Collected Short Fiction, page 782
“My precious son.” She moved toward the ramp. “I must go to him.”
“You can’t!” He caught her fin. “It’s too far. You aren’t able—”
She broke away from him and dived off the ramp. Her first leap carried her only halfway up the slippery rim of the pool. She splashed back, dived, leaped higher. Safe on the ice, she got her breath and swayed to her feet.
He was moving toward the ramp.
“Don’t!” She raised a fin to halt him. “You’ve no strength for it.” That was true. He sank back to the deck, eye shields shut with shame for his weakness and his age. She was still there when he could see again, waving a silent farewell. She turned when she saw his answer, and set out across the ice.
Helpless, he could only watch. Far Diver had fallen far across the frost, and it took her a long time to reach him. Starved too long, her sea shape never made for walking, she fell and rose, fell and rested and rose again, till at last she dropped beside the crumpled body and did not move again.
Watcher lay alone and blind on the raft, his eye shields closed, till he ceased to feel cold or hunger, grief or pain, till he had no will to move again, till memory and emotion darkened and he knew his world was dead.
Watcher, filled with a terrible sadness for Rider and Diver and their dying world, blithe found the cabin of the spider, not quite real until he saw the bright black gleam of the amphibian bead still lying under the hem of the curtain. A lifestone. He shrank from it, shivering. Perhaps it had lain a billion years with the bones in the cave skylers, but something in it still survived.
“Kipper? Having fun?”
Andersen came out of the control room doorway. Day hung limply in his arms, fast asleep. He paused a moment before he walked on to open the curtain and lay her on the berth behind it. He seemed relaxed and cheerful, that glazed intentness gone from his eyes.
“Fun?” Kip pointed at the bead on the floor. “Not with that thing here.”
“If it bothers you . . .”
He picked it up, frowned at it for a moment, and stowed it in the locker with the others. Glad to have it, out of sight, glad to be almost himself again, Kip felt the Watcher’s sadness lifting. The hum of the turbine had died. The spider had stopped. Cruzet was at the kitchen counter, humming no tune as he made breakfast.
“OK, Kipper?” Andersen peered down at him. “You look a little woozy.”
“I’m OK,” he said. “OK now.”
“I know bad things have happened.” Andersen seemed warmly concerned. “But they’re all behind us now. We’re on our way to the continent. Mountains and glaciers to climb. And the mystery of that spectral signal to crack.”
“What do you think we’ll find?”
Skyhold? The skyler fortress he had seen in the dream, built to stand forever? And something in it still alive? Something using the power of the lifestones to defend the frozen planet?
“Exciting, don’t you think,” Andersen urged him again. “Better than your games with Captain Cometeer?”
“Maybe,” Kip said. “Maybe.”
This was no game. He had no exit key to end it. The bright black gleam still shone behind Andersen’s ear. He decided to say nothing of the dream. But he was alive and warm again, no longer the Watcher. Andersen and Cruzet seemed almost human as long as Day was asleep. His mouth was watering to the scent of the frying ham. They were on their way to Skyhold. Perhaps it really was a great adventure.
1997
The Firefly Tree
The tree tickled the sky, sizzled with a strange new life, and told him that there was a place where thing’s could be better.
THEY HAD COME back to live on the old farm where his grandfather was born. His father loved it, but he felt lonely for his friends in the city. Cattle sometimes grazed through the barren sandhills beyond the barbed wire fences, but there were no neighbors. He found no friends except the firefly tree.
It grew in the old fruit orchard his grandfather had planted below the house. His mouth watered for the ripe apples and peaches and peal’s he expected, but when he saw the trees they were all dead or dying. They bore no fruit.
With no friends at all, he stayed with his father on the farm when his mother drove away every morning to work at the peanut mill. His father was always busy in the garden he made among the bare trees in the orchard. The old windmill had lost its wheel, but there was an electric pump for water. Cantaloupe and squash vines grew along the edge of the garden, with rows of tomatoes and beans, and then the corn that grew tall enough to hide the money trees.
His mother fretted that, they might cause trouble. Once he heard her call them marijuana. His father quickly hushed her. The word was strange to him but he never asked what it meant because he saw his father didn’t like it.
He found the firefly tree one day while his father was chopping weeds and moving the pipes that sprayed water on his money trees. It was still tiny then, not as tall as his knee. The leaves were odd: thin arrowheads of glossy black velvet, striped with silver. A single lovely flower had three wide sky-colored petals and a bright yellow star at the center. He sat on the ground by it, breathing its strange sweetness, till his fat her came by with the hoe.
“Don’t hurt it!” he begged. “Please!”
“That stinking weed?” his father grunted. “Get out of the way.”
Something made him reach to catch the hoe.
“Okay.” His father grinned and let it stay. “If you care that much.”
He called it his tree, and watched it grow’. When it wilted in a week with no rain, he found a bucket and carried water from the well. It grew taller than he was, with a dozen of the great blue flowers and then a hundred. The odor of them filled the garden.
Since there was no school, his mother tried to teach him at home. She found a red-backed reader for him, and a workbook with pages for him to fill out while she was away at work. He seldom got the lessons done.
“He’s always mooning over that damn weed,” the father muttered when she scolded him. “High as a kite on the stink of it.”
The odor was strange and strong, but no stink at all. Not to him. He loved it and loved the tree. He carried more water and used the hoe to till the soil around it. Often he stood just looking at the huge blue blooms, wondering what the fruit would be.
One night he dreamed that the tree was swarming with fireflies. They were so real that he got out of bed and slipped out into the dark. The stars blazed brighter here than they had ever been in the city. They lit his way to the orchard, and he heard the fireflies before he came to the tree.
Their buzz rose and fell like the sound of the surf the time they went to visit his aunt who lived by the sea. Twinkling brighter than the stars, they filled the brandies. One of them came to meet him. It hovered in front of his face and lit on the tip of his trembling finger, smiling at him with eyes as blue and bright as the flowers.
He had never seen a firefly close up. It was as big as a bumblebee. It had tiny hands that gripped his fingernail, and one blue eye squinted a little to study his face. The light came from a round topknot on its head. It flickered like something electric, from red to green, yellow to blue, maybe red again. The flashes were sometimes slower than his breath, sometimes so fast they blurred. He thought the flicker was meant to tell him something, but he had no way to understand.
Barefoot and finally shivering with cold, he stood there till the flickering stopped. The firefly shook its crystal wings and flew away. The stars were fading into the dawn, and the tree was dark and silent when he looked. He was back in bed before he heard his mother rattling dishes in the kitchen, making breakfast.
The next night he dreamed that he was back under the tree, with the firefly perched again on his finger. Its tiny face seemed almost human in the dream, and lie understood its winking voice. It told him how the tree had grown front a sharp-pointed acorn that came from the stars and planted itself when it struck the ground.
It told him about the firefly planet, far off in the sky. The fireflies belonged to a great republic spread across the stars. Thousands of different peoples lived in peace on thousands of different worlds. The acorn ship had come to invite the people of Earth to join their republic. They were ready to teach the Earth-people how to talk across space and travel to visit the stars. The dream seemed so wonderful that he tried to tell about it at breakfast.
“What did I tell you?” His father turned red and shouted at his mother. “His brain’s been addled by the stink of that poison weed. I ought to cut it down and burn it.”
“Don’t!” He was frightened and screaming. “I love it. I’ll die if you kill it.”
“I’m afraid he would.” His mother made a sad little frown. “Leave the plant where it is, and I’ll take him to Dr. Wong.”
“Okay.” His father finally nodded, and frowned at him sternly. “If you’ll promise to do your chores and stay out of the garden.”
Trying to keep the promise, lie washed the dishes after his mother was gone to work. He made the beds and swept the floors. He tried to do his lessons, though the stories in the reader seemed stupid to him now.
He did stay out, of the garden, but the fireflies came again in his dreams. They carried him to see the shining forests on their own wonderful world. They took him to visit the planets of other peoples, people who that lived under their seas, people who lived high in their skies, people as small as ants, people larger than the elephants he had seen in a circus parade and queerer than the octopus in the side show. He saw ships that could fly faster than light from star to star, and huge machines he never understood, and cities more magical than fairyland.
He said no more about the dreams till the day his mother came home from work to take him to Dr. Wong. The nurse put a thermometer under his tongue and squeezed his arm with a rubber gadget and left him to wait with his mother for Dr. Wong. Dr. Wong was a friendly man who listened to his chest, and looked at the nurse’s chart and asked him about the fireflies.
“They’re wonderful!” He thought the doctor would believe him. “You must come at, night to see them, sir. They love us. They came to show’ us the way to the stars.”
“Listen to him!” His mother had never been out at night to see the fireflies shining. “That ugly weed has driven him out of his head!”
“An interesting case.” The doctor smiled and patted his shoulder in a friendly way and turned to speak to his mother. “One for the books. The boy should see a psychiatrist.”
His mother had no money for that.
“I’ll just take him home,” she said, “and hope he gets better.”
A police car was parked in front of the house when they got there. His father sat in the back, behind a metal grill. His head was bent. He wouldn’t look up, not even when his mother called through a half-open window.
The police had more cars parked around the garden. They had chopped down all the money trees and thrown them into a pile. The firefly tree lay on top. It fragrance was lost in a reek of kerosene. The policemen made everybody move upwind and set the fire with a hissing blowtorch.
It spread slowly at first, then blazed so high they had to move fan her away. Feeling sick at his stomach, he saw the branches of the tree twist and beat against the flames. He heard a long sharp scream. A cat caught in the fire, the policemen said, but he knew it wasn’t a cat. Fireflies swarmed out of the thrashing branches and exploded like tiny bombs when the flames caught them.
His father was crying when the police took him away, along with a bundle of the money trees for evidence. His mother moved them back to the city. In school again, he tried to tell his new teachers about the fireflies and how they had come to invite the Earth into their great confederation of stars. The teachers said he had a great imagination and sent him to the school psychologist.
The psychologist called his mother to come for a conference. They wanted him to forget the fireflies and do his lessons and look up his old friends again, but he wanted no friends except the fireflies. He grieved for them and grieved for his father and grieved for all that might have been.
The Hole in the World
Jack Williamson published his first story in 1928 and his most recent novel, The Black Sun, came out late last year. Here he brings us a surreal tale of a man whose problems look small . . .
“DEAR, DAD,” AMY’S NOTE began, “I found your address on a letter from Mom’s lawyer. You don’t have to write back to me, but I hope you will. I want to know if you are happy with Miss Winkle. Mom says she’s a vicious bitch. I hope that’s wrong. I’m awful sad about the trouble I made between you and Mom. I know I was sometimes so bad you had to hit me, but I’ll always love you. Even if you can’t pay the support.
“If you can write back, please send it to Millie. She’s my best friend. Her address is on the envelope. Dad, I want you to know I love you. I always will, no matter what.”
The signature was a messy ink stain. She must have cried on it. Maybe she really did love him. She had even sworn she did, crying on the witness stand. She’d told the judge he hadn’t hit her often. Never really hard. She had gotten the bruises and broken her arm when she tripped and fell down the stairs.
A cute little kid, but he couldn’t risk an answer. Gretchen and her blood-sucking attorney would eat him alive with anything they got their greedy hands on. He ran the letter through the shredder. His worry today was the spot on his chin. He had first noticed it while he was shaving.
A tiny white spot with jagged edges, it looked like a fleck of eggshell. But it wasn’t eggshell. His fingers couldn’t feel it. It wouldn’t rub off. Frowning at it, he studied his face again. Still firm enough, pleasing enough when he smiled. The white fleck was still there, but he had other matters on his mind.
He’d been alone all week, but Creighton and Zara were both due back today. Creighton had been off at company headquarters, setting up his new franchise. Zara was away in Dayton, where her sister was having a baby. The franchise meant money, and Zara loved money as much as he loved her. He was picking her up at noon.
And tonight—
Thinking of tonight, he let the razor foil caress his face again. His chin had to be smooth, because whiskers scratched Zara’s delicate skin. She loved to have him begin with a massage of her sweet little feet and work up from there. He splashed aftershave in his hand and rubbed the spot again.
Still there, it looked larger. Maybe a floater? But floaters were dark and it was white. He shut one eye and then the other. Both eyes saw it. Maybe he’d had a drink too many at Steve’s stag party. He tried to whistle on his way downstairs, but his lips were dry and a dull ache throbbed at the back of his skull and the house was too empty.
Gretchen had taken most of the furniture as well as the kids, but Amy had left her school photo tacked to the refrigerator door with a heart-shaped magnet. The spot blotted out half her freckled grin. He ran hot water out of the tap to make instant coffee and ate a stale doughnut before he hurried to the office.
Creighton wasn’t in.
“He said he’d be here,” he told the secretary, “to talk about the franchise—”
“Ask him about it.” She was a straight-spined, sharp-voiced, God-crazed spinster who had never liked him. “He called from Hawaii to say he’ll be in later today.”
“Hawaii?” Goggling at her, he saw the spot above her lifted nose. “I thought he was in Chicago, arranging my new franchise.”
“Chicago?” She pushed up her glasses to give him an indignant glare. “Mr. Creighton has been on vacation in Hawaii. He’ll be here this afternoon.”
She swung back to her computer.
What the hell? Creighton hadn’t mentioned Hawaii. He rubbed his chin and tried to check his sales totals for the month, but the spot blanked the figures out. His head was pounding. His throat felt parched. He got a drink of water and looked at his chin in the lavatory mirror. No longer white, it shone like a fleck of tinfoil. He washed his face and saw it still there.
Bothered more than ever, he called Dr. Kroman, the eye man on the top floor. He knew the nurse, a feisty little redhead. She said she could work him in if he came up at ten. He studied the spot again. Now it was nearly the color of blood and flickering unsteadily, though still there was nothing he could feel. The face of his watch was a crimson shimmer, but he could read the office clock. He went up at ten and the nurse put him in a heavy chair with his head in a vise.
Kroman was a fat, wheezy man who smelled faintly of something that didn’t quite cover an unpleasant breath. Squinting through a battery of lenses, he endured the breath and a dagger of light stabbing his eyes. The spot made it hard to tell which lens was better, but Kroman seemed not to care.
“Sir, you’re a lucky man!” Booming cheerily, Kroman backed away. “I find nothing organic. Your eyes are perfectly normal.”
“But I’ve still got the spot.” He sat blinking at it. “It’s bigger now, turning yellow.”
“It’s nothing physical.” Kroman shrugged at his anxiety. “Nothing at all. If you’re really concerned, you might talk to a good psychologist.”
“I am concerned. When I look past your head, all I see is a hole in the wall.”
“Really?” Kroman chuckled as if at a joke and popped a breath-saver into his mouth.
“Doctor, I’m not crazy!” He squinted at Kroman, who was suddenly headless. “Not that crazy.”
“I don’t say you are.” Kroman smothered another chuckle. “I’m no psychiatrist, but you shouldn’t hesitate if you think you need help. A mental condition is no disgrace today.”
The nurse was at the door, urgently beckoning.
“Solipsism!” Kroman started after her and turned back. “Ever hear of that? The philosophic theory that the self is the only reality. The rest of the world only illusion. Logically, you can’t prove the existence of anything outside yourself. All you really know, or think you know, is what you see and hear and feel. The rest could be hallucination. A fascinating notion, don’t you think?”
