Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  She typed in the code for a priority that would override whatever was on Mr. Mowen’s home terminal. After the code, she typed, “Call Janice at office.” She looked at it for a minute, then back-erased and typed, “Press conference. Research. Eleven a.m.,” and pressed RUN. The screen clicked once and displayed the preliminary test results of side effects on the waste-emissions project. At the bottom of the screen, she read, “Tangential consequences statistically negligible.”

  “You want to bet?” Janice said.

  She called programming. “There’s something wrong with my terminal,” she said to the woman on the line.

  “This is Sue in peripherals rectification. Is your problem in implementation or hardware?”

  She sounded just like Gail in publicity. “You wouldn’t know Brad McAfee, would you?” she said.

  “He’s my fiance.” Sue said. “Why?”

  Janice sighed. “I keep getting readouts that have nothing to do with what I punch in,” Janice said.

  “Oh, then you want hardware repair. The number’s in your terminal directory,” she said, and hung up.

  Janice called up the terminal directory. At first nothing happened. Then the screen clicked once and displayed something titled, “Project Sally.” Janice noticed Lynn Saunders’s name three-quarters of the way down the screen, and Sally Mowen’s at the bottom. She started at the top and read it all the way through. Then she typed in PRINT and read it again as it came rolling out of the printer. When it was done, she tore off the sheet carefully, put it in a file folder, and put the file folder in her desk.

  “I found your glove in the elevator,” Sally said when she came in. She looked terrible, as if the experience of finding Mr. Mowen’s glove had been too much for her. “Is the press conference over?”

  “I didn’t go,” Mr. Mowen said. “I was afraid I’d run into a tree. Could you drive me over to the office? I told Janice I’d be there by nine and it’s two-thirty.”

  “Tree?” Sally said. “I fell out of a tree today. On a linguist.”

  Mr. Mowen put on his overcoat and fished around in the pockets. “I’ve lost my other glove,” he said. “That makes fifty-eight instances of bad luck I’ve had already this morning, and I’ve been sitting stock still for the last two hours. I made a list. The pencil broke, and the eraser, and I erased a hole right through the paper, and I didn’t even count those.” He put the single glove in his coat pocket.

  Sally opened the door for him, and they went down the hall to the elevator. “I never should have said that about the moon,” she said. “I should have said hello. Just a simple hello. So what if the note said he wanted someone who could generate language? That didn’t mean I had to do it right then, before I even told him who I was.”

  Mr. Mowen punched his security code into the elevator. The REJECT light came on. “Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence. And all bad. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was trying to kill me.”

  Sally punched in her security code. The elevator slid open. “I’ve been walking around for hours, trying to figure out how I could have been so stupid,” Sally said. “He was on his way to meet me. At the press conference. He had something to tell me. If I’d just stood up after I fell on him and said, ‘Hello, I’m Sally Mowen, and I’ve found this note. Do you really want someone who can generate language?” but, oh no, I have to say, ‘The moon blues.’ I should have just kept kissing him and never said anything. But, oh, no, I couldn’t let well enough alone.”

  Mr. Mowen let Sally push the floor button in the elevator so no more warning lights would flash on. He also let her open the door of the apartment building. On the way out to the car, he stepped in some gum.

  “Sixty. If I didn’t know better, I’d say your mother was behind this,” Mr. Mowen said. “She’s coming up here this afternoon. To see if I’m minimizing your self-realization potential with my chauvinistic role expectations. That should count for a dozen bad coincidences all by itself.” He got in the car, hunching far back in the seat so he wouldn’t crack his head on the sun visor. He peered out the window at the gray sky. “Maybe there’ll be a blizzard and she won’t be able to get up from Cheyenne.”

  Sally reached for something under the driver’s seat. “Here’s your other glove,” she said, handed it over to him, and started the car. “That note was torn in half. Why didn’t I think about the words that were missing instead of deciding the message was all there? He probably wanted somebody who could generate electricity and speak a foreign language. Just because I liked his picture and I thought he might speak English I had to go and make a complete fool out of myself.”

  It started to snow halfway to the office. Sally turned on the windshield wipers. “With my luck,” Mr. Mowen said, “there’ll be a blizzard, and I’ll be snowed in with Charlotte.” He looked out the side window at the smokestacks. They were shooting another wavery blue blast into the air. “It’s the waste-emissions project. Somehow it’s causing all these damn coincidences.”

  Sally said, “I look and look for someone who speaks decent English, and when I finally meet him, what do I say? ‘You catched me with your face.’ And now he thinks somebody named Brad McAfee put me up to it to keep him from getting to a press conference, and he’ll never speak to me again. Stupid! How could I have been so stupid?”

  “I never should have let them start the project without more testing,” Mr. Mowen said. “What if we’re putting too much ozone into the ozone layer? What if this bicarbonate of soda fallout is doing something to people’s digestion? No measureable side effects, they said. Well, how do you measure bad luck? By the fatality rates?”

  Sally had pulled into a parking space directly in front of Mr. Mowen’s office. It was snowing hard now. Mr. Mowen pulled on the glove Sally had handed him. He fished in his pocket for the other one. “Sixty-one,” he said. “Sally, will you go in with me? I’ll never get the elevator to work.”

  Sally walked with him into the building. On the way up in the elevator, she said, “If you’re so convinced the waste-emissions project is causing your bad luck, why don’t you tell Research to turn it off?”

  “They’d never believe me. Whoever heard of coincidences as a side effect of trash?”

  They went into the outer office. Janice said, “Hello!” as if they had returned from an arctic expedition. Mr. Mowen said, “Thanks, Sally. I think I can make it from here.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go explain what happened to this young man and tell him you’re sorry?”

  “I don’t think that would work,” Sally said. She kissed him on the cheek. “We’re in bad shape, aren’t we?”

  Mr. Mowen turned to Janice. “Get me Research, and don’t let my wife in,” he said, went into his office, and shut the door. There was a crash and the muffled sound of Mr. Mowen swearing.

  Janice sighed. “This young man of yours,” she said to Sally. “His name wouldn’t be Brad McAfee, would it?”

  “No,” Sally said, “but he thinks it is.” On the way to the elevator she stopped and picked up Mr. Mowen’s glove and put it in her pocket.

  After Mr. Mowen’s secretary hung up, Sue called Brad. She wasn’t sure what the connection was between Brad and Mr. Mowen’s secretary’s terminal not working, but she thought she’d better let him know that Mr. Mowen’s secretary knew his name.

  There was no answer. She tried again at lunch and again on her afternoon break. The third time the line was busy. At a quarter of three her supervisor came in and told Sue she could leave early since heavy snow was predicted for rush hour. Sue tried Brad’s number one more time to make sure he was there. It was still busy.

  It was a good thing she was getting off early. She had only worn a sweater to work, and it was already snowing so hard she could hardly see out the window. She had worn sandals, too. Somebody had left a pair of bright blue moon boots in the coatroom, so she pulled those on over her sandals and went out to the parking lot. She wipe
d the snow off the windshield with the sleeve of her sweater, and started over to Brad’s apartment.

  “You didn’t meander on over to the press conference,” Brad said when Ulric came in.

  “No,” Ulric said. He didn’t take off his coat.

  “Old Man Mowen didn’t either. Which was right lucky, because I got to jaw with all those reporters instead of him. Where did you go off to? You look colder than an otter on a snowslide.”

  “I was with the ‘gal’ you found for me. The one you had jump me so I wouldn’t go to the press conference and ruin your chances with Sally Mowen.”

  Brad was sitting at his terminal. “Sally wasn’t there, which turned out to be right lucky because I met this reporter name of Jill who …” He turned around and looked at Ulric. “What gal are you talking about?”

  “The one you had conveniently fall out of a tree on me. I take it she was one of your spare fiancees. What did you do? Make her climb out of the apartment window?”

  “Now let me get this straight. Some gal fell out of that old cottonwood on top of you? And you think I did it?”

  “Well, if you didn’t, it was an amazing coincidence that the branch broke just as I was passing under it and an even more amazing coincidence that she generated language, which was just what that printout you came up with read. But the most amazing coincidence of all is the punch in the nose you’re going to get right now.”

  “Now, don’t get so dudfoozled. I didn’t drop no gal on you, and if I’m lyin’, let me be kicked to death by grasshoppers. If I was going to do something like that, I’d have gotten you one who could speak good English, like you wanted, not … what did you say she did? Generated language?”

  “You expect me to believe it’s all some kind of coincidence?” Ulric shouted. “What kind of … of … dodunk do you take me for?”

  “I’ll admit it is a pretty seldom thing to have happen,” Brad said thoughtfully. “This morning I found me a hundred dollar bill on the way to the press conference. Then I meet this reporter Jill and we get to talking and we have a whole lot in common like her favorite movie is Lay that Rifle Down with Judy Canova in it, and then it turns out she’s Sally Mowen’s roommate last year in college.”

  The phone rang. Brad picked it up. “Well, ginger peachy. Come on over. It’s the big housing unit next to the orental gardens. Apartment 6B.” He hung up the phone. “Now that’s just what I been talking about. That was that gal reporter on the phone. I asked her to come over so’s I could honeyfuggle her into introducing me to Sally, and she says she can’t ’cause she’s gotta catch a plane outta Cheyenne. But now she says the highway’s closed, and she’s stuck here in Chugwater. Now that kind of good luck doesn’t happen once in a blue moon.”

  “What?” Ulric said, and unclenched his fists for the first time since he’d come into the room. He went over to look out the window. He couldn’t see the moon that had been in the sky earlier. He supposed it had long since set, and anyway it was starting to snow. “The moon blues,” he said softly to himself.

  “Since she is coming over here, maybe you should skedaddle so as not to spoil this run of good luck I am having.”

  Ulric pulled Collected American Slang out of the bookcase and looked up, “moon, blue” in the index. The entry read, “Once in a blue moon: rare, as an unusual coincidence, orig. rare as a blue moon; based on the rare occurrence of a blue-tinted moon from aerosol particulates in upper atmosphere; see Superstitions.” He looked out the window again. The smokestacks sent another blast up through the gray clouds.

  “Brad,” he said, “is your waste-emissions project putting aerosols into the upper atmosphere?”

  “That’s the whole idea,” Brad said. “Now I don’t mean to be bodacious, but that gal reporter’s going to be coming up here any minute.”

  Ulric looked up “Superstitions.” The entry for “moon, blue” read, “Once in a blue moon; folk saying attrib. SE America; local superstition linked occurrence of blue moon and unusual coincidental happenings; origin unknown.”

  He shut the book. “Unusual coincidental happenings,” he said. “Branches breaking, people falling on people, people finding hundred dollar bills. All of those are coincidental happenings.” He looked up at Brad. “You wouldn’t happen to know how that saying got started, would you?”

  “Bodacious? It probably was made up by some feller who was waiting on a gal and this other guy wouldn’t hotfoot it out of there so’s they could be alone.”

  Ulric opened the book again. “But if the coincidences were bad ones, they would be dangerous, wouldn’t they? Somebody might get hurt.”

  Brad took the book out of his hands and shoved Ulric out the door. “Now git!” he said. “You’re givin’ me the flit-flats again.”

  “We’ve got to tell Mr. Mowen. We’ve got to shut it off,” Ulric said, but Brad had already shut the door.

  “Hello, Janice,” Charlotte said. “Still an oppressed female in a dehumanizing male-dominated job, I see.”

  Janice hung up the phone. “Hello, Charlotte,” she said. “Is it snowing yet?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said, and took off her coat. It had a red button pinned to the lapel. It read, “NOW … or else!” “We just heard on the radio they’ve closed the highway. Where’s your reactionary chauvinist employer?”

  “Mr. Mowen is busy,” Janice said, and stood up in case she needed to flatten herself against Mr. Mowen’s door to keep Charlotte out.

  “I have no desire to see that last fortress of sadistic male dominance,” Charlotte said. She took off her gloves and rubbed her hands together. “We practically froze on the way up. Lynn Saunders rode back up with me. Her mother isn’t getting a divorce after all. Her bid for independence crumbled at the first sign of societal disapproval, I’m afraid. Lynn had a message on her terminal to call you, but she couldn’t get through. She said for me to tell you she’d be over as soon as she checks in with her fiance.”

  “Brad McAfee,” Janice said.

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. She sat down in the chair opposite Janice’s desk and took off her boots. “I had to listen to her sing his praises all the way from Cheyenne. Poor brainwashed victim of male oppressionist propaganda. I tried to tell her she was only playing into the hands of the entrenched male socio-sexual establishment by getting engaged, but she wouldn’t listen.” She stopped massaging her stockinged foot. “What do you mean, he’s busy? Tell that arrogant sexist pig I’m here and I want to see him.”

  Janice sat back down and took the file folder with “Project Sally” in it out of her desk drawer. “Charlotte,” she said, “before I do that, I was wondering if you’d give me your opinion of something.”

  Charlotte padded over to the desk in her stockinged feet. “Certainly,” she said. “What is it?”

  Sally wiped the snow off the back window with her bare hands and got in the car. She had forgotten about the side mirror. It was caked with snow. She rolled down the window and swiped at it with her hand. The snow landed in her lap. She shivered and rolled the window back up, and then sat there a minute, waiting for the defroster to work and blowing on her cold, wet hands. She had lost her gloves somewhere.

  No air at all was coming out of the defroster. She rubbed a small space clean so she could see to pull out of the parking space and edged forward. At the last minute she saw the ghostlike form of a man through the heavy curtain of snow and stamped on the brake. The motor died. The man she had almost hit came around to the window and motioned to her to roll the window down. It was Ulric.

  She rolled the window down. More snow fell in her lap. “I was afraid I’d never see you again,” Ulric said.

  “I …” Sally said, but he waved her silent with his hand.

  “I haven’t got much time. I’m sorry I shouted at you this morning. I thought … anyway, now I know that isn’t true, that it was a lot of coincidences that … anyway I’ve got to go do somehing right now that can’t wait, but I want you to wait right here for me. Will you do th
at?”

  She nodded.

  He shivered and stuck his hands in his pockets. “You’ll freeze to death out here. Do you know where the housing unit by the oriental gardens is? I live on the sixth floor, apartment B. I want you to wait for me there. Will you do that? Do you have a piece of paper?”

  Sally dug in her pocket and pulled out the folded scrap of paper with, “Wanted: Young woman,” on it. She looked at it a minute and then handed it to Ulric. He didn’t even unfold it. He scribbled some numbers on it and handed it back to her.

  “This is my security code,” he said. “You have to use it for the elevator. My roommate will let you into the apartment.” He stopped and looked hard at her. “On second thought, you’d better wait for me in the hall. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He bent and kissed her through the window. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

  “I …” Sally said, but he had already disappeared into the snow. Sally rolled the window up. The windshield was covered with snow again. She put her hand up to the defroster. There was still no air coming out. She turned on the windshield wipers. Nothing happened.

  Gail didn’t get back to her office until after two. Reporters had hung around after the press conference asking her questions about Mr. Mowen’s absence and the waste-emissions project. When she did make it back to the office, they began calling, and she didn’t get started on her press conference publicity releases until nearly three. She almost immediately ran into a problem. Her notes mentioned particulates, and she knew Brad had said what kind, but she hadn’t written it down. She couldn’t let the report go without specifying which particulates or the press would jump to all kinds of alarming conclusions. She called Brad. The line was busy. She stuffed everything into a large manila envelope and started over to his apartment to ask him.