The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Couldn’t you tell from my sparkling repartee last night?” He leaned back, eyes closed, and rolled the cool glass back and forth on his forehead.

  “Want another beer?”

  “Yeah. Coffee’d be smarter, though.”

  “It’s been sitting all night.”

  “Pay for my sins.” He watched her swivel lightly into the kitchen and, more than ever before, felt the difference in their ages. Seventeen years; he was half again as old as she. A young man would say the hell with the hangover, go grab that luscious thing and carry her back to bed. The organ that responded to this meditation was his stomach, though, and it responded very audibly.

  “Some toast, too. Or do you want something fancier?”

  “Toast would be fine.” Why was she being so nice? Usually if he drank too much, he reaped the whirlwind in the morning.

  “Ugh.” She saw the scorpions. “Five of them now.”

  “I wonder how many it will hold before it comes crashing down. Scorpions everywhere, stunned. Then angry.”

  “I’m sure the bug man knows how to get rid of them.”

  “In Africa they claimed that if you light a ring of fire around them with gasoline or lighter fluid, they go crazy, run amok, stinging themselves to death in their frenzies. Maybe the bug man could do that.”

  “Castle and I came up with a plan last night. It’s kinda screwy, but it might just work.”

  “Read that in a book called Jungle Ways. I was eight years old and believed every word of it.”

  “We figured out a way that it would be legal. Are you listening?”

  “Uh huh. Let me have real sugar and some milk.”

  She poured some milk in a cup and put it in the microwave to warm. “Maybe we should talk about it later.”

  “Oh no. Hemingway forgery. You figured out a way to make it legal. Go ahead. I’m all ears.”

  “See, you tell the publisher first off what it is, that you wrote it and then had it typed up to look authentic.”

  “Sure, be a big market for that.”

  “In fact, there could be. You’d have to generate it, but it could happen.” The toast sprang up and she brought it and two cups of coffee into the living room on a tray. “See, the bogus manuscript is only one part of a book.”

  “I don’t get it.” He tore the toast into strips, to dunk in the strong Cuban coffee.

  “The rest of the book is in the nature of an exegesis of your own text.”

  “If that con man knows what exegesis is, then I can crack a safe.”

  “That part’s my idea. You’re really writing a book about Hemingway. You use your own text to illustrate various points – ‘I wrote it this way instead of that way because . . .’ ”

  “It would be different,” he conceded. “Perhaps the second most egotistical piece of Hemingway scholarship in history. A dubious distinction.”

  “You could write it tongue-in-cheek, though. It could be really amusing, as well as scholarly.”

  “God, we’d have to get an unlisted number, publishers calling us night and day. Movie producers. Might sell ten copies, if I bought nine.”

  “You really aren’t getting it, John. You don’t have a particle of larceny in your heart.”

  He put a hand on his heart and looked down. “Ventricles, auricles. My undying love for you, a little heartburn. No particles.”

  “See, you tell the publisher the truth . . . but the publisher doesn’t have to tell the truth. Not until publication day.”

  “Okay. I still don’t get it.”

  She took a delicate nibble of toast. “It goes like this. They print the bogus Hemingway up into a few copies of bogus bound galleys. Top secret.”

  “My exegesis carefully left off.”

  “That’s the ticket. They send it out to a few selected scholars, along with Xeroxes of a few sample manuscript pages. All they say, in effect, is ‘Does this seem authentic to you? Please keep it under your hat, for obvious reasons.’ Then they sit back and collect blurbs.”

  “I can see the kind of blurbs they’d get from Scott or Mike or Jack, for instance. Some variation of ‘What kind of idiot do you think I am?’”

  “Those aren’t the kind of people you send it to, dope! You send it to people who think they’re experts, but aren’t. Castle says this is how the Hitler thing almost worked – they knew better than to show it to historians in general. They showed it to a few people and didn’t quote the ones who thought it was a fake. Surely you can come up with a list of people who would be easy to fool.”

  “Any scholar could. Be a different list for each one; I’d be on some of them.”

  “So they bring it out on April Fool’s Day. You get the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Publishers Weekly does a story. Everybody wants to be in on the joke. Best-seller list, here we come.”

  “Yeah, sure, but you haven’t thought it through.” He leaned back, balancing the coffee cup on his slight potbelly. “What about the guys who give us the blurbs, those second-rate scholars? They’re going to look pretty bad.”

  “We did think of that. No way they could sue, not if the letter accompanying the galleys is carefully written. It doesn’t have to say—”

  “I don’t mean getting sued. I mean I don’t want to be responsible for hurting other people’s careers – maybe wrecking a career, if the person was too extravagant in his endorsement, and had people looking for things to use against him. You know departmental politics. People go down the chute for less serious crimes than making an ass of yourself and your institution in print.”

  She put her cup down with a clatter. “You’re always thinking about other people. Why don’t you think about yourself for a change?” She was on the verge of tears. “Think about us.”

  “All right, let’s do that. What do you think would happen to my career at BU if I pissed off the wrong people with this exercise? How long do you think it would take me to make full professor? Do you think BU would make a full professor out of a man who uses his specialty to pull vicious practical jokes?”

  “Just do me the favor of thinking about it. Cool down and weigh the pluses and minuses. If you did it with the right touch, your department would love it – and God, Harry wants to get rid of the chairmanship so bad he’d give it to an axe murderer. You know you’ll make full professor about thirty seconds before Harry hands you the keys to the office and runs.”

  “True enough.” He finished the coffee and stood up in a slow creak. “I’ll give it some thought. Horizontally.” He turned toward the bedroom.

  “Want some company?”

  He looked at her for a moment. “Indeed I do.”

  6. In Our Time

  Back already?

  Need to find a meta-causal. One guy seems to be generating the danger flag in various timelines. John Baird, who’s a scholar in some of them, a soldier in some, and a rich playboy in a few. He’s always a Hemingway nut, though. He does something that starts off the ripples in ’95, ’96, ’97; depending on which time line you’re in – but I can’t seem to get close to it. There’s something odd about him, and it doesn’t have to do with Hemingway specifically.

  But he’s definitely causing the eddy?

  Has to be him.

  All right. Find a meta-causal that all the doom lines have in common, and forget about the others. Then go talk to him.

  There’ll be resonance –

  But who cares? Moot after a.d. 2006.

  That’s true. I’ll hit all the doom lines at once, then: neutralize the meta-causal, then jump ahead and do some spot checks.

  Good. And no killing this time.

  I understand. But –

  You’re too close to 2006. Kill the wrong person, and the whole thing could unravel.

  Well, there are differences of opinion. We would certainly feel it if the world failed to come to an end in those lines.

  As you say, differences of opinion. My opinion is that you better not kill anybody or I’ll send you back
to patrol the fourteenth century again.

  Understood. But I can’t guarantee that I can neutralize the meta-causal without eliminating John Baird.

  Fourteenth century. Some people love it. Others think it was nasty, brutish, and long.

  7. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

  Most of the sleuthing that makes up literary scholarship takes place in settings either neutral or unpleasant. Libraries’ old stacks, attics metaphorical and actual; dust and silverfish, yellowed paper and fading ink. Books and letters that appear in card files but not on shelves.

  Hemingway researchers have a haven outside of Boston, the Hemingway Collection at the University of Massachusetts’s John F. Kennedy Library. It’s a triangular room with one wall dominated by a picture window that looks over Boston Harbor to the sea. Comfortable easy chairs surround a coffee table, but John had never seen them in use; worktables under the picture window provided realistic room for computer and clutter. Skins from animals the Hemingways had dispatched in Africa snarled up from the floor, and one wall was dominated by Hemingway memorabilia and photographs. What made the room Nirvana, though, was row upon row of boxes containing tens of thousands of Xerox pages of Hemingway correspondence, manuscripts, clippings – everything from a boyhood shopping list to all extant versions of every short story and poem and novel.

  John liked to get there early so he could claim one of the three computers. He snapped it on, inserted a CD, and typed in his code number. Then he keyed in the database index and started searching.

  The more commonly requested items would appear on screen if you asked for them – whenever someone requested a physical copy of an item, an electronic copy automatically was sent into the database – but most of the things John needed were obscure, and he had to haul down the letter boxes and physically flip through them, just like some poor scholar inhabiting the first nine-tenths of the twentieth century.

  Time disappeared for him as he abandoned his notes and followed lines of instinct, leaping from letter to manuscript to note to interview, doing what was in essence the opposite of the scholar’s job: a scholar would normally be trying to find out what these stories had been about. John instead was trying to track down every reference that might restrict what he himself could write about, simulating the stories.

  The most confining restriction was the one he’d first remembered, walking away from the bar where he’d met Castle. The one-paragraph answer that Hadley had given to Carlos Baker about the unfinished novel; that it was a Nick Adams story about hunting and fishing up in Michigan. John didn’t know anything about hunting, and most of his fishing experience was limited to watching a bobber and hoping it wouldn’t go down and break his train of thought.

  There was the one story that Hemingway had left unpublished, “Boys and Girls Together,” mostly clumsy self-parody. It covered the right period and the right activities, but using it as a source would be sensitive business, tiptoeing through a minefield. Anyone looking for a fake would go straight there. Of course John could go up to the Michigan woods and camp out, see things for himself and try to recreate them in the Hemingway style. Later, though. First order of business was to make sure there was nothing in this huge collection that would torpedo the whole project – some postcard where Hemingway said “You’re going to like this novel because it has a big scene about cleaning fish.”

  The short stories would be less restricted in subject matter. According to Hemingway, they’d been about growing up in Oak Park and Michigan and the battlefields of Italy.

  That made him stop and think. The one dramatic experience he shared with Hemingway was combat – fifty years later, to be sure, in Vietnam, but the basic situations couldn’t have changed that much. Terror, heroism, cowardice. The guns and grenades were a little more streamlined, but they did the same things to people. Maybe do a World War I story as a finger exercise, see whether it would be realistic to try a longer growing-up-in-Michigan pastiche.

  He made a note to himself about that on the computer, oblique enough not to be damning, and continued the eye-straining job of searching through Hadley’s correspondence, trying to find some further reference to the lost novel – damn!

  Writing to Ernest’s mother, Hadley noted that “the taxi driver broke his typewriter” on the way to the Constantinople conference – did he get it fixed, or just chuck it? A quick check showed that the typeface of his manuscripts did indeed change after July 1924. So they’d never be able to find it. There were typewriters in Hemingway shrines in Key West, Billings, Schruns; the initial plan had been to find which was the old Corona, then locate an identical one and have Castle arrange a swap.

  So they would fall back on Plan B. Castle had claimed to be good with mechanical things, and thought if they could find a 1921 Corona, he could tweak the keys around so they would produce a convincing manuscript – lowercase “s” a hair low, “e” a hair high, and so forth.

  How he could be so sure of success without ever having seen the inside of a manual typewriter, John did not know. Nor did he have much confidence.

  But it wouldn’t have to be a perfect simulation, since they weren’t out to fool the whole world, but just a few reviewers who would only see two or three Xeroxed pages. He could probably do a close enough job. John put it out of his mind and moved on to the next letter.

  But it was an odd coincidence for him to think about Castle at that instant, since Castle was thinking about him. Or at least asking.

  8. The Coming Man

  “How was he when he was younger?”

  “He never was younger.” She laughed and rolled around inside the compass of his arms to face him. “Than you, I mean. He was in his mid-thirties when we met. You can’t be much over twenty-five.”

  He kissed the end of her nose. “Thirty this year. But I still get carded sometimes.”

  “I’m a year older than you are. So you have to do anything I say.”

  “So far so good.” He’d checked her wallet when she’d gone into the bathroom to insert the diaphragm, and knew she was thirty-five. “Break out the whips and chains now?”

  “Not till next week. Work up to it slowly.” She pulled away from him and mopped her front with the sheet. “You’re good at being slow.”

  “I like being asked to come back.”

  “How ’bout tonight and tomorrow morning?”

  “If you feed me lots of vitamins. How long you think he’ll be up in Boston?”

  “He’s got a train ticket for Wednesday. But he said he might stay longer if he got onto something.”

  Castle laughed. “Or into something. Think he might have a girl up there? Some student like you used to be?”

  “That would be funny. I guess it’s not impossible.” She covered her eyes with the back of her hand. “The wife is always the last to know.”

  They both laughed. “But I don’t think so. He’s a sweet guy but he’s just not real sexy. I think his students see him as kind of a favorite uncle.”

  “You fell for him once.”

  “Uh huh. He had all of his current virtues plus a full head of hair, no potbelly – and, hm, what am I forgetting?”

  “He was hung like an elephant?”

  “No, I guess it was the millions of dollars. That can be pretty sexy.”

  9. Wanderings

  It was a good thing John liked to nose around obscure neighborhoods shopping; you couldn’t walk into any old K mart and pick up a 1921 Corona portable. In fact, you couldn’t walk into any typewriter shop in Boston and find one, not any. Nowadays they all sold self-contained word processors, with a few dusty electrics in the back room. A few had fancy manual typewriters from Italy or Switzerland; it had been almost thirty years since the American manufacturers had made a machine that wrote without electronic help.

  He had a little better luck with pawnshops. Lots of Smith-Coronas, a few L. C. Smiths, and two actual Coronas that might have been old enough. One had too large a typeface and the other, although the typeface was the sa
me as Hemingway’s, was missing a couple of letters: Th quick b own fox jump d ov th lazy dog. The challenge of writing a convincing Hemingway novel without using the letters “e” and “r” seemed daunting. He bought the machine anyhow, thinking they might ultimately have two or several broken ones that could be concatenated into one reliable machine.

  The old pawnbroker rang up his purchase and made change and slammed the cash drawer shut. “Now you don’t look to me like the kind of man who would hold it against a man who . . .” He shrugged. “Well, who sold you something and then suddenly remembered that there was a place with lots of those somethings?”

  “Of course not. Business is business.”

  “I don’t know the name of the guy or his shop; I think he calls it a museum. Up in Brunswick, Maine. He’s got a thousand old typewriters. He buys, sells, trades. That’s the only place I know of you might find one with the missing whatever-you-call-ems.”

  “Fonts.” He put the antique typewriter under his arm – the handle was missing – and shook the old man’s hand. “Thanks a lot. This might save me weeks.”

  With some difficulty John got together packing materials and shipped the machine to Key West, along with Xeroxes of a few dozen pages of Hemingway’s typed copy and a note suggesting Castle see what he could do. Then he went to the library and found a Brunswick telephone directory. Under “Office Machines & Supplies” was listed Crazy Tom’s Typewriter Museum and Sales Emporium. John rented a car and headed north.

  The small town had rolled up its sidewalks by the time he got there. He drove past Crazy Tom’s and pulled into the first motel. It had a neon VACANCY sign but the innkeeper had to be roused from a deep sleep. He took John’s credit card number and directed him to Room 14 and pointedly turned on the NO sign. There were only two other cars in the motel lot.

  John slept late and treated himself to a full “trucker’s” breakfast at the local diner: two pork chops and eggs and hash browns. Then he worked off ten calories by walking to the shop.