The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (120 page)

But when Jack saw Kirsten’s pictures of the Pacific, all he could think of was dumping the ray-gun into the sea. He could drive out to visit her . . . rent a boat . . . sail out to deep water . . .

No. Jack knew nothing about sailing, and he didn’t have enough money to rent a boat that could venture far offshore. “How many years have I been preparing?” he asked himself. “Didn’t I intend to be ready for any emergency? Now I have an honest-to-god mission, and I’m useless.”

Then Kirsten sent him an emailed invitation to go sailing with her.

She had access to a sea-going yacht. It belonged to her grandparents – the ones she’d visited on Vancouver Island just before she and Jack broke up. During her trip to the island, Kirsten had gone boating with her grandparents every day. At the start, she’d done it to take her mind off Jack; then she’d discovered she enjoyed being out on the waves.

She’d spent time with her grandparents every summer since, learning the ins and outs of yachting. She’d taken courses. She’d earned the necessary licences. Now Kirsten was fully qualified for deep-water excursions . . . and as a gift to wish her well on her new job, Kirsten’s grandparents were lending her their boat for a month. They intended to sail down to Oregon, spend a few days there, then fly off to tour Australia. When they were done, they’d return and sail back home; but in the meantime, Kirsten would have the use of their yacht. She asked Jack if he’d like to be her crew.

When Jack got this invitation, he couldn’t help being disturbed. Kirsten had never mentioned boating before. Because she was living in their home town, most of her email to Jack had been about old high-school friends. Jack had even started to picture her as a teenager again; he’d spent a weekend with the grown-up Kirsten, but all her talk of high-school people and places had muddled Jack’s mental image of her. The thought of a bookish teenage girl captaining a yacht was absurd.

But that was a lesser problem compared to the suspicious convenience of her invitation. Jack needed a boat; all of a sudden, Kirsten had one. The coincidence was almost impossible to swallow.

He thought of the unknown aliens who made the ray-gun. Could they be influencing events? If the ray-gun was intelligent, could it be responsible for the coincidence?

Kirsten had often spent time near the gun. On their first visit to the pond, she and Jack had lain half-naked with the gun in Jack’s backpack beside them.

He thought of Kirsten that day. So open. So vulnerable. The gun had been within inches. Had it nurtured Kirsten’s interest in yachting . . . her decision to get a job in Oregon . . . even her grandparents’ offer of their boat? Had it molded Kirsten’s life so she was ready when Jack needed her? And if the gun could do that, what had it done to Jack himself?

This is ridiculous
, Jack thought.
The gun is just a gun. It doesn’t control people. It just kills them
.

Yet Jack couldn’t shake off his sense of eeriness – about Kirsten as well as the ray-gun. All these years, while Jack had been preparing himself to be a hero, Kirsten had somehow done the same. Her self-improvement program had worked better than Jack’s. She had a boat; he didn’t.

Coincidence or not, Jack couldn’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. He told Kirsten he’d be delighted to go sailing with her. Only later did he realize that their time on the yacht would have a sexual subtext. He broke out laughing. “I’m such an idiot. We’ve done it again.” Like that day at the pond, Jack had only been thinking about the gun. Kirsten had been thinking about Jack. Her invitation wasn’t a carte-blanche come-on but it had a strong hint of, “Let’s get together and see what develops.”

Where Kirsten was concerned, Jack had always been slow to catch the signals. He thought,
Obviously, the ray-gun keeps dulling my senses
. This time, Jack meant it as a joke.

Summer came. Jack drove west with the ray-gun in the trunk of his car. The gun’s safety was on, but Jack still drove as if he were carrying nuclear waste. He’d taken the gun back and forth between his home town and university many times, but this trip was longer, on unfamiliar roads. It was also the last trip Jack ever intended to make with the gun; if the gun didn’t want to be thrown into the sea, perhaps it would cause trouble. But it didn’t.

For much of the drive, Jack debated how to tell Kirsten about the gun. He’d considered smuggling it onto the boat and throwing the weapon overboard when she wasn’t looking, but Jack felt that he owed her the truth. It was overdue. Besides, this cruise could be the beginning of a new relationship. Jack didn’t want to start by sneaking behind Kirsten’s back.

So he had to reveal his deepest secret. Every other secret would follow: what happened to Deana; what had really been on Jack’s mind that day at the pond; what made First Love go sour. Jack would expose his guilt to the woman who’d suffered from the fallout.

He thought,
She’ll probably throw me overboard with the gun
. But he would open up anyway, even if it made Kirsten hate him. When he tossed the ray-gun into the sea, he wanted to unburden himself of everything.

The first day on the boat, Jack said nothing about the ray-gun. Instead, he talked compulsively about trivia. So did Kirsten. It was strange being together, looking so much like they did in high school but being entirely different people.

Fortunately, they had practical matters to fill their time. Jack needed a crash course in seamanship. He learned quickly. Kirsten was a good teacher. Besides, Jack’s longstanding program of hero-dom had prepared his mind and muscles. Kirsten was impressed that he knew Morse code and had extensive knowledge of knots. She asked, “Were you a Boy Scout?”

“No. When I was a kid, I wanted to be able to untie myself if I ever got captured by spies.”

Kirsten laughed. She thought he was joking.

That first day, they stayed close to shore. They never had to deal with being alone; there were always other yachts in sight, and sailboats, and people on shore. When night came, they put in to harbour. They ate in an ocean-view restaurant. Jack asked, “So where will we go tomorrow?”

“Where would you like? Up the coast, down the coast, or straight out to sea?”

“Why not straight out?” said Jack.

Back on the yacht, he and Kirsten talked long past midnight. There was only one cabin, but two separate fold-away beds. Without discussion, they each chose a bed. Both usually slept in the nude, but for this trip they’d both brought makeshift “pajamas” consisting of a T-shirt and track-pants. They laughed at the clothes, the coincidence, and themselves.

They didn’t kiss goodnight. Jack silently wished they had. He hoped Kirsten was wishing the same thing. They talked for an hour after they’d turned out the lights, becoming nothing but voices in the dark.

The next day they sailed due west. Both waited to see if the other would suggest turning back before dark. Neither did. The farther they got from shore, the fewer other boats remained in sight. By sunset, Jack and Kirsten knew they were once more alone with each other. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do.

Jack asked Kirsten to stay on deck. He went below and got the ray-gun from his luggage. He brought it up into the twilight. Before he could speak, Kirsten said, “I’ve seen that before.”

Jack stared at her in shock. “What? Where?”

“I saw it years ago, in the woods back home. I was out for a walk. I noticed it lying in a little crater, as if it had fallen from the sky.”

“Really? You found it too?”

“But I didn’t touch it,” Kirsten said. “I don’t know why. Then I heard someone coming and I ran away. But the memory stayed vivid in my head. A mysterious object in a crater in the woods. I can’t tell you how often I’ve tried to write poems about it, but they never work out.” She looked at the gun in Jack’s hands. “What is it?”

“A ray-gun,” he said. In the fading light, he could see a clump of seaweed floating a short distance from the boat. He raised the gun and fired. The seaweed exploded in a blaze of fire, burning brightly against the dark waves.

“A ray-gun,” said Kirsten. “Can I try it?”

Some time later, holding hands, they let the gun fall into the water. It sank without protest.

Long after that, they talked in each other’s arms. Jack said the gun had made him who he was. Kirsten said she was the same. “Until I saw the gun, I just wrote poems about myself – overwritten self-absorbed pap, like every teenage girl. But the gun gave me something else to write about. I’d only seen it for a minute, but it was one of those burned-into-your-memory moments. I felt driven to find words to express what I’d seen. I kept refining my poems, trying to make them better. That’s what made the difference.”

“I felt driven too,” Jack said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if the gun can affect human minds. Maybe it brainwashed us into becoming who we are.”

“Or maybe it’s just Stone Soup,” Kirsten said. “You know the story? Someone claims he can make soup from a stone, but what he really does is trick people into adding their own food to the pot. Maybe the ray-gun is like that. It did nothing but sit there like a stone. You and I did everything – made ourselves who we are – and the ray-gun is only an excuse.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “But so many coincidences brought us here . . .”

“You think the gun manipulated us because it
wanted
to be thrown into the Pacific? Why?”

“Maybe even a ray-gun gets tired of killing.” Jack shivered, thinking of Deana. “Maybe the gun feels guilty for the deaths it’s caused; it wanted to go someplace where it would never have to kill again.”

“Deana’s death wasn’t your fault,” Kirsten said. “Really, Jack. It was awful, but it wasn’t your fault.” She shivered too, then made her voice brighter. “Maybe the ray-gun orchestrated all this because it’s an incurable romantic. It wanted to bring us together: our own personal matchmaker from the stars.”

Jack kissed Kirsten on the nose. “If that’s true, I don’t object.”

“Neither do I.” She kissed him back.

Not on the nose.

Far below, the ray-gun drifted through the cold black depths. Beneath it, on the bottom of the sea, lay wreckage from the starship that had exploded centuries before. The wreckage had travelled all the way from Jupiter. Because of tiny differences in trajectory, the wreckage had splashed down thousands of miles from where the ray-gun landed.

The ray-gun sank straight toward the wreckage . . . but what the wreckage held or why the ray-gun wanted to rejoin it we will never know.

We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood.

But we wouldn’t.

LESTER YOUNG AND THE JUPITER’S MOONS’ BLUES

Gord Sellar

New writer Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, grew up in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, and currently lives in South Korea, where he teaches at a university. The year 2008 was a big one for him, as he published highly visible stories in
Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Fantasy
, and
Tesseracts Twelve
, one of the splashier debuts in recent years. (He had two previous sales last year, to
Nature
and to
Flurb
, but they went largely unnoticed.) He graduated from Clarion West in 2006. His website is at gordsellar.com.

In addition to writing, Sellar is a jazz buff and plays jazz saxophone, a background he obviously drew upon in writing the clever story that follows, in which a down-and-out jazzman gets a chance to play some literally out-of-this-world music, and hopes that his luck has changed. Which it has, but the question is, which way?

H
IS FIRST NIGHT
back on Earth after his gig on the Frogships, Bird showed up at Minton’s cleaner than a broke-dick dog, with a brand new horn and a head full of crazy-people music. He’d got himself a nice suit somewhere, and a fine new Conn alto. Now, this was back in ’48, when everyone – me included – was crazy about Conn and King and only a few younger cats were playing on Selmer horns.

But it wasn’t just that big-shouldered suit and the horn; the cat was clean. I mean clean, no more dope, no more liquor, no more fried chicken. Hell, he was always called Bird – short for Yardbird – on account of how much fried chicken he liked to eat. This was like a whole different Charlie Parker. He was living clean as a monk. He was walking straight and talking clear. His eyes weren’t all fucked-up and scary anymore, either.

To be honest, I didn’t recognize him when he walked into Minton’s. It was about three am, and the regular jam session had been going for a long time, and all these cats from Philly had shown up, you know, dressed up like country negroes on Sunday morning and playing all that Philadelphia grandpa-swing they liked used to like to play. Smooth and all, but old-fashioned, especially for 1948. Even in New York City, the hotbed of bebop and the only place where the Frogs were taking jazz musicians on tour, there was still a lotta old guys dressed up in Zoot suits cut for them five years before, trying to play like Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges and Lester Young used to in the old days, before they all disappeared. Bebop was huge, but a lot of ignorant cats, they were trying to resist it, still disrespecting us, calling what we played “Chinese music” and shit.

But Bird, he was clean like I said, but he played some shit like I never heard before, like nobody never heard before. I’m telling you, when he went up on the bandstand and brought that horn up to his mouth, the music that came out of it was . . . well, it made us crazy. Back in those days, we were like mad scientists when it came to sounds. We’d be taking a leak at the same time and one of us would break wind and we all knew what note it was. We’d call it together, turn to one another laughing and shit, and say, “E-flat, Jack, you just farted an E-flat.” And that night we’d play every third tune in E-flat.

But them tunes Bird was playing, man, I ain’t never heard nobody put notes together like that. The rhythms were so tangled up that even I had to listen close to catch them all. He was playing 37 notes evenly spaced across a four-beat bar in fast swing, crazy licks like that, and he was playing all these halfway tunings, quarter tones and multiphonics and all kinds of craziness. And even so, he was
swinging
.

Everyone went crazy, it was just too much. And Bird just grinned like a goddamn king and said, in that snooty British gentleman accent he used to like to put on sometimes, “Ladies and gents, this music is the wave of the future. It received its
dé-but
off the rings of Saturn, and if you don’t like it, you can come right on up here and kiss my royal black ass.”

Them old guys, the Zoot suit cats, they didn’t like that, but they didn’t say nothing. Everyone remembered how Bird never took no shit off nobody back before he went off touring the solar system.

Man, all that scared me a little, but I still wanted to get onto one of them Frogships and hear what kind of music everyone was playing up there. They were hiring cats, everyone knew that, but that was all I knew about it. Now, I hadn’t never met Bird before, and I knew he wasn’t going to talk to me, but Max Roach, Max was drumming there that night, and I’d met Max one time before there at Minton’s, so I figured I could talk to him.

Max, he’d gone up onto the Frogships a year or two back. Well, he looked at me like he knew what I wanted, what I was gonna ask about, but he sat down to talk to me anyway. I told him I wanted onto the ships, wanted to know how to get in.

“You audition, same as for anything else,” he said, shrugging. “Who knows what they like? Don’t ask me.”

“But you been on the ships . . .”

“Uh-huh,” Max said, nodded, but didn’t say no more.

“What kind of music they hire
you
to play?”

“Oh, man, you just need to play whatever,” he said in that quiet, calm voice of his. He was a really cool, soulful cat most of the time. “Some of the time, they take cats who swing the old way, real old-fashioned; like what Duke’s band used to play in the old days, or Billy Eckstine’s. Hell, sometimes they want New Orleans funeral songs, or some cat who plays like Jelly Roll Morton. Other times they only take cats who play real
hard
bebop, man. You can’t never know what they want. But anyway, you don’t need to go on up to the ships. It messes a cat up, man.” He tapped the tablecloth with his drumsticks, hit my glass of bourbon with one of them.
Ting
.

I know better now, but then I just thought he was stonewalling me. Figured maybe there were only limited spaces, and he was bullshitting me, trying to keep gigs open for cats he knew better.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Look at Bird! Remember when he left? Cat
went up there
looking like death on a soda cracker, and look at him now!” I glanced over and saw him sitting at a table with Diz and Miles and Monk and Art Blakey and Fat Girl Navarro and a couple of them white women who used to hang around at Minton’s. They were laughing like a bunch of old women, like someone had just told a joke a second before. Bird, he wasn’t fat no more, he was lean, and real clear-headed and healthy-looking, nothing like when they let his ass out of Camarillo. He looked like a cat with a long life ahead of him.

“Bird’s been different,
always
, man,” Max said. “He’s just that kind of cat. Plus, they
fixed
him up. They wanted him bad, so they took him apart and then put him back together out there. A lot of cats, they just . . .” Then he stopped, like he didn’t know what to say, and his eyes went a little scary, the way Bird’s used to be, and he looked at me like he could see through my skin or something, and said, “Look, cats almost never come back like he did. The things that go on . . . you can’t even imagine,” he said.

The room went quiet sometime while we were talking, and I could tell Max was relieved. He didn’t like talking about the Frogships, didn’t want to recommend them to nobody. We both looked around and saw other people were all staring at the back of the club, at the entrance, and what do you know but this big tall-assed Frog had come on in the back and was standing there watching us all.

These days there ain’t a lot of cats who remember what the Frogs looked like, really. It’s been so long since they moved on, and let me tell you, the pictures don’t show not even the half of it. They were like these big frogs who stretched their skin over a real tall man, but they had more eyes and weird-assed hands. No fingers, just some tentacles on the ends of their goddamned arms, man, and they walked on two legs. Now, this Frog, he was fat, and he wore a Zoot suit tailored specially for him, hat and all, which just made him look totally
out
, man, just crazy. He came in with three or four guys, white hipsters, and they sat themselves down at a table in the front of the club that was set out for them in a hurry.

That Frog, he was smoking long, black cigarettes, four or five of them at once, on these long jade cigarette holders. He was looking around, too, with all these eyes on his face, as if to say,
Where’s the goddamn music?
I looked at him closely, and noticed that his skin, his face and hands, even his suit, it was all a little blurry, like a badly-shot photograph. He puffed on his cigarettes and looked around.

Nobody said nothing.

But all these cats, especially them sad Philly boys, they all thought it was their big chance. They hurried on up onto the bandstand, and they started to play their jumped-up jive-ass swing. That old Frog just leaned on back in its chair and kept on smoking those slow-burning black cigarettes, sticking its long blue tongue up into the smoke as it puffed it out. There were little black eyes all over its tongue, too, and they swiveled toward the bandstand.

I couldn’t tell if it was bored or enjoying the show, but I do know that finally, after they finished a few tunes, Bird had finally had enough. He tapped Thelonious Monk on the shoulder, and Monk nodded, and stood up, and went up to the bandstand. Everyone had heard about what had happened that night at the Three Deuces back in January in 1946; everyone knew how these Frog cats felt about Monk’s music.

Man, Thelonious, he just went on up to the piano and sat down, and everyone else on the bandstand just watched him, every one of them quiet and thinking, Oh shit. Monk, he lifted up his hands, all dramatic like he was about to play a Beethoven sonata or whatever, like that, you know what I mean, and when everyone shut up he started playing.

“Straight, No Chaser.” That was a fine tune, just a little jagged and twisted up. He played the head real simple, melody with his right hand, old-fashioned blues stride with the left. The alien leaned forward. Everyone knew how much they liked Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, granddaddy music like that.

But when Monk finished out the head the second time, and started improvising on the changes, man, you could see him sitting with this big-assed grin on his face up there at the piano. He started playing some of his really Monkish shit, all that weird, tangled up melody, banging out tone clusters over and over and plunking out his crooked little comping rhythms.

The Frog, when it heard Monk start up with all that, it stood itself up, dropped its cigarettes on the ground and slapped one hand over its huge front face-eyes and the other behind the back of its head. It was moaning – with three or four voices at once – and this blue stuff starting leaking out of its nose. Then it decided it was time to get the hell out.

It wobbled but finally made it out the door, shaky like a junkie dying to shoot himself up. All them hipster cats it came in with, they all followed it out, making out like they were all nervous and worried. Teddy Hill, who was running Minton’s Playhouse back then, he followed them all out with a scared face on, too. Bird, he laughed like a fucking maniac when he saw all that.

“Damn Frogs never could handle Monk,” Max said, laughing. “Man, that was beautiful!”

A few weeks later, my buddy J.J. came by with this poster he’d found on some lamp-post nearby. He read it out to me while I brushed my teeth one morning.

“Now hiring jazz musicians of all instrumental specialties . . . the intergalactic society of entertainers and artists’ guild . . . Colored Americans only please, special preference currently given to aspiring bebop players. No re-hires from previous tours please. One-year (possibly renewable) contracts available. See the solar system! Play blues on the moons of Jupiter! Go someplace where The Man won’t be breathing down your neck! Press HERE for more information!”

I spat out the foam from my toothpaste, put down my electrobrush, and asked, “So? Where’s the audition?”

He pressed his finger on the word HERE and the sheet went blank for a second. Then a map appeared on it. “Over on West 52nd, at the Onyx.”

“
What?
” I was shocked. Going to the Onyx for an audition, man, that was like going on a tour of Mississippi with a busload of negroes, women and children and all. Over at the Onyx, man, it was all what my father used to call ofays – white men – running the joint, every last one of them motherfuckers so goddamned racist it wasn’t even funny.

“You heard me.
The Onyx
.”

“Shit. What time?”

“The
Onyx?!
” That was my woman, Francine. She’d been cooking and she’d come up behind J.J. so quiet we hadn’t heard her till it was too late. She looked at J.J. and man, it was like,
No bacon for you this morning, motherfucker
—

She pushed past him, put her hands on her hips, and said, “What are you gonna do? Go on up in space, and leave me alone with this baby?” she said, putting her hands under her big belly.