The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Fifty Shades of Grays

  STEVEN BARNES

  Hugo and Nebula nominee Steven Barnes has published over thirty novels, including the NAACP Image Award winning In the Night of the Heat, written with his wife, American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due, and the Emmy-winning “A Stitch in Time” episode of The Outer Limits. His newest novel is Twelve Days. He lives in Southern California, and maintains a Web site at www.stevenbarneslife.com.

  Here’s a sly story that demonstrates that the kind of alien invasion you see in the movies, with deathrays flashing down from the skies and buildings collapsing and whole cities being incinerated, might not be the most effective way to go at all.

  Terrorist.

  That’s what they call me, but I am something worse: both successful traitor and failed saboteur.

  I want to die, for all of this to be over.

  For my last request, I asked to have paper and pen to write my last will and testament. They won’t let me have it, forcing me to use the mindsynch. Damned Traveler tech. Maybe they’re scared I’ll ram the pen up my nose, scribble on my brain and cheat the hangman.

  We make do with what we have.

  I, Carver Kofax, being of sound mind and body, do leave all my worldly possessions to my wife, Rhonda. I owe her that. More than that. More than I, or anyone, can pay.

  It was all my fault, you know. Well … not all, but too damned much. No one else who was there from the beginning seems to have either the capacity or inclination to speak of it.

  This is the way the world ends … not with a whimper, but a bang.

  * * *

  It was the best day of my life, and the worst. And for the same reasons, when it comes right down to it.

  It was a Tuesday in May of 2025. I was seated in Century City’s Dai Shogun restaurant, one of L.A.’s best, chewing a hellishly good Hot Night roll. Dai Shogun’s tuna was spiced to perfection, the shrimp tempura seared crisp, the sashimi salad to die for, the karaoke tolerable.

  “What do you think this is all about?” Rhonda Washington was our agency’s brightest young artist. She was referring to our assignment, a carefully worded challenge to “make ugly sexy” without much more to go on. Bonuses had been offered in lieu of information.

  And the tastiest bonus was the chance to lure Stein and Baker’s dreadlocked princess down from her eighth-floor tower to work with mere mortals like me.

  “No business while I’m eating,” I said, squinting fiercely, until she laughed. “But ask me about ‘bridges’ later.”

  “I’ll do that.” A moment of quiet followed, during which she seemed to be sizing me up.

  “I didn’t know you liked sushi,” I said. Rhonda downed a thick luscious disk of Tekka Maki, nibbling at the seaweed wrap before biting. I’d lusted after her for fourteen months, but this was the first time we’d lunched together. Big accounts change lots of things. This one would change everything, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

  Her grin sparkled with mischief. “There are a lot of things about me you don’t know. Tekka Maki least among them.”

  “And most?”

  Odd how I’d never noticed that feral gleam in her eye. She fiddled with her bracelet, sterling silver with little links at her pulse point. I remember thinking that they looked a bit like police handcuffs. “That would be telling.”

  She smiled at me and popped the rest of the sushi roll between her lips.

  First time I’d ever envied a blob of fish and rice.

  “Tell me something about you I don’t know,” she said.

  I chuckled. “I have a sushi story.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well … before I came to work here, the partners took me to lunch. Sushi restaurant.”

  “This one?”

  “No … one of the ones with a floating boat cycling around, bringing plates of sushi to customers seated in an oval around the chef’s island. Anyway, I’m having a great time, and trying to impress them, and noticed a guy sitting a few seats away watching the chef make him a hand roll. Delicious-looking roll, with lots of sauces and chopped spices. I asked ‘what is that?’ and the guy said ‘it’s a fifteen-spice tuna roll.’

  “My mouth watered. I said ‘Make me one of those.’ The chef agreed, and they started up. I noticed after a few moments that the bar had gotten quiet. Everyone was looking at me. Giggling. Whispering. Laughing. Especially my future employers.

  “I started to have a very odd feeling. Even the guy making my food was grinning. ‘Excuse me,’ I finally said. ‘What exactly is a fifteen-spice tuna roll?’

  “He grinned like a shark. ‘One spice tuna roll … very hot tuna roll,’ he said. ‘Two spice tuna roll … twice as hot.’”

  “Oh my god.” Rhonda giggled, covering her mouth with her hand. “What did you do?”

  “My bosses were watching. The damned thing napalmed my throat. I don’t want to be indelicate, but for the next two days I used asbestos toilet paper.”

  Hers was a rich, throaty laugh, the kind you enjoy triggering in a woman with legs and skin like Rhonda’s. “But, hey,” she said, wiping away tears. “You got the job, right?”

  “Yeah. I got the job.”

  She smiled. Elfin this time, genuinely amused and interested. “Maybe the lesson is that you really like hot things. Or that you like really hot things. Something like that.”

  “Or that I really, really don’t know when to walk away.”

  “That could be too,” she said, with new appraisal. She’d expected me to return her suggestive volley, and instead I’d said something at least marginally thoughtful.

  “Could be,” she said. “We’ll see about that.”

  * * *

  Fifty minutes later we were back at Stein and Baker, and decided to use her office. It was crowded with her line drawings and watercolors. A mini-exhibition. Lady had serious chops and an outsider sensibility, like Norman Rockwell crossed with a Harlem street artist. She oozed creative intensity, and it was difficult to keep my mind on “making ugly sexy.” Artful vagueness ensued when I probed my boss, The Widow Stein, for details. (Yeah, that was what we called her behind her back. Winston Stein, the agency’s founder, had wrapped himself around a Douglas Fir on a Black Diamond ski run. His wife had picked up the pieces and doubled the business in five years. She was a piranha dressed like a goldfish.)

  I perched on Rhonda’s office couch, feet up, comslate on my thighs. Typing thoughts.

  Marketing and sales are two different things, often misunderstood by the public. Marketing is finding prospects, people whose needs or desires might lead them to want your product or service. Hook a basic human need into your product, something like sex, power, or survival, and you have a winner.

  Sales, on the other hand, is convincing the potential customer that your particular brand is what they want. And all advertising and sales is a funnel designed to catch customers by the short hairs, by their need to be liked, or healthy, or wealthy, or married. To convince them that your car or ice cream or sneaker is just the ticket. When you understand people, and you understand selling and marketing, it’s just a matter of connecting the right aspect of the product to the right psychological weakness in your prospect.

  Still too complicated? I’ll put it the way Winston Stein once put it:

  “Marketing is finding women who like sex or would like to find out if they do. Sales is convincing them that they want to go home with YOU, right NOW.”

  Rhonda’s easel faced away from me, so that I could see her intense expression (good) but not what she was drawing (bad). I liked looking at her. She seemed to catch the thought and looked over. “So … since you’re no longer eating, what do you think this is all about?”

  “I’m just going to guess.”

  “Please do.”

  “Selling someone to the American public, I’d guess. Or something cross-cultural.”

  “An individual? A couple?”

  “Don’t know. Some entertainment.
Singers or dancers perhaps. A cultural exchange dance troupe from a country with very ugly citizens. We need their coconuts or something, but have to sell them to the public.”

  “Hmm. What does that have to do with bridges?” Rhonda asked.

  I folded my fingers together and tried to look professorial. “So … we typically emphasize whatever about a model or subject a typical customer might find attractive. Their proportions, colors, music, movement … if they are healthy, then their bodies will be proportional and symmetrical. That appeals to the eye. We can work with that, even distort it digitally, create an aesthetic ‘bridge.’”

  “A ‘bridge’?” She squinted at me.

  “Sure,” I said. “A term I learned in Commercial Aesthetics at UCLA. A blend of two different cultural or racial standards, much the same way that light-skinned black performers like Halle Berry helped de-inhibit negative responses to African facial characteristics. Whites considered them beautiful, so they could slowly accept and relish darker faces. You start with Lena Horne and end up with Lupita Nyong’o.”

  Rhonda’s smile lit up the night. “I’m starting to see why they chose you. I think this is about a movie, a big co-venture with China or India.”

  Yeah. But why did they choose us?

  I’d considered that, and wasn’t totally happy with my answers. “I … was responsible for advertising campaigns selling Nigerian Naija music to Taiwanese audiences. That was tough, for a time. We used a variety of tactics.” The memory wasn’t pleasant, a suborbital jaunt followed by exhausted presentations to people who disguised contempt behind polite smiles and bows. I’d swallowed my bile and brought their money home. It had been my first big win out of business school, and the bonus paid the mortgage my parents back in Augusta had taken out to buy my way into the game.

  Winston Stein had once joked that “Carver Kofax eats pain and shits money.” Hah hah hah. That was me, all right. I’m the guy who would eat wasabi like green tea ice cream if it got me the job.

  * * *

  Three twenty-hour workdays later I was trashed, but managed to stagger into the thirty-fourth-floor office when summoned. Except for racoon eyes, Rhonda looked as delectable as ever.

  Our drawings and ad lines were splashed around the office, taped to windows looking out on Century City and the endless traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. “Make the ugly sexy,” they’d said. So … we used a combination of plug-ugly dogs and monkeys, cartoons of hideous characters from classic and popular vid shows and web strips, choices from a dozen different cultures, all arranged in a way that pointed out their charming personalities, encouraged us to see their “inner beauty” or even suggested that ugly was “charmingly different.” Offend no one, because we’d yet to learn who was holding the debit card.

  The agency’s fearless leader Adrian Stein was there, in all her pantsuited glory. A rare honor, indeed. “So, Carver. Rhonda.” She smiled. “I wanted you to know that this morning we were offered the preliminary contract.” Cheers and high-fives all around. “You will fly to Washington tomorrow, and there you will go to the last step of the competition.”

  “Do you know what? …” Rhonda began.

  Stein raised her hand. “No. Not the slightest. Now get packed, and remember that you are representing us.”

  So we flew, Rhonda and I. Delta served lobster and Dom Perignon in first class, and it felt like the beginning of a new life. We were picked up at the airport by a Rolls Royce drone limo, and taken directly to the Watergate hotel, on Virginia Avenue along the Potomac at the edge of Georgetown. I’d never been to the Watergate, and something about the history made me nervous. The lobby was filled with executive types in bespoke Armani and Kitan. The air crackled with competition. They weren’t all Americans, either. Europeans … South Americans. Some Asians, maybe Koreans or Japanese. This was getting more interesting by the minute.

  This was, I decided, the strangest “co-operative film venture” I’d ever seen. And the men and women guarding the doors and sign-in table were … well, if I had to say, more military than civvy. Not flamboyant at all, dressed in suits rather than uniforms, but something about them said these people have guns. They ushered us into a crowded meeting room, and then the lights went down. The man who took the dais looked like Gandhi in a Brooks Brothers suit.

  “I am Dr. Ahmed,” he said in barely accented Ivy League English. “Good morning. Thank you, all of you, for attending. Please call me Jalil, and for the sake of this discussion, I represent a consortium with … a unique property. Let us say a science fiction book that we believe has the ability to become this generation’s ‘Star Wars.’” He smiled. He was lying. I knew it and probably half the others did as well. “The problem is that if we accurately depict the creature in the story, we believe people will find it unattractive. So … what we need is for each of you to give your best bet on making this image … appealing.”

  Why was he lying? And about what? The screen lit up, and the image resembled something you’d see under a microscope. The sort of dysenteric pond-squiggler that gives me the heebie-jeebies. A furred amoeba. Did they call that hair cilia? There was no scale for size reference, so it could have been a pipsqueak or Godzilla. Floaty things suspended in its sack looked disturbingly like cat eyes, other curly doodads that looked like translucent intestines were floating in a bag of gray Jell-o.

  “We would like to see your drawings tomorrow,” Jalil said. “Twenty-four hours from now.”

  Something tickled the back of my scalp. “Ah … how attractive are you trying to make them?”

  “Mr.…” he consulted a list. Seating chart. “Carver. You may interpret that any way you wish.”

  There were other questions, but Rhonda and I looked at each other, barely able to restrain our mirth.

  Within an hour we were back in our linked hotel room. While we had our own supplies, more had been delivered. Expensive graphic software, camel-hair brushes and a lightning-fast top-of-the-line Mac.

  We barely noticed. We stared at each other, and then at the protozoan portrait and then collapsed into hysterical laughter. So that was it. Some crazy backwater billionaire wanted to get into the movie business, and were promoting some SF movie based on a plug-ugly demon from a tribal backwater. Or something. I’ve seen these things before, and it never works out.

  And the obvious insulting implication was that I’d been chosen for this assignment because I’d made Nigerians attractive to Chinese, and apparently that was now seen as more miraculous than turning vampires into vegans.

  Compared to that aliens would be easy, right? I mean, right?

  We got really, really drunk, and the ideas that emerged from that brainstorming session probably reflected the fact that the sexual tension between us was starting to skyrocket. We drank, and laughed, and vaped, and laughed some more, and around two in the morning we tore off our clothes and did something about that tension.

  We, um, “did something” about it two more times that night. Let’s just say that I discovered that Rhonda’s bracelets proudly proclaimed her inclinations and that, perhaps in anticipation of exactly what had happened between us, she had packed a portable fun kit with her: cuffs, blindfolds, and things which I’d blush to mention, but fit snugly. We’ll leave it at that.

  It was all lava and steam, and for the first time in my life I understood what people meant when they said they’d been “turned out.” When we were too restless to sleep, Rhonda and I dabbled a bit more with the art, but it got explicit this time. We swore we’d get rid of that stuff, but I have to admit that two of those drawings making their way into the courier packet might have been our way of saying “screw you” to the whole thing.

  Then we “did something” about it again. I would have thought we’d both be too raw to do more than cuddle, but her invention and limberness knew no rational bounds, and our coupling was even better this time. She liked me to take control, total, deep, confident control. To my surprise, I found that the more I took command, the more that
, behind the gag and blindfold, her every move and muffled cry said that she was actually controlling me.

  Eventually preliminaries ended and she shed the apparatus and welcomed me into her body fully, joyously, and with an enthusiasm that made me feel like I’d earned my way into an anaconda breeding ball.

  And afterward, we held each other, and let our pulses slow down. My eyes focused, and the first thing I saw was the easel on which images reminiscent of Lovecraftian pornography winked back at me.

  “We … might get into trouble for that.” She giggled, breathing warm into the notch between my shoulder and neck. Her dreads scented of coconut oil.

  “We’re saving Ms. Stein a nightmare, believe me.”

  “I guess we should pack,” she said, and rolled away from me.

  The phone rang. Rhonda picked it up. “Hello?”

  Her eyes got bigger than an orphan in a Margaret Keane painting, accompanied by one of those “is this a joke?” expressions. She hung up.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We’re supposed to be downstairs in fifteen minutes.” Her expression was strained. Shocked, like someone who has bitten into a live cricket.

  Ouch. “They’re that mad?”

  Her eyes were huge. “No. Ah … we got the job.” Her face lit with urchin glee, and we giggled, then guffawed, and fell into each other’s arms. We almost didn’t make it downstairs in time, if you know what I mean.

  * * *

  I’d thought our meeting would be in some Watergate conference room, but instead a drone limo shuttled us to the Pentagon.

  As we were passed through the gate, Rhonda leaned over. “Since when did porn become a security issue?”

  I didn’t know. Couldn’t answer that question. I felt like Neo when Morpheus told him to hop down the rabbit hole.

  We were escorted to a small conference room, and I have to admit that by this time I was well beyond curious. Had no goddamn idea what was happening. Then Jalil walked in, his placid mask suspended. What lurked in its place worried me, some combination of emotions I couldn’t label.