21st Century Science Fiction

by D B Hartwell

  “What’s your problem?” I say.

  Her dark eyes widen, increasing the pool of milky white around them. She looks at Bobby. The sequins of her scarf catch the sun.

  “Jesus Christ, Weyers, what are you talking about?”

  “I just wanta know,” I say still looking at her, “what it is with all this crying all the time, I mean like is it a disease, or what?”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake.” The goats’ heads rear, and the bells jingle. Bobby pulls on the reins. The goats step back with clomps and the rattle of wheels but I continue to block their path. “What’s your problem?”

  “It’s a perfectly reasonable question,” I shout at his shadow against the bright sun. “I just wanta know what her problem is.”

  “It’s none of your business,” he shouts and at the same time the smaller girl speaks.

  “What?” I say to her.

  “It’s the war, and all the suffering.”

  Bobby holds the goats steady. The other girl holds onto his arm. She smiles at me but continues to weep.

  “Well, so? Did something happen to her?”

  “It’s just how she is. She always cries.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Weyers!”

  “You can’t cry all the time, that’s no way to live.”

  Bobby steers the goats and cart around me. The younger girl turns and stares at me until, at some distance, she waves but I turn away without waving back.

  • • • •

  Before it was abandoned and then occupied by the Manmensvitzenders the big house on the hill had been owned by the Richters. “Oh sure they were rich,” my father says when I tell him I am researching a book. “But you know, we all were. You should have seen the cakes! And the catalogs. We used to get these catalogs in the mail and you could buy anything that way, they’d mail it to you, even cake. We used to get this catalog, what was it called, Henry and Danny? Something like that. Two guys’ names. Anyhow, when we were young it was just fruit but then, when the whole country was rich you could order spongecake with buttercream, or they had these towers of packages they’d send you, filled with candy and nuts and cookies, and chocolate, and oh my God, right in the mail.”

  “You were telling me about the Richters.”

  “Terrible thing what happened to them, the whole family.”

  “It was the snow, right?”

  “Your brother, Jaime, that’s when we lost him.”

  “We don’t have to talk about that.”

  “Everything changed after that, you know. That’s what got your mother started. Most folks just lost one, some not even, but you know those Richters. That big house on the hill and when it snowed they all went sledding. The world was different then.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Well, neither could we. Nobody could of guessed it. And believe me, we were guessing. Everyone tried to figure what they would do next. But snow? I mean how evil is that anyway?”

  “How many?”

  “Oh, thousands. Thousands.”

  “No, I mean how many Richters?”

  “All six of them. First the children and then the parents.”

  “Wasn’t it unusual for adults to get infected?”

  “Well, not that many of us played in the snow the way they did.”

  “So you must have sensed it, or something.”

  “What? No. We were just so busy then. Very busy. I wish I could remember. But I can’t. What we were so busy with.” He rubs his eyes and stares out the window. “It wasn’t your fault. I want you to know I understand that.”

  “Pop.”

  “I mean you kids, that’s just the world we gave you, so full of evil you didn’t even know the difference.”

  “We knew, Pop.”

  “You still don’t know. What do you think of when you think of snow?”

  “I think of death.”

  “Well, there you have it. Before that happened it meant joy. Peace and joy.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Well, that’s my point.”

  • • • •

  “Are you feeling all right?” She dishes out the macaroni, puts the bowl in front of me and stands, leaning against the counter, to watch me eat.

  I shrug.

  She places a cold palm on my forehead. Steps back and frowns. “You didn’t eat anything from those girls, did you?”

  I shake my head. She is just about to speak when I say, “But the other kids did.”

  “Who? When?” She leans so close that I can see the lines of makeup sharp against her skin.

  “Bobby. Some of the other kids. They ate candy.”

  Her hand comes palm down, hard, against the table. The macaroni bowl jumps, and the silverware. Some milk spills. “Didn’t I tell you?” she shouts.

  “Bobby plays with them all the time now.”

  She squints at me, shakes her head, then snaps her jaw with grim resolve. “When? When did they eat this candy?”

  “I don’t know. Days ago. Nothing happened. They said it was good.”

  Her mouth opens and closes like a fish. She turns on her heels and grabs the phone as she leaves the kitchen. The door slams. I can see her through the window, pacing the backyard, her arms gesturing wildly.

  • • • •

  My mother organized the town meeting and everybody came, dressed up like it was church. The only people who weren’t there were the Manmensvitzenders, for obvious reasons. Most people brought their kids, even the babies who sucked thumbs or blanket corners. I was there and so was Bobby with his grandpa who chewed the stem of a cold pipe and kept leaning over and whispering to his grandson during the proceedings which quickly became heated, though there wasn’t much argument, the heat being fueled by just the general excitement of it, my mother especially in her roses dress, her lips painted a bright red so that even I came to some understanding that she had a certain beauty though I was too young to understand what about that beauty wasn’t entirely pleasing. “We have to remember that we are all soldiers in this war,” she said to much applause.

  Mr. Smyths suggested a sort of house arrest but my mother pointed out that would entail someone from town bringing groceries to them. “Everybody knows these people are starving. Who’s going to pay for all this bread anyway?” she said. “Why should we have to pay for it?”

  Mrs. Mathers said something about justice.

  Mr. Hallensway said, “No one is innocent anymore.”

  My mother, who stood at the front of the room, leaning slightly against the village board table, said, “Then it’s decided.”

  Mrs. Foley, who had just moved to town from the recently destroyed Chesterville, stood up, in that way she had sort of crouching into her shoulders, with those eyes that looked around nervously so that some of us had secretly taken to calling her Bird Woman, and with a shaky voice, so soft everyone had to lean forward to hear, said, “Are any of the children actually sick?”

  The adults looked at each other and each other’s children. I could tell that my mother was disappointed that no one reported any symptoms. The discussion turned to the bright colored candies when Bobby, without standing or raising his hand, said in a loud voice, “Is that what this is about? Do you mean these?” He half laid back in his chair to wiggle his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of them.

  There was a general murmur. My mother grabbed the edge of the table. Bobby’s grandfather, grinning around his dry pipe, plucked one of the candies from Bobby’s palm, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.

  Mr. Galvin Wright had to use his gavel to hush the noise. My mother stood up straight and said, “Fine thing, risking your own life like that, just to make a point.”

  “Well, you’re right about making a point, Maylene,” he said, looking right at my mother and shaking his head as if they were having a private discussion, “but this is candy I keep around the house to get me out of the habit of smoking. I order it through
the Government Issue catalog. It’s perfectly safe.”

  “I never said it was from them,” said Bobby, who looked first at my mother and then searched the room until he found my face, but I pretended not to notice.

  When we left, my mother took me by the hand, her red fingernails digging into my wrist. “Don’t talk,” she said, “just don’t say another word.” She sent me to my room and I fell asleep with my clothes on still formulating my apology.

  • • • •

  The next morning when I hear the bells, I grab a loaf of bread and wait on the porch until they come back up the hill. Then I stand in their path.

  “Now what d’you want?” Bobby says.

  I offer the loaf, like a tiny baby being held up to God in church. The weeping girl cries louder, her sister clutches Bobby’s arm. “What d’you think you’re doing?” he shouts.

  “It’s a present.”

  “What kind of stupid present is that? Put it away! Jesus Christ, would you put it down?”

  My arms drop to my sides, the loaf dangles in its bag from my hand. Both girls are crying. “I just was trying to be nice,” I say, my voice wavering like the Bird Woman’s.

  “God, don’t you know anything?” Bobby says. “They’re afraid of our food, don’t you even know that?”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause of the bombs, you idiot. Why don’t you think once in a while?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The goats rattle their bells and the cart shifts back and forth. “The bombs! Don’t you even read your history books? In the beginning of the war we sent them food packages all wrapped up the same color as these bombs that would go off when someone touched them.”

  “We did that?”

  “Well, our parents did.” He shakes his head and pulls the reins. The cart rattles past, both girls pressed against him as if I am dangerous.

  • • • •

  “Oh, we were so happy!” my father says, rocking into the memory. “We were like children, you know, so innocent, we didn’t even know.”

  “Know what, Pop?”

  “That we had enough.”

  “Enough what?”

  “Oh, everything. We had enough everything. Is that a plane?” he looks at me with watery blue eyes.

  “Here, let me help you put your helmet on.”

  He slaps at it, bruising his fragile hands.

  “Quit it, Dad. Stop!”

  He fumbles with arthritic fingers to unbuckle the strap but finds he cannot. He weeps into his spotted hands. It drones past.

  Now that I look back on how we were that summer, before the tragedy, I get a glimmer of what my father’s been trying to say all along. It isn’t really about the cakes, and the mail order catalogs, or the air travel they used to take. Even though he uses stuff to describe it that’s not what he means. Once there was a different emotion. People used to have a way of feeling and being in the world that is gone, destroyed so thoroughly we inherited only its absence.

  “Sometimes,” I tell my husband, “I wonder if my happiness is really happiness.”

  “Of course it’s really happiness,” he says, “what else would it be?”

  • • • •

  We were under attack is how it felt. The Manmensvitzenders with their tears and fear of bread, their strange clothes and stinky goats were children like us and we could not get the town meeting out of our heads, what the adults had considered doing. We climbed trees, chased balls, came home when called, brushed our teeth when told, finished our milk, but we had lost that feeling we’d had before. It is true we didn’t understand what had been taken from us, but we knew what we had been given and who had done the giving.

  We didn’t call a meeting the way they did. Ours just happened on a day so hot we sat in Trina Needles’s playhouse fanning ourselves with our hands and complaining about the weather like the grownups. We mentioned house arrest but that seemed impossible to enforce. We discussed things like water balloons, T.P.ing. Someone mentioned dog shit in brown paper bags set on fire. I think that’s when the discussion turned the way it did.

  You may ask, who locked the door? Who made the stick piles? Who lit the matches? We all did. And if I am to find solace, twenty-five years after I destroyed all ability to feel that my happiness, or anyone’s, really exists, I find it in this. It was all of us.

  • • • •

  Maybe there will be no more town meetings. Maybe this plan is like the ones we’ve made before. But a town meeting is called. The grownups assemble to discuss how we will not be ruled by evil and also, the possibility of widening Main Street. Nobody notices when we children sneak out. We had to leave behind the babies, sucking thumbs or blanket corners and not really part of our plan for redemption. We were children. It wasn’t well thought out.

  When the police came we were not “careening in some wild imitation of barbaric dance” or having seizures as has been reported. I can still see Bobby, his hair damp against his forehead, the bright red of his cheeks as he danced beneath the white flakes that fell from a sky we never trusted; Trina spinning in circles, her arms stretched wide, and the Manmensvitzender girls with their goats and cart piled high with rocking chairs, riding away from us, the jingle bells ringing, just like in the old song. Once again the world was safe and beautiful. Except by the town hall where the large white flakes rose like ghosts and the flames ate the sky like a hungry monster who could never get enough.

  TONY BALLANTYNE Born and raised in the northeast of England, Tony Ballantyne made his first sale in 1999, and is best known for his Recursion trilogy of hard SF novels published between 2004 and 2007. Very little of his fiction has been published outside of the United Kingdom thus far, and readers unfamiliar with his work will find many surprises both in science and in fiction.

  “The Waters of Meribah,” published in 2003, is a work of what some have called “radical hard SF.” It builds a universe in which not only is it true that “everything we know is wrong,” but everything SF readers passionately believe is wrong. For instance, the universe, far from being a vast cosmos remote from human concern, is actually only three hundred miles across, and extraordinarily responsive to the presence and feelings of living things. And curiosity, far from being the driver of our greatest achievements, is in fact our fatal flaw. All of this is gradually revealed from the point of view of a convict who is being used as the subject in a series of increasingly dire experiments. It is one of the most creepily memorable stories in modern SF.

  THE WATERS OF MERIBAH

  A pair of feet stood on the table, just waiting to be put on. Grayish-green feet, webbed like ducks; they looked a little like a pair of diver’s flippers, only alive. Very, very alive.

  “We thought we’d start with the feet as you can wear them underneath your clothes while you get used to them. It’s probably best that no one suspects what you are—to begin with, anyway.”

  “Good idea,” said Buddy Joe, looking over the head of the rotund Doctor Flynn at the feet. Alien feet. A faint mist hung around them, alien sweat exuding from alien pores.

  Doctor Flynn held out an arm to stop Buddy Joe from reaching for the feet and putting them on right away.

  “Slow down, Buddy Joe. I have to ask, for the record. Are you sure that you want to put the feet on? You know there will be no taking them off once you have done so.”

  “Yes, I want to put them on,” said Buddy Joe, eyeing the feet.

  “You know that once they are attached they will be part of you? If your body rejects them, it will be rejecting its own feet? Or worse, they may stay attached but the interface may malfunction, leaving you in constant pain?”

  “I know that.”

  “And yet you still want to go ahead?”

  “Of course. I’ve been pumped full of Compliance as a part of my sentence. I have no choice but to do what you tell me.”

  “Oh, I know that. I just need to hear you say it for the record.”

  Docto
r Flynn moved out of the way. Buddy Joe was free to pick up the feet and carry them across the room to a chair. There he sat down, kicked off his shoes and socks and pulled them on.

  It was like pushing his naked human feet into a pair of rubber gloves. He struggled, twisted and wriggled them into position. The alien feet did not want him; they were fighting back, trying to spit him out. Somewhere deep inside his brain he could feel himself screaming. His hands were burning, soaked in the acidic sweat that oozed from the pores of the alien feet. His own feet were being amputated, dissolved by the first stage of the alien body that Doctor Flynn and his team were making him put on. Buddy Joe was feeling excruciating pain, but the little crystal of Compliance that was slowly dissolving into his bloodstream kept him smiling all the while.

  And then, all of a sudden, the feet slipped into place and they became part of him.

  “That’s it!” called one of Doctor Flynn’s team. She looked up from her console and nodded at a nurse. “You can remove the sensors now.”

  She peeled the sticky strips away from his skin and dropped them in the disposal chute.

  “A perfect take. We’ve done it, team.”

  Doctor Flynn was shaking hands with the other people in the room. People were looking at consoles, at the feet, at each other, in every direction but at Buddy Joe. Buddy Joe just stood there, smiling down at his strange new feet, wondering at the strange new sensations he was feeling. The floor felt different through them. Too dry and brittle.

  Doctor Flynn came over, a grin spreading over his round, shiny face. “Okay, we’d like you to walk across the room. Can you do that?”

  He could do that. Dip your feet into a pool of water and see how refraction bends them out of shape. That’s how the feet felt to Buddy Joe. At an angle to the rest of his body; but part of him. Still part of him.

  He took a step forward with his left leg, and the left foot narrowed as he raised it. As it descended it flared out to its full webbed glory, flattened itself out and felt for the texture of the plasticized floor. It recoiled. The floor was too dry, too brittle. A good gush of acid would melt it to nothing. He moved his right foot, and then he flapped and squelched his way across the floor.