The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Though I was not in the least attracted to Alise, kissing her was a powerful sexual experience. It was a chaste kiss. Her lips trembled but did not part, and it only lasted a matter of seconds; yet for its duration, as if her mouth had been coated with some psycho-chemical, my senses sharpened to embrace the moment in microscopic detail. Kissing had always struck me as a blurred pleasure, a smashing together of pulpy flesh accompanied by a flurry of groping. But with Alise I could feel the exact conformation of our lips, the minuscule changes in pressure as they settled into place, the rough material of her blouse grazing my arm, the erratic measures of her breath (which was surprisingly sweet). The delicacy of the act aroused me as no other kiss had before, and when I drew back I half-expected her to have been transformed into a beautiful princess. Not so. She was as ever, small and pale. Prettily ugly. Stunned, I turned toward the beach. The expatriates were gawping at us, and their astonishment reoriented me. I gave them a cheery wave, put my arm around Alise and, inclining my head to hers in a pretense of young love, I led her into the house.

  That night I went to sleep while she was off visiting Tom. I tried to station myself on the extreme edge of the bed, leaving her enough room to be comfortable; but by the time she returned I had rolled onto the center of the mattress, and when she slipped in beside me, turning on her side, her thin buttocks cupped spoon-style by my groin, I came drowsily awake and realized that my erection was butting between her legs. Once again physical contact with her caused a sharpening of my senses, and due to the intimacy of the contact my desire, too, was sharpened. I could no more have stopped myself than I could have stopped breathing. Gently, as gently as though she were the truest of true loves—and, indeed, I felt that sort of tenderness toward her—I began moving against her, thrusting more and more forcefully until I had eased partway inside. All this time she had made no sound, no comment, but now she cocked her leg back over my hip, wriggled closer and let me penetrate her fully.

  It had been a month since Anne had left, and I was undeniably horny; but not even this could explain the fervor of my performance that night. I lost track of how many times we made love. And yet we never exchanged endearments, never spoke or in any way acknowledged one another as lovers. Though Alise’s breath quickened, her face remained set in that characteristic deadpan, and I wasn’t sure if she were deriving pleasure from the act or simply providing a service, paying rent. It didn’t matter. I was having enough fun for both of us. The last thing I recall is that she had mounted me, female superior, her skin glowing ghost-pale in the dawn light, single-scoop breasts barely jiggling; her charcoal eyes were fixed on the wall, as if she saw there an important destination toward which she was galloping me post-haste.

  * * *

  My romance with Alise—this, and the fact that she and Tom had taken to smoking vast amounts of kif and wandering the beach glassy eyed, thus emulating the behavior of the other expatriates—had more or less the desired effect upon everyone … everyone except Richard Shockley. He accosted me on my way to work one morning and told me in no uncertain terms that if I knew what was good for me I should break all ties with the twins. I had about three inches and thirty pounds on him, and—for reasons I will shortly explain—I was in an irascible mood; I gave him a push and asked him to keep out of my business or suffer the consequences.

  “You stupid punk!” he said, but backed away.

  “Punk?” I laughed—laughter has always been for me a spark to fuel rage—and followed him. “Come on, Rich. You can work up a better insult than that. A verbal guy like you. Come on! Give me a reason to get really crazy.”

  We were standing in one of the dusty streets back of the beach, not far from a bakery, a little shop with dozens of loaves of bread laid neatly in the window, and at that moment a member of the Guardia Civil poked his head out the door. He was munching a sweet roll, watching us with casual interest: a short, swarthy man, wearing an olive-green uniform with fancy epaulets, an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, and sporting one of those goofy patent leather hats. Shockley blanched at the sight, wheeled around and walked away. I was about to walk away myself, but the guardsman beckoned. With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I went over to him.

  “Cobarde,” he said, gesturing at Shockley.

  My Spanish was poor, but I knew that word: “coward. “Yeah,” I said. “In ingles, cobarde means chickenshit.”

  “Cheek-sheet,” he said; then, more forcefully, “Cheek-sheet!”

  He asked me to teach him some more English; he wanted to know all the curse words. His name was Francisco, he had fierce bad breath, and he seemed genuinely friendly. But I knew damn well that he was most likely trying to recruit me as an informant. He talked about his family in Seville, his girlfriend, how beautiful it was in Spain. I smiled, kept repeating, “Si, si,” and was very relieved when he had to go off on his rounds.

  Despite Shockley’s attitude, the rest of the expatriates began to accept the twins, lumping us together as weirdos of the most perverted sort, yet explicable in our weirdness. From Don Washington I learned that Tom, Alise, and I were thought to be involved in a ménage à trois, and when I attempted to deny this he said it was no big thing. He did ask, however, what I saw in Alise; I gave some high-school reply about it all being the same in the dark, but in truth I had no answer to his question. Since Alise had moved in my life had assumed a distinct pattern. Each morning I would hurry off to Malaga to work on the movie set; each night I would return home and enter into brainless rut with Alise. I found this confusing. Separated from Alise, I felt only mild pity for her, yet her proximity would drive me into a lustful frenzy. I lost interest in writing, in Spain, in everything except Alise’s undernourished body. I slept hardly at all, my temper worsened, and I began to wonder if she were a witch and had ensorcled me. Often I would come home to discover her and Tom sitting stoned on my porch, the floor littered with sketches of those circuitlike designs (actually they less resembled circuits than a kind of mechanistic vegetation). I asked once what they were. “A game,” replied Alise, and distracted me with a caress.

  Two weeks after she moved in I shouted at the assistant director of the movie (he had been instructing me on how to throw a wineskin with the proper degree of adulation as the English actor-matador paraded in triumph around the bullring) and was fired. After being hustled off the set I vowed to get rid of Alise, whom I blamed for all my troubles. But when I arrived home she was nowhere to be seen. I stumped over to Tom’s house and pounded on the door. It swung open, and I peeked inside. Empty. Half a dozen notebooks were scattered on the floor. Curiosity overrode my anger. I stepped in and picked up a notebook. The front cover was decorated with a hand-drawn swastika, and while it is not uncommon to find swastikas on notebook covers—they make for entertaining doodling—the sight of this one gave me a chill. I leafed through the pages, noticing that though the entries were in English, there were occasional words and phrases in German, these having question marks beside them; then I went back and read the first entry.

  The Fuehrer had been dead three days and still no one had ventured into the office where he had been exposed to the poisoned blooms, although a servant had crawled along the ledge to the window and returned with the news that the corpse was stiffened in its leather tunic, its cheeks bristling with a dead man’s growth, and strings of dessicated blood were hanging from its chin. But as we well remembered his habit of reviving the dead for a final bout of torture, we were afraid that he might have set an igniter in his cells to ensure rebirth, and so we waited while the wine in his goblet turned to vinegar and then to a murky gas that hid him from our view. Nothing had changed. The garden of hydrophobic roses fertilized with his blood continued to lash and slather, and the hieroglyphs of his shadow selves could be seen patrolling the streets …

  The entry went on in like fashion for several pages, depicting a magical-seeming Third Reich, ruled by a dead or mordant Hitler, policed by shadow men known collectively as The Disciples, and po
pulated by a terrified citizenry. All the entries were similar in character, but in the margins were brief notations, most having to do with either Tom or Alise’s physical state, and one passage in particular caught my eye:

  Alise’s control of her endocrine system continues to outpace mine. Could this simply be a product of male and female differences? It seems likely, since we have all else in common.

  Endocrine? Didn’t that have something to do with glands and secretions? And if so, couldn’t this be a clue to Alise’s seductive powers? I wished that old Mrs. Adkins (General Science, fifth period) had been more persevering with me. I picked up another notebook. No swastika on the cover, but on the foreleaf was written, “Tom and Alise, ‘born’ March 12, 1944.” The entire notebook contained a single entry, apparently autobiographical, and after checking out the window to see if the twins were in sight, I sat down to read it. Five pages later I had become convinced that Tom was either seriously crazy or that he and Alise were the subjects of an insane Nazi experiment … or both. The word clone was not then in my vocabulary, but this was exactly what Tom claimed that he and Alise were. They, he said, along with eighteen others, had been grown from a single cell (doner unknown), part of an attempt to speed up development of a true Master Race. A successful attempt, according to him, for not only were the twenty possessed of supernormal physical and mental abilities, but they were stronger and more handsome than the run of humanity: this seemed to me wish-fulfillment pure and simple, and other elements of the story—for example, the continuation of an exotic Third Reich past 1945—seemed delusion. But upon reading further, learning that they had been sequestered in a cave for almost twenty years, being educated by scientific personnel, I realized that Tom and Alise could have been told these things and have assumed their truth. One could easily make a case for some portion of the Reich having survived the war.

  I was about to put down the notebook when I noticed several loose sheets of paper stuck in the rear; I pulled them out and unfolded them. The first appeared to be a map of part of a city, with a large central square labeled “Citadel,” and the rest were covered in a neat script that—after reading a paragraph or two—I deduced to be Alise’s.

  Tom says that since I’m the only one ever to leave the caves (before we all finally left them, that is), I should set down my experiences. He seems to think that having even a horrid past is preferable to having none, and insists that we should document it as well as we can. For myself, I would like to forget the past, but I’ll write down what I remember to satisfy his compulsiveness.

  When we were first experimenting with the tunnel, we knew nothing more about it than that it was a metaphysical construct of some sort. Our control of it was poor and we had no idea how far it reached or through what medium it penetrated. Nor had we explored it to any great extent. It was terrifying. The only constant was that it was always dark, with fuzzy, different-colored lights shining at what seemed tremendous distances away. Often you would feel disembodied, and sometimes your body was painfully real, subject to odd twinges and shocks. Sometimes it was hard to move—like walking through black glue, and other times it was as if the darkness were a frictionless substance that squeezed you along faster than you wanted to go. Horrible afterimages materialized and vanished on all sides—monsters, animals, things to which I couldn’t put a name. We were almost as frightened of the tunnel as we were of our masters. Almost.

  One night after the guards had taken some of the girls into their quarters, we opened the tunnel and three of us entered it. I was in the lead when our control slipped and the tunnel began to constrict. I started to turn back, and the next I knew I was standing under the sky, surrounded by windowless buildings. Warehouses, I think. The street was deserted, and I had no idea where I was. In a panic, I ran down the street and soon I heard the sounds of traffic. I turned a corner and stopped short. A broad avenue lined with gray buildings—all decorated with carved eagles—led away from where I stood and terminated in front of an enormous building of black stone. I recognized it at once from pictures we had been shown—Hitler’s Citadel.

  Though I was still very afraid, perhaps even more so, I realized that I had learned two things of importance. First, that no matter through what otherworldly medium it stretched, the tunnel also negotiated a worldly distance. Second, I understood that the portrait painted of the world by our masters was more or less accurate. We had never been sure of this, despite having been visited by Disciples and other of Hitler’s creatures, their purpose being to frighten us into compliance.

  I only stood a few minutes in that place, yet I’ll never be able to forget it. No description could convey its air of menace, its oppressiveness. The avenue was thronged with people, all—like our guards—shorter and less attractive than I and my siblings, all standing stock-still, silent, and gazing at the Citadel. A procession of electric cars was passing through their midst, blowing horns, apparently to celebrate a triumph, because no one was obstructing their path. Several Disciples were prowling the fringes of the crowd, and overhead a huge winged shape was flying. It was no aircraft; its wings beat, and it swooped and soared like a living thing. Yet it must have been forty or fifty feet long. I couldn’t make out what it was; it kept close to the sun, and therefore was always partly in silhouette. (I should mention that although the sun was at meridian, the sky was a deep blue such as I have come to associate with the late-afternoon skies of this world, and the sun itself was tinged with red, its globe well defined—I think it may have been farther along the path to dwarfism than the sun of this world.) All these elements contributed to the menace of the scene, but the dominant force was the Citadel. Unlike the other buildings, no carvings adorned it. No screaming eagles, no symbols of terror and war. It was a construct of simple curves and straight lines; but that simplicity implied an animal sleekness, communicated a sense of great power under restraint, and I had the feeling that at any moment the building might come alive and devour everyone within its reach. It seemed to give its darkness to the air.

  I approached a man standing nearby and asked what was going on. He looked at me askance, then checked around to see if anyone was watching us. “Haven’t you heard?” he said.

  “I’ve been away,” I told him.

  This, I could see, struck him as peculiar, but he accepted the fact and said, “They thought he was coming back to life, but it was a false alarm. Now they’re offering sacrifices.”

  The procession of cars had reached the steps of the Citadel, and from them emerged a number of people with their hands bound behind their backs, and a lesser number of very large men, who began shoving them up the steps toward the main doors. Those doors swung open, and from the depths of the Citadel issued a kind of growling music overlaid with fanfares of trumpets. A reddish glow—feeble at first, then brightening to a blaze—shone from within. The light and the music set my heart racing. I backed away, and as I did, I thought I saw a face forming in the midst of that red glow. Hitler’s face, I believe. But I didn’t wait to validate this. I ran, ran as hard as I could back to the street behind the warehouses, and there, to my relief, I discovered that the tunnel had once again been opened.

  I leaned back, trying to compare what I had read with my knowledge of the twins. Those instances of silent communication. Telepathy? Alise’s endocrinal control. Their habit of turning lamps out to burn away the night—could this be some residual behavior left over from cave life? Tom had mentioned that the lights had never been completely extinguished, merely dimmed. Was this all an elaborate fantasy he had concocted to obscure their pitiful reality? Whatever, I found that I was no longer angry at them, that they had been elevated in my thoughts from nuisance to mystery. Looking back, I can see that my new attitude was every bit as discriminatory as my previous one. I felt for them an adolescent avidity such as I might have exhibited toward a strange pet. They were neat, weird, with the freakish appeal of Venus fly traps and sea monkeys. Nobody else had one like them, and having them to myself made me fe
el superior. I would discover what sort of tricks they could perform, take notes on their peculiarities, and then, eventually growing bored, I’d move along to a more consuming interest. Though I was intelligent enough to understand that this attitude was—in its indulgence and lack of concern for others—typically ugly-American, I saw no harm in adopting it. Why, they might even benefit from my attention.

  At that moment I heard voices outside. I skimmed the notebook toward the others on the floor and affected nonchalance. The door opened; they entered and froze upon seeing me. “Hi,” I said. “Door was open, so I waited for you here. What you been up to?”

  Tom’s eyes flicked to the notebooks, and Alise said, “We’ve been walking.”

  “Yeah?” I said this with great good cheer, as if pleased that they had been taking exercise. “Too bad I didn’t get back earlier. I could have gone with you.”

  “Why are you back?” asked Tom, gathering the notebooks.

  I didn’t want to let on about the loss of my job, thinking that the subterfuge would give me a means of keeping track of them. “Some screw-up on the set,” I told him. “They had to put off filming. What say we go into town?”

  From that point on no question I asked them was casual; I was always testing, probing, trying to ferret out some of their truth.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Tom. “I thought I’d have a swim.”

  I took a mental note: why do subjects exhibit avoidance of town? For an instant I had an unpleasant vision of myself, a teenage monster gloating over his two gifted white mice, but this was overborne by my delight in the puzzle they presented. “Yeah,” I said breezily. “A swim would be nice.”

  * * *

  That night making love with Alise was a whole new experience. I wasn’t merely screwing; I was exploring the unknown, penetrating mystery. Watching her pale, passionless face, I imagined the brain behind it to be a strange, glowing jewel, with facets instead of convolutions. National Enquirer headlines flashed through my head. NAZI MUTANTS ALIVE IN SPAIN. AMERICAN TEEN UNCOVERS HITLER’S SECRET PLOT. Of course there would be no such publicity. Even if Tom’s story were true—and I was far from certain that it was—I had no intention of betraying them. I wasn’t that big a jerk.