The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Pascal debated testing the hatch to see if she had really carried out her threat, but decided against it. He really didn’t care to find out.

  He returned topside and worked his way carefully to the stem. He stood there and contemplated what he had to do; what he could not escape doing, no matter what his fear.

  Louella had been doing a good job of keeping station. Thorn was still drifting off to the port side, slightly below Primrose’s level. Their positions gave the tow line a downward slope.

  All that he had to do was tie himself to the line and slide down to Thorn’s deck. It sounded so easy, so terribly easy. But what if the line parted? No, he couldn’t afford to think about that.

  Pascal retreated to the winch at midships, tore the remnants of the safety line away and wrapped a new line, fastening the other end to his suit. That would give him some added security, and could be used to drag Rams back aboard.

  He fashioned a short loop around the tow rope with a short length of line, and tied both ends to his suit. After a moment’s hesitation, he attached a second loop—and a third. Just for safety’s sake, he detached the line that held him to the deck and put that around the tow as well. Finally certain that he was quadruple redundantly safe, he lay under the tow and grasped the line with both hands.

  Through the narrow visor of his helmet he could only see the tow rope and the spider’s web of lines he had attached. He concentrated on the line and his gloves around it, trying to suppress any thoughts of what he was about to do. He tried to drive away all thoughts of the depths below him, drawing him so deathly down, down, down.…

  Pascal shook himself. If he hesitated for one more second, thinking about it, he would be unable to move. Ignoring a shudder of stomach-wrenching fear that tore at his insides, he tugged at the tow with one hand, said a short prayer, and began to slide.

  There was a snap, a millisecond of a fall, as the slack in his safety lines was taken up by his weight. The tow vibrated for a second more and then Pascal was falling, sliding, hitting the deck of Thorn with a bone-jarring impact. He clutched the tow tightly through his gloves as he tested the solid reality of the deck beneath his feet. He had made it, he had not fallen. He had conquered the depths of his fear. Nothing was beyond him now. Nothing!

  The smell inside his suit told him that his body had not shared his courage.

  Squirming around to pull himself upright, securing a new safety line to the rolling deck, untangling the many lines that held him to the tow line, and making his way forward to stand on the deck above Rams took only a few minutes. The captain was still hanging, just a few meters down the side. Pascal could see that he had the safety line wrapped around one arm, pinning it to his side.

  “Captain?” he called when he thought he was within range of the other’s radio. “Can you hear me?” Only silence answered him. He could expect no help from Rams.

  But how was he to get Rams’s unconscious body up on deck? It would be impossible to pull the man the short distance up the side with the safety line. At best, he couldn’t lift his own weight under two g’s. What chance did he have of pulling a larger man, and one enclosed in a heavy pressure suit, that far? It would be the equivalent of lifting 350 kilos on Earth! Even professional weightlifters had trouble with that kind of load. No, he couldn’t do that.

  Neither did he think he could maneuver the tangled safety line sideways to the winch and use that to pull him up. A lateral pull would be the same as lifting Rams a half a meter or more; out of the question.

  There was no choice; he’d have to climb down and attach the safety line he’d brought with him. Easy to say—sure, just drop down and hang over the depths once again. Nothing to it, he told himself. After all, hadn’t he come across the gap?

  No, you can’t, his mind replied as the edges of his innermost fear crept back in. He tried not to listen to it as he rigged two lines to the deck; one to support him and one more for additional security. His empty stomach clenched in a knot of sour fear the whole time. He fervently wished that he didn’t have to do this, that there was some other way. Tears stung his eyes. The fear of falling was too great to bear. Why did it have to be him?

  The line he’d tied to the Primrose’s winch was attached to his belt, ready to clamp onto Rams’s suit. Not incidentally, it provided another layer of security for himself.

  Screwing up all of the resolve he could muster, he turned his back on Primrose and forced himself to take one small step backward, out and down, paying a few centimeters of line out behind him. He froze. He could move no farther no matter how hard he forced his legs to move. His fear had taken control. He couldn’t put himself in danger.

  Thorn suddenly started to roll to starboard and Pascal watched the level deck in front of him start to tilt away. He rapidly stepped backward, trying to stay on the top of the rolling ship, letting out line as fast as he could.

  Then, as Thorn heeled to a sixty-degree list, Pascal found himself beside Rams. There was a solid deck directly beneath his feet. “Piece of cake,” he remarked and knelt to attach the safety line to Rams.

  First, though, he had to disconnect the tangled line. The tension between that and the safety line to Primrose would break the captain’s arm if he didn’t. He freed the line and let the wind take it.

  He disconnected the safety line from his suit to clip it to Rams’s when Thorn began to roll the other way. Rams’s body started to slide down the hull. Pascal extended the safety clamp but was stopped short by the limits of the other line. The ship continued to roll. The captain was sliding. In seconds he would plunge into the dark and fall.

  Pascal fumbled to release his own line, trying to balance on the moving hull. His fingers didn’t want to operate the clamp. He felt himself starting to slide on the steepening slope. With a final, desperate twist of his hand, Pascal released the restricting line, lunged forward, and clipped the clamp onto Rams’s suit.

  Both of them began to slide, faster and faster, down the increasingly steep side of the ship. In a panic Pascal threw both arms and one leg around Rams’s body, clinging to him in desperation, as the hull beneath him changed to a vertical wall.

  Pascal screamed in pure terror as he felt them fall from the ship and down into the dark. He knew that the thin line he had put on Rams wouldn’t hold the weight of both of them. He screamed louder as their downward fall stopped and they swung to the top of their arc and began to fall the other way.

  “I am going to die. I am going to die,” he repeated in an unending string of fear-crazed babble. He could feel Jupiter pulling at him, trying to pry his hands apart so he would fall, fall, fall. It was very dark and the manic strength of his arms were all that stood between him and certain death. He clenched his eyes tight and prayed as he had never prayed before.

  There are moments in a man’s life when he faces the core of his being; a single defining moment when his true nature is revealed to him and all pretense, all bluff and bluster, are stripped away. This was Pascal’s moment. He knew that he would never be able to conquer the fear that rested in his innermost being. He knew that he was, at heart, a coward.

  Something clanged on the back of Pascal’s suit as they slammed against something, hard! He felt them start to swing out, and then “CLANG!”—he hit again. He opened his eyes and saw a vast gray wall receding from him. In seconds, they reached the end of their arc and the wall advanced to smash against him once more. He threw his legs out to brace and absorbed the worst of the impact. Rams nearly twisted from his grasp as they hit.

  It took him a second to realize that the “wall” was actually the side of Primrose. It took him another second to realize that it was moving steadily downward beneath his feet.

  He risked a glance up and saw the taut line disappear around the curve of the ship. They were definitely being pulled up the side. He set his feet against the ship’s side and walked up the wall, clutching tightly to Rams and frightfully aware of the depths behind him, beneath him.

  As soon he came
over the edge of the deck he saw Louella standing by the winch. Finally, he was to the point where he could walk more or less upright. From Louella’s perspective it must look as if he were holding the unconscious form of Rams in his arms. He hoped that she wouldn’t realize that he was hanging on to the man for dear life. He hoped that she had not heard him screaming in the dark.

  “Secure the ship,” Louella yelled as soon as the winch stopped. With shaking hands Pascal quickly clipped himself to a safety line. That done, he struggled forward to secure the heavy line to the forward docking winch. The slow progress forward and back gave him time to compose himself. Time for the acceptance of his true nature to sink in.

  * * *

  “Don’t worry. Everything’s under control,” were the first words that Rams heard when he finally recovered consciousness. The pain in his leg had stopped, as had all other sensation below his waist. “We’ve got both ships secured and we’re out of the storm.”

  “My legs…,” he began and then stopped. A woman stood over him like a welcoming angel. One of her arms was in a sling.

  “Gave you a nice little spinal to hold off the pain from your broken leg,” the woman said with a chuckle. “But don’t worry, you’ll be functioning below the waist in a few days. At least I hope so.”

  “I don’t understand. All I remember is getting hit from behind and…”

  The woman smiled. It was a nice smile, he thought. “Pascal went after you and dragged your ass back here.” She grinned. “I think he’ll stop shaking by the time we make station.”

  “But how, where, what…?” Rams mumbled in confusion, feeling himself start to slip back into unconsciousness. “I thought that he was too afraid.”

  Louella shrugged. “I guess the sea’s got a way of getting the most extraordinary things out of you.”

  “The sea…?”

  “Rest now. You’ve got JBI’s most expensive and experienced captain and navigator looking after you. I would think we have a reasonable chance of finding a station with that combination.”

  “… Station,” Rams thought as he succumbed to the call of the drugs. She’d said both ships were secure. He thought of the riches that awaited him.

  The storms really did provide the most amazing things.

  THE MIRACLE OF IVAR AVENUE

  John Kessel

  Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1978. His first solo novel, Good News from Outer Space, was released in 1989 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which have since been assembled in his collection Meeting in Infinity. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1992. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. His most recent book is an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers’ Workshop (which he also helps to run), called Intersections, coedited by Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His stories have appeared in our First, Second (in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly), Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. He has just published a new novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and a new story collection, The Pure Product, is in the works.

  In the eloquent and ironic story that follows, he takes us back to the Glory Days of Old Hollywood, where a stranger has hit town, and some odd things have begun happening, things too strange even for the movies.…

  Inside the coat pocket of the dead man Corcoran found an eyepiece. “Looks like John Doe was a photographer,” the pathologist said, gliding his rubber-gloved thumb over the lens. He handed it to Kinlaw.

  While Corcoran continued to peel away the man’s clothing, Kinlaw walked over to the morgue’s only window, more to get away from the smell of the dissecting table than to examine the lens. He looked through the eyepiece at the parking lot. The device produced a rectangular frame around a man getting into a 1947 Packard. “This isn’t from a camera,” Kinlaw said. “It’s a cinematographer’s monocle.”

  “A what?”

  “A movie cameraman uses it to frame a scene.”

  “You think our friend had something to do with the movies?”

  Kinlaw thought about it. That morning a couple of sixth-graders playing hooky had found the body on the beach in San Pedro. A man about fifty, big, over two hundred pounds, mustache, thick brown hair going gray. Wearing a beat-up tan double-breasted suit, silk shirt, cordovan shoes. Carrying no identification.

  Corcoran hummed “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” while he examined the dead man’s fingers. “Heavy smoker,” he said. He poked in the corpse’s nostrils, then opened the man’s mouth and shone a light down his throat. “This doesn’t look much like a drowning.”

  Kinlaw turned around. “Why not?”

  “A drowning man goes through spasms, clutches at anything within his grasp; if nothing’s there, he’ll usually have marks on his palms from his fingernails. Plus there’s no foam in his trachea or nasal cavities.”

  “Don’t you have to check for water in the lungs?”

  “I’ll cut him open, but that’s not definitive anyway. Lots of drowning men don’t get water in their lungs. It’s the spasms, foam from mucus, and vomiting that does them in.”

  “You’re saying this guy was murdered?”

  “I’m saying he didn’t drown. And he wasn’t in the water more than twelve hours.”

  “Can you get some prints?”

  Corcoran looked at the man’s hand again. “No problem.”

  Kinlaw slipped the monocle into his pocket. “I’m going upstairs. Call me when you figure out the cause of death.”

  Corcoran began unbuttoning the dead man’s shirt. “You know, he looks like that director, Sturges.”

  “Who?”

  “Preston Sturges. He was pretty hot stuff a few years back. There was a big article in Life. Whoa. Got a major surgical scar here.”

  Kinlaw looked over Corcoran’s shoulder. A long scar ran right to center across the dead man’s abdomen. “Gunshot wound?”

  Corcoran made a note on his clipboard. “Looks like appendectomy. Probably peritonitis too. A long time ago—ten, twenty years.”

  Kinlaw took another look at the dead man. “What makes you think this is Preston Sturges?”

  “I’m a fan. Plus, this dame I know pointed him out to me at the fights one Friday night during the war. Didn’t you ever see The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek?”

  “We didn’t get many movies in the Pacific.” He took another look at the dead man’s face.

  When Corcoran hauled out his chest saw, Kinlaw spared his stomach and went back up to the detectives’ staff room. He checked missing-persons reports, occasionally stopping to roll the cameraman’s monocle back and forth on his desk blotter. There was a sailor two weeks missing from the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. A Mrs. Potter from Santa Monica had reported her husband missing the previous Thursday.

  The swivel chair creaked as he leaned back, steepled his fingers, and stared at the wall calendar from Free State Buick pinned up next to his desk. The weekend had brought a new month. Familiar April was a blonde in ski pants standing in front of a lodge in the snowy Sierras. He tore off the page: May’s blonde wore white shorts and was climbing a ladder in an orange grove. He tried to remember what he had done over the weekend but it all seemed to dissolve into a series of moments connected only by the level of scotch in the glass by his reading chair. He found a pencil in his center drawer and drew a careful X through Sunday, May 1. Happy May Day. After the revolution they would do away with pinup calendars and anonymous dead men. Weekends would mean something and lives would have purpose.

  An h
our later the report came up from Corcoran: There was no water in the man’s lungs. Probable cause of death: carbon-monoxide poisoning. But bruises on his ankles suggested he’d had weights tied to them.

  There was no answer at Mrs. Potter’s home. Kinlaw dug out the L.A. phone book. Sturges, Preston was listed at 1917 Ivar Avenue. Probably where Ivar meandered into the Hollywood Hills. A nice neighborhood, but nothing compared to Beverly Hills. Kinlaw dialed the number. A man answered the phone. “Yes?”

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Preston Sturges,” Kinlaw said.

  “May I ask who is calling, please?” The man had the trace of an accent; Kinlaw couldn’t place it.

  “This is Detective Lemoyne Kinlaw from the Los Angeles Police Department.”

  “Just a minute.”

  There was a long wait. Kinlaw watched the smoke curling up from Sapienza’s cigarette in the tray on the adjoining desk. An inch of ash clung to the end. He was about to give up when another man’s voice came onto the line.

  “Detective Kinlaw. How may I help you?” The voice was a light baritone with some sort of high-class accent.

  “You’re Preston Sturges?”

  “Last time I checked the mirror, I was.”

  “Mr. Sturges, the body of a man answering your description was found this morning washed up on the beach at San Pedro.”

  There was a long pause. “How grotesque.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m calling to see whether you are all right.”

  “As you can hear, I’m perfectly all right.”

  “Right,” Kinlaw said. “Do you by any chance have a boat moored down in San Pedro?”

  “I have a sailboat harbored in a marina there. But I didn’t wash up on any beach last night, did I?”

  “Yes, sir. Assuming you’re Preston Sturges.”

  The man paused again. Kinlaw got ready for the explosion. Instead, Sturges said calmly, “I’m not going to be able to convince you who I am over the phone, right?”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Come by The Players around eight tonight. You can put your finger through the wounds in my hands and feet. You’ll find out I’m very much alive.”