The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  He got up and went to the door.

  “What are you fucking about at, Antoyne?” he called. “I said ‘look’. I said ‘take a look’.”

  The fat man, who had trotted up Strait a little into the predawn wind to clear his head, also to see if he could get a glimpse of Irene the Mona through a chink in the boarded windows of the chopshop, came in grinning and shivering with the cold. “Antoyne here can tell us all about it,” Jack Serotonin said. “Everything he knows.”

  “Leave Antoyne alone.”

  “You ever been in there when everything fell apart, Antoyne?”

  “I was never in there, Jack,” Antoyne said hastily. “I never claimed I was.”

  “Everything was just taken away, and you had no idea what established itself in exchange? The air’s like uncooked pastry. It’s not a smell in there, it’s a substrate. In every corner there’s a broken telephone nailed to the wall. They’re all labelled Speak but there’s no line out. They ring but no one’s ever there.”

  Liv Hula gave him a look, then shrugged. To the fat man she explained, “Jack just so hates to lose a client.”

  “Fuck you,” Jack Serotonin said. “Fuck the two of you.”

  He pushed his glass across the counter and walked out.

  After Jack Serotonin left silence returned to the bar. It crowded in on itself, so that Liv Hula and the fat man, though they wanted to speak, were hemmed in with their own thoughts. The onshore wind decreased while the light increased, until they could no longer deny it was dawn. The woman washed and dried the glass Jack Serotonin had used, then put it carefully in its place behind the bar. Then she went upstairs to the room above, where she thought about changing her clothes but in the end only stared in a kind of mounting panic at the disordered bed, the blanket chest and the bare white walls.

  I ought to move on, she thought. I ought to leave here now.

  When she came down again, Antoyne had resumed his place by the window and with his hands on the sill stood watching the payloads lift one after another from the corporate port. He half-turned as if to speak but, receiving no encouragement, turned back again.

  Across the street someone opened the chopshop door.

  After a brief quiet struggle, Irene the Mona stumbled out. She took an uncertain step or two forward, peering blindly up and down Strait like a drunk assessing heavy traffic, then sat down suddenly on the edge of the sidewalk. The door slammed shut behind her. Her skirt rode up. Antoyne pressed his face closer to the glass. “Hey,” he whispered to himself. Irene, meanwhile, set her little shiny red urethane vanity case down beside her and began to claw through its contents with one hand. She was still sitting there two or three minutes later, showing all she had, sniffing and wiping her eyes, when the cats came out of the Raintown event site in an alert silent rush.

  Who knew how many of those cats there were? Another thing, you never found so much as a tabby among them, every one was either black or white. When they poured out of the zone it was like a model of some chaotic mixing flow in which, though every condition is determined, the outcome can never be predicted. Soon they filled Strait in both directions, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell. Irene struggled upright, but the cats took no more notice than if she had been one of the street lamps.

  Irene was born on a planet called Perkin’s Rent. She left there tall and bony, with an awkward walk and big feet. When she smiled her gums showed, and she did her hair in lacquered copper waves so tight and complex they could receive the mains hum, the basic transmissions of the universe. She had a sweet way of laughing. When she boarded the rocket to leave, she was seventeen. Her suitcase contained a yellow cotton dress with a kind of faux-Deco feel, tampons, and four pairs of high heel shoes. “I love shoes,” she would explain to you when she was drunk. “I love shoes.” You got the best of her in those days. She would follow you anywhere for two weeks then follow someone else. She loved a rocket jockey.

  Now she stood with tears streaming down her face, watching the Raintown cats flow around her, until Liv Hula waded fastidiously into the stream and fetched her back to the bar, where she sat her down and said:

  “What can I get you, honey?”

  “He’s dead this time,” Irene said in a rush.

  “I can’t believe that,” Liv Hula said. Immediately she was tidying up inside, planning to stay back inside herself away from the fact of it. But Irene kept repeating in her disorganized way, “He’s dead this time, that’s all,” which made it hard to dissociate. Irene took Liv Hula’s hand and pressed it to her cheek. It was her opinion, she said, that something makes men unfit for most of life; to which Liv Hula replied, “I always thought so, too.” Then Irene broke into snuffling again and had to fetch out her vanity mirror. “Especially the best parts,” she said indistinctly.

  Later, when Antoyne came and tried to make conversation with her, she gave him the full benefit of her looks. He bought her a drink that settled out the same colors as her skirt, pink and yellow, and which he said they drank on some dumb planet he knew fifty lights down the line.

  “I been there, Fat Antoyne,” she told him with a sad smile.

  That original Irene, she thought, wasn’t good at being on her own. She would sit on the bed one place or another, listening to the rain and trying to hold herself together. On the other hand, she never lacked ambition. The stars of the Halo were like one big neon sign to her. The sign said: ALL THE SHOES YOU CAN EAT. When she bought the Mona package, the tailor promised her hair would always smell of peppermint shampoo. She had gone through the catalogues, and that was what she wanted, and the tailor designed it in. On the Raintown streets it was her big selling point.

  “I been there,” she told Antoyne, letting him get the peppermint smell, “and just now I’m glad to meet someone else who’s been there, too.”

  Antoyne was as encouraged by this as any man. He sat on after she finished the drink, trying to engage her with stories of the places he had seen back when he rode the rockets. But Irene had been to all those places too – and more, Liv Hula thought – and fat Antoyne had all he was going to get for one cheap cocktail drink. Liv watched them from a distance, her own thoughts so churned she didn’t care how it ended. Eventually even Antoyne could see the way things were. He scraped his chair back and retreated to his place by the window. What time was it? How had the things happened that ended him up here? He looked out on to Strait. “It’s day,” he said. “Hey,” he grumbled, “I actually respected the guy. You know?” Meanwhile the stream of cats flowed on like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, until suddenly it turned itself off and Strait was empty again. Across the road at the tailor’s they were flushing Joe Leone’s proteins down the drain.

  At the civilian port, the cruise ships, half-hidden in the mist, towered above the buildings; while along the tall narrow streets a traffic of rickshaw girls and tattoo boys had begun, ferrying the tourists from the New Cafe A1 Aktar to Moneytown, from the Church on the Rock to the Rock Church, while around them their shreds and veils of shadow operators whispered, “A sight everyone will be sure to see, a discourse of oppositions.” Fur coats were all over Raintown by eight, dyed the color of honey or horse chestnut, cut to flow like some much lighter fabric. What sort of money was this? Where did it come from? It was off-planet money. It was corporate money. However cruel the trade that produced them, you could hardly deny the beauty of those coats and their luxurious surfaces.

  Shortly after the last cat had vanished into the city, Jack’s client returned to the bar.

  Where Jack had come back filthy, she came back clean. You wouldn’t notice anything new about her, except her shoulders were a little hunched and her face was still. Her hands she thrust into the pockets of her coat. Nothing had been taken away from her, but she held her head more carefully than before, always looking forward as if her neck hurt, or as if she was trying not to notice something hap
pening in the side of her eye. It was hard to read body language like that. She placed herself with care at a table near the window, crossed one leg over the other, and asked in a low voice for a drink. After a little while she said, “I wonder if someone could give that other man the rest of his fee.”

  Antoyne sat forward eagerly.

  “I can do that,” he offered.

  “No you can’t,” Liv Hula warned him. To the woman in the fur coat she said: “Jack’s cheap, he left you for dead. You owe him nothing.”

  “Still,” the woman said. “I feel he should have the rest of his money. It’s here. And I was fine, really.” She stared ahead of herself. “A little puzzled, I suppose, at how unpleasant it is.”

  Liv Hula threw up her hands.

  “Why do they come here?” she asked fat Antoyne in a loud voice. Before he could say anything, she added: “They leave the nice safe tour and they end up in this bar here. They always find our Jack.”

  “Hey, Jack’s okay,” the fat man said.

  “Jack’s a joke, Antoyne, and so are you.”

  Antoyne struggled to his feet and looked as if he was going to challenge that, but in the end he only shrugged. Jack’s client gave him a faint, encouraging smile, but then seemed to look past him. Silence drew out a moment or two; then a chair scraped back and Irene the Mona came over to the table where these events were happening. Her little urethane shoes clattered on the wooden floor. She had wiped her tears and done her lipstick. She was over Joe the Lion now. What had she been on, to invest her considerable life-energy that way? Irene had a future in front of her, everyone agreed, and it was a good, light-hearted one. She had her plans, and they were good ones, too. Though it was true she would keep Joe in her heart pocket many years because that was the kind of girl she knew herself to be.

  “That sure is a beautiful coat,” she said. She held out her hand.

  For a moment, the woman looked nonplussed. Then she shook Irene’s hand and said, “Thank you. It is, isn’t it?”

  “Very beautiful, and I admire it so,” Irene agreed. She gave a little bob, seemed about to add something, then suddenly went and sat down again and toyed with her glass. “Don’t be hard on him, honey,” she called across to Liv Hula. “He’s nothing but a man after all.” It was hard to tell which man she meant.

  “I feel he should have his money,” appealed the woman in the fur coat. When no one answered she set the cash on the table in front of her, in high denomination notes. “Anyway, it’s here for him,” she said.

  “Jesus,” was Liv Hula’s comment. “Antoyne,” she said, “you want another drink?”

  But the fat man had lost patience with the way they treated him in there. He was just a man trying to fit in, someone who had seen as much as anyone else, more than some. It made him angry they didn’t listen. He thought about when he rode the dynaflow ships, and all the planets he saw then, and the things he saw on them. Gay Lung, Ambo Danse and Fourth Part, Waitrose Two and the Thousand Suns: he had scattered himself like money across the Beach stars and down into Radio Bay. He had gone deep in those days. Surfed the Alcubiere warp with Ed Chianese. Owned a rocket, he called her the Kino Chicken. Failed at being solitary. On Santa Muerte inhaled something that deviated both his septum and his sense of where things were. That was it for being a sky pilot.

  What the hell, he thought. Nothing’s ever yours to keep.

  At least he was out of that place now, into the morning somewhere he could breathe, heading for Moneytown and the strip mall wonderland running south of Strait, down past the spaceports to the sea. He was narrowing his eyes in the strong light glittering up off the distant water. He was going to look for work. He was going to look for people who meant it when they smiled.

  After he had gone Liv Hula’s bar was silent. One by one, the shadow operators detached themselves furtively from the ceiling and went to the woman in the fur coat, who acknowledged them absently. Smells crept out of the kitchen and out of the pipes. The three women appeared preoccupied with their own thoughts. Every so often one or the other of them would go to the door and peer up Strait Street toward the event zone, wreathed – silent, heaving, and questionable – in its daytime chemical fogs, while the others watched her expectantly.

  SCOUT’S HONOR

  Terry Bisson

  Terry Bisson is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels such as Fire on the Mountain, Wyrldmaker, the popular Talking Man (which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 1986), Voyage to the Red Planet, Pirates of the Universe, The Pickup Artist, and, in a posthumous collaboration with Walter M. Miller, Jr., a sequel to Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz called Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. He is a frequent contributor to such markets as SCI FICTION, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Omni, Playboy, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His famous story “Bears Discover Fire” won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Award in 1991, the only story ever to sweep them all. In 2000, he won another Nebula Award for his story “macs.” His short work has been assembled in the collections Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories and In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories. His most recent book is a chapbook, Dear Abbey. His stories have appeared in our Eighth, Tenth, Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Twenty-first Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Oakland, California.

  In last year’s Dear Abbey, he sent us ahead to the distant future. Here he sends us back to the equally distant past, for a poignant lesson in what it means to be human.

  On the morning of July 12, 20_ I got

  the following message on my lab

  computer, the only one I have:

  MONDAY

  Made it. Just as planned. It’s real. Here I am in the south of France, or what people think of now (now?) as the south of France. It seems to the north of everywhere. If the cleft is at forty-two hundred feet, it means the ice is low. I can see the tongue of a glacier only about five hundred feet above me. No bones here yet, of course. It’s a clear shot down a narrow valley to the NT site, about one-half mile away. I can see smoke; I didn’t expect that. Wouldn’t they be more cautious? Maybe they aren’t threatened by HS yet and I’m too early. Hope not. Even though it’s not part of the protocol, I would love to learn more about our first encounter (and last?) with another human (hominid?) species. I do like to see the smoke, though. I never thought I would feel loneliness but here I do. Time is space and space is distance (Einstein). Heading down for the NT site. More later.

  The subject line was all noise and so

  was the header. I was still puzzling

  what it was all about, for excepting the

  Foundation’s newsgroup, I get no

  messages at all, when another came

  through the very next morning. The

  dates are mine.

  TUESDAY

  It’s them all right. I am watching about twenty NTs, gathered in the site around a big smoky fire. Even through binoculars, from fifty yards away, they look like big moving shadows. It’s hard to count them. They cluster together then break apart in groups of two or three, but never alone. I can’t tell the males from the females, but there are four or five children, who also stay together in a clump. Wish I could see faces, but it’s dim here. Perpetual overcast. I have been watching almost four hours by the clock on my com, and none have left the site. Separating one out may prove a problem. But I have almost five days (-122) to worry about that. Tomorrow I’ll observe from a different position where I can get a little closer and the light may be better; above, not closer. I know the protocols. I helped write them. But somehow I want to get closer.

  I began to suspect a prank, to which I

  enjoy a certain deliberate and long-

  standing immunity. But I do have a

  friend – Ron – and naturally I suspected

  him (who else?) after the next and

  longer text came through, on the very

  day we were to m
eet.

  WEDNESDAY

  Totally unexpected change in plans. I am sitting here in the cleft with “my own” NT. He’s the perfect candidate for the snatch, if I can keep him here for four days (-98). They are nothing like we thought. The reconstructions are far too anthropomorphic. This is NOT a human, though certainly a hominid. What we thought was a broad nose is more of a snout. He’s white as a ghost, which I guess is appropriate. Or am I the ghost? He is sitting across the fire staring at me, or through me. He seems oddly unconscious much of the time, thoughtless, like a cat. What happened was this: I was heading down to observe the site this morning when I dislodged a boulder that fell on my left leg. I thought for sure it was broken (it isn’t), but I was trapped. The rock had my leg wedged from the knee downward, out of sight in a narrow crevice. I couldn’t help thinking of that turn-of-the-century Utah dude who sawed off his own arm with a Swiss army knife. I was wondering when I would be ready to do that, for I was in a worse spot than him: unless I made it back to the cleft in less than a hundred hours, I was trapped here, and by more than a stone. By Time itself. The numbness scared me worse than pain. It was starting to snow and I was worried about freezing. I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I remember, “my” NT was squatting there looking at me – or through me. Quiet as a cat. Oddly, I was as little surprised as he was. It was like a dream. I pointed at my leg, and he rolled the stone away. It was as simple as that. Either he was immensely strong or had a better angle, or both. I was free, and my leg was now throbbing painfully and bleeding but not broken. I could even stand on it. I hobbl

  Ron is a sci-fi writer who teaches a

  course at the New School. We meet