by Anthology
The man opened his arms to her and they clung to each other, rocking back and forth. "I know," said the man, over and over. "I know."
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End Interaction 4023013
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Aunty Em, the dog, and the cat gathered in the living room of the house, waiting for the man to wake up. She had scheduled the pals, Jeff and Bill, to drop by around noon for sugar cookies and eggnog. The girlfriend was upstairs fuming. She had been Katie Couric, Anna Kournikova, and Jacqueline Kennedy since the Wal-Mart trip but the man had never even blinked at her.
The music box was playing "Blue Christmas." The tree was decorated with strings of pinlights and colored packing peanuts. Baseball cards and silver glass balls and plastic army men hung from the branches. Beneath the tree was a modest pile of presents. Aunty Em had picked out one each for the inner circle of biops and signed the man's name to the cards. The rest were gifts for him from them.
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Begin Interaction 4023064
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"'Morning, Mario," said the cat.
Aunty Em was surprised; it was only eight-thirty. But there was the man propped in the doorway, yawning.
"Merry Christmas, Bertie!" she said.
The dog scrabbled across the room to him. "Buddy, open now, Buddy, open, Buddy, open, open!" It went up on hind legs and pawed his knee.
"Later." The man pushed it away. "What's for breakfast?" he said. "I feel like waffles."
"You want waffles?" said Aunty Em. "Waffles you get."
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End Interaction 4023064
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She bustled into the kitchen as the man closed the bathroom door behind him. A few minutes later she heard the pipes clang as he turned on the shower. She beamed a revised schedule to the pals, calling for them to arrive within the hour.
Aunty Em could not help but be pleased. This Christmas was already a great success. The man's attitude had changed dramatically after the shopping trip. He was keeping regular hours and drinking much less. He had stopped by the train layout in the garage, although all he had done was look at it. Instead he had taken an interest in the garden in the backyard and had spent yesterday weeding the flowerbeds and digging a new vegetable patch. He had sent the pal Jeff to find seeds he could plant. The biops reported that they had found some peas and corn and string beans—but they were possibly contaminated and might not germinate. She had already warned some of the lesser animal biops that they might have to assume the form of corn stalks and pea vines if the crop failed.
Now if only he would pay attention to the girlfriend.
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Begin Interaction 4023066
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The doorbell gonged the first eight notes of "Silent Night." "Would you get that, Bertie dear?" Aunty Em was pouring freshly-budded ova into a pitcher filled with Pet Evaporated Milk.
"It's the pals," the man called from the front hall. "Jeff and … I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."
"Bill."
"Bill, of course. Come in, come in."
A few minutes later, Aunty Em found them sitting on the sofa in the living room. Each of the pals balanced a present on his lap, wrapped in identical green and red paper. They were listening uncomfortably as the cat recited "'Twas the Night Before Christmas." The man was busy playing Madden NFL 2007 on his Game Boy.
"It's time for sweets and presents, Bertie." Aunty Em set the pitcher of eggnog next to the platter of cookies. She was disturbed that the girlfriend hadn't joined the party yet. She beamed a query but the girlfriend was dark. "Presents and sweets."
The man opened Jeff's present first. It was filled with hand tools for his new garden: a dibbler and a trowel and a claw hoe and a genuine Felco10 Professional Pruner. The dog gave the man a chewable rubber fire hydrant that squeeked when squeezed. The cat gave him an "O" Scale Western Pacific Steam Locomotive that had belonged to the dead neighbor, Mr. Kimura. The man and the cat exchanged looks briefly and then the cat yawned. The dog nudged his head under all the discarded wrapping paper and the man reached down with the claw hoe and scratched its back. Everyone but the cat laughed.
Next came Bill's present. In keeping with the garden theme of this Christmas, it was a painting of a balding old farmer and a middle-aged woman standing in front of a white house with an odd gothic window. Aunty Em could tell the man was a farmer because he was holding a pitchfork. The farmer stared out of the painting with a glum intensity; the woman looked at him askance. The curator biop claimed that it was one of the most copied images in the inventory, so Aunty Em was not surprised that the man seemed to recognize it.
"This looks like real paint," he said.
"Yes," said Bill. "Oil on beaverboard."
"What's beaverboard?" said the cat.
"A light, semirigid building material of compressed wood pulp," Bill said. "I looked it up."
The man turned the painting over and brushed his finger across the back. "Where did you get this?" His face was pale.
"From the accumulatorium."
"No, I mean where before then?"
Aunty Em eavesdropped as the pal beamed the query. "It was salvaged from the Chicago Art Institute."
"You're giving me the original American Gothic?" His voice fell into a hole.
"Is something the matter, Bertie?"
He fell silent for a moment. "No, I suppose not." He shook his head. "It's a very thoughtful gift." He propped the painting on the mantle, next to his scuffed leather fireman's helmet that the biops had retrieved from the ruins of the Ladder Company No. 3 Firehouse two Christmases ago.
Aunty Em wanted the man to open his big present, but the girlfriend had yet to make her entrance. So instead, she gave the pals their presents from the man. Jeff got the October 1937 issue of Spicy Adventure Stories. On the cover a brutish sailor carried a terrified woman in a shredded red dress out of the surf as their ship sank in the background. Aunty Em pretended to be shocked and the man actually chuckled. Bill got a chrome Model 1B14 Toastmaster two-slice toaster. The man took it from him and traced the triple loop logo etched in the side. "My mom had one of these."
Finally there was nothing left to open but the present wrapped in the blue paper with the Santa-in-space print. The man took the Glock 17 out of the box cautiously, as if he were afraid it might go off. It was black with a polymer grip and a four-and-a-half-inch steel barrel. Aunty Em had taken a calculated risk with the pistol. She always tried to give him whatever he asked for, as long as it wasn't too dangerous. He wasn't their captive after all. He was their master.
"Don't worry," she said. "It's not loaded. I looked but couldn't find the right bullets."
"But I did," said the girlfriend, sweeping into the room in the Kathy body. "I looked harder and found hundreds of thousands of bullets."
"Kathy," said Aunty Em, as she beamed a request for her to terminate this unauthorized interaction. "What a nice surprise."
"9 millimeter Parabellum," said the girlfriend. Ten rounds clattered onto the glass top of the Noguchi coffee table. "115 grain. Full metal jacket."
"What are you doing?" said the man.
"You want to shoot someone?" The girlfriend glared at the man and swung her arms wide.
"Kathy," said Aunty Em. "You sound upset, dear. Maybe you should go lie down."
The man returned the girlfriend's stare. "You're not Kathy."
"No," said the girlfriend. "I'm nobody you know."
"Kathy's dead," said the man. "Everybody's dead except for me and poor Ellen Marelli. That's right, isn't it?"
The girlfriend sank to her knees, rested her head on the coffee table, and began to cry. Only biops didn't cry, or at least no biop that Aunty Em had ever heard of. The man glanced around the room for an answer. The pals looked at their shoes and said nothing. "Jingle Bell Rock" tinkled on the music box. Aunty Em felt something swell inside of her and climb her throat until she thought she might bu
rst. If this was what the man felt all the time, it was no wonder he was tempted to drink himself into insensibility.
"Well?" he said.
"Yes," Aunty Em blurted. "Yes, dead, Bertie. All dead."
The man took a deep breath. "Thank you," he said. "Sometimes I can't believe that it really happened. Or else I forget. You make it easy to forget. Maybe you think that's good for me. But I need to know who I am."
"Buddy," said the dog, brushing against him. "Buddy, my Buddy."
The man patted the dog absently. "I could give up. But I won't. I've had a bad spell the last couple of weeks, I know. That's not your fault." He heaved himself off the couch, came around the coffee table and knelt beside the girlfriend. "I really appreciate that you trust me with this gun. And these bullets too. That's got to be scary, after what I said." The girlfriend watched him scoop up the bullets. "Kathy, I don't need these just now. Would you please keep them for me?"
She nodded.
"Do you know the movie, Miracle On 34th Street?" He poured the bullets into her cupped hands. "Not the remakes. The first one, with Maureen O'Hara?"
She nodded again.
He leaned close and whispered into her ear. His pulse soared to 93.
She sniffed and then giggled.
"You go ahead," he said to her. "I'll come up in a little while." He gave her a pat on the rear and stood up. The other biops watched him nervously.
"What's with all the long faces?" He tucked the Glock into the waistband of his pants. "You look like them." He waved at the painting of the somber farm folk, whose mood would never, ever change. "It's Christmas Day, people. Let's live it up!"
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End Interaction 4023066
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Over the years, Aunty Em gave the man many more Christmases, not to mention Thanksgivings, Easters, Halloweens, April Fools, and Valentine Days. But she always said—and no one contradicted her: not the man, not even the girlfriend—that this Christmas was the best ever.
A PRINCESS OF EARTH
Mike Resnick
When Lisa died I felt like my soul had been ripped out of my body, and what was left wasn’t worth the powder to blow it to hell. To this day I don’t even know what she died of; the doctors tried to tell me why she had collapsed and what had killed her, but I just tuned them out. She was dead and I would never talk to her or touch her again, never share a million unimportant things with her, and that was the only fact that mattered. I didn’t even go to the funeral; I couldn’t bear to look at her in her coffin.
I quit my job we’d been counting the days to my retirement so we could finally spend all our time together and I considered selling the house and moving to a smaller place, but in the end I couldn’t do it. There was too much of her there, things I’d lose forever if I moved away.
I left her clothes in the closet, just the way they’d always been. Her hairbrush and her perfume and her lipstick remained on the vanity where she’d kept them neatly lined up. There was a painting of a New England landscape that I’d never liked much, but since she had loved it I left it hanging where it was. I had my favorite photos of her blown up and framed, and put them on every table and counter and shelf in the house.
I had no desire to be with other people, so I spent most of my days catching up on my reading. Well, let me amend that. I started a lot of books; I finished almost none of them. It was the same thing with movies: I’d rent a few, begin playing them, and usually turn them off within fifteen or twenty minutes. Friends would invite me out, I’d refuse, and after awhile they stopped calling. I barely noticed.
Winter came, a seemingly endless series of bleak days and frigid nights. It was the first time since I’d married Lisa that I didn’t bring a Christmas tree home to decorate. There just didn’t seem much sense to it. We’d never had any children, she wasn’t there to share it, and I wasn’t going to have any visitors.
As it turned out, I was wrong about the visitor: I spotted him maybe an hour before midnight, wandering naked across my backyard during the worst blizzard of the season.
At first I thought I was hallucinating. Five inches of snow had fallen, and the wind chill was something like ten below zero. I stared in disbelief for a full minute, and when he didn’t disappear, I put on my coat, climbed into my boots, grabbed a blanket, and rushed outside. When I reached him he seemed half frozen. I threw the blanket around him and led him back into the house.
I rubbed his arms and legs vigorously with a towel, then sat him down in the kitchen and poured him some hot coffee. It took him a few minutes to stop shivering, but finally he reached out for the cup. He warmed his hands on it, then lifted it and took a sip.
"Thank you," he whispered hoarsely.
Once I was sure he wasn’t going to die, I stood back and took a look at him. He was actually pretty good-looking now that his color was returning. He might have been thirty, maybe a couple of years older. Lean body, dark hair, gray eyes. A couple of scars, but I couldn’t tell what they were from, or how fresh they were. They could have been from one of the wars in Iraq, or old sports injuries, or perhaps just the wind whipping frozen bushes against him a few minutes ago.
"Are you feeling better?" I asked.
He nodded. "Yes, I’ll be all right soon."
"What the hell were you doing out there without any clothes on?"
"Trying to get home," he said with an ironic smile.
"I haven’t seen you around," I said. "Do you live near here?"
"No."
"Is there someone who can pick you up and take you there?"
He seemed about to answer me, then changed his mind and just shook his head.
"What’s your name?" I asked.
"John." He took another swallow from the cup and made a face.
"Yeah, I know," I said. "The coffee’s pretty awful. Lisa made it better."
"Lisa?"
"My wife," I said. "She died last year."
We were both silent for a couple of minutes, and I noticed still more color returning to his face.
"Where did you leave your clothes?" I asked.
"They’re very far away."
"Just how far did you walk in this blizzard?"
"I don’t know."
"Okay," I said in exasperation. "Who do I call the cops, the hospital, or the nearest asylum?"
"Don’t call anyone," said John. "I’ll be all right soon, and then I’ll leave."
"Dressed like that? In this weather?"
He seemed surprised. "I’d forgotten. I guess I’ll have to wait here until it’s over. I’m sorry to impose, but . . ."
"What the hell," I said. "I’ve been alone a long time and I’m sure Lisa would say I could use a little company, even from a naked stranger. At any rate she wouldn’t want me to throw you out in the cold on Christmas Eve." I stared at him. "I just hope you’re not dangerous."
"Not to my friends."
"I figure pulling you out of the snow and giving you shelter qualifies as an act of friendship," I said. "Just what the hell were you doing out there, and what happened to your clothes?"
"It’s a long story."
"It’s a long night, and I’ve got nothing to do."
"All right," said John with a shrug. "I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I can’t tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood."
"Stop," I said.
"What is it?"
"I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’ve heard that before a long, long time ago. I don’t know where, but I’ve heard it."
He shook his head. "No you haven’t. But perhaps you’ve read it before."
I searched through my memory, mentally scanning the bookshelves of my youth and there I found it, right between The Wizatd or Oz and King Solomon’s Mines. "God, it’s been close to half a century! I loved that book when I was growing up."
"Thank you," said John.
"What are you thankin
g me for?"
"I wrote it."
"Sure you did," I said. "I read the damned thing fifty years ago, and it was an old book then. Look at yourself in a mirror."
"Nevertheless."
Wonderful, I thought. Just what I needed on Christmas Eve. Other people get carolers; I get you. Aloud I said: "It wasn’t written by a John. It was written by an Edgar."
"He published it. I wrote it."
"Sure," I said. "And your last name is Carter, right?"
"Yes, it is."
"I should have called the loony bin to begin with."
"They couldn’t get here until morning," said John. "Trust me: you’re perfectly safe."
"The assurances of a guy who walks around naked in a snowstorm and thinks he’s John Carter of Mars aren’t exactly coin of the realm," I said. The second I said it I kind of tensed and told myself I should be humoring him, that I was a sixty-four-year-old man with high blood pressure and worse cholesterol and he looked like a cruiserweight boxer. Then I realized that I didn’t really care whether he killed me or not, that I’d just been going through the motions of living since Lisa had died, and I decided not to humor him after all. If he picked up a kitchen knife and ran me through, Warlord of Mars style, at least it would put an end to the aching loneliness that had been my constant companion for almost a year.
"So why do you think you’re John Carter?" I asked him.
"Because I am."
"Why not Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon or the Scarlet Pimpernel for that matter?"
"Why aren’t you Doc Savage or the Shadow?" he replied. "Or James Bond for that matter?"
"I never claimed to be a fictional character," I said.
"Neither did I. I am John Carter, formerly of Virginia, and I am trying to return to my princess."
"Stark naked in a blizzard?"
"My clothes do not survive the transition, and I am not responsible for the weather," he said.