The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Fleece thought of two more birds,” Jase said. “A cormorant and a what?”

  “Tern.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Good,” Mack said. “Keep your eyes peeled for Henry. He gets into that moon-over-Monterey shit, it’ll take Rose a month to get him straight.”

  * * *

  “I think I’m going to go,” Jenny told him. “I think I got to do that, Mack. It just keeps eatin’ away. Papa’s likely gone, but Luanne and Mama could be okay.”

  He put out his cigarette and watched her across the room, watched her as she sat at the kitchen table bringing long wings of hair atop her head, going about this simple task with a quick, unconscious grace. The mirror stood against a white piece of driftwood she’d collected. She collected everything. Sand dollars and angel wings, twisted tritons and bright coquinas that faded in a day. Candle by the mirror in a sand-frosted Dr Pepper bottle, light from this touching the bony hillbilly points of her hips. When she left she would take too much of him with her, and maybe he should figure some way to tell her that.

  “I might not be able to get you a pass. I don’t know. They don’t much like us moving around without a reason.”

  “Oh, Mack. People do it all the time.” Peering at him now past the candle. “Hey, now, I’m going to come on back. I just got to get this done.”

  He thought about the trip. Saw her walking old highways in his head. Maybe sixty-five miles up to Beaumont, cutting off north before that into the Thicket. He didn’t tell her everything he heard. The way people were, things that happened. He knew it wouldn’t make a difference if he did.

  Jenny settled in beside him. “I said I’m coming back.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better.”

  He decided, maybe at that moment, he wouldn’t let her go. He’d figure out a way to stop her. She’d leave him in a minute. Maybe come back and maybe not. He had to know she was all right, and so he’d do it. He listened to the surf. On the porch, luna moths big as English sparrows flung themselves crazily against the screen.

  * * *

  The noise of the chopper brought him out of bed fast, on the floor and poking into jeans before Jase and Panagopoulos made the stairs.

  “It’s okay,” he told Jenny, “just stay inside and I’ll see.”

  She nodded and looked scared, and he opened the screen door and went out. Dawn washed the sky the color of moss. Jase and Panagopoulos started talking both at once.

  Then Mack saw the fire, the reflection past the house. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ!”

  “Mack, he’s got pigs,” Panagopoulos said. “I seen ’em. Henry’s got pigs.”

  “He’s got what?”

  “This is bad shit,” Jase moaned, “this is really bad shit.”

  Mack was down the stairs and past the house. He could see other people. He started running, Jase and Panagopoulos at his heels. The chopper was on the ground, and then Fleece came out of the crowd across the road.

  “Henry ain’t hurt bad, I don’t think,” he told Mack.

  “Henry’s hurt?” Mack was unnerved. “Who hurt him, Fleece? Is someone going to tell me something soon?”

  “I figure that Chen likely done a house-to-house,” Fleece said, “some asshole trick like that. Come in north and worked down rousting people out for kicks. Stumbled on Henry; shit, I don’t know. Just get him out of there, Mack.”

  Mack wanted to cry or throw up. He pushed through the crowd and saw Chen, maybe half a dozen soldiers, then Henry. Henry looked foolish, contrite, and slightly cockeyed. His hands were tied behind. Someone had hit him in the face. The rotors stirred waves of hot air. The diner went up like a box. Mack tried to look friendly. Chen lurched about yelling and waving his pistol, looking wild-eyed as a dog.

  “Let’s work this out,” Mack said. “We ought to get this settled and go home.”

  Chen shook his pistol at Mack, danced this way and that in an unfamiliar step. Mack decided he was high on the situation. He’d gotten hold of this and didn’t know where to take it, didn’t have the sense to know how to stop.

  “We can call this off and you don’t have to worry about a thing,” Mack said, knowing Chen didn’t have the slightest notion what he was saying. “That okay with you? We just call it a night right now?”

  Chen looked at him or somewhere else entirely. Mack wished he had shoes and a shirt. Dress seemed proper if you were talking to some clown with a gun. He was close enough to see the pigs. The crate was by the chopper. Two pigs, pink and fat, mottled like an old man’s hand. They were squealing and going crazy with the rotors and the fire and not helping Chen’s nerves or Mack’s either. Mack could just see Henry thinking this out, how he’d do it, fattening up the porkers somehow and thinking what everybody’d say when they saw it wasn’t a joke, not soyburger KC steak or chicken-fried fish-liver rice and chili peppers. Not seaweed coffee or maybe grasshopper creole crunch. None of that play-food shit they all pretended was something else, not this time, amigos, this time honest-to-God pig. Maybe the only pigs this side of Hunan, and only Henry Ortega and Jesus knew where he found them. Mack turned to Chen and gave his best mayoral smile.

  “Why don’t we just forget the whole thing? Just pack up the pigs there and let Henry be. I’ll talk to Major Huang. I’ll square all this with the major. That’d be fine with you, now, wouldn’t it?”

  Chen stopped waving the gun. He looked at Mack. Mack could see wires in his eyes. Chen spoke quickly over his shoulder. Two of the troopers lifted the pigs into the chopper.

  “Now, that’s good,” Mack said. “That’s the thing you want to do.”

  Chen walked off past Henry, his face hot as wax from the fire, moving toward the chopper in this jerky little two-step hop, eyes darting every way at once, granting Mack a lopsided half-wit grin that missed him by a good quarter mile. Mack let out a breath. He’d catch hell from Huang, but it was over. Over and done. He turned away, saw Rose in the crowd and then Fleece. Mack waved. Someone gave a quick and sudden cheer. Chen jerked up straight, just reacting to the sound, not thinking any at all, simply bringing the pistol up like the doctor hit a nerve, the gun making hardly any noise, the whole thing over in a blink and no time to stop it or bring it back. Henry blew over like a leaf, taking his time, collapsing with no skill or imagination, nothing like Anthony Quinn would play the scene.

  “Oh, shit, now don’t do that.” Mack said, knowing this was clearly all a mistake. “Christ, you don’t want to do that!”

  Someone threw a rock, maybe Jase. Troopers raised their rifles and backed off. A soldier near Chen pushed him roughly toward the chopper. Chen looked deflated. The rotors whined up and blew sand. Mack shut it out, turned it back. It was catching up faster than he liked. He wished Chen had forgotten to take the pigs. The thought seemed less than noble. He considered some gesture of defiance. Burn rice in Galveston harbor. They could all wear Washington masks. He knew what they’d do was nothing at all, and that was fine because Henry would get up in just a minute and they’d all go in the diner and have a laugh. Maybe Jase had another jar of wine. Mack was certain he could put this back together and make it right. He could do it. If he didn’t turn around and look at Henry, he could do it.…

  GENE WOLFE

  All the Hues of Hell

  Here’s an unsettling question: If you see a ghost, does the ghost also see you?

  Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics as one of the best SF and fantasy writers working today—perhaps the best. His tetralogy The Book of the New Sun—consisting of The Shadow of the Torturer. The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch—is being hailed as a masterpiece, quite probably the standard against which all subsequent science-fantasy books of the ’80s will be judged; ultimately, it may prove to be as influential as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. The Shadow of the Torturer won the World Fantasy Award. The Claw of the Conciliator won the Nebula
Award. Wolfe also won a Nebula Award for his story “The Death of Doctor Island.” His other books include Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and The Devil in a Forest. His short fiction—including some of the best stories of the ’70s—has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days, and The Wolfe Archipelago. His most recent books are Soldier of the Mist and The Urth of the New Sun. Wolfe lives in Barrington, Illinois, with his family.

  ALL THE HUES OF HELL

  Gene Wolfe

  Three with egg roll, Kyle thought. Soon four without—if this shadow world really has (oh, sacred!) life. The Egg was still rolling, still spinning to provide mock gravitation.

  Yet the roar of the sharply angled guidance jets now seeped only faintly into the hold, and the roll was slower and slower, the feeling of weight weaker and weaker.

  The Egg was in orbit … around nothing.

  Or at least around nothing visible. As its spin decreased, its ports swept the visible universe. Stars that were in fact galaxies flowed down the synthetic quartz, like raindrops down a canopy. Once Kyle caught sight of their mother ship; the Shadow Show herself looked dim and ghostly in the faint light. Of the planet they orbited, there was no trace. Polyaris screamed and took off, executing a multicolored barrel-roll with outstretched wings through the empty hold; like all macaws, Polyaris doted on microgravity.

  In his earphones Marilyn asked, “Isn’t it pretty, Ky?” But she was admiring her computer simulation, not his ecstatic bird: an emerald forest three hundred meters high, sparkling sapphire lakes, suddenly a vagrant strip of beach golden as her hair, and the indigo southern ocean.

  One hundred and twenty degrees opposed to them both, Skip answered instead, and not as Kyle himself would have. “No, it isn’t.” There was a note in Skip’s voice that Kyle had noticed, and worried over, before.

  Marilyn seemed to shrug. “Okay, darling, it’s not really anything to us—less even than ultraviolet. But—”

  “I can see it,” Skip told her.

  Marilyn glanced across the empty hold toward Kyle.

  He tried to keep his voice noncommittal as he whispered to his mike: “You can see it, Skip?”

  Skip did not reply. Polyaris chuckled to herself. Then silence (the utter, deadly quiet of nothingness, of the void where shadow matter ruled and writhed invisible) filled the Egg. For a wild instant, Kyle wondered whether silence itself might not be a manifestation of shadow matter, a dim insubstance felt only in its mass and gravity, its unseen heaviness. Galaxies drifted lazily over the ports, in a white Egg robbed of Up and Down. Their screens were solid sheets of deepest blue.

  Skip broke the silence. “Just let me show it to you, Kyle. Allow me, Marilyn, to show you what it actually looks like.”

  “Because you really know, Skip?”

  “Yes, because I really know, Kyle. Don’t you remember, either of you, what they said?”

  Kyle was watching Marilyn across the hold; he saw her shake her head. “Not all of it.” Her voice was cautious. “They said so much, darling, after all. They said quite a lot of things.”

  Skip sounded as though he were talking to a child. “What the Life Support people said. The thing, the only significant thing, they did say.”

  Still more carefully, Marilyn asked, “And what was that, darling?”

  “That one of us would die.”

  An island sailed across her screen, an emerald set in gold and laid upon blue velvet.

  Kyle said, “That’s my department, Skip. Life Support told us there was a real chance—perhaps as high as one in twenty—that one of you would die, outbound from Earth or on the trip back. They were being conservative; I would have estimated it as one in one hundred.”

  Marilyn murmured, “I think I’d better inform the Director.”

  Kyle agreed.

  “And they were right,” Skip said. “Kyle, I’m the one. I died on the way out. I passed away, but you two followed me.”

  Ocean and isle vanished from all the screens, replaced by a blinking cursor and the word DIRECTOR.

  Marilyn asked, “Respiration monitor, L. Skinner Jansen.”

  Kyle swiveled to watch his screen. The cursor swept from side to side without any sign of inhalation or exhalation, and for a moment he was taken aback. Then Skip giggled.

  Marilyn’s sigh filled Kyle’s receptors. “The programming wizard. What did you do, Skip? Turn down the gain?”

  “That wasn’t necessary. It happens automatically.” Skip giggled again.

  Kyle said slowly, “You’re not dead, Skip. Believe me, I’ve seen many dead men. I’ve cut up their bodies and examined every organ; I know dead men, and you’re not one of them.”

  “Back on the ship, Kyle. My former physical self is lying in the Shadow Show, dead.”

  Marilyn said, “Your physical self is right here, darling, with Ky and me.” And then to the Director: “Sir, is L. Skinner Jansen’s module occupied?”

  The trace vanished, replaced by NEGATIVE: JANSEN 1’S MODULE IS EMPTY.

  “Console,” Skip himself ordered.

  Kyle did not turn to watch Skip’s fingers fly across the keys.

  After a moment Skip said, “You see, this place—the formal name of our great republic is Hades, by the way—looks the way it does only because of the color gradations you assigned the gravimeter data. I’m about to show you its true colors, as the expression has it.”

  A blaze of 4.5, 6, and 7.8 ten-thousandths millimeter light, Polyaris fluttered away to watch Skip. When he made no attempt to shoo her off, she perched on a red emergency lever and cocked an eye like a bright black button toward his keyboard.

  Kyle turned his attention back to his screen. The letters faded, leaving only the blue southern ocean. As he watched, it darkened to sable. Tiny flames of ocher, citron, and cinnabar darted from the crests of the waves.

  “See what I mean?” Skip asked. “We’ve been sent to bring a demon back to Earth—or maybe just a damned soul. I don’t care. I’m going to stay right here.”

  Kyle looked across the vacant white hold toward Marilyn.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “I just can’t, Ky. You do it.”

  “All right, Marilyn.” He plugged his index finger into the Exchange socket, so that he sensed rather than saw the letters overlaying the hellish sea on the screens: KAPPA UPSILON LAMBDA 23011 REPORTS JANSEN 1 PSYCHOTIC. CAN YOU CONFIRM, JANSEN 2?

  “Confirmed, Marilyn Jansen.”

  RESTRAINT ADVISED.

  Marilyn said, “I’m afraid restraint’s impossible as long as we’re in the Egg, sir.”

  DO NOT ABORT YOUR MISSION, JANSEN 2. WILL YOU ACCEPT THE RESTRAINT OF JANSEN 1 WHEN RESTRAINT IS PRACTICAL?

  “Accepted whenever practical,” Marilyn said. “Meanwhile, we’ll proceed with the mission.”

  SATISFACTORY, the Director said, and signed off.

  Skip asked, “So you’re going to lock me up, honeybone?”

  “I hope that by the time we get back it won’t be necessary. Ky, haven’t you anything to give him?”

  “No specifics for psychosis, Marilyn. Not here. I’ve got some back on the Shadow Show.”

  Skip ruffled his beard. “Sure. You’re going to lock up a ghost.” Across the wide hold, Kyle could see he was grinning.

  Polyaris picked up the word: “Ghost! Ghost! Ghost!” She flapped to the vacant center of the Egg, posing like a heraldic eagle and watching to make certain they admired her.

  The shoreline of a larger island entered their screens from the right. Its beach was ashes and embers, its forest a forest of flames.

  “If we’re going to make the grab, Marilyn…”

  “You’re right,” she said. Courageously, she straightened her shoulders. The new life within her had already fleshed out her cheeks and swollen her breasts; Kyle felt sure she had never been quite so lovely before. When she put on her helmet, he breathed her name (though only to himself) before he plugged into the simulation that seemed so much more r
eal than a screen.

  As a score of pink arms, Marilyn’s grav beams dipped into the shadow planet’s atmosphere, growing dark and heavy as they pulled up shadow fluid and gases from a lake on the island and whatever winds might ruffle it. Kyle reflected that those arms should be blue instead of black, and told the onboard assistant director to revert to the hues Marilyn had originally programmed.

  Rej, the assistant director snapped.

  And nothing happened. The gravs grew darker still, and the big accelerator jets grumbled at the effort required to maintain Egg in orbit. When Kyle glanced toward the hold, he discovered it had acquired a twelve-meter yolk as dark as the eggs Chinese bury for centuries. Polyaris was presumably somewhere in that black yolk, unable to see or feel it. He gave a shrill whistle, and she screamed and fluttered out to perch on his shoulder.

  The inky simulation doubled and redoubled, swirling to the turbulence of the fresh shadow matter pumped into the Egg by the gravs. Generators sang the spell that kept the shadow “air” and “water” from boiling away in what was to them a high vacuum.

  The grumbling of the jets rose to an angry roar.

  Skip said, “You’ve brought Hell in here with us, honeybone. You, not me. Remember that.”

  Marilyn ignored him, and Kyle told him to keep quiet.

  Abruptly the gravitors winked out. A hundred tons or more of the shadow-world’s water (whatever that might be) fell back to the surface, fully actual to any conscious entity that might be there. “Rains of frogs and fish, Polyaris,” Kyle muttered to his bird. “Remember Charlie Fort?”

  Polyaris chuckled, nodding.

  Skip said, “Then remember too that when Moses struck the Nile with his staff, the Lord God turned the water to blood.”

  “You’re the one who got into the crayon box, Skip. I’ll call you Moses if you like, but I can hardly call you ‘I Am,’ after you’ve just assured us you’re not.” Kyle was following Marilyn’s hunt for an example of the dominant life form, less than a tenth of his capacity devoted to Polyaris and Skip.

  “You will call me Master!”

  Kyle grinned, remembering the holovamp of an ancient film. “No, Skip. For as long as you’re ill, I am the master. Do you know I’ve been waiting half my life to use that line?”