Some fat guy in a baseball cap is shouting. An exo arm is raised. The suit is like a metal cage around some ancient old dear, and you can see that she’s blinking and confused. I realize all the CCTV is on, and it’s edited out later. That’s entertainment.
The gun goes off. The fat man ducks and yelps, but his hat has already spun off his head. Those suits can aim to within a fraction of a millimetre.
“That’s one move he won’t pull again in a hurry,” says announcer John. He chuckles, like it’s a wrestling match. This stuff, you react to it like a movie. It performs the same function.
All along the rows, a gentle sideways motion begins towards the suits, like a rippling river. It all looks so gentle and calm. On the field police cars pull up and rub noses like it’s a BBQ on a bank by a river on a summer’s day.
The announcers can only tell us what we can see for ourselves. But you know, it becomes more real when they say it. “John, it looks like the police on the field are conferring with both the team heads and stadium security managers.”
“It’s a real problem for them, Marie. How can they apprehend the VAO without injuring any of the fans?”
The great burbling voice begins again. “What do you think of, when you see us? Do you think getting old is something we did to ourselves? Do you think it won’t happen to you? Do you think you won’t get ugly, sick, and weak? Do you think health foods, gyms, and surgery are going to stop that? We’re going to go now. But just remember. Your kids are watching you. And learning. What you do to us, your kids will do to you.”
The crowd is kind of silent, no motion, just a kind of hush, as if the sea had decided to be still. The siren goes round and round, but you have the feeling no one’s listening. The suits march the old guys inside them back down from the stands towards the rescue platform.
The weirdest thing: some kid in a foilsuit helps one of the VAOs up. And I realise that they understand. They’re halfway there, all these people in this stadium, with their soyaburgers and beer and team shirts. They’re halfway there to being on our side.
You got to them Jazza.
And the platform snores itself awake and coughs and whirs, and sort of tilts a bit getting up, like all of us old stereotypes. But once it’s steady, it soars straight up.
And Jazza stands. Just stands still. The program has given him nothing to do, but’s also like he’s finished. He looks up to the sky, like he always does now, up at nothing. He stands like a king on the prow of his ship praying to heaven, and sails away.
And oh god I’m leaking again. Mandy can’t look at me. Her mouth does a bitter little twist and she says. “Silhouette was Jazza ...”
Gus says, “What?”
I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to explain or talk or do anything at all, but I can’t sit still either. I feel sick. I feel messed up. I feel angry. I stand up and lurch out of there. Gus calls after me. “Hey, Brewst, what is this? Brewst?”
I’m walking and I don’t know where or why. I walk into the Solarium and walk into the gym, and walk into the garden, and I go to the library but that only has books, and in the end, there’s only one place to go.
I go back to Jazza’s room. The Kid is still there, like he said he would be. “Scram,” I tell him.
I really look at Jazza. I think that maybe he was going back to Maryland for one last time. Maybe he was going to climb a tree and just stay there.
I’m thinking how we lose everything. Everything we were, everything we made ourselves into. If you were strong that goes, if you were smart that goes, if you were cool that goes.
Jazza’s face is brown and blue like a map. He’s sitting up but his head has dropped backwards, so he’s staring up at the ceiling with his mouth pulled open. His blue eyes go straight through me to nowhere, like he’s looking for an answer but forgot the question.
And that’s when I finally say to myself. He’s gone. Jazza leaked away a long, long time ago. There’s been nothing left of Jazza for months. So I let him go.
I’m not too clear about the whole show after that.
Armament comes back and tries to sound like they’re going to be tough on my ass. Secret Squirrel keeps asking the same questions over and over. The message is: if we find you had anything to do with this, we’ll still get you.
The Armament looks at me. “We know about your hacks. That’ll have to stop.”
Curtis stands there watching, and he starts to squirm a bit and look in my direction.
“Given that you cooperated, we may take a tolerant view of that. But only if you continue to cooperate, only if the attacks stop.”
What I do next is deliberate. I turn to Curtis and shrug and apologise with my eyes. That’s all it takes. Secret Squirrel snaps his head round at Curtis’s, and narrows his eyes.
“24 by 7 by 365, huh?” Armament says in a quiet little voice.
He’s got it. I shrug an apology to Curtis again, just to drive my point home.
Curtis goes edgy, jumpy, mean. “Well. Well, if that means what I think it does, you cannot continue to be a guest here, Mr. Brewster.”
After that, things moved quick.
I told Bill about the hack and the police and it was decided. I would live with my boy. It’s just a beaten-up old bungalow on the Jersey side. Like the kind of house I grew up in, when computers were new and cool, and everything was new and cool from shoes to playing cards and you had takeaway pizza for dinner. Even Mom was cool with headphones. Hot in summer with screen doors for the flies, and dry and warm in winter.
I’m on the phone to Bill and I say, “At least I’ll get out of this goddamned dump.”
There’s a minute silence and then Bill says. “Dad. They’ve worked miracles for you.”
And I think about the neurobics and how my legs are learning to walk, and I have to acknowledge that. So I guess I can lose being mad at the Farm. I guess I can feel I got a pretty good deal.
I go to see Mandy. I fill her in. She says. “You’re the only man here with any cool whatsoever.” She’s got a face like the badlands of Arizona. And I don’t know why but right now, that’s as sexy as fuck.
Remember that transcoder jammed into my dick? Found a new use for it.
So I’m lying there with all the teddy bells and the scent of Miss Dior and I say to Mandy. “Come to Jersey with me.”
She looks down and says, “Oh boy.” Then she says, “I gotta think.”
I ask her, “What’s to think?”
“Baby. If I wanted a bungalow in Jersey, I could have had it. Here, I got a Solarium, I got quiet, I got my own room.”
“You dumb cluck. You’ll be alone.”
I see her looking at different futures. I see her get the fear. It makes all the skin of her face sag like old chamois leather. I hold her and hug her and kiss the top of her dyed conditioned perfumed hair. I try to open up things for her. “Come and be part of my family, babe. Bill’s a great kid; he’ll let us stay up late drinking whisky. We’ll watch old DVDs. They’ll be people round at Thanksgiving.”
And her head is shaking no. “I’ll be stuck in one tiny bedroom, with someone else’s family. That’s where I started out.”
She grunts and slaps my thigh. “I can’t do it.” She sits up and lights a cigarette and then she lets me have it straight.
“I danced for fat old men. I’d get into a bath with other women and they’d look at our cunts through a pane of glass. I was that far from being a whore. I took the money and I got smart with it, and I kept it. Even though asshole after asshole man tried to take it away from me. This, here, fancy pants Happy Farm is my reward.”
She takes a breath and says. “I’m too scared to go to Jersey.”
“I’ll come and see you,” I say. She doesn’t believe me, and I’m not entirely sure I do either.
So suddenly I’m standing outside the Happy Farm, and thank God they’re not currently microwaving anybody, and I’m saying goodbye to the place and you know, I think I’ll miss it. Mandy isn’t
there. Gus is there, which is big of him, and he shakes my hand like maybe he thinks he’ll get Mandy back. But I can see. His arms are thin like sucked-on pens, and his tummy is big like a boil. Gus isn’t going to be with us long.
The Kid comes, and he brings his sweet tiny little wife with him. She’s rehearsed something to say in English. She says it with her eyes closed and giggles afterwards. “Thank you very much Mr. Brewster you have been so good to my Joao.” And then she holds up her beautiful new baby daughter for me to see.
Life goes on. And then it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean anything. Which means that death doesn’t mean anything, either. It means that while you’re here you can do what the hell you want.
I took off the callipers. I wanted to show them that I could do it. I walked for all of us old farts with no money, all the way to the bus. Bill caught me and helped me up the steps.
I looked around for Jazzanova, but he wasn’t there, and never will be.
One thing those bastards don’t know about is the hack that pays Jazza’s bills. It’s a one-off on the bank’s system. It’s not on my machine or on Jazza’s. Curtis doesn’t know that and the Armament doesn’t know that. We’re gonna keep Jazza cared for.
And all I’m feeling is one solid lump of love. I give the Farm one last wave goodbye and go home.
Total buzz.
Winters Are Hard
STEVEN POPKES
Steven Popkes made his first sale in 1985, and in the years that followed has contributed a number of distinguished stories to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Science Fiction Age, Full Spectrum, Tomorrow, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, and others. His first novel, Caliban Landing, appeared in 1987, and was followed in 1991 by an expansion to novel-length of his popular novella “The Egg,” retitled Slow Lightning. (“The Egg,” in its original form, was in our Seventh Annual Collection.) He was also part of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop project to produce science fiction scenarios about the future of Boston, Massachusetts, that cumulated in the 1994 anthology, Future Boston, to which he contributed several stories. He lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, with his family, works for a company that builds aviation instrumentation, and is learning to be a pilot.
In the compelling story that follows, he shows us that although it might be an admirable goal to get close to nature, maybe you shouldn’t get too close ...
Once I got through to Sam Orcutt, Jack Brubaker wasn’t hard to find.
“There he is,” yelled Sam over the roar of the engine and started flying the ancient Cessna in a circle. I suppose the idea of a floatplane is that there is always some lake or river one can land in but I didn’t see any water larger than a pigeon. We were flying deep in the heart of Montana: the Beck-Lewis Wildlife Refuge.
Sam had to be circling for a reason so I looked down the left wing toward the center and sure enough there was a man dressed entirely in fur. He watched us circle for a minute or so, then waved.
Sam leveled out immediately. “He sees us!” he shouted, obviously relieved.
I nodded and checked over Goldie, the red-tailed hawk perched on my shoulder. I’m a freelance human-interest reporter (“HIR” in the trade) and I don’t make that much money. Do I hire a crew? Too expensive. Do I get a partner? In my old Kindergarten class one of the report cards stated: “Does not work well with others.” That particular genetic trait had stayed with me all my life. Instead, I blew a year’s earnings on Goldie. Her visual centers had been modified to download cam quality material to the storage unit and monitor I kept on my belt and she’d been trained to hunt for good camera angles and to watch for my cues.
I lifted her wing to check the readings and the test monitor. If things went well I’d be out here for two weeks and I didn’t want anything to go wrong. The broadcast circuitry passed final self-tests and everything was fully charged. I gave her a strip of steak from a sealed bag in my pocket. She ate it between taking shots of Sam, the airplane, the landscape and me.
We flew up over a ridge and on the other side was a convenient pond no smaller than a postage stamp where we landed. Sam brought the plane up to the shore and we tied it off and unloaded. He brought out two folding chairs and sat them down, then brought out two beers and a six-pack of carbonated water. “Sit down,” he said. “The chairs are for us. He won’t use them.”
About an hour of uncomfortable silence later, Jack Brubaker came over the ridge in a lope. I pulled out my binoculars to see what I could see.
I thought I had seen a man dressed in fur but I was wrong. Jack was covered in fur, all right. His own: a thin pelt the color and texture of a German shepherd. Only the hair on his head and between his legs was different: thick, wiry curls. I couldn’t see any external genitalia. The only naked skin I could see was on the palms of his hands and the area around his eyes and nose. The exposed skin was heavily pigmented but the eyes that shone out under the thick brows were bright, cornflower blue.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” agreed Sam, nodding.
It was perhaps a mile from the top of the ridge down to the plane but Jack wasn’t even breathing hard when he reached us.
“Sam!” he said and grinned. He sniffed the air and glanced at me for a moment and nodded in my direction. “It’s good to see you,” he said to Sam. Then, he saw the bottles of seltzer and the grin grew even broader. “You remembered! Thanks.” He opened one immediately, drained it, belched loudly.
Jack was not especially tall—less than six feet, anyway. But he was as broad as a Samoan. His chest and shoulders were deep and even his head looked large. His legs were thick as logs but even so his knees and ankles seemed outsized. He didn’t smell like a man, even a man who had been in the bush for years without ever taking a shower. Instead, he gave off a musk, a flat, strong and unidentifiable scent. It made me think of tigers or hyenas or, of course, wolves. This man had been thoroughly modified.
“Nice bird,” he said, nodding towards Goldie.
“I said the same thing when I saw it,” said Sam. “This is Dan Perry. He wants to do a story on you.”
“A reporter.” He looked back at Sam and then at me.
I looked back. Jack’s eyes were unreadable. I could see no fear or apprehension. Nor could I see excitement or interest. His eyes had the same deep interest I had until now associated only with animals: the speculative eyes of cougars, the apprehensive eyes of raccoons. I wondered where his humanity had gone. How deep did the modifications go?
I let Sam earn his money. To say everybody has a price is to oversimplify the process. It is more precise to say that money is an inducement to self re-examination. In Sam’s case, it took enough money to hire enough staff to truly take charge of Beck-Lewis. I couldn’t front him the money; I’m not worth that kind of cash. I just helped him find the right people.
Sam drew him away. I turned up the gain on Goldie’s microphones.
“Look. It’s just for a couple of weeks. He’ll take some pictures and then he’ll be gone.” Sam gave me a quick glance. I tried not to look like I was listening.
“It’s enough money to secure this place,” he said, turning back to Jack. “Really secure it. He got me some real backers.”
“Who?” Jack popped open another bottle of seltzer and drained it, belched again.
“Companies with deep pockets. ADM, for one.”
“Supermarket to the world,” Jack said idly and I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, bitter or what. He smiled gently, considering, then looked back at me. “Whatever you say, Sam. Send him east tomorrow and we’ll see what Akela and Raksha have to say about it.” Then, they fell to talking of other things. I recorded everything, even the belches.
Who were Akela and Raksha? I filed the names away for future reference.
The next morning Sam couldn’t wait to get rid of me. I took my pack and equipment and started back east over the ridge. Goldie took off and soared above me
about sixty or seventy feet. Sam seemed to think Jack wouldn’t let me get lost or maybe he just didn’t care.
I kept walking. Near an outcropping of granite a voice behind me said: “Be very still.”
I stopped dead and didn’t move. A wolf the mixed color of wheat and iron appeared in front of me as quickly and suddenly as if it had been excreted from the earth. I had no idea where it came from.
This was no coyote or dog, but a big shouldered, deep-chested animal that had to be well over a hundred pounds. Its mouth was open and it panted slightly. I could see the bright white teeth below the heavy skull. Its eyes were yellow and watched me without any fear whatsoever. It glanced occasionally away from me—checking on Jack, perhaps. It didn’t have the half-myopic look of a dog; I could tell there was nothing wrong with its eyesight.
I was surprised it didn’t sniff me to find out who I was. I half started to hold out my hand to be sniffed as I would to a dog and its behavior changed totally. Gone was the easy appraisal to be replaced by a closed-mouth, no-nonsense menace. I lowered my hand back to my side very, very carefully.
This seemed to be enough and it made a low huffing sound. Behind me, I heard a similar sound as a reply. The wolf turned and trotted away.
I slowly relaxed and Jack put a hand on my shoulder. “Looks like you can stay for a while.”
“Was that Akela or Raksha?”
“Raksha, Akela’s mate. Akela is the alpha wolf. Raksha’s pups are behind the rock so she had to approve you before you could stay. Akela is off hunting somewhere but he’ll check you out when he gets back.” He started walking away. “I’ll show you where you can set up camp. We’ll be staying here another month or so before we head up north with the rest of the pack. If Akela approves, you can stay.”
Goldie came down and landed on my shoulder. I hoped she had caught some good footage. Something occurred to me. “Is my bird going to be all right?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 65