Where (26 page)

Shit. He's been lost inside his head for so long that he comes back into himself with the roar of a felled ox: “Agh!”

Grief brings him to his feet.

Blinking, he turns, looking out over the water like any tourist waiting for the sun to drop; that's what normal people do. So he is watching as something breaks the surface of the tidal basin— a pair of foreign objects at first then more of those …

Shapes, he thinks, gliding toward him in an odd formation, as though a school of fish has come into the tidal basin, more and more surfacing in a neat, geometric design— a triangle, or a wedge advancing, point first. At first the shapes look like domes, but as they glide into the shallows, the domes become heads and then the shoulders emerge and then bodies, more and more showing, dozens surfacing to march in like a legion of dreamers unless it's an advancing army, then, my God!

It's them.

As they approach, Dave is struck by the configuration.

Wait!

Just as he was acknowledging his loss and learning to live with it, Merrill Poulnot emerges, whole and drenched and radiant. She is in the lead— does she see him? Never mind! He heads for the water, floundering in an attempt to run through the mud. He's so slow, he is too slow!

Then the apex of the triangle sorts itself out into two figures, not one. Advancing through the water smoothly, like dancers, she and Rawson Steele are linked.

Not missing. Not forever. They are this. Here.

Years will pass before overt and covert government agencies, journalists and ambitious writers of every kind, psychologists, anthropologists, historians and voyeurs leave off grilling bemused Kraven islanders, but none of them seems able to recall or recognize the mechanics behind their mysterious disappearance or remember even the shape of where they'd been or what happened to them while they were gone.

Mired in the mud, stolidly watching the— approach, Dave grieves for everything he's lost. He will do whatever it takes— he'll do anything to get her back.

 

Acknowledgments

Every novel has to start somewhere, but I'll begin with a brief historical note. Back in the day, some ten years after David Hartwell turned up at Wesleyan for an SF event I'd organized, I met John Silbersack in David's office.

Like all the others,
Where
started inside my head, and grew with the encouragement of Joe Reed, my traditional first reader and live-in cheerleader. The first draft passed through the hands of novelist Kate Maruyama, a born story editor with narrative skills sharpened by years as a development exec in Los Angeles. I owe a lot to this most excellent friend and colleague, my daughter. And to Ko Maruyama for
Gaijin Samurai
expertise.

Thanks to Marco Palmieri and Christopher Morgan at Tor for helping all this happen, and thanks to Erhard Konerding, Documents Librarian, and Alec McLane, Music Librarian and Director of World Music Archives, for inside information on the music scene.

Now, back to the future: My special thanks to John Silbersack of Trident Media for his enthusiasm and his close, perceptive readings, and to David Hartwell for all of the above and for publishing, boosting and hanging out with us ever since the early seventies. I thank my stars for the alchemy that brought the three of us together.

 

Two friends, both named in this volume, noted the central obsession that drives it, a thread that runs through much of my fiction. One knew the backstory, the other did not, and I'm adding this story by way of explanation.
Where
unfolds in the narrative
now.
It's set in the South Carolina low country and in the desert compound, with characters you know by this time— well, all but one of them. “Military Secrets” unfolds in the same world as the novel, but with a different cast, and a setting that morphs as you read it, and yes, I use a first-person narrator. The story, first published in
Asimov's Science Fiction
, identifies the obsession— no, the engine that drives this novel.

— KR

MILITARY SECRETS

When the first bell rings, Mother Immaculata marches us outside for a special announcement. We have to line up on the playground according to size. While the taller kids file into rows behind us, we shuffle in place, wondering.

What is this, anyway? That “special,” attached to “announcement.” Will it be a surprise day off? Games instead of times tables or just ice cream at lunch? Maybe it's a field trip, orange busses lined up to take us all to Water World? Or …

My gut stutters. The biggest thing.

Then Mother Immaculata says, “Everybody whose father isn't dead, take one step forward,” and everybody in the front row steps forward but me.

God, don't make me throw up.

She repeats the way nuns do, in case you didn't get it. “Jessie, I
said,
everybody whose father isn't dead…” Then she drops her arm like a starter's flag. Our whole long row marches off the playground and up the ramp into the gym. I can't.

I have to stay where I am with the second row running up my heels. There are more kids lined up behind them, row after row, up to ninth grade. Even Mother Immaculata is impatient, but I can't move. She comes down on me so fast that her big fat rosary rattles. She grabs my shoulder, hard and turns me around. “See that?”

It's a square of red tape laid out on the tarmac next to the bleachers. “Yes, Stir.”

She gives me a push. “Into the box.”

He isn't dead, I just don't know where he is, OK?
“Yes, Stir.”

For a long time, I'm the only one in the box.

*   *   *

When I was nine, the doorbell rang in the night. I went running down, but Western Union was gone. There was more in the telegram than she ever told, but I didn't know. That night she said it was just Uncle Forrest, investment things, now go back to bed. She waited until morning to tell me anything at all.

I was eating my cornflakes in the sunshine when she began. The Navy thinks Daddy's missing in action, she said, Don't worry, eat your breakfast, it's probably a mistake. I think she said, It says they just lost track of him, that's all, but she never explained. Then she went back inside herself and slammed all the doors. Daddy was “missing,” she told me every time I asked; that's all she said.

*   *   *

I had to wait until she died to read the telegram. After the funeral I went through her things, which you do when your only mother dies. I found letters she wrote to the Navy Department in the same carton; carbon copies, neatly stored. When the Navy declared he was officially dead, she kept writing. She followed up on rumors, reported sightings, fresh details from classmates who had made it home; for decades she numbered reasons to believe
MISSING
meant exactly that.

Lost means they will find him, right?

*   *   *

Right.

This is how kids think. It's how I thought.

All the telegram said, Mother told me the next day, was that they didn't know where Daddy was. She finally got up and put on lipstick the day after: she said, Don't worry, they're out looking for him right now. I wrote the rest inside my head every day after that. His nice new submarine could be silent running, he's out there, but it's a military secret. He'll come back and tell us all about it. Unless he's on a desert island somewhere— accident at sea, he and his crew are stamping SOS into the sand— unless they're bobbing on life rafts because something hurt the sub. Living on fish and rainwater. People in books did that, and Americans in prison camps gave their name and rank and serial number and they never gave in. Skippers helped their men no matter what the guards tried on them, they worked together to escape. He and his crew could be tunneling out right now, crawling on their elbows through deep sand. If not, we would go in and rescue them as soon as we won the war.

Three weeks after we got the telegram, the mailman brought us letters from Daddy, and, look. They were postmarked two days after Mrs. Simpson struggled up our front steps with her sympathy casserole. First proof.

*   *   *

He's still out there.

*   *   *

It was only Thursday, so I made peanut butter and jelly on saltines and went to school.

When you're little, missing in action means a lot of things; the one thing it doesn't mean is dead.

They're out there looking for him, right?

So I went into Sister Marcella's room like always and sat in my same desk in the back, between Teeny Shail and Betsy Braswell. We ate on our same bench by the lunchroom window, and I didn't talk about the telegram, so they didn't have to know. See, officers' children don't cry. When he left for California I felt awful, but officers' children don't cry, not even when you can't see. He's counting on us to be brave. Besides, for all I knew they were finding him that very day, pulling him out of the water while I messed up long division or copied the names of the state capitals off the board. After the last bell I ran all the way home. It would be over and the kids would never even know.

Mother would come running out to tell me they made a mistake and we'd have waffles and cocoa to celebrate.

Instead it was big old Mrs. Simpson from across the street with a casserole, she was on our front porch, sniffling. She could hardly wait to say You poor thing, and she got upset because I wouldn't cry with her and I didn't let her inside. I had to take the casserole to make her go away. Mother was still in her room with the shades down,
Don't bother me
. She didn't come out for supper so when it got dark I had casserole and went to bed because tomorrow I had school.

Next day Sister Marcella popped out of the double front doors at St. Paul's too fast, like she'd been lying in wait. She knelt down in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of me so I couldn't get past. Kids started piling up behind. I guess she wanted to hug, but this dry cleaning smell came up from her habit along with other smells so I couldn't. Her face kept sliding around.
Oh, don't! Sister Marcella, don't cry.
Thank God she didn't. It was just an almost, which was good. Then she opened her mouth and words fell out. “Oh you poor child, you've lost your father,” like it was something I did.

Then she pinned a Miraculous Medal on my collar and told me to be brave, right out where everybody could see. Kids stared, all but the ones that wouldn't look at me.

The Friday paper was on the bulletin board so it was the first thing everybody saw. His picture was up there on the front page. It didn't make it true, but now everybody knew. I don't know why it made me feel guilty. You just do.

I got through the rest of that year thinking,
If
one more kid
in our school got the telegram, at least there would be two of us, but that year, nobody did.
Hope made me savage. In fifth grade, I thought at least one transfer kid would come and I'd see it in his face. He'd walk into our classroom and we'd both know and I wouldn't have to be the only one. I hated it. Other kids' fathers got blown out of the sky or shot dead in combat all the time and our school would have a Mass for him, but we are not the same. When they tell your mother that he's Killed in Action, at least you know.

Missing is still out there, no matter what they say.

You miss him every day. Even after you find the telegram she kept:
AND PRESUMED DEAD
you play out the possibilities. You think, One day he'll walk through that door. You keep thinking it long after you look up and do the math. You're the exact same age he was when he got lost. Older, then much older, but still … Then you consider what time has done to him, what he looks like now and what he needs, but that's OK. You won't care what he looks like or how hard it is, when he walks in that door you'll be glad. You spin out the years thinking,
I will take care of him.

By the time Mother Immaculata was done that day there were three of us standing in the red tape box, watching the ordinary people follow Mother Immaculata back into the building, row on row, leaving us exposed— two big kids from the middle school: this girl Dorcas and Bill, who's tall as a tenth grader, and me.

*   *   *

At the top of the ramp Mother Immaculata sees the last row up the ramp and back into regular life inside. Then she turns and gives us a look. We shuffle, not exactly looking at each other, frightened and excited—
You too!
— and ashamed because we're both girls but we're nothing alike, gaudy Dorcas with your uniform skirt rolled way up above your knees.

No. We are alike, we just didn't know.

Mother Immaculata doesn't say our names, but we can feel her eyes on us. We have our orders. “You wait.”

Either the tarmac grows or we shrink.

When the doors shut on the mother superior her building goes away, leaving us three alone on the playground. For reasons. There's nothing in sight to remind us where we are, which town in what state, or even what country. There's just us three eddying on the tarmac, and at the far end of the playground, a bus. Did that bus pull up while we were watching Mother Immaculata direct traffic away from us, or has it been out here the whole time?

It's a gray steel cylinder with darkened windows, sleek as a bullet and all of a piece, everything tightly sealed until we're close enough. Odd: it hasn't moved. Neither have we, but here it is. The doors pop open.

It's for us.

We climb on board, in hopes.

The doors whish shut on our heels and the motor starts before we can make it up the steps, but you get used to that. When you're a kid you can't ask for explanations. You do as you're told.

*   *   *

The inside of the bus is even darker than the steely shell. As we come up the steps Dorcas tries, “hello?” Nobody speaks. We blunder down the aisle all pardon me, excuse me, looking for seats. Nobody moves, even when Bill fake-loses his balance and bumps them so he can fake-apologize.