Last Summer at Mars Hill (21 page)

My daughter? Loretta says, and
I’m
saying, Your
who
?

Ye-es—

And the girl stepped forward, holding up her skirt so it wouldn’t get wet, and then she looked up, and it was like for the first time she got a good look at Loretta in the headlight. ’Cause she suddenly gave this scream and started laughing, and dropped her purse in the water and ran across and I started running, too, next to Loretta, only then at the last minute I stopped because I thought, Now wait a minute, this is something very special going on here between Loretta and this young woman who is her daughter, and so I stayed and waited a little while until they calmed down.

Well, Alice Jean, I knew it was her because she had Eddie Rule’s eyes and his smile. He may have been a poor father but he did have a nice smile.

And so for a little while there was some crying and laughing and you can just imagine how we all felt. And all the while that old car just sat there, though whoever was inside turned the motor off after a while and smoked a cigarette. There was no radio in it but you could hear him sort of humming to himself.

And finally Loretta said, Well, for god’s sakes let’s go inside, we’re getting soaked.

Well, wait a minute while I get my bag, said Noreen.

She went back to the car and stuck her head in and said something to whoever was in there.

Okay, now this is when I got goosebumps.

Because I couldn’t hear what he was saying—it was too far away, and it wasn’t like I wanted to eavesdrop or anything. I guess I sort of expected it must be old Eddie Rule inside. But now I could definitely hear his voice, and it wasn’t Eddie Rule’s voice at all. It was—

Well,
you
know whose voice it was.

Loretta knew, too. She stood by me with her arms crossed, shivering, and when she heard him she turned to me and opened her mouth and for a minute there I thought she was going to faint.

Oh, my god, she said, oh, my
god
—

Thank you for the ride, I heard Noreen yelling at him, and I could just barely make out his voice saying something back to her, goodbye I guess, something like that. Then she pulled this suitcase out of the car and stood back while it backed up.

Loretta! I said, elbowing her and then pulling her to me. Loretta, hurry up! Tell him thank you—

And she yelled, Thank you, thank you! and then she started running after the car, yelling and waving like she was crazy. Which we all were by then, all of us yelling and waving at him and laughing like we’d known each other all this time, when it’d really only been, like, five minutes. And the car just kept backing up ’til it got over the top of the hill, and then I guess he turned it around and drove off. And that was the last time anybody ever saw Loretta’s famous Cadillac.

Afterwards we went inside and kind of dried off and then on the way to my house we stopped at Big Jim’s and got a half-dozen Specials and went home. The Specials were so Ken Senior wouldn’t be too mad about me being out so late.

And so that’s how it happened. Next day of course the story got out, because there is no way, just no way, you can keep something like that a secret. Noreen says she thinks it was just a coincidence, she says everybody out here in Black Spot looks like him and who could tell the difference? Plus she said if it was really him wouldn’t he have been in a fancy limousine, not some crazy fixed-up car her real mother drove into the reservoir.

But
I
said, Well, that’s how you know it was really him. ’Cause it’s like Loretta said, there’s the Haves and there’s the Have-Nots, and if you’re a Have-Not you never forget what it’s like to be poor and on your own. I mean how could he have sung “Heartbreak Hotel” otherwise? Noreen said, Well, I still have my doubts, but when she and her mama went on Oprah they played it up for all they could, I can tell you that. And like the TV movie director says, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because it’s such a good story.

And I mean there’s Noreen reunited with Loretta to prove it, not to mention how would you ever get a car like that out of the reservoir,
plus
where is that car now, I ask you? Because I saw it, too, and I hadn’t had a thing to drink.

What do I think? Well, Erika honey, I guess it’s just one of those things. Strange things happen sometimes and you just got to take the good with the bad, is all. But you won’t hear me complaining about how it all turned out, not as long as business stays this good and I get that new Mary Rose Cadillac in the fall, no ma’am.

I always felt like I couldn’t take any credit for this, the strangest single thing that’s ever happened to me as a writer. I woke up one Saturday morning when I was alone at home with my daughter Callie, then about a year old. I put on Wall of Voodoo’s
Happy Planet
and started listening to the song “Elvis Bought Dora a Cadillac,” and then “The Have-Nots,” by X. And all of a sudden, I heard this woman’s voice talking in my head: “Now you know Eddie Rule came and took that baby girl…”

Well, when the King calls, you can bet that I listen. So I put Callie in the playpen, sat down and wrote this story in one sitting, finishing it at ten that night. (I remembered to feed and change the baby, too.) The next day I reread the story, corrected a few punctuation marks and sent it off to Gardner Dozois at
Asimov’s,
who
accepted
it.

If only writing were always like that.

When I lived in D.C., there was a man who drove a car like Loretta’s. For years I wondered what the deal was with this guy and then one day someone told me that he had a grownup daughter he’d never met, but he thought that maybe she might see his decked-out vehicle and somehow figure out that he was her real father. Damned if it didn’t work, too.

In the month of Athyr Leucis fell asleep.

—C.P. Cavafy, “In the Month of Athyr”

T
HE ARGALA CAME TO
live with them on the last day of Mestris, when Paul was fifteen. High summer, it would have been by the old Solar calendar; but in the
HORUS
station it was dusk, as it always was. The older boys were poring over an illustrated manual of sexual positions by the sputtering light of a lumiere filched from Father Dorothy’s cache behind the galley refrigerator. Since Paul was the youngest he had been appointed to act as guard. He crouched beside the refrigerator, shivering in his pajamas, and cursed under his breath. He had always been the youngest, always would be the youngest. There had been no children born on the station since Father Dorothy arrived to be the new tutor. In a few months, Father Dorothy had converted Teichman Station’s few remaining women to the Mysteries of Lysis. Father Dorothy was a
galli,
a eunuch who had made the ultimate sacrifice to the Great Mother during one of the high holy days Below. The Mysteries of Lysis was a relatively new cult. Its adherents believed that only by reversing traditional gender roles could the sexes make peace after their long centuries of open hostility. These reversals were enacted literally, often to the consternation of non-believing children and parents.

On the stations, it was easier for such unusual sects and controversial ideas to gain a toehold. The current ruling Ascendancy embraced a cult of rather recent vintage, a form of religious fundamentalism that was a cunning synthesis of the more extreme elements of several popular and ancient faiths. For instance, the Ascendants encouraged female infanticide among certain populations, including the easily monitored network of facilities that comprised the Human Orbital Research Units in Space, or
HORUS
. Because of recent advances in bioengineering, the Ascendants believed that women, long known to be psychologically mutable and physically unstable, might also soon be unnecessary. Thus were the heavily reviled feminist visionaries of earlier centuries unhappily vindicated. Thus the absence of girl children on Teichman, as well as the rift between the few remaining women and their husbands.

To the five young boys who were his students, Father Dorothy’s devotion to the Mysteries was inspiring in its intensity. Their parents were also affected; Father Dorothy believed in encouraging discussions of certain controversial gender policies. Since his arrival, relations between men and women had grown even more strained. Paul’s mother was now a man, and his father had taken to spending most of his days in the station’s neural sauna, letting its wash of endorphins slowly erode his once-fine intellect to a soft soppy blur. The argala was to change all that.

“Pathori,” hissed Claude Illo, tossing an empty salt-pod at Paul’s head. “Pathori, come here!”

Paul rubbed his nose and squinted. A few feet away Claude and the others, the twins Reuben and Romulus and the beautiful Ira Claire, crouched over the box of exotic poses.

“Pathori, come
here
!”

Claude’s voice cracked. Ira giggled; a moment later Paul winced as he heard Claude smack him.

“I
mean
it,” Claude warned. Paul sighed, flicked the salt-pod in Ira’s direction and scuttled after it.

“Look at this,” Claude whispered. He grabbed Paul by the neck and forced his head down until his nose was a scant inch away from the hologravures. The top image was of a woman, strictly forbidden. She was naked, which made it doubly forbidden; and with a man, and smiling. It was that smile that made the picture particularly damning; according to Father Dorothy, a woman in such a posture would never enjoy being there. The woman in the gravure turned her face, tossing back hair that was long and impossibly blonde. For an instant Paul glimpsed the man sitting next to her. He was smiling, too, but wearing the crimson leathers of an Ascendant Aviator. Like the woman, he had the ruddy cheeks and even teeth Paul associated with antique photographs or tapes. The figures began to move suggestively. Paul’s head really
should
explode, now, just like Father Dorothy had warned. He started to look away, embarrassed and aroused, when behind him Claude swore—

“—move, damn it, it’s Dorothy!—”

But it was too late.

“Boys…”

Father Dorothy’s voice rang out, a hoarse tenor. Paul looked up and saw him, clad as always in salt-and-pepper tweeds, his long gray hair pulled back through a copper loop. “It’s late, you shouldn’t be here.”

They were safe: their tutor was distracted. Paul looked beyond him, past the long sweep of the galley’s gleaming equipment to where a tall figure stood in the shadows. Claude swept the box of hologravures beneath a stove and stood, kicking Paul and Ira and gesturing for the twins to follow him.

“Sorry, Father,” he grunted, gazing at his feet. Beside him Paul tried not to stare at whoever it was that stood at the end of the narrow corridor.

“Go along, then,” said Father Dorothy, waving his hands in the direction of the boys’ dormitory. As they hurried past him, Paul could smell the sandalwood soap Father Dorothy had specially imported from his home Below, the only luxury he allowed himself. And Paul smelled something else, something strange. The scent made him stop. He looked over his shoulder and saw the figure still standing at the end of the galley, as though afraid to enter while the boys were there. Now that they seemed to be gone the figure began to walk towards Father Dorothy, picking its feet up with exaggerated delicacy. Paul stared, entranced.

“Move it, Pathori,” Claude called to him; but Paul shook his head and stayed where he was. Father Dorothy had his back to them. One hand was outstretched to the figure. Despite its size—it was taller than Paul, taller than Father Dorothy—there was something fragile and childlike about it. Thin and slightly stooped, with wispy yellow hair like feathers falling onto curved thin shoulders, frail arms crossed across its chest and legs that were so long and frail that he could see why it walked in that awkward tippy-toe manner: if it fell its legs would snap like chopsticks. It smelled like nothing else on Teichman Station, sweet and powdery and warm. Once, Paul thought, his mother had smelled like that, before she went to stay in the women’s quarters. But this thing looked nothing like his mother. As he stared, it slowly lifted its face, until he could see its enormous eyes fixed on him: caramel-colored eyes threaded with gold and black, staring at him with a gaze that was utterly adoring and absolutely witless.

“Paul, come
on
!”

Ira tugged at him until he turned away and stumbled after the others to the dormitory. For a long time afterwards he lay awake, trying to ignore the laughter and muffled sounds coming from the other beds; recalling the creature’s golden eyes, its walk, its smell.

At tutorial the next day Father Dorothy said nothing of finding the boys in the galley, nor did he mention his strange companion. Paul yawned behind the time-softened covers of an ancient linguistics text, waiting for Romulus to finish with the monitor so he could begin his lesson. In the front of the room, beneath flickering lamps that cast gray shadows on the dusty floor, Father Dorothy patiently went over a hermeneutics lesson with Ira, who was too stupid to follow his father into the bioengineering corps, but whose beauty and placid nature guaranteed him a place in the Izakowa priesthood on Miyako Station. Paul stared over his textbook at Ira with his corkscrew curls and dusky skin. He thought of the creature in the galley—its awkwardness, its pallor; the way it had stared at him. But mostly he tried to remember how it smelled. Because on Teichman Station—where they had been breathing the same air for seventeen years, and where even the most common herbs and spices, cinnamon, garlic, pepper, were no longer imported because of the expense to the station’s dwindling group of researchers—on Teichman Station everything smelled the same. Everything smelled of despair.

“Father Dorothy.”

Paul looked up. A server, one of the few that remained in working order, lurched into the little room, its wheels scraping against the door. Claude snickered and glanced sideways at Paul: the server belonged to Paul’s mother, although after her conversion she had declared it shared property amongst all the station women. “Father Dorothy, KlausMaria Dalven asks that her son be sent to her quarters. She wishes to speak with him.”