The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Trench Dweller” was probably one of the Dwellers’ names. “Bubbleward” was a phrase for “up,” since bubbles rose to the surface. Anthony tapped the keys.

  We are from far away, recently arrived. We are small and foreign to the world. We wish to brush the Dwellers with our thoughts. We regret our lack of clarity in diction.

  “I wonder if you’ve thought this through,” Telamon said.

  Anthony hit TRANSMIT. Speakers boomed. The subsonics were like a punch in the gut.

  “Go jump off a cliff,” Anthony said.

  “You’re making a mistake,” said Telamon.

  The Dweller’s answer was surprisingly direct.

  Anthony’s heart crashed in astonishment. Could the Dwellers stand the lack of pressure on the surface? I/We, he typed, Trench Dweller, proceed with consideration for safety. I/We recollect that we are small and weak. He pressed TRANSMIT and flipped to the whalespeech file.

  Deep Dweller rising to surface, he typed. Run fast northward.

  The whales answered with cries of alarm. Flukes pounded the water. Anthony ran to the cabin and cranked the wheel hard to starboard. He increased speed to separate himself from the humpbacks. Behind him, Telamon stumbled in his unfamiliar body as the boat took the waves at a different angle.

  Anthony returned to his computer console. I/We are in a state of motion, he reported. Is living in the home of the light occasion for a condition of damage to us/Trench Dweller?

  “You’re mad,” said Telamon, and then Philana staggered. “He’s done it again,” she said in a stunned voice. She stepped to the starboard bench and sat down. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “I’m talking to the Dwellers. One of them is rising to say hello.”

  “Now?”

  He gave her a skeletal grin. “It’s what you wanted, yes?” She stared at him.

  I’m going over cliffs, he thought. One after another.

  That, Anthony concluded, is the condition of existence. Subsonics rattled crockery in the kitchen.

  Anthony typed, I/We We happily await greeting ourselves and pressed TRANSMIT, then REPEAT. He would give the Dweller a sound to home in on.

  “I don’t understand,” Philana said. He moved to join her on the bench, put his arm around her. She shrugged him off. “Tell me,” she said. He took her hand.

  “We’re going to win.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She was too shaken to argue. “It’s going to be a long fight,” she said.

  “I don’t care.”

  Philana took a breath. “I’m scared.”

  “So am I,” said Anthony.

  The boat beat itself against the waves. The flying yacht followed, a silent shadow.

  Anthony and Philana waited in silence until the Dweller rose, a green-grey mass that looked as if a grassy reef had just calved. Foam roared from its back as it broke water, half an ocean running down its sides. Anthony’s boat danced in the sudden white tide, and then the ocean stilled. Bits of the Dweller were all around, spread over the water for leagues – tentacles, filters, membranes. The Dweller’s very mass had calmed the sea. The Dweller was so big, Anthony saw, it constituted an entire ecosystem. Sea creatures lived among its folds and tendrils: some had died as they rose, their swim bladders exploding in the release of pressure; others leaped and spun and shrank from the brightness above.

  Sunlight shone from the Dweller’s form, and the creature pulsed with life.

  Terrified, elated, Philana and Anthony rose to say hello.

  THE HEMINGWAY HOAX

  Joe Haldeman

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the ’70s. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricen-tennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His story “None So Blind” won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include two mainstream novels, War Year and 1969, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, Tool of the Trade, The Coming, and Camouflage, which won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His short work has been gathered in the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and None So Blind. As editor, he has produced the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent book is a new science fiction novel, Old Twentieth. Coming up are two new collections, A Separate War and Other Stories, and an omnibus of fiction and nonfiction, War Stories. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

  In the vivid and fast-moving novella that follows, Haldeman is at the very top of even his own high standard. What starts out as a relatively harmless literary hoax soon plunges us into an intricate maze of intrigue and murder and betrayal, as cosmic forces fight it out in a behind-the-scenes battle that may determine the fate of humanity itself.

  I. The Torrents of Spring

  Our story begins in a run-down bar in Key West, not so many years from now. The bar is not the one Hemingway drank at, nor yet the one that claims to be the one he drank at, because they are both too expensive and full of tourists. This bar, in a more interesting part of town, is a Cuban place. It is neither clean nor well-lighted, but has cold beer and good strong Cuban coffee. Its cheap prices and rascally charm are what bring together the scholar and the rogue.

  Their first meeting would be of little significance to either at the time, though the scholar, John Baird, would never forget it. John Baird was not capable of forgetting anything.

  Key West is lousy with writers, mostly poor writers, in one sense of that word or the other. Poor people did not interest our rogue, Sylvester Castlemaine, so at first he didn’t take any special note of the man sitting in the corner scribbling on a yellow pad. Just another would-be writer, come down to see whether some of Papa’s magic would rub off. Not worth the energy of a con.

  But Castle’s professional powers of observation caught at a detail or two and focused his attention. The man was wearing jeans and a faded flannel shirt, but his shoes were expensive Italian loafers. His beard had been trimmed by a barber. He was drinking Heineken. The pen he was scribbling with was a fat Mont Blanc Diplomat, two hundred bucks on the hoof, discounted. Castle got his cup of coffee and sat at a table two away from the writer.

  He waited until the man paused, set the pen down, took a drink. “Writing a story?” Castle said.

  The man blinked at him. “No . . . just an article.” He put the cap on the pen with a crisp snap. “An article about stories. I’m a college professor.”

  “Publish or perish,” Castle said.

  The man relaxed a bit. “Too true.” He riffled through the yellow pad. “This won’t help much. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “Tell you what . . . bet you a beer it’s Hemingway or Tennessee Williams.”

  “Too easy.” He signaled the bartender. “Dos cervezas. Hemingway, the early stories. You know his work?”

  “Just a little. We had to read him in school – The Old Man and the Fish?
And then I read a couple after I got down here.” He moved over to the man’s table. “Name’s Castle.”

  “John Baird.” Open, honest expression; not too promising. You can’t con somebody unless he thinks he’s conning you. “Teach up at Boston.”

  “I’m mostly fishing. Shrimp nowadays.” Of course Castle didn’t normally fish, not for things in the sea, but the shrimp part was true. He’d been reduced to heading shrimp on the Catalina for five dollars a bucket. “So what about these early stories?”

  The bartender set down the two beers and gave Castle a weary look.

  “Well . . . they don’t exist.” John Baird carefully poured the beer down the side of his glass. “They were stolen. Never published.”

  “So what can you write about them?”

  “Indeed. That’s what I’ve been asking myself.” He took a sip of the beer and settled back. “Seventy-four years ago they were stolen. December 1922. That’s really what got me working on them; thought I would do a paper, a monograph, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the occasion.”

  It sounded less and less promising, but this was the first imported beer Castle had had in months. He slowly savored the bite of it.

  “He and his first wife, Hadley, were living in Paris. You know about Hemingway’s early life?”

  “Huh uh. Paris?”

  “He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. That was kind of a prissy, self-satisfied suburb of Chicago.”

  “Yeah, I been there.”

  “He didn’t like it. In his teens he sort of ran away from home, went down to Kansas City to work on a newspaper.

  “World War I started, and like a lot of kids, Hemingway couldn’t get into the army because of bad eyesight, so he joined the Red Cross and went off to drive ambulances in Italy. Take cigarettes and chocolate to the troops.

  “That almost killed him. He was just doing his cigarettes-and-chocolate routine and an artillery round came in, killed the guy next to him, tore up another, riddled Hemingway with shrapnel. He claims then that he picked up the wounded guy and carried him back to the trench, in spite of being hit in the knee by a machine gun bullet.”

  “What do you mean, ‘claims’?”

  “You’re too young to have been in Vietnam.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good for you. I was hit in the knee by a machine gun bullet myself, and went down on my ass and didn’t get up for five weeks. He didn’t carry anybody one step.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Well, he was always rewriting his life. We all do it. But it seemed to be a compulsion with him. That’s one thing that makes Hemingway scholarship challenging.”

  Baird poured the rest of the beer into his glass. “Anyhow, he actually was the first American wounded in Italy, and they made a big deal over him. He went back to Oak Park a war hero. He had a certain amount of success with women.”

  “Or so he says?”

  “Right, God knows. Anyhow, he met Hadley Richardson, an older woman but quite a number, and they had a steamy courtship and got married and said the hell with it, moved to Paris to live a sort of Bohemian life while Hemingway worked on perfecting his art. That part isn’t bullshit. He worked diligently and he did become one of the best writers of his era. Which brings us to the lost manuscripts.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Hemingway was picking up a little extra money doing journalism. He’d gone to Switzerland to cover a peace conference for a news service. When it was over, he wired Hadley to come join him for some skiing.

  “This is where it gets odd. On her own initiative, Hadley packed up all of Ernest’s work. All of it. Not just the typescripts, but the handwritten first drafts and the carbons.”

  “That’s like a Xerox?”

  “Right. She packed them in an overnight bag, then packed her own suitcase. A porter at the train station, the Gare de Lyon, put them aboard for her. She left the train for a minute to find something to read – and when she came back, they were gone.”

  “Suitcase and all?”

  “No, just the manuscripts. She and the porter searched up and down the train. But that was it. Somebody had seen the overnight bag sitting there and snatched it. Lost forever.”

  That did hold a glimmer of professional interest. “That’s funny. You’d think they’d get a note then, like ‘If you ever want to see your stories again, bring a million bucks to the Eiffel Tower’ sort of thing.”

  “A few years later, that might have happened. It didn’t take long for Hemingway to become famous. But at the time, only a few of the literary intelligentsia knew about him.”

  Castle shook his head in commiseration with the long-dead thief. “Guy who stole ’em probably didn’t even read English. Dumped ’em in the river.”

  John Baird shivered visibly. “Undoubtedly. But people have never stopped looking for them. Maybe they’ll show up in some attic someday.”

  “Could happen.” Wheels turning.

  “It’s happened before in literature. Some of Boswell’s diaries were recovered because a scholar recognized his handwriting on an old piece of paper a merchant used to wrap a fish. Hemingway’s own last book, he put together from notes that had been lost for thirty years. They were in a couple of trunks in the basement of the Ritz, in Paris.” He leaned forward, excited. “Then after he died, they found another batch of papers down here, in a back room in Sloppy Joe’s. It could still happen.”

  Castle took a deep breath. “It could be made to happen, too.”

  “Made to happen?”

  “Just speakin’, you know, in theory. Like some guy who really knows Hemingway, suppose he makes up some stories that’re like those old ones, finds some seventy-five-year-old paper and an old, what do you call them, not a word processor—”

  “Typewriter.”

  “Whatever. Think he could pass ’em off for the real thing?”

  “I don’t know if he could fool me,” Baird said, and tapped the side of his head. “I have a freak memory: eidetic, photographic. I have just about every word Hemingway ever wrote committed to memory.” He looked slightly embarrassed. “Of course that doesn’t make me an expert in the sense of being able to spot a phony. I just wouldn’t have to refer to any texts.”

  “So take yourself, you know, or somebody else who spent all his life studyin’ Hemingway. He puts all he’s got into writin’ these stories – he knows the people who are gonna be readin’ ’em; knows what they’re gonna look for. And he hires like an expert forger to make the pages look like they came out of Hemingway’s machine. So could it work?”

  Baird pursed his lips and for a moment looked professorial. Then he sort of laughed, one syllable through his nose. “Maybe it could. A man did a similar thing when I was a boy, counterfeiting the memoirs of Howard Hughes. He made millions.”

  “Millions?”

  “Back when that was real money. Went to jail when they found out, of course.”

  “And the money was still there when he got out.”

  “Never read anything about it. I guess so.”

  “So the next question is, how much stuff are we talkin’ about? How much was in that old overnight bag?”

  “That depends on who you believe. There was half a novel and some poetry. The short stories, there might have been as few as eleven or as many as thirty.”

  “That’d take a long time to write.”

  “It would take forever. You couldn’t just ‘do’ Hemingway; you’d have to figure out what the stories were about, then reconstruct his early style – do you know how many Hemingway scholars there are in the world?”

  “Huh uh. Quite a few.”

  “Thousands. Maybe ten thousand academics who know enough to spot a careless fake.”

  Castle nodded, cogitating. “You’d have to be real careful. But then you wouldn’t have to do all the short stories and poems, would you? You could say all you found was the part of the novel. Hell, you could sell that as a book.”

  The odd laugh again. “Sur
e you could. Be a fortune in it.”

  “How much? A million bucks?”

  “A million. . . maybe. Well, sure. The last new Hemingway made at least that much, allowing for inflation. And he’s more popular now.”

  Castle took a big gulp of beer and set his glass down decisively. “So what the hell are we waiting for?”

  Baird’s bland smile faded. “You’re serious?”

  2. In Our Time

  Got a ripple in the Hemingway channel.

  Twenties again?

  No, funny, this one’s in the 1990s. See if you can track it down?

  Sure. Go down to the armory first and –

  Look – no bloodbaths this time. You solve one problem and start ten more.

  Couldn’t be helped. It’s no tea party, twentieth century America. Just use good judgment. That Ransom guy . . . Manson. Right. That was a mistake.

  3. A Way You’ll Never Be

  You can’t cheat an honest man, as Sylvester Castlemaine well knew, but then again, it never hurts to find out just how honest a man is. John Baird refused his scheme, with good humor at first, but when Castle persisted, his refusal took on a sarcastic edge, maybe a tinge of outrage. He backed off and changed the subject, talking for a half hour about commercial fishing around Key West, and then said he had to run. He slipped his business card into John’s shirt pocket on the way out. (Sylvester Castlemaine, Consultant, it claimed.)

  John left the place soon, walking slowly through the afternoon heat. He was glad he hadn’t brought the bicycle; it was pleasant to walk in the shade of the big aromatic trees, a slight breeze on his face from the Gulf side.

  One could do it. One could. The problem divided itself into three parts: writing the novel fragment, forging the manuscript, and devising a suitable story about how one had uncovered the manuscript.

  The writing part would be the hardest. Hemingway is easy enough to parody – one-fourth of the take-home final he gave in English 733 was to write a page of Hemingway pastiche, and some of his graduate students did a credible job – but parody was exactly what one would not want to do.