The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “Sounds good, Dad.” She said, “Let me drive.”

  I have lived in this house for twenty-six years. I was born in the house across the street. In 1957, my friend Gino Ballantoni lived here, and I was over here every day, or just about, for four years, till Gino’s father’s aircraft job moved to California. I’d always wanted it, and after I got out of the Army, I got it on the GI Bill.

  I know its every pop and groan, every sound it makes day or night, the feel of the one place the paint isn’t smooth, on the inside door-jamb trim of what used to be Mo’s room before it was Celine’s. There’s one light switch put on upside down I never changed. The garage makeover I did myself; it’s what’s now the living room.

  I love this place. I would have lived here no matter what.

  I tell myself history wasn’t different enough that this house isn’t still a vacant lot, or an apartment building. That’s, at least, something to hang onto.

  I noticed the extra sticker inside the car windshield. Evidently, we now have an emissions-control test in this state, too. I’ll have to look in the phone book and find out where to go, as this one expires at the end of the month.

  And also, on TV, when they show news from New York, there’s still the two World Trade Center Towers.

  You can’t be too careful about the past.

  The psychiatrist called to ask if someone could sit in on the double session tomorrow – he knew it was early, but it was special – his old mentor from whatever Mater he’d Alma’d at; the guy was in a day early for some shrink hoedown in the Big City and wanted to watch his star pupil in action. He was asking all the patients tomorrow, he said. The old doc wouldn’t say anything, and you’d hardly know he was there.

  “Well, I got enough troubles, what’s one more?”

  He thanked me.

  That’s what did it for me. This was not going to stop. This was not something that I could be helped to work through, like bedwetting or agoraphobia or the desire to eat human flesh. It was going to go on forever, here, until I died.

  Okay, I thought. Let’s get out Occam’s Famous Razor and cut a few Gordian Knots. Or somewhat, as the logicians used to say.

  I went out to the workshop where everybody thinks it all started.

  I turned on the outside breakers. I went inside. This time I closed the door. I went over and turned on the bandsa

  After I got up off the floor, I opened the door and stepped out into the yard. It was near dark, so I must have been out an hour or so.

  I turned off the breakers and went into the house through the back door and through the utility room and down the hall to the living room bookcase. I pulled out Vol 14 of the encyclopedia and opened it.

  Nixon, Richard Milhous, it said (1913–1994). A good long entry.

  There was a sound from the kitchen. The oven door opened and closed.

  “What have you been doing?” asked a voice.

  “There’s a short in the bandsaw I’ll have to get fixed,” I said. I went around the corner.

  It was my wife Susan. She looked a little older, a little heavier since I last saw her, it seemed. She still looked pretty good.

  “Stand there where I can see you,” I said.

  “We were having a fight before you wandered away, remember?”

  “Whatever it was,” I said, “I was wrong. You were right. We’ll do whatever it is you want.”

  “Do you even remember what it was we were arguing about?”

  “No,” I said. “Whatever. It’s not important. The problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in – ”

  “Cut the Casablanca crap,” said Susan. “Jodie and Susie Q want to bring the kids over next Saturday and have Little Eddy’s birthday party here. You wanted peace and quiet here, and go somewhere else for the party. That was the argument.”

  “I wasn’t cut out to be a grandpa,” I said. “But bring ’em on. Invite the neighbors! Put out signs on the street! ‘Annoy an old man here!’ ”

  Then I quieted down. “Tell them we’d be happy to have the party here,” I said.

  “Honestly, Edward,” said Susan, putting the casserole on the big trivet. It was her night to cook. “Sometimes I think you’d forget your ass if it weren’t glued on.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “I’ve damn sure forgotten what peace and quiet was like. And probably lots of other stuff, too.”

  “Supper’s ready,” said Susan.

  JUNE SIXTEENTH AT ANNA’S

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch started out the decade of the 1990s as one of the fastest-rising and most prolific young authors on the scene, took a few years out in mid-decade for a very successful turn as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and, since stepping down from that position, has returned to her old standards of production here in the twenty-first century, publishing a slew of novels in four genres, writing fantasy, mystery, and romance novels under various pseudonyms as well as science fiction. She has published almost twenty novels under her own name, including The White Mists of Power, the four-volume Fey series, the Black Throne series, Alien Influences, and several Star Wars books written with husband Dean Wesley Smith. Her most recent books (as Rusch, anyway) are the novels The Disappeared, Extremes, and Fantasy Life. In 1999, she won Readers Award polls from the readerships of both Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, an unprecedented double honor! As an editor, she was honored with the Hugo Award for her work on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and shared the World Fantasy Award with Dean Wesley Smith for her work as editor of the original hardcover anthology version of Pulphouse. As a writer, she has won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery (for A Dangerous Road, written as Kris Nelscott) and the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award (for Utterly Charming, written as Kristine Grayson); as Kristine Kathryn Rusch, she has won the John W. Campbell Award, been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and took home a Hugo Award in 2000 for her story “Millennium Babies,” making her one of the few people in genre history to win Hugos for both editing and writing.

  In the haunting and poignant story that follows, she shows us that just because things are past, that doesn’t mean that they lose any of their hold on the present . . .

  June Sixteenth at Anna’s. To a conversation connoisseur, those words evoke the most pivotal afternoon in early twenty-first century historical entertainment. No one knows why these conversations have elevated themselves against the thousands of others found and catalogued.

  Theories abound. Some speculate that the variety of conversational types makes this one afternoon special. Others believe this performance is the conversational equivalent of early jazz jam sessions – the points and counterpoints have a beauty unrelated to the words. Still others hypothesize that it is the presence of the single empty chair which allows the visitor to join the proceedings without feeling like an intruder . . .

  – liner notes from June Sixteenth at Anna’s, special six-hour edition

  ON THE NIGHT after his wife’s funeral, Mac pulled a chair in front of the special bookcase, the one he’d built for Leta over forty years ago, and flicked on the light attached to the top shelf. Two copies of every edition ever produced of June Sixteenth at Anna’s – one opened and one permanently in its wrapper – winked back at him as if they shared a joke.

  Scattered between them, copies of the books, the e-jackets, the DVDs, the out-dated Palms, all carrying analysis, all holding maybe a mention of Leta and what she once called the most important day of her life.

  A whiff of lilacs, a jangle of gold bracelets, and then a bejeweled hand reached across his line of sight and turned the light off.

  “Don’t torture yourself, Dad,” his daughter Cherie said. She was older than the shelf, her face softening with age, just as her mother’s had. With another jangle of bracelets, she clicked on a table lamp, then sat on the couch across from him, a couch she used to flounce into when she was a teenager �
� which seemed to him, in his current state, just weeks ago. “Mom wouldn’t have wanted it.”

  Mac threaded his fingers together, rested his elbows on his thighs and stared at the floor so that his daughter wouldn’t see the flash of anger in his eyes. Leta didn’t want anything any more. She was dead, and he was alone, with her memories taunting him from a homemade shelf.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said.

  “I’m a little worried to leave you here,” Cherie said. “Why don’t you come to my place for a few days? I’ll fix you dinner, you can sleep in the guest room, have a look at the park. We can talk.”

  He had talked to Cherie. To Cherie, her soon-to-be second husband, her grown son, all of Leta’s sisters and cousins, and friends, Lord knew how many friends they’d had. And reporters. Strange that one woman’s death, one woman’s relatively insignificant life, had drawn so many reporters.

  “I want to sleep in my own bed,” he said.

  “Fine.” Cherie stood as if she hadn’t heard him. “We’ll get you a cab when it’s time to come home. Dad – ”

  “Cherie.” He looked up at her, eyes puffy from her own tears, hair slightly mussed. “I won’t stop missing her just because I’m at your place. The mourning doesn’t go away once the funeral’s over.”

  Her nose got red, as it always had when someone hit a nerve. “I just thought it might be easier, that’s all.”

  Easier for whom, baby? he wanted to ask, but knew better. “I’ll be all right,” he said again, and left it at that.

  The first time travel breakthroughs came slowly. The breakthroughs built on each other, though, and in the early thirties, scientists predicted that human beings would be visiting their own pasts by the end of the decade.

  It turns out these scientists were right, but not in the way they expected. Human beings could not interact with time. They could only open a window into the time-space continuum, and make a record – an expensive record – of past events.

  Historians valued the opportunity, but no one else did until Susan Yashimoto combined time recordings with virtual reality technology, and holography, added a few augmentations of her own, and began marketing holocordings.

  Her first choices were brilliant. By using a list of historic events voted most likely to be visited should a time machine be invented, she created ’cordings of the birth of Christ, Mohammed’s triumphal return to Mecca, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and dozens of others.

  Soon, other companies entered the fray. Finding their choices limited by copyrights placed on a time period by worried historians afraid of losing their jobs, these companies began opening portals into daily life . . .

  – From A History of Conversation

  J. Booth Centuri, 2066.

  Download Reference Number:

  ConverXGC112445 at Library of Congress

  [loc.org]

  Mac had lied to Cherie. He would not sleep in his own bed. The bedroom was still filled with Leta – the blue and black bedspread they’d compromised on fifteen years before, the matching but frayed sheets she wanted to die on, the tiny strands of long gray hairs that – no matter how much he cleaned – still covered her favorite pillow.

  He’d thrown out her treatment bottles, taken the Kleenex off the nightstand, put the old-fashioned hardcover of Gulliver’s Travels that she would now never finish on their collectibles bookshelf, but he couldn’t get rid of her scent – faintly musky, slightly apricot, and always, no matter how sick she got, making him think of youth.

  He carried a blanket and pillow to the couch, as he had for the last six months of Leta’s life, pulled down the shade of the large picture window overlooking the George Washington Bridge – the view was the reason he’d taken the apartment in that first week of the new millennium, when he’d been filled with hopes and dreams as yet unspoiled.

  He wandered toward the small kitchen for a glass of something – water, beer, he wasn’t certain – stopping instead by Leta’s shelf and flicking on the light, a small act of rebellion against his own daughter.

  The ’cordings glinted again, like diamonds in a jewelry store window, tempting, teasing. He’d walked past this shelf a thousand times, laughed at Leta for her vanity – sometimes I think you’re the only reason the June Sixteenth at Anna’s ’cordings make any money, he used to say to her – and derided her for attaching so much significance to that one day in her past.

  You didn’t even think it important until some holographer guy decided it was, he’d say, and she’d nod in acknowledgement.

  Sometimes, she said to him once, we don’t know what’s important until it’s too late.

  He found himself holding the deluxe retrospective edition – six hours long, with the Latest Updates and Innovations! – the only set of June Sixteenth at Anna’s with both copies still in their wrappers. It had arrived days before Leta died.

  He’d carried the package in to her, brought her newest player out, the one he’d bought her that final Christmas, and placed them both on the edge of the bed.

  “I’ll set you up if you want,” he’d said.

  She had been leaning against nearly a dozen pillows, a cocoon he’d built for her when he realized that nothing would stop her inevitable march to the end. Her eyes were just slightly glazed as she took his hand.

  “I’ve been there before,” she said, her voice raspy and nearly gone.

  “But not this one,” he said. “You don’t know the changes they’ve made. Maybe they have all five senses this time – ”

  “Mac,” she whispered. “This time, I want to stay here with you.”

  In New York’s second Gilded Age, Anna’s was considered the premier spot for conversation. Like the cafes of the French Revolution or Hemingway’s Movable Feast, Anna’s became a pivotal place to sit, converse, and exchange ideas.

  Director Hiram Goldman remembered Anna’s. He applied for a time recording permit, and scanned appropriate days, finally settling on June 16, 2001 for its mix of customers, its wide-ranging conversational high points, and the empty chair that rests against a far wall, allowing the viewer to feel a part of the scene before him . . .

  – liner notes from June Sixteenth at Anna’s,

  original edition

  Mac had never used a holocording, never saw the need to go back in time, especially to a period he’d already lived through. He’d said so to Leta right from the start, and after she picked up her fifth copy of June Sixteenth, she’d stopped asking him to join her.

  He always glanced politely at the interviews, nodded at the crowds who gathered at the retrospectives, and never really listened to the speeches or the long, involved discussions of the fans.

  Leta collected everything associated with that day, enjoying her minor celebrity, pleased that it had come to her after she had raised Cherie and, Leta would tell him, already had a chance to live a real life.

  It was a shame she’d never opened the last ’cording. It was a sign of how ill she had been toward the end. Any other time, she might have read the liner notes – or had the box read them to her – looked at the still holos, and giggled over the inevitable analysis which, she said, was always pretentious and always wrong.

  Mac opened the wrapping, felt it crinkle beneath his fingers as he tossed it in the trash. The plastic surface of the case had been engineered to feel like high-end leather. Someone had even added the faint odor of calfskin for verisimilitude.

  He opened the case, saw the shiny silver disk on the right side, and all his other choices on the left: analysis at the touch of a finger, in any form he wanted – hard-copy, audio, e-copy (format of his choice), holographic discussion; history of the ’cording; a biography of the participants, including but not limited to what happened to them after June 16, 2001; and half a dozen other things including plug-ins (for an extra charge) that would enhance the experience.

  Leta used to spend hours over each piece, reviewing it as if she were going to be quizzed on it, carrying parts of it to him and sharin
g it with him against his will.

  He was no longer certain why he was so against participating. Perhaps because he felt that life moved forward, not backward, and someone else’s perspective on the past was as valid as a stranger’s opinion of a book no one had ever read.

  Or perhaps it was his way of dealing with minor celebrity, being Leta Thayer’s husband, having his life scratched and pawed at without ever really being understood.

  Mac left the case open on the shelf, next to all the other June Sixteenth’s, and stuck his finger through the hole in the center of the silver ’cording, carrying it with him.

  The player was still in the hall closet where he’d left it two weeks before. He dragged it out, knocking over one of Leta’s boots, still marked by last winter’s slush, and felt a wave of such sadness he thought he wouldn’t be able to stand upright.

  He tried anyway, and thought it a small victory that he succeeded.

  Then he carried the player and the ’cording into the bedroom, and placed them on the foot of the bed.

  Two hundred and fifty people crossed the threshold at Anna’s that afternoon, and although they were ethnically and culturally diverse, the sample was too small to provide a representative cross-section of the Manhattan population of that period. The restaurant was too obscure to appeal to the famous, too small to attract people from outside the neighborhood, and too new to have cachet. The appeal of June Sixteenth is the ordinariness of the patrons, the fact that on June 16, 2001 not one of them is known outside their small circle of friends and family. Their very obscurity raises their conversations to new heights.

  – From A History of June Sixteenth at Anna’s

  Erik Reese, University of Idaho Press, 2051

  Maybe it was the trace of her still left in the room. Maybe it was a hedge against the loneliness that threatened to overwhelm him. Maybe it was simply his only way to banish those final images – her skin yellowish and so thin that it revealed the bones in her face, the drool on the side of her mouth, and the complete lack of recognition in her eyes.