The council houses followed the curve of the road, which wound up a slight incline. Beyond the houses was open agricultural land, the plain. The village lay in the opposite direction. From the last house, three hundred yards distant, a woman emerged, wearing an old blue raincoat and pushing a baby’s push-chair. She had a scarf tied over her head and was evidently going into the village to shop.
Larry moved as she drew nearer. The window of the vehicle wound down. A rifle muzzle protruded from it. A shot sounded.
The woman in the blue raincoat fell to her knees, still clinging with one hand to the push-chair.
As three more shots rang out, the push-chair blew apart. The woman’s face was covered with shreds of baby as she fell on the road.
Larry’s mother had seen at least part of this. She was drying a plate on a tea towel. She dropped the plate, ran from the kitchen, and opened the front door.
‘No, no, Larry! Stop it, you fool. Whatever do you think you’re doing?’
Larry had descended from the Land-Rover after firing the four shots. He moved slowly, with a sleep-walker’s lethargy. With that same lethargy, he snugged the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and fired at his mother. She was blown from the porch back into the passage. He fired two more shots into the house. I ran to the bedroom and heaved myself under the bed, fighting blindly with the magazines. I was sure he was after me.
There the police discovered me, four hours later, lying in a pool of my own urine.
So it was that eventually I found myself in a hospital in Swindon close to other victims of Larry Foot. After shooting the woman from the council house and her baby, and his mother, Larry had walked into Bishops Linctus and shot dead the first three people he met, wounding several others. BISHOPS BLOODBATH screamed the tabloid headlines. The quiet little affair roused much more excitement than the Soviet War (in which British troops were involved) then reaching one of its many climaxes outside Tiblisi. Why had Larry done it? The explanation given was that he had always been keen on guns. Presumably the same explanation would cover the Soviet War.
Armed police from Bishops Magnum and Salisbury shot Larry down behind the Shell garage. He had liked to help people, poor Larry. At least he gave a little pleasure to the bloodthirsty readers of the Sun.
This incident got me swiftly—in an ambulance—into the realm of professional medical scrutiny. Within a few days, I again had an identity. I was Roy Edward Burnell, a university lecturer and specialist in church architecture. I had written a learned book, Architrave and Archetype, a thesis linking human aspiration with human-designed structures, cathedrals in particular.
The chief medico in charge of my case, a Dr Rosemary Kepepwe, entered my hospital room smiling, bringing with her a copy of my book. ‘We’re getting somewhere, Roy,’ she said. ‘We’ll contact your wife next.’
I smote my forehead. ‘My God, don’t say I’m married.’
She laughed. ‘I’m afraid so. At least, you were married. We’ll soon have her tracked down—and other people in your past. What is the last thing you remember before the white-out?’
Even to me, her attitude seemed amateurish. When I said something of the sort, Dr Kepepwe explained that most of the original staff of the hospital were serving with British troops in Operation Total Tartary, in Murmansk, Usbekistan, the front in the Caucasus, and the new revolutionary area opening up round Lake Baikal. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a tremendous demand for medication.
‘My husband was a brain surgeon,’ Kepepwe said. ‘The best husband a woman could have. David won the Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy two years in succession. Everyone respected him. We have three children, one of them at Eton and one now working as a waiter in a Little Chef off the M25 at the South Mimms Service Area. But David volunteered to serve with Total Tartary. I had picked up a bit of surgery from him, of course, so here I am.
‘You were quite lucky to get here. Salisbury Plain is all mined these days.’
‘Lucky me,’ I said. But it appeared I did not know how lucky. I had marvelled that it was such a quiet hospital, and ascribed this to efficiency. Not so, Dr Kepepwe explained. I was the only patient in there. All the other wards were empty. Civilian patients had been turned out three days earlier, as the hospital prepared to receive wounded from the Eastern theatre of war.
‘Anyhow, I’d better take your details,’ Dr Kepepwe said, reluctantly. ‘Then I’ll bring you a cup of tea. What did you say was the last thing you remembered?’
I told her. I had gone to South America to view some of the ecclesiastical architecture there. I arrived in Buenos Aires and checked into my hotel. I remembered going up in a gilt elevator. And then—white-out. The fear of standing on the edge of a great abyss overtook me.
Dr Kepepwe saw the expression on my face. ‘Don’t worry—you’re not alone, Roy. How does it feel?’
‘An ocean. A wide ocean with a small island here and there. No continent. The continent has gone.’
As I spoke the words, some strange thing struggled in my mind. A name almost came back to me, then died.
So I waited. Waited to be restored. To pass the time I had access to the hospital library on VDU, together with TV and video. Also the new media craze, the NV, or nostovision. Laser projectors could beam whole programmes into the mind, where the programmes became like your own lived memories, though they faded in a few days. In view of my deficiencies, I avoided the NV and stuck to the library; but little I read remained in my mind.
What sins, what meannesses, what grave errors I had committed in the previous ten years had been forgiven me. I waited in calm, without apprehension.
Dr Kepepwe assured me active steps were being taken to trace those who had been intimate with me during the ten blank years: my parents, my academic colleagues. The confusions of war, the tight security covering the country, made communication difficult.
When she left in the evening, I wandered through the great empty building. In the dark of the long antiseptic corridors, green LEDs glowed, accompanied often by hums or growls. It was like being in the entrails of a glacier.
On the desk in Rosemary Kepepwe’s office stood a photograph of her husband David, very black, smiling genially with a large fish on a scale by his side. I wondered about their lives; but there was nothing on which to speculate. She was little more to me than an embodiment of kindness.
Only my slippered footsteps on the stairs, the tiles. I was a ghost among the ghosts of multitudinous lives whose CVs, like mine, had been lost. Who had lived, died, survived? A phrase came back uncomfortably from the white-out, ‘the sorry jeste of Life’.
But, I told myself as I took a service elevator up to the roof, I should not think in the past tense. Any day now and the hospital would be filled again with the living—the military living, harpooned by their wounds, poised on the brink of a final white-out. They would survive or not, to accumulate more memories, happy or sad as the case might be.
On the roof, the habitations of air-conditioning plants painted black by a city’s grime lived and breathed. I stood on the parapet, looking out over the town of Swindon, willing myself to feel less disembodied. The stars shone overhead, remote but always with promise of something better than the brief rush of biological existence. As I drank them in, a roar of engines sounded.
Three B-52 Stratofortresses flew overhead, from the west towards the eastern stars.
I went downstairs again, to my ward, my nest in the glacier. I must wait. Waiting did not require too much fortitude. One day soon, Dr Kepepwe would do the trick—with luck before the war-damaged moved in to supplant me in her attentions.
The days would pass. Help would come.
Indeed, the days did pass.
And then Stephanie arrived.
Stephanie was a vision of delight, tall, fine-boned, aesthetic of countenance, walking easy and free inside a fawn linen suit. Hair tawny, neat, almost shoulder-length. I admired the way she strolled into the ward, doing quite determinedly some
thing not to her taste. With a cautious smile on her face. And this lady had been my wife. I could have forgotten that? I could have forgotten all the times we had enjoyed together, where we’d been, what we’d done? So it seemed. My head had been bitten off.
Like most gusts of pleasure, this one brought its pain. She sat facing me: calm, sympathetic, but at a distance I had no way of negotiating, as I listened dismayed to what she revealed of those islands, that lost continent.
Stephanie and I had married eight years ago, only four weeks after meeting in Los Angeles for the first time. We were divorced five years later. Here indeed, I thought, must lie some of those sins, meannesses, and grave errors. She broke this news to me gently, casting her clear gaze towards the window in preference to seeing my hurt. The hospital authorities had tracked her down in California, where she was enjoying success as a fabric designer and living with a famous composer of film music.
‘You don’t owe me anything,’ she said. And, after a pause, ‘I don’t owe you anything.’
‘It’s good of you to come and see me. The war and everything, and that jumbo blown out of the skies over the Atlantic…’
A small laugh. ‘I was interested, of course. You’re a bit of medical history.’
‘We had no children?’
She shook her head. ‘That whole business was the reason for our falling out.’
‘Shit,’ I said. A long silence fell between us. I could have crossed the Sahara in it. ‘Did I ever—I mean, since we split up—did I ever—did we communicate at all?’
‘It was final,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to know. I like my new life in the States. What you did was up to you, wasn’t it? But you did send me postcards. Generally of draughty old churches here and there—of the kind you used to drag me into when we were together.’
‘You can’t beat a good old draughty old church,’ I said, smiling.
She did not return the smile. Perhaps the woman lacked humour.
‘I brought a couple of your cards along in my purse,’ she said. I noted the Americanism as she dipped into her handbag. She pulled out one card and handed it over, extending it between two outstretched fingers—as if amnesia was catching.
‘Huh, just one card. I tore the others up, I’m afraid.’ That, I thought was a little unnecessary pain she had no reason to inflict …
The card, crudely coloured, showed a picture of a church labelled as St Stephen’s Basilica, although I saw immediately that architecturally it was not a basilica. I turned it over, glanced at the Hungarian stamp, and read the few words I had scribbled to Stephanie, only three weeks earlier.
‘Budapest. Brief visit here. Making notes for lectures as usual. Need some florid Hungarian architecture. Trust you’re well. Have met strange old friend—just going round to Antonescu’s Clinic with him. Love, Roy.’
* * *
I went back to the Gellert. There, not entirely surprisingly, was Montagu Clements, still wearing my sweater.
He raised his hands in mock-surrender. ‘Pax. No offence meant, honest, old chum. Since I lost my job I’ve worked as a decoy for Antonescu, luring on innocent foreigners who come here to take advantage of low Hungarian prices. Economic necessity and all that’
‘You had your hand in the till—now you’ve had it in my mind. Stealing a memory is like murder, you miserable slob.’
‘Yes, and no doubt it will be legislated against when nostovision becomes something less than a seven-day wonder. Till then, Antonescu earns a modest dollar from his bootleg memory bullets. They’re short of hard currency, the Hungarians. Let me buy you a drink.’
I almost threw myself on him. ‘You’ve poisoned my life, you bastard, you’d probably poison my drink.’
He was very cool. ‘Let’s not fall out. You have a contempt for me. Think how I might feel about you. I’ve had to edit ten years of your memories, a lot of which weren’t edifying. You should be happy to be rid of them.’
‘I see, Clements—the FOAM Theory of History … Never learn anything. Just bloody forget. Haven’t you ever heard that saying about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it? Why do you think the world’s in such a fucking mess?’
He remained unmoved. ‘I have no idea, old boy. Nor, I suspect, do you, for all your academic posturing. Without wishing to hurt your feelings, your last ten years were full of crap. But there—everyone’s last ten years were full of crap…’
We were standing in the baroque foyer of the hotel, which had been built in the great European hotel age during the peaceful years preceding the First World War. I gestured through the doors, through the glass of which traffic could be seen crossing the Szabadsag Bridge. Beyond lay the dense Magyar thoroughfares, the grandiose piles of masonry, where fat profiteers sweated over their calculators.
‘I was already on my way to the police, Clements, old boy. Don’t pretend we’re friends. You had me dumped on Salisbury Plain, don’t forget.’
Clements turned on one of his innocent smiles. ‘Just think, it could have been the Gobi … I interceded on your behalf. Be British, old chap—let’s compromise. Let’s do a deal.’
‘What deal?’
He said, ‘We could discuss business better in the bar. You want your memory back, eh? Don’t go to the police and I’ll bring you your memory this afternoon. Agree? Say three-thirty, after I’ve taken my customary nap. OK?’
So I agreed on it. I agreed, thinking I would go to the police later. Clements turned up at three fifty-five.
We sat at the upstairs bar with two tall glasses of iced white Eger wine, for which I paid. He produced in the palm of his right hand two slender plastic spools, which I recognised as nostovision bullets, ready to be inserted into the head-laser.
‘I had some trouble getting these, old chap. How about fifty dollars each?’
‘Maybe you really have lost your memory or you’d know I wouldn’t fall for that. Hand them over. Why two bullets?’
He took a reflective sip of his wine. ‘Antonescu’s at the cutting edge of psycho-technology. We have to know our customers. They’re mainly in America and the Arab World. It’s a specialised market. We boiled your memory banks down into two categories—the rest we threw away, sorry to say. There’s your speciality, church architecture and all that. That spool has a limited but steady sale to academics—a tribute to all the knowledge you had packed away. I suppose you’ll be glad to get that back. Surely it’s worth fifty dollars to you?’
‘Come on, Clements, what’s the other bullet?’
‘A hundred dollars, old chum? It’s all your life and activities with a woman called Stephanie. Very erotic stuff, believe me. Very popular in Saudi Arabia.’
I threw my wine in his face and grabbed the two bullets.
I leave it to you to decide which bullet I played first.
* * *
The Soviet War continues. Heavy fighting in the Caucasus despite bad weather conditions. Radio reports said that Alliance forces used chemical and bacteriological weapons in the Kutaisi area. Questioned, American General Gus’ Stalinbrass said, ‘What the heck else do we do? These assholes don’t give up easy.’
Last night, four Georgian soldiers crossed the Tiblisi lines, found their way through a minefield, and gave themselves up to a British journalist, Dicky Bowden. One of the soldiers was a boy of fourteen.
Bowden said, ‘Starved and disaffected troops like these are all that stand between our advance and the Caspian Sea.’
He was confident that the war would be over in a week or two. Say a month. Maximum two months.
JACK
Connie Willis
Connie Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family. She first attracted attention as a writer in the late seventies with a number of outstanding stories for the now-defunct magazine Galileo, and went on to establish herself as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of the 1980s. In 1982, she won two Nebula Awards, one for her superb novelette “Fire Watch” (which also won a Hugo), and one for
her poignant short story “A Letter from the Clearys.” In 1989, her powerful novella “The Last of the Winnebagoes” also received both the Nebula and the Hugo, and she won another Nebula last year for her novelette “At the Rialto.” Her books include the novels Water Witch and Light Raid, written in collaboration with Cynthia Felice, Fire Watch, a collection of her short fiction, and the outstanding Lincoln’s Dreams, her first solo novel. Just released is a major new solo novel, Doomsday Book, and a new collection is coming up. Her story “The Sidon in the Mirror” was in our First Annual Collection; her “Blued Moon” was in our Second Annual Collection; her “Chance” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; her “The Last of the Winnebagoes” was in our Sixth Annual Collection; her “At the Rialto” was in our Seventh Annual Collection; and her “Cibola” was in our Eighth Annual Collection.
Here she plunges us deep into the chaotic and dangerous days of World War II London during the Blitz, when Nazi bomber planes were making lethal nightly forays through the skies above the battered and beleaguered city, and London itself was burning—and shows us that not all of the terrors to be encountered are the bombs falling down from the sky.…
The night Jack joined our post, Vi was late. So was the Luftwaffe. The sirens still hadn’t gone by eight o’clock.
“Perhaps our Violet’s tired of the RAF and begun on the aircraft spotters,” Morris said, “and they’re so taken by her charms they’ve forgotten to wind the sirens.”
“You’d best watch out then,” Swales said, taking off his tin warden’s hat. He’d just come back from patrol. We made room for him at the linoleum-covered table, moving our tea cups and the litter of gas masks and pocket torches. Twickenham shuffled his papers into one pile next to his typewriter and went on typing.
Swales sat down and poured himself a cup of tea. “She’ll set her cap for the ARP next,” he said, reaching for the milk. Morris pushed it toward him. “And none of us will be safe.” He grinned at me. “Especially the young ones, Jack.”
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 74
