The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  She smiles. “The way you both are, it would have been strange if it was. But look, you’ve come all this incredible way. Why don’t we go out somewhere?”

  “You must have work to do. Projects—I don’t know—that you need to approve. People to meet.”

  “The thing about being in Elsinore is that things generally go more smoothly when Thea Lorentz isn’t in the way. You saw what it was like last night at dinner. Every time I open my mouth people expect to hear some new universal truth. I ask them practical questions and their mouths drop. Important deals fall apart when people get distracted because Thea’s in the room. That’s why Kasaya’s so useful. He does all that’s necessary—joins up the dots and bangs the odd head. And people scarcely even notice him.”

  “I didn’t think he likes it much when they do.”

  “More questions, Jon?” She raises an eyebrow. “But everything here on Farside must still seem so strange to you, when there’s so much to explore…”

  * * *

  Down stairways. Along corridors. Through storerooms. Perhaps these are the secret routes Kasaya hinted at, winding through the castle like Escher tunnels in whispers of sea-wet stone. Then, they are down in a great, electric-lit cavern of a garage. His Bentley is here, along with lines of other fine and vintage machines long crumbled to rust back on Lifeside. Maseratis. Morgans. Lamborghinis. Other things that look like Dan Dare spaceships of Fabergé submarines. The cold air reeks of new petrol, clean oil, polished metal. In a far corner and wildly out of place, squatting above a small black pool, is an old VW Beetle.

  “Well,” she says. “What do you think?”

  He smiles as he walks around it. The dents and scratches are old friends. “It’s perfect.”

  “Well, it was never that. But we had some fun with it, didn’t we?”

  “How does this work? I mean, creating it? Did you have some old pictures of it? Did you manage to access—”

  “Jon.” She dangles a key from her hand. “Do you want to go out for a drive, or what?”

  * * *

  “The steering even pulls the same way. It’s amazing…”

  Out on roads that climb and camber, giving glimpses through the slowly thinning mist of flanks of forest, deep drops. Headlights on, although it makes little difference and there doesn’t seem to be any other traffic. She twiddles the radio. Finds a station that must have stopped transmitting more than fifty years ago. Van Morrison, Sprinsteen and Dylan. So very, very out of date—but still good—even back then. And even now, with his brown-eyed girl beside him again. It’s same useless deejay, the same pointless adverts. As the road climbs higher, the signal fades to bubbling hiss.

  “Take that turn up there. You see, the track right there in the trees…?”

  The road now scarcely a road. The Beetle a jumble of metallic jolts and yelps. He has to laugh, and Thea laughs as well, the way they’re being bounced around. A tunnel through the trees, and then some kind of clearing, where he stops the engine and squawks the handbrake, and everything falls still.

  “Do you remember?”

  He climbs out slowly, as if fearing a sudden movement might cause it all to dissolve. “Of course I do…”

  Thea, though, strides ahead. Climbs the sagging cabin steps.

  “This is…”

  “I know,” she agrees, testing the door. Which—just as it had always been—is unlocked.

  This, he thinks as he stumbles forward, is what it really means to be dead. Forget the gills and wings and the fine wines and the spectacular food and the incredible scenery. What this is, what it means …

  Is this.

  The same cabin. It could be the same day. Thea, she’d called after him as he walked down the street away from an old actors’ pub off what was still called Covent Garden after celebrating—although that wasn’t the word—the end of Bard on Wheels with a farewell pint and spliff. Farewell and fuck off as far as Northover was concerned, Sam Bartleby and his stupid sword fights especially. Shakespeare and most other kinds of real performance being well and truly dead, and everyone heading for well-deserved obscurity. The sole exception being Thea Lorentz, who could sing and act and do most things better than all the rest of them combined and had an air of being destined for higher things that didn’t seem like arrogant bullshit even if it probably was. Out of his class, really, both professionally and personally. But she’d called to him, and he’d wandered back, for where else was he heading? She’d said she had a kind of proposal, and why didn’t they go out for a while out in her old VW? All the bridges over the Thames hadn’t yet been down then, and they’d driven past the burnt-out cars and abandoned shops until they came to this stretch of woodland where the trees were still alive, and they’d ended up exactly here. In this clearing, inside this cabin.

  There’s an old woodburner stove that Northover sets about lighting, and a few tins along the cobweb shelves, which he inspects and settles on a tin of soup, which he nearly cuts his thumb struggling to open, and sets to warm on the top of the fire as it begins to send out amber shadows. He goes to the window, clears a space in the dust, pretending to check if he turned the VW’s lights off, but in reality trying to grab a little thinking time. He didn’t, doesn’t, know Thea Lorentz that well at this or any point. But he knows her well enough to understand that her spontaneous suggestions are nothing if not measured.

  “Is this how it was, do you think?” she asks, shrugging off her coat and coming to stand behind him. Again, that smell of patchouli. She slides her arms around his waist. Nestles her chin against his shoulder. “I wanted you to be what I called producer and musical director for my Emily Dickinson thing. And you agreed.”

  “Not before I’d asked if you meant roadie and general dogsbody.”

  He feels her chuckle. “That as well…”

  “What else was I going to do, anyway?” Dimly, in the gaining glow of the fire, he can see her and his face in reflection.

  “And how about now?”

  “I suppose it’s much the same.”

  He turns. It’s he who clasps her face, draws her mouth to his. Another thing about Thea is that, even when you know it’s always really her, it somehow seems to be you.

  Their teeth clash. It’s been a long time. This is the first time ever. She draws back, breathless, pulls off that loose-fitting jumper she’s wearing. He helps her with the shift beneath, traces, remembers, discovers or rediscovers, the shape and weight of her breasts. Thumbs her hardening nipples. Then, she pulls away his shirt, undoes his belt buckle. Difficult here to be graceful, even if you’re Thea Lorentz, struggle-hopping with zips, shoes and panties. Even harder for Northover with one sock off and the other caught on something or other, not to mention his young man’s erection, as he throws a dusty blanket over the creaky divan. But laughter helps. Laughter always did. That, and Thea’s knowing smile as she takes hold of him for a moment in her cool fingers. Then, Christ, she lets go of him again. A final pause, and he almost thinks this isn’t going to work, but all she’s doing is pulling off those silver bracelets, and then, before he can realise what else it is she wants, she’s snapping off the bangle of his Rolex as well and pulling him down, and now there’s nothing else to be done, for they really are naked.

  Northover, he’s drowning in memory. Greedy at first, hard to hold back, especially with the things she does, but then trying to be slow, trying to be gentle. Or, at least, a gentleman. He remembers, anyway—or is it now happening?—that time she took his head between her hands and raised it to her gaze. You don’t have to be so careful, she murmurs. Or murmured. I’m flesh and blood, Jon. Just like you …

  He lies back. Collapsed. Drenched. Exhausted. Sated. He turns from the cobweb ceiling and sees the Rolex lies cast on the gritty floor. Softly ticking. Just within reach. But already, Thea is stirring. She scratches, stretches. Bracelet hoops glitter as they slip back over her knuckles. He stands up. Pads over to a stained sink. There’s a trickle of water. What might pass for a towel. Dead or l
iving, it seems, the lineaments of love remain the same.

  “You never were much of a one for falling asleep after,” Thea comments, straightening her sleeves as she dresses.

  “Not much a man, then.”

  “Some might say that…” She laughs as she fluffs her hair. “But we had something, didn’t we, Jon? We really did. So why not again?”

  There it is. Just when he thinks the past’s finally over and done with. Not Emily Dickinson this time, or not only that project, but a kind of greatest hits. Stuff they did together with Bard on Wheels, although this time it’ll be just them, a two-hander, a proper double act, and, yes Jon, absolutely guaranteed no Sam fucking Bartleby. Other things as well. A few songs, sketches. Bits and bobs. Fun, of course. But wasn’t the best kind of fun always the stuff you took seriously? And why not start here and see how it goes? Why not tonight, back at Elsinore?

  As ever, what can he say but yes?

  * * *

  Thea drives. He supposes she did before, although he can’t really remember how they got back to London. The mist has cleared. She, the sea, the mountains, all look magnificent. That Emily Dickinson thing, the one they did before, was a huge commercial and critical success. Even if people did call it a one-woman show, when he’d written half the script and all of the music. To have those looks, and yet to be able to hold the stage and sing and act so expressively! Not to mention, although the critics generally did, that starlike ability to assume a role, yet still be Thea Lorentz. Audrey Hepburn got a mention. So did Grace Kelly. A fashion icon, too, then. But Thea could carry a tune better than either. Even for the brief time they were actually living together in that flat in Pimlico, Northover sometimes found himself simply looking—staring, really—at Thea. Especially when she was sleeping. She just seemed so angelic. Who are you really? he’d wondered. Where are you from? Why are you here, and with me of all people?

  He never did work out the full chain of events that brought her to join Bard on Wheels. Of course, she’d popped up in other troupes and performances—the evidence was still to be found on blocky online postings and all those commemorative hagiographies, but remembrances were shaky and it was hard to work on the exact chain of where and when. A free spirit, certainly. A natural talent. Not the sort who’d ever needed instructing. She claimed that she’d lost both her parents to the Hn3i epidemic and had grown up in one of those giant orphanages they set up at Heathrow. As to where she got that poise, or the studied assurance she always displayed, all the many claims, speculations, myths and stories that eventually emerged—and which she never made any real attempt to quash—drowned out whatever had been the truth.

  They didn’t finish the full tour. Already, the offers were pouring in. He followed her once to pre-earthquake, pre-nuke Los Angeles, but by then people weren’t sure what his role exactly was in the growing snowball of Thea Lorentz’s fame. Flunky, and neither was he. Not that she was unfaithful. At least, not to his knowledge. She probably never had the time. Pretty clear to everyone, though, that Thea Lorentz was moving on and up. And that he wasn’t. Without her, although he tried getting other people involved, the Emily Dickinson poem arrangements sounded like the journeymen pieces they probably were. Without her, he even began to wonder about the current whereabouts of his other old sparring partners in Bard on Wheels.

  It was out old LA, at a meal at the Four Seasons, that he’d met, encountered, experienced—whatever the word for it was—his first dead person. They were still pretty rare back then, and this one had made its arrival on the roof of the hotel by veetol just to show that it could, when it really should have just popped into existence in the newly installed reality fields at their table like Aladdin’s genie. The thing had jittered and buzzed, and its voice seemed over-amplified. Of course, it couldn’t eat, but it pretended to consume a virtual plate of quail in puff pastry with foie gras in a truffle sauce, which it pretended to enjoy with virtual relish. You couldn’t fault the thing’s business sense, but Northover took the whole experience as another expression of the world’s growing sickness.

  Soon, it was the Barbican and the Sydney Opera House for Thea (and how sad was that so many of these great venues were situated next to the rising shorelines) and odd jobs or no jobs at all for him. The flat in Pimlico went, and so, somewhere, did hope. The world of entertainment was careering, lemming-like, toward the cliffs of pure virtuality, with just a few bright stars such as Thea to give it the illusion of humanity. Crappy fantasy-dramas or rubbish docu-musicals that she could sail through and do her Thea Lorentz thing, giving them an undeserved illusion of class. At least, and unlike that idiot buffoon Bartleby, Northover could see why she was in such demand. When he thought of what Thea Lorentz had become, with her fame and her wealth and her well-publicised visits to disaster areas and her audiences with the pope and the Dalai Lama, he didn’t exactly feel surprised or bitter. After all, she was only doing whatever it was that she’d always done.

  Like all truly beautiful women, at least those who take care of themselves, she didn’t age in the way that the rest of the world did. If anything, the slight sharpening of those famous cheekbones and the small care lines that drew around her eyes and mouth made her seem even more breath-takingly elegant. Everyone knew that she would mature slowly and gracefully and that she would make—just like the saints with whom she was now most often compared—a beautiful, and probably incorruptible, corpse. So, when news broke that she’d contracted a strain of new-variant septicemic plague when she was on a fact-finding trip in Manhattan, the world fell into mourning as it hadn’t done since … Well, there was no comparison, although JFK and Martin Luther King got a mention, along with Gandhi and Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe and that lost Mars mission and Kate and Diana.

  Transfer—a process of assisted death and personality uploading—was becoming a popular option. At least, amongst the few who could afford it. The idea that the blessed Thea might refuse to do this thing and deprive a grieving world of the chance to know that somehow, somewhere, she was still there, and on their side, and sorrowing as they sorrowed, was unthinkable. By now well ensconced high up in his commune with his broom and his reputation as an angry hermit, left with nothing but his memories that wrecked piano he was trying to get into tune, even Northover couldn’t help but follow this ongoing spectacle. Still, he felt strangely detached. He’d long fallen out of love with Thea, and now fell out of admiring her as well. All that will-she won’t-she crap that she was doubtless engineering even as she lay there on her deathbed! All she was doing was just exactly what she’d always done and twisting the whole fucking world around her fucking little finger. But then maybe, just possibly, he was getting the tiniest little bit bitter …

  * * *

  Back at Elsinore, Kasaya has already been at work. Lights, a low stage, decent mikes and pa system, along with a spectacular grand piano, have all been installed at the far end of the great hall where they sat for yesterday’s dinner. The long tables have been removed, the chairs re-arranged. Or replaced. It really does look like a bijou theatre. The piano’s a Steinway. If asked, Northover might have gone for a Bechstein. The action, to his mind, and with the little chance he’s even had to ever play such machines, being a tad more responsive. But you can’t have everything, he supposes. Not even here.

  The space is cool, half-dark. The light from the windows is settling. Bartleby and his troupe of merry men have just returned from their day of tally-ho slaughter with a giant boar hung on ropes. Tonight, by sizzling flamelight out in the yard, the dining will be alfresco. And after that … Well, word has already got out that Thea and this newly arrived guy at Elsinore are planning some kind of reunion performance. No wonder the air in this empty hall feels expectant.

  He sits down. Wondrous and mysterious as Thea Lorentz’s smile, the keys—which are surely real ivory—gleam back at him. He plays a soft e-minor chord. The sound shivers out. Beautiful. Although that’s mostly the piano. Never a real musician, Northy. Nor much
of a real actor, either. Never a real anything. Not that much of a stagehand, even. Just got lucky for a while with a troupe of travelling players. Then, as luck tends to do, it ran out on you. But still. He hasn’t sat at one of these things since he died, yet it couldn’t feel more natural. As the sound fades, and the gathering night washes in, he can hear the hastening tick of his Rolex.

  The door at the far end bangs. He thinks it’s most likely Kasaya. But it’s Thea. Barefoot now. Her feet sip the polished floor. Dark slacks, an old, knotted shirt. Hair tied back. She looks the business. She’s carrying loose sheaves of stuff—notes, bits of script and sheet music—almost all of which he recognises as she slings them down across the gleaming lid of the piano.

  “Well,” she says, “shall we do this thing?”

  * * *

  In his room, he stands for a long time in the steam heat of the shower. Finds he’s soaping and scrubbing himself until his skin feels raw and his head is dizzy. He’d always wondered about those guys from al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and the Taliban and New Orthodoxy. Why they felt such a need to shave and cleanse the bodies they would soon be destroying. Now, though, he understands perfectly. The world is ruined and time is out of joint, but this isn’t just a thing you do out of conviction. The moment has to be right, as well.

  Killing the dead isn’t easy. In fact, it’s near impossible. But not quite. The deads’ great strength is the sheer overpowering sense of reality they bring to the sick fantasy they call Farside. Everything must work. Everything has to be what it is, right down to the minutest detail. Everything must be what it seems to be. But this is also their greatest weakness. Of course, they told Northy when they took off his blindfold as he sat chained to a chair which was bolted to the concrete floor in that deserted shopping mall, we can try to destroy them by trying to tear everything in Farside apart. We can fly planes into their reactors, introduce viruses into their processing suites, flood their precious data vaults with seawater. But there’s always a backup. There’s always another power source. We can never wreck enough of Farside to have even a marginal effect upon the whole. But the dead themselves are different. Break down the singularity of their existence for even an instant, and you destroy it forever. The dead become truly dead.