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

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  Among hundreds of others, Rhonda and I were released from our contracts—now that it was out in the open, everyone clamored to work with Them. And the Traveler technology was integrated into our entertainment with steadily increasing frequency and effect. Movies were immersive and hyper-real, more so than any 3-D, hologram, Showscan or anything that had ever existed previously. Somehow we reacted more to those images than the real thing. Amazing. Humanity was heading for a renaissance. I have to admit that I felt a little guilty. The Travelers had come a trillion miles looking for love, and didn’t seem to understand the concept of prostitution. Before I left the facility I had a final meeting with Elvis. He was squished into his exoskeleton, the pinkish indestructible Traveler-cloth “human” suit beneath his white sequinned jumpsuit. I no longer felt the urge to vomit when I was around him. He’d changed his smell and appearance, and that sizzling sensation I got in his presence had died to a mere itch.

  “Hello, Carver,” he said. “Good to see you.”

  “And you.”

  “I think,” he said, “that we’ve accomplished something wonderful together. Thank you.”

  He handed me a card. “What’s this?”

  “A token of my appreciation. One million of your dollars.”

  There it was. Another six zeroes. It was true that a rising tide lifted all boats, that a certain amount of inflation had accompanied Traveler wealth, but Rhonda and I had been paid so well we’d stayed ahead of that curve. In that moment, I realized I never had to work again for the rest of my life. “Thank you!”

  Elvis’s face mask smiled. “Thankyouverymuch.” His namesake’s Vegas drawl. “Cheap at the price, old son.”

  * * *

  Six weeks after we left the Facility I asked Rhonda to marry me, and a month later, she agreed. Our honeymoon was a revelation, as if our prior sex life had been a mere appetizer, and she’d given me the keys to the kitchen. If she had lived a hundred lives as a leather-clad courtesan, that might have explained the days and nights that followed, as she opened one door after another for me, allowed me to glimpse what was within until it felt like she was running an electrified tongue over my body’s every exposed nerve. Then, with a mischievous giggle, she would close that door, give me just enough time to recover and then lead me staggering and wide-eyed to the next.

  In retrospect, it was predictable that Rhonda would be the one to bring the fetish sites to my attention. Three months after we were married she danced into my home office, touched my lips with hers and giggled. “Have I got something to show you!”

  She led me to her office, where she had worked so hard and late at night. Her computer was mostly used for graphics, but like the rest of us she surfed the net to rest her brain in-between creative spurts.

  “I don’t want to tell you how I found this site.”

  “I think I can guess. Feeling a little frisky, were you?”

  She turned the screen around, and for a moment my eyes didn’t focus. Then I saw a very pale woman, gelatinously obese with very short bristly dark hair, sporting animated tattoos that mimicked organelles. They shivered and danced, while three men stood around her performing what I believe Japanese aficionados would refer to as a bukkake ritual. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.

  On the other hand, maybe you shouldn’t. Ignorance is bliss.

  “Is she trying to look like a Traveler?”

  “Wild, huh?”

  The sound was much too good for speakers their size. I didn’t recognize the brand. “New speakers?”

  “Nice, aren’t they?” The speakers were flat as glass panes, but the sound was as good as a ten-thousand-dollar pair of Naim Ovators. T-tech. Traveler music wafted in the background, and with the new speakers, my ears detected odd, previously undetected undertones.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s really strange. It’s a new world. That other stuff … wow.”

  She suddenly pulled in on herself, shrank a little, seemed tentative and a little shy. “Does it turn you on?” Her forefinger fluttered along my forearm.

  “Shit. No. You?”

  She shrugged, her finger ceasing its dance. “Maybe…”

  “Well, we should take advantage of that…”

  “I’m busy right now,” Rhonda said, removing my hands. “… but save some of that heat for me tonight, OK?”

  But … she worked until midnight, and when she did come to bed, she rolled over and went to sleep. That’s marriage, I guess.

  * * *

  More and more often, Rhonda seemed to be in a funk. I think we saw each other less frequently, pretty much devolving to roommates. It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other. It was that some critical spark was just … gone. She was doing more Traveler work, and the “bridging” was subtler. The T’s had gifted us with a printing process that conveyed a dimensional and multi-sensory aspect. Strange. You would look at a picture, and detect a scent. If you weren’t looking directly at it, you detected no smell. I have no idea how they did that, or how it worked, but it did.

  Rhonda’s office was filled with more and more of these Traveler materials. She seemed increasingly dreamy and far-away. And then one summer day in 2036 Rhonda left the house, and stayed out late.

  Very late.

  And when Rhonda returned in the early morning, she seemed … dazed. Like someone thoroughly stoned, with a secretive smile that was too damned easy to interpret. She curled up on the couch with a dreamy expression and wouldn’t talk to me. When I tried she turned her face to the back of the couch and pretended to sleep. Finally, that night I brought her a tray of chicken wings, and sat it down next to her. She smelled it. Turned, smiled faintly, but didn’t speak, other than offer a very soft:

  “Thank you.”

  At that moment, I was certain. “You did it, didn’t you?”

  She looked at me, hands shaking. Didn’t answer.

  “What was it like?” I asked.

  She paused. Then her face softened, as I’d only seen in our deepest, most intimate moments. “I can’t describe it,” she said with an almost feverish intensity.

  “Try,” I said. And in that moment I saw something from her I’d never seen before, and never would again: a desperate desire for me to understand her, as if in understanding we would bond more deeply. But something about what she said reminded me less of someone inviting you to a party, and more like someone skydiving without a parachute, terrified of dying alone. “Think of the worst kiss you’ve ever had. Then … the best sex. Can you do that?”

  I couldn’t help but smile at how she trembled to say those words. “O.K. Then what?”

  “The gap between them is like … what the Gray was like.” She gripped my hands, nails digging into my flesh. “Come with me. Let’s share this. Let’s…” I guess that disgust is something I don’t hide well. She saw it, and drew away, the momentary vulnerability evaporated. Just like that. Gone.

  Her lips twisted with sudden, bitter force. “You’re a coward.”

  We slept in the same bed for a while after that, but … well, you know. And then she moved into the guest room, and never came back to our room. There would have been no point. We had no guests, and she wasn’t coming back to me.

  * * *

  Ten years passed, one aching, disorienting day at a time. I had no need for earning money, but embraced busywork of many kinds, perhaps to distract myself from the unhappy fact that Rhonda and I had become mere roommates. Our sex life had dwindled to memories.

  The world seemed to flow around me, like a stream dividing itself around a rock. I watched the fashions and culture slowly admit more and more Traveler imagery and influence, but little of it really seemed to break through my emotional cocooning. I had endless toys, and work, and that had to be enough.

  Despite promises made in our empty bed I felt a certain nasty urge growing inside me. Every time I heard Traveler music, that compulsion grew. When I watched movies with very special guest stars something deep in my gut t
witched. Like a tumor growing day by day right before your eyes, there is no single moment you can point to when you say “Ah-hah! It’s cancer!” It sneaks up on you.

  The scope of change was too large, the implications beyond sanity. And then one day, as Rhonda had known, the hunger sharpened from a whisper to a scream. I called an aircab and vaped in the backseat until my head spun. It dropped me off in the middle of nowhere and I walked randomly. Yeah, right. Pretended that I didn’t know where I was going, finally ending up at one of the storefront enterprises they called a “friendship club.” Paid my considerable fee, and entered. I’d had to get very very stoned, loaded enough that some part of me knew I would have plausible deniability.

  In an office paneled with stars and nebulae stenciled with obscene constellations I met with a thin man who asked a battery of questions. I guess I answered them properly because I was taken to a shower room, where I was told to bathe. The water wasn’t mere H2O, it had a taste to it, a smell that faded, as if my nose had been numbed. And they led me to a dimmed room. I wished I’d vaped a little more.

  The room’s only furniture was a black couch. And the door behind me was the only door, so I expected it to open, and for something else to enter. I felt myself dizzying as if the scented droplets evaporating on my flesh were seeping into my bloodstream. I needed to sit down. Lay down.

  And the moment I did the “couch” engulfed me.

  Followed immediately by a wave of panic. God! It wasn’t a couch, it was the Traveler version of some kind of sex toy, some B&D playground, their version of leather and chains and whips and gag-balls. No! I …

  And then I felt myself … embraced in every orifice. Welcomed. Hungered for. It was not love. Not sex. It was … the form for which all of those are shadows. The sound, and all the others merely echoes.

  * * *

  When I awakened, I was alone in the room. The “couch” seemed just a couch again, although investigation revealed it to be an exoskeleton, a costume, into which a Traveler had stuffed itself. I left the lust-chamber, walked out past the receptionist’s glassy smile. A half-dozen other experimenters hunched dazedly in the foyer, shuddering like men who had stepped out of a sauna into freezing cold. We sat around, half-dressed, unable to speak … and sharing a knowledge.

  When I vacated the premises, the street outside shimmered with pools of cottony light radiating from no source I could determine. I swore I wouldn’t, but turned around and returned to the friendship center and asked when I could go again. Months, they said. There was a long waiting list. I was told I could pay six figures to be placed at the head of that line. I’m sure Rhonda had. God help me, I considered it. But … I just couldn’t.

  * * *

  Strange how separate threads twist together into a braid strong enough to hang you. How easy it is to rationalize. How proud I was of my tolerance for pain. And fear. Everything was going so well, I told myself. Life was just wonderful. I’d never been wealthy, and money is its own opiate. Perhaps the most powerful. You live in a kind of tunnel, insulated from most concerns. My health remained perfect, as They had promised. I was the same, but the social effects were now more noticeable, thirty years in.

  Boys and girls seemed to care little for differentiating themselves by dresses and pants, or long and short hair, or makeup … as if that aching boy-girl tension no longer mattered quite so much. Or at all. I remember a morning on a London street, when I witnessed a wan couple pushing a perambulator down along the Thames. Our eyes met, and they smiled at me. Hopeful smiles. I smiled back. And as I always had, I reflexively peered into the baby carriage.

  The infant was perhaps three months old, and gazing out at the world with the kind of glazed uncertainty that seems standard on babies that age. When it looked at me, it started to cry. I’d always found that sound to trigger the urge to comfort. Instead … its ululation was just irritating. It’s smooth pale flesh seemed … grublike, and its bald head reminded me of my father, when he was dying of cancer in an Atlanta hospice. I recoiled, and the baby cried more loudly, and the parents pulled back into their shells and hurried away.

  It was the only baby I’d seen for a week. The last one I saw for a month.

  I saw fewer children on the streets, more shuttered and boarded-up schools. Humanity was so happy, so drunken on our new longer lives and endless nifty T-Tech that we just ignored what was happening around us.

  As for me … I never had so much as a sniffle, and maintained beautiful muscle tone without doing so much as a push-up … but certain hungers seem to have quieted. Women passing on the street were often strikingly beautiful, but in a “healthy animal” way, not a matter of artifice or attraction. It was almost as if I was noticing their loveliness the way I might think a painting was lovely. Or a one-man sky-strider “walking” between clouds. Beautiful. Distant. Irrelevant to anything but a cool aesthetic appreciation.

  Then one spring day in 2054 I was having Zavo at a local Starbucks. Oh, right. I’ve not told you about that. Zavo is the commercial name for a T-tech drink. I think they bioengineered it to not only sensitize your brain to norepinephrine, like caffeine does, but provide co-factors that allow your little gray cells to manufacture that juice with scary efficiency. How you can make something that lasts all day, has no jitters, and lets you sleep is beyond me. But it does.

  Good dreams, too. Vivid. Intense.

  When I drank it, I dreamed of the space between the stars.

  A ratty-looking little Asian guy dropped onto the seat across from me. He stared at me, not moving, not speaking. Not blinking. “Do I know you…?” I finally asked.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” he replied. “You haven’t forgotten so much…?”

  I skawed laughter. “Professor Watanabe! Man, it’s been a long time.” Hadn’t seen him since our days at the Facility. He hadn’t worn well. The Professor was well dressed, but he looked tense, like Atlas trying to be casual while holding the world on his shoulders. “You’re doing well. We’re all doing well.”

  “Travelers,” he said.

  A bubble car sailed by, a paramecium in the back seat, a superfluous human pretending to pilot a drone. Fashion statement. Professor Watanabe held my eyes with a smile, and slid over a silver thumb drive.

  “What’s this?” I asked. It looked antique, probably only holding a few terrabytes.

  “Something you need to look at. Tonight.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just read it. The core document will take a few minutes. You could spend a year going through the supporting data. All you could want.”

  “But what?”

  “Open it. Remember my name, and open it.”

  Then, smile frozen on his face, Watanabe left the table. I turned the drive over and over again in a shaking hand.

  What the hell?

  * * *

  As I said, the drive was decades old. Not T-Tech, not even current technology. That should have been a clue. I dragged out an ancient laptop. Instructions scribbled on the side of the drive warned me to disable WiFi before booting, and I did. It utilized an old-fashioned USB connection. I actually had to visit a vintage computer shop to find a proper connection, making lame excuses to the salesman to explain why I wanted a device that had been obsolete for at least thirty years. When I returned home with my acquisition, it took me an hour to figure out how to patch the computer to the drive. When I finally succeeded, a password prompt appeared.

  Password? The professor didn’t give me—

  Then I recalled his odd request: “Remember my name.”

  Was that it? I typed “Watanabe” in, and to my pleasant surprise, his face materialized.

  “Greetings, Mr. Kofax,” he said. As in the coffee shop, Watanabe’s face was pale and drawn. Leeched of color and life. The problem was not his physical health, I was sure. The Travelers had made sure of that. It was something else. Something worse. “You must be wondering about the cloak and dagger. Well, you aren’t going to wonder for very long. I’m g
oing to make this short, but I cannot make it sweet.” He wiped his hand across his forehead, smearing a slick of perspiration. “I wish I could. The short version is: we made a mistake, Carver. You and I. We were the heroes, remember? We figured it out. Well I should have stuck with teaching, and you should have stuck to flogging soap.”

  “Why?” I muttered.

  “Why? Because we’ve done our job too well. Something is going wrong. Human beings aren’t having much sex anymore. Not with each other, at least. The mistake was thinking that when the Travelers told us they could not lie, they were offering every implication of their actions. They were honest, but not … forthcoming.”

  “What are you talking about?” I muttered. For the second time, it was as if he heard me, or had anticipated my thoughts.

  “What I mean is that we figured everything was safe, because we evaluated how Traveler tech affected us. Their music, for instance. Played through our equipment, we found nothing to worry about. But then we began to upgrade our systems, using their tech, and frankly we failed to continue testing as carefully as we should. Traveler tech increased the bandwidth. They’ve given us biological, optical, computational and auditory technology, and we paid too much attention to how powerful it was, and not enough to how it all interlocked.”

  “Meaning what?”

  This was some kind of video AI program. Even coming over an obsolete thumb drive, somehow it was still responding to me. Try as the Professor had to avoid it, Traveler tech’s tendrils were everywhere. “Meaning that we gave them access to our hardware and software … and wetware, Carver. And they are reprogramming us.”

  “How? To do what?”

  “Birthrates are dropping. It’s happening faster and faster. Twenty percent reduction throughout the world, and no one panicked, because no one is complaining. We’ve gone numb somehow. We’re just … not servicing each other.”

  It … was true. Rhonda and I hadn’t had sex in over a decade, and I hadn’t really considered the implications. And kids? We’d never talked …

  No, that’s not true. Once upon a time, we’d talked about having babies. We both came from large families, both loved our brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews … how unlikely was it that neither of us would hanker for kids?