“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, I can see,” he said quietly.
I felt I was close now. I leaned forward. “This doesn’t have to happen. Our medical science will see that you never become that gross parody of yourself. We’ll keep you young and handsome for the rest of your life.”
Welles stirred himself. “I’m dazzled by your generosity. What’s in it for you?”
“Very good. I don’t deny it—we’re no charitable organization. You don’t realize the esteem in which your works are held in the future. A hundred years from now, Citizen Kane is considered the greatest movie ever made. The publicity alone of your return is worth millions. People want to see your work.”
“You sound exactly like George Schaefer persuading me to come out to Hollywood after The War of the Worlds. I’m a genius, unlimited support, people love my work. And the knives were sharpened for me before I even stepped off the plane. Three years later Schaefer is out on the street, I’m a pariah, and his replacement won’t even watch my movie with me. So, have studio executives in the future become saints?”
“Of course not, Orson. But the future has the perspective of time. RKO’s cuts to Ambersons did nothing to protect their investment. Your instincts were better than theirs, not just artistically, but even from the point of view of making money.”
“Tell it to Charles Koerner.”
“I don’t have to. It’s considered the greatest tragedy of cinema history. In 2048, nobody’s ever seen your movie. This print”—I touched the film canister—“is the only existing copy of your version. When it goes missing, and the negatives of the excised footage are destroyed, all that’s left is the botched studio version.”
“This is the only print?”
“The only print.”
Welles ran his long-fingered hand through his hair. He heaved himself to his feet, went to the rail of the schooner, grabbed a shroud to steady himself, and looked up at the night sky. It was a dramatic gesture, as he undoubtedly knew. Without looking back at me, he said, “And your time machine? Where do you keep that?”
“I have a portable unit in my bag. We can’t use it on the ship, but as soon as we are back on land —”
“— we’re off to 2048!” Welles laughed. “It seems I dramatized the wrong H.G. Wells novel.” He turned back to me. “Or maybe not, Mr …?”
“Gruber.”
“Mr. Gruber. I’m afraid that you’ll have to return to the future without me.”
Rosethrush had spent a lot of money sending me here. She wasn’t going to let me try another moment universe if this attempt failed. “Why? Everything I’ve told you is the simple truth.”
“Which gives me a big advantage in facing the next forty years, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t be a fool. Your situation here is no better tomorrow than it was yesterday.” One of the rules is never to get involved, but I was into it now, and I cared about whether he listened to me or not. I could say it was because of my bank balance. I gestured toward the cabins, where Koerner and his family slept. “Worse, after tonight. You’re throwing away your only chance to change your fate. Do you want to mortgage your talent to people like Charles Koerner? Sell yourself for the approval of people who will never understand you?”
Welles seemed amused. “You seem a little exercised about this—Detlev, is it? Detlev, why should this mean so much to you?” He was speculating as much as asking me. “This is just your job, right? You don’t really know me. But you seem to care a lot more than any job would warrant.
“What that suggests to me is that you must really like my movies—I’m flattered, of course—or you are particularly engaged with the problem of the director in the world of business. Yet you must work in the world of business every day.
“So let me make a counter-proposition: You don’t take me back to the future; you stay here with me. I question whether any artist can succeed outside of his own time. I was born in 1915. How am I even going to understand 2048, let alone make art that it wants to see?
“On the other hand, you seem quite familiar with today. You say you know all the pitfalls I’m going to face. And I’ll bet you know your twentieth century history pretty well. Think of the advantage that gives you here! A few savvy investments and you’ll be rich! You want to make movies—we’ll do it together! You can be my partner! With your knowledge of the future we can finance our own studio!”
“I’m a talent scout, not a financier.”
“A talent scout—we’ll use that, too. You must know who the great actors and actresses of the next thirty years are going to be—we’ll approach them before anyone else does. Sign them to exclusive contracts. In ten years we’ll dominate the business!”
He paced the deck to the table, put a brandy glass in front of me, and filled it. “You know, if you hadn’t told me, I would never have thought you were anything other than a servant. You’re something of an actor yourself, aren’t you? A manipulator of appearances. Iago pouring words into my ear? Good, we can definitely use that, too. But don’t tell me, Detlev, there aren’t aspects of the future you wouldn’t like to escape from. Here’s your chance. We can both kiss the Charles Koerners of the world goodbye, or better yet, succeed in their world and rub their faces in it!”
This was a new one. I had been resisted before, I had been told to get lost, I had faced panic and disbelief. But never had a target tried to seduce me.
The thing was, what Welles was saying made a lot of sense. Maybe if I could bring him back I would come out okay, but that didn’t look like it was going to happen. Everything I had told him about himself—his lack of family connections, his troubles with the industry, his bleak prospects—applied to me in 2048. And since I had burned this moment universe by coming here, there was no way anyone from the future was going to come to retrieve me, even if they wanted to. I could make movies with Orson Welles—and eventually, I could make them without him.
I stared at the Ambersons film canister on the table in front of me and got hold of myself. I knew his biography. Welles hadn’t just been abandoned by others. When necessary, he had seduced and abandoned even his most trusted friends. It was always love on his terms.
“Thank you for the offer,” I said. “But I must go back. Are you coming with me?”
Welles sat down in the chair beside me. He smiled. “I guess you’ll have to tell your studio head, or whoever sent you, that I was more difficult than he imagined.”
“You’ll live to regret this.”
“We shall see.”
“I already know. I showed you.”
Welles’s face darkened. When he spoke his voice was distant. “Yes, that was pleasant. But now, it seems our business is finished.”
This was not going to play well when I got back to DAA. I had one chance to salvage my reputation. “Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll take this.” I reached across the table to get the print of Ambersons.
Welles surged forward from his chair, startlingly quick, and snatched the canister before I could. He stood, holding it in his arms, swaying on the unsteady deck. “No.”
“Come now, Orson. Why object to our having your film? In the hundred years after that botched preview in Pomona, no one has ever seen your masterpiece. It’s the Holy Grail of lost films. What possible purpose could be served by keeping it from the world?”
“Because it’s mine.”
“But it’s no less yours if you give it to us. Didn’t you make it to be admired, to touch people’s hearts? Think about —”
“I’ll tell you what to think,” Welles said. “Think about this.”
He seized the canister by its wire handles, twirled on his feet as he swung it round him like a hammer thrower, and hurled it out into the air over the side of the boat. He stumbled as he let it go, catching himself on the rail. The canister arced up into the moonlight, tumbling, and fell to the ocean with only the slightest splash, disappearing instantly.
I was working at my video editor when Moira came into the
apartment. She didn’t bother to knock; she never did. I drained the last of my gin, paused the image of Anne Baxter that stood on my screen, and swiveled my chair around toward her.
“Jesus, Det, are you ever going to unpack?” Moira surveyed the stacks of boxes that still cluttered my living room.
I headed to the kitchen to refill my glass. “That depends—are you going to throw me out again?”
“You know I didn’t want to,” she said. “It was Vijay. He’s always looking over my shoulder.” She followed me into the kitchen. “Is that twentieth century gin? Let me have some.” She examined a withered lime that had been sitting on the windowsill above the sink since before my trip to 1942, then put it back down. “Besides, you’re all paid up for now.”
For now. But Rosethrush had not put me back on salary. She was furious when I returned without Welles, though she seemed to enjoy humiliating me so much that I wondered if that alone was worth what it had cost her. She rode me for my failure at the same time she dismissed it as no more than might be expected. Her comments combined condescension and contempt: not only was I a loser, but I served as a stand in for the loser Welles.
According to Rosethrush, Welles’s turning me down showed a fatal lack of nerve. “He’s a coward,” she told me. “If he came with you, he’d have to be the genius he pretended to be, with no excuses. His genius was all sleight of hand.”
I didn’t mention Welles’s offer to me. Not arguing with her was the price I paid for avoiding another blackballing.
On the editor, I was working on a restoration of The Magnificent Ambersons. By throwing the only existing print overboard, Welles had made my job a lot harder—but not impossible. The negatives of the discarded footage in the RKO archives hadn’t been destroyed until December, 1942, so I’d had time to steal them before I came back. Of course Rosethrush didn’t want Ambersons; she wanted Welles. Hollywood was always about the bottom line, and despite my sales job to Welles, few beyond a bunch of critics and obsessives cared about a hundred-year-old black-and-white movie. But I was banking on the possibility that a restoration would still generate enough publicity to restart my career.
Or maybe I had other reasons. I had not edited a film since the end of my directorial ambitions, twelve years before, and working on this made me realize how much I had missed the simple pleasure of shaping a piece of art with my hands. The restored Ambersons was brilliant, harrowing, and sad. It told the story of the long, slow decline of a great mercantile family, destroyed by progress and bad luck and willful blindness—and by the automobile. It was the first great film to address the depredations of technological progress on personal relations in society; but it was also a human tragedy and a thwarted love story. And it centered on the life of George Minafer, a spoiled rich boy who destroyed himself while bringing misery to everyone around him.
Moira gave up and took the lime off the windowsill. “Where’s a knife? You got any tonic?”
I liked Moira; the very fact that she cared nothing about movies made her refreshingly attractive. But I had work to do. I went back to the editor while she poked around the kitchen. I hit play. On the screen Anne Baxter, as Lucy Morgan, was telling her father, played by Joseph Cotten, the legend of a mythical young Indian chief, Vendonah. Vendonah meant “Rides-Down-Everything.”
“Vendonah was unspeakable,” Lucy said as they walked through the garden. “He was so proud he wore iron shoes and walked over people’s faces. So at last the tribe decided that it wasn’t a good enough excuse for him that he was young and inexperienced. He’d have to go. So they took him down to the river, put him in a canoe, and pushed him out from the shore. The current carried him on down to the ocean. And he never got back.”
I had watched this scene before, but for the first time the words sent a shiver down my spine. I hit pause. I remembered the self-loathing in Welles’s eyes when I had shown him the images of himself in decline, and now I saw that he had made a movie about himself—in fact, he’d made two of them. Both Kane and George Minafer were versions of Welles. Spoiled, abusive, accusing, beautiful boys, aching for their comeuppance. Which they had gotten, all three of them, almost as if they had sought it out, directing the world and the people around them to achieve that aesthetic result. No wonder Welles abused others, pushing until they said “no”—because at some level he felt he deserved to be said “no” to. Maybe he turned down my “yes” because he needed that “no.” The poor bastard.
I stared at the screen. It wasn’t all sleight of hand—or if it was sleight of hand, it was brilliant sleight of hand. Welles had pulled a masterpiece out of the air the way he had pulled the key out of Barbara Koerner’s ear. Yet to keep his integrity, he had thrown the last print of that masterpiece into the ocean.
Within a week I would have it back, complete, ready to give to the world, both a fulfillment of Welles’s immense talent and the final betrayal of his will, sixty-three years after his death. And I would be a player again.
If I ever let anyone else see the film. If I didn’t? What, then, would I do to fill my days?
Behind me, I heard Moira come back out of the kitchen, and the tinkle of ice in her glass. She was going to say something, something irrelevant, and I would have to tell her to get lost. But nothing came. Finally I turned on her, just as she spoke. “What’s this?” she asked.
She was playing idly with an open box of junk. In her hands she held a trophy, a jagged Lucite spike on a black base.
“That?” I said. “That’s—that’s the best original screenplay award from the 2037 Trieste Film Festival.”
She turned it over and put it back into the box. She looked up at me and smiled.
“Anyway, Det, the reason I’m here is to ask if you want to go swimming. It’s been record low UV all this week.”
“Swimming.”
“You know. Water? The beach? Naked women? Come with me, sweetheart, and I promise you won’t get burned.”
“The burn doesn’t worry me,” I said. “But these waters are infested with sharks.”
“Really? Where’d you hear that?”
I turned off the editor and got out of my chair. “Never mind,” I said. “Give me a minute and I’ll find my suit.”
Rogue Farm
Charles Stross
Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century (in fact, as one of the key Writers to Watch in the Oughts), with a sudden burst in the last few years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “Antibodies,” “A Colder War,” “Bear Trap,” “Dechlorinating the Moderator,” “Toast: A Con Report,” “Lobsters,” “Troubadour,” “Tourist,” “Halo,” “Router,” “Nightfall,” “Curator,” and others in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Plasma, and New Worlds. In recent days, he’s becoming prolific at novel length as well. He’d already “published” a novel online, Scratch Monkey, available to be read on his Web site (www.antipope.org/charlie/), and saw his first commercially published novel, Singularity Sky, released in 2003, but he has three novels coming out in 2004: The Iron Sunrise, A Family Trade, and The Atrocity Archive (formerly serialized in the British magazine Spectrum SF), with another new novel, The Clan Corporate, hard on their heels in early 2005 … and, of course, he also has several other new novels in the works. His first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures, was released in 2002. Until his recent retirement to concentrate on fiction writing, Stross was also a longtime columnist for the magazine Computer Shopper. He had two stories in our Eighteenth Annual Collection, plus singletons in our Nineteenth and Twentieth Annual Collections. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Here he gives us a fast, funny, and highly inventive look at a deceptively bucolic future where nothing is quite as simple—or as harmless—as it seems …
It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the southeastern sky toward t
he rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it toward the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.
“Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farmhouse. “Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”
“Joe? Is that you? Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the house.
“Where are you?” he yelled back.
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“Bugger,” he said again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month …”
The sound of a toilet sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on the staircase; then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“Out front, about a quarter mile up the lane.”
“Right.” Hair wild and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard yet?”
“I was thinking you’d want to talk to it first.”
“Too right I want to talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near Edgar’s pond, I got some issues to discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and keep it off our property,” she called after him. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 16
