The Very Best of Tad Williams (25 page)

Passes three more people, all vaguely familiar. That last one, the guy with the big ears, named something like...Freiberg? Right, Freiberg. Worked at the university. Linguist.

Harold stops. That’s a big chunk, all coming back at once. More than that, there’s something important there. Is it Freiberg’s party? Harold turns to ask—fuck the embarrassment, so he’s drunk, he’ll apologize tomorrow—but Freiberg has disappeared. No, Harold suddenly remembers, it was another party that Freiberg had hosted. Champagne, little sweet things baked by Dorothy What’s-her-name, celebrating...what? Something that Harold was in on, too. At the university, of course. They had been selected for...what? A government grant, an honor...? Something big. Freiberg had said “the greatest opportunity that can be imagined,” or something like that. Meant it, too. Harold remembers that he had thought so himself A great opportunity. But now there is a core of pain to the thought, a cold ache like too much ice cream against the teeth.

As these memories tease him, Harold sees a sliding door to the patio. Someone is out there in the pool of light from the fake wrought-iron lamp. Her hair is full and curly, light brown with a faint greenish tinge from the lampglow. Dorothy. Of course. He feels a tug. Was it Dorothy he came with? Dorothy, who worked at the university with him, office across the hall? As he stares at the back of her head and her slender shoulders, he suddenly knows there is a connection of some kind between them, a thread of relationship slender but sticky as spidersilk. He thinks he has it for a moment, but then it is gone, leaving nothing in its place but the dull static of the party.

What’s wrong with my fucking head?

Harold feels another cold shiver. What did he drink tonight? Just that Greek stuff? Could that be enough to turn him into a goddamn mental patient? Could the liquor be bad somehow, gone rotten during some slow journey out of the Mediterranean on a boat full of singing guys with beards? His laugh at this thought is a gurgle. He lurches outside to the patio and puts a hand onto Dorothy’s shoulder.

Hey.

When she turns and sees him her eyes flash terror, the grazing animal that sees the predator too late. She flinches back as if he might strike her.

“Get away,” she says, taking a step toward the house. “Don’t talk to me.”

He stares for a moment, shocked. What has he done? He has an abrupt vision of her hand arcing around to strike him, and now it is he who flinches—but she has not moved. He has remembered, only.

“You hit me,” he says slowly. She did. He remembers now, remembers Dorothy’s wide brown eyes and the sudden sting. “Why did you hit me?”

She is poised to flee. In the lantern light she is all sharp angles of light and shadow, except for the soft cloud of her hair. “You’re frightening me, Harold. Go away.”

He extends a shaking hand as if to hold her, but knows it will only make her bolt. Suddenly he knows there are critical things here, things he should remember. “Tell me,” he says gently—but even speaking quietly, he hears his voice tremble. “Why did you hit me?”

She stares as if trying to decide. A man leans out of the door, a tall fellow with a beard. Mikkelson. Harold doesn’t like him, although he doesn’t know why.

“Dorothy, come on. Come inside.”

She continues to stare at Harold. Mikkelson makes an impatient gesture. “Please come in, Dorothy. You...you shouldn’t be out there.” He looks around, vaguely uncomfortable. “It’s not good. Come in.”

When she does not reply, Harold feels certain that Mikkelson will come out and get her. Mikkelson is pushy, Harold remembers. A know-it-all. Someone who will always tell you why your idea is wrong, your theory untenable. Usually he’s right, but that doesn’t make him any more tolerable. But he was wrong one time, Harold remembers suddenly. One critical time. Very wrong. The memory is there, somewhere.

But Mikkelson, pushy Mikkelson, does not come out. He stares worriedly around the empty patio like a peasant in a night-time graveyard, swears, then slides back into the murmuring dark of the party.

Dorothy runs a hand through her hair. “I’m sorry, but you frighten me.”

“But why?” He lifts his hand again, leaves it hanging in air. “Tell me. I can’t remember anything. I’m sorry, Dorothy, I’m drunk as shit.” He stares at her. “Did I bring you here? To the party?”

Her gaze loses focus. “No. I don’t remember who I came with—but not you, Harold.” She laughs harshly. “Not with you and your zebras.”

“What about them?” A glimmering of crazy hope. Something will be explained.

“You rant about them. All the time. You scare me.”

“What did I say to you? Why did you hit me?”

She looks around now, as Mikkelson did, as though the suburban plank fence might become a horror-movie sliding wall, edging in to crush her.

“You scare me,” she says. “Leave me alone.” Her face is indeed frightened, but there is something else struggling there, too, struggling to get free. “I’m going to talk to Pete.”

Mikkelson’s first name, Harold remembers. Before he can close the distance between them, she slips away, a swirl of shadowed skirt over a lean haunch, a pale shape vanishing through the doorway. A puff of noise from inside is freed as she billows open the drapes on the sliding door, a clack as the screen slides closed.

Harold, beneath the moon, feels sobriety growing like a brittle skeleton beneath his skin and meat. Stark fear in Dorothy’s face. Fear in Mikkelson’s face, too. And even Freiberg, when he went past, had the nervous, doomed look of a Dachau trusty.

Another noise from the doorway. Harold steps back into the shadows, looks up to see the moon overhead, flat and unreal as a bone poker chip. There is a little scuffle as the screen slides open. A voice, raised in sorrow. The girl he had seen earlier, with two men. She’s crying.

“But I saw it!” she wails. “You saw it, too! They’re coming! It was on the news!”

“C’mon, Hannah,” one of the men says. “Like War of the Worlds, you know? Just a joke.”

“It was on the news!” She is struggling to catch her breath. “I want to go home,” she whimpers, then subsides into hiccoughing sobs.

“C’mon, you can lie down for a while. There’s a bed upstairs.”

“You’re just tired, Hannah,” the other adds. “Come on. We’ll sit with you.

The little huddle of humanity staggers back inside, leaving Harold alone again.

The A Group.
It suddenly comes back to him. We were the A Group. The impressive gleam of the title is no more convincing than the metal plate on a bowling trophy. He doesn’t remember much, but he remembers that something went wrong.

Freiberg, me, Dorothy, Pete, others—we were the best. They picked us because we were the best.

Suddenly the yard seems to be closing in on him, just as it did on Dorothy. The gnarled fruit trees seem to reach out with taloned fingers. The murmuring doorway is another trap, innocent and seductive as a quicksand pit. He wants desperately to get away.

Now. Go home. Fuck the keys, fuck the jacket. Walk. That’s good. Breathe air. Think.

He reaches the garden wall in a few steps, pulls himself up, remembers he has no shoes as he catches a splinter in the ball of his foot. The fence, flimsy, made for suburban show and not to resist invasion like more ancient walls, wavers as he reaches the top. A scramble, a popped shirt button, and he tumbles into the dewy grass on the far side. Before him, lit only by the two-dimensional moon, stretches the flat, dark plain of someone else’s lawn, and beyond it, the black blanket of the ocean. Harold scrambles to his feet and begins to walk.

When it happened...

There. What is
it
? Just out of reach.

When it happened, they went to find linguists. The government wanted the best, and they took us. The A Group. “The A Team,” we called ourselves for a joke—like the TV show. A historic moment, Freiberg said. Something the people in our field have dreamed about for years. Contact with another species.

Harold sucks in a breath and stops. It. The landing.

And we wanted to speak with them. To share our thoughts and dreams, and learn the secrets they would bring us, the songs of the stars.

Abruptly, Harold begins to run, the lawn flying away beneath him, his socks soaking through to his cold feet. His own breath is ragged in his ears.

But how were we to know they didn’t come just as explorers, but as conquerors?
The A Group, Harold remembers now, remembers the whole sad joke.
I laughed at the end, when those solemn, spidery creatures put us in that white room, and told us what they were doing outside. The “Z” Group, they should have called us, I said. Not the first— the last. I laughed—God, how I laughed , hurting, hurting—and Dorothy slapped me.

Z is for Zebras in the Zoo.

He slips on some small dark thing on the lawn and stumbles, so that for a few staggering steps he windmills his arms for balance. He doesn’t look down. He knows what it is.

The zebras, he remembers, that long-ago rainy day. Did they see the people watching them—me and my folks, the riffraff zoo crowd, fat women and screaming children spilling popcorn—or did they somehow still see the veldt stretching all around them, just out of reach beyond the bounds of their captivity?

Some of them knew, Harold realizes. Their eyes had said so. You killed us, those brown eyes said.
Now the few of us you have saved for your pleasure are dying, too. Captivity is another sort of death.

As he sees his other shoe lying on the wet grass beneath him, he strikes the invisible thing, the barrier. A terrific force lifts him and shakes him, filling him with lightning from scalp to toes.

On the ground, as consciousness flutters away like a firefly down a long, dark tunnel, he knows he will awake again, back in the cage with the rest of his milling herd. They know there is something wrong—deep down, all of them know—but it has been artificially suppressed somehow. Or perhaps they themselves have beaten it down.

Is that the best way? Harold is sliding into darkness. Just stop fighting? Like the zebras, he thinks. Maybe the only possible victory is to stand and suffer and shame the conqueror.

Maybe someday he will learn not to run against the fences.

H
e placed the burnished rosewood box on the table and then went to all the windows in turn, pulling the drapes together, tugging at the edges to make sure no gap remained. After he had started a fire and set the kettle on the blackened stove, he returned to the table. He opened the box and paused, a smile flickering across his face. The contents of the box gleamed in the candlelight.

“It was a triumph, Henri,” he said loudly. “All Paris will be talking about it tomorrow. The best yet. I wish you could have seen their faces—they were amazed!”

“You are quite a showman,” his brother called back, his voice muffled by the intervening wall. “And the pretty Comtesse? The one I saw the painting of?”

Gerard laughed, a deliberately casual sound. “Ah, yes, the Comtesse de Buise. Her eyes were as wide as a little girl’s. She loved it so much, she wanted to take it home with her and keep it as a pet.” He laughed again. “So beautiful, that one, and so likely to be disappointed—at least in this.” He reached into the box and teased free the velvet ties. “No one will ever make a pet of my wonderful
canard
.”

With the care of a priest handling the sacrament, Gerard Vergalant lifted out the gilded metal duck and set it upright on the table. Eyes narrowed, he took his kerchief from the pocket of his well-cut but ever so slightly threadbare coat and dusted the duck’s feathers and buffed its gleaming bill. He paid particular attention to polishing the glass eyes, which seemed almost more real than those of a living bird. The duck was indeed a magnificent thing, a little smaller than life-size, shaped with an intricacy of detail that made every golden feather a sculpture unto itself.

The teapot chuffed faintly. Vergalant repocketed his kerchief and went to it.

“Indeed, you should have seen them, Henri,” he called. “Old Guineau, the Marquis, he was most dismissive at first—the doddering fool. ‘In my youth, I saw the bronze nightingales of Constantinople,’ he says, and waves his hand in that if-you-must-bore-me way he has. Hah! In his youth he watched them build the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Doddering fool.”

He poured the water into a teacup with a small chip in the handle, then a little more in a bowl which he set on the table.

“The old bastard went on and on, telling everyone about clockwork movement, how the Emperor’s nightingales would lift their wings up and down and swivel their heads. But when my duck walked, they all sat up.” He grinned at the memory of triumph. “None of them expected it to look so real! When it swam, one of the ladies became faint and had to be taken out into the garden. And when it devoured the pile of oats I set on the table before it, even Guineau could not keep the astonishment from his face!”

“I am always sorry I cannot see your performances, Gerard,” his brother called, straining slightly to make himself heard. “I am sure that you were very elegant and clever. You always are.”

“It’s true that no matter how splendid the object is,” Vergalant said thoughtfully, “it is always more respected when presented in an attractive manner. Especially by the ladies. They do not like their entertainment rough.” He paused. “The Comtesse de Buise, for instance. There is a woman of beauty
and
pretty sentiment...”

The duck’s head rotated slightly and the bill opened. There was a near-silent ticking of small gears and the flat gilded feet took a juddering step, then another.

“If you please.” Henri was apologetic.

“Oh, my brother, I am so sorry,” Gerard replied, but his tone was still distant, as though he resented having his memories of the countess sullied by mundane things. He went to the table and fumbled at the duck’s neck for a moment, then found the catch and clicked it. “The tail seems to move a little slowly,” he said. “Several times tonight I thought I saw it moving out of step with the legs.”

The head and neck vibrated for a moment, then the entire upper structure tipped sideways on its hinge. Glassy-eyed, the shining duck head lolled as though its neck had been chopped through with an axe.

“If it was my fault, I apologize, Gerard. I do my best, but this duck, it is a very complicated piece of work. More stops than an organ, and every little bit crafted like the world’s costliest pocketwatch. It is hard to make something that is both beautiful and life-like.”

Vergalant nodded emphatically. “True. Only the good Lord can be credited with consistency in that area.” He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and seemed to like what he saw, for he repeated the head movement with careful gravity. “And the Lord achieved that with the Comtesse de Buise. She has such lovely eyes, Henri. Like deep wells. A man could drown in them. You should have seen her.”

“I wish I had.” The gilded duck shuddered again, ever so slightly, and then a tiny head appeared in the hollow of the throat. Although it was only a little larger than the ball of Gerard Vergalant’s thumb, the resemblance between their two faces was notable. “But I cannot make a seeing-glass that will allow me to look out properly without interfering with the articulation of the throat,” said the little head. Hair was plastered against its forehead in minute ringlets. “One cannot have everything.”

“Still,” Gerard replied with magnificent condescension, “you have done wonderfully well. I could never hope to make such an impression without you.”

The rest of the tiny figure emerged, clothed in sweat-stained garments of gray felt. The little man sat for a moment atop the decapitated duck, then climbed down its back, seeking toeholds in the intricate metalwork of the pinfeathers before dropping to the tabletop.

“It was a good night’s work, then.” Shivering, Henri hurried across the table toward the bowl of hot water.

“Yes, but we cannot yet allow ourselves to rest.” Gerard looked on his brother fondly as Henri pulled off his loose clothing and clambered into the bowl. “No, do not be alarmed! Take your bath—you have earned it. But we do need to develop some new tricks. Perhaps since it takes in food at
one
end...? Yes, that might do it. These people are jaded, and we will need all my most sophisticated ideas—and your careful work, which is of course indispensable—to keep them interested. That old fop Guineau is very well connected. If we play our hand correctly, we may soon be demonstrating my magnificent
canard
for the king himself!”

Henri lowered himself beneath the surface to wet his hair, then rose again, spluttering and wiping water from his face. “The king?” He opened his eyes wide.

Gerard smiled, then reached into his pocket and produced a toothbrush. Henri stood and took it, although it was almost too large for his hands to grasp. As he scrubbed his back, water splashed from the bowl onto the tabletop. A few drops landed near the gilded duck. Gerard blotted them with his sleeve.

“Yes, the king, little brother. Mother always said I would go far, with my quick wits and good looks. But I knew that one needs more in life than simply to be liked. If a man of humble origins wishes to make an impression in this world, if he wishes to be more than merely comfortable, he must know powerful people—and he must show them
wonders
.” He nodded toward the table. “Like the duck, my lovely golden duck. People desire to be...astonished.”

Henri stepped from the bowl. He accepted his brother’s kerchief and began to dry himself, almost disappearing in its folds.

“Ah, Gerard,” he said admiringly. “You always were the clever one.”