Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 4

TWELVE.

NIPPON SERIES.

An office.

A gap has been left in the corrugated wall, perhaps deliberately, to expose a detailed but highly stylized map of Tokyo set into the station's wall. The wall of this shelter and the wall of the station have become confused. Poly-tie binds the cardboard house directly into the fabric of the station, into the Prefecture itself.This is quite clearly an office.

On the wall around the official, integral subway map, fastened to granite composite and brown cardboard with bits of masking tape: a postcard with a cartoon of orange-waistcoated figures escorting a child through a pedestrian crossing, a restaurant receipt (?), a newspaper clipping, a small plastic clipboard with what seem to be receipts, possibly from an ATM, a souvenir program from the 1995 Nippon Series (baseball), and two color photos of a black-and-white cat. In one photo, the cat seems to be here, among the shelters.

Tucked behind a sheet of cardboard are four pens and three pairs of scissors. A small pocket flashlight is suspended by a lanyard of white poly-tie.

To the right, at right angles to the wall above, a cardboard shelf is cantilevered with poly-tie. It supports a box of was.h.i.+ng detergent, a book, a dayglo orange Casio G-Shock wrist.w.a.tch, a white terry face cloth, a red plastic AM/FM ca.s.sette-player, and three disposable plastic cigarette-lighters.

Below, propped against the wall, is something that suggests the bottom of an inexpensive electronic typewriter of the sort manufactured by Brother.

A box of Chinese candy, a cat-brush, a flea-collar.

THIRTEEN.

TV SOUND.

Close-up of the contents of the shelf.

The red stereo AM/FM ca.s.sette-player, its chrome antenna extended at an acute angle for better reception. It is TV Sound brand, model LX-43. Its broken handle, mended widi black electrical tape, is lashed into the structure with white poly-tie.

Beside the three lighters, which are tucked partially beneath the player, in a row, are an unopened moist towelette and a red fine-point felt pen. To the left of the player is a square red plastic alarm clock, the white face cloth, and the Casio G-Shock. The Casio is grimy, one of the only objects in this sequence that actually appears to be dirty. The book, atop the box of laundry detergent, is hardbound, its glossy dustjacket bearing the photograph of a suited and tied j.a.panese executive. It looks expensive. Inspirational? Autobiographical?

To the right of the LX-43: a rigid cardboard pack of Lucky Strike non-filters and a Pokka coffee tin with the top neatly removed (to serve as an ashtray?).

On the cardboard bulkhead above these things are taped up two sentimental postcards of paintings of kittens playing. "Cat collection" in a cursive font.

Below these are glued (not taped) three black-and-white photographs.

#1: A balding figure in jeans and a short-sleeved T-s.h.i.+rt squats before an earlier, unpainted version of this structure.

One of the cartons seems to be screened with the word "PLAST-". He is eating noodles from a pot, using chopsticks.#2: The "alley" between the shelters. The balding man looks up at the camera.

Somehow he doesn't look j.a.panese at all. He sits cross-legged among half-a-dozen others. They look j.a.panese. All are engrossed in something, perhaps the creation of murals.

#3: He squats before his shelter, wearing molded plastic sandals. His hands grip his knees. Now he looks entirely j.a.panese, his face a formal mask of suffering.

Curve of square tiles.

How long has be lived here?

With his cats, his guitar, his neatly folded blankets?

Dolly back.

Hold on the ca.s.sette player.

Behind it, almost concealed, is a Filofax.

Names.

Numbers.

Held as though they might be a map, a map back out of the underground.

Chapter 5 - The Nostalginauts by S.N. Dyer.

S.N. Dyer (Sharon Farber) has been writing competent, entertaining science fiction for years without attracting the recognition she deserves. She has a flair for tone and att.i.tude that is much in evidence here, and characteristically tells an engaging tale, with bits of acute social observation. This is a witty concoction about kids today in the future after a transforming change, again from Asimov's, that is pretty far from hard SF (it seems to me a direct descendant of the 1950s Galaxy or F&SF stories) but still a captivating SF idea. How badly would you feel if your future selves and friends and family, and even strangers, were touristing back in time to watch you at every important moment of your life? Could you get used to it? Rise above it? Could you resist it yourself later? This is a story of teenage angst and a destabilized world. Who is to say it is not serious just because it reeks with att.i.tude?

"So, you wanna go to the prom?"

"Why?" I asked. "Like, I thought the Chess Club was going to hang on Geek-web."

It was going to be a worldwide hook-up of dateless losers. You can't say we don't know how to have a good time.

"I just think I ought to be there," Gar said. "At the prom." He shrugged. I shrugged.We were on the steps of the old Carnegie-built library- its motto: One hundred years, nothing controversial yet-and were watching the church across the street. A wedding. That meant the possibility of time travelers. Or not. Entertaining either way.

"So why me?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why not Net Girl?"

"She's too popular."

True. She's only a junior and already has five electronic boyfriends. She also weighs three hundred pounds. But a h.e.l.l of a website.

"Besides," he said. "You clean up nice. Remember Halloween? You were hot on Halloween."

There was action inside the church now, people opening the doors, spilling outside. We craned forward.

The happy couple emerged. Hands paused, loaded with rice...

Everyone looked around. The question on everyone's lips: Would they be there?

Would the happy couple, a quarter-century older, time travel back to reexperience this day of joy? Gar and I crossed our fingers sarcastically.

Because if they didn't show, it meant they were either dead, or divorced, or dirt poor. Talk about killing the festivities by your absence.

"Any bets?" I asked.

"Loser buys at T-Bell? I say they'll come."

Suddenly the air by a late-model Honda began to crackle and fluoresce. A middle-aged duo clicked into focus, promptly waving at the newlyweds. A collectively held breath exhaled in unison. The couple waved back, and everyone cheered. From across the street, we joined in. Let's hear it for lasting marital bliss.

And then, just as suddenly, the old pair's thirty seconds were up, they clicked out-and here came more travelers. The cheery offspring. Five of them, ranging in age from near-teen to must-have-been-pregnant-on-the-big-day. The crowd went wild.

"Hot d.a.m.n," I said. More life-affirming than an entire week of Nick at Nite.

"So, will you?"

"On Halloween I was a vampire in black velvet and red satin."

"Works for me," said Gar.

So we shook on it, and headed to T-Bell.

"You know how the lights go weird right before the dumdums show?"

When time travelers first started showing up they were called phantoms. When scientists figured out what they were, the media called them time tourists, ornostalginauts. We stuck with phantom, p.r.o.nounced phan-dumb, and finally just dumdums.

I mean, what a phenomenally stupid invention. Time travel that only takes you twenty-five years into the past, lasts half a minute, and you're insubstantial too. It makes a quest for rubber beverage containers look intelligent. Eyelash ma.s.sagers.

Trampoline deodorizers. Computer ventriloquists.

"But it is important," Gar kept saying. "It means Time is quantized. So what if the first level is trivial... Maybe you can visit longer levels."

"Then we'd have boring visitors from the far future, not just people with anniversaries and reunions."

"Maybe guys from further out dress so they won't scare us or give anything away. Or the future scientists could be viewing, oh, australopithecines or trilobites or the big asteroid crash. But it means We Understand Time. Unified Theory of Everything."

I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling. Gar has a lot of emotion invested in time travel. He's convinced he's going to invent it. That's okay with me. He'll need something to keep him busy next fall when he's at MIT and doesn't have his geeky pals from the Chess Club to keep him real. (And no, we don't play chess. We call it that to .scare away stupid people. It works.) A couple of cla.s.smates of the Neanderthal persuasion stopped by our table. "Hey dorks, drowning your sorrows 'cause you don't have prom dates?"

"No," I said. "We're drowning our sorrows because it's lonely being the only ones in town with active synaptic potentials."

"Oooh, big words. I'm sooo scared!"

The bigger one tore open a couple of hot sauce packets and smeared them on my softaco. Ha ha.

I caught the moron's eye, grinned, grabbed half a dozen more packets, added them on, and took a nice happy bite.

The Neanderthals turned pale and left.

"I can't believe it," Gar said. "They're scared of spicy food!"

Good thing I hang on the Weird Cuisine SIG. And it's why I have to leave town.

I want to find out if Thai restau-rants really do exist in nature. But I went back to the problem at hand.

"So why are you set on the senior prom, Gar? It's not like you've ever been to a game or bought a yearbook or anything."

"Last week, something weird happened. I was in my room thinking about Time, and how the lights before the dumdums come are kind of like when I put my metal-rimmed Pinky and the Brain mug in the microwave, and my jaw was hanging open really stupid... and I realized there was someone else in my room. A dumdum.""Wrong address?"

He shook his head. "He was looking at me, and smiling." He shuddered. Our crowd wasn't used to real smiles.

He was right. If true, it was most definitely weird.

"Maybe you were about to be murdered?"

"Yeah, of course, that's it. And now I'm dead."

Because that's the only non-nostalgia use for time travel so far-checking out unsolved crimes. Deterrent value is zero. Face it. If a dumdum shows up while you're busy ventilating a little old lady with an icepick, you don't say, Whoa, I'm caught. You say Cool, I got away with it for twenty-five years! Which to your average criminal and your average teenager is like forever.

"Okay, let's go with this as your grand moment of revelation. Kekule and the snake. Newton and the fig."

I wasn't going to let Gar's ego get any bigger. So his IQ was bigger than the gross national product of Chechnya. He was still a dateless nerd. A laughingstock. A loser whose best friends were so socially inept they could really only talk to him via modem. And of course me, the rebel without a Santa Glaus. The girl for whom the guidance counselors had made up a stamp that said bad att.i.tude.

"You going to remember your old friends when you've got a n.o.bel prize in every room?"

And then something happened. The air fluoresced and a dumdum appeared at the next table. And stared at us, staring back, for the longest thirty seconds of my life, before disappearing again.

"Wow," I said. "Maybe I should save the hot sauce wrappers. They may be worth something someday."

Mom was in the kitchen doing her June Cleaver thing. "Hey Mom!" I yelled, plopping down in front of the TV and going right to Home Shopping so I could make fun of the boomer collectibles. Eighty bucks for a model of a bicycle. "Hey Mom, can I go to the prom tomorrow night?"

I was sort of permanently grounded since I called the princ.i.p.al a neototalitarian babbitoid. I would have been expelled too, but someone finally explained it to him and it just wasn't bad enough.

A fossilized survivor of the Partridge Family was s.h.i.+lling vinyl souvenirs. Makes you proud to be American.

"The prom?"

I jumped. Mom was right behind me. She'd run out from the kitchen, hands still covered in flour, and was wide-eyed like she was going to cry.

"The prom," I said. "It's not like La.s.sie just came home."

She started nervously wiping her hands on her ap.r.o.n. "We'll run out right nowand get your hair done and a dress and..."

"Hey, it's just Gar, and I'll wear my black dress."