Kevin Anderson: The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

She shrugged. “You’re our father. Why wouldn’t we?”

I feel tears starting in my eyes, and I move forward and hug Sandra as tightly as I can. She holds me as I cry.

“It’s all right, Father,” she says. “We’ve come for you. Welcome home.”

The last bit I can only guess at, as I was already gone by then. But the way I see it, as Emma was turning her keys in the lock, the house rumbled, and she heard a loud pop and whoosh coming from upstairs.

“Dad? Dad?” she called out, but I wasn’t there to answer her.

She dashed up the stairs and turned right, toward her father’s bedroom. She pushed the door open to discover her father already gone, amidst a trace of ozone.

I remembered the future.

And in turn, the future remembered me.

Michael A. Burstein was born in New York City, where he attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. He has physics degrees from Harvard College and Boston University, and he attended the Clarion Workshop in 1994. His short fiction has been nominated for ten Hugos and four Nebulas; in 1997 he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. From 1998 to 2000 he served as secretary of SFWA. He and his wife, Nomi, live with their twin daughters in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Library Trustee and Town Meeting Member.

FROM THE AUTHOR: It should be pretty obvious that the bulk of the story is a pastiche of my perfectly ordinary daily life in Brooklyn — riding the shuttle to work, traipsing to the farmers’ market, thinking scornful thoughts about tourists as if I didn’t just move here a few years ago myself, and so on. But there’s an understated sort of magic in Brooklyn which I can feel throughout these perfectly ordinary walks and encounters. It rides my skin like humidity, thrums underneath every conversation. The awareness of this is what marks a true New Yorker, I think. You move here, feel out of place for awhile, and then suddenly snap! There’s this moment where you feel it. You can look at another person who belongs here, who feels that same magic, and you know . It’s like a secret handshake, except New Yorkers would never be so gauche. They’d just glance at each other. That would be enough.

So with “Non-Zero Probabilities,” all I did was make that undercurrent of perpetual strangeness explicit. I’m thrilled with the response this story has gotten, but I completely didn’t expect it, because as the story itself notes — what does it matter whether a city reacts to one improbable disaster (say, 9/11) or another (probability gone haywire)? The city remains, and reacts, the same. That’s where the real magic lies.

IN THE MORNINGS, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors — the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know. Then she takes a bath with herbs, including dried chickory and allspice, from a mixture given to her by the woman at the local botanica. (She doesn’t know Spanish well, but she’s getting to know that, too. Today’s word is suerte .) Then, smelling vaguely of coffee and pumpkin pie, she layers on armor: the Saint Christopher medal her mother sent her, for protection on journeys. The hair-clasp she was wearing when she broke up with Larry, which she regards as the best decision of her life. On especially dangerous days, she wears the pan ties in which she experienced her first self-induced orgasm post-Larry; they’re a bit ragged after too many commercial laundromat washings, but still more or less sound. (She washes them by hand now, with Woolite, and lays them flat to dry.)

Then she starts the trip to work. She doesn’t bike, though she owns one. A next-door neighbor broke an arm when her bike’s front wheel came off in mid-pedal. Could’ve been anything. Just an accident. But still.

So Adele sets out, swinging her arms, enjoying the day if it’s sunny, wrestling with her shitty umbrella if it’s rainy. (She no longer opens the umbrella indoors.) Keeping a careful eye out for those who may not be as well-protected. It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ’hood. And lo and behold, just three blocks into her trip there is a horrible crash and the ground shakes and car alarms go off and there are screams and people start running. Smoke billows, full of acrid ozone and a taste like dirty blood. When Adele reaches the corner, tensed and ready to flee, she beholds the Franklin Avenue shuttle train, a tiny thing that runs on an elevated track for some portions of its brief run, lying sprawled over Atlantic Avenue like a beached aluminum whale. It has jumped its track, fallen thirty feet to the ground below, and probably killed everyone inside or under or near it.

Adele goes to help, of course, but even as she and other good Samaritans pull bodies and screaming wounded from the wreckage, she cannot help but feel a measure of contempt. It is a cover, her anger; easier to feel that than horror at the shattered limbs, the truncated lives. She feels a bit ashamed, too, but holds onto the anger because it makes a better shield.

They should have known better. The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.

Her neighbor — the other one, across the hall — helped her figure it out, long before the math geeks finished crunching their numbers.

“Watch,” he’d said, and laid a deck of cards facedown on her coffee table. (There was coffee in the cups, with a generous dollop of Baileys. He was a nice-enough guy that Adele felt comfortable offering this.) He shuffled it with the blurring speed of an expert, cut the deck, shuffled again, then picked up the whole deck and spread it, still facedown. “Pick a card.”

Adele picked. The Joker.

“Only two of those in the deck,” he said, then shuffled and spread again. “Pick another.”

She did, and got the other Joker.

“Coincidence,” she said. (This had been months ago, when she was still skeptical.)

He shook his head and set the deck of cards aside. From his pocket he took a pair of dice. (He was nice enough to invite inside, but he was still that kind of guy.) “Check it,” he said, and tossed them onto her table. Snake eyes. He scooped them up, shook them, tossed again. Two more ones. A third toss brought up double sixes; at this, Adele had pointed in triumph. But the fourth toss was snake eyes again.

“These aren’t weighted, if you’re wondering,” he said. “Nobody filed the edges or anything. I got these from the bodega up the street, from a pile of shit the old man was tossing out to make more room for food shelves. Brand new, straight out of the package.”

“Might be a bad set,” Adele said.

“Might be. But the cards ain’t bad, nor your fingers.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent despite the pleasant haze that the Baileys had brought on. “Snake eyes three tosses out of four? And the fourth a double six. That ain’t supposed to happen even in a rigged game. Now check this out.”

Carefully he crossed the fingers of his free hand. Then he tossed the dice again, six throws this time. The snakes still came up twice, but so did other numbers. Fours and threes and twos and fives. Only one double six.

“That’s batshit, man,” said Adele.

“Yeah. But it works.”

He was right. And so Adele had resolved to read up on gods of luck and to avoid breaking mirrors. And to see if she could find a four-leafed clover in the weed patch down the block. (They sell some in Chinatown, but she’s heard they’re knockoffs.) She’s hunted through the patch several times in the past few months, once for several hours. Nothing so far, but she remains optimistic.