The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  It was fifteen years later—the Research General had long been fired—when Mando Paige stepped out of the spot where the shrinking ray’s beam crossed itself. He was blue and yellow and red and his hair was curly. I stood within feet of him and he smiled at me. I, of course, couldn’t let him go—not due to any law but my own urge to finish the job I’d started at the outset. As he stepped back toward the ray, I turned it off, and he was trapped, for the moment, in our moment. I called for my assistants to surround him, and I sent one to my office for the revolver I kept in my bottom drawer. He told me that one speck of his saliva contained four million Daltharees. “When I fart,” he said, “I set forth Armadas.” I shot him and the four assistants and then automatically acid-washed the lab to destroy the Dalthareen plague and evidence of murder. No one suspected a thing. I found a few cities sprouting beneath my fingernails last week. There were already rows of domes growing behind my ears. My blood no doubt is the manufacturer of cities, flowing silver through my veins. Crowds behind my eyes, commerce in my joints. Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee.

  Jimmy

  Pat Cadigan

  Pat Cadigan has twice won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel of the year. She lives in gritty, urban North London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, and her son Rob.

  Although primarily known as a science-fiction writer (she’s one of the original cyberpunks), she also writes fantasy and horror stories, which have been collected in Patterns, Dirty Work, and Home by the Sea.

  She has written twelve books, including two nonfiction and one young adult. Her next novel, Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine, will appear Real Soon.

  In “Jimmy,” Cadigan perfectly captures what a pain it was to be an eleven-year-old during the early 1960s. But her eponymous character has an even worse time of it.

  The day JFK got shot, things got really crazy for Jimmy Streubal. For me, too—hell, for everybody—but mostly for Jimmy.

  It wasn’t like things weren’t already screwy for him. He had this really messed-up family situation. When his parents were together, they used to have the kind of fights that the neighbors called the police about. After they got divorced, legend had it the custody fight was back-asswards—his mother tried to force his father to take him and vice versa. In those days, the scandal of having divorced parents in a small town was bad enough but when neither of them wanted you, it was like going around with the word TRASH tattooed on your forehead.

  But it was even worse than that for Jimmy. He had a lot of relatives on both sides of the family—aunts, uncles, all kinds of cousins, and grandparents—and none of them wanted him any more than his parents did.

  Social Services was forced to intervene, as my mother put it. She worked in the admitting office at the local hospital and she knew everybody in Social Services, including Jimmy’s social worker, Mrs. Beauvais. Because there were so many Streubals and Streubal in-laws in town, my mother told me, Mrs. Beauvais was under orders to get one of them to take Jimmy. The county had only one group home for orphaned or unwanted boys but it was over thirty miles away and filled to twice its official capacity with kids who were worse off. The state’s foster-family subsidy was good enough that she could usually talk a reluctant relative into a ninety-day trial period. Unfortunately, Jimmy never lasted that long. Four or five weeks later, Mrs. Beauvais would get a call telling her to come and get him now. All she could do was take Jimmy back to her office and call the next relative on the list.

  My mother didn’t normally share this kind of information with me, but Jimmy and I had been friends since kindergarten and she wanted me to know the facts rather than the gossip. So she swore me to secrecy, promising to kill me if I let anything slip (in those days, if your parents loved you, they threatened your life at least once a week).

  I dutifully vowed not to say a word. I didn’t tell her that I had already heard the same thing, generously embellished, from Mrs. Beauvais’s niece, who sat behind me and served as the class distributor of any gossip worth repeating. Big problems in a small town: If you had any, there wasn’t a hope in hell of keeping them quiet. Nor did I mention that I had heard even more detailed information from Jimmy himself. Neither my mother nor Mrs. Beauvais’s niece knew, for example, that he was always evicted before anyone called the Social Services office; when Mrs. Beauvais arrived, she would find him waiting out on the sidewalk, regardless of the weather or time of day (or night), with a note listing all of his sins and general shortcomings pinned to his shirt.

  “My mom said I stole from her purse,” Jimmy told me. “My dad claimed I smoked his cigarettes and sneaked out at night when I was supposed to be in bed.”

  “Where did you go?” I asked him.

  “Dunno. He never said.” Jimmy wrinkled his nose. “Just out somewhere, getting into trouble and he couldn’t control me.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Uz,” Jimmy added, grinning a little. If you split the syllables between two kids, it didn’t count as swearing.

  “Did you ever ask him?”

  “Ask him what—where I went? Are you kidding? You think I wanted a fat lip?” He ran a hand over his crew cut. Jimmy always had crew cuts, even in the coldest weather. On the first day of school in first grade, the teacher swore she saw lice in his hair so every few weeks, Mrs. Beauvais dragged him to the barber to have clippers run over his head. His hair was so short that it was hard to tell what color it was. I didn’t think it was fair but Jimmy said it was better than getting his head scrubbed with disinfectant shampoo.

  “That stuff smells funny,” he said. “Like you oughta wash floors with it, not your hair, and if it gets in your eyes, it stings worse than anything. I got some in my mouth once and I couldn’t taste anything else for days.”

  It was an odd friendship, Jimmy and me—a boy and a girl, the class troublemaker and the straight-A student. It started, as I said, back in kindergarten. I first noticed Jimmy because he was actually doing something wrong: He was over at the small sink in the corner where Miss Campbell had us all wash our hands after finger-painting, and he was filling a paper cup with water and pouring it into the trash can, over and over again.

  I remember this so vividly that even now I can close my eyes and see it like a clip from a movie—an indie production shot on a budget, The Chant of Jimmy Streubal, maybe. I can see Jimmy moving from the small white sink to the trash can, also white, round-topped with a swing door, and slightly taller than he was, and back again with an expression of deep concentration on his face, a little man with a mission.

  I remember the other kids standing around watching in horrified anticipation of what would happen when Miss Campbell finally looked up from whatever she was engaged in and saw what he was doing; this was so far off the misbehavior scale that no one could imagine what sort of punishment Jimmy was in for.

  Most of all, I remember that I understood immediately what he was doing: He wanted to know how many cups of water it would take to fill the trash can all the way to the top. This was something I had wondered about myself and I had even contemplated trying the same thing to find out. Ultimately, I had decided against it, as it seemed to be the sort of thing that would make Miss Campbell scream and yell and call your mother. As it turned out, I was right but that was no fun. Fun would have been Jimmy telling us exactly how many cups it took and Miss Campbell writing it on the board for him, not to mention getting to see a trash can full of water, instead of what actually happened.

  Strangely, that’s the one thing I can’t remember—what happened when Jimmy got caught, or even how he got caught. Whether one of the kids finally got tired of waiting for the storm and called out, Miss Campbell, look what Jimmy’s doing! or whether Miss Campbell herself suddenly realized there was too much running-water noise and turned to see what fresh hell her teaching degree had visited on her now, I have forgotten completely.

  I’v
e also forgotten exactly how Jimmy was punished for this stupendous transgression but shortly after that, we became friends. We didn’t talk about the Trash Can Incident until a few years later when, after confirming I’d been right about his intentions, I asked him how many cups of water he thought it would have taken.

  “At first, I thought maybe a hundred,” he told me, his voice thoughtful and serious. “But I was just a little kid, I didn’t even really know what a hundred meant. Now I know it would have taken a lot more and I would have had to pour a lot faster—water was leaking out all over the floor.”

  That surprised me—I didn’t remember any water on the floor. Just Jimmy pouring cup after cup into that white trash can. I asked him if that was when all the trouble had first started, with one very bad morning in kindergarten.

  “Nah,” he said, “it had already started at home. The kids next door were playing with matches one day and they set their room on fire. They told their parents I did it and everyone believed them. I couldn’t even tie my own shoes let alone light a match but everyone believed them anyway.”

  In a properly aligned universe, Jimmy would have been throwing rocks at me, putting spiders in my desk, spitting in my hair when my back was turned, and extorting my lunch money out of me. He didn’t actually do anything like that to me or anyone else but for some reason, everyone was sure he did. I couldn’t figure it out; Jimmy said it was his lot in life. His karma, he called it. I had to look that one up, something that didn’t happen very often even when I was ten years old. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how Jimmy would know about something like that. I just figured he was as brainy as I was and hiding it. No one would have believed he was really smart—if he’d ever gotten an A or even a B, everyone would have accused him of cheating. Kids like Jimmy weren’t smart and they weren’t talented. They couldn’t be—otherwise their parents would have wanted them. Wouldn’t they?

  Big problems in a small town; messy questions with neat answers.

  Where were you when you heard Kennedy got shot? had a neat answer for everybody. I was in school—just another day in fifth grade—but Jimmy wasn’t there. Thrown out again, I thought; he was always absent when someone threw him out. This time it was his aunt Linda. Mrs. Barnicle (I swear to God, that was really her name) raised her eyebrows at his empty desk and then got this look like she smelled something bad. That was how she always looked at Jimmy and I hated her for it. I don’t think she knew that she was doing it, which made me hate her even more.

  As if she sensed something, she looked over at me, her expression changing to puzzled and then disapproving, and I realized I had been scowling at her with that same bad-smell expression on my own face. If I didn’t cut it out, I was going to get the chair—the wooden chair in the far corner. You’d get exiled to it for chewing gum, passing notes, answering back, or other high crimes, and if you didn’t sit completely still, it let out a god-awful squealing noise. I had never sat there; Jimmy, of course, had done more time in it than anyone else in the class, maybe more than everyone else combined. It never squealed when he sat in it, which seemed to annoy Mrs. Barnicle more than if he had made it sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  I looked away from her quickly and started sorting my books and papers, hoping she wouldn’t decide to come over and ask me if there was something I’d like to share with her and the rest of the class. Fortunately, the Moran twins went up to her with a complicated question about a math problem we’d had for homework. I kept my head down. With any luck, she would forget all about me.

  The day progressed unremarkably. Judy LeBlanc got caught with a Beatles magazine and was sent to the chair for the rest of the day, Beatlemania being the bane of Mrs. Barnicle’s existence. Judy cried steadily if quietly for the first half hour; she was afraid she wouldn’t get the magazine back and so were the rest of us. She had promised to show it to us at recess and obviously that wasn’t going to happen now. Disappointment hung over us like an indoor cloud.

  Then someone called Mrs. Barnicle out of the classroom and when she came back, she looked as if she’d been hit over the head with a baseball bat. I don’t remember what she said, not the exact words. I just remember disbelief and shock, and an echo of the feeling I’d had when my father had died, a sense that all the things that were supposed to be steady and permanent were actually no more substantial or enduring than soap bubbles.

  I automatically turned to look at Jimmy. His empty desk sat there as if it were anyone else’s, as if it belonged to a kid who just happened to be sick today and not someone whose aunt was kicking him out. As if everything were really quite normal and it wasn’t a world where the president had just been assassinated.

  Assassinated. That was the word Mrs. Barnicle used. She said it over and over and it was so scary, not even the biggest loudmouth jerks in the class sniggered at it.

  They let us out early. On my way home, I passed people crying on the street. Grown-ups crying in public, as if JFK had been someone they’d known personally. Maybe it was Kennedy or maybe it was the tenor of the times, or maybe it was both. Whatever it was, I can’t imagine it happening now; but then, it made everything even scarier and more messed-up. My mother was still at work, unreachable except in an emergency, and since I had neither been shot nor done the shooting, this didn’t qualify. Even if she had been home, she would have been glued to the news and telling me to be quiet. Didn’t matter to me—I wanted Jimmy, not my mother. Jimmy knew about messed-up things. I hurried home, changed out of my school clothes, and went to look for him.

  His aunt Linda lived four blocks away from our apartment building, which wasn’t quite outside the boundary my mother had told me I was confined to when she wasn’t home. As a latchkey kid, I was under strict orders not to roam the streets, something my mother considered both dangerous and disgraceful. Personally, I didn’t see the harm in going for a walk but after discovering the hard way that she somehow always found out when I disobeyed—secret mother radar? superpowers?—I did as I was told. The only person who didn’t make fun of me for this was Jimmy, which I thought was above and beyond the call of friendship. Hell, I made fun of myself for it.

  I walked over to Jimmy’s aunt’s house wishing it weren’t too cold to ride my bike—otherwise I could have been over there and back in under fifteen minutes. Less if his cousins were outside, because then I wouldn’t have to ring the doorbell and talk to his aunt. You could never depend on an adult for a straight answer in a situation like this anyway and Linda Valeri wasn’t the most approachable person in town. Chances were she’d just yell Mind your own business! and slam the door in my face. His cousins, on the other hand, would fall all over themselves to tell me where he was just to show off how much they knew.

  The afternoon sky was graying up so that the day looked colder than it really was. I remember that and I remember I could almost smell snow in the air. Six days to Thanksgiving and it hadn’t snowed but a couple of times; what was left from that wouldn’t have made a decent-size snowman. I was thinking about how early it got dark, how it would be like midnight by six o’clock, which was when my mother got home from work. I had to find Jimmy before then because I wasn’t supposed to be out after dark, especially not on a school night. Then I turned the corner onto his aunt’s street and walked right into the middle of his latest crisis.

  All three of Jimmy’s cousins were outside in front of the house along with his aunt Linda. She had been crying and still was a little, dabbing at her reddened eyes and nose with a wad of tissues about twice the size of a softball. She was talking to two people standing with their backs to me: a woman in an expensive tweed coat and a turquoise velvet hat and a tall skinny guy in a trench coat. A big boat of an Oldsmobile and a little red VW were parked nose-to-nose at the curb, or sort of nose-to-nose—the VW had one tire up on the curb. I was thinking the Olds looked familiar when one of Jimmy’s cousins suddenly yelled, “Hey, I bet she knows—she’s his girlfriend!”

  All three adults turned to see w
ho she was, Jimmy’s aunt glaring as if I had killed Kennedy and the other two looking like they thought I could catch the person who had.

  “Hello? Little girl?” said the woman, bending down a little with a slightly desperate smile. This was Jimmy’s social worker, Mrs. Beauvais, I realized, and I stepped back, wondering if it was too late to run. “What’s your name, dear?”

  “She lives in one of those big blocks on Water Street,” Jimmy’s aunt said. From the tone in her voice, you’d have thought she was talking about maggots.

  Mrs. Beauvais tossed her an irritated glance and turned back to me, her smile becoming more desperate. “It’s okay, dear, you’re not in trouble.”

  The tall skinny man next to her rolled his eyes; when he realized I had seen him, he gave me a big thousand-watt, pleading smile of his own. “Well, of course she knows she’s not in trouble, Jean-Marie,” he said, his voice going all gooey. “We just want to ask you if you know where Jimmy Streubal is. Are you really his girlfriend?”

  “No!” I said hotly, looking daggers at Jimmy’s cousins. If the adults hadn’t been around, I’d have punched them out for that slander. They knew it, too; they made faces at me behind Mrs. Beauvais’s back.

  “We’re just friends. I gotta go home—”

  “No, please, wait a minute—at least tell us your name,” said Mrs. Beauvais, also going all gooey now. “It’s so nice for us to meet a friend of Jimmy’s.”

  I was probably the only one they had ever met, I thought, as I told her who I was.

  “Oh, you’re Janet’s daughter!” Mrs. Beauvais exclaimed as if this was the most wonderful thing she had ever heard. “I know your mother very well, I see her whenever I’m at the hospital—”