The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  The lavender suit turned to look at him. Sunlight glinted on black glass. A still, long minute later, she said, “Don’t mention it,” and started away.

  “I’m looking for Sally Chang. Do you know her? Have you seen her? She’s a flick, kind of a little woman, flamboyant, used to favor bright clothes, electric makeup, that sort of thing.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you.” Lavender was carrying three oxytanks in her arms. “You might try the straw market, though. Lots of bright clothes there.” She ducked into a tunnel opening and disappeared within.

  Gunther stared after her distractedly, then shook his head. He felt so very, very tired.

  The straw market looked as though it had been through a storm. The tents had been torn down, the stands knocked over, the goods looted. Shards of orange and green glass crunched underfoot. Yet a rack of Italian scarfs worth a year’s salary stood untouched amid the rubble. It made no sense at all.

  Up and down the market, flicks were industriously cleaning up. They stooped and lifted and swept. One of them was being beaten by a suit.

  Gunther blinked. He could not react to it as a real event. The woman cringed under the blows, shrieking wildly and scuttling away from them. One of the tents had been re-erected, and within the shadow of its rainbow silks, four other suits lounged against the bar. Not a one of them moved to help the woman.

  “Hey!” Gunther shouted. He felt hideously self-conscious, as if he’d been abruptly thrust into the middle of a play without memorized lines or any idea of the plot or notion of what his role in it was. “Stop that!”

  The suit turned toward him. It held the woman’s slim arm captive in one gloved hand. “Go away,” a male voice growled over the radio.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Who are you?” The man wore a Westinghouse suit, one of a dozen or so among the unafflicted. But Gunther recognized a brown, kidney-shaped scorch mark on the abdomen panel. “Posner – is that you? Let that woman go.”

  “She’s not a woman,” Posner said. “Hell, look at her – she’s not even human. She’s a flick.”

  Gunther set his helmet to record. “I’m taping this,” he warned. “You hit that woman again, and Ekatarina will see it all. I promise.”

  Posner released the woman. She stood dazed for a second or two, and then the voice from her peecee reasserted control. She bent to pick up a broom, and returned to work.

  Switching off his helmet, Gunther said, “Okay. What did she do?”

  Indignantly, Posner extended a foot. He pointed sternly down at it. “She peed all over my boot!”

  The suits in the tent had been watching with interest. Now they roared. “Your own fault Will!” one of them called out. “I told you you weren’t scheduling in enough time for personal hygiene.”

  “Don’t worry about a little moisture. It’ll boil off next time you hit vacuum!”

  But Gunther was not listening. He stared at the flick Posner had been mistreating and wondered why he hadn’t recognized Anya earlier. Her mouth was pursed, her face squinched up tight with worry, as if there were a key in the back of her head that had been wound three times too many. Her shoulders cringed forward now, too. But still.

  “I’m sorry, Anya,” he said. “Hiro is dead. There wasn’t anything we could do.”

  She went on sweeping, oblivious, unhappy.

  He caught the shift’s last jitney back to the Center. It felt good to be home again. Miiko Ezumi had decided to loot the outlying factories of their oxygen and water surpluses, then carved a shower room from the rock. There was a long line for only three minutes’ use, and no soap, but nobody complained. Some people pooled their time, showering two and three together. Those waiting their turns joked rowdily.

  Gunther washed, grabbed some clean shorts and a Glavkosmos teeshirt, and padded down the hall. He hesitated outside the common room, listening to the gang sitting around the table, discussing the more colorful flicks they’d encountered.

  “Have you seen the Mouse Hunter?”

  “Oh yeah, and Ophelia!”

  “The Pope!”

  “The Duck Lady!

  “Everybody knows the Duck Lady!”

  They were laughing and happy. A warm sense of community flowed from the room, what Gunther’s father would have in his sloppy-sentimental way called Gemütlichkeit. Gunther stepped within.

  Liza Nagenda looked up, all gums and teeth, and froze. Her jaw snapped shut. “Well, if it isn’t Izmailova’s personal spy!”

  “What?” The accusation took Gunther’s breath away. He looked helplessly about the room. Nobody would meet his eye. They had all fallen silent.

  Liza’s face was grey with anger. “You heard me! It was you that ratted on Krishna, wasn’t it?”

  “Now that’s way out of line! You’ve got a lot of fucking gall if—” He controlled himself with an effort. There was no sense in matching her hysteria with his own. “It’s none of your business what my relationship with Izmailova is or is not.” He looked around the table. “Not that any of you deserve to know, but Krishna’s working on a cure. If anything I said or did helped put him back in the lab, well then, so be it.”

  She smirked. “So what’s your excuse for snitching on Will Posner?”

  “I never—”

  “We all heard the story! You told him you were going to run straight to your precious Izmailova with your little helmet vids.”

  “Now, Liza,” Takayuni began. She slapped him away.

  “Do you know what Posner was doing?” Gunther shook a finger in Liza’s face. “Hah? Do you? He was beating a woman – Anya! He was beating Anya right out in the open!”

  “So what? He’s one of us, isn’t he? Not a zoned-out, dead-eyed, ranting, drooling flick!”

  “You bitch!” Outraged, Gunther lunged at Liza across the table. “I’ll kill you, I swear it!” People jerked back from him, rushed forward, a chaos of motion. Posner thrust himself in Gunther’s way, arms spread, jaw set and manly. Gunther punched him in the face. Posner looked surprised, and fell back. Gunther’s hand stung, but he felt strangely good anyway; if everyone else was crazy, then why not him?

  “You just try it!” Liza shrieked. “I knew you were that type all along!”

  Takayuni grabbed Liza away one way. Hamilton seized Gunther and yanked him the other. Two of Posner’s friends were holding him back as well.

  “I’ve had about all I can take from you!” Gunther shouted. “You cheap cunt!”

  “Listen to him! Listen what he calls me!”

  Screaming, they were shoved out opposing doors.

  “It’s all right, Gunther.” Beth had flung him into the first niche they’d come to. He slumped against a wall, shaking, and closed his eyes. “It’s all right now.”

  But it wasn’t. Gunther was suddenly struck with the realization that with the exception of Ekatarina he no longer had any friends. Not real friends, close friends. How could this have happened? It was as if everyone had been turned into werewolves. Those who weren’t actually mad were still monsters. “I don’t understand.”

  Hamilton sighed. “What don’t you understand, Weil?”

  “The way people – the way we all treat the flicks. When Posner was beating Anya, there were four other suits standing nearby, and not a one of them so much as lifted a finger to stop him. Not one! And I felt it too, there’s no use pretending I’m superior to the rest of them. I wanted to walk on and pretend I hadn’t seen a thing. What’s happened to us?”

  Hamilton shrugged. Her hair was short and dark about her plain round face. “I went to a pretty expensive school when I was a kid. One year we had one of those exercises that’re supposed to be personally enriching. You know? A life experience. We were divided into two groups – Prisoners and Guards. The Prisoners couldn’t leave their assigned areas without permission from a guard, the Guards got better lunches, stuff like that. Very simple set of rules. I was a Guard.

  “Almost immediately, we started to bully the Prisoners. We pushed
’em around, yelled at ’em, kept ’em in line. What was amazing was that the Prisoners let us do it. They outnumbered us five to one. We didn’t even have authority for the things we did. But not a one of them complained. Not a one of them stood up and said No, you can’t do this. They played the game.

  “At the end of the month, the project was dismantled and we had some study seminars on what we’d learned: the roots of fascism, and so on. Read some Hannah Arendt. And then it was all over. Except that my best girlfriend never spoke to me again. I couldn’t blame her either. Not after what I’d done.

  “What did I really learn? That people will play whatever role you put them in. They’ll do it without knowing that that’s what they’re doing. Take a minority, tell them they’re special, and make them guards – they’ll start playing Guard.”

  “So what’s the answer? How do we keep from getting caught up in the roles we play?”

  “Damned if I know, Weil. Damned if I know.”

  Ekatarina had moved her niche to the far end of a new tunnel. Hers was the only room the tunnel served, and consequently she had a lot of privacy. As Gunther stepped in, a static-y voice swam into focus on his trance chip. “. . . reported shock. In Cairo, government officials pledged . . .” It cut off.

  “Hey! You’ve restored—” He stopped. If radio reception had been restored, he’d have known. It would have been the talk of the Center. Which meant that radio contact had never really been completely broken. It was simply being controlled by the CMP.

  Ekatarina looked up at him. She’d been crying, but she’d stopped. “The Swiss Orbitals are gone!” she whispered. “They hit them with everything from softbombs to brilliant pebbles. They dusted the shipyards.”

  The scope of all those deaths obscured what she was saying for a second. He sank down beside her. “But that means—”

  “There’s no spacecraft that can reach us, yes. Unless there’s a ship in transit, we’re stranded here.”

  He took her in his arms. She was cold and shivering. Her skin felt clammy and mottled with gooseflesh. “How long has it been since you’ve had any sleep?” he asked sharply.

  “I can’t—”

  “You’re wired, aren’t you?”

  “I can’t afford to sleep. Not now. Later.”

  “Ekatarina. The energy you get from wire isn’t free. It’s only borrowed from your body. When you come down, it all comes due. If you wire yourself up too tightly, you’ll crash yourself right into a coma.”

  “I haven’t been—” She stalled, and a confused, uncertain look entered her eyes. “Maybe you’re right. I could probably use a little rest.”

  The CMP came to life. “Cadre Nine is building a radio receiver.

  Ezumi gave them the go-ahead.”

  “Shit!” Ekatarina sat bolt upright. “Can we stop it?”

  “Moving against a universally popular project would cost you credibility you cannot afford to lose.”

  “Okay, so how can we minimize the—”

  “Ekatarina,” Gunther said. “Sleep, remember?”

  “In a sec, babe.” She patted the futon. “You just lie down and wait for me. I’ll have this wrapped up before you can nod off.” She kissed him gently, lingeringly. “All right?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He lay down and closed his eyes, just for a second.

  When he awoke, it was time to go on shift, and Ekatarina was gone.

  It was only the fifth day since Vladivostok. But everything was so utterly changed that times before then seemed like memories of another world. In a previous life I was Gunther Weil, he thought. I lived and worked and had a few laughs. Life was pretty good then.

  He was still looking for Sally Chang, though with dwindling hope. Now, whenever he talked to suits he’d ask if they needed his help. Increasingly, they did not.

  The third-level chapel was a shallow bowl facing the terrace wall. Tiger lilies grew about the chancel area at the bottom, and turquoise lizards skittered over the rock. The children were playing with a ball in the chancel. Gunther stood at the top, chatting with a sad-voiced Ryohei Iomato.

  The children put away the ball and began to dance. They were playing London Bridge. Gunther watched them with a smile. From above they were so many spots of color, a flower unfolding and closing in on itself. Slowly, the smile faded. They were dancing too well. Not one of the children moved out of step, lost her place, or walked away sulking. Their expressions were intense, self-absorbed, inhuman. Gunther had to turn away.

  “The CMP controls them,” Iomato said. “I don’t have much to do, really. I go through the vids and pick out games for them to play, songs to sing, little exercises to keep them healthy. Sometimes I have them draw.”

  “My God, how can you stand it?”

  Iomato sighed. “My old man was an alcoholic. He had a pretty rough life, and at some point he started drinking to blot out the pain. You know what?”

  “It didn’t work.”

  “Yah. Made him even more miserable. So then he had twice the reason to get drunk. He kept on trying, though, I’ve got to give him that. He wasn’t the sort of man to give up on something he believed in just because it wasn’t working the way it should.”

  Gunther said nothing.

  “I think that memory is the only thing keeping me from just taking off my helmet and joining them.”

  The Corporate Video Center was a narrow run of offices in the farthest tunnel reaches, where raw footage for adverts and incidental business use was processed before being squirted to better-equipped vid centers on Earth. Gunther passed from office to office, slapping off flatscreens left flickering since the disaster.

  It was unnerving going through the normally busy rooms and finding no one. The desks and cluttered work stations had been abandoned in purposeful disarray, as though their operators had merely stepped out for a break and would be back momentarily. Gunther found himself spinning around to confront his shadow, and flinching at unexpected noises. With each machine he turned off, the silence at his back grew. It was twice as lonely as being out on the surface.

  He doused a last light and stepped into the gloomy hall. Two suits with interwoven H-and-A logos loomed up out of the shadows. He jumped in shock. The suits did not move. He laughed wryly at himself, and pushed past. They were empty, of course – there were no Hyundai Aerospace components among the unafflicted. Someone had simply left these suits here in temporary storage before the madness.

  The suits grabbed him.

  “Hey!” He shouted in terror as they seized him by the arms and lifted him off his feet. One of them hooked the peecee from his harness and snapped it off. Before he knew what was happening he’d been swept down a short flight of stairs and through a doorway.

  “Mr. Weil.”

  He was in a high-ceilinged room carved into the rock to hold air-handling equipment that hadn’t been constructed yet. A high string of temporary work lamps provided dim light. To the far side of the room a suit sat behind a desk, flanked by two more, standing. They all wore Hyundai Aerospace suits. There was no way he could identify them.

  The suits that had brought him in crossed their arms.

  “What’s going on here?” Gunther asked. “Who are you?”

  “You are the last person we’d tell that to.” He couldn’t tell which one had spoken. The voice came over his radio, made sexless and impersonal by an electronic filter. “Mr. Weil, you stand accused of crimes against your fellow citizens. Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  “What?” Gunther looked at the suits before him and to either side. They were perfectly identical, indistinguishable from each other, and he was suddenly afraid of what the people within might feel free to do, armored as they were in anonymity. “Listen, you’ve got no right to do this. There’s a governmental structure in place, if you’ve got any complaints against me.”

  “Not everyone is pleased with Izmailova’s government,” the judge said.

  “But she controls the CMP, and we could not run
Bootstrap without the CMP controlling the flicks,” a second added.

  “We simply have to work around her.” Perhaps it was the judge; perhaps it was yet another of the suits. Gunther couldn’t tell.

  “Do you wish to speak on your own behalf?”

  “What exactly am I charged with?” Gunther asked desperately. “Okay, maybe I’ve done something wrong, I’ll entertain that possibility. But maybe you just don’t understand my situation. Have you considered that?”

  Silence.

  “I mean, just what are you angry about? Is it Posner? Because I’m not sorry about that. I won’t apologize. You can’t mistreat people just because they’re sick. They’re still people, like anybody else. They have their rights.”

  Silence.

  “But if you think I’m some kind of a spy or something, that I’m running around and ratting on people to Ek – to Izmailova, well that’s simply not true. I mean, I talk to her, I’m not about to pretend I don’t, but I’m not her spy or anything. She doesn’t have any spies. She doesn’t need any! She’s just trying to hold things together, that’s all.

  “Jesus, you don’t know what she’s gone through for you! You haven’t seen how much it takes out of her! She’d like nothing better than to quit. But she has to hang in there because—” An eerie dark electronic gabble rose up on his radio, and he stopped as he realized that they were laughing at him.

  “Does anyone else wish to speak?”

  One of Gunther’s abductors stepped forward. “Your honor, this man says that flicks are human. He overlooks the fact that they cannot live without our support and direction. Their continued well-being is bought at the price of our unceasing labor. He stands condemned out of his own mouth. I petition the court to make the punishment fit the crime.”

  The judge looked to the right, to the left. His two companions nodded, and stepped back into the void. The desk had been set up at the mouth of what was to be the air intake duct. Gunther had just time enough to realize this when they reappeared, leading someone in a G5 suit identical to his own.