The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Everything has its portion of smell. Sylvie had taken down the chairs from one round table and was laying down two steaming dishes of eggs and toast. Several flies accompanied her, and when Milo approached, they found their way to his face and neck. He slapped at them.

  “Don’t,” Sylvie said. “Those are friends of mine, Eric and Mehitabel. The small one is Beulah. Leave them alone. They’re from upstate.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “I’m a vegetarian, okay?”

  “What about the pig? I smelled bacon.”

  “Nope. I can’t help what kind of grease is caked on the burner. That’s the owner’s, not mine. Pull up and chow down, little man. We’ve got a day ahead of us.”

  Milo sat. Sylvie poured them both coffee. “You’re strange,” Milo said.

  “Strange is good. I like strange.”

  “You’re not rich. Not if you sleep in this place.”

  “Did I say I was rich, Milo?”

  “Rich as Croesus.”

  “No, you got me wrong.” Sylvie squeegeed egg yolk with her toast and folded the toast into her mouth. “Rich in creases, that’s what I said. My costume gets all creased sleeping here under the tables, see? Rich in creases, is what I said. It’s a Biblical locution.”

  “Sure. Who owns this place, if you don’t?” Milo nibbled at his toast, played with the spoon in his coffee. Nonchalant—that’s the ticket.

  “The Grass and Trees? Some guy you don’t know.”

  “You work for him?” Bet it’s Devore, he thought.

  “Hell, no. This is a fellowship I got here. No strings attached. Guy appreciates my artistic ability, see? Why aren’t you eating? Miss the meat?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  He started on the eggs, and then he couldn’t stop. He ravened the toast and licked the plate. Sylvie poured him some more coffee. “Hurry it up, though. We got a gig the other side of town.”

  “We?”

  Sylvie shooed Milo from the table, cleared it, and had him put the chairs back up and sweep while she did the dishes. She ducked behind a counter into a small enclosure covered with green striped awning, and fished out two black suitcases. She handed one of them to Milo. “Wait a minute.” Sylvie unlatched her case and pulled out a collapsible top hat, flattened to a disk. She contrived to blow on it, while flexing it just so, and it popped open. She twirled the hat between her fingers so that it wound up on Milo’s head. He flinched. She grabbed her bowler from behind the counter and twirled it onto her own head the same way. “See? It’s just business, little man. Now you’re with me. Moon and Stars!”

  That’s what was stenciled on the suitcases, too:

  *** MOON *

  on hers,

  AND * STARS ***

  on his.

  “Do I have to wear the hat?” he said.

  “Sure you do! It suits you, too. Isn’t it neat how it changes …” She pushed ahead of him to unlock and open the door, and he thought he heard her say, “ … just like you?”

  They only spent a few minutes in daylight, and Sylvie led Milo underground again, this time into the subways. They sat side by side in the strobing, shaking car with the suitcases on their laps; it was awkward, but Sylvie insisted they carry them that way. She also insisted that Milo sit on her left and that they hold the suitcases with the lettering facing out:

  ***MOON* … AND*STARS***

  “Free advertising,” she said. No one looked. No one ever looked on the subway. If they looked, it meant trouble. Anything could happen down there, Milo learned; a baby could be born, water could spring from a stone, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could thunder from a businessman’s lapel, and everybody would turn their page of Newsweek or the Enquirer or the New York Times and keep their eyes down and their elbows close to their hips.

  “What were you doing on the street where I fell yesterday?” Milo said between Manchester Avenue and Lafayette Park. Make it sound like ordinary conversation. “You were right below there, weren’t you?”

  “It was listed in my ephemeris: ‘Boy falling out of the sky northeast of the MacCauly Building.’”

  “Come on, Sylvie.”

  Sylvie shifted uncomfortably on the crowded bench. “Hey! You’re the mystery man, not me, champ. I was going someplace, that’s all. Do you have to take up so much room?”

  Milo scrunched himself farther into the end of the bench. “Have you ever been up there in that building where I fell from?”

  “Where you flew from, you mean? Maybe. Yeah. Why? Yeah.” She looked away. Don’t push too hard. She already knows I’m suspicious. She probably thinks I’ve seen her up there, and she’s cooking up an excuse right now.

  “I might have a client up there, I think, if it’s the building I’m thinking of,” Sylvie said.

  “Equidecohoozits?”

  “No. Well, sort of. Paintings. Copies of the Masters. Subscription service. It’s another sideline. I got a couple of clients like that in that block. What were you doing up there?”

  “Seeing a shrink.”

  “You crazy?”

  “Just nervous. I have trouble sleeping, like.”

  “You’re telling me!”

  “What do you mean?”

  The train stopped. Sylvie slid sideways into Milo, then righted herself as the doors slid open and two women rushed in, business executives, briefcases under their arms, talking about wheat futures. They grabbed a stanchion and braced themselves. The doors clapped shut, and the train lurched forward.

  “What did you mean?” Milo said.

  “You kept me up half the night, screaming and talking in your sleep.”

  “More than the once? What did I say?”

  “Who cares? Stick with me, Milo. I’ll teach you how to sleep … . Let’s move to the next car. I don’t like those two ladies.”

  “Did I say something about Dede?”

  “Every damn thing you say is about Dede, Milo. Get up and let’s go to the next car. They’re looking at me.”

  One of the execs was edging closer. “Moon and Stars? Hey, Moon and Stars! I want to talk to you! I’ve got another deal. Hey!” There was a quality of pleading in the woman’s voice. Sylvie shoved Milo through the passage to the next car, and then the next, brutalizing whoever blocked the way and letting them curse.

  “I hate that,” she said at last. “I did something for her when I was still green, and now she won’t leave me alone.”

  “What do you mean, everything I say is about Dede?”

  “It’s a big city, Milo. You can say whatever you like.”

  The train stopped. They squeezed out, pinched between the shoulders of a dozen workers, shoppers, and students, only some of whom, in the subterranean light, looked human. Milo dutifully clutched his suitcase handle, clutched it so hard it made him think of the way he was clutching something else, in his belly, clutching so deep and so hard for so long that he had stopped thinking of it as something he did; instead it had come to seem like something he suffered. They climbed up into a broad, cobbled square separated by a massive archway from a sunlit park.

  Sylvie walked briskly. Milo quickened his pace to stay abreast. They passed through the arch, across a meadow the size of a football field, and down a dirt pathway through a clump of trees, until they came in sight of a picnic shelter.

  “This is it,” she said. “Employee picnic. Dingsboomps, Incorporated or something. Full payment on day of performance. Watch this.”

  A few children were running toward them from the shelter. As they came within badgering distance, Milo, hanging back a few yards, saw Sylvie’s suitcase stop in midair while Sylvie herself kept walking, still holding on. Like a tugboat trying to pull the shoreline out to sea, Sylvie suddenly was yanked back. The children giggled. Sylvie scowled. She pulled at the case. It wouldn’t budge. She pushed it. She leaned against it. The children fell down laughing.

  Between her teeth, she said to Milo, “Kick it.”

  “Huh?” />
  “Kick it.”

  Milo kicked it. The case flew forward, tumbling Sylvie to the ground. Milo rushed to help her.

  “You ass,” she said. “This is part of it. Give me your hand.” Befuddled, he did it. Sylvie grabbed, pulling Milo down on top of her, sputtering and flailing. “Whoa!” she said—theatrically. The children howled. They ran to the shelter to get their friends.

  Milo lay face down, blinking and huffing, on top of Sylvie, face up, laughing. “You’ll do,” she said. His chest was on top of her chest. He could feel the breasts inside her smock. His legs were on top of hers. Her hair, the little of it that spilled out of the bowler when she tumbled, was in his face.

  He scrambled to his feet, tucked his shirt in, wiped his face, recovered the fallen top hat. Sylvie got up. They picked up the suitcases and walked.

  “Why do you dress like a boy?” he said.

  “Showbiz, little man. It’s all showbiz. Why do you?”

  Sylvie found the Dingsboomps honcho and set up where he told her to. Inside the “AND * STARS ***” suitcase there were plastic pipes, tent poles, and colored nylon sheets with sleeves sewn along the hems for the poles and pipes to make a frame. It took fifteen minutes to erect the puppet stage, five of them to shoo away the children and grab back joints and dinguses they’d boosted from Milo’s suitcase.

  Once the puppet stage was up, Sylvie was ruthless about keeping kids away. “This is our space, see?” she said to Milo, stooping low in the red light filtering through the nylon. She was hanging puppets and props on hooks backstage. “Nobody but showfolk here, Milo. If Mr. Dingsboomps comes back here, we boot him. If it’s the President of the United States, we boot him. If it’s God Almighty with Saint Peter and Saint Paul … what?”

  “Huh?”

  “What do we do?” she said, exasperated.

  “We boot ’em,” Milo said.

  “That’s right. You gotta draw the line, Milo. You see what I mean?” She thrust her arm in and out of a few of the puppets hanging upside-down below the stage, practicing transitions. “Go find the guy in the suit and tell him we’re ready. Then come back here with me. Got it?”

  “Yuh!” Milo ran.

  Sylvie’s puppet show was a Chinese folk tale: Stone Monkey. Milo crouched low and handed her things when she clucked, scowled or elbowed him. He watched, fascinated.

  First, the initial phases of the creation of the universe were enacted: 129,000 years in twelve parts (sixty seconds each) represented by cacophonously squabbling puppets of mouse, bull, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, goat, monkey, cock, dog, and pig. After another twenty-seven thousand years, Sylvie’s Pan Gui smithereened the Enormous Vagueness (a gelatinous blob manipulated by rods and strings). At last, halfway through the show, Stone Monkey was born atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit from a rock that Sylvie reported, in the wavering voice of an Ancient Taoist Sage, to be precisely thirty-six feet five inches in height and twenty-four feet in circumference.

  Rascally Stone Monkey terrorized Heaven and Earth, absconding with various elixirs, virtuous gems, and magic weapons from the Jade Emperor—and anybody else who got in his way. In the end, on a bet with Buddha, he pissed on the Five Pillars at the End of the Universe—some children applauded, some booed, some giggled nervously—but they turned out to be the Buddha’s fingers. Big Bud grabbed up poor Monkey and imprisoned him in a mountain of iron. Curtain.

  The instant the curtain fell, Sylvie said, “Get the money.” In a louder voice, she announced, “Children or others coming within two feet of the puppet stage will be shot,” and she started taking everything apart.

  Always, they slept and breakfasted at The Grass and Trees. Supper at Jitsi’s. They did shows a few times a week at places all over town, indoors and out: libraries, loading docks, the beach, the park, a historical society, some rec centers and settlement houses, street fairs, block parties, and a hospital or two. “If they knew what I was,” Sylvie said, “they’d never hire me. But I look like your clean-cut American kid, now don’t I?”

  “So what are you, Sylvie?” Milo would say.

  “Oh, go fish! When are you gonna show me those wings?”

  “Go fish, yourself!”

  Milo learned the setup routine and could strike quicker than Sylvie after a while. He started doing a few puppets, notably Lord Buddha and, in Sylvie’s “Trash Show,” a bilious Dumpster named Hector. He did chores like filling Monkey’s rubber bladder with water for the piss scene, and velcroing the Enormous Vagueness back together after Pan Gui decomposed it. He learned what to say to Sylvie’s patrons, how to accept their money or put them off when they were late setting up.

  He enjoyed himself. He got a little sun tan. His ribs stopped showing. The hollows around his eyes disappeared. He got to know Jitsi, who called him “Little Man,” because that’s what he heard Sylvie call him.

  Sylvie paid Milo part of her take, fivers at first, then tens and an occasional twenty. When they busked, he got half the hat. “For street work,” she said, “we’re strictly partners.” He liked that.

  After the first week or so, Milo forgot about investigating the Devore-Sylvie connection. It just didn’t seem so important anymore. When Sylvie disappeared, on off days, without explanation or apology, Milo took himself to the zoo, the beach, or the museum. There was never anyone at The Grass and Trees except Milo and Sylvie—and the Monkey King. The owner was on vacation, she said.

  Milo would be settling into his fitful night’s sleep, or would wake at an unknown hour—all the hours were dark down there—and hear the Monkey King cudgeling Lord Erlang. “Take that, you shriveled pus bag!” He would creep sometimes to the foot of the stairs to hear it better.

  “You can’t fool me, you imbecilic macaque!” Sylvie blustered basso profundo, then squealed as Monkey: “Kowtow, pig-face, or I’ll knock you silly!”

  One night Sylvie surprised him by shouting, in her own voice, “Come on up here, Milo. I know you’re awake. You might as well help me with the chase sequence.”

  He walked upstairs and saw Sylvie’s puppet theater set up in one of the bay windows, facing in. It was lit eerily from inside—bloodred. The puppet theater had been transformed into a weird temple with rows of fluted columns (papier-mâché) and stained glass windows (cellophane). The God Erlang, frightening in the red light, appeared in full battle array, carrying a huge lance, huge, that is, in proportion to his own size of ten inches or so.

  Suddenly, the opening of the puppet stage closed in on itself. The carpet Erlang stood on lapped at him like a tongue, the columns gnashed like teeth, the proscenium was like a lip smacking against the apron. Erlang barely managed to wedge the theater space open with his lance.

  “It’s Monkey’s mouth, Milo,” Sylvie said. She left Erlang there, his head drooping lifelessly on his chain mail. “He’s equideco’ed into a temple, get it?

  “First, Monkey turns into a sparrow and Erlang turns into a kite. Then Monkey is a fish, and Erlang is a fish-hawk. When Monkey changes to a water-snake, Erlang turns into a red-crested gray crane. What can Monkey do? He turns into a bustard. Look.” She showed him a thin-billed, long-legged plop of a bird-puppet, with an enlarged face retaining a few essentials of Stone Monkey. “That’s the lowest. A bustard’ll let anything hump it—even crows. Promise me you won’t ever be a bustard, flying boy.”

  “Huh?”

  “Anyway, Erlang shoots him then. So he takes off and turns himself into this temple. See? This flagpole is Monkey’s tail, only I haven’t Sobo-glued the hair on yet. This whole thing here is Monkey’s mouth. The windows are his eyes. But Erlang is onto him. He threatens to break the window panes. That would blind old Monkey.”

  “It’s great, Sylvie! How did you do that?”

  “Adhesives,” she said. “Everything is adhesives, Milo, in the show business anyways: duct tape, hot glue, velcro, rivets—this is like my catechism, see?—stuff inside other stuff all over the place. I wanna start doing this story in a week. Sound okay?�
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  “Teach me.”

  “That’s all I wanted to hear.” She led him behind the puppet stage, into the heart of the red glow, and started to fill his hands with odd things.

  “Sylvie …” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “How can Monkey do all that? I mean, what is he supposed to be that he can change into stuff that way?”

  She stopped what she was doing and looked at Milo. There was nothing in the entire world outside this small ball of red light, Monkey’s mouth, the jumble of props and puppets, the window glass behind them—“ …”—Milo’s eyes, Sylvie’s eyes, each other’s eyes in each other’s eyes. “He’s a shape-shifter, Milo. A shape-shifter.”

  Inside himself, Milo squeezed: not a tightening, but a pushing together, the way he might squeeze the string together on both sides of a knot, to let more slack in for the undoing. There was no thought before him, but a sort of déjà vu. “Dede …” he said.

  “ … Sylvie, you mean.”

  “Sylvie, I feel like I want to tell you something.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of lines to learn here, a lot of cues to get down. Hold this.” She handed him Monkey’s Gold-Banded As-You-Will Cudgel, Weight 13,500 Pounds. She got up and switched on the overhead light. It was a cheap chandelier. The crystals dangled and made little rainbows on Lord Erlang, the puppet heads, masks and posters on the walls, “SAUT DANS LA VIDE,” and all. They went to work.