The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781328618863
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Tavi stood on a pier, wearing a gas mask to filter out the streams of what seemed like mustard gas that would seep out from a nearby building in DUMBO. The cops, also wearing masks, took a brief statement. Tavi gave his fingerprint, and then they told him to leave.

“Just leave?”

There were several harbor-patrol boats hovering near where the alien had struck the water. But there was a lack of urgency to it all. Mostly everyone seemed to be waiting around for something to happen.

The cop taking Tavi’s statement wore a yellow jumpsuit with logos advertising a Financial District casino (RISK YOUR MONEY HERE, JUST LIKE THEY USED TO IN THE OLD STOCK MARKET! WIN BIG, RING THE OLD BELL!). He nodded through his gas mask as he took notes.

“We have your contact info on file. We’re pulling footage now.”

“But aren’t you going to drag the river?”

“Go.”

There was something in the cop’s tone that made it through the muffled gas mask and told Tavi it was an order. He’d done the right thing in an impossible moment.

He’d done the right thing.

Right?

He wanted to go home and take a nap. Draw the shades and huddle in the dark and make all this go away for a day. But there were bills to pay. The cab required insurance, and the kinine fuel it used, shipped down from orbit, wasn’t cheap. Every time the sprinklers under the cab misted up and put down a new layer, Tavi could hear his bank account dropping.

But you couldn’t drive on the actual ground into Manhattan, not if you wanted to get a good review. Plus, the ground-traffic-flow licenses were even more whack than flying licenses because the interstellar tourists didn’t want to put up with constant traffic snarls.

Trying to tell anyone that traffic was authentic old Manhattan just got you glared at.

So: four more fares. More yellowed gas mixing into the main cabin of the cab, making Tavi cough and his eyes water. The last batch, a pack of wolflike creatures that poured into the cab, chittering and yapping like squirrels, requested he take them somewhere serving human food.

“Real human food, not that shit engineered to look like it, but doctored so that our systems can process it.”

Tavi’s dash had lit up with places the Tourist Bureau authorized for this pack of aliens that kept grooming each other as he watched them in his mirror.

“Yeah, okay.”

He took them to his cousin Geoff’s place up in Harlem, which didn’t have as many skyscrapers bubble-wrapped with alien atmospheres. The pack creatures were oxygen breathers, but they supplemented that with something extra running to their noses in tubes that occasionally wheezed and puffed a dust of cinnamon-smelling air.

Tavi wanted some comfort food pretty badly by this point. While the aliens tried to make sense of the really authentic human menus out front, he slipped into the hot gleaming stainless steel of the kitchens in the back.

“Ricky!” Geoff shouted. “You bring those dogs in?”

“Yes,” Tavi confessed, and Geoff gave him a half hug, his dreadlocks slapping against Tavi.

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