The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It was an hour, maybe two—he wore no watch—when he heard her, not speaking, unmistakable: somehow she knew he was there, and was calling him. Peremptory, almost angry—Trisha, angry with him! He went to her—there was no way not to—and saw her wear a darker color than he had ever seen before, a deep coral flush. The surface of her seemed to glitter, and her voice was higher, less understandable.

  She told him to stop it. Stop it now.

  “Stop what?” but he was obviously guilty; he was flushing, too. And angry, angry as she. “It’s a free fucking country, isn’t it?” and more, getting louder and less coherent, until she ordered, ordered, him away: go home, she said, almost red now, never do this again. And unspoken, unspeakable, the threat that she would send him away for good. “Go to hell,” he shrieked, and hurled the nearest thing—a cracked plastic ashtray full of old butts; it did not hit her, but the ashes sifted down to settle on her skin. He slammed out, ran down the stairs, drove off with much squealing of tires and open-window cursing. He was badly frightened: of banishment, of the impossibility of never seeing her, never having her again. Frightened not of her anger, but at what had prompted it; instinct had been right; there was more than privacy at stake here.

  He went back. He had to; even the risk was less than the need to know. More cunning this time, he hid on the ground floor, sitting beerless, solemn and immobile in the greenish shadow of the door, determined to wait all day and all night, to wait until an answer came. The heat seemed more brutal, or perhaps that was his fear.

  Not so many people in-and-out today. The khaki-shorts guy, as usual, hurrying past without a glance, hurrying up the stairs. He followed, very very quietly, creeping like an insect to the top of the stairs. Khaki Shorts went down her hallway; Khaki Shorts, my God! Khaki Shorts went inside her apartment. Without knocking! Without a key!

  It was hard to breathe, all of a sudden, hard to stand. Sweat ran down his sides. His sores tingled. Without knowing he did it, he turned her doorknob, with one lurching motion slammed open her door. He stood in the doorway unmoving, unspeaking, seeing.

  Khaki Shorts was already out of them, one naked sore-spotted leg already resting on Trisha’s sweet pink bulk, erection rapidly wilting at the sight of Taylor in the doorway. “What the fuck?” said Khaki Shorts, and in one lunge Taylor grabbed him by the arm and punched him solidly in the face, punched him again before an answering punch knocked his own air away. He fell back, landing square on his ass, a comical pose. Trisha’s brick-red color was grimmer than anything she might have said. Khaki Shorts was bellowing “What the fuck’s your problem, man? You her pimp or something, man?” and Taylor got up, shaking his head, his mouth hanging open, staring like a walking lobotomy, and kneed Khaki Shorts as he dressed; a motion of perfect violence, perfectly executed. Khaki Shorts let out a mumbled grunt and vomited, down on one knee, and Taylor turned and left.

  Driving home he cried, still open-mouthed, sick with a grief he could not control, empty of all rage: this was far too serious for stupid anger. You her pimp, man? You her pimp, man? He drove past his own apartment, had to turn around and go back. Inside he sat staring down at his hands, his shaking hands. He sat that way until it grew dark, then light again. His hands had stopped shaking. He knew what he had to do.

  He parked across from her building, left the keys in the car. His walk was brisk, unhurried. There was no expression on his face. He opened her door on a woman with bright blonde hair and sagging breasts, her pulpish body bright with sores: “Don’t mind me,” he said, voice too flat but void of threat. “Just go on,” and he went into the bathroom and carefully closed the door.

  The woman left at once, and Trisha’s command came to him, ominous and cool. He was not afraid. He left the bathroom, came to sit beside her. She was a fierce tomato color, and her teeth were exposed.

  “I love you,” he said, very calmly. “But I can’t share you.”

  She did not answer, but slowly, too slowly to track, she went from red to pink again, the softest, palest pink he had ever seen her wear. She did not question him—he was grateful for that—in fact did not speak at all, only reached with her bulk, her loving vastness, opened herself to him: a long precious lovemaking, absolute in its kindness: she understood what he needed.

  He did not cry, this time, nor did he move from her. All his sores were bleeding, fresh red blood and a cool fluid, and the mixture beaded, ran off her skin. He was weak, too weak to take more than tiny erratic breaths, too weak to keep his eyes open; but before they closed for good, he saw her go a color for which there was no name, and he knew it for her true color, the color of her heart. A sweet and luminous smile, and her embrace grew stronger and stronger, a force terrific but completely painless, like being hugged to death. He felt the precise moment when his heart stopped: it felt like a door, closing with rich finality. Yes, he thought, still smiling, or at least it felt as if he was.

  * * *

  There is such a thing as heaven and hell; she was a long-lived organism. How long, she wasn’t sure; she was apologetic, but never mind, he told her, we can find out together. What he did not tell her was that he could feel them, still, when they came to her, a grubby parade of them, endless as a soap opera.

  He had never enjoyed soap operas, but he had time, now, to change his mind.

  STEVEN POPKES

  The Egg

  One of the fastest-rising young writers in SF, Steven Popkes has become a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Night Cry, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. His well-received first novel Caliban Landing appeared in 1987, and he is involved in working on a projected anthology of “Future Boston” stories being put together by the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. He has a master’s degree in physiology, and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

  In the poignant story that follows, Popkes spins a tense and suspenseful tale of a boy caught in a deadly web of conflict and intrigue between competing alien races in a future Boston that’s been opened to the stars.

  The Egg

  STEVEN POPKES

  The rusty, pitted steel was soft but sharp as a knife. It was thirty or forty feet back to the beach. I didn’t really want to climb back down; I didn’t even have to look to convince myself. I knew how far it was. I tried rehearsing things I could say to my Aunt Sara: “Once I got that high, I had to keep going. It was too far to get back down” or “I was just trying to go up a little ways, but then I got stuck.” I shook my head. Didn’t wash. She’d never told me not to come here, but the wreck was the kind of thing she thought eleven-year-old boys Should Not Mess With.

  * * *

  Wasn’t my home anyway.

  I stretched my neck trying to see over the hull to the upper deck. I’d seen the wreck with Aunt Sara’s binoculars a couple of weeks before. Well, Gray’d seen it and pointed it out to me. I’d needed the binoculars, not him. His eyes are a lot sharper than people’s eyes. It had taken me a couple of weeks to figure out how to get over here—two condemned bridges and an old mud flat’s worth of time.

  It was a big ferry, forty meters if it was anything. It was called the Hesperus—I’d got that much from my cousin Jack before he decided I was too young to talk to. I stood there and looked at it. The pontoons had of course collapsed and rotted away—the wreck had been there about five or six years. There were broken tubes all over like so many snakes. These were the pressure fittings to fill up the pontoons, I think. Some of the blue and white paint was still showing in places on the housings, and where the brass fittings were still there and not all corroded and crumbled by the salt, you could still see a little yellow shine. It must have looked grand, running passengers and cars across the harbor, maybe pulling the whistle at some of the larger ships going up to Maine, or over to Europe or Africa—the kind of thing I’d read about happening on earth since I was a little kid.

  I heard sort of a whisper from the beach and looked down. It was Mama. She stood on the sand staring at me, eyes frowned and
crinkled at the edges, the way mothers get when they’re worried. You know. She’d done that even when she was alive.

  I said, “You worry too much, Mama.” I looked up again. It wasn’t that far. I looked back to the ground to tell her that but she was gone. I wished she’d stay in one place for a while.

  I kept my balance by holding the edge of a warped hull plate. The ledge was narrow, rotting like an old log, but it carried me over the pontoon housings. The wind blew from inland. It went right through my jacket. Cold. I shivered like I was almost dead—the way the swamp miners shake when they cough back home. Home. That was something. This was supposed to be home, now. All my life I’d heard how good it was going to be on earth. Well, you could have had earth as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t worth a dog’s hind leg to me.

  The upper hull wasn’t crumbling like the housings, but it was slick from the greasy harbor water. I’d heard tell of the Boston Harbor Cleanup, but I didn’t believe in it.

  The wreck had two bridge towers. One of the automobile gates had fallen inward and the other was held up by just one rusty hinge. It was so heavy it didn’t move with the wind. But, sometimes, it made these echoing cracks like gunfire a long way off. Let me tell you. I know what guns sound like.

  The inside of the ferry was a hollow cave that smelled like the sea at low tide. You know the smell? I didn’t, then. It’s like something died and was pickled in gasoline. I followed this dark stairway from the auto bay to the passenger deck. You could see Boston from there, the domes looked like the foggy blue crystals Mama had on the shelf at home. I don’t know what happened to them. They must have been auctioned off to pay for my ticket here. Anyway, the high buildings were just a bunch of sticks. I could see the boats just outside of Revere. I shaded my eyes but I couldn’t pick out Aunt Sara’s.

  On the inland side of the wreck, I found a narrow little ladder that looked like it went up to the bridge. It shook some when I started to climb it, but I thought it was okay.

  Halfway up, the ladder shifted. I stopped.

  “Don’t do this to me,” I said softly. “I got enough problems.”

  The ladder creaked again.

  “I said don’t!”

  The old rivets popped out of the hull. I grabbed on as hard as I could. Slow as a dream, the ladder pulled away from the hull and I began to fall. I cried out.

  The ladder stopped in mid-air. I choked on the yell and looked down.

  Gray stood below me, two arms holding the ladder, four arms holding the hull and the remaining two ready to catch me. I grinned and relaxed. “Hey there!” I called down to him.

  Gray pushed the ladder back against the hull. “Ira, come down.”

  “I want to look at the bridge.”

  “It is not safe.”

  “You’re here now, right? You’re not going to let anything happen to me.”

  Gray considered for a moment. He didn’t move at all when he did that, just stood still as a big, gray leather rock. “True. Go to the top of the ladder and stand on the ledge. I will follow.”

  I climbed to the top and stood away from the edge. Gray ripped the ladder entirely away from the boat and threw it over the side. Then, he leaped the thirty or forty feet to the upper deck and sat down to keep from bumping his head.

  When he was alive, Papa described Gray like this:

  “Well, he’s huge, close to nine feet tall and a quarter ton in weight. You can’t think of him as a whole, but only in pieces. Like, he’s got the body of a bear but with these overlapping plates of leather of a rhino. His limbs are thick like the legs of an elephant, blunt at the end but with maybe a dozen small fingers, as hard and supple as the legs of a spider. His head is scaled to the rest of him with two wide-set eyes and a little mouth in the center, like the face of a buffalo. There are bumps and protrusions around his face that belong to nothing on earth.

  “He’s not ugly—in fact, he’s kind of beautiful—but he’s strange.”

  I don’t know whether he’s strange or not—I grew up with him and he always looked normal to me. But that part about the animals is right. I looked them up myself.

  “This relic is dangerous,” he said. “I wish you had invited me.”

  I looked away and felt a little guilty. “I wanted to see it for myself.”

  Gray was silent a moment. “Just so. I had forgotten you are getting older. You must use your own judgment, of course. Should I go?”

  I leaned against him. His hard body was cold for a minute, but as I lay there, it grew warmer and softer. Gray was all the home I needed. Which was good, since I didn’t have one anymore. “No. It’ll be more fun with somebody to talk to.” And Aunt Sara wouldn’t be able to yell at me. “Let’s look at the bridge.”

  The windows were broken and there were these different-sized holes in the boards where the instruments had been. Gray didn’t say anything while I looked but followed me down the other side to the passenger compartments. There, the top had caved in and the open space was sunny. Pieces of metal and wire and chain were all over the floor. Old mattresses and rags were piled up against the walls. “Looks like dynamite in a mattress factory,” I said and giggled.

  “Adolescents’ parties, perhaps.” Gray pointed to one wall. “Look at the graffiti.”

  I nodded but I wasn’t much interested. There was a crazy smell here, sour-sharp like ammonia or lemons. I had never smelled anything like it, and it made me curious. Rags were piled against the bundle of chains in the corner and the smell seemed to come from there. I reached toward the pile and Gray stopped me.

  “Wait a moment,” said Gray.

  I held back. He never did anything without a reason. He’s funny that way—not like people, you see. He always knows what he’s doing.

  He delicately pulled apart the rags. In the center was an egg the size of a basketball.

  “Huh.” I stared at the egg. It was wrinkled gray, with smears of yellow and red on the sides.

  “What kind of egg is it?” I leaned over Gray’s arm.

  “I have no idea.”

  “It could be anything!”

  Gray nodded.

  “It could be dragons. Or griffins.” Gray just looked at me. I grinned at him. “Well, okay. It could be aliens nobody has ever heard of. It could take us somewhere.” Somewhere different. Better.

  “The universe is a large place. It could be many things.”

  “Can we hatch it?”

  Gray replaced the rags, then turned to me. “If you wish.”

  The sun was getting low. I could feel the chill in the wind. The cold might be bad for the egg. Dragons. Griffins. Gray never said there weren’t any; just that they were hard to find. “Should we take it back to Aunt Sara’s boat? It’s going to get cold here.”

  Gray was silent. “It was put here on purpose. Something thinks this is the best place for it.”

  That made sense. “I’ll come back and check it tomorrow.”

  Gray stood. “It is getting late. We should go back.”

  “Okay.”

  Gray helped me down the side of the wreck and walked beside me. “Ira,” he said suddenly.

  “Yes.”

  “Let me come with you when you visit the egg.”

  I shrugged. You could trust Gray. You could trust him with anything. “All right.” We walked on a little further. I felt cold and tired. “Carry me?”

  Gray did not answer but picked me up and held me close against his belly with a middle set of arms. Gray’s belly grew warm and I got sleepy. For a second, I thought I could hear my mother but it was just a night bird.

  “Mama was watching me climb the wreck.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  I shrugged. “No. She was just worried.” I liked the feel of Gray’s arm, the muscles under the thick leather. Like elephants or rhinos. I’d seen pictures, like I said before. “I miss them.”

  “I do, too.”

  I could see Papa walking next to Gray. Then it got too dark, but I could still
hear him walking. I felt sad and sleepy and about to cry. “Papa?”

  I don’t think he heard me, but in a minute he began to sing:

  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

  alive as you and me,

  I said Joe Hill you’re ten years dead,

  I never died, said he.

  He used to sing that to me at night, when I couldn’t sleep.

  Gray was quiet. I snuggled deep into his arms. I felt warm and safe and I didn’t feel I had to cry for a while. Pretty soon, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  Damn.

  Sara Monahan hated boats.

  Boats wobbled, wiggled, and writhed to the beating of the sea. Boats were dirty. Boats smelled.

  She cut the motor in the dory and let it drift the last five or six meters to the dock. It was time enough for her to light a cigarette and cough, ready the line and toss it over the cleat on the dock and pull the dory in. She didn’t think about it. Sara Monahan had been a boat person all her life, first when she was born on the eve of the 2005 stock market crash and her father had spent their last savings on the boat hoping that it would be cheaper to keep up than a house. Then, she had grown into a young girl in the flooded city of Hull, amidst the squalor of that place. Sara shuddered at the memory. She’d never blamed the police when they bombed it, just her father when he wouldn’t leave and her mother for siding with him.

  They’d never made it out of the firestorm.

  She’d dragged Roni wailing to the dory and gunned the ancient motor, praying it wouldn’t die and gotten out just ahead of the police fighters. Sara and Roni had kept watch at the casualty lists in the refugee camps for nearly a year just in case. Nothing.

  Screw Boston. Screw the police.

  They’d made their way to Revere. Sara had scraped by studying for the welding certification exams and started work laying steel in the new building boom. Roni had boned up on the merchant marine and had emigrated as soon as she had passed. They’d barely written to each other for fourteen years.