Near + Far (49 page)

Tulip Song was talking to Nerdboy again.

She said to the round-eyed camera: "I once knew this guy, a little rooster of a guy, named Perkins. A partyer, he'd run through your money faster than goose-snot."

"Yeah?" Was that a note of challenge in Nerdboy's reply? Tulip Song kept on like she didn't hear it. She started some long story full of cuff-links and bell jars and errors of circumstance.

But Djuna's attention was caught elsewhere: out on the street an old woman swept with a broom while another one, almost identical, with her skirts hiked up, pissed in the gutter. As she watched, the first woman saw the second, came running, belabored her with the broom while the second continued pissing before gathering herself and scrambling away, serene as salt, and heading down the hill where the glitter of sound's water awaited.

It was an hour and a half by the station clock. Then they were on the road again, rolling out over a lake, another lake. Mountains and more lakes and pines. As she watched, the landscape shifted. There were black and white magpies on the fence poles by the time true darkness overtook the bus.

Day Four

The Traveler's Marvelous Window Garden gave Djuna tiny, perfect pears, sweet as melancholy, and stalks of pink-ribbed celery. Around the edges of the box, strawberries were ripening, but still not quite there. She ate a bite of pear, of peanut butter sandwich, of pear, peanut butter, pear as the road rolled past. It was flat here, all monotonous wheat fields and the great green circles of irrigation. The red haired boy's civilization was battling the upstart Persians.

A small town passed by in a succession of churches and garage sales and one monumental ball of twine. The road stretched like string, taut as heartache and goodbye, leading her into the future.

At evening, they pulled into Lawrence and the Burroughs Space Lift. People got out and milled around while waiting for the bus to be loaded into a transport. The station was vast, high-ceilinged. Some of the travelers passing through here were not human: mutants and tentacled Martians, gelatinous Ood and frond-waving Barbai like cinnamon-scented bushes. There were clones and steam-powered constructs and every kind of robot, from a retro, man-muscled brass and silver Adonis to tech robots as boxy and unadorned as vacuum cleaners.

The elderly woman and the man in the slouched hat sat outside in the humid air. Locusts sang in the surrounding cottonwood trees, still spindly new as though less than a decade had passed since their planting. The air smelled of exhaust and wheat and dying flies. Djuna sat near them and ordered a Tecate and listened. The sugar packets on the table showed a series of zeppelins, balloon bellied and intricate as flowers.

This time the woman was the one doing the talking. She said:

"Once I knew a woman who was a marvelous inventor, who built things of jackstraw and metal gears as thin as paper. She built herself a house that she lived in, like a hermit crab inside its shell, and she kept building inwards, until she grew as thin as a serpent, coiled among her books and magazines and old lanterns."

"What did you sell her?" The man sounded sullen as a chessboard, slouched in his seat as though set in cement. "Space?"

She took a drink of milky soda.

"Death," she said. "The ultimate closet." A shiver went down Djuna's spine as they looked at each other.

Later, much later, the driver came around, got everyone into the bus before it was loaded onto the transport.

The hamper was almost empty, but Djuna took out the cheesecake as she felt the shudder and grip of the Space Elevator, of the transport moving her up, inexorably, into the sky. She ate it, bite by careful bite, as though saying goodbye to its flavor. She thought about what she'd seen along the way, what she'd heard. Maybe any place was the same as any other. Still, she thought about the red dust of Mars. They said it got into the food, that there was an iron tang to the grit there that you couldn't get anywhere else, that had old Martians licking rust in their retired days in too green places.

She thought about opening the window and crawling out, jumping off into space. What would happen then? It could be anything, really. Like a sit-com or a musical or a wonderful book. She'd always thought it would be pleasant to live in a world where people spontaneously broke into song.

If the window didn't open? She'd have to smash it, perhaps with the heel of her shoe. It would be so complicated and messy, though. Would it really be worth it?

Djuna fell asleep dreaming of the sad surge upwards. Of the struts and wickets of her ascent. Of depressed gremlins clinging to a plane's wing, of balloons at dusk over a prairie's red sweep, of the smell of rain-kissed earth. She dreamed of the life she'd left behind, and told it to herself, but the story was dull, like little pearls of days strung on knotted twine, uniformly even and bland as pudding. When did her story begin? Had it yet? Was it done before it had really begun?

Day Five

The bus was still moving, she could feel it, when she woke in the small hours of the morning. Almost everyone on the bus was. She could hear gentle snores and snorts and the humming of the ventilation system. Outside the stars hurtled past as they went up and up. Below them, the world was the size of a half-shadowed duckpond dwindling to a lilypad.

She contemplated the journey as the bus rose through the darkness. She thought about Point A and Point B and the distance in between. She thought about the impossibility of staying at Point A, of poltergeists and zombies and séances full of dust. When she exhaled, the fronds of her marvelous plant stirred and swayed as though they wanted to whisper something.

She read the last page of her book, and then the advertisements in the back, and then the back cover, and then the numbers of the UPC code. She added them up, and understood what they mean, what the bus represented, and why there was no way to go back. Her story was not done, had not yet experienced its Freitag's triangle, its rising action (though surely she was rising now?), its climax, its denouement like the shuddering release before one curls into the seats knowing that the story is done and the lights will come up soon. Stories flowed around her, predicting and shaping her own, as though now were the moment of her birth, the moment she began to speak.

Red dust dunes pulled past, lazy armadillo shapes repeated over and over again. She looked for fellow characters out in the rusty sand, or even footsteps or a bit of discarded paper, its letters desiccated and spiderlike. But the landscape was an empty frame waiting to be occupied.

The other passengers were restless. The mother spent a solid hour on her phone, ignoring the boy asking her questions, tugging at her sleeve. The unicorn girl could not stare out the window easily; her horn tip collided with the plastic, had pocked it painfully once or twice when the bus had jolted. So she stood near a window, bracing herself with an arm, watching the horizon and the sun glaring censoriously overhead.

They pulled into Paradise at dusk. Djuna left her trash in the seat. Someone would come by and clean it after all, and her finished book would be a bonus prize for some lucky cleaner interested in dolphin sex.

The air smelled of iron as she pulled her rolling bag across the bus's pockmarked floor, exited and inhaled, curious. Glass stretched overhead in an enormous dome, etched with ravens and thunderbirds. Hope entered in at the soles of her feet and made her stand straighter. There was no turning back. This was Paradise, after all.

Afternotes

This story is my tribute to one of my favorite books, Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales
. It appeared in a shorter form in
Daily Science Fictio
n
, where it was chosen by editors Michele Barasso and Jonathan Laden.

I opted to use the book's greater length as an excuse to bring back the earlier version.

I hope it's as much fun to read as it was to write. In fact, I hope you enjoyed all of these stories as much as I've had putting them together and writing these notes. It's a great gift to a writer when a reader gives them their time—there's plenty of other books out there after all—and it's appreciated.

Author photo by On Focus Photo.

About Cat Rambo

Raised in the wilds of Indiana, Cat bounced around for several decades before settling in the Pacific Northwest, where she began a prolific writing spree, publishing over a hundred short stories to date in venues that include
Asimov's
,
Weird Tales
, and
Tor.com
. Her work in the field of speculative fiction includes a stint as
Fantasy Magazine
's
editor, numerous nonfiction articles and interviews, and volunteer time with Broad Universe and Clarion West. She has been shortlisted for the Endeavour Award, the Million Writers Award, the Locus Awards, and most recently a World Fantasy Award. This is her third collection.