It’s been quite a trip, this thirty-year journey into creativity. I’m proud to have been associated with it from its inception in what is now the far-off decade of the 1980s, and, although I’m no longer an active participant in its proceedings, I hope to continue to observe from the sidelines as the work of discovering exciting new science-fictional talent goes on into the years ahead.
Carousel
written by
Orson Scott Card
illustrated by
Vincent-Michael Coviello
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orson Scott Card is the author of the novel Ender’s Game, along with more than fifty other books of fiction and nonfiction in many genres, including Pathfinder and The Lost Gate. He also wrote the script of the audioplay Ender’s Game Alive and writes the weekly column “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything” for the Rhino Times in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he and his wife reside.
His online magazine The InterGalactic Medicine Show publishes fiction and art that is well within the strong storytelling tradition that Writers of the Future also represents. Card was born in Washington state and grew up in California, Arizona and Utah. He served a two-year mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the 1970s. He periodically teaches writing and literature at Southern Virginia University.
Orson Scott Card has been a judge of the Writers of the Future Contest since 1994, having earlier served as a guest instructor at the Writers’ Workshops at both Sag Harbor, Long Island and Pepperdine University in Los Angeles. He was also the featured essayist in volumes four and twenty-two of the Writers of the Future anthology.
With respect to his short story “Carousel,” Card offers the following introduction:
“If I were a new writer, offering a story to Writers of the Future in hope of making my first professional sale, I would send the story I actually did submit as my first serious attempt at publication: ‘Ender’s Game.’ It’s worth remembering that while I thought it was a good story (else why would I submit it anywhere?), I had no idea that it would become the foundation of my career. You never know whether your first sale will be a story that really makes a splash, or one that fills pages but no one seems to pay much notice. You can’t advise a new writer, ‘Start with your best,’ because then you can’t submit anything for publication until just before you die, and good luck on timing that with any precision. So instead, I looked through my directory of short stories searching almost at random for something of reasonable length, which has the ingredients that I think a first sale must have. Old coots like me can get away with loosely structured stories, or irresolute ones, or stories that are part of a series, because we’re already a known quantity. But when you’re starting out, your first sale must be complete in itself. There is no reputation, no track record to rely on. It has to have emotional impact and clear resolution. It should have an idea intriguing enough that people might want to talk about it with other readers. But, mostly, it has to be written down in publishable format and sent out of the house—you can’t guess which story an editor will buy, and so you send them all, as soon as they’re done. Finished manuscripts that are kept lying about the house are worthless. Like uncooked fish, they begin to stink very quickly. The only manuscripts with any hope are the ones making the rounds, selling themselves door to door.”
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Born in Norwood, Massachusetts, Vincent-Michael Coviello has always had an interest in the creatures, characters and monsters that go bump in the night. A passion for art was apparent from a young age and only slightly rivaled his fascination with the zoological studies.
It would come as no surprise that his passions mixed with his love of science fiction and fantasy would foster artistic visions of distant worlds, ecosystems and the beings that would inhabit them.
A graduate of the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, Vincent-Michael learned tricks and tools of the trade to help amplify his worldbuilding visions. With a “the deeper the history, the richer the concept” mentality, Vincent-Michael is pursuing a career as a preproduction artist for the video game and film industry. There he hopes to create creatures and characters that are not only interesting to look at but are driven by story.
Humbled and honored to be one of the artists involved with the Illustrators of the Future, Vincent-Michael Coviello is excited to see what is waiting for him just beyond the horizon.
Visit Vincent at: Vcreatures.tumblr.com.
Carousel
Cyril’s relationship with his wife really went downhill after she died. Though, if he was honest with himself—something he generally tried, with some success, to avoid—things hadn’t been going all that well while Alice was alive. Everything he did seemed to irritate her, and when he didn’t do anything at all, that irritated her, too.
“It’s not your fault,” Alice explained to him. “You try, I can see that you try, but you just … you’re just wrong about everything. Not very wrong. Not oblivious or negligent or unconcerned. Just a little bit mistaken.”
“About what? Tell me and I’ll get better.”
“About what people want, who they are, what they need.”
“What do you need?” Cyril asked.
“I need you to stop asking what I need,” she said. “I need you to know. The children need you to know. You never know.”
“Because you won’t tell me.”
“See?” she said. “You have to make it my fault. Why should people always have to tell you, Cyril? It’s like you go through life in a well-meaning fog. You can’t help it. Nobody blames you.”
But she blamed him. He knew that. He tried to get better, to notice more. To remember. But there was that note of impatience—in her voice, the children’s voices, his boss’s voice. As if they were thinking, I’m having to explain this to you?
Then Alice was hit by a car driven by a resurrected Han Dynasty Chinese man who had no business behind the wheel—he plowed into a crowd on a bustling sidewalk and then got out and walked away as nonchalantly as if he had successfully parallel parked a large car in a small space. It was the most annoying thing about the dead—how they thought killing total strangers was no big deal, as long as they didn’t mean to do it. And since the crowd only had two living people in it, the number of deaths was actually quite low. Alice’s death barely rose to the level of a statistic, in the greater scheme of things.
She was thoughtful enough to clean up and change clothes before she came home that night—resurrection restored every body part as it should be at the peak of mature health, but it did nothing for the wardrobe. Still, the change in her attitude was immediate. She didn’t even try to start dinner.
“What’s for dinner, Mom?” asked Delia.
“Whatever your father fixes,” said Alice.
“Am I fixing dinner?” asked Cyril. He liked to cook, but it usually took some planning and he wasn’t sure what Alice would let him use to put together a meal.
“Go out to eat, have cold cereal, I really don’t care,” said Alice.
This was not like her. Alice controlled everybody’s diet scrupulously, which is why she almost never allowed Cyril to cook. He realized at once what it meant, and the kids weren’t far behind.
“Oh, Mom,” said Roland softly. “You’re not dead, are you?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “But don’t worry, it only hurt for about a minute while I bled out.”
“Did the resurrection feel good?” asked Delia, always curious.
“The angel was right there, breathed in my mouth—very sweet. A bit of a tingle everywhere. But really not such a great
feeling that it’s worth dying for, so you shouldn’t be in a hurry to join me, dear.”
“So you won’t be eating with us,” said Cyril.
She shook her head a little, eyes closed. “‘Dead’ means I don’t eat, Cyril. Everyone knows that the dead don’t eat. We don’t breathe except so we can talk. We don’t drink and if we do, it’s just to keep company with the living, and the liquids all evaporate from our skins so we also don’t pee. We also don’t want sex anymore, Cyril. Not with each other and not with you.”
She had never mentioned sex in front of the children before, except for the talk with Delia when she turned ten, and that was all about time-of-the-month things. If Delia had any idea what sex was, Cyril didn’t think she got it from her mother. So the children blanched and recoiled when she mentioned it.
“Oh, don’t be such big babies, you know your father and I had sex, or you wouldn’t look so much like him. Which is fine for you, Roland, your father’s a good-looking man, in his way. But a bit of a drag for you, Delia, with that jaw. And the resurrection won’t fix that. Resurrection isn’t cosmetic surgery. Which is really unfair, when you think about it. People who are genetically retarded or crippled or sick have their DNA repaired to some optimum state, but girls with overly mannish features or tiny breasts or huge ones, for that matter, their DNA is left completely alone, they’re stuck like that for eternity.”
“Thanks, Mom,” said Delia. “I love having my confidence destroyed once again, and I haven’t even begun doing my homework yet.”
“So you aren’t going to eat with us?” asked Roland.
“Oh, of course I’ll sit at table with you,” said Alice. “For the company.”
In the event, Cyril got out everything in the fridge that looked like it might go on a sandwich and everybody made their own. Except Alice, of course. She just sat at the table and made comments, without even a pause to take a bite or chew.
“The way I see it,” said Alice, “is that it’s all poop. Nothing you’re putting on sandwiches even looks appetizing anymore, because I see that poopiness of it all. You’re going to eat it and digest it and poop it out. The nutrients will decay and eventually end up in some farmer’s field where it will become more future-poop, which he’ll harvest and it’ll get processed into a more poopable state, so you can heat it or freeze it or thaw it or whatever, chew it up or drink it, and then turn it into poop again. Life is poop.”
“Mom,” said Delia. “It’s usually Roland who makes us sick while we’re eating.”
“I thought you’d want to hear my new perspective as a post-living person.” She sounded miffed.
“Please speak more respectfully to your mother,” said Cyril to Delia.
“Cyril, really,” said Alice. “I don’t need you to protect me from Delia’s snippy comments. It’s not going to kill me to hear her judgmentalness directed at the woman who gave birth to her.”
“Feel free to criticize your mother’s defecatory comments,” said Cyril. “Or ignore them, as you choose.”
“I know, Dad,” said Delia. There was that familiar hint of eye-rolling in her tone of voice. Once again Cyril must have guessed wrong about what to say, or leave unsaid. He had never really gotten it right when Alice was alive, and now that she was dead-and-resurrected, he’d have no chance, because he was no longer dealing with a wife, or even, strictly speaking, a woman. She was a visitor with a key to the house.
Within a few weeks, Cyril found himself remembering the awful night of Alice’s death as a particularly lovely time, because she actually sat with them during dinner and wasn’t trying to lead the children off into some kind of utterly bizarre activity.
She showed up at any hour of the day, and expected to be able to take Delia or Roland with her on whatever adventure she’d gotten it into her head to try with them.
“No, Alice, you may not take Roland out of school so he can go scuba diving with you.”
“It’s really not your place to say what I can or cannot do,” said Alice.
“The law is clear, Alice—when you die you become, in a word, deceased. You no longer have any custody over the children. Thousands of years of legal precedent make that clear. Not to mention tons of recent case law in which the resurrected are found to be unfit parents in every case.”
“Aren’t you lucky that the dead can’t get angry,” said Alice.
“I suppose that I am,” said Cyril. “But I’m not dead, and I was furious when I found you practically forcing Roland to walk along the top of a very high fence.”
“It’s exhilarating,” said Alice.
“He was terrified.”
“Oh, Cyril, are you really going to let a child’s fears—”
“He was right to be terrified. He could have broken his neck.”
“And would it have been such a tragedy if he did?” asked Alice. “I was run over by a car and I turned out okay.”
“You think you’re okay?” asked Cyril.
Alice held up her hands and twisted her wrists as if to prove that her parts worked.
“Here’s how I know you’re not okay, Alice,” said Cyril. “You keep trying to put the kids in high-risk situations. You’re trying to kill them, Alice.”
“Don’t think of it as death. I’m not dead. How is it death?”
“How can I put this kindly?” said Cyril—who by this point had actually stopped trying to be kind. “You’re dead to me.”
“Just because I’m no longer available for empty reproductive gestures does not mean I’m not here for you, Cyril.”
“I’m going to get a restraining order if you don’t stop taking the kids on dangerous activities. You don’t have any guardianship rights over these children.”
“My fingerprints say I’m still their mother!”
“Alice, when you were their mother, you wanted them to relish every stage of their life. Now you’re trying to get them to skip all the rest of the stages.”
“You can’t manipulate me with guilt,” said Alice. “I’m beyond human emotions and needs.”
“Then why do you still need the children with you?”
“I’m their mother.”
“You were their mother,” said Cyril.
“I was and I am,” said Alice.
“Alice, I may have been a disappointment as a husband.”
“And as a father, Cyril. The children are often disappointed in you.”
“But I meet a basic minimum, Alice. I’m alive. I’m human. Of their species. I want them to be alive. I’d like them to live to adulthood, to marry, to have children.”
Alice shook her head incredulously. “Go outside and look at the street, Cyril. Hundreds of people lie down and sleep in the streets or on the lawns every night, because the world has no shortage of people.”
“Just because you’ve lost all your biological imperatives doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t have them.”
“Cyril, your reasoning is backward. The children will be much happier without biological imperatives.”
“So you admit you’re trying to kill them.”
“I’m trying to awaken them from the slumber of mortality.”
“I don’t want to waken them from that slumber,” said Cyril sharply. “If it’s a dream, then let them finish the dream and come out of it in their own time.”
“When someone you love is living in a nightmare,” said Alice, “you wake them up.”
“Alice,” said Cyril, “you’re the nightmare.”
“Your wife is a nightmare? Your children’s mother?”
“You’re a reanimated dead woman.”<
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“Resurrected,” said Alice. “An angel breathed into my mouth.”
“The angel should have minded its damn business,” said Cyril.
“You always wanted me dead,” said Alice.
“I never wanted you dead until after you were dead and you wouldn’t go away.”
“You’re a bitter failure, Cyril, and yet you cling to this miserable life and insist that the children cling to it, too. It’s a form of child abuse. Of child exploitation.”
“Go away, Alice. Go enjoy your death somewhere else.”
“My eternal life, you mean.”
“Whatever.”
But in the end, Alice won. First she talked Delia into jumping from a bridge without actually attaching any bungee cords to her feet. Once again Cyril had no chance to grieve, because Alice brought Delia by to tell Roland how great death and resurrection were. Delia was fully grown. A woman, but in a retailored version of her dress that fit her larger, womanly body.
“The soul is never a child,” said Alice. “What did you expect?”
“I expected her to take a few more years to grow into this body,” said Cyril.
“Think of it as skipping ahead a few grades,” said Alice, barely able to conceal her gloating.