The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “You ignorant sack of possum poop,” Charlie Badwater said. “You don’t know squat, do you? Columbus’s ship was named the Santa Maria. The Mayflower was a totally different bunch of yonegs. Came ashore up in Maine or somewhere like that.”

  “These schoolkids nowadays, they’re liable to tell you anything,” Thomas Cornstalk remarked. “Half of them can’t read any better than you do. My sister’s girl is going with this white boy, I swear he don’t know any more than the average fencepost.”

  Old Man Alabama was fairly having a fit now. “No,” he howled, flailing the air with his long skinny arms. “No, no, it’s a lie—”

  Charlie Badwater sighed and shook his head. “I bet this isn’t even the Mayflower,” he said to Thomas Cornstalk. “Let’s have a look around.”

  They walked up and down the deserted main deck, looking. There didn’t seem to be anything to tell them the name of the ship.

  “I think they put the name on the stern,” Thomas Cornstalk said. “You know, the hind end of the ship. They did when I was in the corps, anyway.”

  They climbed a ladder and crossed the quarterdeck, paying no attention to Old Man Alabama, who was now lying on the deck beating the planks with his fists. “Hang on to my belt or something, will you?” Thomas Cornstalk requested. “I don’t swim all that good.”

  With Charlie Badwater holding him by the belt, he hung over the railing and looked at the name painted in big letters across the ship’s stern. It was hard to make out at that angle, and upside down besides, but finally he figured it out.

  “Mary Celeste,” he called back over his shoulder. “That’s the name. The Mary Celeste.”

  Charlie Badwater looked at Old Man Alabama. “Mayflower. Columbus. My Native American ass,” he said disgustedly. “I should have let those white guys hang him, back last year.”

  Thomas Cornstalk straightened up and leaned back against the rail. “Well,” he said, “what do we do now?”

  Charlie Badwater shrugged. “Go back where we came from. When we came from.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Anything this old lunatic can do, I can figure out how to undo.”

  Thomas Cornstalk nodded, feeling much relieved. “Do we take him along?”

  “We better. No telling what the consequences might be if we left him.” Charlie Badwater stared at the writhing body on the deck at his feet. “You know the worst part? It was a hell of a great idea he had. Too bad it had to occur to an idiot.”

  “Nasgiduh nusdi,” Thomas Cornstalk said. “That’s how it is.”

  He looked along the empty decks once again. “You think anybody’s ever going to find this boat? Come along in another ship, see this one floating out here in the middle of the ocean, nobody on board … man,” he said, “that’s going to make some people wonder.”

  “People need to wonder now and then,” Charlie Badwater said. “It’s good for their circulation.”

  He grinned at Thomas Cornstalk. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s peel this old fool off the deck and go home.”

  MELODIES OF THE HEART

  Michael F. Flynn

  Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, Michael F. Flynn has a BA in math from La Salle College and an MS for work in topology from Marquette University, and works as an industrial quality engineer and statistician. Since his first sale there in 1984, Flynn has become a mainstay of Analog, and one of their most frequent contributors. He has also made sales to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and elsewhere, and is thought of as one of the best of the crop of new “hard science” writers. His first novel was the well-received In the Country of the Blind. It was followed by Fallen Angels, a novel written in collaboration with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. His most recent book is the novel The Nanotech Chronicles, and a new novel, Firestar, is on the way, as is a collection of his short stories. His story “The Forest of Time” was in our Fifth Annual Collection. He lives in Edison, New Jersey.

  In the poignant and fascinating novella that follows, Flynn invents a new and unique kind of time-travel—one that functions without you actually having to go anywhere …

  I have never been to visit in the gardens of my youth. They are dim and faded memories, brittle with time: A small river town stretched across stony bluffs and hills. Cliffside stairs switchbacking to a downtown of marvels and magical stores. A little frame house nestled in a spot of green, with marigolds tracing its bounds. Men wore hats. Cars gleamed with chrome and sported tailfins enough to take flight. Grown-ups were very tall and mysterious. Sometimes, if you were good, they gave you a nickel, which you could rush to the corner grocery and buy red hot dollars and jawbreakers and licorice whips.

  I don’t remember the music, though. I know I should, but I don’t. I even know what the tunes must have been; I’ve heard them often enough on Classic Rock and Golden Oldy shows. But that is now, my memories are silent.

  I don’t go back; I have never gone back. The town would all be different—grimier and dirtier and twenty years more run down. The house I grew up in was sold, and then sold again. Strangers live there now. The cliffside stairs have fallen into disrepair, and half the stores are boarded up and silent. The corner groceries are gone, and a nickel won’t buy you squat. Grown-ups are not so tall.

  They are still a mystery, though. Some things never change.

  The music is dreamy.

  It’s peaches and creamy.

  Oh! don’t let my feet touch the ground.…

  I remember her as I always remember her: sitting against the wall in the garden sunshine, eyes closed, humming to herself.

  The first time I saw Mae Holloway was my first day at Sunny Dale. On a tour of the grounds, before being shown to my office, the director pointed out a shrunken and bent old woman shrouded in a shapeless, palehued gown. “Our Oldest Resident.” I smiled and acted as if I cared. What was she to me? Nothing, then.

  The resident doctor program was new then. A conservative looking for a penny to pinch and a liberal looking for a middle-class professional to kick had gotten drunk together one night and come up with the notion that, if you misunderstood the tax code, your professional services could be extorted by the state. My sentence was to provide on-site medical care at the Home three days a week. Dr. Khan, who kept an office five miles away, remained the “primary care provider.”

  The Home had set aside a little room that I could use for a clinic. I had a metal desk, an old battered filing cabinet, a chair with a bad caster that caused the wheel to seize up—as if there were a Rule that the furniture there be as old and as worn as the inhabitants. For supplies, I had the usual medicines for aches and pains. Some digitalis. Ointments of one sort or another. Splints and bandages. Not much else. The residents were not ill, only old and tired. First aid and mortuaries covered most of their medical needs.

  The second time I saw Mae Holloway was later that same day. The knock on the door was so light and tentative that at first I was unsure I had heard it. I paused, glanced at the door, then bent again over my medical journal. A moment later, the knock came again. Loud! As if someone had attacked the door with a hammer. I turned the journal down, open to the page I had been reading, and called out an invitation.

  The door opened and I waited patiently while she shuffled across the room. Hobble, hobble, hobble. You would think old folks would move faster. It wasn’t as though they had a lot of time to waste.

  When she had settled into the hard plastic seat opposite my desk, she leaned forward, cupping both her hands over the knob of an old blackthorn walking stick. Her face was as wrinkled as that East Tennessee hill country she had once called home. “You know,” she said—loudly, as the slightly deaf often do, “you oughtn’t leave your door shut like that. Folks see it, they think you have someone in here, so they jes’ mosey on.”

  That notion had been in the back of my mind, too. I had thought to use this time to keep up with my professional reading. “What may I do for you, Mrs. Holloway?” I said.

  She loo
ked away momentarily. “I think—” Her jaw worked. She took a breath. “I think I am going insane.”

  I stared at her for a moment. Just my luck. A nut case right off the bat. Then I nodded. “I see. And why do you say that?”

  “I hear music. In my head.”

  “Music?”

  “Yes. You know. Like this.” And she hummed a few bars of a nondescript tune.

  “I see—”

  “That was ‘One O’Clock Jump!’” she said, nearly shouting now. “I used to listen to Benny Goodman’s band on ‘Let’s Dance!’ Of course, I was younger then!”

  “I’m sure you were.”

  “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

  “I SAID, ‘I’M SURE YOU WERE’!” I shouted at her across the desk.

  “Oh. Yes,” she said in a slightly softer voice. “I’m sorry, but it’s sometimes hard for me to hear over the music. It grows loud, then soft.” The old woman puckered her face and her eyes drifted, becoming distanced. “Right now, it’s ‘King Porter.’ A few minutes ago it was—”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I said. Old folks are slow and rambling and forgetful; a trial to talk with. I rose, hooking my stethoscope into my ears, and circled the desk. Might as well get it over with. Mrs. Holloway, recognizing the routine, unfastened the top buttons of her gown.

  Old folks have a certain smell to them, like babies; only not so pleasant. It is a sour, dusty smell, like an attic in the summer heat. Their skin is dry, spotted parchment, repulsive to the touch. When I placed the diaphragm against her chest, she smiled nervously. “I don’t think you’ll hear my music that way,” she said.

  “Of course not,” I told her. “Did you think I would?”

  She rapped the floor with her walking stick. Once, very sharp. “I’m no child, Doctor Wilkes! I have not been a child for a long, long time; so, don’t treat me like one.” She waved her hand up and down her body. “How many children do you know who look like me?”

  “Just one,” I snapped back. And instantly regretted the remark. There was no point in being rude; and it was none of her business anyway. “Tell me about your music,” I said, unhooking my stethoscope and stepping away.

  She worked her lips and glared at me for a while before she made up her mind to cooperate. Finally, she looked down at the floor. “It was one, two nights ago,” she whispered. Her hands gripped her walking stick so tightly that the knuckles stood out large and white. She twisted it as if screwing it into the floor. “I dreamed I was dancing in the Roseland Ballroom, like I used to do years and years ago. Oh, I was once so light on my feet! I was dancing with Ben Wickham—he’s dead now, of course; but he was one smooth apple and sure knew how to pitch woo. The band was a swing band—I was a swinger, did you know?—and they were playing Goodman tunes. ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’ ‘Stardust.’ But it was so loud, I woke up. I thought I was still dreaming for a while, because I could still hear the music. Then I got riled. I thought, who could be playing their radio so loud in the middle of the night? So I took myself down the hall, room by room, and listened at each door. But the music stayed the same, no matter where I went. That’s when I knowed…” She paused, swallowed hard, looked into the corner. “That’s when I knowed, knew, it was all in my head.”

  I opened the sphygmomanometer on my desk. Mae Holloway was over a hundred years old, according to the Home’s director; well past her time to shuffle off. If her mind was playing tricks on her in her last years, well, that’s what old minds did. Yet, I had read of similar cases of “head” music. “There are several possibilities, Mrs. Holloway,” I said, speaking loudly and distinctly while I fastened the pressure cuff to her arm, “But the best bet is that the music really is all in your head.”

  I smiled at the bon mot, but all the wire went out of her and she sagged shapelessly in her chair. Her right hand went to her forehead and squeezed. Her eyes twisted tight shut. “Oh, no,” she muttered. “Oh, dear God, no. It’s finally happened.”

  Mossbacks have no sense of humor. “Please, Mrs. Holloway! I didn’t mean ‘in your head’ like that. I meant the fillings in your teeth. A pun. Fillings sometimes act like crystal radios and pick up broadcast signals, vibrating the small bones of the middle ear. You are most likely picking up a local radio station. Perhaps a dentist could—”

  She looked up at me and her eyes burned. “That was a wicked joke to pull, boy. It was cruel.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way—”

  “And I know all about fillings and radios and such,” she snapped. “Will Hickey had that problem here five years ago. But that can’t be why I hear music.” And she extruded a ghastly set of false teeth.

  “Well, then—”

  “And what sort of radio station could it be? Swing tunes all the time, and only those that I know? Over and over, all night long, with no interruptions. No commercials. No announcements of song titles or performers.” She raised her free hand to block her ear, a futile gesture, because the music was on the other side.

  On the other side of the ear…? I recalled certain case studies from medical school. Odd cases. “There are other possibilities,” I said. “Neurological problems…” I pumped the bulb and she winced as the cuff tightened. She lowered her hand slowly and looked at me.

  “Neuro…?” Her voice trembled.

  “Fossil memories,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I ain’t—I’m not rememberin’. I’m hearin’. I know the difference.”

  I let the air out of the cuff and unfastened it. “I will explain as simply as I can. Hearing occurs in the brain, not the ear. Sound waves vibrate certain bones in your middle ear. These vibrations are converted into neural impulses and conveyed to the auditory cortex by the eighth cranial nerve. It is the auditory cortex that creates ‘sound.’ If the nerve were connected to the brain’s olfactory region instead, you would ‘smell’ music.”

  She grunted. “Quite a bit of it smells, these days.”

  Hah, hah. “The point is that the sensory cortices can be stimulated without external input. Severe migraines, for example, often cause people to ‘see’ visions or ‘hear’ voices. And sometimes the stimulus reactivates so-called ‘fossil’ memories, which your mind interprets as contemporary. That may be what you are experiencing.”

  She looked a little to the side, not saying anything. I listened to her wheezy breath. Then she gave me a glance, quick, almost shy. “Then, you don’t think I’m … you know … crazy?” Have you ever heard hope and fear fused into a single question? I don’t know. At her age, I think I might prefer a pleasant fantasy world over the dingy real one.

  “It’s unlikely,” I told her. “Such people usually hear voices, not music. If you were going insane, you wouldn’t hear Benny Goodman tunes; you would hear Benny Goodman—probably giving you important instructions.”

  A smile twitched her lips and she seemed calmer, though still uneasy. “It’s always been a bother to me,” she said quietly, looking past me, “the notion that I might be—well, you know. All my life, it seems, as far back as I can remember.”

  Which was not that far, the director had told me that morning. “All your life. Why is that?”

  She looked away and did not speak for a moment. When she did, she said, “I haven’t had no, any, headaches, doc. And I don’t have any now. If that’s what did it, how come I can still hear the music?”

  If she did not want to talk about her fears, that was fine with me. I was no psychiatrist, anyway. “I can’t be sure without further tests, but a trigger event—possibly even a mild stroke—could have initiated the process.” I had been carefully observing her motor functions, but I could detect none of the slackness or slurring of the voice typical of severe hemiplegia. “Dr. Wing is the resident neurologist at the hospital,” I said. “I’ll consult with him.”

  She looked suddenly alarmed, and shook her head. “No hospitals,” she said firmly. “Folks go to hospitals, they die.”

  At her age, that was largely true. I sighed. “Perhaps at Khan’s cl
inic, then. There really are some tests we should run.”

  That seemed to calm her somewhat, for she closed her eyes and her lips moved slightly.

  “Have you experienced any loss of appetite, or episodes of drowsiness?” I asked. “Have you become irritable, forgetful, less alert?” Useless questions. What geezer did not have those symptoms? I would have to inquire among the staff to find out if there had been a recent change in her behavior.

  And she wasn’t listening any more. At least, not to me. “Thank you, Doctor Wilkes. I was so afraid.… That music.… But only a stroke, only a stroke. It’s such a relief. Thank you. Such a relief.”

  A relief? Compared to madness, I suppose it was. She struggled to her feet, still babbling. When she left my office, hobbling once more over her walking stick, she was humming to herself again. I didn’t know the tune.

  Even though we’re drifting down life’s stream apart

  Your face I still can see in dream’s domain;

  I know that it would ease my breaking heart

  To hold you in my arms just once again.

  It was dark when I arrived home. As I turned into the driveway I hit the dashboard remote, and the garage door rose up like a welcoming lover. I slid into the left-hand slot without slowing, easing the Lincoln to a halt just as the tennis ball, hanging by a string from the ceiling, touched the windshield. Brenda never understood that. Brenda always came to a complete stop in the driveway before raising the garage door.

  I could see without looking that I had beaten her home again. And they said doctors kept long hours.… When I stepped from the car, I turned my back on the empty slot.