The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  A teenage girl, in a cheap red coat and yellow winter boots, was sobbing into her cellphone. She was Jovanica, one of his best customers.

  "What's the matter?" he said.

  "Oh! It's you!" Jovanica snapped her phone shut and raised a skinny hand to her lips. "Are you still alive, Mr. Boots?"

  "Why wouldn't I be alive?"

  "Well, what happened to you? Who robbed your store?"

  "I'm not robbed. Everything has been sold, that's all."

  Jovanica's young face screwed up in doubt, rage, frustration, and grief. "Then where are my hair toys?"

  "What?"

  "Where are my favorite barrettes? My hair clips! My scrunchies and headbands and beautiful pins! There was a whole tree of them, right here! I picked new toys from that tree every day! I finally had it giving me just what I wanted!"

  "Oh. That." Borislav had sold the whirling rack of hair toys, along with its entire freight of goods.

  "Your rack sold the best hair toys in town! So super and cool! What happened to it? And what happened to your store? It's broken! There's nothing left!"

  "That's true, 'Neetsa. You had a very special relationship with that interactive rack, but . . .well . . .." Borislav groped for excuses, and, with a leap of genius, he found one. "I'll tell you a secret. You're growing up now, that's what."

  "I want my hair toys! Go get my rack right now!"

  "Hair toys are for the nine-to-fifteen age bracket. You're growing out of that market niche. You should be thinking seriously about earrings."

  Jovanica's hands flew to her earlobes. "You mean pierce my ears?"

  Borislav nodded. "High time."

  "Mama won't let me do that."

  "I can speak to your mama. You're getting to be a big girl now. Soon you'll have to beat the boys away with a stick."

  Jovanica stared at the cracks in the pavement. "No I won't."

  "Yes you will," said Borislav, hefting his cane reflexively.

  Fleka the Gypsy had been an interested observer. Now he spoke up. "Don't cry about your pretty things: because Boots here is the King of Kiosks. He can get you all the pretty things in the world!"

  "Don't you listen to the gypsy," said Borislav. "Listen, Jovanica: your old hair-toy tree, I'm sorry, it's gone for good. You'll have to start over with a brand new one. It won't know anything about what you want."

  "After all my shopping? That's terrible!"

  "Never you mind. I'll make you a different deal. Since you're getting to be such a big girl, you're adding a lot of value by making so many highly informed consumer choices. So, next time, there will be a new economy for you. I'll pay you to teach that toy tree just what you want to buy."

  Fleka stared at him. "What did you just say? You want to pay this kid for shopping?"

  "That's right."

  "She's a little kid!"

  "I'm not a little kid!" Jovanica took swift offense. "You're a dirty old gypsy!"

  "Jovanica is the early hair-toy adopter, Fleka. She's the market leader here. Whatever hair toys Jovanica buys, all the other girls come and buy. So, yeah. I'm gonna cut her in on that action. I should have done that long ago."

  Jovanica clapped her hands. "Can I have lots of extra hair toys, instead of just stupid money?"

  "Absolutely. Of course. Those loyal-customer rewards will keep you coming back here, when you ought to be doing your homework."

  Fleka marveled. "It's completely gone to your head, cashing out your whole stock at once. A man of your age, too."

  The arts district never lacked for busybodies. Attracted by the little drama, four of them gathered round Borislav's kiosk. When they caught him glowering at them, they all pretended to need water from his fountain. At least his fountain was still working.

  "Here comes my mama," said Jovanica. Her mother, Ivana, burst headlong from the battered doors of a nearby block of flats. Ivana wore a belted house robe, a flung-on muffler, a heavy scarf, and brightly knitted woolen house slippers. She brandished a laden pillowcase.

  "Thank God they haven't hurt you!" said Ivana, her breath puffing in the chilly air. She opened her pillowcase. It held a steam iron, a hair dryer, an old gilt mirror, a nickeled hip-flask, a ragged fur stole, and a lidded, copper-bottomed saucepan.

  "Mr. Boots is all right, Mama," said Jovanica. "They didn't steal anything. He sold everything!"

  "You sold your kiosk?" said Ivana, and the hurt and shock deepened in her eyes. "You're leaving us?"

  "It was business," Borislav muttered. "Sorry for the inconvenience. It'll be a while before things settle down."

  "Honestly, I don't need these things. If these things will help you in any way, you're very welcome to them."

  "Mama wants you to sell these things," Jovanica offered, with a teen's oppressive helpfulness. "Then you can have the money to fix your store."

  Borislav awkwardly patted the kiosk's fiberboard wall. "Ivana, this old place doesn't look like much, so empty and with this big hole . . .but, well, I had some luck."

  "Ma'am, you must be cold in those house slippers," said Fleka the Gypsy. With an elegant swoop of his arm, he gestured at the gilt-and-glassed front counter of the Three Cats Café. "May I get you a hot cappuccino?"

  "You're right, sir, it's cold here." Ivana tucked the neck of her pillowcase, awkwardly, over her arm. "I'm glad things worked out for you, Borislav."

  "Yes, things are all right. Really."

  Ivana aimed a scowl at the passersby, who watched her with a lasting interest. "We'll be going now, 'Neetsa."

  "Mama, I'm not cold. The weather's clearing up!"

  "We're going." They left.

  Fleka picked at his discolored canine with his forefinger. "So, maestro. What just happened there?"

  "She's a nice kid. She's hasty sometimes. The young are like that. That can't be helped." Borislav shrugged. "Let's talk our business inside."

  He limped into his empty kiosk. Fleka wedged in behind him and managed to slam the door. Borislav could smell the man's rich, goulash-tinged breath.

  "I was never inside one of these before," Fleka remarked, studying every naked seam for the possible point of a burglar's prybar. "I thought about getting a kiosk of my own, but, well, a man gets so restless."

  "It's all about the product flow divided by the floor space. By that measure, a kiosk is super-efficient retailing. It's about as efficient as any sole proprietor can do. But it's a one-man enterprise. So, well, a man's just got to go it alone."

  Fleka looked at him with wise, round eyes. "That girl who cried so much about her hair. That's not your girl, is she?"

  "What? No."

  "What happened to the father, then? The flu got him?"

  "She was born long after the flu, but, yeah, you're right, her father passed away." Borislav coughed. "He was a good friend of mine. A soldier. Really good-looking guy. His kid is gorgeous."

  "So you didn't do anything about that. Because you're not a soldier, and you're not rich, and you're not gorgeous."

  "Do anything about what?"

  "A woman like that Ivana, she isn't asking for some handsome soldier or some rich-guy boss. A woman like her, she wants maybe a pretty dress. Maybe a dab of perfume. And something in her bed that's better than a hot-water bottle."

  "Well, I've got a kiosk and a broken leg."

  "All us men have a broken leg. She thought you had nothing. She ran right down here, with anything she could grab for you, stuffed into her pillowcase. So you're not an ugly man. You're a stupid man." Fleka thumped his chest. "I'm the ugly man. Me. I've got three wives: the one in Bucharest, the one in Lublin, and the wife in Linz isn't even a gypsy. They're gonna bury me standing, maestro. That can't be helped, because I'm a man. But that's not what you are. You're a fool."

  "Thanks for the free fortune-telling. You know all about this, do you? She and I were here during the hard times. That's what. She and I have a history."

  "You're a fanatic. You're a geek. I can see through you like the windows of this kiosk. You
should get a life." Fleka thumped the kiosk's wallpaper, and sighed aloud. "Look, life is sad, all right? Life is sad even when you do get a life. So. Boots. Now I'm gonna tell you about this fabrikator of mine, because you got some spare money, and you're gonna buy it from me. It's a nice machine. Very sweet. It comes from a hospital. It's supposed to make bones. So the tutorial is all about making bones, and that's bad, because nobody buys bones. If you are deaf and you want some new little black bones in your ears, that's what this machine is for. Also, these black toys I made with it, I can't paint them. The toys are much too hard, so the paint breaks right off. Whatever you make with this fabrikator, it's hard and black, and you can't paint it, and it belongs by rights inside some sick person. Also, I can't read the stupid tutorials. I hate tutorials. I hate reading."

  "Does it run on standard voltage?"

  "I got it running on DC off the fuel cell in my car."

  "Where's the feedstock?"

  "It comes in big bags. It's a powder, it's a yellow dust. The fab sticks it together somehow, with sparks or something, it turns the powder shiny black and it knits it up real fast. That part, I don't get."

  "I'll be offering one price for your machine and all your feedstock."

  "There's another thing. That time when I went to Vienna. I gave you my word on that deal. We shook hands on it. That deal was really important, they really needed it, they weren't kidding about it, and, well, I screwed up. Because of Vienna."

  "That's right, Fleka. You screwed up bad."

  "Well, that's my price. That's part of my price. I'm gonna sell you this toy-maker. We're gonna haul it right out of the car, put it in the kiosk here nice and safe. When I get the chance, I'm gonna bring your bag of coal-straw, too. But we forget about Vienna. We just forget about it."

  Borislav said nothing.

  "You're gonna forgive me my bad, screwed-up past. That's what I want from you."

  "I'm thinking about it."

  "That's part of the deal."

  "We're going to forget the past, and you're going to give me the machine, the stock, and also fifty bucks."

  "Okay, sold."

  With the fabrikator inside his kiosk, Borislav had no room inside the kiosk for himself. He managed to transfer the tutorials out of the black, silent fab and into his laptop. The sun had come out. Though it was still damp and chilly, the boys from the Three Cats had unstacked their white café chairs. Borislav took a seat there. He ordered black coffee and began perusing awkward machine translations from the Polish manual.

  Selma arrived to bother him. Selma was married to a schoolteacher, a nice guy with a steady job. Selma called herself an artist, made jewelry, and dressed like a lunatic. The schoolteacher thought the world of Selma, although she slept around on him and never cooked him a decent meal.

  "Why is your kiosk so empty? What are you doing, just sitting out here?"

  Borislav adjusted the angle of his screen. "I'm seizing the means of production."

  "What did you do with all my bracelets and necklaces?"

  "I sold them."

  "All of them?"

  "Every last scrap."

  Selma sat down as it hit with a mallet. "Then you should buy me a glass of champagne!"

  Borislav reluctantly pulled his phone and text-messaged the waiter.

  It was getting blustery, but Selma preened over her glass of cheap Italian red. "Don't expect me to replace your stock soon! My artwork's in great demand."

  "There's no hurry."

  "I broke the luxury market, across the river at the Intercontinental! The hotel store will take all the bone-ivory chokers I can make."

  "Mmm-hmm."

  "Bone-ivory chokers, they're the perennial favorite of ugly, aging tourist women with wattled necks."

  Borislav glanced up from his screen. "Shouldn't you be running along to your workbench?"

  "Oh, sure, sure, 'give the people what they want,' that's your sick, petit-bourgeois philosophy! Those foreign tourist women in their big hotels, they want me to make legacy kitsch!"

  Borislav waved one hand at the street. "Well, we do live in the old arts district."

  "Listen, stupid, when this place was the young arts district, it was full of avant-gardists plotting revolution. Look at me for once. Am I from the museum?" Selma yanked her skirt to mid-thigh. "Do I wear little old peasant shoes that turn up at the toes?"

  "What the hell has gotten into you? Did you sit on your tack-hammer?"

  Selma narrowed her kohl-lined eyes. "What do you expect me to do, with my hands and my artisan skills, when you're making all kinds of adornments with fabrikators? I just saw that stupid thing inside your kiosk there."

  Borislav sighed. "Look, I don't know. You tell me what it means, Selma."

  "It means revolution. That's what. It means another revolution."

  Borislav laughed at her.

  Selma scowled and lifted her kid-gloved fingers. "Listen to me. Transition number one. When communism collapsed. The people took to the streets. Everything privatized. There were big market shocks."

  "I remember those days. I was a kid, and you weren't even born then."

  "Transition Two. When globalism collapsed. There was no oil. There was war and bankruptcy. There was sickness. That was when I was a kid."

  Borislav said nothing about that. All things considered, his own first Transition had been a kinder time to grow up in.

  "Then comes Transition Three." Selma drew a breath. "When this steadily increasing cybernetic intervention in manufacturing liberates a distinctly human creativity."

  "Okay, what is that about?"

  "I'm telling you what it's about. You're not listening. We're in the third great Transition. It's a revolution. Right now. Here. This isn't Communism, this isn't Globalism. This is the next thing after that. It's happening. No longer merely reacting to this influx of mindless goods, the modern artist uses human creative strength in the name of a revolutionary heterogeneity!"

  Selma always talked pretentious, self-important drivel. Not quite like this, though. She'd found herself some new drivel.

  "Where did you hear all that?"

  "I heard it here in this café! You're just not listening, that's your problem. You never listen to anybody. Word gets around fast in the arts community."

  "I live here too, you know. I'd listen to your nutty blither all day, if you ever meant business."

  Selma emptied her wineglass. Then she reached inside her hand-loomed, artsy sweater. "If you laugh at this, I'm going to kill you."

  Borislav took the necklace she offered him. "Where's this from? Who sent you this?"

  "That's mine! I made it. With my hands."

  Borislav tugged the tangled chain through his fingers. He was no jeweler, but knew what decent jewelry looked like. This was indecent jewelry. If the weirdest efforts of search engines looked like products from Mars, then this necklace was straight from Venus. It was slivers of potmetal, blobs of silver, and chips of topaz. It was like jewelry straight out of a nightmare.

  "Selma, this isn't your customary work."

  "Machines can't dream. I saw this in my dreams."

  "Oh. Right, of course."

  "Well, it was my nightmare, really. But I woke up! Then I created my vision! I don't have to make that cheap, conventional crap, you know! I only make cheap junk because that's all you are willing to sell!"

  "Well . . .." He had never spoken with frankness to Selma before, but the glittering light in her damp eyes made yesterday's habits seem a little slow-witted. "Well, I wouldn't know what to charge for a work of art like this."

  "Somebody would want this, though? Right? Wouldn't they?" She was pleading with him. "Somebody? They would buy my new necklace, right? Even though it's . . .different."

  "No. This isn't the sort of jewelry that the people buy. This is the sort of jewelry that the people stare at, and probably laugh at, too. But then, there would come one special person. She would really want this necklace. She would want this more than anyt
hing. She would have to have this thing at absolutely any price."

  "I could make more like that," Selma told him, and she touched her heart. "Because now I know where it comes from."

  III

  Borislav installed the fab inside the empty kiosk, perched on a stout wooden pedestal, where its workings could be seen by the people.

  His first choices for production were, naturally, hair toys. Borislav borrowed some fancy clips from Jovanica, and copied their shapes inside his kiosk with his medical scanner.

  Sure enough, the fabricator sprayed out shiny black replicas.

  Jovanica amused a small crowd by jumping up and down on them. The black clips themselves were well-nigh indestructible, but their cheap metal springs soon snapped.

  Whenever a toy broke, however, it was a simple matter to cast it right back into the fabrikator's hopper. The fab chewed away at the black object, with an ozone-like reek, until the fabbed object became the yellow dust again.

  Straw, right into gold.

  Borislav sketched out a quick business plan on the back of a Three Cats beer coaster. With hours of his labor, multiplied by price-per-gram, he soon established his point of profit. He was in a new line of work.

  With the new fabrikator, he could copy the shapes of any small object he could scan. Of course, he couldn't literally "copy" everything: a puppy dog, a nice silk dress, a cold bottle of beer, those were all totally out of the question. But he could copy most anything that was made from some single, rigid material: an empty bottle, a fork, a trash can, a kitchen knife.

  The kitchen knives were an immediate hit. The knives were shiny and black, very threatening and scary, and it was clear they would never need sharpening. It was also delightful to see the fabrikator mindlessly spitting up razor-sharp knives. The kids were back in force to watch the action, and this time, even the grownups gathered and chattered.

  To accommodate the eager crowd of gawkers, the Three Cats boys set out their chairs and tables, and even their striped, overhead canopy, as cheery as if it were summer.

  The weather favored them. An impromptu block party broke out.

  Mirko from the Three Cats gave him a free meal. "I'm doing very well by this," Mirko said. "You've got yourself a nine-days' wonder here. This sure reminds me of when Transition Two was ending. Remember when those city lights came back on? Brother, those were great days."