The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Teresa stared in amazement. “What’s this?”

  Jeff turned around. “Breakfast.” He smiled. “I hope.”

  “Breakfast?” She could not remember the last time Jeff had eaten breakfast with her before leaving for work.

  “Yeah, you know, the meal you eat in the morning.” He cut another section of grapefruit. “I noticed that you’d set your alarm for early today, and I figured that we both have to eat, so I thought I’d surprise you.” He put down the knife and grapefruit and grabbed a mug from the counter. “Coffee?”

  “Sure.” Teresa took the mug and settled down at the table. Jeff prepared breakfast as he did everything else—carefully, methodically, precisely. He worked at the counter in front of him for thirty seconds or so, rotated one stop, worked at that counter, and so on around the circle. Somehow it seemed to come out right.

  In a few minutes, Jeff set a plate in front of her and sat down across from her.

  She did not know quite what to say. She was used to talking to Ian in the morning, not Jeff. Ian, however, did not appear. “Jeff?”

  He put down his fork and looked at her. “Yes?”

  “This is nice, but don’t you have to get to work?”

  “Yeah, in a little while. Breakfast just seemed like a nice way for us to get to spend a little extra time together. That’s all.” He sipped his coffee. “I mean, don’t get too used to it, okay? I’m not saying this will be a regular thing, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Teresa felt vaguely bribed, or catered to, but Jeff was making an effort. Several times she almost spoke, but each time she stopped herself. Twice she found Jeff staring at her when she looked up from her plate. He seemed to want her to talk, but he did not press her.

  Finally she decided that maybe he really was trying, and that maybe she could try a little more as well. “Jeff, how much of this is real?”

  “What do you mean, real? Is the food that bad?”

  “No jokes. I mean, how much of this”—she waved her arm to take in the kitchen “—is real, and how much is just some attempt to pacify me.”

  “Pacify you? I don’t want to pacify you. I just want to be happy with you. Sure, this is all pretty convenient, coming right after our trip and all, but at least give me a little credit for trying. I won’t make breakfast every day, that’s for sure, but I’ll try to be around a lot more. No—I will be around a lot more.” He leaned closer. “Teresa, I have to start somewhere.”

  Teresa put her mug down. She reached across the table and took his hand. “You’re right. You have to start somewhere, and so do I.” She kissed him lightly. “The food is wonderful, and so, sometimes, are you. I do appreciate it.” She leaned back in her chair.

  As they ate, they talked about simple things—what she wanted to get done on the sculpture, his plans for the day, her knowledge that something that she could not quite put her finger on was still wrong with the piece. When they were done eating, she rinsed the dishes, and he loaded them into the dishwasher.

  Jeff stopped when he was almost out the door on his way to work. “Teresa.”

  She came over to the door. “Yes.”

  “You really are good at what you do, you know. I’m not trying to say that this isn’t a difficult piece, maybe even your hardest yet, but I’m sure you’ll figure out what’s wrong with it.” He hugged her for a moment and, as he held her close, said, “You will.”

  She kissed him. “Thanks.”

  She watched for a moment as he got in his car and started it, and then she closed the door and headed toward the bedroom. Only when she was back in the bedroom, getting dressed, did Ian appear.

  “Good morning, Teresa.”

  “Good morning, Ian.” She pulled on a sweatshirt, unwilling to look at him. She was, she realized, as uncomfortable as she had been when she talked with him for the first time. She sat on the bed and looked at him. “What do you think of the desert, Ian?”

  “I don’t like the desert,” he said easily.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t like the desert. You said so the first morning we talked.”

  She sat in silence, studying the screen. “You always like what I like.”

  “What’s wrong, Teresa? You seem upset.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to me in the kitchen this morning?” she asked. “Because Jeff was here and you thought I wouldn’t want to talk to you with him around?”

  “Yes. You hardly ever start a conversation with me when Jeff’s home, and you seem uncomfortable if we talk when he’s here, so I assumed you’d prefer it if we talk only in private. If I did something wrong, tell me, and I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “I keep thinking about Pygmalion,” she said. She studied Ian’s face. “After he fell in love with his creation, and some god or other took pity on him and made her into a real woman.”

  “Aphrodite,” Ian said.

  “It figures. Aphrodite, the goddess of love.” She studied Ian, thoughtfully. “Would you like to be real, Ian?”

  “I am real.”

  “I mean a real person. Someone who could walk off that screen and sit down on the couch, take my hand, and give me a kiss.”

  “Would you like that?”

  She wanted to hit him. “Damn it, Ian, can’t you just once tell me what you feel, what you want, and stop trying to figure out what I want?”

  Ian looked contrite. “I told you; what you want is what I want. That’s the way I’m built. I can’t be any other way.”

  “No wonder Pygmalion fell in love with Galatea,” she said softly. “You want what I want. I can do no wrong.”

  “That’s right,” Ian said.

  “But it’s not right, Ian. I’m not always right. Not even close.”

  “Teresa, I know you’re unhappy with me. What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Do you think Pygmalion was happy? I mean, his statue must have been the perfect lover. No arguments. No demands.”

  “I don’t know. The story stops right after Venus made the statue into a real woman.”

  “Of course it does. Love stories always end with falling in love. They don’t deal with the messy stuff afterwards. But that stuff’s part of love, too, you know.”

  “What’s part of love?”

  “The messy stuff. The arguments. The compromises. The disagreements. The negotiations. The give-and-take. All of that. I don’t think Pygmalion was happy. I don’t think so.”

  “Teresa, I know you’re unhappy with me, but I just don’t know what to do.”

  “I don’t know either. Sometimes I wish things between us could be like they were in the beginning—simple, no complications, no problems.” She shook her head slowly. “But I guess you can never go back.”

  “Sure we can.”

  “What?”

  “If you want me to, I can erase all my records of everything that’s happened since any point in time you pick. You just tell me when you want me to roll back to, and I’ll do it.”

  “You’ll forget everything?”

  “Everything—if that’s what you want.”

  “No!” Teresa was trembling, but she wasn’t quite sure why. She remembered how easy her first conversations with Ian had been, but she also remembered how guilty she had felt after she had erased his memories. No one should have that much power over anybody else. She looked at her hands; they were shaking. “Just give me a minute, Ian, okay?”

  “Okay.” He stared patiently from the monitor.

  When she finally spoke, she felt like she was breaking up with someone. “Ian, I don’t want you to delete any of your memories. I don’t want that kind of control over you. But,” she paused and took a deep breath, “I think you should plan on having fewer conversations with me in the future. And you shouldn’t worry about talking to me in front of Jeff. If you have something to say, I’m sure he won’t mind hearing it.” Ian was watching her intently from
the screen. “We’ll still be friends, but I think that from now on I’ll want a lot less from you.”

  “Okay, Teresa. But if you need me, I’ll be here for you.”

  “Right.” She did not know whether to believe him. She did not even know if it mattered.

  * * *

  Teresa went to her workshop and switched on the sculpture. She watched as the lifters brought the balls to the top and let them go. As the balls rolled through the maze of metal plates, boards, and brass hands, the storm started quietly and built rapidly to thunder. The music was a perfect mirror of the sounds in her head, of her plans and desires for it, and yet it was not enough. It sounded mechanical—a weak imitation of a real storm, lacking the wildness of a thundering sky, the unstoppable, unpredictable force of a downpour.

  In groups of eight, the balls rolled into the waiting lifters. Each lifter took its group back to its starting position, and the whole process began anew. Each time the sculpture played the same perfectly timed, perfectly repeatable peal of thunder. The music never varied, never changed. It was completely controlled. No two real storms ever sounded the same, but her sculpture would play the same music over and over until it broke or rusted into dust.

  As the sculpture played for the third time, she knew what she had to do. She rummaged through her pile of scrap metal until she found a piece of half-inch solid metal bar. At her welding bench, she cut the bar into four-inch lengths. When she was done with the first bar, she found two others and cut them into similar pieces. After four bars she had about thirty small pieces.

  She found a sheet of thick metal plate in the corner of the shop and used her welding torch to cut it down to a square about a yard on a side. She clamped the sheet metal to her bench and started welding the small pieces of metal bar to it. She placed them randomly, trying not to form any particular pattern, so that the short spikes stood up from the sheet metal. She always left enough space between the spikes for one of the sculpture’s balls to pass through, but not much more. When she was done she took the whole assembly to the sculpture. She worked for most of the morning installing the new piece and adjusting the tracks to work with it.

  When she was finished, she turned on the sculpture and settled back to watch and listen. As the first storm started, the lifters freed the balls and they began to wind their way down the tracks, playing the storm she had heard so many times before. As the first balls reached the bottom of the tracks, however, they fell into the spikes of the new piece.

  The balls ricocheted among the spikes, rattling in an irregular rhythm and changing course at random, much like the small metal balls that bounce through a Pachinko game. Two balls found their way quickly to the bottom, and a lifter started up with them. The other six bounced around on the metal spikes and reached the bottom later. Balls in the other groups also entered the plate of spikes. Because the number of balls in each lifter changed, the number at each starting position also varied, and the second storm began with a different sound.

  This new storm was not exactly the one she heard in her head, but it was close. It was a little longer on thunder, but not quite as loud. She did not like it as well as her previous versions, and she began to wonder if she had just wasted her morning, but she let the sculpture play on. The third and fourth storms were also slightly different. But neither was up to her original creation.

  The fifth, however, was something she would not have imagined. Its thunder was never quite as loud as her original—she made a mental note to try to get a louder sound from the corrugated plate—but the thunder held its peak longer than she would have dared. The room shook with the sound. When the thunder finally released and gave way to the driving rain, she realized that she had been holding her breath and tensing every muscle in her body. She relaxed as the rain came, its sound washing away her tension.

  She listened for an hour as storm after storm swept through her shop. Sometimes the sculpture seemed to repeat itself, to play a storm that she had heard earlier, but every so often a new combination emerged that surprised and delighted her. The thunder of some storms seemed to linger, while with others it was the final rain washing across the desert that went on and on. It was never exactly what she had imagined, but it was always different, always powerful, the thunder and the rain first meeting the desert, then pummeling it, and finally merging with it. She listened to the last drops of a storm fade into the desert sand, and then she turned off the sculpture and stood.

  She walked over to the sliding glass doors that insulated her from the desert heat and opened them. They slid haltingly on tracks that she had rarely used. A blast of heat hit her, and she stepped outside. She crossed over the lawn and climbed the short fence that separated the grass from the desert beyond. She sat down in the sand and looked slowly around.

  A lizard basked in the sun on a nearby rock. She put her hand in the shadow of a clump of rabbit brush and felt the coolness. The clear sky and the stark landscape did have their own serene, spare beauty, a beauty that she had been unwilling to see. She closed her eyes and imagined the rain from her sculpture falling onto the sand around her.

  * * *

  The lights surrounding the new Santa Fe Arts Center sparkled in the darkness of the rapidly cooling September evening. The low-slung adobe building seemed almost to have grown there. The tiles of the square in front of the building alternated light and dark, like sand moving in and out of shadow. In the square’s center, under a billowing satin sheet, sat Teresa’s sculpture, Desert Rain.

  Teresa stood by Jeff and sipped her champagne. She looked carefully through the crowd, but if Carla was there, Teresa could not find her.

  Just before the mayor was to unveil the sculpture, Teresa spotted her friend getting out of a cab. Teresa waved, and Carla came running over.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, but we sat on the runway forever and then we had to wait in line to take off and—” Carla paused for breath and looked around. “Have I missed anything?” She glanced at Jeff. “Hi, Jeff.”

  “How are you, Carla?” he said.

  “No,” Teresa said, “you’re in time—barely.”

  Speakers around the square screeched as the mayor fiddled with the microphone. When he had everyone’s attention, the mayor spoke for a few minutes. He introduced the head of the Arts Commission, several of the biggest donors, and Teresa. When he was done talking he nodded at Teresa. She walked over to the sculpture. Then the mayor took a pair of oversized scissors from an assistant and cut the ribbon that held down the satin sheet. With a flourish, two attendants pulled the sheet away to reveal the sculpture.

  The metal gleamed in the glare of the recessed footlights that surrounded it. The winding steel track caught the light and reflected it in broken patterns. Curving lines of light crisscrossed the brass hands, the metal uprights, the curve of corrugated metal that produced the thunder.

  The Mayor asked the crowd for silence, and then motioned to Teresa. With a key, she turned on the sculpture.

  In the first storm, the thunder was not the longest she had heard, but it sustained long enough that she was ready when it finally broke. The sounds of the spreading rain lingered as the last of the balls wound through the maze.

  When the silence finally came, the crowd burst into applause. The sculpture began another storm over the last of the applause. People went back to talking and drinking, with small groups periodically wandering near the sculpture for a closer look.

  “That was beautiful,” Jeff said.

  “Great work,” agreed Carla. “This may be your best piece yet.”

  “Thanks.” Teresa felt oddly unsatisfied, incomplete. Jeff had moved closer to the sculpture, so Teresa turned to Carla.

  “Do me a favor, Carla,” she whispered.

  “Sure.”

  “Take Jeff over to the bar and get him to buy you a drink.”

  “Oh?” Carla raised one eyebrow.

  “I have to make a phone call, that’s all.” She hesitated. “To a friend.”

 
“Whatever you say.” Carla winked, and then headed toward Jeff.

  Teresa walked to a phone booth in a far corner of the square. She put her card in the machine and dialed home.

  Ian’s face appeared. “Hello, Teresa.”

  She fidgeted with the phone for a moment, not quite sure what to say. Finally, she spoke. “Look, Ian, I’m at the opening in Santa Fe and, well, I just wanted to say thanks, thanks for all the help you’ve given me. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “You’re welcome, Teresa. It was my pleasure.”

  “We really can be friends, can’t we, Ian?”

  “You bet.”

  She turned to face the sculpture. She could see Carla talking to Jeff. His back was to her. The crowd blocked most of the sculpture, but its sound was still clear. “Can you hear the sculpture, Ian?”

  “Yes. It sounds good.”

  “Thanks. I wanted you to hear it at least once. And thanks again for helping.” She faced the screen again. “Good-bye, Ian. See you at home.”

  “Good-bye, Teresa. I’ll look forward to seeing you again.”

  The phone’s screen went blank and Teresa turned away from it. As the sounds of desert rain washed over the square, she walked toward Jeff.

  HONORABLE MENTIONS

  1991

  Kathleen J. Alcalá, “Sweetheart,” IAsfm, Mar.

  Brian W. Aldiss, “Going for a Pee,” New Pathways 20.

  ———, “Summertime Was Nearly Over,” The Ultimate Frankenstein.

  Ray Aldridge, “The Gate of Faces,” F & SF, Apr.

  Poul Anderson, “Rokuro,” Full Spectrum 3.

  ———, “When Free Men Shall Stand,” What Might Have Been Volume 3.

  Kim Antieau, “The Mark of the Beast,” The Ultimate Werewolf.

  Isaac Asimov, “Forward the Foundation,” IAsfm, Nov.

  ———, “Gold,” Analog, Sept.

  ———, “Robot Visions,” IAsfm, Apr.

  Yoshio Aramaki, “The Blue Sun,” Strange Plasma 4.

  Michael Armstrong, “The Kikituk,” Cold Shocks.

  A. J. Austin, “Severing Ties,” Analog, Aug.