The Best of Nancy Kress (36 page)

“Of course not. But do you know for certain which Sections, and which officials in those Sections, wish for war with the Terrans, and which do not? We can’t be sure. How can you?”

Frablit Pek Brimmidin is innocent, I think. But the thought is useless. Pek Brimmidin is innocent, but powerless.

It tears my soul to think that the two might be the same thing.

Pek Brifjis rubs at the damp carpet with the toe of his boot. He puts the rags in a lidded jar and washes his hands at the washstand. A faint stench still hangs in the air. He comes to stand beside my bed.

“Is that what you want, Uli Pek Bengarin? That I let you leave this house, not knowing what you will do, whom you will inform on? That I endanger everything we have done in order to convince you of its truth?”

“Or you can kill me and let me rejoin my ancestors. Which is what you think I will choose, isn’t it? That choice would let you keep faith with the reality you have decided is true, and still keep yourself secret from the criminals. Killing me would be easiest for you. But only if I consent to my murder. Otherwise, you will violate even the reality you have decided to perceive.”

He stares down at me, a muscular man with beautiful purple eyes. A healer who would kill. A patriot defying his government to prevent a violent war. A sinner who does all he can to minimize his sin and keep it from denying him the chance to rejoin his own ancestors. A believer in shared reality who is trying to bend the reality without breaking the belief.

I keep quiet. The silence stretches on. Finally it is Pek Brifjis that breaks it. “I wish Carryl Walters had never sent you to me.”

“But he did. And I choose to return to my village. Will you let me go, or keep me prisoner here, or murder me without my consent?”

“Damn you,” he says, and I recognize the word as one Carryl Walters used, about the unreal souls in Aulit Prison.

“Exactly,” I say. “What will you do, Pek? Which of your supposed multiple realities will you choose now?”

It is a hot night, and I cannot sleep.

I lie in my tent on the wide empty plain and listen to the night noises. Rude laughter from the pel tent, where a group of miners drinks far too late at night for men who must bore into hard rock at dawn. Snoring from the tent to my right. Muffled lovemaking from a tent farther down the row, I’m not sure whose. The woman giggles, high and sweet.

I have been a miner for half a year now. After I left the northern village of Gofkit Ramloe, Ori’s village, I just kept heading north. Here on the equator, where World harvests its tin and diamonds and pel berries and salt, life is both simpler and less organized. Papers are not necessary. Many of the miners are young, evading their government service for one reason or another. Reasons that must seem valid to them. Here government sections rule weakly, compared to the rule of the mining and farming companies. There are no messengers on Terran bicycles. There is no Terran science. There are no Terrans.

There are shrines, of course, and rituals and processions, and tributes to one’s ancestors. But these things actually receive less attention than in the cities, because they are more taken for granted. Do you pay attention to air?

The woman giggles again, and this time I recognize the sound. Awi Pek Crafmal, the young runaway from another island. She is a pretty thing, and a hard worker. Sometimes she reminds me of Ano.

I asked a great many questions in Gofkit Ramloe. Ori Malfisit, Pek Brifjis said her name was. An old and established family. But I asked and asked, and no such family had ever lived in Gofkit Ramloe. Wherever Ori came from, and however she had been made into that unreal and empty vessel shitting on a rich carpet, she had not started her poor little life in Gofkit Ramloe.

Did Maldon Brifjis know I would discover that, when he released me from the rich widow’s house overlooking the sea? He must have. Or maybe, despite knowing I was an informer, he didn’t understand that I would actually go to Gofkit Ramloe and check. You can’t understand everything.

Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, I wish I had taken Pek Brifjis’s offer to return me to my ancestors.

I work on the rock piles of the mine during the day, among miners who lift sledges and shatter solid stone. They talk, and curse, and revile the Terrans, although few miners have as much as seen one. After work the miners sit in camp and drink pel, lifting huge mugs with dirty hands, and laugh at obscene jokes. They all share the same reality, and it binds them together, in simple and happy strength.

I have strength, too. I have the strength to swing my sledge with the other women, many of whom have the same rough plain looks as I, and who are happy to accept me as one of them. I had the strength to shatter Ano’s coffin, and to bury her even when I thought the price to me was perpetual death. I had the strength to follow Carryl Walters’s words about the brain experiments and seek Maldon Brifjis. I had the strength to twist Pek Brifjis’s divided mind to make him let me go.

But do I have the strength to go where all of that leads me? Do I have the strength to look at Frablit Brimmidin’s reality, and Carryl Walters’s reality, and Ano’s, and Maldon Brifjis’s, and Ori’s—and try to find the places that match and the places that don’t? Do I have the strength to live on, never knowing if I killed my sister, or if I did not? Do I have the strength to doubt everything, and live with doubt, and sort through the millions of separate realities on World, searching for the true pieces of each—assuming that I can even recognize them?

Should anyone have to live like that? In uncertainty, in doubt, in loneliness. Alone in one’s mind, in an isolated and unshared reality.

I would like to return to the days when Ano was alive. Or even to the days when I was an informer. To the days when I shared in World’s reality, and knew it to be solid beneath me, like the ground itself. To the days when I knew what to think, and so did not have to.

To the days before I became—unwillingly—as terrifyingly real as I am now.

Afterword to “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”

What is reality? This is one of the two great questions that have preoccupied philosophers throughout the ages (the other is, How can I get more sex?) Is reality “objective,” outside of ourselves whether we are here or not, or do we create it through our limited perceptions, limited mental capacities, limited knowledge of large and unseen truths?

I first explored these ideas in “Trinity,” where the search was for an unseen God. In “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” I was after something else: the creation of an alien perception of reality, from the alien’s point of view. And yet despite her consensus reality, Uli Pek Bengarin has many human traits: resentment, guilt, cunning, the desires for both revenge and atonement. Even when we try to create the alien, we are still bound to what is comprehensible to us as both writers and readers, to reality as we know it.

“The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” due to vagaries of award qualifications, won the 1997 Sturgeon Award and the 1998 Nebula.

“I’m worried about my granddaughter,” Harry Kramer said, passing half of his sandwich to Manny Feldman. Manny took it eagerly. The sandwich was huge, thick slices of beef and horseradish between fresh slabs of crusty bread. Pigeons watched the park bench hopefully.

“Jackie. The granddaughter who writes books,” Manny said. Harry watched to see that Manny ate. You couldn’t trust Manny to eat enough; he stayed too skinny. At least in Harry’s opinion. Manny, Jackie—the world, Harry sometimes thought, had all grown too skinny when he somehow hadn’t been looking. Skimpy. Stretched feeling. Harry nodded to see horseradish spurt in a satisfying stream down Manny’s scraggly beard.

“Jackie. Yes,” Harry said.

“So what’s wrong with her? She’s sick?” Manny eyed Harry’s strudel, cherry with real yeast bread. Harry passed it to him. “Harry, the whole thing? I couldn’t.”

“Take it, take it, I don’t want it. You should eat. No, she’s not sick. She’s miserable.” When Manny, his mouth full of strudel, didn’t answer, Harry put a hand on Manny’s arm.
“Miserable.”

Manny swallowed hastily. “How do you know? You saw her this week?”

“No. Next Tuesday. She’s bringing me a book by a friend of hers. I know from this.” He drew a magazine from an inner pocket of his coat. The coat was thick tweed, almost new, with wooden buttons. On the cover of the glossy magazine a woman smiled contemptuously. A woman with hollow, starved-looking cheeks who obviously didn’t get enough to eat either.

“That’s not a book,” Manny pointed out.

“So she writes stories, too. Listen to this, just listen. ‘I stood in my backyard, surrounded by the false bright toxin-fed green, and realized that the earth was dead. What else could it be, since we humans swarmed upon it like maggots on carrion, growing our hectic gleaming molds, leaving our slime trails across the senseless surface?’ Does that sound like a happy woman?”

“Hoo boy,” Manny said. 

“It’s all like that. ‘Don’t read my things, Popsy,’ she says. ‘You’re not in the audience for my things.’ Then she smiles without ever once showing her teeth.” Harry flung both arms wide. “Who else should be in the audience but her own grandfather?”

Manny swallowed the last of the strudel. Pigeons fluttered angrily. “She never shows her teeth when she smiles? Never?”

“Never.”

“Hoo boy,” Manny said. “Did you want all of that orange?”

“No, I brought it for you, to take home. But did you finish that whole half a sandwich already?”

“I thought I’d take it home,” Manny said humbly. He showed Harry the tip of the sandwich, wrapped in the thick brown butcher paper, protruding from the pocket of his old coat.

Harry nodded approvingly. “Good, good. Take the orange, too. I brought it for you.”

Manny took the orange. Three teenagers carrying huge shrieking radios sauntered past. Manny started to put his hands over his ears, received a look of dangerous contempt from the teenager with green hair, and put his hands on his lap. The kid tossed an empty beer bottle onto the pavement before their feet. It shattered. Harry scowled fiercely but Manny stared straight ahead. When the cacophony had passed, Manny said, “Thank you for the orange. Fruit, it costs so much this time of year.”

Harry still scowled. “Not in 1937.”

“Don’t start that again, Harry.”

Harry said sadly, “Why won’t you ever believe me? Could I afford to bring all this food if I got it at 1989 prices? Could I afford this coat? Have you seen buttons like this in 1989, on a new coat? Have you seen sandwiches wrapped in that kind of paper since we were young? Have you? Why won’t you believe me?”

Manny slowly peeled his orange. The rind was pale, and the orange had seeds. “Harry. Don’t start.”

“But why won’t you just come to my room and
see
?”

Manny sectioned the orange. “Your room. A cheap furnished room in a Social Security hotel. Why should I go? I know what will be there. What will be there is the same thing in my room. A bed, a chair, a table, a hot plate, some cans of food. Better I should meet you here in the park, get at least a little fresh air.” He looked at Harry meekly, the orange clutched in one hand. “Don’t misunderstand. It’s not from a lack of friendship I say this. You’re good to me, you’re the best friend I have. You bring me things from a great deli, you talk to me, you share with me the family I don’t have. It’s enough, Harry. It’s more than enough. I don’t need to see where you live like I live.”

Harry gave it up. There were moods, times, when it was just impossible to budge Manny. He dug in, and in he stayed. “Eat your orange.”

“It’s a good orange. So tell me more about Jackie.”

“Jackie.” Harry shook his head. Two kids on bikes tore along the path. One of them swerved towards Manny and snatched the orange from his hand. “Aw riggghhhtttt!”

Harry scowled after the child. It had been a girl. Manny just wiped the orange juice off his fingers onto the knee of his pants. “Is everything she writes so depressing?”

“Everything,” Harry said. “Listen to this one.” He drew out another magazine, smaller, bound in rough paper with a stylized line drawing of a woman’s private parts on the cover. On the cover! Harry held the magazine with one palm spread wide over the drawing, which made it difficult to keep the pages open while he read. “‘She looked at her mother in the only way possible: with contempt, contempt for all the betrayals and compromises that had been her mother’s life, for the sad soft lines of defeat around her mother’s mouth, for the bright artificial dress too young for her wasted years, for even the leather handbag, Gucci of course, filled with blood money for having sold her life to a man who had long ceased to want it.’”

“Hoo boy,” Manny said. “About a
mother
she wrote that?”

“About everybody. All the time.”

“And where is Barbara?”

“Reno again. Another divorce.” How many had that been? After two, did anybody count? Harry didn’t count. He imagined Barbara’s life as a large roulette wheel like the ones on TV, little silver men bouncing in and out of red and black pockets. Why didn’t she get dizzy?

Manny said slowly, “I always thought there was a lot of love in her.”

“A lot of that she’s got,” Harry said dryly.

“Not Barbara—Jackie. A lot of…I don’t know. Sweetness. Under the way she is.”

“The way she is,” Harry said gloomily. “Prickly. A cactus. But you’re right, Manny, I know what you mean. She just needs someone to soften her up. Love her back, maybe. Although I love her.”

The two old men looked at each other. Manny said, “Harry…”

“I know, I know. I’m only a grandfather, my love doesn’t count, I’m just there. Like air. ‘You’re wonderful, Popsy,’ she says, and still no teeth when she smiles. But you know, Manny—you are right!” Harry jumped up from the bench. “You are! What she needs is a young man to love her!”

Manny looked alarmed. “I didn’t say—”

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!”

“Harry—”

“And her stories, too! Full of ugly murders, ugly places, unhappy endings. What she needs is something to show her that writing could be about sweetness, too.”

Manny was staring at him hard. Harry felt a rush of affection. That Manny should have the answer! Skinny wonderful Manny!

Manny said slowly, “Jackie said to me, ‘I write about reality.’ That’s what she said, Harry.”

“So there’s no sweetness in reality? Put sweetness in her life, her writing will go sweet. She
needs
this, Manny. A really nice fellow!”

Two men in jogging suits ran past. One of their Reeboks came down on a shard of beer bottle. “Every fucking time!” he screamed, bending over to inspect his shoe. “Fucking park!”

“Well, what do you expect?” the other drawled, looking at Manny and Harry. “Although you’d think that if we could clean up Lake Erie…”

“Fucking derelicts!” the other snarled. They jogged away.

“Of course,” Harry said, “it might not be easy to find the sort of guy to convince Jackie.”

“Harry, I think you should maybe think—”

“Not here,” Harry said suddenly. “Not here.
There
. In 1937.”

“Harry…”

“Yeah,” Harry said, nodding several times. Excitement filled him like light, like electricity. What an idea! “It was different then.”

Manny said nothing. When he stood up, the sleeve of his coat exposed the number tattooed on his wrist. He said quietly, “It was no paradise in 1937 either, Harry.”

Harry seized Manny’s hand. “I’m going to do it, Manny. Find someone for her there. Bring him here.”

Manny sighed. “Tomorrow at the chess club, Harry? At one o’clock? It’s Tuesday.”

“I’ll tell you then how I’m coming with this.”

“Fine, Harry. Fine. All my wishes go with you. You know that.”

Harry stood up too, still holding Manny’s hand. A middle-aged man staggered to the bench and slumped onto it. The smell of whiskey rose from him in waves. He eyed Manny and Harry with scorn. “Fucking fags.”

“Good night, Harry.”

“Manny—if you’d only come…money goes so much farther there…”

“Tomorrow at one. At the chess club.”

Harry watched his friend walk away. Manny’s foot dragged a little; the knee must be bothering him again. Harry wished Manny would see a doctor. Maybe a doctor would know why Manny stayed so skinny.

Harry walked back to his hotel. In the lobby, old men slumped in upholstery thin from wear, burned from cigarettes, shiny in the seat from long sitting. Sitting and sitting, Harry thought—life measured by the seat of the pants. And now it was getting dark. No one would go out from here until the next daylight. Harry shook his head.

The elevator wasn’t working again. He climbed the stairs to the third floor. Halfway there, he stopped, felt in his pocket, counted five quarters, six dimes, two nickels, and eight pennies. He returned to the lobby. “Could I have two dollar bills for this change, please? Maybe old bills?”

The clerk looked at him suspiciously. “Your rent paid up?”

“Certainly,” Harry said. The woman grudgingly gave him the money.

“Thank you. You look very lovely today, Mrs. Raduski.” Mrs. Raduski snorted.

In his room, Harry looked for his hat. He finally found it under his bed—how had it gotten under his bed? He dusted it off and put it on. It had cost him $3.25. He opened the closet door, parted the clothes hanging from their metal pole—like Moses parting the sea, he always thought, a Moses come again—and stepped to the back of the closet, remembering with his body rather than his mind the sharp little twist to the right just past the far gray sleeve of his good wool suit.

He stepped out into the bare corner of a warehouse. Cobwebs brushed his hat; he had stepped a little too far right. Harry crossed the empty concrete space to where the lumber stacks started, and threaded his way through them. The lumber, too, was covered with cobwebs; not much building going on. On his way out the warehouse door, Harry passed the night watchman coming on duty.

“Quiet all day, Harry?”

“As a church, Rudy,” Harry said. Rudy laughed. He laughed a lot. He was also indisposed to question very much. The first time he had seen Harry coming out of the warehouse in a bemused daze, he must have assumed that Harry had been hired to work there. Peering at Rudy’s round, vacant face, Harry realized that he must hold this job because he was someone’s uncle, someone’s cousin, someone’s something. Harry had felt a small glow of approval; families should take care of their own. He had told Rudy that he had lost his key and asked him for another.

Outside it was late afternoon. Harry began walking. Eventually there were people walking past him, beside him, across the street from him. Everybody wore hats. The women wore bits of velvet or wool with dotted veils across their noses and long, graceful dresses in small prints. The men wore fedoras with suits as baggy as Harry’s. When he reached the park there were children, girls in long black tights and hard shoes, boys in buttoned shirts. Everyone looked like it was Sunday morning.

Pushcarts and shops lined the sidewalks. Harry bought a pair of socks, thick gray wool, for 89 cents. When the man took his dollar, Harry held his breath: each first time made a little pip in his stomach. But no one ever looked at the dates of old bills. He bought two oranges for five cents each, and then, thinking of Manny, bought a third. At a candy store he bought
G-8 and His Battle Aces
for fifteen cents. At The Collector’s Cozy in the other time they would gladly give him thirty dollars for it. Finally, he bought a cherry Coke for a nickel and headed toward the park.

“Oh, excuse me,” said a young man who bumped into Harry on the sidewalk. “I’m so sorry!” Harry looked at him hard: but, no. Too young. Jackie was twenty-eight.

Some children ran past, making for the movie theater. Spencer Tracy in
Captains Courageous
. Harry sat down on a green-painted wooden bench under a pair of magnificent Dutch elms. On the bench lay a newsmagazine. Harry glanced at it to see when in September this was: the 28th. The cover pictured a young blond Nazi soldier standing at stiff salute. Harry thought again of Manny, frowned, and turned the magazine cover down.