The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

I finally thought of something to whistle, a crazy dog song for children. I started whistling—

  “That’s enough,” she said. “Now don’t say anything else, but when I nod my head you whistle that. Don’t say anything to me. If you do, it will ruin everything. Nod your head if you understand.”

  I nodded.

  She slapped the fork against her hand and I could see the long tines vibrating. She held it up to my ear, the one I couldn’t hear anything out of. She held it there, concentrating fiercely. Then she nodded.

  I whistled.

  “Okay,” she said. “Good. That is how you start it. Now whistle it again.”

  I whistled.

  Everything went dark and then suddenly my head got very hot. Then I could see again.

  “Good,” Wanji said. “You just sent a signal.”

  “Why did everything get dark?” I asked.

  “All the light got used in the signal,” Wanji said. “It used all the light in your head so you couldn’t see.”

  My head hurt even worse. Now besides my eye aching, my temples were pounding. I had a fever. I raised my hand and felt my hot cheek.

  Wanji picked up the blue packet. “Now we have to figure out about the third one, the one that will let you hibernate.”

  I didn’t want to learn about hibernating. “I feel sick,” I said.

  “It’s probably too soon, anyway,” Wanji said. “Sleep for a while.”

  I felt so awful I didn’t know if I could sleep. But Wanji brought me more tea and I drank that and lay down in my nest and presently I was dreaming.

  iv

  There was a sound of gunfire, far away, just a pop. And then more pop-pop-pop.

  It startled me, although I had been hearing the outrunners’ guns at night since they got here. I woke with a fever and everything felt as if I were still dreaming. I was alone in Wanji’s house. The lamp was still lit but I didn’t know if it had been refilled or how long I had slept. During the long night of winterdark it is hard to know when you are. I got up, put out the lamp, and went outside.

  Morning cold is worst when you are warm from sleep. The dry snow crunched in the dark. Nothing was moving except the dogs were barking, their voices coming at me from every way.

  The outrunners were gone from the center of town, nothing there but the remains of their fire and the trampled slick places where they had walked. I slid a bit as I walked there. My head felt light and I concentrated on my walking because if I did not think about it I didn’t know what my feet would do. I had to pee.

  Again I heard the pop-pop-pop. I could not tell where it was coming from because it echoed off the buildings around me. I could smell smoke and see the dull glow of fire above the trees. It was down from Sckarline, the fire. At first I thought they had gotten a really big fire going, and then I thought they had set fire to the distillery. I headed for home.

  Veronique was asleep in a nest of blankets, including some of my parents’ blankets from their bed.

  “They set fire to the distillery,” I said. I didn’t say it in English, but she sat up and rubbed her face.

  “It’s cold,” she said.

  I could not think of anything to respond.

  She sat there, holding her head.

  “Come,” I said, working into English. “We go see your teacher.” I pulled on her arm.

  “Where is everybody?” she said.

  “My father die, my mother is, um, waiting with the die.”

  She frowned at me. I knew I hadn’t made any sense. I pulled on her again and she got up and stumbled around, putting on boots and jacket.

  Outside I heard the pop-pop-pop again. This time I thought maybe it was closer.

  “They’re shooting again?” she asked.

  “They shoot my father,” I said.

  “Oh God,” she said. She sat down on the blankets. “Oh God.”

  I pulled on her arm.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Hurry,” I said. I made a pack of blankets. I found my ax and a few things and put them in the bundle, then slung it all over my shoulders. I didn’t know what we would do, but if they were shooting people we should run away. I had to pee really bad.

  She did hurry, finally awake. When we went outside and the cold hit her she shuddered and shook off the last of the sleep. I saw the movement of her shoulders against the glow of the fire on the horizon, against the false dawn.

  People were moving, clinging close to houses where they were invisible against the black wood, avoiding the open spaces. We stayed close to my house, waiting to see whose people were moving. Veronique held my arm. A dog came past the schoolhouse into the open area where the outrunners’ fire had been and stopped and sniffed—maybe the place where my father had died.

  I drew Veronique back, along to the back of the house. The spirit door was closed and my father was dead. I crouched low and ran, holding her arm, until we were in the trees and then she slipped and fell and pulled me down too. We slid feet first in the snow, down the hill between the tree trunks, hidden in the pools of shadow under the trees. Then we were still, waiting.

  I still felt feverish and nothing was real.

  The snow under the trees was all powder. It dusted our leggings and clung in clumps in the wrinkles behind my knees.

  Nothing came after us that we could see. We got up and walked deeper into the trees and then uphill, away from the distillery but still skirting the village. I left her for a moment to pee, but she followed me and we squatted together. We should run, but I didn’t know where to run to and the settlement pulled at me. I circled around it as if on a tether, pulling in closer and closer as we got to the uphill part of town. Coming back around we hung in the trees beyond the field behind the schoolhouse. I could see the stabros pens and see light. The outrunners were in the stabros pens and the stabros were down. A couple of the men were dressing the carcasses.

  We stumbled over Harup in the darkness. Literally fell over him in the bushes.

  He was dead. His stomach was ripped by rifle fire and his eyes were open. I couldn’t tell in the darkness if he had dragged himself out here to die or if someone had thrown the body here. We were too close.

  I started backing away. Veronique was stiff as a spooked stabros. She lifted her feet high out of the snow, coming down hard and loud. One of the dogs at the stabros pen heard us and started to bark. I could see it in the light, its ears up and its tail curled over its back. The others barked too, ears toward us in the dark. I stopped and Veronique stopped too. Men in the pen looked out in the dark. A couple of them picked up rifles, and cradling them in their arms walked out toward us from the light.

  I backed up, slowly. Maybe they would find Harup’s body and think that the dogs were barking at that. But they were hunters and they would see the marks of our boots in the snow and follow us. If we ran they would hear us. I was not a hunter. I did not know what to do.

  We backed up, one slow step and then another, while the outrunners walked out away from the light. They were not coming straight at us, but they were walking side by side and they would spread out and find us. I had my knife. There was cover around, mostly trees, but I didn’t know what I could do against a hunter with a rifle, and even if I could stop one the others would hear us.

  There were shouts over by the houses.

  The outrunners kept walking but the shouts did not stop, and then there was the pop of guns. That stopped one and then the other and they half-turned.

  The dogs turned, barking, toward the shouts.

  The outrunners started to jog toward the schoolhouse.

  We walked backward in the dark.

  There were flames over there, at the houses. I couldn’t tell whose house was on fire. It was downhill from the schoolhouse, which meant it might be our house. People were running in between the schoolhouse and Wanji’s house and the outrunners lifted their guns and fired. People, three of them, kept on running.

  The outrunners fired again and again. One o
f the people stumbled but they all kept running. They were black shapes skimming on the field. The snow on the field was not deep because the wind blew it into the trees. Then one was in the trees. The outrunners fired again, but the other two made the trees as well.

  There was a summer camp out this way, down by the river, for drying fish.

  I pulled on Veronique’s arm and we picked our way through the trees.

  * * *

  There were people at the summer camp and we waited in the trees to make sure they were Sckarline people. It was gray, false dawn by the time we got there. I didn’t remember ever having seen the summer camp in the winter before. The drying racks were bare poles with a top covering of snow, and the lean-to was almost covered in drifted snow. There was no shelter here.

  There were signs of three or four people in the trampled snow. I didn’t think it would be the outrunners down there because how would they even know where the summer camp was but I was not sure of anything. I didn’t know if I was thinking right or not.

  Veronique leaned close to my ear and whispered so softly I could barely hear. “We have to go back.”

  I shook my head.

  “Ian is there.”

  Ian. Ian. She meant her teacher.

  She had a hood on her purple clothing and I pulled it back to whisper, “Not now. We wait here.” So close to the brown shell of her ear. Like soft dark leather. Not like a real people’s ear. She was shivering.

  I didn’t feel too cold. I still had a fever—I felt as if everything were far from me, as if I walked half in this world. I sat and looked at the snow cupped in a brown leaf and my mind was empty and things did not seem too bad. I don’t know how long we sat.

  Someone walked in the summer camp. I thought it was Sored, one of the boys.

  I took Veronique’s arm and tugged her up. I was stiff from sitting and colder than I had noticed but moving helped. We slid down the hill into the summer camp.

  The summer camp sat in a V that looked at the river frozen below. Sored was already out of the camp when we got there, but he waved at us from the trees and we scrambled back up there. Veronique slipped and used her hands.

  There were two people crouched around a fire so tiny it was invisible and one of them was Tuuvin.

  “Where is everyone else?” Sored asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Tuuvin stood up.

  “Where’s your mother and your sister?” he asked.

  “I was at Wanji’s house all night,” I said. “Where’s your family?”

  “My da and I were at the stabros pen this morning with Harup,” he said.

  “We found Harup,” I said.

  “Did you find my da?” he asked.

  “No. Was he shot?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “We saw some people running across the field behind the schoolhouse.

  Maybe one of them was shot.”

  He looked down at Gerda, crouched by the fire. “None of us were shot.”

  “Did you come together?”

  “No,” Sored said. “I found Gerda here and Tuuvin here.”

  He had gone down to see the fire at the distillery. The outrunners had taken some of the casks. He didn’t know how the fire had started, if it was an accident or if they’d done it on purpose. It would be easy to start if someone spilled something too close to the fire.

  Veronique was crouched next to the tiny fire. “Janna,” she said, “has anyone seen Ian?”

  “Did you see the offworlder teacher?” I asked.

  No one had.

  “We have to find him,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What are you going to do with her?” Sored asked, pointing at Veronique with his chin. “Is she ill?”

  She crouched over the fire like someone who was sick.

  “She’s not sick,” I said. “We need to see what is happening at Sckarline.”

  “I’m not going back,” Gerda said, looking at no one. I did not know Gerda very well. She was old enough to have children but she had no one. She lived by herself. She had her nose slit by her clan for adultery but I never knew if she had a husband with her old clan or not. Some people came to Sckarline because they didn’t want to be part of their clan anymore. Most of them went back, but Gerda had stayed.

  Tuuvin said, “I’ll go.”

  Sored said he would stay in case anyone else came to the summer camp. In a day or two they were going to head toward the west and see if they could come across the winter pastures of Haufsdaag Clan. Sored had kin there.

  “That’s pretty far,” Tuuvin said. “Toolie Clan would be closer.”

  “You have kin with Toolie Clan,” Sored said.

  Tuuvin nodded.

  “We go to Sckarline,” I said to Veronique.

  She stood up. “It’s so damn cold,” she said. Then she said something about wanting coffee. I didn’t understand a lot of what she said. Then she laughed and said she wished she could have breakfast.

  Sored looked at me. I didn’t translate what she had said. He turned his back on her, but she didn’t notice.

  It took us through the sunrise and beyond the short midwinter morning and into afternoon to get to Sckarline. The only good thing about winterdark is that it would be dark for the outrunners too.

  Only hours of daylight.

  Nothing was moving when we got back to Sckarline. From the back the schoolhouse looked all right, but the houses were all burned. I could see where my house had been. Charred logs standing in the red afternoon sun. The ground around them was wet and muddy from the heat of the fires.

  Tuuvin’s house. Ayudesh’s house and Wanji’s house.

  In front of the schoolhouse there were bodies. My da’s body, thrown back in the snow. My mam and my sister. My sister’s head was broken in. My mam didn’t have her pants on. The front of the schoolhouse had burned but the fire must have burned out before the whole building was gone. The dogs were moving among the bodies, sniffing, stopping to tug on the freezing flesh.

  Tuuvin shouted at them to drive them off.

  My mam’s hip bones were sharp under the bloody skin and her sex was there for everyone to see but I kept noticing her bare feet. The soles were dark. Her toenails were thick and her feet looked old, an old old woman’s feet. As if she were as old as Wanji.

  I looked at people to see who else was there. I saw Wanji, although she had no face but I knew her from her skin. Veronique’s teacher was there, his face red and peeled from fire and his eyes baked white like a smoked fish. Ayudesh had no ears and no sex. His clothes had been taken.

  The dogs were circling back, watching Tuuvin.

  He screamed at them. Then he crouched down on his heels and covered his eyes with his arm and cried.

  I did not feel anything. Not yet.

  * * *

  I whistled the tune that Wanji had taught me to send out the message, and the world went dark. It was something to do, and for a moment, I didn’t have to look at my mother’s bare feet.

  The place for the Sckarline dead was up the hill beyond the town, away from the river, but without stabros I couldn’t think of how we could get all these bodies there. We didn’t have anything for the bodies, either. Nothing for the spirit journey, not even blankets to wrap them in.

  I could not bear to think of my mother without pants. There were lots of dead women in the snow and many of them did have pants. It may not have been fair that my mother should have someone else’s but I could not think of anything else to do so I took the leggings off of Maitra and tried to put them on my mother. I could not really get them right—my mother was tall and her body was stiff from the cold and from death. I hated handling her.

  Veronique asked me what I was doing but even if I knew enough English to answer, I was too embarrassed to really try to explain.

  My mother’s flesh was white and odd to touch. Not like flesh at all. Like plastic. Soft looking but not to touch.

  Tuuvin watched
me without saying anything. I thought he might tell me not to, but he didn’t. Finally he said, “We can’t get them to the place for the dead.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “We don’t have anyone to talk to the spirits,” he said. “Only me.”

  He was the man here. I didn’t know if Tuuvin had talked with spirits or not, people didn’t talk about that with women.

  “I say that this place is a place of the dead too,” he said. His voice was strange. “Sckarline is a place of the dead now.”

  “We leave them here?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  He was beardless, but he was a boy and he was old enough that he had walked through the spirit door. I was glad that he had made the decision.

  I looked in houses for things for the dead to have with them, but most things were burned. I found things half-burned and sometimes not burned at all. I found a fur, and used that to wrap the woman whose leggings I had stolen. I tried to make sure that everybody got something—a bit of stitching or a cup or something, so they would not be completely without possessions. I managed to find something for almost everybody, and I found enough blankets to wrap Tuuvin’s family and Veronique’s teacher. I wrapped Bet with my mother. I kept blankets separate for Veronique, Tuuvin, and me and anything I found that we could use I didn’t give to the dead, but everything else I gave to them.

  Tuuvin sat in the burned-out schoolhouse and I didn’t know if what he did was a spirit thing or if it was just grief, but I didn’t bother him. He kept the dogs away. Veronique followed me and picked through the blackened sticks of the houses. Both of us had black all over our gloves and our clothes and black marks on our faces.

  We stopped when it got too dark, and then we made camp in the schoolhouse next to the dead. Normally I would not have been able to stay so close to the dead, but now I felt part of them.

  Tuuvin had killed and skinned a dog and cooked that. Veronique cried while she ate. Not like Tuuvin had cried. Not sobs. Just helpless tears that ran down her face. As if she didn’t notice.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  Tuuvin said, “We will try for Toolie Clan.”

  I didn’t have any idea where their winter pastures were, much less how to find them, and I almost asked Tuuvin if he did, but I didn’t want to shame his new manhood, so I didn’t.