The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (33 page)

Varner concentrated on the change. It was only one word, but it altered his sense of the entire monologue. The truth was he didn’t like it. Why couldn’t they do the plays the way the plays were written? He’d asked his father this before. “Players need someone to play to,” was the answer. “We’re not spreading a gospel. It doesn’t have to be exact. It has to please.”

Gospel was a loaded word coming from Varner’s father. In the de cades since the Fall, pocket theocracies – this was another word Varner had learned from his father – had sprung up throughout the ruins of the United States of America. Some were benevolent, some dangerous, depending on their leaders’ readings of Scripture. The company avoided them when that was possible, but it wasn’t always. Bands of evangelists roamed the countryside, heavily armed and often looking for a fight. The first time Varner had seen a crucified body, he’d had nightmares. Now he read them as his father did. They were signs that evangelists were around, and not the kind ones.

“You know what I want to hear?” Marquez said. “I had a storyteller come by four or five years ago who said he knew the Odyssey, but he didn’t. Do you? You told Ezra’s boys you did.”

Varner nodded. “I’ll tell you the same thing. I know the Odyssey. And the Iliad. Not line by line, but I know the stories, and I won’t change anything or leave anything out.” Unlike my predecessor, he thought, whose body probably fed the perch in Lake Erie. If they bothered to drag him that far.

“I want you to start like the book does, with Telemachus,” Marquez said. “And the bit with the gods arguing. I hate it when people start with Calypso just because they think the sexy bits should go first.”

“Spoken like a man who has read the book,” Varner said.

Marquez grinned. He was ten or fifteen years younger than Varner, and had strong teeth. “The Missionaries don’t come around here anymore,” he said. “I’ve read some books, yeah.”

Varner’s pulse quickened. Not yet, he thought. Give him what he wants. Then you can ask. “What time would you like to start?” It was almost dark. Past equinox, dark came early this far north.

“Let’s get you fed first,” Marquez said. “You’ll sit at my table. But don’t touch my women.”

Varner didn’t touch Marquez’s women. Even if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have taken the chance. Not with books around. Dinner was trout, roasted squash, wild greens. Marquez ate well. “What was the name of the general who was from here?” Varner asked, to start a conversation.

“That was George Armstrong Custer. Killed at Little Big Horn, out West somewhere. But he was from here, yeah. There’s a statue of him in town.”

“How come you don’t live in town?”

“Because in town is full of people who don’t like people whose last name is Marquez. Fuck them,” Marquez said. “I don’t want to live in their town anyway. They come out here, I send their horses back. Now they leave me alone. Plus there are Missionaries there. I got you figured for a man who doesn’t like the Missionaries.”

“They don’t like me,” Varner said. “Because I look for books.”

Marquez finished crunching through his salad. “I’ll show you my books if I like the way you tell the story. Deal?”

Left unspoken was what would happen if Marquez didn’t like Varner’s telling. “Deal,” Varner said.

One of the women at the table, who could have been Marquez’s wife or daughter – any of them could have been his wife or daughter – spoke up. “You look for any books, or what books do you want?” she asked.

“Any books,” Varner said. In the context, it was true, and if Marquez had what he was looking for, it wouldn’t pay to let him know ahead of time how highly Varner valued it.

“How do you find them?”

“I hear things sometimes,” Varner said. “I’m not the only one looking for books. We talk to each other, when we survive long enough.” He thought of a man he had known only as Derek, burned three years before with his books used as the pyre. Varner had found the body only days after it had happened. He hadn’t even stopped to bury the body, in case the Missionaries were still nearby.

“Everyone who sits at my table knows how to read,” Marquez said. “Even the women. They hate that in town.”

“What books do you have?” Varner asked. It was hard to keep the hunger out of his voice.

“People all around here know to bring me books. Any little thing they find, they bring me.” Marquez filled his glass as he went on, then passed the bottle. “My best book is Grimm’s Fairy Tales. You can read all of the pages.”

When they loaded into the stadium, Pujols’ men had already built a stage, or pieced one together from storage. It had aluminum steps and interlocking sections. Varner felt like a real professional just stepping onto it. Curtains bearing the Cardinal logo hung at either side and behind it, to hide entrances. A tent behind the upstage curtain was big enough for costume changes. One of Pujols’ lieutenants showed them a tunnel from a dugout back into what Varner took for a green room until his father said, “Well, I’ll be damned. So this is what a major-league club house looked like.”

Once, Varner thought, when there was electricity and television and things like that, this must have been a pretty nice place. He wasn’t sure how it helped baseball players get ready for a game, but there was a lot about the pre-Fall world he didn’t understand. The look on his father’s face in the torchlight saddened him. He was old enough to know what had been lost. Sometimes Varner was angry that he had never seen the wondrous pre-Fall America that the old people liked to reminisce about, but sometimes he thought he was better off never having known it. His world was his world. He liked it, on the whole. He liked traveling with his father, he liked doing plays, and although he missed the mother he had never known, the women of the company ganged up on him like a platoon of mothers, so he had never felt unloved by women. Maybe when I get older, he thought, but couldn’t complete the idea. He had lots of fragmented ideas about how things might be when he got older.

When the company came out of the dugout, the thunder of the crowd was the biggest noise Varner had ever heard. There must have been thousands of them, clustered in different sections of the stadium and scattered among the trees in the outfield and lounging on blankets closer in toward the stage. Pujols stood on his dais and shouted through a bullhorn. “Traveling players have come to St. Louis to do a show just for us, people! They bring Shakespeare, and later – after the little ones are shuffled off to bed – some stories for grown-ups.” Whistles and cheers from the crowd overwhelmed Pujols’ voice. He calmed everyone down and said, “I hate introductions, so that’s as long as this one’s going to be. To the play!”

Adrenaline rippled through Varner as he waited in the wings while the tangle of mismatched lovers was introduced, and the mechanicals made their first appearance to plan their own play. He bounced on his toes as Fat Otis cleared the stage, then launched himself out onto the stage to meet the fairy played by his second cousin Ruby. The play was a hit. Nobody went up, everyone was funny, all the little bits of business Varner suggested went over like (as Varner himself would say) gangbusters. Whatever that meant. Varner had never performed before so many people, and never gotten such a raucous response to Puck’s merry malice. When he tore open the front of his costume to reveal the cardinal beneath, proclaiming that he would sweep the Cubs behind the door, the stadium erupted. They could hardly hear themselves through the last scene of the play, and Varner had to deliver his “If we spirits have offended” closing monologue at the top of his lungs, which took something away from the whimsical, mocking approach he preferred. Back in the club house, wiping off makeup and hanging costumes, everyone laughed and joked. Some performances were best forgotten as soon as they were over, but not this one. This one they’d remember.

Pujols burst in to slap backs and kiss the hands of the women. “Marvelous! Excellent!” he cried. Stopping in front of Varner, he winked. “The Cubs bit. I loved it! My dad would have laughed, how he would have laughed!”

“Thank you, sir,” Varner said. He couldn’t help smiling himself, even though he still didn’t like the change. How could you be upset about it when it made the audience so happy?

The entire camp showed up to hear Varner. Children sat down in the front, their parents and the older adults clustered near them, with the younger people hovering in the back so they could nip away to do the things young people always did when their elders were looking the other way. Varner told the Odyssey the way he had heard it from his father, who had memorized it during the Long Winter. He kept the expressions he’d loved hearing in his father’s voice: wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn, wily Odysseus, gray-eyed Athena. But his memory had never been as good as his father’s, so he made no attempt to quote long stretches from the poem. He told the story. Whatever his father had been, Varner was a storyteller. He spoke long into the night, beginning with Athena’s resolve and unfolding the story of Telemachus’ commitment to his mother’s honor and his father’s memory. It had been years since he had told the Odyssey, and it came to life differently in his mind this time through. He was both Telemachus and Odysseus, but doomed in both roles, eternally searching for a father who would never be found and a home that never was.

When it was over, he was hoarse, and a little drunk, and on the edge of tears. Varner, he told himself, you have lost both father and child. So you go chasing after a book about a man who cannot honor and avenge his father. You have let this drive you insane.

Out of the crowd, Marquez appeared to clap him on the shoulder and hand him a bottle. “Just the way it should be told. You are a real storyteller,” he said. “Go around, let everyone say thank you. Then you can come look at my books.” In a haze of exhausted revelation, Varner accepted the thanks and gifts of the audience. He fell into a routine: yes, very kind, thank you, very glad you came. When it was over, he followed Marquez to the blockhouse and waited while Marquez dragged a footlocker out from a corner of the hall. Opening it, Marquez stood back. “See?” he said. “Thirty books. No one for a hundred miles has this many.”

Varner approached the trunk preparing himself for disappointment. Probably he would find a Bible. There would be computer manuals, biographies of celebrities whose fame vanished with the Fall, guides to bettering your personality and your relationship with God and your family. That was all he ever seemed to find, when he found anything at all.

But on top of the neat stacks in the trunk, like a thunderclap rolling across forty years, lay a water-stained, mildewed, broken-backed, but completely readable
Collected Plays of William Shakespeare, volume IV
, containing – in addition to
As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well
, and
Measure for Measure –
the complete text
of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Two hours later, the last of his reservations were gone. Pujols had given him a cup of something warm and spicy, and Varner was drunk for the first time in his life. His father was standing on a picnic table performing his blank-verse version of the story of the Fall. Varner decided he was in love with one of the women bringing plates of smoked meat around. A crackling boom rolled across the sky and Varner looked up to see the fading glow of a fireball. Big one, he thought. We’d have felt that one if it hit. He tried to think of how many big impacts he’d seen or heard. A dozen, maybe? None of them compared to the original Fall, or to the five or six after it that merited the capital letter. The closest Varner had ever been to an impact was once in Michigan somewhere, when he was six or seven. He happened to be looking out from the beach across an immense lake, and a streak of fire from the sky raised a towering plume of steam. A few seconds later, he heard the sound of the impact, and a minute or so after that, huge waves started to roll up the beach. Laughing, Varner had run into the surf, but Fat Otis had caught him and told him that those kinds of waves could suck you right out with them. Another crackle, perhaps farther away or perhaps just from a smaller meteor, brought Varner back to the present. Fat Otis was looking over his shoulder to see if his wife was watching while he tried to get one of the serving women to sit on his lap. And now the list of drowned cities fair: New York, DC, Miami, Boston, Tokyo, Dakar, Lagos, Cape Town, Dublin, Hong Kong . . .

Then it was later, and the party had moved out into one of the enclosed parking lots at the back of the stadium. Trees and vines wove into the chain-link fencing and gave the space the feel of . . . well, they’d just done Midsummer. A fairy bower, or something. Varner was a little sick to his stomach. The sky was alive with shooting stars. Sometimes that meant an impact was on the way, according to Varner’s father. There was no way to know.

Sitting on the back of one of the wagons, Fat Otis was telling a version of the
Miller’s Tale.
Everyone was drunk. Varner found his wagon and crawled in to lie down. His stomach was roiling. A roar of laughter went up outside as Alison fooled Jenkin into kissing her nether eye. Varner rolled over onto his side, hoping to ease the pressure in his stomach. It wasn’t working. He got up and stumbled to an overgrown corner of the parking lot, where he puked his guts out and then rolled away from the mess, lying on his back and waiting for the shakes to go away. Never again, he thought. If this is drinking, I don’t want any part of it.

A commotion arose near the gate, which stood open to the street. Through the babble of voices, Varner heard the clop of horses’ hooves. Words started to jump out at him: filth, ungodly, sin . . . oh no, Varner thought.

Pujols started shouting, and then everyone else was shouting, and then as Varner started to get up and sneak back to the wagon gunfire exploded at the gate. Varner froze, then backed up into the brush. Horses screamed and people were screaming and the guns kept going off and then there was the sound of fire crackling. That was all he could take. Varner scrambled out of the brush and saw too many things all at once.