The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “I made it all up. The dog Bo, and the trips to Venus and Mars, and the cured lumbago. It was a made-up story, ever single Lord God speck of it.”

  And I said that sincerely. Bob Solomon forgive me: As I said it, I believed it was true.

  She looked at me for a spell, her eyes big. She looked for a few seconds like a child I’d told Santa warn’t coming, ever again. Then she grew back up, and with a sad little smile she stepped toward me, pressed her hands flat to the chest bib of my overalls, stood on tippytoes, and kissed me on the cheek, the way she would her grandpap, and as she slid something into my side pocket she whispered in my ear, “That’s not what I hear on Enceladus.” She patted my pocket. “That’s how to reach me, if you need me. But you won’t need me.” She stepped into the yard and walked away, swinging her pocketbook, and called back over her shoulder: “You know what you need, Mr. Nelson? You need a dog. A dog is good help around a farm. A dog will sit up with you, late at night, and lie beside you, and keep you warm. You ought to keep your eye out. You never know when a stray will turn up.”

  She walked around the bush and was gone. I picked up the empty Donald Ducks, because it was something to do, and I was turning to go in when a man’s voice called:

  “Mr. Buck Nelson?”

  A young man in a skinny tie and horn-rimmed glasses stood at the edge of the driveway where Miss Priss—no, Miss Rains, she deserved her true name—had stood a few moments before. He walked forward, one hand outstretched and the other reaching into the pocket of his denim jacket. He pulled out a long flat notebook.

  “My name’s Matt Ketchum,” he said, “and I’m pleased to find you, Mr. Nelson. I’m a reporter with the Associated Press, and I’m writing a story on the surviving flying-saucer contactees of the 1950s.”

  I caught him up short when I said, “Aw, not again! Damn it all, I just told all that to Miss Rains. She works for the A&P, too.”

  He withdrew his hand, looked blank.

  I pointed to the driveway. “Hello, you must have walked past her in the drive, not two minutes ago! Pretty girl in a red-and-black dress, boots up to here. Miss Rains, or Hanes, or something like that.”

  “Mr. Nelson, I’m not following you. I don’t work with anyone named Rains or Hanes, and no one else has been sent out here but me. And that driveway was deserted. No other cars parked down at the highway, either.” He cocked his head, gave me a pitying look. “Are you sure you’re not thinking of some other day, sir?”

  “But she,” I said, hand raised toward my bib pocket—but something kept me from saying gave me her card. That pocket felt strangely warm, like there was a live coal in it.

  “Maybe she worked for someone else, Mr. Nelson, like UPI, or maybe the Post-Dispatch? I hope I’m not scooped again. I wouldn’t be surprised, with the Spielberg picture coming out and all.”

  I turned to focus on him for the first time. “Where is Enceladus, anyway?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I said it again, moving my lips all cartoony, like he was deaf.

  “I, well, I don’t know, sir. I’m not familiar with it.”

  I thought a spell. “I do believe,” I said, half to myself, “it’s one a them Saturn moons.” To jog my memory, I made a fist of my right hand and held it up—that was Saturn—and held up my left thumb a ways from it, and moved it back and forth, sighting along it. “It’s out a ways, where the ring gets sparse. Thirteenth? Fourteenth, maybe?”

  He just goggled at me. I gave him a sad look and shook my head and said, “You don’t know much, if that’s what you know, and that’s a fact.”

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Mr. Nelson, as I was saying, I’m interviewing all the contactees I can find, like George Van Tassel, and Orfeo Angelucci—”

  “Yes, yes, and Truman Bethurum, and them,” I said. “She talked to all them, too.”

  “Bethurum?” he repeated. He flipped through his notebook. “Wasn’t he the asphalt spreader, the one who met the aliens atop a mesa in Nevada?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  He looked worried now. “Um, Mr. Nelson, you must have misunderstood her. Truman Bethurum died in 1969. He’s been dead eight years, sir.”

  I stood there looking at the rhododendron and seeing the pretty face and round hat, hearing the singsong voice, like she had learned English from a book.

  I turned and went into the house, let the screen bang shut behind, didn’t bother to shut the wood door.

  “Mr. Nelson?”

  My chest was plumb hot now. I went straight to the junk room, yanked on the light. Everything was spread out on the floor where I left it. I shoved aside Marilyn, all the newspapers, pawed through the books.

  “Mr. Nelson?” The voice was coming closer, moving through the house like a spooklight.

  There it was: Aboard a Flying Saucer, by Truman Bethurum. I flipped through it, looking only at the pictures, until I found her: dark hair, big dark eyes, sharp chin, round hat. It was old Truman’s drawing of Captain Aura Rhanes, the sexy Space Sister from the planet Clarion who visited him eleven times in her little red-and-black uniform, come right into his bedroom, so often that Mrs. Bethurum got jealous and divorced him. I had heard that old Truman, toward the end, went out and hired girl assistants to answer his mail and take messages just because they sort of looked like Aura Rhanes.

  “Mr. Nelson?” said young Ketchum, standing in the door. “Are you OK?”

  I let drop the book, stood, and said, “Doing just fine, son. If you’ll excuse me? I got to be someplace.” I closed the door in his face, dragged a bookcase across the doorway to block it, and pulled out Miss Rhanes’s card, which was almost too hot to touch. No writing on it, neither, only a shiny silver surface that reflected my face like a mirror—and there was something behind my face, something aways back inside the card, a moving silvery blackness like a field of stars rushing toward me, and as I stared into that card, trying to see, my reflection slid out of the way and the edges of the card flew out and the card was a window, a big window, and now a door that I moved through without stepping, and someone out there was playing a single fiddle, no dance tune but just a-scraping along slow and sad as the stars whirled around me, and a ringed planet was swimming into view, the rings on edge at first but now tilting toward me and thickening as I dived down, the rings getting closer dividing into bands like layers in a rock face, and then into a field of rocks like that no-earthly-good south pasture, only there was so many rocks, so close together, and then I fell between them like an ant between the rocks in a gravel driveway, and now I was speeding toward a pinpoint of light, and as I moved toward it faster and faster, it grew and resolved itself and reshaped into a pear, a bulb, with a long sparkling line extending out, like a space elevator, like a chain, and at the end of the chain the moon became a glowing lightbulb. I was staring into the bulb in my junk room, dazzled, my eyes flashing, my head achy, and the card dropped from my fingers with no sound, and my feet were still shuffling though the fiddle had faded away. I couldn’t hear nothing over the knocking and the barking and young Ketchum calling: “Hey, Mr. Nelson? Is this your dog?”

  THE FINITE CANVAS

  Brit Mandelo

  Some stories are deep and profound enough that they demand to be written not in ink on paper, but in blood. And paid for in blood as well.

  Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic, and the senior fiction editor for Strange Horizons. She has published two nonfiction books, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling. She has had her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Ideomancer. She also writes regularly for Tor.com, and lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

  MOLLY TAPPED THE screen of her finicky tablet with one sweat-damp fingertip, leaving a shimmering smudge. The next page loaded with a slight delay. Rainwater pattered through the one-room clinic’s open windows onto the tile floor, but the baking summer heat
remained untouched. Even with all the windows thrown open it was still at least forty-two degrees C inside, though once the temperature climbed above forty it was hard to judge.

  The slatted wood door swung wide and clattered in its frame. Startled, she slapped the tablet down on her desk harder than she would have liked and reflexively chided herself: You can’t afford another one, be careful. As she stood, the gauzy skirt she’d rolled up to her waist unfurled around her knees. The visitor closed the door with a more gentle hand. Molly noticed first the newcomer’s sheer size, and second the temperature-regulating clothing covering them head to toe. Her stomach clenched. She hadn’t, in all her years downside, ever seen someone who could afford that. The shirt alone would cost more than six years of her clinic’s “humanitarian aid” stipend, and that was if she bought no supplies.

  There was no such thing as a tourist from the stations. A fresh sweat prickled along Molly’s back. The military police wore uniforms. This person didn’t.

  “Did you need help?” she asked after the quiet dragged on a moment too long. “Directions?”

  The stranger pushed back the tan hood of the shirt, revealing a whiteskinned face with a square jaw, thin lips, and brown eyes, set off by a frizzed halo of bleached hair with dark roots. The clothes had done their job—without them, that pale skin would have been blistered and raw from exposure.

  “You’re the doctor?”

  The newcomer’s voice was a melodious, rough-edged alto, like the women who smoked tobacco in old movies. It took Molly a moment to reconcile that voice with the thick, broad body. She saw the faintest hint of breasts under the tan shirt where she hadn’t noticed them before.

  “Yes,” she said, stepping around her desk. She passed the examining table and storage shelves in three strides. Her tank top slid wetly against her skin as she stuck her hand out in offering. “You are?”

  The woman paused, then took Molly’s hand. Her fingers were hot to the touch, red with sunburn. She must not have worn gloves. “Jada.”

  Molly frowned. “What do you need?”

  “Right to the point,” she said. She tugged her hand away and in one smooth yank pulled her shirt over her head. Then she stood straight, shoulders back. Molly flinched but forced herself to look. Jada was heavily muscled, dense as a tree trunk and probably just as hard, but that wasn’t what was breathtaking. It was the scars.

  “You recognize these?” the woman asked.

  Designs snaked over her torso, down into the temp-reg pants, up to her neck. The left side of her rib cage was a silvery mass of letters and symbols, all jumbled; there was a stylized sun around her navel with waving lines of light. A crane, its legs hidden by the waistband of her pants, spread its wings over her right side and torso. There were smaller signs hidden around the larger; three simple slashes crossed the space between her collarbones. Her skin was as readable as a novel, her flesh a malleable masterpiece made with knives. Some of the scars were still pink, and a spiral design on her left breast was an angry, fresh red.

  Murder scars, Molly thought. Syndicate badge. The sheer number of them made her throat constrict. She took a step backward, as if one step would make any difference to a skilled killer.

  “I need a new set,” the woman said, sticking out her bare, untouched arm. “Here.”

  “You must have an artist—” Molly began.

  “Not down here,” the syndicate woman said. She turned her head, looking out the open window at the road. Her mouth formed a thin line as she paused. Molly saw that her ears were pierced with a multitude of silver hoops that hugged the curve of the cartilage. “I need the new marks done now. I can pay you more than enough to make it worth your time.”

  New marks for a new murder, and Molly immediately wondered where this woman had earned the right: on the stations, or locally? She unclenched her jaw. “Why?”

  There was no reason for any syndicate to set foot on old Earth, or what little of it was still habitable, beyond trading for young, desperate, attractive flesh to bring to the stations—unless they were running from the mil-police. Molly suspected that the only reason the station governments bothered to dispatch the police downside at all was to apprehend the occasional syndicate member; they certainly didn’t do much else.

  After a strained silence, Jada replied, “Does it matter?”

  “Money’s not enough,” she said. “Not for one of you.”

  Jada smiled with a cool edge. She wound her shirt around her fist and lifted her chin. Molly kept her eyes on the woman’s face instead of her bare torso, though the scars drew her gaze like the sucking gravity of a black hole. “I’ll bargain you the story. Or any story. I’ve got plenty.”

  “Who did you kill?” Molly ground out.

  “Oh, that,” Jada said. A look passed over her face like a flickering shadow, there and gone before Molly could grasp it. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her mouth dry as she waited for the answer. “No one you know.” She paused, then spoke again, bleak hurt punching through her prior composure. “My partner.”

  Molly hated that it melted her for a moment, and worse, that it pricked her curiosity.

  She was used to hurting. Downside, people lived their lives hurting, starving, scraping by. They wilted, underfed and wounded; tender, fleshy flowers exposed to the scouring radiation of the sun barely filtered through the damaged atmosphere. What she’d had in her pockets upon her deportation had made her the richest woman in the town—a tablet, a few hundred in station currency in her bank, and a medical degree. The money had run out fast on things like setting up a house, before she realized that she would never have it again, and the tablet was bound to die soon, and her degree had only gotten her clinic the monetary sympathy of one of the vast corporate aid—machines station-side, the kind that made people feel good about donating their pocket change to help the needy. The stipend went to the clinic, in any case, to her monthly restock orders brought by courier from the port-city thirty kilometers away and the occasional extra tool. That enviable wealth she’d brought with her could not put food on the table every night or clothes on her back. She hadn’t once in her life gone hungry until the first week on Earth.

  There was no such thing as a tourist, planetside.

  “Why here?” she finally asked.

  Jada cut her a sharp glance. “Because this is where I’ve washed up.”

  Molly smothered her questions—did you abandon your syndicate, are they hunting you, who are you, how did you end up here, are you stuck downside—and crossed the room again. She sat behind her desk, the wood chair digging into the backs of her thighs. Jada shook out her shirt and slipped it over her head again. The tan fabric hid the scars and the flush that had begun to redden her pale skin.

  “How much?” Molly asked.

  “I’ve got a few thousand in station currency stowed away,” she said as she walked up and planted her hands on the desk. “I want the whole arm. He deserves that much of me. Will you or won’t you?”

  Molly closed her eyes to avoid looking at the woman leaning on her desk, her curious desperation a palpable pressure. Still, she was aware of the shadow cast over her, the undeniable presence.

  She thought of the fibrous lump she’d felt with fear-stiffened fingers in her right breast almost a year ago, the phenomenal cost of importing a genetherapy. She ground her teeth against the knowing, and the acceptance, wishing she didn’t need the money like she needed air.

  It hadn’t been anyone she knew. That was enough.

  “It will take a few days,” she said.

  Jada nodded, a short jerk of her chin.

  “When can you start?”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I’ll start the story when you start cutting,” Jada said.

  “All right, fine,” Molly replied, equally short with her.

  Another moment of silence stretched between the two women as Molly pushed her chair back and strode to the examining table. Another person might have spoken to fill it, but Jada w
asn’t that person. She let it hang. Molly snagged a box of sanitation-wipes from the wire shelf in the corner and used two to wipe down the thinly padded table.

  “Let that dry while you tell me what you want done,” she said.

  “Start with flowers,” Jada said, still leaning against the desk behind her. “Then do whatever seems right, once you hear the story. That’s the point, memorializing it.”

  Molly nodded. Her pulse pounded out of control, adrenaline washing in a stinging-hot rush through her veins. She was glad to have her back to the room while she inspected her supplies. This was outside her realm of experience. When she cut someone, it was quick and for a reason, and they didn’t feel it. She didn’t peel their skin off while they watched. It was almost embarrassing that the thought of doing the scars made her more nauseated than working for a syndicate killer.

  “Do you have a preference in utensils?” she asked.

  Jada answered from right behind her, “Scalpel, if you have a small, sharp one.”

  Molly narrowly managed not to flinch at the touch of breath on the nape of her neck, cooling the dampness of sweat. Thousands, she reminded herself, but out loud she said, “One other thing,” as she found the right size of blade in her case. They weren’t intended for reuse, but there was no way to justify throwing away a perfectly good instrument. Instead, she kept everything well sanitized. “If the police show up at my door, what happens?”

  Jada pressed fingertips to the edge of her shoulder blade from behind, at the soft spot where muscle joined muscle. She stiffened. Jada pressed so gently that it didn’t hurt, but it was a hint.

  “I forced you,” she said quietly. “Just like this. No marks. But you were afraid. So you helped me, because you had to, right?”

  “Right,” Molly said, half-strangled.

  Jada’s touch slipped away and she moved to sit on the edge of the table. Molly glanced at her from the corner of her eye.

  “I’ve had—run-ins with them before,” Molly admitted.