Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

Spike is a jackass and one of these days he’s going to get muzzled. One of these days.

  “We should move to the country,” I told them. “Get away from this rebreathed air and callous disrespect for life. Think of it! Sunshine! Clean water! Vegetables! Chickens!”

  “Rats!” screamed Pickles, getting into the spirit of things. “Thumbscrews!”

  Spike sat on her and Gly stuffed a pillow into her mouth. When she stopped twitching they let her up again.

  We packed Gly’s dried herbs and Pickles’ pots of ragweed and toadstools. Gly took all the bulbs from the sockets so we would have flowers in the spring. I filled a box with my toothpick model of Golden Gate Bridge and used coffee grounds and eggshells from the restaurant down the street. Compost is important to organic gardeners and I thought that box of valuables would make a good start.

  Spike sneered at our materialism but before we reached the street door Pickles convinced him that even Buddha and Christ wore robes.

  We had gone no more than six blocks when Gly began to whimper. That was strange. Gly is our Earth Mother. She never leans or cries or raises her voice. It may have been the smog that upset her. People were falling like custard pies in the fumes. Or maybe it wasn’t the smog. Maybe it was the baby we saw lying in a litter basket. Anyway, she quit whimpering when Spike went back and got the baby for her. The baby’s screams weren’t much of an improvement.

  The wounds on my feet had become ulcerated and ugly by the third day and we still weren’t out of the city. Spike complained of headaches after the peace patrol questioned him. Gly filled the dent in his head with a toadstool poultice and it stank. Pickles giggled incessantly. The baby turned blue from screaming.

  We were all a little lightheaded from hunger on the twelfth day when we crossed the City Limits line. Gly put the baby down and breathed deeply of the fresh air. Pickles turned over stones looking for rats. I scratched a pus pocket on my right foot. Spike died. None of us quite knew what to do now that we had reached our goal.

  I have to admit we were an unlikely group of pioneers. Gly is probably the closest of all of us to nature, having been found lying in the middle of the toadstool crop three days after a party. She has never said but her skin is very white and leathery. Spike claims to be in touch with the cycles of the Earth but all he really means is that he knows what it is like to die and he picked up that habit in high school, not the most natural environment.

  I was brought up rather ordinarily in a city apartment. Pickles is the daughter of a 747 and an albatross, abandoned by her mother in a luggage locker. So it’s not as if we had any notions of returning to a natural lifestyle.

  It was the Oracle Usda who turned us on. Read forward his announcements seem like prayers to the god Technos. But read backward, as the Oracle intended, these announcements hold seeds of revolution as a too-cool compost heap holds weed seeds, needing only the proper season to germinate. My experience at the supermarket had provided that season.

  Now here we were. City to the north of us. City to the south of us. Country in the middle. As foretold by the Oracle.

  “Rat,” announced Pickles.

  Gly and I tensed to leap on her but it was not necessary. She was pointing to an animal that was scurrying across the bare, dusty ground underneath the tree where we had taken shelter. It was not a rat. It was a hen with feathers as brown as dried leaves. True to its calling it settled into Spike’s cold, outstretched hand and laid an egg.

  Gly dumped the ragweed from one of Pickles’ pots, broke the egg into it, and scrambled it with her finger. Our first meal, grown on our own farm. We took turns lapping from the pot. Even Spike sat up to have a taste.

  In the days that followed, Pickles and Spike wove branches and autumn leaves into a shelter. I started a compost heap, shredding leaves and crushing eggshells by hand. The baby grew a tail and climbed the tree. Gly had to grow a tail too so she could swing through the upper branches to nurse the baby. The hen laid an egg every day.

  We have lived in the joy of the tree for six years. We watched the City Limits inching toward us. Pickles put down a cinder and broken glass barrier that stopped the cities as well as it stopped slugs. But cities are not so easily frustrated. They sent our old friend Oracle Usda to impound our chicken. We saved her by promising never to smoke her eggs. They sent building inspectors to demolish pur tree because it didn’t meet safety codes. The baby quoted legal precedents at the building inspectors until they cried.

  There was no bitterness in our hearts for the cities because we could see how they were suffering. People would appear at the Limits lines occasionally, fading into view like ghosts in the black mist. We offered them orchids and carnations and dandelion chains but they were too scared to leave their protective veil.

  Lately the blackness has been lifting over the cities,’ thickening as it rises. I think they are trying to cure themselves. Spike says the mist just rises and falls like the tides. Spike is still a jackass but a quieter one.

  Gly and the baby seldom come down from the top of the tree. When they do they bring bananas and grapes and apples and coconuts. Pickles has stopped giggling and she gave back my Euell Gibbons autograph. I ate it for breakfast with honey and yogurt.

  Spike has begun to commune with the earthworms. I think he feels a rapport with them because of his deathly experiences. The other day he shyly showed me a diamond engagement ring. I told him the worms were only after his virginal young body but he still does not listen to me. He borrowed a shovel and I think he’s planning to writhe away with them.

  Every spring the hen dropped her brown feathers and grew green ones. Every autumn the feathers turned yellow, then brown.

  Until lately she continued to lay an egg a day.

  Chicken Little didn’t do enough. The sky really is falling. I can see it in the city to the north and the city to the south. They used to call that stuff smog in the old days and fog in the older days before that. I don’t know what they call it now. Plog, perhaps. I call it sky. I have become a child of the tree.

  Pickles has been studying it. On moonless nights she creeps across the City Limits lines to get a chunk or two. At first she thought I might be able to use it in my compost heap, which has grown healthily and is now sixty feet across.

  That first sample convinced us it wasn’t safe to use in the compost heap. We whacked it with shovels for a while, played ping-pong and polo, and we couldn’t even scratch it. Pickles thinks plastics are breaking down and recombining with smog to form this stuff which falls in chunks from the sky.

  She has a new use for it now. She is building a hen house of sky. Unfortunately, we no longer need a hen house. Our hen crossed the cinder barrier to catch a slug and plog turned her into Chicken Pancake.

  She tasted just fine with fried bananas.

  Hey, Turkey Lurkey, the sky is falling.

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  * * * *

  Though Greg Bear began writing stories when he was eight or nine years old, he denies any autobiographical content in the following tale of archetypal storytellers who have a profound influence on the life of an imaginative child.

  Bear sold Ids “first’ story at the age of fifteen to Robert A. W. Lowndes” Famous Science Fiction; since then he’s published about a dozen more in a variety of sf publications. He’s also an artist, and has sold cover paintings to both Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy (where he illustrated one of his own stories). Born in 1951 in San Diego, he’s lived in Japan, Rhode Island, Texas, the Philippines, and Alaska: his father was in the Navy. He now lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, Christina.

  * * * *

  THE WHITE HORSE CHILD

  Greg Bear

  When I was seven years old, I met an old man by the side of the dusty road between school and farm. The late afternoon sun had cooled, and he was sitting on a rock, hat off, hands held out to the gentle warmth, whistling a pretty song. He nodded at me as I walked past. I nodded back. I was curious, but I knew better than to get inv
olved with strangers, as if they might turn into lions when no one but a little kid was around.

  “Hello, boy,” he said.

  I stopped and shuffled my feet. He looked more like a hawk than a lion. His clothes were brown and grey and russet, and his hands were pink like the flesh of some rabbit a hawk had just plucked up. His face was brown except around the eyes, where he might have worn glasses; around the eyes he was white, and this intensified his gaze. “Hello,” I said.

  “Was a hot day. Must have been hot in school,” he said.

  “They got air conditioning.”

  “So they do, now. How old are you?”

  “Seven,” I said. “Well, almost eight.”

  “Mother told you never to talk to strangers?”

  “And Dad, too.”

  “Good advice. But haven’t you seen me around here before?”

  I looked him over. “No.”

  “Closely. Look at my clothes. What color are they?”

  His shirt was grey, like the rock he was sitting on. The cuffs, where they peeped from under a russet jacket, were white. He didn’t smell bad, but he didn’t look particularly clean. He was smooth-shaven, though. His hair was white, and his pants were the color of the dirt below the rock. “All kinds of colors,” I said.

  “But mostly I partake of the landscape, no?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “That’s because I’m not here. You’re imagining me, at least part of me. Don’t I look like somebody you might have heard of?”

  “Who are you supposed to look like?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m full of stories,” he said. “Have lots of stories to tell little boys, little girls, even big folk, if they’ll listen.”

  I started to walk away.

  “But only if they’ll listen,” he said. I ran. When I got home, I told my older sister about the man on the road, but she only got a worried look and told me to stay away from strangers. I took her advice. For some time afterward, into my eighth year, I avoided that road and did not speak with strangers more than I had to.

  The house that I lived in, with the five other members of my family and two dogs and one beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were rich dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The air was full of smells—bacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean.

  Sometimes my parents argued, and not just about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk.

  * * * *

  It was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I’d forgotten about the old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the grey rock, in a long green skirt summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cottonwoods seen in a late hazy day’s muted light. “Hello, boy,” she said.

  “I don’t recognize you, either,” I blurted, and she smiled.

  “Of course not. If you didn’t recognize him, you’d hardly know me.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked. She nodded. “Who was he? Who are you?”

  “We’re both full of stories. Just tell them from different angles. You aren’t afraid of us, are you?”

  I was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference. “No,” I said. “But what are you doing here? And how do you know—?”

  “Ask for a story,” she said. “One you’ve never heard of before.” Her eyes were the color of baked chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn’t see her whites. When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn’t have any whites.

  “I don’t want to hear stories,” I said softly.

  “Sure you do. Just ask.”

  “It’s late. I got to be home.”

  “I knew a man who became a house,” she said. “He didn’t like it. He stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to flake, and the bathrooms were unbeatable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture and all, and shut his doors and locked them.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after.”

  I laughed, not because the man had died, but because I knew such things were lies. “That’s silly,” I said.

  “Then here’s another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass, waiting for black-and-pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It’s practice. There was a little girl about your age—might have been your sister, but she won’t admit it—who saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother’s dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn’t deny it.”

  “How’d she get back to be my sister again?”

  “She became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too.”

  “My sister did break a pair of Mom’s glasses once.”

  The woman smiled.

  “I got to be going home.”

  “Tomorrow you bring me a story, okay?”

  I ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she thought I was scared, wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got home my older sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen. She was a year older than I but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches taller, and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other way—so her power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly.

  “Where you been?” she asked, like a mother.

  “Somebody tattled on you,” I said.

  Her eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Somebody tattled about what you did to Mom’s sunglasses.”

  “I already been whipped for that,” she said nonchalantly. “Not much more to tell.”

  “Oh, but I know more.”

  “Was not playing doctor,” she said. The youngest, Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of telling the folks somebody or other was playing doctor. She didn’t know what it meant—I just barely did—but it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her only vestige of power.

  “No,” I said, “but I know what you were doing. And I won’t tell anybody.”

  “You don’t know nothing,” she said. Then she accidentally poured half a-pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front. When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening, but I had none of it. Somehow I wasn’t brokenhearted. It gave me time to think of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock.

  * * * *

  School was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cotton woods. I carried my Road-Runner lunc
h pail and my pencil box and one book—a handwriting manual I hated so much I tore pieces out of it at night, to shorten its lifetime—and I walked slowly, to give my story time to gel.

  She was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought. Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominance of grey in her reddish hair, despite the crow’s-feet around her eyes and the smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eight-year-old she was simply a peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her unto graveside.

  “Hello, boy,” she said.

  “Hi.” I sat on the rock.

  “I can see you’ve been thinking,” she said.