The Very Best of F & SF v1

by Gordon Van Gelder (ed)

  He walked out of town. His mule was standing in a clump of weed about forty yards out along the remnant of the coach road. The gunslinger led it back to Kennerly’s stable. Outside, the wind was playing a louder tune. He put the mule up and went back to Sheb’s. He found a ladder in the back shed, went up to the roof, and cut Nort down. The body was lighter than a bag of sticks. He tumbled it down to join the common people. Then he went back inside, ate hamburgers and drank three beers while the light failed and the sand began to fly. That night he slept in the bed where he and Allie had lain. He had no dreams. The next morning the wind was gone and the sun was its usual bright and forgetful self. The bodies had gone south with the wind. At midmorning, after he had bound all his cuts, he moved on as well.

  XVIII

  He thought Brown had fallen asleep. The fire was down to a spark and the bird, Zoltan, had put its head under its wing.

  Just as he was about to get up and spread a pallet in the corner, Brown said, “There. You’ve told it. Do you feel better?”

  The gunslinger started. “Why would I feel bad?”

  “You’re human, you said. No demon. Or did you lie?”

  “I didn’t lie.” He felt the grudging admittance in him: he liked Brown. Honestly did. And he hadn’t lied to the dweller in any way. “Who are you, Brown? Really, I mean.”

  “Just me,” he said, unperturbed. “Why do you have to think you’re such a mystery?”

  The gunslinger lit a smoke without replying.

  “I think you’re very close to your man in black,” Brown said. “Is he desperate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you?”

  “Not yet,” the gunslinger said. He looked at Brown with a shade of defiance. “I do what I have to do.”

  “That’s good then,” Brown said and turned over and went to sleep.

  XIX

  In the morning Brown fed him and sent him on his way. In the daylight he was an amazing figure with his scrawny, burnt chest, pencil-like collarbones and ringleted shock of red hair. The bird perched on his shoulder.

  “The mule?” The gunslinger asked.

  “I’ll eat it,” Brown said.

  “Okay.”

  Brown offered his hand and the gunslinger shook it. The dweller nodded to the south. “Walk easy.”

  “You know it.”

  They nodded at each other and then the gunslinger walked away, his body festooned with guns and water. He looked back once. Brown was rooting furiously at his little cornbed. The crow was perched on the low roof of his dwelling like a gargoyle.

  XX

  The fire was down, and the stars had begun to pale off. The wind walked restlessly. The gunslinger twitched in his sleep and was still again. He dreamed a thirsty dream. In the darkness the shape of the mountains was invisible. The thoughts of guilt had faded. The desert had baked them out. He found himself thinking more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot, instead. Cort had known black from white.

  He stirred again and awoke. He blinked at the dead fire with its own shape superimposed over the other, more geometrical one. He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously.

  That, of course, made him think of Cort again. He didn’t know where Cort was. The world had moved on.

  The gunslinger shouldered his tote sack and moved on with it.

  (Thus ends what is written in the first Book of Roland, and his Quest for the Tower which stands at the root of Time. )

  Return to Table of Contents

  The Dark - Karen Joy Fowler

  Karen Joy Fowler’s novels include Wit’s End, The Jane Austen Book Club, and Sarah Canary. Her short fiction tends to sneak up on readers from unexpected directions, as you’ll soon see.

  In the summer of 1954, Anna and Richard Becker disappeared from Yosemite National Park along with Paul Becker, their three-year-old son. Their campsite was intact; two paper plates with half-eaten frankfurters remained on the picnic table, and a third frankfurter was in the trash. The rangers took several black-and-white photographs of the meal, which, when blown up to eight by ten, as part of the investigation, showed clearly the words love bites, carved into the wooden picnic table many years ago. There appeared to be some fresh scratches as well; the expert witness at the trial attributed them, with no great assurance, to raccoon.

  The Beckers’ car was still backed into the campsite, a green De Soto with a spare key under the right bumper and half a tank of gas. Inside the tent, two sleeping bags had been zipped together marital style and laid on a large tarp. A smaller flannel bag was spread over an inflated pool raft. Toiletries included three toothbrushes; Ipana toothpaste, squeezed in the middle; Ivory soap; three washcloths; and one towel. The newspapers discreetly made no mention of Anna’s diaphragm, which remained powdered with talc, inside its pink shell, or of the fact that Paul apparently still took a bottle to bed with him.

  Their nearest neighbor had seen nothing. He had been in his hammock, he said, listening to the game. Of course, the reception in Yosemite was lousy. At home he had a shortwave set; he said he had once pulled in Dover, clear as a bell. “You had to really concentrate to hear the game,” he told the rangers. “You could’ve dropped the bomb. I wouldn’t have noticed.”

  Anna Becker’s mother, Edna, received a postcard postmarked a day earlier. “Seen the firefall,” it said simply. “Home Wednesday. Love.” Edna identified the bottle. “Oh yes, that’s Paul’s bokkie,” she told the police. She dissolved into tears. “He never goes anywhere without it,” she said.

  In the spring of 1960, Mark Cooper and Manuel Rodriguez went on a fishing expedition in Yosemite. They set up a base camp in Tuolumne Meadows and went off to pursue steelhead. They were gone from camp approximately six hours, leaving their food and a six-pack of beer zipped inside their backpacks zipped inside their tent. When they returned, both beer and food were gone. Canine footprints circled the tent, but a small and mysterious handprint remained on the tent flap. “Raccoon,” said the rangers who hadn’t seen it. The tent and packs were undamaged. Whatever had taken the food had worked the zippers. “Has to be raccoon.”

  The last time Manuel had gone backpacking, he’d suspended his pack from a tree to protect it. A deer had stopped to investigate, and when Manuel shouted to warn it off the deer hooked the pack over its antlers in a panic, tearing the pack loose from the branch and carrying it away. Pack and antlers were so entangled, Manuel imagined the deer must have worn his provisions and clean shirts until antler-shedding season. He reported that incident to the rangers, too, but what could anyone do? He was reminded of it, guiltily, every time he read Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose to his four-year-old son.

  Manuel and Mark arrived home three days early. Manuel’s wife said she’d been expecting him.

  She emptied his pack. “Where’s the can opener?” she asked.

  “It’s there somewhere,” said Manuel.

  “It’s not,” she said.

  “Check the shirt pocket.”

  “It’s not here.” Manuel’s wife held the pack upside down and shook it. Dead leaves fell out. “How were you going to drink the beer?” she asked.

  In August of 1962, Caroline Crosby, a teenager from Palo Alto, accompanied her family on a forced march from Tuolumne Meadows to Vogelsang. She carried fourteen pounds in a pack with an aluminum frame—and her father said it was the lightest pack on the market, and she should be able to carry one-third her weight, so fourteen pounds was nothing, but her pack stabbed her continuously in one coin-sized spot just below her right shoulder, and it still hurt the next morning. Her boots left a blister on her right heel, and her pack straps had rubbed. Her father had bought her a mummy bag with no zipper so as to minimize its weight; it was stiflingly hot, and she sweated all night. She missed an overnight at Ann Watson’s house, where Ann showed them her sister’s Mark Eden bust developer, and her sister retaliated by freezing all their bras behind the twin-pops. She missed The Beverly Hillbillies.

/>   Caroline’s father had quit smoking just for the duration of the trip, so as to spare himself the weight of cigarettes, and made continual comments about Nature, which were laudatory in content and increasingly abusive in tone. Caroline’s mother kept telling her to smile.

  In the morning her father mixed half a cup of stream water into a packet of powdered eggs and cooked them over a Coleman stove. “Damn fine breakfast,” he told Caroline intimidatingly as she stared in horror at her plate. “Out here in God’s own country. What else could you ask for?” He turned to Caroline’s mother, who was still trying to get a pot of water to come to a boil. “Where’s the goddamn coffee?” he asked. He went to the stream to brush his teeth with a toothbrush he had sawed the handle from in order to save the weight. Her mother told her to please make a little effort to be cheerful and not spoil the trip for everyone.

  One week later she was in Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. The diagnosis was septicemic plague.

  Which is finally where I come into the story. My name is Keith Harmon,B.A. in history with a special emphasis on epidemics. I probably know as much as anyone about the plague of Athens. Typhus. Tarantism. Tsutsugamushi fever. It’s an odder historical specialty than it ought to be. More battles have been decided by disease than by generals—and if you don’t believe me, take a closer look at the Crusades or the fall of the Roman Empire or Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

  My M.A. is in public administration. Vietnam veteran, too, but in 1962 I worked for the state of California as part of the plague-monitoring team. When Letterman’s reported a plague victim, Sacramento sent me down to talk to her.

  Caroline had been moved to a private room. “You’re going to be fine,” I told her. Of course, she was. We still lose people to the pneumonic plague, but the slower form is easily cured. The only tricky part is making the diagnosis.

  “I don’t feel well. I don’t like the food,” she said. She pointed out Letterman’s Tuesday menu. “Hawaiian Delight. You know what that is? Green Jell-O with a canned pineapple ring on top. What’s delightful about that?” She was feverish and lethargic. Her hair lay limply about her head, and she kept tangling it in her fingers as she talked. “I’m missing a lot of school.” Impossible to tell if this last was a complaint or a boast. She raised her bed to a sitting position and spent most of the rest of the interview looking out the window, making it clear that a view of the Letterman parking lot was more arresting than a conversation with an old man like me. She seemed younger than fifteen. Of course, everyone in a hospital bed feels young. Helpless. “Will you ask them to let me wash and set my hair?”

  I pulled a chair over to the bed. “I need to know if you’ve been anywhere unusual recently. We know about Yosemite. Anywhere else. Hiking out around the airport, for instance.” The plague is endemic in the San Bruno Mountains by the San Francisco Airport. That particular species of flea doesn’t bite humans, though. Or so we’d always thought. “It’s kind of a romantic spot for some teenagers, isn’t it?”

  I’ve seen some withering adolescent stares in my time, but this one was practiced. I still remember it. I may be sick, it said, but at least I’m not an idiot. “Out by the airport?” she said. “Oh, right. Real romantic. The radio playing and those 727s overhead. Give me a break.”

  “Let’s talk about Yosemite, then.”

  She softened a little. “In Palo Alto we go to the water temple,” she informed me. “And, no, I haven’t been there, either. My parents made me go to Yosemite. And now I’ve got bubonic plague.” Her tone was one of satisfaction. “I think it was the powdered eggs. They made me eat them. I’ve been sick ever since.”

  “Did you see any unusual wildlife there? Did you play with any squirrels?”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “I always play with squirrels. Birds sit on my fingers.” She resumed the stare. “My parents didn’t tell you what I saw?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Figures.” Caroline combed her fingers through her hair. “If I had a brush, I could at least rat it. Will you ask the doctors to bring me a brush?”

  “What did you see, Caroline?”

  “Nothing. According to my parents. No big deal.” She looked out at the parking lot. “I saw a boy.”

  She wouldn’t look at me, but she finished her story. I heard about the mummy bag and the overnight party she missed. I heard about the eggs. Apparently, the altercation over breakfast had escalated, culminating in Caroline’s refusal to accompany her parents on a brisk hike to Ireland Lake. She stayed behind, lying on top of her sleeping bag and reading the part of Green Mansions where Abel eats a fine meal of anteater flesh. “After the breakfast I had, my mouth was watering,” she told me. Something made her look up suddenly from her book. She said it wasn’t a sound. She said it was a silence.

  A naked boy dipped his hands into the stream and licked the water from his fingers. His fingernails curled toward his palms like claws. “Hey,” Caroline told me she told him. She could see his penis and everything. The boy gave her a quick look and then backed away into the trees. She went back to her book.

  She described him to her family when they returned. “Real dirty,” she said. “Real hairy.”

  “You have a very superior attitude,” her mother noted. “It’s going to get you in trouble someday.”

  “Fine,” said Caroline, feeling superior. “Don’t believe me.” She made a vow never to tell her parents anything again. “And I never will,” she told me. “Not if l have to eat powdered eggs until I die.”

  At this time there started a plague. It appeared not in one part of the world only, not in one race of men only, and not in any particular season; but it spread over the entire earth, and afflicted all without mercy of both sexes and of every age. It began in Egypt, at Pelusium; thence it spread to Alexandria and to the rest of Egypt; then went to Palestine, and from there over the whole world...

  In the second year, in the spring, it reached Byzantium and began in the following manner: To many there appeared phantoms in human form. Those who were so encountered, were struck by a blow from the phantom, and so contracted the disease. Others locked themselves into their houses. But then the phantoms appeared to them in dreams, or they heard voices that told them that they had been selected for death.

  This comes from Procopius’s account of the first pandemic, A.D. 541, De Bello Persico, chapter XXII. It’s the only explanation I can give you for why Caroline’s story made me so uneasy, why I chose not to mention it to anyone. I thought she’d had a fever dream, but thinking this didn’t settle me any. I talked to her parents briefly and then went back to Sacramento to write my report.

  We have no way of calculating the deaths in the first pandemic. Gibbon says that during three months, five to ten thousand people died daily in Constantinople, and many Eastern cities were completely abandoned.

  The second pandemic began in 1346. It was the darkest time the planet has known. A third of the world died. The Jews were blamed, and, throughout Europe, pogroms occurred wherever sufficient health remained for the activity. When murdering Jews provided no alleviation, a committee of doctors at the University of Paris concluded the plague was the result of an unfortunate conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

  The third pandemic occurred in Europe during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The fourth began in China in 1855. It reached Hong Kong in 1894, where Alexandre Yersin of the Institut Pasteur at last identified the responsible bacilli. By 1898 the disease had killed six million people in India. Dr. Paul-Louis Simond, also working for the Institut Pasteur, but stationed in Bombay, finally identified fleas as the primary carriers. “On June 2, 1898, I was overwhelmed,” he wrote. “I had just unveiled a secret which had tormented man for so long.”

  His discoveries went unnoticed for another decade or so. On June 27, 1899, the disease came to San Francisco. The governor of California, acting in protection of business interests, made it a felony to publicize the presence of the plague. People died instead of syphi
litic septicemia. Because of this deception, thirteen of the Western states are still designated plague areas.

  The state team went into the high country in early October. Think of us as soldiers. One of the great mysteries of history is why the plague finally disappeared. The rats are still here. The fleas are still here. The disease is still here; it shows up in isolated cases like Caroline’s. Only the epidemic is missing. We’re in the middle of the fourth assault. The enemy is elusive. The war is unwinnable. We remain vigilant.

  The Vogelsang Camp had already been closed for the winter. No snow yet, but the days were chilly and the nights below freezing. If the plague was present, it wasn’t really going to be a problem until spring. We amused ourselves, poking sticks into warm burrows looking for dead rodents. We set out some traps. Not many. You don’t want to decrease the rodent population.

  Deprive the fleas of their natural hosts, and they just look for replacements. They just bring the war home.

  We picked up a few bodies, but no positives. We could have dusted the place anyway as a precaution. Silent Spring came out in 1962, but I hadn’t read it.

  I saw the coyote on the fourth day. She came out of a hole on the bank of Lewis Creek and stood for a minute with her nose in the air. She was grayed with age around her muzzle, possibly a bit arthritic. She shook out one hind leg. She shook out the other. Then, right as I watched, Caroline’s boy climbed out of the burrow after the coyote.

  I couldn’t see the boy’s face. There was too much hair in the way. But his body was hairless, and even though his movements were peculiar and inhuman, I never thought that he was anything but a boy. Twelve years old or maybe thirteen, I thought, although small for thirteen. Wild as a wolf, obviously. Raised by coyotes maybe. But clearly human. Circumcised, if anyone is interested.