Collected short stories, p.11
Collected Short Stories, page 11
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I've got two women waiting for me at home. One of them says, "You look rough," and the other adds, "It must have been quite a ball game." I don't know which of them scares me worse. Instead of answering, I take a long shower and dry myself in the bathroom, putting on clean shorts before coming out again, finding both of them asleep in my bed, one curled up on the other's chest.
It's almost noon when I come to. I'm in the living room, on the couch. A slow, stiff search of the place finds nobody. Just me and my hangover. Dressed and fed, I step into the backyard, thinking the air will do some good. But the sun is scorching and bright enough to blind, and I end up sitting in the shade, on my wobbly adirondack, hoping nobody finds me for a week or two.
Then a voice calls out. "Thank you," it says. Maybe twice, maybe more than that. Then she says my name, and that's when I pry open my eyes, looking across the yard, slowly focusing on the young face staring over the top of the fence. I can go inside. Pretend that I didn't hear her, or just play it rude. But then she says, "I'm Kahren, the one with the package." And in the next breath, she says, "My brother was rude to you. But believe me, I'm thankful for your help, good sir."
Walking to the back fence takes me a week. A year. Forever. I'm staring up at a little girl's face and a woman's smart eyes. She's climbed up on a grapevine to look over. If she's five years old, she's one of the oldest of these kids. And the slowest, and the simplest. Maybe that's why I can stand talking to her. Again, she says my name. Then out of nowhere, she says, "You and I are related. We have a common ancestor in the late 1800s." And I say, "Is that so?" Then I ask, "How do you know? Because of our names?" But no, she shakes her head, telling me, "Our DNA. I took a peek"
"At my DNA?" I blurt. "How did you get that?"
"From the package. You left flakes of dead skin on the sticky label"
"Don't touch my DNA," I tell her. I shout it, practically.
"I never will again," she promises. Then she dips her head, sad about making me angry. Really, she looks nothing but sweet. Five years old, with curly blonde hair and a pouting lip, and behind those big blue eyes revs a brain that's probably already had more thoughts than I'll have in my entire life. But it never occurred to the girl that she was doing wrong. She was just being curious. Being herself. So I say, "Forget it." And dipping her head farther, she says sadly, "I can't forget."
She's a sweet, sweet girl, I'm thinking.
Then several seconds have passed without conversation, and I know she has to be bored. That's why I ask, "So what was in that package? Anything important?" And she doesn't say. Watching me, and not. Nothing showing on her pretty little face. Then just as I'm thinking that she didn't hear me, she asks, "Are you happy?"
"What's that mean?" I ask. "Like, in my life am I happy ?"
She nods. Bites her lower lip, embarrassed again. "If you don't want to answer," she starts, and I say, "No." I say, "No, I'm not happy." Over the fence, talking to a perfect stranger, I admit, "A lot of things really suck lately. If you want to know the truth."
"I do," she says. "Absolutely, yes."
Then she tells me, "The package you brought me it involves my work. My brother's work. We belong to a body of thinking souls, people like you and like me, and certain AIs, too. We realize now that the AI technologies were a tragic mistake. Tragic." She says the word a third time. "Tragic." Then she shakes her head, saying, "Very few people are happy. Even my generation suffers. There's boredom for us. There are subtle, unexpected problems with the new technologies. It makes an imaginative person wonder: Wouldn't it be nice if we could roll everything back to before? To the days prior to the Big Leap?"
The girl does a great job of keeping her voice slow. But it's as if I can't understand what she's telling me. I have to run the words back through my head, wringing the sense out of them. More quiet seconds pass, and I finally ask, "What are you telling me? That you really can change things?"
"Not by myself, no." She leaks a big sigh, plainly hunting for the best way to say what's next. "Roll things back how?" I ask her. I want to know. And she explains, "I guess it's just as it sounds. Roll things back literally. Time is an arrow in motion, and it's amazingly easy to fool that arrow, making it reverse itself. But of course, that doesn't do anyone any good if it just puts us back where we started. If the Big Leap is inevitable, and if anyone builds even just one cheap and easy thinking machine "
I keep staring up at her. Waiting.
"The tough trick," she says, "is to change certain essential laws of the universe. Not everywhere, of course. That would be impossible as well as immoral. No, what we want is to make it impossible for anyone on and around our world say, within a light-month of the Earth make it impossible for them to build AI machinery that works." She looks around, making sure it's just the two of us. "There's no one solution to that enormous problem, of course. But there's a thousand little ways, and if you used all of them, with care, it gives human beings another thousand years to prepare themselves for this momentous change. Which would be a good thing. Don't you think so, good sir?"
I say, "Sure," with a quiet little gasp.
Then she sighs again, looking at me and saying nothing. So I ask her, "What happens to you, if it happens?" And she tells me, flat out, "I never am. The Earth jumps back seven years from today, and there's never a Big Leap forwards, computers remain fast but stupid, and nobody like myself is born. Ever."
"How soon?" I ask.
"Think soon," she advises. Then in her next breath, "Think tonight."
"And you can do that to yourself?" I have to ask. "You can make yourself never be, and you don't even blink about it?"
The girl gives me a long look. Her little mouth is working, twisting at its ends. Then the mouth goes still, and she tells me with a careful voice, "When something is right, you do it. What other choice is there, good sir?"
#
She finds me sitting in front of the game, drinking cold beer. "Who's playing?" she asks, and I tell her, "It's the Cardinals and Cubs." And she asks, "Who's better?" I tell her, "The Cubs, this year." Which makes her ask, "Then why are they behind what, three points?" I don't answer her. Then she glances at my beer, not saying anything about the time of day. I can see what she's thinking, but she doesn't say anything, sitting next to me now, sitting and watching the game for a long while before finally saying, "So aren't you going to offer a girl a taste?"
I tip the can. The beer foams and fills her mouth, and she swirls it hard with her tongue before spitting everything back into the can again.
I taste plastic in my next sip. Or I think I do.
She wipes her mouth against the corner of a little pillow. My wife embroidered a picture of a tabby cat on that pillow. "It was one of her first," I tell my friend. "Hell, I can even see the screw-ups."
The Birdy Girl nods, not looking at the pillow. Or the game. When I finally look at her green eyes, she says, "It's a nice day outside." And when that doesn't do anything, she adds, "There's a playground just up that way," and points, waving one of her arms. "Take me, if you want. Or I can take myself over. But I'm not staying locked up in here. You're not that much fun, you know."
"I know."
We walk over. Or I walk, and she rides. She stands on my belt with both hands holding to the back of my shirt. A couple neighbors spot me coming. They know me and wave. Then I'm past them, and they see the Birdy Girl riding tight, and why that should be entertaining, I don't know. But it makes me laugh. More fun than drinking beer alone, at the very least.
The playground isn't used now. It's been years since it got maintenance. The city, or someone, has set a plastic orange fence up around it, plus signs that keep telling us that it's dangerous and forbidden. The signs threaten to call the authorities. I threaten the signs. Then I give the fence a yank down where others have done the same, and I throw my leg over, and Genevieve jumps off me and runs, and skips, and giggles, looking back to tell me, "Try the slide. I'll stand at the bottom and catch you!"
I'm not going to do that, I decide, then I watch myself do it anyway. I climb up a wooden tower and through a doorway that's way too small, forcing my fat ass into the silvery chute that's about a thousand degrees in the summer sun. It's cooking me. But she's at the bottom, laughing and waving, telling me, "Down. You slide down. Haven't you used one of these contraptions before?" And I let myself go, gravity carrying me down that hot metal chute, and maybe I'm laughing, too. It feels a little bit like laughter. But then I'm at the bottom, sitting on the broiling end of the slide, and I'm quiet and thinking hard to myself, and she tugs at my hand, coaxing me, saying, "There's a teeter-totter over there. See it? You park yourself at one end, and I'll park on the other, then I'll lift you to the sky."
It's those words and the way she says them. That's what rips me open.
Then she isn't talking, staring up at me as her smile falls apart, that brown plastic face becoming concerned, and worried, and a little sad. Finally she says, "Did you know? You're crying."
Like I little kid, I'm leaking tears. Yeah.
She asks, "What is so awful?"
I won't tell her. I decide that it wouldn't be right. So instead, I just give a shrug, saying, "It's just some stuff I'm thinking about."
To a Birdy Girl, there is no problem. "Just think about something else," is her easy advice. "Pick what's really fun. Something you just love. That's what I'd do if I ever got blue. Then I'd think hard about nothing else!"
#
My wife comes home to find me cooking over the stove. Not our AI chef, but me. The sauce is our garden tomatoes, and maybe it's a little runny. And like always, I've cooked the spaghetti until it's mushy. But I'm responsible for everything, including setting the dining room table, and I've killed some flowers in the backyard, propping up their corpses in a fancy crystal vase set out in the middle of everything.
She has to ask what the occasion is, and I'm ready for her. I say, "Do we need an excuse to eat together?" Which pretty well shuts her up. Then I wipe my hands dry and step into the bedroom, asking, "Have you picked which one?" Genevieve is standing on the chest of drawers, watching the mirror as she holds clothes in front of herself. She says, "One of these two, I think." I say, "I like the long dress." She says, "Prude," and laughs. Then my wife wanders in and asks, "What are you two doing?" I say, "Picking." Genevieve says, "For tonight." And my wife gives us this drop-jawed look, then half-snorts, saying, "You're mine," to the Birdy Girl. "You're not his. You're mine."
"I am yours," Genevieve agrees, smiling happily. Then she puts on her long dress, saying, "The other Girls and I are going to see some minor league hardball." As her head comes through the neck hole, she adds, "Afterwards, we're going to molest a player or two. That's the plan, at least."
I don't say anything. I haven't, and I won't. But it wrings me dry, standing there, watching this little machine putting little shoes on those little feet.
Genevieve tells us, "Bye."
I'm not crying, but I feel myself wanting to do just that. I watch her crawl through the cat door, then I make sure that I wander into the living room, watching as the cab pulls up and the back door pops up, nearly a dozen Birdy Girls already standing on the back seat, their big hair bouncing and a few of them wearing honest-to-god ball caps.
One last time, my wife says, "I got her for me. That doll's mine."
"She is yours," I agree. "I won't even look at her again."
We eat at the dining room table. Dinner is mush, but it's tasty mush. It's my mush. Then we make love for the first time this month, and that goes pretty well. Better than pretty well, really. Then one of us feels like talking, and one of us wants to listen. So that's what we do. But after a while, the talker asks, "Are you paying attention to me?" and I say, "I was, dear. I am." Honest, I was trying to listen, but my head kept drifting back to other things. Important things. "I was just thinking about stuff," I confess. With a grumbly tone, she asks, "What stuff?" Then I stop her dead, saying, "I was thinking we ought to have a child. Or two. You know, before it's too late."
We've got a quiet little house when nobody's talking, or even breathing.
A week passes, then she tells me, "I don't know. I've been thinking along those same lines. You know?"
"I thought you were," I say.
She doesn't know what to say now. Using my chest as a pillow, she sets her ear over my heart, and after another long pause, she says, "Yeah, we should." Then she has to ask, "But why the big change? Why all of the sudden?"
It's gotten late. Gotten dark, almost. I'm lying on my back, fighting the urge to look at the time. I realize that I don't know when it's supposed to happen, and besides, I won't know when it comes. That's my best guess. Time will run backwards for seven years, and then it will begin again. Begin new. And I won't have memories of anything recent or sorry, and everything will be fresh, and why in hell am I so eaten up and sad about this thing? It doesn't make sense to me. Not even a little bit.
"Are you all right?" my wife asks me. Concerned now.
"I'm fine," I say, hearing my voice crack. Then I make myself shut my eyes, telling her, "It's just that I got this feeling today. That's why I want kids now. Starting tomorrow, I'm just sure, everything's going to be different."
#
I'm too restless to sleep or even pretend, and then it's sometime after one in the morning, and I suddenly drop into a dark hard sleep, waking when I hear the voice. I know that voice, I'm thinking. It tells me, "Go back to sleep, sorry," and I realize that I've lifted my head off the pillow. "Look at what I got for a souvenir," she says, pushing something up onto the bed. "One of the player's balls. I cut it off myself."
It's a hard white ball with tight stitches and a comfortable leather feel. The ball says to me, "On my first pitch, I was a strike, and I was fouled off, landing in the stands behind home plate."
"Quiet," I tell the ball. Then Genevieve says, "Quiet yourself. Go back to sleep."
But I won't sleep again. It's nearly five in the morning, and I've never been this awake. I put on shorts and shoes and yesterday's shirt, and Genevieve asks, "Where are you going?" I tell her, "Out back. To watch the sun come up, I guess." She says, "Well, I'm tired and grouchy. Can I come with you?" When I don't answer, she follows me into the backyard, sitting in one adirondack while I take the other. Her chair doesn't wobble under her little weight. She sits on one of the armrests, and naps, and I'm sitting next to her, thinking about everything. The neighbor girl didn't out-and-out promise that it would happen tonight. So they might do it tomorrow night, or the next. Whenever it happens, it leads us to the same place, always. Then I'm thinking about having a kid or two, and would it be so bad? Now or seven years ago, there's always problems with it. Then I look at Genevieve, wondering if she's dreaming and what kind of dreams she has. I'm curious, but I won't ask. Then I halfway shut my eyes, and when I open them, it's dawn, and I see a little face rising up over the back fence.
A little hand swings up into view, waving at me.
I leave the Birdy Girl asleep. I walk to the back of the yard, asking, "What?" with a whispery voice.
He says, "I learned what she said to you," in a rush, as if it's one huge and horrible word. I can see his little-boy face in the soft first light of the morning. Both pink hands cling tight to the top of the wooden fence. He says, "Kahren was wrong to mislead you, and I will make her apologize to you." Then he sighs and tells me, "But believe me, sir. There is no truth to anything she said."
What I'm thinking, mostly, is that I'm not all that surprised. I even expected something like this, down deep. Maybe part of mea secret partdidn't want to lose these last seven years, bad as they seemed at the time. I decide to say nothing. I'm just standing in front of him, thinking it through, and he must think that I don't understand. Because he says it again, slower this time. "Nobody can turn back time," he tells me, each word followed by a pause. "And nobody can do any of those things that my cruel, childish sister mentioned to you."
"Maybe you can't do those things," I tell him, flat-out, "but how do you know it can't be done? Maybe when you start having kids, and they're a thousand times smarter than you'll ever be, it'll be done. You ever think about that, kid?"
It's almost worth it, these last pissy years. Just to stand there and see that big-eyed face staring at me, nothing about that boy even a little bit smug now.
I turn and walk back towards my house.
The Birdy Girl stirs on the arm of the chair, muttering, "More," as she dreams. "More, more."
I leave her there.
I go into the house, and I sit on the edge of the bed, watching my sleeping wife. Eventually her eyes come open, and I tell her, "I was right." I tell her, "I don't know why, but everything's changed overnight, and it's pretty much for the better."
The End
BIRTH DAY
By Robert Reed
Everyone likes birthdays. As the ingenious little story that follows will show us, though, some birthdays can be a bit more surprising than others . . .
A relatively new writer, Robert Reed is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and he has also sold stories to Universe, New Destinies, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Synergy, and other magazines and anthologies. His books include the novels The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, and Down the Bright Way, and a new novel is in the works. His story "The Utility Man" was on the final Hugo Ballot in 1990, and his story "Pipes" was in our Ninth Annual Collection. He lives in Lincoln. Nebraska.
* * * *
Jill asks how she looks.
"Fine," I tell her. "Just great, love."
And she says, "At least look at me first. Would you?"
"I did. Didn't I?" She's wearing a powder-blue dress-I've seen it before- and she's done something to her hair. It's very fine and very blonde, and she claims to hate it. I don't like how she has it right now. Not much. But I say, "It's great," because I'm a coward. That's the truth. I sort of nod and tell her, "You do look great, love."
