Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  Let them go. Gathering hoses,

  We pump water, wet the timbers

  In the rain.

  Or we roam

  Among the dead, drag them out

  From the burned hall. Here they lie

  On the wet ground, wives and children,

  Old men. Naomi stands

  Among the living, leans away,

  Turns her face. Thomas is there,

  Blood spilled,

  Body broken,

  With the others. Eirik lays him

  By the fire. Fridmund Bjarnsson

  Finds the gun, the Glock Nine

  Buried in mud, by the stream.

  “Here,” he says, holding it up.

  “I was scared the skraelings took it.

  Thank Jesus—”

  There by the fire,

  Eirik rebukes him. “Bullshit,” he says.

  “Close your mouth.” He climbs the porch,

  Raises his hands. Red are the doorposts,

  The frame behind him, hot with sparks.

  “God,” he repeats, “God be thanked.

  You know Johan, for Jesus’ sake,

  Took for his house

  Hallgrimskirkja,

  On the hill. He thought Jesus

  Could sustain him, could preserve him,

  Save his daughter—don’t you see?

  I also, Eirik the African,

  Sank my faith in something empty—

  Thomas’s gun, the Glock Nine,

  Chrome barreled,

  Bone grip.

  But look now. Neither Jesus

  Nor my Glock is good enough.

  The rich hide behind their walls

  In Hvolsvollur. Who comes to help?

  But I will hike to Hekla’s top,

  Hurl my gun, heave it down

  Into the steam,

  And the steel bullets

  After it. In the afternoon

  I’ll wreck this wall, winch it apart.

  Safety is good, grain in the fields,

  Green-house vegetables; vengeance is better.

  This I tell you: Time was,

  We were happy, here in Iceland.

  Cod in the sea,

  Snow on the mountain,

  Hot water in every house,

  Cash in our pockets, planes and cars,

  The world outside, waiting and close.

  Old men remember, mumble and mutter—

  That time’s gone, turned forever.

  The pools are drained, dams breached,

  Turbines wrecked,

  Ruined engines

  Starved for oil. The sea rises

  Beyond Selfoss. You have seen

  Thousands die, tens of thousands—

  The mind rebels, breaks or bends.

  Days ahead, the dim past,

  Forward, back ward, both the same,

  Wound together.

  At the world’s end,

  Jormungand, the great worm,

  Holds his tail between his jaws.

  Ragnarok rages around us

  Here, tonight, now, forever,

  Or long ago. Good friends,

  Remember it: men and skraelings

  Fought together

  Ages past.

  So—tomorrow we’ll march west

  To Keflavik. Jacobus waits.

  We’ll scour the coast, search for fighters,

  Heroes to help us, guide us home.

  Left behind, you’ll learn of us,

  Tell our legend, teach the truth

  Or invent it

  The old way.

  Parse our lines upon the page:

  Two beats, then pause.

  Two more. Thumping heart,

  Chopping axe, and again.

  Not like the skraelings, with their long lines

  Of clap-trap, closing rhymes—

  Not for us.

  No more.

  Johanna’s alive. How I know,

  I don’t know. Don’t ask.

  But I swear I’ll bring her here,

  Avenge this.” Then he’s silent,

  Standing near the spitting fire,

  Under Hekla, in the rain.

  Six Months, Three Days

  CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

  Charlie Jane Anders (charliejane.com) lives in San Francisco. Anders’s stories have appeared in The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, Strange Horizons, ZYZZYVA, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She’s an editor with io9.com, and the organizer of Writers With Drinks, a monthly San Francisco reading series that’s been going since 2001. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

  “Six Months, Three Days” was published by Tor.com, and this is perhaps its first appearance in print. It is a love story about two clairvoyants whose abilities are otherwise radically different. Doug and Judy both see the future, but Doug sees it as fixed and Judy as branching possibilities. Their relationship becomes a contest between visions of the future as determined or as indeterminate.

  The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.

  Judy is nervous but excited, keeps looking at things she’s spotted out of the corner of her eye. She’s wearing a floral Laura Ashley style dress with an Ankh necklace and her legs are rambunctious, her calves moving under the table. It’s distracting because Doug knows that in two and a half weeks, those cucumber-smooth ankles will be hooked on his shoulders, and that curly reddish-brown hair will spill everywhere onto her lemon-floral pillows; this image of their future coitus has been in Doug’s head for years, with varying degrees of clarity, and now it’s almost here. The knowledge makes Doug almost giggle at the wrong moment, but then it hits him: she’s seen this future too—or she may have, anyway.

  Doug has his sandy hair cut in a neat fringe that was almost fashionable a couple years ago. You might think he cuts his own hair, but Judy knows he doesn’t, because he’ll tell her otherwise in a few weeks. He’s much, much better looking than she thought he would be, and this comes as a huge relief. He has rude, pouty lips and an upper lip that darkens no matter how often he shaves it, with Elvis Costello glasses. And he’s almost a foot taller than her, six foot four. Now that Judy’s seen Doug for real, she’s re-imagining all the conversations they might be having in the coming weeks and months, all of the drama and all of the sweetness. The fact that Judy can be attracted to him, knowing everything that could lay ahead, consoles her tremendously.

  Judy is nattering about some Chinese novelist she’s been reading in translation, one of those cruel satirists from the days after the May Fourth Movement, from back when writers were so conflicted they had to rename themselves things like “Contra Diction.” Doug is just staring at her, not saying anything, until it creeps her out a little.

  “What?” Doug says at last, because Judy has stopped talking and they’re both just staring at each other.

  “You were staring at me,” Judy says.

  “I was …” Doug hesitates, then just comes out and says it. “I was savoring the moment. You know, you can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone.”

  “Well, I didn’t know the hour and the day when you and I would meet,” Judy puts a hand on his. “I saw many different hours and days. In one timeline, we would have met two years ago. In another, we’d meet a few months from now. There are plenty of timelines where we never meet at all.”

  Doug laughs, then waves a hand to show that he’s not laughing at her, although the gesture doesn’t really clarify whom or what he’s actually laughing at.

  Judy is drinking a cocktail called the Coalminer’s Daughter, made out of ten kinds of darkness. It overwhelms her senses with sugary pungency, and leaves her lips black for a moment. Doug is drinking a wheaty Pilsner from a t
apered glass, in gulps. After one of them, Doug cuts to the chase. “So this is the part where I ask. I mean, I know what happens next between you and me. But here’s where I ask what you think happens next.”

  “Well,” Judy says. “There are a million tracks, you know. It’s like raindrops falling into a cistern, they’re separate until they hit the surface, and then they become the past: all undifferentiated. But there are an awful lot of futures where you and I date for about six months.”

  “Six months and three days,” Doug says. “Not that I’ve counted or anything.”

  “And it ends badly.”

  “I break my leg.”

  “You break your leg ruining my bicycle. I like that bike. It’s a noble five-speed in a sea of fixies.”

  “So you agree with me.” Doug has been leaning forward, staring at Judy like a psycho again. He leans back so that the amber light spilling out of the Radish Saloon’s tiny lampshades turn him the same color as his beer. “You see the same future I do.” Like she’s passed some kind of test.

  “You didn’t know what I was going to say in advance?” Judy says.

  “It doesn’t work like that—not for me, anyway. Remembering the future is just like remembering the past. I don’t have perfect recall, I don’t hang on to every detail, the transition from short-term memory to long-term memory is not always graceful.”

  “I guess it’s like memory for me too,” Judy says.

  Doug feels an unfamiliar sensation, and he realizes after a while it’s comfort. He’s never felt this at home with another human being, especially after such a short time. Doug is accustomed to meeting people and knowing bits and pieces of their futures, from stuff he’ll learn later. Or if Doug meets you and doesn’t know anything about your future, that means he’ll never give a crap about you, at any point down the line. This makes for awkward social interactions, either way.

  They get another round of drinks. Doug gets the same beer again, Judy gets a red concoction called a Bloody Mutiny.

  “So there’s one thing I don’t get,” Doug says. “You believe you have a choice among futures—and I think you’re wrong, you’re seeing one true future and a bunch of false ones.”

  “You’re probably going to spend the next six months trying to convince yourself of that,” Judy says.

  “So why are you dating me at all, if you get to choose? You know how it’ll turn out. For that matter, why aren’t you rich and famous? Why not pick a future where you win the lottery, or become a star?”

  Doug works in tech support, in a poorly ventilated sub-basement of a tech company in Providence, RI, that he knows will go out of business in a couple years. He will work there until the company fails, choking on the fumes from old computers, and then be unemployed a few months.

  “Well,” Judy says. “It’s not really that simple. I mean, the next six months, assuming I don’t change my mind, they contain some of the happiest moments of my life, and I see it leading to some good things, later on. And you know, I’ve seen some tracks where I get rich, I become a public figure, and they never end well. I’ve got my eye on this one future, this one node way off in the distance, where I die aged 97, surrounded by lovers and grandchildren and cats. Whenever I have a big decision to make, I try to see the straightest path to that moment.”

  “So I’m a stepping stone,” Doug says, not at all bitterly. He’s somehow finished his second beer already, even though Judy’s barely made a dent in her Bloody Mutiny.

  “You’re maybe going to take this journey with me for a spell,” Judy says. “People aren’t stones.”

  And then Doug has to catch the last train back to Providence, and Judy has to bike home to Somerville. Marva, her roommate, has made popcorn and hot chocolate, and wants to know the whole story.

  “It was nice,” Judy says. “He was a lot cuter in person than I’d remembered, which is really nice. He’s tall.”

  “That’s it?” Marva said. “Oh come on, details. You finally meet the only other freaking clairvoyant on Earth, your future boyfriend, and all you have to say is, ‘He’s tall.’ Uh uh. You are going to spill like a fucking oil tanker, I will ply you with hot chocolate, I may resort to Jim Beam, even.”

  Marva’s “real” name is Martha, but she changed it years ago. She’s a grad student studying 18th century lit, and even Judy can’t help her decide whether to finish her PhD. She’s slightly chubby, with perfect crimson hair and clothing by Sanrio, Torrid, and Hot Topic. She is fond of calling herself “mallternative.”

  “I’m drunk enough already. I nearly fell off my bicycle a couple times,” Judy says.

  The living room is a pigsty, so they sit in Judy’s room, which isn’t much better. Judy hoards items she might need in one of the futures she’s witnessed, and they cover every surface. There’s a plastic replica of a Filipino fast food mascot, Jollibee, which she might give to this one girl Sukey in a couple of years, completing Sukey’s collection and making her a friend for life—or Judy and Sukey may never meet at all. A phalanx of stuffed animals crowds Judy and Marva on the big fluffy bed. The room smells like a sachet of whoop-ass (cardamom, cinnamon, lavender) that Judy opened up earlier.

  “He’s a really sweet guy.” Judy cannot stop talking in platitudes, which bothers her. “I mean, he’s really lost, but he manages to be brave. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to feel like you have no free will at all.”

  Marva doesn’t point out the obvious thing—that Judy only sees choices for herself, not anybody else. Suppose a guy named Rocky asks Marva out on a date, and Judy sees a future in which Marva complains, afterwards, that their date was the worst evening of her life. In that case, there are two futures: One in which Judy tells Marva what she sees, and one in which she doesn’t. Marva will go on the miserable date with Rocky, unless Judy tells her what she knows. (On the plus side, in fifteen months, Judy will drag Marva out to a party where she meets the love of her life. So there’s that.)

  “Doug’s right,” Marva says. “I mean, if you really have a choice about this, you shouldn’t go through with it. You know it’s going to be a disaster, in the end. You’re the one person on Earth who can avoid the pain, and you still go sticking fingers in the socket.”

  “Yeah, but …” Judy decides this will go a lot easier if there are marshmallows in the cocoa, and runs back to the kitchen alcove. “But going out with this guy leads to good things later on. And there’s a realization that I come to as a result of getting my heart broken. I come to understand something.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Judy finds the bag of marshmallows. They are stale. She decides cocoa will revitalize them, drags them back to her bedroom, along with a glass of water.

  “I have no idea, honestly. That’s the way with epiphanies: You can’t know in advance what they’ll be. Even me. I can see them coming, but I can’t understand something until I understand it.”

  “So you’re saying that the future that Doug believes is the only possible future just happens to be the best of all worlds. Is this some Leibniz shit? Does Dougie always automatically see the nicest future or something?”

  “I don’t think so.” Judy gets gummed up by popcorn, marshmallows and sticky cocoa, and coughs her lungs out. She swigs the glass of water she brought for just this moment. “I mean—” She coughs again, and downs the rest of the water. “I mean, in Doug’s version, he’s only 43 when he dies, and he’s pretty broken by then. His last few years are dreadful. He tells me all about it in a few weeks.”

  “Wow,” Marva says. “Damn. So are you going to try and save him? Is that what’s going on here?”

  “I honestly do not know. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Doug, meanwhile, is sitting on his militarily neat bed, with its single hospital-cornered blanket and pillow. His apartment is almost pathologically tidy. Doug stares at his one shelf of books and his handful of carefully chosen items that play a role in his future. He chews his thumb. For the first time in years, Doug desperately
wishes he had options.

  He almost grabs his phone, to call Judy and tell her to get the hell away from him, because he will collapse all of her branching pathways into a dark tunnel, once and for all. But he knows he won’t tell her that, and even if he did, she wouldn’t listen. He doesn’t love her, but he knows he will in a couple weeks, and it already hurts.

  “God damnit! Fucking god fucking damn it fuck!” Doug throws his favorite porcelain bust of Wonder Woman on the floor and it shatters. Wonder Woman’s head breaks into two jagged pieces, cleaving her magic tiara in half. This image, of the Amazon’s raggedly bisected head, has always been in Doug’s mind, whenever he’s looked at the intact bust.

  Doug sits a minute, dry-sobbing. Then he goes and gets his dustpan and brush.

  He phones Judy a few days later. “Hey, so do you want to hang out again on Friday?”

  “Sure,” Judy says. “I can come down to Providence this time. Where do you want to meet up?”

  “Surprise me,” says Doug.

  “You’re a funny man.”

  Judy will be the second long-term relationship of Doug’s life. His first was with Pamela, an artist he met in college, who made headless figurines of people who were recognizable from the neck down. (Headless Superman. Headless Captain Kirk. And yes, headless Wonder Woman, which Doug always found bitterly amusing for reasons he couldn’t explain.) They were together nearly five years, and Doug never told her his secret. Which meant a lot of pretending to be surprised at stuff. Doug is used to people thinking he’s kind of a weirdo.

  Doug and Judy meet for dinner at one of those mom-and-pop Portuguese places in East Providence, sharing grilled squid and seared cod, with fragrant rice, with a bottle of heady vinho verde. Then they walk Judy’s bike back across the river towards the kinda-sorta gay bar on Wickenden Street. “The thing I like about Providence,” says Doug, “is it’s one of the American cities that knows its best days are behind it. So it’s automatically decadent, and sort of European.”