The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He spit on both his hands to show his sincerity, and then, exhaling deeply with relief, he stepped back.

  I turned to Kamiri.

  “Do you consent to till the shamba of Njogu, son of Muchiri?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said softly, bowing her head. “I consent.”

  I held out my right hand, and the bride’s mother placed a gourd of pombe in it.

  “If this man does not please you,” I said to Kamiri, “I will spill the pombe upon the ground.”

  “Do not spill it,” she replied.

  “Then drink,” I said, handing the gourd to her.

  She lifted it to her lips and took a swallow, then handed it to Njogu, who did the same.

  When the gourd was empty, the parents of Njogu and Kamiri stuffed it with grass, signifying the friendship between the two clans.

  Then a cheer rose from the onlookers, the ram was carried off to be roasted, more pombe appeared as if by magic, and while the groom took the bride off to his boma, the remainder of the people celebrated far into the night. They stopped only when the bleating of the goats told them that some hyenas were nearby, and then the women and children went off to their bomas while the men took their spears and went into the fields to frighten the hyenas away.

  Koinnage came up to me as I was about to leave.

  “Did you speak to the woman from Maintenance?” he asked.

  “I did,” I replied.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said that they do not approve of killing babies who are born feetfirst.”

  “And what did you say?” he asked nervously.

  “I told her that we did not need the approval of Maintenance to practice our religion,” I replied.

  “Will Maintenance listen?”

  “They have no choice,” I said. “And we have no choice, either,” I added. “Let them dictate one thing that we must or must not do, and soon they will dictate all things. Give them their way, and Njogu and Kamiri would have recited wedding vows from the Bible or the Koran. It happened to us in Kenya; we cannot permit it to happen on Kirinyaga.”

  “But they will not punish us?” he persisted.

  “They will not punish us,” I replied.

  Satisfied, he walked off to his boma while I took the narrow, winding path to my own. I stopped by the enclosure where my animals were kept and saw that there were two new goats there, gifts from the bride’s and groom’s families in gratitude for my services. A few minutes later I was asleep within the walls of my own boma.

  * * *

  The computer woke me a few minutes before sunrise. I stood up, splashed my face with water from the gourd I keep by my sleeping blanket, and walked over to the terminal.

  There was a message for me from Barbara Eaton, brief and to the point:

  It is the preliminary finding of Maintenance that infanticide, for any reason, is a direct violation of Kirinyaga’s charter. No action will be taken for past offenses.

  We are also evaluating your practice of euthanasia, and may require further testimony from you at some point in the future.

  Barbara Eaton

  A runner from Koinnage arrived a moment later, asking me to attend a meeting of the Council of Elders, and I knew that he had received the same message.

  I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and began walking to Koinnage’s shamba, which consisted of his boma as well as those of his three sons and their wives. When I arrived, I found not only the local elders waiting for me, but also two chiefs from neighboring villages.

  “Did you receive the message from Maintenance?” demanded Koinnage, as I seated myself opposite him.

  “I did.”

  “I warned you that this would happen!” he said. “What will we do now?”

  “We will do what we have always done,” I answered calmly.

  “We cannot,” said one of the neighboring chiefs. “They have forbidden it.”

  “They have no right to forbid it,” I replied.

  “There is a woman in my village whose time is near,” continued the chief, “and all of the signs and omens point to the birth of twins. We have been taught that the firstborn must be killed, for one mother cannot produce two souls—but now Maintenance has forbidden it. What are we to do?”

  “We must kill the firstborn,” I said, “for it will be a demon.”

  “And then Maintenance will make us leave Kirinyaga!” said Koinnage bitterly.

  “Perhaps we could let the child live,” said the chief. “That might satisfy them, and then they might leave us alone.”

  I shook my head. “They will not leave you alone. Already they speak about the way we leave the old and feeble out for the hyenas, as if this were some enormous sin against their God. If you give in on the one, the day will come when you must give in on the other.”

  “Would that be so terrible?” persisted the chief. “They have medicines that we do not possess; perhaps they could make the old young again.”

  “You do not understand,” I said, rising to my feet. “Our society is not a collection of separate people and customs and traditions. No, it is a complex system, with all the pieces as dependent upon each other as the animals and vegetation of the savanna. If you burn the grass, you will not only kill the impala who feeds upon it, but the predator who feeds upon the impala, and the ticks and flies who live upon the predator, and the vultures and maribou storks who feed upon his remains when he dies. You cannot destroy the part without destroying the whole.”

  I paused to let them consider what I had said, and then continued speaking: “Kirinyaga is like the savanna. If we do not leave the old and feeble out for the hyenas, the hyenas will starve. If the hyenas starve, the grass eaters will become so numerous that there is no land left for our cattle and goats to graze. If the old and feeble do not die when Ngai decrees it, then soon we will not have enough food to go around.”

  I picked up a stick and balanced it precariously on my forefinger.

  “This stick,” I said, “is the Kikuyu people, and my finger is Kirinyaga. They are in perfect balance.” I stared at the neighboring chief. “But what will happen if I alter the balance and put my finger here?” I asked, gesturing to the end of the stick.

  “The stick will fall to the ground.”

  “And here?” I asked, pointing to a stop an inch away from the center.

  “It will fall.”

  “Thus is it with us,” I explained. “Whether we yield on one point or all points, the result will be the same: the Kikuyu will fall as surely as the stick will fall. Have we learned nothing from our past? We must adhere to our traditions; they are all that we have!”

  “But Maintenance will not allow us to do so!” protested Koinnage.

  “They are not warriors, but civilized men,” I said, allowing a touch of contempt to creep into my voice. “Their chiefs and their mundumugus will not send them to Kirinyaga with guns and spears. They will issue warnings and findings and declarations, and finally, when that fails, they will go to the Eutopian Court and plead their case, and the trial will be postponed many times and reheard many more times.” I could see them finally relaxing, and I smiled confidently at them. “Each of you will have died from the burden of your years before Maintenance does anything other than talk. I am your mundumugu; I have lived among civilized men, and I tell you that this is the truth.”

  The neighboring chief stood up and faced me. “I will send for you when the twins are born,” he pledged.

  “I will come,” I promised him.

  We spoke further, and then the meeting ended and the old men began wandering off to their bomas, while I looked to the future, which I could see more clearly than Koinnage or the elders.

  I walked through the village until I found the bold young Ndemi, brandishing his spear and hurling it at a buffalo he had constructed out of dried grasses.

  “Jambo, Koriba!” he greeted me.

  “Jambo, my brave young warrior,” I replied.

  “I h
ave been practicing, as you ordered.”

  “I thought you wanted to hunt the gazelle,” I noted.

  “Gazelles are for children,” he answered. “I will slay mbogo, the buffalo.”

  “Mbogo may feel differently about it,” I said.

  “So much the better,” he said confidently. “I have no wish to kill an animal as it runs away from me.”

  “And when will you go out to slay the fierce mbogo?”

  He shrugged. “When I am more accurate.” He smiled up at me. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  I stared at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then spoke: “Tomorrow is a long time away. We have business tonight.”

  “What business?” he asked.

  “You must find ten friends, none of them yet of circumcision age, and tell them to come to the pond within the forest to the south. They must come after the sun has set, and you must tell them that Koriba the mundumugu commands that they tell no one, not even their parents, that they are coming.” I paused. “Do you understand, Ndemi?”

  “I understand.”

  “Then go,” I said. “Take my message to them.”

  He retrieved his spear from the straw buffalo and set off at a trot, young and tall and strong and fearless.

  You are the future, I thought, as I watched him run toward the village. Not Koinnage, not myself, not even the young bridegroom Njogu, for their time will have come and gone before the battle is joined. It is you, Ndemi, upon whom Kirinyaga must depend if it is to survive.

  Once before, the Kikuyu had to fight for their freedom. Under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, whose name has been forgotten by most of your parents, we took the terrible oath of Mau Mau, and we maimed and we killed and we committed such atrocities that finally we achieved Uhuru, for against such butchery, civilized men have no defense but to depart.

  And tonight, young Ndemi, while your parents are asleep, you and your companions will meet me deep in the woods, and you in your turn and they in theirs will learn one last tradition of the Kikuyu, for I will invoke not only the strength of Ngai but also the indomitable spirit of Jomo Kenyatta. I will administer a hideous oath and force you to do unspeakable things to prove her fealty, and I will teach each of you, in turn, how to administer the oath to those who come after you.

  There is a season for all things: for birth, for growth, for death. There is unquestionably a season for Utopia, but it will have to wait.

  For the season of Uhuru is upon us.

  BRUCE McALLISTER

  The Girl Who Loved Animals

  Bruce McAllister published his first story in 1963, when he was seventeen (it was written at the tender age of fifteen). Since then, with only a handful of stories, he has nevertheless managed to establish himself as one of the most respected writers in the business. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, In the Field of Fire, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His first novel, Humanity Prime, was one of the original Ace Specials series. Upcoming is a new novel from Tor, and he is at work on several other novel projects. McAllister lives in Redlands, California, where he is the director of the writing program at the University of Redlands. His story “Dream Baby” was in our Fifth Annual Collection.

  Here he tells the bittersweet story of a girl who loved, not wisely, but too well.…

  THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS

  Bruce McAllister

  They had her on the seventeenth floor in their new hi-security unit on Figueroa and weren’t going to let me up. Captain Mendoza, the one who thinks I’m the ugliest woman he’s ever laid eyes on and somehow manages to take it personally, was up there with her, and no one else was allowed. Or so this young lieutenant with a fresh academy tattoo on his left thumb tries to tell me. I get up real close so the kid can hear me over the screaming media crowd in the lobby and see this infamous face of mine, and I tell him I don’t think Chief Stracher will like getting a call at 0200 hours just because some desk cadet can’t tell a privileged soc worker from a media rep, and how good friends really shouldn’t bother each other at that time of the day anyway, am I right? It’s a lie, sure, but he looks worried, and I remember why I haven’t had anything done about the face I was born with. He gives me two escorts—a sleek young swatter with an infrared Ruger, and a lady in fatigues who’s almost as tall as I am—and up we go. They’re efficient kids. They frisk me in the elevator.

  * * *

  Mendoza wasn’t with her. Two P.D. medics with side arms were. The girl was sitting on a sensor cot in the middle of their new glass observation room—closed-air, anti-ballistic Plexi, and the rest—and was a mess. The video footage, which four million people had seen at ten, hadn’t been pixeled at all.

  Their hi-sec floor cost them thirty-three million dollars, I told myself, took them three years of legislation to get, and had everything you’d ever want to keep your witness or assassin or jihad dignitary alive—CCTV, microwave eyes, pressure mats, blast doors, laser blinds, eight different kinds of gas, and, of course, Vulcan minicannons from the helipad three floors up.

  I knew that Mendoza would have preferred someone more exciting than a twenty-year-old girl with a V Rating of nine point six and something strange growing inside her, but he was going to have to settle for this christening.

  I asked the medics to let me in. They told me to talk into their wall grid so the new computer could hear me. The computer said something like “Yeah, she’s okay,” and they opened the door and frisked me again.

  I asked them to leave, citing Welfare & Institutions Statute Thirty-eight. They wouldn’t, citing hi-sec orders under Penal Code Seven-A. I told them to go find Mendoza and tell him I wanted privacy for the official interview.

  Very nicely they said that neither of them could leave and that if I kept asking I could be held for obstruction, despite the same statute’s cooperation clause. That sounded right to me. I smiled and got to work.

  * * *

  Her name was Lissy Tomer. She was twenty-one, not twenty. According to Records, she’d been born in the East Valley, been abused as a child by both sets of parents, and, as the old story goes, hooked up with a man who would oblige her the same way. What had kept County out of her life, I knew, was the fact that early on, someone in W&I had set her up with an easy spousal-abuse complaint and felony restraining-order option that needed only a phone call to trigger. But she’d never exercised it, though the older bruises said she should have.

  She was pale and underweight and wouldn’t have looked very good even without the contusions, the bloody nose and lip, the belly, and the shivering. The bloody clothes didn’t help either. Neither did the wires and contact gel they had all over her for their beautiful new cot.

  But there was a fragility to her—princess-in-the-fairy-tale kind—that almost made her pretty.

  She flinched when I said hello, just as if I’d hit her. I wondered which had been worse—the beating or the media. He’d done it in a park and had been screaming at her when Mendoza’s finest arrived, and two uniforms had picked up a couple of C’s by calling it in to the networks.

  She was going to get hit with a beautiful posttraumatic stress disorder sometime down the road even if things didn’t get worse for her—which they would. The press wanted her badly. She was bloody, showing, and very visual.

  “Has the fetus been checked?” I asked the side arms. If they were going to listen, they could help.

  The shorter one said yes, a portable sonogram from County, and the baby looked okay.

  I turned back to the girl. She was looking up at me from the cot, looking hopeful, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what she thought I could do for her.

  “I’m your new V.R. advocate, Lissy.”

  She nodded, keeping her hands in her lap like a good girl.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions, if that’s all right. The more I know, the more help I can be, Lissy. But you know that, don’t you.” I grinned.

  She nodded agai
n and smiled, but the lip hurt.

  I identified myself, badge and department and appellation, then read her her rights under Protective Services provisions, as amended—what we in the trade call the Nhat Hanh Act. What you get and what you don’t.

  “First question, Lissy: Why’d you do it?” I asked it as gently as I could, flicking the hand recorder on. It was the law.

  I wondered if she knew what a law was.

  * * *

  Her I.Q. was eighty-four, congenital, and she was a Collins psychotype, class three dependent. She’d had six years of school and had once worked for five months for a custodial service in Monterey Park. Her Vulnerability Rating, all factors factored, was a whopping nine point six. It was the rating that had gotten her a felony restraint complaint option on the marital bond, and County had assumed that was enough to protect her … from him.

  As far as the provisions on low-I.Q. cases went, the husband had been fixed, she had a second-degree dependency on him, and an abortion in event of rape by another was standard. As far as County was concerned, she was protected, and society had exercised proper conscience. I really couldn’t blame her last V.R. advocate. I’d have assumed the same.

  And missed one thing.

  “I like animals a lot,” she said, and it made her smile. In the middle of a glass room, two armed medics beside her, the media screaming downstairs to get at her, her husband somewhere wishing he’d killed her, it was the one thing that could make her smile.

  She told me about a kitten she’d once had at the housing project on Crenshaw. She’d named it Lissy and had kept it alive “all by herself.” It was her job, she said, like her mother and fathers had jobs. Her second stepfather—or was it her mother’s brother? I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter—had taken it away one day, but she’d had it for a month or two.

  When she started living with the man who’d eventually beat her up in a park for the ten o’clock news, he let her have a little dog. He would have killed it out of jealousy in the end, but it died because she didn’t know about shots. He wouldn’t have paid for them anyway, and she seemed to know that. He hadn’t been like that when they first met. It sounded like neurotransmitter blocks, MPHG metabolism. The new bromaine that was on the streets would do it; all the fentanyl analogs would, too. There were a dozen substances on the street that would. You saw it all the time.