'But without memories.'
'How can you remember something that never happened?'
'So Ev and I - '
'No, dear,' Delia said gently.
'How much time do we have?'
'With a little luck, we have the rest of the summer,' Delia said. 'The question is, how do you want to spend it?'
'What does it matter,' Gretta said bitterly. 'If it's all going to end?'
'Everything ends eventually. But after all is said and done, it's what we do in the meantime that matters, isn't it?'
The conversation went on for a while more. But that was the gist of it. Eventually, Gretta got out her cell and called Everett. She had him on speed dial, I noticed. In her most corporate voice, she said, 'Get your ass over here,' and snapped the phone shut without waiting for a response.
She didn't say another word until Everett's car pulled up in front of her place. Then she went out and confronted him. He put his hands on his hips. She grabbed him and kissed him. Then she took him by the hand and led him back into the house.
They didn't bother to turn on the lights.
I stared at the silent house for a little bit. Then I realized that Delia wasn't with me anymore, so I went looking for her.
She was out on the back porch. 'Look,' she whispered.
There was a full moon and by its light we could see the Triceratops settling down to sleep in our backyard. Delia had managed to lure them all the way in at last. Their skin was all silvery in the moonlight; you couldn't make out the patterns on their frills. The big trikes formed a kind of circle around the little ones. One by one, they closed their eyes and fell asleep.
Believe it or not, the big bull male snored.
It came to me then that we didn't have much time left. One morning soon we'd wake up and it would be the end of spring and everything would be exactly as it was before the dinosaurs came. 'We never did get to Paris or London or Rome or Marra-kech,' I said sadly. 'Or even Disney World.'
Without taking her eyes off the sleeping trikes, Delia put an arm around my waist. 'Why are you so fixated on going places?' she asked. 'We had a nice time here, didn't we?'
'I just wanted to make you happy.'
'Oh, you idiot. You did that decades ago.'
So there we stood, in the late summer of our lives. Out of nowhere, we'd been given a vacation from our ordinary lives, and now it was almost over. A pessimist would have said that we were just waiting for oblivion. But Delia and I didn't see it that way. Life is strange. Sometimes it's hard, and other times it's painful enough to break your heart. But sometimes it's grotesque and beautiful. Sometimes it fills you with wonder, like a Triceratops sleeping in the moonlight.
Camouflage by ROBERT REED
From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy (5 Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction as well as to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today's young writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And -like Baxter and Stableford -he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as 'Sister Alice,' 'Brother Perfect,' 'Decency,' 'Savior,' 'The Remoras,' 'Chrysalis,' 'Whiptail,' 'The Utility Man,' 'Marrow,' 'Birth Day,' 'Blind,' 'The Toad of Heaven,' 'Stride,' 'The Shape of Everything,' 'Guest of Honor,' 'Waging Good,' and 'Killing the Morrow,' among at least a half dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the eighties and nineties. Many of his best stories were assembled in his first collection, The Dragons of Springplace. Nor is he nonpro-lific as a novelist, having turned out ten novels since the end of the eighties, including The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remark-ables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, and Sister Alice. His most recent books are a chapbook novella, Mere, a new collection, The Cuckoo's Boys, and a new novel, The Well of Stars. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Here he unravels a deadly murder mystery, set on a spaceship bigger than worlds.
The human male had lived on the avenue for some thirty-two years. Neighbors enerally regarded him as being a solitary creature, short-tempered on occasion, but never rude without cause. His dark wit was locally famous, and a withering intelligence was rumored to hide behind the brown-black eyes. Those with an appreciation of human beauty claimed that he was not particularly handsome, his face a touch asymmetrical, the skin rough and fleshy, while his thick mahogany-brown hair looked as if it was cut with a knife and his own strong hands. Yet that homeliness made him intriguing to some human females, judging by the idle chatter. He wasn't large for a human, but most considered him substantially built. Perhaps it was the way he walked, his back erect and shoulders squared while his face tilted slightly forwards, as if looking down from a great height. Some guessed he had been born on a high-gravity world, since the oldest habits never died. Or maybe this wasn't his true body, and his soul still hungered for the days when he was a giant. Endless speculations were woven about the man's past. He had a name, and everybody knew it. He had a biography, thorough and easily observed in the public records. But there were at least a dozen alternate versions of his past and left-behind troubles. He was a failed poet, or a dangerously successful poet, or a refugee who had escaped some political mess -unless he was some species of criminal, of course. One certainty was his financial security; but where his money came from was a subject of considerable debate. Inherited, some claimed. Others voted for gambling winnings or lucrative investments on now-distant colony worlds. Whatever the story, the man had the luxury of filling his days doing very little, and during his years on this obscure avenue, he had helped his neighbors with unsolicited gifts of money and sometimes more impressive flavors of aid.
Thirty-two years was not a long time. Not for the creatures that routinely traveled between the stars. Most of the ship's passengers and all of its crew were ageless souls, durable and disease-free, with enhanced minds possessing a stability and depth of memory ready to endure a million years of comfortable existence. Which was why three decades was little different than an afternoon, and why for another century or twenty, locals would still refer to their neighbor as the newcomer.
Such was life onboard the Great Ship.
There were millions of avenues like this one. Some were short enough to walk in a day, while others stretched for thousands of uninterrupted kilometers. Many avenues remained empty, dark and cold as when humans first discovered the Great Ship. But some had been awakened, made habitable to human owners or the oddest alien passengers. Whoever built the ship-presumably an ancient, long-extinct species - it had been designed to serve as home for a wide array of organisms. That much was obvious. And there was no other starship like the Great Ship: larger than most worlds and durable enough to survive eons between the galaxies, and to almost every eye, lovely.
The wealthiest citizens from thousands of worlds had surrendered fortunes for the pleasure of riding inside this fabulous machine, embarking on a half-million-year voyage to circumnavigate the galaxy. Even the poorest