The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  But her hand had tightened on the canister. Her knees bent as she began a slow genuflection to the kiln. Gunther could see that she had stopped listening. Drugs and responsibility had done this to her, speeding her up and bewildering her with conflicting demands, until she stood trembling on the brink of collapse. A good night’s sleep might have restored her, made her capable of being reasoned with. But there was no time. Words would not stop her now. And she was too far distant for him to reach before she destroyed the engines. In that instant he felt such a strong outwelling of emotion toward her as would be impossible to describe.

  “Ekatarina,” he said. “I love you.”

  She half-turned her head toward him and in a distracted, somewhat irritated tone said, “What are you—”

  He lifted the bolt gun from his work harness, leveled it, and fired.

  Ekatarina’s helmet shattered. She fell.

  “I should have shot to just breach the helmet. That would have stopped her. But I didn’t think I was a good enough shot. I aimed right for the center of her head.”

  “Hush,” Hamilton said. “You did what you had to. Stop tormenting yourself. Talk about more practical things.”

  He shook his head, still groggy. For the longest time, he had been kept on beta endorphins, unable to feel a thing, unable to care. It was like being swathed in cotton batting. Nothing could reach him. Nothing could hurt him. “How long have I been out of it?”

  “A day.”

  “A day!” He looked about the austere room. Bland rock walls and laboratory equipment with smooth, noncommital surfaces. To the far end, Krishna and Chang were hunched over a swipeboard, arguing happily and impatiently overwriting each other’s scrawls. A Swiss spacejack came in and spoke to their backs. Krishna nodded distractedly, not looking up. “I thought it was much longer.”

  “Long enough. We’ve already salvaged everyone connected with Sally Chang’s group, and gotten a good start on the rest. Pretty soon it will be time to decide how you want yourself rewritten.”

  He shook his head, feeling dead. “I don’t think I’ll bother, Beth. I just don’t have the stomach for it.”

  “We’ll give you the stomach.”

  “Naw, I don’t . . .” He felt a black nausea come welling up again. It was cyclic; it returned every time he was beginning to think he’d finally put it down. “I don’t want the fact that I killed Ekatarina washed away in a warm flood of self-satisfaction. The idea disgusts me.”

  “We don’t want that either.” Posner led a delegation of seven into the lab. Krishna and Chang rose to face them, and the group broke into swirling halves. “There’s been enough of that. It’s time we all started taking responsibility for the consequences of—” Everyone was talking at once. Hamilton made a face.

  “Started taking responsibility for—”

  Voices rose.

  “We can’t talk here,” she said. “Take me out on the surface.”

  They drove with the cabin pressurized, due west on the Seething Bay road. Ahead, the sun was almost touching the weary walls of Som-mering crater. Shadow crept down from the mountains and cratertops, yearning toward the radiantly lit Sinus Medii. Gunther found it achingly beautiful. He did not want to respond to it, but the harsh lines echoed the lonely hurt within him in a way that he found oddly comforting.

  Hamilton touched her peecee. Putting on the Ritz filled their heads.

  “What if Ekatarina was right?” he said sadly. “What if we’re giving up everything that makes us human? The prospect of being turned into some kind of big-domed emotionless superman doesn’t appeal to me much.”

  Hamilton shook her head. “I asked Krishna about that, and he said No. He said it was like . . . Were you ever nearsighted?”

  “Sure, as a kid.”

  “Then you’ll understand. He said it was like the first time you came out of the doctor’s office after being lased. How everything seemed clear and vivid and distinct. What had once been a blur that you called ‘tree’ resolved itself into a thousand individual and distinct leaves. The world was filled with unexpected detail. There were things on the horizon that you’d never seen before. Like that.”

  “Oh.” He stared ahead. The disk of the sun was almost touching Sommering. “There’s no point in going any farther.”

  He powered down the truck.

  Beth Hamilton looked uncomfortable. She cleared her throat and with brusque energy said, “Gunther, look. I had you bring me out here for a reason. I want to propose a merger of resources.”

  “A what?”

  “Marriage.”

  It took Gunther a second to absorb what she had said. “Aw, no . . . I don’t . . .”

  “I’m serious. Gunther, I know you think I’ve been hard on you, but that’s only because I saw a lot of potential in you, and that you were doing nothing with it. Well, things have changed. Give me a say in your rewrite, and I’ll do the same for you.”

  He shook his head. “This is just too weird for me.”

  “It’s too late to use that as an excuse. Ekatarina was right – we’re sitting on top of something very dangerous, the most dangerous opportunity humanity faces today. It’s out of the bag, though. Word has gotten out. Earth is horrified and fascinated. They’ll be watching us. Briefly, very briefly, we can control this thing. We can help to shape it now, while it’s small. Five years from now, it will be out of our hands.

  “You have a good mind, Gunther, and it’s about to get better. I think we agree on what kind of a world we want to make. I want you on my side.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You want true love? You got it. We can make the sex as sweet or nasty as you like. Nothing easier. You want me quieter, louder, gentler, more assured? We can negotiate. Let’s see if we can come to terms.”

  He said nothing.

  Hamilton eased back in the seat. After a time, she said, “You know? I’ve never watched a lunar sunset before. I don’t get out on the surface much.”

  “We’ll have to change that,” Gunther said.

  Hamilton stared hard into his face. Then she smiled. She wriggled closer to him. Clumsily, he put an arm over her shoulder. It seemed to be what was expected of him. He coughed into his hand, then pointed a finger. “There it goes.”

  Lunar sunset was a simple thing. The crater wall touched the bottom of the solar disk. Shadows leaped from the slopes and raced across the lowlands. Soon half the sun was gone. Smoothly, without distortion, it dwindled. A last brilliant sliver of light burned atop the rock, then ceased to be. In the instant before the windshield adjusted and the stars appeared, the universe filled with darkness.

  The air in the cab cooled. The panels snapped and popped with the sudden shift in temperature.

  Now Hamilton was nuzzling the side of his neck. Her skin was slightly tacky to the touch, and exuded a faint but distinct odor. She ran her tongue up the line of his chin and poked it in his ear. Her hand fumbled with the latches of his suit.

  Gunther experienced no arousal at all, only a mild distaste that bordered on disgust. This was horrible, a defilement of all he had felt for Ekatarina.

  But it was a chore he had to get through. Hamilton was right. All his life his hindbrain had been in control, driving him with emotions chemically derived and randomly applied. He had been lashed to the steed of consciousness and forced to ride it wherever it went, and that nightmare gallop had brought him only pain and confusion. Now that he had control of the reins, he could make this horse go where he wanted.

  He was not sure what he would demand from his reprogramming. Contentment, perhaps. Sex and passion, almost certainly. But not love. He was done with the romantic illusion. It was time to grow up.

  He squeezed Beth’s shoulder. One more day, he thought, and it won’t matter. I’ll feel whatever is best for me to feel. Beth raised her mouth to his. Her lips parted. He could smell her breath.

  They kissed.

  OUTNUMBERING THE DEAD

  Frederik Pohlr />
  Frederik Pohl is a seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF, having been one of the genre’s major shaping forces – as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist – for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he won both Hugo and Nebula Awards for his novel Gateway, has also won the Hugo for his stories “The Meeting” (a collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth) and “Fermi and Frost,” and won an additional Nebula for his novel Man Plus; he has also won the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth such as The Space Merchants, Wolfbane, and Gladiator at Law, as well as many solo novels, including Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, Mining the Oort, O Pioneer!, The Siege of Eternity, and The Far Shore of Time. Among his many collections are The Gold at the Starbow’s End, In the Problem Pit, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. His most recent books are the novel The Boy Who Would Live Forever, and a massive retrospective collection, Platinum Pohl. He lives in Palatine, Illinois, with his wife, writer Elizabeth Ann Hull. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 1993.

  The novella that follows may well be one of the best pieces that Pohl has produced during his long career – a wise, funny, madly inventive, and ultimately quite moving look at what it’s like to be the ultimate Have-Not in a high-tech future composed almost entirely of Haves.

  1

  Although the place is a hospital, or as much like a hospital as makes no difference, it doesn’t smell like one. It certainly doesn’t look like one. With the flowering vines climbing its walls and the soothing, gentle plink-tink of the tiny waterfall at the head of the bed, it looks more like the de luxe suite in some old no-tell motel. Rafiel is now spruced up, replumbed and ready to go for another five years before he needs to come back to this place for more of the same, and so he doesn’t look much like a hospital patient, either. He looks like a movie star, which he more or less is, who is maybe forty years old and has kept himself fit enough to pass for twenty-something. That part’s wrong, though. After all the snipping and reaming and implanting they’ve done to him in the last eleven days, what he is a remarkably fit man of ninety-two.

  When Rafiel began to wake from his designer dream he was very hungry (that was due to the eleven days he had been on intravenous feeding) and quite horny, too (that was the last of the designer dream). “B’jour, Rafiel,” said the soft, sweet voice of the nurser, intruding on his therapeutic dream as the last of it melted away. Rafiel felt the nurser’s gentle touch removing the electrodes from his cheekbones, and, knowing very well just where he was and what he had been doing there, he opened his eyes.

  He sat up in the bed, pushing away the nurser’s velvety helping hand. While he was unconscious they had filled his room with flowers. There were great blankets of roses along one wall, bright red and yellow poppies on the windowsill that looked out on the deep interior court. “Momento, please,” he said to the nurser, and experimentally stretched his naked body. They had done a good job. That annoying little pain in the shoulder was gone and, when he held one hand before him, he saw that so were the age spots on his skin. He was also pleased to find that he had awakened with a perfectly immense erection. “Seems okay,” he said, satisfied.

  “Hat, claro,” the nurser said. That was the server’s programmed all-purpose response to the sorts of sense-free or irrelevant things hospital patients said when they first woke up. “Your amis are waiting to come in.”

  “They can wait.” Rafiel yawned, pleasantly remembering the last dream. Then, his tumescence subsiding, he slid his feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. He waved the nurser away and scowled in surprise. “Shit. They didn’t fix this little dizziness I’ve been having.”

  “Voulez see your chart?” the nurser offered. But Rafiel didn’t at all want to know what they’d done to him. He took an experimental step or two, and then the nurser would no longer be denied. Firmly it took his arm and helped him toward the sanitary room. It stood by as he used the toilet and joined him watchfully in the spray shower, the moisture rolling harmlessly down its metal flanks. As it dried him off, one of its hands caught his finger and held on for a moment – heartbeat, blood pressure, who knew what it was measuring? – before saying, “You may leave whenever you like, Rafiel.”

  “You’re very kind,” Rafiel said, because it was his nature to be polite even to machines. To human beings, too, of course. Especially to humans, as far as possible anyway, because humans were what became audiences and no sensible performer wanted to antagonize audiences. But with humans it was harder for Rafiel to be always polite, since his inner feelings, where all the resentments lay, were so frequently urging him to be the opposite – to be rude, insulting, even violent; to spit in some of these handsome young faces sometimes out of the anger that was always burning out of sight inside him. He had every right to that smouldering rage, since he was so terribly cheated in his life, but – he was a fair man – his special problem wasn’t really their fault, was it? And besides, the human race in general had one trait that forgave them most others, they adored Rafiel. At least the surveys showed that 36.9 per cent of them probably did, a rating which only a handful of utter superstars could ever hope to beat.

  That sort of audience devotion imposed certain obligations on a performer. Appearance was one, and so Rafiel considered carefully before deciding what to wear for his release from the hospital. From the limited selection his hospital closet offered he chose red pantaloons, a luminous blue blouse and silk cap to cover his unmade hair. On his feet he wore only moleskin slippers, but that was all right. He wouldn’t be performing, and needed no more on the warm, soft, mossy flooring of his hospital room.

  He time-stepped to the window, glancing out at the distant figures on the galleries of the hundred-meter atrium of the arcology he lived and worked in; and at the bright costumes of those strolling across the airy bridges, before he opaqued the window to study his reflection. That was satisfactory, though it would have been better if he’d had the closets in his condo to choose from. He was ready for the public who would be waiting for him – and for all the other things that would be waiting for him, too. He wondered if the redecoration of his condo had been completed, as it was supposed to have been while he was in the medical facility; he wondered if his agent had succeeded in rebooking the personal appearances he had had to miss, and whether the new show – what was it based on? Yes. Oedipus Rex. Whatever that was – had come together.

  He was suddenly impatient to get on with his life, so he said, “All right, they can come in now” – and a moment later, when the nurser had signaled the receptionists outside that it was all right, in they all came, his friends and colleagues from the new show: pale, tiny Docilia flying over to him with a quick kiss, Mosay, his dramaturge, bearing still more flowers, a corsage to go on Rafiel’s blouse, Victorium with his music box hung around his neck, all grinning and welcoming him back to life. “And comment va our Oedipus this morning?” Mosay asked, with pretend solicitude. Mosay didn’t mean the solicitude to be taken seriously, of course, because there was really nothing for anyone to be solicitous about. The nursers wouldn’t have awakened Rafiel if all the work hadn’t been successfully done.

  “Tutto bene,” Rafiel answered as expected, letting Mosay press the bunch of little pink violets to his blouse and smelling their sweet scent appreciatively. “Ready for work. Oh, and having faim, too.”

  “But of course you are, after all that,” said Docilia, hugging him, “and we have a lunch all set up for you. Can you go now?” she asked him, but looking at the nurser – which answered only by opening the door for them. Warmly clutching his arm and fondly chattering in his ear, Docilia led him out of the room where, for eleven days, he had lain u
nconscious while the doctors and the servers poked and cut and jabbed and mended him.

  Rafiel didn’t even look back as he entered this next serial installment of his life. There wasn’t any nostalgia in the place for him. He had seen it all too often before.

  2

  The restaurant – well, call it that; it is like a restaurant – is located in the midzone of the arcology. There are a hundred or so floors rising above it and a couple of hundred more below. It is a place where famous vid stars go to be seen, and so at the entrance to the restaurant there is a sort of tearoomy, saloony, cocktail-loungy place, inhabited by ordinary people who hope to catch a glimpse of the celebrities who have come there to be glimpsed. As Rafiel and his friends pass through this warm, dim chamber heads gratifyingly turn. Mosay whispers something humorous to Docilia and Docilia, smiling in return, then murmurs something affectionate to Rafiel, but actually all of them are listening more to the people around them than to each other. “It’s the short-time vid star,” one overheard voice says, and Rafiel can’t help glowing a little at the recognition, though he would have preferred, of course, to have been a celebrity only for his work and not for his problem. “I didn’t know she was so tiny,” says another voice – speaking of Docilia, of course; they often say that. And, though Mosay affects not to hear, when someone says; “He’s got a grandissimo coming up, ils disent,” his eyes twinkle a bit, knowing who that “he” is. But then the maître d’ is coming over to guide them to their private table on an outside balcony.

  Rafiel was the last out the door. He paused to give a general smile and wink to the people inside, then stepped out into the warm, diffused light of the balcony, quite pleased with the way things were going. His friends had chosen the right place for his coming-out meal. If it was important to be seen going to their lunch, it was also important to have their own private balcony set aside to eat it on. They wanted to be seen while eating, of course, because every opportunity to be seen was important to theater people – but from a proper distance. Such as on the balcony, where they were in view of all the people who chanced to be crossing the arcology atrium or looking out from the windows on the other side. The value of that was that then those people would say to the next persons they met, “Senti, guess who I saw at lunch today! Rafiel! And Docilia! And, comme dît, the music person.” And their names would be refreshed in the public mind one more time.