Gardner Dozois - A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows

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Science Fiction

By Gardner Dozois

contemporary

A Knight o

Ghosts and

Shadows

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

Fictionwise Publications

www.fictionwise.com

This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely

coincidental.

First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Oct/Nov

2000

NOTICE: This ebook is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or

distribution via email, floppy disk, network, print out, or any other means to a

person other than the original purchaser is a violation of International copyright

law and subjects the violator to fines and/or imprisonment. Fictionwise

Publications offers a $500 reward to anyone who provides information leading to

the conviction of a person infringing on any Fictionwise ebook copyright.

COVER DESIGN BY CHRIS HARDWICK

This ebook is displayed using 100% recycled electrons.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

Sometimes the old man was visited by time-travelers. He would

be alone in the house, perhaps sitting at his massive old wooden

desk with a book or some of the notes he endlessly shuffled through,

the shadows of the room cavernous around him. It would be the

very bottom of the evening, that flat timeless moment between the

guttering of one day and the quickening of the next when the sky is

neither black nor gray, nothing moves, and the night beyond the

window glass is as cold and bitter and dead as the dregs of

yesterday's coffee. At such a time, if he would pause in his work to

listen, he would become intensely aware of the ancient brownstone

building around him, smelling of plaster and wood and wax and old

dust, imbued with the kind of dense humming silence that is made

of many small sounds not quite heard. He would listen to the silence

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

until his nerves were stretched through the building like miles of fine

silver wire, and then, as the shadows closed in like iron and the light

itself would seem to grow smoky and dim, the time-travelers would

arrive.

He couldn't see them or hear them, but in they would come, the

time travelers, filing into the house, filling up the shadows,

spreading through the room like smoke. He would feel them around

him as he worked, crowding close to the desk, looking over his

shoulder. He wasn't afraid of them. There was no menace in them,

no chill of evil or the uncanny—only the feeling that they were there

with him, watching him patiently, interestedly, without malice. He

fancied them as groups of ghostly tourists from the far future, here

we see a twenty-first century man in his natural habitat, notice the

details of gross corporeality, please do not interphase anything,

clicking some future equivalent of cameras at him, how quaint,

murmuring appreciatively to each other in almost audible mothwing

voices, discorporate Gray Line tours from a millennium hence

slumming in the darker centuries.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

Sometimes he would nod affably to them as they came in,

neighbor to neighbor across the vast gulfs of time, and then he

would smile at himself, and mutter “Senile dementia!” They would

stay with him for the rest of the night, looking on while he worked,

following him into the bathroom—see, see!—and trailing around the

house after him wherever he went. They were as much company as

a cat—he'd always had cats, but now he was too old, too near the

end of his life; a sin to leave a pet behind, deserted, when he died—

and he didn't even have to feed them. He resisted the temptation to

talk aloud to them, afraid that they might talk back, and then he

would either have to take them seriously as an actual phenomenon

or admit that they were just a symptom of his mind going at last,

another milestone on his long, slow fall into death. Occasionally, if

he was feeling particularly fey, he would allow himself the luxury of

turning in the door on his way in to bed and wishing the following

shadows a hearty goodnight. They never answered.

Then the house would be still, heavy with silence and sleep, and

they would watch on through the dark.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

That night there had been more time-travelers than usual, it

seemed, a jostling crowd of ghosts and shadows, and now, this

morning, August the fifth, the old man slept fitfully.

He rolled and muttered in his sleep, at the bottom of a pool of

shadow, and the labored sound of his breathing echoed from the

bare walls. The first cold light of dawn was just spreading across the

ceiling, raw and blue, like a fresh coat of paint covering the midden

layers of the past, twenty or thirty coats since the room was new,

white, brown, tan, showing through here and there in spots and

tatters. The rest of the room was deep in shadow, with only the

tallest pieces of furniture—the tops of the dresser and the bureau,

and the upper half of the bed's headboard—rising up from the gloom

like mountain peaks that catch the first light from the edge of the

world. Touched by that light, the ceiling was hard-edged and sharp-

lined and clear, ruled by the uncompromising reality of day; down

below, in the shadows where the old man slept, everything was still

dissolved in the sly, indiscriminate, and ambivalent ocean of the

night, where things melt and intermingle, change their shapes and

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

their natures, flow outside the bounds. Sunk in the gray half-light,

the man on the bed was only a doughy manikin shape, a preliminary

charcoal sketch of a man, all chiaroscuro and planes and pools of

shadow, and the motion of his head as it turned fretfully on the

pillow was no more than a stirring of murky darkness, like mud

roiling in water. Above, the light spread and deepened, turning into

gold. Now night was going out like the tide, flowing away under the

door and puddling under furniture and in far corners, leaving more

and more of the room beached hard-edged and dry above its high-

water line. Gold changed to brilliant white. The receding darkness

uncovered the old man's face, and light fell across it.

The old man's name was Charles Czudak, and he had once been

an important man, or at least a famous one.

He was eighty years old today.

His eyes opened.

* * * *

The first thing that Charles Czudak saw that morning was the clear

white light that shook and shimmered on the ceiling, and for a

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

moment he thought that he was back in that horrible night when

they nuked Brooklyn. He cried out and flinched away, throwing up

an arm to shield his eyes, and then, as he came fully awake, he

realized where he was, and that the light gleaming above signified

nothing more than that he'd somehow lived to see the start of

another day, He relaxed slowly, feeling his heart race.

Stupid old man, dreaming stupid old man's dreams!

That was the way it had been, though, that night. He'd been living

in a rundown Trinity house across Philadelphia at 20th and Walnut

then, rather than in this more luxurious old brownstone on Spruce

Street near Washington Square, and he'd finished making love to

Ellen barely ten minutes before (what a ghastly irony it would have

been, he'd often thought since, if the Big Bang had actually come

while they were fucking! What a moment of dislocation and

confusion that would have produced!), and they were lying in each

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

other's sweat and the coppery smell of sex in the rumpled bed,

listening to a car radio playing outside somewhere, a baby crying

somewhere else, the buzz of flies and mosquitoes at the screens, a

mellow night breeze moving across their drying skins, and then the

sudden searing glare had leaped across the ceiling, turning

everything white. An intense, almost supernatural silence had

followed, as though the universe had taken a very deep breath and

held it. Incongruously, through that moment of silence, they could

hear the toilet flushing in the apartment upstairs, and water pipes

knocking and rattling all the way down the length of the building. For

several minutes, they lay silently in each others arms, waiting,

listening, frightened, hoping that the flare of light was anything

other than it seemed to be. Then the universe let out that deep

breath, and the windows exploded inward in geysers of shattered

glass, and the building groaned and staggered and bucked, and heat

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

lashed them like a whip of gold. His heart hammering at the base of

his throat like a fist from inside, and Ellen crying in his arms, them

clinging to each other in the midst of the roaring nightmare chaos,

clinging to each other as though they would be swirled away and

drowned if they did not.

That had been almost sixty years ago, that terrible night, and if

the Brooklyn bomb that had slipped through the particle-beam

defenses had been any more potent than a small clean tac, or had

come down closer than Prospect Park, he wouldn't be alive today. It

was strange to have lived through the nuclear war that so many

people had feared for so long, right through the last half of the

twentieth century and into the opening years of the twenty-first—but

it was stranger still to have lived through it and kept on going, while

the war slipped away behind into history, to become something that

happened a very long time ago, a detail to be read about by bored

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ScienceFictionByGardnerDozoiscontemporaryAKnightofGhostsandShadowsAKnightofGhostsandShadowsbyGardnerDozois2FictionwisePublicationswww.fictionwise.comThisebookisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,places,andincidentseitherareproductsoftheauthor’simaginationorareusedfictitiously.Anyresemblancetoactualeven...

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