The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “Bosh. The world’s full of bible thumpers, and you’re just another one of them, a little more successful than most. Can’t cross the street some days without some revival preacher going on and on with smug and vaporous pieties. Can’t hear yourself think. Satan? I am personally going to undertake his rehabilitation. He’s been given a bum rap, I think, and I’m quite looking forward to meeting him myself to get his side of the story.”

  “I think you – ”

  “And as for preachers,” Clemens continued, ignoring Bryan, “my experience is that they are for the main part con men. Slick talkers who extract money from people by promising paradise in the sky. I don’t have much use for them.”

  “Mr. Clemens,” Bryan said coldly, “I believe you have just called me a con man.”

  Sam nodded slowly. “Reckon maybe I did.”

  “Mr. Clemens, I and my campaign have showed you hospitality. I don’t believe that I am expected to tolerate insults. Please absent yourself. My assistants will be instructed that you are no longer a person who is desired in my presence, now or in the future.”

  Sam nodded. “You asked for my private opinions. You got ’em. Can’t say you weren’t warned. Oh, and about Darwin. I expect that I lean a little his way, too.”

  The Edison campaign was foundering.

  In only two weeks, Edison’s laboratory had brought out fluorovision tubes to compete with the Tesla tele-videon. Now the two campaigns competed fiercely over which one could lease more telegraph wires to bring campaign speeches to the boroughs, engaging in a competition much to the profit of the telegraph companies.

  But the political maps meticulously kept by Horovitz were pierced by an unhealthy infusion of red pins, the color of Bryan’s Democrats, expanding slowly but inexorably from the heartland outward.

  From the Alleghenies to the Rocky Mountains, farmers and working men were listening to Bryan. It was not Bryan’s campaign speeches that were winning him converts, but his rapidly expanding tele-videon ministry. Bryan had somehow tapped directly into the American heart. He would tell his listeners about the healing power of Jesus and lead the faithful in prayer, and the next day a hundred newspapers reported how blind men began to see. He would lead the faithful in song, and if the papers were to be credited, the deathly sick would sit up from their deathbeds and join the singing. And when Bryan said that they needed money, across America the faithful opened their hearts and their wallets, sending money to Bryan by the barrel, by the ox-cart, by the freight load.

  Edison’s sermons, about how he would reform government by bringing in scientific management, went almost unheard.

  Yet when Sam Clemens came (walking right past the receptionist who but a month ago had told him that Edison would never be available to see him), Edison was remarkably cheerful. “Mr. Mark Twain!” he said in a loud voice. “I am a great admirer of yours!”

  “Thank you,” Clemens said.

  Edison turned his head. “Could you talk a little more distinctly? I have to admit, I have a slight difficulty in hearing.”

  Clemens cleared his throat and said more loudly, “I said, thank you.”

  “Ah, that’s what I expected you’d say. Say, the way I heard things, you and Miss Bernhardt were the ones worked out inventing this tele-videon thing. Any truth to that rumor?”

  “Maybe a tiny bit of truth, Mr. Edison,” Clemens said. “Not so much.”

  “Truth, you say? Ah – that’s a wonderful bit of inventing. Took me almost a week to match it. If you ever need a job, come up to my factory, I’ll have Charles fix you up with a job. Tell him I sent you.”

  “I’m not in the inventing business these days,” Clemens said. “I confess Nikola did the electrical part.”

  “Eh? Nikola? Ah, my erstwhile employee. Well, he’s a tinkerer, reckon I have to give him that, but not much of a practical man.” Edison’s manner changed abruptly to business. “So, Mr. Twain, what is your purpose in coming to visit? I’m a busy man, I must say.”

  “Well, Mr. Edison, I’m here on business,” Sam said. “Got something to sell, what turns out to be just exactly what I figure you need.”

  “And what, exactly, is this I need?”

  “You have an invention, I see, but you don’t rightly know just what to do with it, I reckon,” he said. “The tele-what-is-it, that is.”

  “The fluorovision.”

  “That’s the whatsit. You can send moving pictures out over the wires to everybody from Petunia Flats to East Hell, but you can’t find anything to get them to watch.”

  Edison waved his hands. “My corporation is making films right now. Let Bryan use his tele-videon for superstition. The Edison fluorovision will bring education to the masses.”

  “And will this win the campaign for you, Mr. Edison?”

  “No,” Edison said emphatically. “No, that it will not.”

  “You need an entertainer. A performer. A showman.”

  Edison seemed about to object, but then paused a moment and said, “Perhaps I do. And you propose?”

  “The best.” Samuel Clemens smiled and bowed. “Myself, of course.”

  “And?”

  “I will thrill the masses and bring laughter and music and culture to the people. And make them watch and listen . . . and, in so doing, put them in a mood to hear your message.”

  “And you call this?”

  Samuel Clemens smiled. “I will call it The Mark Twain Variety Hour.”

  “And that’s the story, every word of it unvarnished truth,” Mark Twain said. “Or anyway, that’s the way I heard it told, and now I’m telling you.”

  The live audience howled its laughter, and Clemens bowed and smiled. He dropped out of his Mark Twain voice and turned to the camera.

  “This wraps up today’s Variety Hour,” he said in his finest lecturing voice. “Turn to us next week, same time, same place, when we will bring you the celebrated vaudevillians Fields and Weber. Let me assure you, they’re the funniest things on four legs. And we’ll have the famous soliloquy from Shakespeare’s masterpiece “Hamlet,” acted out by the magnificent Mam’selle Bernhardt of Paris. We’ll have the musical genius John Philip Sousa, and, last and, well, least,” he paused for the laugh, “yours truly just perhaps might be convinced to read you a new story from Calaveras county.

  “This will be a show you won’t want to miss, gentlemen and ladies. Until then, try Cleveland Soap, it keeps you clean. And finally, tell all your friends: A vote for Edison is a vote for America.”

  The camera came in for its final close-up, and he gave it his famous wink and a smile and then signaled with his hands for the cut. Immediately his crew rushed in with a glass of whisky and a cigar, and he dropped into his easy chair.

  “How’d I do?”

  “You were great, Mr. Twain!” the camera boy said. “The best ever!”

  It was an unnecessary question. He knew the show had done well today. He had put in two of Edison’s messages and had managed to mention Cleveland Soap five times and Lydia Pinkham’s Elixir for Ladies six times. Each mention was a hundred dollars in his pocket.

  He was flush, he was in his stride, and he loved every minute of it. With the new televideon broadcasting, Samuel Clemens had found his element and was on top of the world. Did Mr. Bryan think he could hold them with his tele-evangelism? He would give Mr. Bryan a lesson on how to grab an audience, that he would, that he would indeed.

  Horovitz leaned forward and shut off the televideon. (It was an Edison fluorovision, of course, not the crude Tesla tele-videon, but the word televideon had somehow stuck.)

  Mr. Westinghouse promised that within the year, he would have his improved televideons in the home of every man with ten dollars in his pocket – and now that Westinghouse was making a profit on them, he made sure that the programs sent out over the telegraph wires were compatible with both.

  For all his hard work, the election was going to be too close to call, Horovitz knew, but already he was thinking far beyond that. Forget
the election – it didn’t even matter any more, he reckoned. It was going to be the man on the televideon, not the president, who would be the real leader of this coming generation.

  It was time to leave politics. He was tired of it anyway. Twain’s variety show proved that people would watch, and Horovitz thought that this was just the beginning. Over the years, he had learned how to tell people what they wanted. If they would watch Mr. Twain tell jokes, would not people watch, say, a game of baseball on the televideon? Or perhaps football? Wrestling? Which one would play better on the screen? Could he dramatize some of the penny-dreadful novels, perhaps some western gunfighter stories? The eyes of America were eagerly waiting.

  Ah, the twentieth century! So many possibilities! He leaned back and lit his cigar. Barely three years old, and already it was turning out to be a doozy. He could hardly wait to find out what would come next.

  WELCOME TO OLYMPUS, MR. HEARST

  Kage Baker

  One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late 90s, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has since become one of that magazines most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a High Fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her first novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. Her second novel, Sky Coyote, was published in 1999, followed by a third and a fourth, Mendoza in Hollywood and The Graveyard Game, both published in 2001. In 2002, she published her first collection, Black Projects, White Knights. Her most recent books are a novel set in her unique fantasy milieu, The Anvil of the World, and a chapbook novella, The Empress of Mars. Coming up are more Company novels, a novel called The Life of the World to Come, and a new collection, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories. Her stories have appeared in our Seventeenth and Twentieth Annual Collections. In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.

  In the hugely entertaining story that follows, she serves up one of the best of her Company stories, taking us on a droll and fast-paced tour of the Enchanted Hill, to witness a confrontation among the great and powerful that could have momentous – and unexpected – results . . .

  OPENING CREDITS: 1026

  “TAKE TEN!” called the director. Lowering his megaphone, he settled back in his chair. It sank deeper into the sand under his weight, and irritably settling again he peered out at the stallion galloping across the expanse of dune below him, its burnoosed rider clinging against the scouring blast of air from the wind machines.

  “Pretty good so far. . . .” chanted the assistant director. Beside him Rudolph Valentino (in a burnoose that matched the horseman’s) nodded grimly. They watched as the steed bore its rider up one wave of sand, down the next, nearer and nearer to that point where they might cut away –

  “Uh-oh,” said the grip. From the sea behind them a real wind traveled forward across the sand, tearing a palm frond from the seedy-looking prop trees around the Sheik’s Camp set and sending it whirling in front of the stallion. The stallion pulled up short and began to dance wildly. After a valiant second or so the rider flew up in the air and came down on his head in the sand, arms and legs windmilling.

  “Oh, Christ,” the director snarled. “CUT! KILL THE WIND!”

  “YOU OKAY, LEWIS?” yelled the script boy.

  The horseman sat up unsteadily and pulled swathing folds of burnoose up off his face. He held up his right hand, making an okay sign.

  “SET UP FOR TAKE ELEVEN!” yelled the assistant director. The horseman clambered to his feet and managed to calm his mount; taking its bridle he slogged away with it, back across the sand to their mark. Behind them the steady salt wind erased the evidence of their passage.

  “This wind is not going to stop, you know,” Valentino pointed out gloomily. He stroked the false beard that gave him all the appearance of middle age he would ever wear.

  “Ain’t there any local horses that ain’t spooked by goddam palm leaves?” the grip wanted to know.

  “Yeah. Plowhorses,” the director told them. “Look, we paid good money for an Arabian stallion. Do you hear the man complaining? I don’t hear him complaining.”

  “I can’t even see him,” remarked the assistant director, scanning the horizon. “Jeez, you don’t guess he fell down dead or anything, out there?”

  But there, up out of the sand came the horse and his rider, resuming position on the crest of the far dune.

  “Nah. See?” the director said. “The little guy’s a pro.” He lifted the megaphone, watching as Lewis climbed back into the saddle. The script boy chalked in the update and held up the clapboard for the camera. Crack!

  “WIND MACHINES GO – AND – TAKE ELEVEN!”

  Here they came again, racing the wind and the waning light, over the lion-colored waves as the camera whirred, now over the top of the last dune and down, disappearing –

  Disappearing –

  The grip and the assistant director groaned. Valentino winced.

  “I don’t see them, Mr. Fitzmaurice,” the script boy said.

  “So where are they?” yelled the director. “CUT! CUT, AND KILL THE GODDAM WIND.”

  “Sorry!” cried a faint voice, and a second later Lewis came trudging around the dune, leading the jittering stallion. “I’m afraid we had a slight spill back there.”

  “WRANGLERS! Jadaan took a fall,” called the assistant director in horrified tones, and from the camp on the beach a half-dozen wranglers came running. They crowded around the stallion solicitously. Lewis left him to their care and struggled on toward the director.

  The headpiece of his burnoose had come down around his neck, and his limp fair hair fluttered in the wind, making his dark makeup – what was left after repeated face-first impact with dunes – look all the more incongruous. He spat out sand and smiled brightly, tugging off his spirit-gummed beard.

  “Of course, I’m ready to do another take if you are, Mr. Fitzmaurice,” Lewis said.

  “No,” said Valentino. “We will kill him or we will kill the horse, or both.”

  “Oh, screw it,” the director decided. “We’ve got enough good stuff in the can. Anyway the light’s going. Let’s see what we can do with that take, as far as it went.”

  Lewis nodded and waded on through the sand, intent on getting out of his robes; Valentino stepped forward to put a hand on his shoulder. Lewis squinted up at him, blinking sand from his lashes.

  “You work very hard, my friend,” Valentino said. “But you should not try to ride horses. It is painful to watch.”

  “Oh – er – thank you. It’s fun being Rudolph Valentino for a few hours, all the same,” said Lewis, and from out of nowhere he produced a fountain pen. “I don’t suppose I might have your autograph, Mr. Valentino?”

  “Certainly,” said Valentino, looking vainly around for something to autograph. From another nowhere Lewis produced a copy of the shooting script, and Valentino took it. “Your name is spelled?”

  “L-e-w-i-s, Mr. Valentino. Right there?” he suggested. “Right under where it says The Son of the Sheik?” He watched with a peculiarly stifled glee as Valentino signed: For my “other self” Lewis. Rudolph Valentino.

  “There,” said Valentino, handing him the script. “No more falls on the head, yes?”

  “Thank you so much. It’s very kind of you to be worried, but it’s all right, you know,” Lewis replied. “I can take a few tumbles. I’m a professional stunt man, after all.”

  He tucked the script away in his costume and staggered down to the water’s edge, where the extras an
d crew were piling into an old stakebed truck. The driver was already cranking up the motor, anxious to begin his drive back to Pismo Beach before the tide turned and they got bogged down again.

  Valentino watched Lewis go, shaking his head.

  “Don’t worry about that guy, Rudy,” the director told him, knocking sand out of his megaphone. “I know he looks like a pushover, but he never gets hurt, and I mean never.”

  “But luck runs out, like sand.” Valentino smiled wryly and waved at the dunes stretching away behind them, where the late slanting sunlight cast his shadow to the edge of the earth. “Doesn’t it? And that one, I think he has the look of a man who will die young.”

  Which was a pretty ironic thing for Valentino to say, considering that he’d be dead himself within the year and that Lewis happened to be, on that particular day in 1926, just short of his eighteen-hundred and-twenty-third birthday.

  If we immortals had birthdays, anyway.

  FLASH FORWARD: 1933

  “Oh, look, we’re at Pismo Beach,” exclaimed Lewis, leaning around me to peer at it. The town was one hotel and a lot of clam stands lining the highway. “Shall we stop for clams, Joseph?”

  “Are you telling me you didn’t get enough clams when you worked on Son of the Sheik?” I grumbled, groping in my pocket for another mint Lifesaver. The last thing I wanted right now was food. Usually I can eat anything (and have, believe me) but this job was giving me butterflies like crazy.

  “Possibly,” Lewis said, standing up in his seat to get a better view as we rattled past, bracing himself with a hand on the Ford’s windshield. The wind hit him smack in the face and his hair stood out all around his head. “But it would be nice to toast poor old Rudy’s shade, don’t you think?”

  “You want to toast him? Here.” I pulled out my flask and handed it to Lewis. “It would be nice to be on time for Mr. Hearst too, you know?”