The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “And there’s no other way out for him?”

  “No.”

  He was lying—I was sure of it. Somehow I posed for him a way out of Cam Le. “Well … so,” I said, flustered, uncertain of what to do and at the same time pleased with the prospect of conspiring against Tuu.

  “Just sit with me a while,” he said, easing his left foot forward to touch my right ankle.

  Once again I experienced weakness, and over the next seven or eight hours, he would alternately move his foot away, allowing me to recover, and then bring it back into contact with me. I’m not certain what was happening. One logic dictates that since I had been peripherally involved in his death—“part of his process”—he was therefore able to draw strength from me. Likely as not, this was the case. Yet I’ve never been convinced that ordinary logic applied to our circumstance: it may be that we were governed by an arcane rationality to which we both were blind. Though his outward aspect did not appear to undergo further changes, his strength became tangible, a cold radiation that pulsed with the steadiness of an icy heart. I came to feel that the image I was seeing was the tip of an iceberg, the perceptible extremity of a huge power cell that existed mainly in dimensions beyond the range of mortal vision. I tried to give the impression of an interview to our observers by continuing to ask questions; but Stoner sat with his head down, his face hidden, and gave terse, disinterested replies.

  The sun declined to the tops of the palms, the yellow paint of the houses took on a tawny hue, and—drained by the day-long alternation of weakness and recovery—I told Stoner I needed to rest. “Tomorrow,” he said without looking up. “Come back tomorrow.”

  “All right.” I had no doubt that Tuu would be eager to go on with the experiment. I stood and turned to leave; but then another question, a pertinent one, occurred to me. “If a ghost is a stage of growth,” I said, “what’s he grow into?”

  He lifted his head, and I staggered back, terrified. His eyes were ablaze, even the whites winking with cold fire, as if nuggets of phosphorus were embedded in his skull.

  “Tomorrow,” he said again.

  * * *

  During the debriefing that followed, I developed a bad case of the shakes and experienced a number of other, equally unpleasant reactions; the places where Stoner had touched me seemed to have retained a chill, and the thought of that dead hand leeching me of energy was in retrospect thoroughly repellent. A good many of Tuu’s subordinates, alarmed by Stoner’s transformation, lobbied to break off the experiment. I did my best to soothe them, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to return to the village. I couldn’t tell whether Tuu noticed either my trepidation or the fact that I was being less than candid; he was too busy bringing his subordinates in line to question me in depth.

  That night, when Fierman broke out his whiskey, I swilled it down as if it were an antidote to poison. To put it bluntly, I got shit-faced. Both Fierman and Witcover seemed warm human beings, old buddies, and our filthy yellow room with its flickering lamp took on the coziness of a cottage and hearth. The first stage of my drunk was maudlin, filled with self-recriminations over my past treatment of Stoner: I vowed not to shrink from helping him. The second stage … Well, once I caught Fierman gazing at me askance and registered that my behavior was verging on the manic. Laughing hysterically, talking like a speed freak. We talked about everything except Stoner, and I suppose it was inevitable that the conversation work itself around to the war and its aftermath. Dimly, I heard myself pontificating on a variety of related subjects. At one point Fierman asked what I thought of the Vietnam Memorial, and I told him I had mixed emotions.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I go to the Memorial, man,” I said, standing up from the table where we had all been sitting. “And I cry. You can’t help but cryin’, ’cause that”—I hunted for an appropriate image—“that black dividin’ line between nowheres, that says it just right ’bout the war. It feels good to cry, to go public with grief and take your place with all the vets of the truly outstandin’ wars.” I swayed, righted myself. “But the Memorial, the Unknown, the parades … basically they’re bullshit.” I started to wander around the room, realized that I had forgotten why I had stood and leaned against the wall.

  “How you mean?” asked Witcover, who was nearly as drunk as I was.

  “Man,” I said, “it’s a shuck! I mean ten goddamn years go by, and alla sudden there’s this blast of media warmth and government-sponsored emotion. ‘Welcome home, guys,’ ever’body’s sayin’. ‘We’re sorry we treated you so bad. Next time it’s gonna be different. You wait and see.’” I went back to the table and braced myself on it with both hands, staring blearily at Witcover: his tan looked blotchy. “Hear that, man? ‘Next time.’ That’s all it is. Nobody really gives a shit ’bout the vets. They’re just pavin’ the way for the next time.”

  “I don’t know,” said Witcover. “Seems to—”

  “Right!” I spanked the table with the flat of my hand. “You don’t know. You don’t know shit ’bout it, so shut the fuck up!”

  “Be cool,” advised Fierman. “Man’s entitled to his ’pinion.”

  I looked at him, saw a flushed, fat face with bloodshot eyes and a stupid reproving frown. “Fuck you,” I said. “And fuck his ’pinion.” I turned back to Witcover. “Whaddya think, man? That there’s this genuine breath of conscience sweepin’ the land? Open your goddamn eyes! You been to the movies lately? Jesus Christ! Courageous grunts strikin’ fear into the heart of the Red Menace! Miraculous one-man missions to save our honor. Huh! Honor!” I took a long pull from the bottle. “Those movies, they make war seem like a mystical opportunity. Well, man, when I was here it wasn’t quite that way, y’know. It was leeches, fungus, the shits. It was searchin’ in the weeds for your buddy’s arm. It was lookin’ into the snaky eyes of some whore you were bangin’ and feelin’ weird shit crawl along your spine and expectin’ her head to do a Linda Blair three-sixty spin.” I slumped into a chair and leaned close to Witcover. “It was Mordor, man. Stephen King land. Horror. And now, now I look around at all these movies and monuments and crap, and it makes me wanna fuckin’ puke to see what a noble hell it’s turnin’ out to be!”

  I felt pleased with myself, having said this, and I leaned back, basking in a righteous glow. But Witcover was unimpressed. His face cinched into a scowl, and he said in a tight voice, “You’re startin’ to really piss me off, y’know.”

  “Yeah?” I said, and grinned. “How ’bout that?”

  “Yeah, all you war-torn creeps, you think you got papers sayin’ you can make an ass outta yourself and everybody else gotta say, ‘Oh, you poor fucker! Give us more of your tortured wisdom!’”

  Fierman muffled a laugh, and—rankled—I said, “That so?”

  Witcover hunched his shoulders as if preparing for an off-tackle plunge. “I been listenin’ to you guys for years, and you’re alla goddamn same. You think you’re owed something ’cause you got ground around in the political mill. Shit! I been in Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. Compared to those people, you didn’t go through diddley. But you use what happened as an excuse for fuckin’ up your lives … or for being assholes. Like you, man.” He affected a macho-sounding bass voice. “‘I been in a war. I am an expert on reality.’ You don’t know how ridiculous you are.”

  “Am I?” I was shaking again, but with adrenaline not fear, and I knew I was going to hit Witcover. He didn’t know it—he was smirking, his eyes flicking toward Fierman, seeking approval—and that in itself was a sufficient reason to hit him, purely for educational purposes: I had, you see, reached the level of drunkenness at which an amoral man such as myself understands his whimsies to be moral imperatives. But the real reason, the one that had begun to rumble inside me, was Stoner. All my fear, all my reactions thus far, had merely been tremors signaling an imminent explosion, and now, thinking about him nearby, old horrors were stirred up, and I saw myself walking in a napalmed ville rife with dead VC, crispy critters, and beside m
e this weird little guy named Fellowes who claimed he could read the future from their scorched remains and would point at a hexagramlike structure of charred bone and gristle and say, “That there means a bad moon on Wednesday,” and claimed, too, that he could read the past from the blood of head wounds, and then I was leaning over this Canadian nurse, beautiful blond girl, disemboweled by a mine and somehow still alive, her organs dark and wet and pulsing, and somebody giggling, whispering about what he’d like to do, and then another scene that was whirled away so quickly, I could only make out the color of blood, and Witcover said something else, and a dead man was stretching out his hand to me and …

  I nailed Witcover, and he flew sideways off the chair and rolled on the floor. I got to my feet, and Fierman grabbed me, trying to wrangle me away; but that was unnecessary, because all my craziness had been dissipated. “I’m okay now,” I said, slurring the words, pushing him aside. He threw a looping punch that glanced off my neck, not even staggering me. Then Witcover yelled. He had pulled himself erect and was weaving toward me; an egg-shaped lump was swelling on his cheekbone. I laughed—he looked so puffed up with rage—and started for the door. As I went through it, he hit me on the back of the head. The blow stunned me a bit, but I was more amused than hurt; his fist had made a funny bonk sound on my skull, and that set me to laughing harder.

  I stumbled between the houses, bouncing off walls, reeling out of control, and heard shouts … Vietnamese shouts. By the time I had regained my balance, I had reached the center of the village. The moon was almost full, pale yellow, its craters showing: a pitted eye in the black air. It kept shrinking and expanding, and—as it seemed to lurch farther off—I realized I had fallen and was lying flat on my back. More shouts. They sounded distant, a world away, and the moon had begun to spiral, to dwindle, like water being sucked down a drain. Jesus, I remember thinking just before I passed out, Jesus, how’d I get so drunk?

  * * *

  I’d forgotten Stoner’s promise to tell me about the Land of Shades, but apparently he had not, for that night I had a dream in which I was Stoner. It was not that I thought I was him: I was him, prone to all his twitches, all his moods. I was walking in a pitch-dark void, possessed by a great hunger. Once this hunger might have been characterized as a yearning for the life I had lost, but it had been transformed into a lust for the life I might someday attain if I proved equal to the tests with which I was presented. That was all I knew of the Land of Shades—that it was a testing ground, less a place than a sequence of events. It was up to me to gain strength from the tests, to ease my hunger as best I could. I was ruled by this hunger, and it was my only wish to ease it.

  Soon I spotted an island of brightness floating in the dark, and as I drew near, the brightness resolved into an old French plantation house fronted by tamarinds and rubber trees; sections of white stucco wall and a verandah and a red tile roof were visible between the trunks. Patterns of soft radiance overlaid the grounds, yet there were neither stars nor moon nor any source of light I could discern. I was not alarmed by this—such discrepancies were typical of the Land of Shades.

  When I reached the trees, I paused, steeling myself for whatever lay ahead. Breezes sprang up to stir the leaves, and a sizzling chorus of crickets faded in from nowhere as if a recording of sensory detail had been switched on. Alert to every shift of shadow, I moved cautiously through the trees and up the verandah steps. Broken roof tiles crunched beneath my feet. Beside the door stood a bottom-out cane chair; the rooms, however, were devoid of furnishings, the floors dusty, the whitewash flaking from the walls. The house appeared to be deserted, but I knew I was not alone. There was a hush in the air, the sort that arises from a secretive presence. Even had I failed to notice this, I could scarcely have missed the scent of perfume. I had never tested against a woman before, and, excited by the prospect, I was tempted to run through the house and ferret her out. But this would have been foolhardy, and I continued at a measured pace.

  At the center of the house lay a courtyard, a rectangular space choked with waist-high growths of jungle plants, dominated by a stone fountain in the shape of a stylized orchid. The woman was leaning against the fountain, and despite the grayish-green half-light—a light that seemed to arise from the plants—I could see she was beautiful. Slim and honey-colored, with falls of black hair spilling over the shoulders of her ao dai. She did not move or speak, but the casualness of her pose was an invitation. I felt drawn to her, and as I pushed through the foliage, the fleshy leaves clung to my thighs and groin, touches that seemed designed to provoke arousal. I stopped an arm’s length away and studied her. Her features were of a feline delicacy, and in the fullness of her lower lip, the petulant set of her mouth, I detected a trace of French breeding. She stared at me with palpable sexual interest. It had not occurred to me that the confrontation might take place on a sexual level, yet now I was certain this would be the case. I had to restrain myself from initiating the contact: there are rigorous formalities that must be observed prior to each test. And besides, I wanted to savor the experience.

  “I am Tuyet,” she said in a voice that seemed to combine the qualities of smoke and music.

  “Stoner,” I said.

  The names hung in the air like the echoes of two gongs.

  She lifted her hand as if to touch me, but lowered it: she, too, was practicing restraint. “I was a prostitute,” she said. “My home was Lai Khe, but I was an outcast. I worked the water points along Highway Thirteen.”

  It was conceivable, I thought, that I may have known her. While I had been laid up in An Loc, I’d frequented those water points: bomb craters that had been turned into miniature lakes by the rains and served as filling stations for the water trucks attached to the First Infantry. Every morning the whores and their mama sans would drive out to the water points in three-wheeled motorcycle trucks; with them would be vendors selling combs and pushbutton knives and rubbers that came wrapped in gold foil, making them look like those disks of chocolate you can buy in the States. Most of these girls were more friendly than the city girls, and knowing that Tuyet had been one of them caused me to feel an affinity with her.

  She went on to tell me that she had gone into the jungle with an American soldier and had been killed by a sniper. I told her my story in brief and then asked what she had learned of the Land of Shades. This is the most rigorous formality: I had never met anyone with whom I had failed to exchange information.

  “Once,” Tuyet said, “I met an old man, a Cao Dai medium from Black Virgin Mountain, who told me he had been to a place where a pillar of whirling light and dust joined earth to sky. Voices spoke from the pillar, sometimes many at once, and from them he understood that all wars are merely reflections of a deeper struggle, of a demon breaking free. The demon freed by our war, he said, was very strong, very dangerous. We the dead had been recruited to wage war against him.”

  I had been told a similar story by an NLF captain, and once, while crawling through a tunnel system, I myself had heard voices speaking from a skull half buried in the earth. But I had been too frightened to stay and listen. I related all this to Tuyet, and her response was to trail her fingers across my arm. My restraint, too, had frayed. I dragged her down into the thick foliage. It was as if we had been submerged in a sea of green light and fleshy stalks, as if the plantation house had vanished and we were adrift in an infinite vegetable depth where gravity had been replaced by some buoyant principle. I tore at her clothes, she at mine. Her ao dai shredded like crepe, and my fatigues came away in ribbons that dangled from her hooked fingers. Greedy for her, I pressed my mouth to her breasts. Her nipples looked black in contrast to her skin, and it seemed I could taste their blackness, tart and sour. Our breathing was hoarse, urgent, and the only other sound was the soft mulching of the leaves. With surprising strength, she pushed me onto my back and straddled my hips, guiding me inside her, sinking down until her buttocks were grinding against my thighs.

  Her head flung back, she lifted
and lowered herself. The leaves and stalks churned and intertwined around us as if they, too, were copulating. For a few moments my hunger was assuaged, but soon I noticed that the harder I thrust, the more fiercely she plunged, the less intense the sensations became. Though she gripped me tightly, the friction seemed to have been reduced. Frustrated, I dug my fingers into her plump hips and battered at her, trying to drive myself deeper. Then I squeezed one of her breasts and felt a searing pain in my palm. I snatched back my hand and saw that her nipple, both nipples, were twisting, elongating; I realized that they had been transformed into the heads of two black centipedes, and the artful movements of her internal muscles … they were too artful, too disconnectedly in motion. An instant later I felt that same searing pain in my cock and knew I was screwing myself into a nest of creatures like those protruding from her breasts. All her skin was rippling, reflecting the humping of thousands of centipedes beneath.

  The pain was enormous, so much so that I thought my entire body must be glowing with it. But I did not dare fail this test, and I continued pumping into her, thrusting harder than ever. The leaves thrashed, the stalks thrashed as in a gale, and the green light grew livid. Tuyet began to scream—God knows what manner of pain I was causing her—and her screams completed a perverse circuit within me. I found I could channel my own pain into those shrill sounds. Still joined to her, I rolled atop her, clamped her wrists together and pinned them above her head. Her screams rang louder, inspiring me to greater efforts yet. Despite the centipedes tipping her breasts, or perhaps because of them, because of the grotesque juxtaposition of the sensual and the horrid, her beauty seemed to have been enhanced, and my mastery over her actually provided me a modicum of pleasure.

  The light began to whiten, and looking off, I saw that we were being borne by an invisible current through—as I had imagined—an infinite depth of stalks and leaves. The stalks that lashed around us thickened far below into huge pale trunks with circular ribbing. I could not make out where they met the earth—if, indeed, they did—and they appeared to rise an equal height above. The light brightened further, casting the distant stalks in silhouette, and I realized we were drifting toward the source of the whiteness, beyond which would lie another test, another confrontation. I glanced at Tuyet. Her skin no longer displayed that obscene rippling, her nipples had reverted to normal. Pain was evolving into pleasure, but I knew it would be short-lived, and I tried to resist the current, to hold onto pain, because even pain was preferable to the hunger I would soon experience. Tuyet clawed my back, and I felt the first dissolute rush of my orgasm. The current was irresistible. It flowed through my blood, my cells. It was part of me, or rather I was part of it. I let it move me, bringing me to completion.