The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  That night she sat and looked out past our circle of light to their camp, where the birds were calling.

  Silhouetted by the fire she looked like a camel, a beast who had always been wise, and I watched her until the birds went silent.

  The last long stretch to Okalide was four nights of nothing, not even scrub for shelter, and in the pilgrim town we bought up vinegar-wine (only thing that won’t go brackish) and decided to travel at night and rest in the heat of the day.

  Mark drank whenever wine was offered, and he took it as badly as ever, so he was still asleep when the sun set and it was time to go.

  Sara and I sat in the shade of the wagon and watched the night crawl over the dust.

  “Will I ever hear your story?” I asked, and she looked at me as if she knew why I was asking.

  She did know. She knew, and Mark knew, and I was the only one who was just waking up to why.

  Her thin mouth pressed tighter as if she was afraid of the words getting out. “I have no story,” she said. “I was born hidden, and grew hidden, and I married hidden, and now I go to Okalide.”

  “And your husband? Is he kind?”

  “I hope,” she said after a long time. There was a breeze moving in ahead of the moon. “But if not, I’ll be unhappy in Okalide, which is better than being unhappy in Miruna.”

  I wanted to say, stay here and risk unhappiness with me, but “here” was a wagon and a raggedy trail around the desert cities. You met the same sort of people wherever you went, and one day she would regret asking someone his story and learning what he really was.

  She was only my sandal-bride, and by the time the leather wore out she would be happy or unhappy with some other man, and I would still have a wagon and a wide circle of road.

  I said, “You’ll find a way to be happy,” because that was the only thing I really knew about her, and we sat in the shadow of the wagon until the breeze turned cold.

  She sat beside me, wrapped in her thin blanket, all that night as I drove toward Okalide.

  After we were stationed in the morning market, Sara my sandal-bride stepped out from the wagon without even her blanket and said, “I’m ready.”

  Mark came out behind her; when he was on the ground he held out his hand and they shook like it was a business deal.

  “My wishes for a good life,” he started, but abruptly he turned his back and crawled into the wagon as if he had forgotten something important.

  I almost took her elbow, but when I held out my hand she looked at me. Under her gaze I dropped my arm, held it against my side.

  She looked around until she saw some landmark her husband must have given her.

  “This way,” she said, and I followed her out of the market.

  Okalide was under church rule, too, but here I saw women in daylight, at least, buying bread and reading the notices posted in the open squares.

  The crowd that had been a nuisance before was overwhelming now. I wanted to know about the old man carving spoons on his doorstep, about the three young girls running along the edges of the fountain in the square.

  Here no one noticed Sara (my wife). Her face was one of a thousand faces, not some apparition with a ladle of pepper in her hands, but somehow walking beside her I felt like the Empress’ Guard.

  At a corner she looked at the words etched into the clay walls, then turned to me.

  “Which one reads South?” she asked quietly, and my heart broke.

  I pointed, and after she looked at the word to memorize it we turned down the shady street.

  His was the sixteenth door, and when he answered her knock he said, “Sara,” as if she didn’t know her own name, but she just smiled and embraced him.

  I looked back at the main road, where a shaft of sun crawled across the dust.

  He introduced himself, but as he did he wrapped his arm around her waist and I didn’t catch his name.

  “How was your journey?” he asked, and, tripping over himself, “—and of course you’ll come in and have some cold water and some fruit.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “He has an apprentice,” Sara explained, “and they have work.”

  He nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said, and then he turned to her and smiled. “And how was the journey?”

  I held my breath and waited for the first story she would tell him, the first words that would make it one big story sewn with little ones as a wedding gift to him.

  She smiled and said, “A lot of brackish wine.”

  He laughed so hard he had to drop his head, and for a moment she and I looked at each other.

  I saw the bars of her cage bending around her, saw why she had wanted those stories; she’d needed something that was hers, to hoard against a life with some dull boy to whom she had given her word.

  When he had recovered from his laughter he saw I was still there, and blinked. “You need your bride-price, of course, so sorry for forgetting,” he said, and a moment later there was a little ruby bracelet in my palm.

  I was still looking at Sara. I had forgotten I would be paid.

  The priest at the bastion wrote “safely delivered,” and wrote down all our names, and it was over.

  She said, “Come visit as soon as you can.”

  “We’ll be back again,” I said, which was the only lie I ever told her.

  When I got back to the market the wagon was still packed and Mark was waiting in the driver’s seat.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Let’s go,” I said, took the reins.

  We were five miles outside the city when I said, “What do you want to do after your indenture?”

  “Trade!” he blurted, choked on a mouthful of dust.

  I got his story; he had a woman in Suth he’d promised to come back for, and he’d heard about the botanist from Sara and wanted to find new spices. “From the East, maybe,” he said, “if they can be had by ship.”

  I gave him the ruby bracelet. “Payment for the spice I used on the journey. Your indenture is over.”

  The oxen would warm to him; he knew how to drive the wagon.

  I moved through and questioned anyone who would answer. I wanted to know everything about the world. With the first sapphire, I bought a book to write in.

  Some old man married a woman with six red-haired sisters. The youngest got black hair, and set about cursing them all, poorly, and he and I laughed into our beers until we cried.

  Three brothers pulled aside a riverbed to keep their village from flooding, and they bought wine and sang songs in three parts, and I marked the words as fast as I could.

  When the first book was full I bought another, for the botanist and the birders and all the stars I knew.

  I listened to everyone, wrote down everything.

  You have to write down everything. The world is wide, and you never know what stories someone is waiting to hear; maybe someday, someone will have bought a pair of boots from the shoemaker and his ugly wife, down a dusty street in Okalide.

  The Adakian Eagle

  Bradley Denton

  I

  The eagle had been tortured to death.

  That was what it looked like. It was staked out on the mountain on its back, wings and feet spread apart, head twisted to one side. Its beak was open wide, as if in a scream. Its open eye would have been staring up at me except that a long iron nail had been plunged into it, pinning the white head to the ground. More nails held the wings and feet in place. A few loose feathers swirled as the wind gusted.

  The bird was huge, eleven or twelve feet from wingtip to wingtip. I’d seen bald eagles in the Aleutians before, but never up close. This was bigger than anything I would have guessed.

  Given what had been done to it, I wondered if it might have been stretched to that size. The body had been split down the middle, and the guts had been pulled out on both sides below the wings. It wasn’t stinking yet, but flies were starting to gather.

  I stood staring at the eagle for maybe
thirty seconds. Then I got off the mountain as fast as I could and went down to tell the colonel. He had ordered me to report anything hinky, and this was the hinkiest thing I’d seen on Adak.

  That was how I wound up meeting the fifty-year-old corporal they called “Pop.”

  And meeting Pop was how I wound up seeing the future.

  Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to do that. Especially if the future you see isn’t even your own.

  Because then there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to change it.

  II

  I found Pop in a recreation hut. I had seen him around, but had never had a reason to speak with him until the colonel ordered me to. When I found him, he was engrossed in playing Ping-Pong with a sweaty, bare-chested opponent who was about thirty years his junior. A kid about my age.

  Pop had the kid’s number. He was wearing fatigues buttoned all the way up, but there wasn’t a drop of perspiration on his face. He was white-haired, brown-mustached, tall, and skinny as a stick, and he didn’t look athletic. In fact, he looked a little pale and sickly. But he swatted the ball with cool, dismissive flicks of his wrist, and it shot across the table like a bullet.

  This was early on a Wednesday morning, and they had the hut to themselves except for three sad sacks playing poker against the back wall. Pop was facing the door, so when I came in he looked right at me. His eyes met mine for a second, and he must have known I was there for him. But he kept on playing.

  I waited until his opponent missed a shot so badly that he cussed and threw down his paddle. Then I stepped closer and said, “Excuse me, Corporal?”

  Pop’s eyes narrowed behind his eyeglasses. “You’ll have to be more specific,” he said. He had a voice that made him sound as if he’d been born with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  “He means you, Pop,” the sweaty guy said, grabbing his shirt from a chair by the curving Quonset wall. “Ain’t nobody looking for me.”

  Pop gave him the briefest of grins. I caught a glimpse of ill-fitting false teeth below the mustache. They made Pop look even older. And he had already looked pretty old.

  “Cherish the moments when no one’s looking for you,” Pop said. “And don’t call me ‘Pop.’ ‘Boss’ will do fine.”

  “Aw, I like ‘Pop,’ ” the sweaty guy said. “Makes you sound like a nice old man.”

  “I’m neither,” Pop said.

  “You’re half right.” The sweaty guy threw on a fatigue jacket and walked past me. “I’m gettin’ breakfast. See you at the salt mines.”

  Pop put down his paddle. “Wait. I’ll come along.”

  The sweaty guy looked at me, then back at Pop. “I think I’ll see you later,” he said, and went out into the gray Adak morning. Which, in July, wasn’t much different from the slightly darker gray, four-hour Adak night.

  Pop turned away from me and took a step toward the three joes playing poker.

  “Corporal,” I said.

  He turned back and put his palms on the Ping-Pong table, looking across at me like a judge looking down from the bench. Which was something I’d seen before, so it didn’t bother me.

  “You’re a private,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He scowled, his eyebrows pinching together in a sharp V. “Then you should know better than to call another enlisted man ‘sir.’ You generally shouldn’t even call him by rank, unless it’s ‘Sarge.’ We’re all G.I.’s pissing into the same barrels here, son. When the wind doesn’t blow it back in our faces.”

  “So what should I call you?” I asked.

  He was still scowling. “Why should you call me anything?”

  I had the feeling that he was jabbing at me with words, as if I were a thug in one of his books and he were the combative hero. But at that time I had only read a little bit of one of those books, the one about the bird statuette.

  And I had only read that little bit because I was bored after evening chow one day, and one of the guys in my hut happened to have a hardback copy lying on his bunk. I wasn’t much for books back then. So I didn’t much care how good Pop was at jabbing with words.

  “I have to call you something,” I said. “The colonel sent me to take you on an errand.”

  Pop’s scowl shifted from annoyance to disgust. “The colonel?” he said, his voice full of contempt. “If you mean who I think you mean, he’s a living mockery of the term intelligence officer. And he’s still wearing oak leaves. Much to his chagrin, I understand. So I suppose you mean the lieutenant colonel.”

  “That’s him,” I said. He was the only colonel I knew. “He wants you and me to take a drive, and he wants us to do it right now. If you haven’t eaten breakfast, I have a couple of Spam sandwiches in the jeep. Stuck ’em under the seat so the ravens wouldn’t get ’em.”

  Pop took his hands off the table, went to the chairs along the wall, and took a jacket from one of them. He put it on in abrupt, angry motions.

  “You can tell him I don’t have time for his nonsense,” he said. “You can tell him I’m eating a hot meal, and after that, I’m starting on tomorrow’s edition. I’m not interested in his editorial comments, his story ideas, or his journalistic or literary ambitions. And if he doesn’t like that, he can take it up with the brigadier general.”

  I shook my head. “The general’s not in camp. He left last night for some big powwow. Word is he might be gone a week or more. So if I tell the colonel what you just said, I’m the one who’ll be eating shit.”

  Pop snorted. “You’re in the Army and stationed in the Aleutians. You’re already eating shit.”

  He tried to walk past me, but I stepped in front of him.

  He didn’t like that. “What are you going to do, son? Thrash an old man?” He was glaring down at me like a judge again, but now the judge was going to throw the book. Which was something I had also seen before, so it didn’t bother me.

  “I’d just as soon not,” I said.

  Pop glanced back at the poker players. I reckoned he thought they would step up for him. But they were all staring at their cards hard enough to fade the ink, and they didn’t budge.

  “Did you see the boxing matches yesterday?” I asked.

  Pop looked back at me. His eyes had narrowed again.

  “There was a crowd,” he said. “But yes, I watched from a distance. I thought it was a fine way to celebrate the Fourth of July, beating the snot out of our own comrades in arms. I hear the Navy man in the second match was taken to the Station Hospital.”

  I shrugged. “He dropped his left. I had to take the opportunity.”

  Pop bared those bad false teeth. “Now I recognize you. You K.O.’d him. But he laid a few gloves on you first, didn’t he?”

  “Not so’s I noticed.” Thanks to the colonel, I’d had two whole weeks during which my only duty had been to train for the fight. I could take a punch.

  “So you’re tough,” Pop said. His voice had an edge of contempt. “It seems to me that a tough fellow should be killing Japs for his country instead of running errands for an idiot. A tough fellow should—” He stopped. Then he adjusted his glasses and gave me a long look. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “But it occurs to me that you may have been on Attu last year. In which case you may have killed some Japs already.”

  I didn’t like being reminded of Attu. For one thing, that was where the colonel had decided to make me his special helper. For another, it had been a frostbitten nightmare. And seven guys from my platoon hadn’t made it back.

  But I wasn’t going to let Pop know any of that.

  “A few,” I said. “And if the brass asked my opinion, I’d tell them I’d be glad to go kill a few more. But the brass ain’t asking my opinion.”

  Pop gave a weary sigh. “No. No, they never do.” He dug his fingers into his thick shock of white hair. “So, what is it that the lieutenant colonel wants me to assist you with? I assume it’s connected with some insipid piece of ‘news’ he wants
me to run in The Adakian?”

  I hesitated. “It’d be better if I could just show you.”

  Pop’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, good,” he said. His tone was sarcastic. “A mystery.” He gestured toward the door. “After you, then, Private.”

  It felt like he was jabbing at me again. “I thought you said enlisted men shouldn’t call each other by rank.”

  “I’m making an exception.”

  That was fine with me. “Then I’ll call you ‘Corporal.’ ”

  A williwaw began to blow just as I opened the door, but I heard Pop’s reply anyway.

  “I prefer ‘Boss,’ ” he said.

  III

  We made our way down the hill on mud-slicked boardwalks. On Adak, the wind almost always blew, but the most violent winds, the williwaws, could whip up in an instant and just about rip the nose off your face. The one that whipped up as Pop and I left the recreation hut wasn’t that bad, but I still thought a skinny old guy like him might fly off into the muck. But he held the rail where there was a rail, and a rope where there was a rope, and he did all right.

  As for me, I was short and heavy enough that the milder williwaws didn’t bother me too much. But as I looked down the hill to the sloppy road we called Main Street, I saw a steel barrel bouncing along at about forty miles an hour toward Navytown. And some of the thick poles that held the miles of telephone and electrical wires that crisscrossed the camp were swaying as if they were bamboo. We wouldn’t be able to take our drive until the wind let up.

  So I didn’t object when Pop took my elbow and pulled me into the lee of a Quonset hut. I thought he was just getting us out of the wind for a moment, but then he slipped under the lean-to that sheltered the door and went inside. I went in after him, figuring this must be where he bunked. But if my eyes hadn’t been watering, I might have seen the words THE ADAKIAN stenciled on the door.

  Inside, I wiped my eyes and saw tables, chairs, typewriters, two big plywood boxes with glass tops, a cylindrical machine with a hand crank, and dozens of reams of paper. The place had the thick smell of mimeograph ink. Two of the tables had men lying on them, dead to the world, their butts up against typewriters shoved to the wall. A third man, a slim, light-skinned Negro, was working at a drawing board. It looked like he was drawing a cartoon.