The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  Then the trouble phone rang. Jim checked all his dials before he picked it up.

  He listened, then hung up.

  “There’s an outage all down the line. They’re going to switch the two hundred K’s over to the Buffalo net and reroute them back through here. Check all the load levels. Everything’s out from Schenectady to Jersey City.”

  When everything looked ready, Jack signaled to Jim. Jim called headquarters, and they watched the needles jump on the dials.

  Everything went black.

  Almost everything.

  Jack hit all the switches for backup relays, and nothing happened.

  Almost nothing.

  Jim hit the emergency battery work lights. They flickered and went out.

  “What the hell?” asked Jack.

  He looked out the window.

  Something large and bright moved across a nearby reservoir and toward the changing station.

  “Holy Mother of Christ!” he said.

  Jim and Jack went outside.

  The large bright thing moved along the lines toward the station. The power cables bulged toward the bottom of the thing, whipping up and down, making the stanchions sway. The station and the reservoir were bathed in a blue glow as the thing went over. Then it took off quickly toward Manhattan, down the straining lines, leaving them in complete darkness.

  Jim and Jack went back into the plant and ate their lunches.

  Not even the phone worked anymore.

  It was really black by the time Sparks got his gear set up. Everybody in the crowd was talking about the darkness of the city and the sky. You could see stars all over the place, everywhere you looked.

  There was very little noise from the city around the loading area.

  Somebody had a radio on. There were a few Jersey and Pennsy stations on. One of them went off while they listened.

  In the darkness, Sparks worked by the lights of his old truck. What he had in front of him resembled something from an alchemy or magnetism treatise written early in the eighteenth century. Twenty or so car batteries were hooked up in series with jumper cables. He’d tied those in with amps, mikes, transformers, a light board, and lights on the dock area.

  “Stand clear!” he yelled. He bent down with the last set of cables and stuck an alligator clamp on a battery post.

  There was a screeching blue jag of light and a frying noise. The lights flickered and came on, and the amps whined louder and louder.

  The crowd, numbering around five hundred, gave out with prolonged huzzahs and applause.

  “Test test test,” said Lucius. Everybody held their hands over their ears.

  “Turn that fucker down,” said Vinnie. Sparks did. Then he waved to the crowd, got into his old truck, turned the lights off, and drove into the night.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Purple Monsters …,” said Lucius, to wild applause, and Vinnie leaned into the mike, “and the Hellbenders,” more applause, then back to Lucius, “would like to welcome you to the first annual piss-off—I mean, sing-off—between our own Bobby and the Bombers,” cheers, “and the challengers,” said Vinnie, “the Kool-Tones!” More applause.

  “They’ll do two sets, folks,” said Lucius, “taking turns. And at the end, the unlucky group, gauged by your lack of applause, will win a prize!”

  The crowd went wild.

  The lights dimmed out. “And now,” came Vinnie’s voice from the still blackness of the loading dock, “for your listening pleasure, Bobby and the Bombers!”

  “Yayyyyyyyyyy!”

  The lights, virtually the only lights in the city except for those that were being run by emergency generators, came up, and there they were.

  Imagine frosted, polished elegance being thrust on the unwilling shoulders of a sixteen-year-old.

  They had on blue jackets, matching pants, ruffled shirts, black ties, cufflinks, tie tacks, shoes like obsidian mortar trowels. They were all black boys, and from the first note, you knew they were born to sing:

  “Bah bah,” sang Letus the bassman, “doo-doo duh-du doo-ahh, duh-doo-dee-doot,” sang the two tenors, Lennie and Conk, and then Bobby and Fred began trading verses of the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” while the tenors wailed and Letus carried the whole with his bass.

  Then the lights went down and came up again as Lucius said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Kool-Tones!”

  It was magic of a grubby kind.

  The Kool-Tones shuffled on, arms pumping in best Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers fashion, and they ran in place as the hand-clapping got louder and louder, and they leaned into the mikes.

  They were dressed in waiters’ red-cloth jackets the Hellbenders had stolen from a laundry service for them that morning. They wore narrow black ties, except Leroy, who had on a big, thick, red bow tie he’d copped from his sister’s boyfriend.

  Then Cornelius leaned over his mike and: “Doook doook doook doookov” and Ray and Zoot joined with “dook dook dook dookov,” into Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl,” with Leroy smiling and doing all of Chandler’s hand moves. Slim chugged away the “iiiiiiiiyiyiyiyiiiii’s” in the background in runs that made the crowd’s blood run cold, and the lights went down. Then the Bombers were back, and in contrast to the uptempo ending of “The Duke of Earl” they started with a sweet tenor a cappella line and then: “woo-radad-da-dat, woo-radad-da-dat,” of Shep and the Limelites’ “Daddy’s Home.”

  The Kool-Tones jumped back into the light. This time Cornelius started off with “Bom-a-pa-bomp, bomp-pa-pa-bomp, dang-a-dang-dang, ding-a-dong-ding.” and into the Marcels’ “Blue Moon,” not just a hit but a mere monster back in 1961. And they ran through the song, Slim taking the lead, and the crowd began to yell like mad halfway through. And Leroy—smiling, singing, rocking back and forth, doing James Brown tantrum-steps in front of the mike—knew, could feel, that they had them; that no matter what, they were going to win. And he ended with his whining part and Cornelius went “Bomp-ba-ba-bomp-ba-bom,” and paused and then, deeper, “booo mooo.”

  The lights came up and Bobby and the Bombers hit the stage. At first Leroy, sweating, didn’t realize what they were doing, because the Bombers, for the first few seconds, made this churning rinky-tink sound with the high voices. The bass, Letus, did this grindy sound with his throat. Then the Bombers did the only thing that could save them, a white boy’s song, Bobby launching into Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” with both feet hitting the stage at once. Leroy thought he could taste that urine already.

  The other Kool-Tones were transfixed by what was about to happen.

  “They can’t do that, man,” said Leroy.

  “They’re gonna cop out.”

  “That’s impossible. Nobody can do it.”

  But when the Bombers got to the break, this guy Fred stepped out to the mike and went: “Eee-de-ee-dee-eedle-eee-eee, eee-deee-eedle-deeee, eedle-dee-eedle-dee-dee-dee, eewheetle-eedle-dee-deedle-dee-eeeeee,” in a splitting falsetto, half mechanical, half Martian cattle call—the organ break of “Runaway,” done with the human voice.

  The crowd was on its feet screaming, and the rest of the song was lost in stamping and cheers. When the Kool-Tones jumped out for the last song of the first set, there were some boos and yells for the Bombers to come back, but then Zoot started talking about his girl putting him down because he couldn’t shake ‘em down, but how now he was back, to let her know.… They all jumped in the air and came down on the first line of “Do You Love Me?” by the Contours, and they gained some of the crowd back. But they finished a little wimpy, and then the lights went down and an absolutely black night descended. The stars were shining over New York City for the first time since World War II, and Vinnie said, “Ten minutes, folks!” and guys went over to piss against the walls or add to the consolation-prize bottles.

  It was like halftime in the locker room with the score Green Bay 146, You 0.

  “A cheap trick,” said Zoot. “We don’t do shit like that.”

  Leroy sighed. “We’re gon
na have to,” he said. He drank from a Coke bottle one of the Purple Monsters had given him. “We’re gonna have to do something.”

  “We’re gonna have to drink pee-pee, and then Vinnie’s gonna denut us, is what’s gonna happen.”

  “No, he’s not,” said Cornelius.

  “Oh, yeah?” asked Zoot. “Then what’s that in the bottle in the clubhouse?”

  “Pig’s balls,” said Cornelius. “They got ‘em from a slaughterhouse.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know,” said Cornelius, tiredly. “Now let’s just get this over with so we can go vomit all night.”

  “I don’t want to hear any talk like that,” said Leroy. “We’re gonna go through with this and give it our best, just like we planned, and if that ain’t good enough, well, it just ain’t good enough.”

  “No matter what we do, it just ain’t good enough.”

  “Come on, Ray, man”

  “I’ll do my best, but my heart ain’t in it.”

  They lay against the loading dock. They heard laughter from the place where Bobby and the Bombers rested.

  “Shit, it’s dark!” said Slim.

  “It ain’t just us, just the city,” said Zoot. “It’s the whole goddamn U.S.”

  “It’s just the whole East Coast,” said Ray. “I heard on the radio. Part of Canada, too.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Hey, Leroy,” said Cornelius. “Maybe it’s those Martians you’re always talking about.”

  Leroy felt a chill up his spine.

  “Nah,” said Slim. “It was that guy Sparks. He shorted out the whole East Coast up that pole there.”

  “Do you really believe that?” asked Zoot.

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

  “I believe,” said Lucius, coming out of nowhere with an evil grin on his face, “that it’s show time.”

  They came to the stage running, and the lights came up, and Cornelius leaned on his voice and: “Rabbalabbalabba ging gong, rabbalabbalabba ging gong,” and the others went “wooooooooooo” in the Edsels’ “Rama Lama Ding Dong.” They finished and the Bombers jumped into the lights and went into: “Domm dom domm dom doobedoo dom domm dom dobedoobeedomm, wahwahwahwahhh,” of the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me.”

  The Kool-Tones came back with: “Ahhhhhhhhaahhwoooowoooo, ow-ow-ow-owhwoo,” of “Since I Don’t Have You,” by the Skyliners, with Slim singing in a clear, straight voice, better than he had ever sung that song before, and everybody else joined in, Leroy’s voice fading into Slim’s for the falsetto weeeeooooow’s so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

  Then Bobby and the Bombers were back, with Bobby telling you the first two lines and: “Detooodwop, detooodwop, detooodwop,” of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” calm, cool, collected, assured of victory, still running on the impetus of their first set’s showstopper.

  Then the Kool-Tones came back and Cornelius rared back and asked: “Ahwunno wunno hooo? Be-do-be hoooo?” Pause.

  They slammed down into “Book of Love,” by the Monotones, but even Cornelius was flagging, sweating now in the cool air, his lungs were husks. He saw one of the Bombers nod to another, smugly, and that made him mad. He came down on the last verse like there was no one else on the stage with him, and his bass roared so loud it seemed there wasn’t a single person in the dark United States who didn’t wonder who wrote that book.

  And they were off, and Bobby and the Bombers were on now, and a low hum began to fill the air. Somebody checked the amp; it was okay. So the Bombers jumped into the air, and when they came down they were into the Cleftones’ “Heart and Soul,” and they sang that song, and while they were singing, the background humming got louder and louder.

  Leroy leaned to the other Kool-Tones and whispered something. They shook their heads. He pointed to the Hellbenders and the Purple Monsters all around them. He asked a question they didn’t want to hear. They nodded grudging approval, and then they were on again, for the last time.

  “Dep dooomop dooomop doomop, doo ooo, ooowah oowah oooway ooowah,” sang Leroy, and they all asked “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” Leroy sang like he was Frankie Lymon—not just some kid from the projects who wanted to be him—and the Kool-Tones were the Teenagers, and they began to pull and heave that song like it was a dead whale. And soon they had it in the water, and then it was swimming a little, then it was moving, and then the sonofabitch started spouting water, and that was the place where Leroy went into the falsetto “wyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” and in-stead of chopping it where it should have been, he kept on. The Kool-Tones went ooom wahooomwah softly behind him, and still he held that note, and the crowd began to applaud, and they began to yell, and Leroy held it longer, and they started stamping and screaming, and he held it until he knew he was going to cough up both his lungs, and he held it after that, and the Kool-Tones were coming up to meet him, and Leroy gave a tantrum-step, and his eyes were bugging, and he felt his lungs tear out by the roots and come unglued, and he held the last syllable, and the crowd wet itself and—

  The lights went out and the amp went dead. Part of the crowd had a subliminal glimpse of something large, blue, and cool looming over the freight yard, bathing the top of the building in a soft glow.

  In the dead air the voices of the Kool-Tones dropped in pitch as if they were pulled upward at a thousand miles an hour, and then they rose in pitch as if they had somehow come back at that same thousand miles an hour.

  The blue thing was a looming blur and then was gone.

  The lights came back on. The Kool-Tones stood there blinking: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot. The space in front of the center mike was empty.

  The crowd had an orgasm.

  The Bombers were being violently ill over next to the building.

  “God, that was greatl” said Vinnie. “Just great!”

  All four of the Kool-Tones were shaking their heads.

  They should be tired, but this looked worse than that, thought Vinnie. They should be ecstatic. They looked like they didn’t know they had won.

  “Where’s Leroy?” asked Cornelius.

  “How the hell should I know?” Vinnie said, sounding annoyed.

  “I remember him smiling, like,” said Zoot.

  “And the blue thing. What about it?”

  “What blue thing?” asked Lucius.

  “I dunno. Something was blue.”

  “All I saw was the lights go off and that kid ran away,” said Lucius.

  “Which way?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly see him, but he must have run some way. Don’t know how he got by us. Probably thought you were going to lose and took it on the lam. I don’t see how you’d worry when you can make your voices do that stuff.”

  “Up,” said Zoot, suddenly.

  “What?”

  “We went up, and we came down. Leroy didn’t come down with us.”

  “Of course not. He was still holding the same note. I thought the little twerp’s balls were gonna fly out his mouth.”

  “No. We …” Slim moved his hands up, around, gave up. “I don’t know what happened, do you?”

  Ray, Zoot, and Cornelius all looked like they had thirty-two-lane bowling alleys inside their heads and all the pin machines were down.

  “Aw, shit,” said Vinnie. “You won. Go get some sleep. You guys were really bitchin’.”

  The Kool-Tones stood there uncertainly for a minute.

  “He was, like, smiling, you know?” said Zoot.

  “He was always smiling,” said Vinnie. “Crazy little kid.”

  The Kool-Tones left.

  The sky overhead was black and spattered with stars. It looked to Vinnie as if it were deep and wide enough to hold anything. He shuddered.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Somebody bring me a beer!”

  He caught himself humming. One of the Hellbenders brought him a beer.

  Dinner in Audoghast


  * * *

  BRUCE STERLING

  One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to enter SF in the past few decades, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the ’80s, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future, with novels such as the complex and Stapel-donian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth), as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary “Cyberpunk” movement in science fiction, and also as one of the best new hard-science writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, the novels The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Distraction, and Zeitgeist, a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, an omnibus collection (it contains the novel Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus, and the landmark collections Crystal Express, Globalhead, and A Good Old-fashioned Future. His most recent books include a nonfiction study of the future, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, and a new novel, The Zenith Angle. His story “Bicycle Repairman” earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1997 for his story “Taklamakan.” His stories have appeared in our First through Eighth, Eleventh, Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Twentieth annual collections. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

  Sterling was just another of a jostling pack of new writers when he published this story back in 1985, as yet only recognized by a very few of the cognoscenti as a writer to watch … and in the years that followed, we have watched him become one of the most significant talents of his generation. Here, in a story which sounds a cautionary note for our own smug belief in the immortality of our own society, he reminds us that while prophets may indeed be without honor in their own countries, they remain, after all, prophets.…