Something was very wrong.

  Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar snow and bright, sleek skiers were not really the winter she feared, though even in fire-warmed chalets it was hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed. It was continual false, flavorless spring all winter long.

  How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?

  Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often. Not always.

  “There’s a problem,” I said to the director.

  “It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s gotten worse.”

  He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.

  “Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.

  “That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”

  “Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”

  “No, no, no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”

  I sputtered, trying to explain. “But but…”

  “You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care?”

  He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.

  “I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business, like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it. Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh, washing clothes, sitting in a park…”

  “It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”

  He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”

  He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.

  “So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”

  With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”

  The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.

  So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”

  I didn’t go back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.

  I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom. You can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.

  There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers.

  Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.

  Introduction to “Klein’s Machine”

  by Andrew Weiner

  I’ve heard theories about how British science fiction differs in some systematic way from American science fiction, and there is some plausibility to the idea. After all, they grew out of separate evolutionary tracks, interbreeding frequently, but forced to grow in quite different soils. American science fiction was magazine-driven, pulpy, masked in lurid covers that protected it from the smothering embrace of academia but also drove off many of the serious-minded people who might have written, read, and commented within the field. British science fiction, however, was regarded as a continuation of the tradition of H. G. Wells, and included such writers as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis, all of whom exploited science fiction’s power as a medium of satire and allegory. So British science fiction can include within its penumbra such older works as Frankenstein, Gulliver’s Travels, Utopia, and Erewhon, while American science fiction, in search of roots, can only seize with any plausibility upon the works of Jules Verne, and before him the Thrilling Wonder stories from travelers and promoters like John Smith and Marco Polo and, of course, the extravagantly fictional claims of inventors filing for patents on perpetual motion machines.

  So…what is Canadian science fiction? Some kind of averaging of the two traditions? Perelandra with Eve in a strategically torn dress? Brave New World, only the new machines are really really cool?

  On the contrary, without fanfare or any detectable “movement,” there seems to be a Canadian sensibility that is neither British nor American. As practiced by Andrew Weiner, Terence Green, Robert Charles Wilson, Charles de Lint, and even William Gibson (when we use our polarized mirrorshades to filter out the distracting cyberpunkery surrounding him), Canadian speculative fiction has a way of making large issues intensely personal and individual, while imbuing individual lives with a sense of tragedy. Dare I say that it’s a Shakespearian kind of storytelling?

  Or maybe I’m just imagining all this, and these writers have nothing in common except a propensity for pronouncing out and about more in the front of their mouths than Americans do.

  Even if Weiner were from some remote godforsaken spot like Pasadena or Pensacola, “Klein’s Machine” would be an effective tale of a quiet tragedy, of a possible reason why Cassandra isn’t believed.

  KLEIN’S MACHINE

  Andrew Weiner

  1.

  They took him off the bus in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His eyes were blank, and he had been sobbing quietly to himself for the past fifty miles. He was holding the crushed remains of a bright green flower in his left hand.

  The driver turned him over to the ticket clerk, who called the local police. He was unresponsive to their questions. He had no identification, and no possessions except a one-way ticket to San Francisco and a crumpled $20 bill.

  They threw the flower in the garbage and took him to the emergency ward of the local hospital.

  “He’s spaced out,” one of the police officers told the intern. “Flying high.”

  Subsequent blood and urine analysis, however, showed no trace of drugs.

  2.

  “Could be a travel psychosis,” said the senior psychiatrist. “Haven’t seen one in years.”

  “Travel psychosis?” asked the intern.

  “During the war,” the psychiatrist said, “they would send soldiers cross-country by bus, transferring from base to base. Some of them would just disintegrate. The monotony got to them, you see. They had nowhere to look except inside. And they realized that they didn’t know who they were. Of course, these were people who never had a very good grip in the first place.”

  He turned to the blank-eyed patient.

  “Been travelling far, kid?”

  The patient spoke for the first time.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Very far.”

  3.

  The patient was identified on the basis of his fingerprints. He had a minor criminal record in New York State, having been picked up several times at political demonstrations for disturbing the peace. He also had an active file at the FBI, documenting his involvement with several fringe leftist groups, although there were no recent entries.

  The patient’s name was Philip Herbert Klein. He was a resident of New York City. He had been reported missing three weeks before by his mother, Mrs. Alice Klein.

  4.

  Klein was transferred to a state mental hospital, and given anti-psychotic medication.

  Within a few days he was able to converse normally, although he appeared fatigued and withdrawn. He claimed to have no memory of leaving New York City, nor of how he had come to be on a cross-country bus.

  The duty psychiatrist modified the diagnosis from psychosis to hysterical reaction, dissociative type, and arranged for his immediate discharge.

  “Amnesia,” he told the patient’s mother, when she came to take him home.

  “Like on Another World?” she asked.

  “Something like that,” he said. “Although in this case he doesn’t seem to have hit his head.”

  “But where has he been?” she asked. “Where has he been all this time?”

  “Maybe it will come back to him,” the duty psychiatrist said.

  5.

  On his return to New York City, Mrs. Klein, on the recommendation of the duty psychiatrist, arranged for a home visit by a psychiatric social worker.

  While Klein sat on the couch watching a Star Trek rerun, Mrs. Klein explained the situation.

  “He never did anything like this before,” she told the social worker. “He was always a good boy. A little nervous, maybe. High strung. Perhaps a bit over-imaginative. But always such a good boy.”

  After taking a family history, the social worker asked to speak with Klein in private.

  6.

  Report of the psychiatric social worker

  Philip Herbert Klein

  I interviewed the client on the morning of July 24th, three days after his return from Ohio. I also interviewed the client’s mother, Mrs. Alice Klein.

  The client is 23 years old. He has never lived outside his family’s home, and continues to reside with his widowed mother in a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side. He has never held regular employment. He failed to complete his studies in accountancy at the City University, dropping out at the end of the first year. He told me that he had wished to study physics, but had been urged by his mother towards a more “practical” field.

  Neither the client not his mother were forthcoming as to the circumstances surrounding him leaving university, although Mrs. Klein noted on several occasions that her son was troubled at times by “nerves” and was “highly strung.”

  The family has never sought psychiatric assistance for the client, although he was treated briefly for enuresis by a pediatrician at the age of nine, soon after his father’s death.

  The client and his mother subsist on a modest income from the estate of the late Mr. Harry Klein, a clothing manufacturer. The client is the only child. Mr. Klein was a refugee from eastern Europe, considerably older and rather less educated than his wife. Mrs. Klein recalls that her parents felt she had married “beneath” her, a verdict which she only superficially disclaims. Mrs. Klein came from a family with some pretensions to social standing, although little wealth after setbacks in the market.

  At the time of their marriage, Mr. Klein was quite successful in his business, but later he suffered considerable reverses. This change in their fortunes, in some way a repetition of Mrs. Klein’s own childhood experiences, coincided with the birth of their son. It seems that the client grew up in an atmosphere of some tension and economic insecurity, and that these conflicts between the parents were transmitted to him.

  Philip himself claims to recall little about his father, who worked long hours and was rarely home. He does recall that Mr. Klein spoke with a marked accent, and had no knowledge of or interest in popular sports such as baseball, which caused him some embarrassment with his peer group. He “does not remember” how he felt when his father died, although his mother says that he “took it badly.” As already noted, his enuresis first became severe at that time.

  The mother, in any case, has apparently always been the dominant figure within this family constellation. Currently, she appears less concerned about her son’s condition per se as with the fact that he was outside her surveillance and control for so lengthy a period.

  Mrs. Klein suggested, in fact, that Philip might have been “kidnapped” and “brainwashed” by some radical group, although she was quite unable to suggest any motive for such an action. She has, apparently, warned her son repeatedly of the dangers of mixing with “bad company.”

  The boy (it is very difficult to think of him as a man) has little social life, and rarely leaves the apartment. For some period of time he was involved with peripheral socialist groups, but left following a disagreement he appears to have gone out of his way to engineer. He has no close friends of either sex, although he is a prolific letter-writer. He spends much of his time tinkering with fantastic and apparently useless machinery, styling himself an “inventor.” (His mother recalls that in his teens he attempted to obtain a patent for a “space drive,” an incident she found enormously comical.)

  His other great interest is reading popular fiction, specifically science fiction. His room is littered with paperbacks of this description. His interest in this literature goes back to early adolescence, and at one time he himself produced an amateur journal of criticism and discussion for circulation to similarly anomic and obsessive individuals.

  “There is nothing like (these books),” he told me. “Nothing in the world.”

  The client has been diagnosed as suffering a classical dissociative reaction, of amnesia coupled with fugue state. On the occasion of the home visit, the client still claimed to be unable to recall any details of his experiences during his absence from home. He did, however, offer a hypothetical explanation of his disappearance, one so bizarre as to raise the question of a more severe pathology. The client told me that he believed that he had been “travelling in time.” He attempted to substantiate this claim through reference to his personal journal.

  I have referred the client for further psychiatric treatment on an outpatient basis.

  7.

  Excerpts from the journal of Philip Herbert Klein

  February 7, 198-

  Freezing cold today, arse-freezing cold, highest wind chill factor for the day in eleven years, got to be a screw-up in the sunspot cycle. Almost died of exposure getting over to Claude’s place for the Progressive League meeting. Big argument with Ma before I left, why am I wasting my life hanging around with commie creeps, why am I doing this to her, and etc. You just can’t win. Last year it was, get out of the house, find an interest, make new friends.

  Lousy attendance at the meeting, not even the whole Central Committee. Claude is a lousy speaker, and “Capital Movements in West Africa” is not exactly a crowd-puller. I could have done without it myself. All his usual stuff about the Rockefellers and the Chase-Manhattan and the Trilateral Commission. No facts, just speculation. Claude has always been flipped-out on the Rockefellers. Always has to personalize everything.

  “Come on,” I said, when I couldn’t take it anymore. “We have to be scientific, here. We’re supposed to be scientific socialists, aren’t we?”