The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  I think now that might have been the instant things started to go wrong between us – when Herminia didn’t register the magnificence of that incredible car.

  This Buck Rogers car pulled up a few yards away from me, and then doors opened, one on each side.

  And those damn doors just seemed to disappear! All I could think was that they had slid into the body of the car faster than my eye could follow, like pocket doors in a house.

  The driver stepped out first, followed on the other side by the passenger.

  From the driver’s side unfolded this lanky joker well over six feet tall. He wore a wild Hawaiian shirt with a pattern of flowers and ukuleles and surfboards and palm trees that seemed to form hazy secret images where they overlapped and intersected. The shirt hung loose over a pair of lime green poplin trousers. Huaraches revealed bare feet, but sunglasses concealed his eyes. He had Mitch Miller facial hair – Big Sur bohemian mustache and unconnected chin spinach – but his head was otherwise hairless. And then there was the matter of his skin.

  I’ve always heard people say that someone had an “olive” complexion, and usually what they mean is that the person they’re talking about is dago-dark. But in this case, it was really true. All the skin I could see on this guy was a muted dusky green, kinda like dusty eucalyptus leaves.

  While I was still trying to get my mind around both the guy and his car, I caught sight of his passenger.

  Back in the Army, I used to truly dig this girlie cartoon the thoughtful brass produced for us dogfaces. “Ack-Ack Amy” was the name of the character, and the artist – I made a point of remembering his name – was Bill Ward. Man, could he draw stacked babes! Even on paper Ack-Ack Amy seemed so physical – although I doubt there had had ever been any real gal built like her – that you could almost feel her in your arms. Especially if it was a lonely night in your foxhole.

  Back home, I ran into Ward’s stuff again. He was doing this funnybook where the gal was named Torchy, and he had only gotten better at drawing. Torchy was Ack-Ack Amy times ten, more woman than any six regular gals rolled together.

  The woman who got out of the strange car could have been Torchy’s va-va-voom fashion model sister.

  Her hair was chin-length, colored platinum, with a flip. Milk-white skin contrasted with her boyfriend’s jade tint. Her nose was pert, her lips lush and lively and her jawline was honed finer than the cylinders in a Ferrari. Thinking back, I certainly didn’t notice anything funny about her eyes from that distance. Mostly because I was so knocked out by her body. That body – oh, man! She had firm, outthrusting boobs like the nosecones on a Nike missile, a rack that Jane Russell would’ve have killed for, and they were barely concealed under a blue angora sweater which molded itself to every braless curve. (The sweater was long-sleeved, but she wasn’t sweating that I could see, even in that heat.) Pink toreador pants lacquered her sassy rump and killer legs, and a pair of strappy high heels in crocodile leather raised her almost as tall as her companion.

  My heart was threatening to throw a rod. Herminia finally noticed my reaction, and immediately got huffy. She sneered at the newcomers, especially the woman, said, “Que puta!”, then returned to her soda, slurping up the last of it with exaggerated rudeness.

  I covered the distance between me and the strangers in about five long bounds.

  Once I got up close to them, I noticed three odd things.

  The shell of the car was cast all in one piece, and was too thin to hold any concealed doors. It didn’t look like any metal I had ever seen either, more like plastic.

  The man’s bare head featured concentric circles of bumps on his skull, just under his scalp, like somebody had buried a form-fitting waffle-iron grid underneath his skin.

  And the woman’s eyes had no pupils. In place of the expected little human black circles stepped down against the hard sunlight, her irises were centered with sparkling irregular golden starbursts.

  My first impulse was to inquire about his appearance, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it tactfully. And then the moment when I could have passed, as he stuck out his hand for a shake. I took his paw, and although his grip was strong, his hand felt all wrong, like it had been broken and reassembled funny. Then he spoke.

  “Zzzip, guten, chirp, bon, zzzt, hallo! Name Space, skrk, chien, zzz, perro, no, zeep, dog! Name Spacedog is. Here to, zzzt, race I am.”

  The guy’s crazy speech was studded with pauses and wrong words. Weird noises – buzzes and clicks and grinding sounds, some of them almost mechanical in nature – alternated with the language. He reminded me of a bad splice job between a tape of an argument in the U.N. cafeteria and one of that new UNIVAC machine at work. But I can’t continue to imitate him exactly for the rest of this story, although I can hear his voice today just as clearly as I did fifty years ago. Just remember that every time I report Spacedog’s conversation – some of which I only puzzled out years after he had vanished – all those quirks were part of it.

  “Well,” I said, trying to maintain my cool, “you came to the right place.” I was dying to get a look under the nonexistent hood of his car. And the furtive glimpses of his dashboard that I was snagging through the open door were driving me insane! There were more dials and knobs and buttons and toggles on that panel than any car had a right to feature. And some startling missing parts: no steering wheel or pedals!

  But all thoughts of engines vanished when I realized Spacedog’s girlfriend had come around to our side of the car. And now she stood close enough to me for my breath to stir the fuzzy fibers of her sweater.

  “Obdulio Benitez,” I said, and put out my sweaty, trembling hand. She took it with her small dry palm and delicate fingers and smiled brilliantly, but said nothing.

  Spacedog spoke for her. “This Stella is. Crypto-speciated quasiconjugal adjunct. Exteriorized anima and inseminatory receptacle.”

  I couldn’t make heads nor tails out of this description, but my brain wasn’t working properly just then. I felt like a million buzzing bees had flowed through that ultrafemale handshake and now swarmed in my veins.

  Stella continued to smile broadly, without speaking. I couldn’t manage to get out a single word myself.

  Very reluctantly, I released Stella’s hand and tried to focus on Spacedog.

  By this time, all the other Bandits and competitors and spectators had come over to see who these visitors were. Excited murmurs and exclamations filled the air at the unexplained mirage of the weird car and its occupants. All the guys were putting themselves in danger of severe whiplash, jerking their heads back and forth between Stella and the car, while the women huddled in a tight knot of suspicion and jealousy, growling and hissing like wet cats. I beamed what I hoped was a reassuring glance at Herminia, but she didn’t accept it. In her midriff-knotted shirt and Big Yank jeans, she suddenly looked bumpkinish to me, compared to Stella’s sophistication, like Daisy Mae next to Stupefyin’ Jones, with me some poor wetback Little Abner caught in the middle.

  Finally Joaquin shouldered to the front of the crowd. Doffing his helmet – a football player’s old leather one he had stuffed with asbestos pads – my little buddy said boldly, “So, amigo, you’re probably here to drag.”

  “Yes! Probability one! Speed-racing most assuredly Spacedog’s goal is! Burn longchain molecules! Haul gluteus! Scorch the planetary surface! Bad to the osteoclasts! Eat my particulates, uniformed societal guardian!”

  I could sense that everyone here wanted to ask Spacedog about his green skin. But this was exactly the one question nobody in the Bandits would ever voice. After all the prejudice we had experienced, and our unwritten club law of no bias against any race, we just couldn’t make an exception now, no matter how strange the guy’s coloration was. Spacedog had come among perhaps the only bunch of racers in the whole country who would never broach the topic of his origins.

  And today I wonder just how accidental that arrival was.

  The closest Joaquin could come to the topic was a mild, �
�So, where you from?”

  Spacedog hesitated a moment, then answered, “Etruria. Small node of Europa. Earth continent, not satellite. Stella and Spacedog Etruscans are. Speak only old tongue between ourselves.”

  Here Spacedog unloaded a few sentences of wild lingo that sounded like nothing I had ever heard in Italy. Stella made no reply. All the listeners nodded wisely, mostly willing to accept his unlikely explanation.

  “No racing in Etruria. Must to California for kicks come.”

  Joaquin made his decison then, speaking for all the Bandits. “Well, pachuco, Paradise Mesa is racing central in this neighborhood. Let’s see what you and your crate can do.”

  Spacedog clapped his hands together like a five-year-old at the circus. “Most uptaking! Stella, alongside kindly Oblong Benzedrine, please wait.”

  I didn’t know what was harder to believe: my good luck in being nominated as Stella’s companion, or what I saw next.

  Spacedog hopped into his car and picked up a stretchy helmet like a thick bathing cap. The cordless device was studded with shiny contacts on the inside – contacts that matched the bumps on his head. He snugged the helmet on, and suddenly disappeared from view: the mysterious car doors had rematerialized out of nowhere.

  Quiet as smoke, the Flash Gordon car wheeled off then as the crowd parted for it, angling across the lake bed toward the Christmas Tree lights that marked the starting line. By the time all the spectators were properly arrayed, Joaquin had pulled up in his own car.

  Joaquin hazed his hides while getting into position, sending up smoke from his tires and exhausting mind-blowing billows of nitro fumes. Very cool and intimidating. But Spacedog, invisible behind his smoked glass, didn’t choose to play up his own engine power at all.

  The lights worked down to green, and the cars were off.

  Spacedog crossed the finish line before Joaquin had covered a third of the distance. Nobody even got Spacedog’s elapsed time. The guys with the stopwatches just couldn’t react fast enough.

  Joaquin came to a stop halfway down the track in an admission of total defeat I had never seen before.

  I turned my head to gauge the reaction of Stella, standing close by my side.

  Although she continued to smile, the starry-eyed woman showed no extra emotion, as if the outcome had never been in doubt. She just radiated a kind of animal acceptance of whatever ocurred.

  Within the next minute, the two drivers had returned to the starting line. Spacedog disappeared his door and emerged from his car.

  “Victory! Spacedog uber todo! More race! More race!”

  Well, that was a challenge none of us could refuse.

  Over the rest of that afternoon, as the sun sank and reddened, we threw everything we had against Spacedog and his supercar. Or, to use the nickname that the crowd was now chanting, “UFO! UFO!” Useless, all useless, like lobbing softballs to Micky Mantle.

  When it was my turn to pit El Tigre against the UFO, my heart was in my throat, despite the certainty of failure. What if by some fluke I was the one to beat him? What would Stella – I mean, Herminia – think of that?

  Needless to say, I didn’t beat him.

  Finally, after Spacedog had whipped our collective ass six ways from San Diego, we called it a day and broke out the cerveza. Spacedog made a funny face when he first tasted the beer, as if he had never encountered such a drink before. But soon he was downing cans of Blatz like a soldier just home from Korea.

  After suitable lubrication, Joaquin broached the question uppermost in all our minds.

  “What’s that car run on, ’dog?”

  “Neutrinos.”

  “You mean nitro?”

  “Yes, nitro. Excuse tongue of inadvertent falsity, please.”

  Joaquin pondered that revelation for a while, then said, “Custom engine?”

  “Spacedog himself engine grow.”

  We all had a laugh over that, and quit pestering Spacedog. We all figured we’d have a good long look at his engine before too long.

  Especially once we had made him the newest member of the Bean Bandits, a solemn ceremony we duly enacted a half hour later.

  One arm around Stella’s wasp waist, Spacedog raised his beer in a toast when we were done.

  “Liquid token of future conquests hoisted! Leguminous reivers hegemony established is!”

  We all cheered, though we weren’t quite sure what we were endorsing.

  Well, the exploits of the Bean Bandits during the next few months of that long-ago year of 1951 should have been engraved in gold for future generations. But instead, hardly any records were kept. That was just how we thought and how we did – or didn’t do – things in those days. Who had time to write stuff down or even snap a few pictures? There was always another tire to change or mill to rebore. Nobody knew that the kicks we were having would someday become the stuff of legend. We just lived for the moment, for the roar of the engines and the satisfaction of leaving your opponents in the dust.

  So that’s why, search until you’re blue, you won’t find any pictures of Spacedog and his four-wheeled UFO. Which is not to say you can’t get a lot of the surviving oldtimers to talk about him. Nobody who was around then is likely to have forgetten the scorched path he cut through the California racing world. Anybody who ever saw that car of his soundlessly accelerate faster’n a Soviet MIG would never forget their jaw-dropping reaction.

  Up and down the state, we raced against a dozen clubs and blew all their doors off. The Bandits had been hot shit before Spacedog, but now we were unbeatable. Soon, we knew, we’d have to go further afield for competition. Out to Bonneville Flats first probably, then off to some of the prestige Southern tracks. (Though how a bunch of beaners would fare down in the Jim Crow South was something we hadn’t considered.)

  Everybody in the club was ecstatic, especially Joaquin. To be on top of the racing world, that was all he had ever wanted. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t personally behind the wheel of the top car. As long as Spacedog was a bona fide Bean Bandit, Joaquin could bask in the shared glory.

  As for Spacedog himself, I’ve never seen anyone so hepped-up all the time. You’d think he was earning a million dollars per win. I remember one time after we won every heat against a crew from Long Beach, Spacedog drank twelve cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and stood atop the roof of his car reciting some kind of Etruscan poetry that sounded like a vacuum cleaner fighting against ten coyotes and losing.

  And me, I felt pretty good too. But in my case, it wasn’t the racing that made me happy. It was having Stella Star Eyes hanging on my arm.

  I never knew whether Spacedog really wanted me personally to watch his girl, or if my good fortune was just an arbitrary thing. Did he pick me for some special reason, like because I was the oldest, most responsible-seeming guy in the Bandits, with a steady girl of his own? Or would the privilege and duty of minding Stella during the races have gone to any guy who Spacedog happened to meet first?

  This question bothered me a little from time to time, but mostly got lost in the sensual overload whenever I was side by side with Stella. Race after race I squired her around, fetching her drinks, finding her the best vantage for viewing Spacedog’s triumphs. Standing within inches of her, I became lost in the heavenly geography of her knockout body, my mind turning all hazy with dreamy lust. Something about her silence magnified the sheer animal attraction of her incredible physique. Whenever it came time for me to climb into El Tigre and run my own races, I had to practically tear myself away from her.

  It was difficult, but for all those months I never acted on my desires. The code said not to steal the girl of another Bandit. And if Stella was feeling anything for me, I never saw any evidence of such feelings.

  Stella was always polite and aboveboard. She never gave me any come-ons or randy signals, never flirted or teased. Her lack of speech of course had lots to do with maintenance of her proper behavior, as well as mine. Kind of hard to hit on someone if they can’t answer your pickup line. Bu
t of course words aren’t everything, or even the main thing in such matters, and I was pretty sure even by her body language that she felt entirely neutral toward me.

  As for Herminia – well, things had cooled off considerably between us. She didn’t come to meets anymore, and we only saw each other about once a week, usually for a movie and a burger and a kiss goodnight at her doorstep. Her cousin Carlos asked me what was wrong between us, and I couldn’t really explain. Hell, it wasn’t like I was even cheating on her. I was just keeping the foreign girlfriend of one of my fellow clubmembers company during the time he was busy racing.

  I don’t know how long I would have gone on in this crazy white knight, blue balls way without making a play for Stella. But matters were taken out of my control one day when something really quite simple happened.

  Spacedog’s UFO ran out of fuel.

  All the Bean Bandits had traveled out to Paradise Mesa for a race against some guys from Bakersfield. Spacedog and Stella were slated to arrive separately from the rest of us. From what we could learn from the secretive, twisty-talking, green-faced Bandit, he and Stella didn’t live in San Diego proper, but somewhere on its outskirts. Where, exactly, no one ever had learned. That was just one of the lesser mysteries surrounding Spacedog and his woman. But because we wanted to respect and humor our winningest member, we didn’t push it.

  The sleek UFO hummed through the gates on its golden tires. All the Bandits and the hometown crowd raised a rousing cheer at the sight of the unbeatable dragster, and a shiver of despair passed like a chill breeze through the Bakersfield boys.

  But then the unexpected happened. The miracle car that had never even burped or stuttered before seemed to ripple and shimmer in a wave of unreality, as if plunged into an oven made of mirrors. Then it rolled feebly to a halt halfway to the starting line.

  The doors did their vanishing trick, and Spacedog hurtled out, followed more calmly by Stella. The man’s face beneath his omnipresent sunglasses and rubber helmet was two shades greener than normal, and he clutched in his hands a black cylinder a little bigger than a beer can. He hustled toward us, yelling wildly in Etruscan. As he came close, I could see that the cylinder had a hairline crack running jaggedly down its length.