The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (40 page)

When the company came out of the dugout, the thunder of the crowd was the biggest noise Varner had ever heard. There must have been thousands of them, clustered in different sections of the stadium and scattered among the trees in the outfield and lounging on blankets closer in toward the stage. Pujols stood on his dais and shouted through a bullhorn. “Traveling players have come to St. Louis to do a show just for us, people! They bring Shakespeare, and later – after the little ones are shuffled off to bed – some stories for grown-ups.” Whistles and cheers from the crowd overwhelmed Pujols’ voice. He calmed everyone down and said, “I hate introductions, so that’s as long as this one’s going to be. To the play!”

Adrenaline rippled through Varner as he waited in the wings while the tangle of mismatched lovers was introduced, and the mechanicals made their first appearance to plan their own play. He bounced on his toes as Fat Otis cleared the stage, then launched himself out onto the stage to meet the fairy played by his second cousin Ruby. The play was a hit. Nobody went up, everyone was funny, all the little bits of business Varner suggested went over like (as Varner himself would say) gangbusters. Whatever that meant. Varner had never performed before so many people, and never gotten such a raucous response to Puck’s merry malice. When he tore open the front of his costume to reveal the cardinal beneath, proclaiming that he would sweep the Cubs behind the door, the stadium erupted. They could hardly hear themselves through the last scene of the play, and Varner had to deliver his “If we spirits have offended” closing monologue at the top of his lungs, which took something away from the whimsical, mocking approach he preferred. Back in the club house, wiping off makeup and hanging costumes, everyone laughed and joked. Some performances were best forgotten as soon as they were over, but not this one. This one they’d remember.

Pujols burst in to slap backs and kiss the hands of the women. “Marvelous! Excellent!” he cried. Stopping in front of Varner, he winked. “The Cubs bit. I loved it! My dad would have laughed, how he would have laughed!”

“Thank you, sir,” Varner said. He couldn’t help smiling himself, even though he still didn’t like the change. How could you be upset about it when it made the audience so happy?

The entire camp showed up to hear Varner. Children sat down in the front, their parents and the older adults clustered near them, with the younger people hovering in the back so they could nip away to do the things young people always did when their elders were looking the other way. Varner told the Odyssey the way he had heard it from his father, who had memorized it during the Long Winter. He kept the expressions he’d loved hearing in his father’s voice: wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn, wily Odysseus, gray-eyed Athena. But his memory had never been as good as his father’s, so he made no attempt to quote long stretches from the poem. He told the story. Whatever his father had been, Varner was a storyteller. He spoke long into the night, beginning with Athena’s resolve and unfolding the story of Telemachus’ commitment to his mother’s honor and his father’s memory. It had been years since he had told the Odyssey, and it came to life differently in his mind this time through. He was both Telemachus and Odysseus, but doomed in both roles, eternally searching for a father who would never be found and a home that never was.

When it was over, he was hoarse, and a little drunk, and on the edge of tears. Varner, he told himself, you have lost both father and child. So you go chasing after a book about a man who cannot honor and avenge his father. You have let this drive you insane.

Out of the crowd, Marquez appeared to clap him on the shoulder and hand him a bottle. “Just the way it should be told. You are a real storyteller,” he said. “Go around, let everyone say thank you. Then you can come look at my books.” In a haze of exhausted revelation, Varner accepted the thanks and gifts of the audience. He fell into a routine: yes, very kind, thank you, very glad you came. When it was over, he followed Marquez to the blockhouse and waited while Marquez dragged a footlocker out from a corner of the hall. Opening it, Marquez stood back. “See?” he said. “Thirty books. No one for a hundred miles has this many.”

Varner approached the trunk preparing himself for disappointment. Probably he would find a Bible. There would be computer manuals, biographies of celebrities whose fame vanished with the Fall, guides to bettering your personality and your relationship with God and your family. That was all he ever seemed to find, when he found anything at all.

But on top of the neat stacks in the trunk, like a thunderclap rolling across forty years, lay a water-stained, mildewed, broken-backed, but completely readable
Collected Plays of William Shakespeare, volume IV
, containing – in addition to
As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well
, and
Measure for Measure –
the complete text
of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Two hours later, the last of his reservations were gone. Pujols had given him a cup of something warm and spicy, and Varner was drunk for the first time in his life. His father was standing on a picnic table performing his blank-verse version of the story of the Fall. Varner decided he was in love with one of the women bringing plates of smoked meat around. A crackling boom rolled across the sky and Varner looked up to see the fading glow of a fireball. Big one, he thought. We’d have felt that one if it hit. He tried to think of how many big impacts he’d seen or heard. A dozen, maybe? None of them compared to the original Fall, or to the five or six after it that merited the capital letter. The closest Varner had ever been to an impact was once in Michigan somewhere, when he was six or seven. He happened to be looking out from the beach across an immense lake, and a streak of fire from the sky raised a towering plume of steam. A few seconds later, he heard the sound of the impact, and a minute or so after that, huge waves started to roll up the beach. Laughing, Varner had run into the surf, but Fat Otis had caught him and told him that those kinds of waves could suck you right out with them. Another crackle, perhaps farther away or perhaps just from a smaller meteor, brought Varner back to the present. Fat Otis was looking over his shoulder to see if his wife was watching while he tried to get one of the serving women to sit on his lap. And now the list of drowned cities fair: New York, DC, Miami, Boston, Tokyo, Dakar, Lagos, Cape Town, Dublin, Hong Kong . . .

Then it was later, and the party had moved out into one of the enclosed parking lots at the back of the stadium. Trees and vines wove into the chain-link fencing and gave the space the feel of . . . well, they’d just done Midsummer. A fairy bower, or something. Varner was a little sick to his stomach. The sky was alive with shooting stars. Sometimes that meant an impact was on the way, according to Varner’s father. There was no way to know.

Sitting on the back of one of the wagons, Fat Otis was telling a version of the
Miller’s Tale.
Everyone was drunk. Varner found his wagon and crawled in to lie down. His stomach was roiling. A roar of laughter went up outside as Alison fooled Jenkin into kissing her nether eye. Varner rolled over onto his side, hoping to ease the pressure in his stomach. It wasn’t working. He got up and stumbled to an overgrown corner of the parking lot, where he puked his guts out and then rolled away from the mess, lying on his back and waiting for the shakes to go away. Never again, he thought. If this is drinking, I don’t want any part of it.

A commotion arose near the gate, which stood open to the street. Through the babble of voices, Varner heard the clop of horses’ hooves. Words started to jump out at him: filth, ungodly, sin . . . oh no, Varner thought.

Pujols started shouting, and then everyone else was shouting, and then as Varner started to get up and sneak back to the wagon gunfire exploded at the gate. Varner froze, then backed up into the brush. Horses screamed and people were screaming and the guns kept going off and then there was the sound of fire crackling. That was all he could take. Varner scrambled out of the brush and saw too many things all at once.

The wagons, burning. Pujols, dead among the hooves of a horse ridden by a cold-eyed man sighting down the barrel of his rifle at Varner.

Varner’s father, face down on the asphalt, one motionless arm outstretched toward the burning wagon.

Varner broke and ran, followed by the crack of the gunshot and the buzz of the bullet passing near his head. He scaled the fence and flung himself over the top of it, tearing his fingers on barbed wire. The fire crackled, the sound seeming to grow until just as his bare feet hit the ground outside the parking lot Varner understood that this crackle was coming from above and as that thought came to his mind the biggest sound he’d ever heard first knocked him off his feet and then blew him out like a candle.

*  *  *

Varner had nothing to trade but his rifle and Touchstone, neither of which he could live without, and he would not beg. So he asked Marquez for permission to copy the play from the book. Using the backs of the scraps and sheaves of paper he had collected over the previous four de cades, Varner wrote out the play over the course of three days. Every night he told a story – the
Miller’s Tale
, his father’s old version of the Fall, finally the
Iliad –
and every day he wrote until his eyes felt boiled and his fingers lost their strength. On the morning of the fourth day, he left. Instead of going to Cincinnati, he turned west, driving Touchstone along the old Turnpike until he turned south on the outskirts of Chicago and found passage on a boat down the Illinois River out of Peoria. Snow fell twice before he arrived there.

I have it, Varner thought when he was safely on the boat. But I am too old to play the role, and I have no troupe. It all comes to nothing, this striving after approval from people gone to dust. Yet I keep doing it. The whole reason for coming this way was so he could pass by the shipwreck castle and ask, as he did every year or two or three, whether there had been news of Sue.

He read the play over and over while the boat made its slow way down toward its confluence with the Mississippi at Grafton. Each reading, it seemed, was a litany of his sins. I have played the Dane, Varner realized. Since I was nineteen years old, that is all I have done. Once he stood on the deck of the boat, the pages held out over the water. Let it be gone, he said to himself – but could not make himself do it. The pilot, a boy of twenty-three, said, “What’s that?”

“A story,” Varner said. He looked at the pages, fluttering in a chill morning breeze, and at the swirl of water below them.

“What you want to throw it away for?” the pilot asked. “Tell it to me instead. What’s it called?”

“Hamlet,” Varner said.

“What’s it about?”

“A man whose father is killed, and he can’t figure out how to avenge him.” Still Varner held the pages out over the water. What would it be like to be free of them?

“Revenge is simple,” the pilot said. “You find the sonsofbitches and kill them, right?”

Later it would be called the Seventh Fall, although everyone knew that there must have been more, in other parts of the world. Varner remembered stealing shoes from a dead man partially buried in a drift of bricks. He remembered running, then being knocked down by aftershocks. A glow in the sky to the north turned him south, and by morning he had come to swampy bottomland where the angry Mississippi boiled and churned. Varner was hungry and lost. His father was dead. Everything was gone. He had no food and he knew better than to drink the water here. He climbed into the crook of a willow tree, high enough that he thought the water couldn’t reach him. I could die, he thought. He’d never been able to believe that he could really die until that moment. He felt the earth growling, and the willow tree swayed. Varner gripped the branch between his thighs and pressed his back into the trunk. His father was dead. Fat Otis was dead. Cousin Ruby was dead. Everything he had owned was burned. Pujols was dead. Who would live in the stadium? The river churned and roared. Dead animals floated in the foam, rolled over and disappeared. Varner leaned to one side, his shoulder coming to rest against a side branch. Would the Missionaries come looking for him? The sound of the bullet passing hung in his ears, became the whine of mosquitoes. Stop, Varner thought. All of it. Stop.

A voice called out to him, and Varner realized he’d fallen asleep. His skin was alive with mosquito bites. “Boy. Up there. You ever coming down?”

Varner looked down and saw that the river had risen during the day. It was getting dark, and in the deepening shadows, he saw a flat-bottomed boat with an old man standing in its stern holding a long pole that trailed into the water. The man lit an oil lantern. “Come on down from there,” he said. “River might keep coming up, and the snakes’ll be up in the trees if it does.”

“Snakes?” Varner said. He didn’t like the idea of snakes.

“Goddamn right, snakes,” the man said. “Why are you up there?”

“I was running away,” Varner said.

“From who?”

“Missionaries, I think. They – ” But before he could say it, a wave of grief welled up in Varner’s throat and choked away the words.

“All right, kid. All right,” the boatman said. “I know all about the Missionaries. You come with me. Come down from there before the snakes get you.”

He stopped at the old shipwreck, on the outskirts of a town once known as Herculaneum. Carl Schuler was dead, but his son John lived in the same part of the ship. He had been Varner’s favorite brother, and forty years on, they fell easily back into conversation even though they only saw each other every two or three years. The other two Schuler boys were dead, and one of the sisters. The other sister, Piper, was in another part of the ship with children and grandchildren of her own. “I heard a year or so ago about Sue,” John said before Varner could ask. “I heard river bandits got her up north somewhere, and her kids, too.”