The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Manny nodded. Harry watched Jackie’s teeth.

  “We’d like you both to come to dinner soon,” Ann said. She smiled. “I’m a good cook.”

  Manny’s eyes gleamed.

  Jackie said, “I know this must be hard for you—” but Harry saw that she didn’t really mean it. She didn’t think it was hard. For her it was so real that it was natural weather, unexpected maybe, but not strange, not out of place, not out of time. In front of the bench, sunlight striped the pavement like bars.

  Suddenly Jackie said, “Oh, Popsy, did I tell you that it was your friend Robert who introduced us? Did I tell you that already?”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” Harry said. “You did.”

  “He’s kind of a nerd, but actually all right.”

  After Jackie and Ann left, the two old men sat silent a long time. Finally Manny said diplomatically, “You want to get a snack, Harry?”

  “She’s happy, Manny.”

  “Yes. You want to get a snack, Harry?”

  “She didn’t even recognize him.”

  “No. You want to get a snack?”

  “Here, have this. I got it for you this morning.” Harry held out an orange, a deep-colored navel with flawless rind: seedless, huge, guaranteed juicy, nurtured for flavor, perfect.

  “Enjoy,” Harry said. “It cost me ninety-two cents.”

  S.P. SOMTOW

  Lottery Night

  Born in Bangkok, Thailand, S.P. Somtow (also known to some as Somtow Sucharitkul) has lived in six countries and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. Multitalented as well as multilingual, he has an international reputation as an avant-garde composer, and his works have been performed in more than a dozen countries on four continents. Among his compositions are “Gongula 3 for Thai and Western Instruments” and “The Cosmic Trilogy.” His book publications include the novels Starship and Haiku, Mall-world, Light on the Sound, The Darkling Wind, and The Fallen Country. His most recent books are the novels The Shattered Horse, Vampire Junction, and, just released, a new novel, Moon Dance. In 1986, he received the Daedalus Award for The Shattered Horse. His story “Fiddling for Water-buffaloes” was in our Fourth Annual Collection. A resident of the United States for many years, he now makes his home in California.

  In the fast, funny, and gonzo story that follows, he takes us to one of the strangest and most evocative worlds you’re ever likely to experience—modern-day Bangkok.

  Warning: this story is not for the squeamish!

  Lottery Night

  S. P. SOMTOW

  “You’ve got everything you need now.” My grandmother was even more fidgety than usual; she didn’t quite look me in the eye as she fanned herself continually with a folded-over fashion magazine. “Your sleeping bag … don’t forget that. And insect repellent.”

  “We’ve been through it a thousand times,” I said, trying to conceal my trepidation at the adventure to come.

  “Food—”

  “A Snickers and a Big Mac,” I said. “It’s all here.” I tapped the brown paper bag. I hoped it wouldn’t rain. The air was humid; on the balcony of our high-rise, my little sister Kaew was glued to a soap opera on the portable television—a courtroom scene—and my mother was pounding coconuts.

  “I almost forgot … the amulets! You mustn’t forget the amulets!” My khun yaai scrambled up off the floor and hobbled into her room, muttering darkly to herself, just as my father let himself in, took off his shoes and began unbuttoning his khaki police uniform. He glanced at me, squatting in the middle of the room, wishing I could eat the Big Mac now—that was a special treat my Aunt Joom bought for me down at the mall, you could have bought three bowls of noodles for the same price—and immediately began hectoring my mother.

  “I really don’t understand why we have to send the boy,” he said. “Looks like another monsoon shower tonight. I could go myself.”

  “There’s no need to baby him,” my little sister piped up. “He’s fourteen years old and he polishes his rocket every night.”

  “I do not!” I said. “Well, not every night.”

  “Where ever did you learn such filthy language, little girl?” my grand mother screeched from the inner room. My father couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

  My mother patiently pounded coconuts. On television, in the soap opera, the judge was declaring that the two-headed daughter of the peasant woman was the rightful heir to the Petchari millions, and the lawyer had just revealed that he was actually the god Indra in disguise.

  “I mean, honored mother of my wife,” my father went on, after he had recovered from laughing. “I am the patriarch of this family, and it’s only proper if there’s any favor to be sought from the venerable ancestors, I should be the one to—”

  “Don’t be silly,” my grandmother said, coming back in with a tray of amulets. My father quickly ducked so that his head would not be higher than hers. “In the first place, it’s your doing that we’re reduced to these present straits; in the second, he was her favorite great-great-nephew; in the third, you know very well that your Great-Aunt Snit hated your guts. She couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as you when she was alive. Why on earth would she want to tell you a winning lottery number?”

  “Even so,” my father said, “the dead can be propitiated with the right gifts … and … and that was years ago, and it was because she was senile and kept mistaking me for the man who jilted her for an Indian woman.”

  My mother strained the pulped coconut through a cheesecloth and poured some of the juice into a Batman glass for my sister to drink. “We can’t take any chances,” she said. There was a sad finality to her voice, and my father sat down sulkily on a floor cushion.

  “It’s all superstition anyway,” he said. “If everyone could win the lottery by sleeping in a cemetery and having some charitable ghost whisper the winning number in a dream … why, everybody’d be a millionaire! Some of those grave-yards get more crowded than the kick-boxing stadium on Wednesday nights … and speaking of chok muai…” He stalked out to the balcony and started to twiddle the channel. The shrill snarl of the war oboe filled the air, punctuated by the pounding of drums. He turned the volume up so high it even drowned out the traffic.

  “Oh, please, khun poh! I wanna see what happens to the two-headed—” my sister started whining.

  “Shut up. I’ve got a lot of money riding on the red tonight.”

  My mother and grandmother looked at each other and rolled their eyes. To me, it was just one more indication of our desperate plight. My father had faithfully gambled on the blue for ten years.

  “The amulets,” my grandmother said. She lifted each one in turn, held it in between her palms in an attitude of reverence. As my father farted and belched in the background, she enumerated their virtues. “Here’s an old and very powerful luangpoh I acquired from a Chinaman who makes his living gambling on cockfights … here’s an amethyst pohng ham that was dug up in Chiang Rai…” She put each one around my neck and ran through a couple of mantras appropriate to each. “Are you sure you’ll be all right with all this American food?” she said. “I don’t want you getting diarrhea in a graveyard in the middle of the night. You might attract a phii krasue.”

  I shuddered. For the first time it occurred to me that tonight’s outing wasn’t just another boyish lark—it was to be an encounter with the supernatural world that surrounds us all. No one wants to attract a phii krasue. Many phii krasue are seductively beautiful at first—until they lose their heads. We’d had one in the family once, my great-great-great-uncle Noi, whose bad karma had caused him to be reincarnated as one of these vile creatures. I had been raised on tales of how his head used to detach itself from his body, and, dragging the slimy guts behind it, would slither around the family compound using its tongue as a pseudopod. Phii krasue live entirely on shit, of course, and there was a practical side to having a malevolent spirit around in those olden days without indoor plumbing, but as soon as my family had been able to afford a toile
t, back in the late 1950s, my grandmother had an exorcist brought in to propel my multi-uncle on to the next world.

  This was long before I was born. I had never seen the much-vaunted village home, never even so much as set foot beyond the city limits of Bangkok except when we went to the beach; then again, everyone knows there is nothing worthwhile outside the City-of-Angels-the-Divine-and-Great-Metropolis-Etc.-Etc.

  My grandmother finished bedecking me with amulets and was now blessing me. My father was still absorbed in his boxing match. My mother was in the kitchen, praying to a plaster reproduction of the Emerald Buddha that sat in a niche above the refrigerator, next to the photographs of Their Divine Majesties. The smell of burning joss-sticks wafted through the living room. I closed my eyes, trying to achieve a state of samadhi before setting out on this pilgrimage that might mean the difference between the family retreating to the boondocks or moving to a more upscale condominium on Sukhumvit.

  In the midst of my reverie I heard my grandmother singing. It was an old lullaby from the village in a hick dialect, but it was strangely soothing. A mood of profound inner shanti swept over me, but it was soon disrupted by the sound of my elders arguing.

  “I really should drive him down to the cemetery myself,” my father was saying.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said my grandmother. “That old Datsun pickup of yours won’t make it past the edge of the soi.”

  “Yes, but I could take him in my police car,” said my father, “and maybe get a couple of hundred baht in traffic bribes on my way home.”

  “How crass,” said the khun yaai.

  “I’ll take the bus,” I said. “The soi is flooded anyway.”

  * * *

  I didn’t want a ride from my father because I had a secret errand or two to do on the way to the cemetery where Khun Chuad Snit’s remains had lain since the time of the Divine King Chulalongkorn. I needed time to get in the right state of mind; I wanted to eat the Big Mac; and I had a mind to see if my American friend, Joey Friedberg, wanted to come along.

  The soi was completely flooded from yesterday’s monsoon outburst and I had to take a boat to the main road at a cost of two baht. I was dressed in my best—I didn’t want to feel ashamed in front of my ancestors—a Ralph Lauren shirt from the best counterfeiter in town, a gold Rolex that would have fooled Mr. Rolex himself. I didn’t want to ruin my clothes, so instead of climbing up the drainage pipe to get into Joey’s apartment, I actually rang at the front gate. My Aunt Joom, who worked for the Friedbergs as a maid or something, buzzed me in.

  The first thing I heard was the television. Traditional ranaat music filmed the living room. It was one of those cultural programs that are only watched by old people and American anthropologists. You see, the Friedbergs were a very unusual species of American. Like real people, they didn’t wear shoes in the house, and instead of going to isb, Joey actually went to a Thai school. Joey’s mother made a living entirely by writing scholarly papers about our national peculiarities, for which the Ford Foundation supplied everything: the apartment, the servants, the chauffeur. (She had even done a fifty-page monograph analyzing all the Sanskrit components of the true name the City-of-Angels-the-Divine-and-Great-Metropolis-Etc.-Etc., which is, of course, the only city whose name is so long it is always written with two “Etc.”s.) She didn’t appear to have a husband. At the moment, Mrs. Friedberg was having Aunt Joom walk back and forth across the living room striking various statuesque poses, and taking endless snapshots.

  “Oh, Samraan,” she called out to me, confusing me a bit, because I wasn’t used to being called by my True Name, “Joey’ll be right out … Joom, undulate a bit more, will ya?… beautiful, beautiful.”

  Joey came out of his bedroom. He was loaded down with gear: compasses, Swiss army knives, canteens, dangling all over his gangly frame. We stood for a while, transfixed by Aunt Joom’s virtuoso performance. She was wiggling her hips, fluttering her eyelids, and slithering sinuously across the room as the lanky Mrs. Friedberg snapped furiously away, leaping over sofas and climbing onto credenzas, to get the best possible angles.

  “Rad!” said Joey.

  “Totally,” I said in English, impressed in spite of myself.

  “The illusion is complete,” Joey said, switching to Thai.

  “I’ve known her all my life, and I still can hardly tell she isn’t a woman,” I said.

  Aunt Joom paused for a breath. “Let me get you a Coke,” she said to me.

  “You really don’t have to, Joom dear,” said Mrs. Friedberg. “You’re not a servant, you know.” Nonetheless, Joom minced off to the kitchen, every inch the proper serving maid, though the nuances of her servility were doubtless lost on her mistress. Mrs. Friedberg sighed. “I can’t wait to get these pictures developed.”

  “What’re they for, Mom?”

  “Oh, it’s a paper called ‘Katoey: transvestitism in the resonating contexts of contemporary Thai society.” She shook her long red hair into place and noticed me at last. Joey and I stood side by side. My friend was, of course, much taller than me, and his height was further accentuated by his immaculately spiked blond hair. He limped a bit, and one arm was longer than the other; it was from an auto accident he’d been in when he was five that had put him in a coma for a year. He wore a neon pink teeshirt that depicted a surfing triceratops. “Going camping, dears?” Mrs. Friedberg said to us.

  “Aw c’mon, Mom,” said Joey. “I told you all about it, didn’t I? Like, it’s lottery night—tomorrow’s the last day to buy lottery tickets—and we’re spending the night at the tomb of Samraan’s Khun Chuad Snit!”

  “Oh, ah … right! The business about sleeping in a graveyard and getting winning lottery numbers from ghosts, right? Interesting example of cultural syncretism … gotta do a paper on it sometime … well, be careful, dears,” she said, “and Joey, maybe you can do some field notes or something.” Absently, she handed him a five hundred baht note. White people never know the value of money.

  I closed my eyes and thought of the ordeal to come. It was a bad idea to bring Joey, I thought. Even though I’d promised, even though he and his mother were almost like Thai people. I was going to end up as a footnote in Mrs. Friedberg’s dissertation and even Joey wasn’t going to take the spirits seriously. Maybe they’d be so angry at my bringing a farang that they wouldn’t materialize at all. I found myself attempting to put myself back into a state of samadhi. Without thinking, I began to hum the lullaby my grandmother had sung to me earlier that day.

  When I opened my eyes again, Mrs. Friedberg was staring at me, wide-eyed. “Why Samraan, that was such a curious, wonderful song. What was it?”

  “Just … a song, Mrs. Friedberg. My grandmother’s…”

  “From the provinces?”

  I was suddenly embarrassed at having betrayed the hick origins of my family. I don’t know why I was so sensitive about losing face; they wouldn’t have understood anyway. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared at the floor.

  “Does your grandmother know any more of those songs? Ya know, the Ford Foundation’s shelling out mega-shekels for ethnomusicology these days—”

  “Right, Mom, later,” Joey said, rolling his eyes. He just couldn’t wait to be out of there.

  As we reached the door, we heard Mrs. Friedberg’s final admonishment. “And don’t get stoned!”

  “Who’s she fucking kidding?” Joey said to me, pulling a reefer out of his pocket just as we reached the corner of Soi Jintana and the main road. We were on higher ground and the water was only ankle deep. Banana trees lined the walls of the apartment complex. The sun was setting behind veils of smog; the odors of gasoline and night-blooming jasmine wafted across the skyline of high-rises and silhouetted pagodas. Traffic screeched endlessly by and we had to wait ten minutes before we could safely jaywalk the intersection. At the corner, a withered Indian hawked lottery tickets.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Not until tomorrow.”

  “I can’t wait,” Joey said. A
pretty young prostitute of indeterminate gender accosted him, and he yelled back. “Hii men meuan turian kuan!!”

  “Ai haa! You can’t say things like that!” The irate whore was coming after us, swinging her purse. She was making straight for me—of course, it hadn’t occurred to her that it was the farang boy calling her names.

  “Duck!” I grabbed Joey’s arm and pushed him into an alley.

  ‘Didn’t I get it right?” he said as he lit up.

  “Of course you got it right,” I said, “but you can’t just be going around telling someone her pussy smells like a puréed durian fruit and hope to get away with—”

  “Shit!” he said, laughing too loud. “She’s fucking gaining on us!” Wielding the purse with deadly accuracy, the woman fetched me a hefty clout on the side of the head. Joey yanked me into the back doorway of a crowded noodle shop, and we dived under a table and scrambled through the forest of diners’ legs to reach the front door.

  A bus appeared and we ran wildly after it. About a dozen people were hanging on the door and the bus careened at a forty-five degree angle as it rounded a corner. As we hopped on board, the prostitute tripped over a stray dog and sprawled into a sidewalk noodle vendor. We hung out of the side of the bus, clutching the door-pole with one hand, our legs trailing the traffic as we wove lurching through the ooze of jam-packed cars, glinting in the sunset like the scales of a giant serpent.

  “Why do I always have to rescue you, little brother?” Joey said.

  “Fuck off,” I said in English, “and don’t call me ‘little brother.’” Joey might be my best friend, but that didn’t give him the right to count me as his relative. Foreigners never know their place.

  * * *

  My great-great-aunt’s tomb was in a pretty out-of-the-way tambol of the City of Etc. Etc. In the days when Great-great-aunt Snit had been cremated and her ashes interred there, there was this temple in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by paddy fields. Now there were a few signs of development; beside the temple was the skeleton of a shopping mall-in-progress, and there was a half-built overpass that hulked over the cemetery. There was a palatial movie theatre across the street from the cemetery. It was showing Aliens; a thirty-foot-tall statue of the H.R. Giger monster welcomed the patrons, its mechanized jaws opening and closing to the strains of a Michael Jackson song. At its entrance, a bunch of kids hawked boxes of incense sticks and candles in case someone might want to make a quick offering at the shrine across the street.