F&SF 2011-11-01 - Nov_Dec

by F

  "I never lied. I'm sorry, Bolorma."

  "Put it down."

  Erden placed Object Three on the walkway, gently so it wouldn't bounce up into space. The pain in her ribs made her eyes water. Bolorma gestured with the gun and she stepped back.

  With the gun still aiming itself at Erden, Bolorma stooped and picked it up. "Don't come after me," she said. "If I ever see you again I'll kill you. Understand?"

  She backed up a dozen more steps with the gun still covering Erden, then turned and headed for the ship.

  Erden took out the silly-looking little pistol Bolorma had given her and shot her in the back. The shaped-charge round struck between Bolorma's shoulderblades and detonated. The blast punched through Bolorma's armored suit and turned her torso into soup. Erden moved slowly forward, firing two more rounds at the floating corpse in front of her. She gently unplugged the fuzzy-looking gun and tossed it off into space, then took the Object from Bolorma's hands.

  "Good-bye, love," she said.

  She drew back her hand to toss away her pistol, but stopped and tucked it into her pouch instead. She had to cover a kilometer of surface to reach the hole. There might be other people in her way.

  * * *

  How Peter Met Pan

  By Albert E. Cowdrey | 7455 words

  One longtime F&SF reader wondered if our recent flurry of global warming stories (such as Sean McMullen's "The Precedent" and Robert Reed's "Dead Man's Run") had any connection to the fact that your editor recently assembled a book of stories about climate change. The answer is no. We've seen an increase in such stories simply because writers who look to the future are concerned about our changing planet and they see dramatic potential in those changes. Considering how many of his stories take a long view into the future (such as "Crux" and "The Tribe of Bela"), it's not surprising that Albert Cowdrey should consider a future where environmental changes have altered our world. What should be surprising, however, is where this story takes us....

  PETE SMITH CLICKED OFF his omni, quenching the discordant sounds of Canadian Revolutionary Grunge, dropped his backpack, and sank to the ground midway between Tim Nguyen and a sign saying SCENIC OUTLOOK.

  He gazed glumly at the Inland Sea, the tarnished-silver water, the brushy islands that once had been Ozark foothills. They called this scenery? But Tim was all goggly, not over what they could see but what they couldn't.

  "There's a lost world under that water," he enthused. "A whole world!"

  "Baroque," Pete mumbled, scratching his mosquito bites. Baroque was a campus catchword that could mean anything from fantastic to yeah, right. He was rubbing a sore muscle and noting a blister trying to get started on his left heel, when a sudden vision swept away his sour mood.

  Two figures emerged from the trees on the shore of a little island. Hastily excavating his backpack, Pete found the binoculars he used for birding—all sorts of birding—and checked them out.

  "They're women, " he breathed. "And I mean they are bare butt. "

  "Let me see."

  Reluctantly he passed Tim the 'nocks. He let them self-adjust, peered, then handed them back. "Isn't that just like swimmers?" he mused. "They go in the water. Then you can't spy on them anymore."

  Pete looked again, sighed, and put away the glasses. Tim punched him lightly on the shoulder and suggested they get in gear. "It's only 1620. Let's make a few more clicks tonight. Way we're going, we'll never see beautiful Edmonton again."

  Grunting, "Who the hell wants to?" Pete heaved himself to his feet, hoisted his pack to his shoulders, then paused to adjust his khaki shorts.

  "Hard to walk on three legs, right?" Tim asked pleasantly, and—ignoring Pete's two-syllable reply—led the way back onto the Westside Trail.

  Once Edmonton, Alberta, had called itself the Houston of the North because of its oil sands (wherever, youngsters grumbled, Houston used to be). The profits funded its great university and allowed today's boosters to call it the Harvard of Canada (whatever, freshmen sneered, Harvard might have been).

  A metropolis of fourteen million, its winters still brisk but no longer polar, the onetime brawling boomtown became the goal of smart kids and ambitious parents from all over North America. Including Pete's. Getting into U.A. had been a struggle. Now he wanted only to escape it for a while.

  Not just the noisy, polluted city and not just his failing grades. Above all, he needed to forget the way Abbey Trout, the love of his life (well, the latest love of his life, anyway) had dumped him for a hockey-playing Canuck ape named Louis Laroche. Louie's name meant "The Rock" in French, and that was what his Anglophone fans chanted whenever he made a goal: Rock! Rock! Rock!

  Shee-it. And then that humiliating business in the campus beer garden—the fight he started and Louie finished. No wonder, when Pete sat for his calculus test next day, his swollen eyes could hardly tell an integral from a differential. Fortunately, the long spring break was at hand, time to let his bruises fade and mocking friends forget. When he returned, he'd buckle down and get his grades back on track before his old man totally orbited. For months Tim had been making noises about using his vacation for a hike, and suddenly Pete volunteered to go with him. Didn't matter where. Anywhere to escape—even the Westside Trail.

  He breathed his first sigh of relief when Tim's little Lao-Tzu hummed through the university's granite gates and up a ramp onto the TransCanada Thruway. Despite Tim's blather about global warming, crossing the endless dun prairies at a hundred clicks an hour (about max for the old electro) had been damn cold. They had to don faux sheepskins whenever they left the Chinese Philosopher to seek a restroom, or plug in at a service station, or buy fried-tofu-and-stale-bun sandwiches at an AutoServe.

  But in Wisconsin the first faint green of new buds appeared in the elms, and with every click thereafter the weather warmed and the roads grew worse. Definitely they were back in the beat-up old U.S.A. Bumping down crumbling interstates and near-impassable backroads, they passed through Illinois into Missouri, finally reaching the hamlet of Cape Girardeau, a few miles north of the point where the Mississippi exits the Commerce Hills and joins the Ohio to form the Inland Sea.

  While Tim put the Philosopher into long-term parking, Pete bought tickets on a battered freight-and-passenger boat called the Southern Belle . They hastened aboard just before the gangplank lifted, stowed their gear in a minuscule cabin and unfolded deck chairs. Sprawling at length, big feet up and 'nocks in hand, Pete gazed at scenes unlike any around his home in the American Rockies or his school on the Canadian plains.

  Fishing boats stretched out nets like lacy wings. Predatory birds were everywhere, screaming and diving gulls, white pelicans soaring on the thermals, brown ones patrolling a few meters above the surface like sharp-prowed hovercraft. Of course boring old Tim was obsessed with his thesis—that was why he'd planned the hike originally—and ignored the birds but went goggly over the nacreous bloom of an oil slick.

  "It's an ancient refinery," he said happily, "still leaking after all these years."

  Christ, thought Pete, an oil slick. "So who cares?"

  "Well, it's a clue. Like I told you, there's a whole world down there. Atlantis in the mud."

  "Yeah, yeah. It's all D&G." D&G meant Dead and Gone. Tim answered with a quote from some ancient writer who said the past isn't dead—it isn't even past.

  "The guy who said that is dead himself, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Figures."

  A chiming bell ended their bickering. They joined the dozen other passengers—sailors, traders, landsmen—in the Southern Belle' s cabin, where even the air felt greasy, and devoured enormous helpings of sausage and spuds. Over coffee Pete flirted casually with a slatternly waitress, while Tim paid attention to the captain, a dry leathery man of no special age, as he told tales of seeing bison, gray wolves, and a bear too big even for a grizzly drinking from the shallows of the Inland Sea.

  "It's the country drying up," Tim informed him. "Western species moving east. The coast
s are drowning, but the desert's spreading. It's like the end of the Pleistocene. A rather fascinating process to observe."

  "Fascinating for you, maybe," growled the captain. "My family lived in Phoenix, three generations. When there was a Phoenix, before the aquifers ran dry."

  "Never know when to shut up, do you?" Pete inquired as they retreated to the passenger deck. "'Oh, your family was wiped out? Baroque!'"

  "Come on. They weren't wiped out, just displaced. People are always getting displaced. Couple centuries ago, my folks had to leave Vietnam. It happens."

  The chairs had been taken, and crates and bales and a few head of restless cattle filled the lower deck, so they sprawled on gray boards in the bow, watching a vast moon rise in the east and the tiny lights of fishing villages slip past on the western shore. Tim pulled out his omni and called a colleague back in Edmonton to describe the Inland Sea. Pete lay back, laced his fingers behind his head and revisited his memories of Abbey, goddamn her. If only she were here, and Louie the Rock someplace in hell....

  "I wish I could stop thinking about that effing woman," he told Tim as midnight approached.

  By then they were lying in their bunks. Having lost the coin toss, Pete occupied the upper, the plywood ceiling only a few centimeters from the tip of his nose.

  "God damn that bitch," he added for about the ten-thousandth time since the breakup occurred.

  "Mm," said Tim, reposing comfortably in the lower.

  Actually, via the giant whispering gallery of the campus, he'd heard what was in the wind a good month before it happened. Abbey, said gossipers, planned to register as a hockey star's domestic partner, had even talked with her friends about maybe getting preg (though, she admitted, "Daddy would flatline"). Like many another lover, Pete had merely been the last to know.

  Tim's first reaction to the news had been relief. If Pete had moved in with Abbey, he'd have been left paying the whole rental on his comfortable off-campus rooms. Now the only danger was that emotional distress might cause Pete to flunk out. But that seemed unlikely—the romance, after all, had been the kind of thing everybody got into at the dangerous age of eighteen. And out of again. From the cool peak of twenty-eight, Tim thought of his young roomie with condescending affection. Nice kid. Of course he's an a-hole. But at that age, who isn't?

  His own future looked pretty well set. With a Canadian doctorate in hand, he felt pretty sure of winning a tenure-track appointment someplace. Back in Idaho, his mother was already talking to the parents of some nice Viet-Am girls. He wanted a job, a wife, ultimately kids, but felt no sense of urgency. It would happen in time, and if that made him look smug and conventional, well, professors were supposed to be like that. Tim could think of plenty worse things to be.

  Contentedly, he drifted toward sleep. The day had been long. The boat's ancient diesel—illegal, like all engines using hydrocarbon fuels, but still in use anyway—throbbed like a heartbeat behind the bulkhead. Pete's complaining voice subsided to a drowsy murmur, soon joined by the gentle rhythm of Tim's snores.

  At bustling Shreveport, where the Red River of the South meets the Inland Sea, they strapped their possessions to the metal frames of backpacks and strode ashore on the echoing gangplank.

  Amid the throng of people at the dock, the clatter of loader bots, the buzz and squawk of little cars, they managed to find an Infobooth where a disembodied voice gave them directions to a ranger station on the Westside Trail. A sighing No. 3 electrobus carried them to a lodge of duroplast logs on the outskirts of town, where a pot-bellied forester in green Interior Department uniform introduced himself as Ranger Rick. He shook their hands and boomed, "Welcome to the deep dark woods, young guys!"

  He talked like a redneck, yet had the instincts of a scientist or at least a packrat. He insisted they view his collection of local oddities—a fossil mammoth's tooth, a Clovis spearpoint, flint scrapers and arrowheads, chinaware from a Spanish-era fort, spiked collars that told silent tales of slavery, fat lead bullets hinting of the war that ended it.

  "Lotta dying been done 'round here," he said solemnly. "That's why you hear all these stories."

  "What stories?" asked Pete.

  "Oh, you know. Stuporstitions."

  When nothing more definite followed, he went outside and sat down on a rustic bench and dozed until the others emerged. The ranger was telling Tim they should have brought skin-diving equipment. "Just think what y'all could see underwater—towns and cities and factories. A whole drownded world!"

  "Next time," Tim promised and Pete thought, Next time for you, maybe.

  They followed Rick's directions to Milepost One, so called even though distances were not marked in miles any more than in leagues, ells, or cubits. They waved good-bye, and like actors stepping through a backdrop into another world, passed from the hot March sunlight into the dancing shadows of the woods. There Tim quickly strode ahead. He'd spent weeks preparing for the hike, running laps around the gym's indoor track, while Pete had been too preoccupied with l'affaire Abbey to toughen up. When Pete asked him to slow down, he tossed over his shoulder the rather insulting words, "You shorten my stride."

  Pete found himself hiking alone, on a winding trail through second-growth woodland choked with underbrush. The sandy soil was like a mattress to walk on, and clouds of mosquitoes and flies whining out of the thickets treated the repellent he'd smeared on as a kind of appetizer to the feast of blood beneath. But it was having an old guy like Tim outpace him that really browned Pete off. And if he bitched about being left behind, Tim would squinch up his narrow little eyes, smile coolly and look superior.

  No wonder Dad had instructed University Housing to find a "responsible older man" for him to room with. So that, just as at home, there'd always be somebody around to remind him that he was ridiculous, infantile and dumb, dumb, dumb. By the time he arrived at the Scenic Overlook, Pete was so mad at things in general that he'd almost forgotten Abbey. And then the naked nymphs appeared from nowhere, and swept the developing tantrum out of his mind.

  "You have the attention span of a housefly," Tim liked to tell him. Sometimes that was a blessing.

  THE MAGIC the nymphs had brought with them lingered.

  As the sun declined and the shadows advanced, a sunset breeze sprang up and blew away the bugs. The air turned cool and sweet, and when Tim finally decided they could stop for the day, they had no need for tents, not even for a campfire. They threw a nylon rope over the branch of a tree, hoisted their packs out of reach of meandering bears, and spread their sleeping bags on the fragrant, needle-and-leaf-cushioned ground.

  Munching energy bars, they sat cross-legged and rested and gossiped until moonrise. Pete thought of Abbey, but only to notice that she, like the world she belonged to, was fading away. The blue eastern sky deepened toward black and an owl made a hollow sound over and over, like a rustic flute. At last, muttering good night, Tim submerged into his sleeping bag, turned over and said uhhhh, as he always did when falling asleep.

  Pete had pulled off his boots and begun massaging his stuck-together toes, when he noticed a gleam of light among the trees. One of those fishing villages, he thought. And immediately afterward, I bet they have beer.

  Tim was already snoring. Old guys, he reflected, need their rest. He pulled his boots back on, retied the laces and headed downslope through a grove of shadowy swamp cedars. Ten minutes brought him to the outskirts of a town, where the moon sketched a dark church with a white steeple and a courthouse with a low, dully glimmering dome. But Pete wasn't looking for churches or courthouses. Faint impacted sounds of revelry drew him toward a jumble of small houses, and he turned down a slippery, sopping lane that led to a ramshackle building. A sign half obliterated by rust said PILGRIM'S REST, DOLAN, ARKANSAS.

  Pete cracked a weatherstained door and poked his nose into a small, crowded room. A Brueghel canvas of peasant faces stopped in mid-drawl and turned to stare at him. A crone of a barmaid waved him to a rickety table, poured him a foamy draft beer from a
pitcher, and asked politely whar he was fum. The word "hiker" won instant recognition, and an old man with a corrugated face—apparently the town's Designated Liar—hitched his chair closer and started telling Pete tales of local wonders. About immense brown bears that liked to lunch on wayfarers, and "wuff" packs that tracked their victims with the sound of light rain pattering on fallen leaves.

  These, Pete decided, must be some of Ranger Rick's stuporstitions. Pleasantly weary and already a little drunk, he settled back in a chair made of driftwood and listened happily as the Liar went from animals to ghosts and demons. The worst of the latter was someone or something called Jorgon.

  "Used to be a guy named Jorgenson," he explained.

  "Jorkin," said somebody.

  "Jadwin," said a third.

  "Whatever," snapped the Liar, who didn't relish interruptions from amateurs. " Ah call him Jorgenson. Ever'body said he was a lucky man—back when he was a man. Beautiful wife, four fine kids. His best friend was named Stevens, and they was real tight, owned a boat together, fished together, drank together. Well, one night Jorgenson and his wife got into a fight over something, and she told him she'd been getting it on with Stevens for years. She said the kids was all his, and if Jorgenson wasn't as dumb as a stump he'd of seen it hisseff.

  "He went into the room where the kids was laying asleep and looked 'em over real good, and he knew that for once in her life she was telling him the truth. So he took his shotgun and kilt all five of 'em—wife and kids—went hunting for Stevens, and did him, too. The sheriff come looking for him, and later on the feds. He give 'em all a good run for their money, but they cornered him at last at the edge of the bluff 'bout a mile fum here, so he jumped into the sea and drownded.

  "Only he didn't stay down. He died mad at the world, so he feels like he's got business to finish, and from time to time he comes up and takes over the body of a wild beast. You can tell it's him, 'cause the animal don't act right—don't act natural, like it ought to. Folks sees him now and then, when a b'ar, instead of shuffling off like a real b'ar most generally does, stands up on its hind legs and gives them this steady cool look, just like a man. He looks 'em over real good, like he's measuring them, and ever' time he sees a gal makes him think of his wife or a guy reminds him of Stevens"—the storyteller paused at this point, and gazed thoughtfully at Pete—"he was about your age, son. Well, ever' time Jorgon sees a guy like that, he goes crazy and tears him to pieces."