The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  That is a mere approximation of what I remember, an overformal and inadequate rendering of an experience that seems with the passage of time to grow ever more untranslatable. Trapped by the limitations of language, I can only hint at the sense of alienness that had pervaded me, at the compulsions of the thing I believed I had become. I woke on the beach before dawn not far from Konwicki’s house, and I thought that after the possession—or the transformation, or whatever it had been—had ended, in the resultant delirium, I must have wandered down from the hillside and passed out. No other possibility offered itself. My muscles still ached from the experience, and my memories were powerful and individual and sickening. I remembered how it felt to have the strength to tear iron like rotten cloth; I remembered a cold disdain for a world I now embraced in gratitude and relief; I remembered the sight of a black hand wicked with curved talons closing around Konwicki and lifting him high; I remembered intelligence without sentiment, hatred without passion; I remembered a thousand wars in the spirit that I had never fought; I remember killing a hundred brothers for the right to survive; I remembered a silence that caused pain; I remembered thoughts like knives, a wind like religion, a brilliance like fear; I remembered things for which I had no words. Things that made me tremble.

  But as the sun brought light into the world, light brought doubt into my mind and caused the memories to diminish in importance. Their very sharpness was a reason to doubt them; memories, I believed, should be fragmentary, chaotic, and these—despite their untranslatable essence—were a poignant, almost physical, weight inside my head. Their vividness seemed a stamp of fradulence, of the manufactured, and thus my problems with interpreting what had happened became complex and confusing. How much, for instance, had Odille known? Had she, out of hatred for Konwicki, manipulated me? Had she known more than she had said, trying to encourage a deadly confrontation? And if so, what sort of confrontation was she trying to encourage? And what about coincidence? The coincidence of so many elements of those days and the dreams and the game. Was it really coincidence, or could what seemed coincidence have been a matter of selective memory? And Konwicki … had he been honest with me that night on the point, or had he, too, been engaged in manipulation? Could Odille’s desertion have left him more bereft than he had allowed, and was that a significant motivation? I wished I had let him finish speaking, that I had learned what he meant by the phrase “for every action there’s a reaction.” Was that merely another coincidence, or did it refer to an exchange of travelers between this world and that desert hell? And most pertinent, had my deep-seated anger against an old lover been a sufficiently powerful poison to cause me to imagine an unimaginable horror, to erect an insane rationalization for a crime of passion? Or had anger been the key that opened both Konwicki and me to the forces of the game? Each potential answer to any of these questions cast a new light upon the rest, and therefore to determine an ultimate answer became a problem rather like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were constantly changing shape.

  The sun had cleared the horizon, shining palely through thin gray clouds; clumps of seaweed littered the beach, looking at a distance like bodies washed up by the surf, and heaps of foam like dirty soapsuds demarked the tidal margin. My head felt packed with cotton, and I couldn’t think. Then I was struck by an illumination, a hope. Maybe none of it had happened. A psychotic episode of some kind. I went stumbling through the mucky sand toward Konwicki’s place, growing more and more certain that I would find him there. And when I burst into the darkened shack, I saw someone asleep on an air mattress against the wall, a head with brown hair protruding from beneath a blanket.

  “Konwicki!” I said, elated.

  The head turned toward me. A tanned teenage girl propped herself on an elbow, the blanket slipping from her breasts; she rubbed her eyes, pouted, and said grouchily, “Who’re you?”

  The air in the room stank, heavy with the sourness of sexual activity and marijuana. I couldn’t tell if the girl was pretty; her environment suppressed even the idea of prettiness. “Where’s Konwicki?” I asked.

  “You a friend of Carl’s?”

  “Yeah, we’re soul mates.” Being a wiseass helped stifle my anxiety.

  The girl noticed her exposure, covered herself.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “I dunno.” She slumped back down. “He went somewhere with Ryan last night. He’ll probably be back soon.” She shaded her eyes, peered into the thin light. “What’s it like out there? Still drizzling?”

  “No,” I said dully.

  The girl shook her hair back from her eyes. “I think I’ll catch a swim.”

  I stood looking down at the cardboard box that contained the Mayan figurines.

  “That means I’d like to put on my suit,” said the girl.

  “Oh … right. Sorry.” I started out the door.

  “After I’m dressed,” said the girl, “you can wait here if you want. Carl’s real free with his place.”

  I stood outside, uncertain what to do. While I was considering my options, the girl came out the door, wearing a red bikini; she waved and walked toward the water’s edge. I stared in through the door at the cardboard box. Konwicki would not be returning, I realized, and the answer to all my questions might lie in that box. I checked to make sure that the girl wouldn’t be a problem—she was splashing through the shallows—and darted inside. I picked up the box, then remembered the papers; I stuffed as many of them as possible in among the figurines, stuck some more under my arm, and went jogging along the shore toward home.

  * * *

  These were the facts, then. Konwicki was missing. The police were indifferent to the matter. Gringos were prone to make unannounced exits of this sort, they said. Likely he had gotten a girl in trouble. Ryan had been found on the hill, incapable of rational speech, his wrist broken; I saw him once before he was flown home under sedation, and he looked very like the Ryan of my dream. Drugs, said the local doctor. An Indian family with a small farm claimed that a demon had torn a hole in their roof and chased them through the jungle; but the sightings of demons was commonplace among the hill people, and their testimony was disregarded, the hole in the roof chalked up to storm damage—a ceiba tree had fallen onto it. A deer had been found disemboweled in the jungle, but the wound could have been made by a machete. A shack had been destroyed, apparently by the wind. As the days passed and the memories of that night grew faint, I came to see this combination of facts as an indictment against myself. It was conceivable that in chasing Ryan, I had frightened an Indian family who had already been terrified by a tree crashing down upon their roof, and that in my rage, a rage funded by the bizarre materials of Konwicki’s game, I had erected a delusionary system to deny my participation in a violent act. Having this conclusion, I became desperate to prove it wrong. I refused to accept that I was a murderer, and I pored over Konwicki’s notes, trying to legitimize the game. I discovered what he had meant by saying that the game could be prolongd; according to his notes, the winner could choose to continue alone for one more move, and thereby negate the penalties that accrued to both winner and loser … though why anyone would choose this option was beyond me. Perhaps the Mayans ranked their priorities differently from those of our culture, and personal survival was not high among them. The fact that Konwicki had not told me that I, the winner, would save him and risk myself by continuing seemed to testify that he was been trying to trick me into going on. However, that wasn’t sufficient proof. Even if he had not given the game any credence, he might—as Odille had suggested—have said the exact same thing in order to gain a hold on me. The events of that night lay on an edge between the rational and the irrational, and the problem of which interpretation to place upon them was in the end a matter of personal choice.

  Yet I was obsessed with finding a solution, and for the next month I pursued the question. I no longer had dreams of the pyramids and the desert, but I had other dreams in which I saw Konwic
ki’s tormented face. From these dreams I would wake covered with sweat, and I would go into my study and spend the remaining hours of the night staring at the four counters that had been employed in the game: the dwarf, the warrior, the woman, the infant. I grew distracted. My thoughts would for a time be gleefully manic, sharp, and then would become muzzy and vague. I was afflicted by the smell of blood; I had fevers, aural hallucinations of roaring and screams. And I fell into a deep depression, as deep as the one that had owned me in New York, unable to disprove to my own satisfaction the notion that I had killed a man.

  Throughout this period, Odille was loving and supportive, exhausting herself on my behalf, and during moments of clarity, I realized how fortunate I was to have her, how much I had come to love her. It was this realization that began to pull me out of my depression … that, and the further realization that she was beginning to fray under the pressures of dealing with my breakdown. Over the span of a week, she grew sullen and short-tempered. I would find her pacing, agitated, and when I would try to console her, she would often as not react with hostility. Usually I was able to break through to her, to bring her back to normalcy. Then one night, returning from the corner store, where I had gone to buy olive oil, matches, some other things for the kitchen, as I came into the living room, I heard Odille out on the patio, sobbing, cursing, her voice thickened like a drunkard’s. It was the voice I’d heard in my dream, coming from one of the cubicles in the pyramid. I stopped in my tracks, and as I listened, a dissolute feeling spread through my guts. There was no doubt about it. Not only were the timbre and rhythms identical, but also the words.

  “Bastard,” she was saying. “Oh, you bastard. God, I hate you, I hate you! You.…” A wail. “Dead man, that’s what I’ll call you. I’ll say, ‘How are you, dead man?’ And when you ask what I mean by that, I’ll say that I’m just anticipating … you fucking bastard!”

  I went out onto the patio, walking softly. It was hot, and a few drops of rain were falling, speckling the concrete. Sweat poured off my neck and chest and back; my shirt was plastered to my skin. The lights were off, the moon high, printing a filigree of leaf shadow on the concrete, and Odille was perched on the edge of a chair in the shadows, her head down and hands clasped together—a tense, prayerful attitude. It seemed hotter the nearer I came to her. “Odille,” I said.

  She threw back her head, her strained face visible through strands of hair; she looked like a madwoman caught at some secretive act.

  I started toward her, but she jumped up and backed away. “Don’t touch me, you bastard!”

  “Jesus, Odille!”

  I moved forward a step or two, and she screamed. “You lied to me! Always lies! Even in Irún … even then you were lying!”

  She had told me enough about her affair in Paris to make me think it was her old lover—and not me—that she was addressing. “Odille,” I said. “It’s me … Ray!” She blinked, appeared to recognize me; but when I came forward again, she said, “I won’t listen to you anymore, Carl. Everything you say is self-serving. It has nothing to do with what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking.”

  I took her by the shoulders. “Look at me, Odille. It’s Ray.”

  “Oh God … Ray!” The tension drained from her face. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” Her mouth twisted into an expression of revulsion, and she pushed me back. “Sitting there mooning about that bitch in New York. You think I don’t know? I do … I know! Every time you touch me, I know!”

  “Odille!”

  Again her face grew calm, or rather, registered an ordinary level of distress. “Oh God!” she said. “I feel out of control, I feel…!”

  I tried to embrace her, and she slapped me hard, knocking me off-balance. She came at me, shouting, slapping, and clawing, and I went backward over the arm of a chair. My head struck the concrete, sending spears of white light shooting back into my eyes; I grabbed at her leg as she stepped over me, but I was stunned, my coordination impaired, and I only grazed her calf with my fingernail. By the time I managed to stand, Odille was long gone.

  I went into the living room and stood by a table that I had marked into zones like the game board; the four counters were set upon it, and on the floor was the box containing the remaining two counters. In the pool of lamplight, the rough brownish orange finish of the clay had the look of pocked skin; shadows had collected in their eye sockets, making them appear ghoulish. I would have liked to break them, to scatter them with a sweep of my hand and dash them to the floor; but I was frightened of them. I recalled now what Ryan had said in my dream about the victor paying a price, and I also recalled Konwicki’s description of the female counter. A maniac, Odille had said. Foulmouthed and physically abusive. It was possible to dismiss the evidence of dreams, to blame Odille’s emotional state on stress, on the turbulent emotional climate of her past, to dissect experience and devise a logical system that would explain away everything inexplicable. But there had been one too many coincidences, and I knew now that the game and all its hallucinatory consequences had been real, that the potency of the game was in part due to the fact that this world and the one from which the game derived were ultimately coincidental, lying side by side, matching one another event for event; the game was a bridge between those worlds, allowing the evil character of one to tap into and transform the weak principles of the other. Maybe the Mayans had played the game too often; maybe it had infected them, and they had fled their cities, looking for someplace untainted by that other world. Maybe that ominous vibration of the old ruins, of Tikal and Palenque and Cobán, was a remnant of the power of evil, a lingering pulse of the ancient machinery. The theory was impossible to prove or disprove, but I had the feeling that I was not far from right. And what was to happen now? Was I to lose Odille, watch her decline into a madness that accorded with the character assigned her counter by some impersonal agency, some functionary of a universal plan?

  So it appeared.

  It was curious, my calmness at that moment. I had no idea whether or not there was a remedy to the situation. I thought about Konwicki’s notes, his declaration that the game could be prolonged if the winner chose to put himself at risk for one more move, and I remembered, too, how Ryan had hinted at much the same thing in the dream; but there was nothing in Konwicki’s notes that explained how one should initiate the tactic. Still, I acted as if there was remedy, as if I had a decision to make. I sat down in a straight-backed chair, staring at the counters, and thought about what we make when we make love, the weave of dependencies and pleasures and habituations that arise from the simple act of bestowing love, which is an act of utter honesty, of revelation and admission, of being innocent enough to open oneself completely to another human being and take a step forward into the dangerous precinct of their wills, hoping that they have taken the same immeasurable step, hoping they will not backtrack and second-guess what they know absolutely—that here is a rare chance to deny the conventional wisdom, to attempt an escape from the logics that supposedly define us. Karen Maniaci had taken that step and then had become afraid. It was not blameful, what she had done; it was only sad. And perhaps her rejection of love, her sublimation of desire, and her decision to view the life of her heart in terms of an emotional IRA, a long-term yuppie investment, choosing the security of what she could endure over the potentials of hope—maybe that was all of which she was capable. But that was the imperfect past. I thought of Odille then—her childhood of white lace and Catholic virtue, her intelligence and her ordinary passage through schools and men and days to this beach at the ends of the earth, this place where one thing more than the expected had happened—and I thought of the risk we had taken with one another without knowing it … to begin with, anyway. At some point we must have known, and still we had taken it. As it had been with Karen, it was now—I did not understand how to step back from that commitment, even though it was clear that the prospect of yet another risk lay before me.

  Perhaps the game was—as Konwicki had suggested—merely
a matter of attunement, not of rules; and perhaps once I’d entered the game’s sphere of influence, I had only to acknowledge it, to make a choice, and then that choice would be actualized within its boundaries. Whatever the case, I must have reached a decision that bore upon the game, because I realized that the table and the counters had undergone a transformation. The surface of the table had become an undulating surface of rusty orange upon which the counters stood like colossi, and in the distance, apparently miles and miles away, was a complex of black pyramids. It was as if I were a giant peering in from the edge of the world, looking out over a miniature landscape … miniature, but nonetheless real. The wind was blowing the sand into tiny scarves that attenuated and sparkled as they vanished, and hanging above the pyramids was a fuming violet-white sun. Acting without thought, feeling again that sense of power and possession, I removed three of the counters, leaving the dwarf to stand facing the black buildings alone. After a moment I took one of the two remaining counters from the cardboard box and set it close to the gnome. The figure depicted a youth, its proportions less distorted than those of the dwarf, yet with muscles not so developed as those of the warrior. I leaned back in my chair, feeling drained, wasted. The table had returned to normal, a flat surface marked with lines of chalk.

  I was more than a little afraid. I wasn’t sure what exactly I had done, but now I wanted to retreat from it, deny it. I pushed back my chair, becoming panicked, darting glances to the side, expecting to see an immense black talon poking toward me from window or door. The house seemed a trap—I remembered Konwicki and Ryan in the hut on the hill—and I scurried out into the night. It was spitting rain, and the wind was driving in steadily off the sea, shredding the palms, breaking the music from a radio in the house next door into shrads of brght noise. I felt disoriented, needing—as I had that first night at Konwicki’s—something to hold, something that would give me weight and balance, and I sprinted down onto the beach, thinking that Odille would be there. At the Café Pluto or one of the other bars. Maybe now that the game had been joined once again, she would have grown calm, regained her center. The moon flashed between banks of running clouds, and chutes of flickering lantern lights spilled from shanty windows, illuminating patches of weeds, strips of mucky sand littered with fish corpses and offal and coconut tops. In the darkness above the tossing palms, I glimpsed a phantom shape, immense and snake-headed, visible for a fraction of a second, and I picked up my pace, running now out of fear, the salt air sharp in my lungs, expecting a great claw to lay open my backbone. Then I spotted Odille—a shadow at the margin of the sea, facing toward the reef. The tide was going out, leaving an expanse of dark sand studded with driftwood and shells. I ran faster yet, and as I came near, she turned to me, backed away, saying something lost in the noise of the wind and surf. I caught her by her shoulders, and she tried to twist free.