Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (22 page)

A day after I met that old man, I was typing out “Eviction Notice” on a borrowed laptop in a dorm room at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I finished in about eight hours of typing. To date, that’s the fastest I’ve ever completed a story. It is also, to date, the most traumatic writing experience I’ve ever had. My oldest son was two at the time “Eviction Notice” was written, and…well, it was difficult for me to keep a professional, clinical distance. I think that the only reason I was able to get through it at all was because, writing it, I knew how it was going to end.

I can’t guess how
you
made it through…

Allen Frost
assumed the first cherub he spotted was part of the restaurant’s Valentine’s decorations. He and Mary sat on the enclosed patio at Zorba’s. He’d taken a pause to sip his wine when he first saw the cherub behind the string of red foil hearts that hung in the window. The cherub was outside, looking like a baby doll with pasted-on wings.

A second cherub fluttered down, wings flapping. A third descended to join them, then a fourth. Allen thought it was a little late in the evening to still be putting up decorations, but he appreciated the work someone had put into the dolls. Their wings moved in a way that struck him as quite realistic, if “realistic” was a word that could be used to describe a flying baby.

Then the first cherub punched the window and the glass shattered. Everyone in the room started screaming. The cherubs darted into the restaurant, followed by a half dozen more swooping from the sky. Mary jumped up, her chair falling. Before it clattered against the tile floor, a cherub had grabbed her arm. She shrieked, hitting it with her free hand, trying to knock it loose, until another cherub grabbed her by the wrist.

Allen lunged forward, grabbing one of the cherubs by the leg, trying to pull it free. He felt insane—the higher parts of his brain protested that this couldn’t be happening. Nonetheless, his sensory, animal self knew what was real. His fingers were wrapped around the warm, soft skin of a baby’s leg. White swan wings held the infant aloft. A ring of golden light the size of a coffee-cup rim hovered above the angel’s wispy locks. The whole room smelled of ozone and honeysuckle. The cherub’s fat baby belly jiggled as Allen punched it.

The angel cast a disapproving gaze at Allen, its dark blue eyes looking right down to Allen’s soul. Allen suddenly stopped struggling. He felt inexplicably naked and ashamed in the face of this creature. He averted his eyes, only to find himself staring at the angel’s penis, the tiny organ simultaneously mundane and divine and rude. He still had a death grip on the cherub’s leg. Gently, the cherub’s stubby hands wrapped around Allen’s middle and ring fingers. The cherub jerked Allen’s fingers back with a
snap,
leaving his fingernails flat against the back of his wrist.

Allen fell to his knees in pain. Mary disappeared behind a rush of angels, a flurry of wings white as the cotton in a bottle of aspirin. Her screams vanished beneath the flapping cacophony. Somewhere far in the distance, a trumpet sounded.

The Rapture
was badly timed for Allen Frost. He taught biology at the local community college while working on his doctorate. This semester, he had a girl in his class, Rachael Young, who wouldn’t shut up about intelligent design. She monopolized his classroom time. Her leading questions were thinly disguised arguments trying to prove Darwin was crap. He’d been blowing off steam about Rachael when he’d said something really stupid, in retrospect.

“People who believe in intelligent design are mush-brained idiots,” he said. “The idea that some God—”

“I believe in God,” Mary said.

“But, you know, not in
God
God,” Allen explained. “You’re open-minded. You’re spiritual, but not religious.”

Mary’s eyes narrowed into little slits. “I have very strong beliefs. You just never take the time to listen to them.”

Allen sighed. “Don’t be like this,” he said. “I’m only saying you’re not a fundamentalist.”

Mary still looked wounded.

Allen felt trapped. Most of the time, he and Mary enjoyed a good relationship. They agreed on so much. But when talk turned to religion, he felt, deep in his heart, they were doomed. Their most sincere beliefs could never be reconciled.

Allen lifted his wineglass to his lips and took a long sip, not so much to taste the wine as to shut up before he dug his hole any deeper. He turned his attention to the cherubs outside the window. Then his brains turned to mush.

Because, when you’re wrestling an angel—its powerful wings beating the air, its dark, all-knowing eyes looking right through you—you can’t help but notice evolution really doesn’t explain such a creature. The most die-hard atheist must swallow his pride and admit the obvious. An angel is the product of intelligent design.

A year
after the Rapture, Allen tossed his grandmother’s living room furniture onto the lawn, then whitewashed the floor.

When he was done, Allen went out to the porch to read while the floor dried. It had been four hours, eleven minutes since he’d put his current book down. He’d grown addicted to reading, feeling as uncomfortable without a book in hand as a smoker without a cigarette. He purchased his reading material, and the occasional groceries, with income he made reading tarot cards; he was well known to his neighbors as a magician. He always informed his hopeful visitors he didn’t know any real magic. They came anyway. The arcane symbols painted all over the house gave people certain ideas about him.

The books that lined the shelves of his library only added to his reputation for mysticism. He was forever studying some new system of magic—from voodoo to alchemy to cabala. Much of the global economy had collapsed after the Rapture, but supernatural literature experienced a boom.

He did most of his trading over the Internet. The world, for the most part, was intact. It wasn’t as if the angels came down and ripped out power lines or burned cities. They had simply dragged off God’s chosen. No one was even certain how many people were gone—some said a billion, but the official UN estimate was a comically understated one hundred thousand. The real hit to the economy came in the aftermath of the Rapture; a lot of people didn’t show up for work the next day. Allen suspected he could have found a reason to do his job if he’d been a fireman or a cop or a doctor. But a biology teacher? There was no reason for him to get out of bed. He’d spent the day hugging Mary’s pillow, wondering how he’d been so wrong. He spent the day after that reading her Bible.

He hadn’t understood it. Even in the aftermath of the Rapture, it didn’t make sense to him. So he’d begun reading books written to explain the symbolic language of the Bible, which led him to study cabala, which set him on his quest to understand the world he lived in by understanding its underlying magical foundations.

Jobless, unable to pay his rent, he’d moved into his grandmother’s abandoned house, where he’d studied every book he could buy, trade, or borrow to learn magic. So far, every book was crap. Alchemy, astrology, chaos magic, witchcraft—bullshit of the highest order. Yet he kept reading. He tested the various theories, chanting spells, mixing potions, and divining tea leaves. He was hungry for answers. How did the world really work? Pre-Rapture, science answered that question.

But science, quite bluntly, had been falsified. The army of angels had carried away his understanding of the world.

Allen now lived in a universe unbounded by natural laws. He lived in a reality where everything was possible. Books were his only maps into this terra incognita.

The whitewash
dried, leaving a blank sheet twenty feet across. It was pristine as angel wings. Allen crept carefully across it, having bathed his feet in rainwater. He wore pale, threadbare cotton. He’d shaved his head, even his eyebrows. The only dark things in the room were his eyes and the shaft of charcoal he carried. He crouched, recited the prayer he’d studied, then used his left hand to trace the outer arc of the summoning circle. The last rays of daylight faded from the window. His goal was to speak with an angel before dawn.

With the circle complete, he started scribing arcane glyphs around its edges. This part was nerve-wracking; a single misplaced stroke could ruin the spell. When the glyphs were done, Allen filled the ring with questions. Where was Mary? Would he see her again? Was there hope of reunion? These and a dozen other queries were marked in shaky, scrawled letters. His hand ached. His legs cramped from crouching. He pushed through the pain to craft graceful angelic script.

It was past midnight when he finished. He placed seven cones of incense along the edge of the circle and lit them. The air smelled like cheap aftershave.

He retrieved the polished sword from his bedroom and carried it into the circle, along with Solomon’s Manual. He opened to the bookmarked incantation. Almost immediately, a bright light approached the house. Shadows danced on the wall. A low bass rumble rattled the windows.

A large truck with no muffler was clawing its way up the gravel driveway.

Disgusted by the interruption, Allen stepped outside the circle and went to the front porch, book and sword still in hand. The air was bracing—the kind of chill February night where every last bit of moisture has frozen out of the sky, leaving the stars crisp. The bright moon cast stark shadows over the couch, end tables, and lamps cluttering the lawn.

Allen lived in the mountains of southern Virginia, miles from the nearest town. His remote location let him know all his neighbors—and the vehicle in his driveway didn’t belong to any of them. It was a flatbed truck. Like many vehicles these days, it was heavily armed. A gunner sat on the back, manning a giant machine gun bolted to the truck bed. The fact that the gunner sat in a rocking chair took an edge from the menace a gun this large should have projected. Gear and luggage were stacked on the truck bed precariously. A giant, wolfish dog stood next to the gunner, its eyes golden in the moonlight.

The truck shuddered to a halt, the motor sputtering into silence. Loud bluegrass music seeped through the cab windows. It clicked off and the passenger door opened. A woman got out, dressed in camouflage fatigues. She looked toward the porch, where Allen stood in shadows, then said, “Mr. Frost?”

Allen assumed they were asking about his grandfather. The mailbox down at the road still bore his name—his grandmother never changed it after he died, nor had Allen bothered with it after his grandmother had vanished.

“If you’re looking for Nathan Frost, he died years ago.”

“No,” the woman said, in a vaguely familiar voice. “Allen Frost.”

“Why do you want him? Who are you?”

“My name is Rachael Young,” she answered.

The voice and face clicked. The intelligent-design girl from his last class. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. You’ve found me.”

The driver’s door opened and closed. A long-haired man with a white beard down to his waist came around the front of the truck. “Well now,” the old man said, in a thick Kentucky accent. “You’re the famous science fella.”

“Famous?” asked Allen.

“My granddaughter’s been talking you up for nigh on a year,” said Old Man Young. “Says you’re gonna have answers.”

“We looked all over for you,” said Rachael. “The college said you’d gone to live with your grandmother in Texas.”

“Texas? I don’t have any relatives in Texas.”

“No shit,” the gunner on the flatbed said. “Been all over this damn country, chasin’ one wild goose after another. You better not be a waste of our time.” The dog beside him began to snarl as it studied Allen.

“Luke,” said Old Man Young. “Mind your language. Haul down the ice chest.”

“Sorry we got here so late, Mr. Frost,” Rachael said, walking toward him. She was looking at the sword and book. “Have we, uh, interrupted something?”

“Maybe,” Allen said. “Look, I’m a little confused. Why, exactly, have you been looking for me?”

“You’re the only scientist I trust,” she said. “When we used to have our conversations in class, you always impressed me. I really respected you. You knew your stuff. Since your specialty is biology, we want you to look at what we’ve got in the cooler and tell us what it is.”

Allen wasn’t sure what struck him as harder to swallow—that she’d spent a year tracking him down, or that she remembered the tedious cross-examinations she’d subjected him to as conversations.

Luke, the gunner, hopped off the truck carrying a large green Coleman cooler. It made sloshing noises as he lugged it to the porch. Luke was middle-aged, heavyset, crew cut. Rachael’s father?

Luke placed the container at Rachael’s feet. Rachael leaned over and unsnapped the clasp. “Get ready for a smell,” she said, lifting the lid.

Strong alcohol fumes washed over the porch. Allen’s eyes watered. The fumes carried strange undertones—corn soaked in battery acid, plus a touch of rotten teeth, mixed with a not-unpleasant trace of cedar.

“We popped this thing into Uncle Luke’s moonshine to preserve it,” Rachael said.

Despite the moonlight, it was too dark for Allen to make out what he was looking at. Rachael stepped back, removing her shadow from the contents. Allen was horrified to find these crazy people had brought him the corpse of a baby with a gunshot wound to its face. The top of its head was missing. The baby was naked, bleached pale by the brew in which it floated. There was something under it, paler still, like a blanket. Only, as his eyes adjusted, Allen realized the baby wasn’t sharing the cooler with a blanket but with some kind of bird—he could make out the feathers.

When he finally understood what he was looking at, his hands shook so hard he dropped his sword, and just missed losing a toe.

Allen lit
the oil lamps while Luke lugged the cooler into the kitchen. Allen only had a couple of hours’ worth of gasoline left for the generator; he wanted to save every last drop until he was ready to examine the dead cherub. While Luke set the corpse in the sink to let the alcohol drain off, Allen gathered up all the tools he thought he might need—knives, kitchen shears, rubber gloves, Tupperware. Rachael was outside, taking care of the dog, and Old Man Young was off, in his words, “to secure the perimeter.”

“That means he’s gone to pee,” Rachael had explained once her grandfather was out of earshot.

To take notes during the autopsy, Allen found a black Sharpie and a loose-leaf notebook half filled with notes he’d made learning ancient Greek. As he flipped to a blank page, he said, “I can’t believe you shot one of these. I thought they were invulnerable. I saw video where a cop emptied his pistol into one. The bullets bounced off.”