The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  What is it that I want from them? I don’t know exactly.

  I want to know that I have left something behind. I want to be sure that the world does not end with me. I want the feeling, the understanding, the certainty that the world will go on.

  I wonder if the dying dinosaurs were glad to see the mammals, tiny ratlike creatures that rustled secretively in the underbrush.

  * * *

  When I was in seventh grade, all the girls had to watch a special presentation during gym class one spring afternoon. We dressed in our gym clothes, then sat in the auditorium and watched a film called Becoming a Woman. The film talked about puberty and menstruation. The accompanying pictures showed the outline of a young girl. As the film progressed, she changed into a woman, developing breasts. The animation showed her uterus as it grew a lining, then shed it, then grew another. I remember watching with awe as the pictures showed the ovaries releasing an egg that united with a sperm, and then lodged in the uterus and grew into a baby.

  The film must have delicately skirted any discussion of the source of the sperm, because I remember asking my mother where the sperm came from and how it got inside the woman. The question made her very uncomfortable. She muttered something about a man and woman being in love—as if love were somehow all that was needed for the sperm to find its way into the woman’s body.

  After that discussion, it seems to me that I was always a little confused about love and sex—even after I learned about the mechanics of sex and what goes where. The penis slips neatly into the vagina—but where does the love come in? Where does biology leave off and the higher emotions begin?

  Does the female pseudoscorpion love the male when their dance is done? Does the male spider love his mate as he scurries away, running for his life? Is there love among the bowerbirds as they copulate in their bower? The textbooks fail to say. I speculate, but I have no way to get the answers.

  * * *

  My creatures engage in a long, slow courtship. I am getting sicker. Sometimes, my mother comes to ask me questions that I will not answer. Sometimes, men sit by my bed—but they are less real than my mother. These are men I cared about—men I thought I might love, though I never got beyond the thought. Through their translucent bodies, I can see the laboratory walls. They never were real, I think now.

  Sometimes, in my delirium, I remember things. A dance back at college; I was slow-dancing, with someone’s body pressed close to mine. The room was hot and stuffy and we went outside for some air. I remember he kissed me, while one hand stroked my breast and the other fumbled with the buttons of my blouse. I kept wondering if this was love—this fumbling in the shadows.

  In my delirium, things change. I remember dancing in a circle with someone’s hands clasping mine. My feet ache, and I try to stop, but my partner pulls me along, refusing to release me. My feet move instinctively in time with my partner’s, though there is no music to help us keep the beat. The air smells of dampness and mold; I have lived my life underground and I am accustomed to these smells.

  Is this love?

  I spend my days lying by the window, watching through the dirty glass. From the mouth of the alley, he calls to her. I did not give him a voice, but he calls in his own way, rubbing his two front legs together so that metal rasps against metal, creaking like a cricket the size of a Buick.

  She strolls past the alley mouth, ignoring him as he charges toward her, rattling his teeth. He backs away, as if inviting her to follow. She walks by. But then, a moment later, she strolls past again and the scene repeats itself. I understand that she is not really oblivious to his attention. She is simply taking her time, considering her situation. The male intensifies his efforts, tossing his head as he backs away, doing his best to call attention to the fine home he has created.

  I listen to them at night. I cannot see them—the electricity failed two days ago and the streetlights are out. So I listen in the darkness, imagining. Metal legs rub together to make a high creaking noise. The sail on the male’s back rattles as he unfolds it, then folds it, then unfolds it again, in what must be a sexual display. I hear a spiked tail rasping over a spiny back in a kind of caress. Teeth chatter against metal—love bites, perhaps. (The lion bites the lioness on the neck when they mate, an act of aggression that she accepts as affection.) Claws scrape against metal hide, clatter over metal scales. This, I think, is love. My creatures understand love.

  I imagine a cock made of copper tubing and pipe fittings sliding into a canal lined with sheet metal from a soda can. I hear metal sliding over metal. And then my imagination fails. My construction made no provision for the stuff of reproduction: the sperm, the egg. Science failed me there. That part is up to the creatures themselves.

  * * *

  My body is giving out on me. I do not sleep at night; pain keeps me awake. I hurt everywhere, in my belly, in my breasts, in my bones. I have given up food. When I eat, the pains increase for a while, and then I vomit. I cannot keep anything down, and so I have stopped trying.

  When the morning light comes, it is gray, filtering through the haze that covers the sky. I stare out the window, but I can’t see the male. He has abandoned his post at the mouth of the alley. I watch for an hour or so, but the female does not stroll by. Have they finished with each other?

  I watch from my bed for a few hours, the blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Sometimes, fever comes and I soak the blanket with my sweat. Sometimes, chills come, and I shiver under the blankets. Still, there is no movement in the alley.

  It takes me more than an hour to make my way down the stairs. I can’t trust my legs to support me, so I crawl on my knees, making my way across the room like a baby too young to stand upright. I carry the blanket with me, wrapped around my shoulders like a cape. At the top of the stairs, I rest, then I go down slowly, one step at a time.

  The alley is deserted. The array of hubcaps glitters in the dim sunlight. The litter of bright papers looks forlorn and abandoned. I step cautiously into the entrance. If the male were to rush me now, I would not be able to run away. I have used all my reserves to travel this far.

  The alley is quiet. I manage to get to my feet and shuffle forward through the papers. My eyes are clouded, and I can just make out the dangling bedspread halfway down the alley. I make my way to it. I don’t know why I’ve come here. I suppose I want to see. I want to know what has happened. That’s all.

  I duck beneath the dangling bedspread. In the dim light, I can see a doorway in the brick wall. Something is hanging from the lintel of the door.

  I approach cautiously. The object is gray, like the door behind it. It has a peculiar, spiraling shape. When I touch it, I can feel a faint vibration inside, like the humming of distant equipment. I lay my cheek against it and I can hear a low-pitched song, steady and even.

  When I was a child, my family visited the beach and I spent hours exploring the tidepools. Among the clumps of blue-black mussels and the black turban snails, I found the egg casing of a horn shark in a tidepool. It was spiral-shaped, like this egg, and when I held it to the light, I could see a tiny embryo inside. As I watched, the embryo twitched, moving even though it was not yet truly alive.

  * * *

  I crouch at the back of the alley with my blanket wrapped around me. I see no reason to move—I can die here as well as I can die anywhere. I am watching over the egg, keeping it safe.

  Sometimes, I dream of my past life. Perhaps I should have handled it differently. Perhaps I should have been less cautious, hurried out on the mating line, answered the song when a male called from his bower. But it doesn’t matter now. All that is gone, behind us now.

  My time is over. The dinosaurs and the humans—our time is over. New times are coming. New types of love. I dream of the future, and my dreams are filled with the rattle of metal claws.

  JOE HALDEMAN

  The Hemingway Hoax

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University o
f Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the ’70s. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” and won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre). His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, Worlds, Worlds Apart, and (with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II) There Is No Darkness, the collections Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures, and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent books are the “techno-thriller” Tool of the Trade, and the SF novels Buying Time and The Hemingway Hoax. His story “Manifest Destiny” was in our First Annual Collection, and his story “More Than the Sum of His Parts” was in our Third Annual Collection. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

  In the vivid and fast-moving novella that follows, Haldeman is at the very top of even his own high standard, as what starts out as a relatively harmless literary hoax soon plunges us into an intricate maze of intrigue and murder and betrayal, as cosmic forces fight it out in a battle that may determine the fate of humanity itself.…

  The Hemingway Hoax

  JOE HALDEMAN

  1. The Torrents Of Spring

  Our story begins in a rundown bar in Key West, not so many years from now. The bar is not the one Hemingway drank at, nor yet the one that claims to be the one he drank at, because they are both too expensive and full of tourists. This bar, in a more interesting part of town, is a Cuban place. It is neither clean nor well-lighted, but has cold beer and good strong Cuban coffee. Its cheap prices and rascally charm are what bring together the scholar and the rogue.

  Their first meeting would be of little significance to either at the time, though the scholar, John Baird, would never forget it. John Baird was not capable of forgetting anything.

  Key West is lousy with writers, mostly poor writers, in one sense of that word or the other. Poor people did not interest our rogue, Sylvester Castlemaine, so at first he didn’t take any special note of the man sitting in the corner scribbling on a yellow pad. Just another would-be writer, come down to see whether some of Papa’s magic would rub off. Not worth the energy of a con.

  But Castle’s professional powers of observation caught at a detail or two and focused his attention. The man was wearing jeans and a faded flannel shirt, but his shoes were expensive Italian loafers. His beard had been trimmed by a barber. He was drinking Heineken. The pen he was scribbling with was a fat Mont Blanc Diplomat, two hundred bucks on the hoof, discounted. Castle got his cup of coffee and sat at a table two away from the writer.

  He waited until the man paused, set the pen down, took a drink. “Writing a story?” Castle said.

  The man blinked at him. “No … just an article.” He put the cap on the pen with a crisp snap. “An article about stories. I’m a college professor.”

  “Publish or perish,” Castle said.

  The man relaxed a bit. “Too true.” He riffled through the yellow pad. “This won’t help much. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “Tell you what … bet you a beer it’s Hemingway or Tennessee Williams.”

  “Too easy.” He signaled the bartender. “Dos cervezas. Hemingway, the early stories. You know his work?”

  “Just a little. We had to read him in school—The Old Man and the Fish? And then I read a couple after I got down here.” He moved over to the man’s table. “Name’s Castle.”

  “John Baird.” Open, honest expression; not too promising. You can’t con somebody unless he thinks he’s conning you. “Teach up at Boston.”

  “I’m mostly fishing. Shrimp nowadays.” Of course Castle didn’t normally fish, not for things in the sea, but the shrimp part was true. He’d been reduced to heading shrimp on the Catalina for five dollars a bucket. “So what about these early stories?”

  The bartender set down the two beers and gave Castle a weary look.

  “Well … they don’t exist.” John Baird carefully poured the beer down the side of his glass. “They were stolen. Never published.”

  “So what can you write about them?”

  “Indeed. That’s what I’ve been asking myself.” He took a sip of the beer and settled back. “Seventy-four years ago they were stolen. December 1922. That’s really what got me working on them; thought I would do a paper, a monograph, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the occasion.”

  It sounded less and less promising, but this was the first imported beer Castle had had in months. He slowly savored the bite of it.

  “He and his first wife, Hadley, were living in Paris. You know about Hemingway’s early life?”

  “Huh uh. Paris?”

  “He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. That was kind of a prissy, self-satisfied suburb of Chicago.”

  “Yeah, I been there.”

  “He didn’t like it. In his teens he sort of ran away from home, went down to Kansas City to work on a newspaper.

  “World War I started, and like a lot of kids, Hemingway couldn’t get into the army because of bad eyesight, so he joined the Red Cross and went off to drive ambulances in Italy. Take cigarettes and chocolate to the troops.

  “That almost killed him. He was just doing his cigarettes-and-chocolate routine and an artillery round came in, killed the guy next to him, tore up another, riddled Hemingway with shrapnel. He claims then that he picked up the wounded guy and carried him back to the trench, in spite of being hit in the knee by a machine-gun bullet.”

  “What do you mean, ‘claims’?”

  “You’re too young to have been in Vietnam.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good for you. I was hit in the knee by a machine-gun bullet myself, and went down on my ass and didn’t get up for five weeks. He didn’t carry anybody one step.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Well, he was always rewriting his life. We all do it. But it seemed to be a compulsion with him. That’s one thing that makes Hemingway scholarship challenging.”

  Baird poured the rest of the beer into his glass. “Anyhow, he actually was the first American wounded in Italy, and they made a big deal over him. He went back to Oak Park a war hero. He had a certain amount of success with women.”

  “Or so he says?”

  “Right, God knows. Anyhow, he met Hadley Richardson, an older woman but quite a number, and they had a steamy courtship and got married and said the hell with it, moved to Paris to live a sort of Bohemian life while Hemingway worked on perfecting his art. That part isn’t bullshit. He worked diligently and he did become one of the best writers of his era. Which brings us to the lost manuscripts.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Hemingway was picking up a little extra money doing journalism. He’d gone to Switzerland to cover a peace conference for a news service. When it was over, he wired Hadley to come join him for some skiing.

  “This is where it gets odd. On her own initiative, Hadley packed up all of Ernest’s work. All of it. Not just the typescripts, but the handwritten first drafts and the carbons.”

  “That’s like a Xerox?”

  “Right. She packed them in an overnight bag, then packed her own suitcase. A porter at the train station, the Gare de Lyon, put them aboard for her. She left the train for a minute to find something to read—and when she came back, they were gone.”<
br />
  “Suitcase and all?”

  “No, just the manuscripts. She and the porter searched up and down the train. But that was it. Somebody had seen the overnight bag sitting there and snatched it. Lost forever.”

  That did hold a glimmer of professional interest. “That’s funny. You’d think they’d get a note then, like ‘If you ever want to see your stories again, bring a million bucks to the Eiffel Tower’ sort of thing.”

  “A few years later, that might have happened. It didn’t take long for Hemingway to become famous. But at the time, only a few of the literary intelligentsia knew about him.”

  Castle shook his head in commiseration with the long-dead thief. “Guy who stole ’em probably didn’t even read English. Dumped ’em in the river.”

  John Baird shivered visibly. “Undoubtedly. But people have never stopped looking for them. Maybe they’ll show up in some attic someday.”

  “Could happen.” Wheels turning.

  “It’s happened before in literature. Some of Boswell’s diaries were recovered because a scholar recognized his handwriting on an old piece of paper a merchant used to wrap a fish. Hemingway’s own last book, he put together from notes that had been lost for thirty years. They were in a couple of trunks in the basement of the Ritz, in Paris.” He leaned forward, excited. “Then after he died, they found another batch of papers down here, in a back room in Sloppy Joe’s. It could still happen.”

  Castle took a deep breath. “It could be made to happen, too.”

  “Made to happen?”

  “Just speakin’, you know, in theory. Like some guy who really knows Hemingway, suppose he makes up some stories that’re like those old ones, finds some seventy-five-year-old paper and an old, what do you call them, not a word processor—”

  “Typewriter.”

  “Whatever. Think he could pass ’em off for the real thing?”

  “I don’t know if he could fool me,” Baird said, and tapped the side of his head. “I have a freak memory: eidetic, photographic. I have just about every word Hemingway ever wrote committed to memory.” He looked slightly embarrassed. “Of course that doesn’t make me an expert in the sense of being able to spot a phony. I just wouldn’t have to refer to any texts.”