Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  I looked at the specs and felt proud.

  And then a terrible thought came to me. Or crystallised in me. Formed out of all the things I was. Was already written in me.

  I found myself staggered by it. And hopeful about it. And fearful that I was hopeful. I felt I could save myself. That’s ironic too.

  My fingers fumbling, I wrote Lindsey a congratulatory email and then rewrote it three times before I sent it so that it was a model of everything at my end being normal.

  I knew what I was going to be doing on Christmas Day.

  * * *

  DUE DATES ARE not an exact science. We’d had a couple of false alarms, but when Christmas Eve arrived, everything was stable. “I think it’s going to be a few more days,” I told Ben.

  I woke without needing an alarm the next morning, to the strange quiet of Christmas Day. I left Ben sleeping, showered and dressed in the clothes I’d left ready the night before. Creeping about amongst the silence made me think of Father Christmas. I looked back in on Ben and felt fondly about him. That would have been the last time for that.

  I drove through streets that were Christmas empty. My security card worked fine on a door that didn’t know what day it was.

  And then I was into the absolute silence of these familiar spaces, walking swiftly down the corridors, like a ghost.

  The lab had been tidied away for the holidays. I had to unlock a few storage areas, to remember a few combinations. I reached into the main safe and drew out the crown of lights.

  * * *

  I PAUSED AS I sat in Lindsay’s chair, the crown connected to a power source, the control systems linked up to a keyboard and screen in my lap. I considered for a moment, or pretended to, before putting it on my head.

  Could what I was about to do to my brain harm the foetus?

  Not according to what had happened with the monkeys. They were all fine, physically. I could only harm myself. We’d theorised that too long a connection between minds, more than a few minutes, would result in an extreme form of what the schizophrenics dealt with, perhaps a complete brain shutdown. Death. I would have to feel that coming and get out, or would have to unconsciously see it approaching on the screen, or just count the seconds.

  Or I would fail my child completely.

  I nearly put it all away again, locked up, walked out.

  Nearly.

  I put the crown on my head, I connected the power source, I took the keyboard in my hands and I watched the particle trails in my own mind begin to resolve on the screen, and I concentrated on them, in the way we’d always talked about, and I started typing before I could think again. I hit activate.

  * * *

  THE MINDS OF the monkeys seemed to select their own targets. The imaging for those experiments showed two sets of trails reacting to each other, symmetrical, beautiful. That seemed to suggest not the chaotic accident of schizophrenia, but something more tranquil, perhaps something like a religious experience, we’d said. But of course we had nothing objective to go on. I had theorised that since it turns out we evolved with every moment of ourselves just a stray particle away, the human trait of seeing patterns in chaos, of always assuming there is a hidden supernatural world, was actually selected for us. We’d devised a feedback monitor that would allow a human subject to watch, and, with a bit of training, hence alter the particle tracks in one’s own head via the keyboard and screen. I had hypothesised that, because the schizophrenic state can be diagnosed, that is, it isn’t just interference like white noise but a pattern of interference, there must be some rule limiting which past states were being accessed, something that let in only a finite number. It had been Lindsay who’d said that perhaps this was only about time and not about space, that perhaps one had to be relatively near the minds doing the interfering, and thus, perhaps, the range was limited by where the earth was in its orbit.

  That is to say, you only heard from your previous states of mind on the same calendar date.

  Which turns out to have been what you might call a saving grace.

  * * *

  IT WAS LIKE being knocked out.

  I’d never been knocked out. Not then.

  I woke … and … Well, I must have been about three months old.

  * * *

  MY VISION IS the wrong shape. It’s like being in an enormous cinema with an oddly shaped screen. Everything in the background is a blur. I hear what I’m sure are words, but … I haven’t brought my understanding with me. It’s like that part of me can’t fit in a baby’s mind. This is terrifying, to hear the shapes of words but not know what they mean. I start yelling.

  The baby that I’m part of starts yelling in exactly the same way!

  And then … and then …

  The big comfort shape moves into view. Such joy comes with it. Hello, big comfort shape! It’s me! It’s me! Here I am!

  Big comfort shape puts its arms around me, and it’s the greatest feeling of my life. An addict’s feeling. I cry out again, me, I did that, to make it happen again, more! Even while it’s happening to me I want more. I yell and yell for more. And it gives me more.

  Up to a point.

  * * *

  I PULLED THE crown off my head.

  I rubbed the tears from my face.

  If I’d stayed a moment longer, I might have wanted to stay forever, and thus harmed the mind I was in, all because I wasn’t used to asking for and getting such divine attention.

  Up to a point.

  What was that point? Why had I felt that? I didn’t know if I had, really. How was it possible to feel such a sense of love and presence, but also that miniscule seed of the opposite, that feeling of it not being enough or entire? Hadn’t I added that, hadn’t I dreamt it?

  I quickly put the crown back on my head. I had a fix now, I could see where particular patterns took me, I could get to—

  * * *

  OH. MUCH CLEARER now. I must be about two years old. I’m walking around an empty room, marching, raising my knees and then lowering them, as if that’s important.

  Oh, I can think that. There’s room for that thought in my head. I’m able to internally comment on my own condition. As an adult. As a toddler.

  Can I control…? I lower my foot. I stand there, inhabiting my toddler body, aware of it, the smallness of everything. But my fingers feel huge. And awkward. It’s like wearing oven gloves. I don’t want to touch anything. I know I’d break it.

  And that would be terrible.

  I turn my head. I put my foot forward. It’s not like learning to drive, I already know how all this is done, it’s just slightly different, like driving in America. I can hear …

  Words I understand. “Merry Christmas!” From through the door. Oh, the door. The vase with a crack in it. The picture of a Spanish lady that Dad cut off the side of a crate of oranges and put in a frame. The smell of the carpet, close up. Oh, reactions to the smell, lots of memories, associations, piling in.

  No! No! I can’t take that! I can’t understand that! I haven’t built those memories yet!

  Is this why I’ve always felt such enormous meaningless meaning about those objects and smells? I put it all out of my mind, and try to just be. And it’s okay. It’s okay.

  The Christmas tree is enormous. With opened presents at the bottom, and I’m not too interested in those presents, which is weird, they’ve been left there, amongst the wrapping. The wrapping is better. This mind doesn’t have signifiers for wrapping and tree yet, this is just a lot of weird stuff that happens, like all the other weird stuff that happens.

  I head through the doorway. Step, step, step.

  Into the hall. All sorts of differences from now, all sorts of objects with associations, but no, never mind the fondness and horror around you.

  I step carefully into the kitchen.

  And I’m looking up at the enormous figure of my mother, who is talking to … who is that? A woman in a headscarf. Auntie someone … oh, she died. I know she died! And I forgot her completely! Bec
ause she died!

  I can’t stop this little body from starting to shake. I’m going to cry. But I mustn’t!

  “Oh, there she goes again,” says Mum, a sigh in her voice. “It’s Christmas, you mustn’t cry at Christmas.”

  “She wants to know where her daddy is,” says the dead auntie. “He’s down the pub.”

  “Don’t tell her that!” That sudden fear in her voice. And the wryness that always went along with that fear. As if she was mocking herself for her weakness.

  “She can’t understand yet. Oh, look at that. Is she meant to be walking like that?” And oh no, Mum’s looking scared at me too. Am I walking like I don’t know how, or like an adult?

  Mummy grabs me up into her arms and looks and looks at me, and I try to be a child in response to the fear in her face … but I have a terrible feeling that I look right into those eyes as me. I’m scaring her, like a child possessed!

  * * *

  I TOOK THE crown off more slowly that time. And then immediately put it on again. And now I knew I was picking at a scab. Now I knew and I didn’t care. I wanted to know what everything in my mother’s face at that moment meant.

  * * *

  I’M SEVEN AND I’m staring at nothing under the tree. I’m up early and I’m waiting. Something must soon appear under the tree. There was nothing in the stocking at the end of my bed, but they/Father Christmas/they/Father Christmas/they might not have known I’d put out a stocking.

  I hear the door to my parents’ bedroom opening. I tense up. So much that it hurts. My dad enters the room and sighs to see me there. I bounce on my heels expectantly. I do a little dance that the connections between my muscles and my memory tell me now was programmed into me by a children’s TV show.

  He looks at me like I’m some terrible demand. “You’re too old for this now,” he says. And I remember. I remember this from my own memory. I’d forgotten this. I hadn’t forgotten. “I’m off down the shops to get you some presents. If I can find any shops that are open. If you’d stayed asleep until you were supposed to, they’d have been waiting for you. Don’t look at me like that. You knew there wasn’t any such thing as Father Christmas.”

  He takes his car keys from the table and goes outside in his dressing gown, and drives off in the car, in his dressing gown.

  * * *

  I’M EIGHT, AND I’m staring at a huge pile of presents under the tree, things I wanted but have been carefully not saying anything about, things that are far too expensive. Mum and Dad are standing there, and as I walk into the room, eight-year-old walk, trying, no idea how, looking at my mum’s face, which is again scared, just turned scared in the second she saw me … but Dad starts clapping, actually applauding, and then Mum does too.

  “I told you I’d make it up to you,” says Dad. I don’t remember him telling me. “I told you.” This is too much. This is too much. I don’t know how I’m supposed to react. I don’t know how in this mind or outside of it.

  I sit down beside the presents. I lower my head to the ground. And I stay there, to the point where I’m urging this body to get up, to show some bloody gratitude! But it stays there. I’m just a doll, and I stay there. And I can’t make younger me move and look. I don’t want to.

  I’m nine, and I’m sitting at the dinner table, with Christmas dinner in front of me. Mum is saying grace, which is scary, because she only does it at Christmas, and it’s a whole weird thing, and oh, I’m thinking, I’m feeling weird again, I’m feeling weird like I always feel on Christmas Day. Is this because of her doing that?

  I don’t think I’m going to be able to leave any knowledge about what’s actually going on in the mind I’m visiting. The transmission of information is only one way. I’m a voice that can suggest muscle movement, but I’m a very quiet one.

  * * *

  I’M FIFTEEN. OH. This is the Christmas after Dad died. And I’m … drunk. No, I wasn’t. I’m not. It just feels like I am. What’s inside my head is … huge. I hate having it in here with me. Right now. I feel like I’m … possessed. And I think it was like that in here before I arrived to join in. The shape of what I’m in is different. It feels … wounded. Oh God, did I hurt it already? No. I’m still me here and now. I wouldn’t be if I’d hurt my young brain back then. No, I, I sort of remember. This is just what it was like being fifteen. My mind feels … like it’s shaped awkwardly, not like it’s wounded. All this … fury. I can feel the weight of the world limiting me. I can feel a terrible force towards action. Do something, now! Why aren’t all these idiots around me doing something, when I know so well what they should do?! And God, God, I am horny even during this, which is, which is … terrible.

  I’m bellowing at Mum, who’s trying to raise her voice to shout over me at the door of my room. “Don’t look at me like that!” I’m shouting. “We never have a good Christmas because of you! Dad would always try to make it a good Christmas, but he had to deal with you! Stop being afraid!”

  I know as I yell this that it isn’t true. I know now and I know then.

  She slams the door of my room against the wall and marches in, raising a shaking finger—

  I grab her. I grab her and I feel the frailness of her as I grab her, and I use all my strength, and it’s lots, and I shove her reeling out of the door, and she crashes into the far wall and I run at her and I slam her into it again, so the back of her head hits the wall and I meant to do it and I don’t, I so terribly don’t. I’m beating up an old woman!

  I manage to stop myself from doing that. Just. My new self and old self manage at the same time. I let go.

  She bursts out crying. So do I.

  “Stop doing that to me!” I yell.

  “I worry about you,” she manages to sob. “It’s because I worry about you.”

  Is it just at Christmas she worries? I think hard about saying it, and this body says it. My voice sounds odd saying it. “Is it just at Christmas?”

  She’s silent, looking scared at how I sounded. Or, oh God, is she afraid of me now?

  This is what did it, I realise. I make this mind go weird at Christmas, and they always noticed. It’s great they noticed. What I grew up with, how I was brought up, is them reacting to that, expecting that, for the rest of the year. This makes sense, I’ve solved it! I’ve solved who I am! Who I am is my own fault! I’m a self-fulfilling prophecy!

  Well, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Should have known that. Everybody should realise that about themselves. Simple!

  I find that I’m smiling suddenly and Mum bursts into tears again. To her, it must seem like she’s looking at a complete psycho.

  * * *

  I TORE OFF the crown. I remembered doing that to her. Then I let myself forget it. But I never did. And that wasn’t the only time. Lots of grabbing her. On the verge of hitting her. Is that a thing, being abused by one’s child? It got lost in the layers of who she and I were, and there I was, in it, and suddenly it was the most important thing. And now it was again.

  Because of Dad dying, I thought, because of that teenage brain, and then I thought no, that’s letting myself off the hook.

  Guilty.

  But beyond that, my teenage-influenced self had been right: I’d found what I’d gone looking for. I’d messed up my own childhood by what I was doing here. That was a neat end to the story, wasn’t it? Yes, my parents had been terribly lacking on occasion. But they’d had something beyond the norm to deal with. And I’d been … terrifying, horrible, beyond that poor frail woman’s ability to deal with.

  But that only let them off the hook … up to a point.

  Hadn’t that bit with there being no presents, that bit with the car, weren’t those beyond normal? Had me being in that mind on just one day of the year really been such a big factor?

  Would I end up doing anything like that? Would I be a good parent?

  Perhaps I should have left it there.

  But there was a way to know.

  * * *

  IN A CHRISTMAS CAROL, we hear
from charity collectors visiting Scrooge’s shop that when his partner Marley was alive, they both always gave generously. And you think therefore that Scrooge was a happy, open person then. But Scrooge doesn’t confirm that memory of theirs. When we meet Marley’s ghost, he’s weighed down by chains “he forged in life.” He’s warning Scrooge not to be like he was. So were the charity collectors lying or being too generous with their memory of Christmas past? Or is it just that they sometimes caught Scrooge and Marley on a good day? The latter doesn’t seem the sort of thing that happens to characters in stories. I’ve been told that story isn’t a good model for what happened to me. But perhaps, because of what’s written in the margins there, it is.

  * * *

  I SAT THERE thinking, the crown in my hands. I’d been my own ghost of Christmas future. But I could be a ghost of Christmas past too.

  Was I going to be a good parent?

  I could find out.

  I set the display to track the other side of the scale. To take me into the future, as we’d only speculated that some day might be possible. And I put the crown back on before I could think twice.

  * * *

  OH. OH THERE she is. My baby is a she! I’m holding her in my arms. I love her more than I thought it was possible to love anything. The same way the big comfort thing loved me. And I didn’t understand that until I put those moments side by side. This mind I’m in now has changed so much. It’s hugely focussed on the little girl who’s asleep right here. It’s a warm feeling, but it’s … it’s hard too. Where did that come from? That worries me. She’s so little. This can’t be that far in the future. But I’ve changed so much. There’s a feeling of … this mind I’m in wanting to prove something. She wants to tell me it’s all going to be okay. That I have nothing but love inside me in this one year in the future. And I do … up to a point.