Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  “So, how exactly do you go about uninventing things?” I asked.

  “It’s hard,” he admitted. “It’s all about unpicking probability threads from the fabric of creation. But they tend to be long and tangled, like spaghetti. So it’s rather like having to unpick a strand of spaghetti from a haystack.”

  “Sounds like thirsty work,” said Michael, and I signalled him to pour me another pint of Old Bodger.

  “Fiddly,” said the little man. “Yes. But I pride myself on doing good. Each day I wake, and, even if I’ve unhappened something that might have been wonderful, I think, Obediah Polkington, the world is a happier place because of something that you’ve uninvented.”

  He looked into his remaining scotch, swirled the liquid around in his glass.

  “The trouble is,” he said, “with the Wispamuzak gone, that’s it. I’m done. It’s all been uninvented. There are no more horizons left to undiscover, no more mountains left to unclimb.”

  “Nuclear Power?” suggested ‘Tweet’ Peston.

  “Before my time,” said Obediah. “Can’t uninvent things invented before I was born. Otherwise I might uninvent something that would have led to my birth, and then where would we be?” Nobody had any suggestions. “Knee-high in jet-packs and flying cars, that’s where,” he told us. “Not to mention Morrison’s Martian Emolument.” For a moment, he looked quite grim. “Ooh. That stuff was nasty. And a cure for cancer. But frankly, given what it did to the oceans, I’d rather have the cancer.

  “No. I have uninvented everything that was on my list. I shall go home,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, bravely, “and weep, like Alexander, because there are no more worlds to unconquer. What is there left to uninvent?”

  There was silence in the Fountain.

  In the silence, Brian’s iPhone rang. His ring-tone was The Rutles singing ‘Cheese and Onions’. “Yeah?” he said. Then, “I’ll call you back.”

  It is unfortunate that the pulling out of one phone can have such an effect on other people around. Sometimes I think it’s because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull out our phones together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we’re easily bored.

  Whatever the reason, the phones came out.

  Crown Baker took a photo of us all, and then Twitpicced it. Jocelyn started to read her text messages. Tweet Peston tweeted that he was in the Fountain and had met his first uninventor. Professor Mackintosh checked the Test Match scores, told us what they were and emailed his brother in Inverness to grumble about them. The phones were out and the conversation was over.

  “What’s that?” asked Obediah Polkinghorn.

  “It’s the iPhone 5,” said Ray Arnold, holding his up. “Crown’s using the Nexus X. That’s the Android system. Phones. Internet. Camera. Music. But it’s the apps. I mean, do you know, there are over a thousand fart sound-effect apps on the iPhone alone? You want to hear the unofficial Simpsons Fart App?”

  “No,” said Obediah. “I most definitely do not want to. I do not.” He put down his drink, unfinished. Pulled his tie up. Did up his coat. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said, as if to himself. “But, for the good of all …” And then he stopped. And he grinned. “It’s been marvellous talking to you all,” he announced to nobody in particular as he left the Fountain.

  The Middle of Somewhere

  JUDITH MOFFETT

  Judith Moffett (www.judithmoffett.com) lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She is an English professor (retired), a poet, a Swedish translator, a science-fiction writer, and the author of eleven books in five genres. Two of her novels were New York Times Notable Books. Her most recent novel is The Bird Shaman (2008), the third in her Holy Ground Trilogy, after The Ragged World (1991) and Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream (1992). She spent most of 2010 and half of 2011 writing a memoir of her long friendship with the poet James Merrill, who died in 1995. In 2013 Greywolf Press will bring out Air Mail, the correspondence between American poet Robert Bly and the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year; Moffett translated Tranströmer’s early letters to Bly for that book. This is her first short fiction in several years.

  “The Middle of Somewhere” was published in Welcome to the Greenhouse, an excellent anthology of stories about climate change, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. A teenaged girl helps a seventy-year old woman collect data on bird hatching, that demonstrates the veracity of climate change. It is very clearly within the framework of science fiction, very science oriented, and also a revelation of character.

  Kaylee is entering data on Jane’s clunky old desktop computer, and texting with a few friends while she does it, when the weather alarm goes off for the second time.

  Cornell University’s NestWatch Citizen Scientist program runs this website where you have a different chart for each nest site you’re monitoring. You’re supposed to fill in the data after each visit to the site. Jane’s got a zillion different kinds of birds nesting on her property, and she knows where a lot of them are doing it, so Kaylee’s biology teacher fixed it up with Jane, who’s a friend of hers, for Kaylee to do this NestWatch project for class. Twice a week all spring she’s been coming out to Jane’s place to monitor seven pairs of nesting birds. The place used to be a farm but is all grown up now in trees and bushes except for five or ten acres around the house, which Jane keeps mowed. Bluebirds like short grass and open space.

  Jane is nice, but seriously weird. All Kaylee’s friends think so, and to be honest Kaylee kind of slants what she tells people to exaggerate that side of Jane, who lives a lot like people did way before Kaylee was born, in this little log house with only three small rooms and no dishwasher or clothes dryer, and solar panels on the roof. She has beehives—well, that’s not so weird, though for an old lady maybe it is—but all her water is pumped from a cistern, plus she has two rain barrels out in the garden. Rain barrels! Kaylee knows for a fact that a few years back, when they brought city water out this far from town, Jane just said, Oh well, I can always hook up later if I think I need to. So you have to watch every drop of water you use at Jane’s house, like only flushing the toilet every so often, unless they’re getting plenty of rain. There’s a little sign taped to the bathroom wall that you can’t avoid reading when you’re sitting on the toilet: IF IT’S YELLOW / LET IT MELLOW / IF IT’S BROWN / FLUSH IT DOWN. Sometimes Kaylee flushes it down even when it isn’t brown, out of embarrassment.

  The flushing thing is partly about water and partly about the septic tank. Kaylee’s friend Morgan’s house has a septic tank too, so Kaylee already knows it’s best to use them as little as possible, and that there are things you can’t put into them or the biology of the tank will get messed up and smell. If you happen to mention anything to Jane about, like, your new SmartBerry, or a hot music group or even the Anderson High basketball team, the Bearcats, when they went to the state finals, she just looks blank, but once when Kaylee asked a simple question about why Jane didn’t clean paintbrushes at the sink, like her dad always did, Jane talked animatedly for ten minutes about bacteria and “solids” and drain fields and septic lagoons. Kaylee’s friends laughed their heads off when they heard about that (“So she’s going on about how the soil in Anderson County is like pure clay, duh, so it doesn’t pass the ‘perk test,’ which is why she’s got this lagoon, and I’m thinking ‘Fine, great, whatever!’ and trying to like edge away …”). Kaylee’s seen the little outhouse in the trees on the other side of the driveway, across from the clothesline (clothesline!), for dry spells when flushing even a few times a day would use more water than Jane wants to waste. That would normally be in late summer. Kaylee’s relieved it’s spring right now.

  The computer Kaylee has to use for data entry here is a million years old and slow as anything. She couldn’t believe it when Jane said one day that when and if DSL finally made it this far into rural Kentucky, she planned to sign up.

  But the thing that makes all that beside the
point for now, is that Jane has been monitoring certain species of birds here for years and years, and knows just about everything there is to know about them. Anything she doesn’t know, she looks up in books, or on the Birds of North America website, and then she knows that too.

  On the Garden Box page Kaylee fills in blanks. Species: Tree swallow. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 0. Number of live young: 6. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status: Completed nest. Adult activity: Feeding young at nest. (Both parents dive-bombed Kaylee today for the entire ninety seconds she had the front of the nest box swung open, swooping down like fighter pilots, aiming for her eyes, pulling up just before they would have hit her head [she happened to have forgotten her hat]. When she was done they chased her all the way back to the house. Tree swallows are beautiful, sleekly graceful little birds, white and glossy dark blue, but Kaylee is so not crazy about the dive-bombing part.) Young status: Naked young. (The babies—“hatchlings” she should remember to say—hatched out only two days ago, and resemble squirming wads of pink bubble gum with huge dark eyeballs bulging under transparent lids still sealed shut, and little stumpy wings.) Management: No. Everything’s fine. Comment: Leave blank. The only thing not ordinary about this nest is how early it is, the earliest first-egg date for tree swallows ever recorded on Jane’s farm. Everybody on NestWatch is posting early nesting dates. Climate change, is the general assumption. Kaylee’s parents think climate change is a hoax. Kaylee doesn’t care whether it is or not, but saying so makes her project feel more dramatic, like, more cutting-edge. Submit.

  Next site: Barn. Species: Black vulture. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 2. Number of live young: 0. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status—and right then Jane’s NOAA Weather Radio emits its long piercing shriek.

  Jane comes in off the porch, where she’s been putting Revolution on the dogs to kill the ticks they pick up in the hay that grows wherever there aren’t any trees or blackberries. “What now? They only announced the watch twenty minutes ago.” The shrieking goes on and on, you can’t hear yourself think. Finally it stops and the radio buzzes three times, and then a robot voice declares, The National Weather Service in Louisville has issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the following counties in Kentucky: Anderson, Franklin, Henry, Nelson, Mercer, Scott, Shelby, Spencer … Kaylee stops listening and goes back to her data entering and her texting. Nest status: No constructed nest. Adult activity: At/on, then flushed from nest. (When Kaylee squeezed through the crack between the barn doors an hour ago, the mother vulture, as always, got up and hesitantly stalked, like a huge black chicken, away from her two gigantic eggs lying on the bare dirt floor. The father didn’t show up this afternoon, which suits Kaylee just fine. Jane says he’s all bluster, but he threatens her as if he means it, hissing and spreading his enormous white-tipped black wings like an eagle on a banner, and she’s scared of him. Scared he’ll barf on her, too; they do that, to drive predators away.)

  “I’m going out to the garden,” Jane says now. She’s wearing her big straw hat, so she’ll be safe from dive-bombing tree swallows. “If you hear thunder, get off the computer fast, okay?”

  “Okay.” Though right now the sky through the study window looks just flat gray, not stormy at all. Young status: (Leave that blank. The eggs should be hatching in ten days or so. Jane’s hoping for two live babies this time. Most often one of the eggs is infertile.) Number of dead young: 0. And so on. Submit.

  She’s worked her way through Patio (eastern phoebe) and Pond Box (chickadee) while keeping up on Lady Bearcats practice with Morgan, and Macy’s cat’s hairball with Macy, who’s at the vet’s, and checking Facebook every few minutes, and is just starting on Path Box (bluebird, her favorite) when the radio emits its blood-curdling screech once again. Jane is still in the garden. When the robot comes on again, Kaylee is the only one in the house to hear it say, The National Weather Service in Louisville has issued a tornado warning for the following counties in Kentucky: Anderson, Franklin, Grant, Marion, Owen, and Washington until 6:30 pm. The National Weather Service has identified rotation in a storm located fifteen miles southwest of Lebanon and heading north-northeast at 40 mph. Cities in the path of this storm include Lebanon; Springfield; Harrodsburg; Lawrenceburg; Alton … Kaylee shoves back her chair, grabbing her SmartBerry, and runs to the door. “Jane! Hey Jane!” she yells. “They just said it’s a tornado warning!” Behind her the robot says sternly This is a dangerous storm. If you are in the path of this storm, take shelter immediately. Go to the lowest level of a sturdy building … “They said take shelter immediately!” she shouts.

  Jane drops her shovel and starts trotting toward the house, calling “Fleece and Roscoe! Come!” She doesn’t trot too fast, she’s got arthritis in her knees like Kaylee’s grandma, but Jane is much, much thinner than Mammaw; think of Mammaw trotting anywhere! The dogs race up the steps onto the deck, followed by Jane holding on to the handrail. “Are you sure they said warning?” she puffs. “I wouldn’t have thought it looked that threatening,” and just then they hear the heavy rumble of thunder. Fleece, the white poodle, trembles violently and slinks through the doggy door into the house; she hates thunderstorms. The sky is starting to churn. As the rest of them come in, the radio is repeating its announcement, including the part about taking shelter immediately. Jane says, “Well that blew up out of nowhere! Okay, I guess we get to go sit in the basement for a while. Did you turn off the computer?” Kaylee shakes her head. “Get your data submitted?”

  She nods. “Almost all of it.”

  “Good. Go on down, I’ll be there in a sec.”

  Kaylee snatches up her backpack and runs down the basement stairs, then isn’t sure what to do. Jane’s house is set into a slope, so half the basement is underground and the other half isn’t; you can walk straight out the patio doors, climb a ladder kept out there for the purpose, and check on the phoebe’s nest perched like a pillbox hat on the light fixture. It’s pretty crowded down here; the basement is the size of the house, tiny, and piled with boxes containing mostly books. But now Jane’s hurrying down with Roscoe the beagle behind her, leading the way into what looks like a closet under the stairs, but turns out to be a kind of wedge-shaped storm shelter. Fleece is already in there, lying on a mat and panting. Roscoe flops down beside Fleece; they must be used to this drill. There’s a folding canvas chair in the shelter too. Jane says, “I guess you’ll have to squeeze in with the dogs. Or maybe just sit here on the mat next to them. I have to take the chair or in five minutes my back will be screaming worse than the radio.” Which, Kaylee sees, she’s brought down with her, and which she now switches back on.

  But the robot voice is only repeating what it said already. Jane turns down the volume. Kaylee sits cross-legged on the edge of the mat and consults her SmartBerry.

  When she first started working on the nesting project with Jane, she’d kept the SmartBerry in her jacket pocket or in her hand all the time; but when Jane noticed, she’d made her put it away. “You can’t do science like that, hon, texting seven of your friends while checking out a nest. Good observation requires all your attention, not just some of it.” Kaylee doesn’t see why; she’s always doing half a dozen things at once, everybody does. It’s actually hard to do only one thing. She tried to argue that she could record the data directly onto the NestWatch site from her SmartBerry, skipping the note-taking and data entry phases completely, and take pictures. But Jane doesn’t trust her not to spend the travel time between nest sites chatting, instead of listening and looking around, which is smart of Jane, Kaylee grudgingly admits. They’ve compromised: she can use her smartphone during data entry time, but not while actually monitoring nests. It makes Kaylee feel twitchy, all that time hiking between sites and trying to identify bird songs, not knowing what’s going on everywhere else.

  Now she says, “I should probably call my mom so she doesn’t worry.”

  “Good idea.”

  No
body answers at home. Kaylee’s brother Tyler always drops her off at Jane’s on his way to work his shift, so he’s at work, and her dad picks her up on his way home, but her mom must be out. When the answering machine comes on, Kaylee says, “Mom, did the siren go off? There’s a tornado warning, I hope you’re someplace safe. I’m down in Jane’s basement till it’s over, so don’t worry. See you later.” Then she rapidly texts safe in basement @ janes dont worry and sends that to her mom and dad, then sends im in janes basement where r u? to all her best friends at once, Hannah, Tabby, Andrew, Shannon, Jacob, Morgan, Macy, and waits for somebody to text back. It takes her mind off being scared, not that she’s all that scared really. There are tornado watches and a few warnings every spring—more and more of them in the last few years—her mom is always complaining, but they’ve never actually come to anything around Lawrenceburg, though she’s seen the TV shots of other places, even in Kentucky, where whole houses got turned into piles of rubble in a few seconds. The worst watches are the night ones, when you can’t see what the sky looks like.

  While she waits—in the circumstances Jane can hardly object—she gets on Facebook and posts, “I’m in a tornado warning in Jane’s basement!”

  She’s reading Tabby’s text—me + my mom + the twins r in the city hall shelter—when Jane puts her hand on Kaylee’s arm. “Listen. Do you hear that—like a freight train?” Something does sound like a freight train, getting louder and louder. She feels a thrill of serious fear, which spikes into panic when Jane says urgently, “Better get down low.”

  At that instant three more buzzing beeps interrupt the droning radio robot. A tornado has been sighted on the ground near Glensboro, heading north-northeast at forty miles per hour. If you are in the path of this storm, move to the lowest level of a building or interior room and protect yourself from flying glass. Kaylee and Jane look at each other; Glensboro is only a couple of miles west of here. If it stays organized this tornado should pass near Lawrenceburg at 5:45 pm, near Birdie at 5:50 pm, near Alton at 6 o’clock pm, and near Frankfort at 6:15 pm, the flat voice states.