The Best of Michael Swanwick (45 page)

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt just fine.

There were any number of mental exercises I could try out. The adapter presented me with a menu of them. But I dismissed it out of hand. Forget that nonsense.

I just wanted to stand there, not feeling guilty about Sophia. Not missing her. Not regretting a thing. I knew it wasn’t my fault. Nothing was my fault, and if it had been that wouldn’t have bothered me either. If I’d been told that the entire human race would be killed five seconds after I died a natural death, I would’ve found it vaguely interesting, like something you see on a nature program. But it wouldn’t have troubled me.

Then it was over.

***

For a long instant I just sat there. All I could think was that if this thing had been around four years ago, Sophia would be here with me now. She’d never have chosen optimization knowing it would be like
that
. Then I took off the wraparounds.

Hellene was smiling. “Well?” she said. She just didn’t get it.

“Now it’s your turn to do something for me.”

For a flicker of an instant she looked disappointed. But it didn’t last. “What is it?”

“It’ll be morning soon,” I said. “I want you to come to Mass with me.”

Hellene looked at me as if I’d invited her to wallow in feces. Then she laughed. “Will I have to eat human flesh?”

It was like a breath of wind on a playing-card castle. All the emotional structures my assemblers had been putting together collapsed into nothingness. I didn’t know whether I should be glad or sad. But I knew now that I would never—
could
never—love this woman.

Something of this must have showed in my expression, for Hellene quickly said, “Forgive me, that was unspeakably rude.” One hand fluttered by the side of her skull. “I’ve grown so used to having a mediator that without it I simply blurt out whatever enters my head.” She unplugged the adapter and put it back in her purse. “But I don’t indulge in superstitions. Good God, what would be the point?”

“So you think religion is just a superstition?”

“It was the first thing to go, after I was optimized.”

***

Sophia had said much the same thing, the day of her optimization. It was an outpatient operation, in by three, out by six, no more complicated than getting your kidneys regrown. So she was still working things out when she came home. By seven she’d seen through God, prayer, and the Catholic Church. By eight she had discarded her plans to have children and a lifelong love of music. By nine she’d outgrown me.

Hellene cocked her head to the side in that mannered little gesture optimized businesspeople use to let you know they’ve just accessed the time. “It’s been lovely,” she said. “Thank you, you’ve been so very kind.But now if you’ll excuse me, I really must go. My children—”

“I understand.”

“I face a severe fine if I don’t see them at least twice a month. It’shappened three times so far this year and quite frankly my bank account can’t take it.”

***

On the way out, Hellene noticed the portrait of Sophia by the door. “Your wife?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“She’s exquisite.”

“Yes,” I said. “She is.” I didn’t add that I’d killed her. Nor that a panel of neuroanalysts had found me innocent by virtue of a faulty transition function and, after minor chemical adjustments and a two-day course on anger control techniques, had released me onto the street without prejudice.

Or hope.

That was when I discovered the consolation of religion. Catholics do not believe in faulty transition functions. According to the Church, I had sinned. I had sinned, and therefore I must repent, confess, and atone.

I performed an act of true contrition, and received absolution. God has forgiven me.

Mind you, I have not forgiven
myself
. Still, I have hope.

Which is why I’ll never be optimized. The thought that a silicon-doped biochip could make me accept Sophia’s death as an unfortunate accident of neurochemistry and nothing more, turns my stomach.

“Good-bye,” I said.

Hellene waved a hand in the air without turning around. She disappeared in the direction of Queen Street Station. I shut the door.

From Hill Street, which runs the height of Glasgow’s Old City, you can stand at an intersection and look down on one side upon Charing Cross and on the other upon Cowcaddens. The logic of the city is laid clear there and although the buildings are largely Victorian (save for those areas cleared by enemy bombings in World War II, which are old modern), the logic is essentially medieval: The streets have grown as they will, in a rough sort of grid, and narrow enough that most are now fit for one-way traffic only.

But if you look beyond Cowcaddens, the ruins of the M8 Motorway cut through the city, wide and out of scale, long unused but still fringed by derelict buildings, still blighting the neighborhoods it was meant to serve. A dead road, fringed by the dead flesh of abandoned buildings.

Beyond, by the horizon, were the shimmering planes and uncertain surfaces of the buildings where the new people lived, buildings that could never have been designed without mental optimization, all tensengricity and interactive film. I’d been in those bright and fast habitats. The air
sings
within their perfect corridors. Nobody could deny this.

Still, I preferred the terraces and too-narrow streets and obsolete people you find in the old city. The new people don’t claim to be human, and I don’t claim that being human is any longer essential. But I cling to the human condition anyway, out of nostalgia perhaps but also, possibly, because it contains something of genuine value.

I sat in the straight-backed Charles Rennie MacIntosh and stared at the icon. It was all there, if only I could comprehend it: the dark dimensions of the human mind. Such depths it holds!

Such riches.

Scherzo with Tyrannosaur

A keyboardist was playing a selection of Scarlotti’s harpsichord sonatas, brief pieces one to three minutes long, very complex and refined, while the
Hadrosaurus
herd streamed by the window. There were hundreds of the brutes, kicking up dust and honking that lovely flattened near-musical note they make. It was a spectacular sight.

But the
hors d’oeuvres
had just arrived: plesiosaur wrapped in kelp,beluga smeared over sliced maiasaur egg, little slivers of roast dodo on toast, a dozen delicacies more. So a stampede of common-as-dirtherbivores just couldn’t compete.

Nobody was paying much attention.

Except for the kid. He was glued to the window, staring with an intensity remarkable even for a boy his age. I figured him to be about ten years old.

Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, I went over to stand next to him. “Enjoying yourself, son?”

Without looking up, the kid said, “What do you think spooked them? Was it a—?” Then he saw the wranglers in their jeeps and his face fell. “Oh.”

“We had to cheat a little to give the diners something to see.” I gestured with the wine glass past the herd, toward the distant woods. “But there are plenty of predators lurking out there—troodons, dromaeosaurs…even old Satan.”

He looked up at me in silent question.

“Satan is our nickname for an injured old bull rex that’s been hanging around the station for about a month, raiding our garbage dump.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The kid looked devastated.
T. rex
a scavenger!
Say it ain’t so
.

“A tyrannosaur is an advantageous hunter,” I said, “like a lion. When it chances upon something convenient, believe you me, it’ll attack. And when a tyrannosaur is hurting, like old Satan is—well, that’s about as savage and dangerous as any animal can be. It’ll kill even when it’s not hungry.”

That satisfied him. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad.”

In companionable silence, we stared into the woods together, looking for moving shadows. Then the chime sounded for dinner to begin, and I sent the kid back to his table. The last hadrosaurs were gone by then.

He went with transparent reluctance.

The Cretaceous Ball was our big fund-raiser, a hundred thousand dollars a seat, and in addition to the silent auction before the meal and the dancing afterwards, everybody who bought an entire table for six was entitled to their very own paleontologist as a kind of party favor.

I used to be a paleontologist myself, before I was promoted. Now I patrolled the room in tux and cummerbund, making sure everything was running smoothly.

Waiters slipped in and out of existence. You’d see them hurry behind the screen hiding the entrance to the time funnel and then pop out immediately on the other side, carrying heavily-laden trays.
Styracosaurus
medallions in mastodon mozzarella for those who liked red meat. Archaeopteryx almondine for those who preferred white. Radicchio and fennel for the vegetarians.

All to the accompaniment of music, pleasant chitchat, and the best view in the universe.

Donald Hawkins had been assigned to the kid’s table—the de Cherville Family. According to the seating plan the heavy, phlegmatic man was Gerard, the money-making
paterfamilias
. The woman beside him was Danielle, once his trophy wife, now aging gracefully. Beside them were two guests—the Cadigans—who looked a little overwhelmed by everything and were probably a favored employee and spouse. They didn’t say much. A sullen daughter, Melusine, in a little black dress that casually displayed her perfect breasts. She looked bored and restless—trouble incarnate. And there was the kid, given name Philippe.

I kept a close eye on them because of Hawkins. He was new, and I wasn’t expecting him to last long. But he charmed everyone at the table. Young, handsome, polite—he had it all. I noticed how Melusine slouched back in her chair, studying him through dark eyelashes, saying nothing. Hawkins, responding to something young Philippe had said, flashed a boyish, devil-may-care grin. I could feel the heat of the kid’s hero-worship from across the room.

Then my silent beeper went off, and I had to duck out of the late Cretaceous and back into the kitchen, Home Base, year 2082.

***

There was a Time Safety Officer waiting for me. The main duty of a TSO is to make sure that no time paradoxes occur, so the Unchanging wouldn’t take our time privileges away from us. Most people think that time travel was invented recently, and by human beings. That’s because our sponsors don’t want their presence advertised.

In the kitchen, everyone was in an uproar. One of the waiters was leaning, spraddle-legged and arms wide against the table, and another was lying on the floor clutching what looked to be a broken arm. The TSO covered them both with a gun.

The good news was that the Old Man wasn’t there. If it had been something big and hairy—a Creationist bomb, or a message from a million years upline—he would have been.

When I showed up, everybody began talking at once.

“I didn’t do
noth
ing, man, this bastard—”

“—guilty of a Class Six violation—

“—broke my fucking
arm
, man. He threw me to the ground!”

“—work to do. Get them out of my kitchen!”

It turned out to be a simple case of note-passing. One of the waiters had, in his old age, conspired with another recruited from a later period, to slip a list of hot investments to his younger self. Enough to make them both multibillionaires. We had surveillance devices planted in the kitchen, and a TSO saw the paper change hands. Now the perps were denying everything.

It wouldn’t have worked anyway. The authorities keep strict tabs on the historical record. Wealth on the order of what they had planned would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

I fired both waiters, called the police to take them away, routed a call for two replacements several hours into the local past, and had them briefed and on duty without any lapse in service. Then I took the TSO aside and bawled him out good for calling me back real-time, instead of sending a memo back to me three days ago. Once something has happened, though, that’s it. I’d been called, so I had to handle it in person.

It was your standard security glitch. No big deal.

But it was wearying. So when I went back down the funnel to Hilltop Station, I set the time for a couple hours after I had left. I arrived just as the tables were being cleared for dessert and coffee.

Somebody handed me a microphone, and I tapped it twice, for attention. I was standing before the window, a spectacular sunset to my back.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “let me again welcome you to the Maastrichtian, the final age of the late Cretaceous. This is the last research station before the Age of Mammals. Don’t worry, though—the meteor that put a final end to the dinosaurs is still several thousand years in the future.” I paused for laughter, then continued.

“If you’ll look outside, you’ll see Jean, our dino wrangler, setting up a scent lure. Jean, wave for our diners.”

Jean was fiddling with a short tripod. She waved cheerily, then bent back to work. With her blond ponytail and khaki shorts, she looked to be just your basic science babe. But Jean was slated to become one of the top saurian behaviorists in the world, and knew it too. Despite our best efforts, gossip slips through.

Now Jean backed up toward the station doors, unreeling fuse wire as she went. The windows were all on the second floor. The doors, on the ground floor, were all armored.

“Jean will be ducking inside for this demonstration,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to be outside unprotected when the lure goes off.”

“What’s in it?” somebody called out.

“Triceratops blood. We’re hoping to call in a predator—maybe even the king of predator,
Tyrannosaurus rex
himself.” There was an appreciative murmur from the diners. Everybody here had heard of
T. rex
. He had real star power. I switched easily into lecture mode. “If you dissect a tyrannosaur, you’ll see that it has an extremely large olfactory lobe—larger in proportion to the rest of its brain than that of any other animal except the turkey vulture. Rex can sniff his prey”—carrion, usually, but I didn’t say that—”from miles away. Watch.”

The lure went off with a pop and a puff of pink mist.

I glanced over at the de Cherville table, and saw Melusine slip one foot out of her pump and run it up Hawkins’ trouser leg. He colored.

Her father didn’t notice. Her mother—her
step
mother, more likely—did, but didn’t care. To her, this was simply what women did. I couldn’t help notice what good legs Melusine had.

“This will take a few minutes. While we’re waiting, I direct your attention to Chef Rupert’s excellent pastries.”

I faded back to polite applause, and began the round of table hopping. A joke here, a word of praise there. It’s banana oil makes the world go round.

When I got to the de Chervilles, Hawkins’ face was white.

“Sir!” He shot to his feet. “A word with you.”

He almost dragged me away from the table.

When we were in private, he was so upset he was stuttering. “Th-that young woman, w-wants me t-to…”

“I know what she wants,” I said coolly. “She’s of legal age—make your own decision.”

“You don’t
understand!
I can’t possibly go back to that table.” Hawkins was genuinely anguished. I thought at first that he’d been hearing rumors, dark hints about his future career. Somehow, though, that didn’t smell right. There was something else going on here.

“All right,” I said. “Slip out now. But I don’t like secrets. Record a full explanation and leave it in my office. No evasions, understand?”

“Yes, sir.” A look of relief spread itself across his handsome young face. “Thank you, sir.”

He started to leave.

“Oh, and one more thing,” I said casually, hating myself. “Don’t go anywhere near your tent until the fund-raiser’s broken up.”

***

The de Chervilles weren’t exactly thrilled when I told them that Hawkins had fallen ill, and I’d be taking his place. But then I took a tyrannosaur tooth from my pocket and gave it to Philippe. It was just a shed—rexes drop a lot of teeth—but no need to mention that.

“It looks sharp,” Mrs. de Cherville said, with a touch of alarm.

“Serrated, too. You might want to ask your mother if you can use it for a knife, next time you have steak,” I suggested.

Which won him over completely. Kids are fickle. Philippe immediately forgot all about Hawkins.

Melusine, however, did not. Eyes flashing with anger, she stood, throwing her napkin to the floor. “I want to know,” she began, “just
what
you think you’re—”

Fortunately, that was when Satan arrived.

The tyrannosaur came running up the hillside at a speed you’d have to be an experienced paleontologist to know was less than optimal. Even a dying
T. rex
moves
fast
.

People gasped.

I took the microphone out of my pocket, and moved quickly to the front of the room. “Folks, we just got lucky. I’d like to inform those of you with tables by the window that the glass is rated at twenty tons per square inch. You’re in no danger whatsoever. But you are in for quite a show. Those who are in the rear might want to get a little closer.”

Young Philippe was off like a shot.

The creature was almost to us. “A tyrannosaur has a hyperacute sense of smell,” I reminded them. “When it scents blood, its brain is overwhelmed. It goes into a feeding frenzy.”

A few droplets of blood had spattered the window. Seeing us through the glass, Satan leaped and tried to smash through it.

Whoomp!
The glass boomed and shivered with the impact. There were shrieks and screams from the diners, and several people started to their feet.

At my signal, the string quartet took up their instruments again, and began to play while Satan leaped and tore and snarled, a perfect avatar of rage and fury. They chose the scherzo from Shostokovich’s piano quintet.

Scherzos are supposed to be funny, but most have a whirlwind, uninhibited quality that makes them particularly appropriate to nightmares and the madness of predatory dinosaurs.

Whoomp!
That mighty head struck the window again and again and again. For a long time, Satan kept on frenziedly slashing at the window with his jaws, leaving long scratches in the glass.

Philippe pressed his body against the window with all his strength, trying to minimize the distance between himself and savage dino death. Shrieking with joyous laughter when that killer mouth tried to snatch him up. I felt for the kid, wanting to get as close to the action as he could. I could identify.

I was just like that myself when I was his age.

***

When Satan finally wore himself out and went bad-humoredly away, I returned to the de Chervilles. Philippe had restored himself to the company of his family. The kid looked pale and happy.

So did his sister. I noticed that she was breathing shallowly. Satan does that to young women.

“You dropped your napkin.” I handed it to Melusine. Inside was a postcard-sized promotional map, showing Hilltop Station and behind it Tent City, where the researchers lived. One of the tents was circled. Under it was written,
While the others are dancing
.

I had signed it
Don.

***

“When I grow up I’m going to be a paleontologist,” the kid said fervently. “A behavioral paleontologist, not an anatomist or a wrangler.” Somebody had come to take him home. His folks were staying to dance. And Melusine was long gone, off to Hawkins’ tent.

“Good for you,” I said. I laid a hand on his shoulder. “Come see me when you’ve got the education. I’ll be happy to show you the ropes.”

The kid left.

He’d had a conversion experience. I knew exactly how it felt. I’d had mine standing in front of the Zallinger “Age of Reptiles” mural in the Peabody Museum in New Haven. That was before time travel, when paintings of dinosaurs were about as real as you could get. Nowadays I could point out a hundred inaccuracies in how the dinosaurs were depicted. But on that distant sun-dusty morning in the Atlantis of my youth, I just stood staring at those magnificent brutes, head filled with wonder, until my mother dragged me away.