The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He laughed at her. “I wouldn’t know, would I? I’ve never been a parent.”

  “Well, I have, and believe me, Rafiel, it isn’t easy. What difference does it make, really, what kind of animal incubates your child for you? But Charlus says it’s important and, oh, Rafiel, we had such a battle over it!”

  She shook her head, mourning the obstinacy and foolishness of men. Then she decided to forgive. “It isn’t altogether his fault, I suppose. He’s worried. Especially now. Especially because it’s almost fin the second trimester and that means it’s time—”

  She came to a quick halt, once more biting her lip. Rafiel knew why: it was more suddenly remembered tact. The end of the second trimester was when they had to do the procedure to make the child immortal, because at that point the fetal immune system wasn’t developed yet and they could manipulate it in the ways that would make it live essentially for ever.

  “That’s a scary time, I know,” said Rafiel, to be comforting, but of course he did know. Everyone knew he knew, and why he knew. The operation was serious for a little fetus. A lot of them died, when the procedure didn’t work—or managed to survive, but with their natural immune systems mortally intact. Like Rafiel.

  “Oh, mon cher,” she said, “you know I didn’t mean anything personal by that!”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he said reassuringly; but all the same, the happy buzz of the day’s good rehearsing was lost, the evening’s edge was gone, and long before they had finished their leisurely supper, he had abandoned any plan of inviting her back to his condo for the night.

  * * *

  It did spoil the evening for him. Too early for sleep, too late to make any other arrangements, he wandered alone through his condo. He tried reading, but it seemed like a lot of effort. He glanced toward the barre, but his muscles were sore enough already from the day’s work-out. He switched on the vid, roaming the channels to see if there was anything new and good, but there wasn’t. A football series coming to its end in Katmandu, an election in Uruguay—who cared about such things? He paused over a story about a habitat now being fitted out with engines to leave the solar system: it was the one named Hakluyt and it held his interest for a moment because of that silly woman, Hillaree, with her script. It would be interesting, he thought, to take that final outward leap to another star.… Of course, not for him, who would be long dead before the expedition could hope to arrive. He switched to the obituaries—his favorite kind of news—but the sparse list held no names that interested him. He switched again to the entertainment channels. There was a new situation comedy that he had heard about. The name was Dachau, and he remembered that one of the parts was played by a woman he had slept with a few times, years ago. Now she was playing a—a what?—a concentration-camp guard in Germany in World War II, it seemed. It was a comic part; she was a figure of fun as the Jews and Gypsies and political enemies who were inmates constantly mocked and outwitted her. It did have its funny bits. Rafiel laughed as one of the inmates, having escaped to perform some heroic espionage feat for the Allies, was sneaked back into the camp under the very eyes of the commandant. Still, he wondered if things had really ever been that jolly in the real concentration camps of the time, where the real death ovens burned all day and all night.

  It all depended on whether you were personally involved, he thought.

  And then he switched it off, thinking of Docilia. He shouldn’t have been so curt with her. She couldn’t help being what she was. If death seemed comical to the deathless, was that her fault? Hadn’t most of the world, for centuries on end, found fun in the antics of the dwarves and the deformed, even making them jesters at their courts? Perhaps the hunchbacks themselves hadn’t found anything to laugh at—but that was their point of view.

  As his attitude toward dying was his own.

  He thought for a moment of calling Docilia to apologize—perhaps the evening might be salvaged yet. Then he remembered what Mosay had said about personal messages and scrolled them up.

  The first one was personal, all right, and a surprise. It was a talking message, and as soon as the picture cleared he recognized the face of the man who happened to have been his biological father.

  The man hadn’t changed a bit. (Well, why would he, in a mere ninety-some years?) He was as youthful and as handsome as he had been when, on a rare visit, he had somewhat awkwardly taken young Rafiel on his knee. “I saw you were in the Krankhaus again,” the man in the screen said, with the look of someone who was paying a duty call on an ailing friend—not a close one, though. “It reminded me we haven’t heard from each other in a long time. I’m glad everything fait bon, Rafiel—son—and, really, you and I ought to have lunch together some prossimo giorno.”

  That was it. Rafiel froze the picture before it disappeared, to study the dark, well-formed face of the man whose genes he had carried. But the person behind the face eluded him. He sighed, shrugged and turned to the other message.…

  And that one made him stiffen in his chair, with astonishment too sharp to be joy.

  It wasn’t an imaged message, or even a spoken one; it was a faxed note, in a crabbed, nearly illegible handwriting that he knew very well:

  Dearest Rafiel, I was so glad to hear you got through another siege with the damned doctors. Mazel tov. I’m sending you a little gift to celebrate your recovery—and to remind you of me, because I think of you so very often.

  What the gift was he could not guess, because it hadn’t arrived yet, but the note was signed, most wonderfully signed:

  For always, your Alegretta.

  6

  Naturally, all kinds of connections and antipathies appear among the Oedipus troupe as they come together. Charlus is the sire of Docilia’s unborn child. Andrev, who is to play the Creon, is the son of the composer of the score, Victorium. Ormeld, the Priest, and Andrev haven’t acted together for thirty-five years, because of a nasty little firefight over billing in what happened to be the first production in which either got an acting credit. (They hug each other with effusive but wary joy when they come together in the rehearsal hall.) Sander, the Tiresias, studied acting under Mosay when Mosay had just abandoned his own dramatic career (having just discovered how satisfying the god-behind-the-scenes role of a dramaturge was). Sander is still just a little awed by his former teacher. All these interconnections are quite separate from the ordinary who-had-been-sleeping-with-whom sort of thing. They had to be kept that way. If people dragged up that sort of ancient history they’d never get everything straight. Actually, nobody is dragging anything up—at least, not as far as the surface where it can be seen. On the contrary. Everybody is being overtly amiable to everybody else and conspicuously consecrated to the show, so far. True, they haven’t yet had much chance to be anything else, since it’s only the first day of full-cast rehearsal.

  * * *

  Although Mosay was still off scouting for locations—somewhere in Turkey, somebody said, though why anybody would want to go to Turkey no one could imagine—he had taken time to talk to them all by grid on the first day. “Line up, everybody,” he ordered, watching them through the monitor over his camera. “What I want you to do is just a quick run-through of the lines. Don’t sing. Don’t dance, don’t even act—we just want to say the words and see each other. Docilia, please leave Charlus alone for a minute and pay attention. Victorium will proctor for me, while I”—a small but conspicuous sigh; Mosay had not forgotten his acting skills—”keep trying to find the right location for our production.”

  Actually it was Rafiel who was paying least attention, because his mind was full of lost Alegretta. Now, perhaps, found again? For you never forgot your first love.…

  Well, yes, you did, sometimes, but Rafiel never had. Never could have in spite of the sixty or seventy—could it have been eighty? a hundred?—other women he had loved, or at least made love to, in the years since then. Alegretta had been something very special in his life.

  He was twenty years old then, a bright young c
ertain-to-be-a-star song-and-dance man. Audiences didn’t know that yet, because he was still doing the kind of thing you had to start out with, cheap simulations and interactives, where you never got to make your own dramatic statement. The trade was beginning to know him, though, and Rafiel was quite content to be working his way up in the positive knowledge that the big break was sure to come. (And it had come, no more than a year later.)

  But just then he had, of all things, become sick. (No one got sick!) When the racking cough began to spoil his lines, he had to do something. He complained to his doctors about it. Somewhat startled (people didn’t have coughs), the doctors put him in a clinic for observation, because they were as discomfited by it as Rafiel himself. And when all the tests were over, the head resident herself came to his hospital room to break the bad news.

  Even all these decades later, Rafiel remembered exactly what she had looked like that morning. Striking. Sexy, too; he had noticed that right away, in spite of the circumstances. A tall woman, taller in fact than Rafiel himself; with reddish-brown hair, a nose with a bit of a bend in it that kept it from being perfect in any orthodox way, but a smile that made up for it all. He had looked at her, made suspicious by the smile, a little hostile because a little scared. She sat down next to him, no longer smiling. “Rafiel,” she said directly, “I have some bad news for you.”

  “Che c’e? Can’t you fix this damn cold?” he said, irritated.

  She hesitated before she answered. “Oh, yes, we can cure that. We’ll have it all cleared up by morning. But you see, you shouldn’t have a cough at all now. It means…” she paused, obviously in some pain. “It means the procedure didn’t work for you,” she said at last, and that was how Alegretta told Rafiel that he was doomed to die in no more than another hundred years, at most.

  When he understood what she was saying, he listened quietly and patiently to all the explanations that went with it. Queerly, he felt sorrier for her than for himself—just then he did, anyway; later on, when it had all sunk in, it was different. But as she was telling him that such failures were very rare, but still they came up now and then, and at least he had survived the attempt, which many unborn babies did not, he interrupted her. “I don’t think you should be a doctor,” he told her, searching her lovely face.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “You take it too hard. You can’t stand giving bad news.”

  She said soberly, “I haven’t had much practice at it, have I?”

  He laughed at her. She looked at him in surprise, but then, he was still in his twenties, and a promise of another hundred years seemed close enough to forever. “Practice on me,” he urged. “When I’m released, let’s have dinner.”

  They did. They had a dozen dinners, those first weeks, and breakfasts too, because that same night he moved into her flat above the hospital wing. They stayed together nearly two weeks; and there had never been another woman like her. “I’ll never tell,” she promised when they parted. “It’s a medical confidence, you know. A secret.” She never had told, either.

  And his career did blossom. In those days, Rafiel didn’t need to be an oddity to be a star, he became a star because he was so damn good.

  It was only later on that he became an oddity as well because, though Alegretta had never told, there were a lot of other checkups, and ultimately somebody else had.

  It had not mattered to Rafiel, then, that Alegretta was nearly a hundred to his twenty. Why should it? Such things made no difference in a world of eternal youth. Alegretta did not look one minute older than himself … And it was only later, when she had left him, and he was miserably trying to figure out why, that he realized the meaning of the fact that she never would.

  * * *

  First run-throughs didn’t matter much. All they were really for was to get the whole cast together, to get some idea of their lines and what the relationship of each character was to the others, who was what to whom. They didn’t act, much less sing; they read their lines at half-voice, eyes on the prompter scroll on the wall more than each other. It didn’t matter that Rafiel’s mind was elsewhere. When others were onstage he took out the fax from Alegretta and read it again. And again. But he wasn’t, he thought, any more inattentive than any of the others. The pretty young Antigone—what was her real name? Bruta? Something like that—was a real amateur, and amateurishly she kept trying to move toward stage front each time she spoke. Which was not often; and didn’t matter, really, because when Mosay came back he would take charge of that sort of thing in his gentle, irresistible way. And Andrev, the Creon, had obviously never even looked at the script, while Sander, who was to play the blind prophet, Tiresias, complained that there wasn’t any point in doing all this without the actual dramaturge being present. Victorium had his hands full.

  But he was dealing with it. When they had finished the quick run-through he dispatched Charlus to start on the choreography of the first scene, where all the Thebans were reciting for the audience their opening misery under the Sphinx. Rafiel was reaching in his pocket for another look at the fax when Victorium came over. “Sind Sie okay, Rafiel?” he asked. “I thought you seemed just a little absent-minded.”

  “Pas du tout,” Rafiel said, stuffing the letter away. Then, admitting it, “Well, just a little, forse. I, ah, had a letter from an old friend.”

  “Yes,” Victorium said, nodding. “Mosay said something about it. Alegretta, was that her name?”

  Rafiel shrugged, not letting his annoyance show. Of course Mosay had known all about Alegretta because Mosay made it a point to know everything there was to know about every one of his artists; but to pry into private mail, and then to discuss it with others, was going too far.

  “Old lovers can still make the heart beat faster, can’t they?” he said.

  “Yes?” Victorium said, not meaning to sound skeptical, but obviously not troubled with any such emotions himself. “Has it been a long time? Will you be seeing her again?”

  “Oh”—startled by the thought, almost afraid of it—”no, I don’t think so. No, probably not—she’s a long way away. She seems to be in one of the orbiters now. You know she used to be a doctor? But now she’s given up medicine, doing some kind of science now.”

  “She sounds like a very interesting person,” Victorium said neutrally—a little absent-minded himself, too, because in the center of the room Charlus had started showing the Thebans the dance parts, and Victorium had not failed to catch the sounds of his own music. Still looking at the Thebans, Victorium said, “Mosay asked me to show you the rough simulation for the opening. Let’s go over to the small screen—oh, hell,” he said interrupting himself, “can you pardonnez-moi a minute? Verdammt, Charlus has got them hopping when the music’s obviously con vivace. I’ll be right back.”

  Rafiel listened to the raised voices, giving them his full willed attention in order to avoid a repetition of the rush of feeling that Victorium’s casual suggestion had provoked. Charlus seemed to be winning the argument, he thought, though the results would not be final until Mosay returned to ratify them. It was a fairly important scene. Antigone, Ismene, Polyneices, and Eteocles—the four children of Oedipus and Jocasta—were doing a sort of pas de quatre in tap, arms linked like the cygnets in Swan Lake, while they sang a recapitulation of how Oedipus came and saved them from the horrid Sphinx. The chorus was being a real chorus, in fact a chorus line, tapping in the background and, one by one, speaking up—a potter, a weaver, a soldier, a household slave—saying yes, but things are going badly now and something must be done. Then Rafiel would make his entrance as Oedipus and the story would roll on … but not today.

  Victorium was breathing hard when he rejoined Rafiel. “You can ignore all that,” he said grimly, “because I’m sure Mosay isn’t going to let that dummkopf dance-teacher screw up the grand ensemble. Never mind.” He snapped on the prompter monitor to show what he and Mosay had programmed for the under-the-credits opening. “Let’s get down your part here. This is before
the actual story begins, showing you and the Sphinx.”

  Rafiel gave it dutiful attention. Even in preliminary stick-figure simulation, he saw that the monster on the screen was particularly unpleasant-looking, like a winged reptile. “Che the hell cosa is that?”

  “It’s the Sphinx, of course. What else would it be?” Victorium said, stopping the computer simulation so Rafiel could study the creature.

  “It doesn’t look like a sphinx to me. It looks like a crocodile.”

  “Mosay,” Victorium said with satisfaction, “looked it up. Thebes was a city on the Nile, you know. The Nile is famous for crocodiles. They sacrificed people to them.”

  “But this one has wings.”

  “Perchè no? You’re probably thinking of that other Egyptian sphinx. The old one out of the desert? This one’s different. It’s a Theban sphinx, and it looks like whatever Mosay says it looks like.” Victorium gave him the look of someone who would like to chide an actor for wasting time with irrelevant details—if the actor hadn’t happened to be the star of the show. “The important thing is that it was terrorizing the whole city of Thebes, after their ancien roi, Laius, got murdered, until you came along and got rid of it for them. Which, of course, is why the Thebans let you marry Jocasta and be their nouveau roi.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll have to write some new music for the Sphinx to sing the riddle, but,” he said wistfully,”Mosay says we don’t want too much song and dance here because, see, tutta qui is just a kind of prologue. It isn’t in the Sophocles play. We’ll just run it under the credits to mise the scene—oh, merde. What’s that?”

  He was looking at the tel window on the screen, where Rafiel’s name had begun to flash.

  “Somebody’s calling me, I guess,” Rafiel said.

  “You shouldn’t be getting personal calls during rehearsal, should you?” he chided. Then he shrugged. “San ferian. See who it is, will you?”