The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  “To cover this bare spot in my hair.”

  “The first person from your family to visit, I will tell them.”

  “Nobody’s going to visit.”

  “I see. Then I will get you a hat.”

  “Thanks.” And then, surprising myself, “They don’t want me to do none of this.”

  “No,” he said quietly, and without asking what I meant, “I imagine they do not.”

  “They think you conduct experiments on us like we’re lab animals. Like with the Nazis. Or Frankenstein.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think they are … unknowing.” It felt like a huge betrayal. Still, I kept on. “Especially my Granmama.”

  “Grandmothers are often fierce. Mine is.” He made some notes on a tablet, typing and swiping without looking at it.

  I hadn’t thought of him—of any of them—as having a grandmother. I demanded, like that would make this grandmother more solid, “What’s her name?”

  “Chunhua. What is the name of your grandmother?”

  “Ludmilla. Like me.” I thought a minute. “‘Fierce’ is the right word.”

  “Then we have this in common, yes?”

  But I warn’t yet ready to give him that much. “I bet my granmama is more fierce than any of your kin.”

  He smiled, a crinkling of his strange bald face, eyes almost disappearing in folds of smooth skin. “I would—what is it you say, in poker?—‘see that bet’ if I could.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  He didn’t answer, and his smile disappeared. I said, “What did your granmama do that was so fierce?”

  “She made me study. Hours every day, hours every night. All spring, all summer, all winter. When I refused, she beat me. What does yours do?”

  All at once I didn’t want to answer. Was beating better or worse? Granmama never touched me, nor any of us. Dr. Chung waited. Finally I said, “She freezes me. Looks at me like … like she wants to make a icy wind in my mind. And then that wind blows, and I can’t get away from it nohow, and then she turns her back on me.”

  “That is worse.”

  “Really? You think so?”

  “I think so.”

  A long breath went out of me, clearing out my chest. I said, “Bobby warn’t always like he is now. He taught me to fish.”

  “Do you like fishing?”

  “No.” But I liked Bobby teaching me, just the two of us laughing down by the creek, eating the picnic lunch Mama put up for us.

  A nurse, masked and gowned like on TV, came in and said, “We’re ready.”

  The last thing I remember was lying on the table, breathing in the knock-out gas, and thinking, Now at least I’m going to get a long deep sleep. Only at the very last minute I panicked some and my hand, strapped to the table, flapped around a bit. Another hand held it, strong and steady. Dr. Chung. I went under.

  * * *

  When I woke, it was in a different hospital room but Dr. Chung was still there, sitting in a chair and working a tablet. He put it down.

  “Welcome back, Ms. Connors. How do you feel?”

  I put my hand to my head. A thick bandage covered part of it. Nothing hurt, but my mouth was dry, my throat was scratchy, and I had a floaty feeling. “What do you got me on? Oxycontin?”

  “No. Steroids to control swelling and a mild pain med. There are only a few nerve receptors in the skull. Tomorrow we will take you back to Blaine. Here.”

  He handed me a red knit hat.

  All at once I started to cry. I never cry, but this was so weird—waking up with something foreign in my skull, and feeling rested instead of skitterish and tired, and then this hat from this strange-looking man.… I sobbed like I was Cody, three years old with a skinned knee. I couldn’t stop sobbing. It was awful.

  Dr. Chung didn’t high-tail it out of there. He didn’t try to there-there me, or take my hand, or even look embarrassed and angry mixed together, like every other man I ever knowed when women cry. He just sat and waited, and when I finally got myself to stop, he said, “I wish you would call me ‘Dan.’”

  “No.” Crying had left me embarrassed, if not him. “It isn’t your name. Is it?”

  “No. It just seems more comfortable for Westerners.”

  “What is your damned name?”

  “It is Hai. It means ‘the ocean.’ “

  “You’re nothing like any ocean.”

  “I know.” He grinned.

  “Do all Chinese names mean something?”

  “Yes. I was astonished when I found out American names do not.”

  “When was that?”

  “When I came here for graduate school.”

  I was talking too much. I never rattled on like this, especially not to Chinese men who had me cut open. It was the damn drugs they gave me, that thing for swelling or the “mild pain med.” I’d always stayed strictly away from even aspirin, ’cause of watching Mama and Bobby. Afore I could say anything, Dr. Chung said, “Your meds might induce a little ‘high,’ Ludmilla. It will pass soon. Meanwhile, you are safe here.”

  “Like hell I am!”

  “You are. And I apologize for calling you ‘Ludmilla.’ I have not received permission.”

  “Oh, go the fuck ahead. Only it’s ‘Ludie.’” I felt my skull again. I wanted to rip off the bandage. I wanted to run out of the hospital. I wanted to stay in this bed forever, talking, not having to deal with my family. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  Maybe Dr. Chung did, because he went on talking, a steadying stream of nothing: graduate school in California and riding busses in China and his wife’s and daughters’ names. They were named after flowers, at least in English: Lotus and Jasmine and Plum Blossom. I liked that. I listened, and grew sleepy, and drifted into dreams of girls with faces like flowers.

  * * *

  I was two days in Johnson Memorial and two more in a bed at the clinic, and every single one of them I worried about Shawn. Nobody came to see me. I thought Patty might, or maybe even Dinah if Bobby’d a let her, but they didn’t. Well, Patty was only twelve, still pretty young to come alone. So I watched TV and I talked with Dr. Chung, who didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do.

  “Don’t you got to see patients?”

  “I’m not an M.D., Ludie. Dr. Liu mostly sees the patients.”

  “How come Blaine got so many Chinese doctors? Aren’t Americans working on optogenetics?”

  “Of course they are. Liu Bo and I became friends at the university and so applied for this grant together.”

  “And you brought Jenny.”

  “She is Bo’s fiancé.”

  “Oh. She warn’t— There he is, the bastard!”

  President Rollins was on TV, giving a campaign speech. Red and blue balloons sailed up behind him. My hands curled into fists. Dr. Chung watched me, and I realized—stupid me!—that of course he was working. He was observing me, the lab rat.

  He said, “Why do you hate the president so?”

  “He stopped the government checks and the food stamps. It’s ’cause of him and his Libbies that most of Blaine is back to eating squirrels.”

  Dr. Chung looked at the TV like it was the most fascinating thing in the world, but I knew his attention was really on me. “But under the Libertarians, aren’t your taxes lower?”

  I snorted. “Five percent of nothing isn’t less to pay than fifteen percent of nothing.”

  “I thought the number of jobs in the coal mines had increased.”

  “If you can get one. My kin can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t tell him why not. Bobby and Uncle Ted and maybe even now Shawn—they can’t none of them pass a drug screen. So I snapped, “You defending Ratface Rollins?”

  “Certainly not. He has drastically and tragically cut funding for basic research.”

  “But here you all are.” I waved my arm to take in the room and the machines hooked up to me and the desk in the lobby where Mrs. Cully was doing something on a comput
er. I was still floating.

  “Barely,” Dr. Chung said. “This study is funded as part of a grant now four years old and up for renewal. If—” He stopped and looked—for just a minute, and the first time ever—a little confused. He didn’t know why he was telling me so much. I didn’t know, either. My excuse was the pain drugs.

  I said, “If Ratface wins, you lose the money for this clinic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? I mean, why this one specially?”

  He chewed on his bottom lip, something else I didn’t see him do afore. I thought he warn’t going to say any more, but then he did. “The study so far has produced no publishable results. The population affected is small. We obtained the current grant just before President Rollins came into office and all but abolished both the FDA and research money. If the Libertarians are re-elected, it’s unlikely our grant will be renewed.”

  “Isn’t there someplace else to get the money?”

  “Not that we have found so far.”

  Mrs. Cully called to him then and he left. I sat thinking about what he said. It was like a curtain lifted on one corner, and behind that curtain was a place just as dog-eat-dog as Blaine. Bobby scrambled to dig coal from the side of the highway, and these doctors scrambled to dig money out of the government. Dinah worked hard to make it okay that Bobby hit her (“It ain’t him, it’s the fucking sickness!”), and Dr. Chung worked hard to convince the government it was a good idea to put a bunch of algae and a light switch in my skull. Then I thought about how much I liked him telling me all that, and about the bandages coming off and the real experiment starting tomorrow, and about lunch coming soon. And then I didn’t think about nothing because Bobby burst into the clinic with his .22.

  “Where is she? Where’s my fucking sister?”

  “Bobby!”

  He didn’t hear me, or he couldn’t. I scrambled out of bed but I was still hooked up to a bunch of machines. I yanked the wires. Soothing voices in the lobby but I couldn’t make out no words.

  The .22 fired, sounding like a mine explosion.

  “Bobby!”

  Oh sweet Jesus, no—

  But he hadn’t hit nobody. Mrs. Cully crouched on the floor behind her counter. The bullet hole in the wall warn’t anywhere near her or Dr. Chung, who stood facing Bobby and talking some soothers that there was no way Bobby was going to hear. He was wild-eyed like Dad had been near the end, and I knew he hadn’t slept in days and he was seeing things that warn’t there. “Bobby—”

  “You whore!” He fired again and this time the bullet whizzed past Dr. Chung’s ear and hit the backside of Mrs. Cully’s computer. Bobby swung the rifle toward me. I stood stock-still, but Dr. Chung started forward to grab the barrel. That would get Bobby’s attention and he would—God no no …

  But afore I could yell again, the clinic door burst open and Shawn grabbed Bobby from behind. Bobby shouted something, I couldn’t tell what, and they fought. Shawn didn’t have his whole manhood growth yet, but he didn’t have Bobby’s way-gone sickness yet, neither. Shawn got the rifle away from Bobby and Bobby on the ground. Shawn kicked him in the head and Bobby started to sob.

  I picked up the rifle and held it behind me. Dr. Chung bent over Bobby. By this time the lobby was jammed with people, two nurses and Dr. Liu and Jenny and Pete Lawler, who must a been in a examining room. All this happened so fast that Shawn was just preparing to kick Bobby again when I grabbed his arm. “Don’t!”

  Shawn scowled at the bandage on my head. “He’s going to get us all put behind bars. Just the same, he ain’t wrong. You’re coming home with me.”

  The breath went out of me. I warn’t ready for this. “No, Shawn. I’m not.”

  “You come home with me or you don’t never come home again. Granmama says.”

  “I’m not going. They’re going to help me here, and they can help you, too! You don’t need to get like Bobby, like Dad was—”

  He shook off my arm. And just like that, I lost him. The Connors men don’t hardly never change their minds once they make them up. And soon Shawn wouldn’t even have a mind. Seven months from the first sleeplessness to death.

  Shawn yanked Bobby to his feet. Bobby was quiet now, bleeding from his head where Shawn kicked him. Dr. Liu started to say, “We must—” but Dr. Chung put a hand on his arm and he shut up. Shawn held out his other hand to me, his face like stone, and I handed him Bobby’s gun. Then they were gone, the truck Shawn borrowed or stole roaring away up the mountain.

  Dr. Chung knew better than to say anything to me. I looked at the busted computer and wondered how much it cost, and if they would take it out of my pay. Then I went back into my room, closed the door, and got into bed. I would a given anything, right up to my own life, if I could a slept then. But I knew I wouldn’t. Not now, not tonight, not—it felt like at that minute—ever again. And by spring, Shawn would be like Bobby. And so would I.

  * * *

  “You need a pass-out,” I said to Dr. Chung.

  He paused in his poking at my head. “A what?”

  “When Bonnie Jean got a fish at a pet store once, they gave her a pass-out paper, TAKING CARE OF YOUR GOLDFISH. To tell her how to do for the fish—not that she done it. You need a pass-out, TAKING CARE OF YOUR BRAIN ALGAE.”

  Dr. Chung laughed. When he did that, his eyes almost disappeared, but by now I liked that. Nobody else never thought I was funny, even if my funning now was just a cover for nerves. Dr. Liu, at the computer, didn’t laugh, and neither did Jenny. I still didn’t like her eyes.

  I sat on a chair, just a regular chair, with my head bandage off and the shaved patch on my head feeling too bare. All my fingers could feel was a tiny bit of something hard poking above my skull: the end of the fiber-optic implant. Truth was, I didn’t need a pass-out paper. I knew what was going to happen because Dr. Chung explained it, as many times as I wanted, till I really understood. The punchpad in his hand controlled what my “optrode” did. He could send blue or yellow laser light down it, which would make my new algae release tiny particles that turned on and off some cells in my brain. I’d seen the videos of mice, with long cables coming from their skulls, made to run in circles, or stop staggering around drunk-like, or even remember mazes quicker.

  Last night I asked Dr. Chung, “You can control me now, can’t you?”

  “I have no wish to control you.”

  “But you could.”

  “No one will control you.”

  I’d laughed then, too, but it tasted like lemons in my mouth.

  “Ready?” Dr. Liu said.

  “Ready.” I braced myself, but nothing happened. I didn’t feel nothing at all. But at the screen Jenny went, “Aaaaaaaahhh.”

  “What?” I said.

  “It works,” Dr. Chung said quietly. “We are getting a good picture of optrode response.”

  On the screen was a bunch of wavy lines, with a lot of clicking noises.

  That went on for a long bit: me sitting in the chair feeling nothing, Dr. Chung turning lights on and off in my head that I didn’t see, lines and numbers on the computer, and lots of long discussions with words I didn’t understand. Maybe some of them were Chinese. And then, just when I was getting antsy and bored both at the same time, something happened. Another press of the punchpad and all at once I saw the room. Not like I saw it afore—I mean I really saw it. Every little thing was clear and bright and separate and itself: the hard edge of the computer screen, the way the overhead light made a shadow in the corner, a tiny brown stain on the hem of Jenny’s white coat—everything. The room was like Reverend Baxter said the world looked right when God created it: fresh and new and shining. I could feel my mouth drop open and my eyes get wide.

  “What?” Dr. Chung said. “What is it, Ludie?”

  I told him. He did something with the switch in his hand and all the fresh clearness went away. “Oh! Bring it back!”

  “Hyperawareness,” Dr. Liu said. “The opsins could be over-expressing?”

  �
�Not that quickly,” Dr. Chung said. “But—”

  “Bring it back!” I almost shouted it.

  He did. But after a minute it was almost too much. Too bright, too clear, too strange. And then it got clearer and brighter, so that it almost blinded me and I couldn’t see and everything was wrong and—

  It all stopped. Dr. Chung had pressed some switch. And then I wanted it back.

  “Not yet, Ludie,” he said. He sounded worried. “You were injected with multiple opsins, you know, each responding to a different wavelength of light. We’re going to try a different one. Would you stand up, please? Good … now walk toward me.”

  I did, and he did something with his switch, and all at once I couldn’t move. I was frozen. The computer started clicking loud as a plague of locusts.

  Jenny said, “Pronounced inhibitory motor response.”

  I said, “Stop!”

  Then I could move again and I was pounding on Dr. Chung with my fists. “You said you warn’t going to control me! You said!”

  He grabbed my wrists and held them; he was stronger than he looked. “I didn’t know that would happen, Ludie. This is all new, you know. Nobody wants to control you.”

  “You just did, you bastard!”

  “I did not know the inhibitory neurons would fire that strongly. Truly, I did not.”

  Jenny said something in Chinese.

  “No,” Dr. Chung said sharply to her.

  “I’m done here,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s enough for a first session,” Dr. Liu said. Which warn’t what I meant. I meant I was going home.

  * * *

  But I didn’t. Instead I went to my room in the clinic, got into bed, and slept a little. Not long, not real hard, but enough to calm me down. Then I got up and found Dr. Chung in his office.

  If he was glad to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead he handed me an envelope. “This came for you in the mail.”

  Inside was a single page torn from the Sears catalogue, a page with kids’ coats on the top and enough white space at the bottom for Dinah to print THANK U. So she got the money I been sending her from my pay. Where did she tell Bobby the warm clothes come from, the coats and stuff for Lewis, Arianna, Timmy, Cody, Bonnie Jean? No, that was stupid—Bobby was too far gone to notice even if the kids ran around buck naked.