The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  When he got home Karen was waiting in the living room. “You want anything from Safeway?” she asked. Felix shook his head and she walked out. He heard the car door slam and the engine shriek to life.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon in the studio with the door shut, just looking at the guitar. He didn’t need to practice; his hands already knew what to do.

  The guitar was almost unearthly in its beauty and perfection. It was the single most expensive thing he’d ever bought for his own pleasure, but he couldn’t look at it without being twisted up inside by guilt. And yet, at the same time he lusted for it passionately, wanted to run his hands endlessly over the hard, slick finish, bury his head in the plush case and inhale the musky aroma of guitar polish, feel the strings pulsing under the tips of his fingers.

  Looking back he couldn’t see anything he could have done differently. Why wasn’t he happy?

  When he came out the living room was dark. He could see a strip of light under the bedroom door, hear the snarling hiss of the TV. He felt like he was watching it all from the deck of a passing ship; he could stretch out his arms but everything would still just drift out of his reach.

  He realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He made himself a sandwich and drank an iced tea glass full of whiskey and fell asleep on the couch.

  * * *

  A little after noon on Sunday he staggered into the bathroom. His back ached and his fingers throbbed and his mouth tasted like a kitchen drain. He showered and brushed his teeth and put on a clean T-shirt and jeans. Through the bedroom window he could see Karen lying out on the lawn chair with the Sunday paper. The pages were pulled so tight that her fingers made ridges across them. She was trying not to look back at the house.

  He made some toast and instant coffee and went to sort through his tapes. He felt like he ought to try to learn some songs, but nothing seemed worth the trouble. Finally he played a Mozart symphony that he’d taped for Karen, jealous of the sound of the orchestra, wanting to be able to make it with his hands.

  * * *

  The band practiced in a run-down neighborhood off Rundberg and IH35. All the houses had big dogs behind chain link fences and plastic Big Wheels in the driveways. Sid met him at the door and took him back to a garage hung with army blankets and littered with empty beer cans.

  Sid was tall and thin and wore a black Def Leppard T-shirt. He had blond hair in a shag to his shoulders and acne. The drummer and bass player had already set up; none of the three of them looked to be more than twenty-two or -three years old. Felix wanted to leave but he had no place else to go.

  “Want a brew?” Sid asked, and Felix nodded. He took the Jackson out of its case and Sid, coming back with the beer, stopped in his tracks. “Wow,” he said. “Is that your axe?” Felix nodded again. “Righteous,” Sid said.

  “You know any Van Halen?” the drummer asked. Felix couldn’t see anything but a zebra striped headband and a patch of black hair behind the two bass drums and the double row of toms.

  “Sure,” Felix lied. “Just run over the chords for me, it’s been a while.” Sid walked him through the progression for “Dance the Night Away” on his ¾ sized Melody Maker and the drummer counted it off. Sid and the bass player both had Marshall amps and Felix’s little Princeton, even on ten, got lost in the wash of noise.

  In less than a minute Felix got tired of the droning power chords and started toying with them, adding a ninth, playing a modal run against them. Finally Sid stopped and said, “No, man, it’s like this,” and patiently went through the chords again, A, B, E, with a C# minor on the chorus.

  “Yeah, okay,” Felix said and drank some more beer.

  They played “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” by ZZ Top and “Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin. Felix tried to stay interested, but every time he played something different from the record Sid would stop and correct him.

  “Man, you’re a hell of a guitar player, but I can’t believe you’re as good as you are and you don’t know any of these solos.”

  “You guys do any Jeff Beck?” Felix asked.

  Sid looked at the others. “I guess we could do ‘Shapes of Things,’ right? Like on that Gary Moore album?”

  “I can fake it, I guess,” the drummer said.

  “And could you maybe turn down a little?” Felix said.

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” Sid said, and adjusted the knob on his guitar a quarter turn.

  Felix leaned into the opening chords, pounding the Jackson, thinking about nothing but the music, putting a depth of rage and frustration into it he never knew he had. But he couldn’t sustain it; the drummer was pounding out 2 and 4, oblivious to what Felix was playing, and Sid had cranked up again and was whaling away on his Gibson with the flat of his hand.

  Felix jerked his strap loose and set the guitar back in its case.

  “What’s the matter?” Sid asked, the band grinding to a halt behind him.

  “I just haven’t got it today,” Felix said. He wanted to break that pissant little toy Gibson across Sid’s nose, and the strength of his hatred scared him. “I’m sorry,” he said, clenching his teeth. “Maybe some other time.”

  “Sure,” Sid said. “Listen, you’re really good, but you need to learn more solos, you know?”

  Felix burned rubber as he pulled away, skidding through a U-turn at the end of the street. He couldn’t slow down. The car fishtailed when he rocketed out onto Rundberg and he nearly went into a light pole. Pounding the wheel with his fists, hot tears running down his face, he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  * * *

  Karen was gone when Felix got home. He found a note on the refrigerator. “Sherry picked me up. Will call in a couple of days. Have a lot to think about. K.”

  He set up the Princeton and tried to play what he was feeling and it came out bullshit, a jerkoff reflex blues progression that didn’t mean a thing. He leaned the guitar against the wall and went into his studio, shoving one tape after another into the decks, and every one of them sounded the same, another tired, simpleminded rehash of the obvious.

  “I didn’t ask for this!” he shouted at the empty house. “You hear me? This isn’t what I asked for!”

  But it was, and as soon as the words were out he knew he was lying to himself. Faster hands and a better ear weren’t enough to make him play like Beck. He had to change inside to play that way, and he wasn’t strong enough to handle it, to have every piece of music he’d ever loved turn sour, to need perfection so badly that it was easier to give it up than learn to live with the flaws.

  He sat on the couch for a long time and then, finally, he picked up the guitar again. He found a clean rag and polished the body and neck and wiped each individual string. Then, when he had wiped all his fingerprints away, he put it back into the case, still holding it with the rag. He closed the latches and set it next to the amp, by the front door.

  For the first time in two days he felt like he could breathe again. He turned out all the lights and opened the windows and sat down on the couch with his eyes closed. Gradually his hands became still and he could hear, very faintly, the fading music of the traffic and the crickets and the wind.

  JUDITH MOFFETT

  Surviving

  Here’s an absorbing and evocative study about two very different women who find that they really share a deep similarity of mind and heart: they are both caught, agonizingly, between two worlds.…

  Judith Moffett is the author of four books—two of poetry, one of criticism, and one of translations from the Swedish—but “Surviving” was her first professional fiction sale, which certainly makes it one of the more remarkable debut stories of recent years. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, she now lives with her husband in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, and teaches a science fiction course and a graduate course in twentieth-century American poetry at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also taught for four summers at the prestigious Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, and was given a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writin
g Fellowship Grant for her poetry—which she then used to finance the writing of her also remarkable first novel, Pennterra, which is coming up in late 1987 as part of the new Isaac Asimov Presents line from Congdon & Weed.

  SURVIVING

  Judith Moffett

  For nearly eighteen years I’ve been keeping a secret to honor the memory of someone, now pretty certainly dead, who didn’t want it told. Yet over those years I’ve come gradually to feel uncomfortable with the idea of dying without recording what I know—to believe that science would be pointlessly cheated thereby, and Sally, too; and just lately, but with a growing urgency, I’ve also felt the need to write an account of my own actions into the record.

  Yet it’s difficult to begin. The events I intend to set down have never, since they happened, been out of my mind for a day; nevertheless the prospect of reexperiencing them is painful and my silence the harder to break on that account.

  I’ll start, I guess, with the afternoon an exuberant colleague I scarcely knew at the time spotted me through the glass door and barged into the psychology department office calling, “Hey, Jan, you’re the expert on the Chimp Child—wait’ll you hear this, you’re not gonna believe it!”

  People were always dashing to inform me of some item, mostly inconsequential, relating to this subject. I glanced across at John from the wall of mailboxes, hands full of memos and late papers, one eyebrow probably raised. “What now?”

  “We’ve hired her!” And when I continued to look blank: “No kidding, I was just at a curriculum committee meeting in the dean’s office, and Raymond Lickorish in Biology was there, and he told me: they’ve definitely given Sally Barnes a tenure-track appointment, to replace that old guy who’s retiring this year, what’s his name, Ferrin. The virus man. Raymond says Barnes’s Ph.D. research was something on viruses and the origin of life on earth and her published work is all first-rate and she did well in the interview—he wasn’t there so he didn’t meet her, but they were all talking about it afterward—and she seems eager to leave England. So the department made her an offer and she accepted! She’ll be here in September, I swear to God!”

  By this point I’m sure I was showing all the incredulous excitement and delight a bearer of happy tidings could possibly have wished. And no wonder: I wrote my dissertation on Sally Barnes; I went into psychology chiefly because of the intense interest her story held for me. In fact the Chimp Child had been a kind of obsession of mine—part hobby, part mania—for a long time. I was a college freshman, my years of Tarzan games in the woods less far behind me than you might suppose, in 1990, when poachers hauled the screeching, scratching, biting, terrified white girl into a Tanzanian village and told its head man they would be back to collect the reward. Electrified, I followed the breaking story from day to day.

  The girl was quickly and positively identified as Sally, the younger daughter of Martin and Hilary Barnes, Anglican missionary teachers at a secondary school in the small central African republic of Malawi, who had been killed when the light plane in which they and she were traveling from Kigoma had crashed in the jungle. A helicopter rescue crew found only the pilot’s body in the burned-out fuselage. Scavengers may have dragged the others away and scattered the bones; improbable survivors of the crash may have tried to walk out—the plane had come down in the mountains, something less than 150 kilometers east of Lake Tanganyika—and starved, or been killed by anything from leopards to thieves to fever. However it was, nothing had been heard or seen of the Barnes family after that day in 1981; it was assumed that one way or another all three had died in the bush.

  No close living relatives remained in England. An older daughter, left at home that weekend with an attack of malaria, had been sent to an Anglican school for the children of missionaries, somewhere in the Midlands. There was no one but the church to assume responsibility for her sister the wild girl, either.

  The bureaucracies of two African nations and the Church of England hummed, and after a day or two Sally was removed to the Malosa School in Southern Malawi, where the whole of her life before the accident had been lived. She could neither speak nor understand English, seemed stunned, and masturbated constantly. She showed no recognition of the school, its grounds or buildings, or the people there who had been friendly with her as a small child. But when they had cleaned her up, and cropped her matted hair, they recognized that child in her; pictures of Sally at her fourth birthday party, printed side by side in the papers with new ones of the undersized thirteen-year-old she had become, were conclusive. Hers was one of those faces that looks essentially the same at six and sixty.

  But if the two faces obviously belonged to the same person, there was a harrowing difference.

  A long time later Sally told me, gazing sadly at this likeness of herself: “Shock. It was nothing but shock, nothing more beastly. On top of everything else, getting captured must have uncovered my memories of the plane crash—violence; noise; confusion; my parents screaming, then not answering me—I mean, when the poachers started shooting and panicked everybody, and then killed the Old Man and flung that net over me, I fought and struggled, of course, but in the end I sort of went blank. Like the accident, but in reverse.”

  “Birth Trauma Number Three?” We were sitting cross-legged on the floor before the fireplace in my living room, naked under blankets, like Mohegan. I could imagine the scene vividly, had in fact imagined it over and over: the brown child blindly running, running, in the green world, the net spreading, dropping in slow motion, the child pitching with a crash into wet vegetation. Helplessness. Claustrophobia. Uttermost bowel-emptying terror. The hysterical shrieks, the rough handling … Sally patted my thigh, flushed from the fire’s heat, then let her hand stay where it was.

  “No point looking like that. What if they hadn’t found me then? At University College, you know, they all think it was only just in time.”

  “And, having read my book, you know I think so, too.” We smiled; I must have pressed my palm flat to her hot, taut belly, or slipped my hand behind her knee or cupped her breast—some such automatic response. “The wonder is that after that double trauma they were able to get you back at all. You had to have been an awfully resilient, tough kid, as well as awfully bright. A survivor in every sense. Or you’d have died of shock and grief after the plane crashed, or of shock and grief when the poachers picked you up, or of grief and despair in England from all that testing and training, like spending your adolescence in a pressure cooker.” I can remember nuzzling her shoulder, how my ear grazed the rough blanket. “You’re a survivor, Sal.”

  In the firelight Sally smiled wanly. “Mm. Up to a point.”

  Any standard psych text published after 2003 will describe Sally Barnes as the only feral child in history to whom, before her final disappearance, full functional humanity had been restored. From the age of four and a half until just past her thirteenth birthday, Sally acted as a member of a troop of chimpanzees in the Tanzanian rain forest; from sixteen or seventeen onward, she was a young Englishwoman, a person. What sort of person? The books are vague on this point. Psychologists, naturally enough, were wild to know; Sally herself, who rather thought she did know, was wild to prevent them from turning her inside out all her life in the interest of Science. I was (and am) a psychologist and a partisan, but professional integrity is one thing and obsession is quite another, and if I choose finally to set the record straight it’s not because I respect Sally’s own choice any less.

  From the very first, of course, I’d been madly infatuated with the idea of Sally, in whose imagined consciousness—that of a human girl accepted by wild creatures as one of themselves—I saw, I badly wished to see, myself. The extreme harshness of such a life as hers had been—with its parasites, cold rains, bullying of the weak by the strong, and so forth—got neatly edited out of this hyperromantic conception; yet the myth had amazing force. I don’t know how many times I read the Jungle Books and the best of the Tarzan novels between the ages of eight and fifteen, whi
le my mother hovered uneasily in the background, dropping hints about eye makeup and stylish clothes. Pah.

  So that later, when a real apechild emerged from a real jungle and the Sunday supplements and popular scientific magazines were full of her story, for me it was an enthralling and fabulous thing, one that made it possible to finish growing up, at graduate school, inside the myth: a myth not dispelled but amplified, enhanced, by scientific scrutiny. The more one looked at what had happened to Sally, the more wonderful it seemed.

  Her remarkable progress had been minutely documented, and I had read every document and published half a dozen of my own, including my dissertation. It was established that she had talked early and could even read fairly well before the accident, and that her early family history had been a happy, stable one; all we experts were agreed that these crucial factors explained how Sally, alone among feral children, had been able to develop, or reacquire normal language skills in later life. She was therefore fortunate in her precocity; fortunate, too, in her foster society of fellow primates. Almost certainly she could not have recovered, or recovered so completely, from eight years of life as a wolf or a gazelle. Unlike Helen Keller, she had never been sensually deprived; unlike Kaspar Hauser, also sensually deprived, she had not been isolated from social relations—wild chimpanzees provide one another with plenty of those; unlike the wolf girls of India, she had learned language before her period of abstention from the use of it. And like Helen Keller, Sally had a very considerable native intelligence to assist her.

  It may seem odd that despite frequent trips to England, I had never tried to arrange a meeting with the subject of all this fascinated inquiry, but in some way my fixation made me shy, and I would end each visit by deciding that another year would do as well or better. That Sally might come to America, and to my own university, and to stay, was a wholly unlooked-for development. Now that chance had arranged it, however, shyness seemed absurd. Not only would we meet, we would become friends. Everyone would expect us to, and nothing seemed more natural.