Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  Ivan was, therefore, taken aback when a lovely woman approached from his brother’s blind side, touched Ivan fleetingly on the forearm, and said, “I’m so glad you came, it’s so good to see you.” She wore a short skirt, belted at the waist. Her back, flanks, and shoulders were bare. The tips of her breasts were barely covered by two narrow, translucent strips of fabric that crossed at the navel and fastened behind her neck.

  “It’s so good to see you, too,” Ivan said.

  She said, “I have to go get after the help for a second, but don’t you go away,” and vanished.

  Ivan caught up with Don and said, “Who was that?”

  “Who was who?”

  A simply pretty rather than gorgeous girl paused before Ivan with a food-laden tray and smiled invitingly; he helped himself to some unrecognizable but delicious foodstuff. Before he could help himself to seconds, she was gone. He consoled himself with a drink plucked from another passing try.

  The singer fronting the combo was Frank Sinatra, who snapped his fingers and smiled as he sang “My Way.” According to a placard, the skinny, artfully scruffy young men accompanying him were The Sex Pistols. Although none of the real people in the room appeared to notice when the song ended, Frank Sinatra thanked them for their applause and told them they were beautiful. Ivan caught up with the girl with the food tray and had helped himself to a snack before he realized that she was a different girl and it was a different snack. She was pretty in her own right, however, and the snack was as mysterious and delicious as the first had been. The combo began playing again, somewhat picking up the tempo. As Frank Sinatra sang that he didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew how to get it, Don turned, pointed vaguely, and said to Ivan, “I see somebody over there I have to go schmooze with. I’d introduce you, but he’s a pig.”

  “So go schmooze. I can look after myself.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Okay. Ogle some starlets—I’ll be back in a mo.”

  As though she had rotated into the space vacated by Don, a long tawny woman appeared before Ivan. Her waist was as big around as his thigh. Her high breasts exerted a firm, friendly pressure against his lapels. He thought she had the most kissable-looking mouth he had ever seen. She said, “I’m sure I know you.”

  Ivan smiled. “I was one of the original Sex Pistols.”

  “Really!” She glanced over her shoulder at the hologram, then peered at Ivan again. “Which one?”

  Ivan nodded vaguely in the band’s direction. “The dead one.”

  She pouted fetchingly. “Who are you, really?”

  He decided to see what would happen if he disregarded Don and Michelle’s advice. He said, “I’m a pedologist.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you specialize in child actors? No, wait, that’s a foot specialist, right?” She looked doubtfully at his hands, which were big and brown, hard and knobby. “Is your practice in Beverly Hills?”

  “Gondwanaland.”

  “Ah,” she said, and nodded, and looked thoughtful, and lost interest. Ivan let her rotate back the way she had come and then sidled into and through the next room. The house was a maze of rooms opening onto other rooms, seemingly unto infinity; inside of five minutes, he decided that he was hopelessly lost. Surrounded by small groups of people talking animatedly among themselves, he turned more or less in place, eavesdropping casually. He quickly gathered that most of the people around him believed in astrology, psychics, cosmetic surgery, and supply-side economics, and that some few among them were alarmed by the trend toward virtual actors. He overheard a tanned, broad-shouldered crewcut man say to a couple of paler and less substantial men, “What chance have I got? I’m losing parts to John Wayne, for chrissake! He’s been dead for decades, and he’s a bigger star than ever.”

  “Costs less than ever, too,” said the wispier of the other two men, “and keeps his right-wing guff to himself.”

  The broad-shouldered man scowled. “I don’t want what happened to stuntmen to happen to actors!”

  “Oh, don’t be alarmist,” the wispy man said. “No one’s going to get rid of actors. Oh, they might use fewer of them, but—besides, stuntmen’re holding their own overseas, and—”

  “Crazy goddamn Aussies and Filipinos!”

  “—and,” the wispy man said insistently, “the films do have a significant following in this country. For some viewers, it’s not enough to see an actor who looks like he’s risking his life. They want the extra kick that comes from knowing an actor really is risking his life.”

  The third man had a satisfied air and was shaped like a bowling pin; his white suit and scarlet ascot enhanced the resemblance. “Until that happens,” he told the broad-shouldered man, “better get used to playing second fiddle to John Wayne. Right now, I got development people e-synthing old physical comedians from the nineteen-whenevers. Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Jackie Chan. People still bust a gut laughing at those guys.”

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  “You will. Because I’m putting ’em together in a film. Lots of smash-up, fall-down. Sure, we use computers to give ’em what they never had before—voices, color—personalities! But when people see Buster Keaton fall off a moving train, they know there’s no fakery.”

  “Who the hell cares if some dead guy risks his life?”

  The bowling-pin-shaped man jabbed a finger into the air. “Thrills are timeless!”

  Glimpsing yet another pretty girl with a food tray, Ivan exited right, through a doorway. He somehow missed the girl, made a couple of turns at random, and was beginning to wonder amusedly if he had happened upon another spacetime anomaly when he suddenly and unexpectedly found himself outdoors, on the tiled shore of a swimming pool as big, he decided, as the Tethys Sea—Galveston Bay, at least. There were small groups of people ranged at intervals around the pool and one person in the water, who swam to the edge, pulled herself up, and was revealed to be a sleekly muscular Amazon. As she toweled her hair, she let her incurious gaze alight fleetingly on Ivan, then move on; she was as indifferent to his existence as though he were another of the potted palms. She rose lithely, draped her towel over one exquisite shoulder, and walked past him into the house.

  Ivan sipped his drink, thrust his free hand into his trousers pocket, and ambled toward the far end of the pool and an array of women there. At a table in their midst, like a castaway on an island circled by glistening succulent mermaids, a bald, fat, fortyish man sat talking animatedly to himself. A waiter stood at the ready behind a cart laden with liquor bottles. A large rectangular object, either a man or a refrigerator stuffed into a sports jacket, took up space nearby. Just as this large object startled Ivan by looking in his direction, the fat man suddenly laughed triumphantly, leaped to his feet, and clapped his hands. He pointed at bottles on the cart, and the waiter began to fuss with them. The fat man turned, looked straight at Ivan, evidently the only suitable person within arm’s reach, and pulled him close. “Help me celebrate,” he said, and to the large object, “Larry, get the man a chair.” Larry pulled a chair back from the table, waited for Ivan to sit, then moved off a short distance. The fat man introduced himself as John Rubis and looked as though he expected Ivan to have heard of him. Ivan smiled pleasantly and tried to give the impression that he had.

  “I am real happy!” Rubis pointed at his own ear, and Ivan realized that there was an AnswerMan plugged into it. “The word from the folks at Northemico is go!” He indicated the liquor cart. “What can I get you?”

  “Brought my own. Congratulations.” Ivan toasted him, and they drank. Rubis smacked his lips appreciatively. Ivan said, “You work for Northemico?”

  “I deal with Northemico. Their entertainment division.”

  “I didn’t even realize Northemico had an entertainment division.”

  “Hey, they got everything.” He turned toward the waiter and said, “Fix me up another of these.”

  “Sorry, I’m just a pedologist from Podunk.” Rubis
looked perplexed. “Pedologist,” Ivan said, enunciating as clearly as he could.

  “Ah.” Rubis listened to his AnswerMan again. “As in child specialist—or soil scientist? No, that can’t be right. Sorry about that, Doctor. Sometimes my little mister know-it-all gets confused. At least it didn’t think you said you’re a pederast, ha ha. So what is it, set me straight here, what’s your claim to celebrity?”

  Ivan mentally shrugged and asked himself, Why the hell not? and to John Rubis he said, “I was one of the first people to travel through time.”

  Instead of responding to that, Rubis held up a forefinger, said, “Incoming,” looked away, and hunched over the table, listening intently to his AnswerMan and occasionally muttering inaudibly. Ivan’s attention wandered. Light reflecting from the pool’s surface shimmered on the enclosing white walls. The water was as brilliantly blue-green as that ancient sea—and as he pictured that sea in his mind, he also pictured a woman like a tanned and buffed Aphrodite rising from the waters. And when he told her that he was a foot specialist, she heaved a sigh of exasperation and dived back into the sea.

  Rubis turned back to him and said, “Sorry. You aren’t kidding about the time-travel, are you?”

  “Well, I was part of the first team of time-travelers—half of it. There were just two of us. Afterward, I made other visits and helped establish a community of scientists in Paleozoic time. The base camp’s the size of a small town now.”

  Rubis stared at him for what felt like a long moment. Then a light seemed to come on behind the man’s eyes, and he snapped his fingers and pointed. “Yeah. The hole through time. Back to, what, the Stone Age?”

  “Um, actually, back to quite a bit before. Back to the Paleozoic Era, four hundred million and some odd years ago. The Siluro-Devonian boundary.”

  “Yeah, that’s right! The Age of Trillobites. So, what, you’re out here pitching the story of your life to producers?”

  “No, I’m just visiting my brother. He’s the screenwriter in the family.” That information did not seem to impress Rubis particularly, so Ivan added, “He was just up for a Best Screenplay Oscar. Donald Kelly.” Rubis brightened. “My own fifteen minutes of fame are long past, and they really didn’t amount to all that much.”

  “Mm. Any face minutes?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You know, your face on the TV screen. Media interviews. Face minutes.”

  “Ah. I turn up in some old documentaries. Everybody made documentaries for a while, until all six people who were remotely interested were sick of them.”

  Rubis rolled his eyes. “Documentaries! Even I watched part of one. No offense, but it was like watching grass grow. The most exciting thing you found was a trillobite, and it’s basically just some kind of big water bug, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, basically.”

  “There’ve been bigger bugs in movies already. Like in—like in Them and I. And The Thief of Baghdad. Seen it?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I thought the Indonesian settings were interesting.”

  “Our first idea was to actually shoot it in Baghdad. But not much of Baghdad’s standing any more. So—besides, Indonesia, Baghdad“—Rubis made a gesture expressive of some point that was not altogether clear to Ivan—”eh!”

  “Once upon a time,” Ivan said, “if you wanted to make a movie about Baghdad, you built sets on sound stages here in Hollywood, right?”

  “Aah, nobody makes movies in Hollywood any more. Too expensive. Lousy unions. But this is still the place to be, the place to make deals. Anyway, like I was saying, about time-travel—I’ve always thought it’s a sensational thing. When you think about it, it really is just the biggest thing since the early days of space travel. I wish it could be used for something more interesting than studying bugs and slime a million years ago, but don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a real shame the time-travelers never caught on with the public like those first guys who went to the moon—Armstrong, Altman. Now those guys were celebrities.”

  “It’s not like we could do a live broadcast from the Paleozoic. The view wouldn’t have commended itself to most people anyway. The Silurian Period looks like a cross between a gravel pit and a stagnant pond. And we didn’t plant a flag or say anything heroic. In fact—” Ivan hesitated for a moment, considering. “Still, it was all tremendously exciting. It was the most exciting thing in the world.”

  The wall opposite the door had pivoted away. The metal platform had begun to move on rails toward a ripple in the air. Everything had turned to white light and pain. Ivan, blinded, felt as though someone had taken careful aim with a two-by-four and struck him across his solar plexus. There was a terrifying, eternal moment when he could not suck in air. Then he drew a breath and started to exhale, and his stomach turned over. The convulsion put him on his hands and knees. Too excited to eat breakfast that morning, he had only drunk a cup of coffee. Now burning acid rose in his throat. He felt cramps in his calf muscles. His earphones throbbed with the sound of—what was it, crying, groaning … ?

  Retching. His vision cleared, and he saw Dilks nearby, lying on his side, feebly moving his arms. For some reason, part of Dilks’ visor was obscured. Ivan threw his weight in that direction and half rolled, half crawled to the man’s side. Now he could see Dilks’ face through the yellow-filmed visor. Dilks had lost his breakfast inside his helmet. Ivan spoke his name, but it was quickly established that, though Dilks’ helmetphone worked, his microphone was fouled and useless. There was nothing to be done for it now: they could not simply remove Dilks’ helmet and clean out the mess; they were under strictest orders not to contaminate the Paleozoic.

  Nearby, the air around the anomaly rippled like a gossamer veil. Ivan looked around at the Paleozoic world. He and Dilks were on the shingle just above the high-tide line and just below a crumbling line of cliffs. The sun stood at zenith in the cloudless sky. The sea was blue-green, brilliant, beautiful.

  Ivan bent over Dilks again and said, “You’re in bad shape. We’ve got to get you back. Come on, I’ll help you.”

  Dilks vehemently shoved him away. He looked gray-faced inside his helmet, but he grimaced and shook his head, and though he could not say what he meant, Ivan understood him. We didn’t come all this way only to go right back. Dilks patted the front of Ivan’s suit and then motioned in the direction of the water.

  Ivan nodded. He said, “I’ll be right back.” He staggered to his feet, checked the instruments attached to the platform, activated the camera mounted on his helmet, and collected soil and air samples in the vicinity of the platform. Then, with what he hoped was a reassuring wave to Dilks, he lumbered toward the water. The shingle made for treacherous footing, and yet, as he looked out upon the expanse of water, he experienced a shivery rush of pleasure so particular that he knew he had felt it only once before, during boyhood, on the occasion of his first sight of the sea off Galveston Island. He had never been mystically inclined, even as a boy, but, then as now, he had responded to something tremendous and irresistible, the sea’s summons, had rush straight down to the water and dived in happily.

  Nothing moved along the whole beach, nothing except the curling waves and the tangles of seaweed they had cast up. The beach curved away to left and right. It must curve away forever, Ivan thought. Hundreds, thousands of miles of perfectly unspoiled beach. He knelt on the dark wet sand and collected a sample of seawater. As he sealed the vial, he saw something emerge from the foam about two meters to his right. It was an arthropod about as big as his hand, flattened and segmented and carried along on jointed legs. The next wave licked after it, embraced it, appeared momentarily do draw it back toward the sea. The wave retreated, and the creature hesitated. Come on, Ivan thought, come on. Come on. He entertained no illusions that he had arrived on the spot just in time to greet the first Earth creature ever to come ashore. Surely, a thousand animals, a million, had already done so, and plants before them, and microorganisms before plants. Nevertheless, he had to admire the timing
of this demonstration. He crouched, hands on knees, and waited. Foam rushed over the creature again. Come on, Ivan commanded it, make up your dim little mind. It’s strange out here on land, not altogether hospitable, but you’ll get used to it, or your children will, or your great-grandchildren a million times removed. Eventually, most of the species, most of the biomass, will be out here.

  The arthropod advanced beyond the reach of the waves and began nudging through the seawrack. Eat hearty, Ivan thought, taking a cautious step toward the animal. He reflected on the persistence in vertebrates of revulsion toward arthropods. He felt kindly toward this arthropod, at least. Both of us, he thought, are pioneers.

  As last he reluctantly tore himself away and returned to Dilks, who had sagged to the ground by the platform. Ivan propped the stricken man up and pointed toward the ripple. “We’ve got to cut this short,” he said.

  Dilks indicated disagreement, but more weakly than before.

  “You’re hurt,” Ivan said, holding him up, “and we’ve got to go back.” There was a crackle of static in Ivan’s helmetphone, and he heard Dilks speak a single word.

  “…failed…”

  “No! We didn’t fail! We got here alive, and we’re getting back alive. Nobody can take that away from us, Dilks. We’re the first. And we’ll come again.”

  They got clumsily onto the platform. Ivan made Dilks as comfortable as possible and then activated the platform. The air around the ripple began to roil and glow. Ivan gripped the railing and faced the glow. “Do your goddamn worst.”

  Rubis had offered Ivan a cigar, which he politely refused, and stuck one into his own mouth, and Larry had lurched forward to light it. Now, enveloped in smoke, Rubis said, “Trillobites just never did catch on with the public. Maybe if you’d found a really big trillobite. On the other hand, trillobites didn’t make for very cuddly stuffed toys, either, and that’s always an important consideration. The merchandising, I mean.”