The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  On our way home, in darkness, I tell Jill how much I love her.

  Her response is heartfelt and surprising. Her passion is a little unnerving. Did she have an interlude with a husky-voiced waiter, perhaps? Did he say things and do things to leave her ready for my hands and tender words? Maybe so. Or maybe there was something that I hadn’t caught for myself. I just needed someone to make me pay attention, maybe?

  We embraced on the limousine’s expansive seat, then it’s more than an embrace. I notice the windows have gone black, and there’s a divider between the driver and us. Music plays somewhere. I don’t recognize the piece. Then we’re finished, but there’s no reason to dress—they will make time for us—and after a second coupling, we have enough, and dress and arrive home moments later. We thank our driver, then the sitter. “Oh, we had a lovely time!” Mrs. Simpson gushes. “Such lovely children!”

  Whose? I’m wondering. Ours?

  We check on David in his room, Mary Beth in hers, and everything seems intact. Mrs. Simpson probably spun perfect children’s stories for them, or invented games, then baked them cookies without any help from the oven, and sent them to bed without complaints.

  Once a year seems miraculous.

  Jill and I try once more in our own bed, but I’m tired. Old. Spent. I sleep hard, and wake to find that it’s Saturday morning, the kids watching TV and my wife brewing coffee. The house looks shabby, I’m thinking. After every Birth Day, it looks worn and old. Like old times, Jill holds my hand under the kitchen table, and we sip, and suddenly it seems too quiet in the family room.

  Our instincts are pricked at the same instant.

  Mary Beth arrives with a delighted expression. What now?

  “He’s stuck,” she announces.

  “David—?” Jill begins.

  “On the stairs.… He got caught somehow.…”

  We have iron bars as part of the railing, painted white and very slick. Somehow David has thrust his head between two bars and become stuck. He’s crying without sound. In his mind, I suppose, he’s making ready to spend the rest of his life in this position. That’s the kind of kid he is.… Oh God, he worries me.

  “How did this happen?” I ask.

  “She told me to—”

  “Liar!” shouts his sister.

  Jill says, “Everyone, be quiet!”

  Then I’m working to bend the rails ever so slightly, to gain enough room to pull him free. Only, my strength ebbs when I start to laugh. I can’t help myself. Everything has built up, and Jill laughs, too. We’re both crazy for a few moments, giggling like little kids. And later, after our son is safe and Mary Beth is exiled to her room for the morning, Jill pours both of us cups of strong, cool coffee; and I comment, “You know, we wouldn’t make very good bacteria.”

  “Excuse me?” she says. “What was that gem?”

  “If we had to be bacteria … you know … swimming in the slime? We’d do a piss-poor job of it. I bet so.”

  Maybe she understands me, and maybe not.

  I watch her nod and sip, then she says, “And they wouldn’t make very good people. Would they?”

  I doubt it.

  “Amen,” I say. “Amen!”

  NAMING NAMES

  Pat Cadigan

  We all know the old saw about how “sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Untrue. Most untrue. As the scary, intricate, and passionate story that follows will demonstrate.…

  Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in Overland Park, Kansas. She made her first professional sale in 1980, and has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the best new writers in SF. She was the coeditor, along with husband Arnie Fenner, of Shayol, perhaps the best of the semiprozines of the late 70s; it was honored with a World Fantasy Award in the “Special Achievement, Non-Professional” category in 1981. She has also served as Chairperson of the Nebula Award Jury and as a World Fantasy Award Judge. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her second novel, Synners, appeared in 1991 to even better response, as well as winning the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her story “Pretty Boy Crossover” has recently appeared on several critics’ lists as among the best science fiction stories of the 1980s; her story “Angel” was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award (one of the few stories ever to earn that rather unusual distinction); and her collection Patterns has been hailed as one of the landmark collections of the decade. Her stories have appeared in our First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Annual Collections. Her most recent book is a new novel, Fools, and a new story collection, Dirty Work, is coming up soon.

  It had been years since I’d had the dream. So many years that I thought I’d finally outgrown it, if there is such a thing as outgrowing a recurring dream. It was the only recurring dream I’d ever had, and when I stopped having it, I’d all but forgotten about it. As time goes on, little pieces of life drop away and are left behind, unmourned and unmissed. I always figured that coming across them again meant you were retraveling old territory, either because you’d missed something important the first time through, or you’d just gotten jammed up, stuck in a rut. I’d also always figured that it would happen to me, even more than once, but the dream took me by surprise anyway.

  In the dream, I’m way out in an enormous area, a kind of ghost-field, and I’m standing partially below the ground. I used to think I was in a hole or a well, or maybe even just shrunk to the size of an apple, but it’s none of those things. I’m just lower than the surface, sunk into the ground deeply enough that the long, wild weeds tower over my head. It’s almost dark—the clear sky is the deep blue that comes in the last minutes of sunset. There’s a golden glow in the west; stars are beginning to appear. I keep looking up, at the sky, at the glow, at the weeds leaning in the pre-night breeze, and in that suspended moment, my mother walks by.

  It’s more of a very slow stroll, a drift. She isn’t here to find me. She isn’t looking for anyone or anything, because, I realize, she knows where everything is, or where it ought to be.

  And then somebody calls her name. The voice is distant yet very clear, like one of those stars overhead. But the name it calls is not my mother’s name.

  Except that somehow it is. I know that it is. Not because my mother turns toward the voice with a genuinely frightened expression that I have never seen on her face in real life—I know this is her name because it fits her, describes her, is her. It’s the articulation of her, mentally, physically, spiritually, any way at all, anything that is about her, in her, of her, what she has seen, what she’s known. What she has told, what she will never tell.

  My mother takes a step backward—I’m not sure whether it’s to run, or to brace herself against some imminent attack, and I know that she isn’t sure, either. I know everything about my mother now, I realize. But of course I do—it’s all contained in that name, that Name, her Name.

  And I think to myself, I’ve got to remember this. I’ve got to remember everything I know about her now, everything I know about her and everything I know about our life together and her life before me and after I went out on my own. I’ve got to remember the way she thinks …

  That’s as far as my thoughts go, however, because then she turns and sees me through the bending weeds. Her black hair flares with the movement, her face is tight, eyes wide, the cords in her neck stand out starkly. I understand two things: first, it’s all my fault that this voice, wherever it comes from, whoever it belongs to, called her Name, and second, the voice is about to call another Name, and this one will be mine.

  That was where I always woke up, and it was no different this time. For a long time, I lay staring at the distorted oblong of light thrown across the ceiling by the window. The bedroom of my current apartment had an eastern exposure and I always opened the curtains just before I went to sleep, so the sun could wake me in the morning. It wasn’t that I
was so crazy for getting up with the sun; I just liked lying there watching the morning come on before I had to join the rest of the world. My insistence on easing into a day and easing out of it was probably why I didn’t have much in the way of those cultural trophies most people have by the time they’re staring thirty in the face, but then, I wasn’t working on an ulcer or a heart attack or a drinking problem, either. When you don’t eat much, there isn’t much that eats you.

  Most mothers would have said that was no kind of attitude to have. Maybe mine would have, but probably not out loud, or at least not to my face. All mother-daughter relationships have a certain amount of odd to them, but ours was odder than most. This was probably because it had always been just us. The focus becomes a lot tighter between a parent and child when there’s no one else in the house—no distractions. I went from infant to very young roommate to accomplice, and I stayed an accomplice for a long, long time, until we both sensed there was a change coming, some fork in the road that meant she had to go her way and I had to go mine. It was that bloodless.

  As I lay there, I tried to remember everything I’d known about her in the dream. I could still feel what it was like to know but, as always, it had all gone away when I’d woken up. Every bit, including that Name I’d heard. The only thing I knew without a doubt was that she was going to call me.

  Where was she now, anyway? Seattle, still? The fogginess that dreams always leave behind hadn’t cleared out of my head yet, I wasn’t ready to connect with anything real. Except for that certainty that my mother was going to call, and very soon.

  Heat shimmies ran through the block of light on the ceiling. The details of the day were starting to press on me but I already felt removed from everything, pulled out of my routine to some place where no one else could go.

  I picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Did I wake you?” asked my mother.

  “No. This is the time I usually wake up.”

  “Ah.” My mother is one of those people who remembers things audibly. “Well, I’ve been up all night.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Yes. Or—well, not exactly wrong. There’s a problem.”

  “What is it?” I asked. I knew exactly what she was going to say but sometimes you can’t skip any steps in a process.

  “It’s … it’s hard to explain on the phone. Easier if you just come here and I can lay the whole thing out for you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing now … what kind of job do you have?”

  “I’m a chauffeur.” I smiled into the phone at her baffled silence. “A limo driver. I take people out to the airport and pick them up when their planes come in. Nothing I can’t walk away from.”

  “Yes, that’s you. Never do anything you can’t walk away from.”

  “It always seemed like a good policy,” I said, pushing down the sheet and kicking it off.

  “Well, will you come?”

  “Mom,” I said, “what do you think.”

  * * *

  I could have saved my job by just saying I had a family emergency—my mother was in the hospital in critical condition and I had to rush to her bedside for a will-she-live-or-die vigil—but I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was so scrupulously truthful—in fact, I’ve always lied quite a lot—but that there are times when a lie is … bad. Now, that would sound crazy to all those lovers of truth walking the streets in search of an honest man with their lanterns dangling precariously in front of their self-righteous noses. But the fact is, the truth is a very dangerous thing and most people aren’t very careful with it because most of the time, they don’t even recognize it. Consequently, they end up lying when they think they’re being truthful, and spilling the truth when they think they’re covering up.

  Only if you know what the truth is can a lie be useful, a distraction for the sake of personal protection. And anyone who has ever kept quiet to keep from looking foolish has no business feeling disdainful at that.

  Truth, or a lie: the right tool for the right job, that’s all it is. I knew that whatever my mother had called me about had something to do with truth, and so if I’d lied to my supervisor at the Silver Eagle Limo Service, I’d have queered things somehow, gotten off to a bad start and gone downhill from there. So I just told him that I was going to see my mother in Seattle (I’d remembered right) and I didn’t know how long I’d be gone.

  Victor went around and around about it and, I had to go along with him, because otherwise he would never have seen. He asked me if she was sick and I said no, not to my knowledge. Was she in the hospital? No, of course not, if she wasn’t sick, then she wouldn’t be in the hospital. Was this an emergency? Well, my mother seemed to feel it was. Did she have anybody out there she could turn to? No, no one. What about my father? I hedged on that and just said, good question. Which it was, since I didn’t know the answer myself. Was my mother in trouble? Yes, some kind but she hadn’t told me what. Could I find out? Not without going to see her.

  He’d pause there and sit back from his messy desk, tapping his lower front teeth with a pen until he hurt himself. Then he’d sit up straight, tap the pen on the desk, and start all over again. Was my mother sick? Not that I knew of. Was she in the hospital? No. Was this an emergency? For her, yes. Wasn’t there anyone else? No. Your father? Good question. Was she in trouble? Yes. What kind? Shrug. Sit back; tap teeth; wince; sit up, tap desk, start over. Like a recurring dream. I wondered idly if Victor had ever had one.

  Finally he came out with the cycle-breaker: who did I think was going to do my airport runs if I just took off? I said I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen the work schedule.

  That did it for him, of course, but he had to ask one last question just to make sure—why did I insist on screwing everything up like this, did I really want to make everything hard on everyone else?

  No, I told him, I just wanted to go see my mother. So that made him sure he’d had enough and he fired me. I turned in my uniform and a driver named Barney let me deadhead out to the airport, where he was going to pick up half a dozen people named Gershon returning from a family reunion. I sat in the front seat and Barney chattered all the way out, mostly about what a dick Victor was and how smart I’d been to make him fire me because now I could collect unemployment. I hadn’t thought of that; it had just been cleaner, more definite. I could face Seattle and my mother completely unencumbered.

  Well, maybe not completely—I still had my apartment, but there wasn’t much in it that belonged to me, and anything I felt I couldn’t do without was in my backpack. I could return to it or not, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in the long run, like a disposable bookmark.

  Barney gave me a raised fist salute as he drove away from the curb at the terminal to go in search of the homeward-bound Gershons. It gave me a good feeling, as if he had passed me a little of his power to use for the trip, so I could conserve my own.

  I’d never thought of myself as a superstitious person, but then it’s bad luck to say you’re superstitious. No; actually, I’d just never thought of it in those terms but I suppose that, seen from the outside, I was devoutly superstitious. From the inside, I thought of it as having experience.

  * * *

  My mother was waiting right there at the gate when I got off the plane in Seattle. She was easy to spot in the crowd, even though at five feet, she had to look up at most people, including me. Her black hair, streaked with a little more silver than last time I’d seen her, flowed down below her shoulders, a few strands catching here and there on her gauzy peasant blouse. She had probably bought the calf-length skirt at one of those semi-ethnic shops, though I couldn’t tell which culture she was paying tribute to. The dark socks crumpled around the tops of her hiking shoes made her legs look like sticks.

  “You look good, Mom,” I said, bending down to hug her.

  Her hands batted against my shoulders like nervous, fluttering birds. “I look the same.”

  �
�And that’s good.”

  She reached up and brushed back the hair hanging over my right eye. It fell forward again immediately, to her disapproval, but she just tucked one hand into the crook of my elbow and led me through the airport, telling me about the big old house she’d acquired and how the rain made her woolen wall-hangings smell.

  The cool, damp air was a relief after the unrelenting dry and hot spell in the midwest. I’d never been to this area of the country before and I could see why my mother had ended up here. The climate and the mountains suited her, and the city was variegated enough to accommodate all kinds of perspectives.

  “As close to an enlightened society as I’m going to come,” she said, pulling up in front of a three-storey brick house. The porch had been painted recently. “I suppose stain would look better, but I had a coupon for Glidden’s rainy-day gray.”

  “Really?”

  She paused in the act of unlocking the front door. “What do you think.” My mother would hoist me on my own petard at any moment, for no other reason than to show that she could.

  I smelled the woolen wall-hangings as soon as I walked in. There were two very large ones hanging on either side of the entry hall, straw-colored things with mandala-like patterns woven into them. “Mary had a monster lamb,” I said, sniffing. “Was this ever sheepherding country? I can’t remember.”

  “You never knew,” said my mother. “It’s impossible to remember what you’ve never known. I don’t know, either.”

  I dropped my backpack at the foot of the stairs and followed her into the kitchen for the tea-making ritual. All visitors, including me, meant a fresh-brewed pot of darjeeling. In many ways, my mother was like an eccentric from central casting, and on purpose, as if following a script was her safety net.