The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “A few.”

  I shook my head, kind of the way you would if you weren’t completely awake and needed to snap out of a daze or something.

  “I can’t look at the lens,” I said. “It will…you know…It will make me go out.”

  “Out? Out where?”

  I shrugged. “Poof. Who knows? I was hoping you’d be able to show me how to stop doing it.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  And I thought, Are you out of your fucking mind?

  I told myself to just get the hell out of there, but I was stuck, feet firmly planted on the creaking planks of some rat-infested house on this crooked old road, while I stared and stared, and could feel the humid chemical mists from the choppy sea that wore away at the foundations of a collapsing pier.

  Fucking Marbury.

  I pulled my hand up and held my clenched fist in front of Dr. Q. Edward Cahill’s chest. He took a drag from his cigarette.

  The ocean rippled.

  “Let me see it.”

  I opened my hand.

  I looked away, Jack. As soon as I moved my fingers, Dr. Cahill’s room lit up with shadows and shapes that seemed to project three-dimensional images into the smoke that hung everywhere.

  “What’s it supposed to be?” Dr. Cahill said.

  I turned my eyes down and stared at my feet. It felt like I was balancing on a surfboard.

  A shark-infested monster break, Jack.

  “I don’t know. One of the lenses. Like I said, it’s not the lens that got us there, but I can’t look at it. I don’t know what it is. You’re supposed to know, aren’t you?”

  He said, “I don’t see anything in it at all, boy.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  I didn’t understand it. Cahill grabbed the lens out of my hand. As he moved it across the small space between us, everything seemed to twist and smear in the room. I got so dizzy I had to sit down—right on the floor in front of Cahill’s feet.

  He ignored me. I heard the chink of the lens as he placed it down on his desktop. I felt sick.

  Then Cahill opened the box he’d grabbed. It contained another lens—a dark green one that was much smaller in diameter than the one I’d brought.

  He looked down at me as he stood. “Are you all right?”

  My ears roared with the terrible howling of a hurricane, the clicking of millions of bugs.

  I shook my head. “Just dizzy.”

  Cahill turned his attention back to the lenses.

  “This was one of Marbury’s eyepieces,” he said, and raised the small emerald-colored disc. “I haven’t been able to determine what it’s supposed to do.”

  I couldn’t say whether the lens Cahill was holding had any connection to Marbury. All I knew was that I saw nothing in it. Apparently, Cahill couldn’t see anything in either one of the lenses.

  At least, he didn’t see things until he put them together.

  From where I sat on the floor, I was unsure what Cahill did with the smaller lens. It sounded as though he placed it down on top of the blue one I’d stolen from Jack’s room.

  Tink!

  Then he leaned over his desk.

  Dr. Q. Edward Cahill stared down into the lens and vaporized.

  It was just like that. No noise, no struggle. He turned pale, and a few seconds later I realized I could see through him.

  I could say he burned up—became smoke—but that wasn’t exactly the way it happened. It was as if every atom in his body, his clothing, even the cigarette he held between his lips, everything, simply decided to float away. And it wasn’t smoke, but I could smell him. I breathed in tiny fragments of what had once been Dr. Cahill’s body, and I knew it.

  Nothing smells like that, breathing in what used to be some other person.

  I threw up in Cahill’s trash can.

  I must have sat there on the floor with my face down in that garbage for ten minutes.

  Everything stunk like puke and cigarettes.

  I needed to get out of there, but I was scared I couldn’t make myself stand up. So I shut my eyes and waited.

  That was a mistake, too.

  Things started happening somewhere behind the door at the back of Cahill’s office.

  You know how sick we get sometimes, Jack, when we pop in and out of Marbury? How it’s a different kind of sick, sharper, stinging, sweating like you’re going to die. And then the shakes hit.

  You know that.

  That’s how it felt when I was down on the floor in Dr. Cahill’s office.

  I heard the waves lapping at the posts of the pier.

  I didn’t raise my head, but I noticed the light as it changed inside the room, flooding outward from the spot where Creighton Marbury’s lenses lay on Dr. Cahill’s desk. And things began moving around me—shadows.

  A television came on in the back room. It must have been a television. Jack, you remember, don’t you? I swear to God it was playing one of those Home Shopping Channel programs.

  They were selling amethyst jewelry.

  The Amethyst Hour.

  The same thing that was on the television the night Freddie Horvath kidnapped Jack Whitmore.

  You remember.

  Then I heard voices coming from the room, arguing, angry. And there were footsteps and the sound of the door opening.

  And I heard this: the same twanging, velvet lilt of Dr. Cahill, only it was a boy’s voice, and he said, “I’ll put your head on a fucking hook, Jack Whitmore. I am King of Marbury.”

  I looked up.

  You know the light, the bland, boiled-pork color of everything in Marbury. It was Marbury inside that room, Jack, and it went on forever, horizonless and gray.

  The Double-Slit Paradox—you can be in two places at once.

  He’d explained it like that: You can be and not be, and nothing at all exists until you observe it.

  Through that back doorway, I was looking out at the street in front of Cahill’s guesthouse, like it was a mirror’s reflection of the same redbrick staircase I’d climbed moments earlier when I arrived. It was the same, but it was Marbury.

  How does the passenger come to arrive at his point of embarkation?

  I spun around to be sure I was still inside Dr. Cahill’s office. The front door—the door I’d come through—it was still there. Waves lapped at the broken old support posts of the pier. I heard it. Creighton Marbury’s photograph had become a window, blasting directly through the wall of the office, looking out on a landscape Jack and I had ridden through in some other time.

  It was all real.

  I had to get to those lenses, to wrap them up the way Jack always did. But I felt myself slipping, being pulled into Marbury—or wherever the next place was—just like Cahill had been.

  And I needed to stop Marbury from spilling out of those lenses, Jack.

  Dropping in on a big wave.

  I pushed myself to my feet and blindly pawed for the professor’s desk. My fingers swept across its surface.

  Framed through the open back doorway, a small boy—maybe ten years old—sat on the brick steps beside the house—this house—with his bony, bare knees tucked up in front of his chin. The kid looked starved, a living skeleton who wore nothing but a filthy rag for shorts.

  He sat there pulling apart the dead rat I’d seen earlier.

  The boy was eating it.

  Fucking Marbury.

  Just as my fingertip brushed across the two lenses on the desktop, I saw my best friend, Jack Whitmore, looking up at me from the bottom of the stairway.

  He was dressed in soldier’s clothing, and he carried a small rifle—just as he’d looked all those other times in Marbury.

  “Jack?”

  He turned and ran away, disappearing in the haze fogging the street.

  I wanted to go after him so bad. I can’t exactly say why I didn’t follow Jack.

  The little kid sat there, chewing. His teeth and lips smacked wetly into the meat of the dead thin
g he held in his hands.

  I said, “Dumb fucking kid.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and knocked the lenses down from the desk and onto the floor.

  Tink!

  I can say that it stopped, but it didn’t, Jack. Not really.

  Dr. Cahill and I let Marbury out.

  The waves in the photograph stilled.

  I went back down to my knees and felt around the floor for the lenses, but I could only find the larger one—the one I’d stolen from Jack. As soon as I jammed it down inside my pocket, the stale Marbury light faded inside the office and I found myself able to breathe again.

  It was the door at the rear of the office, though, that still remained open. And on the other side of the doorway, the boy on the stairsteps gnawed at his meal under the steaming gray sky of the place I knew as Marbury.

  He glanced back at me, his face smeared with goo. The kid could have been Cahill in reverse—redheaded, pale as cottage cheese.

  He spit something small and dark and said, “Tell your friend to keep out. I’m king here.”

  Then he turned back to his meal.

  I could take a step inside, right?

  Just a quick look around, you know, to see the sights.

  But I didn’t do it, Jack. I knew I would never come back if I did that.

  So I waited for a moment at the front door, trying to work up the nerve to leave. I couldn’t stand the smell of the place—vomit and cigarette smoke. And every time I’d glance at the doorway to the back room, it was still the same. It wouldn’t go away.

  I felt like a little kid hiding my face under a pillow at night because the dark shadows inside my room all turned to monsters until the light of dawn made them vanish. But whenever I’d look, the show hadn’t ended; Marbury was there beyond the threshold of that back door.

  But I thought, what if there’s something even worse outside the front—the way I’d come in? There never were any sure bets after Jack and I started popping back and forth.

  I wanted to go home, though, to be home.

  I opened the door and left Dr. Cahill’s office.

  I flipped the blue lens around in my sweating fingers as I walked down the uneven brick staircase. The rat was gone. No little kid. And there was a parking ticket tucked beneath the windshield wiper on my truck.

  Fucking Berkeley.

  I couldn’t tell Jack what I’d done.

  On the drive back to Glenbrook, I’d nearly convinced myself that none of it happened anyway.

  When I got home the first thing I did was hide the lens I’d stolen from Jack in a place where he’d be able to find it if he ever needed to look. And before going to bed, I called my friend.

  “Hey Jack, what do you think about going out to Cayucos tomorrow to catch some waves?”

  “Sounds good. I can be over at, like, seven.”

  “There’s supposed to be a monster swell coming in.”

  “I heard.”

  “Maybe a few hungry sharks, too.”

  Jack laughed. “You’re insane, Con.”

  “Dude. I know.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  Copyright (C) 2012 by Andrew Smith

  Art copyright (C) 2012 by Scott Fischer

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  Matsumoto Miho had seen ten thousand hospital rooms on the feeds, and not one had looked like this. The room did look clean—no cup or chair was out of place—but a proper hospital room, an American hospital room, contained one patient, not four. The patients, even in the Chinese and Indian feeds, did not look like these men. Proper patients were muscular, bandaged or form-fleshed, unblemished save for a few cuts and, most importantly, attractive.

  These men appeared skeletal, with heads of wild hair, bodies shiny and shrink-wrapped in quarantine cocoons. Miho couldn’t have picked her father from the group if her mother hadn’t led the way to his bedside. Daily sunlamp therapy made him darker than any lab worker should have been. His withered arms, bruised purple along their lengths, rested at uncomfortable angles. His dry mouth hung open, few teeth remaining in it. His eyes were shut, as if in agony.

  “Otōsan,” she whispered.

  “Your father is tired,” Miho’s mother said. A cup of barley tea sat by the bed, untouched. Her father could no longer drink, but robot porters brought the cups every four hours.

  “Should his sheets be changed?” Miho asked.

  “Your father is a special case, because of the quarantine,” Mother said. “His family is not expected to change his sheets. The porters change them when he is taken away for bathing and recontainment. You would understand this if you visited more.”

  Miho didn’t want to visit more. It had all happened so fast. A month ago her father had been swimming laps around men ten years his junior at their building’s pool. Then a containment breach in his research lab at the pharmaceutical company had turned him into this. Nanos filled his body, more mobile than any cancer.

  “We don’t yet have the technology to stop this,” Dr. Nakamura had said. “We’ve never encountered it before. Matsumoto-san’s organs are slowly shutting down. We could keep him alive with machines, but he doesn’t want that.”

  “No, sensei,” Miho’s mother agreed. “My husband does not want that.” It would be an undignified life.

  “It is your husband’s wish that we closely monitor his progress in order to develop procedures for the next patient with such a problem.”

  “Of course.”

  It was just like Father, thinking of himself and his life as nothing but a tool to help others. What had it gotten him? The very machines he’d designed to save the lives of others now offered him death. Miho couldn’t bring herself to touch his atrophied hands. They had once lifted her high onto his big shoulders and bounced her around their home. Those shoulders now stabbed up to form brittle tents in his hospital gown.

  They spent the evening there. Miho watched feeds with the volume low and closed her eyes as if resting so her mother wouldn’t see the video strips light up beneath her lids. She used a hack common to schoolchildren and young office workers which turned off the video every time she opened her eyes.

  She navigated the feeds through a simple yes/no decision tree with a billion branches, choosing paths by simple brainwave control: a concentrated happy thought for “Yes,” a sad one for “No.” Miho and millions like her performed complex maneuvers with hundreds of lightning-speed decisions that made most adults quake. One respected Indian psychologist worried that the technology created a hyperspeed bipolar generation.

  First she caught up on her messages. Tomi would be back from America next week with her maddening friend, Leslie, and would meet her at the high road party. Leslie looked forward to tasting Miho’s latest culinary masterpiece. Ugh. No message from Ichiro. She never expected one, but always checked. Next Miho tried a couple of hospital shows to reinforce the contrast with her surroundings, but couldn’t bear to watch for long. She settled on selling her collection of synthetic flowers piece by piece as she had done for spending money for the last month, periodically glancing up at Aimi’s perfect face in the upper right corner of the marketplace. Why did she keep that posted there?

  While her mother spoke to the doctor, Miho studied the posters in the waiting room, captivated by the advertisement for pore sealing treatment. She synced to the ad, and it came alive through her feeds. The face of the girl on the poster enlarged until Miho could see ultra-smooth skin at the m
icroscopic level. Perfect skin can be achieved. Blemishes a thing of the past. Pure plaz smoothness!

  If only she could have that for herself. There were no prices. She wanted nothing more than to ask how much it cost, but couldn’t, under the circumstances. Her concern should be for her father today, and for the foreseeable future, but then…pure plaz smoothness. Ichiro might love her again if she didn’t look so plain. His friend, Takumi, told her as much last year. She could even become beautiful.

  Miho remembered riding a pony at Ichiro’s uncle’s farm at five years of age, holding him tighter than she needed to. She made a game of feigning terror, like she thought was expected of a girl when with a boy. His father, Tanaka-san, led them on foot. The sun moved two of her handspans across the sky as they rode, but in Miho’s memory it seemed like such a short ride. Her head pressed against Ichiro’s rough oxford shirt as she watched the grassy trail bounce below them. She inhaled the heat and the earthy smell of the small, brown horse. When they returned to the stable, Ichiro leapt from the pony and fell hard on one knee. She remembered his quivering lip when he looked to his softhearted father. Miho jumped down to help him up.

  “You’re all right,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek like her mother would have kissed her. Little Ichiro’s crinkled face smoothed into wonder and he ran off, amid his father’s soft laughter.

  The next month at school, Ichiro found Miho on the playground. “When we get married, my uncle will give us a pony to ride whenever we want,” he told her. “It will be a proper robotic pony that knows how to behave itself.” She had taken their eventual marriage for granted from that day. Through how many kite-flying Aprils? How many school trips and birthday parties? Ten years’ worth, culminating in their first kiss. Trailing off into their last kiss.

  A low, guttural thunder shook the spacescrapers. Darkness encroached upon the dying afternoon. In the distance, grey gulls fought for purchase on mast or tower in the rising winds. Miho hated the thunder and the lightning and hated the winds ruffling her short black hair. They groaned and screamed, ancient and horrible powers as restless as the earth itself. In this age, man should have been able to stave them off with his machine cities. Nature, always filthy, returned Miho’s hatred with a light rain blown in her face like spittle.