The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “It’s now or never,” Jimmy-Ray says and looks at me. “Fred? You’ll do it, wontcha? You’ll tell ’em I’m not fakin’ this?”

  I give a sigh and nod and Jimmy-Ray goes running over to the press yelling he’s got corrobation.

  “That’s ‘corroboration’!” Al calls after him, but he doesn’t hear.

  Bill gives me a little shove. “Well, go ahead. Get it over with.”

  The press doesn’t seem too inclined to pay Jimmy-Ray much mind and I’m not so sure they’ll pay any attention to me, either, but I give it a try.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” I say, “Jimmy-Ray here is telling you the truth. He has been set up. Somebody set him up to look like a liar. I know for a fact that Jimmy-Ray has been visited by an alien.”

  A few of them stop and give me skeptical looks.

  “I know, because I been visited, too. Just the way Jimmy-Ray has.” I get a few laughs on that and then Bill is standing next to me. “It’s a fact,” he says. “I met the alien, too.” He turns to the sheriff. “And so’s Sheriff Bailey. Ain’t that right, sheriff?”

  “Dammit, Bill,” says the sheriff, “if you wanna tell everybody about your private life, that’s your affair, but why’d you have to go spill the beans on me for?”

  Jimmy-Ray’s mouth is so wide open it might get jammed that way. It occurs to me that’s the only way I’ve seen him lately, and it ain’t a good look for him.

  “You might as well make a clean breast of it, Ed,” Bart says to the sheriff. The press is definitely interested again. A couple of Jimmy-Ray’s friends backing him up is one thing, but a sheriff is something else.

  “Hey, what I do on my off hours ain’t nobody’s business but my own,” Bailey says. “Just because I’m havin’ sex with aliens doesn’t mean I’m not in my cruiser ready to roll when somebody needs help. I take my beeper up to the saucer with me.” The expressions on all those faces make me glad for Ed that he’s retiring at the end of the month.

  Jimmy-Ray looks like he’s gonna bust something important. “I never told them it was sex!” he yells.

  “Well, what did you hold out on ’em for?” yawns Al. “That’s the best part. Otherwise, they’d just be a bunch of funny-lookin’ tourists, even if they are from another galaxy.”

  “Did they say which galaxy?” one of the reporters calls out.

  “Andromeda,” Al says, boreder than shit. “Where else? It’s the closest one, easy trip by space warp.”

  “Andromedans,” says Bart and gives a sniff. “You can have ’em. I like the ones from our own galaxy better. They’re all flat-headed, about yea high”—he puts his hand out at waist-level—“so I always got a place to put my beer.”

  “You don’t like the ten-foot-tall ladies?” Jack says.

  “I don’t know as you can call ’em ladies,” Bart says.

  “Hey, they’re aliens. Don’t make no difference, you might as well call ’em ladies. They sure look like ladies. Great, big, beautiful ladies.”

  “I wasn’t thinkin’ of their looks,” Bart says, so prim I almost bust out laughing. “I don’t like my aliens that aggressive. Could spill the beer.”

  Then Bill jumps in talkin’ about snake-people from Aldebaran and Jimmy-Ray about wets his pants. “It’s not like that!” he yells. “It’s not like that! It’s something beautiful and wonderful and there’s no snake-people, there’s no flat-top beer-holders, there’s—”

  “Jimmy-Ray, I think you better come back in the house now and quiet down.” Karen’s there suddenly, pulling at his arm and kind of wincing at all the reporters.

  “There’s no ten-foot-tall ladies!” Jimmy-Ray screams, and everyone shuts up and looks at him.

  “Well, maybe not for you,” Jack says, after a long moment. “You got your preferences, I got mine. I don’t know what you been foolin’ around with, but the ten-foot-tall ladies kinda spoiled me for anything else.” He turns back to the reporters who are sticking microphones and little tape recorders in his face. “See, they’re big, but they got these little teeny-tiny—”

  “Stop it!” Jimmy-Ray sobs, and breaks down crying. This is just too embarrassing for Karen, who lets go of him and moves away. I go over to her and pat her on the shoulder.

  “It prob’ly won’t last too much longer,” I tell her.

  She just rolls her eyes and a couple reporters break from the pack and come over. “What about you, Mrs. Carver? Did you know about these aliens?”

  “You leave my wife alone!” Jimmy-Ray yells, and he runs over, but a chunky guy with a camera steps in front of him to get a picture of Karen.

  “Well, of course I knew,” she says, resigned that she’s not gonna get away without having to do her part. “Jimmy-Ray and I don’t keep secrets from each other. He knew when I had Elvis’s babies, and he was completely understanding. He knew it was a childhood dream of mine, to be the mother of Elvis’s children. It only took about six weeks—aliens are so much more advanced than we are—”

  Jimmy-Ray has gone positively incoherent and he’s either gonna bust a blood vessel in his head or start swinging. Bill and I drag him away kicking and screaming while Karen is still explaining how Elvis was really an alien and had to make like he died when he started to metamorphose into his new appearance, which was when he was getting fat and all.

  We take Jimmy-Ray around the other side of the house and let him work it out. It’s like watching a giant child have a temper tantrum and I really think he’s gone over the brink and we’ll never get him back. Maybe we should have just called County Medical in the first place, because it looks like that’s where he’s gonna end up after all.

  But in about fifteen minutes, he’s all blown out. He can’t think of another bad thing to call me and Bill and everyone else except Karen, and it’s just as well because he’s starting to lose his voice anyway. Finally, he’s just sitting on the ground with his fists on his knees and his face all red and breathing hard. Bill squats down and says, “Okay. Feel better?”

  Jimmy-Ray looks at Bill and then at me. “Why?” he croaks. “Why?”

  “Why?” Bill shakes his head. “Jimmy-Ray, are you completely stupid? Why in hell do you think?”

  Jimmy-Ray just stares at him.

  “You just make me so mad sometimes.” Bill gets up. “Explain the facts of life to this chucklehead,” he says to me. “He’s married to your cousin.”

  “Second cousin,” I say automatically, and kneel down next to Jimmy-Ray. “Look—you had a nice time that night, right? What kinda person kisses and tells? Did you used to do that in high school?”

  “Get off it,” Jimmy-Ray growls.

  “Okay, right,” I say, glancing at Bill, “it’s not that. Suppose you got someone to believe you. Suppose you got a whole bunch of people to believe you, and they all came out here to wait for the alien and the alien picked them up. What do you think would happen?”

  “I’d have corrobation,” he says defiantly.

  “‘Corroboration.’ You’d also have crowds. They’d all tell their friends and their friends would tell more friends and pretty soon we’d have the whole damned country comin’ here. Now you think on that for a minute. The whole damned country. People from New York City. Rock groups, and all their groupies. Republicans. Murderers on weekend furloughs. The goddam President and the whole Cabinet, too, and movie stars, not to mention the rest of California. Geraldo. How about that? You really want to share the alien with Geraldo? When your own wife goes there, too? What kinda person are you?”

  Jimmy-Ray just keeps staring at me and I get up, brushing my pants off.

  “We got a good thing here,” Bill says, “and we ain’t lettin’ anybody spoil it. If Geraldo or anyone else wants an alien, let ’em go find one of their own. You got two choices: you pull yourself together and you go back and tell the reporters how you were proud Karen had Elvis’s babies or any other crazy thing, the crazier the better. Got it? Or you’re cut off. No more alien.”

  Now, that�
�s the only lie we’ve actually told him because as far as we know, the alien doesn’t actually talk to anyone and nobody seems to have any influence on it. It just shows up, beams you aboard, and has a good time with you. And that’s not always sex, except for the alien, because it thinks of everything as sex all the time.

  Anyway, we figure we got to throw the fear of God into Jimmy-Ray to make sure he behaves. And after a while, he comes around the house and tries a couple of lame stories about lizard-people that can lick their eyebrows. But all the reporters ignore him, maybe because they’re all sure that lizard-people don’t have eyebrows, or because it’s too similar to Bill’s snake-people. That’s good enough, though, and after everybody leaves, we all go home, too.

  Well, the story makes one scandal rag before it dies a natural death and life goes back to normal. Sometime after that, we hear Karen Carver’s pregnant.

  So that’s nice, we all say, and think nothing else of it. But nine months later, we hear she delivers at County Medical and Jimmy-Ray just runs off and leaves her. Her being my second cousin and all, I go see her after she gets home, figuring she must be pretty upset.

  “We had a terrible fight right in the delivery room,” she tells me. “I just couldn’t believe it, and neither could the doctor or any of the nurses. They had to make him leave. Then I got home with the baby and all his clothes and things were gone.”

  “That’s awful,” I say. “But some men are like that, Karen. Can’t handle major responsibilities. Maybe he’ll straighten out after a few weeks, though, and want to come back.”

  “I wouldn’t take him,” she says. “He’s been a complete mope since that other business a while ago. I think it’s just as well. I got plenty of help with the baby.” She brightens up. “You want to see him?”

  “Sure,” I say, and she takes me into the baby’s room.

  Well, do I really have to tell you that then and there I see why Jimmy-Ray run off like he did? Karen nods at me. “You want to hold him?” And then without waiting for an answer, she picks him up and puts him right in my arms. “Don’t worry, he won’t break.”

  Having held three of my own and numerous others of relatives and friends, I ain’t worried about that. I was just took by surprise for a minute there, because never have I seen a baby that looked just like Elvis. There are lots of real strong resemblances around here, of course, but no babies that were ever born with the sideburns. Not a single one.

  CHAFF

  Greg Egan

  Hot new Australian writer Greg Egan has been very impressive and very prolific in the early years of the nineties, seeming to turn up almost everywhere with high-quality stories. He is a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere. Several of his stories have appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, including this one; in fact, he placed two stories in both our Eighth and Ninth Annual Collections—the first author ever to do that back-to-back in consecutive volumes—and placed another story in our Tenth Annual Collection. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared last year in England, to wide critical acclaim, and is due out shortly in the U.S.; and his second novel, Permutation City, is slated to appear in 1994. Coming up is a collection of his short fiction, and I think it’s clear that Egan is well on his way to becoming one of the Big Names of the nineties.

  Here he takes us to the steaming jungles of South America for an unsettling and hard-edged story that explores some of the same sort of territory as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—but then throws away the map and takes us into a whole new uncharted territory, one full of both promise and menace, for a glimpse of what may be the future of humanity.…

  * * *

  El Nido de Ladrones—the Nest of Thieves—occupies a roughly elliptical region, 50,000 square kilometres in the western Amazon Lowlands, straddling the border between Colombia and Peru. It’s difficult to say exactly where the natural rain forest ends and the engineered species of El Nido take over, but the total biomass of the system must be close to a trillion tonnes. A trillion tonnes of structural material, osmotic pumps, solar energy collectors, cellular chemical factories, and biological computing and communications resources. All under the control of its designers.

  The old maps and databases are obsolete; by manipulating the hydrology and soil chemistry, and influencing patterns of rainfall and erosion, the vegetation has reshaped the terrain completely: shifting the course of the Putumayo River, drowning old roads in swampland, raising secret causeways through the jungle. This biogenic geography remains in a state of flux, so that even the eye-witness accounts of the rare defectors from El Nido soon lose their currency. Satellite images are meaningless; at every frequency, the forest canopy conceals, or deliberately falsifies, the spectral signature of whatever lies beneath.

  Chemical toxins and defoliants are useless; the plants and their symbiotic bacteria can analyse most poisons, and reprogram their metabolisms to render them harmless—or transform them into food—faster than our agricultural warfare expert systems can invent new molecules. Biological weapons are seduced, subverted, domesticated; most of the genes from the last lethal plant virus we introduced were found three months later, incorporated into a benign vector for El Nido’s elaborate communications network. The assassin had turned into a messenger boy. Any attempt to burn the vegetation is rapidly smothered by carbon dioxide—or more sophisticated fire retardants, if a self-oxidizing fuel is employed. Once we even pumped in a few tonnes of nutrient laced with powerful radioisotopes—locked up in compounds chemically indistinguishable from their natural counterparts. We tracked the results with gamma-ray imaging: El Nido separated out the isotope-laden molecules—probably on the basis of their diffusion rates across organic membranes—sequestered and diluted them, and then pumped them right back out again.

  So when I heard that a Peruvian-born biochemist named Guillermo Largo had departed from Bethesda, Maryland, with some highly classified genetic tools—the fruits of his own research, but very much the property of his employers—and vanished into El Nido, I thought: At last, an excuse for the Big One. The Company had been advocating thermonuclear rehabilitation of El Nido for almost a decade. The Security Council would have rubber-stamped it. The governments with nominal authority over the region would have been delighted. Hundreds of El Nido’s inhabitants were suspected of violating US law—and President Golino was aching for a chance to prove that she could play hard ball south of the border, whatever language she spoke in the privacy of her own home. She could have gone on prime time afterwards and told the nation that they should be proud of Operation Back to Nature, and that the 30,000 displaced farmers who’d taken refuge in El Nido from Colombia’s undeclared civil war—and who had now been liberated forever from the oppression of Marxist terrorists and drug barons—would have saluted her courage and resolve.

  I never discovered why that wasn’t to be. Technical problems in ensuring that no embarrassing side-effects would show up down-river in the sacred Amazon itself, wiping out some telegenic endangered species before the end of the present administration? Concern that some Middle Eastern warlord might somehow construe the act as licence to use his own feeble, long-hoarded fission weapons on a troublesome minority, destabilizing the region in an undesirable manner? Fear of Japanese trade sanctions, now that the rabidly anti-nuclear Eco-Marketeers were back in power?

  I wasn’t shown the verdicts of the geopolitical computer models; I simply received my orders—coded into the flicker of my local K-Mart’s fluorescent tubes, slipped in between the updates to the shelf price tags. Deciphered by an extra neural layer in my left retina, the words appeared blood red against the bland cheery colours of the supermarket aisle. I was to enter El Nido and retrieve Guillermo Largo. Alive.

  * * *

  Dressed like a local real-estate agent—right down to the gold-plated bracelet-phone, and the worst of all possible $300 haircuts—I visited Largo’s abandoned home in Bethesda
: a northern suburb of Washington, just over the border into Maryland. The apartment was modern and spacious, neatly furnished but not opulent—about what any good marketing software might have tried to sell him, on the basis of salary less alimony.

  Largo had always been classified as brilliant but unsound—a potential security risk, but far too talented and productive to be wasted. He’d been under routine surveillance ever since the gloriously euphemistic Department of Energy had employed him, straight out of Harvard, back in 2005—clearly, too routine by far … but then, I could understand how 30 years with an unblemished record must have given rise to a degree of complacency. Largo had never attempted to disguise his politics—apart from exercising the kind of discretion that was more a matter of etiquette than subterfuge; no Che Guevara T-shirts when visiting Los Alamos—but he’d never really acted on his beliefs, either.

  A mural had been jet-sprayed onto his living room wall in shades of near infrared (visible to most hip 14-year-old Washingtonians, if not to their parents). It was a copy of the infamous Lee Hing-cheung’s A Tiling of the Plane with Heroes of the New World Order, a digital image which had spread across computer networks at the turn of the century. Early 90s political leaders, naked and interlocked—Escher meets the Kama Sutra—deposited steaming turds into each other’s open and otherwise empty brain-cases—an effect borrowed from the works of the German satirist George Grosz. The Iraqi dictator was shown admiring his reflection in a hand mirror—the image an exact reproduction of a contemporary magazine cover in which the moustache had been retouched to render it suitably Hitleresque. The US President carried—horizontally, but poised ready to be tilted—an egg-timer full of the gaunt hostages whose release he’d delayed to clinch his predecessor’s election victory. Everyone was shoe-horned in, somewhere—right down to the Australian Prime Minister, portrayed as a public louse, struggling (and failing) to fit its tiny jaws around the mighty presidential cock. I could imagine a few of the neo-McCarthyist troglodytes in the Senate going apoplectic, if anything so tedious as an inquiry into Largo’s defection ever took place—but what should we have done? Refused to hire him if he owned so much as a Guernica tea-towel?