Shapers of Worlds Volume II, page 35
Casey hit her. It wasn’t a hard slap, he didn’t know he was going to do it until he had, and instantly he regretted it more than he had ever regretted anything else in his life. Kara put her hand to her red cheek and turned away from him, the sheet twisting itself around her small striped breasts. Tears filled her eyes but did not fall. Casey put out one hand to touch her shoulder, but he couldn’t make the hand quite connect, and it hung there, suspended between them, useless.
“Kara . . . oh, God, Kara, I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer. The sheet humped up over her thin legs. Something broke in Casey, something so light and delicate he hadn’t known himself that it was there or what he would say when it wasn’t.
“Kara, listen, I’m sorry I hit you, so fucking sorry I don’t know how to say it. But, Kara, you don’t know, you can’t know, I’ve wanted there to be something out there since I was a kid, wanted it more desperately than anything else in my whole fucking life. I used to stand out there on the plains and squeeze my eyes shut and will them to be out there, to come down to me, because I was one of them. I knew it, so they had to know it, too. I made up whole stories, epics, about how I got left here by mistake and adopted by my parents, but they’d come back for me eventually. It was so real I could taste it, Kara, could shiver with it down to my bones, my marrow. It was like a religion, or an insanity. And I still would like to believe, would give fucking anything to believe, but I can’t. The evidence against it is just too strong. Do you know what the odds are that intelligent life would behave like . . . so I started to convince myself that the stories were just made up. I started to make them up, to write them down. Kara, it’s not ‘superiority,’ it’s not wisecracks, it’s . . . Kara, do you see what I’m talking about? Can you understand what I’m trying to mean? Kara?”
She didn’t answer. After a while, he touched her. She put her head on his shoulder. He wiped her tears. She let him. He stroked her hair and apologized all over again. She said it was all right, looking pensive and thoughtful. He pulled the blanket protectively up to her chin. She lay still in his arms. He kissed her. She smiled. A few days later, she called and said they should have a long talk. He never saw her again.
Paul Rizzo was getting married, and he wrote to invite Casey to the wedding. His bride was a fellow faculty member at Lunell College—an assistant professor, Rizzo wrote, underlining the words twice. She was also “the only child of a wealthy shoe-polish entrepreneur.” Casey tried to figure out how you got really wealthy from shoe polish, couldn’t, and knew that this proved nothing. He wouldn’t have known how to become really wealthy if the process were detailed for him in heroic couplets. For all he knew, shoe polish was a rewarding and fulfilling way to make money enough to freshly wallpaper all the spare rooms in Montana. For all he knew, shoes and the right polish were what his life had been missing all along, the yin and yang of his universe’s deficiencies. For all he knew.
With his letter, Rizzo had enclosed a picture of his fiancée, cut from the local newspaper that had announced their engagement. She looked pretty, if a little blurry. The invitation was embossed with blue-and-white doves swooping around a quotation from Keats.
Tramping along over the hard Montana snows on Christmas night, Casey tried to picture the wedding. There would be champagne, and sexy-coy toasts, and good food. There would be women—bridesmaids in silky dresses, Lunell professors with good minds, college-student relatives giggly and flushed with wine. The wedding was in April, over Easter recess, so the bridesmaids and professors and gigglers would have on spring dresses, light and bare. They would smell of flowery perfumes. They would dance on strappy, high-heeled sandals. They would talk to Casey on the dance floor, at the bar, on the church steps. And they would all ask him, eventually, what it was that he “did.” Or tried to do. Or was supposed to be doing.
Somewhere near the barns, a cow lowed. Casey tramped up to his old flat rock, knocked the snow off it, and sat down. Overhead, the stars blazed. He willed himself to concentrate on the stars, to forget the depressing mechanics of attending Rizzo’s wedding, the self-kept scoresheets. He just wouldn’t think about it. Above him glittered Thekala, aka Aldebaran, aka The Red Terror. To the south and east shone Rigel, Sirius, Betelguese, Pollux, Procyon. The Orion Nebula, spawn-ground of new stars. They used to pretend it was alive, like a queen bee. Only the southwest looked subdued, empty of all but the faint stars of Cetus. The sky there was a soft, even black, lustrous with reflected light, like . . .
Like shoe polish.
In January, the ground froze so hard that no graves could be dug. People continued to die anyway, and their caskets were stacked, carefully labelled, in a brick vault to await a thaw. Casey was laid off. Nothing else seemed to be opening up in the cemetery line. So he took a job as a part-time janitor in a high school, nightly scrubbing anatomical impossibilities off lavatory walls with industrial-strength cleanser. He wrote.
In February, it snowed fifty-two inches, a century’s record. During the entire month, the sky remained cloudy; if the stars had all simultaneously winked out, their light spent like so many weary philanderers, Casey wouldn’t have known it. He caught the flu and spent six days in bed, feverishly watching the barber pole revolve against the grey snow. He wrote.
In March, Dr. James Randall Stine, Chairman of the Graduate Committee and a widower for two years, announced his engagement to Miss Kara Phillips, a kindergarten teacher in the local public schools. Casey’s father called to just pass on the information that Marty Hillek’s father was looking around for someone with business sense to help him run the Holiday Inn. He wrote.
In April, a week before Rizzo’s wedding, Casey’s third attempt at a novel sold to a major publisher. It was about a galactic empire.
He leaped through the dark April woods, the letter in his hand, the ground inches below his feet. He was Pan with scriptorial pipes, Orpheus with graphic lyre, Caesar of the literary spaceways. He was the godchild of intergalactic muses. He was the first person in the universe to publish a novel. He was the Pied Piper with hordes at his singing back, Circe with spells to drive men mad. He was drunk, but only partly on California champagne.
Running wildly through springtime smells unseen in the darkness, he held the letter before him and a little to one side, like a spear, brandishing it upward.
“See! See!” he called up between the trees, drunkenly flaunting his own theatricality. “See! See what I did about you! Look! Look!”
The stars glittered.
Casey stopped running and stood panting beneath a sugar maple, holding his side. He was Shakespeare, he was Tolstoy, he was Dreiser, he was a definite A. He could walk on spangle-coloured planets forever, just as soon as his stomach lay still.
The stars glittered.
Across the sky, the branches of the sugar maple slanted like bars. Gemini sliced in half, Dubhe divided from Merak. Through the bars, the Milky Way looked broken, fitful, about to sever and recede even more, and it was already so far away, so high . . . so high . . . they were all so high . . . For a dizzy second, Casey put his hand on the tree trunk, searching for a foothold. But the second passed, and he stood on the ground, half-trampled fern shoots under his worn boots.
The stars glittered.
Okay, so the universe doesn’t notice, hardly an original observation, Casey ol’ boy, got to do better than that. What’d you expect—a supernova? No romantic despair; cosmic self-pity strictly forbidden in moments of drunken triumph, on pain of triviality. No brooding, no self-indulgent self-incrimination. “A man’s reach should exceed . . .” so you’ve got a hell of a reach, kudos to you, ol’ Jer, good to have a hell of a reach. Supposed to have a hell of a reach. Reach for a star a star is born born to boogie . . . oh, hell. I am not Prufrock, nor was meant to be—
Meant to be what?
Abruptly, he saw that he was not alone. Under the sugar maple, at the edge of the wide circle of branches, stood a child. A skinny, grubby boy, eleven years old, gazing upward. Casey lurched forward, but the boy ignored him. Motionless except for his eyes, he was conquering distant, spangle-coloured planets, and in his shining look, Casey saw, there was no longing; no one longs for what he already possesses. He was still, complete, but as Casey grabbed wildly to throttle the unbearable wholeness in the rapt face that he knew perfectly well was not there, the champagne heaved, and he threw up into the trampled fern shoots. When he could finally wipe his mouth on his shirttail, the boy was gone.
The stars glittered.
Casey stumbled back through the woods. In one small clearing, he smelled lilacs, barely budded but sweet in the dark, and he turned his head away. Somewhere, he lost the path. Scratched by brambles, scuffing the decay of last year’s leaves, he thrashed forward until the moon rose. It was easier, then, to walk, but the moonlit pattern of dark branches on the white letter made him squeeze his eyes shut, and it was thus that he tripped over the spaceship.
It wasn’t really, of course. The ship itself was a hundred feet away, dully black in the moonlight, circled with birch branches that had been pushed aside by its landing and had snapped back. Casey, sprawled on the ground over a foot-long, log-shaped . . . whatever it was, could almost feel the crack of those returning birch limbs on his back and shoulders. He reached under himself to feel the Whatever; it was—hard and smooth, faintly vibrating. Unlike the boy, it did not vanish.
Unsuspected additional champagne churned in his stomach.
The ship was small; it could hardly be more than some sort of shuttle. Curved into flowing lines and embraced by budding trees, it looked weirdly beautiful in the night woods, weirdly right. Moonlight slid off the black surface, a deep, rich black the colour of loam. Leaves and ferns grew right up to where the ship rested on the forest floor. There was no burned patch, no sign that the ship had not always been there, would not always be there, a part of the ferns and birches, surrounded by the usual night rustlings and scamperings. An owl hooted.
Under Casey’s belly, the Whatever began to hum.
He rolled off it and scrambled to his feet. A section of the ship slid upward, sending a shaft of blue light over the ground. Slowly, a ramp descended until it met the dead leaves, which sighed softly.
Casey closed his eyes. He was drunk, he told himself. He was drunk, he was emotionally exhausted, he was hallucinating in some bizarre, wish-fulfillment fantasy. He was insane, he was schizophrenic, he was dead. He was a grown man with a more-or-less job, aging parents, and his own copy of the ten-volume Oxford English Dictionary. He was afraid, but not of the ship.
When he opened his eyes, it was still there. The “door” was still open. Nothing was visible inside except the bright blue light. The log-shaped Whatever rose into the air as high as Casey’s chest and floated toward the ship. Ten feet away, it stopped, floated back to Casey’s chest, then again toward the ship. When Casey didn’t follow, it repeated the whole sequence. Casey took one step forward.
He was on the flat rock under the twilight sky. “Would You Go?” they asked each other, sprawled on concave stomachs. “Nah,” said Marty Hillek—too dangerous. “Chicken!” said Carl Nielsen, “chicken!” “I’d go,” said Billy DeTine, “I wouldn’t care, I’m not afraid, I’d go.” “Me too,” whispered little Jerry Casey, youngest of the lot. “Me too.” “What if you never got back?” said Marty Hillek, and no one said anything.
“The probability,” lectured the professor to Astronomy 101, “of intelligent life visiting Earth covertly is very small. Even if we generously suppose a fifty-fifty chance of life developing on any planet within a twenty-five-light-year radius of Earth, the next calculation would—”
“You don’t know,” insisted Kara Stine, née Phillips. “Nobody really knows.”
Casey took another step forward. Wet leaves squished under his boot. The letter rustled in his hand:
Dear Mr. Casey:
We are happy to inform you that our editorial staff is very impressed with your book, and that we are interested in publishing it. First, however, it is necessary . . .
The Whatever floated back to Casey a third time. It was humming more loudly now, and in the humming, Casey heard a soft urgency.
Moonlight shone on the letter, crumpled where his fist had tightened, fouled at one corner with vomited champagne.
“Would You Go?” asked Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine. “What if you never got back?” Nights on the cemetery tombs: Regulus Fomalhaut Betelguese Ri-i-gel. Days at his desk, struggling with stars on the head of a pin. “If Jerry Casey, great unpublished novelist, hasn’t personally seen one . . .” “Me too,” whispered little Jerry Casey. We are happy to inform you . . . “What are you doing now? I mean your, uh, plans?” “Me too. Oh, me too.” Happy to inform you . . . “Escapist improbabilities, Mr. Casey. You must see . . . ‘galactic empire’!” Happy to inform you . . .
Casey, battlefield for two warring empires, hiccupped in anguish.
Carefully, as if he might break, he took three steps backward. Then three more.
The Whatever followed him, then reversed direction and floated towards the ship, but only once. It floated inside, and the curved section of hull lowered slowly. The ship started to rise, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, the dark hull stood poised above the birches, blotting out the stars. Then it blurred and was gone. The birch branches snapped back. Something small and furry scuttled away through the leaves, startled by the sudden sharp sobbing that went on and on, the unchecked tearless sobbing of an eleven-year-old boy.
You know the rest. All but Casey’s name, which is not Casey. You can read in any standard reference work about the first official UN contact with the Beta Hydrans, fifteen years ago last May. You can read the pages and pages of testimony from the Des Moines dentist and the Portuguese fisherman and the Australian housewife who visited the Beta Hydran spacecraft during their reconnaissance landings. You can read about the shifts of global power and the scientific boons and the interstellar promises of good faith and speedy return by the Beta Hydrans, who were not part of a galactic empire and who seemed bewildered by the entire concept. You can’t not read it; it’s everywhere.
You can look up Casey, too, in the reference works, and read about how he became the most famous “name” in SF before he was forty-five. You can look up his awards, his honorary this-and-thats, his movie credits, the alimony he pays both wives, his bout with alcoholism. If your mind runs that way, you can look up his biographies—written, all, by impoverished PhDs weary of Keats—which will analyze for you all the early environmental influences on Casey’s writing. You can look up the academic critics, also impoverished PhDs, who have concerned themselves with Casey’s novels. They find in all of them, except the first, a “lost, human yearning, a quality almost mythic in the scope of its cosmic rootlessness” (Glasser, Richard J., “Rockets and Wanderjahr: Another Look at SF.” PMLA, 122 (1992), 48-76). You can look it all up, or could if you knew Casey’s name. You’d recognize it, even if you don’t read “that space stuff.”
But what you don’t know, can’t look up, is the loss of Casey’s galactic empire. What it was, what it meant, how it felt. You don’t know. Unless it has happened to you, you don’t know. You can’t ever know.
I Remember Paris
By James Alan Gardner
We’ve all heard one version of the story. Zeus hosted a banquet but didn’t invite Eris, the Goddess of Discord. Eris showed up anyway and threw a golden apple inscribed to the fairest into the gathering. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed to deserve the apple. Zeus was too wily to judge among the goddesses himself, so he appointed Prince Paris of Troy to pick which was the most beautiful. All three goddesses offered Paris bribes . . .
But here we stop. Fate isn’t fixed. Small things can produce big changes, especially when gods are involved.
In the best-known version of history, Zeus moved quickly to pass on the burden of judging. He tossed the golden apple to Hermes. “Take this to Prince Paris, as fast as the wind.” The apple reached Paris in a heartbeat.
The prince was a virile young man, so whose bribe did he choose? Aphrodite’s, of course. She offered him the love of the world’s most beautiful woman. Naturally, young Paris leaped at the chance.
But in another version of the tale, Zeus acted with less haste. When the goddesses began to argue, Zeus rose from his throne and glared as if to say, Must we, really? Do you have to fall for such an obvious trick? But none of the goddesses backed down. In annoyance, Zeus handed Hermes the apple but said, “No need to rush.”
So, Hermes took his time . . . and for gods, whole years pass like minutes. By the time Hermes reached Prince Paris in Troy, the prince had aged two decades and was not so thoroughly ruled by his loins. He still found Aphrodite’s offer tempting, but after sober deliberation, Paris chose Hera’s bribe instead. She had promised to make Paris king of all Europe and Asia . . . and a man in his forties wants status and power more than he wants a mere roll in the hay.
In the world that ensued, poets sing of the great Parisian empire: a realm which united half the world, both for better and for worse. But the saga of that empire would last a hundred days in the telling; let us not take the time. Tonight, we will share a briefer tale, one as true as the others.
In this final version, Zeus got morosely to his feet when he heard the goddesses start to bicker. After long, weary moments, he trudged across the Olympian feast-hall to where Hermes awaited. “Take your time,” Zeus said to his messenger. “Maybe the goddesses will eventually let this go.”
Obediently, Hermes dawdled en route. He sported with dryads, satyrs, and centaurs. By the time he gave Paris the apple, the prince had passed his sixtieth year.
