The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  The dress was packed in brown paper and carefully tied so it would not crease. There were farewells, and Mae scurried back to the hairdresser’s. Sunni was only just finished, hair spray and scent rising off her like steam.

  “This is the dress,” said Mae and peeled back part of the paper, to give Halat and Sunni a glimpse of the tulle and Styrofoam.

  “Oh!” the women said, as if all that white were clouds, in dreams.

  And Halat was paid. There were smiles and nods and compliments and then they left.

  Outside the shop, Mae breathed out as though she could now finally speak her mind. “Oh! She is good, that little viper, but you have to watch her, you have to make her work. Did she give you proper attention?”

  “Oh, yes, very special attention. I am lucky to have you for a friend,” said Sunni. “Let me pay you something for your trouble.”

  Mae hissed through her teeth. “No, no, I did nothing, I will not hear of it.” It was a kind of ritual.

  There was no dream in finding Sunni’s surly husband. Mr. Haseem was red-faced, half-drunk in a club with unvarnished walls and a television.

  “You spend my money,” he declared. His eyes were on Mae.

  “My friend Mae makes no charges,” snapped Sunni.

  “She takes something from what they charge you.” Mr. Haseem glowered like a thunderstorm.

  “She makes them charge me less, not more,” replied Sunni, her face going like stone.

  The two women exchanged glances. Mae’s eyes could say: How can you bear it, a woman of culture like you?

  It is my tragedy, came the reply, aching out of the ashamed eyes. So they sat while the husband sobered up and watched television. Mae contemplated the husband’s hostility to her, and what might lie behind it. On the screen, the local female newsreader talked: Talents, such people were called. She wore a red dress with a large gold broach. Something had been done to her hair to make it stand up in a sweep before falling away. She was as smoothly groomed as ice. She chattered in a high voice, perky through a battery of tiger’s teeth. “She goes to Halat’s as well,” Mae whispered to Sunni. Weather, maps, shots of the honored President and the full cabinet one by one, making big decisions.

  The men in the club chose what movie they wanted. Since the Net, they could do that. It had ruined visits to the town. Before, it used to be that the men were made to sit through something the children or families might also like, so you got everyone together for the watching of the television. The clubs had to be more polite. Now, because of the Net, women hardly saw TV at all and the clubs were full of drinking. The men chose another kung-fu movie. Mae and Sunni endured it, sipping Coca-Cola. It became apparent that Mr. Haseem would not buy them dinner.

  Finally, late in the evening, Mr. Haseem loaded himself into the van. Enduring, unstoppable, and quite dangerous, he drove them back up into the mountains, weaving across the middle of the road.

  “You make a lot of money out of all this,” Mr. Haseem said to Mae.

  “I . . . I make a little something. I try to maintain the standards of the village. I do not want people to see us as peasants. Just because we live on the high road.”

  Sunni’s husband barked out a laugh. “We are peasants!” Then he added, “You do it for the money.”

  Sunni sighed in embarrassment. And Mae smiled a hard smile to herself in the darkness. You give yourself away, Sunni’s-man. You want my husband’s land. You want him to be your dependent. And you don’t like your wife’s money coming to me to prevent it. You want to make both me and my husband your slaves.

  It is a strange thing to spend four hours in the dark listening to an engine roar with a man who seeks to destroy you.

  In late May, school ended.

  There were no fewer than six girls graduating and each one of them needed a new dress. Miss Soo was making two of them; Mae would have to do the others, but she needed to buy the cloth. She needed another trip to Yeshibozkay.

  Mr. Wing was going to town to collect a new television set for the village. It was going to be connected to the Net. There was high excitement: graduation, a new television set. Some of the children lined up to wave good-bye to them.

  Their village, Kizuldah, was surrounded by high, terraced mountains. The rice fields went up in steps, like a staircase into clouds. There was snow on the very tops year round.

  It was a beautiful day, cloudless, but still relatively cool. Kwan, Mr. Wing’s wife, was one of Mae’s favorite women; she was intelligent, sensible; there was less dissembling with her. Mae enjoyed the drive.

  Mr. Wing parked the van in the market square. As Mae reached into the back for her hat, she heard the public address system. The voice of the Talent was squawking.

  “. . . a tremendous advance for culture,” the Talent said. “Now the Green Valley is no farther from the center of the world than Paris, Singapore, or Tokyo.”

  Mae sniffed. “Hmm. Another choice on this fishing net of theirs.”

  Wing stood outside the van, ramrod straight in his brown and tan town shirt. “I want to hear this,” he said, smiling slightly, taking nips of smoke from his cigarette.

  Kwan fanned the air. “Your modern wires say that smoking is dangerous. I wish you would follow all this news you hear.”

  “Ssh!” he insisted.

  The bright female voice still enthused. “Previously all such advances left the Valley far behind because of wiring. This advance will be in the air we breathe. Previously all such advances left the Valley behind because of the cost of the new devices needed to receive messages. This new thing will be like Net TV in your head. All you need is the wires in the human mind.”

  Kwan gathered up her things. “Some nonsense or another,” she murmured.

  “Next Sunday, there will be a test. The test will happen in Tokyo and Singapore but also here in the Valley at the same time. What Tokyo sees and hears, we will see and hear. Tell everyone you know, next Sunday, there will be a test. There is no need for fear, alarm, or panic.”

  Mae listened then. There would certainly be a need for fear and panic if the address system said there was none.

  “What test, what kind of test? What? What?” the women demanded of the husband.

  Mr. Wing played the relaxed, superior male. He chuckled. “Ho-ho, now you are interested, yes?”

  Another man looked up and grinned. “You should watch more TV,” he called. He was selling radishes and shook them at the women.

  Kwan demanded, “What are they talking about?”

  “They will be able to put TV in our heads,” said the husband, smiling. He looked down, thinking perhaps wistfully of his own new venture. “Tut. There has been talk of nothing else on the TV for the last year. But I didn’t think it would happen.”

  All the old market was buzzing like flies on carrion, as if it were still news to them. Two youths in strange puffy clothes spun on their heels and slapped each other’s palms, in a gesture that Mae had seen only once or twice before. An old granny waved it all away and kept on accusing a dealer of short measures.

  Mae felt grave doubt. “TV in our heads. I don’t want TV in my head.” She thought of viper newsreaders and kung fu.

  Wing said, “It’s not just TV. It is more than TV. It is the whole world.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It will be the Net. Only, in your head. The fools and drunks in these parts just use it to watch movies from Hong Kong. The Net is all things.” He began to falter.

  “Explain! How can one thing be all things?”

  There was a crowd of people gathering to listen.

  “Everything is on it. You will see on our new TV.” Kwan’s husband did not really know either.

  The routine was soured. Halat the hairdresser was in a very strange mood, giggly, chattery, her teeth clicking together as if it were cold.

  “Oh, nonsense,” she said when Mae went into her usual performance. “Is this for a wedding? For a feast?”

  “No,” said Mae. “
It is for my special friend.”

  The little hussy put both hands either side of her mouth as if in awe. “Oh! Uh!”

  “Are you going to do a special job for her or not?” demanded Mae. Her eyes were able to say: I see no one else in your shop.

  Oh, how the girl would have loved to say: I am very busy – if you need something special come back tomorrow. But money spoke. Halat slightly amended her tone. “Of course. For you.”

  “I bring my friends to you regularly because you do such good work for them.”

  “Of course,” the child said. “It is all this news, it makes me forget myself.”

  Mae drew herself up, and looked fierce, forbidding, in a word, older. Her entire body said: do not forget yourself again. The way the child dug away at Kwan’s hair with the long comb handle said back: peasants.

  The rest of the day did not go well. Mae felt tired, distracted. She made a terrible mistake and, with nothing else to do, accidentally took Kwan to the place where she bought her lipsticks.

  “Oh! It is a treasure trove!” exclaimed Kwan.

  Idiot, thought Mae to herself. Kwan was good-natured and would not take advantage. But if she talked! There would be clients who would not take such a good-natured attitude, not to have been shown this themselves.

  “I do not take everyone here,” whispered Mae. “Hmm? This is for special friends only.”

  Kwan was good-natured, but very far from stupid. Mae remembered, in school Kwan had always been best at letters, best at maths. Kwan was pasting on false eyelashes in a mirror and said, very simply and quickly, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

  And that was far too simple and direct. As if Kwan were saying: fashion expert, we all know you. She even looked around and smiled at Mae, and batted her now huge eyes, as if mocking fashion itself.

  “Not for you,” said Mae. “The false eyelashes. You don’t need them.”

  The dealer wanted a sale. “Why listen to her?” she asked Kwan.

  Because, thought Mae, I buy fifty riels’ worth of cosmetics from you a year.

  “My friend is right,” said Kwan, to the dealer. The sad fact was that Kwan was almost magazine-beautiful anyway, except for her teeth and gums. “Thank you for showing me this,” said Kwan, and touched Mae’s arm. “Thank you,” she said to the dealer, having bought one lowly lipstick.

  Mae and the dealer glared at each other, briefly. I go somewhere else next time, Mae promised herself.

  There were flies in the ice cream shop, which was usually so frosted and clean. The old man was satisfyingly apologetic, swiping at the flies with a towel. “I am so sorry, so distressing for ladies,” he said, as sincerely as possible knowing that he was addressing farm wives from the hills. “The boys have all gone mad, they are not here to help.”

  Three old Karz grannies in layers of flower-patterned cotton thumped the linoleum floor with sticks. “It is this new madness. I tell you madness is what it is. Do they think people are incomplete? Do they think that Emel here or Fatima need to have TV all the time? In their heads?”

  “We have memories,” said another old granny, head bobbing.

  “We knew a happier world. Oh so polite!”

  Kwan murmured to Mae, “Yes. A world in which babies died overnight and the Red Guards would come and take all the harvest.”

  “What is happening, Kwan?” Mae asked, suddenly forlorn.

  “The truth?” said Kwan. “Nobody knows. Not even the big people who make this test. That is why there will be a test.” She went very calm and quiet. “No one knows,” she said again.

  The worst came last. Kwan’s ramrod husband was not a man for drinking. He was in the promised cafe at the promised time, sipping tea, having had a haircut and a professional shave. He brandished a set of extension plugs and a coil of thin silky cable rolled around a drum. He lit his cigarette lighter near one end, and the light gleamed like a star at the other.

  “Fye buh Ho buh tih kuh,” Wing explained. “Light river rope.” He shook his head in wonder.

  A young man called Sloop, a tribesman, was with him. Sloop was a telephone engineer and thus a member of the aristocracy as far as Mae was concerned. He was going to wire up their new TV. Sloop said with a woman’s voice, “The rope was cheap. Where they already have wires, they use DSL.” He might as well have been talking English for all Mae understood him.

  Wing seemed cheerful. “Come,” he said to the ladies. “I will show you what this is all about.”

  He went to the communal TV and turned it on with an expert’s flourish. Up came not a movie or the local news, but a screen full of other buttons.

  “You see? You can choose what you want. You can choose anything.” And he touched the screen.

  Up came the local Talent, still baring her perfect teeth. She piped in a high, enthusiastic voice that was meant to appeal to men and bright young things.

  “Hello. Welcome to the Airnet Information Service. For too long the world has been divided into information haves and have-nots.” She held up one hand toward the Heavens of information and the other out toward the citizens of the Valley, inviting them to consider themselves as have-nots.

  “Those in the developed world can use their TVs to find any information they need at any time. They do this through the Net.”

  Incomprehension followed. There were circles and squares linked by wires in diagrams. Then they jumped up into the sky, into the air, only the air was full of arching lines. The field, they called it, but it was nothing like a field. In Karsistani, it was called the Lightning-flow, Compass-point Yearning Field. “Everywhere in the world.” Then the lightning flow was shown striking people’s heads. “There have been many medical tests to show this is safe.”

  “Hitting people with lightning?” Kwan asked in crooked amusement. “That does sound so safe.”

  “Umm,” said Wing, trying to think how best to advocate the new world. “Thought is electrical messages. In our heads. So, this thing, it works in the head like thought.”

  “That’s only the Format,” said Sloop. “Once we’re formatted, we can use Air, and Air happens in other dimensions.”

  What?

  “There are eleven dimensions,” he began, and began to see the hopelessness of it. “They were left over after the Big Bang.”

  “I know what will interest you ladies,” said her husband. And with another flourish, he touched the screen. “You’ll be able to have this in your heads, whenever you want.” Suddenly the screen was full of cream color. One of the capital’s ladies spun on her high heel. She was wearing the best of the nation’s fashion design. She was one of the ladies in Mae’s secret treasure book.

  “Oh!” breathed out Kwan. “Oh, Mae, look, isn’t she lovely!”

  “This address shows nothing but fashion,” said her husband.

  “All the time?” Kwan exclaimed and looked back at Mae in wonder. For a moment, she stared up at the screen, her own face reflected over those of the models. Then, thankfully, she became Kwan again. “Doesn’t that get boring?”

  Her husband chuckled. “You can choose something else. Anything else.”

  It was happening very quickly and Mae’s guts churned faster than her brain to certain knowledge: Kwan and her husband would be fine with all this.

  “Look,” he said. “You can even buy the dress.”

  Kwan shook her head in amazement. Then a voice said the price and Kwan gasped again. “Oh, yes, all I have to do is sell one of our four farms, and I can have a dress like that.”

  “I saw all that two years ago,” said Mae. “It is too plain for the likes of us. We want people to see everything.”

  Kwan’s face went sad. “That is because we are poor, back in the hills.” It was the common yearning, the common forlorn knowledge. Sometimes it had to cease, all the business-making, you had to draw a breath, because after all, you had known your people for as long as you had lived.

  Mae said, “None of them are as beautiful as you are, Kwan.” It wa
s true, except for her teeth.

  “Flattery talk from a fashion expert,” said Kwan lightly. But she took Mae’s hand. Her eyes yearned up at the screen, as secret after secret was spilled like blood.

  “With all this in our heads,” said Kwan to her husband. “We won’t need your TV.”

  It was a busy week.

  It was not only the six dresses. For some reason, there was much extra business.

  On Wednesday, Mae had a discreet morning call to make on Tsang Muhammad. She liked Tsang, she was like a peach that was overripe, round and soft to the touch and very slightly wrinkled. Tsang loved to lie back and be pampered, but only did it when she had an assignation. Everything about Tsang was off-kilter. She was Chinese with a religious Karz husband, who was ten years her senior. He was a Muslim who allowed, or perhaps could not prevent, his Chinese wife from keeping a family pig.

  The family pig was in the front room being fattened. Half of the room was full of old shucks. The beast looked lordly and pleased with itself. Tsang’s four-year-old son sat tamely beside it, feeding it the greener leaves, as if the animal could not find them for itself.

  “Is it all right to talk?” Mae whispered, her eyes going sideways toward the boy.

  Tsang, all plump smiles, nodded very quickly yes.

  “Who is it?” Mae mouthed.

  Tsang simply waggled a finger.

  So it was someone they knew. Mae suspected it was Kwan’s oldest boy, Luk. Luk was sixteen but fully grown, kept in pressed white shirt and shorts like a baby, but the shorts only showed he had hair on his football-player calves. His face was still round and soft and babylike but lately had been full of a new and different confusion.

  “Tsang. Oh!” gasped Mae.

  “Ssssh,” giggled Tsang, who was red as a radish. As if either of them could be certain what the other one meant. “I need a repair job!” So it was someone younger.

  Almost certainly Kwan’s handsome son.

  “Well, they have to be taught by someone,” whispered Mae.

  Tsang simply dissolved into giggles. She could hardly stop laughing.

  “I can do nothing for you. You certainly don’t need redder cheeks,” said Mae.