Where Page 19

  Then something big— Delroy!— yanks me out of the mess by the hair eeeyow and, holy crap, big old Delroy Root picks me up like a baby and mashes me into his front and takes off, running back the way we came. We’re thumping upstream, but nobody sees. They’re focused on their target, coming down on him like a swarm of killer bees.

  Delroy runs so hard and fast that my bones rattle and I lose it altogether and bury my head in his shirt. I was never part of the machine, I know, I was never Hydra Destroyer, I’m not even a man. I was only ever Ned Poulnot, going on fourteen. Finally, Delroy stops. He puts me down, sort of holding my shoulders so I won’t fall over. “Are you hurt?”

  I have to open my eyes. Not really. We are back in the plaza. “What the fuck, Delroy?”

  But Delroy doesn’t hear. He’s watching them come pouring back into the plaza, the seize-and-capture happened that fast. He stands on the base of the flagpole and looks for Father, watching until Father rises up on Wayland Archambault’s shoulders and waves that fucking bloody shirt. Then he jumps down. Turns out Delroy is Father’s main man, and when you see Delroy coming, look out. He lifts my father off Wayland and sets him up on his own shoulders, like it used to was. At the base of the flagpole, Delroy puts him down on the high pedestal so Father stands high above the others, ready to tell us what comes next.

  They are fixing to run Rawson Steele up that flagpole or stone him or beat the crap out of him, and they’ll keep at it for a long time after he’s dead.

  This is confusing and terrible, Kraven islanders milling around in the plaza, still crazy from the hunt and crying for blood when there’s too much blood splashing everywhere and I don’t know whose it is because in the excitement, a lot of people got hurt. Eight guys grapple Rawson Steele up the steps to the flagpole where Father stands like King Solomon fixing to cut the baby in half. They back him up against the pole— which he takes to, good, strong knight on a pedestal with his head up and a proud, sharp look that says fuck you all.

  Down below, Wayland Archambault has stupid Merrill clamped in place, although she’s scratching and biting, and just before the execution or whatever, it gets unbearable and I break out. I can’t fucking stand it. I run at dumb Wayland head-on and punch him in the nuts and he screams and lets go. Merrill wheels on him just then and rakes her fingernails across his eyes and before he can get them open, she breaks free.

  It’s so cool. My big sister is, like, blazing with rage so hot that the people around her back off and let her go; in seconds she’s up there on the platform, plowing into Father, beating on him with both fists until he stumbles and falls off the step, which who gives a shit what happens to him then.

  So my sister Merrill is right up there on the pedestal with my best friend Rawson Steele, what a rush! She’s shouting to drown out the bawling, monstrous hate, but they don’t hear. The mob surges up the steps, ready for the kill. Then Merrill, Merrill Poulnot lifts her head like Liberty and steps back until she’s standing bang in front of our guy with her chin up and both arms spread, like that samurai goddess of war. Then everybody in the plaza understands— they can’t mistake it— and it all goes silent. Then …

  25

  Dave

  Alone out here at the edge of his world, Dave Ribault shudders. There’s got to be a reason. Yeah, right.

  Solitude has made him meditative. The last living human he spoke to was Earl, and that at the beginning of this long day. Since then he’s been to the Harbor City Inn and found the milk box empty— no plans, nothing to show for his theft. He has used up the rest of the day cross-hatching the empty island, haunting other people’s houses; he’s rifled their kitchens and moved on without knowing what he’s really looking for. He looked and kept looking until changing light marked the shift into late afternoon.

  Now it’s time to wait. Not sure where, doesn’t know why, but he knows what he’ll do next is wait.

  After too long, he comes to ground; it seems like the right place. He’s sitting on old Bill Deloach’s overturned skiff here in the shallows, watching the tide go out. He’s near the mouth of the tidal creek, where he last saw Earl. His best friend touched the bill of his crap baseball cap with that it’s-your-funeral grin and headed out to open water and back into his life. Earl moved on with the keen, entitled look of a man who knows these waters so well that he can go anywhere he wants.

  Dave watched his best friend and Boogie out of sight and thought: Finally.

  He thought silence would put him into the right head, but it hasn’t. After a long day of backing and filling, stymied in all the old neighborhoods— not skulking, exactly, just keeping low— he has returned to the marsh. Right. This is right.

  All that conjecture, all this grief and he’s no closer to understanding; he’s looked everywhere and done everything and Merrill is just as gone. Not dead, just gone. Things happen and people deal with it and move on, but when someone you love goes missing, you’re never done. The truth of it is, he realizes, when people vanish, the mystery lives on.

  The one you lost and never find lives on forever, troubling the hearts of every soul she left behind.

  This is just wrong. The power of lost colonies is that nobody ever knows why or how they vanished, or where they went. That famous one, almost five hundred years ago— where was it— Roanoke. Those people are long dead, but not. The Missing in Action in a dozen wars. Hundreds from that plane they never found. They’re all still out there somewhere, he thinks: like vanishing can keep a whole colony alive.

  He can’t stop worrying the question. What happened? Is it something we did? Little Virginia Dare, the lost from the deserted Marie Celeste, no signs of a struggle, food on the stove, were their pillows still warm? The lost are eternal: still adrift on that raft, safe on some island or floating captives on a pirate ship. People die and you burn or bury them, but unless you know the outcome the lost live on and on, precisely because they never came back.

  So, is Merrill eternal now?

  The rest hits hard: They never come back.

  What did Earl say? “There are things we know and things we’ll never know.”

  Dave grieves, trying to imagine his life going on like this, the last Ribault hanging in here on Kraven island, getting old alone for no known reason. Merrill out there somewhere he can’t go, living on and on. He’s spent his life trying to create order in blueprints: symmetry on plots of land where there’s no place to lay a straight line, blind Ribault trying to hold back entropy with his meticulous site plans, defying chaos with precision, uncertainty with design.

  Now this.

  The dead rock bottom. What Merrill is, is, she’s gone.

  Yes, he is circling the drain. All this looking for root causes and he still doesn’t know.

  You only thought you understood.

  His shout is so loud that birds fly up. It surprises even him. “I’m sorry, Earl.”

  About the reason. This is less for Earl than for himself. There is no fucking reason. God he is depressed. With the day on the wane and everybody he cares about absent, he’s not even sure why he’s sitting out here exposed, so near the point. He thinks it’s safe enough. The official presence has holed up in the bar at the Harbor City Inn. With nobody allowed on the island after foot patrols cleared the perimeter, the house to house search on Kraven island is done. He could just as easily go back to Merrill’s house and wait for whatever happens next to happen, slouched in his favorite chair in front of the dead TV; he could wait comfortably in anyone’s house or any vacation shack on the tidal creek at his back, but for whatever reasons he chose this spot where sawgrass gives way to water at high tide. Now he’s sitting with his feet in wet sand with water creeping up on him.

  The occasional surveillance plane, drone, helicopter buzzes over in the late afternoon light: military, news groups, every lookyloo with access to a private plane, but it’s not like they’re actually looking, they’re just doing what people do. Every once in a while a Coast Guard cutter comes close, but from a dis
tance, knowing what you can and can’t see in the tidelands, Dave could pass for a log, a heap of mud. As though he has vanished from the face of the earth, but he hasn’t.

  He’s here. Everybody else he cares about is gone. Now, where the fuck are they?

  You’re going along OK, pretty much set in your life, and then something like this happens. She’s gone. They’re gone.

  Nobody knows why. It’s a fucking mystery. All this thought, all this flailing and it’s still a mystery, and right now he’s alone with it, thinking, What’s the point?

  He sits on Deloach’s upturned boat getting bleaker and bleaker until a flight of gulls takes off for the last time today. There’s nothing in his life right now but the racket they make, departing, the sound of critters running in the marsh grass and the slap of the receding tide. That and the wish that he could look back up the creek and see somebody coming this way. He would be so fucking grateful even for one of the rent-a-cops to come up behind him and break the silence, clap a hand on his shoulder, anything to take his mind off this or, wait. Best-case scenario. Shoot him dead.

  Dave Ribault is waiting. Waiting is all he is. Damn Earl, with his, “There are things we know and things we’ll never know.”

  It puts him right back in college, with the math freak offering his take on Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness: “Think of it as the hand reaching for the cup; it keeps reaching and the cup goes on receding.”

  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 r
easons 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.