The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

“Stop, stop, stop!”

  Parties were being held all over town in honor of the officers and crew of the Empire, and the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic. There were nearly a thousand crewmen all told, which was far too many to be feted within a single building. Mary and I were bound for a lesser gathering at the Library Company, presided over by a minor Biddle and catered by Julius Nash and his crew of colored waiters.

  We were within sight of our destination when I looked up and saw my future.

  Looming above the Walnut Street Prison yard, tethered by a hundred lines, was the Empire, barely visible through the gray sheets of rain. It dwarfed the buildings beneath. Gusts of wind tugged and shoved at the colorless balloons, so that they moved slightly, darkness within darkness, like an uneasy dream shifting within a sleeper’s mind.

  I gaped, and stepped in a puddle so deep the water went over my boot. Stumbling, I crashed to one knee. Mary shrieked.

  Then I was up and hobbling-running again, as fast I could. My trousers were soaked with ice-cold water, and my knee blazed with pain, but at least the pot was untouched.

  It was no easy life, being the eldest son in a family dependent upon a failing boardinghouse. Constant labor was my lot. Not that I minded labor—work was the common lot of everyone along the docks, and cheerily enough submitted to. It was the closing of prospects that clenched my soul like an iron fist.

  In those days I wanted to fly to the Sun and build a palace on the Moon. I wanted to tunnel to the dark heart of the Earth and discover rubies and emeralds as large as my father’s hotel. I wanted to stride across the land in seven-league boots, devise a submersible boat and with it discover a mermaid nation under the sea, climb mountains in Africa and find leopards at their snowy peaks, descend Icelandic volcanos to fight fire-monsters and giant lizards, be marked down in the history books as the first man to stand naked at the North Pole. Rumors that the Empire would be signing replacements for those airmen who had died during the flight from London ate at my soul like a canker.

  Father Tourneaux had had great hopes that I might one day be called to the priesthood, preferably as a Jesuit, and when I was younger my mother had encouraged this ambition in me with tales of martyrdom by Iroquois torture and the unimaginable splendors of the Vatican state. But, like so much else, that dream had died a slow death with the dwindling and wasting away of my father.

  In prosperous times, a port city offered work enough and opportunity in plenty for any ambitious young man. But Philadelphia had not yet recovered from the blockades of the recent war. The posting my brother-in-law had as good as promised me had vanished along with two ships of his nascent fleet, sacrificed to the avarice of British power. The tantalizing possibility that there might be money found to send me to the University of Paris to study mathematics had turned to pebbles and mist as well. My prospects were nonexistent.

  Mary grabbed my arm and dragged me around. “Will—you’re dreaming again! You’ve walked right past the doorway.”

  Tacey Nash saw us come in. Eyes round with outrage, she directed at me a glare that would have stunned a starling, had one been unlucky enough to fly through its beam. “Where have you been?”

  I set the pot down on a table, and proceeded to unwrap layers of newspapers and old blanket scraps from its circumference. “Mother insisted that—”

  “Don’t talk back.” She lifted the lid and with it wafted the steam from the stewed oysters toward her nostrils. They flared as the scent of ginger reached them. “Ah.” Briefly her face softened. “Your mother still knows how to cook.”

  One of the waiters placed the pot over a warming stove. Mary briskly tied on an apron—with Patricia married and out of the house, she’d assumed the role of the practical sister and, lacking Patty’s organizational genius, tried to compensate with energy—and with a long spoon gave the pot a good stir. Another waiter brought up tureens, and she began filling them.

  “Well?” Tacey said to me. “Are you so helpless that you cannot find any work to do?”

  So the stew had come in time, after all! Relieved, I glanced over my shoulder and favored my sister with a grin. She smiled back at me, and for one warm instant, all was well.

  “Where shall I start?” I asked.

  Why was I so unhappy in those days? There was a girl and I had loved her in my way, and thought she loved me, too. One of us tired of the other, and so we quarreled and separated, to the eternal misery of both. Or so I assume—I retain not a jot of this hypothetical affair, but considering my age, it seems inevitable. Yet it was not a romantic malaise I suffered from, but a disease more all-encompassing.

  I was miserable with something far worse than love.

  I had a hunger within me for something I could neither define nor delimit. And yet at the same time I suffered the queasy fullness of a man who has been at the table one hour too many. I felt as if I had swallowed several live cats which were now proceeding to fight a slow, sick, unending war within me. If I could, I would have vomited up everything—cats, girl, wharves, boardinghouse, city, world, my entire history to date—and only felt the better for being rid of them. Every step I took seemed subtly offbalance. Every word I said sounded exactly wrong. Everything about me—my soul, mind, thought, and physical being—was in my estimation thoroughly detestable.

  I had no idea then what was wrong with me.

  Now I know that I was simply young.

  I suppose I should describe that makeshift kitchen, set up within the Loganian Annex of the Library. The warming pans steaming. The elegant black men with their spotless white gloves bustling out with tureens of stew and returning with bowls newly emptied of punch. How, for the body of the meal, the waiters stood behind the airmen (who, though dressed in their finest, were still a raffish lot), refilling their plates and goblets, to the intense embarrassment of everyone save the officers, who were of course accustomed to such service, and how Julius himself stood by the dignitaries’ table, presiding over all, with here a quiet signal to top up an alderman’s glass and there a solemn pleasantry as he spooned cramberries onto the plate of the ranking officer.

  Yet that is mere conjecture. What I retain of that dinner is, first, the order of service and, second, the extraordinary speech that was made at its conclusion, most of which I missed from being involved in a conversation of my own, and its even more extraordinary aftermath. No more. The kitchen, for all of me, may as well not have existed at all.

  The menu was as follows:

  To begin, fish-house punch, drunk with much merriment.

  Then, oyster stew, my mother’s, eaten to take the edge off of appetites and quickly cleared away.

  Finally, the dinner itself, in two courses, the first of which was:

  roasted turkey stuffed with bread, suet, eggs, sweet herbs

  tongue pie made with apples and raisins

  chicken smothered in oysters with parsley sauce served with boiled onions

  cramberries

  mangoes

  pickled beans

  celery

  pickled beets

  conserve of rose petals

  braised lambs’ quarters

  red quince preserves

  Followed by the second course of:

  trout poached in white wine and vinegar

  stew pie made of veal

  alamode round of beef, corned and stuffed with beef, pork, bread, butter, salt, pepper, savory, and cayenne; braised, served with French beans

  parsnips

  purple spotted lettuce and salat herbs

  pickled cucumbers

  spinach

  roasted potatoes

  summer pears

  white, yellow, and red quince preserves

  Finally, after the table had been cleared and deserted:

  soft gingerbread

  Indian pudding

  pumpkin pie

  cookies, both almond and cinnamon

  Each course of which was, in the manner of the times, served up all at once in a multitude of d
ishes, so as to fill the tables completely and impress the diners with an overwhelming sense of opulence and plenty. Many a hungry time in my later adventures I would talk myself to sleep by repeating each dish several times over in my mind, recollecting its individual flavor, and imagining myself so thoroughly fed that I turned dishes away untasted.

  Thus do we waste our time and fill our minds with trivialities, while all the time the great world is falling rapidly into the past, carrying our loved ones and all we most value away from us at the rate of sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour, eight thousand, seven hundred sixty-six hours per year!

  So much for the food. Let me now describe the speech.

  The connection between the Loganian and the main library was through a wide upper-level archway with stairs descending to the floor on either side of the librarian’s desk. It was a striking, if inefficient, arrangement, which coincidentally allowed us to easily spy upon the proceedings below.

  When the final sweets and savories had been placed upon the tables, the waiters processed up the twin stairs, and passed through the Loganian to a small adjacent room for a quiet meal of leftovers. I went to the archway to draw the curtain shut, and stayed within its shadows, looking down upon the scene.

  The tables were laid so that they filled the free space on the floor below, with two shoved together on the eastern side of the room for the officers and such city dignitaries—selectmen and flour merchants, mostly—who could not aspire to the celebration in Carpenter’s Hall. All was motion and animation. I chanced to see one ruffian reach out to remove a volume from the shelves and, seeing a steelpoint engraving he admired, slide the book under the table, rip the page free, and place it, folded, within the confines of his jacket. Yet that was but one moment in such a menagerie of incident as would have challenged the hand of a Hogarth to record.

  Somebody stood—Biddle, I presume—and struck an oratorical stance. From my angle, I could see only his back. Forks struck goblets for silence, so that the room was briefly filled with the song of dozens of glass crickets.

  The curtains stirred, and Socrates joined me, plate in hand and gloves stuffed neatly into his sash. “Have I missed anything?” he whispered.

  I knew Socrates only slightly, as one who was in normal conditions the perfect opposite of his master, Julius: the most garrulous of men, a fellow of strange fancies and sudden laughter. But he looked sober enough now. I shook my head, and we both directed our attention downward.

  “ … the late unpleasantness between our two great nations,” the speaker was saying. “With its resolution, let the admiration the American people have always held for our British kindred resume again its rightful place in the hearts of us all.”

  Now the curtains stirred a second time, and Tacey appeared. Her countenance was as stormy as ever. Quietly, she said, “What is this nonsense Mary tells me about you going up Wissahickon to work in a mill?”

  There was an odd stirring among the airmen, a puzzled exchange of glances.

  Turning away from the speaker, I said, “I intended to say good-bye to you before I left.”

  “You’ve been intending to say good-bye to me since the day we met. So you do mean it, then?”

  “I’m serious,” I admitted.

  Those dark, alert eyes flicked my way, and then back. “Oh, yes, you would do well in the mills—I don’t think.”

  “Tacey, I have little choice. There is no work to be had on the wharves. If I stay at home, I burden Mother with the expense of my upkeep, and yet my utmost labor cannot increase her income by a single boarder. She’ll be better off with my room empty and put out to let.”

  “Will Keely, you are a fool. What future can there be for you performing manual labor in a factory? There are no promotions. The mill owners all have five sons apiece—if a position of authority arises, they have somebody close at hand and dear to their hearts to fill it. They own, as well, every dwelling within an hour’s walk of the mills. You must borrow from your family to buy your house from them. For years you scrimp, never tasting meat from month to month, working from dawn to dusk, burying pennies in the dirt beneath your bed, with never a hope of earning enough to attract a decent wife. Then the owners declare that there is no longer a market for their goods, and turn out most of their employees. There is no work nearby, so the laborers must sell their houses. Nobody will buy them, however low the price may be, save the mill owners. Who do, for a pittance, because six months later they will begin hiring a new batch of fools, who will squander their savings on the house you just lost.”

  “Tacey—”

  “Oh, I can see the happy crowds now, when you return to the wharves in five years. ‘Look,’ they will cry, ‘here comes the famous factory boy! See how his silver buttons shine. What a handsome coach he drives—General Washington himself never owned so finely matched a sextet of white horses. Behold his kindly smile. He could buy half of New York city with his gold, yet it has not spoiled him at all. All the girls wish to marry him. They can see at a glance that he is an excellent dancer. They tat his profile into lace doilies and sleep with them under their pillows at night. It makes them sigh.’”

  So, bickering as usual, we missed most of Biddle’s speech. It ended to halfdrunken applause and uncertain laughter. The British airmen, oddly enough, did not look so much pleased as bewildered.

  After a certain amount of whispering and jostling at the head table, as if no one there cared to commit himself to public speech, a thin and spindly man stood. He was a comical fellow in an old-fashioned powdered wig so badly fitting it must surely have been borrowed, and he tittered nervously before he said, “Well. I thank our esteemed host for that most, ah, unusual—damn me if I don’t say peculiar—speech. Two great nations indeed! Yes, perhaps, someday. Yet I hope not. ‘Whimsical,’ perhaps, is the better word. I shall confine myself to a simple account of our historic passage … .”

  So the speech progressed, and if the American’s speech had puzzled the British officer, it was not half so bewildering as those things he said in return.

  He began by applauding Tobias Whitpain, he of world-spanning renown, for the contributions made through his genius to the success of the first trans-Atlantic aerial crossing were matched only by the foresight of Queen Titania herself for funding and provisioning the airship. Isabella was now dethroned, he said, from that heavenly seat reserved for the muse of exploration and science.

  “Whitpain?” I wondered. “Queen Titania?”

  “What is that you are playing with?” Tacey hissed sharply.

  I looked up guiltily. But the question was directed not at me but toward Socrates, who yet stood to my other side.

  “Ma’am?” he said, the picture of innocence, as he shoved something into my hand, which, from reflexive habit, I slid quickly into a pocket.

  “Show me your hands,” she said, and then, “Why are you not working? Get to work.”

  Socrates was marched briskly off. I waited until both were out of sight before digging out his toy.

  It was a small mirror in a cheap, gaudy frame, such as conjure women from the Indies peer into before predicting love and health and thirteen children for gullible young ladies. I held it up and looked into it.

  I saw myself.

  I saw myself standing in the square below the great stepped ziggurat at the center of Nicnotezpocoatl. Which grand metropolis, serving twice over the population of London herself, my shipmates inevitably called Nignog City. Dear old Fuzzleton was perched on a folding stool, sketching and talking, while I held a fringed umbrella over him, to keep off the sun. He cut a ludicrous figure, so thin was he and so prissily did he sit. But, oh, what a fine mind he had!

  We were always talking, Fuzzleton and I. With my new posting, I was in the strange position of being simultaneously both his tutor and student, as well as serving as his bootblack, his confidant, and his potential successor.

  “The Empire is not safe anchored where it is,” he said in a low voice, lest we be overh
eard by our Aztec warrior guardians. “Fire arrows could be shot into the balloons from the top of the ziggurat. These people are not fools! They’ve nosed out our weaknesses as effectively as we have theirs. Come the day they fear us more than they covet our airship, we are all dead. Yet Captain Winterjude refuses to listen to me.”

  “But Lieutenant Blacken promised—,” I began.

  “Yes, yes, promises. Blacken has ambitions, and plans of his own, as well. We—”

  He stopped. His face turned pale and his mouth gaped wide. The stool clattered onto the paving stones, and he cried, “Look!”

  I followed his pointing finger and saw an enormous Negro hand cover the sky, eclipsing the sun and plunging the world into darkness.

  “Thank you,” Socrates said. His face twisted up into a grotesque wink, and he was gone.

  I returned my attention to the scene below.

  The speaker—old Fuzzleton himself, I realized with a start—was winding up his remarks. He finished by raising a glass high in the air, and crying loudly: “To America!—Her Majesty’s most treasured possession.”

  At those words, every American started to his feet. Hands were clapped to empty belts. Gentlemen searched their coats for sidearms they had of course not brought. There were still men alive who had fought in the War of Independence, and even if there had not been such, memory of the recent war with its burning of Washington and, closer to home, the economically disastrous blockade of American ports was still fresh in the minds of all. Nobody was eager to return to the embrace of a foreign despot; whether king or queen, George or Titania, made no difference. Our freedoms were young enough that all were aware how precariously we held them.

  The British, for their part, were fighting men, and recognized hostility when confronted with it. They came to their feet as well, in a very Babel of accusation and denial.

  It was at that instant, when all was confusion and violence hovered in the air, that a messenger burst into the room.