burned it in the stove later. It flared up in some strange colors, I tell you.
Then they walked out together into that awful night, poor people, and we never saw them again.
When Lanark sobered up he said he didn’t remember anything, but he never asked any questions either, like why there was a hole in the ceiling or where all the blood had come from. We cleaned up and mended as best we could. One thing we had plenty of in this town was lumber, anyhow.
That’s all. The radio worked for a few years, and when it finally broke we couldn’t fix it, so I put it away in the attic. We missed it, especially once the war started, but maybe we were better off not worrying about that, with what we’d been told.
Lanark never talked about what happened in so many words, but one time when he was sober he told me he’d figured out that Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina must have been Socialists, because of the way they talked, and maybe J. Edgar Hoover had come after them. I told him he was probably right. Anyway nobody else ever came sniffing around after them. There was a wildfire across Gamboa Ridge a few years later, 1938 that would have been, and now there’s only an old rusted stove back in the manzanita to show where their house was.
Lanark drank more after that, but why shouldn’t he, and it got so I’d have to walk him home nights to be sure he got there. Sometimes he kissed me at the door, but he was too broken up to do anything else. Eventually I’d have to go make sure he was still alive in the mornings, too. One morning he wasn’t. That was back in 1942, I guess.
Miss Harlan lived on a good long time in that cottage, kept Billy waiting until 1957 before she went off into the sea with him. At least, I imagine that’s what happened; the door was standing open, the house all full of damp, and there was a trail of sand clear from her room down to the beach, like confetti and rice after a wedding. Nobody haunts the place now. That snooty woman sells her incenses and herbal teas out of it, but I have to say she keeps the garden nice.
So I’m the last one that knows.
I kept the bar open. Right after the war the highway was put through, and those young drifters found the shacks that didn’t belong to anybody and started living in them, with their beat parties and poetry. Then later the hippies came in, and pretty soon rich people from San Francisco discovered the place, and it was all upscale after that.
Not that it’s a bad thing. When Kevin and Jon offered me all that money for the hotel, I was real happy. Being the way they are, I knew they’d fix everything up beautiful, which they have, too, mahogany and brass all restored so I don’t have to feel guilty about it anymore. They’re kind to me. I stay on in my old room and they call me Nana Luisa, and that’s nice.
They sit me out here in this chair so I can watch everything going on, all along the street, and sometimes they’ll bring guests and introduce me as the town’s official history expert, and I get interviewed for newspapers now and then. I tell them about the old days, just the kinds of stuff they want to hear. I listen more than I talk. Mostly I just like to watch people.
It’s pretty now, with the flower gardens and art galleries, and the cottages all lived in by rich folks with sports cars, and you’d never think there’d been whorehouses or saloon brawls here. The biggest noise is the town council complaining about the traffic jams we get weekends. People talk about how Marian’s Landing was such an unspoiled weekend getaway once, and how more tourists are going to ruin it. They don’t know what ruin is.
I look out my window at night and there’s lights in all the little houses, the human community all nice and cozy and thinking they’re here to stay, but that cold black night out there is just as heartless as it was, and a lot bigger than they are. Anything could happen. I know. The lights could go out, dwindling one by one or all at once, and there’d be nothing but the sea and the dark trees behind us, and maybe one roomful of folks left behind, lighting a lamp in the window so they don’t feel so alone.
But I don’t worry much about Arion.
Even with all the restoration and remodeling, even with them selling T-shirts and kites and ice cream out of the sawmill now, nobody’s ever found any of him. He’s still down there, under that new redwood decking, and sometimes at night I hear him moaning, though people think it’s just the wind in a sea cave. He’s growing back together, or growing himself some new parts; Aunty Irina said he might do either.
He will get out one of these days, but I figure I’ll be dead by the time he does. That’s one of the advantages to being a mortal.
I do worry about my sweetie boys, I’m afraid this AIDS epidemic will get them. I wonder if it’s something to do with that Labienus fellow, the one Uncle Jacques told me cooks up epidemics because he hates mortal folk. And I wonder if Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina found a new place to hide, some shelter in out of the black night, and how the war for power over the Earth is going.
Because that’s what it is, see. I’m not crazy, honey. It’s all there in the Bible. For some have entertained angels unawares, but some folks get let in on their secrets, you follow me? And it isn’t a comforting thing to know the truth about angels.
The Millennium Party - WALTER WILLIAMS
Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice Of The Whirlwind. House Of Shards, Days of Atonement, and Aristoi. His novel Metropolitan garnered wide critical acclaim in 1996 and was one of the most talked-about books of the year. His most recent books are a sequel to Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Trek novel, Destiny’s Way. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World.” His stories have appeared in our Third through Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, and Seventeenth Annual Collections.
Here he gives us a short, sharp look at a future where there’s a place for everything, and everything’s in its place…
D arien was making another annotation to his lengthy commentary on the Tenjou Cycle when his Marshal reminded him that his wedding anniversary would soon be upon him. This was the thousandth anniversary-a full millennium with Clarisse!-and he knew the celebration would have to be a special one.
He finished his annotation and then de-slotted the savant brain that contained the cross-referenced database that allowed him to manage his work. In its place he slotted the brain labeled Clarisse/Passion, the brain that contained memories of his time with his wife. Not all memories, however: the contents had been carefully purged of any of the last thousand years’ disagreements, arguments, disappointments, infidelities, and misconnections… The memories were only those of love, ardor, obsession, passion, and release, all the most intense and glorious moments of their thousand years together, all the times when Darien was drunk on Clarisse, intoxicated with her scent, her brilliance, her wit.
The other moments, the less-than-perfect ones, he had stored elsewhere, in one brain or another, but he rarely reviewed them. Darien saw no reason why his mind should contain anything that was less than perfect.
Flushed with the sensations that now poured through his mind, overwhelmed by the delirium of love, Darien began to work on his present for his wife.
When the day came, Darien and Clarisse met in an environment that she had designed. This was an arrangement that had existed for centuries, ever since they both realized that Clarisse’s sense of spatial relationships was better than his. The environment was a masterpiece, an apartment built on several levels, like little terraces, that broke the space up into smaller areas that created intimacy without sacrificing the sense of spaciousness. All of the furniture was designed for no more than two people. Darien recognized on the walls a picture he’d given Clarisse on her four hundredth birthday, an elaborate, antique dial telephone from their honeymoon apartment in Paris, and a Japanese paper doll of a woman in an antique kimono, a present he had given
