Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I came in out of the heat of Marrakech into Hilton air conditioning. Wet shirt clinging cold to the small of my back while I read the message you’d relayed through Fox. You were in all the way; Hiroshi would leave his wife. It wasn’t difficult for you to communicate with us, even through the clear, tight film of Maas security; you’d shown Hiroshi the perfect little place for coffee and kipferl. Your favorite waiter was white haired, kindly, walked with a limp, and worked for us. You left your messages under the linen napkin.

  All day today I watched a small helicopter cut a tight grid above this country of mine, the land of my exile, the New Rose Hotel. Watched from my hatch as its patient shadow crossed the grease-stained concrete. Close. Very close.

  I left Marrakech for Berlin. I met with a Welshman in a bar and began to arrange for Hiroshi’s disappearance.

  It would be a complicated business, intricate as the brass gears and sliding mirrors of Victorian stage magic, but the desired effect was simple enough. Hiroshi would step behind a hydrogen-cell Mercedes and vanish. The dozen Maas agents who followed him constantly would swarm around the van like ants; the Maas security apparatus would harden around his point of departure like epoxy.

  They know how to do business promptly in Berlin. I was even able to arrange a last night with you. I kept it secret from Fox; he might not have approved. Now I’ve forgotten the town’s name. I knew it for an hour on the autobahn, under a gray Rhenish sky, and forgot it in your arms.

  The rain began, sometime toward morning. Our room had a single window, high and narrow, where I stood and watched the rain fur the river with silver needles. Sound of your breathing. The river flowed beneath low, stone arches. The street was empty. Europe was a dead museum.

  I’d already booked your flight to Marrakech, out of Orly, under your newest name. You’d be on your way when I pulled the final string and dropped Hiroshi out of sight.

  You’d left your purse on the dark, old bureau. While you slept I went through your things, removing anything that might clash with the new cover I’d bought for you in Berlin. I took the Chinese .22, your microcomputer, and your bank chip. I took a new passport, Dutch, from my bag, a Swiss bank chip in the same name, and tucked them into your purse.

  My hand brushed something flat. I drew it out, held the thing, a diskette. No labels.

  It lay there in the palm of my hand, all that death. Latent, coded, waiting.

  I stood there and watched you breathe, watched your breasts rise and fall. Saw your lips slightly parted, and in the jut and fullness of your lower lip, the faintest suggestion of bruising.

  I put the diskette back into your purse. When I lay down beside you, you rolled against me, waking, on your breath all the electric night of a new Asia, the future rising in you like a bright fluid, washing me of everything but the moment. That was your magic, that you lived outside of history, all now.

  And you knew how to take me there.

  For the very last time, you took me.

  While I was shaving, I heard you empty your makeup into my bag. I’m Dutch now, you said, I’ll want a new look.

  Dr. Hiroshi Yomiuri went missing in Vienna, in a quiet street of Singerstrasse, two blocks from his wife’s favorite hotel. On a clear afternoon in October, in the presence of a dozen expert witnesses, Dr. Yomiuri vanished.

  He stepped through a looking glass. Somewhere, offstage, the oiled play of Victorian clockwork.

  I sat in a hotel room in Geneva and took the Welshman’s call. It was done, Hiroshi down my rabbit hole and headed for Marrakech. I poured myself a drink and thought about your legs.

  Fox and I met in Narita a day later, in a sushi bar in the JAL terminal. He’d just stepped off an Air Maroc jet, exhausted and triumphant.

  Loves it there, he said, meaning Hiroshi. Loves her, he said, meaning you.

  I smiled. You’d promised to meet me in Shinjuku in a month.

  Your cheap, little gun in the New Rose Hotel. The chrome is starting to peel. The machining is clumsy, blurry Chinese stamped into rough steel. The grips are red plastic, molded with a dragon on either side. Like a child’s toy.

  Fox ate sushi in the JAL terminal, high on what we’d done. The shoulder had been giving him trouble, but he said he didn’t care. Money now for better doctors. Money now for everything.

  Somehow it didn’t seem very important to me, the money we’d gotten from Hosaka. Not that I doubted our new wealth, but that last night with you had left me convinced that it all came to us naturally, in the new order of things, as a function of who and what we were.

  Poor Fox. With his blue oxford shirts crisper than ever, his Paris suits darker and richer. Sitting there in JAL, dabbing sushi into a little rectangular tray of green horseradish, he had less than a week to live.

  Dark now, and the coffin racks of New Rose are lit all night by floodlights, high on painted metal masts. Nothing here seems to serve its original purpose. Everything is surplus, recycled, even the coffins. Forty years ago these plastic capsules were stacked in Tokyo or Yokohama, a modern convenience for traveling businessmen. Maybe your father slept in one. When the scaffolding was new, it rose around the shell of some mirrored tower on the Ginza, swarmed over by crews of builders.

  The breeze tonight brings the rattle of a pachinko parlor, the smell of stewed vegetables from the pushcarts across the road.

  I spread crab-flavored krill paste on orange rice crackers. I can hear the planes.

  Those last few days in Tokyo, Fox and I had adjoining suites on the fifty-third floor of the Hyatt. No contact with Hosaka. They paid us, then erased us from official corporate memory.

  But Fox couldn’t let go. Hiroshi was his baby, his pet project. He’d developed a proprietary, almost fatherly, interest in Hiroshi. He loved him for his Edge. So Fox had me keep in touch with my Portuguese businessman in the Medina, who was willing to keep a very partial eye on Hiroshi’s lab for us.

  When he phoned, he’d phone from a stall in Djemaa-el-Fna, with a background of wailing vendors and Atlas panpipes. Someone was moving security into Marakech, he told us. Fox nodded. Hosaka.

  After less than a dozen calls, I saw the change in Fox, a tension, a look of abstraction. I’d find him at the window, staring down fifty-three floors into the Imperial gardens, lost in something he wouldn’t talk about.

  Ask him for a more detailed description, he said, after one particular call. He thought a man our contact had seen entering Hiroshi’s lab might be Moenner, Hosaka’s leading gene man.

  That was Moenner, he said, after the next call. Another call and he thought he’d identified Chedanne, who headed Hosaka’s protein team. Neither had been seen outside the corporate arcology in over two years.

  By then it was obvious that Hosaka’s leading researchers were pooling quietly in the Medina, the black executive Lears whispering into the Marrakech airport on carbon-fiber wings. Fox shook his head. He was a professional, a specialist, and he saw the sudden accumulation of all that prime Hosaka Edge in the Medina as a drastic failure in the zaibatsu’s tradecraft.

  Christ, he said, pouring himself a Black Label, they’ve got their whole bio section in there right now. One bomb. He shook his head. One grenade in the right place at the right time …

  I reminded him of the saturation techniques Hosaka security was obviously employing. Hosaka had lines to the heart of the Diet, and their massive infiltration of agents into Marrakech could only be taking place with the knowledge and cooperation of the Moroccan government.

  Hang it up, I said. It’s over. You’ve sold them Hiroshi. Now forget him.

  I know what it is, he said. I know. I saw it once before.

  He said that there was a certain wild factor in lab work. The edge of Edge, he called it. When a researcher develops a breakthrough, others sometimes find it impossible to duplicate the first researcher’s results. This was even more likely with Hiroshi, whose work went against the conceptual grain of his field. The answer, often, was to. fly the breakthrough boy from lab to co
rporate lab for a ritual laying on of hands. A few pointless adjustments in the equipment, and the process would work. Crazy thing, he said, nobody knows why it works that way, but it does. He grinned.

  But they’re taking a chance, he said. Bastards told us they wanted to isolate Hiroshi, keep him away from their central research thrust. Balls. Bet your ass there’s some kind of power struggle going on in Hosaka research. Somebody big’s flying his favorites in and rubbing them all over Hiroshi for luck. When Hiroshi shoots the legs out from under genetic engineering, the Medina crowd’s going to be ready.

  He drank his scotch and shrugged.

  Go to bed, he said. You’re right, it’s over.

  I did go to bed, but the phone woke me. Marrakech again, the white static of a satellite link, a rush of frightened Portuguese.

  Hosaka didn’t freeze our credit, they caused it to evaporate. Fairy gold. One minute we were millionaires in the world’s hardest currency, and the next we were paupers. I woke Fox.

  Sandii, he said. She sold out. Maas security turned her in Vienna. Sweet Jesus.

  I watched him slit his battered suitcase apart with a Swiss army knife. He had three gold bars glued in there with contact cement. Soft plates, each one proofed and stamped by the treasury of some extinct African government.

  I should’ve seen it, he said, his voice flat.

  I said no. I think I said your name.

  Forget her, he said. Hosaka wants us dead. They’ll assume we crossed them. Get on the phone and check our credit.

  Our credit was gone. They denied that either of us had ever had an account.

  Haul ass, Fox said.

  We ran. Out a service door, into Tokyo traffic, and down into Shinjuku. That was when I understood for the first time the real extent of Hosaka’s reach.

  Every door was closed. People we’d done business with for two years saw us coming, and I’d see steel shutters slam behind their eyes. We’d get out before they had a chance to reach for the phone. The surface tension of the underworld had been tripled, and everywhere we’d meet that same taut membrane and be thrown back. No chance to sink, to get out of sight.

  Hosaka let us run for most of that first day. Then they sent someone to break Fox’s back a second time.

  I didn’t see them do it, but I saw him fall. We were in a Ginza department store an hour before closing, and I saw his arc off that polished mezzanine, down into all the wares of the new Asia.

  They missed me somehow, and I just kept running. Fox took the gold with him, but I had a hundred New Yen in my pocket. I ran. All the way to the New Rose Hotel.

  Now it’s time.

  Come with me, Sandii. Hear the neon humming on the road to Narita International. A few late moths trace stop-motion circles around the floodlights that shine on New Rose.

  And the funny thing, Sandii, is how sometimes you just don’t seem real to me. Fox once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economics. Ghost of the new century, congealing on a thousand beds in the world’s Hyatts, the world’s Hiltons.

  Now I’ve got your gun in my hand, jacket pocket, and my hand seems so far away. Disconnected.

  I remember my Portuguese business friend forgetting his English, trying to get it across in four languages I barely understood, and I thought he was telling me that the Medina was burning. Not the Medina. The brains of Hosaka’s best research people. Plague, he was whispering, my businessman, plague and fever and death.

  Smart Fox, he put it together on the run. I didn’t even have to mention finding the diskette in your bag in Germany.

  Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said. The thing was there for the overnight construction of just the right macromolecule. With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii. But not as expensive as you turned out to be for Hosaka.

  I hope you got a good price from Maas.

  The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn’t face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you.

  So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka researchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered permanent brain damage.

  Hiroshi hadn’t worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the synthesizer hummed to itself all night long, building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH.

  Maas. Small, fast, ruthless. All Edge.

  The airport road is a long, straight shot. Keep to the shadows. And I was shouting at that Portuguese voice, I made him tell me what happened to the girl, to Hiroshi’s woman. Vanished, he said. The whir of Victorian clockwork.

  So Fox had to fall, fall with his three pathetic plates of gold, and snap his spine for the last time. On the floor of a Ginza department store, every shopper staring in the instant before they screamed.

  I just can’t hate you, baby.

  And Hosaka’s helicopter is back, no lights at all, hunting on infrared, feeling for body heat. A muffled whine as it turns, a kilometer away, swinging back toward us, toward New Rose. Too fast a shadow, against the glow of Narita.

  It’s alright, baby. Only please come here. Hold my hand.

  GENE WOLFE

  The Map

  Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics to be one of the best—perhaps the best—SF and fantasy writers working today. His tetralogy The Book of the New Sun—consisting of The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch—is being hailed as a masterpiece, quite probably the standard against which all subsequent science-fantasy books of the ‘80s will be judged; ultimately, it may prove to be as influential as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. The Shadow of the Torturer won the World Fantasy Award. The Claw of the Conciliator won the Nebula Award. Wolfe also won a Nebula Award for his story “The Death of Doctor Island.” His other books include Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and The Devil in a Forest. His short fiction—including some of the best stories of the ’70s—has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories and Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days. His most recent books are Free Live Free, a novel, and The Wolfe Archipelago, a collection. His story “The Cat” was in our First Annual Collection. Wolfe lives in Barrington, Illinois with his wife and family.

  Here—in a story set in the strange and evocative universe of The Book of the New Sun—he takes us to the far, far future … to a time when the sun has grown old and red and dim, the moon has grown green with forests, and old Urth groans under the almost insupportable weight of her own unnumbered years … takes us for a journey down the fabled river Gyoll, through the unimaginably vast and ancient ruins of the dying city Nessus, for a tale of temptation, greed, and mystery.

  On the night before, he had forgotten all his plans and fought, half blinded by his blood after Laetus broke the ewer over his head. Perhaps that was for the best.

  And yet if they had not taken his knife while he slept, he might have killed them both.

  “Master Gurloes will be angry.” That was what they used to say to terrify one another into doing well. Severian would have been angry too, to be sure, and Severian had beaten him more than once. He spat out clotted blood. Beaten him worse than Laetus and Syntyche had last night. Severian had been captain of apprentices in the year before his own.

  Now Severian was the Autarch, Severian was the law, and murderers died under the law’s hand.

  Someone was pounding at the hatch. He spat again, this time into the slop jar, and shouted in the direction of the vent. It let in enough light for him to see the impression Syntyche had left in her bunk as she lay face to the bulkhead, feigning sleep. He smoothed it with his hands.

  For a moment he groped for his clothes and his knife, but the knife was gone. He chuckled and rocked back on his own narrow bunk, pushing both legs into his trousers together.

  More pounding; the boat rocked beneath him as the stranger searched for
another way into the cabin. He spat a third time, and from habit reached up to draw the bolt that was back already. “Hatch sticks! Come on down, you catamite, I’m not coming up.”

  The stranger lifted it and clambered down the steep steps.

  “‘Ware deck beams.”

  He stooped as he turned about, and he was tall enough that he had to. “You’re Captain Eata?”

  “Sit on the other bunk. Nobody’s using it any more. What do you want?”

  “But you are Eata?”

  “We’ll talk about that later, maybe. After you tell me what you want.”

  “A guide.”

  Eata was feeling the cut on his head and did not answer.

  “I was told that you are an intelligent man.”

  “Not by a friend.”

  “I need a man with a boat to take me down Gyoll. To tell me what I need to know concerning the ruins. They said you knew it as well as any man alive.”

  “An asimi,” Eata said. “One asimi for each day. And you’ll have to help me handle her—my deckhand and I had a little argument last night.”

  “Shall we say six orichalks? It should only take a day, and I—” Eata was not listening. He had seen the broken lock on his sea chest, and he was laughing. “The key’s in my pocket!” He gripped the younger, taller man by the knee. “My pants were on the floor!” In his mirth, he nearly choked on the words.

  In the flat lands that Gyoll itself had made, Gyoll had little current; but the wind was in the east, and Eata’s boat heeled a bit under the pressure of her wide gaffsail. The old sun, well above the tallest towers now, painted the sail’s black image on the oily water.

  “What do you do, Captain?” the stranger asked. “How do you live?”

  “By doing whatever pays. Cargo to the delta and fish to the city, mostly.”

  “It’s a nice boat. Did you build it?”

  “No,” Eata said. “Bought it. Not fast like you’re used to.” His head still hurt, and he leaned on the tiller with one hand pressed to his temple.