The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She lifted the coffee cup to her lips and took a sip.

  "I'm Lily," Lily said helpfully, staring wonderingly at the intricate wrinkles all over Clarissa's hands, and at the brown liver-spots on them, and the way they trembled all the time so that coffee kept sloshing out down the sides of the cup. If Lily's low res looks were short on detail. Clarissa seemed to possess detail in reckless abandon. And yet—and this was the part that puzzled Lily—it was to no apparent decorative purpose. That look must have cost a fortune, Lily thought, but why would anyone choose to look like that?

  "I'm Clarissa, my dear. I'm Clarissa Fall," said the old lady grandly, finishing her coffee and shaking the drips out of the cup before screwing it back onto the top of the flask.

  "Do you know the way?" Lily ventured. "Do you know the way to Piccadilly Circus?"

  "I should think so," Clarissa snorted. 'Tm over two hundred years old and I've lived in London since I was born. I'm the last physical person left in London, you know." She looked at her watch. She craved company and attention and yet when she actually had it, she was always curiously impatient and off-hand.

  "Oh. Two hundred," repeated Lily humbly. "That's quite old. Only otherwise I was going to suggest I could come and show you the way…"

  "Yes, do come by all means," said Clarissa magnanimously.

  The laws of the physical universe prevented physical people from riding on virtual vehicles, but there was nothing in the rules of the Field to prevent virtual people from riding a physical car. The only difficulty was that the invalid car was only designed for one, so Lily had to ride at the back on the little rack intended to carry bags of shopping.

  "I don't mind," said Lily, who couldn't afford dignity. "It's not that far."

  "I'll have to turn my implant off, I'm afraid," Clarissa told her, "so I can see the bumps on the road. You won't be able to talk to me until we're there."

  "I don't mind," said Lily gamely. She had no idea what Clarissa meant, but she had long since accepted that life was largely incomprehensible.

  Clarissa turned the key to start the car. As she did so she noticed the meter that showed the remaining charge in the battery. When she set out, the needle had pointed to fully charged, but now it was on the edge of the red area marked warning! very low! She allowed herself for a single moment to see the trouble she was in—and to feel fear—and then she pushed it firmly from her conscious mind.

  Clarissa drove slowly down Tottenham Court Road. The shop buildings were dark and empty, their windows blank, or sometimes broken and full of dead leaves. The roads were bare and strewn with rubble. Apart from the whine of her electric car and the click of stones thrown up by its rubber wheels, there was utter silence.

  But Lily saw windows full of goods for sale, cars and buses all around them, and people everywhere.

  "Nearly there!" she called out cheerfully, still not fully grasping that Clarissa with her implant inactivated couldn't hear her or sense her presence in any way. Then she gave a little shriek as Clarissa nonchalantly swerved across the road directly into the path of oncoming traffic and carried on down the wrong side of the road, magnificently indifferent to honking horns and shouts of indignation.

  "She's physical," Lily called out by way of explanation from her perch on the back of Clarissa's little car. "She's just physical."

  Half-way along Shaftesbury Avenue, the battery gave out and the car died.

  And now Clarissa was scared. It was getting towards evening; it was turning very cold; and she was an elderly woman with an injured foot in the middle of a ruined city. She had nowhere to stay, nothing to eat or drink, and no means of getting home.

  But Clarissa was good at pushing things out of her mind.

  "It's not far," she muttered, referring not to the fake chateau, her distant home, but to Piccadilly Circus which still lay ahead. Piccadilly Circus offered no warmth, no nourishment, no resolution at all of her difficulties, but all of that was beside the point. "I'll just have to walk," she said. "It's absurd to come this far and not get to see it."

  She dismounted from her car and began, painfully, to limp the last couple of hundred metres, but then she remembered Lily and stopped.

  "I'M GOING TO WALK THE LAST BIT!" she bellowed back, assuming correctly that Lily was trailing behind her, but erroneously that Lily's invisibility made her deaf. "I Can't SEE YOU because MY IMPLANT'S TURNED OFF and I don't want to turn it on again until I get there, or it will SPOIL THE EFFECT."

  She had it all planned out. She would not turn on her implant until she was right in the middle of the Circus.

  "YOU'RE VERY WELCOME TO COME ALONG THOUGH!" she shouted, as if she personally controlled access to the public streets.

  She hobbled forward a few steps along the silent ruined avenue (while in the other London, cars swerved around her, pedestrians turned and stared and Lily patiently plodded behind her as if the two of them were Good King Wenceslas and his faithful page.)

  "I'll tell you what though," Clarissa said, pausing again. Her face was screwed up with the pain of her injured foot, but her tone was nonchalant. "If you felt like calling the council and asking them to get hold of someone physical to come and help me out, I would be grateful… Only my dratted car has QUITE RUN OUT OF POWER you see, so it's not going to be able to get me back."

  "I don't have any money," said Lily. "Is it an emergency do you think? Shall I call the emergency number?"

  But of course Clarissa couldn't hear her.

  It was getting dark as she limped into Piccadilly Circus. The buildings were inert slabs of masonry, all those thousands of coloured light bulbs on the old advertising signs were cold and still and the statue of Eros was more like the angel of death on a mausoleum than the god of physical love.

  Some gusts of rain came blowing down Regent Street. Clarissa's lips and fingers were blue with cold and her whole body was trembling. (Lily was amazed: she had never seen such a thing, for consensuals are never cold.) Clarissa was in great pain too—the broken bone in her ankle had slipped out of place and felt like a blade being twisted in her flesh—and she was tired and hungry and thirsty. Too late she realised she had left her flask of coffee behind in her abandoned car.

  "You're a fool, Clarissa Fall," she told herself. "You don't look after yourself. One of these days you'll just keel over and the rats will come and eat you up. And it will be your own stupid fault." Then she remembered her low res companion. "ARE YOU STILL THERE LILY?" she bellowed. "Did you make that CALL FOR ME? I'm just going to get across to the statue there and then I'll turn my implant on and WE CAN TALK."

  She hobbled to the base of Eros and then reached up to the implant switch behind her ear. The colour, the electricity, the teeming life of a great city at night came flooding instantly into the desolate scene. There were people everywhere, and cars with shining headlamps and glowing tail-lights, and black taxis and red double-decker buses full of passengers, lit upstairs and down with a cheery yellow glow. But above all there were the lights, the wonderful electric streams of colour that made shining moving pictures and glittering logos and words that flowed across fields of pure colour in purple and red and green and yellow and blue and white.

  "Ah!" cried Clarissa in rapture, "almost like when I was a little girl and the lights were real!"

  "I told you they were lovely," Lily said, like a pet dog that will wait an hour, two hours, three hours for its mistress to glance in its direction, and still be no less grateful when the longed-for attention finally comes.

  Clarissa turned, smiling, but the sight of Lily's cartoonish moon-face had an unexpected effect on her. She felt a stab of pity for Lily and at the same time revulsion. Her smile ceased to be real. Her pleasure vanished. She felt the bitter cold of the physical world pushing through, the needle-sharp physical pain nagging at her from her foot, the physical ache in her head that came from tiredness and dehydration.

  Lily sensed her change of mood and the simple line that represented her mouth was just starting to cu
rve downwards when Clarissa switched off her implant again. Lily vanished, along with lights, taxis, buses and crowds. It was very dark and quite silent and the buildings were dim shadows.

  "The thing is, Lily," Clarissa announced to the empty darkness, "that you con-sensuals are all just like these lights. Just moving pictures made out of little dots. Just pictures of buses, pictures of cars, pictures of people, pictures of shop windows."

  Deliberately turning away from where Lily had been, Clarissa turned the implant on again and watched the lights come back. But there was no thrill this time, no exhilarating shock, nothing to offset the cold and the pain. It was no different really to changing channels on a TV set, she thought bitterly, and straight away reached up to flick the implant off again. But now the switch, which was designed to be turned on and off a couple of times a day, finally broke under the strain of her constant tinkering with it and refused to stay in one position or the other. Clarissa's perceptual field now flickered randomly every few seconds from the consensual to the physical world and back again —and she couldn't make it stop. She stood helplessly and ineffectually fingering the switch for a short time, then gave up and sank down to the ground at the foot of the statue. What else was there to do?

  "Did you call up the council, Li — " she began, and then the consensual world disappeared. "Oh dear. LILY, ARE YOU STILL THERE?… Oh you are, good. Did you call the council only I think I ought to go home now… Lily? LILY! ARE THE COUNCIL GETTING HELP?… Tell them I don't want Agents mind. Tell them to get some physicals out. They'll be cross with me, but they'll come anyway. I don't care what Richard said."

  Actually, whether she liked it or not, Agents were coming, four of them, from different directions, from different errands in different parts of London. They were still some way off but they were on their way. The Hub had sent them, having contacted Richard Howard and been told by him that we physicals wouldn't come out again.

  Later Richard began to worry about what he'd done and called me. "I know it seems harsh," he said, rather defensively, "but I do feel we've got to keep out of this, don't you agree? Clarissa's got to learn that when we say something we mean it, or she'll keep doing this stuff over and over again. I mean she's in Piccadilly Circus for god's sake! Even Clarissa must be perfectly well aware that she couldn't go into central London and get back again in that silly little car of hers. She obviously just assumed that we would come and fetch her. She just banked on it."

  I was as furious with Clarissa as he was. I had spent the afternoon raking leaves and tidying up in my secluded little garden. I had just eaten a small meal and taken a glass of port and was looking forward to a quiet evening alone in the warm behind drawn curtains, making some preparatory notes for Chapter 62 of my book The Decline and Fall of Reality. (I had dealt in Chapters 60 and 61 with the advent of the Internet and the mobile telephone and was just getting to what was to be the great central set-piece of my whole account: the moment where the human race is presented for the first time with incontrovertible evidence that its own activity will destroy the planet, not in centuries or even decades but in years, unless it can reduce its physical presence to a fraction of its current levels.)

  "Bloody Clarissa! Bloody bloody Clarissa!"

  Why should I give up the treat of a quiet evening and a new chapter, when she herself had deliberately engineered her own difficulties? I absolutely dreaded going into the centre of London at any time, as Clarissa surely knew, and yet here she was calmly assuming that I could and should be dragged there whenever it suited her convenience. And yet I knew I had to go to her.

  "I can't leave her to the Agents, though, Richard. I know she's a pain, I know we're being used, but I can't just leave her."

  "Oh for goodness' sake, Tom, it'll teach her a lesson," Richard said, hardening in his resolve now he had my own flabbiness of will to kick against. "How will she ever learn if we don't stay firm now? It's really for her own good. And anyway, the Agents can't be called off now. You know what they're like."

  "Well if they're going to be there anyway, I'd better be there too," I said. "They scare her silly. I'll drive up there now, so at least there's someone on hand that she knows."

  I went out into the cold and started up my car. I resented Clarissa bitterly. I absolutely dreaded a reprise of the dark feelings that trips into London invariably churned up in me, the shame, the embarrassment, the feeling of loss, the envy, the deep, deep grief that is like the grief of facing a former lover who belongs now to another and will never be yours again… I was exhausted by the very thought of the effort of it all, not to mention the discomfort and the cold.

  When I got to Piccadilly Circus, Agents were just arriving, one emerging from Shaftesbury Avenue, one from Piccadilly and one each from the northern and southern branches of Regent Street. But, huddled up under the statue of Eros, Clarissa couldn't see them, for when she was in purely physical mode it was too dark and when she was in consensual mode they were invisible. Beside her squatted Lily with her consensual arm round Clarissa's physical shoulder. Sometimes Clarissa could see Lily and sometimes she couldn't, but either way she could get no warmth from the embrace, however much Lily might want to give it.

  As my physical headlights swept across the physical space, the first thing Clarissa saw was two of the Agents looming out of the darkness and advancing towards her. It felt like some nightmare from her childhood, and she screamed. Then her implant switched on by itself and the lights and the buses and the crowds returned to screen them out. But that was even worse because she knew that behind this glossy facade the Agents were still really there, slowly advancing, though now unseen.

  She screamed again.

  "Keep away from me, you hear me! Just keep away."

  "Don't be scared, Clarissa," said Lily. "I'm here for you."

  But Lily didn't have a clue. She had never experienced cold. She had never known physical pain. She wasn't aware of the presence of the Agents. She had no inkling of the other world of silence and shadow that lay behind the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus.

  I got out of my car. I had my own implant switched on and I picked my way gingerly over the ground between me and Clarissa, knowing only too well how easily nasty physical potholes can be concealed by the virtual road surface. I was doing my best to ignore the many consensual eyes watching me with disapproval and dislike and I was seething all the while with rage at self-obsessed Clarissa for putting me through all this yet again. How dare she drag me out here into the cold night? How dare she expose me to the illusion of the consensual city and to the disapproving gaze of the consensual people, when I all I ever wanted was to be at home behind my high hedges that I had cut into the shape of castle walls, behind my locked doors, behind my tightly drawn curtains, writing about reality.

  "You know her do you?" a man asked me. "Well, you want to do something about her, mate. She's nuts. She's mental. She needs help"

  I didn't respond. I had never known how to speak to these people, so manifestly unreal and yet so obviously alive. I both despised and envied them. How tawdry their constructed world was and how craven their meek acceptance of it. Yet how narrow and dull my own world was by comparison, my bleak garden, my clipped hedges, my book, my nightly glass of port, my weekly sally down the road to the Horse and Hounds, the Last Real Pub, to drink Real Beer with the diminishing band of decrepit and barren old men and woman who call themselves the Last Real People.

  "She needs locking up more like," said a woman. "That's the same one that blocked the Northern Line last month with her carrying on. I saw her face in the paper."

  I picked my way through the traffic.

  "Alright Clarissa," I called coldly as I came up to her, "I'm here again for you. Muggins is here again as you no doubt expected he would be. I've come to fetch you home."

  "Muggins? Who's that?" she quavered. She was afraid it was one of the Agents.

  "It's just me, Clarissa. It's just Tom."

  "It's who?" muttered Clarissa, strainin
g to see me.

  "He said Tom, dear," Lily told her.

  Clarissa glanced sideways at the cartoon face with its little black dot eyes and its downward curved mouth. Then Lily vanished again, along with the whole Field, and Clarissa was back in the dark physical world. But the lights of my car were there now and, without the distraction of the Field, Clarissa could clearly see me approaching as well as the Agents around me, waiting to step in if I couldn't resolve things.

  Awkwardly, wincing with pain, she rose to her feet.

  "I just wanted to see the lights again, like they were when I was a child," she said stubbornly.

  And then she began to spin round on the spot like children sometimes do in play, but very very slowly, shuffling round and round with her feet and grimacing all the while with pain. And as she revolved, the faulty switch on her implant continued to flicker on and off so that, for a few seconds the bright lights and the buses and the cars span around her, and then it was the turn of the darkness that was the source of her coldness and her pain, and it was the dim cold walls of the empty buildings that moved round her, lit only by the headlights of my car.

  Lily appeared and disappeared. When she was there the Agents vanished. When she vanished, they appeared. The constant was me, who like Clarissa could both feel the physical cold, and see the consensual lights.

  "Come on Clarrie," I said to her gently. "Come on Clarrie."

  The old lady ignored me for a while, carrying on with her strange slow-motion spinning and singing a tuneless little song under her breath. People were craning round in cars and buses to look at us. Pedestrians were standing across the road and watching us as frankly as if this really was a Circus and we were there expressly to put on a show. Then abruptly Clarissa stopped spinning. She tottered with dizziness, but her eyes were blazing like the eyes of a cornered animal.

  "Who are you?" she demanded. "Who exactly are you?"

  It was odd because in that moment everything around me seemed to intensify: the sharpness of the cold night air in the physical world, the brilliance of the coloured lights in the consensual one, the strange collision of the two worlds that my Clarrie had single-handedly brought about… And I found that I didn't feel angry any more, didn't even mind that she'd brought me all this way.