The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (39 page)

“You are too old, Varner,” he said to himself “Too old to play the role anyway. Why do you search?” He said this every time; it was his ritual, his sacrament of failure, repeated in libraries from the Rocky Mountains to the drowned ghosts of the great Eastern cities. And as he always did, Varner reached in his pack and found the thin bound sheaf of papers that was all he had of the play he had dedicated his life to. He read it through: Act One nearly complete, salvaged from his father’s belongings; halves and fragments of Acts Two and Three, with the third scenes of both complete (Varner spoke the King’s praying monologue aloud when traveling, to stay awake on Touchstone’s back, and answered with Hamlet’s “am I then revenged?”, crying out to the forests and fields of what had once been the United States of America); a few lines only from Acts Four and Five. It had struck him more than once how unlikely it was that his knowledge of the play decreased so steadily from beginning to end. Shouldn’t he have expected to have a few bits from each part? Words, words, words. Himself a story, Varner went on.

Having the play as he did, though, strengthened Varner’s conviction that he was doing the work of destiny. Every page, every line he found moldering in libraries and schools and the homes whose long-dead own ers had not burned all their books for fuel during the Long Winter spurred him toward completeness. Varner lived only for the day when he could bring together the text, assign parts, find a theater far from Missionaries and hear the words spoken again as they were meant to be.

St Louis looked worse than Chicago, or Cleveland. Varner had seen drawings and even some photographs of the East Coast cities, or what was left of them. St Louis looked much the same as those photographs. The Fall had unleashed every fault in the Earth’s crust, and according to Varner’s father, Memphis and St. Louis had been leveled by quakes before fire and flood had reduced them the rest of the way to ruin. From across the Mississippi, Varner saw the stumps of the Arch, one higher than the other. The river swirled around their bases, and lapped over the ruins of Laclede’s Landing. On this side of the river, they stood in the midst of a vast trainyard, with engines and cars lying where the quakes had flung them from the tracks. They came gingerly to the edge of the water and waited at the foot of a collapsed pier where a handwritten sign said
FOR FERRY WAVE WHITE FLAG.
“Fat Otis,” Varner’s father said, “your shirt is the best white flag we’ve got.” So Fat Otis tied his shirt to the end of a stick and waved it until an answering flag waved from the Missouri side. To the north and south, the pilings of fallen bridges thrust up from the river. A ferry approached them, and they negotiated passage. On the way across, Varner’s father asked where they might play. The ferryman shrugged. “Depends on which way you’re headed,” he said. “You go north, it’s wet. Don’t know who lives out there. You go south, it’s wet. You go too far west, into the County, you get bandits. In town, maybe you talk to Pujols. He’s at the stadium.”

“Pujols?” Varner’s father asked. “Really?”

The ferryman cracked a smile. “Says he was his father. ’Tween you and me, I doubt it. But don’t say that to him.”

“Who’s Pujols?” Varner asked.

“Baseball player,” his father said. “One hell of a baseball player, back before the Fall.” Varner had seen teams of players barnstorming. His father had warned him about them, especially if they came to see a play. The boys who played women’s roles excited other kinds of interest, Varner’s father said. Don’t ever let them get you alone. He couldn’t imagine that baseball had ever been played in front of as many people as it would have taken to fill the stadium in St. Louis. The seats, rows and rows of them, in two decks above which hooked the ruins of the girders that had supported a third, seemed enough to accommodate every person Varner had ever seen, all at once. Pujols was about as old as Varner’s father, his face brown and seamed where it showed through a white waterfall of a beard. He wore a shirt with an insignia of a cardinal perched on a baseball bat, and held a bat in both hands throughout their conversation. He asked what the company could perform.

“Any and all Shakespeare,” Varner’s father said, “except the ones that aren’t worth performing. Some musical revues, which are for later in the Evening. And we do a story about the Fall.”

“Shakespeare,” Pujols said. “A funny one. I will feast you after, and then we’ll see about your songs.”

Leaving Ann Arbor, Varner turned south, following US-23 until it merged into 75, which went all the way to Florida. There would be snow here soon. He would need to get back to Cincinnati and down the river soon. As he got older, he made a seasonal ritual of letting the river take him back to the life he remembered from his youth – the boats, days spent dangling fishing lines into the warm brown water near Natchez or the shattered ruins of Memphis. And he still held out hope of finding Sue, so he stopped by the shipwreck castle every other year to catch up with the Schulers and learn what could be learned. Forty years had passed with no word of Sue, but he still held out hope. More, in fact, than he had in his quest to honor his father. Since he could not do that, perhaps he would yet be able to meet his child.

On the outskirts of a town called Monroe, which his father had said was the birthplace of a general famous for dying, Varner came to a camp, forty or fifty people in lean-tos and a few huts built of scavenged timber, all arranged around a central block house. Three men rode out to meet him with guns. “State your business, stranger,” one of them said.

“My name is Varner, and I am an actor,” Varner said. “Also I can sing, and I’ll tell a story for my supper.”

The three horse men exchanged glances. “What kind of a story?” the first asked. Varner had them figured for a father and his sons. The resemblance was strong through the jaw and the set of the eyes. Hard eyes.

“Any kind. Tell me what you want.” Touchstone snorted and Varner patted his neck. “I and my equine fool here travel the land, telling stories and looking for pages out of old books.” Often it was dangerous to admit this, but Varner hadn’t survived forty years on his own by not being able to recognize a Missionary – or any other brand of fanatic. These were honest people, or if not honest, not zealots or casual killers.

The second horse man, one of the boys, asked, “What kind of books?”

“I’m interested in any kind, but I’m a literary man. It’s the old stories, the great stories, that I want the most.”

“You know the Odyssey?”

“Not in Greek,” Varner said, daring a joke. “But the story? Oh yes. From ‘Sing me, O Muse’ to the slaughter of the suitors, I know the Odyssey. Would you like to hear it tonight?”

“We heard part of the Odyssey the last time an actor came by,” the boy said. “Only he didn’t get to finish because – ”

“It’ll be up to Marquez what we hear tonight,” the first horse man interrupted. “He’ll want to meet you.” He turned and rode back toward the camp. The two boys fell in behind Varner. Neither of them spoke to him again.

They spent the remainder of the day in a parking lot behind the stadium, rehearsing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Varner’s father considered it the funniest of Shakespeare’s plays, and Varner was glad for the chance to play without wearing a dress. Fat Otis would play Bottom. Varner’s father would play Oberon and Theseus. Since Pujols didn’t appear to be a Bible-thumper, Otis’ wife Charlie would play Titania and Hippolyta. And so on. They ran through scenes, added bits of business to cater to the stadium setting – Snug the joiner would add an aside about the poor condition of the play house, and Varner himself would tinker with Puck’s “now the hungry lion roars” monologue. “Here’s what you say,” his father instructed him. “The last couplet, instead of saying ‘I am sent with broom before, / To sweep the dust behind the door’ say sweep the Cubs behind the door.” He gave Varner a shirt with a cardinal on the front, like Pujols’. “This was the team that played here. The Cubs were rivals. They’ll eat it up.”

Varner concentrated on the change. It was only one word, but it altered his sense of the entire monologue. The truth was he didn’t like it. Why couldn’t they do the plays the way the plays were written? He’d asked his father this before. “Players need someone to play to,” was the answer. “We’re not spreading a gospel. It doesn’t have to be exact. It has to please.”

Gospel was a loaded word coming from Varner’s father. In the de cades since the Fall, pocket theocracies – this was another word Varner had learned from his father – had sprung up throughout the ruins of the United States of America. Some were benevolent, some dangerous, depending on their leaders’ readings of Scripture. The company avoided them when that was possible, but it wasn’t always. Bands of evangelists roamed the countryside, heavily armed and often looking for a fight. The first time Varner had seen a crucified body, he’d had nightmares. Now he read them as his father did. They were signs that evangelists were around, and not the kind ones.

“You know what I want to hear?” Marquez said. “I had a storyteller come by four or five years ago who said he knew the Odyssey, but he didn’t. Do you? You told Ezra’s boys you did.”

Varner nodded. “I’ll tell you the same thing. I know the Odyssey. And the Iliad. Not line by line, but I know the stories, and I won’t change anything or leave anything out.” Unlike my predecessor, he thought, whose body probably fed the perch in Lake Erie. If they bothered to drag him that far.

“I want you to start like the book does, with Telemachus,” Marquez said. “And the bit with the gods arguing. I hate it when people start with Calypso just because they think the sexy bits should go first.”

“Spoken like a man who has read the book,” Varner said.

Marquez grinned. He was ten or fifteen years younger than Varner, and had strong teeth. “The Missionaries don’t come around here anymore,” he said. “I’ve read some books, yeah.”

Varner’s pulse quickened. Not yet, he thought. Give him what he wants. Then you can ask. “What time would you like to start?” It was almost dark. Past equinox, dark came early this far north.

“Let’s get you fed first,” Marquez said. “You’ll sit at my table. But don’t touch my women.”

Varner didn’t touch Marquez’s women. Even if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have taken the chance. Not with books around. Dinner was trout, roasted squash, wild greens. Marquez ate well. “What was the name of the general who was from here?” Varner asked, to start a conversation.

“That was George Armstrong Custer. Killed at Little Big Horn, out West somewhere. But he was from here, yeah. There’s a statue of him in town.”

“How come you don’t live in town?”

“Because in town is full of people who don’t like people whose last name is Marquez. Fuck them,” Marquez said. “I don’t want to live in their town anyway. They come out here, I send their horses back. Now they leave me alone. Plus there are Missionaries there. I got you figured for a man who doesn’t like the Missionaries.”

“They don’t like me,” Varner said. “Because I look for books.”

Marquez finished crunching through his salad. “I’ll show you my books if I like the way you tell the story. Deal?”

Left unspoken was what would happen if Marquez didn’t like Varner’s telling. “Deal,” Varner said.

One of the women at the table, who could have been Marquez’s wife or daughter – any of them could have been his wife or daughter – spoke up. “You look for any books, or what books do you want?” she asked.

“Any books,” Varner said. In the context, it was true, and if Marquez had what he was looking for, it wouldn’t pay to let him know ahead of time how highly Varner valued it.

“How do you find them?”

“I hear things sometimes,” Varner said. “I’m not the only one looking for books. We talk to each other, when we survive long enough.” He thought of a man he had known only as Derek, burned three years before with his books used as the pyre. Varner had found the body only days after it had happened. He hadn’t even stopped to bury the body, in case the Missionaries were still nearby.

“Everyone who sits at my table knows how to read,” Marquez said. “Even the women. They hate that in town.”

“What books do you have?” Varner asked. It was hard to keep the hunger out of his voice.

“People all around here know to bring me books. Any little thing they find, they bring me.” Marquez filled his glass as he went on, then passed the bottle. “My best book is Grimm’s Fairy Tales. You can read all of the pages.”

When they loaded into the stadium, Pujols’ men had already built a stage, or pieced one together from storage. It had aluminum steps and interlocking sections. Varner felt like a real professional just stepping onto it. Curtains bearing the Cardinal logo hung at either side and behind it, to hide entrances. A tent behind the upstage curtain was big enough for costume changes. One of Pujols’ lieutenants showed them a tunnel from a dugout back into what Varner took for a green room until his father said, “Well, I’ll be damned. So this is what a major-league club house looked like.”

Once, Varner thought, when there was electricity and television and things like that, this must have been a pretty nice place. He wasn’t sure how it helped baseball players get ready for a game, but there was a lot about the pre-Fall world he didn’t understand. The look on his father’s face in the torchlight saddened him. He was old enough to know what had been lost. Sometimes Varner was angry that he had never seen the wondrous pre-Fall America that the old people liked to reminisce about, but sometimes he thought he was better off never having known it. His world was his world. He liked it, on the whole. He liked traveling with his father, he liked doing plays, and although he missed the mother he had never known, the women of the company ganged up on him like a platoon of mothers, so he had never felt unloved by women. Maybe when I get older, he thought, but couldn’t complete the idea. He had lots of fragmented ideas about how things might be when he got older.