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

man, and I believe that the Final Solution, as perpetrated both in Germany under the Fuehrer and here under President MacNaish, was almost certainly an unnecessarily inhumane means of dealing with an acknowledged problem. There seems to me no reason at all why the Jews could not have been dealt with in the same way as MacNaish coped with the nigger problem. But in my youth I was more encumbered by the cultural baggage of my elders and peers. That moment when I recognized that the old ticket-seller might well be partly Semitic and yet did nothing about it was a major leap forward in the evolution of my own, independent worldview. From now on I at least recognized that there was the possibility for me to develop attitudes and a morality that were not merely carbon copies of those my parents lived by.
    I shuffled into the semi-gloom of the theater and, sure enough, my regular seat was vacant – fifth row from the front, on the right side of the aisle. There were still a few minutes to go before the torn red-plush curtains would draw back and the screen flicker into life, and so as always I craned round to check that all the regulars were arrived or arriving. There was the middle-aged woman with the tightly clutched beadwork handbag and the perpetually watery eyes. There was the young couple who came here to neck in the back row and who I could swear once went the whole way there, right through the central section of a movie called Casablanca , in fact; at the end one of the characters said something like "Play it for me again, Tom" and half the small audience burst into sniggers. There was the tall man who carried himself so upright that I always guessed he'd been in the military fifty years ago. And there were the rest. You understand, none of us ever spoke to each other or even acknowledged each other's presence, yet in a strange way we'd each gotten to know our fellows, and there was a certain bonding between us. Quite how we'd have reacted had any of us ever run into one of the other Rupolo Monday-afternoon regulars I do not know: it never happened to me, and it was a prospect that made me quail. Today, as usual, there were a couple of new faces, too – doubtless stragglers who'd wandered in off the street less to watch the movie than to make three and a half hours of their lives disappear.
    I turned back toward the screen just as the curtains drew apart.
    The first movie to be shown today was called Private Kohl's War , and it was directed, according to the opening credits, by Thea von Harbou – one of the directors whose biographies I'd noticed on the library shelves. It told the story, in color, of a young soldier who'd taken part in the invasion of England and then fought in the sequence of battles that led to the Fall of London. At the end it showed him celebrating the surrender, contributing to the extermination of the Communists, and making plans to import his beautiful blonde German girlfriend so they could marry and raise kids on the small plot of farmland he'd been permitted to annex. It was a well enough made movie, and some of the camerawork and sets were superb – strongly influenced by Art Deco in places – but overall I found the movie unsatisfying and often tedious. Where were Chips and Ginger? The few Brits who had speaking parts were either villains of the stupidest sort or wise collaborators who might as well have been Germans themselves. And where was all the poignancy of watching stiff-upper-lip heroes who didn't know that, despite all their courage and dedication, they were doomed to be on the losing side, whatever their temporary triumphs? Where was all the antiquated slang I had come to love?
    I glanced around me as the lights came up. So far as I could tell, none of the other regulars had found the movie in any way less enjoyable than usual – I seemed to be the only one to have noticed the very different character of this piece from our customary fare. Well, there had been other dreary movies