Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 11

"Hold your fire!" I yelled.

KA-BLAM!.

The theater rocked with the blast of an anti-tank sh.e.l.l. Enorme spun one last time-then shattered, and fell to the concrete floor in pieces.

"No!" I yelled, stumbling, falling to my knees.

It was all over.

Prang and Ward edged closer and closer to the shapeless pile of pseudo stone. Boudin helped me up, and I joined them.

"What the h.e.l.l..." Ward muttered. The pieces were starting to smoke, like dry ice. The Enorme wasfading: all that is solid melts into air. We watched in astonished silence until the pieces all were gone, as if he had never been.

"What the h.e.l.l was that, a ghost?" asked Ward, looking at me almost with respect.

I shook my head and retreated to the open door. I couldn't answer him. I couldn't bear to look at him.

"That was a robot!" said Prang, angrily extracting the last Camel from her pack. "From outer s.p.a.ce.

And priceless, you fool!"

"Sent here half a million years ago to accelerate our evolution," Boudin explained. "And to signal its Makers when we were finally capable of destroying it."

"Well, it's sure as h.e.l.l destroyed," said Ward. "So I guess we sure as h.e.l.l pa.s.sed the test."

"No. " It was almost midnight. I stepped outside, past the puzzled cops, and looked up at the million cold stars, scattered like broken gla.s.s across the dark floor of the universe.

I wished I had a cigarette. I wondered what the Makers were and what they would do with us when they came.

"No," I said again, to no one in particular, "I think we flunked."

The Measure of All Things

RICHARD CHWEDYK.

Richard Chwedyk lives in Chicago with his wife, Pamela Miller, and often reads in the Chicago area, most recently at the Twilight Tales reading series at the Red Lion Pub (where an early draft of "The Measure of All Things" was first presented). His poetry has been recently published in Tales of the Unantic.i.p.ated and Tales from the Red Lion (also from Twilight Tales/11th Hour), but has also appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Oyez Review, Paul Hoover's Legendary Oink! (now called New American Writing) and The Best of Hair Trigger anthology, among even older and more obscure publications. He teaches creative writing cla.s.ses for Oakton Community College, but his major paycheck comes from doing layout/copyediting for a chain of newspapers in the Chicago suburbs. He has had fiction published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and s.p.a.ce and Time. He has moderated writing workshops at a number of recent worldcons, and will do so again at ConJose in 2002.

"The Measure of All Things" was published in F & SF, and is one of two stories in this volume that might be considered in the tradition of H. G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (see James Morrow's story, in this collection); it might even be perhaps a bit d.i.c.kensian in its sentimentality.

The home for biopet saurs has metaphorical reverberations that ambiguously evoke abandoned pets, orphans, and abused children.

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

-William Blake

Axel was the first to see the car coming down the driveway from the main road. He stood on the table next to the picture window, where he always stands after breakfast, looking out at the woods, the sun (if it's out), the clouds (if it isn't), shifting his weight from one clumpy foot to the other, tail raised to balance himself against the slick, smooth surface. His mouth, as always, was wide open, displaying rows of benign teeth-benign compared to the predator he was modeled upon; and his tiny black eyes were alight with amazement, as always, as if he was witness to a secret miracle every moment.

"Huuuuuu-man!" he shouted. "Huuuu-man coming up the road!"

I had just finished cleaning up the kitchen, taking stock of the food supplies: plenty of pellets (some saurs still preferred them); another day's worth of collards and meat; and enough of the ever-essential oranges to last out the week. I needed more coffee, but since it was "human stuff' it took a lesser priority.A razor, too, would have been nice, and a new hairbrush. A pair of jeans wouldn't have hurt either, or at least another belt (I was losing a little weight), but I was getting off the subject of food. I drank my cold, leftover breakfast coffee with a touch of melancholy as I walked into the living room.

"Huuuuu-man!"

The room was bright. The windows were open. Rain was predicted for that night but just then you couldn't ask for more beautiful spring weather. Few saurs paid attention to Axel's alarm, since Axel, in his constant ebullience, often announced the arrival of alien battle cruisers, or warned us of approaching death rays, tidal waves (we are four hundred kilometers from the ocean), and Confederate Army divisions charging our house from out of the woods.

"Are you goofing around again, Axel?" Agnes said, her spiked tail and back plates upright in a guarded stance. "Because if you are-"

"Real," Axel insisted. "Real real real real. Big blue car coming down the driveway!" He pointed out the window with his tiny forepaw.

I walked over and confirmed the sighting: a dark blue Mercedes, the sort of car that's always been popular with young men who want to show the world that they've arrived. I wondered briefly if I'd ever wanted that: the sense of validation those wheels provided. I couldn't remember, but when I was a boy, like every other kid, I wanted everything.

"Is it the doctor?" Agnes asked.

"She's not due until this afternoon."

"It's not that horrible researcher, is it? The one who wants a tissue sample from Hetman."

"Researchers aren't Mercedes-type people," I a.s.sured her.

"I'll give him some tissue to sample!" She swung her tail back to demonstrate. Her battle-stance is less impressive when you consider that Agnes is forty centimeters long, her head is about the size of an apricot, and her tail spikes really wouldn't stand up in a fight.

"No," I said as I looked down at Axel and Axel looked up at me. "I think we have a visitor."

"Visitor!" Axel repeated in a whisper, as if he'd heard the word for the first time.

He hadn't, of course. Visitors aren't frequent here, but they're certainly not unheard of. Delivery drivers come all the time. Dr. Margaret Pagliotti visits once a week. Folks from the Atherton Foundation stop by for regular inspections. But there are other visitors, people who come by just to see the saurs.

Most people these days hardly remember them. The smallest saur is no more than ten centimeters long. The largest one is a meter and a half tall. They're not "real" dinosaurs-that's another business altogether-but they were modeled after them, sometimes to painstaking detail, but more often to the cuter, cartoonish caricatures that children of many generations before wore on their pajamas or had printed on their lunchboxes and notebooks. They were an outgrowth of that vision of dinosaurs as cuddly buddies, friends to all children everywhere-moving, talking versions of the plush toys they've always played with.

That's what they were designed to be. That's why they were brought into the world. Forget for the moment that the manufacturers had plans to make enormous sums of money on them, at which they succeeded (several million were sold); forget also that the designers were trying to put forward their own subtle agenda: that bioengineering and its nanotech components could be safe and fun-cuddly, like a s...o...b..x-sized triceratops-an agenda at which they were far less successful. Forget all that, at least for the moment.

To the saurs themselves, they had come into being to be friends, buddies, giving out love and receiving affection from appreciative girls and boys. That's what they were designed to do-that, and nothing else.

The designers fidgeted about for a name-they didn't like "life-toy," since it contained the troublesome "life" word. They didn't want the saurs confused with "animals," since that would place them under hundreds of government regulations. "Bio-toy" pa.s.sed with all the marketing departments, so someone went out and wrote a definition of it: a toy modeled from bio-engineered materials, behaving without behavior, lifelike without being "alive."

The blue Mercedes parked in the gravel at the end of the driveway. I looked around our old Victorian-style house and its saurian occupants: the group gathered around the video screen watching a Buster Keaton film; little ones, mouse-and squirrel-sized guys riding across the living room on the battery-powered carts we call skates; in the dining room, another group of little ones were sitting before the big Reggiesystem computer, having a geography lesson (I could tell it was geography because I could hear them repeating the word "Togo" in unison); in another corner sat the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, blowing into their plastic horns; further back, in the library, I could see Diogenes and Hubert (two of the biggest guys, very tyrannosaurian) shelving books (yes, we still have books here, and even the saurs who can't read are fascinated by the ill.u.s.trations, the type styles, even the little colophons); also in there was Hetman's ba.s.sinet-sized hospital bed, rolled over to the sunniest window.

Along with the usual furniture, scattered about were the ha.s.socks and clever stair-step things the saurs use to get up on the furniture; the old wheelchair lift-adapted to meet the needs of the saurs-was in operation, transporting the little and the lame back and forth between first and second floors.

It's a world I've grown accustomed to, but one that many visitors find fairly startling, and some even find disturbing.

"Well," I said to everyone within earshot, "ready for a visitor?"

Most were indifferent to the prospect. Some jumped onto skates and rode off to other parts. Others climbed up on the chairs and couches, not wanting to be underfoot with a stranger in the house.

Charlie, a light brown badger-sized triceratops, hobbled away from the group around the video, accompanied by his beloved companion, Rosie, and headed for the lift. The designers, for all their mastery of eyes, ears, brains, and larynxes, had trouble with limbs, and it was hard to find a saur who didn't walk with at least a slight defect, though many limped for other reasons.

"If it's that Joe," Charlie called back to me, "tell him I'm not here. Tell him I'm dead."

Charlie has been saying this for years whenever visitors come by, even though in all that time not one of them has been named Joe.

"Humans," Agnes grumbled. "Idiots. I wish they'd all just leave us alone."

I noticed her mate, Sluggo, wasn't with her and I asked where he was.

"Feeding squirrels. Feeding sparrows. He's always feeding someone, like some G.o.dd.a.m.ned Saint Francis."

"He never feeds us," said Pierrot, a pint-sized theropod standing by the couch closest to the window, with his friend Jean-Claude, a dark green tyrannosur three times his height.

"Carnosaurs!" Agnes spat out the word with a resonance that belied her size. "Hopeless, brainless embarra.s.sments!"

"I'm glad to see the lovely day has not affected Agnes's mood," said Doc, a light brown theropod just under a meter tall, with heavy-lidded eyes and a serene smile that makes you think he must have gotten into the liquor cabinet.

"That is her nature," I said to Doc as I brushed my hair back.

He sat on a plastic box over which he could drape his tail and rest his weary legs. Before him played two of the tiniest saurs in the house, named Slim and Slam. The two held a pen between them as if it were an enormous treetrunk and drew lines and curves on a sheet of paper spread before them.

"And nature," he replied, "we know, is a thing we shouldn't adjust without caution."

"I hate when you talk about me as if I can't hear!" Agnes thumped her tail against the floor.

"I meant to ask before," Doc said as he watched Slim and Slam at work/play, "did you sleep well?"

"Yes," I lied. I knew I'd had a nightmare but I couldn't remember any of the details. The best I could recall was a vague sense of hiding in a cramped, dark place. Perhaps I'd cried out in my sleep.

"You did?" The skin behind Doc's thick eyelids furrowed as he looked up at me.

"Of course. Why do you ask?"

"No reason." The deep voice took on a placating smoothness. "You look tired."

We heard the soft clip of a very expensive car door shutting outside.

"I'd better go out and greet our visitor," I said.

"Is the security on?" Agnes asked sharply. "Of course. You know it's always on."

"Hmmph!" She positioned herself under the lamp table next to the couch. "Remember, I'm watching!"

It was hardly a matter of remembering.

The visitor stood outside, reluctant, it seemed, to step onto the porch. He looked in his early thirties-a few years younger than myself, I figured-with an athletic build, light gray eyes, and strong facial features. His expression had that severity most professional people affect these days, with downward-bent forehead lines ending in a little "V" between his eyebrows. He wore a dark blue sports jacket, light gray slacks, and a rose-colored shirt with the top b.u.t.ton open.

It was all very acquired and practiced, as if he were living up to a model. But everyone out there in the real world acted that way. So would I, if I were out there.

"Look at that!" Axel shouted. "He's bald!"

He jumped up and down as I went to the door. "Take me with! Please! Please!"

"You'll have to behave yourself."

"Yes! Yes! Won't say a word. Just want to watch when he pulls out his mini-machine gun and starts shooting-du-du-du-du-du-du-right through the walls!"

Agnes groaned.

I picked Axel up and cradled him in my right arm. As I looked down at him, I couldn't help noticing the long scar down his back. It's been many years since that scar was made, but you could tell it had been a deep, nasty cut that left it.

Out on the porch, I said "Good morning," to the visitor. I must have looked a mess, but you can never dress for visitors because you never know when they're coming.

"Morning," he said with a deep, rehea.r.s.ed voice. "You must be Groverton."

"That's me." I shifted Axel over to my left side and held out my hand. "Tom Groverton. And this is Axel."

Axel raised a forepaw and said "Hiya!" but the visitor ignored him. I shook hands with the man but he wouldn't tell me his name.

"You're looking for someone, aren't you? Most visitors are."

He spoke hesitantly, as if he wished he'd brought an attorney with him. "I don't really know if he's-"

"HIYA!" Axel tried again.

"-here. I-we, my brother and I-had him when we were kids. There's not much chance of it, but I thought-"

"HIYA!".

The visitor looked at Axel at last and slightly bowed his head. "-I thought he might be up here."

I gestured for him to come up on the porch and sit down on the old bench. "Maybe you could give me a little description of him."

"He was-is, I guess-a stegosaur. Maybe thirty-five centimeters long. Orange on the top, mostly, and a kind of purple color on the bottom. Some patches of yellow between the orange and the purple.