I found out later Bucannon got them all. People said yeah, sure, they’d see that the message got to the guy, but Bucannon always got them. He told people to say yes when I asked. He knew. He always knew.
I didn’t have a dream about Steve and that was the important thing.
* * *
When I finally dreamed that Steve died, that it took more guys in uniforms than you’d think possible—with more weapons than you’d think they’d ever need—in a river valley awfully far away, I didn’t tell Bucannon about it. I didn’t tell him how Steve was twitching on the red earth up North, his body doing its best to dodge the rounds even though there were just too many of them, twitching and twitching, even after his body wasn’t alive anymore.
I cried for a while and then stopped. I wanted to feel something but I couldn’t.
I didn’t ask for pills or booze and I didn’t stay awake the next two nights scared about dreaming it again. There was something I needed to do.
I didn’t know how long I had. I didn’t know whether Steve’s team—the one in the dream—had already gone out or not. I didn’t know a thing, but I kept thinking about what Bucannon had said, the “fixity,” how maybe the future couldn’t be changed, how even if Bucannon hadn’t intercepted those messages something else would have kept the future the way it was and those guys would have died anyway.
I found the Green Beanie medic who’d taken me to my hooch that first day. I sat down with him in the mess. One of Bucannon’s types was watching us but I sat down anyway. I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?” And he said, “I’m not supposed to say, Lieutenant. You know that.”
“Yes, Captain, I do know that. I also know that because you took me to my little bunker that day I will probably dream about your death before it happens, if it happens here. I also know that if I tell the people running this project about it, they won’t do a thing, even though they know how accurate my dreams are, just like they know how accurate Steve Balsam is, and Blakely, and Corigiollo, and the others, but they won’t do a thing about it.” I waited. He didn’t blink. He was listening.
“I’m in a position, Captain, to let someone know when I have a dream about them. Do you understand?”
He stared at me.
“Yes,” he said.
I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“Do you know anything about the mission he is about to go out on?”
He didn’t say a thing for a moment. Then he said, “Red Dikes.”
“I don’t understand, Captain.”
He didn’t want to have to explain—it made him mad to have to. He looked at the MD type by the door and then he looked back at me.
“You can take out the Red Dikes with a one-K nuclear device, Lieutenant. Everyone knows this. If you do, Hanoi drowns and the North is down. Balsam’s team is a twelve-man night insertion beyond the DMZ with special MAC V ordnance from a carrier in the South China Sea. All twelve are talents. Is the picture clear enough, Lieutenant?”
I didn’t say a thing. I just looked at him.
Finally I said, “It’s a suicide mission, isn’t it. The device won’t even be real. It’s one of Bucannon’s ideas—he wants to see how they perform, that’s all. They’ll never use a nuclear device in Southeast Asia and you know that as well as I do, Captain.”
“You never know, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, you do.” I said it slowly so he would understand.
He looked away.
“When is the team leaving?”
He wouldn’t answer anymore. The MD type looked like he was going to walk toward us.
“Captain?” I said.
“Thirty-eight hours. That’s what they’re saying.”
I leaned over.
“Captain,” I said. “You know the shape I was in when I got here. I need it again. I need enough of it to get me through a week of this place or I’m not going to make it. You know where to get it. I’ll need it tonight.”
As I walked by the MD type at the door I wondered how he was going to die, how long it was going to take, and who would do it.
* * *
I killed Bucannon the only way I knew how.
I started screaming at first light and when he came to my bunker, I was crying. I told him I’d had a dream about him. I told him I dreamed that his own men, guys in cammies and all of them talents, had killed him, they had killed him because he wasn’t using a nurse’s dreams to keep their friends alive, because he had my dreams but wasn’t doing anything with them, and all their friends were dying.
I looked in his eyes and I told him how scared I was because they killed her too, they killed the nurse who was helping him too.
* * *
I told him how big the 9-millimeter holes looked in his fatigues, and how something else was used on his face and stomach, some smaller caliber. I told him how they got him dusted off soon as they could and got him on a sump pump and IV as soon as he hit Saigon, but it just wasn’t enough, how he choked to death on his own fluids.
He didn’t believe me.
“Was Lieutenant Balsam there?” he asked.
I said no, he wasn’t, trying not to cry. I didn’t know why, but he wasn’t, I said.
His eyes changed. He was staring at me now.
He said, “When will this happen, Mary?”
I said I didn’t know—not for a couple of days at least, but I couldn’t be sure, how could I be sure? It felt like four, maybe five, days, but I couldn’t be sure. I was crying again.
This is what made him believe me in the end.
He knew it would never happen if Steve were there—but if Steve was gone, if the men waited until Steve was gone?
Steve would be gone in a couple of days and there was no way that this nurse, scared and crying, could know this.
* * *
He moved me to his bunker and had someone hang canvas to make a hooch for me inside his. He doubled the guards and changed the guards and doubled them again, but I knew he didn’t think it was going to happen until Steve left.
I cried that night. He came to my hooch. He said, “Don’t be frightened, Mary. No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt anyone.”
But he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t tried to stop a dream from coming true—even though I’d asked him to—and he didn’t know whether he could or not.
I told him I wanted him to hold me, someone to hold me. I told him I wanted him to touch my forehead the way he did, to push my hair back the way he did.
At first he didn’t understand, but he did it.
I told him I wanted someone to make love to me tonight, because it hadn’t happened in so long, not with Steve, not with anyone. He said he understood and that if he’d only known he could have made things easier on me.
He was quiet. He made sure the flaps on my hooch were tight and he undressed in the dark. I held his hand just like I’d held the hands of the others, back in Cam Ranh Bay. I remembered the dream, the real one where I killed him, how I’d held his hand while he got undressed, just like this.
Even in the dark I could see how pale he was and this was like the dream too. He seemed to glow in the dark even though there wasn’t any light. I took off my clothes, too. I told him I wanted to do something special for him. He said fine, but we couldn’t make much noise. I said there wouldn’t be any noise. I told him to lie down on his stomach on the cot. I sounded excited. I even laughed. I told him it was called “around the world” and I liked it best with the man on his stomach. He did what I told him and I kneeled down and lay over him.
I jammed the needle with the morphine into his jugular and when he struggled I held him down with my own weight.
No one came for a long time.
When they did, I was crying and they couldn’t get my hand from the needle.
* * *
Steve’s team wasn’t sent. The dreams stopped, just the way Bucannon thought they would. Because I killed a man to keep
another alive, the dreams stopped. I tell myself now this was what it was all about. I was supposed to keep someone from dying—that’s why the dreams began—and when I did, they could stop, they could finally stop. Bucannon would understand it.
“There is no talent like yours, Mary, that does not operate out of the psychological needs of the individual,” he would have said. “You dreamed of death in the hope of stopping it. We both knew that, didn’t we. When you killed me to save another, it could end, the dreams could stop, your gift could return to the darkness where it had lain for a million years—so unneeded in civilization, in times of peace, in the humdrum existence of teenagers in Long Beach, California, where fathers believed their daughters to be whores or lesbians if they went to war to keep others alive. Am I right, Mary?”
This is what he would have said.
* * *
They could have killed me. They could have taken me out into the jungle and killed me. They could have given me a frontal and put me in a military hospital like the man in ’46 who had evidence that Roosevelt knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl. The agency Bucannon had worked for could have sent word down to have me pushed from a chopper on the way back to Saigon, or had me given an overdose, or assigned me to some black op I’d never come back from. They were a lot of things they could have done, and they didn’t.
They didn’t because of what Steve and the others did. They told them you’ll have to kill us all if you kill her or hurt her in any way. They told them you can’t send her to jail, you can send her to a hospital but not for long, and you can’t fuck with her head, or there will be stories in the press and court trials and a bigger mess than My Lai ever was.
It was seventy-six talents who were saying this, so the agency listened.
Steve told me about it the first time he came. I’m here for a year, that’s all. There are ten other women in this wing and we get along—it’s like a club. They leave us alone.
Steve comes to see me once a month. He’s married—to the same one in Merced—and they’ve got a baby now, but he gets the money to fly down somehow and he tells me she doesn’t mind.
He says the world hasn’t turned blue since he got back, except maybe twice, real fast, on freeways in central California. He says he hasn’t floated out of his body except once, when Cathy was having the baby and it started to come out wrong. It’s fading away, he says, and he says it with a laugh, with those big eyelashes and those great shoulders.
Some of the others come, too, to see if I’m okay. Most of them got out as soon as they could. They send me packages and bring me things. We talk about the mess this country is in, and we talk about getting together, right after I get out. I don’t know if they mean it. I don’t know if we should. I tell Steve it’s over, we’re back in the Big PX and we don’t need it anymore—Bucannon was right—and maybe we shouldn’t get together.
He shakes his head. He gives me a look and I give him a look and we both know we should have used the room that night in Cam Ranh Bay, when we had the chance.
“You never know,” he says, grinning. “You never know when the baby might wake up.”
That’s the way he talks these days, now that he’s a father.
“You never know when the baby might wake up.”
BRUCE STERLING
Flowers of Edo
One of the major new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Last Dangerous Visions, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. He has attracted special acclaim in the last few years for a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny, and the nature of humanity itself. His story “Cicada Queen” was in our First Annual Collection; his “Sunken Gardens” was in our Second Annual Collection; his “Green Days in Brunei” and “Diner in Audoghast” were in our Third Annual Collection; and his “The Beautiful and the Sublime” was in our Fourth Annual Collection. His novels include The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, and Schismatrix, a novel set in the Shaper/Mechanist future. He is editor of Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology. Upcoming are two new novels, Islands in the Net, from Arbor House, and The Difference Engine, in collaboration with William Gibson, from Bantam.
No two Sterling stories are ever much alike in tone or setting. Here, for instance, he takes us to nineteenth-century Japan in the days just after its first contact with Europeans—a milieu as strange and mysterious as any alien planet, in Sterling’s gifted hands—for a lively and fascinating tale of an ex-samurai who finds he must do battle with the demons of progress.
FLOWERS OF EDO
Bruce Sterling
(with the author’s thanks to Yoshio Kobayashi and HAYAKAWA’S SF MAGAZINE)
Autumn. A full moon floated over old Edo, behind the thinnest haze of high cloud. It shone like a geisha’s night-lamp through an old mosquito net. The sky was antique browned silk.
Two sweating runners hauled an iron-wheeled rickshaw south, toward the Ginza. This was Kabukiza District, its streets bordered by low, tile-roofed wooden shops. These were modest places: coopers, tobacconists, cheap fabric shops where the acrid reek of dye wafted through reed blinds and paper windows. Behind the stores lurked a maze of alleys, crammed with townsmen’s wooden hovels, the walls festooned with morning glories, the tinder-dry thatched roofs alive with fleas.
It was late. Kabukiza was not a geisha district, and honest workmen were asleep. The muddy streets were unlit, except for moonlight and the rare upstairs lamp. The runners carried their own lantern, which swayed precariously from the rickshaw’s drawing-pole. They trotted rapidly, dodging the worst of the potholes and puddles. But with every lurching dip, the rickshaw’s strings of brass bells jumped and rang.
Suddenly the iron wheels grated on smooth red pavement. They had reached the New Ginza. Here, the air held the fresh alien smell of mortar and brick.
The amazing New Ginza had buried its old predecessor. For the Flowers of Edo had killed the Old Ginza. To date, this huge disaster had been the worst, and most exciting, fire of the Meiji Era. Edo had always been proud of its fires, and the Old Ginza’s fire had been a real marvel. It had raged for three days and carried right down to the river.
Once they had mourned the dead, the Edokko were ready to rebuild. They were always ready. Fires, even earthquakes, were nothing new to them. It was a rare building in Low City that escaped the Flowers of Edo for as long as twenty years.
But this was Imperial Tokyo now, and not the Shogun’s old Edo any more. The Governor had come down from High City in his horse-drawn coach and looked over the smoldering ruins of Ginza. Low City townsmen still talked about it—how the Governor had folded his arms—like this—with his wrists sticking out of his Western frock coat. And how he had frowned a mighty frown. The Edo townsmen were getting used to those unsettling frowns by now. Hard, no-nonsense, modern frowns, with the brows drawn low over cold eyes that glittered with Civilization and Enlightenment.
So the Governor, with a mighty wave of his modern, frock-coated arm, sent for his foreign architects. And the Englishmen had besieged the district with their charts and clanking engines and tubs full of brick and mortar. The very heavens had rained bricks upon the black and flattened ruins. Great red hills of brick sprang up—were they houses, people wondered, were they buildings at all? Stories spread about the foreigners and their peculiar homes. The long noses, of course—necessary to suck air through the stifling brick walls. The pale skin—because bricks, it was said, drained the life and color out of a man.…
The rickshaw drew up short with a final brass jingle. The older rickshawman spoke, panting. “Far enough, gov?”
“Yeah, this’ll do,” said one passenger, piling out. His name was Encho Sanyutei. He was the son and successor of a famous vaudeville comedian and, at thirty-five, was now a well-known performer in his own rig
ht. He had been telling his companion about the Ginza Brick-town, and his folded arms and jutting underlip had cruelly mimicked Tokyo’s Governor.
Encho, who had been drinking, generously handed the older man a pocketful of jingling copper sen. “Here, pal,” he said. “Do something about that cough, will ya?” The runners bowed, not bothering to overdo it. They trotted off toward the nearby Ginza crowd, hunting another fare.
Parts of Tokyo never slept. The Yoshiwara District, the famous Nightless City of geishas and rakes, was one of them. The travelers had just come from Asakusa District, another sleepless place: a brawling, vibrant playground of bars, Kabuki theaters, and vaudeville joints.
The Ginza Bricktown never slept either. But the air here was different. It lacked that earthy Low City working-man’s glow of sex and entertainment. Something else, something new and strange and powerful, drew the Edokko into the Ginza’s iron-hard streets.
Gaslights. They stood hissing on their black foreign pillars, blasting a pitiless moon-drowning glare over the crowd. There were eighty-five of the appalling wonders, stretching arrow-straight across the Ginza, from Shiba all the way to Kyobashi.
The Edokko crowd beneath the lights was curiously silent. Drugged with pitiless enlightenment, they meandered down the hard, gritty street in high wooden clogs, or low leather shoes. Some wore hakama shirts and jinbibaori coats, others modern pipe-legged trousers, with top hats and bowlers.
The comedian Encho and his big companion staggered drunkenly toward the lights, their polished leather shoes squeaking merrily. To the Tokyo modernist, squeaking was half the fun of these foreign-style shoes. Both men wore inserts of “singing leather” to heighten the effect.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 10