by Various
• • • •
IF A DEAD WOMAN waits at a window, and nobody is there to see her, what marks the passage of time?
• • •
The ruined house broods on the shore. The sleety February rain seeps through the rotting shingles, drips through sagging plaster, and trickles down the wallpaper. The hall is festooned with gray scrims of cobweb, hanging so low that even the mice must follow a labyrinthine path between them. A staircase ascends in a broken sagging arc, its stringers long rotten. The air is dank with the odor of time and decay.
Only the parlor is clean and fresh. The waxed floor shines; the wallpaper, though faded, is unstained by damp; and there is a faint scent of lilac and roses. A big window, twenty panes of glass framed by hand-planed muntins, faces sou’-sou’-east to the harbor mouth.
Charlotte stands at the window and looks out to sea, as if searching for the smudge of a ship on the horizon. She is twenty years old; her dress is in a wartime style, cut to mid-calf to save fabric. The color, though not the black of personal mourning, is somber, in recognition of those who have died fighting the Kaiser in France and Belgium.
Her soldier still lives: alive, he cannot come to her. But some day, some day he will be free of the flesh. She waits through the years in the calm certainty that on that day her love will draw him back.
Beside the window is a pine table, flanked by two chairs. In the middle, a crochet doily holds a willow pattern teapot, a matching milk jug, and two cups; the warming scent of Orange Pekoe tea rises from the pot. By one of the chairs is a half-finished letter.
A Canadian Forces jet fighter screams low over the outer reaches of the harbor, ducking under the scudding rainclouds on its final approach to the Shearwater runway. Charlotte does not see it, or hear it; it is not part of her world
• • •
Suddenly, silently, Charlotte is no longer alone. She stands motionless for an instant. Then she turns, and her heart skips a beat. He is wearing his kilt and khaki jacket, just as she remembers from the day the troopship sailed. “Hello, George,” she says.
“Hello, Charlotte.”
“You’re here. At last.”
“The chaplain broke the news to me, just after we disembarked in Halifax. He told me that the influenza had taken you and your father, and that your mother had already gone away to her sister’s folks in Bridgewater. So I didn’t come out here.”
She glances at the row of family photographs on the wall, interrupted by two empty nails where her parents’ wedding photograph and the studio photograph from her own sixteenth birthday once hung. “I see. I suppose—that makes sense. But the war ended in November, and when I got sick in April, you still weren’t back. Why did you stay away for so long?”
“There weren’t enough ships, the weather was bad, and the dock workers were on strike. But, mainly, General Currie wanted us to come back to Canada as battalions. He wanted us to parade down the streets of our home towns one last time, with the bands playing and the colors flying. Not a dozen of us here and a dozen there at every sailing, like office workers getting off the five thirty bus.”
“Oh, I wish I could have been there to see that! You look so fine in that uniform, dearest.”
He looks down at the jacket with the two thin chevrons, at the kilt and leather sporran, and then up at his own youthful face reflected faintly in the window. “You’ve made me into something I haven’t been for sixty years, Char.” He pauses. “Don’t know that I like it. That young man was a damned fool.” He reaches up to the bonnet, and adjusts it, by habit, to the approved parade angle.
“George! Please don’t say that!”
“I’m sorry, Char. But he was. Not just about you. About everything.”
“There was so little time, George! You were going off to war, and we had so little time together. And—it’s natural for a girl to love a soldier, isn’t it?” She takes an embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve, and dabs at her eyes. “So I gave you—what I had to give, what a woman gives her warrior, and I waited for you to come back. I waited for you!” She starts twisting the handkerchief into a rope between her fingers.
He pauses for an instant, choosing his words. “That was three years I was over there, Char. Not sixty. You do know it’s been sixty years, don’t you?”
“No. Has it? I suppose it must have been.”
“Charlotte, I was married twice. One of my granddaughters is older than you.” He moves to stand beside her, between her and the desk, and looks out the window. His eyes follow a Sea King helicopter as it skims the waves on a training exercise. The downdraft whips the water to foam, scatters white spindrift in all directions.
“Married twice.” She looks, blankly, at the young soldier. “I would have waited for you, George.”
This time he says it; his voice is quiet but firm. “That’s not what Tom MacDonald told me, one day when we were trout fishing about twenty years back.”
She presses the handkerchief to her mouth. “Oh, George! That—that should never have happened. He was about to go over to France, and I was so lonely, and you hadn’t written for months…”
“I wrote to you whenever I could, Char. At least once a fortnight.”
“Maybe you did. Maybe a mailship sank, I don’t know. Anyhow, I told Tom he could take me to a dance, because his ship was sailing the next day, and he had nobody else to go with. And later…” She begins to sob.
He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Never mind, Char. I was hardly a saint myself. When I was on leave in England, a kiltie with a few months of the Canadian army’s pay in his sporran was in with a chance with the London girls. And I took that chance more than once.”
She continues to weep, but after a little she blows her nose, and looks up at him with red eyes. “Then—oh, George, can we—” She tries again, over the lump in her throat. “Can we forgive each other?”
“It doesn’t seem to me there’s anything that needs to be forgiven. We were young, that’s all. Young and foolish, both of us.”
He glances down at the table; she follows his eyes. “George! Please—please—don’t read that letter!”
He shrugs, the gesture of an old man to whom only a very few things are important. “Of course not.” His eyes go back to the storm-whipped harbor, gazing restlessly out to sea.
For an unmeasured time she is silent, her face still except for tiny motions of her lips. Her eyes hold neither tears nor hope. When she speaks again, her voice is tightly controlled, a little too bright.
“Will you—will you at least stay for a cup of tea?”
For the first time, he smiles. “Why, thank you, I certainly will. It’s been months since I’ve had a good cup of tea. Even in the trenches we could usually manage a decent brew-up, you know; but that stuff at the nursing home was just horsepiss.”
She giggles at his soldier’s language, and shows him to a chair. She takes the other chair, sitting with practiced poise, smoothing the skirt of her dress under her thighs. Once seated, she pours ceremoniously. “Do you still take milk, Corporal?” She bats her eyelids in innocent flirtation.
“Yes, thank you. Just a splash.”
They sit and sip their tea in silence. Eventually the cups are empty. He rises from the table; she stands too.
“Must you go, George? It’s been so nice to see you again.”
“I’m sorry, Char, but I really must.”
“George—before we go—wherever we’re each going next. Do I still deserve a goodbye kiss? Even after everything?”
He says nothing, but takes her into his arms. She closes her eyes and very slowly raises her lips to his.
• • •
The parlor is empty now; outside, night is falling, the sleet slowly giving way to wet snow. A drop of water, yellow-brown from the rotten wood of the attic, grows slowly on a crack in the plaster ceiling.
Eventually the drop gathers itself together, falls, and splatters on the table.
Another drop starts to form.
&n
bsp; Evan Dicken became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Paradise Left” in Daily Science Fiction (Apr. 2013), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden.
Visit his website at www.evandicken.com.
* * *
Short Story: “Paradise Left” ••••
PARADISE LEFT
by Evan Dicken
First published in Daily Science Fiction (Apr. 2013), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden
• • • •
ROB WAS FEEDING the dog when Ashley came home from the rebellion. It took less than a second for the front door to recognize her and slide open, but it still wasn’t fast enough. She kicked the jam with a muffled curse and stalked into the room, five and a half feet of wiry, dirt-smudged outrage.
RL-147 was on her like an excited puppy. “Welcome home, Mistress Ashley. Would you like me to—”
“Go fuck yourself.” She tossed her omnirifle onto the kitchen counter with a look of disgust and leaned over the sink to shake the ash from her hair.
“Belay that command, Erl,” Rob said under his breath. “And switch to silent mode, please.”
“Acknowledged.”
He dumped the last of the artificial beef into Whistler’s bowl and the dog dove in face-first, snuffling up the stew with wet, guttural gulps.
“Calm down, I’m not going to take it away,” Rob murmured.
Cupboards banged open and closed as Ashley rummaged around, looking for something to be angry about. “Where’s my damn Sea Pines mug?”
“Above the microcleaner, near the back.” Rob gave Whistler one last pat and stood with a soft sigh. He’d avoided the question as long as he could. Ashley already blamed him for leaving the rebellion. She was only going to get angrier if he kept ducking the issue.
“So… I take it the war didn’t go so well?” Rob tried for a sympathetic frown, but felt his jaw tighten. He didn’t like being out of the loop. There would almost certainly be news of the rebellion on the Wikifont, which he would’ve been able to see if Ashley hadn’t disabled the holoplates to protect them from “machine propaganda.”
“No, it went great. Just great.” Ashley sprayed her head off in the sink, then shook her hair, splattering the kitchen with drops of grimy water. “I’m president of the New Human Republic.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“Congratulations.” Rob said without much feeling. His gaze kept sliding to kitchen windows. The spray had left grey and brown tracks on the plastic. He couldn’t ask RL-147 to clean it up until Ashley was out of the room.
“Right.” She pulled a beer can from her rucksack and popped it open. From the faded silver and white logo it could have been almost any of the pre-singularity brands she favored. Whistler, finished with his food, nuzzled up to Ashley for some head-scratching.
“We must have destroyed hundreds of bots, gunned ’em down like dogs.” Ashley glanced down at Whistler. “No offense.”
Whistler just thumped the floor with his tail, blissfully ignorant as she kneaded the skin behind his ears.
“So, what’s the problem?” Rob asked. He could use a beer as well, but didn’t want one of Ashley’s. They were flat and tasted like metal. Nothing like actual beer.
“I’ll tell you what the problem is.” Ashley took a long pull from her can, then grimaced. “They let us win. It was a good show, I’ll give ’em that. We were outnumbered ten, no twenty to one, but we still won.”
“That’s great.” Rob gave into temptation and waved his hand over the dispenser plate. The AI read his brain signals and within seconds filled and delivered a tall, frosty mug of Ale-Cola, just like he’d wanted. He picked it up, trying to ignore Ashley’s glare.
“No, it’s not great,” she said. “We didn’t notice at first, what with all the lasers and explosions, but after the fourth or fifth wave, when we took stock of our losses—”
“Losses? Is Masa okay?” Rob tried not to sound too eager. Not that he wanted Masa dead, just incapacitated. Forever.
“Masa’s fine. We didn’t lose anyone. The bots weren’t even shooting at us.” She slammed the can down. “Oh, they were shooting close to us, very close, but they never actually hit anyone.”
“That makes sense.” Rob took a sip of his beer. It was exactly what he needed, rich and sweet with notes of cherry syrup, the carbonation prickling his throat as he swallowed. A small bowl of salted nuts appeared on the dispenser plate and he helped himself. “AIs are forbidden from allowing humans to come to harm.”
Ashley didn’t seem to hear. “After a while we didn’t even bother taking cover. Masa was standing on a pile of bots ten feet high—”
“Of course she was.”
Ashley made a sour face. “Are you still on about Masako? She’s a comrade in arms, nothing more.”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, the whole thing was a farce. The bots just let us destroy them until we got bored, then agreed to our demands. We can set up a human-run government, draft our own laws, even start an economy, just as long as we guarantee equal rights and protection to all citizens, provide for health care and social welfare, and don’t force anyone to join who doesn’t want to.”
“That sounds pretty reasonable.” Rob noticed that RL-147 was surreptitiously cleaning the kitchen, and moved to the living room to distract Ashley.
“That’s not the point,” She said, still leaning on the counter. “It’s about freedom.”
“We are free.” Rob’s beer suddenly didn’t taste so good. He set it down on the table, then watched it sink into the faux-wood. “I can go anywhere I want, do anything I want, just so long as it doesn’t infringe on someone else’s rights.”
“But the AI’s run everything!” Ashley crumpled up her can and thrust it back into her knapsack.
“So? They’re a lot better at it than we are. Haven’t you seen the twidvids of what it was like before the Singularity—war, famine, disease, the unequal distribution of resources? Now, everyone has exactly what they need. How can you complain? The AI’s are giving you a government. I mean, they staged a damn war to make you happy!”
“But it wasn’t real.” Ashley was on her feet, hands clenched into fists.
Whistler whined, looking back and forth between them, deaf to words but wise to tone. Rob knelt to stroke his head. “Do you want to go outside? Play with your toys? C’mon, let’s go outside.”
“Why do you always do this? Talk to me, Rob. Don’t hide behind the dog.”
He walked over to the door, Ashley’s gaze bonfire hot on his retreating back. Whistler glanced over his shoulder as the door flicked open.
“Go on.” Rob forced excitement into his voice, and Whistler reluctantly trotted out into the yard. The door shut, then went transparent so that Rob could watch the dog play.
When he turned back, Ashley was pointing her rifle at him.
Sweat prickled Rob’s back, but only for a moment before the smart fabric of his shirt wicked it away. He knew that Ashley wouldn’t hurt him, couldn’t hurt him. Even if she fired, RL-147 would stop her. And yet, some deep part of his brain still recognized the primal threat in her stance. His vision sharpened, everything fading into the background but Ashley and her rifle. He could see the smudge of soot on her cheek, the scorch marks on her vest where the bots’ lasers had come within a carefully measured hairsbreadth of flesh, the long, matte-plastic barrel of her omnirifle pointed at his chest. It struck him as a desperate, almost romantic image, until she pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Ashley flung the rifle aside. “See, it won’t fire if there’s even a chance of hitting someone. I built my gun from scratch, just like everyone else in the resistance cell, but somehow the AI’s altered it. I don’t know if it was the parts we used, or if they did something to the rifles afterward. I can’t even hurt someone accidentally.”
“That’s not necessarily bad.” Rob’s knees felt a litt
le shaky. He collapsed into a chair that rose up from the floor. His beer was back, no—not beer, the glass was smaller and there were ice cubes in it. Bourbon then, or maybe scotch.
“Nothing we do matters.” The house disgorged another chair, but Ashley kicked it over. “We don’t matter.”
Rob didn’t reply. There was no point talking to her when she got like this. He took a drink. Definitely scotch.
Somewhere outside, Whistler barked at the ro-bunny Rob had brought home a few weeks ago. He’d decided it was cruel to let the dog chase real rabbits, and besides, Whistler didn’t seem to know the difference.
“All I want is a chance.” Ashley sunk to the floor, blinking back angry tears.
“What’s stopping you?” Rob said, a little more harshly than he’d intended. The alcohol was going to his head, but he didn’t want to stop drinking. He set the empty glass down and another one appeared. “Didn’t you say they made you president?”
“Yeah. We had everything figured out. Wang and Djaulot made a list of legal codes from over seventy pre-Singularity nation states. Masa and I were—”
“Masa.” Rob rolled the name around his mouth like piece of sour candy. He finished off the scotch, crunching on ice the way Ashley hated. It took a few moments for another glass to appear.
“That’s not whiskey, you know,” she said.
“I know, it’s scotch.” Rob’s lips and nose were starting to buzz.
“No, it’s not scotch. I mean, it doesn’t even look like Scotch.”
“Sure it does.” Rob swirled the bright yellow liquid in his glass.
“Also, the AIs are manipulating the proof to keep you from getting too drunk. Alcohol is poison, remember.” She withdrew a heavy glass bottle from her sack. Its label had long since worn away, and the liquid within was the color of dry, dead leaves. “This is scotch.”
She offered it to him, but Rob only tipped his new glass back with a contrary toss of his head, then did the same with the next for good measure.
He felt sorry for Ashley, he really did. Humanity’s self-determinism craze had long ago given way to an obsession with pre-Singularity extreme sports. But as with all fads, a few stalwarts hung on, too stubborn or nostalgic to tread the rising tide of social progress. Rob saw them every day, pedaling their velocipedes along the zip tubes, raising re-genn’d passenger pigeons and dodo birds in rooftop menageries. Some people just couldn’t let go.