The fate of mice, p.1
The Fate of Mice, page 1
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR The Fate of Mice:
“Palwick combines sharp political commentary with pleasing flights of fancy with deep psychological insight — and all in prose clear as water. Delicately balanced between hope and heartbreak, these are stories you’ll remember.”
KAREN JOY FOWLER, AUTHOR OF The Jane Austen Book Club
“This is a collection of magnificent, heart-breaking stories. Susan Palwick sees the world with a fearless clarity and tells a truth so sharp it makes you weep. Be warned: long after you close the book, these stories will haunt you. They’ll stay with you, changing who you are and how you see the world around you.”
PAT MURPHY, AUTHOR OF The City, Not Long After
“The Fate of Mice shines light on our dark secrets with compassion, wit, and very fine writing.”
SHEILA WILLIAMS, EDITOR OF Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
“These stories are brilliant and thought-provoking, as well as packing an unexpectedly intense emotional punch.”
PRAISE FOR The Necessary Beggar:
Jo Walton, author of Tooth and Claw and Farthing
“Graced with exceptionally intimate understanding of its characters, Palwick’s beautifully crafted tale of exiles struggling to come to terms with a deeply troubled earth is exquisite.”
Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“A triumphant testament to the transcendent power of love and tribute to what being a stranger in a strange land truly means, Palwick’s long-awaited second novel (after 1992’s Flying in Place) succeeds as a heart-wrenching romance, a sharp meditation on refugees and displaced persons and a tragicomedy of cultural differences.”
Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“…a unique story of a family’s love and the power of forgiveness to transcend the boundary between life and death… highly recommended.”
Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
“…terrifying intimacy…American ironies…lingering mystery, and raw, authentic emotions.”
PRAISE FOR Flying in Place:
Locus
“One of the best and most moving novels by a new author I have read in years.”
ALLISON LURIE, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF Foreign Affairs
“Packs a huge emotional wallop… Flying in Place is a brave and honest work, an impressive and important debut.”
San Francisco Examiner
“Flying in Place is a bittersweet novel of a dead sister who returns to give our narrator the tools she need to break her family out of the poisonous pattern that is consuming them all… beautifully handled… a wonderful debut for a writer who has proved she can write well in long forms as well as short ones — may it be the first of many novels from Palwick, each one better than the ones before.”
ORSON SCOTT CARD, AUTHOR OF Ender’s Game
“The moving and compelling writing is sustained as the revelations unfold.”
Library Journal
“Unflinching clarity and great dramatic power… Susan Palwick, a young writer who has hitherto attracted some notice for her stories, poems, and essays, is with Flying in Place a novelist of moment.”
Newsday
“Chilling and finely tuned … Palwick avoids pat solutions, offering instead a deeply felt, deeply moving tale.”
Publishers Weekly
“Rewarding… Palwick’s characterization of Emma is superb, as truthful as that of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Emma’s compelling voice carries this book into the world of first-class storytelling.”
Seattle Times
“Simple, strong, and very powerful… a true page-turner…. A book so achingly true you want to thank the author. A book like this, a story that can captivate us and raise our awareness, tells truths that need to be told.”
Raleigh News & Observer
“It is a deeply moving book. Palwick’s withering understatements of pain are laced with a regret for the lost magic of childhood — even a ruined childhood.”
GEOFF RYMAN, AUTHOR OF Was and Air
“Flying in Place is compelling, wrapping deep-empathy insights in lyric poetry to show us the monster behind the mask.”
ANDREW VACHSS, AUTHOR OF Dead and Gone
The Fate of Mice
Copyright © 2007 by Susan Palwick
This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Cover design: Ann Monn
Interior design & typography: John D. Berry
The typeface is Mercury.
Tachyon Publications
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, CA 94107
(415) 285-5615
www.tachyonpublications.com
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
ISBN 10:1-892391-42-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-892391-42-1
Printed in the United States of America
by Worzalla
First Edition: 2007
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“The Fate of Mice” copyright © 2005 by Susan Palwick. First published by Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2005. | “Gestella” copyright © 2001 by Susan Palwick. First appeared in Starlight 3 edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (New York: Tor Books). | “The Old World” copyright © 2007 by Susan Palwick. First appearance in print. | “Jo’s Hair” copyright © 1995 by Susan Palwick. First appeared in Xanadu 2 edited by Jane Yolen (New York: Tor Books). | “Going After Bobo” copyright © 2000 by Susan Palwick. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 2000. | “Beautiful Stuff” copyright © 2004 by Susan Palwick. First appeared in Sci Fiction (www.scifi.com, August 2004). | “Elephant” copyright © 1986 by Susan Palwick. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1986. | “Ever After” copyright © 1987 by Susan Palwick. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1987. | “Stormdusk” copyright © 2007 by Susan Palwick. First appearance in print. | “Sorrel’s Heart” copyright © 2007 by Susan Palwick. First appearance in print. | “GI Jesus” copyright © 1996 by Susan Palwick. First appeared in Starlight 1 edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (New York: Tor Books). | Excerpts from “The Elephant” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, translated by Mark Strand, copyright 1976 by Mark Strand. Reprinted from Another Republic, edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand, published by Ecco Press in 1976, by permission of the publisher.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION • Paul di Filippo
The Fate of Mice
Gestella
The Old World
Jo’s Hair
Going After Bobo
Beautiful Stuff
Elephant
Ever After
Stormdusk
Sorrel’s Heart
GI Jesus
for my father
Lessons in Mortality
PAUL DI FILIPPO
You’re going to die. We all are. Maybe today, in the middle of reading (writing) this sentence. (Okay, I guess I made it through!) Maybe a hundred years from now. But unless and until some uber-technological “Rapture of the Nerds” rewrites the fatal certainties of the entirety of human existence up till now (and I’m not counting on any such rescue, although I haven’t entirely dismissed eventual resurrection during the Big Crunch via the Omega Point), your passing from this mortal coil — my passing, the passing of all whom we love — is guaranteed.
Given this dire knowledge, the one sure prophecy granted to mankind, how then do we live our lives? How do we extract meaning from our limited days, experience pleasure and perhaps even joy while beneath the shadow of the Grim Reaper? Is such positivity even possible? Perhaps we should all just throw in the towel, adopt a nihilistic, despairing outlook on life, and trudge along glumly toward the grave.
Susan Palwick is someone who has pondered long, hard, and fruitfully on such matters, perhaps the central existential quandary of this human universe, employing a keen, unblinking, rational and yet empathetic gaze. And she has returned from her sojourn in the charnel grounds bearing answers, answers that do not minimize either the suffering or the triumphs of human existence.
Answers cloaked, as the best answers often are, in stories, myths, fables: the stories to be found in this fine collection, multivalent and captivating narratives whose own reasons for being transcend any mere preaching.
Palwick has two excellent, award-winning novels to her credit: Flying in Place (1992) and The Necessary Beggar (2005). This third volume represents a welcome addition to her small but hard-won canon. She is plainly not one of those writers who feels compelled to issue a book (or more) a year. The very sparseness of her output inclines us to regard her infrequent appearances as essential and weighty and valuable, and reading The Fate of Mice merely confirms this surface impression.
Each story herein occupies a different region in the great country of fantastical literature, exhibiting Palwick’s extensive range and ambition. We meet with pure fantasy, horror, and science fiction, as well as subtle blendings of the three genres. In addition, we encounter a mimetic masterpiece, an example of excellent naturalism that would not be out of place in the pages of The New Yorker. But no matter what the form or venue, all of Palwick’s work deals with the tender, aching dilemma addressed above.
How does one live boldly in the face of looming personal extinction?
The story that lends its title to this collection shows Palwick’s ingenuity in framing this issue — and the universality of her concern
In subsequent stories, Palwick continues to find brilliant new emblems for her thesis.
Aligning itself with work by the great Carol Emshwiller, “Gestella” concerns a female werewolf (with an accelerated aging problem that dramatizes the issue of mortality even more keenly) whose doomed failure to consider her own best interests represents a cautionary parable about abandoning one’s responsibilities in favor of societal pressure.
“The Old World” is a utopia, that rarest of science-fictional outings these days, one that would feel like a collaboration between Cory Doctorow and Ted Chiang, were it not utterly Palwickian. Here, Palwick humorously inverts her usual scenario, asking: how can one maintain glumness in a near-perfect world? The result illuminates the quandary from a totally novel direction.
Palwick can work on big scales, as in “The Old World,” or on deliciously intimate levels, such as in “Jo’s Hair,” which chronicles the life of an inanimate hairpiece that enjoys all the experiences denied to its society-bound originator, before the severed halves achieve a unity at death.
The fate of a “mere” cat encapsulates a huge life lesson for the teen protagonist of “Going After Bobo,” a tale which inhabits its contemporary Reno, Nevada landscape with the clarity of the best mainstream writing.
Like Lucius Shepard collaborating with Robert Sheckley, Palwick conjures up a zombie meditation on life and death in “Beautiful Stuff,” wherein the dead are wiser than the living.
Another miniaturist wonder, “Elephant” is the record of a woman who wills herself pregnant, in the face of her own doubts about the life she’s living. Bradbury might well have written something similar.
“Ever After” takes the Cinderella myth and grants it a horrific twist, sending its fairy godmother and young charge down a darkling road of independence from all seats of power. (It should be mentioned at this juncture that Palwick’s strong feminist concerns usefully salt and season the universality of her approach.)
Replaying the old myth of the woman abducted from a fairy realm into human bondage, “Stormdusk” adds a twist that completely unbalances the old equations.
In a postapocalyptic setting where human freaks strive for the basic rights of life, Palwick constructs a love story worthy of Sturgeon, titled “Sorrel’s Heart.”
And finally, Palwick engineers a miraculous Vonnegut-like assault against the shared ills of all flesh with “GI Jesus,” a bracingly heretical — yet ultimately deeply religious — story that conflates a mortally ill woman, the image of a lost soldier, and an icon of Jesus lodged in a most unlikely place, all against the perfectly-realized backdrop of Innocence, Indiana.
Taken as a whole, then, the varied stories in this volume offer a map of the labyrinth that is our lives. Not outward to a hypothetical exit, toward some impossible other world of infinite freedom (there is nothing beyond the labyrinth), but inward, to confront the Minotaur of Death, embrace him, and dance.
The Fate of Mice
I remember galloping, the wind in my mane and the road hard against my hooves. Dr. Krantor says this is a false memory, that there is no possible genetic linkage between mice and horses, and I tell him that if scientists are going to equip IQ-enhanced mice with electronic vocal cords and teach them to talk, they should at least pay attention to what the mice tell them. “Mice,” Dr. Krantor tells me acidly, “did not evolve from horses,” and I ask him if he believes in reincarnation, and he glares at me and tells me that he’s a behavioral psychologist, not a theologian, and I point out that it’s pretty much the same thing. “You’ve got too much free time,” he snaps at me. “Keep this up and I’ll make you run the maze again today.” I tell him that I don’t mind the maze. The maze is fine. At least I know what I’m doing there: finding cheese as quickly as possible, which is what I’d do anyhow, anytime anyone gave me the chance. But what am I doing galloping?
“You aren’t doing anything galloping,” he tells me. “You’ve never galloped in your life. You’re a mouse.” I ask him how a mouse can remember being a horse, and he says, “It’s not a memory. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe you got the idea from something you heard or saw somewhere. On TV.” There’s a small TV in the lab, so Dr. Krantor can watch the news, but it’s not even positioned so that I can see it easily. And I ask him how watching something on TV would make me know what it felt like to be a horse, and he says I don’t know what it feels like to be a horse, I have no idea what a horse feels like, I’m just making it up.
But I remember that road, winding ahead in moonlight, the harness pulling against my chest, the sound of wheels behind me. I remember the three other horses in harness with me, our warm breath steaming in the frosty air. And then I remember standing in a courtyard somewhere, and someone bringing water and hay. We stood there for a long time, the four of us, in our harness. I remember that, but that’s all I remember. What happened next?
Dr. Krantor came grumbling into the lab this morning, Pippa in tow. “You have to behave yourself,” he says sternly, and deposits her in a corner.
“Mommy was going to take me to the zoo,” she says. When I stand on my hind legs to peer through the side of the cage, I can see her pigtails flouncing. “It’s Saturday.”
“Yes, I know that, but your mother decided she had other plans, and I have to work today.”
“She did not have other plans. She and Michael were going to take me to the zoo. You just hate Michael, Daddy!”
“Here,” he says, handing her a piece of graph paper and some colored pens. “You can draw a picture. You can draw a picture of the zoo.”
“You could have gotten a babysitter,” Pippa yells at him, her chubby little fists clenched against her polka-dot dress. “You’re cheap. A babysitter’d take me to the zoo!”
“I’ll take you myself, Pippa.” Dr. Krantor is whining now. “In a few hours. I just have a few hours of work to do, okay?”
“Huh,” she says. “And I bet you won’t let me watch TV, either! Well, I’m gonna talk to Rodney!”
Pippa calls me Rodney because she says it’s prettier than rodent, which is what Dr. Krantor calls me: The Rodent, as if in my one small body I contain the entire order of small, gnawing mammals having a single pair of upper incisors with a chisel-shaped edge. Perhaps he intends this as an honor, although to me it feels more like a burden. I am only a small white mouse, unworthy to represent all the other rodents in the world, all the rats and rabbits and squirrels, and now I have this added weight, the mystery Dr. Krantor will not acknowledge, the burden of hooves and mane.
“Rodney,” Pippa says, “Daddy’s scared I’ll like Michael better than him. If you had a baby girl mouse and you got a divorce and your daughter’s Mommy had a boyfriend, would you be jealous?”
“Mice neither marry nor are given in marriage,” I tell her. In point of fact, mice are non-monogamous, and in stressful situations have been known to eat their young, but this may be more than Pippa needs to know.
Pippa scowls. “If your daughter’s Mommy had a boyfriend, would you keep her from seeing your daughter at all?”
“Sweetheart,” Dr. Krantor says, striding over to our corner of the lab and bending down, “Michael’s not a nice person.”
“Yes he is.”
“No, he’s not.”
“Yes he is! You’re just saying that because he has a picture of a naked lady on his arm! But I see naked ladies in the shower after I go swimming with Mommy! Michael doesn’t always ride his motorcycle, Daddy! He promised to take me to the zoo in his truck!”
“Oh, Pippa,” he says, and bends down and hugs her. “I’m just trying to protect you. I know you don’t understand now. You will someday, I promise.”
