"You couldn't make music?"
Allegra didn't look up. "No. Oh, I could still play..." she picked up her flute from where she had placed on the table "...but nothing new came to me, just variations of things I'd done before. And when it became obvious to everyone that I was blocked, all the people I thought were my friends went away, and I was alone."
"What about your family?"
She felt wetness at the corners of her eyes. "No family. I never made time for that. Too busy. There was once someone I loved, but..." She took a deep breath that rattled in her throat. "Well, it wasn't long before he was gone, too."
Allegra picked up the napkin from her lap, daubed her eyes. "So I decided to leave everything behind, go as far away as I could. The Union Astronautica had started the public lottery for people who wanted to come here. The selection was supposed to be totally random, but I met someone who knew how to rig the system. I gave him everything I'd owned so that I'd get a winning number, then took only what I could carry in my bag. And...well, anyway, here I am."
"So why are you here?"
Allegra gazed across the table at Sissy. Hadn't she heard anything she had just said? Just as on Earth, everything she did was pointless: another exercise in self-indulgence. Yet she couldn't bring herself to scold her neighbor. It wasn't Sissy's fault that she was disturbed. Someone had hurt her a long time ago, and now...
"Excuse me. I think I need to visit the privy." Allegra pushed back her chair, stood up. "If you'd gather the dishes and put 'em over there, I'll wash them tomorrow."
"Okay." Sissy continued to stare at her. "If there's any food left, can I give it to my chickens?"
"Sure. Why not?" She tried not to laugh. Her best friend was a lunatic who cared more about her damn birds. "I'll be back," she said, then opened the door and stepped outside.
The night was darker than she'd expected; a thick blanket of clouds had moved across the sky, obscuring the wan light cast by Bear. She regretted not having carried a lamp with her, yet the privy was located only a couple of dozen feet behind her house, and she knew the way by memory.
She was halfway across the back yard, though, when she heard the soft crackle of a foot stepping upon dry grass, somewhere close behind her.
Allegra stopped, slowly turned...and a rod was thrust against her chest. "Hold it," a voice said, very quietly. "Don't move."
Against the darkness, she detected a vague form. The rod was a rifle barrel; of that she was certain, although she couldn't see anything else. "Sure, all right," she whispered, even as she realized that the voice had spoken in Old English. "Please don't hurt me."
"We won't, if you cooperate." We won't? That meant there were others nearby. "Where's Cecelia?"
"I don't..." It took Allegra a moment to realize that he meant Sissy. "She's gone. I don't know where she is...maybe at the fiesta."
By now her eyes had become dark-adapted, and she could make out the figure a little better: abearded young man, probably in his early twenties, wearing a catskin serape, his face shrouded by a broad hat. She carefully kept her hands in sight, and although he didn't turn it away from her, at least he stepped back a little when he saw that she wasn't armed.
"I rather doubt that," he murmured. "She doesn't go into town much."
"How would you know?"
A pause. "Then you know who I am."
"I've got a good idea...."
"Get this over, man," a voice whispered from behind her. "We're running out of..."
"Calm down." The intruder hesitated, his head briefly turning toward her cabin. "Is she in there?" She didn't answer. "Call her out."
"No. Sorry, but I won't."
He let out his breath. "Look, I'm not going to hurt her, or you either. I just want to talk to..."
"She doesn't want to talk to you." Allegra remembered the com Chris had given her. It was on her bedside table, where she had put it before she had taken her afternoon nap. Yet even if she could get to it, she wasn't sure how much difference it would make. The Proctors were a long way off, and these men sounded as if they were anxious to leave. "If you want to speak to her, you're going to have to go in there yourself."
He took a step toward the cabin. "Carlos, damn it!" the one behind her snapped. "We don't have time for this! Let's go!"
Carlos. Now she knew who he was, even if she had only suspected it before: Carlos Montero, one of the original settlers. The teenager who had sailed alone down the Great Equatorial River, charting the southern coast of Midland the year after the Alabama arrived. Like the other colonists, he'd vanished into the wilderness when the Glorious Destiny showed up. Now he was back.
"So you're Rigil Kent," she whispered. "Glad to make your acquaintance."
"Guess they found my note." He chuckled softly. "I imagine Chris doesn't have much good to say about me."
"Neither does his mother. Please, just leave her alone."
"Look, I don't want to push this." He lowered his gun. "Would you just deliver a message...?"
"Dammit!" Now the second figure came in sight; Allegra wasn't surprised to see that he wasn't much older than Carlos, also wearing a poncho and carrying a rifle. He grasped his friend's arm, pulling him away. "Time's up, man! Move or lose it!"
"Cut it out, Barry." Carlos shook off his hand, looked at Allegra again. "Tell her Susan's all right, that she's doing well, and so's Wendy. Tell her that we miss her, and if she ever changes her mind, all she has to do is..."
A brilliant flash from the direction of the landing field. For a moment Allegra thought someone was shooting off fireworks, then the hollow thud of an explosion rippled across Shuttlefield as a ball of fire rose above the settlement. She suddenly knew what it was: one of the Long Journey shuttles blowing up.
"That's it! We're out of here!" Barry turned to run, sprinting away into the dark marshland behind the shacks. "Go!"
Yet Carlos lingered for another moment. Now Allegra could see him clearly; there was a ruthless grin on his face as he looked at her one last time. "And one more thing," he said, no longer bothering to keep his voice low, "and you can pass this along to Chris or whoever else...Coyote belongs to us!" He jabbed a finger toward the explosion. "Rigil Kent was here!"
And then he was gone, loping off into the swamp. In another moment he had vanished, leaving behind the shouts of angry and frightened men, the rank odor of burning fuel.
Wrapping her arms around herself, Allegra walked back to the cabin. As she turned the corner, she was surprised to find Sissy standing outside the door. She watched the distant conflagration, her face without emotion. Allegra saw that she clutched her flute.
"He returned." Her voice was a hoarse whisper. "I knew he would."
"I...I saw him." Allegra came closer, intending to comfort her. "He was outside. He told me to tell you..." "I know. I heard everything...every word."
And then she raised the flute, put it to her mouth, and began to play the opening bars of "Jerusalem."
Flawlessly, without a single missed note.
The shuttle burned all night; by morning it was a blackened skeleton that lay in the center of the landing field. Fortunately the blaze didn't spread to the rest of Shuttlefield; Allegra would later learn that the townspeople, upon realizing that their homes weren't in danger, abandoned all efforts at forming a bucket brigade and spent the rest of the night dancing around the burning spacecraft, throwing empty ale jugs into the pyre. It was the highlight of First Landing Day, one which people would talk about for a long time to come.
Later that day, Chris Levin came out to check on his mother. She was through feeding the chickens, though, and didn't want to talk to him. The door of her shack remained shut even after he pounded on it, and after awhile he gave up and walked over to visit Allegra. She told him that they'd spent a quiet evening in her house, and were unaware of any trouble until they heard the explosion. No, they hadn't seen anyone; did he know who was responsible? Chris didn't seem entirely satisfied by this answer, but he didn't challenge it, either. Allegra returned the com he'd lent her, and he left once again.
In the months to come, as the last warm days faded away and the long autumn set in, she continued to make flutes. Once she had enough, she began selling them to shops and kiosks. Most of those who purchased them didn't know how to play them, so she began giving lessons, at first in Shuttlefield, then in Liberty. By midwinter she was holding weekly seminars in the community center, and earning enough that she was eventually able to quit her job as a dishwasher. Some of her students turned out to have talent, and it wasn't long before she had trained enough musicians to form the Coyote Wood Ensemble.
One morning, she awoke to see the first flakes of snow falling upon the marshes. Winter was coming, and yet she didn't feel the cold. Instead she heard a muse whose voice she hadn't heard in many years.
She picked up her flute, put it to her lips, and without thinking about what she was doing, began to play an unfamiliar melody; for her, it sounded like a song of redemption. When she was done, there were tears in her eyes. Two days later, she taught it to her students. She called the piece "Cecelia."
Yet despite invitations to move to Liberty, she remained in Shuttlefield, living in a small one-room cabin on the outskirts of town. Every morning, just after sunrise, she sat outside and waited for her neighbor to finish feeding the chickens. And then, regardless of whether the days were warm or if there was snow on the ground, they would practice together. Two women, playing the flute, watching the sun come up over Shuttlefield.
And waiting. Waiting for the return of Rigil Kent.
Bread and Bombs
M. RICKERT.
M. Rickert lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. She had only three stories published prior to 2003, but appeared almost every month in 2003 in Fantasy & Science Fiction, with a number of different and excellent stories, including "The Chambered Fruit," "The Super Hero Saves the World," and "Peace on Suburbia," work good enough to make her the hot new writer of the year in our opinion.
"Bread and Bombs" also appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction. The story's complex and resonant social criticism suggests a contrast to J.G. Ballard's Running Wild. Rickert's is excellent dystopian near-future SF told from the point of view of an adult recalling a terrible time from her childhood. A town's children have a social conscience that puts them at odds with paranoid adult society. The strange children of the Manmensvitzender family did not go to school so we only knew they had moved into the old house on the hill because Bobby had watched them move in with their strange assortment of rocking chairs and goats. We couldn't imagine how anyone would live there, where the windows were all broken and the yard was thorny with brambles. For a while we expected to see the children, two daughters who, Bobby said, had hair like smoke and eyes like black olives, at school. But they never came.
We were in the fourth grade, that age that seems like waking from a long slumber into the world the adults imposed, streets we weren't allowed to cross, things we weren't allowed to say, and crossing them, and saying them. The mysterious Manmensvitzender children were just another in a series of revelations that year, including the much more exciting (and sometimes disturbing) evolution of our bodies. Our parents, without exception, had raised us with this subject so thoroughly explored that Lisa Bitten knew how to say vagina before she knew her address and Ralph Linster delivered his little brother, Petey, when his mother went into labor one night when it suddenly started snowing before his father could get home. But the real significance of this information didn't start to sink in until that year. We were waking to the wonders of the world and the body; the strange realizations that a friend was cute, or stinky, or picked her nose, or was fat, or wore dirty underpants, or had eyes that didn't blink when he looked at you real close and all of a sudden you felt like blushing.
When the crab apple tree blossomed a brilliant pink, buzzing with honey bees, and our teacher, Mrs.
Graymoore, looked out the window and sighed, we passed notes across the rows and made wild plans for the school picnic, how we would ambush her with water balloons and throw pies at the principal. Of course none of this happened. Only Trina Needles was disappointed because she really believed it would but she still wore bows in her hair and secretly sucked her thumb and was nothing but a big baby.
Released into summer we ran home or biked home shouting for joy and escape and then began doing everything we could think of, all those things we'd imagined doing while Mrs. Graymoore sighed at the crab apple tree which had already lost its brilliance and once again looked ordinary. We threw balls, rode bikes, rolled skateboards down the driveway, picked flowers, fought, made up, and it was still hours before dinner. We watched TV, and didn't think about being bored, but after a while we hung upside down and watched it that way, or switched the channels back and forth or found reasons to fight with anyone in the house. (I was alone, however and could not indulge in this.) That's when we heard the strange noise of goats and bells. In the mothy gray of TV rooms, we pulled back the drapes, and peered out windows into a yellowed sunlight.
The two Manmensvitzender girls in bright clothes the color of a circus, and gauzy scarves, one purple, the other red, glittering with sequins came rolling down the street in a wooden wagon pulled by two goats with bells around their necks. That is how the trouble began. The news accounts never mention any of this; the flame of crab apple blossoms, our innocence, the sound of bells. Instead they focus on the unhappy results. They say we were wild. Uncared for. Strange. They say we were dangerous. As if life was amber and we were formed and suspended in that form, not evolved into that ungainly shape of horror, and evolved out of it, as we are, into a teacher, a dancer, a welder, a lawyer, several soldiers, two doctors, and me, a writer.
Everybody promises during times like those days immediately following the tragedy that lives have been ruined, fu- tures shattered but only Trina Needles fell for that and eventually committed suicide. The rest of us suffered various forms of censure and then went on with our lives. Yes it is true, with a dark past but, you may be surprised to learn, that can be lived with. The hand that holds the pen (or chalk, or the stethoscope, or the gun, or lover's skin) is so different from the hand that lit the match, and so incapable of such an act that it is not even a matter of forgiveness, or healing. It's strange to look back and believe that any of that was me or us. Are you who you were then? Eleven years old and watching the dust motes spin lazily down a beam of sunlight that ruins the picture on the TV and there is a sound of bells and goats and a laugh so pure we all come running to watch the girls in their bright colored scarves, sitting in the goat cart which stops in a stutter of goat-hoofed steps and clatter of wooden wheels when we surround it to observe those dark eyes and pretty faces. The younger girl, if size is any indication, smiling, and the other, younger than us, but at least eight or nine, with huge tears rolling down her browncheeks.
We stand there for a while, staring, and then Bobby says, "What's a matter with her?"
The younger girl looks at her sister who seems to be trying to smile in spite of the tears. "She just cries all the time."
Bobby nods and squints at the girl who continues to cry though she manages to ask, "Where have you kids come from?"
He looks around the group with an are-you-kidding kind of look but anyone can tell he likes the weeping girl, whose dark eyes and lashes glisten with tears that glitter in the sun. "It's summer vacation."
Trina, who has been furtively sucking her thumb, says, "Can I have a ride?" The girls say sure. She pushes her way through the little crowd and climbs into the cart. The younger girl smiles at her. The other seems to try but cries especially loud. Trina looks like she might start crying too until the younger one says, "Don't worry. It's just how she is." The crying girl shakes the reins and the little bells ring and the goats and cart go clattering down the hill. We listen to Trina's shrill scream but we know she's all right.
When they come back we take turns until our parents call us home with whistles and shouts and screen doors slam. We go home for dinner, and the girls head home themselves, the one still crying, the other singing to the accompaniment of bells.
"I see you were playing with the refugees," my mother says. "You be careful around those girls. I don't want you going to their house."
"I didn't go to their house. We just played with the goats and the wagon."
"Well all right then, but stay away from there. What are they like?"
"One laughs a lot. The other cries all the time."
"Don't eat anything they offer you."
"Why not?"
"Just don't."
"Can't you just explain to me why not?"
"I don't have to explain to you, young lady, I'm your mother."
We didn't see the girls the next day or the day after that. On the third day Bobby, who had begun to carry a comb in his back pocket and part his hair on the side, said, "Well hell, let's just go there." He started up the hill but none of us followed.
When he came back that evening we rushed him for information about his visit, shouting questions at him like reporters. "Did you eat anything?" I asked, "My mother says not to eat anything there."
He turned and fixed me with such a look that for a moment I forgot he was my age, just a kid like me, in spite of the new way he was combing his hair and the steady gaze of his blue eyes. "Your mother is prejudiced," he said. He turned his back to me and reached into his pocket, pulling out a fist that he opened to reveal a handful of small, brightly wrapped candies. Trina reached her pudgy fingers into Bobby's palm and plucked out one bright orange one. This was followed by a flurry of hands until there was only Bobby's empty palm.
Parents started calling kids home. My mother stood in the doorway but she was too far away to see what we were doing. Candy wrappers floated down the sidewalk in swirls of blue, green, red, yellow and orange.
My mother and I usually ate separately. When I was at my dad's we ate together in front of the TV which she said was barbaric.
"Was he drinking?" she'd ask. Mother was convinced my father was an alcoholic and thought I did not remember those years when he had to leave work early because I'd called and told him how she was asleep on the couch, still in her pajamas, the coffee table littered with cans and bottles which he threw in the trash with a grim expression and few words.
My mother stands, leaning against the counter, and watches me. "Did you play with those girls today?"
"No. Bobby did though."
"Well, that figures, nobody really watches out for that boy. I remember when his daddy was in high school with me. Did I ever tell you that?" "Uh-huh."
"He was a handsome man. Bobby's a nice looking boy too but you stay away from him. I think you play with him too much."
"I hardly play with him at all. He plays with those girls all day."
"Did he say anything about them?"
"He said some people are prejudiced."
"Oh, he did, did he? Where'd he get such an idea anyway? Must be his grandpa. You listen to me, there's nobody even talks that way anymore except for a few rabble rousers, and there's a reason for that. People are dead because of that family. You just remember that. Many, many people died because of them."
"You mean Bobby's, or the girls?"
"Well, both actually. But most especially those girls. He didn't eat anything, did he?"
I looked out the window, pretending a new interest in our backyard, then, at her, with a little start, as though suddenly awoken. "What? Uh, no."
She stared at me with squinted eyes. I pretended to be unconcerned. She tapped her red fingernails against the kitchen counter. "You listen to me," she said in a sharp voice, "there's a war going on."
I rolled my eyes.
"You don't even remember, do you? Well, how could you, you were just a toddler. But there was a time when this country didn't know war. Why, people used to fly in airplanes all the time."
I stopped my fork halfway to my mouth. "Well, how stupid was that?"