Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

We mounted a rescue attempt immediately. Cody, number six in the cowboy lineup, was a pilot whenever he wasn’t practicing his sit spins. With his aerial skills, my financial resources, and the true bravery of cowboys everywhere, we sped north. By the time we arrived, flames were shooting from the pristine countryside. The government lab was in ruins. Neill and Buck were safe in the woods, but Neill’s left arm was missing.

“They took it,” Neill said, holding his empty sleeve forlornly. I imagine he was thinking about sex again; it’s hard to perform the Four in Hand when you don’t have a hand to put in the appropriate orifice.

Yuri thumped him on the back. “We’ll build you another, partner.”

Dana gave Neill a kiss on the cheek, leaving pink lipstick behind. “The important thing is you’re alive.”

Buck was sooty but unharmed. We considered each other across the small clearing. His shoulders were stiff, his chin defiant. I wondered if he had killed any of the government men, and if he’d feel bad about that in the years to come.

Neill said, “You should come back with us, Buck.”

“Nah,” he said, in a slow but deliberate drawl. “I’m better off on my own for now. But y’all keep in touch.”

With that he loped off into the woods, his gait odd.

Only once we were on the chopper, speeding home, did I realize Buck had sawed the skates off his feet.

For the first thirty years of my life, men in women’s clothing did nothing for me. Dana changed all that. By day he skated around in his blue jeans, leather gloves, and black shirts with elbow patches. Come evening, he would disappear into my closets and emerge wearing the best of my gowns, shoes, and precious jewelry. I don’t know who taught him how to apply makeup but he was a master designer with shadow and blush. Whoever knew my nipples would perk up at the sight? The human body is a strange organism.

He said he didn’t want to be a woman full time. That would ruin the skating act. But from the moment he came out of the factory he had a yearning for the lacy softness of a brassiere, the arch of fine high heel shoes, the glitter and graceful folds of a well-made cocktail dress. He liked to shave his legs (yes, my robots had renewable hair) and stretch long, sleek stockings over them. He enjoyed hooking a lace garter belt around his hips. In bed he wore pink lingerie and was an enthusiastic supporter of phalluses shaped like pistols. He also would say or do anything to make me laugh, including the use of feathers, ice cubes, and an endless supply of dirty limericks.

Before the Big Freeze, Dana would go into town dressed as a woman, on the prowl for a man who could love all of him. I worried about those trips, but there’s no stopping a sexy cowboy on a mission. After Neill’s rescue at Mount Sugarloaf, Dana’s feelings for him flared into a one-sided infatuation that affected them both on the ice. Dana started doubling his jumps instead of landing triples, and Neill nearly dropped him once during a lift, and then someone loosened the seams on Neill’s costume so that all of him popped out during a backflip.

Things might have gotten worse between them, but the next day we received a distress call from Long Island Sound. An ice barge with children aboard had run into trouble. The boys saddled up and rode out on snowmobiles. During the rescue Dana was lost to the water. One moment he was hoisting an infant to safety and in the next, the merciless ice had opened up and sucked him into its black depths.

Neill took the loss especially hard. For weeks he skated around the rink in silence, wearing black clothes and one of Dana’s favorite feather boas. I myself tried to remember all of Dana’s dirty jokes and limericks. None of them seemed funny anymore. The others mourned their lost brother by getting his name tattooed on their forearms and inventing a new jump-spin-land combination called Dana’s Stick.

Buck heard about it, though I’m not sure which of the boys called him. He called me on the vid to express his regrets. I could see a blazing hearth behind him; his secret lair didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but there seemed to be a lot of computers and equipment. I imagined the place was as gloomy and bitter as Buck himself.

“Dana was a good cowboy,” Buck said. “I’m sorry he’s gone.”

“Are you?” I asked. “You didn’t much approve of his attire.”

Which was true, and Buck was robot enough not to deny it.

“I don’t want to fight,” he said, instead. On the vid, his shoulders were slumped and his eyes downcast. “I do miss y’all, even if you don’t miss me.”

Fat snowflakes slapped lightly against the windows of my bedroom. It wasn’t like Buck to be so boldly needy. Maybe all those years alone in New Hampshire were changing his outlook on life. He’d gone there after Herbert’s death; to mourn, maybe, or to bitterly rue the loss of his creator.

“We miss you a lot,” I told him. “You can come home anytime you want.”

“My work is important.” Like Doc, Buck had inherited Herbert’s genius and overinflated ego. He believed he could save the planet. I guess the real Herbert might have been able to, but his mechanical heir hadn’t succeeded yet.

“Kay,” Buck said, breaking the silence between us. “If I came back, would you get rid of everyone but me? Would you let me be your only cowboy?”

From Buck, this was unheard of. We’d never even kissed. From day one he’d been wild, untamed, his own free robot.

He must have seen confusion in my face, because he logged off without saying goodbye.

As it turned out, our grieving over Dana was happily in vain. Three weeks after the disaster on the ice, he sent word from Key West. Robots don’t need to breathe, of course, so after being sucked into the powerful currents of the reversed Gulf Stream, he’d simply hung on for the ride. He liked Key West a lot. Though it was no longer a tropical paradise, the ice fishermen still applauded the sunset each night before snuggling into their igloos. He’d found true love in the arms of a Cuban named Elian, and did we mind if he stayed down there to teach the locals how to figure skate?

Yuri and Cody were my fiercely competitive sexy robots. Not on the ice. During performances they were consummate professionals, and the townsfolk who came up for the shows once a month never saw their intense rivalry. But you’ve never seen two boys compete so much over who could eat more flapjacks (though they couldn’t, technically, eat), get more drunk (simulated, in wildly hilarious ways), or score higher on cowboy video games (eighteen-hour marathon sessions in the library were not unheard of, until I got sick of hearing “Yee-haw!” and threw them out). In the back forty they rode robot horses and roped robot steer until Doc had to bang the dents out of them, and then they started all over again. In my bed they wrestled over who got my back passage and who got my front. No matter who won, I always benefited from their rivalry.

One day they got it into their heads to see who could cross-country ski the farthest. By this time Doc was in Italy, Dana was in Key West, and Buck was still in New Hampshire. The skate show had diminished to just Yuri, Cody, and Neill, and didn’t draw crowds from town like it used to. Not that many people still lived anywhere in New England. The smart ones had drifted south to the crowded equatorial nations, and the old ones rarely left their homes anymore.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Cody asked one night, his hand pumping away pleasurably inside me.

“Mind what?” I gasped.

Yuri’s mouth lifted from my right nipple. “If we modify skis to fit our skates and go off for a little while.”