The year0 edition, p.37
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 Edition, page 37
“But I didn’t meet a model or actress, I met the sex pot she was pretending to be in the photo. She even had a staple in her navel where it holds the magazine pages together.”
Rod refilled John’s wine glass, saying, “What was she like, you know, in bed? What happened next?”
“Hey!” Annabel cut in. “Maybe he likes his privacy.”
“The only reason I had the magazine was to hide my L. L. Bean catalog inside it,” John said. “In the catalog there were photos of people skiing or buying Christmas wreaths and things like that, and one of the woman was, well, I was attracted to her. It’s that simple. Crazy about her, actually. Obsessed, you might say. For the past two years.” He felt out of breath.
“What did she look like?” Madeline asked him.
“She was just nice, that’s all. She looked—. I could tell she—. She was authentic, real. She was beautiful, but that’s not important. She was—she was what you want when you want to marry someone. I want to marry her.”
There was silence around the table. John felt his face getting hot, his hand darted out for his wine glass but knocked it over—“Sorry!”—and he jumped up and got a paper towel to mop up the spilled wine.
The next day Annabel Lee drove over to Providence to visit a widowed aunt whose husband used to buy sporting gear from L. L. Bean; the uncle had died over a year ago and, sure enough, Annabel found the Christmas catalog from two years past and brought it back with her. That night she slid it across the kitchen table and asked him, “Which one is she?”
John opened the catalog, flipped a couple of pages, then turned the magazine around so the others could see it. “Look, the man with the string of Christmas tree lights in his hand is married to the woman who is about to hand him the cup of eggnog, and the woman off by the fireplace—that’s the one I told you about.
“Nice sweater,” Rod said. “Looks warm.”
“How do you know who’s married to who?” Annabel asked.
“He’s decorating the family Christmas tree, right? Then the person bringing eggnog from the kitchen would be his wife. And there’s other scenes, too.” He swept three pages back. “Look. They’re outside in the snow and, see, the father is pulling the sled with the little girl on it and the woman next to the sled, looking down at her daughter, is the same one who made the eggnog. And this other woman—I wish I had her name—is looking at them and smiling. And there’s the farmhouse in the background.”
“Oh, yes,” Madeline said.
“There’s other indoor photos,” John said, sweeping several pages aside. “Look. Here she is alone. This is a bedroom, an old-fashioned bedroom. See the edge of the bed quilt? And the braided rug? She has no wedding ring.”
“Nice bathrobe,” Rod said.
“And this is one of my favorite photos,” John said, turning to the front of the catalog. “See. It’s the farm house, the wreath on the big front door, and the light from the window shining on the snow outside, and through the window you can see the people inside, standing by the fire, talking. –What do you think?”
“I think you should look for her,” Annabel told him. “Don’t go back to your other life in that parallel universe.” Rod and Madeline agreed with Annabel. “Stay in this one,” they said.
And that’s what John did. He stayed and got an outdoor job with a landscape company in Stamford, Connecticut. He insisted on paying Rod and Madeline for his room, despite their objections, and he contributed his share for food and other household expenses and, of course, he designed a new poster for the band, as well as helping to set up the lights and amplifiers when they played. He bought blue jeans, chinos, and a few shirts from—you guessed it—L. L. Bean. He had always had friends or, to be exact, friendly acquaintances at work, one or two anyway, one for sure, but he had never felt so at home in his life as he did now.
From time to time he thought about phoning his number in Brooklyn Heights, but a certain uneasiness or superstitious dread had always made him hesitate and he’d forget about it. Early in December he bought himself a cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone and on a whim he did phone his old apartment. It rang and rang and just as he was about to hang up there was a click and a woman’s voice said Hello. John fumbled for words, told her his name and asked about his furniture. “What furniture do you mean?” the woman asked, clearly baffled by the question. He asked was there furniture in the apartment. “No, it’s quite empty and ready to rent. If you’d like to see it, we can set up an appointment and—.” He told her he had his graphics studio there and the woman said, “Yes, it would make an excellent graphics studio.” She was still talking when John hung up, finished with his old life. Anyway, by then he’d bought a green twelve-year-old third-hand Chevy pickup truck and was ready to go looking for the young woman in the catalog.
“Where you going to look?” Rod asked him.
“From the appearance of the white clapboard farm house and the depth of the snow, I figure Maine,” John said.
“Good, that narrows it down.”
On December 10 John Mousse said good-bye to Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline Usher and to Annabel Lee. He knew they were an odd looking bunch but, frankly, he liked them and they made him feel good. He had never asked Annabel Lee about her name, which was the same as the title of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, but he guessed she would have a good explanation for it. Pale Madeline had previously kept her hair dyed black to match her punk-Goth style, but last night she’d changed it to an electric blue. When he said good-bye he stroked her hair, saying, “It’s beautiful, Madeline, really beautiful.” Rod, his eyes looking even more deeply socketed than ever, gave him an envelope with all the money John had paid to rent the bedroom. Then John hopped into his rattle-trap pickup truck and drove off, hammering his horn and waving to them. Way down the road he turned on the windshield wipers because it had begun to snow in very fine little flakes.
10
Ordinarily it isn’t a hard drive from western Connecticut to Maine. You take 91 North to Hartford, then branch North East on 84 into Massachusetts and onto the Mass Pike going North East until you cross 495. Then you make a big curve North and East around Boston and when you reach 95, the coastal highway, you go across a bit of New Hampshire and North, North East into Maine. But John was driving straight into a North Easter, a New England blizzard. More and more of the world was being erased and by the time he reached Maine everything outside the pickup was blank. He drove into the night, his headlights filled with a dense whirling white confetti, as if a deranged artist had torn the world to a zillion bits and was hurling them at the pickup truck. John must have turned off the highway, because when the storm passed and the sky cleared he was on a narrow freshly plowed road, driving between high banks of snow.
At the crest of a hill he pulled to a stop. In the moonlight he could see for miles over gentle white hills and dark pine woods. He got out, astonished at the quiet and the pure deep, deep space. He climbed the snow bank and saw lighted windows at the other end of a nearby snowfield, and lights down in the valley. He parked the pickup as far to the side as he could, then he climbed the snow bank and plodded through the dreamy deep snow to the house. Lamplight from a big front window spilled onto the snow, and he could see a man and two women decorating a Christmas tree. He knocked at the door and the man opened it. “Hi,” John said. “My name is John Mousse and I’m lost.”
“It’s a bad night to get lost in,” the man said, an easy-going guy wearing an L. L. Bean blue canvas shirt. “But it looks like it’s over. Come in, give us your coat, tell us where you want to get to.”
John stepped inside and, dizzy with anxiety, held the edge of the door frame while he took off his coat and knocked the snow from his boots. A woman in a new forest-green wool jacket handed him a mug of steaming cocoa and the young woman coming across the room asked him, “Did you say you were John Mousse?”
“Yes,” John said.
“You’re not lost. My name is Kate Greenway. I’m the woman you spoke to a couple of days ago about renting a place. You asked if it was furnished.” She was in the China blue heather ribbed merino wool sweater from two years ago. “The phone got cut off and I was so afraid you hadn’t heard the directions on how to get here.”
“I recognize you,” John said, his heart banging so hard he was afraid she’d hear it. “Recognize your voice, I mean. For the apartment. Yes.”
“It’s just up the road about a mile, a refinished barn next to my house. Completely modern appliances inside. It’s small, but I think you’ll like it.”
The easy-going guy and the woman in the dark jacket had turned away to help a little girl hang an ornament on the tree.
“I’m sure I’ll like it,” John said. “I’ve wanted to live in a place like this for years. Away from the city, out in the country.”
“And here you are at last,” Kate said. “Because I’ve been waiting—I mean, the apartment’s been waiting—I mean, the apartment, it’s really nice.”
“So this is Maine, the real Maine,” John said, happy to be here. And Kate smiled, and it was a warm smile, and “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
CRIMES AND GLORY
PAUL MCAULEY
“‘Where are they?’”
“They? Who’s this ‘they,’ Niles?” I say, wondering if he’s finally flipped. “There’s noout here but us chickens. And we’re where we’ve always been. Right behind you and catching up fast.”
“It’s a famous question, Emma. Even though I know your training wasn’t all it could have been, I’m surprised and more than a little shocked that you don’t recognise it.”
At the beginning of this long chase, Niles Sarkka maintained an imperial silence, week after week, month after month. He didn’t answer my calls, and after a while I gave up trying to call him. Then, after turnover, after we switched off our motor and flipped end for end and switched it back on and began to decelerate, applying the brakes as we slid down the steepening slope of the warm yellow star’s gravity well, he called me. He wanted to know why we’d left it so late; I told him that a smart fellow like him should be able to work it out for himself.
But he hasn’t, not yet, although he’s been nagging away at it ever since. As our ship has grown closer to his, as both have grown closer to our final destination, the calls have begun to increase in frequency. And like most people living on their own, Niles has developed eccentric habits. He calls without any regard for time of day, so I have to carry the q-phone everywhere, and it’s a big old heavy thing the size of a briefcase, one of the first models. This call, the second in three days, has fetched me out of my weekly bath, and baths are a big deal on the ship. It’s not just a question of scrubbing off a week’s worth of grime; it’s also an escape from the 1.6 g pull. Sinking into buoyant water and resting sore joints and swollen legs and aching backs. Forgetting for a little while how far we’ve come from all that’s known, and the possibility we might not be able to get back. So, standing dripping wet on an ice-cold floor, grappling with the q-phone and trying to knot a towel around me while the other women slosh and wallow in hot dark water in the big bamboo tub, I’m annoyed and resentful, and having a hard time hiding it.
Saying, “As far as I’m concerned, my training was good enough to catch you.”
Fortunately, Niles Sarkka ignores my sarcasm. He’s in one of his pedagogical moods, behaving as if he’s back in front of the TV camera, delivering a solemn lecturette to his adoring audience.
“ ‘Where are they?’ ” he says. “A famous question famously asked by the physicist Enrico Fermi when he and his colleagues were discussing flying saucers and likelihood of faster-than-light travel. ‘Where are they?’ Fermi exclaimed. Given the age and size of the Galaxy, given that it was likely that life had evolved more than once, the Earth should have been visited many times over. If aliens existed, they should already be here. And since they weren’t, Fermi argued, they did not exist. Many scientists and philosophers challenged his paradox with a variety of ingenious solutions, or tried to explain the absence of aliens with a variety of equally ingenious scenarios. But we are privileged to know the answer. We know that they were there all along. We know that the Jackaroo have been watching us for centuries, and chose to reveal themselves in our hour of greatest need. But their appearance provoked many other questions. Where did they come from? Why were they watching us, and why have they intervened? Why have they survived for so long, when we know that other intelligent species have not? Are they outliers, or something different? Are we like them, or are we like the other so-called Elder Cultures—doomed to a finite span, doomed to die out, or to evolve into something beyond our present comprehension? Or are we doomed by our association with the Jackaroo, who set us free from the cage of Earth, yes, but only to let us move into a slightly larger cage. Where we can be studied or played with until they grow tired of us. And so on, and so on. The Jackaroo provided a kind of answer to Fermi’s question, Emma, but it generated a host of new mysteries. Soon, we will discover the answers to some of them. Doesn’t it excite you? It should. I am excited. Excited, and amazed, and more than a little afraid. If you and your farmer friends have even the slightest hint of imagination, you should feel excited and amazed and afraid too. For we are fast approaching the threshold of a new chapter of human history.”
Like every criminal who knows the game is up, Niles Sarkka is trying to justify actions that can’t be justified. Trying to climb a ladder of words towards that last little chink of light high above the dungeon of his plight. I let him talk, of course. It’s always easier to let the guilty talk. They give so much away it isn’t even funny. Niles Sarkka is responsible for the deaths of three people and stole code that could, yes, this is about our only point of agreement, radically change our understanding of our place in the Universe and our relationship with the Jackaroo. So of course I let him talk, but I’m getting cold, standing there in only a towel, my vertebrae are grinding together, blood is pooling in my tired and swollen legs, and I’m growing more impatient than usual with his discursions and bluster, his condescending lesson on the history of the search for extraterrestrial life. So when at last he says that he doesn’t care what people think of him now, that history will judge him and that’s all that counts, I can’t help myself.
“I’ll tell you who will judge you, Niles. A jury of your peers, in Court One of the Justice Centre in Port of Plenty.”
He hangs up. Affronted and offended no doubt, the pompous fool. Anxiety nips at me, I wonder if this time I’ve gone too far, but it soon passes. I know he will call back. Because he wants to convince me that, despite all the bad things he’s done, he will be vindicated by what he expects to discover. Because he has only one q-phone, and I have its twin. Because he has no one else to talk to, out here in the deep and lonely dark between the stars.
As far as I was concerned, it began with a call from one of our contacts in the Port of Plenty Police Department, telling me that the two code jockeys I was looking for, Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton, had been traced to a motel.
It was a little past eight in the evening. As usual, I’d been writing up notes on the day’s work with half an eye on the news channel. I found the remote and switched off the TV and said, “Are they in custody?”
“It looks like they’re dead. The room they rented is burned out, and there are two crispy critters inside. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there it is. And info is info, good or bad, right?”
I didn’t bother to reassure him that he would get paid in due course. “Who’s the attending?”
“Zacarias. August Zacarias. He’s good police, closes more than his fair share of cases. A prince of the city, too.”
“Where can I find him?”
“He’s still at the scene. From what I hear, it’s a mess out there.”
The motel was at the outer edge of the city, close to an off-ramp on the orbital freeway and an access road that climbed a slope of thorn scrub to an industrial park. The streetlights along the road were out, the long low sheds of the park squatted in darkness, and the lights were out in the motel office and its string of rooms, too. A transformer on top of a power-line pole fizzed and sparked. I parked behind a clutch of police cruisers and the satellite van of the local TV news team, and badged my way past the patrol officers who were keeping a small crowd on the right side of crime scene tape strung between a couple of saw horses. The TV reporter and her camerawoman tried to zero in on me, but I ducked away. I was excited and apprehensive: this had brought three months of careful investigative work to a sudden and unwelcome crux, and I had no idea how it would play out.
The warm night air stank of charred wood, smoke, and a sharp tang like freshly-cut metal. The headlamps of a pair of fire trucks patchily lit an L-shaped string of rooms that enclosed two sides of the parking lot; their flashers sent flickers of orange light racing over wet tarmac and the roofs of angle-parked cars and pickup trucks. Firefighters in heavy slickers and yellow helmets were rolling up hoses. A chicken was perched on the cab of a pickup and several more strutted and pecked amongst a couple of picnic tables set on a strip of grass by a derelict swimming pool. The room at the end of the short arm of the L was lit by portable floods, light falling strong and stark on blackened walls, smoke curling from the broken door and the smashed, soot-stained window. Jason Singleton’s car, an ancient Volkswagen Faraday, stood in front of this ruin. The windshield was shattered and its hood was scorched clean of paint and its plastic fender was half-melted.
The homicide detective who had caught the call, August Zacarias, was a tall man in his fifties, with matt black skin and wooly hair clipped short and brushed with grey at the temples, dressed in a brown suit with a windowpane check and polished brown Oxford loafers, a white shirt and a buttercup yellow silk tie. A micropore mask hung under his chin and he stripped off soot-stained vinyl gloves as he came towards me, saying that he understood I wanted to take his case away from him. He had a signet ring on the index finger of his right hand: the kind of ring, faced with a chunk of opal, worn by male members of the Fortunate Five Hundred.
