Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Yet that is mere conjecture. What I retain of that dinner is, first, the order of service, and second, the extraordinary speech that was made at its conclusion, most of which I missed from being involved in a conversation of my own, and its even more extraordinary aftermath. No more. The kitchen, for all of me, may as well not have existed at all.

  The menu was as follows:

  To begin, fish-house punch, drunk with much merriment.

  Then, oyster stew, my mother's, eaten to take the edge off of appetites and quickly cleared away.

  Finally, the dinner itself, in two courses, the first of which was:

  roasted turkey stuffed with bread, suet, eggs, sweet herbs

  tongue pie made with apples and raisins chicken smothered in oysters with parsley sauce served with:

  boiled onions cranberries mangoes pickled beans celery pickled beets conserve of rose petals braised lambs quarters

  red quince preserves

  Followed by the second course of:

  trout poached in white wine and vinegar

  stew pie made of veal

  alamode round of beef, corned and stuffed with beef, pork,bread, butter, salt, pepper, savory and cayenne; braised served with:

  french beans parsnips purple spotted lettuce and salat herbs pickled cucumbers spinach roasted potatoes summer pears white, yellow, and red quince preserves

  Finally, after the table had been cleared and deserted:

  soft gingerbread

  Indian pudding pumpkin pie cookies, both almond and cinnamon

  * * * *

  Each course of which was, in the manner of the times, served up all at once in a multitude of dishes, so as to fill the tables complete and impress the diners with an overwhelming sense of opulence and plenty. Many a hungry time in my later adventures I would talk myself to sleep by repeating each dish several times over in my mind, recollecting its individual flavor, and imagining myself so thoroughly fed that I turned dishes away untasted.

  Thus do we waste our time and fill our minds with trivialities, while all the time the great world is falling rapidly into the past, carrying our loved ones and all we most value away from us at the rate of sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour, eight thousand seven hundred sixty-six hours per year!

  So much for the food. Let me now describe the speech.

  The connection between the Loganian and the main library was through a wide upper-level archway with stairs descending to the floor on either side of the librarian's desk. It was a striking, if inefficient, arrangement which coincidentally allowed us to easily spy upon the proceedings below.

  When the final sweets and savories had been placed upon the tables, the waiters processed up the twin stairs, and passed through the Loganian to a small adjacent room for a quiet meal of leftovers. I went to the archway to draw the curtain shut, and stayed within its shadows, looking down upon the scene.

  The tables were laid so that they filled the free space on the floor below, with two shoved together on the eastern side of the room for the officers and such city dignitaries—selectmen and flour merchants, mostly—who could not aspire to the celebration in Carpenter's Hall. All was motion and animation. I chanced to see one ruffian reach out to remove a volume from the shelves and, seeing a steelpoint engraving he admired, slide the book under the table, rip the page free, and place it, folded, within the confines of his jacket. Yet that was but one moment in such a menagerie of incident as would have challenged the hand of a Hogarth to record.

  Somebody stood—Biddle, I presume—and struck an oratorical stance. From my angle, I could see only his back. Forks struck goblets for silence, so that the room was briefly filled with the song of dozens of glass crickets.

  The curtains stirred, and Socrates joined me, plate in hand and gloves stuffed neatly into his sash. “Have I missed anything?” he whispered.

  I knew Socrates only slightly, as one who was in normal conditions the perfect opposite of his master, Julius: the most garrulous of men, a fellow of strange fancies and sudden laughter. But he looked sober enough now. I shook my head, and we both directed our attention downward.

  “...the late unpleasantness between our two great nations,” the speaker was saying. “With its resolution, let the admiration the American people have always held for our British kindred resume again its rightful place in the hearts of us all.”

  Now the curtains stirred a second time, and Tacey appeared. Her countenance was as stormy as ever. Quietly, she said, “What is this nonsense Mary tells me about you going up Wissahickon to work in a mill?”

  There was an odd stirring among the airmen, a puzzled exchange of glances.

  Turning away from the speaker, I said, “I intended to say good-bye to you before I left.”

  “You've been intending to say good-bye to me since the day we met. So you do mean it, then?”

  “I'm serious,” I admitted.

  Those dark, alert eyes flicked my way, and then back. “Oh, yes, you would do well in the mills—I don't think.”

  “Tacey, I have little choice. There is no work to be had on the wharves. If I stay at home, I burden Mother with the expense of my upkeep, and yet my utmost labor cannot increase her income by a single boarder. She'll be better off with my room empty and put out to let.”

  “Will Keely, you are a fool. What future can there be for you performing manual labor in a factory? There are no promotions. The mill owners all have five sons apiece—if a position of authority arises, they have somebody close at hand and dear to their hearts to fill it. They own, as well, every dwelling within an hour's walk of the mills. You must borrow from your family to buy your house from them. For years you scrimp, never tasting meat from month to month, working from dawn to dusk, burying pennies in the dirt beneath your bed, with never a hope of earning enough to attract a decent wife. Then the owners declare that there is no longer a market for their goods, and turn out most of their employees. There is no work nearby, so the laborers must sell their houses. Nobody will buy them, however low the price may be, save the mill owners. Who do, for a pittance, because six months later they will begin hiring a new batch of fools, who will squander their savings on the house you just lost.”

  “Tacey—”

  “Oh, I can see the happy crowds now, when you return to the wharves in five years. Look, they will cry, here comes the famous factory boy! See how his silver buttons shine. What a handsome coach he drives—General Washington himself never owned so finely matched a sextet of white horses. Behold his kindly smile. He could buy half of New York city with his gold, yet it has not spoiled him at all. All the girls wish to marry him. They can see at a glance that he is an excellent dancer. They tat his profile into lace doilies and sleep with them under their pillows at night. It makes them sigh.”

  So, bickering as usual, we missed most of Biddle's speech. It ended to half-drunken applause and uncertain laughter. The British airmen, oddly enough, did not look so much pleased as bewildered.

  After a certain amount of whispering and jostling at the head table, as if no one there cared to commit himself to public speech, a thin and spindly man stood. He was a comical fellow in an old-fashioned powdered wig so badly fitting it must surely have been borrowed, and he tittered nervously before he said, “Well. I thank our esteemed host for that most, ah, unusual—damn me if I don't say peculiar—speech. Two great nations indeed! Yes, perhaps, someday. Yet I hope not. Whimsical, perhaps, is the better word. I shall confine myself to a simple account of our historic passage...”

  So the speech progressed, and if the American's speech had puzzled the British officer, it was not half so bewildering as those things he said in return.

  He began by applauding Tobias Whitpain, he of world-spanning renown, for the contributions made through his genius to the success of the first trans-Atlantic aerial crossing were matched only by the foresight of Queen Titania herself for funding and provisioning the airship. Isabella was now dethroned, he said, from that heavenly seat r
eserved for the muse of exploration and science.

  “Whitpain?” I wondered. “Queen Titania?”

  “What is that you are playing with?” Tacey hissed sharply.

  I looked up guiltily. But the question was directed not at me but toward Socrates, who yet stood to my other side.

  “Ma'am?” he said, the picture of innocence, as he shoved something into my hand, which from reflexive habit, I slid quickly into a pocket.

  “Show me your hands,” she said, and then, “Why are you not working? Get to work”

  Socrates was marched briskly off. I waited until both were out of sight before digging out his toy.

  It was a small mirror in a cheap, gaudy frame, such as conjure women from the Indies peer into before predicting love and health and thirteen children for gullible young ladies. I held it up and looked into it.

  I saw myself.

  * * * *

  I saw myself standing in the square below the great stepped ziggurat at the center of Nicnotezpocoatl. Which grand metropolis, serving twice over the population of London herself, my shipmates inevitably called Nignog City. Dear old Fuzzleton was perched on a folding stool, sketching and talking, while I held a fringed umbrella over him, to keep off the sun. He cut a ludicrous figure, so thin was he and so prissily did he sit. But, oh, what a fine mind he had!

  We were always talking, Fuzzleton and I. With my new posting, I was in the strange position of being simultaneously both his tutor and student, as well as serving as his bootblack, his confidant, and his potential successor.

  “The Empire is not safe anchored where it is,” he said in a low voice, lest we be overheard by our Aztec warrior guardians. “Fire arrows could be shot into the balloons from the top of the ziggurat. These people are not fools! They've nosed out our weaknesses as effectively as we have theirs. Come the day they fear us more than they covet our airship, we are all dead. Yet Captain Winterjude refuses to listen to me.”

  “But Lieutenant Blacken promised—” I began.

  “Yes, yes, promises. Blacken has ambitions, and plans of his own, as well. We—”

  He stopped. His face turned pale and his mouth gaped wide. The stool clattered onto the paving stones, and he cried, “Look!”

  I followed his pointing finger and saw an enormous Negro hand cover the sky, eclipsing the sun and plunging the world into darkness.

  * * * *

  “Thank you,” Socrates said. His face twisted up into a grotesque wink, and he was gone.

  I returned my attention to the scene below.

  The speaker—old Fuzzleton himself, I realized with a start—was winding up his remarks. He finished by raising a glass high in the air, and crying loudly: “To America!—Her Majesty's most treasured possession.”

  At those words, every American started to his feet. Hands were clapped to empty belts. Gentlemen searched their coats for sidearms they had of course not brought. There were still men alive who had fought in the War of Independence, and even if there had not been such, memory of the recent war with its burning of Washington and, closer to home, the economically disastrous blockade of American ports was still fresh in the minds of all. Nobody was eager to return to the embrace of a foreign despot, whether king or queen, George or Titania, made no difference. Our freedoms were young enough that all were aware how precariously we held them.

  The British, for their part, were fighting men, and recognized hostility when confronted with it. They came to their feet as well, in a very Babel of accusation and denial.

  It was at that instant, when all was confusion, and violence hovered in the air, that a messenger burst into the room.

  * * * *

  Is that poker hot yet? Then plunge it in the wine and let the spices mull. Good. Hand me that. ‘Twill help with the telling.

  It was the madness of an instant that led me to join the airshipmen's number. Had I taken the time to think, I would not have done it. But ambition was my undoing. I flung my towel away, darted into the kitchen to give my sister a quick hug and a peck on her cheek, and was down the stairs in a bound and a clatter.

  In the library, all was confusion, with the British heading in a rush for the doorway, and the Americans holding back out of uncertainty, and fear as well of their sudden ferocity.

  I joined the crush for the door.

  Out in the cobbled street, we formed up into a loose group. I was jostled and roughly shoved, and I regretted my rashness immediately. The men about me were vague grey shapes, like figures in a dream. In the distance I heard the sound of angry voices.

  A mob.

  I was standing near the officers and overheard one argue, “It is unwise to leave thus quickly. It puts us in the position of looking as though we had reason to flee. ‘Tis like the man seen climbing out his host's bedroom window. Nothing he says will make him look innocent again.”

  “There is no foe I fear half so much as King Mob,” Fuzzleton replied. “March them out.”

  The officer saluted, spun about, and shouted, “To the ship—double-time, on the mark!” Clapping his horny hands together, he beat out the rhythm for a sailor's quick-march, such as I had played at a thousand times as a lad.

  Rapidly the airmen began to move away.

  Perforce I went with them.

  By luck or good planning, we reached the prison yard without encountering any rioters. Our group, which had seemed so large, was but a drop of water to the enormous swirling mass of humanity that had congregated below the airship.

  All about me, airmen were climbing rope ladders, or else being yanked into the sky. For every man thus eliminated, a new rope suddenly appeared, bounced, and was seized by another. Meanwhile, lines from the Whitpain engines were being disconnected from the tubs of purified river water, where they had been generating hydrogen.

  Somebody slipped a loose loop around me and under my arms and with a sudden lurch I went soaring up into the darkness.

  * * * *

  Oh, that was a happy time for me. The halcyon weeks ran one into another, long and languid while we sailed over the American wilderness. Sometimes over seas of forest, other times over seas of plains. There were occasional Indian tribes which...

  Eh? You want to know what happened when I was discovered? Well, so would I. As well ask, though, what words Paris used to woo Helen. So much that we wish to know, we never shall! I retain, however, one memory more precious to me than all the rest, of an evening during the crossing of the shallow sea that covers the interior of at least one American continent.

  Our shifts done, Hob and I went to the starboard aft with no particular end but to talk. “Sit here and watch the sunset,” she said, patting the rail. She leaned against me as we watched, and I was acutely aware of her body and its closeness. My eyes were half-closed with a desire I thought entirely secret when I felt her hand undoing the buttons on my trousers.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered in alarm.

  “Nothing they don't expect young lads to do with each other now and then. Trust me. So long as you're discreet, they'll none of them remark on't.”

  Then she had me out and with a little laugh squeezed the shaft. I was by then too overcome with desire to raise any objections to her remarkable behavior.

  Side by side we sat on the taffrail, as her hand moved first slowly and then with increasing vigor up and down upon my yard. Her mouth turned up on one side in a demi-smile. She was enjoying herself.

  Finally I spurted. Drops of semen fell, silent in the moonlight, to mingle their saltiness with that of the water far below. She bent to swiftly kiss the tip of my yard and then tucked it neatly back into my trousers. “There,” she said. “Now we're sweethearts.”

  My mind follows them now, those fugitive drops of possibility on their long and futile, yet hopeful, flight to the sea. I feel her hand clenching me so casually and yet profoundly. She could not have known how much it meant to me, who had never fired off my gun by a woman's direct intervention before. Yet inwardly I blessed her for it, and
felt a new era had opened for me, and swore I would never forget her nor dishonor her in my mind for the sake of what she had done for me.

  Little knowing how soon my traitor heart would turn away from her.

  But for then I knew only that I no longer desired to return home. I wanted to go on with my Hob to the end of the voyage and back to her thronged and unimaginable London with its Whitpain engines and electrified lighting and surely a place for an emigré from a nonexistent nation who knew (as none of them did) the Calculus.

  * * * *

  Somewhere around here, I have a folded and water-damped sheet of foolscap, upon which I apparently wrote down a short list of things I most wished never to forget. I may have lost it, but no matter. I've read it since a hundred times over. It begins with a heading in my uncertain Latin.

  * * * *

  Ne Obliviscaris

  1. My father's burial

  2. The Aztec Emperor in his golden armor

  3. Hob's hair in the sunset

  4. The flying men

  5. Winterjude's death & what became of his Lady

  6. The air-serpents

  7. The sound of icebergs calving

  8. Hunting buffalo with the Apache

  9. Being flogged

  10. The night we solved the Whitpain Calculus

  * * * *

  Which solution of course is gone forever—else so much would be different now! We'd live in a mansion as grand as the President's, and savants from across the world would come a-calling upon your old father, just so they could tell their grandchildren they'd met the Philadelphia Kepler, the American Archimedes. Yet here we are.

  So it is savage irony that I remember that night vividly—the small lantern swinging lightly in the gloom above the table covered with sheet after sheet of increasingly fervid computation—Calculus in my hand and Whitpain equations in Fuzzleton's, and then on one miraculous and almost unreadable sheet, both of our hands dashing down formula upon formula in newly invented symbols, sometimes overlapping in the excitement of our reconciliation of the two geniuses.