Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  "Yes, that silly little thing about a man in a rowboat. Vingt Ans . . . something like that. I’ve had my book scouts scouring the stalls and garrets for it since I-forget-when."

  "I had no idea you were looking for such a thing."

  "Oh, yes," she said. "I was looking for it. And I have found it too."

  "You have what?"

  The outer doors of their apartments slammed open, and the front room filled with voices. Somebody–it could only be Monsieur–was shouting at the top of his weak voice. Surplus was clearly trying to soothe him. The Dedicated Doctor was there as well, urging his client to calm himself.

  Darger leapt from the bed, and hastily threw on his clothes. "Wait here," he told Mignonette. Having some experience in matters of love, he deftly slipped between the doors without opening them wide enough to reveal her presence.

  He stepped into absolute chaos.

  Monsieur stood in the middle of the room waving a copy of an ancient pamphlet titled Vingt Ans dans un Bateau à Rames in the air. On its cover was a crude drawing of a man in a rowboat holding a magnet from a fishing pole. He shook it until it rattled. "Swindlers!" he cried. "Confidence tricksters! Deceivers! Oh, you foul creatures!"

  "Please, sir, consider your leucine aminopeptidases," the Dedicated Doctor murmured. He wiped the little man’s forehead with a medicated cloth. "You’ll put your inverse troponin ratio all out of balance. Please sit down again."

  "I am betrayed!"

  "Sir, consider your blood pressure."

  "The Tour d’Etranger was to be my immortality!" Monsieur howled. "What can such false cozeners as you know of immortality?"

  "I am certain there has been a misunderstanding," Surplus said.

  "Consider your fluoroimmunohistochemical systems. Consider your mitochondrial refresh rate."

  The two apes, released from their chair-carrying chore, were running in panicked circles. One of them brushed against a lamp and sent it crashing to the floor.

  It was exactly the sort of situation that Darger was best in. Thinking swiftly, he took two steps into the room and in an authoritative voice cried, "If you please!"

  Silence. Every eye was upon him.

  Smiling sternly, Darger said. "I will not ask for explanations. I think it is obvious to all of us what has happened. How Monsieur has come to misunderstand the import of the chapbook I cannot understand. But if, sir, you will be patient for the briefest moment, all will be made clear to you." He had the man! Monsieur was so perfectly confused (and anxious to be proved wrong, to boot) that he would accept anything Darger told him. Even the Dedicated Doctor was listening. Now he had but to invent some plausible story–for him a trifle–and the operation was on track again. "You see, there is–"

  Behind him, the doors opened quietly. He put a hand over his eyes.

  Mignonette d’Etranger entered the room, fully dressed, and carrying the chrome revolver. In her black silks, she was every inch the imperious widow. (Paradoxically, the fact that she obviously wore nothing beneath those silks only made her all the more imposing.) But she had thrown her veils back to reveal her face: cold, regal, and scornful.

  "You!" She advanced wrathfully on her husband. "How dare you object to my taking a lover? How dare you!"

  "You . . . you were . . ." The little man looked bewildered by her presence.

  "I couldn’t get what I need at home. It was only natural that I should look for it elsewhere. So it costs you a day of your life every time we make love! Aren’t I worth it? So it costs you three days to tie me up and whip me! So what? Most men would die for the privilege."

  She pressed the gun into his hands.

  "If I mean so little to you," she cried histrionically, "then kill me!" She darted back and struck a melodramatic pose alongside Darger. "I will die beside the man I love!"

  "Yes. . . ." Belated comprehension dawned upon Monsieur’s face, followed closely by a cruel smile. "The man you love."

  He pointed the pistol at Darger and pulled the trigger.

  But in that same instant, Mignonette flung herself before her lover, as if to shelter his body with her own. In the confines of so small a room, the gun’s report was world-shattering. She spun around, clutched her bosom, and collapsed in the bedroom doorway. Blood seeped onto the carpet from beneath her.

  Monsieur held up the gun and stared at it with an expression of total disbelief.

  It went off again.

  He collapsed dead upon the carpet.

  The police naturally suspected the worst. But a dispassionate exposition of events by the Dedicated Doctor, a creature compulsively incapable of lying, and an unobtrusive transfer of banknotes from Surplus allayed all suspicions. Monsieur d’Etranger’s death was obviously an accident d’amour, and Darger and Surplus but innocent bystanders. With heartfelt expressions of condolence, the officers left.

  When the morticians came to take away Monsieur’s body, the Dedicated Doctor smiled. "What a horrible little man he was!" he exclaimed. "You cannot imagine what a relief it is to no longer give a damn about his health." He had signed death warrants for both Monsieur and his widow, though his examination of her had been cursory at best. He hadn’t even touched the body.

  Darger roused himself from his depressed state to ask, "Will you be returning for Madame’s body?"

  "No," the Dedicated Doctor said. "She is a cat, and therefore the disposition of her corpse is a matter for the department of sanitation."

  Darger turned an ashen white. But Surplus deftly stepped beside him and seized the man’s wrists in his own powerful paws. "Consider how tenuous our position is here," he murmured. Then the door closed, and they were alone again. "Anyway–what body?"

  Darger whirled. Mignonette was gone.

  "Between the money I had to slip to les flics in order to get them to leave as quickly as they did," Surplus told his morose companion, "and the legitimate claims of our creditors, we are only slightly better-off than we were when we first arrived in Paris."

  This news roused Darger from his funk. "You have paid off our creditors? That is extremely good to hear. Wherever did you get that sort of money?"

  "Ci, Ca, and l’Autre. They wished to be bribed. So I let them buy shares in the salvage enterprise at a greatly reduced rate. You cannot imagine how grateful they were."

  It was evening, and the two associates were taking a last slow stroll along the luminous banks of the Seine. They were scheduled to depart the city within the hour via river-barge, and their emotions were decidedly mixed. No man leaves Paris entirely happily.

  They came to a stone bridge, and walked halfway across it. Below, they could see their barge awaiting them. Darger opened his Gladstone and took out the chrome pistol that had been so central in recent events. He placed it on the rail. "Talk," he said.

  The gun said nothing.

  He nudged it ever so slightly with one finger. "It would take but a flick of the wrist to send you to the bottom of the river. I don’t know if you’d rust, but I am certain you cannot swim."

  "All right, all right!" the pistol said. "How did you know?"

  "Monsieur had possession of an extremely rare chapbook that gave away our scheme. He can only have gotten it from one of Mignonette’s book scouts. Yet there was no way she could have known of its importance–unless she had somehow planted a spy in our midst. That first night, when she broke into our rooms, I heard voices. It is obvious now that she was talking with you."

  "You are a more intelligent man than you appear."

  "I’ll take that for a compliment. Now tell me–what was this ridiculous charade all about?"

  "How much do you know already?"

  "The first bullet you fired lodged in the back wall of the bedroom. It did not come anywhere near Mignonette. The blood that leaked from under her body was bull’s blood, released from a small leather bladder she left behind her. After the police departed, she unobtrusively slipped out the bedroom window. Doubtless she is a great distance away by now. I know all that occur
red. What I do not understand is why."

  "Very well. Monsieur was a vile old man. He did not deserve a beautiful creature like Mignonette."

  "On this we are as one. Go on."

  "But, as he had her made, he owned her. And as she was his property, he was free to do with her as he liked." Then, when Darger’s face darkened, "You misapprehend me, sir! I do not speak of sexual or sadomasochistic practices but of chattel slavery. Monsieur was, as I am sure you have noted for yourself, a possessive man. He had left instructions that upon his death, his house was to be set afire, with Mignonette within it."

  "Surely, this would not be legal!"

  "Read the law," the gun said. "Mignonette determined to find her way free. She won me over to her cause, and together we hatched the plan you have seen played to fruition."

  "Tell me one thing, Surplus said curiously. "You were programmed not to shoot your master. How then did you manage. . . ?

  "Iam many centuries old. Time enough to hack any amount of code."

  "Ah," said Surplus, in a voice that indicated he was unwilling to admit unfamiliarity with the gun’s terminology.

  "But why me?" Darger slammed a hand down on the stone rail. "Why did Madame d’Etranger act out her cruel drama with my assistance, rather than . . . than . . . with someone else’s?"

  "Because she is a cold-hearted bitch. Also, she found you attractive. For a whore such as she, that is justification enough for anything."

  Darger flushed with anger. "How dare you speak so of a lady?"

  "She abandoned me," the gun said bitterly. "I loved her, and she abandoned me. How else should I speak of her under such circumstances?"

  "Under such circumstances, a gentleman would not speak of her at all," Surplus said mildly. "Nevertheless, you have, as required, explained everything. So we shall honor our implicit promise by leaving you here to be found by the next passer-by. A valuable weapon such as yourself will surely find another patron with ease. A good life to you, sir."

  "Wait!"

  Surplus quirked an eyebrow. "What is it?" Darger asked.

  "Take me with you," the gun pleaded. "Do not leave me here to be picked up by some cutpurse or bourgeois lout. I am neither a criminal nor meant for a sedentary life. I am an adventurer, like yourselves! I can be of enormous aid to you, and an invaluable prop for your illicit schemes."

  Darger saw how Surplus’s ears perked up at this. Quickly, and in his coldest possible manner, he said, "We are not of the same social class, sir."

  Taking his friend’s arm, he turned away.

  Below, at the landing-stage, their barge awaited, hung with loops of fairy-lights. They descended and boarded. The hawsers were cast off, the engine fed an extra handful of sugar to wake it to life, and they motored silently down-river, while behind them the pistol’s frantic cries faded slowly in the warm Parisian night. It was not long before the City of Light was a luminous blur on the horizon, like the face of one’s beloved seen through tears.

  PAYING IT FORWARD

  Michael A. Burstein

  Legacies can take many forms. . . .

  I’m dying.

  No one knows it yet. Having never married, I have no family to mourn my passing. I do have my fans, who would probably turn out in droves to say farewell if I had chosen to let them know in advance. But in the twilight of my time, I want to face this final passage alone.

  Of course, I’m not completely alone. I still have my mentor, Carl Lambclear. I’ll email him tonight, and he’ll email me back, and just remembering how much he helped me will keep me going until the very end. We’ll exchange our latest story ideas, and share more turns of phrase that we both find appealing. Carl Lambclear is the one person I could open up to about my condition, and I’m glad that I did.

  It’s the ultimate irony, I suppose, that once more I find myself having something in common with Lambclear. He, too, is familiar with the emotional gamut that accompanies an inoperable brain tumor; after all, many years ago, he died of the same thing.

  It started long ago, at the beginning of the century. I think it’s almost impossible for anyone who didn’t live through it to fully appreciate the swinging moods that the world experienced. For the months before and after New Year’s Eve 2000, everyone all over the world seemed to harbor a quiet expectation that things would become new and different. The twenty-first century, a century of imagination and great wonders, was arriving, and optimism was the order of the day.

  Of course, most of us sobered up after the economy tanked and September 11 happened and the other events of the ohs came to pass. With each tragedy, small or large, it was as if a curtain had plummeted down over another hope that was now irrevocably gone.

  For me, the curtain came down when Carl Lambclear died.

  I was in my early twenties, a recent college graduate dealing with one of the worst economic downturns to follow a time of great economic growth. Despite a double honors degree in Chemistry and Physics, I couldn’t find a job, and I didn’t really know what I would do with one if I had one.

  Because what I really wanted to do was write science fiction.

  My parents had waited until their later years to have their only child; and, as an unfortunate consequence, they both died of old age while I was still in college. But fortunately, they had also left me enough of an estate to take care of myself during that difficult time. And that meant I had a chance to explore what I wanted to do with my life, rather than having to take the first job that came in my direction just to support myself.

  I had grown up reading the great works of science fiction, pressed upon me by my father. Although in his later years his tastes had turned to mystery novels, he still understood the ability of science fiction to unleash the imagination of a teenage outcast. And I had been so captivated by the works of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and all the rest, that I simply could not imagine doing anything else with my life but trying to bring that sense of the fantastic to others.

  And so I had been trying to establish myself as a writer of science fiction. I’d published a few stories in small markets while in college, but to no great acclaim. While pursuing my formal degrees, I had studied writing informally by reading book after book on technique, plot, character, setting, and whatever else seemed useful. But one book I had devoured above all others: Writing Short Science Fiction by Carl Lambclear.

  It wasn’t just that I enjoyed Lambclear’s novels. I also enjoyed his ability to teach, to explain how he created the worlds that he did in a way to make them fascinating. Lambclear had a lot of advice on how to draw the reader in, and the advice was just as fun to read as his fiction.

  On the day he died, I visited his webpage, and read about all the new books he was planning. It’s a strange phenomenon, I suppose, the dead leaving traces of themselves scattered around cyberspace as if they were still alive. Of course, I imagine people might have felt that way from the time the first person died who had a portrait painted. I remember reading mainstream mystery stories involving messages from beyond the grave, but not ghost stories and the like. There was nothing new about the idea of someone leaving a suicide note, or a clue to their murderer, but as technology progressed, the fictional and nonfictional deceased would leave answering machine messages, videotaped wills, and even emails set to go if a code word wasn’t entered into a computer on a daily basis.

  But for me, the spookiest of such messages from the dead were the webpages.

  A personal webpage–even a professional webpage, come to think of it–was a vivid statement in the ether, saying to one and all that this person exists. To visit a webpage knowing that the subject of it is dead is like talking to a ghost, and hearing about all the tasks that the dead one left undone.

  So, when I heard that Lambclear had died, it spurred me to visit his webpage. I had never done so before; odd, I suppose, given how much I liked his stuff, but it had honestly never occurred to me to do so.

  So I pointed my browser (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on an iMac, con
nected via a 56K internal modem, if anyone still remembers those things) at his webpage and waited for it to download. The long amount of time it took surprised me. Most writers maintained webpages that were light on the graphics and easy on the text, which made downloading them rather fast, even over a simple phone line. But Lambclear’s page displayed elaborate graphics, and so I sat at my desk, staring at my computer screen and sighing as I waited for the bytelock to clear.

  Finally, just when I thought my computer had frozen up completely, the browser bar filled all the way from the left to the right, indicating that the download was done. The picture on my screen made it evident why it had taken so long. Lambclear’s webpage displayed a simulation of the control panel of a spaceship, with digital displays and blinking lights. As I stared at it, dumbfounded, my speakers started playing beeps and whooshes to go along with the effect. Windows on the control panel flashed funny messages, warning of strange anomalies, asteroids, black holes, and wormholes, and requesting that I make course corrections so I wouldn’t hit anything.

  I smiled. Although I doubted that Lambclear had designed the graphics himself, they did fit his style quite well. Lambclear wrote a lot of hard science fiction set on spaceships, rollicking adventure stories set against a rock-solid background of real physics.

  Something else fit his style as well. The graphics were intense on the eyes, but they didn’t make the webpage confusing to navigate. When I moused over all the graphics, nothing happened. Lambclear had placed a list of links to the other pages on the site over on the left of his main page, away from the graphic of the spaceship control panel. And each link was a simple word, such as "Home," "News," "Biography," "Novels," and "Bibliography." The link right under "Home" was to a site map, so I knew that despite the fancy setup, he wanted his information to be as accessible as possible to any visitors.

  And on the bottom of the page sat a link that read, very simply, "Send me email."

  I stared at it for a long time with regret. I had never emailed Lambclear, and clearly he had been interested in receiving feedback from his fans. If only I had thought of it before, I could have emailed him, let him know how much his work meant to me, and how much I wanted to emulate him.