The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I start my search down by the riverfront, since that’s where Jeanne saw the Scavenger yesterday. The sun, at dawn on this Ice Age autumn morning, is small and pale, a sad little lemon far away. But the wind is quiet now. The ground is still soft from the summer thaw, and I look for tracks. There’s permafrost five feet down, but the topsoil, at least, turns spongy in May and gets downright muddy by July. Then it hardens again and by October it’s like steel, but by October we live mostly indoors.

  There are footprints all over the place. We wear leather sandals, but a lot of us go barefoot much of the time, even now, in forty-degree weather. The people of the tribe have long, narrow feet with high arches. But down by the water near the fishnets I pick up a different spoor, the mark of a short, thick, low-arched foot with curled-under toes. It must be my Neanderthal. I smile. I feel like Sherlock Holmes. “Hey, look, Marty,” I say to the sleeping village. “I’ve got the ugly bugger’s track. B.J.? Paul? Danny? You just watch me. I’m going to find him faster than you could believe.”

  * * *

  Those aren’t their actual names. I just call them that, Marty, Paul, B.J., Danny. Around here everyone gives everyone else his own private set of names. Marty’s name for B.J. is Ungklava. He calls Danny Tisbalalak and Paul is Shibgamon. Paul calls Marty Dolibog. His name for B.J. is Kalamok. And so on all around the tribe, a ton of names, hundreds and hundreds of names for just forty or fifty people. It’s a confusing system. They have reasons for it that satisfy them. You learn to live with it.

  A man never reveals his true name, the one his mother whispered when he was born. Not even his father knows that, or his wife. You could put hot stones between his legs and he still wouldn’t tell you that true name of his, because that’d bring every ghost from Cornwall to Vladivostok down on his ass to haunt him. The world is full of angry ghosts, resentful of the living, ready to jump on anyone who’ll give them an opening and plague him like leeches, like bedbugs, like every malign and perverse bloodsucking pest rolled into one.

  We are somewhere in western Russia, or maybe Poland. The landscape suggests that: flat, bleak, a cold grassy steppe with a few oaks and birches and pines here and there. Of course a lot of Europe must look like that in this glacial epoch. But the clincher is the fact that these people build mammoth-bone houses. The only place that was ever done was Eastern Europe, so far as anybody down the line knows. Possibly they’re the oldest true houses in the world.

  What gets me is the immensity of this prehistoric age, the spans of time. It goes back and back and back and all of it is alive for these people. We think it’s a big deal to go to England and see a cathedral a thousand years old. They’ve been hunting on this steppe thirty times as long. Can you visualize 30,000 years? To you, George Washington lived an incredibly long time ago. George is going to have his 300th birthday very soon. Make a stack of books a foot high and tell yourself that that stands for all the time that has gone by since George was born in 1732. Now go on stacking up the books. When you’ve got a pile as high as a ten-story building, that’s 30,000 years.

  A stack of years almost as high as that separates me from you, right this minute. In my bad moments, when the loneliness and the fear and the pain and the remembrance of all that I have lost start to operate on me, I feel that stack of years pressing on me with the weight of a mountain. I try not to let it get me down. But that’s a hell of a weight to carry. Now and then it grinds me right into the frozen ground.

  * * *

  The flat-footed track leads me up to the north, around the garbage dump, and toward the forest. Then I lose it. The prints go round and round, double back to the garbage dump, then to the butchering area, then toward the forest again, then all the way over to the river. I can’t make sense of the pattern. The poor dumb bastard just seems to have been milling around, foraging in the garbage for anything edible, then taking off again but not going far, checking back to see if anything’s been caught in the fishnet, and so on. Where’s he sleeping? Out in the open, I guess. Well, if what I heard last night is true, he’s as hairy as a gorilla; maybe the cold doesn’t bother him much.

  Now that I’ve lost the trail, I have some time to think about the nature of the mission, and I start getting uncomfortable.

  I’m carrying a long stone knife. I’m out here to kill. I picked the military for my profession a long time ago, but it wasn’t with the idea of killing anyone, and certainly not in hand-to-hand combat. I guess I see myself as a representative of civilization, somebody trying to hold back the night, not as anyone who would go creeping around planning to stick a sharp flint blade into some miserable solitary tramp.

  But I might well be the one that gets killed. He’s wild, he’s hungry, he’s scared, he’s primitive. He may not be very smart, but at least he’s shrewd enough to have made it to adulthood, and he’s out here earning his living by his wits and his strength. This is his world, not mine. He may be stalking me even while I’m stalking him, and when we catch up with each other he won’t be fighting by any rules I ever learned. A good argument for turning back right now.

  On the other hand if I come home in one piece with the Scavenger still at large, Zeus will hang my hide on the bone-house wall for disobeying him. We may all be great buddies here but when the chief gives the word, you hop to it or else. That’s the way it’s been since history began and I have no reason to think it’s any different back here.

  I simply have to kill the Scavenger. That’s all there is to it.

  I don’t want to get killed by a wild man in this forest, and I don’t want to be nailed up by a tribal court-martial either. I want to live to get back to my own time. I still hang on to the faint chance that the rainbow will come back for me and take me down the line to tell my tale in what I have already started to think of as the future. I want to make my report.

  The news I’d like to bring you people up there in the world of the future is that these Ice Age folk don’t see themselves as primitive. They know, they absolutely know, that they’re the crown of creation. They have a language—two of them, in fact—they have history, they have music, they have poetry, they have technology, they have art, they have architecture. They have religion. They have laws. They have a way of life that has worked for thousands of years, that will go on working for thousands more. You may think it’s all grunts and war clubs back here, but you’re wrong. I can make this world real to you, if I could only get back there to you.

  But even if I can’t ever get back, there’s a lot I want to do here. I want to learn that epic of theirs and write it down for you to read. I want to teach them about kayaks and bridges, and maybe more. I want to finish building the bone-house we started last week. I want to go on horsing around with my buddies B.J. and Danny and Marty and Paul. I want Sally. Christ, I might even have kids by her, and inject my own futuristic genes into the Ice Age gene pool.

  I don’t want to die today trying to fulfill a dumb murderous mission in this cold bleak prehistoric forest.

  * * *

  The morning grows warmer, though not warm. I pick up the trail again, or think I do, and start off toward the east and north, into the forest. Behind me I hear the sounds of laughter and shouting and song as work gets going on the new house, but soon I’m out of earshot. Now I hold the knife in my hand, ready for anything. There are wolves in here, as well as a frightened half man who may try to kill me before I can kill him.

  I wonder how likely it is that I’ll find him. I wonder how long I’m supposed to stay out here, too—a couple of hours, a day, a week?—and what I’m supposed to use for food, and how I keep my ass from freezing after dark, and what Zeus will say or do if I come back empty-handed.

  I’m wandering around randomly now. I don’t feel like Sherlock Holmes any longer.

  * * *

  Working on the bone-house, that’s what I’d rather be doing now. Winter is coming on and the tribe has grown too big for the existing four houses. B.J. directs the job and Marty and Paul sing and chant and play
the drum and flute, and about seven of us do the heavy labor.

  “Pile those jawbones chin down,” B.J. will yell, as I try to slip one into the foundation the wrong way around. “Chin down, bozo! That’s better.” Paul bangs out a terrific riff on the drum to applaud me for getting it right the second time. Marty starts making up a ballad about how dumb I am, and everyone laughs. But it’s loving laughter. “Now that backbone over there,” B.J. yells to me. I pull a long string of mammoth vertebrae from the huge pile. The bones are white, old bones that have been lying around a long time. They’re dense and heavy. “Wedge it down in there good! Tighter! Tighter!” I huff and puff under the immense weight of the thing, and stagger a little, and somehow get it where it belongs, and jump out of the way just in time as Danny and two other men come tottering toward me carrying a gigantic skull.

  The winter-houses are intricate and elaborate structures that require real ingenuity of design and construction. At this point in time B.J. may well be the best architect the world has ever known. He carries around a piece of ivory on which he has carved a blueprint for the house, and makes sure everybody weaves the bones and skulls and tusks into the structure just the right way. There’s no shortage of construction materials. After 30,000 years of hunting mammoths in this territory, these people have enough bones lying around to build a city the size of Los Angeles.

  The houses are warm and snug. They’re round and domed, like big igloos made out of bones. The foundation is a circle of mammoth skulls with maybe a hundred mammoth jawbones stacked up over them in fancy herringbone patterns to form the wall. The roof is made of hides stretched over enormous tusks mounted overhead as arches. The whole thing is supported by a wooden frame and smaller bones are chinked in to seal the openings in the walls, plus a plastering of red clay. There’s an entranceway made up of gigantic thighbones set up on end. It may all sound bizarre but there’s a weird kind of beauty to it and you have no idea, once you’re inside, that the bitter winds of the Pleistocene are howling all around you.

  The tribe is seminomadic and lives by hunting and gathering. In the summer, which is about two months long, they roam the steppe, killing mammoths and rhinos and musk oxen, and bagging up berries and nuts to get them through the winter. Toward what I would guess is August the weather turns cold and they start to head for their village of bone-houses, hunting reindeer along the way. By the time the really bad weather arrives—think Minnesota-and-a-half—they’re settled in for the winter with six months’ worth of meat stored in deep-freeze pits in the permafrost. It’s an orderly, rhythmic life. There’s a real community here. I’d be willing to call it a civilization. But—as I stalk my human prey out here in the cold—I remind myself that life here is harsh and strange. Alien. Maybe I’m doing all this buddy-buddy nickname stuff simply to save my own sanity, you think? I don’t know.

  * * *

  If I get killed out here today the thing I’ll regret most is never learning their secret religious language and not being able to understand the big historical epic that they sing every night. They just don’t want to teach it to me. Evidently it’s something outsiders aren’t meant to understand.

  The epic, Sally tells me, is an immense account of everything that’s ever happened: the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Encyclopaedia Britannica all rolled into one, a vast tale of gods and kings and men and warfare and migrations and vanished empires and great calamities. The text is so big and Sally’s recounting of it is so sketchy that I have only the foggiest idea of what it’s about, but when I hear it I want desperately to understand it. It’s the actual history of a forgotten world, the tribal annals of thirty millennia, told in a forgotten language, all of it as lost to us as last year’s dreams.

  If I could learn it and translate it I would set it all down in writing so that maybe it would be found by archaeologists thousands of years from now. I’ve been taking notes on these people already, an account of what they’re like and how I happen to be living among them. I’ve made twenty tablets so far, using the same clay that the tribe uses to make its pots and sculptures, and firing it in the same beehive-shaped kiln. It’s a godawful slow job writing on slabs of clay with my little bone knife. I bake my tablets and bury them in the cobblestone floor of the house. Somewhere in the twenty-first or twenty-second century a Russian archaeologist will dig them up and they’ll give him one hell of a jolt. But of their history, their myths, their poetry, I don’t have a thing, because of the language problem. Not a damned thing.

  * * *

  Noon has come and gone. I find some white berries on a glossy-leaved bush and, after only a moment’s hesitation, gobble them down. There’s a faint sweetness there. I’m still hungry even after I pick the bush clean.

  If I were back in the village now, we’d have knocked off work at noon for a lunch of dried fruit and strips of preserved reindeer meat, washed down with mugs of mildly fermented fruit juice. The fermentation is accidental, I think, an artifact of their storage methods. But obviously there are yeasts here and I’d like to try to invent wine and beer. Maybe they’ll make me a god for that. This year I invented writing, but I did it for my sake and not for theirs and they aren’t much interested in it. I think they’ll be more impressed with beer.

  A hard, nasty wind has started up out of the east. It’s September now and the long winter is clamping down. In half an hour the temperature has dropped fifteen degrees, and I’m freezing. I’m wearing a fur parka and trousers, but that thin icy wind cuts right through. And it scours up the fine dry loose topsoil and flings it in our faces. Someday that light yellow dust will lie thirty feet deep over this village, and over B.J. and Marty and Danny and Paul, and probably over me as well.

  Soon they’ll be quitting for the day. The house will take eight or ten more days to finish, if early-season snowstorms don’t interrupt. I can imagine Paul hitting the drum six good raps to wind things up and everybody making a run for indoors, whooping and hollering. These are high-spirited guys. They jump and shout and sing, punch each other playfully on the arms, brag about the goddesses they’ve screwed and the holy rhinos they’ve killed. Not that they’re kids. My guess is that they’re twenty-five, thirty years old, senior men of the tribe. The life expectancy here seems to be about forty-five. I’m thirty-four. I have a grandmother alive back in Illinois. Nobody here could possibly believe that. The one I call Zeus, the oldest and richest man in town, looks to be about fifty-three, probably is younger than that, and is generally regarded as favored by the gods because he’s lived so long. He’s a wild old bastard, still full of bounce and vigor. He lets you know that he keeps those two wives of his busy all night long, even at his age. These are robust people. They lead a tough life, but they don’t know that, and so their souls are buoyant. I definitely will try to turn them on to beer next summer, if I last that long and if I can figure out the technology. This could be one hell of a party town.

  * * *

  Sometimes I can’t help feeling abandoned by my own time. I know it’s irrational. It has to be just an accident that I’m marooned here. But there are times when I think the people up there in 2013 simply shrugged and forgot about me when things went wrong, and it pisses me off tremendously until I get it under control. I’m a professionally trained hard-ass. But I’m 20,000 years from home and there are times when it hurts more than I can stand.

  Maybe beer isn’t the answer. Maybe what I need is a still. Brew up some stronger stuff than beer, a little moonshine to get me through those very black moments when the anger and the really heavy resentment start breaking through.

  In the beginning the tribe looked on me, I guess, as a moron. Of course I was in shock. The time trip was a lot more traumatic than the experiments with rabbits and turtles had led us to think.

  There I was, naked, dizzy, stunned, blinking and gaping, retching and puking. The air had a bitter acid smell to it—who expected that, that the air would smell different in the past?—and it was so cold it burned my nostrils. I knew at once that I
hadn’t landed in the pleasant France of the Cro-Magnons but in some harsher, bleaker land far to the east. I could still see the rainbow glow of the Zeller ring, but it was vanishing fast, and then it was gone.

  The tribe found me ten minutes later. That was an absolute fluke. I could have wandered for months, encountering nothing but reindeer and bison. I could have frozen; I could have starved. But no, the men I would come to call B.J. and Danny and Marty and Paul were hunting near the place where I dropped out of the sky and they stumbled on me right away. Thank God they didn’t see me arrive. They’d have decided that I was a supernatural being and would have expected miracles from me, and I can’t do miracles. Instead they simply took me for some poor dope who had wandered so far from home that he didn’t know where he was, which after all was essentially the truth.

  I must have seemed like one sad case. I couldn’t speak their language or any other language they knew. I carried no weapons. I didn’t know how to make tools out of flints or sew a fur parka or set up a snare for a wolf or stampede a herd of mammoths into a trap. I didn’t know anything, in fact, not a single useful thing. But instead of spearing me on the spot they took me to their village, fed me, clothed me, taught me their language. Threw their arms around me and told me what a great guy I was. They made me one of them. That was a year and a half ago. I’m a kind of holy fool for them, a sacred idiot.