Гарри Тертлдав - The First Heroes

Can you tell that story? The vaunting steles do not, nor any poems that officials preserved.

It cannot be reduced to a game, nor presented in terms of one. The metaphor itself is immoral.

A wail floated down the stairs, its eerie pitch catching the ageless-ness of the dreaming mind. Leslie left the room at once, negotiating the darkened floor's furniture and doorways with intimate familiarity. At the top of the stairs she heard it again, wavering between frightened and querulous, and went to her daughter's room. Megan was asleep but in distress, her head turning from side to side in the faint moonlight as her mouth shaped half words. As Leslie approached, she saw the dim glint of open eyes.

"It's all right, honey." Experts advise that children having nightmares not be wakened, but her parents had learned how to offer Megan comfort without disturbing her. Leslie stroked her daughter's hair and murmured that everything was okay.

"I heard the plane and it scared me."

"Plane?" The Bridgeport Airport was a few miles away, and corporate jets sometimes landed late at night. Leslie tried to recall whether she had heard a plane a minute before.

"It sounded like a jet," Megan said lucidly.

Leslie doubted that her daughter had ever heard a nonjet engine overhead, but she took her true meaning. Storm-tossed but hearing the lighthouse, she realized with a pang that her misery did not matter, nor Trent's professional tribulations nor his baffled fury, but only her daughter's well-being, which she had heeded but not enough. "It's all right," she said, leaning forward and touching foreheads in the dark. "No more bad planes."

What is wrong cannot soon be put right—at least not what lies in the mind, which occupies not two or even three dimensions, but the infolds of a space no one has mapped. Leslie began attending her daughter more closely, reading to her at night (no Homer) and stopping with her for hot chocolate on their way back from the library or soccer practice. Megan worried about the school's winter pageant, holiday plans, a classmate's parents' divorce. She mentioned the World Trade Center only when discussing an assignment to summarize the week's news. What more concerned her was an image she had come upon while searching the Net with a friend's older sister: a condemned woman being forced to kneel while a Taliban executioner put a rifle to her skull.

"It's a horrible picture," Leslie agreed. She was furious that her daughter had been shown it. "The people who did that. . ." Megan spoke with unaccustomed hesitancy. "They belong to al Qaeda, don't they?"

"Not exactly." If you want to get technical. "The Taliban let al Qaeda stay in their country, but they did not help carry out the attacks. The President insisted that they turn over Osama bin Laden, which they probably couldn't do, so he launched an invasion."

"I don't care," said Megan firmly. She was staring into the middle distance, where the woman kneeling facedown was visible to both of them. "I'm glad he's dead."

He wasn't the only one, though. As the death toll from the September attacks steadily dropped from the initial six thousand to just more than half that, a reciprocal number, of those killed in Afghanistan, rose to match it. The first, dwindling value was widely followed and subtly resented—one couldn't actually accuse those compiling it of unpatriotism—while the second, swelling one was neither: its extent (reported only on dissident websites) unacknowledged and enjoyed.

Leslie spoke twice with Megan's teacher, and even rejoined the list-serv of women who had become pregnant the same month she had, which she had dropped four years ago. She read online reports of children experiencing anxiety and bad dreams, spoke to her therapist of Megan rather than herself, and watched her daughter: eating breakfast, doing homework, asleep. When troubled Megan was before her, she ignored everything else.

Rumblings from the shocked economy sounded dimly from work and home. Great Games, losing market share, canceled its plans for a line of Ziggurat novels, and Trent (midway through the second book but not yet paid for the first) slid from stunned rage into depression. Leslie comforted him distractedly. Truckloads of rubble filed by the thousands, like a column of ants reducing a picnic's rubbish, from the still-smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero to Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill, where it was sifted for personal effects and body parts. Troops of the "Northern Alliance" (a cognomen worthy of Star Wars) drove the remains of the Taliban into the mountains, which shuddered beneath the impact of enormous American bombs called "daisycutters."

Leslie wanted to spend the hour before dinner with her daughter, but Trent finally protested at cooking every night. Coming from the kitchen, she heard them sitting in the office together, discussing return trips to favorite movies.

"Dumbledore is kind of like Gandalf," Megan was saying matter-of-factly, "except I don't think Gandalf would be very good with children."

"He treated those hobbits like children."

"... But Sauron and Lord Voldemort are even more similar, aren't they?"

"Well, it's hard to put much spin on evil incarnate, isn't it?"

"Incarnate?" Leslie could hear her taste the word. "Is that what they call the 'evil-doers'?"

Trent groaned softly. "How I hate that term."

"Because they don't think what they're doing is evil," said Megan wisely. Leslie stood outside the doorway, leaning forward slightly to see them. "They think that God wants them to do this."

"That's right. And our culture—what the President calls 'Western Civilization'—believes that we are doing what God wants, though the government is careful not to say so in as many words. In the real world, your enemy doesn't oblige you by acting like Sauron or Voldemort."

"Or Darth Vader." Megan has a happy thought. "We'll be seeing Part Two of all three movies next year! Too oh oh too!"

"It must be the age of sequels."

"And the age of Evil-doers."

Trent laughed. "In movies, yes. In real life, it would be better if people were more careful about using that word."

"Or cowardly.'"

"Indeed." Trent looked at their daughter closely. "You still think about that?"

Megan shrugged. "Julie's dad almost got killed." She paused, then asked, "Did Gilgamesh represent Western values?"

"Gilgamesh? He lived before there was a West, or a Middle East."

She is changing the subject, Leslie wanted to cry out, but Megan turned to face her father and said, "I'm sorry your book's not going to be published."

Trent blinked. "Heavens, dear, don't worry about that. Maybe someone else will publish it. Maybe I was writing the wrong book." He extended an arm, and Megan slipped under it. "That's an awfully tiny problem, if you think about it."

Lying awake, Leslie listened to her husband's steady breathing and wondered at the loss of his dream, the rout of the last ditch. He had told her in college that prose narrative was dead, that they stood at the end of its era just as the—had he actually said ancient Sumerians?— stood at its birth.

Science fiction was the mode of the era, but its future masterpieces would not come in strings of sentences. The Web—he had charmed her by admitting that he too had reflexively read www. as "World War Won"—had blossomed in their college years from jury-rigging of dial-ups to a vast nervous system, and Trent's vision of nonlinear, multimedia fictions—richly complex structures of word, image, and sound, detailed as Cibachrome and nuanced as Proust—seemed ready to take shape in the hypertrophied craniums of the ever-cheaper CPUs.

Trent seemed untroubled that the point of entry to this technology would be through electronic games, which were being developed solely for audiences uninterested in formal innovation and poststructural dif-ferance. He expected not to retain copyright to his early work, which would be remembered only as technical exercises and crude forerunners of the GlasTome. Its form would emerge by pushing against commercial boundaries from the inside. Even product, he told Leslie, could be produced with a greater or lesser degree of artistry.