The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Whatever the reason, he put the ’cording in the player, sat the requisite distance from the wireless technology – so new and different when he was young, not even remarked on now – and flicked on the machine.

  It didn’t take him away as he’d expected it to. Instead it surrounded him in words and pictures and names. He didn’t know how to jump past the opening credits, so he sat very still and waited for the actual ’cording to begin.

  Because June Sixteenth at Anna’s is a conversation piece, its packagers never wasted their resources on sensual reconstructions. Sound is present and near perfect. Even the rattle of pans in the kitchen resonates in the dining room. The vision is also perfect – colors rich and lifelike, light and shadow so accurate that if you step into the sunlight you can almost feel the heat.

  But almost is the key word here. Except for fundamentals like making certain that solid objects are indeed solid, required of all successful holocordings, June Sixteenth at Anna’s lacks the essentials of a true historical projection. We cannot smell the garlic, the frying meat, the strawberries that look so fresh and ripe on the table nearest our chair.

  Purists claim this is so that we can concentrate on the conversation. But somehow the lack of sensation limits the spoken word. When Rufolio Field lights his illegal cigar three hours into our afternoon and management rebuffs him, we see the offense but do not take it. We are reminded that we are observers – part of the scene, but in no way of the scene.

  Once the illusion is shattered, June Sixteenth at Anna’s is reduced to its component parts. It becomes a flat screen documentary remixed for the holocorders, both lifeless and old-fashioned, when what we long for is the kind of attention to detail given to truly historic moments, like The Gettysburg Address (Weekend Edition) or the newly released Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand . . .

  – Review of June Sixteenth at Anna’s,

  Special Six Hour Edition

  in The Essential Holographer

  February 22, 2050

  The restaurant comes into view very slowly. Out of the post-credits darkness, he hears laughter, the gentle flow of voices, the clink of silverware. Then pieces appear – the maître d’s station, a simple podium flanked by two small indoor trees, the doorway leading into the restaurant proper, the couple – whom he would have termed elderly in 2001 – slipping past him toward a table in the back.

  Mac stands in the doorway, feeling a sense of déjà vu that would have been ridiculous if it weren’t so accurate. He has been here before. Of course. A hundred times before the restaurant closed in 2021. Only he never saw the early décor – the round bistro tables covered with red checked cloths; the padded sweetheart chairs that didn’t look comfortable; the floor-to-ceiling windows on the street level, an indulgence that went away only a few months later, shattered by ash and falling debris.

  The restaurant is almost full. A busboy removes a sweetheart chair from the table closest to the window, holding the chair by its wire frame. He carries the chair to the wall closest to Mac, sets it down, and nods at the maître d’, who leads a young couple into the dining room.

  Mac needs no more than the sway of her long black hair to recognize Leta. His heart leaps, and for a moment he thinks: she isn’t dead. She’s right here, trapped in a temporal loop, and if he frees her, she’ll come home again.

  Instead, he sits in the empty chair.

  A speaker above him plays Charlie Burnet’s “Skyliner,” a CD from its poor quality, remastered from the original tapes. Pans rattle in the kitchen, and voices murmur around him, talking about the best place to eat foie gras, the history of graveyards in Manhattan, new ways to celebrate Juneteenth.

  He cannot hear Leta. She is all the way across the room from him, several famous conversations away, her hand outstretched as if waiting for him to take it.

  He has a good view of her face, illuminated by the thin light filtering through the windows – the canyons of the city blocking any real sun. She is smiling, nodding at something her companion says, her eyes twinkling in that way she had when she thought everything she heard was bullshit but she was too polite to say so.

  Mac hadn’t known her when she was here – they met in October, during that seemingly endless round of funerals, and he remembered telling her he felt guilty for feeling that spark of attraction, for beginning something new when everything else was ending.

  She had put her hand on his, the skin on her palms dry and rough from all the assistance she’d been giving friends: dishes, packing, childcare. Her eyes had had shadows so deep he could barely see their shape. It wasn’t until their second date that he realized her eyes had a slightly almond cast, and they were an impossible shade of blue.

  There are no shadows under her eyes here, in Anna’s. Leta is smiling, looking incredibly young. Mac never knew her this young, this carefree. Her skin has no lines, and that single white strand that appeared above her right temple – the one she’d plucked on their first date and looked at in horror – isn’t visible at all.

  She wears a white summer dress that accents her sun-darkened skin, and as she talks, she takes a white sweater from the suitcase she used to call a purse. He recognizes the shudder, the gestures, as she puts the sweater over her shoulders.

  She is clearly complaining about the cold, about air conditioning he cannot feel. The air here is the same as the air in his bedroom, a little too warm. So much is missing, things his memory is supplying – the garlic and wine scent of Anna’s, the mixture of perfumes that always seemed to linger in front of the door. He isn’t hungry, and he should be. He always got hungry after a few moments in here, the rich fragrances of spiced pork in red sauce and beef sautéed in garlic and wine – Anna’s specialties – making him wish that the restaurant hurried its service instead of priding itself on its European pace.

  But Anna’s had been a favorite of Leta’s long before Mac ate there. She had been the one who showed it to him, at the grand re-opening that December, filled with survivors and firefighters and local heroes, all trying to celebrate a Christmas that had more melancholy than joy.

  Six months away for this Leta. Six months and an entire lifetime away.

  A waiter walks past with a full tray – polenta with a mushroom sauce, several side dishes of pasta, and breadsticks so warm their steam floats past Mac. He cannot smell them, although he wants to. He reaches for one and his fingers find bread so hard and crusty it feels stale. He cannot pull the breadstick off, of course. This is a construct, a group memory – the solidity added to make the scene feel real.

  He’s not confined to the chair – he knows that much about ’cordings. He can walk from table to table, listen to each conversation, maybe even go into the kitchen, depending on how deluxe this edition is.

  He is not tempted to move around. He wants to stay here, where he can see the young woman who would someday become his wife flirting with a man whom she decides, one week later, to never see again after he gives her the only black eye she will ever have.

  One of the many stories, she used to say, that never made it into the analysis.

  Leta tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, laughs, sips some white wine. Mac watches her, enthralled. There is a carefreeness to her he has never seen before, a lightness that had vanished by the time he met her.

  He isn’t sure he would be interested in this Leta. She has beauty and style, but the substance, the caring that so touched him the day of his uncle’s funeral, isn’t present at all.

  Maybe the substance is in the conversation. The famous conversation. After a moment’s hesitation, he decides to listen after all.

  June Sixteenth at Anna’s has often been compared with jazz – the lively, free-flowing jazz of the 1950s and 60s, recorded on vinyl with all the scratches and nicks, recorded live so that each cough and smattering of early applause adds to the sense of a past so close that it’s almost tangible.

  Yet June Sixteenth at Anna’s has more than that. It has community, a feeling that all the observ
er has to do is pull his chair to the closest table, and he will belong.

  Perhaps it is the setting – very few holocordings take place in restaurants because of the ambient noise – or perhaps it is the palpable sense of enjoyment, the feeling that everyone in the room participates fully in their lives, leaving no moment unobserved . . .

  – “The Longevity of June Sixteenth at Anna’s,”

  by Michael Meller, first given as a speech

  at the June Sixteenth Retrospective held

  at the Museum of Conversational Arts

  June 16, 2076

  The cheap CD is playing “Sentimental Journey,” Doris Day’s melancholy voice at odds with the laughter in this well-lit place. Mac walks past table after table, bumping one. The water glasses do not shake, the table doesn’t even move, and although he reflexively apologizes, no one hears him.

  He feels like a ghost in a room full of strangers.

  The conversations float around him, intense, serious, sincere. He’s not sure what makes these discussions famous. Is it the unintentional irony of incorrect predictions, like the group of businessmen discussing October’s annual stock market decline? Or the poignancy of plans that would never come about, lives with less than three months left, all the obvious changes ahead?

  He does not know. The conversations don’t seem special to him. They seem like regular discussions, the kind people still have in restaurants all over the city. Perhaps that’s the appeal, the link that sends the conversation collector from the present to the past.

  His link still sits at her table, flipping her hair off her shoulder with a casual gesture. As he gets closer, he can almost smell her perfume. Right about now she should acknowledge him, that small turn in his direction, the slight raise of her eyebrows, the secret smile that they’d shared from the first instant they’d met.

  But she doesn’t turn. She doesn’t see him. Instead, she’s discussing the importance of heroes with a man who has no idea what heroism truly is.

  Her fingers tap nervously against the table, a sign – a week before she throws Frank Dannen out of her life – that she doesn’t like him at all. It always took time for Leta’s brain to acknowledge her emotions. Too bad she hadn’t realized before he hit her that Frank wasn’t the man for her.

  Mac stops next to the table, glances once at Frank. This is the first time Mac has seen the man outside of photographs. Curly black hair, a strong jaw, the thick neck of a former football player which, of course, he was. Frank died long before the first June Sixteenth at Anna’s appeared, in a bar fight fifteen years after this meal.

  Mac remembers because Leta showed him the story in the Daily News, and said with no pity in her voice, I always knew he would come to a bad end.

  But here, in this timeless place, Frank is alive and handsome in a way that glosses over the details: the way his lower lip sets in a hard line, the bruised knuckles on his right hand, which he keeps carefully hidden from Leta, the two bottles of beer that have disappeared in the short forty-five minutes they’ve been at the table. Frank is barely listening to Leta; instead he checks out the other women in the room, short glances that are imperceptible to anyone who isn’t paying attention.

  Mac is, but he has wasted enough time on this man. Instead Mac stares at the woman who would become his wife. She stops speaking mid-thought, and leans back in her chair. Mac smiles, recognizing this ploy.

  He can predict her next words: Do you want me to continue talking to myself or would you prefer the radio for background noise?

  But she says nothing, merely watches Frank with a quizzical expression on her face, one that looks – to someone who doesn’t know her – like affection, but is really a test to see when Frank will notice that she’s done.

  He doesn’t, at least not while Mac is watching. Leta sighs, picks at the green salad before her, then glances out the window. Mac glances too, but sees nothing. Whoever recorded this scene, whoever touched it up, hadn’t bothered with the outdoors, only with the restaurant and the small dramas occurring inside it.

  Dramas whose endings were already known.

  Because he can’t help himself, Mac touches her shoulder. The flesh is warm and soft to the touch, but it is not Leta’s flesh. It feels like someone else’s. Leta’s skin had a satiny quality that remained with her during her whole life. First, the expense of new satin, and later, the comforting patina of old satin, showing how much it was loved.

  She does not look at him, and he pulls his hand away. Leta always looked at him when he touched her, always acknowledged their connection, their bond – sometimes with annoyance, when she was too busy to focus on it, yet always with love.

  This isn’t his Leta. This is a mannequin in a wax works, animated to go through its small part for someone else’s amusement.

  Mac can’t take any more. He stands up, says, “Voice command: stop.”

  And the restaurant fades to blackness a piece at a time – the tables and patrons first, then the ambient noise, and finally the voices, fading, fading, until their words are nothing but a memory of whispers in the dark.

  June Sixteenth at Anna’s should not be a famous conversation piece. The fact that it is says more about our generation’s search for meaning than it does about June 16, 2001.

  We believe that our grandparents lived fuller lives because they endured so much more. Yet all that June Sixteenth at Anna’s shows us is that each life is filled with countless moments, memorable and unmemo-rable – and the only meaning that these moments have are the meanings with which we imbue them at various points in our lives.

  – From June Sixteenth at Anna’s Revisited,

  Mia Oppel, Harvard University Press, 2071.

  Mac ended up standing beside the bed, only a foot from the player. The ’cording whirred as it wound down, the sound aggressive, as if resenting being shut off mid-program, before all the conversations had been played.

  The scent of Leta lingered, and Mac realized that it had been the only real thing in his entire trip. The scent and the temperature of his bedroom had accompanied him into Anna’s, bringing even more of the present into his glimpse of the past.

  He took the ’cording out of the player, and carried it to the living room, placing the silver disk in its expensive case. Then he returned to the bedroom, put the player away, and lay down on the bed for the first time since Leta had left it, almost a week ago.

  If he closed his eyes, he could imagine her warmth, the way he used to roll into it mornings after she had gotten up. It was like being cradled in her arms, and often he would fall back to sleep until she would wake him in exasperation, reminding him that he had a job just like everyone else on the planet and it was time he went off to do it.

  But the bed wasn’t really warm, and if he fell asleep, she wasn’t going to wake him, not now, not ever. The ’cording had left him feeling hollow, almost as if he’d done something dirty, forbidden, seeking out his wife where he knew she couldn’t have been.

  He had no idea why she watched all of the June Sixteenths. Read the commentary, yes, he understood that. And he understood the interviews, the way she accepted a fan’s fawning over something she never got paid for, never even got acknowledged for. Some of the June Sixteenth participants sued for their per centage of the profits – and lost, since ’cordings were as much about packaging as the historical moment – but Leta had never joined them.

  Instead, she went back to that single day in her life over and over again, watching her younger self from the outside, seeing – what? Looking for – what?

  It certainly wasn’t Frank. Mac knew her well enough for that. Had she been looking for a kind of perspective on herself, on her life? Or trying to figure out, perhaps, what her world would have been like if she had made different choices, tried other things?

  He didn’t know. And now, he would never know. He had teased her, listened to her talk about the ancillary materials, even bought her the latest copies of June Sixteenth, but he had never once heard her
speak about the experience of walking around as an outsider in her own past.

  A mystery of Leta – like all the other mysteries of Leta, including but not limited to why she had loved him – would remain forever unsolved.

  He couldn’t find the answers in June Sixteenth, just as he couldn’t find Leta there. All that remained of Leta were bits and pieces – a scent, slowly fading; a voice, half remembered; the brush of her skin against his own.

  Leta’s life had an ending now, her existence as finite as June Sixteenth at Anna’s, her essence as impossible to reproduce.

  Mac hugged her favorite pillow to himself. Leta would never reappear again – not whole, breathing, surprising him with her depth.

  The realization had finally come home to him, and settled in his heart: She was gone, and all he had left of her were her ghosts.

  THE GREEN LEOPARD PLAGUE

  Walter Jon Williams

  Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of The Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, and Aristoi. His novel Metropolitan garnered wide critical acclaim in 1996 and was one of the most talked-about books of the year. His other books include a sequel to Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Trek novel, Destiny’s Way. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World.” His stories have appeared in our Third through Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, Seventeenth, and Twentieth Annual Collections.