Year's Best SF 17

“You can see for yourself. At least this means it’s over.”

“But you were supposed to break your leg.”

Doug almost tosses both hands in the air, until he remembers he can’t. “This is exactly why I can’t deal with you any more. We both agreed, on our very first date, I break my arm. You’re just remembering it wrong, or being difficult on purpose.”

Doug wants to go to the hospital by himself, but Judy insists on going with. He curses at the pain, stumbling over every knot and root.

“You broke your arm.” Judy’s half-sobbing, half-laughing, it’s almost too much to take in. “You broke your arm, and maybe that means that all of this … that maybe we could try again. Not right away, I’m feeling pretty raw right now, but in a while. I’d be willing to try.”

But she already knows what Doug’s going to say: “You don’t get to hurt me any more.”

She doesn’t leave Doug until he’s safely staring at the hospital linoleum, waiting to go into X-ray. Then she pedals home, feeling the cold air smash into her face. She’s forgotten her helmet, but it’ll be okay. When she gets home, she’s going to grab Marva and they’re going straight to Logan, where a bored check-in counter person will give them dirt-cheap tickets on the last flight to Miami. They’ll have the wildest three days of their lives, with no lasting ill effects. It’ll be epic, she’s already living every instant of it in her head. She’s crying buckets but it’s okay, her bike’s headwind wipes the slate clean.

“And Weep Like Alexander” NEIL GAIMAN

Neil Gaiman (neilgaiman.com) lives with his wife, Amanda Palmer, in Boston, Massachusetts, and maintains an office near Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a celebrity. He became prominent in the late 1980s as a writer of intellectually and aesthetically satisfying comics, particularly Sandman, at the same time he was improving his craft as a writer of fiction and emerging as a popular writer of stories. His first novel (after the popular collaboration with Terry Prachett, Good Omens, 1990) was Neverwhere (1996), followed by Stardust (1999). His third novel, American Gods (2001), won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and signaled a new level of achievement in his literary career. His young adult novels, Coraline (2002) and The Graveyard Book (2008), are particularly notable. Some of his short fiction is collected in Smoke and Mirrors (1998), M Is for Magic (2004), and Fragile Things (2006). He is currently writing a novel that may be a sequel to American Gods.

“And Weep Like Alexander” was published in an original collection of SF tall tales told in a bar, Fables from the Fountain, edited by Ian Whates. It is in the British SF tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s humorous Tales from the White Hart. It features Obediah Polkinghorn, uninventor, and answers such questions as why we have no flying cars today. We think it is a delightful answer.

The little man hurried into the Fountain and ordered a very large whisky. “Because,” he announced to the pub in general, “I deserve it.”

He looked exhausted, sweaty and rumpled, as if he had not slept in several days. He wore a tie, but it was so loose as to be almost undone. He had greying hair that might once have been ginger.

“I’m sure you do,” said Brian Dalton.

“I do!” said the man. He took a sip of the whisky as if to find out if he liked it, then, satisfied, gulped down half the glass. He stood completely still, for a moment, like a statue. “Listen,” he said. “Can you hear it?”

“What?” I said.

“A sort of background whispering white noise that actually becomes whatever song you wish to hear when you sort of half-concentrate upon it?”

I listened. “No,” I said.

“Exactly,” said the man, extraordinarily pleased with himself. “Isn’t it wonderful? Only yesterday, everybody in the Fountain was complaining about the Wispamuzak. Professor Mackintosh here was grumbling about having Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” stuck in his head and how it was now following him across London. Today, it’s gone, as if it had never been. None of you can even remember that it existed. And that is all due to me.”

“I what?” said Professor Mackintosh. “Something about the Queen?” And then, “Do I know you?”

“We’ve met,” said the little man. “But people forget me, alas. It is because of my job.” He took out his wallet, produced a card, passed it to me.

OBEDIAH POLKINGHORN

it read, and beneath that in small letters,

UNINVENTOR.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said. “What’s an uninventor?”

“It’s somebody who uninvents things,” he said. He raised his glass, which was quite empty. “Ah. Excuse me, Sally, I need another very large whisky.”

The rest of the crowd there that evening seemed to have decided that the man was both mad and uninteresting. They had returned to their conversations. I, on the other hand, was caught. “So,” I said, resigning myself to my conversational fate. “Have you been an uninventor long?”

“Since I was fairly young,” he said. “I started uninventing when I was eighteen. Have you never wondered why we do not have jet-packs?”

I had, actually.

“Saw a bit on Tomorrow’s World about them, when I was a lad,” said Michael, the landlord. “Man went up in one. Then he came down. Raymond Burr seemed to think we’d all have them soon enough.”

“Ah, but we don’t,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, “because I uninvented them about twenty years ago. I had to. They were driving everybody mad. I mean, they seemed so attractive, and so cheap, but you just had to have a few thousand bored teenagers strapping them on, zooming all over the place, hovering outside bedroom windows, crashing into the flying cars …”

“Hold on,” said Sally. “There aren’t any flying cars.”

“True,” said the little man, “but there were. You wouldn’t believe the traffic jams they’d cause. You’d look up and it was just the bottoms of bloody flying cars from horizon to horizon. Some days I couldn’t see the skies at all. People throwing rubbish out of their car windows … They were easy to run—ran off gravitosolar power, obviously— but I didn’t realise that they needed to go until I heard a lady talking about them on Radio Four, all ‘Why Oh Why Didn’t We Stick With Non-Flying Cars?’ She had a point. Something needed to be done. I uninvented them. I made a list of inventions the world would be better off without and, one by one, I uninvented them all.”

By now he had started to gather a small audience. I was pleased I’d grabbed a good seat.

“It was a lot of work, too,” he continued. “You see, it’s almost impossible not to invent the Flying Car, as soon as you’ve invented the Lumenbubble. So eventually I had to uninvent that too. And I miss the individual Lumenbubble: a massless portable light-source that floated half a metre above your head and went on when you wanted it to. Such a wonderful invention. Still, no use crying over unspilt milk, and you can’t mend an omelette without unbreaking a few eggs.”