Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  Her mother boarded a hired carriage, leaning on Mr. Wiechman’s hand. She held a parcel under her arm. Anna had never seen it before. It was flat and round and wrapped in newspaper. Anna thought it was a gift from Booth. It made her envious.

  Later at her mother’s trial, Anna would hear that the package had contained a set of field glasses. A man named Lloyd would testify that Mary Surratt had delivered them to him and had also given him instructions from Booth regarding guns. It was the single most damaging evidence against her. At her brother’s trial, Lloyd would recant everything but the field glasses. He was, he now said, too drunk at the time to remember what Mrs. Surratt had told him. He had never remembered. The prosecution had compelled his earlier testimony through threats. This revision would come two years after Mary Surratt had been hanged.

  Anna stood at the window a long time, pretending that Booth might return with just such a present for her.

  John Wilkes Booth passed George Atzerodt on the street at five p.m.. Booth was on horseback. He told Atzerodt he had changed his mind about the kidnapping. He now wanted the Vice President killed. At 10:15 or thereabouts. “I’ve learned that Johnson is a very brave man,” Atzerodt told him.

  “And you are not,” Booth agreed. “But you’re in too deep to back out now.” He rode away. Booth was carrying in his pocket a letter to the editor of The National Intelligencer. In it, he recounted the reasons for Lincoln’s death. He had signed his own name, but also that of George Atzerodt.

  The men who worked with Atzerodt once said he was a man you could insult and he would take no offense. It was the kindest thing they could think of to say. Three men from the Kirkwood bar appeared and took Atzerodt by the arms. “Let’s find another bar,” they suggested. “We have hours and hours yet before the night is over. Eat, drink. Be merry.”

  At six p.m. John Wilkes Booth gave the letter to John Matthews, an actor, asking him to deliver it the next day. “I’ll be out of town or I would deliver it myself,” he explained. A group of Confederate officers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue where John Wilkes Booth could see them. They were unaccompanied; they were turning themselves in. It was the submissiveness of it that struck Booth hardest. “A man can meet his fate or make it,” he told Matthews. “A man can rise to the occasion or fall beneath it.”

  At sunset, a man called Peanut John lit the big glass globe at the entrance to Ford’s Theatre. Inside, the presidential box had been decorated with borrowed flags and bunting. The door into the box had been forced some weeks ago in an unrelated incident and could no longer be locked.

  It was early evening when Mary Surratt returned home. Her financial affairs were still unsettled; Mr. Nothey had not even shown up at their meeting. She kissed her daughter. “If Mr. Nothey will not pay us what he owes,” she said, “I can’t think what we will do next. I can’t see a way ahead for us. Your brother must come home.” She went into the kitchen to oversee the preparations for dinner.

  Anna went in to help. Since the afternoon, since the moment Booth had not spoken to her, she had been overcome with unhappiness. It had not lessened a bit in the last hours; she now doubted it ever would. She cut the roast into slices. It bled beneath her knife and she thought of Henrietta Irving’s white skin and the red heart beating underneath. She could understand Henrietta Irving perfectly. All I crave is affection, she said to herself, and the honest truth of the sentiment softened her into tears. Perhaps she could survive the rest of her life, if she played it this way, scene by scene. She held the knife up, watching the blood slide down the blade, and this was dramatic and fit her Shakespearian mood.

  She felt a chill and when she turned around one of the new boarders was leaning against the doorjamb, watching her mother. “We’re not ready yet,” she told him crossly. He’d given her a start. He vanished back into the parlor.

  Once again, the new guests hardly ate. Louis Wiechman finished his food with many elegant compliments. His testimony in court would damage Mary Surratt almost as much as Lloyd’s. He would say that she seemed uneasy that night, unsettled, although none of the other boarders saw this. After dinner Mary Surratt went through the house, turning off the kerosene lights one by one.

  Anna took a glass of wine and went to sleep immediately. She dreamed deeply, but her heartbreak woke her again only an hour or so later. It stabbed at her lightly from the inside when she breathed. She could see John Wilkes Booth as clearly as if he were in the room with her. “I am the most famous man in America,” he said. He held out his hand, beckoned to her.

  Downstairs she heard the front door open and close. She rose and looked out the window, just as she had done that afternoon. Many people, far too many people were on the street. They were all walking in the same direction. One of them was George Atzerodt. Hours before he had abandoned his knife but he too would die, along with Mary Surratt. He had gone too far to back out. He walked with his hands over the shoulders of two dark-haired men. One of them looked up. He was of a race Anna had never seen before. The new boarders joined the crowd. Anna could see them when they passed out from under the porch overhang.

  Something big was happening. Something big enough to overwhelm her own hurt feelings. Anna dressed slowly and then quickly and more quickly. I live, she thought, in the most wondrous of times. Here was the proof. She was still unhappy, but she was also excited. She moved quietly past her mother’s door.

  The flow of people took her down several blocks. She was taking her last walk again, only backwards, like a ribbon uncoiling. She went past St. Patrick’s Church, down Eleventh Street. The crowd ended at Ford’s Theatre and thickened there. Anna was jostled. To her left, she recognized the woman from the carriage, the laughing woman, though she wasn’t laughing now. Someone stepped on Anna’s hoop skirt and she heard it snap. Someone struck her in the back of the head with an elbow. “Be quiet!” someone admonished someone else. “We’ll miss it.” Someone took hold of her arm. It was so crowded, she couldn’t even turn to see, but she heard the voice of Cassie Streichman.

  “I had tickets and everything,” Mrs. Streichman said angrily. “Do you believe that? I can’t even get to the door. It’s almost ten o’clock and I had tickets.”

  “Can my group please stay together?” a woman toward the front asked. “Let’s not lose anyone,” and then she spoke again in a language Anna did not know.

  “It didn’t seem a good show,” Anna said to Mrs. Streichman. “A comedy and not very funny.”

  Mrs. Streichman twisted into the space next to her. “That was just a rehearsal. The reviews are incredible. And you wouldn’t believe the waiting list. Years. Centuries! I’ll never have tickets again.” She took a deep, calming breath. “At least you’re here, dear. That’s something I couldn’t have expected. That makes it very real. And,” she pressed Anna’s arm, “if it helps in any way, you must tell yourself later there’s nothing you could have done to make it come out differently. Everything that will happen has already happened. It won’t be changed.”

  “Will I get what I want?” Anna asked her. She could not keep the brightness of hope from her voice. Clearly, she was part of something enormous. Something memorable. How many people could say that?

  “I don’t know what you want,” Mrs. Streichman answered. She had an uneasy look. “I didn’t get what I wanted,” she added. “Even though I had tickets. Good God! People getting what they want. That’s not the history of the world, is it?”

  “Will everyone please be quiet!” someone behind Anna said. “Those of us in the back can’t hear a thing.”

  Mrs. Streichman began to cry, which surprised Anna very much. “I’m such a sap,” Mrs. Streichman said apologetically. “Things really get to me.” She put her arm around Anna.

  “All I want,” Anna began, but a man to her right hushed her angrily.

  “Shut up!” he said. “As if we came all this way to listen to you.

  ITSY BITSY SPIDER

  James Patrick Kelly

  When I round out that my
rather was still alive after all these years and living at Strawberry Fields, I thought he'd gotten just what he deserved. Retroburbs are where the old, scared people go to hide. I'd always pictured the people in them as deranged losers. Visiting some fantasy world like the disneys or Carlucci's Carthage is one thing, moving to one is another. Sure, 2038 is messy, but it's a hell of a lot better than nineteen-sixty-whatever.

  Now that I'd arrived at 144 Bluejay Way, I realized that the place was worse than I had imagined. Strawberry Fields was pretending to be some long-lost suburb of the late twentieth century, except that it had the sterile monotony of cheap VR. It was clean, all right, and neat, but it was everywhere the same. And the scale was wrong. The lots were squeezed together and all the houses had shrunk—like the dreams of their owners. They were about the size of a one-car garage, modular units tarted up at the factory to look like ranches, with old double-hung storm windows and hardened siding of harvest gold, barn red, forest green. Of course, there were no real garages; faux Mustangs and VW buses cruised the quiet streets. Their carbrains were listening for a summons from Barbara Chesley next door at 142, or the Goltzes across the street, who might be headed to Penny Lanes to bowl a few frames, or the hospital to die.

  There was a beach chair with blue nylon webbing on the front stoop of 144 Bluejay Way. A brick walk led to it, dividing two patches of carpet moss, green as a dream. There were names and addresses printed in huge lightstick letters on all the doors in the neighborhood; no doubt many Strawberry Fielders were easily confused. The owner of this one was Peter Fancy. He had been born Peter Fanelli, but had legally taken his stage name not long after his first success as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1. I was a Fancy too; the name was one of the few things of my father's I had kept.

  I stopped at the door and let it look me over. "You're Jen," it said.

  "Yes." I waited in vain for it to open or to say something else. "I'd like to see Mr. Fancy, please." The old man's house had worse manners than he did. "He knows I'm coming," I said. "I sent him several messages." Which he had never answered, but I didn't mention that.

  "Just a minute," said the door. "She'll be right with you."

  She? The idea that he might be with another woman now hadn't occurred to me. I'd lost track of my father a long time ago—on purpose. The last time we'd actually visited overnight was when I was twenty. Mom gave me a ticket to Port Gemini, where he was doing the Shakespeare in Space program. The orbital was great, but staying with him was like being under water. I think I must have held my breath for the entire week. After that, there were a few, sporadic calls, a couple of awkward dinners—all at his instigation. Then twenty-three years of nothing.

  I never hated him, exactly. When he left, I just decided to show solidarity with Mom and be done with him. If acting was more important than his family, then to hell with Peter Fancy. Mom was horrified when I told her how I felt. She cried and claimed the divorce was as much her fault as his. It was too much for me to handle; I was only eleven years old when they separated. I needed to be on someone's side and so I had chosen her. She never did stop trying to talk me into finding him again, even though after a while it only made me mad at her. For the past few years, she'd been warning me that I'd developed a warped view of men.

  But she was a smart woman, my mom—a winner. Sure, she'd had troubles, but she'd founded three companies, was a millionaire by twenty-five. I missed her.

  A lock clicked and the door opened. Standing in the dim interior was a little girl in a gold-and-white checked dress. Her dark, curly hair was tied in a ribbon. She was wearing white ankle socks and black Mary Jane shoes that were so shiny they had to be plastic. There was a Band-Aid on her left knee.

  "Hello, Jen. I was hoping you'd really come." Her voice surprised me. It was resonant, impossibly mature. At first glance I'd guessed she was three, maybe four; I'm not much good at guessing kids' ages. Now I realized that this must be a bot—a made person.

  "You look just like I thought you would." She smiled, stood on tiptoe and raised a delicate little hand over her head. I had to bend to shake it. The hand was warm, slightly moist, and very realistic. She had to belong to Strawberry Fields; there was no way my father could afford a bot with skin this real.

  "Please come in." She waved on the lights. "We're so happy you're here." The door closed behind me.

  The playroom took up almost half of the little house. Against one wall was a miniature kitchen. Toy dishes were drying in a rack next to the sink; the pink refrigerator barely came up to my waist. The table was full-sized; it had two normal chairs and a booster chair. Opposite this was a bed with a ruffled Pumpkin Patty bedspread. About a dozen dolls and stuffed animals were arranged along the far edge of the mattress. I recognized most of them: Pooh, Mr. Moon, Baby Rollypolly, the Sleepums, Big Bird. And the wallpaper was familiar too: Oz figures like Toto and the Wizard and the Cowardly Lion on a field of Munchkin blue.

  "We had to make a few changes," said the bot. "Do you like it?"

  The room seemed to tilt then. I took a small, unsteady step and everything righted itself. My dolls, my wallpaper, the chest of drawers from Grandma Fanelli's cottage in Hyannis. I stared at the bot and recognized her for the first time.

  She was me.

  "What is this," I said, "some kind of sick joke?" I felt like I'd just been slapped in the face.

  "Is something wrong?" the bot said. "Tell me. Maybe we can fix it."

  I swiped at her and she danced out of reach. I don't know what I would have done if I had caught her. Maybe smashed her through the picture window onto the patch of front lawn or shaken her until pieces started falling off. But the bot wasn't responsible, my father was. Mom would never have defended him if she'd known about this. The old bastard. I couldn't believe it. Here I was, shuddering with anger, after years of feeling nothing for him.

  There was an interior door just beyond some shelves filled with old-fashioned paper books. I didn't take time to look as I went past, but I knew that Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne and L. Frank Baum would be on those shelves. The door had no knob.

  "Open up," I shouted. It ignored me, so I kicked it. "Hey!"

  "Jennifer." The bot tugged at the back of my jacket. "I must ask you..."

  "You can't have me!" I pressed my ear to the door. Silence. "I'm not this thing you made." I kicked it again. "You hear?"

  Suddenly an announcer was shouting in the next room. "... Into the post to Russell, who kicks it out to Havlicek all alone at the top of the key, he shoots... and Baylor with the strong rebound." The asshole was trying to drown me out.

  "If you don't come away from that door right now," said the bot, "I'm calling security."

  "What are they going to do?" I said. "I'm the long-lost daughter, here for a visit. And who the hell are you, anyway?"

  "I'm bonded to him, Jen. Your father is no longer competent to handle his own affairs. I'm his legal guardian."

  "Shit." I kicked the door one last time, but my heart wasn't in it. I shouldn't have been surprised that he had slipped over the edge. He was almost ninety.

  "If you want to sit and talk, I'd like that very much." The bot gestured toward a banana yellow beanbag chair. "Otherwise, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

  It was the shock of seeing the bot, I told myself—I'd reacted like a hurt little girl. But I was a grown woman and it was time to start behaving like one. I wasn't here to let Peter Fancy worm his way back into my feelings. I had come because of Mom.

  "Actually," I said, "I'm here on business." I opened my purse. "If you're running his life now, I guess this is for you." I passed her the envelope and settled back, tucking my legs beneath me. There is no way for an adult to sit gracefully in a beanbag chair.

  She slipped the check out. "It's from Mother." She paused, then corrected herself, "Her estate." She didn't seem surprised.

  "Yes."

  "It's too generous."

  "That's what I thought."

  "She must've taken care of you too?"


  "I'm fine." I wasn't about to discuss the terms of Mom's will with my father's toy daughter.

  "I would've liked to have known her," said the bot. She slid the check back into the envelope and set it aside. "I've spent a lot of time imagining Mother."

  I had to work hard not to snap at her. Sure, this bot had at least a human equivalent intelligence and would be a free citizen someday, assuming she didn't break down first.

  But she had a cognizor for a brain and a heart fabricated in a vat. How could she possibly imagine my mom, especially when all she had to go on was whatever lies he had told her?

  "So how bad is he?"

  She gave me a sad smile and shook her head. "Some days are better than others. He has no clue who President Huong is or about the quake, but he can still recite the dagger scene from Macbeth. I haven't told him that Mother died. He'd just forget it ten minutes later."

  "Does he know what you are?"

  "I am many things, Jen."

  "Including me."

  "You're a role I'm playing, not who I am." She stood. "Would you like some tea?"

  "Okay." I still wanted to know why Mom had left my father four hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars in her will. If he couldn't tell me, maybe the bot could.

  She went to her kitchen, opened a cupboard, and took out a regular-sized cup. It looked like a bucket in her little hand. "I don't suppose you still drink Constant Comment?"

  His favorite. I had long since switched to rafallo. "That's fine." I remembered that when I was a kid my father used to brew cups for the two of us from the same bag because Constant Comment was so expensive. "I thought they went out of business long ago."

  "I mix my own. I'd be interested to hear how accurate you think the recipe is."