The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Then I saw him. His back was to me. He was just a black outline against the fire. He had his hands open wide, as if he was explaining. He had his empty hands open. Harup was watching my father explaining something to some of the outrunners and something was wrong.

  One of the outrunners turned his head and spat.

  My father, I couldn’t hear his voice, but I could see his body, his shoulders moving as he explained. His shoulders working, working hard as if he were swimming. Such hard work, this talking with his hands open, talking, talking.

  The outrunner took two steps, bent down and pulled his rifle into the light. It was a dark thing there, a long thing against the light of the fire. My father took a step back and his hands came up, pushing something back.

  And then the outrunner shot my father.

  All the singing stopped. The fire cracked and the sparks rose like stars while my father struggled in the snow. He struggled hard, fighting and scraping back through the snow. Elbow-walking backward. The outrunner was looking down the long barrel of the rifle.

  Get up, I thought. Get up. For a long time it seemed I thought, Get up, get up. Da, get up! But no sound came out of my mouth and there was black on the snow in the trampled trail my father left.

  The outrunner shot again.

  My father flopped into the snow and I could see the light on his face as he looked up. Then he stopped.

  Harup watched. No one moved except the outrunner who put his rifle away.

  I could feel the red meat, the hammering muscle in my chest. I could feel it squeezing, squeezing. Heat flowed in my face. In my hands.

  Outrunners shouted at outrunners. “You shit,” one shouted at the one who shot my father. “You drunken, stupid shit!” The one who shot my father shrugged at first, as if he didn’t care, and then he became angry too, shouting.

  My breath was in my chest, so full. If I breathed out loud the outrunners would hear me out here. I tried to take small breaths, could not get enough air. I did not remember when I had been holding my breath.

  Harup and the hunters of Sckarline sat, like prey, hiding in their stillness. The arguing went on and on, until it wasn’t about my father at all and his body was forgotten in the dirty snow. They argued about who was stupid and who had the High-on’s favor. The whisak was talking.

  I could think of nothing but air.

  I went back through the dark, out of Sckarline, and crept around behind the houses, in the dark and cold until I could come to our house without going past the fire. I took great shuddering breaths of cold air, breathed out great gouts of fog.

  My mother was trying to get Bet quiet when I came in. “No,” she was saying, “stop it now, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

  “Mam,” I said, and I started to cry.

  “What?” she said. “Janna, your face is all red.” She was my mam, with her face turned toward me, and I had never seen her face so clearly.

  “They’re going to kill all of us,” I said. “They killed Da with a rifle.”

  She never said a word but just ran out and left me there. Bet started to cry although she didn’t really know what I was crying about. Just that she should be scared. Veronique was still. As still as Harup and all the hunters.

  * * *

  Wanji came and got me and brought me to Ayudesh’s house because our house is small and Ayudesh’s house had enough room for some people. Snow was caked in the creases of my father’s pants. It was in his hands too, unmelted. I had seen dead people before, and my father looked like all of them. Not like himself at all.

  My mother had followed him as far as the living can go, or at least as someone untrained in spirit journeys, and she was not herself. She was sitting on the floor next to his body, rocking back and forth with her arms crossed in her lap. I had seen women like that before, but not my mother. I didn’t want to look. It seemed indecent. Worse than the body of my father, since my father wasn’t there at all.

  Bet was screaming. Her face was red from the effort. I held her even though she was heavy and she kept arching away from me like a toddler in a tantrum. “Mam! Mam!” she kept screaming.

  People came in and squatted down next to the body for a while. People talked about guns. It was important that I take care of Bet so I did, until finally she wore herself out from crying and fell asleep. I held her on my lap until the blood was out of my legs and I couldn’t feel the floor and then Wanji brought me a blanket and I wrapped Bet in it and let her sleep.

  Wanji beckoned me to follow. I could barely stand, my legs had so little feeling. I held the wall and looked around, at my mother sitting next to the vacant body, at my sister, who though asleep was still alive. Then I tottered after Wanji as if I were the old woman.

  “Where is the girl?” Wanji said.

  “Asleep,” I said. “On the floor.”

  “No, the girl,” Wanji said, irritated. “Ian’s girl. From the university.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to be watching her. Didn’t Ayudesh tell you to watch her?”

  “You mean Veronique? She’s back at my house. In my bed.”

  Wanji nodded and sucked on her teeth. “Okay,” she said. And then again to herself, “Okay.”

  Wanji took me to her house, which was little and dark. She had a lamp shaped like a bird. It had been in her house as long as I could remember. It didn’t give very much light, but I had always liked it. We sat on the floor. Wanji’s floor was always piled high with rugs from her home and furs and blankets. It made it hard to walk but nice to sit. Wanji got cold and her bones hurt, so she always made a little nest when she sat down. She pulled a red-and-blue rug across her lap. “Sit, sit, sit,” she said.

  I was cold, but there was a blanket to wrap around my shoulders and watch Wanji make hot tea. I couldn’t remember being alone with Wanji before. But everything was so strange it didn’t seem to make any difference and it was nice to have Wanji deciding what to do and me not having to do anything.

  Wanji made tea over her little bird lamp. She handed me a cup and I sipped it. Tea was a strange drink. Wanji and Ayudesh liked it and hoarded it. It was too bitter to be very good, but it was warm and the smell of it was always special. I drank it and held it against me. I started to get warm. The blanket got warm from me and smelled faintly of Wanji, an old dry smell.

  I was sleepy. It would have been nice to go to sleep right there in my little nest on Wanji’s floor.

  “Girl,” Wanji said. “I must give you something. You must take care of Veronique.”

  I didn’t want to take care of anybody. I wanted someone to take care of me. My eyes started to fill up and in a moment I was crying salt tears into my tea.

  “No time for that, Janna,” Wanji said. Always sharp with us. Some people were afraid of Wanji. I was. But it felt good to cry, and I didn’t know how to stop it so I didn’t.

  Wanji didn’t pay any attention. She was hunting through her house, checking in a chest, pulling up layers of rugs to peer in a corner. Was she going to give me a gun? I couldn’t think of anything else that would help very much right now, but I couldn’t imagine that Wanji owned a gun.

  She came back with a dark blue plastic box not much bigger than the span of my spread hand. That was almost as astonishing as a gun. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. I was warm and tired. Would Wanji let me sleep right here on her floor?

  Wanji opened the plastic box, but away from me so I couldn’t see inside it. She picked at it as if she were picking at a sewing kit, looking for something. I wanted to look in it but I was afraid that if I tried she’d snap at me.

  She looked at me. “This is mine,” she said. “We both got one and we decided that if the people who settled Sckarline couldn’t have it, we wouldn’t either.”

  I didn’t care about that. That was old talk. I wanted to know what it was.

  Wanji wasn’t ready to tell me what it was. I had the feeling that Ayudesh didn’t know about this, and I was afraid sh
e would talk herself out of it. She looked at it and thought. If I thought, I thought about my father being dead. I sipped tea and tried to think about being warm, about sleeping but that feeling had passed. I wondered where Tuuvin was.

  I thought about my da and I started to cry again.

  I thought that would really get Wanji angry so I tried to hide it, but she didn’t pay any attention at all. The shawl she wore over her head slipped halfway down so when I glanced up I could see where her hair parted and the line of pale skin. It looked so bare that I wanted it covered up again. It made me think of the snow in my father’s hands.

  “It was a mistake,” Wanji said.

  I thought she meant the box, and I felt a terrible disappointment that I wouldn’t get to see what was inside it.

  “You understand what we were trying to do?” she asked me.

  With the box? Not at all.

  “What are the six precepts of development philosophy?” she asked.

  I had to think. “One,” I said, “that economic development should be gradual. Two, that analyzing economic growth by the production of goods rather than the needs and capacities of people leads to displacement and increased poverty. Three, that economic development should come from the integrated development of rural areas with the traditional sector—”

  “It’s just words,” she snapped at me.

  I didn’t know what I had done wrong so I ducked my head and sniffed and waited for her to get angry because I couldn’t stop crying.

  Instead she stroked my hair. “Oh, little girl. Oh, Janna. You are one of the bright ones. If you aren’t understanding it, then we really haven’t gotten it across, have we?” Her hand was nice on my hair, and it seemed so unlike Wanji that it scared me into stillness. “We were trying to help, you know,” she said. “We were trying to do good. We gave up our lives to come here. Do you realize?”

  Did she mean that they were going to die? Ayudesh and Wanji?

  “This,” she said, suddenly brisk. “This is for, what would you call them, runners. Foreign runners. It is to help them survive. I am going to give it to you so that you will help Veronique, understood?”

  I nodded.

  But she didn’t give it to me. She just sat holding the box, looking in it. She didn’t want to give it up. She didn’t feel it was appropriate.

  She sighed again, a terrible sound. Out of the box she pulled shiny foil packets, dark blue, red, and yellow. They were the size of the palm of her hand. Her glasses were around her neck. She put them on like she did in the schoolroom, absent from the gesture. She studied the printing on the foil packets.

  I loved foil. Plastic was beautiful, but foil, foil was something unimaginable. Tea came in foil packets. The strange foods that the teachers got off the skimmer came in foil.

  My tea was cold.

  “This one,” she said, “it is a kind of signal.” She looked over her glasses at me. “Listen to me, Janna. Your life will depend on this. When you have this, you can send a signal that the outsiders can hear. They can hear it all the way in Bashtoy. And after you send it, if you can wait in the same place, they will send someone out to get you and Veronique.”

  “They can hear it in Bashtoy?” I said. I had never even met anyone other than Wanji and the teachers who had ever been to Bashtoy.

  “They can pick it up on their instruments. You send it every day until someone comes.”

  “How do I send it?”

  She read the packet. “We have to set the signal, you and I. First we have to put it in you.”

  I didn’t understand, but she was reading, so I waited.

  “I’m going to put it in your ear,” she said. “From there it will migrate to your brain.”

  “Will it hurt?” I asked.

  “A little,” she said. “But it has its own way of taking pain away. Now, what should be the code?” She studied the packet. She pursed her lips.

  A thing in my ear. I was afraid and I wanted to say no, but I was more afraid of Wanji so I didn’t.

  “You can whistle, can’t you?” she asked.

  I knew how to whistle, yes.

  “Okay,” she said, “here it is. I’ll put this in your ear, and then we’ll wait for a while. Then when everything is ready we’ll set the code.”

  She opened up the packet and inside was another packet and a little metal fork. She opened the inside packet and took out a tiny little disk, a soft thing almost like egg white or like a fish egg. She leaned forward and put it in my left ear. Then she pushed it in hard and I jerked.

  “Hold still,” she said.

  Something was moving and making noise in my ear and I couldn’t be still. I pulled away and shook my head. The noise in my ear was loud, a sort of rubbing, oozing sound. I couldn’t hear normal things out of my left ear. It was stopped up with whatever was making the oozing noise. Then it started to hurt. A little at first, then more and more.

  I put my hand over my ear, pressing against the pain. Maybe it would eat through my ear? What would stop it from eating a hole in my head?

  “Stop it,” I said to Wanji. “Make it stop!”

  But she didn’t, she just sat there, watching.

  The pain grew sharp, and then suddenly it stopped. The sound, the pain, everything.

  I took my hand away. I was still deaf on the left side but it didn’t hurt.

  “Did it stop?” Wanji asked.

  I nodded.

  “Do you feel dizzy? Sick?”

  I didn’t.

  Wanji picked up the next packet. It was blue. “While that one is working, we’ll do this one. Then the third one, which is easy. This one will make you faster when you are angry or scared. It will make time feel slower. There isn’t any code for it. Something in your body starts it.”

  I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.

  “After it has happened, you’ll be tired. It uses up your energy.” She studied the back of the packet, then she scooted closer to me, so we were both sitting cross-legged with our knees touching. Wanji had hard, bony knees, even through the felt of her dress.

  “Open your eye, very wide,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said. “Is this going to hurt?”

  “No,” she said.

  I opened my eyes as wide as I could.

  “Look down, but keep your eyes wide open,” she said.

  I tried.

  “No,” she said, irritated, “keep your eyes open.”

  “They are open,” I said. I didn’t think she should treat me this way. My da had just died. She should be nice to me. I could hear her open the packet. I wanted to blink but I was afraid to. I did, because I couldn’t help it.

  She leaned forward and spread my eye open with thumb and forefinger. Then she swiftly touched my eye.

  I jerked back. There was something in my eye. I could feel it, up under my eyelid. It was very uncomfortable. I blinked and blinked and blinked. My eye filled up with tears, just the one eye, which was very very strange.

  My eye socket started to ache. “It hurts,” I said.

  “It won’t last long,” she said.

  “You said it wouldn’t hurt!” I said, startled.

  “I lied,” Wanji said, matter-of-fact.

  It hurt more and more. I moaned. “You’re hateful,” I said.

  “That’s true,” she said, unperturbed.

  She picked up the third packet, the red one.

  “No,” I said, “I won’t hurt! I won’t! You can’t do it!”

  “Hush,” she said, “This one won’t hurt. I saved it until last on purpose.”

  “You’re lying!” I scrambled away from her. The air was cold where the nest of rugs and blankets had been wrapped around me. My head ached. It just ached. And I still couldn’t hear anything out of my left ear.

  “Look,” she said, “I will read you the lingua. It is a patch, nothing more. It says it will feel cold, but that is all. See, it is just a square of cloth that will rest on your neck. If it hurts you can tak
e it off.”

  I scrambled backward away from her.

  “Janna,” she said. “Enough!” She was angry.

  I was afraid of it, but I was still more afraid of Wanji. So I hunched down in front of her. I was so afraid that I sobbed while she peeled the back off the square and put it on me.

  “See,” she said, still sharp with me, “it doesn’t hurt at all. Stop crying. Stop it. Enough is enough.” She waved her hands over her head in disgust. “You are hysterical.”

  I held my hand over the patch. It didn’t hurt but it did feel cold. I scrunched up and wrapped myself in a rug and gave myself over to my misery. My head hurt and my ear still ached faintly and I was starting to feel dizzy.

  “Lie down,” Wanji said. “Go on, lie down. I’ll wake you when we can set the signal.”

  I made myself a nest in the mess of Wanji’s floor and piled a blanket and a rug on top of me. Maybe the dark made my head feel better, I didn’t know. But I fell asleep.

  * * *

  Wanji shook me awake. I hadn’t been asleep long, and my head still ached. She had the little metal fork from the ear packet, the yellow packet. It occurred to me that she might stick it in my ear.

  I covered my ear with my hand. My head hurt enough. I wasn’t going to let Wanji stick a fork in my ear.

  “Don’t scowl,” she said.

  “My head hurts,” I said.

  “Are you dizzy?” she asked.

  I felt out of sorts, unbalanced, but not dizzy, not really.

  “Shake your head,” Wanji said.

  I shook my head. Still the same, but no worse. “Don’t stick that in my ear,” I said.

  “What? I’m not going to stick this in your ear. It’s a musical fork. I’m going to make a sound with it and hold it to your ear. When I tell you to I want you to whistle something, okay?”

  “Whistle what?” I said.

  “Anything,” she said, “I don’t care. Whistle something for me now.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to whistle. I couldn’t think of anything at all except that I wished Wanji would leave me alone and let me go back to sleep.

  Wanji squatted there. Implacable old bitch.