The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  “Well, no, I can’t really stay …”

  “But how else you gonna know all the people wind up comin?”

  She give me a narrow-eyed look. “Ivorene? What’s gotten into you? Are you – you’re not – you haven’t been—”

  She think my horse drunk. “Siddown and fine out,” I say, and now she accept my invitation. I get her to take some candy, too. Lemondrop. Ain’t no need to shock her system with too much sweetness.

  All this time, guests keep arrivin. All dressed up, nice, bright colors, shiny fabrics, boots, big belts – Not quite right, not exactly how they did it, back in the day, but – they lookin pretty good! I keep handin out the candy, hopin everyone get to enjoy themself.

  Grooves start jumpin. I can’t contain myself, never no good at that. ’Fore she know it, Miz Mealymouth holdin my candy bowl and I am out on the dance floor actin like anybody’s fool. “Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip!” I sing over the music. Why they all just watchin me?

  Next song. Kressi come up behind me, stand still a minute. I turn so she see me smile. Take her hand, spin her round, dosi-do an play the clown. She lose some a her worry, gain some grace. Soon she swishin her robe like waves and dancin like light on the water. Very Yemaya, very Mother of Fishes. Good. That’s who we got to bring down here tonight.

  Boy over there wanna dance with her. I get out the way. In a minute a whole bunch of ’em cuttin loose. Flyin elbows, flashin feet. Funk start to rise.

  Someone important at the door. I go see why they not comin in.

  ’Cause the one told me she really can’t stay tryin to keep him out, that’s why! Big shinin man in a paper dress standin there while she tell him get on back in bed. She call him Edde. “Yes, Miz Yancey,” he say, and nod. Too polite to push her out the doorway.

  Not me. But I do it without touchin. All a sudden, she sittin down. I help her back up. Edde head for the pole.

  “Call Doctor Thompson!” this Yancey tell me. Tell me. Tell me!

  She won’t leave, now I wish she would. I could make her, but I rather dance. Rather she did, too. Like everybody else but her. Funk steady risin, but this woman drag us down. And we close, so goddam close.

  Gotta get over the hump. Gotta get over the hump.

  Where my bopgun?

  I look all around. Someone shoulda brought it to me before now. Ain’t I already asked? Sure, when my horse first pray to me. Nobody better make me ask a second time.

  Edde hoppin all around, jumpin so he see over people’s shoulders, headed for my pole. He there. He grab it.

  Swing down, sweet chariot, stop, and let me ride.

  Two now. I on two horses. Much easier. Look at me across the room. Look at me back. These are the Good Times.

  Homin in on Miz Yancey. All she wanna do is stan there. I bring me some dancers. Soft music, an they swirl like liquid, spillin over the floor. Swoosh, shoosh, they spin Miz Yancey round, rock her shoulders, sway her hips, draw her deep into that psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop. Carry her like a cup a foam on they tide. Over to my pole. Twirl her round, turn her loose and let her grab on to stand steady. She ready. I watch the funk gettin up for the downstroke. Watch it fall upon that horse’s head.

  She come! Mother of Fishes, she come! Twistin, slidin, slippin, ridin – here among us! Yemaya has come!

  “… control is based upon exploration of n-dimensional spaces and finding key spaces for transformations, first in decisive small local regions, which can result in large-scale transformations.”

  Kressi opened her eyes on chaos. How long had she been dancing? It had felt so good to forget, to let the music take her far away. But where was she?

  Surging dancers squeezed her against a wall. Perpendicular. Smooth, unjointed. She was in a corridor, outside the yurt. But Good Boy’s music still surrounded her. Someone had patched the yurt’s sound system into the City’s speakers.

  Miz Sloan capered by in Ali’s arms, transparent slippers kicking high. Then the flood of dancers ebbed, trailing a pair she recognized with a shock as Passela and Fanfan. They were – he was – from behind Passela had shoved her hands inside the front of his pants, way inside. As she watched, Fanfan squatted down slightly, allowing Passela to leap astride his hips. Without dropping a beat, they vanished into the crowd. Kressi caught her breath, then started slowly after them, thinking hard.

  Either they had all gone crazy at the same time, or it was a very good thing she’d spit out that piece of candy her mother gave her.

  No. Not her mother. Whatever it was Ivorene had called up to help them. A supraself metaprogram, to use her term. Three days ago, Kressi had agreed to go along with anything it wanted. To believe that her mother had known what she was doing, and that this – entity – would somehow perform the task it had been set and leave. It had been hard to stick by her decision. It wasn’t getting any easier.

  The corridor emptied. Kressi spotted her favorite fossil embedded in a nearby stretch of likelime. She was outside the infirmary.

  She went into the empty lobby. Over the music’s steady throb, she heard Doctor Thompson’s angry protests. She had to see what was happening in the cubicles, in the ward. Even if there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  There was nothing she could do, or even see. Nothing but the brightly colored backs of her fellow Citizens, pulsing rhythmically, flaring and floating and – She closed her eyes. Tight. But shining patterns formed, even more dangerous to her focus.

  She opened her eyes again and pounded on the back before her. The drug would wear off soon. John C. Lilly used LSD, but Ivorene had opted for a tailored version of Narby’s Amazonian formula in her early experiments. Presumably this was what Good Boy had printed out and put into the candy. The dancers’ ecstasy would last no more than half a shift, and the effects on Kressi would be slighter, and of a much shorter duration.

  Long seconds passed till the man blocking her way moved. He backed up suddenly, kicking her in the shins. Others did the same, and the tight knot of dancers dissolved into a loose semicircle around the door of Cubicle One. Kressi peered between shifting shoulders and saw Captain Yancey emerge. Her unblinking eyes seemed to protrude slightly from her head. She raised dusty, chalk-white hands and held them clasped in front of her, then began to move them slowly together, as if working up a lather.

  Without warning, Captain Yancey whirled and stalked off to her left. Kressi scrambled to follow her. A high, burbling voice wailed through the speakers: “I can’t swim! I never could swim! Let go mah laig!”

  Six’s occupant looked oddly serene, though his room was filled with partying strangers. Two men sat on opposite sides of his bed, propping him erect. Sweat glittered on his forehead as he swayed lightly to the music. Kressi glanced automatically at the headboard: Charles Tobin – temp 40/heart rate 120.

  Captain Yancey leaned forward and placed both hands on Mr. Tobin’s head. The patient slithered down onto his bed as if to avoid her. She stooped to maintain contact and began to shudder slowly, so deeply she shook the patient and his cot. Mr. Tobin’s body straightened, then arched like a leafspring, vibrating faster and faster. Horrified, Kressi tried to call up the courage to step forward and touch him, somehow stop what was happening. But it ended on its own before she could manage that. Captain Yancey stood back and left him flat on the cot. His hair and face were white with whatever she’d rubbed on her hands. He seemed to be asleep. The headboard thought so, too.

  The room emptied. Kressi hesitated, then hurried out.

  She barely made it into Seven. Dancers screened the cot. A new voice sang to what sounded like the same song, assuring everyone that they could swim in the water and not get wet.

  A child’s frightened crying cut through the music. It came from the cot. Kressi struggled to reach it. By the time she got there, the child lay quiet and calm.

  It was Junior Watt. Kressi recognized the normally feisty tenyear-old despite his mask of white. His eyelids fluttered briefly as she called his name,
then he sighed and smiled. As she watched, the headboard’s readouts flickered, changing to those of a healthy sleeping boy.

  “What are you doing?” she asked Captain Yancey.

  In response, the older woman grabbed Kressi by her braids and pulled her closer. Shutting her eyes reflexively, Kressi felt a hand scrub her face with a slightly gritty powder. The press of dancers suddenly stilled to hold her motionless. She twisted stubbornly in place, getting nowhere. The hand’s scrubbing motions softened, becoming oddly gentle, reminding her of – of—

  Of how her mother washed her face one morning, grooming her for an online interview, just weeks before the ascent to their ship. She’d fought Ivorene, flung away the washcloth, but her mother had picked it up and persisted in her work. Captain Yancey’s touch felt as tender, and as determined.

  No. Not Captain Yancey’s. This supraself metaprogram’s touch.

  It was cleaning its children.

  Kressi relaxed. And sensed a lightness, a lifting. As if old, nameless, chains had fallen from her, training weights she’d put on long ago and since forgotten.

  She opened her eyes slowly. The room was empty. Then Doctor Thompson walked through the cubicle’s doorway holding a gun. “Kressi?” he asked.

  “I’m okay. It’s just—”

  “What’s that stuff on your face?”

  Good question. “I dunno.”

  “It’s on the others, too. I’ll get a sample container.” He turned to leave.

  “Wait – you’re not going to shoot Captain Yancey, are you?”

  “No. Where’d you get—” He looked at the gun he was tucking absentmindedly under his robe’s sash. “Oh. This. It’s only a water pistol.” He pulled it free again and looked down at it as if it belonged to another person, someone immature and hopelessly embarrassing. “I had it in my office for some reason, and when they all came in at once it seemed …

  “Here. Take it.” Doctor Thompson handed her the gun. It felt heavy and wet. “I’m not going to try to stop them. This laying on of hands, or whatever you want to call it, it’s working.”

  Kressi had come to the same conclusion, but it startled her to hear him say so.

  “I knew from the beginning an unconventional course of therapy was called for, but—” He shrugged his shoulders and waved an arm vaguely in the air. “Next time you talk to Ivorene, ask her to give me a call so we can discuss what she’s done.”

  It was at this point that Kressi realized that her mother had been missing from among the dancers. That she’d been absent ever since Kressi roused herself from her trance. Ever since the party’s migration to the infirmary. So Ivorene must still be back at home.

  No, not Ivorene. Or maybe, yes. If the wave of symptoms had been conquered, the Good Boy metaprogram might have finally given up his hold. It would be Ivorene waiting for Kressi at the yurt, worn out from her long ordeal, not even sure of her own success.

  With that in mind, Kressi called home. No answer. Maybe all it meant was that her mother felt too tired to open the feed. But when A Shift’s crew showed up minutes later, unaffected by candy, she was happy to leave Captain Yancey and her entourage to them. By then the music’s volume had dropped, and a lot of partiers had drifted off; perhaps half their number remained. Doctor Thompson followed them through the ward, smiling and recording notes, nodding at Kressi as she took her leave.

  The blind was still raised at the bottom of the yurt’s ramp. She plodded to the top without shutting it, expecting to find drugged or sleeping stragglers, but the place was empty. Everyone had gone. Everyone except one slim figure robed in black and red, sitting at the base of the pole Good Boy had erected. Her mother?

  No. The figure popped to its feet like a button and lifted its chin to peer at her through half-lidded eyes, and Kressi knew there was one more guest to get rid of.

  But how?

  “Well?” asked Good Boy. “I kep all a my promises now. How bout yours?”

  Promises? “I said I’d help you for three days. I did. You said you’d cure the mystery disease. Okay, that’s pretty much taken care of. Which means it’s time for you to go.”

  Good Boy tilted his head consideringly. “There was the partay, yes. Music, dancing. Sweetness we shared. But these wasn’t all a my requirements.”

  “I require my mother back! Good Boy, you gave your word—” Kressi lowered her head and took a deep breath, trying to imagine life if Ivorene never recovered possession of her body. Her mother would be locked up, drugged helpless. Kressi would get handed off to someone to be fostered till she reached sixteen, probably Captain Yancey or worse, and of course nobody’d ever be able to make Ivorene any better because there was nothing really wrong with her—

  “Come now.” Good Boy’s tone had turned suddenly cajoling. He stepped quickly toward her, almost running. “I am aware you got it. Hand it over. All gonna be well.”

  “Hand what over?” Unnerved by his proximity, she put her hands in her pockets to prove that they were empty and felt something hard and slick.

  Doctor Thompson’s water pistol. She pulled it out. “This?”

  Ivorene’s teeth gleamed against her wide-stretched lips in a glad smile. “At last!” Good Boy received the gun reverently, cradling it in upturned palms as he examined it. The smile faded. “This a toy?”

  “Good Boy, it’s all we have!”

  He aimed it at her. “It loaded?” And shot her full in the face.

  Kressi choked, coughed, swallowing salty water and wiping it from her eyes. She heard him laughing, heard him stop, heard the clatter of something hitting the yurt’s floor. Felt shaking arms wrap around her damp head and haul it closer, pressing it up against cloth-covered flesh. She fought free, but when she could see again there was something different –

  “Mom?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me outta my name like that! Just because I happen to be your—”

  “Ivorene!” She nestled back into her mother’s arms once more. For however long she could.

  “New areas of conscious awareness can be developed, beyond the current conscious comprehension of the self. With courage, fortitude, and perseverance the previously experienced boundaries can be crossed into new territories of subjective awareness and experience.”

  Stars shone through the yurt’s many windows. Everything else was dark till Kressi held her lighter to the three candles in front of her. Three long flames leapt up, wavering golden fingers that quickly steadied and grew still. Two people sat at the table, two biocomputers containing at least that many control metaprograms. One of them happened to have given birth to the other.

  Doctor Thompson, Captain Yancey, and a dozen others waited to watch the night’s proceedings through the live feed. A sheet from the printer contained a list of their questions.

  Ivorene reached around the candles to grasp her daughter by her wrist. “Who do you think we should get for them to talk to?” she asked. Her palm slid against her daughter’s in an almost unconscious clasp.

  You, Kressi wanted to say, but no, this was research. Talking to Ivorene wasn’t an option right now. Wasn’t always going to be one. Not with her mother. “You decide this time.”

  Sensitive instruments recorded and broadcast Ivorene’s reply: “Good Boy.”

  Kressi sat up in her chair, planted her feet more firmly on the floor, and released her mother’s hand.

  “… the bodies of the network housing the minds, the ground on which they rest, the planet’s surface, impose definite limits. These limits are to be found experientially and experimentally, agreed upon by special minds, and communicated to the network. The results are called consensus science.”

  (All quotes are from John C. Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments, second edition, 1974, Bantam Books, NY, NY.)

  THE SECOND CARD OF THE MAJOR ARCANA

  Thoraiya Dyer

  He sits up against one of the altar stones.

&
nbsp; I move in the long shadows of marble columns. A dry wind from across the valley tosses the dangling ties of my veil, bringing more knowledge to me. My human face, framed by yards of black silk, smiles with a woman’s smile.

  “Excuse me,” I say, and he leaps to his feet, hiding the pack of pornographic playing cards behind his back. The boy appears, not long released from his compulsory military service, bushy buzz cut just beginning to regrow, skin browned from stakeouts in sunshine-dazzled snowfields and fingernails brittle from picking garbage and dead cats from the dishwater Mediterranean.

  Nor am I long released. Freedom is a luxury for both of us.

  “Do you need directions?” the boy asks and the riddle rises in my chest.

  “I need directions to the one who is wiser than I,” I say. “Thus might I return to the God with a refutation in hand.”

  My claws flex slightly in their sheaths.

  “Are you lost?” He gapes. “There’s nobody here. The bus to Chtaura comes in one hour.”

  Incorrect. I open my inner eye and stop the boy’s heart.

  He slips down the side of the altar stone like a stain. The absence of blood turns his dark Arab face the colour of weak tea. The temple I remember is dismembered, but I am still bound to protect it from fools. I sense the foundations. A few of them remain, buried deep beneath the derelict Umayyad monstrosity. Other stones have been removed to distant places. They describe the new boundary of my zeal.

  Where is the scholar?

  There was a grown man with a naked chin who rolled back the stone, a priest who whispered the words of awakening. I must find him. The task of bringing the stones back to the temple is his. It will be simpler to guard once it is made whole.

  For now, the greater part of the world lies within the temple.

  I step lightly around the body on padded paws. The loose, layered robes of the Bekaa Bedouin swish in the dust behind me. They erase tracks, which resemble those of the melanistic Asiatic lion, extinct in the Levant since the early fourteenth century.