Otherworldly Maine (47 page)

“We were like babies when we came out of the trees. We knew nothing. We cried and called for our mothers. Glooskap taught us how to build fires, how to make canoes, how to hunt the animals he had made for us.

“At the end of his days Glooskap left the earth for fairyland. He promised he would return, but he never has.”

By dawn Morgan had just about had it. He couldn't sleep, finally passed out from exhaustion, woke up with sore spots up and down his torso from lying on uneven ground—rocks interspersed by mushy patches of damp ground, and half-eaten by the mosquitoes. He'd been so exhausted, and so cold, even under his fur-lined jacket, that he could not move enough even to get closer to the fire. He remembered worrying about his grandfather—he didn't even have a jacket!—but he'd been unable to think it through enough to do anything about it.

He gazed into the gray and pink-haloed light of morning, gasped as several deer wandered through with unexpected majesty, and saw his grandfather standing there, taking off all his clothes.

“What the hell? Granddad! Gary! Gary, do something!”

“Hey,” Gary's voice issued from a pile of leaves on the other side of the dead fire. Morgan couldn't help admiring his brother's cleverness, and wished he'd built himself such a bed. “Hey, Grandpa. I don't think you really want to do that.”

But their grandfather did not appear to hear them, his lips moving rapidly, almost inaudibly, in prayer or story. Both brothers scrambled to their feet, struggled to get their shoes on.

Before they could move to stop him, he had finished stripping off all his clothes, and was now passing through the trees, his arms outstretched, hands briefly caressing each tree as he passed. With each minute more light was exploding in the spaces between trunks and in the gaps of the branchy canopy overhead as daylight spread like an out-of-control fire. Morgan watched the aged legs as he stepped through low-growing bramble, winced as scratches appeared on his shins, blood mixing with wild blackberry stains over his flanks and wrinkled belly.

It seemed impossible, but whether because of his forest skills or some hidden reservoir of strength, he was faster than either one of them. They managed to barely keep him in sight (and that only, Morgan suspected, because he allowed it), but they could not catch him.

Finally he stopped before a stand of large trees and started dancing, gazing high up into the top branches as if he expected to see Glooskap's head nodding there. He was naked, bloody, and completely out of his mind. The distant Knife Edge was just visible above the trees, a glistening shard of sacrificial metal in the new sun.

Morgan and Gary stopped a couple of hundred feet away, and didn't even try to approach him. Morgan was doubled over, his head raised just enough to keep an eye on his grandfather, but he thought he was in serious danger of passing out. It gave him grim satisfaction that Gary, for all his Indian pride, looked no better.

“So that's . . . ” He jerked his head to point. ” . . . our legacy.”

“Bro . . . you're not looking . . . at it . . . right.”

“I see . . . a naked old man . . . exposed . . . to the elements . . . waltzing . . . through the woods . . . tearing . . . up his skin, trying to find . . . a particular tree . . . he's going to climb inside, because . . . that's where he originally came from. What else am I supposed to see?”

“He's doing something that
means
something to him. That's more than we can say for you. Or for me either, most of the time.”

The brothers finally managed to straighten themselves up. They gazed at their grandfather, who'd stopped dancing. Now he just stood there, perfectly still, looking up into the tree.

“That's why he stopped,” Gary said. “Just look at those trees, so close together they might as well be a solid wood wall. He's never going to get through them. You go over there and talk to him, try to calm him down. God, I hope he doesn't have a heart attack! I'll go get his clothes. He got to see the mountain, and all these trees. I think we can take him back now.”

“Wait, I thought you said he had a right . . .”

“He does. But I didn't know . . . it would be like this. Did you?” Morgan shook his head. “But hey.” Gary turned back down the trail. “At least now he's given us a helluva story to tell.”

Morgan looked over at his grandfather, just as his grandfather walked into the trees.

“There's nothing to worry about,” Gary said, walking beside him. “Just look at this, you can't move fast through here—I bet he's not more than half a dozen feet away, probably sitting on the ground, leaning against one of these trunks. You know he likes the feel of the bark.”

“I know,” Morgan said, straining his eyes, looking for a glimpse, any kind of indication their grandfather had been through here. Gary was right—it was slow going, almost impossible to move. The trunks were so close together, and the undergrowth so thick. A serious fire danger, he thought. He couldn't understand why the parks people had left it this way. And no signs of their grandfather's passage.

Gary said, “Really old people get like that, I've heard. They get . . . fixated . . . on a texture, a feeling, even a sound. They get compulsive like that.”

Eventually they split up to cover more ground, calling back and forth so that they, too, did not lose each other. Here
was
the forest primeval, it seemed. It was difficult to conceive of human beings controlling this kind of growth. Here the forest was sky, and ground, and everything in between. Here it was the air you breathed.

“Hey . . . ” Morgan called, and heard his brother's distant, responsive
hey
.

He struggled to raise his knees within a particularly dense tangle of limbs and vines, lifted his head, and saw the enormous tanned leg, its foot jammed into the ground, raising the forest floor around it, the top of the leg, approximately where the thigh must begin, hidden within the dense cover above.

He thought to turn and struggle his way out of there, but instead pushed forward, unable to turn away from this living bit of his grandfather's creation story. He felt silly when he got there—from a few feet away it was obviously bark, not skin, just the biggest tree he'd ever seen, personally. He got right up on it, and could not help reaching out, and touch, and found it to be as rough and textured as he'd expected, and yet meant, somehow, for his hand. He was weak from the search, and the bark seemed to move under his skin, and in the soft sigh of wood breath, he heard, “You tell your own story. You make it up as you go along.”

He tilted his head to hear better. “This is my story—what is yours?” And looking off the edge of the tree, saw that a face had appeared there, just around the edge: dark and smooth and untroubled, with little character reflecting the simple wear and tear of living. It was a baby's face, if that baby were six feet tall and in his twenties.

It disappeared, and Morgan scrambled around the perimeter of the tree, and saw the naked skin flashing through slits in the dense foliage, moving impossibly fast.

They made their way out and reported the disappearance, but when they led the parks people back to where they thought they had last seen their grandfather, there was no sign of the dense stand of trees, and nothing like the massive tree Morgan had encountered. Growth like that, they were told, did not exist here.

They were in a great deal of trouble, and both did jail time, and both were scared, but thought they deserved it. Gary's dad hired the lawyer, who told them they didn't need to go to jail. No one thought they'd done away with him. They'd just been reckless, and lost him. But they refused to speak in court of the experience, and that angered the judge. They had their story, they said, but it was a family tale they didn't want to share.

“His name was Joseph,” Morgan told the judge. “I called him the old Indian because that's what my mother called him. But his name was Joseph, and he was Passamaquoddy.”

“He was our grandfather,” was all Gary would say.

Three weeks after their grandfather's disappearance, some hikers found a young Indian man, naked, up on the Knife Edge. He spoke mostly gibberish, grunts, and a few Passamaquoddy words, and apparently unable to hunt, had been surviving on berries and carrion. When asked where he'd come from, he pointed to the trees below, and repeated “
Nikuwoss! Nikuwoss!
” A local man translated it as “My mother! My mother!” The papers ran articles on feral children over the next several weeks, but as so often happens, news of this nameless Indian gradually faded away.

KAREN JORDAN ALLEN grew up in Indiana and earned a master's degree from Yale Divinity School, but she has now spent half her life in Maine and expects never to live anywhere else. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in a number of magazines and anthologies, including
Asimov's Science Fiction, Maine Times, Bates: The Alumni Magazine, A Nightmare's Dozen, The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age
, and
Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
. When not writing, she moonlights as a pianist and Spanish teacher.

LEE ALLRED's stories have appeared in publications ranging from
Asimov's Science Fiction
magazine to DC Comics, but he is perhaps best known for his Civil War stories, such as “East of Appomattox” (
Alternate Generals
III) and “For the Strength of the Hills” (
Writers of the Future
Volume 13). The latter was a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. He served three tours of duty in Iraq and recalls that upon return from his first tour, his plane touched down in Portland where he was greeted warmly by a large group of Mainers.

JACK L. CHALKER (1944–2005) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where he taught history for more than 10 years. Among his several awards is the New England Science Fiction Society's E. E. Smith Memorial Award. Best known for his novel
Midnight at the Well of Souls
and its sequels, he published more than 60 novels in addition to numerous works of short fiction and nonfiction. He founded the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Mirage Press, and among his avocations was an abiding interest in ferryboats.

NOREEN DOYLE has lived most of her life in Maine. Publications featuring her fiction and nonfiction include
Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits, Dig, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy
and
Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition
. With Harry Turtledove she edited the World Fantasy Award-nominated
The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age
. She earned a B.A. from the University of Maine (anthropology and art) and M.A.s from Texas A&M (nautical archaeology) and the University of Liverpool (Egyptology).

Author or editor of more than 80 books, GARDNER DOZOIS edited
Asimov's Science Fiction
for 20 years and has been compiling
The Year's Best Science Fiction
collections since 1984. During that time he has won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times. His short fiction has also earned two Nebula Awards. His most recent novel, co-written with George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham, is
Hunter's Run
. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he now lives in Philadelphia.

TOM EASTON holds a doctorate in theoretical biology from the University of Chicago and teaches at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. His recent nonfiction books include
Classic Editions Sources: Environmental Studies, Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Science, Technology, and Society
, and
Off the Main Sequence: Science Fiction and the Non-Mass Market
. His latest novels are
Firefight
and
The Great Flying Saucer Conspiracy
. He has been writing the book review column for the SF magazine
Analog
since 1979.

GREGORY FEELEY is the author of
The Oxygen Barons, Arabian Wine
, and many novellas, stories, and articles. His fiction, which has earned Nebula Award and Philip K. Dick Award nominations, can be found in
Asimov's Science Fiction, Interzone
, and many other magazines and anthologies, including several best-of-the-year volumes. He lives three small states away from Maine, which he visits whenever he can for its bookstores and hiking trails.

ELIZABETH HAND is the multiple-award-winning author of numerous novels, including the psychological thriller
Generation Loss
and the contemporary fantasies
Illyria, Mortal Love
, and three short fiction collections. She is a longtime contributor of book reviews and essays to many publications, including
Down East
magazine, the
Washington Post Book World
, and
Salon
. She moved to Maine in 1988, where she lives in Lincolnville Center with her two teenage children and her partner, UK critic John Clute. “Echo” won a Nebula Award in 2007.

Now an editor with 30 years in journalism, DANIEL HATCH has been a reporter for, among other newspapers,
The New York Times
. He is also a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard. Today he lives in Springfield, Massachusetts, though his ancestors moved to what later became Maine. He has resided in Lisbon Falls and spent time every summer on Tripp Lake in West Poland, where he has had occasion to go after that largemouth bass hiding in the reeds and the shallow water.

JEFF HECHT is a free-lance science and technology writer whose articles can be found in such periodicals as
Omni, Earth, Cosmos
, and
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
. His short fiction has appeared in
Analog, Asimov's, Interzone, Nature
, and other magazines and anthologies. His books include
Beam: the Race to Make the Laser, City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics
, and
Understanding Fiber Optics
. He earned his B.S. electronic engineering from the California Institute of Technology and vacations regularly in Maine.