The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Miss Selassie, how much is she?”

  “One hundred khans an hour.”

  “Oh, dear. And how much for an electronic room?”

  Professor Yang rightly believed that all the appliances known to modern science would be needed if he was to spend his expensive hour doing anything more than enjoying Miss Selassie’s company.

  “Fifty khans an hour. However,” said the box seductively, “for such a man as yourself, Honored Professor, the house gladly makes a special price: Miss Selassie and an electronic room for an hour for the sum total of—”

  A brief pause, during which Yang felt himself growing anxious.

  “One hundred and thirty-five khans, a ten-percent reduction.”

  “Agreed,” breathed Yang, giving himself no time to think. There was a brief flutter in the box as his bank checked his voice-print and transferred another K135 from his already deflated account to one of the bulging accounts of Radiant Love House.

  “You should’ve asked for twenty percent off,” said a voice, making Yang jump. A long, stringy, bony man holding a kif pipe rose from the other side of the double divan and stretched and yawned.

  “I hope you haven’t been eavesdropping,” snapped Yang.

  “No more than I had to,” said Stef in a bored voice. “I’ve made my selection, but the selectee is popular and she’s busy. I’m just telling you, if you’ve got the balls to bargain you can get them down twenty percent, sometimes more if it’s a slow night. The ten percent reduction they offer you is just merchandizing.”

  Resentment at the stranger’s intrusion struggled with economic interest in Professor Yang’s breast. The latter won.

  “Really?” he said.

  “Sure. I do it all the time. You could’ve gotten the whole works for one-twenty.”

  “Indeed. And the electronic room—is it really worth it?”

  “It is if you have to have it.”

  Yang was just beginning to get angry when the door opened and a very tall naked woman entered. Her hair was in a thousand white braids and her eyes were oval rubies. The aureoles of her taut, almost conical breasts were much the same color as her eyes. A faint scent of faux ambergris wafted into the waiting room and mingled with the fumes of kif. Yang sat hypnotized.

  “You the customer?” she asked Stef with some interest.

  “No, I’m waiting for Dzhun. This guy’s your customer.”

  “Figures,” she sighed, and taking Professor Yang’s thin and trembling hand in her own, the White Tiger led him away.

  A few minutes later the box made two announcements: Dzhun was ready, and Stef was to wipe his cock and get to Yama’s office soonest. Stef promptly did what he almost never did—lost it completely.

  “FUCK THE FUCKING UNIVERSE!” he roared in English. The divan weighed a hundred kilos but he tossed it end over end. At the crash the door flew open and a guard entered, pulling an impact pistol half as long as her arm. Stef calmed down instantly.

  “Ya bi sori. My deepest and humblest apologies,” he said, clapping his hands together and bowing. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  Stef had seen a number of bodies killed by impact weapons. A body shot usually left very little except the head, arms and legs, plus assorted fragments.

  “Straighten out the goddamn sofa,” said the guard, watching him narrowly. She was Mongol and looked tough. Stef did as he was told.

  “Incidentally,” he said as he was leaving, “I’ll need a raincheck on Dzhun. I already paid my khans.”

  “Talk to the front desk,” growled the guard.

  Outside, Stef took a deep breath and ordered a hovercab. He felt that he now had a personal score to settle with the svini who had not only stolen a wormholer but forestalled his session with Dzhun. Since the svini were the only reason he currently had money enough to buy her time, that was unreasonable. But Stef wanted to be unreasonable. That was how he felt.

  “So the theft was an inside job,” he muttered, trying without success to get comfortable in one of Yama’s black chairs.

  “Yes. A trusted scientist turns out to belong to a terrorist group that calls itself Crux. He’s been checked a hundred times. Living quietly, no extra money, no nothing. During lie-detection tests, brain chemicals always indicated he was telling the truth. Trouble was, the wrong questions got asked. Are you loyal? To what? He answers yes, meaning loyal to humanity as he understands it. Are you a member of any subversive group? Subversive in what sense? To the existing order, or to humanity? He gets by with a false answer again.”

  “What exactly do these Crux fuckers believe in?”

  “Life. The absolute value of human life. The wormholer opens the way to reverse the worst calamity in human history, the Time of Troubles. Trillions of lives are hanging on the issue—not only the lives that were lost in the famines and plagues and wars but all their descendants to the tenth generation.”

  Stef growled, scratched himself, longing for kif, for Dzhun. “Bunch of fucking idealists.”

  “Exactly. People with a vision, willing to destroy the real world for the sake of an idea. We’ve gotta kill them all.”

  Yama jumped up—a springy man, muscular, bandy-legged. He was fifty and nearing middle age, but a lifetime of the martial arts enabled him to bounce around like a ball of elastoplast.

  “Kill them!” he roared, chopping at the air.

  Watching him tired Stef.

  “And this was what you called me back for?”

  “No. Or not only.” Yama fell back into the desk chair. “The group that has this grand vision is, of course, organized in cells that have to be cracked one by one. But the guy who talked in the White Chamber knew one name outside his cell, the name of a woman, an offworlder. She’s called Dyeva. She’s one of the founders of the movement, and she was supposed to contact him.”

  Stef sighed. “Anything from IC on her?”

  “No,” admitted Yama. “No report yet from Infocenter.”

  “Call me when one comes in,” said Stef, rising. “I’m extremely grateful for the way you took me away from my pleasures to give me information that, as yet, has no practical significance. Please don’t do it again.”

  Yama saw him to the door, nodding to the Darksider who approached smelling like the shit of lions, owls and cormorants mixed together. Stef pinched his nostrils and spoke like a duck.

  “I love coming to your office, Yama. The place has a certain air about it.”

  Half an hour later, Stef was again sprawled in the middling expensive parlor at Radiant Love House, waiting. Another customer had taken Dzhun while he was away. Stef spent the time smoking kif and thinking about shooting Dyeva, whoever she was, with an impact pistol.

  “Phut,” he said, imitating the uninspiring sound of the weapon. He made his long hands into a ball and drew them rapidly apart, imitating the explosion inside the target. Stef had studied wound ballistics and he knew that impact ammo vaporized in the body and formed a rapidly expanding sphere of superheated gas and destructive particles. Dyeva v’átomi sa dizolva, he thought. The svin flies apart, turns to molecules, atoms, protons and quarks.

  “How happy I am,” murmured the box, “to inform you, Sir, that the person of your choice is ready to receive you.”

  Instantly Stef was up and moving, his bloody thoughts forgotten. At heart he was a lover, not a killer.

  In the blue peace of the electronic room, Professor Yang lay huddled under a sheet of faux silk.

  Beside him, her hand still languidly resting on a gadget called an erector-injector, lay a statue of living ivory. At least he now knew the White Tiger’s given name. Even if it was only a prost’s working name, a nom d’amour, for Yang it was what the old French phrase meant—a name of love.

  “Selina,” he murmured, and she turned her head and smiled at him.

  “I’m afraid your time is up,” she whispered. “But perhaps you’ll come again, my dear. You were special.”

  “Selina,” he said again. Around him mo
nitors winked and a low electromagnetic hum soothed with a white sound. Yang was all too conscious of the birth of a new obsession, one even less affordable than four wives and natural sugar.

  “I must see you again,” he said.

  Detecting the urgent note in his voice, Selina smiled. Ah, that enigmatic whore’s smile! thought Yang with pain in his heart. What did it mean? Pleasure in you, pleasure in your money, no pleasure at all but mere professionalism? Who could tell?

  Wasn’t this how he had happened to marry the most obnoxious of his four wives?

  Dyeva sat quietly in the front room of a small but elegant suburban villa.

  The windows were open and the morning sun entered through a gentle screen of glossy leaves thrown out by a lemon tree. The room held all the necessities of rustic living, bare beams across the ceiling, lounges covered with faux linen, a glass table bearing apples and oranges and kuvisu fruit, and a mashina half the length of the wall to entertain the owner, a Professor of Rhetoric whose hobby was playing at revolution.

  Relaxing on the lounges were the other members of the cell: two students and a dark and tensely attractive woman of middle age who bore a painted mark on her forehead. The students were still talking about Professor Yang’s lecture of last evening, tailor-made as it seemed for the members of Crux.

  “Lord Buddha, but he makes you see it,” said the boy, fingering a string of beads restlessly. He was an Old Believer. Dyeva had noticed years ago that such people were represented in Crux far beyond their numbers in the general population.

  The girl was lovely: bronzed, yellow-haired, sloe-eyed, the perfect Eurasian. She called herself Dián and spoke in a throaty whisper that someone had told her was mysterious.

  “Actually, he’s a horrible old man. But it’s as Kuli says, he has the gift of making the past live.”

  “We expect to do more along that line,” said the owner of the villa in a deep, resonant voice, and the two young people laughed happily. All three of them loved the taste of conspiracy; the older man, whose codename was Zet, earnestly hoped to seduce Dián. Supposedly nobody in the group knew anybody else’s real name. They had a vast and fundamentally childish panoply of measures to preserve secrecy—passwords, hand signals, ways of passing information in complicated and difficult ways. Because cyberspace was a favorite hunting ground for the supermashini of the Security Forces, they avoided electronic contact whenever possible. Instead, they had oaths, secret meetings, symbols. Their key symbol was the looped cross of ancient Egypt, the crux ansata—the sign of life.

  Kuli wore a crux on a cord around his neck; at meetings he took it out for all to see. The girl, Dyeva noted with amazement, had the symbol tattooed on the palm of one slender hand. Why didn’t the senior members of the cell force her to have it removed?

  People had often told Dyeva that she had icewater in her veins. That wasn’t true: her emotions were intense, only deeply buried. Right now anger and alarm were stirring deep beneath her masklike face. Did her life, to say nothing of the lives of trillions of human beings, depend on these amateurs, children?

  The dark woman, who called herself Lata, brushed a hand across her brow and said, “The essential thing is to speed our visitor safely on her way. And I must tell all of you something I learned last night. The theft of the wormholer has been discovered and there have been arrests.”

  “Arrests?” demanded Dián, in a scandalized tone. “Of someone I know?”

  She seemed to think that the polizi had no right to arrest members of a secret organization merely because it was bent on annihilating the existing world.

  “No,” sighed Lata. “Fortunately for you. That beast Kathmann and the polizi drugged and tortured both the guards and the people who were responsible for technical maintenance of the wormholer. Thus they learned that one of the scientists had been involved in the theft. Thank God, the device had already been turned over to another cell, and the poor man who talked didn’t know their names or where it is at present.”

  The two young people seemed paralyzed. Zet was turning his head from side to side, looking at the furniture, the fresh fruit. Dyeva had no trouble reading his mind: the glupetz had suddenly realized that he could lose all this by playing at conspiracy. Some day, she thought, if he thinks about it long enough, he will realize that he may lose much more.

  “I will go with you,” said Dyeva, rising and pointing at Lata, apparently the only one of the gathering with any sense. “You will conduct me. I must not stay here longer and endanger these heroes of humanity.”

  Zet looked relieved at the news she’d soon be gone; Kuli and Dián were still absorbing the news of the arrests. He was stunned, she indignant.

  “Oh, but the people who were tortured—they’re martyrs!” she exclaimed suddenly and burst into tears.

  “Yes,” said Dyeva, “and by this time they are also corpses. Death is the reward the technicians of the Chamber hold out to their victims. I will be packed and gone in five minutes if you will lead me,” she said to Lata.

  “Of course,” said the dark woman, and Dyeva hastened to the room where she had slept to gather her kit.

  Later, in Lata’s hovercar, Dyeva asked her how she had come to join the movement.

  “I despise this world,” Lata said quietly. “It’s a gutter of injustice and pain. Nothing will be lost if this world suddenly vanishes at the word of Lord Krishna. Of course, if we manage to undo the Troubles, success will cost us our own lives. That is the splendor of Crux. If our movement did not demand the ultimate sacrifice I would not have joined it.”

  Another Old Believer, though Dyeva, only this time of the Hindu type. And I was brought up a Christ-worshipper, and the boy Kuli is a Buddhist. Are we all remnants and leftovers of a dead world? Is that why we wish to restore it?

  “What are you thinking?” asked Lata.

  “Wondering why the movement contains so many Old Believers.”

  “Oh, I think I know. It’s because we want to undo the death of our faiths. So many people simply stopped believing after the Troubles. They said to themselves, There is no God. Or, if there is and he allows this to happen, I do not care about him.”

  Dyeva glanced at her curiously. They were entering the air-space above Ulanor and Lata paid frowning attention to the traffic until a beam picked up her car’s black box. For an instant Dyeva had a powerful urge to continue this conversation, to talk about things that had real meaning. Then she remembered that the less Lata knew about her, and she about Lata, the better for both of them.

  “We all come to it for different reasons,” she said guardedly, and silence followed. The little car revolved above the Worldcity, bearing two women who hoped to change it into a phantasm that never had existed at all.

  Stef and Dzhun were having breakfast in a teashop deep in the Clouds and Rain District. Half the customers seemed to recognize Dzhun, and she waved and blew kisses to them. She had scrubbed off her white working makeup and with it had gone her nighttime pretense of lotus delicacy and passivity. She looked and was a tough young woman to whom life had not been kind.

  “Wild turnover last night,” she said to a red-haired eunuch who had stopped by the table to shriek and fondle her. “I did ten guys.”

  “Oh my dear,” said the sisi, “I do ten on my way to work.”

  “Seems you’ve got some catching up to do,” Stef told Dzhun when the sisi had moved on.

  “Oh, he’s such a bragger. And old, too. When I’m his age I’ll have my own house and instead of bragging about doing ten guys I’ll be doing one—the one I choose.”

  “And that one will be me.”

  “Only if you get rich,” said Dzhun candidly, buttering a bun. “I’m tired of being a robotchi, a working stiff. I’ve got a senator on the string now, Stef, did I tell you? Soon you won’t be able to afford me at all.”

  She dimpled as she always did when saying unpalatable things.

  “Is that why I’m buying you breakfast?”

  “Oh Stef, I’m j
ust needling you. I love my poor friends, too. Look, why don’t you take me to Lake Bai for a week or two? Get a cabin. I won’t demand a villa. Not yet.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m on a big case right now. One that might even save your life.”

  Dzhun stopped eating and stared at him. “You’re telling the truth?”

  “Believe it. When the payoff comes, it’ll be as big as the case. Then we’ll go to Bai. Get a villa, not a cabin.”

  Stef spoke with the calm assurance he employed when he was in a state of total uncertainty. The investigation was dead in the water. The arrests had not led to the wormholer. IC still hadn’t come up with a make on Dyeva. Mashini were combing passenger lists of recent arrivals from the offworlds—voiceprints, retinographs, DNA samples—turning up nobody with a record, nobody who fit the profiles. Stef’s local contacts had nothing to offer.

  “What’s it all about, Stef?” asked Dzhun.

  “Never mind. The case is a beheader. It’s nothing you want to know about, so don’t ask. It’s a security matter and it’d be a hell of a shame if the Darksiders came and carted off a butt like yours to the White Chamber.”

  Their voices had fallen to whispers. Dzhun’s face was so close that Stef’s breath moved her long eyelashes. A delicate scent clung to her kimono, some nameless offworld flower, and the drooping faux silk disclosed the roundness of her little breasts like pomegranates. Stef could have eaten her with a spoon.

  “I won’t say anything,” she promised. “If anybody asks what you’re doing, I’ll say that you never tell me anything.”

  Stef leaned back and sipped the bitter green tea he used to clear his head in the morning. Effortlessly, Dzhun put her whore’s persona on again, screaming and waving at a friend who had just entered the teashop. Towering over the crowd, the White Tiger of the Nile headed for their table.