Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (18 page)

Johnboy smiled, then turned to bring his face close to Thomas’s helmet, peering in through the faceplate. Johnboy was still wearing that strange, dreamy look, so unlike his usual animated expression, and his eyes were clear and compassionate and calm. “It calls for an act of faith, Thomas. Maybe that’s how every world begins.” He grinned at Thomas. “Meanwhile, I think I’m going to take a swim, too.” He strolled off toward the canal, bouncing a little at each step.

Thomas stood unmoving, the two red lights flashing on his chinstrap readout.

“They’re both going swimming now,” Thomas said dully.

“Thomas! Can you hear me, Thomas?”

“I hear you,” Thomas mumbled.

They were having fun in their new world—he could see that. The kind of fun that kids had . . . that every child took for granted. The joy of discovery, of everything being
new . . .
the joy that seemed to get lost in the grey shuffle to adulthood, given up bit by incremental bit . . .

“You’re just going to have to trust me, Thomas.
Trust me.
Take my word for it that I know what I’m talking about. You’re going to have to take that on faith. Now
listen
to me. No matter what you think is going on down there,
don’t take your helmet off.”

His father used to lecture him in that same tone of voice, demanding, domineering . . . and at the same time condescending. Scornful. Daddy knows best. Listen to me, boy, I
know
what I’m talking about! Do what I
tell
you to do!

“Do you hear me? Do
not
take your helmet off? Under any circumstances at all. That’s an
order.”

Thomas nodded, before he could stop himself. Here he was, good boy little Tommy, standing on the fringes again, taking orders, doing what he was told. Getting passed over
again.
And for what?

Something flew by in the distance, headed toward the hills.

It looked to be about the size of a large bird, but like a dragonfly, it had six long, filmy gossamer wings, which it swirled around in a complexly interweaving pattern, as if it were rowing itself through the air.

“Get to the lander, Thomas, and close the hatch.”

Never did have any fun. Have to be twice as good as
any
of them, have to bust your goddamn ass—

“That’s a direct order, Thomas!”

You’ve got to make the bastards respect you, you’ve got to
earn
their respect. His father had said that a million times. And how little time it had taken him to waste away and die, once he’d stopped trying, once he realized that you can’t earn what people aren’t willing to sell.

A red and yellow lizard ran over his boot, as quick and silent as a tickle. It had six legs.

One by one, he began to undog the latches of his helmet.

“No! Listen to me! If you take off your helmet, you’ll
die.
Don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t do it!”

The last latch. It was sticky, but he tugged at it purposefully.

“You’re killing yourself! Stop it!
Please. Stop! You goddamn stupid nigger! Stop—”

Thomas smiled, oddly enough feeling closer to the commander in that moment than he ever had before. “Too late,” he said cheerfully.

Thomas twisted his helmet a quarter turn and lifted it off his head.

When the third red light winked on, Commander Redenbaugh slumped against the board and started to cry. He wept openly and loudly, for they had been good men, and he had failed all of them, even Thomas, the best and steadiest of the lot. He hadn’t been able to save a goddamned one of them!

At last he was able to pull himself together. He forced himself to look again at the monitor, which showed three space-suited bodies sprawled out lifelessly on the rusty-red sand.

He folded his hands, bent his head, and prayed for the souls of his dead companions. Then he switched the monitor off.

It was time to make plans. Since the
Plowshare
would be carrying a much lighter-than-anticipated return cargo, he had enough excess fuel to allow him to leave a bit early, if he wanted to, and he
did
want to. He began to punch figures into the computer, smiling bitterly at the irony. Yesterday he had been regretting that they had so little time left in Mars orbit. Now, suddenly, he was in a hurry to get home . . . but no matter how many corners he shaved, he’d still be several long, grueling months in transit—with quite probably a court-martial waiting for him when he got back.

For an instant, even the commander’s spirit quailed at the thought of that dreadful return journey. But he soon got himself under control again. It would be a difficult and unpleasant trip, right enough, but a determined man could always manage to do what needed to be done. Even if he had to do it alone.

When the
Plowshare’s
plasma drive was switched on, it created a daytime star in the Martian sky. It was like a shooting star in reverse, starting out at its brightest and dimming rapidly as it moved up and away.

Thomas saw it leave. He was leaning against his makeshift spear—flametree wood, with a fire-hardened tip—and watching Johnboy preparing to skin the dead hyena-leopard, when he chanced to glance up. “Look,” he said.

Johnboy followed Thomas’s eyes and saw it, too. He smiled sardonically and lifted the animal’s limp paw, making it wave bye-bye. “So long, Ahab,” Johnboy said. “Good luck.” He went back to skinning the beast. The hyena-leopard—a little bit larger than a wildcat, six-legged, saber-tusked, its fur a muddy purple with rusty-orange spots—had attacked without warning and fought savagely; it had taken all three of them to kill it.

Woody looked up from where he was lashing a makeshift flametree-wood raft together with lengths of wiring from the lander. “I’m sure he’ll make it okay,” Woody said quietly.

Thomas sighed. “Yeah,” he said, and then, more briskly, “Let me give you a hand with that raft. If we snap it up, we ought to be ready to leave by morning.”

Last night, climbing the highest of the rolling hills to the north, they had seen the lights of a distant city, glinting silver and yellow and orange on the far horizon, gleaming far away across the black midnight expanse of the dead sea bottom like an ornate and intricate piece of jewelry set against ink-black velvet.

Thomas was still not sure if he hoped there would be aristocratic red men there, and giant four-armed green Tharks, and beautiful Martian princesses.

Solace

Introduction to Solace

“Solace” concerns the transmission of virtual-reality scenarios from one person’s mind directly to another’s. Because Gardner Dozois wrote it, it’s a superb story: compelling, horrifying, provocative. It is also instructive about the growth of science fiction over the last several decades.

The virtual-reality machine goes back at least as far as Isaac Asimov’s 1955 story “Dreaming Is A Private Thing.” In that story, the future that spawned “dreamies” looks pretty much like the present. Only the machine itself is added. Dozois’ future, in contrast, is multi-layered and
different.
Casually mentioned details accumulate, creating a rich, bleak surround for the story: “the bus stopped to take on methane.” “Somewhere out there a killer satellite had found its prey.” A hologram of Botticelli’s
Adoration of the Magi.
A Santa Fe comprising adobe buildings, “mock adobe buildings,” and megastructures of “terraces and tetrahedrons.” Cambodian immigrant children chattering in Spanish. Here is a future complex enough to inhabit.

And we do. The Asimov story describes story events, and we observe them with interest. In the Dozois story, we live the events. Again through the rich use of matter-of-fact detail, we feel as if we’re riding that ramshackle bus beside Kleisterman, eating at that Santa Fe greasy spoon. We taste it, smell it, feel it in our bones.

But the largest difference between the 1955 and 1990 stories go much deeper. In “Dreaming Is a Private Thing” the protagonist faces several problems: recruiting new talent to create “dreamies,” possible government censorship due to dreamies being (gasp!) used as porn, and a star dreamer wanting to quit. In “Solace” the protagonist faces himself, and he . . . No, I won’t spoil it for you. But it’s a problem far more troubling and terrifying than employee relations.

The Asimov story seeks to entertain us, and it succeeds admirably. It is still, after nearly fifty years, fun to read. But the Dozois story is after more. It forces us to confront ourselves, and this depth of effect, plus the masterly use of detail, marks the best SF of today. It illustrates how far the field has come.

Plus, of course, illustrating the genius of Gardner Dozois.

Nancy Kress

Solace

Kleisterman took a zeppelin to Denver, a feeder line to Pueblo, then transferred to a clattering local bus to Santa Fe. The bus was full of displaced Anglos who preferred the life of migrant fieldworker to the Oklahoma refugee camps, a few Cambodians, a few Indians, and a number of the poorer Hispanics, mostly mestizos—unemployables who had hoped that the liberation would mean the fulfillment of all their dreams, but who had instead merely found themselves working for rich Mexican
caudillos
rather than for millionaire Anglos. Most of the passengers had been across the border to blow their work vouchers in Denver or Carson City, and were now on their way back into Aztlan for another week’s picking. They slouched sullenly in their seats, some passed out from drink or God Food and already snoring, many wrapped in ponchos or old Army blankets against the increasing chill of the evening. They ignored Kleisterman, even though, in spite of his carefully anonymous clothes, he was clearly no field hand—and Kleisterman preferred it that way.

The bus was spavined and old, the seats broken in, the sticky vinyl upholstery smelling of sweat and smoke and ancient piss. A Greyhound logo had been chipped off the side and replaced by VIAJANDO AZTLAN. The bus rattled through the cold prairie night with exquisite slowness, farting and lurching, the transmission groaning and knocking every time the driver shifted gears. The heat didn’t work, or the interior lights, but Kleisterman sat stoically, not moving, as one by one the blaring radios faded and the crying babies quieted, until Kleisterman alone was awake in the chill darkness, his eyes gleaming in the shadows, shifting restlessly, never closing.

At some point during the night, they passed the Frontera Libertad, the Liberty Line, and its largely symbolic chain-link fence, and stopped at a checkpoint. A cyborg looked in, his great blank oval face glowing with sullen heat, like a dull rufous moon; he peered eyelessly at them for a thoughtful moment, then waved them on.

South of the border, in what had once been Colorado, they began to crawl up the long steep approach to the Raton Pass, the bus juttering and moaning like a soul in torment. Kleisterman was being washed by waves of exhaustion now, but in spite of them he slept poorly, fitfully, as he always did. It seemed as if every time his head dropped, his eyes closed, faces would spring to vivid life behind his eyelids, faces he did not want to encounter or consider, and his head would jerk up again, and his eyes would fly open, like suddenly released window shades. As always, he was afraid to dream . . . which only increased the bitter irony of his present mission. So he pinched himself cruelly to stay awake as the old bus inched painfully up and over the high mountain pass, and onto the Colorado Plateau.

At Raton, the bus stopped to take on more methane. The town was dark and seemingly deserted, the only light a dim bulb in the window of a ramshackle building that was being used as a fuel dump. Kleisterman stepped out of the bus and walked away from the circle of light to piss. It was very cold, and the inverted black bowl of sky overhead blazed with a million icy stars, more than Kleisterman had ever seen at once before. There was no sound except for a distant riverine roar of cold wind through the trees on the surrounding hillsides. His piss steamed in the milky starlight. As he watched, one of the stars overhead suddenly, noiselessly, flared into diamond brilliance, a dozen times as bright as it had been, and then faded, guttering, and was gone. Kleisterman knew that somewhere out there a killer satellite had found its prey, out there where the multinationals and the great conglomerates fought their silent and undeclared war, with weapons more obvious than those they usually allowed themselves to use on Earth. The wind shifted, blowing through the high valley now, cutting him to the bone with chill, and bringing with it the howling of wolves, a distant, feral keening that put the hair up along his spine in spite of himself. They were only the distant cousins of dogs, after all; just dogs, talking to one another on the wind. Still, the hairs stayed up.

Feet crunching gravel, Kleisterman went back to the bus and climbed aboard, found his iron-hard seat again in the darkness. In spite of the truly bitter cold, the air inside the bus was thick and stale, heavy with sleep, exhaled breath, spilled wine, sweat, the smell of cigarette smoke and marijuana and garlic. He huddled in his overcoat, shivering, and wondered whose satellite or station had just been lost, and if any of his old colleagues had had anything to do with the planning or execution of the strike. Possibly. Probably, even. Once again, he had to fight sleep, in spite of the cold. Once he turned his head and looked out of the window, and Melissa was there in the burnished silver moonlight, standing alongside the bus, staring up at him, and he knew that he had failed to stay awake, and jerked himself up out of sleep and into the close, stuffy darkness of the bus once again. Stillness. The other passengers tossed and murmured and farted. The moon
had
come out, a fat pale moon wading through a boiling river of smoky clouds, but Melissa was gone. Had not been there. Would not ever be anywhere anymore. Kleisterman found himself nodding again and pressed his face against the cold window glass, fighting it off. He would not dream. Not now. Not yet.

The bus sat unmoving in the silent town for an hour, two hours, three, for no reason Kleisterman could ascertain, and then the driver appeared again, from who knows where, climbed aboard muttering and swearing, slammed the door, twisted the engine into noisy, coughing life.

They rattled on through the night, winding down slowly out of the mountains, stopping here and there at small villages and communes to discharge passengers, the hung-over field hands climbing wordlessly from the bus and disappearing like spirits into the darkness, Kleisterman sleeping in split-second dozes. He woke from one such doze to see that the windows had turned red, red as though washed with new blood, and thought that he still slept; but it was the dawn, coming up from the broken badlands to the east, and they went down through the blood-red dawn to Santa Fe.

Kleisterman climbed stiffly down from the bus at Santa Fe. The sun had not yet warmed the air. It was still cold. The streets were filled with watery grey light, through which half-perceived figures moved with the stiff precision of early risers on a brisk morning. Kleisterman found a shabby cafe a block away from the bus station, ordered
huevos rancheros
and a bowl of green chili, was served the food by a sullen old Anglo woman wearing a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt. Unusually for Santa Fe, the food was terrible, tasting of rancid grease and ashes. Kleisterman spooned it up anyway, mechanically, taking it medicinally almost. As fuel. How long had it been since he’d really enjoyed a meal? All food seemed to taste dreadful to him these days. How long since he’d really had a full night’s sleep? His hand shook as he spooned beet sugar into his bitter chicory coffee. He’d always been a tall, thin, bony man, but the reflection the inside of the cafe’s window showed him was gaunt, emaciated, almost cadaverous. He’d lost a lot of weight. This could not go on . . . Grimly he checked through his preparations once again. This time he’d been very careful about being traced. He’d made his contacts with exquisite care. There should be no trouble.

He left the cafe. The light had become bluer, the shadows oil-black and sharp, the sky clear and cerulean. The sun was not yet high, but the streets were already full of people. Mexican soldiers were everywhere, of course, in their comic-opera uniforms, so absurdly ornate that it was difficult to tell a private from a general. Touring Swedish nationals, each with the scarlet King’s Mark tattoo on the right cheek, indicating that they were above most local law. Gangs of skinny Cambodian kids on skateboards whizzed by, threading their way expertly through the crowds, calling to one another in machine-gun-fast bursts of Spanish. A flat-faced Indian leaned from a storefront and swore at them in Vietnamese, shaking his fist. Two chimeras displayed for Kleisterman, inflating their hoods and hissing in playful malice, then sliding aside as he continued to walk toward them unperturbed. This was the kind of unregulated, wide-open town where he could find what he needed, out on the fringes, in the interstices of the worldwide networks, where things would not be watched so closely as elsewhere—no longer part of the United States but not really well integrated into Old Mexico either, with a limited official presence of the multinationals, but plenty of black-market money circulating anyway.

He crossed the plaza, with its ancient Palace of the Governors, which had seen first Spanish, then Anglo, now Mexican conquerors come and go. There were slate-grey thunderheads looming over the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which in turn loomed over the town. There was a New Town being built to the southeast, on the far side of the mostly dry Santa Fe River, a megastructure of bizarre geometric shapes, all terraces and tetrahedrons; but here in the Old Town the buildings were still made of adobe or mock adobe, colored white or salmon or peach. He threaded a maze of little alleyways and enclosed courtyards on the far side of the plaza, the noise of the plaza fading away behind, and came at last to a narrow building of sun-faded adobe that displayed a small brass plaque that read DR. AU-CONSULTATIONS.

Trembling a little, Kleisterman climbed a dusty stairwell to a third-floor office at the back of a long, dim hallway. Dr. Au turned out to be one of those slender, ageless Oriental men of indeterminate nationality who might have been fifty or eighty. Spare, neat, dry, phlegmatic. The name was Chinese, but Kleisterman suspected that he might actually be Vietnamese, as his English held the slightest trace of a French accent. He had a sad, compassionate face, and hard eyes. An open, unscreened window looked out through the thick adobe wall to an enclosed courtyard with a cactus garden below. The furniture was nondescript, well-used, and the carpet dusty and threadbare, but an exquisite hologram of Botticelli’s
Adoration of the Magi
moved and glittered in muted colors on the bare white walls, and the tastefully discreet ankh earring in the doctor’s left earlobe might well have been real silver. There was no receptionist—just a desk with a complex of office terminals, a few faded armchairs, and Dr. Au.

Kleisterman could feel his heart pounding and his vision blurring as he and Dr. Au engaged in an intricate pavane of hints and innuendo and things not quite said, code words and phrases being mentioned in passing with artful casualness, contacts named, references mentioned and discussed. Dr. Au moved with immense wariness and delicacy, at every stage ready to instantly disengage, always phrasing things so that there was a completely innocent interpretation that could be given his words, while Kleisterman was washed by alternate waves of impatience, fear, rage, despair, muddy black exhaustion, ennui. At last, however, they reached a point beyond which it would no longer be possible to keep up the pretense that Kleisterman had come here for some legal purpose, a point beyond which both men could not proceed without committing themselves. Dr. Au sighed, made a fatalistic gesture, and said, “Well, then, Mr.”—glancing at the card on his desk—“Ramirez, what can I do for you?”

Terror rose up in Kleisterman then. Almost, almost, he got up and fled. But he mastered himself. And as he pushed instinctual fear down, guilt and self-hate and anger rose, black and bristling and strong. None of this had reached his face.

“I want you to destroy me,” Kleisterman said calmly.

Dr. Au looked first surprised, then wary—reassessing the situation for signs of potential entrapment—then, after a pause, almost regretful. “I must say, this is somewhat out of our line. We’re usually asked to supply illicit fantasies, clandestine perversions, occasionally a spot of nonconsensual behavior modification.” He looked at Kleisterman with curiosity. “Have you thought about this? Do you really mean what you say?”

Kleisterman was as cool as ice now, although his hands still trembled. “Yes, I mean it. I used to be in the business; I used to be an operator myself, so I can assure you that I understand the implications perfectly. I want to die. I want you to kill me. But that’s not all. Oh, no.” Kleisterman leaned forward, his gaunt face intense. His voice rose. “I want you to destroy me. I want you to make me suffer. You’re an operator, an adept, you know what I mean. Not just pain; anybody can do that. I want you to make me pay.” Kleisterman slumped back in his chair, made a tired gesture. “I know you can do it; I know you’ve
done
it. I know you are discreet. And when you’re done with me, a hundred years subjective from now, you can get rid of my body, discreetly, and no one will ever know what happened to me. It will be as if I had never existed.” His voice roughened. “As if I had never been born. Would to God I had not been.”

Dr. Au made a noncommittal noise, tapped his fingers together thoughtfully. His face was tired and sad, as though in his life he had been made to see more deeply than he cared to into the human soul. His eyes glittered with interest. After a polite pause, he said, “You must be quite certain of this, for later there will be no turning back. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”

Kleisterman made an impatient, despairing gesture. “I could have put a bullet in my head at any time, but that means nothing. It’s not enough, not nearly enough. There must be retribution. There must be restitution. I must be made to pay for what I have done. Only this way can I find solace.”

“Even so . . .” Dr. Au said, doubtfully.

Kleisterman held up his hand. Moving with slow deliberation, he reached into an inner pocket, produced a coded credit strip. “All my assets,” he said, “and they are considerable.” He held the credit slip up for display, then proffered it to Dr. Au. “I want you to destroy me,” he said.

Dr. Au sighed. He looked left, he looked right, he looked down, he looked up. His face was suffused with dull embarrassment. But he took the credit strip.

Dr. Au ushered Kleisterman politely into an adjacent room, stood by with sad patience while Kleisterman removed his clothing. At a touch, a large metal egg rose from the floor, opened like a five-petaled flower, extruded a narrow metal bench or shelf. Dr. Au gestured brusquely; Kleisterman lay down on the bench, wincing at the touch of cold metal on his naked skin. Dr. Au leaned close over him, his face remote now and his movements briskly efficient, as though to get it all over with quickly. He taped soft cloth pads first over Kleisterman’s left eye, then over his right. There was a feeling of motion, and Kleisterman knew that the metal shelf was sliding back into the machine, which would be retracting around it, the petals closing tight to form a featureless steel egg, with him inside.