The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I’m leaving, Tony. I only stayed around to make sure you thawed all right. I’m all packed.”

  He mumbled something sarcastic. It did not make much sense, even to him, but the tone of voice was right. He knew she was not as strong as she thought she was. Otherwise she wouldn’t have tried to spring this on him while he was still groggy. He sat up in the tank.

  “Leave, then,” he said. “Help me out of here.”

  He huddled on the couch in the drawing room and tried not to feel cold as he stared at the mist which hung over Galway Bay. There was no horizon; both the sky and the water were the color of old thatch. Exactly the same kind of day it had been when he had climbed into the tank. He had never much liked Ireland. But when the Republic had extended its tax benefits to drug artists, his accountants had forced citizenship on him.

  Wynne had a fire going; the room had filled with the bitter smell of burning peat. She brought him a cup of coffee. There was a red and green pill on the saucer. “What’s this?” He held it up.

  “New. Serentol. Helps you relax.”

  “I’ve been stiff for six months, Wynne. I’m plenty relaxed.”

  She shrugged, took the pill from him and popped it into her mouth. “No sense wasting it.”

  “Where will you go?” he said.

  She seemed surprised that he would ask, as if she had expected an argument first. “England for a while,” she said. “After that I don’t know.”

  “All right.” He nodded. “No sense staying here any longer than you have to. But you will come back when it’s tank time again?”

  She shook her head; the peacock hair fluttered. He decided that he could get used to it.

  “How much will it cost to change your mind?”

  She smiled. “You haven’t got enough.”

  He matched the smile. “Come give us a kiss then.” He pulled her down onto his lap. She was twenty-two years old and very beautiful. He knew it was immodest of him to think this because when he looked at her he saw himself. The best thing about these revivals was watching her catch up in age as he hibernated the winters away to establish residency for tax purposes. In another thirty-odd years they would both be in their fifties. “I love you,” he said.

  “Sure.” Her voice was slurred. “Daddy loves his little girl.”

  Cage was shocked. He had never heard her talk that way before. Something had happened while he was in the tank. But then she giggled and put her hand on his thigh. “You can come with us, if you want.”

  “Us?” He brushed his fingertips across the smooth scalp and wondered how many serentols she had taken that day.

  * * *

  James I was fascinated by Stonehenge, so much so that he commissioned the celebrated architect Inigo Jones to draw a plan of the stones and determine their purpose. The results of Jones’ studies were published posthumously in 1655 by his son-in-law. Jones rejected the notion that such a structure could have been raised by any indigenous people since “the ancient Britains (were) utterly ignorant, as a Nation wholly addicted to Wars, never applying themselves to the Study of Arts, or troubling their thoughts with any Excellency.” Instead Jones, who had learned his art in Renaissance Italy and was a student of classical architecture, declared that Stonehenge must be a Roman temple, a blending of the Tuscan and Corinthian styles, possibly built during the reign of the Flavian emperors.

  In 1663 Dr. Walter Charlton, a physician to Charles II, disputed Jones’ theory, maintaining that Stonehenge was built by the Danes “to be a Court Royal, or a place for the Election and Inauguration of their Kings.” The poet Dryden applauded Charlton in verse,

  “Stone-heng, once thought a Temple, you have found

  A Throne, where Kings, our Earthly Gods, were crown’d”

  In fact, many pointed to the crown-like shape of Stonehenge as proof of this theory. Of couse these speculations, coming so soon after Charles had been restored to the throne following a long exile, were politically convenient. The most astute courtiers spared no effort to discredit Cromwell’s republic and to curry royal favor by reasserting the antiquity of divine right of kings.

  * * *

  Wynne had been Cage’s greatest extravagance. He had never really sought the money; the entertainment multinationals kept forcing it on him. Once he had acquired a Raphael and a Constable and a Klee, vacationed in the Mindanao Trench on the Habitat Three and at the Disney on the moon, he found precious little else worth the trouble of buying.

  People envied him: the rich, the famous drug artist. But when Cage first hit it at Western Amusement, he had almost suffocated in his new wealth. The problem was that the money would not just sit there and keep quiet. It screamed for attention. It had to be collected, managed and disbursed by an endless procession of people with tight smiles and firm handshakes who insisted on giving him advice no matter how much he paid them to leave him alone. To them he was Tony Cage, Incorporated.

  It was while he was developing Focus that Cage decided he needed someone to help him spend the money. He felt no particular urge to contract a marriage. None of the women he was sleeping with at the time mattered to him. He knew that they had been drawn by that irresistible pheromone: the smell of success. He wanted to share his life with someone who would be bound to him by ties no lawyer could break. Someone who would be uniquely his. Forever. Or so he imagined. Perhaps there was nothing romantic about it at all. Maybe the sociobiologists were right and what was at work was an instinct that had been wired into the brains of vertebrates back in the Devonian: reproduce, reproduce.

  Wynne was carried in an artificial womb. It was cleaner that way, medically and legally. All it took was a tissue culture from a few of Cage’s intestinal epithelial cells and some gene sculpturing to change the “Y” chromosome to an “X,” as well as a few other miscellaneous improvements. Just this and a little matter of one-point-two-million new dollars and Wynne was his.

  He told himself that he must reject all the labels that they tried to put on Wynne. He refused to think of her as his daughter. Nor was she exactly his clone. She was like a twin, except that they were carried to term in different wombs and her birth came some twenty-six years after his and the abusive environment that twisted him never touched her. Which was to say she was nothing like a twin. She was something new, something infinitely precious. There were no rules for her behavior, no boundaries for her abilities. He liked to brag that he had got exactly what he had ordered. “She’s prettier than me, smarter, a better tennis player,” he would joke, “worth every cent.”

  Cage did not have much time for Wynne when she was a toddler. Back in those days he was still testing the product on himself and often as not would stagger home quite twisted. He found her an English nanny—the best kind. He did not pay Mrs. Detling to love the little girl; Wynne earned that on her own. The fierce old woman spent truckloads of Cage’s money on Wynne; their philosophy was to treat the girl as if she were a blank disk on which must be recorded only the most important information. For Wynne’s sake they traveled whenever Cage could get away from the lab. Detling helped her develop an Old World command of languages; Wynne spoke English, Russian, Spanish, a smattering of Japanese, and she could read her Virgil in Latin. When she entered third form she tested in the ninety-ninth percentile for her age group on the Geneva Culture-Free Intelligence Profile.

  It was not until she was seven that Cage began to take real pleasure in her company. Her charm was an incongruous mix of maturity and childishness.

  He came home from the lab one day to find Wynne networking a game on the telelink.

  “I thought you were going to see your friend. What’s her name?” he said.

  “Haidee? I decided not to when Nanny told me you were coming home early.”

  “I just came home to change.” At the time he was working on Laughers and still had a buzz from a morning dose. He did not want to start giggling like a fool in front of the child so he opened the bar and poked a pressure syringe filled with neuroleptic to s
traighten himself out. “I have a date. Have to go out at six.”

  She signed off from the game. “With that new one? Jocelyn?”

  “Jocelyn, yes.” He held out his hand for the telelink controller. “Mind if I check the mail?”

  She gave it to him. “I miss you when you’re at work, Tony.”

  He had heard this before. “I miss you too, Wynne.” He brought up the mail menu on the screen and began the sort.

  She snuggled next to him and watched in silence. “Tony,” she said at last, “do grownups ever cry?”

  “Hmmm.” Western was bitching about the delays with Laughers, threatened to hold up the bonus from Soar. “Sometimes, I guess.”

  “They do?” She sounded shocked. “If they fall down and scrape their knees?”

  “Usually it’s because something sad happens.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something sad.” Long silence. “You know.” He wanted her to change the subject.

  “I saw Jocelyn crying.”

  She had his attention.

  “The other night,” Wynne said. “She came and sat on the couch, waiting for you. I was playing house behind the chair. She didn’t know I was here. She’s ugly, you know, when she cries. The stuff under her eyes makes her tears black. Then she got up and she was going toward the bathroom and she saw me and looked at me like it was my fault she was crying. But she kept going and didn’t say anything. When she came out, she was happy again. At least she wasn’t crying. Did you make her sad?”

  “I don’t know, Wynne.” He felt as thought he should be angry but he did not know at whom. “Maybe I did.”

  “Well, I don’t think that was a very grownup thing to do. I don’t think I like her much.” Wynne looked at him then to see if she had gone too far.

  “Well, what does she have to be sad about? She sees you more than I do and I don’t cry.”

  He hugged her. “You’re a good girl, Wynne.” He decided then not to see Jocelyn that night. “I love you.”

  Many people try to make a division between personal life and life at work. Before Wynne, Cage had always been lonely, no matter whom he was with. He hated facing the void at the center of his personal life; throwaway women like Jocelyn only fed the emptiness. He went to work to escape himself; this was the secret of his success. But as Wynne grew older he had to change, gradually making room for her in his life until she filled it.

  * * *

  William Stukeley belonged to the grand tradition of English eccentrics. From 1719 to 1724 this impressionable young antiquarian spent his summers exploring Stonehenge. His meticulous fieldwork was not to be equaled for a century and a half. Stukeley made precise measurements of the relationships between the stones. He explored the surrounding countryside and discovered that the circle was but a part of a much larger neolithic complex. He was the first to point out the orientation of Stonehenge’s axis toward the summer solstice. He did not, however, publish these findings until ten years later. In the interim he took holy orders, married, moved from London to Lincolnshire and decided he was a Druid.

  From his quirky reading of the Bible, Pliny, and Tacitus, Stukeley had deduced that the Druids must be direct descendants of the Biblical Abraham, who had hitched a ride to England on Phoenician ships. Although his book contained an account of the superb fieldwork at Stonehenge, Stukeley’s polemical intent was best summed up in the frontispiece, a portrait of the author as Chyndonax, a prince of the Druids. It was “a chronological history of the origin and progress of true religion, and of idolatry.” Stukeley painted a vision of noble sages practicing a pure natural religion, the modern equivalent of which, he was at pains to point out, was none other than his own beloved Church of England! The Druids had built Stonehenge as a temple to their serpent god. Although Stukeley believed that the rites practiced there may have included human sacrifice, he was inclined to forgive his spiritual forebears their excesses. Perhaps they had got Abraham’s example wrong.

  A hundred years later Stukeley’s Druidical fantasy had wormed its way both into the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the popular imagination. In 1857 a direct rail link between London and Salisbury was established and the Victorians descended in droves. To some Stonehenge was splendid confirmation of the ancient and present greatness of Britannia, to others it was a dark dream of disemboweled maidens and pagan license. It was about this time that the summer solstice became a spectacle. The pubs in nearby Amesbury stayed open all night, although by license only tourists were to be served. If the skies were clear those who staggered on to Stonehenge might number in the thousands. It was not a respectful crowd. They would break bottles against the bluestones and climb the sarsens, dancing in the midsummer dawn. The dreaming stillness of the Wiltshire plain would be shattered by rowdy laughter and the clatter of vehicles.

  * * *

  Cage never liked Tod Schluermann. He told himself the fact that Tod had become Wynne’s lover while Cage was in the tank had nothing to do with it. Nor did it matter that Tod had convinced her to go with him to England. Tod had bounced around the world in his twenty-four years; his father had been an Air Force doctor. Born in the Philippines, he had grown up on bases in Germany, Florida, and Colorado. He had flunked out of the Air Force Academy and had attended several other colleges without acquiring anything more substantial than distaste for getting up early.

  Tod was a skinny kid who looked good in the gaudy skintights that had come into fashion. He was handsome in a streamlined way. Beneath his face was the delicate bone structure of a Renaissance madonna. In order to get into the Academy he had needed cochlear implants to correct a slight hearing problem; he had ordered the surgeons to clip his ears. He had no hair on him at all except for a black brush on his head. Like Wynne he had a pale blue skin tint; in some lights he looked like a corpse.

  He and Wynne had met at a drug club; she was doing Soar at a light table when he sat down next to her. Cage never understood exactly what Tod was doing at the club. Tod did not often use psychoactive drugs and, although he tried to hide it, seemed to disapprove of regular users. A good candidate for the Drug Temperance League. There was a streak of the puritan in him that distanced him from his licentious generation. In his years in and out of college, Tod had read widely but not well. Like many self-taught men, he suspected expertise. He had native intelligence, that was clear, but arrogance often made him seem stupid.

  “And where are you two going to get the money to live?” Cage asked him over dinner the night before they left Ireland.

  Tod swirled a premier cru Chablis in a Waterford crystal wineglass and smiled. “Money is only a problem if you think too much about it, man.”

  “Tony, would you stop worrying and pass the veal?” Wynne said. “We’ll be fine.” No one spoke as Tod helped himself to seconds and passed her the serving dish. “After all,” she continued, “we’ll have my allowance.”

  There was a spot of Madeira sauce on Tod’s chin. “I don’t want your money, Wynne.”

  Cage knew that was for his benefit. Wynne’s allowance was generous enough to support a barrister in Mayfair; he didn’t want her wasting it on Tod. “What makes you think you can learn to program a video synthesizer? People go to school for that, you know.”

  “School, yes.” He and Wynne exchanged glances. “Well, you know, the problem is that by the time the teachers get done with you, they’ve mashed your creativity flat. Talk to the good little ‘A’ students who catch on with the big companies and you find that they’ve forgotten why they became artists in the first place. All they know how to do is recycle the stale old crap they learned at school. Anyone can see it. Just call up some videos on the telelink. Yesterday’s news, man.”

  “Tod’s been studying very hard. And he’s had some experience already,” said Wynne. “Besides, it isn’t as hard to learn to program as it used to be. They’ve really been working to make the interface a lot more accessible.”

  “They? You mean the stale old corporate grinds?”
r />   “Tony.” Wynne pushed away from the table.

  “No,” said Tod. “He’s right.” She settled down again. Cage hated the way she always gave in to Tod. “Look, man, I’m not saying that everything you learn in school is corrupt. Look at you. I mean, you could never have developed Soar or anything if you hadn’t done your time. I give you a lot of credit for coming out of that whole. Your work is brilliant. I know artists who can’t even think about a project until they poke a few ml’s of your Focus. But that’s what it’s about, man. What’s important is the art, not the technology.”

  “We’re talking about computer-driven video synthesizers, Tod.” Cage laid his fork across the plate. The conversation had killed his appetite. “I happen to know a little something about them. I’ve had programmers working for me, remember. They’re complicated machines. And expensive to use. How are you going to afford the access time you’ll need?”

  Tod was the only one still eating. “There are ways,” he said between bites. “The small shops are open to hackers after business hours. Go in at three in the morning and work until five. Cheap.”

  “Even if you come up with anything worthwhile, you have to get it distributed. The multinationals like Western Amusement won’t even touch freelance.”

  Tod shrugged. “So? I’ll start at the bottom. That’s why we’re going to England. British telelink has plenty of open slots on community access stations. Once people see what I’ve got, it’ll be easy. I know it.”

  Wynne poured a volatile stimulant called Bliss into a brandy snifter, breathed deeply of the fumes, and passed it. Tod’s sniff was quick and disapproving; he offered the glass to Cage. Colleen came in with the dessert and Cage realized that there was nothing he could say. It was obvious that Tod did not have the resiliency to fight through the inevitable setbacks. In six months it would be another scheme. Tod would blame Wynne or Cage—someone else!—for his failure and continue his aimless life without them, secure in the delusion that he was a genius trapped in a world full of fools. It was obvious.