Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Slowly his mind wandered back to the quandary at hand—what had become of the monkey’s hind legs? Kenny frowned and puzzled and tried to work it all out in his head, but nothing occurred to him. Finally he slid his newly discovered feet into a pair of bedroom slippers and shuffled to the closet were he had stored all of his mirrors. Closing his eyes, he reached in, fumbled about, and found the full-length mirror that had once hung on his bedroom wall. It was a large, wide mirror. Working entirely by touch, Kenny fetched it out, carried it a few feet, and painstakingly propped it up against a wall. Then he held his breath and opened his eyes.

  There in the mirror stood a gaunt, gray, skeletal-looking fellow, hunched over and sickly. On his back, grinning, was a thing the size of a gorilla. A very obese gorilla. It had a long, pale, snakelike tail, and great long arms, and it was as white as a maggot and entirely hairless. It had no legs. It was … attached to him now, growing right out of his back. Its grin was terrible, and filled up half of its face. It looked very like the gross proprietor of the monkey treatment emporium, in fact. Why had he never noticed that before? Of course, of course.

  Kenny Dorchester turned from the mirror, and cooked the monkey a big rich dinner before going to bed.

  That night he dreamed of how it all started, back in the Slab when he had met Boney Moroney. In his nightmare a great evil white thing rode atop Moroney’s shoulders, eating slab after slab of ribs, but Kenny politely pretended not to notice while he and Boney made bright, spritely conversation. Then the thing ran out of ribs, so it reached down and lifted one of Boney’s arms and began to eat his hand. The bones crunched nicely, and Moroney kept right on talking. The creature had eaten its way up to the elbow when Kenny woke screaming, covered with a cold sweat. He had wet his bed, too.

  Agonizingly, he pushed himself up and staggered to the toilet, where he dry-heaved for ten minutes. The monkey, angry at being wakened, gave him a desultory slap from time to time.

  And then a furtive light came into Kenny Dorchester’s eyes. “Boney,” he whispered. Hurriedly, he scrambled back to his bedroom on hands and knees, rose, and threw on some clothes. It was three in the morning, but Kenny knew there was no time to waste. He looked up an address in his phone book, and called a cab.

  Boney Moroney lived in a tall, modern high-rise by the river, with moonlight shining brightly off its silver-mirrored flanks. When Kenny staggered in, he found the night doorman asleep at his station, which was just as well. Kenny tiptoed past him to the elevators and rode up to the eighth floor. The monkey on his back had begun stirring now, and seemed uneasy and ill-tempered.

  Kenny’s finger trembled as he pushed the round black button set in the door to Moroney’s apartment, just beneath the eyehole. Musical chimes sounded loudly within, startling in the morning stillness. Kenny leaned on the button. The music played on and on. Finally he heard footsteps, heavy and threatening. The peephole opened and closed again. Then the door swung open.

  The apartment was black, though the far wall was made entirely of glass, so the moonlight illuminated the darkness softly. Outlined against the stars and the lights of the city stood the man who had opened the door. He was hugely, obscenely fat, and his skin was a pasty fungoid white, and he had little dark eyes set deep into crinkles in his broad suety face. He wore nothing but a vast pair of striped shorts. His breasts flopped about against his chest when he shifted his weight. And when he smiled, his teeth filled up half his face. A great crescent moon of teeth. He smiled when he saw Kenny, and Kenny’s monkey. Kenny felt sick. The thing in the door weighed twice as much as the one on his back. Kenny trembled. “Where is he?” he whispered softly. “Where is Boney? What have you done to him?”

  The creature laughed, and its pendulous breasts flounced about wildly as it shook with mirth. The monkey on Kenny’s back began to laugh, too, a higher, thinner laughter as sharp as the edge of a knife. It reached down and twisted Kenny’s ear cruelly. Suddenly a vast fear and a vast anger filled Kenny Dorchester. He summoned all the strength left in his wasted body and pushed forward, and somehow, somehow, he barged past the obese colossus who barred his way and staggered into the interior of the apartment. “Boney,” he called, “where are you, Boney? It’s me, Kenny.”

  There was no answer. Kenny went from room to room. The apartment was filthy, a shambles. There was no sign of Boney Moroney anywhere. When Kenny came panting back to the living room, the monkey shifted abruptly, and threw him off balance. He stumbled and fell hard. Pain went shooting up through his knees, and he cut open one outstretched hand on the edge of the chrome-and-glass coffee table. Kenny began to weep.

  He heard the door close, and the thing that lived here moved slowly toward him. Kenny blinked back tears and stared at the approach of those two mammoth legs, pale in the moonlight, sagging all around with fat. He looked up and it was like gazing up the side of a mountain. Far, far above him grinned those terrible mocking teeth. “Where is he?” Kenny Dorchester whispered. “What have you done with poor Boney?”

  The grin did not change. The thing reached down a meaty hand, fingers as thick as a length of kielbasa, and snagged the waistband of the baggy striped shorts. It pulled them down clumsily, and they settled to the ground like a parachute, bunching around its feet.

  “Oh, no,” said Kenny Dorchester.

  The thing had no genitals. Hanging down between its legs, almost touching the carpet now that it had been freed from the confines of the soiled shorts, was a wrinkled droopy bag of skin, long and gaunt, growing from the creature’s crotch. But as Kenny stared at it in horror, it thrashed feebly, and stirred, and the loose folds of flesh separated briefly into tiny arms and legs.

  Then it opened its eyes.

  Kenny Dorchester screamed and suddenly he was back on his feet, lurching away from the grinning obscenity in the center of the room. Between its legs, the thing that had been Boney Moroney raised its pitiful stick-thin arms in supplication. “Oh, nooooo,” Kenny moaned, blubbering, and he danced about wildly, the vast weight of his monkey heavy on his back. Round and round he danced in the dimness, in the moonlight, searching for an escape from this madness.

  Beyond the plate glass wall the lights of the city beckoned.

  Kenny paused and panted and stared at them. Somehow the monkey must have known what he was thinking, for suddenly it began to beat on him wildly, to twist at his ears, to rain savage blows all around his head. But Kenny Dorchester paid no mind. With a smile that was almost beatific, he gathered the last of his strength and rushed pell-mell toward the moonlight.

  The glass shattered into a million glittering shards, and Kenny smiled all the way down.

  It was the smell that told him he was still alive, the smell of disinfectant, and the feel of starched sheets beneath him. A hospital, he thought amidst a haze of pain. He was in a hospital. Kenny wanted to cry. Why hadn’t he died? Oh, why, oh, why? He opened his eyes, and tried to say something.

  Suddenly a nurse was there, standing over him, feeling his brow and looking down with concern. Kenny wanted to beg her to kill him, but the words would not come. She went away, and when she came back she had others with her.

  A chubby young man stood by his side and touched him and prodded him here and there. Kenny’s mouth worked soundlessly. “Easy,” the doctor said. “You’ll be all right, Mr. Dorchester, but you have a long way to go. You’re in a hospital. You’re a very lucky man. You fell eight stories. You ought to be dead.”

  I want to be dead, Kenny thought, and he shaped the words very, very carefully with his mouth, but no one seemed to hear them. Maybe the monkey has taken over, he thought. Maybe I- can’t even talk anymore.

  “He wants to say something,” the nurse said.

  “I can see that,” said the chubby young doctor. “Mr. Dorchester, please don’t strain yourself. Really. If you are trying to ask about your friend, I’m afraid he wasn’t as lucky as you. He was killed by the fall. You would have died as well, but fortunately you landed on top of him.”

/>   Kenny’s fear and confusion must have been obvious, for the nurse put a gentle hand on his arm. “The other man,” she said patiently. “The fat one. You can thank God he was so fat, too. He broke your fall like a giant pillow.”

  And finally Kenny Dorchester understood what they were saying, and he began to weep, but now he was weeping for joy, and trembling.

  Three days later, he managed his first word. “Pizza,” he said, and it came weak and hoarse from between his lips, but the sound elated him and he repeated it, louder, and then louder still, and before long he was pushing the nurse’s call button and shouting and pushing and shouting. “Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza,” he chanted, and he would not be calm until they ordered one for him. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

  PAT CADIGAN

  Nearly Departed

  Born in Schenectady, New York, Pat Cadigan is one of the best new writers in SF and is well on her way to becoming one of the Big Names of the ’80s. For many years, Cadigan was primarily known as co-editor of Shayol, perhaps the best of the semiprozines (it was honored with a World Fantasy Award in the “Special Achievement, Non-Professional” category in 1981), but in 1980 she made her first professional sale, to New Dimensions, and soon became a frequent contributor to Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Shadows, among other markets. Cadigan has been making something of a mark of late as a writer of quiet but scary supernatural horror stories, but within SF she is perhaps best known so far for her sequence of “Pathosfinder” stories. Beginning with “The Pathosfinder” in The Berkley Showcase in 1981, this series details the adventures of “Deadpan Allie,” a sort of high-tech psychoanalyst of the future who can hook directly into another person’s mind to seek out the root causes of their psychological troubles. In the jazzy and multifaceted story that follows, one of the “Pathosfinder” sequence, she suggests that stock phrases like “the privacy of the grave,” “quiet as a tomb” and “rest in peace” may soon be marked “obsolete” in the dictionary …

  Cadigan lives in Overland Park, Kansas, where she works for Hallmark Cards. She has served as a World Fantasy Award judge and as Chairwoman of the Nebula Award jury. She is currently at work on a novel, tentatively entitled Captives.

  “Three things,” I said, and held up a matching set of three fingers.

  Nelson Nelson looked tolerantly amused. “Run ’em.”

  “One—” I curled my index finger. “I don’t do empaths. Two—” I bent my ring finger. “I don’t get physical. Three—” I pointed the remaining finger at the old fox on the other side of the desk. “I don’t rob graves.”

  The couch creaked as NN rolled over onto his back and folded one arm behind his head. “Is that all that’s bothering you? Kitta Wren hasn’t been buried.”

  “I don’t do dead people. If God had meant me to pathosfind dead people, he wouldn’t have invented the Brain Police.”

  A broad smile oozed over NN’s saggy features as he reached for a cigarette. He was smoking those lavender things again. They smelled like young girls. “What’s the matter, Allie? Are you scared of a dead person’s brain?”

  “I’m scarder of some live ones I know. Fear isn’t the issue. I just have certain beliefs and this job you’re asking me to take goes against every one of them.”

  “Such as?”

  Sighing, I shifted position on my couch and scratched my forearm. The vulgar gold lamé upholstery NN was so enamored of was giving me a rash. You can dispute taste but you can’t stop it. “Such as, death is the end. The end means there is no more. Dead people should be allowed to rest in peace instead of having their brains plundered and looted for any last bit of—of treasure, like Egyptian tombs.”

  “Eloquent. Really eloquent, Deadpan,” NN said after a moment. “You’re probably the most eloquent mindplayer this agency has ever employed. Someday you might talk yourself out of a job, but not this time.” He winked at me. “Actually, I respect your feelings. Those are good feelings, especially for someone who trades on the name Deadpan Allie.”

  “Being deadpan doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings. You just don’t show them.”

  “I personally don’t share them. I feel there’s a lot of validity in, say, going in and getting the last measures of unfinished music from a master composer who dropped dead at the harpsitron, or mining the brain of a gifted writer for the story that was unwritable in life. Postmortem art is highly regarded and a large number of artists, including Kitta Wren, signed postmortem art contracts. It’s a sort of life after death—the only one we know about for sure.”

  I scratched my rash some more and didn’t say anything.

  “Kitta Wren wanted a postmortem. It’s not grave robbing. If she hadn’t signed the contract, it would be different.”

  “Kitta Wren was a five-star lunatic. She had a psychomimic’s license and when she wasn’t writing her poetry, she was bouncing off the walls.”

  “Ah, but she was brilliant,” NN said dreamily. I blinked at him, astounded. I’d had no idea he liked poetry. “When it came to her work, she was totally in control. Somehow I always thought that control would bring her down. In a thousand years, I never would have guessed anyone would kill her.”

  I wanted to tear my hair and rend my garment. “NN,” I said as calmly as I could, “I hate murder. I am not the Brain Police. If they want to find out who did her, let them send in one of their own to wander around in her mind.”

  “Oh, they will,” Nelson Nelson said cheerfully. “Right after the postmortem.” A cloud of lavender smoke dissipated over my head as NN flipped his cigarette into the suckhole in the center of his desk. “The Brain Police can’t do anything until that’s taken care of. Otherwise whatever poetry is left in there could be fragmented and irretrievably lost.”

  The rash had crept up past my elbow. I kept scratching. “There are mindplayers who postmortem for a living.”

  “I’ll pardon the expression. Wren’s manager hired you. Come along, now, it’ll take you somewhere you’ve never traveled.”

  “I’ve never been to the heart of a white dwarf star and I don’t see why I should go.”

  NN exhaled with a noise that was almost a growl. “Do you want to work for me?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  He gave me that oozy smile again. “Deadpan, this is important. And you might learn something.” He raised up on one elbow. “Just give it a chance. If you can’t do it once you’re in, fine. But try it.”

  I sat up, scrubbing my arm through my sleeve. “Don’t make a habit of signing me up for postmortems.”

  My eyes popped out. I held them in my palms until I felt the connections to my optic nerves break and then lowered them gently into the bowl of solution. The agency’s hypersystem would have removed them for me, but I’ve always preferred doing that little chore myself.

  I lay down on the slab and felt it move me head first into the system. Even blind, I could sense the vastness of it around me as it swallowed me down to my neck. It was the size of a small canyon, big enough to spend the rest of your life in just wandering around. All I wanted at the moment was some basic reality affixing and reassurance. If I was going to run barefoot through a dead lunatic’s mind, I needed all the reinforcement I could get. After an hour of letting the system eat my head, I almost felt ready.

  I hadn’t been gassing Nelson Nelson as to how I felt about postmortems just to cover a corpse phobia. To me, you ought to be able to take something with you—or at least make sure it goes the same time you do—and if it’s your art, so be it. Hell, there were plenty of living artists with a lot to offer. Stripping a dead person’s mind for the last odds and ends seemed close to unspeakable.

  I supposed the appeal of postmortem art was partly what Nelson Nelson had said—life after death. But there seemed to be more than a little thanatophilia at work. Art after death made me think of sirens on rocks, and I wasn’t the only one who heard them singing. Occasionally there’d be an item in
the news-tube about some obscure holographer or composer—holographers and composers appeared to be particularly susceptible—found dead with a note instructing that an immediate postmortem be performed because the person had been convinced that the unreachable masterpiece he/she had been groping for successfully in life could be liberated only by the Big Bang of death.

  So there’d be the requested postmortem and the mindplayer who hooked into the brain, which was all wired up and floating in stay-juice like a toy boat lost at sea, would come out not with a magnificent phoenix formed of the poor deader’s ashes but with a few little squibs and scraps from half-completed thoughts that had turned in on themselves, swallowing their own tails for lack of substance, vortices that had gone nowhere and never would. Some people aren’t happy just with being alive. They have to be dead, too.

  At least Kitta Wren hadn’t been one of those. The information Nelson Nelson had dumped into the data center in my apartment was freckled with little details, but rather sketchy taken all together. I punched her picture up on my screen and sided it with her bio.

  She’d been a very ordinary woman, squarish in the face with a high forehead and medium brown untreated hair. Her only physical affectation had been her eyes. Since the advent of biogems, everyone had at least a semi-precious stare. Jade and star sapphires had always been popular choices and moonstones proliferated among entertainers of the more mediocre stripe. I hadn’t seen very many people with my own preference for the shifting brown of cat’s-eye and it takes a certain coloring to carry off diamonds effectively, but Kitta Wren had gotten herself something I’d never seen before.