“All it looks like to me is an unbelievable amount of work,” Alan said.
She nodded. “Almost too much.” She smiled to herself. “I was one of the first double DGDs to be born. When I was old enough to understand, I thought I didn’t have much time. First I tried to kill myself. Failing that, I tried to cram all the living I could into the small amount of time I assumed I had. When I got into this project, I worked as hard as I could to get it into shape before I started to drift. By now I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I weren’t working.”
“Why haven’t you … drifted?” I asked.
“I don’t know. There aren’t enough of our kind to know what’s normal for us.”
“Drifting is normal for every DGD sooner or later.”
“Later, then.”
“Why hasn’t the scent been synthesized?” Alan asked. “Why are there still concentration-camp rest homes and hospital wards?”
“There have been people trying to synthesize it since I proved what I could do with it. No one has succeeded so far. All we’ve been able to do is keep our eyes open for people like Lynn.” She looked at me. “Dilg scholarship, right?”
“Yeah. Offered out of the blue.”
“My people do a good job keeping track. You would have been contacted just before you graduated or if you dropped out.”
“Is it possible,” Alan said, staring at me, “that she’s already doing it? Already using the scent to … influence people?”
“You?” Beatrice asked.
“All of us. A group of DGDs. We all live together. We’re all controlled, of course, but…” Beatrice smiled. “It’s probably the quietest house full of kids that anyone’s ever seen.”
I looked at Alan, and he looked away. “I’m not doing anything to them,” I said. “I remind them of work they’ve already promised to do. That’s all.”
“You put them at ease,” Beatrice said. “You’re there. You … well, you leave your scent around the house. You speak to them individually. Without knowing why, they no doubt find that very comforting. Don’t you, Alan?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I must have. From my first visit to the house, I knew I wanted to move in. And when I first saw Lynn, I…” He shook his head. “Funny, I thought all that was my idea.”
“Will you work with us, Alan?”
“Me? You want Lynn.”
“I want you both. You have no idea how many people take one look at one workroom here and turn and run. You may be the kind of young people who ought to eventually take charge of a place like Dilg.”
“Whether we want to or not, eh?” he said.
Frightened, I tried to take his hand, but he moved it away. “Alan, this works,” I said. “It’s only a stopgap, I know. Genetic engineering will probably give us the final answers, but for God’s sake, this is something we can do now!”
“It’s something you can do. Play queen bee in a retreat full of workers. I’ve never had any ambition to be a drone.”
“A physician isn’t likely to be a drone.” Beatrice said.
“Would you marry one of your patients?” he demanded. “That’s what Lynn would be doing if she married me—whether I become a doctor or not.”
She looked away from him, stared across the room. “My husband is here,” she said softly. “He’s been a patient here for almost a decade. What better place for him … when his time came?”
“Shit!” Alan muttered. He glanced at me. “Let’s get out of here!” He got up and strode across the room to the door, pulled at it, then realized it was locked. He turned to face Beatrice, his body language demanding she let him out. She went to him, took him by the shoulder, and turned him to face the door. “Try it once more,” she said quietly. “You can’t break it. Try.”
Surprisingly, some of the hostility seemed to go out of him. “This is one of those p.v. locks?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I set my teeth and looked away. Let her work. She knew how to use this thing she and I both had. And for the moment, she was on my side.
I heard him make some effort with the door. The door didn’t even rattle. Beatrice took his hand from it, and with her own hand flat against what appeared to be a large brass knob, she pushed the door open.
“The man who created that lock is nobody in particular,” she said. “He doesn’t have an unusually high I.Q., didn’t even finish college. But sometime in his life he read a science-fiction story in which palm-print locks were a given. He went that story one better by creating one that responded to voice or palm. It took him years, but we were able to give him those years. The people of Dilg are problem solvers, Alan. Think of the problems you could solve!”
He looked as though he were beginning to think, beginning to understand. “I don’t see how biological research can be done that way,” he said. “Not with everyone acting on his own, not even aware of other researchers and their work.”
“It is being done,” she said, “and not in isolation. Our retreat in Colorado specializes in it and has—just barely—enough trained, controlled DGDs to see that no one really works in isolation. Our patients can still read and write—those who haven’t damaged themselves too badly. They can take each other’s work into account if reports are made available to them. And they can read material that comes in from the outside. They’re working, Alan. The disease hasn’t stopped them, won’t stop them.” He stared at her, seemed to be caught by her intensity—or her scent. He spoke as though his words were a strain, as though they hurt his throat. “I won’t be a puppet. I won’t be controlled … by a goddamn smell!”
“Alan—”
“I won’t be what my mother is. I’d rather be dead!”
“There’s no reason for you to become what your mother is.”
He drew back in obvious disbelief.
“Your mother is brain damaged—thanks to the three months she spent in that custodial-care toilet. She had no speech at all when I met her. She’s improved more than you can imagine. None of that has to happen to you. Work with us, and we’ll see that none of it happens to you.”
He hesitated, seemed less sure of himself. Even that much flexibility in him was surprising. “I’ll be under your control or Lynn’s,” he said.
She shook her head. “Not even your mother is under my control. She’s aware of me. She’s able to take direction from me. She trusts me the way any blind person would trust her guide.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Not here. Not at any of our retreats.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then you don’t understand how much individuality our people retain. They know they need help, but they have minds of their own. If you want to see the abuse of power you’re worried about, go to a DGD ward.”
“You’re better than that, I admit. Hell is probably better than that. But…”
“But you don’t trust us.”
He shrugged.
“You do, you know.” She smiled. “You don’t want to, but you do. That’s what worries you, and it leaves you with work to do. Look into what I’ve said. See for yourself. We offer DGDs a chance to live and do whatever they decide is important to them. What do you have, what can you realistically hope for that’s better than that?”
Silence. “I don’t know what to think,” he said finally.
“Go home,” she said. “Decide what to think. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.”
He looked at me. I went to him, not sure how he’d react, not sure he’d want me no matter what he decided.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
The question startled me. “You have a choice,” I said. “I don’t. If she’s right … how could I not wind up running a retreat?”
“Do you want to?”
I swallowed. I hadn’t really faced that question yet. Did I want to spend my life in something that was basically a refined DGD ward? “No!”
“But you
will.”
“… Yes.” I thought for a moment, hunted for the right words. “You’d do it.”
“What?”
“If the pheromone were something only men had, you would do it.”
That silence again. After a time he took my hand, and we followed Beatrice out to the car. Before I could get in with him and our guard-escort, she caught my arm. I jerked away reflexively. By the time I caught myself, I had swung around as though I meant to hit her. Hell, I did mean to hit her, but I stopped myself in time. “Sorry,” I said with no attempt at sincerity.
She held out a card until I took it. “My private number,” she said. “Before seven or after nine, usually. You and I will communicate best by phone.”
I resisted the impulse to throw the card away. God, she brought out the child in me.
Inside the car, Alan said something to the guard. I couldn’t hear what it was, but the sound of his voice reminded me of him arguing with her—her logic and her scent. She had all but won him for me, and I couldn’t manage even token gratitude. I spoke to her, low-voiced.
“He never really had a chance, did he?”
She looked surprised. “That’s up to you. You can keep him or drive him away. I assure you, you can drive him away.”
“How?”
“By imagining that he doesn’t have a chance.” She smiled faintly. “Phone me from your territory. We have a great deal to say to each other, and I’d rather we didn’t say it as enemies.”
She had lived with meeting people like me for decades. She had good control. I, on the other hand, was at the end of my control. All I could do was scramble into the car and floor my own phantom accelerator as the guard drove us to the gate. I couldn’t look back at her. Until we were well away from the house, until we’d left the guard at the gate and gone off the property, I couldn’t make myself look back. For long, irrational minutes, I was convinced that somehow if I turned, I would see myself standing there, gray and old, growing small in the distance, vanishing.
HOWARD WALDROP
Night of the Cooters
One of the best short-story writers in the business, Howard Waldrop also has perhaps the wildest and most fertile imagination of any SF writer since R. A. Lafferty. And, like Lafferty, he is known for his strong, shaggy humor, offbeat erudition, and bizarre fictional juxtapositions. These qualities are strongly evident in the wild and wooly tale that follows; it examines some of the events that might have occurred on the periphery of and simultaneously with the central action of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, but from a perspective very different from any Wells would ever have come up with.…
Born in Huston, Mississippi, Waldrop now lives in Austin, Texas. He has sold short fiction to markets as diverse as Omni, Analog, Playboy, Universe, Crawdaddy, New Dimensions, Shayol, and Zoo World. His story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and World Fantasy Award in 1981. His first novel, written in collaboration with fellow Texan Jake Saunders, was The Texas-Israeli War: 1999. His first solo novel, Them Bones, appeared in 1984. His first collection, Howard Who?, appeared in 1986 and was quickly recognized as one of the most important collections of the decade. It was followed in 1987 by another important collection, All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop. His story “Man-Mountain Gentian” was in our First Annual Collection; his “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” was in our Third Annual Collection; and his “Fair Game” was in our Fourth Annual Collection.
NIGHT OF THE COOTERS
Howard Waldrop
This story is in memory of Slim Pickens (1919–1983)
Sheriff Lindley was asleep on the toilet in the Pachuco County courthouse when someone started pounding on the door. “Bert!” the voice yelled as the sheriff jerked awake.
“Goldang!” said the lawman. The Waco newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor.
He pulled his pants up with one hand and the toilet chain on the water box overhead with the other. He opened the door. Chief Deputy Sweets stood before him, a complaint slip in his hand.
“Dang it, Sweets!” said the sheriff. “I told you never to bother me in there. It’s the hottest Thursday in the history of Texas! You woke me up out of a hell of a dream!”
The deputy waited, wiping sweat from his forehead. There were two big circles, like half-moons, under the arms of his blue chambray shirt.
“I was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and I was a Aztec or a Mixtec or somethin’,” said the sheriff. “Anyways, I was buck naked, and I was standin’ on one of them ball courts with the little bitty stone rings twenty foot up one wall, and they was presentin’ me to Moctezuma. I was real proud, and the sun was shinin’, but it was real still and cool down there in the Valley of the Mexico. I look up at the grandstand, and there’s Moctezuma and all his high mucketymucks with feathers and stuff hangin’ off ’em, and more gold than a circus wagon. And there was these other guys, conquistadors and stuff, with beards and rusty helmets, and I-talian priests with crosses you coulda barred a livery-stable door with. One of Moctezuma’s men was explainin’ how we was fixin’ to play ball for the gods and things. I knew in my dream I was captain of my team. I had a name that sounded like a bird fart in Aztec talk, and they mentioned it and the name of the captain of the other team, too. Well, everything was goin’ all right, and I was prouder and prouder, until the guy doing the talkin’ let slip that whichever team won was gonna be paraded around Tenochtitlán and given women and food and stuff like that; and then tomorrow A.M. they was gonna be cut up and simmered real slow and served up with chilis and onions and tomatoes.
“Well, you never seed such a fight as broke out then! They was ayellin’, and a priest was swingin’ a cross, and spears and axes were flyin’ around like it was an Irish funeral. Next thing I know, you’re a-bangin’ on the door and wakin’ me up and bringin’ me back to Pachuco County! What the hell do you want?”
“Mr. De Spain wants you to come over to his place right away.”
“He does, huh?”
“That’s right. Sheriff. He says he’s got some miscreants he wants you to arrest.”
“Everybody else around here has desperadoes. De Spain has miscreants. I’ll be so danged glad when the town council gets around to movin’ the city limits fifty foot the other side of his place, I won’t know what to do! Every time anybody farts too loud, he calls me.”
Lindley and Sweets walked back to the office at the other end of the courthouse. Four deputies sat around with their feet propped up on desks. They rocked forward respectfully and watched as the sheriff went to the hat pegs. On one of the dowels was a sweat-stained hat with turned-down points at front and back. The side brims were twisted in curves. The hat angled up to end in a crown that looked like the business end of a Phillips screwdriver. Under the hat was a holster with a Navy Colt .41 that looked like someone had used it to drive railroad spikes all the way to the Continental Divide. Leaning under them was a ten-gauge pump shotgun with the barrel sawed off just in front of the foregrip. On the other peg was an immaculate new round-top Stetson of brown felt with a snakeskin band half as wide as a fingernail running around it.
The deputies stared.
Lindley picked up the Stetson.
The deputies rocked back in their chairs and resumed yakking.
“Hey, Sweets!” said the sheriff at the door. “Change that damn calendar on your desk. It ain’t Wednesday, August seventeenth; it’s Thursday, August eighteenth.”
“Sure thing, Sheriff.”
“And you boys try not to play checkers so loud you wake the judge up, okay?”
“Sure thing, Sheriff.”
Lindley went down the courthouse steps onto the rock walk. He passed the two courthouse cannons he and the deputies fired off three times a year—March second, July fourth, and Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Each cannon had a pyramid of ornamental cannonballs in front of it.
Waves of heat came off the cannons, the ammunition, the telegraph wires overhead, and, in the distance
, the rails of the twice-a-day spur line from Waxahachie.
The town was still as a rusty shovel. The forty-five-star United States flag hung like an old, dried dishrag from its stanchion. From looking at the town you couldn’t tell the nation was about to go to war with Spain over Cuba, that China was full of unrest, and that five thousand miles away a crazy German count was making airships.
Lindley had seen enough changes in his sixty-eight years. He had been born in the bottom of an Ohio keelboat in 1830; was in Bloody Kansas when John Brown came through; fought for the Confederacy, first as a corporal, then a sergeant major, from Chickamauga to the Wilderness; and had seen more skirmishes with hostile tribes than most people would ever read about in a dozen Wide-Awake Library novels.
It was as hot as under an upside-down washpot on a tin shed roof. The sheriff’s wagon horse seemed asleep as it trotted, head down, puffs hanging in the still air like brown shrubs made of dust around its hooves. There were ten, maybe a dozen people in sight in the whole town. Those few on the street moved like molasses, only as far as they had to, from shade to shade. Anybody with sense was asleep at home with wet towels hung over the windows, or sitting as still as possible with a funeral-parlor fan in their hands.
The sheriff licked his big droopy mustache and hoped nobody nodded to him. He was already too hot and tired to tip his hat. He leaned back in the wagon seat and straightened his bad leg (a Yankee souvenir) against the boot board. His gray suit was like a boiling shroud. He was too hot to reach up and flick the dust off his new hat. He had become sheriff in the special election three years ago to fill out Sanderson’s term when the governor had appointed the former sheriff attorney general. Nothing much had happened in the county since then.
“Gee-hup,” he said.
The horse trotted three steps before going back into its walking trance.
Sheriff Lindley didn’t bother her again until he pulled up at De Spain’s big place and said, “Whoa, there.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 42