The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  In July he delivered his first breech birth, a primapara whose labor was so long and painful and bloody he thought at one point he’d lose both mother and baby. He lost neither, although the new mother cursed him in Spanish and spit at him. She was too weak for the saliva to go far. Holding the warmassed, nine-pound baby boy, Jesse had heard a camera click. He cursed too, but feebly; the sharp thrill of pleasure that pierced from throat to bowels was too strong.

  In August he lost three patients in a row, all to conditions that would have needed elaborate, costly equipment and procedures: renal failure, aortic aneurysm, narcotic overdose. He went to all three funerals. At each one the family and friends cleared a little space for him, in which he stood surrounded by respect and resentment. When a knife fight broke out at the funeral of the aneurysm, the family hustled Jesse away from the danger, but not so far away that he couldn’t treat the loser.

  In September a Chinese family, recent immigrants, moved into Androula’s sprawling boarding house. The woman wept all day. The man roamed Boston, looking for work. There was a grandfather who spoke a little English, having learned it in Peking during the brief period of American industrial expansion into the Pacific Rim before the Chinese government convulsed and the American economy collapsed. The grandfather played go. On evenings when no one wanted Jesse, he sat with Lin Shujen and moved the polished white and black stones over the grid, seeking to enclose empty spaces without losing any pieces. Mr. Lin took a long time to consider each move.

  In October, a week before Jesse’s trial, his mother died. Jesse’s father sent him money to fly home for the funeral, the first money Jesse had accepted from his family since he’d finally told them he had left the hospital. After the funeral Jesse sat in the living room of his father’s Florida house and listened to the elderly mourners recall their youths in the vanished prosperity of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

  “Plenty of jobs then for people who’re willing to work.”

  “Still plenty of jobs. Just nobody’s willing any more.”

  “Want everything handed to them. If you ask me, this collapse’ll prove to be a good thing in the long run. Weed out the weaklings and the lazy.”

  “It was the sixties we got off on the wrong track, with Lyndon Johnson and all the welfare programs—”

  They didn’t look at Jesse. He had no idea what his father had said to them about him.

  Back in Boston, stinking under Indian summer heat, people thronged his room. Fractures, cancers, allergies, pregnancies, punctures, deficiencies, imbalances. They were resentful that he’d gone away for five days. He should be here; they needed him. He was the doctor.

  * * *

  The first day of his trial, Jesse saw Kenny standing on the courthouse steps. Kenny wore a cheap blue suit with loafers and white socks. Jesse stood very still, then walked over to the other man. Kenny tensed.

  “I’m not going to hit you,” Jesse said.

  Kenny watched him, chin lowered, slight body balanced on the balls of his feet. A fighter’s stance.

  “I want to ask something,” Jesse said. “It won’t affect the trial. I just want to know. Why’d you do it? Why did they? I know the little girl’s true genescan showed 98 percent risk of leukemia death within three years, but even so—how could you?”

  Kenny scrutinized him carefully. Jesse saw that Kenny thought Jesse might be wired. Even before Kenny answered, Jesse knew what he’d hear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

  “You couldn’t get inside the system. Any of you. So you brought me out. If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain—”

  “You don’t make no sense,” Kenny said.

  “Was it worth it? To you? To them? Was it?”

  Kenny walked away, up the courthouse steps. At the top waited the Goceks, who were suing Jesse for two million dollars he didn’t have and wasn’t insured for, and that they knew damn well they wouldn’t collect. On the wall of their house, wherever it was, probably hung Rosamund’s deathbed picture, a little girl with a plain, sallow face and beautiful hair.

  Jesse saw his lawyer trudge up the courthouse steps, carrying his briefcase. Another lawyer, with an equally shabby briefcase, climbed in parallel several feet away. Between the two men the courthouse steps made a white empty space.

  Jesse climbed, too, hoping to hell this wouldn’t take too long. He had an infected compound femoral fracture, a birth with potential erythroblastosis fetalis, and an elderly phlebitis, all waiting. He was especially concerned about the infected fracture, which needed careful monitoring because the man’s genescan showed a tendency toward weak T-cell production. The guy was a day laborer, foul-mouthed and ignorant and brave, with a wife and two kids. He’d broken his leg working illegal construction. Jesse was determined to give him at least a fighting chance.

  THE COMING OF VERTUMNUS

  Ian Watson

  One of the most brilliant innovators to enter SF in many years, Ian Watson writes fiction that is typified by its vivid and highly original conceptualization. He sold his first story in 1969, and attracted widespread critical attention in 1973 with his first novel, The Embedding. His novel The Jonah Kit won the British Science Fiction Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1976 and 1977, respectively. Watson’s other books include Alien Embassy, Miracle Visitors, The Martian Inca, Under Heaven’s Bridge (coauthored with Michael Bishop), Chekhov’s Journey, Deathhunter, The Gardens of Delight, Queenmagic, Kingmagic, The Book of the River, The Book of the Stars, and The Book of Being, the collections The Very Slow Time Machine, Sunstroke, Slow Birds, and Evil Water. As editor, his books include the anthologies Pictures at an Exhibition, Changes (coedited with Michael Bishop), and Afterlives (coedited with Pamela Sargent). His most recent books are the collection Stalin’s Teardrops and the novel The Flies of Memory. He has had stories in our First and Fifth Annual Collections. Watson lives with his wife and daughter in a small village in Northhamptonshire, England.

  In the complex, suspenseful, and deliciously paranoid novella that follows, Watson demonstrates, with typical ingenuity and inventiveness, that the best conspiracies are those that go way back …

  Do you know the Portrait of Jacopo Strada, which Titian painted in 1567 or so?

  Bathed in golden light, this painting shows us a rich connoisseur displaying a nude female statuette which is perhaps eighteen inches high. Oh yes, full-bearded Signor Strada is prosperous—in his black velvet doublet, his cerise satin shirt, and his ermine cloak. He holds that voluptuous little Venus well away from an unseen spectator. He gazes at that spectator almost shiftily. Strada is exposing his Venus to view, yet he’s also withholding her proprietorially so as to whet the appetite.

  With her feet supported on his open right hand, and her back resting across his left palm, the sculpted woman likewise leans away as if in complicity with Strada. How carefully his fingers wrap around her. One finger eclipses a breast. Another teases her neck. Not that her charms aren’t on display. Her hands are held high, brushing her shoulders. Her big-navelled belly and mons veneris are on full show. A slight crossing of her knees hints at a helpless, lascivious reticence.

  She arouses the desire to acquire and to handle her, a yearning that is at once an artistic and an erotic passion. Almost, she seems to be a homunculus—a tiny woman bred within an alchemist’s vessel by the likes of a Paracelsus, who had died only some twenty-five years previously.

  I chose this portrait of Jacopo Strada as the cover for my book, Aesthetic Concupiscence. My first chapter was devoted to an analysis of the implications of this particular painting …

  Jacopo Strada was an antiquary who spent many years in the employ of the Habsburg court, first at Vienna and then at Prague, as Keeper of Antiquities. He procured and catalogued gems and coins as well as classical statuary.

  Coins were important to the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, because coins bore the portraits of monarchs. A collection of coins was a visible genealogy of God-anointed rulers. Back on Christmas
Day in the year 800 the Pope had crowned Charlemagne as the first “Emperor of the Romans.” The Church had decided it no longer quite had the clout to run Europe politically as well as spiritually. This imperial concoction—at times heroic, at other times hiccuping along—lasted until 1806. That was when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, abdicated without successor so as to thwart Napoleon from grabbing the title. By then, as they say, the Emperor presided over piecemeal acres which were neither an empire, nor Roman, nor holy. Of course, effectively the Habsburg dynasty had hijacked the title of Emperor, which was supposed to be elective.

  History has tended to view the Habsburg court of Rudolph II at Prague in the late 1570s and 80s as wonky, wacky, and weird: an excellent watering hole for any passing nut-cases, such as alchemists, hermetic occultists, or astrologers—who of course, back then, were regarded as “scientists.” Not that true science wasn’t well represented, too! Revered astronomer Tycho Brahe burst his bladder with fatal result at Rudolph’s court, due to that Emperor’s eccentric insistence that no one might be excused from table till his Caesarian Majesty had finished revelling.

  Botanists were very busy classifying plants there, and naturalists were taxonomizing exotic wildlife (of which many specimens graced Rudolph’s zoo)—just as Strada himself tried to impose order and methodology upon ancient Venuses.

  Strada resigned and quit Prague in 1579, perhaps in irritation that his aesthetic criteria held less sway over Rudolph than those of another adviser on the Imperial art collection—namely Giuseppe Archimboldo …

  * * *

  My troubles began when I received a phone call at Central St. Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross Road, where I lectured part-time in History of the Same. The caller was one John Lascelles. He introduced himself as the UK personal assistant to Thomas Rumbold Wright. Oil magnate and art collector, no less. Lascelles’s voice had a youthfully engaging, though slightly prissy timbre.

  Was I the Jill Donaldson who had written Aesthetic Concupiscence? I who had featured scintillatingly on Art Debate at Eight on Channel 4 TV? Mr Wright would very much like to meet me. He had a proposition to make. Might a car be sent for me, to whisk me the eighty-odd miles from London to the North Cotswolds?

  What sort of proposition?

  Across my mind there flashed a bizarre image of myself as a diminutive Venus sprawling in this oil billionaire’s acquisitive, satin-shirted arms. For of course in my book I had cleverly put the stiletto-tipped boot into all such as he, who contributed to the obscene lunacy of art prices.

  Maybe Thomas Rumbold Wright was seeking a peculiar form of recompense for my ego-puncturing stiletto stabs, since he—capricious bachelor—was certainly mentioned once in my book …

  “What sort of proposition?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Lascelles, boyishly protesting innocence.

  I waited. However, Lascelles was very good at silences, whereas I am not.

  “Surely you must have some idea, Mr. Lascelles?”

  “Mr Wright will tell you, Ms. Donaldson.”

  Why not? Why not indeed? I had always revelled in paradoxes, and it must be quite paradoxical—not to mention constituting a delicious piece of fieldwork—for Jill Donaldson to accept an invitation from Thomas R. Wright, lavisher of untold millions upon old canvases.

  One of my prime paradoxes—in my “Stratagems of Deceit” chapter—involved a comparison between the consumption of sensual fine art, and of visual pornography. I perpetrated an iconography of the latter based upon interviews I conducted with “glamour” photographers on the job. No, I didn’t see it as my mission to deconstruct male-oriented sexism. Not a bit of it. That would be banal. I came to praise porn, not to bury it. Those sumptuous nudes in oils of yore were the buoyant, respectable porn of their day. What we needed nowadays, I enthused—tongue in cheek, several tongues in cheek indeed—were issues of Penthouse magazine entirely painted by latterday Masters, with tits by the Titians of today, vulvas by Veroneses, pubes by populist Poussins … Ha!

  * * *

  I was buying a little flat in upper Bloomsbury, with the assistance of Big Brother Robert who was a bank manager in Oxford. Plump sanctimonious Bob regarded this scrap of property as a good investment. Indeed, but for his support, I could hardly have coped. Crowded with books and prints, on which I squandered too much, Chez Donaldson was already distinctly cramped. I could hold a party in it—so long as I only invited a dozen people and we spilled on to the landing.

  Even amidst slump and eco-puritanism, London property prices still bore a passing resemblance to Impressionist price-tags. Perhaps eco-puritanism actually sustained high prices, since it seemed that one ought to be penalized for wishing to live fairly centrally in a city, contributing to the sewage burden and resources and power demand of megalopolis, and whatnot.

  Well, we were definitely into an era of radical repressiveness. The Eco bandwagon was rolling. Was one’s lifestyle environmentally friendly, third-world friendly, future friendly? The no-smoking, no-car, no-red-meat, no-frilly-knickers, sackcloth-and-ashes straitjacket was tightening; and while I might have seemed to be on that side ethically as regards the conspicuous squandering of megamillions on paintings, I simply did not buy the package. Perhaps the fact that I smoked cigarettes—oh penalized sin!—accounted in part for my antipathy to the Goody-Goodies. Hence my naughtiness in exalting (tongues in cheek) such a symptom of unreconstructed consciousness as porn. Paradox, paradox. I did like to provoke.

  How many lovers had such a tearaway as myself had by the age of thirty-one? Just three, in fact; one of them another woman, a painting student.

  Peter, Annie, and Phil. No one at the moment. I wasn’t exactly outrageous in private life.

  Peter had been the prankster, the mercurial one. For his “God of the Deep” exhibition he wired fish skeletons into the contours of bizarre Gothic cathedrals, which he displayed in tanks of water. Goldfish were the congregations—was this art, or a joke? Several less savoury anarchistic exploits finally disenchanted me with Peter—about the time I decided definitively that I really was an art historian and a critic (though of capricious spirit).

  * * *

  Sending a Mercedes, with darkened windows, to collect me could have wiped out my street cred. Personally, I regarded this as a Happening.

  Mind you, I did experience a twinge of doubt—along the lines that maybe I ought to phone someone (Phil? Annie? Definitely not Peter …) to confide where I was being taken, just in case “something happens to me…” I didn’t do so, yet the spice of supposed danger added a certain frisson.

  When my doorbell rang, the radio was bemoaning the death of coral reefs, blanched leprous by the extinction of the symbiotic algae in them. This was sad, of course, tragic; yet I didn’t intend to scourge myself personally, as the participants in the programme seemed to feel was appropriate.

  The driver proved to be a Dutchman called Kees, pronounced Case, who “did things” for Rumby—as he referred to Thomas Rumbold Wright. Athletic-looking and bearded, courteous and affable, Case wore jeans, Reeboks, and an open-necked checked shirt. No uniform or peaked cap for this driver, who opened the front door of the Merc so that I should sit next to him companionably, not behind in splendid isolation. Case radiated the easy negligence of a cultured bodyguard-if-need-be. I was dressed in similar informal style, being determined not to doll myself up in awe for the grand encounter—though I refused to wear trainers with designer names on them.

  Although Wright maintained a corporate headquarters in Texas, he personally favoured his European bastion, Bexford Hall. This had recently been extended by the addition of a mini-mock-Tudor castle wing to house his art in even higher security. The Sunday Times colour supplement had featured photos of this jail of art. (Did it come complete with a dungeon, I wondered?)

  The mid-June weather was chilly and blustery—either typical British summer caprice or a Greenhouse spasm, depending on your ideology.

  As we were heading out towards the m
otorway, we soon passed one of those hoardings featuring a giant poster of Archimboldo’s portrait of Rudolph II as an assembly of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Ripe pear nose; flushed round cheeks of peach and apple; cherry and mulberry eyes; spiky chestnut husk of a chin; corn-ear brows, and so on, and so on.

  The Emperor Rudolph as Vertumnus, Roman god of fruit trees, of growth and transformation. Who cared about that particular snippet of art historical info? Across the portrait’s chest splashed the Eco message, WE ARE ALL PART OF NATURE. This was part of that massive and highly successful Green propaganda campaign exploiting Archimboldo’s “nature-heads”—a campaign which absolutely caught the eye in the most persuasive style.

  These posters had been adorning Europe and America and wherever else for the best part of two years now. Indeed, they’d become such a radiant emblem of eco-consciousness, such a part of the mental landscape, that I doubted they would ever disappear from our streets. People even wore miniatures as badges—as though true humanity involved becoming a garlanded bundle of fruit and veg, with a cauliflower brain, perhaps.

  Case slowed and stared at that hoarding.

  “Rudolph the red-nosed,” I commented.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Case replied, “Ah, and Rudolph loved Archimboldo’s jokes so much that he made him into a Count! Sense of humour’s sadly missing these days, don’t you think?”

  My driver must have been boning up on his art history. The Green poster campaign was certainly accompanied by no background info about the artist whose images they were ripping off—or perhaps one ought to say “recuperating” for the present day … rather as an ad agency might exploit the Mona Lisa to promote tampons. (Why is she smiling…?)