A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  She could wish that the bioengineered fungus had never dissolved the world, but then she would be faced with whatever climate disaster the fungus had prevented. She could make a blanket wish that the world would be safe from global disasters for the next thousand years—and maybe unleash a millennium of stagnation. Or worse, depending on the slippery definition of “safe.”

  She guessed that wishing for a thousand wishes wouldn’t work—in fact, that kind of shenanigans might be how Richard Wolf wound up where he was now.

  The media server in the panic room had a bazillion movies and TV episodes about the monkey paw, the wishing ring, the magic fountain, the Faustian bargain, the djinn, the vengeance-demon, and so on. So she had plenty of time to soak up the accumulated wisdom of the human race on the topic of making wishes, which amounted to a pile of clichés. Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.

  Marisol and Richard sat and watched The Facts of Life together. Richard kept complaining and saying things like, “This is worse than being trapped inside a bottle.” But he also seemed to enjoy complaining about it.

  “This show kept me marginally sane when I was the only person on Earth,” Marisol said. “I still can’t wrap my mind around what happened to the human race. So, you are conscious of the passage of time when you’re inside the bottle.” She was very careful to avoid phrasing anything as a question.

  “It’s very strange,” Richard said. “When I’m in the bottle, it’s like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank, except not particularly warm. I float, with no sense of who or where I am, but meanwhile another part of me is getting flashes of awareness of the world. But I can’t control them. I might be hyperaware of one ant carrying a single crumb up a stem of grass, for an eternity, or I might just have a vague sense of clouds over the ocean, or some old woman’s aches and pains. It’s like hyper-lucid dreaming, sort of.”

  “Shush,” said Marisol. “This is the good part—Jo is about to lay some Brooklyn wisdom on these spoiled rich girls.”

  The episode ended, and another episode started right away. You take the good, you take the bad. Richard groaned loudly. “So what’s your plan, if I may ask? You’re just going to sit here and watch television for another few years?” He snorted.

  “I have no reason to hurry,” Marisol said. “I can spend a decade coming up with the perfect wishes. I have tons of frozen dinners.”

  At last, she took pity on Richard and found a stash of PBS American Playhouse episodes on the media server, plus other random theatre stuff. Richard really liked Caryl Churchill, but didn’t care for Alan Ayckbourn. He hated Wendy Wasserstein. Eventually, she put him back in his bottle again.

  Marisol started writing down possible draft wishes in one of the three blank journals that she’d found in a drawer. (Burton had probably expected to record his thoughts, if any, for posterity.) And then she started writing a brand-new play, instead. The first time she’d even tried, in a few years.

  Her play was about a man—her protagonists were always men—who moves to the big city to become a librarian, and winds up working for a strange old lady, tending her collection of dried-out leaves from every kind of tree in the world. Pedro is so shy, he can’t even speak to more than two people, but so beautiful that everybody wants him to be a fashion model. He pays an optometrist to put drops in his eyes, so he won’t see the people photographing and lighting him when he models. She had no clue how this play was going to end, but she felt a responsibility to finish it. That’s what Mrs. Garrett would expect.

  She was still stung by the idea that her prize-winning play was dumb, or worse yet kind of misogynistic. She wished she had an actual copy of that play, so she could show it to Richard and he would realize her true genius. But she didn’t wish that out loud, of course. And maybe this was the kick in the ass she needed to write a better play. A play that made sense of some of this mess.

  “I’ve figured it out,” she told Richard the next time she opened his bottle. “I’ve figured out what happened those other times. Someone finds your bottle after the apocalypse, and they get three wishes. So the first wish is to bring the world back and reverse the destruction. The second wish is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But then they still have one wish left. And that’s the one where they do something stupid and selfish, like wishing for irresistible sex appeal.”

  “Or perfect hair,” said Richard Wolf, doing his patented eye-roll and air-swat.

  “Or unlimited wealth. Or fame.”

  “Or everlasting youth and beauty. Or the perfect lasagna recipe.”

  “They probably figured they deserved it,” Marisol stared at the pages of scribbles in her hands. One set of diagrams mapping out her new, as-yet-unnamed play. A second set of diagrams trying to plan out the wish-making process, act by act. Her own scent clung to every surface in the panic room, the recirculated and purified air smelled like the inside of her own mouth. “I mean, they saved the world, right? So they’ve earned fame or sex or parties. Except I bet that’s where it all goes wrong.”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” said Wolf, arms folded and head tilted to one side, like he was physically restraining himself from expressing an opinion.

  Marisol threw out almost every part of her new play, except the part about her main character needing to be temporarily vision-impaired so he can model. That part seemed to speak to her, once she cleared away the clutter about the old woman and the leaves and stuff. Pedro stands, nearly nude, in a room full of people doing makeup and lighting and photography and catering and they’re all blurs to him. And he falls in love with one woman, but he only knows her voice, not her face. And he’s afraid to ruin it by learning her name, or seeing what she looks like.

  By now, Marisol had confused the two processes in her mind. She kept thinking she would know what to wish for, as soon as she finished writing her play. She labored over the first scene for a week before she had the nerve to show it to Richard, and he kept narrowing his eyes and breathing loudly through his nose as he read it. But then he said it was actually a promising start, actually not terrible at all.

  The mystery woman phones Pedro up, and he recognizes her voice instantly. So now he has her phone number, and he agonizes about calling her. What’s he afraid of, anyway? He decides his biggest fear is that he’ll go out on a date with the woman, and people will stare at the two of them. If the woman is as beautiful as Pedro, they’ll stare because it’s two beautiful people together. If she’s plain-looking, they’ll stare because they’ll wonder what he sees in her. When Pedro eats out alone, he has a way of shrinking in on himself, so nobody notices him. But he can’t do that on a date.

  At last, Pedro calls her and they talk for hours. On stage, she is partially hidden from the audience, so they, too, can’t see what the woman looks like.

  “It’s a theme in your work, hmmm?” Richard Wolf sniffed. “The hidden person, the flirting through a veil. The self-loathing narcissistic love affair.”

  “I guess so,” Marisol said. “I’m interested in people who are seen, and people who see, and the female gaze, and whatever.”

  She finished the play, and then it occurred to her that if she made a wish that none of this stuff had happened, her new play could be un-written as a result. When the time came to make her wishes, she rolled up the notebook and tucked it into her waistband of her sweatpants, hoping against hope that anything on her immediate person would be preserved when the world was rewritten.

  In the end Pedro agrees to meet the woman, Susanna, for a drink. But he gets some of the eye-dilating drops from his optometrist friend. He can’t decide whether to put the drops in his eyes before the date—he’s in the men’s room at the bar where they’re meeting, with the bottle in his hand, dithering—and then someone disturbs him and he acciden
tally drops the bottle in the toilet. And Susanna turns out to be pretty, not like a model but more distinctive. She has a memorable face, full of life. She laughs a lot, Pedro stops feeling shy around her. And Pedro discovers that if he looks into Susanna’s eyes when he’s doing his semi-nude modeling, he no longer needs the eye drops to shut out the rest of the world.

  “It’s a corny ending,” Marisol admitted. “But I like it.”

  Richard Wolf shrugged. “Anything is better than unearned ambivalence.” Marisol decided that was a good review, coming from him.

  Here’s what Marisol wished:

  1) I wish this apocalypse and all previous apocalypses had never happened, and that all previous wishes relating to the apocalypse had never been wished.

  2) I wish that there was a slight alteration in the laws of probability as relating to apocalyptic scenarios, so that if, for example, an event threatening the survival of the human race has a ten percent chance of happening, that ten percent chance just never comes up, and yet this does not change anything else in the material world.

  3) I wish that I, and my designated heirs, will keep possession of this bottle, and will receive ample warning before any apocalyptic scenario comes up, so that we will have a chance to make the final wish.

  She had all three wishes written neatly on a sheet of paper torn out of the notebook, and Richard Wolf scrutinized it a couple times, scratching his ear. “That’s it?” he said at last. “You do realize that I can make anything real. Right? You could create a world of giant snails and tiny people. You could make The Facts of Life the most popular TV show in the world for the next thousand years—which would, incidentally, ensure the survival of the human race, since there would have to be somebody to keep watching The Facts of Life. You could do anything.”

  Marisol shook her head. “The only way to make sure we don’t end up back here again is to keep it simple.” And then, before she lost her nerve, she picked up the sheet of paper where she’d written down her three wishes, and she read them aloud.

  Everything went cheaply glittery around Marisol, and the panic room reshaped into The Infinite Ristretto, a trendy café that just happened to be roughly the same size and shape as the panic room. The blue-leather walls turned to brown brick, with brass fixtures and posters for the legendary all-nude productions of Mamet’s Oleanna and Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother.

  All around Marisol, friends whose names she’d forgotten were hunched over their laptops, publicly toiling over their confrontational one-woman shows and chamber pieces. Her best friend Julia was in the middle of yelling at her, freckles almost washed out by her reddening face.

  “Fuck doctors,” Julia was shouting, loud enough to disrupt the whole room.

  “Theatre is a direct intervention. It’s like a cultural ambulance. Actors are like paramedics. Playwrights are surgeons, man.”

  Marisol was still wearing Burton’s stained business shirt and sweatpants, but somehow she’d gotten a pair of flip-flops. The green bottle sat on the rickety white table nearby. Queen was playing on the stereo, and the scent of overpriced coffee was like the armpit of God.

  Julia’s harangue choked off in the middle, because Marisol was giving her the biggest stage hug in the universe, crying into Julia’s green-streaked hair and thanking all her stars that they were here together. By now, everyone was staring at them, but Marisol didn’t care. Something fluttery and heavy fell out of the waistband of her sweatpants. A notebook.

  “I have something amazing to tell you, Jools,” Marisol breathed in Julia’s ear. She wanted to ask if Obama was still president and the Cold War was still over and stuff, but she would find out soon enough and this was more important. “Jools, I wrote a new play. It’s all done. And it’s going to change everything.” Hyperbole was how Marisol and Julia and all their friends communicated. “Do you want to read it?”

  “Are you seriously high?” Julia pulled away, then saw the notebook on the floor between their feet. Curiosity took over, and she picked it up and started to read.

  Marisol borrowed five bucks and got herself a pour-over while Julia sat, knees in her face, reading the play. Every few minutes, Julia glanced up and said, “Well, okay,” in a grudging tone, as if Marisol might not be past saving after all.

  WHERE THE TRAINS TURN

  Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

  If it’s in any way possible for You, please make this somehow un-happened! I’ll give you anything!

  A typical child’s prayer; directed to any sufficiently omnipotent Divine Being who chances to be listening

  Not since my girlhood have I bothered to read books that contain invented events or nonexistent people, were they written by Hemingway, Joyce, Mann, Blyton, Christie, Jansson or any other of the millions of literary talents in this universe—I prefer unquestionable facts, and to relax I sometimes like to read encyclopaedias. It’s hard enough to cope day by day with what presumes to be my own everyday reality; to stir and feed imagination with fiction would just make me lose my sense of reality altogether. It’s pretty fickle already, my understanding of which part of the things I remember has actually happened and what is composed of mere empty memories which never had a reference in the historical continuum that’s called objective reality.

  I don’t like to think about the past, because it mixes my head up and makes my bowels loose and gives me a severe migraine to boot. But I cannot stop remembering my son. That’s why I still often sneak with a spade to the graveyard of my memories and dig up pieces of my life with my son Rupert. Of his peculiarly fatal relationship to trains, of his brilliant days of success and happiness that made me so proud, and of everything else.

  For the sake of my son I write down these thoughts, seek him from dream images, from memories, from everywhere. Perhaps I’m afraid I’ll forget him; but could I forget?

  I hunt my memories, examine them, turn and twist them, and try to understand what happened and why; for Rupert’s sake I consider the eternal logical circle of cause and effect and my own part in it, trying to get some sense out of it, as painful and against my nature as such an effort always has been to me.

  Even as a girl I understood how important it is to live in a world as logical and sensible as possible. I never let myself be ruled by grand emotions, and yet was quite reasonably happy (or at least fairly unruffled most of the time), and then just I out of all the world’s expectant women became Rupert’s mother.

  Even as a baby he was restless, probably had nightmares, poor thing, and quite soon it turned out that my blue-eyed son Rupert was not a very sensible child. He let loose a mental chaos; even for a child he was extremely irrational. By and by he made an actual art form of his addiction to irrationality. At five years old for example he had a strange mania to mix calendars and set all the clocks he found to a wrong time. When he turned seven, I bought him a watch of his own, a golden Timex. He liked it, very much indeed, and wound it up regularly, but always it was an hour or two fast or slow, sometimes even more.

  More than a couple of times I was seized with a feeling that I had been caught in the middle of The Great Irrationality Circus where Rupert was a pompous mad director. Even looking at him made my head ache.

  I miss him every day. Sometimes I still go to the window in the middle of preparing dinner and perhaps imagine seeing him in the backyard, the silly old owl that I am, just like decades ago, in another time, another life:

  Rupert was playing on the backyard. Like a whirlwind dressed in a sun-yellow t-shirt and blue terry shorts he flew from here to there: from the tree stump to the currant bush, from the bush to the old puffed-up rowan that had been just sitting in the middle of the backyard very likely since creation, and on again to the nervously trembling top of the tree. From there the boy kept chatting to the birds flying by, to the clouds, to the sky, the sun and to the tree itself.

  I repressed my urge to run out and yell at Rupert to come down to the ground at once on pain of a severe punishment before he would fall and break
his slender fledgling-neck and spoil the whole beautiful summer day by dying and becoming one of those stupidly careless kids the curt news-in-brief in the papers always told about.

  I turned my back to the kitchen window. “Where do you plan to go today?” I asked Gunnar. My emphatically civilized tone reflected my inner turmoil as little as possible. I poured out more coffee for my guest. I always made him coffee, although I knew he’d actually have wanted cocoa. I did have a tin of cocoa behind the flour bags on the upper shelf, but that was for Rupert—grownups according to my opinion ought to drink coffee or tea.

  “I don’t know. Where ever we fancy.”

  “I do know: to the railway, as always. I can’t figure what you actually see in those railways,” I muttered.

  “Is it really so inconceivable to you?” Gunnar asked with a strange expression on his face. “That your son has a yearning to be close to the railway? And that the sound of a train quickens his blood?”

  I shook my head, embarrassed. I couldn’t figure what he was after. I waited for some kind of an explanation, but he just smiled his irritating Mona Lisa smile, and I did not feel like muddling my head with his riddles.

  He sat at the kitchen table, erect and altogether faultlessly upright, slim and polished. He was well-featured but slightly pale (as was Rupert). The almost feminine elegance of his slender limbs and graceful movements didn’t really lessen his distinctive masculinity, which flowed from somewhere deeper in his personality. He wore perfect greyish tailormade suits and even his ties probably cost as much as an ordinary off-the-peg suit. Now he had on a smart copper toned tie, given as a Father’s Day gift on Rupert’s behalf a couple of years ago. The man looked what he was—a Very Important Person in a big firm, with more money in his pockets, power and contacts than any single person ever really needed.

  “Perhaps we’ll leave then,” he said. He went to the hall and stopped for a moment. “I’ll bring the boy back before evening. Round seventeen-thirty, as usual. Well, Emma, enjoy the silence. Are you going to do anything special today? It’s a good day to drive to town and go to a movie for instance.”