The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The Benjan singleton reaches me in time. Nearly.

  He struggles with their minions. I help. I am many and he is one. He is quick, I am slow. That he is one of the originals does matter to me. I harbor the same affection for him that one does for a favorite finger.

  I hit the first one of the bastards square on. It goes to pieces just as it swings the claw thing at me.

  Damn! it’s good to be back in a body again. My muscles bunching under tight skin, huffing in hot breaths, happy primate murder-joy shooting adrenaline-quick.

  One of the Majiken comes in slow as weather and I cut him in two. Been centuries since I even thought of doing somethin’ like that. Thumping heart, yelling, joyful slashing at them with tractor spin-waves, the whole business.

  A hell of a lot of ’em, though.

  They hit me in shoulder and knee and I go down, pain shooting, swimming in the low centrifugal g of the station. Centuries ago I wanted to go swimming in the clear blue seas of Luna, I recall. In warm tropical waters at the equator, under silvery Earthshine. ...

  But she is there. I swerve and dodge and she stays right with me. We waltz through the bastards. Shards flying all around and vacuum sucking at me but her in my veins. Throat-tightening pure joy in my chest.

  Strumming notes sound through me and it is she

  Fully in me, at last Gift of the station in all its spaces

  For which we give thanks yea verily in this the ever-consuming moment—

  Then there is a pain there and I look down and my left arm is gone.

  Just like that.

  And she of ages past is with me now.

  —and even if he is just digits running somewhere, he can relive scenes, the grainy stuff of life. He feels a rush of warm joy. Benjan will escape, will go on. Yet so will he, the mere simulation, in his own abstract way.

  Distant agonies echo. Coming nearer now. He withdraws further.

  As the world slows to frozen silence outside he shall meditate upon his memories. It is like growing old, but reliving all scenes of the past with sharpness and flavor retained.

  —(The scent of new-cut grass curls up red and sweet and humming through his nostrils. The summer day is warm; a Gray wind caresses him, cool and smooth. A piece of chocolate bursts its muddy flavor in his mouth.)

  Time enough to think over what has happened, what it means. He opens himself to the moment. It sweeps him up, wraps him in a yawning bath of sensation. He opens himself. Each instant splinters sharp into points of perception. He opens himself. He. Opens. Himself.

  Gray is not solely for humanity. There are greater categories now. Larger perspectives on the world beckon to us. To us all.

  You know many things, but what he knows is both less and more than what I tell to us.

  —for Martin Fogg

  V.A.O.

  GEOFF RYMAN

  Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone—the magazine where almost all of his published short fiction has appeared—with his brilliant novella The Un-conquered Country that he first attracted any serious attention. The Un-conquered Country, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of www.ryman.com, and which, in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent book is a new novel, Lust. His stories have appeared in our Twelfth, Thirteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Annual Collections.

  In the wry and compelling story that follows, he introduces us to some people at the very end of life who find that there’s still some challenges to face—and some surprises ahead.

  Jazzanova wandered off again. He was out all night.

  They tell me that they’ve found him up a tree. So I sit in his room and wait for him and I remember that he told me once that when he was a kid, he used to climb up pine trees in the park to read comics—Iron Man, Dr. Midnight. I guess he was a dreamy kind of kid. Then he came to Jersey and started to live it instead. That’s when we met, in college.

  They bring him back in. Jazza looks like a cricket that somebody’s stained brown with tea. I hate his shuffling walk. His feet never leave the ground like he’s wearing slippers all the time. The backwards baseball cap he always wears doesn’t suit Alzheimer’s either. He shuffles off to take a leak and I hear him getting into a fight with his talking toilet.

  The toilet says, “You’ve been missing your medication.” It’s probably sampled his pee.

  Jazzanova doesn’t like that. “Goddamit!” He sounds drunk and angry. He flushes the thing, to shut it up. He comes out and his glasses start up on him. “11:15,” his glasses say in this needling little voice. “You should have taken medication at 9:00 am and 10:30 am. Go to the blue tray and find the pills in the green column.”

  They never let up on you. The whole place is wired. It’s so full of ordnance you can hear it. Jazza’s bedroom sounds like it’s full of hummingbirds.

  He blanks it all out and kinda falls back onto the sofa. His callipers aren’t so hot on sitting down. Then he just stares for a couple of seconds. He’s looking at his hands like they don’t belong to him. Finally he says to me, “What say we get outa here for a beer, um ...”

  He’s forgotten who I am again. I can see the little flicker in his glasses as it goes through photos and whispers my name at him. “Brewster,” he says. Then he like, shrugs and says, “It’s all in the mix.”

  It’s all in the mix. That’s what he always says when he’s pretending he’s chilled out and not gaga. Jazza’s still on planet Clubland, a million years ago. Maybe he’s happy there.

  But he can’t pay his bills.

  “Bar’s not open,” I tell him. I hold out his blue tray of pills. “Take one of these, man. Top buzz.”

  Instead of taking one, he fumbles up a wholehandful and the tray says to him “Nooooooo.” It sounds like a bouncer outside a club.

  “Shit,” he says and takes five of the fuckers anyway.

  Outside his big window, it’s late summer, early morning, all kinda smoky. It’s a nice view; I’ll say that. Lawn, trees. The view is wired too. Whole place is full of VAO. Victim Activated Ordnance. To protect us rich old folks.

  Once I saw this kid who’d climbed over the wall. He was just a kid. He probably just wanted to play on the grass. The camera saw him and zapped him. They used pulse sound on him. He clutched his head and tried to run, but his feet kept wobbling. Each bullet is 150 decibels and you can’t really think. He stumbled down onto his knees and he’d stand up, drop, stand up drop down again until they came for him.

  I used to make that stuff. I used to make the software that recognises faces. Now it recognises me.

  I go back and my room smells like a trashcan. It’s got grey hair in the corners. It pisses me off what I pay for this place. The least they could do is keep it clean. There’s got to be some advantages to being an old vegetable.

  I push the buzzer and I get no answer. I push again, and nothing happens so I go to the screen and start shouting. I tell ’em straight up, “I push your buzzer and you don’t come, man. I could be dying of a heart attack up here. If I tell the papers, that’d blow your sales pitch. You don’t answer my
buzzer, I scorch your ass!”

  About 45 minutes later the Kid shows up moving real slow. He leans back against the wall, arms folded. I can’t even remember what fucked-up country he’s from, but I can read him. He’s got that mean, sour look you get when nobody gives a fuck so why should you.

  I feel pretty pissed off myself. “Next time I ring the buzzer you fuckin show up.”

  “Sorry, Sir.” Kid says ‘Sir’ like maybe it means Dog in his own language.

  “What the fuck is up with you?”

  “Nothing, Sir.”

  I look for buttons to push. You know, like if someone blanks you out, you get them mad and maybe you find out what’s going on?

  I insult the Kid. “Can’t you talk English?”

  Nothing.

  “It’s a helluva way to get a tip. Or no tip. You want no tip?”

  His arms snap open like a spring lock, his head swivels like armed CCTV, and his mouth spouts garbage like a TV in translation. I pushed his button all right.

  When he stops swearing in Albanian or Mongolian or whatever I finally hear him squawk. “I get no tip no how!”

  So that’s it. He’s not getting his tips.

  The assholes who run this place don’t pay the staff. You gotta give the nurses tips, the cleaners tips, the doctors tips, the waiters tips. If the toilets get more intelligent we’ll have to tip the toilets. And management makes sure you do it regular. That’s one of the things about this dump I hate the most. They keep sending you little forms to fill in to debit your bank account. Those fuckin forms show up on your computer, on your TV, on your microwave, on your specs. The forms have these horrible chirpy little voices. “I’m sure you want to express your appreciation for the staff.”

  It costs 100 thousand a year to live here and they call the tips discretionary. That’s another hundred fifty a week. And I make sure I pay it because I want these bozos to motor if I get sick or something.

  I keep my voice cool cause I want to make sure I got this right. “No tips? I pay your tips, man.”

  I need this guy’s name. You cannot talk somebody down if you don’t know their name. My eyeglasses are running through all the photographs of staff, and finally I see him. I click a bit of my brain, like I’m going to ask him his name. The glasses tell me.

  The Kid is called Joao and he’s from some part of Indonesia that speaks Portuguese.

  “Joao?” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I am sorry. I pay. Really.”

  He stands there swelling up and down like he’s pumping iron.

  “Joao? I pay the tips. You don’t get them?”

  Kid’s so mad his wires are crossed. He scowls and blinks.

  “Lemme show you,” I say.

  I try to ease him to the machine, you know, I just touch his arm, and he throws it off, like this. For a second I think he’s going to give me a Jersey kiss. So I keep my voice low and soft. “Hey, man, just be cool about it, OK. Lemme show you.”

  So I open up my records. See? I show him all that debit. All those tips going out just as regular as spam. I point to the money, there on the screen. Right out of my bank account.

  The Kid blinks and rubs his whole face with his hands. I begin to wonder if they teach people to read in the country he’s from.

  Then suddenly he shouts. “I no get them!” He’s throwing up his hands and wiggling his cheeks. But I can see. Now he’s not mad at me.

  I feel pretty sick myself, in my gut like my chicken was full of salmonella. I’m thinking, oh fuck. Oh fuck. We got ourselves a tips racket.

  Somebody somewhere, probably one of the hotshot doctors who can’t pay for his new swimming pool or his lawsuit insurance is hacking out the cleaners’ tips.

  I could complain, and I could call in the law. But. I got reasons. Know what I mean?

  “How long you not been getting your tips?” I ask him.

  He tells me. Months. I can see why he isn’t all that concerned about cleaning up my shit. I sit him down, pour him a whisky. This will take a while and I want him to know right in his balls who got him back his money. Me. Here. The Brewster.

  I call up my contact. She’s top dope, a tough old babe still on the outside called Nikki. She’s got this great translation package. We have this audio conversation about her new bungalow which is a cover for a hack download. It comes in looking like a phone bill. It then runs a request from a nostalgia TV line. I load up and sit back and watch what looks like an old Britney Spears video.

  It’s not a video, believe me. I can’t do anything that looks like a hack. The ordnance is always watching. They say it’s in case we get ill, but hey, why do they snoop our keystrokes? If you want to hack here, it’s a case of no hands. And everything has to look like something else.

  I smile at the Kid and jerk my head at the cameras, glasses, TV, computer ... all the surveillance. But hey, the Kid’s cool. He can’t speaka da English, but he gets what I’m doing. For the first time I get a smile out him. He chuckles and lifts up the whiskey glass. “Z24!” he says. Ah, that’s Kidtalk.

  “Banging!” I say back. That’s my talk. “You’ve a Britney fan huh?”

  The Kid’s sussed. He knows exactly what’s going on. “Britney ... Whitney ... all that old stuff.” He chuckles and nods and shakes his head. “I big big fan!” I know what’s he’s thinking. He’s thinking, this old guy is into some shit. He’s thinking, this old guy is hacking me back my tips.

  The microwave pings like my dinner’s ready, only it’s not food that’s cooking. I put on my glasses, and then put the transcoder on top of them and suddenly Britney is translated into the Corporation’s accounts. But only if you are looking at ’em through my glasses.

  I got a real good line on who’s been stealing a little bit of the Kid’s bandwidth.

  My Medical Supervisor. Mr. trusted Dr. Curtis. So I siphon out the dosh and siphon it into the Kid’s corporate account. Ready for loading to his bank.

  “Banging!” the Kid says.

  Grand Dad House.

  So then I call on Dr. Curtis. “You got a face like shit and your brains are all on your chin!”

  Dr. Curtis leans back and looks like someone just been told a real bad joke. Behind him is a wall of screens, some of them showing people’s pumping insides.

  You see, you get old, you end up in here and that gives them the right to monitor every last act and word. You’re a patient.

  I’m one mad patient. “I may be 80 but I could still deck you!”

  He leans back, with his eyebrows up and his eyes hooded. “I could always prescriptionize out all that aggressive testosterone. So unbecoming in the aged.”

  I hate him. Really. I can take most people but if I could do Curtis an injury I would. Curtis has got hold of my pubic hair and can give it a twist whenever he wants.

  “Look Curtis, you been hacking off our tips. Duh! Don’t you think the staff kinda of notice they’re not getting paid? And I know we’re all a bunch of senile old codgers, but even we can tell when we don’t get our asses wiped cause the staff can’t feed their kids. You leave our tips alone, asshole!”

  The good doctor sniffs. “I’m afraid I have expenses.”

  “Yeah, and they all got tits.”

  “And I’ve only got one other source of income.” He starts to smile. A nice long pause, like it’s his close up or something. He purses his lips into a little bitty kiss. “You.”

  He’s such a drama student. His breath smells of cheese. He tells me “If my account is empty, I’ll hack it out of yours.”

  No he won’t. It won’t be that easy. But he has got a point. It is the whole point, the underlying point. I gotta sit on that point everyday and it goes straight up my ass.

  I can’t walk without help. My kid’s poor. I gotta find a hundred thou a year.

  So I take it out of other people’s bank accounts, OK?

  Curtis is my doctor. He knows everything I do. I have to give him a cut.

  I have a dream. I put Dr. Curtis in rubber mask and
backwards baseball cap, and shove him out on the lawn at night so the cameras don’t recognise him and he gets area-denied. He gets sound gunned. He gets microwaved; his whole body feels like it’s touching a hot lightbulb. His whole goddamned shaven tattooed trendy fat little ass feels what’s like to be poor and hungry and climbing over our wall just to activate some ordnance.

  All this is before lunch. It’s a well crucial day. Stick around, it’s about to get even more crucial.

  It’s Saturday and that’s Bill’s day to visit. I go to the Solarium and wait, and then wait some more. Today he doesn’t show. I wait a little while longer. And then ring him up to leave a message. I don’t want sound whiney, so I try to sound up. “Hey, Bill, this your Dad. Everything’s cool, I hope it’s under control for you too.”

  Then I sit and hang out. I don’t want to be some sad old fuck. I open up a newspaper. It tells me Congress wants to change tax rates, to ease the burden on younger taxpayers. Oh cool, thanks.

  I go back to check out Jazza. It’s the afternoon, but he’s sleeping like a baby.

  Jazza used to be so cool. It’s good to have someone from your time, your place. Even if he doesn’t remember who you are.

  We wanted to send a rocket to Mars. We built it ourselves and called it Aphrodite and went to Nevada and launched it and it went straight up looking like 1969 and hope.

  We made pretend-music; started our own company, developed a couple of computer games, called ourselves Fighting Fit and sold the company. We ran a pirate download and shared the same girlfriend for a while. After we lost all our money, we emptied the same accounts too. Amateur spaceships don’t pay for themselves. I decided to go mundane, and went into security software. I went straight for a while. Jazza never did. He still hung out there. From time to time I gave him some freelance. When Bill went to college I went to check Jazza out. He was still at a mixing desk at fifty. He was wearing one of those shirts that keeps changing pictures or told the punters what toons he was pumping out.