The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I was supposed to be here just four days and then the Zeller Effect rainbow would come for me and carry me home. Of course within a few weeks I realized that something had gone wonky at the uptime end, that the experiment had malfunctioned and that I probably wasn’t ever going to get home. There was that risk all along. Well, here I am, here I stay. First came stinging pain and anger and I suppose grief when the truth finally caught up with me. Now there’s just a dull ache that won’t go away.

  * * *

  In early afternoon I stumble across the Scavenger Man. It’s pure dumb luck. The trail has long since given out—the forest floor is covered with soft pine duff here, and I’m not enough of a hunter to distinguish one spoor from another in that—and I’m simply moving aimlessly when I see some broken branches, and then I get a whiff of burning wood, and I follow that scent twenty or thirty yards over a low rise and there he is, hunkered down by a hastily thrown-together little hearth roasting a couple of ptarmigans on a green spit. A scavenger he may be, but he’s a better man than I am when it comes to skulling ptarmigans.

  He’s really ugly. Jeanne wasn’t exaggerating at all.

  His head is huge and juts back a long way. His mouth is like a muzzle and his chin is hardly there at all and his forehead slopes down to huge brow ridges like an ape’s. His hair is like straw, and it’s all over him, though he isn’t really shaggy, no hairier than a lot of men I’ve known. His eyes are gray, yes, and small, deep-set. He’s built low and thick, like an Olympic weight lifter. He’s wearing a strip of fur around his middle and nothing else. He’s an honest-to-God Neanderthal, straight out of the textbooks, and when I see him a chill runs down my spine as though up till this minute I had never really believed that I had traveled 20,000 years in time and now, holy shit, the whole concept has finally become real to me.

  He sniffs and gets my wind, and his big brows knit and his whole body goes tense. He stares at me, checking me out, sizing me up. It’s very quiet here and we are primordial enemies, face to face with no one else around. I’ve never felt anything like that before.

  We are maybe twenty feet from each other. I can smell him and he can smell me, and it’s the smell of fear on both sides. I can’t begin to anticipate his move. He rocks back and forth a little, as if getting ready to spring up and come charging, or maybe bolt off into the forest.

  But he doesn’t do that. The first moment of tension passes and he eases back. He doesn’t try to attack, and he doesn’t get up to run. He just sits there in a kind of patient, tired way, staring at me, waiting to see what I’m going to do. I wonder if I’m being suckered, set up for a sudden onslaught.

  I’m so cold and hungry and tired that I wonder if I’ll be able to kill him when he comes at me. For a moment I almost don’t care.

  Then I laugh at myself for expecting shrewdness and trickery from a Neanderthal man. Between one moment and the next all the menace goes out of him for me. He isn’t pretty but he doesn’t seem like a goblin, or a demon, just an ugly thick-bodied man sitting alone in a chilly forest.

  And I know that sure as anything I’m not going to try to kill him, not because he’s so terrifying but because he isn’t.

  “They sent me out here to kill you,” I say, showing him the flint knife.

  He goes on staring. I might just as well be speaking Engish, or Sanskrit.

  “I’m not going to do it,” I tell him. “That’s the first thing you ought to know. I’ve never killed anyone before and I’m not going to begin with a complete stranger. Okay? Is that understood?”

  He says something now. His voice is soft and indistinct, but I can tell that he’s speaking some entirely other language.

  “I can’t understand what you’re telling me,” I say, “and you don’t understand me. So we’re even.”

  I take a couple of steps toward him. The blade is still in my hand. He doesn’t move. I see now that he’s got no weapons and even though he’s powerfully built and could probably rip my arms off in two seconds, I’d be able to put the blade into him first. I point to the north, away from the village, and make a broad sweeping gesture. “You’d be wise to head off that way,” I say, speaking very slowly and loudly, as if that would matter. “Get yourself out of the neighborhood. They’ll kill you otherwise. You understand? Capisce? Verstehen Sie? Go. Scat. Scram. I won’t kill you, but they will.”

  I gesture some more, vociferously pantomiming his route to the north. He looks at me. He looks at the knife. His enormous cavernous nostrils widen and flicker. For a moment I think I’ve misread him in the most idiotically naive way, that he’s been simply biding his time getting ready to jump me as soon as I stop making speeches.

  Then he pulls a chunk of meat from the bird he’s been roasting, and offers it to me.

  “I come here to kill you, and you give me lunch?”

  He holds it out. A bribe? Begging for his life?

  “I can’t,” I say. “I came here to kill you. Look, I’m just going to turn around and go back, all right? If anybody asks, I never saw you.” He waves the meat at me and I begin to salivate as though it’s pheasant under glass. But no, no, I can’t take his lunch. I point to him, and again to the north, and once more indicate that he ought not to let the sun set on him in this town. Then I turn and start to walk away, wondering if this is the moment when he’ll leap up and spring on me from behind and choke the life out of me.

  I take five steps, ten, and then I hear him moving behind me.

  So this is it. We really are going to fight.

  I turn, my knife at the ready. He looks down at it sadly. He’s standing there with the piece of meat still in his hand, coming after me to give it to me anyway.

  “Jesus,” I say. “You’re just lonely.”

  He says something in that soft blurred language of his and holds out the meat. I take it and bolt it down fast, even though it’s only half-cooked—dumb Neanderthal!—and I almost gag. He smiles. I don’t care what he looks like, if he smiles and shares his food then he’s human by me. I smile too. Zeus is going to murder me. We sit down together and watch the other ptarmigan cook, and when it’s ready we share it, neither of us saying a word. He has trouble getting a wing off, and I hand him my knife, which he uses in a clumsy way and hands back to me.

  After lunch I get up and say, “I’m going back now. I wish to hell you’d head off to the hills before they catch you.”

  And I turn, and go.

  And he follows me like a lost dog who has just adopted a new owner.

  * * *

  So I bring him back to the village with me. There’s simply no way to get rid of him short of physically attacking him, and I’m not going to do that. As we emerge from the forest a sickening wave of fear sweeps over me. I think at first it’s the roast ptarmigan trying to come back up, but no, it’s downright terror, because the Scavenger is obviously planning to stick with me right to the end, and the end is not going to be good. I can see Zeus’ blazing eyes, his furious scowl. The thwarted Ice Age chieftain in a storm of wrath. Since I didn’t do the job, they will. They’ll kill him and maybe they’ll kill me too, since I’ve revealed myself to be a dangerous moron who will bring home the very enemy he was sent out to eliminate.

  “This is dumb,” I tell the Neanderthal. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”

  He smiles again. You don’t understand shit, do you, fellow?

  We are past the garbage dump now, past the butchering area. B.J. and his crew are at work on the new house. B.J. looks up when he sees me and his eyes are bright with surprise.

  He nudges Marty and Marty nudges Paul, and Paul taps Danny on the shoulder. They point to me and to the Neanderthal. They look at each other. They open their mouths but they don’t say anything. They whisper, they shake their heads. They back off a little, and circle around us, gaping, staring.

  Christ. Here it comes.

  I can imagine what they’re thinking. They’re thinking that I have really screwed up. That I’ve brought a ghost home for dinner
. Or else an enemy that I was supposed to kill. They’re thinking that I’m an absolute lunatic, that I’m an idiot, and now they’ve got to do the dirty work that I was too dumb to do. And I wonder if I’ll try to defend the Neanderthal against them, and what it’ll be like if I do. What am I going to do, take them all on at once? And go down swinging as my four sweet buddies close in on me and flatten me into the permafrost? I will. If they force me to it, by God I will. I’ll go for their guts with Marty’s long stone blade if they try anything on the Neanderthal, or on me.

  I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about any of this.

  Then Marty points and claps his hands and jumps about three feet in the air.

  “Hey!” he yells. “Look at that! He brought the ghost back with him!”

  And then they move in on me, just like that, the four of them, swarming all around me, pressing close, pummeling hard. There’s no room to use the knife. They come on too fast. I do what I can with elbows, knees, even teeth. But they pound on me from every side, open fists against my ribs, sides of hands crashing against the meat of my back. The breath goes from me and I come close to toppling as the pain breaks out all over me at once. I need all of my strength, and then some, to keep from going down under their onslaught, and I think, this is a dumb way to die, beaten to death by a bunch of berserk cave men in 20,000 B.C.

  But after the first few wild moments things become a bit quieter and I get myself together and manage to push them back from me a little way, and I land a good one that sends Paul reeling backward with blood spouting from his lip, and I whirl toward B.J. and start to take him out, figuring I’ll deal with Marty on the rebound. And then I realize that they aren’t really fighting with me anymore, and in fact that they never were.

  It dawns on me that they were smiling and laughing as they worked me over, that their eyes were full of laughter and love, that if they had truly wanted to work me over it would have taken the four of them about seven and a half seconds to do it.

  They’re just having fun. They’re playing with me in a jolly roughhouse way.

  They step back from me. We all stand there quietly for a moment, breathing hard, rubbing our cuts and bruises. The thought of throwing up crosses my mind and I push it away.

  “You brought the ghost back,” Marty says again.

  “Not a ghost,” I say. “He’s real.”

  “Not a ghost?”

  “Not a ghost, no. He’s live. He followed me back here.”

  “Can you believe it?” B.J. cries. “Live! Followed him back here! Just came marching right in here with him!” He turns to Paul. His eyes are gleaming and for a second I think they’re going to jump me all over again. If they do I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with it. But he says simply, “This has to be a song by tonight. This is something special.”

  “I’m going to get the chief,” says Danny, and runs off.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “I know what the chief wanted. I just couldn’t do it.”

  “Do what?” B.J. asks. “What are you talking about?” says Paul.

  “Kill him,” I say. “He was just sitting there by his fire, roasting a couple of birds, and he offered me a chunk, and—”

  “Kill him?” B.J. says. “You were going to kill him?”

  “Wasn’t that what I was supposed—”

  He goggles at me and starts to answer, but just then Zeus comes running up, and pretty much everyone else in the tribe, the women and the kids too, and they sweep up around us like the tide. Cheering, yelling, dancing, pummeling me, laughing, shouting in that cheerful bone-smashing way of theirs. Forming a ring around the Scavenger Man and throwing their hands in the air. It’s a jubilee. Even Zeus is grinning. Marty begins to sing and Paul gets going on the drum. And Zeus comes over to me and embraces me like the big old bear that he is.

  * * *

  “I had it all wrong, didn’t I?” I say later to B.J. “You were all just testing me, sure. But not to see how good a hunter I am.”

  He looks at me without any comprehension at all and doesn’t answer. B.J., with that crafty architect’s mind of his that takes in everything.

  “You wanted to see if I was really human, right? If I had compassion, if I could treat a lost stranger the way I was treated myself.”

  Blank stares. Deadpan faces.

  “Marty? Paul?”

  They shrug. Tap their foreheads: the timeless gesture, ages old.

  Are they putting me on? I don’t know. But I’m certain that I’m right. If I had killed the Neanderthal they almost certainly would have killed me. That must have been it. I need to believe that that was it. All the time that I was congratulating them for not being the savages I had expected them to be, they were wondering how much of a savage I was. They had tested the depth of my humanity; and I had passed. And they finally see that I’m civilized too.

  At any rate the Scavenger Man lives with us now. Not as a member of the tribe, of course, but as a sacred pet of some sort, a tame chimpanzee, perhaps. He may very well be the last of his kind, or close to it; and though the tribe looks upon him as something dopey and filthy and pathetic, they’re not going to do him any harm. To them he’s a pitiful bedraggled savage who’ll bring good luck if he’s treated well. He’ll keep the ghosts away. Hell, maybe that’s why they took me in, too.

  As for me, I’ve given up what little hope I had of going home. The Zeller rainbow will never return for me, of that I’m altogether sure. But that’s all right. I’ve been through some changes. I’ve come to terms with it.

  We finished the new house yesterday and B.J. let me put the last tusk in place, the one they call the ghost-bone, that keeps dark spirits outside. It’s apparently a big honor to be the one who sets up the ghost-bone. Afterward the four of them sang the Song of the House, which is a sort of dedication. Like all their other songs, it’s in the old language, the secret one, the sacred one. I couldn’t sing it with them, not having the words, but I came in with oom-pahs on the choruses and that seemed to go down pretty well.

  I told them that by the next time we need to build a house, I will have invented beer, so that we can all go out when it’s finished and get drunk to celebrate properly.

  Of course they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but they looked pleased anyway.

  And tomorrow, Paul says, he’s going to begin teaching me the other language. The secret one. The one that only the members of the tribe may know.

  GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER

  Schrödinger’s Kitten

  Every moment of every day a thousand possible futures die unborn around us, a thousand corners not turned, a thousand roads not taken. Sometimes the uncertainty of it all may get to us—but sometimes that very uncertainty may prove to be the finest thing of all.…

  Perhaps the hot young writer of the ’70s (he became a full-time writer in 1971), George Alec Effinger has subsequently maintained a reputation as one of the most creative innovators in SF, and one of the genre’s finest short-story writers. His short work has appeared everywhere, from Playboy to Haunt of Horror. His first novel, What Entropy Means to Me (recently re-released), is considered a cult classic in some circles, and his most recent, and most popular, novel, the gritty and fascinating When Gravity Fails, was a prime contender for a 1987 Hugo Award. His many other books include the novels The Wolves of Memory, The Bird of Time, Those Gentle Voices, and Utopia 3, and the collections Mixed Feelings, Irrational Numbers, and Idle Pleasures. Upcoming is A Fire in the Sun, another book set in the evocative milieu of When Gravity Fails—as is “Schrödinger’s Kitten.”

  SCHRÖDINGER’S KITTEN

  George Alec Effinger

  The clean crescent moon that began the new month hung in the western sky across from the alley. Jehan was barely twelve years old, too young to wear the veil, but she did so anyway. She had never before been out so late alone. She heard the sounds of celebration far away, the three-day festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramada
n. Two voices sang drunkenly as they passed the alley; two others loudly and angrily disputed the price of some honey cakes. The laughter and the shouting came to Jehan as if from another world. In the past, she’d always loved the festival of Îd-el-Fitr; she took no part in the festivities now, though, and it seemed somehow odd to her that anyone else still could. Soon she gave it all no more of her attention. This year she must keep a meeting more important than any holiday. She sighed, shrugging: The festival would come around again next year. Tonight, with only the silver moon for company, she shivered in her blue-black robe.

  Jehan Fatima Ashûfi stepped back a few feet deeper into the alley, farther out of the light. All along the street, people who would otherwise never be seen in this quarter were determinedly amusing themselves. Jehan shivered again and waited. The moment she longed for would come at dawn. Even now the sky was just dark enough to reveal the moon and the first impetuous stars. In the Islamic world, night began when one could no longer distinguish a white thread from a black one; it was not yet night. Jehan clutched her robe closely to her with her left hand. In her right hand, hidden by her long sleeve, was the keen-edged, gleaming, curved blade she had taken from her father’s room.

  She was hungry and wished she had money to buy something to eat, but she had none. In the Budayeen there were many girls her age who already had ways of getting money of their own; Jehan was not one of them. She glanced about and saw only the filth-strewn, damp, and muddy paving stones. The reek of the alley disgusted her. She was bored and lonely and afraid. Then, as if her whole sordid world suddenly dissolved into something else, something wholly foreign, she saw more.

  * * *

  Jehan Ashûfi was twenty-six years old. She was dressed in a conservative dark gray woolen suit, cut longer and more severely than fashion dictated but appropriate for a bright young physicist. She affected no jewelry and wore her black hair in a long braid down her back. She took a little effort each morning to look as plain as possible while she was accompanying her eminent teacher and adviser. That had been Heisenberg’s idea: In these days who believed a beautiful woman could also be a highly talented scientist? Jehan soon learned that her wish of being inconspicuous was in vain. Her dark skin and her accent marked her as a foreigner. She was clearly not European. Possibly she had Levantine blood. Most who met her thought she was probably a Jew. This was Göttingen, Germany, and it was 1925.