Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said. “Did you miss me?”

  “Woof.”

  “I’m coming home, and I won’t leave you alone again, I promise.”

  A Slow Day at the Gallery

  A. M. DELLAMONICA

  A(lyx) M. Dellamonica (http://www.sff.net/people/alyx) lives in Vancouver, B.C. Her stories have appeared in Crank!, Realms of Fantasy, and a number of other venues, most recently the Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts 8. She writes book and software reviews for SF Weekly and Amazon.com.

  “A Slow Day at the Gallery” is from Asimov’s. It is a perceptive and carefully controlled story of contemporary political relevance. It is about the clash of cultures, an allegory of imperialism and cultural appropriation, and about the possibility of real and meaningful communication between radically unlike cultures, between the human and the alien. But that’s all in addition to an involving story in the tradition of James Tiptree, Jr., about an idealist about to do something terrible.

  The museum escort Christopher had requested arrived just as he was winding up a self-guided tour of the Earth exhibit. Staring at Monet’s Waterlily Pond, he was lost in a passion more intense, he suspected, than any he had expended during either of his two brief marriages.

  The painting had been reframed, but was otherwise unchanged since the last time he had seen it, fifty years before. As he gazed at its placid flowers and vibrant willow leaves, Christopher even began to imagine that the grooves time had left on him—age, injuries, bitterness—were just as superficial.

  Same man, different frame. He could do this.

  Leaning heavily on his cane—museum air exhausted him, even here—he tore his gaze away from the shimmering canvas and faced the Tsebsra museum guide. It looked like a badly executed balloon-animal: a tubular sac of tight, rubbery skin balanced on lumpy legs. Stringy eyestalks dangled from the bulb at its top, while the bottom of its body tapered into a long, rubbery tail decorated with blue stripes. The markings meant it was young, probably still ungendered. It wore a floor-length apron printed with its museum ident and, at the moment, it was standing almost upright. The pose could have been reminiscent of a praying mantis, if only the insect had been bleach-white, headless, and lacking its four upper limbs.

  As the guide approached, a faint chime sounded in Christopher’s left ear. “Museum staff member, late adolescent, name on ident equates to Vita,” said his protocol software in a smooth, feminine voice. He had named the program Miss Manners—Em for short. “Posture indicates polite, professional interest and includes appropriate respect for an adult of your years. Vita is curious about the camera you are carrying.”

  Christopher smiled at the guide.

  “Your expression has been interpreted by Vita’s proto and it appears receptive to conversation.”

  So. Converse. He opened his hand to fully reveal the camera, which had captured a shot of the Monet on its tiny screen. “Just didging some postcards for the grandkids.”

  The alien speech was a series of intestinal-sounding gurgles, almost like water boiling on a stove. There was no variation that Christopher could hear, but the translation came through Em immediately. “It looks different from the ones I’ve seen before. Bigger.”

  “It’s antique. Like me.”

  “Would you like me to take a shot of you with the painting?”

  “Sure,” he said. At that, one of its feet whipped up with alarming speed to snatch the device out of Christopher’s hand; its tail slewed around to balance its body weight and its spine bent into an S-curve. Thus contorted, it was able to drop an eye-stalk directly on the scanner. Heart pounding, Christopher grinned into the lens, resisting an urge to wipe the palms of his hands on his hips. It snapped the picture quickly and returned the camera.

  “It would be polite to look away now,” Em said, so Christopher turned back to Monet. The guide sidled up close and then shifted away. It had probably been advised to widen the space between them to a more human-appropriate distance.

  “Do you have many?”

  “Many what?”

  “Grandchildren, sir.”

  “Three boys, four girls.”

  “Ah. So they’re all grown?”

  “No. Humans are gendered at birth.”

  “Vita appears mortified,” reported Em. “You should have corrected it more gently.”

  “My apologies,” the alien said.

  He shrugged—let its software interpret that.

  He had first seen this painting eighty years earlier, when he was in his teens. He had seen digital prints of it when he was even younger, of course—Monet was inescapable. Even so, Christopher had never understood the big fuss until he’d taken a school trip to the National Gallery.

  He had been fooling around with his friends, ignoring the tour, aggravating his teachers and the guards before finally ducking the group altogether. In search of a place to smoke, he had rounded a corner and found the Monet. Recognition had stopped him, nothing more—he paused, frowned, noticed that it was different from the digitals he had seen. Prints couldn’t do justice to oil; couldn’t communicate the singular way these paintings glowed. Monet’s luminous sunlight on water had crept up on him like a pickpocket. He barely noticed when it made away with his heart.

  “This was painted around 1900 A.D. as you reckon time, at a population cluster in Europe called Giverny. Monet had a house there. He painted this garden many times….”

  “France,” he growled.

  “Pardon?”

  “Giverny is in France.”

  A pause. “Are you all right, sir? My proto believes I have upset you.”

  “Upset?” he managed. “Nah, just older’n hell.”

  “It would be perfectly understandable if receiving instruction in your home culture from an offworlder….”

  What? Made me want to gut you?

  “I just need to sit down,” he said, retreating to the cushioned bench in the middle of the room. This gallery was built to look like an authentic Earth museum—off-white plaster walls, smooth hardwood floors, ceiling lights angled to spotlight each work. Furniture, thank Christ, to ease the aching feet of contemplative patrons. The paintings were displayed too close to each other, though, crammed practically into a collage that extended from floor to ceiling. There was a mishmash of periods and styles: Andy Warhol’s soup cans cuddled next to an amateurish painting of a dog. This was, in turn, located beneath Sir Stanley Spencer’s Saint Francis and the Birds and above an Ansel Adams photograph of an American mountain. Only the Monet had any space to itself, and that was probably because there was extra security hidden in the wall on which it was mounted.

  “Grandkids made me promise to snap ’em the damned painting,” he puffed.

  A bubble of fluid jittered beneath Vita’s skin, indicating—according to Em—surprise. “You didn’t come…it wasn’t your wish to see it?”

  Keep a lid on your emotions, old boy, Christopher lectured himself. “Don’t go for the impressionist stuff, and I saw it in London once anyway. I’m more of a sculpture man. I came for the Tsebsra sculpture.”

  “I see. Then…you don’t like it at all?” Vita’s eyestalks quivered. “The way it glints? The shades of green…”

  “It’s all right. You do like it, I take it?”

  “I think it’s wonderfully natural,” Vita gushed. “Tseb work is so formal and mannered. I visit it every day, as soon as I come in. My parents brought me, the day it arrived.”

  “When was that…ten years ago, surely?”

  “As your time is reckoned. The Nandi sold it to the museum after…” Vita shut up abruptly and Christopher didn’t need Em for once to tell him the pause was an awkward one.

  “Oh. The Lloyds of London thing?” He managed to keep his tone off-hand. The National Gallery had lent a Nandieve museum the Monet and a quartet of other paintings. The aliens had paid a ludicrous sum for the loan. A sweetheart deal, or so it must have seemed to the Gallery’s perpetually underfunded curators.
r />   Unfortunately, failure to check the fine print of cultural difference led to disaster in short order. To the Nandi, the word “loan” implied an indefinite term of visitation. They refused to return the paintings.

  The Gallery spent fifteen years trying to get Waterlily Pond back. They were deep in negotiations when some bright bulb in Gallery management decided to put in an insurance claim, asking to be compensated for the value of the time the painting had spent offworld. Reasonable enough, perhaps—but when Lloyds cut the check to the museum, the Nandi claimed this made the painting theirs. The next thing anyone knew, they had auctioned it off to the Tsebsra.

  Fumbling in his vest pocket, Christopher produced a case of small gelatinous tablets, selecting a marked placebo and pressing it under his tongue. He massaged his left armpit gently, pretending to work out a pain that wasn’t there. “You only get two heart transplants these days before they list you as inoperable,” he commented to Vita, figuring that the bunching of its many eyes indicated interest in his movements.

  He’d guessed wrong. “Personal medical information is not discussed openly here,” Em scolded, but before it could tell him how to apologize, Vita piped up, forcing it to translate instead.

  “It’s okay. We’re not all as rigid as the protos are programmed to say we are.” A previously invisible fissure opened under the eyes, revealing an immense empty space bordered by sharp black ridges. “I’m not offended.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I forget I’m not home. Get to be my age, it’s more or less a license to be rude.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. No family is complete without a cantankerous retired war—” His turn to stop short: he had almost said veteran, and soldiers were never allowed here.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Vita is alarmed,” Em reported.

  “Warhorse,” he said. “It’s a saying. It means I’m old meat, child. Unfit for dogs.”

  Its head expanded slightly and a grinding sound issued from its throat. “Noise equates to a laugh, tone denotes relief,” reported Em.

  It and me both, Christopher thought. What was wrong with him?

  “I came to see the Spine,” he said finally, getting to his feet. “Would you take me?”

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Well enough.”

  “This way, then.” Tail swirling, it crooked a toe in the direction of the exit. Christopher got one last hurried glance at the water lilies and then they were gone.

  Outside the authentic human museum with its authentic humidity-controlled air, he felt himself reviving. They passed into an ornately carved walkway, lined with windows and meant to communicate with the sensitive feet of the Tsebs, a lumpy obstacle course of knobs and gaps. Christopher’s ankles ached as he struggled to traverse it without falling. Just another hurdle, he told himself, like ducking the police or smuggling his false ident out of humanspace. He’d been retired for twenty-four years when the boys approached him for this job. Until a minute ago, he would have sworn he remembered his business.

  His cane twisted unexpectedly at the apex of the arch, causing him to wobble. He had braced it in what looked like a knothole, but the knot was mobile, rotating against the force of his weight. Vita caught his elbow with one foot, swung its tail around an upward-thrusting piece of walkway, and heaved in counter-balance. Its grip was weak, and Christopher could feel that the Tseb’s strength would never hold his full weight.

  Between them, though, they managed to keep him upright. Vita moved his cane to more solid ground. Christopher offered solemn, mumbled thanks. After that, the alien stood closer to him.

  Coming off the bridge, Em instructed him to keep his eyes right, toward the ocean. Christopher looked left instead, to a massive hill that rose like a bell-curve from the beach.

  “That is one of our burial mounds,” Vita said. “Look away.”

  “I thought you were a bohemian, Vita. Hard to offend?”

  “Vita’s expression has turned playful. It is receptive to this conversation,” Em said. “However, the topic chosen is highly improper.”

  “You want to know about the mound?”

  “Why not? I didn’t come five thousand lightyears for Andy Warhol or the damned cuisine.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. When we feel that our spirit is about to break with the physical plane…”

  “Is that supposed to mean when you die?”

  Its head contracted, the skin wrinkling momentarily before expansion somewhere else in its body took up the slack. “Die, yes. When we are dying, we go to a mound and climb as high as we can before weakness overcomes us. It is a last chance to measure the worth of our lives.”

  “What if you’re too sick to get there?”

  “Someone takes you to the base of the mound. If you are very respected, they may even carry you up.”

  “But not always?”

  “Nobody can return from a dying place.”

  “So you heft your troublesome old Uncle Pete up the hill—”

  A loud rush of Vita’s internal fluids startled him so badly he stopped speaking.

  “Sound equates to a giggle,” Em said.

  “Carry someone up, watch them die…and then you stay until you starve?”

  “Yes.” Vita paused; Em reported it was afraid of being overheard. “In that case, the measure of worth is not by how high you climb, but by how long you survive.”

  “I suppose that makes as much sense as anything.”

  Light steps behind them made them turn simultaneously, continuing along the lumpy walkway like the well-behaved pair they weren’t. He glanced Vita’s way and offered a conspiratorial wink just as a trio of eye stalks swiveled his way in a gesture that, according to Em, meant almost exactly the same thing.

  He kept his voice lowered. “Say, what if you’re too sick to be moved?”

  “The effort is always made.”

  “Even if it kills you?”

  “Even then.”

  “How come?”

  “We are sun people, Christopher. It is unconscionable to fail to die out of doors.”

  They stepped out of the walkway and into a darkened gallery. “So what if I was to seize up in here?”

  Another alarming giggle. “You’re not a sun person.”

  “Good. I’d hate to—”

  “Yes?”

  “Do something unconscionable,” he finished quietly. His eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw he was in another three-dimensional nightmare—a door of knobs, lumps and potholes. Little orifices covered the outer wall, soft and penetrable, intended for Tseb tails. The ceiling was low and the air smelled sickly sweet, laden with alien pollens. Dark shaggy moss like the hide of a buffalo covered the nooks and crannies. A few cameras were tucked here and there in the corners, but overall security was lax. The Tsebs were a civilized people, after all. They had nothing to fear from their own. As for the few human terrorists who had made it through their security screens, they had been ordered—just like Christopher—to destroy the Monet.

  Vita was still savoring their rebellion against decorum. “I promise you can die right here, Christopher, and nobody will hold it against you.”

  “Swear?”

  Instructed by its proto, it awkwardly made a heart-crossing gesture with one upraised foot. “I swear.”

  “What if I was one of you?”

  It was quiet for long enough that he wondered if he had gone too far, but at last the translation came. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “If it was instantaneous, unexpected, painless—you would be forgiven,” it said. “If not…if you knew you were dying, if you tried to get to the sun and failed, or you didn’t try…”

  “Big time transgression, huh?”

  Its gesture equated, Em said, to a vehement nod. “Every-thing associated with your death would be shunned.”

  “Your culture only takes forgiveness to a point, then?”

  “You have to draw t
he line somewhere.”

  “Indeed,” he agreed. “Quite so.”

  He let Vita slide back into the proper tour, narrating the history of the Spine as they descended down through the treacherous footing of the gallery. They passed shelves of fungus, tiny statues etched from eggshells, ornately carved crystals and black scrolled wands made of a substance called sea root. Everything was three-dimensional, tactile. Feigning awe, Christopher touched things that felt like peanut butter, dead flesh, adhesive tape, cold steel. He snapped the occasional historical treasure with his too-bulky camera and asked dozens of questions.

  There wasn’t a flat surface anywhere. The Tseb didn’t do two-dimensional depiction. Probably that was why human painting fascinated them so.

  Art you can’t touch. Daft primitives.

  Down and around, hobbled by the lumpy floor, he was genuinely winded by the time they arrived at the Spine.

  It was a single glowing sculpture within a massive subterranean chamber, a giant-sized, abstract depiction of the Tsebsra body. Indentations in its belly suggested femininity without insisting upon it; faded bands on its tail hinted at both maturity and youth. It was delicately curved, less knobby than the grotesqueries that had preceded it in the upper galleries.

  A pair of Tsebs were lounging at its base, running their feet over the structure, their sluglike pouches extended to lick the surface. They tucked back in when Vita appeared with Christopher, moving back through the exit without a backward glance.

  They were alone.

  Good. Fewer witnesses, less trouble. He detached the bottom cartridge of his camera and surreptitiously affixed it to the wall beside the door.

  “Vita’s sound equates to a contented sigh,” Em reported.

  Christopher hadn’t heard anything.

  Looking up to the bulging top of the statue, he realized he was disappointed. This was the Tsebs’ Mona Lisa. He had hoped to understand its beauty. He had come so far….

  “Come on!” Vita gripped his arm, urging him closer. They worked their way to the edge of the sculpture and the alien’s tail stretched out to roam over it lovingly.