The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  She says nothing, but doesn’t cry either.

  At 67th they hit traffic. Stop ’n’ go, cacophony of horns, exhaust fumes so thick they tint the aluminum towers blue. She turns on the Yacht’s air filter. She turns off the hazards, which had been blinking the entire ride.

  A guy in a Pillager pick-up opens his door as a lane-splitting bike boy approaches it. The bike boy leans hard left, almost falling into the car in the next lane, but passes under the Pillager’s door. He recovers to vertical the other side.

  “Hey!” Joey says. “Great technique!”

  “I’m sorry he had to use it.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “You don’t know how many times I’ve given Carla exactly the designs she wanted.”

  “Designs don’t matter as much as assholes,” Joey says.

  At 66th they see why there’s a traffic jam so late. Police cruisers are parked in front of VLM.

  She turns east onto 66th, follows it to Temporal Park, but instead of joining the traffic going south on Fleet, she drives into the park.

  “Wow!” Joey says. She plows through brush, she fords streams, she scrapes the base of the vehicle against stones. They might be the only Yacht in the park, though, as they are driving up a hill of birch trees and crabgrass, they pass a stretch limo with tank tread wheels coming down.

  “Shit!” she says.

  “What?”

  “Executives hate trespassers.”

  “Let them pout.”

  “Don’t you see? They’ll call the cops.”

  They follow the park to its end at 53rd. Joey’s alert and adrenalized. There’s no doubt about why now. Her hair is turning brown. She’s not so thin anymore, especially in the chest. And she’s brave and breaks the rules and acts more like a Downster than an Uppie.

  Joey leans over and kisses her cheek.

  She pushes him away. “Let me drive.”

  Midtown. Where Uppies and Downsters mingle. Where bounders burn their savings on three-bedroom brownstone flats. Where Uppies down on their luck or desiring to improve their souls by living like a Downster rent those same flats once the bounders are evicted. Where Joey first realizes he might get laid today, if he can get her downtown to his apartment.

  But first they go to the Exchange Building, on 43rd. They don’t have much choice. The Land Yacht couldn’t make most turns south of 40th. And Joey needs a motorcycle.

  Joey gives her his address, an address on 24th Avenue, at Tick-Tock Square. “Offices of the BDL. The Bike Defense League. My partner Wayne’s got the model. Let’s meet there.”

  He’s afraid she’ll think he wants to abandon her. But he must be sweating sex hormones by the liter. “Okay,” she says. “What are you carrying in that?”

  “Floppy disks,” he says, putting on the backpack. He gets out of the Yacht so she can join the queue for the valet.

  The Exchange Building is a granite Neo-Classical structure fronted by big marble columns. Bike boys and office messengers, word processors and janitors, waitresses and plumbers, are riding their machines (moped, bike, or motorcycle) up a cement ramp toward the building’s entrance. Joey takes the staircase. His knee’s sore but his calves are bulging. The Exchange’s dusty inside smells of fumes and motor oil and is raucous with the sound of motorcycle engines being gunned. Joey forgoes the lines of people with machines and walks to the end of the long counter, where there’s a placard reading special situations.

  “I need a motorcycle. My moped was wrecked.”

  The clerk arches his pierced eyebrow. “I don’t see the moped.”

  “Most of it’s uptown. I’ve got the front wheel outside.”

  “I need the whole moped for a trade. Unless you want a bike.”

  Joey takes a sturdy twelve-speed. Coasting down the exit ramp, he passes Pony-tail, who’s sitting on the staircase eating his lunch from a paper bag.

  “You!”

  Joey starts off. Slaloming around other bikes, standing as he pedals because the bike’s in a high gear, he follows the ramp down, then rides the sidewalk. He reaches the Land Yacht, which is at the front of the valet line.

  The woman’s in the cab.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  He points back at Pony-tail, who’s slim and sprinting after him. He motions for her to get out, and when she doesn’t, he opens the passenger door, lifts the bike—“Take it!”—then climbs into the cab.

  “What the hell?” she says.

  “Why aren’t you in a new car?”

  “They said they had to notify the insurance adjuster because of the moped wheel.”

  Pony-tail pounds the window.

  “Go! They were probably calling the cops.”

  “And now they will for sure,” she says, starting off.

  They take 42nd east, then The Split Second Parkway south. Joey, pressing the bike against the dash so it doesn’t fall on him, feels the great energy of the chase and the even greater one of love. He wants to stroke her brown shiny hair, kiss her long-lashed eyelids. She’s preoccupied with driving, though. Split Second’s the widest road midtown, but still the Yacht’s too big for a single lane. She flattens the mirrors of the little SUCs in the lane over, makes a thump on Joey’s side of the Yacht.

  “What was that?”

  Joey looks in the mirror. “You just dragged a Scamper out of its parking space. Knocked off my moped wheel too.”

  “Great. Is that him way back there?”

  Joey looks. He has a fine view of the bikes and the SUCs behind them. And there’s Pony-tail, on a moped, two blocks behind and gaining.

  Ahead a few blocks, Split Second becomes one-way. One way the wrong way: uptown. Most southbound traffic turns west on 31st. 31st can get clogged so Joey says, “Turn here.”

  “On 35th? It’s an alley!”

  “You’ll fit.”

  She doesn’t. She turns too tight, taking out the signal pole then hitting the Kwik Shoppe grocery on the near corner, bringing down bricks onto a display of half-price cucumbers. The Yacht stops. “Shit!” She puts it into reverse, then into 4WD, but gets only grinding and more bricks. “We’re stuck!”

  “Let’s go on my bike!”

  Joey’s out of the Yacht. He gets on the twelve speed. He sees the Yacht is blocking the alley. “Get out this side!”

  Pony-tail has reached the corner. She’s out, climbing onto the handlebars.

  Pony-tail jumps off his moped. He starts to climb onto the hood of the Yacht.

  “Wait!” she says before Joey starts pedaling.

  She throws a wad of bills at the mustached man in a grocer’s apron who’s just come out of the Kwik Shoppe crying.

  They don’t lose Pony-tail until 33rd and Eon. The guy’s fit in the 30s, a runner, and with the woman sitting on Joey’s handlebars, it’s hard for Joey to get the bike up to speed.

  But at Eon, Joey runs the red light, the Predator pulling a mobile Farmer’s Market uptown honking at him. And seeing Pony-tail stop at the red light, as if obeying traffic signals might earn him points towards Uppiehood, Joey gets inspired. “Let’s ride the Market!”

  The Farmer’s Market is a flat trailer, a third the length of a city block, with a greenhouse atop it. It moves less than a mile an hour. Still in the intersection, greenhouse full of dead cornstalks between them and Pony-tail, they climb onto the trailer near its rear wheels, the woman first, Joey handing her the bike.

  Then through an access door into the greenhouse itself.

  “Keep low,” Joey says. They crawl across the furrowed mulch, toward a pile of cornstalks and debris from the last planting cycle. It’s humid and warm but all Joey can think about is the fine shape of her gray-skirted buttocks before him.

  Recorded thunder crackles from speakers. Cold water from overhead sprinklers douses them. “Shit,” she says, when the rain has stopped and they are sitting close to the cornstalks. “Look at me.”

  Her skirt is muddy, her nylons streaked with grease, and her wet blouse cli
ngs to her so that Joey can see the shape of her breasts. The automatic rain has raised a sweet smell of manure but also, from her body, a heady mix of perfume and perspiration and wet hair. Joey is aroused. “I think you’re beautiful.”

  “Why is that guy after you?” she asks.

  “He’s a bounder.”

  “You did something to him.”

  All at once, shoots break through the mulch, like an array of green swordpoints thrust upward from below. One pokes Joey in the butt. He slides off the shoot towards her, but as he moves to embrace her, he catches his backpack on a sharp broken cornstalk. “Oops!” He’s stuck. “Don’t want to break it!”

  “Break what?” she asks.

  He pulls his arms out of the straps. “The mod— the floppy— the disks.”

  Before he can stop her, she has the pack down from the cornstalk. She opens it. “I thought so.”

  “I can explain,” Joey says. “I wanted to help you.”

  “My car is wrecked. I’ve lost my job. I’m sitting in manure. I don’t need your explanations.” With her hair brown, her blue eyes are startling. “Let’s do things my way now.”

  “Okay.”

  She takes putty and a utility knife out of her purse. She begins to work on the Ghengis Khar.

  As the rows of plants individuate, tomatoes where they sit, stalks of corn in four other rows, Joey wonders how he’s going to get the model to Tick-Tock Square.

  And he wonders if he has any chance of getting laid.

  He watches her finish altering the model. She’s already filled the blade holes and cut away the lever and spring for the APS blades. Now with her knife she levers out the units themselves. Even with the tomato plant sending vines around her ankles, her hand is steady, her motions sure. Joey feels the same admiration he’d have for a bike babe who’d trimmed her delivery time by car-roofing down a busy street. There are too many reasons to love her. He watches green buds turn into green fruit. “You know,” he says, “if we go hide at the BDL office, it will be easier getting uptown tonight.”

  “I don’t care about easy. I care about fast.”

  “I can bike you uptown in fifteen minutes.”

  “I don’t need your help. I have my car.”

  “Your car’s stuck,” Joey says.

  “I’ll get it towed.”

  Three Downsters carrying baskets enter via the forward access door. At that end of the greenhouse, the corn is full-height, the tomatoes fat and red. Harvest time.

  “Hard to get a tow truck downtown,” Joey says.

  “I’ll take my chances.” She’s up, model in hand. One Downster notices her but she ignores him. “I’ll see you around.”

  “At least let me escort you back to your Yacht.”

  She shrugs, not dismissing him, but not encouraging him either. He pulls off a half-ripened tomato then follows her, trampling over the vines, pushing through the corn. They emerge from the greenhouse as the Farmer’s Market pulls into its parking area north of 34th Avenue. Uppies are waiting there to shop, but there’s no sign of Pony-tail.

  On the street, four-story redbrick rowhouses, Joey’s pedaling his bike in its lowest gear, while she walks beside him. She won’t ride with him but seems less angry. “So why did you lie to me?”

  “Because I like you. I wanted to be with you longer.”

  She half-smiles. Then: “Damn.”

  They’ve just turned onto 35th. The Yacht’s surrounded by a crowd. Moped cops are cordoning off the area with yellow crime scene tape.

  “I’m not in trouble?” she asks. “They’re not going to blame me?”

  Joey doesn’t know. He wants to jump off the bike and reassure her with a hug. Instead he says: “Give me the model. I’ll take it to the cops and turn myself in.”

  “How gallant,” she says. Her voice is sarcastic but her eyelashes sparkle with tears. She turns away and wipes her face then looks at Joey and, after taking a deep breath, says, “Let me get on your bike.”

  “You want to go uptown?”

  “Let’s go further downtown first.”

  And south on Century Boulevard, the model making her purse bulge, Joey embarrassed by a hard-on but puzzled too. “Why south?” he asks, raising his voice because he is pedaling fast enough that the air pushes back her hair.

  “I want to shop!”

  “For what?”

  “You’ll see!”

  Puzzling him further because even slumming Uppies shop in the 30s.

  He worries the sight of the cop mopeds has unhinged her.

  But how can you worry much downtown? They reach the 20s and the streets get narrow, so narrow that the Avenues are impassable by the smallest car or SUC, and even on the Boulevards cars are discouraged strongly. They pass a Scamper retreating uptown, chunks of rotten vegetables adhering like ornaments to its hood, wipers smearing the fecal matter dumped upon the windshield. Joey shouts, “It’ll wash off!” to the anxious driver. There are flowers in the building windows, and guys playing flutes for pennies, and women on ten speeds with crepe paper streamers in their hair. Everyone is strong and young and healthy. They cheer Joey like he’s brought back a prize. A guy drinking smuggled Uptown beer toasts them as they pass. A woman walking a wire strung above them across the street calls out, “I love your shoes!” and she, the model-builder, takes off her black business pumps and tosses them at the wire-walking woman, who catches one.

  “Hey!” Joey says.

  They reach 24th Avenue, Tick-Tock Square, and Joey stops.

  “The BDL is in that building,” he says, pointing at the stone building with Gothic arches across the square. “Do you want to come up and show them the model?”

  She studies the many guys sitting on blankets, selling cutlery and worn jackets and action figures from TV shows. “I want to shop.”

  “You can shop later. Why not come up first? They’d really like to see the model.”

  “I want to shop.”

  “Okay.” She’s so beautiful that Joey finds it hard not to stare at her face. “Do you still want to take the model uptown?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “It’s going to be a problem if I go to the BDL with nothing to show.”

  She says nothing, but her nose lines deepen.

  Joey walks the bike a couple of feet, feels beneath his heel the place where concrete ends and cobblestone begins, feels also the reckless strength that surges through him whenever he goes this far downtown. “It’s yours. I shouldn’t have even asked. But maybe you can let me have the toothpick blades.”

  “For the BDL?”

  “Yeah.”

  She gives him the two APS units along with the springs and lever.

  Joey kisses her on the lips.

  She doesn’t return the kiss but her nose lines soften momentarily.

  “Wait for me,” he says.

  “What the fuck is this, dude?”

  Wayne, shaved head, beady eyes, black goatee to his shirtless well-muscled chest, holds an APS unit in his palm. He sits cross-legged on a battered wooden desk, which is pushed against an arch-shaped stained-glass window.

  “It’s the weapon, from the model.”

  “What good is it to me?”

  “It’s a blade,” Joey says. “Build your fenders.”

  “I can’t design shit based off just this. Where’s the rest of it?”

  “I gave it back.”

  “To her?” Wayne thumps the window with his elbow. “I saw you with the smog queen.”

  “She’s the artist. She built the model and broke off the blades and that’s how they’re going to build it now.”

  “She told you that?”

  “She says if she stands up to Carla Dakota, other people will follow.”

  “You believe her? She’s delusional, dude. She’s got killer cars on her conscience and that’s made her crack. And she’s mindfucked you, too.” He snaps the toothpick blades in half. “You’ve been uptown too much. You’re trusting a slumming Uppie just b
ecause she looks good in a skirt. You’ve forgot what it’s about.”

  Joey glances at the tall dusty corridor leading to his bedroom. “And you’ve been sitting on your ass too long to have any perspective.”

  “Perspective?” Wayne opens a manila folder off the desk. “How’s this for perspective? 46th and Eon, bike babe crushed dead by a Universal. 51st and Split-Second, pedestrian flattened by a Predator. 60th and Century, office temp hit by a Pillager running a red light. Broken leg and pelvis. And that’s just this week. You want some more perspective, dude?”

  “I know that crap. That’s why I took the model.”

  “And that’s why you’re going to go down there and get it back from the bitch!”

  He throws the toothpicks at Joey and they bounce off his chest.

  “Fuck you, dude.” No sex, no model, and now attitude from Wayne. Joey wants to punch him but he makes himself walk to the door. “She’s doing more for us than you ever have.”

  Joey’s so angry that he doesn’t recognize the woman until she pushes the bike up to him. “You okay?” she asks.

  He stares at her. She’s wearing a blue stocking cap and a hideous knee-length sweater striped purple and yellow. “Yeah, I’m fine. You found what you were shopping for?”

  “No. My clothes were too big, so I bought this. But there’s something else I need.”

  “Maybe you can find it uptown.”

  “No.” Her brows are knit. “Take me down. To kidtown.”

  On Eon, south of 17th, his butt aching from the cobblestones, watching the grease stain across one of her calves, his anger vanishes, his horniness returns. “Hey!” he says to her. “Let’s have lunch!”

  He points at the plaster-and-adobe two story building midblock. Not only does a kid sell you sandwiches and soda-pop, but there’s a bedroom in the back you can rent for a quarter.

  “I want to go further,” she says.

  “Whatever.” He wants to please her. He just hopes she doesn’t want to go south of 10th, because sometimes even Downsters playing kid forget themselves and don’t come back.

  “Why don’t they fix the buildings?”

  They go past some sort of temple, with stone columns like at the mid-town Exchange Building, but the wooden roof collapsed. Pigeons coo from the wreckage. “Kids don’t come downtown to do work.”