The Year's Best Science Fiction (2008 Edition)

by Michael Swanwick

  So she nerved herself for the fight.

  Certain consequential and outstanding people run our Government. If they send a captain's wife a nicely printed invitation to eat, drink, dance, sing, and to “mingle with society,” then it behooves her to attend.

  The singing and the dancing are veneers for the issue of real consequence: the “mingling with society,” in other words, reproduction. Our gentleman soldiers are frequently absent, guarding the caravans. Our ladies are often widowed through illness and misfortune. Government regards our grimly modest population, and Government does its duty.

  So, if the Palace sets-to in a public celebration, there will reliably be pleasant music for a dance, special food, many people—and many private rooms.

  “I can't attend this fine ball at the capital,” said Baratiya to her husband, “the dust and heat are still too much for little Florrie. But that shouldn't stop you from venturing.”

  Captain Kusak said that he would go for the sake of civic duty. He then saw to the fancy clothes he had begun to affect. Baratiya knew then that he was feigning dislike and eager to go to the ball. Kusak planned to go to the capital to revel in the eerie charms of Stormcrow—shamefully wasting his vigor on a relic who could not bear children.

  If one of our Hill women dresses in her finest garments, that generally means a patchwork dress. Certain fabrics of the past are brightly dyed and nearly indestructible. They were also loomed and stitched by machines instead of human hands, so they have qualities we cannot match. Whenever a salvage caravan comes from a dead city during the cooler months, there is general excitement. Robbing the dead is always a great thrill, though never a healthy one.

  In daily life, our hill women mostly favor saris, a simple unstitched length of cloth. Saris are practical garments, fit for our own time. Still, our women do boast one kind of fine dress which the ancients never had: women's hard-weather gear.

  Stiffened and hooded and polished, tucked and rucked, our hard-weather gear will shed rain, dust, high wind, mud, mosquitoes—it would shed snow, if we ever had snow. Baratiya was young, but she was not a soldier's wife for nothing: she knew how to dress.

  When Baratiya was through stitching her new ball-gown, it was more than simply strong and practical: it was a true creation. Its stern and hardy look was exactly the opposite of the frail, outdated finery that Stormcrow always wore.

  The road to the capital is likely our safest road. Just past the famous ravine bridge—a place of legendary floods and ambushes—the capital road becomes an iron railway. So if the new monsoons are not too heavy, a lone woman in a sturdy ox cart can reach the railhead and travel on in nigh-perfect security.

  Baratiya took this bold course of action, and arrived at the Palace ball. She wore her awesome new riding habit. She arrived in high time to find her husband drinking fortified wine, with Stormcrow languishing on his arm and pecking at a plate of rice. This sight made Baratiya flush, so that she looked even more gorgeous.

  Baratiya deposited her invitation, opened an appointment card and loudly demanded meat.

  The Palace is a place of strict etiquette. If a man and a woman at a Palace ball fill their appointment card and retire to a private niche, they are expected to do their duty to the future of mankind. In order to mate with a proper gusto, the volunteers are given our richest foodstuffs: pork, beef.

  Much more often than you think, after gorging on that flesh, a man and woman will simply talk together in their private room. It is hard work to breed with a stranger. The fact that this conduct is Government-approved does not make it more appealing. Mankind is indeed a crooked timber, and no Government has ever built us quite straight.

  Stormcrow instantly caught the challenging eye of Baratiya, and Stormcrow knew that Baratiya's shouted demand for a feast was a purposeful gesture—aimed not so much at the men, who crowded toward the loud new arrival—but a gesture aimed at herself. Stormcrow was caught at disadvantage, not only by the suddenness of the wife's appearance, but by the stark fact that Captain Kusak seemed to lack much appetite for her.

  The old woman's overstated eagerness to enter a private Palace room with Kusak had dented his confidence. Kusak too had been drinking too much—for he was shy, and troubled by what he was about to do. He was a decent man at heart, and he somehow sensed the inadequacy of his paramour.

  More to the point, Kusak had never seen his young wife so attractive. Those fact that other men were so visibly eager for her company made Kusak stare, and, staring, he found himself fascinated. He could scarcely believe that this startling orgiast, shouting for meat and wine in her thunderous gown, was his threadbare little homebody.

  Stormcrow smiled in the face of her misfortune and redoubled her efforts to charm. But Stormcrow had overplayed her position. She could not hold Kusak's eye, much less his hand.

  Kusak shouldered his way through the throng around his wife.

  “I fear that you come too late, Captain Kusak,” said Baratiya, swilling from her wine-cup. Kusak, his voice trembling, asked her to grant him a private meeting. In response, she showed him her engagement card, already signed with the names of four sturdy male volunteers.

  Kusak begged her to reconsider these appointments.

  Then she replied: “Then show me your own program, dear!”

  Kusak handed his engagement card to her, with his mustached face impassive but his shoulders slumping like a thief's. Baratiya said nothing, but she smiled cruelly, dipped a feather pen in the public inkwell and overwrote Stormcrow's famous name. She defaced it coolly and deliberately, leaving only her ladyship's time-tattered initials.... which are “R” and “K.”

  Man and wife then linked arms and advanced to a private verandah. They emerged from it only to eat. They publicly demanded and ate the most forbidden meat of all, the awesome fare the pioneers ate when they first founded our Hill Station. It is not pork, neither is it beef. But a man and woman will eat that meat when there is no other choice but death: when their future survival together means more to them than any inhibition from their past. In the plain, honest life of our Hills, it is our ultimate pledge.

  A man and woman with a child are of one flesh. When they take a step so grave and public as eating human meat, even Government sees fit to respect that. So wife and husband ate from their own special platter, with their faces burning and their hands trembling with rekindled passion. They ate together with a single mind, like two people stirring the same flame.

  Then Stormcrow, who will never again gorge herself in such a way, turned toward me in the lamplight. She confessed to me that she knew herself well and truly beaten.

  Then she looked me in the eye and confided: “In the very first days of Creation, a woman could just hand a man an apple and make him perfectly happy. Now this is a twice-fallen world. We women have truly been kicked out of Paradise—and as for the men, they've learned nothing.”

  I thought otherwise, as is common with me, but I had nothing to say to console her. So I simply stroked the pretty henna patterns on her hands.

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  * * *

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE

  Charles Coleman Finlay

  So we're getting at a table in a Starbucks, and the beefy guy in the Hawaiian shirt says to me, “Yeah, after the colostomy, I had them put an eyeball in my anus—seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  I think about saying, “Why, ‘cause you wanted hindsight?”

  But because I don't know him or his sense of humor, but mostly because I really need the job, whatever the job is, what I end up doing is taking a long sip of coffee, then saying, “So how'd that work out?”

  “Not so well, you know!” He's surprisingly intense about it, so I slouch forward and rub the stubble on my chin as though I care. Here I am, wearing serious bling, a hand-crafted jewel-covered globe on a chain around my neck, best thing I own, worth a small fortune. The last client I dealt with, some lawyer, made a big deal about it, had all kinds of questions. Now it's this
guy, who's wearing an ugly shirt and telling me about the eyeball in his ass. And I have to take him seriously.

  “See,” he's saying, “I figured I could stick my ass in my windshield and drive down the highway mooning people.”

  I decide I don't care so much whether this guy ends up being my client or not, because, hey, he's whack. So I say, “See anything worth seeing?”

  He laughs. “It didn't work out. The optical nerve they ran up my anus to my spine was more like telegraph wire than DSL. I couldn't see shit—I know! Don't say it. But no depth perception, not much color, just a lot of blurry movement. I tried to drive like this, holding the steering wheel between my legs.” He leans over out of his seat, and reaches down between his legs, miming the action. “Ran off the road on the first curve. Sprained my neck, was lucky I didn't roll the car. You ever have the mocha frappuccino?”

  He's drinking some deluxe frothy thing full of sugar and topped with whipped cream. It must take a college degree to prepare it because the girl behind the counter was telling us about her years as an English major for the three hours it took her to fix the drink. Me, I have my coffee plain. I used to joke that I liked my coffee like I liked my women—strong, hot, and black. But the truth is, I just like it cheap and easy. Which is how I like my women these days too. But it's better if I don't think much about that.

  What I answer is, “No.”

  He takes the lid off to slurp it, and says, “It's like slushie heaven.”

  “What happened to the eyeball?” I ask, ‘cause I gotta know.

  “I had it removed when they grew the new intestine and took off the colostomy. Like I said, not my best idea ever. So are you interested or not? In the job?”

  “What job?” I say. “We haven't talked about anything except your surgeries.”

  He says, “Oh, I'm sorry. Guess I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. But what I mentioned in my e-mail. I was engaged to be married and it turned out badly, now I want to get my jewels back.”

  “Jewels?” I ask. Perking up some.

  He shifts in his seat. The animated parrots on his Hawaiian shirt flutter nervously to new branches. “Yeah.”

  Because I'm impatient and want to know what I'm going after, I say, “Like your grandmother's diamonds? What?”

  “No,” he says. “They're my family jewels.”

  I must stare at him like I'm stupid or something, because he tilts his head back and holds up his chunky hands in open supplication, and finally I say, “What?”

  With a look of exasperation, he leans forward and whispers. “My testicles. She's got my testicles.”

  “Dude,” I say, reaching down to check my own package and make sure it's intact. “Whoa.”

  Tilting his chair back, with a glance at the girl who made our drinks, he says, “I gave them to her for an engagement present. She said she wanted them because she wanted kids and all that. You know, I was in love, I thought, hey, kids, cool. But after we broke it off she wouldn't give them back.”

  And I know if he's telling the truth, I'm in. I'm thinking, if he's telling the truth I'm crazy if I'm not in.

  Of course, he's not telling the whole truth. No one ever does. But is he telling enough truth to make it worth my while to get involved? That's what I need to find out.

  * * * *

  You have to understand that I got into burglary the way some women get into prostitution. First I did it for fun, then I did it for some friends, now I do it for money.

  That's what I tell myself anyways. It's my way up.

  Maybe I should tell you about it, so you can understand why I do what I do. When I do it later.

  It started out a few years ago. I had a roommate who had a drug habit. He was a Have, like the guy I was meeting here in the Starbucks, and I was—am—a Have-not. I was born a borderline Have, my mom being a corporate lawyer and all, but when she divorced my dad for her trophy husband, Corwin, about the time I started middle school, Dad and I plummeted pretty quickly into Have-not territory. I've been trying to climb my way out ever since.

  So my roommate, like I said, turns out he was a gasm addict, a dryhead, hooked on moneyshots, those inhalers that make a guy have orgasms. I tried that stuff once, but let's face it, it doesn't compare to the real thing, not least because where I live you can get the real thing cheaper.

  Anyway, I found out roomie had a habit when he started pawning my stuff to make his dealer rich. I gave him one day to move out, which he did. When I came home from work, he had moved out all right—and taken all my stuff with him.

  I couldn't afford the rates the contract cops charge these days. Oh, sure, I could've taken him to small claims court for nothing, but then I didn't really want to wait until we were scheduled for our TV slot to get satisfaction. That can take months. Instead I found out where he moved, broke in, and stole my stuff back. Since he'd already sold some of it, I had to visit him several more times, over six months and a couple addresses, until the checkbook balanced out.

  The last time I robbed him, it was just for the thrill. The freak had gone straight, borrowed money from his folks, put up cameras and bought a guard fearit, one of those genetically engineered ferret hybrids smalltime dope dealers keep around. But sneaky low-tech beats stupid high-tech. I spraypainted the cameras and drugged the fearit with Nyquil-marinated chicken livers, broke in and took what I wanted. Then nature called at an opportune moment, so I left a king-size dump in the middle of his queen-size bed, wiped my ass on his pillowcases, and called it even.

  I left off that last part when I told my friend Diane about it. Which ended up being lucky, because she'd just found out her boyfriend Joe was cheating on her. Diane was, is, a Euro-Chinese kickboxing brainiac, with big dark eyes and great taste in jewelry. It wasn't like her to get all emotional, but she'd been in love with Joe and had her life planned out right down to the brood of children. That was going to be her whole life. So she took it pretty hard, especially when Joe kept a bunch of things that mattered to her, including her earpod with maybe her ten thousand favorite songs on it, her collection of Generation Mutant action figures, and the celery-colored Fiestaware.

  There we were, drinking away her sorrow, and she started telling me how Joe ruined her world, how he took something away from her she could never have replaced. She was cold-hearted that night, swearing she'd have him killed. I said she didn't need to go that far to get her stuff back. I could do it for her. Trying to impress her, be the nice guy rebound after that jerk. She took me up on it.

  I got her most of her stuff back, but it wasn't enough to make her happy and I didn't get to be the rebound. Truth is, she's always been cold-hearted since that time. Joe died in a motorcycle accident a couple months later, casting a weird pall over the whole thing. She called me up to take her to the funeral, said I was the only one who could understand her true feelings about him. She finished law school after that, found a job at a big criminal firm, and crossed the border into Have-land. And that was that.

  I crossed the border into Crooksville. My plan was to do a few big jobs, salt away the money, and start over. Finish college, go to law school maybe, something like that. Only the jobs were never big enough to give me that chance, even though I keep trying to move up into the big leagues.

  Diane did me a favor here and there, telling some of her more discreet colleagues about my special talents. If their clients didn't have enough money for legal fees to resolve property disputes, they referred their clients to me. Over the past couple years, I've built up a steady business. It's a better gig than smash-and-grabs. I get some inside tip, a key or passcode, plus the people who are robbed are usually not eager to involve the cops. I make way more than I could on my own.

  It was one of Diane's sleazier friends who contacted me about the beefy guy sitting across from me in Starbuck's. In an odd way, everything I have now I owe to Diane.

  I try not to think about the fact that I don't have what I really wanted.

  * * * *

  What I
say next to the guy in the Hawaiian shirt is, “Wow. That took some balls for her to do.”

  He frowns at me like he's already heard all those jokes, which probably he has, so I jump to the next question.

  “Why not just take her to court?”

  After another drink of frothy coffee, he leans forward and says, “Look, I depend on a trust fund and my mother administers it like a fucking food stamp program. She tolerates a lot but if she ever found out that I lost all of her future grandchildren, she'd go off like a missile.”

  “I'll do it,” I tell him.

  Because I'm in the moment I hear him say “trust fund.” I name a price that's twice my usual fee and he says yes so fast I figure I'd lowballed him.

  But that's what happens when you move up into the next league. You make a few mistakes, and you learn.

  I won't sign any affidavits for accuracy, but here's the story he told me, the way he told it to me, only with the boring stuff edited out.

  Said his name was Casto Beckett, and waited for a response like that was supposed to mean something to me. Okay, so later I looked it up, and he's one of the Becketts who own all the rental properties and retail space and the old nostalgia malls they have out by the exurbs. At the time, I had no idea who he was and just waved him on impatiently. He wandered a lot, talking about boarding school, hospitals, his controlling mother. Said he spent a lot of time and money on “business projects"—by which I gather he meant travel, clubs, and drugs—before his mother clamped down on him.

  His ex-fiancée's name is Patrina Solove. They met at a club or a party, somewhere on the scene, he can't remember. But she was an insecure, evil, controlling bitch just like his mother, which is why he fell for her so hard according to his therapist. He'd been in a self-destructive phase then—he didn't do anything harder than the mocha frappuccino these days, honest—and he'd made a lot of bad decisions. One of them was buying Ms. Solove an engagement ring with a five carat diamond in it.