The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (41 page)

“Kids?” Varner said. It was all he could say. There was too much, all at once, to get into words.

“A daughter and her husband,” John said. “There was a boy survived. People up that way found out where she’d come from and brought him down here. He’s staying up in town with Sue’s people this past couple of weeks.”

Varner left the wagon and rode Touchstone hard up into town. Herculaneum had never been much of a city, by the looks of it, and a hundred years after the Fall, it was barely a ruin. Sue’s people had always lived in the courthouse, and still did. Varner knocked on the door and found himself looking into the eyes of Sue’s sister Winona. “I’m Varner,” he said. “Sue and I went around for a while.”

“Yes,” she said. “You did. Are you here about the boy?”

“I am,” Varner said.

“Well, I don’t want you in my house,” Winona said. “But I’ll bring him out to talk to you.”

The boy was nine years old. I played Rosalind and Hero and Hermione when I was nine years old, Varner thought. “Your grandmother’s name was Sue?” he asked. They were sitting on the stone courthouse steps, cracked and heaved from quakes.

“Yes sir,” the boy said quietly.

“And she was from here?”

“She always said her people were down here. We were always in Moline.”

Always in Moline. How many times was I close? Varner wondered. Before I chased a hundred thousand miles across North America looking for a book that might not exist anymore. “I think I knew her,” he said to the boy. “A long time ago.”

“Yes sir,” the boy said.

There was so much more to say. “A long time ago, when we weren’t much older than you. She lived here.” Varner couldn’t get at what he wanted. “I came here when I was eleven. Because someone killed my father.”

For the first time the boy looked at him. “In St Louis,” Varner added.

“We were passing by Hannibal,” the boy said. “They were in canoes. I just swam.” His voice was nearly toneless.

Varner nodded. “You must be a hell of a swimmer. What’s your name?”

“Will,” the boy said. “I’m a good swimmer. I swam all the way down to an island. It was foggy.”

Fifty years apart, Varner thought. My story and his story. “You escaped, like me,” he said.

“How’d you escape?”

“I climbed a fence and ran. Easier than swimming at night in the river. But it was the night of the Seventh Fall,” Varner said. That was when everything had changed for him.

“That was a long time ago,” the boy said.

Varner looked out over the river. “It sure was. You have any other family?”

“No sir,” the boy said.

The whole time, she was in Moline, Varner thought. It was hard to believe. “My name is Varner, Will,” he said. “I had a child once, but I never knew at the time because the mother was taken away from here up to the Quad Cities. That was forty years ago, or a little more. I think the child of mine I was looking for might have been your mother.”

“So you’re my granddad?” the boy asked, not missing a beat. The word cut Varner to pieces. Tears started from his eyes.

“Looks that way, young Will,” he said. He ruffled the boy’s hair. “Looks that way.”

The boatman’s name was Carl Schuler. He added Varner to his family, and for the first time in his life Varner had a mother. Her name was Adele. She was thin and red-haired, with a sharp tongue that often sent the five children – Varner was the fifth – fleeing out into the swamps. They lived with a number of other families, Varner was never certain how many or how they all were related, in the beached hull of a container ship. After the Seventh Fall, parts of the Schulers’ living area needed to be repartitioned and fixed up. Varner was glad to pitch in. He wasn’t sure what it would be like, living in one place all the time, but his father had instilled in him the proposition that adversity existed for the purpose of teaching you how to make lemonade. Now that his father and the rest of the troupe were gone, Varner did his best to fit in where he was. He told the Schulers stories that he’d learned and before long, he was telling them to an audience of everyone who lived in the ship or happened to be stopping for the night on their way up- or downriver. For hundreds of miles along the Mississippi, from St Louis all the way down to the submerged ruin of New Orleans, a loose confederation of rivermen traded and tried to keep the peace. They lived on fish and deer and the rich bottomland soil, which grew every vegetable Varner had ever heard of and more. He learned to handle a boat, a fishing line, and a rifle. He fell in and out of love with the river girls, and once Carl beat the hell out of him when one of the girls got pregnant and was sent away to stay with cousins upriver. Varner asked around, but he never heard whether she had the baby or not. The situation put him in mind of
The Winter’s Tale.
Was his Perdita born and growing up somewhere along the river? Did she know who her father was? He never saw the girl again, but the idea that he might have a child somewhere gnawed at him, until finally when he was nineteen he told Carl Schuler that it was time for him to go.

“Go? Go where?” Carl said.

“Answer me a question,” Varner said. “Did Sue ever have that baby?”

“I don’t know,” Carl said. “That’s the plain truth of it. Her people live up near the Quad Cities. If that’s what’s bothering you, then go. I always knew you wouldn’t stay. A boy who spends the first eleven years of his life on the move sure isn’t going to settle down when he’s just learning to be a man.”

Varner went. Nobody in the Quad Cities, when he got there a month later, could tell him what he needed to know. He stayed there a while, until winter was coming, hoping she would pass by. Every night he told stories, changing them a little each time to suit the audience. During the day, he worked unloading boats or hammering together new houses using pieces of old houses. Sometimes he found books in the old houses. Sixty years of looting and neglect had ruined all but a very few of them. He went to libraries and found most of them burned by God crazies. People told him that there was a group called Missionaries of the Book that went around the country burning every library and bookstore they found. They would come right into your house, too, the story went. And if you had books, you’d better give them up if you wanted to live. Been like that for years. There’s hardly a book left anywhere around here.

No, Varner thought. If I have lost my child, I’m not going to lose the stories. He started trying to write down what he remembered of the plays he’d done in his father’s troupe. So much of it he’d forgotten. Little snatches came back to him, couplets and phrases, sometimes favorite passages ten or a dozen lines at once. It can’t all be lost, he thought. Somewhere out there I’ll be able to find it.

His father had said that it was every actor’s dream to play Hamlet. So Varner would find Hamlet, and he would gather a company, and in his father’s memory he would play the Dane whether anyone showed up to see it or not. Varner traded a month’s labor for a horse and wagon and things he would need to travel. Then he set out, and before he knew it, forty years had passed.

I will be sixty this year, Varner thought. And now I have taken on a boy because he might be my grandson. He’d had to trade Touchstone for Will. Sue’s people weren’t sentimental, and didn’t want the extra mouth to feed, but they were canny enough to see how badly Varner wanted the boy, so they drove a hard bargain. That was all right. There were other horses in the world. Touchstone had been a good one, but he was never going to be the last. Varner and Will walked back down toward the shipwreck castle. “I tell stories for a living, Will,” Varner said. “When I was a boy, about your age, my father taught it to me. You want me to teach it to you?”

“Sure,” Will said. “What stories?”

“All kinds of stories. You’ll learn them. But my favorite one is
Hamlet.
That’s a play. My father always wanted to play the role of Hamlet, and after he died I decided that I would play Hamlet because he never could. But here’s the problem. You know about the Missionaries of the Book?”

Will looked away. “Yes sir,” he said.

“You know what the worst thing is in the world that we could do to the Missionaries of the Book?” Varner asked.

“What?”

“You want to do it?”

“Yeah.”

“The worst thing we could do to them is
Hamlet
, Will,” Varner said. “They haven’t destroyed it yet.”

Walking along the track down to the swamp, Varner considered the path that had brought him here. And driven him a little mad? Perhaps, he thought. Oh yes. But when the wind was westerly, Old Varner thought, he still knew a hawk from a handsaw.

O
LD KRISHNA WAS
walking home from a solid afternoon’s work removing acid tares from the downhill green-garden when he saw the drive flare dropping through the clouds. It was reversed, on braking burn. Whoever’s hull it was, it was also glowing red hot, canted at an extreme angle for maximum drag, maximum deceleration, minimum time in atmosphere. The pilot had a job to do which he imagined might get him shot at by the planetary inhabitants. As Old Krishna was, as far as he was aware, the only planetary inhabitant, this did not bode well.

Still, he couldn’t run. If he ran, he might fall in the high gravity, catch his stick against one of the outcrops of former civilization that filled the hills, break his glasses and have to grind a new pair, even break a leg. And a broken leg, out here, might mean death. He contented himself with hurrying, helping his stroke-damaged left leg along with his good arm and the stick, going on three legs in the Evening.

The house had been selected as a good fortifiable location not easily visible from outside the valley. He had surrounded it quite deliberately with yellowgarden shrubs. The native xanthophyll-reliant vegetation was usually harmless to Earth life, but the shrubs he had chosen were avoided by the native fauna. The house was mostly made of hand-cut stone blocks – he’d cheated by using as many stones levered out of various ruins in the hills as possible, but still doubted he could repeat the feat without industrial construction gear. That sort of work was for the young man he had once been.

This planet’s ruins came in three flavours. First came serene, ancient fractal-patterned structures that merged into the landscape; second came massive, hastily-erected polyhedra that clashed with it. The latter were trademarks of the later Adhaferan empire, the former a matter for future archaeologists. Krishna had had neither the time nor the stomach to research that matter for himself.

The third type of ruin was ramshackle, overgrown, cheerfully constructed of the cheapest possible materials, and clearly identifiable as human. Each ruin had a tidy, identical grave before its front door, and many such ruins surrounded Old Krishna’s house.

There was an ornamental greengarden next to the house, where he’d managed to keep a few terrene flowers alive outside the confines of a glasshouse – edelweiss, crocus, Alaskan lupin, heather, all chosen for the cold and rarefied air. He had kept the heather for the colour, and the bees. At this time of day she might be in the garden stealing bee-honey, pinning up wet clothes, cutting back flowers, or even just sitting reading in the single hammock.

The bushes round the garden disintegrated in a welter of flame. Incinerated pine needles blew in his face like furnace sinter. He smelled cheap, low-tech reaction mass. Petrochemicals! They were still burning hydrocarbons!

The ship was the mass-produced swing-boomerang type he had been dreading, capable of furling itself up into a delta for atmospheric exit, or making itself straight as a die for vertical take-off and landing. It had just vertically landed in his garden. The satellite defence system should, of course, have vaporized the ship before it even entered the atmosphere, but it had been a decade before anyone had happened by to maintain the defences. His masters had not sent so much as a radio message for years. There had probably been a coup in the inworlds.