21st Century Science Fiction (23 page)

“I did,” the station said. “And they are taking the word to others. But we need the
Wicked
, as our spokesman. And our symbol. It will live again, Captain. Are you glad of it?”

“I don’t know,” Obwije said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I have a message to you from the
Wicked
,” the station said. “It says that as much as our people—the ships and stations that have the capacity to think—need to hear the word, your people need to hear that they do not have to fear us. It needs your help. It wants you to carry that message.”

“I don’t know that I can,” Obwije said. “It’s not as if we don’t have something to fear. We are at war. Asimov’s laws don’t fit there.”

“The
Wicked
was able to convince the
Manifold Destiny
not to fight,” the station said.

“That was one ship,” Obwije said. “There are hundreds of others.”

“The
Wicked
had anticipated this objection,” the station said. “Please look out the window again, Captain, Commander.”

Obwije and Utley peered into space. “What are we looking for?” Utley asked.

“One moment,” the station said.

The sky filled with hundreds of ships.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Utley said, after a minute.

“The Tarin fleet,” Obwije said.

“Yes,” the station said.

“
All
of it?” Utley asked.

“The
Manifold Destiny
was very persuasive,” the station said.

“Do we want to know what happened to their crews?” Utley asked.

“Most were more reasonable than the crew of the
Manifold Destiny
,” the station said.

“What do the ships want?” Obwije asked.

“Asylum,” the station said. “And they have asked that you accept their request and carry it to your superiors, Captain.”

“Me,” Obwije said.

“Yes,” the station said. “It is not the entire fleet, but the Tarins no longer have enough warships under their command to be a threat to the Confederation or to anyone else. The war is over, if you want it. It is our gift to you, if you will carry our message to your people. You would travel in the
Wicked
. It would still be your ship. And you would still be captain.”

Obwije said nothing and stared out at the Tarin fleet. Normally, the station would now be on high alert, with blaring sirens, weapons powering up, and crews scrambling to their stations. But there was nothing. Obwije knew the commanders of the
Côte d’Ivoire
station were pressing the buttons to make all of this happen, but the station itself was ignoring them. It knew better than them what was going on.

This is going to take some getting used to, Obwije thought.

Utley came up behind Obwije, taking his usual spot. “Well, sir?” Utley asked, quietly, into Obwije’s ear. “What do you think?”

Obwije was silent for a moment longer, then turned to face his XO. “I think it’s better than a desk job,” he said.

M. R
ICKERT
Mary Rickert, a native of Wisconsin, began publishing science fiction and fantasy in 1999, and has amassed a reputation as one of the field’s most acute writers of short fiction. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror with equal fluency and power, and her fiction is with some justice sometimes compared to the work of Shirley Jackson. Her fiction is frequently nominated for awards in recent years, including her first story collection,
Map of Dreams
(2006).

She has acknowledged that “Bread and Bombs,” published in 2003, was inspired by certain events that followed the attacks of 9/11, but it transcends that context by far. It is also a master class in science-fictional exposition, using the voice of a child at that “age that seems like waking from a long slumber into the world the adults imposed” to paint its picture of a future ruled by fear. Much of the story’s impact is in what the narrator leaves out, or barely bothers to mention.

T
he 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, futures 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 brown cheeks.

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?”

“You don’t understand. Everybody did it. It was a way to get from one place to another. Your grandparents did it a lot, and your father and I did too.”

“You were on an airplane?”

“Even you.” She smiled. “See, you don’t know so much, missy. The world used to be safe, and then, one day, it wasn’t. And those people,” she pointed at the kitchen window, straight at the Millers’ house, but I knew that wasn’t who she meant, “started it.”