Things Will Never Be the Same Page 10

  “I’ve been thinking about this since we found it,” said MIK. He turned it in his good hand, barely able to see its outline. “I wonder what else we lost at the crater.”

  “Lots of stuff,” said GUF. “But we did get to keep this.”

  “This was supposed to last for a long time,” said MIK, “and tell what people were like for future ages? Then the people who put this there must really have liked the man who thought us up?”

  “That’s for sure,” said GUF.

  “And me too, I wonder?”

  “You probably most of all,” said GUF.

  MIK smiled. The smile froze. The eyes went dark, and a thin line of condensation steam rose up from the eartracks. The hand gripped tightly on the cup.

  Outside, the people began to sing a real sad song.

  * * *

  It was a bright sunny morning. GUF put flowers on MIK’s and DUN’s graves at the top of the hill. He patted the earth, stood up uncertainly.

  He had replaced his frozen foot with a little wood-wheeled cart which he could skate along almost as good as walking.

  He stood up and thought of MIK. He set his carpenter’s cap forward on his head and whistled a little tune.

  He picked up his wooden toolbox and started off down the hill to build the kids a swing set.

  AFTERWORD

  This is the only story I ever sold to Playboy, and it was an accident.

  The first thing I ever sold was to Playboy in 1966, to “Playboy’s Party Jokes” (August 1966—guess which one’s mine!) I made $25.00 for about 25 words, a king’s ransom in 1966 real dollars.

  I also couldn’t buy a copy—I was still 19 and was visiting in California when it came out (Hi Paul, Hi Steve, Hi John Chambers and George Metzger, sorry you’re gone, Clint ). You could buy copies of Playboy in TX if you were 18 but you had to be 21 in CA, so I had to wait til I got back (after a 44-hour Greyhound Bus ride) to pick one up.

  Anyway: the accident. I wrote this story on March 8 and 10, 1983, it says here, for Michael Bishop’s (then-named by the publisher The Cosmopedia, the dumbest-assed name ever for an anthology—Mike thankfully got it changed to Light Years and Dark, before it came out, and by then I was in there with another story.) Anyway it was getting down to deadline time. (And since my story log says I did the “final draft” on March 18, I’d probably done the first draft and read it at some long-forgotten convention in Colorado or somewhere and revised it when I got back home.)

  Remember—this is an early draft here, much different. I sent it to Mike and he sent it right back, saying “It might as well be about a lawnmower, a powerwasher and a hedge-clipper” or words to that effect. Well, I sat right down and wrote him another story—“Helpless, Helpless”—that he couldn’t refuse.

  Meanwhile I’d sent the story off to my then-agent, the greatest one in the world, now retired, Joe Elder, and about a week later he called and said Playboy wanted it, with some revisions.

  I’d always assumed selling a story to Playboy would be one of the great experiences of my life. It didn’t happen that way; not because of them but because of me.

  I was behind on the deadline for my first solo novel Them Bones for Terry Carr’s second series of Ace SF Specials (the one that produced me, Gibson’s Neuromancer, Robinson’s The Wild Shore, Shepard’s Green Eyes, Swanwick’s In The Drift and others.) I wasn’t answering the phone. My personal emotional life was down the tubes—my girlfriend was waiting for another SF writer’s divorce—from a lady writer friend of mine, so they could move in together (she and the guy, 4000 mile away)—you know, the kinds of stuff people talk about when they say “glory days.”)

  Anyway, I’m dealing with all this, and Alice Turner, the fiction editor at Playboy (Bob Silverberg is an awe of her editing abilities, and anybody he’s in awe of I’m in awe of, because he has worked with, at least, every fiction editor in the field for the last fifty years) are taking the story through rewrites. One draft. More work on Them Bones, not answering the phone. 2 drafts. More work on the novel. New horrors! on the home front. 3 then 4 drafts. Terry has moved Them Bones’ place in the lineup from 1st to 2nd to 4th, in order of publication. After another draft on “HotP” I write a letter. I offer to pay Playboy back (the money was spent 6 months ago and at my current rate of income will take a couple of years to pay back . . .)

  “I think the story got better and better til about the 3rd draft; now I think it’s just getting different.”

  Alice, gracious woman that she is, agreed to take the fifth revised draft, which is what you just read.

  I finished Them Bones a couple of days later, too.

  Both “Heirs of the Perisphere” (with a great Brad Holland painting I couldn’t afford in a bazillion years illustrating it) came out in Playboy in 1985 and “Flying Saucer Rock And Roll” came out in Omni, too.

  The preliminary Nebula voting is over in 1986 and I get a phone call. Both stories are going to be on the Nebula ballot against each other for short story. Unless I withdraw one of them, which people are urging me to do, so as not to split my own vote.

  Ellen says “You’re shooting yourself in the foot.”

  “Do you want me to drop your story?” I ask.

  “Hell no!” Do you think Alice wants me to drop her story.

  “Hell no!”

  “You see my dichotomy, then?” I said.

  If both stories had been in one magazine or the other, I might have been tempted. But if you’ve read this far, you know what The Peoples’ Hero is going to do.

  I call the Nebula people back. If the voters got nothing better to do than put two of my stories up against each other, leave ’em there.”

  I lost the Nebula handily, splitting my own vote.

  This story was in some Bests of the Year, and a long time later Alice Turner put it in The Best Science Fiction from Playboy, which is what the book is, all that great Clarke and Silverberg and “The Fly” and—my only sale there. She didn’t have to do that, really, what with all the grief we both went through making the story what it is. Or, maybe that’s why.

  Either way I was goddam proud to be there.

  I did one very memorable reading of the story: I can do a pretty good MIK and a great GUF, but I’m weak on DUN. I gave a reading, and Lew Shiner was sitting beside me at the mike, which puzzled people. Lew had gone to a Dallas private school (the one that always called off classes if snow were seen within 50 miles of the Metroplex) and had given up his lunch money for a week—the amount some kid had demanded for teaching Lew to talk in a great Clarence Nash duck-voice. When I got to the DUN parts of the story, Lew let loose. The audience fell out of their chairs. It was great!

  Thanks, Lew.

  THE LIONS ARE ASLEEP THIS NIGHT

  The white man was drunk again. Robert Oinenke crossed the narrow, graveled street and stepped up on the boardwalk at the other side. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the white man raving. The man sat, feet out, back against a wall, shaking his head, punctuating his monologue with cursing words.

  Some said he had been a mercenary in one of the border wars up the coast, one of those conflicts in which two countries had become one; or one country, three. Robert could not remember which. Mr. Lemuel, his history teacher, had mentioned it only in passing.

  Since showing up in Onitsha town the white man had worn the same khaki pants. They were of a military cut, now torn and stained. The shirt he wore today was a dashiki, perhaps variegated bright blue and red when made, now faded purple. He wore a cap with a foreign insignia. Some said he had been a general; others, a sergeant. His loud harangues terrified schoolchildren. Robert’s classmates looked on the man as a forest demon. Sometimes the constables came and took him away; sometimes they only asked him to be quiet, and he would subside.

  Mostly he could be seen propped against
a building, talking to himself. Occasionally somebody would give him money. Then he would make his way to the nearest store or market stall that sold palm wine.

  He had been in Robert’s neighborhood for a few months. Before that he had stayed near the marketplace.

  Robert did not look at him. Thinking of the marketplace, he hurried his steps. The first school bell rang.

  “You will not be dawdling at the market,” his mother had said as he readied himself for school. “Miss Mbene spoke to me of your tardiness yesterday.”

  She took the first of many piles of laundry from her wash baskets and placed them near the ironing board. There was a roaring fire in the hearth, and her irons were lined up in the racks over it. The house was already hot as an oven and would soon be as damp as the monsoon season.

  His mother was still young and pretty but worn. She had supported them since Robert’s father had been killed in an accident while damming a tributary of the Niger. He and forty other men had been swept away when a cofferdam burst. Only two of the bodies had ever been found. There was a small monthly check from the company her husband had worked for, and the government check for single mothers.

  Her neighbor Mrs. Yortebe washed, and she ironed. They took washing from the well-to-do government workers and business people in the better section.

  “I shan’t be late,” said Robert, torn with emotions. He knew he wouldn’t spend a long time there this morning and be late for school, but he did know that he would take the long route that led through the marketplace.

  He put his schoolbooks and supplies in his satchel. His mother turned to pick up somebody’s shirt from the pile. She stopped, looking at Robert.

  “What are you going to do with two copybooks?” she asked.

  Robert froze. His mind tried out ten lies. His mother started toward him.

  “I’m nearly out of pages,” he said. She stopped. “If we do much work today, I shall have to borrow.”

  “I buy you ten copybooks at the start of each school year and then again at the start of the second semester. Money does not grow on the breadfruit trees, you know?”

  “Yes, Mother,” he said. He hoped she would not look in the copybooks; see that one was not yet half-filled with schoolwork and that the other was still clean and empty. His mother referred to all extravagance as “a heart-tearing waste of time and money.”

  “You have told me not to borrow from others. I thought I was using foresight.”

  “Well,” said his mother, “see you don’t go to the marketplace. It will only make you envious of all the things you can’t have. And do not be late to school one more time this term, or I shall have you ever ironing.”

  “Yes, Mother,” he said, Running to her, he rubbed his nose against her cheek. “Good-bye.”

  “Good day. And don’t go near that marketplace!”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The market! Bright, pavilioned stalls covered a square Congo mile of ground filled with gaudy objects, goods, animals, and people. The Onitsha market was a crossroads of the trade routes, near the river and the railway station. Here a thousand vendors sold their wares on weekdays, many times that on weekends and holidays.

  Robert passed the great piles of melons, guinea fowl in cages, tables of toys and geegaws, all bright and shiny in the morning light.

  People talked in five languages, haggling with each other, calling back and forth, joking. Here men from Senegal stood in their bright red hats and robes. Robert saw a tall Waziri, silent and regal, indicating the prices he would pay with quick movements of his long fingers, while the merchant he stood before added two more each time. A few people with raised tattoos on their faces, backcountry people, wandered wide eyed from table to table, talking quietly among themselves.

  Scales clattered, food got weighed, chickens and ducks rattled, a donkey brayed near the big corral where larger livestock was sold. A goat wagon delivered yams to a merchant, who began yelling because they were still too hard. The teamster shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his bill of lading. The merchant threw down his apron and headed toward Onitsha’s downtown, cursing the harvest, the wagoners, and the food cooperatives.

  Robert passed by the food stalls, though the smell of ripe mangoes made his mouth water. He had been skipping lunch for three weeks, saving his Friday pennies. At the schoolhouse far away the ten-minute bell rang. He would have to hurry.

  He came to the larger stalls at the far edge of the market where the booksellers were. He could see the bright paper jackets and dark type titles and some of the cover pictures on them from fifty yards away. He went toward the stall of Mr. Fred’s Printers and High-Class Bookstore, which was his favorite. The clerk, who knew him by now, nodded to Robert as he came into the stall area. He was a nice young man in his twenties, dressed in a three-piece suit. He looked at the clock.

  “Aren’t you going to be late for school this fine morning?”

  Robert didn’t want to take the time to talk but said, “I know the books I want. It will only be a moment.”

  The clerk nodded.

  Robert ran past the long shelves with their familiar titles: Drunkards Believe the Bar Is Heaven; Ruth, the Sweet Honey That Poured Away; Johnny, the Most Worried Husband; The Lady That Forced Me to Be Romantic; The Return of Mabel, in a Drama on How I Was About Marrying My Sister, the last with a picture of Miss Julie Engebe, the famous drama actress, on the cover, which Robert knew was just a way to get people to buy the book.

  Most of them were paper covered, slim, about fifty pages thick. Some had bright stenciled lettering on them, others drawings; a few had photographios. Robert turned at the end of the shelf and read the titles of others quickly: The Adventures of Constable Joe; Eddy, the Coal-City Boy; Pocket Encyclopedia of Etiquette and Good Sense; Why Boys Never Trust Money-Monger Girls; How to Live Bachelor’s Life and a Girl’s Life Without Too Many Mistakes; Ibo Folktales You Should Know.

  He found what he was looking for: Clio’s Whips by Oskar Oshwenke. It was as thin as the others, and the typefaces on the red, green, and black cover were in three different type styles. There was even a different i in the word whips.

  Robert took it from the rack (it had been well thumbed, but Robert knew it was the only copy in the store.) He went down two more shelves, to where they kept the dramas, and picked out The Play of the Swearing Stick by Otuba Malewe and The Raging Turk, or Bajazet II by Thomas Goffe, an English European who had lived three hundred years ago.

  Robert returned to the counter, out of breath from his dash through the stall. “These three,” he said, spreading them out before him.

  The clerk wrote figures on two receipt papers. “That will be twenty-four new cents, young sir,” he said.

  Robert looked at him without comprehension. “But yesterday they would have been twenty-two cents!” he said.

  The clerk looked back down at the books. Then Robert noticed the price on the Goffe play, six cents, had been crossed out and eight cents written over that in big, red pencil.

  “Mr. Fred himself came through yesterday and looked over the stock,” said the clerk. “Some prices he raised, others he liberally reduced. There are now many more two-cent books in the bin out front,” he said apologetically.

  “But . . . I only have twenty-two new cents.” Robert’s eyes began to burn.

  The clerk looked at the three books. “I’ll tell you what, young sir. I shall let you have these three books for twenty-two cents. When you get two cents more, you are to bring them directly to me. If the other clerk or Mr. Fred is here, you are to make no mention of this matter. Do you see?”

  “Yes, yes. Thank you!” he handed all his money across. He knew it was borrowing, which his mother did not want him to do, but he wanted these books so badly.

  He stuffed the pamphlets and receipts into his satchel. As he ran fro
m the bookstall he saw the nice young clerk reach into his vest pocket, fetch out two pennies, and put them into the cashbox. Robert ran as fast as he could toward school. He would have to hurry or he would be late.

  Mr. Yotofeka, the principal, looked at the tardy slip.

  “Robert,” he said, looking directly into the boy’s eyes, “I am very disappointed in you. You are a bright pupil. Can you give me one good reason why you have been late to school three times in two weeks?”

  “No, sir,” said Robert. He adjusted his glasses, which were taped at one of the earpieces.

  “No reason at all?”

  “It took longer than I thought to get to school.”

  “You are thirteen years old, Robert Oinenke!” His voice rose. “You live less than a Congo mile from this schoolhouse, which you have been attending for seven years. You should know by now how long it takes to get from your home to the school!”

  Robert winced. “Yessir.”

  “Hand me your book satchel, Robert.”

  “But I . . .”

  “Let me see.”

  “Yessir.” He handed the bag to the principal, who was standing over him. The man opened it, took out the schoolbooks and copybooks, then the pamphlets. He looked down at the receipt, then at Robert’s record file, which was open like the big book of the Christian Saint Peter in heaven.

  “Have you been not eating to buy this trash?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, yes? Or yes, no?”