The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  At long last a dusty car with a gook corporal at the wheel pulled up beside me. Fierman and Witcover were in back, and Witcover’s eye was discolored, swollen shut. I went around to the passenger side, opened the front door and heard behind me a spit-filled, explosive sound. Turning, I saw that a kid of about eight or nine had jumped out of hiding to ambush me. He had a dirt-smeared belly that popped from the waist of his ragged shorts, and he was aiming a toy rifle made of sticks. He shot me again, jiggling the gun to simulate automatic fire. Little monster with slit black eyes. Staring daggers at me, thinking I’d killed his daddy. He probably would have loved it if I had keeled over, clutching my chest; but I wasn’t in the mood. I pointed my finger, cocked the thumb and shot him down like a dog.

  He stared meanly and fired a third time: this was serious business, and he wanted me to die. “Row-nal Ray-gun,” he said, and pretended to spit.

  I just laughed and climbed into the car. The gook corporal engaged the gears and we sped off into a boil of dust and light, as if—like Stoner—we were passing through a metaphysical barrier between worlds. My head bounced against the back of the seat, and with each impact I felt that my thoughts were clearing, that a poisonous sediment was being jolted loose and flushed from my bloodstream. Thick silence welled from the rear of the car, and not wanting to ride with hostiles all the way to Saigon, I turned to Witcover and apologized for having hit him. Pressure had done it to me, I told him. That, and bad memories of a bad time. His features tightened into a sour knot and he looked out the window, wholly unforgiving. But I refused to allow his response to disturb me—let him have his petty hate, his grudge, for whatever good it would do him—and I turned away to face the violent green sweep of the jungle, the great troubled rush of the world ahead, with a heart that seemed lighter by an ounce of anger, by one bitterness removed. To the end of that passion, at least, I had become reconciled.

  KAREN JOY FOWLER

  The Faithful Companion at Forty

  Karen Joy Fowler published her first story in 1985, and quickly established an impressive reputation, becoming a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among other markets. In 1987, she won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s best new writer; 1986 also saw the appearance of her first book, the collection Artificial Things, which was released to an enthusiastic response and impressive reviews. She is currently at work on her first novel. Fowler lives in Davis, California, has two children, did her graduate work in North Asian politics, and occasionally teaches ballet. Her story “The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things” was in our Third Annual Collection; her story “The Gate of Ghosts” was in our Fourth Annual Collection.

  Here she gives us a surreal and very funny look beyond those thrilling days of yesteryear.

  THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY

  Karen Joy Fowler

  His first reaction is that I just can’t deal with the larger theoretical issues. He’s got this new insight he wants to call the Displacement Theory and I can’t grasp it. Your basic, quiet, practical minority sidekick. The limited edition. Kato. Spock. Me. But this is not true.

  I still remember the two general theories we were taught on the reservation which purported to explain the movement of history. The first we named the Great Man Theory. Its thesis was that the critical decisions in human development were made by individuals, special people gifted in personality and circumstance. The second we named the Wave Theory. It argued that only the masses could effectively determine the course of history. Those very visible individuals who appeared as leaders of the great movements were, in fact, only those who happened to articulate the direction which had already been chosen. They were as much the victims of the process as any other single individual. Flotsam. Running Dog and I used to be able to debate this issue for hours.

  It is true that this particular question has ceased to interest me much. But a correlative question has come to interest me more. I spent most of my fortieth birthday sitting by myself, listening to Pachelbel’s Canon, over and over, and I’m asking myself: Are some people special? Are some people more special than others? Have I spent my whole life backing the wrong horse?

  I mean, it was my birthday and not one damn person called.

  Finally, about four o’clock in the afternoon, I gave up and I called him. “Eh, Poncho,” I say. “What’s happening?”

  “Eh, Cisco,” he answers. “Happy Birthday.”

  “Thanks,” I tell him. I can’t decide whether I am more pissed to know he remembered but didn’t call than I was when I thought he forgot.

  “The big four-o,” he says. “Wait a second, buddy. Let me go turn the music down.” He’s got the William Tell Overture blasting on the stereo. He’s always got the William Tell Overture blasting on the stereo. I’m not saying the man has a problem, but the last time we were in Safeway together he claimed to see a woman being kidnapped by a silver baron over in frozen foods. He pulled the flip top off a Tab and lobbed the can into the ice cream. “Cover me,” he shouts, and runs an end pattern with the cart through the soups. I had to tell everyone he was having a Vietnam flashback.

  And the mask. There are times and seasons when a mask is useful; I’m the first to admit that. It’s Thanksgiving, say, and you’re an Indian so it’s never been one of your favorite holidays, and you’ve got no family because you spent your youth playing the supporting role to some macho creep who couldn’t commit, so here you are, standing in line, to see “Rocky IV” and someone you know walks by. I mean, I’ve been there. But for everyday, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There’s an element of exhibitionism in it. A large element. If you ask me.

  So now he’s back on the phone. He sighs. “God,” he says. “I miss those thrilling days of yesteryear.”

  See? We haven’t talked twenty seconds and already the subject is his problems. His ennui. His angst. “I’m having an affair,” I tell him. Two years ago I wouldn’t have said it. Two years ago he’d just completed his EST training and he would have told me to take responsibility for it. Now he’s into biofeedback and astrology. Now we’re not responsible for anything.

  “Yeah?” he says. He thinks for a minute. “You’re not married,” he points out.

  I can’t see that this is relevant. “She is,” I tell him.

  “Yeah?” he says again, only this “yeah” has a nasty quality to it; this “yeah” tells me someone is hoping for sensationalistic details. This is not the “yeah” of a concerned friend. Still, I can’t help playing to it. For years I’ve been holding this man’s horse while he leaps onto its back from the roof. For years I’ve been providing cover from behind a rock while he breaks for the back door. I’m forty now. It’s time to get something back from him. So I hint at the use of controlled substances. We’re talking peyote and cocaine. I mention pornography. Illegally imported. From Denmark. Of course, it’s not really my affair. Can you picture me? My affair is quiet and ardent. I borrowed this affair from another friend. It shows you the lengths I have to go to before anyone will listen to me.

  I may finally have gone too far. He’s really at a loss now. “Women,” he says finally. “You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.” Which is a joke, coming from him. He had that single-man-raising-his-orphaned-nephew-all-alone schtick working so smoothly the women were passing each other on the way in and out the door. Or maybe it was the mask and the leather. What do women want? Who has a clue?

  “Is that it?” I ask him. “The sum total of your advice? She won’t leave her husband. Man, my heart is broken.”

  “Oh,” he says. There’s a long pause. “Don’t let it show,” he suggests. Then he sighs. Again. “I miss that old white horse,” he tells me. And you know what I do? I hang up on him. And you know what he doesn’t do? He doesn’t call me back.

  It really hurts me.

  So his second reaction, now that I don’t want to listen to him explain
ing his new theories to me, is to say that I seem to be sulking about something, he can’t imagine what. And this is harder to deny.

  The day after my birthday I went for a drive in my car, a little white Saab with personalized license plates. KEMO, they say. Maybe the phone is ringing, maybe it’s not. I feel better when I don’t know. So, he misses his horse. Hey, I’ve never been the same since that little pinto of mine joined the Big Round-up, but I try not to burden my friends with this. I try not to burden my friends with anything. I just nurse them back to health when the Cavendish gang leaves them for dead. I just come in the middle of the night with the medicine man when little Britt has a fever and it’s not responding to Tylenol. I just organize the surprise party when a friend turns forty.

  You want to bet even Attila the Hun had a party on his fortieth? You want to bet he was one hard man to surprise? And who blew up the balloons and had everyone hiding under the rugs and in with the goats? This name is lost forever.

  I drove out into the country, where every cactus holds its memory for me, where every outcropping of rock once hid an outlaw. Ten years ago the terrain was still so rough I would have had to take the International Scout. Now it’s a paved highway straight to the hanging tree. I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, turned off the motor, and I just sat there. I was remembering the time Ms. Emily Cooper stumbled into the Wilcox bank robbery looking for her little girl who’d gone with friends to the swimming hole and hadn’t bothered to tell her mama. We were on our way to see Colonel Davis at Fort Comanche about some cattle rustling. We hadn’t heard about the bank robbery. Which is why we were taken completely by surprise.

  My pony and I were eating the masked man’s dust, as usual, when something hit me from behind. Arnold Wilcox, a heavy-set man who sported a five o’clock shadow by eight in the morning, jumped me from the big rock overlooking the Butterfield trail and I went down like a sack of potatoes. I heard horses converging on us from the left and the right and that hypertrophic white stallion of his took off like a big bird. I laid one on Arnold’s stubbly jaw, but he cold-cocked me with the butt of his pistol and I couldn’t tell you what happened next.

  I don’t come to until it’s after dark and I’m trussed up like a turkey. Ms. Cooper is next to me and her hands are tied behind her back with a red bandanna and there’s a rope around her feet. She looks disheveled, but pretty; her eyes are wide and I can tell she’s not too pleased to be lying here next to an Indian. Her dress is buttoned up to the chin so I’m thinking at least, thank God, they’ve respected her. It’s cold, even as close together as we are. The Wilcoxes are all huddled around the fire, counting money, and the smoke is a straight white line in the sky you could see for miles. So this is more good news, and I’m thinking the Wilcoxes were always a bunch of dumb-ass honkies when it came to your basic woodlore. I’m wondering how they got it together to pull off a bank job, when I hear horse’s hooves and my question is answered. Pierre Cardeaux, Canadian French, hops off the horse’s back and goes straight to the fire and stamps it out.

  “Imbeciles!” he tells them, only he’s got this heavy accent so it comes out “Eembeeceeles.”

  Which insults the Wilcoxes a little. “Hold on there, hombre,” Andrew Wilcox says. “Jess because we followed your plan into the bank and your trail for the getaway doesn’t make you the boss here,” and Pierre pays him about as much notice as you do an ant your horse is about to step on. He comes over to us and puts his hand under Ms. Cooper’s chin, sort of thoughtfully. She spits at him and he laughs.

  “Spunk,” he says. “I like that.” I mean, I suppose that’s what he says, because that’s what they always say, but the truth is, with his accent, I don’t understand a word.

  Andrew Wilcox isn’t finished yet. He’s got this big chicken leg which he’s eating and it’s dribbling onto his chin, so he wipes his arm over his face. Which just spreads the grease around more, really, and anyway, he’s got this hunk of chicken stuck between his front teeth, so Pierre can hardly keep a straight face when he talks to him. “I understand why we’re keeping the woman,” Andrew says. “Cause she has—uses. But the Injun there. He’s just going to be baggage. I want to waste him.”

  “Mon ami,” says Pierre. “Even pour vous, thees stupiditee lives me spitchless.” He’s kissing his fingers to illustrate the point as if he were really French and not just Canadian French and has probably never drunk really good wine in his life. I’m lying in the dust and whatever they’ve bound my wrists with is cutting off the circulation so my hands feel like someone is jabbing them with porcupine needles. Even now, I can remember smelling the smoke which wasn’t there any more and the Wilcoxes who were and the lavender eau de toilette that Ms. Cooper used. And horses and dust and sweat. These were the glory days, but whose glory you may well ask, and even if I answered, what difference would it make?

  Ms. Cooper gets a good whiff of Andrew Wilcox and it makes her cough.

  “He’s right, little brother,” says Russell Wilcox, the runt of the litter at about three hundred odd pounds and a little quicker on the uptake than the rest of the family. “You ever heared tell of a man who rides a white horse, wears a black mask, and shoots a very pricey kind of bullet? This here Injun is his compadre.”

  “Oui, oui, oui, oui,” says Pierre agreeably. The little piggie. He indicates me and raises his eyebrows one at a time. “Avec le sauvage we can, how you say? Meck a deal.”

  “Votre mere,” I tell him. He gives me a good kick in the ribs and he’s wearing those pointy-toed kind of cowboy boots, so I feel it all right. Finally I hear the sound I’ve been waiting for, a hoot-owl over in the trees behind Ms. Cooper, and then he rides up. He hasn’t even gotten his gun out yet. “Don’t move,” he tells Pierre. “Or I’ll be forced to draw,” but he hasn’t finished the sentence when Russell Wilcox has his arm around my neck and the point of his knife jabbing into my back.

  “We give you the Injun,” he says. “Or we give you the girl. You ain’t taking both. You comprendez, pardner?”

  Now, if he’d asked me, I’d have said, hey, don’t worry about me, rescue the woman. And if he’d hesitated, I would have insisted. But he didn’t ask and he didn’t hesitate. He just hoisted Ms. Cooper up onto the saddle in front of him and pulled the bottom of her skirt down so her legs didn’t show. “There’s a little girl in Springfield who’s going to be mighty happy to see you, Ms. Cooper,” I hear him saying, and I’ve got a suspicion from the look on her face that they’re not going straight to Springfield anyway. And that’s it. Not one word for me.

  Of course, he comes back, but by this time the Wilcoxes and Pierre have fallen asleep around the cold campfire and I’ve had to inch my way through the dust on my side like a snake over to Russell Wilcox’s knife, which fell out of his hand when he nodded off, whittling. I’ve had to cut my own bonds, and my hands are behind me so I carve up my thumb a little, too. The whole time I’m right there beneath Russell and he’s snorting and snuffling and shifting around like he’s waking up so my heart nearly stops. It’s a wonder my hands don’t have to be amputated, they’ve been without blood for so long. And then there’s a big shoot-out and I provide a lot of cover. A couple of days pass before I feel like talking to him about it.

  “You rescued Ms. Cooper first,” I remind him. “And that was the right thing to do; I’m not saying it wasn’t; don’t misunderstand me. But it seemed to me that you made up your mind kind of quickly. It didn’t seem like a hard decision.”

  He reaches across the saddle and puts a hand on my hand. Behind the black mask, the blue eyes are sensitive and caring. “Of course I wanted to rescue you, old friend,” he says. “If I’d made the decision based solely on my own desires, that’s what I would have done. But it seemed to me I had a higher responsibility to the more innocent party. It was a hard choice. It may have felt quick to you, but, believe me, I struggled with it.” He withdraws his hand and kicks his horse a little ahead of us because the trail is narrowing. I duck under the branch of a
Prairie Spruce. “Besides,” he says, back over his shoulder. “I couldn’t leave a woman with a bunch of animals like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes. A pretty woman like that. Alone. Defenseless.”

  I start to tell him what a bunch of racists like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes might do to a lonely and defenseless Indian. Arnold Wilcox wanted my scalp. “I remember the Alamo,” he kept saying and maybe he meant Little Big Horn; I didn’t feel like exploring this. Pierre kept assuring him there would be plenty of time for “trophies” later. And Andrew trotted out that old chestnut about the only good Indian being a dead Indian. None of which was pleasant to lie there listening to. But I never said it. Because by then the gap between us was so great I would have had to shout, and anyway the ethnic issue has always made us both a little touchy. I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard him say that some of his best friends are Indians. And I know that there are bad Indians; I don’t deny it and I don’t mind fighting them. I just always thought I should get to decide which ones were the bad ones.

  I sat in that car until sunset.

  But the next day he calls. “Have you ever noticed how close the holy word ‘om’ is to our Western word ‘home’?” he asks. That’s his opening. No hi, how are you? He never asks how I am. If he did, I’d tell him I was fine, just the way you’re supposed to. I wouldn’t burden him with my problems. I’d just like to be asked, you know?