The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St Martin's) 26

by Gardner Dozois

  Kirsten misinterpreted his anxiety. She thought she knew why Jack had brought her to this secluded spot. After a while, she decided he needed encouragement, so she took off her shirt and her bra.

  It was the wrong thing to do. Jack hadn’t meant this outing to be a test . . . but it was, and Kirsten had failed.

  Jack took off his own shirt and wrapped his arms around her, chest touching breasts for the first time. He discovered it was possible to be excited and disappointed at the same time.

  Jack and Kirsten made out on a patch of hard dirt. It was the first time they’d been alone with no risk of interruption. They kept their pants on, but they knew they could go farther: as far as there was. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do. Jack and Kirsten felt light in their skins—open and dizzy with possibilities.

  Yet for Jack, it was all a mistake: one that couldn’t be reversed. Now he’d never tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. He’d missed his chance because she’d acted the way Jack’s sister would have acted. Kirsten had been thinking like a girl and she’d ruined things forever.

  Jack hated the way he felt: all angry and resentful. He really liked Kirsten. He liked making out, and couldn’t wait till the next time. He refused to be a guy who dumped a girl as soon as she let him touch her breasts. But he was now shut off from her and he had no idea how to get over that.

  In the following months, Jack grew guiltier: he was treating Kirsten as if she were good enough for sex but not good enough to be told about the most important thing in his life. As for Kirsten, every day made her more unhappy: she felt Jack blaming her for something but she didn’t know what she’d done. When they got together, they went straight to fondling and more as soon as possible. If they tried to talk, they didn’t know what to say.

  In August, Kirsten left to spend three weeks with her grandparents on Vancouver Island. Neither she nor Jack missed each other. They didn’t even miss the sex. It was a relief to be apart. When Kirsten got back, they went for a walk and a confused conversation. Both produced excuses for why they couldn’t stay together. The excuses didn’t make sense, but neither Jack nor Kirsten noticed—they were too ashamed to pay attention to what they were saying. They both felt like failures. They’d thought their love would last forever, and now it was ending sordidly.

  When the lying was over, Jack went for a run. He ran in a mental blur. His mind didn’t clear until he found himself at the pond.

  Night was drawing in. He thought of all the things he’d done with Kirsten on the shore and in the water. After that first time, they’d come here a lot; it was private. Because of Kirsten, this wasn’t the same pond as when Jack had first begun to practice with the ray-gun. Jack wasn’t the same boy. He and the pond now carried histories.

  Jack could feel himself balanced on the edge of quitting. He’d turned seventeen. One more year of high school, then he’d go away to university. He realized he no longer believed in the imminent arrival of aliens, nor could he see himself as some great hero saving the world.

  Jack knew he wasn’t a hero. He’d used a nice girl for sex, then lied to get rid of her.

  He felt like crap. But blasting the shit out of sticks made him feel a little better. The ray-gun still had its uses, even if shooting aliens wasn’t one of them.

  The next day Jack did more blasting. He pumped iron. He got science books out of the library. Without Kirsten at his side several hours a day, he had time to fill, and emptiness. By the first day of the new school year, Jack was back to his full hero-dom program. He no longer deceived himself that he was preparing for battle, but the program gave him something to do: a purpose, a release, and a penance.

  So that was Jack’s passage into manhood. He was dishonest with the girl he loved.

  Manhood means learning who you are.

  In his last year of high school, Jack went out with other girls but he was past the all-or-nothingness of First Love. He could have casual fun; he could approach sex with perspective. “Monumental and life-changing” had been tempered to “pleasant and exciting.” Jack didn’t take his girlfriends for granted, but they were people, not objects of worship. He was never tempted to tell any of them about the gun.

  When he left town for university, Jack majored in Engineering Physics. He hadn’t decided whether he’d ever analyze the ray-gun’s inner workings, but he couldn’t imagine taking courses that were irrelevant to the weapon. The ray-gun was the central fact of Jack’s life. Even if he wasn’t a hero, he was set apart from other people by this evidence that aliens existed.

  During freshman year, Jack lived in an on-campus dormitory. Hiding the ray-gun from his roommate would have been impossible. Jack left the weapon at home, hidden near the pond. In sophomore year, Jack rented an apartment off campus. Now he could keep the ray-gun with him. He didn’t like leaving it untended.

  Jack persuaded a lab assistant to let him borrow a Geiger counter. The ray-gun emitted no radioactivity at all. Objects blasted by the gun showed no significant radioactivity either. Over time, Jack borrowed other equipment, or took blast debris to the lab so he could conduct tests when no one was around. He found nothing that explained how the ray-gun worked.

  The winter before Jack graduated, Great-Uncle Ron finally died. In his will, the old man left his twenty acres of forest to Jack. Uncle Ron had found out that Jack liked to visit the pond. “I told him,” said big sister Rachel. “Do you think I didn’t know where you and Kirsten went?”

  Jack had to laugh—uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to discover he couldn’t keep secrets any better than his sister.

  Jack’s father offered to help him sell the land to pay for his education. The offer was polite, not pressing. Uncle Ron had doled out so much cash in his will that Jack’s family was now well-off. When Jack said he’d rather hold on to the property “until the market improves,” no one objected.

  After getting his bachelor’s degree, Jack continued on to grad school: first his master’s, then his Ph.D. In one of his courses, he met Deana, working toward her own doctorate—in Electrical Engineering rather than Engineering Physics.

  The two programs shared several seminars, but considered themselves rivals. Engineering Physics students pretended that Electrical Engineers weren’t smart enough to understand abstract principles. Electrical Engineers pretended that Engineering Physics students were pie-in-the-sky dreamers whose theories were always wrong until real Engineers fixed them. Choosing to sit side by side, Jack and Deana teased each other every class. Within months, Deana moved into Jack’s apartment.

  Deana was small but physical. She told Jack she’d been drawn to him because he was the only man in their class who lifted weights. When Deana was young, she’d been a competitive swimmer—“Very competitive,” she said—but her adolescent growth spurt had never arrived and she was eventually outmatched by girls with longer limbs. Deana had quit the competition circuit, but she hadn’t quit swimming nor had she lost the drive to be one up on those around her. She saw most things as contests, including her relationship with Jack. Deana was not beyond cheating if it gave her an edge.

  In the apartment they now shared, Jack thought he’d hidden the ray-gun so well that Deana wouldn’t find it. He didn’t suspect that when he wasn’t home she went through his things. She couldn’t stand the thought that Jack might have secrets from her.

  He returned one day to find the gun on the kitchen table. Deana was poking at it. Jack wanted to yell, “Leave it alone!” but he was so choked with anger he couldn’t speak.

  Deana’s hand was close to the trigger. The safety was off and the muzzle pointed in Jack’s direction. He threw himself to the floor.

  Nothing happened. Deana was so surprised by Jack’s sudden move that she jerked her hand away from the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Jack got to his feet. “I could ask you the same question.”

  “I found this. I wondered what it was.”

  Jack knew she didn’t “find” the gun. It
had been buried under old notebooks inside a box at the back of a closet. Jack expected that Deana would invent some excuse for why she’d been digging into Jack’s private possessions, but the excuse wouldn’t be worth believing.

  What infuriated Jack most was that he’d actually been thinking of showing Deana the gun. She was a very very good engineer; Jack had dreamed that together, he and she might discover how the gun worked. Of all the women Jack had known, Deana was the first he’d asked to move in with him. She was strong and she was smart. She might understand the gun. The time had never been right to tell her the truth—Jack was still getting to know her and he needed to be absolutely sure—but Jack had dreamed . . .

  And now, like Kirsten at the pond, Deana had ruined everything. Jack felt so violated he could barely stand to look at the woman. He wanted to throw her out of the apartment . . . but that would draw too much attention to the gun. He couldn’t let Deana think the gun was important.

  She was still staring at him, waiting for an explanation. “That’s just something from my Great-Uncle Ron,” Jack said. “An African good-luck charm. Or Indonesian. I forget. Uncle Ron traveled a lot.” Actually, Ron sold insurance and seldom left the town where he was born. Jack picked up the gun from the table, trying to do so calmly rather than protectively. “I wish you hadn’t touched this. It’s old and fragile.”

  “It felt pretty solid to me.”

  “Solid but still breakable.”

  “Why did you dive to the floor?”

  “Just silly superstition. It’s bad luck to have this end point toward you.” Jack gestured toward the muzzle. “And it’s good luck to be on this end.” He gestured toward the butt, then tried to make a joke. “Like there’s a Maxwell demon in the middle, batting bad luck one way and good luck the other.”

  “You believe that crap?” Deana asked. She was an engineer. She went out of her way to disbelieve crap.

  “Of course, I don’t believe it,” Jack said. “But why ask for trouble?”

  He took the gun back to the closet. Deana followed. As Jack returned the gun to its box, Deana said she’d been going through Jack’s notes in search of anything he had on partial differential equations. Jack nearly let her get away with the lie; he usually let the women in his life get away with almost anything. But he realized he didn’t want Deana in his life anymore. Whatever connection she and he had once felt, it was cut off the moment he saw her with the ray-gun.

  Jack accused her of invading his privacy. Deana said he was paranoid. The argument grew heated. Out of habit, Jack almost backed down several times, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want Deana under the same roof as the ray-gun. His feelings were partly irrational possessiveness, but also justifiable caution. If Deana got the gun and accidentally fired it, the results might be disastrous.

  Jack and Deana continued to argue: right there in the closet within inches of the ray-gun. The gun lay in its box, like a child at the feet of parents fighting over custody. The ray-gun did nothing, as if it didn’t care who won.

  Eventually, unforgivable words were spoken. Deana said she’d move out as soon as possible. She left to stay the night with a friend.

  The moment she was gone, Jack moved the gun. Deana still had a key to the apartment—she needed it until she could pack her things—and Jack was certain she’d try to grab the weapon as soon as he was busy elsewhere. The ray-gun was now a prize in a contest, and Deana never backed down.

  Jack took the weapon to the university. He worked as an assistant for his Ph.D. supervisor, and he’d been given a locker in the supervisor’s lab. The locker wasn’t Fort Knox but leaving the gun there was better than leaving it in the apartment. The more Jack thought about Deana, the more he saw her as prying and obsessive, grasping for dominance. He didn’t know what he’d ever seen in her.

  The next morning, he wondered if he had overreacted. Was he demonizing his ex like a sitcom cliché? If she was so egotistic, why hadn’t he noticed before? Jack had no good answer. He decided he didn’t need one. Unlike when he broke up with Kirsten, Jack felt no guilt this time. The sooner Deana was gone, the happier he’d be.

  In a few days, Deana called to say she’d found a new place to live. She and Jack arranged a time for her to pick up her belongings. Jack didn’t want to be there while she moved out; he couldn’t stand seeing her in the apartment again. Instead, Jack went back to his home town for a long weekend with his family.

  It was lucky he did. Jack left Friday afternoon and didn’t get back to the university until Monday night. The police were waiting for him. Deana had disappeared late Saturday.

  She’d talked to friends on Saturday afternoon. She’d made arrangements for Sunday brunch but hadn’t shown up. No one had seen her since.

  As the ex-boyfriend, Jack was a prime suspect. But his alibi was solid: his home town was hundreds of miles from the university, and his family could testify he’d been there the whole time. Jack couldn’t possibly have sneaked back to the university, made Deana disappear, and raced back home.

  Grudgingly, the police let Jack off the hook. They decided Deana must have been depressed by the break-up of the relationship. She might have run off so she wouldn’t have to see Jack around the university. She might even have committed suicide.

  Jack suspected otherwise. As soon as the police let him go, he went to his supervisor’s lab. His locker had been pried open. The ray-gun lay on a nearby lab bench.

  Jack could easily envision what happened. While moving out her things, Deana searched for the ray-gun. She hadn’t found it in the apartment. She knew Jack had a locker in the lab and she’d guessed he’d stashed the weapon there. She broke open the locker to get the gun. She’d examined it and perhaps tried to take it apart. The gun went off.

  Now Deana was gone. Not even a smudge on the floor. The ray-gun lay on the lab bench as guiltless as a stone. Jack was the only one with a conscience.

  He suffered for weeks. Jack wondered how he could feel so bad about a woman who’d made him furious. But he knew the source of his guilt: while he and Deana were arguing in the closet, Jack had imagined vaporizing her with the gun. He was far too decent to shoot her for real, but the thought had crossed his mind. If Deana simply vanished, Jack wouldn’t have to worry about what she might do. The ray-gun had made that thought come true, as if it had read Jack’s mind.

  Jack told himself the notion was ridiculous. The gun wasn’t some genie who granted Jack’s unspoken wishes. What happened to Deana came purely from her own bad luck and inquisitiveness.

  Still, Jack felt like a murderer. After all this time, Jack realized the ray-gun was too dangerous to keep. As long as Jack had it, he’d be forced to live alone: never marrying, never having children, never trusting the gun around other people. And even if Jack became a recluse, accidents could happen. Someone else might die. It would be Jack’s fault.

  He wondered why he’d never had this thought before. Jack suddenly saw himself as one of those people who own a vicious attack dog. People like that always claimed they could keep the dog under control. How often did they end up on the evening news? How often did children get bitten, maimed or killed?

  Some dogs are tragedies waiting to happen. The ray-gun was too. It would keep slipping off its leash until it was destroyed. Twelve years after finding the gun, Jack realized he finally had a heroic mission: to get rid of the weapon that made him a hero in the first place.

  I’m not Spider-Man, he thought, I’m Frodo.

  But how could Jack destroy something that had survived so much? The gun hadn’t frozen in the cold of outer space; it hadn’t burned up as it plunged through Earth’s atmosphere; it hadn’t broken when it hit the ground at terminal velocity. If the gun could endure such punishment, extreme measures would be needed to lay it to rest.

  Jack imagined putting the gun into a blast furnace. But what if the weapon went off? What if it shot out the side of the furnace? The furnace itself could explode. That would be a disaster. Other means of destruction
had similar problems. Crushing the gun in a hydraulic press . . . what if the gun shot a hole in the press, sending pieces of equipment flying in all directions? Immersing the gun in acid . . . what if the gun went off and splashed acid over everything? Slicing into the gun with a laser . . . Jack didn’t know what powered the gun, but obviously it contained vast energy. Destabilizing that energy might cause an explosion, a radiation leak, or some even greater catastrophe. Who knew what might happen if you tampered with alien technology?

  And what if the gun could protect itself? Over the years, Jack had read every ray-gun story he could find. In some stories, such weapons had built-in computers. They had enough artificial intelligence to assess their situations. If they didn’t like what was happening, they took action. What if Jack’s gun was similar? What if attempts to destroy the weapon induced it to fight back? What if the ray-gun got mad?

  Jack decided the only safe plan was to drop the gun into an ocean—the deeper the better. Even then, Jack feared the gun would somehow make its way back to shore. He hoped that the weapon would take years or even centuries to return, by which time humanity might be scientifically equipped to deal with the ray-gun’s power.

  Jack’s plan had one weakness: both the university and Jack’s home town were far from the sea. Jack didn’t know anyone with an ocean-going boat suitable for dumping objects into deep water. He’d just have to drive to the coast and see if he could rent something.

  But not until summer. Jack was in the final stages of his Ph.D. and didn’t have time to leave the university for an extended trip. As a temporary measure, Jack moved the ray-gun back to the pond. He buried the weapon several feet underground, hoping that would keep it safe from animals and anyone else who happened by.

  (Jack imagined a new generation of lovesick teenagers discovering the pond. If that happened, he wanted them safe. Like a real hero, Jack cared about people he didn’t know.)