The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Climb back down into your holes, you bastards!” shouted Cyclops on the sidewalk below. Debbie shifted and muttered, and Roger mentally damned the noisy old bum. “Dare to come near me,” Cylops added, “and I’ll smash your gray faces for you! Break your scissor legs!”

  Interested in spite of himself, Roger glanced down at the street—and then peered more closely. Cyclops, as usual, was lurching along the sidewalk and shaking his fists at dire adversaries, but tonight, for once, he seemed to be yelling at people who were actually there. A half-dozen dark figures were bounding about on the shadowed lawns and turning fantastic cartwheels in the dimness between streetlights. Roger’s first guess was that they must be young theater majors from some local college, out larking and wino-hassling after some rehearsal or cast-party, for the figures all seemed to be dressed in gray leotards and wearing gray nylon stockings pulled down over their faces. Then he saw one of them spring from a grasshopper-crouch … and rise all the way up to the third floor of an office building, and cling to the sill of a dark window there for a moment, before spider-jumping back down to the pavement.

  The yellow-flashing traffic lights were strangely coordinated, flinging relayed pulses past at the height of his window, and he felt Evelyn’s presence very strongly. Come out, Roger, she called to him from out in the warm-as-breath night. Decide what you want, so I can give it to you.

  “Can you find my Mom and Dad?” he whispered.

  Debbie instantly sat up in bed behind him. “What?” she said. “Are you crazy?”

  Yes, came Evelyn’s answer from outside. Look. Here they are. I’ll bring them out for you.

  Roger stepped away from the window and began pulling on his pants.

  “Roger!” said Debbie sharply, real concern beginning to show through her reflexive malice. “You’re walking in your sleep. Get back in bed.”

  “I’m awake,” he said, stepping into his shoes without bothering about socks. “I’m going out. You go back to sleep.”

  Aware that she was being left out of something, Debbie bounded out of bed. I’m coming with you.”

  “No, damn it,” he said almost pleadingly as he buttoned alternate buttons on his shirt. “What do you want to come for?”

  “Because you don’t want me to,” she said, her voice muffled under the dress she was pulling on over her head. She stepped into shoes on her way to the door and had it open before he’d even finished tucking in his shirt. “At least I’m waiting for you.”

  They left the apartment by the front door and hurried down the stairs to the pavement. Leaves and flattened paper cups whirled through the air like nocturnal birds, and Cyclops was already a block ahead of Roger and Debbie. Looking past the old man, Roger could see that the stop lights north of the traffic circle were sending synchronized yellow pulses south; the pulses from south and north Main met at the circle like tracer bullets from two directions being fired at a common target.

  His feet were suddenly warmer, and, glancing down, he noticed that he had socks on; also, every button of his shirt was fastened, and his shoes looked polished.

  He began running toward the bending palms that ringed the circle. Debbie, running right behind him, called out in a voice made timid by fright or wonder, “Where are we going?”

  “I could be wrong,” he shouted without looking back, “but I think that, tonight at least, it’s the place where dreams come true.”

  * * *

  Jack Singer straightened the knot of his tie and then stood back from the mirror and admired his reflection. A well-tailored suit cetainly did things for a man—not only did he look lean and fit, with somehow no trace of projecting belly, but even his face seemed tanned and alert, his hair fuller and darker. He patted his breast pocket and felt the slim billfold there, and without having to look he knew it contained a Diner’s Club card, and a Visa—one with that asterisk that means you’re good for more than the average guy, and a gold American Express card, and a few crisp hundred dollar bills for tips.

  He stepped away from the mirror and took a sip of brandy from the glass on the bureau. Good stuff, that five-star Courvoisier. “You about ready, dear?” he called toward his wife’s dressing room.

  “In a minute,” she said. “The diamond fell out of one of my fingernails, and I’ve got it Super-Gluing.”

  He nodded, and though his smile didn’t falter, his fine-drawn eyebrows contracted into a frown. Diamonds in her what? Her fingernails? He’d never heard of such a thing … but he knew better than to ask her about it, for it was clearly just one more part of this weirdly wonderful evening.

  For just a moment, after they had awakened an hour ago, he had thought it was the middle of the night, and their apartment seemed to be … a shabby one they had lived in once. But then the hot Santa Ana wind had puffed in at the window and he had remembered that it was early evening, and that his wife and he were due to attend the dinner being given in their honor at the … what was the name of the hotel?… just the finest hotel in the state … the Splendide, that was it.

  He glanced out the window. “The limo is here, darling,” he called.

  “Coming.” His wife appeared from her dressing room. Fine clothes had done wonders for her, too—she looked twenty pounds slimmer, and would be described as voluptuous now instead of just plain damn fat.

  The chauffeur knocked quietly at the door, and Singer held out his arm for his wife to take.

  They dutifully had a drink apiece in the limousine as it carried them smoothly west on Bailey, and though they couldn’t recall gulping them the glasses were empty by the time the chauffeur made the sweeping turn around three quarters of the traffic circle and then with never a jiggle turned south onto Main and drew in to the curb in front of the Hotel Splendide. A man in an almost insanely ornate red coat and gold-crusted hat opened the door for them.

  Singer got out and then helped his wife out, and he noticed that the sidewalk, which had the Splendide insignia inset into the cement every yard or so, was so brightly lit by spotlights on the lawn and the dozen huge chandeliers in the lobby that he and his wife cast no shadows.

  “They are awaiting you in the Napoleon Lounge, M’sieur,” said the doorman, bowing obsequiously, “drinks and hors d’oeuvre there, and then you are to dine in the Grand Ballroom.” Out of sight somewhere, an orchestra was richly performing a medley of favorites from the 1940’s.

  Singer produced a hundred-dollar bill and let it disappear into the man’s gloved hand. “Thank you, Armand.”

  They strolled across the carpeted floor, surreptitiously admiring their reflections in the tall mirrors that alternated with marble panels on all the walls, and when they walked through the gilded arch into the Napoleon Lounge the other guests all greeted their appearance with delighted cries.

  And they were all elegant—the lovely young woman in the striking sea-green dress, the piratically-handsome old fellow with the eyepatch, the young couple who had been filling two plates over at one of the hors d’oeuvre tables … and especially the woman who was walking toward them with her hands out in welcome, a smile on her porcelain-pale face …

  “Good evening,” the woman said, “we’re all so glad to see you. I’m your hostess this evening—my name is Evelyn.”

  * * *

  Roger, looking up from the plate he’d been filling with caviar and thin slices of some black bread that was thick with caraway seeds, saw the newcomers flinch, just perceptibly, when Evelyn introduced herself, and instantly he knew that this couple must be his parents. They quickly recovered their poise and allowed Evelyn to lead them in, and Roger studied them out of the corner of his eye as, trying not to betray the trembling of his hands and the hard thudding of his heart, he forked a devilled egg and a tiny ear of pickled baby corn onto his plate. They do look prosperous, he thought with cautious satisfaction.

  Evelyn was leading the couple straight toward the table beside which Roger and Debbie stood. “Jack and Irma,” she said to Roger’s parents, “this is Debbie and
Roger.” Again his parents flinched, and Irma stared hard and expressionlessly at Roger for a couple of seconds before extending her hand. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but Evelyn spoke first.

  “Ah, here come the stewards,” she said. “The cocktails are all first-rate here, of course, and on the table there is a list of the particular specialties of the house. And now you must excuse me—I think our Mr. Kemp has a question.” She smiled and spun away toward a middle-aged man who was eyeing the stewards with something like alarm. As much to postpone confronting his parents as from thirst, Roger squinted at the sheet of apparently genuine vellum on which, in fancy calligraphy, the specialty drinks were described, but they were all frothy things like Pink Squirrels and White Russians and Eggnog, and he decided to follow his usual custom in dressy bars and ask for Chivas Regal Royal Salute 25-Year Old … in a snifter. That always impressed people.

  The steward who approached their table, a tall, thin fellow in dark gray, bowed and said, “Can I bring you anything from the bar?”

  “I’ll have one of your Pink Squirrels, but made with whiskey instead of bourbon,” said Debbie in her best misconception-squared style.

  Roger looked up to give the steward a humor-her wink, but he stepped back quickly with a smothered exclamation, for the man’s face, just for a fraction of a second, had seemed to be a featureless gray angularity, like a plastic trash bag stretched taut across the front of a skull.

  A moment later it was just an indistinct face, but Roger said, “Uh, right, and a scotch for me, excuse me,” and took a couple of steps toward the center of the room.

  The dignified man with the eyepatch was staring at him, and Roger realized that it was Cyclops, not looking nearly as ridiculous in antique Navy dress blues as one might have expected. Cyclops, who wasn’t holding a drink, crossed to him and said quietly, “You saw that one, didn’t you? For a second you saw it wasn’t a waiter, but one of the Great Gray-Legged Scissors Men.”

  Oh Jesus, thought Roger unhappily. Where in hell is my scotch? “One of the what?”

  “Oh, sorry, right—I just call ’em that ’cause they look like that guy in the old kids’ rhyme, remember? The Great Red-Legged Scissors Man, who dashes up with a hugh pair of scissors and cuts the thumbs off kids that suck their thumbs? How’s it end?—’I knew he’d come … to naughty little suck-a-thumb.’”

  “They’re…” began Roger, so wildly disoriented that it was hard to take a deep breath or refrain from giggling, “They’re going to cut off our thumbs, are they?”

  Cyclops looked disgusted. “No. Are you drunk? I said I just call ’em that ’cause they look like the guy in the picture that went with that poem. Except these here guys are all gray. No, these guys appear out o’ nowhere when somebody who can boost dreams comes along, the way raindrops appear out o’ nowhere when a low pressure area comes along. Maybe the gray guys are the deep roots of our own minds, curled back up so they poke out o’ the ground near us and seem separate, like the worm that got himself pregnant; or maybe they’re ghosts that you can only see in the spirit light that shines from one of these imagination-amplifier people.” He nodded toward Evelyn, “She’s the one doing it here tonight. The trouble is, such people warp the night, and the more minds she’s overdriving the sharper the angle of the curve, like blowing in one of those kid’s-toy loops that holds a flat surface of soap-film, you know? You blow harder and harder, and the film bellies out rounder and rounder, and them—pop!—it’s a bubble, broke loose and drifting away.”

  “Right,” Roger said, nodding repeatedly and looking around for, if nothing else, a drink someone had abandoned. “Right—a bubble floating away, gotcha. Scissors men. You don’t see a drink anywhere, do—”

  “It’s gonna happen tonight,” said Cyclops harshly. “Damn soon. Did you notice the traffic signals? You know why they’re all flashing at the same second so often now? ’Cause we’re only still intersecting with a few of ’em, what seems like many is just lots o’ reflections of only a couple. When they’re perfectly in step that’ll mean there’s only one left, and the connection between this bubble and the real world is just a thin, thin tunnel.”

  “Sure, but…”

  “I’m leaving now,” Cyclops interrupted. “If you got any sense, you’ll come too. In five minutes it may be too late.”

  “Uhh…” Roger looked thoughtfully down at the elegant Yves St. Laurent suit he’d found himself wearing when he had approached the hotel, and he looked back at the low-cut, sequined gown that Debbie was—just as inexplicably—wearing. Now he held his hand out, palm up, fingers slightly curled, and he concentrated—and then suddenly he was holding a snifter that had an inch of amber fluid swirling in the bottom of it. He smiled up at the stern old man. “Imagination-amplifier, hey?” he said slowly. “I’ll stay for just a little while, thanks. Hell, five minutes—that’s plenty of time.”

  Cyclops smiled with pity and contempt, then turned and strode out of the room. Roger stared over at Evelyn. Who was she, what was she? Clearly something more than a child’s imaginary playmate, or—what had he guessed her to be, earlier?—just a function of his subconscious mind. Of course, maybe he was better off not knowing, not asking inconvenient questions.

  He carried his drink back to where Debbie and his parents were standing. “Well!” he said heartily. “Mom, Dad—it’s good to see you again after all these years.”

  He was shocked by the physical change these words produced in the couple—his father shrank, and was suddenly balding and gray, and the gaps between the buttons of his ill-fitting suit were pulled wide by an abrupt protrusion of belly, and his mother became ludicrously fat, her expression of well-bred amusement turning to one of petulant unhappiness—and belatedly it occurred to Roger that their apparent affluence might be as ephemeral as his own suit and snifter of scotch.

  “You … are Roger, aren’t you?” the old woman whispered. “And,” she added, turning in horror toward their hostess, “that is Evelyn.”

  “Yes,” Roger said, a little surprised to realize that his adventurous delight in this evening had, all at once, evaporated, leaving him feeling old and bitter. “She only found her way back to me tonight. The trip took her more than twenty-five years … but, you remember, she always avoided very populated areas.”

  “Until tonight,” his father pointed out quietly.

  “Until tonight,” Roger agreed.

  His father’s smile was sickly. “Look,” the old man said, “we’ve got lots to discuss, I’ll admit—lots to, uh, beg forgiveness for, even—but can we get out of here right now? Without attracting the attention of … our hostess?”

  Roger looked around. Evelyn was chatting gaily with the group on the other side of the room, and every time she glanced up the chandeliers brightened and the trays of hors d’oeuvre came into clearer focus, but the stewards were getting leaner and taller, and their features were fading like images cast by a projector with a dimming bulb, and peripherally Roger saw one of them out in the lobby leap right up to the ceiling and cling there like a big fly.

  “Yeah,” said Roger, suddenly frightened and taking Cyclops’ warning seriously. He let his drink evaporate, glass and all. “If anybody asks, say we’re just going out for some fresh air—and go on about what a great time you’re having.” He took Debbie’s arm. “Come on.” he said.

  “No, I’m staying. You know what they put in this drink, after I told them not to?”

  “We’re only going for a stroll, just to take a look at the front of the building—but sure, stay if you want.”

  “No, I’m coming.” She put her drink down, and Roger noticed that the glass broke up silently into an unfocussed blur when she let go of it.

  The four of them made their way to the lobby unhindered—Evelyn even saw them go, but looked more exasperated than angry—and Roger led them around the faceless, ceiling-crouching thing and across the carpeted floor, through the front doors, and down the marble steps to the sidewalk.

&nb
sp; “South on Main, come on,” he said, trying not to panic in spite of how synchronized the traffic signals were; “away from the circle.”

  As they trudged along, Roger felt a sudden slickness against his feet, and he realized that his socks had disappeared. He didn’t have to glance to the side to know that Debbie was back in the old sack dress she’d pulled on over her head right after leaping out of bed. Behind him the tick-tock of his mother’s heels and the knock of his father’s shoes became a flapping—bedroom slippers, it sounded like. Good, Roger thought—I guess we weren’t too late.

  He looked up, and the whole sky was turning slowly, like a vast, glitter-strewn wheel, and he couldn’t decide whether to take that as a good sign or a bad one. Funny how the night moves, he thought nervously. I don’t think this is what Bob Seger meant.

  And then his feet were comfortable again, and even though they’d been walking in a straight line he saw the traffic circle ahead, and, from around the corner to the right, the glow of the Splendide’s main entrance.

  The others noticed it too, and slowed. “We were walking south on Main,” Debbie said, “… away from the traffic circle.”

  “And now, without having changed course,” said Roger wearily, “we’re headed east on Bailey, toward it. We waited too long.”

  Jack Singer was smiling broadly. “Screw this,” he said, and his voice was cheerful, if a bit shrill. “I’ll see you all later.” He turned and fled back the way they’d come, his newly-restored suit and shoes disappearing within a few yards, leaving him an overweight man in pyjamas and slippers, puffing and flapping like a clown as he ran.