The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  12 January 2011:

  Israel Lamont was holding big-time when a Krel monitor zipped over the alley. A minute later one of the aliens lurched around the corner and approached him. Lamont was ready.

  “I need to achieve an altered state of consciousness,” the alien said. It wore a red suit, a lightning bolt on its chest.

  “I’m your man,” Lamont said. “You just try this. Best stuff on the street.” He held the vial out in the palm of his hand. “Go ahead, try it.” The Krel took it.

  “How much?”

  “One million.”

  The Krel gave him a couple hundred thousand. “Down payment,” it said. “How does one administer this?”

  “What, you don’t know? I thought you guys were hip.”

  “I have been working hard, and am unacquainted.”

  This was ripe. “You burn it,” Lamont said.

  The Krel started toward the trash-barrel fire. Before he could empty the vial into it, Lamont stopped him. “Wait up, homes! You use a pipe. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Lamont pulled a pipe from his pocket, torched up, and inhaled. The Krel watched him. Brown eyes like a dog’s. Goofy honkie face. The rush took him, and Lamont saw in the alien’s face a peculiar need. The thing was hungry. Desperate.

  “I may try?” The alien reached out. Its hand trembled.

  Lamont handed over the pipe. Clumsily, the creature shook a block of crack into the bowl. Its beaklike upper lip, however, prevented it from getting its mouth tight against the stem. It fumbled with the pipe, from somewhere producing a book of matches. “Shit, I’ll light it,” Lamont said.

  The Krel waited while Lamont held his Bic over the bowl. Nothing happened. “Inhale, man.”

  The creature inhaled. The blue flame played over the crack; smoke boiled through the bowl. The creature drew in steadily for what seemed to be minutes. Serious capacity. The crack burned totally through. Finally the Krel exhaled.

  It looked at Lamont. Its eyes were bright.

  “Good shit?” Lamont said.

  “A remarkable stimulant effect.”

  “Right.” Lamont looked over his shoulder toward the alley’s entrance. It was getting dark. Yet he hesitated to ask for the rest of the money.

  “Will you talk with me?” the Krel asked, swaying slightly.

  Surprised, Lamont said, “O.K. Come with me.”

  Lamont led the Krel back to a deserted store that abutted the alley. They went inside and sat down on some crates against the wall.

  “Something I been wondering about you,” Lamont said. “You guys are coming to own the world. You fly across the planets, Mars and that shit. What you want with crack?”

  “We seek to broaden our minds.”

  Lamont snorted. “Right. You might as well hit yourself in the head with a hammer.”

  “We seek escape,” the alien said.

  “I don’t buy that, neither. What you got to escape from?”

  The Krel looked at him. “Nothing.”

  They smoked another pipe. The Krel leaned back against the wall, arms at its sides like a limp doll. It started a queer coughing sound, chest spasming. Lamont thought it was choking and tried to slap it on the back. “Don’t do that,” it said. “I’m laughing.”

  “Laughing? What’s so funny?”

  “I lied to Colonel Zipp,” it said. “We want cocaine for kicks.”

  Lamont relaxed a little. “I hear you now.”

  “We do everything for kicks.”

  “Makes for hard living.”

  “Better than maintaining consciousness continuously without interruption.”

  “You said it.”

  “Human beings cannot stand too much reality,” the Krel said. “We don’t blame you. Human beings! Disgust, horror, shame. Nothing personal.”

  “You bet.”

  “Nonbeing penetrates that in which there is no space.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The alien laughed again. “I lied to Sepulveda, too. Our time machines take people to the past they believe in. There is no other past. You can’t change it.”

  “Who the fuck’s Sepulveda?”

  “Let’s do some more,” it said.

  They smoked one more. “Good shit,” it said. “Just what I wanted.”

  The Krel slid off the crate. Its head lolled. “Here is the rest of your payment,” it whispered, and died.

  Lamont’s heart raced. He looked at the Krel’s hand, lying open on the floor. In it was a full-sized ear of corn, fashioned of gold, with tassels of finely spun silver wire.

  Today:

  It’s not just physical laws that science fiction readers want to escape. Just as commonly, they want to escape human nature. In pursuit of this, sf offers comforting alternatives to the real world. For instance, if you start reading an sf story about some abused wimp, you can be pretty sure that by chapter two he’s going to discover he has secret powers unavailable to those tormenting him, and by the end of the book, he’s going to save the universe. Sf is full of this sort of thing, from the power fantasy of the alienated child to the alternate history where Hitler is strangled in his cradle and the Library of Alexandria is saved from the torch.

  Science fiction may in this way be considered as much an evasion of reality as any mind-distorting drug. I know that sounds a little harsh, but think about it. An alkaloid like cocaine or morphine invades the central nervous system. It reduces pain, produces euphoria, enhances our perceptions. Under its influence we imagine we have supernormal abilities. Limits dissolve. Soon, hardly aware of what’s happened to us, we’re addicted.

  Science fiction has many of the same qualities. The typical reader comes to sf at a time of suffering. He seizes on it as a way to deal with his pain. It’s bigger than his life. It’s astounding. Amazing. Fantastic. Some grow out of it; many don’t. Anyone who’s been around sf for a while can cite examples of longtime readers as hooked and deluded as crack addicts.

  Like any drug addict, the sf reader finds desperate justifications for his habit. Sf teaches him science. Sf helps him avoid “future shock.” Sf changes the world for the better. Right. So does cocaine.

  Having been an sf user myself, however, I have to say that, living in a world of cruelty, immersed in a culture that grinds people into fish meal like some brutal machine, with histories of destruction stretching behind us back to the Pleistocene, I find it hard to sneer at the desire to escape. Even if escape is delusion.

  18 October 1527:

  Timu drove the foot plow into the ground, leaned back to break the crust, drew out the pointed pole, and backed up a step to let his wife, Collyur, turn the earth with her hoe. To his left was his brother, Okya; and to his right, his cousin, Tupa; before them, their wives planting the seed. Most of the purics of Cajamarca were there, strung out in a line across the terrace, the men wielding the foot plows, and the women or children carrying the sacks of seed potatoes.

  As he looked up past Collyur’s shoulders to the edge of the terrace, he saw a strange man approach from the post road. The man stumbled into the next terrace up from them, climbed down steps to their level. He was plainly excited.

  Collyur was waiting for Timu to break the next row; she looked up at him questioningly.

  “Who is that?” Timu said, pointing past her at the man.

  She stood up straight and looked over her shoulder. The other men had noticed, too, and stopped their work.

  “A chasqui come from the next town,” said Okya.

  “A chasqui would go to the curaca,” said Tupa.

  “He’s not dressed like a chasqui,” Timu said.

  The man came up to them. Instead of a cape, loincloth and flowing onka, the man wore uncouth clothing: cylinders of fabric that bound his legs tightly, a white short-sleeved shirt that bore on its front the face of a man, and flexible white sandals that covered all his foot to the ankle. He shivered in the spring cold.

  He was extraordinarily tall. His face, paler than a normal man’s, was long, hi
s nose too straight, mouth too small, and lips too thin. Upon his face he wore a device of gold wire that, hooking over his ears, held disks of crystal before his eyes. The man’s hands were large, his limbs long and spiderlike. He moved suddenly, awkwardly.

  Gasping for air, the stranger spoke rapidly the most abominable Quechua Timu had ever heard.

  “Slow down,” Timu said. “I don’t understand.”

  “What year is this?” the man asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what is the year?”

  “It is the thirty-fourth year of the reign of the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac.”

  The man spoke some foreign word. “God damn,” he said in a language foreign to Timu, but which you or I would recognize as English. “I made it.”

  Timu went to the curaca, and the curaca told Timu to take the stranger in. The stranger told them that his name was “Chuan.” But Timu’s three-year-old daughter, Curi, reacting to the man’s sudden gestures, unearthly thinness, and piping speech, laughed and called him “the Bird.” So he was ever after to be known in that town.

  There he lived a long and happy life, earned trust and respect, and brought great good fortune. He repaid them well for their kindness, alerting the people of Tahuantinsuyu to the coming of the invaders. When the first Spaniards landed on their shores a few years later, they were slaughtered to the last man, and everyone lived happily ever after.

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  The Cairene Purse

  One of the most prolific, popular, and controversial figures in modern letters, Michael Moorcock has been a major shaping force on the development of science fiction and fantasy, as both author and editor, for more than thirty years. As editor, Moorcock helped to usher in the “New Wave” revolution in SF in the middle 1960s by taking over the genteel but elderly and somewhat tired British SF magazine New Worlds and coaxing it into a bizarre new life. Moorcock transformed New Worlds into a fierce and daring outlaw publication that was at the very heart of the British New Wave movement, and Moorcock himself—for his role as chief creator of the either much admired or much loathed “Jerry Cornelius” stories, in addition to his roles as editor, polemicist, literary theorist, and mentor to most of the period’s most prominent writers—became one of the most controversial figures of that turbulent era. New Worlds died in the early ’70s, after having been ringingly denounced in the Houses of Parliament and banned from distribution by the huge British bookstore and newsstand chain W. H. Smith, but Moorcock himself has never been out of public view for long. His series of “Elric” novels—elegant and elegantly perverse “Sword & Sorcery” at its most distinctive—are wildly popular, and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, Moorcock’s other work, both in and out of the genre, such as the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, Gloriana, Mother London, Warhound and the World’s Pain, Byzantium Endures, and The Laughter of Carthage, has established him as one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers of our day. He has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Guardian Fiction Award. Upcoming are the novels Jerusalem Commands, Revenge of the Rose (the 28th Elric novel), and Where the Dead Meet, and the collection Lunching with the Antichrist. He lives in London.

  Here he takes us on a vivid and disturbing search through the streets and alleyways of a ruined but still vital future Third World, a search for something as elusive now as it was when Pilate washed his hands thousands of years ago—truth.

  The Cairene Purse

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  1 Her First Fond Hope Of Eden Blighted

  On the edge of the Nile’s fertile shadow, pyramids merged with the desert and seemed from the air almost two-dimensional in the steady light of late morning. Spreading now beyond the town of Giza, Cairo’s forty million people threatened to engulf, with their old automobiles, discarded electronics and every dusty nondegradable of the modern world, the grandiose tombs of their ancestors.

  Though Cairo, like Calcutta, was a monument to the enduring survival of our race, I was glad to leave. I had spent only as much time as I needed, seeking information about my archaeologist sister and discovering that everyone in the academic community thought she had returned to England at least a year ago. The noise had begun to seem as tangible as the haze of sand which hung over the crowded motorways, now a mass of moving flesh, of camels, donkeys, horses, mules and humans hauling every variety of vehicle and cargo, with the occasional official electric car or, even rarer, petrol-driven truck.

  I suppose it had been a tribute to my imagined status that I had been given a place on a plane, rather than having to take the river or the weekly train to Aswan. Through the porthole of the little VW8 everything but the Nile and its verdant borders were the colours of sand, each shade and texture of which still held meaning for the nomad Arab, the Bedouin who had conquered the First Kingdom and would conquer several others down the millennia. In the past only the Ptolmies, turning their backs on the Nile and the Sahara, ever truly lost the sources of Egypt’s power.

  My main reason for accepting the assignment was personal rather than professional. My sister had not written for some months and her letters before that had been disconnected, hinting at some sort of emotional disturbance, perhaps in connection with the dig on which I knew she had been working. An employee of UNEC, I had limited authority in Egypt and did not expect to discover any great mysteries at Lake Nasser, which continued to be the cause of unusual weather. The dam’s builders somewhat typically had refused to anticipate this. They had also been warned by our people in the 1950s that the New High Dam would eventually so poison the river with bilharzia that anyone using its water would die. The rain, some of it acid, had had predictable effects, flooding quarries and washing away towns. The local Nubians had long-since been evicted from their valleys to make way for the lake. Their new settlements, traditionally built, had not withstood the altered environment, so the government had thrown up concrete shells for them. The road to Aswan from the airport was lined with bleak half-built structures of rusted metal girders and cinder blocks. Today’s Egyptians paid a high price for regulated water.

  From the airport my horse-drawn taxi crossed the old English dam with its sluices and gigantic gauges, a Victorian engineer’s dream of mechanical efficiency, and began the last lap of the journey into town. Aswan, wretched as much of it is, has a magic few Nile settlements now possess, rising from the East Bank to dominate the coppery blue waters and glinting granite islands of the wide river where white-sailed feluccas cruise gracefully back and forth, ferrying tourists and townspeople between the two sides. The heights, massive grey boulders, are commanded by a beautiful park full of old eucalyptus, poplars and monkey-puzzle trees. Above this, the stately Edwardian glory of Cook’s Cataract Hotel is a marvellous example of balconied and shuttered rococco British orientalism at its finest.

  The further up river one goes the poorer Aswan becomes, though even here the clapboard and corrugated iron, the asbestos sheeting and crumbling mud walls are dominated by a splendid hill-top mosque in the grand Turkish style. I had asked to be billeted at a modest hotel in the middle of town, near the Souk. From the outside, the Hotel Osiris, with its pale pink and green pseudo-neon, reminded me of those backstreet Marseilles hotels where once you could take your partner for a few francs an hour. It had the same romantic attraction, the same impossible promises. I found that, once within its tiny fly-thick lobby—actually the communal hallway leading directly to the courtyard—I was as lost to its appeal as any pop to his lid. I had discovered a temporary spiritual home.

  The Osiris, though scarcely more than a bed and breakfast place by London standards, boasted four or five porters, all of them eager to take my bag to the rooms assigned me by a Hindu lady at the desk. I let one carry my canvas grip up two flights of dirty stairs to a little tiled, run-down apartment looking into the building’s central well where two exhausted dogs, still coupled, panted on their sides in the heat.
Giving him a five-pound note, I asked my porter on the off-chance if he had heard of an Englishwoman called Noone or Pappenheim living in Aswan. My sister had used the poste restante and, when I had last been here, there were few Europeans permanently living in town. He regretted that he could not help. He would ask his brother, who had been in Aswan several months. Evidently, now that I had as it were paid for the information in advance he felt obliged to me. The bakshish custom is usually neither one of bribery nor begging in any European sense, but has a fair amount to do with smooth social intercourse. There is always, with legitimate bakshish, an exchange. Some measure of mutual respect is also usual. Most Arabs place considerable emphasis on good manners and are not always tolerant of European coarseness.

  I had last been in Egypt long before the great economic convulsion following that chain-reaction of destruction or near-exhaustion of so many resources. Then Aswan had been the final port of call for the millions of tourists who cruised the Nile from dawn to dusk, the sound of their dance music, the smell of their barbecues, drifting over fields and mud villages which had remained unchanged for five thousand years.

  In the 80s and 90s of the last century Aswan had possessed, among others, a Hilton, a Sheraton, Ritz-Carlton and a Holiday Inn, but now the luckiest local families had requisitioned the hotels and only the State-owned Cataract remained, a place of pilgrimage for every wealthy enthusiast of 1930s detective stories or autobiographies of the 20th century famous. Here, during wartime, secret meetings had been held and mysterious bargains struck between unlikely participants. Today on the water below the terrace some tourists still sailed, the Israelis and the Saudis on their own elegant schoomers, while other boats carried mixtures of Americans, Italians and Germans, French, English, Swedes, Spaniards, Japanese and Hungarians, their women dressed and painted like pagan temptresses of the local soap-operas, displaying their bodies naked on the sundecks of vast slow-moving windliners the size of an earlier era’s ocean-going ships, serving to remind every decent Moslem exactly what the road to Hell looked like. No 18th century English satirist could have provided a better image.