The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Jaak grinned. “Look at this.” He turned to the dog and held out his hand. “Shake.”

  The dog sat back on its haunches and gravely offered him its paw. Jaak grinned and shook the paw, then tossed it a food pellet. He turned to us and bowed.

  Lisa frowned. “Do it again.”

  Jaak shrugged and went through the performance a second time.

  “It thinks?” she asked.

  Jaak shrugged. “Got me. You can get it to do things. The libraries are full of stuff on them. They’re trainable. Not like a centaur or anything, but you can make them do little tricks, and if they’re certain breeds, they can learn special stuff, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some of them were trained to attack. Or to find explosives.”

  Lisa looked impressed. “Like nukes and stuff?”

  Jaak shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Can I try?” I asked.

  Jaak nodded. “Go for it.”

  I went over to the dog and stuck out my hand. “Shake.”

  It stuck out its paw. My hackles went up. It was like sending signals to aliens. I mean, you expect a bio-job or a robot to do what you want it to. Centaur, go get blown up. Find the op-force. Call reinforcements. The HEV was like that, too. It would do anything. But it was designed.

  “Feed it,” Jaak said, handing me a food pellet. “You have to feed it when it does it right.”

  I held out the food pellet. The dog’s long pink tongue swabbed my palm.

  I held out my hand again. “Shake.” I said. It held out its paw. We shook hands. Its amber eyes stared up at me, solemn.

  “That’s some weird shit,” Lisa said. I shivered, nodding and backed away. The dog watched me go.

  That night in my bunk, I lay awake, reading. I’d turned out the lights and only the book’s surface glowed, illuminating the bunkroom in a soft green aura. Some of Lisa’s art buys glimmered dimly from the walls: a bronze hanging of a phoenix breaking into flight, stylized flames glowing around it; a Japanese woodblock print of Mount Fuji and another of a village weighed down under thick snows; a photo of the three of us in Siberia after the Peninsula campaign, grinning and alive amongst the slag.

  Lisa came into the room. Her razors glinted in my book’s dim light, flashes of green sparks that outlined her limbs as she moved.

  “What are you reading?” She stripped and squeezed into bed with me.

  I held up the book and read out loud.

  “Cut me I won’t bleed. Gas me I won’t breathe.

  Stab me, shoot me, slash me, smash me

  I have swallowed science

  I am God.

  Alone.”

  I closed the book and its glow died. In the darkness, Lisa rustled under the covers.

  My eyes adjusted. She was staring at me. “‘Dead Man,’ right?”

  “Because of the dog,” I said.

  “Dark reading.” She touched my shoulder, her hand warm, the blades embedded, biting lightly into my skin.

  “We used to be like that dog,” I said.

  “Pathetic.”

  “Scary.”

  We were quiet for a little while. Finally I asked, “Do you ever wonder what would happen to us if we didn’t have our science? If we didn’t have our big brains and our weeviltech and our cellstims and—”

  “And everything that makes our life good?” She laughed. “No.” She rubbed my stomach. “I like all those little worms that live in your belly.” She started to tickle me.

  “Wormy, squirmy in your belly,

  wormy squirmy feeds you Nelly.

  Microweevils eat the bad,

  and give you something good instead.”

  I fought her off, laughing. “That’s no Yearly.”

  “Third grade. Basic bio-logic. Mrs. Alvarez. She was really big on weeviltech.”

  She tried to tickle me again but I fought her off. “Yeah, well Yearly only wrote about immortality. He wouldn’t take it.”

  Lisa gave up on the tickling and flopped down beside me again. “Blah, blah, blah. He wouldn’t take any gene modifications. No c-cell inhibitors. He was dying of cancer and he wouldn’t take the drugs that would have saved him. Our last mortal poet. Cry me a river. So what?”

  “You ever think about why he wouldn’t?”

  “Yeah. He wanted to be famous. Suicide’s good for attention.”

  “Seriously, though. He thought being human meant having animals. The whole web of life thing. I’ve been reading about him. It’s weird shit. He didn’t want to live without them.”

  “Mrs. Alvarez hated him. She had some rhymes about him, too. Anyway, what were we supposed to do? Work out weeviltech and DNA patches for every stupid species? Do you know what that would have cost?” She nuzzled close to me. “If you want animals around you, go to a zoo. Or get some building blocks and make something, if it makes you happy. Something with hands, for god’s sake, not like that dog.” She stared at the underside of the bunk above. “I’d cook that dog in a second.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. That dog’s different from a bio-job. It looks at us, and there’s something there, and it’s not us. I mean, take any biojob out there, and it’s basically us, poured into another shape, but not that dog. . . .” I trailed off, thinking.

  Lisa laughed. “It shook hands with you, Chen. You don’t worry about a centaur when it salutes.” She climbed on top of me. “Forget the dog. Concentrate on something that matters.” Her smile and her razor blades glinted in the dimness.

  I woke up to something licking my face. At first I thought it was Lisa, but she’d climbed into her own bunk. I opened my eyes and found the dog.

  It was a funny thing to have this animal licking me, like it wanted to talk, or say hello or something. It licked me again, and I thought that it had come a long way from when it had tried to take off Jaak’s arm. It put its paws up on my bed, and then in a single heavy movement, it was up on the bunk with me, its bulk curled against me.

  It slept there all night. It was weird having something other than Lisa lying next to me, but it was warm and there was something friendly about it. I couldn’t help smiling as I drifted back to sleep.

  We flew to Hawaii for a swimming vacation and we brought the dog with us. It was good to get out of the northern cold and into the gentle Pacific. Good to stand on the beach, and look out to a limitless horizon. Good to walk along the beach holding hands while black waves crashed on the sand.

  Lisa was a good swimmer. She flashed through the ocean’s metallic sheen like an eel out of history and when she surfaced, her naked body glistened with hundreds of iridescent petroleum jewels.

  When the sun started to set, Jaak lit the ocean on fire with his 101. We all sat and watched as the Sun’s great red ball sank through veils of smoke, its light shading deeper crimson with every minute. Waves rushed flaming onto the beach. Jaak got out his harmonica and played while Lisa and I made love on the sand.

  We’d intended to amputate her for the weekend, to let her try what she had done to me the vacation before. It was a new thing in L.A., an experiment in vulnerability.

  She was beautiful, lying there on the beach, slick and excited with all of our play in the water. I licked oil opals off her skin as I sliced off her limbs, leaving her more dependent than a baby. Jaak played his harmonica and watched the sun set, and watched as I rendered Lisa down to her core.

  After our sex, we lay on the sand. The last of the sun was dropping below the water. Its rays glinted redly across the smoldering waves. The sky, thick with particulates and smoke, shaded darker.

  Lisa sighed contentedly. “We should vacation here more often.”

  I tugged on a length of barbed-wire buried in the sand. It tore free and I wrapped it around my upper arm, a tight band that bit into my skin. I showed it to Lisa. “I used to do this all the time when I was a kid.” I smiled. “I thought I was so bad-ass.”

  Lisa smiled. “You are.”

  “Thanks to science.” I glanced over
at the dog. It was lying on the sand a short distance away. It seemed sullen and unsure in its new environment, torn away from the safety of the acid pits and tailings mountains of its homeland. Jaak sat beside the dog and played. Its ears twitched to the music. He was a good player. The mournful sound of the harmonica carried easily over the beach to where we lay.

  Lisa turned her head, trying to see the dog. “Roll me.”

  I did what she asked. Already, her limbs were regrowing. Small stumps, which would build into larger limbs. By morning, she would be whole, and ravenous. She studied the dog. “This is as close as I’ll ever get to it,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s vulnerable to everything. It can’t swim in the ocean. It can’t eat anything. We have to fly its food to it. We have to scrub its water. Dead end of an evolutionary chain. Without science, we’d be as vulnerable as it.” She looked up at me. “As vulnerable as I am now.” She grinned. “This is as close to death as I’ve ever been. At least, not in combat.”

  “Wild, isn’t it?”

  “For a day. I liked it better when I did it to you. I’m already starving.”

  I fed her a handful of oily sand and watched the dog, standing uncertainly on the beach, sniffing suspiciously at some rusting scrap iron that stuck out of the beach like a giant memory fin. It pawed up a chunk of red plastic rubbed shiny by the ocean and chewed on it briefly, before dropping it. It started licking around its mouth. I wondered if it had poisoned itself again.

  “It sure can make you think,” I muttered. I fed Lisa another handful of sand. “If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they’d say about us? Would they even call us human?”

  Lisa looked at me seriously. “No, they’d call us gods.”

  Jaak got up and wandered into the surf, standing knee-deep in the black smoldering waters. The dog, driven by some unknown instinct, followed him, gingerly picking its way across the sand and rubble.

  The dog got tangled in a cluster of wire our last day on the beach. Really ripped the hell out of it: slashes through its fur, broken legs, practically strangled. It had gnawed one of its own paws half off trying to get free. By the time we found it, it was a bloody mess of ragged fur and exposed meat.

  Lisa stared down at the dog. “Christ, Jaak, you were supposed to be watching it.”

  “I went swimming. You can’t keep an eye on the thing all the time.”

  “It’s going to take forever to fix this,” she fumed.

  “We should warm up the hunter,” I said. “It’ll be easier to work on it back home.” Lisa and I knelt down to start cutting the dog free. It whimpered and its tail wagged feebly as we started to work.

  Jaak was silent.

  Lisa slapped him on his leg. “Come on, Jaak, get down here. It’ll bleed out if you don’t hurry up. You know how fragile it is.”

  Jaak said, “I think we should eat it.”

  Lisa glanced up, surprised. “You do?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  I looked up from where I was tearing away tangled wires from around the dog’s torso. “I thought you wanted it to be your pet. Like in the zoo.”

  Jaak shook his head. “Those food pellets are expensive. I’m spending half my salary on food and water filtration, and now this bullshit.” He waved his hand at the tangled dog. “You have to watch the sucker all the time. It’s not worth it.”

  “But still, it’s your friend. It shook hands with you.”

  Jaak laughed. “You’re my friend.” He looked down at the dog, his face wrinkled with thought. “It’s, it’s . . . an animal.”

  Even though we had all idly discussed what it would be like to eat the dog, it was a surprise to hear him so determined to kill it. “Maybe you should sleep on it.” I said. “We can get it back to the bunker, fix it up, and then you can decide when you aren’t so pissed off about it.”

  “No.” He pulled out his harmonica and played a few notes, a quick jazzy scale. He took the harmonica out of his mouth. “If you want to put up the money for his feed, I’ll keep it, I guess, but otherwise. . . .” He shrugged.

  “I don’t think you should cook it.”

  “You don’t?” Lisa glanced at me. “We could roast it, right here, on the beach.”

  I looked down at the dog, a mass of panting, trusting animal. “I still don’t think we should do it.”

  Jaak looked at me seriously. “You want to pay for the feed?”

  I sighed. “I’m saving for the new Immersive Response.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got things I want to buy too, you know.” He flexed his muscles, showing off his tattoos. “I mean, what the fuck good does it do?”

  “It makes you smile.”

  “Immersive Response makes you smile. And you don’t have to clean up after its crap. Come on, Chen. Admit it. You don’t want to take care of it either. It’s a pain in the ass.”

  We all looked at each other, then down at the dog.

  Lisa roasted the dog on a spit, over burning plastics and petroleum skimmed from the ocean. It tasted okay, but in the end it was hard to understand the big deal. I’ve eaten slagged centaur that tasted better.

  Afterward, we walked along the shoreline. Opalescent waves crashed and roared up the sand, leaving jewel slicks as they receded and the sun sank red in the distance.

  Without the dog, we could really enjoy the beach. We didn’t have to worry about whether it was going to step in acid, or tangle in barb-wire half-buried in the sand, or eat something that would keep it up vomiting half the night.

  Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled its shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it.

  Echo (2005)

  ELIZABETH HAND

  ELIZABETH HAND (b. 1957) is the author of Mortal Love, Glimmering, Generation Loss, and several other novels. She began publishing short fiction in the late 1980s and has produced about three dozen stories, including Illyria, “Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol,” and “Last Summer at Mars Hill.”

  Mythic and lyrical, “Echo” is a sad and affecting tale.

  HIS IS NOT the first time this has happened. I’ve been here every time it has. Always I learn about it the same way, a message from someone five hundred miles away, a thousand, comes flickering across my screen. There’s no TV here on the island, and the radio reception is spotty: the signal comes across Penobscot Bay from a tower atop Mars Hill, and any kind of weather—thunderstorms, high winds, blizzards—brings the tower down. Sometimes I’m listening to the radio when it happens, music playing, Nick Drake, a promo for the Common Ground Country Fair; then a sudden soft explosive hiss like damp hay falling onto a bonfire. Then silence.

  Sometimes I hear about it from you. Or, well, I don’t actually hear anything: I read your messages, imagine your voice, for a moment neither sardonic nor world-weary, just exhausted, too fraught to be expressive. Words like feathers falling from the sky, black specks on blue.

  The Space Needle. Sears Tower. LaGuardia Airport. Golden Gate Bridge. The Millennium Eye. The Bahrain Hilton. Sydney, Singapore, Jerusalem.

  Years apart at first; then months; now years again. How long has it been since the first tower fell? When did I last hear from you?

  I can’t remember.

  This morning I took the dog for a walk across the island. We often go in search of birds, me for my work, the wolfhound to chase for joy. He ran across the ridge, rushing at a partridge that burst into the air in a roar of copper feathers and beech leaves. The dog dashed after her fruitlessly, long jaw open to show red gums, white teeth, a panting unfurled tongue.

  “Finn!” I called and he circled round the fern brake, snapping at bracken and crickets, black splinters that leapt wildly from his jaws. “Finn, get back here.”

  He came. Mine is the only voice he knows now.

  There was a while when I worried about things like food and water, whether I might need to get to a doctor. But the dug wel
l is good. I’d put up enough dried beans and canned goods to last for years, and the garden does well these days. The warming means longer summers here on the island, more sun; I can grow tomatoes now, and basil, scotch bonnet peppers, plants that I never could grow when I first arrived. The root cellar under the cottage is dry enough and cool enough that I keep all my medications there, things I stockpiled back when I could get over to Ellsworth and the mainland—albuterol inhalers, alprazolam, amoxicillin, Tylenol and codeine, ibuprofen, aspirin; cases of food for the wolfhound. When I first put the solar cells up, visitors shook their heads: not enough sunny days this far north, not enough light. But that changed too as the days got warmer.

  Now it’s the wireless signal that’s difficult to capture, not sunlight. There will be months on end of silence and then it will flare up again, for days or even weeks, I never know when. If I’m lucky, I patch into it, then sit there, waiting, holding my breath until the messages begin to scroll across the screen, looking for your name. I go downstairs to my office every day, like an angler going to shore, casting my line though I know the weather’s wrong, the currents too strong, not enough wind or too much, the power grid like the Grand Banks scraped barren by decades of trawlers dragging the bottom. Sometimes my line would latch onto you: sometimes, in the middle of the night, it would be the middle of the night where you were, too, and we’d write back and forth. I used to joke about these letters going out like messages in bottles, not knowing if they would reach you, or where you’d be when they did.

  London, Paris, Petra, Oahu, Moscow. You were always too far away. Now you’re like everyone else, unimaginably distant. Who would ever have thought it could all be gone, just like that? The last time I saw you was in the hotel in Toronto, we looked out and saw the spire of the CN Tower like Cupid’s arrow aimed at us. You stood by the window and the sun was behind you and you looked like a cornstalk I’d seen once, burning, your gray hair turned to gold and your face smoke.

  I can’t see you again, you said. Deirdre is sick and I need to be with her.

  I didn’t believe you. We made plans to meet in Montreal, in Halifax, Seattle. Gray places; after Deirdre’s treatment ended. After she got better.