The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  They walked until they dropped, but they found their love as they dropped, and fell in an embrace. Thus they met the end of Romeo and Juliet, despite Todd’s attempt to break free from myth.

  Three hundred years later, when the true Space Age began, their well-preserved corpses would be a source of plays and novels, and they would live on always as one of the great mysteries of that age.

  —for Allen Varney

  ALIEN BOOTLEGGER

  Rebecca Ore

  Rebecca Ore made her first sale to Amazing in 1986. Although she would make several more sales to Amazing over the next few years, as well as sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction and elsewhere, she has made her biggest impact on the science fiction world to date with her novels, and especially with the intricate and intelligent depiction of alien life forms that characterizes her well-known “Alien” trilogy, Becoming Alien, Being Alien, and Human to Human. Her other novels include Declaration Rules and the well-received The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid. Her most recent books are her first collection, Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories, and a fantasy novel, Slow Funeral.

  Ore lives in Critiz, Virginia, in the same kind of Appalachian country she describes so lovingly and with such a keen eye for regional cultural differences in much of her fiction—as in the sly and fast-paced novella that follows, the richly comic and ultimately quite profound story of an entrepreneur muscling in on new territory who has a bit of an edge on the competition.…

  1

  Lilly Nelson at the Hardware Store

  When I first saw the alien was the first warm day after a terrible winter of layoffs. Years like these, men stare at the seed packs, the catalogues for fertilizer spreaders, and wonder if they’ve got enough land for a distiller’s corn crop. Or would the mills hire back soon enough as to make farming superfluous? Rocky Mount was full that day of men speculating about turning back to what their ancestors did back when southwestern Virginia was the frontier. Sort of like what didn’t starve out the great-grandparents won’t starve out us. But few had kept their tractors. No one had draft animals. The ancestors had hated farming like crazy, and the descendants really wanted the factories to start hiring again. But meantime, let’s get some equipment clerk to distract us or go out and gossip about the alien.

  My own business wasn’t off—none of my Driving Under the Influence clients had written me a bad check yet—but I’d still gone to the hardware store, even knowing how crowded it would be. I needed my own distraction. Fibroids waited in my uterus for a sonogram on Tuesday, so today I hefted plastic mesh bags full of spring bulbs, comparing the lies on the package flap to the real flowers I’d seen the last summer I’d planted them.

  Just my luck, I’d have to have surgery. Odd, I’d never wanted children, and it would have been absurd to have a child to take care of when I was forty-three and had my aunt Berenice to worry about, but to have it come to this. Then while I was drinking a Dr Pepper for the caffeine to soothe my addiction headache and waiting for a clerk to sell me some dahlias, the alien walked in and I was finally distracted.

  Nobody wanted to act like a gawking hick. We watched each other to time one quick stare apiece, aiming our eyes when nobody else was looking. The hardware store itself looked weird after I looked away. The alien jolted my eyes into seeing more detail than I’d ever noticed before—dead flies on a fly strip, the little bumps in the plastic weave under my fingers, a cracked front tooth in the clerk’s face as he came around the counter.

  “Welding equipment,” the alien said as a nervous man in a business suit tugged on one of his long bony arms. “Stainless steel welding equipment, stainless-steel pipe, stainless sheets, stainless-steel milk tank.”

  The clerk looked at me. I nodded, meaning okay, deal with that first.

  As the clerk came to him, the alien adjusted the flow on an acetylene torch. He looked like a man crossed with a praying mantis, something a farmer watched for crop-damaging tendencies. In the chitinous head, the eyes looked more jelly-like than decent, though I suspect my own eyes in that head would look just as bad. Actually, the eyes were more or less like human eyes; it was the ears that were faceted like stereo speakers. Big enough. Little indentations inside the facets. I bet it could tell you precisely where a noise was coming from.

  So here the alien is, one of the ones about which we’ve been reading all the reassurances the government chose to give us, I thought. One was hiking the Japanese central mountain crest trail. That was the one the media went crazy over, but others were living in Africa working on tilapia and other food-fish recombinant DNA projects and weaving handicrafts or in Europe taking sailing lessons or studying automotive mechanics. They’d all arrived in a faster-than-light ship and said they were tourists. Yeah, sure, but they had that FTL ship and we didn’t.

  “Lilly, told you I been seeing saucers since 1990 down in Wytheville off 1-77 junction,” a bootlegger’s driver said to me quietly. I looked at the man and wondered if he was driving for one of the DeSpain cousins now. Berenice was always curious about the DeSpains, as though they were a natural phenomenon, not criminals at all. She accused me of resenting criminals who made more money than I did.

  “Look at its ears,” I said, meaning let’s not talk until it’s out of the building at least.

  He considered them and looked back at me with tighter lips.

  I shrugged and visualized the fibroids down inside me, flattened sea cucumbers squirming around. Maybe the alien would bring us better medicine? He bought his equipment and said, “Pickup truck with diplomatic plates.”

  “Bring it around to the side,” the clerk said, trying to sound normal, almost making it.

  After the alien left, the bootlegger’s driver said, “What is he planning to weld stainless for?”

  We all knew one of the options—still-making, no lead salts in stainless-steel boys’ product, and the metal was cheaper than copper. Or maybe he was setting up a dairy? “Maybe he’s a romantic.” I paused. “You ever consider working for Coors?” I said before walking back to the office. I knew his answer before he could have replied—driving legal was a boring-ass job; driving illegal was an adventure.

  Tomorrow was Legal Aid, so I wanted to get the partnership papers filed on the Witherspoon Craft Factory before five. I dreaded Legal Aid. When times were bad, the men screamed at their wives and children, and the women wanted divorces. If he beats you, I’d always say, I’ll help you, but just for yelling at you, come on, honey, you can’t support kids on seven dollars an hour. Better to dust off the old copper pot and get a gristmill, clean the coil, fill a propane tank, and cook some local color in the basement that tax evaders and tourists pay good money for.

  When we heard the aliens were just tourists, the first joke everyone in Franklin County seemed to have heard or simultaneously invented was if having one around was going to drive up real estate taxes again.

  When I got into the office, the answering machine was blinking. My aunt Berenice spoke off the disc: “I remembered hearing where Patty Hearst was hiding, but I think it was just some fire-mouthing. Even then, I was getting too old for simple rhetoric. Bring me something … I forget now … when you come home. And, Lilly, your message makes you sound impossibly country.”

  It wasn’t that she was that senile, Berenice was simply righteously paranoid from a long radical life. I made a note to pick up some single scotch malt from Bobby. He was making fine liquor for now. An independent, but maybe everyone would leave him alone because he made such classic liquor. And he had hospital bills to pay. Pre-existing condition in his child.

  Then I wondered why I wasn’t more excited about the alien. Maybe because I had so much to worry about myself, like who was going to take care of Berenice when I went under the knife?

  I filed the partnership papers at the courthouse and drove by Bobby’s to pick up the single malt. When I pulled up at his house, he was sitting on the porch, twitching a straw in his hand.

  “Bobby,” I said. He had to know what I
was here for.

  “Yo, Luce. I had a visitor today.”

  “Um,” meaning are you going to be a client of mine anytime soon?

  “One of the DeSpains.”

  “You been aging it for five years—”

  He interrupted, “More.”

  “So didn’t you just slip it to friends like I suggested? It’s not like you do it for a living.”

  “I do need the money. But I wanted to make really good liquor. Seemed less desperate that way.”

  “It’s fine liquor,” I said.

  “It was fine liquor,” Bobby said. “DeSpain isn’t going to make me his man.”

  “Well, Bobby,” I said, watching the straw still rolling between his hands, “be careful.” What could I tell him? Dennis DeSpain wasn’t the roughest cousin, and nothing in the liquor business was as rough as the drug business. “You don’t have any liquor now?” Bobby shook his head, the straw pausing a second. Now I had to stop by the ABC store before I went home. Daddy always said legal liquor had artificial dyes and synthetic odors in it.

  When I got up to go, Bobby said, “I guess my wife will have to start waiting tables over at the Lake. I’m just lucky I’m on first shift. In the dye house.” We both knew why the dye house never laid anyone off—the heat drove close to a hundred percent turnovers there.

  “When I was younger,” I said as I got my car keys back out of my purse, “I was going to reform the world. Then, Franklin County. Now…”

  “Yeah, now,” Bobby said.

  “Well, I won’t have you as a client, then.”

  He jerked his shoulders. “I don’t know what I thought I was doing.”

  “Liquor-making the old way is a fine craft.”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, Lilly. I thought if I did it fine, it wouldn’t be so desperate. Man with bad debts turns to making liquor.”

  So, bad times and no simple solutions. I sighed and got in the car, then remembered the alien buying stainless-steel welding equipment, his fingers longer than a man’s but fiddling with the valve with the same bent-head attention as a skilled human.

  I drove back to the ABC store. The alien was leaning against the wall of the ABC store, eating Fig Newtons. At his feet was an ABC store brown bag full of what looked like sampler bottles. The man with him looked even more nervous than the two of them in the hardware store, furtive like. When the alien opened his mouth to bite, I saw his teeth were either crusted with tartar or very weird. They were also rounded, like a child draws teeth, not squared. He stopped to watch me go in. When I came out with the legal malt whiskey, I nodded to him.

  “Lawyer,” he said. “Ex-radical. Wanted to meet you, but not so much by accident that you’d be suspicious.” I went zero to the bone. The voice seemed synthetic, the intonation off even though the accent was utter broadcast journalism.

  “He’s very interested in Franklin County,” his human guide said. “And liquor.” Poor guy sounded like he knew precisely why the alien had bought all the stainless-steel welding equipment and the liquor samples.

  “Really?” I said, not quite asking, remembering quite well the year when most of the distillers went to stainless steel—thank God, no more of the car-radiator stills that killed drinkers.

  The man said, “I’m Henry Allen, with the State Department. He’s Turkemaw of Svarti, a guest of our government.”

  “And a vegetarian,” I said, having recovered enough to pass by them and get back in my car. A farmer would try Sevrin dust or even an illegal brew of DDT if he saw the alien in a stand of corn.

  I don’t know why I think farmer—I’ve never farmed day one in my life and I lived in New York for years. Berenice complains I sound like I’m trying to pass for redneck, but the sound’s inside my head, too. Back at home, a chill intensifying with the dark, Berenice and a young black woman were sitting on the porch talking. They didn’t have the porch light on, so I knew they’d been sitting there awhile, Berenice in the swing, the black woman stiff on the teak bench, both so absorbed in each other they were oblivious to the cold and dark. I tried to remember her name … Mary … no, Marie, a chemical engineering student who’d grown up to be one of those black women who’d gone to college and become plant chemical control officers, rather ferocious about their rise up. Berenice loved anyone who had ears to listen and hadn’t heard all her stories yet.

  As I got out of the car, I felt a bit ashamed of myself for thinking that. She’d told me enough about Marie that I should have realized Berenice listened to her, too.

  When Berenice said, “And the Howe women I knew from Boston said that Emily Dickinson was a senator’s daughter and that she tried like a motherfucker to get published,” the girl threw her head back and laughed. Laughed without holding back, genuinely fond of my aunt, genuinely amused, so I thought better of her.

  Marie said, “They didn’t teach me that at Tech.”

  “No, professors all want to believe they’re more than schoolteachers, but they don’t know what real poets are like.” Berenice could be fierce about this. One of her husbands or lovers wrote poetry books that sold in the forties of thousands. “Always remember you’re more than a chemical engineering student, Marie. Everyone is always more than the labels other people want to put on them.”

  “Of course I’m more than a chemical engineer,” Marie said, tightening the dignity muscles again. I reminded myself of what I’d been like at eighteen and felt more compassionate to us all.

  “Terrella—” Berenice began. I remembered hearing about Terrella, the black woman bootlegger in the forties who killed a man.

  “Terrella,” Marie said. “That kind of kin threatens me.”

  I set the bottle down by Berenice. She sniffed and opened it, sniffed again. “Argh, fake esters. What happened to Bobby’s?”

  “DeSpain.”

  Marie stiffened. Yeah, I remembered too late that I’d named a lover she’d just broken with. Berenice had heard quite a bit about it, as Berenice, when she was in her best mind, could get people to talk. I’d hear more later. Berenice said, “Lilly, get three glasses.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Terrella,” Marie said again. As I got the little glasses we used for straight liquor, I wondered if two denials made a positive. Terrella wore long black skirts way into the fifties, with a pistol and a knife hidden in the folds. Her hair had grown into dreadlocks before we ever knew the style was a style and had a name. She left $25,000 and a house to her daughter when she died, which was remarkable for a black woman in those days, however she got the money. Berenice admired people who could work around the system and not lose, even when they were criminals. To Berenice, one should never resign oneself to any status other people thought appropriate.

  “So you’re kin to Terrella,” I said, putting all the glasses on the table that went with the bench and pouring us each about an inch of the Scotch.

  “I’m even kin to Hugous, the man who runs The Door 18.”

  “Smart man,” Berenice said. “Terrella was smart, too.”

  “She was a hoodlum,” Marie said. “Hugous—”

  “Hugous puts money aside, no matter how he makes it,” Berenice said. “That’s always useful in a capitalist state. Considering that sloppy capitalism’s all we have to work with.” Berenice freed her long gray hair to dangle radical-hippie style and grinned at me. So she’d always been looser and more tolerant than I. I had enough rigidity to get a law degree so that I could support her. Retirement homes, even ones better than she could have afforded, terrified her.

  Not that we weren’t more two of a kind than anyone else in the county, but I always wanted to organize the poor while she thought the poor ought to kick liberal ass as well as boss ass.

  “I saw the alien today after I made the appointment for the sonogram,” I said.

  “Fibroids. Mother had them,” Berenice said. “They thought they were cancer and sent her womb to Wake Forest.”

  “Jesus, Berenice,” Marie said. “That’s like hearing Dennis talk
about jail rape.”

  So, I wondered, what was the context? Did Dennis rape or get raped? Berenice picked up her scotch and drank it all down in one swallow, the crepey skin jerking on her scrawny neck, the long gray hair flying. “Well, Marie, you like your life?”

  “It’s fine,” the girl said tonelessly. “I like Montgomery County better than here.”

  Meaning gossip in Rocky Mount about Dennis DeSpain was a problem, I thought, and none of the Tech students knew yet that she had outlaw kin. I looked at Berenice. Marie got up to go, her hypercorrect suit wrinkled anyway around her rump. I watched as she got in her little Honda.

  “Berenice, I saw the alien buying welding equipment.”

  Berenice said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Marie can weld, too.”

  “DeSpain won’t like that.”

  “Dennis taught Marie about bootlegging. She left him because he tempted her.”

  “Tempted her? I mean, it isn’t like half of Rocky Mount didn’t see them having breakfast and smelling of come last fall.”

  “Tempted her to become a bootlegger. I suspect it’s become like any other supervisory job to Dennis and he needs to have someone new see him as glamorous and dangerous.”

  “Jesus, I thought he was about half in the Klan, certainly able to fuck blacks, but not able to admit they’ve got brains as good as a white boy’s.”

  “Marie’s definitely smarter than most white boys.” Berenice looked for the clip she’d pulled out of her hair and tucked all her hair in the clip behind her neck again. “She’s specializing in alcohols and esters. State’s going to legalize liquor-making one of these days to get some of the taxes.”

  “Why would a Tech student want to make liquor?” I said, angry that she’d risk a college degree for something that trivial. Not so trivial, perhaps, if one was Bobby sweating in a polyester dye house for two dollars an hour over minimum wage, but for a chemical engineering student—stupid.