Year's Best SF 17

“You also can’t expect us actually to believe any of this,” said someone, and I think it was Jocelyn.

“Right,” said Brian. “I mean, next thing you’ll be telling us that you uninvented the space ship.”

“But I did,” said Obediah Polkinghorn. He seemed extremely pleased with himself. “Twice. I had to. You see, the moment we whizz off into space and head out to the planets and beyond, we bump into things that spur so many other inventions. The Polaroid Instant Transporter. That was the worst. And the Mockett Telepathic Translator. That was the worst as well. But as long as it’s nothing worse than a rocket to the moon, I can keep everything under control.”

“So, how exactly do you go about uninventing things?” I asked.

“It’s hard,” he admitted. “It’s all about unpicking probability threads from the fabric of creation. But they tend to be long and tangled, like spaghetti. So it’s rather like having to unpick a strand of spaghetti from a haystack.”

“Sounds like thirsty work,” said Michael, and I signalled him to pour me another pint of Old Bodger.

“Fiddly,” said the little man. “Yes. But I pride myself on doing good. Each day I wake, and, even if I’ve unhappened something that might have been wonderful, I think, Obediah Polkington, the world is a happier place because of something that you’ve uninvented.”

He looked into his remaining scotch, swirled the liquid around in his glass.

“The trouble is,” he said, “with the Wispamuzak gone, that’s it. I’m done. It’s all been uninvented. There are no more horizons left to undiscover, no more mountains left to unclimb.”

“Nuclear Power?” suggested ‘Tweet’ Peston.

“Before my time,” said Obediah. “Can’t uninvent things invented before I was born. Otherwise I might uninvent something that would have led to my birth, and then where would we be?” Nobody had any suggestions. “Knee-high in jet-packs and flying cars, that’s where,” he told us. “Not to mention Morrison’s Martian Emolument.” For a moment, he looked quite grim. “Ooh. That stuff was nasty. And a cure for cancer. But frankly, given what it did to the oceans, I’d rather have the cancer.

“No. I have uninvented everything that was on my list. I shall go home,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, bravely, “and weep, like Alexander, because there are no more worlds to unconquer. What is there left to uninvent?”

There was silence in the Fountain.

In the silence, Brian’s iPhone rang. His ring-tone was The Rutles singing ‘Cheese and Onions’. “Yeah?” he said. Then, “I’ll call you back.”

It is unfortunate that the pulling out of one phone can have such an effect on other people around. Sometimes I think it’s because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull out our phones together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we’re easily bored.

Whatever the reason, the phones came out.

Crown Baker took a photo of us all, and then Twitpicced it. Jocelyn started to read her text messages. Tweet Peston tweeted that he was in the Fountain and had met his first uninventor. Professor Mackintosh checked the Test Match scores, told us what they were and emailed his brother in Inverness to grumble about them. The phones were out and the conversation was over.

“What’s that?” asked Obediah Polkinghorn.

“It’s the iPhone 5,” said Ray Arnold, holding his up. “Crown’s using the Nexus X. That’s the Android system. Phones. Internet. Camera. Music. But it’s the apps. I mean, do you know, there are over a thousand fart sound- effect apps on the iPhone alone? You want to hear the unofficial Simpsons Fart App?”

“No,” said Obediah. “I most definitely do not want to. I do not.” He put down his drink, unfinished. Pulled his tie up. Did up his coat. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said, as if to himself. “But, for the good of all …” And then he stopped. And he grinned. “It’s been marvellous talking to you all,” he announced to nobody in particular as he left the Fountain.

The Middle of Somewhere JUDITH MOFFETT

Judith Moffett (www.judithmoffett.com) lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She is an English professor (retired), a poet, a Swedish translator, a science-fiction writer, and the author of eleven books in five genres. Two of her novels were New York Times Notable Books. Her most recent novel is The Bird Shaman (2008), the third in her Holy Ground Trilogy, after The Ragged World (1991) and Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream (1992). She spent most of 2010 and half of 2011 writing a memoir of her long friendship with the poet James Merrill, who died in 1995. In 2013 Greywolf Press will bring out Air Mail, the correspondence between American poet Robert Bly and the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year; Moffett translated Transtromer’s early letters to Bly for that book. This is her first short fiction in several years.

“The Middle of Somewhere” was published in Welcome to the Greenhouse, an excellent anthology of stories about climate change, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. A teenaged girl helps a seventy-year old woman collect data on bird hatching, that demonstrates the veracity of climate change. It is very clearly within the framework of science fiction, very science oriented, and also a revelation of character.

Kaylee is entering data on Jane’s clunky old desktop computer, and texting with a few friends while she does it, when the weather alarm goes off for the second time.

Cornell University’s NestWatch Citizen Scientist program runs this website where you have a different chart for each nest site you’re monitoring. You’re supposed to fill in the data after each visit to the site. Jane’s got a zillion different kinds of birds nesting on her property, and she knows where a lot of them are doing it, so Kaylee’s biology teacher fixed it up with Jane, who’s a friend of hers, for Kaylee to do this NestWatch project for class. Twice a week all spring she’s been coming out to Jane’s place to monitor seven pairs of nesting birds. The place used to be a farm but is all grown up now in trees and bushes except for five or ten acres around the house, which Jane keeps mowed. Bluebirds like short grass and open space.

Jane is nice, but seriously weird. All Kaylee’s friends think so, and to be honest Kaylee kind of slants what she tells people to exaggerate that side of Jane, who lives a lot like people did way before Kaylee was born, in this little log house with only three small rooms and no dishwasher or clothes dryer, and solar panels on the roof. She has beehives—well, that’s not so weird, though for an old lady maybe it is—but all her water is pumped from a cistern, plus she has two rain barrels out in the garden. Rain barrels! Kaylee knows for a fact that a few years back, when they brought city water out this far from town, Jane just said, Oh well, I can always hook up later if I think I need to. So you have to watch every drop of water you use at Jane’s house, like only flushing the toilet every so often, unless they’re getting plenty of rain. There’s a little sign taped to the bathroom wall that you can’t avoid reading when you’re sitting on the toilet: IF IT’S YELLOW / LET IT MELLOW / IF IT’S BROWN / FLUSH IT DOWN. Sometimes Kaylee flushes it down even when it isn’t brown, out of embarrassment.

The flushing thing is partly about water and partly about the septic tank. Kaylee’s friend Morgan’s house has a septic tank too, so Kaylee already knows it’s best to use them as little as possible, and that there are things you can’t put into them or the biology of the tank will get messed up and smell. If you happen to mention anything to Jane about, like, your new SmartBerry, or a hot music group or even the Anderson High basketball team, the Bearcats, when they went to the state finals, she just looks blank, but once when Kaylee asked a simple question about why Jane didn’t clean paintbrushes at the sink, like her dad always did, Jane talked animatedly for ten minutes about bacteria and “solids” and drain fields and septic lagoons. Kaylee’s friends laughed their heads off when they heard about that (“So she’s going on about how the soil in Anderson County is like pure clay, duh, so it doesn’t pass the ‘perk test,’ which is why she’s got this lagoon, and I’m thinking ‘Fine,