The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Damn fine car. Small for a Caddy, though,” Berenice said. She fished out a cable and seemed to be setting up a cellular phone connection to the laptop. I stopped watching when we drove through Rocky Mount, then looked at the rearview mirror to see if we were being followed. Berenice began pecking keys on the laptop. “Aha,” she said, “Turk’s having trouble expanding.”

  “That means he’s going to be real testy?”

  “The humans don’t cooperate with him as much as they did when he first set up operations. I was more concerned with the human behavior than his.”

  “His we going to be looking at soon.”

  “Marie, he hasn’t killed anyone, even when provoked.”

  “So far,” I said.

  “Marie, if you’re going to be an old lady about this, I should have left you at home.” She typed stiffly. I glanced at her fingers and saw how swollen the knuckles were. She paused in the keying in and said, “I hate being an old lady myself.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking Dennis’s business volume,” she said. “Bobby gave me some clues. I’m in through an aquarium store that handles illicit Asian arrowanas.”

  “Don’t data hackers have to have fast reflexes?” I asked.

  “No. An old lady who’s methodical. Patient. Did I ever tell you … no, now’s not the time. In another case, there was this German who marched through most of the open data on Tymnet. Methodical, yeah, like a Methodist.” I wondered if her brain had overloaded. She looked up and rubbed her eyes with her middle fingers, hands flat against her face. “I did think the Legion of Doom was terrible.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I was older then than Lilly is now.” She hit two keys and pulled out the computer-to-phone cord. “Turk could home in on the signal from the phone.”

  “But he doesn’t kill humans,” I said.

  “Just mucks with their memory, but age is doing that to me already.”

  “Not today.”

  “Adrenaline. I remember everything about protest marches. I even remember how testy you were with Bobby just minutes ago.”

  I wondered if any of the Vietnamese I knew would think she did them any favors, but didn’t say more, just followed her directions into Patrick County, then back into Franklin on the dirt road that led to Turks. When I saw the place, I kinda asked, “An alien in a ranch house?”

  “He makes it look real alien,” Berenice said.

  The alien came out dressed in railroader’s overalls, not farmer’s: that is, the blue and white pinstriped ones, not the solid denim. No shirt, just naked leather skin. One of my aunts used to tell about a Philadelphia man back in the late seventies who’d come to homestead the hills dressed in such things. Turk made pinstripe overalls look more preposterous than I could imagine they could look even on doofus white hippie boy. Then, if you looked again, they looked sinister under that alien head, with only the eyes to look human. I wondered if the faceted ear domes were brittle.

  “Hi, Turk,” Berenice was saying.

  “Ah.” He paused, sniffed the air, and finished with “Berenice, my lawyer’s aunt. And”—another sniff from the wiggling slots—“the woman who visited The Door 18.”

  I’d heard he was half about omniscient, but he wasn’t, then, old people and blacks he hadn’t gotten files on. “Yes,” I said, not wanting to explain that I was Dennis DeSpain’s ex-lover and thanking Hugous for not mentioning my name. I remembered one of my great-grandmothers telling me how we always could use white bigotry, let them think us dumb, and sneak around back of the attitude. “I’m Berenice’s nurse, Mary.” I’d respond to Mary like it was my real name.

  Berenice looked over at me curiously, then grinned. Turk waved a bare arm at us, motioning us in. The leather seemed stretchy, not wrinkled over the joints like human skin. He asked, “Does anyone know you’re here?”

  “Lilly,” Berenice said, “and a couple of people in town.”

  Bare and sterile, the hall smelled of disinfectant, but Turk kept leading us into the kitchen, which smelled of alcohol and fruit. It was crammed full of dehydrators, moldy pots, retorts, scraps of stainless steel; the counters were cut up and burned in places. Turk looked at the mess and said, “Nobody comes to visit.”

  Berenice walked around the room, sniffing almost like Turk, her old nostrils in her long nose wobblingly flexible. She said, “I’ve come to talk about Bobby.”

  The alien froze. Then he said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

  I shook my head. Berenice said, “Thank you. Water, no ice.” She watched the water come out of the tap. “DeSpain attempted to blackmail Bobby into spying on you. Bobby came to us. He doesn’t want to get involved.”

  “He came to you only after I caught him attempting to invade my property,” Turk said.

  I wanted to say something, but that might spoil my humble maid act. Berenice said, “Don’t do anything. Let Lilly work it out when she’s better.”

  “Bobby and Dennis DeSpain are illegal problems for me to have. Not a lawyer’s responsibility. Perhaps Lilly could help me with the State Department, as that is a legal problem I have.”

  Berenice looked like she wondered if her memory was still hyped. “State Department?”

  “A man named Henry Allen.”

  “What do you want Lilly to do?”

  “Get an injunction to stop him. I will take care of my illegal business rivals.”

  I hated myself for wanting to warn Dennis, but my hind brain threw me a flash of his little white-bread throat sweating, breath and blood bobbing through it. I’d never been just another one of his black mistresses.

  “Don’t do anything until Lilly gets back. You might not understand as much of human law and custom as you think.”

  “The State Department knows I’m making illegal liquors, but it does nothing.”

  “Human custom,” Berenice said, “isn’t particularly codified anywhere.”

  “I have human custom for my liquor,” Turk said.

  I said, “I think we’d better go.”

  Berenice suddenly looked old and forgetful again. I was about to ask if she knew where she was when she nodded.

  As we drove home, she said, “Damn, sometimes,” but didn’t say more. Her eyes grew vague and trembled in her head. She opened the laptop, but just looked at it as if she’d known once what it could do.

  “Took a lot out of you?”

  She sighed.

  After we got out of the car back at the house, she said, “I’d like to know more about their customs.”

  “Berenice, there’s only so much you can do.”

  “I think if one thing happens, I can very well do another.”

  “What?”

  “Marie, sometimes you have to defend your own, but who is my own?”

  Sounded to me like the old cranial blood vessels were constricting. We went inside and saw the message light blinking on the answering machine.

  It was Bobby. “Berenice, I can’t let an old lady deal with all this.”

  I said, “What the fuck does he mean?”

  Berenice said, “I hope he doesn’t mean he’s going to try to help DeSpain regardless.”

  The next message was from Lilly. “I called, but you aren’t in. Turk called and asked if I could get an injunction against the State Department. He said it should be a civil liberties issue. Do you have any idea of what he’s talking about?”

  Berenice said, “Marie, wouldn’t it be nice to have more tea?” She sounded like she was trying not to be the kind of woman supported all through her teenaged years by my great-aunts. A suggestion this was, not an order.

  “I’d kinda prefer limeade myself,” I said. “I’ve got some in the freezer.”

  Berenice said, “Sounds great to me.”

  “Aren’t you going to call Lilly back?”

  She reached for the phone as I went to the kitchen to make limeade. When I got back with the pitcher, she said
, “We women are just going to sit. That’s what Lilly suggested.”

  I poured her a glass first. “Berenice, that’s best.”

  “I don’t think it’s best,” she said, but I could see that her ankles were swelling.

  “Want me to take off your shoes?”

  She grimaced, but when I had her shoes off, she reached down stiffly and massaged her ankles. “Go talk to Dennis.”

  “I—”

  “I don’t mean you should offer your body in exchange for Bobby. Tell him to leave the alien alone.”

  “He wouldn’t listen to me. It would hurt his gonads if his wife would put him on the phone.”

  “Chicks to the front,” she said. I realized, after a moment of utter doubt as to her sanity, that the phrase came from radical times before women’s lib.

  “So far Turk hasn’t hurt anyone.”

  “It doesn’t look to me like he tried to leave people unbruised.”

  6

  The Semi-Accidental Mess

  Bobby was sweating as he told DeSpain what had happened to him, but DeSpain compared it to losing his Volvo to the alien’s helicopter and to Henry Allen’s memory lapses. After Bobby wound down, DeSpain said, “You must have done something stupid.” Bobby looked guiltier than he should. “Tell him you’re defecting from me. Just go right up and join him. Don’t just nose around on his roads.”

  “He knows I’m working for you.”

  “I suspect he does, Bobby.” DeSpain hid his anger, easy to do with such a sap. “How do you think he found out about it?”

  “I asked Lilly and Berenice to help me.”

  “Lilly works for the Turk. You ought not have done that, using women. It’s real easy, Bobby.” DeSpain wasn’t sure he cared now what happened to Bobby. “Just go up to the Turk and tell him you want to work for the most aggressive boss.”

  “Dennis. Mr. DeSpain.”

  “When I was twelve, I used to sneak out to where the revenuers lived and run a thing so their trunk lights would drain the batteries. I could fix them without ever touching the engine compartment or opening a car door.”

  “When I was that age, I was milking cows for Daddy.”

  “You would have been.” DeSpain had brought a piece of rebar he’d filed almost through and patched with black wax. He broke the rebar across his knee.

  Bobby said, “The old hippie woman was going to see the Turk. With the maid, you know the one you used to—”

  “If an aged student agitator and a nigger bitch can see the Turk, then I don’t see why you can’t talk to him. I meant for you to do something straightforward, not sneak around his operation sites. Of course that made him suspicious.”

  Bobby’s eyes flew sideways like he just thought of something, a lie or maybe a truth he didn’t want to tell. The men sat so still that DeSpain heard Bobby’s wife inside talking to her babies. Make the boy feel guilty, DeSpain decided, and he said, “You making it dangerous for Lilly and Berenice, dragging them into it.”

  Bobby didn’t answer, but nodded slightly.

  DeSpain said, “Bobby, I’ll talk to you next week, then.” He stood up and brushed off the back of his suit, then made sure he’d scattered the fake rebar wax crumbs. As he went back to his truck, he thought that he could play this several ways.

  When he got back home, Henry Allen had posted him a note on Loose Trade. CONSIDER THAT THE SIXTEEN-INCH LIMIT ON THE SMITH HAS BEEN CHANGED JUST FOR YOU.

  Other Loose Trade subscribers had left electronic giggles. DeSpain wondered for a second if Allen was mocking him, then decided to read the message as a license to kill the Turk.

  He wasn’t sure he could. Might be that the Turk would kill him, and maybe that was what the government wanted. And he wasn’t sure that Allen’s message had official standing. What was it about deniability? He almost typed can’t be just for me, then backed up a few days to see what action there’d been earlier. He noticed a complaint from Luck Aquatics for messages they hadn’t made and wondered why the hacker hadn’t erased the charges. Some ecology freaks, he decided. Ecology, taxes—got so a man couldn’t run an airconditioner without a federal permit.

  Then he wondered if the message was from the real Henry Allen or if the Turk was luring him into an ambush. He reached for his phone and called the State Department. “Hi, I’m Dennis DeSpain in Franklin County and I want to talk to Henry Allen. I’ve talked to him before.”

  “Please hold.” DeSpain waited, then the voice came back. “Mr. De-Spain, Henry Allen says you should proceed with caution. He wishes you well on your fishing trip.”

  “Is self-defense okay?”

  Pause for music. “If it legally passes for self-defense.”

  “Before, I couldn’t even defend myself?”

  “I’m not privy to interpretations,” the voice said. DeSpain hung up, pulled out his microfiche collection, and began going over old court cases beginning with Sidna Allen’s trial in the Hillsboro Courthouse shootout. Yeah, DeSpain thought, if I’m understanding all this correctly, before the State Department decided not to protect the Turk, if I’d shot him, even in self-defense with him shooting at me first, I’d have pulled time like old Sidna for killing an officer of the court, even when the officers drew first.

  Well, now DeSpain could defend himself against the Turk. He wasn’t altogether thrilled.

  Lilly’s Attempted Convalescence

  The doctor read me the biopsy report. Even though they hadn’t found cancer in what they cut out, and even though the ovaries looked good for another five years, I ought to keep coming back every year for checkups, and, no they didn’t get as high as my gallbladder, so I couldn’t know what to expect there.

  Berenice looked confused when I told her; not one of her better days, I thought. Marie, who’d brought her, said, “So, Berenice, you won’t have to go to the nursing home any time soon.”

  Berenice smiled brightly and said, “Marie’s been real good to me.” Marie looked a trifle annoyed.

  I sensed something, but didn’t feel well enough to get into whatever hassle they’d had between them. I said, “Let’s get me home. The hospital got their staples back.”

  I spent a day recovering in my own bed before I got a call from Turk regarding the State Department man, Henry Allen. I was lying down with a pillow against the incision, the phone on speaker mode. “I want to know if you can do anything to keep Henry Allen from encouraging Dennis DeSpain from trying to kill me.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “He left a message for DeSpain on Loose Trade, saying that the limit on trout sizes was canceled just for him.”

  I wondered if I could break my retainer contract due to Turk’s being a Loose Trade subscriber. “Turk, you don’t know what that trash means.”

  “DeSpain called the State Department for a clarification.”

  “Look, as your lawyer, I advise you that distilling liquor, much less adding drugs to it, is illegal. DeSpain keeps a low enough profile that while everyone knows what he does, nobody has ever proved he financed a raided still. And I wouldn’t take Dennis as a client unless the court assigned me. Dennis can’t sue you, you can’t sue the State Department. Really, seriously, why ever you’re making liquor, stop.”

  “I think this is an American Civil Liberties action, restraint of trade.”

  “It’s tax evasion.”

  “It is the forcing of grain and fruit harvesters to sell decomposable products rather than add value by manipulation and set price by aging.”

  “Why don’t you just…” I was about to tell him to give it away, but that wasn’t his point. “Make Dennis an offer. Tell him you’ll help him. After all, you think the law, not the business, is wrong.”

  “Is that legal advice?”

  “No, it isn’t legal advice. It’s personal advice.”

  “DeSpain is hunting me. Can I kill his dogs if they attack me?”

  I wondered what was going on here. “Please stay out of trouble for a couple of weeks until I’ve r
ecovered from the surgery. Or perhaps you’d like to find another lawyer while I’m laid up?” Please.

  “Do the human laws governing self-defense apply to me?”

  “Turk, I’ll get you an opinion on that.” I guessed I ought to do that now. “I’ll get back to you.” I wished I could have told him no, but he could sue me for malpractice if he survived an attack.

  Is this interplanetary protocol or just commonwealth rules? I wondered as I dialed Withold’s office. “Can I speak to Withold?” I said to the secretary. “I need his opinion on a client’s options.”

  “Commonwealth’s attorney Withold Brunner.”

  “Withold, this is Lilly. I’m that alien Turk’s lawyer. I just want to clarify a few things. Is Turk going to be legally treated as a human being under the laws of the commonwealth, or is there some sort of diplomatic immunity I should be aware of? Or how would he be treated if he acted against a human in self-defense?”

  “Lilly, legally, he’s human, subject to state and federal laws. State wanted us to be tolerant at first, but they’ve pulled out now. Didn’t know you were representing bootleggers now.”

  “Thanks. I was intrigued by the alienness.” I called Turk back and told him that he could defend himself. Never take another client on retainer this side of a corporation, I decided.

  That afternoon Bobby Vipperman came by. Marie let him in and didn’t offer anything to him. I lay on the couch half asleep, the surgery line feeling tense.

  “Sorry to bother you, ma’am.”

  “What do you want, Bobby?”

  “Just to talk.”

  “About what, Bobby.”

  He sighed like he was about to sing. Some of his people were singers in the poverty-stricken days when people needed aesthetic anesthesia against weather so coldly hostile it froze piss in bedside slop jars. Life then was so mean that boils quickly ran to blood poisoning and killed you at sixty. I took a closer look at him and saw that he’d pulled himself into a posture out of that old culture. That’s why I’d thought of high lonesome singing. He was making himself into a little artwork fit for a ballad. I said, “I’m tired, Bobby. Can you stay where DeSpain can’t find you for a few days until I can get a body mike for you? If he threatens you again and we’ve got a record of it—”