Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods

  MARIANNE, THE MADAME, AND THE MOMENTARY GODS

  Sheri S. Tepper

  www.sf-gateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Website

  Also By Sheri S. Tepper

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  There were no words in her mind at all. None of the tools of thinking were there, not yet. Nonetheless, she saw faces peering down at her, saw smiles on lips, heard chortling words and knew them. They were people. The words of recognition came swimming through her mind like familiar fish. Mama. Papa. Great-aunt Dagma.

  She was three days old.

  The room was as familiar as the people. Light came from the right, moving in a recognized way as the wind stirred the curtains at the tall window. She already knew the tree outside that window, already knew the lawn beneath that tree. On her fourth birthday there would be a pony tethered there for her birthday gift.

  She knew the house, every closet and attic of it. There were no rooms in it that she was not already aware of, knowing the boundaries and smell and feel of them, tight wall or loose, small window or large, the wonderful magic of familiar-familial spaces. There was porch space, half-open, half-shut in, where tree shadows made walls and the spaces between branches made windows for the wind to reveal and the sun to dart through. There was cavernous attic space, smelling of dust and dead moth bodies, stacked with sealed boxes as mysterious as old people, full of experiences she had not had yet, was not certain she wanted, yet anticipated with a kind of wondering inevitability. There were long, carpeted halls with windows at the ends and dark in the middle, the twining vines and exotic fruits on the rugs making a safe path down the center from light to light. There were bedrooms, each breathing of a special inhabitant with scent and aura peculiar to that one. There was a deep, stone-floored kitchen that begged for a witch’s cauldron and a dragon on the hearth.

  She already knew them all.

  She was not aware that this knowledge was in any respect abnormal or unusual. This was the way of her world. The place was known. Her place was known.

  Her people, too, were known. Cloud-haired mama with her soft skin and smiling mouth; bearded Papa with his hard laugh and huge, swallowing hugs; Great-aunt Dagma with her jet-black brows and lashes under hair as white as snow, with eyes that twinkled sometimes and bit sometimes like sharp little puppy teeth. Marianne could see into all of them as though they were glass.

  Except for half-brother Harvey. He, too, stood at the crib-side, making admiring noises in his suddenly bass, suddenly treble thirteen-year-old voice, but when she looked at him she could not see beyond the surface of his eyes. He was like the pool in the garden when it got muddied after rain, cloudy, hiding everything. One knew there were fish in there, but one could not see them. One could only guess at their cold trajectories, their chilly purposes, and the guessing made one shiver with apprehension. So with Harvey. She did not know him, and awareness of this blighted an otherwise perfect understanding of everything around her. Not that she thought of it in this way. If she acknowledged it at all, it was simply to identify Harvey as different and scary. He, unlike anything else in her environment, was capable of being and doing the utterly unexpected.

  When she was three, they took her to the city.

  The motion of the car put her to sleep, and when she awoke, she saw through the window of the car an endless procession of stranger houses. Each house was tight against the next, all of them staring out at the street in a glare of hard, blue light, watching her. She began to scream.

  Mama picked her up and cuddled her, asking her what it was that hurt and whether it was teeth or tummy. It was neither. It was the sight of that endless row of stranger houses that had frightened her half out of her infant wits. They were the first closed places she had ever seen, the first unfamiliar sights or sounds in her life, and they came as a hideous surprise.

  If Papa had not had to take a detour, they would have gone through a park. Somehow, she remembered a park. The picture of the park superimposed itself on the row of houses and she fell asleep again. There should have been a park.

  Thereafter, from time to time, she experienced similar superimpositions, as though her life were a palimpsest on which one experience was written over another in confusing detail so it was difficult to know which was real and which was something else. Not less real, she thought as she began to be old enough to think about things. Simply less relevant to the other things that were going on.

  Her second encounter with a closed, unfamiliar place came a year or so later, when she was old enough to go for long walks. Her hand held tightly in Nanny’s hand, she strolled down the driveway and out onto the country road. She remembered turning left, but they actually turned right to walk down the road toward the river, passing on the way a tall, gray stone house set well back from the road with windows that stared at her from half-lowered lids. Its door pursed its sill and scowled. As in that time she had visited the city, she wept. She couldn’t tell Nanny what was wrong, she hadn’t the words for it, and everyone assumed some childhood indisposition when it wasn’t that at all. It was simply that she did not know the gray house.

  Every morning she could remember, Marianne had awakened knowing the people and places and events that day would bring.
Each event was ready for her in her recollection, even before she experienced it, as well as the consequences of that event, sometimes far in the future. If she helped the gardener plant bulbs, the ultimate flowers were already there in her mind, though she would not actually see the blooms until spring. As she was lifted onto her pony for the first time, she already remembered learning to ride it. The horse she would love so much would come later, and the memory of that future horse was evoked by the present pony even as she struggled to master the muscles needed to stay on. Her body experienced it for the first time, but her mind – it already knew. It needed only a clue to come to mind. Bulb evoked flower. Pony evoked horse. All her teachers were amazed. ‘She seems to soak it up like a little sponge,’ her riding teacher said, laughing a little uncomfortably. It seemed unfair to the other children that this one should take it all in so easily.

  She assumed, for a time, at least, that everyone lived as she did, knowing what would come before it happened, knowing the places they lived in as soon as they were born. She assumed everyone had occasional visions of some alternate reality, sometimes dull, sometimes bright, sometimes frightening and bizarre. She did not know that she was unique, that no one else in the world lived as she did. She was unwilling to accept that there might be people and places that remained strangers. Instead she chose to believe that the knowledge would come later. She would get to know them someday. Someday there would be no more unfamiliar streets, no more closed doors, no more shut windows. Someday, when she was grown-up, everything would be understood. The gray house, with all its spaces, its roofs and porches, its closets and attics would come to her, part of growing up. She would be able to greet it as she walked on the street. ‘Hello old green-shingly-with-the-cupola. Still have that mouse family in the attic?’ Someday, she told herself comfortingly, intercepting a hard, opaque stare from her half brother, she might know Harvey, too. It would come. She would use the huge, old gray stone house as a yardstick to determine whether the time had come or not.

  The season came when she started to school, and for the first time she began to suspect she might be different from other children. Why should she enter the school on the first day knowing everything about it, while other children cowered and cried as though it were new and strange? Other children did not know where their classrooms were. Why did she? They did not know where the bathrooms were or where the drinking fountain had made a weirdly shaped yellow stain on the wall, like an upside-down giraffe. To Marianne it was all as familiar as though studied in advance. Why should she know her teacher’s name before they met when other children didn’t know? She had to accept the fact that they did not know, and in doing so she learned of her own strangeness. She did not want it to show, so she learned to counterfeit surprise and mimic apprehension. Still, she could never do so without feeling that somehow she was lying.

  She walked to school each day, often going out of her way to pass the great gray house. Each day she peeked at it, quick, birdlike glances, waiting for the day when it would open like a flower with all its high stairs and dormer windows, waiting for the first glimmer of recognition. That year, the year she was six, went by and the house did not open. Nor when she was seven, or eight.

  Still, she believed it would happen. She believed it for a long time, until one day she talked to Great-aunt Dagma, who was very old and thus of an age to have opened all the places of the world, and found that Great-aunt Dagma didn’t know the gray house at all.

  ‘Why, child, I haven’t any idea,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been in it. It’s occupied by some people called Carlson, I believe, but as to whether it has an attic or not? I just don’t know.’

  So the house really was a stranger house. So were the houses in the city. Strangers. Not understood. Marianne sat there, in a state of profound shock, unable to speak for a long time. Great-aunt Dagma was a sympathetic listener who did not make fun, however, and at last Marianne was able to confess that the house was very strange to her. ‘Not like home, Great-aunt,’ she confided. ‘It seems like—oh, like somebody who doesn’t talk our language at all. Some people are like that, too. Harvey’s like that.’

  Great-aunt, with a strangely intent look, agreed that this described Harvey very well. ‘He does always seem to be saying one thing with his mouth and something else with his eyes, doesn’t he, Marianne. Ah, but then, he’s always been a tight, closed boy, like a treasure box with the key hidden away somewhere. His mother was like that, herself, and his aunt is a perfect example. Lubovoskans, you know. It’s a strange, shaman-ridden, paranoid country, Lubovosk – unlike sunny Alphenlicht from which our family comes – so it’s no wonder the people show that characteristic. Harvey is a hard boy to get to know. Don’t let it worry you, child. It isn’t your fault.’

  Marianne had not thought it was her fault. Still, the implication was inescapable, and she was neither so stubborn nor so unintelligent as to miss it. Merely growing up would not open the gray house or her half brother to her after all. And if Harvey and the gray house would not open, then neither would all the other closed places or people – the people like Mrs Sindles at the school, who was always so pursed-lipped and unhappy about no-one-knew-what, who were capable of doing frightening and unexpected things. They would always be that way. Nothing she could do would change it. She wept over it for a few nights, then accepted it, using one of Cloud-haired mama’s favorite phrases, ‘All part of growing up.’ Disillusionment, pain, unpleasant surprise, all were part of growing up.

  She became accustomed to her life: accustomed to knowing ninety-five percent of everything before it occurred; accustomed to the shock of the other five percent, the wild happenings, the accidents, unpredictable and truly frightening; the double visions that were like waking dreams; the occasional places that greeted her as though they were old friends, though Marianne could not recollect how or when they might have met.

  There was a stone church at the corner of Beale Street, for example, set back a little behind a clump of trees, that spoke to her every time she saw it. ‘Remember,’ it said. ’Remember?’ Its tower had an admonitory look, like a raised finger. ‘Remember, Marianne. Pay attention, now.’ A massive rock shelter at the entrance to the Bitter River Road spoke in somewhat the same fashion. ‘Here,’ it said. ’He has been here for some time. He will be here when needed.’

  What was she to make of this? It was a mystery.

  There was a small frame house where an old, old Chinese woman often lay half-asleep on the porch. When Marianne passed by, the woman spoke without opening her lips, ‘One of them is inside. One you’ll need, Marianne. Just keep it in mind.’ Perhaps it was not the woman who spoke at all. Perhaps it was the house that spoke.

  There was a certain maple tree, bigger around than her arms would reach, which, when it was half turned yellow in the fall, whispered, ‘Just now, on the grass. Just this minute he’s come. He’s usually here. Don’t forget.’ And a wall of Virginia creeper, bloody scarlet upon the brick, breathed, ‘One of them lies here every day, waiting for word from you.’

  Messages. From inside. Inside the church, the house, the shelter, the tree, the wall. Messages that were always delivered in the same voice. She believed the voice without understanding it at all. She did not recognize the voice although it was her own, its sound subtly changed in a way she could not have expected. It would be some time before she realized it was her own voice as an adult, as she would someday be.

  Now she could only reply to the church, ‘No, I don’t remember. I’m sorry, but I don’t.’

  She tried to put the messages and the voice out of her mind. It was too troubling to deal with. For a year or two, she succeeded.

  Until she was ten years old and had a dream.

  It was very early one fall morning. She lay in her room, her arms beneath the covers, the window blowing a gauzy curtain half across her face. She was aware of this and aware at the same time that she was dreaming. In the dream, also, there was a window, but she was older, much older. An
old woman, twenty or more. She sat at a desk by the window, oak twigs tapping at the panes, looking out at a green, park-like place across the street. Something horrible crouched at her feet. When she looked, it was only a box, but there was something dreadful in it. Tears dripped from her eyes onto her hands, and in the dream she knew that she grieved. She was crying because Cloud-haired mama and Papa were dead.

  She was crying because Harvey had had something to do with their deaths!

  Ten-year-old Marianne sat straight up in bed, the dream as real as something she might have seen on television, a scream trembling unvoiced somewhere deep in an aching hollow inside her. They were dead. Gone. Killed. And Marianne herself was in terrible danger.

  The dreamlike quality of her terror was something she recognized within a moment. Her heart was not pounding. Her mind screamed, but her body lay upon the bed quietly, without panic. It was visionary terror, not real – or if real, not real in the way that other, more immediate things were real. Though it might hold the essence of reality, it did not exist in the here and now. It was another of those double visions, experienced this time as a dream and coming as an unmistakable warning. The message was clear and un-equivocal. ‘If things go on as they are going,’ she heard that inner voice saying, ‘this dreadful thing will happen.’

  For the first time, she recognized the voice as her own.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, less frightened than angry that some part of her should have separated itself in this way and be playing such tricks on her.

  ‘You know,’ the voice answered. ‘You. I am you.’

  ‘How do you know such things?’ Marianne demanded aloud before she realized she did not need to vocalize for that other self to hear.

  ‘I lived them,’ the voice said.

  ‘Are you from the future?’ she asked, silently.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the voice said, very sadly. ‘In a manner of speaking. Your future is my past. I left you word, Marianne. Messages. I left you helpers. So it won’t happen! You must not let it happen!’