The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

By the time we got back the Show was long over. The crew was taking down the stage in the rain, stacking the big planks. Because of the rain no market stalls had been set up but there was a line of old people with umbrellas standing by Uncle Chris’s trailer, since he’d offered to repair any dentures that needed fixing with his jeweler’s tools. Myko veered us away from them behind Aunt Selene’s trailer, and there we ran smack into our moms and Aunt Nera. They had been looking for us for an hour and were really mad.

  I was scared sick the whole next day, in case the old people got out their guns and came to get us, but nobody seemed to notice the old man was dead and missing, if he was dead. The other thing I was scared would happen was that Aunt Kestrel or Aunt Nera would get to talking with the other women and say something like, “Oh, by the way, the kids found a library and salvaged some books, maybe we should all go over and get some books for the other kids too” because that was exactly the sort of thing they were always doing, and then they’d find the old man’s body. But they didn’t. Maybe nobody did anything because the rain kept all the aunts and kids and old people in next day. Maybe the old man had been a hermit and lived by himself in the library, so no one would find his body for ages.

  I never found out what happened. We left after a couple of days, after Uncle Buck and the others had opened up an office tower and salvaged all the good copper they could carry. I had a knee swollen up and purple where the old man had hit it, but it was better in about a week. The books were worth the pain.

  They lasted us for years. We read them and we passed them on to the other kids and they read them too, and the stories got into our games and our dreams and the way we thought about the world. What I liked best about my comics was that even when the heroes went off to far places and had adventures, they always came back to their village in the end and everybody was happy and together.

  Myko liked the other kind of story, where the hero leaves and has glorious adventures but maybe never comes back. He was bored with the Show by the time he was twenty and went off to some big city up north where he’d heard they had their electrics running again. Lights were finally starting to come back on in the towns we worked, so it seemed likely. He still had that voice that could make anything seem like a good idea, see, and now he had all those fancy words he’d gotten out of Roget’s Thesaurus too. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he talked Sunny into going with him.

  Sunny came back alone after a year. She wouldn’t talk about what happened, and I didn’t ask. Eliza was born three months later.

  Everyone knows she isn’t mine. I don’t mind.

  We read to her on winter nights. She likes stories.

  RE-CROSSING THE STYX

  Ian R. MacLeod

  In the sly story that follows, we accompany a social climber as he makes his way up the social ladder toward the superrich at the top – no matter what he has to sacrifice to get there.

  British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, publishing a slew of strong stories in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere and his work continued to grow in power and deepen in maturity as we moved through the first decade of the new century. Much of his work has been gathered in three collections, Voyages By Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, and Past Magic. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his novella “The Summer Isles,” and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette “The Chop Girl.” In 2003, he published his first fantasy novel, and his most critically acclaimed book, The Light Ages, followed by a sequel, The House of Storms, in 2005, and then by Song of Time, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 2008. A novel version of The Summer Isles also appeared in 2005. His most recent books are a new novel, Wake Up and Dream, and a new collection, Journeys. MacLeod lives with his family in the West Midlands of England.

  WELCOME ABOARD THE Glorious Nomad, all nuclear-powered 450,000 tons of her. She is, literally, a small country in her own right, with her own armed services, laws and currency. But, for all her modernity, life afloat remains old-fashioned. There are the traditional fast food outlets, themed restaurants, coloured fountains, street entertainers and even a barber’s shop staffed by a charmingly impromptu quartet. There are trained armies of chefs, litter collectors, pooper-scoopers and maintenance engineers. Firework displays are held each evening on the main central deck above the Happy Trillionaire Casino, weather permitting. It’s easy to understand why those who can afford her tariffs carry on cruising until – and then long after – death.

  Wandering the decks in his lilac-stripe crew blazer, resident tour host Frank Onions never paid much attention to the news reports he saw in magazines left glowing over the arms of sun loungers. Still, he knew that dying was no longer the big deal it had once been. Death, it had turned out, was the answer to many of the problems of old age. With your weakening heart stopped, with your failing body eviscerated and your memory uploaded and your organs renewed, you were free to shuffle around on your titanium hips for another few decades. And, after that, you could book in for the same procedure again. And again. There were, admittedly, some quibbles about whether the post-living were still technically the same people they had once been. But, working as Frank did in an industry which relied so heavily on the post-centenarian trade, it would have been churlish to complain.

  It seemed like there were more corpses than ever as he led the morning excursion to the ruins of Knossos in Crete, with the Glorious Nomad anchored off what remained of the city of Heraklion. At least fourteen out of the forty-two heads he counted on the tour bus looked to be dead. Make that double, if you included their minders. The easiest way to tell the dead apart from the living was by a quick glance at their wigs and toupees. Not that the living oldies didn’t favour such things as well, but the dead were uniformly bald – hair, like skin, seemed to be something the scientists haven’t fully got the knack of replacing – and had a particularly bilious taste in rugware. The lines of bus seats Frank faced sprouted Elvis coxcombs, dyed punky tufts and Motown beehives. The dead loved to wear big sunglasses, as well. They shunned the light, like the vampires they somewhat resembled, and favoured loose-fitting clothes in unlikely combinations of manmade fabrics. Even the men put on too much makeup to disguise their pasty skins. As the tour bus climbed towards the day’s cultural destination and Frank took the mike and kicked into his spiel about Perseus and the Minotaur, a mixed smell of corrupted flesh, facecream and something like formaldehyde wafted over him.

  The September sun wasn’t particularly harsh as Frank, Glorious Nomad lollipop in raised right hand, guided his shuffling bunch from sight to stair-lift to moving walkway. Here is the priest-king fresco and here is the throne room and here is the world’s first flush toilet. The only other tour group were from the Happy Minstrel, another big cruise vessel berthed at the old American naval base at Souda Bay. As the two slow streams shuffled and mingled in their frail efforts to be first to the souvenir shop, Frank couldn’t help but worry that he was going to end up with some of the wrong guests. Then, as he watched them some more – so frail, so goddamn pointless in their eagerness to spend the money they’d earned back in their discarded lives as accountants from Idaho or lawyers from Stockholm or plant hire salesmen from Wolverhampton – he wondered if it would matter.

  He corralled what seemed like the right specimens back on the bus without further incident, and they headed on toward what today’s itinerary described as A Typical Cretan Fishing Village. The whole place looked convincing enough if you ignored the concrete berms erected as protection against the rising seas, and the local villagers did local villager as well as anyone who had to put on the same act day after day reasonably could.

  Afterwards, Frank sat under a olive tree in what passed for the harbourfront taverna, took a screen out from his back pocket a
nd pretended to read. The waiter brought him stuffed olives, decent black decaf and a plate of warm pita bread. It was hard, sometimes, to complain.

  “Mind if we join you?”

  Frank suppressed a scowl and put away his screen. Then, as he looked up, his contractual smile became genuine.

  “Sure, sure. It would be a pleasure.”

  She was wearing a strappy sundress made of some kind of fabric that twinkled and changed with the dappling light. So did her bare golden shoulders. So did her golden hair.

  “I’m Frank Onions.”

  “Yes . . .” There was a curious intensity to her gaze, which was also golden. “. . . We know.” She raked back a chair. Then another. And beckoned.

  Shit. Not just her. Although Frank supposed that was to be expected; apart from crew, the only young people you found on board ships like the Glorious Nomad were minders. The dead man who shuffled up was a sorry case indeed. His toupee was a kind of silver James Dean duck’s arse, but it was wildly askew. So were the sunglasses, and the tongue which emerged from between ridiculously rouged lips in concentration at the act of sitting looked like a hunk of spoiled liver.

  “Oh, I’m Dottie Hastings, by the way. This is Warren.”

  As this Dottie-vision leant to re-straighten the rug and sunglasses, the dead man slurred something which Frank took to be hello.

  “Well . . .” She returned her gaze to Frank. “We really enjoyed your tour and talk this morning. What can we get you? A carafe of retsina? Some ouzo?”

  Much though he’d have loved to agree with anything Dottie suggested, Frank shook his head. “I really don’t drink that kind of stuff . . . Not that I have a problem with it . . .” He felt compelled to add. “I just like to take care of myself.”

  “Oh yes.” Frank could feel – literally fucking feel – Dottie’s gaze as it travelled over him. “I can see. You work out?”

  “Well. A bit. There’s not much else to do in time off when you’re crew.”

  She made a wry smile. “So. About that drink. Maybe some more coffee? I’m guessing decaf, right?”

  Dottie, he noticed, settled for a small ouzo, although the Warren thing restricted himself to orange juice, a considerable amount of which she then had to mop up from around his wizened neck. There was a strange and unminderly tenderness about her gestures that was almost touching. Lovely though she was, Frank found it hard to watch.

  “You do realise,” she said, balling up paper napkins, “that most of the stories you told us about Knossos are pure myth?”

  Frank spluttered into his coffee. But Dottie was smiling at him in a mischievous way, and her mouth had gone slightly crooked. Then the knowing smile became a chuckle, and he had to join in. After all, so much of what they’d just been religiously inspecting – the pillars, the frescos, the bull’s horns – had been erected by Arthur Evans a couple of hundred years before in a misguided attempt to recreate how he thought Knossos should have been. But Evans got most of it wrong. He was even wrong about the actual name. Frank never normally bothered to spoil his tales of myths and Minotaurs with anything resembling the truth, but, as Warren drooled and he and Dottie chatted, vague memories of the enthusiasm which had once driven him to study ancient history returned.

  Dottie wasn’t just impossibly beautiful. She was impossibly smart. She even knew about Wunderlich, whose theory that the whole of Knossos was in fact a vast mausoleum was a particular favourite of his. By the time they needed to return to the tour bus to view the famous statue of the bare breasted woman holding those snakes – now also known to be a modern fake – Frank was already close to something resembling love. Or at least, serious attachment. There was something about her. Something, especially, about that golden gaze. There was both a playful darkness and a serene innocence somewhere in there which he just couldn’t fathom. It was like looking down at two coins flashing up at you from some cool, deep river. Dottie wasn’t just clever and beautiful. She was unique.

  “Well . . .” He stood up, as dizzy as if he’s been the one who’s been knocking back the ouzo. “Those treasures won’t get looked at on their own.”

  “No. Of course.” A poem of golden flesh and shifting sundress, she, too, arose. Then she leaned to help the Warren-thing, and for all his disgust at what she was doing, Frank couldn’t help but admire the way the tips of her breasts shifted against her dress. “I’m really looking forward to this afternoon. I mean . . .” After a little effort, Warren was also standing, or at least leaning against her. His mouth lolled. His toupee had gone topsy-turvy again, and the skin revealed beneath looked like a grey, half-deflated balloon. “We both are.” Dottie smiled that lovely lopsided grin again. “Me and my husband Warren.”

  Minders were always an odd sort, even if they did make up the majority of Frank’s shipboard conquests. But Dottie was different. Dottie was something else. Dottie was alive in ways that those poor sods who simply got paid for doing what they did never were. But married? You sometimes encountered couples, it was true, who’d crossed the so-called bereavement barrier together. Then there were the gold-diggers; pneumatic blondes bearing not particularly enigmatic smiles as they pushed around some relic in a gold-plated wheelchair. But nowadays your typical oil billionaire simply accepted the inevitable, died, and got himself resurrected. Then he just carried on pretty much as before. That was the whole point.

  Frank Onions lay down in his accommodation tube that night with a prickly sense of dislocation. Just exactly where was he going with his life – living down in these crew decks, deep, deep below the Glorious Nomad’s waterline where the only space you could call your own was so small you could barely move? It might not seem so up along the parks and shopping malls, but down here there was never any doubt that you were at sea. Heavy smells of oil and bilge competed with the pervasively human auras of spoiled food, old socks and vomit. It was funny, really, although not in any particularly ha-ha way, how all the progress of modern technology should have come to this; a hive-like construct where you shut yourself in like you were a pupae preparing to hatch. No wonder he wasted his time in the crew gym working his body into some approximation of tiredness, or occupied what little was left hunting the next easy fuck. No wonder none of the ship’s many attractions held the slightest interest for him. No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

  All he could think of was Dottie. Dottie standing. Dottie seated. Dottie smiling her lopsided smile. The sway of her breasts against that prismatic fabric. Then Frank thought, even though he desperately didn’t want to, of what Dottie might be doing right now with that zombie husband of hers. Mere sex between them didn’t seem very likely, but mopping up food and levering withered limbs in and out of stairlifts was merely the tip of the iceberg of the tasks minders were required to perform. The thing about being dead was that blood, nerve cells and tissue, even when newly cloned, were susceptible to fresh corruption, and thus needed constant renewal and replacement. To earn their salaries, minders didn’t just give up a few years of their lives. After being pumped full of immune-suppressants, they were expected to donate their body fluids and tissues to their hosts on a regular basis. Many even sprouted the goitre-like growths of a new replacement organs.

  Frank tossed. Frank turned. Frank saw throbbing tubes, half flesh, half rubber, emerging from unimaginable orifices. Then he felt the rush of the sea beneath the Glorious Nomad’s great hull as she ploughed on across the Mediterranean. And he saw Dottie rising shining and complete from its waters like some new maritime goddess.

  As the Glorious Nomad zigzagged across the Aegean from the medieval citadel of Rhodes to the holy island of Patmos, Frank Onions kept seeing Dottie Hastings even when she wasn’t there. A glint of her hair amid the trinkets in the backstreets of Skyros. A flash of her shadowed thighs across the golden dunes of Evvoia. He felt like a cat in heat, like an angel on drugs. He felt like he was back in the old times which had never existed.

  Warren Hastings wasn’t hard to find out about when Frank ransacked the Glorious
Nomad’s records. He’d made his first fortune out of those little hoops you used to get hung at the top of shower curtains. His second came from owning the copyright on part of the DNA chain of some industrial biochemical. Warren Hastings was seriously, seriously rich. The sort of rich you got to be not by managing some virtual pop band or inventing a cure for melancholy, but by doing stuff so ordinary no one really knew or cared what it was about. For all the money a top-of-the-range Ultra-Deluxe Red Emperor Suite must be costing him, he and Dottie should by rights have been plying the oceans on their own cruiser, living on a private island, or floating in a spacepod. Perhaps they enjoyed the company of lesser immortals. Or perhaps they simply liked slumming it.

  The more Frank thought about it, the more the questions kept piling up in his head. And the biggest question of all was Dottie herself. It was an odd shock, despite all the times he’d now seen her and Warren exhibiting every sign of tenderness, to discover that she’d married him ten years earlier before he’d even died in a small, private ceremony in New Bali. There she was, dressed in virginal white beneath a floral arch, with Warren standing beside her and looking in a whole lot better shape than he did now. The records were confused and contradictory about exactly when he’d chosen to die, but he must have started seriously decaying before he finally made the leap, whilst Dottie herself seemed to have just emerged, beautiful and smiling and entirely unchanged, into the more discreet and upmarket corners of the society pages, and into what you could no longer describe as Warren’s life.

  It all still felt like a mystery, but for once Frank was grateful for the contract clause which insisted he spend a designated number of hours in the company of paying passengers. He mingled at the cocktail hour of the Waikiki Bar, and feigned an interest in a whole variety of passenger activities about which he couldn’t have given the minutest fuck until he worked out what kind of social routine the Hastings were following, and then began to follow something similar himself.