“Why does he do it?” she asked.
“Dunno. Maybe it’s when Hell doesn’t want you, and Heaven is full. Maybe it’s when a good man does a bad thing. Do you think there is such a thing?”
She thought of Johnny. “Yeah.”
“I think he likes the game. Likes the suffering….” He paused. “You asked me earlier if he was death.”
“You said no.”
He nodded. “I think he’s the one that gets the in-betweens. Does that make sense?”
“No,” she lied, thinking of the look on Johnny’s face as he had hit that kid (man?) again. One time too many. One time when he must have known he was no longer a threat. He’d done it to protect her; she’d never doubted that. But in the darkest reaches of night, she’d sometimes thought he’d been almost glad it had happened, so that he could kill this man. Some party in his own head he’d brought back from the war, she thought, remembering Freddie’s earlier words.
“The ones that death, or whoever, just doesn’t know what to do with, whether to send them up or down.”
“Your friend saved your lives. He was a hero.”
He nodded. “And he killed a little girl he could have let live. But you’re right. He did a good thing and a bad thing. The question was, who cared?”
She looked at him, confused. “You cared, you and all the men in your troop.”
“And you care for your man?”
“I love him,” she said, and when that didn’t seem enough, she added, “More than you could know.”
He nodded again. “So, maybe that’s the answer.”
“What is?” she asked, but she was already getting it.
“A man who’s basically good. A man who has done a good thing, but with just too much badness. Someone who didn’t stop when they could have. And someone who loves that person. There’s the fun for that freak bastard.” He sighed. “Sometimes, you know, sometimes I think we went too fast.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll ask the question again, because it’s important. What you gonna do at the end of the river when you ain’t found him, what then?”
“I don’t even think about that. I will find him.”
“Uh-huh, that’s what we thought when we trekked triple time through the jungle. Never did, though.”
“Why you sayin’ this?”
“Because, in these many years since, I keep thinkin’ the same thing. Why did we give up when we got to the end?”
“Because you hadn’t seen him. He’d beaten you. You weren’t fast enough.”
“Probably you’re right. But what I keep thinkin’ is, what if he didn’t?”
“You mean … ?”
“You ever look back down the road when you’re drivin’ at night? You ever check that cracked rear-view?”
“I ….”
“We didn’t.”
She looked at him long and hard. She smoked a whole cigarette, he did too, and neither of them said a word. A fever of ideas beat in her mind like a drum. As she stubbed the cigarette out, she cursed. “I haven’t got time to think about what-ifs. I’ve got to go.”
“I could come.”
She didn’t even answer that, just grabbed the half-smoked pack and crammed it into her bag. Getting up, she turned to him. “Why do they call you crazy, anyway?”
He shrugged, shuffling to the side of the booth, leaning to the one next door and retrieving his wheelchair. “Search me, baby. Burn a few things down, kill a few animals, mummify your mother, and people just overreact so much ‘round these parts….”
She nodded, and a smile stole across her face. “Or sit in a bar waiting for travellers in distress.”
He nodded. “Who never take my advice anyway. I guess I must be crazy.”
“There’ve been others?”
“Just two, in twenty years or so. First fella went racing along the highway in his fast sports car, got to the end, then sat, and waited. Still waitin’ there when his wife died, I think. Too tricky to say where a river really ends. You got to stop him before he gets there.”
“And the second one?”
“She got to the end too. Didn’t see nothin’. I read she jumped off the old bridge there. Made news, her dying like that. Her husband slipping away the very next day after being in a coma for three weeks. She was half-crazy by the time I saw her, though. Wouldn’t listen. She was on speed so she could keep drivin’ all night.”
“Goodbye, Freddie.” She shook his hand. “Nice meetin’ you.”
“…but you wish you’d never had to. If you do see him, kill the sonofabitch for me, and come tell me about it someday.”
She turned and walked out, not slowing as she tossed the bills on the bar.
Outside, she took a large canister from the trunk and fed the car some water. She thought the head gasket had a minor crack that was going to grow into a big headache by the morning. She’d gotten lazy with the car maintenance since Johnny had started doing it. When the car had drunk all it wanted, she replaced the cap and climbed inside. She looked at the sky, black and bruised.
She turned the key, and the car started second time—best it had managed in a week. She thought for a moment and then was out of the car, running into the bar, shouting across the room, “Hey, old man, you want a ride?”
He was in his wheelchair now and pushed himself forward. “Which way you goin’?”
She looked at him a moment. “You’re navigating.”
Copyright © 2001 Simon Bewick
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Simon Bewick lives in Oxfordshire, England. He has had stories published in Strange Horizons, Blue Murder, Quantum Muse, and Digital Catapult, among others. He’s an e-mail fiend and welcomes any comments you might have. Simon’s previous publication in Strange Horizons was “Special Edition.”
Other Cities #1 of 12: Bellur
By Benjamin Rosenbaum
9/17/01
First in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.
The principal products of Bellur are: tensor equations; scarlet parrots; censorship; critiques of all sorts; and fine hats of pressed, dark-green moss. Its citizens are proud and haughty; they take Bellur gravely.
The Censors’ Building is in an olive grove gone wild (olive oil is no longer among the principal products of Bellur), and during their afternoon break and their evening break the censors wander the groves, picking and nibbling on the bitter olives, searching for inspiration. Censorship in Bellur is an art, it is the Queen of the Arts. Other cities celebrate their poets or sculptors, offer the world their playwrights and clowns; Bellur, its censors. The censors of Bellur can censor the twentieth part of the thickness of one serif of the letter h in 10-point Garamond type, and alter the meaning of a poem entirely; they can censor four thousand pages of a four thousand and fifty page novel, and leave its meaning intact. But this is not the extent of their art; these are mere parlor tricks, mere editorishness. Censorship is a dance with history; by censoring the right word at the right historical moment, the gifted censor can unleash or throttle a revolution.
In the olive grove one tree stands alone, dedicated to the greatest of censors, Albigromious, who came to the Queen of the Arts late in life, after distinguished careers in mathematics and parrot-farming. In his tenure as Grand Censor, he omitted not a line, not a word, not a letter, not a speck of ink from any of the manuscripts that crossed his simple olivewood desk; yet every poet and clown who visited his office went away chastened and subdued, and many an artist grew terrified and burst into tears at the time of his review, even if she was safe in a far distant city. The censors say of Albigromious that in the heyday of his genius not only the artists, but the common people as well, learned to censor themselves.
Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum
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Benjamin Rosenbaum lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and baby daughter, where in addition to scribbling fiction and poetry, he programs in Java (well) and plays rugby (not very well). He attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2001 (the Sarong-Wearing Clarion). His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Writer Online. His previous appearance in Strange Horizons was “A Gardener Betrayed by Roses.” For more about him, see his Web site.
When She Came Walking
By Tim Jones
9/24/01
The first time she walked down our street, pots jumped off stoves, coal leapt from scuttles, wood went rat-a-tat-tatting down hallways. In our yard, a broom and spade got up and lurched around like drunks, trying to decide which way she’d gone.
I caught my first glimpse of her from the window, and that was enough for me. “I’ll be back soon,” I told Mother, and slipped out the door before the questions could start. It was all I could do to stop the door coming with me, and the street looked like a parade had passed through: everything from Mrs. Ormond’s wrought-iron railing to Connor O’Brien’s henhouse had torn free of its moorings and sashayed down the street after her. Lacking much in the way of legs, the henhouse hadn’t got far, but there were frightened hens clucking about and eggs lying hither and yon.