The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year Part 6

"Would you mind it something awful if I went to live with her, Katherine?"

"Would that make you happy?"

"I reckon so."

"But where will you skate?"

"There's a city rink near her house," he said, cheerful and optimistic.

Their affair only lasted three weeks. Doc came back complaining that Skylar had only wanted him for his circuits, but I think it was the poor quality of the city rink that disappointed him most. We commiserated over the breakup on a faux bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire and then he went back to his workshop, happy as any s.e.xy cowboy robot can be. Eventually he went to work for the UN Commission on Warming the Planet Back Up, at their headquarters atop Sicily. The Sicilian women adored him and the frozen Mediterranean was excellent for skating.

III..

Neill and Buck both came off the delivery truck wearing tight white T-shirts and leather vests, very similar in appearance: rugged, fair-haired, with chiseled chins and bright blue eyes. But there was always something comforting about Neill and dangerous about Buck. Maybe it was the way that Neill could stand at the center of a frozen pond and let the stillness of the piney woods seep into him, no need to show off or test the ice. Buck, though? From day one he had to spin as fast as he could, jump higher than anyone else, be the center of a private solar system around which the rest of us...o...b..ted in agitation or love or both.

It's fair to say Neill was bis.e.xual, but during threesomes he was usually more interested in Yuri or Dana than he was in me. When he and I were alone, he was determined to experiment with ropes, knots, and just about every position in the Wild West Guide to s.e.xual Positions. The Mosey, Saddlehorn, and Road Stake went well enough, but I had to replace the damaged headboard after we did the Appaloosa, and needed anti-inflammatories for a week after the Missouri Toothpick. Between rehearsals and marathon s.e.x sessions, Neill read his way through most of my library. He would thump from one bookcase to the next with plastic guards on his skates, fascinated by the great philosophers and religious thinkers.

I wouldn't have minded his choices so much if he didn't entirely skip my row in the self-help section. That's what I did before the Big Bad Ice: Dr. Katherine Campbell, best-selling psychologist. Maybe you've heard of my books? . . . I had a syndicated radio show. I appeared frequently on daytime television. My hair, makeup, wardrobe, and jewelry were impeccable, and my teeth brilliantly white. I was, in a word, insufferable.

In retrospect, Neill showed good sense by skipping my books. Herbert never read them, either. Like his creator, Neill also preferred ink on paper, and the way pages were sewn into spines.

"I prefer gravity," he said, more than once. "Pixels have no weight."

After Buck left us to build his secret laboratory up at Dodge Falls in New Hampshire, Neill volunteered to ski up the Connecticut River and talk some sense into him. The rest of us weren't too keen on the idea. Bad enough to lose Buck to the crazy world outside, but risk another of us as well? Since the advent of the Big Freeze, snow bandits had taken to seizing any shipments of food or fuel that tried to make it overland. On the estate we had the aircar, the heated gardens, a security system, and a larder full enough for decades. Out in the valley, Neill would be on his own.

"What if you don't come back?" asked Dana, number five in the s.e.xy robot lineup. He was our cross-dressing robot: s.e.xy cowboy on the ice, alluring cowgirl off it. He rested one manicured hand on Neill's arm. "What if someone la.s.soes you and burns you for heat?"

Neill said, "I'll ski by night and hide by day."

Yuri took a sip from his beer bottle. None of the robots needed food or liquid, of course, but they'd been designed with storage tanks in their chest cavities to keep up social pretenses. "You think you've got a chance in h.e.l.l of convincing Buck to come back?"

"I think it's worth a try," Neill said, square and honest. Of all the robot she was the one who most missed Herbert, or the ideal of Herbert; the absent father who had created them but then abandoned them with his death. Buck was a piece of Herbert that could not be lost as well.

Neill set off one winter sunset with the sun red behind the pine trees. To make it safely to Buck's lair, he would have to climb over broken bridges and dams, avoid any local marauders, and keep himself safe from the dangers of the natural world. We received messages letting us know he'd successfully pa.s.sed through Hartford and then Springfield. Then, somewhere near Turners Falls, he fell off the map. We heard nothing until Buck broke radio silence, popping up on the vid screen one night to inform us that agents of the U.S. federal government had captured Neill for nefarious experiments. They were holding him in an underground lab near Mount Sugarloaf.

"Experiment on him for what?" I asked, bewildered.

"Herbert personally designed him," Buck said, his voice grim across the many miles. "New Human More Human is defunct. Skylar Anderson destroyed the last of the company records years ago. What's left of the Defense Department thinks they can tear Neill apart and learn enough to build a whole new line of robots."

We mounted a rescue attempt immediately. Cody, number six in the cowboy lineup, was a pilot whenever he wasn't practicing his sit spins. With his aerial skills, my financial resources, and the true bravery of cowboys everywhere, we sped north. By the time we arrived, flames were shooting from the pristine countryside. The government lab was in ruins. Neill and Buck were safe in the woods, but Neill's left arm was missing.

"They took it," Neill said, holding his empty sleeve forlornly. I imagine he was thinking about s.e.x again; it's hard to perform the Four in Hand when you don't have a hand to put in the appropriate orifice.

Yuri thumped him on the back. "We'll build you another, partner."

Dana gave Neill a kiss on the cheek, leaving pink lipstick behind. "The important thing is you're alive."

Buck was sooty but unharmed. We considered each other across the small clearing. His shoulders were stiff, his chin defiant. I wondered if he had killed any of the government men, and if he'd feel bad about that in the years to come.

Neill said, "You should come back with us, Buck."

"Nah," he said, in a slow but deliberate drawl. "I'm better off on my own for now. But y'all keep in touch."

With that he loped off into the woods, his gait odd.

Only once we were on the chopper, speeding home, did I realize Buck had sawed the skates off his feet.

IV..

For the first thirty years of my life, men in women's clothing did nothing for me. Dana changed all that. By day he skated around in his blue jeans, leather gloves, and black shirts with elbow patches. Come evening, he would disappear into my closets and emerge wearing the best of my gowns, shoes, and precious jewelry. I don't know who taught him how to apply makeup but he was a master designer with shadow and blush. Whoever knew my nipples would perk up at the sight? The human body is a strange organism.

He said he didn't want to be a woman full time. That would ruin the skating act. But from the moment he came out of the factory he had a yearning for the lacy softness of a bra.s.siere, the arch of fine high heel shoes, the glitter and graceful folds of a well-made c.o.c.ktail dress. He liked to shave his legs (yes, my robots had renewable hair) and stretch long, sleek stockings over them. He enjoyed hooking a lace garter belt around his hips. In bed he wore pink lingerie and was an enthusiastic supporter of phalluses shaped like pistols. He also would say or do anything to make me laugh, including the use of feathers, ice cubes, and an endless supply of dirty limericks.

Before the Big Freeze, Dana would go into town dressed as a woman, on the prowl for a man who could love all of him. I worried about those trips, but there's no stopping a s.e.xy cowboy on a mission. After Neill's rescue at Mount Sugarloaf, Dana's feelings for him flared into a one-sided infatuation that affected them both on the ice. Dana started doubling his jumps instead of landing triples, and Neill nearly dropped him once during a lift, and then someone loosened the seams on Neill's costume so that all of him popped out during a backflip.

Things might have gotten worse between them, but the next day we received a distress call from Long Island Sound. An ice barge with children aboard had run into trouble. The boys saddled up and rode out on snowmobiles. During the rescue Dana was lost to the water. One moment he was hoisting an infant to safety and in the next, the merciless ice had opened up and sucked him into its black depths.

Neill took the loss especially hard. For weeks he skated around the rink in silence, wearing black clothes and one of Dana's favorite feather boas. I myself tried to remember all of Dana's dirty jokes and limericks. None of them seemed funny anymore. The others mourned their lost brother by getting his name tattooed on their forearms and inventing a new jump-spin-land combination called Dana's Stick.

Buck heard about it, though I'm not sure which of the boys called him. He called me on the vid to express his regrets. I could see a blazing hearth behind him; his secret lair didn't have much in the way of furniture, but there seemed to be a lot of computers and equipment. I imagined the place was as gloomy and bitter as Buck himself.

"Dana was a good cowboy," Buck said. "I'm sorry he's gone."

"Are you?" I asked. "You didn't much approve of his attire."

Which was true, and Buck was robot enough not to deny it.

"I don't want to fight," he said, instead. On the vid, his shoulders were slumped and his eyes downcast. "I do miss y'all, even if you don't miss me."

Fat snowflakes slapped lightly against the windows of my bedroom. It wasn't like Buck to be so boldly needy. Maybe all those years alone in New Hampshire were changing his outlook on life. He'd gone there after Herbert's death; to mourn, maybe, or to bitterly rue the loss of his creator.

"We miss you a lot," I told him. "You can come home anytime you want."

"My work is important." Like Doc, Buck had inherited Herbert's genius and overinflated ego. He believed he could save the planet. I guess the real Herbert might have been able to, but his mechanical heir hadn't succeeded yet.

"Kay," Buck said, breaking the silence between us. "If I came back, would you get rid of everyone but me? Would you let me be your only cowboy?"

From Buck, this was unheard of. We'd never even kissed. From day one he'd been wild, untamed, his own free robot.

He must have seen confusion in my face, because he logged off without saying goodbye.

As it turned out, our grieving over Dana was happily in vain. Three weeks after the disaster on the ice, he sent word from Key West. Robots don't need to breathe, of course, so after being sucked into the powerful currents of the reversed Gulf Stream, he'd simply hung on for the ride. He liked Key West a lot. Though it was no longer a tropical paradise, the ice fishermen still applauded the sunset each night before snuggling into their igloos. He'd found true love in the arms of a Cuban named Elian, and did we mind if he stayed down there to teach the locals how to figure skate?

V..

Yuri and Cody were my fiercely compet.i.tive s.e.xy robots. Not on the ice. During performances they were consummate professionals, and the townsfolk who came up for the shows once a month never saw their intense rivalry. But you've never seen two boys compete so much over who could eat more flapjacks (though they couldn't, technically, eat), get more drunk (simulated, in wildly hilarious ways), or score higher on cowboy video games (eighteen-hour marathon sessions in the library were not unheard of, until I got sick of hearing "Yee-haw!" and threw them out). In the back forty they rode robot horses and roped robot steer until Doc had to bang the dents out of them, and then they started all over again. In my bed they wrestled over who got my back pa.s.sage and who got my front. No matter who won, I always benefited from their rivalry.

One day they got it into their heads to see who could cross-country ski the farthest. By this time Doc was in Italy, Dana was in Key West, and Buck was still in New Hampshire. The skate show had diminished to just Yuri, Cody, and Neill, and didn't draw crowds from town like it used to. Not that many people still lived anywhere in New England. The smart ones had drifted south to the crowded equatorial nations, and the old ones rarely left their homes anymore.

"You don't mind, do you?" Cody asked one night, his hand pumping away pleasurably inside me.

"Mind what?" I gasped.

Yuri's mouth lifted from my right nipple. "If we modify skis to fit our skates and go off for a little while."

The boys had learned long ago that I can't deny them anything when I'm about to o.r.g.a.s.m, and so off they went on their journey. That was twenty years ago. They circ.u.mnavigated frozen oceans, icy Mideast deserts, and the top of every mountain they could find. They brought food, fuel, and engine parts to small villages. In those pockets of civilization where humanity still struggled to survive, they also performed pairs skating routines. The seats were often empty but for wide-eyed children who had never known prosperity or what it was like to be truly warm.

VI..

In the end, only Neill and I remained on the estate. I was too old and withered and stubborn to move. Neill was too devoted to leave. He continued to read the philosophers in the library, though after fifty years he'd surely memorized every one. In bed, he was considerate of my frail bones, v.a.g.i.n.al dryness, and decreased libido. Ours was no longer a world in which women could find medical or surgical solace from the cruelties of old age. Earth was a dying planet, destined to be buried under ice and snow no matter what miracle solutions always seemed at hand.

Long after the house computer had rusted into silence, the skating rink was still operational. Neill had become an excellent solo performer. For hours he would skate to singers long forgotten, like Toby Keith and Taylor Swift. Most days I would pull on my scarf and coat and boots to trudge down the slope and watch him spin. Some days I dozed off in my fireside chair, instead, and he would kiss my forehead on his way out the door.

"I'll be back in time for dinner," he would say.

One evening I woke to a cold hearth and dark skies. The house was silent but for my own voice. I made my way down the slippery slope already knowing the sad truth. Neill was exactly where I expected him to be: center ice, arms raised up, legs crossed, face proud. He had skated his final performance. He would stand there until the roof caved in and winter buried him forever.

"I'm sorry," I said, through tears. "You shouldn't have been alone."

"He wasn't," a voice said behind me, from the empty stands.

Buck was standing in the shadows, his hands buried in the pockets of his long camel hair coat. We regarded each other across a gulf of empty seats and old regrets.

"He knew his battery was going," Buck said, shifting his gaze to Neill. "We were never designed to last this long, Kay."

"The others..." I said faintly.

"Have come to see me," he said. "I managed to extend them for a few more years, but Neill didn't want that. He was ready to be released. No one really wants to be immortal."

I wiped my face. "Not even you, Herbert?"

Buck blinked. For a moment I thought he was going to deny it. Then he said, "How long have you known?"

"I was always suspicious that you wouldn't sleep with me," I said. "And I thought something was amiss when you took the biological Herbert's death so hard. But it was Skylar who confirmed it, on her deathbed. She said she always suspected you'd downloaded your own personality into one of the robots to preserve yourself. You did an excellent job."

Buck moved closer to the edge of the rink. I wondered if he missed the glide of ice under his skates, the rush of air as he sped around in circles.

"It was an experiment," he said. "I didn't really expect success. All of a sudden I was handsome, and young again, and graceful for the first time in my life. But you only had eyes for the others."

"You could have joined us."

"I hated you back then. You always made me aware of my own deficiencies. I wasn't a perfect man, but for decades I believed I was."

I couldn't argue with that. Didn't want to, not with Neill frozen on the ice in front of us. All I could do was pull my hat down over my ears and make my slow, painful way up the slope to the empty house that had been rowdy with s.e.xy cowboys for so many decades. Release sounded like a good word. Sounded like a long-promised reward after fifty years of ice.

Buck followed me. Heated up soup that I wouldn't eat and tucked me into a bed too big for just one person. I remembered him on the night he proposed marriage. Just the two of us in a sidewalk cafe in summertime, coffee and baklava on the table between us, moonlight on the street and in his eyes.

"Come back to Dodge Falls with me," he said. "Let us take care of you."

So I did.

VII.

And it's here I've spent my last years, slowly dying amid well-heated rooms and hydroponic gardens that bloom with long-forgotten flowers. Dana keeps me company most of the time. He's not very erectile anymore, but we enjoy taking baths together and snuggling under blankets and putting on our best dresses for afternoon tea. Buck never comes to my bed. Maybe he thinks I'll break a hip. Maybe I'm afraid to show him what a sack of old flesh I've become, while he's still strong and handsome. He spends his days working on the Big Freeze. He thinks he's finally found a solution; even now, pilots are seeding the oceans and clouds with chemicals that will restore the planet's damaged equilibrium. We hope.

Dana and I can count the days we have left, or at least a rough approximation. Yuri and Doc and Cody are already gone, my beautiful boys. It's Buck I'm worried about. Years of skating took their toll on the others, but he could outlive us for another ten years. Who will take care of him? Who will save him from the loneliness and bitterness? He needs a companion.

I should have known he has a plan.

"Here she is," he says one morning, unveiling a gla.s.s cabinet in his lab. "I've kept her in storage all these years and just finished the upgrade."

Inside is a beautiful woman: glossy brown hair, clear skin, firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s, legs to die for. Her cowboy hat, suede skirt, and fringed shirt are as fresh as the day she rolled off the a.s.sembly line. The seventh s.e.xy robot. An homage to the greatest love of Herbert's life.

"Skylar!" I exclaim indignantly. "You built a perfect replica of her, not me?"

He blinks at me. "That's not Skylar-that's you!"

I glare.

He wilts.

"It's Skylar," Dana confirms. "Her nose always was a little bit crooked."

Buck says, "Well, it doesn't matter. She's never been activated. There's no personality profile. I want you to have her, Kay. I can transfer your mind into this body."

"No. Give her to Dana," I say.