The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She was a crazy, wasteful, happy woman, without a trace of malice or permanence or ambition in her; easily pleased and easily bored, and strangely serene despite the hectic pace she kept up. She cherished things and lost them and forgot them: things, days, people. She had fun, though, and I had fun with her; that was her talent, and her destiny, not always an easy one. Once, hungover in a New York hotel, watching a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me: “Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.”

  And she did. Snow-foiling in Austria; she was among the first to get one of those Snow Leopards, silent beasts as fast as speedboats. Alfredo called me in California to tell me, but with the distance and his accent and his eagerness to tell me he wasn’t to blame, I never grasped the details. I was still her husband, her closest relative, heir to the little she had left by that time, and beneficiary too of The Park’s access concept. Fortunately The Park’s services included collecting her from the morgue in Gstaad and installing her in her chamber at The Park’s California unit. Beyond signing papers and taking delivery when Georgie arrived by freight airship at Van Nuys, there was nothing for me to do. The Park’s representative was solicitous, and made sure I understood how to go about accessing Georgie, but I wasn’t listening. I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about death, the fact of it, the fate of the remains, and the situation of the living faced with it, seems grotesque to me, embarrassing, useless. And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless: someone I loved is dead, let me therefore dress in clown’s clothes, talk backwards, and buy expensive machinery to make up for it. I went back to L.A.

  A year or more later, the contents of some safe-deposit boxes of Georgie’s arrived from the lawyer’s: some bonds and such stuff, and a small steel case, velvet-lined, that contained a key, a key deeply notched on both sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car.

  * * *

  Why did I go to The Park that first time? Mostly because I had forgotten about it: getting that key in the mail was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new, but which after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious.

  I understood very well that The Park and its access concept were very probably only another cruel joke on the rich, preserving the illusion that they can buy what can’t be bought, like the cryonics fad of thirty years ago. Once in Ibiza Georgie and I met a German couple who also had a contract with The Park; their Wasp hovered over them like a paraclete, and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs. Did they, Georgie wondered, exclude the Wasp from their bedroom? Or did its presence there stir them to greater efforts, proofs of undying love and admirable vigor for the unborn to see?

  No, death wasn’t to be cheated that way, any more than by pyramids, by masses said in perpetuity; it wasn’t Georgie saved from death that I would find. But there were eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory; Georgie hadn’t excluded the Wasp from her bedroom, our bedroom, and she who had never performed for anybody could not have conceived of performing for it. And there would be me, too, undoubtedly, caught unintentionally by the Wasp’s attention: out of those thousands of hours there would be hundreds of myself, and myself had just then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.

  That summer, then, I borrowed a Highway Access Permit (the old HAPpy cards of those days) from a county lawyer I knew, and drove the coast highway up to where The Park was, at the end of a pretty beach road, all alone above the sea. It looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery, a low stucco wall topped with urns, amid cypresses, an arched gate in the center. A small brass plaque on the gate: Please Use Your Key. The gate opened, not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped corridor going down: the cemetery wall was an illusion, the works were underground. Silence, or nameless muzak like silence; solitude—either the necessary technicians were discretely hidden, or none were needed. Certainly the access concept turned out to be simplicity itself, in operation anyway. Even I, who am an idiot about information technology, could tell that. The Wasp was genuine state-of-the-art stuff, but what we mourners got was as ordinary as home movies, as old letters tied up in ribbon.

  A display screen near the entrance told me down which corridor to find Georgie, and my key let me into a small screening room where there was a moderate-sized TV monitor and two comfortable chairs; dark walls of chocolate-brown carpeting. The sweet-sad muzak. Georgie herself was evidently somewhere in the vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place. In the control panel before the TV were a keyhole for my key, and two bars: ACCESS and RESET.

  I sat, feeling foolish and a little afraid too, made more uncomfortable by being so deliberately soothed by neutral furnishings and sober tools. I imagined, around me, down other corridors, in other chambers, others communed with their dead as I was about to do, that the dead were murmuring to them beneath the stream of muzak; that they wept to see and hear, as I might; but I could hear nothing. I turned my key in its slot, and the screen lit up; the dim lights dimmed further, and the muzak ceased. I pushed ACCESS, obviously the next step. No doubt all these precedures had been explained to me long ago at the dock when Georgie in her aluminum box was being offloaded, and I hadn’t listened. And on the screen she turned to look at me—only not at me, though I started and drew breath—at the Wasp that watched her.

  She was in midsentence, midgesture. Where? When? Or put it on the same card with the others, she said, turning away. Someone said something, Georgie answered, and stood up, the Wasp panning and moving erratically with her, like an amateur with a home-video camera. A white room, sunlight, wicker. Ibiza. Georgie wore a cotton blouse, open; from a table she picked up lotion, poured some on her hand, and rubbed it across her freckled breastbone. The meaningless conversation about putting something on a card went on, ceased. I watched the room, wondering what year, what season I had stumbled into. Georgie pulled off her shirt—her small round breasts tipped with large childish nipples, child’s breasts she still had at forty, shook delicately—and she went out onto the balcony, the Wasp following, blinded for a moment by sun, adjusting. If you want to do it that way, someone said. The someone crossed the screen, a brown blur, naked. It was me. Georgie said: Oh, look, hummingbirds.

  She watched them, rapt, and the Wasp crept close to her cropped blond head, rapt too, and I watched her watch. She turned away, rested her elbows on the balustrade. I couldn’t remember this day. How should I? One of hundreds, of thousands … She looked out to the bright sea, wearing her sleepwalking face, mouth partly open, and absently stroked her breast with her oiled hand. An iridescent glitter among the flowers was the hummingbird.

  Without really knowing what I did—I felt hungry, suddenly, hungry for pastness, for more—I touched the RESET bar. The balcony in Ibiza vanished, the screen glowed emptily. I touched ACCESS.

  At first there was darkness, a murmur; then a dark back moved away from before the Wasp’s eye, and a dim scene of people resolved itself. Jump. Other people, or the same people, a party? Jump. Apparently the Wasp was turning itself on and off according to the changes in light levels here, wherever here was. Georgie in a dark dress having her cigarette lit: brief flare of the lighter. She said Thanks. Jump. A foyer or hotel lounge. Paris? The Wasp jerkily sought for her among people coming and going; it couldn’t make a movie, establishing shots, cutaways—it could only doggedly follow Georgie, like a jealous husband, seeing nothing else. This was frustrating. I pushed RESET. ACCESS. Georgie brushed her teeth, somewhere, somewhen.

&
nbsp; I understood, after one or two more of these terrible leaps. Access was random. There was no way to dial up a year, a day, a scene. The Park had supplied no program, none; the eight thousand hours weren’t filed at all, they were a jumble like a lunatic’s memory, like a deck of shuffled cards. I had supposed, without thinking about it, that they would begin at the beginning and go on till they reached the end. Why didn’t they?

  I also understood something else. If access was truly random, If I truly had no control, then I had lost as good as forever those scenes I had seen. Odds were on the order of eight thousand to one (more? Far more? Probabilities are opaque to me) that I would never light on them again by pressing this bar. I felt a pang of loss for that afternoon in Ibiza. It was doubly gone now. I sat before the empty screen, afraid to touch ACCESS again, afraid of what I would lose.

  I shut down the machine (the light-level in the room rose, the muzak poured softly back in) and went out into the halls, back to the display screen in the entranceway. The list of names slowly, greenly rolled over like the list of departing flights at an airport: code numbers were missing from beside many, indicating perhaps that they weren’t yet in residence, only awaited. In the D’s, three names, and Director: hidden among them as though he were only another of the dead. A chamber number. I went to find it, and went in.

  The Director looked more like a janitor, or a night watchman, the semi-retired type you often see caretaking little-visited places. He wore a brown smock like a monk’s robe and was making coffee in a corner of his small office, out of which little business seemed to be done. He looked up startled, caught out, when I entered.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I understand this system right.”

  “A problem?” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at me a little wide-eyed and shy, hoping not to be called on for anything difficult. “Equipment’s all working?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that it could be.” I described what I thought I had learned about The Park’s access concept. “That can’t be right, can it?” I said. “That access is totally random…”

  He was nodding, still wide-eyed, paying close attention.

  “Is it?” I asked.

  “Is it what?”

  “Random.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, sure. If everything’s in working order.”

  I could think of nothing to say for a moment, watching him nod reassuringly. Then: “Why?” I asked. “I mean why is there no way at all to, to organize, to have some kind of orgainzed access to the, to the material?” I had begun to feel that sense of grotesque foolishness in the presence of death, as though I were haggling over dead Georgie’s effects. “That seems stupid, if you’ll pardon me.”

  “Oh no, oh no,” he said. “You’ve read your literature? You’ve read all your literature?”

  “Well, to tell the truth…”

  “It’s all just as described,” the Director said. “I can promise you. If there’s any problem at all…”

  “Do you mind,” I said, “if I sit down?” I smiled—he seemed so afraid of me and my complaint, of me as mourner, possibly grief-crazed and unable to grasp the simple limits of his responsibilities to me, that he needed soothing himself. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think I understand. I’m kind of dumb about these things.”

  “Sure. Sure. Sure.” He regretfully put away his coffee makings and sat behind his desk, lacing his fingers together like a consultant. “People get at lot of satisfaction out of the access here,”he said, “a lot of comfort, if they take it in the right spirit.” He tried a smile. I wondered what qualifications he had had to show to get this job. “The random part. Now it’s all in the literature. There’s the legal aspect, you’re not a lawyer are you, no no sure, no offense. You see, the material here isn’t for anything, except, well, except for communing. But suppose the stuff were programmed, searchable. Suppose there was a problem about taxes or inheritance or so on. There could be subpoenas, lawyers all over the place, destroying the memorial concept completely.”

  I really hadn’t thought of that. Built-in randomness saved past lives from being searched in any systematic way. And no doubt saved The Park from being in the records business, and at the wrong end of a lot of suits. “You’d have to watch the whole eight thousand hours,” I said, “right, and even if you found what you were looking for there’d be no way to replay it after you’d seen it. It would have gone by.” It would slide into the random past even as you watched it, like that afternoon in Ibiza, that party in Paris. Lost.

  He smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “They didn’t predict that. The randomness. It was a side effect, an effect of the storage process. Just luck.” His grin turned down, his brows knitted seriously. “See, we’re storing here at the molecular level. We have to go that small, for space problems. I mean your eight thousand hour guarantee, if we had gone tape or conventional, how much room would it take up? If the access concept caught on. A lot of room. So we went vapor-trap and endless-tracking. Size of my thumbnail. It’s all in the literature.” He looked at me strangely. I had a sudden intense sensation that I was being fooled, tricked, that the man before me in his smock was no expert, no technician, he was a charlatan, or maybe a madman impersonating a Director and not belonging here at all. It raised the hair on my neck, and passed. “So the randomness,” he was saying. “It was an effect of going molecular. Brownian movement. All you do is lift the endless-tracking for a microsecond, and you get a rearragement at the molecular level. We don’t randomize. The molecules do it for us.”

  I remembered Brownian movement, just barely, from physics class. The random movement of molecules, the teacher said; it has a mathematical description; it’s like the movement of dust motes you see swimming in a shaft of sunlight, like the swirl of snowflakes in a glass paperweight that shows a cottage being snowed on. “I see,” I said. “I guess I see.”

  “Is there,” he said, “any other problem?” He said it as though there might be some other problem, and that he knew what it might be, and that he hoped I didn’t have it. “You understand the system, key lock, two bars, ACCESS, RESET…”

  “I understand,” I said. “I understand now.”

  “Communing,” he said, standing, relieved, sure I would be gone soon. “I understand. It takes a while to relax into the communing concept.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It does.”

  I wouldn’t learn what I had come to learn, whatever that was. The Wasp had not been good at storage after all, no, no better than my young soul had been; days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye, it hadn’t seen well and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the unforgettable than my own eye had been: no better and no worse: the same.

  And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh look, hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.

  The sun was setting when I left The Park, the satin sea foaming softly, randomly around the rocks.

  I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowning what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred, and was past.

  It was two years, nearly, since Georgie had died: two years until, for the first and last time, I wept for her; for her, and for myself.

  * * *

  Of course I went back. After a lot of work and correctly-placed dollars, I netted a HAPpy card of my own. I had time to spare, like a lot of people then, and often on empty afternoons (never on Sunday) I would get out onto the unpatched and weedgrown freeway and glide up the Coast. The Park was always open. I relaxed into the communing concept.

  Now, after some hundreds of hours spent there underground, now when I have long ceased to go through those doors
(I have lost my key, I think, anyway I don’t know where to look for it), I know that the solitude I felt myself to be in was real; the watchers around me, the listeners I sensed in other chambers, were mostly my imagination. There was rarely anyone there. These tombs were as neglected as any tombs anywhere usually are. Either the living did not care to attend much on the dead—when have they ever?—or the hopeful buyers of the contracts had come to discover the flaw in the access concept: as I discovered it, in the end.

  ACCESS and she takes dresses one by one from her closet, and holds them against her body, and studies the effect in a tall mirror, and puts them back again. She had a funny face which she never made except when looking at herself in the mirror, a face made for no one but herself, that was actually quite unlike her. The mirror Georgie.

  RESET.

  ACCESS. By a bizarre coincidence here she is looking in another mirror. I think the Wasp could be confused by mirrors. She turns away, the Wasp adjusts; there is someone asleep, tangled in bedclothes on a big hotel bed, morning, a room-service cart. Oh: the Algonquin: myself. Winter. Snow is falling outside the tall window. She searches her handbag, takes out a small vial, swallows a pill with coffee, holding the cup by its body and not its handle. I stir, show a tousled head of hair. Conversation: unintelligible. Gray room, whitish snow-light, color degraded. Would I now (I thought, watching us) reach out for her? Would I in the next take her, or she me, push aside the bedclothes, open her pale pajamas? She goes into the john, shuts the door. The Wasp watches stupidly, excluded, transmitting the door.