The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Come in.” She stood aside as he entered. He was surprised again at how exactly her cabin duplicated his. She observed him solemnly. He wondered if she ever smiled when she was alone.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, answering the unspoken question. “I don’t even want to think about it. I wish he would just go away.”

  “He won’t.”

  He read the sympathy in her expression and wondered exactly why Ndavu had brought her along. “What I could use is a drink.”

  “What did you want to talk about?” She sat next to him.

  “Nothing.” He felt like blurting out Ndavu’s secret; he thought it might make a difference to her. But he had promised. “I don’t know.” Wing scratched his ear. “I never told you that it was a nice party. The hot dogs were a big hit.”

  She smiled. “Snob appeal had something to do with it, don’t you think? I’m sure that most of them like vitabulk just fine. But they have to rave about natural or else people will think they have no taste. At the mission we’ve been eating raw batch and no one complains. After a while natural seems a little bit decadent—or at least a waste of time.”

  “The essence can’t taste mustard, eh?”

  Before Ndavu, she might have detected the irony in his voice and bristled at it; now she nodded. “Exactly.”

  “But what is the essence? How can anything be you that can’t taste mustard, that doesn’t even have a body?”

  “The essence is that part of mind which can be reproduced in artificial media,” she said with catechetical swiftness.

  “And that’s what you want when you die, to have your personality deleted, your memories summarized and edited and re-edited until all you are is a collection of headlines about yourself stored in a computer?” He shook his head. “Sounds like a lousy substitute for heaven.”

  “But heaven is a myth.”

  “Okay,” he said, trying to match her calm but not quite succeeding, “but I can’t help but notice that the Messengers are in no hurry to have their essences extracted. They use the Chani globulins to keep themselves alive as long as they can. Why? And since they can’t explain shriving, how do they know heaven is a myth?”

  “Nothing is perfect, Phil.” He was surprised to hear her admit it. “That’s the most difficult part of the message. We can’t claim perfection; we can only aspire to it.”

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time at the mission?”

  “Ndavu is very demanding.”

  “And what about Piscataqua House? Who’s minding the inn?”

  She looked blank for a moment, as if trying to remember something that was not very important. “The inn pretty much takes care of itself, I guess.” She frowned. “Business is terrible, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “We’ve been in the red for over a year. Nobody goes any place these days.” She tugged at a wrinkle in the leg of her jumpsuit. “I’ve been thinking of selling or maybe even just closing the old place up.”

  Wing was shocked. “You never told me you were having problems.”

  She stared through the floor for a moment. The starship’s rotation had presented them with a view of the hazy blue rim of earth’s atmosphere set against star-flecked blackness. “No,” she said finally. “Maybe I didn’t. At first I thought the Cloud might turn things around. Bring more tourists to New Hampshire, to Portsmouth—to the inn to see you. Ndavu offered a loan to hold me over. But now it doesn’t matter much anymore.”

  “Ndavu!” Wing stood and began to pace away his anger. “Always Ndavu. He manipulated us to get his way. You must see that.”

  “Of course I see. You’re the one who doesn’t see. It’s not his way he’s trying to get. It’s the way.” She leaned forward as if to stop him and make him listen. He backed away. “He has disrupted dozens of lives just to bring you here. If you had given him any kind of chance, none of it would have happened. But you were prejudiced against him or just stubborn—I don’t know what you were.” Her eyes gleamed. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I think he wanted me to fall in love with Jim McCauley.”

  Wing gazed at her in silent horror.

  “And he was right to do it; Jim has been good for me. He isn’t obsessed with himself and his projects and his career. He finds the time to listen—to be there when I need him.”

  “You let that alien use you to get to me?”

  “I didn’t know at the time that he was doing it. I didn’t know enough about the message to appreciate why he had to do it. But now I’m glad. I would have just been another reason for you to turn him down. It’s important that you go to Aseneshesh. It’s the most important thing you’ll ever do.”

  “It’s so important that two other people turned him down, right? I should too. Just because I fit some damned personality profile…”

  “He said it that way only because you haven’t yet accepted the message. He’s not just some telelink psych, Phil, he can see into your essence. He knows what you need to grow and reach fulfillment. He knew when he asked you that you would accept.”

  Wing felt dizzy. “If I leave with him and go uptime or whatever he calls it—zapping off at the speed of light—I’ll never see you again. You’ll be downtime here, and you’ll be dead for centuries before I get back. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “It means I’ll always miss you.” Her voice was flat, as if she were talking about a stolen towel.

  He crossed the room to her, dropped to his knees, took her hands. “You meant so much to me, Daisy. Still do, after everything.” He spoke without hope, yet he was compelled to say it. “All I want is to go back to the way it was. Do you remember? I know you remember.”

  “I remember we were two lonely people, Phil. We couldn’t give each other what we needed.” She made him let go and then ran her hand through his hair. “I remember I was unhappy.” Sometimes when they were alone, reading or watching telelink, she would scratch his head. Now she fell absently into the old habit. Even though he knew he had lost her, he took comfort from it.

  “I was always afraid to be happy.” Wing rested his head in her lap. “I felt as if I didn’t deserve to be happy.”

  The stars shone up at them with an ancient, pitiless light. Ndavu had done a thorough job, Wing thought. He’s given me good reasons to go, reasons enough not to stay. The Messengers were nothing if not thorough.

  * * *

  Wing was dreaming of his father. In the dream his father was asleep on the Murphy bed in the go-tube. Wing had just returned from a parade held to honor him as the first human to go to the stars and he was angry that his father had not been there. Wing shook him, told him to wake up. His father stared up at him with rheumy, hopeless eyes and Wing noticed how frail he was. Look at me, Wing said to the old man, I’ve done something that was much harder than what you did. I didn’t just leave my country, I left the planet, my time, everything. And I adjusted. I was strong and I survived. His father smiled like a Messenger. You love to dramatize yourself, said the old man. You think you are the hero of your story. His father began to shrink. But surviving takes a long time, he said and then he was nothing but a wet spot on the sheet and Wing was alone.

  The telelink rang, jolting Wing awake. He cursed himself for an idiot; he had forgotten to set the screening program. The computer brought up the lights of his go-tube as he fumbled at the keyboard beside his bed.

  “Phillip Wing speaking. Hello?”

  “Mr. Wing? Phillip Wing? This is Hubert Fields; I’m with the Boston desk of Infoline. Can you tell me what’s going on there?”

  “Yes.” Wing tapped a key and opened a window on the telelink’s monitor. He could see the skyline of Portsmouth against a horizon the color of blue cat’s-eye; the status line said 5:16 AM. “I’m sitting here stark naked, having just been rudely awakened by your call, and I’m wondering why I’m talking to you.” The pull of earth’s gravity had left him stiff and irritable.

  Fields sounded unperturbed; Wing
could not remember if he had ever been interviewed by this one before. “We’ve had confirmation from two sources that the messenger Ndavu has offered you a commission which would require that you travel to another planet. Do you have any comment?”

  “All I can say is that we have discussed a project.”

  “On another planet?”

  Wing yawned.

  “We’ve also had reports that you recently toured the Messenger starship, which would make you the first human to do so. Can you describe the ship for us?”

  Silence.

  “Mr. Wing? Can you at least tell me when you’ll be leaving earth?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t tell us?”

  “I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet. I’m hanging up now. Make sure there’re two l’s in Phillip.”

  “Will we see you at the ceremonies today?”

  Wing broke the connection. Before he could roll back into bed the computer began playing his Thursday morning wakeup: the Minuet from Suite No. 1 of Handel’s Water Music. It was 5:30; today was the dedication of the Glass Cloud.

  He squashed the gel mat with its nest of blankets and sheets back into the wall of the go-tube. Most of his clothes were scattered in piles on the oak floor but Daisy had bought him a gray silk Mazzini suit for the occasion which was still hanging in its garment bag on the towel rack. Twice he had returned it; she had sent it back to him both times. He tried it on: a little loose in the waist. Daisy had not realized that he had lost weight since he had moved out.

  Wing walked briskly across the strip to the USTS terminal where he was just in time to catch the northbound red-white-and-blue. It seemed as though everybody in the world had offered to give Wing a ride to North Conway that day, which was why he had perversely chosen to take a bus. He boarded the 6:04 carryvan which was making its everyday run up Route 16 with stops in Dover, Rochester, Milton, Wakefield, Ossipee, and North Conway. The spectators who would flock to the dedication were no doubt still in bed. They would arrive after lunch in hovers from New York or in specially-chartered 328 double-deckers driving nonstop from Boston and Portland and Manchester. Some would come in private cars; the Vice-President and the Secretary of the Interior were flying in from Washington on Air Force One. New Hampshire state police expected a crowd upwards of half a million, scattered along the ninety-seven kilometers of the Glass Cloud’s circuit.

  A crowd of angry locals had gathered at the bus stop in Ossipee. They hustled a clown on board and then banged the side of the carryvan with open hands to make the driver pull out. The clown was wearing a polka-dotted bag that came down to her ankles and left her arms bare; the dots cycled slowly through the spectrum. She had a paper-white skin tint and her hair was dyed to match the orange circles around her eyes. A chain of tiny phosphorescent bananas joined both ears and dangled beneath her chin. A woman up front tittered nervously; the man across the aisle from Wing looked disgusted. Even New Hampshire Yankees could not politely ignore such an apparition. But of course she wanted to be noticed; like all clowns she lived to provoke the astonished or disapproving stare.

  “Seat taken?” she said. The carryvan accelerated abruptly, as if the driver had deliberately tried to make her fall. The clown staggered and sprawled next to Wing. “Is now.” She laughed, and shoved her camouflage-colored duffle bag under the seat in front of her. “Where ya goin?”

  Wing leaned his head against the window. “North Conway.”

  “Yeah? Me too. Name’s Judy Thursday.” She held out her hand to Wing.

  “Phillip.” He shook it weakly and the man across the aisle snorted. The clown’s skin felt hot to the touch, as if she had the metabolism of a bird.

  They rode in silence for a while; the clown squirmed in her seat and hummed to herself and clapped her hands and giggled. Eventually she opened the duffle bag and pulled out a small grease-stained cardboard box. “Popcorn? All natural.”

  Wing gazed at her doubtfully. The white skin tint made her eyes look pink. He had been on the road for two hours and had skipped breakfast.

  “Very nutritious.” She stuffed a handful into her mouth. “Popped it myself.”

  She was the kind of stranger mothers warned little children about. But Wing was hungry and the smell was irresistible. “They seemed awfully glad to see you go back there,” he said, hesitating.

  “No sense of humor, Phil.” She put a kernel on the tip of her tongue and curled it into her mouth. “Going to the big party? Dedications are my favorite; always some great goofs. Bunch of us crashed the dedication of this insurance company tower—forget which—down in Hartford, Connecticut. Smack downtown, tallest building, the old edifice complex, you know? You shoulda seen, the suits went crazy. They had this buffet like—real cheese and raw veggies and some kinda meat. We spraypainted the entire spread with blue food coloring. And then I got into the HVAC system and planted a perfume bomb. Joint must still smell like lilacs.” She leaned her head back against the seat and laughed. “Yeah, architecture is my life.” She shook the popcorn box at Wing and he succumbed to temptation. The stuff was delicious.

  “Hey, nice suit.” The clown caught Wing’s sleeve as he reached for another handful and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Real silk, wow. How come you’re riding the bus, Phil?”

  Wing pulled free, gently. “Looking for something.” He found himself slipping into her clipped dialect. “Not sure exactly what. Maybe a place to live.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Beautiful country for goofs. The whole show is gonna be a goof, I figure. What do you think?”

  Wing shrugged.

  “I mean like what is this Glass Cloud anyway? A goof. No different from wrapping the White House in toilet paper, if you ask me. Except these guys got permits. Mies Van der Rohe, Phil, you know Mies Van der Rohe?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know that. But old Mies made all those glass boxes. The ones that got abandoned, they use ’em for target practice.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “I think Mies musta known what would happen. After all, he had four names. Musta been a goof in there somewhere.” She offered him another handful and then closed the box and stuck it back in her bag. The carryvan rumbled across the bridge over the Saco River and headed up the strip that choked the main approach to North Conway.

  “These guys on the link keep saying what a breakthrough this gizmo is and I keep laughing,” she continued. “They don’t understand the historical context, Phil, so why the hell don’t they just shut up? Nothing new under the sun, twist and shout. The biggest goof of all.” Wing noticed for the first time that her pupils were so dilated that her eyes looked like two bottomless wells. The van slowed, caught in strip traffic; even in daylight the flash bars seemed to pulse with garish intensity.

  “Me, I thought it was kinda unique.” Wing could not imagine why he was talking like this.

  “Oh, no, Phil. No, no. It’s the international style in the sky, is what it is. Study some architecture, you’ll see what I mean.” The carryvan crawled into a snarl of USTS vehicles near the old North Conway railroad station which had been moved to the airport and converted to a tourist information center. An electroluminescent banner hung from its Victorian gingerbread cornice. Green words flickered across it: “Welcome to North Conway in the Heart of the Mount Washington Valley Home of the Glass Cloud Welcome to…” Hovers were scattered across the landing field like seeds; tourists swarmed toward the center of town on foot. The line of busses waiting to unload at the terminal stopped moving. After ten minutes at a standstill the carryvan driver opened the doors and the passengers began to file out. When Wing rose he felt dizzy. The clown steadied him.

  “Goodbye, Judy,” he said as they stood blinking in the bright May sunshine. “Thanks for the popcorn.” He shielded his eyes with his hand; her skin tint seemed to be glowing. “Try not to get into too much trouble.”

  “Gonna be a real colorful day, Phil.” She leaned up and kissed hi
m on the lips. Her breath smelled like popcorn. “It’s a goof, understand? Stay with it. Have fun.”

  He fell back against the bus as she pushed into the crush of people, her polka dots saturated with shades of blue and violet, her orange hair like a spark. As she disappeared the crowd itself began to change colors. Cerulean moms waited in bathroom lines with whining sulphur kids in shorts. Plum grandpas took vids while their wrinkled apricot wives shyly adjusted straw hats. Wing glanced up and the sky went green. He closed his eyes and laughed silently. She had laced the popcorn with some kind of hallucinogen. Exactly the kind of prank he should have expected. Maybe he had suspected. Was not that why he had taken the bus, to give something, anything, one last chance to happen? To make the final decision while immersed in the randomness of the world he would have to give up? Maybe he ought to spend this day-of-all-days twisted. He kept his eyes closed; the sun felt warm on his face. Stay with it, she had said. “Have fun,” he said aloud to no one in particular.

  * * *

  “It’s a tribute to the American genius.” The Vice-President of the United States shook Wing’s hand. “We’re all very proud of you.”

  Wing said, “Get out of Mexico.”

  Daisy tugged at his arm. “Come on, Phillip.” Her voice sounded like brakes screeching.

  The Vice-President, who was trying to pretend—in public at least—that he was not going deaf, tilted his head toward an incandescent aide in a three-piece suit. “Mexico,” the aide repeated, scowling at Wing. The Vice-President at ninety-one was the oldest person ever to hold the office. He nodded sadly. “The tragic conflict in Mexico troubles us all, Mr. Wing. Unfortunately there are no easy answers.”

  Wing shook Daisy off. “We should get out and leave the PMF to sink or swim on its own.” The Vice-President’s expression was benignly quizzical; he cupped a hand to his ear. The green room was packed with dignitaries waiting for the dedication to begin and it sounded as if every one of them was practicing a speech. “I said…” Wing started to repeat.

  The Vice-President had leaned so close that Wing could see tiny broken veins writhing like worms under his skin. “Mr. Wing,” he interrupted, “have you stopped to consider how difficult we could make it for you to leave this planet?” He kept his voice low, as if they were making a deal.