There were brontosaurs lumbering along Broadway, as usual taking up the center of the street, with more agile herds of honking, duckbilled hadrosaurs dodging in and out of the lanes between them, and an occasional carnosaur stumping along by the curb, shaking its great head back and forth and hissing to itself in the back of its throat. It used to be a person could get a bus here, and without even needing a transfer get within a block of the house, but now, with all the competition for road space, they ran slowly if they ran at all—another good example of how the world was going to hell. He dodged between a brachiosaur and a slow-moving stegosaurus, crossed Broadway, and turned down toward Avenue A.
The triceratops were butting their heads together on Avenue A; they came together with a crash like locomotives colliding that boomed from the building fronts and rattled windows all up and down the street. Nobody in the neighborhood would get much sleep tonight. Michael fought his way up the steps of his tenement brownstone, crawling over the dimetrodons lounging on the stoop. Across the street, he could see the mailman trying to kick an iguanodon awake so that he could get past it into another brownstone’s vestibule. No wonder his checks were late.
Upstairs, his wife put his plate in front of him without a word, and he stopped only to take off his wet jacket before sitting down to eat. Tuna casserole again, he noticed without enthusiasm. They ate in gloomy silence until the room was suddenly lit up by a sizzling bolt of lightning, followed by a terrific clap of thunder. As the echoes of thunder died, over even the sound of the now torrential rain, they could hear a swelling cacophony of banging and thudding, shrieking and crashing.
“Goddamn,” Michael’s wife said, “it’s doing it again!”
The old man got up and looked out of the window, out over a panorama of weed-and-trash-choked tenement backyards. It was literally raining dinosaurs out there—as he watched, they fell out of the sky by the thousands, twisting and scrambling in the air, bouncing from the pavement like hail, flopping and bellowing in the street.
“Well,” the old man said glumly, pulling the curtain closed and turning back from the window, “at least it’s stopped raining cats and dogs.”
AFTERWORD TO A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER
There’s probably not much that really needs to be said about this little piece of fluff. Michael’s anecdote about its origin is fundamentally accurate. If I hadn’t wanted to type something—anything—to test my new typewriter ribbon, and if we hadn’t all been drunk at the time, and at that stage in the festivities when you’ll laugh at anything, it never would have been written.
My agent, Virginia Kidd, wisely persuaded us to change its title from “Fortean Phenomenon”—my choice—to the more evocative “A Change in the Weather,” and we sold it first crack out of the box to the highest-paying fiction market in America, for a larger word-rate than any of us had ever even dreamed of before.
What else can you possibly say?
TIME BRIDE
GARDNER DOZOIS & JACK DANN
The man-who-wasn’t-there first spoke to Marcy when she was eight years old.
She had gone out to play with her friends Shelley Mitnich and Michelle Liebman, a rare time out from under the eyes of her strict and over-protective parents, and in later years she would come to remember that long late-summer afternoon as an idyll of freedom and happiness, in many ways the last real moments of her childhood. The sky was high and blue and cloudless, the sun warm without being blisteringly hot, the breezes balmy, and as they played time seemed to stretch out, slow down, and then stop altogether, hanging suspended like honey melting on the tongue. They played Mother May I, halfball, Chinese jump rope, and giant steps. They played jacks—onesies, twosies, threesies, sweepsies, and squeezesies. They played hide-and-go-seek. They played Red Light Green Light, and Red Rover, and Teakettle Hot Teakettle Cold. They played double-dutch. They played Mimsy, chanting:
a mimsy, a clapsie
I whirl my hands to bapsie
my right hand
my left hand
high as the sky
low as the sea
touch my knee
touch my heel
touch my toe
and under we go!
while they went through a complicated routine of throwing a ball up and clapping before catching it, throwing a ball up and whirling their hands and touching their shoulders (bapsie) before catching it, and so forth, until at last they threw the ball under their legs on the final word, their faces as grimly intent and serious as the faces of druids performing holy mysteries at the summer solstice. And when Shelley got mad and went home because she got stuck on the Qs while playing A My Name Is Alice, and Marcy hadn’t—coming right out with “Q my name is Queenie, my husband’s name is Quintin, we come from Queensbury where we sell quilts” cool as could be, making it look infuriatingly easy—Michelle and Marcy kept right on playing, playing hop-scotch, playing dolls, playing Movie Star, in which Michelle pretended to be Nick Charles and Marcy got to be Nora and walk a pillow named Asta on a leash. And when Michelle had to go in because it was time for her dumb piano lesson, Marcy kept on playing by herself, not wanting the afternoon to end, reluctant to go back to the gloomy old house where there was nothing to do but watch television or sit in her room and play pretend games, which weren’t any fun because she felt locked up in that house.
Marcy ran through the scrub lots behind the houses, swishing through the waist-high tangles of grass and wild wheat and weeds, pretending to be a horse. Usually when she played horses it was with Michelle and yucky old Shelley—Marcy’s name was Lightning, and she was a beautiful black horse with a white mane and white tail, and Michelle was Star, and Shelley was Blaze—and she hadn’t been sure that she would like playing horses all by herself, with nobody to run from forest fires with or chase rustlers with, but she found that she did like it. Running alone and free, the wind streaming her hair out behind her, the sky seeming to whirl dizzily around her as she ran, running so fast that she thought that she could run right off the edge of the world, so far and fast that no one could ever catch her again—yes, she liked it very much, perhaps more than she had ever liked anything up to that moment.
She ran through the scrub lots and the patches of trash woods—pines and aspens growing like weeds—and down through the sunlit meadow to the river.
There she paused to catch her breath, teetering dramatically on the riverbank with her arms stretched out to either side. This time of year, the river ran nearly dry—just the barest trickle of water, perhaps an inch deep, worming its way through a dry bed littered with thousands of rocks of all sizes and shapes, from tiny rounded pebbles to boulders the size of automobiles—but Marcy pretended that she was about to fall in and maybe drown, so that Mommy would be sorry, or maybe she’d have to swim like anything to escape, or maybe a mermaid would save her and take her to a magic cave . . . She whirled around and around on the riverbank, her arms still outstretched to either side. She was one of those classically beautiful children who look like Dresden china figurines, with wide liquid eyes and pale blemishless skin and finely chiseled features, an adult face done in miniature. She was wearing a new blue dress trimmed with eyelet lace, and her hair shone like beaten gold as she spun in the sunlight.
She whirled until she was too dizzy to stand, and then she sat down with a plop in the mud of the riverbank, which was still soggy from the morning’s rain. She was dismayed for a second, realizing what she’d done; then she smiled, and began to pat her hands in the mud with a kind of studied perversity.
“You shouldn’t play in the mud,” an adult voice said sternly.
She flinched and looked up—expecting to see one of the neighbors, or perhaps a workman from the new house they were putting up on the far side of the meadow.
No one was there.
“You’re getting your dress all muddy that way,” the voice complained, “and I can just imagine how much your mother must have had to pay for it, too. Have some consideration for others!”
>
Marcy stood up slowly, feeling gooseflesh prickle along her arms. Again, no one was there. Carefully, she looked all around her, but there was no place for anyone to hide—the grass was too short here, and the nearest clump of trees was a hundred yards away—so she didn’t see how anyone could be playing a trick on her.
She stood there silently, frowning, trying to figure it out, still composed but beginning to be a little scared. The wind ruffled her hair and fluttered the lace on her muddy dress.
“You’re the one,” the voice said gloatingly. It seemed to emanate from the thin air right beside her, loud and unmistakable. “I knew it as soon as I saw you. Yes, you’re the right one—you’ll do very nicely indeed, I can tell. Boy, am I going to get my money’s worth out of this. Every cent—it’s worth it.”
The voice sounded smug, pleased-with-itself, somewhat pompous. Like the voice of one of those sanctimonious and not-terribly-bright adults who would always insist on telling her stories with a moral or giving her Words To Live By, the kind of adults who would show slides of their vacation trip, or pinch her cheeks and tell her how big she was getting, like her Uncle Irving, who always stunk up the house with cigar smoke and whose droning-voiced company was more annoying than the nickel he invariably gave her was worth. A schlimazel, as her father would say, a schlimazel’s voice, coming at her out of the empty August sky.
“Are you a ghost?” she asked politely, more intrigued than frightened now.
The voice chuckled. “No, I’m not a ghost.”
“Are you invisible, then, like on TV?”
“Well . . .” the voice said, “I guess I’m not really there at all, the way you mean it, although I can see you and talk to you whenever I want, little Marcia.”
Marcy shook her head. In spite of him saying that he wasn’t a ghost, she pictured him as one, as a little-man-who-wasn’t-there, like in the poem Mommy had read her, and for a long time that would be the way she would think of him. “How did you know my name?” she asked.
The man-who-wasn’t-there chuckled smugly again. “I know lots of things, Marcia, and I can find out nearly anything I want to know. My name is Arnold Waxman, and someday I’m going to marry you.”
“No you’re not,” she said, startled.
“Oh yes I am. I’m going to be your husband, little Marcia, you’ll see. With my guidance you’re going to grow up to be a perfect young lady, the perfect bride, and when the time is right, you’ll marry me.”
“Oh no I won’t,” she said, more vehemently, feeling tears start in her eyes. “I won’t, I won’t. You’re a liar, a yucky old liar.”
“Have some respect!” the man-who-wasn’t-there said sharply. “Is this a way to talk to your future husband?”
But Marcy was already running, whizzing suddenly away like a stone shot out of a sling, up the slope, across the meadow, past the foundations for the new house. Not until she reached the first line of trees, the riverbank far behind her, did she whirl and yell back, “I’m not going to marry you, you dumb old ghost! I’m not!”
“Oh, I think you will,” said a voice beside her, from the thin and empty summer air.
###
Barry Meisner, Marcy’s father, was putting on his tallis and t’fillen, preparing to pray, when a voice spoke to him out of the ceiling: “Mr. Meisner? I have a proposition to make to you.”
“What?” Mr. Meisner said, turning around, as if the voice might have emanated out of the red leather bar across the room. He cautiously walked over to the bar and looked behind it, but found nothing but his collection of vintage wines, a towel that had fallen to the floor, and a bottlecap that the maid had overlooked.
“So now you’re hearing things,” Mr. Meisner mumbled, scolding himself.
“Mr. Meisner,” said the voice clearly, “please, just listen to me for a moment, and I’ll explain everything.”
“Oh, my God!” Mr. Meisner said, now looking straight up at the ceiling light which spotlit the bar and the ivory collection which filled the narrow mirrored shelves on the wall behind it. Mr. Meisner, a successful businessman who attributed his success to a personal God who took a particular interest in him, suddenly began to shake. “Oh, my God. I always knew you were real. I’m your son, Barry,” and he raised his arms before him and intoned the Shema: “Hear Oh Israel, the—”
“Please, Mr. Meisner,” said the voice, “I am most certainly not God. Now if you’ll just listen—”
Mr. Meisner lowered his arms reluctantly. “You’re not God?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then who are you, what are you?” Mr. Meisner looked this way and that. “Come out! Show yourself!”
“I can’t show myself, Mr. Meisner, because I’m from the future.”
“The future!”
“That’s right,” said the voice, sounding somewhat smug. Mr. Meisner squinted suspiciously up at the ceiling. “So, you’re from the future, huh? You have a time machine, maybe, like in the movies? So, you want to talk to a person, why don’t you step out and say hello, instead of doing tricks like a ventriloquist with the ceiling?”
“Mr. Meisner,” the voice said, and you could almost hear the sigh behind the words, “there is no such thing as a time machine. Not the kind that you’re talking about, anyway. It’s quite impossible for anybody to physically travel through time. Or so the scientists tell me—I must admit that I don’t really understand it myself. But the point is that I can’t step out and shake hands with you because I’m not really there, not physically. You understand? Now what I do have is a device that lets me see through time, and enables me to speak to you, and hear what you have to say in return. And let me tell you, Mr. Meisner, it’s expensive. The timescopes were developed only a little while ago (from my point of view, of course), and you wouldn’t believe how much it’s costing me to talk to you right now.”
“Long distance calls are always expensive,” Mr. Meisner said blandly; he had regained some of his composure, and he wasn’t about to let a voice from the ceiling think that it could impress him by bragging about its money. He idly fingered the loose leather strap of the t’fillen while he looked thoughtfully upward. “So, then, Mr. Voice—” he said at last.
“Mr. Meisner, please. I’m not a voice, I’m a person just like you, and I have a name. My name is Arnold Waxman.”
Mr. Meisner blinked. “So, then, Mr. . . . Waxman,” he began again. “So you’re up there in the future, and you’re calling me, and it’s costing you a million dollars a minute, or whatever they use for money in the future, and any time now the operator is going to break in and start yelling you should put another dime in the slot . . . ” He paused. “So what do you want? Why are you bothering me?”
“I’d like to speak to you about your daughter, Marcy.”
“What about my daughter?” demanded Mr. Meisner, startled again.
“I would like your permission to marry her.”
“Marry her? Are you a pervert, is that it?” Mr. Meisner began shaking with anger and fear. No one was going to marry his daughter. She wasn’t even bat mitzvahed yet. Suddenly he stopped, and buried his face in his hands. “I am hearing things,” Mr. Meisner said flatly, satisfied that he had finally had a breakdown. “Now let my wife deny that I’ve been working too hard.”
A sigh filled the room. “Mr. Meisner, you’re not crazy. You’re living in the Twentieth Century, please try to act like a civilized man, not some superstitious aborigine.”
“You should talk about civilized! My daughter is eight years old. Is this what they do in the future, marry eight-year-old girls?” A thought struck him and he began to panic. “Where is she? Oh my God, is she alright? What—”
“Calm yourself, Mr. Meisner,” Arnold said. “Your daughter is fine; in fact, she’s on her way home right now.”
“She better be okay,” Mr. Meisner said ominously.
“Please let me explain, Mr. Meisner. I don’t want to marry Marcy now. I want to marry her in the future, ten years from n
ow, when she’s eighteen. That is, I believe, an acceptable age. And I am, as I believe I’ve already mentioned, a very rich man. A very respectable man. She could do far worse, believe me.”
Mr. Meisner shook his head dubiously. “I should arrange a marriage like my Grandmother who lived in a shtetl?”
“I think you will find that the old ways contained much wisdom.”
“Are you Jewish?” Mr. Meisner asked suspiciously.
“Of course I’m Jewish. Would I want to marry your daughter if I wasn’t?”
“We’re not Orthodox,” said Mr. Meisner.
“Neither am I,” Arnold said.
“No—come back in ten years when you’re real and we can talk again. Until then, you’re a figment of my imagination.”
“You know perfectly well that I’m real, Mr. Meisner,” Arnold said angrily, “and in ten years it will be too late for Marcy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Meisner, do you have any idea what’s going on up here in the future?”
Mr. Meisner shrugged. “I should know the future? I have enough trouble with the present.”
“Well, let me tell you, you think it’s bad down there now, you just wait until you see the future! It’s a zoo. A jungle. The complete breakdown of all moral values. Kids running wild. Lewdness. Indecency. Do you want to live to see the day when your daughter is schtupping every boy she passes on the street?”
“Don’t you dare talk like that about my daughter!”
“Mr. Meisner, without my guidance, she’ll marry a goy!”
There was a heavy silence. “That’s a lie,” Mr. Meisner said at last, but he said it without much conviction. He paused again, then sighed. “So if I make an arrangement with you, how will that change what happens to my Marcy?”
Slow Dancing Through Time Page 13