The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  So it was with no regret that I followed the last slice into the airlock myself, even looking forward to the scourging if White Hill was on the other side.

  She wasn’t. A number of other people were missing, too. She left this note behind:

  I knew from the day we were called back here what my new piece would have to be, and I knew I had to keep it from you, to spare you sadness. And to save you the frustration of trying to talk me out of it.

  As you may know by now, scientists have determined that the Fwndyri indeed have sped up the Sun’s evolution somehow. It will continue to warm, until in thirty or forty years there will be an explosion called the “helium flash.” The Sun will become a red giant, and the Earth will be incinerated.

  There are no starships left, but there is one avenue of escape. A kind of escape.

  Parked in high orbit there is a huge interplanetary transport that was used in the terraforming of Mars. It’s a couple of centuries older than you, but like yourself it has been excellently preserved. We are going to ride it out to a distance sufficient to survive the Sun’s catastrophe, and there remain until the situation improves, or does not.

  This is where I enter the picture. For our survival to be meaningful in this thousand-year war, we have to resort to coldsleep. And for a large number of people to survive centuries of coldsleep, they need my jaturnary skills. Alone, in the ice, they would go slowly mad. Connected through the matrix of my mind, they will have a sense of community, and may come out of it intact.

  I will be gone, of course. I will be by the time you read this. Not dead, but immersed in service. I could not be revived if this were only a hundred people for a hundred days. This will be a thousand, perhaps for a thousand years.

  No one else on Earth can do jaturnary, and there is neither time nor equipment for me to transfer my ability to anyone. Even if there were, I’m not sure I would trust anyone else’s skill. So I am gone.

  My only loss is losing you. Do I have to elaborate on that?

  You can come if you want. In order to use the transport, I had to agree that the survivors be chosen in accordance with the Earth’s strict class system—starting with dear Norita, and from that pinnacle, on down—but they were willing to make exceptions for all of the visiting artists. You have until mid-Deciembre to decide; the ship leaves Januar first.

  If I know you at all, I know you would rather stay behind and die. Perhaps the prospect of living “in” me could move you past your fear of coldsleep; your aversion to jaturnary. If not, not.

  I love you more than life. But this is more than that. Are we what we are?

  W.H.

  The last sentence is a palindrome in her language, not mine, that I believe has some significance beyond the obvious.

  * * *

  I did think about it for some time. Weighing a quick death, or even a slow one, against spending centuries locked frozen in a tiny room with Norita and her ilk. Chattering on at the speed of synapse, and me unable to not listen.

  I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.

  If White Hill were to be at the other end of those centuries of torture, I know I could tolerate the excruciation. But she was dead now, at least in the sense that I would never see her again.

  Another woman might have tried to give me a false hope, the possibility that in some remote future the process of jaturnary would be advanced to the point where her personality could be recovered. But she knew how unlikely that would be even if teams of scientists could be found to work on it, and years could be found for them to work in. It would be like unscrambling an egg.

  Maybe I would even do it, though, if there were just some chance that, when I was released from that din of garrulous bondage, there would be something like a real world, a world where I could function as an artist. But I don’t think there will even be a world where I can function as a man.

  There probably won’t be any humanity at all, soon enough. What they did to the Sun they could do to all of our stars, one assumes. They win the war, the Extermination, as my parent called it. Wrong side exterminated.

  Of course the Fwndyri might not find White Hill and her charges. Even if they do find them, they might leave them preserved as an object of study.

  The prospect of living on eternally under those circumstances, even if there were some growth to compensate for the immobility and the company, holds no appeal.

  * * *

  What I did in the time remaining before mid-Deciembre was write this account. Then I had it translated by a xenolinguist into a form that she said could be decoded by any creature sufficiently similar to humanity to make any sense of the story. Even the Fwndyri, perhaps. They’re human enough to want to wipe out a competing species.

  I’m looking at the preliminary sheets now, English down the left side and a jumble of dots, squares, and triangles down the right. Both sides would have looked equally strange to me a few years ago.

  White Hill’s story will be conjoined to a standard book that starts out with basic mathematical principles, in dots and squares and triangles, and moves from that into physics, chemistry, biology. Can you go from biology to the human heart? I have to hope so. If this is read by alien eyes, long after the last human breath is stilled, I hope it’s not utter gibberish.

  * * *

  So I will take this final sheet down to the translator and then deliver the whole thing to the woman who is going to transfer it to permanent sheets of platinum, which will be put in a prominent place aboard the transport. They could last a million years, or ten million, or more. After the Sun is a cinder, and the ship is a frozen block enclosing a thousand bits of frozen flesh, she will live on in this small way.

  So now my work is done. I’m going outside, to the quiet.

  SOME LIKE IT COLD

  John Kessel

  Here’s a stylish, bleak, and blackly ironic look at the future of the Entertainment Industry. If you think it’s a corrupt business now, hang around—you ain’t seen nothing yet …

  Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as to many other magazines and anthologies. Kessel’s first solo novel, Good News from Outer Space, was released in 1989 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which have since been assembled in his acclaimed collection Meeting in Infinity. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. His most recent book is an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop (which he also helps to run), called Intersections, coedited with Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His stories have appeared in our First, Second (in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly), Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Annual Collections. He is currently finishing a new novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice.

  Her heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein. Lincoln was out of the question, but with a little work I could look Einsteinesque. I grew a dark mustache, adopted wild graying hair. From wardrobe I requisitioned a pair of wool slacks, a white cotton shirt, a gabardine jacket with narrow lapels. The shoes were my own, my prized possession—genuine leather, Australian copies of mid twentieth-century brogues, comfortable, well broken in. The prep-room mirror reflected back a handsomer, taller, younger relative of old Albert, a cross between Einstein and her psychiatrist Dr. Greenson.

  The moment-universes surrounding the evening of Saturday
, August 4 were so thoroughly burned—tourists, biographers, conspiracy hunters, masturbators—that there was no sense arriving then. Besides, I wanted to get a taste of the old LA, before the quake. So I selected the Friday evening 18:00 PDT moment-universe. I materialized in a stall in the men’s room at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. Some aim for deserted places; I like airports, train stations, bus terminals. Lots of strangers if you’ve missed some detail of costume. Public transport easily available. Crowds to lose oneself in. The portable unit, disguised as an overnight bag, never looks out of place. I stopped in a shop and bought a couple of packs of Luckies. At the Hertz counter I rented a navy blue Plymouth with push-button transmission, threw my canvas camera bag and overnight case into the back and, checking the map, puzzled out the motel address on Wilshire Boulevard that Research had found for me.

  The hotel was ersatz Spanish, pink stucco and a red tile roof, a colonnade around a courtyard pool where a teenage boy in white T-shirt and DA haircut leaned on a cleaning net and flirted with a couple of fifteen-year-old girls. I sat in the shadowed doorway of my room, smoked a Lucky and watched until a fat woman in a caftan came out and yelled at the boy to get back to work. The girls giggled.

  The early evening I spent driving around. In Santa Monica I saw the pre-tsunami pier, the one she would tell Greenson she was going to visit Saturday night before she changed her mind and stayed home. I ate at the Dancers: a slab of prime rib, a baked potato the size of a football, a bottle of zinfandel. Afterward I drove my Plymouth along the Miracle Mile. I rolled down the windows and let the warm air wash over me, inspecting the strip joints, theaters, bars, and hookers. A number of the women, looking like her in cotton-candy hair and tight dresses, gave me the eye as I cruised by.

  I pulled into the lot beside a club called the Blue Note. Over the door a blue neon martini glass swamped a green neon olive in gold neon gin. Inside I ordered a scotch and listened to a trio play jazz. A thin white guy with a goatee strangled his saxophone: somewhere in there might be a melody. These cutting-edge late-moderns thought they had the future augured. The future would be cool and atonal, they thought. No squares allowed. They didn’t understand that the future, like the present, would be dominated by saps, and the big rush of 2043 would be barbershop quartets.

  I sipped scotch. A brutal high, alcohol, like putting your head in a vise. I liked it. I smoked a couple more Luckies, layering a nicotine buzz over the alcohol. I watched couples in the dim corners of booths talk about their pasts and their futures, all those words prelude to going to bed. Back in Brentwood she was spending another sleepless night harassed by calls telling her to leave Bobby Kennedy alone.

  A woman with dark Jackie hair, black gloves, and a very low-cut dress sat down on the stool next to me. The song expired and there was a smattering of applause. “I hate this modern crap, don’t you?” the woman said.

  “It’s emblematic of the times,” I said.

  She gave me a look, decided to laugh. “You can have the times.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” I said.

  “You’re not American, are you? The accent.”

  “I was born in Germany.”

  “Ah. So you’ve seen bad times?”

  I sipped my scotch. “You could say so.” Her eyelids were heavy with shadow, eyelashes a centimeter long. Pale pink lipstick made her thin lips look cool; I wondered if they really were. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  “Thanks.” She watched me fumble with the queer, nineteenth-century style currency. Pyramids with eyes on them, redeemable in silver on demand. I bought her a gin and tonic. “My name’s Carol,” she told me.

  “I am Detlev.”

  “Detleff? Funny name.”

  “Not so common, even in Germany.”

  “So Detleff, what brings you to LA? You come over the Berlin Wall?”

  “I’m here to see a movie star.”

  She snorted. “Won’t find any in here.”

  “I think you could be a movie star, Carol.”

  “You’re not going to believe this, Detleff, but I’ve heard that line before.”

  “You’ll have to offer me another then.”

  We flirted through three drinks. She told me she was lonely, I told her I was a stranger. We fell toward a typical liaison of the Penicillin Era: we learned enough about each other (who knew how much of it true?) not to let what we didn’t know come between us and what we wanted. Her image of me was compounded by her own fantasies. I didn’t have so many illusions. Or maybe mine were larger still, since I knew next-to-nothing about these people other than what I’d gleaned from images projected on various screens. An image had brought me here; images were my job. They had something to do with reality, but more to do with desire.

  I studied the cleavage displayed by Carol’s dress, she leaned against my shoulder, and from this we generated a lust we imagined would turn to sweet compassion, make up for our losses, and leave us blissfully complete in the same place. We would clutch each other’s bodies until we were spent, lie holding each other close, our souls commingled, the first moment of a perfect marriage that would extend forward from this night in an endless string of equally fulfilling nights. Then we’d part in the morning and never see each other again. That was the dream. I followed her back to her apartment and we did our best to produce it. Afterward I lay awake thinking of Gabrielle, just after we’d married, sunbathing on the screened beach at Nice. I’d watched her, as had the men who passed by. How much of her wanted us to look at her? Was there any difference, in her mind, between my regard and theirs?

  I left Carol asleep with the dawn coming up through the window, made my way back to the pink hotel, and got some sleep of my own.

  Saturday I spent touring pre-quake LA. I indulged vices I could not indulge in Munich in 2043. I smoked many cigarettes. I walked outside in direct sunlight. I bought a copy of the Wilhelm edition of the I Ching, printed on real paper. At midafternoon I stepped into a diner and ordered a bacon cheeseburger, rare, with lettuce and tomato and a side of fries. My mouth watered as the waitress set it in front of me, but after two bites I felt overcome by a wave of nausea. Hands sticky with blood and mayonnaise, I watched the grease congeal in the corner of the plate.

  So far, so good. I was a fan of the dirty pleasures of the twentieth century. Things were so much more complicated then. People walked the streets under the shadow of the bomb. They all knew, at some almost biological level, that they might be vaporized at any second. Their blood vibrated with angst. Even the blonde ones. I imagined my ancestors half a world away in a country they expected momentarily to turn into a radioactive battleground, carrying their burden of guilt through the Englischer Garten. Sober Adenauer, struggling to stitch together half a nation. None of them fat, bored, or decadent.

  And Marilyn, the world over, was their goddess. That improbable female body, that infantile voice, that oblivious demeanor.

  Architecturally, LA 1962 was a disappointment. There was the appropriate amount of kitsch, hot-dog stands shaped like hot dogs and chiropractors’ offices like flying saucers, but the really big skyscrapers that would come down in the quake hadn’t been built yet. Maybe some of them wouldn’t be built in this time-line anymore, thanks to me. By now my presence, through the butterfly effect, had already set this history off down another path from the one of my home. Anything I did toppled dominoes. Perhaps Carol’s life would be ruined by the memory of our night of perfect love. Perhaps the cigarettes I bought saved crucial lives. Perhaps the breeze of my Plymouth’s passing brought rain to Belgrade, drought to India. For better or worse, who could say?

  I killed time into the early evening. By now she was going through the two-hour session with Greenson trying to shore up her personality against that night’s depression.

  At 9:00 I took my camera bag and the portable unit and got into the rental car. It was still too early, but I was so keyed up I couldn’t sit still. I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, walked along the beach at Malibu, then turned
around and headed back. Sunset Boulevard twisted through the hills. The lights of the houses flickered between trees. In Brentwood I had some trouble finding Carmelina, drove past, then doubled back. Marilyn’s house was on Fifth Helena, a short street off Carmelina ending in a cul-de-sac. I parked at the end, slung my bags over my shoulder, and walked back.

  A brick and stucco wall shielded the house from the street. I circled round through the neighbor’s yard, pushed through the bougainvillea and approached from the back. It was a modest hacienda-style ranch, a couple of bedrooms, tile roof. The patio lights were off and the water in the pool lay smooth as dark glass. Lights shone from the end bedroom to the far left.

  First problem would be to get rid of Eunice Murray, her companion and housekeeper. If what had happened in our history was true in this one, she’d gone to sleep at midevening. I stepped quietly through the back door, found her in her bedroom and slapped a sedative patch onto her forearm, holding my hand across her mouth against her struggling until she was out.

  A long phone cord snaked down the hall from the living room and under the other bedroom door. The door was locked. Outside, I pushed through the shrubs, mucking up my shoes in the soft soil, reached in through the bars over the opened window, and pushed aside the blackout curtains. Marilyn sprawled face down across the bed, right arm dangling off the side, receiver clutched in her hand. I found the unbarred casement window on the adjacent side of the house, broke it open, then climbed inside. Her breathing was deep and irregular. Her skin was clammy. Only the faintest pulse at her neck.

  I rolled her onto her back, got my bag, pried back her eyelid and shone a light into her eye. Her pupil barely contracted. I had come late on purpose, but this was not good.

  I gave her a shot of apomorphine, lifted her off the bed and shouldered her toward the bathroom. She was surprisingly light—gaunt, even. I could feel her ribs. In the bathroom, full of plaster and junk from the remodelers, I held her over the toilet until she vomited. No food, but some undigested capsules. That would have been a good sign, except she habitually pierced them with a pin so they’d work faster. There was no way of telling how much Nembutal she had in her bloodstream.