The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “The sound was so loud I thought my ears were bleeding. Automatically, I dropped to the floor and covered my head. There was a little debris, not much, where I was. When I finally dared to look, what I saw didn’t make any sense. I still can’t tell you exactly what I saw. I blocked it out. But sometimes, I think I dream it. I dream that I saw Johnson’s head sitting on a Texas flagpole. I’m pretty sure that’s just my imagination, because in the dream, he’s got this vaguely surprised-annoyed expression on his saggy old face, like he’s saying, Whut the fuck is goin’ on here?

  “Anyway, the next thing I knew, I was out on the street again, and somebody was crying about they were bombing us now, along with the Vietnamese. Which was about the time the Guard opened fire, thinking we were bombing them, I guess.

  “I was lucky. I took a bullet in my thigh and it put me out of action. Just a flesh wound, really. It bled pretty impressively for a while and then quit. By then, I was so out of my head that I can’t even tell you where I staggered off to. The people who found me in their front yard the next morning took care of me and got me to a hospital. It was a five-hour wait in the emergency room. That was where I was when I heard about Kennedy.”

  * * *

  Part of the data recovered

  from a disk

  taken in a raid on an illegal

  software laboratory,

  March, 1981

  Jack Kennedy had died in the middle of a Dallas street, his head blown off in front of thousands of spectators and his horrified wife. Bobby Kennedy had narrowly missed meeting his end during a moment of triumph in a Los Angeles hotel. Ultimately, that seemed to have been only a brief reprieve before fate caught up with him …

  Jasmine Chang

  * * *

  “Everyone heard the explosion but nobody knew whether it was something the demonstrators had done, or if the National Guard had rolled in a tank, or if the world had come to an end. I ran down to the lobby with just about everyone else on the staff and a good many of the hotel guests, trying to see what was happening outside without having to go out in it. Nobody wanted to go outside. That night, the manager on duty had told us that anyone who wanted could stay over if we didn’t mind roughing it in the meeting rooms. I made myself a sleeping bag out of spare linens under a heavy table in one of the smaller rooms. The night before, the cops had cracked one of the dining room windows with a demonstrator’s head. I wasn’t about to risk my neck going out in that frenzy.

  “Well, after the explosion, we heard the rifle fire. Then the street in front of the hotel, already crowded, was packed all of a sudden. Wall-to-wall cops and demonstrators, and the cops were swinging at anything they could reach. They were scything their way through the crowd, you see—they were mowing people down to make paths so they could walk. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. For awhile it was the worst. I wish it could have stayed that way.

  “The lobby was filling up, too, but nobody really noticed because we were all watching that sickening scene outside. The whole world was watching, they said. I saw a camera crew and all I could think was their equipment was going to get smashed to bits.

  “I don’t know when Kennedy came down to the lobby. I don’t know why the Secret Service didn’t stop him, I don’t know what he thought he could do. He must have been watching from his window. Maybe he thought he could actually address the crowd—as if anyone could have heard him. Anyway, he was there in the lobby and none of us really noticed him.

  “The demonstrator who forced his way into the revolving door—he was just a kid, he looked about fifteen years old to me. Scared out of his mind. The revolving door was supposed to be locked, but when I saw that kid’s face, I was glad it wasn’t.

  “Then the cops tried to force their way in after him but they got stuck, there was a billyclub jammed in the door or something. And the kid was babbling about how they’d blown up Kennedy at the convention. ‘They threw a bomb and killed Kennedy! They blew him up with Johnson and McGovern!’ he was yelling over and over. And Bobby Kennedy himself rushed over to the kid. I’m pretty sure that was the first any of us really noticed him, when it registered. I remember, I felt shocked and surprised and numb all at once, seeing Kennedy right there, right in the middle of a lobby. Like he was anybody. And nobody else moved, we all just stood there and stared like dummies.

  “And Kennedy was trying to tell the kid who he was, that he wasn’t dead and what bomb and all that. The kid got even more hysterical, and Kennedy was shaking him, trying to get something coherent out of him, we’re all standing there watching and finally the cops manage to get through the revolving door.

  “They must have thought the kid was attacking Kennedy. That’s all I can figure. Even if that’s not how they looked. The cops. They looked … weird. Like they didn’t know what they were doing, or they did know but they’d forgotten why they were supposed to do it. I don’t know. I don’t know. But it was so weird, because they all looked exactly alike to me right at that moment, even though when I looked at them again after, they weren’t anything alike, even in their uniforms. But they looked like identical dolls then, or puppets, because they moved all at once together. Like a kick-line of chorus girls, you know? Except that it wasn’t their legs that came up but their arms.

  “I know that when they raised their guns, they were looking at the kid, and I thought, ‘No, wait!’ I tried to move toward them, I was reaching out and they fired.

  “It was like another bomb had gone off. For a moment, I thought another bomb had gone off, just a split second before they were going to fire. Then John Kennedy—I mean, Bobby, Bobby Kennedy—that’s a Freudian slip, isn’t it?—he did this clumsy whirl around and it looked like he was turning around in anger, like people do sometimes, you know? Like he was going, ‘Dammit, I’m leaving!’ And then he went down, and it was so awful because—well, this is going to sound really strange, I guess, but … well … when you see people get shot on a TV show, it’s choreographed or something, they do these kind of graceful falls. Kennedy was … they’d robbed him of his dignity. That’s the only way I can think to put it. They shot him and humiliated him all at once, he looked clumsy and awkward and helpless.

  “And I was outraged at that. I know it must sound weird, a man got shot, killed, and I’m talking about how he looked undignified. But that’s like what taking someone’s life is—taking their humanity, making them a thing. And I was outraged. I wanted to grab one of those cops’ guns and make them into things. Not just because it was Bobby Kennedy, it could have been anyone on that floor at that moment, the kid, the manager, my supervisor—and I hated my supervisor’s guts.

  “Right then, I understood what the demonstrations were about, and I was against the war. Up until then, I’d been kind of for it—not really for it, more like, ‘I hate war, but you’re supposed to serve your country.’ But right then, I understood how horrifying it must be to be told to make somebody into a thing, or be told you have to go out and risk being made into a thing. To kill, to be killed.

  “All that went through my mind in a split second and then I started screaming. Then I heard this noise … under my screams, I heard this weird groan. It was Kennedy. They say he was dead by then and it must have been the air going out of his lungs past his vocal cords that made the sound. Awful. Just awful. I ran and pulled the fire alarm. It was the only thing I could think to do. And this other chambermaid, Lucy Anderson, she started pounding on the front windows and screaming, ‘Stop! Stop! They killed Kennedy! They killed Kennedy!’ Probably nobody could hear her, but even if anyone had, it wouldn’t have mattered, because most of the people out there thought Kennedy was already dead in the explosion.

  “It wasn’t the Fire Department that used the hoses on those people. The cops commandeered the fire trucks and did that. And we were stuck in that hotel for another whole day and night. Even after they cleared the streets, they wouldn’t let any of us go anywhere. Like house arrest.

  “The questioning was awful.
Nobody mistreated me or hit me or anything like that, it was just that they kept at me. I had to tell what I saw over and over and over and over until I thought they were either trying to drive me out of my mind so I wouldn’t be able to testify against those cops, or trying to find some way to make it seem like I was really the one who’d done it.

  “By the time they told me I could leave the hotel, I was mad at the world, I can tell you. Especially since that Secret Service agent or whoever he was told me I’d be a lot happier if I moved out of Chicago and started over somewhere else. He really screwed that one up, and it was lucky for me he did. I left, and I was far, far away when the shit really hit the fan. I started over, all right—I got a new name and a new identity. Everybody else who was in that lobby—Lucy Anderson, the manager, the other staff and guests—they all disappeared. The last anyone saw of them, the Secret Service was taking them away. The cops vanished, too, but I have a feeling they didn’t vanish to quite the same thing as the others. And the kid killed himself. They said. Right, sure. I bet he couldn’t survive the interrogation.

  “Of course, all that was a long time ago. Hard to imagine now how things were then. I was only twenty, then. I was working days and taking college courses at night. I wanted to be a teacher. Now I’m in my early forties, and sometimes I think I dreamed it all. I dreamed that I lived in a country where people voted their leaders into office, where you just had to be old enough and not be a convicted felon and you could vote. Instead of having to take those psychological tests and wait for the investigators to give you a voting clearance. It is like a dream, isn’t it? Imagining that there was a time in this country when you could be anything you wanted to be, a teacher, a doctor, a banker, a scientist. I was going to be a teacher. I was going to be a history teacher, but those are mostly white people. My family’s been in this country forever, but because I’m Oriental, I’ve got conditional citizenship now … and I was born here! I suppose I shouldn’t complain. If anyone found out I saw Kennedy get it, I’d probably be unconditionally dead. Because everyone knows that the rumor that Kennedy was shot by some cops with a bad aim in a hotel lobby is just another stupid rumor, like the second gunman in Dallas in 1963. Everyone knows Kennedy died in the explosion at the convention center. That’s the official version of how he died and it’s the official version, government certified, that’s the truth.

  “Where I live, they have routine segregation, so I can’t use any of the whites’ facilities. I’ve thought about applying to move to one of the larger cities where there’s elective segregation and nothing’s officially ‘white-only,’ but I hear the waiting lists are years long. And somebody told me that everything is really just as segregated as here, they’re just not as open and honest about it. So maybe I’d really be no better off …

  “But I wish that I could have become a teacher—any kind of teacher—instead of a cook. I can’t even become a chef, because that’s another men-only field. I don’t want to be a chef necessarily, because I really don’t like to cook and I’m not very good at it. But it was all I could get. The list of available careers for non-whites gets smaller all the time.

  “Sometimes, I think it actually wasn’t meant to be this bad. Sometimes I think that nobody really wanted the military to take over the government for real, I think it was just panic about so many of the Democratic candidates dying along with the President in that blast and the rioting that wouldn’t stop and all that. It did seem as if the country was completely falling apart and somebody had to do something fast and decisive. Well, sure, somebody should have. Somebody should have figured out who was the President with Madman Johnson and Humpty Humphrey and all those Senators dead—there had to be somebody left, right? All of Congress wasn’t there. I mean, if I’d known, if a lot of us had known how things were going to come out, I think we’d have just let Ronald Reagan be president for four years, run him against Wallace or something and kept free elections, instead of postponing the elections and then having them abolished.

  “People panicked. That’s what it all came down to, I think. They were panicking in the streets, they were panicking in the government, and they were panicking in their homes. Our own panic brought us down.”

  * * *

  Undated typescript found in

  a locker in the downtown

  San Diego bus terminal,

  April 9, 1993

  Our own panic brought us down. For many who were eyewitness to certain events of 1968, this would seem to be a fitting coda, if coda is the word, for the ensuing twenty-five years …

  Oh, hell, I don’t know why I’m bothering to try to sum this up. How do you sum up a piece of history gone wrong? How do you sum up the fall of a country that believes it was saved from chaos and destruction? And who am I asking, anyway? I’m out of the country now, another wetback who finally made it across the border to freedom. There was a time when wetbacks went north to freedom, but I’m pretty sure nobody would remember that now. Mexico is sad and dusty and ancient, the people poor and suspicious of Anglos, though I’m so brown now that I can pass convincingly as long as I don’t try to speak the language—my accent is still atrocious.

  But the freedom here—nothing like what we used to have, but the constraints are far fewer. You don’t need to apply for a travel permit in-country, you just go from place to place. Of course, it’s not really that hard to get a travel permit in the US, they give them out routinely. But I’m of that generation that remembers when it was different, and it galls me that I would have to apply for one at all if I want to go from, say, Newark to, say, Cape May. I’ve deliberately chosen two cities I’ve never been to, just in case these papers fall into the wrong hands. God knows enough of my papers have been lost over the years. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle I haven’t been caught.

  It’s a hell of a life when you’re risking prosecution and imprisonment just for trying to put together a true account of something that happened two and a half decades before.

  Why I bothered—well, there are a lot of reasons. Because I’ve learned to love truth. And because I want to atone for what I did to “Carole Feeney” and the others. I’m still amazed that she didn’t recognize me, but I guess twenty-five years is a long time after all.

  I really thought I was doing the right thing at the time. I thought infiltrating the leftist groups was all right if it was just to make sure that nobody was stockpiling weapons or planning to blow up a building. Or assassinate another leader. I truly wish I could have arrested Annie Phillips and her group long before Chicago. Some of the people I talked to who were in the streets that night blame Annie for everything that’s happened since, and I think that’s why the authorities kept her alive instead of killing her—so the old radicals could hate her more than the government.

  After I talked to Annie, I understood why she turned violent, even if I didn’t condone it. If her voice could have been heard in 1964, maybe all these voices could be heard now, though they might not have so much to say …

  How melodramatic, “Davis.” I can’t help it. I was actually just like any of them in the year 1968—I thought my country was in trouble, and I was trying to do something about it. And—

  And what the hell, we won the Vietnam war. Hooray for America. The Vietnamese are all but extinct, but we brought the boys back home. We sent them right back out to the Middle East, and then down to Nicaragua, and to the Philippines, and to Europe, of course, where they don’t protest our missile bases much any more. That big old stick. We’ve gone one better than talking softly and carrying a big stick. Now we don’t talk at all …

  * * *

  In the weeks since I finally got out of the country, I’ve been having this recurring dream. I keep dreaming that things turned out differently, that there was even just one thing that didn’t happen, or something else that did happen, and the country just … went on. And so I keep thinking about it. If Johnson hadn’t run … if that bomb hadn’t gone off … if Kennedy hadn’t been killed.… if it had only
been half the number of demonstrators … if Dylan had showed up.

  If Dylan had showed up … I wonder sometimes if that’s it. God, the world should be so simple. Instead of simple and brutal and crude.

  Even after putting together this risky account, I’m not sure that I really know much more than I did in the beginning. I was hoping that I might figure it all out, how, instead of winning the battle and losing the war, we won the war and lost everything we had. But it could have been different. I don’t know why it’s so important to me to believe that. Maybe because I don’t want to believe that this was the way we were going no matter what. I don’t want to believe that everything that was of any value is stuck back there in the sixties.

  Papers found in a hastily vacated room

  in an Ecuadorian flophouse by occupying

  American forces during the third

  South American War, October 13, 1998

  PIPES

  Robert Reed

  A relatively new writer, Robert Reed is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to Universe, New Destinies, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Synergy, and elsewhere. His books include the novels The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, and Down the Bright Way. His most recent novel is the well-received The Remarkables. He is currently working on two new novels, Cul-de-Sac and An Exaltation of Larks. His story “The Utility Man” was on last year’s Final Hugo Ballot, and I doubt that he is going to be a stranger to the award ballots in years to come, either. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  In the quietly compelling story that follows, he shows us that even the most elaborate and well-worked-out plans may fail if they don’t take into account one very important factor—the people who have to fit into them.

  I was living south of campus, upstairs in one of those big old houses cut up into apartments of impractical sizes and shapes. The neighborhood itself was halfway gone—empty lots and shaggy grass, deer in the night and the old people with their pensions and their inertia. The university was planning to move next year. To Omaha. At least there was industry in Omaha, and a stable population, and I was promised a permanent position if I could make my work sing. Sing. That’s how the project head said it. “Make it sing, Aaron,” he told me. “You’re the final filter. My editor. The one who puts the pieces into a harmonious whole.” He was a charming and gracious asshole, and he rode me about deadlines and the needs of the government. Which is why I worked at home, avoiding his pointed smiles and pestering questions. In order to get the miracles done.