The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Yellow Legs entered and ambled over to the place of honor. Folding his feet beneath him, he sat facing the sunrise. Handsome Dog looked up from his food. “It will be hard for me to return this honor, if you still shun my cabin.”

  “My sister’s cabin,” Stays Behind corrected him. “If you wish to do your host a service, honor him as your new brother-in-law.”

  Handsome Dog rocked back on his heels, laughing. “Such a meal would choke a man. How could my host want a silly girl who jabbers out of turn?”

  Yellow Legs packed the red clay pipe and passed it to Handsome Dog. “Things have gone too far. I may no longer refuse her and keep my honor.”

  Handsome Dog’s gaze flicked from host to sister-in-law. “Hetchetu aloh, there is something here that needs smoking on.”

  “If you are insulted, we will not keep you.” Stays Behind sat herself at the entrance, untying the tipi flap.

  Burnt Thighs stormed back and forth outside, their anger audible through the thin hides. “Look, I’m smoking,” Handsome Dog said, putting the pipe to his lips. “May men not smoke without having to hear women?”

  When the pipe came back to him, Yellow Legs passed it to Teacher Miller. “I thought badly because you didn’t thank me for my vision, but I was wrong. The vision with the Wasichu signs was not meant for you. It was meant for Stays Behind.”

  Miller was bemused. “How do you know?”

  “A coyote told us.”

  “Coyote?”

  “Yes.” Yellow Legs sighed. “I know coyotes are hardly to be trusted. But this one sent us past the Moon and Morning Star, to a Spirit World that lies alongside the Twin Stars in the winter sky. Soon, we will all go there for good.”

  Miller gave polite agreement. Like Handsome Dog, he found it politic to humor his host. They smoked, talked, and ate while snow began to blow down from the sky. As night won out over day, word rode up White Clay Creek that Black Elk’s Ogalalas had been driven from the Agency without food or tipis. Few had meat to share, but Stays Behind packed the last of the buffalo meat into anything-possible-bags and lashed them to their ponies.

  She also painted Miller’s face black and wrapped blankets round his Wasichu suit. Stepping back, she laughed. “You don’t look like a Lakota, but neither do you look like a Wasichu. No one will shoot you without asking first what you are.”

  They set off through the snow, with Yellow Legs leading and Handsome Dog coming along behind, wearing wolfskins over his uniform jacket. It was a good night to be all Ogalala. On the east bank of White Clay Creek, they found red fires on the prairie, flickering through the gray snowfall like broken bits of the setting sun. The dark wind carried a woman’s voice, wailing out a death song. As they drew nearer, they could hear that it was Black Elk’s mother, singing for her son. He had gone to face the Wasichu with the Sacred Bow of the West, and had not returned. Stays Behind offered her meat, but she wouldn’t eat and went on wailing into the wind.

  Suddenly, the singing ceased, replaced by the slow beat of tired horses’ hooves and by babies crying. Black Elk came riding out of the snow on a weary buckskin, still carrying the Sacred Bow of the West and cradling a crying baby girl. Red Crow was right behind him, with another crying child. Eager hands helped them dismount, and women with milk took the babies. Soon, the only crying round that campfire came from Black Elk’s mother, sobbing now that her son was safe.

  Black Elk was not the venerable medicine man Miller had expected. Instead, he was a serious young man, with a flaming rainbow and red streaks of lightning on his ghost shirt. When he wasn’t having visions, he worked as a clerk in a Wasichu store. His face was red with paint, and eagle feathers hung from his shoulders, wrists, and elbows. These feathers fluttered in the wind, and the red lightning flashed in the firelight. “Big Foot’s people have been butchered near Wounded Knee, in the twisted creek that has no name. We scattered the soldiers, saving some women and children. My Medicine Bow protected me, but for many it was too late. These babies have no mothers, and there are many babies lying frozen on the prairie.”

  Wind and snow whipped between the fires. Everyone talked till dawn. The story of Wounded Knee was told again and again by those who had been there. Yellow Legs and Stays Behind told about their vision. At first light a war party was forming. Men began to rub dirt on themselves, showing that they were nothing without the Earth Mother’s help. Black Elk’s mother had ceased crying and brought him his rifle. Black Elk set aside his Medicine Bow, mounting his buckskin again. He was still wearing the red war paint. “Yellow Legs, your visions are strong and your buffalo meat good, but I must answer yesterday with bullets. If I do not see you again, seek me in the Spirit World.”

  The war party crossed White Clay Creek and was gone. Everyone else began the long march into the Badlands. By nightfall they were camped on a high platform in the Badlands, called Sheltering Place. Sheer cliffs fell away at every side. The campsite could only be approached across a narrow neck of land, which was easily swept with rifle fire.

  No Wasichu soldiers came to get them, but a Lakota named Little Soldier brought Black Elk back to camp. His rainbow shirt was ripped and bloody, a bullet had torn open his stomach, and his intestines were held in by strips of torn blanket. Old Hollow Horn, a Bear medicine man, was called to heal him. Stays Behind felt strange, for she was no longer able to help Old Hollow Horn with his healing. That was work for virgins. Instead, she sat on the edge of the precipice, watching the cliff fall away beneath her feet cascading into deep shadow.

  Miller came and sat beside her, warmed by a blanket, but without his black paint. Everyone here knew he was a Wasichu. During that day’s fighting, Black Robes and Sisters from the Mission had worked among the Lakota, helping the wounded and praying for the dead. The Lakota’s war was against soldiers. “What will you do?”

  Stays Behind looked down, smoothing the creases in her calico dress. “What can I do, besides follow my vision?”

  “Medicine visions won’t stop machine guns. Look what happened to Black Elk.”

  She looked towards the Twin Stars, marking where the sun and Morning Star would rise. “Do you still have the paper I gave you?”

  Miller fished into his pocket and pulled out the wrinkled scrap of notebook paper. The formulas were smudged and faded. He could no longer read them under the winter stars.

  She smoothed the paper against her knee. “Coyote said you could explain them to me.”

  “These formulas might mean a lot, a new approach to the physics of light, a new way of looking at the world. But first science has to test them. That will take time. No one can say what they really mean. Not right now.”

  For the first time ever, she looked him straight in the face, her dark eyes deep wells of starlight. “We don’t have time. Your science is crushing us with wagon guns and iron wire. Last year, we lost most of the land between the Smoky River and the Good. Now, we are losing the Ghost Dance. By the time you decide what everything means, my people will be gone, gone like the buffalo and the long grass.”

  Miller nodded. “I told you that everything passes and that one day the whole universe will die the heat death. All science can do is make the best of what is. Study, learn more mathematics, and you can be the one to test these formulas.”

  Stays Behind folded the paper and fit it into her medicine bag. “There’s another way.” She pointed away from Sheltering Place, towards the Twin Stars. “Out there is another world, and Coyote is going to take us there. He has collected people and animals from our past and has brought them to a great world, larger than this one. He says that he has already been with me there, talked to me, helped me explore the universe.”

  She no longer seemed a girl, but a grave and distant young woman. Miller measured the space between them and found it was only a matter of inches. Wind stirred the stars overhead, and he would have liked to touch her, but the gulf between them was too great. Instead, he pulled the blanket round his knees. “Maybe you can mix mathematics with talking c
oyotes, but I can’t.”

  When morning came, Yellow Legs led all who would follow away from Sheltering Place, deeper into the Badlands.

  * * *

  The man who finally rescued Miller was a Wasichu, though he wasn’t a white man. He was a corporal from the Ninth Cavalry—“colored” as the Wasichu would say. This Black Wasichu had been scouting for hostiles beyond the Smoky, but he found only Miller, resting in a pine-bough lean-to near Top of the Badlands. The Moon of Popping Trees had given way to the Moon of Frost in the Tipis. Miller was exhausted and hungry, but no worse off for his stay among the Lakota.

  The corporal explained that the Ninth was searching for Yellow Legs’s band. Miller said only that they’d better be ready to go some distance.

  The Black Wasichu shook his head. “Don’t matter how far, we’ll get ’em sure enough. We’ve got a way with Indians, comes from not being white. No offense meant.”

  The Quaker said that no offense had been taken.

  After helping Miller onto his own mount, the corporal began to lead the lone horse and rider back toward his troop. “Hell, if the old Negro Ninth hadn’t shown up, the Seventh would have had another Little Big Horn on White Clay Creek. The Lakota chased them all the way back there from Wounded Knee.”

  They topped a dun-colored fold in the earth, and the corporal’s narrative was cut short. Metal flashed in the frigid morning sun. The corporal pushed back his cap for a better view. “God Almighty, this piece of prairie looks more fit for a church sale than a fight.”

  From his seat on the horse’s back, Miller scanned the litter of abandoned guns, knives, cooking tins, cups, pots, wash buckets, belt buckles, and tent pegs.

  The corporal rested his weary arm on the saddle. “Looks like these poor Indians just tried to get rid of everything the white man gave ’em.”

  He turned a sage eye to the teacher. “You know a lot of them are just crazy with grief, going around seeing things. Back by the Agency, when Red Cloud told his Bad Faces to lay down their guns, a bunch of them ran wild, shooting their own dogs and ponies, just ’cause Red Cloud wouldn’t let ’em shoot us no more.”

  It shook the corporal to see such suffering. He led his horse and Miller through the mess, searching for tracks and stooping to pick up anything that might prove useful. There was a fair amount of silver trinkets to be found, and even a few coins.

  Miller watched the cold wind play on a single patch of color—torn, red, and flapping in their path. Even before they reached it, Miller knew what it would be. A crimson calico dress, wrapped round an old Henry rifle from the Fetterman fight.

  NEAL BARRETT, JR.

  Diner

  Here’s another story by Neal Barrett, Jr., as different in mood from “Perpetuity Blues” as night is from day, but still strong, surprising, and original.

  DINER

  Neal Barrett, Jr.

  He woke sometime before dawn and brought the dream back with him out of sleep. The four little girls attended Catholic junior high in Corpus Christi. Their hand-painted guitars depicted tropical Cuban nights. They played the same chord again and again, a dull repetition like small wads of paper hitting a drum. The light was still smoky, the furniture unrevealed. He made his way carefully across the room. The screened-in porch enclosed the front side of the house facing the Gulf, allowing the breeze to flow in three directions. He could hear rolling surf, smell the sharp tang of iodine in the air. Yet something was clearly wrong. The water, the sand, the sky had disappeared, lost behind dark coagulation. With sudden understanding he saw the screen was clotted with bugs. Grasshoppers blotted out the morning. They were bouncing off the screen, swarming in drunken legions. He ran outside and down the stairs, knowing what he’d find. The garden was gone. A month before, he’d covered the small plot of ground with old window screens and bricks. The hoppers had collapsed the whole device. His pitiful stands of lettuce were cropped clean, razored on the ground as if he’d clipped them with a mower. Radishes, carrots, the whole bit. Eaten to the stalk. Then it occurred to him he was naked and under attack. Grasshopper socks knitted their way up to his knees. Something considered his crotch. He yelled and struck out blindly, intent on knocking hoppers silly. The fight was next to useless, and he retreated up the stairs.

  * * *

  Jenny woke while he was dressing.

  “Something wrong? Did you yell just a minute ago?”

  “Hoppers. They’re all over the place.”

  “Oh, Mack.”

  “Little fuckers ate my salad bar.”

  “I’m sorry. It was doing so good.”

  “It isn’t doing good now.” He started looking for his hat.

  “You want something to eat?”

  “I’ll grab something at Henry’s.”

  She came to him, still unsteady from sleep, awkward and fetching at once. Minnie Mouse T-shirt ragged as a kite. A certain yielding coming against him.

  “I got to go to work.”

  “Your loss, man.”

  “I dreamed of little Mexican girls.”

  “Good for you.” She stepped back to gather her hair, her eyes somewhere else.

  “Nothing happened. They played real bad guitar.”

  “So you say.”

  * * *

  He made his way past the dunes and the ragged stands of sea grass, following the path over soft, dry sand to solid beach, the dark rows of houses on stilts off to his right, the Gulf rolling in, brown as mud, giving schools of mullet a ride. The hoppers had moved on, leaving dead and wounded behind. The sun came up behind dull, anemic clouds. Two skinny boys searched the ocean’s morning debris. He found a pack of Agricultural Hero cigarettes in his pocket and cupped his hands against the wind. George Panagopoulos said there wasn’t any tobacco in them at all. Said they made them out of half-dried shit and half kelp and that the shit wasn’t bad, but he couldn’t abide the kelp. Where the sandy road angled into the beach, he cut back and crossed Highway 87, the asphalt cracked and covered with sand, the tough coastal grass crowding in. The highway trailed southwest for two miles, dropping off abruptly where the red-white-and-blue Galveston ferries used to run, the other end stretching northeast up the narrow strip of Bolivar Peninsula past Crystal Beach and Gilchrist, then off the peninsula to High Island and Sabine Pass.

  Mack began to find Henry’s posters north of the road. They were tacked on telephone poles and fences, on the door of the derelict Texaco station, wherever Henry had wandered in this merchandising adventure. He gathered them in as he walked, snapping them off like paper towels. The sun began to bake, hot wind stinging up sand in tiny storms. The posters said: FOURTH OF JULY PICNIC AT HENRY ORTEGAS DINER. ALL THE BARBECUE PORK YOU CAN EAT. EL DIOS BLESS AMERICA

  Henry had drawn the posters on the backs of green accounting forms salvaged from the Sand Palace Motor Home Inn. Even if he’d gotten Rose to help, it was a formidable undertaking.

  No easy task to do individually rendered, slightly crazed, and plainly cokeyed fathers of our country. Every George Washington wore a natty clip-on Second Inaugural tie and, for some reason, a sporty little Matamoros pimp mustache. Now and then along the borders, an extra reader bonus, snappy American flags or red cherry bombs going kapow.

  Mack walked on picking posters. Squinting back east he saw water flat as slate, vanishing farther out with tricks of the eye. Something jumped out there or something didn’t.

  * * *

  Jase and Morgan were in the diner, and George Panagopoulos and Fleece. They wore a collection of gimmie caps and patched-up tennis shoes, jeans stiff and sequined with the residue of fish. Mack took the third stool down. Fleece said it might get hotter. Mack agreed it could. Jase leaned down the counter.

  “Hoppers get your garden, too?”

  “Right down to bedrock is all,” Mack said.

  “I had this tomato,” Panagopoulos said, “this one little asshole tomato ‘bout half as big as a plum; I’m taking a piss and hear these hoppers coming and I’m down and out of the house
like that. I’m down there in what, maybe ten, twenty seconds flat, and this tomato’s a little bugger and a seed. You know? A little bugger hanging down, and that’s all.” He made a swipe at his nose, held up a finger, and looked startled and goggle-eyed.

  Mack pretended to study the menu and ordered KC steak and fries and coffee and three eggs over easy; and all this time Henry’s standing over the charcoal stove behind the counter, poking something flat across the grill, concentrating intently on this because he’s already seen the posters rolled up and stuffed in Mack’s pocket and he knows he’ll have to look right at Mack sooner or later.

  “Galveston’s got trouble,” Jase said. “Dutch rowed back from seeing that woman in Clute looks like a frog. Said nobody’s seen Mendez for ‘bout a week.”

  “Eddie’s a good man for a Mex,” Morgan said from down the counter. “He’ll stand up for you, he thinks you’re in the right.”

  Mack felt the others waiting. He wondered if he really wanted to get into this or let it go.

  Fleece jumped in. “Saw Doc this morning, sneaking up the dunes ‘bout daylight. Gotta know if those hoppers eat his dope.”

  Everyone laughed except Morgan. Mack was silently grateful.

  “I seen that dope,” Jase said. “What it is there’s maybe three tomato plants ‘bout high as a baby’s dick.”

  “I don’t want to hear nothin’ about tomatoes,” said Panagopoulos.

  “Don’t make any difference what it is,” Fleece said. “Man determined to get high, he going to do it.”

  Panagopoulos told Mack that Dutch’s woman up in Clute heard someone had seen a flock of chickens. Right near Umbrella Point. Rhode Island Reds running loose out on the beach.