Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Read online

  SERIOUS ONLY

  ENQUIRE WITH MR. ROBERT SHELBOURNE.

  LA JETéE

  “Look at this,” Mrs. Sunquist said, “They’re even tearing down the buildings I hated to make way for new.”

  Mr. Sunquist knew he should be irate. Bobby Shelbourne hustled his phony nostalgia in the one place where nostalgia was useless. Somehow, he could do nothing but envy the man’s gall.

  They found an open-air market down the street. Palm fronds covered the porch, implying some sort of tropical oeuvre. Nearer the road were the hydrogen pumps, and electrical-charge outlets, and gasoline for the hybrids. As Mr. Sunquist started into the hydrogen lane, his wife grabbed his wrist and pointed across the street.

  Their own car was parked at the curb, as if the occupants had gone for a walk over the chalk-white dunes to the ocean.

  The Sunquists stared in astonishment. It was indeed their car, only the paint had faded to a dried-out coral. The seats had been left to the salt air and the sun till they had rotted open.

  Someone had half-pulled an old beach blanket across the over-ripened seat cushions. An insignia on the blanket commemorated the Mer Noire regatta, fourteen years hence. The blanket looked as if it had been in the sun a couple of years even beyond that.

  Mr. Sunquist thought for a moment. He realized what it had to mean. “It’s our car all right, but we’ve passed it on to our child. This is just the sort of thing we would do.”

  Mrs. Sunquist looked doubtful. “Sixteen years from now? We’ll have this car sixteen years from now?”

  “It surely wouldn’t be us.” Mr. Sunquist cast a melodramatic stare toward Mrs. Sunquist. “Are we down on the beach somewhere? Should we go look?”

  Mrs. Sunquist had given over the need to match her husband, dare-for-dare. “Let’s just get some power and go,” she said.

  Mr. Sunquist wanted to egg her on a little. “Are you sure? We might be out there. On the beach. Living.”

  “This isn’t funny,” she said. “Let’s just get the power and go.”

  Mr. Sunquist might have pushed a little harder but for the baby.

  “You’re lucky,” he told her. He went upto pay for the fuel. She followed along to find a bathroom.

  Around the corner from the pump island was a fruit stand and a cashier. As they approached, they heard a gravelly voice. “You know what you put on those? No, not sugar.” Chesty laughter. “Thing’s already sweet. Why would you put sugar on it? No, you know what they do in Mexico? They put salt on their mangos. A little cayenne pepper. Here.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Sunquist traded looks. An afternoon of chasing the ghosts of memory had left them unprepared for their role as someone else’s ghost. They asked each other in that wordless language of married couples if they should go, but neither of them moved.

  Mr. Sunquist felt his throat dry up. He thought for a moment. Was he sure he wanted to see himself like this? He grew impatient with his own timidity. What would happen, anyway? Would they blow up? Some sort of mutual annihilation, as if they were both opposing nuclear particles?

  They stepped into the back of the cashier’s line as casually as they could manage.

  He was with a young girl. She had caramel-colored hair, like Mrs. Sunquist’s had been when she had been a student. That same lithe waist. Those legs.

  This is my daughter, Mr. Sunquist realized. The lust in him should have shamed him, but it merely made him furtive.

  The store clerk flipped a light on so the old man could see what he was doing with that mango. A reflection appeared in the counter glass. Mr. Sunquist stared in fascination at the face of a tired satyr.

  “We were such scoundrels when we were your age.”

  “Who’s that?” the young woman frowned at the yellow fruit coming apart in her fingers. Her mind was a million years down the T-Line Highway.

  “Here. Let me show you something. Over here to the northwest.” He was so casual about the way he put his arm around the girl’s waist. He aimed her toward a dark smudge along the knife-edge of the horizon. It was the most natural thing in the world.

  “Who were you such scoundrels with, Billy?”

  “If you look over this way,” the old man said, “you can see the actual heat death of the universe.” He was trying hard to instill his voice with a sense of wonder that life had not held for him in a very long time. The young woman followed his arm.

  Mr. Sunquist was shocked at the resemblance she had to his wife. The dark, sloe eyes, the long, caramel-blond hair, the mobile mouth.

  “It looks more like fog,” she observed with adolescent irony.

  “Can’t see it with the naked eye. Somebody set a radio telescope pointing that way. Came back with dead air. Nothing.”

  The girl nodded. She understood: The cosmic background radiation. It was supposed to be evenly distributed throughout the universe. “Gee, that’s interesting.” She slurped mango slices.

  The old man leaned close as if he wanted to steal a kiss. The girl smiled back at him, What? The soft light of her trust set him back. He looked away down the beach, as if uncertain what to do.

  She asked him what he was thinking. He ran his hand up and down her arm, elbow to shoulder as he considered his answer.

  “I was thinking of a moment from my life a long time ago,” he answered. “I was on a patio, dancing with a girl who looked very much like you. We were both a little drunk, and her boyfriend was playing for us, and everyone was friends, you know? Just. Friends. And right now, I was thinking that may have been the sweetest moment of my life.”

  “It must be nice,” the girl offered, “having a lifetime of memories like that. I wish I had one moment I could look back on.”

  The old Sunquist laughed, shook his head. “No, it’s terrible,” he said. “You spend the rest of your life trying to find that moment again, and it’s never where you thought.” He paused, as if he’d only just heard his own words. “It’s amazing what a person will do to recapture one moment of peace. Amazing and terrible.

  Something in his tone made the girl back away. But somehow she was still in his arms, and in turning she had presented her face to him.

  He kissed her hard on the mouth. The girl pushed him back. For a moment, her chin bunched up and her cheeks reddened as if she might cry, or pummel the old man to the ground.

  “Dammit,” she said. “Damn it.” Her hands went up in exasperation. An impulse took hold of her. She ran up and slugged him in the arm, dared him to respond.

  The old Sunquist could do nothing but stare at her in stupid love. A moment of silence, then she stalked away down the beach. He squeezed his lips between his fingers. He squinted in anguish. He paced around in a little circle of perplexity, so that Mr. Sunquist could not help feeling sorry for him.

  He called after the girl, laughing heartily as if it had all been a joke; she made an obscene gesture over her shoulder.

  The present-tense Mr. Sunquist became aware of a profound silence directly behind him. He waited as long as he could before turning around.

  Mrs. Sunquist—Melanie—was gone.

  He put his fingers to his nose the way he did whenever he had to steady his vision after too much bourbon. He thought, this is ridiculous. How can I be blamed for something that hasn’t even happened yet? Our child isn’t even born. I don’t even know for certain it will be a girl.

  But in his heart, he knew it was not ridiculous. He knew himself well enough to know it was entirely likely. He simply couldn’t believe Mrs. Sunquist would not forgive him. He had been forgiven all his life, hadn’t he?

  He pushed himself up to the sand dune and searched the beach. He saw the girl stalking away along a concrete sea wall, making angry little skips with her palm against the rough stone blocks.

  He couldn’t find Mrs. Sunquist anywhere.

  He realized the old man was beside him. He wondered what he should do. He had heard of people meeting themselves, of course. One always heard stories. He just couldn’t remember how any of those
stories turned out.

  When he could stand it no longer, he turned to the old man: “You know what you’ve done?” he asked.

  The man looked shocked, like a theater patron suddenly addressed from the stage.

  “You’re not supposed to—”

  “You couldn’t keep your hands off your own daughter? Damn it.”

  In truth, he was not very angry. Mr. Sunquist was more overcome with weariness. In his weariness, he saw his older persona in a cool and distant light, the way one sees one’s parents after a while. He wasn’t addressing himself anymore. He was addressing a sad old man who had lost track of things somehow.

  He crouched down to take the old man’s hand. It was bloated, the skin shiny and taut. “I’m sorry,” he said, “It’s just—” He paused. How to put this? “That’s our daughter. Do you understand? There are some things I just can’t do. If I do these things, there will be no limits for me at all.” He looked into the cracked old face for some sign he was getting through.

  “Daughter? What do you take me for? That’s not our daughter.” The old man laughed. There was a certain malicious strain in the reedy voice. Even now, he wasn’t so different. “We don’t have a daughter. We have a son, Jeremy, but I haven’t seen him in five years. You don’t know this yet, do you? Sorry. Shouldn’t have opened my mouth, I guess.”

  Mr. Sunquist sighed; of course, this man would know how Mr. Sunquist longed for a son. He would use that knowledge to win sympathy, emotional leverage. Mr. Sunquist wondered if this was the man he truly was destined to become. What a pathetic and self-serving old liar.

  “Come on, now,” he said as gently as possible. “I recognized her eyes. I know her cheekbones. The resemblance is too strong. You can’t tell me this was just some kid you picked up.”

  The old satyr leaned close. Mr. Sunquist held his breath at the tang of stale bourbon. “Of course it looks like Melanie,” he hissed through his gaping teeth. “It is Melanie.”

  Mr. Sunquist felt something clammy and soft in the pit of his stomach. “You’re not supposed to. . .”

  “I was lonely,” he said. “Mrs. Sunquist left me a couple of years ago—left us, I should say. Left us. I got my car, I took a ride down on the T-Line Highway.” The rheumy eyes squinted defiantly. “Look at you, you’re so self-righteous. What are you doing here? Huh? What are you doing here?”

  “You’re lying.” Mr. Sunquist backed away. Melanie had to be somewhere on this beach; she had been right behind him a moment ago. He called out for her, but his words were caught up in a sudden gust of wind and scattered across the beach like sea birds.

  “Lying? To you? Why would I lie to you, of all people?”

  Way down by the waterline, Mr. Sunquist saw the young girl his wife had been. She looked back at the sound of her name. Was that recognition in her eyes? Mr. Sunquist entertained the notion of following after her. But she was not his wife, and he was not really Billy Lee Sunquist. Not her Billy Lee Sunquist. She turned away up the beach even as he debated his next move, and then she was gone.

  “I would know if you’d messed about in my past. Mrs. Sunquist—Melanie—would have said something.”

  “Times change. Have you talked to Melanie recently?”

  “You can’t just drive down the road and change my life. You can’t do that.”

  “Screw your life. I was lonely.”

  “You can’t do that,” he repeated fervently, hopefully.

  He left the old man on the top of the dune and started back for his car. He found it sitting quietly in its refueling lane. The passenger-side door remained slightly ajar, just as his wife had left it.

  He walked out in the street and called for her. He had to be wrong. She was here somewhere. She was confused; maybe she hated him a little bit. But she was still his wife. He couldn’t have changed time. One didn’t do such things in La Jetée. It just wasn’t done.

  He ran down the street, backward in time, calling for her as he went. Among the empty cliffs where beach hotels and seafood restaurants and temporal observatories had once been, gulls cocked their heads to peer down at him.

  He pulled up, gasping at the highway on-ramp. All right, he told himself. Something terrible had happened. But it wasn’t too late to fix things. Melanie was still there for him. She was a little ways down the T-Line Highway, that was all.

  He would find her as she had been. He would protect her from that sad old ghost. And she would love him more than ever. He would see to it. He would be good to her, and listen to what she said. He would love the woman she was now. And the memories of the people they had been? He would let them remain beautiful memories, nothing more.

  Headlights rolled across his shoulders. He turned and stumbled. The car rolled right up to his knees. He thought he was dead.

  The driver was a woman with shoulder-length caramel-colored hair and exotically slanted eyes. The passenger was a sad-eyed little man. He stepped out to help Mr. Sunquist off the pavement.

  “Are you all right? We didn’t even see you. We got lost coming up the T-Line Highway and missed our city. We’re just trying to find our way out of here. Trying, you know, not to see more than we should. . . .”

  Mr. Sunquist looked at his wife. Her face was clouded with blank concern for a stranger she had almost killed.

  He raised his hands to plead with her through the windshield. He started to ask her, Have I changed so much!

  “Roger,” she said to her husband, “ask him if he needs to go to the doctor. He looks like he’s in shock.” She started to slip out from behind the wheel. Her husband waved her back in the car.

  “Don’t do that, Honey. Just stay there.”

  Mr. Sunquist saw by the way she moved that she was extremely pregnant.

  “Here.” Roger Swann peeled a twenty-five dollar bill off his money clip and stuffed it in Mr. Sunquist’s hand. “Go on now, fella.” He glanced back at his wife in a meaningful way. “She’s having a baby,” Roger Swann confided. “I just want to keep her happy.”

  Mr. Sunquist looked down at the bill, wadded up in his palm. When he looked back, the Swanns were already driving away.

  He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t think what. He watched them pull around, back onto the T-Line Highway going south.

  He ran back to the car. He used the twenty-five dollar bill to pay for his charge. The truth, he realized, was back in one of those cities along the beach. All he had to do was find where his life had diverged from its path—find that moment of clarity. Wasn’t that what he’d always come back to La Jetée to do? He would make it right.

  Fifteen minutes up the highway, the towers of La Jetée, like a city sculpted from thoroughly burned ash, rose in the heat of a morning Mr. Sunquist couldn’t remember seeing.

  He pulled off the highway and wept.

  KEEPERS OF EARTH

  ROBIN WAYNE BAILEY

  THIS UNIT REMEMBERS. THIS unit. . . .I. . . .I. . .I remember.

  I remember the empty streets. I remember the empty buildings, the empty shops, and the empty parks. I remember an empty swing creaking in the wind. I remember the silence of an empty city. I remember the smell of emptiness.

  I remember the empty blue sky—no cloud, no smoke, no smog, not even a bird. A dirty newspaper blew against my metal foot as I stood alone and looked up at that sky. My eyes were empty, too, but I was crying all inside.

  I remember the sun, and most of all I remember the sudden fierce light, the horrible whiteness, then the endless fire.

  And I thought, Where are my masters?

  * * *

  Ezekiel 808 stood alone in the Prime Observatory. The lights of the stars that shone down through the open dome reflected on the silvery metal of his face, in the flawless, technological perfection of his gleaming eyes. He loved the stars, the still beauty of the night with all his mechanical heart. Yet the great telescope and the sky’s mysteries offered no distraction to soothe his turmoil.

  He held up one hand to the starlight, studyi
ng his long fingers. They seemed strange to him now as he slowly flexed and opened them, not his own at all. He peered at the image of his face reflected in his smooth palm, and wondered what—no, who—he was.

  “Ezekiel 808 is disturbed.” Michael 2713 stood in the observatory’s entrance. His speech programs seemed to be malfunctioning. His voice wavered, and his words were punctuated with uncharacteristic pauses and hesitations. “You. . .” he began again, troubling over the pronoun. “You are monitoring to the Alpha’s testimony.”

  Michael 2713 was only an assisting unit, assigned to the observatory to process computations, to calibrate equipment, and to maintain the great telescope’s tracking units. He was not a high-order unit, yet he served well, and of late seemed even to exceed his programming.

  “I must provide data,” Ezekiel 808 answered finally. He, too, found speech oddly difficult. His neural pathways churned with an inexplicable chaos, and none of his self-run diagnostics provided a cause. “I must also render judgment,” he continued. “It falls to the First-Orders to evaluate the Alpha’s actions.”

  Michael 2713 walked across the floor and stopped at the console that controlled the dome’s massive drive engines. Though he looked up into the night, the shadow of the telescope eclipsed his face. “I, too, have been monitoring,” he admitted. “I am only Fourth-Order, Ezekiel 808. How is it that this unit. . .” He hesitated again. “How is it that I can feel such confusion? Such uncertainty? Such. . .” Michael 2713 stopped and stood unmoving as if awaiting a command, though within the parameters of his programming he was totally capable of independent action. “Revulsion,” he said at last.

  Ezekiel 808 focused his attention more keenly on his assisting unit. A Fourth-Order might experience confusion over instruction or data input or even express uncertainty if sufficient variables affected a computational outcome. But revulsion?

  “The Alpha has committed a great crime,” Ezekiel 808 explained. “We have never known crime. The First-Orders must try to understand.”