Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 23

We were shaking. I was shaking all over. I sat in the hot tub and watched my suit dissolve, like dry ice, leaving no trace.

"Hey, don't cry," said Bee. "I know we're all upset."

"It's okay to cry," said Vishnu. I was crying.

"What happened?" asked Yoshi. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, tell me."

"They're leaving," said Bee.

"They don't want us," I said. "They don't want us any more."

"What the f.u.c.k are you talking about?"

"We should all just be still for a while," said Bee. "Come and get in the water, Chang. Vishnu.

Claire."

Claire. My parents gave me that name. I hadn't thought about them in a long time. I started to cry again, really hard this time.

By noon we were warmed and fed-and dejected. "It's over," Bee said finally.

"They're leaving," Chang said. I knew it too. We all knew the same things. The feelings turned into ideas, gradually, like the graphics in a slow web connection. Sooner or later we all had the same pictures in our minds.

"They're disappointed in us," I said.

"I want them to stay," said Vishnu.

"Of course, we want to be with them," said Bee. "But we can't make them want to be with us."

"What in the h.e.l.l are you all talking about?" asked Yoshi.

"They're leaving," I said. I pointed outside. The yellow print was gone, and the pyramid looked black and forbidding. Closed.

"Explain, d.a.m.n it."

"The thing is, we knew them long ago," said Bee. As I listened, my emotions were spinning, like dust in sunlight, settling as he spoke onto the table of my mind, in which his voice, like a fingertip, traced his words: "This is not first contact, it is second contact."

And what he was saying, we all knew.

"They were our G.o.ds," said Chang.

"Not exactly," said Vishnu. "We were their companion species, their helper. We lived only to please them. We looked up to them."

"Their favorite," I said. "Their pet."

"And they loved us," said Chang. "And they love us still."

"But they wanted more," said Bee. "They set us free so we could develop without them. They put us down on Earth, where we could escape the worship of them that makes our knees go weak and our minds go blank. They wanted a true companion. They thought if they left us alone we would develop into a sentient race on our own."

"And we did," I said, surprised at how much I knew; at the depth of the ideas and images that had been implanted in me. "The light was a test, to see if we had developed enough to leave the Earth and come to them."

"They knew better than to appear among us," said Chang. "Can you imagine the chaos?"

"It might have been great," said Vishnu.

"It was a test," said Bee. "And we did it, we pa.s.sed. They were so pleased."

"But then disappointed," I said. "Because nothing had really changed."

"It might have been great," said Vishnu, again.

"We still can't see them; our minds still go blank in their presence. We fall to our knees and worship them, and that's all we can do, even now."

"We can't love them less," said Chang bitterly. "How can they expect us to love them less?"

"There's a message for you," said Yoshi.

"For me?" My mind wrenched itself back to the real world. I stood up, dripping. Water drips in long sheets on the Moon. I looked outside and saw that the pyramid was gone.

"How did you find me here?"

"Haven't we been through that before?" It was Willoughby, my next door neighbor, the retired FBIagent. "The light's gone out, what did you guys do?"

"Put Sam on," I said.

"He won't eat. How long before you get back?"

"A week, probably," I said. "We will have to write a report." I heard a noise behind me; it was Chang in tears.

"Is something wrong?"

"No, we're fine," I said. It was over and I was glad. "Put Sam on."

"Hold on."

Yoshi had joined them in the pool, standing there in her orange coveralls, wet to the knees. They were hugging and crying. I heard a sort of gruff whine.

"Sam, is that you?"

"Woof!"

"Sam, listen carefully. Can you hear me?"

I could imagine Sam looking around, sniffing, trying to locate the face and hand and smell that went with the voice.

"I'll be back soon," I said. "Did you miss me?"

"Woof."

"I'm coming home, and I won't leave you alone again, I promise."

A Slow Day at the Gallery

A. M. DELLAMONICA.

A(lyx) M. Dellamonica (http://www.sff.net/people/alyx) lives in Vancouver, B.C. Her stories have appeared in Crank!, Realms of Fantasy, and a number of other venues, most recently the Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts 8. She writes book and software reviews for SF Weekly and Amazon.com.

"A Slow Day at the Gallery" is from Asimov's. It is a perceptive and carefully controlled story of contemporary political relevance. It is about the clash of cultures, an allegory of imperialism and cultural appropriation, and about the possibility of real and meaningful communication between radically unlike cultures, between the human and the alien. But that's all in addition to an involving story in the tradition of James Tiptree, Jr., about an idealist about to do something terrible.

The museum escort Christopher had requested arrived just as he was winding up a self-guided tour of the Earth exhibit. Staring at Monet's Waterlily Pond, he was lost in a pa.s.sion more intense, he suspected, than any he had expended during either of his two brief marriages.

The painting had been reframed, but was otherwise unchanged since the last time he had seen it, fifty years before. As he gazed at its placid flowers and vibrant willow leaves, Christopher even began to imagine that the grooves time had left on him-age, injuries, bitterness-were just as superficial.

Same man, different frame. He could do this.

Leaning heavily on his cane-museum air exhausted him, even here-he tore his gaze away from the shimmering canvas and faced the Tsebsra museum guide. It looked like a badly executed balloon-animal: a tubular sac of tight, rubbery skin balanced on lumpy legs. Stringy eyestalks dangled from the bulb at its top, while the bottom of its body tapered into a long, rubbery tail decorated with blue stripes. The markings meant it was young, probably still ungendered. It wore a floor-length ap.r.o.n printed with its museum ident and, at the moment, it was standing almost upright. The pose could have been reminiscent of a praying mantis, if only the insect had been bleach-white, headless, and lacking its four upper limbs.

As the guide approached, a faint chime sounded in Christopher's left ear. "Museum staff member, late adolescent, name on ident equates to Vita," said his protocol software in a smooth, feminine voice.

He had named the program Miss Manners-Em for short. "Posture indicates polite, professional interestand includes appropriate respect for an adult of your years. Vita is curious about the camera you are carrying."

Christopher smiled at the guide.

"Your expression has been interpreted by Vita's proto and it appears receptive to conversation."

So. Converse. He opened his hand to fully reveal the camera, which had captured a shot of the Monet on its tiny screen. "Just didging some postcards for the grandkids."

The alien speech was a series of intestinal-sounding gurgles, almost like water boiling on a stove.

There was no variation that Christopher could hear, but the translation came through Em immediately. "It looks different from the ones I've seen before. Bigger."

"It's antique. Like me."

"Would you like me to take a shot of you with the painting?"

"Sure," he said. At that, one of its feet whipped up with alarming speed to s.n.a.t.c.h the device out of Christopher's hand; its tail slewed around to balance its body weight and its spine bent into an S-curve.

Thus contorted, it was able to drop an eye-stalk directly on the scanner. Heart pounding, Christopher grinned into the lens, resisting an urge to wipe the palms of his hands on his hips. It snapped the picture quickly and returned the camera.

"It would be polite to look away now," Em said, so Christopher turned back to Monet. The guide sidled up close and then shifted away. It had probably been advised to widen the s.p.a.ce between them to a more human-appropriate distance.

"Do you have many?"

"Many what?"

"Grandchildren, sir."

"Three boys, four girls."

"Ah. So they're all grown?"

"No. Humans are gendered at birth."

"Vita appears mortified," reported Em. "You should have corrected it more gently."

"My apologies," the alien said.

He shrugged-let its software interpret that.

He had first seen this painting eighty years earlier, when he was in his teens. He had seen digital prints of it when he was even younger, of course-Monet was inescapable. Even so, Christopher had never understood the big fuss until he'd taken a school trip to the National Gallery.

He had been fooling around with his friends, ignoring the tour, aggravating his teachers and the guards before finally ducking the group altogether. In search of a place to smoke, he had rounded a corner and found the Monet. Recognition had stopped him, nothing more-he paused, frowned, noticed that it was different from the digitals he had seen. Prints couldn't do justice to oil; couldn't communicate the singular way these paintings glowed. Monet's luminous sunlight on water had crept up on him like a pickpocket.

He barely noticed when it made away with his heart.

"This was painted around 1900 A.D. as you reckon time, at a population cl.u.s.ter in Europe called Giverny. Monet had a house there. He painted this garden many times...."

"France," he growled.

"Pardon?"

"Giverny is in France."

A pause. "Are you all right, sir? My proto believes I have upset you."

"Upset?" he managed. "Nah, just older'n h.e.l.l."

"It would be perfectly understandable if receiving instruction in your home culture from an offworlder...."

What? Made me want to gut you?

"I just need to sit down," he said, retreating to the cushioned bench in the middle of the room. This gallery was built to look like an authentic Earth museum-off-white plaster walls, smooth hardwood floors, ceiling lights angled to spotlight each work. Furniture, thank Christ, to ease the aching feet of contemplative patrons. The paintings were displayed too close to each other, though, crammedpractically into a collage that extended from floor to ceiling. There was a mishmash of periods and styles: Andy Warhol's soup cans cuddled next to an amateurish painting of a dog. This was, in turn, located beneath Sir Stanley Spencer's Saint Francis and the Birds and above an Ansel Adams photograph of an American mountain. Only the Monet had any s.p.a.ce to itself, and that was probably because there was extra security hidden in the wall on which it was mounted.

"Grandkids made me promise to snap 'em the d.a.m.ned painting," he puffed.

A bubble of fluid jittered beneath Vita's skin, indicating-according to Em-surprise. "You didn't come...it wasn't your wish to see it?"

Keep a lid on your emotions, old boy, Christopher lectured himself. "Don't go for the impressionist stuff, and I saw it in London once anyway. I'm more of a sculpture man. I came for the Tsebsra sculpture."