The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  As good a name as any. “Yes. Same as the Norse god.”

  He laughed. “Sure, Loki. Anything you like. Fuck you.”

  Such a musical voice. “Now there you go. Seems to me, Milo—if you don’t mind my giving you my unsolicited opinion—that you have something of an attitude problem.” I punched the cigarette lighter, reached back and pulled a cigar from my jacket on the back seat, in the process weaving the car all over Highway 6. I bit the end off the cigar and spat it out the window, stoked it up. My insects wailed. I cannot explain to you how good I felt.

  “Take for instance this crossword puzzle book. Why did you throw it out the window?”

  I could see Milo watching me in the mirror, wondering whether he should take me seriously. The headlights fanned out ahead of us, the white lines at the center of the road pulsing by like a rapid heartbeat. Take a chance, Milo. What have you got to lose?

  “I was pissed,” he said. “It’s a waste of time. I don’t care about stupid games.”

  “Exactly. It’s just a game, a way to pass the time. Nobody ever really learns anything from a crossword puzzle. Corporation lawyers don’t get their Porsches by building their word power with crosswords, right?”

  “I don’t care about Porsches.”

  “Neither do I, Milo. I drive an Audi.”

  Milo sighed.

  “I know, Milo. That’s not the point. The point is that it’s all a game, crosswords or corporate law. Some people devote their lives to Jesus; some devote their lives to artwork. It all comes to pretty much the same thing. You get old. You die.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “Why do you think I picked you up, Milo? I saw your question mark and it spoke to me. You probably think I’m some pervert out to take advantage of you. I have a funny name. I don’t talk like your average middle-aged businessman. Forget about that.” The old excitement was upon me; I was talking louder and louder, leaning on the accelerator. The car sped along. “I think you’re as troubled by the materialism and cant of life in America as I am. Young people like you, with orange hair, are trying to find some values in a world that offers them nothing but crap for ideas. But too many of you are turning to extremes in response. Drugs, violence, religious fanaticism, hedonism. Some, like you I suspect, to suicide. Don’t do it, Milo. Your life is too valuable.” The speedometer touched eighty, eighty-five. Milo fumbled for his seatbelt but couldn’t find it.

  I waved my hand, holding the cigar, at him. “What’s the matter, Milo? Can’t find the belt?” Ninety now. A pickup went by us going the other way, the wind of its passing beating at my head and shoulder. Ninety-five.

  “Think, Milo! If you’re upset with the present, with your parents and the schools, think about the future. What will the future be like if this trend toward valuelessness continues in the next hundred years? Think of the impact of new technologies! Gene splicing, gerontological research, artificial intelligence, space exploration, biological weapons, nuclear proliferation! All accelerating this process! Think of the violent reactionary movements that could arise—are arising already, Milo, as we speak—from people’s efforts to find something to hold onto. Paint yourself a picture, Milo, of the kind of man or woman another hundred years of this process might produce!”

  “What are you talking about?” He was terrified.

  “I’m talking about the survival of values in America! Simply that.” Cigar smoke swirled in front of the dashboard lights, and my voice had reached a shout. Milo was gripping the sides of his seat. The speedometer read 105. “And you, Milo, are at the heart of this process! If people continue to think the way you do, Milo, throwing their crossword puzzle books out the windows of their Audis across America, the future will be full of absolutely valueless people! Right, MILO?” I leaned over, taking my eyes off the road, and blew smoke into his face, screaming, “ARE YOU LISTENING, MILO? MARK MY WORDS!”

  “Y—yes.”

  “GOO, GOO, GA-GA-GAA!”

  I put my foot all the way to the floor. The wind howled through the window; the gray highway flew beneath us.

  “Mark my words, Milo,” I whispered. He never heard me. “Twenty-five across. Eight letters. N-i-h-i-l—.”

  My pulse roared in my ears, there joining the drowned choir of the fields and the roar of the engine. My body was slimy with sweat, my fingers clenched through the cigar, fists clamped on the wheel, smoke stinging my eyes. I slammed on the brakes, downshifting immediately, sending the transmission into a painful whine as the car slewed and skidded off the pavement, clipping a reflecting marker and throwing Milo against the windshield. The car stopped with a jerk in the gravel at the side of the road, just shy of a sign announcing, “Welcome to Ohio.”

  There were no other lights on the road; I shut off my own and sat behind the wheel, trembling, the night air cool on my skin. The insects wailed. The boy was slumped against the dashboard. There was a star fracture in the glass above his head, and warm blood came away on my fingers when I touched his hair. I got out of the car, circled around to the passenger’s side, and dragged him from the seat into the field adjoining the road. He was surprisingly light. I left him there, in a field of Ohio soybeans on the evening of a summer’s day.

  * * *

  The city of Detroit was founded by the French adventurer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a supporter of Comte de Pontchartrain, minister of state to the Sun King, Louis XIV. All of these men worshipped the Roman Catholic god, protected their political positions, and let the future go hang. Cadillac, after whom an American automobile was named, was seeking a favorable location to advance his own economic interests. He came ashore on July 24, 1701 with fifty soldiers, an equal number of settlers, and about one hundred friendly Indians near the present site of the Veterans Memorial Building, within easy walking distance of the Greyhound Bus Terminal.

  The car had not run well after the accident, developing a reluctance to go into fourth, but I did not care. The encounter with Milo had gone exactly as such things should go, and was especially pleasing because it had been totally unplanned. An accident—no order, one would guess—but exactly as if I had laid it all out beforehand. I came into Detroit late at night via Route 12, which eventually turned into Michigan Avenue. The air was hot and sticky. I remember driving past the Cadillac Plant; multitudes of red, yellow, and green lights glinting off dull masonry and the smell of auto exhaust along the city streets. The sort of neighborhood I wanted was not far from Tiger Stadium: pawnshops, an all-night deli, laundromats, dimly lit bars with red Stroh’s signs in the windows. Men on streetcorners walked casually from noplace to noplace.

  I parked on a side street just around the corner from a Seven-Eleven. I left the motor running. In the store I dawdled over a magazine rack until at last I heard the racing of an engine and saw the Audi flash by the window. I bought a copy of Time and caught a downtown bus at the corner. At the Greyhound station I purchased a ticket for the next bus to Toronto and sat reading my magazine until departure time.

  We got onto the bus. Across the river we stopped at customs and got off again. “Name?” they asked me.

  “Gerald Spotsworth.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Calgary.” I gave them my credentials. The passport photo showed me with hair. They looked me over. They let me go.

  I work in the library of the University of Toronto. I am well read, a student of history, a solid Canadian citizen. There I lead a sedentary life. The subways are clean, the people are friendly, the restaurants are excellent. The sky is blue. The cat is on the mat.

  We got back on the bus. There were few other passengers, and most of them were soon asleep; the only light in the darkened interior was that which shone above my head. I was very tired, but I did not want to sleep. Then I remembered that I had Ruth’s pills in my jacket pocket. I smiled, thinking of the customs people. All that was left in the box were a couple of tiny pink tabs. I did not know what they were, but I broke one down the middle with my f
ingernail and took it anyway. It perked me up immediately. Everything I could see seemed sharply defined. The dark green plastic of the seats. The rubber mat in the aisle. My fingernails. All details were separate and distinct, all interdependent. I must have been focused on the threads in the weave of my pants leg for ten minutes when I was surprised by someone sitting down next to me. It was Ruth. “You’re back!” I exclaimed.

  “We’re all back,” she said. I looked around and it was true: on the opposite side of the aisle, two seats ahead, Milo sat watching me over his shoulder, a trickle of blood running down his forehead. One corner of his mouth pulled tighter in a rueful smile. Mr. Graves came back from the front seat and shook my hand. I saw the fat singer from the country club, still naked. The locker room boy. A flickering light from the back of the bus: when I turned around there stood the burning man, his eye sockets two dark hollows behind the wavering flames. The shopping mall guard. Hector from the hardware store. They all looked at me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Ruth.

  “We couldn’t let you go on thinking like you do. You act like I’m some monster. I’m just a person.”

  “A rather nice looking young lady,” Graves added.

  “People are monsters,” I said.

  “Like you, huh?” Ruth said. “But they can be saints, too.”

  That made me laugh. “Don’t feed me platitudes. You can’t even read.”

  “You make such a big deal out of reading. Yeah, well, times change. I get along fine, don’t I?”

  The mall guard broke in. “Actually, miss, the reason we caught on to you is that someone saw you go into the men’s room.” He looked embarrassed.

  “But you didn’t catch me, did you?” Ruth snapped back. She turned to me. “You’re afraid of change. No wonder you live back here.”

  “This is all in my imagination,” I said. “It’s because of your drugs.”

  “It is all in your imagination,” the burning man repeated. His voice was a whisper. “What you see in the future is what you are able to see. You have no faith in God or your fellow man.”

  “He’s right,” said Ruth.

  “Bull. Psychobabble.”

  “Speaking of babble,” Milo said, “I figured out where you got that googoo-goo stuff. Talk—”

  “Never mind that,” Ruth broke in. “Here’s the truth. The future is just a place. The people there are just people. They live differently. So what. People make what they want of the world. You can’t escape human failings by running into the past.” She rested her hand on my leg. “I’ll tell you what you’ll find when you get to Toronto,” she said. “Another city full of human beings.”

  This was crazy. I knew it was crazy. I knew it was all unreal, but somehow I was getting more and more afraid. “So the future is just the present writ large,” I said bitterly. “More bull.”

  “You tell her, pal,” the locker room boy said.

  Hector, who had been listening quietly, broke in, “For a man from the future, you talk a lot like a native.”

  “You’re the king of bullshit, man,” Milo said. “‘Some people devote themselves to artwork!’ Jesus!”

  I felt dizzy. “Scut down, Milo. That means ‘Fuck you too.’” I shook my head to try to make them go away. That was a mistake: the bus began to pitch like a sailboat. I grabbed for Ruth’s arm but missed. “Who’s driving this thing?” I asked, trying to get out of the seat.

  “Don’t worry,” said Graves. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  “He’s brain-dead,” Milo said.

  “You couldn’t do any better,” said Ruth, pulling me back down.

  “No one is driving,” said the burning man.

  “We’ll crash!” I was so dizzy now that I could hardly keep from vomiting. I closed my eyes and swallowed. That seemed to help. A long time passed; eventually I must have fallen asleep.

  When I woke it was late morning and we were entering the city, cruising down Eglinton Avenue. The bus has a driver after all—a slender black man with neatly trimmed sideburns who wore his uniform hat at a rakish angle. A sign above the windshield said, “Your driver—safe, courteous,” and below that, on the slide-in name plate, “Wilbert Caul.” I felt like I was coming out of a nightmare. I felt happy. I stretched some of the knots out of my back. A young soldier seated across the aisle from me looked my way; I smiled, and he returned it briefly.

  “You were mumbling to yourself in your sleep last night,” he said.

  “Sorry. Sometimes I have bad dreams.”

  “It’s okay. I do too, sometimes.” He had a round, open face, an apologetic grin. He was twenty, maybe. Who knew where his dreams came from? We chatted until the bus reached the station; he shook my hand and said he was pleased to meet me. He called me “sir.”

  I was not due back at the library until Monday, so I walked over to Yonge Street. The stores were busy, the tourists were out in droves, the adult theaters were doing a brisk business. Policemen in sharply creased trousers, white gloves, sauntered along among the pedestrians. It was a bright, cloudless day, but the breeze coming up the street from the lake was cool. I stood on the sidewalk outside one of the strip joints and watched the videotaped come-on over the closed circuit. The Princess Laya. Sondra Nieve, the Human Operator. Technology replaces the traditional barker, but the bodies are more or less the same. The persistence of your faith in sex and machines is evidence of your capacity to hope.

  Francis Bacon, in his masterwork The New Atlantis, foresaw the utopian world that would arise through the application of experimental science to social problems. Bacon, however, could not solve the problems of his own time and was eventually accused of accepting bribes, fined £40,000, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He made no appeal to God, but instead applied himself to the development of the virtues of patience and acceptance. Eventually he was freed. Soon after, on a freezing day in late March, we were driving near Highgate when I suggested to him that cold might delay the process of decay. He was excited by the idea. On impulse he stopped the carriage, purchased a hen, wrung its neck and stuffed it with snow. He eagerly looked forward to the results of his experiment. Unfortunately, in haggling with the street vendor he had exposed himself thoroughly to the cold and was seized with a chill which rapidly led to pneumonia, of which he died on April 9, 1626.

  There’s no way to predict these things.

  When the videotape started repeating itself I got bored, crossed the street, and lost myself in the crowd.

  RICHARD KEARNS

  Grave Angels

  Here’s a poignant and stylish exploration of the ambiguous borderland between life and death, by new writer Richard Kearns.…

  A former editor of the SFWA Bulletin, Richard Kearns has published stories in Orbit 21, Dragons of Light, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He is currently at work on his first novel, tentatively titled The Price of Heaven. Born in Chicago, he now lives in Beverly Hills, California.

  GRAVE ANGELS

  Richard Kearns

  I first met Mr. Beauchamps when he dug Aunt Fannie’s grave, the day before she died. I can remember it very clearly.

  School was over, the heat of summer had finally settled in, withering the last of spring’s magnolia blossoms, and I had just turned ten. Bobby, my older brother, and his friends had gone to the swimming hole down by the Dalton place, but I hadn’t gone with them—not because I didn’t want to. The last time I’d gone, they’d stolen my clothes. I figured it’d be at least another week before it’d be safe to go with them.

  So I’d gone to the Evans Cemetery instead.

  There were two cemeteries inside the Evans city limits—one for whites and one for blacks. It’s still that way, as a matter of fact. But the white cemetery—the Evans Cemetery proper—had sixteen of the biggest oak trees in all of Long County, growing close enough together so you could move from one tree to the next without having to get down again. I liked to go there, e
specially on hot days, and climb the trees, read, watch the motorcars hurry in and out of Evans like big black bugs. There was always a breeze in the oaks, and I was sure it never touched the earth.

  I used to sit in those branches for hours at a time, like a meadowlark or a squirrel, listening to that breeze. Underneath me, I could feel the trees bend and sway, creaking and rattling and bumping into one another, as if they were all alive and talking among themselves, elbowing each other and laughing sometimes.

  I remember it was a Saturday, and I remember I’d brought Robinson Crusoe with me to read. I’d read it before, but it was a story I enjoyed—I liked pretending that I was entirely alone, free to do whatever I wanted.

  I had just gotten comfortable on my branch when I heard someone humming down underneath me, and the sound of wood being tossed into a pile on the ground. Quietly, I closed my book and turned around to spy.

  There was an old black man standing with his back to me, maybe thirty feet away from the tree I was in. He was dressed in blue and white striped overalls and a white long-sleeved shirt. On his head was an engineer’s cap like the men wore down in the railway yard—It had blue and white stripes in it too. Next to him was a wheelbarrow—old, rust- and dirt-encrusted, its contents spilled on the ground: several two-by-fours of different lengths, painted white; a big tan canvas, all folded up; and digging tools.

  He took his cap off, mopped his head with a big red bandanna handkerchief—he was partly bald—put the hat back on, stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket, and studied the graves for a moment, fists on his hips.

  Then he sighed, shook his head, and, mumbling and grunting, squatted and scooped up the pieces of lumber in his arms. Their ends flailed the air every which way as he stood again.

  He made his way over by Great-Great-Grandpa Evan’s grave—the one with the angel sculpted in red granite—where, after deciding on a spot, he spent a couple of minutes meticulously arranging the two-by-fours so they formed a perfect white rectangle against the green grass. He then retrieved the canvas, spread it next to the area he’d staked out, rolled up his sleeves, took out a shovel, and started digging up the sod.