Future Americas

by John Helfers

  ‘‘Benjamin!’’ his mother chided.

  ‘‘So how exactly does that have anything at all to do with us?’’ Samantha asked.

  Jerry stood taller suddenly. ‘‘Well, here’s what it has to do with us. Imagine there are many many more Earths than this one, all of them occupying the same position in space, but in different dimensions.’’

  ‘‘Hey, like the comics,’’ Ben said, thinking of the multiple Earths in the comic book microfiche library his dad had bought him for his eighth birthday. ‘‘They had an Earth One and an Earth Two and . . . and—’’

  ‘‘Earth Three’s next, pea brain.’’

  Ben glowered at his sister, considered saying something in response, but was caught short by his father.

  ‘‘So whether we make it or not,’’ Jerry began.

  ‘‘Honey—’’

  ‘‘Whether we make it or not here,’’ he corrected, ‘‘we do make it somewhere.’’

  ‘‘According to Schrödinger’s cat,’’ Samantha said, her voice suddenly softer and more girlish than ever before.

  Jerry was nodding. ‘‘If it could be any other way, poochie,’’ he said.

  Samantha nodded. ‘‘I know, Daddy,’’ she whispered.

  ‘‘So!’’ Sally exclaimed, and she clapped her hands. ‘‘Time to get aboard and batten down the hatches.’’

  ‘‘And splice the topsail?’’ Ben offered.

  ‘‘And hoist the anchor!’’ Jerry added with a flourish of his arms.

  They all looked at Samantha. She frowned and started to giggle.

  ‘‘And—’’ she began.

  They looked expectantly.

  ‘‘Yes?’’ said her father.

  ‘‘And—’’

  ‘‘And?’’ echoed her mother.

  Eyes wide, little Ben hugged himself and shook, as though he were cold.

  Samantha clapped her hands together and laughed. ‘‘And shiver me timbers!’’ she proclaimed.

  They ran across the greensward and, one by one, clambered up the rickety ladder until they were safely inside the rocket ship.

  ‘‘I’m not even convinced this thing can fly,’’ Samantha said as she lowered herself into her cot, surprised at how calm she sounded . . . and, indeed, felt. She placed a hand against her left side and searched until she found her heartbeat, breathing a sigh of relief when the found it . . . and a second sigh when she realized it was just bomping away as normal, no faster and no slower.

  Ben watched his sister from his own cot, making a brave attempt at buckling himself in. ‘‘You okay?’’

  Samantha nodded, turning her attention up ahead of her where her mother and father were securing all loose materials before take-off. ‘‘I’m fine.’’ She stretched over against her own straps. ‘‘Here,’’ she said, ‘‘let me give you a hand.’’

  Ben reluctantly removed his glassbowl helmet and stowed it in the side cabinet along with his beloved facsimile comic books and his favorite toy bear.

  Jerry shouted ‘‘Everyone okay back there?’’

  ‘‘Aye aye, Captain,’’ Samantha replied.

  ‘‘You reckon we are going to be okay?’’ Ben whispered as Samantha secured his straps and gave him a pat on the tummy.

  She nodded. ‘‘Dad said.’’

  Ben made a mouth and sighed. ‘‘Yeah,’’ he said, ‘‘I just can’t get it out of my head. What he said.’’

  ‘‘What he said about what?’’

  ‘‘Samantha, Benjamin . . . better prepare yourselves. Dad’s switching on.’’

  ‘‘Okay.’’ Samantha turned to her brother and repeated the question.

  ‘‘About the cat. And all the other universes.’’ He looked out of the window alongside him and felt the first satisfying thrum of the engines. ‘‘All the other ‘us’es,’’ he added. He turned to his sister. ‘‘All the other Americas,’’ he said.

  Samantha turned to her own porthole and looked out onto the shimmering Walden Pond and the sandy paths surrounding it, with the remains of the bicentenary construct of Thoreau’s shack in the clearing and the rickety remains of the lean-to where they had spent the past few weeks.

  The rocket ship shuddered.

  ‘‘Get ready,’’ Jerry shouted.

  A clap of thunder signaled the appearance of a funnel directly above them. They could see it clearly through the ship’s reinforced Perspex nose.

  Samantha and Ben watched their mother reach over and grasp their father’s arm. Up ahead, a black tear was opening up across the sky . . . stars broiling inside it amidst clouds of gaseous vapor.

  ‘‘Wow!’’

  Samantha reached out her hand and took hold of her brother’s shoulder, squeezing it. When he turned around to look at her, his eyes were moist.

  ‘‘We’ll be okay,’’ Samantha said as the ship started to lift.

  Ben pushed himself back hard against his cot seat. ‘‘I know,’’ he said.

  The acceleration made their chests ache and the black tear, its edges twisting and warping, beckoned them.

  ‘‘I wonder where we’ll come out,’’ Samantha wondered aloud.

  ‘‘Just think,’’ Ben said as the ground fell away behind them. ‘‘There’s another Earth out there someplace where, today, we all just go home.’’

  Samantha nodded.

  ‘‘Here we go!’’ Jerry Stuczi screamed at the top of his lungs.

  Just a few seconds after the rocket ship had disappeared into the rip in the sky—taking with it the very last (but maybe not) family on Earth—the rip closed with something akin to the slamming of a screen door.

  And then a serenity of sorts descended onto Walden Pond and onto all the ancient paths and roads, all the multitudinous byways and highways, and every hill and every valley of Earth and the great continent of America . . . in all of their myriad disguises.

  THE POWER OF HUMAN REASON

  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch has sold novels in several different genres under many different names. The most current Rusch novel is Recovery Man: A Retrieval Artist Novel. The Retrieval Artist novels are stand-alone mysteries set in a science fiction world. She’s won the Endeavor Award for that series. Her writing has received dozens of award nominations, as well as several actual awards from science fiction’s Hugo to the Prix Imagainare, a French fantasy award for best short fiction. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.

  FIRST YOU NOTICE the things you can’t do. No matter how many times you replace your hips or your knees or your ankles, no matter how many rejuvenating stem cell treatments you get, no matter how many shots you take to keep yourself thin, you can’t jump from a four-foot ledge into an alley and not hurt yourself.

  You’d think I’d know this. You’d think I’d remember it.

  But there I was, lying on concrete that smelled like day-old piss, nursing my skinned elbow and wondering if I’d broken it for the fifth time.

  Thinking. Reflecting.

  Because I couldn’t catch my goddamn breath. You land a little sideways, you topple, you fall, and the first thing th
at goes is the fucking breath.

  And of course my partner, still young at fifty-seven, sprinted by me like he was taking steroids—which, for all I knew, he was. He yelled, ‘‘Stop! Police!’’ and then I heard the take-down, which sounded pretty much the way it had at my very first take-down, in this self-same city—hell, for all I know, in this self-same alley—sixty-five years ago.

  The rattle of chain-link. The grunts. The curses. The snick of handcuffs followed by another grunt, and then a thud, and another for good measure.

  It would be a few minutes before my partner, DeAndre Dawson, dragged the perp back to me. So I had a few minutes to ease myself up, test the elbow—yep, it took my weight; it wasn’t broken—and then slowly get to my feet.

  During moments like that, I felt like an old man. Which, according to my father’s generation, I was. Now, according to the revised government guidelines, I was in late middle age. Or early old age, however you wanted to count it.

  Eighty-seven. Three years from the magic nine-O when the city demands that its most loyal, most attached public servants retire.

  Mandatory retirement, which actually means so what if you haven’t saved enough, bastard, it’s time to get your fat ass out of the precinct. Of course, I dreaded the day when they forced my not-so-fat ass out of the place— not just for the lack of money, but also for the lack of daily companionship and something to do.

  About the time I staggered to my feet, caught my balance, and was finally able to pretend that my elbow didn’t ache, DeAndre had come back with the perp. DeAndre’s a big guy, nearly six-four, and had a previous career as a pro basketball player. He blew his knee in his rookie season, and that was in the day when the replacements didn’t quite make him DeAndre the Giant anymore. So he got to ride to the end of his two-million-dollar contract, and spent three years figuring out what he wanted to do. While figuring, he watched too much television and became way too fond of the detective shows so popular back then, which was how he went to the police academy with the idea of becoming a detective, and which was why he was now partnered with me.

  The perp spat at my feet and caught my attention. I eyeballed him. Until he bolted down the fire escape of that six-story building, he’d just been a witness that we wanted to interview.

  This kid jittering in front of me wasn’t old enough to run with reflexive guilt from using junk which was mostly legal and not all that harmful anymore. He ran because he knew something or stole something or, God forbid, did something.

  And whatever he did, it wasn’t murdering Stephanie Watson-Cable. Because whoever murdered Steffie had a brain.

  A real prodigious brain.

  This was the first murder I’d seen in thirty years that had a genius component.

  Whoever committed the crime had left no forensic evidence at all.

  And believe you me, in this modern era, when a single DNA test could identify the killer in a matter of seconds, when one fiber left at the crime scene could identify without a doubt the location it came from, when the itsybitsy cameras embedded in each chip of paint on the walls could replay the actual crime itself, not leaving forensic evidence was the closest thing to a goddamn miracle that I’d ever seen.

  I said ‘‘close’’ because I wasn’t going to give the bastard credit.

  No matter how fucking brilliant he was.

  Stephanie Watson-Cable ran a chop shop in an ancient block-long building on Glisan. Took me fifteen years to pronounce that street name correctly. In Portland (that’s Oregon, not Maine), streets have normal spellings with amazing mispronunciations: Glisan is pronounced ‘‘Glee-son’’; Couch is pronounced ‘‘Cooch.’’

  It’s one way to tell the locals from the pretenders, and we use it. Because Oregon, famous seventy years ago for not liking outsiders, has gotten even worse in the intervening decades.

  Steffie was a local girl—Queen of Rosaria in 2020 (that’s queen of the city’s annual Rose Festival to you outsiders) and like every queen before her, a gorgeous straight-A student who could’ve won various good citizen awards if someone gave them out. She got a scholarship to Brown, spent four years there, and then came home where, like everyone else in the downturn of ’25, she couldn’t find work or even the promise of it.

  So she invented her own.

  Her high-end escort service was just a profitable cover for the heart of her business—the moment-after pills, the venereal disease neutralizers, the occasional abortion, the expensive adoption, and the surrogate services.

  She was, according to some, doing the devil’s work. I never thought so. I always thought she was a little misguided. I used to tell her that I wished she’d used that amazing brain of hers to start a legal business.

  She’d just laughed at me. Depending on the decade, she said, my business is legal. I’m just waiting for the tide to turn.

  Apparently the tide wasn’t going to turn in her lifetime.

  DeAndre, on the other hand, never liked Steffie. He thought her too superior for someone in her profession, and even though he denied it, he was attracted to her.

  It was hard not to be. She had flawless coffee-colored skin and slightly upturned eyes that made her seem even more intelligent than she was. Her lips were unfashionably slender, but they paired well with her tiny nose and high cheekbones.

  She never used fat treatments, preferring to hold onto her figure with rigorous exercise and a not-so-rigorous diet. Her clothing was always proper with a hint of suggestion, and it always revealed her long, beautiful legs—the very best part of an already spectacular body.

  When the call for detectives came, I fully expected her to greet us at the downstairs entrance like she had the one time that a girl had died in her back room. Back then, Steffie had given us full access as well as all the information she’d had on the girl, stuff that Steffie, with the help of Portland’s best lawyers, usually kept confidential.

  But that day, Steffie’s flawless skin had been mottled from crying and her usually perfect makeup had been smeared. She had escorted us upstairs, and she helped the forensic team find all the cameras she’d hidden, as well as giving us all the images that had either the victim or the perpetrator.

  Then, without a warrant, she’d let us collect all the data from the collection units throughout the building, something she had never done before.

  When I asked why, Steffie said in a low husky voice I’d never heard from her before, that the bastard couldn’t get away with it. In fact, she said she’d testify if she had to, even if it incriminated herself and her girls, just so that she could make sure he would never go free again.

  But on this day, the person who met us at the door was the chief of forensics, boss of my boss. He was tall and slender, with a pale whiteness that either came from being indoors too much or working around too many chemicals.

  He wore a black suit with a long waistcoat that seemed inappropriate to a crime scene, and when he saw us, he crossed his arms and glared.

  ‘‘Took you long enough,’’ he said.

  I had learned an entire lifetime ago not to make excuses to the brass, but DeAndre had never absorbed the lesson. While he stammered something about being in North Portland and traffic and the impossibility of getting across the MaxTrain lines, the chief watched me.

  ‘‘It’s a mess,’’ he said when DeAndre finished.

  DeAndre was about to launch into a second explanation, thinking ‘‘mess’’ referred to our trip across town, but I put a hand on his arm.

  ‘‘We need old-fashioned legwork,’’ the chief said to me. ‘‘That’s why we called you in.’’

  You, referring to me, a man who had once gotten commend
ations for his work as a detective back when detecting involved reading people as well as evidence, putting pieces together from seemingly impossible scraps, and finding things that should have remained hidden in a society without an interconnected database of information.

  ‘‘What happened?’’ I asked.

  DeAndre stopped, and looked from the chief to me, as if he finally realized that the conversation wasn’t about him.

  ‘‘See for yourself,’’ the chief said, and led us up the stairs.

  Steffie’s place was at the edge of the Pearl District. Back when I considered myself middle-aged—forty years ago or so now—the Pearl was going through a revitalization. Condos, trendy businesses, upscale restaurants all flocked there.

  Now it had settled into middle age itself, with solid restaurants and long-established businesses, residents who had found city life essential but not necessarily the hottest, latest thing.

  Technically, a business like Steffie’s shouldn’t have thrived here—at least not in the mind of men like DeAndre—but I always thought it made perfect sense. True city dwellers were more forgiving than their suburban counterparts, and Steffie was running an upscale service for people who wanted discretion as well as the things she provided.

  She was, in her own way, a long-term celebrity who represented the darker side of the city, and somehow gave it a more positive spin.

  Even the staircase leading up to the main floor projected that positive image. Old staircases in other buildings on Glisan had the dark, cavelike atmosphere of a strictly emergency exit. Steffie had remodeled hers into a wide showplace with shallow, clean white carpeted steps that looked almost like the stairs into a palace.

  When you reached the main floor, the stairs widened even more, so that they functioned as more of a grand entrance than a stairwell. And as you stepped onto the landing, a soft chime went off, letting the people inside the business know that someone had arrived.

  Usually the double black doors swung open at that point, and someone—generally one of the youngest, most attractive escorts—greeted you with a glass of sparkling water and an inviting smile.