The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  TAWNY PETTICOATS

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swanwick (www.michaelswanwick.com) is one of the most acclaimed and prolific science fiction and fantasy writers of his generation. He has received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years and has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy and five Hugo Awards as well as receiving nominations for the British Science Fiction Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Michael’s latest novel is Chasing the Phoenix, a second post-Utopian adventure featuring confidence artists Darger and Surplus. He is currently at work on even more new novels and stories.

  THE INDEPENDENT PORT city and (some said) pirate haven of New Orleans was home to many a strange sight. It was a place where sea serpents hauled ships past fields worked by zombie laborers to docks where cargo was loaded onto wooden wagons to be pulled through streets of crushed oyster shells by teams of pygmy mastodons as small as Percheron horses. So none thought it particularly noteworthy when for three days an endless line of young women waited in the hallway outside a luxury suite in the Maison Fema for the opportunity to raise their skirts or open their blouses to display a tattooed thigh, breast, or buttock to two judges who sat on twin chairs watching solemnly, asked a few questions, thanked them for their time, and then showed them out.

  The women had come in response to a handbill, posted throughout several parishes, that read:

  SEEKING AN HEIRESS ARE YOU . . .

  A YOUNG WOMAN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 21? FATHERLESS?

  TATTOED FROM BIRTH ON AN INTIMATE PART OF YOUR BODY?

  IF SO, YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO GREAT RICHES

  INQUIRE DAYTIMES, SUITE 1, MAISON FEMA

  “YOU’D THINK I’D be tired of this by now,” Darger commented during a brief break in the ritual. “And yet I am not.”

  “The infinite variety of ways in which women can be beautiful is indeed amazing,” Surplus agreed. “As is the eagerness of so many to display that beauty.” He opened the door. “Next.”

  A woman strode into the room, trailing smoke from a cheroot. She was dauntingly tall – six feet and a hand, if an inch – and her dress, trimmed with silver lace, was the same shade of golden brown as her skin. Surplus indicated a crystal ashtray on the sideboard and, with a gracious nod of thanks, she stubbed out her cigar.

  “Your name?” Darger said after Surplus had regained his chair. “My real name, you mean, or my stage name?”

  “Why, whichever you please.”

  “I’ll give you the real one then.” The young woman doffed her hat and tugged off her gloves. She laid them neatly together on the sideboard. “It’s Tawnymoor Petticoats. You can call me Tawny.”

  “Tell us something about yourself, Tawny,” Surplus said.

  “I was born a carny and worked forty-milers all my life,” Tawny said, unbuttoning her blouse. “Most recently, I was in the sideshow as the Sleeping Beauty Made Immortal By Utopian Technology But Doomed Never To Awaken. I lay in a glass coffin covered by nothing but my own hair and a strategically placed hand, while the audience tried to figure out if I was alive or not. I’ve got good breath control.” She folded the blouse and set it down by her gloves and hat. “Jake – my husband – was the barker. He’d size up the audience and when he saw a ripe mark, catch ’im on the way out and whisper that for a couple of banknotes it could be arranged to spend some private time with me. Then he’d go out back and peer in through a slit in the canvas.”

  Tawny stepped out of her skirt and set it atop the blouse. She began unlacing her petticoats. “When the mark had his trousers off and was about to climb in the coffin, Jake would come roaring out, bellowing that he was only supposed to look – not to take advantage of my vulnerable condition.” Placing her underthings atop the skirt, she undid her garters and proceeded to roll down her stockings. “That was usually good for the contents of his wallet.”

  “You were working the badger game, you mean?” Surplus asked cautiously. “Mostly, I just lay there. But I was ready to rear up and cold-cock the sumbidge if he got out of hand. And we worked other scams too. The pigeon drop, the fiddle game, the rip deal, you name it.”

  Totally naked now, the young woman lifted her great masses of black curls with both hands, exposing the back of her neck. “Then one night the mark was halfway into the coffin – and no Jake. So I opened my eyes real sudden and screamed in the bastard’s face. Over he went, hit his head on the floor, and I didn’t wait to find out if he was unconscious or dead. I stole his jacket and went looking for my husband. Turns out Jake had run off with the Snake Woman. She dumped him two weeks later and he wanted me to take him back, but I wasn’t having none of that.” She turned around slowly, so that Darger and Surplus could examine every inch of her undeniably admirable flesh.

  Darger cleared his throat. “Um... you don’t appear to have a tattoo.” “Yeah, I saw through that one right away. Talked to some of the girls you’d interviewed and they said you’d asked them lots of questions about themselves but hadn’t molested them in any way. Not all of ’em were happy with that last bit. Particularly after they’d gone to all the trouble of getting themselves inked. So, putting two and four together, I figured you were running a scam requiring a female partner with quick wits and larcenous proclivities.”

  Tawny Petticoats put her hands on her hips and smiled. “Well? Do I get the job?”

  Grinning like a dog – which was not surprising, for his source genome was entirely canine – Surplus stood, extending a paw. But Darger quickly got between him and the young woman, saying, “If you will pardon us for just a moment, Ms. Petticoats, my friend and I must consult in the back room. You may use the time to dress yourself.”

  When the two males were secluded, Darger whispered furiously, “Thank God I was able to stop you! You were about to enlist that young woman into our conspiracy.”

  “Well, and why not?” Surplus murmured equally quietly. “We were looking for a woman of striking appearance, not overly bound to conventional morality, and possessed of the self-confidence, initiative, and inventiveness a good swindler requires. Tawny comes up aces on all counts.”

  “Working with an amateur is one thing – but this woman is a professional. She will sleep with both of us, turn us against each other, and in the end abscond with the swag, leaving us with nothing but embarrassment and regret for all our efforts.”

  “That is a sexist and, if I may dare say so, un-gallant slander upon the fair sex, and I am astonished to hear it coming from your mouth.”

  Darger shook his head sadly. “It is not all women but all female confidence tricksters I abjure. I speak from sad – and repeated – experience.”

  “Well, if you insist on doing without this blameless young creature,” Surplus said, folding his arms, “then I insist on your doing without me.”

  “My dear sir!”

  “I must be true to my principles.”

  Further argumentation, Darger saw, would be useless. So, putting the best possible appearance on things, he emerged from the back room to say, “You have the job, my dear.” From a jacket pocket he produced a silver filigreed vinaigrette and, unscrewing its cap, extracted from it a single pill. “Swallow this and you’ll have the tattoo we require by morning. You’ll want to run it past your pharmacist first, of course, to verify –”

  “Oh, I trust you. If y’all had just been after tail, you wouldn’t’ve waited for me. Some of those gals was sharp lookers for sure.” Tawny swallowed the pill. “So what’s the dodge?”

  “We’re going to work the black money scam,” Surplus said.

  “Oh, I have always wanted a shot at running that one!” With a whoop, Tawny threw her arms about them both.

  Though his fingers itched to do so, Darger was very careful not to check to see if his wallet was still there.

  THE NEXT DAY, ten crates of black money – actually, rectangles of scrap parchment dyed black in distant Vicksburg – were carried into the hotel by zombie laborers and then, at
Surplus’s direction, piled against the outside of Tawny’s door so that, hers being the central room of the suite, the only way to enter or leave it was through his or Darger’s rooms. Then, leaving the lady to see to her dress and makeup, her new partners set out to speak to their respective marks.

  Darger began at the city’s busy docklands.

  The office of the speculator Jean-Nagin Lafitte were tastefully opulent and dominated by a Mauisaurus skull, decorated with scrimshaw filigree chased in silver. “Duke” Lafitte, as he styled himself, or “Pirate” Lafitte, as he was universally known, was a slim, handsome man with olive skin, long and flowing hair, and a mustache so thin it might have been drawn on with an eyebrow pencil. Where other men of wealth might carry a cane, he affected a coiled whip, which he wore on his belt.

  “Renting an ingot of silver!” he exclaimed. “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “It is a simple enough proposition,” Darger said. “Silver serves as a catalyst for a certain bioindustrial process, the precise nature of which I am not at liberty to divulge to you. The scheme involves converting bar silver to a colloidal slurry which, when the process is complete, will be recovered and melted back into bar form. You would lose nothing. Further, we will only tie up your wealth for, oh, let us say ten days to be on the safe side. In return for which we are prepared to offer you a ten percent return on your investment. A very tidy profit for no risk at all.”

  A small and ruthless smile played upon the speculator’s lips. “There is the risk of your simply taking the silver and absconding with it.”

  “That is an outrageous implication, and from a man I respected less highly than I do you, I would not put up with it. However” – Darger gestured out the window at the busy warehouses and transshipment buildings – “I understand that you own half of everything we see. Lend my consortium a building in which to perform our operation and then place as many guards as you like around that building. We will bring in our apparatus and you will bring in the silver. Deal?”

  For a brief moment, Pirate Lafitte hesitated. Then, “Done!” he snapped, and offered his hand. “For fifteen percent. Plus rental of the building.”

  They shook, and Darger said, “You will have no objection to having the ingot tested by a reputable assayist.”

  IN THE FRENCH Quarter, meanwhile, Surplus was having an almost identical conversation with a slight and acerbic woman, clad in a severe black dress, who was not only the mayor of New Orleans but also the proprietress of its largest and most notorious brothel. Behind her, alert and unspeaking, stood two uniformed ape-men from the Canadian Northwest, both with the expressions of baffled anger common to beasts that have been elevated almost but not quite to human intelligence. “An assayist?” she demanded. “Is my word not good enough for you? And if it is not, should we be doing business at all?”

  “The answer to all three of your questions, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, is yes,” Surplus said amiably. “The assay is for your own protection. As you doubtless know, silver is routinely adulterated with other metals. When we are done with the silver, the slurry will be melted down and re-cast into an ingot. Certainly, you will want to know that the bar returned to you is of equal worth to the bar you rented out.”

  “Hmmm.” They were sitting in the lobby of the madam-mayor’s maison de tolérance, she in a flaring wicker chair whose similarity to a throne could not possibly be unintentional, and Surplus on a wooden folding chair facing her. Because it was still early afternoon, the facility was not open for business. But messengers and government flunkies came and went. Now one such whispered in Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s ear. She waved him away. “Seventeen and a half percent, take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Good,” Tresjolie said. “I have business with the zombie master now. Move your chair alongside mine, and stay to watch. If we are to do business, you will find this salubrious.”

  A round and cheerful man entered the public room, followed by half a dozen zombies. Surplus studied these with interest. Though their eyes were dull, their faces were stiff, and there was an unhealthy sheen to their skin, they looked in no way like the rotting corpses of Utopian legend. Rather, they looked like day laborers who had been worked into a state of complete exhaustion. Which doubtless was the case.

  “Good morning!” said the jolly man, rubbing his hands briskly together. “I have brought this week’s coffle of debtors who, having served their time, are now eligible for forgiveness and manumission.”

  “I had wondered at the source of your involuntary labor force,” Surplus said. “They are unfortunates who fell into arrears, then?”

  “Exactly so,” said the zombie master. “New Orleans does not engage in the barbarous and expensive practice of funding debtors’ prisons. Instead, debt-criminals are chemically rendered incapable of independent thought and put to work until they have paid off their debt to society. Which today’s happy fellows have done.” With a roguish wink, he added, “You may want to keep this in mind before running up too great a line of credit at the rooms upstairs. Are you ready to begin, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie?”

  “You may proceed, Master Bones.”

  Master Bones gestured imperiously and the first zombie shuffled forward. “Through profligacy you fell into debt,” he said, “and through honest labor you have earned your way out. Open your mouth.”

  The pallid creature obeyed. Master Bones produced a spoon and dipped into a salt cellar on a nearby table. He dumped the salt into the man’s mouth. “Now swallow.”

  By gradual degrees, a remarkable transformation came over the man. He straightened and looked about him with tentative alertness. “I...” he said. “I remember now. Is my... is my wife...?”

  “Silence,” the zombie master said. “The ceremony is not yet complete.” The Canadian guardsmen had shifted position to defend their mistress, should the disoriented ex-zombie attack her.

  “You are hereby declared a free citizen of New Orleans again, and indebted to no man,” Tresjolie said solemnly. “Go and overspend no more.” She extended a leg and lifted her skirts above her ankle. “You may now kiss my foot.”

  “SO DID YOU ask Tresjolie for a line of credit at her sporting house?” Tawny asked when Surplus reported his adventure to his confederates.

  “Certainly not!” Surplus exclaimed. “I told her instead that it has always been my ambition to own a small but select private brothel, one dedicated solely to my own personal use. A harem, if you will, but one peopled by a rotating staff of well-paid employees. I suggested I might shortly be in a position to commission her to find an appropriate hotel and create such an institution for me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She told me that she doubted I was aware of exactly how expensive such an operation would be.”

  “And you said to her?

  “That I didn’t think money would be problem,” Surplus said airily. “Because I expected to come into a great deal of it very soon.”

  Tawny crowed with delight. “Oh, you boys are such fun!”

  “In unrelated news,” Darger said, “your new dress has come.”

  “I saw it when it first arrived.” Tawny made a face. “It is not calculated to show off my body to its best advantage – or to any advantage at all, come to that.”

  “It is indeed aggressively modest,” Darger agreed. “However, your character is demure and inexperienced. To her innocent eyes, New Orleans is a terribly wicked place, indeed a cesspool of carnality and related sins. Therefore, she needs to be protected at all times by unrevealing apparel and stalwart men of the highest moral character.”

  “Further,” Surplus amplified, “she is the weak point in our plans, for whoever has possession of her tattoo and knows its meaning can dispense with us entirely by kidnapping her off the street.”

  “Oh!” Tawny said in a small voice, clearly intended to arouse the protective instincts of any man nearby.

  Surplus took an instinctive step toward her, and th
en caught himself. He grinned like the carnivore he was. “You’ll do.”

  THE THIRD MEETING with a potential investor took place that evening in a dimly-lit club in a rundown parish on the fringe of the French Quarter – for the entertainment was, in the public mind, far too louche for even that notoriously open-minded neighborhood. Pallid waitresses moved lifelessly between the small tables, taking orders and delivering drinks while a small brass-and-drums jazz ensemble played appropriately sleazy music to accompany the stage show.

  “I see that you are no aficionado of live sex displays,” the zombie master Jeremy Bones said. The light from the candle sconce on the table made the beads of sweat on his face shine like luminous drops of rain.

  “The artistic success of such displays depends entirely on the degree to which they agree with one’s own sexual proclivities,” Darger replied. “I confess that mine lie elsewhere. But never mind that. Returning to the subject at hand: The terms are agreeable to you, then?”

  “They are. I am unclear, however, as to why you insist the assay be performed at the Bank of San Francisco, when New Orleans has several fine financial institutions of its own.”

  “All of which are owned in part by you, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, and Duke Lafitte.”

  “Pirate Lafitte, you mean. An assay is an assay and a bank is a bank. Why should it matter to you which one is employed?”

  “Earlier today, you brought six zombies to the mayor to be freed. Assuming this is a typical week, that would be roughly three hundred zombies per year.

  Yet all the menial work in the city has been handed over to zombies and there still remain tens of thousands at work in the plantations that line the river.”

  “Many of those who fall into debt draw multi-year sentences.” “I asked around, and discovered that Lafitte’s ships import some two hundred prisoners a week from municipalities and territories all the way up the Mississippi to St. Louis.”