The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

But he’s got a point to make and it has something to do with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. How she clicks her heels together and says, over and over like a mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” and she’s actually able to travel through space. “Not in the book,” I tell him.

  “I know,” he says. “In the movie.”

  “I thought it was the shoes,” I say.

  And his voice lowers; he’s that excited. “What if it was the words?” he asks. “I’ve got a mantra.”

  Of course, I’m aware of this. It always used to bug me that he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Your mantra, he says, loses its power if it’s spoken aloud. So by now I’m beginning to guess what his mantra might be. “A bunch of people I know,” I tell him, “all had the same guru. And one day they decided to share the mantras he’d given them. They each wrote their mantra on a piece of paper and passed it around. And you know what? They all had the same mantra. So much for personalization.”

  “They lacked faith,” he points out.

  “Rightfully so.”

  “I gotta go,” he tells me. We’re reaching the crescendo in the background music and it cuts off with a click. Silence. He doesn’t say goodbye. I refuse to call him back.

  The truth is, I’m tired of always being there for him.

  So I don’t hear from him again until this morning when he calls with the great Displacement Theory. By now I’ve been forty almost ten days, if you believe the birth certificate the reservation drew up; I find a lot of inaccuracies surfaced when they translated moons into months. So that I’ve never been too sure what my rising sign is. Not that it matters to me, but it’s important to him all of a sudden; apparently you can’t analyze personality effectively without it. He thinks I’m a Pisces rising; he’d love to be proved right.

  “We can go back, old buddy,” he says. “I’ve found the way back.”

  “Why would we want to?” I ask. The sun is shining and it’s cold out. I was thinking of going for a run.

  Does he hear me? About like always. “I figured it out,” he says. “It’s a combination of biofeedback and the mantra ‘home.’ I’ve been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know, that was never the problem, but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped me and forced me back.” He pauses here and I think I’m supposed to say something, but I’m too pissed. He goes on. “Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I’m about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement.” He says this like he’s shivering. “I couldn’t get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward.”

  He pauses again and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.

  His voice is severe. “This is too important for you to miss just because you’re sulking about god knows what, pilgrim,” he says. “This is travel through space and time.”

  “This is baloney,” I tell him. I’m uncharacteristically blunt, blunter than I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the-womb period. If nobody’s listening, what does it matter?

  “Displacement,” he repeats and his voice is all still and important. “Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?”

  I don’t believe I’ve heard him correctly. “Say what?”

  “Return with me,” he says and then he’s gone for good and this time he hasn’t hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There’s a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don’t have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. “You call this grass?” it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. “Where’s the plains, man? Where’s the railroad?”

  So I’m happy for him. Really I am.

  But I’m not going with him. Let him roam it alone this time. He’ll be fine. Like Rambo.

  Only then another buffalo appears. And another. Pretty soon I’ve got a whole herd of them out front, trying to eat my yard and gagging. And whining. “The water tastes funny. You got any water with locusts in it?” I don’t suppose it’s an accident that I’ve got the same number of buffalo here as there are men in the Cavendish gang. Plus one. I keep waiting to see if any more appear; maybe someone else will go back and help him. But they don’t. This is it.

  You remember the theories of history I told you about. Back in the beginning? Well, maybe somewhere between the great men and the masses, there’s a third kind of person. Someone who listens. Someone who tries to help. You don’t hear about these people much so there probably aren’t many of them. Oh, you hear about the failures, all right, the shams: Brutus, John Alden, Rasputin. And maybe you think there aren’t any at all, that nobody could love someone else more than he loves himself. Just because you can’t. Hey, I don’t really care what you think. Because I’m here and the heels of my moccasins are clicking together and I couldn’t stop them even if I tried. And it’s okay. Really. It’s who I am. It’s what I do.

  * * *

  I’m going to leave you with a bit of theory to think about. It’s a sort of riddle. There are good Indians, there are bad Indians and there are dead Indians. Which am I?

  There can be more than one right answer.

  JOSEPH MANZIONE

  Candle in a Cosmic Wind

  Here’s a melancholy yet ultimately affirming story about the last days of the planet Earth, by new writer Joseph Manzione.

  This was Joseph Manzione’s first published story. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  CANDLE IN A COSMIC WIND

  Joseph Manzione

  1

  Go down now, through the tumultuous layers of atmosphere, through storms of ice-crystals streaming along violently shifting patterns of wind, into the becalmed, translucent regions of ash and dust, floating in stagnant eddies above the blighted surface. Down there, the forests are barely visible, hardened stumps rising above the deep snow. The cities sprawl like desiccated corpses, mouths open to the sky, veins clogged with debris. The mountains writhe like wounded beasts and bleed living ice.

  Strange things happen in that inhuman cold. Sounds. Visions. Dogs raise their heads above the snow, baring broken glass teeth as gauzy vapors sluice from their maws and spill across the land. The wind on their liquid backs, they hunt with the guttering sun, seeking warmth in the waste. Cold. Shadows lingering lovingly over the dead snow, the stillness under dark bellies flowing inexorably from horizon to horizon.

  The dogs lope across the white plain, espying what they hunger for; a large vehicle lies mired by the remains of a highway. The stillness is shattered by the sounds of ice striking hot metal, as several of the creatures leap onto the hood and runners. One draws back a hard, blue paw and smashes the rimed windshield. The woman inside awakens and screams as the maelstrom of glass and teeth explodes over her, engulfing her—

  Avdotya Nazarovna choked and sat up in her tiny bunk, wringing with sweat. She gasped and struggled to breathe, flailing at her throat and face with her muscular arms. The quiet inside the cab silenced her. The ticking of the diesel calmed her. Finally she glanced at the dashboard in front of the driver’s seat. 0513 on the morning of June 17th, the display read; the wind was from the northwest at fourteen kilometers per hour, and the ambient air temperature was – 101° Celsius. The dogs had fled back into her subconscious, but the filthy, frigid twilight outside remained.

  She arose shakily and moved through the cramped cab, making coffee and reconstituting eggs and cereal. It was the city she had just passed through, she decided, as she took a shower in the small water closet. After twelve days on the ruined interstate, she had crossed over a high range of mountains and descended into the valley of the Great Salt Lake. She had expected the city to be a tertiary detonation site; certainly the Americans had a military airbase here, as well as corporate research and manufacturing centers for strategic weapons systems. Getting through would be dangerous, since
the blast would have buckled bridges and filled the streets with rubble.

  But when she emerged onto the uplands above Salt Lake City, it spread out as far as she could see, unblemished, almost geometrically pristine. Her fury welled up and she hammered on the dash for many minutes, screaming curses at Ben Kimball and all of the American killers who had escaped Russian vengeance, as well as the stupidity and incompetence of her own people, especially in the Racketnyye Voyska Strategischeskovo Naznacheniya.

  They had lost the war when it finally came, all of the new Soviet peoples, and particularly those like herself. She hated the treachery she had seen; her motherland could only be pocked and pitted like the skin of an old orange, and Gregori and the boy Nikolai would be gone.

  But the city had shown her the other side of the same story, for if the Americans had created so much slaughter, they had paid the greater price after the short war ended. Avdotya could not forget what she saw, scenes so similar to those in her dreams.

  A young woman wrapped in a grimy yellow blanket knelt rigidly in the deep snow, one arm locked across her forehead, as though she grieved. The other arm stood stiff against the sky, the delicate, blackened fist appearing to beat the air. A small sheet of ice flared from the naked arm and hand, the moisture and warmth of the tissue forceably extinguished by the searingly cold wind.

  An armed group of citizens had tried to hold a large grocery market against a mob. Somebody had made a careless effort to stack and burn the bodies, for sanitary reasons or perhaps just for the heat. In the yard of an elaborate church across the street, three children hung by their necks from a painter’s scaffold. The crows had frozen dead at their feet.

  Near the zoo, a partially dismembered giraffe was roped up to a traffic light. An axe was still buried in its carved flank.

  A police officer had been crucified on a cinema marquee. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, Avdotya read, as she drove slowly by.

  The neighborhoods beyond were shrouded in ice, the homes shut up behind blank windows and barricaded doors. She could imagine families asleep in the upstairs bedrooms.

  Avdotya had stopped in the downtown district in front of Temple Square and the shopping malls across the street. Dressed in a black thermal suit, she had climbed down from the truck to look around. She abruptly decided to visit an American department store and find a pair of cowboy boots and some makeup, if there were any left.

  But something had howled in the distance, as she trudged through the snow.

  She had jumped, and twisted around, listening.

  The howl came again, faintly, almost floating on the air. It drew out into a wailing screech, and faded.

  “Ai…,” she whispered, letting out her breath. What was it? Somebody else? A … dog?

  Something else?

  She had backed across the street, breathing heavily. Shadows of the empty office buildings and arcades crept across the snow. Behind the idling truck, the Mormon temple rose into a salmon-colored sky. Its grey-granite walls and fluted arches were hung with thick blue sheets of ice that sparkled perversely in the dying light. Atop the highest tower, a ghostly figure draped in burnished gold blew salvation on a horn to the empty gardens and avenues below.

  Avdotya had shivered. When the howl came a third time, she scrambled into the truck and drove quickly away through the drifts, out of the city, past the dead lake, and into the desert wastes beyond. Hours later, she had stopped and slept.

  Of course it was the wind, she told herself, as she swung down into the driver’s seat, toweling her short, wet, red hair. The wind, sluicing through a shattered window, growling up out of an elevator shaft, or lapping around a pile of rubble. And then, in her dreams, the dogs had come.

  “Eventually it’s going to get to me,” she said aloud. “I’ll begin a conversation with myself that I’ll never finish. I’ll have a dream and I won’t wake up.”

  She hit the charging switch on the main diesel.

  “But not here … not in this place. At home.”

  The diesel caught, and roared.

  2

  There were worse dreams.

  She stood in the bottom of a cavernous pit, staring up at a small, circular patch of blue sky, far above. She was desperately trying to find a way to climb out, when with a sudden flash, the sky kindled and burned. Through the heat and bitter odors, she noticed figures appearing around the edges of the pit, silhouetted against the roiling glare. They jumped, one, and then another, and then many, flailing their arms and screaming thinly as they hurtled down. But they burst into flames before they hit the bottom, and soon the air above was saturated with fire, and a rain of cinders streaked Avdotya’s face with soot and covered the concrete beneath her feet with a dark carpet that crunched underfoot.

  Thick clusters of writhing torches fell about her, and the vast, steel walls of the pit were lit with a lurid, unsteady glow. The rain of cinders congealed and heaped around her knees, rising up over her thighs and waist as she struggled to remain on top of the tide. The air grew heavy with dust and smoke and she gagged and retched and the light softened into a diffused crimson radiance and still the cinders fell, burying her, and sifting into her open, working mouth.

  “Nikolai!” she spit up. “… Gregori.…”

  But the last thing she felt was the earth below wrenching and splitting wide with a roar and a wave of great heat, as a huge steel spike thrust up through the cinders and impaled her, lifting her broken body toward the dying sky. And as the light faded and her eyes stilled and went cold, she caught sight of the mummified remains of Ben Kimball beckoning to her from the lip of the pit, the skull grinning with obscene familiarity.

  When the war began, she had been in an American wing command bunker in the missile fields northwest of Omaha. She was a major in the R.V.S.N., the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, and her own rocket regimental complex, a group of RS-21 launchers outside of Novosibirsk, already had been dismantled under the detailed provisions of U.N. Resolution 242. The Ministry of Defense could think of no better qualifications nor more sensitive postings for professional orphans like Avdotya, so she and thousands of others—R.V.S.N. technicians, P.V.O.—Strany officers, political commissars, boom-boom submariners and more—were sent to the United States to observe comparable American disarmament under the 242 plan. The American officers at Omaha had tolerated her, just as she had politely ignored Stockwell and Belinda Nhu the year before. The Americans deactivated systems according to a meticulously negotiated schedule, while Avdotya and four comrades, and a very serious team of U.N. observers from Senegal, simply watched, day after day.

  Until Ben Kimball had slammed down the blue phone on his desk in the operations center, pointed a pistol in Avdotya’s face, and given a launch-sequence order to the remaining Peacekeeper II missile crews on line. In the ensuing shouting and confusion, the reporter from Izvestia—a KGB operative—garroted a young American guard and grabbed her automatic weapon. The Senegalese died quickly, as did the reporter and three American technicians, but Avdotya and her two remaining comrades managed to break out through a light cordon of bewildered guards. Not knowing what to do, they ran through endless corridors pursued by the Americans, and Avdotya lost the P.V.O. Strany pilot first, and later the boy from the embassy. She had taken to the airducts then, and eventually found herself outside the main generator bunker and the underground fuels and stockpiles depot. She killed three guards and managed to barricade herself in that section before they found her, but by then the short war was almost over, and circumstances had changed. The generation of power in a protected environment was paramount, and she controlled supplies, machines, and computers. Despite the desperate efforts of the surviving Americans in the weeks that followed, they were not able to flush her out.

  Above ground, the world appeared to die very quickly. Avdotya resigned herself to a life spent in a safe cage; there was enough of everything to sustain her body, but her emotional suffering was unavoidable. By the third year, however, the permafrost reached far
below the bunker and the huge fuel tanks embedded in the earth around it. Inside the tanks the heating elements could no longer cope with the extreme temperatures, and the fuel slowly congealed into a molasses-like gel that could not be pumped. She foresaw these consequences, and though she could do nothing about them, she took steps to make a temporary escape. She selected a huge all-terrain diesel tractor, building in heating systems, generators and charging circuits, insulated armor and meshed treads. She stowed food and water in the trunk, and a vast amount of fuel in electrically-heated tanks. Two weeks before she was ready, the main generator shut down, and she fought the encroaching frost with portable burners. She barely managed it, but she was already dead. The days of her life were counted by the fuel gauges on the truck’s instrument panels.

  3

  She drove slowly for hours across the vast desert playa west of the Great Salt Lake. The sun sank ahead of her, finally burying itself in a pearly turquoise smear beneath a moving front of ice-crystals. The storm came and went, and she continued well into the night.

  She thought of home.

  She feared the frozen sea most. She would have to cross onto it somewhere along the coasts or Oregon or Washington, and make the best of whatever she found. Possibly … probably?.… she would be hindered or stopped by deep crevices, or ranges of jumbled pressure ice thrust up from the interior, frozen geology to match the oceans of Callisto, or Europa. If she was stopped, she would get out and walk, she told herself; the sight of the mountains of the Kamchatka Peninsula on the distant horizon would be enough. She did not want to die here.

  Strange, she thought, as she stared out at the fierce stars riding the darkened sky. Everything is so different from my expectations … I anticipated little more than a burnt crypt up here on the surface, the climate barely beginning to find an equilibrium, a few resilient species of plants coming back, a lot of detonation sites and dirty zones, background contamination localized at specific points … instead, there is the terrible cold, the clear nights and days without much evidence of dust and ash, the quickly changing weather, the absence of detonation damage, the unfocused nature of periodic radiation …