The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

The crater was two paces across and barren of plant life. The vegetation had burned in the heat of the ray-gun’s fall. Soon enough, new spring growth would sprout, making the crater less obvious. At present though, the ray-gun stood out on the charred earth like a snake in an empty birdbath.

  Jack picked up the gun. Though it looked like briarwood, it was cold like metal. It felt solid: not heavy, but substantial. It had the heft of a well-made object. Jack turned the gun in his hands, examining it from every angle. When he looked down the muzzle, he saw a crystal lens cut into hundreds of facets. Jack poked it with his baby-finger, thinking the lens was a piece of glass that someone had jammed inside. He had the idea this might be a toy – perhaps a squirt-gun dropped by a careless child. If so, it had to be the most expensive toy Jack had ever seen. The gun’s barrel and its lens were so perfectly machined that no one could mistake the craftsmanship.

  Jack continued to poke at the weapon until the inevitable happened: he pressed the trigger blister. The ray-gun went off.

  It might have been fatal, but by chance Jack was holding the gun aimed away from himself. A ray shot out of the gun’s muzzle and blasted through a maple tree ten paces away. The ray made no sound, and although Jack had seen it clearly, he couldn’t say what the ray’s colour had been. It had no colour; it was simply a presence, like wind-chill or gravity. Yet Jack was sure he’d seen a force emanate from the muzzle and strike the tree.

  Though the ray can’t be described, its effect was plain. A circular hole appeared in the maple tree’s trunk where bark and wood disintegrated into sizzling plasma. The plasma expanded at high speed and pressure, blowing apart what remained of the surrounding trunk. The ray made no sound, but the explosion did. Shocked chunks of wood and boiling maple sap few outward, obliterating a cross-section of the tree. The lower part of the trunk and the roots were still there; so were the upper part and branches. In between was a gap, filled with hot escaping gases.

  The unsupported part of the maple fell. It toppled ponderously backwards. The maple crashed onto the trees behind, its winter-bare branches snagging theirs. To Jack, it seemed that the forest had stopped the maple’s fall, like soldiers catching an injured companion before he hit the ground.

  Jack still held the gun. He gazed at it in wonder. His mind couldn’t grasp what had happened.

  He didn’t drop the gun in fear. He didn’t try to fire it again. He simply stared.

  It was a ray-gun. It would never be anything else.

  Jack wondered where the weapon had come from. Had aliens visited these woods? Or was the gun created by a secret government project? Did the gun’s owner want it back? Was he, she or it searching the woods right now?

  Jack was tempted to put the gun back into the crater, then run before the owner showed up. But was there really an owner nearby? The crater suggested that the gun had fallen from space. Jack had seen photos of meteor impact craters; this wasn’t exactly the same, but it had a similar look.

  Jack turned his eyes upward. He saw a mundane after-school sky. It had no UFOs. Jack felt embarrassed for even looking.

  He examined the crater again. If Jack left the gun here, and the owner never retrieved it, sooner or later the weapon would be found by someone else – probably by children playing in the woods. They might shoot each other by accident. If this were an ordinary gun, Jack would never leave it lying in a place like this. He’d take the gun home, tell his parents, and they’d turn it over to the police.

  Should he do the same for this gun? No. He didn’t want to.

  But he didn’t know what he wanted to do instead. Questions buzzed through his mind, starting with, “What should I do?” then moving on to, “Am I in danger?” and, “Do aliens really exist?”

  After a while, he found himself wondering, “Exactly how much can the gun blow up?” That question made him smile.

  Jack decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the gun – not now and maybe not ever. He would take it home and hide it where it wouldn’t be found, but where it would be available if trouble came. What kind of trouble? Aliens . . . spies . . . supervillains . . . who knew? If ray-guns were real, was anything impossible?

  On the walk back home, Jack was so distracted by “What ifs?” that he nearly got hit by a car. He had reached the road that separated the woods from neighbouring houses. Like most roads in that part of Jack’s small town, it didn’t get much traffic. Jack stepped out from the trees and suddenly a sports-car whizzed past him, only two steps away. Jack staggered back; the driver leaned on the horn; Jack hit his shoulder on an oak tree; then the incident was over, except for belated adrenaline.

  For a full minute afterward, Jack leaned against the oak and felt his heart pound. As close calls go, this one wasn’t too bad: Jack hadn’t really been near enough to the road to get hit. Still, Jack needed quite a while to calm down. How stupid would it be to die in an accident on the day he’d found something miraculous?

  Jack ought to have been watching for trouble. What if the threat had been a bug-eyed monster instead of a car? Jack should have been alert and prepared. In his mind’s eye he imagined the incident again, only this time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a tree. That’s how you’re supposed to cheat death if you’re carrying a ray-gun: with cool heroic fair.

  But Jack couldn’t do somersaults. He said to himself, I’m Peter Parker, not Spider-Man.

  On the other hand, Jack had just acquired great power. And great responsibility. Like Peter Parker, Jack had to keep his power secret, for fear of tragic consequences. In Jack’s case, maybe aliens would come for him. Maybe spies or government agents would kidnap him and his family. No matter how farfetched those things seemed, the existence of a ray-gun proved the world wasn’t tame.

  That night, Jack debated what to do with the gun. He pictured himself shooting terrorists and gang lords. If he rid the world of scum, pretty girls might admire him. But as soon as Jack imagined himself storming into a terrorist stronghold, he realized he’d get killed almost immediately. The ray-gun provided awesome firepower, but no defense at all. Besides if Jack had found an ordinary gun in the forest, he never would have dreamed of running around murdering bad guys. Why should a ray-gun be different?

  But it was different. Jack couldn’t put the difference into words, but it was as real as the weapon’s solid weight in his hands. The ray-gun changed everything. A world that contained a ray-gun might also contain flying saucers, beautiful secret agents . . . and heroes.

  Heroes who could somersault away from oncoming sports-cars. Heroes who would cope with any danger. Heroes who deserved to have a ray-gun.

  When he was young, Jack had taken for granted he’d become a hero: brave, skilled and important. Somehow he’d lost that belief. He’d let himself settle for being ordinary. But now he wasn’t ordinary: he had a ray-gun.

  He had to live up to it. Jack had to be ready for bug-eyed monsters and giant robots. These were no longer childish daydreams; they were real possibilities in a world where ray-guns existed. Jack could picture himself running through town, blasting aliens and saving the planet.

  Such thoughts made sense when Jack held the ray-gun in his hands – as if the gun planted fantasies in his mind. The feel of the gun filled Jack with ambition.

  All weapons have a sense of purpose.

  Jack practised with the gun as often as he could. To avoid being seen, he rode his bike to a tract of land in the country: twenty acres owned by Jack’s Great-Uncle Ron. No one went there but Jack. Uncle Ron had once intended to build a house on the property, but that had never happened. Now Ron was in a nursing home. Jack’s family intended to sell the land once the old man died, but Ron was healthy for someone in his nineties. Until Uncle Ron’s health ran out, Jack had the place to himself.

  The tract was undeveloped – raw forest, not a woods where children played. In the middle lay a pond, completely hidden by trees. Jack would float sticks in the pond and shoot them with the gun.

  If he missed,
the water boiled. If he didn’t, the sticks were destroyed. Sometimes they erupted in fre. Sometimes they burst with a bang but no flame. Sometimes they simply vanished. Jack couldn’t tell if he was doing something subtly different to get each effect, or if the ray-gun changed modes on its own. Perhaps it had a computer which analysed the target and chose the most lethal attack. Perhaps the attacks were always the same, but differences in the sticks made for different results. Jack didn’t know. But as spring led to summer, he became a better shot. By autumn, he’d begun throwing sticks into the air and trying to vaporize them before they reached the ground.

  During this time, Jack grew stronger. Long bike rides to the pond helped his legs and his stamina. In addition, he exercised with fitness equipment his parents had bought but never used. If monsters ever came, Jack couldn’t afford to be weak – heroes had to climb fences and break down doors. They had to balance on rooftops and hang by their fingers from cliffs. They had to run fast enough to save the girl.

  Jack pumped iron and ran every day. As he did so, he imagined dodging bullets and tentacles. When he felt like giving up, he cradled the ray-gun in his hands. It gave him the strength to persevere.

  Before the ray-gun, Jack had seen himself as just another teenager; his life didn’t make sense. But the gun made Jack a hero who might be needed to save the Earth. It clarified everything. Sore muscles didn’t matter. Watching TV was a waste. If you let down your guard, that’s when the monsters came.

  When he wasn’t exercising, Jack studied science. That was another part of being a hero. He sometimes dreamed he’d analyse the ray-gun, discovering how it worked and giving humans amazing new technology. At other times, he didn’t want to understand the gun at all. He liked its mystery. Besides, there was no guarantee Jack would ever understand how the gun worked. Perhaps human science wouldn’t progress far enough in Jack’s lifetime. Perhaps Jack himself wouldn’t have the brains to figure it out.

  But he had enough brains for high school. He did well; he was motivated. He had to hold back to avoid attracting attention. When his gym teacher told him he should go out for track, Jack ran slower and pretended to get out of breath.

  Spider-Man had to do the same.

  Two years later, in geography class, a girl named Kirsten gave Jack a daisy. She said the daisy was good luck and he should make a wish.

  Even a sixteen-year-old boy couldn’t misconstrue such a hint. Despite awkwardness and foot-dragging, Jack soon had a girlfriend.

  Kirsten was quiet but pretty. She played guitar. She wrote poems. She’d never had a boyfriend but she knew how to kiss. These were all good things. Jack wondered if he should tell her about the ray-gun.

  Until Kirsten, Jack’s only knowledge of girls came from his big sister, Rachel. Rachel was seventeen and incapable of keeping a secret. She talked with her friends about everything and was too slapdash to hide private things well. Jack didn’t snoop through his sister’s possessions, but when Rachel left her bedroom door ajar with empty cigarette packs tumbling out of the garbage can, who wouldn’t notice? When she gossiped on the phone about sex with her boyfriend, who couldn’t overhear? Jack didn’t want to listen, but Rachel never lowered her voice. The things Jack heard made him queasy – about his sister, and girls in general.

  If he showed Kirsten the ray-gun, would she tell her friends? Jack wanted to believe she wasn’t that kind of girl, but he didn’t know how many kinds of girl there were. He just knew that the ray-gun was too important for him to take chances. Changing the status quo wasn’t worth the risk.

  Yet the status quo changed anyway. The more time Jack spent with Kirsten, the less he had for shooting practice and other aspects of hero-dom. He felt guilty for skimping on crisis preparation; but when he went to the pond or spent a night reading science, he felt guilty for skimping on Kirsten. Jack would tell her he couldn’t come over to do homework and when she asked why, he’d have to make up excuses. He felt he was treating her like an enemy spy: holding her at arm’s length as if she were some femme fatale who was tempting him to betray state secrets. He hated not trusting her.

  Despite this wall between them, Kirsten became Jack’s lens on the world. If anything interesting happened, Jack didn’t experience it directly; some portion of his mind stood back, enjoying the anticipation of having something to tell Kirsten about the next time they met. Whatever he saw, he wanted her to see it too. Whenever Jack heard a joke, even before he started laughing, he pictured himself repeating it to Kirsten.

  Inevitably, Jack asked himself what she’d think of his hero-dom. Would she be impressed? Would she throw her arms around him and say he was even more wonderful than she’d thought? Or would she get that look on her face, the one when she heard bad poetry? Would she think he was an immature geek who’d read too many comic books and was pursuing some juvenile fantasy? How could anyone believe hostile aliens might appear in the sky? And if aliens did show up, how delusional was it that a teenage boy might make a difference, even if he owned a ray-gun and could do a hundred push-ups without stopping?

  For weeks, Jack agonized: to tell or not to tell. Was Kirsten worthy, or just a copy of Jack’s sister? Was Jack himself worthy, or just a foolish boy?

  One Saturday in May, Jack and Kirsten went biking. Jack led her to the pond where he practiced with the gun. He hadn’t yet decided what he’d do when they got there, but Jack couldn’t just tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. She’d never believe it was real unless she saw the rays in action. But so much could go wrong. Jack was terrified of giving away his deepest secret. He was afraid that when he saw hero-dom through Kirsten’s eyes, he’d realize it was silly.

  At the pond, Jack felt so nervous he could hardly speak. He babbled about the warm weather . . . a patch of mushrooms . . . a crow cawing in a tree. He talked about everything except what was on his mind.

  Kirsten misinterpreted his anxiety. She thought she knew why Jack had brought her to this secluded spot. After a while, she decided he needed encouragement, so she took off her shirt and her bra.

  It was the wrong thing to do. Jack hadn’t meant this outing to be a test . . . but it was, and Kirsten had failed.

  Jack took off his own shirt and wrapped his arms around her, chest touching breasts for the first time. He discovered it was possible to be excited and disappointed at the same time.

  Jack and Kirsten made out on a patch of hard dirt. It was the first time they’d been alone with no risk of interruption. They kept their pants on, but they knew they could go farther: as far as there was. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do. Jack and Kirsten felt light in their skins – open and dizzy with possibilities.

  Yet for Jack, it was all a mistake: one that couldn’t be reversed. Now he’d never tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. He’d missed his chance because she’d acted the way Jack’s sister would have acted. Kirsten had been thinking like a girl and she’d ruined things forever.

  Jack hated the way he felt: all angry and resentful. He really liked Kirsten. He liked making out, and couldn’t wait till the next time. He refused to be a guy who dumped a girl as soon as she let him touch her breasts. But he was now shut off from her and he had no idea how to get over that.

  In the following months, Jack grew guiltier: he was treating Kirsten as if she were good enough for sex but not good enough to be told about the most important thing in his life. As for Kirsten, every day made her more unhappy: she felt Jack blaming her for something but she didn’t know what she’d done. When they got together, they went straight to fondling and more as soon as possible. If they tried to talk, they didn’t know what to say.

  In August, Kirsten left to spend three weeks with her grandparents on Vancouver Island. Neither she nor Jack missed each other. They didn’t even miss the sex. It was a relief to be apart. When Kirsten got back, they went for a walk and a confused conversation. Both produced excuses for why they couldn’t stay together. The excuses didn’t make sense, but neither Jack nor Kirsten noticed – th
ey were too ashamed to pay attention to what they were saying. They both felt like failures. They’d thought their love would last forever, and now it was ending sordidly.

  When the lying was over, Jack went for a run. He ran in a mental blur. His mind didn’t clear until he found himself at the pond.

  Night was drawing in. He thought of all the things he’d done with Kirsten on the shore and in the water. After that first time, they’d come here a lot; it was private. Because of Kirsten, this wasn’t the same pond as when Jack had first begun to practice with the ray-gun. Jack wasn’t the same boy. He and the pond now carried histories.

  Jack could feel himself balanced on the edge of quitting. He’d turned seventeen. One more year of high school, then he’d go away to university. He realized he no longer believed in the imminent arrival of aliens, nor could he see himself as some great hero saving the world.

  Jack knew he wasn’t a hero. He’d used a nice girl for sex, then lied to get rid of her.

  He felt like crap. But blasting the shit out of sticks made him feel a little better. The ray-gun still had its uses, even if shooting aliens wasn’t one of them.

  The next day Jack did more blasting. He pumped iron. He got science books out of the library. Without Kirsten at his side several hours a day, he had time to fill, and emptiness. By the first day of the new school year, Jack was back to his full hero-dom program. He no longer deceived himself that he was preparing for battle, but the program gave him something to do: a purpose, a release, and a penance.

  So that was Jack’s passage into manhood. He was dishonest with the girl he loved.

  Manhood means learning who you are.

  In his last year of high school, Jack went out with other girls but he was past the all-or-nothingness of First Love. He could have casual fun; he could approach sex with perspective. “Monumental and life-changing” had been tempered to “pleasant and exciting”. Jack didn’t take his girlfriends for granted, but they were people, not objects of worship. He was never tempted to tell any of them about the gun.