The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  The assistant swooped on them from behind her glass counter. She had green hair, which even to Tom seemed reasonable enough, nothing more than a playful use of hair dye, but close-up it didn’t actually appear to be hair at all, but some sort of sleek curtain which reminded him of cellophane. It crackled when she touched it, which she did often, as if she couldn’t quite believe it was there, the way men do when they have just grown a moustache or beard. She and Terr were soon gabbling about brands and tensile strength and power-to-weight ratios and cold-down and thrillbiting and brute thermals and cloud virgins – which Tom guessed was them. But Terr was soaking it all up in the way that she soaked up anything that was new and fresh and exciting. He watched her in the mirror behind the counter, and caught the amazing flash of those storm green eyes. She looked so beautiful when she was like this; intent and surprised. And he longed to touch that meeting of her throat and jaw just beneath her ear, which was still damp from the rain and desperately needed kissing, although this was hardly the appropriate time. And those eyes. He loved the way Terr gazed right back at him when she was about to come; that look itself was enough to send him tumbling, falling into those gorgeous green nebulae, down into the spreading dark core of her pupils which were like forming stars.

  “Of course, it’ll take several weeks, just to make the basic bodily adjustments . . .”

  Was the assistant talking to him? Tom didn’t know or care. He edged slightly closer to the counter to hide the awkward bulge of his erection, and studied the Kendal Mint Cake, which they still had for sale. The brown and the chocolate-coated, and the standard white blocks, which did indeed taste like frozen toothpaste, but much, much sweeter. A man with jade skin and dreadfully thin arms excused-me past Tom to select a big bar, and then another. Tom found it encouraging, to think that Kendal Mint Cake was still thriving in this new age. There were medals and awards on the old-fashioned wrapping, which commemorated expeditions and treks from back in the times when people surmounted physical challenges with their unaided bodies because, as Mallory had said before he disappeared into the mists of the last ridge of Everest, they were there. But it stood to reason that you needed a lot of carbohydrate if your body was to fuel the changes which were necessary which would allow you to, as the adverts claimed, fly like a bird. Or at least flap around like a kite. Pretty much, anyway.

  This was the new world of extreme sports, where, if you wanted to do something that your body wasn’t up to, you simply had your body changed. Buzzing between channels a while back in search of a site which offered Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which to Tom, when he was feeling a bit down, was the equivalent of a warm malt whisky, he’d stumbled across a basketball match, and had paused the search engine, imagining for a moment he’d stumbled across a new version of Fantasia, then wondering at the extraordinary sight of these ten-and twelve-foot giants swaying between each other on their spindly legs, clumsy and graceful as new-born fawns. But this, after all, was the future. It was the world he was in. And Terr was right when she urged him to accept it, and with it this whole idea of flying, and then offered to help with the money, which Tom declined, ridiculously excessive though the cost of it was. He lived cheaply enough most of the time, and the bank was always happy to add more to his student loan so that he could spend the rest of his life repaying it. And he and Terr were not going the whole way, in any case. They were on the nursery slopes, they were ugly chicks still trembling in their nest, they were Dumbo teetering atop that huge ladder in the circus tent. They were cloud virgins. So the heart and circulatory enhancements, and the bone-thinning and the flesh-wasting and the new growth crystals which sent spiderwebs of carbon fiber teasing their way up through your bone marrow, the Kevlar skin that the rapids surfers used, all the stuff which came stacked with health warnings and disclaimers that would have made the Surgeon General’s warning on a packet of full-strength Camels look like a nursery tale: all of that they passed on. They simply went for the basic Honda starter kits of vials and Classic (“Classic” meant boring and ordinary; even Tom had seen enough adverts to know that) wings. That would do – at least for a beginning, Terr said ominously, between humming to herself and swinging the elegant little bag which contained the first installment of their vials as they headed out from the shop into the driving winter rain.

  It was January already, and the weather remained consistently foul for weeks in its own unsettled English way, which was cold and damp, and billows and squalls, and chortling gutters and rainswept parks, and old leaves and dog mess on the slippery Birmingham pavements. The Nissan broke down again too, but in a way which was beyond Tom’s skill to repair. The part he needed might as well have been borne from China on a none-too-fast sea-clipper, the time it took to come. Days and weekends, they were grounded, and sort-of living together in Tom’s digs, or the pounding smoky Rastafarian fug of Terr’s shared house in Handsworth. But Tom liked the Rastas; they took old-fashioned chemicals, they worshipped an old-fashioned God, and talked in their blurred and rambling way of a mythic Africa which would never exist beyond the haze of their dreams. Tom did a little ganja himself, and he did a fair amount of wine, and he lay in bed with Terr back in his digs in Erdington one night when the first men landed on Mars, and they watched the big screen on the wall from the rucked and damp sheets while the landlord’s cat slept on the purring computer.

  “Hey, look . . .” Terr squirmed closer to him. “Roll over. I want to see. I was sure I could feel something just then . . .”

  “I should hope so.”

  Terr chuckled, and Tom rolled over. He stared at the face in the woodgrain of the old mahogany headboard. She drew back the sheets from him. The cold air. The rain at the window. The murmuring of the astronauts as they undocked and began the last slow glide. Her fingers on his bare shoulders, then on his spine. It hurt there. It felt as if her nails were digging.

  “Hey!!!”

  “No no no no no . . .” She pressed him there, her fingers tracing the source of the pain. A definite lump was rising. An outgrowth which, in another age, would have sent you haring to the doctor thinking, cancer . . .

  “I’m jealous Tom. I thought I was going to be the first. It’s like when I was a kid, and I concentrated hard on growing breasts.”

  “And it happened?”

  “Obviously . . . Cheeky sod . . . A bit, any” Slim and warm and womanly, she pressed a little closer. He felt her breath, her lips, down on his back where the quills were growing. She kissed him there. “I check in the mirror every morning. I try to feel there . . .” he felt her murmur. “It’s like a magic spell, isn’t it? Waiting for the vials to work. You haven’t noticed anything on me yet, have you, Tom?”

  “No.” He turned his head and looked at Terr. She was lying on her front too, and the red light of rising Mars on the screen was shining on the perfect skin of her thighs, her buttocks, her spine, her shoulders.

  “You must have been waiting for this to happen for a long time,” she said.

  “What?”

  Her blonde hair swayed as she tipped her head towards the screen. “Men landing on Mars.”

  He nodded.

  “Will it take much longer before they actually touch down?”

  “I suppose a few minutes.”

  “Well, that’s good news . . .” Terr’s hand traveled down his spine. Her knuckles brushed his buttocks, raising the goosebumps. Her fingers explored him there. “Isn’t it . . . ?”

  So they missed the actual instant when the lander kicked up the rusty dust of the surface, but were sharing a celebratory bottle of Asti Spumante an hour or so later when, after an interminable string of adverts, the first ever human being stepped onto the surface of another planet and claimed all its ores and energies and secrets for the benefit of the mission’s various sponsors. Another figure climbed out. Amid the many logos on this one’s suit there was a Honda one, which sent Tom’s mind skittering back towards the growing lump on his back which he could feel like a bad spot no matter how he laid the
pillows now that Terr had mentioned it. How would he sleep from now on? How would they make love? Terr on top, fluttering her Honda wings like a predator as she bowed down to eat him? It was almost a nice idea, but not quite. And the Mars astronauts, even in their suits, didn’t look quite right to Tom either. The suits themselves were okay – they were grey-white, and even had the sort of longer-at-top faceplates he associated with 2001 and Hal and Dave Poole and Kubrick’s incredible journey towards the alien monolith – but they were the wrong shape in the body; too long and thin. It was more like those bad old films; you half expected something horrible and inhuman to slither out of them once they got back into the lander, where it turned out to have crossed light years driven by nothing more than a simple desire to eat people’s brains . . .

  Tom poured out the rest of the Asti into his glass.

  “Hey!” Terr gave him a playful push. He slopped some of it. “What about me? You’ve had almost all of that . . .”

  He ambled off into the cupboard which passed for his kitchen to get another bottle of something, and stroked the landlord’s cat and gave the keyboard of his PC a tweak on the way. It was processing a search in the region of Cygnus, and not on the usual waterhole wavelength. Somebody’s hunch. Not that the PC had found anything; even in those days, he had the bells and whistles rigged for that event. But what was the problem with him, he wondered, as he raked back the door of the fridge and studied its sparse contents? He was watching the first Mars landing, in bed with a naked, beautiful and sexually adventurous woman, while his PC diligently searched the stars for the crucial first sign of intelligent life. If this wasn’t his dream of the future, what on earth was? And even this flying gimmick which Terr was insisting they try together – that fitted in as well, didn’t it? In many ways, the technology that was causing his back to grow spines was a whole lot more impressive than the brute force and money and Newtonian physics which had driven that Martian lander from one planet to another across local space.

  The problem with this manned Mars landing, as Tom had recently overheard someone remark in the university refectory, was that it had come at least four decades too late. Probably more, really. NASA could have gone pretty much straight from Apollo to a Mars project, back at the end of the delirious 1960s. Even then, the problems had been more of money than of science. Compared to politics, compared to getting the right spin and grip on the public’s attention and then seeing the whole thing through Congress before something else took the headlines or the next recession or election came bounding along, the science and the engineering had been almost easy. But a first landing by 1995 at the latest, that had once seemed reasonable – just a few years after establishing the first permanent moonbase. And there really had been Mariner and Viking back in those days of hope and big-budget NASA: technically successful robot probes which had nevertheless demystified Mars and finished off H.G. Wells’ Martians and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ princesses and Lowell’s canals in the popular mind, and which, despite Sagan’s brave talk about Martian giraffes wandering by when the camera wasn’t looking, had scuppered any realistic sense that there might be large and complex Martian lifeforms waiting to be fought against, interviewed, studied, dissected, argued over by theologians, or fallen in love with. Still, there were hints that life might exist on Mars at a microscopic level; those tantalizingly contradictory results from the early Viking landers, and the micro-bacteria supposedly found on Martian meteorites back on Earth. But, as the probes had got more advanced and the organic tests more accurate, even those possibilities had faded. Tom, he’d watched Mars become a dead planet both in the real world, and in the books he loved reading. The bulge-foreheaded Martians faded to primitive cave-dwellers, then to shy kangaroo-like creatures of the arid plains, until finally they became bugs dwelling around vents deep in the hostile Martian soil, then anaerobic algae, until they died out entirely.

  Mars was a dead planet.

  Tom unscrewed the bottle of slivovitz which was the only thing he could find, and went back to bed with Terr, and they watched the figures moving about on the Martian landscape between messages from their sponsors. They were half Martians already. Not that they could breathe the emaciated atmosphere, or survive without their suits on, but nevertheless they had been radically transformed before the launch. Up in space, in null gravity, their bones and their flesh and their nutritional requirements had been thinned down to reduce the payload, then boosted up just a little as they approached Mars a year and a half later so they could cope with the planet’s lesser pull. They were near-sexless creatures with the narrow heads and bulging eyes of a thyroid condition, fingers as long and bony as ET’s. The way they looked, far worse than any flyers, Tom figured that you really didn’t need to search further than these telecasts to find aliens on Mars. Or Belsen victims.

  The slivovitz and the whole thing got to him. He had a dim recollection of turning off the screen at some point, and of making love to Terr, and touching the hollow of her back and feeling a tiny sharp edge there sliding beneath her skin; although he wasn’t quite sure about that, or whether he’d said anything to her afterwards about growing bigger breasts, which had been a joke in any case. In the morning, when she had gone, he also discovered that he had broken up the Honda vials and flushed them down the communal toilet. Bits of the spun glass stuff were still floating there. He nearly forgot his slivovitz headache as he pissed them down. This was one thing he’d done when he was drunk he was sure he’d never regret.

  The winter faded. Terr went flying. Tom didn’t. The spines on her back really weren’t so bad; the wings themselves were still inorganic in those days, carbon fiber and smart fabric, almost like the old microlites, except you bonded them to the quills with organic superglue just before you took the leap, and unbonded them again and stacked them on the roofrack of your car at the end of the day. Terr’s were sensitive enough when Tom touched them, licked them, risked brushing their sharp edges against his penis to briefly add a new and surprising spice to their love-making, although if he grew too rough, too energetic, both he and they were prone to bleed.

  Terr was unbothered about his decision to stop taking the vials in any case. After all, it was his life. And why do something you don’t want to do just to please me? she’d said with her characteristic logic. But Terr was moving with a different set now, with the flyers, and their relationship, as spring began and the clean thermals started to rise on the flanks of Skiddaw and Helvellyn and Ben Nevis, began to have that ease and forgetfulness which Tom, little versed though he was in the ways of love, still recognized as signaling the beginning of the end. Terr had always been one for changing enthusiasms in any case. At university, she was now talking of studying creative writing, or perhaps dropping the literature thing entirely and swapping over to cultural studies, whatever the hell that was. It would be another one of Terr’s enthusiasms, just, as Tom was coming to realize, had been Tom Kelly.

  He still saw plenty of Terr for a while, although it was more often in groups. He enjoyed the jazz with her at Ronnie Scott’s and sat around fluorescent tables in the smart bars along Broad Street with people whose faces often reminded him of those rubber-masked creatures you used to get in Star Trek. The world was changing – just like Terr, it didn’t feel like it was quite his any longer, even though he could reach out and touch it, taste it, smell it. He drove up with her once or twice to the Lakes, and watched her make that first incredible leap from above the pines on Skiddaw and across the wind-rippled grey expanse of Bassenthwaite Lake. He felt nothing but joy and pride at that moment, and almost wished that he, too, could take to the air, but soon, Terr was just another colored dot, swooping and circling in the lemony spring sunlight on her Honda-logoed wings, and no longer a cloud virgin. He could block her out with the finger of one hand.

  So they drifted apart, Tom and Terr, and part of Tom accepted this fact – it seemed like a natural and organic process; you meet, you exchange signals of mutual interest, you fall in love and fuck each o
ther brainless for a while and live in each other’s skin and hair, then you get to know your partner’s friends and foibles and settle into a warmer and easier affection as you explore new hobbies and positions and fetishes until the whole thing becomes just a little stale – and part of Tom screamed and hollered against the loss, and felt as if he was drowning as the sounds, the desperate, pleading signals he wanted to make, never quite seemed to reach the surface. He had, after all, always been shy and diffident with women. Especially the pretty ones. Especially, now, Terr.

  At the end of the summer term, Tom got his postgrad diploma based around his SETI work and Terr didn’t get anything. Just as she’d done with Tom, she’d worn Aston University out as she explored its highways and byways and possibilities with that determination that was so uniquely Terr. Next year, if any would take her and she could gather up the money, she’d have to try another enthusiasm at another university. They hadn’t been lovers for months, which seemed to Tom like years, and had lost regular contact at the time, by pure chance, he last saw her. Tom needed to get on with his life, and had already booked a flight to spend some time at home with his parents in the States while he decided what getting on with life might actually involve for him.