The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Here Dr. Hotton takes the so-called “modern view,” from which I must dissociate myself. I, for one, find it intolerable that large sections of the American wilderness should be made into “no-go areas” by the vandalistic activities of our so-called “striped-tailed cousins.” Admittedly, excesses may have been committed in early attempts to exterminate the verminous, booming population of these masked bandits. But the damage to agriculture has been severe, and the history of kamikaze attacks by self-infected rabid raccoons is a terrifying one.

  Dr. Hotton holds that we must now “share the planet with a fellow civilized species.” He bolsters his argument with hearsay evidence of “raccoon culture” that to me seems rather flimsy. The woven strips of bark known as “raccoon wampum” are impressive examples of animal dexterity, but to my mind it remains to be proven that they are actually “money.” And their so-called “pictographs” seem little more than random daubings. The fact remains that the raccoon population continues to rise exponentially, with raccoon bitches whelping massive litters every spring. Dr. Hotton, in a footnote, suggests that we can relieve crowding pressure by increasing the human presence in space. This seems a farfetched and unsatisfactory scheme.

  The last chapter is speculative in tone. The prospect of intelligent rats is grossly repugnant; so far, thank God, the tough immune system of the rat, inured to bacteria and filth, has rejected retroviral invasion. Indeed, the feral cat population seems to be driving these vermin toward extinction. Nor have opossums succumbed; indeed, marsupials of all kinds seem immune, making Australia a haven of a now-lost natural world. Whales and dolphins are endangered species; they seem unlikely to make a comeback even with the (as-yet-unknown) cetacean effects of chernobyling. And monkeys, which might pose a very considerable threat, are restricted to the few remaining patches of tropical forest and, like humans, seem resistant to the disease.

  Our neural chernobyl has bred a folklore all its own. Modern urban folklore speaks of “ascended masters,” a group of chernobyl victims able to survive the virus. Supposedly, they “pass for human,” forming a hidden counterculture among the normals, or “sheep.” This is a throwback to the dark tradition of Luddism, and the popular fears once projected onto the dangerous and reckless “priesthood of science” are now transferred to these fairy tales of supermen. This psychological transference becomes clear when one hears that these “ascended masters” specialize in advanced scientific research of a kind now frowned upon. The notion that some fraction of the population has achieved physical immortality, and hidden it from the rest of us, is utterly absurd.

  Dr. Hotton, quite rightly, treats this paranoid myth with the contempt it deserves.

  Despite my occasional reservations, this is a splendid book, likely to be the definitive work on this central phenomenon of modern times. Dr. Hotton may well hope to add another Pulitzer to his list of honors. At ninety-five, this grand old man of modern science has produced yet another stellar work in his rapidly increasing oeuvre. His many readers, like myself, can only marvel at his vigor and clamor for more.

  for Greg Bear

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  House of Bones

  We usually think of our neolithic ancesters as primitive and brutish, but as the slyly fascinating story that follows suggests, if we could actually meet them, we might be surprised.…

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and three Hugo Awards. His novels include Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, and Shadrach in the Furnace. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, and Beyond the Safe Zone. His most recent books are the novels Tom O’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, and At Winter’s End. For many years he edited the prestigious anthology series New Dimensions, and has recently, along with his wife, Karen Haber, taken over the editing of the Universe anthology series. His story “Multiples” was in our First Annual Collection; “The Affair” was in our Second Annual Collection; “Sailing to Byzantium”—which won a Nebula Award in 1986—was in our Third Annual Collection; “Against Babylon” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; and “The Pardoner’s Tale” was in our Fifth Annual Collection. He lives in Oakland, California.

  HOUSE OF BONES

  Robert Silverberg

  After the evening meal Paul starts tapping on his drum and chanting quietly to himself, and Marty picks up the rhythm, chanting too. And then the two of them launch into that night’s installment of the tribal epic, which is what happens, sooner or later, every evening.

  It all sounds very intense but I don’t have a clue to the meaning. They sing the epic in the religious language, which I’ve never been allowed to learn. It has the same relation to the everyday language, I guess, as Latin does to French or Spanish. But it’s private, sacred, for insiders only. Not for the likes of me.

  “Tell it, man!” B.J. yells. “Let it roll!” Danny shouts.

  Paul and Marty are really getting into it. Then a gust of fierce stinging cold whistles through the house as the reindeer-hide flap over the doorway is lifted, and Zeus comes stomping in.

  Zeus is the chieftain. Big burly man, starting to run to fat a little. Mean-looking, just as you’d expect. Heavy black beard streaked with gray and hard, glittering eyes that glow like rubies in a face wrinkled and carved by windburn and time. Despite the Paleolithic cold, all he’s wearing is a cloak of black fur, loosely draped. The thick hair on his heavy chest is turning gray too. Festoons of jewelry announce his power and status: necklaces of seashells, bone beads, and amber, a pendant of yellow wolf teeth, an ivory headband, bracelets carved from bone, five or six rings.

  Sudden silence. Ordinarily when Zeus drops in at B.J.’s house it’s for a little roistering and tale-telling and butt-pinching, but tonight he has come without either of his wives, and he looks troubled, grim. Jabs a finger toward Jeanne.

  “You saw the stranger today? What’s he like?”

  There’s been a stranger lurking near the village all week, leaving traces everywhere—footprints in the permafrost, hastily covered-over campsites, broken flints, scraps of charred meat. The whole tribe’s keyed. Strangers aren’t common. I was the last one, a year and a half ago. God only knows why they took me in: because I seemed so pitiful to them, maybe. But the way they’ve been talking, they’ll kill this one on sight if they can. Paul and Marty composed a Song of the Stranger last week and Marty sang it by the campfire two different nights. It was in the religious language so I couldn’t understand a word of it. But it sounded terrifying.

  Jeanne is Marty’s wife. She got a good look at the stranger this afternoon, down by the river while netting fish for dinner. “He’s short,” she tells Zeus. “Shorter than any of you, but with big muscles, like Gebravar.” Gebravar is Jeanne’s name for me. The people of the tribe are strong, but they didn’t pump iron when they were kids. My muscles fascinate them. “His hair is yellow and his eyes are gray. And he’s ugly. Nasty. Bighead, big flat nose. Walks with his shoulders hunched and his head down.” Jeanne shudders. “He’s like a pig. A real beast. A goblin. Trying to steal fish from the net, he was. But he ran away when he saw me.”

  Zeus listens, glowering, asking a question now and then—did he say anything, how was he dressed, was his skin painted in any way. Then he turns to Paul.

  “What do you think he is?”

  “A ghost,” Paul says. These people see ghosts everywhere. And Paul, who is the bard of the tribe, thinks about them all the time. His poems are full of ghosts. He feels the world of ghosts pressing in, pressing in. “Ghosts have gray eyes,” he says. “This man has gray eyes.”

  “A ghost, maybe, yes. But what kind of ghost?”

  “What kind?”

  Zeus glares. “You should listen to your own
poems,” he snaps. “Can’t you see it? This is a Scavenger Folk man prowling around. Or the ghost of one.”

  General uproar and hubbub at that.

  I turn to Sally. Sally’s my woman. I still have trouble saying that she’s my wife, but that’s what she really is. I call her Sally because there once was a girl back home who I thought I might marry, and that was her name, far from here in another geological epoch.

  I ask Sally who the Scavenger Folk are.

  “From the old times,” she says. “Lived here when we first came. But they’re all dead now. They—”

  That’s all she gets a chance to tell me. Zeus is suddenly looming over me. He’s always regarded me with a mixture of amusement and tolerant contempt, but now there’s something new in his eye. “Here is something you will do for us,” he says to me. “It takes a stranger to find a stranger. This will be your task. Whether he is a ghost or a man, we must know the truth. So you, tomorrow: you will go out and you will find him and you will take him. Do you understand? At first light you will go to search for him, and you will not come back until you have him.”

  I try to say something, but my lips don’t want to move. My silence seems good enough for Zeus, though. He smiles and nods fiercely and swings around, and goes stalking off into the night.

  * * *

  They all gather around me, excited in that kind of animated edgy way that comes over you when someone you know is picked for some big distinction. I can’t tell whether they envy me or feel sorry for me. B.J. hugs me, Danny punches me in the arm, Paul runs up a jubilant-sounding number on his drum. Marty pulls a wickedly sharp stone blade about nine inches long out of his kit-bag and presses it into my hand.

  “Here. You take this. You may need it.”

  I stare at it as if he had handed me a live grenade.

  “Look,” I say. “I don’t know anything about stalking and capturing people.”

  “Come on,” B.J. says. “What’s the problem?”

  B.J. is an architect. Paul’s a poet. Marty sings, better than Pavarotti. Danny paints and sculpts. I think of them as my special buddies. They’re all what you could loosely call Cro-Magnon men. I’m not. They treat me just like one of the gang, though. We five, we’re some bunch. Without them I’d have gone crazy here. Lost as I am, cut off as I am from everything I used to be and know.

  “You’re strong and quick,” Marty says. “You can do it.”

  “And you’re pretty smart, in your crazy way,” says Paul. “Smarter than he is. We aren’t worried at all.”

  If they’re a little condescending sometimes, I suppose I deserve it. They’re highly skilled individuals, after all, proud of the things they can do. To them I’m a kind of retard. That’s a novelty for me. I used to be considered highly skilled too, back where I came from.

  “You go with me,” I say to Marty. “You and Paul both. I’ll do whatever has to be done but I want you to back me up.”

  “No,” Marty says. “You do this alone.”

  “B.J.? Danny?”

  “No,” they say. And their smiles harden, their eyes grow chilly. Suddenly it doesn’t look so chummy around here. We may be buddies but I have to go out there by myself. Or I may have misread the whole situation and we aren’t such big buddies at all. Either way this is some kind of test, some rite of passage maybe, an initiation. I don’t know. Just when I think these people are exactly like us except for a few piddling differences of customs and languages, I realize how alien they really are. Not savages, far from it. But they aren’t even remotely like modern people. They’re something entirely else. Their bodies and their minds are pure Homo sapiens but their souls are different from ours by 20,000 years.

  To Sally I say, “Tell me more about the Scavenger Folk.”

  “Like animals, they were,” she says. “They could speak but only in grunts and belches. They were bad hunters and they ate dead things that they found on the ground, or stole the kills of others.”

  “They smelled like garbage,” says Danny. “Like an old dump where everything was rotten. And they didn’t know how to paint or sculpt.”

  “This was how they screwed,” says Marty, grabbing the nearest woman, pushing her down, pretending to hump her from behind. Everyone laughs, cheers, stamps his feet.

  “And they walked like this,” says B.J., doing an ape-shuffle, banging his chest with his fists.

  There’s a lot more, a lot of locker-room stuff about the ugly shaggy stupid smelly disgusting Scavenger Folk. How dirty they were, how barbaric. How the pregnant women kept the babies in their bellies twelve or thirteen months and they came out already hairy, with a full mouth of teeth. All ancient history, handed down through the generations by bards like Paul in the epics. None of them has ever actually seen a Scavenger. But they sure seem to detest them.

  “They’re all dead,” Paul says. “They were killed in the migration wars long ago. That has to be a ghost out there.”

  Of course I’ve guessed what’s up. I’m no archaeologist at all—West Point, fourth generation. My skills are in electronics, computers, time-shift physics. There was such horrible political infighting among the archaeology boys about who was going to get to go to the past that in the end none of them went and the gig wound up going to the military. Still, they sent me here with enough crash-course archaeology to be able to see that the Scavengers must have been what we call the Neanderthals, that shambling race of also-rans that got left behind in the evolutionary sweepstakes.

  So there really had been a war of extermination between the slow-witted Scavengers and clever Homo sapiens here in Ice Age Europe. But there must have been a few survivors left on the losing side, and one of them, God knows why, is wandering around near this village.

  Now I’m supposed to find the ugly stranger and capture him. Or kill him, I guess. Is that what Zeus wants from me? To take the stranger’s blood on my head? A very civilized tribe, they are, even if they do hunt huge woolly elephants and build houses out of their whitened bones. Too civilized to do their own murdering, and they figure they can send me out to do it for them.

  “I don’t think he’s a Scavenger,” Danny says. “I think he’s from Naz Glesim. The Naz Glesim people have gray eyes. Besides, what would a ghost want with fish?”

  Naz Glesim is a land far to the northeast, perhaps near what will someday be Moscow. Even here in the Paleolithic the world is divided into a thousand little nations. Danny once went on a great solo journey through all the neighboring lands: he’s a kind of tribal Marco Polo.

  “You better not let the chief hear that,” B.J. tells him. “He’ll break your balls. Anyway, the Naz Glesim people aren’t ugly. They look just like us except for their eyes.”

  “Well, there’s that,” Danny concedes. “But I still think—”

  Paul shakes his head. That gesture goes way back, too. “A Scavenger ghost,” he insists.

  B.J. looks at me. “What do you think, Pumangiup?” That’s his name for me.

  “Me?” I say. “What do I know about these things?”

  “You come from far away. You ever see a man like that?”

  “I’ve seen plenty of ugly men, yes.” The people of the tribe are tall and lean, brown hair and dark shining eyes, wide faces, bold cheekbones. If they had better teeth they’d be gorgeous. “But I don’t know about this one. I’d have to see him.”

  Sally brings a new platter of grilled fish over. I run my hand fondly over her bare haunch. Inside this house made of mammoth bones nobody wears very much clothing, because the structure is well insulated and the heat builds up even in the dead of winter. To me Sally is far and away the best-looking woman in the tribe, high firm breasts, long supple legs, alert, inquisitive face. She was the mate of a man who had to be killed last summer because he became infested with ghosts. Danny and B.J. and a couple of the others bashed his head in, by way of a mercy killing, and then there was a wild six-day wake, dancing and wailing around the clock. Because she needed a change of luck they gave Sally to me
, or me to her, figuring a holy fool like me must carry the charm of the gods. We have a fine time, Sally and I. We were two lost souls when we came together, and together we’ve kept each other from tumbling even deeper into the darkness.

  “You’ll be all right,” B.J. says. “You can handle it. The gods love you.”

  “I hope that’s true,” I tell him.

  Much later in the night Sally and I hold each other as though we both know that this could be our last time. She’s all over me, hot, eager. There’s no privacy in the bone-house and the others can hear us, four couples and I don’t know how many kids, but that doesn’t matter. It’s dark. Our little bed of fox pelts is our own little world.

  There’s nothing esoteric, by the way, about these people’s style of lovemaking. There are only so many ways that a male human body and a female human body can be joined together, and all of them, it seems, had already been invented by the time the glaciers came.

  At dawn, by first light, I am on my way, alone, to hunt the Scavenger man. I rub the rough strange wall of the house of bones for luck, and off I go.

  * * *

  The village stretches for a couple of hundred yards along the bank of a cold, swiftly flowing river. The three round bone-houses where most of us live are arranged in a row, and the fourth one, the long house that is the residence of Zeus and his family and also serves as the temple and house of parliament, is just beyond them. On the far side of it is the new fifth house that we’ve been building this past week. Farther down, there’s a workshop where tools are made and hides are scraped, and then a butchering area, and just past that there’s an immense garbage dump and a towering heap of mammoth bones for future construction projects.

  A sparse pine forest lies east of the village, and beyond it are the rolling hills and open plains where the mammoths and rhinos graze. No one ever goes into the river, because it’s too cold and the current is too strong, and so it hems us in like a wall on our western border. I want to teach the tribesfolk how to build kayaks one of these days. I should also try to teach them how to swim, I guess. And maybe a few years further along I’d like to see if we can chop down some trees and build a bridge. Will it shock the pants off them when I come out with all this useful stuff? They think I’m an idiot, because I don’t know about the different grades of mud and frozen ground, the colors of charcoal, the uses and qualities of antler, bone, fat, hide, and stone. They feel sorry for me because I’m so limited. But they like me all the same. And the gods love me. At least B.J. thinks so.