The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I blinked up an internals menu into my peripheral vision and adjusted to the room’s temperature. Then I went to the edge of the bar. The room got even quieter.…

  The bartender, old Thredmartin himself, reluctantly came over to me.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked me.

  I looked over him, to the selection of bottles, tubes, and cans on display behind him. “I don’t see it,” I said.

  “Eh?” He glanced back over his shoulder, then quickly returned to peering at me.

  “Bone’s Barley,” I said.

  “We don’t have any more of that,” Thredmartin said, with a suspicious tone.

  “Why not?”

  “The man who made it died.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Twenty years, more or less. I don’t see what business of—”

  “What about his son?”

  Thredmartin backed up a step. Then another. “Henry,” he whispered. “Henry Bone.”

  “Just give me the best that you do have, Peter Thredmartin,” I said. “In fact, I’d like to buy everybody a round on me.”

  “Henry Bone! Why, you looked to me like a bad ’un indeed when you walked in here. I took you for one of them glims, I did,” Thredmartin said. I did not know what he was talking about. Then he smiled an old devil’s crooked smile. “Your money’s no good here, Henry Bone. I do happen to have a couple of bottles of your old dad’s whiskey stowed away in back. Drinks are on the house.”

  And so I returned to my world, and for most of those I’d left behind it seemed as if I’d never really gone. My neighbors hadn’t changed much in the twenty years local that had passed, and of course, they had no conception of what had happened to me. They knew only that I’d been to the war—the Big War at the End of Time—and evidently everything turned out okay, for here I was, back in my own time and my own place. I planted Ferro’s desert barley, brought in peat from the mountain bogs, bred the biomass that would extract the minerals from my hard ground water, and got ready for making whiskey once again. Most of the inhabitants of Ferro were divided between whiskey families and beer families. Bones were distillers, never brewers, since the Settlement, ten generations before.

  It wasn’t until she called upon me that I heard the first hints of the troubles that had come. Her name was Alinda Bexter, but since we played together under the floorplanks of her father’s hotel, I had always called her Bex. When I left for the war, she was twenty, and I twenty-one. I still recognized her at forty, five years older than I was now, as she came walking down the road to my house, a week after I’d returned. She was taller than most women on Ferro, and she might be mistaken for a usa-human splice anywhere else. She was rangy, and she wore a khaki dress that whipped in the dry wind as she came toward me. I stood on the porch, waiting for her, wondering what she would say.

  “Well, this is a load off of me,” she said. She was wearing a brimmed hat. It had ribbon to tie under her chin, but Bex had not done that. She held her hand on it to keep it from blowing from her head. “This damn ranch has been one big thankless task.”

  “So it was you who kept it up,” I said.

  “Just kept it from falling apart as fast as it would have otherwise,” she replied. We stood and looked at one another for a moment. Her eyes were green. Now that I had seen an ocean, I could understand the kind of green they were.

  “Well then,” I finally said. “Come on in.”

  * * *

  I offered her some sweetcake I’d fried up, and some beer that my neighbor, Shin, had brought by, both of which she declined. We sat in the living room, on furniture covered with the white sheets I had yet to remove. Bex and I took it slow, getting to know each other again. She ran her father’s place now. For years, the only way to get to Heidel was by freighter, but we had finally gotten a node on the Flash, and even though Ferro was still a backwater planet, there were more strangers passing through than there ever had been—usually en route to other places. But they sometimes stayed a night or two in the Bexter Hotel. Its reputation was spreading, Bex claimed, and I believed her. Even when she was young, she had been shrewd but honest, a combination you don’t often find in an innkeeper. She was a quiet woman—that is, until she got to know you well—and some most likely thought her conceited. I got the feeling that she hadn’t let down her reserve for a long time. When I knew her before, Bex did not have many close friends, but for the ones she had, such as me, she poured out her thoughts, and her heart. I found that she hadn’t changed much in that way.

  “Did you marry?” I asked her, after hearing about the hotel and her father’s bad health.

  “No,” she said. “No, I very nearly did, but then I did not. Did you?”

  “No. Who was it?”

  “Rall Kenton.”

  “Rall Kenton? Rall Kenton whose parents run the hops market?” He was a quarter-splice, a tall man on a world of tall men. Yet, when I knew him, his long shadow had been deceptive. There was no spark or force in him. “I can’t see that, Bex.”

  “Tom Kenton died ten years ago,” she said. “Marjorie retired, and Rall owned the business until just last year. Rall did all right; you’d be surprised. Something about his father’s passing gave him a backbone. Too much of one, maybe.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died,” she said. “He died too, just as I thought you had.” Now she told me she would like a beer after all, and I went to get her a bottle of Shin’s ale. When I returned, I could tell that she’d been crying a little.

  “The glims killed Rall,” said Bex, before I could ask her about him. “That’s their name for themselves, anyway. Humans, repons, kaliwaks, and I don’t know what else. They passed through last year and stayed for a week in Heidel. Very bad. They made my father give over the whole hotel to them, and then they had a … trial, they called it. Every house was called and made to pay a tithe. The glims decided how much. Rall refused to pay. He brought along a pistol—Lord knows where he got it—and tried to shoot one of them. They just laughed and took it from him.” Now the tears started again.

  “And then they hauled him out into the street in front of the hotel.” Bex took a moment and got control of herself. “They burnt him up with a p-gun. Burned his legs off first, then his arms, then the rest of him after they’d let him lie there a while. There wasn’t a trace of him after that; we couldn’t even bury him.”

  I couldn’t take her to me, hold her, not after she’d told me about Rall. Needing something to do, I took some tangled banwood from the tinder box and struggled to get a fire going from the burnt-down coals in my hearth. I blew into the fireplace and only got a nose full of ashes for my trouble. “Didn’t anybody fight?” I asked.

  “Not after that. We just waited them out. Or they got bored. I don’t know. It was bad for everybody, not just Rall.” Bex shook her head, sighed, then saw the trouble I was having and bent down to help me. She was much better at it than I, and the fire was soon ablaze. We sat back down and watched it flicker.

  “Sounds like war-ghosts,” I said.

  “The glims?”

  “Soldiers who don’t go home after the war. The fighting gets into them and they don’t want to give it up, or can’t. Sometimes they have … modifications that won’t let them give it up. They wander the timeways—and since they don’t belong to the time they show up in, they’re hard to kill. In the early times, where people don’t know about the war, or have only heard rumors of it, they had lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies.”

  “What can you do?”

  I put my arm around her. It had been so long. She tensed up, then breathed deeply, serenely.

  “Hope they don’t come back,” I said. “They are bad ones. Not the worst, but bad.”

  We were quiet for a while, and the wind, blowing over the chimney’s top, made the flue moan as if it were a big stone flute.

  “Did you love him, Bex?” I asked. “Rall?”

  She didn’t even hesitate in her answer
this time. “Of course not, Henry Bone. How could you ever think such a thing? I was waiting to catch up with you. Now tell me about the future.”

  And so I drew away from her for a while, and told her—part of it at least. About how there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together again, not enough mass to undulate in an eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but dim night. I told her about the twilight armies gathered there, culled from all times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy-to-galaxy, system-to-system, fighting until the critical point is reached, when entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless, stagnant pools of nothing. No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain … inherit the dark field. They win.

  “And did you win?” she asked me. “If that’s the word for it.”

  The suns were going down. Instead of answering, I went outside to the woodpile and brought in enough banwood to fuel the fire for the night. I thought maybe she would forget what she’d asked me—but not Bex.

  “How does the war end, Henry?”

  “You must never ask me that.” I spoke the words carefully, making sure I was giving away nothing in my reply. “Every time a returning soldier tells that answer, he changes everything. Then he has two choices. He can either go away, leave his own time, and go back to fight again. Or he can stay, and it will all mean nothing, what he did. Not just who won and who lost, but all the things he did in the war spin off into nothing.”

  Bex thought about this for a while. “What could it matter? What in God’s name could be worth fighting for?” she finally asked. “Time ends. Nothing matters after that. What could it possibly matter who won … who wins?”

  “It means you can go back home,” I said. “After it’s over.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I shook my head and was silent. I had said enough. There was no way to tell her more, in any case—not without changing things. And no way to say what it was that had brought those forces together at the end of everything. And what the hell do I know, even now? All I know is what I was told, and what I was trained to do. If we don’t fight at the end, there won’t be a beginning. For there to be people, there has to be a war to fight at the end of things. We live in that kind of universe, and not another, they told me. They told me, and then I told myself. And I did what I had to do so that it would be over and I could go home, come back.

  “Bex, I never forgot you,” I said. She came to sit with me by the fire. We didn’t touch at first, but I felt her next to me, breathed the flush of her skin as the fire warmed her. Then she ran her hand along my arm, felt the bumps from the operational enhancements.

  “What have they done to you?” she whispered.

  Unbidden the old words of the skyfallers’ scream, the words that were yet to be, surfaced in my mind.

  They sucked down my heart

  to a little black hole.

  You cannot stab me.

  They wrote down my brain

  on a hard knot of space.

  You cannot turn me.

  Icicle spike

  from the eye of a star.

  I’ve come to kill you.

  I almost spoke them, from sheer habit. But I did not. The war was over. Bex was here, and I knew it was over. I was going to feel something, once again, something besides guile, hate, and rage. I didn’t yet, that was true, but I could feel the possibility.

  “I don’t really breathe anymore, Bex; I pretend to so I won’t put people off,” I told her. “It’s been so long, I can’t even remember what it was like to have to.”

  Bex kissed me then. At first, I didn’t remember how to do that either. And then I did. I added wood to the fire, then ran my hand along Bex’s neck and shoulder. Her skin had the health of youth still, but years in the sun and wind had made a supple leather of it, tanned and grained fine. We took the sheet from the couch and pulled it near to the warmth, and she drew me down to her on it, to her neck and breasts.

  “Did they leave enough of you for me?” she whispered.

  I had not known until now. “Yes,” I answered, “there’s enough.” I found my way inside her, and we made love slowly, in a way that might seem sad to any others but us, for there were memories and years of longing that flowed from us, around us, like amber just at the melting point, and we were inside and there was nothing but this present with all of what was, and what would be, already passed. No time. Finally, only Bex and no time between us.

  We fell asleep on the old couch, and it was dim half-morning when we awoke, with Fitzgerald yet to rise in the west and the fire a bed of coals as red as the sky.

  * * *

  Two months later, I was in Thredmartin’s when Bex came in with an evil look on her face. We had taken getting back together slow and easy up till then, but the more time we spent around each other, the more we understood that nothing basic had changed. Bex kept coming to the ranch and I took to spending a couple of nights a week in a room her father made up for me at the hotel. Furly Bexter was an old-style McKinnonite. Men and women were to live separately and only meet for business and copulation. But he liked me well enough, and when I insisted on paying for my room, he found a loophole somewhere in the Tracts of McKinnon about cohabitation being all right in hotels and hostels.

  “The glims are back,” Bex said, sitting down at my table. I was in a dark corner of the pub. I left the fire for those who could not adjust their own internals to keep them warm. “They’ve taken over the top floor of the hotel. What should we do?”

  I took a draw of beer—Thredmartin’s own thick porter—and looked at her. She was visibly shivering, probably more from agitation than fright.

  “How many of them are there?” I asked.

  “Six. And something else, some splice I’ve never seen, however many that makes.”

  I took another sip of beer. “Let it be,” I said. “They’ll get tired, and they’ll move on.”

  “What?” Bex’s voice was full of astonishment. “What are you saying?”

  “You don’t want a war here, Bex,” I replied. “You have no idea how bad it can get.”

  “They killed Rall. They took our money.”

  “Money.” My voice sounded many years away, even to me.

  “It’s muscle and worry and care. You know how hard people work on Ferro. And for those … things … to come in and take it! We cannot let them—”

  “—Bex,” I said. “I am not going to do anything.”

  She said nothing; she put a hand on her forehead as if she had a sickening fever, stared at me for a moment, then looked away.

  One of the glims chose that moment to come into Thredmartin’s. It was a halandana, a splice—human and jan—from up-time and a couple of possible universes over. It was nearly seven feet tall, with a two-footlong neck, and it stooped to enter Thredmartin’s. Without stopping, it went to the bar and demanded morphine.

  Thredmartin was at the bar. He pulled out a dusty rubber, little used, and before he could get out an injector, the halandana reached over, took the entire rubber and put it in the pocket of the long gray coat it wore. Thredmartin started to speak, then shook his head, and found a spray shooter. He slapped it on the bar, and started to walk away. The halandana’s hand shot out and pushed the old man. Thredmartin stumbled to his knees.

  I felt the fingers of my hands clawing, clenching. Let them loosen; let them go.

  Thredmartin rose slowly to one knee. Bex was up, around the bar, and over to him, steadying his shoulder. The glim watched this for a moment, then took its drug and shooter to a table, where it got itself ready for an injection.

  I looked at it closely now. It was female, but that did not mean much in halandana splices. I could see it phase around the edges with dead, gray flames. I clicked in wideband overspace, and I could see through the halandana to the chair it was sitting in and the unpainted wood of the wall behind it. A
nd I saw more, in the spaces between spaces. The halandana was keyed in to a websquad; it wasn’t really an individual anymore. Its fate was tied to that of its unit commander. So the war-ghosts—the glims—were a renegade squad, most likely, with a single leader calling the shots. For a moment, the halandana glanced in my direction, maybe feeling my gaze somewhere outside of local time, and I banded down to human normal. It quickly went back to what it was doing. Bex made sure Thredmartin was all right, then came back over to my table.

  “We’re not even in its timeline,” I said. “It doesn’t think of us as really being alive.”

  “Oh God,” Bex said. “This is just like before.”

  I got up and walked out. It was the only solution. I could not say anything to Bex. She would not understand. I understood—not acting was the rational, the only, way, but not my way. Not until now.

  I enhanced my legs and loped along the road to my house. But when I got there, I kept running, running off into the red sands of Ferro’s outback. The night came down, and as the planet turned, I ran along the length of the Big Snake, bright and hard to the southwest, and then under the blue glow of Steiner, when she rose in the moonless, trackless night. I ran for miles and miles, as fast as a jaguar, but never tiring. How could I tire when parts of me stretched off into dimensions of utter stillness, utter rest? Could Bex see me for what I was, she would not see a man, but a kind of colonial creature, a mash of life pressed into the niches and fault lines of existence like so much grit and lichen. A human is anchored with only his heart and his mind; sever those, and he floats away. Floats away. What was I? A medusa fish in an ocean of time? A tight clump of nothing, disguised as a man? Something else?