The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Or maybe he’d wanted to surprise me. My father, that is. He was expecting me; the sense of it drifted up to me with the people’s voices, along with the force of his presence, faint at this distance but there nonetheless. When I got a little farther down the steps, he’d sense my presence like a ripple crossing his own. My father, the spider.

  I turned away from the stairs and began making my way along the embankment through the brush and dead leaves until I was directly behind the house. I half-climbed, half-slid down the embankment, trying to be quiet and failing completely. Still, no one bothered to take a look around the back and see what all the crunching and rustling was about. Either they all figured it was the indigenous wildlife or they couldn’t really hear it that well.

  The rear windows were high up and not terribly large, but the ledges were generous. Jumping, I caught the rough edge of the one farthest from the party noise, and there was enough room for me to rest my forearm on it and pull myself up.

  I was looking into my father’s studio. The easel holding my mother’s portrait stood in the center of the room, facing away from me toward the door. This was it, the big unveiling of the capstone of his career, if you could call thirteen paintings of one blurry woman a career. But being a knower himself, he’d known exactly how to play it as an artistic obsession. He could have been well-known if he had chosen to allow his notoriety to expand beyond the small local but lucrative scenes he’d been cultivating here and there around the country.

  But this would do it for him, I realized. Like that other artist, Wyeth, with the Helga paintings.

  Helga? If I could have seen the entire series right then, I would have known her Name immediately.

  The window was locked; I broke one of the panes and managed to unlock it without severing any major blood vessels on the shards left in the frame. Pushing the window up and clambering inside seemed to take forever and left me with sore arm muscles. I was surprised that I could do it at all; moving around vigorously was something else I’d never engaged in much.

  The portrait was covered with a white linen cloth. I hesitated, holding one corner, and then slipped my hand underneath. The paint—acrylics? oils? Glidden’s rainy-day gray?—felt almost-sticky, as if it were a minute or so away from being completely dry.

  “Go ahead. You might as well. I painted it to be looked at.”

  I didn’t turn around.

  “Besides, family shouldn’t have to wait until the ceremonial unveiling.”

  He came over and put his hands on my shoulders. “Of course, if you want to wait, I won’t insist,” he added.

  “When did you finish it?” I asked, pulling my hand away from the painting.

  “Who says it’s finished?” He tried to turn me around but I refused to move and he let go of me. “I thought I’d show it tonight and get some comments on it before I did anything final to it. If, indeed, I need to, other than take a last look.”

  Yeah, sure, I thought.

  He walked around behind the easel and leaned on the top of the painting, studying me. I raised my eyes to look at him. My mother had shown him to me but I wasn’t prepared for the sight of him as he was now, in person. I could see everything immediately and I reached for the cloth, intending to yank it off. He clapped a hand down over it, holding it in place.

  “Sorry—changed my mind. You’re a smart girl,” he said, almost approvingly. “Excuse me—woman. Though people your age are more children than not to me. It really isn’t finished, you know; I couldn’t finish it until I’d met my daughter. I must say, I had thought you would look much more like her, so this is a pleasant surprise. You don’t seem to know, though, whether you came to try to stop me, or just to kill me. Why don’t you come out and meet the other guests while you’re thinking it over?”

  He came around the easel and tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow. It was such a corny thing to do that I couldn’t help laughing. This seemed to startle him, but he didn’t say anything about it, leading me through the house as if he were already parading in victory. The house itself was surprisingly shabby, the furniture faded, old, and worn. In the dining room, people stood around in clumps, picking at the enormous spread of carefully-arranged party food, hors d’oeuvres and deli-style cold-cuts, salad mixtures in big stoneware bowls, and bottle after bottle of champagne, standing in rows. They still reminded me of magazine-ad people; I half-expected my father to regroup them more artfully. But he just introduced me around and those generic faces gave me generic smiles, expressed tasteful astonishment that Boileau had a daughter, and went back to their generic party discussions.

  “Pretty harmless group,” I said, as my father led me outside.

  “They don’t have the faintest idea,” my father said, handing me down the front steps. “Let me show you.”

  He went up to the nearest person, a blond, bearded man in conversation with a tall, black-haired woman, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Henry, Alberta, I’d like you to meet my daughter.”

  Alberta beamed while Henry hurriedly transferred a paper plate of potato salad to his other hand so he could shake hands with me. “Well, this is a surprise and a pleasure!” he said heartily.

  “She’s come to put a stop to me,” my father said, giving me a sidelong glance. “Probably by driving a stake through my heart or something.”

  “Really,” said Alberta. “And where did she go to school?”

  “Wherever her mother chose to take her. Mostly bad public schools with no budgets and demoralized teachers, I imagine.”

  “Ah. My next-door neighbor’s kids all went there,” said Henry. “They seemed to enjoy it. Do you paint, also?” he asked me.

  “Oh, my daughter hasn’t done much of anything for the last twenty-some years, thanks to her mother. But now that she has come into her own, I guess she’ll do whatever she wants—enslave a few people, maybe win a lottery or two—under different names, of course—and possibly kill her mean old father this evening.”

  “Well, that’s what I understand from many people such as yourself,” Henry said congenially. “The children all tend to go off in other directions, and I guess that’s understandable, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  “No offense taken,” I said, and turned to my father. “They really don’t get it.”

  “None of them do,” my father said. “You could walk around here like the invisible woman, completely unnoticed, unless I called their attention to you.”

  I looked around suspiciously.

  “Haven’t touched them,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, I’m not so sure that most of them even have Names. They’re more like a herd of sheep, they’ve been told what to do and what to expect since they were born. Since before they were born. They are their clothes, their cars, their jobs; their things own them. Not me. I could have them if I wanted, I suppose, but that can be more trouble than it’s worth. Right?”

  Of course he had sensed what I’d done at the gallery—all of his paintings were there, and they were as much of him as they were of my mother. He hadn’t thought I’d know that, which was why he’d changed his mind about letting me see his nearly-finished masterpiece. I wondered how he planned to finish it and show it now.

  He didn’t seem concerned. We drifted through the crowd in the yard, meeting more of them. He continued to play his little conversation game, though to what purpose I didn’t know. Maybe just because they were so willing and he was so able.

  Eventually, I noticed that the day had stopped darkening. The slight wind that had been rustling the surrounding trees had also ceased and the party gabble had acquired a strangely muffled sound, as if it were coming from under a belljar. People who had been wandering about the yard and going in and out of the house were now rooted to wherever they stood—without noticing, of course.

  “Timing,” my father said, cheerfully. “What you need in this business is a good sense of timing and for that you have to understand time itself.”

  “I thought you were
a knower, not a timekeeper,” I said, taking a bacon-wrapped morsel off a plate held by a woman in black satin pajamas.

  “Knowers are multi-talented that way,” he said. “Don’t eat that. Nothing’s edible when it’s stuck between moments, it’ll be like chewing a lump of styrofoam.”

  I put the hors d’oeuvre back on the plate. “What about them? Are they still functioning?”

  He nodded, looking at the quiet water. “They’re right with me, as much as they can be, which is enough for my purpose.” He turned his smile to me. “It’s finished, now, in case you didn’t know. I’ve been finishing it while I’ve been walking around here with you. Now I know what I should see, what we should all see. Time to bring it out.”

  “I’ve brought it out for you.”

  My mother was standing in the middle of the yard next to the easel, one hand resting gracefully along the top like a game-show hostess’s. Once the initial shock had passed, I knew I shouldn’t have been surprised. Diverting him with me was the only way she could possibly have gotten close to him.

  “I’m sure you meant to invite me,” she went on, smiling at the people standing around. “A great artist would never unveil a masterpiece without inviting the subject to be present.”

  He took a step toward her and she grabbed a corner of the linen covering.

  “Come on, Boileau,” she said. “You’ve had all the fun up to now. Let me have the privilege of unveiling it.”

  “No—”

  The motion of her yanking the linen away lasted forever. The cloth flew up and out, its folds twisting and turning like a flower opening up before it sailed away.

  It was now a picture of the two of them. There was still only one subject but what my father had put into it of himself was now equally as obvious as my mother’s face and, consequently, her Name. You couldn’t see it without seeing both of them. Of course. My mother hadn’t been able to undo any of the last thirty years, so she had just done a little more.

  Someone began to applaud. It spread through the gathering; they were all putting their plates and glasses down on the ground beside them and clapping their hands enthusiastically. Someone even whistled.

  My mother went to my father and pulled him over to the easel. She bowed, turned and gestured to him, and then began to clap her own hands, slowly and deliberately, almost in his face. “Sometimes a stalemate is the best victory you can hope for,” I heard her tell him over the ovation still going on around them. “Maybe that’s the only victory that really means anything for people like us.” She looked at me; her smile was grim. “You remember that. You remember that you can’t really Name Names without Naming yourself.”

  It was true, I saw, as she moved around behind the easel and continued applauding my father. You had to look really closely to see that it was not just a picture of the two of them but a family portrait of the three of us, but since most people didn’t know about me, they’d never quite see it in the right way. And my mother would go on making sure they didn’t, as long as nobody ever spoke her Name. Especially me.

  I turned and ran up the dirt stairs to the road. There was a car idling by the mailbox.

  “Need a lift?” said the guy from the gallery. It wasn’t really a question.

  “Who’s minding the store?” I asked him.

  He laughed. “You are. As if you didn’t know.”

  * * *

  They were out in force on the ferryboat this time, not bothering to hide themselves. I couldn’t get away from all the conversations taking place around me, even in the bathroom. It wasn’t chocolate cupcakes that they wanted.

  I considered it. My new friend—his name, I learned belatedly, was Gus, short for Augustus, and what had his parents been thinking of?—wouldn’t be happy here, but he wasn’t going to be happy anywhere any more. That wasn’t his purpose in life.

  “Just think it over,” one woman was telling another on a nearby bench. “Of course, you can’t take too long but that’s the nature of the business we’re all in.”

  I made Gus stay there while I went up to the upper deck. A group of kids, teenagers, were comparing notes about some party they’d all been to.

  “… give anything for a system like that … all that power…”

  “… more than I make in two months, maybe three…”

  “… everybody’d always be hitting on you to come over and use it, though…”

  “… and the whole world wants to be your best friend. I dunno if I want best friends like that…”

  “… got to use it while you were there … think it over…”

  Big help. I went back down to the lower deck. Gus was gone. I thought one of them had gotten impatient and decided to force the issue, but then I found him standing outside near the stern.

  “Is that how it is?” he said. “When we dock, you just walk off and I don’t? That’s a pretty big offering. What do you get in return, a whole ferryboat and all the bad snacks you can stuff in your face?”

  “Are you wearing a watch?” I asked.

  “Yes. A Rolex.”

  “Give it to me.” I wrapped a ten-dollar bill around the wristband and left it on a bench.

  “My parents gave me that,” he said accusingly.

  “You can get another. I’ll buy you another.”

  “You’ll have to. I need things like that. It’s what I am, you know.” He smiled. “Yeah, I guess you do know.”

  I did. His Name stood for material things and status symbols, the acquisition of shiny stones and metals and pretty pictures. They owned him, the condition of my ownership, for as long as it was in force. He was going to be an expensive pet; I’d have to win a lottery or two.

  I could feel him settling into his new life. That was the real price, I thought. Once you had power, you ended up having to depend on it. Eventually, like anything else, it owned you.

  Eventually? No, from the beginning; we just don’t bother admitting it at first.

  We were close to the mainland now and would be docking in a few minutes. Gus linked arms with me and dragged me into the middle of the crowd gathering impatiently at the exit. “I don’t like to wait in line, either,” he said. “I like to go first.” He put his arms around my shoulders and gave me a hard squeeze.”You know, I’m going to like this a lot better than I thought I would.”

  I smiled up at him. “Behave yourself.”

  “Or what—you’ll bring me back here and leave me?” He laughed.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll tell you my Name.”

  It was a month before he dared to speak again. I bought him the Rolex anyway.

  THE ELVIS NATIONAL THEATER OF OKINAWA

  Jonathan Lethem and Lukas Jaeger

  Here’s a funny and razor-sharp look at the World of Tomorrow. And you thought today was weird! You ain’t seen nothing yet!

  Jonathan Lethem is yet another one of those talented new writers who are continuing to pop up all over as we progress into the decade of the 1990s. He works at an antiquarian bookstore, writes slogans for buttons, and lyrics for several rock bands (including Two Fettered Apes, EDO, Jolley Ramey, and Feet Wet), and is also the creator of the ‘Dr. Sphincter’ character on MTV. In addition to all these certifiably cool credentials, Lethem has also had sales in the last few years to Interzone, New Pathways, Pulphouse, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Universe, Journal Wired, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Aboriginal SF, and elsewhere; his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is slotted for 1994. His story “Walking the Moons” was in our Eighth Annual Collection.

  Lukas Jaeger is a graduate of the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He is an animator and cartoonist, and his first two films, Dimwit’s Day and It’s You, have been shown in festivals worldwide. His current film-in-progress is called Big Concrete Place.

  Both men live in the San Francisco Bay area, and this is their first collaboration.

  Sam’s Big Kinesthetic went down the Blind Alleyway to check out Tokyo Norton’s new act: the
Elvis National Theatre of Okinawa. Sam’s Big was a threesome consisting of a neuropublicity agent, a talent development scout, and a bush-robot that hooked them into the infodrip, and into one another. They all went by the name Sam’s Big, and they never walked alone.

  Tokyo Norton ran a noisy, credit-chip-sized stage in darkest Das Englen, but he had a nose for imported novelties. Sam’s Big had to keep its finger on the pulse.

  “You wanna wanna put Ento on the big show?” jabbered Norton after the revue was closed. They whirred above the rooftop of the Alleyway in Norton’s ramjet gazebo. The emotional kaleidoscope on Norton’s forehead performed an unnecessary flourish, which annoyed Sam’s Big.

  “I don’t know,” said Sam’s Big. “There’s something there—”

  “For truly understand Ento,” said Norton, “I have to give context.” He snorted. “Is cultivated secretly, according to ancient stricture. No foreigner has ever seen before. Is guild of monks perform ancient mysteries. Not just song and dance.”

  “The whole thing’s an ancient ritual?” mused Sam’s Big. “The weird karate kicks, the whole bit with the handkerchiefs … that wild number about ‘Pork Salad Ani’?”

  “Oh yes, oh yes. Quite elaborate and mysterious.”

  “What’s the reference, though? What’s ‘Elvis’?”

  “Impersonation of ‘Elvis’ medieval Japanese folk art. Origins shrouded in veils of misty time. Forgotten meanings, buried in layers of abstraction. Foreigner never see before—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Sam’s Big knew perfectly well that ninety per cent of what passed for Jap culture was filched from overseas, and usually garbled to incomprehensibility in the process. It didn’t matter. The point was, this Ento drama had something at the core, something interesting. “The whole look,” Sam’s Big said, “the sideburns, the pallid, fatty physique. Cosmurgery?”