Those flowers outside the window still call me, although I cannot speak back to them — their voices are to me stronger and clearer than your own. It is obvious to me that I was not created by G-d merely to converse with humans.
Couldn’t you find it in your heart to return me to the banks of the Vltava, a bit here and a bit there, never to chop wood or carry water again? An eternal Sabbath. That is all I really want.
No Place to Raise Kids: A Tale of Forbidden Love
This is no place to raise kids, Jim thought, looking around at smooth canvas rocks and pathetic plastic trees. But for people like us, in love and on the run, with babies on the way, there’s no good place and no good time.
They’d managed to conceal their affair from prying eyes, even on the mercilessly public stage that was the Enterprise. If, as he expected, Uhura knew, she had kept their secret. But, with the twins’ gestation so near, there was nothing to do but jump ship, taking with them only the few props they could grab from the science officer’s kip and, at the last minute, McCoy’s black bag. Jim knew there was nothing in it but modernist pepper mills and hand-carved pieces of styrofoam packing material, but it would have to do in a pinch. Those weird bits of styrofoam had saved his own life in the past.
He looked over at Spock, who was sitting propped up against one of the fake rocks, breathing in short pants. (In short pants, he thought. Who writes this crap? They should read their damned scripts out loud.)
“Push,” he said. “Shouldn’t you push?”
Or should you not push? What did he know of these things? Where was Computer? Computer would know. Computer was on the ship.
We should have used a glass tank, he thought. But Spock had wanted the human experience of giving birth, and, of course, he’d had the knowledge and skill to make the necessary modifications. And now Spock was bringing forth his children in sorrow, the curse of Eve, one hundred percent human.
He’s so stoic, Jim thought. So stoic, so brilliant — and so beautiful, really. Will he continue to be this lovely to me when the makeup wears off and the rubber ears crumble? Or will we sink into boring domesticity, raising tribbles, perhaps, for Harry Mudd? Centuries from now, a minute or two at warp speeds, the Enterprise will discover us gone. Will they return to this godforsaken location to look for us, and find us dead, our starving descendants welcoming them as saviors? Or will they find a prosperous community, happily into syndication, repeating itself season after season? Thanks to relativity and the power of television, the crew of the Enterprise will remain young while we breed, age, and die.
He could call Scottie with the flick of a switch, and Scottie would beam them up. Jim considered the idea. A few special effects, and he and Spock, in the throes of childbirth, would rematerialize on the deck of the Enterprise. Then the show would cut for a commercial, and the kids would generate plot complications happily ever after.
That’s not real life, Jim thought. That’s not what it’s all about.
He could hear Spock thrashing against the canvas rock. He was yelling “Grab the baby! Turn its head!” This was real life.
The Trains that Climb the Winter Tree
Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn
It was the middle of the night when the elves came out of the mirrors. Everyone in the house was asleep. Outside, the city slumbered. Silent as shadows, the warriors went from room to room. Their knives were so sharp they could slit a throat without awakening their victim.
They killed all the adults.
The children they spared.
The bodies were carried away, back through the mirrors. Four of the elves swiftly stripped naked. They put on the adults’ nightclothes over their sexless bodies. Their own clothing they hid at the bottom of dresser drawers where the children never went. Then each one slowly and carefully assumed the form and features, down to the most intimate details, of Father, Mother, Grandmother, and Great-Aunt Adelaide.
Meanwhile, the other warriors were fetching boxes from the far side of the parlor mirror. With preternatural grace they removed from them tiny, toy-sized locomotives and passenger cars, boxcars, coal hoppers, refrigerator cars, gondolas, tank cars, flatbeds piled high with logs, floodlight cars, mail cars, ore cars, cabooses, and a tiny string of circus cars with gorillas in cages and giraffes poking through the roofs…. Unwrapped tissue paper foamed up into drifts, which were then whisked magically away. Clever elfin fingers assembled tracks and placed alongside them stations, houses, bungalows, garages, churches, restaurants, fruit and vegetable stands, a roller rink, a grain elevator, a lumberyard, a coaling station, factories, water towers, and a central roundhouse with a turntable. Bridges spanned imaginary rivers. Tunnels split papier-mâché mountains. The transformers were hooked up, the electrical connections made, and the trains set in motion.
Then the elves left. The four who remained went to three separate bedrooms where they lay down and pretended to sleep. The one who was not Father pretended to snore.
It was Christmas Eve, and nobody outside the house knew that life inside it had changed forever.
Roland was the first one up on Christmas morning. He tiptoed down the stairs from the attic room which he shared with Benjamin and then quietly past Sasha and Zoë’s room on the second floor, so he wouldn’t wake up any of his siblings. Roland was seven and he saw things differently. Just before falling asleep last night, he had told himself to wake up fifteen minutes before any of the others so he could see the toys and the decorations before they came down. Christmas didn’t look like other days. He wanted to see it clearly, and it distracted him when other people were there.
And, oh, he did see it clearly! Roland froze in the doorway, letting Christmas morning wrap its glittery tentacles of light about him. The tree was a vast darkness spangled with multicolored stars brighter than anything in the winter sky. The packages that Jolly Father Nicholas had piled so high were candy-colored, troll-haunted mountains! And through them ran a train.
What a train it was! Crossing gates clanged shut as it slammed past. It flew through forests of birch and spruce and stopped at coal hoppers to take on fuel and at log hoppers to unload. Tiny plastic cows shuffled on and off of cattle cars. Commuters waited patiently at stations that twinkled with lights. The train rattled over trestle bridges, disappeared into tunnels, reappeared from under overpasses thronged with cars, and thundered past night-silent gas stations and factory buildings. There was a wee village that was the exact twin of the one lying outside Roland’s front door, right down to the sizes and types of the trees, and the train paused there, directly in front of the house, as if waiting for somebody to emerge and climb aboard. Then, with an impatient puff of smoke, the black locomotive chuffed and chugged and tugged the train away.
Off it sped to lands unknown
After the track left the village, it wound through the living room, under the divan, past the farms that lay beneath the big upright radio, around Mother’s potted sanseveria, between a water tower and a single forlorn custard stand, and into the shadows of the tree and the piney fragrance of its branches. And then, amazingly, the track turned and twisted and ran up the tree. It spiraled around and around the trunk, showing here and there a glint of bright metal before disappearing entirely into the wintry darkness. Did it ever come down again? Roland wondered. He was the kind of child who enjoyed logical puzzles and took forever solving them because he saw far more possibilities than the other children did. He didn’t assume that just because something acted in a way contrary to all prior experience, that meant it was impossible. The universe made sense; deep down inside, Roland was sure of that. But it wasn’t necessarily a sense that you understood.