Year’s Best SF 15

by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

  Potter said, “That won’t happen.”

  “I’ve answered your questions, Mr. Potter.” Churchill looked accusingly at his smoldering cigar and set it on the edge of the little table. “Now you must answer one or two for me. The colonel here has told me that I am not being taken to President Kuhn. It relieved my mind at the time and will relieve it further now, if you confirm it. What do you say?”

  “That we want you, not Kuhn.” By a gesture, Potter indicated von Steigerwald and himself. “Donovan sent us. We’re from the O.S.S.—the Office of Strategic Services. Roosevelt set us up before he was voted out, and he put Colonel Donovan in charge. President Kuhn has found us useful.”

  Churchill looked thoughtful. “As you hope to find me.”

  “Exactly. Kuhn and his German-American Bund have been pro-German throughout the war, as you must know. America even sold Germany munitions.”

  Churchill nodded.

  “But now Hitler’s the master of Europe, and he’s starting to look elsewhere. He has to keep his army busy, after all, and he needs new triumphs.” Potter leaned forward, his thin face intense. “Roosevelt, who had been immensely popular just a year before, was removed from office because he opened America to European Jews—”

  “Including you,” von Steigerwald put in.

  “Right, including me and thousands more like me. America was just recovering from the Depression, and people were terrified of us refugees and what we might do to the economy. Fritz Kuhn and his German-American Bund replaced the old, patriotic Republican Party that had freed the slaves. I’m sure that half the people who voted for Kuhn hoped he would send us back to Hitler.”

  Churchill said, “Which he has declined to do.”

  “Of course.” Potter grinned. “Who would he protect America from if we were gone? He’s getting shaky as it is.”

  Von Steigerwald cleared his throat. “It might be possible to persuade Roosevelt to come out of retirement. Potter here thinks that way. He may be right.”

  “Or at least to get Roosevelt to endorse some other Democrat,” Potter said.

  Churchill nodded. “I could suggest half a dozen. No doubt you could add a dozen more. But where do I come into all this? Donovan wants me, you say.”

  Potter nodded. “He does, but to understand where you come in, Mr. Prime Minister, you have to understand Donovan and his position. He was Roosevelt’s man. Roosevelt appointed him, and he’s done a wonderful job. The O.S.S. worked hard and selflessly for America when Roosevelt was president, and it’s working hard and selflessly for America now that Kuhn and his gang are in the White House.”

  “Yet he would prefer Roosevelt.” Churchill fished a fresh cigar from his pocket.

  “We all would,” Potter said. “Donovan doesn’t think he’ll do it—he’s a sick man—but that’s what all of us would like. We’d like America to go back to nineteen forty and correct the mistake she made then. Above all, we’d like the Bund out of power.”

  Rolling the cigar between his hands, Churchill nodded.

  “But if and when it comes to a war between Hitler and Kuhn, we will be with Kuhn and our country.”

  “Right or wrong.” Churchill smiled.

  “Exactly.”

  Von Steigerwald cleared his throat again. “You’re not American, Potter. You’re a refugee—you said so. Where were you born?”

  “In London,” Potter snapped. “But I’m as American as you are. I’m a naturalized United States citizen.”

  “Thanks to Donovan, I’m sure.”

  Potter turned back to Churchill. “So far Kuhn hasn’t interned us, much less returned us to the Germans. There are quite a few people whose advice and protests have prevented that. Donovan’s one of them. We give America a pool of violently anti-Nazi people, many well-educated, who speak every European language. If you’ve been wondering why so many of us are in the O.S.S. you should understand now.”

  “I wasn’t wondering,” Churchill said mildly.

  “War with Hitler looks inevitable.” Potter paused scowling. “Once I told my native-born friend here that England had stood alone against the Axis. He corrected me. America really will stand alone. She won’t have a friend in the world except the conquered peoples.”

  “Which is why we freed you,” von Steigerwald added. “If Hitler can be kept busy trying to get a grip on his conquests—on Britain and France, particularly—he won’t go after America. It will give President Kuhn time to persuade the die-hard Democrats that we must arm, and give him time to do it. We’ve taken Iceland, and we’ll use it to beam your broadcasts to Britain. We’re broadcasting to Occupied Norway already.”

  Frowning, Churchill returned the cigar to his pocket. “You want me to lead a British underground against the Huns.”

  “Exactly,” Potter said. “To lead them from the safety of America, and to form a government in exile.”

  “Already I have led the British underground you hope for from London.” Churchill was almost whispering. “From the danger of London.” Abruptly his voice boomed, filling the tiny cabin. “From the ruins of London I have led the ruins of the British people against an enemy ten times stronger than they. They were a brave people once. Now their brave are dead.”

  “You,” said Potter, “are as brave as any man known to history.”

  “I,” said Churchill, “could not bring myself to take my own life, though I had sworn I would.”

  “You tried to kill yourself long ago,” von Steigerwald reminded him, “in Africa.”

  “Correct.” Churchill’s eyes were far away. “I had a revolver. I put it to my temple and pulled the trigger. It would not fire. I pulled the trigger again. It would not fire. I pointed it out the window and pulled the trigger a third time, and it fired.”

  He chuckled softly. “This time I lacked the courage to pull the trigger at all. They snatched it from me and threw me down, and I knew I should have shot them instead. I would have killed one or two, the rest would have killed me, and it would have been over.”

  He turned to Potter. “What you propose—what my friend Donovan proposes—will not work. It cannot be done. Let me tell you instead what I can do and will do. Next year, I will run for president.”

  Von Steigerwald said, “Are you serious?”

  “Never more so. I will run, and I will win.”

  For a moment, hope gleamed in Potter’s eyes; but they were dull when he spoke. “You can’t become president, Mr. Prime Minister. The president must be a native-born citizen. It’s in the Constitution.”

  “I am native born,” Churchill smiled, “and I shall become a citizen, just as you have. It is a little-known fact, but my mother returned to her own country—to the American people she knew and loved so much—so that her son might be born there. I was born in…”

  Churchill paused, considering. “In Boston, I think. It’s a large place, with many births. My friend Donovan will find documentary proof of my nativity. He is a skilful finder of documents, from what I’ve heard.”

  “Oh, my God.” Potter sounded as if he were praying. “Oh, my God!”

  “Kuhn is a Hitler in the egg,” Churchill told him. “The nest must be despoiled before the egg can hatch. I collected eggs as a boy. Many of us did. I’ll collect this one. As I warned the British people—”

  Von Steigerwald had pushed off the safety as his Luger cleared the holster. Churchill was still speaking when von Steigerwald shot him in the head.

  “Heil Kuhn!” von Steigerwald muttered.

  Potter leaped to his feet and froze, seeing only the faintly smoking muzzle aimed at his face.

  “He dies for peace,” von Steigerwald snapped. “He would have had America at war in a year. Now pick him up. Not like that! Get your hands under his arms. Drag him out on deck and get one of them to help you throw him overboard. They starved him. He can’t be heavy.”

  As Potter fumbled with the latch of the cabin door, von Steigerwald wondered whether it would be necessary to shoot Potter as well.
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  Necessary or not, it would certainly be pleasant.

  The Calculus Plague

  MARISSA K. LINGEN

  Marissa K. Lingen (www.marissalingen.com) lives in Eagan, Minnisota. In 1999 she won the Asimov’s Award for Undergraduate fiction (now called the Dell Magazines Award) and has been writing short stories ever since. She has been publishing stories in the genre since 2002. “My background was in physics,” she says, “so I’m particularly pleased to have sold to Nature, Nature Physics, and Analog, but I also write fantasy—On Spec has published several of my hockey fantasy stories.”

  “The Calculus Plague” was published in Analog. Here, a biological scientist is experimenting with viruses on a college campus and makes a world-changing discovery. The story of the scientist who discovers something that transforms our understanding of the world is a standard of SF and an essential part of the genre’s charm.

  The Calculus Plague came first. Almost no one took offense at it. In fact, it took a while for anyone to find out about it at all. No one had any reason to talk about a dim memory of their high school math teacher, whose face didn’t seem familiar somehow, and what was her name again? His name? Well, what did it matter?

  It wasn’t until Dr. Leslie Baxter, an economics professor at the U, heard her four-year-old son ask, “What’s Newton’s Method, Mommy?” that anyone began to notice anything wrong. At first Leslie assumed that Nicholas’s most recent babysitter had been talking about his calculus assignment over the phone when sitting for Nicholas, but when she confronted the young man, he admitted that he had taken part in a viral memory experiment that was aimed at teaching calculus through transmission of memories.

  Young Nicholas Baxter was living proof that it did no good to remember something if you couldn’t understand it to begin with. Leslie assured Nicholas that she would explain the math when he was older. Then she went to the faculty judicial board to discuss forming a committee to establish ethical guidelines for faculty participation in viral memory transfer research.

  They were still deciding who would be on the committee—from which departments, in which proportions, and was Dr. So-and-so too junior for the responsibility? Was Prof. Such-and-such too senior to agree to take it on?—when the second wave hit.

  “I know I have never taken George’s seminar on Faulkner,” said Leslie furiously. “Never! I hate Faulkner, and George wasn’t on faculty anywhere I’ve studied.”

  “But what does it hurt to remember some kids sitting around talking about The Sound and the Fury, Les?” asked her friend and colleague Amy Pradhan.

  “Easy for you to say. You didn’t catch it.”

  Amy shrugged. “I don’t think I’d be making a fuss if I had.”

  Leslie shook her head. “Don’t take this wrong, but you don’t even like it when people drop by your house without calling first. But somehow it’d be better if it was your head?”

  “It’s not like they can read your thoughts, Les.”

  “No, they can make my thoughts. And that’s worse.”

  “They’re not making you like Faulkner,” said Amy. “I know someone else who caught it and loved Faulkner, and she doesn’t hate it now. You can still respond as yourself.”

  “Mighty big of them, to let me respond as myself.”

  Amy grimaced. “Can we talk about something else, please?

  “Okay, okay. How’s Molly? Are you still seeing her?”

  Amy blushed and the conversation moved on to friends and family, books and movies, campus gossip, and other things that had nothing to do with Leslie coming down with a stuffy nose and Faulkner memories.

  The usual people wrote their editorials and letters to the editor, but most people could not bother themselves to get excited about a virally transmitted memory of a lecture on Faulkner. Even the Faulkner-haters in the English department shrugged and moved on. Leslie found herself alone in confronting the project head, Dr. Solada Srisai. Srisai was tidy in the way of women who have had to fight very hard and very quietly for what they have. The warm red of her suit went perfectly with the warm brown of her skin. Leslie felt tall and chilly and ridiculous.

  “I don’t think anyone will be hurt by knowing calculus, do you?” Solada murmured, when Leslie explained why she was there.

  “You’re a biologist,” said Leslie. “You know how many forms you have to fill out to do human experimentation. If I want to ask a dozen freshmen whether they’d buy a cookie for a dollar, I have to fill out forms.”

  “Our experimental subjects filled out their forms,” said Solada. “The viruses fell slightly outside our predicted parameters and got transmitted to a few people close to the original test subjects and then a few people close to them. This is a problem we will remedy in future trials, I assure you.”

  A grad student with wire-rimmed glasses poked her head around the door. “Solada, we’ve got the people from the Empty Moon here.”

  “Start going over their parameters,” said Solada. “I’ll be done with this in a minute.”

  “Empty Moon?” asked Leslie.

  “It’s a new café,” said Solada. “We’ve come to an agreement with them about marketing. Volunteers—who have all the forms filled out, Dr. Baxter—will be infected with positive memories of the food at the Empty Moon Café, and we’ll track their reports of how often they eat there and what they order compared to what they remember.”

  “Don’t you have an ethical problem with this?” Leslie demanded.

  Solada shrugged. “Not everybody likes the same food. If they go to the Empty Moon and have a terrible sandwich or the service is slow, they’ll figure their first memory was a fluke. They’ll go somewhere else. Or if they’re in the mood for Mexican, they’ll go for Mexican. We’ll make sure that this virus is far less mutative and virulent than the others—which were really not bad considering how colds usually spread on a college campus. Well within the error range one might expect.”

  “Not within the error range I’d expect,” said Leslie. “I’ll be conveying this to a faculty ethics committee, Dr. Srisai.”

  Solada shrugged and smiled dismissively. “You must do as your conscience dictates, of course.”

  The business at the Empty Moon Café was booming. Leslie told herself very firmly that her memory of the awesome endive salad she’d had there was a snare and a delusion; she stayed away even when Amy wanted to meet there for coffee.

  No one else seemed to care when she tried to tell them about the newest marketing ploy.

  A few weeks later, Leslie was doing the dishes while her husband put Nicholas to bed. Her doorbell rang three times in quick succession, and then there was a pounding on the door. Wiping her hands on the dishtowel, she went to answer it. Amy was standing on the doorstep, an ashen undertone to her dark skin.

  “There’s been—” Amy swallowed hard, and managed to get a strangled, “Oh, God,” past her lips.

  “Come in. Sit down. I’ll get you tea. What’s happened?”

  “Tom Barras—he’s—”

  “Deep breaths,” said Leslie, putting the kettle on.

  “You know I’ve been one of the faculty advisors to the GLBT group on campus,” said Amy. “There’s been an attack. A member of the group—Tom Barras—a nice bi boy, civil engineering major—is in the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know! I thought we were—I know gay-bashing still happens, but I thought we were better than that here.” Leslie bit back a comment about illusions of the ivory tower. Her friend needed a listening ear, not a lecture. Amy got herself calmed down, gradually, and Leslie went to bed feeling faintly ill. She and her husband insisted on putting Amy’s bike in the back of their car and driving her home, just in case.

  The story of the assault came out gradually: Tom’s attacker, Anthony Dorland, said he had previously been set upon behind Hogarth Hall by a group of men. One of them had groped him repeatedly, making suggestive personal comments, while the others looked on and laughed. “I couldn’
t do anything about it,” Anthony told campus security in strangled tones. “I was alone. But then I was out last night, and I heard his voice. It was the same voice, I know it. I would know it anywhere. He was coming out of his meeting, and so I waited until he was alone. I don’t care what he does with people who like it, but I’m not that way! He shouldn’t force himself on people like that! It’s not right! So I thought, well, let’s see how you like it when you’re all alone and someone jumps on you.”

  When campus security asked Dorland why he had not fought back immediately or reported the incident, he looked confused. “He was so much bigger than me, and he had all his friends—I don’t know—I just felt like I couldn’t. Like no one would believe me.” Pressed for a time of incident, he said, “I don’t know. A while ago. A few weeks ago, maybe? I don’t know.”

  The police officers looked from one young man to the other. Tom was several inches shorter than Anthony and slightly built.

  Tom returned to consciousness a day later, to the great relief of his family and friends, including Amy. A few days after that, the faculty started hearing rumors of other students who had experienced the same thing but could not say when it had happened. Some of them had roommates who said they didn’t remember their roommate coming in beaten up or upset; others had roommates with identical memories—and identical sniffles.

  Scores on calculus midterms shot up by an average of fifteen points.

  Leslie noticed a few students wearing surgical masks on campus one morning. The next day it was a few more. She took Nicholas to get one at the campus bookstore and encountered Solada Srisai coming out with a bag. Without thinking, she grabbed Nicholas close to her.