The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  He opens a panel in the front of the arch. A massive knife switch is revealed. Tesla makes a short bow and then throws the switch.

  The air crackles with ozone. Electricity roars through Tesla’s body. His hair stands on end and flames dance at the tips of his fingers. Electricity is his God, his best friend, his only lover. It is clean, pure, absolute. It arcs through him and invisibly into the sky. Tesla alone can see it. To him it is blinding white, the color he sees when inspiration, fear, or elation strikes him.

  The coils draw colossal amounts of power. All across the great hall, all over the White City, lights flicker and dim. Anne Morgan cries out in shock and fear.

  Through the vaulted windows overhead the sky itself begins to glow.

  Something sparks and hisses and the machine winds down. The air reeks of melted copper and glass and rubber. It makes no difference. The miracle is complete.

  Tesla steps down from the platform. His friends edge away from him, involuntarily. Tesla smiles like a wise father. “If you will follow me, I will show you what man has wrought.”

  Already there are screams from outside. Tesla walks quickly to the doors and throws them open.

  Anne Morgan is one of the first to follow him out. She cannot help but fear him, despite her attraction, despite all her best intentions. All around her she sees fairgoers with their necks craned upward, or their eyes hidden in fear. She turns her own gaze to the heavens and lets out a short, startled cry.

  The sky is on fire. Or rather, it burns the way the filaments burn in one of Tesla’s electric lamps. It has become a sheet of glowing white. After a few seconds the glare hurts her eyes and she must look away.

  It is midnight, and the Court of Honor is lit as if by the noonday sun. She is close enough to hear Tesla speak a single, whispered word: “Magnificent.”

  Westinghouse comes forward nervously. “This is quite spectacular,” he says, “but hadn’t you best, er, turn it off?”

  Tesla shakes his head. Pride shines from his face. “You do not seem to understand. The atmosphere itself, some 35,000 feet up, has become an electrical conductor. I call it my ‘terrestrial night light.’ The charge is permanent. I have banished night from the world for all time.”

  “For all time?” Westinghouse stammers.

  Anne Morgan slumps against a column, feels the cold marble against her back. Night, banished? The stars, gone forever? “You’re mad,” she says to Tesla. “What have you done?”

  Tesla turns away. The reaction is not what he expected. Where is their gratitude? He has turned their entire world into a White City, a city in which crime and fear and nightmares are no longer possible. Yet men point at him, shouting curses, and women weep openly.

  He pushes past them, toward the train station. Meat machines, he thinks. They are so used to their inefficient cycles of night and day. But they will learn.

  He boards a train for New York and secures a private compartment. As he drives on into the white night, his window remains brilliantly lighted.

  In the light there is truth. In the light there is peace. In the light he will be able, at last, to sleep.

  PAT MURPHY

  Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates

  Here’s a strange and troubling little story that dares to ask that burning question, Is there sex after life?

  Pat Murphy lives in San Francisco, where she works for a science museum, the Exploratorium. Her elegant and incisive stories appeared throughout the decade of the 1980s in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Elsewhere, Amazing, Universe, Shadows, Chrysalis, and other places. One of them, the classic “Rachel in Love,” one of the most popular stories of the decade, won a Nebula Award in 1988. Murphy’s first novel, The Shadow Hunter, appeared in 1982, to no particular notice, but her second novel, The Falling Woman, won her a second Nebula Award in 1988, and was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the late ’80s. Her third novel, The City, Not Long After, has just appeared, as has a collection of her short fiction, Points of Departure, and she is at work on another novel. Her story “In the Islands” was in our First Annual Collection, and “Rachel in Love” was in our Fifth Annual Collection.

  Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates

  PAT MURPHY

  This is not science. This has nothing to do with science. Yesterday, when the bombs fell and the world ended, I gave up scientific thinking. At this distance from the blast site of the bomb that took out San Jose, I figure I received a medium-size dose of radiation. Not enough for instant death, but too much for survival. I have only a few days left, and I’ve decided to spend this time constructing the future. Someone must do it.

  It’s what I was trained for, really. My undergraduate studies were in biology—structural anatomy, the construction of body and bone. My graduate studies were in engineering. For the past five years, I have been designing and constructing robots for use in industrial processing. The need for such industrial creations is over now. But it seems a pity to waste the equipment and materials that remain in the lab that my colleagues have abandoned.

  I will put robots together and make them work. But I will not try to understand them. I will not take them apart and consider their inner workings and poke and pry and analyze. The time for science is over.

  * * *

  The pseudoscorpion, Lasiochernes pilosus, is a secretive scorpionlike insect that makes its home in the nests of moles. Before pseudoscorpions mate, they dance—a private underground minuet—observed only by moles and voyeuristic entomologists. When a male finds a receptive female, he grasps her claws in his and pulls her toward him. If she resists, he circles, clinging to her claws and pulling her after him, refusing to take no for an answer. He tries again, stepping forward and pulling the female toward him with trembling claws. If she continues to resists, he steps back and continues the dance: circling, pausing to tug on his reluctant partner, then circling again.

  After an hour or more of dancing, the female inevitably succumbs, convinced by the dance steps that her companion’s species matches her own. The male deposits a packet of sperm on the ground that has been cleared of debris by their dancing feet. His claws quiver as he draws her forward, positioning her over the package of sperm. Willing at last, she presses her genital pore to the ground and takes the sperm into her body.

  Biology texts note that the male scorpion’s claws tremble as he dances, but they do not say why. They do not speculate on his emotions, his motives, his desires. That would not be scientific.

  I theorize that the male pseudoscorpion is eager. Among the everyday aromas of mole shit and rotting vegetation, he smells the female, and the perfume of her fills him with lust. But he is fearful and confused: a solitary insect, unaccustomed to socializing, he is disturbed by the presence of another of his kind. He is caught by conflicting emotions: his all-encompassing need, his fear, and the strangeness of the social situation.

  I have given up the pretense of science. I speculate about the motives of the pseudoscorpion, the conflict and desire embodied in his dance.

  * * *

  I put the penis on my first robot as a kind of joke, a private joke, a joke about evolution. I suppose I don’t really need to say it was a private joke—all my jokes are private now. I am the last one left, near as I can tell. My colleagues fled—to find their families, to seek refuge in the hills, to spend their last days running around, here and there. I don’t expect to see anyone else around anytime soon. And if I do, they probably won’t be interested in my jokes. I’m sure that most people think the time for joking is past. They don’t see that the bomb and the war are the biggest jokes of all. Death is the biggest joke. Evolution is the biggest joke.

  I remember learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution in high school biology. Even back then, I thought it was kind of strange, the way people talked about it. The teacher presented evolution as a fait accompli, over and done with. She muddled her way through the complex speculations regarding human evolution, talking about Ramapithecu
s, Australopithecus, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. At Homo sapiens she stopped, and that was it. The way the teacher looked at the situation, we were the last word, the top of the heap, the end of the line.

  I’m sure the dinosaurs thought the same, if they thought at all. How could anything get better than armor plating and a spiked tail. Who could ask for more?

  Thinking about the dinosaurs, I build my first creation on a reptilian model, a lizardlike creature constructed from bits and pieces that I scavenge from the industrial prototypes that fill the lab and the storeroom. I give my creature a stocky body, as long as I am tall; four legs, extending to the side of the body then bending at the knee to reach the ground; a tail as long as the body, spiked with decorative metal studs; a crocodilian mouth with great curving teeth.

  The mouth is only for decoration and protection; this creature will not eat. I equip him with an array of solar panels, fixed to a sail-like crest on his back. The warmth of sunlight will cause the creature to extend his sail and gather electrical energy to recharge his batteries. In the cool of the night, he will fold his sail close to his back, becoming sleek and streamlined.

  I decorate my creature with stuff from around the lab. From the trash beside the soda machine, I salvage aluminum cans. I cut them into a colorful fringe that I attach beneath the creature’s chin, like the dewlap of an iguana. When I am done, the words on the soda cans have been sliced to nonsense: Coke, Fanta, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper mingle in a collision of bright colors. At the very end, when the rest of the creature is complete and functional, I make a cock of copper tubing and pipe fittings. It dangles beneath his belly, copper bright and obscene looking. Around the bright copper, I weave a rat’s nest of my own hair, which is falling out by the handful. I like the look of that: bright copper peeking from a clump of wiry black curls.

  Sometimes, the sickness overwhelms me. I spend part of one day in the ladies’ room off the lab, lying on the cool tile floor and rousing myself only to vomit into the toilet. The sickness is nothing that I didn’t expect. I’m dying, after all. I lie on the floor and think about the peculiarities of biology.

  * * *

  For the male spider, mating is a dangerous process. This is especially true in the spider species that weave intricate orb-shaped webs, the kind that catch the morning dew and sparkle so nicely for nature photographers. In these species, the female is larger than the male. She is, I must confess, rather a bitch; she’ll attack anything that touches her web.

  At mating time, the male proceeds cautiously. He lingers at the edge of the web, gently tugging on a thread of spider silk to get her attention. He plucks in a very specific rhythm, signaling to his would-be lover, whispering softly with his tugs: “I love you. I love you.”

  After a time, he believes that she has received his message. He feels confident that he has been understood. Still proceeding with caution, he attaches a mating line to the female’s web. He plucks the mating line to encourage the female to move onto it. “Only you, baby,” he signals. “You are the only one.”

  She climbs onto the mating line—fierce and passionate, but temporarily soothed by his promises. In that moment, he rushes to her, delivers his sperm, then quickly, before she can change her mind, takes a hike. A dangerous business, making love.

  * * *

  Before the world went away, I was a cautious person. I took great care in my choice of friends. I fled at the first sign of a misunderstanding. At the time, it seemed the right course.

  I was a smart woman, a dangerous mate. (Odd—I find myself writing and thinking of myself in the past tense. So close to death that I consider myself already dead.) Men would approach with caution, delicately signaling from a distance: “I’m interested. Are you?” I didn’t respond. I didn’t really know how.

  An only child, I was always wary of others. My mother and I lived together. When I was just a child, my father had left to pick up a pack of cigarettes and never returned. My mother, protective and cautious by nature, warned me that men could not be trusted. People could not be trusted. She could trust me and I could trust her, and that was all.

  When I was in college, my mother died of cancer. She had known of the tumor for more than a year; she had endured surgery and chemotherapy, while writing me cheery letters about her gardening. Her minister told me that my mother was a saint—she hadn’t told me because she hadn’t wanted to disturb my studies. I realized then that she had been wrong. I couldn’t really trust her after all.

  I think perhaps I missed some narrow window of opportunity. If, at some point along the way, I had had a friend or a lover who had made the effort to coax me from hiding, I could have been a different person. But it never happened. In high school, I sought the safety of my books. In college, I studied alone on Friday nights. By the time I reached graduate school, I was, like the pseudoscorpion, accustomed to a solitary life.

  I work alone in the laboratory, building the female. She is larger than the male. Her teeth are longer and more numerous. I am welding the hip joints into place when my mother comes to visit me in the laboratory.

  “Katie,” she says, “why didn’t you ever fall in love? Why didn’t you ever have children?”

  I keep on welding, despite the trembling of my hands. I know she isn’t there. Delirium is one symptom of radiation poisoning. But she keeps watching me as I work.

  “You’re not really here,” I tell her, and realize immediately that talking to her is a mistake. I have acknowledged her presence and given her more power.

  “Answer my questions, Katie,” she says. “Why didn’t you?”

  I do not answer. I am busy and it will take too long to tell her about betrayal, to explain the confusion of a solitary insect confronted with a social situation, to describe the balance between fear and love. I ignore her just as I ignore the trembling of my hands and the pain in my belly, and I keep on working. Eventually, she goes away.

  I use the rest of the soda cans to give the female brightly colored scales: Coca-Cola red, Sprite green, Fanta orange. From soda cans, I make an oviduct, lined with metal. It is just large enough to accommodate the male’s cock.

  * * *

  The male bowerbird attracts a mate by constructing a sort of art piece. From sticks and grasses, he builds two close-set parallel walls that join together to make an arch. He decorates this structure and the area around it with gaudy trinkets: bits of bone, green leaves, flowers, bright stones, and feathers cast off by gaudier birds. In areas where people have left their trash, he uses bottle caps and coins and fragments of broken glass.

  He sits in his bower and sings, proclaiming his love for any and all females in the vicinity. At last, a female admires his bower, accepts his invitation, and they mate.

  The bowerbird uses discrimination in decorating his bower. He chooses his trinkets with care—selecting a bit of glass for its glitter, a shiny leaf for its natural elegance, a cobalt-blue feather for a touch of color. What does he think about as he builds and decorates? What passes through his mind as he sits and sings, advertising his availability to the world?

  * * *

  I have released the male and I am working on the female when I hear rattling and crashing outside the building. Something is happening in the alley between the laboratory and the nearby office building. I go down to investigate. From the mouth of the alley, I peer inside, and the male creature runs at me, startling me so that I step back. He shakes his head and rattles his teeth threateningly.

  I retreat to the far side of the street and watch him from there. He ventures from the alley, scuttling along the street, then pauses by a BMW that is parked at the curb. I hear his claws rattling against metal. A hubcap clangs as it hits the pavement. The creature carries the shiny piece of metal to the mouth of the alley and then returns for the other three, removing them one by one. When I move, he rushes toward the alley, blocking any attempt to invade his territory. When I stand still, he returns to his work, collecting the hubcaps, carry
ing them to the alley, and arranging them so that they catch the light of the sun.

  As I watch, he scavenges in the gutter and collects things he finds appealing: a beer bottle, some colorful plastic wrappers from candy bars, a length of bright yellow plastic rope. He takes each find and disappears into the alley with it.

  I wait, watching. When he has exhausted the gutter near the mouth of the alley, he ventures around the corner and I make my move, running to the alley entrance and looking inside. The alley floor is covered with colored bits of paper and plastic; I can see wrappers from candy bars and paper bags from Burger King and McDonald’s. The yellow plastic rope is tied to a pipe running up one wall and a protruding hook on the other. Dangling from it, like clean clothes on the clothesline, are colorful pieces of fabric: a burgundy-colored bath towel, a paisley print bedspread, a blue satin bedsheet.

  I see all this in a glance. Before I can examine the bower further, I hear the rattle of claws on pavement. The creature is running at me, furious at my intrusion. I turn and flee into the laboratory, slamming the door behind me. But once I am away from the alley, the creature does not pursue me.

  From the second-story window, I watch him return to the alley and I suspect that he is checking to see if I have tampered with anything. After a time, he reappears in the alley mouth and crouches there, the sunlight glittering on his metal carapace.

  In the laboratory, I build the future. Oh, maybe not, but there’s no one here to contradict me, so I will say that it is so. I complete the female and release her.

  The sickness takes over then. While I still have the strength, I drag a cot from a back room and position it by the window, where I can look out and watch my creations.