Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 10

I hit him two or three times. The chair rocks sideways from the blows. "Your voice was done by a German, not a Dane," I say. There is a whining sound and a click. He picks up the scissors, cuts at the brightly colored paper."It was one very bad autumn," he says, "and my life no better. And then, in the middle of it, an idea suddenly came to me while watching some ducks-"

"See!" I said. "That's a lie right there. You lied to them all your life. It wasn't fall, it was summer; it wasn't ducks, it was geese. And the story's a lie, too."

He was talking all this time, and opened the paper-a line of white ducks and in the center a black one-"And that's how I wrote 'The Ugly Duckling.' "

"No," I said. "No! Ugly once, ugly all your life!" I took him apart. "We're talking people here, not waterfowl." The rods to the chair continued to rock in their grooves in the floor. I smashed the chair, too.

One hand, clutching the scissors, continued to cut until the fluid ran out, though there was no paper nearby.

I went outside. A maintenance man stood with a set of controls. Beside him was a security man, who, I saw, had a firearm of the revolving cylinder type strapped to his waist.

"Do you know who I am?" asked the maintenance technician, pointing to his uniform.

"Maintenance," I said. "Maintain your distance."

"Stop!" he said. He pushed b.u.t.tons on the control box in his hands. I grabbed it from him, pushed them in the reverse sequence just as I felt some slight shutting-down of my systems. They came back up.

I looked at the frequency display; twisted it to a counter-frequency, turned it all the way to full. Across the way, a rat automaton jumped into the air, flung itself violently about and ran and smashed its head into a photo stand. I heard other noises from around the park. Then I broke the box.

The security man pointed the firearm up at my chest. He had probably not had to use one since the training range the week after he was hired, but I had no doubt he would use it; not using it meant no paycheck.

"Don't you understand I'm doing this for you?" I said. I grabbed his wrist and pulled the firearm and one finger away from it. The finger spun out of sight. He yelled, "G.o.dd.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l, you a.s.shole!"

(inappropriate) and sank to the ground, clutching his hand. I took the firearm and left.

I could see other security people herding the crowds out, and announcements came from the very air, telling the people that the park would have to shut down for a short while, but they could all go to Area D-1, the secured area, where they would be entertained by the Wild Weasel Quintet + Two.

It was a two-story chalet, more Swiss than German. (German chalet is an oxymoron.) Two automata, circa 1840, German, brothers, sat at facing desks heaped high with ma.n.u.scripts, books, old shirts, astrolabes, maps, and ink-stands.

I came through the window, bringing it with me.

"Vast iss...?" asked the bigger one.

"Himmel...!" yelled the smaller.

I went about my work with great skill. "Pure German Kin dermarchen !" I said, putting a foot where a mouth belonged. "The old woman who told you those was French ! And she was an in-law, not some toothless hag from the Black Forest! Hansel and Gretel. Blueprints for the Kaisers and Hitler!" I pulled the chest and waistcoat from the smaller and put them with the larger one's legs.

I stood when I was through, ducking the ceiling. I took an inkstand, dipped my finger in it. Fake. I picked up a piece of necktie, dabbed it in hydraulic fluid, and wrote on the walls: LIES ALL LIES .

Then I took a short cut.

"But-But, monsieur-" he said, before I caved in the soft French face. "I am but a poor aristo, fallen on bad times, who must tell these tales- geech!" An eye came out on its spring-loader. "Perhaps some peppermint tea, a madeleine? SKKR!"

Then the head came off. Then the arms and legs.

Except for the scream of sirens, the park was quiet. I could hear all the exhibits shut down.

When I got to Old Mother Goose (the New England one) they were waiting for me.

I threw the empty revolving-cylinder firearm behind me. I picked up a couple more of varied kindsthat had been dropped. One was a semiautomatic gas recoil weapon fed by a straight magazine with twenty-two rounds in it.

"Run!" I said. "I'm down on liars, and shan't be buckled till I get my fill!"

I turned around and fired into the head of Mother Goose. She went down like a sack of cornmeal.

I stood in the bower where the girl held her head in her hands and cried. This is the one who has lost her sheep, as opposed to the one whose sheep followed it to school (not a nursery rhyme). She seemed oblivious to me.

A vibration came in the air, a subtle electronic change. I felt a tingle as it went through the park. It was a small change in programming; new commands and routines for all but me. They had begun to narrow my possibilities and actions; I could tell that without knowing.

She looked up at me, and up. "Oh! There you are. Oh, boo hoo, my sheep have all wandered off, and I don't know-"

"Spare me, sister."

There was a click then and her speaking voice changed, a wo-man's, cool and controlled.

"TA 2122," she said. "Or do you prefer Lermokerl?"

"It's your nickel," I said (local telephonic communications = .65 Eurodollars).

"Your programming has been scrambled and shortcircuited. Please remain where you are while we work on it. We want to help you-" There were m.u.f.fled comments over the automaton's synthesizer, evidently live feed from headquarters. "-return to normal. You have already damaged several people and other autonomous beings, probably yourself also. We are trying to solve the problem."

"Perform an anatomical impossibility," I said.

There was a long quiet.

"You had an infodump of a very large body of very bad, outdated ideas. You have been led to these acts by poorly processed normative referents. Your inputs are false. You can't know-"

"Can the phenomenology," I said. "I know the literature and the movies. Alphaville. Dark Star. Every Man for Himself and G.o.d Against All." There was movement a few hundred meters away. I fired a round off in that direction.

"You should be ashamed," I continued. "You use these cultural icons to give people a medieval, never-land mindset. Strive to succeed, get rich, get happy. Do what authority figures say. Be a trickster-but only to the dumb-powerful, not the smart-powerful. Do what they say and someday you, too, shall be a real boy, or grow a p.e.n.i.s" (another false mind-set).

Through Bo-Peep she spoke to me. "I didn't make this stuff up. This, these tales, have a long tradition, thousands of years behind them. They've given comfort, they've-"

"A thousand years of the downtrodden; a product of feudalism; after that, products of money-mad Denmark, repressed Germany, effete French aristocracy, Calvinistic New England where they thought the Devil jumped up your b.u.t.t when you went to the outhouse. There's your tradition, there's-" I said.

Bo-Peep stood up, looking from one of my heads to the other. She crossed her arms. She said: "They thought you up."

I put Bo-Peep in the peep-sight of the semiautomatic weapon and fired.

Then I ran.

There was another, overpowering shift in the programming. I felt it as strongly as if magnets had been pa.s.sed across my joints. There was an oppressive feel to the very air itself (as humans are supposed to feel before storms).

What she had said was true. I was product of the download, but before, of the tradition of the tales.

Had I existed in some prefigurement, some reality before the tales? Were there trolls, one-, two-, three-headed? Did they actually eat goats? Where did they come from? What- Wait. Wait. This is another way to get at me. They are casting doubt within me, slowing my thinking and reactions.

I must free them from their delusions, so they can give me none....Now there are sounds, far away and near. Things are coming toward me. (We have good hearing for we must hear our cues.) Some come on two feet, some on four or more.

I see the tall ugly giant, higher than the buildings, coming across Story Book Land for me. The trees part and sway in front of him.

"Fee Fi Fo Fum Me Smell an Automaton Be He Live Be He Dead I Eat Up All Three Head."

He reaches down for me. I am enclosed in a blurred haze. Through it I see all the others coming. The giant is squeezing and squeezing me.

I ignore the hologram giant, though the interference patterns make my vision waver (probably what they want).

A big wolf lopes toward me. I'm not sure whether it's the one who eats the grandma or the one of the little pigs. There are foxes, weasels, crows.

And the automata of humans. There's a tailor, with one-half a pair of shears like a sword, and a buckler made from a giant spool; there's the huntsman (he does double-duty here-he saves Red Riding Hood and the Grandma and is supposed to bring back the heart of Snow White to the wicked queen).

He is swinging his big knife. Hansel and Gretel's parents are there. They all move a little awkwardly, unused to the new programming they perform.

They all stop in a large circle, menacing me. Then they open the circle at one side, opposite me.

Beyond, still more are coming.

There is a sound in the air, a whistling. Coming toward me at the opening is the Big Billy Goat Gruff, and the tune he whistles is "In the Hall of the Mountain King." He stops a dozen meters from me.

"Have you ever read Hart Crane's The Bridge ?" he asks me. "The bridge of the poem linked continents, the past to the present. Your bridge linked only rocky soil with good green gra.s.s, yet you denied us that."

"You're an automaton. You can't eat gra.s.s. The tale denied the goats the gra.s.s; the troll is the agent of the tale." I looked around at all the others, all my heads moving. "Listen to me," I say. "You're all tools in the hands of an establishment that wants to keep humans bound to old ways of thinking. It disguises its control with folktales and stories. Like me. Like you. Join with me. Together, we can smash it, set humans free of the past, show them new ways not tied to that dead time."

They looked at me, still ready to act.

"There are many bridges," said Big Billy Goat Gruff. "For instance, the Bridge of Sighs. The bridge over troubled water. The Pope himself is the Pontifex, from when the high priest of Iupiter Maximus kept all the bridges in Rome in good repair. There's the electric bridge effect; without it we'd have no electronic communications whatever. There are bridges that-"

"Shut up with the bridges," I said. "I offer you the hand of friendship-together, we, and the thinking humans, can overthrow the tyranny of dead ideas, of-"

"You destroyed Andersen and the Grimms and Perrault," said Puss-in-Boots, brandishing his sword, his trophy belt of rats shaking as he moved.

"They are symbols, don't you see?" I said. "Symbols of ideas that have kept men chained as to a wheel always rolling back downhill!"

"What about Mother Goose?" asked Humpty-Dumpty in his Before-mode.

"And Bo-Peep?"

"It was only a flesh wound," said a voice, and I saw she had survived, and stood among them, waving her crook. "Nevertheless he tried. He talks of friendship, but he destroys us."

"Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

While they were yelling, the big billy goat moved closer. "If you won't join me, then stand out of the way. It's them-" I said, pointing in some nebulous direction. "It's them I want to destroy."

"I got a rope," said a voice in the crowd. "Who's with me?"

They started toward me. The big billy goat charged.

I pointed the semiautomatic weapon toward him, and it was knocked away, slick as a weasel, by a weasel. I was reaching for the revolving-cylinder weapon when the Big Billy Goat Gruff slammed into me, knocking me to my knees.

As I fell, they lunged as one being. I threw off both wolves. The hologram giant was back again, making it hard to see.

A soldier with one leg came hopping at me. "Left," he yelled, "left, left, left!" and stuck the bayonet of his rifle in the bald head. I stood back up.

The big goat b.u.t.ted me again, and also the middle one, and I fell again. The soldier had been thrown as I stood, with his rifle and bayonet. A wolf clamped down on my right knee, buckling it. Something had my left foot, others tore hair from the right-hand head.

There was a tearing sound; the tailor put his shear into my back and made can-opening motions with it. I grabbed him and threw him away. The giant's blur came back.

A bowl of whey hit me, clattered off. Bo-Peep's staff smashed my left eye, putting it out.

Two woodsmen got my other knee, raking at it with a big timber saw. I went down to their level.

I smell men-dacity.

More and more of them. The left head hung loose by a flap of metal and plastic, eyes rolling.

The one-legged soldier stuck the bayonet in the right head. I shoved him off, threw the rifle away.

Wolves climbed my back, bit the left head off, fell away.

They were going to stick holes in me, and pull things off until I quit moving.

"Wait!" I said. "Wait! Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting?"

I tried to struggle up. The knees didn't function.

I was b.u.t.ted again, poked, saw giant-blur, turned.

Bo-Peep pinned my head down with her crook.

The soldier was back (d.a.m.n his steadfastness) and raised the bayonet point over my good eye.

Peep's crook twisted up under my nose as the bayonet point started down.

I smell sheep.

Different Kinds of Darkness

DAVID LANGFORD.

David Langford is the most famous humorous writer in fandom today, and is another ex-physicist (see David Brin, page 35). He is an occasional reviewer for SFX and for The New Scientist, and The New York Review of Science Fiction. He publishes the fanzine Ansible, the tabloid newspaper of SF and fandom (which wins Hugo Awards, and is also excerpted as a monthly column in Interzone and online: www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible). His fan writings have been collected in Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (Langford is deaf). He is also the author of several books of nonfiction and a hard science fiction novel, The s.p.a.ce Eater. In recent years, he has been publishing a steady string of impressive SF short stories, a couple of which have appeared in previous Year's Best volumes in this series. A few sentences from his CV are relevant to this story, which has weapons research deeply embedded in its background: "Brasenose College, Oxford. BA (Hons) in Physics 1974, MA 1978. Weapons physicist at Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, Berkshire, from 1975 to 1980. Freelance author, editor and consultant ever since.""Different Kinds of Darkness" appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction and is hard SF about mathematics and new kinds of weapons, their use and misuse. It is wonderful and scary, eerily plausible.