Year's Best SF 17

Six Months, Three Days CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

Charlie Jane Anders (charliejane.com) lives in San Francisco. Anders’s stories have appeared in The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, Strange Horizons, ZYZZYVA, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She’s an editor with io9.com, and the organizer of Writers With Drinks, a monthly San Francisco reading series that’s been going since 2001. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

“Six Months, Three Days” was published by Tor.com, and this is perhaps its first appearance in print. It is a love story about two clairvoyants whose abilities are otherwise radically different. Doug and Judy both see the future, but Doug sees it as fixed and Judy as branching possibilities. Their relationship becomes a contest between visions of the future as determined or as indeterminate.

The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.

Judy is nervous but excited, keeps looking at things she’s spotted out of the corner of her eye. She’s wearing a floral Laura Ashley style dress with an Ankh necklace and her legs are rambunctious, her calves moving under the table. It’s distracting because Doug knows that in two and a half weeks, those cucumber-smooth ankles will be hooked on his shoulders, and that curly reddish-brown hair will spill everywhere onto her lemon-floral pillows; this image of their future coitus has been in Doug’s head for years, with varying degrees of clarity, and now it’s almost here. The knowledge makes Doug almost giggle at the wrong moment, but then it hits him: she’s seen this future too—or she may have, anyway.

Doug has his sandy hair cut in a neat fringe that was almost fashionable a couple years ago. You might think he cuts his own hair, but Judy knows he doesn’t, because he’ll tell her otherwise in a few weeks. He’s much, much better looking than she thought he would be, and this comes as a huge relief. He has rude, pouty lips and an upper lip that darkens no matter how often he shaves it, with Elvis Costello glasses. And he’s almost a foot taller than her, six foot four. Now that Judy’s seen Doug for real, she’s re-imagining all the conversations they might be having in the coming weeks and months, all of the drama and all of the sweetness. The fact that Judy can be attracted to him, knowing everything that could lay ahead, consoles her tremendously.

Judy is nattering about some Chinese novelist she’s been reading in translation, one of those cruel satirists from the days after the May Fourth Movement, from back when writers were so conflicted they had to rename themselves things like “Contra Diction.” Doug is just staring at her, not saying anything, until it creeps her out a little.

“What?” Doug says at last, because Judy has stopped talking and they’re both just staring at each other.

“You were staring at me,” Judy says.

“I was …” Doug hesitates, then just comes out and says it. “I was savoring the moment. You know, you can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone.”

“Well, I didn’t know the hour and the day when you and I would meet,” Judy puts a hand on his. “I saw many different hours and days. In one timeline, we would have met two years ago. In another, we’d meet a few months from now. There are plenty of timelines where we never meet at all.”

Doug laughs, then waves a hand to show that he’s not laughing at her, although the gesture doesn’t really clarify whom or what he’s actually laughing at.