The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

“Corn dog or on a bun, Mr. Wing?” Bechet was beaming.

  “On a bun please, Bechet.” Wing held out his plate. “They seem to like it.”

  “I hope so, sir.”

  The guests were in various stages of gustatory ecstasy. The fare was not at all unusual for the wealthy; they ate at least one natural meal a day and meat or fish once a week. For others, forty-five grams of USDA guaranteed pure beef frankfurter was an extravagance: Christmas dinner, birthday treat. One of the strangers from the mission was the first to go for thirds. Ndavu had the good manners not to eat at all; perhaps he had orders not to alarm the natives with his diet.

  The party fragmented after dinner; most guests seemed eager to put distance between themselves and the Messenger. It was a strain being in the same room with Ndavu; Wing could certainly feel it. Daisy led a group of gardeners to the greenhouse. Others gathered to watch the latest episode of Jesus On First. The religious spectacle of the hard-hitting Jesus had made it one of the most popular scripted sports events on telelink. The more boisterous guests went to the inn’s cellar bar. Wing alone remained trapped in the Hawthorne parlor with the guest of honor.

  “It has been a successful evening,” said Ndavu, “so far.”

  “You came with an agenda?” Wing saw Peter the busboy gawking at the alien as he gathered up dirty plates.

  Ndavu smiled. “Indeed I did. You are a very hard man to meet, Phillip. I am not sure why that is, but I hope now that things will be different. Will you visit me at the mission?”

  Wing shrugged. “Maybe sometime.” He was thinking to himself that he had the day after the heat death of the universe free.

  “May I consider that a commitment?”

  Wing stooped to pick up a pickle slice before someone—probably Peter—squashed it into the Kashgar rug. “I’m glad your evening has been a success,” he said, depositing the pickle on Peter’s tray as he went by.

  “Before people accept the message, they must first accept the Messenger.” He said it like a slogan. “You will forgive me if I observe that yours is a classically xenophobic species. The work has just begun; it will take years.”

  “Why do you do it? I mean you, personally.”

  “My motives are various—even I find it difficult to keep track of them all.” The Messenger squirmed in the wheelchair and his knee brushed Wing’s leg. “In that I suspect we may be alike, Phillip. The fact is, however, that my immediate concern is not spreading the message. It is getting your complete attention.”

  The alien was very close. “My attention?” Rumor had it that beneath their perfect exteriors lurked vile creatures, unspeakably grotesque. Evolutionary biologists maintained that it was impossible that the Messengers were humanoid.

  “You should know that you are being considered for a most prestigious commission. I can say no more at this time but if you will visit me, I think we may discuss…”

  Wing had stopped listening to Ndavu—saved by an argument out in the foyer. An angry man was shouting. A woman pleaded. Daisy. “Excuse me,” he said, turning away from Ndavu.

  “No, I won’t go without you.” The angry man was the glow sculptor, McCauley. He was about Wing’s age, maybe a few years older. There was gray in his starchy brush of brown hair. He might have been taken for handsome in a blunt way except that his blue and silver stretchsuit was five years out of date and he was sweating.

  “For God’s sake, Jimmy, would you stop it?” Daisy was holding out a coat and seemed to be trying to coax him into it. “Go home. Please. This isn’t the time.”

  “You tell me when. I won’t keep putting it off.”

  “Something the matter?” Wing went up on the balls of his feet. If it came to a fight he thought he could hold his own for the few seconds it would take reinforcements to arrive. But it was ridiculous, really; people in Portsmouth did not fight anymore. He could hear someone running toward the foyer from the kitchen. A knot of people clustered at the bottom of the stairs. He would be all right, he thought. “Daisy?” Still, it was a damned nuisance.

  He was shocked by her reaction. She recoiled from him as if he were a monster out of her worst nightmare and then sank down onto the sidechair and started to cry. He ought to have gone to her then but McCauley was quicker.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He took the coat from her nerveless hands and kissed her quickly on the cheek. Wing wanted to throw him to the floor but found he could not move. Nobody in the room moved but the stranger his wife had called Jimmy. Something in the way she had said his name had paralyzed Wing. All night long he had sensed a tension at the party but, like a fool, he had completely misinterpreted it. Everyone knew; if he moved they might all start laughing.

  “Shouldn’t have…” McCauley was murmuring something; his hand was on the door. “Sorry.”

  “You don’t walk out now, do you?” Wing was proud of how steady his voice was. Daisy’s shoulders were shaking. Her sculptor did not have an answer; he did not even stop to put on his coat. As the door closed behind him Wing had the peculiar urge to call Congemi out of the crowd and make him take responsibility for this citizen of the world information state. His brave new world was filled with people who had no idea of how to act in public.

  “Daisy?”

  She would not look at him. Although he felt as if he were standing stark naked in the middle of the foyer of the historic Piscataqua House, he realized no one was looking at him.

  Except Ndavu.

  * * *

  “I said you’ve had enough.” The dealer pushed Wing’s twenty back across the bar. “There’s such a thing as an overdose, you know. And I’d be liable.”

  Wing stared down at the twenty, as if Andy Jackson might offer him some helpful advice.

  “The cab is waiting. You ought to go home.”

  Wing glanced up without comprehension, trying to bring the man into focus.

  “I said go home.”

  Wing could not go home. The morning after the party he had moved out of Piscataqua House. Now he was living in his go-tube at a rack just off the Transitway. A burly hack appeared beside Wing and put an arm around him. The next thing he knew he was standing outside the flash bar.

  “Is cold, yes?” The hack stamped his feet against the icy pavement and smiled; his teeth were decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs. He was wearing thin joggers and the gold sweat suit of the Rockingham Cab Company.

  “Exit 6. Stop Inn.” The cold made it easier for Wing to think. He squeezed into the wedge-shaped pedicab; the big hack slithered onto the driver’s crouch and slid his feet into the toe clips. A musty locker-room smell lingered in the passenger compartment. There was no space heater but after a few minutes of the hack’s furious peddling the smell turned into a warm stink.

  They were caught briefly in the usual jam on Islington Street. About twenty protesters had gathered in front of what had once been the Church of the Holy Spirit and was now the Messengers’ mission to the states of New Hampshire and Maine. A few carried electric candles; others brandished hand-lettered signs that said things like “NO RELIGION WITHOUT GOD” and “LOOK INTO THE BIBLE.” The rest circulated among the stalled bicycles and pedicars, distributing anti-Messenger propaganda. On a whim Wing opened his window just wide enough to accept a newsletter. “Go with Jesus,” said the protester. As the pedicab rolled away, he unfolded the newsletter. All he could read by street light were headlines: “SCIENCE SAYS NO IMMORTALITY” and “ALABAMA BANS ALIENS” and “HOW THEY REALLY LOOK.”

  “J-freaks always back up traffic here,” said the hack. “Wouldn’t read this crap if you paid me.” He jerked his thumb at the mission. “Ever scan the message?”

  “Not yet.”

  “No worse than any other church; better than some. The beetles’ll feed you, give you a warm bed. Course, they don’t explain nothing, except to tell you there’s no such a thing as pleasure. Or pain.” He laughed. “Maybe that’s the beetle way, but it ain’t the way life tastes to me.”

  As they approached Ex
it 6, they passed through a neighborhood of shabby go-tube parks and entered the strip. The strip was an architectural tumor that had metastasized to Transitway exits from Portsmouth, Virginia to Portsmouth, New Hampshire—a garish clump of chain vitabulk joints, clothes discounters, flash bars, surrogatoriums, motels, data shops, shoe stores, tube racks, bike dealers, too many warehouses, and a few moribund tourist traps selling plastic lobsters and screaming T-shirts. What was not malled was connected by optical plastic tunnels, once transparent but now smudged with sea salt and pollution. In the midst of it all squatted a US Transit Service terminal of bush-hammered concrete that was supposed to look like rough-cut granite. Docked at the terminal were semis and container trains and red-white-and-blue USTS busses in all sizes, from the enormous double-decked trunk line rigs to local twenty-passenger carryvans.

  The Stop Inn was on the far edge of the strip, a six-story plastic box that looked like yet another warehouse except for the five-story stop sign painted on its east facade. There were hook-ups for about forty go-tubes on the top three floors and another forty fixed tubes on the bottom three. The stairwell smelled of smoke and disinfectant.

  Wing and Daisy had customized their go-tube on spare weekends right after they had been married but they had only used it twice: vacations at the disneydome in New Jersey and the Grand Canyon. Somehow they could never find time to get away. The tube had an oak rolltop desk, a queen-sized Murphy bed with a gel mattress and Wing’s one extravagance: an Alvar Aalto loveseat. The ceiling was a single sheet of mirror plastic that Wing had nearly broken his back installing. At the far end was a microwave, sink, toilet and mirror set in a wall surround of Korean tile that Daisy had spent two months picking out. A monitor and keyboard were mounted on a flex-arm beside the bed. The screen was flashing; he had messages.

  “Phillip.” Ndavu sat in an office at an enormous desk; he looked like a banker who had just realized he had made a bad loan. “I am calling to see if there’s anything I can do to help…”

  Wing paused the message and poured himself two fingers of scotch—no water, no ice.

  “… I want you to know how sorry I am about the way things have turned out. I have just seen Daisy and I must tell you that she is extremely upset. If there is anything I can do to help resolve the problem, please, please let…”

  “Yeah,” Wing muttered, “get the hell out of my life.”

  “… you did promise to stop by the mission. There is still the matter of the commission I mentioned…” Wing deleted the message. He finished his drink before bringing up the next message in the queue.

  “We have to talk, Phil.” Daisy was sitting in shadow; her face was a low-res blur. She sounded like she had a cold. “It’s not fair, what you’re doing. You can’t just throw everything away without giving me a chance to explain. I know I waited too long but I didn’t want to hurt you … Maybe you won’t believe this but I still love you. I don’t know what to say … it can’t be like it was before but maybe…” There was a long silence. “Call me,” she said.

  Wing drew a breath that burned his throat worse than the whiskey and then he smashed the keyboard with his fist, pounding at the delete key again and again until her face went away. His hand was numb and there was blood smeared on the keys.

  * * *

  The Messengers’ mission on Islington Street sprawled over an entire block, an unholy jumble of architectural afterthoughts appended to the simple neogothic chapel that had once been the Church of the Holy Spirit. There was a Victorian rectory, a squat brick-facade parochial school built in the 1950s, and an eclectic auditorium that dated from the oughts. The fortunes of the congregation had since declined and the complex had been abandoned, successfully confounding local redevelopers until the Messengers bought it. The initiates of northern New England’s first mission had added an underground bike lockup, washed the stained glass, repaired the rotted clapboards, and planted an arborvitae screen around the auditorium and still Wing thought it was the ugliest building in Portsmouth.

  In the years immediately after first contact there had been no contact at all with the masses; complex and secret negotiations continued between the Messengers and various political and industrial interests. Once the deals were struck, however, the aliens had moved swiftly to open missions for the propagation of the message, apparently a strange brew of technophilic materialism and zen-like self-effacement, sweetened by the promise of cybernetic immortality. The true import of the message was a closely held secret; the Messengers would neither confirm nor deny the reports of those few initiates who left the missions.

  Wing hesitated at the wide granite steps leading to the chapel; they were slick from a spring ice storm. Freshly sprinkled salt was melting holes in the ice and there was a shovel propped against one of the massive oak doors. It was five-thirty in the morning—too early for protesters. No one inside would be expecting visitors, which was fine with Wing: he wanted to surprise the Messenger. But the longer he stood, the less certain he was of whether he was going in. He looked up at the eleven stone apostles arranged across the tympanum. Tiny stylized flames danced over their heads, representing the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. He could not read the apostles’ expressions; acid rain had smudged their faces. Wing felt a little smudged himself. He reached into his back pocket for the flask. He took a swig and found new courage as a whiskey flame danced down his throat. He staggered into the church—twisted in the good old-fashioned way and too tired to resist Ndavu anymore.

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom Wing saw that there had been some changes made in the iconography. Behind the altar hung a huge red flag with the Buddhist Wheel of Law at its center and the words “LOOK INTO THE SUN” embroidered in gold thread beneath it. A dancing Shiva filled a niche next to a statue of Christ Resurrected. Where the Stations of the Cross had once been were now busts: Pythagoras, Plato, Lao-tze. Others whose names he did not recognize were identified as Kabalists, Gnostics, Sufis, and Theosophists—whatever they were. Wing had not known what to expect but this was not quite it. Still, he thought he understood what the Messengers were trying to do. The Romans had been quick to induct the gods of subjugated peoples into their pantheon. And what was humanity if not subjugated? That was why he had come, he thought bitterly. To acknowledge that he was beaten.

  A light came on in the vestry next to the altar. Footsteps echoed across the empty church and then Jim McCauley stepped into the candlelight and came to the edge of the altar rail. “Is someone there?”

  Wing swayed down the aisle, catching at pews to steady himself. He felt as empty as the church. As he approached the altar he saw that McCauley was wearing a loosely tied yellow bathrobe; his face was crinkled, as if he had just then come from a warm bed. With Daisy? Wing told himself that it did not matter anymore, that he had to concentrate on the plan he had discovered an hour ago at the bottom of a bottle of Argentinean Scotch: catch them off guard and then surrender. He saluted McCauley.

  The man gathered his yellow bathrobe more tightly. “Who is it?”

  Wing stepped up to the altar rail and grasped it to keep from falling. “Phillip Wing, A.I.A. Here to see the head beetle.” McCauley looked blank. “Ndavu to you.”

  “The mentor expects you, Phillip?”

  Wing cackled. “I should hope not.”

  “I see.” McCauley gestured at the gate in the center of the altar rail. “Come this way—do you need help, Phillip?”

  In response Wing vaulted the rail. His trailing foot caught and he sprawled at McCauley’s feet. The sculptor was wearing yellow plastic slippers to match the robe.

  “Hell no,” Wing said and picked himself up.

  McCauley eyed him doubtfully and then ushered him through the vestry to a long flight of stairs. As they descended, Peter Bornsten, the busboy from Piscataqua House, scurried around the corner and sprinted up toward them, taking steps two at a time.

  “Peter,” said McCauley. “I thought you were shoveling the steps.”

  Pete
r froze. Wing had never seen him like this: he was wearing janitors’ greens and had the lame expression of a guilty eight-year-old. “I was, Jim, but the ice was too hard and so I salted it and went down to the kitchen for some coffee. I was cold,” he said lamely. He glared briefly at Wing as if it were his fault and then hung his head. The Peter Bornsten Wing knew was a careless young stud whose major interests were stimulants and nurses.

  “Go and finish the steps,” McCauley touched Peter’s forehead with his middle finger. “The essence does not experience cold, Peter.”

  “Yes, Jim.” He bowed and scraped by them.

  McCauley’s slippers flapped as he walked slowly down the hallway that ran the length of the mission’s basement. Doorways without doors opened into rooms filled with cots. It looked as if there were someone sleeping on every one. Wing smelled the yeasty aroma of curing vitabulk long before they passed a kitchen where three cooks were sitting at a table around four cups of ersatz coffee. At the end of the hall double doors opened onto an auditorium jammed with folding tables and chairs. A door to the right led up a short flight of stairs to a large telelink conferencing room and several small private offices.

  McCauley went to one of the terminals at the conference table and tapped at the keyboard. Wing had a bad angle on the screen; all he could see was the glow. “Phillip Wing,” said McCauley and the screen immediately went dark.

  Wing sat down across the table from him and pulled out his flask. “Want some?” There was no reply. “You the welcoming committee?”

  McCauley remained standing. “I spread the message, Phillip.”

  Someone else might have admired the calm with which McCauley was handling himself; Wing wanted to see the bastard sweat. “I thought you were supposed to be an artist. You had shows in New York, Tokyo—you had a career going.”

  “I did.” He shrugged. “But my reasons for working were all wrong. Too much ego, not enough essence. The Messengers showed me how trivial art is.”

  Wing could not let him get away with that. “Maybe it’s just you that’s trivial. Maybe you didn’t have the stuff to make art that meant anything. Ever think of that?”