The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “No problem. I’m glad you checked. It might not have been me, after all. I might have been somebody else.”

  “Right. Everything okay then, right?”

  “Right. And I have a weapon, remember?”

  “I remember. I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “I do.”

  “You’re the doctor.”

  The door clicked shut. The inner door opened. Milo jumped.

  “Can you fly like that all the time, or was it just some kind of crazy fluke?” The big kid speared one of Milo’s fries—“You mind?”—and shoveled it on in. He was only an inch taller than Milo, if that, but the swagger made it six. He never stopped talking except to swallow. “Because if you can do that whenever you want to, little man, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  They sat in a corner of the big, greasy restaurant. The light there was like bleach, harsh and merciless. Cadaverous chain smokers sucked coffee and talked to themselves, silently or aloud. With one hand, a lean, gap-toothed Okie was rocking her toddler’s walker, while, with the other, finger by finger, she managed a hot-dog bun oozing green. At the next table, three college students discussed Heidegger over meatloaf. The proprietor, Aristotle Jitsi, sweet-talked a girlfriend on the phone pinched between his ear and shoulder, while he scraped the grill.

  The big kid wore a bowler hat and a black leather jacket, the overcoat kind favored by suave Italian street toughs, not the motorcycle kind. He had drawstring pants on, loose, with wide vertical stripes, red and white. His shoes were black leather Danskins-a rope walker? A ballet dancer? The ensemble didn’t make much sense. “Well? Can you?”

  Milo mopped up ketchup with a crust of his grilled cheese, then didn’t eat it. He pushed the whole plate of French fries toward the big kid. “I don’t know what happened … . Thanks, I’m not hungry anymore.” Milo sneaked a look down at his own clothes. He never knew what he was wearing until he looked: T-shirt, faded jeans, sneakers, the cowboy belt they gave him last year on his birthday—lassoed Brahma bull buckle.

  “You weren’t trying to kill yourself, were you?”

  “No.”

  “I think you could do it again. I think you’ve got some kind of a talent. I was just walking by, and I saw you whistling down like a dropped bomb. I heard the thud. I just about threw up. Then I ran up, and there you were, folding in your wings. Are they wings? Where did you get them? Do you make ’em? Your wings and that furry stuff you tucked away somewhere. For aerodynamics, right? Come on! I’m in the show business, little man. I could do something for you. Tell me some stuff … . How about a piece of pie?”

  Milo got up from the table and looked around for an exit.

  “Hey, sit back down. I’m not done with you. Where you going, anyway? I bet you got no place to stay. Look at you. I can get you a place to stay, no sweat, no charge, but talk to me, little man, talk to me.”

  Milo started to walk, but a twinge in his calves stopped him. He didn’t know what to do with his legs anymore. He felt like an unmagnetized compass. Where to go? Not the group home—they’d ship him back to Devore! Outside of that, one place seemed as good as another. He could live here, talking to himself, breathing cigarettes, eating grease. He could die here, rocking some toddler in a walker, waiting for his teeth to rot.

  “Come back,” the big kid said. “I’ll buy you a piece of pie. I’m rich as Croesus. I’m in the show business.”

  Milo sat down. “But I don’t feel like talking. I don’t know what happened, honest. Some guy was after me. He thought I had something he wanted, but I don’t have anything. Do I look like I have anything?”

  “What about those wings, boy? Those must be something to have.”

  “Do I look like I have any secret pockets on me?” Milo lifted his arms up over his head. “You must have been seeing things. I just landed lucky.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Something’s fishy here, little man, but I don’t care. I like you. I live off fishy, anyway. Look at this.” The big kid pulled a card out of his inner vest pocket and spun it across the table in front of Milo:

  *** MOON * AND * STARS ***

  Spectacles, Phantasmagoria, Puppets

  for

  Festivals, Conventions, Parties,

  Theatrical Events, Promotions

  Of Every Conceivable Variety!!!

  by

  S. VERDUCCI, MASTER SHOWMAN

  (Equidecomposabilization Services Available

  to Select Clientele)

  “What’s equidecohoozits?”

  “That’s a sort of code word, little man. People who need it generally know that word; when they see it on my card, they know that I can supply it. It’s a sort of a side line.”

  “What does it mean?”

  The big kid leaned across the table and spoke to Milo in a low voice. He watched Milo as he spoke, as if to measure Milo’s response, word by word. “Look here, suppose you got two balls, okay? A great big one and a little bitsy one, both of them thick as a brick. Suppose I told you I had a way of taking the bitsy one apart and putting it back together so it was just as big as the great biggy, or making the biggy into a bitsy without adding or taking away a single atom? You reckon that would be handy?”

  “That’s what Dede wanted to know!” Milo started in his chair as if he’d touched a high power line. He hadn’t spoken or thought that name for eight years. He coughed, trying to hide his shock, but the big kid hadn’t missed it.

  “Who’s Dede?”

  “I don’t know. Just somebody. I told you, I don’t feel like talking.”

  “Is she some kind of a brain?”

  “She was my sister. Leave it alone, okay?”

  “Okay, okay!” the big kid said. “I got brains in my family too—brains and weirdoes, take your pick. I’m the only normal one … Look at the back of the card.” Milo had to tilt the card to catch the light just so, but then he saw—there was a rainbow across it. “I’m a puppeteer, little man. I’m S. Verducci, traveling showman: MOON & STARS, Inc. And I want you to work with me. What do you say to that? You’ll be rich as Croesus, too.”

  “I don’t know. You gonna put me up for the night?”

  “Didn’t I say so? Let’s go. You’re tired, huh? Wait—pie?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s your name?”

  “Milo.”

  “Okay, Milo, follow me. Follow me, flying boy.” S. Verducci dropped a silver dollar into his glass of water, which was still full. He picked up a crushed, empty hard-pack of Marlboros from the floor, tore off one side and placed it over the top of the glass. Then, holding the cardboard there, he inverted the glass on the table and slipped the cardboard out. The silver dollar was at the bottom of an upsidedown glass of water. “Don’t you love it? Let the waiter earn his tip, huh? It’s okay—Jitsi likes me.”

  Milo followed S. Verducci past the coffee hounds, the welfare mothers, the college brains—a hooker moving in—and past the counter, to the door.

  “Bye-bye Jitsi, you old poisoner!” S. Verducci said.

  “Bye-bye, Moon and Stars!”

  Out the door into the breezy evening.

  They walked twenty blocks, increasingly dark, increasingly run-down. Milo spied Dede watching from behind trash cans, though he was careful not to look. She disguised herself as a pimp cruising by in a vintage Cadillac. Her telescope was trained on Milo from a tenement window. And Devore was with her. He was small. He could hide anywhere, even behind fire hydrants maybe, or down below a sewer grate, phoning Milo’s position in to Dede, who had a cop’s uniform, a patrol car and a gun. Devore had a gun, too. He’d said so.

  Don’t think about Dede. There was a way to unthink things, to hold them in the blind spot. All it took was a knot in your stomach—and insomnia. Don’t think about … who?

  They came to a sooty storefront to which S. Verducci had a key. Stenciled across one large bay window in bold cursive were the words, “THE GRASS AND TREES.” Underneath that: “Coffee and Conve
rsation.” There was a faint red light inside. S. Verducci turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The hinges squeaked. The casement groaned. A wonderful smell of wisteria flowed out.

  “Everything has its portion of smell,” Milo said.

  “Anaxagoras!” said S. Verducci. “Smell, scent, essence, sentience! Everything is everywhere. Nothing’s as solid as it seems! That’s my whole business, little man! How did you know that?”

  “My sister used to say it, that’s all.”

  They walked past round tables with chairs on top of them. At the back, they turned a tight corner, and Verducci flicked on a light. They were at the top of a staircase leading to the basement. “Come on.” He led Milo into a sort of black box theater downstairs, with a dozen transplanted church pews around a square platform. There was a large canopied bed onstage. “You can sleep here. I’ll sleep upstairs. There’s a toilet around the corner. I’ll leave the light on at the top of the stairwell so you don’t get totally spooked. See you in the morning, champ.”

  S. Verducci pulled off the bowler. He shook his head, and a stream of brown hair tumbled down to his waist.

  “You’re a girl!” Milo said.

  “Sure. What did you think?”

  “What does the ‘S’ stand for?”

  “Sylvie. Sweet dreams, little man.” She climbed the stairs, leaving Milo alone, in the cellar, in the dark.

  Dede at the library on a Saturday morning, Milo in her lap with a Dr. Seuss. He peers up at the book she’s reading, sees diagrams that look like envelopes folded funny and ones like globes with twisted meridians. There are letters Dede says are Greek and words she says are German. One Hebrew letter: aleph. Aleph with a tiny zero. Aleph with a tiny one. And a lazy eight: infinity.

  “Is this how you do it, Milo?” Dede whispers. She doesn’t expect an answer. At home Mama is washing her hands. Washing her hands and washing her hands.

  Suddenly he is in the dark cellar at The Grass and Trees again, the air swarming with hypnagogic images, red and green, intricate, impenetrable geometries. He feels that he has just screamed, but nothing stirs. He rubs himself all over to make sure he is a human being. He checks his skin for fur, his shoulder blades for wings.

  Sylvie’s in cahoots with Devore—the thought, like a sudden needle, pierces him, as he remembers where he is.

  He falls asleep again, and when he blows out the candles, seven of them plus one for good luck, all at once he finds himself on the wrong side of his lips. He is a puff of air eddying around the flames. It only lasts a second. Then all the candles are out. He smiles, but everyone else is screaming. Some of the children cover their eyes. “What’s wrong?” Milo says. Dede is watching with intense curiosity. Curiosity and desire.

  Mama hasn’t seen it. Mama is in the kitchen washing the sink over and over. Papa’s eyes are bulging, his mouth hangs open, and his muscles are drawn so tight he looks like a starved alley cat. “What did you do? What the hell kind of trick is that?” He licks his lips and scans the room with a wild look. “Never mind! Never mind!” He runs to the door, then runs back, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I didn’t see nothing.” He shakes one of the guests. “Shut up! Shut up! Everything’s okay!” They all stop crying, terrified. “Am I right, Milo? Am I right?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “That was a mean, dumb trick, Milo. What, did you sneak under the table and back, huh? Don’t you ever let me see you do that again.” Milo won’t.

  “What’s the matter?” Sylvie, in her striped pants and a sleeveless undershirt, was standing silhouetted at the cellar door. Scant light from the stairway bathed her like earthshine on a slight, crescent moon.

  “Huh?” He sat up. He had been lying fully clothed on top of the covers.

  “You shouted. What’s the matter? Scared of the dark? Tell me. Don’t be ashamed.” She walked toward him. Dim, reflected light played on her bare shoulders, through a tangle of hair. A moment of brighter light on one collarbone, as she brushed the hair away, made Milo lift his gaze to the soft, simple curve of her face, the broad forehead, the gentle slope of her nose, and her full lips. The thin fabric of the undershirt hung away from her torso, down from the peaks of her small breasts, and light diffused through the undershirt, shadowing her breasts like X rays. Then she blended into the teeming dark nearer Milo’s bed.

  “Stay away.”

  “You think I’m gonna rape you or something? There’s a little blue light I was gonna turn on behind the stage. The techy uses it to see what he’s doing when he runs cues. Or maybe you’d like a couple of Kliegs. The control board is back there. I was gonna fiddle with it for you. Don’t bother to say thank you.”

  “Okay. Put on the blue light. Don’t touch me, though.”

  “You’re a pip, you know that?”

  Milo clutched the covers around him and crouched under the canopy while Sylvie walked past him, barely visible in the deepening shadow toward the back of the room. She was just a glint, now and then, a hint of skin, a wrinkle of fabric, disjointed patches of shifting light. Milo heard a click, blue light spilled faintly around the edge of a curtain, then the curtain was pulled back, and the black room filled with blue objects and blue air. It was as if the tide had gone out, leaving jetsam draped with blue algae on blue sand.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “Okay … did I really scream?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark. But this is better. Thank you.”

  “Sure thing. Okay now?” She was crossing the room, making a wide arc around the stage, weaving through the chairs.

  “Yeah … hey!” Milo called to her as she started to mount the stairs again.

  “What?”

  “Why’s there a bed onstage?”

  “Don’t ask.” She trudged upstairs again. Milo heard her scuffling around, then slumping down and groaning quickly into slumber.

  In cahoots. Definitely in cahoots. Milo whispered to himself, “I’m going to watch her. I’m going to find out about her. Her and Devore. They’re up to something. They think I’m dumb, but I’m going to fool them.”

  No thorazine tonight. His muscles itched in places he couldn’t reach to scratch. Every time he closed his eyes, he was deeply asleep; if he winked them open again, it was as if he’d been out for hours. Every sensum was thick with Devore’s malevolence and Sylvie’s conspiracy. Like a bombarded infantryman: “Keep a tight ass, Milo,” he told himself.

  Then Dede was cradling him in her lap, saying, “Everything is made of numbers, Milo. That’s what Pythagoras said. Whatever you are, honey, something’s the same, see? But what? Is it numbers? Euclid’s all wet; there’s no congruence between a little boy and a BankAmerica Mastercard, is there? No similarity, like angles and stuff. They’re not even the same genus of topological space, because you got holes through your head and your butt and your little winkie, but a charge card’s all connected everywhere.

  “Something’s the same though, because you go from this to that and back again, and whatever you are, you’re you, aren’t you? So how do you do it?”

  “Why do you care, Dede?”

  “You do such nice things for me, Milo, when you do those change-ums, I never want it to stop. I gotta figure out what’s going on, so we don’t lose you.” She turns pages so furiously, a few of them rip. The librarian says something, but Dede pays no attention. “Maybe it has something to do with equideco …”

  From upstairs: “Hey! You okay?”

  “What?”

  “You were screaming again.”

  “Sorry!”

  There was no sunlight in the cellar, and therefore no time, just blue. Milo slept and woke like a subway car surfacing and descending through a dark metropolis. He got up to find the toilet. He stumbled past the control board “backstage,” a closet with massive, ancient rheostats, a clipboard on a string, empty Coke bottles, and dust. Passing beyond the sphere of the backstage light, Milo knew where he was by the
sound of his footsteps. They echoed more sharply as he reached the tiled room.

  The bathroom door was held open by a mop bucket full of dirty water. On its scummy surface there were rainbows. Daylight leaked in through the bathroom window. Milo walked into the light and relieved himself into a urinal. The daylight, the tinkle, the morning breeze, were like a benediction. He walked out past the rainbows, the dimmers, and the stage, to the stairway. He smelled bacon.

  He started up the stairs, when a gigantic crow peeked into the stairway from above, cawed a few times and said, in a high, scratchy voice, “Soup’s on, little man!” Milo stumbled three steps backward.

  Then Sylvie’s face appeared next to the crow’s. She continued, in the crow’s voice, “Eggs and toast for humans! Pictures of eggs and toast for the puppets!” Then she thrust out one arm, at the end of it a puppet made of five or six tiny men in trench coats—one puppet with multiple jaws that moved together: “Hiss! Boo!”

  “Oh shut up,” Sylvie said, “or I’ll give you a picture of angleworms to eat.” She pulled out of sight, her puppets with her. A second later the tiny men reappeared. “Angleworms!” they shuddered. “We’re not partial to angleworms!” They scooted off.

  The walls upstairs were covered with posters, masks, hand puppets, and marionettes, from minuscule to elephantine, hanging by hooks and wire. There were posters for wassail consorts, pantomimes, plays by people named Beckett, Ionesco, Tzara, Artaud, old cigarette ads enameled in three colors, embossed on tin; also a wall-sized photograph of a man gleefully smiling as he leapt, birdlike, from a high window onto the street below—a bicyclist trundling past, unawares. “SAUT DANS LA VIDE,” it said underneath. “LEAP INTO NOTHINGNESS,” Sylvie explained.

  Among the masks there were bug-eyed Balinese demons with teeth like tusks; there were lions’ heads, monkeys, frogs, grotesque insects, the mask of a beautiful girl with a skull mask nested underneath, also a variety of clown noses and Swiss carnival masks, larval, exaggerated, alive, that Sylvie said she had received from a “business associate” in Basel. And the puppets: the huge crow and the little men back on their hooks already, mustached villains with black hats, Punch and Judy, Orlando Furioso in a plumed helmet, and also a variety of animals and inanimate objects. There was a printing press puppet, a city block whose tenement windows were mouths, a sky with star eyes and the moon for a mouth, a mountain, a lock and key, a long-legged airplane, and a truck with teeth under its hood, among many still stranger.