Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

He found the sheer number of shops fun to browse, but few of them sold anything of use to humans. In the beginning, a lot of researchers and scientists had rushed there to buy what the Galactics were selling, sure they could reverse engineer what they found.

Turned out it was a lot of cheap alien stuff that purported to be made in Earth but wasn’t. Last year some government agency purchased a “real” human sports car that could be shipped back to the home planet of your choice. It had an engine inside that seemed to be some kind of antigravity device that got everyone really excited. It exploded when they cracked the casing, taking out several city blocks.

When confronted about it, the tall, furry, sauropod-like aliens that had several other models in their windows on Broadway shrugged and said it wasn’t made by them, they just shipped them to Earth to sell.

But Galactics packed the city buying that shit when they weren’t slouching beside the lakes in Central Park. If Tavi couldn’t get to Manhattan, he didn’t have a job.

With a groan, Tavi tapped 9-1-1. There were going to be a lot of questions. He was going to be in it up to his neck.

But if he took off, they’d have his transponder on file. Then he’d look guilty.

With a faint clenching in his stomach, Tavi prepared for his day to go wrong.

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 Bureau of Tourism 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. “Maybe they’ll tip you a million.”

“ Shiiiit . Maybe they’ll tip you a trillion .”

It was an old service-job joke. How much did it cost to cross a galaxy to put your own eyes, or light receptors, on a world just for the sake of seeing it yourself? Some of the aliens who had come to Earth had crossed distances so great, traveled in ships so complicated, that they spent more than a whole country’s GDP.

A tip from one of them could be millions. There were rumors of such extravagances. A dish boy turned rich suddenly. A tour guide with a place built on the moon.

But the Bureau of Tourism and the Galactic-owned companies bringing the tourists here warned them not to overpay for services. The Earth was a fragile economy, they said. You didn’t want to just run around handing out tips worth a year of some individual’s salary. You could create accidental inflation, or unbalance power in a neighborhood.

So the apps on the tourist’s systems, whatever types of systems they used, knew what the local exchange rates were and paid folk down here on the ground proportionally.

Didn’t stop anyone from wishing, though.

Geoff slid him over a plate of macaroni pie, some peas and rice, and chicken. Tavi told him about his morning.

“You shouldn’t have called the police,” Geoff said.

“And what, just keep flying?”

“The bureau will blacklist you. They have to save face. And no one is going to want to hear about a tourist dying on the surface. It’s bad publicity. You’re going to lose your license into Manhattan. NYC bureau’s the worst, man.”

Tavi cleaned his fingers on a towel, then coughed. The taste of cinnamon came up strong through his throat.

“You okay?”

Tavi nodded, eyes watering. Whatever the pack out there was sniffing, it was ripping through his lungs.

“You need to be careful,” Geoff said. “Get a better filter in that cab. Nichelle’s father got lung cancer off a bunch of shit coming off the suits of some sundivers last year, doctors couldn’t do nothing for him.”

“I know, I know,” Tavi said between coughs.

Geoff handed him a bag with something rolled up in aluminum foil inside. “Roti for the road. Chicken, no bone. I have doubles if you want?”

“No.” Geoff was being too nice. He knew how Tavi was climbing out from a financial hole and had been bringing by “extras” after he closed up each night.

Most of the food here was for non-human tourists, variations on foods that wouldn’t upset their unique systems. Tavi had lied in taking the tourist pack here; the food out front was for the dog-like aliens. But the stuff in the bag was real, something Geoff made for folk who knew to come in through the back.

Tavi did one more run back to JFK, and this time he flew a few loops around the megastructure. JFK Interspacial was the foot of a leg that stretched up into the sky, piercing the clouds and rising beyond until it reached space. It was a pier that led to the deep water where the vast alien ships that moved tourists from star to star docked. It was the pride of the US. Congress had financed it by pledging the entire country’s GDP for a century to a Galactic building consortium, so no one really knew how to build another after it was done, but the promise was that increased Manhattan tourism would bring in jobs. Because with the Galactics shipping in things to sell here in exchange for things they wanted, there wasn’t much in the way of industrial capacity. Over half the US economy was tourism, the rest service jobs.