The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Are you thinking of leaving?”

  “Oh, I can’t stay here forever.” He grinned at me, then broke into a run; and I ran, too, chasing him through the clumps of fern underneath the trees, until at last we collapsed breathless with laughter beside the bole of an enormous pine, a grandfather of the forest.

  For a while we did nothing but breathe hard, smiling at each other. Then Florey reached up to touch the trunk. “Look.”

  A glutinous tear of sap was oozing from a crevice in the papery bark. A scarlet beetle struggled in it. “Once upon a time your ancestors ruled over half this world, and half a dozen besides. Your ancestors, and mine. Now look at your people, ruled by Greater Brazil and not even knowing it, trapped in their little lives. Insects in amber. You’re different, though, aren’t you?”

  “I…”

  “Sure. You want to escape.” And he leaned forward and kissed me.

  I pulled back, but only a little. His silver eyes were a centimeter from mine; his hands touched my face before he sat back, smiling.

  His hands … I caught one, the left. The knuckles were slightly swollen, and I could feel something thin and hard sliding under the bump of bone in each.

  “All right,” he said, and made a fist. And from his knuckles sprang claws, black and curved to a point like thorns, the one above the thumb slightly larger, a spur like that of a bird of prey, tipped with translucent gold. “I had it done a few years ago, when I signed up and out. The freighter ended up on Serenity, and this was the fashion there, briefly. Still comes in handy in fights, once in a while.” He touched my cheek, and I felt five pricking points, the nearest (the thumb) just beneath my eye. Now I did jerk back, and stand.

  “I thought you had your own ship. You said…”

  Florey brushed at his forehead. “Oh yeah, that.” He stood, too, brushing pine needles from his knees. “Can you keep a secret, Clary?”

  “I guess.”

  “What I said when I first came here, about being rich and so on, that was to impress your father. So he wouldn’t throw me out, so he’d take notice of me. Oh, I’m no duke, just a freespacer, but I do come from Elysium … and I’m not freeloading. That bridge will work. Understand?”

  “A little.” But I wasn’t sure how I felt about him now, what his untruths meant.

  “Come on, show me the ruins.” He held out his hand, and after a moment I took it. And like a fool led him on.

  * * *

  The ruins began as a long ribbon of clear ground between the trees; only thick, spongy cushions of moss grew there. You walked along this and suddenly realized the rocks on either side were the remains of walls, all overgrown with grass and fern, and then you were in the middle of it, tall trees growing up through what had been houses, square doorways gaping like the mouths of caves. Some had left no trace but the shape of their cellars, deep pools of still green water over which clouds of mosquitoes swirled.

  Florey poked around for a few minutes, then complained, “I thought there’d be more than this. What happened to all the machinery?”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Metal,” he said impatiently, “or plastic. Christ, it couldn’t all have rotted away. There must be something worth taking. What’s inside here?”

  He stooped at a doorway curtained with ivy, and I caught his shoulder. “You can’t go in there. Bears live in some of these old places. They can be dangerous.”

  “So can I.” He drew out his lightstick and flicked it on, pushed through the ivy. After a moment I followed, my heart beating quickly and lightly. Holding his light high, Florey stood at the beginning of a spiral ramp that curved down and down. You couldn’t see the end of it. Bright colors glistened on the walls in twisting abstract patterns. You felt that you would fall into them forever if you looked for too long. Here and there mud had been daubed in crude symbols: the traces of bears. I pointed them out.

  “They live in the rooms underneath. No one knows how far it all extends. They say it underlies all of the mountain.” It was cold in there, and I hugged my shoulders as I peered into the flickering shadows of the spiral ramp. “The bears can be dangerous. They speak a kind of American, but it isn’t much like ours.”

  “Our ancestors, Christ. Why did they trouble to alter bears? They were crazy, Clary, you know? They did so much damage to the world at one time that they spent most of their energies afterward putting it back together, changing animals to make them more intelligent, raising extinct species from dust. What do you think the bears are guarding down there?”

  “It was all looted ages ago. Come on, Gil, please.” I thought that I could hear something moving far below, in the darkness. After a moment he shrugged and turned to follow me out into the sunlight.

  I sat in the shade of a little aspen that canted out from the remains of a wall, and watched Florey prowl the ruins. The sunlight sank to my bones, and I closed my eyes. After a while Florey sat beside me. His white chest, the single crease in his flat belly. His black hair tangled about his white face.

  “Is it true,” I asked, “about the people in the old days growing animals?”

  “Surely. Plants, too. Greater Brazil may have invented the phase graffle, but it’s way behind the old biology. That was all lost in the war, like a lot of things. On Elysium we lost Earth, you know.”

  “What’s a phase graffle?”

  “It keeps a ship together in phase space. A sort of keel into reality, you understand? Otherwise the entropic gradient would spatter it all over the universe.”

  I sighed. “I wish I knew more.”

  “It’s a big universe outside this forest. You’re better off here, really you are.” His silver eyes flashed in the sunlight. His knees leaned negligently against my thigh.

  I don’t know how it happened; the beginning was lost in the deed. But one of us must have made a move toward the other, a word, a touch. I don’t remember whether it was Florey or me, but we were tangled together, kissing, and then he began to make love to me and I surrendered. It didn’t last long. Afterward I lay still while Florey rearranged his clothing and said, to the ruins, to the sky, “A virgin! Well, well. A virgin!” He seemed both delighted and amused.

  A stone was digging into my shoulder, and my skin stung where his claws had scratched all down my sides, but I lay in a kind of haze of fulfillment. I had changed something, made a move all my own; and as I tenderly watched Florey, I imagined leaving the forest with him, rising amongst the lights in the sky with him … and then I remembered Elise. A kind of panic seized me, and I began to cry, although there were no tears, just a sort of racking hiccup attack, absurd and not at all romantic. Of course Florey tried to comfort me, and that made things worse.

  “I won’t tell,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  “It’s not that. It’s…”

  “Your fiancé, yeah. He kind of hates me, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s just … just a jealous kid.”

  “Listen, Clary, I’m maybe ten years older than he, but that’s all. I’m human, too. I didn’t ask to be raised into some kind of god.” As if the thought had struck something in him, he repeated, slowly, “Some kind of god. Jesus Christ.”

  “I think you could be head of my family if you wanted.”

  “No, Clary, see, your father tolerates me because I’m helping him, raising his prestige. That’s all. Listen, I’ll have a talk with your young man, set him straight. He’s kind of cute, you know. I’d be unhappy to think he dislikes me.”

  “I don’t see how—”

  But Florey smiled. “Don’t I have a way with words, now? Come on, smile. That’s it. I’ll fix it up, you’ll see. You ride a horse?”

  “Not often.”

  “But you have, yes?” All at once he was brutally businesslike. “So don’t worry about your maidenhead, O.K.?”

  I said helplessly, “I love you,” and felt the guilty pang that goes with letting slip a lie, and didn’t know why. Of course I know now that I was in love not with Fl
orey but with the idea he represented, the idea of freedom, of flying away from the forest.

  “You can’t come with me, Clary. My life is kind of complicated right now.”

  “You’ve done something wrong, haven’t you?”

  He was silent for a moment. His silver eyes were unfathomable, and I began to feel afraid. Then he sighed. “Yeah, you could say that. You won’t tell anyone.”

  “Oh, we both have our secrets to keep.” Everything, the bright sunlight spinning amongst the new leaves of the aspen, the soft green ruins, the spring air, mocked me. I was a dark, discordant blot in the center of it all. When Florey held out his hand to help me up, I ignored it, and we didn’t touch, and hardly talked, all the way back.

  * * *

  At the house, I went straight to my room and scrubbed the dried blood from my thighs and my dress with cold, clean water, rinsing over and over until my skin was red and sore. Then I lay down and cried—real, hot tears, but not for long—and went down to the kitchen and helped prepare supper as if nothing had happened. If my mother noticed anything, she kept it to herself.

  That evening as usual, Florey sat out near the creek with a half-circle of people before him as he recounted one of his stories. I could hear his lilting cadence from my bedroom window, all meaning botched by distance, and I had to pull my bolster over my head so I could sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning I didn’t go up into the forest but worked in the kitchen, preparing vegetables and then scrubbing the long, scarred pine table until it shone white and my fingers were raw. It was a kind of penance. My mother watched me work, and at last brought me a parcel of food.

  “You’ll be carrying this up to your friend, I suppose.”

  I had to take it: to refuse would have been to admit that something had happened.

  “Clary,” my mother said, and brushed her long hair back from her round face. “Child, I haven’t said anything before, but be careful. He’s a stranger, remember, not our own kind.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Mother.”

  “Don’t you be, Clary, that’s all. Think of Elise. You’re hurting him, and by doing that you’re hurting both families. Life has to go on, Clary.”

  “Oh, of course. Everything has to be as it always was.” My grandmother was watching me, from her corner, her sunken eyes bright in her wrinkled face, and suddenly I felt trapped. I grabbed the parcel and ran out, was crossing the fields before I remembered that I didn’t want to see Florey.

  But he wasn’t at the bridge; my father told me that the Seyour Florey had gone on up. “He said that he wanted to see what it was like. An odd one, eh, Clary?”

  I remembered what Florey had said about seeing Elise, and felt cold. Things were getting out of control. I would have fled after him, but my father began to tell me about the work on the bridge. This was meant kindly enough; he thought that I was interested, didn’t see my panicky impatience. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before, but it’s a fine idea.” He scratched his grizzled beard. “You’re like me, aren’t you, Clary? You like new things. Not like your mother, keeping herself in her kitchen.” For it was my father’s idea, not wholly inaccurate, that my mother was forever plotting against him.

  My brother Rayne was chopping a pine log into wedges while my father talked: the sound of his ax rang amongst the trees, and each blow was like a blow in my heart. At last I could bear it no longer.

  “I have to go,” I said, “so the Seyour gets his lunch.”

  “Oh, he’ll be down with us soon enough. Wait up, Clary!”

  But I was already halfway across the new bridge, the rough, unseasoned planking swaying under my bare feet so that I had to cling to the rope hand-guide. The cladding was finished on only one side; on the other side I could see, fifty meters below, thrashing white water. Droplets stung my face as I went, and then I was safe on the other side and I turned to wave to my father before I went on, climbing through the forest toward the high pastures.

  I left the trees behind, and fresh breezes blew down the grassy slopes into my face; beneath my feet the turf was as warm as fresh-baked bread. Our family’s sheep should have been at pasture by then, but the men were waiting until the bridge was built, and their small, turf-roofed hogans were shuttered and empty. Higher up I could see the Shappards’ flocks slowly moving against the green mountainside; higher still, the snow-covered double peak flashed in the sunlight.

  My worries seemed to fall away as I climbed, insignificant beneath the vast blue sky. I dissolved in the breathless now of the spring day, swinging the greasy parcel of food as I tramped upward, stopping now and then to sprawl on the turf and look at the line of the forest below, the long, tree-clad ridges that saddled away on either side, vanishing into the hazy distances. Someday I would find out what was beyond them, even though I would be married to Elise. If my mother could handle my father, I could handle him.

  And then I saw Elise’s dog.

  She came running toward me at her full speed, overshooting and turning back to posture frantically, so excited that her few words were no more than panting barks. “’ome, ’ome,” she managed to say at last, “follow me, ’lary!”

  I asked what was wrong, but all she would say was, “Ba’. Ba’ thing. ’ome!” And she grabbed my wrist, pricking it all round with her teeth, tugging gently but impatiently.

  Sheep scattered before us as I followed her, the bells of the leaders clonking dully. A high bluff jutted out of the slope, cloaked in blueberry bushes. When we reached it, the dog circled me, then growled, “Ba’ thing,” and led me through the bushes.

  And there, in a hollow on the other side of the bushes, I saw them. Elise and Florey.

  Both were naked, moving like starfish on each other.

  And I ran, plunging through the bushes with the dog at my heels, out pacing her as she turned back to her master. I remember thinking that I mustn’t drop the parcel of food, otherwise they would know who had been there. That seemed important at the time. If they didn’t see me, it would be all right. I didn’t stop running until I reached the first trees, and then I had to stop, and leaned against the fragrant bark of a pine as I sobbingly caught my breath.

  At last I could go on, and I took the old path down, my mind as empty as the shafts of sunlight that fell between the trees. The path followed a ridge around the valley in which the Shappards’ house lay, its tangle of roofs and pinnacles small in the distance as a toy’s, and I broke into a run again, crossing the ridge and plunging down through the trees, leaping from white stone to white stone at the ford and running on toward my own house. My mother was in the yard feeding the chickens—and then she saw me and dropped the little sack of grain just as I crashed into her oh so familiar bulk.

  It all came out in bits and pieces. I would start to say something and then begin to cry, shaking my head away from my mother’s soothing hand. But my mother was calmly insistent, listening to all I had to say but not believing any of it until I timorously showed her the scratches Florey had made along my flanks.

  “Child, child.”

  My aunts were all there, too, by now, watching me to see if I would explode or change into a lizard, do something at once wonderful and dreadful. But I did nothing except cry, quietly and steadily now, sniffling and wiping my nose on the back of my hand.

  “Child, child.”

  “Something,” my grandmother pronounced from her corner, “something must be done. Or he’ll bring ruin to us all.”

  “Stop crying, child,” my mother told me. “We’ll think of something.”

  “How can we do anything against him?” It was my aunt Genive, nervous as a squirrel. “I mean, with that stick of his, even the men couldn’t—”

  “Men, Jenny, know nothing useful,” my mother said. “We’ll be more subtle. Go on now and get some ivy leaves. A double handful will suffice.”

  Genive opened her mouth, then saw my mother’s expression and darted out of the kitchen.

  “What—what
are you going to do?”

  “Wipe your nose, child. We’ll befuddle this Seyour Florey, that’s what, and take him down a peg or two as he deserves. Duke indeed. He won’t stay around here when we’ve done.” She lifted out the flagon of cider cooling in a tub of water and poured it into a pan on the stove. The sweet, sharp smell of apples filled the room as she stirred, and when Genive brought in bunches of ivy, my mother plucked the leaves and one by one dropped them into the pan. In her corner, my grandmother chuckled and nodded.

  “The old ways, oh yes. He’ll see.”

  “You taught me,” my mother said. Every face was intent on her as she stirred; we must have looked like a coven of witches. Now the smell of apples was tinged with something earthy and bitter. My mother lifted the pan from the stove and said, “We’ll strain it when it’s cool. Clary, tonight you’ll pour the Seyour Florey’s drink for him when he tells his lies, and make sure he has his fill.”

  I nodded, although I didn’t understand.

  “You’ll see,” my mother said, and rumpled my hair. “Now, tell me what you know of his weapons.”

  * * *

  As Florey talked that evening, spinning out a tale about the jungles of Pandora and the old ruins hidden within them, I sat at his elbow and topped up his mug with the adulterated cider as my mother had ordered. Earlier, Florey had cornered me in the yard and told me that everything was all right with Elise, he would come down later on and make up with me.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “You’re trembling. You’re not frightened of me, now. After our time in the ruins?”

  “A little.”

  He laughed and looked around—no one was about—and bent and printed a kiss on my lips that burned all evening. Later, when I came up to him as people were settling around the stump on which he sat, a king with his court at his feet, and poured his first mug of cider, he winked at me and whispered, “Don’t worry, Clary,” and drank off a draft. I looked away, ashamed at my betrayal but feeling at the same time a sick eagerness for it to be over: that image of Florey and Elise burned in my mind as Florey’s kiss burned on my lips.