The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  He walked down 16th Street, with its curious alternation of condo fortresses and abandoned buildings, to the Mall. There, big khaki tanks dominated the broad field of dirt and trash and tents and the odd patch of grass. Most of the protesters were still asleep in their scattered tent villages, but there was an active crowd around the Washington Monument, and Leroy walked on over, ignoring the soldiers by the tanks.

  The crowd surrounded a slingshot as tall as a man, made of a forked tree branch. Inner tubes formed the sling, and the base was buried in the ground. Excited protesters placed balloons filled with red paint into the sling, and fired them up at the monument. If a balloon hit above the red that already covered the tower, splashing clean white—a rare event, as the monument was pure red up a good third of it—the protesters cheered crazily. Leroy watched them as they danced around the sling after a successful shot. He approached some of the calmer seated spectators.

  “Want to buy a joint?”

  “How much?”

  “Five dollars.”

  “Too much, man! You must be kidding! How about a dollar?”

  Leroy walked on.

  “Hey, wait! One joint, then. Five dollars … shit.”

  “Going rate, man.”

  The protester pushed long blond hair out of his eyes and pulled a five from a thick clip of bills. Leroy got the battered Marlboro box from his pocket and took the smallest joint from it. “Here you go. Have fun. Why don’t you fire one of them paint bombs at those tanks, huh?”

  The kids on the ground laughed. “We will when you get them stoned!”

  He walked on. Only five joints left. It took him less than an hour to sell them. That meant thirty dollars, but that was it. Nothing left to sell. As he left the Mall he looked back at the monument; under its wash of paint it looked like a bone sticking out of raw flesh.

  * * *

  Anxious about coming to the end of his supply, Leroy hoofed it up to Dupon Circle and sat on the perimeter bench in the shade of one of the big trees, footsore and hot. In the muggy air it was hard to catch his breath. He ran the water from the drinking fountain over his hands until someone got in line for a drink. He crossed the circle, giving a wide berth to a bunch of lawyers in long-sleeved shirts and loosened ties, lunching on wine and cheese under the watchful eye of their bodyguard. On the other side of the park Delmont Briggs sat by his cup, almost asleep, his sign propped on his lap. The wasted man. Delmont’s sign—and a little side business—provided him with just enough money to get by on the street. The sign, a battered square of cardboard, said PLEASE HELP—HUNGRY. People still looked through Delmont like he wasn’t there, but every once in a while it got to somebody. Leroy shook his head distastefully at the idea.

  “Delmont, you know any weed I can buy? I need a finger baggie for twenty.”

  “Not so easy to do, Robbie.” Delmont hemmed and hawed and they dickered for a while, then he sent Leroy over to Jim Johnson, who made the sale under a cheery exchange of the day’s news, over by the chess tables. After that Leroy bought a pack of cigarettes in a liquor store, and went up to the little triangular park between 17th, S, and New Hampshire, where no police or strangers ever came. They called it Fish Park for the incongruous cement whale sitting by one of the trash cans. He sat down on the long broken bench, among his acquaintances who were hanging out there, and fended them off while he carefully emptied the Marlboros, cut some tobacco into the weed, and refilled the cigarette papers with the new mix. With their ends twisted he had a dozen more joints. They smoked one and he sold two more for a dollar each before he got out of the park.

  But he was still anxious, and since it was the hottest part of the day and few people were about, he decided to visit his plants. He knew it would be at least a week till harvest, but he wanted to see them. Anyway it was about watering day.

  East between 16th and 15th he hit no-man’s land. The mixed neighborhood of fortress apartments and burned-out hulks gave way to a block or two of entirely abandoned buildings. Here the police had been at work, and looters had finished the job. The buildings were battered and burnt out, their ground floors blasted wide open, some of them collapsed entirely, into heaps of rubble. No one walked the broken sidewalk; sirens a few blocks off, and the distant hum of traffic, were the only signs that the whole city wasn’t just like this. Little jumps in the corner of his eye were no more than that; nothing there when he looked directly. The first time, Leroy had found walking down the abandoned street nerve-racking; now he was reassured by the silence, the stillness, the no-man’s land smell of torn asphalt and wet charcoal, the wavering streetscape empty under a sour milk sky.

  * * *

  His first building was a corner brownstone, blackened on the street sides, all its windows and doors gone, but otherwise sound. He walked past it without stopping, turned and surveyed the neighborhood. No movement anywhere. He stepped up the steps and through the doorway, being careful to make no footprints in the mud behind the doorjamb. Another glance outside, then up the broken stairs to the second floor. The second floor was a jumble of beams and busted furniture, and Leroy waited a minute to let his sight adjust to the gloom. The staircase to the third floor had collapsed, which was the reason he had chosen this building: no easy way up. But he had a route worked out, and with a leap he grabbed a beam hanging from the stairwell and hoisted himself onto it. Some crawling up the beam and he could swing onto the third floor, and from there a careful walk up gapped stairs brought him to the fourth floor.

  The room surrounding the stairwell was dim, and he had jammed the door to the next room, so that he had to crawl through a hole in the wall to get through. Then he was there.

  Sweating profusely, he blinked in the sudden sunlight, and stepped to his plants, all lined out in plastic pots on the far wall. Eleven medium-sized female marijuana plants, their splayed green leaves drooping for lack of water. He took the rain funnel from one of the gallon jugs and watered the plants. The buds were just longer than his thumbnail; if he could wait another week or two at least, they would be the size of his thumb or more, and worth fifty bucks apiece. He twisted off some water leaves and put them in a baggie.

  He found a patch of shade and sat with the plants for a while, watched them soak up the water. Wonderful green they had, lighter than most leaves in D.C. Little red threads in the buds. The white sky lowered over the big break in the roof, huffing little gasps of muggy air onto them all.

  * * *

  His next spot was several blocks north, on the roof of a burned-out hulk that had no interior floors left. Access was by way of a tree growing next to the wall. Climbing it was a challenge, but he had a route here he took, and he liked the way leaves concealed him even from passersbys directly beneath him once he got above the lowest branches.

  The plants here were younger—in fact one had sprouted seeds since he last saw them, and he pulled the plant out and put it in the baggie. After watering them and adjusting the aluminum foil rain funnels on the jug tops, he climbed down the tree and walked back down 14th.

  He stopped to rest in Charlie’s Baseball Club. Charlie sponsored a city team with the profits from his bar, and old members of the team welcomed Leroy, who hadn’t been by in a while. Leroy had played left field and batted fifth a year or two before, until his job with the park service had been cut. After that he had had to pawn his glove and cleats, and he had missed Charlie’s minimal membership charge three seasons running, and so he had quit. And then it had been too painful to go by the club, and drink with the guys and look at all the trophies on the wall, a couple of which he had helped to win. But on this day he enjoyed the fan blowing, and the dark, and the fries that Charlie and Fisher shared with him.

  Break over, he went to the spot closest to home, where the new plants were struggling through the soil, on the top floor of an empty stone husk on 16th and Caroline. The first floor was a drinking place for derelicts, and old Thunderbird and whiskey bottles, half still in bags, littered the dark room
, which smelled of alcohol, urine, and rotting wood. All the better: few people would be foolish enough to enter such an obviously dangerous hole. And the stairs were as near gone as made no difference. He climbed over the holes to the second floor, turned and climbed to the third.

  The baby plants were fine, bursting out of the soil and up to the sun, the two leaves covered by four, up into four again.… He watered them and headed home.

  * * *

  On the way he stopped at the little market that the Vietnamese family ran, and bought three cans of soup, a box of crackers and some Coke. “Twenty-two oh five tonight, Robbie,” old Huang said with a four-toothed grin.

  The neighbors were out on the sidewalk, the women sitting on the stoop, the men kicking a soccer ball about aimlessly as they watched Sam sand down an old table, the kids running around. Too hot to stay inside this evening, although it wasn’t much better on the street. Leroy helloed through them and walked up the flights of stairs slowly, feeling the day’s travels in his feet and legs.

  In his room Debra was awake, and sitting up against her pillows. “I’m hungry, Leroy.” She looked hot, bored; he shuddered to think of her day.

  “That’s a good sign, that means you’re feeling better. I’ve got some soup here should be real good for you.” He touched her cheek, smiling.

  “It’s too hot for soup.”

  “Yeah, that’s true, but we’ll let it cool down after it cooks, it’ll still taste good.” He sat on the floor and turned on the hot plate, poured water from the plastic jug into the pot, opened the can of soup, mixed it in. While they were spooning it out Rochelle Jackson knocked on the door and came in.

  “Feeling better, I see.” Rochelle had been a nurse before her hospital closed, and Leroy had enlisted her help when Debra fell sick. “We’ll have to take your temperature later.”

  Leroy wolfed down crackers while he watched Rochelle fuss over Debra. Eventually she took a temperature and Leroy walked her out.

  “It’s still pretty high, Leroy.”

  “What’s she got?” he asked, as he always did. Frustration …

  “I don’t know any more than yesterday. Some kind of flu I guess.”

  “Would a flu hang on this long?”

  “Some of them do. Just keep her sleeping and drinking as much as you can, and feed her when she’s hungry. —Don’t be scared, Leroy.”

  “I can’t help it! I’m afraid she’ll get sicker.… And there ain’t nothing I can do!”

  “Yeah, I know. Just keep her fed. You’re doing just what I would do.”

  After cleaning up he left Debra to sleep and went back down to the street, to join the men on the picnic tables and benches in the park tucked into the intersection. This was the “living room” on summer evenings, and all the regulars were there in their usual spots, sitting on tables or bench back. “Hey there, Robbie! What’s happening?”

  “Not much, not much. No man, don’t kick that soccer ball at me, I can’t kick no soccer ball tonight.”

  “You been walking the streets, hey?”

  “How else we going to find her to bring her home to you.”

  “Hey lookee here, Ghost is bringing out his TV.”

  “It’s Tuesday night at the movies, y’all!” Ghost called out as he approached and plunked a little hologram TV and a Honda generator on the picnic table. They laughed and watched Ghost’s pale skin glow in the dusk as he hooked the system up.

  “Where’d you get this one, Ghost? You been sniffing around the funeral parlors again?”

  “You bet I have!” Ghost grinned. “This one’s picture is all fucked up, but it still works—I think—”

  He turned the set on and blurry three-dee figures swam into shape in a cube above the box—all in dark shades of blue.

  “Man, we must have the blues tonight,” Ramon remarked. “Look at that!”

  “They all look like Ghost,” said Leroy.

  “Hey, it works, don’t it?” Ghost said. Hoots of derision. “And dig the sound! The sound works—”

  “Turn it up then.”

  “It’s up all the way.”

  “What’s this?” Leroy laughed. “We got to watch frozen midgets whispering, is that it Ghost? What do midgets say on a cold night?”

  “Who the fuck is this?” said Ramon.

  Johnnie said, “That be Sam Spade, the greatest computer spy in the world.”

  “How come he live in that shack, then?” Ramon asked.

  “That’s to show it’s a tough scuffle making it as a computer spy, real tough.”

  “How come he got four million dollars worth of computers right there in the shack, then?” Ramon asked, and the others commenced giggling, Leroy loudest of all. Johnnie and Ramon could be killer sometimes. A bottle of rum started around, and Steve broke in to bounce the soccer ball on the TV, smashing the blue figures repeatedly.

  “Watch out now, Sam about to go plug his brains in to try and find out who he is.”

  “And then he gonna be told of some stolen wetware he got to find.”

  “I got some wetware myself, only I call it a shirt.”

  Steve dropped the ball and kicked it against the side of the picnic table, and a few of the watchers joined in a game of pepper. Some men in a stopped van shouted a conversation with the guys on the corner. Those watching the show leaned forward. “Where’s he gonna go?” said Ramon. “Hong Kong? Monaco? He gonna take the bus on over to Monaco?”

  Johnnie shook his head. “Rio, man. Fucking Rio de Janeiro.”

  Sure enough, Sam was off to Rio. Ghost choked out an objection: “Johnnie—ha!—you must have seen this one before.”

  Johnnie shook his head, though he winked at Leroy. “No man, that’s just where all the good stolen wetware ends up.”

  A series of commercials interrupted their fun: deodorant, burglarkillers, cars. The men in the van drove off. Then the show was back, in Rio, and Johnnie said, “He’s about to meet a slinky Afro-Asian spy.”

  When Sam was approached by a beautiful black Asian woman the men couldn’t stand it. “Y’all have seen this one before!” Ghost cried.

  Johnnie sputtered over the bottle, struggled to swallow. “No way! Experience counts, man, that’s all.”

  “And Johnnie has watched one hell of a lot of Sam Spade,” Ramon added.

  Leroy said, “I wonder why they’re always Afro-Asian.”

  Steve burst in, laughed. “So they can fuck all of us at once, man!” He dribbled on the image, changed the channel. “—army command in Los Angeles reports that the rioting killed at least—” He punched the channel again. “What else we got here—man!—what’s this?”

  “Cyborgs Versus Androids,” Johnnie said after a quick glance at the blue shadows. “Lots of fighting.”

  “Yeah!” Steve exclaimed. Distracted, some of the watchers wandered off. “I’m a cyborg myself, see, I got these false teeth!”

  “Shit.”

  * * *

  Leroy went for a walk around the block with Ramon, who was feeling good. “Sometimes I feel so good, Robbie! So strong! I walk around this city and I say, the city is falling apart, it can’t last much longer like this. And here I am like some kind of animal, you know, living day to day by my wits and figuring out all the little ways to get by … you know there are people living up in Rock Creek Park like Indians or something, hunting and fishing and all. And it’s just the same in here, you know. The buildings don’t make it no different. Just hunting and scrapping to get by, and man I feel so alive—” he waved the rum bottle at the sky.

  Leroy sighed. “Yeah.” Still, Ramon was one of the biggest fences in the area. It was really a steady job. For the rest … They finished their walk, and Leroy went back up to his room. Debra was sleeping fitfully. He went to the bathroom, soaked his shirt in the sink, wrung it out. In the room it was stifling, and not even a waft of a breeze came in the window. Lying on his mattress sweating, figuring out how long he could make their money last, it took him a long time to fall asleep
.

  * * *

  The next day he returned to Charlie’s Baseball Club to see if Charlie could give him any piecework, as he had one or two times in the past. But Charlie only said no, very shortly, and he and everyone else in the bar looked at him oddly, so that Leroy felt uncomfortable enough to leave without a drink. After that he returned to the Mall, where the protesters were facing the troops ranked in front of the Capitol, dancing and jeering and throwing stuff. With all the police out it took him a good part of the afternoon to sell all the joints left, and when he had he walked back up 17th Street feeling tired and worried. Perhaps another purchase from Delmont could string them along a few more days.…

  At 17th and Q a tall skinny kid ran out into the street and tried to open the door of a car stopped for a red light. But it was a protected car despite its cheap look, and the kid shrieked as the handle shocked him. He was still stuck by the hand to it when the car roared off, so that he was launched through the air and rolled over the asphalt. Cars drove on by. A crowd gathered around the bleeding kid. Leroy walked on, his jaw clenched. At least the kid would live. He had seen bodyguards gunthieves down in the street, kill them dead and walk away.

  * * *

  Passing Fish Park he saw a man sitting on a corner bench looking around. The guy was white, young; his hair was blond and short, he wore wire-rimmed glasses, his clothes were casual but new, like the protesters’ down on the Mall. He had money. Leroy snarled at the sharp-faced stranger, approached him.

  “What you doing here?”

  “Sitting!” The man was startled, nervous. “Just sitting in a park!”

  “This ain’t no park, man. This is our front yard. You see any front yard to these apartment buildings here? No. This here is our front yard, and we don’t like people just coming into it and sitting down anywhere!”

  The man stood and walked away, looked back once, his expression angry and frightened. The other man sitting on the park benches looked at Leroy curiously.