Kate Wilhelm - 20 Short Stories and Novellas

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 108.48KB 40 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

======================

MoonGate

by Kate Wilhelm

======================

First published in Orbit 20, ed. Damon Knight, Harper and Row, 1977

Fictionwise Contemporary

Science Fiction and Fantasy

---------------------------------

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the

purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from Fictionwise.com

then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines.

Please visit www.fictionwise.com to purchase a legal copy. Fictionwise.com

offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright

violators of Fictionwise ebooks.

---------------------------------

WHEN ANYONE asked Victoria what the GoMarCorp actually did, she

answered vaguely, "You know, light bulbs, electronics, stuff like that." When

her father pressed her, she admitted she didn't know much about the company

except for her own office in the claims department of the Mining Division.

She always felt that somehow she had disappointed her father, that she had

failed him. Because the thought and the attendant guilt angered her she

seldom dwelled on it. She had a good apartment, nice clothes, money enough to

save over and above the shares of stock the company handed out regularly. She

was doing all right. At work she typed up the claims reports on standard

forms, ran a computer check and pulled cards where any similarities appeared

-- same mine, same claimants, same kinds of claims ... She made up a folder

for each claim, clipped together all the forms, cards, correspondence, and

placed the folder in her superior's in-basket. What happened to it after that

she never knew.

Just a job, she thought, but when it was lunchtime she went to lunch.

When it was quitting time, she walked away and gave no more thought to it

until eight-thirty the next morning. Mimi, on the other hand, boasted about

her great job with the travel agency, and never knew if she would make it to

lunch or not. Victoria checked her watch against the wall clock in The Crepe

Shop and when the waiter came she ordered. She ate lunch, had an extra

coffee; Mimi still had not arrived when she left the restaurant and walked

back to her office. "Rich bitch, couldn't make up her mind how to get to

Rio," Mimi would say airily. "I'm sending her by dugout."

Late in the afternoon Diego called to say Mimi had had an accident

that morning; she was in the hospital with a broken leg. "You can't see her

until tomorrow. They've knocked her out back into last week to set it, so

I'll come by later with the keys and maps and stuff. You'll have to go get

Sam alone."

"I can't drive the camper alone in the mountains!"

"Gotta go. See you later, sugar."

"Diego! Wait..." He had hung up.

Victoria stared at the report in her typewriter and thought about Sam.

He had worked here as a claims investigator eight years ago. She had been

married then; she and Sam had developed a close nodding relationship. He was

in and out for two years, then had grown a beard and either quit or been

fired. She hadn't seen him again until six months ago, when they had met by

chance on a corner near the office.

His beard was full, his hair long, he was dressed in jeans and sandals.

"You're still there?" he asked incredulously.

"It's a job," she said. "What are you up to?"

"You'll never believe me."

"Probably not."

"I'll show you." He took her arm and began to propel her across the

street.

"Hey! I'm on lunch hour."

"Call in sick."

"I can't," she protested, but he was laughing at her, and in the end,

she called in sick. When she told Sam it was the first time she had done

that, he was astonished.

He drove an old VW, so cluttered with boxes, papers, magazines, other

miscellaneous junk, there was hardly room for her to sit. He took her to a

garage that was a jumble of rocks. Rocks on the floor, in cartons, on

benches, on a picnic table, rocks everywhere.

"Aquamarine," he said, pointing. "Tourmaline, tiger-eye, jadeite from

Wyoming, fire opal..."

There was blue agate and banded agate, sunstones, jasper, garnet,

carnelian ... But, no matter how enthusiastic he was, no matter by what names

he called them, they were rocks, Victoria thought in dismay.

When he said he made jewelry, she thought of the clunky pieces

teenaged girls bought in craft shops.

"I'll show you," he said, opening a safe. He pulled out a tray and she

caught her breath sharply. Rings, brooches, necklaces -- lovely fragile gold

chains with single teardrop opals that flared and paled with a motion;

blood-red carnelian flecked with gold, set in ornate gold rings; sea-colored

aquamarines in silver...

A few weeks later he had a show in a local art store and she realized

that Sam Dumarie was more than an excellent craftsman. He was an artist.

* * * *

"You get off at noon on Good Friday," Sam had said early that spring. "Don't

deny it. I lived with GoMar rules for years, remember. And you have Monday

off. That's enough time. You and Mimi drive the camper up to get me and I'll

show you some of the most terrific desert you can imagine."

"Let's do it!" Mimi cried. "We've both asked off until Wednesday. We

were going to my parents' house for the weekend, but this is more exciting!

Let's do it, Vickie." With hardly a pause she asked if Diego could join them.

"He's a dear friend," she said to Sam, her eyes glittering. "But he wants to

be so much more than that. Who knows what might develop out on the desert?"

Watching her, Victoria knew she was using Diego, that it was Sam she

was after, and it didn't matter a bit. Hadn't mattered then, didn't matter

now, she thought, driving slowly looking for a restaurant, remembering

Diego's words:

"Get hungry, just pull over and toss a steak on the stove. Enough food

for a week for all of us. Get sleepy, pull over, crawl in one of the bunks.

That simple."

But there was no place to pull over on the highway, and no place to

park and broil a steak. She spotted a restaurant, had dinner, and wished the

motels had not had their no-vacancy lights on all down the main street of

this small town. According to the map, she was about fifty miles south of

Lake Shasta, and there would be campgrounds there, places to park and sleep.

She climbed back inside the camper and started driving again.

Sam had given Diego explicit directions, and the more Victoria thought

about them, and about the roads -- everything from double green lines down to

faint broken lines on the map -- the more she wished she had taken Mimi's

suggestion and called the Oregon state police. Sam had gone up to the

mountains with friends who had left him there. The police could find him, she

thought, or find his friends and locate Sam that way. They could give him a

ride to the nearest town, where he could rent a car to drive himself home.

Sam would understand why no one had showed up at the appointed hour. And she

knew she had refused that way out because Mimi had angered her finally.

"Why?" Mimi had asked petulantly. She was very lovely, her hair black

and lustrous, her brown eyes large as marbles. "After all, if you haven't

snagged him in six months, why do you think this weekend will do it?"

* * * *

It was after twelve when she finally came to a stop, hit the light switch,

and rested her head for several minutes on the steering wheel. She had been

up since six that morning, had worked half the day, and she felt as if she

had been wrestling elephants all evening. She neither knew nor cared where

she was, someplace near the lake, someplace where the traffic was distant and

no lights showed. She hauled herself up, staggered through the camper to the

bunks, and fell onto one of them without bothering to undress. Presently she

shifted so that the covers were over her instead of under her, and it seemed

she had hardly closed her eyes before she was wakened by shouts.

Dazed, she pulled the shade aside. It was not yet light.

"This is a parking lot!" a man yelled at her. "Move it out of here."

It was bitter cold that morning and the sky was uniformly gray. She

turned the radio on to the weather channel and nodded glumly at the report.

Freezing level three thousand feet, snow in the higher passes.

All morning she crept along, sometimes in the clouds, sometimes in

swirling snow, sometimes below the weather. At one o'clock she realized she

had left the cold front behind her; she was east of the mountains, heading

north in Oregon. The sun was brilliant, but the wind speed had increased

enough to rock the camper, and she fought to hold it to forty miles an hour.

The rain forest had given way to pines on her left, and off to her

right there was the desert. Later in the afternoon she turned east an U.S.

26, and after a few miles stopped at a rest area for lunch. This was the

Juniper Wayside Park, a small plaque said, and went on to extol the virtues

of the juniper tree. The trees were misshapen, no two alike. Some grew out

sideways like shrubs, some were almost as upright as pines; none was over

twenty feet tall. Beyond the small grove of junipers the ground was flat

brown, dotted with sagebrush and occasional clumps of wirelike grass. The

wind screamed over the empty land. Shivering, Victoria got back inside the

camper. She made a sandwich and studied the instructions Sam had written.

She had less than sixty miles to go; it was four-thirty. She should be

there well before dark. A truck thundered past the park, and she jumped,

startled. It was the first vehicle that had passed her since she had turned

east. But, she thought, it proved other traffic did use this highway; she

would not be totally alone on the desert.

When she started again, no one else was in sight. The road was

straight as far as she could see in both directions, and it was a good road,

but she had to slow down again and again until she was driving no faster than

thirty-five miles an hour. Even at that speed the wind out of the northwest

was a steady pressure against the side of the camper, pushing, pushing. When

it let up, she rebounded. When it gusted, she was almost swept off the road.

To her left -- she could not judge distance in this treeless country

-- there were hills, or mountains, and sharply sawed-off mesas. Now and than

a pale dirt road appeared, vanished in the sagebrush. Her highway was sending

out feelers, tendrils that crept toward the hills and never reached them.

Milepost 49. She shook her head. Those little roads were being

swallowed by the desert. It was a joke. Sam had not meant for them to drive

on one of those go-nowhere roads. Milepost 50, 51 ... She slowed down even

more, gripped the wheel hard enough to make her hands ache. There was no

place she could stop on the highway, no place she could pull over to

consider. U.S. 26 was two lanes; there was no shoulder, only the desert. When

Milepost 57 came, she turned north onto a dirt road. She felt only

resignation now. She had to keep driving; the road was too narrow for two

cars to pass. On either side there was only rock-strewn, barren ground,

sagebrush, and boulders, increasing in size now. She could see nothing behind

her except a cloud of dust. The sun had dipped behind the mountains and the

wind now hurled sand against the windshield. The road curved and she hit the

brakes, gasping. Before her was a chasm, a gorge cut into the land so deeply

she could not see the bottom, only the far side where sharply tilted strata

made her feel dizzy for a moment.

Some ancient river, she thought, had thundered out of the hills, an

irresistible force that no rock could withstand. Where was it now? Gone

forever, but its passageway remained. A mighty god, it had marked the land

for centuries to come, its print cruelly raked into the earth. The forests it

had nourished were gone; the bears and otters and beavers, all gone; the land

was deserted, wailing its loneliness. She roused with a jerk. It was the wind

screaming through the window vent. Soon it would be dark; she had to find a

place where it would be safe to stop for the night.

She read the directions again before she started. Sixteen miles on the

road, turn right, through a gate, a short distance to a second gate, twelve

more miles. She glanced at the odometer frequently as she drove, willing the

numbers to change. The cliffs on her left were already dark in shadows, and

the gorge she cautiously skirted appeared to be bottomless. This narrow road

had been blasted out of the mountains; it threaded upward in a series of

blind curves.

Every step for six months, she thought, had led her to this: driving

alone on the desert, miles from another person, miles from help if she should

have an accident. Driving on a track that seemed designed to make any

stranger end up at the bottom of a ravine.

She realized there was a wire fence on her right. She could not

remember when it had first appeared. She had been climbing steadily, slowed

to ten miles an hour on hairpin curves, with no attention to spare for

scenery. Now the land was flattening out again. She almost cried out her

relief when she saw the gate. She had to turn on the headlights to see how to

open it; she drove through, got out and closed it again, and stood looking at

the western sky, streaked with purple, gold, and a deep blue that almost

glowed. The wind stung her eyes and chilled her. She turned around to study

the track ahead. It could not be called a road here, she decided, and knew

she would not try to drive another mile that day.

"I'm sorry, Sam," she murmured, climbing back into the camper. She

humped and ground her way only far enough from the dirt road not to be

covered with dust if someone else drove by, and then she turned off the

motor. Without that noise, it seemed that the voice of the wind intensified,

filled all available space. She closed the vent tight, and the high-pitched

wail stopped, but the roar was all around her. Now and then the camper

swayed, and she thought perhaps she should move it so that the wind would not

hit it broadside. She sat gripping the steering wheel, straining to see

ahead, until she realized how dark it had become; she could see nothing at

all with the headlights off. Night had come like the curtain on the last act.

She pulled the shades tight, checked the locks, and thought about

dinner, decided it would be more trouble than it was worth. Instead, she

looked in the liquor cabinet, chose Irish, poured the last of the coffee into

her cup, filled it with the whisky, and sat on a bunk sipping it as she

pulled off her shoes. Her shoulders and back ached from her day-long battle

with the wind. When her cup was empty, she lay down and pulled the covers

over her ears. The wind roared and the camper shook and she slept.

* * * *

She awakened and sat up, straining to hear; there was nothing. The wind had

stopped and there was no sound except her breathing. A faint light outlined

one of the windows where she had failed to fasten the shade securely. Wearily

she got up, not at all refreshed by sleep, and very hungry. She went to the

bathroom, looked at the shower, shook her head, and went to the refrigerator

instead. Food, then a cleanup, then drive again. As she sipped her second cup

of coffee she opened the shade and looked out, and for a long time didn't

even breathe.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Kate Wilhelm - 20 Short Stories and Novellas.pdf

共40页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Kate Wilhelm - 20 Short Stories and Novellas

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: