The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (34 page)

The wagons, burning. Pujols, dead among the hooves of a horse ridden by a cold-eyed man sighting down the barrel of his rifle at Varner.

Varner’s father, face down on the asphalt, one motionless arm outstretched toward the burning wagon.

Varner broke and ran, followed by the crack of the gunshot and the buzz of the bullet passing near his head. He scaled the fence and flung himself over the top of it, tearing his fingers on barbed wire. The fire crackled, the sound seeming to grow until just as his bare feet hit the ground outside the parking lot Varner understood that this crackle was coming from above and as that thought came to his mind the biggest sound he’d ever heard first knocked him off his feet and then blew him out like a candle.

*  *  *

Varner had nothing to trade but his rifle and Touchstone, neither of which he could live without, and he would not beg. So he asked Marquez for permission to copy the play from the book. Using the backs of the scraps and sheaves of paper he had collected over the previous four de cades, Varner wrote out the play over the course of three days. Every night he told a story – the
Miller’s Tale
, his father’s old version of the Fall, finally the
Iliad –
and every day he wrote until his eyes felt boiled and his fingers lost their strength. On the morning of the fourth day, he left. Instead of going to Cincinnati, he turned west, driving Touchstone along the old Turnpike until he turned south on the outskirts of Chicago and found passage on a boat down the Illinois River out of Peoria. Snow fell twice before he arrived there.

I have it, Varner thought when he was safely on the boat. But I am too old to play the role, and I have no troupe. It all comes to nothing, this striving after approval from people gone to dust. Yet I keep doing it. The whole reason for coming this way was so he could pass by the shipwreck castle and ask, as he did every year or two or three, whether there had been news of Sue.

He read the play over and over while the boat made its slow way down toward its confluence with the Mississippi at Grafton. Each reading, it seemed, was a litany of his sins. I have played the Dane, Varner realized. Since I was nineteen years old, that is all I have done. Once he stood on the deck of the boat, the pages held out over the water. Let it be gone, he said to himself – but could not make himself do it. The pilot, a boy of twenty-three, said, “What’s that?”

“A story,” Varner said. He looked at the pages, fluttering in a chill morning breeze, and at the swirl of water below them.

“What you want to throw it away for?” the pilot asked. “Tell it to me instead. What’s it called?”

“Hamlet,” Varner said.

“What’s it about?”

“A man whose father is killed, and he can’t figure out how to avenge him.” Still Varner held the pages out over the water. What would it be like to be free of them?

“Revenge is simple,” the pilot said. “You find the sonsofbitches and kill them, right?”

Later it would be called the Seventh Fall, although everyone knew that there must have been more, in other parts of the world. Varner remembered stealing shoes from a dead man partially buried in a drift of bricks. He remembered running, then being knocked down by aftershocks. A glow in the sky to the north turned him south, and by morning he had come to swampy bottomland where the angry Mississippi boiled and churned. Varner was hungry and lost. His father was dead. Everything was gone. He had no food and he knew better than to drink the water here. He climbed into the crook of a willow tree, high enough that he thought the water couldn’t reach him. I could die, he thought. He’d never been able to believe that he could really die until that moment. He felt the earth growling, and the willow tree swayed. Varner gripped the branch between his thighs and pressed his back into the trunk. His father was dead. Fat Otis was dead. Cousin Ruby was dead. Everything he had owned was burned. Pujols was dead. Who would live in the stadium? The river churned and roared. Dead animals floated in the foam, rolled over and disappeared. Varner leaned to one side, his shoulder coming to rest against a side branch. Would the Missionaries come looking for him? The sound of the bullet passing hung in his ears, became the whine of mosquitoes. Stop, Varner thought. All of it. Stop.

A voice called out to him, and Varner realized he’d fallen asleep. His skin was alive with mosquito bites. “Boy. Up there. You ever coming down?”

Varner looked down and saw that the river had risen during the day. It was getting dark, and in the deepening shadows, he saw a flat-bottomed boat with an old man standing in its stern holding a long pole that trailed into the water. The man lit an oil lantern. “Come on down from there,” he said. “River might keep coming up, and the snakes’ll be up in the trees if it does.”

“Snakes?” Varner said. He didn’t like the idea of snakes.

“Goddamn right, snakes,” the man said. “Why are you up there?”

“I was running away,” Varner said.

“From who?”

“Missionaries, I think. They – ” But before he could say it, a wave of grief welled up in Varner’s throat and choked away the words.

“All right, kid. All right,” the boatman said. “I know all about the Missionaries. You come with me. Come down from there before the snakes get you.”

He stopped at the old shipwreck, on the outskirts of a town once known as Herculaneum. Carl Schuler was dead, but his son John lived in the same part of the ship. He had been Varner’s favorite brother, and forty years on, they fell easily back into conversation even though they only saw each other every two or three years. The other two Schuler boys were dead, and one of the sisters. The other sister, Piper, was in another part of the ship with children and grandchildren of her own. “I heard a year or so ago about Sue,” John said before Varner could ask. “I heard river bandits got her up north somewhere, and her kids, too.”

“Kids?” Varner said. It was all he could say. There was too much, all at once, to get into words.

“A daughter and her husband,” John said. “There was a boy survived. People up that way found out where she’d come from and brought him down here. He’s staying up in town with Sue’s people this past couple of weeks.”

Varner left the wagon and rode Touchstone hard up into town. Herculaneum had never been much of a city, by the looks of it, and a hundred years after the Fall, it was barely a ruin. Sue’s people had always lived in the courthouse, and still did. Varner knocked on the door and found himself looking into the eyes of Sue’s sister Winona. “I’m Varner,” he said. “Sue and I went around for a while.”

“Yes,” she said. “You did. Are you here about the boy?”

“I am,” Varner said.

“Well, I don’t want you in my house,” Winona said. “But I’ll bring him out to talk to you.”

The boy was nine years old. I played Rosalind and Hero and Hermione when I was nine years old, Varner thought. “Your grandmother’s name was Sue?” he asked. They were sitting on the stone courthouse steps, cracked and heaved from quakes.

“Yes sir,” the boy said quietly.

“And she was from here?”

“She always said her people were down here. We were always in Moline.”

Always in Moline. How many times was I close? Varner wondered. Before I chased a hundred thousand miles across North America looking for a book that might not exist anymore. “I think I knew her,” he said to the boy. “A long time ago.”

“Yes sir,” the boy said.

There was so much more to say. “A long time ago, when we weren’t much older than you. She lived here.” Varner couldn’t get at what he wanted. “I came here when I was eleven. Because someone killed my father.”

For the first time the boy looked at him. “In St Louis,” Varner added.

“We were passing by Hannibal,” the boy said. “They were in canoes. I just swam.” His voice was nearly toneless.

Varner nodded. “You must be a hell of a swimmer. What’s your name?”

“Will,” the boy said. “I’m a good swimmer. I swam all the way down to an island. It was foggy.”

Fifty years apart, Varner thought. My story and his story. “You escaped, like me,” he said.

“How’d you escape?”

“I climbed a fence and ran. Easier than swimming at night in the river. But it was the night of the Seventh Fall,” Varner said. That was when everything had changed for him.

“That was a long time ago,” the boy said.

Varner looked out over the river. “It sure was. You have any other family?”

“No sir,” the boy said.

The whole time, she was in Moline, Varner thought. It was hard to believe. “My name is Varner, Will,” he said. “I had a child once, but I never knew at the time because the mother was taken away from here up to the Quad Cities. That was forty years ago, or a little more. I think the child of mine I was looking for might have been your mother.”

“So you’re my granddad?” the boy asked, not missing a beat. The word cut Varner to pieces. Tears started from his eyes.

“Looks that way, young Will,” he said. He ruffled the boy’s hair. “Looks that way.”

The boatman’s name was Carl Schuler. He added Varner to his family, and for the first time in his life Varner had a mother. Her name was Adele. She was thin and red-haired, with a sharp tongue that often sent the five children – Varner was the fifth – fleeing out into the swamps. They lived with a number of other families, Varner was never certain how many or how they all were related, in the beached hull of a container ship. After the Seventh Fall, parts of the Schulers’ living area needed to be repartitioned and fixed up. Varner was glad to pitch in. He wasn’t sure what it would be like, living in one place all the time, but his father had instilled in him the proposition that adversity existed for the purpose of teaching you how to make lemonade. Now that his father and the rest of the troupe were gone, Varner did his best to fit in where he was. He told the Schulers stories that he’d learned and before long, he was telling them to an audience of everyone who lived in the ship or happened to be stopping for the night on their way up- or downriver. For hundreds of miles along the Mississippi, from St Louis all the way down to the submerged ruin of New Orleans, a loose confederation of rivermen traded and tried to keep the peace. They lived on fish and deer and the rich bottomland soil, which grew every vegetable Varner had ever heard of and more. He learned to handle a boat, a fishing line, and a rifle. He fell in and out of love with the river girls, and once Carl beat the hell out of him when one of the girls got pregnant and was sent away to stay with cousins upriver. Varner asked around, but he never heard whether she had the baby or not. The situation put him in mind of
The Winter’s Tale.
Was his Perdita born and growing up somewhere along the river? Did she know who her father was? He never saw the girl again, but the idea that he might have a child somewhere gnawed at him, until finally when he was nineteen he told Carl Schuler that it was time for him to go.

“Go? Go where?” Carl said.

“Answer me a question,” Varner said. “Did Sue ever have that baby?”

“I don’t know,” Carl said. “That’s the plain truth of it. Her people live up near the Quad Cities. If that’s what’s bothering you, then go. I always knew you wouldn’t stay. A boy who spends the first eleven years of his life on the move sure isn’t going to settle down when he’s just learning to be a man.”

Varner went. Nobody in the Quad Cities, when he got there a month later, could tell him what he needed to know. He stayed there a while, until winter was coming, hoping she would pass by. Every night he told stories, changing them a little each time to suit the audience. During the day, he worked unloading boats or hammering together new houses using pieces of old houses. Sometimes he found books in the old houses. Sixty years of looting and neglect had ruined all but a very few of them. He went to libraries and found most of them burned by God crazies. People told him that there was a group called Missionaries of the Book that went around the country burning every library and bookstore they found. They would come right into your house, too, the story went. And if you had books, you’d better give them up if you wanted to live. Been like that for years. There’s hardly a book left anywhere around here.

No, Varner thought. If I have lost my child, I’m not going to lose the stories. He started trying to write down what he remembered of the plays he’d done in his father’s troupe. So much of it he’d forgotten. Little snatches came back to him, couplets and phrases, sometimes favorite passages ten or a dozen lines at once. It can’t all be lost, he thought. Somewhere out there I’ll be able to find it.

His father had said that it was every actor’s dream to play Hamlet. So Varner would find Hamlet, and he would gather a company, and in his father’s memory he would play the Dane whether anyone showed up to see it or not. Varner traded a month’s labor for a horse and wagon and things he would need to travel. Then he set out, and before he knew it, forty years had passed.

I will be sixty this year, Varner thought. And now I have taken on a boy because he might be my grandson. He’d had to trade Touchstone for Will. Sue’s people weren’t sentimental, and didn’t want the extra mouth to feed, but they were canny enough to see how badly Varner wanted the boy, so they drove a hard bargain. That was all right. There were other horses in the world. Touchstone had been a good one, but he was never going to be the last. Varner and Will walked back down toward the shipwreck castle. “I tell stories for a living, Will,” Varner said. “When I was a boy, about your age, my father taught it to me. You want me to teach it to you?”

“Sure,” Will said. “What stories?”

“All kinds of stories. You’ll learn them. But my favorite one is
Hamlet.
That’s a play. My father always wanted to play the role of Hamlet, and after he died I decided that I would play Hamlet because he never could. But here’s the problem. You know about the Missionaries of the Book?”

Will looked away. “Yes sir,” he said.

“You know what the worst thing is in the world that we could do to the Missionaries of the Book?” Varner asked.

“What?”

“You want to do it?”