The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (106 page)

He took the elevator to the first floor, stalked savagely through the lobby, and went out the side door to the “remembrance garden”. Stupid name, New Age-y stupid. He wanted to kick something, wanted to bellow for —

Energy punched through him, from the base of his spine up his back and into his brain, mild but definite, like a shock from a busted toaster or something. Then it was gone.

What the fuck was
that
? Was he okay? If he fell, like Anna –

He was okay. He didn’t have Anna’s thin delicate bones. Whatever it was, was gone now. Just one of those things.

On a Nursing floor of St Sebastian’s, a woman with just a few days to live muttered in her long, last half-sleep. An IV dripped morphine into her arm, easing the passage. No one listened to the mutterings; it had been years since they’d made sense. For a moment she stopped and her eyes, again bright in the ravaged face that had once been so lovely, grew wide. But for only a moment. Her eyes closed and the mindless muttering resumed.

In Tijuana, a vigorous old man sitting behind his son’s market stall, where he sold cheap serapes to jabbering
touristos
, suddenly lifted his face to the sun. His mouth, which still had all its white flashing teeth, made a big O.

In Bombay, a widow dressed in white looked out her window at the teeming streets, her face gone blank as her sari.

In Chengdu, a monk sitting on his cushion on the polished floor of the meditation room in the ancient Wenshu Monastery shattered the holy silence with a shocking, startled laugh.

TWO

Carrie Vesey sat in the back of Dr Erdmann’s classroom and thought about murder.

Not that she would ever do it, of course. Murder was wrong. Taking a life filled her with horror that was only —

Ground-up castor beans were a deadly poison
.

— made worse by her daily witnessing of old people’s aching desire to hold onto life. Also, she —

Her step-brother had once shown her how to disable the brakes on a car
.

— knew she wasn’t the kind of person who solved problems that boldly. And anyway her —

The battered-woman defence almost always earned acquittal from juries.

— lawyer said that a paper trail of restraining orders and ER documentation was by far the best way to —

If a man was passed out from a dozen beers, he’d never feel a bullet from his own service revolver.

— put Jim behind bars legally. That, the lawyer said, “would solve the problem” – as if a black eye and a broken arm and constant threats that left her scared even when Jim wasn’t in the same
city
were all just a theoretical “problem,” like the ones Dr Erdmann gave his physics students.

He sat on top of a desk in the front of the room, talking about something called the “Bose-Einstein condensate.” Carrie had no idea what that was, and she didn’t care. She just liked being here, sitting unheeded in the back of the room. The physics students, nine boys and two girls, were none of them interested in her presence, her black eye, or her beauty. When Dr Erdmann was around, he commanded all their geeky attention, and that was indescribably restful. Carrie tried – unsuccessfully, she knew – to hide her beauty. Her looks had brought her nothing but trouble: Gary, Eric, Jim. So now she wore baggy sweats and no make-up, and crammed her 24-carat-gold hair under a shapeless hat. Maybe if she was as smart as these students she would have learned to pick a different kind of man, but she wasn’t, and she hadn’t, and Dr Erdmann’s classroom was a place she felt safe. Safer, even, than St Sebastian’s, which was where Jim had blackened her eye.

He’d slipped in through the loading dock, she guessed, and caught her alone in the linens supply closet. He was gone after one punch, and when she called her exasperated lawyer and he found out she had no witnesses and St Sebastian’s had “security,” he’d said there was nothing he could do. It would be her word against Jim’s. She had to be able to
prove
that the restraining order had been violated.

Dr Erdmann was talking about “proof,” too: some sort of mathematical proof. Carrie had been good at math, in high school. Only Dr Erdmann had said once that what she’d done in high school wasn’t “mathematics,” only “arithmetic.” “Why didn’t you go to college, Carrie?” he’d asked.

“No money,” she said in a tone that meant: Please don’t ask anything else. She just hadn’t felt up to explaining about Daddy and the alcoholism and the debts and her abusive step-brothers, and Dr Erdmann hadn’t asked. He was sensitive that way.

Looking at his tall, stooped figure sitting on the desk, his walker close to hand, Carrie sometimes let herself dream that Dr Erdmann – Henry – was fifty years younger. Forty to her twenty-eight – that would work. She’d Googled a picture of him at that age, when he’d been working at someplace called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He’d been handsome, dark-haired, smiling into the camera next to his wife, Ida. She hadn’t been as pretty as Carrie, but she’d gone to college, so even if Carrie had been born back then, she wouldn’t have had a chance with him. Story of her life.

“ — have any questions?” Dr Erdmann finished.

The students did – they always did – clamouring to be heard, not raising their hands, interrupting each other. But when Dr Erdmann spoke, immediately they all shut up. Someone leapt up to write equations on the board. Dr Erdmann slowly turned his frail body to look at them. The discussion went on a long time, almost as long as the class. Carrie fell asleep.

When she woke, it was to Dr Erdmann, leaning on his walker, gently jiggling her shoulder. “Carrie?”

“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be. We bored you to death, poor child.”

“No! I loved it!”

He raised his eyebrows and she felt shamed. He thought she was telling a polite lie, and he had very little tolerance for lies. But the truth is, she always loved being here.

Outside, it was full dark. The autumn rain had stopped and the unseen ground had that mysterious, fertile smell of wet leaves. Carrie helped Dr Erdmann into her battered Toyota and slid behind the wheel. As they started back toward St Sebastian’s, she could tell that he was exhausted. Those students asked too much of him! It was enough that he taught one advanced class a week, sharing all that physics, without them also demanding he —

“Dr Erdmann?”

For a long terrible moment she thought he was dead. His head lolled against the seat but he wasn’t asleep: His open eyes rolled back into his head. Carrie jerked the wheel to the right and slammed the Toyota alongside the curb. He was still breathing.

“Dr Erdmann?
Henry
?”

Nothing. Carrie dove into her purse, fumbling for her cell phone. Then it occurred to her that his panic button would be faster. She tore open the buttons on his jacket; he wasn’t wearing the button. She scrambled again for the purse, starting to sob.

“Carrie?”

He was sitting up now, a shadowy figure. She hit the overhead light. His face, a fissured landscape, looked dazed and pale. His pupils were huge.

“What happened? Tell me.” She tried to keep her voice even, to observe everything, because it was important to be able to make as full a report as possible to Dr Jamison. But her hand clutched at his sleeve.

He covered her fingers with his. His voice sounded dazed. “I . . . don’t know. I was . . . somewhere else?”

“A stroke?” That was what they were all afraid of. Not death, but to be incapacitated, reduced to partiality. And for Dr Erdmann, with his fine mind . . .

“No.” He sounded definite. “Something else. I don’t know. Did you call 911 yet?”

The cell phone lay inert in her hand. “No, not yet, there wasn’t time for —”

“Then don’t. Take me home.”

“All right, but you’re going to see the doctor as soon as we get there.” She was pleased, despite everything, with her firm tone.

“It’s seven-thirty. They’ll all have gone home.”

But they hadn’t. As soon as Carrie and Dr Erdmann walked into the lobby, she saw a man in a white coat standing by the elevators. “Wait!” she called, loud enough that several people turned to look, evening visitors and ambulatories and a nurse Carrie didn’t know. She didn’t know the doctor, either, but she rushed over to him, leaving Dr Erdmann leaning on his walker by the main entrance.

“Are you a doctor? I’m Carrie Vesey and I was bringing Dr Erdmann – a patient, Henry Erdmann, not a medical doctor – home when he had some kind of attack, he seems all right now but someone needs to look at him, he says —”

“I’m not an M.D.,” the man said, and Carrie looked at him in dismay. “I’m a neurological researcher.”

She rallied. “Well, you’re the best we’re going to get at this hour so please look at him!” She was amazed at her own audacity.

“All right.” He followed her to Dr Erdmann, who scowled because, Carrie knew, he hated this sort of fuss. The non-M.D. seemed to pick up on that right away. He said pleasantly, “Dr Erdmann? I’m Jake DiBella. Will you come this way, sir?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and led the way down a side corridor. Carrie and Dr Erdmann followed, everybody’s walk normal, but still people watched.
Move along, nothing to see here
. . . why were they still staring? Why were people such ghouls?

But they weren’t, really. That was just her own fear talking.

You trust too much, Carrie
, Dr Erdmann had said just last week.

In a small room on the second floor, he sat heavily on one of the three metal folding chairs. The room held the chairs, a grey filing cabinet, an ugly metal desk, and nothing else. Carrie, a natural nester, pursed her lips, and this Dr DiBella caught that, too.

“I’ve only been here a few days,” he said apologetically. “Haven’t had time yet to properly move in. Dr Erdmann, can you tell me what happened?”

“Nothing.” He wore his lofty look. “I just fell asleep for a moment and Carrie became alarmed. Really, there’s no need for this fuss.”

“You fell asleep?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Has that happened before?”

Did Dr Erdmann hesitate, ever so briefly? “Yes, occasionally. I
am
ninety, doctor.”

DiBella nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned to Carrie. “And what happened to you? Did it occur at the same time that Dr Erdmann fell asleep?”

Her eye. That’s why people had stared in the lobby. In her concern for Dr Erdmann, she’d forgotten about her black eye, but now it immediately began to throb again. Carrie felt herself go scarlet.

Dr Erdmann answered. “No, it didn’t happen at the same time. There was no car accident, if that’s what you’re implying. Carrie’s eye is unrelated.”

“I fell,” Carrie said, knew that no one believed her, and lifted her chin.

“Okay,” DiBella said amiably. “But as long as you’re here, Dr Erdmann, I’d like to enlist your help. Yours, and as many other volunteers as I can enlist at St Sebastian’s. I’m here on a Gates Foundation grant in conjunction with Johns Hopkins, to map shifts in brain electrochemistry during cerebral arousal. I’m asking volunteers to donate a few hours of their time to undergo completely painless brain scans while they look at various pictures and videos. Your participation will be an aid to science.”

Carrie saw that Dr Erdmann was going to refuse, despite the magic word “science”, but then he hesitated. “What kind of brain scans?”

“Asher-Peyton and functional MRI.”

“All right. I’ll participate.”

Carrie blinked. That didn’t sound like Dr Erdmann, who considered physics and astronomy the only “true” sciences and the rest merely poor step-children. But this Dr DiBella wasn’t about to let his research subject get away. He said quickly, “Excellent! Tomorrow morning at eleven, Lab 6B, at the hospital. Ms Vesey, can you bring him over? Are you a relative?”

“No, I’m an aide here. Call me Carrie. I can bring him.” Wednesday wasn’t one of her usual days for Dr Erdmann, but she’d get Marie to swap schedules.

“Wonderful. Please call me Jake.” He smiled at her, and something turned over in Carrie’s chest. It wasn’t just that he was so handsome, with his black hair and grey eyes and nice shoulders, but also that he had masculine confidence and an easy way with him and no ring on his left hand . . .
idiot
. There was no particular warmth in his smile; it was completely professional. Was she always going to assess every man she met as a possible boyfriend? Was she really that needy?

Yes. But this one wasn’t interested. And anyway, he was an educated scientist and she worked a minimum-wage job. She
was
an idiot.

She got Dr Erdmann up to his apartment and said good-night. He seemed distant, pre-occupied. Going down in the elevator, a mood of desolation came over her. What she really wanted was to stay and watch Henry Erdmann’s TV, sleep on his sofa, wake up to fix his coffee and have someone to talk to while she did it. Not go back to her shabby apartment, bolted securely against Jim but never secure enough that she felt really safe. She’d rather stay here, in a home for failing old people, and how perverted and sad was that?

And what
had
happened to Dr Erdmann on the way home from the college?

THREE

Twice now. Henry lay awake, wondering what the hell was going on in his brain. He was accustomed to relying on that organ. His knees had succumbed to arthritis, his hearing aid required constant adjustment, and his prostate housed a slow-growing cancer that, the doctor said, wouldn’t kill him until long after something else did – the medical profession’s idea of cheerful news. But his brain remained clear, and using it well had always been his greatest pleasure. Greater even than sex, greater than food, greater than marriage to Ida, much as he had loved her.

God, the things that age let you admit.

Which were the best years? No question there: Los Alamos, working on Operation Ivy with Ulam and Teller and Carson Mark and the rest. The excitement and frustration and awe of developing the “Sausage,” the first test of staged radiation implosion. The day it was detonated at Eniwetok. Henry, a junior member of the team, hadn’t of course been present at the atoll, but he’d waited breathlessly for the results from Bogon. He’d cheered when Teller, picking up the shock waves on a seismometer in California, had sent his three-word telegram to Los Alamos: “It’s a boy.” Harry Truman himself had requested that bomb —” to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor” – and Henry was proud of his work on it.