The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  She laughs, shaking her head.

  Music is playing. Wine is flowing. The port is beautiful in daylight, but even more so under these lanterns, these stars, this moon, on this warm summer night. Someone grabs Saul and pulls him out to join the dance that fills the square. Agatha remains sitting by me. They’re sweet, considerate kids. One of them always stays at Papa’s side.

  “Do you know what kind of work Bill does these days?” I ask Agatha—a clumsy attempt both to satisfy my curiosity, and to raise the subject of Bill and Meg.

  “He works the markets, Papa. Like always. He sells commodities.”

  “But if he deals in things,” I say, genuinely if only vaguely puzzled, “that must mean there isn’t enough of everything…?” But perhaps it’s another part of the game. If everything was available in unlimited supply, there would be no fun left, would there? Nothing to save up for. No sense of anticipation or pleasurable denial. But then, how come Bill takes it all so seriously? What’s he trying to prove?

  Agatha shrugs So what? at my question anyway. She really doesn’t understand these things herself, and cares even less. Then someone pulls her up into the dance, and Saul takes her place beside me. The moment is lost. Saul’s tapping his feet. Smiling at Agatha as her bright skirt swirls. No metacam tonight, no Picasso faces. She doesn’t dissolve or clap her hands, burst into laughter or tears, or walk back singing to the table. But it’s hard not to keep thinking of all those tumbling possibilities. Where does it end? Is there a different Papa for every moment, even one that sprawls dying right now on these slick cobbles as blood pumps out from fragile arteries into his brain? And is there another one, far across the barricades of time, that sits here with Saul as Agatha swirls and dances, with Hannah still at his side?

  I reach for my wine glass and swallow, swallow. Hannah’s dead—but what if one cell, one strand of double helix, one atom had been different…? Or perhaps if Hannah had been less of an optimist? What if she hadn’t ignored those tiny symptoms, those minor niggles, if she’d worried and gone straight to the doctor and had the tests? Or if it had happened later, just five or ten years later, when there was a guaranteed cure…?

  But still—and despite the metacam—I’m convinced that there’s only one real universe. All the rest is hocus pocus, the flicker of an atom, quantum magic. And, after all, it seems churlish to complain about a world where so many things have finally worked out right.…

  “Penny for them.”

  “What?”

  “Your thoughts.” Saul pours out more wine. “It’s a phrase.”

  “Oh yes.” My head is starting to fizz. I drink the wine. “It’s an old one. I know it.”

  The music stops. Agatha claps, her hands raised, her face shining. The crowd pushes by. Time for drinks, conversation. Looking across the cleared space of the square, down the shadowed street leading to the harbor, I see a grey-haired woman walking toward us. I blink twice, slowly, waiting for her to disappear. But my ears pick up the clip of her shoes over the voices and the re-tuning of the band. She’s smiling. She knows us. She waves. As my heart trampolines on my stomach, she crosses the square and pulls a seat over to our table.

  “May I?”

  Agatha and Saul nod Yes. They’re always happy to meet new people. Me, I’m staring. She’s not Hannah, of course. Not Hannah.

  “Remember?” She asks me, tucking her dress under her legs as she sits down. “I helped carry your bags to that car of yours. I’ve seen it once or twice in the square. I’ve always wondered who drove it.”

  “It’s Papa’s pride and joy,” Agatha says, her chest heaving from the dance.

  The woman leans forward across the table, smiling. Her skin is soft, plump, downy as a peach.

  I point to Saul. “My grandson here’s got this device. He tells me it projects other possible worlds—”

  “—Oh, you mean a metacam.” She turns to Saul. “What model?”

  Saul tells her. The woman who isn’t Hannah nods, spreads her hands, sticks out her chin a little. It’s not the choice she’d have made, but …

  “More wine, Papa?”

  I nod. Agatha pours.

  I watch the woman with grey hair. Eyes that aren’t Hannah’s color, a disappointing droop to her nose that she probably keeps that way out of inverted vanity. I try to follow her and Saul’s conversation as the music starts up again, waiting for her to turn back toward me, waiting for the point where I can butt in. It doesn’t come, and I drink my wine.

  Somewhere there seems to be a mirror—or perhaps it’s just a possible mirror in some other world, or my own blurred imagination—and I see the woman whose name I didn’t catch sitting there, and I can see me, Papa. Propped at an off-center angle against the arms of a chair. Fat belly and long thin limbs, disturbingly pale eyes and a slack mouth surrounded by drapes of ancient skin. A face you can see right through to the skull beneath.

  Not-Hannah laughs at something Saul says. Their lips move, their hands touch, but I can’t hear any longer. I’ve been blinking too much—I may even have been crying—and I’ve somehow turned my eardrums off. In silence, Not-Hannah catches Saul’s strong young arms and pulls him up to dance. They settle easily into the beat and the sway. His hand nestles in the small of her back. She twirls in his arms, easy as thistledown. I blink, and drink more wine, and the sound crashes in again. I blink again. It’s there. It’s gone. Breaking like the tide. What am I doing here anyway, spoiling the fun of the able, the happy, the young?

  This party will go on, all the dancing and the laughing, until a doomsday that’ll never come. These people, they’ll live forever. They’ll warm up the sun, they’ll stop the universe from final collapse, or maybe they’ll simply relive each glorious moment as the universe turns back on itself and time reverses, party with the dinosaurs, resurrect the dead, dance until everything ends with the biggest of all possible bangs.

  “Are you all right, Papa?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I pour out more of the wine.

  It slops over the table.

  Saul’s sitting at the table again with Not-Hannah, and the spillage dribbles over Not-Hannah’s dress. I say fuck it, never mind, spilling more as I try to catch the flow, and I’ve really given the two of them the perfect excuse to go off together so he can help her to clean up. Yes, help to lift off her dress even though she’s old enough to be his—

  But then, who cares? Fun is fun is fun is fun. Or maybe it’s Agatha she was after. Or both, or neither. It doesn’t matter, does it? After all, my grandchildren have got each other. Call me old-fashioned, but look at them. My own bloody grandchildren. Look at them. Creatures from another fucking planet—

  But Not-Hannah’s gone off on her own anyway. Maybe it was something I said, but my eardrums are off—I can’t even hear my own words, which is probably a good thing. Saul and Agatha are staring at me. Looking worried. Their lips are saying something about Papa and Bed and Home, and there’s a huge red firework flashing over the moon. Or perhaps it’s a warning cursor, which was one of things Doc Fanian told me to look out for if there was ever a problem. My body is fitted with all sorts of systems and alarms, which my flesh and veins happily embrace. It’s just this brain that’s become a little wild, a little estranged, swimming like a pale fish in its bowl of liquid and bone. So why not fit a few new extra pieces, get rid of the last of the old grey meat? And I’d be new, I’d be perfect—

  * * *

  Whiteness. Whiteness. No light. No darkness.

  “Are you in there, Papa?”

  Doc Fanian’s voice.

  “Where else would I be?”

  I open my eyes. Everything becomes clear. Tiger-stripes of sunlight across the walls of my bedroom. The silver mantis limbs of my bedhelper. The smell of my own skin like sour ancient leather. Memories of the night before. “What have you done to me?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  I blink and swallow. I stop myself from blinking again. Doc Fanian’s in beach shorts and
a bright, ridiculous shirt; his usual attire for a consultation.

  “Did you know,” I say, “that they’ve installed a big red neon sign just above the moon that says Please Stop Drinking Alcohol?”

  “So the cursor did work!” Doc Fanian looks pleased with himself. His boyish features crinkle. “Then I suppose you passed out?”

  “Not long after. I thought it was just the drink.”

  “It’s a safety circuit. Of course, the body has got one too, but it’s less reliable at your age.”

  “I haven’t even got a hangover.”

  “The filters will have seen to that.”

  Doc Fanian gazes around my bedroom. There’s a photo of Hannah on the far wall. She’s hugging her knees as she sits on a grassy bank with nothing but sky behind her; a time and place I can’t even remember. He peers at it, but says nothing. He’s probably had a good mooch around the whole house by now, looking for signs, seeing how Papa’s managing. Which is exactly why I normally make a point of visiting him at the surgery. I never used to be afraid of doctors when I was fitter, younger. But I am now. Now that I need them.…

  “Your grandchildren called me in. They were worried. It’s understandable, although there was really no cause. None at all.” There’s a faint tone of irritation in Doc Fanian’s voice. He’s annoyed that anyone should doubt his professional handiwork, or think that Papa’s systems might have been so casually set up that a few glasses of wine would cause any difficulty.

  “Well, thanks.”

  “It’s no problem.” He smiles. He starts humming again. He forgives easily. “If you’d care to pop into the surgery in the next week or two, there’s some new stuff I’d like to show you. It’s a kind of short-term memory enhancement. You know—it helps if you forget things you’ve been doing recently.”

  I say nothing, wondering what Doc Fanian has encountered around the house to make him come up with this suggestion.

  “Where are Saul and Agatha?”

  “Just next door. Packing.”

  “Packing?”

  “Anyway.” He smiles. “I really must be going. I’d like to stay for breakfast, but…”

  “Maybe some other universe, eh?”

  He turns and gazes back at me for a moment. He understands more about me than I do myself, but still he looks puzzled.

  “Yes,” he nods. Half-smiling. Humoring an old man. “Take care, you hear?”

  He leaves the door open behind him. I can hear Saul and Agatha. Laughing, squabbling. Packing.

  I shift myself up. The bedhelper trundles out and offers arms for me to grab. I’m standing when Saul comes into the room.

  “I’m sorry about getting the doc out, Papa. We just thought, you know.…”

  “Why are you packing? You’re not off already, are you?”

  He smiles. “Remember, Papa? We’re off to the Amazon. We told you on the beach yesterday.”

  I nod.

  “But it’s been great, Papa. It really has.”

  “I’m sorry about last night. I behaved like an idiot.”

  “Yes.” He claps his hands on my bony shoulders and laughs outright. “That was quite something.” He shakes his head in admiration. Papa, a party animal! “You really did cut loose, didn’t you?”

  * * *

  Agatha fixes breakfast. The fridge is filled with all kinds of stuff I’ve never even heard of. They’ve re-stocked it from somewhere, and now it looks like the horn of plenty. I sit watching my lovely granddaughter as she moves around, humming.

  Cooking smells. The sigh of the sea wafts through the open window. Another perfect day. The way I feel about her and Saul leaving, I could have done with grey torrents of rain. But even in paradise you can’t have everything.

  “So,” I say, “you’re off to the Amazon.”

  “Yeah.” She bangs the plates down on the table. “There are freshwater dolphins. Giant anteaters. People living the way their ancestors did, now the rainforest has been restored.” She smiles, looking as dreamy as last night when she gazed at the moon. I can see her standing in the magical darkness of a forest floor, naked as a priestess, her skin striped with green and mahogany shadows. It requires no imagination at all. “It’ll be fun,” she says.

  “Then you won’t be visiting Bill and Meg for a while?”

  She bangs out more food. “There’s plenty of time. We’ll get there eventually. And I wish we’d talked more here, Papa, to be honest. There are so many things I want to ask.”

  “About Grandma?” I ask. Making an easy guess.

  “You too, Papa. All those years after she died. I mean, between then and now. You’ll have to tell me what happened.”

  I open my mouth, hoping it will fill up with some comment. But nothing comes out. All those years: how could I have lived through so many without even noticing? My life is divided as geologists divide up the rock crust of Earth’s time: those huge empty spaces of rock without life, and a narrow band which seems to contain everything. And Saul and Agatha are leaving, and time—that most precious commodity of all—has passed me by. Again.

  Agatha sits down on a stool and leans forward, brown arms resting on her brown thighs. For a moment, I think that she’s not going to press the point. But she says, “Do tell me about Grandma, Papa. It’s one of those things Dad won’t talk about.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I know this is awkward, but … how did she die?”

  “Bill’s never told you?”

  “We figured that perhaps he was too young at the time to know. But he wasn’t, was he? We worked that out.”

  “Bill was eleven when your Gram died.” I say. I know why she’s asking me this now: she’s getting Papa’s story before it’s too late. But I’m not offended. She has a right to know. “We tried to keep a lot of stuff about Hannah’s death away from Bill. Perhaps that was a mistake, but that was what we both decided.”

  “It was a disease called cancer, wasn’t it?”

  So she does know something after all. Perhaps Bill’s told her more than she’s admitting. Perhaps she’s checking up, comparing versions. But, seeing her innocent, questioning face, I know that the thought is unjust.

  “Yes,” I say, “it was cancer. They could cure a great many forms of the disease even then. They could probably have cured Hannah if she’d gone and had the tests a few months earlier.”

  “I’m sorry, Papa. It must have been awful.”

  I stare at my lovely granddaughter. Another new century will soon be turning, and I’m deep into the future; further than I’d ever imagined. Has Agatha ever even known anyone who’s died? And pain, what does she know about pain? And who am I, like the last bloody guest at the Masque of the Red Death, to reveal it to her now?

  What does she want to know, anyway—how good or bad would she like me to make it? Does she want me to tell her that, six months after the first diagnosis, Hannah was dead? Or that she spent her last days in hospital even though she’d have liked to have passed away at home—but the sight of her in her final stages distressed little Bill too much? It distressed me, too. It distressed her. Her skin was covered in ulcers from the treatment that the doctors had insisted on giving, stretched tight over bone and fluid-distended tissue.

  “It was all over with fairly quickly,” I say. “And it was long ago.”

  My ears catch a noise behind me. I turn. Saul’s standing leaning in the kitchen doorway, his arms folded, his head bowed. He’s been listening, too. And both my grandchildren look sad, almost as if they’ve heard all the things I haven’t been able to tell them.

  Now Saul comes and puts his arm around my shoulder. “Poor Papa.” Agatha comes over too. I bury my face into them, trembling a little. But life must go on, and I pull away. I don’t want to spoil their visit by crying. But I cry anyway. And they draw me back into their warmth, and the tears come sweet as rain.

  Then we sit together, and eat breakfast. I feel shaky and clean. For a few moments, the present seems as real as the pa
st.

  “That car of yours,” Saul says, waving his fork, swapping subjects with the ease of youth. “I was thinking, Papa, do you know if there’s any way of getting another one?”

  I’m almost tempted to let him have the Ford. But then, what would that leave me with? “There used to be huge dumps of them everywhere,” I say.

  “Then I’ll come back here to the island and get one, and get all that incredible stuff you’ve had done in that workshop down in the port. I mean,” he chuckles, “I don’t want to have to stop for gas.”

  Gas. When did I last buy gas? Years ago, for sure. Yet the old Ford still rattles along.

  “Anyway,” Agatha says, standing up, her plate empty although I’ve hardly even started on mine. “I’ll finish packing.”

  I sit with Saul as he finishes his food, feeling hugely un-hungry, yet envying his gusto. He pushes the plate back, glances around for some kitchen machine that isn’t there to take it, then pulls a face.

  “Papa, I nearly forgot. I said I’d fix that console of yours.”

  I nod. The engaged flag that prevented him and Agatha getting through to me before they arrived must still be on: the thing that stops people from ringing.

  Saul’s as good as his word. As Agatha sings some wordless melody in their room, he goes through some of the simpler options on the console with me. I nod, trying hard to concentrate. And Hannah holds her knees and smiles down at us from the photo on the wall. Saul doesn’t seem to notice her gaze. I’m tempted to ask for his help with other things in the house. Ways to reprogram the mec-gardener and the vacuum, ways to make the place feel more like my own. But I know that I’ll never remember his instructions. All I really want is for him to stay talking to me for a few moments longer.

  “So you’re okay about that, Papa?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He turns away and shouts, “Hey, Ag!”

  After that, everything takes only a moment. Suddenly, they’re standing together in the hall, their bags packed. Venice. Paris. New York. The Sea of Tranquility. Ready to go.

  “We thought we’d walk down to the port, Papa. Just catch whatever ferry is going. It’s such a lovely day.”