The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (118 page)

The tract was undeveloped – raw forest, not a woods where children played. In the middle lay a pond, completely hidden by trees. Jack would float sticks in the pond and shoot them with the gun.

If he missed, the water boiled. If he didn’t, the sticks were destroyed. Sometimes they erupted in fre. Sometimes they burst with a bang but no flame. Sometimes they simply vanished. Jack couldn’t tell if he was doing something subtly different to get each effect, or if the ray-gun changed modes on its own. Perhaps it had a computer which analysed the target and chose the most lethal attack. Perhaps the attacks were always the same, but differences in the sticks made for different results. Jack didn’t know. But as spring led to summer, he became a better shot. By autumn, he’d begun throwing sticks into the air and trying to vaporize them before they reached the ground.

During this time, Jack grew stronger. Long bike rides to the pond helped his legs and his stamina. In addition, he exercised with fitness equipment his parents had bought but never used. If monsters ever came, Jack couldn’t afford to be weak – heroes had to climb fences and break down doors. They had to balance on rooftops and hang by their fingers from cliffs. They had to run fast enough to save the girl.

Jack pumped iron and ran every day. As he did so, he imagined dodging bullets and tentacles. When he felt like giving up, he cradled the ray-gun in his hands. It gave him the strength to persevere.

Before the ray-gun, Jack had seen himself as just another teenager; his life didn’t make sense. But the gun made Jack a hero who might be needed to save the Earth. It clarified
everything
. Sore muscles didn’t matter. Watching TV was a waste. If you let down your guard, that’s when the monsters came.

When he wasn’t exercising, Jack studied science. That was another part of being a hero. He sometimes dreamed he’d analyse the ray-gun, discovering how it worked and giving humans amazing new technology. At other times, he didn’t want to understand the gun at all. He liked its mystery. Besides, there was no guarantee Jack would ever understand how the gun worked. Perhaps human science wouldn’t progress far enough in Jack’s lifetime. Perhaps Jack himself wouldn’t have the brains to figure it out.

But he had enough brains for high school. He did well; he was motivated. He had to hold back to avoid attracting attention. When his gym teacher told him he should go out for track, Jack ran slower and pretended to get out of breath.

Spider-Man had to do the same.

Two years later, in geography class, a girl named Kirsten gave Jack a daisy. She said the daisy was good luck and he should make a wish.

Even a sixteen-year-old boy couldn’t misconstrue such a hint. Despite awkwardness and foot-dragging, Jack soon had a girlfriend.

Kirsten was quiet but pretty. She played guitar. She wrote poems. She’d never had a boyfriend but she knew how to kiss. These were all good things. Jack wondered if he should tell her about the ray-gun.

Until Kirsten, Jack’s only knowledge of girls came from his big sister, Rachel. Rachel was seventeen and incapable of keeping a secret. She talked with her friends about everything and was too slapdash to hide private things well. Jack didn’t snoop through his sister’s possessions, but when Rachel left her bedroom door ajar with empty cigarette packs tumbling out of the garbage can, who wouldn’t notice? When she gossiped on the phone about sex with her boyfriend, who couldn’t overhear? Jack didn’t want to listen, but Rachel never lowered her voice. The things Jack heard made him queasy – about his sister, and girls in general.

If he showed Kirsten the ray-gun, would she tell her friends? Jack wanted to believe she wasn’t that kind of girl, but he didn’t know how many kinds of girl there were. He just knew that the ray-gun was too important for him to take chances. Changing the status quo wasn’t worth the risk.

Yet the status quo changed anyway. The more time Jack spent with Kirsten, the less he had for shooting practice and other aspects of hero-dom. He felt guilty for skimping on crisis preparation; but when he went to the pond or spent a night reading science, he felt guilty for skimping on Kirsten. Jack would tell her he couldn’t come over to do homework and when she asked why, he’d have to make up excuses. He felt he was treating her like an enemy spy: holding her at arm’s length as if she were some femme fatale who was tempting him to betray state secrets. He hated not trusting her.

Despite this wall between them, Kirsten became Jack’s lens on the world. If anything interesting happened, Jack didn’t experience it directly; some portion of his mind stood back, enjoying the anticipation of having something to tell Kirsten about the next time they met. Whatever he saw, he wanted her to see it too. Whenever Jack heard a joke, even before he started laughing, he pictured himself repeating it to Kirsten.

Inevitably, Jack asked himself what she’d think of his hero-dom. Would she be impressed? Would she throw her arms around him and say he was even more wonderful than she’d thought? Or would she get that look on her face, the one when she heard bad poetry? Would she think he was an immature geek who’d read too many comic books and was pursuing some juvenile fantasy? How could anyone believe hostile aliens might appear in the sky? And if aliens did show up, how delusional was it that a teenage boy might make a difference, even if he owned a ray-gun and could do a hundred push-ups without stopping?

For weeks, Jack agonized: to tell or not to tell. Was Kirsten worthy, or just a copy of Jack’s sister? Was Jack himself worthy, or just a foolish boy?

One Saturday in May, Jack and Kirsten went biking. Jack led her to the pond where he practiced with the gun. He hadn’t yet decided what he’d do when they got there, but Jack couldn’t just
tell
Kirsten about the ray-gun. She’d never believe it was real unless she saw the rays in action. But so much could go wrong. Jack was terrified of giving away his deepest secret. He was afraid that when he saw hero-dom through Kirsten’s eyes, he’d realize it was silly.

At the pond, Jack felt so nervous he could hardly speak. He babbled about the warm weather . . . a patch of mushrooms . . . a crow cawing in a tree. He talked about everything except what was on his mind.

Kirsten misinterpreted his anxiety. She thought she knew why Jack had brought her to this secluded spot. After a while, she decided he needed encouragement, so she took off her shirt and her bra.

It was the wrong thing to do. Jack hadn’t meant this outing to be a test . . . but it was, and Kirsten had failed.

Jack took off his own shirt and wrapped his arms around her, chest touching breasts for the first time. He discovered it was possible to be excited and disappointed at the same time.

Jack and Kirsten made out on a patch of hard dirt. It was the first time they’d been alone with no risk of interruption. They kept their pants on, but they knew they could go farther: as far as there was. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do. Jack and Kirsten felt light in their skins – open and dizzy with possibilities.

Yet for Jack, it was all a mistake: one that couldn’t be reversed. Now he’d never tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. He’d missed his chance because she’d acted the way Jack’s sister would have acted. Kirsten had been thinking like a girl and she’d ruined things forever.

Jack hated the way he felt: all angry and resentful. He really liked Kirsten. He liked making out, and couldn’t wait till the next time. He refused to be a guy who dumped a girl as soon as she let him touch her breasts. But he was now shut off from her and he had no idea how to get over that.

In the following months, Jack grew guiltier: he was treating Kirsten as if she were good enough for sex but not good enough to be told about the most important thing in his life. As for Kirsten, every day made her more unhappy: she felt Jack blaming her for something but she didn’t know what she’d done. When they got together, they went straight to fondling and more as soon as possible. If they tried to talk, they didn’t know what to say.

In August, Kirsten left to spend three weeks with her grandparents on Vancouver Island. Neither she nor Jack missed each other. They didn’t even miss the sex. It was a relief to be apart. When Kirsten got back, they went for a walk and a confused conversation. Both produced excuses for why they couldn’t stay together. The excuses didn’t make sense, but neither Jack nor Kirsten noticed – they were too ashamed to pay attention to what they were saying. They both felt like failures. They’d thought their love would last forever, and now it was ending sordidly.

When the lying was over, Jack went for a run. He ran in a mental blur. His mind didn’t clear until he found himself at the pond.

Night was drawing in. He thought of all the things he’d done with Kirsten on the shore and in the water. After that first time, they’d come here a lot; it was private. Because of Kirsten, this wasn’t the same pond as when Jack had first begun to practice with the ray-gun. Jack wasn’t the same boy. He and the pond now carried histories.

Jack could feel himself balanced on the edge of quitting. He’d turned seventeen. One more year of high school, then he’d go away to university. He realized he no longer believed in the imminent arrival of aliens, nor could he see himself as some great hero saving the world.

Jack knew he wasn’t a hero. He’d used a nice girl for sex, then lied to get rid of her.

He felt like crap. But blasting the shit out of sticks made him feel a little better. The ray-gun still had its uses, even if shooting aliens wasn’t one of them.

The next day Jack did more blasting. He pumped iron. He got science books out of the library. Without Kirsten at his side several hours a day, he had time to fill, and emptiness. By the first day of the new school year, Jack was back to his full hero-dom program. He no longer deceived himself that he was preparing for battle, but the program gave him something to do: a purpose, a release, and a penance.

So that was Jack’s passage into manhood. He was dishonest with the girl he loved.

Manhood means learning who you are.

In his last year of high school, Jack went out with other girls but he was past the all-or-nothingness of First Love. He could have casual fun; he could approach sex with perspective. “Monumental and life-changing” had been tempered to “pleasant and exciting”. Jack didn’t take his girlfriends for granted, but they were people, not objects of worship. He was never tempted to tell any of them about the gun.

When he left town for university, Jack majored in Engineering Physics. He hadn’t decided whether he’d ever analyze the ray-gun’s inner workings, but he couldn’t imagine taking courses that were irrelevant to the weapon. The ray-gun was the central fact of Jack’s life. Even if he wasn’t a hero, he was set apart from other people by this evidence that aliens existed.

During freshman year, Jack lived in an on-campus dormitory. Hiding the ray-gun from his roommate would have been impossible. Jack left the weapon at home, hidden near the pond. In sophomore year, Jack rented an apartment off campus. Now he could keep the ray-gun with him. He didn’t like leaving it untended.

Jack persuaded a lab assistant to let him borrow a Geiger counter. The ray-gun emitted no radioactivity at all. Objects blasted by the gun showed no significant radioactivity either. Over time, Jack borrowed other equipment, or took blast debris to the lab so he could conduct tests when no one was around. He found nothing that explained how the ray-gun worked.

The winter before Jack graduated, Great-Uncle Ron finally died. In his will, the old man left his twenty acres of forest to Jack. Uncle Ron had found out that Jack liked to visit the pond. “I told him,” said big sister Rachel. “Do you think I didn’t know where you and Kirsten went?”

Jack had to laugh – uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to discover he couldn’t keep secrets any better than his sister.

Jack’s father offered to help him sell the land to pay for his education. The offer was polite, not pressing. Uncle Ron had doled out so much cash in his will that Jack’s family was now well-off. When Jack said he’d rather hold on to the property “until the market improves”, no one objected.

After getting his bachelor’s degree, Jack continued on to grad school: first his master’s, then his Ph.D. In one of his courses, he met Deana, working toward her own doctorate – in Electrical Engineering rather than Engineering Physics.

The two programs shared several seminars, but considered themselves rivals. Engineering Physics students pretended that Electrical Engineers weren’t smart enough to understand abstract principles. Electrical Engineers pretended that Engineering Physics students were pie-in-the-sky dreamers whose theories were always wrong until real Engineers fixed them. Choosing to sit side by side, Jack and Deana teased each other every class. Within months, Deana moved into Jack’s apartment.

Deana was small but physical. She told Jack she’d been drawn to him because he was the only man in their class who lifted weights. When Deana was young, she’d been a competitive swimmer – “
Very
competitive,” she said – but her adolescent growth spurt had never arrived and she was eventually outmatched by girls with longer limbs. Deana had quit the competition circuit, but she hadn’t quit swimming nor had she lost the drive to be one up on those around her. She saw most things as contests, including her relationship with Jack. Deana was not beyond cheating if it gave her an edge.

In the apartment they now shared, Jack thought he’d hidden the ray-gun so well that Deana wouldn’t find it. He didn’t suspect that when he wasn’t home she went through his things. She couldn’t stand the thought that Jack might have secrets from her.

He returned one day to find the gun on the kitchen table. Deana was poking at it. Jack wanted to yell, “Leave it alone!” but he was so choked with anger he couldn’t speak.

Deana’s hand was close to the trigger. The safety was off and the muzzle pointed in Jack’s direction. He threw himself to the floor.

Nothing happened. Deana was so surprised by Jack’s sudden move that she jerked her hand away from the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”