Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  Delia had about decided that the draw behind Lame Man Bench was one of his regular stops, like the ten campsites she used over and over again when she was herding on Joe-Johns Mountain; but after those three times in the first month, she didn't see him again.

  At the end of September, she brought the sheep down to the O-Bar. After the lambs had been shipped out she took her band of dry ewes over onto the Nelson prairie for the fall, and in mid-November, when the snow had settled in, she brought them to the feed lots. That was all the work the ranch had for her until lambing season. Jesus and Alice belonged to the O-Bar. They stood in the yard and watched her go.

  In town, she rented the same room as the year before, and, as before, spent most of a year's wages on getting drunk and standing other herders to rounds of drink. She gave up looking into the sky.

  In March, she went back out to the ranch. In bitter weather, they built jugs and mothering-up pens, and trucked the pregnant ewes from Green, where they'd been feeding on wheat stubble. Some ewes lambed in the trailer on the way in, and after every haul, there was a surge of lambs born. Delia had the night shift, where she was paired with Roy Joyce, a fellow who raised sugar beets over in the valley and came out for the lambing season every year. In the black, freezing cold middle of the night, eight and ten ewes would be lambing at a time. Triplets, twins, big singles, a few quads, ewes with lambs born dead, ewes too sick or confused to mother. She and Roy would skin a dead lamb and feed the carcass to the ranch dogs and wrap the fleece around a bummer lamb, which was intended to fool the bereaved ewe into taking the orphan as her own, and sometimes it worked that way. All the mothering-up pens swiftly filled, and the jugs filled, and still some ewes with new lambs stood out in the cold field waiting for a room to open up.

  You couldn't pull the stuck lambs with gloves on, you had to reach into the womb with your fingers to turn the lamb, or tie cord around the feet, or grasp the feet barehanded, so Delia's hands were always cold and wet, then cracked and bleeding. The ranch had brought in some old converted school buses to house the lambing crew, and she would fall into a bunk at daybreak and then not be able to sleep, shivering in the unheated bus with the gray daylight pouring in the windows and the endless daytime clamor out at the lambing sheds. All the lambers had sore throats, colds, nagging coughs. Roy Joyce looked like hell, deep bags as blue as bruises under his eyes, and Delia figured she looked about the same, though she hadn't seen a mirror, not even to draw a brush through her hair, since the start of the season.

  By the end of the second week, only a handful of ewes hadn't lambed. The nights became quieter. The weather cleared, and the thin skiff of snow melted off the grass. On the dark of the moon, Delia was standing outside the mothering-up pens drinking coffee from a thermos. She put her head back and held the warmth of the coffee in her mouth a moment, and, as she was swallowing it down, lowering her chin, she caught the tail end of a green flash and a thin yellow line breaking across the sky, so far off anybody else would have thought it was a meteor, but it was bright, and dropping from southwest to due west, maybe right onto Lame Man Bench. She stood and looked at it. She was so very goddamned tired and had a sore throat that wouldn't clear, and she could barely get her fingers to fold around the thermos, they were so split and tender.

  She told Roy she felt sick as a horse, and did he think he could handle things if she drove herself into town to the Urgent Care clinic, and she took one of the ranch trucks and drove up the road a short way and then turned onto the rutted track that went up to Joe-Johns.

  The night was utterly clear and you could see things a long way off. She was still an hour's drive from the Churros' summer range when she began to see a yellow-orange glimmer behind the black ridgeline, a faint nimbus like the ones that marked distant range fires on summer nights.

  She had to leave the truck at the bottom of the bench and climb up the last mile or so on foot, had to get a flashlight out of the glove box and try to find an uphill path with it because the fluttery reddish lightshow was finished by then, and a thick pall of smoke overcast the sky and blotted out the stars. Her eyes itched and burned, and tears ran from them, but the smoke calmed her sore throat. She went up slowly, breathing through her mouth.

  The wing had burned a skid path through the scraggly junipers along the top of the bench and had come apart into about a hundred pieces. She wandered through the burnt trees and the scattered wreckage, shining her flashlight into the smoky darkness, not expecting to find what she was looking for, but there he was, lying apart from the scattered pieces of metal, out on the smooth slab rock at the edge of the draw. He was panting shallowly and his close coat of short brown hair was matted with blood. He lay in such a way that she immediately knew his back was broken. When he saw Delia coming up, his brow furrowed with worry. A sick or a wounded dog will bite, she knew that, but she squatted next to him. It's just me, she told him, by shining the light not in his face but in hers. Then she spoke to him. "Okay," she said. "I'm here now," without thinking too much about what the words meant, or whether they meant anything at all, and she didn't remember until afterward that he was very likely deaf anyway. He sighed and shifted his look from her to the middle distance, where she supposed he was focused on approaching death.

  Near at hand, he didn't resemble a dog all that much, only in the long shape of his head, the folded-over ears, the round darkness of his eyes. He lay on the ground flat on his side like a dog that's been run over and is dying by the side of the road, but a man will lay like that too when he's dying. He had small-fingered nail-less hands where a dog would have had toes and front feet. Delia offered him a sip from her water bottle, but he didn't seem to want it, so she just sat with him quietly, holding one of his hands, which was smooth as lambskin against the cracked and roughened flesh of her palm. The batteries in the flashlight gave out, and sitting there in the cold darkness she found his head and stroked it, moving her sore fingers lightly over the bone of his skull, and around the soft ears, the loose jowls. Maybe it wasn't any particular comfort to him, but she was comforted by doing it. Sure, okay, you can go on.

  She heard him sigh, and then sigh again, and each time wondered if it would turn out to be his death. She had used to wonder what a coyote, or especially a dog, would make of this doggish man, and now while she was listening, waiting to hear if he would breathe again, she began to wish she'd brought Alice or Jesus with her, though not out of that old curiosity. When her husband had died years before, at the very moment he took his last breath, the dog she'd had then had barked wildly and raced back and forth from the front to the rear door of the house as if he'd heard or seen something invisible to her. People said it was her husband's soul going out the door or his angel coming in. She didn't know what it was the dog had seen or heard or smelled, but she wished she knew. And now she wished she had a dog with her to bear witness.

  She went on petting him even after he had died, after she was sure he was dead, went on petting him until his body was cool, and then she got up stiffly from the bloody ground and gathered rocks and piled them onto him, a couple of feet high, so that he wouldn't be found or dug up. She didn't know what to do about the wreckage, so she didn't do anything with it at all.

  In May, when she brought the Churro sheep back to Joe-Johns Mountain, the pieces of the wrecked wing had already eroded, were small and smooth-edged like the bits of sea glass you find on a beach, and she figured that this must be what it was meant to do: to break apart into pieces too small for anybody to notice, and then to quickly wear away. But the stones she'd piled over his body seemed like the start of something, so she began the slow work of raising them higher into a sheepherder's monument. She gathered up all the smooth eroded bits of wing, too, and laid them in a series of widening circles around the base of the monument. She went on piling up stones through the summer and into September, until it reached fifteen feet. Mornings, standing with the sheep miles away, she would look for it through the binoculars and think about ways to raise it hi
gher, and she would wonder what was buried under all the other monuments sheepherders had raised in that country. At night, she studied the sky, but nobody came for him.

  In November, when she finished with the sheep and went into town, she asked around and found a guy who knew about star-gazing and telescopes. He loaned her some books and sent her to a certain pawnshop, and she gave most of a year's wages for a 14 x 75 telescope with a reflective lens. On clear, moonless nights, she met the astronomy guy out at the Little League baseball field, and she sat on a fold-up canvas stool with her eye against the telescope's finder while he told her what she was seeing: Jupiter's moons, the Pelican Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy. The telescope had a tripod mount, and he showed her how to make a little jerry-built device so she could mount her old 7 x 32 binoculars on the tripod too. She used the binoculars for their wider view of star clusters and small constellations. She was indifferent to most discomforts, could sit quietly in one position for hours at a time, teeth rattling with the cold, staring into the immense vault of the sky until she became numb and stiff, barely able to stand and walk back home. Astronomy, she discovered, was a work of patience, but the sheep had taught her patience, or it was already in her nature before she ever took up with them.

  FALLING ONTO MARS

  Geoffrey Landis

  The people of the planet Mars have no literature. The colonization of Mars was unforgiving, and the exiles had no time to spend in writing. But still they have stories, the tales they told to children too young to really understand, stories that these children tell to their own children. These are the legends of the Martians.

  Not one of the stories is a love story.

  In those days, people fell out of the sky. They fell through the ochre sky in ships that were barely functional, thin aluminum shells crowded with fetid humanity, half of them corpses and the other half little more than corpses. The landings were hard, and many of the ships split open on impact, spilling bodies and precious air into the barely-more-than-vacuum of Mars. And still they fell, wave after wave of ships, the refuse of humanity tossed carelessly through space and falling onto the cratered deserts of Mars.

  In the middle of the twenty-first century the last of the governments on Earth abolished the death penalty, but they found that they had not yet abolished killing or rape or terrorism. Some criminals were deemed too vicious to rehabilitate. These were the broken ones, the ones too cunning and too violent to ever be returned to society. To the governments of Earth, shipping them to another world and letting them work out their own survival had been the perfect solution. And if they failed to survive, it would be their own fault, not the work of the magistrates and juries of Earth.

  The contracts to build ships to convey prisoners went to the cheapest supplier. If prisoners had a hard time, and didn't have quite as much food or water as had been specified, or if the life-support supplies weren't quite as high a quality as had been specified, what of it? And who would tell? The voyage was one way; not even the ships would return to Earth. No need to make them any more durable than the minimum needed to keep them from ripping apart during the launch. And if some of the ships ripped open after launch, who would mourn the loss? Either way, the prisoners would never be returned to society.

  G-g-grampa Jared, we are told, was in the fifth wave of exiles. Family tradition says Jared was a political dissident, sent in the prison ships for speaking too vigorously in defense of the helpless.

  The governments of Earth, of course, claimed that political dissidents were never shipped to Mars. The incorrigible, the worst criminals, the ones so unrepentant that they could never be allowed back into human society: this is what the prisons of Earth sent to Mars, not political prisoners. But the governments of Earth are long skilled at lying. There were murderers sent to Mars indeed, but among them were also those exiled only for daring to give voice to their dangerous thoughts.

  Yet family tradition lies as well. There had been innocent men into exile, yes, but my great-great grandfather was not one of them. Time has blurred the edges, and no one now knows the details for sure. But he was one of the survivors, a skinny ratlike man, tough as old string and cunning as a snake.

  My G-g-grandma Kayla was one of the original inhabitants of Mars, one of the crew of the science base at Shalbatana, the international station that had been established on Mars long before anybody thought up the idea to dump criminals on Mars. When the order came that the science station was to close, and that they were to evacuate Mars, she chose to stay. Her science was more important, she told the magistrates and people of Earth, than politics. She was studying the paleoclimate of Mars, trying to come to an understanding of how the planet had dried and cooled, and how cycles of warming and cooling had passed over the planet in long, slow waves. It was an understanding, she said, that was desperately needed on the home planet.

  Great-great-grandma Kayla, in her day, had earned a small measure of fame for being one of the seventeen that stayed on Mars with the base at Shalbatana. That fame might have helped some. Their radio broadcasts, as people fell out of the sky, nudged the governments of Earth to remember their promises. Exile to Mars was not—or at least they had claimed it was not—intended as a death sentence. The pleas of the refugees could easily be dismissed as exaggerations and lies, but Shalbatana had a radio, and their vivid and detailed reports of the refugees had some effect.

  The first few years supplies were sent from Earth, mostly from volunteer organizations: Baha'i relief groups, Amnesty International, the holy sisters of Saint Paul. It wasn't enough.

  After the first two waves, the scientists who stayed behind realized that they would have no more hope of doing science. They greeted the prisoners as best they could, helped them in the deadly race of time to build habitats, to start growing the plants that they would need to purify the air and survive.

  Mars is a desert, a barren rock in space. There was no mercy in sending criminals to Mars instead of sending them to death. They could learn quickly, or die. Most of them died. A few leaned: learned to electrolyze the deep-buried groundwater to generate oxygen, learned to refine the raw materials to make the tools to make the furnaces to reduce the alloys to make the machines to build the machines that would allow them to live. But, as fast as they could build the machinery that might keep them alive, more waves of desperate, dying prisoners poured down from the sky; more angry, violent men who thought that they had nothing left to lose.

  It was the sixth wave that wrecked the base. This was a stupid, self-destructive thing to do, but the men were vicious, resentful, and dying. A generation later, they called themselves political refugees, but there is little doubt that for the most part they were thugs and robbers and murderers. From the sixth wave came a leader, a man who called himself Dingo. On Earth, he had machine-gunned a hundred people in an apartment block that fell behind in paying him protection. On the ship, Dingo killed seven prisoners with his bare hands, simply to make the point that he was going to be the leader.

  Leader he was From fear or respect or pure anger, the prisoners on the ship followed him, and when they fell onto Mars, he harassed them, lectured them, beat them, and forged them into an angry army. They had been abandoned on Mars, Dingo told them, to die slowly. They could only survive if they matched the Earth's brutality with their own. He marched them five hundred kilometers across the barren sands to the Shalbatana habitat.

  The habitat was taken before the inhabitants had even realized it was under attack. The scientists who hadn't abandoned the station were beaten with scraps of metal from the vandalized habitat, blindfolded, and held as hostages while the prisoners radioed the Earth with their demands. When the demands were unanswered, the men were stripped and thrown naked out onto the sands to die. In rage and desperation, the mob that had been the sixth wave ripped apart the base, the visible symbol of the civilization that had sent them a hundred million miles to die. The women who remained on the base were raped, and then the destroyers gave them the chance to plead for
their lives.

  The men of the fourth and fifth waves had joined together. For the most part they were strangers to each other—many of them had never seen each others’ faces except through the reflective visor of a suit. But they had slowly learned that the only way to survive was to cooperate. They learned to burrow under the sand, and when their home-made radios told them that the base was being sacked, they crept across the desert, and silently watched, and waited. When the destroyers abandoned the base, after looting it of everything that they thought was valuable, the fifth wave, hiding under the sands, burst out and caught them unprepared. Of the destroyers who had attacked Shalbatana base, not a single one survived. The leader Dingo fled into the desert, and it was Jared Vargas, my great-great grandfather, who saw him, followed him, tracked him down, and killed him.

  And then they went to Shalbatana base, to see whether anything left could be salvaged.

  G-g-grandpa found her in the wreckage and ripped the tape off her eyes. She looked at him, her eyes unable to focus in the sudden light, and thought him one of the same group that had raped her and sabotaged the habitat. She had no way of knowing that others from his group were frantically working to patch up one of the modules to hold air, while G-g-grandpa and others searched for survivors. As the leaking air shrieked in her ears, she looked up at him, blinking, blood running from her nose and ears and anus, and said, “You have to know before I die. Oxygen in the soil. Release it by baking.”