Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  Or back, I thought. “Jack Williamson lived in this house from 1947 to…” Tonia'd said, and paused and then said, “…the present,” and I'd thought the side-ways glance was to see my reaction to his name, but what if she'd intended to say, “from 1947 to 1998”? Or “2015”?

  What if that was why she kept pausing when she talked, because she had to remember to say “Jack Williamson is” instead of “Jack Williamson was,” “does most of his writing” instead of “did most of his writing,” had to remember what year it was and what hadn't happened yet?

  “‘If the field were strong enough,’” I remembered Tonia saying out at the ranch, “‘we could bring physical objects through space-time instead of mere visual images.’” And the tour group had all smiled.

  What if they were the physical objects? What if the tour had traveled through time instead of space? But that didn't make any sense. If they could travel through time they could have come on a weekend Jack Williamson was home, or during the week of the Williamson Lectureship.

  I read on, looking for explanations. The book talked about quantum mechanics and probability, about how changing one thing in the past could affect the whole future. Maybe that was why they had to come when Jack Williamson was out of town, to avoid doing something to him that might change the future.

  Or maybe Nonstop Tours was just incompetent and they'd come on the wrong weekend. And the reason they didn't have cameras was because they all forgot them. And they were all really tourists, and The Legion of Time was just a science fiction book and I was making up crackpot theories to avoid thinking about Cross and the job.

  But if they were ordinary tourists, what were they doing spending a day staring at a tumbledown shack in the middle of nowhere? Even if they were tourists from the future, there was no reason to travel back in time to see a science fiction writer when they could see presidents or rock stars.

  Unless they lived in a future where all the things he'd predicted in his stories had come true. What if they had genetic engineering and androids and spaceships? What if in their world they'd terraformed planets and gone to Mars and explored the galaxy? That would make Jack Williamson their forefather, their founder. And they'd want to come back and see where it all started.

  The next morning, I left my stuff at the Portales Inn and went over to the library. Checkout wasn't till noon, and I wanted to wait till I'd found out a few things before I made up my mind whether to take the job or not. On the way there I drove past B. and J. Drugs and then College Drug. Neither of them were open, and I couldn't tell from their outsides how old they were.

  The library opened at eight and the room with the Williamson collection in it at 9:30, which was cutting it close. I was there at 9:15, looking in through the glass at the books. There was a bronze plaque on the wall and a big mobile of the planets.

  Tonia had said the collection “isn't very big at this point,” but from what I could see, it looked pretty big to me. Rows and rows of books, filing cabinets, boxes, photographs.

  A young guy in chinos and wire-rimmed glasses unlocked the door to let me in. “Wow! Lined up and waiting to get in! This is a first,” he said, which answered my first question.

  I asked it anyway. “Do you get many visitors?”

  “A few,” he said. “Not as many as I think there should be for a man who practically invented the future. Androids, terraforming, antimatter, he imagined them all. We'll have more visitors in two weeks. That's when the Williamson Lectureship week is. We get quite a few visitors then. The writers who are speaking usually drop in.”

  He switched on the lights. “Let me show you around,” he said. “We're adding to the collection all the time.” He took down a long flat box. “This is the comic strip Jack did, Beyond Mars. And here is where we keep his original manuscripts.” He opened one of the filing cabinets and pulled out a sheaf of typed yellow sheets. “Have you ever met Jack?”

  “No,” I said, looking at an oil painting of a white-haired man with a long, pleasant-looking face. “What's he like?”

  “Oh, the nicest man you've ever met. It's hard to believe he's one of the founders of science fiction. He's in here all the time. Wonderful guy. He's working on a new book, The Black Sun. He's out of town this weekend, or I'd take you over and introduce you. He's always delighted to meet his fans. Is there anything specific you wanted to know about him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Somebody told me about him seeing the magazine with his first story in it in a drugstore. Which drugstore was that?”

  “It was one in Canyon, Texas. He and his sister were going to school down there.”

  “Do you know the name of the drugstore?” I said. “I'd like to go see it.”

  “Oh, it went out of business years ago,” he said. “I think it was torn down.”

  “We went there yesterday,” Tonia had said, and what day exactly was that? The day Jack saw it and bought all three copies and forgot his groceries? And what were they wearing that day? Print dresses and double-breasted suits and hats?

  “I've got the issue here,” he said, taking a crumbling magazine out of a plastic slipcover. It had a garish picture of a man being pulled up out of a crater by a brilliant crystal. “December, 1928. Too bad the drugstore's not there anymore. You can see the cabin where he wrote his first stories, though. It's still out on the ranch his brother owns. You go out west of town and turn south on State Highway 18. Just ask Betty to show you around.”

  “Have you ever had a tour group in here?” I interrupted.

  “A tour group?” he said, and then must have decided I was kidding. “He's not quite that famous.”

  Yet, I thought, and wondered when Nonstop Tours visited the library. Ten years from now? A hundred? And what were they wearing that day?

  I looked at my watch. It was 9:45. “I've got to go,” I said. “I've got an appointment.” I started out and then turned back. “This person who told me about the drugstore, they mentioned something about Number 5516. Is that one of his books?”

  “5516? No, that's the asteroid they're naming after him. How'd you know about that? It's supposed to be a surprise. They're giving him the plaque Lectureship week.”

  “An asteroid,” I said. I started out again.

  “Thanks for coming in,” the librarian said. “Are you just visiting or do you live here?”

  “I live here,” I said.

  “Well, then, come again.”

  I went down the stairs and out to the car. It was 9:50. Just enough time to get to Cross's and tell him I'd take the job.

  I went out to the parking lot. There weren't any tour buses driving through it, which must mean Jack Williamson was back from his convention. After my meeting with Cross I was going to go over to his house and introduce myself. “I know how you felt when you saw that Amazing Stories in the drugstore,” I'd tell him. “I'm interested in the future, too. I liked what you said about it, about science fiction lighting the way and science making the future real.”

  I got in the car and drove through town to Highway 70. An asteroid. I should have gone with them. “It'll be fun,” Tonia said. It certainly would be.

  Next time, I thought. Only I want to see some of this terraforming. I want to go to Mars.

  I turned south on Highway 70 towards Cross's office. ROSWELL 92 MILES, the sign said.

  “Come again,” I said, leaning out the window and looking up. “Come again!”

  Columbiad

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Stephen Baxter has, relatively speaking, burst into prominence overnight. His first works were published in England in the early 1990s, but in 1995 and 1996 he became a major figure in hard SF. Not only were his earlier novels reprinted in the U.S., but his 1995 The Time Ships was a leading contender in 1996 for the Hugo Award for best novel, and, in addition to his earlier novel, Flux, was released in the U.S. A new novel, Voyager, was released in England and in the U.S. in early 1997. At the same time, he managed to write and publish a number of SF stories, principa
lly in Interzone and SF Age. “Columbiad” mines a vein that has been of some interest to Baxter in recent years—the history of SF. The Time Ships is a sequel to H. G. Wells's The Time Machine; this story, from SF Age, is a story of H. G. Wells in the year 1990, and of Jules Verne's From Earth to the Moon, to which this story might be considered a sequel. It ends this year's Year's Best on the theme of the wonders of space travel.

  The initial detonation was the most severe. I was pushed into my couch by a recoil that felt as if it should splay apart my ribs. The noise was extraordinary, and the projectile rattled so vigorously that my head was thrown from side to side.

  And then followed, in perfect sequence, the subsidiary detonations of those smaller masses of guncotton lodged in the walls of the cannon. One after another these barrel-sized charges played vapor against the base of the projectile, accelerating it further, and the recoil pressed with ever-increasing force.

  I fear that my consciousness departed from me, for some unmeasured interval.

  When I came to, the noise and oscillation had gone. My head swam, as if I had imbibed heavily of Ardan's wine butts, and my lungs ached as they pulled at the air.

  But, when I pushed at the couch under me, I drifted slowly upward, as if I were buoyant in some fluid that had flooded the projectile.

  I was exultant. Once again my Columbiad had not failed me!

  My name is Impey Barbicane, and what follows—if there are ears to hear—is an account of my second venture beyond the limits of the terrestrial atmosphere: that is, the first voyage to Mars.

  My lunar romance received favorable reviews on its London publication by G. Newnes, and I was pleased to place it with an American publisher and in the Colonies. Sales were depressed, however, due to unrest over the war with the Boers. And there was that little business of the protests by M. Verne at the “unscientific” nature of my device of gravitational opacity; but I was able to point to flaws in Verne's work, and to the verification of certain aspects of my book by experts in astronomy, astronomical physics, and the like.

  All of this engaged little of my attention, however. With the birth of Gip, and the publication of my series of futurological predictions in The Fortnightly Review, I had matters of a more personal nature to attend to, as well as of greater global significance.

  I was done with interplanetary travel!

  It was with surprise and some annoyance, therefore, that I found myself the recipient, via Newnes, of a series of missives from Paris, penned—in an undisciplined hand—by one Michel Ardan. This evident eccentric expressed admiration for my work and begged me to place close attention to the material he enclosed, which I should find “of the most extraordinary interest and confluence with [my] own writings.”

  As is my custom, I had little hesitation in disposing of this correspondence without troubling to read it fully.

  But M. Ardan continued to pepper me with further fat volleys of paper.

  At last, in an idle hour, while Jane nursed Gip upstairs, I leafed through Ardan's dense pages. And I have to confess that I found my imagination—or the juvenile underside of it!—pricked.

  Ardan's enclosure purported to be a record made by a Colonel Maston, of Baltimore in the United States, over the years 1872 to 1873—that is, some twenty-eight years ago. This Maston, now dead, claimed to have built an apparatus that had detected “propagating electro-magnetic emissions”: a phenomenon first described by James Clerk Maxwell, and related, apparently, to the more recent wireless-telegraphy demonstrations of Marconi. If this were not enough, Maston also claimed that the “emissions” were in fact signals encoded after the fashion of a telegraphic message.

  And these signals—said Maston and Ardan—had emanated from a source beyond the terrestrial atmosphere: from a space voyager, en route to Mars!

  When I got the gist of this, I laughed out loud. I dashed off a quick note instructing Newnes not to pass on to me any further communications from the same source.

  Fifth day. Two hundred and ninety-seven thousand leagues.

  Through my lenticular glass scuttles, the Earth now appears about the size of a full Moon. Only the right half of the terrestrial globe is illuminated by the Sun. I can still discern clouds, and the glare of ice at the poles.

  Some distance from the Earth a luminous disk is visible, aping the Earth's waxing phase. It is the Moon, following the Earth on its path around the Sun. It is to my regret that the configuration of my orbit was such that I passed no closer to the satellite than several hundred thousand leagues.

  The projectile is extraordinarily convenient. I have only to turn a tap and I am furnished with fire and light by means of gas, which is stored in a reservoir at a pressure of several atmospheres. My food is meat and vegetables and fruit, hydraulically compressed to the smallest dimensions; and I have carried a quantity of brandy and water. My atmosphere is maintained by means of chlorate of potassium and caustic potash: The former, when heated, is transformed into chloride of potassium, and the oxygen thus liberated replaces that which I have consumed; and the potash, when shaken, extracts from the air the carbonic acid placed there by the combustion of elements of my blood.

  Thus, in interplanetary space, I am as comfortable as if I were in the smoking lounge of the Gun Club itself, in Union Square, Baltimore!

  Michel Ardan was perhaps seventy-five. He was of large build, but stoop-shouldered. He sported luxuriant side-whiskers and mustache; his shock of untamed hair, once evidently red, was largely a mass of gray. His eyes were startling: Habitually he held them wide open so that a rim of white appeared above each iris, and his gaze was clear but vague, as if he suffered from near-sight.

  He paced about my living room, his open collar flapping. Even at his advanced age Ardan was a vigorous, restless man, and my home, Spade House—spacious though it is—seemed to confine him like a cage. I feared besides that his booming Gallic voice must awaken Gip. Therefore I invited Ardan to walk with me in the garden; in the open air I fancied he might not seem quite so out of scale.

  The house, built on the Kent coast near Sandgate, is open to a vista of the sea. The day was brisk, lightly overcast. Ardan showed interest in none of this, however.

  He fixed me with those wild eyes. “You have not replied to my letters.”

  “I had them stopped.”

  “I have been forced to travel here unannounced. Sir, I have come here to beg your help.”

  I already regretted allowing him into my house—of course I did!—but some combination of his earnestness, and the intriguing content of those unsolicited missives, had temporarily overwhelmed me. Now, though, I stood square on my lawn, and held up the newest copy of his letter.

  “Then perhaps, M. Ardan, you might explain what you mean by transmitting such romantic nonsense in my direction.”

  He barked laughter. “Romantic it may be. Nonsense—never!”

  “Then you claim this business of ‘propagating emissions’ is the plain and honest truth, do you?”

  “Of course. It is a system of communication devised for their purposes by Impey Barbicane and Colonel Maston. They seized on the electro-magnetic discoveries of James Maxwell with the vigor and inventiveness typical of Americans—for America is indeed the Land of the Future, is it not?”

  Of that, I was not so certain.

  “Colonel Maston had built a breed of mirror—but of wires, do you see?—in the shape of that geometric figure called a hyperbola—no, forgive me!—a parabola, for this figure, I am assured, collects all impinging waves into a single point, thus making it possible to detect the weakest…”

  “Enough.” I was scarcely qualified to judge the technical possibilities of such a hypothetical apparatus. And besides, the inclusion of apparently authentic detail is a technique I have used in my own romances, to persuade the reader to accept the most outrageous fictive lies. I had no intention of being deceived by it myself!

  “These missives of yours—received by Maston—purport to be from the inhabitant of a proj
ectile, beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. And this projectile, you claim, was launched into space from the mouth of an immense cannon, the ‘Columbiad,’ embedded in a Florida hillside…”

  “That is so.”

  “But, my poor M. Ardan, you must understand that these are no more than the elements of a fiction, written three decades ago by M. Verne—your countryman—with whom I, myself, have corresponded.”

  Choleric red bloomed in his battered cheeks. “Verne indeed now claims his lazy and sensational books were fiction. It is convenient for him to do so. But they were not! He was commissioned to write truthful accounts of our extraordinary voyage!”

  “Well, that's as may be. But see here. In M. Verne's account the projectile was launched toward the Moon. Not to Mars.” I shook my head. “There is a difference, you know.”

  “Sir, I pray you resist treating me as imbecilic. I am well aware of the difference. The projectile was sent toward the Moon on its first journey—in which I had the honor of participating…”

  The afternoon was extending, and I had work to do; and I was growing irritated by this boorish Frenchman. “Then, if this projectile truly was built, perhaps you would be good enough to show it to me.”

  “I cannot comply.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because it is no longer on the Earth.”

  “Ah.” Of course not! It was buried in the red dust of Mars, with this Barbicane inside.

  “But…”

  “Yes, M. Ardan?”

  “I can show you the cannon.”

  The Frenchman regarded me steadily, and I felt an odd chill grow deep within me.

  Seventy-third day. Four million one hundred and eightyfour thousand leagues.

  Today, through my smoked glass, I have observed the passage of the Earth across the face of the Sun.

  The planet appeared first as a mar in the perfect rim of the parent star. Later it moved into the full glare of the fiery ball, and was quite visible as a whole disk, dwarfed by the Sun's mighty countenance. After perhaps an hour another spot appeared, even smaller than the first: It was the Moon, following its parent toward the Sun's center.