The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Ruth.

  “We couldn’t let you go on thinking like you do. You act like I’m some monster. I’m just a person.”

  “A rather nice-looking young lady,” Graves added.

  “People are monsters,” I said.

  “Like you, huh?” Ruth said. “But they can be saints, too.”

  That made me laugh. “Don’t feed me platitudes. You can’t even read.”

  “You make such a big deal out of reading. Yeah, well, times change. I get along fine, don’t I?”

  The mall guard broke in. “Actually, miss, the reason we caught on to you is that someone saw you walk into the men’s room.” He looked embarrassed.

  “But you didn’t catch me, did you?” Ruth snapped back. She turned to me. “You’re afraid of change. No wonder you live back here.”

  “This is all in my imagination,” I said. “It’s because of your drugs.”

  “It is all in your imagination,” the burning man repeated. His voice was a whisper. “What you see in the future is what you are able to see. You have no faith in God or your fellow man.”

  “He’s right,” said Ruth.

  “Bull. Psychobabble.”

  “Speaking of babble,” Milo said, “I figured out where you got that goo-goo-goo stuff. Talk—”

  “Never mind that,” Ruth broke in. “Here’s the truth. The future is just a place. The people there are just people. They live differently. So what? People make what they want of the world. You can’t escape human failings by running into the past.” She rested her hand on my leg. “I’ll tell you what you’ll find when you get to Toronto,” she said. “Another city full of human beings.”

  This was crazy. I knew it was crazy. I knew it was all unreal, but somehow I was getting more and more afraid. “So the future is just the present writ large,” I said bitterly. “More bull.”

  “You tell her, pal,” the locker-room boy said.

  Hector, who had been listening quietly, broke in. “For a man from the future, you talk a lot like a native.”

  “You’re the king of bullshit, man,” Milo said. “ ‘Some people devote themselves to artwork’! Jesus!”

  I felt dizzy. “Scut down, Milo. That means ‘Fuck you too.’ ” I shook my head to try to make them go away. That was a mistake: the bus began to pitch like a sailboat. I grabbed for Ruth’s arm but missed. “Who’s driving this thing?” I asked, trying to get out of the seat.

  “Don’t worry,” said Graves. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  “He’s brain-dead,” Milo said.

  “You couldn’t do any better,” said Ruth, pulling me back down.

  “No one is driving,” said the burning man.

  “We’ll crash!” I was so dizzy now that I could hardly keep from being sick. I closed my eyes and swallowed. That seemed to help. A longtime passed; eventually I must have fallen asleep.

  When I woke it was late morning and we were entering the city, cruising down Eglinton Avenue. The bus had a driver after all—a slender black man with neatly trimmed sideburns who wore his uniform hat at a rakish angle. A sign above the windshield said, YOUR DRIVER—SAFE, COURTEOUS, and below that, on the slide-in nameplate, WILBERT CAUL. I felt like I was coming out of a nightmare. I felt happy. I stretched some of the knots out of my back. A young soldier seated across the aisle from me looked my way; I smiled, and he returned it briefly.

  “You were mumbling to yourself in your sleep last night,” he said.

  “Sorry. Sometimes I have bad dreams.”

  “It’s okay. I do too, sometimes.” He had a round open face, an apologetic grin. He was twenty, maybe. Who knew where his dreams came from? We chatted until the bus reached the station; he shook my hand and said he was pleased to meet me. He called me “sir.”

  I was not due back at the library until Monday, so I walked over to Yonge Street. The stores were busy, the tourists were out in droves, the adult theaters were doing a brisk business. Policemen in sharply creased trousers, white gloves, sauntered along among the pedestrians. It was a bright, cloudless day, but the breeze coming up the street from the lake was cool. I stood on the sidewalk outside one of the strip joints and watched the videotaped come-on over the closed circuit. The Princess Laya. Sondra Nieve, the Human Operator. Technology replaces the traditional barker, but the bodies are more or less the same. The persistence of your faith in sex and machines is evidence of your capacity to hope.

  Francis Bacon, in his masterwork The New Atlantis, foresaw the Utopian world that would arise through the application of experimental science to social problems. Bacon, however, could not solve the problems of his own time and was eventually accused of accepting bribes, fined £40,000, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He made no appeal to God, but instead applied himself to the development of the virtues of patience and acceptance. Eventually he was freed. Soon after, on a freezing day in late March, we were driving near Highgate when I suggested to him that cold might delay the process of decay. He was excited by the idea. On impulse he stopped the carriage, purchased a hen, wrung its neck, and stuffed it with snow. He eagerly looked forward to the results of his experiment. Unfortunately, in haggling with the street vendor he had exposed himself thoroughly to the cold and was seized by a chill that rapidly led to pneumonia, of which he died on April 9, 1626.

  There’s no way to predict these things.

  When the videotape started repeating itself I got bored, crossed the street, and lost myself in the crowd.

  Stable Strategies for Middle Management

  * * *

  EILEEN GUNN

  Eileen Gunn is not a prolific writer, but her stories are well worth waiting for, and are relished (and eagerly anticipated) by a small but select group of knowledgeable fans who know that she has a twisted perspective on life un-like anyone else’s, and a strange and pungent sense of humor all her own. She has made several sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as to markets such as Amazing, Proteus, Tales by Moonlight, and Alternate Presidents, and has been a Nebula and Hugo finalist several times. She is the editor and publisher of the jazzy and eclectic electronic magazine The Infinite Matrix (www.infinitematrix.net), and the chairman of the board of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Coming up is her first short story collection, Stable Strategies and Others, and she is at work on a biography of the late Avram Davidson. After brief periods of exile in Brooklyn and San Francisco, she is now back in Seattle, Washington, where she had formerly resided for many years, much to the relief of the other inhabitants.

  In the strange and funny story that follows, a Hugo finalist, she shows us how bioscience may someday make possible career-advancement ploys far more bizarre than any that are possible today.…

  Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has shaped the early insect’s chewing mouth-parts into her descendants’ chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools—pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.

  From the popular science program Insect People!

  I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn’t have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come.

  I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier.


  I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart?

  I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor.

  He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand.

  “Time to get up?” he asked. I nodded. “Oh, God,” he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer.

  “I’ll make coffee,” I said. “Do you want some?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Just a glass of apricot nectar,” he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. “This is real interesting, but it wasn’t in the catalog. I’ll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke’s.”

  “I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches,” I said.

  “Not from the flower arrangements …” he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. “Come here.”

  It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his. We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. “How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?” I asked.

  “There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities.” He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. “Let me know if my tongue is too rough.”

  It was not.

  Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.

  Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

  Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food.

  My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my ten A.M. meeting. Maybe I’d just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.

  Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch.

  In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a textbook example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree.

  He was dressed for success in a pin-striped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates?

  I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, “factoring in the need for pipeline throughout,” “fine-tuning the media mix,” without even cracking a smile.

  Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight from business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn’t like him, but I envied his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected badly on me that I didn’t join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions.

  I didn’t think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I’d take.

  “Yeah, we can do that for you,” I told him. “No problem.” We’d see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end.

  Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered—I’d heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.

  Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry’s arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn’t taste as good as he smelled, but I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn’t to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my stylets to find a capillary.

  Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again.

  “We were discussing the Model 2000 launch. Or have you forgotten?” he said, rubbing his arm.

  “Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning.” I was embarrassed.

  “Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake.” He was annoyed, and I couldn’t really blame him. “Let’s get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I’ve got another meeting at eleven in Building Two.”

  Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course, I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget.…

  During the remainder of the meeting, my glance kept drifting through the open door of the conference room, toward a large decorative plant in the hall, one of those oases of generic greenery that dot the corporate landscape. It didn’t look succulent exactly—it obviously wasn’t what I would have preferred to eat if I hadn’t been so hungry—but I wondered if I swung both ways?

  I grabbed a handful of the broad leaves as I left the room and carried them back to my office. With my tongue, I probed a vein in the thickest part of a leaf. It wasn’t so bad. Tasted green. I sucked them dry and tossed the husks in the wastebasket.

  I was still omnivorous, at least—female mosquitoes don’t eat plants. So the process wasn’t complete.…

  I got a cup of coffee, for company, from the kitchenette and sat in my office with the door closed and wondered what was happening. The incident with Harry disturbed me. Was I turning into a mosquito? If so, what the hell kind of good was that supposed to do me? The company didn’t have any use for a whining loner.

  There was a knock at the door, and my boss stuck his head in. I nodded and gestured him into my office. He sat down in the visitor’s chair on the other side of my desk. From the look on his face, I could tell Harry had talked to him already.

  Tom Samson was an older guy, pre-bioengineering. He was well versed in stimulus-response techniques, but had somehow never made it to the top job. I liked him, but then that was what he intended. Without sacrificing authority, he had pitched his appearance, his gestures, the tone of his voice, to the warm end of the spectrum. Even though I knew what he was doing, it worked.

  He looked at me with what appeared to be sympathy, but was actually a practiced sign stimulus, intended to defuse any fight-or-flight response. “Is there something bothering you, Margaret?”

  “Bother
ing me? I’m hungry, that’s all. I get short-tempered when I’m hungry.”

  Watch it, I thought. He hasn’t referred to the incident; leave it for him to bring up. I made my mind go blank and forced myself to meet his eyes. A shifty gaze is a guilty gaze.

  Tom just looked at me, biding his time, waiting for me to put myself on the spot. My coffee smelt burnt, but I stuck my tongue in it and pretended to drink. “I’m just not human until I’ve had my coffee in the morning.” Sounded phony. Shut up, I thought.

  This was the opening that Tom was waiting for. “That’s what I wanted to speak to you about, Margaret.” He sat there, hunched over in a relaxed way, like a mountain gorilla, unthreatened by natural enemies. “I just talked to Harry Winthrop, and he said you were trying to suck his blood during a meeting on marketing strategy.” He paused for a moment to check my reaction, but the neutral expression was fixed on my face and I said nothing. His face changed to project disappointment. “You know, when we noticed you were developing three distinct body segments, we had great hopes for you. But your actions just don’t reflect the social and organizational development we expected.”

  He paused, and it was my turn to say something in my defense. “Most insects are solitary, you know. Perhaps the company erred in hoping for a termite or an ant. I’m not responsible for that.”

  “Now, Margaret,” he said, his voice simulating genial reprimand. “This isn’t the jungle, you know. When you signed those consent forms, you agreed to let the B-E staff mold you into a more useful corporate organism. But this isn’t nature, this is man reshaping nature. It doesn’t follow the old rules. You can truly be anything you want to be. But you have to cooperate.”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” I said, cooperatively. “I’m putting in eighty hours a week.”