Keeper of Dreams (29 page)

Jared didn’t bother telling him that “I don’t remember” was a huge lie. He knew enough to realize that telling the truth would convince everybody that they were liars, and only lies would convince anybody they were telling the truth.

Todd didn’t recover consciousness after the surgery for three days, and then he was in and out as his body fought off a devastating fever and an infection that antibiotics didn’t seem to help. So delirious that nothing he said made sense—to the cops and the doctors, anyway. Men with arrows. Elves. Eggo waffles. Worms with mouths and anuses. Flying through space. Floods and flying and . . . definitely delirium.

The cops found what looked like bloodstains on the chain saw, but since Todd’s wounds were punctures and the stains turned out not to react properly to any of the tests for blood, the evidence led them nowhere. It might end up in somebody’s X file, but what the whole event would not do was end up in court.

When Todd woke up for real, Dad and Jared were there by his bed. Dad only had time to say, “It’s a shame if you don’t remember anything at all,” before the detective and the doctor were both all over him, asking how it happened, who did it, where the injuries were inflicted.

“On another planet,” said Todd. “I flew through space to get there and I never let go of the hose but then it got sucked away from me and I was lost until I got jabbed in the shoulder with the rake and I held on and rode it home.”

That was even better than amnesia, since the doctor assumed he was still delirious and they left Todd and Dad and Jared alone. Later, when Todd was clearly
not
delirious, he was ready with his own amnesia story, along with tales of weird dreams he had while in a coma.

The doctor’s report finally said that Todd’s injuries were consistent with old-fashioned arrows, the kind with barbs, only there were no removal injuries. It was as if the arrows had entered his body and dissolved somehow. And as to where Mom had been all those years, they hadn’t a clue, and except for dehydration and some serious but generalized weight loss, she seemed to be in good health.

And when at last they were home together, they didn’t talk about it
much. One time through the story so everybody would know what happened to everybody else, but then it was done.

Mom couldn’t get over how many years she had missed, how much bigger and older Todd and Jared had become. She started blaming herself for being gone that whole time, but Dad wouldn’t let her. “We all did what made sense to us at the time,” he said. “The best we could. And we’re back together
now
. Todd has some interesting scars. You have to take calcium pills to recover from bone loss. There’s only one thing left to take care of.”

The mouth of the worm in the closet. The anus of the worm in the shed.

The solution wasn’t elegant, but it worked. First they hooked the anus with the rake one last time, covered the top with a tarpaulin, and dragged it to the car. They drove to the lake and dragged the thing up to the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the water, then shoved it as far as they could over the edge, with Dad and Mom gripping Todd tightly so he wouldn’t fall.

Let Eggo come back if he wanted. Given how tough he was, it probably wouldn’t hurt him much, but it would be a very inconvenient location.

The mouth in the closet was harder, because they couldn’t move it from their end. But a truckload of manure dumped on the front lawn allowed them to bring wheelbarrows full of it into the house and on into the bedroom, where they took turns shoveling it into the maw.

On the other side, they knew, it would be a fine mist of manure, spreading with the wind out across the town. Huge volumes of it, coming thick and fast.

And sure enough, by the time the manure pile was half gone, the mouth disappeared. Eggo must have moved it from his end. Which was all they wanted.

Of course, then they had to get the smell out of the house and spread a huge amount of leftover manure over the lawn and across the garden, and the neighbors were really annoyed with the stench in the neighborhood until a couple of rains had settled it down. But they had a great lawn the next spring.

Only one thing that Todd had to know. He asked Mom when they
were alone one night, watching the last installment of the BBC miniseries of
Pride and Prejudice
after Dad and Jared had fallen asleep.

“What did you see?” he asked. “During the passage?” When she seemed baffled, he added, “Between worlds.”

“See?” asked Mom. “What did
you
see?”

“It was like I was in space,” said Todd, “only I could breathe. Faster than light I was going, stars everywhere, and then I zoomed down to the planet and . . . there I was.”

She shook her head. “I guess we each saw what we wanted to see. Needed to see, maybe. No outer space for me. No stars. Just you and Jared and your dad, waiting for me. Beckoning to me. Telling me to come home.”

“And the hose?”

“Never saw it,” she said. “During the whole passage. I could
feel
it, hold tightly to it, but all I saw was . . . home.”

Todd nodded. “OK,” he said. “But it
was
another planet, just the same. Even if I didn’t really see my passage through space. It was a real place, and I was there.”

“You were there,” said Mom.

“And you know what?” said Todd.

“I hope you’re not telling me you ever want to go back.”

“Are you kidding?” said Todd. “I’ve had my fill of space travel. I’m done.”

“There’s no place like home,” said Mom, clicking her heels together.

The assignment from editors Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann was simple enough. Write an old-time adventure story that puts kids in space.

Hey, kids in space—isn’t that what Card does?

I took on the assignment with the firm intention of fulfilling it literally. In fact, I was expecting that I’d write a story set in Battle School, so that it would not only be a kids-in-space adventure, it would be tied to the
Ender’s Game
universe.

But then the deadline rolled around, and I hadn’t thought of a single idea that worked well enough for me to be ready to write it. What I had
was a weird story in which there
was
a monster in the closet, and it actually ate a kid’s mom. But what does
that
have to do with kids in space? It’s kids in the bedroom, for pete’s sake!

Still . . . as I’ve told writing students for many years, the best stories often come from the juxtaposition of completely unrelated ideas. My own career is full of them. For instance:

My second novel,
Treason
, came from a map I doodled on which I started naming my imaginary countries with surnames from our present world; I combined it with a separate idea about people who could regenerate limbs at will, including limbs that weren’t actually missing, so they’d come to parties with an extra arm or leg or other body part.

Hart’s Hope
came from an idea session with the very first writing class I taught, in which magical power came from blood, with the most power going to a woman who killed her own child; I combined it with an intriguing map I had drawn of a city in which, depending on what gate you enter through, you find a completely different place.

Even the original “Ender’s Game” story came from one idea—a safe “battle room” in which soldiers trained for combat in space, but with walls to keep them from drifting away and getting lost; and then another idea, in which children are playing a complex space videogame but their commands get turned into orders followed by real pilots in a faraway space battle.

It’s in the tension between these ideas, the struggle to make them fit, that creativity gets stimulated and you start to come up with stuff that’s really cool—ideas that weren’t going to come to you out of the blue.

So it was with this story. I had the monster-in-closet-eats-mom idea, and the need to have a kid travel from planet to planet. So . . . what if the monster in the closet is actually a living creature that, like an earthworm, survives on the energy differential between different universes? The same worm has both a mouth and an anus on both worlds, and objects that enter through one end are spewed out the other, intact—the creature “digests” only energy in a purer form. Solid objects and living creatures are just fiber.

I wrote to Gardner about this one, because it still didn’t fit the parameters of the anthology. He told me to go ahead—perhaps because it was better than finding somebody else at such a late date—and I ended up
with a story that I liked even more than I expected. After it first appeared in
Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space
, “Space Boy” went on to become a Young Adult book on its own, from Subterranean Press, and I’m developing it into a film project. You never know what the desperation before a deadline can lead to.

Hakira enjoyed coasting the streets of Manhattan. The old rusted-out building frames seemed like the skeleton of some ancient leviathan that beached and died, but he could hear the voices and horns and growling machinery of crowded streets and smell the exhaust and cooking oil, even if all that he saw beneath him were the tops of the trees that had grown up in the long-vanished streets. With a world as uncrowded as this one, there was no reason to dismantle the ruins, or clear the trees. It could remain as a monument, for the amusement of the occasional visitor.

There were plenty of places in the world that were still crowded. As always, most people enjoyed or at least needed human company, and even recluses usually wanted people close enough to reach from time to time. Satellites and landlines still linked the world together, and ports were busy with travel and commerce of the lighter sort, like bringing out-of-season fruits and vegetables to consumers who preferred not to travel to where the food was fresh. But as the year 3000 was about to pass away, there were places like this that made the planet Earth seem almost empty, as if humanity had moved on.

In fact, there were probably far more human beings alive than anyone had ever imagined might be possible. No human had ever left the solar system, and only a handful lived anywhere but Earth. One of the Earths, anyway—one of the angles of Earth. In the past five hundred
years, millions had passed through benders to colonize versions of Earth where humanity had never evolved, and now a world seemed full with only a billion people or so.

Of the trillions of people that were known to exist, the one that Hakira was going to see lived in a two-hundred-year-old house perched on the southern coast of this island, where in ancient times artillery had been placed to command the harbor. Back when the Atlantic reached this far inland. Back when invaders had to come by ship.

Hakira set his flivver down in the meadow where the homing signal indicated, switched off the engine, and slipped out into the bracing air of a summer morning only a few miles from the face of the nearest glacier. He was expected—there was no challenge from the security system, and lights showed him the path to follow through the shadowy woods.

Because his host was something of a show-off, a pair of sabertooth tigers were soon padding along beside him. They might have been computer simulations, but knowing Moshe’s reputation, they were probably genetic back-forms, very expensive and undoubtedly chipped up to keep them from behaving aggressively except, perhaps, on command. And Moshe had no reason to wish Hakira ill. They were, after all, kindred spirits.

The path suddenly opened up onto a meadow, and after only a few steps he realized that the meadow was the roof of a house, for here and there steep-pitched skylights rose above the grass and flowers. And now, with a turn, the path took him down a curving ramp along the face of the butte overlooking the Hudson plain. And now he stood before a door.

It opened.

A beaming Moshe stood before him, dressed in, of all things, a kimono. “Come in, Hakira! You certainly took your time!”

“We set our appointment by the calendar, not the clock.”

“Whenever you arrive is a good time. I merely noted that my security system showed you taking the grand tour on the way.”

“Manhattan. A sad place, like a sweet dream you can never return to.”

“A poet’s soul, that’s what you have.”

“I’ve never been accused of that, before.”

“Only because you’re Japanese,” said Moshe.

They sat down before an open fire that seemed real, but gave off no
smoke. Heat it had, however, so that Hakira felt a little scorched when he leaned forward. “There are Japanese poets.”

“I know. But is that what anyone thinks of, when they think of the wandering Japanese?”

Hakira smiled. “But you
do
have money.”

“Not from money-changing,” said Moshe. “And what I don’t have, which you also don’t have, is a home.”

Hakira looked around at the luxurious parlor. “I suppose that technically this
is
a cave.”

“A homeland,” said Moshe. “For nine and a half centuries, my friend, your people have been able to go almost anywhere in the world but one, an archipelago of islands once called Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu—”

Hakira, suddenly overcome by emotion, raised his hand to stop the cruel list. “I know that your people, too, have been driven from their homeland—”