Free infinities by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Scott Nicholson, Garry Kilworth, Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Kaitlin Queen, Iain Rowan, Linda Nagata, Keith Brooke

survived the war and, if so, what had eventually become of him; but this was something that in the event I never got around to doing until years later, by which time my interest was no longer so poignant. (As I now recall it, he did indeed survive – until the mid-1970s sometime – living in seclusion as an honored but largely ignored figure.)
    Whatever the historical veracity, the movie was engrossing – for the first hour or so, anyway. After that it became more like a standard adventure thriller ... or, at least, that is my recollection of it.
    The second feature, Mrs. Miniver , was less interesting to me. Again it centered on the British experience of the war, but this time at the domestic level. The eponymous character was a housewife in England, and she and her neighbors pluckily came through Axis bombings and the like. I wasn't surprised at the end to discover it had been an American movie, despite its British setting, because throughout I had been troubled by the stylistic differences between it and the others. Something about it had just not rung quite true. Traditional Hollywood England, like traditional Hollywood Arabia, is a strange otherworld that never really existed outside the moviemakers' imaginations.
    My phone conversation with my mother that night was brief, covering only the basics: who the father of Glenda Doberman's unborn baby might be (a matter on which Glenda herself was apparently pretty vague, as I might have guessed) and whether the girl might be wise to get an abortion; the latest stop-the-presses news about my father's indigestion (no change); the question of my fruit and vegetable intake; and the insistence that I shouldn't be wasting my life sitting in stuffy cinemas the whole time but should instead be either studying or running around playing ball in the fresh air, or preferably both at the same time. It was a conversation I could have scripted myself by cutting and pasting fragments from previous phonecalls, and the sensation I'd had the previous week of being dislocated from the rest of reality returned in full force. And, once more, it persisted. Long after I'd put the phone back on its hook and retreated to the relative sanctuary of my single room I still felt as if the walls and furniture around me were no more real than movie props, that if I bumped against them too hard they'd ripple or collapse.
    And the feeling extended to people as well. Was Mrs. Bellis, with her overloud television set and her farts and all, actually real ? I hardly ever saw the woman – I saw her as little as I possibly could, if the truth be told – and so, for all I knew, all the rest of her existence might just be as a soundtrack blasted through the intervening wall to torment me. Mr. Perkins at the deli, the intense old guy at the Rupolo, my colleagues and peers at the university – all of them seemed to me suddenly to be puppets or special effects, all controlled by some unseen, insane director. Sitting on my lumpy, thin-mattressed bed, I began to concoct fantasies about this director, the quasi-god who had brought all of this false display into existence, the puppet-master who made the people around me perform the charades they did. He was called Qinmeartha – I have no idea where the name came from – and he was the only one among the gods who had thought creation was a worthwhile enterprise. For going against their jointly expressed opinion and bringing the universe into existence, he was punished by being constantly mocked by the failure of his creation ever to achieve full, one hundred per cent reality. Always it remained just this side of fully convincing, even to him. Always his creatures remained puppets, or two-dimensional projections on the flat screen of his universe, their true reality forever being somewhere else . The only key that could change this situation was another aspect of him, called – again the name came to me from nowhere – the Girl Child LoChi, but she didn't wish to be a