The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yes,” said Miranda. “I feel better.”

  “Wonderful.” Dr. Matsui handed the feedback to Matthew. “Store it,” she told him.

  Miranda spoke hesitatingly. “I had other things I wanted to say to him,” she said. “It doesn’t feel resolved.”

  “I don’t think the sessions ever resolve things,” Dr. Matsui said. “The best they can do is open the mind to resolution. The resolution still has to be found in the real world.”

  “Can I see him again?” Miranda asked.

  Dr. Matsui interlaced her fingers and pressed them to her chest. “A repeat would be less expensive, of course,” she said. “Since we’ve already got Daniel. We could just run him through again. Still, I’m reluctant to advise it. I wonder what else we could possibly gain.”

  “Please, Anna,” said Miranda. She was looking down at her arms, remembering how firmly fleshed they had seemed.

  “Let’s wait and see how you’re feeling after our next couple regular visits. If the old regrets persist and, more importantly, if they’re still interfering with your ability to get on with things, then ask me again.”

  She was standing. Miranda swung her legs over the side of the chair and stood, too. Matthew walked with her to the door of the office. “We’ve got a goalie coming in next,” he confided. “She stepped into the goal while holding the ball; she wants to remember it the way it didn’t happen. Self-indulgent if you ask me. But then, athletes make the money, right?” He held the door open, his arm stretched in front of Miranda. “You feel better, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she reassured him.

  * * *

  She met Daniel for lunch at Frank Fats Cafe. They ordered fried clams and scallops, but the food never came. Daniel was twenty again and luminescent with youth. His hair was blond and his face was smooth. Had he really been so beautiful? Miranda wondered.

  “I’d love a coke,” he said. “I haven’t had one in thirty years.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Miranda. “They don’t have the real thing in heaven?”

  Daniel looked puzzled.

  “Skip it,” she told him. “I was just wondering what it was like being dead. You could tell me.”

  “It’s classified,” said Daniel. “On a need to know basis.”

  Miranda picked up her fork which was heavy and cold. “This time it’s you who looks wonderful. Positively beatific. Last time you looked so—” she started to say old, but amended it. After all, he had looked no older than she did these days. Such things were relative. “Tired,” she finished.

  “No, I wasn’t tired,” Daniel told her. “It was the war.”

  “The war’s over now,” Miranda said and this time his smile was decidedly unpleasant.

  “Is it?” he asked. “Just because you don’t read about it in the paper now? Just because you watch the evening news and there’s no body count in the corner of the screen?”

  “Television’s not like that now,” Miranda began, but Daniel hadn’t stopped talking.

  “What’s really going on in Southeast Asia? Do you even know?” Daniel shook his head. “Wars never end,” he said. He leaned threateningly over the table. “Do you imagine for one minute that it’s over for me?”

  Miranda slammed her fork down. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t try to make me guilty of that, too. You didn’t have to go. I begged you not to. Jesus, you knew what the war was. If you’d gone off to save the world from communist aggression, I would have disagreed, but I could have understood. But you knew better than that. I never forgave you for going.”

  “It was so easy for you to see what was right,” Daniel responded angrily. “You were completely safe. You women could graduate without losing your deferment. Your goddamn birthday wasn’t drawn twelfth in the draft lottery and if it had been you wouldn’t have cared. When was your birthday drawn? You don’t even know.” Daniel leaned back and looked out the window. People appeared on the street. A woman in a red mini-skirt got into a blue car. Then Daniel faced her again, large before Miranda. She couldn’t shut him out. “‘Go to Canada,’ you said. ‘That’s what I’d do.’ I wonder. Could you have married your mathematician in Canada? I can just picture you saying good-bye to your mother forever.”

  “My mother’s dead now,” said Miranda. A knot of tears tightened about her throat.

  “And so the hell am I.” Daniel reached for her wrists, holding them too hard, hurting her deliberately. “But you’re not, are you? You’re just fine.”

  * * *

  There was a voice behind Daniel. “Miranda. Miranda,” it called.

  “Mother,” cried Miranda. But, of course it wasn’t, it was Anna Matsui, gripping her wrists, bringing her back. Miranda gasped for breath and Dr. Matsui let go of her. “It was awful,” said Miranda. She began to cry. “He accused me…” She pulled the wires from her eyes recklessly. Tears spilled out of them. Miranda ached all over.

  “He accused you of nothing.” Dr. Matsui’s voice was sharp and disappointed. “You accused yourself. The same old accusations. We made Daniel out of you, remember?” She rolled her chair backward, moved to the monitor for the feedback. Matthew handed it to her and she read it, shaking her head. Her short black hair flew against her cheeks. “It shouldn’t have happened,” she said. “We used only the memories that made you happy. And with your gift for lucid dreaming—well, I didn’t think there was a risk.” Her face was apologetic as she handed Miranda a tissue and waited for the crying to stop. “Matthew wanted to recall you earlier,” she confessed, “but I didn’t want it to end this way.”

  “No!” said Miranda. “We can’t stop now. I never answered him.”

  “You only need to answer yourself. It’s your memory and imagination confronting you. He speaks only with your voice, he behaves only as you expect him to.” Dr. Matsui examined the feedback map again. “I should never have agreed to a repeat. I certainly won’t send you back.” She looked at Miranda and softened her voice. “Lie still. Lie still until you feel better.”

  “Like in another thirty years?” asked Miranda. She closed her eyes; her head hurt from the crying and the wires. She reached up to detach one close to her ear. “Everything he said to me was true,” she added tonelessly.

  “Many things he didn’t say are bound to be true as well,” Dr. Matsui pointed out. “Therapy is not really concerned with truth, which is almost always merely a matter of perspective. Therapy is concerned with adjustment—adjustment to an unchangeable situation or to a changing truth.” She lifted a pen from her collar, clicking the point in and out absentmindedly. “In any given case,” she continued, “we face a number of elements within our control and a far greater number beyond it. In a case such as yours, where the patient has felt profoundly and morbidly guilty over an extended period of time, it is because she is focusing almost exclusively on her own behavior. ‘If only I hadn’t done x,’ she thinks, ‘then y would never have happened.’ Do you understand what I’m saying, Miranda?”

  “No.”

  “In these sessions we try to show you what might have happened if the elements you couldn’t control were changed. In your case we let you experience a continued relationship with Daniel. You see that you bore him no malice. You wished him nothing ill. If he had come back the bitterness of your last meeting would have been unimportant.”

  “He asked me to marry him,” said Miranda. “He asked me to wait for him. I told you that. And I said that I was seeing Allen. Allen! I said as far as I was concerned he was already gone.”

  “You wish you could change that, of course. But what you really want to change is his death and that was beyond your control” Dr. Matsui’s face was sweet and intense.

  Miranda shook her head. “You’re not listening to me, Anna. I told you what happened, but I lied about why it happened. I pretended we had political differences. I thought my behavior would be palatable if it looked like a matter of conscience. But really I dated Allen for the first time before Daniel had e
ven been drafted. Because I knew what was coming. I saw that his life was about to get complicated and messy. And I saw a way out of it. For me, of course. Not for him.” Miranda began to pick unhappily at the loose skin around her nails. “What do you think of that?” she asked. “What do you think of me now?”

  “What do you think?” Dr. Matsui said and Miranda responded in disgust.

  “I know what I think. I think I’m sick of talking to myself. Is that the best you therapists can manage? I think I’ll stay home and talk to the mirrors.” She pulled off the remaining connections to her scalp and sat up. “Matthew,” she said. “Matthew!”

  Matthew came to the side of her chair. He looked thin, concerned, and awkward. What a baby he was, really, she thought. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five. “How old are you, Matthew?” she asked.

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Be a hell of a time to die, wouldn’t it?” She watched Matthew put a nervous hand on his short brown hair and run it backward. “I want your opinion about something, Matthew. A hypothetical case. I’m trusting you to answer honestly.”

  Matthew glanced at Dr. Matsui who gestured with her pen for him to go ahead. He turned back to Miranda. “What would you think of a woman who deserted her lover, a man she really claimed to love, because he got sick and she didn’t want to face the unpleasantness of it?”

  Matthew spoke carefully. “I would imagine that it was motivated by cowardice rather than cruelty,” he said. “I think we should always forgive sins of cowardice. Even our own.” He stood looking at Miranda with his earnest, innocent face.

  “All right, Matthew,” she said. “Thank you.” She lay back down in the chair and listened to the hum of the idle machines. “Anna,” she said. “He didn’t behave as I expected. I mean, sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. Even the first time.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Dr. Matsui.

  “The first session he was older than I expected. Like he hadn’t died, but had continued to age along with me.”

  “Wish fulfillment.”

  “Yes, but I was surprised by it. And I was surprised by the setting. And he said something very odd right at the end. He quoted me Zeno’s paradox and it really exists, but I never heard it before. It didn’t sound like something Daniel would say, either. It sounded more like my husband, Michael. Where did it come from?”

  “Probably from just where you said,” Dr. Matsui told her. “Michael. You don’t think you remember it, but obviously you did. And husbands and lovers are bound to resemble each other, don’t you think? We often get bits of overlap. Our parents show up one way or another in almost all our memories.” Dr. Matsui stood. “Come in Tuesday,” she said. “We’ll talk some more.”

  “I’d like to see him one more time,” said Miranda.

  “Absolutely not,” Dr. Matsui answered, returning Miranda’s chair to its upright position.

  * * *

  “Where are we, Daniel?” Miranda asked. She couldn’t see anything.

  “Camp Pendleton,” he answered. “On the beach. I used to run here mornings. Guys would bring their girlfriends. Not me, of course.”

  Miranda watched the landscape fill in as he spoke. Fog remained. It was early and overcast. She heard the ocean and felt the wet, heavy air begin to curl her hair. She was barefoot on the sand and a little cold. “I’m so sorry, Daniel,” she said. “That’s all I ever really wanted to tell you. I loved you.”

  “I know you did.” He put his arm around her. She leaned against him. I must look like his mother, she thought; in fact, her own son was older than Daniel now. She looked up at him carefully. He must have just arrived at camp. The hair had been all but shaved from his head.

  “Maybe you were right, anyway,” Daniel told her. “Maybe I just shouldn’t have gone. I was so angry at you by then I didn’t care anymore. I even thought about dying with some sense of anticipation. Petulant, you know, like a little kid. I’ll go and get killed and then she’ll be sorry.”

  “And she was,” said Miranda. “God, was she.” She turned to face him, pressed her lined cheek against his chest, smelled his clothes. He must have started smoking again. Daniel put both arms around her. She heard a gull cry out ecstatically.

  “But when the time came I really didn’t want to die,” Daniel’s voice took on an unfamiliar edge, frightened, slightly hoarse. “When the time came I was willing to do anything rather than die.” He hid his face in her neck. “Do you have kids?” he asked. “Did you and Michael ever?”

  “A son,” she said.

  “How old? About six?”

  Miranda wasn’t sure how old Jeremy was now. It changed every year. But she told him, wonderingly, “Of course not, Daniel. He’s all grown up. He owns a pizza franchise, can you believe it? He thinks I’m a bore.”

  “Because I killed a kid during the war. A kid about six years old. I figured it was him or me. I shot him.” Miranda pushed back from Daniel, trying to get a good look at his face. “They used kids, you know,” he said. “They counted on us not being able to kill them. I saw this little boy coming for me with his hands behind his back. I told him to stop. I shouted at him to stop. I pointed my rifle and said I was going to kill him. But he kept coming.”

  “Oh, Daniel,” said Miranda. “Maybe he didn’t speak English.”

  “A pointed rifle is universal. He walked into the bullet.”

  “What was he carrying?”

  “Nothing,” said Daniel. “How could I know?”

  “Daniel,” Miranda said. “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t do that.” Her words unsettled her even more. “Not the way I remember you,” she said. “This is not the way I remember you.”

  “It’s so easy for you to see what’s right,” said Daniel.

  I’m going back, thought Miranda. Where am I really? I must be with Anna, but then she remembered that she was not. She was in her own study. She worked to feel the study chair beneath her, the ache in her back as she curved over her desk. Her feet dangled by the wheels, she concentrated until she could feel them. She saw her own hand, still holding her pencil, and she put it down. Things seemed very clear to her. She walked to the bedroom and summoned Dr. Matsui over the console. She waited perhaps fifteen minutes before Anna appeared.

  “Daniel’s the one with the problem,” Miranda said. “It’s not me, after all.”

  “There is no Daniel.” Dr. Matsui’s voice betrayed a startled concern. “Except in your mind and on my tapes. Apart from you, no Daniel.”

  “No. He came for me again. Just like in our sessions. Just as intense. Do you understand? Not a dream,” she cut off Dr. Matsui’s protest. “It was not a dream, because I wasn’t asleep. I was working and then I was with him. I could feel him. I could smell him. He told me an absolutely horrible story about killing a child during the war. Where would I have gotten that? Not the sort of thing they send home in their letters to the bereaved.”

  “There were a thousand ugly stories out of Vietnam,” said Dr. Matsui. “I know some and I wasn’t even born yet. Or just barely born. Remember My Lai?” Miranda watched her image clasp its hands. “You heard this story somewhere. It became part of your concept of the war. So you put it together now with Daniel.” Dr. Matsui’s voice took on its professional patina. “I’d like you to come in, Miranda. Immediately. I’d like to take a complete read-out and keep you monitored a while. Maybe overnight. I don’t like the turn this is taking.”

  “All right,” said Miranda. “I don’t want to be alone anyway. Because he’s going to come again.”

  “No,” said Dr. Matsui firmly. “He’s not.”

  Miranda took the elevator to the garage and unlocked her bicycle. She was not frightened and wondered why not. She felt unhappy and uncertain, but in complete control of herself. She pushed out into the bike lane. When the helicopter appeared overhead, Miranda knew immediately where she was. A banana tree sketched itself in on her right. There was a smell in the air which was strange to her. Old diesel engines, w
hich she recognized, but also something organic. A lushness almost turned to rot. In the distance the breathtaking green of rice growing. But the dirt at her feet was bare.

  Miranda had never imagined a war could be so quiet. Then she heard the chopper. And she heard Daniel. He was screaming. He stood right next to her, beside a pile of sandbags, his rifle stretched out before him. A small, delicately featured child was just walking into Miranda’s view, his arms held behind him. All Miranda had to do was lift her hand.

  “No, Daniel,” she said. “His hands are empty.”

  Daniel didn’t move. The war stopped. “I killed him, Randy,” said Daniel. “You can’t change that.”

  Miranda looked at the boy. His eyes were dark, a streak of dust ran all the way up one shoulder and onto his face. He was barefoot. “I know,” she said. “I can’t help him.” The child faded and disappeared. “I’m trying to help you.” The boy reappeared again, back further, at the very edge of her vision. He was beautiful, unbearably young. He began to walk to them once more.

  “Can you help me?” Daniel asked.

  Miranda pressed her palm into his back. He wore no shirt and was slick and sweaty. “I don’t know,” she said. “Was it a crime of cowardice or of cruelty? I’m told you can be forgiven the one, but not the other.”

  Daniel dropped his rifle into the dirt. The landscape turned slowly about them, became mountainous. The air smelled cleaner and was cold.