The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  Sure looked busy out there, though. All that hurry and industry, all that rising dust—a long way from the indolent calm of Doletown.

  * * *

  At the sanctuary an aibot custodian seven feet tall and wearing a somber black waistcoat and matching hat led me to a door marked PACZOVSKI—Grandfather's room, where a few of his worldly possessions were arrayed to help keep his sensorium lively and alert.

  He needed all the help he could get. All that remained of him was his neuroprosthetic arrays. His mortal clay had been harvested for its biomedical utilities and buried over a year ago. His epibiotic ghost survived but was slurring into Shannon entropy, a shadow of a shade of itself.

  Still, he recognized me when I knocked and entered. "Toby!" his photograph called out.

  The photo in its steel frame occupied most of the far wall. It smiled reflexively. That was one of the few expressions Grandfather retained. He could also do a frown of disapproval, a frown of anxiety, a frown of unhappiness, and raised eyebrows meant to register surprise or curiosity, although those last had begun to fade in recent months.

  And in a few months more there would be nothing left of him but the picture itself, as inert as a bust of Judas Caesar (or whatever—history's not my long suite).

  But he recognized the bottle of Sauvignon blanc I took out of my carrypack and placed on the rutted surface of an antique table he had once loved. "That's the stuff!" he roared, and, "Use a coaster, for Christ's sake, Toby; you know better than that."

  I turned down his volume and stuck a handkerchief under the sweating bottle. Grandfather had always loved vintage furniture and fine wines.

  "But I can't drink it," he added, sketching a frown of lament: "I'm not allowed."

  Because he had no mouth or gut. Dead people tend to forget these things. The bottle was strictly for nostalgia, and to give his object-recognition faculties a little kick. "I need some advice," I said.

  His eyes flickered between me and the bottle as if he couldn't decide which was real or, if real, more interesting. "Still having trouble with that woman. . .?"

  "Her name is Lada."

  "Your employer."

  "Right."

  "And wife."

  "That too," I said. "Once upon a time."

  "What's she done now?"

  "Long story. Basically, she made me an accessory to an act of. . . let's say, a questionable legal and ethical nature."

  "I don't do case law anymore." Grandfather had been a trial lawyer for an uptown firm back when his heart was still beating. "Is this problem serious?"

  "I washed off the blood last night," I said.

  * * *

  Six weeks ago Lada Joshi had called me into her office and asked me if I still had any friends in Doletown.

  "Same friends I always had," I told her truthfully. There was a time when I might have lied. For much of our unsuccessful marriage Lada had tried to wean me away from my Doletown connections. It hadn't worked. Now she wanted to start exploiting them again.

  Her office was high above the city deeps. Through the window over her shoulder I could see the spine of a sunlit heat-exchanger, and beyond that a bulbous white cargodrome where unmanned aircraft buzzed like honey-fat bees.

  Lada herself was beautiful and ambitious but not quite wealthy, or at least not as wealthy as she aspired to be. Her business, LadajoshiTM, was a bottom-tier novelty-trawling enterprise, one of hundreds in the city. I had been one of her stable of Doletown stringers until she married me and tried to elevate me socially. The marriage had ended in a vending-machine divorce after six months. I was just another contract employee now, far as Lada was concerned, and I hadn't done any meaningful work for weeks. Which was maybe why she was sending me back to Doletown. I asked her what the deal was.

  She smiled and tapped the desktop with her one piece of expensive jewelry, a gold prosthetic left-hand index finger with solid onyx knuckles. "I've got a client who wants some work done on his behalf."

  "Doletown work?"

  "Partly."

  "What kind of client?" Usually it was Lada who had to seek out clients, often while fending off a shoal of competitors. But it sounded as if this one had come to her.

  "The client prefers to remain anonymous."

  Odd, but okay. It wasn't my business, literally or figuratively. "What kind of work?"

  "First we have to bankroll an artist named—" She double-checked her palmreader. "Named Jafar Bloom, without making it too obvious we're interested and without mentioning our client."

  Whom I couldn't mention in any case, since Lada wouldn't give me any hints. "What kind of artist is Jafar Bloom?"

  "He has an animal act he calls the Chamber of Death, and he wants to open a show under the title 'The Cartesian Theater'. I don't know much more than that. He's deliberately obscure and supposedly difficult to work with. Probably a borderline personality disorder. He's had some encounters with the police but he's never been charged with aberrancy. Moves around a lot. I don't have a current address—you'll have to track him down."

  "And then?"

  "Then you front him the money to open his show."

  "You want him to sign a contract?"

  She gave me a steely look. "No contract. No stipulations."

  "Come on, Lada, that doesn't make sense. Anybody could hand this guy cash, if that's all there is to it. Sounds like what your client wants is a cut-out—a blind middleman."

  "You keep your accounts, Toby, and I'll keep mine, all right? You didn't fret about ethics when you were fucking that Belgian contortionist."

  An argument I preferred not to revisit. "And after that?"

  "After what? I explained—"

  "You said 'First we bankroll Jafar Bloom.' Okay, we bankroll him. Then what?"

  "We'll discuss that when the time comes."

  Fine. Whatever.

  We agreed on a per diem and expenses and Lada gave me some background docs. I read them on the way home, then changed into my gypsy clothes—I had never thrown them away, as much as she had begged me to—and rode a transit elevator all the way down to the bottom stop, sea level, the lowest common denominator: Doletown.

  * * *

  An aibot constructor roared by Grandfather's window on its way to a nearby hive, momentarily drowning out conversation. I glimpsed the machine as it rumbled past. A mustard-yellow unit, not even remotely anthropomorphic. It wasn't even wearing clothes.

  But it was noisy. It carried a quarter-ton sack of concrete on its broad back, and its treads stirred up chalky plumes of dust. It was headed for a nursery hive shaped like a twenty-story artillery shell, where aibots of various phyla were created according to instructions from the Entrepreneurial Expert System that roams the cryptosphere like a benevolent ghost.

  Grandfather didn't like the noisy aibots or their factories. "When I was young," he said as soon as he could make himself heard, "human beings built things for other human beings. And they did it with a decent sense of decorum. Dulce et decorum. All this goddamn noise!"

  I let the remark pass. It was true, but I didn't want to hear his inevitable follow-up lament: And in those days a man had to work for his living, etc. As if we lived in a world where nobody worked! True, since the population crash and the Rationalization, nobody has to work in order to survive. . . but most of us do work.

  I cleared my throat. "As I was saying—"

  "Your story. Right. Jafar Bloom. Did you find him?"

  "Eventually."

  "He's an artist, you said?"

  "Yes."

  "So what's his medium?"

  "Death," I said.

  * * *

  In fact it had been remarkably difficult to hook up with Jafar Bloom.

  Doletown, of course, is where people live who (as Grandfather would say) "don't work." They subsist instead on the dole, the universal minimum allotment of food, water, shelter, and disposable income guaranteed by law to the entire ever-shrinking population of the country.

  Most nations have simila
r arrangements, though some are still struggling to pay vig on the World Bank loans that bought them their own Entrepreneurial Expert Systems.

  Back in grandfather's day economists used to say we couldn't afford a universal dole. What if everybody went on it; what if nobody worked? Objections that seem infantile now that economics is a real science. If nobody worked, fewer luxury goods would be produced; our EES would sense the shift in demand and adjust factory production downward, hunting a new equilibrium. Some aibots and factories would have to remodel or recycle themselves, or else the universal stipend would be juiced to compensate. Such adjustments, upward or downward, happen every day.

  Of course it's a falsehood to say "nobody works," because that's the whole point of an EES/aibot-driven economy. The machines work; human labor is elective. The economy has stopped being a market in the classic sense and become a tool, the ultimate tool—the self-knapping flint, the wheel that makes more wheels and when there are enough wheels reconfigures itself to make some other desirable thing.

  So why were people like me (and 75% of the downsized masses) still chasing bigger incomes? Because an economy is an oligarchy, not a democracy; a rich guy can buy more stuff than a dole gypsy.

  And why do we want stuff? Human nature, I guess. Grandfather was still nagging me to buy him antiques and beer, even though he was far too dead to appreciate them.

  Doletown, as I was saying, is where the hardcore dole gypsies live. I once counted myself among their number. Some are indolent but most are not; they "work" as hard as the rest of us, though they can't exchange their work for money (because they don't have a salable product or don't know how to market themselves or don't care to sully themselves with commerce).

  Their work is invisible but potentially exploitable. Lots of cultural ferment happens in Doletown (and every living city has a Doletown by one name or another). Which is why two-bit media brokers like LadajoshiTM trawl the district for nascent trends and unanticipated novelties. Fish in the right Doletown pool and you might land a juicy patent or copyright coshare.

  But Jafar Bloom was a hard man to reach, reclusive even by Doletown standards. None of my old cronies knew him. So I put the word out and parked myself in a few likely joints, mostly cafes and talk shops—the Seaside Room, the infamous Happy Haunt, the nameless hostelries along the infill beaches. Even so, days passed before I met anyone who would acknowledge an acquaintance with him.

  "Anyone" in this case was a young woman who strode up to my table at the Haunt and said, "People say you're curious about Jafar Bloom. But you don't look like a creep or a sadist."

  "Sit down and have a drink," I said. "Then you can tell me what I am."

  She sat. She wore gypsy rags bearing logo stamps from a shop run by aibot recyclers down by the docks. I used to shop there myself. I pretended to admire the tattoo in the shape of the Greek letter omega that covered her cheeks and forehead. It looked as if a dray horse had kicked her in the face. I asked her if she knew Jafar Bloom personally.

  "Somewhat," she said. "We're not, um, intimate friends. He doesn't really have any intimate friends. He doesn't like people much. How did you hear about him?"

  "Word gets around."

  "Well, that's how I heard of you. What do you want from Bloom?"

  "I just want to see the show. That's all. Can you introduce me to him?"

  "Maybe."

  "Maybe if?"

  "Maybe if you buy me something," she said demurely.

  So I took her to a mall on one of the abandoned quays where the air smelled of salt and diesel fuel. The mall's location and inventory was dictated by the commercial strategies and profit-optimizing algorithms of the EES, but it stocked some nice carriage-trade items that had never seen the inside of an aibot workshop. She admired (and I bought for her) a soapstone drug pipe inlaid with chips of turquoise—her birthstone, she claimed.

  Three days later she took me to a housing bloc built into the interstices of an elevated roadway and left me at an unmarked steel door, on which I knocked three times.

  A few minutes later a young man opened it, looking belligerent.

  "I don't kill animals for fun," he said, "if that's what you're here for."

  Jafar Bloom was tall, lean, pale. His blond hair was long and lank. He wore a pair of yellow culottes, no shirt. "I was told you do theater," I said.

  "That's exactly what I do. But rumors get out that I'm torturing animals. So I have the Ethical Police dropping by, or untreated ginks who want to see something get hurt."

  "I just want to talk business."

  "Business?"

  "Strictly."

  "I've got nothing to sell."

  "May I come in?"

  "I guess so," he said, adding a glare that said, but you're on probation. "I heard you were looking for me."

  I stepped inside. His apartment looked like a studio, or a lab, or a kennel—or a combination of all three. Electronic items were stacked in one dim corner. Cables veined across the floor. Against another wall was a stack of cages containing animals, mostly rats but also a couple of forlorn dogs.

  The skylight admitted a narrow wedge of cloudy daylight. The air was hot and still and had a kind of sour jungle odor.

  "I'm completely aboveboard here," Bloom said. "I have to be. Do you know what the consequence would be if I was needlessly inflicting pain on living things?"

  Same consequence as for any other demonstrable mental aberration. We don't punish cruelty, we treat it. Humanely.

  "I'd be psychiatrically modified," Bloom said. "I don't want that. And I don't deserve it. So if you're here to see something hurt—"

  "I already said I wasn't. But if you don't deal in cruelty—"

  "I deal in art," he said crisply.

  "The subject of which is—?"

  "Death."

  "Death, but not cruelty?"

  "That's the point. That's exactly the point. How do you begin to study or examine something, Mr.—?"

  "Paczovski."

  "How do you study a thing unless you isolate it from its environment? You want to study methane, you distill it from crude petroleum, right? You want gold, you distill it from dross."

  "That's what you do? You distill death?"

  "That's exactly what I do."

  I walked over to the cages and looked more closely at one of the dogs. It was a breedless mutt, the kind of animal you find nosing through empty houses out in the suburbs. It dozed with its head on its paws. It didn't look like it had been mistreated. It looked, if anything, a little overfed.

  It had been fitted with a collar—not an ordinary dog collar but a metallic band bearing bulbous black extrusions and webs of wire that blurred into the animal's coat.

  The dog opened one bloodshot eye and looked back at me.

  "Good trick, distilling death. How do you do that exactly?"

  "I'm not sure I should answer any questions until you tell me what you want to buy."

  Bloom stared at me challengingly. I knew he'd been telling the truth about the Ethical Police. Some of their reports had been included in Lada's dossier. None of these animals had been or would be harmed. Not directly.

  "I don't want to buy anything," I said.

  "You said this was a business deal."

  "Business or charity, depending on how you look at it." I figured I might as well lay it out for him as explicitly as possible. "I don't know what you do, Mr. Bloom. I represent an anonymous investor who's willing to put money into something called The Cartesian Theater. All he wants in return is your written assurance that you'll use the money for this theatrical project rather than, say, buggering off to Djibouti with it. How's that sound?"

  It sounded unconvincing even to me. Bloom's skepticism was painfully obvious. "Nobody's giving away free money but the EES."

  "Given the investor's wish for anonymity, there's no further explanation I can offer."

  "I'm not signing away my intellectual property rights. I've got patents pending. And I refuse to divulge my tech
niques."

  "Nobody's asking you to."

  "Can I have that in writing?"

  "In triplicate, if you want."

  Suddenly he wasn't sure of himself. "Bullshit," he said finally. "Nobody invests money without at least a chance of profiting by it."

  "Mr. Bloom, I can't answer all your questions. To be honest, you're right. It stands to reason the investor hopes to gain something by your success. But it might not be money. Maybe he's an art lover. Or maybe he's a philanthropist, it makes him feel good to drop large amounts of cash in dark places."

  Or maybe he shared Bloom's fascination with death.

  "How much money are we talking about?"

  I told him.

  He tried to be cool about it. But his eyes went a little misty.

  "I'll give it some thought," he said.

  * * *

  Grandfather had been a trial lawyer during his life. His epibiotic ghost probably didn't remember much of that. Long-term memory was unstable in even the most expensive neuroprostheses. But there was enough of the lawbook left in him that his photo grew more animated when I mentioned open-ended contracts or the Ethical Police.

  He said, "Exactly how much did you know about this guy going in?"

  "Everything that was publicly available. Bloom was born in Cleveland and raised by his father, an accountant. Showed signs of high intellect at an early age. He studied electronic arts and designed some well-received neural interfaces before he quit the business and disappeared into Doletown. He's eccentric and probably obsessive, but nothing you could force-treat him for."

  "And I assume he took the money you offered."

  "Correct." Half up front, half when the Cartesian Theater was ready to open.

  "So what was he doing with those animals?"

  One of the sanctuary aibots passed the open door of Grandfather's memorial chamber. It paused a moment, adjusting its tie and tugging at its tailed vest. It swiveled its eyestalks briefly toward us, then wheeled on down the corridor. "Nosey fucking things," Grandfather said.