The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Ah!” he said. “And what do you have for me, Señor Cienfuegos?”

  With a flourish, Arce deposited the box on the table and was rewarded by an appreciative sigh. In the dim light, his culinary offering—ordinary by the grotesque standards for the Malsueno—looked spectacularly mysterious: an 18-inch-long section of a rotten log, shining a vile, vivid green, with the swirls of phosphorescent fungus that nearly covered its dark, grooved surface; scuttling here and there were big spiders that showed a negative black against the green radiance, like intricate holes in a glowing film that was sliding back and forth … except now and again, they merged into a single many-legged blackness that pulsed and shimmered and grew larger still. Bathed in that glow, Mr. Akashini’s face was etched into a masklike pattern of garish light and shadow.

  “What are they?” he said, his eyes glued to the box.

  For Mr. Akashini’s benefit, Arce resorted to invention.

  “They are among the great mysteries of the Malsueno,” he said. “And thus, they have no name, for who can name the incomprehensible? They are insect absences, they live, they prey on life, and yet they are lightless and undefined, more nothing than something. They are common yet the essence of rarity. They are numberless, yet they are one.”

  At this, words failed him. He folded his arms and affected a solemn pose.

  “Excellent!” whispered Mr. Akashini, leaning close to the lid of the box. He made one of his customary throaty growls. “You may leave now. I wish to eat alone so as to maximize my understanding.”

  That was agreeable to Arce, who had no wish to observe the fate of the spiders and the fungus-coated log. But as he turned to leave, pleased with the facility with which he had satisfied the terms of his employment, Mr. Akashini said, “You have provided me with a marvelous hors d’oeuvre, señor, but I expect much more of you. Is that clear?”

  “Of course,” said Arce, startled.

  “No, not of course. There is nothing of course about what I’ve asked of you. I expect diligence. And even more than diligence, I expect zeal.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Akashini, fitting his gaze to the glowing feast, his face again ordered by that impenetrable smile. “Exactly.”

  * * *

  Although for weeks he obeyed Mr. Akashini’s instructions and sought out ever more exotic and deadly suppers, to Arce’s surprise, his employer did not sicken and die but thrived on his diet of poisons and claws and spore. His healthy glow increased, his biceps bulged like cannon balls, his eyes remained clear. It became a challenge to Arce to locate a dish that would weaken Mr. Akashini’s resistance, that would at least cause him an upset stomach. He did not care for Mr. Akashini and had concluded that the man was something more sinister than a fool. And when Nacho asked again what was the nature of his business in room 23, Arce had no qualms about telling him, thinking that Nacho would make a joke of his employer’s diet. But Nacho was incredulous and shook his fist at Arce. “I’m warning you,” he said, “I won’t have you taking advantage of my guests.”

  Arce understood that Nacho was concerned that he might be swindling Mr. Akashini and not cutting him in for a percentage. When he tried to clarify the matter, Nacho only threatened him again, demanded money, and Arce walked away in disgust.

  It was evident by the way Mr. Akashini used his camera that he had no regard for anyone in the town. He would approach potential subjects, all smiles and bows, and proceed to pose them, making it plain that he was ridiculing the person whose photograph he was preparing to take. He posed confused, dignified old men with bouquets of flowers, he posed Nacho with a toy machine gun, he posed a young girl with an ugly birthmark on her cheek holding an armful of puppies. Afterward, he would once again smile and bow, but the smiles were sneers and the bows were slaps. Arce understood the uses of contempt—he had witnessed it among his own people in their harsh attitude toward Americans. Yet they were expressing the classic resentment of the poor toward the wealthy, and he could not fathom why Mr. Akashini, who was wealthier than an American, should express a similar attitude toward the poor. Perhaps, he thought, Mr. Akashini had himself been poor and was now having his revenge. But why revenge himself upon those who had never lorded it over him? Was his need to understand, to consume, part and parcel of a need to dominate and deride? All Arce knew of Japan had been gleaned from books dealing with the samurai, with knights, swords and a chill formal morality, and he had the notion that the values detailed in these books were of moment to Mr. Akashini, though in some distorted fashion. Yet, in the end, he could not decide if Mr. Akashini were as simple as he appeared or if there were more to him than met the eye, and he thought this might be a question to which not even his employer knew the answer.

  Be he complicated or simple, one thing was apparent—Mr. Akashini did not know as much as he pretended. He could spout volumes of facts concerning the Malsueno. Yet his knowledge lacked the depth of experience, the unifying character of something known in the heart of the mind, and Arce could not accept the idea that consumption bestowed upon him a deeper comprehension. The things he claimed to understand of America—rock-and-roll music, say—he understood in a Japanese way, imbuing them with watered-down samurai principles and a neon romanticism redolent of contemporary Tokyo night-club values and B movies, thereby transforming them into devalued icons that bore little relation to the realities from which they had sprung.

  However, Arce was not such a fool that he claimed to understand Mr. Akashini, and putting his doubts aside, he made an interior renewal of his contract and set himself to feed Mr. Akashini the absolute essence of the Malsueno, hoping to either prove or disprove the thesis. He was beginning to feel an odd responsibility to his job, to a man who—though he paid well—had shown him nothing but contempt, and while this conscientious behavior troubled him, being out of character with the person he believed he had become, he had no choice but to obey its imperatives.

  Arce’s searches carried him farther and farther afield and one morning found him in a clearing three days’ trek from Santander Jimenez. Mr. Akashini would be occupied for the better part of a week in devouring his latest offering, which included lapis bees and lime ants, a section from the trunk of a gargantua garnished with its thorns, an entire duende cooked with blood vine, various fungi, all seasoned with powder ground from woohli bones and served with a variety of mushrooms. Thus, Arce, being in no particular hurry, stopped to rest and enjoy the otherworldly beauty of the clearing, its foliage a mingling of mineral brilliance and fairy shape such as occurred only within the confines of the Malsueno.

  At the center of the clearing was a cloud pool, a ragged oval some 12 feet in diameter, whose quicksilver surface mirrored the surrounding foliage—yellow weeds; boulders furred with orange moss; mushrooms the size of parasols, their purple crowns mottled with spots of vermilion; mattes of dead lianas thick as boas; shrubs with spine-tipped viridian leaves that quested ceaselessly for some animal presence in which to inject their venom; and, dangling from above, the immense red leaves of a gargantua, each large enough to wrap about oneself several times.

  Through gaps in the foliage, Arce could see the slender trunks of other gargantuas rising above the canopy, vanishing into a bank of low clouds. And in the middle distance, its translucent flesh barely visible against the overcast, a rainbird flapped up from a stinger palm and beat its way south against the prevailing wind. Arce watched it out of sight, captivated by the almost impalpable vibration of its wings, by the entirety of the scene, with its gaudy array of colors and exotic vitality. At times like this, he was able to shrug off the bitter weight of his past for a few moments and delight in the mystery he inhabited.

  Once he had carefully inspected the area, he settled on a boulder and opened the face plate of his protective suit. The heat was oppressive after the coolness of the suit, and the air stank of carrion and sweet rot, yet it was refreshing to feel the breeze on his face. He took a packet of dried fruit from a pocket on his sle
eve and ate, ever aware of the rustlings and cries and movement about him—there were creatures in this part of the jungle that could pluck him from his suit with no more difficulty than a man shelling a peanut, and they were not always easy to detect. Absently, he tossed a piece of apricot into the cloud pool and watched the silvery surface effloresce as it digested the fruit, ruffles of milky rose and lavender spreading from the point of impact toward the edges like the opening of a convulsed bloom. He considered collecting a vial of the fluid for Mr. Akashini—that would test the efficacy of his implants.

  Yet to Arce’s mind, the cloud pool did not embody the essence of the jungle but rather was a filigree, an adornment, and he doubted that he could provide his employer with any more quintessentially Malsuenan a meal than some of those he had already served him. Mr. Akashini had eaten fillet of tarzanal, woohli, ghost lemur, jaguar, malcoton; he had supped on stews of tar fish, manta bat, pezmiel, manatee; he had consumed stone, leaf, root, spore; he had gorged himself on sauces compounded of poison, feces, animal and plant excrescence of every kind; yet he appeared as healthy and ignorant as before. What, Arce thought, if it were the very efficacy of his implants that kept him from true understanding? Perhaps to attain such a state, one must be vulnerable to that which one wished to understand.

  He unzipped another pocket on his sleeve and removed a packet of pavonine spores. Arce was no addict, but he enjoyed a taste of the drug now and again, and when attempting to seek out certain animals, he found it more than a little useful. He touched a spore-covered finger tip to his tongue, enough to sensitize him to his immediate environment. Within seconds, he felt a tightening at the back of his throat, a queasiness and a touch of vertigo. A violent cramp doubled him over, bringing tears and spots before his eyes. By the time the cramp had passed, he seemed to be crawling along a high branch of a gargantua, hauling himself along with knobby, hairy fingers tipped with claws, pushing aside heavy folds of dangling leaves with ropy patterns of veins, inflamed by a dark-red emotion that sharpened into lust as he was being lifted, shaken, pincers locked about his chitinous body and, above him, impossibly tall pale arcs of grass blades and the glowing white blur of an orchid sun; and then, fat with blood, he hung dazed and languorous in a shadowy place; and then he was leaping, his jaws wide, claws straining toward the flanks of a fleeing tapir; and then his mind went blank and still and calm, like a pool of emerald water steeped in a single thought; and then, his shadow casting a lake of darkness across a thicket of sapodilla bushes, he roared, on fire with the ecstasy of his strength and the exuberance of his appetites.

  Less than three minutes after he had taken the pavonine, Arce came unsteadily to his feet and started hunting for the calm green mind that his mind had touched … like nothing he had touched before. Calm, and yet a calm compounded of a trillion minute violences, like the jungle itself in the hour before first light, brimming with hot potentials, but, for the moment, cool and peaceful and hushed. Whatever it had been was close by the pool, Arce was certain, and so he knew it could be nothing large. He overturned rocks with the toe of his boot, probed in the weeds with a rotten stick and at length unearthed a smallish snake with an intricate pattern of red and yellow and white tattooed across its black scales. It slithered away but did so with no particular haste, as if—rather than trying to elude capture—it was simply going on its way, and when Arce netted it, instead of twisting and humping about, it coiled up and went to sleep. Seeing this, Arce did not doubt that the snake’s skull housed the mind he had contacted, and although he had no real feeling that the snake would implement Mr. Akashini’s understanding, still he was pleased to have found something new and surprising to feed him.

  * * *

  On his return to Santander Jimenez, he served Mr. Akashini a meal that included a palm salad with diced snake meat. Then, leaving him to dine alone, he walked across town to the Salon Tia Flaca, a rambling three-story building of dark-green boards close to the market, and there secured the companionship of a whore for the night. The whore, his favorite, was named Expectacion and was a young thing, 19 or 20, pretty after the fashion of the women of the coast, slim and dark, with full breasts and a petulant mouth and black hair that tumbled like smoke about her shoulders. Once they had made love, she brought Arce rum with ice and lime and lay beside him and asked questions about his life whose answers were of no interest to her whatsoever. Arce realized that her curiosity was a charade, that she was merely fulfilling the forms of their unwritten contract, but nevertheless, he felt compelled to tell her about Mr. Akashini and the peculiar business between them, because by so doing, he hoped to disclose a pattern underlying it, something that would explain his new sense of responsibility, his complicity in this foolhardy mission.

  When he was done, she propped herself up on an elbow, her pupils cored with orange reflections from the kerosene lamp, and said, “He pays you so much, and still you remain in Santander Jimenez?”

  “It’s as I’ve told you … I’m as happy here as anywhere. I’ve nowhere to go.”

  “Nowhere! You must be crazy! This”—she waved at the window, at the dark wall of the jungle beyond and the malfunctioning neons of the muddy little town—“this is nowhere! Even money can’t change that. But the capital … with money. That’s a different story.”

  “You’re young,” he said. “You don’t understand.”

  She laughed. “The only way you can understand anything is to do it.… Then it’s not worth talking about. Tell that to your Japanese man. Anyway, you’re the one who doesn’t understand.” She threw her arms about him, her breasts flattening against his chest. “Let’s get out of here, let’s steal the Jap’s money and go to the capital. Even if the theft is reported, the police there don’t care what happens in the Malsueno. You know that’s true. They’ll just file the report. Come on, Papá! I swear I’ll make you happy.”

  Arce was put off by her use of the word papá, and said, “Do you think I’m a fool? In the capital, the minute I turned my back, you’d be off with the first good-looking boy who caught your eye.”

  “You are a fool to think I’m just a slut.” She drew back and seemed to be searching his face. “I’ve been a whore since I was twelve, and I’ve learned all I need to know about good-looking boys. What gets my heart racing is somebody like you. Somebody rich and refined who’ll keep me safe. I’d marry a guy like you in a flash. But even if I was the kind of woman you say, no injury I did you would be worse than what you’re doing to yourself by staying here.”

  He thought he detected in her eyes a flicker of something more than reflected light, of an inner luminescence like that found in the eyes of a malcoton. It occurred to him that she herself was of the Malsueno, one of its creatures, the calm green habit of her thoughts every bit as inexplicable to him as the mind of the snake he had captured. And yet there was something in her that brought back memories of his dead wife—a mixture of energy and toughness that tempted him to believe not only in her but in himself, in the possibility that he could regain his energy and hope.

  “Maybe someday,” he told her. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Papá. I don’t think it’s in you.” She arched her back, and her breasts rolled on her chest, drawing his eyes to the stiffened chocolate-colored nipples. “I guess you were born to be a marañero. But at least you’ve got good taste in whores.”

  She went astride him and made love to him with more enthusiasm than before, and as he arched beneath her, watching her in the dim light that penetrated the fall of her hair, which hung down about his head, walling him into a place of warm breath and musk, he imagined that he knew her, that he could see past the deceits and counterfeits in her rapt features to a place where she was in love not with him but with the security offered by his circumstance. Not truly in love but—like a beast that has spotted its prey—in the grip of a fierce opportunism, a feeling that might as well have been love for its delirium and consuming intensity.

  * * *

&nb
sp; The next day, when Arce visited the hotel, Nacho Perez, dressed in a sweat-stained guayabera and shorts, questioned him about his activities in room 23.

  “What’s going on up there?” he asked, mopping perspiration from his brow. “I won’t have any funny business. Is he a drug addict? A pervert? What are you doing with him? He never lets anyone in the room, not even the maid. I won’t tolerate this kind of behavior.”

  “You’ll tolerate anything, Nacho,” said Arce, “as long as you’re paid to tolerate it. Ask your questions of Akashini.”

  “Listen to me…” Nacho began, but Arce caught him by the shirt front and said, “You bastard! Give me a reason—not a good reason, just a little one—and I’ll cut you, do you hear?”

  Nacho licked his lips and said, “I hear,” but there was no conviction in his voice.

  On reaching the room, Arce discovered that Mr. Akashini had spent a sleepless night. His color was poor, his brow clammy, his hands trembling. Yet when Arce suggested that he forgo his meal, the Japanese man said, “No, no! I’m all right.” He passed a handkerchief across his brow. “Perhaps something simple. A few plants … some insects.” Arce had no choice but to comply, and for several days thereafter, he served Mr. Akashini harmless meals from the edge of the jungle; yet despite this, whether because of the snake or simply because of a surfeit of poisons that had neutralized his implants, Mr. Akashini continued to deteriorate. His skin acquired the unhealthy shine of milk spore, his eyes were clouded, his manner distracted, and he grew so weak that it took him three tries to heave himself up from his chair. Nothing Arce said would sway him from his course.

  “I feel”—Mr. Akashini had to swallow—“I feel as if I am … close to something.”