The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  And he too smiled, and went away in turn.

  And another season passed …

  … till rubicund Autumn made his appearance. He was a more elderly fellow with an oaten beard, a fat pear of a nose, mushroom ears, clusters of grapes instead of locks of hair. His chin was a pomegranate. He wore an overripe burst fig as an earring. He winked lecherously, and departed even as I tried to cry out to him through rigid lips, to stay.

  For next came Winter, old and gnarled, scabbed and scarred, his nose a stump of rotted branch, his skin of fissured bark, his lips of jutting bracket-fungus.

  Winter stayed for a longer grumbly time, though he no more reached to touch me than had his predecessors. His departure—the apparent end of this cycle of seasons—plunged me into despair. I was as cold as marble.

  Until one day the door opened yet again, and golden light bathed my prison chamber.

  Vertumnus himself advanced—the fruitful God, his cheeks of ripe apple and peach, head crowned with fruit and grain, his chest a mighty pumpkin. His cherry and blackberry eyes glinted.

  Rudolph!

  He reached for me. Oh to be embraced by him! To be warmed.

  He lifted my paralyzed naked body from its dusty niche.

  * * *

  The crash which propelled me back into the drawing room might almost have been caused by his dropping me and letting me shatter.

  For a moment I thought that this was indeed so.

  Yet it was my trance which had been shattered.

  A policeman was in the room. An armed policeman, crouching. He panned his gun around. Plainly I was the only other person present.

  The crash must have been that of those double oak doors flying open as he burst in.

  Footsteps thumped, elsewhere in the house.

  Voices called.

  “Empty!”

  “Empty!”

  Several other officers spilled into the room.

  “You all right, Miss?”

  I could move my limbs—which were clothed exactly as earlier on, in jeans and maroon paisley sweater. I wasn’t tiny and naked, after all. I stared around. No sign of von Habsburg or Voss or Martin.

  “You all right, Miss? Do you understand me?”

  I nodded slowly. I still felt feeble.

  “She was just sitting here all on her own,” commented the officer, putting his pistol away. “So what’s happening?” he demanded of me.

  How did they know I was here?

  “I was … forced into a taxi,” I said. “I was brought here, then given some drug.”

  “What sort of drug? Why?”

  “It made me … dream.”

  “Who brought you here?”

  “A man called Martin…”

  He’s the Habsburg Emperor’s hit-man … The drug was concocted by a magician …

  How could I tell them such things? How could I explain about Rudolph Vertumnus…? (And how could I deny Vertumnus, who had almost rekindled me…?)

  “They were trying to get me to deny things I wrote about the painter Archimboldo…”

  “About a painter?”

  I tried to explain about the pictures, the bombing in Amsterdam, and how my flat had been burgled. My explanation slid away of its own accord—for the sake of sheer plausibility, and out of logical necessity!—from any Habsburg connexion, and into the ecofreak channel.

  The officer frowned. “You’re suggesting that the Greens who bombed that gallery also kidnapped you? There’s no one here now.”

  “They must have seen you coming and run away. I’m quite confused.”

  “Hmm,” said the officer. “Come in, Sir,” he called.

  In walked Phil: chunky, dapper Phil, velvet jacketed and suede-shoed, his rich glossy brown hair brushed back in elegant waves, as ever.

  * * *

  It was Phil who had seen me pushed into the taxi; he who had noticed the gleam of gun from right across the street where he had been loitering with intent outside a bookshop, waiting for me to emerge from St. Martin’s so that he could bump into me. He’d managed to grab another taxi and follow. He’d seen me hustled into that house in North London, wearing those black “goggles.” It took about an hour for him to stir up the armed posse—an hour, during which four seasons had passed before my eyes.

  The fact that Phil and I were long-term “friends” and that he turned out to be a “journalist”—of sorts—irked the police. The abduction—by persons unknown, to a vacant house, where I simply sat waiting patiently—began to seem distinctly stage-managed … for the sake of publicity. Nor—given the Amsterdam connection—did my mention of drugs help matters. Calling out armed police was a serious matter.

  We were both obliged to answer questions until late in the evening before we could leave the police station; and even then it seemed as if we ourselves might still be charged with some offence. However, those deaths in Amsterdam lent a greater credence to what I said. Maybe there was something serious behind this incident …

  I, of course, was “confused.” Thus, early on, I was given a blood test, about which the police made no further comment; there couldn’t have been any evidence of hash or acid in my system.

  I needed to stay “confused” until I could get to talk to Rumby.

  Peeved Phil, of course, insisted on talking to me over late dinner in a pizzeria—we were both starving by then.

  I lied quite a lot; and refrained from any mention of Habsburgs or the Star Club. The Archimboldo paintings had all been genuine. Rumby was an upfront person. Euro Ecofreaks must have bombed the gallery. Must have abducted me. Blondie Martin; elderly man, name unknown; stout man, name of Voss, who wore a strange costume. German speakers. Just the same as I’d told the police, five or six times over. The kidnappers had tried to persuade me to denounce what I had written because my words were an insult to Archimboldo, emblem of the Greens. They had drugged me into a stupor—from which I recovered with surprising swiftness. Rescue had come too soon for much else to transpire …

  Phil and I were sharing a tuna, anchovy, and prawn ensemble on a crispy base, and drinking red wine.

  “It’s quite some story, Jill. Almost front-page stuff.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “The Eco connection! Bombing, abduction … I’d like to run this by Freddy on the news desk.”

  “You’re an art critic, Phil—and so am I. I don’t want some cockeyed blather in the papers.”

  “Jill,” he reproached me, “I’ve just spent all evening in a police station on account of you.”

  “I’m grateful you did what you did, Phil. Let’s stop it there.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you could still be in danger! Or … aren’t you, after all? Was this a publicity stunt? Was it staged by Wright? You’re in deep, but you want out now? Why would he stage such a stunt? If he did … what really happened in Amsterdam?”

  Dear God, how his antennae were twitching. “No, no, no. It couldn’t be a stunt because the only witness to it was you, and that was quite by chance!”

  “By chance,” he mused … as though maybe I might have spied him from an upper window in St. Martin’s and promptly phoned for a kidnapper.

  “Look, Phil, I’m confused. I’m tired. I need sleep.”

  Into the pizzeria stepped a stout, bald man wearing a dark blue suit. He flourished a silver-tipped walking stick. Goering on a night out. His bulgy eyes fixed on mine. He swished the stick, and I screamed with pain, jerking against the table, spilling both our wines.

  “Jill!”

  Phil managed to divert the red tide with his paper napkin at the same time as he reached out towards me. Other customers stared agog, and the manager hastened in our direction. Were we engaged in some vicious quarrel? Wine dripped on to the floor tiles.

  Voss had vanished. I slumped back.

  “Sorry,” I said to the manager. “I had a bad cramp.”

  The manager waved a waiter to minister to the mess. Other diners resumed munching their pizzas.

  �
��Whatever happened?” whispered Phil.

  “A cramp. Just a cramp.”

  Could one of those Habsburgers have trailed us to the police station and hung around outside for hours, keeping watch till we emerged?

  Had I truly seen Voss, or only someone who resembled him? Someone whose appearance and whose action triggered that pain reflex? That agonizing hallucination …

  * * *

  Phil took me back to the flat in a taxi. I had no choice but to let him come up with me—in case the place was infested.

  It wasn’t. Then it took half an hour to get rid of my friend, no matter how much tiredness I claimed. By the time I phoned Rumby’s private number it was after eleven.

  Him, I did start to tell about the Habsburgs.

  He was brevity itself. “Say no more,” my rich protector cut in. My Rumby Daddy. “Stay there. I’m sending Case now. He’ll phone from the car just as soon as he’s outside your place. Make quite sure you see it’s him before you open your door.”

  I dozed off soundly in the Merc. When I arrived at Bexford, Rumby had waited up to quiz me and pump me—attended by Case, and a somewhat weary Lascelles.

  I got to bed around four …

  … leaving Rumby aiming to do some serious phoning. Had Big Daddy been breaking out the benzedrine? Not exactly. Rumby always enjoyed a few hours advantage over us local mortals. So as to stay more in synch with American time-zones he habitually rose very late of a morning. A night shift duo always manned the computer consoles and transatlantic satellite link. In that sense, Bexford never really closed down.

  I’d already gathered that crisis was somewhat of a staff of life around Rumby—who seemed to cook up his own personal supply of benzedrine internally. During my previous two-day sojourn, there’d been the incident of the microlite aircraft. Thanks to a Cotswold Air Carnival, microlites were overflying Bexford at a few hundred feet now and then. Rumby took exception and had Lascelles trying to take out a legal injunction against the organizers.

  Simultaneously, there’d been the business of the starlings. Affronted by those microlite pterodactyls, and seeking a new air-base for their sorties, a horde of the quarrelsome birds took up residence on the satellite dish. Their weight or their shit might distort bits of information worth millions. What to do? After taking counsel from an avian welfare organization, Rumby despatched his helicopter to collect a heap of French pétard firecrackers from Heathrow to string underneath the gutters. So my stay had been punctuated by random explosive farts …

  * * *

  I woke at noon, and Rumby joined me for breakfast in the big old kitchen—antiquity retrofitted with stainless steel and ceramic hobs. A large TV set was tuned to CNN, and an ecologist was inveighing about rocket exhausts and the ozone holes.

  “Each single shuttle launch releases a hundred and sixty-three thousand kilograms of hydrogen chloride that converts into an atmospheric mist of hydrochloric acid! So now they’re kindly promising to change the oxidizer of the fuel—the ammonium perchlorate that produces this vast cloud of pollution—to ammonium nitrate instead—”

  As soon as I finished my croissant, Rumby scuttled the cooks—a couple of local women—out to pick herbs and vegetables. He blinked at me a few times.

  “Any more sightings of flowerpot men? Or Habsburgs?” he enquired.

  “That isn’t funny, Rumby. It happened.”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid you’ve been given a ringbinder, Jill.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’ve been talking to one of my best chemists over in Texas. Sally has a busy mind. Knows a lot about pharmaceuticals.” He consulted scribbles in a notebook. “The ring in question’s a molecular structure called an indole ring … These rings bind to synapses in the brain. Hence, ring-binder. They’re psychotomimetic—they mimic psychoses. Your little pets will probably stay in place a long time instead of breaking down. Seems there’s a lot of covert designer drug work going on right now, aimed at cooking up chemicals to manipulate people’s beliefs. Sally had heard rumours of one drug code-named Confusion—and another one called Persuasion, which seems to fit the bill here. It’s the only explanation for the hallucination—which came from within you, of course, once you were given the appropriate prod.”

  “I do realize I was hallucinating the … flowerpot men. You mean this can continue … indefinitely?”

  “You flashed on for a full encore in that pizza parlour, right? Whiplash! Any fraught scenes in future involving old Archy could do the same. Media interviews, that sort of thing—if you disobey the Habsburg view of Archy. Though I guess you mustn’t spill the beans about them publicly.”

  “They told me so. How did I get away with telling you last night?”

  “They were interrupted before they’d finished influencing you.” He grinned. “I guess I might be high enough in the hierarchy of your loyalties to outrank their partial hold on you. Media or Press people wouldn’t be, so you’d be advised to follow the Habsburg party line with them. Maybe you could resist at a cost.”

  “Of what?”

  “Pain, inflicted by your own mind. Distortions of reality. That’s what Sally says. That’s the word on these new ring-binders. They bind you.”

  The more I thought about this, the less I liked it.

  “How many people know about these persuader drugs?” I asked him carefully.

  “They haven’t exactly featured in Newsweek. I gather they’re a bit experimental. Sally has an ear for rumours. She’s part of my research division. Runs a search-team scanning the chemistry journals. Whatever catches the eye. Any tips of future icebergs. New petrochemical applications, mainly.” He spoke as if icebergs started out fully submerged, then gradually revealed themselves. “She helped dig up data on the correct paint chemistry for the Archies.”

  How frank he was being.

  Apparently. And how glib.

  “So how would a Habsburg magician get his paws on prototype persuader drugs?” I demanded.

  Rumby looked rueful. “Hell, maybe he is a magician! Alchemy precedes chemistry, don’t they say?”

  “In the same sense that Icarus precedes a jumbo jet?”

  One of the cooks returned bearing an obese marrow.

  * * *

  Impulse took me to the kitchen garden, to brood on my own. The sun had finally burned through persistent haze to brighten the rows of cabbages, majestic cauliflowers, and artichokes, the rhubarb, the leeks. An ancient brick wall backed this domain, trusses of tomatoes ranged along it. Rooks cawed in the elms beyond, prancing about those raggedy sticknests that seemed like diseases of the branches.

  Had the old gent whom I’d met really been Heinrich von Habsburg? A Holy Roman Emperor waiting in the wings to step on the world stage? Merely because he told me so, in persuasive circumstances?

  What if that trio in the drawing room had really been ecofreaks masquerading as Habsburgs, pulling the wool over my eyes, trying to bamboozle me into confession?

  Did puritanical ecofreaks have the wit to stage such a show?

  How much more likely that the Star Club, with its presumed access to cutting-edge psychochemistry—and a penchant for dirty tricks?—was responsible for the charade, and for my drugging!

  Whether Rumby himself knew so, or not.

  Wipe me out as a reliable witness to my own part in the prank? Eliminate me, by giving me an ongoing nervous breakdown?

  Would that invalidate what I’d written?

  Ah no. The slur would be upon ecologists …

  And maybe, at the same time, test that persuader drug? Give it a field-trial on a highly suitable test subject, namely myself? The Club’s subsequent aim might be try similar persuasion on influential ecofreaks to alter their opinions or to make them seem crazy …

  In my case, of course, they wouldn’t wish to turn me into an eco-groupie … Thus the Habsburg connection could have seemed like a fertile ploy.

  Was there a genuine, elderly Heinrich von Habsburg somewhere in Germany or Austria? Oh,
doubtless there would be …

  The vegetable garden began slithering, pulsing, throbbing. Ripe striped marrows thumped upon the ground, great green gonads. Tomatoes tumesced. Leeks were waxy white candles with green flames writhing high. Celery burst from earth, spraying feathery leaves. Sprouts jangled. Cauliflowers were naked brains.

  The garden was trying to transform itself, to assemble itself into some giant sprawled potent body—of cauli brain, leek fingers, marrow organs, green leaf flesh …

  I squealed and fled back towards the kitchen itself.

  Then halted, like a hunted animal.

  I couldn’t go inside—where Rumby and Case and Lascelles plotted … the downfall of Nature, the rape of the planets, the bleeding of oil from Earth’s veins to burn into choking smoke.

  Behind me, the vegetable jungle had stilled. Its metamorphosis had halted, reversed.

  If I thought harmoniously, not perversely, I was safe.

  Yet my mind was churning, and reality was unstuck.

  In my perception one conspiracy overlayed another. One scheming plot, another scheming plot. Therefore one reality overlayed another reality with hideous persuasiveness. Where had I just been, but in a vegetable plot?

  I couldn’t go into that house, to which I had fled for safety only the night before. For from inside Bexford Hall invisible tendrils arched out across the sky, bouncing up and down out of space, linking Rumby to star crusaders who were playing with my mind—and to whom he might be reporting my condition even now, guilefully or innocently.

  On the screen of the sky I spied a future world of Confusion and Persuasion, where devoted fanatics manipulated moods chemically so that Nature became a multifold creature evoking horror—since it might absorb one into itself, mind-meltingly, one’s keen consciousness dimming into pulsing, orgasmic dreams; and from which one could only flee in silver ships, out to the empty serenity of space where no universally linked weeds infested the floating rocks, no bulging tomato haemorrhoids the asteroids …

  Or else conjuring up a positive lust for vital vegetative unity!

  I slapped myself, trying to summon a Habsburger whiplash of pain to jerk me out of this bizarre dual vision.