The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Hey buddy, you okay?” The bartender came around in front of him and jumped. “Christ, Harry, punch nine-one-one!”

  John gave a slight ineffectual wave. “No rush,” he croaked.

  The bartender cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Always on my shift?”

  22. Death in the Afternoon

  John woke up behind a Dumpster in an alley. It was high noon and the smell of fermenting garbage was revolting. He didn’t feel too well in any case; as if he’d drunk far too much and passed out behind a Dumpster, which was exactly what had happened in this universe.

  In this universe. He stood slowly to a quiet chorus of creaks and pops, brushed himself off, and staggered away from the malefic odor. Staggered, but not limping – he had both feet again, in this present. There was a hand-sized numb spot at the top of his left leg where a .51 caliber machine gun bullet had missed his balls by an inch and ended his career as a soldier.

  And started it as a writer. He got to the sidewalk and stopped dead. This was the first universe where he wasn’t a college professor. He taught occasionally – sometimes creative writing; sometimes Hemingway – but it was only a hobby now, and a nod toward respectability.

  He rubbed his fringe of salt-and-pepper beard. It covered the bullet scar there on his chin. He ran his tongue along the metal teeth the army had installed thirty years ago. Jesus. Maybe it does get worse every time. Which was worse, losing a foot or getting your dick sprayed with shrapnel, numb from severed nerves, plus bullets in the leg and face and arm? If you knew there was a Pansy in your future, you would probably trade a foot for a whole dick. Though she had done wonders with what was left.

  Remembering furiously, not watching where he was going, he let his feet guide him back to the oldster’s bar where the Hemingway had showed him how to swallow a piano. He pushed through the door and the shock of air-conditioning brought him back to the present.

  Ferns. Perfume. Lacy underthings. An epicene sales clerk sashayed toward him, managing to look worried and determined at the same time. His nose was pierced, decorated with a single diamond button. “Si-i-r,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice, “may I help you?”

  Crotchless panties. Marital aids. The bar had become a store called The French Connection. “Guess I took a wrong turn. Sorry.” He started to back out.

  The clerk smiled. “Don’t be shy. Everybody needs something here.”

  The heat was almost pleasant in its heavy familiarity. John stopped at a convenience store for a six-pack of greenies and walked back home.

  An interesting universe; much more of a divergence than the other had been. Reagan had survived the Hinckley assassination and actually went on to a second term. Bush was elected rather than succeeding to the presidency, and the country had not gone to war in Nicaragua. The Iran/Contra scandal nipped it in the bud.

  The United States was actually cooperating with the Soviet Union in a flight to Mars. There were no DeSotos. Could there be a connection?

  And in this universe he had actually met Ernest Hemingway.

  Havana, 1952. John was eight years old. His father, a doctor in this universe, had taken a break from the New England winter to treat his family to a week in the tropics. John got a nice sunburn the first day, playing on the beach while his parents tried the casinos. The next day they made him stay indoors, which meant tagging along with his parents, looking at things that didn’t fascinate eight-year-olds.

  For lunch they went to La Florida, on the off chance that they might meet the famous Ernest Hemingway, who supposedly held court there when he was in Havana.

  To John it was a huge dark cavern of a place, full of adult smells. Cigar smoke, rum, beer, stale urine. But Hemingway was indeed there, at the end of the long dark wood bar, laughing heartily with a table full of Cubans.

  John was vaguely aware that his mother resembled some movie actress, but he couldn’t have guessed that that would change his life. Hemingway glimpsed her and then stood up and was suddenly silent, mouth open. Then he laughed and waved a huge arm. “Come on over here, daughter.”

  The three of them rather timidly approached the table, John acutely aware of the careful inspection his mother was receiving from the silent Cubans. “Take a look, Mary,” he said to the small blond woman knitting at the table. “The Kraut.”

  The woman nodded, smiling, and agreed that John’s mother looked just like Marlene Dietrich ten years before. Hemingway invited them to sit down and have a drink, and they accepted with an air of genuine astonishment. He gravely shook John’s hand, and spoke to him as he would to an adult. Then he shouted to the bartender in fast Spanish, and in a couple of minutes his parents had huge daiquiris and he had a Coke with a wedge of lime in it, tropical and grown-up. The waiter also brought a tray of boiled shrimp. Hemingway even ate the heads and tails, crunching loudly, which impressed John more than any Nobel Prize. Hemingway might have agreed, since he hadn’t yet received one, and Faulkner had.

  For more than an hour, two Cokes, John watched as his parents sat hypnotized in the aura of Hemingway’s famous charm. He put them at ease with jokes and stories and questions – for the rest of his life John’s father would relate how impressed he was with the sophistication of Hemingway’s queries about cardiac medicine – but it was obvious even to a child that they were in awe, electrified by the man’s presence.

  Later that night John’s father asked him what he thought of Mr. Hemingway. Forty-four years later, John of course remembered his exact reply: “He has fun all the time. I never saw a grown-up who plays like that.”

  Interesting. That meeting was where his eidetic memory started. He could remember a couple of days before it pretty well, because they had still been close to the surface. In other universes, he could remember back well before grade school. It gave him a strange feeling. All of the universes were different, but this was the first one where the differentness was so tightly connected to Hemingway.

  He was flabby in this universe, fat over old, tired muscle, like Hemingway at his age, perhaps, and he felt a curious anxiety that he realized was a real need to have a drink. Not just desire, not thirst. If he didn’t have a drink, something very very bad would happen. He knew that was irrational. Knowing didn’t help.

  John carefully mounted the stairs up to their apartment, stepping over the fifth one, also rotted in this universe. He put the beer in the refrigerator and took from the freezer a bottle of icy vodka – that was different – and poured himself a double shot and knocked it back, medicine drinking.

  That spiked the hangover pretty well. He pried the top off a beer and carried it into the living room, thoughtful as the alcoholic glow radiated through his body. He sat down at the typewriter and picked up the air pistol, a fancy Belgian target model. He cocked it and, with a practiced two-handed grip, aimed at a paper target across the room. The pellet struck less than half an inch low.

  All around the room the walls were pocked from where he’d fired at roaches, and once a scorpion. Very Hemingwayish, he thought; in fact, most of the ways he was different from the earlier incarnations of himself were in Hemingway’s direction.

  He spun a piece of paper into the typewriter and made a list:

  EH & me –

  – both bad doctor fathers

  – both forced into music lessons

  – in high school wrote derivative stuff that didn’t show promise

  – Our war wounds were evidently similar in severity and location. Maybe my groin one was worse; army doctor there said that in Korea (and presumably WWI), without helicopter dustoff, I would have been dead on the battlefield. (Having been wounded in the kneecap and foot myself, I know that H’s story about carrying the wounded guy on his back is unlikely. It was a month before I could put any stress on the knee.) He mentioned genital wounds, possibly similar to mine, in a letter to Bernard Baruch, but there’s nothing in the Red Cross report about them.

  But in both cases, being wounded and surviving was the central experience of our y
outh. Touching death.

  – We each wrote the first draft of our first novel in six weeks (but his was better and more ambitious).

  – Both had unusual critical success from the beginning.

  – Both shy as youngsters and gregarious as adults.

  – Always loved fishing and luting and guns; I loved the bullfight from my first corrida, but may have been influenced by H’s books.

  – Spain in general

  – have better women than we deserve

  – drink too much

  – hypochondria

  – accident proneness

  – a tendency toward morbidity

  – One difference. I will never stick a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger. Leaves too much of a mess.

  He looked up at the sound of the cane tapping. The Hemingway was in the Karsh wise-old-man mode, but was nearly transparent in the bright light that streamed from the open door. “What do I have to do to get your attention?” it said. “Give you cancer again?”

  “That was pretty unpleasant.”

  “Maybe it will be the last.” It half sat on the arm of the couch and spun the cane around twice. “Today is a big day. Are we going to Paris?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something big happens today. In every universe where you’re alive, this day glows with importance. I assume that means you’ve decided to go along with me. Stop writing this thing in exchange for the truth about the manuscripts.”

  As a matter of fact, he had been thinking just that. Life was confusing enough already, torn between his erotic love for Pansy and the more domestic, but still deep, feeling for Lena . . . writing the pastiche was kind of fun, but he did have his own fish to fry. Besides, he’d come to truly dislike Castle, even before Pansy had told him about the setup. It would be fun to disappoint him.

  “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  “First destroy the novel.” In this universe, he’d completed seventy pages of the Up-in-Michigan novel.

  “Sure.” John picked up the stack of paper and threw it into the tiny fireplace. He lit it several places with a long barbecue match, and watched a month’s work go up in smoke. It was only a symbolic gesture, anyhow; he could retype the thing from memory if he wanted to.

  “So what do I do? Click my heels together three times and say ‘There’s no place like the Gare de Lyon’?”

  “Just come closer.”

  John took three steps toward the Hemingway and suddenly fell up down sideways –

  It was worse than dying. He was torn apart and scattered throughout space and time, being nowhere and everywhere, everywhen, being a screaming vacuum forever –

  Grit crunched underfoot and coalsmoke was choking thick in the air. It was cold. Grey Paris skies glowered through the long skylights, through the complicated geometry of the black steel trusses that held up the high roof. Bustling crowds chattering French. A woman walked through John from behind. He pressed himself with his hands and felt real.

  “They can’t see us,” the Hemingway said. “Not unless I will it.”

  “That was awful.”

  “I hoped you would hate it. That’s how I spend most of my timespace. Come on.” They walked past vendors selling paper packets of roasted chestnuts, bottles of wine, stacks of baguettes and cheeses. There were strange resonances as John remembered the various times he’d been here more than a half century in the future. It hadn’t changed much.

  “There she is.” The Hemingway pointed. Hadley looked worn, tired, dowdy. She stumbled, trying to keep up with the porter who strode along with her two bags. John recalled that she was just recovering from a bad case of the grippe. She’d probably still be home in bed if Hemingway hadn’t sent the telegram urging her to come to Lausanne because the skiing was so good, at Chamby.

  “Are there universes where Hadley doesn’t lose the manuscripts?”

  “Plenty of them,” the Hemingway said. “In some of them he doesn’t sell ‘My Old Man’ next year, or anything else, and he throws all the stories away himself. He gives up fiction and becomes a staff writer for the Toronto Star. Until the Spanish Civil War; he joins the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and is killed driving an ambulance. His only effect on American literature is one paragraph in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

  “But in some, the stories actually do see print?”

  “Sure, including the novel, which is usually called Along With Youth. There.” Hadley was mounting the steps up into a passenger car. There was a microsecond of agonizing emptiness, and they materialized in the passageway in front of Hadley’s compartment. She and the porter walked through them.

  “Merci,” she said, and handed the man a few sou. He made a face behind her back.

  “Along With Youth?” John said.

  “It’s a pretty good book, sort of prefiguring A Farewell To Arms, but he does a lot better in universes where it’s not published. The Sun Also Rises gets more attention.”

  Hadley stowed both the suitcase and the overnight bag under the seat. Then she frowned slightly, checked her wristwatch, and left the compartment, closing the door behind her.

  “Interesting,” the Hemingway said. “So she didn’t leave it out in plain sight, begging to be stolen.”

  “Makes you wonder,” John said. “This novel. Was it about World War I?”

  “The trenches in Italy,” the Hemingway said.

  A young man stepped out of the shadows of the vestibule, looking in the direction Hadley took. Then he turned around and faced the two travelers from the future.

  It was Ernest Hemingway. He smiled. “Close your mouth, John. You’ll catch flies.” He opened the door to the compartment, picked up the overnight bag, and carried it into the next car.

  John recovered enough to chase after him. He had disappeared.

  The Hemingway followed. “What is this?” John said. “I thought you couldn’t be in two timespaces at once.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “It sure as hell wasn’t the real Hemingway. He’s in Lausanne with Lincoln Steffens.”

  “Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.”

  “He knew my name!”

  “That he did.” The Hemingway was getting fainter as John watched.

  “Was he another one of you? Another STAB agent?”

  “No. Not possible.” It peered at John. “What’s happening to you?”

  Hadley burst into the car and ran right through them, shouting in French for the conductor. She was carrying a bottle of Evian water.

  “Well,” John said, “that’s what—”

  The Hemingway was gone. John just had time to think Marooned in 1922? when the railroad car and the Gare de Lyon dissolved in an inbursting cascade of black sparks and it was no easier to handle the second time, spread impossibly thin across all those light years and millennia, wondering whether it was going to last forever this time, realizing that it did anyhow, and coalescing with an impossibly painful snap:

  Looking at the list in the typewriter. He reached for the Heineken; it was still cold. He set it back down. “God,” he whispered. “I hope that’s that.”

  The situation called for higher octane. He went to the freezer and took out the vodka. He sipped the gelid syrup straight from the bottle, and almost dropped it when out of the corner of his eye he saw the overnight bag.

  He set the open bottle on the counter and sleepwalked over to the dining room table. It was the same bag, slightly beat-up, monogrammed EHR, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. He opened it and inside was a thick stack of manila envelopes.

  He took out the top one and took it and the vodka bottle back to his chair. His hands were shaking. He opened the folder and stared at the familiar typing.

  Ernest M. Hemingway

  One-eye for Mine

  Fever stood up. In the moon light he could xx see blood starting on his hands. His pants were torn at the knee and he knew it would he bleeding there too. He watched the lights of the caboose disppear in the trees wh
ere the track curved.

  That lousy crut of a brakeman. He would get him some day.

  Fever xxxxxxx off the end of a tie and sat down to pick the cinders out of his hands and knee. He could use some water. The brakeman had his canteen.

  He could smell a campfire. He wondered if it would be smart to go find it. He knew about the wolves, the human kind that lived along the rails and the disgusting things they liked. He wasn’t afraid of them but you didn’t look for trouble.

  You don’t have to look for trouble, his father would say. Trouble will find you. His father didn’t tell him about wolves, though, or about women.

  There was a noise in the brush. Fever stood up and slipped his hand around the horn grip of the fat Buck clasp knife in his pocket.

  The screen door creaked open and he looked up to see Pansy walk in with a strange expression on her face. Lena followed, looking even stranger. Her left eye was swollen shut and most of that side of her face was bruised blue and brown.

  He stood up, shaking with the sudden collision of emotions. “What the hell—”

  “Castle,” Pansy said. “He got outta hand.”

  “Real talent for understatement.” Lena’s voice was tightly controlled but distorted.

  “He went nuts. Slappin’ Lena around. Then he started to rummage around in a closet, rave about a shotgun, and we split.”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  “We’ve already been there,” Lena said. “It’s all over.”

  “Of course. We can’t work with—”

  “No, I mean he’s a criminal. He’s wanted in Mississippi for second-degree murder. They went to arrest him, hold him for extradition. So no more Hemingway hoax.”

  “What Hemingway?” Pansy said.

  “We’ll tell you all about it,” Lena said, and pointed at the bottle. “A little early, don’t you think? You could at least get us a couple of glasses.”