As soon as Alvin looked at him. Joe screamed at him. “You can’t just let it be, can you! You have to do it again and again and again, don’t you!”

  Oh, I see, Alvin thought. By wanting to change things, I was just making them more the same. Trying to control the world they live in. I didn’t think it through well enough. God played a dirty trick on me, giving me that cup from the cloud.

  “I’m sorry,” Alvin said.

  “No!” Joe shouted. “There’s nothing you can say!”

  “You’re right,” Alvin said, trying to calm Joe. “I should just have—”

  “Don’t say anything!” Joe screamed, his face red.

  “I won’t, I won’t,” said Alvin. “I won’t say another—”

  “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

  “I’m just agreeing with you, that’s—”

  Joe lunged forward and screamed it in his father’s face. “God damn you, don’t talk at all!”

  “I see,” said Alvin, suddenly realizing. “I see—as long as I try to put it in words, I’m forcing my view of things on the rest of you, and if I—”

  There were no words left for Joe to say. He had tried every word he knew that might silence his father, but none would. Where words fail, there remains the act. The only thing close at hand was a heavy glass dish on the side table. Joe did not mean to grab it. did not mean to strike his father across the head with it. He only meant his father to be still. But all his incantations had failed, and still his father spoke, still his father stood in the way, refusing to let him pass, and so he smashed him across the head with the glass dish.

  But it was the dish that broke, not his father’s head. And the fragment of glass in Joe’s hand kept right on going after the blow, followed through with the stroke, and the sharp edge of the glass cut neatly through the fleshy, bloody, windy part of Alvin’s throat. All the way through, severing the carotid artery, the veins, and above all the trachea, so that no more air flowed through Alvin’s larynx. Alvin was wordless as he fell backward, spraying blood from his throat, clutching at the pieces of glass imbedded in the side of his face.

  “Uh-oh.” said Connie in a high and childish voice.

  Alvin lay on his back on the floor, his head propped up on the front edge of the couch. He felt a terrible throbbing in his throat and a strange silence in his ears where the blood no longer flowed. He had not known how noisy the blood in the head could be, until now, and now he could not tell anyone. He could only lie there, not moving, not turning his head, watching.

  He watched as Connie stared at his throat and slowly tore at her hair; he watched as Joe carefully and methodically pushed the bloody piece of glass into his right eye and then into his left. / see now, said Alvin silently Sorry I didn’t understand before. You found the answer to the riddle that devoured us, my Oedipus. I’m just not good at riddles, I’m afraid.

  1985

  The Fringe

  Although it has been a number of years since Orson Scott Card (“Closing the Timelid,” December 1979) has appeared in F&SF, the wait has been worthwhile. “The Fringe” presents us with a powerful picture of a devastated North America trying to rebuild through the efforts of a few concerned people who must combat not only the landscape but human ignorance and greed.

  LaVon’s book report was drivel, of course. Carpenter knew it would be from the moment he called on the boy. After Carpenter’s warning last week, he knew LaVon would have a book report—LaVon’s father would never let the boy be suspended. But LaVon was too stubborn, too cocky, too much the leader of the other sixth-graders’ constant rebellion against authority to let Carpenter have a complete victory.

  “I really, truly loved Little Men,” said LaVon. “It just gave me goose bumps.”

  The class laughed. Excellent comic timing, Carpenter said silently. But the only place that comedy is useful here in the New Soil country is with the gypsy pageant wagons. That’s what you’re preparing yourself for, LaVon, a career as a wandering parasite who lives by sucking laughter out of weary farmers.

  “Everybody nice in this book has a name that starts with D. Demi is a sweet little boy who never does anything wrong. Daisy is so good that she could have seven children and still be a virgin.”

  He was pushing the limits now. A lot of people didn’t like mention of sexual matters in the school, and if some pinheaded child decided to report this, the story could be twisted into something that could be used against Carpenter. Out here near the fringe, people were desperate for entertainment. A crusade to drive out a teacher for corrupting the morals of youth would be more fun than a traveling show, because everybody could feel righteous and safe when he was gone. Carpenter had seen it before, not that he was afraid of it, the way most teachers were. He had a career no matter what. The university would take him back, eagerly; they thought he was crazy to go out and teach in the low schools. I’m safe, absolutely safe, he thought. They can’t wreck my career. And I’m not going to get prissy about a perfectly good word like virgin.

  “Dan looks like a big bad boy, but he has a heart of gold, even though he does say real bad words like devil sometimes.” LaVon paused, waiting for Carpenter to react. So Carpenter did not react.

  “The saddest thing is poor Nat, the street fiddler’s boy. He tries hard to fit in, but he can never amount to anything in the book, because his name doesn’t start with D.”

  The end. LaVon put the single paper on Carpenter’s desk, then went back to his seat. He walked with the careful elegance of a spider, each long leg moving as if it were unconnected to the rest of his body, so that even walking did not disturb the perfect calm. The boy rides on his body the way I ride in my wheelchair, thought Carpenter. Smooth, unmoved by his own motion. But be is graceful and beautiful, fifteen years old and already a master at winning the devotion of the weakhearted children around him. He is the enemy, the torturer, the strong and beautiful man who must confirm his beauty by preying on the weak. I am not as weak as you think.

  LaVon’s book report was arrogant, far too short, and flagrantly rebellious. That much was deliberate, calculated to annoy Carpentor. Therefore Carpenter would not show the slightest trace of annoyance. The book report had also been clever, ironic, and funny. The boy, for all his mask of languor and stupidity, had brains. He was better than this farming town; he could do something that mattered in the world besides driving a tractor in endless contour patterns around the fields. But the way he always had the Fisher girl hanging on him, he’d no doubt have a baby and a wife and stay here forever. Become a big shot like his father, maybe, but never leave a mark in the world to show he’d been there. Tragic, stupid waste.

  But don’t show the anger. The children will misunderstand, they’ll think I’m angry because of LaVon’s rebelliousness, and it will only make this boy more of a hero in their eyes. Children choose their heroes with unerring stupidity. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, all they know of life is cold and bookless classrooms interrupted now and then by a year or two of wrestling with this stony earth, always hating whatever adult it is who keeps them at their work, always adoring whatever fool gives them the illusion of being free. You children have no practice in surviving among the ruins of your own mistakes. We adults who knew the world before it fell, we feel the weight of the rubble on our backs.

  They were waiting for Carpenter’s answer. He reached out to the computer keyboard attached to his wheelchair. His hands struck like paws at the oversized keys. His fingers were too stupid for him to use them individually. They clenched when he tried to work them, tightened into a fist, a little hammer with which to strike, to break, to attack; he could not use them to grasp or even hold. Half the verbs of the world are impossible to me, he thought as he often thought. I learn them the way the blind learn words of seeing—by rote, with no hope of ever knowing truly what they mean.

  The speech synthesizer droned out the words he keyed. “Brilliant essay, Mr. Jensen. The irony was powerful, the savagery was refreshing. Unfortunately, it also revealed the poverty of your soul. Alcott’s title was ironic, for she wanted to show that despite their small size, the boys in her book were great-hearted. You, however, despite your large size, are very small of heart indeed.”

  LaVon looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes. Hatred? Yes, it was there. Do hate me, child. Loathe me enough to show me that you can do anything I ask you to do. Then I’ll own you, then I can get something decent out of you, and finally give you back to yourself as a human being who is worthy to be alive.

  Carpenter pushed outward on both levers, and his wheelchair backed up. The day was nearly over, and tonight he knew some thing would change, painfully, in the life of the town of Reefrock. And because in a way the arrests would be his fault, and because the imprisonment of a father would cause upheaval in some of these children’s families, he felt it his duty to prepare them as best he could to understand why it had to happen, why, in the larger view, it was good. It was too much to expect that they would actually understand, today; but they might remember, might forgive him someday for what they would soon find out he had done to them.

  So he pawed at the keys again. “Economics,” said the computer. “Since Mr. Jensen has made an end of literature for the day.” A few more keys, and the lecture began. Carpenter entered all his lectures and stored them in memory, so that he could sit still as ice in his chair, making eye contact with each student in turn, daring them to be inattentive. There were advantages in letting a machine speak for him; he had learned many years ago that it frightened people to have a mechanical voice speak his words while his lips were motionless. It was monstrous, it made him seem dangerous and strange. Which he far preferred to the way he looked: weak as a worm, his skinny, twisted, palsied body rigid in his chair; his body looked strange but pathetic. Only when the synthesizer spoke his acid words did he earn respect from the people who always, always looked downward at him.

  “Here in the settlements just behind the fringe,” his voice went, “we do not have the luxury of a free economy. The rains sweep onto this ancient desert and find nothing here but a few plants growing in the sand. Thirty years ago nothing lived here; even the lizards had to stay where there was something for insects to eat, where there was water to drink. Then the fires we lit put a curtain in the sky, and the ice moved south, and the rains that had always passed north of us now raked and scoured the desert. It was opportunity.”

  LaVon smirked as Kippie made a great show of dozing off. Carpenter keyed an interruption in the lecture. “Kippie, how well will you sleep if I send you home now for an afternoon nap?”

  Kippie sat bolt upright, pretending terrible fear. But the pretense was also a pretense; he was afraid, and so to conceal it he pretended to be pretending to be afraid. Very complex, the inner life of children, thought Carpenter.

  “Even as the old settlements were slowly drowned under the rising Great Salt Lake, your fathers and mothers began to move out into the desert, to reclaim it. But not alone. We can do nothing alone here. The fringers plant their grass. The grass feeds the herds and puts roots into the sand. The roots become humus, rich in nitrogen. In three years the fringe has a thin lace of soil across it. If at any point a fringer fails to plant, if at any point the soil is broken, then the rains eat channels under it, and tear away the fringe on either side, and eat back into farmland behind it. So every fringer is responsible to every other fringer, and to us. How would you feel about a fringer who failed?”

  “The way I feel about a fringer who succeeds,” said Pope. He was the youngest of the sixth-graders, only thirteen years old, and he sucked up to LaVon disgracefully.

  Carpenter punched four codes. “And how is that?” asked Carpenter’s metal voice.

  Pope’s courage fled. “Sorry.” Carpenter did not let go. “What is it you call fringers?” he asked. He looked from one child to the next, and they would not meet his gaze. Except LaVon.

  “What do you call them?” he asked again.

  “If I say it, I’ll get kicked out of school,” said LaVon. “You want me kicked out of school?”

  “You accuse them of fornicating with cattle, yes?”

  A few giggles.

  “Yes, sir,” said LaVon. “We call them cow-fornicators, sir.”

  Carpenter keyed in his response while they laughed. When the room was silent, he played it back. “The bread you eat grows in the soil they created, and the manure of their cattle is the strength of your bodies. Without fringers you would be eking out a miserable life on the shores of the Mormon Sea, eating fish and drinking sage tea, and don’t forget it.” He set the volume of the synthesizer steadily lower during the speech, so that at the end they were straining to hear.

  Then he resumed his lecture. “After the fringers came your mothers and fathers, planting crops in a scientifically planned order: two rows of apple trees, then six meters of wheat, then six meters of com, then six meters of cucumbers, and so on; year after year, moving six more meters out, following the fringers, making more land, more food. If you didn’t plant what you were told, and harvest it on the right day, and work shoulder to shoulder in the fields whenever the need came, then the plants would die, the rain would wash them away. What do you think of the farmer who does not do his labor or take his work turn?”

  “Scum,” one child said. And another: “He’s a wallow, that’s what he is.”

  “If this land is to be truly alive, it must be planted in a careful plan for eighteen years. Only then will your family have the luxury of deciding what crop to plant. Only then will you be able to be lazy if you want to, or work extra hard and profit from it. Then some of you can get rich, and others can become poor. But now, today, we do everything together, equally, and so we share equally in the rewards of our work.”

  LaVon murmured something.

  “Yes, LaVon?” asked Carpenter.

  He made the computer speak very loudly. It startled the children.

  “Nothing,” said LaVon.

  “You said, ‘Except teachers.’ ”

  “What if I did?”

  “You are correct,” said Carpenter. “Teachers do not plow and plant in the fields with your parents. Teachers are given much more barren soil to work in, and most of the time the few seeds we plant are washed away with the first spring shower. You are living proof of the futility of our labor. But we try, Mr. Jensen, foolish as the effort is. May we continue?”

  LaVon nodded. His face was flushed. Carpenter was satisfied. The boy was not hopeless—he could still feel shame at having attacked a man’s livelihood.

  “There are some among us,” said the lecture, “who believe they should benefit more than others from the work of all. These are the ones who steal from the common storehouse and sell the crops that were raised by everyone’s labor. The black market pays high prices for the stolen grain, and the thieves get rich. When they get rich enough, they move away from the fringe, back to the cities of the high valleys. Their wives will wear fine clothing, their sons will have watches, their daughters will own land and marry well. And in the meantime, their friends and neighbors, who trusted them, will have nothing, will stay on the fringe, growing the food that feeds the thieves. Tell me, what do you think of a black marketeer?” He watched their faces. Yes, they knew. He could see how they glanced surreptitiously at Dick’s new shoes, at Kippie’s wristwatch. At Yutonna’s new city-bought blouse. At LaVon’s jeans. They knew, but out of fear they had said nothing. Or perhaps it wasn’t fear. Perhaps it was the hope that their own fathers would be clever enough to steal from the harvest, so they could move away instead of earning out their eighteen years.

  “Some people think these thieves are clever. But I tell you they are exactly like the mobbers of the plains. They are the enemies of civilization.”

  “This is civilization?” asked LaVon.

  “Yes.” Carpenter keyed an answer. “We live in peace here, and you know that today’s work brings tomorrow’s bread. Out on the prairie they don’t know that. Tomorrow a mobber will be eating their bread, if they haven’t been killed. There’s no trust in the world, except here. And the black marketeers feed on trust. Their neighbors’ trust. When they’ve eaten it all, children, what will you live on then?” They didn’t understand, of course. When it was story problems about one truck approaching another truck at sixty kleeters and it takes an hour to meet, how far away were they?—the children could handle that, could figure it out laboriously with pencil and paper and prayers and curses. But the questions that mattered sailed past them like little dust devils, noticed but untouched by their feeble, self-centered little minds.

  He tormented them with a pop quiz on history and thirty spelling words for their homework, then sent them out the door.

  LaVon did not leave. He stood by the door, closed it, spoke. “It was a stupid book,” he said.

  Carpenter clicked the keyboard. “That explains why you wrote a stupid book report.”

  “It wasn’t stupid. It was funny. I read the damn book, didn’t I?”

  “And I gave you a B.”

  LaVon was silent a moment, then said, “Do me no favors.”

  “I never will.”

  “And shut up with that goddamn machine voice. You can make a voice yourself. My cousin’s got palsy and she howls to the moon.”

  “You may leave now, Mr. Jensen.”

  “I’m gonna hear you talk in your natural voice someday, Mr. Machine.”

  “You had better go home now, Mr. Jensen.”

  LaVon opened the door to leave, then turned abruptly and strode the dozen steps to the head of the class. His legs now were tight and powerful as horses’ legs, and his arms were light and strong. Carpenter watched him and felt the same old fear rise within him. If God was going to let him be born like this, he could at least keep him safe from the torturers.

  “What do you want, Mr. Jensen?” But before the computer had finished speaking Carpenter’s words, LaVon reached out and took Carpenter’s wrists, held them tightly. Carpenter did not try to resist; if he did, he might go tight and twist around on the chair like a slug on a hot shovel. That would be more humiliation than he could bear, to have this boy see him writhe. His hands hung limp from LaVon’s powerful fists.