The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  “What?”

  “The rescue. You never called to tell Surveillance you didn’t need help.”

  Etan swallowed. “Yes. I did.”

  “Liar.”

  All right, Etan thought. Enough was too much. “I don’t know what transport services you work for, but I’ll find out. They ought to know about you.”

  “Yeah? What should they know—that I make free repairs at the bidding of an alien hairball?” The navigator grinned bitterly.

  “No.” Etan’s voice was quiet. “They should know that maybe you’ve been working too long and too hard for aliens.” His eyes swiveled apologetically to the creature. “Not that I mean to offend—”

  “Forget it. It doesn’t understand a goddam word.”

  “Then why did you want me to talk to it?”

  “Because I understand. We’re attuned. On several frequencies, mind you, one for every glorious mood it might have. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Etan shook his head. “You need help.”

  “Fuck if I do. Now finish your thanks and start thinking up some more things to say.”

  The bread-and-flowers aroma intensified until Etan’s nerves were standing on end. His heart pounded ferociously, and he wondered if a smell could induce cardiac arrest.

  “I think I’ve finished thanking your employer.” He looked directly at the creature. “And that’s all I have to say. Under more pleasant circumstances, I might have talked my head off. Sorry.” He started to get up.

  The navigator moved quickly for someone who was supposed to be drunk. Etan found himself pinned against the back of the seat before he realized that the man wasn’t jumping up to open the door. For a moment, he stared into the navigator’s flushed face, not quite believing.

  “Talk,” the navigator said softly, almost gently. “Just talk. That’s all you’ve got to do.”

  Etan tried heaving himself upward to throw them both off the seat and onto the floor, but the navigator had him too securely. “Help!” he bellowed. “Somebody help me!”

  “Okay, yell for help. That’s good, too,” said the navigator, smiling. They began to slide down on the seat together with Etan on the bottom. “Go ahead. Yell all you want.”

  “Let me up and I won’t report you.”

  “I’m sure I can believe that.” The navigator laughed. “Tell us a whole fairy story now.”

  “Let me go or I swear to Christ I’ll kill you and that furry shit you work for.”

  “What?” the navigator asked, leaning on him a little harder. “What was that, sir?”

  “Let me go or I’ll fucking kill youl”

  Something in the air seemed to break, as though a circuit had been completed or some sort of energy discharged. Etan sniffed. The bread-and-flowers aroma had changed, more flowers, less bread, and much weaker, dissipating in the ventilation before he could get more than a whiff.

  The navigator pushed himself off Etan and plumped down heavily on the seat across from him again. Etan held still, looking first at the man rubbing his face with both hands and then turning his head so he could see the creature sliding down behind the cushion. We scared it, he thought, horrified. Bad enough to make it hide under the seat.

  “Sir.”

  Etan jumped. The navigator was holding a fistful of currency out to him. The denominations made him blink.

  “It’s yours, sir. Take it. You can go now.”

  Etan pulled himself up. “What the hell do you mean, it’s mine?”

  “Please, sir.” The navigator pressed one hand over his left eye. “If you’re going to talk anymore, please step outside.”

  “Step outs—” Etan slapped the man’s hand away and lunged for the door.

  “Wait!” called the navigator, and in spite of everything, Etan obeyed. The navigator climbed out of the transport clumsily, still covering his eye, the other hand offering the currency. “Please, sir. You haven’t been hurt. You have a repaired vehicle, more than a little pocket money here—you’ve come out ahead if you think about it.”

  Etan laughed weakly. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Just take the money, sir. My employer wants you to have it.” The navigator winced and massaged his eye some more. “Purely psychosomatic,” he said, as though Etan had asked. “The implant is painless and causes no damage, no matter how intense the exchange between species. But please lower your voice, sir. My employer can still feel your sound, and he’s quite done with you.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “The money is yours from my employer,” the navigator said patiently. “My employer loves people. We discussed that earlier. Loves them. Especially their voices.”

  “So?” Etan crossed his arms. The navigator leaned over and stuffed the money between Etan’s forearms.

  “Perhaps you remember what else we were discussing. I really have no wish to remind you, sir.”

  “So? What’s all that stuff about gender—what’s that got to do with …” Etan’s voice died away.

  “Human voices,” the navigator said. “No speech where they come from. And we’re so new and different to them. This one’s been here only a few weeks. Its preference happens to be that of a man speaking from fear and anger, something you can’t fake.”

  Etan took a step back from the man, unfolding his arms and letting the money fall to the ground, thinking of the implant, the man feeling whatever the creature felt.

  “I don’t know if you could call it perversion or not,” said the navigator. “Maybe there’s no such thing.” He looked down at the bills. “Might as well keep it. You earned it. You even did well.” He pulled himself erect and made a small, formal bow. “Good day, sir,” he said, with no mockery at all and climbed into the transport’s front seat. Etan watched the limo roll out of the breakdown lane and lumber away from him.

  After a while he looked down. The money was still there at his feet, so he picked it up.

  Just as he was getting back into his own vehicle, the console phone chimed. “We’ve got an early opening in our patrol pattern,” Surveillance told him. “So we can swing by and get you in ten minutes.”

  “Don’t bother,” Etan said.

  “Repeat?”

  “I said, you’re too late.”

  “Repeat again, please.”

  Etan sighed. “There isn’t anything to rescue me from anymore.”

  There was a brief silence on the other end. “Did you get your vehicle over-hauled?”

  “Yeah,” Etan said. “That, too.”

  Snow

  * * *

  JOHN CROWLEY

  One of the most respected authors of our day, John Crowley is perhaps best known for his fat and fanciful novel Little, Big, which won the prestigious World Fantasy Award. His other novels include Beasts, The Deep, Engine Summer, AEgypt, Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania. His short fiction has been gathered in two collections, Novelty and Antiquities. His most recent books are a novel, The Translator, and a new collection, Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in our Third and Seventh annual collections. He lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts.

  Throughout the centuries, people have spent a great deal of money on the quest for forgetfulness. But, as the bittersweet story that follows suggests, someday it might prove even more expensive to remember.…

  I don’t think Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death. No, it was her first husband—an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy guy—who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died him-self shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it, it was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.

  In fact the thing really was about the size of a w
asp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless flight. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. And so its name fit all around: one of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. O Death, where is thy sting?

  Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid; you had to be a little careful around it; it followed Georgie at a variable distance, depending on her motions and the number of other people around her, the level of light, and the tone of her voice. And there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with a tennis racket. It cost a fortune (if you count the access and the perpetual-care contract, all prepaid), and though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous.

  It wasn’t recording all the time. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. Darkness shut it off. And then sometimes it would get lost. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened a closet door, and it flew out, unchanged. It went off looking for her, humming softly. It must have been shut in there for days.

  Eventually it ran out, or down. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that many functions. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and over, like a winter fly. Then one day the maid swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. By that time it had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self—all on file, taking up next to no room, at The Park. And then, when the time came, you could go there, to The Park, say on a Sunday afternoon; and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find her personal resting chamber; and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her: her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older, fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory ever green.

  I married Georgie for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s contract for her. She married me, I think, for my looks; she always had a taste for looks in men. I wanted to write. I made a calculation that more women than men make, and decided that to be supported and paid for by a rich wife would give me freedom to do so, to “develop.” The calculation worked out no better for me than it does for most women who make it. I carried a typewriter and a case of miscellaneous paper from Ibiza to Gstaad to Bali to London, and typed on beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie liked me in ski clothes.

  Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk and see that I was in a way a rarity, a type that you also run into often among women and less among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty, aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a strong, square, tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I figured out why I had for so long been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t as interesting as I had been. At about the same time I realized I wasn’t a writer at all. Georgie’s investment stopped looking as good to her, and my calculation had ceased to add up; only by that time I had come, pretty unexpectedly, to love Georgie a lot, and she just as unexpectedly had come to love and need me too, as much as she needed any-body. We never really parted, even though when she died I hadn’t seen her for years. Phone calls, at dawn or four A.M. because she never, for all her travel, really grasped that the world turns and cocktail hour travels around with it.

  She was a crazy, wasteful, happy woman, without a trace of malice or permanence or ambition in her—easily pleased and easily bored and strangely serene despite the hectic pace she kept up. She cherished things and lost them and forgot them: things, days, people. She had fun, though, and I had fun with her; that was her talent and her destiny, not always an easy one. Once, hung over in a New York hotel, watching a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me, “Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.”

  And she did. Snow-foiling in Austria, she was among the first to get one of those snow leopards, silent beasts as fast as speedboats. Alfredo called me in California to tell me, but with the distance and his accent and his eagerness to tell me he wasn’t to blame, I never grasped the details. I was still her husband, her closest relative, heir to the little she still had, and beneficiary, too, of The Park’s access concept. Fortunately, The Park’s services included collecting her from the morgue in Gstaad and installing her in her chamber at The Park’s California unit. Beyond signing papers and taking delivery when Georgie arrived by freight airship at Van Nuys, there was nothing for me to do. The Park’s representative was solicitous and made sure I understood how to go about accessing Georgie, but I wasn’t listening. I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about death, the fact of it, the fate of the remains, and the situation of the living faced with it, seems grotesque to me, embarrassing, useless. And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless: Someone I loved is dead; let me therefore dress in clown’s clothes, talk backwards, and buy expensive machinery to make up for it. I went back to L.A.

  A year or more later, the contents of some safe-deposit boxes of Georgie’s arrived from the lawyer’s: some bonds and such stuff, and a small steel case, velvet lined, that contained a key, a key deeply notched on both sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car.

  Why did I go to The Park that first time? Mostly because I had forgotten about it: getting that key in the mail was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new but which after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious.

  I understood very well that The Park and its access concept were very probably only another cruel joke on the rich, preserving the illusion that they can buy what can’t be bought, like the cryonics fad of thirty years before. Once in Ibiza, Georgie and I met a German couple who also had a contract with The Park; their Wasp hovered over them like a Paraclete and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs. Did they, Georgie wondered, exclude the Wasp from their bedroom? Or did its presence there stir them to greater efforts, proofs of undying love and admirable vigor for the unborn to see?

  No, death wasn’t to be cheated that way, any more than by pyramids, by masses said in perpetuity. It wasn’t Georgie saved from death that I would find. But there were eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory; Georgie hadn’t excluded the Wasp from her bedroom, our bedroom, and she who had never performed for anybody could not have conceived of performing for it. And there would be me, too, undoubtedly, caught unintentionally by the Wasp’s attention: out of those thousands of hours there would be hundreds of myself, and myself had just then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.

  That summer, then, I borrowed a Highway Access Permit (the old HAPpy card of those days) from a county lawyer I knew and drove the coast highway up to where The Park was, at the end of a pretty beach road, all alone above the sea. It looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery, a low stucco wall topped with urns, amid cypresses, an arched gate in the center. A small brass plaque on the gate: PLEASE USE YOUR KEY. The gate opened, not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped corridor going down: The cemetery wall was an illusion, the works were underground. Silence, or nameless Muzak like silence; solitude—either the necessary technicians were discreetly hidden or none were needed. C
ertainly the access concept turned out to be simplicity itself, in operation anyway. Even I, who am an idiot about information technology, could tell that. The Wasp was genuine state-of-the-art stuff, but what we mourners got was as ordinary as home movies, as old letters tied up in ribbon.

  A display screen near the entrance told me down which corridor to find Georgie, and my key let me into a small screening room where there was a moderate-size TV monitor, two comfortable chairs, and dark walls of chocolate-brown carpeting. The sweet-sad Muzak. Georgie herself was evidently somewhere in the vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place. In the control panel before the TV were a keyhole for my key and two bars: ACCESS and RESET.

  I sat, feeling foolish and a little afraid, too, made more uncomfortable by being so deliberately soothed by neutral furnishings and sober tools. I imagined, around me, down other corridors, in other chambers, that others communed with their dead as I was about to do; that the dead were murmuring to them beneath the stream of Muzak; that they wept to see and hear, as I might. But I could hear nothing. I turned my key in its slot, and the screen lit up. The dim lights dimmed further, and the Muzak ceased. I pushed ACCESS, obviously the next step. No doubt all these procedures had been explained to me long ago at the dock when Georgie in her aluminum box was being off-loaded, and I hadn’t listened. And on the screen she turned to look at me—only not at me, though I started and drew breath—at the Wasp that watched her.

  She was in mid-sentence, mid-gesture. Where? When? Or put it on the same card with the others, she said, turning away. Someone said something, Georgie answered, and stood up, the Wasp panning and moving erratically with her, like an amateur with a home-video camera. A white room, sunlight, wicker. Ibiza. Georgie wore a cotton blouse, open; from a table she picked up lotion, poured some on her hand, and rubbed it across her freckled breastbone. The meaningless conversation about putting something on a card went on, ceased. I watched the room, wondering what year, what season I had stumbled into. Georgie pulled off her shirt—her small round breasts tipped with large, childlike nipples, child’s breasts she still had at forty, shook delicately. And she went out onto the balcony, the Wasp following, blinded by sun, adjusting. If you want to do it that way, someone said. The someone crossed the screen, a brown blur, naked. It was me. Georgie said: Oh, look, hummingbirds.