Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Candy shaped like brachiopods and sea scorpions? How about breakfast cereal? Sugar-frosted Trilobites?”

  Perfectly serious, Rubis nodded. “Now, if you’d’ve set the dial in your time machine for the age of dinosaurs instead.”

  “There wasn’t actually a time machine. Just the spacetime anomaly, the hole. And it just happened to open up where it did.”

  “That’s too bad. And ain’t it the way it always happens with science? We spent a godzillion dollars sending people to the Moon and Mars, and the Moon’s just a rock and Mars’s just a damn desert.”

  “Well, I don’t know anyone honestly expected—”

  “Now, dinosaurs, dinosaurs’ve been hot sellers forever. Dino toys, VR—they had all that stuff when I was a kid, and it still outsells every damn thing in sight. And every two, three years, regular as laxatives, another big dino movie. But what’ve you got? You got nothing, I’m sorry to say.” He began to count on his fingers the things which Ivan did not have. “You got no big concept. You got no merchandisable angle. You got no crossover potential. Crossover potential’s very big these days. You know, like Tarzan meets Frankenstein. James Bond versus Mata Hari. But, most of all, you haven’t got dinosaurs, though. Everybody knows if you’re going to tell a story set in the prehistoric past, there have to be dinosaurs. Without dinosaurs, there’s no drama.”

  “I guess not,” Ivan said, and took a long sip of his drink, and looked at the shimmering blue-green water in the pool. The slowly stirring air seemed to carry a faint smell of burning. He said to Rubis, “Let me bounce an idea for a different kind of time-travel story off you. Tell me what you think.”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “Okay. You have to bear in mind that when we speak of traveling backward through time, into the past, what we’re really talking about is traveling between just two of infinite multiple Earths. Some of these multiple Earths may be virtually identical, some may be subtly different, some are wildly different—as different as modern and prehistoric times. Anyway, what you actually do when you travel through time is go back and forth between Earths. Earth as it is, here and now, and another Earth, Earth as it was in the Paleozoic Era.”

  Rubis murmured, “Weird,” and smiled.

  “Now let’s say someone from our present-day visits a prehistoric Earth and returns. After a while, after the initial excitement’s died down, he starts to ponder the implications of travel back and forth between multiple Earths. He’s come back to a present-day Earth that may or may not be his own present-day Earth. If it’s virtually identical, well, if the only difference is, say, the outcome of some subatomic occurrence, then it doesn’t matter. But maybe there’s something subtly off on the macro level. It wouldn’t be anything major. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Confederate States would all’ve gone down to defeat. Or maybe the time-traveler only suspects that something may be subtly off. His problem is, he’s never quite sure, he can’t decide whether something is off or he only thinks it is, so he’s always looking for the telling detail. But there are so many details. If he never knew in the first place how many plays Shakespeare really wrote or who all those European kings were …&8221;

  Rubis nodded. “I get it. Not bad.” He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “But I still think it needs dinosaurs.”

  Ivan chuckled softly, without mirth. “You should look up my niece’s boyfriend.” He turned on his seat, toward the burning hills.

  They swept down Mulholland. Ivan said to Don, “Thanks for taking me. I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun.” Don gave him a curious look. “No, really. I had a very good time, a wonderful time.”

  “Probably a better time than I did.”

  Ivan made a noncommittal sound. “I needed this experience as a kind of reality check.”

  Don laughed sharply. “Hollywood isn’t the place to come for a reality check.”

  “Well, okay. Let’s just say I had a very enlightening and entertaining poolside chat with our host.”

  “Johnny Rubis? Christ. He wasn’t our host. Our host was a swine in human form named Lane. He was holding court indoors the whole time. I went in and did my dip and rise and got the hell out as fast as I could. Whatever Rubis may’ve told you he was doing by the pool, he was just showing off. See what a big deal I am. There were guys all over the place doing the same thing—women, too. Dropping names and making a show of pissant phone calls. See what big deals we are. Whatever Rubis may’ve told you, he’s not that high in the food chain. A year ago he was probably packaging videos with titles like Trailer Park Sluts. He’s an example of the most common form of life in Hollywood. The self-important butthead. I know, I’ve worked for plenty like him.”

  “Writing novels based on movies based on novels?”

  Don shook his head. “Not me. Not lately, anyway?”

  Ivan wondered if Don despised himself as much as he apparently despised everyone else in Hollywood. He hoped it was not so. More than anything, he hoped it was not so. “Don,” he said, “I’m sorry I said that. I’m really terribly sorry.”

  Don shrugged. “No offense taken.” He gave Ivan a quick grin. “Hey, big brother, I’ve been insulted by professionals. It’s one of the things writers in Hollywood get paid for.”

  They rode in silence for a time.

  Then Don said, “Do you know what a monkey trap is?

  “Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but do you know how it works? You take a dry gourd and cut a small hole in it, just big enough for the monkey to get its hand through. You put a piece of food inside the gourd and attach the gourd to a tree or a post. The monkey puts his hand into the gourd, grabs the piece of food, and then can’t pull his fist back through the hole. He could get away if he’d only let go of the food, but he just can’t make himself let go. So, of course, he’s trapped.”

  “Is the money really that good?”

  “Christ, Ivan, the money’s incredible. But it isn’t just the money. What it is, is that every great once in a long goddamn while, against all the odds—remember, before all this happened, I worked in the next best habitat favorable to self-important buttheads, which is politics. While you were off exploring prehistoric times, I was writing like a sumbitch on fire and trying to get the hell out of Texas. I paid the rent, however, by working for the state legislature. Whenever a legislator wanted to lay down a barrage of memorial resolutions, I was the anonymous flunky who unlimbered the ‘whereases’ and the ‘be it resolveds.’ Every now and then, I wrote about forgotten black heroes of the Texas Revolution, forgotten women aviators of World War Two—something, anyway, that meant something. But, of course, in those resolutions, everything was equally important. Most of my assignments were about people’s fiftieth wedding anniversaries, high-school football teams, rattlesnake roundups. Finally, I was assigned to write a resolution designating, I kid you not, Texas Bottled Water Day. Some people from the bottling industry were in town, lobbying for God remembers what, and someone in the lege thought it’d be real nice to present them with a resolution. Thus, Texas Bottled Water Day. When I saw the request, I looked my boss straight in the eye, and I told him, This is not work for a serious artist. He quite agreed. First chance he got, he fired me.”

  “Maybe you should’ve quit before it came to that.”

  “Well, I’d’ve quit anyway as soon as the writing took off.” Don changed his grip on the steering wheel. “But while I was a legislative drudge, I lived for those few brief moments when the work really meant something.”

  His face, it seemed to Ivan, was suddenly transformed by some memory of happiness. Or perhaps it was just the car. The car cornered like a dream.

  THE THING ABOUT BENNY

  M. Shayne Bell

  M. Shayne Bell first came to public attention in 1986, when he won first place in that year’s Writers of the Future contest. Since then he has published a number of well-liked stories in Asimov’s—including a Hugo Finalist, “Mrs Lincoln’s China”, and a loosely connect
ed series of stories about life in a future Africa—as well as appearing in Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Pulphouse, Starlight 2, Vanishing Acts and elsewhere, published a well-received first novel, Nicoji, and edited an anthology of stories by Utah writers, Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor. Bell has an M.A. degree in English from Brigham Young University, and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

  In the quiet little story that follows, he shows us how a small hope can bloom even on the edge of disaster… if you know how to look for it, that is.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen”, day 3.

  En route from the airport.

  BENNY SAID, APROPOS of nothing, “The bridge is the most important part of a song, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, me trying to drive in all that traffic and us late, as usual. “That’s all I think about when I’m hearing music—those important bridges.”

  “No, really.” Benny looked at me, earphones firmly covering his ears, eyes dark and kind of surprised. It was a weird look. Benny never has much to say, but when he does the company higher-ups told me I was supposed to take notice, try to figure out how he does what he does.

  The light turned green. I drove us onto North Temple, downtown Salt Lake not so far off now. “Bridges in songs have something to do with extinct plants?” I asked.

  “It’s all in the music,” he said, looking back at the street and sitting very, very still.

  “Messages about plants are in the music?” I asked.

  But he was gone, back in that trance he’d been in since LA. Besides, we were minutes from our first stop. He always gets so nervous just before we start work. “What if we find something?” he’d asked me once, and I’d said, “Isn’t that the point?”

  He started rubbing his sweaty hands up and down his pant legs. I could hear the tinny melody out of his earphones. It was “Dancing Queen” week. Benny’d set his player on endless repeat, and he listened to “Dancing Queen” over and over again on the plane, in the car, in the offices we went to, during meals, in bed with the earphones on his head. That’s all he’d listen to for one week. Then he’d change to a different Abba song on Sunday. When he’d gone through every Abba song ever recorded, he’d start over.

  “Check in,” Benny said.

  “What?”

  “The Marriott.”

  I slammed brakes, did a U-turn, did like he’d asked. That was my job, even if we were late. Benny had to use the toilet, and he would not use toilets in the offices we visited.

  I carried the bags up to our rooms—no bellhop needed, thank you. What’s a personal assistant for if not to lug your luggage around? I called Utah Power and Light to tell them we were still coming. Then I waited for Benny in the lobby. My mind kept playing “Dancing Queen” over and over. “It’s all in the music,” Benny’d said, but I failed to understand how anybody, Benny included, could find directions in fifty-year-old Abba songs to the whereabouts of plants extinct in the wild.

  Benny tapped me on the shoulder. “It’s close enough that we can walk,” he said. “Take these.”

  He handed me his briefcase and a stack of World Botanies pamphlets and motioned to the door. I always had to lead the way. Benny wouldn’t walk with me. He walked behind me, four or five steps back, Abba blasting in his ears. It was no use trying to get him to do differently. I gave the car keys to the hotel car people so they could park the rental, and off we went.

  Utah Power and Light was a first visit. We’d do a get-acquainted sweep of the cubicles and offices, then come back the next day for a detailed study. Oh sure, after Benny’d found the Rbapis excelsa in a technical writer’s cubicle in the Transamerica Pyramid, everybody with a plant in a pot had hoped to be the one with the cancer cure. But most African violets are just African violets. They aren’t going to cure anything. Still, the hopeful had driven college botany professors around the world nuts with their pots of begonias and canary ivy and sword ferns.

  But they were out there. Plants extinct in the wild had been kept alive in the oddest places, including cubicles in office buildings. Benny’d found more than his share. Even I take “Extract of Rhapis excelsa” treatment one week each year like everybody else. Who wants a heart attack? Who doesn’t feel better with his arteries unclogged? People used to go jogging just to feel that good.

  The people at UP&L were thrilled to see us—hey, Benny was their chance at millions. A lady from HR led us around office after cubicle after break room. Benny walked along behind the lady and me. It was Dieffenbachia maculata after Ficus benjamina after Cycus revoluta. Even I could tell nobody was getting rich here. But up on the sixth floor, I turned around and Benny wasn’t behind us. He was back staring at a Nemanthus gregarius on a bookshelf in a cubicle just inside the door.

  I walked up to him. “It’s just goldfish vine,” I said.

  The girl in the cubicle looked like she wanted to pick up her keyboard and kill me with it.

  “Benny,” I said, “we got a bunch more territory to cover. Let’s move it.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and followed along behind me, but after about five minutes he was gone again. We found him back at the Nemanthus gregarius. I took a second look at the plant. It looked like nothing more than Nemanthus gregarius to me. Polly, the girl in the cubicle, was doing a little dance in her chair in time to the muffled “Dancing Queen” out of Benny’s earphones. Mama mia, she felt like money, money, money.

  I made arrangements with HR for us to come back the next day and start our detailed study. The company CEO came down to shake our hands when we left. Last we saw of Polly that day was her watering the Nemanthus gregarius.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen”, day 3.

  Dinner.

  The thing about Benny is, he never moves around in time to the music. I mean, he can sit there listening to “Dancing Queen” over and over again and stare straight ahead, hands folded in his lap. He never moves his shoulders. He never taps his toes. He never sways his hips. Watching him, you’d think “Dancing Queen” was some Bach cantata.

  I ordered dinner for us in the hotel coffee shop. Benny always makes me order for him, but god forbid it’s not a medium-rare hamburger and fries. We sat there eating in silence, the only sound between us the muffled dancing queen having the time of her life. I thought maybe I’d try a little conversation. “Hamburger OK?” I asked.

  Benny nodded.

  “Want a refill on the Coke?”

  He picked up his glass and sucked up the last of the Coke, but shook his head no.

  I took a bite of my burger, chewed it, looked at Benny. “You got any goals?” I asked him.

  Benny looked at me then. He didn’t say a word. He stopped chewing and just stared.

  “I mean, what do you want to do with your life? You want a wife? Kids? A trip to the moon? We fly around together, city after city, studying all these plants, and I don’t think I even know you.”

  He swallowed and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I have goals,” he said.

  “Well, like what?”

  “I haven’t told anybody. I’ll need some time to think about it before I answer you. I’m not sure I want to tell anybody, no offence.”

  Jeez, Benny, take a chance on me why don’t you, I thought. We went back to eating our burgers. I knew the higher-ups would want me to follow the lead Benny had dropped when we were driving in from the airport, so I tried. “Tell me about bridges,” I said. “Why are they important in songs?”

  Benny wouldn’t say another word. We finished eating, and I carried Benny’s things up to his room for him. At the door he turned around and looked at me. “Bridges take you to a new place,” he said. “But they also show you the way back to where you once were.”

  He closed the door.

  I didn’t turn on any music in my room. It was nice to have it a little quiet for a change. I wrote my reports and e-mailed them off, then went out for a dr
ink. I nursed it along, wondering where we stood on the bridges.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen”, day 4.

  UP&L offices.

  World Botanies sends Benny only to companies that meet its criteria. First, they have to have occupied the same building for fifty years or more. You’d be surprised how few companies in America have done that. But if a company has moved around a lot, chances are its plants have not gone with it. Second, it’s nice if the company has had international ties, but even that isn’t necessary. Lots of people somehow failed to tell customs about the cuttings or the little packets of seeds in their pockets after vacations abroad. If a company’s employees had travelled around a lot, or if they had family ties with other countries, they sometimes ended up with the kind of plants we were looking for. UP&L has stayed put for a good long time, plus its employees include former Mormon missionaries who’ve poked around obscure corners of the planet. World Botanies hoped to find something in Utah.

  The UP&L CEO and the HR staff and Polly were all waiting for us. You’d think Benny’d want to go straight up to the sixth floor to settle the Nemanthus gregarius question, but he didn’t. Benny always starts on the first floor and works his way to the top, so we started on floor one.

  The lobby was a new install, and I was glad Benny didn’t waste even half an hour there. Not much hope of curing cancer with flame nettle or cantea palms. The cafeteria on the second floor had some interesting Cleistocactus strausii. Like all cactus, it’s endangered but not yet extinct in the wild—there are still reports of Cleistocactus strausii growing here and there in the tops of the Andes. As far as anybody can tell, it can’t cure a thing.

  We didn’t make it to the sixth floor till after four o’clock, and you could tell that Polly was a nervous wreck.

  But Benny walked right past her Nemanthus gregarius.