The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Here I have to admit to a lack of empathy, which for a facilitator is tantamount to a truck driver admitting to falling asleep at the wheel. My own revulsion at having to spend another day confined in plastic masked what Segura was feeling about his own confinement. I was not alert. I had lost some of my professional control. I didn’t see where his disgust was leading him, leading us.

  This is hindsight again: One of the talents that Segura translated into millions of dollars was an ability to hide his emotions, to make people misread him. This was not something he had to project: he did it automatically, the way a pathological liar will lie even when there is nothing at stake. The misogyny that seemed to flood his attitude toward the painting—and Rhonda—was only a small fraction of what he must have actually felt, emotions amplified by the buffer drug and empath circuitry. Some woman must have hurt him profoundly, repeatedly, when he was a child. Maybe that’s just amateur psychology. I don’t think so. If it had a sexual component, it would have felt quite different, and I would have instantly picked up on it. His hate was more primitive, inchoate.

  I knew already that Segura was the kind of person who tightens up during facilitation, which was a relief; they’re easier to work with. Doubly a relief with Segura, since from the beginning I felt I didn’t want to know him all that well.

  I might have prevented it by quitting early. But I wanted to do all the light passages and then start the next day with a fresh palette, loaded with dark. Perhaps I also wanted to punish Segura, or push him.

  The actions were simple, if the motivations were not. We had gone 20 minutes past the six-hour mark and had perhaps another half hour to go. I had an annoying headache, not bad enough to make me quit. I assumed Segura felt the same.

  Every now and then we approached Rhonda to adjust her pose. Only a mannequin could retain exactly the same posture all day. Her chin had fallen slightly. Segura got up and walked toward her.

  I don’t remember feeling his hand slip out and pick up the large wash brush, one that we hadn’t used since the first day. Its handle is a stick of hardwood that is almost an inch in diameter, ending in a sharp bevel. I never thought of it as a weapon.

  He touched her chin with his left forefinger and she tilted her head up, closing her eyes. Then with all his strength he drove the sharp stick into her chest.

  The blast of rage hit me without warning. I fell backward off the stool and struck my head. It didn’t knock me out, but I was stunned, disoriented. I heard Rhonda’s scream, which became a horrible series of liquid coughs, and heard the paper and desk accessories scattering as (we later reconstructed) she lurched forward and Segura pushed her face down onto the desk. Then there were three meaty sounds as he punched her repeatedly in the back with the handle of the brush.

  About this time M&M and Allison came rushing through the door. I don’t know what Allison did, other than not scream. M&M pulled Segura off Rhonda’s body, a powerful forearm scissored across his throat, cutting off his wind.

  I couldn’t breathe either, of course. I started flopping around, gagging, and M&M yelled for Allison to unhook me. She turned me over and ripped off the top part of the skinsuit and jerked the electrodes free.

  Then I could breathe, but little else. I heard the quiet struggle between M&M and Segura, the one-sided execution.

  Allison carried me into the prep room and completed the procedure that M&M normally did, stripping off the skinsuit and giving me the shot. In about ten minutes I was able to dress myself and go back into the office.

  M&M had laid out Rhonda’s body on a printer’s dropsheet, facedown in a shockingly large pool of blood. He had cleaned the blood off the desk and was waxing it. The lemon varnish smell didn’t mask the smell of freshly butchered meat.

  Segura lay where he had been dropped, his limbs at odd angles, his face bluish behind the skinsuit mask.

  Allison sat on the couch, motionless, prim, impossibly pale. “What now?” she said softly. M&M looked up and raised his eyebrows.

  I thought. “One thing we have to agree on before we leave this room,” I said, “is whether we go to the police or … take care of it ourselves.”

  “The publicity would be terrible,” Allison said.

  “They also might hang us,” M&M said, “if they do that here.”

  “Let’s not find out,” I said, and outlined my plan to them.

  It took a certain amount of money. It was a good thing I had the million in advance. We staged a tragic accident, transferring both of their bodies to a small boat whose inboard motor leaked gasoline. They were less than a mile from shore when thousands saw the huge blossom of flame light up the night, and before rescuers could reach the hulk, the fire had consumed it nearly to the waterline. Burned almost beyond recognition, the “artist” and his model lay in a final embrace.

  I finished the face of the picture myself. A look of pleasant surprise, mischievousness. The posture that was to have communicated hardness was transformed into that of a woman galvanized by surprise, perhaps expectation.

  We gave it to Segura’s family, along with the story we’d given to the press: Crusty financier falls in love with young law student/model. It was an unlikely story to anyone who knew Segura well, but the people who knew him well were busy scrambling after his fortune. His sister put the picture up for auction in two weeks, and since its notoriety hadn’t faded, it brought her $2.2 million.

  There’s nothing like a good love story that ends in tragedy.

  Back in New York, I looked at my situation and decided I could afford to quit. I gave Allison and M&M generous severance pay, and what I got for the studio paid for even nicer places in Maine and Key West.

  I sold the facilitating equipment and have since devoted myself to pure water colors and photography. People understood. This latest tragedy on top of the grotesque experience with the Monster.

  But I downplayed that angle. I wanted to do my own work. I was tired of collaboration, and especially tired of the skinsuit. The thousand decisions every hour, in and out of control.

  You never know whose hand is picking up the brush.

  LIESERL

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter is another of those young British writers such as Paul J. McAuley, Iain Banks, Gwyneth Jones, Ian McDonald, Ian R. MacLeod, and Greg Egan (actually an Australian, but that’s Close Enough for Government Work, as they say) who are busily revitalizing the “hard-science” story here at the beginning of the nineties (in parallel, one should add, with American counterparts such as Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Bear, and along with older but revitalized writers such as Brian Stableford, Vernor Vinge, and Ian Watson). Like most of the writers mentioned above, Baxter often works on the cutting edge of science—his work bristles with weird new ideas, and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope … but he usually succeeds in balancing conceptualization with storytelling, and rarely forgets the human side of the equation.

  This balancing act is displayed beautifully in “Lieserl,” which introduces us to one of the strangest and most haunting characters you’re ever likely to meet.…

  Stephen Baxter has become one of Interzone’s most frequent contributors since making his first sale there in 1987, and he has also made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. His first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic acclaim, and his second novel, Timelike Infinity was released in 1992 to similar response. His most recent book is a new novel, Anti-Ice.

  * * *

  Lieserl was suspended inside the body of the Sun.

  She spread her arms wide and lifted up her face. She was deep within the Sun’s convective zone, the broad mantle of turbulent material beneath the glowing protosphere; convective cells larger than the Earth, tangled with ropes of magnetic flux, filled the world around her. She could hear the roar of the great convective founts, smell the stale photons diffusing out towards space from the remote fusing core.


  She felt as if she were inside some huge cavern. Looking up she could see how the photosphere formed a glowing roof over her world perhaps fifty thousand miles above her, and the boundary of the inner radiative zone was a shining, impenetrable floor another fifty thousand miles beneath.

  Lieserl? Can you hear me? Are you all right?

  The capcom. It sounded like her mother’s voice, she thought.

  She thrust her arms down by her sides and swooped up, letting the floor and roof of the cavern-world wheel around her. She opened up her senses, so that she could feel the turbulence as a whisper against her skin, the glow of hard photons from the core as a gentle warmth against her face.

  Lieserl? Lieserl?

  She remembered how her mother had enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

  * * *

  Even at the moment she was born she knew something was wrong.

  A face loomed over her: wide, smooth, smiling. The cheeks were damp, the glistening eyes huge. “Lieserl. Oh, Lieserl…”

  Lieserl. My name, then.

  She explored the face before her, studying the lines around the eyes, the humorous upturn of the mouth, the strong nose. It was an intelligent, lived-in face. This is a good human being, she thought. Good stock …

  Good stock? What am I thinking of?

  This was impossible. She felt terrified of her own explosive consciousness. She shouldn’t even be able to focus her eyes yet …

  She tried to touch her mother’s face. Her own hand was still moist with amniotic fluid—but it was growing visibly, the bones extending and broadening, filling out the loose skin like a glove.

  She opened her mouth. It was dry, her gums already sore with budding teeth.

  She tried to speak.

  Her mother’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, Lieserl. My impossible baby.”

  Strong arms reached beneath her. She felt weak, helpless, consumed by growth. Her mother lifted her up, high in the air. Bony adult fingers dug into the aching flesh of her back; her head lolled backwards, the expanding muscles still too weak to support the burgeoning weight of her head. She could sense other adults surrounding her, the bed in which she’d been born, the outlines of a room.

  She was held before a window, with her body tipped forward. Her head lolled; spittle laced across her chin.

  An immense light flooded her eyes.

  She cried out.

  Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

  * * *

  The first few days were the worst. Her parents—impossibly tall, looming figures—took her through brightly lit rooms, a garden always flooded with sunlight. She learned to sit up. The muscles in her back fanned out, pulsing as they grew. To distract her from the unending pain, clowns tumbled over the grass before her, chortling through their huge red lips, then popping out of existence in clouds of pixels.

  She grew explosively, feeding all the time, a million impressions crowding into her soft sensorium.

  There seemed to be no limit to the number of rooms in this place, this House. Slowly she began to understand that some of the rooms were Virtual chambers—blank screens against which any number of images could be projected. But even so, the House must comprise hundreds of rooms. And she—with her parents—wasn’t alone here, she realized. There were other people, but at first they kept away, out of sight, apparent only by their actions: the meals they prepared, the toys they left her.

  On the third day her parents took her on a trip by flitter. It was the first time she’d been away from the House, its grounds. She stared through the bulbous windows, pressing her nose to heated glass. The journey was an arc over a toylike landscape; a breast of blue ocean curved away from the land, all around her. This was the island of Skiros, her mother told her, and the sea was called the Aegean. The House was the largest construct on the island; it was a jumble of white, cube-shaped buildings, linked by corridors and surrounded by garden—grass, trees. Further out there were bridges and roads looping through the air above the ground, houses like a child’s bricks sprinkled across glowing hillsides.

  Everything was drenched in heavy, liquid sunlight.

  The flitter snuggled at last against a grassy sward close to the shore of an ocean. Lieserl’s mother lifted her out and placed her—on her stretching, unsteady legs—on the rough, sandy grass.

  Hand in hand, the little family walked down a short slope to the beach.

  The Sun burned through thinned air from an unbearably blue sky. Her vision seemed telescopic. She looked at distant groups of children and adults playing—far away, halfway to the horizon—and it was as if she was among them herself. Her feet, still uncertain, pressed into gritty, moist sand. She could taste the brine salt on the air; it seemed to permeate her very skin.

  She found mussels clinging to a ruined pier. She prised them away with a toy spade, and gazed, fascinated, at their slime-dripping feet.

  She sat on the sand with her parents, feeling her light costume stretch over her still-stretching limbs. They played a simple game, of counters moving over a floating Virtual board, pictures of ladders and hissing snakes. There was laughter, mock complaints by her father, elaborate pantomimes of cheating.

  Her senses were electric. It was a wonderful day, full of light and joy, extraordinarily vivid sensations. Her parents loved her—she could see that in the way they moved with each other, came to her, played with her.

  They must know she was different; but they didn’t seem to care.

  She didn’t want to be different—to be wrong. She closed her mind against the thoughts, and concentrated on the snakes, the ladders, the sparkling counters.

  * * *

  Every morning she woke up in a bed that felt too small.

  Lieserl liked the garden. She liked to watch the flowers straining their tiny, pretty faces towards the Sun, as the great light climbed patiently across the sky. The sunlight made the flowers grow, her father told her. Maybe she was like a flower, she thought, growing too quickly in all this sunlight.

  On the fifth day she was taken to a wide, irregularly shaped, colourful classroom. This room was full of children—other children!—and toys, drawings, books. Sunlight flooded the room; perhaps there was some clear dome stretched over the open walls.

  The children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly to brilliantly coloured Virtual figures—smiling birds, tiny clowns. The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She’d never been so close to other children before. Were these children different too?

  One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother’s legs. But her mother’s familiar warm hands pressed into her back. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”

  As she stared at the unknown girl’s scowling face, Lieserl’s questions, her too-adult, too-sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that mattered to her—all that mattered in the world—was that she should be accepted by these children—that they wouldn’t know she was different.

  An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He wore a jumpsuit coloured a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. “Lieserl, isn’t it? My name’s Michael. We’re glad you’re here.” In a louder, exaggerated voice, he said, “Aren’t we, people?”

  He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused “Yes.”

  “Now come and we’ll find something for you to do,” Michael said. He led her across the child-littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boy—red-haired, with startling blue eyes—was staring at a Virtual puppet which endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes, two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears, three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers, following the tinny voice of the Virtual. “Two. One. Two and one is three.”

&n
bsp; Michael introduced her to the boy—Tommy—and she sat down with him. Tommy, she was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed aware that Lieserl was present—let alone different.

  The number Virtual ran through its cycle and winked out of existence. “Bye bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!”

  Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl, awkwardly, copied his posture. Now Tommy turned to her—without appraisal, merely looking at her, with unconscious acceptance.

  Lieserl said, “Can we see it again?”

  He yawned and poked a finger into one nostril. “No. Let’s see another. There’s a great one about the preCambrian explosion—”

  “The what?”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck…”

  The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who’d scowled at Lieserl—Ginnie—started some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl’s bony wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl’s growth rate was slowing, but she was still growing out of her clothes during a day). Then—unexpectedly, astonishingly—Ginnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual. When Michael came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that Ginnie must be mistaken; but Michael told her not to cause such distress, and for punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes, without stimulation.

  It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of Lieserl’s life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.

  * * *

  The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They reached the room Lieserl remembered—there was Michael, smiling a little wistfully to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginnie—but Ginnie seemed different: childlike, unformed …

  At least a head shorter than Lieserl.

  Lieserl tried to recapture that delicious enmity of the day before, but it vanished even as she conjured it. Ginnie was just a kid.