Year's Best SF 11, page 20
“Lorraine!” he said. “And here I was about to write this day off as a total loss.” He put his hand on her shoulder and urged her through the entrance. “Come, come in.” Chance had no use for daylight; that was another strike against his being real. Once the Barrow was safely locked down again he relaxed. “So,” he said, “here we are, just the two of us. I’m hoping this means you’ve finally dumped the boy genius?”
Rain had long since learned that the best way to deflect Chance’s relentless flirting was just to ignore it. As far as she knew, he had never taken a lover. She took a deep breath and counted to five. Unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin. The air in the Barrow had the familiar damp weight she remembered from when she first woke up at Nowhere; it settled into Rain’s lungs like a cold. Before her were crates and jars and barrels and boxes of goods that the people of Nowhere had asked the cognisphere to recreate. Later that night Ferdie Raskolnikov and his crew would load the lot onto trucks for delivery around town tomorrow.
“What’s this?” Rain bent to examine a wide-bladed shovel cast with a solid steel handle. It was so heavy that she could barely lift it.
“Shelly Castorp thinks she’s planting daffodils with this.” Chance shook his head. “I told her that the handles of garden tools were always made of wood but she claims her father had a shovel just like that one.” He shook his head. “The specific gravity of steel is 7.80 grams per cubic centimeter, you know.”
“Oh?” When Rain let the handle go, the shovel clanged against the cement floor. “Can we grow daffodils?”
“We’ll see.” Chance muscled the shovel back into place on its pallet. He probably didn’t appreciate her handling other people’s orders. “I’m racking my brains trying to remember if I’ve got something here for you. But I don’t, do I?”
“How about those binoculars I keep asking for?”
“I send the requests….” He spread his hands. “They all bounce.” The corners of his mouth twitched. “So is this about us? At long last?”
“I’m just looking for a book, Chance. A novel.”
“Oh,” he said, crestfallen. “Better come to the office.” Normally if Rain wanted to add a book to the Very Memorial Library, she’d call Chance and put in an order. Retrieving books was usually no problem for the collective intelligence of humanity, which had uploaded itself into the cognisphere sometime in the late twenty-third century. All it needed was an author and title. Failing that, a plot description or even just a memorable line might suffice for the cognisphere to perform a plausible, if not completely accurate, reconstruction of some lost text. In fact, depending on the quality of the description, the cognisphere would recreate a version of pretty much anything the citizens of Nowhere could remember from the world.
Exactly how it accomplished this, and more important, why it bothered, was a mystery.
Chance’s office was tucked into the rear of the Barrow, next to the crèche. On the way, they passed the Big Board of the MemEx, which tracked audience and storyteller accounts for all the residents of Nowhere and sorted and cataloged the accumulated memories. Chance stopped by the crèche to check the vitals of Rahim Aziz, who was destined to become the newest citizen of Nowhere, thus bringing the population back up to the standard 853. Rahim was to be an elderly man with a crown of snowy white hair surrounding an oval bald spot. He was replacing Lucy Panza, the tennis pro and Town Calligrapher, who had gone missing two weeks ago and was presumed to have thrown herself over the edge without telling anyone.
“Old Aziz isn’t quite as easy on the eye as you were,” said Chance, who never failed to remind Rain that he had seen her naked during her revival. Rahim floated on his back in a clear tube filled with a yellow, serous fluid. He had a bit of a paunch and the skin of his legs and under his arms was wrinkled. Rain noted with distaste that he had a penis tattoo of an elephant.
“When will you decant him?”
Chance rubbed a thumb across a readout shell built into the wall of the crèche. “Tomorrow, maybe.” The shell meant nothing to Rain. “Tuesday at the latest.”
Chance Conrad’s office was not so much decorated as overstuffed. Dolls and crystal and tools and fossils and clocks jostled across shelves and the tops of cabinets and chests. The walls were covered with pix from feelies made after Rain’s time in the world, although she had seen some of them at the Ziegfowl. She recognized Oud’s Birthdeath, Fay Wray in full fetish from Time StRanger and the wedding cake scene from Two of Neala. Will claimed the feelies had triggered the cancerous growth of history—when all the dead actors and sports stars and politicians started having second careers, the past had consumed the present.
“So this is about a novel then?” Chance moved behind his desk but did not sit down. “Called?” He waved a hand over his desktop and its eye winked at him.
“The Last President.” Rain sat in the chair opposite him.
“Precedent as in a time-honored custom, or president as in Marie Louka?”
“The latter.”
He chuckled. “You know, you’re the only person in this town who would say the latter. I love that. Would you have my baby?”
“No.”
“Marry me?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Sleep with me?”
“Chance.”
He sighed. “Who’s the author?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Chance rubbed under his eyes with the heels of his hands. “You’re sure about that? You wouldn’t care to take a wild guess? Last name begins with the letter…what? A through K? L through Z?”
“Sorry.”
He stepped from behind the desk and his desktop shut its eye. “Well, the damn doggie didn’t know either, which is why I couldn’t help him.”
Rain groaned. “He’s been here already?”
“Him and a couple of his pooch pals.” Chance opened the igloo which stood humming beside the door. “Cooler?” He pulled out a frosty pitcher filled with something thick and glaucous. “It’s just broccoli nectar and a little ethanol-style vodka.”
Rain shook her head. “But that doesn’t make sense.” She could hear the whine in her voice. “They’re agents of the cognisphere, right? And you access the cognisphere. Why would it ask you to ask itself?”
“Exactly.” Chance closed the door and locked it. This struck Rain as odd; maybe he was afraid that Ferdi Raskolnikov would barge in on them. “Things have been loopy here lately,” he said. “You should see some of the mistakes we’ve had to send back.” He poured broccoli cocktail for himself. It oozed from the pitcher and landed in his coffee mug with a thick plop. “I’ve spent all afternoon trying to convince myself that the dogs are some kind of a workaround, maybe to jog some lost data loose from the MemEx.” He replaced the pitcher in the igloo and settled onto the chair behind his desk. “But now you show up and I’m wondering: Why is Rain asking me for this book?”
She frowned. “I ask you for all my books.”
He considered for a moment, tapping the finger against his forehead and then pointed at her. “Let me tell you a story.” Rain started to object that she had neither goods nor services to offer him in return and she had just drained her MemEx account to dry spit, but he silenced her with a wave. “No, this one is free.” He took a sip of liquid broccoli. “An audience credit unencumbered, offered to the woman of my dreams.”
She stuck out her tongue.
“Why does this place exist?” he asked.
“The Barrow?”
“Nowhere.”
“Ah, eschatology.” She laughed bitterly. “Well, Father Samsa claims this is the afterlife, although I’ll be damned if I know whether it’s heaven or hell.”
“I know you don’t believe that,” said Chance. “So then this is some game that the cognisphere is playing? We’re virtual chesspersons?”
Rain shrugged.
“What happens when we step off the edge?”
“Nobody knows.” Just then a cacophony of clocks yawped, pinged, and buzzed in six o’clock. “This isn’t much of a story, Chance.”
“Patience, love. So you think the cognisphere recreated us for a reason?”
“Maybe. Okay, sure.” A huge spider with eight paintbrush legs shook itself and stretched on a teak cabinet. “We’re in a zoo. A museum.”
“Or maybe some kind of primitive backup. The cognisphere keeps us around because there’s a chance that it might fail, go crazy—I don’t know. If that happened, we could start over.”
“Except we’d all die without the cognisphere.” The spider stepped onto the wall and picked its way toward the nearest corner. “And nobody’s made any babies that I know of. We’re not exactly Adam and Eve material, Chance.”
“But that’s damn scary, no? Makes the case that none of us is real.”
Rain liked him better when he was trying to coax her into bed. “Enough.” She pushed her chair back and started to get up.
“Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Story time. When I was a kid, I used to collect meanies.”
“Meanies?” She settled back down.
“Probably after your time. They were ’bots, about so big.” He held forefinger and thumb a couple of centimeters apart. “Little fighting toys. There were gorilla meanies and ghoul meanies and Nazi meanies and demon meanies and dino meanies. Fifty-two in all, one for every week of the year. You set them loose in the meanie arena and they would try to kill one another. If they died, they’d shut down for twenty-four hours. Now if meanies fought one on one, they would always draw. But when you formed them into teams, their powers combined in different ways. For instance, a ghoul and Nazi team could defeat any other team of two—except the dino and yeti. For the better part of a year, I rushed home from school every day to play with the things. I kept trying combinations until I could pretty much predict the outcome of every battle. Then I lost interest.”
“Speaking of losing interest,” said Rain, who was distracted by the spider decorating the corner of Chance’s office in traceries of blue and green.
“I’m getting there.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and took another sip from the mug. “So a couple of years go by and I’m twelve now. One night I’m in my room and I hear this squeaking coming from under my bed. I pull out the old meanie arena, which has been gathering dust all this time, and I see that a mouse has blundered into it and is being attacked by a squad of meanies. And just like that I’m fascinated with them all over again. For weeks I drop crickets and frogs and garter snakes into the arena and watch them try to survive.”
“That’s sick.”
“No question. But then boys can’t help themselves when it comes to mindless cruelty. Anyway, it didn’t last. The wildlife was too hard on the poor little ’bots.” He drained the last of the broccoli. “But the point is that I got bored playing with a closed set of meanies. Even though I hadn’t actually tried all possible combinations, after a while I could see that nothing much new was ever going to happen. But then the mouse changed everything.” He leaned forward across the desk. “So let me propose a thought experiment to you, my lovely Lorraine. This mysterious novel that everyone is so eager to find? What if the last name of the author began with the letter…” He paused and then seemed to pluck something out of the air. “Oh, let’s say ‘W.’”
Rain started.
“And just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that the first name also begins with ‘W’…. Ah, I see from your expression that this thought has also occurred to you.”
“It’s not him,” said Rain. “He was revived at nineteen; he’s just a kid. Why would the cognisphere care anything about him?”
“Because he’s the mouse in our sad, little arena. He isn’t simply recycling memories of the world like the rest of us. The novel your doggies are looking for doesn’t exist in the cognisphere, never did. Because it’s being written right here, right now. Maybe imagination is in short supply wherever the doggies come from. Lord knows there isn’t a hell of a lot of it in Nowhere.”
Rain would have liked to deny it, but she could feel the insult sticking to her. “How do you know he’s writing a novel?”
“I supply the paper, Rain. Reams and reams of it. Besides, this may be hell, as Father Samsa insists, but it’s also a small town. We meddle in each other’s business, what else is there to do?” His voice softened; Rain thought that if Chance ever did take a lover, this would be how he might speak to her. “Is the book any good? Because if it is, I’d like to read it.”
“I don’t know.” At that moment, Rain felt a drop of something cold hit the back of her hand. There was a dot the color of sky on her knuckle. She looked up at the spider hanging from the ceiling on an azure thread. “He doesn’t show it to me. Your toy is dripping.”
“Really?” Chance came around the desk. “A woman of your considerable charms is taking no for an answer?” He reached up and cradled the spider into his arms. “Go get him, Rain, You don’t want to keep your mouse waiting.” He carried the spider to the teak cabinet.
Rain rubbed at the blue spot on her hand but the stain had penetrated her skin. She couldn’t even smudge it.
But Will wasn’t waiting, at least not for Rain. She stopped by their apartment but he wasn’t there and he hadn’t left a note. Neither was he at the Button Factory nor Queequeg’s Kava Cave. She looked in at the Laughing Cookie just as Fast Eddie was locking up. No Will. She finally tracked him down at the overlook, by the blue picnic table under the chestnut trees.
Normally they came here for the view, which was spectacular. A field of wildflowers, tidy-tips and mullein and tickseed and bindweed, sloped steeply down to the edge of the mesa. But Will was paying no attention to the scenery. He had scattered a stack of five loose-leaf binders across the table; the whole of The Great American Novel or The Last President or whatever the hell it was called. Three of the binders were open. He was reading—but apparently not writing in—a fourth. A No. 2 pencil was tucked behind his ear. Something about Will’s body language disturbed Rain. He usually sprawled awkwardly wherever he came to rest, a giraffe trying to settle on a hammock. Now he was gathered into himself, hunched over the binder like an old man. Rain came up behind him and kneaded his shoulders for a moment.
He leaned back and sighed.
“Sorry about this afternoon.” She bent to nibble his ear. “Have you eaten?”
“No.” He kissed the air in front of him but did not look at her.
She peeked at the loose-leaf page in front of him and tried to decipher the handwriting, which was not quite as legible as an EEG chart…. knelt before the coffin, her eyes wide in the dim holy light of the cathedral. His face was wavy…No, thought Rain straightening up before he suspected that she was reading. Not wavy. Waxy. “Beautiful evening,” she said.
Will shut the binder he had been reading and gazed distractedly toward the horizon.
Rain had not been completely honest with Chance. It was true that Will hadn’t shown her the novel, but she had read some of it. She had stolen glimpses over his shoulder or read upside down when she was sitting across from him. Then there was the one guilty afternoon when she had come back to their apartment and gobbled up pages 34–52 before her conscience mastered her curiosity. The long passage had taken place in a bunker during one of the Resource Wars. The President of Great America, Lawrence Goodman, had been reminiscing with his former mistress and current National Security Advisor, Rebecca Santorino, about Akron, where they had first fallen in love years ago and which had just been obliterated in retaliation for an American strike on Zhengzhou. Two pages later they were thrashing on the president’s bed and ripping each other’s clothes off. Rain had begun this part with great interest, hoping to gain new insight into Will’s sexual tastes, but had closed the binder uneasily just as the president was tying his lover to the Louis XVI armoire with silk Atura neckties.
Will closed the other open binders and stacked all five into a pile. Then he pulled the pencil from behind his ear, snapped it in two, and let the pieces roll out of his hand under the picnic table. He gave her an odd, lopsided smile.
“Will, what’s the matter?” Rain stared. “Are you okay?”
In response, he pulled a baggie of cookie dust from his shirt pocket and jiggled it.
“Here?” she said, coloring. “In plain sight?” Usually they hid out when they were eating dust, at least until they weathered the first rush. The Cocoa Peanut Butter Chunk made them giggly and not a little stupid. Macaroon Sandies often hit Rain like powdered lust.
“There’s no one to see.” Will licked his forefinger and stuck it into the bag. “Besides, what if there was?” He extended the finger toward her, the tip and nail coated with the parti-colored powder. “Does anyone here care what we do?”
She considered telling him then what Chance Conrad had said about small towns, but she could see that Will was having a mood. So she just opened her mouth and obediently stuck her tongue out. As he rotated the finger across the middle of her tongue, she tasted the sweet, spicy grit. She closed her mouth on the finger and he pulled it slowly through her lips.
“Now you,” she said, reaching for the baggie. They always fed each other cookie dust.
Rain and Will sat on the tabletop with their feet on the seat, facing the slope that led down to the edge of Nowhere. The world beneath the impossibly high cliff was impossibly flat, but this was still Rain’s favorite lookout, even if it was probably an illusion. The land stretched out in a kind of grid with rectangles in every color of green: the brooding green of forests, the dreaming green of fields under cultivation, and the confused gray-green of scrub land. Dividing the rectangles were ribbons the color of wet sand. Rain liked to think they were roads, although she had never spotted any traffic on them. She reached for Will’s hand and he closed it around hers. He was right: she didn’t care if anyone saw them together like this. His skin was warm and rough. As she rubbed her finger over the back of his hand, she thought she could make out a faded blue spot. But maybe it was a trick of the twilight, or a cookie hallucination.
