Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  Christopher touched the cool surface. Visually it was seamless, a single white structure made of unidentifiable material. But under his fingers the texture and temperature varied: parts of it were woody, others metallic, still others plastic. Towering above them, the statue’s shadow was washed out by the steady golden light emitted from six light globes which encircled it like a wide halo.

  This thing predates Columbus and Shakespeare, Christopher thought. It has been sitting here since before my kind invented the printing press.

  Nothing. His old heart refused to be moved.

  Vita hissed; Em chirped a translation. “When I was new-hatched my parents brought me here. I climbed all the way to the top. The holds look worn down from here at the bottom, but the effect is intentional. You’d be surprised how firm they are! When you are very young, Christopher, you can sit on the top, inflate your sacs, and leap down.”

  “That’s a long way to fall,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s perfectly safe. Inside the coiled tail is a soft moss, and as babies our bodies are very light. Craket the Maker intended it this way. She felt it was important for the Spine to speak to us differently at the various stages of our lives.”

  He squinted at the bulb at the top of the sculpture. “It’s a long way up. Weren’t you scared?”

  “Terrified. I had to be coaxed down. My parents were deeply shamed.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “I am the better for it. Many of my kind only come to see the Spine once or twice. The embarrassment brought me back again and again. It remade my soul.”

  “I see,” Christopher said.

  “Perhaps you should take a rest. I think it would be comfortable if you wanted to sit here.”

  He looked at it dubiously. It was about as high and thick as a park bench, even reasonably, flat, but streaks of dried saliva were flaking away where the other Tsebs had been licking it.

  Gentle white toes closed on his scarred elbow.

  “Are you all right? I know I said it was acceptable for you to die indoors but you would alert me if you were unwell, wouldn’t you?”

  “Old man’s prerogative,” he murmured. The grip on his arm tightened and he leaned against it experimentally. Vita gurgled.

  “Sound denotes physical exertion,” Em said.

  He let himself fall.

  He landed atop the alien, tangling a leg and an arm over its twisting body. One of the bumps in the floor caught him in the kidney, a blinding, sudden pain that dulled his awareness of Vita beneath him, bucking and squeaking. Liquids in its body compressed under his weight and its thin skin stretched against him. The sounds it made, according to Em, equated to surprise and minor pain.

  “Christopher? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “Sorry. I’ll get off you in a sec—just need my pills. Are you hurt?”

  “Just pressed,” it said. “Your body is so warm! How do you stand it?”

  “Cold blood,” he muttered. Then, opening the packet of tablets, he bounced the golden globs down the length of the white body.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, maintaining the façade for one more second. Then the tabs reacted to the room’s ambient moisture. They popped, releasing a gelatinous payload that bound the Tseb to the floor of the chamber.

  A chatter like rocks grinding together from the body beneath him.

  “Vita is alarmed.”

  He rolled off it, backed away. The jelly splotches spread and welded it down—tail, toes, body. It tugged at one with its foot and tore a hunk of skin away. Fluid the color of motor oil flowed into the fuzz that covered the floor.

  “Stay still,” he ordered. “You’ll injure yourself.”

  “Christopher?”

  Retrieving his cane, he leaned hard against the Spine and caught his breath. Vita was still wiggling on the floor.

  “Don’t move,” he said again. The web packet from his camera had already expanded to seal the room’s only entrance, encasing it in a gelatinous webwork. It wouldn’t seal them in for long, but he didn’t need long.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Causing a diplomatic incident,” he said, unpacking the cane.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some chaps I know wanted me to destroy the Monet. You see, people back home have been sitting around with their thumbs up their arses for rather a long time, as we reckon it, doing squat about getting the painting back from you.”

  The cane was filled with three different harmless fluids, all under pressure. His pals had thought he would spray it over the paintings in the Earth gallery. One two, game over. Instead he unpacked its tripod and took careful aim at the top of the Spine. He started the mechanism that would mix the chemicals into an acid. A single green droplet hissed from the tip of the device.

  “Squeal denotes pain,” Em said.

  He looked at the child. Vita was struggling against its bonds again, and a great hunk of its leg had been torn open.

  “Listen to me,” he told it. “Those capsules were meant to hold a human. Your skin is obviously very delicate. You must lie still…you’re going to be seriously injured if you don’t stop.”

  Vita shuddered once. Little fissures bled at the edges of the jellies that bound it to the floor.

  “All right,” Vita said. After a moment, when it had clearly stopped moving, Christopher returned to his destruction of the statue. The cane beeped, indicating that the acid’s mix cycle was complete. He took careful aim at the top of the Spine.

  Strong toes gripped his knee then, hurling him backward, off-balance. He fell, tangled in the grip of Vita’s bleeding leg. The cane, still in his hand, rained droplets of acid over them both. He closed his eyes, covered his face. His jacket caught most of it, although he could smell his hair burning.

  “Don’t do this, Christopher,” Vita pleaded.

  “It’s too late.” He struggled to free himself without tearing Vita’s skin further, wincing as its body gurgled beneath him. The acid was blistering long sticky lines near its eyes, the flesh running like melted cheese. Finally he rolled off of it, propped himself up on his elbows. Taking aim from down on the floor, he began to spray. He laid the acid on the Spine in a straight, consistent layer, just like paint.

  Vita yanked his leg and hissed; Em translated. “Stop!”

  He struggled to breathe. “The general idea was that by destroying the Monet, you see, we would punish both your museum and the people in my government who let it go. The boys had whipped up these clever gadgets they thought I could slip into this place. They wanted an old man, preferably one who had one toe in the crematorium anyway. But the Earth exhibit is too well protected.” Acrid smoke burned at his eyes, the first chemical reaction of acid burning the statue. “Besides, that painting means more to me than my own mother. You might say it remade my soul.”

  “You haven’t got one,” Vita whispered.

  “I was going to tell them to stuff their job. But someone else would have gone, don’t you see? And what if I was wrong? What if they did destroy it? It would have been a pointless sacrifice. Cutting off our nose, as they say. I even considered warning the authorities, just to save the painting.”

  “Sound equates to a contemptuous snort,” Em said.

  “But then I thought—if we’re going to take all these lovely toys halfway across the galaxy, why not put them to real use? Punish the guilty, I reckoned, instead of the innocent.”

  Drops of water dribbled down from the ceiling, an immense and sudden profusion of moisture. Striking the acid, it sizzled and steamed. Christopher saw that the Spine was discolored, but not destroyed. The damage was probably reparable, and the acid was being dispersed by the fire system. He was failing.

  There was nothing more he could do; he was out of weapons. The boys had tried to build a bomb into a hearing aid or a proto, and all they’d done was blow the tester right into a coma.

  He’d come all this way, and at best he would have scared them.

  �
�Vita requires immediate medical attention.” Em gave the words a plaintive tone.

  “All right, all right.”

  The grip on his knee had loosened, and he managed to stand upright again. The cane’s payload was half used, and so he spent the rest of the cartridge spreading acid on the door seal. Security must be outside by now, trying to cut their way in…there was no reason not to help them now.

  “Bring a doctor,” he shouted.

  He spared a last glance for the intact Spine and then, finally, forced himself to look down. The knobby floor around Vita’s body was filled with golden blood and water, and its struggles were weakening. It had torn itself apart trying to stop him.

  And the funny thing was he’d never been the sort who could bear to see someone who was hurt—even scratched—but he could look right at Vita. It was like seeing a movie monster, a stop-motion death-scene. Before he retired, he had bombed a shuttle full of Tsebs over Earth’s lost paintings. He had lain awake nights, imagining they died like humans. Now…

  “They’re coming,” he said. “Hang on.”

  “Sound denotes great pain.”

  Take its mind off it, he thought. “I had a part-time job when I was a kid,” he said. “Guided museum tours in my home town. I worked slow days only at first—they wouldn’t trust me with whole groups, just the random wandering tourist. I’m tempted to think that’s what your job here is like, Vita—that we have that much, at least, in common.”

  “We have nothing in common,” Em translated. “I’m not like you.”

  “I wanted to stay on with that museum, but nobody at home wanted to look at paintings anymore. It’s all digital home galleries and knobby bric-a-brac. There was no job for me.” He knelt, lifted a flap of Tseb skin and tried to press it back against the wound. Frothy orange foam was seeping from its throat.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Vita asked, twitching away from the hand he’d clapped over its injury.

  “Distraction,” he said.

  “From what? Your desecration?”

  He glanced at the Spine again, mottled with faint black streaks where the various materials merged. “It didn’t work.”

  It laughed bitterly. “You’re saying that because you think I’m dying.”

  “No,” Christopher said. He didn’t insult it by apologizing. “You’ll be fine. I’m trying to take your mind off the discomfort.”

  “Do you mean pain?” If its body language showed a reaction, Em didn’t catch it.

  “Sorry.”

  “Chattering at me like a scatbug doesn’t help.”

  “They’ll be through the door in a minute. I didn’t know your skin was so delicate, Vita—”

  “Shut up.” With that, the alien wound its toes along a hold in the floor and tried to pull itself to the blockaded exit. Pieces of its innards unraveled, stringing along the lumpy floor. Its tail tore loose, lashing the Spine with fading vigor.

  It was within a yard of the exit when he finally heard Security breaking through the acid-weakened blockade with a cutting tool. Their faces filled a small gap in the webbing, and then they desperately tore at the rest of it, trying to open the gateway for Vita. One of them extended its tail through the hole, dangling it like a rescue rope.

  They weren’t fast enough. The injured guide had stopped moving. Air blatted, escaping the tears in the rubbery white skin as if it were a deflating life raft. Vita’s body shrank, and then went still.

  After a moment, the guard’s tail retracted to the other side of the door. Tseb eyestalks crowded the opening. Four or five of them stared at Christopher through the shredded jelly of the once-blocked entrance.

  “It was only meant to immobilize,” he said.

  There was no response. He threw away the cane and put his hands up. Didn’t they have protos?

  “I’m unarmed now,” he said.

  No reaction. They actually backed up the corridor, away from him and out of sight.

  “Aren’t you going to arrest me?” He rubbed his face, was surprised to find it wet.

  Silence. He looked at the knobby, impassable floor. His cane, disassembled and empty, would never hold his weight again. “Hey. You cops. Going to cart me off or not?”

  A chime, suddenly, from Em. “You are located in a dying place. Please leave the chamber and surrender yourself to the authorities.”

  “What the hell?” He opened his mouth to shout again and then realization hit. They wouldn’t come in. Their art treasure was sealed away, ostracized by rigid beliefs and the blood of a child. They were going to leave Vita’s body here to rot with its beloved Spine.

  And who was he to be offended by that?

  When another minute passed and they still didn’t come after him, Christopher heaved his body over the base of the Spine so he was inside the curve of its tail. He lay inside, head and legs raised by its height, and found that it fit him just right. The mossy floor was blessedly comfortable, just as the tour had advertised.

  “Something soft to land on,” he murmured, settling in. His leg was aching from the pratfall he’d taken onto the lumpy floor and both feet were throbbing. He kicked off his shoes, waggled his toes in the warm, moist air.

  One last lump pressed into his hip—the camera. He took it out, set it to slideshow, and projected images onto the curvy white interior of the Spine. Warhol. Spencer. Malta. A fake Picasso. A Bill Reid sketch. The Monet. Himself, posing for fake grandkids. Vita. The Mound. Vita again.

  “Expression equates to a friendly smile,” Em said.

  Christopher tore the proto speaker out of his ear and flipped back to the paintings.

  After a couple of hours, he started to get hungry.

  Ailoura

  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  Paul Di Filippo lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the most active literary denizen of Providence in the genre since H.P. Lovecraft, a reviewer, correspondent, and prolific writer of fiction. If there’s a literary movement or school, he’s part of it, or tries it on for size, or joins it. He has been publishing fantasy and SF since 1985, and widely in the last decade. His books include Ciphers (1990), The Steampunk Trilogy (1995), Ribofunk (1996), Fractal Paisleys (1997), Lost Pages (1998), Joe’s Liver (2000), and Strange Trades (2001). His books out in 2002 include Babylon Sisters and the short story collection Little Doors.

  “Ailoura,” an SF story based on “Puss in Boots,” appeared in Out of this World, an anthology of SF using fairy tales as templates, edited by Wil McCarthy, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Jon Helfers. It was one of the better SF anthologies of the year. The theme of the anthology plays to Di Filippo’s postmodern strengths. Despite the hyperbolic style, the family intrigue to murder dad during his high-tech rejuvenation treatment and deprive the virtuous younger son of his inheritance has a ring of odd plausibility. It is an interesting story in which the SF and fairy-tale elements blend nicely.

  The small aircraft swiftly bisected the cloudless chartreuse sky. Invisible encrypted transmissions raced ahead of it. Clearance returned immediately from the distant, turreted manse—Stoessl House—looming in the otherwise empty riven landscape like some precipice-perching raptor. The ever-unsleeping family marchwarden obligingly shut down the manse’s defenses, allowing an approach and landing. Within minutes, Geisen Stoessl had docked his small deltoid zipflyte on one of the tenth-floor platforms of Stoessl House, cantilevered over the flood-sculpted, candy-colored arroyos of the Subliminal Desert.

  Geisen unseamed the canopy and leaped easily out onto the broad sintered terrace, unpeopled at this tragic, necessary, hopeful moment. Still clad in his dusty expeditionary clothes, goggles slung around his neck, Geisen resembled a living marble version of some young roughneck godling. Slim, wiry, and alert, with his laughter-creased, soil-powdered face now set in solemn lines absurdly counterpointed by a mask of clean skin around his recently shielded green eyes, Geisen paused a moment to brush from his protective suit the heaviest evidence of his recent wildcat digging in the Lustrous Wastes. Satisfie
d that he had made some small improvement in his appearance upon this weighty occasion, he advanced toward the portal leading inside. But before he could actuate the door, it opened from within.

  Framed in the door stood a lanky, robe-draped bestient: Vicuna, his mother’s most valued servant. Set squarely in Vicuna’s wedge-shaped hirsute face, the haughty maid’s broad velveteen nose wrinkled imperiously in disgust at Geisen’s appearance, but the moreauvian refrained from voicing her disapproval of that matter in favor of other upbraidings.

  “You arrive barely in time, Gep Stoessl. Your father approaches the limits of artificial maintenance, and is due to be reborn any minute. Your mother and brothers already anxiously occupy the Natal Chambers.”

  Following the inhumanly articulated servant into Stoessl House, Geisen answered, “I’m aware of all that, Vicuna. But traveling halfway around Chalk can’t be accomplished in an instant.”

  “It was your choice to absent yourself during this crucial time.”

  “Why crucial? This will be Vomacht’s third reincarnation. Presumably this one will go as smoothly as the first two.”

  “So one would hope.”

  Geisen tried to puzzle out the subtext of Vicuna’s ambiguous comment, but could emerge with no clue regarding the current state of the generally complicated affairs within Stoessl House. He had obviously been away too long—too busy enjoying his own lonely but satisfying prospecting trips on behalf of the family enterprise—to be able to grasp the daily political machinations of his relatives.

  Vicuna conducted Geisen to the nearest squeezer, and they promptly dropped down fifteen stories, far below the bedrock in which Stoessl House was rooted. On this secure level, the monitoring marchwarden hunkered down in its cozy low-Kelvin isolation, meaningful matrices of B-E condensates. Here also were the family’s Natal Chambers. At these doors blazoned with sacred icons Vicuna left Geisen with a humid snort signifying that her distasteful attendance on the latecomer was complete.

  Taking a fortifying breath, Geisen entered the rooms.

  Roseate illumination symbolic of new creation softened all within: the complicated apparatus of rebirth as well as the sharp features of his mother, Woda, and the doughy countenances of his two brothers, Gitten and Grafton. Nearly invisible in the background, various bestient bodyguards hulked, inconspicious yet vigilant.