The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  Sleep on demand isn’t an option that Doc Fanian’s been able to offer me yet. When I’ve mentioned to him how long the nights can seem—and conversely how easily I drop without willing it in the middle of the afternoon—he gives me a look that suggests that he’s heard the same thing from thousands of other elderly patients on this island. I’m sure a solution to these empty hours will be found eventually, but helping the old has never been a primary aim of technology. We’re flotsam at the edge of the great ocean of life. We have to make do with spin-offs as the waves push us further and further up the beach.

  But no sleep. No sleep. Just silence and whiteness. If I wasn’t so tired, I’d pursue the age-old remedy and get up and actually do something. It would be better, at least, to think happy thoughts of this happy day. But Saul and Agatha evade me. Somehow, they’re still too close to be real. Memory needs distance, understanding. That’s what sleep’s for, but as you get older, you want sleep, but you don’t need it. I turn over in shimmering endless whiteness. I find myself thinking of gadgets, of driftwood spindrift spinoffs. Endless broken gadgets on a white infinite shore. Their cracked lids and flailing wires. If only I could kneel, bend, pick them up and come to some kind of understanding. If only these bones would allow.

  There was a time when I could work the latest Japanese gadget straight out of the box. I was a master. VCR two-year-event timers, graphic equalizers, PCs and photocopiers, the eight-speaker stereo in the car. Even those fancy camcorders were no problem, although somehow the results were always disappointing. I remember Hannah walking down a frosty lane, glancing back toward me with the bare winter trees behind her, smiling though grey clouds of breath. And Hannah in some park with boats on a lake, holding baby Bill up for me as I crouched with my eye pressed to the viewfinder. I used to play those tapes late at night after she died when Bill was asleep up in his room. I’d run them backward, forward, freeze-frame. I’d run them even though she wasn’t quite the Hannah I remembered, even though she always looked stiff and uneasy when a lens was pointed at her. I had them re-recorded when the formats changed. Then the formats changed again. Things were redigitized. Converted into solid-state. Into superconductor rings. Somewhere along the way, I lost touch with the technology.

  * * *

  In the morning, the door to the room where my grandchildren are sleeping is closed. After persuading my front door to open, and for some stubborn reason deciding not to put on my autolegs, I hobble out into the sunlight and start to descend the steps at the side of my house unaided. Hand over rickety hand.

  It’s another clear and perfect morning. I can see the snow-gleam of the mainland peaks through a cleft in the island hills, and my neighbors the Euthons are heading out on their habitual morning jog. They wave, and I wave back. What’s left of their greying hair is tucked into headbands as though it might get in the way.

  The Euthons sometimes invite me to their house for drinks, and, although he’s shown it to me many times before, Mr. Euthon always demonstrates his holographic hi-fi, playing Mozart at volume levels that the great genius himself can probably hear far across the warm seas and the green rolling continents in his unmarked grave. I suspect that the Euthons’ real interest in me lies simply in the fascination that the old have for the truly ancient—like gazing at a signpost: this is the way things will lead. But they’re still sprightly enough, barely past one hundred. One morning last summer, I looked out and saw the Euthons chasing each other naked around their swimming pool. Their sagging arms and breasts and bellies flapped like featherless wings. Mrs. Euthon was shrieking like a schoolgirl and Mr. Euthon had a glistening pink erection. I wish them luck. They’re living this happy, golden age.

  I reach the bottom of the steps and catch my breath. Parked in the shadow of my house, my old Ford is dented, splattered with dust and dew. I only ever take it on the short drive to and from the port nowadays, but the roads grow worse by the season, and extract an increasingly heavy price. Who’d have thought the road surfaces would be allowed to get this bad, this far into the future? People generally use flyers now, and what land vehicles there are have predictive suspension; they’ll give you a magic carpet ride over any kind of terrain. Me and my old car, we’re too old to be even an anachronism.

  I lift up the hood and gaze inside, breathing the smell of oil and dirt. Ah, good old-fashioned engineering. V8 cylinders. Sparkplugs leading to distributor caps. Rust holes in the wheel arch. I learnt about cars on chilly northern mornings, bit by bit as things refused to work. I can still remember most of it more easily than what I had for lunch yesterday.

  A flock of white doves clatter up and circle east, out over the silken sea toward the lime groves on the headland. Bowed down beneath the hood, my fingers trace oiled dirt, and I find myself wishing that the old girl actually needed fixing. But over the years, as bits and pieces have given out and fallen away, the people at the workshop in the port have connected in new devices. I’m still not sure that I believe them when they tell me that until they are introduced into the car’s system, every device is actually the same. To me, that sounds like the kind of baloney you give to someone who’s too stupid to understand. But the new bits soon get oiled-over nicely enough anyway, and after a while they even start to look like the old bits they’ve replaced. It’s like my own body, all the new odds and ends that Doc Fanian’s put in. Eardrums, corneas, a liver, hips, a heart, joints too numerous to mention. Endless chemical implants to make up for all the things I should be manufacturing naturally. Little nano-creatures that clean and repair the walls of my arteries. Stuff to keep back the pain. After a while, you start to wonder just how much of something you have to replace before it ceases to be what it is.

  “Fixing something, Papa?”

  I look up with a start, nearly cracking my head on the underside of the hood.

  Agatha.

  “I mean, your hands look filthy.” She stares at them, these gnarled old tree roots that Doc Fanian has yet to replace. A little amazed. She’s in the same blouse she wore yesterday. Her hair’s done up with a ribbon.

  “Just fiddling around.”

  “You must give me and Saul a ride.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Did you hear us come back last night, Papa? I’m sorry if we were noisy—and it was pretty late.” Carved out of the gorgeous sunlight, she raises a fist and rubs at sleep-crusted eyes.

  “No.” I point. “These ears.”

  “So you probably missed the carnival fireworks as well. But it must be great, being able to turn yourself off and on like that. What are they? Re or inter-active?”

  I shrug. What can I say…? I can’t even hear fireworks—or my own grandchildren coming in drunk. “Did you have a good time last night?”

  “It was nice.” She gazes at me, smiling. Nice. She means it. She means everything she says.

  I see that she’s got wine stains on her blouse, and bits of tomato seed. As she leans over the engine, I gaze at the crown of her head, the pale skin whorled beneath.

  “You still miss Grandma, don’t you, Papa?” she asks, looking up at me from the engine with oil on the tip of her nose.

  “It’s all in the past,” I say, fiddling for the catch, pulling the hood back down with a rusty bang.

  Agatha gives me a hand as I climb the steps to the front of the house. I lean heavily on her, wondering how I’ll ever manage alone.

  * * *

  I drive Saul and Agatha down to the beach. They rattle around in the back of my Ford, whooping and laughing. And I’m grinning broadly too, happy as a kitten as I take the hairpins in and out of sunlight, through cool shadows of forest with the glittering race of water far below. At last! A chance to show that Papa’s not past it! In control. The gearshift’s automatic, but there’s still the steering, the brakes, the choke, the accelerator. My hands and feet shift in a complex dance, ancient and arcane as alchemy.

  We crash down the road in clouds of dust. I beep the horn, but people can hear us coming a mile
off, anyway. They point and wave. Flyers dip low, their bee-wings blurring, for a better look. The sun shines bright and hot. The trees are dancing green. The sea is shimmering silver. I’m a mad old man, wise as the deep and lovely hills, deeply loved by his deeply lovely grandchildren. And I decide right here and now that I should get out more often. Meet new strangers. See the island, make the most of the future. Live a little while I still can.

  * * *

  “You’re okay, Papa?”

  On the bench, Agatha presses a button, and a striped parasol unfolds. “If we leave this here, it should keep track of the sun for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you still swim?” She reaches to her waist and pulls off her T-shirt. I do not even glance at her breasts.

  Saul’s already naked. He stretches out on the white sand beside me. His penis flops out over his thigh; a beached baby whale.

  “Do you, Papa? I mean, swim?”

  “No,” I say. “Not for a few years.”

  “We could try one of the pedalos later.” Agatha steps out from her shorts and underpants. “They’re powered. You don’t have to pedal unless you want to.”

  “Sure.”

  Agatha shakes the ribbon from her hair and scampers off down the beach, kicking up the sand. It’s late morning. Surfers are riding the deep green waves. People are laughing, splashing, swimming, drifting on the tide in huge transparent bubbles. And on the beach there are sun-worshippers and runners, kids making sandcastles, robot vendors selling ice cream.

  “Ag and Dad are a real problem,” Saul says, lying back, his eyes closed against the sun.

  I glance down at him. “You’re going to see him.…?”

  He pulls a face. “It’s a duty to see Mum and Dad, you know? It’s not like coming here to see you, Papa.”

  “No.”

  “You know what they’re like.”

  “Yes,” I say, wondering why I even bother with the lie.

  Of course, when Hannah died, everyone seemed to assume a deepening closeness would develop between father and son. Everyone, that is, apart from anyone who knew anything about grief or bereavement. Bill was eleven then, and when I looked up from the breakfast table one morning, he was twelve, then thirteen. He was finding his own views, starting to seek independence. He kept himself busy, he did well at school. We went on daytrips together and took foreign holidays. We talked amicably, we visited Mum’s grave at Christmas and on her birthday and walked through the damp grass back to the car keeping our separate silences. Sometimes, we’d talk animatedly about things that didn’t matter. But we never argued. When he was seventeen, Bill went to college in another town. When he was twenty, he took a job in another country. He wrote and rang dutifully, but the gaps got bigger. Even with tri-dee and the revolutions of instantaneous communication, it got harder and harder to know what to say. And Bill married Meg, and Meg was like him, only more so: a child of that generation. Respectful, hardworking, discreet, always ready to say the right thing. I think they both dealt in currency and commodities for people who couldn’t be bothered to handle their own affairs. I was never quite sure. And Meg was always just a face and a name. Of course, their two kids—when they finally got around to having them—were wildly different. I loved them deeply, richly. I loved them without doubt or question. For a while, when Saul and Agatha were still children and I didn’t yet need these autolegs to get around, I used to visit Bill and Meg regularly.

  Agatha runs back up the beach from her swim. She lies down and lets the sun dry her shining body. Then it’s time for the picnic, and to my relief, they both put some clothes back on. I don’t recognize most of the food they spread out on the matting. New flavors, new textures. I certainly didn’t buy any of it yesterday on my trip to the port. But anyway, it’s delicious, as lovely as this day.

  “Did you do this in the last century, Papa?” Saul asks. “I mean, have picnics on the beach?”

  I shrug Yes and No. “Yes,” I say eventually, “But there was a problem if you sat out too long. A problem with the sky.”

  “The sky?”

  Saul reaches across the mat to re-stack his plate with something sweet and crusty that’s probably as good for you and unfattening as fresh air. He doesn’t say it, but still I can tell that he’s wondering how we ever managed to get ourselves into such a mess back then, how anyone could possibly mess up something as fundamental as the sky.

  Afterward, Saul produces his metacam palette from one of the bags. It unfolds. The little pinhead buzzes up, winking in the light.

  “The sand here isn’t a problem?” I ask.

  “Sand?”

  “I mean … getting into the mechanism.”

  “Oh, no.”

  From the corner of my eye, I see Agatha raising her eyebrows. Then she plumps her cushion and lies down in the sun. She’s humming again. Her eyes are closed. I’m wondering if there isn’t some music going on inside her head that I can’t even hear.

  “You were saying yesterday, Saul,” I persist, “that it’s more than a camera.…”

  “Well,” Saul looks up at me, and blanks the palette, weighing up just how much he can tell Papa that Papa would understand. “You know about quantum technology, Papa, and the unified field?”

  I nod encouragingly.

  He tells me anyway. “What it means is that for every event, there are a massive number of possibilities.”

  Again, I nod.

  “What happens, you see, Papa, is that you push artificial intelligence along the quantum shift to observe these fractionally different worlds, to make the waveform collapse. That’s where we get all the world’s energy from nowadays, from the gradient of that minute difference. And that’s how this palette works. It displays some of the worlds that lie close beside our own. Then it projects them forward. A kind of animation. Like predictive suspension, only much more advanced.…”

  I nod, already losing touch. And that’s only the beginning. His explanation carries on, grows more involved. I keep on nodding. After all, I do know a little about quantum magic. But it’s all hypothetical, technical stuff; electrons and positrons. It’s got nothing to do with real different worlds, has it?

  “So it really is showing things that might have happened?” I ask when he’s finally finished. “It really isn’t a trick?”

  Saul glances down at his palette, then back up at me, looking slightly offended. The pinhead lens hangs motionless in the air between us, totally ignoring the breeze “No,” he says. “It’s not a trick, Papa.”

  Saul shows me the palette: he even lets me rest the thing on my lap. I gaze down, and watch the worlds divide.

  The waves tumble, falling and breaking over the sand in big glassy lumps. The wind lifts the flags along the shore in a thousand different ways. The sky shivers. A seagull flies over, mewing, breaking into a starburst of wings. Grey comet-tailed things that might be ghosts, people, or—for all I know—the product of my own addled and enhanced senses, blur by across the shore.

  “You’ve got implant corneas, haven’t you, Papa?” Saul says. “I could probably rig things up so you could have the metacam projected directly into your eyes.”

  “No thanks,” I say.

  Probably remembering what happened to the VR, Saul doesn’t push it.

  I look down in wonder. “This is…”

  What? Incredible? Impossible? Unreal?

  “This is…”

  Saul touches the palette screen again. He cancels out the breaking, shattering waves. And Agatha calls the vendor for an ice cream, and somehow it’s a shock when she pushes the cool cone into my hand. I have to hold it well out of the way, careful not to drip over the palette.

  “This is…”

  And my ice creams falls, splattering Saul’s arm.

  Agatha leans over. “Here, let me. I’ll turn that off, Papa.”

  “Yes, do.”

  There’s nothing left on the palette now, anyway. Just a drop of ice cream, and the wide empty beach. The screen
blanks at Agatha’s touch, and the pinhead camera shoots down from a sky that suddenly seems much darker, cooler. Immense purple-grey clouds are billowing over the sea. The yachts and the flyers are turning for home. Agatha and Saul begin to pack our stuff away.

  “I’ll drive the car home, Papa,” Agatha says, helping me from the deckchair just as I feel the first heavy drops of rain.

  “But…”

  They take an arm each. They half-carry me across the sand and up the slope to the end of the beach road where I’ve parked—badly I now see—the Ford.

  “But…”

  They put me down, and unhesitatingly unfold the Ford’s complex hood. They help me in.

  “But…”

  They wind up the windows and turn on the headlights just as the first grey veils strike the shore. The wipers flap, the rain drums. Even though she’s never driven before in her life, Agatha spins the Ford’s wheel and shoots uphill through the thickening mud, crashing through the puddles toward the hairpin.

  Nestled against Saul in the back seat, too tired to complain, I fall asleep.

  * * *

  That evening, we go dancing. Saul. Agatha. Papa.

  There are faces. Gleaming bodies. Parakeet colors. Looking through the rooftops of the port into the dark sky, I can see the moon. I’m vaguely disappointed to find that she’s so full tonight. Since I’ve had these corneas fitted, and with the air nowadays so clear, I can often make out the lights of the new settlements when she’s hooded in shadow.

  Agatha leans over the café table. She’s humming some indefinable tune. “What are you looking at, Papa?”

  “The moon.”

  She gazes up herself, and the moon settles in the pools of her eyes. She blinks and half-smiles. I can tell that Agatha really does see mystery up there. She’s sat in the bars, slept in the hotels, hired dust buggies and gone crater-climbing. Yet she still feels the mystery.

  “You’ve never been up there, have you, Papa?”

  “I’ve never left the Earth.”

  “There’s always time,” she says.

  “Time for what?”