Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction Read online

  Kelly Dahl flings the Ka-bar into the darkness near where the bow had gone, her strong hands pull my wrists above my head, and she leans her weight on her elbows on either side of me. “You did find me,” she whispers, and lowers her face to mine.

  What happens next is not clear. It is possible that she kisses me, possible that we kiss each other, but time ceases to be sequential at that moment so it is possible that we do not kiss at all. What is clear—and shall remain so until the last moment of my life—is that in this final second before seconds cease to follow one another I move my arms to take her weight off her elbows, and Kelly Dahl relaxes onto me with what may be a sigh, the warmth of her face envelopes the warmth of my face, a shared warmth more intimate than any kiss, the length of her body lies full along the length of my body, and then—inexplicably—she continues descending, moving closer, skin against skin, body against body, but more than that, entering me as I enter her in a way that is beyond sexual. She passes into me as a ghost would pass through some solid form, slowly, sensually but without self-conscious effort, melding, melting into me, her form still tangible, still touchable, but moving through me as if our atoms were the stars in colliding galaxies, passing through each other without contact but rearranging the gravity there forever.

  I do not remember us speaking. I remember only the three sighs—Kelly Dahl’s, mine, and the sigh of the wind coming up to scatter the last sparks of the fire that had somehow burned down to embers while time had stopped.

  IV

  Palinode

  I knew instantly upon awakening—alone—that everything had changed. There was a difference to the light, the air. A difference to me. I felt more attached to my senses than I had in years, as if some barrier had been lifted between me and the world.

  But the world was different. I sensed it at once. More real. More permanent. I felt fuller but the world felt more empty.

  My Jeep was in the campground. The tent was where I had left it. There were other tents, other vehicles. Other people. A middle-aged couple having breakfast outside their Winnebago waved in a friendly manner as I walked past. I could not manage a return wave.

  The resident camp ranger ambled over as I was loading the tent in the back of the Jeep.

  “Didn’t see you come in last night,” he said. “Don’t seem to have a permit. That’ll be seven dollars. Unless you want to stay another day. That’ll be seven more. Three night limit here. Lots of folks this summer.”

  I tried to speak, could not, and found—to my mild surprise—that my billfold still had money in it. I handed the ranger a ten dollar bill and he counted back the change.

  He was leaving when I finally called to him. “What month is it?”

  He paused, smiled. “Still July, the last time I looked.”

  I nodded my thanks. Nothing else needed to be explained.

  I showered and changed clothes in my apartment. Everything was as I had left it the night before. There were four bottles of Scotch in the kitchen cabinet. I lined them up on the counter and started to pour them down the sink, realized that I did not have to—I had no urge to take a drink—and set them back in the cabinet.

  I drove first to the elementary school where I had taught years ago. The teachers and students were gone for the summer, but some of the office staff were there for the summer migrant program. The principal was new, but Mrs. Collins, the secretary, knew me.

  “Mr. Jakes,” she said. “I almost didn’t recognize you in that beard. You look good in it. And you’ve lost weight and you’re all tanned. Have you been on vacation?”

  I grinned at her. “Sort of.”

  The files were still there. I was afraid that they’d gone to the district headquarters or followed the kids through junior high and high school, but the policy was to duplicate essential material and start new files beginning with seventh grade.

  All of the students from that last sixth-grade class were still in the box in the storage closet downstairs, all of their cumulative record folders mildewing away with the individual class photos of the students staring out—bright eyes, braces, bad haircuts from a decade before. They were all there. Everyone but Kelly Dahl.

  “Kelly Dahl,” repeated Mrs. Collins when I came up from the basement and queried her. “Kelly Dahl. Strange, Mr. Jakes, but I don’t remember a child named Kelly Dahl. Kelly Daleson, but that was several years before you left. And Kevin Dale…but that was a few years before you were here. Was he here very long? It might have been a transfer student who transferred back out, although I usually remember…”

  “She,” I said. “It was a girl. And she was here a couple of years.”

  Mrs. Collins frowned as if I had insulted her powers of recall. “Kelly Dahl,” she said. “I really don’t think so, Mr. Jakes. I remember most of the students. It’s why I suggested to Mr. Pembroke that this thing wasn’t necessary…” She waved dismissively toward the computer on her desk. “Are you sure the child was in one of your sixth-grade classes…not someone in high school or someone you met…after?” She pursed her lips at the near faux pas.

  “No,” I said. “It was someone I knew before I was fired. Someone I knew here. Or so I thought.”

  Mrs. Collins ran fingers through her blue hair. “I may be wrong, Mr. Jakes.” She said it in a tone that precluded the possibility.

  The high school records agreed with her. There had been no Kelly Dahl. The manager at the trailer park did not remember the three people; in fact, his records and memory showed that the same elderly couple had been renting what I remembered as the Dahl trailer since 1975. There was no microfilm record of the murder of Patricia Dahl in The Boulder Daily Camera and calls to North Platte and Omaha revealed no arrest of anyone named Carl Reems at any time in the past twelve years.

  I sat on my apartment terrace, watched the summer sun set behind the Flatirons, and thought. When I grew thirsty, ice water satisfied. I thought of the Jeep and camping gear down in the parking stall. There had been a Remington rifle in the back of the Jeep, a .38-caliber revolver in the blue pack. I had never owned a rifle or pistol.

  “Kelly,” I whispered finally. “You’ve really managed to go away this time.”

  I pulled out my billfold and looked at the only photograph of Allan that had escaped Maria’s purge—my son’s fifth-grade class picture, wallet-size. After a while I put away the photo and billfold and went in to sleep.

  Weeks passed. Then two months. The Colorado summer slipped into early autumn. The days grew shorter but more pleasant. After three hard interviews, I was offered a job at a private school in Denver. I would be teaching sixth-graders. They knew my history, but evidently thought that I had changed for the better. It was Friday when I finished the final interview. They said they would call me the next day, on Saturday.

  They were as good as their word. They sounded truly pleased when they offered me the job—perhaps they knew it meant a new start for me, a new life. They were surprised by my answer.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind.” I knew now that I could never teach eleven-year-olds again. They would all remind me of Allan, or of Kelly Dahl.

  There was a shocked silence. “Perhaps you would like another day to think about it,” said Mr. Martin, the headmaster. “This is an important decision. You could call us on Monday.”

  I started to say “no,” began to explain that my mind was made up, but then I heard Wait until Monday. Do not decide today.

  I paused. My own thoughts had echoed like this before since returning from Kelly Dahl. “Mr. Martin,” I said at last, “that might be a good idea. If you don’t mind, I’ll call you Monday morning with my decision.”

  On Sunday morning I picked up The New York Times at Eads tobacco store, had a late breakfast, watched the 11 A.M. Brinkley news show on ABC, finished reading the Times Book Review, and went down to the Jeep about one in the afternoon. It was a beautiful fall day and the drive up Left Hand Canyon and then up the hard jeep trail took less than an hour.


  The blue sky was crisscrossed with contrails through the aspen leaves when I stopped the Jeep ten feet from the entrance to the vertical mineshaft.

  “Kiddo,” I said aloud, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. “You found me once. I found you once. Do you think we can do it together this time?”

  I was talking to myself and it felt silly. I said nothing else. I put the Jeep in first and floored the accelerator. The hood first rose as we bounced over the lip of the pit, I caught a glimpse of yellow aspen leaves, blue sky, white contrails, and then the black circle of the pit filled the windshield.

  I hit the brake with both feet on the pedal. The Jeep slid, bucked, slewed to the left, and came to a stop with the right front tire hanging over the open pit. Shaking slightly, I backed the Jeep up a foot or two, set the brake, got out of the vehicle and leaned against it.

  Not this way. Not this time. I did not know if the thought was mine alone. I hoped not.

  I stepped closer to the edge, stared down into the pit, and then stepped back.

  MONTHS have passed. I took the teaching job in Denver. I love it. I love being with the children. I love being alive again. I am once again the sage on the stage, but a quieter sage this time.

  The bad dreams continue to bother me. Not dreams of Kelly Dahl, but Kelly Dahl’s dreams. I wake from nightmares of Carl coming into my small room in the trailer, of trying to speak to my mother as she smokes a cigarette and does not listen. I fly awake from dreams of awakening to Carl’s heavy hand over my mouth, of his foul breath on my face.

  I feel closest to Kelly Dahl at these times. Sitting up on the bed, sweat pouring from me, my heart pounding, I can feel her presence. I like to think that these dreams are an exorcism for her, a long overdue offer of love and help for me.

  It is impossible to explain the feeling that Kelly Dahl and I shared that last night in her world…in our world. Galaxies colliding, I think I said, and I have since looked up the photographic telescope images of that phenomenon: hundreds of billions of stars passing in close proximity as great spiral clusters pinwheel through one another, gravities interacting and changing each spiral forever but no stars actually colliding. This has some of the sense of what I felt that night, but does not explain the aftermath—the knowledge of being changed forever, of being filled with another human’s mind and heart and memories, of solitude ceasing. It is impossible to share the knowledge of being not just two people, but four—ourselves here, and truly ourselves where we meet again on that alternate place of going away.

  It is not mystical. It is not religious. There is no afterlife, only life.

  I cannot explain. But on some days out on the recess grounds, on some warm Colorado winter days when the sunlight is like a solid thing and the high peaks of the Divide gleam to the west as if they were yards away rather than miles, then I close my eyes as the children play, allow myself to hear the wind above the familiar murmur of children at play, and then the echoes of that separate but equal reality are clear enough. Then all this becomes the memory, the echo.

  THE Flatirons are gone, but a dirt road leads to low cliffs that look out over the Inland Sea. The Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and lodgepole trees are gone; the narrow road winds through tropical forests of sixty-foot ferns and flowering cycads the size of small redwoods. Cedarlike conifers let down lacy branches and one unidentifiable tree holds clusters of seeds that resemble massive shaving brushes. The air is humid and almost dizzyingly thick with the smell of eucalyptus, magnolia, something similar to apple blossoms, sycamore, and a riot of more exotic scents. Insects buzz and something very large crashes through the underbrush deep in the fern forest to my right as the Jeep approaches the coast.

  Where the Flatirons should be, tidal flats and lagoons reflect the sky. Everything is more textured and detailed than I remember from earlier visits. The sea stretches out to the east, its wave action strong and constant. The road leads to a causeway and the causeway leads across the tidal pools to Mont-Saint-Michel, the city-cathedral and its high walls gleaming in late afternoon light.

  Once I pause on the causeway and reach back for my binoculars, scanning the city walls and parapets.

  The Ford Bronco is parked outside the gate. Kelly Dahl is on the rampart of the highest wall, near the cathedral entrance high on the stone island. She is wearing a red sweatshirt and I notice that her hair has grown out a bit. The sunlight must be glinting on my field glasses, for as I watch she smiles slightly and raises one hand to wave at me even though I am still a quarter of a mile away.

  I set the glasses back in their case and drive on. To my right, in one of the deep pools far out beyond the quicksand flats, a long-necked plesiosaur, perhaps of the alasmosaurian variety, lifts a flat head studded with its fish-catching basket of teeth, peers nearsightedly across the flats at the sound of my Jeep’s engine, and then submerges again in the murky water. I stop a moment to watch the ripples but the head does not reappear. Behind me, where the Flatirons and Boulder once were—will someday be—something roars a challenge in the forest of cycads and ferns.

  Focusing on the dot of red high on the miracle that is Mont-Saint-Michel, imagining that I can see her waving now—somehow seeing her clearly even without the field glasses—I get the Jeep in gear and drive on.

  Introduction to “Orphans of the Helix”

  ...............................

  This story started—as all stories do—as a vague rumination, quickened into focus during a Star Trek: Voyager telephone pitch, was midwifed into existence by Robert Silverberg, and finally resulted in me missing the Ninth Annual Lincoln Street Water Fight. It is, I think, a decent story, but it wasn’t worth missing the water fight.

  Some readers may know that I’ve written four novels set in the “Hyperion Universe”—Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. A perceptive subset of those readers—perhaps the majority—know that this so-called epic actually consists of two long and mutually dependent tales, the two Hyperion stories combined and the two Endymion novels combined, broken into four books because of the realities of publishing. An even smaller subset of readers might know that I’ve vowed not to write any more novels set in this Hyperion universe for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that I don’t want to dilute any existing vitality of the epic in a series of profitable but diminishing-returns-for-the-reader sequels.

  Still, I never promised not to return to my Hyperion universe via the occasional short story or even novella-length tale. Readers enjoy such universes and miss them when they’re gone (or when the writer who created them is gone forever) and this nostalgia for old reading pleasures is precisely what gives rise to the kind of posthumous franchising—the sharecropping-for-profit of a writer’s original vision—that I hate so much in today’s publishing. But the occasional short work in an otherwise “completed” universe is my attempt at a compromise between retilling tired fields and completely abandoning the landscape.

  Or something like that.

  At any rate, this idea for a future Hyperion story had not yet become that supersaturated solution necessary before writing can commence, when a Star Trek producer contacted me about suggesting and writing an episode for their Voyager series. I had been contacted by the Star Trek people before and had had to beg off from even discussing such involvement, because of imminent novel deadlines or a film script I was working on or whatever.

  Now, I’ve been known to say unkind things in public places about the Star Trek universe—calling Star Trek: The Next Generation the “Neutered Generation” in one guest of honor speech, for instance, or admitting in an interview that I saw Gene Roddenberry’s much-loved vision of the future as essentially fascist. Perhaps the producers had forgiven me for those comments. Or much more likely, probably no one involved in the Star Trek business had ever come across them. In any event, they invited me to come to L.A. to “do a pitch” (a phrase I adore for its appropriate inanity) for their program Star Trek: Voyager and, when I sai
d that I didn’t have time for such a trip, allowed me to do one over the telephone.

  In the meantime, they sent me about ten volumes of Star Trek background material—the “Bible” for the show, tech manuals, character outlines, synopses of previous and future episodes, diagrams and floorplans of Voyager—the whole nine yards. I admit that I enjoyed skimming through all this stuff, especially the “scientific explanation” of such fantasy gimmicks as the transporter and warp drive and so forth. It’s part of the appeal of Star Trek—all the Star Treks—that there seems to be a complex universe there with rules and limitations and textures only partially glimpsed by the viewer. That is, I think, what fuels so much of the fannish speculation—whether the homoerotic fanzine tales concerning the original crew’s characters or the endless variations on gaming.

  So, the producer called me at the appointed date, although I admit that I had all but forgotten about the impending pitch.

  “Essentially,” I said, “I’d like to script an episode in which the Voyager crew doesn’t get its umpteenth failed chance to get home, but gets an opportunity to get outside the stupid ship.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” said the producer. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean even though the sets are getting bigger and they have the holodeck and all, these characters are still Spam in a can,” I said. “These guys spend years—freaking years—in corridors and turbolifts and on that boring post-modernist bridge. Their private quarters look like rooms in a Holiday Express. What if they had the chance to leave the ship forever and get out into space?”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah,” said the producer. “Go on.”

  “Okay,” I say, getting the pitch-virus now, warming to the wonderfulness of my own imagination, “say the Voyager has to drop out of warp drive and visit a planetary system to replenish its dilithium crystals or to clean the barnacles off its anti-matter nacelles or to get fresh water or whatever the hell reason you’ve always got them diverting into harm’s way…”