The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The black man who did everything for De Spain opened the gate.

  “Sheriff,” he said.

  “Luther,” said Lindley, nodding his head.

  “Around back, Mr. Lindley.”

  There were two boys—raggedy town kids, the Strother boy and one of the poor Chisums—sitting on the edge of the well. The Chisum kid had been crying.

  De Spain was hot and bothered. He was only half dressed, with suit pants, white shirt, vest, and stockings on but no shoes or coat. He hadn’t macassared his hair yet. He was pointing a rifle with a barrel big as a drainpipe at the two boys.

  “Here they are, Sheriff. Luther saw them down in the orchard. I’m sure he saw them stealing my peaches, but he wouldn’t tell me. I knew something was up when he didn’t put my clothes in the usual place next to the window where I like to dress. So I looked out and saw them. They had half a potato sack full by the time I crept around the house and caught them. I want to charge them with trespass and thievery.”

  “Well, well,” said the sheriff, looking down at the sackful of evidence. He turned and pointed toward the black man. “You want me to charge Luther here with collusion and abetting a crime?” Neither Lindley’s nor Luther’s face betrayed any emotion.

  “Of course not,” said De Spain. “I’ve told him time and time again he’s too soft on filchers. If this keeps happening, I’ll hire another boy who’ll enforce my orchard with buckshot, if need be.”

  De Spain was a young man with eyes like a weimaraner’s. As Deputy Sweets said, he had the kind of face you couldn’t hit just once. He owned half the town of Pachuco City. The other half paid him rent.

  “Get in the wagon, boys,” said Lindley.

  “Aren’t you going to cover them with your weapon?” asked De Spain.

  “You should know by now, Mr. De Spain, that when I wear this suit I ain’t got nothin’ but a three-shot pocket pistol on me. Besides”—he looked at the two boys in the wagon bed—“they know if they give me any guff, I’ll jerk a bowknot in one of ’em and bite the other’n’s ass off.”

  “I don’t think there’s a need for profanity,” said De Spain.

  “It’s too damn hot for anything else,” said Lindley. “I’ll clamp ’em in the juzgado and have Sweets run the papers over to your office tomorrow mornin’.”

  “I wish you’d take them out one of the rural roads somewhere and flail the tar out of them to teach them about property rights,” said De Spain.

  The sheriff tipped his hat back and looked up at De Spain’s three-story house with the parlor so big you could hold a rodeo in it. Then he looked back at the businessman, who’d finally lowered the rifle.

  “Well, I know you’d like that,” said Lindley. “I seem to remember that most of the fellers who wrote the Constitution were pretty well off, but some of the other rich people thought they had funny ideas. But they were really pretty smart. One of the things they were smart about was the Bill of Rights. You know, Mr. De Spain, the reason they put in the Bill of Rights wasn’t to give all the little people without jobs or money a lot of breaks with the law. Why they put that in there was for if the people without jobs or money ever got upset and turned on them, they could ask for the same justice everybody else got.”

  De Spain looked at him with disgust. “I’ve never liked your homespun parables, and I don’t like the way you sheriff this county.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” said Lindley. “You’ve got sixteen months, three weeks, and two days to find somebody to run against me. Good evening, Mr. De Spain.”

  He climbed onto the wagon seat.

  “Luther.”

  “Sheriff.”

  He turned the horse around as De Spain and the black man took the sack of peaches through the kitchen door into the house.

  The sheriff stopped the wagon near the railroad tracks where the houses began to deviate from the vertical.

  “Jody. Billy Roy.” He looked at them with eyes like chips of flint. “You’re the dumbest pair of squirts that ever lived in Pachuco City! First off, half those peaches were still green. You’d have got bellyaches, and your mothers would have beaten you within an inch of your lives and given you so many doses of Black Draught you’d shit over ten-rail fences all week. Now listen to what I’m sayin’, ’cause I’m only gonna say it once. If I ever hear of either of you stealing anything, anywhere in this county, I’m going to put you both in school.”

  “No, Sheriff, please, no!”

  “I’ll put you in there every morning and come and get you out seven long hours later, and I’ll have the judge issue a writ keeping you there till you’re twelve years old. And if you try to run away, I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth with Joe Sweeper’s bloodhounds, and I’ll bring you back.”

  They were crying now.

  “You git home.” They were running before they left the wagon.

  * * *

  Somewhere between the second piece of corn bread and the third helping of snap beans, a loud rumble shook the ground.

  “Goodness’ sakes!” said Elsie, his wife of twenty-three years. “What can that be?”

  “I expect that’s Elmer, out by the creek. He came in last week and asked if he could blast on the place. I told him it didn’t matter to me as long as he did it between sunup and sundown and didn’t blow his whole family of rug rats and yard apes up.

  “Jake, down at the mercantile, said Elmer bought enough dynamite to blow up Fort Worth if he’d a mind to—all but the last three sticks in the store. Jake had to reorder for stump-blowin’ time.”

  “Whatever could he want with all that much?”

  “Oh, that damn fool has the idea the vein in that old mine that played out in ’83 might start up again on his property. He got to talking with the Smith boy, oh, hell, what’s his name—?”

  “Leo?”

  “Yeah, Leo, the one that studies down in Austin, learns about stars and rocks and all that shit.…”

  “Watch your language, Bertram!”

  “Oh, hell, anyway, that boy must have put a bug up Elmer’s butt about that—”

  “Bertram!” said Elsie, putting down her knife and fork.

  “Oh, hell, anyway. I guess Elmer’ll blow the side off his hill and bury his house before he’s through.”

  The sheriff was reading a week-old copy of the Waco Herald while Elsie washed up the dishes. He sure missed Brann’s Iconoclast, the paper he used to read, which had ceased publication when the editor was gunned down on a Waco street by an irate Baptist four months before. The Waco paper had a little squib from London, England, about there having been explosions on Mars ten nights in a row last month, and whether it was a sign of life on that planet or some unusual volcanic activity.

  Sheriff Lindley had never given volcanoes (except those in the Valley of the Mexico) or the planet Mars much thought.

  Hooves came pounding down the road. He put down his paper. “Sheriff, sheriff!” he said in a high, mocking voice.

  “What?” asked Elsie. Then she heard the hooves and began to dry her hands on the towel on the nail above the sink.

  The horse stopped out front; bare feet slapped up to the porch; small fists pounded on the door.

  “Sheriff! Sheriff!” yelled a voice Lindley recognized as belonging to either Tommy or Jimmy Atkinson.

  He strode to the door and opened it.

  “Tommy, what’s all the hooraw?”

  “Jimmy. Sheriff, something fell on our pasture, tore it all to hell, knocked down the tree, killed some of our cattle, Tommy can’t find his dog, Mother sent—”

  “Hold on! Something fell on your place? Like what?”

  “I don’t know! Like a big rock, only sparks was flyin’ off it, and it roared and blew up! It’s at the north end of the place, and—”

  “Elsie, run over and get Sweets and the boys. Have them go get Leo Smith if he ain’t gone back to college yet. Sounds to me like Pachuco County’s got its first shootin’ star. Hold on, Jimmy, I’m comin’ right a
long. We’ll take my wagon; you can leave your pony here.”

  “Oh, hurry, Sheriff! It’s big! It killed our cattle and tore up the fences—”

  “Well, I can’t arrest it for that,” said Lindley. He put on his Stetson. “And I thought Elmer’d blowed hisself up. My, my, ain’t never seen a shooting star before.…”

  * * *

  “Damn if it don’t look like somebody threw a locomotive through here,” said the sheriff. The Atkinson place used to have a sizable hill and the tallest tree in the county on it. Now it had half a hill and a big stump and beyond, a huge crater. Dirt had been thrown up in a ten-foot-high pile around it. There was a large, rounded, gray object buried in the dirt and torn caliche at the bottom. Waves of heat rose from it, and gray ash, like old charcoal, fell off it into the shimmering pit.

  Half the town was riding out in wagons and on horseback as the news spread. The closest neighbors were walking over in the twilight, wearing their go-visiting clothes.

  “Well, well,” said the sheriff, looking down. “So that’s what a meteor looks like.”

  Leo Smith was in the pit, walking around.

  “I figured you’d be here sooner or later,” said Lindley.

  “Hello, Sheriff,” said Leo. “It’s still too hot to touch. Part of a cow’s buried under the back end.”

  The sheriff looked over at the Atkinson family. “You folks is danged lucky. That thing coulda come down smack on your house or, worse, your barn. What time did it fall?”

  “Straight up and down six o’clock,” said Mrs. Atkinson. “We was settin’ down to supper. I saw it out of the corner of my eye; then all tarnation came down. Rocks must have been falling for ten minutes!”

  “It’s pretty spectacular, Sheriff,” said Leo. “I’m going into town to telegraph off to the professors at the university. They’ll sure want to look at this.”

  “Any reason other than general curiosity?” asked Lindley.

  “I’ve only seen pictures and handled little bitty parts of one,” said Leo, “but it doesn’t look usual. They’re generally like big rocks, all stone or iron. The outside of this one’s soft and crumbly. Ashy, too.”

  There was a slight pop and a stove-cooling noise from the thing.

  “Well, you can come back into town with me if you want to. Hey, Sweets!”

  The chief deputy came over.

  “A couple of you boys better stay here tonight, keep people from falling in the hole. I guess if Leo’s gonna wire the university, you better keep anybody from knockin’ chunks off it. It’ll probably get pretty crowded. If I was the Atkinsons, I’d start chargin’ a nickel a look.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  “I’ll be out here tomorrow mornin’ to take another gander. I gotta serve a process paper on old Theobald before he lights out for his chores. If I sent one ‘a’ you boys, he’d as soon shoot you as say howdy.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  He and Leo and Jimmy Atkinson got in the wagon and rode off toward the quiet lights of town far away.

  * * *

  There was a new smell in the air.

  The sheriff noticed it as he rode toward the Atkinson ranch by the south road early the next morning. There was an odor like when something goes wrong at the telegraph office. Smoke was curling up from the pasture. Maybe there was a scrub fire started from the heat of the falling star.

  He topped the last rise. Before him lay devastation the likes of which he hadn’t seen since the retreat from Atlanta.

  “Great gawd ahmighty!” he said.

  There were dead horses and charred wagons all around. The ranch house was untouched, but the barn was burned to the ground. There were crisscrossed lines of burnt grass that looked like they’d been painted with a tarbrush.

  He saw no bodies anywhere. Where was Sweets? Where was Luke, the other deputy? Where had the people from the wagons gone? What had happened?

  Lindley looked at the crater. There was a shiny rod sticking out of it, with something round on the end. From here it looked like one of those carnival acts where a guy spins a plate on the end of a dowel rod, only this glinted like metal in the early sun. As he watched, a small cloud of green steam rose above it from the pit.

  He saw a motion behind an old tree uprooted by a storm twelve years ago. It was Sweets. He was yelling and waving the sheriff back. Lindley rode his horse into a small draw, then came up into the open.

  There was movement over at the crater. He thought he saw something. Reflected sunlight flashed by his eyes, and he thought he saw a rounded silhouette. He heard a noise like sometimes gets in bob wire on a windy day. He heard a humming sound then, smelled the electric smell real strong. Fire started a few feet from him, out of nowhere, and moved toward him.

  Then his horse exploded. The air was an inferno, he was thrown spinning—

  He must have blacked out. He had no memory of what went next. When he came to, he was running as fast as he ever had toward the uprooted tree.

  Fire jumped all around. Luke was shooting over the tree roots with his pistol. He ducked. A long section of the trunk was washed with flames and sparks.

  Lindley dove behind the root tangle.

  “What the dingdong is goin’ on?” he asked as he tried to catch his breath. He still had his new hat on, but his britches and coat were singed and smoking.

  “God damn, Bert! I don’t know,” said Sweets, leaning around Luke. “We was out here all night; it was a regular party; most of the time we was up on the lip up there. Maybe thirty or forty people comin’ and goin’ all the time. We was all talking and hoorawing, and then we heard something about an hour ago. We looked down, and I’ll be damned if the whole top of that thing didn’t come off like a mason jar!

  “We was watching, and these damn things started coming out—they looked like big old leather balls, big as horses, with snakes all out the front—”

  “What?”

  “Snakes. Yeah, tentacles Leo called them, like an octy-puss. Leo’d come back from town and was here when them boogers came out. Martians he said they was, things from Mars. They had big old eyes, big as your head! Everybody was pushing and shoving; then one of them pulled out one of them gun things, real slow like, and just started burning up everything in sight.

  “We all ran back for whatever cover we could find—it took ’em a while to get up the dirt pile. They killed horses, dogs, anything they could see. Fire was everywhere. They use that thing just like the volunteer firemen use them water hoses in Waco!”

  “Where’s Leo?”

  Sweets pointed to the draw that ran diagonally to the west. “We watched awhile, finally figured they couldn’t line up on the ditch all the way to the rise. Leo and the others got away up the draw—he was gonna telegraph the university about it. The bunch that got away was supposed to send people out to the town road to warn people. You probably would have run into them if you hadn’t been coming from Theobald’s place. Anyway, soon as them things saw people were gettin’ away, they got mad as hornets. That’s when they lit up the Atkinsons’ barn.”

  A flash of fire leapt in the roots of the tree, jumped back thirty feet into the burnt grass behind them, then moved back and forth in a curtain of sparks.

  “Man, that’s what I call a real smoke pole,” said Luke.

  “Well,” Lindley said. “This won’t do. These things done attacked citizens in my jurisdiction, and they killed my horse.”

  He turned to Luke.

  “Be real careful, and get back to town, and get the posse up. Telegraph the Rangers and tell ’em to burn leather gettin’ here. Then get aholt of Skip Whitworth and have him bring out The Gun.”

  * * *

  Skip Whitworth sat behind the tree trunk and pulled the cover from the six-foot rifle at his side. Skip was in his late fifties. He had been a sniper in the War for Southern Independence when he had been in his twenties. He had once shot at a Yankee general just as the officer was bringing a forkful of beans up to his mouth. When the f
ork got there, there were only some shoulders and a gullet for the beans to drop into.

  That had been from a mile and a half away, from sixty feet up a pine tree.

  The rifle was an .80-caliber octagonal-barrel breechloader that used two and a half ounces of powder and a percussion cap the size of a jawbreaker for each shot. It had a telescopic sight running the entire length of the barrel.

  “They’re using that thing on the end of that stick to watch us,” said Lindley. “I had Sweets jump around, and every time he did, one of those cooters would come up with that fire gun and give us what-for.”

  Skip said nothing. He loaded his rifle, which had a breechblock lever the size of a crowbar on it, then placed another round—cap, paper cartridge, ball—next to him. He drew a bead and pulled the trigger. It sounded like dynamite had gone off in their ears. The wobbling pole snapped in two halfway up. The top end flopped around back into the pit.

  There was a scrabbling noise above the whirring from the earthen lip. Something round came up.

  Skip had smoothly opened the breech, put in the ball, torn the cartridge with his teeth, put in the cap, closed the action, pulled back the hammer, and sighted before the shape reached the top of the dirt.

  Metal glinted in the middle of the dark thing. Skip fired. There was a squeech; the whole top of the round thing opened up; it spun around and backward, things in its front working like a daddy longlegs thrown on a roaring stove.

  Skip loaded again. There were flashes of light from the crater. Something came up shooting, fire leaping like hot sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil, the air full of flames and smoke. Skip fired again.

  The fire gun flew up in the air. Snakes twisted, writhed, disappeared.

  It was very quiet for a few seconds.

  Then there was the renewed whining of machinery and noises like a pile driver, the sounds of filing and banging. Steam came up over the crater lip.

  “Sounds like a steel foundry in there,” said Sweets.

  “I don’t like it one bit,” said Lindley. “Be danged if I’m gonna let ’em get the drop on us. Can you keep them down?”

  “How many are there?” asked Skip.