The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Ray Bradbury Theater,” “Tales from the Darkside,” and a new show called “Werewolf” are also phosphor-dot invaders of your living room, but I have not seen any of them. No great loss in most cases, I suspect.

  * * *

  The 45th World Science Fiction convention, Conspiracy, was held in Brighton, England, August 27–31, 1987, and drew an estimated attendance of 5,000. The 1987 Hugo Awards, presented at Conspiracy, were: Best Novel, Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card; Best Novella, “Gilgamesh in the Outback,” by Robert Silverberg; Best Novelette, “Permafrost,” by Roger Zelazny; Best Short Story, “Tangents,” by Greg Bear; Best Non-Fiction, Trillion Year Spree, by Brian Aldiss and Dave Wingrove; Best Professional Editor, Terry Carr; Best Professional Artist, Jim Burns; Best Dramatic Presentation, Aliens; Best Semi-Prozine, Locus; Best Fanzine, Ansible; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Brad Foster; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Karen Joy Fowler.

  The 1986 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Halloran House Hotel in New York City, on May 2, 1987, were: Best Novel, Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card; Best Novella, “R & R,” by Lucius Shepard; Best Novelette, “The Girl Who Fell from the Sky,” by Kate Wilhelm; Best Short Story, “Tangents,” by Greg Bear; plus the Grand Master Award to Isaac Asimov.

  The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Thirteenth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, November 1, 1987, were: Best Novel, Perfume, by Patrick Suskind; Best Novella, “Hatrack River,” by Orson Scott Card; Best Short Story, “Red Light,” by David Schow; Best Anthology/Collection, Tales of the Quintana Roo, James Tiptree, Jr.; Best Artist, Robert Gould; Special Award (Professional), Jane Yolen; Special Award (Non-Professional), (tie) Jeff Conner and W. Paul Ganley; plus a Life Achievement Award to Jack Finney.

  The 1986 John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner was A Door into Ocean, by Joan Slonczewski.

  The fifth Philip K. Dick Memorial Award winner was Homunculus, by James P. Blaylock.

  The first Theodore Sturgeon Award winner was “Surviving,” by Judith Moffett.

  * * *

  Death took a heavy toll on the science fiction field again in 1987, inflicting several major losses. The dead include: Alfred Bester, 73, SF writer, author of The Demolished Man and the cult classic, The Stars My Destination, which many critics consider to be the best SF novel ever written; Dr. Alice Sheldon, 71, better known to SF audiences by her pseudonyms of James Tiptree, Jr. and Raccoona Sheldon, under which names she established herself as one of the very best short-story writers ever to enter the field, author of several classic collections and the novel Brightness Falls from the Air, a personal friend; Terry Carr, 50, writer and editor, perhaps the most influential SF editor of the last twenty years, creator of both the original and the recently refurbished Ace Special series, as well as the Universe series of original anthologies, the longest-running anthology series in SF, a well-respected Best of the Year series, and dozens of other anthologies, another friend; Theodore R. Cogswell, 68, writer and editor, best known as the author of the collection The Wall around the World; Richard Wilson, 66, writer and Futurian, Nebula winner for the story “Mother to the World”; veteran author Gardner F. Fox, 68; thriller and associational writer Alistair Maclean, 64; writer Erskine Caldwell, 83; veteran writer and publisher Donald Wandrei, 79; Ejler Jakobsson, 75, one-time editor of Galaxy magazine; Richard Delap, 45, SF critic and editor; Bea Mahaffey, 60, veteran editor and long-time fan; E. Nelson Bridwell, 55, comics writer and expert on comics history; Danny Kaye, 74, actor, perhaps best known to the SF audience for his role in The Court Jester; Ray Bolger, 83, actor, perhaps best known to the SF audience for his role as the Scarecrow in the film classic The Wizard of Oz; Polly Freas, 68, wife of SF artist Kelly Freas; Murray I. Dann, 76, father of SF writer Jack Dann; Joseph LoBrutto, 12, son of SF editor Pat LoBrutto; Lawrence Lyle Heinlein, 86, brother of SF writer Robert Heinlein; Maude Dickson, 96, mother of SF writer Gordon R. Dickson; and Hugh McCaffrey, 63, brother of SF writer Anne McCaffrey.

  PAT MURPHY

  Rachel in Love

  Pat Murphy lives in San Francisco, where she works for a science museum, the Exploratorium. Her elegant and incisive stories have been turning up for the past few years in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Elsewhere, Amazing, Universe, Shadows, Chrysalis, and other places. Her first novel, The Shadow Hunter, was published in 1982. Her most recent novel, The Falling Woman, is at the time of this writing a strong contender for the 1987 Nebula Award, as is “Rachel in Love.” Her story “In the Islands” was in our First Annual Collection.

  Here she gives us perhaps her strongest and most eloquent story to date, a haunting tale that forces us to take a new look at just what it really means to be human.

  RACHEL IN LOVE

  Pat Murphy

  It is a Sunday morning in summer and a small brown chimpanzee named Rachel sits on the living room floor of a remote ranch house on the edge of the Painted Desert. She is watching a Tarzan movie on television. Her hairy arms are wrapped around her knees and she rocks back and forth with suppressed excitement. She knows that her father would say that she’s too old for such childish amusements—but since Aaron is still sleeping, he can’t chastise her.

  On the television, Tarzan has been trapped in a bamboo cage by a band of wicked Pygmies. Rachel is afraid that he won’t escape in time to save Jane from the ivory smugglers who hold her captive. The movie cuts to Jane, who is tied up in the back of a jeep, and Rachel whimpers softly to herself. She knows better than to howl: she peeked into her father’s bedroom earlier, and he was still in bed. Aaron doesn’t like her to howl when he is sleeping.

  When the movie breaks for a commercial, Rachel goes to her father’s room. She is ready for breakfast and she wants him to get up. She tiptoes to the bed to see if he is awake.

  His eyes are open and he is staring at nothing. His face is pale and his lips are a purplish color. Dr. Aaron Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, is not asleep. He is dead, having died in the night of a heart attack.

  When Rachel shakes him, his head rocks back and forth in time with her shaking, but his eyes do not blink and he does not breathe. She places his hand on her head, nudging him so that he will waken and stroke her. He does not move. When she leans toward him, his hand falls limply to dangle over the edge of the bed.

  In the breeze from the open bedroom window, the fine wisps of gray hair that he had carefully combed over his bald spot each morning shift and flutter, exposing the naked scalp. In the other room, elephants trumpet as they stampede across the jungle to rescue Tarzan. Rachel whimpers softly, but her father does not move.

  Rachel backs away from her father’s body. In the living room, Tarzan is swinging across the jungle on vines, going to save Jane. Rachel ignores the television. She prowls through the house as if searching for comfort—stepping into her own small bedroom, wandering through her father’s laboratory. From the cages that line the walls, white rats stare at her with hot red eyes. A rabbit hops across its cage, making a series of slow dull thumps, like a feather pillow tumbling down a flight of stairs.

  She thinks that perhaps she made a mistake. Perhaps her father is just sleeping. She returns to the bedroom, but nothing has changed. Her father lies open-eyed on the bed. For a long time, she huddles beside his body, clinging to his hand.

  He is the only person she has ever known. He is her father, her teacher, her friend. She cannot leave him alone.

  The afternoon sun blazes through the window, and still Aaron does not move. The room grows dark, but Rachel does not turn on the lights. She is waiting for Aaron to wake up. When the moon rises, its silver light shines through the window to cast a bright rectangle on the far wall.

  Outside, somewhere in the barren rocky land surrounding the ranch house, a coyote lifts its head to the rising moon and wails, a thin sound that is as lonely as a train whistling through an abandoned station. Rachel joins in with a desolate howl of loneliness and
grief. Aaron lies still and Rachel knows that he is dead.

  * * *

  When Rachel was younger, she had a favorite bedtime story.—Where did I come from? she would ask Aaron, using the abbreviated gestures of ASL, American Sign Language.—Tell me again.

  “You’re too old for bedtime stories,” Aaron would say.

  —Please, she’d sign.—Tell me the story.

  In the end, he always relented and told her. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Rachel,” he said. “She was a pretty girl, with long golden hair like a princess in a fairy tale. She lived with her father and her mother and they were all very happy.”

  Rachel would snuggle contentedly beneath her blankets. The story, like any good fairy tale, had elements of tragedy. In the story, Rachel’s father worked at a university, studying the workings of the brain and charting the electric fields that the nervous impulses of an active brain produced. But the other researchers at the university didn’t understand Rachel’s father; they distrusted his research and cut off his funding. (During this portion of the story, Aaron’s voice took on a bitter edge.) So he left the university and took his wife and daughter to the desert, where he could work in peace.

  He continued his research and determined that each individual brain produced its own unique pattern of fields, as characteristic as a fingerprint. (Rachel found this part of the story quite dull, but Aaron insisted on including it.) The shape of this “Electric Mind,” as he called it, was determined by habitual patterns of thoughts and emotions. Record the Electric Mind, he postulated, and you could capture an individual’s personality.

  Then one sunny day, the doctor’s wife and beautiful daughter went for a drive. A truck barreling down a winding cliffside road lost its brakes and met the car head-on, killing both the girl and her mother. (Rachel clung to Aaron’s hand during this part of the story, frightened by the sudden evil twist of fortune.)

  But though Rachel’s body had died, all was not lost. In his desert lab, the doctor had recorded the electrical patterns produced by his daughter’s brain. The doctor had been experimenting with the use of external magnetic fields to impose the patterns from one animal onto the brain of another. From an animal supply house, he obtained a young chimpanzee. He used a mixture of norepinephrin-based transmitter substances to boost the speed of neural processing in the chimp’s brain, and then he imposed the pattern of his daughter’s mind upon the brain of this young chimp, combining the two after his own fashion, saving his daughter in his own way. In the chimp’s brain was all that remained of Rachel Jacobs.

  The doctor named the chimp Rachel and raised her as his own daughter. Since the limitations of the chimpanzee larynx made speech very difficult, he instructed her in ASL. He taught her to read and to write. They were good friends, the best of companions.

  By this point in the story, Rachel was usually asleep. But it didn’t matter—she knew the ending. The doctor, whose name was Aaron Jacobs, and the chimp named Rachel lived happily ever after.

  Rachel likes fairy tales and she likes happy endings. She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent heart of a young chimp.

  * * *

  Sometimes, when Rachel looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She remembers having small, pale, delicate hands. Memories lie upon memories, layers upon layers, like the sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.

  Rachel remembers a blonde-haired fair-skinned woman who smelled sweetly of perfume. On a Halloween long ago, this woman (who was, in these memories, Rachel’s mother) painted Rachel’s fingernails bright red because Rachel was dressed as a gypsy and gypsies liked red. Rachel remembers the woman’s hands: white hands with faintly blue veins hidden just beneath the skin, neatly clipped nails painted rose pink.

  But Rachel also remembers another mother and another time. Her mother was dark and hairy and smelled sweetly of overripe fruit. She and Rachel lived in a wire cage in a room filled with chimps and she hugged Rachel to her hairy breast whenever any people came into the room. Rachel’s mother groomed Rachel constantly, picking delicately through her fur in search of lice that she never found.

  Memories upon memories: jumbled and confused, like random pictures clipped from magazines, a bright collage that makes no sense. Rachel remembers cages: cold wire mesh beneath her feet, the smell of fear around her. A man in a white lab coat took her from the arms of her hairy mother and pricked her with needles. She could hear her mother howling, but she could not escape from the man.

  Rachel remembers a junior high school dance where she wore a new dress: she stood in a dark corner of the gym for hours, pretending to admire the crepe paper decorations because she felt too shy to search among the crowd for her friends.

  She remembers when she was a young chimp: she huddled with five other adolescent chimps in the stuffy freight compartment of a train, frightened by the alien smells and sounds.

  She remembers gym class: gray lockers and ugly gym suits that revealed her skinny legs. The teacher made everyone play softball, even Rachel who was unathletic and painfully shy. Rachel at bat, standing at the plate, was terrified to be the center of attention. “Easy out,” said the catcher, a hard-edged girl who ran with the wrong crowd and always smelled of cigarette smoke. When Rachel swung at the ball and missed, the outfielders filled the air with malicious laughter.

  Rachel’s memories are as delicate and elusive as the dusty moths and butterflies that dance among the rabbit brush and sage. Memories of her girlhood never linger; they land for an instant, then take flight, leaving Rachel feeling abandoned and alone.

  * * *

  Rachel leaves Aaron’s body where it is, but closes his eyes and pulls the sheet up over his head. She does not know what else to do. Each day she waters the garden and picks some greens for the rabbits. Each day, she cares for the animals in the lab, bringing them food and refilling their water bottles. The weather is cool, and Aaron’s body does not smell too bad, though by the end of the week, a wide line of ants runs from the bed to the open window.

  At the end of the first week, on a moonlit evening, Rachel decides to let the animals go free. She releases the rabbits one by one, climbing on a stepladder to reach down into the cage and lift each placid bunny out. She carries each one to the back door, holding it for a moment and stroking the soft warm fur. Then she sets the animal down and nudges it in the direction of the green grass that grows around the perimeter of the fenced garden.

  The rats are more difficult to deal with. She manages to wrestle the large rat cage off the shelf, but it is heavier than she thought it would be. Though she slows its fall, it lands on the floor with a crash and the rats scurry to and fro within. She shoves the cage across the linoleum floor, sliding it down the hall, over the doorsill, and onto the back patio. When she opens the cage door, rats burst out like popcorn from a popper, white in the moonlight and dashing in all directions.

  * * *

  Once, while Aaron was taking a nap, Rachel walked along the dirt track that led to the main highway. She hadn’t planned on going far. She just wanted to see what the highway looked like, maybe hide near the mailbox and watch a car drive past. She was curious about the outside world and her fleeting fragmentary memories did not satisfy that curiosity.

  She was halfway to the mailbox when Aaron came roaring up in his old jeep. “Get in the car,” he shouted at her. “Right now!” Rachel had never seen him so angry. She cowered in the jeep’s passenger seat, covered with dust from the road, unhappy that Aaron was so upset. He didn’t speak until they got back to the ranch house, and then he spoke in a low voice, filled with bitterness and suppressed rage.

  “You don’t want to go out there,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it out there. The world is filled with petty, narrow-minded, stupid people. They wouldn’t understand you. And anyone they don’t understand, they want to hurt. They hurt anyone who’s different. If they know that you’re different, they punish you, hurt you. They’d lock you up and never
let you go.”

  He looked straight ahead, staring through the dirty windshield. “It’s not like the shows on TV, Rachel,” he said in a softer tone. “It’s not like the stories in books.”

  He looked at her then and she gestured frantically.—I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  “I can’t protect you out there,” he said. “I can’t keep you safe.”

  Rachel took his hand in both of hers. He relented then, stroking her head. “Never do that again,” he said. “Never.”

  Aaron’s fear was contagious. Rachel never again walked along the dirt track and sometimes she had dreams about bad people who wanted to lock her in a cage.

  * * *

  Two weeks after Aaron’s death, a black-and-white police car drives slowly up to the house. When the policemen knock on the door, Rachel hides behind the couch in the living room. They knock again, try the knob, then open the door, which she had left unlocked.

  Suddenly frightened, Rachel bolts from behind the couch, bounding toward the back door. Behind her, she hears one man yell, “My God! It’s a gorilla!”