The Hemingway Hoax

The Hemingway Hoax

By Joe Haldeman

“So what is the big event?”

“It’s impossible for you to know. It’s not important, anyhow.” Actually, it would take a rather cosmic viewpoint to consider the event unimportant: the end of the world.

Or at least the end of life on Earth. Right now, there were two earnest young politicians, in the United States and Russia, who on 11 August 2006 would be President and Premier of their countries. On that day, one would insult the other beyond forgiveness, and a button would be pushed, and then another button, and by the time the sun set on Moscow, or rose on Washington, there would be nothing left alive on the Planet at all – from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere; not a cockroach, not a paramecium, not a virus, and all because there are some things a man just doesn’t have to take, not if he’s a real man.

Hemingway wasn’t the only writer who felt that way, but he was the one with the most influence on this generation. The apparition who wanted John dead or at least not typing didn’t know exactly what effect his pastiche was going to have on Hemingway’s influence, but it was going to be decisive and ultimately negative. It would prevent or at least delay the end of the world in a whole bundle of universes, which would put a zillion adjacent realities out of kilter, and there would be hell to pay all up and down the Omniverse. Many more people that six billion would die – and it’s even possible that all of Reality would unravel, and collapse back to the primordial Hiccup from whence I came.

Hoax. Photo by Elena

“If it’s not important, then why are you so hell-bent on keeping me from preventing it? I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t believe me, then!” At an imperious gesture, all the capsules rolled back into the corner and reassembled into a piano, with a huge crashing chord. None of the barflies heard it. “I should think you’d cooperate with me just to prevent the unpleasantness of dying over and over.”

John had the expression of a poker player whose opponent has inadvertently exposed his hole card. “You get used to it,” he said. “And it occurs to me that sooner or later I’ll wind up in a universe that I really like. This one doesn’t have a hell of a lot to recommend it.” His foot tapped twice and then twice again.

“No,” the Hemingway said. “It will get worse each time.”

“You can’t know that. This has never happened before.”

“True so far, isn’t it?”

John considered it for a moment. “Some ways. Some ways not.”

The Hemingway shrugged and stood up. “Well. Think about my offer.” The cane appeared. “Happy cancer.” It tapped him on the chest and disappeared.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)