The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (37 page)

“No one remembers,” the last SF
writer says, sadly.

“
You
remember,” the
agent says.

But the last SF writer is
shaking his head, staring into the cold clam chowder, beneath the hot
anachronistic neon light. “Too late,” he mutters, “It’s all gone.”

2

The last SF writer sits in the
all-night diner, fiddling with a flaking copy of an ancient science fiction
magazine. The pages have been annotated in microscopic print. As a weary
waitress refills his coffee cup, he says to her, “They don’t make life like
they used to.”

“Preachin’ to the choir,
sweetheart.” the waitress says, and with leaden steps disappears somewhere
behind the counter.

“She has no idea what you’re
talking about,” the agent says from behind a pair of thin-framed eyeglasses
perched precariously on the bridge of his bulbous nose.

The last SF writer waves the
magazine in the air, creating a minor blizzard of decayed pulp all about the
table top. “It was seventy-eight years ago when this story first appeared. It
was true then, and it’s true now.”

“Ironic, isn’t it,” the agent
says dryly without looking up from the contract he’s been reading.

“You know why I come here every
night?”

“Because it’s just around the
corner from your apartment,” the agent says.

The last SF writer ignores him.
“Because they still have menus that you can
read
and because
flesh-and-blood waitresses still serve the food. Not like those new diners,
with the voice-recognition ordering systems, computerized chefs, robotic
servers...”

“Yes,” says the agent, finally
looking up from his papers, “but those places have something that this place
does not.”

“Such as?”

“Patrons.”

“I can sympathize,” the last SF
writer says. “It is a different world now. It has evolved beyond me. Beyond
this—” he shakes more flakes of paper off the ancient magazine. He glances
toward the waitress standing behind the counter at the far end of the diner
staring catatonically at the door. “She could be Linda Nielsen,” he says.

“And you could be Jim Mayo,”
the agent says.

“And it would all end the same,
regardless.”

Staring at his papers, the
agent says, “They don’t make life like they used to.”

3

The last SF writer sits in the
all-night diner with ancient newspaper clippings spread out across his table.
From an inner coat pocket, he pulls out a ball-point pen and adds to the notes
he has scribbled on the napkin before him. It takes him quite some time, and
before he is through, he has filled both sides of its surface with tiny print.

The waitress stops by the table
with more coffee and the last SF writer says to her, “Would you be a doll and
bring me some more napkins? Thank you, dear.” She smiles at him vacuously and
walks off.

Then he says to his agent, “We
were too smart for our own good. That was our downfall. Ahead of our time would
be an understatement. We were ahead of
any
time. Listen to this—” he
glances down at his napkin, “—’The Rocket Man’, published ninety years ago;
‘The Skylark of Space’, one hundred and thirteen years ago; ‘Requiem’, one
hundred and one years ago. The list goes on and on.

“Do you know when human beings
last set foot on the moon?” He does not wait for an answer. “Over sixty-eight
years ago! I was virtually a newborn then. No sir, we have outsmarted
ourselves. We were the leaders. We were there before the rest of them in every
single case: the moon, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. We had the
vision
to see what they could not see. We inspired the last great generation, I tell
you. Ask any one of those twelve dead astronauts who actually stood on the
moon—
stood on the moon!
—ask any one of them what inspired them to do
something so incredibly outrageous and they will undoubtedly point to some
aspect of science fiction.

“And where are we today? We
have solved the problem of literacy by eliminating it: ‘Books’ (if you can call
them that) are sensory interactive, require no knowledge of letters, and no
imagination on the part of the reader. Automobiles drive themselves—oftentimes
without any passengers. Food preparation does not require human participation.
Dogs can be walked by autonomous leashes. Hair can be colored by genetic pills.
They have taken the ideas that we gave to them, and used them to solve every
trivial
problem they could think of.”

This thought has been recurring
to the last SF writer with increasing frequency. He wipes sweat from his
forehead allowing several large drops to fall into his napkin, smearing the
blue ink in several places.

“We are no closer to the moon,”
he says, scribbling madly as he speaks, “no closer to cold fusion, or curing
cancer or a dozen other diseases. We have become preoccupied with a
world-girdling network of electronic interaction and narcissism. The universe
outside does not exist. It cannot affect us and we cannot affect it.”

Finally, he breaks down and
says what he is really thinking: “It is hard to watch a species on its way to
extinction.” He thinks the ambiguity of this is profound, for while by “species”
he means “science fiction writer,” he could just as easily be referring to the
human race.

It is at this point he realizes
that he has been alone in the diner the entire time. His agent is not there,
and he has been talking aloud to an invisible audience. Perhaps he has not even
been talking. Perhaps it has all been in his head.

4

The last SF writer sits in the
all-night diner and stares at the neon “Live Nudes” sign just outside the
window. It is a mark of the deterioration in this part of town that the nude
dancers are, in fact, live. In most places the dancers are computer-generated
simulacrums, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing—until you try and
touch them.

His agent sits across from him,
sipping at his coffee and reading a newspaper, but newspapers are rare, except
in museums, and in fact, the agent himself seems rarified, fading in and out,
at times appearing solid, and at other times like those ghostly holographic
dancers.

“When was the last time you
actually
sold
a story of mine?” the last SF writer asks.

“When was the last time you
wrote
a story for me to sell.?”

“I am no longer able to write.
I’ve lost that power. It has withered away out of disgust.”

“There is no longer a market.”

“We are a dying breed.”

“
You
are a dying breed.”

The last SF writer scratches at
his chin and stares into his soup bowl. “This is how Hwoogh felt.”

The agent flickers out for a
moment and then reconstitutes himself. He shrugs his shoulders and says,
“Survival of the fittest. Nothing personal, you understand.”

The last SF writer nods sadly.
“The day is done.”

“How long?”

“One hundred and two years.”

5

The last SF writer sits in the
all-night diner. He is not well. The mild aches now make him restless. The
cough, which started as a tickle in his throat, has grown into some kind of
infection in his lungs. He avoids looking at himself in the mirror.

“We never really made it beyond
Apollo,” he says to his agent. “Do you realize that it has been sixty-nine
years since human beings have set foot on the moon? Since Barry Malzberg’s
Beyond
Apollo
was first published?” In his mind, both were the same.

“I always thought that a most
depressing book,” the agent says, sipping his coffee.

“A most
insightful
book,” the last SF writer says, and then is overcome by a siege of coughing.
When he recovers, wiping bits of green sputum from the table with a greasy
napkin, he says, “I can sympathize with Harry Evans. The conditions were
intolerable.”

“The conditions
are
intolerable,” the agent says. Then he changes the subject. “Have you heard that
scientists at M.I.T. think they’ve built a time machine that will actually
work?”

“I don’t listen to tabloids,”
the last SF writer says.

“It was
the headline of all the major news organizations this morning.”

“I no longer pay any attention
to the news.”

With a hint of emotion, the
agent says, “With a time machine, you could go back in time an change
things—you know, so that events turn out differently.”

“And what would I change?” the
last SF writer asks.

“Well...maybe what gets
written, how it is received and so forth.”

“Too late, it’s already been
done, seventy-six years ago in a story called ‘The Longest Science Fiction
Story Ever Told.’“

“Ah, but that was a
story
.
I am talking about
life
, altering our reality,
making a difference
.”

The last SF writer hawks spits
something unpleasant into his napkin. He says, “It will never work.”

“Why not?”

“There has never been a
successful science fiction story involving time travel, that didn’t end
ironically, or dramatically. Call it a writer’s intuition, but I’d wager that
even if their so-called time machine worked, altering the past would not
achieve the desired goals. It would only make things far worse.”

“How could you possibly know
that?” the agent asks.

“I am not the first to know it,
just the last. Harry Evans knew it. The reasoning is clear: the conditions were
intolerable. A time machine? Ha! That will never work out.”

6

The last SF writer sits in the
all-night diner, or perhaps he is asleep on his bed in the tiny, one-room
studio he maintains around the corner from a diner which he has never actually
visited. It is August 15, 2041 and as he nibbles at his toast and soup, or
perhaps just rolls over in bed to face away from the calendar, he realizes that
he is probably the only person on Earth who knows that one hundred years ago
today, “Nightfall” first made its appearance on the magazine racks.

“The greatest science fiction
story ever written was more prescient than anyone could have possibly known,”
he says to his agent—to the empty room. “We humans used to be fascinated by the
stars. They roused the spirit of our ancestors and some of the mystery that
surrounded them seemed to evaporate over the centuries.”

“You are not making sense,” the
agent says; or so the last SF writer thinks to himself. “This is why you
stopped writing; this is why you haven’t written a story in thirty years.”

“Some of that fascination,” the
last SF writer continues, “inspired a couple of generations of writers, and
during that brief interval, they shined like a golden sun.

“Now, we are afraid of the
stars. We do not understand them; cannot understand them. No—worse—we have
forgotten
them. We focused on trivialities, a quest for the ultimate in leisure when we
should have been inspired to focus on industry and the quest for knowledge.
That is what those men and women inspired in others. Somewhere along the way,
though, something went terribly wrong.”

He casts about the restaurant
as though looking for an answer, catches the eye of the waitress and holds up
his empty cup of coffee. She quickly refills the cup, and the last SF writer
reaches toward the small nightstand next to his bed to take a sip of water from
the glass there, but manages only to knock the glass to the floor with a crash.
He does not have the strength to get out of bed and clean it up.

“Perhaps it is a cycle,” the
agent says.

“Yes, a cycle. And maybe
someday, it will start itself up all over again from scratch. That would be
nice to believe, would it not? All of the old stories, retold exactly as they
were told then, but to sound brand new. Like the library of Babel...” his voice
trails off.

The agent (who is now a
discorporate whisper in the mind of the last SF writer) says, “The question
remains: will they get it right?”

The last SF writer does not
know the answer to this. He can
hope
, but he does not know. He will not
know. He says nothing for a long time, laying very still in the dark, empty
room around the corner from the “Live Nudes” sign, his breath coming at
irregular intervals. He thinks only of the great stories, and does not think of
the future. He thinks of the stars, which others cannot see and which he cannot
see, but which he
knows
are there, slowing winking out one by one.

Waiting for Jakie

Barbara Krasnoff

I like the blue pills best. I
have others, of course—the purple ones, and the green and yellow ones. The tiny
white ones? Those are just for blood pressure, and all they really do, in my
opinion, is give a living to the drug companies. Not that I have anything against
drug companies, God forbid; after all, they not only allow me to face each day,
but gave my son Benjamin a decent living for many years until the AIDS got him,
poor boy.