Memories of the Future Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction by Barry N. Malzberg

  Little Red Schoolhouse

  Goddess in Granite

  The Dandelion Girl

  Glass Houses

  Promised Planet

  Divine Wind

  Cousins

  Three-Mile Syndrome

  Shakespeare of the Apes

  The Haute Bourgeoisie

  A Drink of Darkness

  What Bleak Land

  Other Books by ElectricStory

  Memories of the Future

  by Robert F. Young

  ElectricStory.com, Inc.®

  Memories of the Future

  by Robert F. Young

  Robert F. Young published frequently in major markets from the 1950s to his death in 1985. Disney even optioned film rights to one of his books. However, probably because he wrote few novels, he was never widely known. His better stories, many collected here, captured a deep sense of nostalgia and winnowed a glimpse of true love from mere obsession: a mountaineer must redeem his life by scaling a miles-long artifact shaped like a woman; a little boy attempts to return from a bleak city to the idyllic country of his memory; a mysterious wanderer transforms the lives of a struggling family during the Great Depression. In his introduction, Barry N. Malzberg brings to light some of the fascinating contradictions of this author, whose lean, elegant prose and poignant, though guarded, romantic sensibility deserve to find a wider audience.

  MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

  Copyright © 2001 by the estate of Robert F. Young. All rights reserved.

  Ebook edition of Memories of the Future copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-59729-088-3

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-930815-58-2

  ElectricStory.com and the ES design are registered trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  These stories are a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

  Introduction by and copyright © 2001 Barry N. Malzberg.

  Cover art by and copyright © 2001 Cory and Catska Ench.

  Edited by Robert Kruger.

  Original Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  For the full ElectricStory catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.

  Baen Ebooks electronic version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Promised Planet”: First published in If, December 1955.

  “Little Red Schoolhouse”: First published in Galaxy, March 1956.

  “Goddess in Granite”: First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1957.

  “The Dandelion Girl”: First published in The Saturday Evening Post, April 1961.

  “A Drink of Darkness”: First published in Fantastic, Stories of Imagination, July 1962.

  “Shakespeare of the Apes”: First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1975.

  “The Haute Bourgeoisie”: First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1980.

  “Divine Wind”: First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1984.

  “Glass Houses”: First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1984.

  “Three-Mile Syndrome”: First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1985.

  “Cousins”: First published in Analog, April 1986.

  “What Bleak Land”: First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1987.

  Introduction

  ROBERT F. YOUNG 1915–1985

  YOUNG, LIKE HIS PRINCIPALS, IS AN INTERESTING and ultimately, perhaps, tragic figure. (Tragedy of course implies that the principal has had some height from which to fall; that’s arguable with Young.) His men struggle against nature, landscape, time, circumstance, and—his recurringly obsessive theme with which he is most identified—giantesses. His men are forced by landscape or by mythic object (like the World Tree, which is the central figure of The Last Yggdrasill, probably his best known novel) to some level of self-confrontation they cannot abide and, over and again, they fall away from that confrontation. Sometimes it is the soul which shrivels, sometimes it is the corpus itself: suicide through stubbornness and insistence is as common a theme as the giantesses. Again and again Young portends through the juxtaposition of unbearable or imponderable external force, again and again portent leads to destruction or flight. Infrequently does it lead to healing or accommodation. Young’s body of work is, perhaps, a paradigm of a haunted soul.

  Perhaps not. The comparison of writer and work is almost impossible; Young is one of the least-known science fiction or fantasy writers of reputation. He published widely through the science fiction and fantasy markets and even in The Saturday Evening Post for well over thirty-five years; his first collection, The Worlds of Robert F. Young, was published in 1965 by Simon & Schuster (Young was one of the few science fiction writers who published through this mainstream, hardcover house), and yet he remained obscure, a mystery to the science fiction community and—one might infer from the stories—a mystery to himself. The Last Yggdrasil, that World-Tree novel, was optioned for a significant amount by the Disney Studios in the mid-1980s (the film, unfortunately, was never made), and his giantesses made enough of an impression upon the science fiction community to be the subject of parody here and there. However, unlike some of the writers to whom he could be compared (Jerry Sohl, Michael Shaara), mainstream writers who perched or landed in science fiction because their themes externally were science fiction, Young never had any audience outside of the genre and in the years since his death his work has been marginalized. This posthumous collection—only his third collection and the first in thirty-two years—can only contribute to the restoration of his reputation.

  Young is an interesting and felicitous writer who—like a good many others—deserved and deserves more attention than he got; maybe this bothered him, maybe it didn’t. The stories imply fierce ambition and frustration but might themselves have been a release. His obituary in the science fiction news magazine Locus revealed a fact which was apparently unknown to everyone: Young had been a janitor in the Buffalo school system for decades, retiring only the year he died. A science-fiction-writing janitor? A science fiction writer compelled to employment as a janitor? As one an anomaly, as the other imponderable. All of us contain multitudes; the real landscape inside all of us makes the outer unconquerable.

  Perhaps this was Young’s central point: We travel from and toward a central, inextinguishable mystery.

  —Barry N. Malzberg

  March 2001, inextinguishably

  Little Red Schoolhouse

  RONNIE AVOIDED THE TOWNS. Whenever he came to one, he made a wide detour, coming back to the tracks miles beyond it. He knew that none of the towns was the village he was looking for. The towns were bright and new, with white streets and brisk cars and big factories, while the village in the valley was old and quiet, with rustic houses and shaded streets and a little red schoolhouse.
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  Just before you came to the village, there was a grove of friendly maples with a brook winding through them. Ronnie remembered the brook best of all. In summer, he had waded in it many times, and he had skated on it in winter; in autumn, he had watched the fallen leaves, like Lilliputian ships, sail down it to the sea.

  Ronnie had been sure that he could find the valley, but the tracks went on and on, through fields and hills and forests, and no familiar valley appeared. After a while, he began to wonder if he had chosen the right tracks, if the shining rails he followed day after day were really the rails along which the stork train had borne him to the city and to his parents.

  He kept telling himself that he wasn’t truly running away from home, that the aseptic three-room apartment in which he had lived for a month wasn’t his home at all, any more than the pallid man and woman who had met him at the bustling terminal were his mother and father.

  His real home was in the valley, in the old rambling house at the outskirts of the village; and his real parents were Nora and Jim, who had cared for him throughout his boyhood. True, they had never claimed to be his parents, but they were just the same, even if they put him on the stork train when he was asleep and sent him to the city to live with the pallid people who pretended to be his parents.

  Nights, when the shadows came too close around his campfire, he thought of Nora and Jim and the village. But most of all, he thought of Miss Smith, the teacher in the little red schoolhouse. Thinking of Miss Smith made him brave, and he lay back in the summer grass beneath the summer stars and he wasn’t scared at all.

  On the fourth morning, he ate the last of the condensed food tablets he had stolen from his parents’ apartment. He knew that he had to find the valley soon and he walked faster along the tracks, staring eagerly ahead for the first familiar landmark—a remembered tree or a nostalgic hilltop, the silvery twinkle of a winding brook. The trip on the stork train had been his first trip into the outside world, so he was not certain how the valley would look, coming into it from the surrounding countryside; nevertheless, he was sure he would recognize it quickly.

  His legs were stronger now than they had been when he had first stepped off the stork train and his dizzy spells were becoming less and less frequent. The sun no longer bothered his eyes and he could look for long moments at the blue sky and the bright land with no painful after-images.

  Toward evening he heard a high-pitched whistle and his heart began to pound. He knew at last that he had the right tracks and that he couldn’t be very far from the valley, for the whistle was the shrill lullaby of a stork train.

  Ronnie hid in the weeds that lined the embankment and watched the train pass. He saw the children reclining on their chairbeds, staring curiously through the little windows, and he remembered how he had stared, too, on his trip to the city, how surprised—and frightened—he had been, upon awakening, to see the strange new land unrolling before his aching eyes.

  He wondered if his face had been as white as those he was seeing now, as white and as peaked and as sickly, and he guessed that it had been, that living in the valley affected your complexion some way, made your eyes sensitive to light and your legs weak.

  But that couldn’t be the answer. His legs had never been weak when he had lived in the valley, he remembered, and his eyes had never bothered him. He had never had trouble seeing the lessons on the blackboard in the little red schoolhouse, and he’d read all the printed words in the schoolbooks without the slightest difficulty. In fact, he’d done so well with his reading lessons that Miss Smith had patted him on the back, more times than he could remember, and told him that he was her star pupil.

  Suddenly he realized how eager he was to see Miss Smith again, to walk into the little classroom and have her say, “Good morning, Ronnie,” and see her sitting reassuringly behind her desk, her yellow hair parted neatly in the middle and her round cheeks pink in the morning light. For the first time it occurred to him that he was in love with Miss Smith, and he recognized his real reason for returning to the valley.

  The other reasons were still valid, though. He wanted to wade in the brook again and feel the cool tree shadows all around him, and after that he wanted to meander through the maples, picking a slow way homeward, and finally he wanted to wander down the lazy village street to the house and have Nora scold him for being late for supper.

  The stork train was still passing. Ronnie couldn’t get over how long it was. Where did all the children come from? He didn’t recognize a single one of them, yet he had lived in the valley all his life. He hadn’t recognized any of the children on his own stork train, either, for that matter. He shook his head. The whole thing was bewildering, far beyond his understanding.

  When the last of the cars had passed, he climbed back up the embankment to the tracks. Dusk was seeping in over the land and soon, he knew, the first star would appear. If only he could find the valley before night came! He wouldn’t even pause to wade in the brook; he would run through the maples and down the street to the house. Nora and Jim would be delighted to see him again and Nora would fix a fine supper; and perhaps Miss Smith would come over during the evening, as she sometimes did, and discuss his schoolwork, and he would walk to the gate with her, when she was ready to go, and say good night, and see the starlight on her face as she stood goddess-tall beside him.

  He hurried along the tracks, staring hungrily ahead for some sign of the valley. The shadows deepened around him and the damp breath of night crept down from the hills. Insects awoke in the tall meadow grass, katydids and crickets and frogs began singing in ponds.

  After a while, the first star came out.

  He was surprised when he came to the big broad-shouldered building. He did not recall having seen it during his ride on the stork train. That was odd, because he had never left the window once during the whole trip.

  He paused on the tracks, gazing at the towering brick façade with its tiers and tiers of small barred windows. Most of the upper windows were dark, but all of the first-floor windows were ablaze with light. The first-floor windows were different in other respects, too, he noticed. There were no bars on them and they were much larger than the higher ones. Ronnie wondered why that should be.

  And then he noticed something else. The tracks stretched right up to the imposing façade and entered the building through a lofty archway. Ronnie gasped. The building must be a terminal, like the one in the city, where his parents had met him. But why hadn’t he seen it when the stork train had passed through it?

  Then he remembered that he’d been put on the train when he was asleep and could have missed the first part of the journey. He’d assumed, when he awoke, that the train was just pulling out of the valley, but perhaps it had pulled out some time before—a long time, even—and had passed through the terminal while he was sleeping.

  It was a logical explanation, but Ronnie was reluctant to accept it. If it was true, then the valley was still a long way off, and he wanted the valley to be close, close enough for him to reach it tonight. He was so hungry he could hardly stand it, and he was terribly tired.

  He looked miserably at the big hulking building, wondering what to do.

  “Hello, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie almost collapsed with fright on the tracks. He peered around him into the shadows. At first he saw no one, but after a while he made out the figure of a tall man in a gray uniform standing in a grove of locusts bordering the tracks. The man’s uniform matched the shadows, and Ronnie realized with a start that he had been standing there all along.

  “You are Ronnie Meadows, aren’t you?”

  “Yes—yes, sir,” Ronnie said. He wanted to turn and run, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He was so tired and weak that the tall man could catch him easily.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Ronnie,” the tall man said, a note of warmth in his voice. He left the tree shadows and walked over to the tracks. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “Worried?”

  �
��Why, of course. Worrying about boys who leave the valley is my job. You see, I’m the truant officer.”

  Ronnie’s eyes got big. “Oh, but I didn’t want to leave the valley, sir,” he said. “Nora and Jim waited until I went to sleep one night, and then they put me on the stork train, and when I woke up I was already on my way to the city. I want to go back to the valley, sir. I—I ran away from home.”

  “I understand,” the truant officer said, “and I’m going to take you back to the valley—back to the little red schoolhouse.” He reached down and took Ronnie’s hand.

  “Oh, will you, sir?” Ronnie could hardly contain the sudden happiness that coursed through him. “I want to go back in the worst way!”

  “Of course I will. It’s my job.” The truant officer started walking toward the big building and Ronnie hurried along beside him. “But first I’ve got to take you to the principal.”

  Ronnie drew back. He became aware then of what a tight grip the truant officer had on his weak-feeling hand.

  “Come on,” the truant officer said, making the grip even tighter. “The principal won’t hurt you.”

  “I—I never knew there was a principal,” Ronnie said, hanging back. “Miss Smith never said anything about him.”