The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  it slows down around the manuscripts or me –

  golden years the mid-twenties everything clicks Paris Vorarlburg Paris Schruns Paris Pamplona Paris Madrid Paris Lausanne

  couldn’t believe she actually

  most of a novel dozens of poems stories sketches – contes, Kitty called them by God woman you show me your conte and I’ll show you mine

  so drunk that night I know better than to drink that much absinthe so drunk I was half crawling going up the stairs to the apartment I saw weird I saw God I saw I saw myself standing there on the fourth landing with Hadley’s goddamn bag

  I waited almost an hour, that seemed like no time or all time, and when he, when I, when he came crashing up the stairs he blinked twice, then I walked through me groping, shook my head without looking back and managed to get the door unlocked

  flying back through the dead winter French countryside, standing in the bar car fighting hopelessness to Hadley crying so hard she can’t get out what was wrong with Steffens standing gaping like a fish in a bowl

  twisting again, painlessly inside out, I suppose through various dimensions, seeing the man’s life as one complex chord of beauty and purpose and ugliness and chaos, my life on one side of the Möbius strip consistent through its fading forty-year span, starting, starting, here:

  the handsome young man sits on the floor of the apartment holding himself, rocking racked with sobs, one short manuscript crumpled in front of him, the room a mess with drawers pulled out, their contents scattered on the floor, it’s like losing an arm a leg (a foot a testicle), it’s like losing your youth and along with youth

  with a roar he stands up, eyes closed fists clenched, wipes his face dry and stomps over to the window

  breathes deeply until he’s breathing normally

  strides across the room, kicking a brassiere out of his way

  stands with his hand on the knob and thinks this:

  life can break you but you can grow back strong at the broken places

  and goes out slamming the door behind him, somewhat conscious of having been present at his own birth.

  With no effort I find myself standing earlier that day in the vestibule of a train. Hadley is walking away, tired, looking for a vendor. I turn and confront two aspects of myself.

  “Close your mouth, John. You’ll catch flies.”

  They both stand paralyzed while I slide open the door and pull the overnight bag from under the seat. I walk away and the universe begins to tingle and sparkle.

  I spend forever in the black void between timespaces. I am growing to enjoy it.

  I appear in John Baird’s apartment and set down the bag. I look at the empty chair in front of the old typewriter, the green beer bottle sweating cold next to it, and John Baird appears, looking dazed, and I have business elsewhere, elsewhen. A train to catch. I’ll come back for the bag in twelve minutes or a few millennia, after the bloodbath that gives birth to us all.

  25. A Moveable Feast

  He wrote the last line and set down the pencil and read over the last page sitting on his hands for warmth. He could see his breath. Celebrate the end with a little heat.

  He unwrapped the bundle of twigs and banked them around the pile of coals in the brazier. Crazy way to heat a room, but it’s France. He cupped both hands behind the stack and blew gently. The coals glowed red and then orange and with the third breath the twigs smoldered and a small yellow flame popped up. He held his hands over the fire, rubbing the stiffness out of his fingers, enjoying the smell of the birch as it cracked and spit.

  He put a fresh sheet and carbon into the typewriter and looked at his penciled notes. Final draft? Worth a try:

  Ernest M. Hemingway,

  74 rue da Cardinal Lemoine,

  Paris, France

  ))Up in Michigan))

  Jim Gilmore came to Horton’s Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Hortom

  Shit, a typo. He flinched suddenly, as if struck, and shook his head to clear it. What a strange sensation to come out of nowhere. A sudden cold stab of grief. But larger somehow than grief for a person.

  Grief for everybody, maybe. For being human.

  From a typo?

  He went to the window and opened it in spite of the cold. He filled his lungs with the cold damp air and looked around the familiar orange-and-grey mosaic of chimney pots and tiled roofs under the dirty winter Paris sky.

  He shuddered and eased the window back down and returned to the heat of the brazier. He had felt it before, exactly that huge and terrible feeling. But where?

  For the life of him he couldn’t remember.

  MR. BOY

  James Patrick Kelly

  James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially with Wildlife, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as “Solstice,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Glass Cloud,” “Pogrom,” “Home Front,” “Undone,” and “Bernardo’s House,” and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His story “Think Like a Dinosaur” won him a Hugo Award in 1996, as did his story “1016 to 1,” in 2000. Kelly’s first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look into the Sun. His short work has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur, and, most recently, in a new collection, Strange But Not a Stranger. His most recent book is the chapbook novella, Burn, and coming up is an anthology co-edited with John Kessel, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Born in Minneola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire. He has a Web site at www.JimKelly.net, and reviews Internet-related matters for Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald told us long ago that the rich were not like you and me, but it takes the pyrotechnic and wildly inventive story that follows, the first story to really put James Patrick Kelly on the map as one of the foremost writers of his generation, to demonstrate just how unlike us they could eventually become.

  I was already twitching by the time they strapped me down. Nasty pleasure and beautiful pain crackled through me, branching and rebranching like lightning. Extreme feelings are hard to tell apart when you have endorphins spilling across your brain. Another spasm shot down my legs and curled my toes. I moaned. The stiffs wore surgical masks that hid their mouths, but I knew they were smiling. They hated me because my mom could afford to have me stunted. When I really was just a kid I did not understand that. Now I hated them back; it helped me get through the therapy. We had a very clean transaction going here. No secrets between us.

  Even though it hurts, getting stunted is still the ultimate flash. As I unlived my life, I overdosed on dying feelings and experiences. My body was not big enough to hold them all; I thought I was going to explode. I must have screamed because I could see the laugh lines crinkling around the stiffs’ eyes. You do not have to worry about laugh lines after they twank your genes and reset your mitotic limits. My face was smooth and I was going to be twelve years old forever, or at least as long as Mom kept paying for my rejuvenation.

  I giggled as the short one leaned over me and pricked her catheter into my neck. Even through the mask, I could smell her breath. She reeked of dead meat.

  Getting stunted always left me wobbly and thick, but this time I felt like last Tuesday’s pizza. One of the stiffs had to roll me out of recovery in a wheelchair.

  The lobby looked like a furniture showroom. Even the plants had been newly waxed. There was nothing to remind the clients that they were bags of blood and piss. You are all biological machines now, said the lobby, clean as space-station lettuce. A scattering of people sat on the hard chairs. Stennie and Comrade were fidgeting by the elevators. They looked as if they were thinking of rearran
ging the furniture – like maybe into a pile in the middle of the room. Even before they waved, the stiff seemed to know that they were waiting for me.

  Comrade smiled. “Zdrast’ye.”

  “You okay, Mr. Boy?” said Stennie. Stennie was a grapefruit-yellow stenonychosaurus with a brown underbelly. His razor-clawed toes clicked against the slate floor as he walked.

  “He’s still a little weak,” said the stiff, as he set the chair’s parking brake. He strained to act nonchalant, not realizing that Stennie enjoys being stared at. “He needs rest. Are you his brother?” he said to Comrade.

  Comrade appeared to be a teenaged spike neck with a head of silky black hair that hung to his waist. He wore a window coat on which twenty-three different talking heads chattered. He could pass for human, even though he was really a Panasonic. “Nyet,” said Comrade. “I’m just another one of his hallucinations.”

  The poor stiff gave him a dry nervous cough that might have been meant as a chuckle. He was probably wondering whether Stennie wanted to take me home or eat me for lunch. I always thought that the way Stennie got reshaped was more funny-looking than fierce – a python that had rear-ended an ostrich. But even though he was a head shorter than me, he did have enormous eyes and a mouthful of serrated teeth. He stopped next to the wheelchair and rose up to his full height. “I appreciate everything you’ve done.” Stennie offered the stiff his spindly three-fingered hand to shake. “Sorry if he caused any trouble.”

  The stiff took it gingerly, then shrieked and flew backward. I mean, he jumped almost a meter off the floor. Everyone in the lobby turned, and Stennie opened his hand and waved the joy buzzer. He slapped his tail against the slate in triumph. Stennie’s sense of humor was extreme, but then he was only thirteen years old.

  Stennie’s parents had given him the Nissan Alpha for his twelfth birthday, and we had been customizing it ever since. We installed blue mirror glass, and Stennie painted scenes from the Late Cretaceous on the exterior body armor. We ripped out all the seats, put in a wall-to-wall gel mat and a fridge and a microwave and a screen and a minidish. Comrade had even done an illegal operation on the carbrain so that we could override in an emergency and actually steer the Alpha ourselves with a joystick. It would have been cramped, but we would have lived in Stennie’s car if our parents had let us.

  “You okay there, Mr. Boy?” said Stennie.

  “Mmm.” As I watched the trees whoosh past in the rain, I pretended that the car was standing still and the world was passing me by.

  “Think of something to do, okay?” Stennie had the car and all and he was fun to play with, but ideas were not his specialty. He was probably smart for a dinosaur. “I’m bored.”

  “Leave him alone, will you?” Comrade said.

  “He hasn’t said anything yet.” Stennie stretched and nudged me with his foot. “Say something.” He had legs like a horse: yellow skin stretched tight over long bones and stringy muscle.

  “Prosrees! He just had his genes twanked, you jack.” Comrade always took good care of me. Or tried to. “Remember what that’s like? He’s in damage control.”

  “Maybe I should go to socialization,” Stennie said. “Aren’t they having a dance this afternoon?”

  “You’re talking to me?” said the Alpha. “You haven’t earned enough learning credits to socialize. You’re a quiz behind and forty-five minutes short of E-class. You haven’t linked since . . .”

  “Just shut up and drive me over.” Stennie and the Alpha did not get along. He thought the car was too strict. “I’ll make up the plugging quiz, okay?” He probed a mess of empty juice boxes and snack wrappers with his foot. “Anyone see my comm anywhere?”

  Stennie’s schoolcomm was wedged behind my cushion. “You know,” I said, “I can’t take much more of this.” I leaned forward, wriggled it free, and handed it over.

  “Of what, poputchik?” said Comrade. “Joyriding? Listening to the lizard here?”

  “Being stunted.”

  Stennie flipped up the screen of his comm and went on-line with the school’s computer. “You guys help me, okay?” He retracted his claws and tapped at the oversized keyboard.

  “It’s extreme while you’re on the table,” I said, “but now I feel empty. Like I’ve lost myself.”

  “You’ll get over it,” said Stennie. “First question: Brand name of the first wiseguys sold for home use?”

  “NEC-Bots, of course,” said Comrade.

  “Geneva? It got nuked, right?”

  “Da.”

  “Haile Selassie was that king of Ethiopia who the Marleys claim is god, right? Name the Cold Wars: Nicaragua, Angola . . . Korea was the first.” Typing was hard work for Stennie; he did not have enough fingers for it. “One was something like Venezuela. Or something.”

  “Sure it wasn’t Venice?”

  “Or Venus?” I said, but Stennie was not paying attention.

  “All right, I know that one. And that. The Sovs built the first space station. Ronald Reagan – he was the president who dropped the bomb?”

  Comrade reached inside of his coat and pulled out an envelope. “I got you something, Mr. Boy. A get-well present for your collection.”

  I opened it and scoped a picture of a naked dead fat man on a stainless-steel table. The print had a DI verification grid on it, which meant this was the real thing, not a composite. Just above the corpse’s left eye there was a neat hole. It was rimmed with purple that had faded to bruise blue. He had curly gray hair on his head and chest, skin the color of dried mayonnaise, and a wonderfully complicated penis graft. He looked relieved to be dead. “Who was he?” I liked Comrade’s present. It was extreme.

  “CEO of Infoline. He had the wife, you know, the one who stole all the money so she could download herself into a computer.”

  I shivered as I stared at the dead man. I could hear myself breathing and feel the blood squirting through my arteries. “Didn’t they turn her off?” I said. This was the kind of stuff we were not even supposed to imagine, much less look at. Too bad they had cleaned him up. “How much did this cost me?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Hey!” Stennie thumped his tail against the side of the car. “I’m taking a quiz here, and you guys are drooling over porn. When was the First World Depression?”

  “Who cares?” I slipped the picture back into the envelope and grinned at Comrade.

  “Well, let me see then.” Stennie snatched the envelope. “You know what I think, Mr. Boy? I think this corpse jag you’re on is kind of sick. Besides, you’re going to get in trouble if you let Comrade keep breaking laws. Isn’t this picture private?”

  “Privacy is twentieth-century thinking. It’s all information, Stennie, and information should be accessible.” I held out my hand. “But if glasnost bothers you, give it up.” I wiggled my fingers.

  Comrade snickered. Stennie pulled out the picture, glanced at it, and hissed. “You’re scaring me, Mr. Boy.”

  His schoolcomm beeped as it posted his score on the quiz, and he sailed the envelope back across the car at me. “Not Venezuela, Vietnam. Hey, Truman dropped the plugging bomb. Reagan was the one who spent all the money. What’s wrong with you dumbscuts? Now I owe school another fifteen minutes.”

  “Hey, if you don’t make it look good, they’ll know you had help.” Comrade laughed.

  “What’s with this dance anyway? You don’t dance.” I picked Comrade’s present up and tucked it into my shirt pocket. “You find yourself a cush or something, lizard boy?”

  “Maybe.” Stennie could not blush, but sometimes when he was embarrassed the loose skin under his jaw quivered. Even though he had been reshaped into a dinosaur, he was still growing up. “Maybe I am getting a little. What’s it to you?”

  “If you’re getting it,” I said, “it’s got to be microscopic.” This was a bad sign. I was losing him to his dick, just like all the other pals. No way I wanted to start over with someone new. I had been alive for twenty-five years now. I wa
s running out of things to say to thirteen-year-olds.

  As the Alpha pulled up to the school, I scoped the crowd waiting for the doors to open for third shift. Although there was a handful of stunted kids, a pair of gorilla brothers who were football stars and Freddy the Teddy – a bear who had furry hands instead of real paws – the majority of students at New Canaan High looked more or less normal. Most working stiffs thought that people who had their genes twanked were freaks.

  “Come get me at five-fifteen,” Stennie told the Alpha. “In the meantime, take these guys wherever they want to go.” He opened the door. “You rest up, Mr. Boy, okay?”

  “What?” I was not paying attention. “Sure.” I had just seen the most beautiful girl in the world.

  She leaned against one of the concrete columns of the portico, chatting with a couple other kids. Her hair was long and nut-colored and the ends twinkled. She was wearing a loose black robe over mirror skintights. Her schoolcomm dangled from a strap around her wrist. She appeared to be seventeen, maybe eighteen. But of course, appearances could be deceiving.

  Girls had never interested me much, but I could not help but admire this one. “Wait, Stennie! Who’s that?” She saw me point at her. “With the hair?”

  “She’s new – has one of those names you can’t pronounce.” He showed me his teeth as he got out. “Hey, Mr. Boy, you’re stunted. You haven’t got what she wants.”

  He kicked the door shut, lowered his head, and crossed in front of the car. When he walked, he looked like he was trying to squash a bug with each step. His snaky tail curled high behind him for balance, his twiggy little arms dangled. When the new girl saw him, she pointed and smiled. Or maybe she was pointing at me.

  “Where to?” said the car.

  “I don’t know.” I sank low into my seat and pulled out Comrade’s present again. “Home, I guess.”

  I was not the only one in my family with twanked genes. My mom was a three-quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. Originally she wanted to be full-sized, but then she would have been the tallest thing in New Canaan, Connecticut. The town turned her down when she applied for a zoning variance. Her lawyers and their lawyers sued and countersued for almost two years. Mom’s claim was that since she was born human, her freedom of form was protected by the Thirtieth Amendment. However, the form she wanted was a curtain of reshaped cells that would hang on a forty-two-meter-high ferroplastic skeleton. Her structure, said the planning board, was clearly subject to building codes and zoning laws. Eventually they reached an out-of-court settlement, which was why Mom was only as tall as an eleven-story building.