The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  The chain, cheap lightweight links, gave way, and the door opened. Mia walked in.

  “Christ, Jack. Look at you.”

  I lay sprawled across the bed, and both Mias wrinkled their noses at the smell.

  I said, even though it wasn’t what I meant, “How the fuck did you get in here?”

  “Well, didn’t you see how I got in here? Weren’t you even conscious?” She walked closer and went on staring at me, in soiled underwear, the empty bottle on the floor. Something moved behind their eyes.

  “How did you find me?” It hurt to speak.

  “Hacked your Visa account. You put this dump on it.”

  “Go away, Mia.”

  “When I’m good and ready. Jesus, look at you.”

  “So don’t.”

  I tried to roll over, but couldn’t, so I closed my eyes.

  Mia said, “I didn’t think you had it in you. No, I really didn’t.” Her tone was so stupid—such a mix of ignorance and some sort of stupid feminine idealization of macho asshole behavior—that I opened my eyes again. She was smiling.

  “Get. Out. Now.”

  “Not till you tell me what this is all about. Is it Dr. Schraeder? They told me you two were pals.”

  Fran. The pain started again. And the numbers.

  “That’s it, isn’t it, Jack? She was your friend, not just your adviser. I’m sorry.”

  I said, “She was the only person I ever met who was what she was supposed to be.”

  “Yeah? Well, then, I’m really sorry. I’m not what I’m supposed to be, I know. And you sure the hell aren’t. Although, you know … you look closer to him this morning than you ever did on campus. More … real.”

  I couldn’t shove her out the door, and I couldn’t stop her talking, and I couldn’t roll over without vomiting. So I brought my arm up and placed it across my eyes.

  “Don’t cry, Jack. Please don’t cry.”

  “I’m not—”

  “On second thought, do cry. Why the fuck not? Your friend is dead. Go ahead and cry, if you want to!” And she knelt beside me, despite what I must smell like and look like, and put her arms around me while, hating every second of it, I cried.

  When I was done, I pushed her away. Drawing every fiber of my body into it, I hauled myself off the bed and toward the bathroom. My stomach churned and the rooms wavered. It took two hands to grope along the wall to the shower.

  The water hit me, hard and cold and stinging. I stood under it until I was shivering, and it took that long to realize I still had my briefs on. Bending over to strip them off was torture. My toothbrush scraped raw the inside of my mouth, and the nerves in my brain. I didn’t even care that when I staggered naked into the bedroom, Mia was still there.

  She said, “Your body is closer to his than your face.”

  “Get out, Mia.”

  “I told you, when I’m ready. Jack, there aren’t any more of us. At least not that I know of. Or that you do. We can’t fight like this.”

  I groped in my overnight bag, untouched for four days, for fresh underwear. Mia seemed different than she had in the cafeteria: gentler, less abrasive, although she looked the same. I didn’t care which—or who—she was.

  “We need each other,” Mia said, and now there was a touch of desperation in her voice. I didn’t turn around.

  “Jack—listen to me, at least. See me!”

  “I see you,” I said. “And I don’t want to. Not you, not anybody. Get out, Mia.”

  “No.”

  “Have it your way.”

  I pulled on my clothes, gritted my teeth to get on my shoes, left them untied. I braced myself to push past her.

  She stood in the exact center of the room, her hands dangling helplessly at her sides. Behind her the other Mia stood gracefully, her drooping body full of sorrow. But the physical Mia, face twisted in an ugly grimace, was the only one looking at me.

  I stopped dead.

  They always both looked at me. At the same time. Everybody’s both: Mia, Diane, Fran, the department chair, my students. Where one looked, the other looked. Always.

  Mia said, more subdued than I had ever heard her. “Please don’t leave me alone with this Jack. I … need you.”

  The other Mia looked across the room, not over my shoulder. Not at him. At … what?

  From a small difference in initial states you get widely differing states with repeated iterations. Diverging, diverging, chaos … and somewhere in there, the strange attractor. The means to make sense of it.

  And just like that, I saw the pattern in the phase space diagrams. I saw the equations.

  “Jack? Jack!”

  “Just let me … write them down…”

  But there wasn’t any chance I’d forget them. They were there, so clear and obvious and perfect, exactly what Fran and I had been searching for.

  Mia cried, “You can’t just leave! We’re the only two people like this!”

  I finished scribbling the equations and straightened. My head ached, my stomach wanted to puke, my intestines prickled and squirmed. My eyes were so puffy I could barely see out of them. But I saw her, looking at me with her scared bravado, and I saw the other one, not looking at me at all. Diverging. She was right—we were the only two people like this, linked in our own chaotic system. And the states I could see were diverging.

  “No,” I got out, just before I had to go back into the bathroom. “There aren’t two. Soon … only one of you.”

  She stared at me like I was crazy, all the time I was puking. And the other Jack was doing God knows what.

  I didn’t really care.

  * * *

  I haven’t published the equations yet.

  I will, of course. They’re too important not to publish: proof that any physical system showing an ultradependence on initial conditions must have a strange attractor buried somewhere in its structure. The implications for understanding chaos are profound. But it’s not easy to publish this kind of innovation when you no longer have even a post-doc position at a decent university. Even though Fran’s name will go first on the article.

  I may just put it out on the Internet. Without prior peer review, without copyright protection, without comment. Out onto the unstructured, shifting realities of the net. After all, I don’t really need formal attention. I don’t really want it.

  I have what I wanted: relief. The other faces—other rooms, other buildings, other gardens—are receding from me now. I catch only glimpses of them out of the corner of my eye, diminished in size by the distance between us, and getting smaller all the time. Diverging toward their own strange attractors.

  It’s not the same for Mia. When she said at the Morningside Motel that I looked more like the ideal Jack than ever before, it wasn’t a compliment to my unshaven frowziness. For her, the phase space diagrams are converging. She can barely discern the ideal separate from the physical now; the states are that close.

  She smiles at everyone. People are drawn to her as to a magnet; she treats them as if their real selves are their ideal ones.

  For now.

  The crucial characteristic about chaotic systems is that they change unpredictably. Not as unpredictably as before the Schraeder Equations, but still unpredictably. Once you fall into the area past the Feigenbaum number, states converge or diverge chaotically. Tomorrow Mia could see something else. Or I could.

  I have no idea what the ideal Mia was looking at when she gazed across the motel room, away from both me and him. When you are not the shadow on the cave wall but the genuine ideal, what is the next state?

  I don’t want to know. But it doesn’t matter whether or not I want it. If that state of life comes into being, then it does, and all we can do is chase it through the chaos of dens and labyrinths and underground caves, trying to pin it momentarily with numbers, as our states diverge from what we know toward something I cannot even imagine, and don’t want to.

  Although, of course, that too may change.

  HOME

>   Geoff Ryman

  Here’s a sad, disturbing, and all-too-likely vision of the World of the Future, which turns out to be the kind of place that you might want to visit, but where you certainly wouldn’t want to live …

  Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone—the magazine where most of his short fiction has appeared—with his brilliant novella “The Unconquered Country” that he first attracted any serious attention. One of the best novellas of the decade, “The Unconquered Country” had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life and the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was. His most recent book is a collection of four novellas, Unconquered Countries. His story “Dead Space for the Unexpected” appeared in our Twelfth Annual Collection.

  There was another one of them this morning, by Waterloo Station. He was a young lad. About a month ago, he had asked me for money. He said it was to feed his dog. He kept the animal inside his jacket and it poked its head out. I remember thinking it looked too gentle a creature to live out on the street. The dog leaned out and tried to lick my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I only have 20 pence.”

  He had some sort of regional accent, rather pleasant actually. “Ach, I cannot take a man’s last 20 pee.”

  “Take it, take it, I’ve got credit cards.” Why do they beg for change when no one carries money anymore? Finally I got him to take it. The tips of his fingers were yellow.

  He lived with others of his kind under a railway arch that had canvas across its mouth and a painted board over the top that announced that it was a Homeless Peoples’ Theatre Group. Rather enterprising I thought, and I would have gone, except that they never put anything on. Sometimes when I walked past, there would be a fire behind the canvas and a few chords from a guitar. That took me back, I can tell you. Just try to hear a guitar anywhere these days.

  * * *

  Someone had crucified him. He was hanging on a wire mesh fence in front of a demolition site. A crowd of people were gawking at him, as though they were slightly but personally embarrassed by something. I think they were feeling a bit silly, grinning at each other, rather like they used to look when they lined up to see the Queen. Actually, I couldn’t imagine what they were feeling.

  Very suddenly all the boys, none of the girls, just the boys, began to dance in unison, a sort of gloomy square dance. Well, that was just too much for me, I couldn’t make it out at all, I turned to an older woman who looked rather sensible. By older, I mean about 35, and I said to her, “He had a dog. Has anyone seen his dog?”

  She tutted. “They would have killed that too.” She said it in the most extraordinary way. I simply could not understand her tone of voice. I think she felt it would have been a botched job if they had not killed the dog.

  “You oughtn’t to be allowed out,” she said, with a kind of crooked smile. Her intent may even have been kindly, to warn me. But there was a glint about it that I did not like. It is obviously going to be my fate from now on to understand every word that anyone says to me, but not a single sentence. I couldn’t find the dog.

  And I couldn’t face the wait on the train platform either. I do hate stepping over sleeping bags, especially when they’re full of person. I indulged and took a taxi.

  “Steady on, old boy, let me help you in,” said the driver.

  “Thank you,” I said, trying to settle myself in, but my coat had twisted itself about me in the most uncomfortable way. “It’s good to know that human beings are not an entirely extinct species.”

  He was looking at me in his mirror by now, his face closed up like a shop. I evidently was an old codger.

  “There’s just been another one of those killings,” I said. “ALL these people smirking at the poor boy just as though someone had told a bad joke. Nobody trying to get the poor lad down from where they’d strung him up.”

  “Uh,” he said. “Yeah.” Yes, I was a boring old coot, and I was going to go on being boring.

  “It’s not decent. There wasn’t a shred of acknowledgement that killing people is wrong.”

  The taxi driver shrugged. “Some people think it keeps the streets clear.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of old people too. I suppose you’ll be saying they ought to start on us next.”

  He roared with laughter. He nodded. I think he agreed.

  I got out and watched him drive off, and it was only then that I realized I’d forgotten to get my coffee. Coffee, I’ll have you know, was the whole reason for going to Waterloo in the first place. There used to be a little shop near me that sold coffee, nice young person ran it, rather old-fashioned, you know, dungarees and no makeup. I could talk to her. Now the only place left is near Waterloo, where they sell it to Frenchmen. It’s like going into a sex shop. All nudges and winks and some sort of coffee-fiend argot. And I do resent being held up as some sort of laboratory specimen proving the harmlessness of caffeine.

  “There you go,” says the man behind the counter, and points to me. “He’s still with us. Didn’t do him any harm, did it?”

  “I drink coffee because I like the taste,” I say, and they all roar with laughter. Well, it’s nice to find yourself a continual source of amusement to others.

  I live in fear. I can’t carry groceries, they’re too heavy for me. Not that anyone knows what you mean when you use the word groceries. They send these food kits. You know, yeast tablets, vitamin E capsules. And the persons who deliver them are more terrifying than anything you’ll see around Waterloo. They wear these tribal mask things over their faces. I asked one of them once if it was something to do with air pollution. His response was to repeat the words “air pollution” several times over, at increasing volume. I think everyone imagines they’re having to shout at people who are wearing headphones.

  And I don’t like those Home Help things. How is a computer supposed to know what’s good for you? Bloody fascist health freaks. Always trying to replace a good cuppa with Hibiscus or Rose Hip—they all sound like plump women. I refuse to have my eating habits monitored by a machine. I’ll eat and drink what I like, thank you very much.

  * * *

  I finally succeeded in getting my front door open, and there was my niece and her friend with their boots on my sofa. I can’t say I like the way she drops in and uses my house, but you can’t be an old stick all the time, can you. My niece is called Gertrude and her friend is Brunnhilde. Who gives people these names? They all sound like characters in grand opera.

  “Tough time, Grumps?” Gertrude bellows. It’s like trying to hold a conversation in the middle of a rugby pitch.

  “You’ll get marks on my sofa,” I tell her.

  “Not marks. Bloodstains,” said Brunnhilde going all bug-eyed like a horror movie. Something else they don’t have these days. Both girls are huge, vast, like something out of the first issue of Superman, you know, lifting vehicles singlehanded. I, in the meantime, am getting into a wrestling match with my coat and scarf. My coat and scarf are winning. Even my clothing is insolent these days.

  “Here, let me do it for you,” says Gertrude and takes them from me. “Wossa ma-ah, Grumps?” Her speech is interrupted by more glottal stops than a Morris Minor in need of a service.

  “I saw another one of those bodies,” I said.

  “You weren’t down Wa’ahloo, again, were you?” she said.

  “It’s where I get my coffee
from,” I said. “Or rather, used to.”

  “Coffee,” says Brunnhilde and makes a moue of disgust the size of a bagel. “I’d rather drink paint stripper.”

  “Wa’ahloo is where all the dossers hang out, Grumps. Issa bloody wossa butcher shop.”

  Brunnhilde is rubbing her thighs in a way that I take to be sarcastic. “Maybe he likes a bit of excitement.”

  Gertrude giggles at the idea, and smoothes down my coat. For her, it lies still. I tell you the thing is alive and has it in for me. “Look, Grumps. Do yourself a favor. Stay north of the river. You don’t know where the safe passages are.”

  “I refuse to accept that there are parts of this city where I must not walk.”

  “You don’t go for a stroll down the middle of the motorway, do you? Come on, sit down.”

  I do as I’m told, but I’m still upset. My hands are shaking. They are also lumpy and blue and cold. “Why do they do it?” I say.

  “Why do we do it, you mean,” says Gertrude, plumping up a pillow.

  “You do it?”

  “Well, yeah. We all do it, Grumps. It’s game. There’s too many of them on the streets. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get hurt. You know. You’re out with your mates, you’re in a gang, you see another gang. You leave each other alone.”

  “And go for the defenceless. Well that is brave of you!”

  Brunnhilde explains the rationale for me. “They’re killing themselves with all that booze and fags.” I remembered the yellow tips of that boy’s fingers.

  “Then let them do it in peace, you don’t have to help them.”

  Oh dear. I’m shocked again. I can’t accept that nice young people on a date will kill someone as part of the evening’s entertainment. In my day, you felt racy if you fell down in the gutter. Stoned was lying on your back upside down and realizing you were trying to crawl across the sky.

  “They’re just using up resources,” says Brunnhilde, and she stands up, and starts to case the joint. Her upper lip is working as her tongue runs back and forth over her teeth. It looks as though she has a mouthful of weasels. “You live here all alone, then?” she asks.