Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

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  About the Editor

  Copyright Page

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  For my mother, who loved words.

  Preface

  Tor.com celebrated its tenth anniversary on July 20, 2018—the forty-ninth anniversary of the first manned moon landing. It started out innocently enough. In 2006, our publisher, Fritz Foy, while attending the Tor Books holiday party, pulled Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden and me aside and said he wanted to create a “river of conversation, art, and fiction” within the SF/F community—an online magazine that crossed the borders between publishers and media.

  It took us a couple years to get off the ground. During that time, whenever we felt lost in the process, we’d come back to the word “genuine.” We wanted to build a place that treated science fiction and fantasy (and related subjects) with gravitas and humor, a place to have fun without shying away from weightier, more thoughtful subjects. In short, we wanted to build a place where we wanted to hang out. The ten years since the launch feel like a day, and like a million years. So much has changed, but the essence remains the same—we’re still talking about the things we love. Through all the hashtags and trending topics, we still find the key to success is focusing on good, solid content.

  We’ve published short fiction from day one. We knew from the start that fiction was always going to be at the heart of Tor.com. As publishers it made sense, but also … the entire site is dedicated to storytelling. Of course we wanted fiction to be our focal point. We have since published hundreds of original stories, along with art, reprints, comics, and poems—all of which are a source of pride for us, as well as bringing enjoyment to our readers.

  Within these covers you’ll find a selection of those stories. There are established authors, sure to be read for decades, alongside newer writers working hard to make their mark on the field. Some of these stories are award nominees and winners. Most of all, they are stories in which to see ourselves reflected with grace and humor and, at times, with terror. They reach deep inside us as they stretch for the stars and are as intrinsically human as they are impossible.

  With my art background, I’m much more comfortable calling myself a curator than an editor—especially when all of these stories were initially acquired by a dream team of editorial talent. The consistent quality of the stories that come into my email inbox each month is slightly less mind-boggling when I remember that they are coming from Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Liz Gorinsky, and a select group of others. As publishers, we gave these editors free rein, and they ran with it. What you see is their taste and vision in as pure a form as we can offer.

  Putting this anthology together was a heartbreaking enterprise in many ways. As much as I enjoy revisiting the stories collected here, I feel as if I am leaving old friends behind when it comes to the ones that couldn’t fit in this volume. If you like these stories, I really do hope that you might make your way over to the website and explore others. There was so much that had to be left out. Some of my favorites were just too long to include—Mary Rickert’s short novel The Mothers of Voorhisville and Veronica Schanoes’s stunning novella Burning Girls, to name just two. John Scalzi’s hilarious April Fools’ Day offering, an “excerpt” from The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, would be out of context here, but, I assure you, is well worth your time. And please check out Wesley Allsbrook and Barrie Potter’s amazing short comic To Eternity.

  We’ve also commissioned poetry and flash fiction over the years, wonderful pieces that deserve all the attention they can get. There are so many worlds and voices to discover.

  While we are on the subject of what is not here, I want to express a special thanks to all the artists who have contributed to the website throughout the years. They have played a big part in making Tor.com a premier outlet for short fiction. Their contribution is incalculable. This anthology wasn’t the place to showcase their illustrations, but look them up: The work is glorious and every bit as affecting as the stories themselves.

  It takes a rocket to run a website. Literally countless people are involved when you include the readers, our most important collaborators. I do hope you take a look at the acknowledgments and see for yourself how many people have helped, in so many ways, to bring these stories to you today.

  We decided to launch on Moon Landing Day for its obvious inspiration and appeal to us as science fiction fans. Having reached the moon, we continue to explore. We still touch the stars and use that perspective to reflect and measure ourselves. With infinite curiosity, I hope you enjoy the stories that these forty authors have crafted. And I hope you enjoy them enough to keep coming back to Tor.com for decades to come.

  Irene Glynn-Gallo

  New York City

  January 2018

  Six Months, Three Days

  Charlie Jane Anders

  The story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future and a woman who can see all possible futures. They’re both right. Hugo Award winner, Nebula Award nominee. Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

  The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.

  Judy is nervous but excited, keeps looking at things she’s spotted out of the corner of her eye. She’s wearing a floral Laura Ashley–style dress with an ankh necklace and her legs are rambunctious, her calves moving under the table. It’s distracting because Doug knows that in two and a half weeks, those cucumber-smooth ankles will be hooked on his shoulders, and that curly reddish-brown hair will spill everywhere onto her lemon-floral pillows; this image of their future coitus has been in Doug’s head for years, with varying degrees of clarity, and now it’s almost here. The knowledge makes Doug almost giggle at the wrong moment, but then it hits him: she’s seen this future too—or she may have, anyway.

  Doug has his sandy hair cut in a neat fringe that was almost fashionable a couple years ago. You might think he cuts his own hair, but Judy knows he doesn’t, because he’ll tell her otherwise in a few weeks. He’s much, much better looking than she thought he would be, and this comes as a huge relief. He has rude, pouty lips and an upper lip that darkens no matter how often he shaves it, with Elvis Costello glasses. And he’s almost a foot taller than her, six foot four. Now that Judy’s seen Doug for real, she’s re-imagining all the conversations they might be having in the coming weeks and months, all of the drama and all of the sweetness. The fact that Judy can be attracted to him, knowing everything that could lie ahead, consoles her tremendously.

  Judy is nattering about some Chinese novelist she’s been reading in translation, one of those cruel satirists from the days after the May Fourth Movement, from back when writers were so conflicted they had to rename themselves things lik
e “Contra Diction.” Doug is just staring at her, not saying anything, until it creeps her out a little.

  “What?” Doug says at last, because Judy has stopped talking and they’re both just staring at each other.

  “You were staring at me,” Judy says.

  “I was…” Doug hesitates, then just comes out and says it. “I was savoring the moment. You know, you can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone.”

  “Well, I didn’t know the hour and the day when you and I would meet,” Judy puts a hand on his. “I saw many different hours and days. In one timeline, we would have met two years ago. In another, we’d meet a few months from now. There are plenty of timelines where we never meet at all.”

  Doug laughs, then waves a hand to show that he’s not laughing at her, although the gesture doesn’t really clarify whom or what he’s actually laughing at.

  Judy is drinking a cocktail called the Coalminer’s Daughter, made out of ten kinds of darkness. It overwhelms her senses with sugary pungency, and leaves her lips black for a moment. Doug is drinking a wheaty pilsner from a tapered glass, in gulps. After one of them, Doug cuts to the chase. “So this is the part where I ask. I mean, I know what happens next between you and me. But here’s where I ask what you think happens next.”

  “Well,” Judy says. “There are a million tracks, you know. It’s like raindrops falling into a cistern, they’re separate until they hit the surface, and then they become the past: all undifferentiated. But there are an awful lot of futures where you and I date for about six months.”

  “Six months and three days,” Doug says. “Not that I’ve counted or anything.”

  “And it ends badly.”

  “I break my leg.”

  “You break your leg ruining my bicycle. I like that bike. It’s a noble five-speed in a sea of fixies.”

  “So you agree with me.” Doug has been leaning forward, staring at Judy like a psycho again. He leans back so that the amber light spilling out of the Radish Saloon’s tiny lampshades turn him the same color as his beer. “You see the same future I do.” Like she’s passed some kind of test.

  “You didn’t know what I was going to say in advance?” Judy says.

  “It doesn’t work like that—not for me, anyway. Remembering the future is just like remembering the past. I don’t have perfect recall, I don’t hang on to every detail, the transition from short-term memory to long-term memory is not always graceful.”

  “I guess it’s like memory for me too,” Judy says.

  Doug feels an unfamiliar sensation, and he realizes after a while it’s comfort. He’s never felt this at home with another human being, especially after such a short time. Doug is accustomed to meeting people and knowing bits and pieces of their futures, from stuff he’ll learn later. Or if Doug meets you and doesn’t know anything about your future, that means he’ll never give a crap about you, at any point down the line. This makes for awkward social interactions, either way.

  They get another round of drinks. Doug gets the same beer again, Judy gets a red concoction called a Bloody Mutiny.

  “So there’s one thing I don’t get,” Doug says. “You believe you have a choice among futures—and I think you’re wrong, you’re seeing one true future and a bunch of false ones.”

  “You’re probably going to spend the next six months trying to convince yourself of that,” Judy says.

  “So why are you dating me at all, if you get to choose? You know how it’ll turn out. For that matter, why aren’t you rich and famous? Why not pick a future where you win the lottery, or become a star?”

  Doug works in tech support, in a poorly ventilated subbasement of a tech company in Providence, Rhode Island, that he knows will go out of business in a couple years. He will work there until the company fails, choking on the fumes from old computers, and then be unemployed a few months.

  “Well,” Judy says. “It’s not really that simple. I mean, the next six months, assuming I don’t change my mind, they contain some of the happiest moments of my life, and I see it leading to some good things, later on. And you know, I’ve seen some tracks where I get rich, I become a public figure, and they never end well. I’ve got my eye on this one future, this one node way off in the distance, where I die aged ninety-seven, surrounded by lovers and grandchildren and cats. Whenever I have a big decision to make, I try to see the straightest path to that moment.”

  “So I’m a stepping stone,” Doug says, not at all bitterly. He’s somehow finished his second beer already, even though Judy’s barely made a dent in her Bloody Mutiny.

  “You’re maybe going to take this journey with me for a spell,” Judy says. “People aren’t stones.”

  And then Doug has to catch the last train back to Providence, and Judy has to bike home to Somerville. Marva, her roommate, has made popcorn and hot chocolate, and wants to know the whole story.

  “It was nice,” Judy says. “He was a lot cuter in person than I’d remembered, which is really nice. He’s tall.”

  “That’s it?” Marva said. “Oh, come on, details. You finally meet the only other freaking clairvoyant on Earth, your future boyfriend, and all you have to say is, ‘He’s tall.’ Uh-uh. You are going to spill like a fucking oil tanker. I will ply you with hot chocolate, I may resort to Jim Beam, even.”

  Marva’s “real” name is Martha, but she changed it years ago. She’s a grad student studying eighteenth-century lit, and even Judy can’t help her decide whether to finish her PhD. She looks like pop culture’s idea of a fag hag: slightly chubby, with perfect crimson hair and clothing by Sanrio, Torrid, and Hot Topic. She is fond of calling herself “mallternative.”

  “I’m drunk enough already. I nearly fell off my bicycle a couple times,” Judy says.

  The living room is a pigsty, so they sit in Judy’s room, which isn’t much better. Judy hoards items she might need in one of the futures she’s witnessed, and they cover every surface. There’s a plastic replica of a Filipino fast-food mascot, Jollibee, which she might give to this one girl Sukey in a couple of years, completing Sukey’s collection and making her a friend for life—or Judy and Sukey may never meet at all. A phalanx of stuffed animals crowds Judy and Marva on the big fluffy bed. The room smells like a sachet of whoop-ass (cardamom, cinnamon, lavender) that Judy opened up earlier.

  “He’s a really sweet guy.” Judy cannot stop talking in platitudes, which bothers her. “I mean, he’s really lost, but he manages to be brave. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to feel like you have no free will at all.”

  Marva doesn’t point out the obvious thing—that Judy only sees choices for herself, not anybody else. Suppose a guy named Rocky asks Marva out on a date, and Judy sees a future in which Marva complains, afterwards, that their date was the worst evening of her life. In that case, there are two futures: one in which Judy tells Marva what she sees, and one in which she doesn’t. Marva will go on the miserable date with Rocky, unless Judy tells her what she knows. (On the plus side, in fifteen months, Judy will drag Marva out to a party where she meets the love of her life. So there’s that.)

  “Doug’s right,” Marva says. “I mean, if you really have a choice about this, you shouldn’t go through with it. You know it’s going to be a disaster, in the end. You’re the one person on Earth who can avoid the pain, and you still go sticking fingers in the socket.”

  “Yeah, but…” Judy decides this will go a lot easier if there are marshmallows in the cocoa, and runs back to the kitchen alcove. “But going out with this guy leads to good things later on. And there’s a realization that I come to as a result of getting my heart broken. I come to understand something.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Judy finds the bag of marshmallows. They are stale. She decides cocoa will revitalize them, drags them back to her bedroom, along with a
glass of water.

  “I have no idea, honestly. That’s the way with epiphanies: You can’t know in advance what they’ll be. Even me. I can see them coming, but I can’t understand something until I understand it.”

  “So you’re saying that the future that Doug believes is the only possible future just happens to be the best of all worlds. Is this some Leibniz shit? Does Dougie always automatically see the nicest future or something?”

  “I don’t think so.” Judy gets gummed up by popcorn, marshmallows, and sticky cocoa, and coughs her lungs out. She swigs the glass of water she brought for just this moment. “I mean—” She coughs again, and downs the rest of the water. “I mean, in Doug’s version, he’s only forty-three when he dies, and he’s pretty broken by then. His last few years are dreadful. He tells me all about it in a few weeks.”

  “Wow,” Marva says. “Damn. So are you going to try and save him? Is that what’s going on here?”

  “I honestly do not know. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Doug, meanwhile, is sitting on his militarily neat bed, with its single hospital-cornered blanket and pillow. His apartment is almost pathologically tidy. Doug stares at his one shelf of books and his handful of carefully chosen items that play a role in his future. He chews his thumb. For the first time in years, Doug desperately wishes he had options.

  He almost grabs his phone, to call Judy and tell her to get the hell away from him, because he will collapse all of her branching pathways into a dark tunnel, once and for all. But he knows he won’t tell her that, and even if he did, she wouldn’t listen. He doesn’t love her, but he knows he will in a couple weeks, and it already hurts.

  “God damn it! Fucking god fucking damn it fuck!” Doug throws his favorite porcelain bust of Wonder Woman on the floor and it shatters. Wonder Woman’s head breaks into two jagged pieces, cleaving her magic tiara in half. This image, of the Amazon’s raggedly bisected head, has always been in Doug’s mind, whenever he’s looked at the intact bust.