I had been wondering how to get Ramirez off Katie’s trail, and she had done it herself, jumping to conclusions just like the Society. With a little effort, I could convince Katie, too: Do you know why I really came to see you today? To catch the Society. I had to pick somebody the Society couldn’t possibly know about from my lifeline, somebody I didn’t have any known connection with.
Katie watched the screen, looking like she already half-believed it. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded some more. Any known connection.
“Stop,” I said.
“What about the truck?” Ramirez demanded. “What does it have to do with this sting of yours?”
“Nothing,” I said. “And neither does the Water Board, which is an even bigger bully than the Society. So do what the chief says. Full cooperation. Case closed. We’ll get them on lifeline tapping.”
She digested that, or maybe she’d already hung up and was calling Dolores Chiwere. I looked at the image of Mrs. Ambler on the screen. It had faded enough to look slightly overexposed but not enough to look tampered with. And Taco was gone.
I looked at Katie. “The Society will be here in another fifteen minutes,” I said, “which gives me just enough time to tell you about Aberfan.” I gestured at the couch. “Sit down.”
She came and sat down. “He was a great dog,” I said. “He loved the snow. He’d dig through it and toss it up with his muzzle and snap at the snowflakes, trying to catch them.”
Ramirez had obviously hung up, but she would call back if she couldn’t track down Chiwere. I put the exclusion back on and went over to the developer. The image of Mrs. Ambler was still on the screen. The bath hadn’t affected the detail that much. You could still see the wrinkles, the thin white hair, but the guilt, or blame, the look of loss and love, was gone. She looked serene, almost happy.
“There are hardly any good pictures of dogs,” I said. “They lack the necessary muscles to take good pictures, and Aberfan would lunge at you as soon as he saw the camera.”
I turned the developer off. Without the light from the screen, it was almost dark in the room. I turned on the overhead.
“There were less than a hundred dogs left in the United States, and he’d already had the newparvo once and nearly died. The only pictures I had of him had been taken when he was asleep. I wanted a picture of Aberfan playing in the snow.”
I leaned against the narrow shelf in front of the developer’s screen. Katie looked the way she had at the vet’s, sitting there with her hands clenched, waiting for me to tell her something terrible.
“I wanted a picture of him playing in the snow, but he always lunged at the camera,” I said, “so I let him out in the front yard, and then I sneaked out the side door and went across the road to some pine trees where he wouldn’t be able to see me. But he did.”
“And he ran across the road,” Katie said. “And I hit him.”
She was looking down at her hands. I waited for her to look up, dreading what I would see in her face. Or not see.
“It took me a long time to find out where you’d gone,” she said to her hands. “I was afraid you’d refuse me access to your lifeline. I finally saw one of your pictures in a newspaper, and I moved to Phoenix, but after I got here I was afraid to call you for fear you’d hang up on me.”
She twisted her hands the way she had twisted her mittens at the vet’s. “My husband said I was obsessed with it, that I should have gotten over it by now, everybody else had. That they were only dogs anyway.” She looked up, and I braced my hands against the developer. “He said forgiveness wasn’t something somebody else could give you, but I didn’t want you to forgive me exactly. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.”
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. Photo-journalists 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.
Afterword for “The Last of the Winnebagos”
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 airconditioning) 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.”
Connie Willis is known not only for her amazing fiction—some of which is on dazzling display in this volume, and much of which is still out there for you to discover, if you have not done so already—but also for her signature speeches at various events and conventions. These speeches are moving and funny and so very quintessentially Connie that you can’t help falling in love with her not only as a writer, but as an incredible human being.
So, as a special added bonus, we are publishing three of her speeches here, for your reading pleasure. Two have been delivered before—one at the 2006 Worldcon, where Connie was Guest of Honor, and one at the 2012 Nebula Awards, where Connie received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. The third was never delivered.
I know the reading experience can’t quite replicate Connie’s expert delivery (although the format of the speeches will give you some insight into how they are meant to be read), but I still found myself smiling and with tears in my eyes at the end of each one.
Enjoy! And thank you, Connie, for everything you do.
—Anne Lesley Groell
Executive Editor
(and LSE: Long-Suffering Editor*)
* See Grand Master Acceptance Speech, though I think MDE—Much Delighted Editor—is by far the better designation.
2006 WORLDCON GUEST OF HONOR SPEECH
(Given August 17, 2006)
A MIRACLE OF RARE DEVICE:
ON BOOKS, SF, AND MY LIFE AMONG THEM
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:
—my long-suffering secretary Laura Lewis
—and my even more long-suffering family
—my miracle-working agents: Patrick Delahunt, Ralph Vicinanza, and Vince Gerardis
—my extremely patient editors Anne Groell
and Sheila Williams
and Gardner Dozois
—my EXTREMELY patient readers
—and my friends,
my fellow soldiers in the trenches,
who’ve kept me from getting discouraged
and more than once talked me out of quitting altogether.
All my best moments in science fiction I owe to you guys—
&nb
sp; —staying up all night after that first Nebula Awards banquet
with John Kessel and Jim Kelly,
eating chocolate chip cookies and red pistachio nuts
and getting red-stained hands that didn’t fade for weeks
—sitting in workshops with Ed Bryant
and Cynthia Felice
and Mike Toman
and George R.R. Martin
—driving to Portales to see Jack Williamson
with Charlie Brown
and Scott Edelman
and Walter Jon Williams
—gossiping with Nancy Kress
and Ellen Datlow
and Eileen Gunn
—laughing at something
Michael Cassutt
or Eileen Gunn
or Howard Waldrop said.
—laughing at something Gardner Dozois said so hard I snorted a piece of lettuce up my nose, nearly killing myself.
You guys are the wittiest, smartest, nicest people in the world, and I would not have lasted five minutes in science fiction without you.
But most important,
I need to thank
Robert Heinlein
and Louisa May Alcott
and Kit Reed
and Damon Runyon
and Sigrid Undset
and Theodore Sturgeon
and Agatha Christie
and Jerome K. Jerome
and Daphne du Maurier
and Philip K. Dick
and Rumer Godden
and L. M. Montgomery
and Ray Bradbury
and Shirley Jackson
and Bob Shaw
and James Herriot
and Mildred Clingerman
and P. G. Wodehouse
and Dorothy L. Sayers
and Daniel Keyes
and J. R. R. Tolkien
and Judith Merril
and Charles Williams
and William Shakespeare.
Which brings me to the subject of this speech.