Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 40

Making up his mind, he put his hand softly against the top of the window sash and pushed on it gently and evenly. Just then the bedroom light blinked out, plunging the room into darkness. He ducked away from the window, his heart racing. Minutes pa.s.sed and nothing happened, the night silent but for the sound of crickets and the muted chatter on the television. He stood up again, took a deep breath, and pushed the window open as far as it would go. After listening to the silence, he boosted himself up onto the sill, overbalancing and sliding into the room. He stood up, hearing voices-his mother and father, talking quietly but urgently.

He saw the smashed dime in the tray along with some other coins, and in an instant it was in his hand and he turned back toward the window, crawling through, his shoes b.u.mping against the sill as he tumbled onto the ground. He clambered to his feet, grabbing the window to shut it. The bedroom light came on, and he froze in a crouch, the window not quite shut, the curtain hitched open an inch where it had caught on the latch. He hesitated, drawing his hand slowly away from the window frame, certain they knew someone had been in the house. And yet he couldn't bring himself to move: getting away-getting back-meant nothing to him.

"Don't say anything to him," his father said, close by now. "There's no use making him worry." Alan saw him briefly as he crossed the bedroom, disappearing beyond the edge of the curtain.

"But the oven is still warm," his mother said, following him in. "And sauce on the tray in the trash isn't even dried out. I think he was here when we came home. What if he's still in the house?"

Alan bent toward the window until he could see her face. Somehow it hadn't occurred to him how young she would be, probably thirty-five or six. He had known that she was pretty, but over the years he had lost track of how absolutely lovely she had been, and he found that his memory of her was shaped by her last years, when she was older and fighting with the cancer.

"He's not in the house," his father said. "I've been all through it, putting things away. If he's not in here, which he's obviously not, then he's gone. I'll check the garage and the shed just to make sure. For now, though, let's just keep this to ourselves."

"But what did he want? This is too weird. He was reading one of my books. Who would break into a house to read the books?"

"I don't know. I don't think anything's missing. There was money on the dresser in the bedroom, and it's still there. Your jewelry box hasn't been touched...."

There was a sudden silence now, and Alan realized that the curtains were moving gently in the breeze through the open window. He ducked away down the side of the house as quickly and silently as he could, half expecting to hear the window slide open behind him or the sound of hurrying footsteps in the house.

Without hesitating he set straight out across the back lawn toward the garden shed, looking back at the kitchen window and back door. The light was on in the kitchen, but there was still no one visible.

Should he get the chair out of the shed? Be sitting down for this? Reenact the whole thing exactly? He dug the five objects out of his pocket and held them in one hand, hopefully antic.i.p.ating the disorienting shift, the rising of the wind, the rippling air. But nothing happened. He was simply alone in the moonlit night, the crickets chirping around him. His father appeared in the kitchen now, clearly heading toward the back door, and Alan moved back toward the grapevines, out of sight. He heard the door open as he sat down on the lawn, laying the objects on his knees, compelling himself to concentrate on them and not on the approaching footsteps, which stopped close by. He opened his eyes and looked up, feeling like an idiot. His father stood a few feet away, a golf club in his hands, staring down at him. Alan stared back in momentary confusion. He might have been looking at his own brother.

"Why don't you just stay there," his father said, "so I don't have to bean you with this driver."

"Sure."

"What were you doing in the house?"

For a time Alan couldn't answer. When he found his voice he said simply, "I'm Alan." "Okay. I'm Phil. Pardon me if I don't shake your hand. What the h.e.l.l were you doing in my house? What were you looking for?"

Alan smiled at the question, which was no easier to answer than the last one. "My past," he said. "I was looking for my past. You don't recognize me, do you? You can't."

"What do you mean, your past? Did you used to live here or something? This is some kind of nostalgia thing?"

"Yeah. I used to live here."

"So what are you doing with my son's stuff? That's from his room, isn't it? That dog and the tiki?"

"It's from his room. But I didn't steal it."

"You're just borrowing it?"

"Yes," Alan said softly. Then, "No, it's mine, too. I am Alan... Dad." He had to force himself to say it out loud, and he found that there were tears welling in his eyes. His father still stood staring at him, his own face like a mask.

Alan went on, pulling random bits from his memory: "You bought me the aquarium at that place in Garden Grove, off Magnolia Street. We got a bunch of fish, and they all ate each other, and we had to go back down there and buy more. And you know the cracked shade on the lamp in the livingroom? Me and Eddie Landers did that by accident after school on Halloween day when we were waiting for Mom to come home. That was probably last Halloween, or maybe two years ago at the most. I was the mummy, remember? Eddie was Count Dracula. He was staying here because his parents were out of town. Let me show you something," he said, carefully laying the five trinkets on the brick pad in front of the shed door and then shifting forward to get to his feet. His father took a step back, and the head of the golf club rose where it had been resting on the lawn. Alan stopped moving. "Can I get up?"

"Okay. Slowly, eh?"

"Sure. Just getting my wallet." Alan stood, reaching into his back pocket. He took his drivers license out of his wallet and held it out. "Look at the date." He pocketed the wallet, and his father took the card, turning it so that it was illuminated by moonlight. "Above the picture," Alan told him. He heard laughter from inside the house now, and realized that it was himself, probably watching television, still oblivious to everything going on outside here.

After glancing at it his father handed the license back. "I guess I don't get it," he said. But clearly he did get it; he simply couldn't believe it.

Alan put the license into his shirt pocket. "I came back from-from thirty years from now. In the future."

He pointed at the objects lying on the bricks. "You and I buried this stuff in a coffee can, like a treasure, under the first stepping stone, right there."

"We did, eh? We buried them? When was that?"

Alan shrugged. "Any day now, I guess. Next month? I don't know, but we buried them. We will, anyway. I came back and dug them up."

There was the sound of the back door opening, and his mother came out onto the back stoop, looking in their direction. "What are you doing, dear?" she asked with feigned cheerfulness. "Is everything all right?"

Probably she was ready to call the police.

"Yeah, it's fine," Alan's father said back to her. "Just... putting some stuff away." She stepped back into the house and shut the door, but then reappeared in the kitchen, where she stood at the window, watching.

His father was still staring at him, but puzzled, less suspicious now.

"You remember the time we were up at Irvine Park," Alan asked, "and we found those old bottle caps with the cork on the back, and you got the corks out and put the bottle caps on my shirt, with the cork holding them on from the other side? And I picked up that cactus apple and got all the needles in my hand? And it started to rain, and we got under the tree, and you said that the pitcher of lemonade would get wet, and Mom ran back to the table to cover it?"

His father dropped the golf club to the lawn, letting it lie there. "That was thirty years ago," Alan said. "Can you imagine? It's still funny, though. And there was that time when Mom lost her purse, remember, and she looked all over for it, and you came home from work and found it in the refrigerator?"

"She put it away with the groceries," his father said. "That was last month."

Alan nodded. "I guess it could have been." He realized now that his father's silence was no longer disbelief, and he stepped forward, opening his arms. His father hugged him, and for a time they stood there, listening to the night, saying nothing. Alan stepped away finally, and his father squeezed him on the shoulder, smiling crookedly, looking hard at his face.

Alan reached into his pocket and took out the odds and ends that he carried, the buffalo nickel, his pocket knife. He showed his father the little antler-handled knife. "Recognize this? It's just like the one you gave me, except I lost that one. I found this one just like it at the hardware store and bought it about a year ago."

"I didn't give you a pocket knife like that."

"You know what? I guess maybe you haven't given it to me yet." "Then I guess I don't need to bother, if you're just going to lose the d.a.m.ned thing."

Alan smiled at him. "But if you don't, then how am I going to know to buy this one at the hardware store?"

They listened in silence to the crickets for a moment. "How old would you be now?" his father asked him.

"Forty-two," Alan said. "How about you?"

"Forty. That's pretty funny. Married?"

"Yeah. Take a look at this." He dug in his wallet again, removing a picture of Tyler, his high school graduation picture. He looked at it fondly, but abruptly felt dizzy, disoriented. He nearly sat down to keep himself from falling. His father took the picture, and the dizziness pa.s.sed. "That's Tyler," Alan said, taking a deep breath and focusing his thoughts. But he heard his own voice as an echo, as if through a tube. "Your grandson. Susan and I gave him Mom's maiden name."

Alan's father studied the picture. "He looks like your mother, doesn't he?"

"A lot. I didn't realize it until tonight, when she was standing in my bedroom. You must have seen that the window was open...?"

"Your bedroom," his father said, as if wondering at the notion. "Here." Alan took his keys out of his other pocket. Among them was the loose house key that he had removed from the nail in the juniper. "That's how I got into the house."

Still holding Tyler's picture, his father took the key. He nodded at the other keys on Alan's key ring.

"What's that one?"

Alan held out his car key. "Car key. One of the b.u.t.tons is for the door locks and the other pops the trunk open from a distance. There's a little battery in it. It puts out an FM radio wave. Push the door b.u.t.ton a couple of times, and an alarm goes off." Alan pushed it twice, recalling that his own car, in some distant s.p.a.ce and time, was sitting just thirty feet away, and he found himself listening to hear a ghostly car alarm. But what he heard, aside from the crickets and the muted sound of the television, was a far-off clanking noise, like rocks cascading onto a steel plate. The night wind ruffled his hair. And from beyond the fence, just for a split second, the dark canopy of walnut leaves looked hard-edged and rectilinear to him, like rooftops. Then it was a dark, slowly moving ma.s.s again, and he heard laughter and the sound of the television.

"Thirty years?"

"It seems like a long time, but I swear it's not."

"No, I don't guess it is. What's the date back where you come from? Just out of curiosity."

Alan thought about it. "Eighth of July, 2001." He found himself thinking about his mother, doing the math in his head. What did she have? Twenty years or so? His father hadn't ever remarried. Alan glanced toward the house where his mother still stood at the window, looking out at the night.

His father followed his gaze. "Tell me something," he said after a moment. "Were you happy? You know, growing up?"

"I was happy," Alan said truthfully. "It was a good time."

"You found your heart's desire?"

"Yeah, I married her."

"And how about your boy Tyler? You think he's happy?" He held the picture up.

"I think so. Sure. I know it."

"Uh huh. Look, I think maybe it's better if you go back now, before your Mom flips. Can you? It's getting late."

"Yeah," Alan said, realizing absolutely that the clanking noise he had heard was the sound of a jackhammer. He took the pocket knife and nickel out of his pocket again, and held them in his hand with his keys, then reached into his shirt pocket to retrieve his drivers license.

"I'd invite you in, you know, for ice cream and cookies, but your mother-I don't know what she'd do. I don't think it would..."

"I know. Alan too...." He nodded at the house. "We might as well let him watch TV."

"Right. It would be like... a disturbance, or something. I guess we don't need that. We're doing pretty good on our own."

"And it's going to stay good," Alan said. "Is there anything...?"

"That I want to know?" His father shook his head. "No. I'm happy with things like they are. I'm looking forward to meeting Tyler, though." He handed the picture back.

"If you can ever find some way to do it," Alan said, taking the picture, "let Mom know that..."

But he felt himself falling backward. And although it came to him later as only a dim memory, he recalled putting out his hand to stop his fall, dropping the stuff that he held. He found himself now in bright sunlight, lying on the dead Bermuda gra.s.s, the words of his half-finished sentence lost to him, the onrushing wind already dying away and the smell of grapes heavy on the sun-warmed air. The telltale glitter shimmered before his eyes, and he sat up dizzily, looking around, squinting in the brightness, hearing the clanging of the jackhammer, which cut off sharply, casting the afternoon into silence. He saw that the shed was dilapidated and doorless now, the house once again boarded up. His car, thank G.o.d, sat as ever in the driveway. His keys! He stood up dizzily, looking down at his feet. With his keys gone he had no way of...

"Hey."

At the sound of the voice, Alan shouted in surprise and reeled away into the wall of the shed, turning around and putting out his hands. He saw that a man sat in the dilapidated aluminum lawn chair beneath the silk oak-his father, smiling at him. With the sun shining on his face, he might have been a young man. Alan lowered his hands and smiled back.

"Welcome home," his father said to him.

About the Authors

In 1977, at the age of 35, Barry B. Longyear decided that, although he enjoyed being a printer, he hated printing customers. He sold his printing company and went into writing full time, somewhat neglecting two areas: figuring out what to write and how to write it. He calls this the "kamikaze school of career selection."

Through an admittedly fortunate series of circ.u.mstances, he learned what he needed to learn and made his first sale, the short story "The Tryouts," to Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine the next year. In his first year of publication he sold many more stories and his first three books, Manifest Destiny, Circus World, and City of Baraboo (all 1980, Berkley/Putnam), and a year later became the first writer to be awarded the Nebula Award (for the novella "Enemy Mine"), the Hugo Award (also for "Enemy Mine"), and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer all in the same year. His novelettes "Homecoming" and "Savage Planet" were nominated for Hugos in 1979 and 1980. He received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Maine at Farmington in 1981. His writings have been published in Omni, Asimov's, Amazing, a.n.a.log, ASFA, Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Mystery Magazine, Return to the Twilight Zone, and Catfantastic V (some under the names Mark Ringdalh, Frederick Longbeard, Shaw Vinest, and Tol E. Rant), as well as in the nonfiction book Teaching Science Fiction: Education For Tomorrow.

In the works now are Alien Runes (an oracle for the now universe), a collection of his stories from the hard edge t.i.tled Dark Corners, and a sequel to his recent Hazelden release t.i.tled Life Sucks Better Clean. As part of the preparation to write his first mystery novel, tentatively t.i.tled The Hangman's Son, Barry has recently completed training as a private investigator and is a member of a community Joint Resolution Team involved in dealing with first-time juvenile offenders.

Longyear resides in New Sharon, Maine with his lovely wife Jean. His hobbies include wood carving, computer games, sailing, watercolor painting, and especially downhill skiing, for which he will immediately drop whatever else it is that he is doing.

"I believe that every imaginable universe exists somewhere in the cosmos, at least while I am researching and writing a story. One of my tasks is to be as true to that universe as possible, which for me involves going to wherever/whenever, living and wandering there for a time, then reporting what I have experienced. The things that I report are those messages, ideas, and tales that alter my mind such that my view of the universe and my place in it become changed, bent, even twisted. It is my endeavor to take these matters and warp the reader's mind as well. Brain damage is not my quest, however. It is only a side effect. My true mission is to go to strange and wonderful places, both dark and humorous, to pursue and grasp important truths about myself, life, and the universe that for some reason are much more understandable in science fiction than they are in the here and now. It's also fun."

Gavin J. Grant lives in Brooklyn. He edits and publishes Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, works for the independent bookshop portal Booksense.com, attended the Clarion workshop in 2000, and does not go back to visit his family in Scotland quite often enough.

Howard Waldrop, who was born in Mississippi and now lives in Washington State, is one of the most iconoclastic writers working today. His highly original books include the novels Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, and Going Home Again. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette "The Ugly Chickens." Waldrop a.s.serts that he killed Omni Online. His story "Mr. Goober's Show" went up "four days before the switch was thrown," he notes. It was reprinted in the September 1998 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Waldrop continues to work on The Moon World and I, John Mandeville, novels ten and twenty-eight years in the making, respectively.

His story "Our Mortal Span," based on the fairy tale about the three billy goats gruff, was recently published in Black Heart, Ivory Bones, the last of the Datlow/Windling adult fairy tale series. He also recently caught and released an eighteen-pound chinock salmon on a 5-wt. flyrod several weeks ago. He says, "You don't want to do that every day."

Leigh Kennedy was born in Denver, Colorado, and received a BA in history from Metropolitan State College.She moved to Austin, Texas in 1980, where she received heat rash and a new accent. She then emigrated to England in 1985 where she received yet another accent and two children with her husband, Chris Priest. Her occupations have varied from emptying bedpans to writing indexes for philosophy texts. Kennedy presently lives with her family in Hastings, on the south coast of England.

Steven Utley: My Whole Life Story (Complete in One Volume) I was born a week and a day after Harry Truman had pulled the rug out from under Thomas Dewey, in the year of the Berlin Airlift and the first full-blown commercial television broadcasts. (For the history-challenged: 1948.) Over the next couple of decades, my parents, including my father, a noncommissioned officer in the Air Force, herded my three siblings and me from place to exotic place (England, Okinawa, Kansas) as part of the Pentagon's master plan to defeat communism.

As a child I enjoyed books and old movies and imitatively worked up my own stories both prose and in comic-book form. I broke into print in the seventh grade with a poem about Hannibal (the Carthaginian general, not Samuel L. Clemens's hometown), but it wasn't until my freshman year of high school, when I discovered Mars-the Mars of science fiction's two great romantics, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury-that I somehow understood that I, too, must grow up to be A Writer, or at least a rich and famous person. Ten years later, I was one! A Writer, I mean.

By then (we're up to the early 1970s, in case you've lost track), my family had settled in Tennessee but momentum had carried me clear on into Texas, where I fell in with other young writers, including Lisa Tuttle, Howard Waldrop, and Bruce Sterling, and fell in love with one of them. Whichever one of them it was (accounts vary) enticed me to Austin, then a sort of bohemian paradise and still, in my heart, what every military brat must eventually seek-Home. Nevertheless, Austin having evolved into a replica of Dallas, many of us Austinians (which are not quite the same thing as Texans) are now expatriates living in exotic places such as the Scottish hinterlands and the backwoods of Washington State, or, in my own case, smack on the buckle of the Bible Belt. I lead a quiet life, surrounded as I am by my books and my cats and my dangerously inbred neighbors.

All of the above is the truth or as much of it as I'm able to fabricate on the spur of the moment.

A. R. Morlan was born on January 3, 1958 in Chicago, Illinois. The only child of divorced parents, she lived in the Los Angeles area from 1961 to 1969 when she moved to the midwest. Morlan graduated magna c.u.m laude from Mount Senario College in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, in December 1980 with a B.A. in English, and minors in Theatre Arts and History. Her first published work was a quiz in Twilight Zone Magazine (1983). Her first published story was "Four Days Before the Snow," in Night Cry (1985). She lives with a houseful of cats.

John W. Randal lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-the city in which he was born. Primed by an early interest in Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, he happily immersed himself in the science fiction and fantasy novels found on the shelves of his grade school library. In 1987, he graduated from La Roche College with a degree in English and set about trying to sell some of his own stories. Two years later he succeeded.

He was a First Place winner in the 1989 Writers of the Future contest and has been fortunate enough to have his short fiction appear in a variety of publications. He finds inspiration in music, dreams, and in nature-especially a view of the ocean, or of Pittsburgh's three rivers, gleaming like black gla.s.s at night.

He hopes you enjoy his fiction. He enjoys creating it.

Terry Dowling is Australia's most awarded writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He is author of Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, and Twilight Beach (the Tom Rynosseros saga); Wormwood, The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, and Blackwater Days; and co-editor of Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF and The Essential Ellison.

Dowling's stories have appeared locally in such magazines as Omega Science Digest, Australian Short Stories, Aphelion, Eidolon, and Aurealis and anthologies as diverse as Dreaming Down Under, Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction, Alien Sh.o.r.es, The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories and The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Overseas publications include The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Tenebres, Ikarie, Event Horizon, and j.a.pan's SF; and appearances in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror and The Year's Best Horror.

M. Shayne Bell has published short fiction in Asimov's, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tomorrow, Amazing Stories, Gothic.Net, Interzone, Science Fiction Age, and Realms of Fantasy, plus numerous anthologies, including The Year's Best Science Fiction #6, The Best of Writers of the Future, Starlight 2, Future Earths: Under African Skies, Simulations: Fifteen Tales of Virtual Reality, Isaac Asimov's Mother's Day, War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, and Vanishing Acts. He published stories in each of the three Star Wars short story anthologies. His short story "Mrs. Lincoln's China" (Asimov's, July 1994) was a 1995 Hugo Awardfinalist.

Bell is author of the novel, Nicoji (Baen Books, 1990), and editor of the anthology, Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor (Signature Books, 1993), for which he received an AML award for editorial excellence. In 1991 he received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Bell has also published poetry in a number of venues, including Asimov's, Amazing Stories, and Once Upon a Midnight, an anthology commemorating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." His poem "One Hundred Years of Russian Revolution" (Amazing Stories, 1989) was a Science Fiction Poetry a.s.sociation Rhysling Award finalist. He worked for six years as poetry editor of Sunstone magazine.