Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  6.

  After a scratch dinner of canned artichoke hearts, pineapple slices, pre-cooked baby potatoes, pickled eel from a jar, and rather dry lightly-salted wheaten thins, washed down with Californian Chablis from the refrigerator, Blackett dressed in slightly more formal clothing for his weekly visit to Kafele Massri. This massively obese bibliophile lived three streets over in the Baptist rectory across the street from the regional library. At intervals, while doing his own shopping, Blackett scavenged through accessible food stores for provender that he left in plastic bags beside Massri’s side gate, providing an incentive to get outside the walls of the house for a few minutes. The man slept all day, and barely budged from his musty bed even after the sun had gone down, scattering emptied cans and plastic bottles about on the uncarpeted floor. Massri had not yet taken to urinating in his squalid bedclothes, as far as Blackett could tell, but the weekly visits always began by emptying several jugs the fat man used at night in lieu of chamber pots, rinsing them under the trickle of water from the kitchen tap, and returning them to the bedroom, where he cleared away the empties into bags and tossed those into the weedy back yard where obnoxious scabby cats crawled or lay panting.

  Kafele Massri was propped up against three or four pillows. “I have. New thoughts, Robert. The ontology grows. More tractable.” He spoke in a jerky sequence of emphysematic wheezing gasps, his swollen mass pressing relentlessly on the rupturing alveoli skeining his lungs. His fingers twitched, as if keying an invisible keyboard; his eyes shifting again and again to the dead computer. When he caught Blackett’s amused glance, he shrugged, causing one of the pillows to slip and fall. “Without my beloved internet, I am. Hamstrung. My preciiiouuus.” His thick lips quirked. He foraged through the bed covers, found a battered Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator. Its green strip of display flickered as his fingers pressed keys. “Luckily. I still have. This. My slide rule.” Wheezing, he burst into laughter, followed by an agonizing fit of coughing.

  “Let me get you a glass of water, Massri.” Blackett returned with half a glass; any more, and the bibliophile would spill it down his vast soiled bathrobe front. It seemed to ease the coughing. They sat side by side for a time, as the Egyptian got his breath under control. Ceaselessly, under the impulse of his pudgy fingers, the small green numerals flickered in and out of existence, a Borgesian proof of the instability of reality.

  “You realize. Venus is upside. Down?”

  “They tipped it over?”

  They was a placeholder for whatever force or entity or cosmic freak of nature had translated the two moons into orbit around the second planet, abstracting them from Earth and Jupiter and instantaneously replacing them in Venus space, as far as anyone could tell in the raging global internet hysteria before most of humanity was translated as well to the renovated world. Certainly Blackett had never noticed that the planet was turned on its head, but he had only been on Venus less than five days before he was recovered, against his will, to central Texas.

  “Au contraire. It has always. Spun. Retrograde. It rotates backwards. The northern or upper hemisphere turns. Clockwise.” Massri heaved a strangled breath, made twisted motions with his pudgy, blotched hands. “Nobody noticed that until late last. Century. The thick atmosphere, you know. And clouds. Impenetrable. High albedo. Gone now, of course.”

  Was it even the same world? He and the Egyptian scholar had discussed this before; it seemed to Blackett that whatever force had prepared this new Venus as a suitable habitat for humankind must have done so long ago, in some parallel or superposed state of alternative reality. The books piled around this squalid bed seemed to support such a conjecture. Worlds echoing away into infinity, each slightly different from the world adjacent to it, in a myriad of different dimensions of change. Earth, he understood, had been struck in infancy by a raging proto-planet the size of Mars, smashing away the light outer crust and flinging it into an orbiting shell that settled, over millions of years of impacts, into the Moon now circling Venus. But if in some other prismatic history, Venus had also suffered interplanetary bombardment on that scale, blowing away its monstrous choking carbon dioxide atmosphere and churning up the magma, driving the plate tectonic upheavals unknown until then, where was the Venerean or Venusian moon? Had that one been transported away to yet another alternative reality? It made Blackett tired to consider these metaphysical landscapes radiating away into eternity even as they seemed to close oppressively upon him, a psychic null-point of suffocating extinction.

  Shyly, Kafele Massri broke the silence. “Robert, I have never. Asked you this.” He paused, and the awkward moment extended. They heard the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall outside.

  “If I want to go back there? Yes, Kafele, I do. With all my heart.”

  “I know that. No. What was it. Like?” A sort of anguish tore the man’s words. He himself had never gone, not even for a moment. Perhaps, he had joked once, there was a weight limit, a baggage surcharge his account could not meet.

  “You’re growing forgetful, my friend. Of course we’ve discussed this. The immense green-leaved trees, the crystal air, the strange fire-hued birds high in the canopies, the great rolling ocean–”

  “No.” Massri agitated his heavy hands urgently. “Not that. Not the sci fi movie. Images. No offense intended. I mean . . . The affect. The weight or lightness of. The heart. The rapture of. Being there. Or the. I don’t know. Dislocation? Despair?”

  Blackett stood up. “Clare informs me I have damaged affect. ‘Flattened,’ she called it. Or did she say ‘diminished’? Typical diagnostic hand-waving. If she’d been in practice as long as I—”

  “Oh, Robert, I meant no—”

  “Of course you didn’t.” Stiffly, he bent over the mound of the old man’s supine body, patted his shoulder. “I’ll get us some supper. Then you can tell me your new discovery.”

  7.

  Tall cumulonimbus clouds moved in like a battlefleet of the sky, but the air remained hot and sticky. Lightning cracked in the distance, marching closer during the afternoon. When rain fell, it came suddenly, drenching the parched soil, sluicing the roadway, with a wind that blew discarded plastic bottles and bags about before dumping them at the edge of the road or piled against the fences and barred, spear-topped front gates. Blackett watched from the porch, the spray of rain blowing against his face in gusts. In the distance a stray dog howled and scurried.

  On Venus, he recalled, under its doubled moons, the storms had been abrupt and hard, and the ocean tides surged in great rushes of blue-green water, spume like the head on a giant’s overflowing draught of beer. Ignoring the shrill warnings of displaced astronomers, the first settlers along one shoreline, he had been told, perished as they viewed the glory of a Ganymedean-Lunar eclipse of the sun, twice as hot, a third again as wide. The proxivenerean spring tide, tugged by both moons and the sun as well, heaped up the sea and hurled it at the land.

  Here on Earth, at least, the Moon’s current absence somewhat calmed the weather. And without the endless barrage of particulate soot, inadequately scrubbed, exhaled into the air by a million factory chimneys and a billion fuel fires in the Third World, rain came more infrequently now. Perhaps, he wondered, was it time to move to a more salubrious climatic region. But what if that blocked his return to Venus? The very thought made the muscles at his jaw tighten painfully.

  For an hour he watched the lowering sky for the glow pasted beneath distant clouds by a flash of electricity, then the tearing violence of lightning strikes as they came closer, passing by within miles. In an earlier dispensation, he would have pulled the plugs on his computers and other delicate equipment, unprepared to accept the dubious security of surge protectors. During one storm, years earlier, when the Moon still hung in the sky, his satellite dish and decoder burned out in a single nearby frightful clap of noise and light. On Venus, he reflected, the human race were yet to advance to the recovery of electronics. How many had died with the instant loss of infrastructure�
�sewerage, industrial food production, antibiotics, air conditioning? Deprived of television and music and books, how many had taken their own lives, unable to find footing in a world where they must fetch for themselves, work with neighbors they had found themselves flung amongst willy-nilly? Yes, many had been returned just long enough to ransack most of the medical supplies and haul away clothing, food, contraceptives, packs of toilet paper . . . Standing at the edge of the storm, on the elegant porch of his appropriated mansion, Blackett smiled, thinking of the piles of useless stereos, laptops and plasma TV screens he had seen dumped beside the immense Venusian trees. People were so stereotypical, unadaptive. No doubt driven to such stupidities, he reflected, by their lavish affect.

  8.

  Clare found him in the empty car park, pacing out the dimensions of Petra’s Great Temple. He looked at her when she repeated his name, shook his head, slightly disoriented.

  “This is the Central Arch, with the Theatron,” he explained. “East and West corridors.” He gestured. “In the center, the Forecourt, beyond the Proneos, and then the great space of the Lower Temenos.”

  “And all this,” she said, looking faintly interested, “is a kind of imaginal reconstruction of Petra.”

  “Of its Temple, yes.”

  “The rose-red city half as old as time?” Now a mocking note had entered her voice.

  He took her roughly by the arm, drew her into the shade of the five-story brick and concrete structure where neuropharmaceutical researchers had formerly plied their arcane trade. “Clare, we don’t understand time. Look at this wall.” He smote it with one clenched fist. “Why didn’t it collapse when the Moon was removed? Why didn’t terrible earthquakes split the ground open? The earth used to flex every day with lunar tides, Clare. There should have been convulsions as it compensated for the changed stresses. Did they see to that as well?”

  “The dinosaurs, you mean?” She sighed, adopted a patient expression.

  Blackett stared. “The what?”

  “Oh.” Today she was wearing deep red culottes and a green silk shirt, with a bandit’s scarf holding back her heavy hair. Dark adaptive-optic sunglasses hid her eyes. “The professor hasn’t told you his latest theory? I’m relieved to hear it. It isn’t healthy for you two to spend so much time together, Robert. Folie à deux is harder to budge than a simple defensive delusion.”

  “You’ve been talking to Kafele Massri?” He was incredulous. “The man refuses to allow women into his house.”

  “I know. We talk through the bedroom window. I bring him soup for lunch.”

  “Good god.”

  “He assures me that the dinosaurs turned the planet Venus upside down 65 million years ago. They were intelligent. Not all of them, of course.”

  “No, you’ve misunderstood—”

  “Probably. I must admit I wasn’t listening very carefully. I’m far more interested in the emotional undercurrents.”

  “You would be. Oh, damn, damn.”

  “What’s a Temenos?”

  Blackett felt a momentary bubble of excitement. “At Petra, it was a beautiful sacred enclosure with hexagonal flooring, and three colonnades topped by sculptures of elephants’ heads. Water was carried throughout the temple by channels, you see—” He started pacing off the plan of the Temple again, convinced that this was the key to his return to Venus. Clare walked beside him, humming very softly.

  9.

  “I understand you’ve been talking to my patient.” Blackett took care to allow no trace of censure to color his words.

  “Ha! It would be extremely uncivil, Robert. To drink her soup while maintaining. A surly silence. Incidentally, she maintains. You are her. Client.”

  “A harmless variant on the transference, Massri. But you understand that I can’t discuss my patients, so I’m afraid we’ll have to drop that topic immediately.” He frowned at the Egyptian, who sipped tea from a half-filled mug. “I can say that Clare has a very garbled notion of your thinking about Venus.”

  “She’s a delightful young woman, but doesn’t. Seem to pay close attention to much. Beyond her wardrobe. Ah well. But Robert, I had to tell somebody. You didn’t seem especially responsive. The other night.”

  Blackett settled back with his own mug of black coffee, already cooling. He knew he should stop drinking caffeine; it made him jittery. “You know I’m uncomfortable with anything that smacks of so-called ‘Intelligent Design.’ ”

  “Put your mind at. Rest, my boy. The design is plainly intelligent. Profoundly so, but. There’s nothing supernatural in it. To the contrary.”

  “Still—dinosaurs? The dog I was talking to the other day favors what it called a ‘singularity excursion.’ In my view, six of one, half a dozen—”

  “But don’t you see?” The obese bibliophile struggled to heave his great mass up against the wall, hauling a pillow with him. “Both are wings. Of the same argument.”

  “Ah.” Blackett put down his mug, wanting to escape the musty room with its miasma of cranky desperation. “Not just dinosaurs, transcendental dinosaurs.”

  Unruffled, Massri pursed his lips. “Probably. In effect.” His breathing seemed rather improved. Perhaps his exchanges with an attractive young woman, even through the half-open window, braced his spirits.

  “You have evidence and impeccable logic for this argument, I imagine?”

  “Naturally. Has it ever occurred to you. How extremely improbable it is. That the west coast of Africa. Would fit so snugly against. The east coast of South America?”

  “I see your argument. Those continents were once joined, then broke apart. Plate tectonics drifted them thousands of miles apart. It’s obvious to the naked eye, but nobody believed it for centuries.”

  The Egyptian nodded, evidently pleased with his apt student. “And how improbable is it that. The Moon’s apparent diameter varies from 29 degrees 23 minutes to 33 degrees 29 minutes. Apogee to perigee. While the sun’s apparent diameter varies. From 31 degrees 36 minutes to 32 degrees 3 minutes.”

  The effort of this exposition plainly exhausted the old man; he sank back against his unpleasant pillows.

  “So we got total solar eclipses by the Moon where one just covered the other. A coincidence, nothing more.”

  “Really? And what of this equivalence? The Moon rotated every 27.32 days. The sun’s sidereal rotation. Allowing for current in the surface. Is 25.38 days.”

  Blackett felt as if ants were crawling under his skin. He forced patience upon himself.

  “Not all that close, Massri. What, some . . . eight percent difference?”

  “Seven. But Robert, the Moon’s rotation has been slowing as it drifts away from Earth, because it is tidally locked. Was. Can you guess when the lunar day equaled the solar day?”

  “Kafele, what are you going to tell me? 4 BC? 622 AD?”

  “Neither Christ’s birth nor Mohammed’s Hegira. Robert, near as I can calculate it, 65.5 million years ago.”

  Blackett sat back, genuinely shocked, all his assurance draining away. The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The Chicxulub impact event that exterminated the dinosaurs. He struggled his way back to reason. Clare had not been mistaken, not about that.

  “This is just . . . absurd, my friend. The slack in those numbers . . . But what if they are right? So?”

  The old man hauled himself up by brute force, dragged his legs over the side of the bed. “I have to take care of business,” he said. “Leave the room, please, Robert.”

  From the hall, where he paced in agitation, Blackett heard a torrent of urine splashing into one of the jugs he had emptied when he arrived. Night music, he thought, forcing a grin. That’s what James Joyce had called it. No, wait, that wasn’t it—Chamber music. But the argument banged against his brain. And so what? Nothing could be dismissed out of hand. The damned Moon had been picked up and moved, and given a vast deep carbon dioxide atmosphere, presumably hosed over from the old Venus through some higher dimension. Humanity had been relocated to the clea
ned-up version of Venus, a world with a breathable atmosphere and oceans filled with strange but edible fish. How could anything be ruled out as preposterous, however ungainly or grotesque?

  “You can come back in now.” There were thumps and thuds.

  Instead, Blackett went back to the kitchen and made a new pot of coffee. He carried two mugs into the bedroom.

  “Have I frightened you, my boy?”

  “Everything frightens me these days, Professor Massri. You’re about to tell me that you’ve found a monolith in the back garden, along with the discarded cans and the mangy cats.”

  The Egyptian laughed, phlegm shaking his chest. “Almost. Almost. The Moon is now on orbit a bit over. A million kilometers from Venus. Also retrograde. Exactly the same distance Ganymede. Used to be from Jupiter.”

  “Well, okay, hardly a coincidence. And Ganymede is in the Moon’s old orbit.”

  For a moment, Massri was silent. His face was drawn. He put down his coffee with a shaking hand.

  “No. Ganymede orbits Venus some 434,000 kilometers out. According to the last data I could find before. The net went down for good.”

  “Farther out than the Moon used to orbit Earth. And?”

  “The Sun, from Venus, as you once told me. Looks brighter and larger. In fact, it subtends about 40 minutes of arc. And by the most convenient and interesting coincidence. Ganymede now just exactly looks . . .”

  “. . . the same size as the Sun, from the surface of Venus.” Ice ran down Blackett’s back. “So it blocks the Sun exactly at total eclipse. That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “Except for the corona, and bursts of solar flares. As the Moon used to do here.” Massri sent him a glare almost baleful in its intensity. “And you think that’s just a matter of chance? Do you think so, Dr. Blackett?”