“Look,” the card seller said. He took his cards out of the embroidered bag. “It is in here.” He squatted on the sidewalk, oblivious to the dirt, the people walking by, the fumes from the street. The street, Charles noticed as he sat next to him, seemed to be paved with bottle caps.
The card seller spread the cards in front of him. “Look,” he said. “It is foretold. The cards are our oracle, our newspaper, our entertainment. All depends on how you read them.” Charles wondered where the man had learned to speak English, but he didn’t want to interrupt. “See,” the man said as he turned over a card. “Here you are. The tourist. It was foretold that you would come to the city.”
“And then what?” Charles asked. “How do I get back?”
“We have to ask the cards,” the man said. Idly he turned over another card, the ruins of Marmaz. “Maybe we wait for the next printing.”
“Next—” Charles said. “You mean the cards don’t stay the same?”
“No,” the man said. “Do your newspapers stay the same?”
“But—Who prints them?”
The man shrugged. “We do not know.” He turned over another card, a young blond woman.
“Debbie!” Charles said, startled.
“Yes,” the man said. “The woman you came with. We had to convince her to go, so that you would fulfill the prophecy and come to the city. And then we took your pieces of paper, the ones that are so important to the tiraz. That is a stupid way to travel, if I may say so. In the city the only papers that are important to us are the cards, and if a man loses his cards he can easily get more.”
“You—you took my passport?” Charles said. He did not feel as angry as he would like. “My passport and my plane tickets? Where are they?”
“Ah,” the man said. “For that you must ask the cards.” He took out another set of cards from his bag and gave them to Charles. Before Charles could answer he stood up and walked away.
By midday Charles had found the small park again. He sat down and spread out the cards, wondering if there was anything to what the card seller had said. Debbie did not appear in his deck. Was his an earlier printing, then, or a later one?
An American couple came up to him as he sat puzzling over the cards. “There are those cards again,” the woman said. “I just can’t get over how quaint they are. How much are you charging for yours?” she asked Charles. “The man down the street said he’d give them to us for ten.”
“Eight,” Charles said without hesitation, gathering them up.
The woman looked at her husband. “All right,” he said. He took a five and three ones from his wallet and gave them to Charles.
“Thank you, sor,” Charles said.
The man grunted. “I thought he spoke English very well,” the woman said as they walked away. “Didn’t you?”
A card seller gave him three more decks of cards and an embroidered bag later that day. By evening he had sold two of the decks. A few nights later, he joined the sellers of cards as they waited in the small park for the new printing of the cards. Somewhere a bell tolled midnight. A woman with beautiful long dark hair and an embroidered shawl came out of the night and silently took out the decks of cards from her bag. Her silver bracelets flashed in the moonlight. She gave Charles twelve decks. The men around him were already tearing the boxes open and spreading the cards, reading the past, or the present, or the future.
After about three years Charles got tired of selling the cards. His teeth had turned red from chewing the nut everyone chewed and he had learned to smoke the cigarettes wrapped in leaves. The other men had always told him that someone who spoke English as well as he did should be a tour guide, and finally he decided that they were right. Now he takes groups of tourists through the ruins of Marmaz, telling them about the god of the sun and the goddess of the moon and whatever else he chooses to make up that day. He has never found out what country he lives in.
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER
One
George Alec Effinger cites the theater of the absurd as a major influence on his writing and refers to his style of multilayered, free-ranging fiction as “surreal fantasy.” He first earned renown as a writer of stylish and challenging short stories in magazines and anthologies in the 1970s. His first novel, What Entropy Means to Me, is actually a quartet of linked stories that begin as a traditional quest fantasy but subtly transforms into a reflexive inquiry into family dynamics, political power struggles, and the act of artistic creation. Subsequent stories show a similar audacity of plotting and narrative structure. A number of his tales, notably “The Pinch-Hitters,” “Naked to the Invisible Eye,” “From Downtown at the Buzzer,” and “Breakaway,” draw on sports and games as their central metaphor. His novels Death in Florence, Those Gentle Voices: A Promethean Romance, and The Wolves of Memory evoke a sense of parallel realities and alternate worlds through their deployment of characters with the same names as those in short stories but with different personalities and motivations. Effinger has explored the intricate possibilities of time travel in his novels The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time and satirized heroic fantasy in Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Sword-person. His trilogy of novels featuring Marîd Audran ( When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss—all set in a future Middle East) is notable for its rendering of traditional Moslem culture receptive to the incursions of cyberpunk technology. Effinger’s numerous stories have been collected in Mixed Feelings, Irrational Numbers, Dirty Tricks, and Idle Pleasures. He has also written a number of film novelizations; a roundrobin novel, The Red Tape War; Nightmare Blue (with Gardner Dozois); and the mainstream novel Felicia.
IT WAS YEAR 30, Day 1, the anniversary of Dr. Leslie Gillette’s leaving Earth. Standing alone at the port, he stared out at the empty expanse of null space. “At eight o’clock, the temperature in the interstellar void is a negative two hundred seventy-three degrees Celsius,” he said. “Even without the wind chill factor, that’s cold. That’s pretty damn cold.”
A readout board had told him that morning that the ship and its lonely passenger would be reaching the vicinity of a star system before bedtime. Gillette didn’t recall the name of the star—it had only been a number in a catalogue. He had long since lost interest in them. In the beginning, in the first few years when Jessica had still been with him, he had eagerly asked the board to show them where in Earth’s night sky each star was located. They had taken a certain amount of pleasure in examining at close hand stars which they recognized as features of major constellations. That had passed. After they had visited a few thousand stars, they grew less interested. After they had discovered yet more planetary bodies, they almost became weary of the search. Almost. The Gillettes still had enough scientific curiosity to keep them going, farther and farther from their starting point.
But now the initial inspiration was gone. Rather than wait by the port until the electronic navigator slipped the ship back into normal space, he turned and left the control room. He didn’t feel like searching for habitable planets. It was getting late, and he could do it the next morning.
He fed his cat instead. He punched up the code and took the cat’s dinner from the galley chute. “Here you go,” said Gillette. “Eat it and be happy with it. I want to read a little before I go to sleep.” As he walked toward his quarters he felt the mild thrumming of the corridor’s floor and walls that meant the ship had passed into real space. The ship didn’t need directions from Gillette; it had already plotted a safe and convenient orbit in which to park, based on the size and characteristics of the star. The planets, if any, would all be there in the morning, waiting for Dr. Gillette to examine them, classify them, name them, and abandon them.