Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  All this time “Sonja” was in her apartment, lying in a foam couch with a visor over her head. The visor delivered compressed bursts of stimuli to her visual cortex: the other sense perceptions riding piggyback on the visual, triggering a whole complex of neuronal groups; tricking her mind/brain into believing the world of the dream was out there. The brain works like a computer. You cannot “see” a hippopotamus, until your system has retrieved the “hippopotamus” template from memory, and checked it against the incoming. Where does the “real” exist? In a sense this world was as real as the other…But the thought of “Lessingham's” unknown body disturbed her. If he was too poor to lease good equipment, he might be lying in the clinic now in a grungy public cubicle…cathetered, and so forth: the sordid details.

  She had never tried virtual sex. The solitary version had seemed a depressing idea. People said the partnered kind was the perfect zipless fuck. He sounded experienced; she was afraid he would be able to tell she was not. But it didn't matter. The virtual-therapy group wasn't like a dating agency. She would never meet him in the real, that was the whole idea. She didn't have to think about that stranger's body. She didn't have to worry about the real “Lessingham's” opinion of her. She drew herself up in the firelight. It was right, she decided, that Sonja should be a virgin. When the moment came, her surrender would be the more absolute.

  In their daytime he stayed in character. It was a tacit trade-off. She would acknowledge the other world at nightfall by the campfire, as long as he didn't mention it the rest of the time. So they traveled on together, Lessingham and Red Sonja, the courtly scholar-knight and the taciturn warrior-maiden, through an exquisite Maytime: exchanging lingering glances, “accidental” touches…And still nothing happened. “Sonja” was aware that “Lessingham,” as much as herself, was holding back from the brink. She felt piqued at this. But they were both, she guessed, waiting for the fantasy they had generated to throw up the perfect moment of itself. It ought to. There was no other reason for its existence.

  Turning a shoulder of the hillside, they found a sheltered hollow. Two rowan trees in flower grew above the river. In the shadow of their blossom tumbled a little waterfall, so beautiful it was a wonder to behold. The water fell clear from the upper edge of a slab of stone twice a man's height, into a rocky basin. The water in the basin was clear and deep, a-churn with bubbles from the jet plunging from above. The riverbanks were lawns of velvet, over the rocks grew emerald mosses and tiny water flowers.

  “I would live here,” said Lessingham softly, his hand dropping from his riding bird's bridle. “I would build me a house in this fairy place, and rest my heart here forever.”

  Sonja loosed the black stallion's rein. The two beasts moved off, feeding each in its own way on the sweet grasses and springtime foliage.

  “I would like to bathe in that pool,” said the warrior-maiden.

  “Why not?” He smiled. “I will stand guard.”

  She pulled off her leather harness and slowly unbound her hair. It fell in a trembling mass of copper and russet lights, a cloud of glory around the richness of her barely clothed body. Gravely she gazed at her own perfection, mirrored in the homage of his eyes. Lessingham's breath was coming fast. She saw a pulse beat, in the strong beauty of his throat. The pure physical majesty of him caught her breath.…

  It was their moment. But it still needed something to break this strange spell of reluctance. “Lady—” he murmured—

  Sonja gasped. “Back to back!” she cried. “Quickly, or it is too late!”

  Six warriors surrounded them, covered from head to foot in red-and-black armor. They were human in the lower body, but the head of each appeared beaked and fanged, with monstrous faceted eyes, and each bore an extra pair of armored limbs between breastbone and belly. They fell on Sonja and Lessingham without pause or a challenge.

  Sonja fought fiercely as always, her blade ringing against the monster armor. But something cogged her fabulous skill. Some power had drained the strength from her splendid limbs. She was disarmed. The clawed creatures held her, a monstrous head stooped over her, choking her with its fetid breath.…

  When she woke again she was bound against a great boulder, by thongs around her wrists and ankles, tied to hoops of iron driven into the rock. She was naked but for her linen shift, it was in tatters. Lessingham was standing, leaning on his sword. “I drove them off,” he said. “At last.” He dropped the sword, and took his dagger to cut her down.

  She lay in his arms. “You are very beautiful,” he murmured. She thought he would kiss her. His mouth plunged instead to her breast, biting and sucking at the engorged nipple. She gasped in shock, a fierce pang leapt through her virgin flesh. What did they want with kisses? They were warriors. Sonja could not restrain a moan of pleasure. He had won her. How wonderful to be overwhelmed, to surrender to the raw lust of this godlike animal.

  Lessingham set her on her feet.

  “Tie me up.”

  He was proffering a handful of blood-slicked leather thongs.

  “What?”

  “Tie me to the rock, mount me. It's what I want.”

  “The evil warriors tied you—?”

  “And you come and rescue me.” He made an impatient gesture. “Whatever. Trust me. It'll be good for you too.” He tugged at his bloodstained silk breeches, releasing a huge, iron-hard erection. “See, they tore my clothes. When you see that, you go crazy, you can't resist…and I'm at your mercy. Tie me up!”

  “Sonja” had heard that eighty percent of the submissive partners in sadomasochist sex are male. But it is still the man who dominates his “dominatrix”: who says tie me tighter, beat me harder, you can stop now.…Hey, she thought. Why all the stage directions, suddenly? What happened to my zipless fuck? But what the hell. She wasn't going to back out now, having come so far.…There was a seamless shift, and Lessingham was bound to the rock. She straddled his cock. He groaned. “Don't do this to me.” He thrust upward, into her, moaning. “You savage, you utter savage, uuunnh…” Sonja grasped the man's wrists and rode him without mercy. He was right, it was as good this way. His eyes were half-closed. In the glimmer of blue under his lashes, a spirit of mockery trembled.…She heard a laugh, and found her hands were no longer gripping Lessingham's wrists. He had broken free from her bonds, he was laughing at her in triumph. He was wrestling her to the ground.

  “No!” she cried, genuinely outraged. But he was the stronger.

  It was night when he was done with her. He rolled away and slept, as far as she could tell, instantly. Her chief thought was that virtual sex didn't entirely connect. She remembered now, that was something else people told you, as well as the “zipless fuck.” It's like coming in your sleep, they said. It doesn't quite make it. Maybe there was nothing virtuality could do to orgasm, to match the heightened richness of the rest of the experience. She wondered if he, too, had felt cheated.

  She lay beside her hero, wondering, where did I go wrong? Why did he have to treat me that way? Beside her, “Lessingham” cuddled a fragment of violet silk, torn from his own breeches. He whimpered in his sleep, nuzzling the soft fabric, “Mama…”

  She told Dr. Hamilton that “Lessingham” had raped her.

  “And wasn't that what you wanted?”

  She lay on the couch in the mirrored office. The doctor sat beside her with his smart notebook on his knee. The couch collected “Sonja's” physical responses as if she was an astronaut umbilicaled to ground control; and Dr. Jim read the telltales popping up in his reassuring horn-rims. She remembered the sneaking furtive thing that she had glimpsed in “Lessingham's” eyes, the moment before he took over their lust scene. How could she explain the difference? “He wasn't playing. In the fantasy, anything's allowed. But he wasn't playing. He was outside it, laughing at me.”

  “I warned you he would want to stay in control.”

  “But there was no need! I wanted him to be in control. Why did he have to steal what I wanted to give him anyway?”

/>   “You have to understand, “Sonja,” that to many men it's women who seem powerful. You women feel dominated and try to achieve ‘equality.’ But the men don't perceive the situation like that. They're mortally afraid of you: and anything, just about anything they do to keep the upper hand, seems like justified self-defense.”

  She could have wept with frustration. “I know all that! That's exactly what I was trying to get away from. I thought we were supposed to leave the damn baggage behind. I wanted something purely physical.…Something innocent.”

  “Sex is not innocent, ‘Sonja.’ I know you believe it is, or ‘should be.’ But it's time you faced the truth. Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control. Sex is no exception. Now that's basic. You can't escape from it in direct-cortical fantasy. It's in our minds that relationships happen, and the mind, of course, is where virtuality happens too.” He sighed, and made an entry in her notes. “I want you to look on this as another step toward coping with the real. You're not sick, ‘Sonja.’ You're unhappy. Not even unusually so. Most adults are unhappy, to some degree—”

  “Or else they're in denial.”

  Her sarcasm fell flat. “Right. A good place to be, at least some of the time. What we're trying to achieve here—if we're trying to achieve anything at all—is to raise your pain threshold to somewhere near average. I want you to walk away from therapy with lowered expectations: I guess that would be success.”

  “Great,” she said, desolate. “That's just great.”

  Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, you guys! You are so weird. It's always the same story. Can't live with you, can't live without you…You can't go on this way, you know. Its getting ridiculous. You want some real advice, ‘Sonja’? Go home. Change your attitudes, and start some hard peace talks with that husband of yours.”

  “I don't want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”

  Dr. Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor act. “Listen. I'll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: a hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. He grinned. “I've been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man…”

  He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”

  She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn't matter.

  “You wouldn't understand.”

  Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”

  She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he'd lost a customer, that was why he'd been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she'd lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy talk was! He'd never have dared to play the sex change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn't likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn't trouble her.

  So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr. Hamilton's judgment. He had the telltales: he would know. She recognized with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities; unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations.…But that's crazy, she thought. I don't hate men, and I don't believe “Lessingham” hates women. There's nothing psychotic about what we're doing. We're making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that's all. Okay, it's convenience food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along, that is cheaper, easier, and more fun than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.

  The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain.…

  Doblin's Lecture

  ALLEN STEELE

  Allen Steele won the Hugo Award in 1996 for his challenging novella, “The Death of Captain Future.” He burst into prominence as a hard-SF writer with his first novel in 1989, Orbital Decay. He has gone on to become one of the best young hard-SF writers of the 1990s, with a talent for realism and a penchant for portraying the daily, gritty problems of living and working in space in the future. His background is in professional newspaper journalism and it shows in “Doblin's Lecture.” That work appeared in Pirate Writings, one of the distinguished and ambitious small-business SF magazines (others include Absolute Magnitude and Tomorrow) whose value to the field was especially underlined in 1996 when the two literary magazines of SF, Crank! and Century, took the year off. Century did publish one issue, as did Aboriginal—a peer of Pirate Writings, but neither had much impact. This is not a typical Steele SF story—no space, no technological problems—except in that it attains a kind of everyday realism that is, in this case, quite disturbing. This is a straight-out piece of near-future extrapolation that deals with the materials of today's daily news. It is a cold piece of present tense reportage and is a moral tale about the need to acknowledge and confront reality in order to cure social problems.

  A crisp autumn night on a midwestern university campus. A cool breeze, redolent of pine cones and coming winter, softly rustles bare trees and whisks dead leaves to scurry across the walkways leading to the main hall. Lights glow from within Gothic windows as a last handful of students and faculty members hurry toward the front entrance. There is to be a famous guest speaker tonight; no one wants to be late.

  A handful of students picket in the plaza outside the hall; some carry protest signs, others trying to hand fliers to anyone who will take them. The yellow photo-copies are taken and briefly read, then shoved into pockets or wadded up and tossed into waste cans; the signs are glanced at, but largely ignored.

  A poster taped above the open double-doors states that absolutely no cameras, camcorders, or tape recorders are permitted inside. Just inside the doors, the crowd is funneled through a security cordon of off-duty police officers hired for the evening. They check campus I.D.'s, open day packs, run chirping hand-held metal detectors across chests, arms and legs. Anyone carrying metal objects larger or less innocent than keyrings, eye-glasses, or ballpoint pens is sent back outside. A trash can behind the guards is half-filled with penknives, bottle openers, cigarette lighters, and tear-gas dispensers, discarded by those who would rather part with them than rush them back to dorm rooms or cars, and thereby risk missing the lecture. Seating is limited, and it's been announced that no one will be allowed to stand or sit in the aisles.

  Two students, protesters from the campus organization opposed to tonight's presentation, are caught with cloth banners concealed under their jackets. They're escorted out the door by the cops, who dump their banners in the trash without reading them.

  The auditorium holds 1,800 seats, and each one has been claimed. The stage is empty save for a podium off to one side and a stiff-backed oak armchair in its center. The chair's legs are securely bolted to the floor, its armrests equipped with metal shackles; loose belts dangle from its sides. Its vague resemblance to a prison electric chair is lost on no one.

  Four state troopers stand quietly in t
he wings on either side of the stage. Several more are positioned in the back of the hall, their arms folded across their chests or their thumbs tucked into service belts carrying revolvers, tasers, and Mace canisters. More than a few people quietly remark that this is the first time in a long while that the auditorium has been filled to capacity without anyone smelling marijuana.

  At ten minutes after eight, the house lights dim and the room goes dark save for a pair of spotlights focused on the stage. The drone of voices fades away as the dean of the sociology department—a distinguished-looking academian in his early fifties, thin gray hair and humorless eyes—steps from behind the curtain on stage left and quickly strides past the cops to the lectern.

  The dean peeks at the index cards in his hand as he introduces himself, then spends a few moments informing the audience that tonight's speaker has been invited to the university not to provide entertainment, but primarily as a guest lecturer for Sociology 450, Sociology 510, and Sociology 525. His students, occupying treasured seats in the first six rows, try not to preen too much as they open their notebooks and click their pens. They're the chosen few, the ones who are here to learn something; the professor squelches their newfound self-importance by reminding them that their papers on tonight's lecture are due Tuesday by ten o'clock. The professor then tells the audience that no comments or questions will be permitted during the guest speaker's opening remarks, and that anyone who interrupts the lecture in any way will be escorted from the hall and possibly be placed under arrest. This causes a minor stir in the audience, which the dean smoothly placates by adding that a short question-and-answer session will be held later, during which members of the audience may be allowed to ask questions, if time and circumstances permit.

  Now the dean looks uncomfortable. He glances uneasily at his cards as if it's faculty poker night and he's been dealt a bad hand. After the guest speaker has made his remarks, he adds (a little more softly now, and with no little hesitance), and once the Q&A session is over, there may be a special demonstration. If time and circumstances permit.