Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  Spacedog instantly went placid, faster than any normal person would’ve. “Verdad! Mais oui! Back at mother — Back home! Fully charged with particles of powertude!”

  “No problem then. We’ll just have someone drive you there to pick it up, and you’ll be back to racing before you can say ‘Jack the Bear.’”

  “Nein! Spacedog alone must go. No accompaniment needed or possible. Perimeters of defensive illusion not breached must be!”

  “Oh…kay. Who has a street machine they can lend Spacedog?”

  “He can take El Tigre.” The words were out of my mouth before I knew they were coming.

  “Oblong! Mi companero! Spacedog your primitive pride and joy will kindly treat. Back in the shortest span!”

  Joaquin shook my hand and said, “Thanks, Papa Obie. I know you don’t let just anyone drive your buggy. But we need Spacedog to win today.”

  “Sure. No sweat.” I followed Spacedog toward my car and handed him the keys. He slipped easily behind the wheel, toyed with the shift and the pedals, then cranked the engine.

  “You sure you’re good with driving this kind of car? It doesn’t work by helmet, you know…”

  “Downloading scripts even as we speak. Finished! Haptic prompts all in place! Adios, mon frère!”

  He roared off then in a cloud of dust, faster than Korean Commies retreating before MacArthur’s troops.

  When the air cleared, I saw Stella left alone in the crowd.

  I hurried to her side.

  I don’t think Spacedog meant to leave her behind. In fact, in retrospect I know he didn’t. But he was just so jazzed about racing that he forgot all about his woman. It’s an oversight not a few hotrodders have made.

  Stella was showing more emotion than I had ever seen her display before, but unfortunately it wasn’t the good kind. Her usual smile had been replaced by a fretful grimace. She was kind of twitchy all over, and her jagged unnatural pupils were changing shape and size like the neon chaser lights at Googie’s.

  “Hey, Stella, what’s the matter? Don’t worry, the old Spacedog will be back soon. And he actually looked like he knew how to drive my car, so he probably won’t get in no accidents. Don’t worry about nothing. You need a drink? Come with me and we’ll grab a couple of cold sodas.”

  I walked the jittery woman over to where I knew a cooler of drinks waited, on the far side of one of the car trailers. The races had already begun, and everybody who wasn’t tinkering with their machines or driving was busy watching. Stella and I were totally alone for the first time since we had met, and Spacedog was accelerating away from us.

  I bent over, fishing for two bottles of pop from the cracked ice. “You like grapefruit? All I see here is Squirt.” When I straightened up with the drinks and turned to face Stella, I nearly died.

  She still wore her blue angora sweater, but she had stripped off her pants. Her bush blazed as platinum as her hairdo.

  Now she lunged at the waistband of my trousers, and I dropped both bottles to fend her off.

  “Stella, no! We can’t! Not here!”

  She wouldn’t listen. Her hands fastened on my pants and popped the top button. The sound of my zipper unladdering sounded louder to me than the engines a few hundred yards away.

  Stella leaped up and wrapped her legs around my waist, and suddenly there was no more possibility of resistance. I was harder than Egyptian algebra, all the stifled lust of several months coming to a head.

  I grabbed her boobs as she wriggled her pelvis to fit me into her wet heat, and despite my enthusiasm and hers I nearly wilted.

  That was no sweater Stella always wore. Her torso was covered in blue fur. I had twin handfuls of shaggy tit, like grabbing a combination of Lily St. Cyr and Lambchop.

  But underneath the short fur they were still the most incredible boobs I had ever handled.

  I pivoted around to brace Stella’s back against the side of the trailer, and in less time than it takes to tell we finished the hottest, wildest, most surprising knee-trembler I had ever dared to imagine. She never made a sound the whole while.

  No one caught us. When it was over and I had stopped panting, we dressed again and rejoined the crowd.

  Spacedog returned from his mission in under an hour. With the replacement fuel source installed in his car, he rejoined the field and proceeded to whomp Bakersfield ass.

  Finally, around sunset, he came triumphantly to where Stella and I waited for him. But as soon as he got within a few feet of us, Spacedog somehow knew. He threw his arms toward the sky and wailed.

  “Ruined! Polluted! The imprinting of my gyno-symbiote all shattered! Now either Oblong or Spacedog must die!”

  Behind the wheel of El Tigre, heading south out of San Diego toward Ensenada in early darkness, following the tail-lights of Spacedog’s sleek UFO down the highway, I felt a crazy mess of emotions. Shame, fear, pride, anger, happiness — I could hardly begin to sort out my feelings. Sure I had betrayed a friend. But I hadn’t made the first move. His girl had jumped my bones. And what a jumping! But was she responsible for her own actions? Was Stella simple-minded? Had I taken advantage of a beautiful moron? And what part of Italy grew girls with blue fur and starry eyes?

  I tried to dismiss all these confusing questions by concentrating on the road. I didn’t know where we were going, but I was honor-bound to go there.

  Back at Paradise Mesa, the Bean Bandits had held an impromptu court to decide how the affair between me and Spacedog would play out. (I confessed everything up front. Stella, natch, stayed silent through the whole debate.) Spacedog, as the affronted party, had gotten to call the tune.

  “I this cabron challenge! Cosmic Chicken the trial!”

  Joaquin wore a sad and solemn look. “I don’t know about that, ’dog. Playing chicken usually ends up with someone getting killed. We don’t want any heat from the cops. That would spell the end of the Bandits.”

  “No worry. Not here ritual of the Chicken enacted. Distant place, only Oblong and Spacedog present, no witnesses.”

  “Well, whatever’s gotta be.” Joaquin gripped both our hands. “May the best Bandit win.”

  I didn’t relish playing Chicken with Spacedog, especially at night. But I owed him something for my betrayal of his trust, and this was the method of payment he had chosen.

  Halfway to Ensenada, in the middle of nowhere without a sign of civilization around, Spacedog flipped on his turn signal, then pulled a left offroad. His headlights, then mine, illuminated an empty field.

  Empty for the first second or two of our arrival. Then a giant lighted hatch opened in mid-air about twenty feet above us. From the lower edge of the hatch a corrugated ramp extruded itself to the turf, and Spacedog drove straight up it and into sheer impossibility. El Tigre was right behind him, but the car must have been driving itself, since my brain was frozen in disbelief.

  We came to a halt inside a vast vaulted hanger, full of strange machineries and stranger smells and a couple of smallish spindle-shaped craft that looked like the Air Force’s worst nightmares.

  I climbed out of my car to join Spacedog and Stella.

  “This thing is a spaceship! A real UFO! You two aren’t from Italy at all! You’re aliens!”

  “Verdad, traitorous companero of yore. Now must you the limits of your primitive worldview finally acknowledge. But surely Bandits one and all already knew as much.”

  I considered Spacedog’s words. “I guess we all did. But we just didn’t want to admit it. So long as you were winning races for us, it didn’t matter.”

  “Understood. And I too the boat did not wish to rock. Too much fun I was having! Spacedog not welcome on home world any longer. Too oddball, too flippy, too wild! Only racing with new friends my sole raison yo soy. This big secret, not to be broadcast. But you not ever return will, so consequence of my telling nil.”

  “Let me off this thing, Spacedog! I didn’t agree to this!”

  “Too late. Observe.”

  Some kind of deluxe TV
screen on a nearby wall flared into life. The whole stinking Earth, small as a cloud-wrapped custom blue gearshift knob, barely registered in a lower corner of the star-filled image.

  “Where are we heading?”

  “To the hottest track around. Your primary.”

  “Primary what?”

  “Your Sun, your Sun!”

  I slumped back against my car. “We’re going to play chicken against the Sun?”

  “Correct.”

  “Would you at least tell me why we have to do this?”

  Spacedog indicated the hangdog Stella, who looked as if she were suffering from the worst kind of hangover combined with a bad case of the flu. “My exteriorized anima you have psychosomatically contaminated. No longer bonded to me alone, but now partly to you she is. With the death of one of us, she whole will restored be.”

  There was a lot more talk about entangled muon pairs and hormonal tipping points and morphic resonance and quantum brain structures and the various telepathic alien animals that Stella had been constructed from, and how she had panicked once Spacedog’s mentality passed out of contact and how she had fastened on me as his replacement. But I wasn’t paying any attention, because all I could focus on was Spacedog’s eyes.

  He had removed his sunglasses to reveal some kind of chrome robot eyeballs in place of natural ones. Now he levered up the hood of my car, and his eyeballs telescoped out of his green face on flexible stalks to examine hidden parts of my engine.

  “Impossible to retrofit. Must dissolve and grow new one.”

  He went to a cabinet and found what appeared to be a spray can and a silver egg. He sprayed El Tigre’s engine that I had labored so many hours on, and the whole thing just crumbled into sand. Then he dropped the egg into the empty space, sprayed that from the same can — only after twisting the nozzle — and closed the hood.

  “New powerplant ready by time we Mercury pass. Now to control room for much-needed sustenance.”

  We three rode some kind of antigravity chute up to the bridge. A ring of TVs showed a dozen different outer space views that sent my brain deeper into a tizzy. The view that really flipped me out was the one that displayed our Sun. That raging furnace swelled even as I watched, and soon filled the whole screen. Then the magnification dropped a notch, and the hellspot was small again. But the whole cycle just kept repeating: swell, diminish, swell, diminish — At this rate we’d be there in no time.

  Spacedog and I sat down in some kind of chairs that squirmed around to accomodate our butts. Stella moved half-heartedly about, assembling some kind of space food. I guess I ate, but I don’t really remember. Nobody said anything until Spacedog spoke. His manic manner had faded to a thoughtful cast.

  “Resistance to Stella by any hominid inseminator futile is, Oblong. This I admit. Also my complicity and unforesightedness in leaving her behind under your exclusive care. And yet our duel in the Sun must still take place. Regrets profound, lo siento mucho, pero que sera, sera.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  In no time Mercury hurtled by us like a forlorn piece of grit under the wheels of a dragster. When the spaceship finally stopped, Spacedog told me were just one million miles from the Sun.

  On the TV down in the hanger, the Sun boiled and lashed like an insane beast. Giant prominences erupted, whipped the vacuum, then collapsed back into the white-hot speckled chaos of the surface. Heaving clouds of colored gases shimmied like Gypsy Rose Lee. The scene was like looking into Satan’s flaming asshole itself.

  I drew my terrified eyes away to focus on the new engine under the hood of El Tigre. A featureless irregular silver blob, the mechanism floated, unattached to any drive train or controls.

  “This neutrinos eats. Not from small container source used on Earth, but taking from ambient flux put out by Sun. Think of ramscoop on hood of your car. Power from neutrinos used to warp spacetime geodesics and propel vehicle. Much higher speeds reached out here.”

  “And how do I control it? I don’t have head bumps to run a helmet like you.”

  “Neutrino drive now interfaced to your standard controls. Pedals, steering wheel, shift.”

  “So, I assume we both race toward the Sun till one of us burns up?”

  “Not so. Contest over too soon if heat a factor. Protective fields surrounding your car absolutely resistant to temperatures of over ten billion kelvins. Sun only one million tops.”

  “Then what’s the danger?”

  “Gravity. Drive not powerful enough to overcome Sun’s pull. Too close, and trapped forever you are, lost in the turbulence of convection zone. Death when limited oxygen supply in car runs out. Quite painless, actually, with unique scenic surroundings.”

  “So the first one to chicken out actually survives and wins Stella.”

  “Yes. But then victor also number one coward fake hotrodder, full of merde, and must forever live with undying shame.”

  I considered for a moment. The alien logic was all twisted, with the “chicken” getting the girl. But then the matter of honor hit home. My mind ran back to the war, when I had nearly bought the farm a score of times, sticking my head up out of the foxhole to snap off a few rounds, rather than be thought a coward. Maybe Spacedog’s logic wasn’t so twisted after all.

  “With any luck, both of us’ll die. Let’s rumble.”

  Stella had been left back on the bridge. I climbed behind the wheel of El Tigre, and noticed a small TV screen that looked like it had been grown somehow right onto my dash. The tiny TV lit up, showing Spacedog in the cockpit of UFO.

  “Shields on,” said Spacedog, and instantly our two vehicles were surrounded by glowing transparent bubbles of force.

  “Actual photons not permitted to truly pass through shields to your eyes. Exterior conditions reconstructed based on information hitting shields, then result displayed on inside of bubble. Sophisticated simulation, all virtual but highly accurate.”

  The hull hatch opened, air puffed away, and the car we called the UFO zipped out. Tentatively I pressed the accelerator and El Tigre responded like a charm.

  Outside the big ship, we aimed our noses at the raving furnace of the Sun. A virtual set of Christmas Tree lights appeared on the inner surface of my shields and began to work down to green.

  I didn’t wait, but tromped down when they turned yellow, shooting ahead of Spacedog.

  Even if I had to cheat, this was one race between us I was going to win. Or lose, depending on your point of view.

  All the fear and resignation and dismay I had felt inside the ship had been burned away by the awesome sight of the Sun and realization of the unique chance I had been given.

  No one on Earth had ever pulled a drag like this, a neutrino drag. Behind the wheel of the most souped-up car ever, I was blasting down God’s own blacktop, toward certain glorious death and a place in racing legend.

  Assuming Spacedog was honorable enough to report back to the Bandits.

  “You’d better tell Joaquin and everyone else about me winning!” I yelled at the TV screen.

  “Factual impossibility! Spacedog to perish here! You chicken out will!”

  I looked out my side window and saw that Spacedog had pulled up even with me. “Never!” I yelled, then shifted up.

  I noticed then that my speedometer had been recalibrated — into fractions of lightspeed, according to the new label — and that I was hitting point oh one.

  This race was going to be over pretty damn fast.

  “Entering fringes of photosphere now, coward! Turn back!”

  Although my cockpit was cool, I was sweating buckets. The enormous tendrils of the Sun coiled around us in slow-motion horror, arcs of fire big enough to swallow the whole Earth.

  I put El Tigre in third gear.

  “I your shadow am! Cars equal, no outrunning each other!”

  “Then join me in hell, Spacedog!”

  And at that instant some force yanked my nose ninety degrees off course. I spun my wheel uselessly, screamed and swore,
but all to no avail.

  “Ha-ha! Spacedog wins! I satisfied die! Oblong, listen! Ounce for ounce, the human body hotter than the Sun burns!”

  And with those enigmatic words, he flew on straight for the heart of the star.

  El Tigre exited the photosphere at right angles to its entrance path. And there was the big ship, guiding me back inside along some kind of invivisble attraction beam.

  Stella had pulled me out of the death race.

  Me, not Spacedog.

  She entered the hanger once it had filled with air again. I climbed out of El Tigre, exhausted and numb.

  But when I saw her restored to her old vivacious ultra-Torchy magnificence, I just couldn’t feel down.

  She came into my arms and we made love right there, her gorgeous ass resting on the flames painted across El Tigre’s fender.

  We sunk the spaceship — including El Tigre, the one item that really hurt me to lose — in the Pacific a mile offshore, more by accident than on purpose. Stella kind of knew how to pilot it, but not really. The swim nearly killed us, and I guess we were lucky to escape alive. We made our way back to San Diego and the old scene: my business, the Bandits, a very frosty Herminia. We tried to fit back into the old routines, but it just didn’t work out. I had lost my taste for drag racing, and working as a plain old mechanic on cars just didn’t make sense any longer. Besides, although Joaquin and the Bandits never said anything outright, I knew they all thought I had killed Spacedog to get his girl.

  And of course in a way I had.

  Stella and I moved to San Francisco and opened up a coffee shop. We called it “The Garage,” and decorated it with fake posters and lame souvenirs no real hotrodder would have ever approved of. But Stella drew customers like money draws lawyers, and we did well.

  I didn’t have any regrets about surviving. I knew I had been prepared to run that solar race to the deadly finish line, and that only Stella’s intervention had stopped me. The mystery of that one decisive act of hers immediately began to bug me, once we were home safe. Pulling my ass out of the solar fires represented the most initiative and individuality she had ever exhibited, before or since. Was she acting like a loyal slave simply to preserve the “master” she had most recently bonded with? Or did she really love me and prefer my companionship over Spacedog’s? After a few years, this question really began to obsess me. I couldn’t get the answer out of Stella in words of course. But one day she spontaneously took up a pen and some paper and drew me her reply.