Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Read online

  —Give me them, I say. Give me arms and legs and ears and eyes. Please, Sheila Downey. Make me human.

  —I can’t, she says. I can’t do that. But I do have an alternative.

  —What’s that?

  —We have a goat.

  —A goat.

  —Yes. A fine Boer buck. A very handsome fellow. I think he’ll hold up nicely.

  —Hold up to what?

  —The surgery.

  She waits as if I’m supposed to answer, but I’m not sure what she’s asking. So I wait, too.

  —Well? she asks.

  —Well what?

  —Should we give it a shot? Take your brain and put it in this goat? See what happens?

  She’s not joking.

  I ask her why.

  —Why what?

  —A goat. Why a goat?

  —Ah. Because we have one.

  Of course. Science is nothing if not expedient.

  —The other reason is because it’s feasible. That is, we think we have a chance. We think we can do it.

  This I should have known. But the fact is, I’ve never wanted to be a goat. Not ever. Not once. Not even part of once.

  —Maybe so, she says. But remember, you never wanted to be a human until you got a human brain.

  I recall her saying once that living within limits is what living is. I’m sure I should be grateful, but this so-called alternative is hard to stomach. It’s like offering an arm to a person who’s lost a leg. A pointless charity.

  Moreover, it seems risky. How, I wonder, can they even do it, fit a human brain into a goat?

  —With care, says Sheila Downey.

  Of that I have no doubt. But I’m thinking more along the lines of size and shape and dimensional disparity. I’m thinking, that is, of my soft and tender brain stuffed into the small and unforgiving skull of a goat. Forgive me, but I’m thinking there might be a paucity of space.

  She admits they’ll have to make adjustments.

  —What kind of adjustments?

  —We’ll pare you down a bit. Nothing major. Just a little cortical trim.

  —Snip, snip, eh, Sheila Downey?

  —If it’s any consolation, you won’t feel it. Most likely you won’t even notice.

  That’s what scares me most. That I’ll be different and not know it. Abridged, reduced, diminished.

  I’d rather die.

  —Posh, she says.

  —Help me, Sheila Downey. If you care for me at all, do this for me. Give me a human body.

  She sighs, denoting what, I wonder? Impatience? Disappointment? Regret? —It’s not possible. I’ve told you.

  —No?

  —No. Not even remotely possible.

  —Fine. Then kill me.

  An ultimatum! How strange to hear such words spring forth. How unwormly and—dare I say it—human of me.

  I can’t believe that she will actually do it, that she will sacrifice what she herself has made. I can’t believe it, and yet of course I can.

  She sighs again, as though it’s she who’s being sacrificed, she who’s being squeezed into a space not her own.

  —Oh, worm, she says. What have we done?

  I’ve had a dream. I wish that I could say that it was prescient, but it was not. I dreamed that I was a prince, a wormly prince, an elegant, deserving prince of mud and filth. And in this dream there was a maiden sent to test me, or I her. An ugly thing of golden hair and rosy cheeks, she spurned me once, she spurned me twice, she spurned me time and time again, until at last she placed me in her palm and took me home. She laid me on her bed. We slept entwined. And when I woke, I had become a human, and the maiden had become a princess, small enough to fit in my palm. I placed her there. I thought of all her hidden secrets, her mysteries. I’d like to get to know you, I said, enraptured. Inside and out. I’d like to cut you up (no harm intended). I really would.

  Did I say I’d never be a goat? Did I say I’d rather die? Perhaps I spoke a bit too hastily. My pride was wounded.

  In point of fact, I will be a goat. I’ll be anything Sheila Downey says. She has the fingers and the toes. She has the meddlesome nature and the might.

  Words and thoughts are wonderful, and reason is a fine conceit. But instinct rules the world. And Sheila Downey’s instinct rules mine. She will slice and dice exactly as she pleases, pick apart to her heart’s content and fuss with putting back together until the cows come home. She’s eager and she’s restless and she has no way to stop. And none to stop her. Certainly not me.

  So yes, I will be a goat. I’ll be a goat and happy for it. I’ll be a goat and proud.

  If this means a sliver or two less cortex, so be it. Less cortex means less idle thought. Fewer hopes that won’t materialize. Fewer dreams that have no chance of ever coming true.

  I doubt that I will love again, but then I doubt that I will care.

  I doubt that I will doubt again, but this, I think, will be a blessing. Doubt muddies the waters. Doubt derails. Sheila Downey doesn’t doubt. She sets her sights, and then she acts. She is the highest power, and I’m her vessel.

  Make that vassal.

  Command me, Sheila Downey. Cut me down to size. Pare me to your purpose.

  Yours is a ruthless enterprise. Ruthless, but not without merit.

  This world of yours, of hybrids and chimeras, humans and part-humans, promise to be an interesting world. Perhaps it will also be a better one. Perhaps more fun.

  What good in this? For humans, the good inherent in making things. The good in progress. The good in living without restraint.

  What good for worms? That’s simple. No good.

  All the better, then, that I won’t know.

  But will I? Will I know? Today’s the day, and soon I’ll be this capricornis personality, yet one more permutation in a line of permutations stretching back to the dawn of life. I will lose speech, that much seems certain. But thought, will that building also crumble? And words, the bricks that make the building, will they disintegrate, too?

  And if they do, what then will I be, what kind of entity? A lesser one I cannot help but think. But less of more is still more than I ever was before. It does no good to rail at fate or chew the cud of destiny, at least no good to me. If I lose u’s, so what? I’ll lose the words unhappy and ungrateful. I’ll lose unfinished and unrestrained. Uxorious I doubt will be an issue. Ditto usury. And ululation seems unlikely for a goat.

  And after that, if I lose more, who cares? I’ll fill my mind with what I can, with falling rain, crisp air and slanting light. I’ll climb tall hills and sing what I can sing. I’ll walk in grass.

  Living is a gift. As a tiny crawly, as a fat and hairy ram, and as a man.

  Call a pal.

  Bang a pan

  Say thanks.

  Adapt.

  FROM HERE YOU CAN SEE THE SUNQUISTS

  RICHARD WADHOLM

  ALL THAT SUMMER, THE Sunquists debated a trip to La Jetée.

  Mr. Sunquist said that summer was the time to go. The tourists would be off to Kleege’s Beach, where the hotels were new and no one worried about slipping back and forth in time as they walked down the beach. The Sunquists would have La Jetée to themselves.

  Mrs. Sunquist was plainly uneasy about La Jetée. She would not say why. The Sunquists were travelers, after all. Cosmopolitans. They savored a difficult aesthetic experience.

  She spoke only of their neighbors, the Dales, who had spent a month in Nepal. “They seemed so happy,” she said. “They had their own sherpas. They rode in a cart up to Annapurna, pulled by a team of yetis.”

  Mr. Sunquist wondered at her reluctance. Was she worried for the baby? He knew that she was nervous. Mrs. Sunquist had the sort of nerves that only a mid-life pregnancy can bring on. But women had babies in La Jetée all the time. Some women spent their entire pregnancies there. Mr. Sunquist proposed nothing more than a week—a farewell to the city of their youth. What could that hurt?

  He plied his wife with nostalgia. He remind
ed her of their first meeting, in the galleries along Gull Street. Mr. Sunquist had purchased mangoes at Sonny’s Seafood Chewder Bar and shown her how to eat them with salt and cayenne pepper.

  He smiled as Mrs. Sunquist twisted her lips to taste the sweetness of the fruit, the heat of the red pepper. This was one of their quiet and indelible memories together. Mr. Sunquist knew it.

  “We can go back and see it, just exactly as it was,” he told her.

  “Nothing is ever exactly as it was,” she said.

  “In La Jetée it is,” he said. This was not an article of faith on his part. In La Jetée, it was a simple fact.

  “What about us? Will we be the same?”

  “We will be what we’ve always been,” he promised her. “You’ll see.”

  It was in the nature of the world that their last journey to La Jetée should begin sweetly. Just as the hours of canyon roads had become unendurable, something shimmered in the air, a change of light or air pressure. The road took a turn and they found themselves at the bottom of the cliff road, looking out at the city of their youth.

  Mrs. Sunquist had been quiet these last two hours. Now, she could not help smiling. “It’s still the most beautiful places we ever lived,” she said.

  La Jetée glowed under the slanted light of evening, as vivid as a fever dream. Every little outbuilding and café a rich, ridiculous red. Every boat-repair shop a bitter aqua, a harsh viridian.

  Melancholy limned the moment. The Sunquists had agreed that this would be their last trip to La Jetée. The baby was coming. They both had experienced things in La Jetée that no one needed to grow up with, Mr. Sunquist had said so himself. That had been an easy decision in their kitchen. As he drank in his last visits of La Jetée, Mr. Sunquist would have taken it back.

  “Do you remember that time at Lola’s Bookstore,” Mr. Sunquist asked his wife, “when Pieczyznski, the chess master, challenged nineteen of his own iterations to speed tournaments?”

  “And he beat twelve of them?” She laughed at the image. “And played the other seven to draws. . . .”

  “—And then he killed himself, because twelve of the nineteen were older versions of himself, and he could see how his powers would decline!” The Sunquists shook their heads; this was a favorite memory of theirs. Something they had always planned to get back to see again.

  “Do you think we can find that?” she asked.

  Mr. Sunquist nodded down the road. The La Jetée of last summer had passed into the expanding time signatures of the Present City. He thought he recognized it, floating against the horizon, spectral and overbright. Or maybe he saw some other iteration, realized by other Sunquists on other summer jaunts.

  “He’s there,” Mr. Sunquist said. “I know that. We need a Feyaman diagram to orient ourselves, that’s all.” He knew a kiosk in the hotel district, they could get one there.

  Just off the frontage road, they passed the skeleton of a new luxury hotel, half-built and abandoned. It rose from behind its screen of construction siding like the rusted gantries of some failed cosmodrome. A faded sign promised completion in the spring. It did not mention the year.

  Mr. Sunquist winced a little as they drove by. So many friends had gone in with him on this investment. They should have known, he told himself. Vacation real estate can be so risky.

  But Mr. Sunquist had no time to indulge regret. His mind was on the row of orchid houses that had been dug under in the hotel’s wake. Where was that paella kitchen where he had taught Mrs. Sunquist how to eat mangoes? Or the hotel where they had hidden themselves away from the heat on those breathless August days when the sky was blue-black with unspent rain? A less romantic man would have surrendered these places to the iterations of memory. Mr. Sunquist surrendered nothing.

  Twenty-five years up the highway would be the Hotel Mozambique, just as it had been at the height of its renown. During the hot weekends of August, the Sunquists had allowed themselves little vacations from their basement apartment on Four O’Clock Street. The Hotel Mozambique had been their destination. Mr. Sunquist remembered the room they had asked for. Number 219 looked out on the black-bottom pool and the ocean across the road.

  Here also would be Sonny’s Bar, and the night he had proposed marriage to Melanie Everett. This was one of Mrs. Sunquist’s favorite moments.

  They would get their room at the Mozambique, he decided. From there, they would find the night of their proposal. But something about their Feynman was corrupted. Or maybe Mrs. Sunquist wasn’t reading it properly. Whatever, the Sunquists found themselves retracing a patch of highway twenty-five years up the road. Just as their navigating turned quarrelsome, Mrs. Sunquist sighted a blue-and-white beachcomber bicycle racked up alongside the Ciriquito Street pier.

  She pointed into the haze of decoherence that muffled the world beyond the road. In that instant, a moment coalesced before them.

  Mr. Sunquist found himself in a narrow parking strip looking down on a gentrified waterfront. Sailboats in slips, cafés with sun decks. Temporal observatories offered “Views of Parallel Worlds!” And, “The Chance to See the Life You Might Have Led!” All for two dollars.

  Sonny’s Bar nestled into the crook where the Ciriquito Street Pier met the beach. Like every other building on the beach, Sonny’s Bar showed its backside to the landlubbers’ world. A sign had been painted above the dumpsters, reminding all the old neighborhood that Sonny had been serving them in this same location. “Since most of you were underage.”

  “I don’t see my truck,” Mr. Sunquist said. “Are you sure this is the night?”

  “You called me from your office and said to meet you here,” Mrs. Sunquist said. “I do not make a habit of bicycling to bars. This is the night you proposed.”

  “Maybe we pulled off the highway a few minutes early,” Mr. Sunquist offered. He suggested they wait for him inside the bar, just to be sure.

  The interior was designed in one of those inverted situations from the turn of some century. The patrons clambered together on a large round cushion the color and texture of boxing gloves. Three bartenders hovered over a counter that encircled them.

  TV monitors were placed to catch the eye at every angle. In this age, Sonny’s fancied itself a sports bar. But Sonny himself? He liked novelas, Mexican soap operas. Two different ones were playing simultaneously as the Sunquists walked in. A regular was complaining that the World Cup was on, Brazil versus Russia. Sonny was laughing and nodding, paying the man no particular mind. His eyes were neither on the man, nor on the screens.

  Like everyone else in the room, Sonny watched the girl in the sun dress and sandals. She sat on the quiet side of the circular cushion, away from most of the television screens. She read Justine (the one by Lawrence Durrell, not the Marquis de Sade), and nudged a glass of chardonnay around by the stem. Maybe it was something about seeing across twenty-five years in the space of a single room, but Mr. Sunquist imagined that the girl was bathed in a singular light. Maybe it was simply that everyone else seemed to dim by comparison.

  The Sunquists found chairs in an alcove beneath one of the television screens. They had a view of the bar from here, and the television to distract anyone who looked their way.

  A waiter asked what they were having. Mrs. Sunquist asked for iced tea. (“Iced tea,” she snickered, “This kills me.”)

  Mr. Sunquist liked a scotch and soda, but not here. And As he looked across the bar, he recognized iterations of himself and his wife from other summers, all drinking scotch-and-sodas. He did not wish to be known by the sort of drink he ordered. He ordered a glass of merlot.

  Mrs. Sunquist put a hand on his arm. “You know, I was furious at you for leaving me alone in a bar,” she said. A phone call had kept Mr. Sunquist from leaving some warehouse on Gull Street wanting to be an artists’ left.

  Mrs. Sunquist did not seem furious; she was smiling at her younger reflection. The girl on the couch didn’t look furious. She looked like a stranded angel, patiently waiting on gravity’s de
mise.

  “Right about now, I was giving you five more minutes to walk through the door.”

  “You were very tolerant with me, Mrs. S.”

  But it wasn’t tolerance that had kept her in her seat for an hour.

  A little man entered the bar and approached her. He wore a suit and tie, but badly. They were not what he was used to. He was not yet thirty, yet his scalp already showed through the down at the top of his head. A last bit of baby fat lent his eyes a squint when he smiled.

  Mr. and Mrs. Sunquist bushed each other as the little man asked to sit. “He was very polite,” Mrs. Sunquist recalled.

  “He was scared of you,” Mr. Sunquist chuckled. “Look how bald he’s become in just a few years.” Mr. Sunquist remembered the little man from their old neighborhood. He didn’t remember the name. But the young man had existed at the periphery of Bobby Shelbourne’s crew, Mr. Sunquist remembered that.

  The Sunquists stifled giggles; Melanie let him buy her a glass of wine, though a glass stood half full at her elbow. She smiled at him as he fumbled at his introduction: Roger J. Swann, from a local desk of one of the international banks in Kleege’s Beach. He never mentioned the old bungalows they had all shared on the beach, or the parties at Sonny’s and at Bobby Shelbourne’s apartment. He seemed happy in his role as stranger. In the presence of Melanie Everett, he might have been happy with anything. The story as the Sunquists retold it to each other over the years had this desperate little man crawling into Melanie’s lap. In fact, Swann never looked down at her open décolletage. His eyes were glued to her face. Every smile she made brought one in return. Her jokes made him laugh, and cover his mouth with his palm.

  Melanie Everett asked him about himself. (Surely, she was being wicked!) Roger Swann was awed by her consideration. He grew flustered. He might have gone.

  Melanie had this thing she did, this nervous laugh, as if she were the one who needed reassurance. Swann happily reassured her.

  He told her about his work. Roger Swann was a programmer for the bank. “More like a game warden,” he confided. “The programs do their own programming anymore. I just make sure they remember who they’re working for.”