The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  He walked across the deserted plaza, his footsteps still echoing. An acoustical trick. His path took him past that rare thing in the former Soviet Union, a new statue. Hands on hips, a rolled blueprint under one arm, Sergei Korolev stood stiff-legged and looked at the sky. As Aksyonov approached, he thought once again: a poor likeness. It favored Lenin. As how could it not? The sculptor had done only Lenins for thirty years.

  As he approached the marble Chief, he began to smell the flowers. More than usual, judging from the smell and from the dark heaps at the base of the statue. At dawn the Kazakhs would clear away the oldest bouquets, but enough would remain to give the plaza its only color, its only mystery.

  The Kazakhs picked up just the flowers, and left the rest. Space photos clipped from magazines and crudely framed. Children’s plastic toy rockets. Boxes of the shoddy East German pens the Chief had used – as if he had had much choice. About once a month, Aksyonov fetched a crate from the cafeteria and collected them all, carried them to the lost and found. A silly chore, beneath his dignity; he could easily ask the Kazakhs to do it, or anyone else at the complex, for that matter. But Aksyonov had never spoken to anyone at Baikonur about this – this whatever-it-was – this shrine. And he never intended to. Not even to ask who in the devil kept piling up the stuff in the first place. One toy space station, he knew, he had carted away at least three times.

  No one ever offered to help him, either.

  As Aksyonov passed the statue, he saw a new shape on the ground. What – ? He stopped and gaped, sucked in his breath.

  The shape reared up, and Aksyonov cried out. A man was scrambling to his feet.

  “Apologies, good sir,” the man said, in Kazakh. “I did not mean to frighten. My apologies.”

  The man already was trotting away, dusting himself. He might have looked back once, but then he was lost in the darkness of the plaza.

  Exhaling, willing his heart to slow, Aksyonov peered at the base of the statue. Had the man left some token of esteem? Aksyonov was quite sure he had interrupted something.

  Had the man really been on his knees, prone on the pavement, facing the statue? Had he really been in the Muslim attitude of prayer?

  Aksyonov hurried across the pavement to the blank-faced Khrushchev block that housed his rooms. On the stoop, he fumbled for his keys.

  Aksyonov had read that in Paris, grieving tourists piled sentimental litter atop the graves of movie actors and pop stars. One expected such things of Paris.

  But this was Baikonur, sobersided Baikonur. There were no tourists, no adolescents here. The cosmonauts, yes, they were a superstitious, childish lot, always had been – the stories they brought back from the Peace, well! Really. But the engineers, computer programmers, astrophysicists, bureaucrats?

  Absurdity – the Chief a pop star!

  Unlocked, the door proved to be stuck, as usual; he shouldered it open. Another dart of pain.

  Who prays to a pop star?

  He closed the door behind him and groped for the switch. With typical foresight, Khrushchev’s electricians had placed the switch more than a yard away from the door, and at a peculiar height. It was always a bit of a search.

  The cafeteria light was easier to find. Once, Aksyonov, restless in the middle of the night, had walked into the darkened cafeteria, flipped on the light, and startled a group of fifteen or so engineers, all young, huddled around a single candle at a corner table. They looked stricken. A dope orgy, was Aksyonov’s first thought. Thrilled and mortified, he fumbled an apology, turned the light back off, and left, never to raise the subject with anyone. It was none of his business. He never asked Tolubko what it was that she whisked off the table, and hid in her lap. It had looked, fleetingly, like a photograph.

  Aksyonov did not encourage his colleagues to share the details of their personal lives. Only the details of the projects they were working on. And they did that, he was sure.

  Pretty sure.

  Where was that damn light? His fingernails raked the plaster.

  A space program as jihad. Imagine.

  When they pray to the Chief, does he answer?

  He answered Novikov.

  “Novikov,” Aksyonov muttered. Old men were allowed to talk to themselves, weren’t they? “I put the Chief in Novikov’s head! Just to calm him down, make his last moments less horrible. If anyone helped him, it was not the Chief. It was I. I, Aksyonov.”

  His hands slid all over the wall. This was embarrassing. Would he have to call someone, to cry out, Tolubko, please come over here, turn on my light for me? She’d think it a ruse, a ploy to entice her into bed. He laughed, then began to cry. He would never find the light. He was an old, old man, and there was no light. He leaned against the wall and slid down. He sat on the floor, sobbing in the darkness.

  Stop it, Aksyonov. Stop it.

  He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around himself, clutched himself. He felt the trembling worsen. He bit his lip, fought a scream.

  He was not alone in the room.

  This was helpful, a fact to hold. The trembling in his arms gradually eased, and he relaxed his grip. His upper arms and his fingers were sore. Stiff tomorrow. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, as his mother had taught him long ago. He did not open his eyes, but he knew that if he did . . .

  He knew.

  “Ah, Chief,” Aksyonov said. “Lurk around here all you wish. I will never worship you. I know you too well, and I love you too much.”

  He woke up, sitting against the wall. He ached everywhere. The lights were on, and it was night outside. Beside him was the telephone table. Good; it was sturdy enough. He hauled himself up, holding on, groaning only a little. He stood, rubbed his arms and legs, wondered why on earth he had fallen asleep in such a position. He answered himself, I am an old man, and then sought other problems. With some trouble and trembling he unbuttoned his shirt, absently switched on the drafting-table lamp. He looked down at his designs and was immediately engrossed, lost in his work even as he sank into the creaking chair.

  And if while working he sometimes vocalized his thoughts, as if comparing notes, airing ideas – yes, even arguing – with an old friend, well, what of it? He was no cultist, no kneeling Kazakh. He was an engineer.

  “Here’s the problem, Chief,” Aksyonov murmured. “Here, this is the best design for the solar arrays, in terms of fuel efficiency. Mounted like so, on the service module. So far, so good. But there are other considerations. For example . . .”

  Aksyonov’s papers slid one over the other. His chair creaked. Tight-lipped, with ruler and pen, he drew a true line. He laid his plans all through the night, until dawn.

  NEUTRINO DRAG

  Paul Di Filippo

  Although he has published novels, including two in collaboration with Michael Bishop, Paul Di Filippo shows every sign of being one of those rare writers, like Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, who establish their reputations largely through their short work. His short fiction popped up with regularity almost everywhere in the ’80s and ’90s and continues to do so into the Oughts with a large body of work that has appeared in such markets as Interzone, Sci Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, The Twilight Zone Magazine, New Worlds, Amazing Fantastic, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in many small press magazines and anthologies. His short work has been gathered into critically acclaimed collections such as The Steampunk Trilogy, Ribofunk, Calling All Brains!, Fractal Paisleys, and, most recently, Strange Trades. Di Filippo’s other books include the novels Ciphers, Lost Pages, Joe’s Liver, and, in collaboration with Michael Bishop, Would It Kill You To Smile? and Muskrat Courage. Di Filippo is also a well-known critic, working as a columnist for two of the leading science fiction magazines simultaneously, with his often wry and quirky critical work appearing regularly in both Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – a perhaps unique distinction. In addition, he frequently contributes revie
ws and other critical work to Science Fiction Weekly, Locus Online, Tangent Online and other Internet venues.

  Racers are always looking for a technological edge that will give them an advantage over their competitors. As the wry story that follows demonstrates, though, sometimes that can be taken a bit too far.

  I KNOW WHY THE SUN doesn’t work the way the scientists think it should.

  Me and a guy who called himself Spacedog fucked it up back in 1951, racing our roadsters in a match of Cosmic Chicken out in space, closer’n Mercury to hell itself.

  I never told a soul about that last grudge match between me and Spacedog. Who’d’ve believed me? Spacedog never returned to Earth to back my story up. And no one else was there to witness our race anyhow, except Stella Star Eyes. And she never says anything anytime, not even after fifty years with me.

  But now that I’m an old, old guy likely to hit the Big Wall of Death and visit the Devil’s pitstop soon, I figure I might as well try to tell the whole story the exact way it happened. Just in case Spacedog’s car ever maybe starts eating up the Sun or something worse.

  I got demobbed in ’56, went back home to San Diego and opened up a welding shop with the few thousand dollars I had saved and with the skills the Army had generously given me in exchange for nearly getting my ass shot up in a dozen European theaters from Anzio to Berlin. Palomar Customizing, Obdulio Benitez, proprietor, that was me. I managed to get some steady good-paying work right out of the holeshot, converting Caddies and Lincolns to hearses for the local funeral trade. The grim joke involved in this arrangement didn’t escape me, since I still woke up more nights than not, drenched in sweat and yelling, memories of shellfire and blood all too vivid. If any of a hundred Nazi bullets had veered an inch, I would have already taken my own ride in a hearse – assuming any part of me had survived to get bagged – and never been here building the corpse wagons.

  One of the first helpers I hired at my shop was this high-school kid, Joaquin Arnett.

  You heard me right, Joaquin Arnett, the legendary leader of the Bean Bandits, that mongrel pack of barrio-born hotrodders who started out by tearing up the California racing world like Aztecs blew through captives, and then went on to grab national honors from scores of classier white-bread teams across the nation. By the time he retired from racing in the Sixties, Joaquin had racked up more trophies and records than almost any other driver, and fathered two sons to carry on his dream.

  But back in the late Forties, all that was still in the future. I hired a wiry, smiling, wired kid with skin a little lighter than my own, a kid with no rep yet, but just a mania for cars and racing.

  Joaquin got his start picking up discarded car parts – coils, magnetos – and fixing them. He had taught himself to drive at age nine. By the time he got to my shop, he’d been bending iron on his own for several years, making chassis after chassis out of scrap and dropping flatheads in front, fat skins in back and deuce bodies on top. Once he got his hands on my shop’s equipment, he burst past all the old barriers that had stopped him from making his dreams really come true. The railjobs and diggers he began to turn out in his off-hours were faster and hotter than anything else on the streets or the tracks.

  Joaquin had been driving for the Road Runners and the Southern California Roadster Club since 1948. But when 1951 rolled around, he decided he wanted to start his own team. He recruited a bunch of childhood buddies – Carlos Ramirez, Andrew Ortega, Harold Miller, Billy Glavin, Mike Nagem, plus maybe twenty others – and they became the Bean Bandits, a name that picked up on the taunts of “Beaners!” they heard all the time and made the slur into a badge of ethnic pride.

  When Joaquin first came to work for me, I was driving a real pig, something the legendary little old lady from Pasadena would’ve turned her nose up at. An unmodified ’32 Packard I had picked up cheap before the war, which had subsequently sat on its rims in my parents’ garage for five years while I was overseas. I plain didn’t care much about cars at that point. They were just transportation, something to get me and Herminia – Herminia Ramirez, a distant cousin of Carlos’s – around town on a date.

  But working side by side with Joaquin, watching the fun he had putting his rods together, was contagious. The customizing and racing bugs bit me on the ass, one on each cheek, and never let go. Soon on weekends and nights I was elbow-deep in the guts of a ’40 Oldsmobile, patching in a Cadillac engine that was way too much power for the streets, but was just right for the dry lakes.

  The Bean Bandits, you see, raced the cars they created at a couple of places. Paradise Mesa, the old airfield outside the city that was our home track, and the dry lakebeds of El Mirage and Muroc. There the drivers could cut loose without worrying about citizens or cops or traffic lights, focusing on pure speed.

  When I started running my new Olds – painted glossy pumpkin orange with black flames, and its name, El Tigre, lettered beautifully across both front fenders – first in trials with the Bean Bandits and then against drivers from other clubs, I found that my nightmares started to go away. Not completely, but enough. That sweet deal alone would have hooked me on racing forever, if all the other parts of it – the sound, the speed, the thrills, the glory – hadn’t already done the trick.

  The real excitement started when we discovered nitro. That was nitromethane, a gasoline alternative that did for engines what the sight of Wile E. Coyote did for the Road Runner. At first we thought nitro was more volatile than it actually was, and we carried it to meets in big carboys swaddled in rags. “Stand back! This could blow any second!” Scared the shit out of the competition, until they got hip to nitro too. And eventually, when we discovered the shitty things pure nitro did to our engines, we began to cut it fifty-fifty with regular fuel. Still, plenty of extra kick remained, and nitro let us get closer and closer to the magic number of 150 mph with every improvement we made.

  I remember Joaquin boasting to me one day, “Papa Obie, soon enough we’re gonna be as fast as them damn new UFO things people are talking about.”

  I don’t feel like I was ever a real card-carrying member of the Bean Bandits. I never wore one of their shirts with their silly cartoon on it – a Mexican jumping bean with sombrero, mask and wheels – and I never lined up at the staging lights known as the Christmas Tree with them in any for-the-book races, just the unofficial drags. The main thing that kept me out of the club – in my own mind anyhow – was my age.

  When I left the service I was already twenty-six years old, and by 1951 I had crossed that big red line into my thirties. Joaquin and all his buddies were a lot younger than me. They liked to tease me, calling me “Papa Obie” and names like that. Not that they ever discriminated against anyone, on any basis. Mostly Hispanics, the Bandits had members who were Anglo, Lebanese, Japanese and Filipino. They would’ve took me on in a heartbeat. But my concerns weren’t the same as theirs. They had nothing in mind but kicks. I had a business to run, and was thinking in a vague way about marrying Herminia and settling down.

  Still, I hung out with the Bandits a lot and never felt like they held me at arm’s length. Practically every weekend in 1951, you could find me behind the wheel of El Tigre, hauling ass down three dusty miles of dry lake bottom trial after trial, the nitro fumes making my eyes water and nose burn, smiling when I beat someone, scowling when I got beaten and already planning refinements to my car.

  Yeah, that was my routine and my pleasure all right, and at the time I even thought it might last forever.

  Until Spacedog and Stella Star Eyes showed up.

  That Saturday afternoon at Paradise Mesa the sun seemed to burn hotter than I’d ever known it to shine before, even in California. I had gone through about six cans of Nesbitt’s Orange Drink between noon and three, a few gulps used to wash down the tortillas we had bought at our favorite stand on the Pacific Coast Highway on our way up here.

  At that moment, Herminia and I were sitting on the edge of one of the empty trailers used to transport the more outrageous hot rod
s that couldn’t pass for grocery getters, trying to get a little shade from a canvas tarp stretched above us on poles. We were the only ones facing the entrance to the dragstrip. Everyone else had their heads under hoods or their eyes on the race underway between Joaquin and some guy from Pomona. Joaquin was running his ’29 Model A with the Mercury engine, and the driver from Pomona was behind the wheel of a chopped and channelled Willys.

  That was when this car like nothing I had ever seen before pulled in.

  This rod was newer than color TV. It looked like Raymond Loewy might’ve designed it fifty years from now for the 1999 World’s Fair. Low and streamlined and frenched to the max, matte silver in color, its window glass all smoky somehow so that you couldn’t see inside, this car skimmed along on skinny tires colored an improbable gold, making less noise than Esther Williams underwater, but managing to convey the impression of some kind of deep power barely within the driver’s control.

  I had gotten to my feet without consciously planning to stand, tossing my last cone-topped can of soda, still half-full, onto the ground. Herminia was less impressed, and just kept slurping her Nesbitt’s up through a straw.