The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “You should be outside,” I said, briskly throwing off my jacket, lifting the phone off its hook. “A day like this. The yacht race is about to start.”

  “Sussh.…” She was watching TV. Two experts, I saw, were talking. Behind them was an old picture of the fabled starship.

  “You haven’t been watching this crap all day?”

  “It’s interesting,” she said.

  The picture changed to a fuzzy video shot of old Earth. People everywhere, more cars in the streets than you’d have thought possible. Then other shots of starving people with flies crawling around their eyes. Most of them seemed to be black, young, female.

  “I guess we’ve come a long way,” I said, getting a long glass from the marble-topped corner cabinet and filling it with the stuff that Hannah had made up in a jug. It tasted suspiciously non-alcoholic, but I decided to stick with it for now, and to sit down on the sofa beside her and try, as the grey-haired expert on the screen might have put it, to make contact.

  Hannah looked at me briefly when I laid my hand on her thigh, but then she re-crossed her legs and turned away. No chance of getting her into bed then, either. The TV presenter was explaining that many of the people on the starship had left relatives behind. And here, he said, smiling his presenter’s smile, is one of them. The camera panned to an old lady. Her Dad, it seemed, was one of the travelers up there. Now, she was ancient. She nodded and trembled like a dry leaf. Some bloody father, I thought. I wonder what excuse he’ll give tonight, leaving his daughter as a baby, then next saying hello across light years to a lisping hag.

  “Oh, Jesus.…”

  “What’s the matter?” Hannah asked.

  “Nothing.” I shook my head.

  “Did you have an okay morning?”

  “It was fine. I thought I’d come back early, today being today.”

  “That’s nice. You’ve eaten?”

  “I’ve had lunch.”

  I stood up and wandered back over to the cabinet, topping my drink up to the rim with vodka. Outside, in the bay, the gun went off to signify the start of the yacht race. I stood on the patio and watched the white sails turn on a warm soft wind that bowed the heavy red blooms in our garden and set the swing down the steps by the empty sandpit creaking on its rusted hinges.

  I went back inside.

  Hannah said, “You’re not planning on getting drunk, are you?”

  I shrugged and sat down again. The fact was, I’d reached a reasonable equilibrium. The clear day outside and this shadowed room felt smooth and easy on my eyes and skin. I’d managed to put that ridiculous scene with Erica behind me, and the retsina, and now the vodka, were seeing to it that nothing much else took its place. Eventually, the TV experts ran out of things to say, and the studio faded abruptly and gave way to an old film. I soon lost the plot and fell asleep. And I dreamed, thankfully and gratefully, about nothing. Of deep, endless, starless dark.

  * * *

  We dressed later and drove through Danous in the opentop toward Jay Dax’s villa up in the hills. All the shops were open after the long siesta. Music and heat and light poured across the herringboned cobbles, and the trinket stalls were full of replicas of the starship. You could take your pick of earrings, keyrings, lucky charms, models on marble stands with rubies for rockets, kiddie toys. I added to the general mayhem by honking the horn and revving the engine to get through the crowds. And I found myself checking the lamplit faces, wondering if Erica was here, or where else she might be. But all I could imagine were giggles and sweaty embraces. Erica was a bitch—always was, always would be. Now, some other girl, some child who, these fifteen years on, would be almost her build, her age.…

  Then, suddenly—as we finally made it out of town—we saw the stars. They’d all come out tonight, a shimmering veil over the grey-dark mountains.

  “I was thinking, this afternoon,” Hannah said, so suddenly that I knew she must have been playing the words over in her head. “That we need to find time for ourselves.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Trouble is, when you do what I do for a living.…”

  “You get sick of hearing about problems? You don’t want to know about your own?”

  Her voice was clear and sweet over the sound of the engine and the whispering night air. I glanced across and saw from the glint of her eyes that she meant what she was saying. I accelerated over the brow of a hill into the trapped sweetness of the valley beyond, wishing that I hadn’t drunk the retsina and the vodka, wishing that I’d answered the phone in the surgery, fighting back a gathering sense of unease.

  I said, “We haven’t really got much to complain about, have we? One tragedy in our whole lives, and at least that left a few happy memories. Anyone should be able to cope with that. And time—do you really think we’re short of time?”

  She folded her arms. After all, she’d been the one who’d gone to pieces. I’d been the source of strength. Good old Owen who—all things considered—took it so well. And after everything, after all the Johns, and the warm and pretty years in this warm and pretty location, and with business at the surgery still going well, how could I reasonably complain?

  Soon there were other cars ahead of us, other guests heading for parties in the big villas. And there was a campfire off to the right, people dancing and flickering like ghosts through the bars of the forest. We passed through the wrought iron gates, and Jay Dax’s white villa floated into view along the pines, surrounded tonight by a lake of polished coachwork. We climbed out. All the doors were open, all the windows were bright. A waltz was playing. People were milling everywhere.

  I took Hannah’s hand. We climbed the marble steps to the main doorway and wandered in beneath a cavernous pink ceiling. The Gillsons and the Albarets were there. Andre Prilui was there too, puffed up with champagne after a good showing in the Starship Day yacht race. Why, if only Spindrift hadn’t tacked across his bows on the way around the eastern buoy … and look, here comes Owen, Good Old Owen with his pretty cello-playing wife, Hannah.

  “Hey!”

  It was Rajii, husband of Hannah’s sister Bernice. He took us both by the arm, steering us along a gilded corridor.

  “Come on, the garden’s where everything’s happening.”

  I asked, “Have you seen Sal?”

  “Sal?” Rajii said, pushing back a lock of his black hair, “Sal Mohammed?” Already vague with drink and excitement. “No, now you mention it. Not a sign.…”

  This was a big party even by Jay Dax’s standards. The lanterns strung along the huge redwoods that bordered the lawns enclosed marquees, an orchestra, swingboats, mountainous buffets. No matter what news came through on the tachyon burst from the starship, the party already had the look of a great success.

  Bernice came up to us. She kissed Hannah and then me, her breath smelling of wine as she put an arm round my waist, her lips seeking mine. We were standing on the second of the big terraces leading down from the house. “Well,” Rajii said, “What’s your guess, then? About this thing from the stars.”

  Ah yes, this thing from the stars. But predictions this close to the signal were dangerous; I mean, who wanted to be remembered as the clown who got it outrageously wrong?

  “I think,” Hannah said, “That the planet they find will be green. I mean, the Earth’s blue, Mars is red, Venus is white. It’s about time we had a green planet.”

  “What about you, Owen?”

  “What’s the point in guessing?” I said.

  I pushed my way off down the steps, touching shoulders at random, asking people if they’d seen Sal. At the far end of the main lawn, surrounded by scaffolding, a massive screen reached over the treetops, ready to receive the starship’s transmission. Presently, it was black; the deepest color of a night sky without stars, like the open mouth of God preparing to speak. But my face already felt numb from the drink and the smiling. I could feel a headache coming on.

  I passed through an archway into a walled garden and sat down on a bench. Overhead now,
fireworks were crackling and banging like some battlefield of old. I reached beside me for the drink I’d forgotten to bring, and slumped back, breathing in the vibrant night scents of the flowers. These days, people were getting used to me disappearing, Owen walking out of rooms just when everyone was laughing, Owen vanishing at dances just as the music was starting up. Owen going off in a vague huff and sitting somewhere, never quite out of earshot, never quite feeling alone. People don’t mind—oh, that’s Owen—they assume I’m playing some amusing private game. But really, I hate silence, space, solitude, any sense of waiting. Hate and fear it as other people might fear thunder or some insect. Hate it, and therefore have to keep peeking. Even in those brief years when Hannah and I weren’t alone and our lives seemed filled, I could still feel the empty dark waiting. The black beyond the blue of these warm summer skies.

  Somewhere over the wall, a man and a woman were laughing. I imagined Bernice coming to find me, following when I walked off, as I was sure she was bound to do soon. The way she’d kissed me tonight had been a confirmation, and Rajii was a fool—so who could blame her? Not that Bernice would be like Erica, but right now that was an advantage. A different kind of John was just what I needed. Bernice would be old and wise and knowing, and the fact that she was Hannah’s sister—that alone would spice things up for a while.

  I thought again of the day I’d been through: scenes and faces clicking by. Hannah half asleep in bed this morning; Mrs. Edwards in the surgery; hopeless Sal Mohammed; young and hopeful Erica; then Hannah again, and the dullness of the drink, and all the people here at this party, the pointless endless cascade; and the starship, the starship, the starship, and the phone ringing unanswered in the surgery and me taking it off the hook there and doing so again when I got home. And no sign of Sal this evening, although he’d told me he was going to come.

  I walked back out of the rose garden just as the fog of the fireworks was fading and the big screen was coming on. I checked my watch. Not long now, but still I climbed the steps and went back through the nearly empty house and found the car. I started it up and drove off down the drive, suddenly and genuinely worried about Sal, although mostly just thinking how tedious and typical of me this was becoming, buggering off at the most crucial moment of this most crucial of nights.

  But it was actually good to be out on the clean night road with the air washing by me. No other cars about now, everybody had got somewhere and was doing something. Everybody was waiting. And I could feel the stars pressing down, all those constellations with names I could never remember. Sal Mohammed’s house was on the cliffs to the west of the town, and so I didn’t have to drive through Danous to get there. I cut the engine outside and sat for a moment, listening to the beat of the sea, and faintly, off through the hedges and the gorse and the myrtle, the thump of music from some neighbor’s party. I climbed out, remembering days in the past. Sal standing in a white suit on the front porch, beckoning us all in for those amazing meals he then used to cook. Sal with that slight sense of camp that he always held in check, Sal with his marvelous, marvelous way with a story. Tonight, all the front windows were dark, and the paint, as it will in this coastal environment if you don’t have it seen to regularly, was peeling.

  I tried the bell and banged the front door. I walked around the house, peering in at each of the windows. At the back, the porch doors were open, and I went inside, turning on lights, finding the usual bachelor wreckage. I could hear a low murmur, a TV, coming from Sal’s bedroom. Heavy with premonition, I pushed open the door, and saw the colored light playing merely over glasses and bottles on a rucked and empty bed. I closed the door and leaned back, breathless with relief, then half-ducked as a shadow swept over me. Sal Mohammed was hanging from the ceiling.

  I dialed the police from the phone by the bed. It took several beats for them to answer and I wondered as I waited who would be doing their job tonight. But the voice that answered was smooth, mechanical, unsurprised. Yes, they’d be along. Right away. I put down the phone and gazed at Sal hanging there in the shifting TV light, wondering if I should cut the cord he’d used, or pick up the chair. Wondering whether I’d be interfering with evidence. The way he was hanging and the smell in the room told me that it didn’t matter. He’d done a good job, had Sal; it even looked, from the broken tilt of his head, that he’d made sure it ended quickly. But Sal—although he was incapable of admitting it to himself—was bright and reliable and competent in almost everything he did. I opened a window, then sat back down on the bed, drawn despite myself toward the scene that the TV in the corner was now playing.

  The announcer had finally finished spinning things out, and the ancient photo of the starship in pre-launch orbit above the Moon had been pulled out to fill the screen. It fuzzed, and the screen darkened for a moment. Then there was another picture, in motion this time, and at least as clear as the last one, taken from one of the service pods that drifted like flies around the main body of the starship. In the harsh white light of a new sun, the starship looked old. Torn gantries, loose pipes, black flecks of meteorite craters. Still, the systems must be functioning, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing this at all. And of course it looked weary—what else was there to expect?

  The screen flickered. Another view around the spaceship, and the white flaring of that alien sun, and then, clumsily edited, another. Then inside. Those long grey tunnels, dimly and spasmodically lit, floorless and windowless, that were filled by the long tubes of a thousand living coffins. The sleepers. Then outside again, back amid the circling drones, and those views, soon to become tedious, of the great starship drifting against a flaring sun.

  As I watched, my hand rummaged amid the glasses and the bottles that Sal had left on the bed. But they were all empty. And I thought of Erica, how she was spending these moments, and of all the other people at the gatherings and parties. I, at least, would be able to give an original answer if I was asked, in all the following years—Owen, what were you doing when we first heard from the stars?

  The TV was now showing a long rock, a lump of clinker really, flipping over and over, catching light, then dark. Then another rock. Then back to the first rock again. Or it could have been a different one—it was hard to tell. And this, the announcer suddenly intoned, breaking in on a silence I hadn’t been aware of, is all the material that orbits this supposedly friendly cousin of our sun. No planets, no comets even. Despite all the studies of probability and orbital perturbation, there was just dust and rubble here, and a few mile-long rocks.

  There would be no point now in waking the sleepers in their tunnels and tubes. Better instead to unfurl the solar sails and use the energy from this sun to find another one. After all, the next high-probability star lay a mere three light years away, and the sleepers could dream through the time of waiting. Those, anyway, who still survived.…

  I stood up and turned off the TV. Outside, I could hear a car coming. I opened the front door and stood watching as it pulled in from the road. Hardly a car at all really, or a van. Just a grey colorless block. But the doors opened, and the police emerged. I was expecting questions—maybe even a chance to break the news about the starship—but the police were faceless, hooded, dark. They pushed by me and into the house without speaking.

  Outside, it was quiet now. The noise of the neighbor’s party had ceased, and there was just the sound and the smell of the sea. People would be too surprised to be disappointed. At least, at first. Sal had obviously seen it coming—or had known that there was nothing about this Starship Day that could change things for him. Death, after all, isn’t an option that you can ever quite ignore. And it’s never as random as people imagine, not even if it happens to a kid just out playing on a swing in their own back garden. Not even then. You always have to look for some kind of purpose and meaning and reason, even inside the dark heart of what seems like nothing other than a sick and pointless accident.

  The police came out again, lightly carrying something that might or might not have been Sa
l’s body. Before they climbed back into their grey van, one of them touched my shoulder with fingers as cool as the night air and gave me a scrap of paper. After they’d driven off, I got back into my car and took the road down into the now quiet streets of Danous, and parked by the dark harbor, and went up the steps to my surgery.

  It all seemed odd and yet familiar, to be sitting at my desk late on Starship Day with the PC humming. The screen flashed PLEASE WAIT. For what? How many years? Just how much longer will the dreamers have to go on dreaming? I felt in my pocket for the piece of paper, and carefully typed in the long string of machine code. Then I hit return.

  PLEASE WAIT.

  I waited. The words dribbled down off the screen, then the screen itself melted, and me with it, and then the room. The lifting of veils, knowing where and what I truly was, never came as the surprise I expected. Each time it got less so. I wondered about what Sal Mohammed had said to me in the dream of this morning. All that stuff about grey endless corridors—was he seeing where he really was? But I supposed that after this number of journeys and disappointments, after so many dead and lifeless suns, and no matter how well I did my job, it was bound to happen. How many Starship Days had there been now? How many years of silence and emptiness? And just how far were we, now, from Earth? Even here, I really didn’t want to think about that.