The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  What are the odds of it, I wondered, what are the odds of coming upon the same minutes again, these minutes.

  I stir within the bedclothes.

  I leaned forward to hear, this time, what I would say; it was something like but fun anyway, or something.

  Fun, she says, laughing, harrowed, the degraded sound a ghost’s twittering. Charlie, someday I’m going to die of fun.

  She takes her pill. The Wasp follows her to the john and is shut out.

  Why am I here? I thought, and my heart was beating hard and slow. What am I here for? What?

  RESET.

  ACCESS.

  Silvered icy streets, New York, Fifth Avenue. She is climbing, shouting from a cab’s dark interior. Just don’t shout at me, she shouts at someone; her mother I never met, a dragon. She is out and hurrying away down the sleety street with her bundles, the Wasp at her shoulder. I could reach out and touch her shoulder and make her turn and follow me out. Walking away, lost in the colorless press of traffic and people, impossible to discern within the softened snowy image.

  —

  Something was very wrong.

  Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar snow and bright, sleek skiers were not really the winter she feared, though even in fire-warmed chalets it was hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed. It was continual false, flavorless spring all winter long.

  How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?

  Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often. Not always.

  “There’s a problem,” I said to the director.

  “It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s gotten worse.”

  He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.

  “Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.

  “That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”

  “Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”

  “No, no, no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”

  I sputtered, trying to explain. “But, but…”

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care?”

  He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.

  “I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business, like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it. Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh, washing clothes, sitting in a park….”

  “It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”

  He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”

  He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.

  “So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”

  With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”

  The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.

  “So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”

  —

  I didn’t go back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and the Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.

  I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom, you can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.

  There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers. Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.

  The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things

  KAREN JOY FOWLER

  Karen Joy Fowler (1950– ) is an influential and award-winning US writer of speculative and mainstream fiction associated with the Humanists (including Kim Stanley Robinson) and the rise of feminist science fiction. She studied at Berkeley and the University of California at Davis, receiving a BA in political science and an MA in North Asian studies. Fowler is best known as the author of two bestselling novels, The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), which was made into a movie, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013). She has won several awards, including the Nebula Award and
World Fantasy Award, in addition to being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Warwick Prize (both for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). In 1991, Fowler cofounded the James Tiptree Jr. Award, given annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that “expands or explores our understanding of gender.”

  We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is not, strictly speaking, science fiction (although, amusingly enough, it was shortlisted for the Nebula Award for science fiction) but exhibits a speculative impulse in how it interrogates the way human beings interact with and perceive animals. Her often ambiguous approach to genre writing also manifests in novels like Sarah Canary (1991), which can be read as a feminist story of the nineteenth century and a first-contact story with a character who may or may not be an alien.

  Fowler began publishing science fiction with “Recalling Cinderella” in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, volume 1 (1985), edited by Algis Budrys. Swiftly thereafter her first collection, Artificial Things (1986), had a large impact on the field and she won the 1987 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Later collections include Peripheral Vision (1990), Letters from Home (1991; with separate stories by Fowler, Pat Cadigan, and Pat Murphy), and Black Glass: Short Fictions (1997), which assembles stories from the previous two volumes, plus original material, and which was recently reissued. Her most recent collection, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories (2009), won the World Fantasy Award. Fowler has shown considerable range in her short fiction throughout her career. Some stories, like “Face Value” (1986) or “Faded Roses” (1989), are pure science fiction, while others shift into fantasy or fabulation, using ambiguity in ingenious and unique ways.

  On the topic of ambiguity, Fowler wrote in an essay included in Wonderbook (2013), “I don’t use ambiguity in a story as a literary device or a postmodern trick…I use it in an attempt to acknowledge that the things we think we know are submerged in a vast sea of things we don’t know and things we will never know. I mean to admit to my own lack of comprehension about the world in which we live.”

  “The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things” (1985), originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, features hypnotherapy and time travel. Despite being an early tale of hers, the story is typically Fowleresque in its mixture of complexity and deep characterization.

  THE LAKE WAS FULL OF ARTIFICIAL THINGS

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Daniel was older than Miranda had expected. In 1970, when they had said good-bye, he had been twenty-two. Two years later he was dead, but now, approaching her with the bouncing walk which had suited his personality so well, he appeared as a middle-aged man and quite gray, though solid and muscular. She noted with relief that he was smiling. “Randy!” he said. He laughed delightedly. “You look wonderful.”

  Miranda glanced down at herself, wondering what, in fact, she did look like or if she had any form at all. She saw the flesh of her arms firm again and the skin smooth and tight. So she was the twenty-year-old. Isn’t that odd, she thought, turning her hands palms up to examine them. Then Daniel reached her. The sun was bright in the sky behind him, obscuring his face, giving him a halo. He put his arms around her. I feel him, she thought in astonishment. I smell him. She breathed in slowly. “Hello, Daniel,” she said.

  He squeezed her slightly, then dropped his arms and looked around. Miranda looked outward, too. They were on the college campus. Surely this was not the setting she would have chosen. It unsettled her, as if she had been sent backward in time and gifted with prescience, but remained powerless to make any changes, was doomed to see it all again, moving to its inevitable conclusion. Daniel, however, seemed pleased.

  He pointed off to the right. “There’s the creek,” he said, and suddenly she could hear it. “Memories there, right?” And she remembered lying beneath him on the grass by the water. She put her hands on his shoulders now; his clothes were rough against her palms and military—like his hair. He gestured to the round brick building behind her. “Tollman Hall,” he said. “Am I right? God, this is great, Randy. I remember everything. Total recall. I had Physics Ten there with Dr. Fielding. Physics for nonmajors. I couldn’t manage my vectors and I got a B.” He laughed again, throwing an arm around Miranda. “It’s great to be back.”

  They began to walk together toward the center of campus, slow walking with no destination, designed for conversation. They were all alone, Miranda noticed. The campus was deserted, then suddenly it wasn’t. Students appeared on the pathways. Longhairs with headbands and straights with slide rules. Just what she remembered. “Tell me what everyone’s been doing,” Daniel said. “It’s been what? Thirty years? Don’t leave out a thing.”

  Miranda stooped and picked a small daisy out of the grass. She twirled it absentmindedly in her fingers. It left a green stain on her thumb. Daniel stopped walking and waited beside her. “Well,” Miranda said. “I’ve lost touch with most of them. Gail got a job on Le Monde. She went to Germany for the reunification. I heard she was living there. The antinuclear movement was her permanent beat. She could still be there, I suppose.”

  “So she’s still a radical,” said Daniel. “What stamina.”

  “Margaret bought a bakery in San Francisco. Sixties cuisine. Whole grains. Tofu brownies. Heaviest cookies west of the Rockies. We’re in the same cable chapter so I keep up with her better. I saw her last marriage on TV. She’s been married three times now, every one a loser.”

  “What about Allen?” Daniel asked.

  “Allen,” repeated Miranda. “Well, Allen had a promising career in jogging shoes. He was making great strides.” She glanced at Daniel’s face. “Sorry,” she said. “Allen always brought out the worst in me. He lost his father in an air collision over Kennedy. Sued the airline and discovered he never had to work again. In short, Allen is rich. Last I heard, and this was maybe twenty years ago, he was headed to the Philippines to buy himself a submissive bride.” She saw Daniel smile, the lines in his face deepening with his expression. “Oh, you’d like to blame me for Allen, wouldn’t you?” she said. “But it wouldn’t be fair. I dated him maybe three times, tops.” Miranda shook her head. “Such an enthusiastic participant in the sexual revolution. And then it all turned to women’s liberation on him. Poor Allen. We can only hope his tiny wife divorced him and won a large settlement when you could still get alimony.”

  Daniel moved closer to her and they began to walk again, passing under the shade of a redwood grove. The grass changed to needles under their feet. “You needn’t be so hard on Allen,” he said. “I never minded about him. I always knew you loved me.”

  “Did you?” asked Miranda anxiously. She looked at her feet, afraid to examine Daniel’s face. My god, she was wearing moccasins. Had she ever worn moccasins? “I did get married, Daniel,” she said. “I married a mathematician. His name was Michael.” Miranda dropped her daisy, petals intact.

  Daniel continued to walk, swinging his arms easily. “Well, you were always hot for mathematics. I didn’t expect you to mourn me forever.”

  “So it’s all right?”

  Daniel stopped, turning to face her. He was still smiling, though it was not quite the smile she expected, not quite the easy, happy smile she remembered. “It’s all right that you got married, Randy,” he said softly. Something passed over his face and left it. “Hey!” he laughed again. “I remember something else from Physics Ten. Zeno’s paradox. You know what that is?”

  “No,” said Miranda.

  “It’s an argument. Zeno argued that motion was impossible because it required an object to pass through an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time.” Daniel swung his arms energetically. “Think about it for a minute, Randy. Can you fault it? Then think about how far I came to be here with you.”

  —

  “Miranda. Miranda.” It was her mother’s voice, rousing her for school. Only then it wasn’t. It was Dr. Matsui, who merely sounded maternal, despite the fact that she had no children of her own and was not ye
t thirty. Miranda felt her chair returning slowly to its upright position. “Are you back?” Dr. Matsui asked. “How did it go?”

  “It was short,” Miranda told her. She pulled the taped wires gently from her lids and opened her eyes. Dr. Matsui was seated beside her, reaching into Miranda’s hair to detach the clips which touched her scalp.

  “Perhaps we recalled you too early,” she conceded. “Matthew spotted an apex so we pulled the plug. We just wanted a happy ending. It was happy, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Dr. Matsui’s hair, parted on one side and curving smoothly under her chin, bobbed before Miranda’s face. Miranda touched it briefly, then her own hair, her cheeks, and her nose. They felt solid under her hand, real, but no more so than Daniel had been. “Yes, it was,” she repeated. “He was so happy to see me. So glad to be back. But, Anna, he was so real. I thought you said it would be like a dream.”

  “No,” Dr. Matsui told her. “I said it wouldn’t be. I said it was a memory of something that never happened and in that respect was like a dream. I wasn’t speaking to the quality of the experience.” She rolled her chair to the monitor and stripped the long feed-out sheet from it, tracing the curves quickly with one finger. Matthew, her technician, came to stand behind her. He leaned over her left shoulder, pointing. “There,” he said. “That’s Daniel. That’s what I put in.”

  Dr. Matsui returned her chair to Miranda’s side. “Here’s the map,” she said. “Maybe I can explain better.”