The year0 edition, p.30
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 Edition, page 30
There was another difference, which I did not mention to Percy, and that was that every time I remarked on our similarities I could hear my wife’s scornful voice saying (as she had said when I first shared the idea of this project with her), “Oh, Tom, don’t be ridiculous. You’re nothing like that Percy Camber. That’s your mother talking—all that abolitionist guilt she burdened you with. As if you need to prove you haven’t betrayed the cause, whatever the cause is, exactly.”
Maggie failed to change my mind, though what she said was true.
“From about eight foot down,” Ephraim said cryptically, lifting the lantern.
Eight feet is as high an average man can reach without standing on something. Between eight feet and the floor is the span of a man’s reach.
“You see, sir,” Ephraim said, “my son and I were held in separate barracks. The idea behind that was that a man might be less eager to escape if it meant leaving behind a son or father or uncle. The overseers said, if you run, your people will suffer for it. But when my chance come I took it. I don’t know if that’s a sin. I think about it often.” He walked toward the nearest wall, the lantern breaking up the darkness as it swayed in his grip. “This barracks here was my son’s barracks.”
“Were there many escapes?” Percy asked.
I began to see that something might have been written on the wall, though at first it looked more like an idea of writing: a text as crabbed and indecipherable as the scratchings of the Persians or the Medes.
“Yes, many,” Ephraim said, “though not many successful. At first there was fewer guards on the gates. They built the walls up, too, over time. Problem is, you get away, where is there to go? Even if you get past these sandy hills, the country’s not welcoming. And the guards had rifles, sir, the guards had dogs.”
“But you got away, Ephraim.”
“Not far away. When I escaped it was very near the last days of Pilgassi Acres.” (He pronounced it Pigassi, with a reflexive curl of contempt on his lips.) “Company men coming in from Richmond to the overseer’s house, you could hear the shouting some nights. Rations went from meat twice a week to a handful of cornmeal a day and green bacon on Sundays. They fired the little Dutch doctor who used to tend to us. Sickness come to us. They let the old ones die in place, took the bodies away to bury or burn. Pretty soon we knew what was meant to happen next. They could not keep us, sir, nor could they set us free.”
“That was when you escaped?”
“Very near the end, sir, yes, that’s when. I did not want to go without Jordan. But if I waited I knew I’d be too weak to run. I told myself I could live in the woods and get stronger, that I would come back for Jordan when I was more myself.”
He held the lantern close to the board wall of this abandoned barracks.
Percy was suffering more from his wound now than he had seemed to when he received it, and he grimaced as I helped him follow Ephraim. We stood close to the wild man and his circle of light, though not too close—I was still conscious of his rifle and of his willingness to use it, even if he was not in a killing mood right now.
The writing on the wall consisted of names. Hundreds of names. They chased each other around the whole of the barn in tight horizontal bands.
“I expect the overseers would have let us starve if they had the time. But they were afraid federal men would come digging around. There ought to be nothing of us left to find, I think was the reasoning. By that time the cholera had taken many of us anyhow, weak and hungry as we were, and the rest . . . well, death is a house, Mr. Camber, with many doorways. This is my son’s name right here.”
Jordan Nash was picked out by the yellow lantern light.
“Dear God,” said Percy Camber, softly.
“I don’t think God come into it, sir.”
“Did he write his own name?”
“Oh, yes, sir. A northern lady taught us both to read, back in the Missouri camp. I had a Bible and a copy book from her. I still read that Bible to this day. Jordan was proud of his letters.” Ephraim turned to me as if I, not Percy, had asked the question: “Most of these men couldn’t write nor read. Jordan didn’t just write his own name. He wrote all these names. Each and every one. A new man came in, he would ask the name and put it down as best he could. The list grew as we came and went. Many years’ worth, sir. All the prisoners talked about it, how he did that. He had no pencil or chalk, you know. He made a kind of pen or brush by chewing down sapling twigs to soften their ends. Ink he made all kind of ways. He was very clever about that. Riverbottom clay, soot, blood even. In the autumns the work crews drawing water from the river might find mushrooms which turn black when you picked them, and they brought them back to Jordan—those made fine ink, he said.”
The pride in Ephraim’s voice was unmistakable. He marched along the wall with his lantern held high so we could see his son’s work in all its complexity. All those names, written in the space between a man’s reach and the floor. The letters were meticulously formed, the lines as level as the sea. Some of the names were whole names, some were single names, some were the kind of whimsical names given to house servants. They all ran together, to conserve space, so that in places you had to guess whether the names represented one person or two.
. . . John Kincaid Tom Abel Fortune Bob Swift Pompey Atticus Joseph Wilson Elijah Elijah Jim Jim’s Son Rufus Moses Deerborn Moses Raffity . . .
“I don’t know altogether why he did it,” Ephraim said. “I think it made him feel better to see the men’s names written down. Just so somemight know we passed this way, he said.”
Jordan lived in this barracks from eight foot down. And so did shockingly many others.
“This is why you shot at us,” Percy whispered, a kind of awe or dread constricting his throat.
“I make it seem dangerous up here, yes, sir, so that nowon’t come back and take it down or burn it. And yet I suppose they will sooner or later whether I scare anyor not. Or if not that then the weather will wear it down. I keep it best I can against the rain, sir. I don’t let birds or animals inside. Or even the daylight, sir, because the daylight fades things, that ink of Jordan’s is sensitive to it. All be gone one day I suppose, but I will too, by and by, and yourselves as well, of course.”
“Perhaps we can make it last a little longer,” Percy said.
Of course I knew what he meant.
“I’ll need light,” I said.
The fierce hot light of the fading day.
Ephraim was anxious to help, once Percy explained the notion to him. He threw open the barracks door. He took down the wood he had tacked over the south-facing windows. There were iron bars in the window frames.
In the corners the light was not adequate despite our best efforts. Ephraim said he had a sheet of polished tin he used for a mirror, which might help reflect the sunlight in. He went to his encampment to get it. By that time he trusted us enough to leave us alone for a short time.
Once again I suggested escape. But Percy refused to leave. So I kept about my work.
There were only so many exposures I could make, and I wanted the names to be legible. In the end I could not capture everything. But I did my best.
Ephraim told us about the end of Pilgassi Acres. He had been nearby, hidden half-starving in a grove of dwarf pines, when he heard the initial volley of gunshots. It was the first of many over the several hours that followed. Gunfire in waves, and then the cries of the dying. By that sound he knew he would never see his son Jordan again.
Trenches were dug in the ground. Smoke from the chimneys lay over the low country for days. But the owners had been hasty to finish their work, Ephraim said. They had not bothered to burn the empty barracks before they rode off in their trucks and carriages.
Ever since that time Ephraim had sheltered in the barn of a poor white farmer who was sympathetic to him. Ephraim trapped game in exchange for this modest shelter. Eventually the farmer lent him his rifle, so that Ephraim could bring back an occasional deer as well as rabbits and birds. The farmer didn’t talk much, Ephraim said, but there were age-browned copies of Garrison’s Liberator stored in the barn; and Ephraim read these with interest, and improved his vocabulary and his understanding of the world.
Hardly anyone came up to Pilgassi Acres nowadays except hunters following game trails. He scared them off with his rifle if they got too close to Jordan’s barracks.
There was no point leaving the barracks after dark, since we could not safely travel in the carriage until sunrise. Percy’s condition worsened during the night. He came down with a fever, and as he shivered his wound began to seep. I made him as comfortable as possible with blankets from the carriage, and Ephraim brought him water in a cracked clay jug.
Percy was lucid, but his ideas began to run in whimsical directions as midnight passed. He insisted that I take Mrs. Stowe’s letter from where he kept it in his satchel and read it aloud by lamplight. It was this letter, he said, that had been the genesis of the book he was writing now, about the three million. He wanted to know what Ephraim would make of it.
I kept my voice neutral as I read, so that Mrs. Stowe’s stark words might speak for themselves.
“That is a decent white woman,” Ephraim said when had heard the letter and given it some thought. “A Christian woman. She reminds me of the woman that taught me and Jordan to read. But I don’t know what she’s so troubled about, Mr. Camber. This idea there was no war. I suppose there wasn’t, if by war you mean the children of white men fighting the children of white men. But, sir, I have seen the guns, sir, and I have seen them used, sir, all my life—all my life. And in my father’s time and before him. Isn’t that war? And if it is war, how can she say war was avoided? There were many casualties, sir, though their names are not generally recorded; many graves, though not marked; and many battlefields, though not admitted to the history books.”
“I will pass that thought on to Mrs. Stowe,” Percy whispered, smiling in his discomfort, “although she’s very old now and might not live to receive it.”
And I decided I would pass it on to Elsebeth, my daughter.
I packed up my gear very carefully, come morning.
This is Jordan’s name, I imagined myself telling Elsie, pointing to a picture in a book, the book Percy Camber would write.
This photograph, I would tell her, represents light cast in a dark place. Like an old cellar gone musty for lack of sun. Sunlight has a cleansing property, I would tell her. See: I caught a little of it here.
I supposed there was enough of her grandmother in her that Elsebeth might understand.
I began to feel hopeful about the prospect.
Ephraim was less talkative in the morning light. I helped poor shivering Percy into the carriage. I told Ephraim my mother had once published a poem in the Liberator, years ago. I couldn’t remember which issue.
“I may not have seen that number,” Ephraim said. “But I’m sure it was a fine poem.”
I drove Percy to the doctor in Crib Lake. The doctor was an old man with pinch-nose glasses and dirty fingernails. I told him I had shot my servant accidentally, while hunting. The doctor said he did not usually work on colored men, but an extra ten dollars on top of his fee changed his mind.
He told me there was a good chance Percy would pull through, if the fever didn’t worsen.
I thanked him, and went off to buy myself a drink.
ON THE HUMAN PLAN
JAY LAKE
I am called Dog the Digger. I am not mighty, neither am I fearsome. Should you require bravos, there are muscle-boys aplenty among the rat-bars of any lowtown on this raddled world. If it is a wizard you want, follow the powder-trails of crushed silicon and wolf’s blood to their dark and winking lairs. Scholars can be found in their libraries, taikonauts in their launch bunkers and ship foundries, priests amid the tallow-gleaming depths of their bone-ribbed cathedrals.
What I do is dig. For bodies, for treasure, for the rust-pocked hulks of history, for the sheer pleasure of moving what cannot be moved and finding what rots beneath. You may hire me for an afternoon or a month or the entire turning of the year. It makes me no mind whatsoever.
As for you, I know what you want. You want a story.
Oh, you say you want the truth, but no one ever really wants the truth. And stories are the greatest of the things for which I dig. Mightier even than the steel-bound femurs of the deinotheria bred by the Viridian Republic, which I can show you in vast necropolii beneath the Stone-Doored Hills. More treasured than the golden wires to be pulled by the fistful from the thinking heads which line the Cumaean Caves, screaming as the lights of their eyes flash and die.
Anyone with a bit of talent and the right set of bones to throw can foretell the future. It’s written in fat-bellied red across every morning sky. But to aftertell the past, that is another trick entirely.
They say death is the door that never opens twice. At least, not until it does. Sorrow is usually the first child of such a birthing, though just as often the last to be recognized.
People die. Cities die. Nations die. In time the sun itself will die, though already it grows red and obese, a louche, glowering presence fat on the midsummer horizon. When the daystar opens up its arms, all graves will be swallowed in fire, but for now, the bones of men lie atop older bones beneath the friable earth.
Likewise the skins of cities. All our places are built on other places. A man might dig down until the very heat of the earth wells up from the bottom of his shaft, and still there will be floors and streets and wooden frames pressed to stone fossils to greet him there.
You know that the first woman to greet the morning had gone to sleep the night before as an ape. Some angel stirred her dreams with God’s long spoon, and the next day she remembered the past. The past was young then, not even thirty hours old, but it had begun.
That woman bred with an ape who didn’t yet know he was man, then birthed a hairy little baby who learned she was another woman, and so the world unfolded into history. That woman died, too, laid herself down into the earth and let herself be covered with mud which turned to rock.
If I dig down far enough, someday I’ll find that grandmother of us all. But this story you’ve come for is about another time, when I only dug down to death’s doorstep.
It was an exogen come to me, in the twenty-seventh hour of the day. My visitor was taller than a pike-pole, with skin translucent as the slime of a slug. Still, it was on the human plan, with two arms, two legs, and a knobby bit at the top that glittered. The ropes and nodules of its guts shimmered inside that slick, smooth, shiny skin. Its scent-map was strange, the expected story of starships and time’s slow decay mixed in with spices and a sweat which could have gotten a rock-crusher drunk.
Dangerous, this one. But they always were. The safe ones stayed home.
“Digger,” the exogen said. It used a voder which could have come from before the dawn of technology. Believe me, I know.
I’m not one for judging a man by his shape. Metatron knows I find myself judged enough. Still, I’m cautious around one who comes from too far away, for a man distant from his home has no need of scruples. “Aye, and that’s me.”
Something flashed pale, pallid blue in the exogen’s middle gut. “Compensation.”
One of them types. I could handle this. Like talking to a Taurian. All syntax implied inside a hyperlimited morphemic constellation. Like playing a game of two hundred questions. “Compensation in what cause?”
“Seeking.”
“That’s what I do. I seek. By digging. What do you seek?”
“Death.”
That one required some careful thought. I didn’t reckon this exogen had come all the way across the Deep Dark between the stars just for me to dig him a grave. Not that I hadn’t dug a grave or four in my day. It was just that no one spent the kind of energy budget this exogen had dedicated to being here on Earth simply to lay themselves down.
“Anyone’s death in particular?”
“Death.” My visitor flashed a series of colors, then manipulated its voder. “Thanatos.”
“Oh, Death his own self.” I considered that. “You must be aware that death isn’t really anywhere to be found. Mythic personification doesn’t leave behind calling cards for me to dig up. Entropic decay does, but everything is evidence of that.”
I knew from experience that it would take the exogen a while to assemble my loose stream of lexemes into a meaningful morph that fit its own mind. I’d been working on my sun-altar when it had found me among the dunes of rusted bolts where I make my home. So I returned to my labors, confident that my visitor would speak again when it was ready.
Exogens work on their own timescale. Some are sped up so fast they can experience a standard-year in a few hours, others move so slowly they speak to rocks, and perceive trees as fast-moving weeds. In time, this one would answer.
Two days later, it did.
“Secrets,” the exogen said, as if no time had passed at all.
“You want me to dig for the secrets of death?” I laughed. “There’s no secret to death. It finds us all. Death is the least secret thing in the universe. I can open any grave and show you.”
The traveler’s hand brushed down its translucent front, trailing tiny colored flares. “Undying.” The voder somehow sounded wistful.
I picked up a ritual axe from the Second Archaean Interregnum, traced a claw tip down the blade edge. “That’s easy enough to take care of. Dying is simple. It’s living that’s hard.”
For an awful moment, I wondered if the exogen was going to dip its head and dare me into trying that pulsing neck. Instead it just stared a while. I thought the exogen had slipped back into slow-time, until it spoke again. “Door.”
“Door.” Death’s door? That was a figure of speech as old as architecture. This exogen must have something more literal in mind.
“Door.” This time the voder’s tones implied an emphatic conclusion. The exogen shut down, sinking into a quietude that took it across the border from life into art. The sense of light and life which had skimmed across it like yellow fog on a sulfuritic lake was gone.
