Year's Best SF 17

“How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine. You know how it is.”

I nodded. Yes, I knew how it was.

“What brings you here?” I asked.

“Business,” said Bob. He smiled wryly. “Yet another SF anthology. The angle this time is that it features stories from American writers in exile. So I’m systematically approaching the ones I know, trying to track down those I don’t have a contact for, and commissioning. The deal’s already set up with Editions Jules Verne—the anthology will be published here, in English. In the US it’ll be available on Amazon. That way, I can get around all the censorship problems. It’s not so bad you can’t read what you like, but publishing what you like is more of a problem.”

“So bad you had to come here just to contact the writers?”

“That’s right. Trying to set this up online from inside the US might be … well. Let’s just say I didn’t want to take the chance.”

“Jeez,” I said. “That bad.”

I looked back down at the books and saw that my forefinger had landed, as if guided by an invisible hand, on the spine of a J. Neil Schulman paperback. I tugged out Alongside Night.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve found what I’m looking for. You?”

Bob shrugged. “Just browsing,” he said. “Fancy a coffee?”

“Sure.”

I nipped inside, paid a euro for the book, and rejoined Bob outside in the chilly February afternoon. He stood gazing across the Seine at Notre-Dame.

“Hard to believe I’m actually looking at it,” he said. He blinked and shook his head. “Where to?”

I indicated left. “Couple of hundred metres, nice traditional place.”

The cafe was on the Quai des Grands Augustins. The bitter wind blew grit in our faces. Along the way, I noticed Bob looking askance at the flaring reds, yellows and blacks of the leftist, anarchist and altermondialiste posters plastered on walls and parapets.

“Must be kind of weird, seeing all that commie kipple everywhere,” he said.

“You stop noticing,” I said.

The doorway was easy to miss. Inside, the cafe seemed higher than it was wide, a little canyon of advertisement mirrors and verdegrised brass and smoke-stained woodwork. Two old guys eyed us and returned to their low-voiced conversation around a tiny handheld screen across which horses galloped. I ordered a couple of espressos and we took a table near the back under a Ricard poster that looked like it predated the Moon landings, if not the Wright brothers. We fiddled with envelopes of sugar and slivers of wood, and sipped for a few moments in silence.

“Well,” Bob said at last, “I suppose I have to ask. What do you think of the Revolution?”

“It always reminds me,” I said, “of something Marx said about the French state: how all the revolutions have ‘perfected this machine, instead of smashing it’.”

Bob yelped with laughter. “Fuck, yeah! But trust you to come up with a Marx quote. You were always a bit of a wanker in that respect.”

I laughed too, and we took some time to reminisce and catch up.

Bob was a science-fiction fan, an occasional SF editor, and an anarchist, but none of these paid his bills. He was an anthropology professor at a Catholic university deep in the Bible Belt. He spent very little time propagating the ideas of anarchism, even in the days when that had been safe—‘wanker’ and ‘hobbyist’ were among his kinder terms for ideologues. Instead, he worked with trade union locals, small business forums, free software start-ups, and tribal guerrillas in Papua New Guinea. This was all anthropological research, or so he claimed. Such groups tended to be more effective after he’d worked with them.

I hadn’t thought much about him over the years, to be honest—we were never exactly close—but when I had, I’d wondered how he was doing under the new order in the United States. Not too well, by the sound of things. Still, it would probably have been worse for him if I’d emailed to ask. This thought helped to quash my pang of guilt about not having kept in touch.

“Hey,” Bob was saying, “wait a minute—you must know some of these writers!”

I nodded.

“Maybe you could give me some contact details?”

At that moment I began to suspect that we hadn’t met by accident.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said.

I had the numbers of most of the writers Bob was looking for on my mobile. “But,” I went on, “I do know where you can find them tomorrow morning. Every SF writer in Paris, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Bob looked puzzled for a moment.

“The ascent,” I said.

He smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course!”

Like he’d forgotten; like he hadn’t timed his visit just for this. The date had been announced on New Year’s Eve, in a special Presidential broadcast from the Elysee Palace.

We exchanged phone numbers and finished our coffees.

“Fancy a glass of wine?” Bob said.

I looked at my watch. “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” I said. “But I’ll see you tomorrow. Jardin de Luxembourg, main gate, 11 a.m.”

“See you there,” Bob said.

I strolled across the Ile de la Cite, pausing for a moment to soak in the glow of the low sun off the front of Notre-Dame. As always, it sent me down long passages of reminiscence and meditation. Something about that complexity that fills your eyes, that you can take in at a single glance, lifts the spirit. It reminds me of the remaining frontage of the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, which many years ago I gazed at bedazzled, dusty, heat-struck, light- struck, dumb-struck. The pagan and the Christian architectural exuberance are in that respect alike.

And as always, as a sort of footnote as I turned and stepped away, came the thought of another building on that island, one as representative of our age, in its chill cement modernism, as the cathedral’s gothic was of its. Embarrassing to admit: my response to the Memorial to the Deportation has always been shaped by a prior description, the one in Iain M. Banks’s novella The State of the Art. My eyes, as always, pricked at the thought; the hairs of my chin and neck, as always, prickled. Seeing the memorial, for a moment, through the eyes of an imaginary alien communist: why should that move me so much? That is on top, you understand, of the import of the thing itself, of its monstrous synecdoche. Perhaps I’m just nostalgic for that alien communist view. These days, in the Year Three, the view’s hard to conjure—but when was it not?

I took the Metro from Chatelet to Bastille and walked briskly up Richard Lenoir, turned left to buy a few expensive necessities—a baguette, a half-litre of table wine, a handful of vegetables, a jar of sauce—in the local Bonne Marche, and hurried through the warren of small streets between the two boulevards to the tiny flat we rented off Beaumarchais. I had a pasta and salad ready by the time my wife came home. She was tired, as always. At our age it’s hard to find decent work. She’s stuck in admin, for one of the health associations. In the English- speaking world, mutualism is one of those wanker anarchist ideologies. In France, ‘mutualiste’ is a quotidian reality, a name on thousands of signboards for opticians, dentists, doctors. I hoped I had the opportunity to rub Bob’s nose in this at some point.

As for my own work … it too is exhausting, but in a different way.

I brought my wife coffee in bed at nine the following morning. She gave me a glare from under the cover.

“It’s early.”

“I thought you might want to come along.”

“You must be joking. I’m knackered. If I’m awake I’ll watch it on the telly.”

“Okay,” I said.

I kissed her forehead and left the coffee on the bedside table. I caught up with the news and online chatter over my own breakfast, and left the flat about ten-thirty. The sky was cloudless, the air cold and still. The low sun gilded the gold of the Bastille monument a few hundred metres down the road. Children whooped and yelled on the slides and swings in the little park along the centre of the boulevard. On a bench a homeless man slept, or lay very still, under rimed newspaper sheets. On the next bench, a young couple shared a joint and glanced furtively at the tramp. The market stalls had been up for hours, at this season selling preserves, knick-knacks, knock-offs, football