Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3)

by Anthology

  Pete took the bag off his shoulder, opened it, and withdrew his slim silver laptop, along with a CD wallet full of DVDs. “Gone with the Wind,” he said, inserting a disc into the laptop, calling up the DVD controls, and fast forwarding to the first scene with Clark Gable.

  Ally stared at the LCD screen, and Pete watched the reflected colors move against her face. Gable’s voice, though tinny through the small speakers, was resonant as always.

  Pete closed the laptop gently. “I do know movies,” he said. “Just not exactly the same ones you do.”

  “This, those books, you…you’re from another world. It’s like…like…”

  “Something out of the Twilight Zone, I know. But actually, you’re from another world. Every night, for an hour or so—less, lately—the door to Impossible Dreams appears on my street.

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “Come on,” he said, and held out his hand. She took it, and he led her out the door. “Look,” he said, gesturing to the bakery next door, the gift shop on the other side, the bike repair place across the street.

  Ally sagged back against the door, half-retreating inside the shop. “This isn’t right. This isn’t what’s supposed to be here.”

  “Go on back in,” he said. “The store has been appearing later and vanishing sooner every night, and I’d hate for you to get stranded here.”

  “Why is this happening?” Ally said, still holding his hand.

  “I don’t know,” Pete said. “Maybe there’s no reason. Maybe in a movie there would be, but…”

  “Some movies reassure us that life makes sense,” Ally said. “And some movies remind us that life doesn’t make any sense at all.” She exhaled roughly. “And some things don’t have anything to do with movies.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Pete said. “Listen, keep the laptop. The battery should run for a couple of hours. There’s a spare in the bag, all charged up, which should be good for a couple more hours. Watching movies really sucks up the power, I’m afraid. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find an adapter to charge the laptop in your world—the standards are different. But you can see a couple of movies at least. I gave you all my favorite DVDs, great stuff by Hayao Miyazaki, Beat Takeshi, Wes Anderson, some classics…take your pick.”

  “Pete…”

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s been so good talking to you these past few nights.” He tried to think of what he’d say if this was the last scene in a movie, his Casablanca farewell moment, and a dozen appropriate quotes sprang to mind. He dismissed all of them. “I’m going to miss you, Ally.”

  “Thank you, Pete,” she said, and went, reluctantly, back into Impossible Dreams. She looked at him from the other side of the glass, and he raised his hand to wave just as the door disappeared.

  * * * *

  Pete didn’t let himself go back the next night, because he knew the temptation to go into the store would be too great, and it might only be open for ten minutes this time. But after pacing around his living room for hours, he finally went out after ten and walked to the place the store had been, thinking maybe she’d left a note, wishing for some closure, some final-reel gesture, a rose on the doorstep, something.

  But there was nothing, no door, no note, no rose, and Pete sat on the sidewalk, wishing he’d thought to photograph Ally, wondering which movies she’d decided to watch, and what she’d thought of them.

  “Hey, Mr. Nickels.”

  Pete looked up. Ally stood there, wearing a red coat, his laptop bag hanging from her shoulder. She sat down beside him. “I didn’t think you’d show, and I did not relish the prospect of wandering in a strange city all night with only fifty dollars in nickels to keep me warm. Some of the street names are the same as where I’m from, but not enough of them for me to figure out where you lived.”

  “Ally! What are you doing here?”

  “You gave me those books,” she said, “and they all talk about Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, how it transformed cinema.” She punched him gently in the shoulder. “But you didn’t give me the DVD!”

  “But…everyone’s seen Citizen Kane!”

  “Not where I’m from. The print was destroyed. Hearst knew the movie was based on his life, and he made a deal with the studio, the guards looked the other way, and someone destroyed the film. Welles had to start over from nothing, and he made Jason and the Argonauts instead. But you’ve got Citizen Kane! How could I not come see it?”

  “But Ally…you might not be able to go back.”

  She laughed, then leaned her head on his shoulder. “I don’t plan to go back. There’s nothing for me there.”

  Pete felt a fist of panic clench in his chest. “This isn’t a movie,” he said.

  “No,” Ally said. “It’s better than that. It’s my life.”

  “I just don’t know—”

  Ally patted his leg. “Relax, Pete. I’m not asking you to take me in. Unlike Blanche Dubois—played by Jessica Tandy, not Vivian Leigh, where I’m from—I don’t depend on the kindness of strangers. I ran away from home when I was fifteen, and never looked back. I’ve started from nothing before, with no friends or prospects or ID, and I can do it again.”

  “You’re not starting from nothing,” Pete said, putting his arm around her. “Definitely not.” The lights weren’t going to come up, the curtain wasn’t coming down; this wasn’t the end of a movie. For once, Pete liked his life better than the vivid continuous dream of the screen. “Come on. Let’s go watch Citizen Kane.”

  They stood and walked together. “Just out of curiosity,” he said. “Which movies did you watch on the laptop?”

  “Oh, none. I thought it would be more fun watching them with you.”

  Pete laughed. “Ally, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  She cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. “You sound like you’re quoting something,” she said, “but I don’t know what.”

  “We’ve got a lot of watching to do,” he said.

  “We’ve got a lot of everything to do,” Ally replied.

  WHO'S AFRAID OF WOLF 359?

  Ken Macleod

  When you’re as old as I am, you’ll find your memory’s not what it was. It’s not that you lose memories.

  That hasn’t happened to me or anyone else since the Paleocosmic Era, the Old Space Age, when people lived in caves on the Moon. My trouble is that I’ve gained memories, and I don’t know which of them are real. I was very casual about memory storage back then, I seem to recall. This could happen to you too, if you’re not careful. So be warned. Do as I say, not as I did.

  Some of the tales about me contradict each other, or couldn’t possibly have happened, because that’s how I told them in the first place. Others I blame on the writers and tellers. They make things up. I’ve never done that.

  If I’ve told stories that couldn’t be true, it’s because that’s how I remember them.

  Here’s one.

  * * * *

  I ran naked through the Long Station, throwing my smart clothes away to distract the Tycoon’s dogs.

  Breeks, shirt, cravat, jacket, waistcoat, stockings, various undergarments—one by one they ran, flapped, slithered, danced, or scurried off, and after every one of them raced a scent-seeking but merci-fully stupid hound. But the Tycoon had more dogs in his pack than I had clothes in my bundle. I was down to my shoes and the baying continued. I glanced over my shoulder. Two dogs were just ten meters behind me. I hurled a shoe at each of them, hitting both animals right on their genetically modified noses. The dogs skidded to a halt, yelping and howling. A few meters away was a jewelry booth. I sprinted for it, vaulted the counter, grabbed a recycler, and bashed at the display cabinet. An alarm brayed and the security mesh rattled down behind me. The dogs, recovered and furious, hurled themselves against it.

  The rest of the pack pelted into view and joined them. Paws, jaws, barking, you get the picture.

  “Put your hands up,” said a vo
ice above the din.

  I turned and looked into the bell-shaped muzzle of a Norton held in the hands of a sweet-looking lass wearing a sample of the stall’s stock. I raised my hands, wishing I could put them somewhere else. In those days, I had some vestige of modesty.

  “I’m human,” I said. “That can’t hurt me.”

  She allowed herself the smallest flicker of a glance at the EMP weapon’s sighting screen.

  “It could give you quite a headache,” she said.

  “It could that,” I admitted, my bluff called. I’d been half hoping she wouldn’t know how to interpret the readouts.

  “Security’s on its way,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “Better them than the dogs.”

  She gave me a tight smile. “Trouble with the Tycoon?”

  “Yes,” I said. “How did you guess?”

  “Only the owner of the Station could afford dogs,” she said. “Besides…” She blinked twice slowly.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “Or serving girls.”

  The stallkeeper laughed in my face. “All this for a servant? Wasn’t it Her Ladyship’s bedroom window you jumped out of?”

  I shuddered. “You flatter me,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know about—?”

  She blinked again. “It’s on the gossip channels already.” I was about to give a heated explanation of why that time-wasting rubbish wasn’t among the enhancements inside my skull, thank you very much, when the goons turned up, sent the dogs skulking reluctantly away, and took me in. They had the tape across my mouth before I had a chance to ask the stallkeeper her name, let alone her number. Not, as it turned out, that I could have done much with it even if I had. But it would have been polite.

  * * * *

  The charge was attempting to willfully evade the civil penalties for adultery. I was outraged.

  “Bastards!” I shouted, screwing up the indictment and dashing it to the floor of my cell. “I thought polygamy was illegal!”

  “It is,” said my attorney, stooping to pick up the flimsy, “in civilized jurisdictions.” He smoothed it out.

  “But this is Long Station One. The Tycoon has privileges.”

  “That’s barbaric,” I said.

  “It’s a relic of the Moon Caves,” he said.

  I stared at him. “No it isn’t,” I said. “I don’t remember”—I caught myself just in time—“reading about anything like that.”

  He tapped a slight bulge on his cranium. “That’s what it says here. Argue with the editors, not with me.”

  “All right,” I said. A second complaint rose to the top of the stack. “She never said anything about being married!”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “That would have been grossly impolite. In the circumstances, it would have implied that she was contemplating adultery.”

  “I see.” He sighed. “I’ll never understand the… ethics, if that’s the word, of you young gallants.”

  I smiled at that.

  “However,” he went on, “that doesn’t excuse you for ignorance of the law—”

  “How was I to know the Tycoon was married to his wenches?”

  “—or custom. There is an orientation pack, you know. All arrivals are deemed to have read it.”

  ‘“Deemed,’” I said. “Now, there’s a word that just about sums up every-thing that’s wrong about—”

  “You can forgo counsel, if you wish.”

  I raised my hands. “No, no. Please. Do your best.”

  He did his best. A week later, he told me that he had got me off with a fine plus compensation. If I borrowed money to pay the whole sum now, it would take two hundred and fifty-seven years to pay off the debt. I had other plans for the next two hundred and fifty-seven years. Instead, I negotiated a one-off advance fee to clean up Wolf 359, and used that to pay the court and the Tycoon. The experimental civilization around Wolf 359—a limited company—had a decade earlier gone into liquidation, taking ten billion shareholders down with it. Nobody knew what it had turned into. Whatever remained out there had been off limits ever since, and would be for centuries to come—unless someone went in to clean it up.

  In a way, the Wolf 359 situation was the polar opposite of what the Civil Worlds had hitherto had to deal with, which was habitats, networks, some-times whole systems going into exponential intelligence enhancement—what we called a fast burn. We knew how to deal with a fast burn. Ignore it for five years, and it goes away. Then send in some heavily firewalled snoop robots and pick over the wreckage for legacy hardware. Sometimes you get a breakout, where some of the legacy hardware reboots and starts getting ideas above its station, but that’s a job for the physics team.

  A civilizational implosion was a whole different volley of nukes. Part of the problem was sheer nervousness. We were too close historically to what had happened on the Moon’s primary to be altogether confident that we wouldn’t somehow be sucked in ourselves. Another part of it was simple economics: the job was too long-term and too risky to be attractive, given all the other opportunities available to anyone who wasn’t completely desperate. Into that vacancy for someone who was completely desperate, I wish I could say I stepped. In truth, I was pushed.

  Even I was afraid of Wolf 359.

  * * * *

  An Astronomical Unit is one of those measurements that should be obsolete, but isn’t. It’s no more—or less—arbitrary than the light-year. All our units have origins that no longer mean anything to us—we measure time by what was originally a fraction of one axial rotation, and space by a fraction of the circumference, of the Moon’s primary. An AU was originally the distance between the Moon’s primary and its primary, the Sun. These days, it’s usually thought of as the approximate distance from a G-type star to the middle of the habitable zone. About a hundred and fifty million kilometers.

  The Long Tube, which the Long Station existed to shuttle people to and from and generally to maintain, was one hundred and eighty astronomical units long. Twenty-seven thousand million kilometers, or, to put it in perspective, one light-day. From the shuttle, it looked like a hairline crack in infinity, but it didn’t add up to a mouse’s whisker in the Oort. It was aimed straight at Sirius, which I could see as a bright star with a fuzzy green haze of habitats. I shivered. I was about to be frozen, placed with the rest of the passengers on the next needle ship out, electromagnetically accelerated for months at 30 g to relativistic velocities in the Long Tube, hurtled across 6.4 light-years, decelerated in Sirius’s matching tube, accelerated again to Procyon, then to Talande 21185, and finally sent on a fast clipper to Lalande’s next-door neighbor and fellow red dwarf, Wolf 359. It had to be a fast clip-per because Wolf 359’s Long Tubes were no longer being calibrated—and when you’re aiming one Long Tube across light-years at the mouth of an-other, calibration matters.

  A fast clipper—in fact, painfully slow, the name a legacy of pre-Tube times, when 0.1c was a fast clip—also has calibration issues. Pushed by laser, decelerated by laser reflection from a mirror shell deployed on nearing the target system, it was usually only used for seedships. This clipper was an adapted seedship, but I was going in bulk because it was actually cheaper to thaw me out on arrival than to grow me from a bean. If the calibration wasn’t quite right, I’d never know.

  The shuttle made minor course corrections to dock at the Long Tube.

  “Please pass promptly to the cryogenic area,” it told us.

  I shivered again.

  * * * *

  Cryogenic travel has improved since then: subjectively, it’s pretty much instantaneous. In those days, it was called cold sleep, and that’s exactly what it felt like: being very cold and having slow, bad dreams.

  Even with relativistic time dilation and a glacial metabolism, it lasted for months.

  I woke screaming in a translucent box.

  “There, there,” said the box. “Everything will be all right. Have some coffee.”

  The lid o
f the box extruded a nipple toward my mouth. I screamed again.

  “Well, if you’re going to be like that.. .” said the box.

  “It reminded me of a nightmare,” I said. My mouth was parched. “Please.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  I sucked on the coffee and felt warmth spread from my belly.

  “Update me,” I said, around the nipple.

  My translucent surroundings became transparent, with explanatory text and diagrams floating like afterimages. A view, with footnotes. This helped, but not enough. An enormous blue and white sphere loomed right in front of me. I recoiled so hard that I hurt my head on the back of the box.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “A terraformed terrestrial,” said the box. “Please do try to read before reacting.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought we were falling toward it.”

  “We are,” said the box.

  I must have yelled again.

  “Read before reacting,” said the box. “Please.”

  I turned my head as if to look over my shoulder. I couldn’t actually turn it that far, but the box obligingly swiveled the view. The red dwarf lurked at my back, apparently closer than the blue planet. I felt almost relieved. At least Wolf 359 was where I expected it. According to the view’s footnotes, nothing else was, except the inactive Long Tubes in the wispy remnant of the cometary cloud, twelve light-hours out.

  No solar-orbit microwave stations. Not even the hulks of habitats. No asteroids. No large cometary masses. And a planet, something that shouldn’t have been there, was. I didn’t need the explanatory text to make the connection. Every scrap of accessible mass in the system had been thrown into this gaudy reconstruction. The planet reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Moon’s primary, back when it had liquid water.

  The most recent information, inevitably a decade or so out of date, came from Lalande 21185. Watching what was going on around Wolf 359 was a tiny minority interest, but in a population of a hundred billion, that can add up to a lot. Likewise, the diameter of Lalande’s habitat cloud was a good deal smaller than an Astronomical Unit, but that still adds up to a very large virtual telescope. Large enough to resolve the weather patterns on the planet below me, never mind the continents. The planet’s accretion had begun before I set off, apparently under deliberate control, and the terra-forming had been completed about fifty years earlier, while I was en route. It remained raw—lots of volcanoes and earthquakes—but habitable. There was life, obviously, but no one knew what kind. No radio signals had been detected, nor any evidence of intelligence, beyond some disputably artificial clusters of lights on the night side.