The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  At last he could no longer bear to look at the monster. “Save it.” He closed his eyes and still saw those ugly windows burned on the insides of his lids.

  “Saved,” said the computer.

  He sat, too weary to move, and let his mind soak in the blackness of the empty screen. He knew he had spent too much time recently worrying about the Cloud and the Messengers. It was perverse since everything was going so well. All the checklists were now complete, pre-flight start-up tests were underway and Seven Wonders had scheduled dedication ceremonies for Memorial Day. The opening of the Second Wonder of the Modern World would have been reason enough for a news orgy, but now the Messengers’ involvement was beginning to overshadow Wing’s masterpiece. Telelink reporters kept calling him from places like Bangkok and Kinshasa and Montevideo to ask him about the aliens. Why were they supporting the Cloud? When would they invite humanity to join their commonwealth and share in their immortality technology? What were they really like?

  He had no answers. Up until now he had done his best to avoid meeting the alien, Ndavu. Like most intelligent people, Wing had been bitterly disappointed by the Messengers. Their arrival had changed nothing: there were still too many crazy people with nukes; the war in Mexico dragged on. Although they had been excruciatingly diplomatic, it was clear that human civilization impressed them not at all. They kept their secrets to themselves—had never invited anyone to tour their starships or demonstrated the technique for preserving minds after death. The Messengers claimed that they had come to Earth for raw materials and to spread some as-yet vague message of galactic culture. Wing guessed that they held humanity in roughly the same esteem with which the conquistadors had held the Aztecs. But he could hardly admit that to reporters.

  “Something else?” The computer disturbed his reverie; it was set to prompt him for new commands after twenty minutes of inactivity.

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched, accidentally knocking his print of da Vinci’s John the Baptist askew. “What the hell time is it, anyway?”

  “One-fourteen-thirty-five AM, 19 February 2056.”

  He decided that he was too tired to get up and fix the picture.

  “Here you are.” Daisy appeared in the doorway. “Do you know what time it is?” She straightened the Baptist and then came up behind his chair. “Something wrong?”

  “SEE-Coast.”

  She began to massage his shoulders and he leaned his head back against her belly. “Can’t it wait until the morning?”

  The skin was itchy where the tear had dried. Wing rubbed it, considering.

  “Would you like to come to bed?” She bent over to kiss him and he could see that she was naked beneath her dressing gown. “All work and no play…”

  The stink of doubt that he had tried so hard to perfume with concentration enhancers still clung to him. “But what if I wake up tomorrow and can’t work on this crap? What if I don’t believe in what I’m doing anymore? I can’t live off the Glass Cloud forever.”

  “Then you’ll find something else.” She sifted his hair through her fingers.

  He plastered a smile on his face and slipped a hand inside her gown—more from habit than passion. “I love you.”

  “It’s better in bed.” She pulled him from his chair. “Just you keep quiet and follow Mother Goodwin, young man. She’ll take the wrinkles out of your brow.”

  He stumbled as he came into her arms but she caught his weight easily. She gave him a fierce hug and he wondered what she had been doing all evening.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said softly, “about this party. I give in: go ahead if you want and invite Ndavu. I promise to be polite—but that’s all.” He wanted to pull back and see her reaction but she would not let him go. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one of the things I want,” she said. Her cheek was hot against his neck.

  * * *

  Piscataqua House was built by Samuel Goodwin in 1763. A handsome building of water-struck brick and granite, it was said to have offered the finest lodging in the colonial city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Nearly three hundred years later it was still an inn and Daisy Goodwin was its keeper.

  Wing had always been intrigued by the way Daisy’s pedigree had affected her personality. It was not so much the old money she had inherited—most of which was tied up in the inn. It was the way she could bicycle around town and point out the elementary school she had attended, the Congregational Church where her grandparents had married, the huge black oak in Prescott Park that great-great-Uncle Josiah had planted during the Garfield administration. She lived with the easy grace of someone who was exactly where she belonged, doing exactly what she had always intended to do.

  Wing had never belonged. He had been born in Taipei but had fled to the States with his Taiwanese father after his American mother had been killed in the bloody reunification riots of 2026. His father, a software engineer, had spent the rest of a bitter life searching in vain for what he had left on Taiwan. Phillip Wing had gone to elementary schools in Cupertino, California; Waltham, Massachusetts; Norcross, Georgia; and Orem, Utah. He knew very little about either side of his family. “When you are old enough to understand,” his father would always say. “Someday we will talk. But not now.” Young Phillip learned quickly to stop asking; too many questions could drive his father into one of his binges. He would dose himself to the brink of insensibility with memory sweeteners and stay up half the night weeping and babbling in the Taiwanese dialect of Fujian. His father had died when Wing was a junior at Yale. He had never met Daisy. Wing liked to think that the old man would have approved.

  Wing tried hard to belong—at least to Daisy, if not to Piscataqua House. He had gutted the Counting House, a hundred-and-ninety-five-year old business annex built by the merchant Goodwins, and converted it into his offices. He was polite to the guests despite their annoying ignorance about the Cloud; most people thought it had been designed by Solon Petropolus. He helped out when she was short-handed, joined the Congregational Church despite a complete lack of religiosity, and served two terms on the city’s Planning Board. He endured the dreaded black-tie fund raisers of the National Society of Colonial Dames for Daisy’s sake and took her to the opera in Boston at least twice a year even though it gave him a headache. Now she was asking him to play host to an alien.

  An intimate party of twenty-three had gathered in the Hawthorne parlor for a buffet in Ndavu’s honor. Laporte had flown down from North Conway with his wife, Jolene. Among the locals were the Hathaways, who were still bragging about their vacation on Orbital Three, Magda Rudowski, Artistic Director of Theater-by-the-Sea, the new city manager, whose name Wing could never remember, and her husband, who never had anything to say, Reverend Smoot, the reformalist minister, and the Congemis, who owned SEE-Coast. There were also a handful of Ndavu’s hangers-on, among them the glow sculptor, Jim McCauley.

  Wing hated these kinds of parties. He had about as much chat in him as a Trappist monk. To help ease his awkwardness, Daisy sent him out into the room with their best cut-glass appetizer to help the guests get hungry. He wandered through other people’s conversations, feeling lost.

  “Oh, but we love it up north,” Jolene Laporte was saying. “It’s peaceful and the air is clean and the mountains…”

  “… are tall,” Laporte finished her sentence and winked as he reached for the appetizer. “But it’s plugging cold—Jesus!” Magda Rudowski laughed nervously. Laporte looked twisted; he had the classic hollow stare, as if his eyes had just been fished out of a jar of formaldehyde.

  “Don’t make fun, Leon,” Jolene said, pouting. “You love it too. Why, just the other day he was saying how nice it would be to stay on after the Cloud opened. I think he’d like to bask in his glory for a while.” She sprayed a test dose from the appetizer onto her wrist and took a tentative sniff. “How legal is this?”

  “Just some olfactory precursors,” Wing said, “and maybe twenty ppm of Glow.”

&
nbsp; “Maybe I’m not the only one who deserves credit, Jolene. Maybe Phil here wants a slice of the glory too.”

  Daisy wheeled the alien into the parlor. “Phillip, I’d like you to meet Mentor Ndavu.” Wing had never seen her so happy.

  The alien was wearing a loose, black pinstriped suit. He might have been a corporate vice-president with his slicked-back gray hair and long, ruddy face except that he was over two meters tall. He had to slump to fit into his wheelchair and his knees stuck out like bumpers. The chair whined as it rolled; Ndavu leaned forward extending his hand. Wing found himself counting the fingers. Of course there were five. The Messengers were nothing if not thorough.

  “I have been wanting to meet you, Phillip.”

  Wing shook hands. Ndavu’s grip was firm and oddly sticky, like plastic wrap. The Messenger grinned. “I am very much interested in your work.”

  “As we all are interested in yours.” Reverend Smoot brushed past Wing. “I, for one, would like to know…”

  “Reverend,” Ndavu spoke softly so that only those closest to him could hear, “must we always argue?”

  “… would like to know, Mentor,” continued Smoot in his pulpit voice, “how your people intend to respond to the advisory voted yesterday by the Council of Churches.”

  “Perhaps we should discuss business later, Reverend.” Ndavu shot a porcelain smile at Laporte. “Leon, this must be your wife, Jolene.”

  Daisy got Wing’s attention by standing utterly still. Between them passed an unspoken message which she punctuated by tilting her head. Wing’s inclination was to let Smoot and Ndavu go at each other but he took firm hold of the Reverend’s arm. “Would you like to see the greenhouse, Magda?” he said, turning the minister toward the actress. “The freesias are just coming into bloom; the place smells like the Garden of Eden. How about you, Reverend?” Glowering, Smoot allowed himself to be led away.

  A few of the other guests had drifted out into what had once been the stables. Daisy’s parents had replaced the old roof with sheets of clear optical plastic during the Farm Crusade, converting the entire wing into a greenhouse. In those days the inn might have closed without a reliable source of fresh produce. Magda Rudowski paused to admire a planter filled with tuberous begonias.

  Reverend Smoot squinted through the krylac roof at the stars, as if seeking heavenly guidance. “I just have to wonder,” he said, “who the joke is on.”

  Wing and Magda exchanged glances.

  “How can you look at flowers when that alien is undermining the foundations of our Judeo-Christian heritage?”

  Magda touched Smoot’s sleeve. “It’s a party, Reverend.”

  “If they don’t believe in a god, how the hell can they apply for tax-exempt status? ‘Look into the sun,’ what kind of message is that? A year ago they wouldn’t say a word to you unless you were from some government or conglomerate. Then they buy up some abandoned churches and suddenly they’re preaching to anyone who’ll listen. Look into the sun my ass.” He took two stiff-legged steps toward the hydroponic benches and then spun toward Wing and Magda Rudowski. “You look into the sun too long and you go blind.” He stalked off.

  “I don’t know what Daisy was thinking of when she invited him,” Magda said.

  “He married us,” said Wing.

  She sighed, as if that had been an even bigger mistake. “Shall I keep an eye on him for you?”

  “Thanks.” Wing thought then to offer her the appetizer. She inhaled a polite dose and Wing took a whiff himself, thinking he might as well make the best of what threatened to be bad business. The Glow loosened the knot in his stomach; he could feel his senses snapping to attention. They looked at each other and giggled. “Hell with him,” he said, and then headed back to the parlor.

  Jack Congemi was arguing in the hall with Laporte. “Here’s just the man to settle this,” he said.

  “Congemi here thinks telelink is maybe going to put the trades out of business.” Laporte spoke as though his brain were parked in lunar orbit and he were hearing his own words with a time delay. “Tell him you can’t fuse plasteel gun emplacements in Tijuana sitting at a console in Greeley, Colorado. Makes no plugging difference how good your robotics are. You got to be there.”

  “The Koreans did it. They had sixty percent completion on Orbital Three before a human being ever set foot on it.”

  “Robots don’t have a union,” said Laporte. “The fusers do.”

  “Before telelink, none of us could have afforded to do business from a beautiful little nowhere like Portsmouth.” Congemi liked to see himself as the local prophet of telelink; Wing had heard this sermon before. “We would have all been jammed into some urb hard by the jump port and container terminals and transitways and maglev trunks. Now no one has to go anywhere.”

  “But without tourists,” said Wing, “inns close.”

  Congemi held his hands out like an archbishop blessing a crowd. “Of course, people will always travel for pleasure. And we at SEE-Coast will continue to encourage people to tour our beautiful Granite State. But we are also citizens of a new state, a state which is being born at this very moment. The world information state.”

  “Don’t care where they come from.” Laporte’s voice slurred. “Don’t care whether they’re citizens of the plugging commonwealth of Messengers, just so long as they line up to see my Cloud.” He poked a finger into Wing’s shoulder as if daring him to object.

  It was not the first time he had heard Laporte claim the Cloud as his. Wing considered throwing the man out and manners be damned. Instead he said, “We’ll be eating soon,” and went into the parlor.

  For a time he was adrift on the tides of the party, smiling too much and excusing himself as he nudged past people on his way to nowhere. He felt angry but the problem was that he was not exactly sure why. He told himself that it was all Daisy’s fault. Her party. He aimed the appetizer at his face and squeezed off a piggish dose.

  “Phillip. Please, do you have a moment?” Ndavu gave him a toothy grin. There was something strange about his teeth: they were too white, too perfect. He was talking to Mr. and Mrs. Hatcher Poole III, who were standing up against the wall like a matched set of silver lamps.

  “Mentor Ndavu.”

  “Mentor is a title my students have given me. I am your guest and we are friends, are we not? You must call me Ndavu.”

  “Ndavu.” Wing bowed slightly.

  “May I?” The Messenger turned his wheelchair to Wing and held out his hand for the appetizer. “I had hoped for the chance to observe mind-altering behavior this evening.” He turned the appetizer over in his long spider-like hands and then abruptly sprayed it into his face. The entire room fell silent and then the Messenger sneezed. No one had ever heard of such a thing, a Messenger sneezing. The Pooles looked horrified, as if the alien might explode next. Someone across the room laughed and conversation resumed.

  “It seems to stimulate the chemical senses.” Ndavu wrinkled his nose. “It acts to lower the threshold of certain olfactory and taste receptors. There are also trace elements of another substance—some kind of indole hallucinogen?”

  “I’m an architect, not a drug artist.”

  Ndavu passed the appetizer on to Mrs. Poole. “Why do you ingest these substances?” The alien’s skin was perfect too; he had no moles, no freckles, not even a wrinkle.

  “Well,” she said, still fluttering from his sneeze. “they are nonfattening.”

  Her husband laughed nervously. “I take it, sir, that you have never eaten vitabulk.”

  “Vitabulk? No.” The Messenger leaned forward in his wheelchair. “I have seen reports.”

  “I once owned a bulkery in Nashua,” continued Hatcher Poole. “The ideal product, in many ways: cheap to produce, nutritionally complete, an almost indefinite shelf life. Without it, hundreds of millions would starve—”

  “You see,” said Wing, “it tastes like insulation,”

  “Depends on the genetics of your starter batch,” said P
oole. “They’re doing wonders these days with texturization.”

  “Bread flavor isn’t that far off.” Mrs. Poole had squeezed off a dose that they could probably smell in Maine. “And everything tastes better after a nice appetizer.”

  “Of course, we’re serving natural food tonight,” said Wing. “Daisy has had cook prepare a traditional meal in your honor, Ndavu.” He wished she were here chatting and he was in the kitchen supervising final preparations. “However, some people prefer to use appetizers no matter what the menu.”

  “Prefer?” said Poole, who had passed the appetizer without using it. “A damnable addiction, if you ask me.”

  * * *

  Two white-coated busboys carried a platter into the parlor, its contents hidden beneath a silver lid. They set it on the mahogany sideboard beneath a portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne brooding. “Dinner is served!” The guests lined up quickly.

  “Plates and utensils here, condiments on the tea table.” Daisy’s face was flushed with excitement. She was wearing that luminous blue dress he had bought for her in Boston, the one that had cost too much. “Cook will help you find what you want. Enjoy.” Bechet, resplendent in his white cook’s hat, placed a huge chafing dish beside the silver tray. With a flourish, Peter the busboy removed the lid from the silver tray. The guests buzzed happily and crowded around the sideboard, blocking Wing’s view. He did not have to see the food, however; his hypersensitized olfactories were drenched in its aroma.

  As he approached the sideboard, he could hear Bechet murmuring. “Wieners, sir. Hot dogs.”

  “Oh my god, Hal, potato salad—mayonnaise!”

  “Did he say dog?”

  “Nothing that amazing about relish. I put up three quarts myself last summer. But mustard!”

  “No, no, I’ll just have to live with my guilt.”