Modern classics of fanta.., p.78
Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 78
She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit Coyote’s people did not bury their dead, she knew that But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff paws stuck out. The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also went to where the salmon had lain on the cedar mat, and finding the carcass of a lamb heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned thing. Then she stood up and walked away without looking back.
At the top of the hill she stood and looked across the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the town lying in the pass between the twin hills.
“I hope you all die in pain,” she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert
It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening north of Horse Butte.
“I didn’t cry,” the child said.
“None of us do,” said Chickadee. “Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother’s house.”
It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke she wove.
“Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person.”
“Grandmother,” Chickadee greeted her.
The child said, “I’m not one of them.”
Grandmother’s eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.
“Old Person, then,” said Grandmother. “You’d better go back there now, Granddaughter. That’s where you live.”
“I lived with Coyote. She’s dead. They killed her.”
“Oh, don’t worry about Coyote!” Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. “She gets killed all the time.”
The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.
“Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”
“I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”
Chickadee shook her head once, silent
“It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas… You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?”
The child nodded.
“They’ve been looking for you.”
“They have?”
“Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”
“Serves him right Serves them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.
“Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark comers in the basement. Don’t kill me, or 111 make it rain…”
“I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”
The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak
“Will I ever see Coyote?”
“I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.
The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”
“Yes. You can keep your eye.”
“Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.
* * * *
ROBERT SAMPSON
A Gift of the People
Sometimes in the cold dead middle of the night, we may get the uneasy intuition that our tidy rational world is surrounded by Powers old and strange and implacable, remorseless creatures who swim and flicker subliminally around us, vanishing at the turn of a head. If we’re lucky, we’ll never actually see these Powers. If we’re really lucky, we’ll never have to meet them…
The late Robert Sampson, a veteran pulp-era author who had sold to Planet Stories and Weird Tales, in recent years retired from NASA’s Marshall Space Right Center and began to revitalize his career with a number of sales to the top short fiction markets in both the science fiction and mystery fields. In mystery, he won the Edgar Award for the best story of 1986. In the science fiction genre, his stories appeared in Full Spectrum, Strange Plasma, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His most recent book was Dangerous Horizons, a study of famous series characters of the pulp magazine era. He lived for many years in Huntsville, Alabama, and died in 1993 at the age of sixty-five.
* * * *
My brother Ted was eight when he first saw the People. I suppose it was for the first time. He never talked much, especially about that. When he saw them, if he saw them, he was at the bottom of Lake Olwanee, about twenty seconds from drowning. I had teased him into that mess, so it was not something I even wanted to talk about, either.
Olwanee, in northern Ohio, is a sprawling, mud-bottomed lake with a dark-pebble beach that agonized our feet. About seventy feet offshore floated a raft, its black timber riding clustered oil drums. It was beyond comfortable swimming distance and was therefore a challenge. Whatever was nearly out of reach, I felt obligated to strain after.
I insisted that Ted swim with me out to the raft.
He didn’t want to, having more sense than I did, even then. I was two years older and, as I recall, I shamed him into the attempt—not from any need of company but from the silent pulsing of rivalry that spreads its dark under so many family relationships.
Limping across the beach, we plunged into water the color and temperature of iced coffee. The raft was distant, black, and ominously tilted. Ted thrashed furiously toward it, arms pounding up spray, his head rigidly lifted, like the head of a scouting turtle.
After a bitter struggle, he flailed to the raft. His fingers locked hard on the slippery timbers and there he huddled, shaking, white-faced, gulping air. He had fought his way out by sheer will. Even to me, it was apparent he could not fight his way back.
Eventually he tried.
The years overlay this incident with a spurious inevitability, as if events could have happened only this way. But, like so much else, events seem inevitable only when you stair straight at what happened, ignoring the motives behind.
Ted tried for shore. Hallway there, his splashing stopped. Very quietly, he submerged.
From the raft, I saw the pale glimmer of his body dwindle through the clear black water. Guilt shocked me. I had wanted him to fail, I suppose, without ever considering the consequences of failure.
No one else noticed that he had gone down. I hurled off the raft and swam furiously to where he had vanished. Not a bubble marked the spot. I surface dived, eyes open, swimming steeply away from the light. The water seemed to open all around me, black and deep and hollow, as if I swam downward through the ceiling of a liquid room, immensely empty. I descended through layers of increasing cold. Pressure closed around me. Light left the water and I could see nothing.
Then, entirely without warning, my hands plunged into a chilled silk of mud.
I jerked away in horror. As I did so, my left hand lightly grazed cold skin. I clutched and missed. I spread my arms and found nothing and groped at random through that lightless place tasting of stirred mud.
I was confused and needed air. I lashed about, scared and disoriented within that darkness.
And blundered full against his small, cold figure, sitting upright, arms locked about his knees.
I clutched him with both hands, squeezing unmercifully, and drove both feet against the mud. My legs sank in to the knees. In a frenzy, I kicked loose. The mud taste thickened in the water. Mindless, angry, horrified, I kicked frantically. Slowly we wallowed upward. Anguish gripped my chest. Beneath, the mud waited for our return.
It was black, then not so black. I was mad for air. The water grayed, then transformed itself to opaque white, softly warm, and we burst into the light.
Afterward we sprawled loose-limbed on the beach stones. I felt the violence in my heart, and, at the edge of my sight, in all that sun, dark mist wavered.
But no one had noticed. Past us stormed a pack of kids, howling after a yellow ball. Not one of them knew. It had all happened right beside them, sixteen feet away—the blind search above the mud, the despairing struggle upward. As close to those kids as the skins on their bodies. But not one of them knew.
Finally I asked him, “How come you just sat there?”
“Was watching them.”
“Watching who?”
“People.”
“People” was a favored word. He used it with casual ambiguity to mean swimmers or weeds or fish or fleets of boats. The imprecision bothered neither of us.
He added in his thin voice, “They watched but they wouldn’t come.”
I said, “Nobody saw us. You shut up.”
He rolled over to stare at me with uncomprehending eyes. “You hit the People. They went away.”
Then he slammed me hard on one shoulder and scrambled up and tottered off toward the car.
* * * *
Eventually Ted learned to swim—although in an indoor swimming pool. He had developed a distaste for the water of lakes and streams. He prowled warily at the banks of these, studying their currents with calculating eyes.
“Swimming doesn’t bother you, does it?” he asked, many vacations later.
We lounged in a boat that slowly drifted across the weed beds of Indian Lake. Ahead of our prow, swarms of brightly patched red and yellow turtles scattered wildly.
I said, “In lakes and stuff? No. Should it?”
“Look at all that down there.” He motioned toward the green-brown banks of weeds that rose like cliffs in the transparent water. “Weeds, turtles, all that stuff.”
“You can stay out of the weeds.”
“I was just thinking,” he said. “Suppose there’s something in there looking at you. Watching. Lying back where they can see and you can’t, all quiet. Not curious, not mad, just watching you and the way you move and waiting till you go someplace else. Just patient and quiet and part of the water, sort of.”
“What? Fish?”
“No, not that.”
I sensed that he had told me something of importance and I had not understood. In some annoyance, I snapped, “What you talking about, watching?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was just a sort of feeling I had. A kind of idea. I don’t like swimming much.”
* * * *
We grew up and grew apart. Twenty-five years of education and military service separated us. The parents died and Ted married. So did I, although that was a mistake. We settled into the flow of time, I in Texas with NASA, Bill in Pennsylvania as an associate college professor.
We did not write much. We were separated by more than geography. The Ted and Ray Madison who were joined, as children, by blood ties and silent competition, were separated, as adults, by the same factors. We indulged our separation carefully, as if aware of what closer relations might incubate.
In early June, I took off a week to visit him. I had been at NASA headquarters in Washington, as a mainly silent handler of viewgraphs and printed handouts showing wonderfully high shuttle launch rates, supported by personnel who never got tired, never encountered technical problems, and needed no spare parts. This was in 1985, before the ethereal palace of mission planning splintered against reality.
Ted and his wife Barbara owned a small farmhouse just outside of Peter’s Ford. This is one of those tiny Pennsylvania towns with narrow streets and worn red or white brick buildings crowding against the sidewalk, their windows masked by interior curtains. They resemble rows of faces with their eyes shut.
You crept through town at thirty miles an hour (radar enforced) until, with no warning, the town fell away. You came at once among fields rolling leisurely across shallow hills.
This was worn country, old country, rubbed by time, concealing a million years’ worth of death beneath its gentle fields. Behind fat clusters of willows along Happyjack Creek showed lines of blue mountains, as lovely and ominous as an endgame in chess.
I followed a gravel road between fields of young corn. Far overhead, a hawk watched from its spiral against a hot blue sky. The road rose around a knoll and circled a small brown and white house, full of windows. Bulky trees shielded it from the fields.
I stopped the car and stepped out. The shaded air smelled sweetly cool. I could hear nothing. No wind, no birds, no creak of limb or flutter of leaf. My footsteps grated loudly as I walked to the house and rapped on the screen.
“Hey, Ted.”
No one answered.
Far overhead, limbs and leaves interlocked in ascending layers through which blazed bright bits of sky. I stood at the bottom of a clear, dim well of light as transparent as water, listening to the silence.
The screen door banged when I entered the house. Tire kitchen smelled of onions and wax, and on the walls gleamed copper food molds. I called again and got no answer and moved, watchful and soft-footed into the next room.
This was a brown and gold living room, full of light. It was as neatly ordered as a small girl dressed for Sunday school. Well-used furniture crowded against stuffed bookcases. On the pale walls matted watercolors glowed soft rose, blue, pale green. Their mood was calm. The technique was pure Barbara: she favored partially drawn outlines touched by color. It was delicate work that looked like the tag end of a dream.
I stood listening intently, although there was nothing to listen to. “This place,” I said loudly, “is like the Marie Celeste.” And moved to the baby grand piano by a double window. A transcription of Handel’s Water Music stood open on a rack above the keyboard.
When I touched the keys, the piano emitted an unexpected bellow of sound. I jumped, scowled, looked at the music. Handel instantly defeated me. Closing the Water Musk, I rooted through a stack of 1930s sheet music, searching for simplicity.
At the bottom of the pile, under a copy of “Muddy River Moan,” I found a folded watercolor. It was a study of light and shadow along a stream. From the water stared a transparent man, evidently stretched among white stones. It was hard to tell. His body melted into shadow. Except for the figure, which was irritatingly indistinct, it was a nice piece of work. Barbara’s name was scribbled in the lower right-hand corner.
After tucking the watercolor back under the music, I sat and listened. Caught myself listening. Stood up violently and padded through the hush of the back door.
Outside, the sense of being watched was powerful, the quiet intolerable. High overhead, layered leaves quivered, liquid and unstable as flowing water. Some sort of small gray animal slowly crept along a high branch, like the silent sliding of a gray fingertip. I could not see it clearly. It flowed out of sight and I had the curious feeling that it stopped behind the leaves to look down at me.
From the road rang a clear feminine voice: “Hey, Ray. Here I am.”
I jumped less than a foot and stepped down to greet Barbara.
She was a tall girl, lean and square-faced, with a lot of flying brown hair. She wore jeans and a color-smudged old shirt with the tail out, and carried a wooden painter’s box. “I was down at the creek,” she said, kissing me. “You’re early. Lordy, isn’t it hot? When’d you get in?”
“Just a while ago. Thought you were all lost in the woods.”
“How do you like the place? Isn’t it lovely?”
A bird shrilled. Overhead a limb jerked as a squirrel scuttled along it and a twig clicked against the top of my car. In the distance, I heard the lament of cattle.
“Listen to that bird,” I said.
“Place is full of birds. Wait till you hear them in the morning. Let’s get a drink. Where’s your bag?”
Inside, in the living room, I settled into a gold chair and watched her snap open the wooden box and rustle out her sketches. “Ted hates me going down to the creek to paint. But it’s so pretty.”
“What’s the matter with the creek? Quicksand?”
“No. It’s shallow. Stony. Look here.”
She showed me her sketches—white stones and sun on a shallow skin of water. No transparent figures.
