Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I studied him, gauging where he was. There should be a good quantity of oxytocin running through his system by now, not to mention a bit of alcohol. Enough? Maybe. I turned so we were both facing where the fireworks would be, shoulder to shoulder. I matched the way his shoulders hunched and the way he stood, one leg forward a bit, knees almost locked—not enough for him to think I was mocking him, but enough to tell his subconscious that I was his kind of people.

  “Those were some days, weren’t they? You were a helluva runner, man.”

  He nodded and smiled.

  “Smart, too,” I added. “You knew how to plan a race. There’s more to a footrace than flat-out speed, and I like the way you approached it.”

  I hadn’t actually known any of that before grazing for his switches; but he was pleased. “You have to stick around and meet the boys,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I told him. “I’ve got a few people showing up.”

  He wasn’t married, and he wasn’t happy about that, so I was careful not to make one of my imaginary people an imaginary wife. He nodded and I handed him the flask again. That was enough. Alcohol and oxytocin can complement each other, but the effects can become unpredictable. And those of us who do this don’t like unpredictable.

  I said, “Who are the people you’re meeting?”

  “Some guys from work.”

  “Bankers,” I said. “Exciting crowd, eh?”

  He chuckled. “They can be more fun than you’d think.”

  “Yeah? What do you do there?”

  “Mortgages.”

  “Ah. Not a lot of those these days.”

  “Well, and foreclosures.”

  “Oh! That’d keep you busy.”

  It started raining a little. We both ignored it.

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “What’s it like?” I asked him.

  “Hmmm?”

  “What’s it like, working on foreclosures?”

  “Masses of paperwork. I mean, masses of paperwork. I don’t handle it directly, I supervise. But you wouldn’t believe the red tape, the legalities, the forms.”

  “Yeah. A guy I went to high school with just had his farm foreclosed on.” Okay, the time for subtlety was over; make it or break it right now. “Do you ever think about it?”

  “About what?”

  I put my left hand into my pants pocket, squeezed the other sponge, put the diluted scent of an old diesel engine onto my hand, and wiped it on my shirt. I brought my right hand up and playfully pushed at his head. It’s a delicate thing, that push. Do it wrong, and all of a sudden your usual heterosexual male starts feeling vaguely threatened, or at least uncomfortable. Do it right, and it’s a sort of friendly teasing gesture that permits you to brush your finger past his temple.

  “About throwing people out of their houses.”

  He was quiet for a long time after that.

  It’s a strange thing. If you’re going to have a job like Pete’s, you must have defenses. Layers of them. First, you concentrate on the tasks, ignoring as much as you can the end result. But more, you have to have built up justifications and arguments enough to keep you going in to work every day—in fact to keep you not bothered by going in to work every day. By any reasonable measure, someone doing that can’t have a conscience about it.

  But somewhere, under the walls and layers and defenses, there’s the guy who went to college, who lettered in track, who wanted that girl to notice him. And still further under, there’s the boy who loved fresh corn-on-the-cob, who spent hours watching his grampa work on the tractor, who played with his cousins in spring woods full of sweet william.

  He’s in there somewhere. You just have to find him.

  The rain came down—light, but steady.

  He said, “But what could I do?”

  “You could walk the line,” I said. “Between delaying and sabotaging the foreclosures, and going so far you get fired. You’re in a position to do that. And not only that, but you’d enjoy the game.”

  He stared at me.

  I smiled. I was facing him now, and I reached out and, once more, lightly touched his temple with a finger. “You’ve been thinking about it anyway. You might not have been aware of it, but somewhere inside you’ve been thinking how much fun it would be to gum up the works, just a little.”

  Yeah, just a little.

  That’s where I left him. He was thinking about it, but I knew it had worked.

  Two weeks later, Ren was back.

  She was curled up in my arms, her hand on my chest, and I was enjoying her touch and the way the sweat was drying on me. Susi scratched at the door.

  “What the other Washington did was big,” I said. “But some people, like me and Peter, are just cut out for little things.”

  “Unlike Oskar,” she said.

  I nodded, and her head bounced a bit on my chest. “Oskar wants to see the whole banking structure come tumbling down and the wealth divided. But Pete and I don’t work on that scale.”

  “I don’t either,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “There are, like, nine homes on this block about to be foreclosed on. You gave some of them more time, and maybe now they won’t be. I think that’s a win.”

  “Yeah.” I pulled her closer. “I’m not saying it’s good. I’m saying it’s better than nothing.”

  “It’s better,” she agreed. “What did you do after you left him?”

  “About what you’d expect,” I said. “Found myself a decent beer, missed you a lot, and watched the fireworks in the rain.”

  “Fireworks in the Rain” copyright © 2013 by Steven Brust

  GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

  Geoffrey Alan Landis (born May 28, 1955) is an American scientist, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on planetary exploration, interstellar propulsion, solar power and photovoltaics. He holds eight patents, primarily in the field of improvements to solar cells and photovoltaic devices and has given presentations and commentary on the possibilities for interstellar travel and construction of bases on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.

  He is the author of over fifty published short stories and novelettes, and twenty poems. He has won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for science fiction short stories. His first novel, Mars Crossing, was published by Tor in December, 2000, and a short story collection, Impact Parameter, will appear from Golden Gryphon this November. His work has been translated into nineteen languages.

  As well as a writer of science fiction, Geoffrey Landis is a research scientist with the Space Power and Propulsion Division of the N.A.S.A. John Glenn Research Center. His work on the Mars Pathfinder project involves understanding the effect of Martian dust on the solar energy reaching the surface of Mars. He has published over two hundred scientific papers in the fields of photovoltaics, space power and propulsion systems, and astronautics, and holds four patents. He lives in Berea, Ohio, with his wife, science-fiction writer Mary Turzillo, and two cats, Lurker and Lepton, neither of whom write.

  Ripples in the Dirac Sea, by Geoffrey A. Landis

  1989 Nebula Short Story

  My death looms over me like a tidal wave, rushing toward me with an inexorable slow-motion majesty. And yet I flee, pointless though it may be.

  I depart, and my ripples diverge to infinity, like waves smoothing out the footprints of forgotten travellers.

  WE WERE SO CAREFUL to avoid any paradox, the day we first tested my machine. We pasted a duct-tape cross onto the concrete floor of a windowless lab, placed an alarm clock on the mark, and locked the door. An hour later we came back, removed the clock, and put the experimental machine in the room with a super-eight camera set in the coils. I aimed the camera at the X, and one of my grad students programmed the machine to send the camera back half an hour, stay in the past five minutes, then return. It left and returned without even a flicker. When we developed the film, the time on the clock was half an hour before we loaded the camera. We'd succeeded in opening the door into the
past. We celebrated with coffee and champagne.

  Now that I know a lot more about time, I understand our mistake, that we had not thought to put a movie camera in the room with the clock to photograph the machine as it arrived from the future. But what is obvious to me now was not obvious then.

  I ARRIVE, and the ripples converge to the instant now from the vastness of the infinite sea.

  To San Francisco, June 8, 1965. A warm breeze riffles across dandelion-speckled grass, while puffy white clouds form strange and wondrous shapes for our entertainment. Yet so very few people pause to enjoy it. They scurry about, diligently preoccupied, believing that if they act busy enough, they must be important. "They hurry so," I say. "Why can't they slow down, sit back, enjoy the day?"

  "They're trapped in the illusion of time," says Dancer. He lies on his back and blows a soap bubble, his hair flopping back long and brown in a time when "long" hair meant anything below the ear. A puff of breeze takes the bubble down the hill and into the stream of pedestrians. They uniformly ignore it. "They're caught in the belief that what they do is important to some future goal." The bubble pops against a briefcase, and Dancer blows another. "You and I, we know how false an illusion that is. There is no past, no future, only the now, eternal."

  He was right, more right than he could have possibly imagined.

  Once I, too, was preoccupied and self-important. Once I was brilliant and ambitious. I was twenty-eight years old, and I made the greatest discovery in the world.

  FROM MY hiding place I watched him come up the service elevator. He was thin almost to the point of starvation, a nervous man with stringy blond hair and an armless white T-shirt. He looked up and down the hall, but failed to see me hidden in the janitor's closet. Under each arm was a two-gallon can of gasoline, in each hand another. He put down three of the cans and turned the last one upside down, then walked down the hall, spreading a pungent trail of gasoline. His face was blank. When he started on the second can, I figured it was about enough. As he passed my hiding spot, I walloped him over the head with a wrench, and called hotel security. Then I went back to the closet and let the ripples of time converge.

  I arrived in a burning room, flames licking forth at me, the heat almost too much to bear. I gasped for breath-a mistake-and punched at the keypad.

  Notes on the Theory and Practice of Time Travel:

  1. Travel is possible only into the past.

  2. The object transported will return to exactly the time and place of departure.

  3. It is not possible to bring objects from the past to the present.

  4. Actions in the past cannot change the present.

  ONE TIME I tried jumping back a hundred million years, to the Cretaceous, to see dinosaurs. All the picture books show the landscape as being covered with dinosaurs. I spent three days wandering around a swamp-in my new tweed suit--before catching even a glimpse of any dinosaur larger than a basset hound. That one-a theropod of some sort, I don't know which-skittered away as soon as it caught a whiff of me. Quite a disappointment.

  MY PROFESSOR in transfinite math used to tell stories about a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. One day all the rooms are full, and another guest arrives. "No problem," says the desk clerk. He moves the person in room one into room two, the person in room two into room three, and so on. Presto! A vacant room.

  A little later, an infinite number of guests arrive. "No problem," says the dauntless desk clerk. He moves the person in room one into room two, the person in room two into room four, the person in room three into room six, and so on. Presto! An infinite number of rooms vacant.

  My time machine works on just that principle.

  AGAIN I RETURN TO 1965, the fixed point, the strange attractor to my chaotic trajectory. In years of wandering I've met countless people, but Daniel Ranien-Dancer-was the only one who truly had his head together. He had a soft, easy smile, a battered secondhand guitar, and as much wisdom as it has taken me a hundred lifetimes to learn. I've known him in good times and bad, in summer days with blue skies that we swore would last a thousand years, in days of winter blizzards with drifted snow piled high over our heads. In happier times we have laid roses into the barrels of rifles; we have laid our bodies across the city streets in the midst of riots, and not been hurt. And I have been with him when he died, once, twice, a hundred times over.

  He died on February 8, 1969, a month into the reign of King Richard the Trickster and his court fool Spiro, a year before Kent State and Altamont and the secret war in Cambodia slowly strangled the summer of dreams. He died, and there was-is-nothing I can do. The last time he died I dragged him to a hospital, where I screamed and ranted until finally I convinced them to admit him for observation, though nothing seemed wrong with him. With X rays and arteriograms and radioactive tracers, they found the incipient bubble in his brain; they drugged him, shaved his beautiful long brown hair, and operated on him, cutting out the offending capillary and tying it off neatly. When the anesthetic wore off, I sat in the hospital room and held his hand. There were big purple blotches under his eyes. He gripped my hand and stared, silent, into space. Visiting hours or no, I didn't let them throw me out of the room. He just stared. In the gray hours just before dawn he sighed softly and died. There was nothing at all that I could do.

  TIME TRAVEL is subject to two constraints: conservation of energy, and causality. The energy to appear in the past is only borrowed from the Dirac sea, and since ripples in the Dirac sea propagate in the negative direction, transport is only into the past. Energy is conserved in the present as long as the object transported returns with zero time delay, and the principle of causality assures that actions in the past cannot change the present. For example, what if you went into the past and killed your father? Who, then, would invent the time machine?

  Once I tried to commit suicide by murdering my father, before he met my mother, twenty-three years before I was born. It changed nothing, of course, and even when I did it, I knew it would change nothing. But you have to try these things. How else could I know for sure?

  NEXT WE TRIED sending a rat back. It made the trip through the Dirac sea and back undamaged. Then we tried a trained rat, one we borrowed from the psychology lab across the green without telling them what we wanted it for. Before its little trip it had been taught to run through a maze to get a piece of bacon. Afterwards, it ran the maze as fast as ever.

  We still had to try it on a human. I volunteered myself and didn't allow anyone to talk me out of it. By trying it on myself, I dodged the university regulations about experimenting on humans.

  The dive into the negative-energy sea felt like nothing at all. One moment I stood in the center of the loop of Renselz coils, watched by my two grad students and a technician; the next I was alone, and the clock had jumped back exactly one hour. Alone in a locked room with nothing but a camera and a clock, that moment was the high point of my life.

  The moment when I first met Dancer was the low point. I was in Berkeley, a bar called Trishia's, slowly getting trashed. I'd been doing that a lot, caught between omnipotence and despair. It was 1967. 'Frisco then-it was the middle of the hippy era-seemed somehow appropriate.

  There was a girl, sitting at a table with a group from the university. I walked over to her table and invited myself to sit down. I told her she didn't exist, that her whole world didn't exist, it was all created by the fact that I was watching, and would disappear back into the sea of unreality as soon as I stopped looking. Her name was Lisa, and she argued back. Her friends, bored, wandered off, and in a while Lisa realized just how drunk I was. She dropped a bill on the table and walked out into the foggy night.

  I followed her out. When she saw me following, she clutched her purse and bolted.

  He was suddenly there under the streetlight. For a second I thought he was a girl. He had bright blue eyes and straight brown hair down to his shoulders. He wore an embroidered Indian shirt, with a silver and turquoise medallion around his neck and a guitar slung acr
oss his back. He was lean, almost stringy, and moved like a dancer or a karate master. But it didn't occur to me to be afraid of him.

  He looked me over. "That won't solve your problem, you know," he said.

  And instantly I was ashamed. I was no longer sure exactly what I'd had in mind or why I'd followed her. It had been years since I'd first fled my death, and I had come to think of others as unreal, since nothing I could do would permanently affect them. My head was spinning. I slid down the wall and sat down, hard, on the sidewalk. What had I come to?

  He helped me back into the bar, fed me orange juice and pretzels, and got me to talk. I told him everything. Why not, since I could unsay anything I said, undo anything I did? But I had no urge to. He listened to it all, saying nothing. No one else had ever listened to the whole story before. I can't explain the effect it had on me. For uncountable years I'd been alone, and then, if only for a moment... It hit me with the intensity of a tab of acid. If only for a moment, I was not alone.

  We left arm in arm. Half a block away, Dancer stopped, in front of an alley. It was dark.

  "Something not quite right here." His voice had a puzzled tone.

  I pulled him back. "Hold on. You don't want to go down there-" He pulled free and walked in. After a slight hesitation, I followed.

  The alley smelled of old beer, mixed with garbage and stale vomit. In a moment, my eyes became adjusted to the dark.

  Lisa was cringing in a corner behind some trash cans. Her clothes had been cut away with a knife, and lay scattered around. Blood showed dark on her thighs and one arm. She didn't seem to see us. Dancer squatted down next to her and said something soft. She didn't respond. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around her, then cradled her in his arms and picked her up. "Help me get her to my apartment."

  "Apartment, hell. We'd better call the police," I said.

  "Call the pigs? Are you crazy? You want them to rape her, too?"

  I'd forgotten; this was the sixties. Between the two of us, we got her to Dancer's VW bug and took her to his apartment in The Hash-bury. He explained it to me quietly as we drove, a dark side of the summer of love that I'd not seen before. It was greasers, he said. They come down to Berkeley because they heard that hippie chicks gave it away free, and get nasty when they met one who thought otherwise.