Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said.

“ Have to? Perhaps not. But it will be. Human nature will take charge. All the things that make life worth having will disintegrate. There’ll be no families, because there’ll be no children. Love as we understand it will become a poor thing; its most noble expression will be reduced to hollow acts of self-gratification.”

“I really must be going,” I said.

“What’s your first name?” he asked. “ Mrs. Marshall is so formal.”

“Catherine.”

“Catherine. A good Christian name. Are you a Christian?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“I’m not. We live in a mechanical universe, Catherine. It doesn’t care about us, one way or the other. So we need to be very careful. If we violate the rules, it will take its price. We do not occupy a special place; we have no protection.”

It sounded like my conversation with Father McMurtrie. But I’d switched sides. “I know,” I said, looking at my watch. “I’m late, Dr. Plainfield. I have to go.”

“The problem is, nobody cares. Except a few crazies, right? It’s all too far in the future.” I was off and moving quickly across the curve of the lawn.

“We’ll all be dead in the water,” he said, his words blown about my ears by the wind. “Unless you do something.”

He was still standing in the same place, framed against the tombstones, when I drove off.

I proceeded to get lost in the cemetery. I’d never been there before and there was a series of curving roads, all looking the same. I drove in circles for several minutes, and at one point passed the canopy again, which the two workers were taking down. The casket was gone. As was Plainfield.

I pulled out onto Wildberry Avenue, turned left, and started home.

I thought about heads rolling around the Tower of London and crusades setting out for the Middle East. I thought about how it had been to know that the next boy to come into my life might be the one. I thought of the innocence and the passion of being seventeen and in love for the very first time and wondered how such things would be possible in the Sunrise world.

The sudden blare of an airhorn caught my attention: I was halfway across Garden Avenue, sailing through a red light, and watching a tractor-trailer bear down from the left. The driver’s face twisted with horror.

It was one of those moments that freezes, where the whole world squeezes down to a single piece of reality, to a little bulldog ornament atop the hood of that oncoming truck.

Then time resumed its flow, and I jammed down on the gas, stomped the pedal through the floor. Brakes screeched, and the street rolled overhead, the air bag exploded in my face, and my lights went out.

I woke up in a bed at Mercy Hospital with a broken arm, a lot of cuts and bruises, and several traffic citations. The truck driver, they told me, was okay. Not happy, but okay.

Hal shook his head and lectured me about being more careful. I described how the day had gone, and he said he’d assumed something like that had happened.

“Are you any closer to making up your mind how you feel?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”

“You’re ahead of me.”

“I’d like to go for it, Hal. Give our kid a chance at the centuries.”

“I thought you’d come down on that side,” he said. “Was it the priest?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“What then?”

I wanted to smile but I was swollen and the effort hurt. “I think I realized what I wanted when I looked up and saw the driver’s face.”

“His face ?”

I replayed the moment. “It was contorted, like he knew he’d killed me. So I thought I was dead too.” I looked at him and realized how much I loved him. “There’s no advantage in being dead. Life is very sweet, and I can’t see anything either inspiring or dignified about dying. If we can beat it, I say we go ahead. And do it any way we can.”

Hal reached over and took my hand. “But the truth is,” he said, “the looney, this guy Plainfield, has a point. Without new people getting born on a regular basis, we will become static. We will decay.”

It was early evening. The sunlight was fading in the window. I looked at it for a moment. “Yeah, Hal. Maybe we will. But I think we’ve gotten so used to dying we think that’s part of what it means to be human. I say we take over for the DNA and try it the other way for a change. See what happens.

It came in over the transom, like a couple hundred other manuscripts each week, memoirs of people nobody ever heard of, novels that start with weather reports and introduce thirty characters in the first two pages, massive collections of unreadable poetry from someone’s grandmother.

They all go into a stack for the screeners, who look through them, attach our form rejection, and send them back.

Actually there’s only one screener. Her name is Myra Crispee. She has one green eye and one blue eye, and a talent for going through the slush pile. She picks out the occasional possibility and gets rid of the rest. Every day. Love my job, she says. When I ask her why, she says it’s because I pay her the big bucks.

Tempus Publishing isn’t a major outfit, but we do okay. We don’t specialize. Tempus will publish anything that looks as if it’ll make money. But most of the manuscripts we see have already made the rounds at Random House, HarperCollins, and the other biggies. Some come in from an agent, but that has no effect on the way we treat them. Unless we know the author, they all go into the pile.

Sometimes we get lucky. We published a couple of self-help books last year that did extremely well, and a novel about Noah’s ark that became a runaway bestseller.

Anyhow, the day it arrived was cold and wet. The heating system had gone down again so I was wrapped in a sweater. I’d just opened the office and had turned on the coffee when Myra came in, carrying an umbrella and a manuscript. That was unusual. She doesn’t usually take these things home. “Hey, Jerry,” she said, “I think we’ve got a winner.”

“Really?”

She was beaming. “Yes. I was up half the night with it.” She trooped over to her desk and sat down in front of what I thought was a second manuscript, but which turned out to be the rest of the submission.

“My God,” I said, “that looks like a thousand pages.”

She peeked at the end. “Twelve hundred and twelve. I’ve only read a few chapters, but if the rest of it is like what I’ve seen—.”

“That good, huh?”

“I couldn’t put it down.” The magic words. We seldom saw anything that wasn’t easy to walk away from. She leafed through the pages. “Incredible,” she said. “Who is this guy?”

“What is it?” I asked.

“He calls it The Long War . It’s about the war in the Middle East.”

“Which one?”

“How many are we involved in? I didn’t see the news this morning.”

“It’s been done,” I said.

“Not like this, boss.” She was still turning pages.

“Who’s it by?”

“Guy named Patterson.” She shook her head. “Edward Patterson. Ever hear of him?”

He was a stranger to me. “What’s the cover letter say?”

She needed a minute to find it. “‘Novel enclosed.’“

“That’s all?”

“That’s it.”

We used to have a screener’s box where she could deposit manuscripts that were potentially publishable. We dispensed with it because Myra rarely put anything in it. So she just brought the manuscript over and laid it on a side table. Then she walked back to her desk, pulled the next submission off the pile, and began turning pages. But I knew she was really waiting for me. Wanted me to pick up The Long War . “I’ll look at it before I go home,” I said.