The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018

by John Joseph Adams

  Then, through Bill, we got an invitation to move to Houston, where I could become a Guardian of an even bigger Library. So we did.

  There were the usual private grumps: “We’ll do it your way, because that’s what we always do. Besides, we’ll be working with Bill.”

  We moved—and it was a disaster. They were planning to disassemble our Tolmec unit on the day we left, so there was no coming back. It turned out that the area of Houston that we were moving to (Pasadena) just wasn’t anywhere as sophisticated as Tolmec.

  A month after we got there, Bill—it turned out—wouldn’t be able to work with us. In our front two rooms we had three times the books we’d had in Tolmec, and the woman who was assigned the job was Bill’s opposite: Ms. Chase was fat, talkative, and the first time I said anything to her she stood up from her desk and said, “If you don’t like the way I do my job, see the Hermit.” I did not say anything to Cellibrex about that one because he would just say, “Do what you want, you’ll do it your way anyway,” and I would point out how I was always doing what he wanted, as soon as he would say what it was.

  The next morning, when Chase came in, I said to her, “I know I’m an old man, but this is not working out. Would you please get me an appointment with the Hermit?” I expected her to look frightened or contrite or otherwise confused. But she surprised me.

  “Happily.” Fifteen minutes later she came in to say, “You have an appointment at three o’clock. I’ll take you over there myself in an Uber, if you like. Do you want your partner to come with you? You might be more comfortable with him . . . ?” and she waited with uncharacteristic expectancy.

  “No,” I said. “It’ll be simpler if I just go myself.”

  At twenty of three, she came in. “I meant to get you five minutes ago, but the time got away from me. Take a sweater or a hoodie. You two don’t use any air conditioning to speak of, and that place is going to be very cold. I’ve got a notebook here. I could jot down some of the things you’ve been complaining about. But the main thing is you want me transferred—and I’d like that too!”

  I went in where Cellibrex was sleeping in our queen-sized bed. I kissed his bare shoulder through the sheet, which is how I like to sleep, though I have a heavier blanket over my half of the bed. He opened an eye and said, “Did you take your pills . . . ?” and I said, as I often do, “Oops. I’ll take them,” which is another current of our lives that I can leave behind a traditional literary screen. Then I left and Chase and I went out into the heat of Houston’s September.

  “Make sure you tell them you and I both want me to change my job,” Chase said. “Just remember that’s what you’re here for. The way you two old fellows go around, I wouldn’t be surprised if you both forgot.”

  “Are you going to take me back?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “They’ll get you home.” I was totally unsure of myself, and felt very much the stranger in a strange land, but I started walking in through the interleaved walls. At one point I saw a large desk and an elderly dark-skinned woman in a straight-up-and-down black quilted garment. On her face was a blotch of white skin . . . that made me frown. I don’t know where I got the idea from, but I suddenly went up to her. “Excuse me. I don’t want to bother you. But were you ever the assistant to the Hermit of Tolmec—oh, many years ago. Twenty—no, fifty at least.”

  “Why, yes,” she said, turning to look at me. “I was. Why do you ask?”

  “Now, that,” I said, “is amazing. But age in a small town is always full of such coincidences. Well, I was one of the children you had for an educational program that you were running there.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember that. We had one practically every year. That was quite a while ago. I was only a youngster myself back then.”

  I said, “I’m to report to the Hermit of Houston. I expect that’s a room full of booths that you go into and tell them your problems . . .”

  She nodded. “Any place in front of that wall will accomplish the same end.”

  “Oh.” I looked over where she indicated. “Well, perhaps I should go over there and get started.”

  I leaned on my cane and turned. She said, “Excuse me. Wait a moment.”

  I turned back.

  “I assume you were one of the students who didn’t go on to the next level. I used to teach Ms. Chase, who brought you here, back when she was a boy too, just like you. Well, not exactly like you. That’s just a way of putting it. But that was a decade after I taught you. But to the extent that there is a Hermit of Houston these days, I’m it. Because you were in our group at all, probably that means you were pretty sharp. Do you want to come to my office for a little bit? You might find it interesting. There isn’t any Texas-Mexico border these days, but given that there used to be one only a generation before you were born, you might find it interesting what . . . well, some of what you might have learned if you’d gone on to the next level.”

  “I really have to get home to my partner . . .” She made me feel quite uncomfortable. Not like the assistant I remembered but like the Hermit herself.

  “Well, whether he knows it or not, he’s probably a native of Mexico. You look as if you might be one too.” She smiled. “Come this way, if you would . . . don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get home safely and on time.”

  I followed her, and I can’t tell you how much I felt I was going down a dangerous rabbit or worm hole. “What’s Mexico?” I asked. I glanced at her feet, out of some long-remembered habit, to see what color shoelaces she might be wearing.

  But it was just a door. The room behind it was almost identical to my own—I thought perhaps there would be a big chair, like the ornate one I remembered the old Hermit had sat in. But this was a simple chair with a simple console beside it. And the pattern on the walls was an enlarged reproduction of material certificates, except in gray rather than pale blue and gold. The carpet was only a little darker in hue than the one in our own bedroom. She walked over to it. She wore sandals, I realized. And a large ring on her big toe. “How would you feel about making a cup of tea for us . . . ? There used to be a drink called coffee, but we don’t have it anymore. Possibly your partner drank a great deal of it when he was much younger in the last gangs that worked in its cultivation—much to the south of here. But then you had your coming-of-age forgetting process, so that wouldn’t be a problem for you.” There weren’t any laces at all.

  “I suppose so. If you have some teabags and a teakettle . . . ?”

  “I have a tea ball—” she went over to the chair “—and an electric water boiler and robots to make it which are all waiting behind the walls, which can be activated from either here—” and she touched a button on the arm of her chair “—or there—” and a chair that looked notably more comfortable than hers rose beside me. “Please, sit down. Sit there, unless you’d be more comfortable standing. And often, even at my age, I am.”

  “That all sounds pretty unusual for me,” I said. But I sat, while she stood.

  “The reason there’s no Texas-Mexico border is because a generation before you were born a politician who very few people remember today proposed we build a wall between what was then the Republic of Mexico and what was then the Republic of the United States of America. The election of 2020 was the Trump of Doom for the Pence—which is the name they gave to an institution called the Electoral College, which was supposed to be a safety net that guarded against the abuse of popular elections—which from time to time didn’t work. In general, megalithic republics weren’t doing too well either.”

  I frowned. “I don’t remember that word . . .”

  “A very, very large republic. And a republic was a country run by elected officials. Generally speaking, unions worked better. Ships of state. The body politic. Bricolage. In general, smaller groups working together and connecting up according to what seemed necessary, and cutting back when it seemed right to do.” She moved in front of her own chair and sat. “It works so much better now that we’ve separated the
sexes and mixed up the genders—given them their proper dignity along with that of the ethnicities. All you have to do is dissociate them from where someone actually comes from and how they got here. Then you can do anything you want with them—thank the Night and the Day. What I have been told and what I operate by is that there is a place called Haven and there is a place called Mars and the moon and the moons of the gas giants. There are many people from other unions already working to exploit these and live on them. They don’t always tell—in fact, they almost never tell—the people who were there where they were or how they got there or got back. I think the chances are almost overwhelming that your partner—” she looked down at her chair arm, fingered something there, and a table grew up from the carpet in front of her and another grew in front of me, with a steaming cup and a teapot “—spent his time in Guatemala, Belize, or who knows, in those other unions we don’t mention anymore . . . I’m very fond of my robots. Have them for a decade and it’s almost impossible not to be. Yes, my information tells me that your partner is likely to have been one of those who was turned loose in our landscape (. . . oh, there’s some glitch right now in the internet!)—” and for a moment she made one of those familiar tight-lidded eye squeezes that I’ve only seen people do in films, almost as if she were in pain “—after he was returned from a virtual lunar colony, so I’m not getting an exact figure. That’s what we call the flat earth. But others interpret it differently.” She picked up her cup and sipped.

  “But what are they working to accomplish?”

  “To control mean production—”

  “The means of production . . . ?”

  Glancing at me, she raised an eyebrow that could have used some trimming, as if surprised I knew the term. “I only wish. No, that’s something you might have found on Facebook. This is pure Handbook. It’s about the imposing of normative, mean standards. Its critics say that it’s both mean—that is, cruel and simpleminded together—and productive only of death . . . in huge amounts! But that’s what it’s designed for. We assume we’ll be able to bring the population below the sustainable level in this particular union in two more generations—at least in this quarter of the globe.

  “An analysis of the means of production yields a pretty tight theory that same-sex relations produce a variety in art, child-rearing, battle, and even science that is a benefit in pretty much any social structure humans might take part in. Mean production says they’re abnormal and the best thing to do is to stamp them out. What you see here is the most humane way we’ve been able to come up with for doing it. Now we can just withdraw, sit back, and watch you die. It’s not pretty, but at least it keeps you away from the fewer and fewer healthy folk. And you don’t have to envy them—or Lesbians or anyone else. You never see them.”

  I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink at all.

  “Do you like your new home here in Houston?”

  I didn’t think we’d been here long enough to know, but this was certainly an unsettling beginning to it. “Do you really want me—or us—to know all this?”

  “I think if you tell too many others who don’t already believe or ‘know’ it, they will decide you are one form or another of bat-shit crazy, which I believe is the demotic phrase that still persists in the English of this area.” She smiled. “Something I suspect your partner has a good grasp of. And if my information is correct—and I have been raised to believe that it always is—I doubt very much he will believe it either. We find it pretty easy to manipulate people’s memories and worldviews these days. You live with Teddy C. Rodriguez, am I right?”

  “I think I’d like to get on home,” I said. (That is not Cellibrex’s real name either. But in this account, that’s close enough to it so it will do. Suffice it to say that she gave a name for him I recognized, and because she knew it, I felt far less at ease than I had been when I’d walked in. I would have expected her to call him . . . well, Cellibrex, the way I do here. But I thought the other was a secret, at least from such as she.)

  “You were in the same class with Ara, weren’t you,” said the Hermit with a falling rather than a rising inflection.

  I nodded.

  “If you’d gotten to the second level, you would have learned your birthday and known how old you were for the rest of your life—not just till eighteen. We don’t encourage such promiscuous knowledge among the population. It makes it easier to control what you think you think about the world.” Then she seemed to remember herself—or perhaps saw something on the small screen on the arm of her chair. “All the children we select are smart. And for the first three levels it’s practically a lottery who goes on to the next level, but we have to have some way and we call it testing. Still, it makes differences in what happens to you in your life. It’s only at the fifth or sixth condensation, when we’re bringing youngsters in from outside the Union borders, that the testing can be at all significant.” She chuckled. “Though some say it’s a lottery all the way to the top. Some of the students who were just pleasant rather than particularly smart I keep track of. Like your Ms. Chase. Wonderful boy . . . ! Wonderful boy! As, really, were you and Teddy as well. Go through the door there; there’s a man with a pedicab who will drive you home. It is a shameless indulgence that I use for myself and some of my friends.”

  “Eh—thank you,” I said. “This way . . . ?”

  “No . . . ,” she said. “Over there. If you want to take your teacup and teapot with you as souvenirs . . . ? I have them made for me—”

  “No . . . ,” I repeated, because that’s what she’d said to me; though later I wished I had, at least to show Cellibrex, to have some proof.

  “A last question—have you or your partner ever encountered the rumor of another order of human being? A witch, a succubus, a woman—not as we use the word here for someone you could meet in any public pornographic gathering in any sensory helmet theater, but a different kind of woman—or girl perhaps . . . ?”

  I stopped and looked back. “What do you mean?”

  “Right now,” she said, “that’s the perfect answer! Every once in a while a man like your partner gets it into his head from somewhere that there is an entirely other form of humanity . . . and given the tasks we have of bringing down the population reasonably and safely, it’s not a good rumor to let get out and about. It doesn’t usually work, even when he thinks he’s found one or a few of them. What I’ve been told, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t true, is that there aren’t a lot of them left . . . anywhere, at this point. They were harder to exterminate than you folks. But . . . well. I’m just glad that wasn’t my department. And by now we have pretty much anyone who might even be mistaken for one under our thumb, thousands of miles away. Goodbye.”

  I walked forward and two panels in the wall opened that I hadn’t even seen. Stepping outside, I saw a man sitting on a bench beside some greenery, looking at a magazine with pictures on the pages that were shifting like the old ones I remembered my sister used to read, back when I’d had a family. Did he still have one? I wondered. (I hadn’t seen any of mine since I’d gone traveling as a child.) Did Cellibrex—?

  Suddenly I remembered. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I have to go back. The reason I came was to tell someone that Ms. Chase wasn’t happy with her job, and—” Because I was thinking all sorts of things Cellibrex had said that came back to me: maybe his experiences and travels in the Union, in the world, were indeed broader than mine. . . .

  But I also felt it was very dangerous to try to pin them down with a language that had been so carefully tailored to erase the possibility. (I could hear her saying to this same man, “I’m going to take in some porn this afternoon . . .” Though it’s the thing everyone does and talks about, it’s not what everyone does and writes about.)

  The man looked at something on his wrist, then blinked up at me. “According to this, that was taken care of when you came in. I’m assuming you’re ready to return to where you live . . . ?”

  “The Hermit has
already seen to—?”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The Hermit. She said she used you—”

  “Oh,” he said, “about ten big officers at the Hermitage use me to take their friends around the city. But I don’t think there is a Hermit anymore. I’ve got your address here. All you have to do is get in and put the blanket up around you if you get chilly. But it’s a nice day. Watch your cane there.”

  So that’s what I did.

  The doors to the back of the Houston Hermitage were glass and blackened bronze, like my childhood memories of the doors at the front of the Hermitage in Tolmec. I was surprised, and yes, for the first time since I’d arrived, I felt relieved. It was glorious weather.

  We drove off, with the young guy pedaling in his sandals. (He was probably forty, at least.) I held the handle of my cane in both hands, looking down where the rubber tip was on the ridged mat across the bottom of the little gondola I was seated in. My driver pedaled us along beside Segways and closed vehicles. My cane swayed back and forth, and I looked around at bits and pieces of Houston going by.

  Why, I wondered, would anyone want another kind of human being, unless it was just for difference? (Was it possible to have a greater difference between people than there was, say, between myself and Cellibrex? Myself and Ms. Chase . . . ?) He drove through bustling Houston. When you look at things, you do very little panning. Your eye locks on something, and even when you’re walking, you follow it until you snap your eyes to something else. When I was a child, I used to wonder if every time you snapped your eyes you died and woke up in a new present, but just with memories of the past. As I rode home, looking from one bit to another of the landscape of my new home in Houston, so different from the landscape I had negotiated when I was a child, I wondered if there wasn’t something to my old theory.

  “Cell . . . ?”

  “Mmm . . . ?”

  “Does it ever bother you that you’re probably a decade closer to dying than I am?”