The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  The arthropod advanced beyond the reach of the waves and began nudging through the seawrack. Eat hearty, Ivan thought, taking a cautious step toward the animal. He reflected on the persistence in vertebrates of revulsion toward arthropods. He felt kindly toward this arthropod, at least. Both of us, he thought, are pioneers.

  As last he reluctantly tore himself away and returned to Dilks, who had sagged to the ground by the platform. Ivan propped the stricken man up and pointed toward the ripple. “We’ve got to cut this short,” he said.

  Dilks indicated disagreement, but more weakly than before.

  “You’re hurt,” Ivan said, holding him up, “and we’ve got to go back.” There was a crackle of static in Ivan’s helmetphone, and he heard Dilks speak a single word.

  “… failed …”

  “No! We didn’t fail! We got here alive, and we’re getting back alive. Nobody can take that away from us, Dilks. We’re the first. And we’ll come again.”

  They got clumsily onto the platform. Ivan made Dilks as comfortable as possible and then activated the platform. The air around the ripple began to roil and glow. Ivan gripped the railing and faced the glow. “Do your goddamn worst.”

  Rubis had offered Ivan a cigar, which he politely refused, and stuck one into his own mouth, and Larry had lurched forward to light it. Now, enveloped in smoke, Rubis said, “Trilobites just never did catch on with the public. Maybe if you’d found a really big trilobite. On the other hand, trilobites didn’t make for very cuddly stuffed toys, either, and that’s always an important consideration. The merchandising, I mean.”

  “Candy shaped like brachiopods and sea scorpions? How about breakfast cereal? Sugar-frosted Trilobites?”

  Perfectly serious, Rubis nodded. “Now, if you’d’ve set the dial in your time machine for the age of dinosaurs instead.”

  “There wasn’t actually a time machine. Just the space-time anomaly, the hole. And it just happened to open up where it did.”

  “That’s too bad. And ain’t it the way it always happens with science? We spent a godzillion dollars sending people to the Moon and Mars, and the Moon’s just a rock and Mars’s just a damn desert.”

  “Well, I don’t know anyone honestly expected—”

  “Now, dinosaurs, dinosaurs’ve been hot sellers forever. Dino toys, VR—they had all that stuff when I was a kid, and it still outsells every damn thing in sight. And every two, three years, regular as laxatives, another big dino movie. But what’ve you got? You got nothing, I’m sorry to say.” He began to count on his fingers the things which Ivan did not have. “You got no big concept. You got no merchandisable angle. You got no crossover potential. Crossover potential’s very big these days. You know, like Tarzan meets Frankenstein. James Bond versus Mata Hari. But, most of all, you haven’t got dinosaurs, though. Everybody knows if you’re going to tell a story set in the prehistoric past, there have to be dinosaurs. Without dinosaurs, there’s no drama.”

  “I guess not,” Ivan said, and took a long sip of his drink, and looked at the shimmering blue-green water in the pool. The slowly stirring air seemed to carry a faint smell of burning. He said to Rubis, “Let me bounce an idea for a different kind of time-travel story off you. Tell me what you think.”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “Okay. You have to bear in mind that when we speak of traveling backward through time, into the past, what we’re really talking about is traveling between just two of infinite multiple Earths. Some of these multiple Earths may be virtually identical, some may be subtly different, some are wildly different—as different as modern and prehistoric times. Anyway, what you actually do when you travel through time is go back and forth between Earths. Earth as it is, here and now, and another Earth, Earth as it was in the Paleozoic Era.”

  Rubis murmured, “Weird,” and smiled.

  “Now let’s say someone from our present-day visits a prehistoric Earth and returns. After a while, after the initial excitement’s died down, he starts to ponder the implications of travel back and forth between multiple Earths. He’s come back to a present-day Earth that may or may not be his own present-day Earth. If it’s virtually identical, well, if the only difference is, say, the outcome of some subatomic occurrence, then it doesn’t matter. But maybe there’s something subtly off on the macro level. It wouldn’t be anything major. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Confederate States would all’ve gone down to defeat. Or maybe the time-traveler only suspects that something may be subtly off. His problem is, he’s never quite sure, he can’t decide whether something is off or he only thinks it is, so he’s always looking for the telling detail. But there are so many details. If he never knew in the first place how many plays Shakespeare really wrote or who all those European kings were …”

  Rubis nodded. “I get it. Not bad.” He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “But I still think it needs dinosaurs.”

  Ivan chuckled softly, without mirth. “You should look up my niece’s boyfriend.” He turned on his seat, toward the burning hills.

  They swept down Mulholland. Ivan said to Don, “Thanks for taking me. I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun.” Don gave him a curious look. “No, really. I had a very good time, a wonderful time.”

  “Probably a better time than I did.”

  Ivan made a noncommittal sound. “I needed this experience as a kind of reality check.”

  Don laughed sharply. “Hollywood isn’t the place to come for a reality check.”

  “Well, okay. Let’s just say I had a very enlightening and entertaining poolside chat with our host.”

  “Johnny Rubis? Christ. He wasn’t our host. Our host was a swine in human form named Lane. He was holding court indoors the whole time. I went in and did my dip and rise and got the hell out as fast as I could. Whatever Rubis may’ve told you he was doing by the pool, he was just showing off. See what a big deal I am. There were guys all over the place doing the same thing—women, too. Dropping names and making a show of pissant phone calls. See what big deals we are. Whatever Rubis may’ve told you, he’s not that high in the food chain. A year ago he was probably packaging videos with titles like Trailer Park Sluts. He’s an example of the most common form of life in Hollywood. The self-important butthead. I know, I’ve worked for plenty like him.”

  “Writing novels based on movies based on novels?”

  Don shook his head. “Not me. Not lately, anyway?”

  Ivan wondered if Don despised himself as much as he apparently despised everyone else in Hollywood. He hoped it was not so. More than anything, he hoped it was not so. “Don,” he said, “I’m sorry I said that. I’m really terribly sorry.”

  Don shrugged. “No offense taken.” He gave Ivan a quick grin. “Hey, big brother, I’ve been insulted by professionals. It’s one of the things writers in Hollywood get paid for.”

  They rode in silence for a time.

  Then Don said, “Do you know what a monkey trap is?”

  “Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but do you know how it works? You take a dry gourd and cut a small hole in it, just big enough for the monkey to get its hand through. You put a piece of food inside the gourd and attach the gourd to a tree or a post. The monkey puts his hand into the gourd, grabs the piece of food, and then can’t pull his fist back through the hole. He could get away if he’d only let go of the food, but he just can’t make himself let go. So, of course, he’s trapped.”

  “Is the money really that good?”

  “Christ, Ivan, the money’s incredible. But it isn’t just the money. What it is, is that every great once in a long goddamn while, against all the odds—remember, before all this happened, I worked in the next best habitat favorable to self-important buttheads, which is politics. While you were off exploring prehistoric times, I was writing like a sumbitch on fire and trying to get the hell out of Texas. I paid the rent, however, by working for the state legislature. Whenever a legislator wanted to lay down a barrage of memorial resolutions, I wa
s the anonymous flunky who unlimbered the ‘whereases’ and the ‘be it resolveds.’ Every now and then, I wrote about forgotten black heroes of the Texas Revolution, forgotten women aviators of World War Two—something, anyway, that meant something. But, of course, in those resolutions, everything was equally important. Most of my assignments were about people’s fiftieth wedding anniversaries, high-school football teams, rattlesnake roundups. Finally, I was assigned to write a resolution designating, I kid you not, Texas Bottled Water Day. Some people from the bottling industry were in town, lobbying for God remembers what, and someone in the lege thought it’d be real nice to present them with a resolution. Thus, Texas Bottled Water Day. When I saw the request, I looked my boss straight in the eye, and I told him, This is not work for a serious artist. He quite agreed. First chance he got, he fired me.”

  “Maybe you should’ve quit before it came to that.”

  “Well, I’d’ve quit anyway as soon as the writing took off.” Don changed his grip on the steering wheel. “But while I was a legislative drudge, I lived for those few brief moments when the work really meant something.”

  His face, it seemed to Ivan, was suddenly transformed by some memory of happiness. Or perhaps it was just the car. The car cornered like a dream.

  Have Not Have

  * * *

  GEOFF RYMAN

  Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone—the magazine where almost of all his published short fiction has appeared—with his brilliant novella “The Un-conquered Country” that he first attracted any serious attention. “The Unconquered Country,” one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of www.ryman.com, and which in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent books are two new novels, Lust and Air. His stories have appeared in our Twelfth, Thirteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth through Twenty-first annual collections.

  As the poignant and disquieting story that follows demonstrates, progress always comes—whether you want it to or not.

  Mae lived in the last village in the world to go on line. After that, everyone else went on Air.

  Mae was the village’s fashion expert. She advised on makeup, sold cosmetics, and provided good dresses. Every farmer’s wife needed at least one good dress. The richer wives, like Mr. Wing’s wife Kwan, wanted more than one.

  Mae would sketch what was being worn in the capital. She would always add a special touch: a lime green scarf with sequins; or a lacy ruffle with colorful embroidery. A good dress was for display. “We are a happier people and we can wear these gay colors,” Mae would advise.

  “Yes, that is true,” her customer might reply, entranced that fashion expressed their happy culture. “In the photographs, the Japanese women all look so solemn.”

  “So full of themselves,” said Mae, and lowered her head and scowled, and she and her customer would laugh, feeling as sophisticated as anyone in the world.

  Mae got her ideas as well as her mascara and lipsticks from her trips to the town. Even in those days, she was aware that she was really a dealer in information. Mae had a mobile phone. The mobile phone was necessary, for the village had only one line telephone, in the tea room. She needed to talk to her suppliers in private, because information shared aloud in the tea room was information that could no longer be sold.

  It was a delicate balance. To get into town, she needed to be driven, often by a client. The art then was to screen the client from her real sources.

  So Mae took risks. She would take rides by herself with the men, already boozy after the harvest, going down the hill for fun. Sometimes she needed to speak sharply to them, to remind them who she was.

  The safest ride was with the village’s schoolteacher, Mr. Shen. Teacher Shen only had a pony and trap, so the trip, even with an early rise, took one whole day down and one whole day back. But there was no danger of fashion secrets escaping with Teacher Shen. His interests lay in poetry and the science curriculum. In town, they would visit the ice cream parlor, with its clean tiles, and he would lick his bowl, guiltily, like a child. He was a kindly man, one of their own, whose education was a source of pride for the whole village. He and Mae had known each other longer than they could remember.

  Sometimes, however, the ride had to be with someone who was not exactly a friend.

  In the April before everything changed there was to be an important wedding.

  Seker, whose name meant Sugar, was the daughter of the village’s pilgrim to Mecca, their Haj. Seker was marrying into the Atakoloo family, and the wedding was a big event. Mae was to make her dress.

  One of Mae’s secrets was that she was a very bad seamstress. The wedding dress was being made professionally, and Mae had to get into town and collect it. When Sunni Haseem offered to drive her down in exchange for a fashion expedition, Mae had to agree.

  Sunni herself was from an old village family, but her husband Faysal Haseem was from further down the hill. Mr. Haseem was a beefy brute whom even his wife did not like except for his suits and money. He puffed on cigarettes and his tanned fingers were as thick and weathered as the necks of turtles. In the back seat with Mae, Sunni giggled and prodded and gleamed with the thought of visiting town with her friend and confidant who was going to unleash her beauty secrets.

  Mae smiled and whispered, promising much. “I hope my source will be present today,” she said. “She brings me my special colors, you cannot get them anywhere else. I don’t ask where she gets them.” Mae lowered her eyes and her voice. “I think her husband.…”

  A dubious gesture, meaning, that perhaps the goods were stolen, stolen from—who knows?—supplies meant for foreign diplomats? The tips of Mae’s fingers rattled once, in provocation, across her client’s arm.

  The town was called Yeshibozkay, which meant Green Valley. It was now approached through corridors of raw apartment blocks set on beige desert soil. It had a new jail and discos with mirror balls, billboards, illuminated shop signs and Toyota jeeps that belched out blue smoke.

  But the town center was as Mae remembered it from childhood. Traditional wooden houses crowded crookedly together, flat-roofed with shutters, shingle-covered gables and tiny fading shop signs. The old market square was still full of peasants selling vegetables laid out on mats. Middle-aged men still played chess out-side tiny cafes; youths still prowled in packs.

  There was still the public address system. The address system barked out news and music from the top of the electricity poles. Its sounds drifted over the city, announcing public events or new initiatives against drug dealers. It told of progress on the new highway, and boasted of the well-known entertainers who were visiting the town.

  Mr. Haseem parked near the market, and the address system seemed to enter Mae’s lungs, like cigarette smoke, perfume, or hair spray. She stepped out of the van and breathed it in. The excitement of being in the city trembled in her belly. As much as the bellowing of shoppers, farmers and donkeys; as much as the smell of raw petrol and cut greenery and drains, the address system made her spirits rise. She and her middle-aged client looked on each other and gasped and giggled at them-s
elves.

  “Now,” Mae said, stroking Sunni’s hair, her cheek. “It is time for a complete makeover. Let’s really do you up. I cannot do as good work up in the hills.”

  Mae took her client to Halat’s, the same hairdresser as Sunni might have gone to anyway. But Mae was greeted by Halat with cries and smiles and kisses on the cheek. That implied a promise that Mae’s client would get special treatment. There was a pretense of consultancy. Mae offered advice, comments, cautions. Careful! she has such delicate skin! Hmm, the hair could use more shaping there. And Halat hummed as if perceiving what had been hidden before and then agreed to give the client what she would otherwise have given. But Sunni’s nails were soaking, and she sat back in the center of attention, like a queen.

  All of this allowed the hairdresser to charge more. Mae had never pressed her luck and asked for a cut. Something beady in Halat’s eyes told her there would be no point. What Mae got out of it was standing, and that would lead to more work later.

  With cucumbers over her eyes, Sunni was safely trapped. Mae announced, “I just have a few errands to run. You relax and let all cares fall away.” She disappeared before Sunni could protest.

  Mae ran to collect the dress. A disabled girl, a very good seamstress called Miss Soo, had opened up a tiny shop of her own.

  Miss Soo was grateful for any business, poor thing, skinny as a rail and twisted. After the usual greetings, Miss Soo shifted round and hobbled and dragged her way to the back of the shop to fetch the dress. Her feet hissed sideways across the uneven concrete floor. Poor little thing, Mae thought. How can she sew?

  Yet Miss Soo had a boyfriend in the fashion business. Genuinely in the fashion business, far away in the capital city, Balshang. The girl often showed Mae his photograph. It was like a magazine photograph. The boy was very handsome, with a shiny shirt and coiffed-up hair. She kept saying she was saving up money to join him. It was a mystery to Mae what such a boy was doing with a cripple for a girl-friend. Why did he keep contact with her? Publicly Mae would say to friends of the girl: it is the miracle of love, what a good heart he must have. Otherwise she kept her own counsel which was this: you would be very wise not to visit him in Balshang.