I see the situation now belongs to him, so I go back to the catsup bottles. I’m still plenty burned though, about Charlie man-handling me and about Kathy rushing so stupid into the kitchen to get Charlie. She’s a flake and always has been.

  Charlie is scowling and nodding. The harder he scowls, the nicer the government guy’s voice gets. Pretty soon the government guy is smiling sweet as pie. Charlie slinks back into the kitchen, and the four men move toward the door with John in the middle of them like some high school football huddle. Next to the real men he looks stranger than he did before, and I see how really flat his face is. But then when the huddle’s right opposite the table with my catsup bottles John breaks away and comes over to me.

  “I am sorry, Sally Gourley,” he says. And then, “I seldom have the chance to show our friendliness to an ordinary Earth person. I make so little difference!”

  Well, that throws me. His voice sounds so sad, and besides I never thought of myself as an ordinary Earth person. Who would? So I just shrug and wipe off a catsup bottle with my towel. But then John does a weird thing. He just touches my arm where Charlie squeezed it, just touches it with the palm of one of those hands. And the palm’s not slimy at all—dry, and sort of cool, and I don’t jump or anything. Instead I remember that beautiful noise when he said his other name. Then he goes out with three of the men and the door bangs behind them on a gust of rain because Charlie never fixed the air-stop from when some kids horsing around broke it last spring.

  The fourth man stays and questions me: what did the alien say? what did I say? I tell him, but then he starts asking the exact same questions all over again, like he didn’t believe me the first time, and that gets me mad. Also he has this snotty voice, and I see how his eyebrows move when I slip once and accidentally say “he don’t.” I might not know what John’s muscles mean but I sure the hell can read those eyebrows. So I get miffed and pretty soon he leaves and the door bangs behind him.

  I finish the catsup and mustard bottles and Kathy finishes the coffee machine. The radio in the ceiling plays something instrumental, no words, real sad. Kathy and me start to wash down the booths with disinfectant, and because we’re doing the same work together and nobody comes in, I finally say to her, “It’s funny.”

  She says, “What’s funny?”

  “Charlie called that guy ‘him’ right off. ‘I don’t got to serve him,’ he said. And I thought of him as ‘it’ at first, least until I had a name to use. But Charlie’s the one who threw him out.”

  Kathy swipes at the back of her booth. “And Charlie’s right. That thing scared me half to death, coming in here like that. And where there’s food being served, too.” She snorts and sprays on more disinfectant.

  Well, she’s a flake. Always has been.

  “The National Enquirer,” Kathy goes on, “told how they have all this firepower up there in the big ship that hasn’t landed yet. My husband says they could blow us all to smithereens, they’re so powerful. I don’t know why they even came here. We don’t want them. I don’t even know why they came, all that way.”

  “They want to make a difference,” I say, but Kathy barrels on ahead, not listening.

  “The Pentagon will hold them off, it doesn’t matter what weapons they got up there or how much they insist on seeing about our defenses, the Pentagon won’t let them get any toeholds on Earth. That’s what my husband says. Blue bastards.”

  I say, “Will you please shut up?”

  She gives me a dirty look and flounces off. I don’t care. None of it is anything to me. Only, standing there with the disinfectant in my hand, looking at the dark windows and listening to the music wordless and slow on the radio, I remember that touch on my arm, so light and cool. And I think, they didn’t come here with any firepower to blow us all to smithereens. I just don’t believe it. But then why did they come? Why come all that way from another star to walk into Charlie’s diner and order a green salad with no dressing from an ordinary Earth person?

  Charlie comes out with his keys to unlock the cash register and go over the tapes. I remember the old couple who stiffed me and I curse to myself. Only pie and coffee, but it still comes off my salary. The radio in the ceiling starts playing something else, not the sad song, but nothing snappy neither. It’s a love song, about some guy giving and getting treated like dirt. I don’t like it.

  “Charlie,” I say, “What did those government men say to you?”

  He looks up from his tapes and scowls. “What do you care?”

  “I just want to know.”

  “And maybe I don’t want you to know,” he says, and smiles nasty like. Me asking him has put him in a better mood, the creep. All of a sudden I remember what his wife said when she got the stitches. “The only way to get something from Charlie is to let him smack me around a little, and then ask him when I’m down. He’ll give me anything when I’m down. He gives me shit if he thinks I’m on top.”

  I do the rest of the clean-up without saying anything. Charlie swears at the night’s take—I know from my tips that it’s not much. Kathy teases her hair in front of the mirror behind doughnuts and pies, and I put down the breakfast menus. But all the time I’m thinking, and I don’t much like my thoughts.

  Charlie locks up and we all leave. Outside it’s stopped raining but it’s still misty and soft, real pretty but too cold. I pull my sweater around myself and in the parking lot, after Kathy’s gone, I say, “Charlie.”

  He stops walking towards his truck. “Yeah?”

  I lick my lips. They’re all of a sudden dry. It’s an experiment, like, what I’m going to say. It’s an experiment.

  “Charlie. What if those government men hadn’t come just then and the…blue guy hadn’t been willing to leave? What would you have done?”

  “What do you care?”

  I shrug. “I don’t care. Just curious. It’s your place.”

  “Damn right it’s my place!” I could see him scowl, through the mist. “I’d of squashed him flat!”

  “And then what? After you squashed him flat, what if the men came then and made a stink?”

  “Too bad. It’d be too late then, huh?” He laughs and I can see how he’s seeing it: the blue guy bleeding on the linoleum and Charlie standing over him, dusting his hands together.

  Charlie laughs again and goes off to his truck, whistling. He has a little bounce in his step. He’s still seeing it all, almost like it really had happened. Over his shoulder he calls to me, “They’re built like wimps. Or girls. All bone, no muscle. Even you must of seen that,” and his voice is cheerful. It doesn’t have any anger in it, or hatred, or anything but a sort of friendliness. I hear him whistle some more, until the truck engine starts up and he peels out of the parking lot, laying rubber like a kid.

  I unlock my Chevy. But before I get in, I look up at the sky. Which is really stupid because of course I can’t see anything, with all the mists and clouds. No stars.

  Maybe Kathy’s right. Maybe they do want to blow us all to smithereens. I don’t think so, but what the hell difference does it ever make what I think? And all at once I’m furious at John, furiously mad, as furious as I’ve ever been in my life.

  Why does he have to come here, with his bird calls and his politeness? Why can’t they all go someplace else beside here? There must be lots of other places they can go, out of all them bright stars up there behind the clouds. They don’t need to come here, here where I need this job and so that means I need Charlie. He’s a bully, but I want to look at him and see nothing else but a bully. Nothing else but that. That’s all I want to see in Charlie, in the government men—just smalltime bullies, nothing special, not a mirror of anything, not a future of anything. Just Charlie. That’s all. I won’t see nothing else.

  I won’t.

  “I make so little difference,” he says.

  Yeah. Sure.

  Introduction to “The Fringe”

  by Orson Scott Card

  My own story? On the one hand, it is a repulsively immodest thing to do, to include a story of my own in an anthology of the “important” sf stories of the 1980s. On the other hand, the publisher told me he wouldn’t publish these volumes if a story of mine weren’t included. And on the third hand, if somebody else had edited this anthology and didn’t include something of mine, I would never have forgiven him. So I’m not going to pretend my publisher had to twist my arm very hard to get me to include a story. I wanted to have something in here, and if that proves me to be vain and ambitious, please remember that it was Nancy Kress, not myself, that I set up as a model of virtue.

  So, OK, fine, a story of mine—but which one? Has to be one from the 1980s. That eliminates a huge swath of stories. Has to be short—so my one Hugo-winning novella is out. Has to be science fiction, so the whole Alvin Maker collection is eliminated, and so are my mainstream pieces. Just a handful of survivors, now.

  This one: The first story I wrote for a writing workshop of fellow professionals. The first story I wrote when I felt like I actually understood what a short story was, as opposed to a novel. The only story I ever wrote that John Kessel liked. And a story I still care about, a character I still love. It’s up to you to decide if this story belongs in this book; if it doesn’t, then nothing else of mine does, either.

  THE FRINGE

  Orson Scott Card

  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 he is graceful and beautiful, fifteen years old and already a master at winning the devotion of the weak-hearted 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 Carpenter. 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 here. 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 something 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.