The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  She wasn’t angry, simply felt … numb. “You want to buy one of my flights.” The flights you wouldn’t share.

  “Yeah.” Selva’s smile was wary. “If you don’t want me to look at it, I won’t. I’ll just turn it over to Xavier.”

  “And what if he tells you to work with it?” Flat voice, still so calm.

  “Well…” Wrinkled nose, grimace. “I’ll have to, yeah. But there’s no reason it’d show up in one of my projects.” She reached, laid a virtual hand on Therese’s arm. “Does it really bother you so much? I’d really like to come watch if you’d let me. I just can’t do it when you snap your fingers.”

  “I didn’t snap my fingers. I asked.” Therese looked down at her arm. Her eyes gave her Selva’s long, slender fingers curving across her forearm. She felt nothing. Without skins, this was a ghost-touch, maybe would have been a ghost-touch if Selva was standing here in the flesh.

  Which she wasn’t.

  “Money.” She laughed softly, bitterly. “I sure need it.” So she got to choose, sell her soul or her skins.… “Hey, why not?” The words tasted bitter on her tongue. “I’ll sell Xavier his flight. You can watch it if you want. I don’t care.”

  “I won’t look at it.” Selva’s face was dark and still, like a pool at twilight when you couldn’t see the bottom. “What do they mean to you?” she asked. “Your light-nets?”

  For a moment words pressed at the back of her throat. I rode Pegasus home. Almost.

  Almost wasn’t good enough. She’d learned that as an artist. She swallowed, and the words were gone. “You gotta be there,” she said softly.

  “I would be. If you’d let me.” Selva’s eyes flashed, but she kept her temper under control. “Sometimes I think you do your lights because they aren’t real. You can hang out at that nice safe airport and you don’t have to care. Oh they’re flesh and not virtual, that’s not what I mean. Coming up to Vancouver is real. Working for Xavier and doing your art anyway is real. I think you’re afraid of real, Therese. Do you know how much it hurt me when you stayed behind? Do you know how much I love you? Or do you care?”

  No! Therese struggled for the words she had swallowed, but they wouldn’t come back. I didn’t know. You never told me. “Yeah, I care.” She turned away, pulled her goggles off. “I care a lot.”

  But her goggles were off and that signaled her system to shut off the connect. So probably Selva hadn’t heard that last.

  Which was a good thing, maybe. Because it didn’t matter at all.

  “You want to buy my next flight?” she whispered. “Fine.” She reached for the tumbled pile of her skinthins. “I’ll give it to you, and you can give it to Xavier, and he can pay me for it.” She laughed, a single note that hurt her throat like a sob.

  Hey, why not?

  * * *

  Her skins itched. She scratched, one hand on the wheel because there wasn’t any traffic on the airport road this time of night. Full recording gear meant skins, gloves, hood, the works. Patch on the left eyelid to the synch micro-cameras on her headband to her eye-track. She’d get it all—every twitch of body language that put you into the scene, register the physical tensions of fight-flight surprise, ambivalence, joy. All for you, baby. All for your boss.

  Selva would be there at the airport.

  Whose reality? You’re afraid.… Selva’s voice whispered in her ear. Afraid …

  Therese braked hard, almost missed the turn. The car lurched and bucked, going too fast for the rutted track, and she clung to the wheel as thorns put new scratches in the paint. Nobody here except her. The engine stalled and died, and she pushed the door open. Frosty night air. The east wind was blowing, flowing down the Gorge like an invisible river of ice-cold water. It tugged at the black stocking cap she wore, flicked tendrils of hair into her eyes, and pried chilly fingers down her neck.

  Good night for flying, Selva. She touched her eyelid to make sure the tracking patch was in place, tapped the control at her waist. Recording. The tiny telltale winked green. Therese leaped, fingers hooking into the softly clashing chain link, scrambled over, and dropped. The grass wasn’t wet tonight. An east wind had dried out the ground with its cold breath. Rags of thin cloud briefly obscured the sliver of moon. Do you see it, Selva? You can’t feel the wind, but you’ll feel me shiver, feel the subtle shifts as I push against it.

  This is reality. Not the Net. Not pleasant virtual conversations in an unreal living room made up of electrons and fantasy.

  This.

  So who was she trying to convince? Scanning the landscape, the broken stumps of lights, she walked slowly along the abandoned runway. Planes used to land in sweeps of light, touching down between chains of blue jewels. Coming to get her, coming to take her home, only she’d never gone. The wind teased her, kissing her neck with cold lips. She could fly from this spot, but she kept on going, blaming the boarders that might show any time.

  A lie. She was going to fly from the hangar, in front of Jazz’s yearning faces. No other place would work, and she didn’t stop to examine the reason for that. The gate apron glimmered like a gray wasteland in the faint moonlight. She skirted it, an eye out for the night watchman’s flash. No sign of him. She never saw him between midnight and one. She’d long ago figured that for his break. For a while, she had wondered why he hadn’t realized that she always set up during that hour. If he really wanted to catch her, he could do it just by changing his routines. She’d thought he was dumb at first. Then she’d decided that maybe he didn’t really want to catch her.

  Only he’d reported her car. So, maybe she’d been wrong. The hangar loomed ahead, concrete apron veined with grass-grown cracks. Too rough for the boarders. Therese dropped her carryall in the long grass beyond the apron, got out her stakes. One. Two. Hammerstrokes jarred the plastic spikes into the soil, every blow recorded in muscle action and reaction. Therese finished pounding the third stake in, and flung the hammer aside, not needing it anymore. She realized then—that this was the last time. The last flight.

  Never again, because once something broke, you couldn’t put it back together again. When she downloaded this night’s recording into Selva’s filespace, the airport, whatever it meant, whatever it was, would be broken. Lips pressed against tears that didn’t come, she began to lay out the precise tangles of her light-net. Her skins recorded what she saw, stored it in hard-memory in her belt-pack, then beamed it home to her system, bouncing the digitized kaleidoscope of light and shadow and movement off the face of some battered satellite. From Earth to space to Earth again. The wind caught her kite as she unfurled it. Feel it, Selva? How it pulls at my arms? You can’t smell the scent of fall and eastern desert in the wind, you can’t feel the echoes of this place, of Pegasus spreading his invisible wings overhead.

  She had never walked through the airport gates, gotten onto a plane, and gone into those beautiful futures. Last night, she had let Pegasus go. On the wall, Jazz’s faces yearned silently for a home that wasn’t here. The east wind snatched at the kite, rough and importunate, full of rude force. She tossed it into the sky, and a gust snatched meters of line through her fingers, lofting it high, higher. She reached the end of the line, let go. It snapped tight, thrumming with strain as the wind gusted again. Perhaps life was nothing but departures—from the darkness of the womb, from the dark and light of life—only departing, never arriving. Hand in her pocket, finger just caressing the remote button, she walked over to the hangar.

  “So, turn it on.” Jazz’s voice from the darkness didn’t startle her tonight. “C’mon, tonight’s the night.” Excitement hummed in his words. “Turn it on.”

  Tonight’s the night. His belief infected her. Sometimes—as a kid in the airport late at night, when exhaustion blurred the line between fantasy and reality—for a few brief minutes her plane was landing, and she waited for the stewardess to open her little desk beside the ramp, to announce the row numbers that were boarding first. Sometimes she had stood in line to board, her blood thrumming wit
h the anticipation of takeoff, the lights below, the black starry sky a ceiling to forever.…

  If she had walked up to that desk, would the stewardess have smiled, welcomed her? “Okay,” she whispered, and thumbed the control. Above them, light; twisting, shimmering beneath the stars, jewel-bright in strands and twists, tangled like DNA, or love, or the trailing hair of God, charged with the invisible pulse of the wind.

  He was right—it was the same cry as the people on the hangar door, written in glyphs of light and wind and the perfect night. We are homesick. Please take us home.… Shoulder touching shoulder, Therese and Jazz searched the sky. They would come. How could they not come?

  Boots scraped on concrete.

  “Fuck,” Jazz breathed. “Not now. Not yet!”

  Therese looked over her shoulder. The night watchman stood on the edge of the concrete apron, a shadowy form in a dark uniform coverall, bulky and ominous.

  Jazz hesitated, agony in the twist of his shoulders. “It’s the camps for me, if I get busted again,” he hissed. “Oh, fuck!” And ran.

  It had shattered into ruin, they wouldn’t hear, they wouldn’t come. Reality crashed in like a wave—fines, money. And Therese leapt after Jazz, her own heart hammering with boogeyman dread and real fear. Wrong way, a sane corner of her brain shrieked at her. Double back, cut past him, and you can get over the fence.

  But Jazz raced on ahead of her, a moving shadow in the dark, drawing her after him. If he was caught, he’d go to an adult detention camp. His fear infected her, lashed her with adrenaline. Fear for him, for her. His aliens wouldn’t find him in a camp. They wouldn’t know to look for him there, and he’d know it. That he’d never go home. And he’d die. Concrete jarred her as she reached the gate-apron.

  She risked a glance over her shoulder, saw the night watchman emerge from darkness onto the gray glimmer of the concrete, running slowly, heavily. What was the range of his stunner? An ancient set of wheeled stairs leaned against the face of the terminal, the kind that had been pushed up against small commuter planes for passengers to climb. Jazz was up it in a flash, balancing on the top, reaching for the sill of the huge dark windows just above him.

  Therese followed him, afraid to look back and see if the night watchman was behind her, afraid she’d tear her skins on the rusty metal. Above, the glass had been broken out of the huge windows. Moonlight glinted on triangular fragments sticking up like razor teeth. Therese grabbed a bare stretch of sill, levered herself over. Tom skins would be worse than a sliced hide. She could heal. The skins wouldn’t. “Jazz?” No answer. “Where are you?”

  Moonlight turned shadow into memory, picked out a patch of blue and red carpet, a flash of chrome from a chair. Therese halted, the watchman forgotten, fumbled for the flash in her pocket. Light speared out, touching naked girders and trailing cables like ripped-out guts or vines, fallen squares of tattered and smoke-stained acoustic tile. She shivered.

  The blue and red carpet, the plastic and chrome furniture, had looked so new and beautiful, a promise made of a future connected by those landing planes to that long-ago today. People had looked at her and had smiled, knowing that she was one of them, with somewhere to go, someone to welcome her.

  Such a silly game to play. The flash beam trembled in her hand, making the shadowy space stutter in light and shadow.

  Glass tinkled behind her. The sound scattered memory, galvanized her into a run. Glass crunched beneath her feet, and she smelled the sour stink of old dead fire. She swung her flash, motes of dust twinkling in the beam, turning it into a hazy sword of light. Her light-sword kissed denim blue, black shirt. Jazz. She kept it on him as she ran, tethered to him by light. Random heaps took shape and vanished at the edges of vision; chairs, wrecked furniture, piles of fallen ceiling tile. Electric-cable guts. Cobwebs. Jazz ducked right, and she followed him down a wide corridor. A rumpled abandoned sleeping bag looked like a body, brought her heart briefly into her throat. Jazz veered again, through a huge archway this time, out into the cavernous center of the terminal. The vast space stretched away into darkness. Here and there, trash, dead leaves, and debris shoaled against ticket counters or in the corners of empty waiting areas.

  The floor quivered beneath Therese’s feet. She froze, adrenaline washing through her like ice water. Cautiously, she bounced up and down.

  The floor bounced with her.

  Which meant what? That they could fall through? “Jazz?” She hissed his name, but he was already halfway across the space, heading for the old front doors.

  Therese started after him, afraid to yell and bring the night watchman after them. On her left, carpeting hung in frayed tatters into a hole in the floor. The flashlight’s weakening beam reflected off glossy char, showed her fallen burned timbers. So. A fire had gutted the lower level. How much of the floor was ready to crumble? “Jazz!” This time she did yell. “Jazz, stop! The floor!”

  As if her words had cued it, the floor sagged beneath his feet, rotted carpet stretching, tearing with a dry, ripping sound. Dust rose in a cloud, and, arms flung wide, Jazz sank into it, disappearing downward in terrible slow motion. Therese lunged, hands reaching, grabbed for him, and felt the floor sag beneath her. Carpet tore with a dry ripping sound, and she screamed, falling. Carpeting disintegrated between her clutching fingers, and she screamed again, vision full of darkness, lungs full of pungent, dank char-reek, imagining concrete below, nails and fallen beams, spears to pierce her. Hardness slammed her ribs, and a terrible weight crashed down across her back, slammed the breath from her lungs in a red blaze of hurt. She struggled to breathe, the flash tumbling downward, beam slashing the darkness.

  A little air seeped into her aching lungs, easing the panic. Slowly, she began to sort out the hurting; beam beneath her, pressing hard into chest, thighs, shoulder, Jazz lying half across her, crushing her ribcage, his muscles iron hard as he panted in her ear. The flashlight was still on—small miracle. Dust hazed the slender beam. It was a long way down.

  “Fuck,” Jazz whispered. And moved.

  “Stop!” Therese clutched the beam as they tilted sideways, struggling for balance. “Stay still.”

  “Okay.” Explosion of breath in her ear. “All right!”

  How do you get out of this little situation, Therese Oberti? Easy enough. Let go. She giggled.

  “What so funny?” Jazz snarled. Scared.

  “Gravity.” She peered cautiously sideways. “You could maybe climb onto those beams.”

  “Uh-uh. Too far. Down I can maybe handle.” Jazz sucked in a deep breath. “Hang on, okay?”

  Light splashed them from above, searingly bright. “Nice going.” A male voice, disgusted. “You guys really blew it. Hang on, and I’ll see if I can find something you can grab.” The light beam shifted, and Therese glimpsed a fold of dull green coverall, a dark webbing belt. The night watchman.

  Caught. She felt Jazz’s muscles clamp tighter.

  “Here.” The light shifted back, drowning their flash’s petty beam, illuminating fallen timbers, ashes, and twisted metal below. “You on top, grab this.” A long piece of wood, maybe a piece of doorframe, appeared. “Hang on real tight, and I’ll try to haul you up.”

  It was at least ten feet to the floor. Therese stared at the ashes and burned junk, holding on as hard as she could. She could feel Jazz hesitating, his indecision humming though her. And in a few more minutes, she was going to lose her grip.… “Do it,” she hissed. “Quick!”

  With a grunt, he grabbed for the wood. His body twisted, his weight dragging Therese sideways, trying to torque her off her perch. Silent, focused on flesh, muscle-clench, finger-grip against greasy metal, she processed kaleidoscopic images of Jazz swinging from the bending strip of wood, legs flailing for a toehold, dust showering. Then the floor gave way. They fell together, Jazz and the night watchman, in a tangle of green and denim, dark skin and darker hair. For an eerie instant, the flash shone full on the night watchman’s face: wide cheekbones, brown Hispanic skin, black hair,
eyes full of shocked surprise. A moment later, they hit with the ugly flesh sound of impact. The big flash went out.

  “Fuck!” Jazz’s whisper seemed to carry throughout the entire airport.

  “Is that all you can say?” Panic clawed at her and she needed to get down. Groping, her fingers touched wood, closed incredibly tight. She swung by her hands, feet scrabbling, finding solid footing. Fallen beams wove a web of shadow across the glow from her dim flash, guided her lower. Her feet crunched into ash, and a shadow moved. Resolved into Jazz, sooty faced.

  “You okay?” Therese touched a shoulder, reassured by the warm flesh beneath T-shirt fabric.

  “I guess.” The shoulder lifted and dropped; a shrug, rather than rejection. “Nothing’s broken, I don’t think.” He shifted from beneath her fingers, and a moment later the flashbeam wobbled as he picked it up. “I think our cop landed hard.” The light touched a green-clad shoulder, slid upward to spotlight a stubbled jaw.

  He was younger than she’d thought; not much older than her, with curly dark hair and thick brows. Not exactly handsome. A trickle of blood down the side of his face glowed wet and crimson in the light. Jazz slid ashy gray fingers beneath his jaw.

  “He’s alive. I hate cops.”

  “I’m not … a cop.” His eyes opened wide, and he tried to grin. It turned into a grimace of pain. “I’m private.”

  “Cop, private gun.” Jazz shrugged. “Same deal.”

  “No, it isn’t.” He sat up slowly, leaned his bloody, ash-smeared forehead against a raised knee. “God, my head hurts.… I yelled when I saw you come this way. The fire two years back gutted the bottom level. They ought to tear the whole place down, but there’d go my job, so what the hell?”

  “How do we get out of here?” Jazz sabered the light-sword through the darkness, revealing fallen beams and ashes, twisted wads of heat-warped metal and melted plastics. “I got this schedule.…”