The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year Part 32

"You're a true maestro," he said, hefting the phone. Some of our fellow Jammie Dodgers had drifted in and out through my works that day, and now they filed in behind Cecil and giggled and poked each other like naughty children. Cecil rubbed the phone against a thumb drive and transferred his cut, then walked to the window, slid away the board, aligned the projector's eye with the crack and then used his laser-pointer to find the mirror he'd set into the wall of the tall council high-rise opposite the pub. He was trying to get the pointer to bounce off the mirror and then show up on the large, blank wall of the adjacent high-rise.

Once he had the shot lined up, he fitted a little monocle to the projector's eye and tapped at the phone's screen. A moment later, the phone's speaker started to play the familiar sting music he used for his Great Work, and I rushed to the next window to see the result. At first, it was just a big, fuzzy blur on the blank wall, a watery light-show. My heart sank-it wasn't going to work after all.

But as Cecil turned the monocle's focus dial, the image sharpened, and sharpened again, and then it was as if I was watching a film at a big, open air cinema-like one of those American drive-in theatres. There was no sound, but that was all right: there was Keith Kennenson, in his role as an angry priest struggling with alcoholism in inner-city Boston in Whiskey and the Drum Whiskey and the Drum, tearing off his dog-collar as he lost his faith, storming out the door, and now he was walking down a street that wasn't Boston at all-it was the moon base from Skyjacked! Skyjacked!, and the cut was so smooth that you'd swear they were one movie, and Kennenson bounded down the ramp toward the main door where the bomber had hidden his charge, Kennenson's face a grim mask- He clicked the phone off. The Jammie Dodgers lost our minds. "It worked, it worked!" We danced ring-a-rosie like toddlers and collapsed in each other's arms.

"Right, all good," he said. "Tomorrow night we move."

It's amazing what a lot of respect high-viz vest and a couple of traffic pylons will get you, even in Leicester Square. We started work at 8AM, when the only people in the square were a long queue of tourists waiting for cheap theatre tickets and a few straights clicking over the pavement in their work shoes as they rushed for offices in Soho. Between me and Sal and Amir, we got nine little "security mirrors" placed on the walls of strategic buildings in less than an hour. At one point, a Community Support Officer-one of those fake coppers who sign up for the sheer thrill of the authority-even directed traffic around our ladder. I was glad of all the little IR LEDs I'd strung un.o.btrusively around my helmet then, for they surely blew out the cameras in his hat and epaulettes.

It was Cecil that hired the hotel room overlooking the square, using a prepaid debit card from a newsagent's. They asked for his national ID card and he claimed in a funny mid-Atlantic drawl that he'd emigrated to the States ten years before and never been issued one, and said that his pa.s.sport was at the Russian emba.s.sy getting a business-traveller's visa glued into it. They accepted a California "driver's license" that I made up at the squat, decorating it with a wide variety of impressive security holograms that I printed from a little specialist ID printer I found at an industrial surplus store. I was worried I'd overdone it-one of the holos was almost certainly a Masonic symbol-but the desk clerk just put it down on the photocopier and took a copy. The holograms did a great job of blocking Cecil's face on the copy.

From then, it was just a waiting game. Waiting for the sun to set. Waiting for the crowds to fill the square. Waiting for the first film showings to let in, the huge queues snaking around the square as each attendee had his phone and electronics taken off and put into storage during the movie. Then the second screening. Finally, at 11:30, the square was well-roaring: everyone who'd been at the second show, everyone queued up for the third show, everyone spilling out of the pubs-a heaving ma.s.s of humanity.

You can fit eight Jammie Dodgers into a single-occupancy Leicester Square hotel room. Provided that they don't all try to breathe in at once. We breathe in s.h.i.+fts.

Cecil knelt at the window, phone on the sill, careful marks he'd made with a sharp pencil and his laser-pointer showing the precise angles to each mirror. He looked around at us all, his eyes s.h.i.+ning. "This is it," he said. "My Leicester Square premier."

The monocle is already glued to the phone's back over the projector's eye. The phone's been fitted to a little movable tripod. And now, with a trembling fingertip, Cecil prods the screen. Then, quickly, nimbly, spinning the focus k.n.o.b on the monocle. Then the hiss of air sucked over teeth and we all rush to the window to see, peering around the drapes. He was much better on the focus this time, faster despite his trembling hand. There, on the marquee of the Odeon, Keith Kennenson as an eight-year-old, begging his mother to let him have a puppy, then a montage of shots of Kennenson with his different dogs, a mix of reality TV, feature films, dramas, comedies, the story of a life with dogs, the same character actors moving in and out of shot.

Below, the crowd boiled over. People were pointing, laughing, screeching, aiming their phones at the Odeon, and coppers were rus.h.i.+ng about, shouting into their lapels, and-He moved the phone, swiveling it to line up with the next mark and BAM, there was Kennenson again, a series of love scenes this time, writ large on the huge marquee of the Virgin Megatheatre, and the crowd looked this way and that, trying to see where the magic pictures made of light and ingenuity had went and they found it, and the police rushed around again and BAM- It was now screening on the Empire, and now it was an extended battle, Kennenson fighting a shark, a ninja, terrorists, Romans, n.a.z.is and BAM, it was in the gardens in the middle of the square. The crowd was going wild, moving like a great wave from side to side, phones held high, getting in the cops' way.

"Time to go," I said, watching more cops trying to push their way into the square, then more. "Time to go go, Cec," I said again, tugging his arm. The other Dodgers were already stealing out the door, padding their way to the fire-stairs and the lifts, led by tall Sal with a pad of post-it notes that she carefully stuck over the eye of each CCTV as she pa.s.sed it, her infrared LEDs having temporarily blinded it already.

Cecil let me lead him away. He was trembling all over, and there were tears rolling down his cheeks, though he didn't seem aware of them. We peeled off our gloves and stuck them in our pockets, pulled off our hairnets, and removed the disposable booties from our shoes. We made our way down the lift in silence, Cecil visibly pulling himself together, so that he was able to calmly nod at the night clerk, tossing a tw.a.n.gy, "Guh-night!" over his shoulder as we stepped out into bedlam.

And that is how I will always picture Cecil B DeVil, standing there on the edges of Leicester Square, face turned up to the flas.h.i.+ng lights, cheeks wet with new tears, as the disposable phone abandoned in the hotel window played out another 18 minutes and 12 seconds of the Great Work before the law found it and shut it down, provoking howls from the crowd.

But the howls didn't turn ugly, didn't turn into a riot. Instead, what we got was-an ovation.

Somewhere in the crowd, someone began to clap. And then someone else clapped, and then hundreds were clapping, and whistling and catcalling, and Cecil and I looked at each other and he was crying so hard the snot was running down his face. I thought of my family on the estate and d.a.m.ned if I didn't start to cry, too.

For a pair of hardened gangsters, we were a b.l.o.o.d.y soppy pair.

THE MAIDEN FLIGHT OF MCCAULEY'S BELLEROPHON BELLEROPHON ELIZABETH HAND.

Elizabeth Hand published her first story in 1988 and her first novel, Winterlong Winterlong, in 1990. The author of nine novels and three collections of short fiction, Hand has established herself as one of the finest and most respected writers of outsider fantasy and science fiction working today. Her work has won the Nebula, World Fantasy, James Tiptree, Jr., International Horror Guild, and Mythopoeic awards. Her most recent books are novel Generation Loss Generation Loss and short novel and short novel Illyria Illyria. She is currently working on a new novel, Wonderwall Wonderwall.

Being a.s.signed to The Head for eight hours was the worst security s.h.i.+ft you could pull at the museum. Even now, thirty years later, Robbie had dreams in which he wandered from the Early Flight gallery to Balloons & Airs.h.i.+ps to Cosmic Soup, where he once again found himself alone in the dark, staring into the bland gaze of the famous scientist as he intoned his endless lecture about the nature of the universe.

"Remember when we thought nothing could be worse than that?" Robbie stared wistfully into his empty gla.s.s, then signaled the waiter for another bourbon and c.o.ke. Across the table, his old friend Emery sipped a beer.

"I liked The Head," said Emery. He cleared his throat and began to recite in the same portentous tone the famous scientist had employed. "Trillions and trillions of galaxies in which our own is but a mote of cosmic dust. It made you think."

"It made you think about killing yourself," said Robbie. "Do you want to know how many times I heard that?"

"A trillion?"

"Five thousand." The waiter handed Robbie a drink, his fourth. "Twenty-five times an hour, times eight hours a day, times five days a week, times five months."

"Five thousand, that's not so much. Especially when you think of all those trillions of galleries. I mean galaxies. Only five months? I thought you worked there longer."

"Just that summer. It only seemed like forever."

Emery knocked back his beer. "A long time ago, in a gallery far, far away," he intoned, not for the first time.

Thirty years before, the Museum of American Aviation and Aeros.p.a.ce had just opened. Robbie was nineteen that summer, a recent dropout from the University of Maryland, living in a group house in Mount Rainier. Employment opportunities were scarce; making $3.40 an hour as a security aide at the Smithsonian's newest museum seemed preferable to bagging groceries at Giant Food. Every morning he'd punch his time card in the guards' locker room and change into his uniform. Then he'd duck outside to smoke a joint before trudging downstairs for morning meeting and that day's a.s.signments.

Most of the security guards were older than Robbie, with backgrounds in the military and an eye on future careers with the DC Police Department or FBI. Still, they tolerated him with mostly good-natured ribbing about his longish hair and bloodshot eyes. All except for Hedge, the security chief. He was an enormous man with a shaved head who sat, knitting, behind a bank of closed-circuit video monitors, observing tourists and guards with an expression of amused contempt.

"What are you making?" Robbie once asked. Hedge raised his hands to display an intricately patterned baby blanket. "Hey, that's cool. Where'd you learn to knit?"

"Prison." Hedge's eyes narrowed. "You stoned again, Opie? That's it. Gallery Seven. Relieve Jones."

Robbie's skin went cold, then hot with relief when he realized Hedge wasn't going to fire him. "Seven? Uh, yeah, sure, sure. For how long?"

"Forever," said Hedge.

"Oh, man, you got The Head." Jones clapped his hands gleefully when Robbie arrived. "Better watch your a.s.s, kids'll throw s.h.i.+t at you," he said, and sauntered off.

Two projectors at opposite ends of the dark room beamed twin shafts of silvery light onto a head-shaped Styrofoam form. Robbie could never figure out if they'd filmed the famous scientist just once, or if they'd gone to the trouble to shoot him from two different angles.

However they'd done it, the sight of the disembodied Head was surprisingly effective: it looked like a hologram floating amid the hundreds of back-projected twinkly stars that covered the walls and ceiling. The creep factor was intensified by the stilted, slightly puzzled manner in which the Head blinked as it droned on, as though the famous scientist had just realized his body was gone, and was hoping no one else would notice. Once, when he was really stoned, Robbie swore that the Head deviated from its script.

"What'd it say?" asked Emery. At the time he was working in the General Aviation Gallery, operating a flight simulator that tourists clambered into for three-minute rides.

"Something about peaches," said Robbie. "I couldn't understand, it sort of mumbled."

Every morning, Robbie stood outside the entrance to Cosmic Soup and watched as tourists streamed through the main entrance and into the Hall of Flight. Overhead, legendary aircraft hung from the ceiling. The 1903 Wright Flyer with its Orville mannequin; a Lilienthal glider; the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. From a huge pit in the center of the hall rose a Minuteman III ICBM, rust-colored stains still visible where a protester had tossed a bucket of pig's blood on it a few months earlier. Directly above the entrance to Robbie's gallery dangled the Spirit of St. Louis Spirit of St. Louis. The aides who worked upstairs in the planetarium amused themselves by shooting paperclips onto its wings.

Robbie winced at the memory. He gulped what was left of his bourbon and sighed. "That was a long time ago."

"Tempus fugit, baby. Thinking of which-" Emery dug into his pocket for a Blackberry. "Check this out. From Leonard."

Robbie rubbed his eyes blearily, then read.

From: [email protected] Subject: Tragic Illness Date: April 6, 7:58:22 PM EDT To:

Dear Emery, I just learned that our Maggie Blevin is very ill. I wrote her at Christmas but never heard back. Fuad El-Hajj says she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer last fall. Prognosis is not good. She is still in the Fayetteville area, and I gather is in a hospice. I want to make a visit though not sure how that will go over. I have something I want to give her but need to talk to you about it.

L.

"Ahhh." Robbie sighed. "G.o.d, that's terrible."

"Yeah. I'm sorry. But I figured you'd want to know."

Robbie pinched the bridge of his nose. Four years earlier, his wife, Anna, had died of breast cancer, leaving him adrift in a grief so profound it was as though he'd been poisoned, as though his veins had been pumped with the same chemicals that had failed to save her. Anna had been an oncology nurse, a fact that at first afforded some meager black humor, but in the end deprived them of even the faintest of false hopes borne of denial or faith in alternative therapies.

There was no time for any of that. Zach, their son, had just turned twelve. Between his own grief and Zach's subsequent acting-out, Robbie got so depressed that he started pouring his first bourbon and c.o.ke before the boy left for school.

Two years later, he got fired from his job with the County Parks Commission.

He now worked in the s.h.i.+pping department at Small's, an off-price store in a desolate shopping mall that resembled the ruins of a regional airport. Robbie found it oddly consoling. It reminded him of the museum. The same generic atriums and industrial carpeting; the same bleak sunlight filtered through clouded gla.s.s; the same vacant-faced people trudging from Dollar Store to SunGla.s.s Hut, the way they'd wandered from the General Aviation Gallery to Cosmic Soup.

"Poor Maggie." Robbie returned the Blackberry. "I haven't thought of her in years."

"I'm going to see Leonard."

"When? Maybe I'll go with you."

"Now." Emery shoved a twenty under his beer bottle and stood. "You're coming with me."

"What?"

"You can't drive-you're snackered. Get popped again, you lose your license."

"Popped? Who's getting popped? And I'm not snackered, I'm-" Robbie thought. "Snockered. You p.r.o.nounced it wrong."

"Whatever." Emery grabbed Robbie's shoulder and pushed him to the door. "Let's go."

Emery drove an expensive hybrid that could get from Rockville to Utica, New York, on a single tank of gas. The vanity plate read MARVO and was flanked by b.u.mper stickers with messages like GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE: TYPE 2 PHASERS KILL PEOPLE and FRAK OFF! as well as several slogans that Emery said were in Klingon.

Emery was the only person Robbie knew who was somewhat famous. Back in the early 1980s, he'd created a local-access cable TV show called Captain Marvo's Secret s.p.a.cetime, Captain Marvo's Secret s.p.a.cetime, taped in his parents' bas.e.m.e.nt and featuring Emery in an aluminum foil costume behind the console of a cardboard s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. Captain Marvo watched videotaped episodes of low-budget 1950s science fiction serials with t.i.tles like taped in his parents' bas.e.m.e.nt and featuring Emery in an aluminum foil costume behind the console of a cardboard s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. Captain Marvo watched videotaped episodes of low-budget 1950s science fiction serials with t.i.tles like Payload: Moondust Payload: Moondust while bantering with his co-pilot, a homemade puppet made by Leonard, named Mungbean. while bantering with his co-pilot, a homemade puppet made by Leonard, named Mungbean.

The show was pretty funny if you were stoned. Captain Marvo became a cult hit, and then a real hit when a major network picked it up as a late-night offering. Emery quit his day job at the museum and rented studio time in Baltimore. He sold the rights after a few years, and was immediately replaced by a flashy actor in Lurex and a glittering robot sidekick. The show limped along for a season, then died. Emery's fans claimed this was because their slacker hero had been sidelined.

But maybe it was just that people weren't as stoned as they used to be. These days the program had a surprising afterlife on the internet, where Robbie's son Zach watched it with his friends, and Emery did a brisk business selling memorabilia through his official Captain Marvo website.

It took them nearly an hour to get into DC and find a parking s.p.a.ce near the Mall, by which time Robbie had sobered up enough to wish he'd stayed at the bar.

"Here." Emery gave him a sugarless breath mint, then plucked at the collar of Robbie's s.h.i.+rt, acid-green with SMALLS embroidered in purple. "Christ, Robbie, you're a freaking mess."

He reached into the back seat, retrieved a black t-s.h.i.+rt from his gym bag. "Here, put this on."

Robbie changed into it and stumbled out onto the sidewalk. It was mid-April but already steamy; the air s.h.i.+mmered above the pavement and smelled sweetly of apple blossom and coolant from innumerable air conditioners. Only as he approached the museum entrance and caught his reflection in a gla.s.s wall did Robbie see that his t-s.h.i.+rt was emblazoned with Emery's youthful face and foil helmet above the words O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN.

"You wear your own t-s.h.i.+rt?" he asked as he followed Emery through the door.

"Only at the gym. Nothing else was clean."

They waited at the security desk while a guard checked their IDs, called upstairs to Leonard's office, signed them in and took their pictures before finally issuing each a Visitor's Pa.s.s.

"You'll have to wait for Leonard to escort you upstairs," the guard said.

"Not like the old days, huh, Robbie?" Emery draped an arm around Robbie and steered him into the Hall of Flight. "Not a lot of retinal scanning on your watch."

The museum hadn't changed much. The same aircraft and s.p.a.ce capsules gleamed overhead. Tourists cl.u.s.tered around the lucite pyramid that held slivers of moon rock. Sunburned guys sporting military haircuts and tattoos peered at a mockup of an F-15 flight deck. Everything had that old museum smell: soiled carpeting, machine oil, the wet-laundry odor wafting from steam tables in the public cafeteria.

But The Head was long gone. Robbie wondered if anyone even remembered the famous scientist, dead for many years. The General Aviation Gallery, where Emery and Leonard had operated the flight simulators and first met Maggie Blevin, was now devoted to Personal Flight, with models of jetpacks worn by alarmingly lifelike mannequins.

"Leonard designed those." Emery paused to stare at a child-sized figure who seemed to float above a solar-powered skateboard. "He could have gone to Hollywood."

"It's not too late."

Robbie and Emery turned to see their old colleague behind them.

"Leonard," said Emery.

The two men embraced. Leonard stepped back and tilted his head. "Robbie.

I wasn't expecting you."

"Surprise," said Robbie. They shook hands awkwardly. "Good to see you, man."

Leonard forced a smile. "And you."

They headed toward the staff elevator. Back in the day, Leonard's hair had been long and luxuriantly blond. It fell unbound down the back of the dogs.h.i.+tyellow uniform jacket, designed to evoke an airline pilot's, that he and Emery and the other General Aviation aides wore as they gave their spiel to tourists eager to yank on the controls of their Link Trainers. With his patrician good looks and stern gray eyes, Leonard was the only aide who actually resembled a real pilot.

Now he looked like a cross between Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi and Willie Nelson. His hair was white, and hung in two braids that reached almost to his waist. Instead of the c.r.a.ppy polyester uniform, he wore a white linen tunic, a necklace of unpolished turquoise and coral, loose black trousers tucked into scuffed cowboy boots, and a skull earring the size of Robbie's thumb. On his collar gleamed the cheap knock-off pilot's wings that had once adorned his museum uniform jacket. Leonard had always taken his duties very seriously, especially after Margaret Blevin arrived as the museum's first Curator of Proto-Flight. Robbie's refusal to do the same, even long after he'd left the museum himself, had resulted in considerable friction between them over the intervening years.

Robbie cleared his throat. "So, uh. What are you working on these days?" He wished he wasn't wearing Emery's idiotic t-s.h.i.+rt.

"I'll show you," said Leonard.

Upstairs, they headed for the old photo lab, now an imaging center filled with banks of computers, digital cameras, scanners.

"We still process film there," Leonard said as they walked down a corridor hung with production photos from The Day the Earth Stood Still The Day the Earth Stood Still and and Frau im Mond Frau im Mond. "Negatives, old motion picture stock-people still send us things."