The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Christ!” said Konwicki with annoyance. “Put that down!”

  The figurine was a pre-Columbian dwarf of yellowish brown clay with stumpy legs, a potbelly, a hooked nose, and thick, brutish lips. The eyes were slitted folds. About the size of a Barbie doll. Ugly as a wart. Holding it gave me focus and made me feel not merely whole, but powerful. The only remnant of my buzz was a sense that the figurine was full of something heavy and shifting, like a dollop of mercury. It seemed to throb in my hand.

  “Put it down!” Konwicki’s tone had become anxious.

  “Why? Is it valuable?” I turned the figure, examining it from every angle. “Don’t worry, man! I won’t drop it.”

  “Just put it down, all right?”

  Holding the figurine in my left hand, away from Konwicki, I leaned forward and saw that the cardboard box contained five more figurines, all standing. “What are they? They look like a set.”

  Konwicki held out his hand for the figurine, but I was feeling more and more in control. As if the figurine were a strengthening magic. I wasn’t about to let it go. Odille, I saw, was regarding Konwicki with distaste.

  “I’m not going to drop it, man. You think I’m too stoned or something? Hey”—I flashed him a cheery grin—”I feel great. Tell me what they are.”

  Ryan, too, was staring at Konwicki; he laughed soddenly and said in an Actor’s Equity German accent, “Tell him, Master.”

  Konwicki grimaced like a man much put upon. “They’re part of a game. An old Mayan game. I bought it off a chiclero in Flores.”

  “Really?” I said. “How do you play?”

  “I can set the figures up, but I don’t know what happens after that.”

  “If you know how to set them up, you must know something about it.”

  An exasperated sigh. “All right … I’ll set them up, but be careful.”

  A long piece of plyboard was leaning against the wall to his left; it was stained a rusty orange and marked with a mosaic of triangular zones. He laid the board flat and arranged the five figures, three at the corners, the other two at the center edge opposite one another. The corner nearest me was vacant, and after a brief hesitation, I set the dwarf down upon it.

  “What next?” I said.

  “I told you. I don’t know. Whoever’s playing picks one of the figures to be his corner. But after that.…” He shrugged.

  “How many can play?”

  “From two to six people.”

  “Why don’t you and I give it a shot?” I said.

  It was curious how I felt as I said that. I was giving him an order, one I knew he’d obey. And I was eager for him to obey. I wanted him on the board, vulnerable to my moves, even though I didn’t know what moves existed. That animal grin that had first manifested itself in front of the Café Pluto once again spread across my face.

  “Come on, Carl,” I said mockingly. “Don’t you want to play?”

  He pretended to be complying for the sake of harmony, giving Odille a glance that said, What can I do?, and stretched out his hand, letting it hover above the figurines as if testing a discharge that issued from the head of each. At last he touched a clay warrior with a feathered headdress and a long spear. I felt less competent, and my thoughts frayed once again; it appeared that my relapse had boosted Konwicki’s spirits. His bland smile switched on, and he leaned back against the wall. The noise of wind and sea smoothed out into a slow, oscillating roar, as if something big and winged were making leisurely flights around the outside of the hut.

  On impulse, I picked up the dwarf, and, suddenly brimming with gleeful hostility, I set it down beside a figurine at the center of the board, a lumpy female gnome with a prognathous jaw and slack breasts. Konwicki countered by moving a figurine resembling a squat infant to the side of his warrior. Thereafter we made a number of moves in rapid succession using the same four figurines. Complex moves, each consisting of more than one figurine, sometimes in tandem, utilizing every portion of the board. The entire process could not have taken more than a few minutes, but I could have sworn the game lasted for an hour at least. The room had been transformed into a roaring cell that channeled the powers of wind and sea, drew them into a complex circuit. A weight was shifting inside me, shifting just as the interior weights of the figurines seemed to shift, as if some liquid were being tipped this way and that, guiding my hand. Along with the apprehension of strength was the feeling of a separate entity at work, a quick, nasty brute of a being with a potbelly and arms like tree trunks, grunting and scuttling here and there, stinking of clay and blood. And yet I maintained enough sense of myself to be afraid. Things were getting out of hand, I realized, but I had no means of controlling them. As I stared at the board, it began to appear immense, to exhibit an undulating topography, and I could feel myself dwindling, becoming lost among those rust-colored swells and declivities, coming closer to some terrible danger.

  And then it was over … the game, the feelings of power and possession. Konwicki tried a smile, but it wouldn’t stick. He looked wasted, worn-out. Exactly how I felt. Despite the intensity and strangeness of what I had experienced, I blamed it all on substance abuse. And I was sick of games, of repartee. I struggled to my feet, held out a hand to Odille. “You want to take a walk?” I asked.

  I’d expected that she would look to Konwicki for approval or for some sort of validation; but without hesitation, she let me help her to stand.

  “Carl,” I said with my best anchorman sincerity. “It’s been fun.”

  He kept his face deadpan, but in his eyes was a shine that struck me as virulent, venomous. “That’s how it is, huh?” he said, directing his words. I thought, to neither me nor Odille, but to the space between us.

  “Night, all,” I said, and steered Odille toward the door. I kept waiting for Konwicki to make some hostile remark; but he remained silent, and we got through the door without incident. We went along the edge of the shore, and after we had gone about thirty yards, Odille said, “You don’t want to walk, do you, Raymond? Tell me what you really want.”

  “This how it is in Paris?” I said. “Everything made clear beforehand?”

  “This isn’t Paris.”

  “How are you with honesty?” I asked.

  “Sometimes not so good.” She shrugged as if to say that was the best she could offer.

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” I said. “Intelligent, appealing. I’m tired of being in pain. Whatever possibilities exist for us … that’s what I want.”

  She made a noncommittal noise.

  “What?” I said.

  “I thought you’d say you loved me.”

  “I want to love you, and that’s the same thing,” I said. “What the depth of my feelings are at this moment doesn’t matter. One thing I’ve learned about love … you’re a fool if you judge it by how dizzy it makes you feel.” To an extent, this was a lie I was telling myself, but it was such a clever lie that it came cloaked in the illuminative suddenness of a truth recognized, allowing me to adopt the role of a sincere man struggling to be honest … which was the case. Perhaps we are all such fraudulent creatures at heart that we must find a good script before we can successfully play at being honest.

  “But the dizziness,” said Odille. “That’s important, too.”

  “I’m starting to get dizzy now. How about you?”

  “You’re a clever man, Raymond,” she said after a pause. “I don’t know if I’m a match for you.”

  “If I’m so damned clever, don’t try and baffle me with humility.”

  She said nothing, but the wind and surf and the thudding of coconuts falling onto the sand seemed an affirmation. At last she stood on tiptoe, and her lips grazed my cheek. “Let’s go home,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Late that night, Odille came astride me. Her skin gleamed palely in the moonlight shining through the window, her black hair stuck to the sweat on her shoulders in eloquent curls, and each of her rapid exhalations was cored with a frail note as if s
he were singing under her breath. Her breasts were small and long and slightly pendulous, with puffy dark areolae, reminding me of National Geographic breasts, shaped something like the slippers Aladdin wears in illustrations from The Arabian Nights; and her features looked so cleanly drawn as to appear stylized. Her delicacy, its exotic particularity, inspired desire, affection, passion. And one thing more, an emotion that underlay the rest: the need to degrade her. Part of my mind rebelled against this urge, but it was huge in me, a brutish drive, and I hooked my fingers into the plump meat of her thighs, gripping hard enough to leave bruises, and began to use her roughly. To my surprise, she responded in kind; her fingernails raked my chest, and soon our lovemaking evolved into a savage contest that lasted nearly until dawn.

  I slept no more than a few hours, and even that was troubled by a dream in which I found myself in a dwarfish, heavily muscled body with ocher skin, crouching on the crest of a dune of rust-colored sand, one that overlooked a complex of black pyramids. A hot wind blew fans of grit into the air, stinging my face and chest. The complex appeared to be a mile or so away, but I knew this was an illusion created by the clarity of the air, and that it would take me hours to reach the buildings. I knew many things about the place. I knew, for instance, that the expanse of sand between the dune and the complex was rife with dangers, and I also knew that there was life within the complex … a form of life dangerous to me. I understood this was a dream, albeit of an unusual sort, and that awareness was, I thought, a kind of wakefulness, leading me to believe that the dangers involved were threats not only to my dream self but to my physical self as well. Yet despite this knowledge, I was moved to start walking toward the complex.

  I walked for about an hour, growing dehydrated and faint from the heat. The buildings seemed no nearer to hand, and the sun was a violet-white monster, seething with prominences, that looked much closer than the sun with which I was familiar, and although great banks of silvery-edged gray clouds were crossing the sky with the slowness of cruising galleons, they never once obscured the sun, breaking apart as they drew near to permit its continued radiance, re-forming once they had passed. It was as if the light were a solid barrier, an invisible cylindrical artifact around which they were forced to detour. Crabs with large pincers, their shells almost the same color as the sand, burrowed in the dunes; they were quite aggressive, occasionally chasing me away from their homes … or hunting me.

  After another hour, I came to an exceptionally smooth stretch of sand, lying flat as a pond, in this wholly unlike the rest of the desert, which wind had sculpted into an infinite sequence of undulations and rises, and in color a shade more coppery. The world was so quiet that I could hear the whine of my circulatory system, and I was afraid to step forward, certain that the sand hid some peril; I supposed it to be something in the order of quicksand. At last, deciding to give it a test, I unbuckled the belt that held my sheathed knife (I was not in the least surprised to discover that I had a knife), and, removing the weapon, I tossed the belt out onto the sand. For a moment, it lay undisturbed. But then the sand beneath it began to circulate in the manner of a slow whirlpool. I sprang back from the edge of the sand, retreating into the lee of a dune, just as the whirlpool erupted, spraying coppery orange filaments high into the air, filaments that were—I realized as they fell back to earth around me—serpents with flat, questing heads, the largest of them seven or eight feet in length. The pit from which they had been spewed was expanding. I scrambled higher on the dune, clawing at the sand, and gazed down into a vast maw, where thousands of white sticks—human bones, I saw—were being pushed up and then scattered downward as if falling off the shoulders of a huge, dark presence that was forcing its way up through them from some unimaginable depth.…

  At that moment I waked, blinking against the sunlight, still snared by the tag ends of the dream, still trying to climb out of danger to the top of the dune, and discovered Odille propped on an elbow, looking down at me with a concerned expression. The sight of her seemed to nullify all the fearful logic of the dream, and I felt foolish for having been so caught up in it. The corners of Odille’s lips hitched up in a faint smile. “You were tossing about,” she said. “So I woke you. I’m sorry if.…”

  “No,” I said, “I’m glad you did. I was having a bad dream.” I boosted myself to a sitting position. My muscles ached, and dried blood striped my chest. “Jesus Christ!” I said, staring at the scratches; I remembered how it had been the previous night and was embarrassed.

  “Are you all right?” Odille asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You … did I…?”

  “Hurt me? I have some bruises. But it looks to me”—she pointed at my abrasions—”that you lost the battle.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, still flustered. “I don’t know what got into me. I’ve never … I mean, last night. I’ve never been like that … not so.…”

  She put a forefinger to my lips. “Nor have I. But apparently, it’s what we both wanted. Maybe we needed it, maybe.…” She made an angry noise.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m just sick of explaining myself in terms of the past.”

  I thought I knew her meaning, and I wondered if that was what it had been for both us—a usage of each other’s bodies in order to inflict pain on phantom lovers. I pulled her down, let her rest on my shoulder; her hair fanned across my chest, cool and heavy and silky. I wanted to say something, but nothing came to mind. The pressure of her body aroused me, but I felt tender now, empty of that perverse lust that had enlivened me hours before. She shifted her head so she could see my eyes.

  “I won’t ask what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “Nothing bad.”

  “Then I will ask.”

  “I was thinking about making love with you again.”

  She made a pleased noise. “Why don’t you?”

  I turned to face her, drawing her against me, but as we began to kiss, to touch, I realized I was afraid of making love, of reinstituting that fierce animalism. That puzzled me. In retrospect, I had been somewhat repelled by my behavior, but in no way frightened. Yet now I had a sense that I might be opening myself to some danger, and I recalled how I’d felt while playing the game with Konwicki—there had been a feeling identical to that I’d had during our lovemaking. One of helplessness, of possession. I forced myself to dismiss all that, and soon my uneasiness passed. The sun melted like butter across the bed, and the sounds of morning, of birds and the sea and a woman vendor crying, “Coco de aguas,” came through the window like music to flesh out the rhythm that we made.

  * * *

  For a month or thereabouts, I believe that I was happy. Odille and I began to make a life, an easy and indulgent life that seemed in its potentials for pleasure and consolation proof against any outside influence. It was not only our sexuality that was a joy; we were becoming good friends. I came to see that like many attractive women, she had a poor self-image, that she had been socialized to believe that beauty was a kind of cheapness, a reason for shame, and that her disastrous affair might have been a self-destructive act performed to compensate for a sense of worthlessness. Saying it like that is an over-simplification, but it was in essence true, and I thought that she had known her affair would be ill-fated; I wondered if my own affair had been similar, a means of punishment for a shameful quality I perceived in myself, and I wondered further if our budding relationship might not have the same impetus. But I should have had no worries in that regard. Everything—sex, conversation, domestic interaction—was too easy for us; there was no great tension involved, no apprehension of loss. We were healing each other, and although this was a good thing, a healthy thing, I missed that tension and realized that its absence was evidence of our impermanence. I tried to deny this, to convince myself that I was in love with her as deeply as I had been in love with Karen, and to an extent my self-deception was a success. Atop the happiness we brought to one another, I installed a level of passionate intensity t
hat served to confound my understanding of the relationship, to counterfeit the type of happiness that I believe necessary to maintain closeness. Yet even at my happiest, I had the intimation of trouble hovering near, of a menace not yet strong enough to effect its will. And as time wore on, I began to have recurring dreams that centered upon those black pyramids in the rust-colored desert.

  At the outset, all the dreams were redolent of the first, dealing with dangers overcome in the desert. But eventually I made my way into the complex. The pyramids were enormous, towering several hundred feet high, and as I’ve said were reminiscent of old Mayan structures, with fancifully carved roof combs and steep stairways leading up the faces to temples set atop them, all of black stones polished to a mirror brilliance that threw back reflections of my body—no longer that of a dwarf, but my own, as if the dwarf were merely a transitional necessity—and were joined with incredible precision, the seams almost microscopic. The sand had drifted in over the ebony flagstones, lying in thin curves, and torpid serpents were coiled everywhere, some slithering along leisurely, making sinuous tracks in the sand. Here and there I saw human bones half-buried in the sand, most so badly splintered that it was impossible to tell from which part of the body they had come. Many of the buildings had been left unfinished or else had been designed missing one or more outer walls, so that passing beside them, I had views of their labyrinthine interiors: mazes of stairways that led nowhere, ending in midair, and oddly shaped cubicles.

  Before entering the complex, I had been visited with certain knowledge that the buildings were not Mayan in origin, that the Mayan pyramids were imperfect copies of them; but had I not intuitively known this, I might have deduced it from the nature of the carvings. They were realistic in style and depicted nightmare creatures—demons with spindly legs, grotesque barbed phalli, and flat, snakelike heads with gaping mouths and needle teeth and fringed with lank hair—who were engaged in dismembering and otherwise violating human victims. In a plaza between two pyramids, I came upon a statue of one of these creatures, wrought of the same black stone, giving its skin a chitinous appearance. It stood thirty feet in height, casting an obscenely distorted shadow; the sun hung behind its head at an oblique angle, creating a blinding corona of violet-white glare that masked its features and appeared to warp the elongated skull. But the remainder of its anatomy was in plain view. I ran my eyes along the statue, taking in clawed feet; knees that looked to be double-jointed; the distended sac of scrotum and the tumescent organ; jutting hipbones; the dangling hooked hands, each finger wickedly curved and tipped with a talon the length of a sword; the belly swollen like that of a wasp. I was mesmerized by the sight, ensnared by a palpable vibration that seemed to emanate from the figure, by an alluring resonance that made me feel sick and dizzy and full of buzzing, incoherent thoughts. From beneath heavy orbital ridges, the eyes glinted as if cored with miniature suns, and my shock at this semblance of life broke the statue’s hold on me. I backed away, then turned and sprinted for my life.…