The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  So Halloran stays.

  A conversation tires her; her feet swell and deflate, swell and deflate, with grim comic regularity; her lips bleed, her gums. She plays Transplant, very loud, tells Michael she wishes she could jack right into the music so as to feel it, literally, in her bones. She lets him do almost everything for her, when he is there; it calms and pleases him, as much as he can be pleased, anymore. When they make love he holds her like china, like thinnest crystal that a thought could shatter. They spend a lot of time in tears.

  “Oh this is old,” she whispers, stroking his back as he lies atop her. “This is just getting so old.”

  There is no answer to that, so he gives none. He is too tired even to cry, or pound fists, or scream that their treatments are shit, shit! He feels her heart beat. It seems so strong. How can anyone who looks so sick have such a robust heartbeat? Thank God for it. Let it beat forever, till he and all the world is dust.

  “Know what?”

  “What?”

  “Know what I’d like to do, more than anything?”

  He raises himself from her, moves to his side, cradles her that way. “What would you like to do?”

  “Arrowhead.”

  The word makes a silence. Vacuum. Each knows what the other is thinking.

  Finally, Michael: “It’s a neurological strain. A big strain. You might—it could hurt you.”

  She laughs, not sarcastically, with genuine humor. “What a tragedy that would be.”

  More silence.

  “There isn’t a lot left,” she says, very gently, “that I can do. This,” running her hand down his body, her touch ethereal. “And that. Just one. Just one ride.”

  He doesn’t answer. He can’t answer. Anything he says would be cruel. She puts her hand on his cheek, strokes his skin, the blond stubble. There is a lot she could say, many things: If you love me—one last chance—last favor. She would rather die, and for her it is not an academic pronouncement, than say those things, any of those things.

  “All I care about,” he says finally, his voice deeper than she has ever heard it, “is that I don’t want to be a part of something that hurts you. But I guess it’s already too late, isn’t it?”

  For her, there is no answer to that.

  Much later: “You really want to do it?”

  He can feel her nod in the dark.

  “Shit.”

  * * *

  “Okay,” Michael says, for the tenth time. “It’ll take me a couple minutes to get there, get plugged in. I’ll get going, and then this—” indicating a red LED “—will pulse. You jack in then. Okay?”

  “Please, Mister,” in a little girl’s voice, undertone of pure delight, “how do you work this thing?”

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” He is smiling too, finally. “Fasten your seatbelt, then.” She is pale with excitement, back almost painfully rigid, his denim cap jaunty on her head. When he kisses her, he tastes the coppery flavor of blood. He leaves, to march down the hall like Ghenghis Khan.

  Halloran’s heart is thrashing as she jacks in, to the accompaniment of the LED. She feels Michael at once, a strong presence, then—go.

  The slow dazzle of the slipstream night, rushing over her like black water, rich phosphorescence, things, passing, the alien perfection of Arrowhead, the flow and flower of things whose names she knows but now cannot fathom or try, the sense of flying, literal arrowhead splicing near to far, here to there, cutting, riding, past the farthest edge—it is wonder beyond dreams, more than she could have wished, for either of them. Worth everything, every second of every pain, every impatience and disappointment, of the last two years. She does not think these things in words, or terms; the concept of rightness unfolds, origami, as she flies, and if she could spare the second she would nod Yes, that’s so.

  Michael, beside her, feels this rightness too; on his own or as a gift from her, he cannot tell, would not bother making the distinction. She is in ecstasy, she is inside him, they are both inside Arrowhead. He could ride this way forever, world without end.

  They find out, of course, Bruce and the others; almost at once. There is a warning monitor that is made to detect just this thing. They are in the tandem quarters, they forcibly unplug her. Michael feels her leaving, the abrupt disunity, and eyes-open screams, hands splayed across the air, as Arrowhead gives a lurch. As soon as she is out of the system she collapses. Grinning.

  Bruce teeters on the edge of speechlessness. One assistant says, voice loud with disbelief, “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done to yourself? Do you know what’s—”

  “No,” she corrects, from the bottom of the tunnel, faces ringing her like people looking down a manhole. “No, you have no idea.”

  * * *

  South Carolina is a lot farther away than Proxima Centauri.

  KIM NEWMAN

  Famous Monsters

  Here’s a sort of madcap, black-humored, alternate-world Hollywood Babylon, complete with Selenites and betentacled B-picture Martians, courtesy of new writer Kim Newman.

  Kim Newman is a film critic who lives in London, England. His critical study Horror: 100 Best Books, written in collaboration with Stephen Jones, is just out from Xanadu.

  FAMOUS MONSTERS

  Kim Newman

  You know, I wouldn’t be doing this picture if it weren’t for Chaney Junior’s liver. In all the obits, they said it was a heart attack, but anyone who knew Lon knows better. Doing all these interviews with the old-timers, you must have heard the stories. They don’t tell the half of it. I didn’t get to work with Lon till well past his prime. Past my prime too, come to that. It was some Abbott and Costello piece of shit in the 50s. Already, he looked less human than I do. Wattles, gut, nose, the whole fright mask. And the stink. Hell, but he was a good old bastard. Him and me and Brod Crawford used to hit all the bars on the Strip Friday and Saturday nights. We used to scare up a commotion, I can tell you. I guess we were a disgrace. I quit all that after I got a tentacle shortened in a brawl with some hophead beatniks over on Hollywood Boulevard. I leaked ichor all over Arthur Kennedy’s star. That’s all gone now, anyway. There aren’t any bars left I can use. It’s not that they won’t serve me—the Second War of the Worlds was, like, twenty-five years ago now, and that’s all forgotten—but no one stocks the stuff any more. It’s easy enough to get. Abattoirs sell off their leavings for five cents a gallon. But this California heat makes it go rancid and rubbery inside a day.

  Anyway, just before Lon conked out—halfway through a bottle of Wild Turkey, natch—he signed up with Al to do this picture. It was called The Mutilation Machine back then. It’s Blood of the Cannibal Creature now. Al will change it. He always does. The footage with Scott Brady and the bike gang is from some dodo Al never got finished in the 60s. Something a-Go-Go? Lousy title. Cycle Sadists a-Go-GO, that’s it. It must be great being a film historian, huh? What with all this confusion and crapola? Do you know how they were paying Lon? Bottles. When Al wanted him to walk across a room in a scene, he’d have the assistant director hold up a bottle of hooch off-camera and shake it. Lon would careen across the set, knocking things and people over, and go for the booze, and Al would get his shot. I don’t suppose I’m all that much better off. One of the backers is a wholesale butcher, and he’s kicking in my fee in pig blood. I know you think that sounds disgusting, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

  For a while, it looked like Lon would last out the picture. Al got the scene where he’s supposed to pull this kootch-kootch dancer’s guts out. He was playing Groton the Mad Zombie, by the way. So it’s not Chekhov. Al has already cut the scene together. Okay, so there’s some scratching on the neg. Al can fix it. He’s going to put on some more scratches, and make them look like sparks flying out of Lon. Groton is supposed to be electric. Or atomic. One or the other. The girl keeps laughing while Lon gets his mitts inside her sweater, but they can dub some screams in, and music and growling and it’ll be okay. At least, it’ll be as okay as anything ev
er is in Al’s movies. Did you catch Five Bloody Graves? It was a piece of shit. After this, he wants to do a picture with Georgina Spelvin and the Ritz Brothers called The Fucking Stewardesses. You can bet he’ll change that title.

  But one scene is all there is of Lon. So, when he buys the farm Al calls me up. I don’t have an agent any more, although I used to be with the William Morris crowd. I do all my deals myself. I couldn’t do a worse job than some of the people in this business. I used to be handled by a guy called Dickie Nixon, a real sleazo scumbag. He was the one who landed me in Orbit Jocks, and screwed me out of my TV residuals. Anyway, I know Al. I worked for him once before, on Johnny Blood Rides Roughshod. That was the horror western that was supposed to put James Dean back on the top. What a joke. The fat freak kept falling off his horse. It turned out to be a piece of shit. Al and me worked something out on this one, and so here I am in Bronson Caverns again, playing Groton the Mad Zombie. They’ve rewritten the script so I can be Lon in all the early scenes. I know it sounds ridiculous, what with the shape and everything. But, hell, I can cram myself into a pair and a half of jeans and a double-size poncho. In the new script, my character is a Martian—I mean, I can’t play an Eskimo, can I?—but when John Carradine zaps me with the Mutilation Machine I turn into a human being. Well, into Groton the Mad Zombie. It’s the most challenging part that’s come my way in years, even if the film is going to be a total piece of shit. I’m hoping my performance will be a tribute to Lon. I’ve got the voice down. “George, lookit duh rabbits, George.” Now, I working on the walk. That’s difficult. You people walk all weird. No matter how long I hang around you, I still can’t figure out how you manage with just the two legs.

  * * *

  I’m an American citizen, by the way, I was hatched in Los Angeles. Put it down to the Melting Pot. Mom flopped down in the 20s, when the Old World political situation started going to hell. She’d been through WW I and couldn’t face that again. It’s in the culture, I guess. When your head of government is called the High War Victor you know you’re in trouble. I’m not that way. I’m mellow. A typical native Californian, like my twenty-eight brood siblings. I’m the only one of us left now. The rest all died off or went back to the skies. I can’t let go. It’s showbiz, you know. It’s in the ichor. You must understand that if you do all these interviews. What do you call it, oral history? It’s important, I suppose. Someone should take all this down before we all die out. Did you get to Rathbone? There was a guy with some stories. I never got on with him though, despite all those pictures we did together. He lost some relatives in the First War of the Worlds, and never got around to accepting that not all non-terrestrials were vicious thugs.

  I suppose you’ll want to know how I got into the movies? Well, I’m that one in a million who started as an extra. It was in the late 30s, when I’d barely brushed the eggshell out of my slime. Four bucks a day just for hanging around cardboard nightclubs or walking up and down that street where the buildings are just frontages. In Swing Time, I’m in the background when Fred and Ginger do their “Pick Yourself Up” routine. They were swell, although Rogers put my name down on some list of communist sympathizers in the 50s and I nearly had to go before HUAC. Do I look like a commie? Hell, how many other Americans can blush red, white and blue? I didn’t stay an extra long. I suppose I’m noticeable. There were very few of us in Hollywood, and so I started getting bit parts. Typically, I’d be a heavy in a saloon fight, or an underworld hanger-on. If you catch The Roaring Twenties on a re-run, look out for me during the massacre in the Italian restaurant. Cagney gets me in the back. It’s one of my best deaths. I’ve always been good at dying.

  My big break came when 20th Century-Fox did the Willie K’ssth films. Remember? Rathbone played Inspector Willie K’ssth of the Selenite Police Force. Willie K’ssth Takes Over, Willie K’ssth and The Co-Eds, Willie K’ssth On Broadway, and so on. There were more than twenty of them. I was Jimbo, Willie’s big, dumb Martian sidekick. I did all the comedy relief scenes—going into a tentacle-flapping fright in haunted houses, getting hit on the head and seeing animated stars in fight sequences. The films don’t play much now, because of the Selenite pressure groups. They hate the idea of a human actor in the role. And when Earl Derr Biggers was writing the books in the 20s, the Grand Lunar had them banned on the Moon. I don’t see what they were bothered about. Willie always spots the killer and comes out on top. He usually gets to make a bunch of human beings look ridiculous as well. In not one of the books or movies did Jimbo ever guess who the murderer was, even when it was blatantly obvious. And it usually was. For a while, I was typed as the dumb, scared Martie. Some of my siblings said I was projecting a negative image of the race, but there was a Depression on and I was the only one of the brood in regular work. I’ve got nothing against Selenites, by the way, although the Grand Lunar has always had a rotten Sapient Rights record. It’s no wonder so many of them headed for the Earth.

  After the New York Singe, I was quickly dropped from the series. We were half-way through shooting Willie K’ssth on Coney Island when the studio quietly pulled my contract. They rewrote Jimbo as a black chauffeur called Wilbur Wolverhampton and got Stepin Fetchit to do the role. They still put out the film under its original title, even though there wasn’t a Coney Island any more. I’d have sued, but there was a wave of virulent Anti-Martian feeling sweeping the country. That was understandable, I guess. I had relatives in New York, too. Suddenly, forty years of cultural exchange was out of the porthole and we were back to interspecial hatred. Nobody cared that Mom was a refugee from High War Victor Uszthay in the first place, and that since his purges most of her brood siblings were clogging up the canals. I was pulled out of my apartment by the Beverly Hills cops and roughed up in a basement. They really did use rubber hoses. I’ll never forget that. I ended up in an internment camp, and the studio annexed my earnings. The hate mail was really nasty. We were out in the desert, which wasn’t so bad. I guess we’re built for deserts. But at night people in hoods would come and have bonfires just outside the perimeter. They burned scarecrows made to look like Martians and chanted lots of blood and guts slogans. That was disturbing. And the guards were a bit free with the cattle prods. It was a shameful chapter in the planet’s history, but no one’s researched it properly yet. The last interview I did was with some Martian-American professor doing a thesis on Roosevelt’s treatment of so-called “enemy aliens.” He was practically a hatchling, and didn’t really understand what we’d had to go through. I bet his thesis will be a piece of shit. There were rumours about this camp in Nevada where the guards stood back and let a mob raze the place to the ground with the Marties still in it. And who knows what happened in Europe and Asia?

  * * *

  Then the cylinders started falling, and the war effort got going. Uszthay must have been a bigger fool than we took him for. With Mars’ limited resources, he couldn’t possibly keep the attack going for more than six months. And Earth had cavorite, while he was still using nineteenth-century rocket cannons. Do you know how many cylinders just landed in the sea and sunk? So, Roosevelt got together with the world leaders in Iceland—Hitler, Stalin, Oswald Cabal—and they geared up for Earth’s counterinvasion. Finally, I got all the hassles with my citizenship sorted out, and the authorities reluctantly admitted I had as much right to be called an American as any other second generation immigrant. I had to carry a wad of documentation the size of a phone book, but I could walk the streets freely. Of course, if I did I was still likely to get stoned. I did most of my travelling in a curtained car. According to what was left of my contract, I owed 20th a couple of movies. I assumed they’d pay me off and I’d wind up in an armaments factory, but no, as soon as I was on the lot I was handed a stack of scripts. Suddenly, everyone was making war pictures.

  The first was Mars Force, which I did for Howard Hawks. I was loaned to Warners for that. It was supposed to be a true story. I don’t know if you remember, but the week after the Singe a handful of foolha
rdy volunteers climbed into their Cavor Balls and buzzed the red planet. They didn’t do much damage, but it was Earth’s first retaliative strike. In the movie, they were after the factories where the elements for the heat rays were being synthesized. In real life, they just flattened a couple of retirement nests and got rayed down. In Mars Force, I played the tyrannical Security Victor at the factories. I spent most of the film gloating over a crystal-scope, looking at stock footage of the smoking plains where New York used to be. I also got to drool over a skinny terrestrial missionary, snivel in fear as the brave Earthmen flew over in their Christmas tree ornaments and be machine-gunned to death by John Garfield. It was typical propaganda shit, but it was a pretty good picture. It stands up a lot better than most of the other things I did back then.

  I was typecast for the rest of the war. I’ve raped more nurses than any actor alive—although what I was supposed to see in you sandpaper-skinned bipeds is beyond me. And I did a lot of plotting, scheming, saluting, backstabbing, bombing, blasting, cackling, betraying, sneering and strutting. I saw more action than Patton and Rommel put together, and without ever stepping off the backlots. The furthest I ever went for a battle was Griffith Park. I had a whole set of shiny, slimy uniforms. I played every rank we had going. In Heat Ray!, I even got to play Uszthay, although that’s like asking Mickey Mouse to play John the Baptist. I soon lost count of the number of times I had to swear to crush the puny planet Earth in my lesser tentacles. I got killed a lot. I was shot by Errol Flynn in Desperate Journey, bombed by Spencer Tracy in Thirty Seconds Over Krba-Gnsk, and John Wayne got me in Soaring Tigers, The Sands of Grlshnk and The Fighting Seabees. In Lunaria, Bogart plugs me as I reach for the crystalphone on the launchfield. Remember that one? Everyone says it’s a classic. It got the Academy Award that year. Claude Rains asks Bogart why he came to Lunaria, and Bogart says he came for the atmosphere. “But there’s no atmosphere on the Moon,” says Rains. “I was misinformed.” I wanted the role of the freedom fighter who floats off to Earth with Ingrid Bergman at the end, but Jack Warner chickened out of depicting a sympathetic Martie and they made the character into a Selenite. Paul Henried could never keep his antennae straight. I had to make do with being another Inferior War Victor. No one believed there were any anti-Uszthay Martians. That’s typical earthbound thinking.