eyes that bug out of the sides of his head; if he needs to (and he often does because he’s a green-blooded warrior chieftain), he can see in two directions at once. His scaly skin looks like rough-cut jade, and he’s your very best friend . . . or, rather, he will become your very best friend once you grow up into what you’re supposed to be.

You first met him on the school bus.

Well, you found his four- armed picture on the cover of a magazine scrunched under the cushion of your seat. The wrinkled, yellowstained magazine was thick as a book and still smelled of lemon cordial. And there he was, the one and only Tars Tarkas—scimitar, spear, carbine, and sapphire-pommeled battle- axe in hand—holding back an army of slavering, reptilian centurions. Beside him, but not dwarfed by the jade- skinned Barsoomian, stood a sandy-haired, broad-shouldered Earthman. And right then and there—without even having to read the magazine—you knew who that Earthman was. It was you, the grown-up you, the real you. And there you were, standing tall and unafraid, army knife gleaming under the silvery light of the twin moons, protecting a half-naked princess—who looked just like your sister—from a leaping, two-headed Martian tiger.

Your sister told you to leave the dirty, old magazine on the bus, but you stuffed it into your book satchel. At lunch break you sneaked away to Pearl Park, sat under the gazebo near the stream, ate your peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and read the magazine until you knew it by heart. Then you buried it because now it was yours; you wouldn’t need paper and pictures to remember who you really were. And no matter what the Dickhead might try to do to you, the real you (who stands six foot seven and can jump thirty feet in the air on Barsoom) would be able to protect your sister.

It doesn’t matter that you are skinny and pimply and only twelve and three-quarters, because the real you and your companion Tars Tarkas have given their solemn word that they will come to help whenever you call. All you have to do is follow proper procedure: raise your naked arms at just the right hour, encompass the night sky, and remember the proper sequence of incantations taught to you by Tars Tarkas in the sacred language of his people, the green Thants.

But unless you do it right, unless your thoughts are properly focused and calibrated to the exact telegraphic frequency, you will just stand there like an idiot in your birthday suit; and there will be no sak of transformation.

No Barsoom.

No adventures with Tars Tarkas and the grown-up Captain John Carter.

And . . . no help here on Earth.

You’ve been crossing out the days on your free pocket calendar from john’s meat emporium, foster,
_{03-5675- 0000}
, and now it’s the Queen’s Birthday weekend, which means trouble because the Dickhead is home and prowling about. The weather has become unseasonably warm, and tonight—Saturday nights are always the worst—you hear the Dickhead’s footsteps, the squeak and squeal of doorknob and door, and the consequent soft banging noises in your sister’s bedroom. Quiet as a snake and angry as a two-headed tiger, you sneak out of your room. The Dickhead won’t hear thetap-click of your bedroom door latch, not with all that stentorian breathing, and then you’re free and breathing the cool, unstrangulated air of the sunken garden.

But you’ve no time for air and freedom.

You need to save your sister, so—difficult as it may be to concentrate—you raise your arms to embrace the star- spangled night and pray (in the sacred Thantian language) for the familiar, blindingly bright flash of transformation.