Stories Read online

  As fall came on she rearranged her shifts, working nights so she could take advantage of the daylight. In a couple of weeks the ground would be frozen and she’d have to shut down until spring. It was then, when she was feeling rushed, that she discovered a U-Store-It outside Mentor with a stockade fence and a dirt road running through the pines behind it. Across the raw lumber, kids had sprayed their illegible fluorescent-red names.

  She walked Ollie along the fence until he stopped, sniffing at a weedy mound. She pulled him away twice, and both times he came back to the same spot. “Good boy,” she said, giving him a treat, and looped his leash around a tree.

  She prodded the mound with her walking stick. The dirt was sandy and loose, and she went back to her car for the shovel.

  She dug her first hole deep, then shallow ones every three feet. She was out of shape, and had to dip her head and wipe her face on her shoulder. It was cool out, and when she stopped for a drink of water the sweat on her neck made her shiver. By the time she reached the middle of the fence, the sky was starting to get dark. At the four corners of the self-storage, high floodlights popped on, buzzing and drawing bugs, throwing weird shadows. She checked her cell phone—it was almost five. She needed to go home and get ready for work. Rather than leave the site unguarded overnight she decided to call the FBI.

  They told her it was too late in the day. They’d send someone out to talk to her tomorrow.

  When she complained to her older son, he asked how long she’d been doing this.

  The agent they sent asked the same question. He looked over her binders and the picture of the girl on the mantel and the big map tacked up in the kitchen.

  “I’m just trying to help,” she said. “If it was one of my kids, I’d want everybody to pitch in.”

  “I would too,” the agent said soothingly, as if it was common sense.

  The next day they took her out to the site in an unmarked Suburban to watch a backhoe dig a trench along the fence line. Agents in windbreakers and latex gloves sifted the dirt through metal screens, then spread it on tarps for the dogs. A project like this would have taken her weeks, and she was glad she’d called. She imagined the girl’s mother hearing the news. She didn’t care about getting the credit. It was enough to know the girl was finally home.

  They found nothing. Just dirt. Worms. It had all been a coincidence. As the agent said, there was graffiti on everything these days.

  Meaning she was crazy.

  Dropping her off, he thanked her. “I know your heart was in the right place.”

  Was it? She could admit that at least part of the reason she was searching for a stranger’s daughter was that no one else needed her. Just Ollie.

  She promised her sons to take a break after that. She took down the map and stored the picture in a drawer and watched the last weeks of fall pass.

  Honoring her pledge was easier in the winter. She used the time to rethink her strategy and stockpile supplies. Some sites recommended a pitchfork to turn the soil, others a pickax. On paper, again and again, she rearranged her trunk, as if she were traveling cross-country. She enrolled Ollie in an online course for sniffer dogs, practicing with scented rags in the backyard. He didn’t always get them right away, and stood looking at her as if she might give him a hint.

  “Do you want to pass or not?” she asked. “Or am I just wasting my time?”

  She kept an eye on the Web site, and cruised the chat groups for news. She was afraid one day the page would come up and say she’d been found, but month after month, nothing changed. It had been two and a half years. Besides the family, she might be the only person looking for her.

  In March the ground thawed and she tacked up the map. She’d turned her older boy’s room into a command center, emptying his desk and filling the drawers with her notebooks. On a brand-new corkboard she posted her schedule. Four days a week she’d search, weather permitting. She’d been too impatient in the fall, letting her emotions get the best of her. She’d actually expected to find the girl her first time out, as if she were psychic. She needed to be calm and methodical. If she was going to succeed, it would be because she knew how to work.

  Ollie just liked riding in the car and going for walks. He had his certificate, but the death scent made him sneeze. The smells that interested him came from other dogs, and he immediately covered them with his own, lifting his leg and making her wait. As spring turned to summer the only thing he’d discovered was a bee’s nest, provoking a swarm and earning him a bump on the nose. He would have stayed and tried to fight them if she hadn’t dragged him away.

  She made the mistake of telling her younger son, who told her older son, who called and said he thought they agreed she was going to stop.

  “I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she said.

  “I’m worried about you. Do you understand why?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why,” he said.

  After that, every time he called, he made a point of asking how the search was going.

  She refused to lie.

  “The same,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  It meant she was ranging farther and farther west, devoting whole weeks to a single exit off the interstate, tromping the buggy jungles behind truck stops and fireworks outlets, breaking ground by every stockade fence she came across, graffitied or not. Her knees creaked, her arms ached, and then at work she had to lean over the conveyor and lift a gallon of milk into someone’s cart, and she thought maybe he was right. She was too old to be doing this.

  There was always the possibility James Wade had been lying. As her map filled with pins, she tried not to let it bother her.

  In August, jumping a drainage ditch, she twisted her ankle and missed three weeks, ruining her schedule and giving her son a new excuse to badger her. To catch up she went out five days a week, but felt like she was rushing, cutting corners. The weather was mild, Indian summer lingering deep into October. If it held up (and the Weather Channel said there was a chance), she’d have a shot at finishing.

  One bright afternoon she was outside Fairport Harbor, behind a Ryder truck center, when Ollie stopped and lay down in a shallow trough filled with pine duff. He rested his head on his paws and flattened his ears back as if he were being punished. It wasn’t anything she’d taught him.

  “Come on, get up.” She whistled and clapped, and still he didn’t budge. She had to coax him away with a treat and tie him to a tree, and even then he hunkered down, cowering.

  The Ryder place wasn’t a self-storage, and the fence, though heavily tagged, was chain link with green plastic slats, but she went to get the video camera anyway.

  The trough was tub shaped, around five feet long, and sunk a few inches below the ground around it. She brushed away the leaves and pine needles and laid the pitchfork beside it for scale, narrating as she panned along the fence. “November third, 2008, 1:27 P.M.”

  When she’d gotten enough coverage, she set down the camera and took up the pitchfork. She dug into the very center of the trough, jabbing the prongs through the crust, pushing it deeper with her foot, pulling back on the handle so the ground cracked and broke around the tines. She stuck it in again, levering open a hole.

  Behind her Ollie whined.

  “Shush,” she said.

  The third time she dug down and yanked back, the pitchfork snagged on a swath of fabric.

  It was discolored with mud and stank of mildew, but was unmistakably a piece of green nylon, a wisp of white batting poking from a hole.

  She set aside the pitchfork, tossed away her gloves and tugged at the piece, pulling another couple inches through the dirt. It was the shell of a sleeping bag, she could see the thick seam of the zipper. With a finger she wiped at the crumbling mud, revealing rusty teeth.

  Thank God, she thought. What would Brian say now?

  As long as she’d waited for this moment, she didn’t want to see what was inside. The thing to do was stop and call
someone, but after last year, she couldn’t. She knelt beside the hole, digging it free with her bare hands. This time she would make sure. Then everyone would know she wasn’t crazy.

  LEIF IN THE WIND

  Gene Wolfe

  “HE’S BEEN OUT THERE,” ENA SAID, “for an hour and fifty-two minutes. It took him twenty-eight to nail that plate back down. I’ve been trying to get him to come back in ever since.”

  Brennan rubbed his chin. It was a big one, and required quite a bit of rubbing. “He answers you? He replies?”

  “Sometimes. Not always.”

  “But he’s conscious?”

  “I think so.”

  “Fugue state?”

  Ena shrugged.

  “Talk to him.”

  “I’ll try.” Ena’s gesture switched on the mike. “This is Ena again, Leif. Brennan is here with me now. What are you doing?”

  “Watching the sunrise, Ena. The planetary shadow is fading. Fading…This sun appears behind the horizon curve, just peeping out past it now. I can feel the first breezes of its solar wind.”

  Brennan tried to make his voice soft. “You can’t possibly feel a solar wind, Leif. You’re suited up.”

  “I feel it.”

  Ena said, “Please come back, Leif. We’ve completed the survey, done everything we were supposed to do, and—”

  Brennan interrupted her. “The job’s finished, Leif. There’s no life down there. We have rock samples, cores, the works. Habitable planet, no life. Seed it and there could be colonies here in two hundred years. Maybe less.”

  Leif said nothing.

  Ena said, “I’ve never begged a man for anything—”

  “Birds. I see birds.”

  Brennan snorted. “You don’t see birds, damnit! There aren’t any, and if there were, you couldn’t see them from up here.”

  Ena said, “Think of me, Leif—if you won’t think of yourself, at least think of me. The trip home will take fifteen more years. What if Brennan dies?”

  Silence.

  “Walt died. So did Barbara and Alaia. Brennan could die, too. I’d try to take the ship home all by myself, and I’d go insane. I couldn’t bear it. You know what the tests showed—nobody could.” She paused, waiting. “Think of me if you won’t think of yourself.”

  Leif exclaimed, “You should see these birds! The detail! The colors! The combs and crests and wattles!”

  Brennan said, “You’re dreaming them, Leif.”

  “I couldn’t dream anything like this. It isn’t in me. It isn’t in anybody. They’re so big, and they get smaller as they come closer. Smaller and smaller, like jewels.”

  Ena looked at Brennan, expecting him to reply, and saw that he was suiting up. She switched off her mike. “Are you going out there after him?”

  “If I have to, yes.”

  “I know you could outwrestle him, but can you catch him?”

  “I’ll have to.”

  She switched her mike back on. “Leif, I’m offering everything I’ve got. I’ll be your slave if you’ll just come back.” She gulped, and wondered whether her mike had picked it up. “I’ll do your details, all of them, and mine, too. We’ll be heroes when we get home, and I’ll give you a bath first, and clean and press your uniform. I’ll shine your boots and polish your brass. You said I was beautiful once, remember? Wouldn’t you like a beautiful slave?”

  Brennan muttered, “Did he really?”

  “I’ll—sleep with you like you wanted, Leif. You can do whatever you like with me, and I’ll do whatever you tell me to. Please?”

  Leif said, “They’re nesting in me, all the beautiful birds. Perching on nerve fibers, sipping from tiny veins, Ena. Fluttering and singing. This is how a tree feels in summer.”

  Wearily, Ena switched off her mike. “He doesn’t care about me.”

  “He doesn’t care about us,” Brennan told her. “Not now he doesn’t.”

  Leif said, “The wind murmurs in my branches, and the birds nest there.” He sounded rapturous. Ena’s screen showed a silver starfish, arms wide, legs spread, face invisible behind the glare of sunlight on his visor. Slowly, the starfish revolved, rolling like a wheel.

  She heard the airlock open. “You’re going after him?”

  Brennen stepped into the airlock. “Wish me luck.”

  “I do,” she said. The airlock closed, and she added, “I wish you both luck. I hope you don’t kill each other.”

  Still later: “Most of all I wish me luck.”

  Was there nothing she could do but sit and watch? She unsnapped her belt, floated up, and pushed off.

  Walt should have looked just as she remembered him from last time—so quickly frozen that no big crystals had formed, eyes shut, and very, very dead.

  He did not. Dead, yes, but still there. So quickly frozen, she thought, that his soul had not had time to leave his body. Brennan thought it might be possible to reanimate him back on earth, and Brennan might be right.

  Walt’s eyes were not completely shut. Surely they had been before?

  Surely. But Walt was peeking out like one who feigns sleep.

  “I may sleep with Leif if Brennan brings him back. I’ll have to sleep with Brennan. You’re dead, Walt.” Ena paused. “You’re dead for now, anyway. I won’t be cheating on you.”

  From behind a plastic shield as clear as air, Walt watched her in silence.

  “You understand, don’t you?” She began to close the lid. “Besides, I—we’re not all that different from you, we women.”

  She returned to the bridge, floating along ovoid black corridors that should have echoed but did not. It had been wrong to silence them, she thought. The sound absorption was too good, it worked too well. Ghosts whispered in the black corridors now, Alaia’s ghost and Barbara’s.

  Walt’s ghost.

  On her screen, Brennan had a line around Leif’s waist and was playing it out behind him as he returned to the ship. Brightly lit by rising Beta Andromedae, the slack orange line traced fantastic loops and whorls against the still-dark planet they orbited. Ena switched on her mike. “Did he give you any trouble, Brennan?”

  “Not a bit.”

  Changing viewpoints, she watched Brennan enter the airlock, turn, and begin hauling Leif in. No resistance, but…She inserted a sedative cap in the injector. Leif, she told herself, was not particularly strong. And pushed aside the knowledge that all psychotics were.

  Inside, he removed his helmet without assistance. His expression was rapt, his eyes elsewhere. The neck was one of the best places.

  Leif relaxed, swaying, and Brennan said, “That was probably a good idea.”

  “It can’t hurt.” Ena was opening Leif’s suit.

  “I’m full of birds,” Leif told her.

  “I see.”

  “They’re nesting in me. Have I mentioned that?”

  Absently, she nodded.

  “We are their trees. That’s why there are no trees down there. We trees have just arrived.” Leif paused. “I would like to sit down.”

  “No reason not to,” Brennan told him. “Step out of the boots and I’ll put you in a chair.”

  When Leif did not move, Brennan lifted him out, the magnetic boot soles holding them to the deck. When Brennan had Leif in his console seat, Ena belted him in.

  The first jump covered four thousandths of one light-year; recharging for the next would take thirty-six hours.

  “Are we going home?” Leif asked. He sounded sleepy, and had not touched the buckle that held him in his seat.

  Brennan said, “Right.” He was refolding Leif’s suit.

  “You’ll have to walk in the spinner,” Ena told Leif, “just like Brennan and me. Just like you did on the trip out. Can you do it?”

  Leif seemed not to have heard her.

  “Two hours a day,” Brennan said. “If you don’t, your legs will break when we get home.”

  Ena was inspired. “Your limbs, Leif. That’s your arms and your legs. You know what happens when limbs bre
ak.”

  Leif stared at her. “The nests fall down.”

  “Exactly!”

  “I’m going into the spinner now.” Leif released his buckle. “Three hours. Three hours every day for me. I won’t forget.”

  When Leif had gone, Brennan chuckled, wrapped Ena in his arms, and kissed her. When they parted, he whispered, “You were always the smartest woman on board.”

  They were recharging for the fourth jump when Ena heard the first bird, its clear trills carried through the ventilation system. A twenty-minute search found it in Specimen Storage number 3, where it had nested among her neatly labeled sacks of rocks.

  It was somewhat larger than a crow, and was not (she decided) exactly as a bird should be. That sinuous neck, armored in diamond scales, might have belonged to a snake; the sides of its long, curved beak were toothed like the blades of saws. It spread its wings when she approached, threatening her with retractile claws that sprouted from their forward edges.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Ena said softly. “Really, I don’t. You’re very, very valuable to all three of us. You’re an alien life-form, you see.” It was difficult to remain calm.

  The bird rattled its feathers—a warning buzz, loud and abrupt.

  She kicked off from a specimen bag, backing away. “I’m going to bring you something to eat. I don’t know what you’ll like, so I’ll try several things.” Could it eat their food?

  Brennan was checking the recharge readings. “Pile’s running good,” he told her. “Next jump should be right on schedule.”

  “Leif’s birds are real.” She had drifted over to her console.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Seeing his skepticism, she nodded. “Sure. But don’t you hear that noise? Listen. I think it’s coming through the vents.”

  After a moment he left his seat and kicked off, stopping aft vent. Ena smiled to herself.

  “That’s a bearing getting ready to fail. Probably one of the fans. I’ll see to it.”

  As he shot out into the corridor, she called, “Good luck!”