The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009
Page 24
“I don’t know.”
“How did it get inside you?” she asked.
“Through my ears,” he said.
“Does it hurt?”
“I was different when I came back in.”
“Stronger?”
“No, more something else.”
“Can you say?”
“I’ve had dreams.”
“So what,” she said. “I had a dream the other night that I was out on the Grand Conciliation Balcony, dressed for the odd jibbery when all of a sudden a little twisher rumbles up and whispers to me the words—‘Elemental Potency.’ What do you think it means? I can’t get the phrase out of my head.”
“It’s nonsense,” he said.
“Why aren’t your dreams nonsense?”
“They are,” he said. “The other night I had this dream about a theory. I can’t remember if I saw it in the pages of a dream magazine or someone spoke it or it just jumped into my sleeping head. I’ve never dreamt about a theory before. Have you?”
“No,” she said.
“It was about living in the dome. The theory was that since the dome is closed things that happen in the dome only affect other things in the dome. Because the size of Daltharee is as we believe so miniscule compared to the rest of the larger world, the repercussions of the acts you engage in in the dome will have a higher possibility of intersecting each other. If you think of something you do throughout the day as an act, each act begins a chain reaction of mitigating energy in all directions. The will of your own energy, dispersed through myriad acts within only a morning will beam, refract, and reflect off the beams of others’ acts and the walls of the closed system, barreling into each other and causing sparks at those locations where your essence meets itself. In those instances, at those specific locations, your will is greater than the will of the dome. What I was then told was that a person could learn a way to act at a given hour—a quick series of six moves—that send out so many ultimately crisscrossing intentions of will that it creates a power mesh capable in its transformative strength of bending reality to whim.”
“You’re crazy,” she said.
There is a slight pause here, the sound of wind blowing in the trees.
“Hey, what ever happened to your Aunt?” he asked.
“They got it out of her.”
“Amazing,” he said. “Close call . . . ”
“She always seemed fine too,” she said. “But swallowing a knitting needle? That’s not right.”
“She doesn’t even knit, does she?”
“No,” she said.
“Good thing she didn’t have to pass it,” he said. “Think about the intersecting beams of will resulting from that act.”
She laughed. “I heard the last pigeon died yesterday.”
“Yeah?”
“They found it in the park, on the lawn amidst the Moth trees.”
“In all honesty, I did that,” he said. “You know, not directly, but just by the acts I went through yesterday morning. I got out of bed, had breakfast, got dressed, you know, . . . like that. I was certain that by mid-day that bird would be dead.”
“Why’d you kill it?” she asked.
There’s a pause in the conversation here filled up by the sound of machinery in the distance just beneath that of the wind in the trees.
“Having felt what I felt outside the dome, I considered it a mercy,” he said.
“Interesting . . . ” she said. “I’ve gotta get going. It looks like rain.”
“Will you call me?” he asked.
“Eventually, of course,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
Funny thing about Paige, he found religion in the latter years of his life. After serving out his sentence, he renounced his crackpot Science and retreated to a one room apartment in an old boarding house on the edge of the great desert. He courted an elderly woman there, a Mrs. Trucy. I thought he’d been long gone when we finally contacted him. After a solid fifteen years of recording conversations, it became evident that the domed city was failing—the economy, the natural habitat, were both in disarray. A strange illness had sprung up amid the population, an unrelenting, fatal insomnia that took a dozen of them to Death each week. Nine months without a single wink of sleep. The conversations we recorded then were full of anguish and hallucination.
Basically, we asked Paige what he might do to save his own created world. He came to work for us and studied the problem full time. He was old then, wrinkles and fly-away hair in strange, ever-shifting formations atop his scalp, eye glasses with one ear loop. Every time he’d make a mistake on a calculation or a technique, he’d swallow a thumbtack. When I asked if the practice helped him concentrate he told me, “No.”
Eventually, on a Saturday morning when no one was at the lab but himself and an uninterested security guard, he broke into the vault that held the shrinking ray. He started the device up, aimed it at the glass milk bottle containing Daltharee, and then sat on top of the bottle, wearing a parachute. The ray discharged, shrinking him. He fell in among the gigantic folds of the handkerchief. Apparently he managed to work his way down past the end of the material and leap into the blizzard, out over the dome of the city. No one was there to see him slowly descend, dangerously buffeted by the insane winds. No one noticed him slip through the door in the dome.
Conversations came back to us eventually containing his name. Apparently he’d told them the true nature of the dome and the bottle it resided inside of. And then after some more time passed, there came word that he was creating another domed city inside a gallon milk bottle from the city of Daltharee. Where would it end, we wondered, but it was not a thought we enjoyed pursuing as it ran in a loop, recrossing itself, reiterating its original energy in ever diminishing reproductions of ourselves. Perhaps it was the thought of it that made my assistant accidentally drop the milk bottle one afternoon. It exploded into a million dark blue shards, dirt and dome and tiny trees spread across the floor. We considered studying its remains, but instead, with a shiver, I swept it into a pile and then into the furnace.
A year later, Mrs. Trucy came looking for Mando. She insisted upon knowing what had become of him. We told her that the law did not require us to tell her, and then she pulled a marriage certificate out of her purse. I was there with the Research General at the time, and I saw him go pale as a ghost upon seeing that paper. He told her Mando had died in an experiment of his own devising. The wrinkles of her gray face torqued to a twist and sitting beneath her pure silver hair, her head looked like a metal screw. Three tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes. If Mando died performing an experiment, we could not be held responsible. We would, though, have to produce the body for her as proof that he’d perished. The Research General told her we were conducting a complete investigation of the tragedy and would contact her in six weeks with the results and the physical proof —in other words, Mando’s corpse.
My having shoveled Daltharee into the trash without searching for survivors or mounting even a cursory rescue effort was cause for imprisonment. My superior, the Research General, having had my callous act take place on his watch was also liable. After three nerve wracking days, I conceived of a way for us to save ourselves. In fact it was so simple it astounded me that neither one of us, scientific minds though we be, didn’t leap to the concept earlier. Using Mando’s own process for creating diminutive humanity, we took his DNA from our genetic files, put it through a chemical bath to begin the growth process, and then tortured the cells into tininess. We had to use radical enzymes to speed the process up given we only had six weeks. By the end of week five we had a living, breathing, Mando Paige, trapped under a drinking glass in our office. He was dressed in a little orange jump suit, wore black boots, and was in the prime of his youth. We studied his attempts to escape his prison with a jeweler’s loop inserted into each eye. We thought we could rely on the air simply running out in the glass and him suffocating.
Days pa
ssed and Paige hung on. Each day I’d spy on his meager existence and wondered what he must be thinking. When the time came and he wasn’t dead, I killed him with a cigarette. I brought the glass to the very edge of the table, bent a plastic drinking straw that I shoved the longer end of up into the glass and then caught it fairly tightly against the table edge. As for the part that stuck out, I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke up into the glass. I gave him five lung fulls. The oxygen displacement was too much, of course.
Mrs. Trucy accepted our story and the magnified view of her lover’s diminutive body. We told her how he bravely took the shrinking ray for the sake of Science. She remarked that he looked younger than when he was full sized and alive, and the Research General told her, “As you shrink, wrinkles have a tendency to evaporate.” We went to the funeral out in the desert near her home. It was a blazingly hot day. She’d had his remains placed into a thimble with some tape across the top, and this she buried in the red sand.
Later, as the sun set, the Research General and I ate dinner at a ramshackle restaurant along a dusty road right outside of Mateos. He had the pig knuckle with sauerkraut and I had the chicken croquettes with orange gravy that tasted brown.
“I’m so relieved that asshole’s finally dead,” whispered the Research General.
“There’s dead and there’s dead,” I told him.
“Let’s not make this complicated,” he said. “I know he’s out there in some smaller version of reality, he could be filling all available space with smaller and smaller reproductions of himself, choking the ass of the universe with pages and pages of Mando Paige. I don’t give a fuck as long as he’s not here.”
“He is here,” I said, and then they brought the Martinis and the conversation evaporated into reminiscence.
That night as I stood out beneath the desert sky having a smoke, I had a sense that the cumulative beams generated by the repercussions of my actions over time, harboring my inherent will, had reached some far flung boundary and were about to turn back on me. In my uncomfortable bed at the Hacienda Motel, I tossed and turned, drifting in and out of sleep. It was then that I had a vision of the shrinking ray, its sparkling blue emission bouncing off a mirror set at an angle. The beam then travels a short distance to another mirror with which it collides and reflects. The second mirror is positioned so that it sends the ray back at its own original source. The beam strikes and mixes with itself only a few inches past the nozzle of the machine’s barrel. And then I see it in my mind —when a shrinking ray is trained upon itself, its diminutive-making properties are cancelled twice and as it is a fact that when two negatives are multiplied they make a positive, this process makes things bigger. As soon as the concept was upon me, I was filled with excitement and couldn’t wait to get back to the lab the next day to work out the math and realize an experiment.
It was fifteen years later, the Research General had long been fired, when Mando Paige stepped out of the spot where the shrinking ray’s beam crossed itself. He was blue and yellow and red and his hair was curly. I stood within feet of him and he smiled at me. I, of course, couldn’t let him go —not due to any law but my own urge to finish the job I’d started at the outset. As he stepped back toward the ray, I turned it off, and he was trapped, for the moment, in our moment. I called for my assistants to surround him, and I sent one to my office for the revolver I kept in my bottom drawer. He told me that one speck of his saliva contained four million Daltharees. “When I fart,” he said, “I set forth Armadas.” I shot him and the four assistants and then automatically acid washed the lab to destroy the Dalthareen plague and evidence of murder. No one suspected a thing. I found a few cities sprouting beneath my fingernails last week. There were already rows of domes growing behind my ears. My blood no doubt is the manufacture of cities, flowing silver through my veins. Crowds behind my eyes, commerce in my joints. Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee.
THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY
JAMES ALAN GARDNER
This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, “It shoots rays.”
They are dangerous rays. If they hit you in the arm, it withers. If they hit you in the face, you go blind. If they hit you in the heart, you die. These things must be true, or else it would not be a ray-gun. But it is.
Ray-guns come from space. This one came from the captain of an alien starship passing through our solar system. The ship stopped to scoop up hydrogen from the atmosphere of Jupiter. During this refueling process, the crew mutinied for reasons we cannot comprehend. We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood but we wouldn’t. Our brains only know how to be human.
Although alien thoughts are beyond us, alien actions may be easy to grasp. We can understand the “what” if not the “why.” If we saw what happened inside the alien vessel, we would recognize that the crew tried to take the captain’s ray-gun and kill him.
There was a fight. The ray-gun went off many times. The starship exploded.
All this happened many centuries ago, before telescopes. The people of Earth still wore animal skins. They only knew Jupiter as a dot in the sky. When the starship exploded, the dot got a tiny bit brighter, then returned to normal. No one on Earth noticed—not even the shamans who thought dots in the sky were important.
The ray-gun survived the explosion. A ray-gun must be resilient, or else it is not a ray-gun. The explosion hurled the ray-gun away from Jupiter and out into open space.
After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t burn up.
The ray-gun fell at night during a blizzard. Traveling thousands of miles an hour, the ray-gun plunged deep into snow-covered woods. The snow melted so quickly that it burst into steam.
The blizzard continued, unaffected. Some things can’t be harmed, even by ray-guns.
Unthinking snowflakes drifted down. If they touched the ray-gun’s surface they vaporized, stealing heat from the weapon. Heat also radiated outward, melting snow nearby on the ground. Melt-water flowed into the shallow crater made by the ray-gun’s impact. Water and snow cooled the weapon until all excess temperature had dissipated. A million more snowflakes heaped over the crater, hiding the ray-gun till spring.
In March, the gun was found by a boy named Jack. He was fourteen years old and walking through the woods after school. He walked slowly, brooding about his lack of popularity. Jack despised popular students and had no interest in anything they did. Even so, he envied them. They didn’t appear to be lonely.
Jack wished he had a girlfriend. He wished he were important. He wished he knew what to do with his life. Instead, he walked alone in the woods on the edge of town.
The woods were not wild or isolated. They were crisscrossed with trails made by children playing hide-and-seek. But in spring, the trails were muddy; most people stayed away. Jack soon worried more about how to avoid shoe-sucking mud than about the unfairness of the world. He took wide detours around mucky patches, thrashing through brush that was crisp from winter.
Stalks broke as he passed. Burrs stuck to his jacket. He got farther and farther from the usual paths, hoping he’d find a way out by blundering forward rather than swallowing his pride and retreating.
In this way, Jack reached the spot where the ray-gun had landed. He saw the crater it had made. He found the ray-gun itself.
The gun seized Jack’s attention, but he didn’t know what it was. Its design was too alien to be recognized as a weapon. Its metal was blackened but not black, as if it had once been another color but had finished that phase of its existence. Its pistol-butt was bulbous, the size of a tennis ball. Its barrel, as long as Jack’s hand, was straight but its surface had dozens of nubs like a briarwood cane. The gun’s trigger was a protruding blister you squeezed till it po
pped. A hard metal cap could slide over the blister to prevent the gun from firing accidentally, but the safety was off; it had been off for centuries, ever since the fight on the starship.
The alien captain who once owned the weapon might have considered it beautiful, but to human eyes, the gun resembled a dirty wet stick with a lump on one end. Jack might have walked by without giving it a second look if it hadn’t been lying in a scorched crater. But it was.
The crater was two paces across and barren of plant life. The vegetation had burned in the heat of the ray-gun’s fall. Soon enough, new spring growth would sprout, making the crater less obvious. At present, though, the ray-gun stood out on the charred earth like a snake in an empty birdbath.
Jack picked up the gun. Though it looked like briarwood, it was cold like metal. It felt solid: not heavy, but substantial. It had the heft of a well-made object. Jack turned the gun in his hands, examining it from every angle. When he looked down the muzzle, he saw a crystal lens cut into hundreds of facets. Jack poked it with his pinky, thinking the lens was a piece of glass that someone had jammed inside. He had the idea this might be a toy—perhaps a squirt-gun dropped by a careless child. If so, it had to be the most expensive toy Jack had ever seen. The gun’s barrel and its lens were so perfectly machined that no one could mistake the craftsmanship.
Jack continued to poke at the weapon until the inevitable happened: he pressed the trigger blister. The ray-gun went off.
It might have been fatal, but by chance Jack was holding the gun aimed away from himself. A ray shot out of the gun’s muzzle and blasted through a maple tree ten paces away. The ray made no sound, and although Jack had seen it clearly, he couldn’t say what the ray’s color had been. It had no color; it was simply a presence, like wind chill or gravity. Yet Jack was sure he’d seen a force emanate from the muzzle and strike the tree.
Though the ray can’t be described, its effect was plain. A circular hole appeared in the maple tree’s trunk where bark and wood disintegrated into sizzling plasma. The plasma expanded at high speed and pressure, blowing apart what remained of the surrounding trunk. The ray made no sound, but the explosion did. Shocked chunks of wood and boiling maple sap flew outward, obliterating a cross-section of the tree. The lower part of the trunk and the roots were still there; so were the upper part and branches. In between was a gap, filled with hot escaping gases.