The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition

by Rich Horton (ed)

  It wasn’t like I could do anything. Not like I could bring back the dead, not like I could have known—

  Andy had to have known.

  She had a program that knew everything. I would check that every morning before I put on a shirt, if I had it. What sort of program warns me about a bomb threat and then doesn’t tell my sister not to ride her bike? SELDON had to have known. Andy had to have known.

  Why’d she want to burn that disk?

  I punched in Andy’s demographics.

  That morning I’d overheard Dad calling the school and telling them that I was still in shock over Andy’s death. Maybe I was. I missed her, yeah, but I wasn’t crying or screaming or anything. All I can remember was a dull ache and curiosity about her Quadra, her pet projects, that code. I felt like she had part of her that she kept trying to share and it was hidden in this computer, part of her I never got to see because programming and soccer and science fiction were all like trigonometry—things I was good at, but didn’t enjoy.

  That’s why I put in Andrea’s information. I wanted to know what was going on between her and SELDON.

  I selected Friends first.

  Friends read EVERYONE MISSES YOU, BUT IT’S OVER NOW.

  It quit. This time, I was glad.

  A bunch of Andy’s friends had been at her funeral. A couple of her high school friends flew in. One of them wished she hadn’t been cremated because he had a first serialization copy of The War of the Worlds in Pearson’s Weekly he would have let Dad bury with her. Of course they missed her. Andy was great. I tried something else.

  Misc. IT’S OVER NOW.

  Maybe there wasn’t much you could tell to someone who ended up lying on the side of the road and died before the ambulances could get to her.

  Bad luck. THERE’S NOTHING LEFT. IT’S OVER NOW.

  Bad luck gave me the obvious answer. She was twenty-eight and brilliant and just riding her bike when a car came out of nowhere and hit her. Dumb luck. Bad luck.

  Good luck. IT’S OKAY. IT’S OVER NOW.

  That’s when my hand started shaking.

  That line made it sound like a suicide. Like something in her life caught up to her and she ran straight into a Subaru to escape it. Like we were going to be that grieving family on the news, everybody knows the one; the family that says, “There was never any indication, she always seemed so happy.”

  And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be told that by a stupid secret computer program that had no way of knowing anything and still knew my sister better than I did. I didn’t want it to know anything.

  I punched in 3 for Family.

  YOU SHOULD HAVE BURNED THE DISK.

  I kicked the power strip and both the computers went down. I shot back in my computer chair and jerked to a stop against my bed, both black monitors staring at me. YOU SHOULD HAVE BURNED THE DISK. 3 for family. 3 for Dad trying to Talk while I installed this. 3 for me reading her handwriting in sharpie on the label. 3 for me.

  I should have burned the disk?

  Good luck. I could stick to good luck from now on. If it was even real. If SELDON.crn actually knew anything and wasn’t just random words and a few coincidences. Then I thought of the bomb in the locker room, and how I could have been there. I thought of Andy and her insistence that nothing computerized was random. Bad luck. Someone was injured. I could have been.

  Burn this disk. Why didn’t it just tell me to beware the Ides of March?

  I rolled back over and flipped the powerstrip back on with my toe. I booted both of my computers up and made myself open SELDON again.

  For a long time I just stared at the input box. After a few minutes I wrote in my name, but the date I gave was the day Andy died. I punched in 3 for family.

  YOUR SISTER LOVES YOU.

  I think I was shaking again.

  I wrote in Andy’s info for that day, her deathday, and stopped on the prompt. Good luck? Bad luck? She’d died—most of the answers seemed obvious, and some, I didn’t want to know. I went with the one I didn’t want to know instead of the ones I already did. Good luck.

  A TRULY RANDOM CHANCE IS WAITING JUST OUTSIDE THE DOOR, good luck read. Then for bad luck it just said MAYBE PREDESTINATION’S NOT THAT BAD.

  I wanted to punch through the monitor.

  I tried typing in WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? and got an ERROR: INDEX OUT OF BOUNDS as soon as I hit W. Same with 0, with 6, with T for TELL ME WHAT YOU ARE. I closed all the code windows, shut the computer down, ran downstairs so I could deal with something that wasn’t it, and ended up running back up with a bowl of spaghetti and a mumbled “Sorry Dad I just don’t want to talk right now” because I couldn’t leave it alone. My eyes were burning. I told myself it was from onions. Dad never simmered them enough.

  I wanted to tear that program apart. I wanted to print out all those Usenet group pages, print out all that code, sit at my desk and go through it and learn it and make it tell me what it knew. It had to tell me. Computers weren’t smarter than people; people programmed them. They were just better at crunching numbers.

  Sometime after my spaghetti was cold Dad knocked on my door again. “David,” he said, “I know you want to be alone, and it’s all right that you take some time for that . . . ”

  I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to solve this.

  Dad pushed open my door and saw me, and then he just walked in. He pulled my chair around to face him and he sat down on the edge of my bed and I hunched down and didn’t want him there.

  “David,” he said, “turn off the computers. Please.”

  I didn’t want to, but turning off the computers gave me a way not to look at him for a minute or so.

  “We need to talk through this,” he said, like there was a way to. If he’d known programming maybe we could have talked through SELDON, but Andy was dead. No logic, no reasoning, just dead and what was I supposed to say about that?

  “I don’t want to,” I said, and Dad’s face tightened up. I wasn’t the problem there. I wasn’t the thing being impossible to solve.

  “It’s not healthy to keep everything inside of you,” Dad said. “I know this is horrible and I wish I knew how to help you, but you and Andy always had it so together,” he said, and Andy was the one who’d always had it together, and I was stuck here between SELDON and Dad with no way to deal with either one.

  It didn’t matter that I wasn’t healthy or Dad couldn’t help. What mattered was that I had to know why Andrea had a program that could tell the future, I had to know and Andy wasn’t there to tell me, and for a second it mattered more that she couldn’t tell me than she wasn’t there.

  It was just for a second. Really. Just a second and I caught myself. I wanted Andy back more than I wanted to understand this, but I was sitting there with my mouth open and I must have been shaking or something because I remember Dad reaching over to me and then I was crushed against his chest, crying.

  I really hadn’t wanted to cry.

  He held onto me for I don’t know how long. The black space behind my eyelids was warmer than the black window I’d been staring at, and the thump-thump-thump I couldn’t block out coming from Dad’s heart started blocking out the hum of electricity in the room.

  I didn’t know what I was doing. More than not knowing .crn programming, more than not knowing how logic and chance and the future fit together, I wanted Andrea back and I couldn’t have that so I was getting in fights with a program she’d made. It didn’t make sense to me.

  When Dad finally let me go, there was a wet patch on his shirt where my eyes had been.

  We sat for a while. We talked about nothing. He left me alone after that, staring at the blank screen of Andy’s Quadra. It’d been supposed to make this all easier.

  I booted it up, feeling horrible for doing it. I opened up SELDON thinking I didn’t want to.

  I wrote in my information and the correct date.

  1 for Good luck. TRUST THAT BAD FEELING.

  5 for Misc.

 
This time it thought for a while. I could hear the Quadra’s harddrive struggling like I’d tried to install Doom on it and it couldn’t handle that at all. After a while it gave me my answer.

  GOODBYE, DAVID.

  That night I snuck out while Dad was sleeping and went out back to our firepit. I was wearing my black Metallica hoodie and cargo pants but white sneakers; I guess I blended in with the darkness anyway. There were stars out and a bit more than a half moon, so it wasn’t hard to see.

  I took all the wet leaves and stuff out of the pit and cleared off the gravel around it. Then I put down the grate and some charcoal and a shoebox. The shoebox was full of shredded newspaper and matchbooks and some oil—whatever I thought would burn. And it had the zip disk.

  I wasn’t out there in my suit or my dress shoes, but I wasn’t sure people wore suits to cremations anyway. I poured some lighter fluid over everything and lit the charcoal. Then I crouched there and watched it all burn. It stank, and it smoldered, and it flared up when the matches caught, and oily smoke went up through the trees.

  It took a long time to burn down, and the zip disk wasn’t gone like I had hoped. But it was blackened and melted, which was enough. I dumped a bucket of water into the pit and stirred up the ashes.

  I snuck back up to my room. On the way there I stopped outside Dad’s door, and I heard him turn over on his bed. I heard him adjust the sheets. I didn’t listen long.

  My Dell was asleep. The Quadra hummed at me and I sat down, trashed the SELDON program, and turned it off. Lots cleaner than the fire. Of course it didn’t feel the same.

  I changed into pajamas and lay down, pulling the sheets up over my head. Andy had always been smarter than me; I never could get into her interests, but I trusted her. I’d forget about SELDON, if I could. Maybe tomorrow I’d play some Lemmings or Exile on the Quadra, maybe I’d find somewhere to spend that twenty I got from the gutter. I’d try, anyway. And maybe tomorrow I’d talk to Dad about something that wasn’t Andy or her death.

  Maybe letting go was something I did need to learn.

  I fell asleep thinking of the fire, the stench of the smoke as it rose through the branches. It’d been dark and solid, and it went straight up and disappeared against the sky until only the absence of stars told me where it was. I fell asleep thinking of absence, SELDON and Andy and a way of knowing the future, and then I was out, and I don’t remember my dreams.

  THE MAIDEN FLIGHT OF MCCAULEY’S BELLEROPHON

  ELIZABETH HAND

  Being assigned to The Head for eight hours was the worst security shift you could pull at the museum. Even now, thirty years later, Robbie had dreams in which he wandered from the Early Flight gallery to Balloons & Airships to Cosmic Soup, where he once again found himself alone in the dark, staring into the bland gaze of the famous scientist as he intoned his endless lecture about the nature of the universe.

  “Remember when we thought nothing could be worse than that?” Robbie stared wistfully into his empty glass, then signaled the waiter for another bourbon and Coke. Across the table, his old friend Emery sipped a beer.

  “I liked The Head,” said Emery. He cleared his throat and began to recite in the same portentous tone the famous scientist had employed. “Trillions and trillions of galaxies in which our own is but a mote of cosmic dust. It made you think.”

  “It made you think about killing yourself,” said Robbie. “Do you want to know how many time I heard that?”

  “A trillion?”

  “Five thousand.” The waiter handed Robbie a drink, his fourth. “Twenty-five times an hour, times eight hours a day, times five days a week, times five months.”

  “Five thousand, that’s not so much. Especially when you think of all those trillions of galleries. I mean galaxies. Only five months? I thought you worked there longer.”

  “Just that summer. It only seemed like forever.”

  Emery knocked back his beer. “A long time ago, in a gallery far, far away,” he intoned, not for the first time.

  Thirty years before, the Museum of American Aviation and Aerospace had just opened. Robbie was nineteen that summer, a recent dropout from the University of Maryland, living in a group house in Mount Rainier. Employment opportunities were scarce; making $3.40 an hour as a security aide at the Smithsonian’s newest museum seemed preferable to bagging groceries at Giant Food. Every morning he’d punch his time card in the guards’ locker room and change into his uniform. Then he’d duck outside to smoke a joint before trudging downstairs for morning meeting and that day’s assignments.

  Most of the security guards were older than Robbie, with backgrounds in the military and an eye on future careers with the D.C. Police Department or FBI. Still, they tolerated him with mostly good-natured ribbing about his longish hair and bloodshot eyes. All except for Hedge, the security chief. He was an enormous man with a shaved head who sat, knitting, behind a bank of closed-circuit video monitors, observing tourists and guards with an expression of amused contempt.

  “What are you making?” Robbie once asked. Hedge raised his hands to display an intricately-patterned baby blanket. “Hey, that’s cool. Where’d you learn to knit?”

  “Prison.” Hedge’s eyes narrowed. “You stoned again, Opie? That’s it. Gallery Seven. Relieve Jones.”

  Robbie’s skin went cold, then hot with relief when he realized Hedge wasn’t going to fire him. “Seven? Uh, yeah, sure, sure. For how long?”

  “Forever,” said Hedge.

  “Oh, man, you got The Head.” Jones clapped his hands gleefully when Robbie arrived. “Better watch your ass, kids’ll throw shit at you,” he said, and sauntered off.

  Two projectors at opposite ends of the dark room beamed twin shafts of silvery light onto a head-shaped Styrofoam form. Robbie could never figure out if they’d filmed the famous scientist just once, or if they’d gone to the trouble to shoot him from two different angles.

  However they’d done it, the sight of the disembodied Head was surprisingly effective: it looked like a hologram floating amid the hundreds of back-projected twinkly stars that covered the walls and ceiling. The creep factor was intensified by the stilted, slightly puzzled manner in which the Head blinked as it droned on, as though the famous scientist had just realized his body was gone, and was hoping no one else would notice. Once, when he was really stoned, Robbie swore that the Head deviated from its script.

  “What’d it say?” asked Emery. At the time he was working in the General Aviation Gallery, operating a flight simulator that tourists clambered into for three-minute rides.

  “Something about peaches,” said Robbie. “I couldn’t understand, it sort of mumbled.”

  Every morning, Robbie stood outside the entrance to Cosmic Soup and watched as tourists streamed through the main entrance and into the Hall of Flight. Overhead, legendary aircraft hung from the ceiling. The 1903 Wright Flyer with its Orville mannequin; a Lilienthal glider; the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. From a huge pit in the center of the Hall rose a Minuteman III ICBM, rust-colored stains still visible where a protester had tossed a bucket of pig’s blood on it a few months earlier. Directly above the entrance to Robbie’s gallery dangled the Spirit of St. Louis. The aides who worked upstairs in the planetarium amused themselves by shooting paperclips onto its wings.

  Robbie winced at the memory. He gulped what was left of his bourbon and sighed. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Tempus fugit, baby. Thinking of which—” Emery dug into his pocket for a Blackberry. “Check this out. From Leonard.”

  Robbie rubbed his eyes blearily, then read.

  From: l.scopes@MAAA.SI.edu

  Subject: Tragic Illness

  Date: April 6, 7:58:22 PM EDT

  To: emeryubergeek@gmail.com

  Dear Emery,

  I just learned that our Maggie Blevin is very ill. I wrote her at Christmas but never heard back. Fuad El-Hajj says she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer last fall. Prognosis is not good. She is
still in the Fayetteville area, and I gather is in a hospice. I want to make a visit though not sure how that will go over. I have something I want to give her but need to talk to you about it.

  L.

  “Ahhh.” Robbie sighed. “God, that’s terrible.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. But I figured you’d want to know.”

  Robbie pinched the bridge of his nose. Four years earlier, his wife, Anna, had died of breast cancer, leaving him adrift in a grief so profound it was as though he’d been poisoned, as though his veins had been pumped with the same chemicals that had failed to save her. Anna had been an oncology nurse, a fact that at first afforded some meager black humor, but in the end deprived them of even the faintest of false hopes borne of denial or faith in alternative therapies.

  There was no time for any of that. Zach, their son, had just turned twelve. Between his own grief and Zach’s subsequent acting-out, Robbie got so depressed that he started pouring his first bourbon and coke before the boy left for school. Two years later, he got fired from his job with the County Parks Commission.

  He now worked in the shipping department at Small’s, an off-price store in a desolate shopping mall that resembled the ruins of a regional airport. Robbie found it oddly consoling. It reminded him of the museum. The same generic atriums and industrial carpeting; the same bleak sunlight filtered through clouded glass; the same vacant-faced people trudging from Dollar Store to SunGlass Hut, the way they’d wandered from the General Aviation Gallery to Cosmic Soup.