The Best of Connie Willis (59 page)

There hadn’t been any reproach, any accusation in her face when I told her she was responsible for the extinction of a species that day at the vet’s, and there wasn’t now. Maybe she doesn’t have the facial muscles for it, I thought bitterly.

“Do you know why I came to see you today?” I said angrily. “My camera broke when I tried to catch Aberfan. I didn’t get any pictures.”

I grabbed the picture of Mrs. Ambler out of the developer’s tray and flung it at her. “Her dog died of newparvo. They left it in the Winnebago, and when they came back, it was dead.”

“Poor thing,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at the picture. She was looking at me.

“Mrs. Ambler didn’t know she was having her picture taken. I thought if I got you talking about Aberfan, I could get a picture like that of you.”

And surely now I would see it, the look I had really wanted when I set the eisenstadt down on Katie’s kitchen table, the look I still wanted, even though the eisenstadt was facing the wrong way, the look of betrayal the dogs had never given us. Not even Misha. Not even Aberfan. How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?

I pointed at the eisenstadt. “It’s not a briefcase. It’s a camera. I was going to take your picture without your even knowing it.”

She had never known Aberfan. She had never known Mrs. Ambler, either, but in that instant before she started to cry she looked like both of them. She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, and the love, the loss was there in her voice, too. “If you’d had it then, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I looked at the eisenstadt. If I had had it then, I could have set it on the porch and Aberfan would never have even noticed it. He would have burrowed through the snow and tossed it up with his nose, and I could have thrown snow up in big glittering sprays that he would have leaped at, and it never would have happened.

Katie Powell would have driven past, and I would have stopped to wave at her, and she, sixteen years old and just learning to drive, would maybe even have risked taking a mittened hand off the steering wheel to wave back, and Aberfan would have wagged his tail into a blizzard and then barked at the snow he’d churned up.

He wouldn’t have caught the third wave. He would have lived to be an old dog, fourteen or fifteen, too old to play in the snow anymore, and even if he had been the last dog in the world I would not have let them lock him up in a cage, I would not have let them take him away. If I had had the eisenstadt.

No wonder I hated it.

It had been at least fifteen minutes since Ramirez called. The Society would be here any minute. “You shouldn’t be here when the Society comes,” I said, and Katie nodded and smudged the tears off her cheeks and stood up, reaching for her carryit.

“Do you ever take pictures?” she said, shouldering the carryit. “I mean, besides for the papers?”

“I don’t know if I’ll be taking pictures for them much longer. Photojournalists are becoming an extinct breed.”

“Maybe you could come take some pictures of Jana and Kevin. Kids grow up so fast, they’re gone before you know it.”

“I’d like that,” I said. I opened the screen door for her and looked both ways down the street at the darkness. “All clear,” I said, and she went out. I shut the screen door between us.

She turned and looked at me one last time with her dear, open face that even I hadn’t been able to close. “I miss them,” she said.

I put my hand up to the screen. “I miss them, too.”

I watched her to make sure she turned the corner and then went back in the living room and took down the picture of Misha. I propped it against the developer so Segura would be able to see it from the door.

In a month or so, when the Amblers were safely in Texas and the
Society had forgotten about Katie, I’d call Segura and tell him I might be willing to sell it to the Society, and then in a day or so I’d tell him I’d changed my mind. When he came out to try to talk me into it, I’d tell him about Perdita and Beatrix Potter, and he would tell me about the Society.

Chiwere and Ramirez would have to take the credit for the story—I didn’t want Hunter putting anything else together—and it would take more than one story to break them, but it was a start.

Katie had left the print of Mrs. Ambler on the couch. I picked it up and looked at it a minute and then fed it into the developer. “Recycle,” I said.

I picked up the eisenstadt from the table by the couch and took the film cartridge out. I started to pull the film out to expose it, and then shoved it into the developer instead and turned it on. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds.”

I had apparently set the camera on its activator again—there were ten shots or so of the backseat of the Hitori. Vehicles and people. The pictures of Katie were all in shadow. There was a Still Life of Kool-Aid Pitcher with Whale Glass and another one of Jana’s toy cars, and some near-black frames that meant Katie had laid the eisenstadt facedown when she brought it to me.

“Two seconds,” I said, and waited for the developer to flash the last shots so I could make sure there wasn’t anything else on the cartridge and then expose it before the Society got here. All but the last frame was of the darkness that was all the eisenstadt could see lying on its face.

The last one was of me.

The trick in getting good pictures is to make people forget they’re being photographed. Distract them. Get them talking about something they care about.

“Stop,” I said, and the image froze.

Aberfan was a great dog. He loved to play in the snow, and after I
had murdered him, he lifted his head off my lap and tried to lick my hand.

The Society would be here any minute to take the longshot film and destroy it, and this one would have to go, too, along with the rest of the cartridge. I couldn’t risk Hunter’s being reminded of Katie. Or Segura taking a notion to do a print-fix and peel on Jana’s toy cars.

It was too bad. The eisenstadt takes great pictures. “Even you’ll forget it’s a camera,” Ramirez had said in her spiel, and that was certainly true. I was looking straight into the lens.

And it was all there, Misha and Taco and Perdita and the look he gave me on the way to the vet’s while I stroked his poor head and told him it would be all right, that look of love and pity I had been trying to capture all these years. The picture of Aberfan.

The Society would be here any minute. “Eject,” I said, and cracked the cartridge open, and exposed it to the light.

The End of the World is back in fashion these days, what with the whole Mayan calendar thing, nuclear terrorists in the news, and the ever more dire threat of global warming, but what people forget is that it’s
always
ending.

Extinction happens on a daily basis: pay phones, soda fountains, carbon paper, LPs, metal merry-go-rounds, Woolworth’s, clothespins, VCRs, swimming caps, dial telephones, ocean liners, linen handkerchiefs, Beeman’s chewing gum. And we never really appreciate any of it till it’s too late, till it’s already gone.

I particularly miss cherry phosphates, drive-in movies, and those great swings with linked-metal chains and wooden seats. And I know, I know, they were dangerous, but you could swing so high on them, all the way out over the landscape and up into the sky. And on the way home from the drive-in, you could lean your head out of the car (which had no air-conditioning) and look up at the moonlit summer clouds and the dark, star-filled sky.

I miss roller coasters—the old-fashioned kind with white-painted wooden frameworks and rackety cars. And passenger trains with Pullman berths and dining cars with white tablecloths, and Green River soda pop, and canvas sneakers.

And soon, I fear, I will also miss books.

Even the stories in this collection are testimony to how quickly things vanish, and not just “The Last of the Winnebagos.” Many were written before the advent of cell phones and the Internet; Egypt and Iraq have changed a lot, film is nearly extinct, and in a few more years the sheet music in “All Seated on the Ground” and the paperbacks and travel guides
in “Death on the Nile” will seem oddly quaint. “Why didn’t they just have a Kindle?” readers will ask.

Science fiction seems especially vulnerable to questions like that, since we’re supposed to be predicting the future and all, and it’s tempting to update the stories when they’re reprinted, especially after you’ve just watched a movie in which the actors are all talking on shoebox-sized cell phones. Or are standing in front of the World Trade Center. It’s tempting to change the dates (especially if they’ve already passed) and the technology.

But once you change one thing, you have to change another, and another, and eventually the entire plot. And besides, it’s a little too much like the Egyptian pharaohs chiseling out all mention of the previous Ramses, erasing the past.

So let them stand, reminders of the past we had and the future we thought was coming, and of how ephemeral it all is. And remember what Albert Camus had to say on the subject: “Do not wait upon the Day of Judgment. It happens every day.”

(Given August 17, 2006)

The thing that’s so great about being a guest of honor at Worldcon

is that it gives me the chance

to thank all the people who helped me become a writer:

like my junior high school teacher Mrs. Werner

who read Rumer Godden’s
An Episode of Sparrows

out loud to us

and first introduced me to the Blitz

and my high school English teacher

Mrs. Juanita Jones,

who encouraged me in my writing

even though I showed no signs of talent whatsoever,

and I forced her to read my story about how I’d met George

Maharis of the TV series
Route 66
,

a story which includes deathless lines like,

“His face lit up like a birthday cake.”

And in which the heroine,

while driving in downtown Manhattan, manages to run into a tree—

obviously the tree from
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
.

It also gives me a chance to thank all those people who’ve helped
me keep writing all these years: