Year’s Best SF 15

by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

  “If I didn’t get my throat cut.”

  “Oh, people always overstate that little problem! The big problem is—you know—who wants to work that hard? I got to know this place, because I knew that I could be a hero here. Bigger than my father. I’d be smarter than him, richer than him, more famous, more powerful. I would be better! But that is a burden. ‘Improving the world,’ that doesn’t make me happy at all. That’s a curse, it’s like slavery.”

  “What does make you happy, Massimo?”

  Clearly Massimo had given this matter some thought. “Waking up in a fine hotel with a gorgeous stranger in my bed. That’s the truth! And that would be true of every man in every world, if he was honest.”

  Massimo tapped the neck of the garish brandy bottle with the back of the carving knife. “My girlfriend Svetlana, she understands all that pretty well, but—there’s one other thing. I drink here. I like to drink, I admit that—but they really drink around here. This version of Italy is in the almighty Yugoslav sphere of influence.”

  I had been doing fine so far, given my circumstances. Suddenly the nightmare sprang upon me, unfiltered, total, and wholesale. Chills of terror climbed my spine like icy scorpions. I felt a strong, irrational, animal urge to abandon my comfortable chair and run for my life.

  I could run out of the handsome cafe and into the twilight streets of Turin. I knew Turin, and I knew that Massimo would never find me there. Likely he wouldn’t bother to look.

  I also knew that I would run straight into the world so badly described by that grimy newspaper. That terrifying world would be where, henceforth, I existed. That world would not be strange to me, or strange to anybody. Because that world was reality. It was not a strange world, it was a normal world. It was I, me, who was strange here. I was desperately strange here, and that was normal.

  This conclusion made me reach for my shot glass. I drank. It was not what I would call a ‘good’ brandy. It did have strong character. It was powerful and it was ruthless. It was a brandy beyond good and evil.

  My feet ached and itched in my ruined shoes. Blisters were rising and stinging. Maybe I should consider myself lucky that my aching alien feet were still attached to my body. My feet were not simply slashed off and abandoned in some black limbo between the worlds.

  I put my shot-glass down. “Can we leave now? Is that possible?”

  “Absolutely,” said Massimo, sinking deeper into his cozy red leather chair. “Let’s sober up first with a coffee, eh? It’s always Arabic coffee here at the Elena. They boil it in big brass pots.”

  I showed him the silver coin. “No, she settled our bill for us, eh? So let’s just leave.”

  Massimo stared at the coin, flipped it from head to tails, then slipped it in a pants pocket. “Fine. I’ll describe our options. We can call this place the ‘Yugoslav Italy,’ and, like I said, this place has a lot of potential. But there are other versions.” He started ticking off his fingers.

  “There’s an Italy where the ‘No Nukes’ movement won big in the 1980s. You remember them? Gorbachev and Reagan made world peace. Everybody disarmed and was happy. There were no more wars, the economy boomed everywhere…Peace and justice and prosperity, everywhere on Earth. So the climate exploded. The last Italian survivors are living high in the Alps.”

  I stared at him. “No.”

  “Oh yes. Yes, and those are very nice people. They really treasure and support each other. There are hardly any of them left alive. They’re very sweet and civilized. They’re wonderful people. You’d be amazed what nice Italians they are.”

  “Can’t we just go straight back to my own version of Italy?”

  “Not directly, no. But there’s a version of Italy quite close to yours. After John Paul the First died, they quickly elected another Pope. He was not that Polish anticommunist—instead, that Pope was a pedophile. There was a colossal scandal and the Church collapsed. In that version of Italy, even the Moslems are secular. The churches are brothels and discotheques. They never use the words ‘faith’ or ‘morality.’”

  Massimo sighed, then rubbed his nose. “You might think the death of religion would make a lot of difference to people. Well, it doesn’t. Because they think it’s normal. They don’t miss believing in God any more than you miss believing in Marx.”

  “So first we can go to that Italy, and then nearby into my own Italy—is that the idea?”

  “That Italy is boring! The girls there are boring! They’re so matter-of-fact about sex there that they’re like girls from Holland.” Massimo shook his head ruefully. “Now I’m going to tell you about a version of Italy that’s truly different and interesting.”

  I was staring at a round of the sausage. The bright piece of gristle in it seemed to be the severed foot of some small animal. “All right, Massimo, tell me.”

  “Whenever I move from world to world, I always materialize in the Piazza Vittorio Veneto,” he said, “because that plaza is so huge and usually pretty empty, and I don’t want to hurt anyone with the explosion. Plus, I know Torino—I know all the tech companies here, so I can make my way around. But once I saw a Torino with no electronics.”

  I wiped clammy sweat from my hands with the cafe’s rough cloth napkin. “Tell me, Massimo, how did you feel about that?”

  “It’s incredible. There’s no electricity there. There’s no wires for the electrical trolleys. There are plenty of people there, very well-dressed, and bright colored lights, and some things are flying in the sky…big aircraft, big as ocean-liners. So they’ve got some kind of power there—but it’s not electricity. They stopped using electricity, somehow. Since the 1980s.”

  “A Turin with no electricity,” I repeated, to convince him that I was listening.

  “Yeah, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? How could Italy abandon electricity and replace it with another power source? I think that they use cold fusion! Because cold fusion was another world-changing event from the 1980s. I can’t explore that Torino—because where would I plug in my laptop? But you could find out how they do all that! Because you’re just a journalist, right? All you need is a pencil!”

  “I’m not a big expert on physics,” I said.

  “My God, I keep forgetting I’m talking to somebody from the hopeless George Bush World,” he said. “Listen, stupid: physics isn’t complicated. Physics is very simple and elegant, because it’s structured. I knew that from the age of three.”

  “I’m just a writer, I’m not a scientist.”

  “Well, surely you’ve heard of ‘consilience.’”

  “No. Never.”

  “Yes you have! Even people in your stupid world know about ‘consilience.’ Consilience means that all forms of human knowledge have an underlying unity!”

  The gleam in his eyes was tiring me. “Why does that matter?”

  “It’s makes all the difference between your world and my world! In your world there was a great physicist once…Dr. Italo Calvino.”

  “Famous literary writer,” I said, “he died in the 1980s.”

  “Calvino didn’t die in my Italy,” he said, “because in my Italy, Italo Calvino completed his ‘Six Core Principles.’”

  “Calvino wrote ‘Six Memos,’” I said. “He wrote ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium.’ And he only finished five of those before he had a stroke and died.”

  “In my world Calvino did not have a stroke. He had a stroke of genius, instead. When Calvino completed his work, those six lectures weren’t just ‘memos.’ He delivered six major public addresses at Princeton. When Calvino gave that sixth, great, final speech, on ‘Consistency,’ the halls were crammed with physicists. Mathematicians, too. My father was there.”

  I took refuge in my notebook. ‘Six Core Principles,’ I scribbled hastily, ‘Calvino, Prince ton, consilience.’

  “Calvino’s parents were both scientists,” Massimo insisted. “Calvino’s brother was also a scientist. His Oulipo literary group was obsessed with mathematics. When Calvino delivered lectures worthy
of a genius, nobody was surprised.”

  “I knew Calvino was a genius,” I said. I’d been young, but you can’t write in Italian and not know Calvino. I’d seen him trudging the porticoes in Turin, hunch-shouldered, slapping his feet, always looking sly and preoccupied. You only had to see the man to know that he had an agenda like no other writer in the world.

  “When Calvino finished his six lectures,” mused Massimo, “they carried him off to CERN in Geneva and they made him work on the ‘Semantic Web.’ The Semantic Web works beautifully, by the way. It’s not like your foul little Internet—so full of spam and crime.” He wiped the sausage knife on an oil-stained napkin. “I should qualify that remark. The Semantic Web works beautifully—in the Italian language. Because the Semantic Web was built by Italians. They had a little bit of help from a few French Oulipo writers.”

  “Can we leave this place now? And visit this Italy you boast so much about? And then drop by my Italy?”

  “That situation is complicated,” Massimo hedged, and stood up. “Watch my bag, will you?”

  He then departed to the toilet, leaving me to wonder about all the ways in which our situation could be complicated.

  Now I was sitting alone, staring at that corked brandy bottle. My brain was boiling. The strangeness of my situation had broken some important throttle inside my head.

  I considered myself bright—because I could write in three languages, and I understood technical matters. I could speak to engineers, designers, programmers, venture capitalists and government officials on serious, adult issues that we all agreed were important. So, yes, surely I was bright.

  But I’d spent my whole life being far more stupid than I was at this moment.

  In this terrible extremity, here in the cigarette-choked Elena, where the half-ragged denizens pored over their grimy newspapers, I knew I possessed a true potential for genius. I was Italian, and, being Italian, I had the knack to shake the world to its roots. My genius had never embraced me, because genius had never been required of me. I had been stupid because I dwelled in a stupefied world.

  I now lived in no world at all. I had no world. So my thoughts were rocketing through empty space.

  Ideas changed the world. Thoughts changed the world—and thoughts could be written down. I had forgotten that writing could have such urgency, that writing could matter to history, that literature might have consequence. Strangely, tragically, I’d forgotten that such things were even possible.

  Calvino had died of a stroke: I knew that. Some artery broke inside the man’s skull as he gamely struggled with his manifesto to transform the next millennium. Surely that was a great loss, but how could anybody guess the extent of that loss? A stroke of genius is a black swan, beyond prediction, beyond expectation. If a black swan never arrives, how on Earth could its absence be guessed?

  The chasm between Massimo’s version of Italy and my Italy was invisible—yet all encompassing. It was exactly like the stark difference between the man I was now, and the man I’d been one short hour ago.

  A black swan can never be predicted, expected, or categorized. A black swan, when it arrives, cannot even be recognized as a black swan. When the black swan assaults us, with the wingbeats of some rapist Jupiter, then we must rewrite history.

  Maybe a newsman writes a news story, which is history’s first draft.

  Yet the news never shouts that history has black swans. The news never tells us that our universe is contingent, that our fate hinges on changes too huge for us to comprehend, or too small for us to see. We can never accept the black swan’s arbitrary carelessness. So our news is never about how the news can make no sense to human beings. Our news is always about how well we understand.

  Whenever our wits are shattered by the impossible, we swiftly knit the world back together again, so that our wits can return to us. We pretend that we’ve lost nothing, not one single illusion. Especially, certainly, we never lose our minds. No matter how strange the news is, we’re always sane and sensible. That is what we tell each other.

  Massimo returned to our table. He was very drunk, and he looked greenish. “You ever been in a squat-down Turkish toilet?” he said, pinching his nose. “Trust me: don’t go in there.”

  “I think we should go to your Italy now,” I said.

  “I could do that,” he allowed idly, “although I’ve made some trouble for myself there…my real problem is you.”

  “Why am I trouble?”

  “There’s another Luca in my Italy. He’s not like you: because he’s a great author, and a very dignified and very wealthy man. He wouldn’t find you funny.”

  I considered this. He was inviting me to be bitterly jealous of myself. I couldn’t manage that, yet I was angry anyway. “Am I funny, Massimo?”

  He’d stopped drinking, but that killer brandy was still percolating through his gut.

  “Yes, you’re funny, Luca. You’re weird. You’re a terrible joke. Especially in this version of Italy. And especially now that you’re finally catching on. You’ve got a look on your face now like a drowned fish.” He belched into his fist. “Now, at last, you think that you understand, but no, you don’t. Not yet. Listen: in order to arrive here—I created this world. When I press the Function-Three key, and the field transports me here—without me as the observer, this universe doesn’t even exist.”

  I glanced around the thing that Massimo called a universe. It was an Italian cafe. The marble table in front of me was every bit as solid as a rock. Everything around me was very solid, normal, realistic, acceptable and predictable.

  “Of course,” I told him. “And you also created my universe, too. Because you’re not just a black swan. You’re God.”

  “‘Black swan,’ is that what you call me?” He smirked, and preened in the mirror. “You journalists need a tag-line for everything.”

  “You always wear black,” I said. “Does that keep our dirt from showing?”

  Massimo buttoned his black woolen jacket. “It gets worse,” he told me. “When I press that Function-Two key, before the field settles in…I generate millions of potential histories. Billions of histories. All with their souls, ethics, thoughts, histories, destinies—whatever. Worlds blink into existence for a few nanoseconds while the chip runs through the program—and then they all blink out. As if they never were.”

  “That’s how you move? From world to world?”

  “That’s right, my friend. This ugly duckling can fly.”

  The Elena’s waiter arrived to tidy up our table. “A little rice pudding?” he asked.

  Massimo was cordial. “No, thank you, sir.”

  “Got some very nice chocolate in this week! All the way from South America.”

  “My, that’s the very best kind of chocolate.” Massimo jabbed his hand into a cargo pocket. “I believe I need some chocolate. What will you give me for this?”

  The waiter examined it carefully. “This is a woman’s engagement ring.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It can’t be a real diamond, though. This stone’s much too big to be a real diamond.”

  “You’re an idiot,” said Massimo, “but I don’t care much. I’ve got a big appetite for sweets. Why don’t you bring me an entire chocolate pie?”

  The waiter shrugged and left us.

  “So,” Massimo resumed, “I wouldn’t call myself a ‘God’—because I’m much better described as several million billion Gods. Except, you know, that the zero-point transport field always settles down. Then, here I am. I’m standing outside some cafe, in a cloud of dirt, with my feet aching. With nothing to my name, except what I’ve got in my brain and my pockets. It’s always like that.”

  The door of the Elena banged open, with the harsh jangle of brass Indian bells. A gang of five men stomped in. I might have taken them for cops, because they had jackets, belts, hats, batons and pistols, but Turinese cops do not arrive on duty drunk. Nor do they wear scarlet armbands with crossed lightning bolts.

  The cafe
fell silent as the new guests muscled up to the dented bar. Bellowing threats, they proceeded to shakedown the staff.

  Massimo turned up his collar and gazed serenely at his knotted hands. Massimo was studiously minding his own business. He was in his corner, silent, black, inexplicable. He might have been at prayer.

  I didn’t turn to stare at the intruders. It wasn’t a pleasant scene, but even for a stranger, it wasn’t hard to understand.

  The door of the men’s room opened. A short man in a trenchcoat emerged. He had a dead cigar clenched in his teeth, and a snappy Alain Delon fedora.

  He was surprisingly handsome. People always underestimated the good looks, the male charm of Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy sometimes seemed a little odd when sunbathing half-naked in newsstand tabloids, but in person, his charisma was overwhelming. He was a man that any world had to reckon with.

  Sarkozy glanced about the cafe, for a matter of seconds. Then he sidled, silent and decisive, along the dark mahogany wall. He bent one elbow. There was a thunderclap. Massimo pitched face-forward onto the small marble table.

  Sarkozy glanced with mild chagrin at the smoking hole blown through the pocket of his stylish trenchcoat. Then he stared at me.

  “You’re that journalist,” he said.

  “You’ve got a good memory for faces, Monsieur Sarkozy.”

  “That’s right, asshole, I do.” His Italian was bad, but it was better than my French. “Are you still eager to ‘protect’ your dead source here?” Sarkozy gave Massimo’s heavy chair one quick, vindictive kick, and the dead man, and his chair, and his table, and his ruined, gushing head all fell to the hard cafe floor with one complicated clatter.

  “There’s your big scoop of a story, my friend,” Sarkozy told me. “I just gave that to you. You should use that in your lying commie magazine.”

  Then he barked orders at the uniformed thugs. They grouped themselves around him in a helpful cluster, their faces pale with respect.