The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17
Page 102
You could tell them. Put it to a vote. Nothing would change, most like. But they wanted heroes, someone to believe in more than they wanted statistics and the truth, not just someone to make the hard decisions, maintain the beautiful lie, but hide such things. Saviors who wouldn’t quit even when they were struck at from both sides, who without ever planning or wanting to protect them from the truth. Even from the wayward bits and pieces of their own natures.
It was early morning before the kid came in. Sam always felt he could guess which way it would go, but this time he wasn’t entirely sure. His pistol’s safety was off just in case – Lethe – but the holster cover was clipped down. His dueling stick was carefully in its sheath.
The kid came strolling along, kicking dust.
“Wanted to be a hero, Mr. Aitch,” he said, falling in alongside when Sam started walking. “That’s all.”
“I know,” Sam said. “So we do impressions, Thomas. There are times when second best just has to do.”
DRAGONHEAD
Nick DiChario
Nick DiChario has sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Weird Tales, Universe 2, Universe 3, Alternate Kennedys, Alternate Warriors, Alternate Outlaws, Alternate Tyrants, The Ultimate Alien, and many other markets. He’s the coeditor, with Claudia Bishop, of the mystery anthology Death Dines at 8:30. His most recent book is a collection of his stories written in collaboration with Mike Resnick, Magic Feathers: The Mike and Nick Show.
In the sharp-edged little story that follows, he suggests that if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot of knowledge can be downright deadly . . .
THIS IS WHAT YOU KNOW:
Kermit the frog is left-handed. Charlie Brown’s father was a barber. Twenty-one per cent of Americans claim to be regularly bored out of their minds. In Iowa, sixty-five traffic accidents a year are caused by cornstalks. According to Genesis 1:20–22, the chicken came before the egg. Thirteen people a year are killed by fallen vending machines.
This is what you hear:
– What are his chances, doctor?
– I won’t lie to you, Mrs. Lang. There is currently no known cure for Dragonhead.
– Dragonhead. I hate that term. I hate it.
– Everyone hates it. It’s becoming the disease of the millennium. We’re finally beginning to understand what digitalia addiction is doing to our children. But I have to be honest with you, for most young people that understanding comes too late.
– Digitalia. Another term I hate. Fancy word for digital implant. Fancy word for brain sex, is what it is.
– Actually, Mrs. Lang, mind fuck and information masturbation are the most common slang terms for –
– You don’t have to talk like that. I know what it means.
– I’m sorry.
– That’s all right . . . I’m just . . . I’m just desperate. Your program comes highly recommended. You’ve had success, haven’t you, in some cases?
– Yes, a small per centage of patients have shown some improvement through a controlled regimen of neural shock therapy, but the results are varied. Most patients can’t pull their minds out of the information stream, not even after the implants are removed and no more new data is getting in. Your son’s chances are slim. You must understand that. Are you sure you want to put him through this?
– I don’t have a choice, do I? I have to try something. I can’t lose him like this, so senselessly. I’ll try anything . . . anything to get him back. Ian, Ian, do you hear me? Please come back, please. I’m your mother. You have a family and a life here with us, a God-given life. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?
– Please, Mrs. Lang, come away now. He can’t hear you, or if he does, the words mean nothing to him; they’re no different than any other words streaming through his head. It’s time for us to start his first treatment.
– Doctor, Ian told me that the digitalia was harmless. He said it was nothing more than a tattoo, a tattoo in his cerebellum. Jesus. God. All his friends were getting it done. Why shouldn’t he?
This is what you know:
Stars. Black stars dancing the bumblebee polka – stinging multiplying, imploding inside your brain, hot honey drip drip dripping down your spine. Leather straps. Cool smooth taste of airy neural electricity. Every hair follicle whispers sweet nothings in your skull. Subtle weight of iron and blood in your mouth. Is that water leaking from your eyes, or whalebones, or tailbones, or baseballs, or mothballs, or dictionaries, or pictionaries, or barbed wire, or haywire? Hard rock music makes termites chew through wood at twice their usual speed. A sneeze can travel as fast as 100 miles per hour. Point three per cent of all road accidents in Canada involve a moose. Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his baseball cap to keep his head cool. On the wall, a clock reads 4:20 am or pm. In the movie Pulp Fiction, all the clocks remain frozen on 4:20. 4:20. 4:20. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on that wall?
Forever.
Pinprick . . . pinprick . . . kiss . . . kiss . . . kiss . . .
This is what you hear:
– Ian, it’s me, your mamma.
This is what matters:
A raindrop falls at approximately seven miles per hour. South Bend, Indiana, 1924, a monkey is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to pay a twenty-five dollar fine for smoking a cigarette. “False Dragonhead” is a wildflower, a member of the mint family, indigenous to the riverbanks and thickets of Minnesota, Quebec, and the mountains of North Carolina; when its flowers are pushed right or left, they stay that way; common nickname: obedient flower.
DEAR ABBEY
Terry Bisson
Here’s a breathtaking tour, lyrical and sad, from our troubled present all the way to The End of Time, with stops along the way to consider the question of whether or not there’s going to be a future for humanity – or if there should be.
Terry Bisson is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels such as Fire on the Mountain, Wyrldmaker, the popular Talking Man (which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 1986), Voyage to the Red Planet, Pirates of the Universe, The Pickup Artist, and, in a posthumous collaboration with Walter M. Miller, Jr., a sequel to Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz called Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. He is a frequent contributor to such markets as Sci Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Omni, Playboy, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and, in 1991, his famous story “Bears Discover Fire” won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Award, the only story ever to sweep them all. In 2000, he won a Nebula Award for his story “macs.” His short work has been assembled in the collections Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories and In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories. His stories have appeared in our Eighth, Tenth, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.
1-
LEE AND I WERE never really friends, and never is saying a lot if you are covering all the way from late October to the End of Time. We were office mates, initially; colleagues, as it turned out; comrades, if you insist. And traveling companions, to be sure.
If it seems odd to you that a Distinguished Professor of Higher Mathematics should share an office with an American Studies Associate, you have never worked at a community college; much less Southwest Connecticut Community College, which is, due in small part to its central location on the BosWash Corridor, and in no small part to its liberal hiring po
licies, a brief and unceremonious stop for eastern seaboard academics on their way down, or out, or both. Lee had brought his exalted title with him from MIT, from which he had decamped after an undisclosed (and, as it turned out, almost entirely diversionary) conflict with a department head. But hey, we all have our little secrets. I, on the other hand, like most of my other colleagues at “Swick” (as we called it on the rare occasions when we spoke among ourselves), had been hired sight unseen, no-questions-asked, to fulfill some obscure bureaucratic quota, and could count on being let go when I came up for review in a year or so.
Not that I frankly my dear gave a damn. I was only passing through.
But enough about me. Did I mention that Lee was Chinese? Sixtyish, which meant old enough to be my father (if you could imagine my old man with a doctorate, or even imagine my old man, but that’s another story) and a political refugee from mainland China, which could mean, or so I then thought, anything.
Lee was somewhat of a campus celeb since at MIT he had been shortlisted for a Ballantine (the math MacArthur). His post-post doc from Rice had apparently carried no language requirement, since he spoke a coarse pidgin with a brutal and bizarre Texas drawl. It was as if he had learned English from a “You Know You’re a Redneck If” phrase book.
A shared office at SWCCC meant one desk, one chair, one TI line; the two of us weren’t supposed to be in the office at the same time. It was a timeshare, which is ironic, I suppose, considering. We each had our own shallow drawer. I kept a pint of bourbon and a few books in mine. Lee kept – who knew? – a Time Machine in his.
The day it all began was a Friday – the last day of classes before the long holiday weekend, when the “Swick” campus was due to become even quieter and deader than usual.
Since when did Halloween become a college holiday? As much as I hated teaching, I hated holidays even worse. Especially this coming weekend. I had promised to stay away from the apartment while Helen picked up her stuff, mainly the extra uniforms and the little wheeled bag that fit perfectly through the carry-on templates. It was, like her underwear, and indeed her personality, a pricey and initially fetching example of minimal design. And there was, of course, her little dog. But enough about her. I finished my last class (Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives; of which two-thirds had escaped on that underground railway that spirits students away before holidays) and stopped by the office to have a drink and puzzle out a way to kill the evening. No big deal. Welcome to Moviefone.
When I opened the office door and saw a pair of cowboy boots on the desk, my heart skipped, as they say, a beat. Did Connecticut, like New Jersey, have sheriffs? (Turns out it does but they are not Chinese.) But it was nothing so serious. It was only my rarely seen office mate, Won “Bill” Lee, leaning back, reading, a paper cup in one hand and a book in the other.
“Dr. Cole!” Lee said, sitting up and spilling the contents of the paper cup down the front of his never-iron (and never-really-white) white shirt with its plastic pocket protector filled with pens. I could tell by the smell it was my Jack Daniels. “Lay in wait!”
The book was mine too: The Monkey Wrench Gang.
“Just Cole is okay,” I said. “But hey, Lee, keep your seat. I’m only passing through. What are you doing here this late on a Friday afternoon, anyway?” I reached for the phone, but while I was dialing 777-FILM, Lee cut me off with one finger.
“Lay in wait,” Lee said again, standing up. “You and me, pardner.”
“Me? What can I do for you?”
“Like the good book says,” Lee said mysteriously. He replaced the book and the bottle in my drawer and pulled a PalmPC out of his own. Then he grinned, suddenly and rather incongruously, and pointed toward the door. “Round on the house? Wet the whistle? Happy Hour?”
I figured, Why not? Halloween comes only once a year. Thank God.
Lee was small, even for a Chinaman, with black hair that managed to look short and uncut at the same time. He wore a hideous L.L.Bean safari jacket over his no-iron shirt and pen protector. And shoes, you don’t want to know. Since the campus was, quite literally, in the Middle of Nowhere, and I had no car (don’t believe in them: which was only one of Helen’s well-documented complaints), we rode in Lee’s rather surprising Prius to a little place a block from the Sound called, ominously, it seems in retrospect, the Pequod. “Two Jack,” Lee said, and two amber shots of B Grade bourbon appeared on the bar.
I am always amazed that foreigners think Jack Daniels is an A bourbon. I drink it strictly in honor of my Tennessee grandmother. But what the hell, it seemed as good a way as any to kill an evening. “Cheers,” I said, raising my glass. “To Chinese-American friendship.”
“China-merica no-no,” Lee said, shaking his head with a sudden seriousness. Then he smiled, like an actor changing moods. “Dear Abbey yes! Monkey Ranch Gang yes!”
Dear Abbey? I was startled, suspicious even. But no, no way – I decided to let it go. “It’s ‘Wrench,’” I said, draining my glass and signaling for another. “But why not? Here’s to old Ed Abbey.”
Lee smiled and toasted back. Then he winked. “To the Jersey Kaczynski.”
“Whoa!” I looked around. We were alone in the bar except for a couple in the far back, by the jukebox. “Where’d you hear that?”
Though it was no secret how I had lost my position at Princeton, I hadn’t exactly advertised it at Swick. It had been almost five years before. I had done eleven months for refusing to testify about the firebombing of some ski lifts in the Poconos, with collateral damage. No direct connection had been proven, or even officially alleged. Since then I had, rather strategically, distanced myself from the environmental movement.
“Pell,” said Lee. “Smell the beans. No problem.”
“Spill the beans,” I said. “And it is a problem because this Pell should learn to mind his own business and keep his mouth shut. I didn’t know you ran with that crowd anyway.”
Which was true. If Lee was Green, this was the first I had heard of it. The Greens (at Swick, anyway) tended to be all white and ostentatiously boho, neither of which fit Lee’s profile; or, for that matter, my own.
But I felt (as usual) compelled to say more. “The Jersey Kaczynski thing was all bullshit anyway. I had no connection with EarthAlert or with the individuals who were later captured. I happened to be an easy target because I had assigned Kaczynski’s ‘Unabomber Manifesto’ in an American Studies class. The feds came after me because they were too stupid or too lazy to find the individuals they actually wanted.”
Not exactly true but close enough for the Pequod.
“They needn’t have bothered anyway,” I said, getting wound up in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that Lee could barely understand me. Or so I thought. “The environmental movement is a joke. It’s way too late for talk. Peat fires in the arctic tundra. In Africa, the elephants are dying in heaps. The sea level is expected to rise two to four feet in the next hundred years. Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Every any idea,” said Lee, nodding. “Lamentation river stage flood.” What that meant, he explained, and I pieced together, as we shared another round and I began to understand Lee’s fractured Texas English, was that China’s infamous Yellow River Dam project had reached reservoir level one week before, inundating the last of the ancient, doomed villages. Either Lee’s English or my understanding, or both, got better with the whiskey, and I learned that Lee had worked as an engineer on the project for eleven years before comprehending what a disaster it would be. He had then opposed it publicly and clandestinely for two years before being forced to leave the country just two steps ahead of the secret police.
“Bare excape,” he said with an enigmatic smile, effortlessly nailing the authentic Texas pronunciation. I looked at my colleague with new respect. Eleven months in Allenwood Federal Correctional Facility was a piece of cake compared to what they do to you in China, if they catch you. And I had been lecturing him!
“So here’s to Ted,”
I said. I didn’t bother to whisper. Except for the two in the far back, by the jukebox, Lee and I were the only people in the Pequod besides the bartender, a mournful Connecticut Yankee who politely kept his distance while he wiped glasses and watched the “news” on TV, as if the routine murders of inner-city drug dealers were news.
“Ted?” Lee asked, raising his tiny glass.
“Ted Kaczynski. Because the crazy fucker’s right, unfucking-fortunately,” I explained, signaling for another round. “Because we’re in the middle of what E. O. Wilson calls the Sixth Extinction. Because the ongoing, relentless, merciless, and mindless destruction of the planet overrules whatever small progress might have been made against racism, nationalism, greed, or ignorance or all of the above. Because they can’t even make a fucking gesture of a deal to stop global warming; because they deny it’s even happening; because – ”
“So why not Pell? Why not Greens?”
“Because, Lee, what’s Texan for a day late and a dollar short?”
“Why not Monkey Ranch, then, Cole? Why not Dear Abbey indeed?”
“Whoa!” I said, aloud this time. There it was, Dear Abbey, again. This time it was no mistake. It was deliberate. I could tell by Lee’s suddenly inscrutable smile.
Some kind of cop: that was my first thought. I set down my empty glass. “I beg your fucking pardon. What in the world are you talking about?”
“What he’s talking about is what we’ve all been talking about for the past two and a half years,” said a familiar voice from the back of the bar, by the jukebox.
I was suddenly sober, or so it seemed to me. My heart, or what I have been told passes for a heart, was pounding as I turned and faced the two who were walking toward me out of the shadows in the back of the bar. One was Pell, of course, I should have guessed; and right behind Pell was my most valued, most troublesome, and least expected friend.