The Spirit Gate (58 page)

Digital edition: 20141115vnm

www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624

Maya became addicted to science fiction when her dad let her
stay up late to watch
The Day the
Earth Stood Still
. Mom was horrified. Dad was unrepentant. Maya slept
with a night-light in her room until she was 15.

She started her writing career sketching science fiction
comic books in the last row of her grade school classroom. She was never
apprehended. Since then her short fiction has been published in
Analog
,
Amazing Stories
,
Century
,
Realms of Fantasy
,
Interzone
,
Paradox
and
Jim
Baen’s Universe
. Her novelette,
The
White Dog,
was a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award.

Her debut novel,
The
Meri
(Baen), was a
Locus Magazine
1992 Best First Novel nominee. She is
a sometime collaborator with Michael Reaves, with whom she’s penned three Star
Wars novels, and a Del Rey original,
Mr.
Twilight.
Their collaboration,
Star
Wars: The Last Jedi
was a
New York Times
Bestseller.

Maya lives in San Jose where she writes, performs, and
records original and parody (filk) music with her husband and awesome musician
and music producer, Chef Jeff Vader, All-Powerful God of Biscuits. The couple
frequently serves as Guest of Honor at science fiction/fantasy conventions and
at filk music gatherings, and has been honored with Pegasus Awards for Best Parody
and Best Performer. They’ve produced five music albums:
RetroRocket Science
,
Aliens Ate My Homework
and
Grated Hits
(parody),
and the original music CDs
Manhattan Sleeps
and
Mobius Street
.
To top it off, they’ve also produced
three musical children: Alex, Kristine, and Amanda.

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (Coruscant Nights Book Four)

Del Rey / Lucas Books, 2013
with Michael
Reaves

STAR WARS: SHADOW GAMES
Del Rey/Lucas Books, 2011
with Michael
Reaves

The Mer Cycle:
THE MERI
TAMINY
THE CRYSTAL ROSE

A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK
Book View Cafe, 2010

TACO DEL AND THE FABLED TREE OF DESTINY
Book View Cafe, 2010

SHAMAN (A Collection of Short Science Fiction)
Book View Cafe, 2013

ALL THE COLORS OF TIME (A Collection of Short Science Fiction)
Book View Cafe, 2014

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One:
If Market Street Flooded

“If
Market Street ever flooded,” said Stanislaus Ouspensky, “South Philly
would be an island.”

He
contemplated this possibility over a bowl of chicken soup in a postage-stamp-sized
deli on South Tenth Street between Cross and Tasker.

Across
the counter, the deli’s owner, Izzy Davidov, looked up from the newspaper
spread across the worn linoleum of his countertop and raised a graying
eyebrow. “How so?”

Ouspensky
straightened from his soup and flung his arms wide, dripping chicken
broth across the counter. “Just look. Water on three sides; history
on the fourth. All it would take is a little push”—he demonstrated
on the lone matzo ball still bobbing in the bowl—“and we’re cut
off from the present. Because Time gets confused in South Philly.”

At
the end of the counter closest to the door, Ganady Puzdrovsky and his
best friend, Yevgeny Toschev, locked eyes over their root beer. The
boys had heard Mr. Ouspensky hold forth on this subject before and knew
that Mr. Ouspensky believed Time flowed into Philly and eddied there,
unable to find a way out again. At least, that’s what he claimed to
believe.

Stanislaus Ouspensky,
who had lived in a walk-up on 20
^th
Street across from Connie
Mack Stadium since the Creation, had watched many baseball games from
his rooftop before the notorious ‘spite fence’ went up in ’35.
To Ganady and Yevgeny he had privately intimated that because of these
so-called time-eddies, he could
still
watch them. At the ambiguous
age of sixteen—stranded midway between childhood and adulthood—neither
boy could completely discount the claim. Neither was sure he wanted
to.

“Confused?”
repeated Izzy, eyeing the golden beads of liquid on his previously spotless
countertop. “How does Time get confused?”

“Abigail
Adams’s Bed and Breakfast is how,” said Mr. Ouspensky. “The Betsy
Ross Museum is how. Time slides down the Broad Street Line and finds
these places, and it eddies around them and gets stuck. Do you know
what you get when Time gets stuck?”

“No,”
said Izzy, rattling his paper. “But I suspect you will tell me.”

“Windows
into the past. Windows into
history
. That’s what you get.”
He glanced at the two boys out of the corner of his eye and winked,
making them parties to his theory.

As
indeed, they were. Thanks in large part to Mr. Ouspensky and his philosophical
ramblings, their Philadelphia was not circumscribed by the neat grid
of streets or a modern façade. Their Philly wasn’t merely trapped
in Time, it was sinking back into it.

This
meant there were times when Izzy’s deli was a tavern at which thieves
and pirates gathered in the wee hours. And Saint Stanislaus’ Church
was a grand and massive cathedral gone to weed, in which sad monks carried
out their daily rites, and at night worked for an unspecified Underground.

“Windows?”
repeated Izzy, his eyebrows just visible above the edge of the newspaper.
“I’ll tell you what I know about windows, Ouspensky. I know that
mine haven’t been washed for above a week thanks to that
hulyen
,
Nikolai Puzdrovsky.”

Ganady
snorkeled into his straw, root beer exploding up the sides of the bottle.
Hearing his elder brother referred to as a “hellraiser,” even in
Yiddish, was not without humor. Lazy, Nikolai might be called, careless,
maybe—but a hulyen?

The
hulyen himself appeared just then as if magically summoned, stepping
through Izzy’s door with the sharp April wind nipping after him. He
closed the door in its face and said, “Hey, Mr. O. Hey, Izzy. Can
I get a grape soda?”

Izzy’s
eyebrows rose again at the sound of his pet name coming from Nikolai’s
lips. Neither of the other boys would have dared address him in such
fashion, but Nikolai was seventeen and as of this past winter, considered
himself to be sufficiently grown up to experiment with such adult privilege.

“How
do you do,
Mister
Puzdrovsky?” asked Izzy mildly. “I’ll
be happy to see to your soda as soon as I’ve finished my business
with Ganady.”

Ganady’s
ears perked up at this, for he had no idea that business was being done
with him.

Izzy
said, “So, Ganady, since my windows have gone unwashed this week past,
I am wondering if you and your young friend might be interested in a
bit of work. One could do the windows, one the floors . . .”

Nikolai
reverted swiftly to his youth. “Gee, Mr. Davidov, I was going to do
them Friday, but . . . well, I had to make up some homework, and then it
was getting dark, and you know how Mama is about us being out after
dark.”

“My
windows don’t know from homework,” said Izzy. “They’re just
dirty. Perhaps Ganady doesn’t have homework that must be made up?”

Ganady
glanced at Nikolai, whose entire thought process was writ publicly on
his lean face. Certainly he wanted the money, but having to do windows
on Friday afternoons instead of all the other things that could be done . . .

Nikolai
took a deep breath. “I’ll do them Wednesday. I promise. Right after
school. Will that be okay, Mr. D.?”

Izzy
grunted what Ganady assumed was an affirmative and poked his long nose
back into his paper. “You know where the soda is. Help yourself.”

Nikolai
did just that, swinging around the end of the counter to the beaten-up
little icebox where Izzy kept his cold stuff. He was back out again
in a moment, swigging a grape Nehi. “Seen any good ballgames lately,
Mr. Ouspensky?” he asked.

“A
few,” said the old man coyly, dunking the hapless matzo ball with
his spoon. He did not elaborate.

In
days past, he would have waxed poetic about the games, but Nikolai was
no longer of the inner circle. To Ganady’s chagrin, his elder brother
had begun to change with the onset of this, his junior year, until by
now, in early April, he seemed as blasé and unimaginative as his peers.

For
his part, Nikolai merely grinned, sucked his soda and said, “Mama
sent me to bring you home, Ganny. And Eugene’s wanted up at the restaurant.”

Yevgeny’s
eyes shot sparks of perfect delft blue onto his freckled cheeks. “Don’t
call me that,” he said.

Nikolai
shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself. All I know is, your Mama wants
you to help out in the kitchen.”

Unlike
Yevgeny, who resisted Americanization with every fiber of his being,
Nikolai had become relentlessly American, his interests running more
and more to cars and leather bomber jackets and chinos and high-school
dances. Mama and Baba were the only ones at home who could call him
“Nikolai” or “Nikki” these days; everyone else must call him
“Nick.” He had unilaterally decided that Yevgeny would be “Eugene”
instead of “Zhenya” or some other standard diminutive. He had also
coined the shortened version of Ganady’s name on the grounds that
the Polish version—“Genna”—“sounded girly.” Everyone had
taken to using it—even their Mama on occasion. Ganady couldn’t find
it in himself to care with anything like the passion Yevgeny did.

Nick
said South Philadelphia was an antique or a museum, or worse, a human
rummage sale. Further, Ganady and Yevgeny with their heads full of time
eddies and magical windows were
yentas
who might just as well
be doing needlework and sharing neighborhood gossip with Baba Irina’s
glayzele tey
society.

He
rarely joined the other boys on their rambles these days, and when he
did, Ganady knew he was only along for the ride. He never brought his
imagination with him. To hear Nick tell it, the only reason he spent
any time with the younger boys at all was to keep them from dropping
permanently through one of Ouspensky’s magic windows, leaving him
to explain their disappearance to the elder Puzdrovskys.

Root
beer bottles drained, the two younger boys followed Nikolai from the
deli.

“Saturday?”
asked Mr. Ouspensky from behind them.

“Saturday,”
said Ganady and Yevgeny in unison.

And
Izzy Davidov muttered, “Mr. D!” and rattled his newspaper.

“Saturday,
what?” asked Nikolai as the boys made their way up the street.

Ganady
shrugged, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, trying to lose
the root-beer-bottle chill. “Oh, nothing. We’re um . . .”

Yevgeny
said, “We’re going to help Mr. Ouspensky put up a new clothesline.”