The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Borislav refused her busily flashing inkware. “Oh yes, word gets around about that electric bar-coding nonsense! Those fancy radio-ID stickers of yours. Yes, yes, I’m sure those things are just fine for rich foreign people with shopping wands!”

  “Sir, if you sensibly deployed this electronic tracking system, you could keep complete, real-time records of all your merchandise. Then you would know exactly what’s selling, and not. You could fully optimize your product flow, reduce waste, maximize your profit, and benefit the environment through reduced consumption.”

  Borislav stared at her. “You’ve given this speech before, haven’t you?”

  “Of course I have! It’s a critical policy issue! The modern Internet-of-Things authenticates goods, reduces spoilage, and expedites secure cross-border shipping!”

  “Listen, madame doctor: your fancy bookkeeping won’t help me if I don’t know the soul of the people! I have a little kiosk! I never compete with those big, faceless mall stores! If you want that sort of thing, go shop in your five-star hotel!”

  Dr. Grootjans lowered her sturdy purse and her sharp face softened into lines of piety. “I don’t mean to violate your quaint local value system … . Of course we fully respect your cultural differences … . Although there will be many tangible benefits when your regime fully harmonizes with European procedures.”

  “‘My regime,’ is it? Ha!” Borislav thumped the hollow floor of his kiosk with his cane. “This stupid regime crashed all their government computers! Along with crashing our currency, I might add! Those crooks couldn’t run that fancy system of yours in a thousand years!”

  “A comprehensive debate on this issue would be fascinating!” Dr. Grootjans waited expectantly, but, to her disappointment, no such debate followed. “Time presses,” she told him at last. “May I raise the subject of a complete acquisition?”

  Borislav shrugged. “I never argue with a lady or a paying customer. Just tell what you want.”

  Dr. Grootjans sketched the air with her starry wand. “This portable shelter would fit onto an embassy truck.”

  “Are you telling me that you want to buy my entire kiosk?”

  “I’m advancing that option now, yes.”

  “What a scandal! Sell you my kiosk? The people would never forgive me!”

  “Kiosks are just temporary structures. I can see your business is improving. Why not open a permanent retail store? Start over in a new, more stable condition. Then you’d see how simple and easy regulatory adoption can be!”

  Ace swung a heavily laden shopping bag from hand to hand. “Madame, be reasonable! This street just can’t be the same without this kiosk!”

  “You do have severe difficulties with inventory management. So, I will put a down payment on the contents of your store. Then,” she turned to Ace, “I will hire you as the inventory consultant. We will need every object named, priced, and cataloged. As soon as possible. Please.”

  Borislav lived with his mother on the ground floor of a local apartment building. This saved him trouble with his bad leg. When he limped through the door, his mother was doing her nails at the kitchen table, with her hair in curlers and her feet in a sizzling foot bath.

  Borislav sniffed at the stew, then set his cane aside and sat in a plastic chair. “Mama dear, heaven knows we’ve seen our share of bad times.”

  “You’re late tonight, poor boy! What ails you?”

  “Mama, I just sold my entire stock! Everything in the kiosk! All sold, at one great swoop! For hard currency, too!” Borislav reached into the pocket of his long coat. “This is the best business day I’ve ever had!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! It’s fantastic! Ace really came through for me—he brought his useful European idiot, and she bought the whole works! Look, I’ve saved just one special item, just for you.”

  She raised her glasses on a neck chain. “Are these new fabbing cards?”

  “No, Mama. These fine souvenir playing cards feature all the stars from your favorite Mexican soap operas. These are the originals, still in their wrapper! That’s authentic cellophane!”

  His mother blew on her wet scarlet nails, not daring to touch her prize. “Cellophane! Your father would be so proud!”

  “You’re going to use those cards very soon, Mama. Your Saint’s Day is coming up. We’re going to have a big bridge party for all your girlfriends. The boys at the Three Cats are going to cater it! You won’t have to lift one pretty finger!”

  Her mascaraed eyes grew wide. “Can we afford that?”

  “I’ve already arranged it! I talked to Mirko who runs the Three Cats, and I hired Mirko’s weird gay brother-in-law to decorate that empty flat upstairs. You know—that flat nobody wants to rent, where that mob guy shot himself. When your old girls see how we’ve done that place up, word will get around. We’ll have new tenants in no time!”

  “You’re really fixing the haunted flat, Son?”

  Borislav changed his winter boots for his woolly house slippers. “That’s right, Mama. That haunted flat is gonna be a nice little earner.”

  “It’s got a ghost in it.”

  “Not anymore, it doesn’t. From now on, we’re gonna call that place … what was that French word he used?—we’ll call it the ‘atelier’!”

  “The ‘atelier’! Really! My heart’s all aflutter!”

  Borislav poured his mother a stiff shot of her favorite digestive.

  “Mama, maybe this news seems sudden, but I’ve been expecting this. Business has been looking up. Real life is changing, for the real people in this world. The people like us!” Borislav poured himself a brimming cup of flavored yogurt. “Those fancy foreigners, they don’t even understand what the people are doing here today!”

  “I don’t understand all this men’s political talk.”

  “Well, I can see it on their faces. I know what the people want. The people … They want a new life.”

  She rose from her chair, shaking a little. “I’ll heat up your stew. It’s getting so late.”

  “Listen to me, Mama. Don’t be afraid of what I say. I promise you something. You’re going to die on silk sheets. That’s what this means. That’s what I’m telling you. There’s gonna be a handsome priest at your bedside, and the oil and the holy water, just like you always wanted. A big granite headstone for you, Mama, with big golden letters.”

  As he ate his stew, she began to weep with joy.

  After supper, Borislav ignored his mother’s usual nagging about his lack of a wife. He limped down to the local sports bar for some serious drinking. Borislav didn’t drink much anymore, because the kiosk scanned him whenever he sat inside it. It used a cheap superconductive loop, woven through the fiberboard walls. The loop’s magnetism flowed through his body, revealing his bones and tissues on his laptop screen. Then the scanner compared the state of his body to its records of past days, and it coughed up a medical report.

  This machine was a cheap, pirated copy of some hospital’s fancy medical scanner. There had been some trouble in spreading that technology, but with the collapse of public health systems, people had to take some matters into their own hands. Borislav’s health report was not cheery. He had plaque in major arteries. He had some seed-pearl kidney stones. His teeth needed attention. Worst of all, his right leg had been wrecked by a land mine. The shinbone had healed with the passing years, but it had healed badly. The foot below his old wound had bad circulation.

  Age was gripping his body, visible right there on the screen. Though he could witness himself growing old, there wasn’t much he could do about that.

  Except, that is, for his drinking. Borislav had been fueled by booze his entire adult life, but the alcohol’s damage was visibly spreading through his organs. Lying to himself about that obvious fact simply made him feel like a fool. So, nowadays, he drank a liter of yogurt a day, chased with eco-correct paper cartons of multivitamin fruit juices, European approved, licensed, and fully patented. He did that grumpily and he resented it de
eply, but could see on the screen that it was improving his health.

  So, no more limping, pitching and staggering, poetically numbed, down the midnight streets. Except for special occasions, that is. Occasions like this one.

  Borislav had a thoughtful look around the dimly lit haunt of the old Homeland Sports Bar. So many familiar faces lurking in here—his daily customers, most of them. The men were bundled up for winter. Their faces were rugged and lined. Shaving and bathing were not big priorities for them. They were also drunk.

  But the men wore new, delicately tinted glasses. They had nice haircuts. Some had capped their teeth. The people were prospering.

  Ace sat at his favorite table, wearing a white cashmere scarf, a tailored jacket, and a dandified beret. Five years earlier, Ace would have had his butt royally kicked for showing up at the Homeland Sports Bar dressed like an Italian. But the times were changing at the Homeland.

  Bracing himself with his cane, Borislav settled into a torn chair beneath a gaudy flat-screen display, where the Polish football team was making fools of the Dutch.

  “So, Ace, you got it delivered?”

  Ace nodded. “Over at the embassy, they are weighing, tagging, and analyzing every single thing you sell.”

  “That old broad’s not as stupid as she acts, you know.”

  “I know that. But when she saw that cheese grater that can chop glass. The tiling caulk that was also a dessert!” Ace half-choked on the local cognac. “And the skull adjuster! God in heaven!”

  Borislav scowled. “That skull adjuster is a great product! It’ll chase a hangover away”—Borislav snapped his fingers loudly—“just like that!”

  The waitress hurried over. She was a foreign girl who barely spoke the language, but there were a lot of such girls in town lately. Borislav pointed at Ace’s drink. “One of those, missie, and keep ’em coming.”

  “That skull squeezer of yours is a torture device. It’s weird; it’s nutty. It’s not even made by human beings.”

  “So what? So it needs a better name and a nicer label. ‘The Craniette,’ some nice brand name. Manufacture it in pink. Emboss some flowers on it.”

  “Women will never squeeze their skulls with that crazy thing.”

  “Oh yes, they will. Not old women from old Europe, no. But some will. Because I’ve seen them do it. I sold ten of those! The people want it!”

  “You’re always going on about ‘what the people want.’”

  “Well, that’s it! That’s our regional competitive advantage! The people who live here, they have a very special relationship to the market economy.” Borislav’s drink arrived. He downed his shot.

  “The people here,” he said, “they’re used to seeing markets wreck their lives and turn everything upside down. That’s why we’re finally the ones setting the hot new trends in today’s world, while the Europeans are trying to catch up with us! These people here, they love the new commercial products with no human origin!”

  “Dr. Grootjans stared at that thing like it had come from Mars.”

  “Ace, the free market always makes sense—once you get to know how it works. You must have heard of the ‘invisible hand of the market.’”

  Ace downed his cognac and looked skeptical.

  “The invisible hand—that’s what gives us products like the skull squeezer. That’s easy to understand.”

  “No, it isn’t. Why would the invisible hand squeeze people’s heads?”

  “Because it’s a search engine! It’s mining the market data for new opportunities. The bigger the market, the more it tries to break in by automatically generating new products. And that headache-pill market, that’s one of the world’s biggest markets!”

  Ace scratched under his armpit holster. “How big is that market, the world market for headaches?”

  “It’s huge! Every convenience store sells painkillers. Little packets of two and three pills, with big price markups. What are those pills all about? The needs and wants of the people!”

  “Miserable people?”

  “Exactly! People who hate their jobs, bitter people who hate their wives and husbands. The market for misery is always huge.” Borislav knocked back another drink. “I’m talking too much tonight.”

  “Boots, I need you to talk to me. I just made more money for less work than I have in a long time. Now I’m even on salary inside a foreign embassy. This situation’s getting serious. I need to know the philosophy—how an invisible hand makes real things. I gotta figure that out before the Europeans do.”

  “It’s a market search engine for an Internet-of-Things.”

  Ace lifted and splayed his fingers. “Look, tell me something I can get my hands on. You know. Something that a man can steal.”

  “Say you type two words at random: any two words. Type those two words into an Internet search engine. What happens?”

  Ace twirled his shot glass. “Well, a search engine always hits on something, that’s for sure. Something stupid, maybe, but always something.”

  “That’s right. Now imagine you put two products into a search engine for things. So let’s say it tries to sort and mix together … a parachute and a pair of shoes. What do you get from that kind of search?”

  Ace thought it over. “I get it. You get a shoe that blows up a plane.”

  Borislav shook his head. “No, no. See, that is your problem right there. You’re in the racket; you’re a fixer. So you just don’t think commercially.”

  “How can I outthink a machine like that?”

  “You’re doing it right now, Ace. Search engines have no ideas, no philosophy. They never think at all. Only people think and create ideas. Search engines are just programmed to search through what people want. Then they just mix, and match, and spit up some results. Endless results. Those results don’t matter, though, unless the people want them. And here, the people want them!”

  The waitress brought a bottle, peppered sauerkraut, and a leathery loaf of bread. Ace watched her hips sway as she left. “Well, as for me, I could go for some of that. Those Iraqi chicks have got it going on.”

  Borislav leaned on his elbows and ripped up a mouthful of bread. He poured another shot, downed it, then fell silent as the booze stole up on him in a rush. He was suddenly done with talk.

  Talk wasn’t life. He’d seen real life. He knew it well. He’d first seen real life as a young boy, when he saw a whole population turned inside out. Refugees, the unemployed, the dispossessed, people starting over with pencils in a tin cup, scraping a living out of suitcases. Then people moving into stalls and kiosks. “Transition,” that’s what they named that kind of life. As if it were all going somewhere in particular.

  The world changed a lot in a Transition. Life changed. But the people never transitioned into any rich nation’s notion of normal life. In the next big “Transition,” the twenty-first-century one, the people lost everything they had gained.

  When Borislav crutched back, maimed, from the outbreak of shooting-and-looting, he threw a mat on the sidewalk. He sold people boots. The people needed his boots, even indoors, because there was no more fuel in the pipelines and the people were freezing.

  Come summer, he got hold of a car. Whenever there was diesel or biofuel around, he sold goods straight from its trunk. He made some street connections. He got himself a booth on the sidewalk.

  Even in the rich countries, the lights were out and roads were still. The sky was empty of jets. It was a hard Transition. Civilization was wounded.

  Then a contagion swept the world. Economic depression was bad, but a plague was a true Horseman of the Apocalypse. Plague thundered through a city. Plague made a city a place of thawing ooze, spontaneous fires, awesome deadly silences.

  Borislav moved from his booth into the freezing wreck of a warehouse, where the survivors sorted and sold the effects of the dead. Another awful winter. They burned furniture to stay warm. When they coughed, people stared in terror at their handkerchiefs. Food shortages, too, this time: the dizzy
edge of famine. Crazy times.

  He had nothing left of that former life but his pictures. During the mayhem, he took thousands of photographs. That was something to mark the day, to point a lens, to squeeze a button, when there was nothing else to do, except to hustle, or sit and grieve, or jump from a bridge. He still had all those pictures, every last one of them. Everyday photographs of extraordinary times. His own extraordinary self: he was young, gaunt, wounded, hungry, burning eyed.

  As long as a man could recognize his own society, then he could shape himself to fit its circumstances. He might be a decent man, dependable, a man of his word. But when the society itself was untenable, when it just could not be sustained, then “normality” cracked like a cheap plaster mask. Beneath the mask of civilization was another face: the face of a cannibal child.

  Only hope mattered then: the will to carry on through another day, another night, with the living strength of one’s own heartbeat, without any regard for abstract notions of success or failure. In real life, to live was the only “real.”

  In the absence of routine, in the vivid presence of risk and suffering, the soul grew. Objects changed their primal nature. Their value grew as keen as tears, as keen as kisses. Hot water was a miracle. Electric light meant instant celebration. A pair of boots was the simple, immediate reason that your feet had not frozen and turned black. A man who had toilet paper, insulation, candles: he was the people’s hero.

  When you handed a woman a tube of lipstick, her pinched and pallid face lit up all over. She could smear that scarlet on her lips, and when she walked down the darkened street it was as if she were shouting aloud, as if she were singing.

  When the plague burned out—it was a flu, and it was a killer, but it was not so deadly as the numb despair it inspired—then a profiteer’s fortune beckoned to those tough enough to knock heads and give orders. Borislav made no such fortune. He knew very well how such fortunes were made, but he couldn’t give the orders. He had taken orders himself, once. Those were orders he should never have obeyed.