Year's Best SF 11, page 11
I feel down between my legs, trying to figure out if he delivered. What a thing it would be to carry Hieronymus Bosch’s baby! That would tie him to me for sure. I think I’m ovulating today, as a matter of fact. Just for luck, I twist around and prop my feet up on the wall, giving the Dutch Master’s wrigglers every opportunity to work their way up to the hidden jewel of my egg.
Resting there, thinking things over, I can visualize them, pointy-nosed with beating tails, talking to each other in Dutch, enjoying themselves in Glenda-land, on a pilgrimage to my Garden of Earthly Delights.
He keeps on sleeping, and I amble back into the kitchen to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich. I’m happy, but at the same time I have this bad feeling that Harna somehow tricked me. That stuff about wrapping me up and taking me home. Some weird shit is gonna come down, I just know it.
But now here comes Jerome out the bedroom, looking mellower than before. Our little hump and cuddle has helped his mind-set.
“Greetings, Glenda,” he says. “I enjoyed our venery.”
“Likewise.” He looks so cute and inquisitive that I run over and kiss his cheek. And I can’t help asking, “You don’t think I’m too fat?”
“You’re well-fed,” he says, cupping my boobs. “Clean and healthy. But do you worship Satan? Your spirit-familiar Harna—surely she is unholy.”
“I don’t know much about Harna,” I admit. “She only appeared today. And Satan? Naw, dog. I’m a Catholic girl.” Fallen away, I don’t mention. I cross myself and he’s relieved.
“I can go home?” he asks, glancing out the window at the quiet street in the noon sun.
“You belong with me,” I tell him. “I’ll give you a baby. You never had one back then. I love your art. You’re mucho famous here, you know. I have a whole book of your pictures.”
I root around the apartment, wanting to show him, but damn it, that book is totally gone. I’m guessing that Harna took it. She was saying something about copying Jerome’s perspective maps so she can—fit our world into a sack? That has to be wack. If only she’s gone for good. Maybe hoping hard enough can make it so. I skip over to Jerome and kiss him again. He lets me.
“I can’t find my book, but we can go to the SJSU library,” I tell him. “It’s just across the campus and they’re open on Sunday. And I think the Art Mart is open today too. I’ll buy you some paint.”
“Buy paint?” says Jerome. “I mix my own.”
“We get it in tubes,” I say. “Like sausage. Ready-made. Here, you eat a grilled cheese sandwich too, and then we’ll look for Hieronymus Bosch books in the library.”
Well, guess what we find under bosch, hieronymus, in the library? Not jack shit. When Harna and I abducted him from the fifteenth-century Dutch town of s’Hertogenbosch and carried him to twenty-first century San Jose, California, we wiped out his role in history. Maybe he finished one or two minor paintings before we nabbed him, but as far as the history of art is concerned, he never lived. Jerome doesn’t really pick up on how weird this is—I mean all he’s seen me do is look at an incomprehensible-to-a-medieval-mind online card catalog, and we nabbed him before he was famous anyway, so he’s not feeling the loss. But me, I feel it bad.
Bosch was a really important artist, you know—or maybe you don’t. Come to think of it, I might be the only one who remembers our world before I changed our history. But take it from me, Hieronymus Bosch was King. The Elvis of artists. His work influenced a lot of people in all kinds of ways over the centuries.
More ways than I’d imagined.
Because now, walking off the campus and getting a coffee, I’m paying attention and I’m noticing differences in our non-Bosch world. There aren’t any ads for horror movies in the paper, for instance, which is way odd.
The Episcopal church that used to be by the coffee shop is a pho noodle parlor. On a hunch, I look in the yellow pages in the coffee shop, and there’s no Episcopal or Baptist or Proletarian or whatever churches in town at all. With no Bosch, the Protestant thing never happened! The sisters that whipped me through grade school would be happy, but I’m thinking, Dear God, what have I done?
The cars are different too, duller than before, and every single one of them is cream-colored, not even any silver or maroon.
The barrista in the coffee shop who usually wears foundation and drawn-on eyebrows has her face bare as a granola hippie’s. And her hair is all bowl-cut and sensible. Ugh. The world is definitely lagging without the cumulative influences of my man Jerome.
On the plus side, you can smoke in the coffee shop now, and all the cigarettes are fat and laced with nutmeg and clove, which I dig. The Supertaqueria next door isn’t selling tongue anymore, also fine by me. The fonts on the signs are somehow lower and fatter and more, like, Sanskrit-looking. The people in the magazine ads are wearing more clothes, and generally heavier.
Hey, I can live with some change, if that’s what it takes to get Glenda her man.
I buy Jerome a canvas and some acrylics at the Art Mart—putting them on a new credit card that some pinheads mailed me last week. Back home, my Dutch Master sniffs suspiciously at the paint, preparing to start layering the stuff over the colored drawing on my smaller wall.
There’s a knock on the door. I’ve been expecting this. I peep through the peephole and it’s Harna, looking just like her voice sounds, like a rich old white woman in a flowery dress and pillbox hat. I don’t want to let her in, but she walks right through the closed door.
“Hello, Glenda and Jerome,” goes Harna. “I have a commission for the artist.” She plumps a velvet sack right down on my kitchen table. Clink of gold coins. Perfectly calculated to get Jerome’s juices flowing.
“What kind of painting do you need, my lady?” asks Jerome, setting down his paintbrush and making a greedy little bow.
“A picture of that,” she says, pointing out the window to Sixth Street and the San Jose cityscape. “With full perspective accuracy. You can paint it—there.” She points to my big blank living room wall.
“How soon would you need it?” asks Jerome.
“By sundown,” says Harna.
“He can’t paint that fast,” I protest.
“I’ll speed him up,” says Harna, with a twitch of her dowager lips. “I’ll return with the rising of the moon.”
Sure enough, Jerome starts racing around the room like a cockroach when the light comes on, pausing only long enough to ask me to get him more paint.
When I come back from the Art Mart with a shopping bag of paint tubes, he’s already roughed in an underpainting of the street—the houses with their tile and shingle roofs, the untrimmed palm trees, the dead dingy cars, the vines, a few passers-by captured in motion, the tops of the houses in the next block, the houses after them, the low brown haze from the freeways, and beyond that the golden-grassed foothills and the blank blue sky.
He’s all over the wall, and the painting is so perfect and beautiful I can hardly stand it. Every ten seconds, it seems like, he darts over to the window, then darts back. He’s such a nut that he’s putting in every single person and car that goes past, so the picture is getting more and more crowded.
The sun is going down and a few lights come on in the windows outside. Somehow Jerome is keeping up with it, changing his painting to match the world, touching the buildings with sunset gold, damping the shadows into warmer shades, pinkening the sky—and then darkening it.
A fat full moon comes up over the foothills and, quick as a knife, Jerome paints it onto my wall, sprinkling stars all around it.
And then Harna’s in the room again.
“It’s enough,” she says. “He can stop.”
Jerome cranks down to normal speed. I hand him more Oreos and coffee. He slugs down the nourishment, then drinks a quart of water from the sink.
“What happens now?” I ask Harna.
“Like I said before,” she answers, not looking so much like a human anymore. Her pink skin is peeling away in patches, and underneath she’s green. “I’m going to bag you and your world and take you home. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”
And then she shoots out of the window and disappears into the distance past the moon.
“We have to stop her!” I tell Jerome, picking up my purse.
“What?” he says. He sounds tired.
“We have to run after Harna.”
Jerome looks at me for a long time. And then he smiles. “If you say so, Glenda. Being with you is interesting.”
The two of us run down the apartment stairs and right away I can see that things are seriously weird. The cars across the street are two-thirds as big as the cars on my side.
“Hurry,” I tell Jerome, and we run around the corner to the next block. The houses on that next street are half the size of the houses on my street. We run another block, which takes only a couple of seconds, as each block is way smaller than the one before. The houses are only waist high. We go just a little farther and now we’re stepping right over the houses, striding across a block at a time.
Another step takes us all the way across Route 101, the step after that across east San Jose. The farther from Jerome’s picture we get, the smaller things are.
“Perspective!” exclaims Jerome. “The world has shrunk to perspective!”
We hop over the foothills. And now it gets really crazy. With one last push of our legs, we leap past the moon. It’s a pale yellow golf ball near our knees. We’re launched into space, man. The stars rush past, all of them, denser and denser—zow—and then we’re past everything, beyond the vanishing point, out at infinity.
Clear white light, firm as Jell-O, and you can stand wherever you like. Up where it’s the brightest, I see a throne and a bearded man in it, just like in Jerome’s paintings. It’s God, with Jesus beside Him, and between them is the Dove, which I never did get. Right below the Trinity is my own Virgin of Guadalupe, with wiggly yellow lines all around her. And up above them all are my secret guardians, the Powerpuff Girls from my favorite Saturday morning cartoon. Jerome sees them too. We clasp hands. I know deep inside myself that now forever we two are married. I’m crying my head off.
But somebody jostles me, it’s Harna right next to us, pushing and grunting, trying to wrestle our whole universe into a brown sack. She’s the shape of a green Bosch-goblin with a slit mouth.
I turn off the waterworks and whack Harna up the side of the head with my purse. Jerome crouches down and butts her in the stomach. Passing the vanishing point has made us about as strong as our enemy, the demonic universe-collector. While she’s reeling back, I quick get hold of her sack and shake its edges free of our stars.
Harna comes at me hot and heavy, with smells and electric shocks and thumps on my butt. Jerome goes toe-to-toe with her, shoving her around, but she’s starting to hammer on his head pretty good. Just then I notice a brush and tubes of white and blue paint in my purse. I hand them to Jerome and while I use some Extreme Wrestling moves from TV on Harna, Jerome quick paints a translucent blue sphere around her with a cross on top—a spirit trap.
I shove the last free piece of Harna fully inside the ball and, presto, she’s neutralized. With a hissing, farting sound she dwindles from our view, disappearing in a direction different from any that we can see. I wave one time to the Trinity, the Virgin and the Powerpuff Girls, and, how awesome, they wave back. And then we’re outta there.
The walk home is a little tricky—that first step in particular, where you go from infinity back into normal space, is a tough one. But we make it.
As soon as we’re in my apartment, I help Jerome slap some house-paint over his big mural. And when we go outside to check on things, everything is back to being its own right size. We’ve saved our universe.
To celebrate, we get some Olde Antwerpen forty-ouncers at the 7–11 and hop into my bed, cuddling together at one end leaning against the wall. I’m kind of hoping Jerome will want to get it on, but right now he seems a little tired. Not too tired to check out my boobs though.
Just when it might start to get interesting, here comes Harna’s last gasp. I can’t see her anymore, but I can hear her voice, and so can Jerome. “Have it your way,” intones the prissy universe-collector. “Keep your petty world. But the restoration must be in full. Before I leave for good, Hieronymus must go home.”
“Think I’ll stay here,” says Jerome, who’s holding a tit in one hand and a beer in the other.
“Back,” says Harna, and her presence disappears for good.
As she leaves, the living breathing man next to me turns into—oh hell—an art book.
“No way,” I sob. “I need him.” I quick say the Hail Mary three times, like the sisters taught me. But the Bosch book just sits there. I pour some of the microhomies onto it. Nothing doing. I squeeze red paint onto the book cover and stick a split Oreo cookie to it. Still no good. And then in desperation, I pray to my special protectors, the Powerpuff Girls. And the day’s last miracle begins.
The book twitches in my hands, throbs, splits in two, and the two copies move apart, making a, like, hyperdimen-sional man-hole.
And, yes, pushing his way out of the hole, here comes my Hieronymus Bosch, his hair flopping, his eyes sharp, his mouth thin with concentration.
He’s in my bed—and the dumb book is gone. Screw art history. Jerome will make even better paintings than before. And if that doesn’t work out, there’s reality TV.
You know anybody who can help with my show?
The Forever Kitten
PETER F. HAMILTON
Peter F. Hamilton (www.peterfhamilton.co.uk) lives in Oakham, England. He began publishing SF in the early 1990s with three SF detective novels—Mindstar Rising (1993), A Quantum Murder (1994), and The Nano Flower (1995). But his prominence began with a massive trilogy of one-thousand-page novels (in its original British form)—The Reality Dysfunction (1996), The Neutronium Alchemist (1997), and The Naked God (2000), together the Night’s Dawn Trilogy. In the U.S., all three books were divided into two volumes each, so it became a six-book series). A collection, A Second Chance at Eden (1998), is set in the same “Confederation” future as the trilogy. The whole setting is so complex that Hamilton published a non-fiction guide, The Confederation Handbook: The Essential Guide to the Night’s Dawn Series, in 2000. Two of his three later novels to date are also space opera—Fallen Dragon (2001) and Pandora’s Star (2004), his Commonwealth saga. The Void Trilogy is currently being written. After Iain M. Banks, Hamilton is the most popular British space opera writer of the last decade.
“The Forever Kitten” appeared in Nature. It is small scale and closely focused, about scientific research, money, and ethics. It is just plausible enough to be an effective SF horror story.
The mansion’s garden was screened by lush trees. I never thought I’d be so entranced by anything as simple as horse chestnuts, but that’s what 18 months in jail on remand will do for your appreciation of the simple things.
Joe Gordon was waiting for me; the venture capitalist and his wife Fiona were sitting on ornate metal chairs in a sunken patio area. Their five-year-old daughter, Heloise, was sprawled on a pile of cushions, playing with a ginger kitten.
“Thanks for paying my bail,” I said.
“Sorry it took so long, Doctor,” he said. “The preparations weren’t easy, but we have a private plane waiting to take you to the Caribbean—an island the EU has no extradition treaty with.”
“I see. Do you think it’s necessary?”
“For the moment, yes. The Brussels Bioethics Commission is looking to make an example of you. They didn’t appreciate how many regulations you violated.”
“They wouldn’t have minded if the treatment had worked properly.”
“Of course not, but that day isn’t here yet, is it? We can set you up with another lab out there.”
“Ah well, there are worse places to be exiled. I appreciate it.”
“Least we could do. My colleagues and I made a lot of money from the Viagra gland you developed.”
I looked at Heloise again. She was a beautiful child, and the smile on her face as she played with the kitten was angelic. The ball of ginger fluff was full of rascally high spirits, just like every two-month-old kitten. I kept staring, shocked by the familiar pattern of marbling in its fluffy light fur.
“Yes,” Joe said with quiet pride. “I managed to save one before the court had the litter destroyed. A simple substitution; the police never knew.”
“It’s three years old now,” I whispered.
“Indeed. Heloise is very fond of it.”
“Do you understand what this means? The initial stasis-regeneration procedure is valid. If the kitten is still alive and maintaining itself at the same biological age after this long, then in theory it can live forever, just as it is. The procedure stabilized its cellular structure.”
“I understand perfectly, thank you, Doctor. Which is why we intend to keep on funding your research. We believe that human rejuvenation is possible.”
I recognized the greed in his eyes: it wasn’t pleasant. “It’s still a long way off. This procedure was just the first of a great many. It has no real practical application, we can’t use it on an adult. Once a mammal reaches sexual maturity its cells can’t accept such a radical modification.”
“We have every confidence that in the end you’ll produce the result we all want.”
I turned back to the child with her pet, feeling more optimistic than I had in three years. “I can do it,” I said through clenched teeth. “I can.” Revenge, it is said, is best served cold. I could see myself looking down on the gravestones of those fools in the Bioethics Commission in, say…oh, about 500 years’ time. They’d be very cold indeed by then.
Joe’s affable smile suddenly hardened. I turned, fearing the police had arrived. I’m still very twitchy about raids.
It wasn’t the police. The teenage girl coming out from the house was dressed in a black leather micro-skirt and very tight scarlet T-shirt. She would have been attractive if it wasn’t for the permanent expression of belligerence on her face; the tattoos weren’t nice either. The short sleeves on the T-shirt revealed track marks on her arms. “Is that…”
