Orson Scott Card is a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner, and the author of an acknowledged classic (Ender’s Game). We’re proud to welcome him to the pages of Galaxy’s Edge.
Cyril’s relationship with his wife really went downhill after she died. Though, if he was honest with himself—something he generally tried, with some success, to avoid—things hadn’t been going all that well while Alice was alive. Everything he did seemed to irritate her, and when he didn’t do anything at all, that irritated her too.
“It’s not your fault,” Alice explained to him. “You try, I can see that you try, but you just...you’re just wrong about everything. Not very wrong. Not oblivious or negligent or unconcerned. Just a little bit mistaken.”
“About what? Tell me and I’ll get better.”
“About what people want, who they are, what they need.”
“What do you need?” Cyril asked.
“I need you to stop asking what I need,” she said. “I need you to know. The children need you to know. You never know.”
“Because you won’t tell me.”
“See?” she said. “You have to make it my fault. Why should people always have to tell you, Cyril? It’s like you go through life in a well-meaning fog. You can’t help it. Nobody blames you.”
But she blamed him. He knew that. He tried to get better, to notice more. To remember. But there was that note of impatience—in her voice, the children’s voices, his boss’s voice. As if they were thinking, I’m having to explain this to you?
Then Alice was hit by a car driven by a resurrected Han dynasty Chinese man who had no business behind the wheel—he plowed into a crowd on a bustling sidewalk and then got out and walked away as nonchalantly as if he had successfully parallel parked a large car in a small space. It was the most annoying thing about the dead—how they thought killing total strangers was no big deal, as long as they didn’t mean to do it. And since the crowd only had two living people in it, the number of deaths was actually quite low. Alice’s death barely rose to the level of a statistic, in the greater scheme of things.
She was thoughtful enough to clean up and change clothes before she came home that night—resurrection restored every body part as it should be at the peak of mature health, but it did nothing for the wardrobe. Still, the change in her attitude was immediate. She didn’t even try to start dinner.
“What’s for dinner, Mom?” asked Delia.
“Whatever your father fixes,” said Alice.
“Am I fixing dinner?” asked Cyril. He liked to cook, but it usually took some planning and he wasn’t sure what Alice would let him use to put together a meal.
“Go out to eat, have cold cereal, I really don’t care,” said Alice.
This was not like her. Alice controlled everybody’s diet scrupulously, which is why she almost never allowed Cyril to cook. He realized at once what it meant, and the kids weren’t far behind.
“Oh, Mom,” said Roland softly. “You’re not dead, are you?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “But don’t worry, it only hurt for about a minute while I bled out.”
“Did the resurrection feel good?” asked Delia, always curious.
“The angel was right there, breathed in my mouth—very sweet. A bit of a tingle everywhere. But really not such a great feeling that it’s worth dying for, so you shouldn’t be in a hurry to join me, dear.”
“So you won’t be eating with us,” said Cyril.
She shook her head a little, eyes closed. “‘Dead’ means I don’t eat, Cyril. Everyone knows that the dead don’t eat. We don’t breathe except so we can talk. We don’t drink and if we do, it’s just to keep company with the living, and the liquids all evaporate from our skins so we also don’t pee. We also don’t want sex anymore, Cyril. Not with each other and not with you.”
She had never mentioned sex in front of the children before, except for the talk with Delia when she turned ten, and that was all about time-of-the-month things. If Delia had any idea what sex was, Cyril didn’t think she got it from her mother. So the children blanched and recoiled when she mentioned it.
“Oh, don’t be such big babies, you know your father and I had sex, or you wouldn’t look so much like him. Which is fine for you, Roland, your father’s a good-looking man, in his way. But a bit of a drag for you, Delia, with that jaw. And the resurrection won’t fix that. Resurrection isn’t cosmetic surgery. Which is really unfair, when you think about it. People who are genetically retarded or crippled or sick have their DNA repaired to some optimum state, but girls with overly mannish features or tiny breasts or huge ones, for that matter, their DNA is left completely alone, they’re stuck like that for eternity.”
“Thanks, Mom,” said Delia. “I love having my confidence destroyed once again, and I haven’t even begun doing my homework yet.”
“So you aren’t going to eat with us?” asked Roland.
“Oh, of course I’ll sit at table with you,” said Alice. “For the company.”
In the event, Cyril got out everything in the fridge that looked like it might go on a sandwich and everybody made their own. Except Alice, of course. She just sat at the table and made comments, without even a pause to take a bite or chew.
“The way I see it,” said Alice, “is that it’s all poop. Nothing you’re putting on sandwiches even looks appetizing any more, because I see that poopiness of it all. You’re going to eat it and digest it and poop it out. The nutrients will decay and eventually end up in some farmer’s field where it will become more future-poop, which he’ll harvest and it’ll get processed into a more poopable state, so you can heat it or freeze it or thaw it or whatever, chew it up or drink it, and then turn it into poop again. Life is poop.”
“Mom,” said Delia. “It’s usually Roland who makes us sick while we’re eating.”
“I thought you’d want to hear my new perspective as a post-living person.” She sounded miffed.
“Please speak more respectfully to your mother,” said Cyril to Delia.
“Cyril, really,” said Alice. “I don’t need you to protect me from Delia’s snippy comments. It’s not going to kill me to hear her judgmentalness directed at the woman who gave birth to her.”
“Feel free to criticize your mother’s defecatory comments,” said Cyril. “Or ignore them, as you choose.”
“I know, Dad,” said Delia. There was that familiar hint of eye-rolling in her tone of voice. Once again Cyril must have guessed wrong about what to say, or leave unsaid. He had never really gotten it right when Alice was alive, and now that she was dead-and-resurrected, he’d have no chance, because he was no longer dealing with a wife, or even, strictly speaking, a woman. She was a visitor with a key to the house.
Within a few weeks, Cyril found himself remembering the awful night of Alice’s death as a particularly lovely time, because she actually sat with them during dinner and wasn’t trying to lead the children off into some kind of utterly bizarre activity.
She showed up at any hour of the day and expected to be able to take Delia or Roland with her on whatever adventure she’d gotten it into her head to try with them.
“No, Alice, you may not take Roland out of school so he can go scuba diving with you.”
“It’s really not your place to say what I can or cannot do,” said Alice.
“The law is clear, Alice—when you die you become, in a word, deceased. You no longer have any custody over the children. Thousands of years of legal precedent make that clear. Not to mention tons of recent case law in which the resurrected are found to be unfit parents in every case.”
“Aren’t you lucky that the dead can’t get angry,” said Alice.
“I suppose that I am,” said Cyril. “But I’m not dead, and I was furious when I found you practically forcing Roland to walk along the top of a very high fence.”
“It’s exhilarating,” said Alice.
“He was terrified.”
“Oh, Cyril, are you really going to let a child’s fears—”
“He was right to be terrified. He could have broken his neck.”
“And would it have been such a tragedy if he did?” asked Alice. “I was run over by a car and I turned out OK.”
“You think you’re OK?” asked Cyril.
Alice held up her hands and twisted her wrists as if to prove that her parts worked.
“Here’s how I know you’re not OK, Alice,” said Cyril. “You keep trying to put the kids in high-risk situations. You’re trying to kill them, Alice.”
“Don’t think of it as death. I’m not dead. How is it death?”
“How can I put this kindly?” said Cyril, who by this point had actually stopped trying to be kind. “You’re dead to me.”
“Just because I’m no longer available for empty reproductive gestures does not mean I’m not here for you, Cyril.”
“I’m going to get a restraining order if you don’t stop taking the kids on dangerous activities. You don’t have any guardianship rights over these children.”
“My fingerprints say I’m still their mother!”
“Alice, when you were their mother, you wanted them to relish every stage of their life. Now you’re trying to get them to skip all the rest of the stages.”
“You can’t manipulate me with guilt,” said Alice. “I’m beyond human emotions and needs.”
“Then why do you still need the children with you?”
“I’m their mother.”
“You were their mother,” said Cyril.
“I was and I am,” said Alice.
“Alice, I may have been a disappointment as a husband.”
“And as a father, Cyril. The children are often disappointed in you.”
“But I meet a basic minimum, Alice. I’m alive. I’m human. Of their species. I want them to be alive. I’d like them to live to adulthood, to marry, to have children.”
Alice shook her head incredulously. “Go outside and look at the street, Cyril. Hundreds of people lie down and sleep in the streets or on the lawns every night, because the world has no shortage of people.”
“Just because you’ve lost all your biological imperatives doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t have them.”
“Cyril, your reasoning is backward. The children will be much happier without biological imperatives.”
“So you admit you’re trying to kill them.”
“I’m trying to awaken them from the slumber of mortality.”
“I don’t want to waken them from that slumber,” said Cyril sharply. “If it’s a dream, then let them finish the dream and come out of it in their own time.”
“When someone you love is living in a nightmare,” said Alice, “you wake them up.”
“Alice,” said Cyril, “you’re the nightmare.”
“Your wife is a nightmare? Your children’s mother?”
“You’re a reanimated dead woman.”
“Resurrected,” said Alice. “An angel breathed into my mouth.”
“The angel should have minded its damn business,” said Cyril.
“You always wanted me dead,” said Alice.
“I never wanted you dead until after you were dead and you wouldn’t go away.”
“You’re a bitter failure, Cyril, and yet you cling to this miserable life and insist that the children cling to it, too. It’s a form of child abuse. Of child exploitation.”
“Go away, Alice. Go enjoy your death somewhere else.”
“My eternal life, you mean.”
“Whatever.”
But in the end, Alice won. First she talked Delia into jumping from a bridge without actually attaching any bungee cords to her feet. Once again Cyril had no chance to grieve, because Alice brought Delia by to tell Roland how great death and resurrection were. Delia was fully grown. A woman, but in a retailored version of her dress that fit her larger, womanly body.”
“The soul is never a child,” said Alice. “What did you expect?”
“I expected her to take a few more years to grow into this body,” said Cyril.
“Think of it as skipping ahead a few grades,” said Alice, barely able to conceal her gloating.
If Cyril had thought resurrected Alice was awful, resurrected Delia was unbearable. His love for his daughter had become, without his realizing it, far stronger and deeper than his lingering affection for his wife. So he could not help but grieve for the young girl cut off in her prime. While the snippy, smart-mouthed woman of the same name, who thought she had a right to dwell in his house and follow him around, mocking him constantly—she was a stranger.
How can you grieve for people who just won’t go away? How can you grieve for a daughter whose grownup dead-and-resurrected self ridicules your mourning? “Oh, did Daddy lose his widdow baby?”
There was nothing to do but say an occasional silent prayer—which they mocked when they noticed him doing it. Only Cyril was never quite sure what he was praying for. Please get rid of all the dead? Please unresurrect them? Would God even hear that prayer?
Roland died of a sudden attack of influenza a few months later. “You can’t blame me for it this time,” said Alice.
“You know you were sneaking him out into the cold weather specifically so he’d catch cold. The dying was a predictable result. You’re a murderer, Alice. You should be in hell.”
Alice smiled even more benignly. “I forgive you for that.”
“I’ll never forgive you for taking away my children.”
“Now you’re unencumbered. I thought that’s what you secretly wished for.”
“Thanks for telling me my deepest wishes,” said Cyril. “They were so deep I never knew they existed.”
“Come with us, Father,” said Roland.
“In due time, I’ll go where I can find what I need,” said Cyril. “You don’t need me.”
Roland was so tall. Cyril’s heart ached to see him. My little boy, he thought. But he could not say it. Roland’s gentle pity on him was harder to bear than Delia’s open scorn.
They would not go. They talked about it, but sheer inertia kept anyone from changing. Finally it dawned on Cyril. Just because he was the only predead resident of the house did not bind him to it. His life had been stripped away from him; why was he clinging to the house that used to hold it?
For the shower, the toilet, the bathroom sink; for the refrigerator, the microwave, the kitchen table; for the roof, the bed, a place to store his clothes. The burden and blessing of modern life. Unlike the resurrected, if Cyril was going to eat, he had to work; if he was going to work, he had to look presentable. For his health he needed shelter from weather, a safe place to sleep.
The resurrected people who used to love him did not need this place, but would not leave; he needed the place, but could not bear these people who made it impossible for him to truly grieve the terrible losses he had suffered. Job had it all wrong, thought Cyril. Having lost his wife and children, it was better to lose all his other possessions and live in an ashpit, covered in boils. Then, at least, everyone could see and understand what had happened to him. His friends might have been wretched comforters, but at least they understood that he was in need of comfort.
Just because he had to store his food and clothing there, and return there to wash himself and sleep, did not mean he had to live there, to pass waking hours there, listening to his dead wife explain his inadequacies to him, or his dead daughter agree with her, or his dead son pity him.
Cyril took to leaving work as soon as he could, and sometimes when he couldn’t, just walking out of the building, knowing he was putting his already somewhat pitiful career in jeopardy. He would walk the streets, delaying the commute home as long as possible. He thought of joining his wife and children in death and resurrection, but he had seen how death stripped them of all desire, and even though his current malaise came from the frustration of his deepest desires, he did not want to part with them. Desire was what defined him, he understood that, and to give them up was to lose himself, as his wife and children were lost.
Bitterly, Cyril remembered the Bible school of his childhood. Lose your soul to find it? Yes, the dead had certainly done that. Lost soul, self, and all, but whatever they found, it wasn’t really life. Life was about hunger and need and finding ways to satisfy them. Nature red in tooth and claw, yes, but hadn’t the human race found ways to create islands of peace in the midst of nature? Lives in which terror was so rare that people paid money to go to amusement parks and horror movies in order to remember what terror felt like.
This life was even more peaceful, even less lonely, wasn’t it? When he walked the streets, he jostled with thousands and thousands of the resurrected, who crowded every street as they went about their meaningless existence, not even curious, but moving for the sake of moving, or so it seemed to him; pursuing various amusements because they remembered that this was a thing that human beings did, and not because they desired amusement.
They crowded the streets so that traffic barely moved yet they provided no boost to the economy. Needing nothing, they bought nothing. They had no money, because they had no desires, and therefore nothing to work for. They were the sclerosis of commerce. Get out of my way, thought Cyril, over and over. And then: Do what you want. I’m not going anywhere either.
He was living like the dead, he recognized that. His life was as empty as theirs. But underneath his despair and loneliness and ennui, he was seething with resentment. Since God obviously existed after all, since it was hard to imagine how else one might explain the sudden resurrection-of-all-who-had-ever—lived, what did he mean by it? What were they supposed to do with this gift that preserved life eternally while robbing it of any sort of joy or pleasure? So Cyril was ironically receptive when he found the uptown mansion with a sign on the door that said: GOD’S ANTEROOM
Nobody used “anteroom” anymore, but the idea rather appealed to him. So he went up the short walk and climbed the stoop and opened the front door and stepped inside.
It was a good-sized foyer, which he assumed was formed by tearing out a wall and combining the front parlor with the original vestibule. The space was completely filled by a small merry-go-round. As far as Cyril could see, no doors or stairs led out of the room except the front door he had just come through.
“Hello?” His voice didn’t echo—the room wasn’t big enough for that. It just fell into the space, flat and dull. He thought of calling again, louder, but instead stepped up onto the carousel.
It was small. Only two concentric circles of animals to ride, the outer one with seven, the inner one with three, plus a single one-person bench shaped like the Disney version of a throne, molded in smooth, rounded lines of hard plastic pretending to be upholstery.
Cyril thought of sitting there, since it required no effort. But he thought better of it, and walked around the carousel, touching each animal in turn. Chinese dragon, zebra, tiger, horse, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giant mouse. Porpoise, eagle, bear. All extravagantly detailed and finely hand-painted—there was nothing sloppy or faded or seedy about the thing. In fact, he could truly say that the carousel was a work of art, a small, finely crafted version of a mass entertainment.
He had never known there was such a thing as a boutique carousel. Who would ever come to ride such a thing? And what would they pay? Part of the pleasure of full-sized carousels was the fact that it was so crowded and public. Here in this room, the carousel looked beautiful and sad at the same time. Too small for the real purpose of a carousel—a place where people could display themselves to one another, while enjoying the mild pleasure of moving up and down on a faux beast. Yet too large for the room, crowded, almost as if this were a place where beautiful things were stored while awaiting a chance for display in a much larger space.
Cyril sat on the hippopotamus.
“Would you like me to make it go?” asked a woman’s voice.
Cyril had thought he was alone. He looked around, startled, a little embarrassed, beginning the movement of getting back off the hippo, yet stopping himself because the voice had not challenged him, but rather offered to serve him.
Then he saw her through the grillwork of the faux ticket booth in a space that must have been a coat closet when the house was first built. How did she get in or out? The booth had no door.
Her appearance of youth and health led him to assume she was dead and resurrected.
“I can’t really afford...” he began.
“It’s free,” she said.
“Hard to stay in business at those rates,” said Cyril.
“It’s not a business,” she said.
Then what is it? he wanted to ask. But instead he answered, “Then yes. I’d like to ride.”
Silently the carousel slipped into movement without a lurch; had he not been paying attention, Cyril would not have been able to say when movement began.
The silence did not last long, for what would a carousel be without music? No calliope, though—what accompanied this carousel sounded like a quartet of instruments. Cello, oboe, horn, and harpsichord, Cyril thought, without any effort to sort out the sounds. Each instrument was so distinctive it was impossible not to catalog them. They played a sedate music in three-four time, as suited a carousel or skating rink, yet the music was also haunting in a modal, folk-songish way.
Cyril let the carousel carry him around and around. The movement did not have the rapid sweep of a full-size carousel, but rather the dizzying tightness of spin of a children’s hand-pushed merry-go-round. He had to close his eyes now and then to keep from becoming light-headed or getting a slight headache from the room that kept slipping past his vision.
It did not occur to him to ask her to slow it down, or stop. He simply clung to the pole and let it move him and the hippo up and down.
Because the music was so gentle, the machinery so silent, the distance from him to the ticket booth so slight even when he was on the far side of the room, Cyril felt it possible—no, obligatory—to say something after a while.
“How long does the ride last?” he asked.
“As long as you want,” she said.
“That could be forever,” he said.
“If you like,” she said.
He chuckled. “Do you get overtime?”
“No,” she said. “Just time.”
“Too bad,” he said. Then he remembered that she was dead, and neither payment nor time would mean very much to her.
“Do you read?” he asked. “Or do you have a DVD player in there?”
“What?” she asked.
“To pass the time. Between patrons. While the customers are riding. It can’t be thrilling to watch me go around and around.”
“It actually is,” she said. “Just a little.”
Liar, thought Cyril. Nothing is thrilling to the dead.
“You’re not dead yet,” she said.
“No,” he answered, wanting to add, What gave me away? but keeping his silence. He knew what gave him away. He had asked questions. He was curious. He had bothered to ride at all. He had closed his eyes to forestall nausea. So many signs of life.
“So you can’t ride forever.”
“I suppose not,” said Cyril. “Eventually I have to sleep.”
“And eat,” she said. “And urinate.”
“Doesn’t look like you have a restroom, either,” said Cyril.
“We do,” she said.
“Where?” He looked for a door.
“It has an outside entrance.”
“Don’t the homeless trash the place?” he asked.
“I don’t mind cleaning it up,” she said.
“So you do it all? Run the carousel, clean the restrooms?”
“That’s all there is,” she said. “It isn’t hard.”
“It isn’t interesting, either.”
“Interesting enough,” she said. “I don’t get bored.”
Of course not. You have to have something else you want to be doing before you really feel bored.
“Where are you from?” asked Cyril, because talking was better than not talking. He wanted to ask her to stop the carousel, because he really was getting just a little sick now, but if he stopped, she might insist that he go. And if he got off, yet was allowed to stay, where would he stand while he talked to her?
“I died here as a little girl. My mother gave birth to me on the voyage.”
“Immigrants,” said Cyril.
“Isn’t everyone?” she answered.
“So you never grew up.”
“I’m up,” she said, “but you’re right, without growing into it. I was very sick, my mother wiping my brow, crying. And then I was full-grown, and had this strange language at my lips, and there were all these buildings and people and nothing to do.”
“So you found a job.”
“I came through the door and found the ticket booth standing open. I knew it was called a ticket booth as soon as I saw it, though I never saw a ticket booth before in my life. I could read the signs, too, and the letters, though they weren’t in the language I learned as a baby. I turned on the carousel and it went around and I like to watch it, so I stayed.”
“So nobody hired you.”
“Nobody’s told me to go,” she said. “The machinery isn’t complicated. I can make it go backward, too, but nobody likes that, so I don’t even offer anymore.”
“Can you make it go slower?”
“That’s the slowest setting,” she said. “It can go at two faster speeds. Do you want to see?”
“No,” he said quickly, though for a moment he wanted to say yes, just to find out what it would feel like.
“No one likes that either, though people still ask. The living ones throw up sometimes, at the faster speeds.”
“Sometimes the resurrected come to ride?”
“Sometimes they come with the living ones. A dead mother and her living children. That sort of thing.”
“How do you like it?” he asked.
“Well enough,” she said, “or I wouldn’t stay.”
He realized she must have thought he meant how she liked her job, or watching the carousel.
“I meant, how do you like resurrection?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a choice, so I don’t think about it.”
“When you were dying, what did you want?”
“I wanted my mother not to cry. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to feel better.”
“Do you feel better now?” asked Cyril.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose so. My mother isn’t crying anymore. I found her after I resurrected. She didn’t know me, but I knew her. She was just as I remember her, only not so sad. She and I didn’t talk long. There wasn’t much to say. She said that she wept for me until her husband made her stop so he could bury me. She wouldn’t move away, because she would have to leave my grave behind, so they lived their whole lives nearby, and raised eleven other children and sent them out into the world, but she never forgot me.”
The story made Cyril want to weep for his own dead children, even though they were alive again, after a fashion. “She must have been glad to see you,” he said.
“She didn’t know me. It was her baby that she wanted to see.”
“I know,” said Cyril. “My wife got my children to die and they came back like you. Grown up. I miss the children that I lost.” And then he did cry, just for a couple of sobs, before he got control of himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been able to cry till now. Because they’re still there.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m glad to see you cry.”
He didn’t even ask why. He knew: Her mother, being resurrected, had not cried. The woman needed to see a living person cry for a dead child. Needed. How could she need anything?
“What’s your name?” asked Cyril.
“Dorcas,” she said.
“Not a common name anymore,” said Cyril.
“It’s from the Bible. I never studied the Bible when I was alive. I was too young to read. But I came back knowing how to read. And the whole Bible is in my memory. So is everything. It’s all there, every book. I can either remember them as if I had already read them, or I can close my eyes and read them again, or I can close my eyes and see the whole story play out in front of my eyes. And yet I never do. It’s enough just to know what’s in all the books.”
“All of them? All the books ever written?”
“I don’t know if it’s all of them. But I’ve never thought of a book that I haven’t read. If one book mentions another book, I’ve already read it. I know how they all end. I suppose it must be more fun to read, if you don’t already know every scene and every word.”
“No worse than the carousel,” said Cyril. “It just goes around and around.”
“But the face of the person riding it changes,” she said. “And I don’t always know what they’re going to say before they say it.”
“So you’re curious.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t really care. It just passes the time.”
Cyril rode in silence for a while.
“Why do you think he did it?” he finally asked.
“Who?” she asked. Then, “Oh, you mean the resurrection. Why did God, you know.”
“This is God’s anteroom, right? So it seems appropriate to wonder. Why now. Why everybody all at once. Why children came back as adults.”
“Everybody gets their perfect body,” she said. “And knowledge. Everything’s fair. God must be fair.”
Cyril pondered that. He couldn’t even argue with it. Very even-handed. He couldn’t feel that he had been singled out for some kind of torment. Many people had suffered worse. When his children had died, he was still able to talk to them. It had to feel much worse if they were simply gone.
“Maybe this is a good thing,” said Cyril.
“Nobody believes that,” she said.
“No,” said Cyril. “I can’t imagine that they do. When you wish—when your child dies, or your wife. Or husband, or whatever—you don’t really think of how they’d come back. You want them back just as they were. But then what? Then they’d just die again, later, under other circumstances.”
“At least they’d have had a life in between,” said Dorcas.
Cyril smiled. “You’re not the ordinary dead person,” he said. “You have opinions. You have regrets.”
“What can I regret? What did I ever do wrong?” she asked. “No, I’m just pissed off.”
Cyril laughed aloud. “You can’t be angry. My wife is dead, and she’s never angry.”
“So I’m not angry. But I know that it’s wrong. It’s supposed to make us happy and it doesn’t, so it’s wrong, and wrongness feels...”
“Wrong,” Cyril prompted.
“And that’s as close as I can come to being angry,” said Dorcas. “You too?”
“Oh, I can feel anger! I don’t have to be ‘close,’ I’ve got the real thing. Pissed off, that’s what I feel. Resentful. Spiteful. Whining. Self-pitying. And I don’t mind admitting it. My wife and children were resurrected and they’ll live forever and they seem perfectly content. But you’re not content.”
“I’m content,” she said. “What else is there to be? I’m pissed off, but I’m content.”
“I wish this really were God’s anteroom,” said Cyril. “I’d be asking the secretary to make me an appointment.”
“You want to talk to God?”
“I want to file a complaint,” said Cyril. “It doesn’t have to be, like, an interview with God himself. I’m sure he’s busy.”
“Not really,” said the voice of a man.
Cyril looked at the inner row, where a handsome young man sat in the throne. “You’re God?” Cyril asked.
“You don’t like the resurrection,” said God.
“You know everything, right?” asked Cyril.
“Yes,” said God. “Everybody hates this. They prayed for it, they wanted it, but when they got it, they complained, just like you.”
“I never asked for this.”
“But you would have,” said God, “as soon as somebody died.”
“I wouldn’t have asked for this,” said Cyril. “But what do you care?”
“I’m not resurrected,” said God. “Not like them. I still care about things.”
“Why didn’t you let them care, then?” asked Cyril.
“Billions of people on Earth again, healthy and strong, and I should make them care? Think of the wars. Think of the crimes. I didn’t bring them back to turn the world into hell.”
“What is it, if it isn’t hell?” asked Cyril.
“Purgatory,” said Dorcas.
“Limbo,” Cyril suggested back.
“Neither one exists,” said God. “I tried them for a while, but nobody liked them, either. Listen, it’s not really my fault. Once a soul exists, it can never be erased. Annihilated. I found them, I had to do something with them. I thought this world was a good way to use them. Let them have a life. Do things, feel things.”
“That worked fine,” said Cyril. “It was going fine till you did this.” He gestured toward Dorcas.
“But there were so many complaints,” said God. “Everybody hated death, but what else could I do? Do you have any idea how many souls I have that still haven’t been born?”
“So cycle through them all. Reincarnation, let them go around and around.”
“It’s a long time between turns,” said God. “Since the supply of souls is infinite.”
“You didn’t mention infinite,” said Cyril. “I thought you just meant there were a lot of us.”
“Infinite is kind of a lot,” said God.
“To me it is,” said Cyril. “I thought that to you—”
“I know, this whole resurrection didn’t work out like I hoped. Nothing does. I should never have taken responsibility for the souls I found.”
“Can’t you just...put some of us back?”
“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said God, shaking his head vehemently. “Never that. It’s—once you’ve had a body, once you’ve been part of creation, to take you back out of it—you’d remember all the power, and you’d feel the loss of it—like no suffering. Worst thing in the world. And it never ends.”
“So you’re saying it’s hell.”
“Yes,” said God. “There’s no fire, no sulfur and all that. Just endless agony over the loss of...of everything. I can’t do that to any of the souls. I like you. All of you. I hate it when you’re unhappy.”
“We’re unhappy,” said Cyril.
“No,” said God. “You’re sad, but you’re not really suffering.”
Cyril was in tears again. “Yes I am.”
“Suck it up,” said God. “It can be a hell of a lot worse than this.”
“You’re not really God,” said Cyril.
“I’m the guy in charge,” said God. “What is that, if not God? But no, there’s no omnipotent transcendental being who lives outside of time. No unmoved mover. That’s just stupid anyway. The things people say about me. I know you can’t help it. I’m doing my best, just like most of you. And I keep trying to make you happy. This is the best I’ve done so far.”
“It’s not very good,” said Cyril.
“I know,” said God. “But it’s the best so far.”
Dorcas spoke up from the ticket booth. “But I never really had a life.”
God sighed. “I know.”
“Look,” said Cyril. “Maybe this really is the best. But do you have to have everybody stay here? On Earth, I mean? Can’t you, like, create more worlds?”
“But people want to see their loved ones,” said God.
“Right,” said Cyril. “We’ve seen them. Now move them along and let the living go on with our lives.”
“So maybe a couple of conversations with the dead and they move on,” said God, apparently thinking about it. “What about you, Dorcas?”
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m dead, what do I care?”
“You care,” said God. “Not the cares of the body. But you have the caring of a soul. It’s a different kind of desire, but you all have it, and it never goes away.”
“My wife and children don’t care about anything,” said Cyril.
“They care about you.”
“I wish,” said Cyril.
“Why do you think they haven’t left? They see you’re unhappy.”
“I’m unhappy because they won’t go,” said Cyril.
“Why haven’t you told them that? They’d go if you did.”
Cyril said nothing. He had nothing to say.
“You don’t want them to go,” said Dorcas.
“I want my children back,” Cyril said. “I want my wife to love me.”
“I can’t make people love other people,” said God. “Then it wouldn’t be love.”
“You really have a limited skill set,” said Cyril.
“I really try not to do special favors,” said God. “I try to set up rules and then follow them equally for everybody. It seems more fair that way.”
“By definition,” said Dorcas. “That’s what fairness is. But who says fairness is always good?”
God shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I wish I did. But I’ll give it a shot, how about that? Maybe I can eventually fix this thing. Maybe the next thing will be a little better. And maybe I’ll never get it right. Who knows?”
And he was gone.
So was Dorcas.
Cyril got off the hippo. He was dizzy and had to cling to the pole. The carousel wasn’t going to stop. So he waited until he had a stretch of open floor and leapt off.
He stumbled, lurched against a wall, slid down, and lay on the floor. The quartet stopped playing. The carousel slowed down and stopped. Apparently it automatically knew when there were no passengers.
A baby cried.
Cyril walked to the ticket window and looked in. On the floor sat a toddler, a little girl, surrounded by a pile of women’s clothing. The toddler looked up at him. “Cyril,” she said in her baby voice.
“Do you remember being a grownup?” Cyril asked her.
The little girl looked puzzled.
“How do I get in there?”
“Hungry!” said the little girl and she cried again.
Cyril saw a door handle inside the ticket booth and eventually figured out where the door was in the outside wall. He got it open. He picked up little Dorcas and wrapped her in the dress she had been wearing. God was giving her a life.
Cyril carried her out of God’s anteroom and down the stoop. The crowds were gone. Just a few cars, with only the living inside them. Some of them were stopped, the drivers just sitting there. Some of them were crying. Some just had their eyes closed. But eventually somebody honked at somebody else and the cars in the middle of the road started going again.
Cyril took a cab home and carried the baby inside. Alice and Delia and Roland were gone. There was food in the fridge. Cyril got out the old high chair and fed Dorcas. When she was done, he set her in the living room and went in search of toys and clothes. He mentally talked to Alice as he did: So it’s stupid to keep children’s clothes and toys when we’re never going to have more children, is it? Well, I never said it, but I always thought it, Alice: Just because you decided not to have any more babies doesn’t mean I would never have any.
He got Dorcas dressed and she played with the toys until she fell asleep on the living room carpet. Then Cyril lay on the floor beside her and wept for his children and the wife he had loved far more than she loved him, and for the lost life; yet he also wept for joy, that God had actually listened to him, and given him this child, and given Dorcas the life she had longed for.
He wondered a little where God had sent the other souls, and he wondered if he should tell anybody about his conversation with God, but then he decided it was all none of his business. He had a job the next day, and he’d have to arrange for day care, and buy food that was more appropriate for the baby. And diapers. He definitely needed those.
He slept, and dreamed that he was on the carousel again, dizzy, but moving forward, and he didn’t mind at all that he would never get anywhere, because it was all about the ride.
Copyright © 2012 by Orson Scott Card