The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  In the sly and seductive story that follows, he takes us to a world that is breathlessly waiting to celebrate a very unusual kind of holiday …

  The news was everywhere. It was in our dreams, it was on TV. Tonight, the travelers on the first starship from Earth would awaken.

  That morning, Danous yawned with the expectant creak of shutters, the first stretch of shadow across narrow streets. The air shimmered with the scent of warming pine, it brushed through the shutters and touched our thoughts even as our dreams had faded. For this was Starship Day, and, from tonight, nothing would ever be the same. Of course, there were parties organized. Yacht races across the bay. Holidays for the kids. The prospect of the starship’s first transmission, an instantaneous tachyon burst across the light years, had sent the wine sellers and the bakers scurrying toward their stocks and chasing their suppliers. And the suppliers had chased their suppliers. And the bread, the fruit, the hats, the dresses, the meat, the marquees, the music had never been in such demand. Not even when.… Not even when.… Not even when. But there were no comparisons. There had never been a day such as this.

  As if I needed reminding, the morning paper on the mat was full of it. I’d left my wife Hannah still asleep, weary from the celebrations that had already begun the night before, and there were wine glasses scattered in the parlor, the smell of booze and stale conversation. After starting with early drinks and chatter at the Point Hotel, Hannah’s sister Bernice and her husband Rajii had stayed around with us until late. At least, they’d stayed beyond the time I finally left the three of them and went to bed, feeling righteous, feeling like a sourpuss, wondering just what the hell I did feel. But some of us still had work to do on this starship morning. I opened the curtains and the shutters and let in the sound and the smell of the sea. I stacked a tray with the butts and bottles and glasses. I squeezed out an orange, filled a bowl with oats and yoghurt and honey. I sat down outside with the lizards in the growing warmth of the patio.

  Weighted with a stone, my newspaper fluttered in the soft breeze off the sea. Page after page of gleeful speculation. Discovery. Life. Starship. Hope. Message. Already, I’d had enough. Why couldn’t people just wait? All it took was for the tide to go in and out, for the sun to rise and fall, for stars and darkness to come, and we’d all know the truth anyway. So easy—but after all this time, humanity is still a hurrying race. And I knew that my patients would be full of it at the surgery, exchanging their usual demons for the brief hope that something from outside might change their lives. And I’d have to sit and listen, I’d have to put on my usual caring-Owen act. The stars might be whispering from out of the black far beyond this blue morning, but some of us had to get on with the process of living.

  * * *

  Hannah was still half-asleep when I went in to say goodbye.

  “Sorry about last night,” she said.

  “Why sorry?”

  “You were obviously tired. Rajii does go on.”

  “What time did they leave?”

  “I don’t know.” She yawned. “What time did you go to bed?”

  I smiled as I watched her lying there still tangled in sleep. Now that I had to go, I wanted to climb back in.

  “Will you be in for lunch?”

  “I’m—meeting someone.”

  Bad, that. The wrong kind of pause. But Hannah just closed her eyes, rolling back into the sheets and her own starship dreams. I left the room, pulled my cream jacket on over my shirt and shorts, and closed the front door.

  * * *

  I wheeled my bicycle from the lean-to beside the lavender patch and took the rough road down into town. For some reason, part of me was thinking, maybe we should get another dog; maybe that would be a change, a distraction.

  Another perfect morning. Fishing boats in the harbor. Nets drying along the quay. Already the sun was high enough to set a deep sparkle on the water and lift the dew off the bougainvillaea draped over the seafront houses. I propped my bike in the shadowed street outside the surgery and climbed the wooden steps to the door. I fed the goldfish tank in reception. I dumped the mail in the tray in my office. I opened a window, sat down at my desk, and turned on the PC, hitting the keys to call up my morning’s appointments. Mrs. Edwards scrolled up, 9:00. Sal Mohammed, 10:00. Then John for lunch. Mrs. Sweetney in the afternoon. On a whim, I typed in

  About the starship.

  PLEASE WAIT

  What do you think will happen?

  Again, PLEASE WAIT.

  The computer was right of course. Wait. Just wait. Please wait. A seagull mewed. The PC’s fan clicked faintly, ticking away the minutes as they piled into drifts of hours and days. Eventually, I heard the thump of shoes on the steps, and I called, “Come right in,” before Mrs. Edwards had time to settle with the old magazines in reception.

  “Are you sure, Owen? I mean, if you’re busy.…”

  “The door’s open.”

  Ah, Mrs. Edwards. Red-faced, the smell of eau de cologne already fading into nervous sweat. One of my regulars, one of the ones who keep coming long after they’d forgotten why, and who spend their days agonizing new angles around some old neurosis so that they can lay it in front of me like a cat dropping a dead bird.

  As always, she looked longingly at the soft chair, then sat down on the hard one.

  “Big day,” she said.

  “It certainly is.”

  “I’m terribly worried,” she said.

  “About the starship?”

  “Of course. I mean, what are they going to think of us?”

  I gazed at her, my face a friendly mask. Did she mean whatever star-creatures might be out there? Did she mean the travelers in the starship, waking from stasis after so many years? Now there was a thought. The travelers, awakening. I suppose they’ll wonder about their descendants here on Earth, perhaps even expect those silver-spired cities we all sometimes still dream about, or maybe corpses under a ruined sky, dead rivers running into poisoned seas.

  “Mrs. Edwards, there probably won’t be any aliens. Anyway, they might be benign.”

  “Benign?” She leaned forward over her handbag and gave me one of her looks. “But even if they are, how can we be sure?”

  * * *

  After Mrs. Edwards, Sal Mohammed. Sal was an old friend, and thus broke one of the usual rules of my practice. But I’d noticed he was drinking too heavily, and when I’d heard that he’d been seen walking the town at night in his pajamas—not that either of these things was usual per se—I’d rung him and suggested a visit.

  He sat down heavily in the comfortable chair and shook his head when I offered coffee. There were thickening grey bags under his eyes.

  He asked, “You’ll be going to Jay Dax’s party tonight?”

  “Probably. You?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, tired and sad and eager. “I mean, this is the big day, isn’t it? And Jay’s parties.…” He shook his head.

  “And how do you really feel?”

  “Me? I’m fine. Managing, anyway.”

  “How are you getting on with those tension exercises?”

  His eyes flicked over toward the cork notice board where a solitary child’s painting, once so bright, had curled and faded. “I’m finding them hard.”

  I nodded, wondering for the millionth time what exactly it was that stopped people from helping themselves. Sal still wasn’t able to even sit down in a chair for five minutes each day and do a few simple thought exercises. Most annoying of all was the way he still lumbered up to me at do’s, his body stuffed into a too-small suit and his face shining with sweat, all thin and affable bonhomie although I knew that he only managed to get out now by tanking up with downers.

  “But today’s like New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?” he said. “Starship Day.”

  I nodded. “That’s a way of seeing it.”

  “Everything could change—but even if it doesn’t, knowing it won’t change will be something in itself too, won’t it? It’s a time to make new resolutions.�
�”

  But Sal got vague again when I asked him about his own resolutions, and by the end of our session we were grinding through the usual justifications for the gloom that filled his life.

  “I feel as though I’m traveling down these grey and empty corridors,” he said. “Even when things happen, nothing ever changes.…”

  He’d gone on for so long by then—and was looking at me with such sincerity—that I snapped softly back, “Then why don’t you give up, Sal? If it’s really that bad—what is it that keeps you going?”

  He looked shocked. Of course, shocking them can sometimes work, but part of me was wondering if I didn’t simply want to get rid of Sal. And as he rambled on about the pointlessness of it all, I kept thinking of tonight, and all the other nights. The parties and the dances and the evenings in with Hannah and the quietly introspective walks along the cliffs and the picnics in the cool blue hills. I just kept thinking.

  * * *

  The lunches with John that I marked down on my PC were flexible. In fact, they’d got so flexible recently that one or the other of us often didn’t turn up. This particular John was called Erica, and we’d been doing this kind of thing since Christmas, in firelight and the chill snowy breath from the mountains. I’ve learnt that these kind of relationships often don’t transfer easily from one season to another—there’s something about the shift in light, the change in the air—but this time it had all gone on for so long that I imagined we’d reached a kind of equilibrium. That was probably when it started to go wrong.

  It was our usual place. The Arkoda Bar, up the steps beside the ruins. There was a group a few tables off that I vaguely recalled. Two couples, with a little girl. The girl was older now—before, she’d been staggering like a drunk on toddler’s splayed legs; now she was running everywhere—but that was still why I remembered them.

  I almost jumped when Erica came up behind me.

  “You must be early—or I must be late.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t been here long.”

  She sat down and poured what was left of the retsina into the second glass. “So you’ve been here a while.…”

  “I was just watching the kid. What time is it?”

  “Who cares? Don’t tell me you’ve been working this morning, Owen.”

  “I can’t just cancel appointments just because there’s some message coming through from the stars.”

  “Why not?”

  I blinked, puzzled for a moment, my head swimming in the flat white heat of the sun. “I do it because it’s my job, Erica.”

  “Sorry. Shall we start again?”

  I nodded, watching the golden fall of her hair; the sweat-damp strands clinging to her neck, really and truly wishing that we could start all over again. Wishing, too, that we’d be able to talk about something other than the goddamn starship.

  But no, Erica was just like everybody else—plotting the kind of day that she could witter on about in years to come. She wanted to rent a little boat so that we could go to some secret cove, swim and fish for shrimps, and bask on the rocks, and watch the night come in. She even had a little TV in her handbag all ready for the broadcast.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Erica. I’ve got appointments. And I’ve got to go out this evening.”

  “So have I. You’re not the only one with commitments.”

  “I just can’t escape them like you can. I’m a married man.”

  “Yeah.”

  The people with the little girl paused in their chatter to look over at us. We smiled sweetly back.

  “Let’s have another bottle of wine,” I suggested.

  “I suppose,” Erica said, “you just want to go back to that room of yours above the surgery so you can screw me and then fall asleep?”

  “I was hoping—”

  “—isn’t that right? Owen?”

  I nodded: it was, after all, a reasonably accurate picture of what I’d had in mind. I mean, all this business with the boat, the secret cove, fishing for shrimps.…

  I held out my hand to pat some friendly portion of her anatomy, but she leaned back out of my reach. The people with the kid had stopped talking and were staring deeply into their drinks.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This isn’t working, is it?”

  I kept a professional silence. Whatever was going to be said now, it was better that Erica said it. I mean, I could have gone on about her selfish enthusiasm in bed, her habit (look! she’s doing it now!) of biting her nails and spitting them out like seed husks, and the puzzled expression that generally crossed her face when you used any word with more than three syllables. Erica was a sweet, pretty kid. Tanned and warm, forgiving and forgetful. At best, holding her was like holding a flame. But she was still just a rich Daddy’s girl, good at tennis and tolerably fine at sex and swimming and happy on a pair of skis. And if you didn’t say anything damaging to her kind when you split up, they might even come back to you years later. By then they’d be softer, sadder, sweeter—ultimately more compromising, but sometimes worth the risk.

  So I sat there as Erica poured out her long essay on How Things Had Gone Wrong, and the sun beat down, and the air filled with the smell of hot myrtle, and the sea winked far below. And the little girl chased blue and red butterflies between the tables, and her parents sat listening to the free show in vaguely awestruck silence. It even got to me after a while. I had to squint and half-cover my face. Selfish, calculating, shallow, moody. Nothing new—Erica was hardly one for in-depth personal analysis—but she warmed to her subject, searching the sky for the next stinging adjective. Some of them were surprisingly on target—and for her, surprisingly long. I thought of that scarred and ancient starship tumbling over some strange new world, preparing to send us all a message. And I thought of me, sitting in the heat with the empty bottle of retsina, listening to this.

  “You’re right,” I said eventually. “You deserve better than me. Find someone your own age, Erica. Someone with your own interests.”

  Erica gazed at me. Interests. Did she have any interests?

  “But—”

  “—No.” I held up a hand, noticing with irritation that it was quivering like a leaf. “Everything you said is true.”

  “Just as long as you don’t say we can still be friends.”

  “But I think we will,” I said, pushing back the chair and standing up.

  Quickly bending down to kiss her cheek before she could lean away, I felt a brief pang of loss. But I pushed it away. Onward, onward.…

  “You’ll learn,” I said, “that everything takes time. Think how long it’s taken us to get to the stars.”

  I waved to her, and to the silent group with their sweet little kid. Then I jogged down the hot stone steps to my bike.

  * * *

  Back at the office, there was a note stuffed through the letterbox and the phone was ringing. The phone sounded oddly sad and insistent, but by the time I’d read Odette Sweetney’s message canceling her afternoon appointment on account of what she called This Starship Thing, it had clanged back into silence.

  I decided to clear the flat upstairs. The doorway led off from reception, with a heavy bolt to make it look unused—to keep up the charade with Hannah. I’d sometimes go on to her about how difficult it was to find a trusty tenant, and she’d just nod. I’d really given up worrying about whether she believed me.

  The gable room was intolerably hot. I opened the windows, then set about removing the signs of Erica’s habitation. I pulled off the sheets. I shook out the pillows. I picked up the old straw sunhat that lay beneath the wicker chair. For the life of me, I couldn’t ever remember Erica ever wearing such a thing. Perhaps it had belonged to Chloe, who’d been the previous John; straw hats were more her kind of thing. But had it really sat there all these months, something for Erica to stare at as we made love? It was all so thoughtlessly uncharacteristic of me. Under the bed, I found several blonde hairs, and a few chewed-off bits of fingernail.

  I re-bolt
ed the door and went back into the surgery. I turned on the PC and re-scheduled Odette Sweetney’s appointment. Then I gazed at the phone, somehow knowing that it was going to ring again. The sound it made was grating, at odds with the dusty placidity of my surgery, the sleepy white town and the sea beyond the window. I lifted the receiver, then let it drop. Ahh, silence. Today, everything could wait. For all I knew, we’d all be better tomorrow. Miraculously happy and healed.

  I locked the door and climbed onto my bicycle. I was determined to make the most of my rare free afternoon—no John, no patients—but time already stretched ahead of me like this steep white road. It’s a problem I’ve always had, what to do when I’m on my own. The one part of my work at the surgery that invariably piques my interest is when my patients talk about solitude. I’m still curious to know what other people do when they’re alone, leaning forward in my chair to ask questions like a spectator trying to fathom the rules of some puzzling new game. But for the second half of my marriage with Hannah, I’d found it much easier to keep busy. In the days, I work, or I chase Johns and screw. In the evenings, we go to dinners and parties. The prospect of solitude—of empty space with nothing to react to except your own thoughts—always leaves me feeling scared. So much better to be good old Owen in company, so much easier to walk or talk or drink or sulk or screw with some kind of audience to respond to.

  I cycled on. The kids were playing, the cats were lazing on the walls. People were getting drunk in the cafés, and the yachts were gathering to race around the bay. Our house lies east of the town, nesting with the other white villas above the sea. I found Hannah sitting alone in the shadowed lounge, fresh mint and ice chattering in the glass she was holding, her cello propped unplayed beside the music stand in the far corner. When I come home unexpectedly, I like it best of all when she’s actually playing. Sometimes, I’ll just hang around quietly and unannounced in some other part of the house, or sit down under the fig tree in the garden, listening to that dark sound drifting out through the windows, knowing that she doesn’t realize she has an audience—that I’m home. She’s a fine player, is Hannah, but she plays best unaccompanied, when she doesn’t realize anyone is listening. Sometimes, on days when there’s a rare fog over the island and the hills are lost in grey, the house will start to sing too, the wind-chimes to tinkle, the floorboards to creak in rhythm, the cold radiators to hum. The whole of her heart and the whole of our marriage is in that sound. I sit listening in the damp garden or in another room, wishing I could finally reach through it to the words and the feelings that must surely lie beyond.