The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Sam lay awake for a long time each time this happened, trembling, fearful. Not because he thought God would strike him down—he knew that if God hadn’t struck his father dead for adultery, Sam was certainly in no danger because of an erotic dream. He was afraid because he knew that in these dreams he revealed himself to be exactly as lustful and evil as his father. He did not want to feel any sexual desire for Anamari. She was old and lean and tough, and he was afraid of her, but most of all Sam didn’t want to desire her because he was not like his father, he would never have sexual intercourse with a woman who was not his wife.

  Yet when he walked into the village of Agualinda, he felt eager to see her again, and when he found her—the village was small, it never took long—he could not erase from his mind the vivid memory of how she looked in the dreams, reaching out to him, her breasts loose and jostling, her slim hips rolling toward him—and he would bite his cheek for the pain of it, to distract him from desire.

  It was because he was living with Father; the old bastard’s goatishness was rubbing off on him, that’s all. So he spent as little time with his father as possible, going home only to sleep at night.

  The harder he worked at the jobs Anamari gave him to do, the easier it was to keep himself from remembering his dream of her kneeling over him, touching him, sliding along his body. Hoe the weeds out of the corn until your back is on fire with pain! Wash the Baniwa hunter’s wound and replace the bandage! Sterilize the instruments in the alcohol! Above all, do not, even accidentally, let any part of your body brush against hers; pull away when she is near you, turn away so you don’t feel her warm breath as she leans over your shoulder, start a bright conversation whenever there is a silence filled only with the sound of insects and the sight of a bead of sweat slowly etching its way from her neck down her chest to disappear between her breasts where she only tied her shirt instead of buttoning it.

  How could she possibly be a virgin, after the way she acted in his dreams?

  “Where do you think the dreams come from?” she asked.

  He blushed, even though she could not have guessed what he was thinking. Could she?

  “The dreams,” she said. “Why do you think we have dreams that come true?”

  It was nearly dark. “I have to get home,” he said. She was holding his hand. When had she taken his hand like that, and why?

  “I have the strangest dream,” she said. “I dream of a huge snake, covered with bright green and red feathers.”

  “Not all the dreams come true,” he said.

  “I hope not,” she answered. “Because this snake comes out of—I give birth to this snake.”

  “Quetzal,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “The feathered serpent god of the Aztecs. Or maybe the Mayas. Mexican, anyway. I have to go home.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It’s almost dark,” he said.

  “Stay and talk to me!” she demanded. “I have room, you can stay the night.”

  But Sam had to get back. Much as he hated staying with his father, he dared not spend a night in this place. Even her invitation aroused him. He would never last a night in the same house with her. The dream would be too strong for him. So he left her and headed back along the path through the jungle. All during the walk he couldn’t get Anamari out of his mind. It was as if the plants were sending him the vision of her, so his desire was even stronger than when he was with her.

  The leaves gradually turned from green to black in the seeping dark. The hot darkness did not frighten him; it seemed to invite him to step away from the path into the shadows, where he would find the moist relief, the cool release of all his tension. He stayed on the path, and hurried faster.

  He came at last to the oilmen’s town. The generator was loud, but the insects were louder, swarming around the huge area light, casting shadows of their demonic dance. He and his father shared a large one-room house on the far edge of the compound. The oil company provided much nicer hovels than the Brazilian government.

  A few men called out to greet him. He waved, even answered once or twice, but hurried on. His groin felt so hot and tight with desire that he was sure that only the shadows and his quick stride kept everyone from seeing. It was maddening: the more he thought of trying to calm himself, the more visions of Anamari slipped in and out of his waking mind, almost to the point of hallucination. His body would not relax. He was almost running when he burst into the house.

  Inside, Father was washing his dinner plate. He glanced up, but Sam was already past him. “I’ll heat up your dinner.”

  Sam flopped down on his bed. “Not hungry.”

  “Why are you so late?” asked his father.

  “We got to talking.”

  “It’s dangerous in the jungle at night. You think it’s safe because nothing bad ever happens to you in the daytime, but it’s dangerous.”

  “Sure, Dad. I know.” Sam got up, turned his back to take off his pants. Maddeningly, he was still aroused; he didn’t want his father to see.

  But with the unerring instinct of prying parents, the old bastard must have sensed that Sam was hiding something. When Sam was buck naked, Father walked around and looked, just as if he never heard of privacy. Sam blushed in spite of himself. His father’s eyes went small and hard. I hope I don’t ever look like that, thought Sam. I hope my face doesn’t get that ugly suspicious expression on it. I’d rather die than look like that.

  “Well, put on your pajamas,” Father said. “I don’t want to look at that forever.”

  Sam pulled on his sleeping shorts.

  “What’s going on over there?” asked Father.

  “Nothing,” said Sam.

  “You must do something all day.”

  “I told you, I help her. She runs a clinic, and she also tends a garden. She’s got no electricity, so it takes a lot of work.”

  “I’ve done a lot of work in my time, Sam, but I don’t come home like that.”

  “No, you always stopped and got it off with some whore along the way.”

  The old bastard whipped out his hand and slapped Sam across the face. It stung, and the surprise of it wrung tears from Sam before he had time to decide not to cry.

  “I never slept with a whore in my life,” said the old bastard.

  “You only slept with one woman who wasn’t,” said Sam.

  Father slapped him again, only this time Sam was ready, and he bore the slap stoically, almost without flinching.

  “I had one affair,” said Father.

  “You got caught once,” said Sam. “There were dozens of women.”

  Father laughed derisively. “What did you do, hire a detective? There was only the one.”

  But Sam knew better. He had dreamed these women for years. Laughing, lascivious women. It wasn’t until he was twelve years old that he found out enough about sex to know what it all meant. By then he had long since learned that any dream he had more than once was true. So when he had a dream of Father with one of the laughing women, he woke up, holding the dream in his memory. He thought through it from beginning to end, remembering all the details he could. The name of the motel. The room number. It was midnight, but Father was in California, so it was an hour earlier. Sam got out of bed and walked quietly into the kitchen and dialed directory assistance. There was such a motel. He wrote down the number. Then Mother was there, asking him what he was doing.

  “This is the number of the Seaview Motor Inn,” he said. “Call this number and ask for room twenty-one twelve and then ask for Dad.”

  Mother looked at him strangely, like she was about to scream or cry or hit him or throw up. “Your father is at the Hilton,” she said.

  But he just looked right back at her and said, “No matter who answers the phone, ask for Dad.”

  So she did. A woman answered, and Mom asked for Dad by name, and he was there. “I wonder how we can afford to pay for two motel rooms on the same night,” Mom said coldly. “Or are
you splitting the cost with your friend?” Then she hung up the phone and burst into tears.

  She cried all night as she packed up everything the old bastard owned. By the time Dad got home two days later, all his things were in storage. Mom moved fast when she made up her mind. Dad found himself divorced and excommunicated all in the same week, not two months later.

  Mother never asked Sam how he knew where Dad was that night. Never even hinted at wanting to know. Dad never asked him how Mom knew to call that number, either. An amazing lack of curiosity, Sam thought sometimes. Perhaps they just took it as fate. For a while it was secret, then it stopped being secret, and it didn’t matter how the change happened. But one thing Sam knew for sure—the woman at the Seaview Motor Inn was not the first woman, and the Seaview was not the first motel. Dad had been an adulterer for years, and it was ridiculous for him to lie about it now.

  But there was no point in arguing with him, especially when he was in the mood to slap Sam around.

  “I don’t like the idea of you spending so much time with an older woman,” said Father.

  “She’s the closest thing to a doctor these people have. She needs my help and I’m going to keep helping her,” said Sam.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, little boy.”

  “You don’t know anything about this, so just mind your own business.”

  Another slap. “You’re going to get tired of this before I do, Sammy.”

  “I love it when you slap me, Dad. It confirms my moral superiority.”

  Another slap, this time so hard that Sam stumbled under the blow, and he tasted blood inside his mouth. “How hard next time, Dad?” he said. “You going to knock me down? Kick me around a little? Show me who’s boss?”

  “You’ve been asking for a beating ever since we got here.”

  “I’ve been asking to be left alone.”

  “I know women, Sam. You have no business getting involved with an older woman like that.”

  “I help her wash a little girl who has bowel movements in bed, Father. I empty pails of vomit. I wash clothes and help patch leaking roofs and while I’m doing all these things we talk. Just talk. I don’t imagine you have much experience with that, Dad. You probably never talk at all with the women you know, at least not after the price is set.”

  It was going to be the biggest slap of all, enough to knock him down, enough to bruise his face and black his eye. But the old bastard held it in. Didn’t hit him. Just stood there, breathing hard, his face red, his eyes tight and piggish.

  “You’re not as pure as you think,” the old bastard finally whispered. “You’ve got every desire you despise in me.”

  “I don’t despise you for desire,” said Sam.

  “The guys on the crew have been talking about you and this Indian bitch, Sammy. You may not like it, but I’m your father and it’s my job to warn you. These Indian women are easy, and they’ll give you a disease.”

  “The guys on the crew,” said Sam. “What do they know about Indian women? They’re all fags or jerk-offs.”

  “I hope someday you say that where they can hear you, Sam. And I hope when it happens I’m not there to stop what they do to you.”

  “I would never be around men like that, Daddy, if the court hadn’t given you shared custody. A no-fault divorce. What a joke.”

  More than anything else, those words stung the old bastard. Hurt him enough to shut him up. He walked out of the house and didn’t come back until Sam was long since asleep.

  Asleep and dreaming.

  * * *

  Anamari knew what was on Sam’s mind, and to her surprise she found it vaguely flattering. She had never known the shy affection of a boy. When she was a teenager, she was the one Indian girl in the schools in São Paulo. Indians were so rare in the Europeanized parts of Brazil that she might have seemed exotic, but in those days she was still so frightened. The city was sterile, all concrete and harsh light, not at all like the deep soft meadows and woods of Xingu Park. Her tribe, the Kuikuru, were much more Europeanized than the jungle Indians—she had seen cars all her life, and spoke Portuguese before she went to school. But the city made her hungry for the land, the cobblestones hurt her feet, and these intense, competitive children made her afraid. Worst of all, true dreams stopped in the city. She hardly knew who she was, if she was not a true dreamer. So if any boy desired her then, she would not have known it. She would have rebuffed him inadvertently. And then the time for such things had passed. Until now.

  “Last night I dreamed of a great bird, flying west, away from land. Only its right wing was twice as large as its left wing. It had great bleeding wounds along the edges of its wings, and the right wing was the sickest of all, rotting in the air, the feathers dropping off.”

  “Very pretty dream,” said Sam. Then he translated, to keep in practice. “Que sonho lindo.”

  “Ah, but what does it mean?”

  “What happened next?”

  “I was riding on the bird. I was very small, and I held a small snake in my hands—”

  “The feathered snake.”

  “Yes. And I turned it loose, and it went and ate up all the corruption, and the bird was clean. And that’s all. You’ve got a bubble in that syringe. The idea is to inject medicine, not air. What does the dream mean?”

  “What, you think I’m a Joseph? A Daniel?”

  “How about a Sam?”

  “Actually, your dream is easy. Piece of cake.”

  “What?”

  “Piece of cake. Easy as pie. That’s how the cookie crumbles. Man shall not live by bread alone. All I can think of are bakery sayings. I must be hungry.”

  “Tell me the dream or I’ll poke this needle into your eye.”

  “That’s what I like about you Indians. Always you have torture on your mind.”

  She planted her foot against him and knocked him off his stool onto the packed dirt floor. A beetle skittered away. Sam held up the syringe he had been working with; it was undamaged. He got up, set it aside. “The bird,” he said, “is North and South America. Like wings, flying west. Only the right wing is bigger.” He sketched out a rough map with his toe on the floor.

  “That’s the shape, maybe,” she said. “It could be.”

  “And the corruption—show me where it was.”

  With her toe, she smeared the map here, there.

  “It’s obvious,” said Sam.

  “Yes,” she said. “Once you think of it as a map. The corruption is all the Europeanized land. And the only healthy places are where the Indians still live.”

  “Indians or half-Indians,” said Sam. “All your dreams are about the same thing, Anamari. Removing the Europeans from North and South America. Let’s face it. You’re an Indian chauvinist. You give birth to the resurrection god of the Aztecs, and then you send it out to destroy the Europeans.”

  “But why do I dream this?”

  “Because you hate Europeans.”

  “No,” she said. “That isn’t true.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “Because you know me. I’m not a European anymore, I’m a person. Obviously you’ve got to keep that from happening anymore, so you can keep your bigotry alive.”

  “You’re making fun of me, Sam.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m not. These are true dreams, Anamari. They tell you your destiny.”

  She giggled. “If I give birth to a feathered snake, I’ll know the dream was true.”

  “To drive the Europeans out of America.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t care what the dream says. I won’t do that. Besides, what about the dream of the flowering weed?”

  “Little weed in the garden, almost dead, and then you water it and it grows larger and larger and more beautiful—”

  “And something else,” she said. “At the very end of the dream, all the other flowers in the garden have changed. To be just like the flowering weed.” She reached out and rested h
er hand on his arm. “Tell me that dream.”

  His arm became still, lifeless under her hand. “Black is beautiful,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “In America. The U.S., I mean. For the longest time, the blacks, the former slaves, they were ashamed to be black. The whiter you were, the more status you had—the more honor. But when they had their revolution in the sixties—”

  “You don’t remember the sixties, little boy.”

  “Heck, I barely remember the seventies. But I read books. One of the big changes, and it made a huge difference, was that slogan. Black is beautiful. The blacker the better. They said it over and over. Be proud of blackness, not ashamed of it. And in just a few years, they turned the whole status system upside down.”

  She nodded. “The weed came into flower.”

  “So. All through Latin America, Indians are very low status. If you want a Bolivian to pull a knife on you, just call him an Indian. Everybody who possibly can, pretends to be of pure Spanish blood. Pure-blooded Indians are slaughtered wherever there’s the slightest excuse. Only in Mexico is it a little bit different.”

  “What you tell me from my dreams, Sam, this is no small job to do. I’m one middle-aged Indian woman, living in the jungle. I’m supposed to tell all the Indians of America to be proud? When they’re the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low?”

  “When you give them a name, you create them. Benjamin Franklin did it, when he coined the name American for the people of the English colonies. They weren’t New Yorkers or Virginians, they were Americans. Same thing for you. It isn’t Latin Americans against Norteamericanos. It’s Indians and Europeans. Somos todos indios. We’re all Indians. Think that would work as a slogan?”