The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Did that man…,” her father said. The old man’s voice broke. “Did he?”

  “I tried to take the thing, the trunch, from him. He’d left it lying on the table by the door.” Bex spoke in a hollow voice. “I thought that nobody was going to do anything, not even Henry, so I had to. I had to.” Her facial bruises were superficial. But she held her legs stiffly together, and clasped her hands to her stomach. There was vomit on her dress. “The trunch had some kind of alarm set on it,” Bex said. “So he caught me.”

  “Bex, are you hurting?” I said to her. She looked down, then carefully spread her legs. “He caught me and then he used the trunch on me. Not full strength. Said he didn’t want to do permanent damage. Said he wanted to save me for later.” Her voice sounded far away. She covered her face with her hands. “He put it in me,” she said.

  Then she breathed deeply, raggedly, and made herself look at me. “Well,” she said. “So.”

  I put her into my bed, and he sat in the chair beside it, standing watch for who knew what? He could not defend his daughter, but he must try, as surely as the suns rose, now growing farther apart, over the hard pack of my homeworld desert.

  Everything was changed.

  “Bex,” I said to her, and touched her forehead. Touched her fine, brown skin. “Bex, in the future, we won. I won, my command won it. Really, really big. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re all here.”

  Bex’s eyes were closed. I could not tell if she’d already fallen asleep. I hoped she had.

  “I have to take care of some business, and then I’ll do it again,” I said in a whisper. “I’ll just have to go back up-time and do it again.”

  Between the first and second rising, I’d reached Heidel, and as Hemingway burned red through the storm’s dusty leavings, I stood in the shadows of the entrance foyer of the Bexter Hotel. There I waited.

  The halandana was the first up—like me, they never really slept—and it came down from its room looking, no doubt, to go out and get another rubber of its drug. Instead, it found me. I didn’t waste time with the creature. With a quick twist in n-space, I pulled it down to the present, down to a local concentration of hate and lust and stupidity that I could kill with a quick thrust into its throat. But I let it live; I showed it myself, all of me spread out and huge, and I let it fear.

  “Go and get Marek Lambrois,” I told it. “Tell him Colonel Bone wants to see him. Colonel Henry Bone of the Eighth Sky and Light.”

  “Bone,” said the halandana. “I thought—”

  I reached out and grabbed the creature’s long neck. This was the halandana weak point, and this halandana had a ceramic implant as protection. I clicked up the power in my forearm a level and crushed the collar as I might a tea cup. The halandana’s neck carapace shattered to platelets and shards, outlined in fine cracks under its skin.

  “Don’t think,” I said. “Tell Marek Lambrois to come into the street and I will let him live.”

  This was untrue, of course, but hope never dies, I’d discovered, even in the hardest of soldiers. But perhaps I’d underestimated Marek. Sometimes I still wonder.

  He stumbled out, still partly asleep, onto the street. Last night had evidently been a hard and long one. His eyes were a red no detox nano could fully clean up. His skin was the color of paste.

  “You have something on me,” I said. “I cannot abide that.”

  “Colonel Bone,” he began. “If I’d knowed it was you—”

  “Too late for that.”

  “It’s never too late, that’s what you taught us all when you turned that offensive around out on the Husk and gave the Chaos the what-for. I’ll just be going. I’ll take the gang with me. It’s to no purpose, our staying now.”

  “You knew enough yesterday—enough to leave.” I felt the rage, the old rage that was to be, once again. “Why did you do that to her?” I asked. “Why did you—”

  And then I looked into his eyes and saw it there. The quiet desire—beaten down by synthesized emotions, but now triumphant, sadly triumphant. The desire to finally, finally die. Marek was not the unthinking brute I’d taken him for after all. Too bad for him.

  I took a step toward Marek. His instincts made him reach down, go for the trunch. But it was a useless weapon on me. I don’t have myelin sheaths on my nerves. I don’t have nerves anymore; I have wiring. Marek realized this was so almost instantly. He dropped the trunch, then turned and ran. I caught him. He tried to fight, but there was never any question of him beating me. That would be absurd. I’m Colonel Bone of the Sky-falling 8th. I kill so that there might be life. Nobody beats me. It is my fate, and yours too.

  I caught him by the shoulder, and I looped my other arm around his neck and reined him to me—not enough to snap anything. Just enough to calm him down. He was strong, but had no finesse.

  Like I said, glims are hard to kill. They’re the same as snails in shells in a way, and the trick is to draw them out—way out. Which is what I did with Marek. As I held him physically, I caught hold of him, all of him, over there, in the place I can’t tell you about, can’t describe. The way you do this is by holding a glim still and causing him great suffering, so that they can’t withdraw into the deep places. That’s what vampire stakes and Roman crosses are all about.

  And, like I told Bex, glims are bad ones, all right. Bad, but not the worst. I am the worst.

  Icicle spike

  from the eye of a star.

  I’ve come to kill you.

  I sharpened my nails. Then I plunged them into Marek’s stomach, through the skin, into the twist of his guts. I reached around there and caught hold of something, a piece of intestine. I pulled it out. This I tied to the porch of the Bexter Hotel.

  Marek tried to untie himself and pull away. He was staring at his insides, rolled out, raw and exposed, and thinking—I don’t know what. I haven’t died. I don’t know what it is like to die. He moaned sickly. His hands fumbled uselessly in the grease and phlegm that coated his very own self. There was no undoing the knots I’d tied, no pushing himself back in.

  I picked him up, and as he whimpered, I walked down the street with him. His guts trailed out behind us, like a pink ribbon. After I’d gotten about twenty feet, I figured this was all he had in him. I dropped him into the street.

  Hemingway was in the northeast and Fitzgerald directly east. They both shone at different angles on Marek’s crumple, and cast crazy, mazy shadows down the length of the street.

  “Colonel Bone,” he said. I was tired of his talking. “Colonel—”

  I reached into his mouth, past his gnashing teeth, and pulled out his tongue. He reached for it as I extracted it, so I handed it to him. Blood and drool flowed from his mouth and colored the red ground even redder about him. Then, one by one, I broke his arms and legs, then I broke each of the vertebrae in his backbone, moving up his spinal column with quick pinches. It didn’t take long.

  This is what I did in the world that people can see. In the twists of other times and spaces, I did similar things, horrible, irrevocable things, to the man. I killed him. I killed him in such a way that he would never come to life again, not in any possible place, not in any possible time. I wiped Marek Lambrois from existence. Thoroughly. And with his death the other glims died, like lights going out, lights ceasing to exist, bulb, filament and all. Or like the quick loss of all sensation after a brain is snuffed out.

  Irrevocably gone from this timeline, and that was what mattered. Keeping this possible future uncertain, balanced on the fulcrum of chaos and necessity. Keeping it free, so that I could go back and do my work.

  I left Marek lying there, in the main street of Heidel. Others could do the mopping up; that wasn’t my job. As I left town, on the way back to my house and my life there, I saw that I wasn’t alone in the dawn-lit town. Some had business out at this hour, and they had watched. Others had heard the commotion and come to windows and porches to see what it was. Now they knew. They knew what I was, what I was to be. I
walked alone down the road, and found Bex and her father both sound asleep in my room.

  I stroked her fine hair. She groaned, turned in her sleep. I pulled my covers up to her chin. Forty years old, and as beautiful as a child. Safe in my bed. Bex. Bex. I will miss you. Always, always, Bex.

  I went to the living room, to the shroud-covered furniture. I sat down in what had been my father’s chair. I sipped a cup of my father’s best barley-malt whiskey. I sat, and as the suns of Ferro rose in the hard-iron sky, I faded into the distant, dying future.

  THIRTEEN PHANTASMS

  James P. Blaylock

  James P. Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, and now lives in Orange, California. He made his first sale to the now-defunct semiprozine Unearth, and subsequently became one of the most popular, literate, and wildly eclectic fantasists of the ’80s and ’90s. His story “Paper Dragons” won him a World Fantasy Award in 1986. His critically acclaimed novels—often quirky blends of different genres (SF, fantasy, nineteen-century mainstream novels, horror, romance, ghost stories, mystery, adventure) that would seem doomed to clash, but which, in Blaylock’s whimsically affectionate hands somehow do not—include The Last Coin, Land of Dreams, The Digging Leviathan, Homunculus, Lord Kelvin’s Machine, The Elfin Ship, The Disappearing Dwarf, The Magic Spectacles, The Stone Giant, The Paper Grail, and Night Relics. His most recent book is the novel All the Bells on Earth. His aforementioned “Paper Dragons” appeared in our Third Annual Collection.

  In the evocative and lushly nostalgic story that follows, he shows us that sometimes you can Go Home Again—if you just try hard enough.

  There was a small window in the attic, six panes facing the street, the wood frame unpainted and without moldings. Leafy wisteria vines grew over the glass outside, filtering the sunlight and tinting it green. The attic was dim despite the window, and the vines outside shook in the autumn wind, rustling against the clapboards of the old house and casting leafy shadows on the age-darkened beams and rafters. Landers set his portable telephone next to the crawl-space hatch and shined a flashlight across the underside of the shingles, illuminating dusty cobwebs and the skeleton frame of the roof. The air smelled of dust and wood, and the attic was lonesome with silence and moving shadows, a place sheltered from time and change.

  A car rolled past out on the street, and Landers heard a train whistle in the distance. Somewhere across town, church bells tolled the hour, and there was the faint sound of freeway noise off to the east like the drone of a perpetual-motion engine. It was easy to imagine that the wisteria vines had tangled themselves around the window frame for some secretive purpose of their own, obscuring the glass with leaves, muffling the sounds of the world.

  He reached down and switched the portable phone off, regretting that he’d brought it with him at all. It struck him suddenly as something incongruous, an artifact from an alien planet. For a passing moment he considered dropping it through the open hatch just to watch it slam to the floor of the kitchen hallway below.

  Years ago old Mr. Cummings had set pine planks across the two-by-six ceiling joists to make a boardwalk beneath the roof beam, apparently with the idea of using the attic for storage, although it must have been a struggle to haul things up through the shoulder-width attic hatch. At the end of this boardwalk, against the north wall, lay four, dust-covered cardboard cartons—full of “junk magazines,” or so Mrs. Cummings herself had told Landers this morning. The cartons were tied with twine, pulled tight and knotted, all the cartons the same. The word ASTOUNDING was written on the side with a felt marker in neat, draftsmanlike letters. Landers wryly wondered what sort of things Mr. Cummings might have considered astounding, and after a moment, he decided that the man had been fortunate to find enough of it in one lifetime to fill four good-sized boxes.

  Landers himself had come up empty in that regard, at least lately. For years he’d had a picture in his mind of himself whistling a cheerful out-of-key tune, walking along a country road, his hands in his pockets and with no particular destination, sunlight streaming through the trees and the limitless afternoon stretching toward the horizon. Somehow that picture had lost its focus in the past year or so, and as with an old friend separated by time and distance, he had nearly given up on seeing it again.

  It had occurred to him this morning that he hadn’t brewed real coffee for nearly a year now. The coffee pot sat under the counter instead of on top of it, and was something he hauled out for guests. There was a frozen brick of ground coffee in the freezer, but he never bothered with it anymore. Janet had been opposed to freezing coffee at all. Freezing it, she said, killed the aromatic oils. It was better to buy it a half pound at a time, so that it was always fresh. Lately, though, most of the magic had gone out of the morning coffee; it didn’t matter how fresh it was.

  The Cummingses had owned the house since it was built in 1924, and Mrs. Cummings, ninety years old now, had held on for twenty years after her husband’s death, letting the place run down, and then had rented it to Landers and moved into the Palmyra Apartments beyond the Plaza. Occasionally he still got mail intended for her, and it was easier simply to take it to her than to give it back to the post office. This morning she had told him about the boxes in the attic: “Just leave them there,” she’d said. Then she had shown him her husband’s old slide rule, slipping it out of its leather case and working the slide. She wasn’t sure why she kept it, but she had kept a couple of old smoking pipes too, and a ring-shaped cut-crystal decanter with some whiskey still in it. Mrs. Cummings didn’t have any use for the pipes or the decanter any more than she had a use for the slide rule, but Landers, who had himself kept almost nothing to remind him of his own past, understood that there was something about these souvenirs, sitting alongside a couple of old photographs on a small table, that recalled better days, easier living.

  * * *

  The arched window of the house on Rexroth Street in Glendale looked out onto a sloping front lawn with an overgrown carob tree at the curb, shading a dusty Land Rover with what looked like prospecting tools strapped to the rear bumper. There was a Hudson Wasp in the driveway, parked behind an Austin Healey. Across the street a man in shirtsleeves rubbed paste polish onto the fender of a Studebaker, and a woman in a sundress dug in a flower bed with a trowel, setting out pansies. A little boy rode a sort of sled on wheels up and down the sidewalk, and the sound of the solid-rubber wheels bumping over cracks sounded oddly loud in the still afternoon.

  Russell Latzarel turned away from the window and took a cold bottle of beer from Roycroft Squires. In a few minutes the Newtonian Society would come to order, more or less, for the second time that day. Not that it made a lot of difference. For Latzarel’s money they could recess until midnight if they wanted to, and the world would spin along through space for better or worse. He and Squires were both bachelors, and so unlike married men they had until hell froze over to come to order.

  “India Pale Ale,” Latzarel said approvingly, looking at the label on the squat green bottle. He gulped down an inch of beer. “Elixir of the gods, eh?” He set the bottle on a coaster. Then he filled his pipe with Balkan Sobranie tobacco and tamped it down, settling into an armchair in front of the chessboard, where there was a game laid out, half played. “Who’s listed as guest of honor at West Coast Con? Edward tells me they’re going to get Clifford Simak and van Vogt both.”

  “That’s not what it says here in the newsletter,” Squires told him, scrutinizing a printed pamphlet. “According to this it’s TBA.”

  “To be announced,” Latzarel said, then lit his pipe and puffed hard on it for a moment, his lips making little popping sounds. “Same son of a bitch as they advertised last time.” He laughed out loud and then bent over to scan the titles of the chess books in the bookcase. He wasn’t sure whether Squires read the damned things or whether he kept them there to gain some sort of psychological advantage, which he generally didn’t need.

  It was warm for November, and the casement windows along the
west wall were wide open, the muslin curtains blowing inward on the breeze. Dust motes moved in the sunshine. The Newtonian Society had been meeting here every Saturday night since the war ended, and in that couple of years it had seldom broken up before two or three in the morning. Sometimes when there was a full house, all twelve of them would talk straight through until dawn and then go out after eggs and bacon, the thirty-nine-cent breakfast special down at Velma’s Copper Pot on Western, although it wasn’t often that the married men could get away with that kind of nonsense. Tonight they had scheduled a critical discussion of E. E. Smith’s Children of the Lens, but it turned out that none of them liked the story much except Hastings, whose opinion was unreliable anyway, and so the meeting had lost all its substance after the first hour, and members had drifted away, into the kitchen and the library and out to the printing shed in the backyard, leaving Latzarel and Squires alone in the living room. Later on tonight, if the weather held up, they would be driving out to the observatory in Griffith Park.

  There was a shuffling on the front walk, and Latzarel looked out in time to see the postman shut the mailbox and turn away, heading up the sidewalk. Squires went out through the front door and emptied the box, then came back in sorting letters. He took a puzzled second look at an envelope. “You’re a stamp man,” he said to Latzarel, handing it to him. “What do you make of that?”

  * * *

  Landers found that he could stand upright on the catwalk, although the roof sloped at such an angle that if he moved a couple of feet to either side, he had to duck to clear the roof rafters. He walked toward the boxes, but turned after a few steps to shine the light behind him, picking out his footprints in the otherwise-undisturbed dust. Beneath that dust, if a person could only brush away the successive years, lay Mr. Cummings’s own footprints, coming and going along the wooden boards.

  There was something almost wrong about opening the boxes at all, whatever they contained, like prying open a man’s coffin. And somehow the neatly tied string suggested that their packing hadn’t been temporary, that old Mr. Cummings had put them away forever, perhaps when he knew he was at the end of things.