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

part of Qinmeartha any longer, and had fled from him. A further part of the curse the other gods had placed upon him for his audacity was that for the rest of eternity he would chase the Girl Child LoChi but, even if he located and trapped her, would never be able to persuade her to rejoin him and thereby make the universe fully real.
    I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, which displayed a map of some of the more obscure parts of Canada, or maybe Scandinavia – somewhere with plenty of fjords, anyway. Two cops were arguing heatedly about the morality of shooting traitors in cold blood. The fish market was noisily closing for the night. (In all my time in that apartment I never once bought fish from the market, even though it was almost directly downstairs. The fish looked good and smelled good. I think it was the constant daytime noise of the staff and customers shouting at each other, a noise that started at five in the morning and went on until seven at night, that engendered my aversion to the produce.) A kid bellowed, presumably having fallen off its swing. Were there fjords in Canada? I couldn't remember. Maybe the map could be of a bit of New Zealand – I was pretty certain there were fjords there ...
    And once more a deep and dreamless sleep took me into its arms.
    ~
    And so the weeks went by and went by, each of them following very much the same pattern. Christmas, with its excruciating visit home, came and went. Although I continued to work hard at the university – my parents had made sacrifices to get me there, so it was my obligation to do so – I found that more and more I was living for my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo, that veterinary science was being shifted off towards the edge of my preoccupations. Only during those three and a half hours each week when I was sitting in the Rupolo, with or without popcorn (more usually without), did I feel that my mind was truly alive, and enlivened. It was the genesis of a lifelong passion, one that has molded the man I now am.
    Of course, at this distance of years I cannot possibly recall the titles of all the movies I saw during those Monday afternoons, and, although I can remember great tracts of their plots, sometimes I suspect they have all become jumbled each among the others, so that what I bring to mind are not individual movies but just some gigantic composite, a sort of huge metamovie. Most of the movies were British, or at least centered on Britishers, and generally the Britishers were in conflict with the Germans; but there were a few that featured Americans, and their struggles with either the Germans or the Japanese or both. The movies were generally from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, although occasionally the Rupolo's owner saw fit to show something a bit more recent. A few of the titles that I do remember are Albert RN , The Great Escape , The Bridge on the River Kwai , The Colditz Story , Ice Cold in Alex , Stalag 17 , Sahara , D-Day , Gallipoli , Danger Within , Foxhole in Cairo , The Captive Heart , The Mackenzie Break , The Purple Heart , The Longest Day , Tora! Tora! Tora! , Hannibal Brooks , King Rat , The Password is Courage , The Betrayal , Prisoner of War ...
    I suppose I should make a confession here. I am not an unusually stupid man, and several decades ago, when I was studying for my doctorate, I was undoubtedly brighter and sharper than I am today. However, I have to admit that, while I followed the plots of these movies keenly – others might snore during a Rupolo Monday matinee but not me – it took me a long time to realize that a composite was emerging from the whole sequence of movies that was, well, distinctly ... odd . I still cannot understand why it took me such a while to notice this. Nor can I understand why it was that, for all my genuine and unbridled passion for these features and by extension for cinema as a whole, it never occurred to me until near the end of that academic year to do more than simply watch the