Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition

by Rich Horton

  "Exactly.” Chance closed the door and locked it. This struck Rain as odd; maybe he was afraid that Ferdi Raskolnikov would barge in on them. “Things have been loopy here lately,” he said. “You should see some of the mistakes we've had to send back.” He poured broccoli cocktail for himself. It oozed from the pitcher and landed in his coffee mug with a thick plop. “I've spent all afternoon trying to convince myself that the dogs are some kind of a workaround, maybe to jog some lost data loose from the MemEx.” He replaced the pitcher in the igloo and settled onto the chair behind his desk. “But now you show up and I'm wondering: Why is Rain asking me for this book?"

  She frowned. “I ask you for all my books."

  He considered for a moment, tapping the finger against his forehead and then pointed at her. “Let me tell you a story.” Rain started to object that she had neither goods nor services to offer him in return and she had just drained her MemEx account to dry spit, but he silenced her with a wave. “No, this one is free.” He took a sip of liquid broccoli. “An audience credit unencumbered, offered to the woman of my dreams."

  She stuck out her tongue.

  "Why does this place exist?” he asked.

  "The Barrow?"

  "Nowhere."

  "Ah, eschatology.” She laughed bitterly. “Well, Father Samsa claims this is the afterlife, although I'll be damned if I know whether it's heaven or hell."

  "I know you don't believe that,” said Chance. “So then this is some game that the cognisphere is playing? We're virtual chesspersons?"

  Rain shrugged.

  "What happens when we step off the edge?"

  "Nobody knows.” Just then a cacophony of clocks yawped, pinged, buzzed in six o'clock. “This isn't much of a story Chance."

  "Patience, love. So you think the cognisphere recreated us for a reason?"

  "Maybe. Okay, sure.” A huge spider with eight paintbrush legs shook itself and stretched on a teak cabinet. “We're in a zoo. A museum."

  "Or maybe some kind of primitive backup. The cognisphere keeps us around because there's a chance that it might fail, go crazy—I don't know. If that happened, we could start over."

  "Except we'd all die without the cognisphere.” The spider stepped onto the wall and picked its way toward the nearest corner. “And nobody's made any babies that I know of. We're not exactly Adam and Eve material, Chance."

  "But that's damn scary, no? Makes the case that none of us is real."

  Rain liked him better when he was trying to coax her into bed. “Enough.” She pushed her chair back and started to get up.

  "Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Story time. When I was a kid, I used to collect meanies."

  "Meanies?” She settled back down.

  "Probably after your time. They were bots, about so big.” He held forefinger and thumb a couple of centimeters apart. “Little fighting toys. There were gorilla meanies and ghoul meanies and nazi meanies and demon meanies and dino meanies. Fifty-two in all, one for every week of the year. You set them loose in the meanie arena and they would try to kill one another. If they died, they'd shut down for twenty-four hours. Now if meanies fought one on one, they would always draw. But when you formed them into teams, their powers combined in different ways. For instance, a ghoul and nazi team could defeat any other team of two—except the dino and yeti. For the better part of a year, I rushed home from school every day to play with the things. I kept trying combinations until I could pretty much predict the outcome of every battle. Then I lost interest."

  "Speaking of losing interest,” said Rain, who was distracted by the spider decorating the corner of Chance's office in traceries of blue and green.

  "I'm getting there.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and took another sip from the mug. “So a couple of years go by and I'm twelve now. One night I'm in my room and I hear this squeaking coming from under my bed. I pull out the old meanie arena, which has been gathering dust all this time and I see that a mouse has blundered into it and is being attacked by a squad of meanies. And just like that I'm fascinated with them all over again. For weeks I drop crickets and frogs and garter snakes into the arena and watch them try to survive."

  "That's sick."

  "No question. But then boys can't help themselves when it comes to mindless cruelty. Anyway, it didn't last. The wildlife was too hard on the poor little bots.” He drained the last of the broccoli. “But the point is that I got bored playing with a closed set of meanies. Even though I hadn't actually tried all possible combinations, after a while I could see that nothing much new was ever going to happen. But then the mouse changed everything.” He leaned forward across the desk. “So let me propose a thought experiment to you, my lovely Lorraine. This mysterious novel that everyone is so eager to find? What if the last name of the author began with the letter...” He paused and then seemed to pluck something out of the air. “Oh, let's say ‘W'.''

  Rain started.

  "And just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that the first name also begins with ‘W’ ... Ah, I see from your expression that this thought has also occurred to you."

  "It's not him,” said Rain. “He was revived at nineteen; he's just a kid. Why would the cognisphere care anything about him?"

  "Because he's the mouse in our sad, little arena. He isn't simply recycling memories of the world like the rest of us. The novel your doggies are looking for doesn't exist in the cognisphere, never did. Because it's being written right here, right now. Maybe imagination is in short supply wherever the doggies come from. Lord knows there isn't a hell of a lot of it in Nowhere."

  Rain would have liked to deny it, but she could feel the insult sticking to her. “How do you know he's writing a novel?"

  "I supply the paper, Rain. Reams and reams of it. Besides, this may be hell, as Father Samsa insists, but it's also a small town. We meddle in each other's business, what else is there to do?” His voice softened; Rain thought that if Chance ever did take a lover, this would be how he might speak to her. “Is the book any good? Because if it is, I'd like to read it."

  "I don't know.” At that moment, Rain felt a drop of something cold hit the back of her hand. There was a dot the color of sky on her knuckle. She looked up at the spider hanging from the ceiling on an azure thread. “He doesn't show it to me. Your toy is dripping."

  "Really?” Chance came around the desk. “A woman of your considerable charms is taking no for an answer?” He reached up and cradled the spider into his arms. “Go get him, Rain, You don't want to keep your mouse waiting.” He carried it to the teak cabinet.

  Rain rubbed at the blue spot on her hand but the stain had penetrated her skin. She couldn't even smudge it.

  * * * *

  But Will wasn't waiting, at least not for Rain. She stopped by their apartment but he wasn't there and he hadn't left a note. Neither was he at the Button Factory nor Queequeg's Kava Cave. She looked in at the Laughing Cookie just as Fast Eddie was locking up. No Will. She finally tracked Will down at the overlook, by the blue picnic table under the chestnut trees.

  Normally they came here for the view, which was spectacular. A field of wildflowers, tidy-tips and mullein and tickseed and bindweed, sloped steeply down to the edge of the mesa. But Will was paying no attention to the scenery. He had scattered a stack of five looseleaf binders across the table; the whole of The Great American Novel or The Last President or whatever the hell it was called. Three of the binders were open. He was reading—but apparently not writing in—a fourth. A No. 2 pencil was tucked behind his ear. Something about Will's body language disturbed Rain. He usually sprawled awkwardly wherever he came to rest, a giraffe trying to settle on a hammock. Now he was gathered into himself, hunched over the binder like an old man. Rain came up behind him and kneaded his shoulders for a moment.

  He leaned back and sighed.

  "Sorry about this afternoon.” She bent to nibble his ear. “Have you eaten?"

  "No.” He kissed the air in front of him but di
d not look at her.

  She peeked at the looseleaf page in front of him and tried to decipher the handwriting, which was not quite as legible as an EEG chart.... knelt before the coffin, her eyes wide in the dim holy light of the cathedral. His face was wavy ... No, thought Rain straightening up before he suspected that she was reading. Not wavy. Waxy. “Beautiful evening,” she said.

  Will shut the binder he had been reading and gazed distractedly toward the horizon.

  Rain had not been completely honest with Chance. It was true that Will hadn't shown her the novel, but she had read some of it. She had stolen glimpses over his shoulder or read upside down when she was sitting across from him. Then there was the one guilty afternoon when she had come back to their apartment and gobbled up pages 34-52 before her conscience mastered her curiosity. The long passage had taken place in a bunker during one of the Resource Wars. The President of Great America, Lawrence Goodman, had been reminiscing with his former mistress and current National Security Advisor, Rebecca Santorino, about Akron, where they had first fallen in love years ago and which had just been obliterated in retaliation for an American strike on Zhengzhou. Two pages later they were thrashing on the president's bed and ripping each other's clothes off. Rain had begun this part with great interest, hoping to gain new insight into Will's sexual tastes, but had closed the binder uneasily just as the President was tying his lover to the Louis XVI armoire with silk Atura neckties.

  Will closed the other open binders and stacked all five into a pile. Then he pulled the pencil from behind his ear, snapped it in two, and let the pieces roll out of his hand under the picnic table. He gave her an odd, lopsided smile.

  "Will, what's the matter?” Rain stared. “Are you okay?"

  In response, he pulled a baggie of cookie dust from his shirt pocket and jiggled it.

  "Here?” she said, coloring. “In plain sight?” Usually they hid out when they were eating dust, at least until they weathered the first rush. The Cocoa Peanut Butter Chunk made them giggly and not a little stupid. Macaroon Sandies often hit Rain like powdered lust.

  "There's no one to see.” Will licked his forefinger and stuck it into the bag. “Besides, what if there was?” He extended the finger toward her, the tip and nail coated with the parti-colored powder. “Does anyone here care what we do?"

  She considered telling him then what Chance Conrad had said about small towns but she could see that Will was having a mood. So she just opened her mouth and obediently stuck her tongue out. As he rotated the finger across the middle of her tongue, she tasted the sweet, spicy grit. She closed her mouth on the finger and he pulled it slowly through her lips.

  "Now you,” she said, reaching for the baggie. They always fed each other cookie dust.

  Rain and Will sat on the tabletop with their feet on the seat, facing the slope that led down to the edge of Nowhere. The world beneath the impossibly high cliff was impossibly flat, but this was still Rain's favorite lookout, even if it was probably an illusion. The land stretched out in a kind of grid with rectangles in every color of green: the brooding green of forests, the dreaming green of fields under cultivation and the confused gray-green of scrub land. Dividing the rectangles were ribbons the color of wet sand. Rain liked to think they were roads, although she had never spotted any traffic on them. She reached for Will's hand and he closed it around hers. He was right: she didn't care if anyone saw them together like this. His skin was warm and rough. As she rubbed her finger over the back of his hand, she thought she could make out a faded blue spot. But maybe it was a trick of the twilight, or a cookie hallucination.

  The rectangles and the ribbons of the land to the southwest had always reminded her of something, but she had never quite been able to figure out what. Now as Eddie's magic cookie dust sparked through her bloodstream, and she felt Will's warm hand in hers, she thought of a trip she had taken with her father when she was a just a kid to a museum in an old city called Manhilton, that got blown up afterward. In the museum were very old pix that just hung on the wall and mostly didn't do anything, and she remembered taking a cab to get there and the cab had asked what her name was but she wouldn't tell it so it called her little girl which she didn't like because she was seven already, and the museum had escalators that whispered music, and there was one really, really big room filled with pix of all blurry water lilies, and outside in a sculpture garden there were statues made of metal and rocks but there were no flowers because it was cold so she and Dad didn't stay out there very long and inside again were lots of pix of women with three eyes and too many corners and then some wide blue men blocked her view of the Mona Lisa so she never really saw that one, which everyone said later was supposed to be so special but one she did see and remembered now was a pix of a grid that had colored rectangles and with ribbons of red and yellow separating them, and she asked her Dad if it was a map of the museum and he laughed down at her because her Dad was so tall, tall as any statue and he said the pix wasn't a map, it was a mondrian and she asked him what a mondrian was and then he laughed again and she laughed and it was so easy to laugh in those days and Will was laughing too.

  "I want to go down there.” He laughed as he pointed down at the mondrian which stretched into the rosy distance.

  "There?” Rain didn't understand; the best part of her was still in the museum with her father. “Why?"

  "Because there are people living there. Must be why Chance won't give out binoculars or telescopes.” He let go of her hand. “Because it's not here."

  "You're going to step over the edge?” Her voice rose in alarm.

  "No, silly.” He leapt up, stood on the tabletop and raised his arms to the sky. “I'm going to climb down."

  "But that's the same thing."

  "No, it isn't. I'll show you.” He slid off the picnic table and started toward the thicket of scruffy evergreens and brambles that had overgrown the edge of Nowhere. He walked along this tangle until he came to a bit of blue rag tied to a branch, glanced over his shoulder to see if she was still with him and then wriggled into the scrub. Rain followed.

  They emerged into a tiny clearing She sidled beside him and he slipped an arm around her waist to brace her. The cliff was steep here but not sheer. She could make out a narrow dirt track that switched back through scree and stunted fir. Maybe a mountain goat could negotiate it, if there were any mountain goats. But a single misstep would send Will plunging headlong. And then there was the Drop. Everyone knew about the Drop. They traded stories about it all the time. Scary stories. She was about to ask him why, if there were people down there, they hadn't climbed up for a visit, when he kicked a stone over the edge. They watched it bounce straight down and disappear over a ledge.

  "Lucy Panza showed me this,” said Will, his face flushed with excitement.

  Rain wondered when he'd had time to go exploring the edge with Lucy Panza. “But she stepped over the edge."

  "No,” he said. “She didn't."

  She considered the awful slope for a moment and shuddered. “I'm not going down there, Will."

  He continued peering down the dirt track. “I know,” he said.

  The calm with which he said it was like a slap in the face. She stared at him, speechless, until he finally met her gaze. “I'll come back for you.” He gave her the goofy, apologetic grin he always summoned up when he upset her. “I'll make sure the path is safe and I'll make all kinds of friends down at the bottom and when the time is right, I'll be back."

  "But what about your book?"

  He blew a dismissive breath between his lips. “I'm all set with that."

  "It's finished?"

  "It's crap, Rain.” His voice was flat. “I'm not wasting any more time writing about some stupid made-up president. There are no more presidents. And how can anyone write the Great American novel when there is no more America?” He caught his breath. “Sorry,” he said. “I know that's what you wanted me to do.” He gave her a sour smile. “You're welcome to read it if you want. Or hand it ov
er to the dogs. That should be good for a laugh.” Then he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

  Of course Rain kissed him back. She wanted to drag him down on top of her and rip his clothes off, although there really wasn't enough room here to make love. She would even have let him take her on the picnic table, tie her to the damn table, if that's what he had wanted. But his wasn't the kind of kiss that started anything.

  "So I'm coming back, I promise,” he murmured into her ear. “Just tell everyone that you're waiting for me."

  "Wait a minute.” She twisted away from him. “You're going now? It's almost dark. We just ate cookie dust.” She couldn't believe he was serious. This was such a typical boneheaded-Will-stunt he was pulling. “Come home, honey,” she said. “Get some sleep. Things might look different in the morning."

  He stroked her hair. “I've got at least another hour of light,” he said. “Believe me, I've thought about this a long time, Rain.” Then he brushed his finger against her lips. “I love you."

  He took a step over the edge and another. He had gone about a dozen meters before his feet went out from beneath him and he fell backwards, skidding on his rear end and clutching at the scrub. But he caught himself almost immediately and looked up at her, his face pale as the moon. “Oops!” he called cheerfully.

  Rain stood at the edge of the cliff long after she could no longer see him. She was hoping that he'd come to a dead end and have to turn back. The sun was painting the horizon with fire by the time she fetched Will's binders to the edge of Nowhere. She opened one after another and shook the pages free. They fluttered into the twilight like an exaltation of larks. A few landed briefly on the path before launching themselves again into the breeze and following their creator out of her life. When all the pages had disappeared, Rain took the whistle that the dogs had given her and hurled it as far into the mondrian as she could.

  Only then did she let herself cry. She thought she deserved it.