The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Get in!”

  She ducked into the car, which somehow reminded her of the scutter, and it accelerated away. A Tourist who had scrabbled for the door handle spun back and fell. Kylie leaned over the seat. The Tourist got up, the other two standing beside him, not helping. Then Toby cranked the car into a turn that threw her against the door. They were climbing a steep hill, and Toby seemed to be doing too many things at once, working the clutch, the steering wheel, and radio, scanning through stations until he lighted upon something loud and incomprehensible that made him smile and nod his head.

  “You better put on your seatbelt,” he said. “They’ll ticket you for that shit, believe it or not.”

  Kylie buckled her belt.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You came out of nowhere.”

  “Anything can happen. Who were those guys?”

  “Tourists.”

  “Okay. Hey, you know what?”

  “What?”

  He took his hand off the shifter and pulled Kylie’s locator out of his inside jacket pocket.

  “I bet you I can fix this gizmo.”

  “Would you bet your soul on it?”

  “Why not?” He grinned.

  He stopped at his apartment to pick up his tools, and Kylie waited in the car. There was a clock on the dashboard. 11:45 A.M. She set the timer on her wrist chronometer.

  Twelve hours and change.

  They sat in a coffee bar in Belltown. More incomprehensible music thumped from box speakers bracketed near the ceiling. Paintings by some local artist decorated the walls, violent slashes of color, faces of dogs and men and women drowning, mouths gaping.

  Kylie kept an eye open for Tourists.

  Toby hunched over her locator, a jeweler’s kit unrolled next to his espresso. He had the back off the device and was examining its exotic components with the aid of a magnifying lens and a battery operated light of high intensity. He had removed his jacket and was wearing a black sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. His forearms were hairy. A tattoo of blue thorns braceleted his right wrist. He was quiet for a considerable time, his attention focused. Kylie drank her second espresso, like the queen of the world, like it was nothing to just ask for coffee this good and get it.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Ah.”

  “What?”

  “Ah, what is this thing?”

  “You said you didn’t need to know.”

  “I don’t need to know, I just want to know. After all, according to you, I’m betting my immortal soul that I can fix it, so it’d be nice to know what it does.”

  “We don’t always get to know the nice things, do we?” Kylie said. “Besides, I don’t believe in souls. That was just something to say.” Something her mother had told her, she thought. The Old Men didn’t talk about souls. They talked about zoos.

  “You sure downed that coffee fast. You want to go for three?”

  “Yeah.”

  He chuckled and gave her a couple of dollars and she went to the bar and got another espresso, head buzzing in a very good way.

  “It’s a locator,” she said, taking pity on him, after returning to the table and sitting down.

  “Yeah? What’s it locate?”

  “The city’s Eternity Core.”

  “Oh, that explains everything. What’s an eternity core?”

  “It’s an alien machine that generates an energy field around the city and preserves it in a sixteen hour time loop.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Now can you fix it?”

  “Just point out one thing.”

  She slurped up her third espresso. “Okay.”

  “What’s the power source? I don’t see anything that even vaguely resembles a battery.”

  She leaned in close, their foreheads practically touching. She pointed with the chipped nail of her pinky finger.

  “I think it’s that coily thing,” she said.

  He grunted. She didn’t draw back. She was smelling him, smelling his skin. He lifted his gaze from the guts of the locator. His eyes were pale blue, the irises circled with black rings.

  “You’re kind of a spooky chick,” he said.

  “Kind of.”

  “I like spooky.”

  “Where I come from,” Kylie said, “almost all the men are impotent.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded.

  “Where do you come from,” he asked, “the east side?”

  “East side of hell.”

  “Sounds like it,” he said.

  She kissed him, impulsively, her blood singing with caffeine and long-unrequited pheromones. Then she sat back and wiped her lips with her palm and stared hard at him.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” she said.

  “Me.”

  “Just fix the locator, okay?”

  “Spooky,” he said, picking up a screwdriver with a blade not much bigger than a spider’s leg.

  A little while later she came back from the bathroom and he had put the locator together and was puzzling over the touchpad. He had found the power button. The two inch square display glowed the blue of cold starlight. She slipped it from his hand and activated the grid. A pinhead hotspot immediately began blinking.

  “It work okay?” Toby asked.

  “Yes.” She hesitated, then said, “Let’s go for a drive. I’ll navigate.”

  They did that.

  Kylie liked the little, round canary car. It felt luxurious and utilitarian at the same time. Letting the locator guide her, she directed Toby. After many false turns and an accumulated two point six miles on the odometer, she said:

  “Stop. No, keep going, but not too fast.”

  The car juddered as he manipulated clutch, brake, and accelerator. They rolled past a closed store front on the street level of a four story building on First Avenue, some kind of sex shop, the plate glass soaped and brown butcher paper tacked up on the inside.

  Two men in cheap business suits loitered in front of the building. Tourists.

  Kylie scrunched down in her seat.

  “Don’t look at those guys,” she said. “Just keep driving.”

  “Whatever.”

  Later on they were parked under the monorail tracks eating submarine sandwiches. Kylie couldn’t get over how great everything was, the food, the coffee, the damn air. All of it the way things used to be. She could hardly believe how great it had been, how much had been lost.

  “Okay,” she said, kind of talking to herself, “so they know I’m here and they’re guarding the Core.”

  “Those bastards,” Toby said.

  “You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew what they really were.”

  “They looked like used car salesmen.”

  “They’re Tourists,” Kylie said.

  “Oh my God! More tourists!”

  Kylie chewed a mouthful of sub. She’d taken too big a bite. Every flavor was like a drug. Onions, provolone, turkey, mustard, pepper.

  “So where are the evil tourists from?” Toby asked. “California?”

  “Another dimensional reality.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Kylie’s chronometer toned softly. Ten hours.

  Inside the yellow car there were many smells and one of them was Toby.

  “Do you have any more tattoos?” she asked.

  “One. It’s--”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to show me. But not here. At the place where you live.”

  “You want to come to my apartment?”

  “Your apartment, yes.”

  “Okay, spooky.” He grinned. So did she.

  Some precious time later the chronometer toned again. It wasn’t on her wrist anymore. It was on the hardwood floor tangled up in her clothes.

  Toby, who was standing naked by the refrigerator holding a bottle of grape juice, said, “Why’s your watch keep doing that?”

  “It’s a countdown,” Kylie sa
id, looking at him.

  “A countdown to what?”

  “To the end of the current cycle. The end of the loop.”

  He drank from the bottle, his throat working. She liked to watch him now, whatever he did. He finished drinking and screwed the cap back on.

  “The loop,” he said, shaking his head.

  When he turned to put the bottle back in the refrigerator she saw his other tattoo again: a cross throwing off light. It was inked into the skin on his left shoulder blade.

  “You can’t even see your own cross,” she said.

  He came back to the bed.

  “I don’t have to see it,” he said. “I just like to know it’s there, watching my back.”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “My mother is.”

  “I just like the idea of Jesus,” he said.

  “You’re spookier than I am,” Kylie said.

  “Not by a mile.”

  She kissed his mouth, but when he tried to caress her she pushed him gently back.

  “Take me someplace.”

  “Where?”

  “My grandparents’ house.” She meant “great” grandparents, but didn’t feel like explaining to him how so many decades had passed outside the loop of the Preservation.

  “Right now?”

  “Yes.”

  It was a white frame house on Queen Anne Hill, sitting comfortably among its prosperous neighbors on a street lined with live oaks. Kylie pressed her nose to the window on the passenger side of the Vee Dub, as Toby called his vehicle.

  “Stop,” she said. “That’s it.”

  He tucked the little car into the curb and turned the engine off. Kylie looked from the faded photo in her hand to the house. Her mother’s mother had taken the photo just weeks before the world ended. In it, Kylie’s great grandparents stood on the front porch of the house, their arms around each other, waving and smiling. There was no one standing on the front porch now.

  “It’s real,” Kylie said. “I’ve been looking at this picture my whole life.”

  “Haven’t you ever been here before?”

  She shook her head. At the same time her chronometer toned.

  “How we doing on the countdown?” Toby asked.

  She glanced at the digital display.

  “Eight hours.”

  “So what happens at midnight?”

  “It starts up again. The end is the beginning.”

  He laughed. She didn’t.

  “So then it’s Sunday, right? Then do you countdown to Monday?”

  “At the end of the loop it’s not Sunday,” she said. “It’s the same day over again.”

  “Two Saturdays. Not a bad deal.”

  “Not just two. It goes on and on. November ninth a thousand, ten thousand, a million times over.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can look at me like that if you want. I don’t care if you believe me. You know something, Toby?”

  “What?”

  “I’m having a really good day.”

  “That’s November ninth for you.”

  She smiled at him, then kissed him, that feeling, the taste, all of the sensation in its totality.

  “I want to see my grandparents now.”

  She opened the door and got out but he stayed in the car. She crossed the lawn, strewn with big colorful oak leaves, to the front door of the house, stealing backward glances, wanting to know he was still there waiting for her in the yellow car. Her lover. Her boyfriend.

  She started to knock on the door but hesitated. From inside the big house she heard muffled music and laughter. She looked around. In the breeze an orange oak leaf detached from the tree and spun down. The sky blew clear and cold. Later it would cloud over and rain. Kylie knew all about this day. She had been told of it since she was a small child. The last day of the world, perfectly preserved for the edification of alien Tourists and anthropologists. Some people said what happened was an accident, a consequence of the aliens opening the rift, disrupting the fabric of reality. What really pissed everybody off, Kylie thought, was the dismissive attitude. There was no occupying army, no invasion. They came, destroyed everything either intentionally or accidentally, then ignored the survivors. The Preservation was the only thing about the former masters of the Earth that interested them.

  Kylie didn’t care about all that right now. She had been told about the day, but she had never understood what the day meant, the sheer sensorial joy of it, the incredible beauty and rightness of it. A surge of pure delight moved through her being, and for a moment she experienced uncontainable happiness.

  She knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” A woman in her mid-fifties with vivid green eyes, her face pressed with comfortable laugh lines. Like the house, she was a picture come to life. (Kylie’s grandmother showing her the photographs, faded and worn from too much touching.)

  “Hi,” Kylie said.

  “Can I help you?” the live photograph said.

  “No. I mean, I wanted to ask you something.”

  The waiting expression on her face so familiar. Kylie said, “I just wanted to know, are you having a good day, I mean a really good day?”

  Slight turn of the head, lips pursed uncertainly, ready to believe this was a harmless question from a harmless person.

  “It’s like a survey,” Kylie said. “For school?”

  A man of about sixty years wearing a baggy wool sweater and glasses came to the door.

  “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “A happiness survey,” Kylie’s great grandmother said, and laughed.

  “Happiness survey, huh?” He casually put his arm around his wife and pulled her companionably against him.

  “Yes,” Kylie said. “For school.”

  “Well, I’m happy as a clam,” Kylie’s great grandfather said.

  “I’m a clam, too,” Kylie’s great grandmother said. “A happy one.”

  “Thank you,” Kylie said.

  “You’re very welcome. Gosh, but you look familiar.”

  “So do you. Goodbye.”

  Back in the car Kylie squeezed Toby’s hand. There had been a boy on the Outskirts. He was impotent, but he liked to touch Kylie and be with her, and he didn’t mind watching her movies, the ones that made the Old Men sad and angry but that she obsessively hoarded images from in her mind. The boy’s hand always felt cold and bony. Which wasn’t his fault. The nicest time they ever had was a night they had spent in one of the ruins with a working fireplace and enough furniture to burn for several hours. They’d had a book of poems and took turns reading them to each other. Most of the poems didn’t make sense to Kylie but she liked the sounds of the words, the way they were put together. Outside, the perpetual storms crashed and sizzled, violet flashes stuttering into the cozy room with the fire.

  In the yellow car, Toby’s hand felt warm. Companionable and intimate.

  “So how are they doing?” he said.

  “They’re happy.”

  “Great. What’s next?”

  “If you knew this was your last day to live,” Kylie asked him, “what would you do?”

  “I’d find a spooky girl and make love to her.”

  She kissed him. “What else?”

  “Ah--”

  “I mean without leaving the city. You can’t leave the city.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’d just get stuck in the Preservation Field until the loop re-started. It looks like people are driving out but they’re not.”

  He looked at her closely, searching for the joke, then grinned. “We wouldn’t want that to happen to us.”

  “No.”

  “So what would you do on your last day?” he asked.

  “I’d find a spooky guy who could fix things and I’d get him to fix me up.”

  “You don’t need fixing. You’re not broken.”