The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois (ed)

Author:Gardner Dozois (ed) [Dozois, Gardner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, SF
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2008-07-08T07:00:00+00:00

I changed jobs, fled the West Coast, and kept to old, sprawling eastern metropolises like New York and Boston. Nearly a year passed. There was no sign of Rahul Moghe. Janani’s letters also did not mention him except to warn me to be vigilant. She hoped I had seen the last of him.

I knew, however, that he would be back, that he would find me. I sensed this in a way that I did not understand. I would dream of him sometimes, of the long arms of his mind reaching for me, drawing me to him, to the abyss of his soul. He terrified me. But there was a part of me that wanted to know him, perhaps the only other person with my ability.

Then one afternoon, in a café in Boston, where I was attempting to drink what Americans fondly believe to be chai, I met Sankaran.

I was amusing myself constructing a meta-beast from the very uppity literary crowd in one corner and a dysfunctional family of four at the next table when someone coasted through the whole mess of mental cobwebbing like it wasn’t there. Instinctively I looked toward him. He was unmistakably Indian, delicately built, with a thatch of unkempt black hair and an apologetic and neglected mustache. His hands were slender and brown. He sat down with a book and a coffee cup and was soon lost in whatever he was reading.

I went across to him, trying to control my excitement. His being Indian provided an easy excuse to introduce myself.

He was a post-doctoral researcher at one of the universities scattered about this great city. He lived in a hole in Cambridge. While traveling on a bus he had gotten so engrossed in a collection of conference reports that he had gotten off at the wrong stop. Finding himself near a café, he had dropped in for a coffee and a good, long read.

“You mean you don’t know where you are?”

He turned his brown eyes to me and smiled. For a moment he really seemed to be there in the café. “Does any body?” he said, separating the “body” from the “any” with the precision of a surgeon. I thought this a deeply philosophical statement until he explained that he meant that since the Earth and the solar system and the entire galaxy were constantly changing their places in space, one had to be very specific about reference frames. I was utterly charmed.

After I helped Sankaran find his way home, we became friends. He never sought me out, but I began to haunt a coffee shop in Cambridge where he turned up nearly every evening like a homing pigeon, armed with books and papers. When aware of the mundane world, he treated it with a bemused, indiscriminate kindness—being the kind of person who, upon bumping into people, doors, or potted plants, apologizes to them with equal courtesy. Much of the time I watched him over my coffee cup, filled with silent wonder. I could explore his mind, embrace it with my own, but I could not draw it to me, play with it, or manipulate it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.