Best Science Fiction of the Year 1984 Part 20

"Those skies!" murmured Barry ecstatically. He wore the drunken expression of the satisfied voluptuary.

"Some people like paintings of puppies or naked women," I offered. "Barry likes light and air."

We left the museum and had lunch. Barry told us which things on the menu were worth ordering, and which things were an abomination. He made us all drink an obscure im-ported beer from Ecuador. To Barry, the world was divided up into masterpieces and abominations. It made life so much simpler for him, except that he never understood why his friends could never tell one from the other.

At the football game, Barry compared our school's quarter-back to Y. A, t.i.ttle. He compared the other team's punter to Ngoc Van Vinh. He compared the halftime show to the Ohio State band's Script Ohio formation. Before the end of the third quarter, it was very obvious to me that Barry was going to have absolutely no luck at all with Dixie. Before the clock ran out in the fourth quarter, Brigid and I had made whis-pered plans to dump the other two as soon as possible and sneak away by ourselves. Dixie would probably find an ex-cuse to ride the bus back to her dorm before suppertime. Barry, as usual, would spend the evening in our room, read-ing The Making of the President 1996.

On other occasions Barry would lecture me about subjects as diverse as American Literature (the best poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, the best novelist James T. Farrell), ani-mals (the only correct pet was the golden retriever), clothing (in anything other than a navy blue jacket and gray slacks a man was just asking for trouble), and even hobbies (Barry collected military decorations of czarist Imperial Russia. He wouldn't talk to me for days after I told him my father collected barbed wire).

Barry was a wealth of information. He was the campus arbiter of good taste. Everyone knew that Barry was the man to ask.

But no one ever did. We all hated his guts. I moved out of our dorm room before the end of the fall semester. Shunned, lonely, and bitter Barry Rintz wound up as a guidance coun-selor in a Jugh school in Ames, Iowa. The job was absolutely perfect for him; few people are so lucky in finding a career.

If I didn't know better, I might have believed that Barry was the original advance spy for the nuhp.

When the nuhp had been on Earth for a full year, they gave us the gift of interstellar travel. It wa.s.surprisingly inexpen-sive. The nuhp explained their propulsion system, which was cheap and safe and adaptable to all sorts of other earthbound applications. The revelations opened up an entirely new area of scientific speculation. Then the nuhp taught us their navi-gational methods, and about the "shortcuts" they had discov-ered in s.p.a.ce. People called them s.p.a.ce warps, although technically speaking, the shortcuts had nothing to do with Einsteinian theory or curved s.p.a.ce or anything like that. Not many humans understood what the nuhp were talking about, but that didn't make very much difference. The nuhp didn't understand the shortcuts, either; they just used them. The matter was presented to us like a Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. We bypa.s.sed the whole business of cautious scientific experimentation and leaped right into commercial exploita-tion. Mitsubis.h.i.+ of La Paz and Martin Marietta used nuhp schematics to begin construction of three luxury pa.s.senger s.h.i.+ps, each capable of transporting a thousand tourists any-where in our galaxy. Although man had yet to set foot on the moons of Jupiter, certain selected travel agencies began book-ing pa.s.sage for a grand tour of the dozen nearest inhabited worlds.

Yes, it seemed that s.p.a.ce was teeming with life, humanoid life on planets circling half the G-type stars in the heavens. "We've been trying to communicate with extraterrestrial in-telligence for decades,"

complained one Soviet scientist. "Why haven't they responded?''

A friendly nuhp merely shrugged. "Everybody's trying to communicate out there," he said. "Your messages are like Publishers Clearing House mail to them." At first, that was a blow to our racial pride, but we got over it. As soon as we joined the interstellar community, they'd begin to take us more seriously. And the nuhp had made that possible.

We were grateful to the nuhp, but that didn't make them any easier to live with. They were still insufferable. As my second term as president came to an end, Pleen began to advise me about my future career. "Don't write a book," he told me (after I had already written the first two hundred pages of a A President Remembers). "If you want to be an elder statesman, fine; but keep a low profile and wait for the people to come to you."

"What am I supposed to do with my time, then?" I asked.

"Choose a new career," Pleen said. "You're not all that old. Lots of people do it. Have you considered starting a mail-order business? You can operate it from your home. Or go back to school and take courses in some subject that's always interested you. Or become active in church or civic projects.

Find a new hobby: raising hollyhocks or collecting military decorations."

"Pleen," I begged, "just leave me alone."

He seemed hurt. "Sure, if that's what you want." I regret-ted my harsh words.

All over the country, all over the world, everyone was having the same trouble with the nuhp. It seemed that so many of them had come to Earth, every human had his own personal nuhp to make endless suggestions. There hadn't been so much tension in the world since the 1992 Miss Universe contest, when the most votes went to No Award.

That's why it didn't surprise me very much when the first of our own mother s.h.i.+ps returned from its 28-day voyage among the stars with only 276 of its 1,000 pa.s.sengers still aboard. The other 724 had remained behind on one lush, exciting, exotic, friendly world or another. These planets had one thing in common: they were all populated by charming, warm, intelligent, humanlike people who had left their own home worlds after being discovered by the nuhp. Many races lived together in peace and harmony on these planets, in s.p.a.cious cities newly built to house the fed-up expatriates. Perhaps these alien races had experienced the same internal jealousies and hatreds we human beings had known for so long, but no more. Coming together from many planets throughout our galaxy, these various peoples dwelt contentedly beside each other, united by a single common adversion: their dislike for the nuhp.

Within a year of the launching of our first interstellar s.h.i.+p, the population of Earth had declined by 0.5 percent. Within two years, the population had fallen by almost 14 million. The nuhp were too sincere andtoo eager and too sympathetic to fight with. That didn't make them any less tedious. Rather than make a scene, most people just up and left. There were plenty of really lovely worlds to visit, and it didn't cost very much, and the opportunities in s.p.a.ce were unlimited. Many people who were frustrated and disappointed on Earth were able to build new and fulfilling lives for themselves on plan-ets that until the nuhp arrived, we didn't even know existed.

The nuhp knew this would happen. It had already happened dozens, hundreds of times in the past, wherever their mother s.h.i.+ps touched down. They had made promises to us and they had kept them, although we couldn't have guessed just how things would turn out.

Our cities were no longer decaying warrens imprisoning the impoverished ma.s.ses. The few people who remained behind could pick and choose among the best housing. Landlords were forced to reduce rents and keep properties in perfect repair just to attract tenants.

Hunger was ended when the ratio of consumers to food producers dropped drastically. Within ten years, the popula-tion of Earth was cut in half, and was still falling.

For the same reason, poverty began to disappear. There were plenty of jobs for everyone. When it became apparent that the nuhp weren't going to compete for those jobs, there were more opportunities than people to take advantage of them.

Discrimination and prejudice vanished almost overnight. Everyone cooperated to keep things running smoothly despite the large-scale emigration. The good life was available to everyone, and so resentments melted away. Then, too, what-ever enmity people still felt could be focused solely on the nuhp; the nuhp didn't mind, either. They were oblivious to it all.

I am now the mayor and postmaster of the small human community of New Dallas, here on Thir, the fourth planet of a star known in our old catalog as Struve 2398. The various alien races we encountered here call the star by another name, which translates into "G.o.d's Pineal." All the aliens here are extremely helpful and charitable, and there are few nuhp.

All through the galaxy, the nuhp are considered the mes-sengers of peace. Their mission is to travel from planet to planet, bringing reconciliation, prosperity, and true civiliza-tion. There isn't an intelligent race in the galaxy that doesn't love the nuhp. We all recognize what they've done and what they've given us.

But if the nuhp started moving in down the block, we'd be packed and on our way somewhere else by morning.

A DAY IN THE SKIN (OR, THE CENTURY WE WERE OUT OF THEM).

Tanith Lee

When we go out to colonize the planets of other stars, odds are that there will be unexpected catastrophes. Science fiction has told of such things often, but we must bear in mind that by the time we achieve interstellar travel our technology will be greatly advanced, so we may by then have the means to cope with great problems. Of course, coping will always remain basically a human task, as Tanith Lee shows in this story.

Tanith Lee is one of the most accomplished science fiction writers of the past ten years, in both short stories and novels. She's been so prolific and accomplished that even a sample list of her books would be impractical; this story will give an example of why that's true.And the first thing you more or less think when you get Back is: G.o.d, where's everything gone? (Just as, similarly, when you get Out you more or less think, Hey where's all this coming from?) Neither thought is rational, simply out-raged instinct. The same as, coming Back, it seems for a moment stone silent, blind dark and ice cold. It's none of those. It's nothing. In a joking mood, some of us have been known to refer to it, this-what shall I call it? this place-as Sens-D (sensory deprivation). It isn't though, because when your Outward senses-vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch- when they go off, other things come on. The a/fer-senses. Hard to describe. For a time, you reckon them as compensa-tion, stand-ins, like eating, out in the skin world, a cut of sausage when you hankered for a steak. Only in a while it stops being that. It becomes steak. The equivalent senses are just fine, although the only non-technical way I can come up with to express them is in terms of equivalents, alternatives.

And time itself is a problem, in here, or down there, or where the h.e.l.l ever. Yes, it pa.s.ses. One can judge it. But one rarely does, after the first months. In the first months you're con-stantly pacing, like some guy looking at his watch: Is it time yet? Is it time now? Then that cools off. Something happens, in here, down there... So that when at last the impulse comes through Time to get up (or Out) you turn lazily, like a fish in a pool (equivalents), and you equivalently say, Oh really? Do I have to?

"Sure, Scay. You do have to. It's in the Company con-tract. And if I let you lie, there'd be all h.e.l.l and hereafter to pay H.Q. Not to mention from you, when you finally get Out for keeps."

So I alter-said, in the way the impulse can a.s.similate and send on, "How long, and what is it?"

"One day. One huge and perfect High Summer day. Forty-two hours. And you got a good one, Scay, listen, a real beauty."

"Male or female?"

"A/ee-male."

"All right. I can about remember being female."

"First female for you for ten years, ah? Exciting."

"Go knit yourself a brain."

Dydoo, who manages the machines, snuffled and whined, which I alter-heard now clearly, as he set up my ride. I tried to pull myself together for the Big Wrench. But you never manage it. Suddenly you are whirling down a tunnel full of fireworks, at the end of which you explode inside a ma.s.s of stiff jelly. And there I was, flailing and shrieking, just as we all flail and shriek, in the middle of a support couch in the middle of Transfer.

"Husha hush," said the machines, and gentle firm me-chanical arms held me and held me down.

Presently I relapsed panting-yes, panting. Air.

"Look up," said Dydoo. I looked. Things flashed and tickered. "Everything's fine. You can hear me?

See me?"

"I can even smell you," I gasped, tears streaming down my face, my heart cras.h.i.+ng like surf on the rocks. There was a dull booming pain in my head I cared for about as much as Dydoo cared for my last remark. "Dydoo," I continued, speech not coming easy, "who had this one last? I think they gave it a cranial fracture."

"Nah, nah. 'S all right. Mike tied one on with the wine and brandy-pop. It's pumped full of vitamins and de-tox. Should take about a hundred and fifteen seconds more, and you'll feel just dandy, you rat."

I lay there, waiting for Mike Plir's hangover to go away, and watched, with my borrowed eyes, Dydoo bustling round the s.h.i.+ny bright room. He is either a saint or a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t (or are they the same?).

Since one of us has to oversee these particular machines, he agreed to be it, and so he took the only living quarters permanently available. The most highly developed local fauna is a kind of dog-likecreature, spinally adapted for walking upright, like the Terran ape, and with articulated forepaws and jaw. With a little surgery, this nut-brown woolly beast, with its floppy ears and huge soulful eyes, was all ready for work, and thus for Dydoo.

"My, Dydoo," I said, "you look real sweet today. Come on over, I'll give you a bone."

"Shurrup," growled Dydoo. No doubt, these tired old jests get on his furry nerves.

Once my skull stopped booming, I got up and went to look at myself in the unlikely pier-gla.s.s at one end of the antiseptic room.

"Well, I remember this one. This used to be Miranda."

There she stood, twenty-five, small, curvy, a little heavy but nice, creamy gold, with long fair hair down to her second cl.u.s.ter of dimples.

"Yeah. Good stuff," said Dydoo, deciding yet again; he doesn't or can't afford to hold a grudge more than a minute.

"How long, I wonder, before I get a go at my own-"

"Now you know it doesn't work like that, Scay. Don't you? Hah?"

"Yes, I know it doesn't. Just lamenting, Dydoo. Tell me, who had me Out last time?"

"Vundar Cope. And he broke off a bit."

"What? Hexos Christ! Which bit?"

"Just kidding," said Dydoo. "If you're worried, I'll take you over to the Store, and let yah look."

"No thanks, for Chrissake. I don't like seeing myself that way."

"Okay. And try to talk like a lady, can't you?"

"Walkies, Dydoo," I snarled. "Fetch!"

"Ah, get salted."

It took me a couple of quivery hours to grow accustomed to being in Miranda's body; correction, Fern. Sub. 68. I bruised my hips a lot, trying to get between and by furniture that was no longer wide enough for me. The scented bath and the lingerie were exciting all right. But not in the right way, I'd been male in the beginning and much of the time after, and I'd had a run of being male for every one of my fifty-one days a year Out for ten, eleven years. That's generally how it's designated, unless an adventurous preference is stated. Stick with what you're used to. But sometimes you must take what you can get. I allowed a while before I left Transfer, to see to a couple of things. The lingerie and the mirrors helped. It was a safe bet, I probably wouldn't be up (to mis-coin a phrase) to any straight s.e.x this holiday. Besides, I didn't know who else was Out, and Dydoo had gotten so grouchy in the end, I hadn't bothered to ask. Normally there are around forty to fifty people in the skin on any given day. Amounts of time vary, depending on how the work programs pan out and the "holiday" schedules have built up. My day, I now re-called, was a free diurnal owing to me from last year, that the Company had never yet made up. Perfect to the letter, our Company. After all, who wants to get sued? Not that anyone who sues ever wins, but it's messy.

I wondered, as the moving ramp carried me out into town, just what Dydoo was getting paid to keep him woofing along in there.

The first body I pa.s.sed on Mainstreet was Fedalin's, and it gave me the creeps, the way it still sometimes does, because naturally it wasn't Fedalin inside. Whoever was, was giving it a heck of a time.

Red-rimmed eyes, drug-smoked irises, shaking hands and faltering feet. To make matters worse, the wreck blew a bleary whistle after Miranda's stacking. I didn't stop to belt him. My lady's stature and hersoft fists were of use only in one sort of brawl. I could see, I thought, nor for the first, why the Company rules keep your own personal body in the Store whenever you yourself are Out. It means you never get into your own skin, but then too, there are never any overlaps, during which you might meet yourself on the sidewalk with some other b.a.s.t.a.r.d driving. Pandemonium that would be, trying to throttle them, no doubt, for the lack of care they were taking with your precious goods-and only, of course, ending up throttling yourself. In a manner. Al-though I didn't like looking at my own battered old (thirty-five) skin lying there, in ice, like a fish dummy, in the Store, I had once or twice gone over and compulsively peeked. The second occasion, not only gave me the s.h.i.+vers, but I'd flown into a wow of a rage because someone had taken me Out for a week's leave and put ten pounds on my gut. Obviously, the machines would get that off in a few days. (The same as lesions, black eyes, and stomach ulcers get got rid of. The worst I ever heard tell of was a cancerous lung that required one whole month of cancer-antibodies, which is twice as long as it takes to cure it in a body that's occupied.) But there, even so, you get upset, you can't help it. So it's on the whole better not to go and look, though H.Q. says it's okay for you to go and look-which is to prove to us all our skins are still around in the public lending library. G.o.dd.a.m.n it.

The contract says (and we all have a contract) that as soon as the Bank is open for Business (five years it's supposed to be now, but five years ago they said that, too) we all go Back into our own bodies.

Or into new improved bodies, or into new improved versions of our old bodies, or-you name it. A real party, and we all get a prize. When it all started, around eighty years ago, that is, once everybody had settled after the initial squalling matches, Violent Scenes, hysteria, etc., some of us got a wild thrill out of the novelty. Pebka-Sol, for example, has it on record always, where possible, to come Out as a lady.

And when he finally gets a skin of his own again, that is due to be a lady, also. But Pebka-Sol lost his own skin, the true, masculine one, so he's ent.i.tled. I guess we're the lucky ones, me, Fedalin, Miranda, Christof, Haro- those of us that didn't lose anything as a result of the Acci-dent. Except, our rights...

I try to be conscientious, myself, I really do. But handling Miranda was going to be a drag. She's a lot littler than me, or than I'm used to, and her capacity is a lot less. I'm used to drinking fairly hard, but hard was the word it was going to be on her, if I tried that; plus she'd already been doused by some jack, yesterday. I walked into the bar on Mainstreet, the bar we used to hit in gabbling droves long, long ago under the glitter-kissed green dusk, when we were our own men and women. No one was there now, though Fedalin's haunt had just walked him out the door. I dialed a large pink Angel and put it, a sip at a time, into Miranda's insides, to get her accustomed. "Here's not looking at you, kid," I toasted her.

I had that weird feeling I recollect I had when I first scooped a female body from the draw forty odd years ago. Shock and disorientation, firstly. Then a turn-on, racy, kinky, great. I'd got to the stage now of feeling I was on a date, dating Miranda, only I was Miranda. My first lady had been Qwainie, and Qwainie wasn't my type, which in the long run made things easier faster. But Miranda is my type. Oh my yes. (Which is odd in a way as the only woman I ever was really serious with-well, she wasn't like Miranda at all.) So I dialed Miranda another Angel, and we drank it down.

As this was happening, a tall, dark man with a tawny tan, the right weight and nothing forcing steam out of his nose and eyeb.a.l.l.s, came into the bar. He dialed a Coalwater, the most lethal beer and alcohol mix in the galaxy (they say); one of my own preferred tipples, and sauntered over.

"Nice day, Scay."

"He knows me," said Miranda's soft cute voice with the slight lisp.

"The way you drink, feller," he said.

I had emptied the gla.s.s, and Miranda's ears were faintly ringing. I'd have to wait a while for the girl to catch up.

"Well, if he knows me that well, then I'll hazard on who he is."

"Win, and he'll stand you a Coalwater.""The lady wouldn't like that. Anyway. Let's try Haro Fielding."

"Hole in one."

"Well, fancy that. They let us Out the same time again."

Haro, whom I thought was in the skin of one of the tech. people whose name I had mislaid, grinned mildly.

"I've been Out a couple of weeks. Tin and irradium traces over south. Due Back In tomorrow noon.

You?"

"Forty-two hours."

"Hard bread."

"Yeah."

We stared into our gla.s.ses, mine empty, and I wished sweet Miranda would buck up and stop ringing so I could drink some more. Haro's rig had been auspicious, a tall dark man just like Haro"s own body.

But he'd treated it with respect. That was Haro Fielding all over, if you see what I mean. A really nice guy, super intelligent, intellectual, all that, and sound, as about nothing but people ever are, and that rarely, let me add. We had been working together on the asti-manganese traces the other side of the Rockies when the Accident happened, back here in town. That was how we two kept our skins. I remember we were down a tunnel sc.r.a.ping away, with the a.n.a.lysis robot-pack clunking about in the debris, when the explosion ripped through the planet's bow-els. It was a low, thrumming vibration, where we were, more than a bang. We were both a pair of tall guys, but Haro taller than me, with one of the best brains I ever came across. And he stood up and crashed this brain against the tunnel-ceiling and nearly knocked himself out. "What the F was that?" I asked, after we'd gotten ourselves together. "It sounded," said Haro to me, "like the whole of Base Town just blew up, hit the troposphere, and fell back down again." He wasn't far out.

We made it back through the rock hills in the air-buggy inside twenty minutes. When we came over the top and saw the valley full of red haze and smoke and jets of steam, I was scared as h.e.l.l. You could hear alarm bells and sirens going, but the smog was too thick to work out what kind of rescue went on and what was just automatic noise and useless. I sat in the driver's seat, gunning the buggy forward, and swearing and half crying. And Haro said, "It's okay."

"Of course it's not b.l.o.o.d.y okay. Look at it-there's no G.o.dd.a.m.n thing left-''

"Hey," he said, "calm down."

"Calm down! You're crazy. No, I'm not just shaken up over who may have just died in that soup. I'm p.i.s.sing myself that if it's all gone, we'll never get off this guck-heeled planet alive."