Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  The rain was a drizzle that blunted the streetlights, Union Square lit gently, puddles reflecting. Her relief at being away from the crowd was overwhelming. What now? She sat on the nearest bench to consider her next move. At this hour of the day the city was in motion, umbrellas crossing Broadway like a flock of dark birds.

  “Tiffany?”

  It was Victor Freeman, the youngest member of her husband’s legal team. Their offices were near here, she remembered. He stood over her with an umbrella.

  “I don’t use that name anymore.”

  “What can I call you?”

  “Rose.”

  “Pretty.” He sat beside her, although the bench was very wet, and angled his umbrella so that it sheltered both of them. His overcoat looked warm and expensive, the opposite of Mr. Thursday’s cheap beige. “Why are you sitting out here in the rain?”

  I was waiting for you, she thought, but of course this didn’t make sense. “The subway’s down,” she said. “I came up for air.”

  “Where were you headed?”

  “Home. Scarsdale.”

  He frowned, confused. Rose and Daniel’s house in Scarsdale had been seized along with all their other assets.

  “I rent an au pair suite. It’s a room with a kitchenette and a bathroom over a garage.”

  “Oh.”

  “I like it. It’s all I need.”

  “Let me give you a ride home. My car’s in a garage around the corner.”

  “You live in Scarsdale too?”

  “No, but as a former member of your husband’s defense team, I feel that driving you home is literally the least I can do.”

  “How far out of your way is it?”

  “Professional guilt notwithstanding,” he said, as they walked in the direction of the garage, “I just bought a car, and to be honest, I’ll take any opportunity to go on an unnecessary drive.”

  The yellow Lamborghini seemed to shine in the dim light of the garage.

  “It’s a ridiculous car,” Victor said, “but I love it.”

  “I don’t think it’s ridiculous.” Rose thought it was beautiful, and when she said this, Victor smiled.

  “I think it’s beautiful too, actually. It’s like something from the future. I know it’s a frivolous purchase, but I don’t know, I just wanted it so much.” The déjà vu was surfacing again, nudging against the surface of the evening. “I agonized for weeks,” Victor was saying, “but if there’s a thing you really want, and you can afford it, and it’s a beautiful thing that genuinely makes you happy, is there actually anything wrong with just buying it? You could call it crass materialism, but life’s so short.” It seemed to Rose as she buckled herself in that there was something familiar about the car, but she didn’t recognize it for another forty-seven minutes, when the accident began: the SUV drifting into their lane just as Victor turned to ask her something, the delivery truck behind them that didn’t stop in time. She didn’t recognize Victor’s car until the moment of impact, the blare of horns: She knew this car from the nightmare that had woken her three nights in a row. She remembered now. In the dream, and now in waking life, time slowed and expanded. The car was turning sideways between the delivery truck and the SUV, the air filling with glass, steel crumpling, and the thing from the dream was rushing toward her, the overwhelming thing that was dark and quiet and could not be resisted; this was the thing that had jolted her out of sleep when she dreamed it, but in waking life it turned out not to be terrifying at all, only inevitable; it was catching her in the crush of steel and plucking her gently from the accident, it was sweeping her up.

  3.

  Three hundred and forty years after the accident, a lounge singer was drinking scotch with a businessman in a spaceport terminal bar. They’d been flirting half-heartedly for fifteen minutes or so. “And you,” the businessman was saying, “where are you off to today?”

  “I’m going to the moon,” the singer said. The businessman raised his glass. The bartender appeared with a bottle.

  “Oh, no, I was just toasting her,” the businessman explained. “She’s going to the moon.”

  “Everyone here’s going to the moon,” the bartender said. “The next Mars flight isn’t till tomorrow.”

  “Still,” the businessman said mildly, “always worth toasting a change of scenery.” The singer smiled at him and sipped her scotch. “Which colony?” the businessman asked.

  “I’m headed up to Colony Two,” the singer said. “I got a job in a hotel. Actually, in a chain of hotels.”

  “Hilton?”

  “No, Grand Luna.”

  “Ah, I’ve stayed at the Grand Luna. Nice place. Did you tell me you’re a singer?”

  “I did. I am.”

  “My daughter likes to sing,” the businessman said. He looked a little awkward following this announcement. The singer didn’t strike him as the sort of person who enjoyed discussing children. He motioned to the bartender for another glass, but the bartender had developed a sudden interest in the projection above the bar, which was showing a baseball game.

  “Can I ask?” the singer asked, with a gesture that encompassed the businessman’s outfit. He was wearing a beige suit in a style that hadn’t been fashionable since the early twenty-first century. The shoulders of his overcoat were still damp with twenty-first-century rain.

  “It’s for my work. Well, was for my work, I guess I should say.”

  “You’re one of those.”

  “Was one of those. Until this morning.” The businessman raised his glass, which by now contained only a pair of rapidly melting ice cubes. “To getting fired.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. It’s a creepy line of work, frankly.”

  “It always seemed dangerous to me. Going back like that.” “Dangerous and stupid,” the businessman agreed. “Happy to be out of it. My prediction, it’ll be illegal by next year.”

  “I mean, what’s to stop an accident?” the singer said. “Even the smallest thing, you know, you walk through a door ahead of someone…”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many meetings I’ve sat through on this topic.”

  “So you walk through a door in front of someone else, and then, I don’t know, say that little delay means he doesn’t get hit by a car, and he goes on to cause a war that wipes out all of our great-grandparents.”

  “If not all of humanity,” the businessman agreed. He was trying to flag down the bartender, who was absorbed in the game. “This is actually why I drink, if you were curious.”

  “And in that case it’s not that we die, exactly, you and I and everyone we love.” The singer gave what seemed to the businessman to be a somewhat exaggerated shudder. “It’s more that we never get to start existing.”

  “The thought’s occurred to me.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “Same reason anyone does anything in business.”

  “I’ll drink to that. When you went back,” she said, “where exactly did you go?”

  “I specialized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  He succeeded in getting the bartender’s attention and fell silent for a moment while the bartender refilled their drinks. He took a long swallow and glanced at the baseball game; the bartender had rotated the projection for a better view of a replay, and now there was a holographic outfielder directly over the bar. “Nothing sinister,” the businessman said finally, when he saw that the singer was still watching him. “Genealogical research for high net-worth individuals. Look, I’m not saying it’s safe. But if it makes you feel better, it’s not a free-for-all. There are controls in place, both technological and human.”

  “Human?”

  “I was required to meet weekly with a handler in the local time.”

  “Kind of a weak control,” the singer said.

  “Well, you might be right about that. It was the technological controls that got me fired.”

>   “Why’d you get fired?”

  “I tried to avert a car accident.”

  The singer was quiet, watching him.

  “I didn’t think the scanners would pick it up. I knew it was stupid, but it’s not like I tried to avert the First World War.” The singer frowned. Her grasp of twentieth-century history was shaky. “No matter what I did,” he said, “everything I tried, she still got in the car, and the car still crashed.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Just someone I saw every time I went back. My handler’s secretary. I liked her. Kind of a sad story.”

  The singer liked sad stories. She waited.

  “Okay,” the businessman said. By now he’d had a little too much to drink. “So this person, the secretary, she grows up with nothing, terrible family, meets a guy with money, falls in love with him, and then a few years later he goes to jail for some white-collar thing. Long sentence, judge wanted to make an example of him. All his assets were seized, so she’s lost everything. She tries to—no, that’s the wrong word, she succeeds in starting a new life. Changes her name, gets a new job, picks herself up.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she dies six months later in a car crash. I don’t know, I guess I’d been in the business for too long. Maybe I got a little burned out. I was always so careful. I filed these impeccable itineraries with Control and never deviated from them, never tried to change anything, but this person, Rose, she looked a bit like my daughter, and I just thought, what harm would there be, making this one change? Averting this one thing? Most people don’t amount to much. Most people don’t change the world. If she doesn’t die in a car accident, what harm is there in that, really?”

  “Isn’t that exactly the kind of small thing—”

  “Imagine walking into a room,” he said, “and knowing what’s going to happen to everyone in it, because you looked up their birth and death records the night before.”

  The singer seemed to be searching for something to say to this but failed. She downed the last of her scotch.

  “I’m sorry. It’s an unsettling topic. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “My shuttle’s probably boarding by now.”

  “You see the temptation, though? How you might want to just make this one small change, give someone a chance, maybe just—”

  “‘Genealogical research for high net-worth individuals,’” the singer said. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Anyway, thanks for the drinks.” The singer was sliding carefully from her bar stool.

  “You’re welcome,” said the businessman, who hadn’t realized he was paying. He watched her walk away and then touched one of the buttons on his shirt, which he’d kept angled toward her. The recording stopped.

  “Fucking creep,” the bartender muttered, under his breath. The businessman settled up and left without looking at him.

  Later, in his hotel room in Colony One, he dropped the button into a projector and played the conversation back. A three-dimensional hologram of the singer hovered over the side table. I’m going to the moon. A touch of excitement in her voice. In the background, the shadowy figure of the bartender polished a glass while he watched the baseball game. The businessman turned the volume to low. He liked to keep a recording going in the background when he was alone in hotel rooms, so as not to get too lonely. But this was the wrong hologram, he didn’t like the way the bartender hovered, so he scrolled through the library and picked out another: Rose at her desk in the twenty-first century, her smile when she looked up and saw him. He adjusted the speed to the lowest possible setting. The walk past her desk took only two minutes, but in slow motion there was such stillness, such beauty in her small, precise actions—as though underwater she turned from her keyboard to look at him, then back to her keyboard, her hand reaching for a file and bringing it with heartbreaking slowness down to the desk, and all the while he was gliding past her, on his way to Gattler’s office—and this seemed the right recording for the moment. He changed into his pajamas, switched off the bedside lamp so that the only light was the pale glow of the hologram by the bed. He stood for a moment by the window while he brushed his teeth. The hotel was expensive and looked out over a park, and it occurred to him for the thousandth time that if he hadn’t spent time on Earth, he might not know the difference. Tomorrow he’d board the first train to Colony Three, go home and tell his wife what had happened, sweep their little daughter up into his arms. Would his wife be angry? He thought she’d understand. They’d talked about getting out of the industry. But for now he was alone in the quiet of the room. He would never return to the twenty-first century, and there was a sense of liberation in this. He could find a new job. He could live a different, less haunted kind of life. In the silence of the room, the hologram of Rose was reflected on the window, turning in slow motion away from him, superimposed on the pine trees and tall grass of the park. An owl passed silently between the trees.

  Nick Mamatas

  Yearstart at MANKBO, Clams! Clams! Clams!

  YOU’RE not inebriated enough to be warm yet, though the brandy is flowing freely, but truth be told you prefer the cold tonight. The sky is gray slate and starless thanks to the dronelights hovering about the Mankill–Boroughston Bridge Overpass, which you are occupying now, with four hundred of your newest acquaintances who hadn’t been invited to any house parties for Yearstart. So the Railing Across the bridge it is, and all the clams casino, chowder shooters, and mushroom caps stuffed with clams you can eat, plus booze and tiny explosives that’ll leave your hands smudged black but fingers intact for the stroke of midnight.

  Maybe you’ll even meet someone and go home with them and explore a new body and share a joke or two and maybe that body in the room will be the vehicle for an interesting brain and you’ll have a new relationship and your mother will stop calling you to recommend haircuts and extra nanos for your teeth and to settle on a gender already.

  Cold now means warmth later will feel even better.

  You see some acquaintances from your voting bloc and hustle over to them and exchange hellos and teeth-chattery smiles. “Yearstart, Yearstart!” Yi San brings up the latest Cockshott-Cottrell equations and you shush him, finger first to your lips and then to his so that now you both have gunpowder smears on your mouths and won’t have to kiss later, and say, “Dude, chill. It’s Yearstart.”

  “San-san’s just excited,” says Emmal, your best friend in the bloc, because of the sign. She puts up a thumb and you follow it to the sky where drones are dancing and blinking and spelling out CLAMS! CLAMS! CLAMS!

  “We did it,” Yi San says. “We pushed and pushed and built the coalition with the Mankill River group and got the nano allotment to clean up the riverbeds, what, three years ago? That’s why it’s clams, clams, clams now.”

  “And not just one ‘Clams!’” Emmal interrupts, fluttering her fingers like they’re the drones writing in the night sky.

  “And we weren’t even thinking clams at the time,” Yi San says. “We were just thinking a three percent increase in respiratory health ratios.”

  “I was thinking clams at the time, I was just too shy to admit it,” you say and laugh and snatch a clam from a passing tray and slurp it down when Yi San doesn’t laugh at your joke. Instead he explains more about win-win-win scenarios and virtuous circles of calculations and you share a look with Emily and then Aftixi intervenes by asking Yi San if he’d binge-vomited any good research papers and you wink at him in thanks for taking one for the team as Yi San answers Aftixi at length.

  Emmal snakes a proprietary arm around your waist and plants her hot palm on your cold ass to shuffle you away from the rest. “Kiss me,” she says, “it’s an emergency.” You smile and pucker up, and she grabs your face and plants her large lips on your small ones with a joyless urgency. Emmal tastes like paprika and Scotch. She looks better with her eyes closed, as do all eyes-closed kissers, which is a little secret only
people such as you, the open-eyed kissers of this world, know.

  A great shadow passes over your peripheral vision, like a whale moving across the sea of the sky and swallowing all the bioluminescent plankton swimming overhead. You don’t turn from Emmal’s kiss, which is almost comical now in its one-vector pressure, as if your lips were a bleeding wound upon your face, but you shift a bit to get a better look.

  He was the opposite of a shadow, really—a huge man in an iridescent suit that shimmered as he walked along the bridge, his arms wide. What was his name? He was famous for his work, which he performed alone and not en bloc. You ask Emmal by moving your lips against hers: it sounds like mmror mfff ffrrm mffa—Who is that guy?

  “Lydon Walker, the tolkach,” she says, exasperated. “You know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” you say, but do you?

  You do. But you’ve never seen him up close before.

  Not too far away, Aftixi has convinced the rest of the bloc to heft up Yi San and bring him to the edge of the railing. His arms are spread wide and legs tight together. There’s a countdown in Korean, Greek, Spanish, English, Cantonese, in the thuh-thuh-thuh tic of Jeremy, in Bengali, and then Aftixi points and everyone heaves that which had been hefted and Yi San goes flying out into the empty air over the river.

  It’s a fun Yearstart game—Yi San whistles as he falls and the drones zoom down, claws ready, matching speed and plucking him out of the sky to bring him back to his friends on the edge of the bridge. But then there’s another whistle and Yi San floats away from where he was meant to land, back in the outstretched arms of his bloc, and hovers about instead, the drones confused as they are compelled to an underpopulated spot on a stretch of the bridge where Lydon stands, two fingers in his mouth, his big lungs working. Sincere spontaneous applause from everyone outside of your bloc swiftly follows.