Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Didn’t I say so? Let’s go. You’re tired, huh? Wait—pie?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s your name?”

  “Milo.”

  “OK, Milo, follow me. Follow me, flying boy.” S. Verducci dropped a silver dollar into his glass of water, which was still full. He picked up a crushed, empty hard-pack of Marlboros from the floor, tore off one side and placed it over the top of the glass. Then, holding the cardboard there, he inverted the glass on the table and slipped the cardboard out. The silver dollar was at the bottom of an upside-down glass of water. “Don’t you love it? Let the waiter earn his tip, huh? It’s OK—Jitsi likes me.”

  Milo followed S. Verducci past the coffee hounds, the welfare mothers, the college brains—a hooker moving in—and past the counter, to the door.

  “Bye-bye, Jitsi, you old poisoner!” S. Verducci said.

  “Bye-bye, Moon and Stars!”

  Out the door into the breezy evening.

  They walked twenty blocks, increasingly dark, increasingly rundown. Milo spied Dede watching from behind trash cans, though he was careful not to look. She disguised herself as a pimp cruising by in a vintage Cadillac. Her telescope was trained on Milo from a tenement window. And Devore was with her. He was small. He could hide anywhere, even behind fire hydrants maybe, or down below a sewer grate, phoning Milo’s position in to Dede, who had a cop’s uniform, a patrol car and a gun. Devore had a gun, too. He’d said so.

  Don’t think about Dede. There was a way to unthink things, to hold them in the blind spot. All it took was a knot in your stomach—and insomnia. Don’t think about… who?

  They came to a sooty storefront to which S. Verducci had a key. Stencilled across one large bay window in bold cursive were the words, “THE GRASS AND TREES.” Underneath that: “Coffee and Conversation.” There was a faint red light inside. S. Verducci turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The hinges squeaked. The easement groaned. A wonderful smell of wisteria flowed out.

  “Everything has its portion of smell,” Milo said.

  “Anaxagoras!” said S. Verducci. “Smell, scent, essence, sentience! Everything is everywhere. Nothing’s as solid as it seems! That’s my whole business, little man! How did you know that?”

  “My sister used to say it, that’s all.”

  They walked past round tables with chairs on top of them. At the back, they turned a tight corner, and Verducci flicked on a light. They were at the top of a staircase leading to the basement. “Come on.” He led Milo into a sort of black box theatre downstairs, with a dozen transplanted church pews around a square platform. There was a large canopied bed onstage. “You can sleep here. I’ll sleep upstairs. There’s a toilet around the corner. I’ll leave the light on at the top of the stairwell so you don’t get totally spooked. See you in the morning, champ.”

  S. Verducci pulled off the bowler. He shook his head, and a stream of brown hair tumbled down to his waist.

  “You’re a girl!” Milo said.

  “Sure. What did you think?”

  “What does the ‘S’ stand for?”

  “Sylvie. Sweet dreams, little man.” She climbed the stairs, leaving Milo alone, in the cellar, in the dark.

  Dede at the library on a Saturday morning, Milo in her lap with a Dr Seuss. He peers up at the book she’s reading, sees diagrams that look like envelopes folded funny and ones like globes with twisted meridians. There are letters Dede says are Greek and words she says are German. One Hebrew letter: aleph. Aleph with a tiny zero. Aleph with a tiny one. And a lazy eight: infinity.

  “Is this how you do it, Milo?” Dede whispers. She doesn’t expect an answer. At home Mama is washing her hands. Washing her hands and washing her hands.

  Suddenly he is in the dark cellar at The Grass and Trees again, the air swarming with hypnagogic images, red and green, intricate, impenetrable geometries. He feels that he has just screamed, but nothing stirs. He rubs himself all over to make sure he is a human being. He checks his skin for fur, his shoulder blades for wings.

  Sylvie’s in cahoots with Devore—the thought, like a sudden needle, pierces him, as he remembers where he is.

  He falls asleep again, and when he blows out the candles, seven of them plus one for good luck, all at once he finds himself on the wrong side of his lips. He is a puff of air eddying around the flames. It only lasts a second. Then all the candles are out. He smiles, but everyone else is screaming. Some of the children cover their eyes. “What’s wrong?” Milo says. Dede is watching with intense curiosity. Curiosity and desire.

  Mama hasn’t seen it. Mama is in the kitchen washing the sink over and over. Papa’s eyes are bulging, his mouth hangs open, and his muscles are drawn so tight he looks like a starved alley cat. “What did you do? What the hell kind of trick is that?” He licks his lips and scans the room with a wild look. “Never mind! Never mind!” He runs to the door, then runs back, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I didn’t see nothing.” He shakes one of the guests. “Shut up! Shut up! Everything’s OK!” They all stop crying, terrified. “Am I right, Milo? Am I right?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “That was a mean, dumb trick, Milo. What, did you sneak under the table and back, huh? Don’t you ever let me see you do that again.” Milo won’t.

  “What’s the matter?” Sylvie, in her striped pants and a sleeveless undershirt, was standing silhouetted at the cellar door. Scant light from the stairway bathed her like earthshine on a slight, crescent moon.

  “Huh?” He sat up. He had been lying fully clothed on top of the covers.

  “You shouted. What’s the matter? Scared of the dark? Tell me. Don’t be ashamed.” She walked towards him. Dim, reflected light played on her bare shoulders, through a tangle of hair. A moment of brighter light on one collarbone, as she brushed the hair away, made Milo lift his gaze to the soft, simple curve of her face, the broad forehead, the gentle slope of her nose, and her full lips. The thin fabric of the undershirt hung away from her torso, down from the peaks of her small breasts, and light diffused through the undershirt, shadowing her breasts like X-rays. Then she blended into the teeming dark nearer Milo’s bed.

  “Stay away.”

  “You think I’m gonna rape you or something? There’s a little blue light I was gonna turn on behind the stage. The techy uses it to see what he’s doing when he runs cues. Or maybe you’d like a couple of Kliegs. The control board is back there. I was gonna fiddle with it for you. Don’t bother to say thank you.”

  “OK. Put on the blue light. Don’t touch me, though.”

  “You’re a pip, you know that?”

  Milo clutched the covers around him and crouched under the canopy while Sylvie walked past him, barely visible in the deepening shadow inwards the back of the room. She was just a glint, now and then, a hint of skin, a wrinkle of fabric, disjointed patches of shifting light. Milo heard a click, blue light spilled faintly around the edge of a curtain, then the curtain was pulled back, and the black room filled with blue objects and blue air. It was as if the tide had gone out, leaving jetsam draped with blue algae on blue sand.

  “OK?” she said.

  “OK… did I really scream?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark. But this is better. Thank you.”

  “Sure thing. OK now?” She was crossing the room, making a wide arc around the stage, weaving through the chairs.

  “Yeah… hey!” Milo called to her as she started to mount the stairs again.

  “What?”

  “Why’s there a bed onstage?”

  “Don’t ask.” She trudged upstairs again. Milo heard her scuffling around, then slumping down and groaning quickly into slumber.

  In cahoots. Definitely in cahoots. Milo whispered to himself, “I’m going to watch her. I’m going to find out about her. Her and Devore. They’re up to something. They think I’m dumb, but I’m going to fool them.”

  No thorazine tonight. His muscles
itched in places he couldn’t reach to scratch. Every time he closed his eyes, he was deeply asleep; if he winked them open again, it was as if he’d been out for hours. Every sensum was thick with Devore’s malevolence and Sylvie’s conspiracy. Like a bombarded infantryman: “Keep a tight ass, Milo,” he told himself.

  Then Dede was cradling him in her lap, saying, “Everything is made of numbers, Milo. That’s what Pythagoras said. Whatever you are, honey, something’s the same, see? But what? Is it numbers? Euclid’s all wet; there’s no congruence between a little boy and a BankAmerica Mastercard, is there? No similarity, like angles and stuff. They’re not even the same genus of topological space, because you got holes through your head and your butt and your little winkie, but a charge card’s all connected everywhere.

  “Something’s the same though, because you go from this to that and back again, and whatever you are, you’re you, aren’t you? So how do you do it?”

  “Why do you care, Dede?”

  “You do such nice things for me, Milo, when you do those changeums, I never want it to stop. I gotta figure out what’s going on, so we don’t lose you.” She turns pages so furiously, a few of them rip. The librarian says something, but Dede pays no attention. “Maybe it has something to do with equideco… “

  From upstairs: “Hey! You OK?”

  “What?”

  “You were screaming again.”

  “Sorry!”

  There was no sunlight in the cellar, and therefore no time, just blue. Milo slept and woke like a subway car surfacing and descending through a dark metropolis. He got up to find the toilet. He stumbled past the control board “backstage”, a closet with massive, ancient rheostats, a clipboard on a string, empty Coke bottles, and dust. Passing beyond the sphere of the backstage light, Milo knew where he was by the sound of his footsteps. They echoed more sharply as he reached the tiled room.

  The bathroom door was held open by a mop bucket full of dirty water. On its scummy surface there were rainbows. Daylight leaked in through the bathroom window. Milo walked into the light and relieved himself into a urinal. The daylight, the tinkle, the morning breeze were like a benediction. He walked out past the rainbows, the dimmers and the stage, to the stairway. He smelled bacon.

  He started up the stairs, when a gigantic crow peeked into the stairway from above, cawed a few times and said, in a high, scratchy voice, “Soup’s on, little man!” Milo stumbled three steps backwards.

  Then Sylvie’s face appeared next to the crow’s. She continued, in the crow’s voice, “Eggs and toast for humans! Pictures of eggs and toast for the puppets!” Then she thrust out one arm, at the end of it a puppet made of five or six tiny men in trench coats—one puppet with multiple jaws that moved together: “Hiss! Boo!”

  “Oh shut up,” Sylvie said, “or I’ll give you a picture of angleworms to eat.” She pulled out of sight, her puppets with her. A second later the tiny men reappeared. “Angleworms!” they shuddered. “We’re not partial to angleworms!” They scooted off.

  The walls upstairs were covered with posters, masks, hand puppets, and marionettes, from minuscule to elephantine, hanging by hooks and wire. There were posters for wassail consorts, pantomimes, plays by people named Beckett, Ionesco, Tzara, Artaud, old cigarette ads enamelled in three colours, embossed on tin; also a wall-sized photograph of a man gleefully smiling as he leapt, birdlike, from a high window onto the street below—a bicyclist trundling past, unawares. “SAUT DANS LA VIDE,” it said underneath. “LEAP INTO NOTHINGNESS,” Sylvie explained.

  Among the masks there were bug-eyed Balinese demons with teeth like tusks; there were lions’ heads, monkeys, frogs, grotesque insects, the mask of a beautiful girl with a skull mask nested underneath, also a variety of clown noses and Swiss carnival masks, larval, exaggerated, alive, that Sylvie said she had received from a “business associate” in Basel. And the puppets: the huge crow and the little men back on their hooks already, moustached villains with black hats, Punch and Judy, Orlando Furioso in a plumed helmet, and also a variety of animals and inanimate objects. There was a printing press puppet, a city block whose tenement windows were mouths, a sky with star eyes and the moon for a mouth, a mountain, a lock and key, a long-legged airplane and a truck with teeth under its hood, among many still stranger.

  Everything has its portion of smell. Sylvie had taken down the chairs from one round table and was laying down two steaming dishes of eggs and toast. Several flies accompanied her, and when Milo approached, they found their way to his face and neck. He slapped at them.

  “Don’t,” Sylvie said. “Those are friends of mine, Eric and Mehitabel. The small one is Beulah. Leave them alone. They’re from upstate.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “I’m a vegetarian, OK?”

  “What about the pig? I smelled bacon.”

  “Nope. I can’t help what kind of grease is caked on the burner. That’s the owner’s, not mine. Pull up and chow down, little man. We’ve got a day ahead of us.”

  Milo sat. Sylvie poured them both coffee. “You’re strange,” Milo said.

  “Strange is good. I like strange.”

  “You’re not rich. Not if you sleep in this place.”

  “Did I say I was rich, Milo?”

  “Rich as Croesus.”

  “No, you got me wrong.” Sylvie squeegeed egg yolk with her toast and folded the toast into her mouth. “Rich in creases, that’s what I said. My costume gets all creased sleeping here under the tables, see? Rich in creases, is what I said. It’s a Biblical locution.”

  “Sure. Who owns this place, if you don’t?” Milo nibbled at his toast, played with the spoon in his coffee. Nonchalant—that’s the ticket.

  “The Grass and Trees’? Some guy you don’t know.”

  “You work for him?” Bet it’s Devore, he thought.

  “Hell, no. This is a fellowship I got here. No strings attached. Guy appreciates my artistic ability, see? Why aren’t you eating? Miss the meat?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  He started on the eggs, and then he couldn’t stop. He ravened the toast and licked the plate. Sylvie poured him some more coffee. “Hurry it up, though. We got a gig the other side of town.”

  “We?”

  Sylvie shooed Milo from the table, cleared it, and had him put the chairs back up and sweep while she did the dishes. She ducked behind a counter into a small enclosure covered with green striped awning, and fished out two black suitcases. She handed one of them to Milo. “Wait a minute.” Sylvie unlatched her case and pulled out a collapsible top hat, flattened to a disk. She contrived to blow on it, while flexing it just so, and it popped open. She twirled the hat between her fingers so that it wound up on Milo’s head. He flinched. She grabbed her bowler from behind the counter and twirled it onto her own head the same way. “See? It’s just business, little man. Now you’re with me. Moon and Stars!”

  That’s what was stenciled on the suitcases, too:

  ***MOON*

  on hers,

  AND*STARS***

  on his.

  “Do I have to wear the hat?” he said.

  “Sure you do! It suits you, too. Isn’t it neat how it changes… “ She pushed ahead of him to unlock and open the door, and he thought he heard her say, “… just like you?”

  They only spent a few minutes in daylight, and Sylvie led Milo underground again, this time into the subways. They sat side by side in the strobing, shaking car with the suitcases on their laps; it was awkward, but Sylvie insisted they carry them that way. She also insisted that Milo sit on her left and that they hold the suitcases with the lettering facing out:

  MOONAND*STARS*

  “Free advertising,” she said. No one looked. No one ever looked on the subway. If they looked, it meant trouble. Anything could happen down there, Milo learned; a baby could be born, water could spring from a stone, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could thunder from a businessman’s lapel, and everybody would turn their page
of Newsweek or the Enquirer or the New York Times and keep their eyes down and their elbows close to their hips.

  “What were you doing on the street where I fell yesterday?” Milo said between Manchester Avenue and Lafayette Park. Make it sound like ordinary conversation. “You were right below there,weren’t you?”

  “It was listed in my ephemeris: ‘Boy falling out of the sky northeast of the MacCauly Building.’”

  “Come on, Sylvie.”

  Sylvie shifted uncomfortably on the crowded bench. “Hey! You’re the mystery man, not me, champ. I was going some place, that’s all. Do you have to take up so much room?”

  Milo scrunched himself farther into the end of the bench. “Have you ever been up there in that building where I fell from?”

  “Where you flew from, you mean? Maybe. Yeah. Why? Yeah.” She looked away.

  Don’t push too hard. She already knows I’m suspicious. She probably thinks I’ve seen her up there, and she’s cooking up an excuse right now.

  “I might have a client up there, I think, if it’s the building I’m thinking of,” Sylvie said.

  “Equidecohoozits?”

  “No. Well, sort of. Paintings. Copies of the Masters. Subscription service. It’s another sideline. I got a couple of clients like that in that block. What were you doing up there?”

  “Seeing a shrink.”

  “You crazy?”

  “Just nervous. I have trouble sleeping, like.”

  “You’re telling me!”

  “What do you mean?”

  The train stopped. Sylvie slid sideways into Milo, then righted herself as the doors slid open and two women rushed in, business executives, briefcases under their arms, talking about wheat futures. They grabbed a stanchion and braced themselves. The doors clapped shut, and the train lurched forward.

  “What did you mean?” Milo said.

  “You kept me up half the night, screaming and talking in your sleep.”

  “More than the once? What did I say?”

  “Who cares? Stick with me, Milo. I’ll teach you how to sleep… Let’s move to the next car. I don’t like those two ladies.”