Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  It was a joke, of course. It was one of the happy, enduring jokes that couldn’t be spoiled. Fairbridge laughed with delight. A billion choices there were, but there couldn’t be a more apt choice than this one.

  One couldn’t take in all that room at once. It was a detailed world of too many dimensions, yet the pattern that Fairbridge O’Boyle got was one of delightful scantiness. How to example it? What thing to take of the many for its mark?

  In that realm, a chair might have front legs but no back legs, you see. If it were in a certain perspective where the back legs couldn’t be seen, what need to have them? The room did not have four walls all at one time. It had sometimes two walls and sometimes three. However could you see all four walls at one time?

  If one thing hid another, it was not necessary for the hidden thing to be. A person seen in profile had no need of another side of his face. Time enough to have it when it would be visible. If you looked fast enough you could catch that world and its people unlined and abridged, but you had to look fast.

  “What is it, Simon?” Fairbridge asked. “Not that it matters. It’s amazing. Are they all so tricky and happy?”

  “It’s one of the pseudo-bucolic sets. Ah, there are countless ones much more tricky and much happier, but this is an easy one for beginners, and you remain persistently a beginner.”

  “Papa says for you to come in,” said a girl that Fairbridge had always known and with a name that he would never remember. “Grandpa says to give the young jackanapes some pop-skull. Great-grandpa says that you look like a peddler. Are you?”

  Did she really speak? Or were her words lettered in a cartoonist’s balloon over her head? No matter. In her pleasant and unsubstantial way she spoke. This was glad simplicity itself, which is integrated and total simultaneous being. And the pop-skull was joltingly excellent. There was a curious lack that wasn’t felt as a lack.

  “Do you know that this pop-skull is only half a bottle?” Fairbridge asked. “Not in the sense that it’s only half full, but there’s no back to the bottle. I turn it around, and then there’s a back but no front.” He looked at the world in new amazement. This world was too staged a thing to be real.

  “Why, this is the archetype!” he cried. “The frame we are in here, what did Simon call it? Shall we call it pseudo-bucolic social satire?”

  “Yes, let’s do,” the girl agreed. “It’s fun to call things by names like that.”

  Dionysus was there, but as a clown. But he had appeared a dozen times as a comic-strip clown with his real identity unknown. This was like a barn dance, but it was a world as well as a barn, and there were tens of thousands of folks here—Cousin Claude the country clown and Cousin Clarence the city dude, Clarabelle and Clarissa and five thousand other cousins, scampers and gaffers and gawkers of all ages and sexes, patch-pants’ d and white-bearded and coon-crazy and merry.

  They drank mountain-dew and green-fog and panther-sweat and golden-moonshine. There was round-singing and ballad-singing and country-singing; and Fairbridge became drunk with it all. There were jokes and bejangles and stories, the rich originals of them all. Did you know that some of the oldest jokes in the world haven’t been told in the world yet?

  And anomalous intrusions? Whatever would we do without the wonderful anomalous intrusions? Old trains were running through the room, hooting and screaming; and with red-hot pieces falling off them. And many of these trains were never to appear on ordinary earth. And the father of the scanty-clad girl (there was no back to her dress, or to her, unless she turned around, and then there was no front to either), the father came with a shot-gun that was like an elephant gun.

  “All right, young jig-snapper,” the old father said. “You have jazzed my daughter. Now we have the marrying.”

  “This is a primordial village psychic module. You know that, don’t you?” Fairbridge said to the outrageous but not really outraged father. After all, Fairbridge O’Boyle was a professor.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” the father agreed. “Are you ready for the ceremony?”

  “And the shot-gun motif is absolutely primordial,” Fairbridge continued. “I didn’t realize that before.”

  “The shot-gun is prime,” the father said, “but it blasts.” And he blasted the back-side of Fairbridge clear off with it. Oh well, it wouldn’t show unless Fairbridge turned around. He might as well join these merry people in their attributes.

  “Simon, you say that there are millions of such universes and all different?” Fairbridge gasped, and he was now filled with the enormity of the idea.

  “Everything that is is,” Simon said simply. “Come, we’ll visit more of them.”

  “Drop back any time,” the girl said. “There’s always some of us home.”

  They visited dozens, hundreds of universes. They had, in fact, been visiting countless of them simultaneously, and Fairbridge found himself to be hundreds of involved persons, and all of them himself. This was hilarity, this was transcendence. Some of these worlds were incredibly urbane and sophisticated, even though the people of them were barefooted—till you happened to look at their feet. Then, somehow and momentarily, they acquired hasty shoes. You could catch them unshod for a bare instant. Some of the worlds were bucolic in a way that even that first module world couldn’t be. Some were angelic, some were rowdy, some were mind-bursting with their very intellectuality. Some had a wit with such bite that they snapped whole members off one. Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O’Boyle crowded whole lifetimes into that evening and night. These were the multitudes beyond count, the absolutely unforgettable things.

  And Fairbridge woke in the morning, standing and clothed, a morning fool with the manifold memories of the past night slipping away from him forever.

  II

  What bridge and what ferry, what bright ford, is this it?

  What half-penny passage so open to get!

  If miss you this crossing, forever you’ll miss it

  To worlds in the wings all unbornable yet.

  Cocytus Crossing—Benny B–Flat

  That evening, Simon Frakes lectured again to all the learned folks:

  “Please understand one thing: all imagined things have reality. They are not because we imagine them. We imagine them because they are. Imagination is only the encounter with their reality. From the Olympian gods to Boob McNutt, all are persons. To imagine the non-existing is an impossibility. All are with the billions in that limbus. All are entities in the psychic pool. I speak literally.

  “All are real: Kate Fennigate, Moll Flanders, Dirk Stroeve, Ester Jack, Audifax O’Hanlon, Percy Gryce, Virginia Carvel, Count Mosco, Dinah Shadd, Octavia Beaupree, Richard Nixon, Flagman Thiel, Gil Blas, Red Hanrahan, Handy Andy, Sebastian Marchman, Gippo Nolan, Mildred Rogers, Isolde, Deirdre, Frank Couperwood, Sir Kid Rackrent, Jasper Petulengro, Cy Slocum, Lucy Dashwood, Hairbreadth Harry, Julien Sorel, Felix Kennaston, Harold Teen, Matthew Bramble, Abe Kibble, Horatio Maltravers, Constance Povey, Joe Calash, Widow Wadman, Genevieve Rod, Polly Peachum, J. Hartford Oakdale, Nat Buntline, Meg Marsh, Gavin Dishart, Casper Gutman, all are real.”

  “You mean, of course,” said David Dean, who was one of those responsible for the lectures, “that they are real in the sense that they bear a verisimilitude to inner reality, that their expression rings true, that they are valid imaginative creatures.”

  “No, I don’t believe that I mean anything like that at all,” Simon said. “You miss my point. I say that all the entities in the psychic pool are real

  (is there any other way to say ‘real’?)—that they are beings as much as you are a being, that those we know are only those recognized by chance, and that the others are no less real. All are real: Barney Google, Jurgis Rudkus, Bounder J. Roundheels, Morgan Penwolf, Madonna Zilia, Wolf Larsen, Hippolyte Schinner, Cliff Sutherland, Abu Kir and Abu Sir (they are a pair), Madame Verdurin, Arabella Allen, Andy Gump, Elmer Tuggle, Lorelei Lee—”

  “Will you come to your point, Simon!” Fairbridge O’Boyle suggested. The list
eners were beginning to look at each other uneasily.

  “I am on my point completely,” Simon maintained. “One cannot give too many instances: Salvation Yeo, Horseshoe Robinson, David Harum, Florence Udley, Gregers Werle, Daisy Buchanan, Delphine de Nucingen, Paul Bunyan, Becky Sharp, George Bungle, Daisy Bell, Whiskey Johnny, Casey Jones, Althea Pontifex, every person in song, story, picture, play, dream, or delirium is real. Wing Biddlebaum, Happy Hooligan, Snuffy Smith, Lady Sarah Macgreggor, Peter Canavan, Colley Cibber, Enoch Oates.”

  “Are there many more of these?” asked Robert Stokes, who was one of the listeners and who seemed to be developing a nervous condition.

  “Billions of them,” said Simon.

  “Is it necessary to name them all?”

  “Apparently it is. I tell you that there is a multitude in the wings, and you do not believe me. Long John Silver, Major Hoople, Madame Lazonga, Auguste Dupin, Jenny Blanchard, Jeff Peters, Barnacle Bill—these are real.”

  “You are saying that every human type is already in theoretical existence and waiting to be recognized?” ventured Robert Stokes.

  “No, Robert. My words seem to convey nothing to you,” Simon lamented. “I am saying that every possible being is in actual existence always. I am saying that, though only a fraction of them are born physically into the world (that part is accidental and unimportant and can often be had for the asking), many others are made manifest by the thing known loosely as folk-lore. I am saying that these, and the myriad others not made known to you at all, are no less real.”

  But Simon Frakes was not able to convince his listeners. He named another hundred, and then another thousand, instances. The audience became restive: and that was strange, because the subject was an interesting one.

  Benny B–Flat visited Simon Frakes and Fairbridge O’Boyle late one evening. Benny was a song writer.

  “Now, gentlemen and professors,” Benny said to them, “I have a small hatchet of my own to grind. I have heard about this new frolic and I will not beat around the boscage. I believe that there is something in it for me. You talk about this psychic sea where all possible persons and gadgets already exist. And you say that the new things in the world are only old things taken out of that sea, and that we create nothing. Gentlemen, I am looking for the dipper to dip into that sea. Where can I find it?”

  “Here, if you are to find it anywhere,” Simon said. “What do you want to dip out?”

  “Tunes, tunes. I am a tune-smith. We grind them up and we distort them, but first we have to have them. If all possible tunes are already in existence, then who has custody of them?”

  “Oh, Fiddle-Foot Jones and ten thousand others,” Simon said.

  “Can you arrange for me to meet them?” Benny asked. “And what is the tariff?”

  “I can arrange it, Benny B–F,” said Simon, “and the only tariff is the little passage coin that we make ourselves. For the smart ones it’s easy.”

  “I’m smart. And these out-of-the-world tunes, how will they be?”

  “Familiar, Benny, as though you had known them forever: yet new and successful. They will serve your purpose. You believe, and others doubt. Here! I draw five lines on a sheet of paper. Not any five lines. These five lines. Then I pluck the drawing off the paper and make it real. It doesn’t look like a coin, but you use it as a passage coin. Can you do that?”

  “I got it, Cy,” Benny B-Flat said. “You just have to show Benny a thing once. There are folks who wouldn’t even know that this thing is a key or a coin. They wouldn’t know where to look for the river or the door that it fits. I’m glad I’m not one of the slow folks. I’ve got it now, and thanks.”

  “Ah but, Benny, there’s a catch,” Simon warned. “You’ll remember it only if you’re one person in a million.”

  “I’m one in a million,” said Benny B–Flat. But Fairbridge O’Boyle wasn’t one in a million. Fairbridge was an ordinary man who now worried because he woke up every morning standing and clothed and with his hat on his head. He woke with residue of unremembered pleasure and with frustration of loss. He worried because he didn’t know where he spent his nights.

  “I ought to have a wife,” he moaned. “I bet she’d find out where I spend my nights.” But he felt more and more that Simon Frakes was involved in the mystery.

  “Simon,” he said to his wispy friend. “I go somewhere at night. I see something. And then I forget. But it gnaws me. What do I do at night?”

  “Fairbridge, you cross a river you don’t believe is there. You visit the multitudes which you swear do not exist. Amnesia of the visits is often the price of the visits. Once more I show you a device, and perhaps it will stick with you. There is a Greek name for it, and a child’s name for it, and these are the lines of it. See how simply they’re drawn! Five lines, that’s all. You should be able to retain them, but they have a slippery quality. Do you remember who used them when you were a child?”

  “No. Nobody used them. I have never seen lines like those before.”

  “But you have seen them. You have seen them and used them every evening for the last ten days. And you saw them when you were a child. In every group of children there is one who knows them. It is appointed that there should be one such child in every group. One day you played the game of ‘Disappear’, and he used the device and disappeared. And later he took you all with him on the passage over that river, on the bright crossing to the ‘billion worlds’. But later you forgot about it. And in most cases, the child who was the adept also forgot about it.”

  “What’s the name of the river, Simon?”

  “Cocytus, of course.”

  “But that’s a mythological river.”

  “Mythology is one trick to avoid complete forgetting.”

  “What is the name of the device, or the lines?”

  “Obolus, of course.”

  “But that’s the name of an ancient and almost mythological coin. It’s the word I wake up in the morning remembering when everything else has slid away. And it’s myself, O’Boyle. But what is it all, Simon? What is the connection?”

  “It is only the making of an image solid, Fairbridge, ‘imaginint’ in the true sense. Draw the lines on the paper. Then pluck them off in your hand. But with this thing you can cross the river to the worlds beyond the horizon.”

  “This time I’ll remember, Simon. We’ll visit a hundred universes, and I’ll remember, remember, remember.”

  Fairbridge O’Boyle did visit many more than a hundred universes with Simon Frakes that night. He swore that he’d remember them all. And he didn’t. He woke at dawn, standing and clothed and oblivious, a morning fool.

  Simon Frakes was giving the last of his lectures. His pleasant grin had taken on a look of futility. He hadn’t been able to communicate with his listeners well, and whose was the fault of that?

  “If I haven’t convinced you by now, then it may be hopeless,” Simon told his hearers. “‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one risen from the dead’ is one of your own scripture sayings. For my own case I can only say ‘If you will not believe me, neither will you believe one who is not yet born’. Every possible thought has already been thought out, every riddle has been unriddled, every epigram spoken. You have only to tap them. They have been in existence for millennia.”

  “Have you been born, Mr. Frakes?” Professor Dodgson asked quickly.

  “No, of course not. Do I look as if I’d been born?”

  “And where in space is this limbus of yours?” demanded Robert Stokes. “Just where is this teeming limbo of the unborn where everything already exists?”

  “It is fragmented. It is protean. It is everywhere,” said Simon. “Through a door and across a river. And there it is.”

  “Then why can’t we visit it? That would be the only proof.”

  “A dozen of you here present have visited it, Robert. And you yourself have done so several times. But you are not fully convinced. And you forget.”

  “You are sayi
ng that this psychic sea is a sort of common human memory?” Robert fumbled. “But you cannot mean that it is real in the same sense that—”

  Simon Frakes swore a resounding oath from the limbus. It had never been heard in the world before. But it had a familiar ring to it, and it would catch on.

  “I thought a series of lectures by a man unborn would be interesting to you,” Simon said finally, his near-anger having passed. “I intended no more than a friendly visit from my country to yours, and I am sorry if it has gone amiss.”

  “You speak as if you were one of them,” said David Dean. “Your lectures have been interesting, though perhaps not very informative. We are of that adulterous generation. We need a sign.”

  “Oh very well,” Simon sighed, “but the sign will not convince you.”

  Simon Frakes stood there with his grin that was a caricature as a cartoonist might have drawn it. He was there. Then only his grin was there, mocking them in the empty air.

  “I’m sure that I know that grin from somewhere,” Professor Dodgson mumbled. “Ah, but memory is a cat-like thing. It creeps away soft-footed, and is gone.”

  “If you do not believe this, then you will not believe anything,” said the grin of Simon Frakes. Then the grin itself vanished, and that was the last that anyone ever saw of Simon Frakes in that neighborhood.

  “We are undone,” said David Dean. “We engaged a common trickster, a stage magician, to give the first series of the Trefoil Lectures. I doubt if we will be able to continue them under that name. To disappear from a lecture platform into thin air! How corny can you get! How could you have been taken in by that charlatan, Fairbridge?”

  “I taken in? I did not engage him, though he did become my friend.”