The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  We were dancing, all kinds, pogo, no-sweat, skank, it didn’t matter. I saw a few of the hotel staff standing in the doorways tapping their feet. Andru hit that screaming wail in the bass that was the band’s trademark, sort of like a whale dying in your bathtub. People yelled, shook their arms over their heads.

  Then they started to do “Soul Kitchen.” Halfway through the opening, Craig raised his hand, shook it, stopped them.

  “Awwwww,” we said, like when a film breaks in a theater.

  Craig leaned toward the others. He was shaking his head. Morey pointed down at his playlist. They put their heads together. Craig and Abram were giving the other two chord changes or something.

  “Hey! Make music!” yelled some jerk from the doorway.

  Craig looked up, grabbed the mike. “Hold it right there, asshole,” he said, becoming the Craig we had known twenty years ago for a second. He leaned against the mike stand in a Jim Morrison vamp pose. “You stay right here, you’re going to hear the god-damnedest music you ever heard!”

  They talked together for a minute more. Andru shrugged his shoulders, looked worried. Then they all nodded their heads.

  Craig Beausoliel came back up front. “What we’re gonna do now, what we’re gonna do now, gonna do,” he said in a Van Morrison post-Them chant, “is we’re gonna do, gonna do, the song we were gonna do that night in Miami…”

  “Oh, geez,” said Bob, who was on the dance floor near Sharon and me.

  Distressed Flag Sale had gone into seclusion early in 1970, holing up like The Band did in the Basement Tapes days with Dylan, or like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys while they were working on the never-finished Smile album. They were supposedly working on an album (we heard through the grapevine) called either New Music for the AfterPeople or A Song to Change the World, and there were supposedly heavy scenes there, lots of drugs, paranoia, jealousy, and revenge, but also great music. We never knew, because they came out of hiding to do the Miami concert to raise money for the family of a janitor blown up by mistake when somebody drove a car-bomb into an AFEES building one four A.M.

  “It was a great song, man, a great song,” said Craig, “It was going to change the world we thought.” We realized for the first time how drunk Craig really was about then. “We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that got changed, not them. Tonight we’re not Distressed Flag Sale, we’re Lizard Level, and just once anyway, so you’ll all know, tonight we’re gonna do ‘Life Is Like That.’”

  (What changed in Miami was the next five years of their lives. The Miami cops had been holding the crowd back for three hours and looking for an excuse, anyway, and they got it, just after Distressed Flag Sale made its reeling way onstage. The crowd was already frenzied, and got up to dance when the guys started playing “Life Is Like That” and Andru took out his dong on the opening notes and started playing slide bass with it. The cops went crazy and jumped them, beat them up, planted heroin and amphetamines in their luggage in the dressing rooms, carted them off to jail and turned firehoses on the rioting fans.

  Everybody knew the bust was rigged, because they charged Morey with possession of heroin, and everybody knew he was the speed freak.

  And that was the end of Distressed Flag Sale.

  It was almost literally the end of Andru, too. What the papers didn’t tell you was that, as he was uncircumcised, he’d torn his frenum on the strings of the bass, and he almost lost, first, his dong, and then his life before the cops let a doctor in to see him.)

  That’s the history of the song we were going to hear.

  Notes started from the keyboard, like it was going to be another Doors-type song, building. Then Craig moved his fingers a few times on the guitar strings, tinkling things rang up high, like birds were in the air over the stage, sort of like the opening of “Touch of Grey” by the Dead, but not like that either. Then Andru came in, and Morey, then it began to take on a shape and move on its own, like nothing else at all.

  It moved. And it moved me, too. First I was swaying, then stomping my right foot. Sharon was pulling me toward the dance floor. I’d never heard anything like it. This was dance music. Sharon moved in large sways and swings; so did I.

  The floor filled up fast. Everybody moved toward the music. Out of the corner of my eye I saw old Mr. Stoat asking someone to dance. Other teachers moved towards the sound.

  Then I was too busy moving to notice much of anything. I was dancing, dancing not with myself but with Sharon, with Bob and Penny, with everyone.

  All five hundred people danced. Ginny Balducci was at the corner of the floor, making her chair move in small tight graceful circles. I smiled. We all smiled.

  The music got louder; not faster, but more insistent. The playing was superb, immaculate. Lizard Level’s hands moved like they were a bar band that had been playing together every night for twenty years. They seemed oblivious to everything, too, eyes closed, feet shuffling.

  Something was happening on the floor, people were moving in little groups and circles, couples breaking off and shimmying down between the lines of the others, in little waggling dance steps. It was happening all over the place. Then I was doing it—like Sharon and I had choreographed every move. People were clapping their hands in time to the music. It sounded like steamrollers were being thrown around in the ballroom.

  Above it the music kept building and building in an impossible spiral.

  Now the hotel staff joined in, busboys clapping hands, maids and waitresses turning in circles.

  Then the pattern of the dance changed, magically, instantly, it split the room right down the middle, and we were in two long interlocking linked chains of people, crossing through each other, one line moving up the room, the other down it, like it was choreographed.

  And the guys kept playing, and more people were coming into the ballroom. People in pajamas or naked from their rooms, the night manager and the bellboys. And as they joined in and the lines got more unwieldy, the two lines of people broke into four, and we began to move toward the doors of the ballroom, clapping our hands, stomping, dancing, making our own music, the same music, more people and more people.

  At some point they walked away from the stage, joining us, left their amps, acoustic now. Morey had a single drum and was beating it, you could hear Andru and Craig on bass and guitar, Cassuth was still playing the keyboard on the batteries, his speaker held under one arm.

  The street musicians had come into the hotel and joined in, people were picking up trash cans from the lobby, garbage cans from the streets, honking the horns of their stopped cars in time to the beat of the music.

  We were on the streets now. Windows in buildings opened, people climbed down from second stories to join in. The whole city jumped in time to the song, like in an old Fleischer cartoon; Betty Boop, Koko, Bimbo, the buses, the buildings, the moon all swaying, the stars spinning on their centers like pinwheels.

  Chains of bodies formed on every street, each block. At a certain beat they all broke and reformed into smaller ones that grew larger, interlocking helical ropes of dancers.

  I was happy, happier than ever. We moved down one jumping chain of people. I saw mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, dinosaurs, salamanders, fish, insects, jellies in loops and swirls. Then came the beat and we were in the other chain, moving up the street, lost in the music, up the line of dancing people, beautiful fields, comets, nebulae, rockets and galaxies of calm light.

  I smiled into Sharon’s face, she smiled into mine.

  Louder now the music, stronger, pulling at us like a wind. The cops joined in the dance.

  Up Congress Avenue the legislators and government workers in special session came streaming out of their building like beautiful ants from a shining mound.

  Louder now and happier, stronger, dancing, clapping, singing.

  We will find our children or they will find us, before the dance is over, we can feel it. Or afterwards
we will responsibly make more.

  The chain broke again, and up the jumping streets we go, joyous now, joy all over the place, twenty, thirty thousand people, more every second.

  As we swirled and grew, we would sometimes pass someone who was staring, not dancing, feet not moving; they would be crying in uncontrollable sobs and shakes, and occasionally committing suicide.

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  The Growth of the House of Usher

  Here’s an unsettling examination of a bizarre Dream House of a future age, and the cost one pays for living there, by Brian Stableford, whose “The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady” appears elsewhere in this anthology.

  THE GROWTH OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

  Brian Stableford

  It was a dull, dark and soundless day on which I approached by motor-boat the house which my friend Rowland Usher had built in the loneliest spot he could find, in the southern region of the Orinoco delta. There are plenty of lonely spots to be found there nowadays, after a century and a half of changing sea levels due to the greenhouse effect.

  The edifice which Rowland was raising from the silt of that great stagnant swamp was like nothing I had ever seen before, and I am morally certain that it was the strangest dwelling ever planned in the imagination of man. It loomed out of the swamp like a black mountain, without an angle anywhere, and with no windows (though that is the fashion in modern times). Near its crown there were soft crenellations, mere suggestions of battlements, and a number of projections that might have been balconies, but the whole seemed to me languidly shapeless.

  Exactly to what extent he had been inspired by the coincidence of nomenclature that linked him with the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe I do not know, but there is surely some sense in which one of the true architects of that remarkable tower was a long-dead nineteenth-century fantasist, even though the other was a twenty-second century civil engineer. Rowland had always wanted to erect a House of Usher that could not and would not fall into ruin.

  I was not sure, either, of the extent to which the letter summoning me here—which gave every evidence of nervous agitation and spoke of “mental disorder”—might be construed as a kind of satire on Poe. I had never thought of Rowland as a joker, but I could not entirely believe that his protestations were serious. I obeyed his summons, of course, but I was uncertain what to expect.

  I had first met Rowland Usher at college, where we studied civil engineering together. We were partners in practical classes, and we became adept together in the deployment of the Gantz bacteria which are used in modern cementation processes. These engineered bacteria, which can be adapted to almost any kind of raw materials, had already wrought their first revolution, and were helping to transform whole vast areas of land where it had been impossible to build in the past: deserts, steppes and bare mountains alike. While the ecological engineers were transforming the world’s environments, Gantz-inspired structural engineers were building entire new cities for people whose ancestors had never known adequate shelter; thanks to Leon Gantz, there need be no more mud huts—great palaces could be raised from any kind of dirt, whether mud, or sand, or shale.

  Rowland and I had been fired with a similar sense of mission, determined to use the tools which our education provided to their very best purpose, to play our part in a Utopian remaking of the world, which would save it from its multiple crisis. We had shared a sense of vision and an ambition which many of our fellows lacked, and this brought us closer together. We both became increasingly interested in the techniques of genetic engineering involved in the manufacture of Gantz bacteria, and dreamed of imparting new powers to these living instruments, which would equip them to perform more astounding miracles.

  Pioneers in our field were even then experimenting with living systems integrated into the walls of Gantzed structures, so that houses could put down tap roots into the ground on which they stood, to secure their own water-supplies. Living systems for the disposal of human wastes had been in use for some time, and ingenious engineers were trying to adapt these systems to the production of useful materials. These were the kinds of projects which had seized our imaginations, and we often collaborated on the design of imaginary living dwellings which would serve every human purpose.

  * * *

  As I approached the remarkable house which Rowland had built for himself, I could not help but recall these flights of fancy, and I wondered how much progress his genius had made. The castles in the air which I had built had been without exception edifices of considerable beauty and profound charm. No one could say that about the thing which Rowland had elevated from the silt of this great swamp, which retained the blackness of that silt and possessed an outward form that reminded me of nothing so much as one of the great termite mounds I had seen in southern Africa, where I had been working in recent years. The walls seemed slightly less than solid, as though capable of a certain sluggish protoplasmic flow, and this appearance gave me an uneasy feeling as I came to the threshold, recalling to my mind the story of Jonah who was swallowed by a whale.

  Rowland met me at the open door and greeted me with enthusiasm. He conducted me through black, smooth-walled corridors which curved eccentrically into the bowels of the house, to a study where he obviously spent much of his time—there were three telescreens, a well-stocked disc library of miscellaneous publications, an integrated sound system and two well-worn sofas. The chamber was lighted by artificial bioluminescence, which was oddly ruddy and subdued.

  A pot of China tea was waiting for me, timed to perfection, and we sat together drinking from small cups, exchanging platitudes. I had not seen Rowland for more than seven years, thanks to the reclusive habits which kept him apart from human society. I had expected to find him changed, but in spite of his letter I was surprised by the difference in him. He was very thin and pale, and his hair was quite white. His voice was uncertain, sometimes stumbling over simple sentences, and he gave the impression of slight intoxication, though there was no wine to be seen in the room.

  I asked him if he was ill, and he confirmed that he was. Even the most modern diagnostic computers had failed to identify the biochemistry of its cause, despite the most comprehensive sampling and analysis of his bodily fluids. He was continually in touch, electronically, with the medical research foundation at Harvard.

  “You need have no fear for yourself,” he assured me. “This is no virus, or other infection; the fault is integral. This is the same malady which destroyed my father, and my sister Magdalen; somehow, it is in our genes. It seems strange that in this age when we have won such command over the formative powers of DNA, that the cunning double helix should still harbour mysteries, but it does. We have not entirely conquered those inner blights and pestilences which rot the very core of our being.”

  I inferred from this rather florid speech that Rowland was suffering from some exotic form of cancer, associated with a heritable chromosomal abnormality.

  “Your sister died of this same illness?” I remarked.

  He favoured me, as he answered, with a peculiar smile. “Oh yes,” he said. “Many years ago, before I knew you at college. She was seventeen years old—she was born a year before me. The disease afflicts females more severely than males; my father lived to be forty, and I am now forty-seven. My grandfather’s sister—the last female sufferer I have been able to identify—died at nineteen. You will readily understand why the disease is inherited through the male line. It is an Usher complaint, like the one which afflicted my famous namesake. Did I not know he were a fiction, I would suspect a line of actual descent.”

  I think I might have been alarmed if Rowland had told me that his sister were still alive, and had I seen her flitting ethereally through the apartment just then. This would have been one parallel too many for my tired mind to bear. As it was, though, I laughed politely.

  “With Harvard on your side,” I said, “there must be hope of a cure.”

  “No,” he replied. “I do not hope for a cure, but merely an u
nderstanding. Modern medicine has helped me to ameliorate the symptoms of my condition, but having failed precisely to identify its biochemical nature, there is no hope of permanent remission. Its origin is in the brain, which is the least understood of all the organs—perhaps the last great mystery, in this our new Age of Enlightenment. You will have noticed that my speech is affected, and my sight too—which is why, I fear, the lighting here will seem a little eerie to your eyes. The mental disorder of which I spoke in my letter is increasingly perceptible, and I know that my working days are almost over. That is why I asked you to come to me—I want to explain to you what it is that I have been doing all these years, in my solitude, while you have been helping the poor in Africa.

  “I want you to get to know my house, to understand what I have achieved here. I want you, in brief, to be the executor of my will. My personal possessions are worthless, but my additions to the sum of human knowledge and creativity are not. I leave everything to mankind in general, for the joy and benefit of all future generations—and you, my old friend, must convey my legacy to those heirs. There are full records of my data here, of course, but you know as well as I that the world is laden down beyond endurance with stored data, and that knowledge needs human champions if it is to be properly disseminated and developed.”

  I told him that I understood (though in truth I was not entirely sure that I did) and gave him my most earnest promise that I would try to do as he wished. He was delighted by this response, but his enthusiasm seemed suddenly to weaken him, and when we dined he ate almost nothing. Soon afterwards he begged leave to desert me, and after showing me to my bedroom he left me alone, begging me to make full use of the facilities of the house and apologizing profusely for not being able to give me a more thorough introduction to them.

  Because the room had no window I could not ascertain whether the threatened storm had begun, but when I lay silently in my bed I thought that I could perceive a vibration in the dull, warm walls that might have been an echo of lashing rain and howling wind—or which might, instead, have been some mysterious internal process at work within the living fabric of the fabulous structure. After a time I found it strangely comforting, as if it were a subliminal lullaby, and I was carried off by it into peaceful sleep.