The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Caroline says, very fast, “Go bring her down here, James. You’ll have to lift her out of her chair and carry her. Keith, get her chair.” The two men run up the stairs.

  Caroline is shaking. I stand beside her. I growl. The woman still has the gun. She points the gun at Caroline. I wait for Caroline to tell me Attack.

  The woman says, “Don’t try to deny it. You’d do anything for ballet, wouldn’t you? All of you. You’re sick—but you’re not murdering my daughter!”

  Caroline’s face changes. Her smell changes. I feel her hand on my head. Her hand shakes. Her body shakes. I smell anger bigger than other angers. I wait for Attack.

  Deborah says, “You’re all wrong, Mom! Just like you always are! Does this look like a bioenhancement lab? Does it? These people aren’t enhancing me—they’re trying to talk me out of it! These two guys are doctors and they’re trying to ‘deprogram’ me—just like you tried to program me all my life! You never wanted me to dance, you always tried to make me into this cute little college-bound student that you needed me to be. Never what I needed!”

  The men carry Caroline’s mother and Caroline’s mother’s chair down the steps. They put Caroline’s mother in the chair. Caroline’s mother also smells angry. But Caroline smells more angry than anybody.

  Caroline says, “Sound familiar, Mother dear? What Deborah’s saying? What did you learn at the genetic conference? What I’ve been telling you for months, right? Your gift to dance is dying. Because you wanted a prima ballerina at any price. Even if I’m the one to pay it.”

  Caroline’s mother says, “You love dance. You wanted it as much as I did. You were a star.”

  “I never got to find out if I would have been one anyway! That isn’t so inconceivable, is it? And then I might have still been dancing! But instead I was … made. Molded, sewed, carpentered. Into what you needed me to be!”

  Deborah’s mother lowers her gun. Her eyes are big. Caroline’s mother says, “You were a star. You had a good run. Without me, you might have been nothing. Worthless.”

  A man says, very soft, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Caroline is shaking hard. I am afraid she will fall again. Her hand is on her cane. The cane shakes. Her other hand is on me.

  Caroline says, “You cold, self-centered-bitch—”

  A little girl runs down the stairs.

  The little girl says, “Tante Anna! Tante Anna! Où êtes-vous?” She stops at the bottom of the steps. She smells afraid. “Qui sont tout ces gens?”

  Caroline looks at the little girl. The little girl has no shoes. She has long black fur on her head. Her hind feet go out like Caroline’s feet when Caroline dances. The toes look strange. I don’t understand the little girl’s feet.

  Caroline says again, “You cold, self-centered bitch.” Her voice is soft now. She stops shaking. “When did you have her made? Five years ago? Six? A new model with improved features? Who will decay all the sooner?”

  Caroline’s mother says, “You are a hysterical fool.”

  Caroline says, “Angel—attack! Now!”

  I attack Caroline’s mother. I knock over the chair. I bite her foreleg. Someone screams, “Caroline! For God’s sake! Caroline!” I bite Caroline’s mother’s head. I must protect Caroline. This person hurts Caroline. I must protect Caroline.

  A gun fires and I hurt and hurt and hurt—

  I love Caroline.

  10

  The town of Saratoga, where the American Ballet Theater is dancing its summer season, is itself a brightly colored stage. Visitors throng the racetrack, the brand-new Electronics Museum, the historical battle sites. In 1777, right here, Benedict Arnold and his half-trained revolutionaries stopped British forces under General John Burgoyne. It was the first great victory of freedom over the old order.

  Until this year, the New York City Ballet danced here every summer. But the Performing Arts Center chose not to renew the City Ballet contract. In New York, too, City Ballet attendance is half of what it was only a few years ago.

  The Saratoga pavilion is open to the countryside. Ballet lovers fill the seats, spread blankets up the sloping lawn, watch dancers accompanied not only by Tchaikovsky or Chopin but also by crickets and robins. In Saratoga, the ballet smells of freshly mown grass. The classic “white ballets”—Swan Lake, Les Sylphides—are remembered green. Small girls whose first taste of dance is at Saratoga will dream, for the rest of their lives, of toe shoes skimming over wildflowers.

  I take my seat, in the back of the regular seating, as the small orchestra finishes tuning up. The conductor enters to the usual thunderous applause, even though nobody here knows his name and very few care. They have come to see the dancers.

  Debussy floats out over the countryside. Afternoon of a Faun: slow, melting. On the nearly bare stage, furnished only with barre and mirrors, a male dancer in practice clothes wakes up, stretches, warms up his muscles in a series of slow, languorous moves.

  A girl appears in the mirror, which isn’t really a mirror but an empty place in the backdrop. A void. She, too, stretches, poses, pliés. Both dancers watch the mirrors. They are so absorbed in their own reflections that they only gradually become aware of each other’s presence. Even then, they exist for each other only as foils, presences to dance to. In the end the girl will step back through the mirror. There is the feeling that for the boy, she may not really have existed at all, except as a dream.

  It is Deborah’s first lead in a one-act ballet. Her extension is high, her turn out perfect, her movements sure and strong and sustained, filled with the joy of dancing. I can barely stand to look at her. This is her reward, her grail, for continuing her bioenhancement. She isn’t dancing for Anton Privitera, but she is dancing. A year and a half of bioenhancement, bought legally now in Copenhagen and paid for by selling her story to an eager press, has given her the physical possibilities to match her musicality, and her rhythm, and her drive.

  The faun finally touches the girl, turning her slowly en attitude. Deborah smiles. This is her afternoon. She’s willing to pay whatever price the night demands, even though science has no idea yet what, for her kind of treatments, it might be.

  Privitera must have known that some of his dancers were bioenhanced. The completely inadequate bioscans at City Ballet, the phenomenally low injury rate of his prima ballerina—Privitera must have known. Or maybe his staff let him remain in official ignorance, keeping from him any knowledge of heresy in the ranks. There was a rumor that Privitera’s business manager, John Cole, even tried to keep Caroline from “deprogramming” dancers who wanted bioenhancement. The rumor about Cole was never substantiated. But in the last year, City Ballet has been struggling to survive. Too many patrons have withdrawn their favor. The mystique of natural art, like other mystiques, didn’t last forever. It had a good run.

  “If you could have chosen, and that was the only way you could have had the career, would you have chosen the embryonic engineering anyway?” was the sole thing Deborah asked Caroline in jail, through bulletproof plastic glass and electronic speaking systems, under the hard eyes of matrons. Caroline, awaiting trial for second-degree murder, didn’t seem to mind Deborah’s brusqueness, her self-absorption. Caroline was silent a long time, her gaunt face lengthened from the girlish roundness I remembered. Then she said to Deborah, “No.”

  “I would,” Deborah said.

  Caroline only looked at her.

  They’re here, Caroline and her dog. Somewhere up on the grass, Caroline in a powerchair, Angel hobbling on the three legs my bullet left him. Caroline was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. They didn’t let Angel stay with her during the trial. Nor did they let him testify, which would have been abnormal but not impossible. Five-year-olds can testify under some circumstances, and Angel has the biochip-and-reengineered intelligence of a five-year-old. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so abnormal. Or maybe all of us, not just Anton Privitera, will have to change our definition of abnormal.

  Five-year-olds know a lot. It wa
s Marguerite who cried out, “Vous avez assassiné ma tante Anna!” She knew whom I was aiming at, even if the police did not. But Marguerite couldn’t know how much I loathed the old woman who had made her daughter into what her mother needed her to be—just as I, out of love, had tried to do to mine.

  On stage, Deborah pirouettes. Maybe her types of bioenhancement will be all right, despite the growing body of doubts collected by Caroline’s doctor allies. When the first cures for cancer were developed from reengineered retroviruses, dying and desperate patients demanded they be administered without long, drawn-out FDA testing. Some of those patients died even sooner, possibly from the cures. Some lived to be ninety. The edge of anything is a lottery, and protection doesn’t help—not against change, or madmen, or errors of judgment. I protect Caroline, Angel kept saying after I shot him, yelping in pain between sentences. I protect Caroline.

  Deborah flows into a retiré, one leg bent at the knee, and rises on point. Her face glows. Her partner lifts her above his head and turns her slowly, her feet perfectly arched in their toe shoes, dancing on air.

  A VISIT TO THE FARSIDE

  Don Webb

  Don Webb is a small-press veteran whose exuberantly unclassifiable fiction has appeared in more than sixty magazines in the United States, Great Britain, France, Norway, and India. Since the middle of the eighties, he has been a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction (his first sale there, “Jesse Revenged,” is still spoken of admiringly by connoisseurs of the gonzo, and may well be one of the weirdest “Wild West” stories ever written), and his stories have also been included in Interzone, Amazing, New Pathways, Fantasy Tales, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere. He is the author of the very strange “collection” called Uncle Ovid’s Exercise Book, and of two recent chapbook collections, The Bestseller and Other Tales and The Seventh Day and After, and he is currently working on a novel. He lives with his wife Rosemary in Austin, Texas.

  In the eccentric little story that follows, he takes us to a human-colonized Moon, a familiar venue for science fiction stories … but no setting is safely familiar once Webb gets his hands on it, as you shall see.

  * * *

  Sasha hated checkpoints.

  Any Soviet citizen could enter the American ghetto, but her father had access to the central computer. Information belonged to the state as surely as the means of production belonged to the workers—so what her father did was technically a crime.

  A tiny probe removed an infinitesimally small piece of dermis from her left index finger. Enzymes would quickly coax the DNA away from the rest. They would further slice the DNA into small manageable strands—GGACTTA, for example. The negatively charged strands would swim through a conducting agarose trying to reach the positive terminal. The strands would leave their patterns on filter paper, and the DNA print would be checked by the central computer. Such jobs were low priority. It would be twenty, maybe twenty-five, minutes before the central computer told Director Illych Borodin Maservich that his daughter was in the subbasement of the Patrice Lumumba Moon Base.

  By that time she would have accomplished her mission. She would’ve told Todd she was never going to see him again.

  The American sector stank with their ethnic cooking, marijuana, and tobacco. Everyone looked at Sasha as she made her way through the labyrinth of storefronts, brothels, and gambling dens. Correction: Everyone looked at Director Maservich’s daughter. There had been rumors.…

  There were eyes everywhere. Eyes. Sasha was shorter than the Americans. Like all Soviet citizens, she followed a careful exercise program and took calcium supplements. She didn’t have long, brittle, American bones. She could walk on the Earth anytime. In fact, she had, twice. With her dark hair and cobalt eyes, she was every Russian farmboy’s dream.

  Todd Morlan worked at the Tail o’ the Pup, a preposterous American establishment. The Tail was a ten-meter-long “hot dog” painted in appropriate browns, reds, and yellows. The service counter—exactly 1.75 meters from the floor—roughly bisected the wienie. The Tail served hot dogs, hamburgers, malts, shakes, beer, coffee, kosher pickles, hot soft pretzels, and hashish candy. All synthetic, of course. Todd was laying a wienie into an open bun, and Sasha fell in love again.

  Todd was red-haired, dark-skinned, and 2.1 meters tall. All in all, a typical American, except for his virginal skull. Todd’s mother had kept it that way. She had ambitions for Todd.

  The customer had left, and those enormous brown eyes were staring at her.

  “Can I help you, love?”

  “I. I. I want to talk to you.”

  “You are talking to me,” he said. He began to pour synthetic potato mash into fry molds. He could be so difficult at times.

  “I need to talk to you seriously.”

  “Hey, Pop. Can you watch the counter for a minute?”

  Todd’s fat father came bounding out from behind the protein synthesizers. He was proud his son was nailing a Russian chick. He’d been some sort of official at the American Farside base decades ago. He grunted his assent, which was about as articulate as he got these days. A tiny cassette was attached to his bald head. Todd put his hands on the counter and vaulted over. He gave Sasha a little hug which completely exorcised her purpose in being there. Maybe she should just feed what she had to say to a servo and send it down here.

  “Come along, love. We’ll go someplace secure to talk.”

  A joke. No place was beyond her father’s ears. They went deeper into Little America until they came to a tiny freight elevator. Hands plucked at her tunic. Buy this. Buy that. Smoke a genuine hookah pipe. Try genuine Southwest chili. Spot the lady. Snatches of music: rock-’n’-roll, country-’n’-western, electronic jazz. Each kiosk had its own sound—each loud and hideous and from a different period of America’s frozen past. The elevator was a relief even though it was small and dimly lit. Sasha was surprised when Todd pushed the DOWN button. She had thought this was the lowest level. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps Americans did hold occult secrets. What was that old chemistry slogan? Vista Interiora Terrae Recitficando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. Go to the interior of the Earth to find and refine the hidden stone.

  The door opened on the blackness of an air-filled basalt tunnel. Todd took a light from his blue jeans pocket and hung it around his neck.

  The first thing Sasha saw were illegal sides of beef in bubbling clone tanks. The steaks must garner a fantastic price on the black market—not American boodle, real Soviet rubles. There were tanks for cannabis, then tobacco, then hydroponically grown tomatoes. Todd smiled at her. He was putting her love to a test. Either she could report this contraband now or join him in the ranks of criminal.

  This wasn’t fair.

  “Don’t they need light?” Sasha asked, pointing at the plants.

  “Of course,” said Todd. “But they shut off for several seconds when the elevator comes down. We don’t want to reveal all our secrets at once.”

  “But the elevator’s there in plain sight. Anyone could find it.”

  “Could you?”

  She thought of the sights and smells of Little America.

  Too much data, she decided.

  “No.”

  “Besides, haven’t you studied Revised Economics? The State requires the ‘lubrication’ that a black market provides. It hedges the bets for Five Year Planners.”

  They stepped out of the elevator. Lights flickered on in the plant tanks.

  Todd asked, “So what did you need to talk about?”

  Nothing. Nothing now.

  “I just wanted to see you. I need you.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Todd led her down the basalt tunnel.

  “How many people know about this?”

  “That’s a dangerous question. Most of the Americans, I guess. Some of the higher-placed bureaucrats must have realized that the contraband they buy must come from somewhere. All of the American kids. This area functions as a Lovers’ Lane.”

  “Lovers’ Lan
e?”

  Todd began to demonstrate.

  * * *

  One word could describe both Comrade Director Maservich and Mrs. Sally Morlan: ambitious.

  Maservich was stuck in the smallest of the Moon bases. Patrice Lumumba lay four hundred kilometers west of the landing site of Luna 19. It barely made what the capitalists would’ve called a profit—mining, ceramics manufacturing, special atmosphere pharmaceuticals.

  Eventually it would be closed down, but before then he would be directing another base. Maybe Tsiolkovsky Base, pride of the Soviet Moon.

  When the air supply at Farside had gone critical and the Congress of the plugged-in land was unwilling to do anything, the Supreme Soviet ordered him to take in the refugees as a “humanitarian” gesture. Thirty Earth years ago. He knew he would’ve been promoted if it hadn’t been for the Americans. They were a contaminant. They had ruined his career. They and Comrade Risolski’s theory of “economic lubrication.” He wanted to flood the lower levels with disinfectant.

  He sat in his chair watching home movies. He didn’t notice the warning flag on his terminal. His father had been placed—the ambassador to the People’s Republic of Mongolia. There he is now, putting his son in a yak-pulled troika, drinking bitter buttered tea, sledding the snows of Ulan Bator. That was the life, and it would be Director Maservich’s life again.

  Todd’s mother, Sally Morlan, was determined that Todd would leave the American ghetto and join Soviet life. There was no hope for Todd’s father. He didn’t understand. He thought Little America would be around forever. She saw the printout on the wall. Someday Soviet pity would vanish and the Americans would be deported to the earth, where the gravity would kill most of them. She kept a black capsule hidden on her person for such an eventuality.

  At first she welcomed the liaison between Todd and Alexandra Maservich. But she came to realize that Maservich would never allow a marriage. That Todd was just some sort of fling for Alexandra. Broaden her small world. Make her a woman of the cosmos.

  Here’s a sample conversation between Todd and his mother (as recorded by a chuka-bug two standard days before he and Sasha ran off):