The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Jack was in the bar most days. He ate there. He ran his business out of it. He used it as a mail drop, and as a place to check out his clients: but really it was what they called a jump-off joint, positioned well, not too far back from the event site, not so close as to suffer effects. Another advantage it had: Jack was on good terms with the owner, a woman called Liv Hula who never put in a manager but ran it herself day and night. People thought she was the barkeep; that suited her. She wasn’t known to complain. She was one of those women who draw in on themselves after their fortieth year, short, thin, with brush-cut grey hair, a couple of smart tattoos on her muscular forearms, an expression as if she was always thinking of something else. She had music in the bar. Her taste ran to the outcaste beats and saltwater dub you heard a few years back. That aged her as far as Jack Serotonin was concerned. Which is to say they’d been round a time or two.

  “Hey,” she told Jack now, “leave the fat man alone. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion.”

  Serotonin stared at her. “I won’t even answer that.”

  “Bad night, Jack?”

  “You should know. You were there.”

  She poured him a shot of Black Heart rum, along with whatever the fat man was having. “I would say you were out there on your own, Jack,” she said. “Much of the time.” They both laughed. Then she looked over his shoulder at the open door of the bar and said –

  “Maybe you got a customer here.”

  The woman who stood there was a little too tall to wear the high heels in fashion then. She had long thin hands, and that way of looking both anxious and tranquil a lot of those tourist women have. There was a tentativeness about her. She was elegant and awkward at the same time. If she knew how to wear clothes, perhaps that was a learned thing, or perhaps it was a talent she had never fully brought out in herself. You thought instantly she had lost her way. When she came into the bar that morning, she was wearing a black two-piece with a little fitted jacket and calf-length kick-pleat skirt, under a long, honey-colored fur coat. She stood there uncertainly in the doorway, with the cold morning light from Strait Street behind her, and the unflattering light from the window falling across one side of her face, and the first words anyone heard her say were, “Excuse me, I – ”

  At the sound of her voice, the shadow operators unfolded themselves and streamed toward her from every corner of the room, to whirl about her head like ghosts, bats, scrap paper, smoke, or old women clasping antique lockets of hair. They recognized privilege when they saw it.

  “My dear,” they whispered. “What beautiful hands.”

  “Is there anything we can do – ”

  “ – Can we do anything, dear?”

  “What lovely, lovely hands!”

  Liv Hula looked amused. “They never did that for me,” she admitted to the woman in the fur coat. Then she had a sudden vision of her own life as hard-won, dug out raw from nothing much even the few times it seemed to swoop or soar.

  “You came for Jack, he’s over there,” she said.

  She always pointed him out. After that she washed her hands of whatever happened next. This time Jack was waiting. He was low on work, it was a slow year though you wouldn’t guess that from the number of ships clustered in the tourist port. Jack accounted himself intelligent and determined; women, on the other hand, saw him as weak, conflicted, attractive, reading this as a failed attempt to feminize himself. He had been caning it for weeks with fat Antoyne and Liv Hula, but he still looked younger than his age. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, and the woman leaned toward him as if he was the only way she could get her bearings in the room. The closer she approached him the more uncertain she seemed. Like most of them, she wasn’t sure how to broach things.

  “I want you to take me in there,” she said eventually.

  Jack laid his finger on his lips. He could have wished for some statement less bald. “Not so loud,” he suggested.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged and said, “No problem.”

  “We’re all friends here,” Liv Hula said.

  Jack gave Liv a look, which he then turned into a smile.

  The woman smiled too. “Into the event site,” she said, as if there might be any doubt about it. Her face was smooth and tight across longings Jack didn’t quite understand. She looked away from him as she spoke. He should have thought more about that. Instead he ushered her to a table, where they talked for five minutes in low voices. Nothing was easier, he told her, than what she wanted. Though the risk had to be understood, and you underrated at your peril the seriousness of things in there. He would be a fool not to make that clear. He would be irresponsible, he said. Money changed hands. After a time they got up and left the bar.

  “Just another sucker on the vine,” Liv Hula said, loud enough to pause him in the doorway.

  Antoyne claimed to have flown dipships with Ed Chianese. He passed the days with his elbows on the bar staring out through the window at the contrails of descending K-ships in the sky above the houses on the other side of Strait Street. To most people it seemed unlikely he flew with anyone, but he could take a message and keep his mouth shut. The only other thing he ever said about himself was:

  “No one gives a shit about a fat man called Antoyne.”

  “You got that right,” Liv Hula often told him.

  When Jack had gone, there was a silence in the bar. The shadow operators calmed down and packed themselves back into the ceiling corners so the corners looked familiar again – that is, as if they had never been cleaned. Antoyne stared at the table in front of him then across at Liv Hula. It seemed as if they’d speak about Jack or the woman but in the end neither of them could think of anything to say. The fat man was angry that Liv Hula had defended him to Jack Serotonin. He drove his chair back suddenly, it made a kind of complaining sound against the wooden floor. He got up and went over to the window, where he wiped the condensation off with the palm of his hand.

  “Still dark,” he said.

  Liv Hula had to admit that was true.

  “Hey,” he said. “Here’s Joe Leone.”

  Over the street from Black Cat White Cat it was the usual frontages, busted and askew, buildings that had lost confidence in their structural integrity and that now housed shoestring tailor operations specializing in cosmetics or one-shot cultivars. You couldn’t call them “parlors.” The work they did was too cheap for that. They got a trickle of stuff from the Uncle Zip and Nueva Cut franchises downtown; also they took work from the Shadow Boys, work like Joe Leone. Just now Joe was pulling himself down Strait using the fences and walls to hold himself up. His energy ebbed and flowed. He would fall down, wait for a minute, then struggle up again. It looked like hard work. You could see he was holding something in down there with one hand while he leaned on the fence with the other. The closer he got the more puzzled he looked.

  Antoyne made a tube out of his two damp fists and said through it in the voice of a sports commentator at Radio Retro:

  “. . . and will he make it this time?”

  “Be sure to let us know when you join the human race, Antoyne,” Liv Hula said. The fat man shrugged and turned away from the window. “It’s no bet,” he said in his normal voice. “He never failed yet.”

  Joe kept dragging himself down Strait. As he approached you could see the tailors had done something to his face so it had a crude lionlike cast. It was white and sweated up, but it didn’t move properly. They had given it a one-piece look as if it was sculpture, even the long hair swept back and out from his big forehead and cheekbones. Eventually he fell down outside one of the chopshops and stopped moving, and after a couple of minutes two men almost as big as him came out to drag him inside.

  Joe started to fight when he was seven.

  “Never strike out at the other, son,” his father would explain in a patient way. “Because the other is yourself.”

  Joe Leone didn’t follow that, even at seven years old which everyone agreed was his mos
t intelligent time. He liked to fight. By twelve it was his trade, nothing more or less. He had signed with the Shadow Boys. From that time on he lived in one-shot cultivars. He liked the tusks, the sentient tattoos, and the side-lace trousers. Joe had no body of his own. It cost him so much to run those cultivars he would never save up enough to buy himself back. Every day he was in the ring, doing that same old thing. He was getting pretty well messed up. “I lost count the times I seen my own insides. Hey, what’s that? Lose your insides ain’t so hard. Losing a fight, that’s hard.” And he would laugh and buy you another drink.

  Every day they dragged the fucked-up cultivar out of the ring, and the next day Joe Leone had been to the tailor on Strait and come out fresh and new and ready to do it all again. It was a tiring life but it was the life he loved. Liv Hula never charged him for a drink. She had a soft spot for him, it was widely acknowledged.

  “Those fights, they’re cruel and stupid,” she told the fat man now.

  He was too smart to contradict that. After a moment, looking for something else to quarrel over, he said: “You ever do anything before you kept bar?”

  She brought out a lifeless smile for him to consider.

  “One or two things,” she said.

  “Then how come I never heard about them?”

  “Got me there, Antoyne.”

  She waited for him to respond, but now something new on Strait had caught his attention. He wiped the window glass again. He pressed his face up against it. “Irene’s a little late today,” he said.

  Liv Hula busied herself suddenly behind the bar.

  “Oh yes?”

  “A minute or two,” he said.

  “What’s a minute or two to Irene?”

  The fights were a dumb career, that was Liv Hula’s opinion. They were a dumb life. Joe Leone’s whole ambition was as dumb as his self-presentation until he met Irene: then it got worse. Irene was a Mona who had a good track record working the noncorporate spaceport. She was what you call petite, five-three in transparent urethane heels and full of appeal with her flossy blonde hair. Like all those Uncle Zip products she had something organic about her, something real. She watched Joe Leone at the fights and after she smelled his blood she couldn’t leave him alone. Every morning when he came home to the tailor’s, Irene was there too. Between them they summed up New Venusport, the sex industry and the fight industry. When Joe and Irene were together you couldn’t be sure which industry was which. They were a new form of entertainment in themselves.

  Irene commenced to hammer at the chopshop door.

  “How long you think they’ll let her shout before they open up?” fat Antoyne asked. Liv Hula had found a map-shaped stain on the zinc bartop, which she stared at with interest.

  “I don’t know why you’re asking me,” she said.

  “She’s got feelings for him,” said Antoyne, to press his advantage. “That’s undeniable. No one questions that . . . Jesus,” he added to himself, “look at those tits.”

  He tried to imagine Joe Leone, dead and liquefied while his bones and organs reassembled themselves and Irene gave him the Mona side of her mouth. The joke was, Irene’s opinion was no different than Liv Hula’s. Every morning she made them fetch her an old wooden chair and put it at the head of Joe’s tank, with his faded publicity slogan on it, Hold the painkillers. There she sat, ignoring the pink flashing LEDs, which were for show anyway, while the tank proteome slushed around like warm spit, cascades of autocatalysis through a substrate of forty thousand molecular species, flushing every twenty minutes to take off what unwanted product the chemistry couldn’t eliminate. She hated the sucking noises it made.

  One day you won’t get back, she would tell the Lion. One more fight and you’re fucked with me. But Joe was an algorithm by now, somewhere off in operator space. He was choosing new tusks from the catalogue, he was getting tuning to his glycolytic systems. He couldn’t hear a word.

  Oh Joe, I really mean it, she’d say. One more fight.

  Liv Hula sometimes watched the rockets too.

  Near dawn, you got her and the fat man standing by the window together as two tubby brass-looking freighters lifted from the corporate yard. Then a K-ship exited the military pits on the hard white line from its fRAM engine. In the backwash of light a warmer expression came on her face than you would expect. By then the Kefahuchi Tract had begun to fade from the sky, which was tilted like a lid to show one thin eastern arc of pale green, false dawn. Offshore winds would come up soon and, forced along the narrow pipe of Strait Street, churn the low-lying fogs of the event site. That would be the signal for all sorts of people to start the day. Live Hula and Antoyne the fat man watched the K-ship cut the sky like scissors.

  “You ever fly one of those, Antoyne?” she remarked.

  He blinked and turned his head away. “There’s no need for that,” he said. “There’s no need for sarcasm like that.”

  Just then, Jack Serotonin came back in the bar, walking quickly and looking behind him. He had the air of someone whose morning was already off its proper track. His face was white, with a graze on one cheek leaking beads of blood. He had waded through oily water not long ago it seemed; and his zip-up gabardine jacket had one sleeve half off at the shoulder – as if someone had held on to it while they fell, Liv Hula thought immediately, although she did not know why.

  “Jesus, Jack,” she said.

  “Get me a drink,” Jack Serotonin said.

  He walked halfway across the room as if he was going to drink it at the counter, then changed his mind and sat down suddenly at the nearest table. Once there he didn’t seem to know what to do. A few shadow operators detached themselves from the ceiling to examine him; he stared through them. “Shit,” he kept saying in a quiet, surprised way. After a while his breathing calmed down.

  The fat man forgot his hurt feelings as soon as Jack came in. He pulled up a chair and began to tell Jack some story, leaning into it in his enthusiasm so his soft body enveloped the table edge. His voice was quiet and urgent, but you could hear the odd word, “entradista”; “hard X-rays”; “Ed Chianese.” Jack stared through him too, then said, “Shut up or I’ll shoot you where you sit.” The fat man looked hopelessly away. He said all he wanted in this bar was a chance, Jack should give him a chance. He was trying not to cry. “I’m sorry,” Jack said, but he was already thinking about something else, and when Liv Hula brought him his drink, and sat down and said, “Black Heart, Jack, just the way you like it,” he barely seemed to recognize her.

  “Shit,” he said again.

  “Where’s the woman, Jack?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Only I don’t want to hear you left her there.”

  “She cracked and ran. She’s in the aureole somewhere. Antoyne, go to the door, tell me if anyone’s in the street.”

  “All I want is a chance to fit in,” the fat man said.

  “For fuck’s sake, Antoyne.”

  Antoyne said, “No one understands that.”

  Serotonin opened his mouth to say more, then he seemed to forget Antoyne altogether. “I never saw panic like it,” he said. He shook his head. “You couldn’t even say we’d got inside. It’s bad this morning, but it’s not that bad.” He finished his drink and held out the glass. Instead of taking it, Liv Hula caught his wrist.

  “So how bad is it?” she said. She wouldn’t let go until he told her.

  “Things are moving about,” he admitted. “I’ve seen worse, but usually further in.”

  “Where is she, Jack?”

  He laughed. It was a laugh he had practiced too often. “I told you,” he said tiredly, “she’s somewhere in the aureole. We never got any further. She runs off between the buildings, I see silk stockings and that fucking fur coat, then I see nothing. She was still calling from somewhere when I gave up,” he said. “Get me another drink, Liv, or I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  Liv Hula said: “You didn’t go after her, Jack.”

  He
stared.

  “You stayed where it was safe, and shouted a couple times, and then you came home.”

  “Jack would never do that,” the fat man said in a blustering way. No one was going to say Jack would do that. “Hey, Jack. Tell her. You would never do that!” He got up out of his chair. “I’m going in the street and keep an eye open now, just the way you wanted. You got a wrong idea about Jack Serotonin,” he said to Liv Hula, “if you think he’d do that.” As soon as he had gone, she went to the bar and poured Jack another Black Heart rum, while Jack rubbed his face with his hands like someone who was very tired and couldn’t see his way through life any more. His face had an older look than it had when he left. It was sullen and heavy, and his blue eyes took on a temporary pleading quality which one day would be permanent.

  “You don’t know what it’s like in there,” he told her.

  “Of course I don’t,” she said. “Only Jack Serotonin knows that.”

  “Streets transposed on one another, everything laid down out of sync one minute to the next. Geography that doesn’t work. There isn’t a single piece of dependable architecture in the shit of it. You leave the route you know, you’re finished. Lost dogs barking day and night. Everything struggling to keep afloat.”

  She wasn’t disposed to let him get away with that.

  “You’re the professional, Jack,” she reminded him. “They’re the customers. Here’s your other drink if you want it.” She leaned her elbows on the bar. “You’re the one has to hold himself together.”

  This seemed to amuse him. He took the rum down in one swallow, the color came back into his face, and they looked at one another in a more friendly way. He wasn’t finished with her though. “Hey Liv,” he said softly after a moment or two, “what’s the difference between what you’ve seen and what you are? You want to know what it’s like in there? The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it. Then guess what, it starts making something of you.”