Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (568 page)

At last Piggy said, “You believe that crap?” Then, when there was no answer, “It’s none of it true, man! Got that? There’s no magic, and there never was.” Donna could see that he was really angry, threatened on some primal level by the possibility that someone he respected could even begin to believe in magic. His face got pink, the way it always did when he lost control.

“No, it’s all bullshit,” Russ said bitterly. “Like everything else.”

They passed the pipe around again. Then Donna leaned back, stared straight out, and said, “If I could wish for anything, you know what I’d wish for?”

“Bigger tits?”

She was so weary now, so pleasantly washed out, that it was easy to ignore Piggy. “I’d wish I knew what the situation was.”

“What situation?” Piggy asked. Donna was feeling langorous, not at all eager to explain herself, and she waved away the question. But he persisted. “What situation?”

“Any situation. I mean, all the time, I find myself talking with people and I don’t know what’s really going on. What games they’re playing. Why they’re acting the way they are. I wish I knew what the situation was.”

The moon floated before her, big and fat and round as a griffin’s egg, shining with power. She could feel that power washing through her, the background radiation of decayed chaos spread across the sky at a uniform three degrees Kelvin. Even now, spent and respent, a coin fingered and thinned to the worn edge of nonexistence, there was power out there, enough to flatten planets.

Staring out at that great fat boojum snark of a moon, she felt the flow of potential worlds, and within the cold silver disk of that jester’s skull, rank with magic, sensed the invisible presence of Russ’s primitive monks, men whose minds were nowhere near comprehensible to her, yet vibrated with power, existing as matrices of patterned stress, no more actual than Donald Duck, but no less powerful either. She was caught in a waking fantasy, in which the sky was full of power and all of it accessible to her. Monks sat empty handed over their wishing bowls, separated from her by the least fictions of time and reality. For an eternal instant all possibilities fanned out to either side, equally valid, no one more real than any other. Then the world turned under her, and her brain shifted back to realtime.

“Me,” Piggy said, “I just wish I knew how to get back up the stairs.”

They were silent for a moment. Then it occurred to Donna that here was the perfect opportunity to find out what was bugging Russ. If she asked cautiously enough, if the question hit him just right, if she were just plain lucky, he might tell her everything. She cleared her throat. “Russ? What do you wish?”

In the bleakest voice imaginable, Russ said, “I wish I’d never been born.”

She turned to ask him why, and he wasn’t there.

“Hey,” Donna said. “Where’d Russ go?”

Piggy looked at her oddly. “Who’s Russ?”

* * * *

It was a long trip back up. They carried the length of wooden railing between them, and every now and then Piggy said, “Hey, wasn’t this a great idea of mine? This’ll make a swell ladder.”

“Yeah, great,” Donna would say, because he got mad when she didn’t respond. He got mad too, whenever she started to cry, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. She couldn’t even explain why she was crying, because in all the world—of all his friends, acquaintances, teachers, even his parents—she was the only one who remembered that Russ had ever existed.

The horrible thing was that she had no specific memories of him, only a vague feeling of what his presence had been like, and a lingering sense of longing and frustration.

She no longer even remembered his face.

“Do you want to go first or last?” Piggy had asked her.

When she’d replied, “Last. If I go first, you’ll stare at my ass all the way up,” he’d actually blushed. Without Russ to show off in front of, Piggy was a completely different person, quiet and not at all abusive. He even kept his language clean.

But that didn’t help, for just being in his presence was enough to force understanding on her: That his bravado was fueled by his insecurities and aspirations, that he masturbated nightly and with self-loathing, that he despised his parents and longed in vain for the least sign of love from them. That the way he treated her was the sum and total of all of this and more.

She knew exactly what the situation was.

Dear God, she prayed, let it be that I won’t have this kind of understanding when I reach the top. Or else make it so that situations won’t be so painful up there, that knowledge won’t hurt like this, that horrible secrets won’t lie under the most innocent word.

They carried their wooden burden upward, back toward the world.

* * * *

Copyright © 1989 by Michael Swanwick; this story first appeared in
Full Spectrum 2
.

(1949– )

Harry Turtledove’s first two novels, the fantasies
Wereblood
(1979) and
Wereknight
(1979), were published under the pseudonym Eric G. Iverson, since his editor didn’t think readers would believe Turtledove was his real name. Since then, things have changed a bit, with Turtledove’s alternate history novels becoming regular best-sellers. He’s also won a Hugo (for “Down in the Bottomlands,” 1994), two Sidewase Awards for alternate history, and other honors including the Italia award and the Prometheus Award.

After failing out of Cal Tech his first year, Turtledove ended up at UCLA, where he earned a PhD in Byzantine history in 1977. He supported himself as a technical writer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education while his writing career got going, finally leaving to write full-time in 1991. His skills as a Byzantine historian are very much in evidence in Turtledove’s writing, whether directly as in the fantasy
Videssos Cycle
(in which a Roman legion goes to a world with magic) and
Basil Argyros
stories (alternate histories where Muhammad became a Christian saint, preserving the Byzantine empire) or indirectly in alternate histories based on the American Civil War or set in a world where the American Revolution was averted through diplomacy. He’s also used his historical skills on hybrids of alternate history and other subgenres, such as the the best-selling Guns of the South (where racist time travelers supply the South with AK-47s and other modern weapons that allow them to win the Civil War) and WorldWar (where World War II is interrupted by an alien invasion) series.

Turtledove is married to mystery writer Laura Frankos. They have three daughters.

Although he’s best known for his alternate history, when I contacted him about a contribution for this book, Turtledove correctly pointed out that I already had plenty of alternate history in the book, but sorely needed a baseball story.

First published at Tor.com, November 2009

A chilly January night in Roswell. Joe Bauman has discovered that’s normal for eastern New Mexico. It gets hot here in the summer, but winters can be a son of a bitch. That Roswell’s high up—3,600 feet—only makes the cold colder. Makes the sky clearer, too. A million stars shine down on Joe.

One of those stars is his: the big red one marking the Texaco station at 1200 West Second Street. He nods to himself in slow satisfaction. He’s had a good run, a hell of a good run, here in Roswell. The way it looks right now, he’ll settle down here and run the gas station full time when his playing days are done.

Won’t be long, either. He’ll turn thirty-two in April, about when the season starts. Ballplayers, even ones like him who never come within miles of the big time, know how sharply mortal their careers are. If he doesn’t, the ache in his knees when he turns on a fastball will remind him.

He glances down at his watch, which he wears on his right wrist—he’s a lefty all the way. It’s getting close to nine o’clock. He looks up Second Street. Then he looks down the street. No traffic either way. People here make jokes about rolling up the sidewalks after the sun goes down. With maybe 20,000 people, Roswell seems plenty big and bustling to Joe. It’s a damn sight bigger than Welch, Oklahoma, the pissant village where he was born, that’s for sure.

He could close up and go home. Chances that he’ll have any more business are pretty slim. But the sign in the rectangular iron frame says
open ’til midnight
. He’ll stick around. You never can tell.

And it’s not as if he’s never done this before. Dorothy will be amazed if he does come home early. He’s got a TV set—a Packard Bell, just a year old—in a back room, and a beat-up rocking chair she was glad to see the last of, and a shelf with a few books in case he doesn’t feel like staring at the television. He’s got an old, humming refrigerator in there, too (he thinks of it as an icebox more often than not), with some beer. Except for a bed, all the comforts of home.

When he goes in there, he ducks to make sure he doesn’t bang his head. He’s a great big buy—six-five, maybe 235. Maybe more like 250 now, when he’s not in playing shape. Lots and lots of afternoons in the sun have weathered the skin on his face and his forearms and especially his hands.

He leaves the door to the back room open so headlights will warn him in case anybody does come in. When he turns on the TV, the picture is snowy. He needs a tall antenna to bring it in at all, because Roswell doesn’t have a station of its own, though there’s talk of getting one. It isn’t nine yet. Milton Berle isn’t on. Joe can’t stand the program that runs ahead of him. He turns the sound down to nothing. He doesn’t turn the set off: then it would have to warm up again, and he might miss something. But he does ignore it for the time being.

To kill time till Uncle Miltie’s inspired lunacy, he pulls a book off the shelf. “Oh, yeah—the weird one,” he mutters. Something called
The Supernatural Reader
, a bunch of stories put together by Groff and Lucy Conklin. Groff—there’s a handle for you.

Brand-new book, or near enough. Copyright 1953. He found it in a Salvation Army store. Cost him a dime. How can you go wrong?

Story he’s reading is called “Pickup from Olympus,” by a fellow named Pangborn. The guy in the story runs a gas station, which makes it extra interesting for Joe. And there’s a ’37 Chevy pickup in it, and damned if he didn’t learn to drive on one of those before he went into the Navy.

But the people, if that’s what you’d call them, in the pickup…Joe shakes his head. “Weird,” he says again. “Really weird.” He’s the kind of guy who likes things nailed down tight.

He puts
The Supernatural Reader
back on the shelf. With a grunt, he heaves his bulk out of the rocker, walks over to the television, and twists the volume knob to the right. When he plops himself down in the chair once more, it creaks and kind of shudders. One of these days, it’ll fall apart when he does that, and leave him with his ass on the floor. But not yet. Not yet.

A chorus of men dressed the way he would be if he really spiffed himself up—dressed like actors playing service-station jockeys instead of real ones, in other words—bursts into staticky song:

“Oh, we’re the men of Texaco.

We work from Maine to Mexico.

There’s nothing like this Texaco of ours;

Our show tonight is powerful,

We’ll wow you with an hourful

of howls from a showerful of stars;

We’re the merry Texaco-men!

Tonight we may be showmen;

Tomorrow we’ll be servicing your cars!”

Joe sings along, even if he can’t carry a tune in a pail. Texaco is his outfit, too, even more than the Roswell Rockets are. If you’re not a big-leaguer—and sometimes even if you are—baseball is only a part-time job. He’ll get six hundred dollars a month to swing the bat this year, and a grand as a signing bonus. For a guy in a Class C league, that’s great money. But a gas station, now, a gas station is a living for the rest of his life. You get into your thirties, you start worrying about stuff like that. You’d goddamn well better, anyhow.

Out comes Milton Berle. He’s in a dress. Joe guffaws. Christ on His crutch, but Milton Berle makes an ugly broad. Joe remembers how horny he got when he was in the Navy and didn’t even see a woman for months at a time. If he’d seen one who looked like that, he would have kept right on being horny.

Or maybe not. When you’re twenty years old, what the hell are you but a hard-on with legs?

Uncle Miltie starts strumming a ukulele. If that’s not scary, his singing is. It’s way worse than Joe’s. Joe laughs fit to bust a gut. He hope the picture stays halfway decent. This is gonna be a great show.

* * * *

There’s a sudden glow of headlights against the far wall of the back room. “Well, shit,” Joe mutters. He didn’t think it was real likely he’d get a customer this time of night. But he didn’t go home. Unlikely doesn’t mean impossible. Anybody who’s spent years on a baseball field will tell you that. Play long enough and you’ll see everything.

Out of the chair he comes—one more time. He doesn’t want to turn his back on Milton Berle, but he does. When you’re there to do a job, you’ve got to do it. Anybody who made it through the Depression has learned that the hard way.

Parked by the pumps is…Joe shakes his head, wondering about himself. Why the hell should he expect a ’37 Chevy pickup?
That damn book
, he thinks.
That crazy story
.

But the story wouldn’t get to him the way it does if he lived in Santa Fe or Lubbock. Something funny happened in Roswell a few years before he got here. He doesn’t exactly know what. The locals don’t talk about it much, not where he can overhear. They like him and everything. He knocks enough balls over the right-field fence for the ballclub, they’d better like him. Still and all, he remains half a stranger. Roswell may be bigger than Welch, Oklahoma, but it’s still a small town.

Nobody here laughs about flying-saucer yarns, though. They do in Midland and Odessa and Artesia and the other Longhorn League towns, but not in Roswell.

Anyway, in spite of his jimjams, it’s not a ’37 Chevy pickup stopped in front of the pumps, engine ticking as it cools down. It’s an Olds Rocket 88, so new it might have just come off the floor in Albuquerque or El Paso, the two nearest cities with Oldsmobile dealerships.

As he walks around to the driver’s side, the jingle that started off the TV show pops back into his head, God knows why.
We’ll wow you with an hourful of howls from a showerful of stars
. That’s what he’s singing under his breath before the guy in the Oldsmobile rolls down the window so they can talk.

Warmer air gusts out of the car; Joe feels it against his cheek. Well, of course a baby like this will come with a heater. He’s already noticed it sports a radio antenna.
Probably has an automatic transmission, too
, he thinks.
All the expensive options
.

Whoever’s in there, it’s not one of his regulars. He’s never seen this car before. And besides, his regulars are home at this time of night. If they’ve got TVs, they’re watching Uncle Miltie, same as he was. If they don’t, they’re listening to the radio or playing cards or reading a book. Or maybe they’ve already gone to bed. Not much to keep you up late in Roswell.

“What can I do for you?” he asks, trying not to sound pissed off because he’s missing his show. “Just gas? Or do you want me to look under the hood and check your tires, too?”

For a long moment, there’s no answer. He wonders if the driver savvies English. Old Mexico’s less than a hundred miles away. Roswell has a
barrio
. Some of the greasers are wild Rockets fans. Some of them bring their jalopies here because he plays for the team.

Because they do, he can make a stab at asking his question in Spanish. It’s crappy Spanish, sure, but maybe the guy will
comprende
. He’s just about to when the driver says, “Just gas, please. Five gallons of regular.”

Joe frowns. It’s a funny voice, half rasp, half squeak. And he wants to dig a finger into his ear. It’s as if he’s hearing the other guy inside his head, someplace way down deep. And…“You sure, Mister? You got a V-8 in there, you know. You really ought to feed it ethyl. Yeah, costs a couple cents more a gallon, but you make it back in performance and then some. Less engine wear, too.”

Another pause. Maybe the driver’s thinking it over. Joe eyes him, trying to pretend he’s not doing it. The fellow’s funny-looking, which is putting it mildly. Joe wonders if he
is
a guy. He’s sure not very big—he’s got the seat shoved all the way forward. His face is smooth as a girl’s, maybe even smoother. But he’s got on a white shirt, a jacket with lapels, sunglasses even though it’s nighttime, and a fedora with no hair—no hair at all—sticking out from under it. Joe sees there are two more in the car with him, one in front and one in back. They both look and dress like the fellow behind the wheel, poor bastards.

This pause lasts so long, Joe gets ready to try his half-assed Spanish again. Before he can, the driver says, “Regular, please. Less lead goes into the air that way.”

“Huh?” Joe says. Then he remembers ethyl is short for tetraethyl lead. It’s what they put in gas to make it knock less.

“Less lead,” the driver repeats. “Less air pollution.” He reaches out the window to point at the Texaco sign. His hand is tiny. It’s as smooth as his face. And it has only three fingers to go with the thumb. It doesn’t look as if he’s lost one in an accident or during the war. It looks as if he was born that way. He goes on, “You are a man of the star. You have the emblem. You have the song. You should understand such things.”

Was Joe singing the jingle loud enough for the guy to hear him? He doesn’t think so, especially since the Olds’ window was closed then. He’s not a hundred percent sure, though, so he doesn’t push it.

To hide his unease—that voice still seems to form in the middle of his head—he tries to turn it into a joke: “I’m not just a man of the star, Mac.” He also points to the Texaco sign. “I’m a man of the Rockets.”

The guy behind the wheel takes off his sunglasses. His eyes are enormous. They reflect light like a cat’s. Human eyes don’t do that. When they meet Joe’s, he tries to look away, but finds he can’t. They peer into him, as if through a window. He knows he should be scared, but he isn’t.

“A man of the star, and of the Rockets!” the little guy says. His eyes get bigger yet. Joe hasn’t believed they could. “Why, so you are! What a pleasant coincidence! In this vehicle, so are we.”

His two buddies wriggle and twitch as if he’s just come out with something way funnier than any Milton Berle one-liner. “What are you doing to me?” Joe hears his own voice as if from very far away—certainly from farther away than the driver’s. That should be impossible. But unlikely isn’t the same thing, a thought he’s had not long before. He tries again: “What are you going to do to me?”

One more pause from inside the Oldsmobile. It’s as if the driver has to translate even the simplest English into something he can understand.
Martian?
Joe wonders. His feet want to run, but they can’t. He’s frozen where he stands, even more than he would be by a wicked curveball.

“I am buying five gallons of regular from you,” the driver eventually answers. “That is what I am doing to you. And you are a man of the star, and of the Rockets. It is only right that you should be far-traveled in your trade, and so you shall be. And no, since you are curious, we do not speak Martian.” His friends wriggle and twitch again. He adds, “We are from farther away than that ourselves.”

What’s farther away than Mars?
That thought fills Joe’s mind as the driver puts his sunglasses back on. The second he does, most of what they’ve been talking about falls right out of Joe’s mind. He finds himself staring up at the stars, the way he was before he went in to watch Milton Berle. Boy, they look a long way off tonight! He wonders why—but not for long.