IGMS - Issue 11 Read online

  Table of Contents - Issue 11 - March 2009

  Vanishing

  by Peter S. Beagle

  The Absence of Stars

  by Greg Siewert

  The Sin Hypothesis

  by E. A. Lustig

  Tekkai Exhales His Avatar

  by Tony Pi

  The Urn of Ravalos

  by Rebecca Day

  The Man in the Tree

  by Orson Scott Card

  Free Seas

  by David Lubar

  InterGalactic Interview With Tanith Lee

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  Vanishing

  by Peter S. Beagle

  Artwork by Kevin Wasden

  Jansen knew perfectly well that when Arl asked him to drive her to the clinic for her regular prenatal checkup, it meant that every single one of his daughter's usual rides was unavailable. She had already told him that it wouldn't be necessary for him to wait; that Elly, her mother, would be off work by the time the examination was done, and could bring her home. They drove down to Klamath Falls in silence, except for his stiffly-phrased questions about the health of the child she was carrying, and the state of her preparations for its arrival. Once he asked when she expected her husband back, but her reply was such a vague mumble that he missed the sense of it completely. Now and then he glanced sideways at her, but when she met his eyes with her own fierce, stubborn brown ones, he looked away.

  When they parked at the clinic, he said, "I'll come in with you."

  "You don't have to," Arl said. "I told you."

  "Yeah, I know what you told me. But it's my grandson in there" -- he pointed at her heavily rounded belly -- "and I'm entitled to know how he's getting on. Let's go."

  Arl did not move. "Dad, I really don't want you in there."

  Jansen consciously kept his voice low and casual. "Tell you what, I don't care." He got out of the car, walked around to the passenger side, and opened the door. Arl sat where she was for a moment, giving him the I just dare you face he'd known since her childhood; but then she sighed abruptly and pushed herself to her feet, ignoring his offered hand, and plodded ahead of him to the clinic. Jansen followed closely, afraid that she might fall, the walkway being wet with recently melted snow. He would have taken her arm, but he knew better.

  This one would rather die than forgive me. Gracie almost has, Elly might -- someday -- but Arl? Not ever.

  In the clinic they sat one chair apart after she signed in. Jansen pretended to be browsing through Sports Illustrated until Arl disappeared with the Ob/Gyn nurse. He lowered the magazine to his lap then, and simply stared straight ahead at the gray world beyond the window. A sticky-faced child, running by, kicked his ankle and kept going, leaving its pursuing mother to apologize; a young couple sitting next to him argued in savagely-controlled whispers over the exact responsibility for a sexually-transmitted disease. Jansen froze it all out and asked himself for the hundredth useless time why he shouldn't sell the shop -- or just close it and leave, the way people were walking away from their own homes these days. Walk away and put some daylight between himself and trouble. Hanging around sure as hell wasn't doing him any good, and alimony checks didn't care whether you mailed them from Dallas or down the block. Neither did Elly and the girls, not so you'd notice. At least in Dallas he could be warm while he was lonely. He let his eyelids drift shut as he tried to imagine being somewhere else, being someone else, and failed miserably in the attempt. Eyes closed, all the screw-ups and disappointments just seemed to press in closer than ever.

  Shit, he thought. All of it, all of it. And then, At least the little rugrat quit zooming around. That's something.

  The magazine slid from his relaxed fingers, but he didn't hear it hit the floor, and when he opened his eyes to reach down and pick it up he saw that he wasn't in the waiting room anymore.

  He wasn't in Klamath Falls anymore, either. It was night, and he was on the Axel-Springer-Strasse. Instantly alert, he knew where he was, and never thought for a second that he was dreaming. Despite shock, beyond the uncertainties and anxieties of age, he knew that after more than forty-five years he was back at the Wall. The Wall that didn't exist anymore.

  Kreuzberg district, West Berlin, between Checkpoint Charlie and the checkpoint at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, just past where the Zimmerstrasse runs out and the barbed wire and barriers start zigzagging west . . .

  There it was, directly before him, just there, lit by streetlamps -- not the graffiti-covered reinforced concrete of the Grenzmauer 75 that had been hammered to bits by the joyously triumphant "woodpeckers," East and West, when Germany was reunited, and the pieces sold off for souvenirs, but the crude first version he had patrolled in 1963, a gross lump haphazardly thrown together from iron supports, tangles of barbed wire, and dirty gray cement building blocks the East German workers had pasted in place with slaps of mortar no one bothered to smooth. Jansen said softly, "No." He put his fingers to his mouth, like a child, shaking his head hard enough that his neck hurt, hoping desperately to make the clinic waiting-room materialize around him; but the Wall stayed where it was, and so did he.

  He was sitting, he realized, in the doorway of a building he did not want to think about; had, in fact, refused to think about for many years. The old ironwork of the entrance was hard and cold against his shoulders as he pushed away from it and struggled to his feet.

  Everything around him was familiar, his memory somehow fresher for so rarely having been examined. To his right the Wall angled sharply, blocking the road and continuing along the Kommandantenstrasse, while across from him he could see, just barely, the top of the eastern guard tower that looked down on the Death Strip, that deadly emptiness between the eastern inner fence and the Wall, where the VoPos and Russians would fire on anyone trying to make it across to West Berlin.

  Jansen turned from the Wall and took a few hesitant paces along the street. Most of it had actually belonged to East Germany -- the Wall had been built several meters inside the formal demarcation line between East and West, so in some places any West Berliner who stepped too close was in danger of being arrested by East German guards; but elsewhere, in the West Berlin suburbs and beyond, there had been small family gardens growing literally in the shadow of the Wall, and even a little fishing going on. Jansen had always admired the Germans' make-do adaptiveness.

  Here in the city's urban heart, however, the buildings and shops and little businesses displayed a jumble of conditions, some still unrepaired nearly twenty years after the Allies had bombed and blasted their way into Berlin. Aside from the pooling glow of the streetlamps, Jansen could see no slightest sign of life. All the windows were dark, no smoke rose from any chimneys, and there was no one else in the street. The world was as hushed as though it had stopped between breaths. Beneath the unnaturally starless, cloudless black of the night sky there was not so much as a pigeon searching for crumbs, or a stray dog trotting freely.

  Jansen moved on in the silence, confused and wary.

  A few buildings past the Zimmerstrasse he couldn't take it any more. Feeling overwhelmed in the empty quiet, he knocked at the next door he came to, and waited, struggling to bring back what little German he had ever had. Sprechen Sie Englische?, of course. He'd used that one a lot, and found enough Germans who did to get by. But there was also Wo bin ich? -- "where am I?" and Was ist los? -- "what is happening?" -- and Bitte, ich bin verloren -- "please, I'm lost." They all seemed entirely appropriate to his situation.

  When no one responded, he knocked again, harder; then tried the next door, with the same result, and then the three doors after that, each one in turn. Nothing. Yet he had no sense of the city being abandoned, evacuated; even the front window of the little shop where he and Harding had taken turns buying sausages and cheese
for lunch was still crowded with its mysterious, wondrous wares. He saw his dark reflection in the shop window, and recognized his daily grizzled self: lean-faced and thin-mouthed, with deep-set, distant eyes . . . no change there, he thought: an old man caught, somehow, in this younger Jansen's place.

  He might have graduated from knocking to shouting, except for what he discovered at the next intersection.

  Ernie Hamblin -- one of the traffic section MPs quartered with Jansen in the Andrews Barracks -- had gotten a big laugh out of Jansen getting turned around and lost, twice, in his first week on duty, all because the two streets that met here had four different names, one for each direction of the compass. Jansen looked to the right, up the Kochstrasse, and saw nothing unusual when compared with his memory. Straight ahead -- as Axel-Springer-Strasse became the Lindenstrasse -- looked wrong, but in the darkness he couldn't quite make out why. To the left though, down the Oranienstrasse, there was nothing.

  Literally nothing. No street, no houses, no streetlamps . . . only the same endless black as the sky, extending both outward and downward without the slightest hint of change. He walked as close to the road's sharp edge as he dared, trying to make sense of what he wasn't seeing, but could not. It wasn't a cliff face or a pit: it was simply emptiness, darkness vast and implacable, an utter end to the world, as if God had shrugged, shaken His head and walked away in the middle of the Third Day. The ground that should have been there was gone. The city that should have been built on it was gone and worse than gone, carved away with absolute, unhuman precision. Looking out and away at that edge, where it floated rootless in the black sky, Jansen could see buildings that had been neatly sliced in half, as though by some cosmic guillotine, their truncated interiors looking pitifully like opened dollhouses.

  After a while Jansen realized that the edge had a shape; and that it matched, block for receding block, the cartoon lightning jag that was the corresponding section of the Wall. In the face of that understanding, rational thought was impossible. He turned and ran, and didn't notice anything at all until he stopped, out of breath and shaking, in front of the same doorway where he'd come back to this place.

  It was open.

  Jansen stood for a long time at the foot of the narrow stair, looking up into the shadows and becoming more aware with every passing moment that the last thing he wanted to do was go even one step further, because that would commit himself irrevocably to whatever reality lay in wait at the top. When he did finally begin to climb, his body felt like the body of someone heavier than he, someone older, and even more weary.

  The second floor stairs creaked on the sixth and eleventh steps, exactly as he remembered. All the interior doors were closed, blocking out the light from the street, so by the time he reached the fourth landing he was feeling his way, palms and fingers rasping over the rough burned wood and ragged wallpaper. The Berlin Brigade may have sworn by spotless uniforms and occupied fancy officers' quarters, but they took their OPs -- their observation posts -- largely as theyfound them. Jansen counted right-hand doorframes, stopping when he got to the third. His hand found the familiar shape of the brass doorknob, turned it, and eased the door open, grateful to see light again, even if it wasn't very strong this high above the streetlamps.

  The first thing his eyes registered was the neatly folded khaki sweater on the one old armchair in the room. Just where I left it . . . transferred to Stuttgart on half an hour's notice, never did get back here. Then he saw the folding chair placed carefully on its handmade wooden riser, in front of the open window, and the crude signatures and battalion numbers and obscenities scratched into the walls, including six-inch high letters that said T HE "40" HIRED gUNS. Next to that was a blocky '50s-vintage German wall telephone, its cord dangling above a beaten-up oil heater. On the cheap metal table in the corner were a couple of paperbacks -- Mickey Spillane, Erle Stanley Gardner -- and some torn candy bar wrappers. Harding, he thought. Three crap mysteries from the PX every week, like clockwork, along with half their Baby Ruths and Mounds. Good as gold or cigarettes when it came to bartering with the street kids.

  Jansen picked up the Spillane book, opened it, and realized that it was completely blank inside its lurid cover. He frowned, then dropped the empty book and lifted the wall telephone's absurdly light-blue handset. He held it to his ear, and the result was exactly what he expected: no dial tone, no static sputter -- nothing but the dark silence of a long-dead line. He jiggled the hook, which was pointless but irresistible, and then hung up, a little harder than he perhaps needed to do.

  After that he moved to the window, easing gently down into the folding chair positioned before it, because the dream-prop wooden riser under its legs was obviously just as flimsy as the one he'd teetered on so many times back in the real West Berlin. All he needed were his old binoculars and some wet-eared short-time 1st Lieutenant bitching at him and it would be like he'd never left. Except, of course, that there had been a couple of Germanys then, and as he looked out across the street he could see that the world was just as gone on the GDR side of the Wall as on this one. Ahead of him lay the Death Strip he had looked down upon every day for almost two years, the pale gravel raked over the flat ground between the crude outer Wall, topped with Y-shaped iron trees supporting a cloud of barbed wire, and the even cruder inner wall on the other side of the ramshackle watchtower. But the VoPo barracks he knew from before, the decaying and abandoned pre-War buildings that should have been there, were not; and as he looked from right to left, as far as he could see, sharp-edged blackness traced a line that paralleled the Wall itself. Spotting one or two of the old Russian T-62 tanks would have been a strange but distinct comfort right now, but of course there weren't any.

  The telephone rang.

  Jansen spun in his chair and the riser gave way beneath his shifting weight with a sharp crack, spilling him heavily to the ground. His back twisted, muscles on the lower left side spasming, and his right knee flared red with pain. Damn. Real enough to hurt like a son of a bitch!

  The phone rang a second time, then a third ring, a fourth. It took him that long to struggle back to his feet and hitch straight-legged over to it, his right knee still not trustworthy.

  He put his hand on the receiver. It seemed to buzz like a rattlesnake in his fingers, and he held onto it for a second he could make himself pick it up and put it to his ear.

  He said, "Who is this?"

  An instant of silence; then a sudden burst of surprised laughter. "So who should it be, bulvan?" The accent was Russian, as was the gruff timbre of the voice. Even the laughter was Russian. "Come to the window, so I can see you again. I am wondering if you are the Rawhide or the Two-Gun Kid."

  Jansen said, "For God's sake, who are you? Where are you?"

  "Come look. I will turn on light."

  Jansen moved stiffly back to the window, the receiver cord just long enough to stretch. Stepping over the fallen chair, he put his free hand on the windowsill and leaned down to look out. A hundred yards away, toward the far side of the Death Strip, the lights inside the East German guard tower were blinking on and off. As he watched, the pattern stopped and the lights stayed on, allowing him to see a small, bundled-up figure pointing one forefinger at him, sighting along it like a pistol.

  Into the handset, Jansen said, "You?"

  "Garazhi, Rawhide. Me. So good to see you again." The distant figure executed a clumsy bow.

  "Why are you calling me that?" Jansen's mouth was so dry it pained him.

  The chuckle came through the receiver again. "The glorious Soviet army was not nearly as efficient as your leaders liked to believe. Knew only the names of your officers, no one else. But from first day we looked across at each other, I had to call you something. I was learning English from comic books -- very big on black market, you see, the westerns with horses and guns and silly hats, so I called you Rawhide Kid and that short man --"

  "Roscoe Harding."

  "Really? For us he was Two-Gun Kid, and your mostly night fe
llows, Kid Colt and Tex Hopalong. Very satisfying, very shoot-'em-up. We had many such jokes."

  "You don't want to know what we called you."

  Another laugh. "Possibly not. But what name should I give you now, Rawhide? We are both older, I see, and it does not suit."

  "My name's Jansen. Henry Jansen. Listen, you, whatever your name is --"

  "Leonid," said the voice in his ear. "Leonid Leonidovich Nikolai Gavrilenko."

  "That's a mouthful."

  "True. But we are such old acquaintances, you must call me Lyonya. Or not, as you prefer. I do not presume." He paused, then said "Welcome back to the Wall, my friend Jansen. Henry."

  "Look behind you." Jansen kept his voice deliberately flat, but he could feel himself struggling not to panic. "This place isn't real."

  "Da, temnyi. The darkness. I have seen."

  Jansen said, "What the hell is going on? I can't be here. I was in a clinic waiting room with my daughter. She's seven months pregnant, and her husband's run off somewhere. She'll need me." Even as he spoke the words, he tasted their untruth in the back of his mouth. Arl had never had a chance to need him, and wouldn't know how to begin now, even if he wasn't who he was. But the Russian was impressed, or sounded so.

  "Lucky man, Henry. I congratulate you, to have someone needing you. A good life, then? Since we saw each other last?"

  "No," Jansen said. "Not so good. But I have to get back to it right now. Arl -- my daughter -- she won't know where I am. Hell, I don't know where I am."

  "That is, I think, what we should be finding out. We put our thinking caps on, you and I." A certain growling bemusement had entered the Russian's voice. "Do Americans still say that? It cannot be accident, this place. Something is happening to us, something has brought us here. Have looked, but seen no one but you. So I think now, yes, after all, we must meet in person, do you not agree? At last, meet. With thinking caps."

  As absolutely as Jansen wanted to leave the room, the deep suspicion that had been born in him here -- never to abate fully -- had its own hold. "I'm not sure that's a good idea, tovarich."