The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He wondered where Cindy was, what she was thinking about it. Most likely she found it very funny. Cindy had a wonderful ability to be amused by things. There was a line of poetry she liked to quote, from that Roman, Virgil: A storm is rising, the ship has sprung a leak, there’s a whirlpool to one side and sea monsters on the other, and the captain turns to his men and says, “One day perhaps we’ll look back and laugh even at all this.” That was Cindy’s way, Carmichael thought. The Santa Anas are blowing and three big brushfires are burning and invaders from space have arrived at the same time, and one day perhaps we’ll look back and laugh even at all this. His heart overflowed with love for her, and longing. He had never known anything about poetry before he had met her. He closed his eyes a moment and brought her onto the screen of his mind. Thick cascades of jet-black hair; quick, dazzling smile; long, slender, tanned body all aglitter with those amazing rings and necklaces and pendants she designed and fashioned. And her eyes. No one else he knew had eyes like hers, bright with strange mischief, with that altogether original way of seeing that was the thing he most loved about her. Damn this fire, just when he’d been away three days! Damn the stupid men from Mars!

  Where the neat rows and circles of suburban streets ended there was a great open stretch of grassy land, parched by the long summer to the color of a lion’s hide, and beyond that were the mountains, and between the grassland and the mountains lay the fire, an enormous, lateral red crest topped by a plume of foul, black smoke. It seemed to already cover hundreds of acres, maybe thousands. A hundred acres of burning brush, Carmichael had heard once, creates as much heat energy as the atomic bomb they dropped on Hiroshima.

  Through the crackle of radio static came the voice of the line boss, directing operations from a helicopter hovering at about four o’clock. “DC-3, who are you?”

  “Carmichael.”

  “We’re trying to contain it on three sides, Carmichael. You work on the east, Limekiln Canyon, down the flank of Porter Ranch Park. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Carmichael said.

  He flew low, less than a thousand feet. That gave him a good view of the action: sawyers in hard hats and orange shirts chopping burning trees to make them fall toward the fire, bulldozer crews clearing brush ahead of the blaze, shovelers carving firebreaks, helicopters pumping water into isolated tongues of flame. He climbed five hundred feet to avoid a single-engine observer plane, then went up to five hundred more to avoid the smoke and air turbulence of the fire itself. From that altitude he had a clear picture of it, running like a bloody gash from west to east, wider at its western end. Just east of the fire’s far tip he saw a circular zone of grassland perhaps a hundred acres in diameter that had already burned out, and precisely at the center of that zone stood something that looked like an aluminum silo, the size of a ten-story building, surrounded at a considerable distance by a cordon of military vehicles. He felt a wave of dizziness rock through his mind. That thing, he realized, had to be the E.T. spaceship.

  It had come out of the west in the night, Carmichael thought, floating like a tremendous meteor over Oxnard and Camarillo, sliding toward the western end of the San Fernando Valley, kissing the grass with its exhaust, and leaving a trail of flame behind it. And then it had gently set itself down over there and extinguished its own brushfire in a neat little circle about itself, not caring at all about the blaze it had kindled farther back, and God knows what kind of creatures had come forth from it to inspect Los Angeles. It figured that when the UFO’s finally did make a landing out in the open, it would be in L.A. Probably they had chosen it because they had seen it so often on television—didn’t all the stories say that UFO people always monitored out TV transmissions? So they saw L.A. on every other show, and they probably figured it was the capital of the world, the perfect place for the first landing. But why, Carmichael wondered, had the bastards needed to pick the height of the fire season to put their ships down here?

  He thought of Cindy again, how fascinated she was by all this UFO and E.T. stuff, those books she read, the ideas she had, the way she had looked toward the stars one night when they were camping in Kings Canyon and talked of the beings that must live up there. “I’d love to see them,” she said. “I’d love to get to know them and find out what their heads are like.” Los Angeles was full of nut cases who wanted to ride in flying saucers, or claimed they already had, but it didn’t sound nutty to Carmichael when Cindy talked that way. She had the Angeleno love of the exotic and the bizarre, yes, but he knew that her soul had never been touched by the crazy corruption here, that she was untainted by the prevailing craving for the weird and irrational that made him loathe the place so much. If she turned her imagination toward the stars, it was out of wonder, not out of madness: It was simply part of her nature, that curiosity, that hunger for what lay outside her experience, to embrace the unknowable. He had had no more belief in E.T.’s than he did in the tooth fairy, but for her sake he had told her that he hoped she’d get her wish. And now the UFO people were really here. He could imagine her, eyes shining, standing at the edge of that cordon staring at the spaceship. Pity he couldn’t be with her now, feeling all that excitement surging through her, the joy, the wonder, the magic.

  But he had work to do. Swinging the DC-3 back around toward the west, he swooped down as close as he dared to the edge of the fire and hit the release button on his dump lines. Behind him a great crimson cloud spread out: a slurry of ammonium sulfate and water, thick as paint, with a red dye mixed into it so they could tell which areas had been sprayed. The retardant clung in globs to anything and would keep it damp for hours.

  Emptying his four five-hundred-gallon tanks quickly, he headed back to Van Nuys to reload. His eyes were throbbing with fatigue, and the stink of the wet charred earth below was filtering through every plate of the old plane. It was not quite noon. He had been up all night. At the airport they had coffee ready, sandwiches, tacos, burritos. While he was waiting for the ground crew to fill his tanks he went inside to call Cindy again, and again there was no answer at home, none at the studio. He phoned the gallery, and the kid who worked there said she hadn’t been in touch all morning.

  “If you hear from her,” Carmichael said, “tell her I’m flying fire control out of Van Nuys on the Chatsworth fire, and I’ll be home as soon as things calm down a little. Tell her I miss her, too. And tell her that if I run into an E.T. I’ll give it a big hug for her. You got that? Tell her just that.”

  Across the way in the main hall he saw a crowd gathered around someone carrying a portable television set. Carmichael shouldered his way in just as the announcer was saying, “There has been no sign yet of the occupants of the San Gabriel or Orange County spaceships. But this was the horrifying sight that astounded residents of the Porter Ranch area beheld this morning between nine and ten o’clock.” The screen showed two upright tubular figures that looked like squid walking on the tips of their tentacles, moving cautiously through the parking lot of a shopping center, peering this way and that out of enormous yellow, platter-shaped eyes. At least a thousand onlookers were watching them at a wary distance, appearing both repelled and at the same time irresistibly drawn. Now and then the creatures paused to touch their foreheads together in some sort of communion. They moved very daintily, but Carmichael saw that they were taller than the lampposts—twelve feet high, maybe fifteen. Their skins were purplish and leathery looking, with rows of luminescent orange spots glowing along the sides. The camera zoomed in for a closeup, then jiggled and swerved wildly just as an enormously long elastic tongue sprang from the chest of one of the alien beings and whipped out into the crowd. For an instant the only thing visible on the screen was a view of the sky; then Carmichael saw a shot of a stunned-looking girl of about fourteen, caught around the waist by that long tongue, being hoisted into the air and popped like a collected specimen into a narrow green sack. “Teams of the giant creatures roamed the town for nearly an hour,” the announcer intoned. “It has definitely been confirm
ed that between twenty and thirty human hostages were captured before they returned to their spacecraft. Meanwhile, fire-fighting activities desperately continue under Santa Ana conditions in the vicinity of all three landing sites, and—”

  Carmichael shook his head. Los Angeles, he thought. The kind of people that live here, they walk right up and let the E.T’s gobble them like flies.

  Maybe they think it’s just a movie and everything will be okay by the last reel. And then he remembered that Cindy was the kind of people who would walk right up to one of these E.T.’s. Cindy was the kind of people who lived in Los Angeles, he told himself, except that Cindy was different. Somehow.

  He went outside. The DC-3 was loaded and ready.

  In the forty-five minutes since he had left the fire line, the blaze seemed to have spread noticeably toward the south. This time the line boss had him lay down the retardant from the De Soto Avenue freeway interchange to the northeast corner of Porter Ranch. When he returned to the airport, intending to call Cindy again, a man in military uniform stopped him as he crossed the field and said, “You Mike Carmichael, Laurel Canyon?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve got some troublesome news for you. Let’s go inside.”

  “Suppose you tell me here, okay?”

  The officer looked at him strangely. “It’s about your wife,” he said. “Cynthia Carmichael? That’s your wife’s name?”

  “Come on,” Carmichael said.

  “She’s one of the hostages, sir.”

  His breath went from him as though he had been kicked.

  “Where did it happen?” he demanded. “How did they get her?”

  The officer gave him a strange, strained smile. “It was the shopping-center lot, Porter Ranch. Maybe you saw some of it on TV.”

  Carmichael nodded. That girl jerked off her feet by that immense elastic tongue, swept through the air, popped into that green pouch. And Cindy—?

  “You saw the part where the creatures were moving around? And then suddenly they were grabbing people, and everyone was running from them? That was when they got her. She was up front when they began grabbing, and maybe she had a chance to get away, but she waited just a little too long. She started to run, I understand, but then she stopped—she looked back at them—she may have called something out to them—and then—well, and then—”

  “Then they scooped her up?”

  “I have to tell you that they did.”

  “I see,” Carmichael said stonily.

  “One thing all the witnesses agreed, she didn’t panic, she didn’t scream. She was very brave when those monsters grabbed her. How in God’s name you can be brave when something that size is holding you in midair is something I don’t understand, but I have to assure you that those who saw it—”

  “It makes sense to me,” Carmichael said.

  He turned away. He shut his eyes for a moment and took deep, heavy pulls of the hot, smoky air.

  Of course she had gone right out to the landing site. Of course. If there was anyone in Los Angeles who would have wanted to get to them and see them with her own eyes and perhaps try to talk to them and establish some sort of rapport with them, it was Cindy. She wouldn’t have been afraid of them. She had never seemed to be afraid of anything. It wasn’t hard for Carmichael to imagine her in that panicky mob in the parking lot, cool and radiant, staring at the giant aliens, smiling at them right up to the moment they seized her. In a way he felt very proud of her. But it terrified him to think that she was in their grasp.

  “She’s on the ship?” he asked. “The one that we have right up back here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have there been any messages from the hostages? Or from the aliens?”

  “I can’t divulge that information.”

  “Is there any information?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to—”

  “I refuse to believe,” Carmichael said, “that that ship is just sitting there, that nothing at all is being done to make contact with—”

  “A command center has been established, Mr. Carmichael, and certain efforts are under way. That much I can tell you. I can tell you that Washington is involved. But beyond that, at the present point in time—”

  A kid who looked like an Eagle Scout came running up. “Your plane’s all loaded and ready to go, Mike!”

  “Yeah,” Carmichael said. The fire, the fucking fire! He had almost managed to forget about it. Almost. He hesitated a moment, torn between conflicting responsibilities. Then he said to the officer, “Look, I’ve got to get back out on the fire line. Can you stay here a little while?”

  “Well—”

  “Maybe half an hour. I have to do a retardant dump. Then I want you to take me over to that spaceship and get me through the cordon, so I can talk to those critters myself. If she’s on that ship, I mean to get her off it.”

  “I don’t see how it would be possible—”

  “Well, try to see,” Carmichael said. “I’ll meet you right here in half an hour.”

  When he was aloft he noticed right away that the fire was spreading. The wind was even rougher and wilder than before, and now it was blowing hard from the northeast, pushing the flames down toward the edge of Chatsworth. Already some glowing cinders had blown across the city limits, and Carmichael saw houses afire to his left, maybe half a dozen of them. There would be more, he knew. In fire fighting you come to develop an odd sense of which way the struggle is going, whether you’re gaining on the blaze or it’s gaining on you, and that sense told him now that the vast effort that was under way was failing, that the fire was still on the upcurve, that whole neighborhoods were going to be ashes by nightfall.

  He held on tight as the DC-3 entered the fire zone. The fire was sucking air like crazy now, and the turbulence was astounding: It felt as if a giant’s hand had grabbed the ship by the nose. The line boss’s helicopter was tossing around like a balloon on a string.

  Carmichael called in for orders and was sent over to the southwest side, close by the outermost street of houses. Fire fighters with shovels were beating on wisps of flame rising out of people’s gardens down there. The skirts of dead leaves that dangled down the trunks of a row of towering palm trees were blazing. The neighborhood dogs had formed a crazed pack, running desperately back and forth.

  Swooping down to treetop level, Carmichael let go with a red gush of chemicals, swathing everything that looked combustible with the stuff. The shovelers looked up and waved at him, and he dipped his wings to them and headed off to the north, around the western edge of the blaze—it was edging farther to the west too, he saw, leaping up into the high canyons out by the Ventura County line—and then he flew eastward along the Santa Susana foothills until he could see the spaceship once more, standing isolated in its circle of blackened earth. The cordon of vehicles seemed to be even larger, what looked like a whole armored division deployed in concentric rings beginning half a mile or so from the ship.

  He stared intently at the alien vessel as though he might be able to see through its shining walls to Cindy within.

  He imagined her sitting at a table, or whatever the aliens used instead of tables, sitting at a table with seven or eight of the huge beings, calmly explaining Earth to them and then asking them to explain their world to her. He was altogether certain that she was safe, that no harm would come to her, that they were not torturing her or dissecting her or sending electric currents through her simply to see how she reacted. Things like that would never happen to Cindy, he knew.

  The only thing he feared was that they would depart for their home star without releasing her. The terror that that thought generated in him was as powerful as any kind of fear he had ever felt.

  As Carmichael approached the aliens’ landing site he saw the guns of some of the tanks below swiveling around to point at him, and he picked up a radio voice telling him brusquely, “You’re off limits, DC-3. Get back to the fire zone. This is prohibited air space.”
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  “Sorry,” he said. “No entry intended.”

  But as he started to make his turn he dropped down even lower so that he could have a good look at the spaceship. If it had portholes and Cindy was looking out one of those portholes, he wanted her to know that he was nearby. That he was watching, that he was waiting for her to come back. But the ship’s hull was blind-faced, entirely blank.

  Cindy? Cindy?

  She was always looking for the strange, the mysterious, the unfamiliar, he thought. The people she brought to the house: a Navaho once, a bewildered Turkish tourist, a kid from New York. The music she played, the way she chanted along with it. The incense, the lights, the meditation. “I’m searching,” she liked to say. Trying always to find a route that would take her into something that was wholly outside herself. Trying to become something more than she was. That was how they had fallen in love in the first place, an unlikely couple, she with her beads and sandals, he with his steady no-nonsense view of the world: She had come up to him that day long ago when he was in the record shop in Studio City, and God only knew what he was doing in that part of the world in the first place, and she had asked him something and they had started to talk, and they had talked and talked, talked all night, she wanting to know everything there was to know about him, and when dawn came up they were still together, and they had rarely been parted since. He never had really been able to understand what it was that she had wanted him for—the Valley redneck, the aging flyboy—although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love. She had always been searching for that too. Who wasn’t? And he knew that she loved him truly and well, though he couldn’t quite see why. “Love is understanding,” she liked to say. “Understanding is loving.” Was she trying to tell the spaceship people about love right this minute? Cindy, Cindy, Cindy.

  Back in Van Nuys a few minutes later, he found that everyone at the airport seemed to know by this time that his wife was one of the hostages. The officer whom Carmichael had asked to wait for him was gone. He was not very surprised by that. He thought for a moment of trying to go over to the ship by himself, to get through the cordon and do something about getting Cindy free, but he realized that that was a dumb idea: The military was in charge and they wouldn’t let him or anybody else get within a mile of that ship, and he’d only get snarled up in stuff with the television interviewers looking for poignant crap about the families of those who had been captured.