The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I am.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s drive around. Then let’s have a really great meal, like the best food you can think of.”

  “That’s doable.”

  “Then we can go back to your apartment.”

  “What about the big countdown?”

  “Fuck the countdown.” Kylie pushed the timing stud into her chronometer. “There,” she said. “No more countdown.”

  “You like pizza?” Toby said.

  “I don’t know. What is it?”

  After they made love the second time, Kylie fell into a light doze on Toby’s futon bed. She was not used to so much rich stimulation, so much food and drink, so much touching.

  She woke with a start from a dream that instantly disappeared from her consciousness. There was the sound of rain, but it wasn’t the terrible poisonous rain of her world. Street light through the window cast a flowing shadow across the foot of the bed. It reminded her of the shiny fountain at the waterfront. The room was snug and comforting and safe. There was a clock on the table beside the bed but she didn’t look at it. It could end right now.

  She sat up. Toby was at his desk under a framed movie poster, bent over something illuminated by a very bright and tightly directed light. He was wearing his jeans but no shirt or socks.

  Hello,” she said.

  He turned sharply, then smiled. “Oh, hey Kylie. Have a nice rest?”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  He got up and fetched her a half-depleted bottle of water from the refrigerator. While he was doing that she noticed her locator in pieces on the desk.

  “We don’t need that anymore,” she said, pointing.

  “I was just curious. I can put it back together, no problem.”

  “I don’t care about it.” She lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes.

  “Kylie?”

  “Hmmm?” She kept her eyes closed.

  “Who are you? Really.”

  “I’m your spooky girl.”

  “Besides that.”

  She opened her eyes. “Don’t spoil it. Please don’t.”

  “Spoil what?”

  “This. Us. Now. It’s all that matters.”

  Rain ticked against the window. It would continue all night, a long, cleansing rain. Water that anybody could catch in a cup and drink if they wanted to--water out of the sky.

  Toby took his pants down and slipped under the sheet next to her, his body heat like a magnetic field that drew her against him. She pressed her cheek to his chest. His heart beat calmly.

  “Everything’s perfect,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t sound that certain.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Only--this is all pretty fast. Don’t you think we should know more about each other?”

  “Why? Now is what matters.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, what do you do? Where do you live? Basic stuff. Big stuff, too, like do you believe in God or who’d you vote for for president?”

  “I want to go for a long walk in the rain. I want to feel it on my face and not be afraid or sick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re spoiling it. Please, let’s make every second happy. Make it a day we’d want to relive a thousand times.”

  “I don’t want to live any day a thousand times.”

  “Let’s walk now.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  She got out of bed and started dressing, her back to him.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said.

  “I’m not mad.”

  “You are.”

  She turned to him, buttoning her shirt. “Don’t tell me what I am.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You practically sleepwalk through the most important day of your life.”

  “I’m not sleepwalking.”

  “Don’t you even want to fall in love with me?”

  He laughed uncertainly. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “You know it. Kylie.”

  “I mean your last name.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me,” Toby said. “You matter to me.”

  Finished with her shirt, she sat on the edge of the bed to lace her shoes. “No you don’t,” she said. “You only care about me if you can know all about my past and our future. You can’t live one day well and be happy.”

  “Now you sound like Hemingway.”

  “I don’t know what that means and I don’t care.” She shrugged into her parka.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk. I told you what I wanted.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was too ignorant to absorb it.”

  She slammed the door on her way out.

  She stood under the pumpkin-colored light of the street lamp, confused, face tilted up to be anointed by the rain. Was he watching her from the apartment window, his heart about to break? She waited and waited. This is the part where he would run to her and embrace her and kiss her and tell her that he loved, loved, loved her.

  He didn’t come out.

  She stared at the brick building checkered with light and dark apartment windows, not certain which one was his.

  He didn’t come out, and it was spoiled.

  A bus rumbled between her and the building, pale indifferent faces inside.

  Kylie walked in the rain. It was not poison but it was cold and, after a while, unpleasant. She pulled her hood up and walked with her head down. The wet sidewalk was a palette of neon smears. Her fingers touched the shape of the explosive in her pocket. She could find the building with the papered windows. Even if the Tourists tried to stop her she might still get inside and destroy the Eternity Core. It’s what her mother wanted, what the Old Men wanted. But what if they caught her? If she remained in the loop through an entire cycle she would become a permanent part of it. She couldn’t stand that, not the way she hurt right now. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t know the time. She had to reach her scutter and get out.

  A horn went off practically at her elbow. Startled, she looked up. A low and wide vehicle, a boy leaning out the passenger window, smirking.

  “Hey, you wanna go for a ride?”

  “No.”

  “Then fuck you, bitch!” He cackled, and the vehicle accelerated away, ripping the air into jagged splinters.

  She walked faster. The streets were confusing. She was lost. Her panic intensified. Why couldn’t he have come after her and be sorry and love her? But it wasn’t like the best parts of the movies. Some of it was good, but a lot of it wasn’t. Maybe her mother had been right. But Kylie didn’t believe in souls, so wasn’t it better to have one day forever than no days? Wasn’t it?

  Fuck you, bitch.

  She turned around and ran back in the direction from which she’d come. At first she didn’t think she could find it, but there it was, the apartment building! And Toby was coming out the lobby door, pulling his jacket closed. He saw her, and she ran to him. He didn’t mean it and she didn’t mean it, and this was the part where they made up, and then all the rest of the loop would be good--the good time after making up. You had to mix the good and bad. The bad made the good better. She ran to him and hugged him, the smell of the wet leather so strong.

  “You were coming after me,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You were,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  Something clutched at her heart. “It’s the best day ever,” she said.

  “I give it a seven point five.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she said. “You got your spooky girl and you had an adventure and you saved the whole world.”

  “When you put it that way it’s a nine. So come on. I’ll buy you a hot drink and you can tell me about the tourists from the fifth dimension.”

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  He looked at his watch. “Five of eleven.”

  “I d
on’t want a hot drink,” she said. “Can you take us some place with a nice view where we can sit in the Vee Dub?”

  “You bet.”

  The city spread out before them. The water of Elliot Bay was black. Rain whispered against the car and the cooling engine ticked down like a slow timer. It was awkward with the separate seats, but they snuggled together, Kylie’s head pillowed on his chest. He turned the radio on--not to his loud noise-music but a jazz station, like a complement to the rain. They talked, intimately. Kylie invented a life and gave it to him, borrowing from stories her mother and grandmother had told her. He called her spooky, his term of endearment, and he talked about what they would do tomorrow. She accepted the gift of the future he was giving her, but she lived in this moment, now, this sweet inhalation of the present, this happy, happy ending. Then the lights of Seattle seemed to haze over. Kylie closed her eyes, her hand on the explosive sphere, and her mind slumbered briefly in a dark spun cocoon.

  Kylie punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her.

  * * * *

  YELLOW CARD MAN

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  New writer Paolo Bacigalupi made his first sale in 1998 to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, took a break from the genre for several years, and has returned to it in the new century, with new sales to F&SF and Asimov’s. His story “The Calorie Man” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, was a Hugo finalist, and appeared in our Twenty-third Annual Collection; he’s also had stories in our Twenty-first and Twenty-second Annual Collections. Bacigalupi lives with his family in western Colorado, where he works for an environmental newspaper.

  In the gritty and compelling story that follows, he acts as our guide to a harrowing but all-too-probable future Bangkok—one that most of us would probably rather not visit, but which we may be headed toward whether we like it or not.

  * * * *

  Machetes gleam on the warehouse floor, reflecting a red conflagration of jute and tamarind and kink-springs. They’re all around now. The men with their green headbands and their slogans and their wet wet blades. Their calls echo in the warehouse and on the street. Number one son is already gone. Jade Blossom he cannot find, no matter how many times he treadles her phone number. His daughters’ faces have been split wide like blister rust durians.

  More fires blaze. Black smoke roils around him. He runs through his warehouse offices, past computers with teak cases and iron treadles and past piles of ash where his clerks burned files through the night, obliterating the names of people who aided the Tri-Clipper.

  He runs, choking on heat and smoke. In his own gracious office he dashes to the shutters and fumbles with their brass catches. He slams his shoulder against those blue shutters while the warehouse burns and brown-skinned men boil through the door and swing their slick red knives . . .

  Tranh wakes, gasping.

  Sharp concrete edges jam against the knuckles of his spine. A salt-slick thigh smothers his face. He shoves away the stranger’s leg. Sweat-sheened skin glimmers in the blackness, impressionistic markers for the bodies that shift and shove all around him. They fart and groan and turn, flesh on flesh, bone against bone, the living and the heat-smothered dead all together.

  A man coughs. Moist lungs and spittle gust against Tranh’s face. His spine and belly stick to the naked sweating flesh of the strangers around him. Claustrophobia rises. He forces it down. Forces himself to lie still, to breathe slowly, deeply, despite the heat. To taste the sweltering darkness with all the paranoia of a survivor’s mind. He is awake while others sleep. He is alive while others are long dead. He forces himself to lie still, and listen.

  Bicycle bells are ringing. Down below and far away, ten thousand bodies below, a lifetime away, bicycle bells chime. He claws himself out of the mass of tangled humanity, dragging his hemp sack of possessions with him. He is late. Of all the days he could be late, this is the worst possible one. He slings the bag over a bony shoulder and feels his way down the stairs, finding his footing in the cascade of sleeping flesh. He slides his sandals between families, lovers, and crouching hungry ghosts, praying that he will not slip and break an old man’s bone. Step, feel, step, feel.

  A curse rises from the mass. Bodies shift and roll. He steadies himself on a landing amongst the privileged who lie flat, then wades on. Downward, ever downward, round more turnings of the stair, wading down through the carpet of his countrymen. Step. Feel. Step. Feel. Another turn. A hint of gray light glimmers far below. Fresh air kisses his face, caresses his body. The waterfall of anonymous flesh resolves into individuals, men and women sprawled across one another, pillowed on hard concrete, propped on the slant of the windowless stair. Gray light turns gold. The tinkle of bicycle bells comes louder now, clear like the ring of cibiscosis chimes.

  Tranh spills out of the high-rise and into a crowd of congee sellers, hemp weavers, and potato carts. He puts his hands on his knees and gasps, sucking in swirling dust and trampled street dung, grateful for every breath as sweat pours off his body. Salt jewels fall from the tip of his nose, spatter the red paving stones of the sidewalk with his moisture. Heat kills men. Kills old men. But he is out of the oven; he has not been cooked again, despite the blast furnace of the dry season.

  Bicycles and their ringing bells flow past like schools of carp, commuters already on their way to work. Behind him the high-rise looms, forty stories of heat and vines and mold. A vertical ruin of broken windows and pillaged apartments. A remnant glory from the old energy Expansion now become a heated tropic coffin without air conditioning or electricity to protect it from the glaze of the equatorial sun. Bangkok keeps its refugees in the pale blue sky, and wishes they would stay there. And yet he has emerged alive; despite the Dung Lord, despite the white shirts, despite old age, he has once again clawed his way down from the heavens.

  Tranh straightens. Men stir woks of noodles and pull steamers of baozi from their bamboo rounds. Gray high-protein U-Tex rice gruel fills the air with the scents of rotting fish and fatty acid oils. Tranh’s stomach knots with hunger and a pasty saliva coats his mouth, all that his dehydrated body can summon at the scent of food. Devil cats swirl around the vendors’ legs like sharks, hoping for morsels to drop, hoping for theft opportunities. Their shimmering chameleon-like forms flit and flicker, showing calico and Siamese and orange tabby markings before fading against the backdrop of concrete and crowding hungry people that they brush against. The woks burn hard and bright with green-tinged methane, giving off new scents as rice noodles splash into hot oil. Tranh forces himself to turn away.

  He shoves through the press, dragging his hemp bag along with him, ignoring who it hits and who shouts after him. Incident victims crouch in the doorways, waving severed limbs and begging from others who have a little more. Men squat on tea stools and watch the day’s swelter build as they smoke tiny rolled cigarettes of scavenged gold leaf tobacco and share them from lip to lip. Women converse in knots, nervously fingering yellow cards as they wait for white shirts to appear and stamp their renewals.

  Yellow card people as far as the eye can see: an entire race of people, fled to the great Thai Kingdom from Malaya where they were suddenly unwelcome. A fat clot of refugees placed under the authority of the Environment Ministry’s white shirts as if they were nothing but another invasive species to be managed, like cibiscosis, blister rust, and genehack weevil. Yellow cards, yellow men. Huang ren all around, and Tranh is late for his one opportunity to climb out of their mass. One opportunity in all his months as a yellow card Chinese refugee. And now he is late. He squeezes past a rat seller, swallowing another rush of saliva at the scent of roasted flesh, and rushes down an alley to the water pump. He stops short.

  Ten others stand in line before him: old men, young women, mothers, boys.

  He slumps. He wants to rage at the setback. If he had the energy—if he had eaten well yesterday or the day before or even the day before that he would scream, would throw his hemp bag on the street and stamp on it until it turned t
o dust—but his calories are too few. It is just another opportunity squandered, thanks to the ill luck of the stairwells. He should have given the last of his baht to the Dung Lord and rented body-space in an apartment with windows facing east so that he could see the rising sun, and wake early.

  But he was cheap. Cheap with his money. Cheap with his future. How many times did he tell his sons that spending money to make more money was perfectly acceptable? But the timid yellow card refugee that he has become counseled him to save his baht. Like an ignorant peasant mouse he clutched his cash to himself and slept in pitch-black stairwells. He should have stood like a tiger and braved the night curfew and the ministry’s white shirts and their black batons. . . . And now he is late and reeks of the stairwells and stands behind ten others, all of whom must drink and fill a bucket and brush their teeth with the brown water of the Chao Phraya River.