Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (499 page)

The agent was feeling expansive. They had suffered through everything the muffin migration could throw at them, and had survived. Next time, maybe next year, the larger, better equipped team that would arrive to relieve them would be properly informed of the danger and appropriately equipped to deal with it. What he and LeCleur had experienced was just one more consequence of being the primary survey and sampling team on a new world. It came with the job.

“Not visit!” Old Malakotee was emphatic. “You come with us now! Akoe protect you, show you how to survive migration. Go to deep caves and hide.”

LeCleur joined in. “We don’t have to hide, Malakotee. Not anymore. Even if the migration’s not over, it’s obviously passed this place by.”

“Juvenile migration passed.” Stepping back, Old Malakotee eyed them flatly. Outside, the younger Akoe were already clamoring to leave. “Now adults come.”

Bowman blinked, uncertain he had heard correctly. “Adults?” He looked back at LeCleur, whose expression reflected the same bewilderment his partner was feeling. “But—the muffins.” He kicked at the half dozen quiescent bodies scattered around his feet. “These aren’t the adults?”

“They juveniles.” Malakotee stared at him unblinkingly. His demeanor was assurance enough this was not a joke.

“Then if every muffin we’ve been seeing these past seven months has been a juvenile or an infant…” LeCleur was licking his lips nervously. “Where are the adults?”

The native tapped the floor with the butt of his staff. “In ground. Hibernating.” Bowman struggled to get the meaning of the alien words right. “Growing. Once a year, come out.”

The agent swallowed. “They come out—and then what?”

Old Malakotee’s alien gaze met that of the human. “Migrate.” Raising a multi-fingered hand, he pointed. To the southeast. “That way.”

“No wonder.” LeCleur was murmuring softly. “No wonder the juvenile muffins flee in such a frenzy. We’ve already seen that the species is cannibalistic. If the juveniles eat one another, then the adults….” His voice trailed off.

“I take it,” Bowman inquired of the native, surprised at how calm his voice had become, “that the adults are a little bigger than the juveniles?”

Old Malakotee made the Akoe gesture signifying concurrence. “
Much
bigger. Also hungrier. Been in ground long, long time. Very hungry when come out.” He started toward the doorway. “Must go quickly now. You come—or stay.”

Weak from fatigue, Bowman turned to consider the interior of the outpost; the ruined instrumentation, the devastated equipment, the masses of dead muffins. Juvenile muffins, he reminded himself. He contemplated the havoc they had wrought. What would the adults be like? Bigger, Old Malakotee had told them. Bigger, and hungrier. But not, he told himself, necessarily cuter.

Outside, the little band of intrepid Akoe was already moving off, heading at a steady lope for the muffin-bridged ravine, their tails switching rhythmically behind them. Standing at the door, Bowman and LeCleur watched them go. What would the temperature in the deep caves to the north be like? How long could they survive on Akoe food? Could they even keep up with the well-conditioned, fast-moving aliens, who were in their element running for days on end over the grassy plains? The two men exchanged a glance. At least they had a choice. Didn’t they? Well, didn’t they?

Beneath their feet, something moved. The ground quivered, ever so slightly.

* * * *

Copyright © 2000 by Thranx. Inc.; first appeared in
Star Colonies
; from EXECPTIONS TO REALITY; reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

(1951- )

Before my first year of college started I moved to Philadephia and got a job in a bookstore. Since I loved science fiction, I was quickly introduced to Greg Frost, who worked upstairs in the music department. At that point,
Lyrec
(1984) was out, and
Tain
(1986) was about to hit the bookstores. It had never occurred to me that a “real” writer would have to work in a bookstore to support himself—an important lesson for the aspiring writer I was at the time. Greg was amazingly generous with his time and advice, giving me the first really professional (and a little bit traumatizing) critique one of my stories had ever received. (There’s a reason he’s repeatedly asked to teach at Clarion.) He’s been just as generous with his friendship over the years, although happily enough his career has moved past the working-in-bookstores stage.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Greg went to Drake University to study art, intending to be a comic book illustrator. In his second year, he began to dabble with writing; in his third year, a fire in his apartment destroyed all his artwork, but left a single short story intact. Taking that as a sign, he enrolled in the writing program at the University of Iowa, earning his BA in 1976. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1975 and has returned several times as one of the instructors. Along with Judith Berman and Richard Butner, Greg also ran the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshops in the 1990s, and is very much a part of the vibrant Philadelphia-area science fiction community—as in Toronto, the Philadelphia writers are a fairly close-knit but friendly group, and there is a large and active Philadelphia fandom.

He works at Swarthmore College, where he is the Fiction Writing Workshop Director.

Much of Greg’s writing takes place at the intersection of fantasy, science fiction, and folklore.
Tain
and its sequels, for instance, are drawn from Irish folktales. Even in a straightforwardly SF story like “Madonna of the Maquiladora,” there are heavy overtones of faith and folklore, and our need to believe in other people’s visions.

First published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, May 2002

You first hear of Gabriel Perea and the Virgin while covering the latest fire at the Chevron refinery in El Paso. The blaze is under control, the water cannon hoses still shooting white arches into the scorched sky.

You’ve collected some decent shots, but you would still like to capture something unique even though you know most of it won’t get used. The
Herald
needs only one all-inclusive shot of this fire, and you got that hours ago. The rest is out of love. You like to think there’s a piece of W. Eugene Smith in you, an aperture in your soul always seeking the perfect image.

The two firemen leaning against one of the trucks is a good natural composition. Their plastic clothes are grease-smeared; their faces, with the hoods off, are pristine. Both the men are Hispanic, but the soot all around them makes them seem pallid and angelic and strange. And both of them are smoking. It’s really too good to ignore. You set up the shot without them knowing, without seeming to pay them much attention, and that’s when you catch the snippet of their conversation.

“I’m telling you,
cholo
, the Virgin told Perea this explosion would happen. Mrs. Delgado knew all about it.”

“She tells him everything. She’s telling us all. The time is coming, I think.”

Click
. “What time is that?” you ask, capping the camera.

The two men stare at you a moment. You spoke in Spanish—part of the reason the paper hired you. Just by your inflection, though, they know you’re not a native. You may understand all right, but you are an outsider.

The closest fireman smiles. His teeth are perfect, whiter than the white bar of the Chevron insignia beside him. Mexicans have good tooth genes, you think. His smile is his answer: He’s not going to say more.

“All right, then. Who’s Gabriel Perea?”

“Oh, he’s a prophet.
The
prophet, man.”

“A seer.”

“He knows things. The Virgin tells him.”

“The Virgin Mary?” Your disbelief is all too plain.

The first fireman nods and flicks away his cigarette butt, the gesture transforming into a cross—“Bless me, father…”

“Does he work for Chevron?”

The firemen look at each other and laugh. “You kidding, man? They’d never hire him, even if he made it across the Rio Bravo with a green card between his teeth.”

Rio Bravo is what they call the Rio Grande. You turn and look, out past the refinery towers, past the scrub and sand and the Whataburger stand, out across the river banks to the brown speckled bluffs, the shapes that glitter and ripple like a mirage in the distance.

Juarez
.

“He’s over there?”

“Un esclavo de la maquiladora.”

A factory slave. Already you’re imagining the photo essay. “The Man Who Speaks to the Virgin,” imagining it in
The Smithsonian
,
The National Geographic
. An essay on Juarez, hell on earth, and smack in the middle of hell, the Virgin Mary and her disciple. It assembles as if it’s been waiting for you to find it.

“How about,” you say, “I buy you guys a few beers when you’re finished and you tell me more about him.”

The second guy stands up, grinning. “Hey, we’re finished now, amigo.”

“Yeah, that fire’s drowning. Nothing gonna blow today. The Virgin said so.”

You follow them, then, with a sky black and roiling on all sides like a Biblical plague settling in for a prolonged stay.

* * * *

You don’t believe in her. You haven’t since long ago, decades, childhood. Lapsed Catholics adopt the faith of opposition. The Church lied to you all the time you were growing up. Manipulated your fears and guilts. You don’t plan to forgive them for this. The ones who stay believers are the ones who didn’t ask questions, who accepted the rules, the restrictions, on faith. Faith, you contend, is all about not asking the most important questions. Most people don’t think; most people follow in their hymnals. It takes no more than a fingernail to scrape the gilt from the statues and see the rot below. Virgin Mary didn’t exist for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus. She was fashioned by an edict, by a not very bright emperor. She had a cult following and they gained influence and the ear of Constantine. It was all politics. Quid pro quo. Bullshit. This is not what you tell the firemen, but it does make the Virgin the perfect queen for Juarez: that place is all politics and bullshit, too. Reality wrapped in a shroud of the fantastic and the grotesque. Just like the Church itself.

You went across the first time two years ago, right after arriving. The managing editor, a burly, bearded radical in a sportcoat and tie named Joe Baum took you in. He knew how you felt about the power of photography, and after all you’re the deputy art director. One afternoon he just walked over to your desk and said, “Come on, we’re gonna take the afternoon, go visit some people you need to see.” You didn’t understand until later that he was talking about the ones on film. Most of them were dead.

Baum covered El Paso cultural events, which meant he mingled with managers and owners of the
maquiladoras.
“We’ll have to get you into the loop. Always need pictures of the overlords in their tuxes to biff up the society pages.” He didn’t like them too much.

In his green Ford you crossed over on the Puente Libre, all concrete and barbed wire. He talked the whole time he drove. “What you’re gonna see here is George Bush’s New World Order, and don’t kid yourself that it isn’t. Probably you won’t want to see it. Hell, I don’t want to see it, and America doesn’t want to see it with a vengeance.”

He took you to the apartment of a man named Jaime Pollamano. Baum calls him the Chicken Man. Mustache, dark hair, tattoos. A face like a young Charles Bronson. Chicken Man is a street photographer. “We buy some of his photos, and we buy some from the others.” There were six or seven in the little apartment that day, one of them, unexpectedly, a woman. The windows were covered, and an old sheet had been stuck up on the wall. They’d been expecting you. Baum had arranged in advance for your edification. “What you’re gonna see today,” he promised, “is the photos we
don’t
buy.”

The slide show began. Pictures splashed across the sheet on the wall.

First there were the female corpses, all in various states of decay and decomposition. Most were nude, but they weren’t really bodies as much as sculptures now in leather and wood. The photographers had made them strange and haunting and terrifying, all at the same time. In the projector light you can see their eyes—squinting, hard, glancing down, here and there a look of pride, something almost feral. The woman is different. She stares straight at death.

“Teenage girls,” Baum told you while the images kept coming. “They get up at like 4 a.m. to walk for miles to catch a bus to take them to a factory by six. They live in
colonias
, little squatter villages made of pallet wood and trash. Most of these girls here were kidnapped on the way to work. Tortured, raped, murdered. Nobody goes looking for them much. Employee turnover in the maquiladoras is between fifty and a hundred and fifty percent annually, so they’re viewed as just another runaway chica who has to be replaced. The pandillas, the local gangs, get them, or federales on patrol, or even the occasional serial murderer. Who knows who? No one’s looking for her anyway, save maybe her family.”

All you could think to say was, “They’ve lost their breadwinner.”

Baum snorted. “That’s right. She worked a forty-eight hour week, six days, for about twenty-five dollars.”

“A day?”

“A
week
. Per day they make about four dollars and fifty cents. Not just these girls, you understand. All of ’em. All the workers.”

You tried to work that out, how they live on so little money. Finally you suggested, “The cost of living here is cheaper?” The handsome woman photographer’s eyes shifted to you, cold with disgust.

The pictures never stopped coming. You finally passed the gauntlet of dead women. Now it was a man dangling like a
piñata
from a power line. He’d been electrocuted while trying to run a line from a transformer to his home. Then other dead men. Some dying in the street with people all around them. Others dead like the women, executed, tortured, burned alive. You tried to look elsewhere as the images just kept slamming the wall. How many deaths could there be? Baum suddenly said, “Let me put the cost of living thing in perspective for you. You’re seventeen, you live in El Paso, you work six days a week all day and you buy your groceries and pay your bills on your thirty-five dollar paycheck. That’s adjusted gross to compensate for the differences in cost on our side of the river.

“On this side along the river there are over three hundred factories. Big names you know: RCA, Motorola, Westinghouse, GE. We use their products, we all do. They employ almost 200,000 workers, mostly female, living crammed into the
colonias
, altogether about two million people. That’s eighty percent unemployment, by the way.”

Between the images and the facts, you’re lost and grasping for some sort of reality. This is what a series of smiling presidents promised the world? Even as you flounder, the photos change course. A severed arm dangles from the big face of Mickey Mouse, both nailed to a wall; a clown head tops a barbed wire fence post, with laundry drying on the wire; a six-year-old holds a Coca-Cola can, only the straw’s going up his nose, and you can tell by his slack face that whatever’s in that can is fucking him up severely. The power of these images is in their simplicity: This isn’t art, it just
is
. All you could do was repeat the mantra that this is what art is
supposed
to do—shake you up, make you think differently. Make you sweat. Doing its job. God, yes.

Afterwards Baum introduced you to the photographers but the room stayed dark. You walked through the line, shaking hands, nodding, dazed. One man was drunk. Another, the feral one, had the jittery sheen of an addict. The woman hung back. Reality after that onslaught barely touched you.

Baum bought some of the pictures in spite of what he’d told you, paying far too much for them. Maybe he collected them—you were sure they weren’t going to get into the paper. You know what the paper will print. He walked you out, across the street, past his car and through the Plaza de Armas, the main square. It was a Friday night and there must have been a thousand people milling about. The ghosts of all those photos tagged along, bleeding into the world. The cathedral across the plaza was lit in neon reds, greens and golds, looking more like a casino than a church. Everywhere, people were selling something. Most of it was trash collected and reassembled into trinkets, earrings, belts, whatever their skill allowed. There were clowns on stilts wandering around. A man selling flavored ice chips. Baum bought two. Others sold tortillas, drugs, themselves. All of it smelled desperate. A lot of the crowd, Baum told you as you drove home after, were actually Americans. “They come across the border on Friday nights for a little action. The factory girls sell themselves for whatever extra dollars they can get from the party boys.”

You remember at some point in the drive asking him why the workers don’t unionize, and provoking the biggest laugh of all. “No union organizer would have a job by day’s end, is why. Some of them don’t make it home alive, either, although you can’t tie anything to the corporations that fire them. Just as likely they pissed off their co-workers by threatening the status quo. It’s happened before—whole shifts have been fired, everyone blamed for the actions of one or two. When you’re an ant, it doesn’t take a very big rock to squash you. My, what a glorious testament to American greed—and we’ve even kept it from crossing the border, too. So far.”

* * * *

That conversation comes back to you now, driving away from your drinks with the firemen. Gabriel Perea was an activist. In Baum’s terms, he was a dangerous man to himself and anyone who knew him. The Virgin turned him, saved him. She’s protecting him for something important. The firemen expect something between Armageddon and Rapture. Transcendence. All you know is that you want to get there before the Kingdom of Heaven opens for business.

* * * *

“P
ura guasa
,” Baum says when you tell him what you want to do. “Just a lot of superstitious chatter. Nonsense. I’ve heard about this guy before. He’s like an urban legend over there. They need for him to exist, just like her.”

Nevertheless, you say, it’s a great story—the kind of thing that could garner attention. Awards. The human spirit finding the means to survive in the maquiladora even if that means is a fantasy. Baum concedes it could be terrific.