The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The phone was ringing when they got to her apartment.

  “You’re famous,” said Johnny. “That’ll go on all night.”

  “No, it won’t,” said Maggie, “just take it off the hook. I can be famous tomorrow. Tonight I just want to be me.”

  Johnny had a funny look in his eyes. She was sure he was going to kiss her right then. “Just wait right there,” she said. “Don’t go away. Get me a Dr Pepper and open yourself a beer.” She hurried into the bedroom and shut the door. Raised up her skirt and slipped the little wire off her waist. Her heart was beating fast. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Maggie McKenna.”

  Johnny gave a decidedly angry shout from the other room. Another man yelled. Something fell to the floor.

  “Good heavens, what’s that?” said Maggie. She rushed into the room. Johnny had a young man backed against the wall, threatening him with a fist. The man wore a patched cardigan sweater and khaki pants. He was trying to hit Johnny with a sack.

  “Who the hell are you,” said Johnny, “what are you doing in here!”

  “Oh my God,” said Maggie. She stopped in her tracks, then ran past Johnny and threw her arms around the other man’s neck. “Oh Daddy, I knew you wouldn’t leave me! I knew you’d come back!”

  “Maggie? Is that you? Why, you’re all grown up! Say, what a looker you are. Where am I? How’s your mother?”

  “We’ll talk about that. Just sit down and rest.” She could hardly see through her tears. “I’ll explain,” she told Johnny. “At least I’ll give it a try. Oh, Oral, I hope you’re wherever it is you want to be. Johnny, get Daddy a Dr Pepper.” She gave him the sack. “Put this in the kitchen and you come right back.”

  “It’s just catfood and bread,” said Daddy. “I think that fella there took me wrong.”

  “Everything’s all right now.”

  “Maggie, I feel like I’ve been floating around in yogurt. Forever or maybe an hour and a half. It’s hard to say. I don’t know. I’m greatly confused for the moment. I ought to be more than five years older’n you.”

  “It happens. There are documented cases. Just sit down and rest. There’s plenty of time to talk.” Johnny came back with a Dr Pepper. She gave it to her father and led Johnny to the kitchen.

  “I don’t get it,” said Johnny.

  “You got all that business with the monks, you can learn to handle this. Just hold me a minute, all right? And do what you did in the car.”

  Johnny kissed her a very long time. Maggie was sure she was going to faint.

  “I’m a real serious guy,” said Johnny. “I’m not just playing around. I got very strong emotions.”

  “I like you a lot,” said Maggie. “I’m not sure I could love a man in your line of work.”

  “I’m in olives. I got a nice family business.”

  “You’ve got a family in overcoats and shades, Johnny Lucata.”

  “Okay, so we’ll work something out.”

  “I guess maybe we will. I keep forgetting I’m in olive oil too. Maybe you better kiss me again. Johnny there’s so much I want us to do. I want to show you Marble Creek. I want to show you green turtles on a log and the Sidewinderettes doing a halftime double-snake whip. I want to see every single shade of blue in that castle and I’ve got a simply great idea for a play. Oh, Johnny, Daddy’s back and you’re here and I’ve got about everything there is. New York is such a knocked-out crazy wonderful town!”

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight

  Ursula K. Le Guin was possibly the most talked-about SF writer of the seventies—rivaled only by Robert Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr., and Philip K. Dick—and is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre—it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. She has also won two other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, and the National Book Award for Children’s literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, and the other two Earthsea novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. She has had four collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, and most recently, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. Her most recent novel is Always Coming Home.

  Here she tells the evocative story of a little girl lost in a strange and very mysterious way.

  BUFFALO GALS, WON’T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  1

  “You fell out of the sky,” coyote said.

  Still curled up tight, lying on her side, her back pressed against the overhanging rock, the child watched the coyote with one eye. Over the other eye she kept her hand cupped, its back on the dirt.

  “There was a burned place in the sky, up there alongside the rimrock, and then you fell out of it,” the coyote repeated, patiently, as if the news was getting a bit stale. “Are you hurt?”

  She was all right. She was in the plane with Mr. Michaels, and the motor was so loud she couldn’t understand what he said even when he shouted, and the way the wind rocked the wings was making her feel sick, but it was all right. They were flying to Canyonville. In the plane.

  She looked. The coyote was still sitting there. It yawned. It was a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick. The dark tear line back from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat’s.

  She sat up slowly, still holding her right hand pressed to her right eye.

  “Did you lose an eye?” the coyote asked, interested.

  “I don’t know,” the child said. She caught her breath and shivered. “I’m cold.”

  “I’ll help you look for it,” the coyote said. “Come on! If you move around, you won’t have to shiver. The sun’s up.”

  Cold, lonely brightness lay across the falling land, a hundred miles of sagebrush. The coyote was trotting busily around, nosing under clumps of rabbitbrush and cheatgrass, pawing at a rock. “Aren’t you going to look?” it said, suddenly sitting down on its haunches and abandoning the search. “I knew a trick once where I could throw my eyes way up into a tree and see everything from up there, and then whistle, and they’d come back into my head. But that goddamn bluejay stole them, and when I whistled, nothing came. I had to stick lumps of pine pitch into my head so I could see anything. You could try that. But you’ve got one eye that’s O.K.; what do you need two for? Are you coming, or are you dying there?”

  The child crouched, shivering.

  “Well, come if you want to,” said the coyote, yawned again, snapped at a flea, stood up, turned, and trotted away among the sparse clumps of rabbitbrush and sage, along the long slope that stretched on down and down into the plain streaked across by long shadows of sagebrush. The slender gray-yellow animal was hard to keep in sight, vanishing as the child watched.

  She struggled to her feet and—without a word, though she kept saying in her mind, “Wait, please wait”—she hobbled after the coyote. She could not see it. She kept her hand pressed over the right eye socket. Seeing with one eye, there was no depth; it was like a huge, flat picture. The coyote suddenly sat in the middle of the picture, looking back at her, its mouth open, its eyes narrowed, grinning. Her legs began to steady, and her head did not pound so hard, though the deep black ache was always there. She had nearly caught up to the coyote, when it trotted off again. This time she spoke. “Please wait!” she said.

  “O.K.,” said the coyote, but it trotted right on. She followed, walking downhill into the flat picture that at each step was deep.

  Each step was different underfoot; each sage bush was different, and all the same. Following the coyote, she came out from the shadow of the r
imrock cliffs, and the sun at eye level dazzled her left eye. Its bright warmth soaked into her muscles and bones at once. The air, which all night had been so hard to breathe, came sweet and easy.

  The sage bushes were pulling in their shadows, and the sun was hot on the child’s back when she followed the coyote along the rim of a gully. After a while the coyote slanted down the undercut slope, and the child scrambled after, through scrub willows to the thin creek in its wide sand bed. Both drank.

  The coyote crossed the creek, not with a careless charge and splashing like a dog, but single foot and quiet like a cat; always it carried its tail low. The child hesitated, knowing that wet shoes make blistered feet, and then waded across in as few steps as possible. Her right arm ached with the effort of holding her hand up over her eye. “I need a bandage,” she said to the coyote. It cocked its head and said nothing. It stretched out its forelegs and lay watching the water, resting but alert. The child sat down nearby on the hot sand and tried to move her right hand. It was glued to the skin around her eye by dried blood. At the little tearing-away pain, she whimpered; though it was a small pain, it frightened her. The coyote came over close and poked its long snout into her face. Its strong, sharp smell was in her nostrils. It began to lick the awful, aching blindness, cleaning and cleaning with its curled, precise, strong, wet tongue, until the child was able to cry a little with relief, being comforted. Her head was bent close to the gray-yellow ribs, and she saw the hard nipples, the whitish belly fur. She put her arm around the she-coyote, stroking the harsh coat over back and ribs.

  “O.K.,” the coyote said, “let’s go!” And set off without a backward glance. The child scrambled to her feet and followed. “Where are we going?” she said, and the coyote, trotting on down along the creek, answered, “On down along the creek.…”

  * * *

  There must have been a time while she was asleep that she walked because she felt like she was waking up, but she was walking along only in a different place. They were still following the creek, though the gully had flattened out to nothing much, and there was still sagebrush range as far as the eye could see. The eye—the good one—felt rested. The other one still ached, but not so sharply, and there was no use thinking about it. But where was the coyote?

  She stopped. The pit of cold into which the plane had fallen reopened, and she fell. She stood falling, a thin whimper making itself in her throat.

  “Over here!”

  The child turned.

  She saw a coyote gnawing at the half-dried-up carcass of a crow, black feathers sticking to the black lips and narrow jaw.

  She saw a tawny-skinned woman kneeling by a campfire, sprinkling something into a conical pot. She heard the water boiling in the pot, though it was propped between rocks, off the fire. The woman’s hair was yellow and gray, bound back with a string. Her feet were bare. The upturned soles looked as dark and hard as shoe soles, but the arch of the foot was high, and the toes made two neat curving rows. She wore blue jeans and an old white shirt. She looked over at the girl. “Come on, eat crow!” she said.

  The child slowly came toward the woman and the fire, and squatted down. She had stopped falling and felt very light and empty; and her tongue was like a piece of wood stuck in her mouth.

  Coyote was now blowing into the pot or basket or whatever it was. She reached into it with two fingers, and pulled her hand away, shaking it and shouting, “Ow! Shit! Why don’t I ever have any spoons?” She broke off a dead twig of sagebrush, dipped it into the pot, and licked it. “Oh boy,” she said. “Come on!”

  The child moved a little closer, broke off a twig, dipped. Lumpy pinkish mush clung to the twig. She licked. The taste was rich and delicate.

  “What is it?” she asked after a long time of dipping and licking.

  “Food. Dried salmon mush,” Coyote said. “It’s cooling down.” She stuck two fingers into the mush again, this time getting a good load, which she ate very neatly. The child, when she tried, got mush all over her chin. It was like chopsticks: it took practice. She practiced. They ate turn and turn until nothing was left in the pot but three rocks. The child did not ask why there were rocks in the mush pot. They licked the rocks clean. Coyote licked out the inside of the pot-basket, rinsed it once in the creek, and put it onto her head. It fit nicely, making a conical hat. She pulled off her blue jeans. “Piss on the fire!” she cried, and did so, standing straddling it. “Ah, steam between the legs!” she said. The child, embarrassed, thought she was supposed to do the same thing, but did not want to, and did not. Bareassed, Coyote danced around the dampened fire, kicking her long, thin legs out and singing:

  Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight

  Come out tonight, come out tonight,

  Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,

  And dance by the light of the moon?

  She pulled her jeans back on. The child was burying the remains of the fire in creek sand, heaping it over, seriously, wanting to do right. Coyote watched her.

  “Is that you?” she said. “A Buffalo Gal? What happened to the rest of you?”

  “The rest of me?” The child looked at herself, alarmed.

  “All your people.”

  “Oh. Well, Mom took Bobbie—he’s my little brother—away with Uncle Norm. He isn’t really my uncle or anything. So Mr. Michaels was going there anyway, so he was going to fly me over to my real father, in Canyonville. Linda—my stepmother, you know—she said it was O.K. for the summer anyhow if I was there, and then we could see. But the plane.”

  In the silence the girl’s face became dark red, then grayish white. Coyote watched, fascinated. “Oh,” the girl said, “oh—oh—Mr. Michaels—he must be—Did the—”

  “Come on!” said Coyote, and set off walking.

  The child cried, “I ought to go back—”

  “What for?” said Coyote. She stopped to look round at the child, then went on faster. “Come on, Gal!” She said it as a name; maybe it was the child’s name, Myra, as spoken by Coyote. The child, confused and despairing, protested again, but followed her. “Where are we going? Where are we?”

  “This is my country,” Coyote answered with dignity, making a long, slow gesture all round the vast horizon. “I made it. Every goddamn sage brush.”

  And they went on. Coyote’s gait was easy, even a little shambling, but she covered the ground; the child struggled not to drop behind. Shadows were beginning to pull themselves out again from under the rocks and shrubs. Leaving the creek, Coyote and the child went up a long, low, uneven slope that ended away off against the sky in rimrock. Dark trees stood one here, another way over there; what people called a juniper forest, a desert forest, one with a lot more between the trees than trees. Each juniper they passed smelled sharply—cat-pee smell the kids at school called it—but the child liked it; it seemed to go into her mind and wake her up. She picked off a juniper berry and held it in her mouth, but after a while spat it out again. The aching was coming back in huge black waves, and she kept stumbling. She found that she was sitting down on the ground. When she tried to get up, her legs shook and would not go under her. She felt foolish and frightened, and began to cry.

  “We’re home!” Coyote called from way on up the hill.

  The child looked with her one weeping eye, and saw sagebrush, juniper, cheatgrass, rimrock. She heard a coyote yip far off in the dry twilight.

  She saw a little town up under the rimrock: board houses, shacks, all unpainted. She heard Coyote call again, “Come on, pup! Come on, Gal, we’re home!”

  She could not get up, so she tried to go on all fours, the long way up the slope to the houses under the rimrock. Long before she got there, several people came to meet her. They were all children, she thought at first, and then began to understand that most of them were grown people, but all were very short; they were broad-bodied, fat, with fine, delicate hands and feet. Their eyes were bright. Some of the women helped her stand up and walk, coaxing her, “It isn’t much farther, you�
��re doing fine.” In the late dusk, lights shone yellow-bright through doorways and through unchinked cracks between boards. Woodsmoke hung sweet in the quiet air. The short people talked and laughed all the time, softly. “Where’s she going to stay?”—“Put her in with Robin, they’re all asleep already!”—“Oh, she can stay with us.”

  The child asked hoarsely, “Where’s Coyote?”

  “Out hunting,” the short people said.

  A deeper voice spoke: “Somebody new has come into town?”

  “Yes, a new person,” one of the short men answered.

  Among these people the deep-voiced man bulked impressive; he was broad and tall, with powerful hands, a big head, a short neck. They made way for him respectfully. He moved very quietly, respectful of them also. His eyes when he stared down at the child were amazing. When he blinked, it was like the passing of a hand before a candle flame.

  “It’s only an owlet,” he said. “What have you let happen to your eye, new person?”

  “I was—We were flying—”

  “You’re too young to fly,” the big man said in his deep, soft voice. “Who brought you here?”

  “Coyote.”

  And one of the short people confirmed: “She came here with Coyote, Young Owl.”

  “Then maybe she should stay in Coyote’s house tonight,” the big man said.

  “It’s all bones and lonely in there,” said a short woman with fat cheeks and a striped shirt. “She can come with us.”

  That seemed to decide it. The fat-cheeked woman patted the child’s arm and took her past several shacks and shanties to a low, windowless house. The doorway was so low even the child had to duck down to enter. There were a lot of people inside, some already there and some crowding in after the fat-cheeked woman. Several babies were fast asleep in cradle-boxes in the corner. There was a good fire, and a good smell, like toasted sesame seeds. The child was given food and ate a little, but her head swam, and the blackness in her right eye kept coming across her left eye, so she could not see at all for a while. Nobody asked her name or told her what to call them. She heard the children call the fat-cheeked woman Chipmunk. She got up courage finally to say, “Is there somewhere I can go to sleep, Mrs. Chipmunk?”