The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Those paintings weren’t just jokes,” I demurred.

  “No, and neither are those posters.” Case seemed to loathe those, as though he would like to tear them all down. He speeded up, and soon we reached the motorway.

  Under the driving mirror—where idiots used to hang woolly dice, and where nowadays people often hung plastic apples or pears, either sincerely or else in an attempt to immunize their vehicles against ecovandals—there dangled a little model … of a rather complex-looking space station. The model was made of silver, or was at least silver-plated. It swung to and fro as we drove. At times, when I glanced that way, I confused rear-view mirror with model so that it appeared as if a gleaming futuristic craft was pursuing us up the M40, banking and yawing behind us.

  Down where my left hand rested I found power-controls for the passenger seat. So I raised the leather throne—yes indeed, I was sitting on a dead animal’s hide, and no wonder the windows were semi-opaque from outside. I lowered the seat and reclined it. I extruded and recessed the lumbar support.

  Now that I’d discovered this box of tricks, I just couldn’t settle on the most restful position for myself. Supposing the seat had been inflexible, there’d have been no problem. Excessive tech, perhaps? I felt fidgety.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” I asked Case.

  “Rumby smokes in this car,” was his answer, which didn’t quite confide his own personal feelings, unless the implication was that these were largely irrelevant amongst Wright’s entourage.

  Case ignored the 60-mile-an-hour fuel-efficiency speed limit, though he drove very safely in this cushioned tank of a car. He always kept an eye open well ahead and well behind as if conscious of possible interception, by a police patrol, or—who knows?—by Green vigilante kidnappers.

  * * *

  Bexford Hall was in the triangle between Stow-on-the-Wold, Broadway, and Winchcombe, set in a wooded river valley cutting through the rolling, breezy, sheep-grazed uplands.

  The house was invisible from the leafy side road, being masked by the high, wire-tipped stone boundary wall in good repair, and then by trees. Case opened wrought iron gates electronically from the car—apparently the head gardener and family lived in the high-pitched gatehouse alongside—and we purred up a winding drive.

  Lawns with topiary hedges fronted the mullion-windowed house. Built of soft golden limestone around a courtyard, Chez Wright somewhat resembled a civilian castle even before his addition of the bastioned, bastard-architectural art wing. A helicopter stood on a concrete apron. A Porsche, a Jaguar, and various lesser beasts were parked in a row on gravel. A satellite dish graced the rear slate-tiled roof, from which Tudor chimneys rose.

  The sun blinked through, though clouds still scudded.

  And so—catching a glimpse en route of several people at computer consoles, scrutinizing what were probably oil prices—we passed through to John Lascelles’ office, where the casual piles of glossy art books mainly caught my eye.

  Having delivered me, Case left to “do things” …

  Lascelles was tall, willowy, and melancholy. He favoured dark mauve corduroy trousers and a multipocketed purple shirt loaded with many pens, not to mention a clip-on walkie-talkie. On account of the ecclesiastical hues I imagined him as a sort of secular court chaplain to Wright. His smile was a pursed, wistful affair, though there was that boyish lilt to his voice which had misled me on the phone. His silences were the truer self.

  He poured coffee for me from a percolator; then he radioed news of my arrival. It seemed that people communicated by personal radio in the house. In reply he received a crackly splutter of Texan which I hardly caught.

  Lascelles sat and scrutinized me while I drank and smoked a cigarette; on his littered desk I’d noted an ashtray with a cheroot stub crushed in it.

  Lascelles steepled his hands. He was cataloguing me: a new person collected—at least potentially—by his non-royal master, as he himself must once have been collected.

  Woman. Thirty-one. Mesomorphic build; though not exactly chunky. Small high breasts. Tight curly brown hair cropped quite short. Violet vampiric lipstick. Passably callipygian ass.

  Then in bustled Rumby—as I simply had to think of the man thereafter.

  Rumby was a roly-poly fellow attired in crumpled bronze slacks and a floppy buff shirt with lots of pockets for pens, calculator, radio. He wore scruffy trainers, though I didn’t suppose that he jogged around his estate. His white complexion said otherwise. His face was quizzically owlish, with large spectacles—frames of mottled amber—magnifying his eyes into brown orbs; and his thinning feathery hair was rebellious.

  He beamed, almost tangibly projecting energy. He pressed my flesh quickly. He drew me along in his slipstream from Lascelles’ office down a walnut-panelled corridor. We entered a marble-floored domed hall which housed gleaming spotlit models. Some in perspex cases, others hanging. Not models of oil-rigs, oh no. Models of a Moon base, of spacecraft, of space stations.

  Was Rumby a little boy at heart? Was this his den? Did he play with these toys?

  “What do you think about space?” he asked me.

  Mischief urged me to be contrary, yet I told him the truth.

  “Personally,” I assured him, “I think that if we cop out of space now, as looks highly likely, then we’ll be locked up here on Mother Earth for ever after eating a diet of beans and being repressively good with ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs everywhere. Oh dear, we mustn’t mess up Mars by going there the way we messed up Earth! Mess up Mars, for Christ’s sake? It’s dead to start with—a desert of rust. I think if we can grab all those clean resources and free energy in space, we’d be crazy to hide in our shell instead. But there’s neopuritanism for you.”

  Rumby rubbed his hands. “And if Green propaganda loses us our launch window of the next fifty years or so, then we’ve lost forever because we’ll have spent all our spunk. I knew you’d be simpatico, Jill. I’ve read Aesthetic Concubines twice.”

  “Concupiscence, actually,” I reminded him.

  “Let’s call it Concubines. That’s easier to say.”

  Already my life and mind were being mutated by Rumby …

  “So how did you extrapolate my views on space from a book on the art market?” I asked.

  He tapped his brow. “I picked up on your anti-repressive streak and the perverse way you think. Am I right?”

  “Didn’t you regard my book as a bit, well, rude?”

  “I don’t intend to take things personally when the future of the human race is at stake. It is, you know. It is. Green pressures are going to nix everyone’s space budget. Do you know they’re pressing to limit the number of rocket launches to a measly dozen per year world-wide because of the exhaust gases? And all those would have to be Earth-Resources-relevant. Loony-tune environ-mentalists! There’s a religious fervour spreading like clap in a cathouse. It’s screwing the world’s brains.” How colourfully he phrased things. Was he trying to throw me off balance? Maybe he was oblivious to other people’s opinions. I gazed blandly at him.

  “Jill,” he confided, “I’m part of a pro-space pressure group of industrialists called The Star Club. We’ve commissioned surveys. Do you know, in one recent poll forty-five per cent of those questioned said that they’d happily give up quote all the benefits of ‘science’ if they could live in a more natural world without radioactivity? Can you believe such scuzzbrains? We know how fast this Eco gangrene is spreading. How do we disinfect it? Do we use rational scientific argument? You might as well reason with a hippo in heat.”

  “Actually, I don’t see how this involves me…”

  “We’ll need to use some tricks. So, come and view the Wright Collection.”

  * * *

  He took me through a security-coded steel door into his climate-controlled sanctum of masterpieces.

  Room after room. Rubens. Goya. Titian. And other lesser luminaries …

  … till we came to the door of an inner sanctum.

  I
half expected to find the Mona Lisa herself within. But no …

  On an easel sat … a totally pornographic, piscine portrait. A figure made of many fishes (along with a few crustaceans).

  A female figure.

  A spread-legged naked woman, red lobster dildo clutched in one octopus-hand, frigging herself. A slippery, slithery, lubricious Venus composed of eels and catfish and trout and a score of other species. Prawn labia, with legs and feelers as pubic hair … The long suckery fingers of her other octopus-hand teased a pearl nipple …

  The painting just had to be by Archimboldo. It was very clever and, mm, persuasive. It also oozed lust and perversity.

  “So how do you like her?” asked Rumby.

  “That lobster’s rather a nippy notion,” I said.

  “It isn’t a lobster,” he corrected me. “It’s a cooked freshwater crayfish.”

  “She’s, well, fairly destabilizing if you happen to drool over all those ‘We are part of Nature’ posters.”

  “Right! And Archimboldo painted a dozen such porn portraits for private consumption by crazy Emperor Rudolph.”

  “He did?” This was astonishing news.

  “I’ve laid hands on them all, though they aren’t all here.”

  Rumby directed me to a table where a portfolio lay. Opening this, I turned over a dozen large glossy colour reproductions—of masturbating men made of mushrooms and autumnal fruits, men with large hairy nuts and spurting seed; of licking lesbian ladies composed of marrows and lettuce leaves …

  “You researched all the background bio on Strada, Jill. Nobody knows what sort of things our friend Archy might have been painting between 1576 and 1587 before he went back home to Milan, hmm?”

  “I thought he was busy arranging festivals for Rudolph. Masques and tournaments and processions.”

  “That isn’t all he was arranging. Rudy was fairly nutty.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if that’s quite fair to Rudolph…”

  “What, to keep a chained lion in the hall? To sleep in a different bed every night? His mania for exotica! Esoterica! Erotica! A pushover for any passing magician. Bizarre foibles. Loopy as King Ludo of Bavaria—yet with real power. The power to indulge himself—secretly—in orgies and weird erotica, there in vast Ratzen Castle in Prague.”

  I wondered about the provenance of these hitherto unknown paintings.

  To which, Rumby gave a very plausible answer.

  When the Swedes under the command of von Wrangel sacked Prague in 1648 as their contribution to the Thirty Years’ War, they pillaged the imperial collections. Thus a sheaf of Archimboldos ended up in Skoklosters Castle at Bålsta in Sweden.

  “Skoklosters Slott. Kind of evocative name, huh?”

  When Queen Christina converted to Catholicism in 1654 and abdicated the Swedish throne, she took many of those looted art treasures with her to Rome itself—with the exception of so-called German art, which she despised. In her eyes, Archimboldo was part of German art.

  However, in the view of her catechist (who was a subtle priest), those locked-away porn paintings were a different kettle of fish. The Vatican should take charge of those and keep them sub rosa. Painters were never fingered by the Inquisition, unlike authors of the written word. Bonfires of merely lewd material were never an issue in an era when clerics often liked a fuck. Nevertheless, such paintings might serve as a handy blackmail tool against Habsburg Emperors who felt tempted to act too leniently towards Protestants in their domains. A blot on the Habsburg scutcheon, suggesting a strain of lunacy.

  The cardinal-diplomat to whom the paintings were consigned deposited them for safe keeping in the crypt at a certain enclosed convent of his patronage. There, as it happened, they remained until discovered by a private collector in the 1890s. By then the convent had fallen on hard times. Our collector relieved the holy mothers of the embarrassing secret heritage in return for a substantial donation …

  “It’s a watertight story,” concluded Rumby, blinking owlishly at me. “Of course it’s also a complete lie…”

  * * *

  The dirty dozen Archimboldos were forgeries perpetrated in Holland within the past couple of years, to Rumby’s specifications, by a would-be surrealist.

  I stared at the fishy masturbatress, fascinated.

  “They’re fine forgeries,” he enthused. “Painted on antique oak board precisely eleven millimetres thick. Two base layers of white lead, chalk, and charcoal slack…” He expatiated with the enthusiasm of a petrochemist conducting an assay of crude. The accuracy of the lipid and protein components. The pigments consisting of azurite, yellow lead, malachite … Mr Oil seemed to know rather a lot about such aspects of oil painting.

  He waved his hand impatiently. “Point is, it’ll stand up under X-ray, infrared, most sorts of analysis. This is perfectionist forgery with serious money behind it. Oh yes, sponsored exhibition in Europe, book, prints, postcards, media scandal…! These naughty Archies are going to fuck all those Green Fascists in the eyeballs. Here’s their patron saint with his pants down. Here’s what red-nosed Rudy really got off on. Nobody’ll be able to gaze dewy-eyed at those posters any more, drooling about the sanctity of nature. This is nature—red in dildo and labia. A fish-fuck. Their big image campaign will blow up in their faces—ludicrously, obscenely. Can you beat the power of an image? Why yes, you can—with an anti-image! We’ll have done something really positive to save the space budget. You’ll write the intro to the art book, Jenny, in your inimitable style. Scholarly—but provocative.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes, because I’ll pay you three quarters of a million dollars.”

  A flea-bite to Rumby, really …

  The budget for this whole escapade was probably ten times that. Or more. Would that represent the output of one single oil well for a year? A month…? I really had no idea.

  Aside from our crusade for space, smearing egg conspicuously on the face of the ecofreaks might materially assist Rumby’s daily business and prove to be a sound investment, since he profited so handsomely by pumping out the planet’s non-renewable resources.

  “And because you want to sock Green Fascism, Jill. And on account of how this is so splendidly, provocatively perverse.”

  Was he right, or was he right?

  He was certainly different from the kind of man I’d expected to meet.

  Obviously I mustn’t spill the beans in the near future. Consequently the bulk of my fee would be held on deposit in my name in a Zurich bank, but would only become accessible to me five years after publication of Archimboldo Erotico …

  Until then I would need to lead roughly the same life as usual—plus the need to defend my latest opus amongst my peers and on TV and in magazines and wherever else. Rumby—or Chaplain Lascelles—would certainly strive to ensure a media circus, if none such burgeoned of its own accord. I would be Rumby’s front woman.

  I liked the three quarters of a million aspect. This showed that Rumby had subtlety. One million would have been a blatant bribe.

  I also liked Rumby himself.

  I had indeed been collected.

  And that 750K (as Brother Bob would count it) wasn’t by any means the only consideration. I approved.

  As to my fallback position, should the scheme be—ahem—rumbled … well, pranks question mundane reality in a revolutionary manner, don’t they just?

  That was a line from Peter, which I half believed—though not enough to stage a diversion in the National Gallery by stripping my blouse off, as he had wished, while Peter glued a distempery canine turd to Gainsborough’s painting, White Dogs, so as to question “conventions.” I’d balked at that proposed escapade of Peter’s ten years previously.

  This was a political prank—a blow against an insidious, powerful kind of repression; almost, even, a blow for art.

  Thus, my defence.

  * * *

  I took a copy of the erotic portfolio back with me to Bloomsbury to gaze at for a few days; and to keep safely locked
up when I wasn’t looking at it. Just as well that Phil wasn’t involved in my immediate life these days, though we still saw each other casually. I’m sure Phil’s antennae would have twitched if he had still been sleeping with a strangely furtive me. Being art critic for the Sunday Times had seemed to imbue him with the passions of an investigative journalist. Just as soon as Archimboldo Erotico burst upon the scene, no doubt he would be in touch … I would need to tell lies to a former lover and ensure that “in touch” remained a phrase without physical substance. Already I could envision his injured, acquisitive expression as he rebuked me for not leaking this great art scoop to him personally. (“But why not, Jill? Didn’t we share a great deal? I must say I think it’s damned queer that you didn’t breathe a word about this! Very peculiar, in fact. It makes me positively suspicious … This isn’t some kind of revenge on your part, is it? But why, why?”)

  And what would Annie think? She was painting in Cornwall in a women’s artistic commune, and her last letter had been friendly … If I hadn’t offended her with my porn paradoxes, then attaching my name to a glossy volume of fish-frigs and spurting phallic mushrooms oughtn’t to make too much difference, unless she had become radically repressive of late …

  In other words, I was wondering to what extent this escapade would cause a hindwards reconstruction of my own life on account of the duplicity in which I’d be engaging.

  And what about the future—in five years time—when I passed GO and became three quarters of a dollar millionairess? What would I do with all that money? Decamp to Italy? Quit the London grime and buy a farmhouse near Florence?

  In the meantime I wouldn’t be able to confide the truth to any intimate friend. I wouldn’t be able to afford intimacy. I might become some pursed-smile equivalent of Chaplain Lascelles, though on a longer leash.

  Maybe Rumby had accurately calculated that he was getting a bargain.

  To be sure, the shape of my immediate future all somewhat depended on the impact of the book, the exhibition, the extent of the hoo-ha … Personally, I’d give the book as much impact as I could. After all, I did like to provoke.