Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (575 page)

Mom bent over and picked up the log that David had dropped and laid it on the couch beside her.

“‘If it’s okay with you out there in the Golden West, we’ll wait until Rick is done with basic the first week in July and then all come out. Please write and let us know if this is okay. I’m sorry to switch plans on you like this at the last minute, but look at it this way: you have a whole extra month to get into shape for hiking up Pike’s Peak. I don’t know about you, but I sure can use it.’”

Mrs. Talbot had dropped her end of the plastic. It didn’t land on the stove this time, but it was so close to it, it was curling from the heat. Dad just stood there watching it. He didn’t even try to pick it up.

“‘How are the girls? Sonja is
growing like a weed. She’s out for track this year and bringing home lots of medals and dirty sweat socks. And you should see her knees! They’re so banged up I almost took her to the doctor. She says she scrapes them on the hurdles, and her coach says there’s nothing to worry about, but it does worry me a little. They just don’t seem to heal. Do you ever have problems like that with Lynn and Melissa?

“‘I know, I know. I worry too much. Sonja’s fine. Rick’s fine. Nothing awful’s going to happen between now and the first week in July, and we’ll see you then. Love, the Clearys. P.S. Has anybody ever fallen off Pike’s Peak?’”

Nobody said anything. I folded up the letter and put it back in the envelope.

“I should have written them,” Mom said. “I should have told them, ‘Come now.’ Then they would have been here.”

“And we would probably have climbed up Pike’s Peak that day and gotten to see it all go blooey and us with it,” David said, lifting his head up. He laughed and his voice caught on the laugh and cracked. “I guess we should be glad they didn’t come.”

“Glad?” Mom said. She was rubbing her hands on the legs of her jeans. “I suppose we should be glad Carla took Melissa and the baby to Colorado Springs that day so we didn’t have so many mouths to feed.” She was rubbing her jeans so hard she was going to rub a hole right through them. “I suppose we should be glad those looters shot Mr. Talbot.”

“No,” Dad said. “But we should be glad the looters didn’t shoot the rest of us. We should be glad they only took the canned goods and not the seeds. We should be glad the fires didn’t get this far. We should be glad…”

“That we still have mail delivery?” David said. “Should we be glad about that too?” He went outside and shut the door behind him.

“When I didn’t hear from them, I should have called or something,” Mom said.

Dad was still looking at the ruined plastic. I took the letter over to him. “Do you want to keep it or what?” I said.

“I think it’s served its purpose,” he said. He wadded it up, tossed it in the stove, and slammed the door shut. He didn’t even get burned. “Come help me on the greenhouse, Lynn,” he said.

It was pitch dark outside and really getting cold. My sneakers were starting to get stiff. Dad held the flashlight and pulled the plastic tight over the wooden slats. I stapled the plastic every two inches all the way around the frame and my finger about every other time. After we finished one frame, I asked Dad if I could go back in and put on my boots.

“Did you get the seeds for the tomatoes?” he said, as if he hadn’t even heard me. “Or were you too busy looking for the letter?”

“I didn’t look for it,” I said. “I found it. I thought you’d be glad to get the letter and know what happened to the Clearys.”

Dad was pulling the plastic across the next frame, so hard it was getting little puckers in it. “We already knew,” he said.

He handed me the flashlight and took the staple gun out of my hand. “You want me to say it?” he said. “You want me to tell you exactly what happened to them? All right. I would imagine they were close enough to Chicago to have been vaporized when the bombs hit. If they were, they were lucky. Because there aren’t any mountains like ours around Chicago. So they got caught in the fire storm or they died of flashburns or radiation sickness or else some looter shot them.”

“Or their own family,” I said.

“Or their own family.” He put the staple gun against the wood and pulled the trigger. “I have a theory about what happened the summer before last,” he said. He moved the gun down and shot another staple into the wood. “I don’t think the Russians started it or the United States either. I think it was some little terrorist group somewhere or maybe just one person. I don’t think they had any idea what would happen when they dropped their bomb. I think they were just so hurt and angry and frightened by the way things were that they just lashed out. With a bomb.” He stapled the frame clear to the bottom and straightened up to start on the other side. “What do you think of that theory, Lynn?”

“I told you,” I said. “I found the letter while I was looking for Mrs. Talbot’s magazine.”

He turned and pointed the staple gun at me. “But whatever reason they did it for, they brought the whole world crashing down on their heads. Whether they meant it or not, they had to live with the consequences.”

“If they lived,” I said. “If somebody didn’t shoot them.”

“I can’t let you go to the post office anymore,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“What about Mrs. Talbot’s magazines?”

“Go check on the fire,” he said.

I went back inside. David had come back and was standing by the fireplace again, looking at the wall. Mom had set up the card table and the folding chairs in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Talbot was in the kitchen cutting up potatoes, only it looked like it was onions from the way she was crying.

The fire had practically gone out. I stuck a couple of wadded-up magazine pages in to get it going again. The fire flared up with a brilliant blue and green. I tossed a couple of pine cones and some sticks onto the burning paper. One of the pine cones rolled off to the side and lay there in the ashes. I grabbed for it and hit my hand on the door of the stove.

Right in the same place. Great. The blister would pull the old scab off and we could start all over again. And of course Mom was standing right there, holding the pan of potato soup. She put it on top of the stove and grabbed up my hand like it was evidence in a crime or something. She didn’t say anything. She just stood there holding it and blinking.

“I burned it,” I said. “I just burned it.”

She touched the edges of the old scab, as if she was afraid of catching something.

“It’s a burn!” I shouted, snatching my hand back and cramming David’s stupid logs into the stove. “It isn’t radiation sickness. It’s a
burn!”

“Do you know where your father is, Lynn?” she asked.

“He’s out on the back porch,” I said, “building his stupid greenhouse.”

“He’s gone,” she said. “He took Stitch with him.”

“He can’t have taken Stitch,” I said. “Stitch is afraid of the dark.” She didn’t say anything. “Do you
know
how dark it is out there?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked out the window. “I know how dark it is.”

I got my parka off the hook by the fireplace and started out the door.

David grabbed my arm. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

I wrenched away from him. “To find Stitch. He’s afraid of the dark.”

“It’s too dark,” he said. “You’ll get lost.”

“So what? It’s safer than hanging around this place,” I said and slammed the door shut on his hand.

I made it halfway to the woodpile before he grabbed me.

“Let me go,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m going to go find some other people to live with.”

“There aren’t any other people! For Christ’s sake, we went all the way to South Park last winter. There wasn’t anybody. We didn’t even see those looters. And what if you run into them, the looters who shot Mr. Talbot?”

“What if I do? The worst they could do is shoot me. I’ve been shot at before.”

“You’re acting crazy. You know that, don’t you?” he said. “Coming in here out of the clear blue, taking potshots at everybody with that crazy letter!”

“Potshots!” I said, so mad I was afraid I was going to start crying. “Potshots! What about last summer? Who was taking potshots then?”

“You didn’t have any business taking the shortcut,” David said. “Dad told you never to come that way.”

“Was that any reason to try and
shoot
me? Was that any reason to
kill
Rusty?”

David was squeezing my arm so hard I thought he was going to snap it right in two. “The looters had a dog with them. We found its tracks all around Mr. Talbot. When you took the shortcut and we heard Rusty barking, we thought you were the looters.” He looked at me. “Mom’s right. Paranoia’s the number-one killer. We were all a little crazy last summer. We’re all a little crazy all the time, I guess. And then you pull a stunt like bringing that letter home, reminding everybody of everything that’s happened, of everybody we’ve lost.…” He let go of my arm and looked down at his hand.

“I told you,” I said. “I found it while I was looking for a magazine. I thought you’d all be glad I found it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll bet.”

He went inside and I stayed out a long time, waiting for Dad and Stitch. When I came in, nobody even looked up. Mom was still standing at the window. I could see a star over her head. Mrs. Talbot had stopped crying and was setting the table. Mom dished up the soup and we all sat down. While we were eating, Dad came in.

He had Stitch with him. And all the magazines. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Talbot,” he said. “If you’d like, I’ll put them under the house and you can send Lynn for them one at a time.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t feel like reading them any more.”

Dad put the magazines on the couch and sat down at the card table. Mom dished him up a bowl of soup. “I got the seeds,” he said. “The tomato seeds had gotten water-soaked, but the corn and squash were okay.” He looked at me. “I had to board up the post office, Lynn,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you? You understand that I can’t let you go there anymore? It’s just too dangerous.”

“I told you,” I said. “I found it. While I was looking for a magazine.”

“The fire’s going out,” he said.

After they shot Rusty, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere for a month for fear they’d shoot me when I came home, not even when I promised to take the long way around. But then Stitch showed up and nothing happened and they let me start going again. I went every day till the end of summer and after that whenever they’d let me. I must have looked through every pile of mail a hundred times before I found the letter from the Clearys. Mrs. Talbot was right about the post office. The letter was in somebody else’s box.

* * * *

Copyright © 1982 by Davis Publications, Inc.

(1931– )

Ursula Le Guin describes Gene Wolfe as “our Melville,” and that’s certainly reflected in the richness of the worlds he creates, and in his understated characters that make you believe in the over-the-top worlds in which they live. Because his writing is so well-crafted and his worlds so richly layered, critics have occasionally implied that Wolfe somehow was less of a “sciency” science fiction writer—which is odd because by training and profession he was an engineer for many years, and his works are just as conceptually rigorous as their prose is exacting. While I don’t know Gene well beyond the few conversations we’ve had, I suspect he’d be embarrassed by the attention; he’s generally quiet and lets his work speak for itself.

On the other hand, the Melville remark could also be a good humored comment on the
Moby Dick
-like length of some of Wolfe’s most famous works. At a time when the average novel was about half as long as it is today, his
Book of the New Sun
series that began with World Fantasy Award–winner
The Shadow of the Torturer
(1980), Nebula Award winner
The Claw of the Conciliator
(1981),
The Sword of the Lictor
(1981), John W. Campbell Memorial Award–winner
The Citadel of the Autarch
(1982), and coda
The Urth of the New Sun
(1987), and that spawned two other series, were truly massive books, dense as well as rich.

Although born in Brooklyn, New York, Wolfe was raised in Texas. He dropped out of Texas A&M his junior year, only to be drafted and sent to fight in Korea, where he was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge. On his return, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston and went to work as a project engineer for Procter and Gamble. He worked a senior editor at
Plant Engineering
from 1972–84, when he left to write full-time.

His first professionally published story was ‘‘The Dead Man’’ for erotica magazine
Sir
(1965), and most of his early SF stories appeared in Damon Knight’s
Orbit
anthology series, which featured well-written but often unconventional stories. He made a splash with “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” and “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” (1972), then won his first Nebula for “The Death of Doctor Island.”(1973). He went on to a long string of nominations and awards, most recently a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award for
The Best of Gene Wolfe
in 2010. He was awarded a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award in 1996.

He’s won awards for his poetry as well, including a Rhysling in 1978 for “The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps.”

Wolfe has had some health issues in recent years, and had double bypass surgery in 2010. He lives in Barrington, Illinois with his wife of more than fifty years, Rosemary. They have two sons and two daughters.