The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

“You’ll like this,” Courtney said. “I’ve been here five nights straight. Counting tonight.” The bell rang, starting the fight. She leaned forward avidly, hooking her elbows on the railing.

  The zombie was gray-skinned and modestly muscled, for a fighter. But it held up its hands alertly, was light on its feet, and had strangely calm and knowing eyes.

  Its opponent was a real bruiser, a big black guy with classic African features twisted slightly out of true, so that his mouth curled up in a kind of sneer on one side. He had gang scars on his chest and even uglier marks on his back that didn’t look deliberate but like something he’d earned on the streets. His eyes burned with an intensity just this side of madness.

  He came forward cautiously but not fearfully, and made a couple of quick jabs to get the measure of his opponent. They were blocked and countered.

  They circled each other, looking for an opening.

  For a minute or so, nothing much happened. Then the gangster feinted at the zombie’s head, drawing up its guard. He drove through that opening with a slam to the zombie’s nuts that made me wince.

  No reaction.

  The dead fighter responded with a flurry of punches, and got in a glancing blow to its opponent’s cheek. They separated, engaged, circled around.

  Then the big guy exploded in a combination of killer blows, connecting so solidly it seemed they would splinter every rib in the dead fighter’s body. It brought the crowd to their feet, roaring their approval.

  The zombie didn’t even stagger.

  A strange look came into the gangster’s eyes, then, as the zombie counterattacked, driving him back into the ropes. I could only imagine what it must be like for a man who had always lived by his strength and his ability to absorb punishment to realize that he was facing an opponent to whom pain meant nothing. Fights were lost and won by flinches and hesitations. You won by keeping your head. You lost by getting rattled.

  Despite his best blows, the zombie stayed methodical, serene, calm, relentless. That was its nature.

  It must have been devastating.

  The fight went on and on. It was a strange and alienating experience for me. After a while I couldn’t stay focused on it. My thoughts kept slipping into a zone where I found myself studying the line of Courtney’s jaw, thinking about later tonight. She liked her sex just a little bit sick. There was always a feeling, fucking her, that there was something truly repulsive that she really wanted to do but lacked the courage to bring up on her own.

  So there was always this urge to get her to do something she didn’t like. She was resistant; I never dared try more than one new thing per date. But I could always talk her into that one thing. Because when she was aroused, she got pliant. She could be talked into anything. She could be made to beg for it.

  Courtney would’ve been amazed to learn that I was not proud of what I did with her – quite the opposite, in fact. But I was as obsessed with her as she was with whatever it was that obsessed her.

  Suddenly Courtney was on her feet, yelling. The hologram showed Koestler on his feet as well. The big guy was on the ropes, being pummeled. Blood and spittle flew from his face with each blow. Then he was down; he’d never even had a chance. He must’ve known early on that it was hopeless, that he wasn’t going to win, but he’d refused to take a fall. He had to be pounded into the ground. He went down raging, proud and uncomplaining. I had to admire that.

  But he lost anyway.

  That, I realized, was the message I was meant to take away from this. Not just that the product was robust. But that only those who backed it were going to win. I could see, even if the audience couldn’t, that it was the end of an era. A man’s body wasn’t worth a damn anymore. There wasn’t anything it could do that technology couldn’t handle better. The number of losers in the world had just doubled, tripled, reached maximum. What the fools below were cheering for was the death of their futures.

  I got up and cheered too.

  In the stretch afterward, Koestler said, “You’ve seen the light. You’re a believer now.”

  “I haven’t necessarily decided yet.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Koestler said. “I’ve done my homework, Mr. Nichols. Your current position is not exactly secure. Morton-Western is going down the tubes. The entire service sector is going down the tubes. Face it, the old economic order is as good as fucking gone. Of course you’re going to take my offer. You don’t have any other choice.”

  The fax outed sets of contracts. “A Certain Product,” it said here and there. Corpses were never mentioned.

  But when I opened my jacket to get a pen Koestler said, “Wait, I’ve got a factory. Three thousand positions under me. I’ve got a motivated workforce. They’d walk through fire to keep their jobs. Pilferage is at zero. Sick time practically the same. Give me one advantage your product has over my current workforce. Sell me on it. I’ll give you thirty seconds.”

  I wasn’t in sales and the job had been explicitly promised me already. But by reaching for the pen, I had admitted I wanted the position. And we all knew whose hand carried the whip.

  “They can be catheterized,” I said – “no toilet breaks.”

  For a long instant Koestler just stared at me blankly. Then he exploded with laughter. “By God, that’s a new one! You have a great future ahead of you, Donald. Welcome aboard.”

  He winked out.

  We drove on in silence for a while, aimless, directionless. At last Courtney leaned forward and touched the chauffeur’s shoulder.

  “Take me home,” she said.

  Riding through Manhattan I suffered from a waking hallucination that we were driving through a city of corpses. Gray faces, listless motions. Everyone looked dead in the headlights and sodium-vapor streetlamps. Passing by the Children’s Museum I saw a mother with a stroller through the glass doors. Two small children by her side. They all three stood motionless, gazing forward at nothing. We passed by a stop-and-go where zombies stood out on the sidewalk drinking forties in paper bags. Through upper-story windows I could see the sad rainbow trace of virtuals playing to empty eyes. There were zombies in the park, zombies smoking blunts, zombies driving taxies, zombies sitting on stoops and hanging out on street corners, all of them waiting for the years to pass and the flesh to fall from their bones. I felt like the last man alive.

  Courtney was still wired and sweaty from the fight. The pheromones came off her in great waves as I followed her down the hall to her apartment. She stank of lust. I found myself thinking of how she got just before orgasm, so desperate, so desirable. It was different after she came, she would fall into a state of calm assurance; the same sort of calm assurance she showed in her business life, the aplomb she sought so wildly during the act itself.

  And when that desperation left her, so would I. Because even I could recognize that it was her desperation that drew me to her, that made me do the things she needed me to do. In all the years I’d known her, we’d never once had breakfast together.

  I wished there was some way I could deal her out of the equation. I wished that her desperation were a liquid that I could drink down to the dregs. I wished I could drop her in a winepress and squeeze her dry.

  At her apartment, Courtney unlocked her door and in one complicated movement twisted through and stood facing me from the inside. “Well,” she said. “All in all, a productive evening. Good night, Donald.”

  “Good night? Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” She was beginning to piss me off. A blind man could’ve told she was in heat from across the street. A chimpanzee could’ve talked his way into her pants. “What kind of idiot game are you playing now?”

  “You know what no means, Donald. You’re not stupid.”

  “No I’m not, and neither are you. We both know the score. Now let me in, goddamnit.”

  “Enjoy your present,” she said, and closed the door.

  I found Courtney’s present back in my
suite. I was still seething from her treatment of me and stalked into the room, letting the door slam behind me so that I was standing in near-total darkness. The only light was what little seeped through the draped windows at the far end of the room. I was just reaching for the light switch when there was a motion in the darkness.

  Jackets! I thought, and all in panic lurched for the light switch, hoping to achieve I don’t know what. Credit-jackers always work in trios, one to torture the security codes out of you, one to phone the numbers out of your accounts and into a fiscal trapdoor, a third to stand guard. Was turning the lights on supposed to make them scurry for darkness, like roaches? Nevertheless, I almost tripped over my own feet in my haste to reach the switch. But of course it was nothing like what I’d feared.

  It was a woman.

  She stood by the window in a white silk dress that could neither compete with nor distract from her ethereal beauty, her porcelain skin. When the lights came on, she turned toward me, eyes widening, lips parting slightly. Her breasts swayed ever so slightly as she gracefully raised a bare arm to offer me a lily. “Hello, Donald,” she said huskily. “I’m yours for the night.” She was absolutely beautiful.

  And dead of course.

  Not twenty minutes later I was hammering on Courtney’s door. She came to the door in a Pierre Cardin dressing gown and from the way she was still cinching the sash and the disarray of her hair I gathered she hadn’t been expecting me.

  “I’m not alone,” she said.

  “I didn’t come here for the dubious pleasures of your fair white body.” I pushed my way into the room. (But couldn’t help remembering that beautiful body of hers, not so exquisite as the dead whore’s, and now the thoughts were inextricably mingled in my head: death and Courtney, sex and corpses, a Gordian knot I might never be able to untangle.)

  “You didn’t like my surprise?” She was smiling openly now, amused.

  “No. I fucking did not!”

  I took a step toward her. I was shaking. I couldn’t stop fisting and unfisting my hands.

  She fell back a step. But that confident, oddly expectant look didn’t leave her face. “Bruno,” she said lightly. “Would you come in here?”

  A motion at the periphery of vision. Bruno stepped out of the shadows of her bedroom. He was a muscular brute, pumped, ripped, and as black as the fighter I’d seen go down earlier that night. He stood behind Courtney, totally naked, with slim hips and wide shoulders and the finest skin I’d ever seen.

  And dead.

  I saw it all in a flash.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Courtney!” I said, disgusted. “I can’t believe you. That you’d actually. That thing’s just an obedient body. There’s nothing there – no passion, no connection, just . . . physical presence.”

  Courtney made a kind of chewing motion through her smile, weighing the implications of what she was about to say. Nastiness won.

  “We have equity now,” she said.

  I lost it then. I stepped forward, raising a hand, and I swear to God I intended to bounce the bitch’s head off the back wall. But she didn’t flinch – she didn’t even look afraid. She merely moved aside, saying, “In the body, Bruno. He has to look good in a business suit.”

  A dead fist smashed into my ribs so hard I thought for an instant my heart had stopped. Then Bruno punched me in my stomach. I doubled over, gasping. Two, three, four more blows. I was on the ground now, rolling over, helpless and weeping with rage.

  “That’s enough, baby. Now put out the trash.”

  Bruno dumped me in the hallway.

  I glared up at Courtney through my tears. She was not at all beautiful now. Not in the least. You’re getting older, I wanted to tell her. But instead I heard my voice, angry and astonished, saying, “You . . . you goddamn, fucking necrophile!”

  “Cultivate a taste for it,” Courtney said. Oh, she was purring! I doubted she’d ever find life quite this good again. “Half a million Brunos are about to come on the market. You’re going to find it a lot more difficult to pick up living women in not so very long.”

  I sent away the dead whore. Then I took a long shower that didn’t really make me feel any better. Naked, I walked into my unlit suite and opened the curtains. For a long time I stared out over the glory and darkness that was Manhattan.

  I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life.

  The slums below me stretched to infinity. They were a vast necropolis, a never-ending city of the dead. I thought of the millions out there who were never going to hold down a job again. I thought of how they must hate me – me and my kind – and how helpless they were before us. And yet. There were so many of them and so few of us. If they were to all rise up at once, they’d be like a tsunami, irresistible. And if there was so much as a spark of life left in them, then that was exactly what they would do.

  That was one possibility. There was one other, and that was that nothing would happen. Nothing at all.

  God help me, but I didn’t know which one scared me more.

  RECORDING ANGEL

  Ian McDonald

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, and Kirinya, a chapbook novella Tendeleo’s Story, Ares Express, and Cyberabad, as well as two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His stories have appeared in our Fifth through Seventh, Tenth through Twelfth and Fifteenth and Sixteenth annual collections. Coming up is a another new novel, River of Gods. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

  Here’s a look at a bizarre and terrifying future where something enigmatic and implacable is eating Africa, and the people in the way are just going to have to come to terms with it – however they can.

  FOR THE LAST TEN MILES she drove past refugees from the xeno-forming. Some were in their own vehicles. Many rode town buses that had been commandeered to take the people south, or the grubby white trucks of the UNHCR. Most walked, pushing the things they had saved from the advancing Chaga on handcarts or barrows, or laden on the heads and backs of women and children. That has always been the way of it, the woman thought as she drove past the unbroken file of people. The world ends, the women and children must carry it, and the United Nations sends its soldiers to make sure they do not drop it. And the news corporations send their journalists to make sure that the world sees without being unduly disturbed. After all, they are only Africans. A continent is being devoured by some thing from the stars, and I am sent to write the obituary of a hotel.

  “I don’t do gossip,” she had told T. P. Costello, SkyNet’s Nairobi station chief when he told her of the international celebrities who were coming to the death-party of the famous Treehouse Hotel. “I didn’t come to this country to cream myself over who’s wearing which designer dress or who’s having an affair with or getting from whom.”

  “I know, I know,” T. P. Costello had said. “You came to Kenya to be a player in Earth’s first contact with the alien. Everyone did. That’s why I’m sending you. Who cares what Brad Pitt thinks about the Gas Cloud theory versus the Little Gray Men theory? Angles are what I want. You can get angles, Gaby. What can you get?”

  “Angles, T. P.,” she had replied, wearily, to her editor’s now-familiar litany.

  “That’s correct. And you’ll be up there with it, right on terminum. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  That’s correct, T. P., she
thought. Three months in Kenya and all she had seen of the Chaga had been a distant line of color, like surf on a far reef, under the clouded shadow of Kilimanjaro, advancing imperceptibly but inexorably across the Amboseli plain. The spectator’s view. Up there, on the highlands around Kirinyaga where the latest biological package had come down, she would be within touching distance of it. The player’s view.

  There was a checkpoint up at Nanyuki. The South African soldiers in blue UN helmets at first did not know how to treat her, thinking that with her green eyes and long mahogany hair she might be another movie star or television celebrity. When her papers identified her as Gaby McAslan, online multimedia journalist with SkyNet East Africa, they stopped being respectful. A woman they could flirt with, a journalist they could touch for bribes. Gaby endured their flirtations and gave their commanding officer three of the dwindling stock of duty-free Swatches she had bought expressly for the purpose of petty corruption. In return she was given a map of the approved route to the hotel. If she stayed on it she would be safe. The bush patrols had orders to shoot suspected looters or loiterers. Beyond the checkpoint there were no more refugees. The only vehicles were carrying celebrities to the party at the end of the world, and the news corporations following them. The Kikuyu shambas on either side of the road had been long abandoned. Wild Africa was reclaiming them. For a while, then something else would reclaim them from wild Africa. Reverse terraforming, she thought. Instead of making an alien world into Earth, Earth is made into an alien world. In her open-top SkyNet 4x4, Gaby could sense the Chaga behind the screen of heavy high-country timber, and edgy presence of the alien, and electric tingle of anticipation. She had never been this close before.

  When the first biological package came down on the summit of Kilimanjaro, she had known, in SkyNet Multimedia News’s UK office among the towers of London’s Docklands, that this fallen star had her name written on it. The stuff that had come out of it, that looked a little like rain forest and a little like drained coral reef but mostly like nothing anyone had ever seen before, that disassembled terrestrial vegetation into its component molecules and incorporated them into its own matrix at an unstoppable fifty meters every day, confirmed her holy business. The others that came down in the Bismarck Archipelago, the Ruwenzori, in Ecuador and Papua New Guinea and the Maldives, these were only memos from the star gods. It’s here, it’s waiting for you. Hurry up now.