Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Did I say something about Dede?”

  “Every damn thing you say is about Dede, Milo. Get up and let’s go to the next car. They’re looking at me.”

  One of the execs was edging closer. “Moon and Stars? Hey, Moon and Stars! I want to talk to you! I’ve got another deal. Hey!” There was a quality of pleading in the woman’s voice. Sylvie shoved Milo through the passage to the next car, and then the next, brutalizing whoever blocked the way and letting them curse.

  “I hate that,” she said at last. “I did something for her when I was still green, and now she won’t leave me alone.”

  “What do you mean, everything I say is about Dede?”

  “It’s a big city, Milo. You can say whatever you like.”

  The train stopped. They squeezed out, pinched between the shoulders of a dozen workers, shoppers and students, only some of whom, in the subterranean light, looked human. Milo dutifully clutched his suitcase handle, clutched it so hard it made him think of the way he was clutching something else, in his belly, clutching so deep and so hard for so long that he had stopped thinking of it as something he did; instead it had come to seem like something he suffered. They climbed up into a broad, cobbled square separated by a massive archway from a sunlit park.

  Sylvie walked briskly. Milo quickened his pace to stay abreast. They passed through the arch, across a meadow the size of a football field, and down a dirt pathway through a clump of trees, until they came in sight of a picnic shelter.

  “This is it,” she said. “Employee picnic. Dingsboomps, Incorporated or something. Full payment on day of performance. Watch this.”

  A few children were running towards them from the shelter. As they came within badgering distance, Milo, hanging back a few yards, saw Sylvie’s suitcase stop in midair while Sylvie herself kept walking, still holding on. Like a tugboat trying to pull the shoreline out to sea, Sylvie suddenly was yanked back. The children giggled. Sylvie scowled. She pulled at the case. It wouldn’t budge. She pushed it. She leaned against it. The children fell down laughing.

  Between her teeth, she said to Milo, “Kick it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Kick it.”

  Milo kicked it. The case flew forward, tumbling Sylvie to the ground. Milo rushed to help her.

  “You ass,” she said. “This is part of it. Give me your hand.” Befuddled, he did it. Sylvie grabbed, pulling Milo down on top of her, sputtering and flailing. “Whoa!” she said—theatrically. The children howled. They ran to the shelter to get their friends.

  Milo lay face down, blinking and huffing, on top of Sylvie, face up, laughing. “You’ll do,” she said. His chest was on top of her chest. He could feel the breasts inside her smock. His legs were on top of hers. Her hair, the little of it that spilled out of the bowler when she tumbled, was in his face.

  He scrambled to his feet, tucked his shirt in, wiped his face, recovered the fallen top hat. Sylvie got up. They picked up the suitcases and walked.

  “Why do you dress like a boy?” he said.

  “Showbiz, little man. It’s all showbiz. Why do you?”

  Sylvie found the Dingsboomps honcho and set up where he told her to. Inside the “AND STARS **” suitcase there were plastic pipes, tent poles, and coloured nylon sheets with sleeves sewn along the hems for the poles and pipes to make a frame. It took fifteen minutes to erect the puppet stage, five of them to shoo away the children and grab back joints and dinguses they’d boosted from Milo’s suitcase.

  Once the puppet stage was up, Sylvie was ruthless about keeping kids away. “This is our space, see?” she said to Milo, stooping low in the red light filtering through the nylon. She was hanging puppets and props on hooks backstage. “Nobody but showfolk here, Milo. If Mr Dingsboomps comes back here, we boot him. If it’s the President of the United States, we boot him. If it’s God Almighty with Saint Peter and Saint Paul… what?”

  “Huh?”

  “What do we do?” she said, exasperated.

  “We boot ’em,” Milo said.

  “That’s right. You gotta draw the line, Milo. You see what I mean?” She thrust her arm in and out of a few of the puppets hanging upside-down below the stage, practising transitions. “Go find the guy in the suit and tell him we’re ready. Then come back here with me. Got it?”

  “Yuh!” Milo ran.

  Sylvie’s puppet show was a Chinese folk tale: Stone Monkey. Milo crouched low and handed her things when she clucked, scowled or elbowed him. He watched, fascinated.

  First, the initial phases of the creation of the universe were enacted: 129,000 years in twelve parts (sixty seconds each) represented by cacophonously squabbling puppets of mouse, bull, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, goat, monkey, cock, dog and pig. After another twenty-seven thousand years, Sylvie’s Pan Gut smithereened the Enormous Vagueness (a gelatinous blob manipulated by rods and strings). At last, halfway through the show, Stone Monkey was born atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit from a rock that Sylvie reported, in the wavering voice of an Ancient Taoist Sage, to be precisely thirty-six feet five inches in height and twenty-four feet in circumference.

  Rascally Stone Monkey terrorized Heaven and Earth, absconding with various elixirs, virtuous gems, and magic weapons from the Jade Emperor—and anybody else who got in his way. In the end, on a bet with Buddha, he pissed on the Five Pillars at the End of the Universe—some children applauded, some booed, some giggled nervously—but they turned out to be the Buddha’s fingers. Big Bud grabbed up poor Monkey and imprisoned him in a mountain of iron. Curtain.

  The instant the curtain fell, Sylvie said, “Get the money.” In a louder voice, she announced, “Children or others coming within two feet of the puppet stage will be shot,” and she started taking everything apart.

  Always, they slept and breakfasted at The Grass and Trees. Supper at Jitsi’s. They did shows a few times a week at places all over town, indoors and out: libraries, loading docks, the beach, the park, a historical society, some rec centres and settlement houses, street fairs, block parties, and a hospital or two. “If they knew what I was,” Sylvie said, “they’d never hire me. But I look like your clean-cut American kid, now don’t I?”

  “So what are you, Sylvie?” Milo would say.

  “Oh, go fish! When are you gonna show me those wings?”

  “Go fish, yourself!”

  Milo learned the set-up routine and could strike quicker than Sylvie after a while. He started doing a few puppets, notably Lord Buddha and, in Sylvie’s “Trash Show”, a bilious Dumpster named Hector. He did chores like filling Monkey’s rubber bladder with water for the piss scene, and velcroing the Enormous Vagueness back together after Pan Gui decomposed it. He learned what to say to Sylvie’s patrons, how to accept their money or put them off when they were late setting up.

  He enjoyed himself. He got a little sun tan. His ribs stopped showing. The hollows around his eyes disappeared. He got to know Jitsi, who called him “Little Man”, because that’s what he heard Sylvie call him.

  Sylvie paid Milo part of her take, fivers at first, then tens and an occasional twenty. When they busked, he got half the hat. “For street work,” she said, “we’re strictly partners.” He liked that.

  After the first week or so, Milo forgot about investigating the Devore-Sylvie connection. It just didn’t seem so important any more. When Sylvie disappeared, on off days, without explanation or apology, Milo took himself to the zoo, the beach or the museum. There was never anyone at The Grass and Trees except Milo and Sylvie—and the Monkey King. The owner was on vacation, she said.

  Milo would be settling into his fitful night’s sleep, or would wake at an unknown hour—all the hours were dark down there—and hear the Monkey King cudgelling Lord Erlang. “Take that, you shrivelled pus bag!” He would creep sometimes to the foot of the stairs to hear it better.

  “You can’t fool me, you imbecilic macaque!” Sylvie blustered basso profundo, then squealed as Monkey, “Kowtow, pig-face, or I’ll knock you si
lly!”

  One night Sylvie surprised him by shouting, in her own voice, “Come on up here, Milo. I know you’re awake. You might as well help me with the chase sequence.”

  He walked upstairs and saw Sylvie’s puppet theatre set up in one of the bay windows, facing in. It was lit eerily from inside—blood red. The puppet theatre had been transformed into a weird temple with rows of fluted columns (papier-mache) and stained glass windows (cellophane). The God Erlang, frightening in the red light, appeared in full battle array, carrying a huge lance, huge, that is, in proportion to his own size of ten inches or so.

  Suddenly, the opening of the puppet stage closed in on itself. The carpet Erlang stood on lapped at him like a tongue, the columns gnashed like teeth, the proscenium was like a lip smacking against the apron. Erlang barely managed to wedge the theatre space open with his lance.

  “It’s Monkey’s mouth, Milo,” Sylvie said. She left Erlang there, his head drooping lifelessly on his chain mail. “He’s equideco’ed into a temple, get it?

  “First, Monkey turns into a sparrow and Erlang turns into a kite. Then Monkey is a fish, and Erlang is a fish-hawk. When Monkey changes to a water-snake, Erlang turns into a red-crested grey crane. What can Monkey do? He turns into a bustard. Look.” She showed him a thin-billed, long-legged plop of a bird-puppet, with an enlarged face retaining a few essentials of Stone Monkey. “That’s the lowest. A bustard’ll let anything hump it—even crows. Promise me you won’t ever be a bustard, flying boy.”

  “Huh?”

  “Anyway, Erlang shoots him then. So he takes off and turns himself into this temple. See? This flagpole is Monkey’s tail, only I haven’t Sobo-glued the hair on yet. This whole thing here is Monkey’s mouth. The windows are his eyes. But Erlang is on to him. He threatens to break the window panes. That would blind old Monkey.”

  “It’s great, Sylvie! How did you do that?”

  “Adhesives,” she said. “Everything is adhesives, Milo, in the show business anyways: duct tape, hot glue, velcro, rivets—this is like my catechism, see?—stuff inside other stuff all over the place. I wanna start doing this story in a week. Sound OK?”

  “Teach me.”

  “That’s all I wanted to hear.” She led him behind the puppet stage, into the heart of the red glow, and started to fill his hands with odd things.

  “Sylvie… “ he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “How can Monkey do all that? I mean, what is he supposed to be that he can change into stuff that way?”

  She stopped what she was doing and looked at Milo. There was nothing in the entire world outside this small ball of red light, Monkey’s mouth, the jumble of props and puppets, the window glass behind them—”noitasrevnoC dna eeffoC… “—Milo’s eyes, Sylvie’s eyes, each other’s eyes in each other’s eyes. “He’s a shape-shifter, Milo. A shape-shifter.”

  Inside himself, Milo squeezed: not a tightening, but a pushing together, the way he might squeeze the string together on both sides of a knot, to let more slack in for the undoing. There was no thought before him, but a sort of déjà vu. “Dede… “ he said.

  “… Sylvie, you mean.”

  “Sylvie, I feel like I want to tell you something.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of lines to learn here, a lot of cues to get down. Hold this.” She handed him Monkey’s Gold-Banded As-You-Will Cudgel, Weight 13,500 Pounds. She got up and switched on the overhead light. It was a cheap chandelier. The crystals dangled and made little rainbows on Lord Erlang, the puppet heads, masks and posters on the walls, “SAUT DANS LA VIDE,” and all. They went to work.

  There were never any customers, no coffee, no conversation; day after day, the chairs never came off the tables except for Sylvie and Milo. Once, an exterminator showed up with a gas mask, a heavy cylinder and a spray gun that looked like a sci-fi blaster; Sylvie nearly beat him unconscious, shoving him back out the door, while he waved his Service Orders in pink and blue and protected his private parts.

  “Over my dead body,” she said.

  “Vegetarian!” Milo shook his head.

  “They might be Stone Monkey, flying boy. They might be Franz frigging Kafka. How the hell do you know who the cockroaches are? Go kill, if you want to.” She stalked out and didn’t come back until the dark of the next morning, when she woke him to borrow some cash. It took Milo two days to feel that he had made it up to her.

  The fifth week, she taught him how to sleep. She whispered to him in the dark. He let her onto the stage, but not too close: “Milo, there’s a bowl at the bottom of your belly, a big bowl—can you feel it?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, every time you take a breath, like, the bowl kind of fills up with air. Doesn’t that feel good?”

  “I guess.”

  “And every time you breathe out, it kind of steams off, like soup steaming into cold air, see? You don’t have to do a thing, little man. Just feel that bowl fill up, and then feel the steam float off it. Watch how it goes out your mouth and nose, and then feel the air coming in there again. Over and over. Because it feels good, that’s all. If you start thinking about something, just go back to the bowl again. Nobody’s keeping track. You don’t have to get past one. Just one… one… one -see? That’s the real way to count. All those other numbers are a lot of crap. Then, if it’s night, you fall asleep, and if it’s day, you keep awake. Get it?”

  “I’ll try it, Sylvie, but I’m scared.”

  “Tell me about it, sky-jumper boy. Scared!”

  “How old are you?” he asked, staring at her with sudden intensity.

  “A million.”

  “Come on, Sylvie!”

  “Seventeen,” she said.

  “I’m fifteen. We’re practically the same.”

  “Dream on, little man.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever… ?”

  “Yes.” Suddenly she took his hand. “Not yet, Milo. It’s too soon. But I feel it too. I think it might happen. Don’t push, OK?”

  “OK.”

  She cocked her head at him and bit her lip in a way that melted whatever of Milo remained solid before Sylvie. “What do you see when you look at me, Milo?”

  “A girl—what do you mean?”

  “When you see the moon and stars, maybe it’ll be time then… “

  “Sylvie, I want to tell you something about myself.”

  She looked away. “I gotta go somewhere. Tell me when I get back… Do you have any money? I’m a little short.”

  At the beach that day, lying in the sun on a hulk of driftwood, sand dusting his face, fine sea air puffing his shirt and filling his lungs like a sail, Milo breathed. Water welled, sucked and whispered around him. Waves lapped. The bowl filled and emptied. Thoughts came and went. Inside him, a knot loosened.

  Dede was saying, “Milo, how can you be so small?” She was big. She was the Jolly Green Giant. She was King Kong, Mount Everest, the Moon. He felt that he was looking at her the wrong way through a microscope. She flipped him, and he came up heads. She laughed. “I mean, where’s the rest of you, Milo? Don’t worry, I won’t spend you. I wonder what Galileo would say about this. He’s the one who figured out how there are as many square numbers as there are numbers, baby. 1,2, 3, 4, 5… or 1, 4, 9,16, 25… for each of each there’s one of the other—savvy? — even though the one bunch looks bigger, even though the one bunch is a part of the other. Is that how it is for you, Milo?” She tickled him on the eagle’s breast. “Lots or little, somehow you’re still my little Milo. Don’t you lose something when you turn to a quarter? Don’t you get something when you turn to a blimp? How do you do those changeums?”

  The bowl filled, the bowl emptied. The sea. The wind. A knot inside him came undone. “I’m a shape-shifter!”

  The sky darkened. The lake began to glow so intensely blue-green, seething in its basin, that it seemed more emotion than liquid. Strati knit the sky shut. Thu
nder. Milo climbed down from the log, brushed the sand off and started running. He was supposed to meet Sylvie in front of the bathhouse for a show in the old carousel enclosure.

  “When the great world horse pisses, it rains,” Dede had told him once. “Everything is transformations—it says so here in the Upanishads. Wanna hear more?”

  “No.” It had frightened him.

  Now, just as in Dede’s Upanishads, the rain broke like piss from a tight bladder. It sprayed down. The world horse whinnied. Its eyes flashed. The sand was speckled then splotched then rutted, and Milo was spattered with wet sand, splashing, pool to pool, towards the bathhouse. Then the hail began to fall. His scalp tickled. His hair sparkled with hail. When he brushed the tiny hailstones out, his hair crunched.

  It only lasted a few moments, and the drumming of rain and hail subsided. He could hear the waves again, breathing back and forth far behind him, and the flag by the bathhouse flapping like a faltering conversation.

  Sylvie was pacing back and forth between two pillars at the top of the bathhouse steps, just under the eaves of the roof, protected from the downpour. The broad stone steps were littered with tiny hailstones that crackled under Milo’s feet.

  “Sylvie!” he shouted. “I’ve got to tell you something. You’ve got to listen.”

  “Look, I’m in a hurry, Milo. There’s a guy waiting on me inside there, and then we still have that show to do.”

  “But, Sylvie… “

  A tall wiry man in a Hawaiian shirt strolled out of the men’s door across the landing from Sylvie and Milo. He was balding but meticulously groomed and greased, with sideburns down to his long, heavy jaw. His fingers were covered with rings. “Hey, what’s the holdup now? My client is getting impatient.”

  Sylvie turned towards him. “One minute. Just wait inside. I never let you down yet, did I?”

  “Okiedokie.” He ducked back in.

  “Listen, Milo.” Sylvie was slightly trembling. So was Milo, but Sylvie wasn’t wet. “I’m going to leave in a second, but I need you to stay here. You gotta go in where Lenny is and give him something for me—a box with some stuff inside. Watch him, Milo. Watch that he’s careful with the thing I leave him, OK?”