The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  MICHAEL SWANWICK

  Covenant of Souls

  Here’s a vivid and evocative look at the End of Civilization … or perhaps the beginning of it.

  One of the most popular and respected of all the decade’s new writers, Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980 with two strong and compelling stories, “The Feast of St. Janis” and “Ginungagap,” both of which were Nebula award finalists that year. Since then, he has gone on to become a frequent contributor to Omni, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Amazing; his stories have also appeared in Penthouse, Universe, High Times, Triquarterly, and New Dimensions, among other places. His powerful story “Mummer Kiss” was a Nebula Award finalist in 1981, and his story “The Man Who Met Picasso” was a finalist for the 1982 World Fantasy Award. He has also been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. His fast-paced first novel, In the Drift, was published in 1985 as part of the resurrected Ace Specials line. His most recent book is the novel Vacuum Flowers, just out from Arbor House, and he is currently at work on a third novel. His story “Trojan Horse” was in our Second Annual Collection, and “Dogfight,” written with William Gibson, was in our Third Annual Collection. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter, and their young son, Sean.

  COVENANT OF SOULS

  Michael Swanwick

  Something ugly was growing in the air above the altar.

  Peter Wieland didn’t notice it at first. He’d entered the sanctuary from the rear, through the 37th Street narthex, and gone to the front pew without once glancing at the altar. He set his brown paper bag down beside him and removed a Styrofoam cup of black coffee, a bottle of grapefruit juice, and an egg-and-sausage sandwich. He flattened the bag and carefully set the bottle and cup atop it. Stray drops of coffee and juice mingled in its folds.

  Downstairs the nursery school was coming in from the play yard—Peter could hear the children’s voices. He loosened his coat and reached into his shirt pocket for the leads to his Sony-Toshiba “Soundless.” The magazine was loaded to capacity with forty-some thumbnail discs. He looped the bone-inductor mike around his neck and, eyes closed, switched it on.

  Full, rich music flooded his body—Peter had set the Worcester Fragments first in the stack, so he could have Gregorian chants to go with breakfast and the beginning of the workday. He leaned back and let the noiseless sound thunder up his spine. Then slowly, lazily, he opened his eyes.

  Light through the east rose window glinted yellow off a carved wooden angel at the tip of one rafter support. Peter’s gaze wandered to the front of the chancel, and down the arch of organ pipes recessed into the stone behind the darkly shadowed presbytery.

  He saw the thing.

  Peter squinted, shook his head in an involuntary shiver. He saw … something, he was not sure what. It was as if he’d stared into the sun until the rods and cones of his eyes began to burn out. It shimmered. Gingerly, he stretched out a thumb at arm’s length, and found he could hide it from view. But it was still there when he lowered his arm, a small, crawling … nothingness in the air.

  He shifted his head, forcing his gaze away. The thing did not move. It remained over the altar, whether he was looking that way or not.

  Peter’s mouth tasted sour. He wrapped his unfinished sandwich in a paper napkin, shoved it into his pocket, and gathered up the trash. He left the sanctuary with only one backward glance at the strange presence he was not quite sure was there.

  * * *

  Peter dumped the trash in a basket in the parish hall, and then paused to reset the thermostat timer for the Social Action Committee meeting that night. He went downstairs to the smaller furnace room off the kitchen, to check the boiler’s water level. It was low today, and he ran a few gallons in.

  Back through the staircase landing, with its line of padlocked storage cabinets, Peter climbed the four wood steps to the dirt-floored half-basement under the sanctuary. He unlocked the door. The Fragments were still playing within him, though he had long forgotten their presence.

  Peter peered into the dark, cold basement. A few miserly glints of light seeped from windows inadequately boarded up. He flicked the light switch, and a string of bare electric bulbs lit up in a sparse line to the sanctuary boiler in the far rear. Their light barely seemed to reach the ground; darkness huddled in around them.

  Taking the unfinished sandwich from his pocket, Peter unwrapped it and set it down on the dirt, atop its napkin. “Listen,” he called into the darkness. “There’s a bite of food here, and if you stop by the church office, I’ll write you out a meal letter. You can take it to the Emergency Center down the street and they’ll give you a meal, you understand? But I want you out of here or I’ll call the cops. You understand that? Do you?”

  There was no answer.

  He locked the door behind him and took the steps in two leaps. The momentum stayed with him, and when Sheila from the nursery stepped into the landing, he almost collided with her. She flinched away with a small shriek.

  “Jesus!” he said, “you startled me.” The music switched off and suddenly the world seemed empty and silent.

  Dark, curly hair framed Sheila’s thin face. “I’m sorry.” She laughed and made a clutching motion at her heart. Then, serious again, she nodded toward the door. “So what’s the verdict? Do you still think there’s someone living in there?”

  “Yeah, one of the vent people, I think.” He moved away from the door so the possible squatter couldn’t overhear. “I mean, probably just some harmless old wino who kicked in a window, but I’d hate to go wandering through there looking for him. It’s like a maze, all broken furniture and old walls for rooms that don’t exist anymore.”

  “Well, couldn’t we just call the police and let them throw this guy out?”

  Peter shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to unless I was absolutely sure. You realize that they’re charging fifty bucks for a false call?”

  “I can remember when the police would come for free.”

  “You should—they only started charging six months ago.”

  Sheila looked at him reproachfully. “That was a joke.”

  “Oh.” There was something terribly woebegone about her expression, her tone of voice, that was completely out of synch with their conversation. Peter looked more carefully at Sheila, and saw that she was actually trembling at the brink of tears. “What’s the matter then?” he asked gently.

  “Have you seen Sam lately?”

  The question took him by surprise. “No, not lately—I’d assumed he was mostly working in this part of the building.”

  “Oh, Peter, I just talked with Sam yesterday, and I think he’s dying!”

  * * *

  Jennifer came out from the coal bin, where she had made a nest for herself. Furtively, she made her way to first the one door (sniffing at the sandwich there, but not touching it), then the other. The second door’s frame was weak. She put a shoulder to it and heaved, and gave the door a shove with one hand. Still locked, it popped open.

  She was in the children’s bathroom now, all yellow-painted stalls and a single sink. It was warm here, and smelled pleasantly of decay. She paused at the back landing to listen before going through the main room and into the kitchen. The children and their attendant teachers were out in the play yard again, their voices muffled by thick stone walls.

  Jennifer hit up the refrigerator first, stealing a swallow of milk from a plastic gallon there, and an open jar of spaghetti sauce with a circle of bluegreen mold growing atop it. In one of the cupboards was a tin of cookies, sealed against the mice, and she lifted a handful of cookies from it.

  With a spoon she found in the stainless-steel sink, Jennifer carefully scraped off the mold. She retreated back to her nest, temporarily satisfied, alternating butter cookies with spoons of sauce.

  She still could not remember arriving at the church, or what—if anything—had come before. Her mind was like a body coming out of surgery, numb but with unfamiliar pains waiting under the
anesthetic. She was not consciously aware that her memories had fled, and she was driven by no desires, aims, or goals.

  But she knew that she had to eat.

  * * *

  When Peter arrived at his office in the old manse (which was attached to the church, but had no connecting passage with it), he found a note from the pastor on a piece of Covenant letterhead. “On study leave thru Tues week—will leve typing, take mssges eves.” Beside it was a stack of work: routine correspondence, the November Peace Letter, next Sunday’s service, last month’s Council minutes.

  With a disgusted sigh, Peter slapped on the typewriter. His Toshiba began playing a decade-old Touchstone album: hard-driving electric folk. He set the Council notes to one side of the typewriter and an ashtray to the other, lit up, and began typing:

  Council APPROVED the Trustees’ recommendations that (1) we will need to terminate our existing contract with the sexton effective January 1 of the new year. We will provide positive letters of recommendation and provide assistance in seeking out other churches for Sam, if he is interested.

  Peter let the cigarette dangle from his mouth, like Bogart, occasionally drawing it up with his lips and sucking in a long drag. He paid little attention to what he was typing, still worried about the thing over the altar, still wondering whether he’d gotten caught in the weekend drugs trap, and taken his hallucinations home with him into the work week.

  The outer door slammed, the office door flew open, and Sam stormed into the office. “Listen,” he said, “You call the curator, call Mr. Alverson, and tell him that the coffee urn in the kitchen is broke. It’s broke and I can’t fix it, ’cause I don’t got the parts. Now I’ve shut off the water to the urn and I’ve disconnected the pipes, but I don’t know whether I can lift it down or not. I can’t move this arm too well, ’cause they just operated on it.”

  The old sexton’s face and neck were swelled and puffy, and his skin was unnaturally gray. His breathing was harsh.

  “I could help you take the urn down,” Peter offered.

  “I didn’t ask for no help!” the man snapped. “I can do it. Never said I couldn’t. I just want you to call Mr. Alverson and tell him I’ll need me some money for parts.”

  A quick flip through the Rolodex brought up Alverson’s work number, and he punched it into his phone. A secretarial voice said, “Rosen and Weiss,” and Peter said, “Yes. Hello. I’m calling from Midlands Investment Corporation, and I’d like to speak with Mr. Alverson.”

  A moment later, Alverson’s voice said, “Hello, Mr. Wexberg? I—”

  “No, this is the church,” Peter said. “The reason I’m calling is…”

  “Peter,” Alverson said tiredly, “there is not the money for whatever it is. How can I make you understand that?”

  “Look,” Peter said. “I’m not calling you about the roof or the toilets or the pipes that are going to burst one of these days and take out half the church with them. I just want you to talk with Sam.” He thrust the receiver at the sexton. “Here.”

  He snatched up the Peace Letter and scanned a pious rant on radiation-burn victims for grammatical errors. When Sam was gone, he reread the last paragraph on the typewriter. I’ll bet that nobody’s actually told Sam any of this, he thought. He went on to the next paragraph.

  (2) When a new sexton is hired, a warm, sensitive supervisory relationship should be developed which has not existed in recent years with Sam.

  * * *

  It was night when Jennifer next came out and, because she dared not return to the refrigerator so soon, food was harder to find. The kitchen cupboards yielded only a chunk of old cheese, hard as a rock and ignored even by the mice. Gnawing off one tasteless flake at a time, Jennifer went up the back stairs to the top floor.

  The room over the parish hall was originally a chapel, and it still retained the rose windows and oak balconies. But the floorspace had been partitioned into three rooms at a time when the nursery school had been larger. Now they were used exclusively for storage. Jennifer climbed over a partition and systematically rifled old supply cabinets until finally she found a box of noodles among the crayons, paper scissors, and glue. She took two handfuls down to the kitchen and threw them into a pot, which she filled with water and set on the ancient black gas stove to boil.

  The nursery room across from the kitchen had been left unlocked, and Jennifer peeked within. It was a room for hobbits, filled with child-scaled tables and chairs, and lit only by a fluorescent bulb over the fish tank. Chains of paper loops and shadowy crayoned pictures festooned the walls. Low shelves were tumbleful of toys. She tapped a bit of fish food to the guppies and watched them flurry over it.

  There was a plastic brush on one table. She picked it up and sat down in a munchkin-sized chair and began combing out her straight, midback-length hair. It glinted auburn in the fish light.

  She was about to go check on the noodles when the lights blazed on, and an old black man walked in the door.

  Jennifer flinched back in the chair, half-blinded and afraid. Her heart scudded wildly, and her large-knuckled hands clenched white. The sexton stopped when he saw her. “I got to clean this room tonight, missy,” he said defiantly.

  But when Jennifer started to stand, the man waved her down. “No, don’t you get up, that’s all right—I’ll mop around you. No need for you to get up.”

  He lifted a bucket of soapy water into the room and shifted a few chairs and toys, shaking his head at their being in his way. He plunged the mop into the bucket and began swabbing.

  “You with the nursery school?” Sam asked. When she said nothing, he nodded, taking her silence for assent. He mopped vigorously, with the habit of years. But the effort it cost him was obvious, and his breathing soon grew ragged and harsh. He took a gulping breath and leaned against the mop, closing his eyes for strength. “Then you ought to know that I can’t come in during the day,” he said. “A little bit in the morning, but I got chemotherapy and radiotherapy during the day. I don’t want to come in at night, but I got no choice.”

  “Why?” She was startled by her voice—it was totally new to her. It frightened her, and yet almost immediately she wanted to say something again, for the question had caught her by surprise, and she still had no sense of how her voice sounded.

  “There’s a mass on my lungs,” he said, “but that’s not all. There’s more wrong than that. They found the mass, but they’re not sure about the other.” Gingerly, he sat down on one of the low tables. “There’s something the matter with my heart.”

  Jennifer searched for words, found some: “You’ll get better.” Their sound thrilled and elated her.

  The old man opened his eyes, stared off into the middle distance sightlessly. “I’m not going to get no better, young miss, I’m going to die.” Tears trembled at the corners of his eyes, and he shook his head, sending them flying. “But you know what, I don’t want to die. I realize that everybody got to die sometime, but that don’t make it any easier. I don’t want to die!”

  “You won’t die,” Jennifer said.

  Sam clutched the mop handle, staring bitterly at the floor. The tears began falling, large, slow, one at a time.

  Quietly, Jennifer left. In the kitchen she found the noodles had overboiled and the water had put out the flame in the gas burner.

  Before she returned to her nest, though, she saw Sam put his key ring way back in one of the cupboards in the front basement landing. He covered them over with an old rag, but she knew where they were.

  * * *

  Coming up the walk to his office, Peter tripped and dropped his breakfast. The bottle of juice shattered into the sandwich, and he was only able to save half the coffee. He entered his office in a foul mood, dumped the food into the trash and plugged in the electric heater he kept in the leg well of his desk.

  He pulled the paperback copy of Moby-Dick from his hip pocket (he was one-third through this time, his usual bog-down point), and slammed it onto the desktop. Impatiently he drew up
his chair.

  Among the paper on his desk was the Xeroxed Council minutes sheet he’d left in the pastor’s mail slot the night before. He’d circled the sexton items and written “Has anybody told Sam?” in the margin. Now it had been returned with “No, do it please” printed below in the pastor’s calm, neat lettering.

  Angrily, Peter scrawled “Are you aware that Sam is dying?” below the pastor’s note and returned the minutes to the slot. That bought him a day, anyway. He picked up his paperback, ignoring the phone that started ringing just then, since he wasn’t yet officially in. Then the doorbell buzzed and that he couldn’t possibly ignore.

  “Yes?” He opened the door partway, blocking entry with his body. It was one of the vent people, a short, fat man with his hair done up in greasy dreadlocks. His clothes were rotting on his body. Peter could smell them. The man was the color of the city—clothes, skin, hair, all were the same grimy industrial gray—and Peter recognized him. “Oh, it’s you, Ashod.”

  Ashod clutched a broken plastic rosary in one fist, held up before him, crucifix dangling at the end of a single string. It was bright pink. “I gave you a meal letter two weeks ago,” Peter said. “I can’t give you another for at least a month. Come back when it gets really cold and nobody’ll mind.”

  Ashod waved his fist back and forth in negation, the crucifix swinging wildly. “No, no, it’s not that,” he said. “I want to see the lady.”

  “Lady? Somebody in the nursery school?”

  Ashod nodded his head vigorously. “No. I want to see the Lady. I want her to make the voices go away.”

  The telephone was ringing again, and by now it was almost certainly time he was at work. “Come back when it’s cold,” Peter said, closing the door. “Understand—cold?”

  * * *

  Jennifer was learning the building’s rhythms, the daily ebb and flow of people. She emerged when the nursery school children were outside in the yard. Moving quickly, efficiently, she stole another handful of noodles and set them to boiling. Then she took a double handful of colored crayons, being careful to choose only the largest, near-unused ones, and husked them of their paper shells.