The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  The doctor beside me fell to her knees. The third presence – or some part of it – swirled all around us, racing along our own unprepared synapses and neurons, and what swirled and raced was astonishment. A golden, majestic astonishment. We had finally attracted Its attention, finally knocked with enough neural force to be just barely heard – and It was astonished that we could, or did exist. The slow rise of that powerful astonishment within the shielded lab was like the slow swinging around of the head of a great beast to regard some butterfly it has barely glimsped from the corner of one eye. But this was no beast. As Its attention swung toward us, pain exploded in my skull – the pain of sound too loud, lights too bright, charge too high. My brain was burning on overload. There came one more flash of insight – wordless, pattern without end – and the sound of screaming. Then, abruptly, the energy vanished.

  Bohentin, on all fours, crawled toward the holotanks. The doctor lay slumped on the floor; the other doctor had already reached the platform and its two crumpled figures. Someone was crying, someone else shouting. I rose, fell, dragged myself to the side of the platform and then could not climb it. I could not climb the platform. Hanging with two hands on the edge, hearing the voice crying as my own, I watched the doctor bend shakily to Keith, roll him off Devrie to bend over her, turn back to Keith.

  Bohentin cried, “The tapes are intact!”

  “Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God,” someone moaned, until abruptly she stopped. I grasped the flesh-colored padding on top of the platform and pulled myself up onto it.

  Devrie lay unconscious, pulse erratic, face cast in perfect bliss. The doctor breathed into Keith’s mouth – what strength could the doctor himself have left? – and pushed on the naked chest. Breathe, push, breathe, push. The whole length of Keith’s body shuddered; the doctor rocked back on his heels; Keith breathed.

  “It’s all on tape!” Bohentin cried. “It’s all on tape!”

  “God damn you to hell,” I whispered to Devrie’s blissful face. “It didn’t even know we were there!”

  Her eyes opened. I had to lean close to hear her answer.

  “But now . . . we know He . . . is there.”

  She was too weak to smile. I looked away from her, away from that face, out into the tumultuous emptiness of the lab, anywhere.

  They will try again.

  Devrie has been asleep, fed by glucose solution through an IV, for fourteen hours. I sit near her bed, frowned at by the nurse, who can see my expression as I stare at my sister. Somewhere in another bed Keith is sleeping yet again. His rest is more fitful than Devrie’s; she sinks into sleep as into warm water, but he cannot. Like me, he is afraid of drowning.

  An hour ago he came into Devrie’s room and grasped my hand. “How could It – He – It not have been aware that we existed? Not even have known?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “You felt it too, Seena, didn’t you? The others say they could, so you must have too. It . . . created' us in some way. No, that’s wrong. How could It create us and not know?”

  I said wearily, “Do we always know what we’ve created?” and Keith glanced at me sharply. But I had not been referring to my father’s work in cloning.

  “Keith. What’s a Thysania Africana?”

  “A what?”

  “Think of us,” I said, “as just one more biological side-effect. One type of being acts, and another type of being comes into existence. Man stages something like the African Horror, and in doing so he creates whole new species of moths and doesn’t even discover they exist until long afterward. If man can do it, why not God? And why should He be any more aware of it than we are?”

  Keith didn’t like that. He scowled at me, and then looked at Devrie’s sleeping face: Devrie’s sleeping bliss.

  “Because she is a fool,” I said savagely, “and so are you. You won’t leave it alone, will you? Having been noticed by It once, you’ll try to be noticed by It again. Even though she promised me otherwise, and even if it kills you both.”

  Keith looked at me a long time, seeing clearly – finally – the nature of the abyss between us, and its dimensions. But I already knew neither of us could cross. When at last he spoke, his voice held so much compassion that I hated him. “Seena. Seena, love. There’s no more doubt now, don’t you see? Now rational belief is no harder than rational doubt. Why are you so afraid to even believe?”

  I left the room. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, palms spread flat against the tile, and closed my eyes. It seemed to me that I could hear wings, pale and fragile, beating against glass.

  They will try again. For the sake of sure knowledge that the universe is not empty, Keith and Devrie and all the others like their type of being will go on pushing their human brains beyond what the human brain has evolved to do, go on fluttering their wings against that biological window. For the sake of sure knowledge: belief founded on experiment and not on faith. And the Other: being/alien/God? It, too, may choose to initiate contact, if It can and now that It knows we are here. Perhaps It will seek to know us, and even beyond the laboratory Devrie and Keith may find any moment of heightened arousal subtly invaded by a shadowy Third. Will they sense It, hovering just beyond consciousness, if they argue fiercely or race a sailboat in rough water or make love? How much arousal will it take, now, for them to sense those huge wings beating on the other side of the window?

  And windows can be broken.

  Tomorrow I will fly back to New York. To my museum, to my exhibits, to my moths under permaplex, to my empty apartment, where I will keep the heavy drapes drawn tightly across the glass.

  For – oh God – all the rest of my life.

  FLYING SAUCER ROCK AND ROLL

  Howard Waldrop

  Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and Going Home Again. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moon World. His most recent books are the print version of his collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (formerly available only in downloadable form online), the chap-book A Better World’s in Birth!, and a collection of his stories written in collaboration with various other authors, Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations. His stories have appeared in our First, Second, Third, Eleventh, Twelfth and Seventeenth annual collections. Having lived in Washington state for a number of years, Waldrop recently moved back to his former hometown of Austin, Texas, something which caused celebrations and loud hurrahs to rise up from the rest of the population.

  In the classic story that follows, one which has assumed cult favourite status over the years, he brings together flying saucers and a rock and roll band – with some rather startling results.

  THEY COULD HAVE BEEN CONTENDERS.

  Talk about Danny and the Juniors, talk about the Spaniels, the Contours, Sonny Till and the Orioles. They made it to the big time: records, tours, sock hops at $500 a night. Fame and glory.

  But you never heard of the Kool-Tones, because they achieved their apotheosis and their apocalypse on the same night, and then they broke up. Some still talk about that night, but so much happened, the Kool-Tones get lost in the shuffle. And who’s going to believe a bunch of kids, anyway? The cops didn’t and their parents didn’t. It was only two years after the president had been shot in Dallas, and people were still scared. This, then, is the Kool-Tones’ story:

  Leroy was smoking a cigar through a hole he’d cut in a pair of thick, red wax lips. Slim and Zoot were tooting away on Wowee whistles. It was a week after Halloween, and their pockets were still full of trick-or-treat candy they
’d muscled off little kids in the projects. Ray, slim and nervous, was hanging back, “We shouldn’t be here, you know? I mean, this ain’t the Hellbenders’ territory, you know? I don’t know whose it is, but, like, Vinnie and the guys don’t come this far.” He looked around.

  Zoot, who was white and had the beginnings of a mustache, took the yellow wax-candy kazoo from his mouth. He bit off and chewed up the big C pipe. “I mean, if you’re scared, Ray, you can go back home, you know?”

  “Nah!” said Leroy. “We need Ray for the middle parts.” Leroy was twelve years old and about four feet tall. He was finishing his fourth cigar of the day. He looked like a small Stymie Beard from the old Our Gang comedies.

  He still wore the cut-down coat he’d taken with him when he’d escaped from his foster home.

  He was staying with his sister and her boyfriend. In each of his coat pockets he had a bottle: one Coke and one bourbon.

  “We’ll be all right,” said Cornelius, who was big as a house and almost eighteen. He was shaped like a big ebony golf tee, narrow legs and waist blooming out to an A-bomb mushroom of arms and chest. He was a yard wide at the shoulders. He looked like he was always wearing football pads.

  “That’s right,” said Leroy, taking out the wax lips and wedging the cigar back into the hole in them. “I mean, the kid who found this place didn’t say anything about it being somebody’s spot, man.”

  “What’s that?” asked Ray.

  They looked up. A small spot of light moved slowly across the sky. It was barely visible, along with a few stars, in the lights from the city.

  “Maybe it’s one of them UFOs you’re always talking about, Leroy,” said Zoot.

  “Flying saucer, my left ball,” said Cornelius. “That’s Telstar. You ought to read the papers.”

  “Like your mama makes you?” asked Slim.

  “Aww . . . ,” said Cornelius.

  They walked on through the alleys and the dark streets. They all walked like a man.

  “This place is Oz,” said Leroy.

  “Hey!” yelled Ray, and his voice filled the area, echoed back and forth in the darkness, rose in volume, died away.

  “Wow.”

  They were on what had been the loading dock of an old freight and storage company. It must have been closed sometime during the Korean War or maybe in the unimaginable eons before World War II. The building took up most of the block, but the loading area on the back was sunken and surrounded by the stone wall they had climbed. If you stood with your back against the one good loading door, the place was a natural amphitheater.

  Leroy chugged some Coke, then poured bourbon into the half-empty bottle. They all took a drink, except Cornelius, whose mother was a Foursquare Baptist and could smell liquor on his breath three blocks away.

  Cornelius drank only when he was away from home two or three days.

  “Okay, Kool-Tones,” said Leroy. “Let’s hit some notes.”

  They stood in front of the door, Leroy to the fore, the others behind him in a semicircle: Cornelius, Ray, Slim, and Zoot.

  “One, two, three,” said Leroy quietly, his face toward the bright city beyond the surrounding buildings.

  He had seen all the movies with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in them and knew the moves backwards. He jumped in the air and came down, and Cornelius hit it: “Bah-doo, bah-doo, bah-doo – uhh.”

  It was a bass from the bottom of the ocean, from the Marianas Trench, a voice from Death Valley on a wet night, so far below sea level you could feel the absence of light in your mind. And then Zoot and Ray came in: “Oooh-oooh, oob-ooob,” with Leroy humming under, and then Slim stepped out and began to lead the tenor part of “Sincerely,” by the Crows. And they went through that one perfectly, flawlessly, the dark night and the dock walls throwing their voices out to the whole breathing city.

  “Wow,” said Ray, when they finished, but Leroy held up his hand, and Zoot leaned forward and took a deep breath and sang: “Dee-dee-woo-oo, dee-eee-wooo-oo, dee-uhmm-doo-way.”

  And Ray and Slim chanted: “A-weem-wayyy, a-wee,-wayyy.”

  And then Leroy, who had a falsetto that could take hair off an opossum, hit the high notes from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and it was even better than the first song, and not even the Tokens on their number two hit had ever sounded greater.

  Then they started clapping their hands, and at every clap the city seemed to jump with expectation, joining in their dance, and they went through a shaky-legged Skyliners-type routine and into: “Hey-ahh-stuh-huh, hey-ahh-stuh-uhh,” of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ “Stay,” and when Leroy soared his “Hoh-wahh-yuh?” over Zoot’s singing, they all thought they would die.

  And without pause, Ray and Slim started: “Shoo-be-doop, shoo-doop-de-be-doop, shoo-doopbe-do-be-doop,” and Cornelius was going, “Ah-rem-em, ah-rem-em, ah-rem-emm bah.”

  And they went through the Five Satins’ “(I Remember) In the Still of the Night.”

  “Hey, wait,” said Ray, as Slim “woo-uh-wooo-uh-woo-ooo-ah-woo-ah”-ed to a finish, “I thought I saw a guy out there.”

  “You’re imagining things,” said Zoot. But they all stared out into the dark anyway.

  There didn’t seem to be anything there.

  “Hey, look,” said Cornelius. “Why don’t we try putting the bass part of ‘Stormy Weather’ with the high part of ‘Crying in the Chapel’? I tried it the other night, but I can’t – ”

  “Shit, man!” said Slim. “That ain’t the way it is on the records. You gotta do it like on the records.”

  “Records are going to hell, anyway. I mean, you got Motown and some of that, but the rest of it’s like the Beatles and Animals and Rolling Stones and Wayne shitty Fontana and the Mindbenders and . . .”

  Leroy took the cigar from his mouth. “Fuck the Beatles,” he said. He put the cigar back in his mouth.

  “Yeah, you’re right, I agree. But even the other music’s not the – ”

  “Aren’t you kids up past your bedtime?” asked a loud voice from the darkness.

  They jerked erect. For a minute, they hoped it was only the cops.

  Matches flared in the darkness, held up close to faces. The faces all had their eyes closed so they wouldn’t be blinded and unable to see in case the Kool-Tones made a break for it. Blobs of faces and light floated in the night, five, ten, fifteen, more.

  Part of a jacket was illuminated. It was the color reserved for the kings of Tyre.

  “Oh shit!” said Slim. “Trouble. Looks like the Purple Monsters.”

  The Kool-Tones drew into a knot.

  The matches went out and they were in a breathing darkness.

  “You guys know this turf is reserved for friends of the local protective, athletic, and social club, viz., us?” asked the same voice. Chains clanked in the black night.

  “We were just leaving,” said Cornelius.

  The noisy chains rattled closer.

  You could hear knuckles being slapped into fists out there.

  Slim hoped someone would hurry up and hit him so he could scream.

  “Who are you guys with?” asked the voice, and a flashlight shone in their eyes, blinding them.

  “Aww, they’re just little kids,” said another voice.

  “Who you callin’ little, turd?” asked Leroy, shouldering his way between Zoot and Cornelius’s legs.

  A wooooooo! went up from the dark, and the chains rattled again.

  “For God’s sake, shut up, Leroy!” said Ray.

  “Who you people think you are, anyway?” asked another, meaner voice out there.

  “We’re the Kool-Tones,” said Leroy. “We can sing it slow, and we can sing it low, and we can sing it loud, and we can make it go!”

  “I hope you like that cigar, kid,” said the mean voice, “because after we piss on it, you’re going to have to eat it.”

  “Okay, okay, look,” said Cornelius. “We didn’t know it was your turf. We come from over in the projects and . . .”

 
; “Hey, Man, Hellbenders, Hellbenders!” The chains sounded like tambourines now.

  “Naw, naw. We ain’t Hellbenders. We ain’t nobody but the Kool-Tones. We just heard about this place. We didn’t know it was yours,” said Cornelius.

  “We only let Bobby and the Bombers sing here,” said a voice.

  “Bobby and the Bombers can’t sing their way out of the men’s room,” said Leroy. Slim clamped Leroy’s mouth, burning his hand on the cigar.

  “You’re gonna regret that,” said the mean voice, which stepped into the flashlight beam, “because I’m Bobby, and four more of these guys out here are the Bombers.”

  “We didn’t know you guys were part of the Purple Monsters!” said Zoot.

  “There’s lots of stuff you don’t know,” said Bobby. “And when we’re through, there’s not much you’re gonna remember.”

  “I only know the Del Vikings are breaking up,” said Zoot. He didn’t know why he said it. Anything was better than waiting for the knuckle sandwiches.

  Bobby’s face changed. “No shit?” Then his face set in hard lines again. “Where’d a punk like you hear something like that?”

  “My cousin,” said Zoot. “He was in the Air Force with two of them. He writes to ’em. They’re tight. One of them said the act was breaking up because nobody was listening to their stuff anymore.”

  “Well, that’s rough,” said Bobby. “It’s tough out there on the road.”

  “Yeah,” said Zoot. “It really is.”

  Some of the tension was gone, but certain delicate ethical questions remained to be settled.

  “I’m Lucius,” said a voice. “Warlord of the Purple Monsters.” The flashlight came on him. He was huge. He was like Cornelius, only he was big all the way to the ground. His feet looked like blunt I beams sticking out of the bottom of his jeans. His purple satin jacket was a bright fluorescent blot on the night. “I hate to break up this chitchat – ” he glared at Bobby – “but the fact is you people are on Purple Monster territory, and some tribute needs to be exacted.”