Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 36

"Well, it was no simulation. The movie was made before computers could turn any single image into some endless quilt. We were really seeing this vast deserted housing project, high-rise after high-rise with the windows boarded up. The abandoned ruins of some ultra-modern city. It existed, but until that movie n.o.body knew about it. It makes you think."

"It doesn't make me think."

There was no way, at this moment, they were going to have s.e.x. Anyhow, it probably wouldn't have been safe. The boat would capsize and they would drown.

A Sunless Sea

It was as though the whole beach received its light from a few candles. A dim, dim light evenly diffused, and a breeze wafting up from the water with an unrelenting coolness, as at some theater where the air-conditioning cannot be turned off. They huddled within the coc.o.o.n of a single beach towel, thighs pressed together, arms crisscrossed behind their backs in a chaste hug, trying to keep warm. The chill in the air was the first less than agreeable physical sensation he'd known in Xanadu, but it did not impart that zip of challenge that comes with October weather. Rather, it suggested his own mortal diminishment.

A plug had been pulled somewhere, and all forms of radiant energy were dwindling synchronously, light, warmth, intelligence, desire.

There were tears on Debora's cheek, and little sculptures of sea foam in the shingle about them. And very faint, the scent of nutmeg, the last lingering trace of some long-ago lotion or deodorant. The ocean gray as aluminum.

The Wailing

Here were the high-rises from the movie, but in twilight now, and without musical accompaniment, though no less portentous for that. He glided past empty benches and leaf-strewn flower beds like a cameraman on roller skates, until he entered one of the buildings, pa.s.sing immaterially through its plate-gla.s.s door. Then there was, in a slower pan than the helicopter's but rhyming to it, a smooth iambic progression past the doors along the first-floor corridor.

He came to a stop before the tenth door, which stood ajar. Within he could hear a stifled sobbing-a wailing, rather. He knew he was expected to go inside, to discover the source of this sorrow. But he could not summon the will to do so. Wasn't his own sorrow sufficient? Wasn't the loss of a world enough?

A man appeared at the end of the corridor in the brown uniform of United Parcel Service. His footsteps were inaudible as he approached.

"I have a delivery for Cook, Fran," the UPS man announced, holding out a white envelope.

At the same time he was offered, once again, the familiar, forlorn choice between Okay and Cancel.

He clicked on Cancel. There was a trembling, and the smallest flicker of darkness, but then the corridor rea.s.serted itself, and the wailing behind the door. The UPS man was gone, but the envelope remained in his hand. It bore the return address in Quebec of Disney-Mitsubishi.

There was no longer a Cancel to click on. He had to read the letter.

Dear [Name]:

The staff and management of Xanadu International regret to inform you that as of [date] all services in connection with your contract [Number] will be canceled due to new restrictions in the creation and maintenance of posthumous intelligence. We hope that we will be able to resolve all outstanding differences with the government of Quebec and restore the services contracted for by the heirs of your estate, but in the absence of other communications you must expect the imminentclosure of your account. It has been a pleasure to serve you. We hope you have enjoyed your time in Xanadu.

The law of the sovereign state of Quebec requires us to advise you that in terminating this contract we are not implying any alteration in the spiritual condition of [Name] or of his immortal soul. The services of Xanadu International are to be considered an esthetic product offered for entertainment purposes only.

When he had read it, the words of the letter slowly faded from the page, like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

The wailing behind the door had stopped, but he still stood in the empty corridor, scarce daring to breathe. Any moment, he thought, might be his last. In an eyeblink the world might cease.

But it didn't. If anything the world seemed solider than heretofore. People who have had a brush with death often report the same sensation.

He reversed his path along the corridor, wondering if anyone lived behind any of them, or if they were just a facade, a Potemkin corridor in a high-rise in the realm of faerie.

As though to answer his question Debora was waiting for him when he went outside. She was wearing a stylishly tailored suit in a kind of brown tweed, and her hair was swept up in a way that made her look like a French movie star of the 1940s.

As they kissed, the orchestra reintroduced their love theme. The music swelled. The world came to an end.

PART TWO.

Xanadu

But then, just the way that the movie will start all over again after The End, if you just stay in your seat, or even if you go out to the lobby for more popcorn, he found himself back at the beginning, with the same pop-up screen welcoming him to Xanadu and then a choice of Okay or Cancel. But there was also, this time, a further choice: a blue banner that pulsed at the upper edge of consciousness and asked him if he wanted expanded memory and quicker responses. He most definitely did, so with his mental mouse he accepted the terms being offered without bothering to scroll through them.

He checked off a series of Yeses and Continues, and so, without his knowing it, he had become, by the time he was off the greased slide, a citizen of the sovereign state of Quebec, an employee of Disney-Mitsubishi Temps E-Gal, and-cruelest of his new disadvantages-a girl.

A face glimmered before him in the blue gloaming. At first he thought it might be Debora, for it had the same tentative reality that she did, like a character at the beginning of some old French movie about railroads and murderers, who may be the star or only an extra on hand to show that this is a world with people in it. It was still too early in the movie to tell. Only as he turned sideways did he realize (the sound track made a samisen-like Tw.a.n.g! of recognition) that he had been looking in a mirror, and that the face that had been coalescing before him-the rouged cheeks, the plump lips, the fake lashes, the mournful gaze-had been his own! Or rather, now, her own.

As so many other women had realized at a similar point in their lives, it was already too late and nothing could be done to correct the mistake that Fate, and Disney-Mitsubishi, had made. Maybe he'd always been a woman. [Cook, Fran] was a s.e.xually ambiguous name. Perhaps his earlier a.s.sumption that he was male was simply a function of thinking in English, where one may be mistaken about his own ident.i.ty (but not about hers). I think; therefore I am a guy.

He searched through his expanded memory for some convincing evidence of his gender history.

Correction: her gender history. Her-story, as feminists would have it. Oh, dear-would he be one of them now, always thinking in italics, a grievance committee of one in perpetual session?

But look on the bright side (she told herself). There might be advantages in such a change of address.Multiple o.r.g.a.s.ms. Nicer clothes (though she couldn't remember ever wanting to dress like a woman when she was a man). Someone else paying for dinner, a.s.suming that the protocols of hospitality still worked the same way here in Xanadu as they had back in reality. This was supposed to be heaven and already she was feeling nostalgic for a life she couldn't remember, an ident.i.ty she had shed.

Then the loudspeaker above her head emitted a dull Dong!, and she woke up in the Women's Dormitory of State Pleasure-Dome 2. "All right, girls!" said the amplified voice of the matron. "Time to rise and shine. Le temps s'en va, mesdames, le temps s'en va."

State Pleasure-Dome 2

"La vie," philosophized Chantal, "est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulagons toutes les seize heures. C'est un palliative. La morte est un remede." She flicked the drooping ash from the end of her cigarette and made a move of chic despair. Fran could understand what she'd said quite as well as if she'd been speaking English: Life is a disease from which sleep offers relief every sixteen hours. Sleep is a palliative-death a remedy.

They were sitting before big empty cups of cafe au lait in the employee lounge, dressed in their black E-Gal minis, crisp white ap.r.o.ns, and fishnet hose. Fran felt a positive fever of chagrin to be seen in such a costume, but she felt nothing otherwise, really, about her entire female body, especially the b.r.e.a.s.t.s bulging out of their casings, b.r.e.a.s.t.s that quivered visibly at her least motion. It was like wearing a T-shirt with some dumb innuendo on it, or a blatant s.e.xual invitation. Did every girl have to go through the same torment of shame at p.u.b.erty? Was there any way to get over it except to get into it?

"Mon bonheur" declared Chantal earnestly, "est d'augmenter celle des autres." Her happiness lay in increasing that of others. A doubtful proposition in most circ.u.mstances, but not perhaps for Chantal, who, as an E-Gal was part geisha, part rock star, and part a working theorem in moral calculus, an embodiment of Francis Hutcheson's notion that that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. There were times-Thursdays, in the early evening-when Chantal's bedside/Website was frequented by as many as two thousand admirers, their o.r.g.a.s.ms all bissfully synchronized with the reels and ditties she performed on her dulcimer, sometimes a.s.sisted by Fran (an apprentice in the art) but usually all on her own. At such times (she'd confided to Fran) she felt as she imagined a great conductor must feel conducting some choral extravaganza, the Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony.

Except that the dulcimer gave the whole thing a tinge and tw.a.n.g of hillbilly, as of Tammy Wynette singing "I'm just a geisha from the bayou." Of course, the actual Tammy Wynette had died ages ago and could sing that song only in simulation, but still it was hard to imagine it engineered with any other voice-print: habit makes the things we love seem inevitable as arithmetic.

"Encore?" Chantal asked, lifting her empty cup, and then, when Fran had nodded, signaling to the waiter.

Coffee, cigarettes, a song on the jukebox. Simple pleasures, but doubled and quadrupled and raised to some astronomical power, the stuff that industries and gross national products are made of. Fran imagined a long reverse zoom away from their table at the cafe, away from the swarming hive of the city, to where each soul and automobile was a mere pixel on the vast monitor of eternity.

The coffees came, and Chantal began to sing, "Le banheur de la femme n'est pas dans la liberte, mais dans l'acceptation d'un devoir."

A woman's happiness lies not in liberty, but in the acceptance of a duty.

And what was that duty? Fran wondered. What could it be but love?

In a Vision Once I Saw

There were no mirrors in Xanadu, and yet every vista seemed to be framed as by those tinted looking gla.s.ses of the eighteenth century that turned everything into a Claude Lorrain. Look too long or too closely into someone else's face, and it became your own. Chantal would tilt her head back, a flowerbending to the breeze, and she would morph into Fran's friend of his earlier afterlife, Debora. Debora, whose hand had caressed his vanished s.e.x, whose wit had entertained him with Cartesian doubts.

They were the captives (it was explained, when Fran summoned Help) of pirates, and must yield to the desires of their captors in all things. That they were in the thrall of copyright pirates, not authentic old-fashioned buccaneers, was an epistomological quibble. Subjectively their captors could exercise the same cruel authority as any Captain Kidd or Hannibal Lecter. Toes and nipples don't know the difference between a knife and an algorithm. Pirates of whatever sort are in charge of pain and its delivery, and that reduces all history, all consciousness, to a simple system of pluses and minuses, do's and don'ts. Suck my d.i.c.k or walk the plank. That (the terrible simplicity) was the downside of living in a pleasure-dome.

"Though, if you think about it," said Debora, with her hand resting atop the strings of her dulcimer, as though it might otherwise interrupt what she had to say, "every polity is ultimately based upon some calculus of pleasure, of apportioning rapture and meting out pain. The jukebox and the slot machine, what are they but emblems of the Pavlovian bargain we all must make with that great dealer high in the sky?"

She lifted a little silver hammer and bonked her dulcimer a triple bonk of do-sol-do.

"The uncanny thing is how easily we can be programmed to regard mere symbols-" Another do-sol-do. "-as rewards. A bell is rung somewhere, and something within us resonates. And music becomes one of the necessities of life. Even such a life as this, an ersatz afterlife."

"Is there some way to escape?" Fran asked.

Debora gave an almost imperceptible shrug, which her dulcimer responded to as though she were a breeze and it a wind chime hanging from the kitchen ceiling. "There are rumors of escapees-E-Men, as they're called. But no one I've ever known has escaped, or at least they've never spoken of it. Perhaps they do, and get caught, and then the memory of having done so is blotted out. Our memories are not exactly ours to command, are they?"

The dulcimer hyperventilated.

Debora silenced it with a glance and continued: "Some days I'll flash on some long-ago golden oldie, and a whole bygone existence will come flooding back. A whole one-pound box of madeleines, and I will be absolutely convinced by it that I did have a life once upon a time, where there were coffee breaks with doughnuts bought at actual bakeries and rain that made the pavements speckled and a whole immense sensorium, always in flux, which I can remember now only in involuntary blips of recall. And maybe it really was like that once, how can we know, but whether we could get back to it, that I somehow can't believe."

"I've tried to think what it would be like to be back there, where we got started." Fran gazed into the misty distance, as though her earlier life might be seen there, as in an old home video. "But it's like trying to imagine what it would be like in the thirteenth century, when people all believed in miracles and stuff.

It's beyond me."

"Don't you believe in miracles, then?" The dulcimer tw.a.n.ged a tw.a.n.g of simple faith. "I do. I just don't suppose they're for us. Miracles are for people who pay full price. For us there's just Basic Tier programming-eternal time and infinite s.p.a.ce."

"And those may be no more than special effects."

Debora nodded. "But even so..."

"Even so?" Fran prompted.

"Even so," said Debora, with the saddest of smiles, a virtual flag of surrender, "if I were you, I would try to escape."

Those Caves of Ice!

Ebay was a lonely place, as holy and enchanted as some underwater cathedral in the poem of a French symbolist, or a German forest late at night. If you have worked at night as a security guard for the Mall of America, or if you've seen Simone Simon in Cat People as she walks beside the pool (only her footsteps audible, her footsteps and the water's plash), only then can you imagine its darkling beauty, thechange that comes over the objects of our desire when they are flensed of their purveyors and consumers and stand in mute array, aisle after aisle. Then you might sweep the beam of your flashlight across the waters of the recirculating fountain as they perpetually spill over the granite brim. No silence is so large as that where Muzak played, but plays no more.

Imagine such a place, and then imagine discovering an exit that announces itself in the darkness by a dim red light and opening the door to discover a Piranesian vista of a further mall, no less immense, its tiers linked by purring escalators, the leaves of its potted trees shimmering several levels beneath where you are, and twinkling in the immensity, the signs of the stores-every franchise an entrepreneur might lease. Armani and Osh-Kosh, Hallmark, Kodak, Disney-Mitsubishi, American Motors, Schwab. A landscape all of names, and yet if you click on any name, you may enter its portal to discover its own little infinity of choices. Shirts of all sizes, colors, patterns, prices; shirts that were sold, yesterday, to someone in Iowa; other shirts that may be sold tomorrow or may never find a taker. Every atom and molecule in the financial continuum of purchases that might be made has here been numbered and cataloged. Here, surely, if anywhere, one might become if not invisible then scarcely noticed, as in some great metropolis swarming with illegal aliens, among whom a single further citizen can matter not a jot.

Fran became a mote in that vastness, a pip, an alga, unaware of his own frenetic motion as the flow of data took him from one possible purchase to the next. Here was a CD of Hugo Wolf lieder sung by Elly Ameling. Here a pair of Lucchese cowboy boots only slightly worn with western heels. Here six interesting j.a.panese dinner plates and a hand-embroidered black kimono. This charming pig creamer has an adorable French hat and is only slightly chipped. These Viking sweatshirts still have their tags from Wal-Mart, $29.95. Sabatier knives, set of four. A 1948 first edition of The Secret of the Old House.

Hawaiian Barbie with hula accessories. "Elly Ameling Sings Schumann!" a.s.sorted rustic napkins from Amish country.

There is nothing that is not a thought away, nothing that cannot be summoned by a wink and a nod to any of a dozen search engines. But there is a price to pay for such accessibility. The price is sleep, and in that sleep we buy again those commodities we bought or failed to buy before. No price is too steep, and no desire too low. Cream will flow through the slightly chipped lips of the charming pig creamer in the adorable hat, and our feet will slip into the boots we had no use for earlier. And when we return from our night journeys, like refugees returning to the sh.e.l.ls of their burned homes, we find we are where we were, back at Square One. The matron was bellowing over the PA, "Le temps s'en va, mesdames! Le temps s'en va!" and Fran wanted to die.

Grain Beneath the Thresher's Flail

She was growing old in the service of the Khan, but there was no advantage to be reaped from long service, thanks to the contract she'd signed back when. She had become as adept with the hammers of the dulcimer as ever Chantal had been (Chantal was gone now, no one knew whither), but in truth the dulcimer is not an instrument that requires great skill-and its rewards are proportional. She felt as though she'd devoted her life-her afterlife-to the game of Parcheesi, shaking the dice and moving her tokens around the board forever. Surely this was not what the prospectus promised those who signed on.

She knew, in theory (which she'd heard, in various forms, from other denizens), that the great desideratum here, the magnet that drew all its custom, was beauty, the rapture of beauty that poets find in writing poetry or composers in their music. It might not be the Beatific Vision that saints feel face-to-face with G.o.d, but it was, in theory, the next best thing, a bliss beyond compare. And perhaps it was all one could hope for. How could she be sure that this bliss or that, as it shivered through her, like a wind through Daphne's leaves, wasn't of the same intensity that had zapped the major romantic poets in their day?

In any case, there was no escaping it. She'd tried to find an exit that didn't, each day, become the entrance by which she returned to her contracted afterlife and her service as a damsel with a dulcimer.

Tw.a.n.g! Tw.a.n.g! O ciel! O belle nuit! Not that she had any notion of some higher destiny for herself, orsweeter pleasures-except the one that all the poets agreed on: Lethe, darkness, death, and by death to say we end the humdrum daily continuation of all our yesterdays into all our tomorrows.

The thought of it filled her with a holy dread, and she took up the silver hammers of her dulcimer and began, once again, to play such music as never mortal knew before.

The Go-Between

LISA GOLDSTEIN.

Lisa Goldstein [www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein] is a distinguished fantasy writer who occasionally writes SF. Her first fantasy novel, The Red Magician (1982) won the American Book Award for Best Paperback. Tourists (1989), Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (1993), and Dark Cities Underground (1999) are among her other distinguished novels, and her stories are collected in Daily Voices (1989) and Travellers in Magic (1994). In an era when most writers fill their novels with lavish description and dramatize every minor scene, Goldstein is notable for her precise and concise novels, lapidary prose, psychological insight, and condensation-the hallmark of Goldstein's writing is no wasted words.

"The Go-Between," published in Asimov's, is a traditional SF problem-solving story, set in an alien world, with dogs. It has some of the gentle pa.s.sion and social insight of the cla.s.sic City stories of Clifford D. Simak, and a similar love and respect for man's best, first friend.