Was by Geoff Ryman Page A

of the moon. The stars were cold. The valley lay under a sheet of white, and smoke from chimneys hung like freezing fog.
    Only where there were houses was there light, was there warmth. It shone out of the windows, orange, fire red, faintly glowing. Those houses were the only place to go, the only life available.
    Dorothy finally saw what adults wanted her to see. She saw pioneer beauty, from the top of a hill. It was a trade. In exchange, she had to become resigned. Dorothy knuckled under. She heard Aunty Em call, and she walked back down to punishment and food and a new clean bed.
    A few days later, across the naked fields, Dorothy saw Bob Jewell armed with a shovel. For no reason, he was beating one of the scarecrows flat, in a rage.

Zeandale and Manhattan, Kansas
    Winter 1875 – 1876

    “That would make me very unhappy,” answered the china princess. “You see, here in our own country, we live contentedly, and can talk and move around as we please. But whenever any of us are taken away, our joints at once stiffen and we can only stand straight and look pretty . . .”

    —L. Frank Baum,
    The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

    Dorothy knuckled down to learning to read. She would sit by the window, and Aunty Em would open up some huge volume smelling of mushrooms and dust. Toto would tug at her dress to go outside. Toto was kept inside now to keep him from freezing, but he was tied up most of the time.
    “What was the first letter, Dorothy? Look at the book, child. Toto, set. Toto, get to your corner. Dorothy, what is the first letter?”
    Dorothy was ashamed. “ E ?”
    Another bad thing that Aunty Em had found out when Dorothy came was that she did not know her letters.
    “No, Dorothy, that’s a W . Now what does W sound like? A W with an H after it. Whuh. Whuh sound, Dorothy. Now I’ll just read this first sentence for you. ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’”
    Beyond the walls, the woods on the ridge sighed in the wind. Both the sky and the ground were the same white color. Aunty Em asked her to recite the alphabet. Dorothy forgot F .
    “Don’t start all over again,” said Aunty Em. “That’s just learning by rote, parrot fashion, and I want you to really know this. I don’t want people to think we’re ignorant, Dorothy Gael, and they will if you go to school without your alphabet and the rudiments of ciphering!”
    And then she said, “What was your mama thinking of?”
    Dorothy began to hate her mother, for all the things she had left out: prayers and table manners and numbers. Dorothy helped at candle making. She swept up the floor. She watched Aunty Em repairing shoes, repairing trousers, jabbing the needle so hard that she sometimes stabbed herself with it. She watched Aunty Em cook in a rage.
    In the evenings, Henry would come in moving slowly with his long, stick-thin limbs. He would slump in his chair as Aunty Em threw pots about the stove, spilling, burning, humming hymns to herself. She made terrible mistakes. She baked cakes with salt instead of sugar. Meat came out of the oven burned black outside but red raw inside.
    “You could plant an extra crop,” said Aunty Em, one night.
    Uncle Henry was baffled by exhaustion. “What crop?”
    “Spring wheat, corn, I don’t know.”
    “Most of this land is hillside turf, Em, or it’s covered in woods. What you reckon on clearing it?”
    “We could keep hogs in the woods.”
    “We got any spare cash to buy hogs with?”
    “We would have with what fifty acres of river-bottom prime would earn anyone else.”
    “It’s not prime land, Em. Your father didn’t do too much with it either.”
    The pot slammed down as if on a head. “My father was writing the newspaper at the same time, instead of sitting around here with his boots off.”
    “So we’re back to wheat. Every year since I come, people say it’s going to be eight-row wheat, and then