The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Does it run on standard voltage?”

  “I got it running on DC off the fuel cell in my car.”

  “Where’s the feedstock?”

  “It comes in big bags. It’s a powder; it’s a yellow dust. The fab sticks it together somehow, with sparks or something, it turns the powder shiny black, and it knits it up real fast. That part, I don’t get.”

  “I’ll be offering one price for your machine and all your feedstock.”

  “There’s another thing. That time when I went to Vienna. I gave you my word on that deal. We shook hands on it. That deal was really important, they really needed it, they weren’t kidding about it, and, well, I screwed up. Because of Vienna.”

  “That’s right, Fleka. You screwed up bad.”

  “Well, that’s my price. That’s part of my price. I’m gonna sell you this toy maker. We’re gonna haul it right out of the car, put it in the kiosk here nice and safe. When I get the chance, I’m gonna bring your bag of coal straw, too. But we forget about Vienna. We just forget about it.”

  Borislav said nothing.

  “You’re gonna forgive me my bad, screwed-up past. That’s what I want from you.”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “That’s part of the deal.”

  “We’re going to forget the past, and you’re going to give me the machine, the stock, and also fifty bucks.”

  “Okay, sold.”

  With the fabrikator inside his kiosk, Borislav had no room inside the kiosk for himself. He managed to transfer the tutorials out of the black, silent fab and into his laptop. The sun had come out. Though it was still damp and chilly, the boys from the Three Cats had unstacked their white café chairs. Borislav took a seat there. He ordered black coffee and began perusing awkward machine translations from the Polish manual.

  Selma arrived to bother him. Selma was married to a schoolteacher, a nice guy with a steady job. Selma called herself an artist, made jewelry, and dressed like a lunatic. The schoolteacher thought the world of Selma, although she slept around on him and never cooked him a decent meal.

  “Why is your kiosk so empty? What are you doing, just sitting out here?”

  Borislav adjusted the angle of his screen. “I’m seizing the means of production.”

  “What did you do with all my bracelets and necklaces?”

  “I sold them.”

  “All of them?”

  “Every last scrap.”

  Selma sat down as if hit with a mallet. “Then you should buy me a glass of champagne!”

  Borislav reluctantly pulled his phone and text-messaged the waiter.

  It was getting blustery, but Selma preened over her glass of cheap Italian red. “Don’t expect me to replace your stock soon! My artwork’s in great demand.”

  “There’s no hurry.”

  “I broke the luxury market, across the river at the Intercontinental! The hotel store will take all the bone-ivory chokers I can make.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Bone-ivory chokers, they’re the perennial favorite of ugly, aging tourist women with wattled necks.”

  Borislav glanced up from his screen. “Shouldn’t you be running along to your workbench?”

  “Oh, sure, sure, ‘give the people what they want,’ that’s your sick, petit bourgeois philosophy! Those foreign tourist women in their big hotels, they want me to make legacy kitsch!”

  Borislav waved one hand at the street. “Well, we do live in the old arts district.”

  “Listen, stupid, when this place was the young arts district, it was full of avantgardists plotting revolution. Look at me for once. Am I from the museum?” Selma yanked her skirt to mid-thigh. “Do I wear little old peasant shoes that turn up at the toes?”

  “What the hell has gotten into you? Did you sit on your tack hammer?”

  Selma narrowed her kohl-lined eyes. “What do you expect me to do, with my hands and my artisan skills, when you’re making all kinds of adornments with fabrikators? I just saw that stupid thing inside your kiosk there.”

  Borislav sighed. “Look, I don’t know. You tell me what it means, Selma.”

  “It means revolution. That’s what. It means another revolution.”

  Borislav laughed at her.

  Selma scowled and lifted her kid-gloved fingers. “Listen to me. Transition number one. When communism collapsed. The people took to the streets. Everything privatized. There were big market shocks.”

  “I remember those days. I was a kid, and you weren’t even born then.”

  “Transition Two. When globalism collapsed. There was no oil. There was war and bankruptcy. There was sickness. That was when I was a kid.”

  Borislav said nothing about that. All things considered, his own first Transition had been a kinder time to grow up in.

  “Then comes Transition Three.” Selma drew a breath. “When this steadily increasing cybernetic intervention in manufacturing liberates a distinctly human creativity.”

  “Okay, what is that about?”

  “I’m telling you what it’s about. You’re not listening. We’re in the third great Transition. It’s a revolution. Right now. Here. This isn’t communism; this isn’t globalism. This is the next thing after that. It’s happening. No longer merely reacting to this influx of mindless goods, the modern artist uses human creative strength in the name of a revolutionary heterogeneity!”

  Selma always talked pretentious, self-important drivel. Not quite like this, though. She’d found herself some new drivel.

  “Where did you hear all that?”

  “I heard it here in this café! You’re just not listening, that’s your problem. You never listen to anybody. Word gets around fast in the arts community.”

  “I live here, too, you know. I’d listen to your nutty blither all day, if you ever meant business.”

  Selma emptied her wineglass. Then she reached inside her hand-loomed, artsy sweater. “If you laugh at this, I’m going to kill you.”

  Borislav took the necklace she offered him. “Where’s this from? Who sent you this?”

  “That’s mine! I made it. With my hands.”

  Borislav tugged the tangled chain through his fingers. He was no jeweler but knew what decent jewelry looked like. This was indecent jewelry. If the weirdest efforts of search engines looked like products from Mars, then this necklace was straight from Venus. It was slivers of pot metal, blobs of silver, and chips of topaz. It was like jewelry straight out of a nightmare.

  “Selma, this isn’t your customary work.”

  “Machines can’t dream. I saw this in my dreams.”

  “Oh. Right, of course.”

  “Well, it was my nightmare, really. But I woke up! Then I created my vision! I don’t have to make that cheap, conventional crap, you know! I only make cheap junk because that’s all you are willing to sell!”

  “Well …” He had never spoken with frankness to Selma before, but the glittering light in her damp eyes made yesterday’s habits seem a little slow-witted. “Well, I wouldn’t know what to charge for a work of art like this.”

  “Somebody would want this, though? Right? Wouldn’t they?” She was pleading with him. “Somebody? They would buy my new necklace, right? Even though it’s … different.”

  “No. This isn’t the sort of jewelry that the people buy. This is the sort of jewelry that the people stare at, and probably laugh at, too. But then, there would come one special person. She would really want this necklace. She would want this more than anything. She would have to have this thing at absolutely any price.”

  “I could make more like that,” Selma told him, and she touched her heart. “Because now I know where it comes from.”

  III

  Borislav installed the fab inside the empty kiosk, perched on a stout wooden pedestal, where its workings could be seen by the people.

  His first choices for production were, naturally, hair toys. Borislav borrowed some fancy clips from Jovanica, and copied their shapes inside his k
iosk with his medical scanner.

  Sure enough, the fabrikator sprayed out shiny black replicas.

  Jovanica amused a small crowd by jumping up and down on them. The black clips themselves were well-nigh indestructible, but their cheap metal springs soon snapped.

  Whenever a toy broke, however, it was a simple matter to cast it right back into the fabrikator’s hopper. The fab chewed away at the black object, with an ozonelike reek, until the fabbed object became the yellow dust again.

  Straw, right into gold.

  Borislav sketched out a quick business plan on the back of a Three Cats beer coaster. With hours of his labor, multiplied by price-per-gram, he soon established his point of profit. He was in a new line of work.

  With the new fabrikator, he could copy the shapes of any small object he could scan. Of course, he couldn’t literally “copy” everything: a puppy dog, a nice silk dress, a cold bottle of beer, those were all totally out of the question. But he could copy most anything that was made from some single, rigid material: an empty bottle, a fork, a trash can, a kitchen knife.

  The kitchen knives were an immediate hit. The knives were shiny and black, very threatening and scary, and it was clear they would never need sharpening. It was also delightful to see the fabrikator mindlessly spitting up razor-sharp knives. The kids were back in force to watch the action, and this time, even the grown-ups gathered and chattered.

  To accommodate the eager crowd of gawkers, the Three Cats boys set out their chairs and tables, and even their striped overhead canopy, as cheery as if it were summer.

  The weather favored them. An impromptu block party broke out.

  Mirko from the Three Cats gave him a free meal. “I’m doing very well by this,” Mirko said. “You’ve got yourself a nine days’ wonder here. This sure reminds me of when Transition Two was ending. Remember when those city lights came back on? Brother, those were great days.”

  “Nine days won’t last long. I need to get back inside that kiosk, like normal again.”

  “It’s great to see you out and about, mixing it up with us, Boots. We never talk anymore.” Mirko spread his hands in apology, then scrubbed the table. “I run this place now … it’s the pressure of business … that’s all my fault.”

  Borislav accepted a payment from a kid who’d made himself a rock-solid black model dinosaur. “Mirko, do you have room for a big vending machine, here by your café? I need to get that black beast out of my kiosk. The people need their sticks of gum.”

  “You really want to build some vendorizing thing out here? Like a bank machine?”

  “I guess I do, yeah. It pays.”

  “Boots, I love this crowd you’re bringing me, but why don’t you just put your machine wherever they put bank machines? There are hundreds of bank machines.” Mirko took his empty plate. “There are millions of bank machines. Those machines took over the world.”

  IV

  Days passed. The people wouldn’t let him get back to normal. It became a public sport to see what people would bring in for the fabrikator to copy. It was common to make weird things as gag gifts: a black, rock-solid spray of roses, for instance. You could hand that black bouquet to your girlfriend for a giggle, and if she got huffy, then you could just bring it back, have it weighed, and get a return deposit for the yellow dust.

  The ongoing street drama was a tonic for the neighborhood. In no time flat, every café lounger and class-skipping college student was a self-appointed expert about fabs, fabbing, and revolutionary super-fabs that could fab their own fabbing. People brought their relatives to see. Tourists wandered in and took pictures. Naturally they all seemed to want a word with the owner and proprietor.

  The people being the people, the holiday air was mixed with unease. Things took a strange turn when a young bride arrived with her wedding china. She paid to copy each piece, then loudly and publicly smashed the originals in the street. A cop showed up to dissuade her. Then the cop wanted a word, too.

  Borislav was sitting with Professor Damov, an academician and pious blowhard who ran the local ethnographic museum. The professor’s city-sponsored hall specialized in what Damov called “material culture,” meaning dusty vitrines full of battle flags, holy medallions, distaffs, fishing nets, spinning wheels, gramophones, and such. Given these new circumstances, the professor had a lot on his mind.

  “Officer,” said Damov, briskly waving his wineglass, “it may well surprise you to learn this, but the word ‘kiosk’ is an ancient Ottoman term. In the original Ottoman kiosk, nothing was bought or sold. The kiosk was a regal gift from a prince to the people. A kiosk was a place to breathe the evening air, to meditate, to savor life and living; it was an elegant garden pergola.”

  “They didn’t break their wedding china in the gutter, though,” said the cop.

  “Oh, no, on the contrary, if a bride misbehaved in those days, she’d be sewn into a leather sack and thrown into the Bosphorus!”

  The cop was mollified, and he moved right along, but soon a plainclothes cop showed up and took a prominent seat inside the Three Cats Café. This changed the tone of things. The police surveillance proved that something real was happening. It was a kind of salute.

  Dusk fell. A group of garage mechanics came by, still in their grimy overalls, and commenced a deadly serious professional discussion about fabbing trolley parts. A famous stage actor showed up with his entourage, to sign autographs and order drinks for all his “friends.”

  Some alarmingly clean-cut university students appeared. They weren’t there to binge on beer. They took a table, ordered Mirko’s cheapest pizza, and started talking in points-of-order.

  Next day, the actor brought the whole cast of his play, and the student radicals were back in force. They took more tables, with much more pizza. Now they had a secretary, and a treasurer. Their ringleaders had shiny black political buttons on their coats.

  A country bus arrived and disgorged a group of farmers. These peasants made identical copies of something they were desperate to have yet anxious to hide from all observers.

  Ace came by the bustling café. Ace was annoyed to find that he had to wait his turn for any private word with Borislav.

  “Calm down, Ace. Have a slice of this pork pizza. The boss here’s an old friend of mine, and he’s in a generous mood.”

  “Well, my boss is unhappy,” Ace retorted. “There’s money being made here, and he wasn’t told about it.”

  “Tell your big guy to relax. I’m not making any more money than I usually do at the kiosk. That should be obvious: consider my rate of production. That machine can only make a few copies an hour.”

  “Have you finally gone stupid? Look at this crowd!” Ace pulled his shades off and studied the densely clustered café. Despite the lingering chill, a gypsy band was setting up, with accordions and trombones. “Okay, this proves it: See that wiseguy sitting there with that undercover lieutenant? He’s one of them!”

  Borislav cast a sidelong glance at the rival gangster. The North River Boy looked basically identical to Ace: the same woolly hat, cheap black sunglasses, jacket, and bad attitude, except for his sneakers, which were red instead of blue. “The River Boys are moving in over here?”

  “They always wanted this turf. This is the lively part of town.”

  That River Boy had some nerve. Gangsters had been shot in the Three Cats Café. And not just a few times, either. It was a major local tradition.

  “I’m itching to whack that guy,” Ace lied, sweating, “but, well, he’s sitting over there with that cop! And a pet politician, too!”

  Borislav wondered if his eyes were failing. In older days, he would never have missed those details.

  There was a whole little tribe of politicians filtering into the café and sitting near the mobster’s table. The local politicians always traveled in parties. Small, fractious parties.

  One of these local politicals was the arts district’s own national representative. Mr. Savic was a member of the Radical Liberal Demo
cratic Party, a splinter clique of well-meaning, overeducated cranks.

  “I’m gonna tell you a good joke, Ace. ‘You can get three basic qualities with any politician: Smart, Honest, and Effective. But you only get to pick two.’”

  Ace blinked. He didn’t get it.

  Borislav levered himself from his café chair and limped over to provoke a glad-handing from Mr. Savic. The young lawyer was smart and honest, and therefore ineffective. However, Savic, being so smart, was quick to recognize political developments within his own district. He had already appropriated the shiny black button of the young student radicals.

  With an ostentatious swoop of his camel’s-hair coattails, Mr. Savic deigned to sit at Borislav’s table. He gave Ace a chilly glare. “Is it necessary that we consort with this organized-crime figure?”

  “You tried to get me fired from my job in the embassy,” Ace accused him.

  “Yes, I did. It’s bad enough that the criminal underworld infests our ruling party. We can’t have the Europeans paying you off, too.”

  “That’s you all over, Savic: always sucking up to rich foreigners and selling out the guy on the street!”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, you jumped-up little crook! You’re not ‘the street.’ The people are the street!”

  “Okay, so you got the people to elect you. You took office and you got a pretty haircut. Now you’re gonna wrap yourself up in our flag, too? You’re gonna steal the last thing the people have left!”

  Borislav cleared his throat. “I’m glad we have this chance for a frank talk here. The way I figure it, managing this fabbing business is going to take some smarts and finesse.”

  The two of them stared at him. “You brought us here?” Ace said. “For our ‘smarts and finesse’?”

  “Of course I did. You two aren’t here by accident, and neither am I. If we’re not pulling the strings around here, then who is?”