Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “We can’t see into our own future, but we can see into yours. Our temporal direction is the opposite of yours. Our past is your future. Our future is your past. What would you like to know?”

  “The names of the eight horses who will win the eight races at Blue Ribbon Downs this afternoon."

  “Gilded Lily in the first." “Red Beans in the second." “Cactus Joe in the third." “FIy-by-Night in the fourth." “Bangabout in the fifth." “Copperhead in the sixth." “Gandy Dancer in the seventh." “Burglar Dan in the eighth." The eight answers came in eight different voices.

  George Dander picked up the phone and placed the eight bets, each horse to win in its race. But he was a little bit doubtful of what he had done.

  “Even granting that you’ve been in the future where the races will be run this afternoon, how could you have all the winners’ names so glibly?" he asked.

  “We’re smart." one of the voices said.

  “And if your past is my future and your future is my past, how come we are together so long? Why haven’t we passed in less than a moment?"

  “We will always be in the same present, but we will always have arrived at that present from opposite directions," a voice said.

  “And if Cloud-Nine World (usually regarded as legendary; is four-and-a-half light years from here (even as a legend it is firmly located in the Centauri system) why isn’t there a four-and-a-half-year delay in every exchange of ours?"

  “There’s an explanation, but it’s pretty mathematical and we don’t believe you could understand it," one of the voices said.

  All eight of the horses that George Dander bet on did win their races at Blue Ribbon Downs that afternoon, and George was ahead quite a few bucks. Mary Deare met George as he came back to his house after picking up his winnings. She knew all about it, and she couldn’t have known.

  “Don’t relax, George, don’t even think of relaxing,” she said. “Have your voices give you the names of the one hundred stocks that will rise most sharply tomorrow. While you’re getting them down, I’ll phone your broker to have supper with us at the Steak and Ale. And draw a check for twenty thousand dollars, and we’ll get our order to buy in to your broker tonight.”

  “I don’t have twenty thousand dollars, Mary.”

  “Yes you do, honey. You have twenty thousand two hundred and eleven dollars and nineteen cents in your checking account. Why do you try to conceal things from me when we are conditionally engaged and are practically flesh of one flesh?”

  Thirty-three days later, after hectic betting and buying and selling and manipulating futures with never a slip, George Dander was a millionaire. Mary Deare knew that he had reached it before George knew it himself. She had a quicker mind and she kept closer track of such things.

  “We’ll get married at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” she told George. “It’s all working out beautifully.”

  “Good, good,” George said. “Then you’re waiving the other requirement.”

  “I’m waiving nothing. You have an appointment with the dentist in twenty-two minutes. We’d better get down there now. We’re going to get those unsightly buck teeth jerked out of your mouth.”

  “But, Mary, don’t you realize that I, we, wouldn’t be millionaires if it weren’t for my buck teeth and my voices? You’re killing the golden goose, the golden fleece, the golden buck teeth!”

  “Trust me, honey! I always know what I’m doing. I’m not killing that golden goose. I’m going to put it on a business basis.”

  The dentist pulled George Dander’s two priceless buck teeth which were one of the three best sets of paired receptors in the world. And George felt terrible about it.

  “Don’t let them throw them away!” he protested as he came out from under the gas. “Maybe something can be done with them if—”

  “They won’t be thrown away,” Mary Deare reassured him. “My, you do talk funny without them! I have them here in my purse. I told you that I was going to put them on a business basis. Come along now. We’ll get married in the morning, and then we’ll go on a two-day honeymoon.”

  “Why only a two-day honeymoon?” George Dander asked. (He sure did talk funny without his buck teeth.) “Why for only two days?”

  “Because I have a dental appointment on the third day,” Mary Deare said.

  2.

  Nothing of her that does fade

  But does suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-Nymphs hourly ring her knell Ding-Dong—

  Hark, I hear them, Ding-Dong Bell!

  The Tempest, Shakespeare

  ***

  George Dander had mixed feelings at his wedding. He had a great and worrisome emptiness in the front of his mouth, and he had an awkward and floppy upper lip that was now relieved of its job of at least partly covering his buck teeth. He felt somewhat unmanned.

  On the other hand, he was marrying the Unwreckable Mary Deare, an enchanting creature, a metamorphic creature, a pearl beyond price (“That paltry million dollars is only the beginning, honey,” she had whispered to him, “we’ll be big rich”), the Iris goddess at the end of the rainbow. It should be fun. And perhaps he would be more handsome without his big buck teeth (which would now, somehow, be put on a business basis).

  And it was fun, for the two days of their honeymoon. They went to Bald Eagle Cove on Keystone Lake. They ate crawfish tails and Gored Ox Surprise and drank Boilermakers and Sazarac Cocktails. They waterskied and caught catfish and made love. One night they went to a movie at Mannford, and the other night they went to a cow-pasture Rock Concert near New Prue. Yes, all these things were fun when done with the metamorphic Mary Deare.

  And they came back on the morning of the third day because Mary Deare had a dental appointment that day.

  George Dander was absolutely dumbfounded by the appearance of his cherished wife Mary Deare Dander when she came back from the dentist’s.

  “No, no, no!” he said (or he made a pitiful attempt at saying). Try to say “No, no, no” with your two front teeth out: try to say anything with your two front teeth out. “Never, never!” George declared, and he was shaking like a whole treeful of aspen leaves. “Thomebody thay it ithn’t tho!” he begged.

  “You’ll get used to them, honey,” the unwreckable Mary Deare assured him.

  “Really you will, George,” sounded a muffled voice that used to be one of George Dander’s own “voices,” and it was coming somehow from Mary Deare’s mouth. “It is essential that you not only get used to them, but that you learn to love them, that you come to find them things of beauty. You do understand that this world’s ideas of beauty will have to be upgraded before the time of our coming.”

  George Dander tried to scream, but it was somehow pathetic. (Try to scream effectively sometime with your two front teeth gone and your upper lip flapping loosely.)

  And George Dander began to run, and he disappeared over the horizon still running.

  His was surely an odd reaction to his wife’s coming home with two large and handsome buck teeth gleaming in the front of her face in place of six smaller upper front teeth that had never done much for her.

  But George Dander had always been a little bit eccentric.

  George Dander came home again after about a month.

  “Oh, hi, George!” his wife Mary Deare spoke pleasantly. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you too,” George said, but he didn’t really see her. He couldn’t yet stand to look at her. One glimpse out of the corner of his eye was enough. George Dander was tired and dirty and discouraged.

  “You’ll feel better when you get your bridge with your two new teeth from the dentist,” Mary Deare Dander said. “They’ve been ready for you for a month. He fitted you for them when you were still out from the gas when he pulled your two buck teeth. You will be nice-looking when you have two ordinary-sized front teeth and your upper lip has unextended itself.”

  “I will be nice-looking
then, but I won’t be me,” George Dander said. “Mary, let me give you a little history of the world, and of my family, and of my teeth.

  “When the great Indo-Aryan migration from central Asia to Europe began thirty centuries ago, its languages and words began to diverge. Of their original words, only about a hundred are still to be recognized in most of its branches. There isn’t any common word for ocean, for they hadn't lived on the ocean. There isn’t any common word for elephant or palm tree for they didn’t know these things before their split-up. But there is a common word for teeth, for all of them had teeth. It was dondi in Greek, dens in Latin, and dantis in Lithuanian. It is dent in French and diente in Spanish. The word isn’t recognized in English, but we still have dental and dentist. It is tand in Dutch and Scandinavian. With the greatest tribe of all of them (and there are now less than a hundred members of our ‘tribe’ left in the world) the word for tooth is dand and its plural is dander. So my name is George Dander which is George Teeth, and my family name has been ‘teeth’ for a hundred generations. We’ve always known that our buck teeth were receptors, part of the ‘ivory grapevine.’ People with outstanding teeth have always been in rapport with each other and have known each others’ thoughts. Outsiders who noticed this didn’t understand it and they thought that it was telepathy at work. Our buck teeth have been handed down from father to son (but never has any female member of the Dander family shown any signs of buck-teethism) for a hundred generations, growing always larger and more beautiful, and they climaxed in me. This isn’t the first time we have picked up voices from the stars with our front teeth. But now I am shorn of them.”

  “Poor George!” the unwreckable Mary Deare said. “But look at it this way. Your wonderful teeth are in good hands now. which is to say in good mouth now, mine. Now my name is teeth, and the line won’t be broken. Your son, of whom I am gravid now, will have the finest buck teeth ever in the history of the world.”

  “The fact is, George,” said a muffled voice that had been one of George’s own “voices” a month before, “we needed good paired receptors combined with brains, with opportunistic brains, to use for our deployments. You had the good paired receptors. Mary Deare had the fine opportunistic brains. So we made a deal.”

  “And now, honey, we will be rich beyond your fondest expectations,” Mary' Deare told George.

  “I no longer have any fond expectations,” George Dander said sadly, and he went away again.

  But Mary Deare Dander thrived. Those first couple of million dollars had been only peanuts. Now, with the aid of the “voices” she became fabulously rich, and in exchange for it she had only to become a sort of famous role model.

  “Some of them laughed at me for a while, at the way I looked,” she said. “But they laughed at me to their peril. Laughing people, do you ever know who really owns the company from which you have your living? It is dangerous to laugh at the richest woman in the world.” For, by the time that Mary Deare Dander gave birth to George Dander the one-hundred-and-first (Oh, the buck teeth on that new-born baby!) she really was the richest woman in the world, and in three more days she would be the richest person in the world.

  There is nothing so unpredictable as the changes in fads and fashions, especially the fads and fashions of beautiful women. And one of the strangest fashions ever to be taken up was the Dente Sporgente Look (pronounce it Dentay Sporgentay). Who would believe that the Dente Sporgente Look would be equated with having chic, with having elegance, with having total charm?

  Indeed, Marcel Buffon, the greatest beauty expert in the world, writing in the French fashion magazine Lendemain Elegant, wrote ‘‘The new Dente Sporgente Look is like nothing ever seen before. It is something new in beauty, it is something new in excitement, it is something new in bla.” It is true that this was the last thing that Marcel Buffon ever wrote, for immediately after writing that he opened his veins and died. He had always been a puzzling man.

  But the Dente Sporgente Look (the English translation of that wonderful and untranslatable name would be the “Protruding Teeth Look”) was in. No, you wouldn’t have guessed in a hundred guesses that the great new world-wide fashion of that year would be the stylish and beautiful women of the world, millions and millions of them, all having their six upper front teeth pulled out and replaced by a pair of huge buck teeth, implanted in the bone and growing there (they wouldn't be good receptors unless they were growing from the bone because good receptors require the complete bone skeleton to serve as an antenna). And you wouldn’t have guessed in a hundred-and-one guesses that these women would universally be regarded as ravishingly beautiful after the toothy change had been made in them. Whoever effected such a change anyhow, and by what means? (Ah, the Dente Sporgente was almost something new in newness.)

  It isn’t certain who effected it, but the person who turned the greatest profit from it was that richest woman in the world, that metamorphic creature, Mary Deare Dander. Of the three thousand companies and corporations that she now owned, three hundred of them were part of the Buck Tooth Cartel.

  One day, a gnarled and knobby space-traveler who happened to be on World for a short stopover, saw Mary Deare Dander herself, and he reeled back aghast.

  “It is one of the natives of Synnephon-Ennea on Cloud-Nine Planet,” he groaned, “the most repulsive creatures in the Universe. If they have already begun to arrive here, then World would be better off to die the death.”

  “But Cloud-Nine Planet is usually deemed to be a legendary place,” said the travel agent who was expediting the spacetraveler, “and it’s also said that it is impossible to go to it or leave it.”

  “Cloud-Nine Planet is approximately as real as this planet here under my feet, and it is about as easy to get to or leave. Of course, one must always arrive at Cloud-Nine from the future because it’s in a time-reversal eddy. But it’s real, and one can go to and from it with a little trickery. Ugh, isn't she ugly!”

  “She is accounted the most beautiful woman on World,” the travel-agent said.

  “I see now that she is not quite a Cloud-Nine person yet,” the space-traveler mused. “But she is a metamorphic, and she is turning into a Cloud-Nine person. If one isn’t already a Cloud-Nine person, one will become such after a bit of trafficking with the Cloud-Niners. The Cloud-Niners are real, but they destroy the reality of every world they infest.”

  And then the old space-traveler seemed to be literally pulled apart. His four limbs and his head were all separated from his torso by giant and invisible hands, so it seemed. Old space-travelers often talk too much and they suffer the consequences of talking too much. The travel-agent, being a fastidious man, disassociated himself from the scattered remains of the old space-traveler and walked stiffly away.

  The “voices” from Cloud-Nine Planet now had about fifty million good paired receptors that they could use on World, and that was about all they needed for right now.

  Beaver teeth, wild stallion teeth, moose and elk most of all! How could there have been enough of them to satisfy the demand? If the price is set high enough, there will always be enough, either genuine or counterfeit.

  The only still living giant Irish elk in the world had its two front teeth torn out of its mouth in the Dublin zoo one night. “Shame, Shame, Shame,” read the headlines of all the Irish papers, but that pair of giant elk buck teeth was known to bring a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the black market.

  Behemoth teeth were the best of all. matched pairs of behemoth front teeth.

  But the behemoth is a fabulous creature.

  So are the prices for its buck teeth fabulous.

  You say that the behemoth front teeth are really plastic and cost only thirty-five cents a pair to produce? Well, with a base price of thirty-five cents, and approximately a hundred thousand dollars a sale going into advertising and hype, a million dollars a throw for them still yields a tidy profit for somebody, somebody named Mary Deare Dander.

  ***

  Somewhere in dista
nt Space and Time

  Is wetter water, slimier slime.

  And there (we trust) there swimmeth one

  Who swam ere rivers were begun.

  Immense, of fishy form and mind.

  Squamous, omnipotent, and kind.

  Rupert Brooke

  ***

  Mary Deare Dander now had large and glittering thousand-facet insect-type eyes. They would have appeared very ugly to anybody who was born before yesterday, but there were now no such persons. Now everybody was wearing a button that read “I was born anew this morning.” Such persons will soon come to accept and even love thousand-faceted, ugly, insect-type eyes. At least a dozen of the facets of the strange eyes were meaningful, for with them Mary could focus in on scenes on a dozen different worlds including Cloud-Nine Planet. This might be an advantage some time. The enlarged eyes were too big to remain in Mary’s head, so now they were two throbbing, living, baseball-sized, bloodshot-in-seven-colors eyes on the front of Mary Deare’s face.

  These new eyes would be the next fashion for the beautiful women of the world, the Augen-Laugen or Lye-in-the-Eye look. Already such orbs were being installed in leading ladies at a million dollars a throw, and both the numbers of them and the price would pick up. Oh yes, objectively they were very ugly, but who was still objective nowadays? Their introduction was part of the upgrading of the sense of beauty for the people of World, the upgrading that would have to be completed before the Cloud-Nine people themselves could appear.

  George Dander, when he left home that second time, believed that he would never laugh again. And he did not laugh again until a year and a day after his wedding. Then one aspect of the happenings struck him as very, very droll.

  (Hippopotamus front teeth, they were still going well now. They hadn’t much shape or style, but they were mouth-fillingly big. They were second class, but there was always a strong market for the second class. And the most important dealer in the world in hippopotamus front teeth was the metamorphic Mary Deare Dander.)

  “I wonder what the ‘voices’ really look like!” George Dander chortled in glee when the droll mood hit him one day. (Try to chortle some time without any front teeth.) “If they have to effect ‘upgradings’ of this world’s ideas of beauty, like these present capers of theirs, before they can appear at all, boy-o-boy-o-boy! what must they really look like!”