Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Still, they backed away slowly, as of one accord. They did not turn away from Ella until they were farther away, and then they ran toward the Metro entrance and disappeared into the glow.

  It was then that Ella knew for sure: She did not want to go down into the Metro. Not ever.

  A gray overcast crept over the sky, threatening a day of spring drizzle. Ella figured she had about three miles to go. She’d better get started.

  Independence Avenue was right across the street. Now it was just a few blocks’ walk, past the Washington Monument and the Vietnam War Memorial. She had gone there with Nana several times. Her son’s name was on the wall.

  Ella picked up the handle from where she had let it clank to the sidewalk and trudged on. She smelled the dampness of the river and knew well where it was anyway. She and Nana often sat on its banks and watched the beautiful lights of traffic wind along the Virginia shore, and from time to time Nana dressed them both up in finery, took a taxi to a restaurant full of crushed velvet and dark wood, high above the river, sipped a tiny bright drink before dinner as she watched the lights hungrily, sometimes through a glimmer of tears, and taught Ella to like snails.

  She stopped.

  No. Neither of those were true. They were stories Nana had told her, many times, stories about how it would be again once everything was right. Once the electric rains were over.

  She was getting tired, she realized. Tired and hungry and thirsty. After a long trudge, while the sky became steadily more gray, she finally glimpsed them: the magnificent naked people, the man astride the horse, the woman leading it.

  And across the bridge, set on a hill, the white mansion.

  Ella’s arms ached, but the wagon didn’t seem quite as heavy now though she dreaded the hill. The river was swift and rushing below the bridge and she felt as if the dragon of light was bursting through her own chest as she walked across the arch of the bridge.

  Once across it, she had to turn back, not forward, to get her bearings, crossing the main highway via another circle and running up the asphalt until the angle of the hill stopped her. There were only four turns now. And here—

  Here was the stone that said Admiral James Tolliver.

  The man who had rescued her, and then died.

  To the right was another stone for Nana: Rose Ann Tolliver.

  Nana always hurried past these stones, but Ella always saw her glance at them; saw tears well in her eyes. Perhaps she thought that Ella didn’t know her real name. Perhaps she was pretending that Ella had never seen the newspaper articles.

  Perhaps she was pretending that, by rescuing Ella, her husband had ingested the electric rains, and was lost somewhere, uploaded to an unknown future. There was no body here, beneath the stone that read National Hero. He had given his life to help prevent what had actually happened. Maybe.

  Or maybe, because of him, it had not happened everywhere.

  Ella, grunting, tipped the wagon sideways. Rose Ann Tolliver tumbled out. Ella pushed and pulled on her until she was roughly aligned with the headstone. It was all she could do. She had no shovel. She got out Nana’s old driver’s license and slipped it inside the sheet. She saw fresh flowers on some of the graves. Maybe there were real people here. Maybe they were taking care of things. She was not sure she wanted to meet them, though. Just because they took care of Arlington Cemetery did not mean they were sane. But they might bury Rose Ann Tolliver next to the memory of her husband.

  There was the Pentagon, to her right. Five sides, Nana had taken care to teach her the shapes, but somehow Ella thought she had already known.

  She sat below the decaying white mansion and thought of the things that could happen. The things Nana had said might happen. The day that she said might come, the day that Nana told her she had to live for.

  All the people living in Washington the day of the attack, the ones caught in the electric rains, the ones who had rushed into the Metro and been uploaded, would be downloaded. The world would be new, peace-loving, like Ella’s parents had believed it could be.

  Those people would go about their lives in Nana’s timeless, beautiful Washington. They would go to office jobs, come home to families, eat snails in French restaurants or dim sum in Chinatown. They would think, read, do research, go to concerts and plays. They would walk the lovely, tree-lined streets of Washington with friends and relatives.

  They would not be afraid of the rains.

  But when would that be? Ella wondered.

  And why would they be any different than the people she had just met?

  How long was she supposed to polish the furniture, iron the sheets, and plant the dwindling supply of tulip bulbs?

  And how was this supposed to happen?

  Were there really people elsewhere? Normal, old-fashioned people, not rain-mad? In California? Was anyone flying the monitor planes?

  Was there any place the electric rains had not reached, a place where they were doing all the things Nana had longed to do, or figuring out how to do them very soon?

  What would happen if the electric rains fell on her and there was no place to run to, no Metro where she could be uploaded? Would she just go mad herself?

  Nana might not have thought that these were good questions to ask. But she did.

  Ella rose from the damp ground and brushed leaves from her pants. She picked up the wagon handle. The wagon would be useful.

  “Goodbye, Nana,” she said, and walked down the narrow cemetery road heading west.

  © 2007 by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

  Originally published in Eclipse One

  Buried in Time, by Kathleen Ann Goonan

  Three months after Dallas, 1963, Bette sipped black coffee, looked at her watch, and drummed her fingernails on the Formica tabletop of her booth in People’s Drug on 10th Street.

  It was lunch time. Secretaries, construction workers, shoppers, and store clerks took up every available counter stool and seat, and those waiting in line glared at her for hogging an entire booth.

  She wanted to recheck her Q, but as she was one of at most a dozen people in this timestream who had one, she did not want to get out the small screen—rather like a mini-Etch-a-Sketch—and see if she’d perhaps made a mistake in thinking that Eliani Hadntz wanted to meet her.

  She had her own reasons for wanting to meet Hadntz. The cold knot of fear she now lived with needed to be accepted or sliced out.

  She had arrived in Washington by a roundabout route. She had no doubt that some of her enemies were in this timestream as well as in the last, the one in which she had killed Kennedy’s would-be murderers. They might be terrifically puzzled, and thrown off the scent, but their energy and resolve would not easily be left behind.

  She had gazed on her family from afar: watched eleven-year-old Brian, now bereft of his mother, ramble through the gully on the way to school, picking up pop bottles to trade in for candy bars at Al’s Grocery. She saw eight-year-old Megan fall on the playground and lie there, crying. Bette started to run to pick her up before remembering that she should not, could not, and turned away, aching. And she saw fourteen-year-old Jill, her bike basket full of books, riding incessantly to and from the library, her face always serious, as if she could solve the mysteries of the universe by reading day and night.

  Bette’s chief conundrum was this: if she removed herself, as one of the central facilitators of the situation—although ‘situation’ seemed like a mild, small word for a paradigm shift that had so changed the world—perhaps those who lusted after the secret of the Hadntz Device would follow her, like hounds on a scent, and leave her family alone. She had decided that she must vanish more completely, leaving a trail that would draw them away from her family.

  Which meant that there would be no end to her anguish. Even now, the pain of not being with them was overwhelming. All the walls erected by her training so long ago had evaporated, leaving her in a world of crystalline pain. She stood at a lonely crossroads.

  She needed help.

&
nbsp; She was just picking up her briefcase when Hadntz slid into the booth, opposite her.

  “I’m sorry,” Hadntz pulled off a wool hat and set it on the table to her right, next to the ketchup. She stuffed gloves into her coat pocket, which she shrugged from her shoulders.

  “Were there. . .difficulties?”

  “Always.” She seemed detached, as usual. Bette assumed that she was just one of many agents working with Hadntz across a spectrum of spacetime and worlds. She was sure that Hadntz had no need of a timebusting plane. Her ways of movement were more subtle—like Wink’s, who said that when the time was correct, it was like turning a corner, or walking through a gate where the landscape was subtly different, maintained by different gardeners, the plants influenced by a slightly different climate.

  “Think of me as a child in a new environment,” continued Hadntz. “I am learning—as, perhaps, we all must, eventually—how to live in the newly discovered territory we have opened—a frontier of the mind, with its own mountains and impenetrable forests. I am clumsy. I hope you will forgive me.” She held out a hand and Bette squeezed it, briefly. “Coffee, please, and a grilled cheese sandwich on rye with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato,” she said to the hovering waitress.

  “I’m not sure how they’ll put that on a grilled cheese,” said the waitress.

  “Let them figure it out as best they can.”

  Bette ordered the blue plate special. She lit a cigarette and took another sip of coffee.

  Hadntz said, “I want to talk to you about the prepared environment.”

  Bette was startled. “The prepared?—oh,” she said, remembering that was what a Montessori classroom was called. “I have something a little more important to talk about.”

  “I think I know what that is.” Hadntz’s dark eyes were sympathetic. “I have dealt with those problems for years. Indulge me, though, for a minute.”

  “I don’t have another minute!” Bette half-rose from her seat, leaned across the table, and shouted, “I don’t even have another goddamned second!” If Hadntz had been wearing a tie, she would have grabbed it and choked the woman.

  Hadntz said, calmly, “You are drawing a lot of interest.”

  “I don’t care! I—”

  All conversation had stopped. Everyone was looking at her.

  She sat down, stuck another cigarette in her mouth, lit it with a shaking hand, inhaled. Conversations resumed.

  Hadntz said, “Bette, your family is well, despite being in mourning. You are not well. I understand that. Better than you might think. But to reconcile this situation—” She took a sip of coffee. “It is. . .mathematical. There are probabilities. We are working on a new way of seeing, a new way of knowing—wait, wait—” She held up one hand, seeing that Bette was once again opening her mouth to scream. Finally, she just said, quietly, both hands held out beseechingly and her large, dark eyes looking directly into Bette’s, “Trust me, Bette, as I have trusted you. Put simply, right now, there is nothing else we can do.”

  “But it has all gone so horribly wrong.” Bette ripped paper napkins from the holder and mopped her face.

  Hadntz grabbed more napkins, reached over, and rubbed Bette’s cheek. “Mascara.” She began to speak slowly, as if to a child. As if she were a child, Bette listened, desperately tired, desperately wanting to hope. “This is an interim situation, not at all unpredictable in the abstract, but almost impossible, now, to pinpoint in individual terms. This shows us a problem. I have lived this problem. We must turn our attention to discovering how to resolve it. We need to. . .prepare an environment, as it were. I have long been interested in Montessori education, as you know, but haven’t been able to pursue its ramifications to my satisfaction. You have become my expert. Let’s go over it, please, so I can make sure that I understand all the important points. We have met with an unexpected barrier. This is just something we don’t know enough about yet. When one does a scientific experiment—”

  “Experiment! This is no—”

  Hadntz held up one hand. “This is life, now, and we must find a solution, work our way through the problem that has arisen. You could go back home now. But I can’t predict what might happen. Your family is here, in a timestream in which Kennedy was not assassinated. The Device—in this timestream, we will call it “Q”—can incorporate, analyze, and disseminate an astonishing amount of information. Yet we are still in the branching environment in which humans have always lived. Our conscious minds mesh with it, and perhaps even create it, just through the act of observing. But before the cusp created by Q, which you and Jill and Sam and Wink helped bring about, we could not know or access other possible avenues as easily.”

  Bette said, “Easily? You call this easy? I’ve had just about enough of all this mumbo-jumbo. What about me? What about my family?”

  “Knowing about this mumbo-jumbo, as you refer to it right now, or quantum physics, as you usually do, led to the atomic bomb. It is powerful knowledge, Bette. Until a. . .critical reaction takes place—”

  “Like in atomic fission?” asked Bette. “As if all of human life and emotion were some kind of. . .bomb?”

  “Yes,” said Hadntz, but seriously and with her same Zen-like calm, “but this is a critical reaction that will change the deep human instinct for violence and war. You know all this, Bette. You’ve known it for years. From its inception.”

  “Maybe it just didn’t seem real before.” As if the horrors of Europe had not been real. They had been, and she had known them intimately. But she had not caused them, and she had not made those dear to her targets.

  “We are at a place that might tip this balance, ripple out through all timestreams. But there are factors that may well arise that could tip the balance in ways that you and I would not want to see. We could tip back into the process of never-ending war, which has been our species’ unfortunate past. If you want to see this just in terms of your own family, that is your great fortune. Seriously. That is the hope that will propel you. I have only hope for everyone, everywhere. It could be a crippling weight if I allowed it to be. Let me tell you some personal things. I haven’t spoken of them, much.” She bowed her head for a moment, almost as if in prayer, then gazed at Bette. Her eyes seemed to grow darker, and drew Bette into their darkness.

  “In 1940, I began to experience what I called splintering. I could see down various timelines. I could even visit them, briefly, but with enormous pain and difficulty. I did so, but in the process I lost my own mother, Rosa, forever. She is nowhere, now, not in any timeline. It was my fault, completely. I know she would have understood my choice. I know that anyone who outlives loved ones experiences complete and absolute loss, and always has.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “But I could have made the decision to not lose her. The Device, however, showed me the statistical probabilities of that course of action. If I saved her, that small change could lead to unspeakable possibilities. And so I left her to her fate.”

  Hadntz’s expression had not changed. Her face was still calm, serious, knowing. But from her eyes welled large tears, which moved down her cheeks and dripped from her chin like a small waterfalls emerging from a hidden, seasonal source. She did not acknowledge them. Bette wasn’t sure she even knew they were there. She felt the sudden sense that Hadntz was always weeping in this way, behind her face, within her heart, across timestreams. . .

  She reached across and grasped Handtz’s hand with hers and squeezed it tight.

  “We will do what we can,” said Bette.

  “Yes,” Hadntz said, her voice rough, as if she had been weeping for hours. “We have. And we will.”

  The waitress returned with their food. “Are you ladies all right?”

  Bette managed to say, as Hadntz blew her nose, “We could use more coffee.”

  They ate silently for a few minutes. Finally, Bette said, “What do you want to know?”

  Hadntz swallowed the last of her sandwich, drank some coffee, and smiled weakly. “
Thank you, Bette.” After a moment, she continued. “I, and Q, learn through many avenues. Perhaps, for Q, this is a poem, and it needs more models, more metaphors, to absorb, to compare, to sift. I am not speaking lightly; I believe that poetry is one of the most serious and deep endeavors of humanity. You have taught in Montessori classrooms, and you know the theory. We are preparing an environment, one in which humanity can live and prosper optimally. Montessori, through scientific research, was able to devise one that is optimal for education. Perhaps Q can absorb and use your own particular point of view. Tell me about the Montessori prepared environment.”

  Bette frowned, shook her head. “This isn’t the—”

  “I know. But humor me. You are my expert. I am trying to make some connections, here.”

  Bette nodded and found that, after a moment, just talking about it helped her relax. Her knowledge took over and came out as if she were talking to a few interested students at American University, where she had been working on her doctorate. That was in 1968, before. . .

  Forget that. Think about now.

  “Okay. The prepared environment is filled with separate tasks which have to do with taking care of yourself, taking care of the environment, math, and language. Let’s say that we have an ideal classroom.”

  “Let’s.”

  “Children come into the classroom when they are two and a half, roughly. They see other children, older, choosing activities from the shelves, taking them to a table or to a mat on the floor, completing them, and putting them away. Generally, these are activities they choose which take twenty minutes to several days to complete—in which case the child can leave their work out until it is completed. Often they choose to do the same task time after time, or day after day. The directress does not interfere.”

  “What might take several days?”

  “A child might decide to do all of the number chains. They hang in an open cabinet. Each chain is actually a square. The one chain is, of course, a single bead. The two chain is two sets of two, and so on. Each chain can be folded to make a square. Each chain has a corresponding set of numbered arrows. The four chain, for instance, has arrows inscribed with the numbers 4, 8, 12, and 16. The children place each arrow at the appropriate bead. But there are always multiple ways of gaining information in the environment. Brains are different. Learning styles are different. There is never just one path.”