The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “That’s not very forthcoming,” I said. “Do questions bother you?”

  “Not ones that have a purpose.”

  “How about light conversation … that a worthwhile purpose?”

  “Is that your purpose?”

  “What else would it be?”

  “Wow!” said Ryan. “This is like intense … like a big moment.”

  Odille giggled.

  “I got it,” I said. “What would you like to talk about? How about the translation you’re doing … what is it?”

  “The Popol-Vuh,” said Konwicki distractedly.

  “Gee,” I said. “That’s already been translated, hasn’t it?”

  “Not correctly.”

  “Oh, I see. And you’re going to do it right.” I had another pull on the rum bottle. “Hope you’re not wasting your time.”

  “Time.” Konwicki smiled, apparently amused by the concept; he refitted his gaze to the toiling sea.

  “Yeah,” I said, injecting a wealth of sarcasm into my voice. “It’s pretty damn mind-bending, isn’t it?”

  The surf thundered; Konwicki met my eyes, imperturbable. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “I hear you sell great dope.” I clapped a hand to my brow as if recognizing that I had made a social blunder. “Pardon me.… I didn’t intend that to sound disparaging.”

  Konwicki gave me one of his distant smiles. “You’re obviously upset about something,” he said. “You should try to calm down.”

  I sat close beside him on the palm trunk, close enough to cause him to shift away, and was about to bait him further; but he stood, said, “Ta ra,” and walked into the bar.

  “I’d score that round even,” said Ryan. “Mr. Kingsley dominating the first half, the Master coming on late.”

  Odille was gazing after Konwicki, wrapping a curl of hair around one forefinger. She gave me a wave, said, “I’ll be back, O.K.?”, and headed for the bar. I watched her out of sight, tracking the oiled roll of her hips beneath her cutoffs, and when I turned back to Ryan, he was smiling at me.

  “What is it with them?” I asked.

  “With Odille and the Master? Just a little now-and-then thing.” He gave me a sly look. “Why? You interested?”

  I snorted, had a hit of rum.

  “You can win the lady,” said Ryan. “If you’ve a stout heart.”

  I looked at him over the top of the bottle, but offered no encouragement.

  “You see, Ray,” said Ryan, affecting the manner of a lecturer, “Odille’s a wounded bird. The poor thing had a disappointment in love back in Paris. She sought solace in distant lands and had the misfortune of meeting the Master. It’s not much of a misfortune, you understand. The Master’s not much of a Master, so he can’t offer a great deal in the way of good or ill. But he confused Odille, made her believe he could show her how to escape pain through his brand of enlightenment. And that involved a bit of sack time.”

  Given this similarity in history between Odille and myself, I imagined fate had taken a hand by bringing us together. “So what can I do?”

  “Things a bit hazy, are they, Ray?” Ryan chuckled. “Odille’s grown disillusioned with the Master. She’s looking for someone to burst his bubble, to free her.” He reached for the bottle, had a swig, and gagged. “God, that’s awful!” He slumped against the topple palm trunk, screwed the bottle into the sand so that it stood upright. The surf boomed; the wildfire whiteness of the combers imprinted afterimages on my eyes.

  “Anyway,” Ryan went on, “she’s definitely looking for emotional rescue. But you can’t go about it with déclassé confrontation. You’ll have to beat the Master on his own terms, his own ground.”

  Perhaps it was the rum that let me believe that Ryan had a clear view of our situation. “What are his terms?” I asked.

  “Games,” he said. “Whatever game he chooses.” He had another pull off the bottle. “He’s afraid of you, you know. He’s worried that you’re into disciples, and all his children will abandon him for the famous writer. He realized he can’t befuddle you with his usual quasi-erudite crap. So he’ll come up with something new for you. I have no idea what. But he’ll play some game with you. He’s got to.… It’s his nature.”

  “How’s he befuddled you? You seem to have a handle on him.”

  “He’s got no need,” said Ryan. “I’m his fool, and a fool can know the king’s secrets and make fun of them with impunity.”

  I started to ask another question, but let it rest. The wind pulled the soft crush of the surf into a breathy vowel; the moon had lowered behind the hills above the village, its afterglow fanning up into the heavens; the top of the sky had deepened to indigo, and the stars blazed, so dense and intricate in their array that I thought I might—if I were to try—be able to read there all scripture and truth in sparkling sentences. And it was not only in the sky that clarity ruled. What Ryan had said made sense. Odille was testing me … perhaps unconsciously, but testing me nonetheless, unwilling to abandon Konwicki until she was sure of me. I didn’t resent this—it was a tactic often used in establishing relationships. But I was struck by how clear its uses seemed on the beach at Livingston. Not merely the social implications, but its elemental ones: the wounded lovers, the shabby Mephistophelian figure of Konwicki with his sacred books and petty need to exercise power. Man, woman, and Devil entangled in a sexual knot.

  “Did I ever tell you my theory of the Visible?” I asked Ryan.

  “We only just met,” he reminded me.

  “God, you’re right! I’ve been under the illusion that we were old pals.” I plucked the rum bottle from the sand and drank. “In places like this, I’ve always thought it was possible to see how things really are between people. To discern relationships that are obscured by the clutter of urban life. The old relationships, the archetypes.”

  He stared blearily up at me. “Sounds bloody profound, Ray.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it is,” I said, and then added: “Profundity’s my business. Or maybe it’s bullshit … one or the other.”

  “So,” he said, “are you going to play?”

  “I think so … yeah.”

  “Beautiful,” said Ryan. “That’s really beautiful.”

  A few moments later, Konwicki and Odille came out of the bar and walked toward us, deep in conversation.

  Ryan laughed and laughed. “Let the games begin,” he said.

  * * *

  We talked on the beach for another hour, smoking Konwicki’s dope, which smoothed out the rough edges of my drunk, seeming to isolate me behind a thick transparency. I withdrew from the conversation, watching Konwicki. I wasn’t gauging his strengths and weaknesses; despite my exchange with Ryan, I had not formalized the idea that there was to be a contest between us. I was merely observing, intrigued by his conversational strategy. By sidestepping questions, claiming to know nothing about a subject, he managed to intimate that the subject was not worth knowing and that he possessed knowledge in a sphere of far greater relevance to the scheme of things. Odille hung on his every world for a while, but soon began to lose interest, casting glances and smiles at me; it appeared she was trying to maintain a connection with Konwicki, but was losing energy in that regard.

  For the most part, Konwicki avoided looking at me; but at one point, he cut his eyes toward me and locked on. We stared at each other for a long moment, then he turned away with acknowledgment. During that moment, however, the skin on my face went cold, my muscles tensed, and a smile stretched my lips. A feral smile funded by a remorseless hatred quite different from the impassioned, drunken loathing I originally had felt. This emotion, like the smile, seemed something visited upon me and not an intensification of my emotions, and along with it came a sudden increase in my body temperature. A sweat broke on my forehead, my chest and arms, and my vision reddened, and I had a peculiar sense of doubled perceptions, as if I were looking through two different pairs of eyes, one of which was capable of seein
g a wider spectrum. I decided to slack off on the rum.

  At length, Konwicki suggested we get out of the wind, which was blowing stronger, and go over to his place to listen to music. I was of two minds about the proposal; while I wasn’t ready to give up on Odille, neither was I eager to mix it with Konwicki, and I was certain that if I went with them, there would be some bad result. The dope had taken the edge off my enthusiasm. But Odille took my hand, nudged the softness of her breast into my arm.

  “You are coming, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, as if a thought to the contrary had never occurred.

  We walked together along the beach, trailing Konwicki and Ryan, and Odille talked about taking a trip to Escuilpas someday soon to see the Black Virgin in the cathedral there.

  “Women come from all over Central America to be blessed,” she said. “They stand in line for days. Huge fat women in white turbans from Belize. Crippled old island ladies from Roatán. Beautiful slim girls from Panama. All waiting to spend a few seconds kneeling in the shadow of a black statue. When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded primitive. Now it seems strangely modern. The New Primitivism. I keep imagining all those female shadows in the bright sun, radios playing, vendors selling cold drinks.” She gave her hair a toss. “I could use that sort of blessing.”

  “Is it only for women?”

  She let her eyes drift toward me. “Sometimes men wait with them.”

  I asked if what Ryan had told me about her love affair in Paris was the truth. I had no hesitancy in asking this—intimacies were the flavor of the night. A flicker of displeasure crossed her face. “Ryan’s an idiot.”

  “I doubt he’d argue the point.”

  Odille went a few steps in silence. “It was nothing. A fling, that’s all.”

  Her glum tone seemed to belie this.

  “Yeah, I had a fling myself right before I came down here. Like to have killed me, that fling.”

  She glanced up at me, still registering displeasure, but then she smiled. “Perhaps with us it’s a matter of.…” She made a frustrated gesture, unable to find the right words.

  “Victims recognizing the symptoms?” I suggested.

  “I suppose.” She threw back her head and looked up into the sky as if seeking guidance there. “Yes, I had a bad experience, but I’m over it.”

  “Completely?”

  She shook her head. “No … never completely. And you?”

  “Hey, I’m fine,” I said. “It’s like it never happened.”

  She laughed, cast an appraising look my way. “Who was she?”

  “This married woman back in New York.”

  “Oh!” Odille put a hand on my arm in sympathy. “That’s the worst, isn’t it? Married, I mean.”

  “The worst? I don’t know. It was pretty goddamn bad.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Frightened. She got married because she had a run of back luck.… At least, that’s what she told me. Things started going bad around her. Her parents got divorced, her dog ran away, and that seemed a sign something worse might happen. I guess she thought marriage would protect her.” I walked faster. “She’s a fucking mess.”

  “How so?”

  “She doesn’t know what the hell she wants. Whenever she doubts something, she’ll broadcast an opinion pro or con until the contrary opinion has been shouted down in her own mind.” I kicked at the sand. “The last time we talked, she explained how she was happy in her marriage for the same reasons that she’d once claimed to be miserable. The vices of this guy who she’d ridiculed.… She told everyone how much he bored her, how childish he was. All those vices had been transformed into solid virtues. She told me she knew that she couldn’t have the kind of relationship with Barry—that’s her husband—that we’d had, but you had to make trade-offs. Barry at least always wore a neatly pressed suit and could be counted on not to embarrass—though never to scintillate—at business functions.” I sniffed. “As a husband, he made the perfect accessory for evening wear.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “I am. She put me through hell. Of course, I bought into it, so I’ve got no one to blame but myself.”

  “She was beautiful, of course?”

  “She didn’t think so.” I changed the subject. “Was yours married?”

  “No, just a shit.” Her expression became distant, and I knew that for a moment she was back in Paris with the Shit. “For a long time afterward, I threw myself into other relationships. I thought that would help, but it was a mistake.… I can see that now.”

  “Everything seems like a mistake afterward,” I said.

  “Not everything,” she said coyly.

  I wasn’t sure how to take that, and it wasn’t just that her meaning was vague; it was also that I was put off by her coyness. Before I could frame a response, she said, “Talking to Carl has helped me a great deal.”

  “Oh, I see.” I tried to disguise my disappointment, believing this to be a sign that her connection with Konwicki was still vital.

  “No, you don’t. Just having someone to talk to was helpful. Carl’s a fraud, of course. Nothing he says is without guile. But he does listen, and it’s hard to find a good listener. That’s basically all there was between us. I helped him with his work, and … there was more. But it wasn’t important.”

  I wondered if she was playing with me, making me guess at her availability, and was briefly angered by the possibility; but then, recalling how uncertain my own motivations and responses had been. I decided that if I couldn’t forgive her, I couldn’t forgive myself.

  “What are you thinking about?” Odille asked.

  Her features, refined by the moonlight, looked delicate, etched, as if a kind of lucidity had been revealed in them, and I believed that I could see down beneath the games and the layers of false construction, beneath all those defenses, to who she most was, to the woman, no longer an innocent in the accepted sense of the word, but innocent all the same, still hopeful in spite of pain and disillusionment.

  “Konwicki,” I lied. “You helped him translate the Popol-Vuh?”

  “He was being discreet. He’s acquired an old Mayan game and some papers that go with it. That’s what he’s translating.”

  “What sort of game?”

  “From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s a role-playing game. The papers seem to imply that it has to do with spirit travel. The gods. All the old cultures have myths that deal with that. It might be something that the priests used to evoke trances … something like that.”

  For no reason I could determine, this news made me edgy.

  “Is that really what you were thinking about?” Odille asked.

  “I was being discreet,” I said, and she laughed.

  * * *

  Konwicki’s place was a thatched hut with one large room and a sand floor over which a carpet of dried palm fronds had been laid, and was a scrupulously neat advertisement for his travels. Wall hangings from Peru, a brass hookah, a Japanese scroll, a bowl holding some Nepalese jewelry—rings of coral and worked silver, pillows embroidered in a pattern of turquoise thread that I recognized as being from Isfahan. Gourd bowls and various cooking implements hung from pegs, and a hurricane lantern provided a flickering orange light. An old Roxy Music album was playing on a cassette recorder, Bryan Ferry’s nostalgia seeming more effete than usual in those surroundings. In one corner was an orange crate containing a stack of papers covered with Mayan hieroglyphs. I started to pick up the top paper, and Konwicki, who was sitting against the rear wall, rolling a joint, said, “Don’t touch that … please!”

  “What’s the problem? My vibes might unsettle the spiritual fabric?”

  “Something like that.” He licked the edge of the rolling paper.

  Ryan had stretched out on his back between Konwicki and a cardboard box that held some clay figures, a comic book spread open over his eyes; Odille was on her knees facing Konwicki, watching him roll.

  �
��Why don’t you tell me what else is off-limits?” I said.

  He lit the joint, let smoke trickle from his nostrils. “Did you come here just to be contentious?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure why I came,” I said. “I figured you’d tell me.”

  He gave a shrug, blew more smoke. “Why are you so hostile?”

  I dropped down cross-legged next to Odille. “You know what’s going on here, man. But for one thing. I don’t like guys like you … guys who want to grow up to be Charles Manson, but don’t have the balls, so they hang out and maneuver weaker people into fucking them.”

  I said this mildly, and that was not a pose; I felt calm, without malice, merely making an observation. My dislike of Konwicki—it appeared—had shifted into a philosophical mode.

  “And what sort of person are you?” he asked with equal mildness.

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  He made a show of sizing me up. “How about this? A horny, lonely man who’s having trouble adjusting to the onset of middle age.”

  “Gee, Carl,” I said. “I like my kind of guy a lot better than I do yours.”

  He sniffed, amused. “There’s no accounting for taste.” He passed me the joint, and in the spirit of the moment, took a hit, let it circulate, then took another, deeper one. Seconds later I realized that Konwicki had exercised the home-field advantage in our little war and pulled out his killer weed. Even though I was already ripped, I could feel its effects moving through me like a cool, soft wind; it was the kind of weed that immobilizes, the kind with which you need to plan where you want your body to fall. My thoughts became muddled; my extremities felt cold. Yet when the joint was passed to me again, I had still another hit, not wanting to seem a wimp.

  “Good shit, huh?” said Konwicki, watching Ryan suck on the joint.

  “Gawd!” said Ryan, leaking smoke. “What clarity!”

  I’m not sure why I reached for the clay figurines in the box next to Ryan—the need to hold on to something, probably. The wind tattering the thatch made a sound like something huge being torn apart. The inconstant wash of orange light along the walls mesmerized me, and the lantern flame itself was too bright to look at directly. In every minute event, I perceived myriad subtleties, and I could have sworn I was floating a couple of inches above the ground. Perhaps I thought the figurine would give me ballast, bring me back down, because I was blitzed, wrecked, fucked-up. My hand moved in slow motion, effecting a lovely arc toward the box that contained the figurines. But the second I picked one up, I was cured of my sensory overload and felt stone-cold sober, in absolute control.