The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  III

  I see-you-tomorrowed him on the steps of the courthouse, but he was staring at the sky. The bobble-layer of clouds on the horizon was a remarkable satsuma colour. Further up was cyan and eggshell. The surface of the icebound estuary, which looked perfectly smooth and flat in daylight, revealed under the slant light all manner of hollows and jags. Further out at sea, past the iceline where waves turned themselves continually and wearily over, a fishing platform sent a red snake of smoke straight up from the fakir’s-basket of its single chimney.

  “Tomorrow,” he replied absently. He seemed hypnotized by the view.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, mistaking (as I now think) his distraction for anxiety about the prospect of losing some of his five apartments or forty cars and flitters. “The J.M. said he recognized that some individuals have a genius for innovation. That was a good sign. That’s code for: geniuses don’t need to be quite as respectful of the law as ordinary drones.”

  “A genius for innovation,” he echoed.

  “I’m not saying scot-free. Not saying that. But it won’t be too bad. You’ll keep more than you think. It will be fine. Don’t worry. Yes?”

  He suddenly coughed into his gloves—yellow, condom-tight gloves—and appeared to notice me for the first time. God knows I loved him, as a friend loves a true friend, but he bore then as he always did his own colossally swollen ego like a deformity. I never knew a human with so prodigious a self-regard. His selfishness was of the horizoning, all-encompassing sort that is almost touching, because it approaches the selfishness of the small child. His whim: I shall be humanity’s benefactor! But this was not an index of his altruism. It was because his ego liked the sound of the description. Having known him twenty years I would stand up in court and swear to it. He developed the marrow peptide-calcbinder treatment not to combat osteoporosis—the ostensible reason, the thing mentioned in his Medal of Science citation—but precisely because of the plastic surgical spin-off possibilities, so that he could add twenty centimeters to his own long bones. Not that he minded people using his treatment to alleviate osteopathologies, of course.

  Accordingly, when he did not turn up in the courtroom the following day my first thought was that he had simply overslept; or gotten distracted by some tourist pleasure, or that some aspect of his own consciousness had intruded between his perceiving mind and the brute fact that (however much I tried to reassure him) a J.M. was gearing up to fine him half his considerable wealth for property-right violation. It did not occur to me that he might deliberately have absconded. This possibility evidently hadn’t occurred to the court either, or they would have put some kind of restraint upon him. You would think (they thought, obviously) that the prospect of losing so many million euros of wealth was restraint enough.

  The shock in court was as nothing, however, to the fury of the Company: his employer, and mine. I want to be clear: I had been briefed to defend Nic in court, and that only. I made this point forcefully after the event. My brief had been courtroom and legal, not to act as his minder, or to prevent him from boarding a skyhop to Milan (it turned out) in order immediately to board another skyhop to—nobody was quite sure where. “If you’d wanted a minder you should have hired a minder,” I said. I was assertive, not aggressive.

  The court pronounced in absentia, and it went hard on Nic’s fortune. But this did not flush him out.

  His disappearance hurt me. I was sent to a dozen separate meetings in a dozen different global locations within one week; and in the same timeframe I had twenty or so further virtual meetings. Flying over Holland, where robotically tended fields shone greener than jade, and the hedges are all twenty-foot tall, and the glimmering blue rivers sined their paths towards the sea.

  At Denver airport I saw a man with Parkinsonism—not old, no more than forty—sitting in the café and trying to eat a biscuit. He looked as though he was trying to shake hands with his own mouth.

  The news was as full of people starving, as it always is. Images of a huge holding zone in Sri Lanka where people were simply sitting around waiting to die. That look of the starving: hunger has placed its leech-maw upon their heel and sucked all their fluid and solidity out, down to the bones. The skin tautly concave everywhere. The eyes big as manga. The aching face.

  On Channel 9 the famine clock, bottom left corner, rolled its numbers over and over. A blur of numbers.

  I flew to Iceland.

  I flew back to Denver.

  I was acutely aware that Neocles’ vanishment put my own career at risk. Had I always lived amongst wealth, as he had, I might have floated free above the anxiety of this. It’s easy for the wealthy to believe that something will turn up. But I had experienced what a non-medinsure, hardscrabble life was like, and I did not want to go back to it.

  He’s gone rogue, I was told. Why didn’t you stop him? The Company, which had been (to me) a dozen or so points of human contact, suddenly swelled and grew monstrously octopoid. A hundred, or more, company people wanted to speak to me directly. This is serious, I was told.

  He has the patent information on a dozen billion-euro applications, I was told. You want to guarantee the Company’s financial losses should he try and pirate-license those? I thought not.

  I thought not.

  Not everybody scapegoated me. Some departments recognized the injustice in trying to pin Nic’s disappearance on me. Embryology, for instance; a department more likely than most to require expert legal advice, of the sort I had proved myself in the past capable of providing. Optics also assured me of their support, though they did so off the record. But it would have required a self-belief stronger than the one with which providence has provided me to think my career—my twenty-year career—as staff legal counsel for the Company was going to last more than a month. The elegant bee-dance of mutual corporate espionage continued to report that none of our competitors had, yet, acquired any of the intellectual property Nic had in his power to dispose. I had a meeting at Cambridge, in the UK, where late winter was bone-white and ducks on the river looked in astonishment at their own legs. I flew to Rio where the summer ocean was immensely clear and beautiful: sitting on the balcony of our offices it was possible, without needing optical enhancement, to make out extraordinary levels of detail in the sunken buildings and streets, right down to cars wedged in doorways, and individual letters painted on the tarmac.

  I flew to Alaska. I flew to Sydney, where the airport was a chaos of children—a flash mob protest about the cutbacks in youth dole.

  In the midst of all this I somehow found time to begin, discretely, to make plans for a post-Company life. My ex-wife was more understanding than I might have expected, more concerned to maintain medinsure for our two children than for herself. I scouted, gingerly, secretly, for other employment; but even with the most optimistic assessment it was going to be hard to carry five lots of medinsure on my new salary. I could not of course deprive the children, and I did not wish to deprive Kate. That left my ex-wife and myself, and I decided to give up coverage for myself and leave my ex’s in place.

  Then, from the blue, news: Neocles had gone native in Mumbai, of all places. I was called once again to Denver and briefed face-a-face by Alamillo himself, the Company enforcer and bruiser and general bully-fellow. It was not a pleasant tête-à-tête. At this meeting emphasis was placed on the very lastness of this, my last chance. The word last as conventionally used was insufficient to convey just how absolutely last this last chance was, how micron-close to the abyss I found myself, how very terminal my opportunity.

  The very severity of this interview reassured me. Had they not needed me very badly they would not have worked so hard to bully me. For the first time since Nic had so thoughtlessly trotted off—putting at risk, the fucker, not only his own assets but my entire family’s well-being—I felt the warmth of possible redemption touch the chill of my heart.

  “My last chance,” I said. “I understand.”

  “You go to him,” said Alamillo. “You
have a fucking word, yes?”

  I understood then that they were sending me because I was a friend, not because I was a lawyer. They already knew that money was no longer going to provide them with any leverage with Nic anymore—that he had renounced money. He was easing himself into his new role as Jesus Christ, the redeemer of the starving. What can you do to a person who won’t listen to money? What else does Power have, in this world of ours?

  “I’ll talk to him. What else?”

  “Nothing else,” said Amarillo.

  “Bring him home?”

  “No, that’s not what we’re sending you to do. Listen the fuck to me. I don’t give a fucking pin—just, just. Look. We’re sending you to talk to him.”

  IV

  I was flown out on a gelderm plane, its skin stiffening with the frictive heat of a high-inset aerial trajectory. I ate little medallions of liquorish bread, with shark caviar and Russian cheese paté; and then authentic sausages lacquered with honey, and then spears of dwarf asparagus, and then chocolate pellets that frothed deliciously inside the mouth. I drank white wine; a Kenyan vintage. The toilet cubicle of this plane offered seven different sorts of hygiene wipe, including a plain one, one that analyzed your stool as you wiped to check for digestive irregularities and several that imparted different varieties of dotTech to your lower intestine to various ends.

  I watched a film about a frolicsome young couple overcoming the obstacles placed in the way of their love. I watched the news. I watched another film, a long one this time—fifteen minutes, or more—based on the historical events of the French Revolution.

  The tipping point of our descent registered in my viscera like a Christmas-eve tingle of excitement.

  We plummeted to Mumbai.

  Arriving at Chhatrapati Shivaji was like travelling back half a century in time: the smell; the litter; the silver-painted curved ceilings on their scythe-shaped supports. An all-metal train, running on all-metal rails, trundling me from the terminal to the departure room. Then it was a short hop in a Company flicker to Jogeshwari beachfront—seconds, actually: a brief elevation over the peninsular sprawl of the city, its bonsai skyscrapers like stacked dishes, the taller curves and spires further south. The sky was outrageously blue, and the sea bristled with light. And really in a matter of seconds we came down again. I could have walked from airport to seafront, is how close it was. But better to arrive in a flitter, of course. When I’d called Nic he’d been gracious if laid-back in reply: no Company men, just you, old friend. Of course, of course.

  Of course.

  There was a flitter park on the Juhu dyke, and I left the car, and driver, there, and started walking. Forty degrees of heat—mild, I was told, for the season. The sky blue like a gemlike flame. It poured heat down upon the world. The air smelt of several things at once: savoury smells and decaying smells, and the worn-out, salt-odour of the ocean.

  I don’t know what I expected. I think I expected, knowing Nic, to find him gone hippy; dropped-out; or a holy hermit chanting Japa. I pictured him surfing. But as I walked I noticed there was no surf. There were people everywhere: a rather startling profusion of humanity, lolling, walking, rushing, going in and out, talking, singing, praying. It was an enormous crush. The sound of several incompatible varieties of music wrestled in the background: beats locking and then disentangling, simple harmonic melodies twisting about one another in atonal and banshee interaction. Everybody was thin. Some were starvation thin. It was easy enough to pick out these latter, because they were much stiller: standing or sitting with studied motionless. It was those who could still afford to eat who moved about.

  The bay harboured the poking-up tops and roofs of many inundated towers, scattered across the water like the nine queens in the chessboard problem, preventing the build-up of ridable waves. These upper floors of the drowned buildings were still inhabited; for the poor will live where they can, however unsalubrious. Various lines and cables were strung in sweeping droops from roofs to shore. People swam or kicked and splashed through the shallower water. On the new mud beach a few sepia-coloured palm trees waved their heavy feathers in the breeze. Sweat wept down my back.

  And then, as arranged, there was Nic: lying on the flank of the groyne with his great length of hair fanned out on the ground behind him. The first surprise: he was dressed soberly, in black. The second: he was accompanied by armed guards.

  I sat beside my friend. It was so very hot. “I think I was expecting beach bummery.”

  “I saw your plane come over,” he said. “Made quite a racket.”

  “Airbraking.” Like I knew anything about that.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, though,” he said, getting up on his haunches. His guards fidgeted, leaning their elbows on their slung rifles. They were wearing, I noticed, Marathi National Guard uniforms. “Good of you to come,” he clarified.

  “People in Denver are pretty pissed.”

  “There’s not many I’d trust,” he said. He meant that he did, at least, trust me.

  “These boys work for you?” I asked.

  “Soldiers. They do. The Marathi authorities and I have come to an understanding.” Nic hopped to his feet. “They get my hairstyle, and with it they get the popular support. Of the poor. I get a legal government to shelter me. And I get a compound.”

  “Compound?” I asked, meaning: chemical compound? Or barracks? The answer, though, was the latter, because he said:

  “Up in Bhiwandi. All the wealth has moved from the city, up to the mountains, up East in Navi Mumbai. The wealthy don’t believe the sea has stopped coming. They think it’ll likely come on a little more. The wealthy are a cautious lot.”

  “The wealthy,” I said.

  “So you can come along,” he said. “Come along.”

  I got to my feet. “Where?”

  “My flitter’s back here.”

  “Are you allowed to park a flitter down here? I was told flitters had to be parked in the official park, back,” I looked around, vaguely. “Back up there somewhere.”

  “I have,” he said, flashing me a smile, “special privileges.”

  V

  “What is it we do?” he asked me, a few minutes later, as the flitter whisked the two of us, and Nic’s two soldiers, northeast over the Mumbai sprawl. He had to raise his voice. It was noisy as a helecopter.

  “Speaking for myself,” I said, “I work for the Company. I do this to earn enough to keep the people I love safe and healthy. I include you in that category, by the way, you fucker.”

  “And,” he said, smiling slyly, “how is Kate?”

  I’ll insert a word, here, about Kate. It is not precisely germane, but I want to say something. I love her, you see. I’m aware of the prejudice, but I believe it goes without saying that she is as much a human as anybody. She has a vocabulary of nine hundred words and a whole range of phrases and sayings. She has a genuine and sweet nature. She has hair the colour of holly-berries. You’d expect me to say this, and I will say this: it is a particularly strange irony that if the same people who sneer at her personhood post treatment had encountered her before treatment, it would never occur to them to deny that she was a human being. In those circumstances they would have gone out of their way to be nice to her. And if before, why not afterward? Kate is happier now than she ever was before. She is learning the piano. Of all the people I have met in this life, she is the most genuine.

  Do you know what? I don’t need to defend my love to you.

  “She is very well,” I said, perhaps more loudly than I needed to. “Which is more than I can say for your portfolio.”

  “A bunch of houses and cars and shit,” he shouted, making a flowing gesture with his right hand as if discarding it all. His was, despite this theatricality, an untterly unstudied insoucience. That’s what a lifetime of never wanting for money does for you.

  “We could have saved more than half of it,” I said, “if you hadn’t absented you from the court the way you did.”

  “All tho
se possessions,” he said. “They were possessing me.”

  “Oh,” I said. I could not convey to him how fatuous this sounded to me. “How very Brother Brother.”

  He grinned. “Shit it’s good to see you again.”

  “This hair thing of yours,” I asked him, having no idea what he meant by the phrase but guessing it was some nanopeptide technology or other that he had developed. “Is that a company patent?”

  “You know?” he said, his eyes twinkling and his pupils doing that peculiar cycling moon-thing that they do, “it wouldn’t matter if it were. But, no, as it happens, no. As it happens.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s something.”

  He was the hairstyle man, the saviour of the world’s poor. “I’m a benefactor now,” he boomed. “I’m a revolutionary. I shall be remembered as the greatest benefactor in human history. In a year I’ll be able to put the whole company in my fucking pocket.”

  The flitter landed: a little series of bunny hops before coming to rest, that telltale of an inexperienced chauffeur.

  We were inside his compound: a pentagon of walls thick-wreathed with brambles of barbed wire. Inside was a mass of people, and everybody without exception—men women and children—had long, ink-black hair. People were lain flat on the floor, or lolling upon the low roofs, or sitting in chairs, all of them sunbathing, and all with their hair spread and fanned out. A central tower shaped like an oil derrick with a big gun at the top—impressive looking to a pedestrian, but like a cardboard castle to any force armed with modern munitions. There was plenty of space inside the walls, but it was crowded fit to burst. Nic led me along a walkway alongside the central atrium, and the ground was carpeted with supine humanity. They were so motionless that I even wondered whether they might be dead: except that every now and then one would pat their face to dislodge a fly, or breathe in and out.

  “Sunbathers,” I said.

  And then, just before we went in, Nic stopped and turned to me with a characteristically boyish sudden spurt of enthusiasm. “Hey, I tell you what I learnt the other day?”