The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Oh, Evan,” the little triceratops said patiently, “surely even you know that nothing really dies any more.”

  THE GALLERY OF HIS DREAMS

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  New writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, one of the fastest-rising and most prolific young authors on the scene today, has had a very busy few years. She was the editor of Pulphouse in its original incarnation as a quarterly anthology series, and won a World Fantasy Award along with publisher Dean Wesley Smith for her work on it; she is still the editor for various Pulphouse publishing projects, including the Axolotl novella series and a new novella series co-edited with Betsy Mitchell. In 1991, she stepped down as editor of the Pulphouse anthology series to become the new editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, taking over from long-time editor Edward Ferman. As a writer, she won the John W. Campbell Award, and she is also a frequent contributor to Amazing, Aboriginal SF, Full Spectrum, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The White Mists of Power, has just appeared, and she has nine other novels under contract. Her story “Skin Deep” was in our Sixth Annual Collection. She lives in Eugene, Oregon … although it’s difficult to see how she can have time to sleep there! She may be one of the busiest professionals in science fiction today.

  In the compelling story that follows, she takes us back to the turbulent and dangerous days of the American Civil War to meet one of its most famous chroniclers, pioneer photographer Mafhew Brady—and then plunges Brady ahead into a hostile and incomprehensible future of aching strangeness, a future where Brady faces his most bizarre and difficult assignment.…

  Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations.… It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  1838

  Brady leaned against a hay bale and felt the blades dig into his back. He smelled of pig dung and his own sweat, and his muscles ached. His da had gone to the pump to wash up, and then into the cow shed, but Brady claimed he needed a rest. His da, never one to argue with relaxation, let him sit against the hay bales. Brady didn’t dare stay too long; if his ma saw him, she would be on the front porch, yelling insults unintelligible through her Irish brogue.

  He did need to think, though. Milking cows and cleaning the pig pen didn’t give him enough time to make plans. He couldn’t stay on the farm the rest of his life, he knew that. He hated the work, the animals, the smell, and the long hours that all led to a poor, subsistence living. His da thought the farm a step up from the hovel he had grown up in and certainly an improvement from Brady’s grandfather’s life back in the Old Country. Brady often wished he could see what his da’s life or his grandfather’s life had really been like. But he had to trust their memories, memories that, at least in his grandfather’s case, had become more and more confusing as the years progressed.

  Brady pulled a strand of hay from the bale, sending a burst of sharp fresh summer-scent around him. He wanted more than a ruined farm and a few livestock in upstate New York. Mr. Hanley, his teacher, had pulled Brady aside on the day he left school, and reminded him that in the United States of America, even farmboys could become great men. Mr. Hanley used to start the school day by telling the boys that the late President Thomas Jefferson defined the nation’s creed when he wrote that all men were created equal, and President Andrew Jackson had proven the statement true with his election not ten years before.

  Brady didn’t want to be president. He wanted to do something different, something he couldn’t even imagine now. He wanted to be great—and he wanted to be remembered.

  1840

  The spring thaw had turned the streets of New York City into rivers. Brady laughed as he jumped from one sidewalk board to the next, then turned and waited for Page to jump. Page hesitated a moment, running a slender hand through his beard. Then he jumped and landed, one tattered shoe in the cold water, one out. Brady grabbed his friend’s arm, and pulled him up.

  “Good Lord, William, how far away is this man’s home?”

  “He’s not just any man,” Page said, shaking the water off his legs. “He’s a painter, and a damn fine one.”

  Brady smiled. Page was a painter himself and had, a few months earlier, opened a studio below their joint apartment. Brady helped with the rent on the studio as a repayment for Page’s help in moving Brady from the farm. Being a clerk at A.T. Stewart’s largest store was an improvement over farm life—the same kind of improvement that Brady’s father had made. Only Brady wasn’t going to stop there. Page had promised to help by showing Brady how to paint. While Brady had an eye for composition, he lacked the firm hand, the easy grace of a portraitist. Page had been polite; he hadn’t said that Brady was hopeless. But they both knew that Mathew B. Brady would never make his living with a paintbrush in his hand.

  Brady braced himself against a wooden building as he stepped over a submerged portion of sidewalk. “You haven’t said what this surprise is.”

  “I don’t know what the surprise is. Samuel simply said that he had learned about it in France and that we would be astonished.” Page slipped into a thin alley between buildings and then pulled open a door. Brady followed, and found himself staring up a dark flight of stairs. Page was already halfway up, his wet shoe squeaking with each step. Brady gripped the railing and took the stairs two at a time.

  Page opened the door, sending light across the stairs. Brady reached the landing just as Page bellowed, “Samuel!” Brady peered inside, nearly choking on the scent of linseed and turpentine.

  Large windows graced the walls, casting dusty sunlight on a room filled with canvases. Dropcloths covered most of the canvases and some of the furniture scattered about. A desk, overflowing with papers, stood under one window. Near that a large wooden box dwarfed a rickety table. A stoop-shouldered long-haired man braced the table with one booted foot.

  “Over here, Page, over here. Don’t dawdle. Help me move this thing. The damn table is about to collapse.”

  Page scurried across the room, bent down, and grabbed an edge of the box. The man picked up the other side and led the way to his desk. He balanced the box with one hand and his knee while his other hand swept the desk clean. They set the box down and immediately the man pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away the sweat that had dripped into his bushy eyebrows.

  “I meant to show you in a less dramatic fashion,” he said, then looked up.

  Brady whipped his hat off his head and held it with both hands. The man had sharp eyes, eyes that could see right through a person, clear down to his dreams.

  “Well?” the man said.

  Brady nodded. He wouldn’t be stared down. “I’m Mathew B. Brady, sir.”

  “Samuel F. B. Morse.” Morse tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket and clasped his hands behind his back. “You must be the boy Page has been telling me about. He assumes you have some sort of latent talent.”

  Brady glanced at Page. Page blushed, the color seeping through the patches of skin still visible through his beard.

  “Hmmm,” Morse said as he stalked forward. He paced around Brady, studied him for a moment. “You’re what, eighteen?”

  “Almost, sir.”

  “If you had talent, you’d know it by now.” Morse shook his head. His suit smelled faintly of mothballs. “No, no. You’re one of the lucky ones, blessed with drive. A man with talent merely has a head start. A man with drive succeeds.”

  Morse stalked back to his desk, stepping on the papers that littered the floor. “Drive but no talent. I have the perfect machine for you.” He put his hand on the box. “Ever hear of Louis Daguerre? No, of course not. What would a farmboy know of the latest scientific discoveries?”

/>   Brady started, then shot another look at Page. Perhaps Page had said something about Brady’s background. Page ignored him and moved closer to Morse.

  “Daguerre found a way to preserve the world in one image. Look.” He handed Page a small metal plate. As Page tilted it toward the light, Brady saw the Unitarian Church he walked past almost every day.

  “This is a daguerreotype,” Morse said. “I made this one through the window of the third floor staircase at New York University.”

  “That is the right view.” Page’s voice held awe. “You used no paints.”

  “I used this,” Morse said, his hand pounding on the box’s top. “It has a lens here—” and he pointed at the back end from which a glass-topped cylinder protruded “—and a place here for the plates. The plates are silver on copper which I treat with iodine and expose to light through the lens. Then I put the plate in another box containing heated mercury and when I’m done—an image! An exact reproduction of the world in black and white.”

  Brady touched the cool edge of the plate. “It preserves memories,” he said, thinking that if such a device had existed before, he could have seen his father’s hovel, his grandfather’s home.

  “It does more than that, son,” Morse said. “This is our future. It will destroy portrait painting. Soon everything will be images on metal, keepsakes for generations to come.”

  Page pulled back at the remark about portrait painting. He went to the window, looked at the street below. “I suppose that’s why you brought us up here. To show me that I’ll be out of work soon?”

  “No, lad.” Morse laughed and the sound boomed and echoed off the canvas-covered walls. “I want to save you, not destroy you. I’m opening a school to teach this new process and I invite you to join. Fifty dollars tuition for the entire semester and I promise you’ll be a better portraitist when you’re done than you are now.”

  Page gave Morse a sideways look. Page’s back was rigid and his hands were clenched in trembling fists. Brady could almost feel his friend’s rage. “I paint.” Page spoke with a slow deliberation. “I have no need for what will clearly become a poor man’s art.”

  Morse did not seem offended by Page’s remark. “And you, young Brady. Will you use your drive to acquire a talent?”

  Brady stared at the plate and mysterious box. Fifty dollars was a lot of money, but he already had twenty set aside for a trip home. Page did say he had an eye for composition. And if a man with an eye for composition, a lot of drive and a little talent took Daguerre’s Box all over the world, he would be able to send his memories back to the people left behind.

  Brady smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll take your class.”

  He would postpone the trip to see his parents, and raise the rest of the money somehow. Page whirled away from the window as if Brady had betrayed him. But Brady didn’t care. When they got home, he would explain it all. And it was so simple. He had another improvement to make.

  1840

  That night, Brady dreamed. He stood in a large cool room, darkened and hidden in shadows. He bumped into a wall and found himself touching a ribbed column—a doric column, he believed. He took cautious steps forward, stumbled, then caught himself on a piece of painted wood. His hands slid up the rough edges until he realized he was standing beside a single-horse carriage. He felt his way around to the back. The carriage box had no windows, but the back stood wide open. He climbed inside. The faint rotten-egg smell of sulphur rose. He bumped against a box and glass rattled. A wagon filled with equipment. He climbed out, feeling as if he was snooping. There was more light now. He saw a wall ahead of him, covered with portraits.

  The darkness made the portraits difficult to see, but he thought he recognized the light and shadow work of a Daguerre portrait and yet—and yet—something differed, distorted, perhaps, by the dream. And he knew he was in a dream. The cool air was too dry, the walls made of a foreign substance, the lights (what he could see of them), glass-encased boxes on the ceiling. The portraits were of ghastly things: dead men and stark fields, row after row of demolished buildings. On several, someone had lettered his last name in flowing white script.

  “They will make you great,” said a voice behind him. He turned, and saw a woman. At least, he thought it was a woman. Her hair was cropped above her ears, and she wore trousers.

  “Who will make me great?” he asked.

  “The pictures,” she said. “People will remember them for generations.” He took a step closer to her, but she smiled and touched his palm. The shadows turned black and the dream faded into a gentle, restful sleep.

  1849

  Brady leaned against the hand-carved wooden railing. The candles on the large chandelier burned steady, while the candelabras flickered in the breezes left by the dancing couples. A pianist, a violinist, and a cello player—all, Mr. Handy had assured him, very well respected—played the newest European dance, the waltz, from one corner of the huge ballroom. Mothers cornered their daughters along the wall, approving dance cards, and shaking fans at impertinent young males. The staircase opened into the ballroom, and Brady didn’t want to cross the threshold. He had never been to a dance like this before. His only experiences dancing had been at gatherings Page had taken him to when he first arrived in New York. He knew none of the girls except Samuel Handy’s daughter Juliet and she was far too pretty for Brady to approach.

  So he watched her glide across the floor with young man after young man, her hooped skirts swaying, her brown hair in ringlets, her eyes sparkling, and her cheeks flushed. Handy had told him that at the age of four, she had been presented to President Jackson. She had been so beautiful, Handy said, that Jackson had wanted to adopt her. Brady was glad he hadn’t seen her as a child, glad he had seen the mature beauty. When he finished taking the portraits of her father, he would ask if he could take one of her. The wet-plate process would let him make copies, and he would keep one in his own rooms, just so that he could show his friends how very lovely she was.

  The waltz ended, and Julia curtsied to her partner, then left the floor. Her dance card swung from her wrist and the diamonds around her neck caught the candlelight. Too late, Brady realized she was coming to see him.

  “I have one spot left on my dance card,” she said as she stopped in front of him. She smelled faintly of lilacs, and he knew he would have to keep a sprig near her portrait every spring. “And I was waiting for you to fill it.”

  Brady blushed. “I barely know you, Miss Juliet.”

  She batted his wrist lightly with her fan. “Julia,” she said. “And I know you better than half the boys here. You have spent three days in my daddy’s house, Mr. Brady, and your conversation at dinner has been most entertaining. I was afraid that I bored you.”

  “No, no,” he said. The words sounded so formal. How could he joke with his female clients and let this slip of a girl intimidate him? “I would love to take that slot on your dance card, Miss Juliet.”

  “Julia,” she said again. “I hate being named after a stupid little minx who died for nothing. I think when a woman loves, it is her duty to love intelligently, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Brady said, although he had no idea what she was talking about. “And I’m Mathew.”

  “Wonderful, Mathew.” Her smile added a single dimple to her left cheek. She extended her card to him and he penciled his name in for the next dance, filling the bottom of the first page. The music started—another waltz—and she took his hand. He followed her onto the floor, placed one hand on her cinched waist, and held the other lightly in his own. They circled around the floor, the tip of her skirt brushing against his pants leg. She didn’t smile at him. Instead her eyes were very serious and her lips were pursed and full.

  “You don’t do this very often, do you, Mathew?”

  “No,” he said. In fact, he felt as if he were part of a dream—the musicians, the beautifully garbed women, the house servants blending into the wallpaper. Everything at the Handy plantation had an air of al
most too much sensual pleasure. “I work, probably too much.”

  “I have seen what you do, Mathew, and I think it is a wondrous magic.” A slight flush crept into her cheeks, whether from the exertion or her words, Brady couldn’t tell. She lowered her voice. “I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed I was in a beautiful large gallery with light clearer than sunlight and hundreds of people milled about, looking at your portraits on the wall. They all talked about you, how marvelous your work was, and how it influenced them. You’re a great man, Mathew, and I am flattered at the interest you have shown in me.”

  The music stopped and she slipped from his arms, stopping to chat with another guest as she wandered toward the punch table. Brady stood completely still, his heart pounding against his chest. She had been to the gallery of his dreams. She knew about his future. The musicians began another piece, and Brady realized how foolish he must look, standing in the center of the dance floor. He dodged whirling couples and made his way to the punch table, hoping that he could be persuasive enough to convince Julia Handy to let him replace all those other names on the remaining half of her dance card.

  1861

  He woke up with the idea, his body sweat-covered and shimmering with nervous energy. If he brought a wagon with him, it would work: a wagon like the one he had dreamed about the night he had met Morse.

  Brady moved away from his sleeping wife and stepped onto the bare hardwood. The floor creaked. He glanced at Julia, but she didn’t awaken. The bedroom was hot; Washington in July had a muggy air. If the rumors were to be believed, the first battle would occur in a matter of days. He had so little time. He had thought he would never come up with a way to record the war.

  He had started recording history with his book, the Gallery of Illustrious Americans. He had hoped to continue by taking portraits of the impending battles, but he hadn’t been able to figure out how. The wet plates had to be developed right after the portrait had been taken. He needed a way to take the equipment with him to the battlefield. The answer was so simple, he was amazed he had to dream it.