The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020

by John Joseph Adams

  “But aren’t you going to drag the river?”

  “Go.”

  There was something in the cop’s tone that made it through the muffled gas mask and told Tavi it was an order. He’d done the right thing in an impossible moment.

  He’d done the right thing.

  Right?

  He wanted to go home and take a nap. Draw the shades and huddle in the dark and make all this go away for a day. But there were bills to pay. The cab required insurance, and the kinine fuel it used, shipped down from orbit, wasn’t cheap. Every time the sprinklers under the cab misted up and put down a new layer, Tavi could hear his bank account dropping.

  But you couldn’t drive on the actual ground into Manhattan, not if you wanted to get a good review. Plus, the ground-traffic-flow licenses were even more whack than flying licenses because the interstellar tourists didn’t want to put up with constant traffic snarls.

  Trying to tell anyone that traffic was authentic old Manhattan just got you glared at.

  So: four more fares. More yellowed gas mixing into the main cabin of the cab, making Tavi cough and his eyes water. The last batch, a pack of wolflike creatures that poured into the cab, chittering and yapping like squirrels, requested he take them somewhere serving human food.

  “Real human food, not that shit engineered to look like it, but doctored so that our systems can process it.”

  Tavi’s dash had lit up with places the Tourist Bureau authorized for this pack of aliens that kept grooming each other as he watched them in his mirror.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He took them to his cousin Geoff’s place up in Harlem, which didn’t have as many skyscrapers bubble-wrapped with alien atmospheres. The pack creatures were oxygen breathers, but they supplemented that with something extra running to their noses in tubes that occasionally wheezed and puffed a dust of cinnamon-smelling air.

  Tavi wanted some comfort food pretty badly by this point. While the aliens tried to make sense of the really authentic human menus out front, he slipped into the hot gleaming stainless steel of the kitchens in the back.

  “Ricky!” Geoff shouted. “You bring those dogs in?”

  “Yes,” Tavi confessed, and Geoff gave him a half hug, his dreadlocks slapping against Tavi. “Maybe they’ll tip you a million.”

  “Shiiiit. Maybe they’ll tip you a trillion.”

  It was an old service-job joke. How much did it cost to cross a galaxy to put your own eyes, or light receptors, on a world just for the sake of seeing it yourself? Some of the aliens who had come to Earth had crossed distances so great, traveled in ships so complicated, that they spent more than a whole country’s GDP.

  A tip from one of them could be millions. There were rumors of such extravagances. A dish boy turned rich suddenly. A tour guide with a place built on the Moon.

  But the Tourism Bureau and the Galactic-owned companies bringing the tourists here warned them not to overpay for services. The Earth was a fragile economy, they said. You didn’t want to just run around handing out tips worth a year of some individual’s salary. You could create accidental inflation, or unbalance power in a neighborhood.

  So the apps on the tourists’ systems, whatever types of systems they used, knew what the local exchange rates were and paid folk down here on the ground proportionally.

  Didn’t stop anyone from wishing, though.

  Geoff slid him over a plate of macaroni pie, some peas and rice, and chicken. Tavi told him about his morning.

  “You shouldn’t have called the police,” Geoff said.

  “And what, just keep flying?”

  “The bureau will blacklist you. They have to save face. And no one is going to want to hear about a tourist dying on the surface. It’s bad publicity. You’re going to lose your license into Manhattan. NYC bureau’s the worst, man.”

  Tavi cleaned his fingers on a towel, then coughed. The taste of cinnamon came up strong through his throat.

  “You okay?”

  Tavi nodded, eyes watering. Whatever the pack out there was sniffing, it was ripping through his lungs.

  “You need to be careful,” Geoff said. “Get a better filter in that cab. Nichelle’s father got lung cancer off a bunch of shit coming off the suits of some sundivers last year, doctors couldn’t do nothing for him.”

  “I know, I know,” Tavi said between coughs.

  Geoff handed him a bag with something rolled up in aluminum foil inside. “Roti for the road. Chicken, no bone. I have doubles if you want?”

  “No.” Geoff was being too nice. He knew how Tavi was climbing out from a financial hole and had been bringing by “extras” after he closed up each night.

  Most of the food here was for nonhuman tourists, variations on foods that wouldn’t upset their unique systems. Tavi had lied in taking the tourist pack here; the food out front was for the dog-like aliens. But the stuff in the bag was real, something Geoff made for folk who knew to come in through the back.

  Tavi did one more run back to JFK, and this time he flew a few loops around the megastructure. JFK Interspacial was the foot of a leg that stretched up into the sky, piercing the clouds and rising beyond until it reached space. It was a pier that led to the deep water where the vast alien ships that moved tourists from star to star docked. It was the pride of the US. Congress had financed it by pledging the entire country’s GDP for a century to a Galactic building consortium, so no one really knew how to build another after it was done, but the promise was that increased Manhattan tourism would bring in jobs. Because with the Galactics shipping in things to sell here in exchange for things they wanted, there wasn’t much in the way of industrial capacity. Over half the US economy was tourism, the rest service jobs.

  Down at the bottom of JFK, the eager vacationers and sightseers disgorged into terminals designed for their varying biologies and then were kitted out for time on Earth. Or, like Tavi’s latest customer, just bundled into a can that slid into the back of a cab, and that was then dropped off at one of the hotels dwarfing Manhattan’s old buildings.

  When the drop-off of the tourist in a can that Tavi couldn’t see or interact with was done, he headed home. That took careful flying over the remains of La Guardia, which pointed off from Brooklyn toward the horizon, the way it had ever since it collapsed and fell out of stable orbit.

  Land around La Guardia’s remains was cheap, and Tavi lived in an apartment complex roofed by the charred chunk of the once–space elevator’s outer shell.

  “Home sweet home,” he said, coming in for a landing.

  There was a burning smell somewhere in the back of the cab. Smoke started filling the cabin and the impellers failed.

  He remained in the air, the kinine misters doing their job and preventing him from losing neutral buoyancy, and coasted.

  Tavi wanted to get upset, hit the wheel, punch the dash. But he just bit his lip as the car finally stopped just short of the roof’s parking spot. He had the misters spray some cancellation foam, and the car dropped a bit too hard to a stop.

  “At least you got home,” Sienna said, laughing as he opened the doors to the cab and stumbled out. “You know what I think of this Galactic piece of shit.”

  “It gets the job done.”

  Sienna poked her head into the cab, holding her breath. Her puffy hair bobbed against the side of the hatch.

  “Can you fix it?” he asked her.

  “It was one of the dog things, with the cinnamon breath? That gas they breathe catalyzes the O-rings. You need to spend some money to isolate the shaft back here.”

  “Next big tip,” Tavi told her.

  She crawled back out and let out the breath she’d been holding.

  “Okay. Next big tip. I can work on it if you split dinner with me.” She nodded at the bag Geoff had given him.

  “Sure.”

  “There’s also a man waiting by your door. Looks like Tourist Bureau.”

  “Shit.” He didn’t want anyone from the bureau out here. Not in an ill
egal squat in the ruins of the space elevator now draped across this side of the world.

  * * *

  There was no air conditioning; the solar panels lashed to the scrap hull rooftop didn’t pump out enough juice to make that a reality. But the motion-sensitive fans kicked on and the LED track lights all leapt to attention as Tavi led the beet-faced Tourist Bureau agent through the mosquito netting.

  “Your cab is having trouble?”

  The agent, David Kahn, had a tight haircut and glossy brown skin, the kind that meant he didn’t spend much time outside loading aliens into the back of cabs. He had an office job.

  “Sienna will fix it. She grew up a scrapper. Her father was one of the original decommissioners paid to work on picking La Guardia up. Before the contract was canceled and they all decided to stay put. Beer?”

  Tavi passed him a sweaty Red Stripe from the fridge, which Kahn held nervously in one hand as if he wanted to refuse it. Instead, he placed it against his forehead. The man had been waiting a while in the heat. And he was wearing a heavy suit.

  “So, I am here to offer you a grant from the Greater New York Bureau of Tourism,” Kahn started, sounding a little unsure of himself.

  “A grant?”

  “The bureau is starting a modernization campaign to make sure our cabs are the safest on Earth. That means we’d like to take your cab in and have it retrofitted with better security, improved impellers, better airlocks. For the driver’s safety.”

  “The driver?”

  “Of course.”

  Tavi thought it was a line of bullshit. Human lives were cheap; there were billions teeming away on the planet. If Tavi ever stepped out, someone else would bid on his license to Manhattan and he’d be forgotten in days.

  Maybe even hours.

  “Take it,” Sienna said, pushing through the netting. “That piece of shit needs any help it can get.”

  Tavi didn’t have to be told twice. He put his thumb to the documents, verbally repeated assent into a tiny red dot of a light, and then Kahn said a tow truck was on its way.

  They watched the cab get lifted onto its back, the patchwork of a vehicle that Tavi had come to know every smelly inch of.

  “What about the dead alien?” Tavi asked.

  “Well, according to the documents you just signed, you can never talk about the . . . err . . . incident again.”

  “I get it.” Tavi waved a salute at the disappearing cab and tow truck. “I figured as much when you said you had a ‘grant.’ But what happens to the alien? Did you ever find the body?”

  Kahn let out a deep breath. “We found it, downstream of where it jumped.”

  “Why the hell did it do that? Why jump out?”

  “It was out of its mind on vacation drugs. Cameras show the party started in orbit with a few friends, continued down the JFK elevator all the way to the ground.”

  “When do you send the body back to its people?”

  “We don’t.” Kahn looked around, surprised. “No one wants to know a high-profile cephaloid of any kind has died on Earth. So they didn’t. The video of the fall no longer exists in any system.”

  “But they can track the body—”

  “—​already fired off via an old-school rocket aimed at our sun. That leaves no evidence here. Nothing happened on Earth. Nothing happened to you.”

  Kahn shook hands with Sienna and Tavi and left.

  The next morning a brand-new cab was parked on the roof.

  “Easier than scrubbing it all down for DNA,” Sienna said. “The old one’s probably on a rocket as well, just like the body, being shot toward the sun as we speak.”

  He scrambled up some eggs for his ever-hungry roomie, and some extra for the Oraji brothers next door. There were thirty other random clumps of real and found families living in welded-​together scrap here. Several of them watched the sun creep over the rusted wreckage scattered from horizon to horizon as they ate breakfast. Tavi would head back into the drudgery of flying tourists around; Sienna would work at trying to pry something valuable out of the ruins.

  Just as they finished eating, a second cab descended from the clouds. It kicked up some dust as it settled in on the ground.

  “Hey, asshole,” Sienna shouted. “If we all land on metal we don’t kick dust into everyone’s faces.”

  Grumbling assent rose into the morning air.

  The doors slid open, and Tavi felt his stomach drop.

  Another octopus-like alien stood on the ground looking up at them.

  “I’m looking for the human named Tavi,” the speaker box on the exoskeleton buzzed. “Is he here?”

  “Don’t say a thing,” Sienna hissed. Sienna, who had all the smarts built up from a lifetime of eat or be eaten while scavenging in the wreckage.

  “I am Tavi,” Tavi said, stepping down toward the alien.

  “You’re an idiot,” Sienna said. She walked off toward the shadows under a pile of scrap and disappeared.

  * * *

  The alien crouched in a spot of shade, trying to stay out of the sun, occasionally rubbing sunscreen over its photosensitive skin.

  “I’m the cosponsor of the unit last seen in your vehicle when it came down to your planet for sightseeing.”

  Tavi felt his stomach fall out from under him. “Oh,” he said numbly. He wasn’t sure what a cosponsor was, or why the alien’s language had been translated that way. He had the feeling this alien was a close friend, or maybe even family member, of the one he’d witnessed jump to its death.

  “No one will tell me anything, your representatives have done nothing but flail around and throw bureaucratic ink my way,” the alien tourist said.

  “I’m really sorry for your loss,” Tavi said.

  “So, you are my last try before offencers get involved,” the alien concluded.

  “Offencers?”

  The alien used one of its mechanized limbs to point up. A shadow passed over the land. Something vast skimmed over the clouds and blocked the sun. It hummed. And the entire land hummed back with it. Somehow, Tavi knew that whatever was up there could destroy a planet.

  Tavi’s wristband vibrated. Incoming call. Kahn.

  The world was crashing into him. Tavi felt it all waver for a moment, and then he took a deep breath.

  “All I wanted to do was the right thing,” he muttered, and took the call.

  “Very big, alien destroyers,” David Kahn said, in a level, but clearly terrified, voice. “We at the Greater New York Bureau of Tourism highly recommend you do whatever the being or beings currently in contact with you are asking, while also, uh, acknowledging that we have no idea where the missing being they are referring to is. Please hold for the president—”

  Tavi flicked the bracelet off.

  “What do you want?” Tavi asked the alien.

  “I want to know the truth,” it said.

  “I see you have an advanced exotic-worlds encounter suit. Would you like a real human beer with me?”

  “If that helps,” it said.

  * * *

  “You have such a beautiful planet. So unspoiled, paradisiacal. I was swimming with whales in your Pacific Ocean yesterday.”

  Tavi sat down and gave the alien a Red Stripe. It curled a tentacle around it, pulled it back toward its beak. They watched the trees curling around the La Guardia debris shiver in the wind, the fluffy clouds ease through the pale blue sky.

  They deliberately sat with their backs to the section of sky filled with the destroyer.

  “I’ve never been to the Pacific,” Tavi admitted. “Just the Caribbean, where my people come from, and the Atlantic.”

  “I’m a connoisseur of good oceans,” the alien said. “These are just some of the best.”

  “We used to fish on them. My grandfather owned a boat.”

  “Oh, does he still do that? I love fishing.”

  “He started chartering it out,” Tavi said. “The Galactics bought out the restaurants, so he couldn’t sell to his best markets anymore. T
hey own anything near the best spots, and all around the Eastern Seaboard now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “About your friend,” Tavi took a big swig. “They jumped out of my cab. When it was in the air. They were in an altered state.”

  There was a long silence.

  Tavi waited for the world to end, but it didn’t. So he continued, and the alien listened as he told his story.

  “And, there were no security systems to stop them from jumping?” it asked when he finished.

  “There were not, on that cab.”

  “Wow,” it said. “How authentically human. How dangerous. I’ll have to audit your account against the confessions of your bureau, but I have to say, I am very relieved. I suspected foul play, and it turns out it was just an utterly authentic primitive-world experience. No door security.”

  Overhead, long fiery contrails burned through the sky.

  “What is that?” Tavi asked, nervous.

  “Independent verification,” the alien said. It stood up and jumped down to its cab. It looked closely at the rear doors. “I could really just jump out of these, couldn’t I?”

  It opened the door, and Tavi, who had hopped over the roof and down the stairs, caught a glimpse of a pale-faced driver inside. Sorry, friend, he thought.

  There were more shadows descending down out of space. Larger and larger vessels moving through the atmosphere far above.

  “What is happening?” Tavi asked, mouth dry.

  “News of your world has spread,” it said. “You are no longer an undiscovered little secret. Finding out that we can die just in a cab ride—where else can you get that danger?”

  The cab lifted off and flew away.

  Sienna came back out of the shadows. “They’re over every city now. They’re offering ludicrous money for real estate.”

  Tavi looked at the skies. “Did you think it would ever stop?”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Beats them blowing us up, right? They do that, sometimes, to other worlds that fight it.”

  He shook his head. “There’s not going to be anything left for us down here, is there?”