I smile, to be polite, and then tilt my chin, like, you got another customer. She turns, and sees the guy who has a disturbingly blank expression on his face, but when she looks at me again, I shrug, as if to say, too bad we can't talk.
When I get home, I have to clean the place. I've let it go and my mother would shit if she saw it, but she never tries to visit, and doesn't even call. She's got her own life now, and doesn't like to be reminded of the old one, I guess, the one me and my brother are stuck in forever. I pick up beer cans and paper plates and realize this hasn't exactly been the best environment for children. I freaking hate to clean, but after a while I sort of get into it, I put one of the new DVDs in, I don't know what it was called but it was bright and noisy and cheerful, it kept me company. I even washed the windows. Then I hung up the streamers, twisting them from the ceiling in the kitchen and the living room, and I set up the tree, and the tablecloth, and the plates, and then I put the clown costume on, and I looked at myself in the mirror: I was wearing a bright red, yellow, blue, and green polka-dotted jumpsuit, giant red shoes that flopped six inches from my toes, a bright red wig, and a red nose. I looked at myself for awhile, trying to figure out who I reminded myself of, and then I flashed back to a birthday party—was it for me or my brother?—my father dressed up like a clown. I grab my phone and call. The answering machine picks up.
"The thing is," I say, "I mean, come on. Don't give up on me so fast, OK? It was just a movie. It's research, all right? Fuck. I mean really, fuck. Look, I didn't give up on you even with all the drugs and the stealing and shit, right? Right?" It seems like I should say something else, something perfect, but I can't think what that would be so I hang up and call Terry.
"The thing is," I say, "I haven't been completely honest."
There's a moment's pause. A long moment before he says, "Shoot."
"The thing is," I say, "what I want to write about isn't an innocent man." I wait, but he doesn't say anything. "The children . . ." She is standing there, in the middle of the living room, staring at the Christmas tree with the strangest expression on her face. She is dressed just like a regular little girl, in little girl pajamas and a bathrobe. I wave at her and point to the phone, signaling that I'll be winding the call up soon, but her expression doesn't change, she looks at me with confusion, and sorrow.
"What about the kids? What's your point? Can you just give it to me in a sentence?"
"The children were telling the truth, my father was not an innocent man."
Terry whistles, long and low. "Fuck," he says.
"You're the first person I ever told."
"Well, this puts us in the crapper without any shit, that's for sure."
"What?" She is reaching for the tree, touching it lightly with her fingertips, as though afraid it will disappear.
"Listen, if that's the case, what we got is just another story about a fucking pedophile. Those are a dime a dozen. The market is saturated with them. It's not a special story anymore, it's just . . . now wait a second, that kid, you're not saying he had anything to do with that kid's murder are you, 'cause if you were saying that, well then we'd have a story."
"No." She is petting the tree, and this part really gets to me, she leans in to smell it, even though it is fake, she presses her face real close to the branches and then she realizes I am watching and she looks at me again, but in a new way, like she has something she wants to say, like she needs me. "I gotta go," I say.
"I mean even if you think he could have possibly had something to do with it, that we might be able to sell. It gets tricky, 'cause you know all of a sudden everyone's fact checking the hell out of memoirs, but we might be able to work that angle, you know, not that you really believe he killed her, 'cause everyone knows her parents did it, right, but like you could tie her into your story and the idea that your father was someone like her father, you might have something there, OK? We might be able to sell that."
She has big eyes, and they are sad, and she wants to tell me something important, maybe she's going to tell me who did kill her. "Listen, I gotta go," I say. Terry keeps talking, he's getting excited now, just the way, all those years ago, everyone got excited about her murder. I click the phone off.
"What is it?" I say. "You can tell me."
"I wet myself," she says, in the softest little girl voice.
Sure enough, there's a wet stain down the front of her pajamas, and a puddle on the rug beneath the Christmas tree. "That's OK," I say, even as the dank odor reaches me, "sometimes that happens. Why don't you go in the bathroom and take off your clothes. Do you have a way, I mean, I don't know how this works, do you have some clean clothes with you?"
She shakes her head.
I nod, like, OK, no problem. The phone rings and she looks relieved when I don't make any move to answer it. Instead I search through the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor until I find a dingy white t-shirt and a brand new pair of boxer shorts, which of course will be huge on her, so I also give her a tie. She looks up at me with confusion when I hand her the stuff. "It'll be like a costume, for the party. Kind of different from the kind you usually wear, I know. Go in the bathroom, OK, and wash yourself off and take off your wet pajamas and put on the t shirt, and these shorts, and tie these with this, see, like a belt."
"Will you wipe me?" she says.
I shouldn't be surprised by this; I've read all about how she still asked people to wipe her, even though she was dressed up like a movie star. "No. You have to do it yourself, ok?"
She shakes her head and starts to cry.
One thing I can't stand is a crying kid. "OK," I say, "OK, just don't cry, all right?"
We walk into the bathroom and I help her out of her pajamas, her skin is white, pure as fresh soap, and she is completely unembarrassed of her nakedness. She smiles when I wipe her, first with toilet paper, and then with a towel dampened with warm water and I just try not to think about anything, about how tiny she is, or how perfect. I help her put the clean t-shirt on and the boxer shorts, which I cinch around her little waist with the tie and by then she is laughing and I am too and we stand before the mirror to look at ourselves but all I see is me, in the ridiculous clown costume. Where does she keep disappearing to? I call her name, searching through all the rooms, thinking she's playing some kind of game, but I can't find her anywhere. The doorbell rings and I run to answer it, laughing because it's very funny the way she's hidden outside but when I open the door, my brother is standing there.
"Oh, fuck," he says.
"It's not the way it looks."
He looks behind me, at the streamers, the table set with Barbie and dinosaur plates, the cupcakes, the Christmas tree. "Fuck," he says.
"No, wait," I holler, and when he doesn't stop I follow him, flopping down the stairs. "Wait," I say, running after him, though it is difficult in the too-big red shoes, the red wig bouncing down my forehead, "it's not how it looks."
He turns, and I smile at him, knowing he'll understand, after all, we share the same childhood, but instead he looks at me with a horrified expression, as if I am a terrifying ghost, and then he turns his back on me and runs. I don't try to follow him; instead I walk back to my house. Someone in a passing car shouts something and throws a paper cup of soda at me, but misses. I am surprised by this, it seems to me clowns deserve a little respect; after all, they only exist to make people laugh.
When I get back inside, I shut the door and sit on the couch in front of the TV and watch the cartoon people, who are shaped like balloons. There are no dead children and there are no secrets in a world where everyone is brightly colored and devoid of the vulnerabilities of flesh. In balloon world all the problems explode or float away. Even though it's been cold and cloudy for weeks, the sun comes out and fills the room with an explosion of light until I can no longer see the picture on the TV screen. One of the streamers comes loose and dangles over my head, twirling, and I can't help but think, that in spite of what Terry said, there is plenty of shit for the
crapper, but it doesn't matter, because in the distance, I hear the soft hum of a little girl singing. And just like that my mood improves, because I am waiting for the children, and just thinking about them, makes me smile.
The Valley of the Gardens
Tony Daniel
Writer, novelist, and poet, Tony Daniel published his first work in 1990. His first novel, Warpath, appeared in 1993 and was followed by Earthling and the science fiction diptych Metaplanetary and Superluminal. His short fiction has been collected in The Robot's Twilight Companion.
The moving story that follows takes the stuff of space opera—grand romantic adventure set on a galactic scale—and proves once again that the story is always about the people at the heart of the tale.
For weeks, Mac walked the fence. It formed the border where his land topped the mountainous ridge and sided the western slope where the Valley of the Gardens gave way to the Extremadura, Cangarriga's vast northern desert. To the unaided human eye, the fence was made of stone, with pillars of rocks serving as posts every few hundred feet. Within the pillars were steel posts set in concrete that communicated with the jack-rock below. The fence ran deep into the substrate of the land—coded, modified, recoded, and shored up with millennia of layered routine and subroutine—so beyond Mac's comprehension that he might as well call it ensorceled. But, magic or not, the fence had to be fixed, and to fix a fence properly you had to walk it, find the gaps and fill them in.
And the gaps this season were wider than any he ever remembered. The desert on the other side was encroaching, making inroads many feet long down his side of the ridge, and spreading its wildness, its potential pestilence, with it. His own land even on this high ground was tended ground. It might appear free, but that was merely because the land needed to be let alone sometimes. This ridge had been a vineyard before, and would be again someday. Now it was covered with broom grass interspersed with clumps of sage and rosemary. Restoration planting—as carefully planned as the straightest flower row.
The desert had broken through in multiple places in spear points of sand and creosote seedlings. He had more to do than he'd first anticipated. It surprised him. It alarmed him. In fact, his anxiety over the fence had worked its way into his dreams—and even into a couple of his nightmares.
He was reminded of fence gaps whether he was working the line or not. He'd be down below in the valley at some other task and suddenly hear the knowing screech of a desert grackle or be startled by the bounce and buzz of one of the enormous variegated grasshoppers blown into the valley by the winter westerlies in Cangarriga's northern hemisphere and feel shock, betrayal, by the fence. It was supposed to keep such things out—and away from his crops. At odd moments, he found himself suddenly fantasising that a gap in the fence had let in bad code and his upper fields were being subverted and ruined. He'd even start quickly in their direction until he came to his senses and realised he'd only been daydreaming. Dayworrying. He'd had a real dream one night featuring the valley as well. Every surface in it had glowed with a sickly yellow infection—the rosemary, sage and pine covered in a tacky, malfunctioning secretion. And he'd had several dim but troublesome nightmares featuring himself leaving, running through a break in the fence like a madman and disappearing (in the dreams, he was both observer and insane escapee) into the shimmer of the Extremadura vastness.
He couldn't be sure if it was himself or the valley itself that was bringing on the anxiety. Like the fence, Mac was deeply intertwined with the land in ways seen and unseen. But when he checked with other farmers, and with the villagers downvalley in Sant Llorenz, no one had noticed much different.
Maybe it was all just him.
In what was ancient custom while fence-mending, he'd been joined on most days by a Faller nomad, a representative of his neighbors—his sometime enemies and trading partners on the desert side. The Faller walked with him and watched Mac as he worked, allegedly there to be sure that Mac kept to the line and did not cheat the fence outward, but mostly attempting to talk Mac into trading off-planet tech for their desert gleanings. Whatever its purpose, this tradition served to keep the line stationary. For a fence nearly fifty thousand years old, one inch of movement for every season of fence-mending would lop off a great deal of new land, or lose a large field to wildness if pushed in the opposite direction.
For his part, Mac wanted not a speck of the Extremadura. It wasn't just desert, it was wild desert—never terraformed, but created as a battlefield, its source code hopelessly jangled, belligerent and untamed. Its jack-rock was still tainted with nox, the nanotech leavings of that war, never completely defanged. In addition, the Extremadura teemed with every manner of beast, all of them possessing a crazy sentience of sorts emanating from the jack-rock below. Yet people lived there. Nomads like Theresa.
Theresa had come on his second week working the fence, after her brother, the official watcher, had suffered some sort of injury and had to convalesce. She was a daughter of the Faller's clan that roamed this portion of the Extremadura, herding and harvesting whatever usable excretions the desert produced. The Fallers had been on Cangarriga since time immemorial, since the war itself, and were as much a part of the desert as Mac was a part of the valley.
If the valley was beauty and order, the desert was its opposite: wild almost beyond comprehension. It had taken root in the nomads as well. None was alike in appearance or even inner makeup. Some had grown carapaces, had beetled over with chitinous coats sporting insect-like wings that served as solar collectors and message transceivers. Others had grown odd appendages that served arcane purposes, or no purpose at all: roots, antlers. The girl appeared normal but for her forehead, which was nubbined with the buds of two tiny horns.
The weird was commonplace in the desert. What the nomads made their living from, such that it was, was finding the utterly unusual and unique. Over tens of thousands of years, even random computing was bound to churn out a few odd results that might be sold or traded for food and the various gewgaws the nomads lusted after.
Mac reflected that he ought to know; he'd done his share of trading over the years. He usually let his nonsentients analyse the goods, and he himself only had a general awareness of what he bought from the nomads. Customarily, these were things such as solutions to mathematical conundrums, oddball, incredibly compact methods for file archiving, or remixes of movies, novels, or music that might strike someone's fancy on some other world, but had never struck his. In exchange, he sold the nomads the motorcycles they adored, tents, drills, old analyser parts, obsolete robots and cracked-code nonsentient algorithms. Across the desert was strewn the detritus of humanity, the leavings of the religious pilgrimages that had occurred for several centuries after the war ended. Some of the junk was transformed in an odd or beautiful manner, brought back to a twilight life or function by interaction with the jack-rock and other castaway items. Most desert artifacts were worthless, however—as useless and stupid as the washing machine full of regenerating stones the nomads had once tried to sell him.
Much better to live in the Valley of the Gardens, where the land was loved, tended and bountiful.
He'd tried to tell Theresa that in one of their conversations.
"Until you set foot over the line and enter the valley, you'll never know what a shithole you live in," he'd said. "Give it a try, one try, and you're never going back."
Of course, he had no real idea what he was talking about. He'd never been more than a footstep into the Extremadura.
Mac had been teasing Theresa the day he challenged her to cross over, but the next time they met—she tried it. Without a word of warning, she hopped through a tumbled section of fence and stood on his property.
And hopped right back—as if touched by flame.
He'd checked the log that evening and saw that his encroachment protocols hadn't even been triggered by her presence. It was as if a leaf had fallen, or butterfly had flitted, over the edge, rather than a girl.
She was so light. A thing of t
he air. She spoke of the mountains to the south, mountains he'd only seen from trips into orbit, but where she'd been born and raised. She was a creature of high passes. Winter, or the slight chilling of a world that was always warm since the terraforming, was the time the nomads travelled to the flats—an area she hated.
"That's why I keep coming up here to walk with you," she told him. "This little ridge is the closest thing to a mountain I'll see until summer."
He didn't speak much, but asked questions and listened. Mostly what he did was work on the fence: he lifted and placed stones and scanned for true. Every hundred feet, he dug a posthole and set a metal tie into the jack-rock below with jack-ready concrete he mixed in a small green wheelbarrow. Theresa watched, occasionally pitched a stone that had fallen on her side back over to him, told him of her life in the desert mountains.
She was a goatherd. Often she lived in the high passes for weeks on end without seeing another human. The goats were for milk and occasional slaughter, and her main task was to keep desert predators away—which she did with a wicked weapon of a crook she described for Mac—and to rescue animals that got in tricky situations even for goats. Her horn nubbins were her connection to the herd. They were an artifact that had been passed down through generations of women in her clan.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II Page 50