Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

Screams were going up around me. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I felt like I was going to vomit, and I had to hold onto my car’s fender for support.

Somebody behind me was shouting, “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” I turned, and saw a man shaking his fist at the sky. I wanted to join him, but there was no point.

This was just the beginning, I knew. People all over the world had read that entry, along with all the others. Antimatter explosions; designer diseases based on new insights into how biology worked; God only knew what else. We needed a firewall for the whole damn planet, and there was no way to erect one.

I abandoned my car and wandered along the highway until I found an off-ramp. I walked for hours, passing people who were crying, people who were screaming, people who, like me, were too shocked, too dazed, to do either of those things.

I wondered if there was an entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica about Earth, and, if so, what it said. I thought of Ethan McCharles, swinging back and forth, a flesh pendulum, and I remembered that spontaneous little eulogy Chiu, the security guard, had uttered. Would there be a eulogy for Earth? A few kind words, closing out the entry on us in the next edition of the encyclopedia? I knew what I wanted it to say.

I wanted it to say that we mattered, that what we did had worth, that we treated each other well most of the time. But that was wishful thinking, I suppose. All that would probably be in the entry was the date on which our first broadcasts were detected, and the date, only a heartbeat later in cosmic terms, on which they had ceased.

It would take me most of the day to walk home. My son Michael would make his way back there, too, I’m sure, when he heard the news.

And at least we’d be together, as we waited for whatever would come next.

Relativity

Mike Resnick edits a lot of anthologies, and I’m always thrilled when he asks me to contribute to one of them. In 2003, he did a pair of fascinating books for DAW entitled Men Writing Science Fiction as Women and Women Writing Science Fiction as Men. Mike said I could only be in the first, as I was “biologically disqualified”from the second.

I’ve always been fascinated by the effect of time dilation on relationships (one of my all-time favorite SF stories is John Varley’s “The Pusher”), and so “Relativity” was born.

I’m rather happy with the way the story turned out, but whenever I look at the anthology it originally appeared in, I feel a pang of sadness. One of my best friends, Robyn Herrington, contributed to Women Writing Science Fiction as Men. She had been mentored through her career by both me and Mike, and we both loved her a lot. Sadly, though, on May 3, 2004, shortly after her story was published, she passed away after a battle with cancer. I’ll always miss Robyn, and my latest novel, Rollback, is dedicated to her.

* * *

You can’t have brothers without being familiar with Planet of the Apes. I’m not talking about the “re-imaging” clone by Tim Burton, apparently much ballyhooed in its day, but the Franklin J. Schaffner original—the one that’s stood the test of time, the one that, even a hundred years after it was made, boys still watch.

Of course, one of the reasons boys enjoy it is it’s very much a guy film. Oh, there had been a female astronaut along for the ride with Chuck Heston, but she died during the long space voyage, leaving just three macho men to meet the simians. The woman ended up a hideous corpse when her suspended-animation chamber failed, and even her name—“Stewart”— served to desexualize her.

Me, I liked the old Alien films better. Ellen Ripley was a survivor, a fighter. But, in a way, those movies were a cheat, too. When you got right down to it, Sigourney Weaver was playing a man—and you couldn’t even say, as one of my favorite (female) writers does, that she was playing “a man with tits and hips”—’cause ole Sigourney, she really didn’t have much of either. Me, I’ve got not enough of one and too much of the other.