Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

After Salem, the tubeline swung south and then east again to Marblehead, and then on south to Lynn and Boston. But Beverly was about four miles north of Salem, on the far side of the estuary. Rowan supposed that there was some kind of public transportation between the two towns, but he didn’t know what, and couldn’t have afforded to utilize it anyway; the commuter-ticket was dead. He was going to have to walk. Maybe it was better that way.

  Up Essex Street, fumbling and tapping in the dusty sunlight.

  Everything went well for perhaps a mile. Then Rowan discovered, to his dismay, that practically the entire eastern half of town had been razed since the last time he’d been through, and was being made over into a vast industrial complex of some sort. On this side of Essex Street, there were still houses and trees, but on the far side, across a flat expanse of asphalt, he was confronted with a chaotic expanse of factories, trainyards, excavations, construction sites and storage areas. Some of the factories were already in operation, others were still going up. The whole region was crisscrossed with deep gullies and pits, and some areas seemed to have been terraced and stairstepped in a manner reminiscent of strip-mining. Construction was taking place on many different levels among the terraces, and a gray haze of smoke hung over everything. East, toward the ocean, a herd of snaky black machines were busily eating the last of a row of old wooden houses.

  He had hoped to keep to the side streets, but it seemed that there weren’t any side streets here anymore. Unless he circled back to the west, he’d have to keep on following the major thoroughfare north, and that was more risky than he liked.

  Rowan decided that he’d have to take the chance of following Essex Street. He had just started to tap his way forward again when wood-pulp geysered from a tree alongside him, leaving a ragged new hole in the bark.

  Sound slapped his ears a heartbeat later, but by then he was already moving. By the time he consciously realized that someone was shooting at him, he had covered half the distance to the nearest cluster of factory buildings, running faster than he had ever run in his life, dodging and swerving like a madman. Suddenly there was a railing in front of him, with a drop of unknown depth beyond it. He vaulted up and over it without breaking stride. A bullet made the railing ring like a gong a second after he had cleared it.

  He dropped about ten feet down onto hard pavement, took ukemi as well as he could, and was up and dodging instantly in spite of a painfully wrenched ankle. As he ran, he was acutely aware of how hot it was under the glaring sun. The only thought in his head was an incongruous wish for a glass of water. Another shot splintered concrete at his heels, and then he was slamming through a door and into a building. It was some kind of huge assembly plant with a cavernous ceiling, full of cold echoes and bitter blue lights. He bullied his way through it, followed by a spreading wave of alarm as he collided with people and knocked work-benches over, staggering, falling down and scrambling up again. As he dodged out a door on the far side of the plant, he heard another gunshot behind him. Then he was tearing through a narrow alleyway between factories. There were rainbow puddles of oil and spilled chemicals on the ground here, and he splashed through them deliberately, hoping that the bitter reek of them would throw his pursuers off if they were tracking him by scent. Someone shouted excitedly at his heels. He ducked into another factory building.

  It became a phantasmagoria, a nightmare of pursuit. Rowan running endlessly through vast rooms full of shapes and stinks and lights and alien noises, while invisible things snatched at him and tried to pull him down. Everything was fragmentary and disjointed now for Rowan, as though he existed only in discontinuous slices of time. In one such slice, he was hitching a ride on a flat-car that was rumbling through a trainyard between varicolored mountains of chemical waste, listening to sirens and shouts behind him and wondering when he should jump off and run. In another, he was dodging through a multi-leveled forest of oddly jointed pipes, like a child swarming through a jungle gym. Another, and he was climbing slowly and tenaciously up a cyclone fence. Another, and he was running through a vacant lot, a construction site that had been temporarily abandoned and which had been grown over everywhere by man-high expanses of scrub grass and wild wheat.

  Rowan tripped over a discarded tool, fell flat on his face, stayed down. That saved him. A scythe of heat swept across the field at hip level, and suddenly all the grass was burning. This time, they were using lasers. He rolled frantically through the blazing grass in an instinctive attempt to put out the little fires that were starting on his clothes and in his hair, and accidentally tumbled down into a steep, clay-sided gulley. There was a sluggish, foot-deep trickle of muddy water at the bottom of the gulley, and he crawled through it on his belly while everything burned above him, choking, blinded by smoke and baked by heat that blistered his back, an inchworm on a griddle in Hell.

  Then he was kneeling in a tree-shaded backyard while someone washed his face with a wet, scented towel. He retched helplessly, and firm hands held his head. He had something very important to say, some vitally important thing that he had almost remembered, but when he tried to speak all he could coax from his cracked lips and swollen tongue was an ugly jangling croak. “Shut up, goddamn you,” said an anxious voice. A woman’s voice. He rested in her arms, and stared up at her in awe. She was here now. “Road’s out that way”—not knowing that he couldn’t see which way she was pointing—“don’t guess you’d want to go back out over the fence the way you came in, too suspicious.” She hesitated, as though afraid to wish him well. “Go on, now,” she said at last, and he could almost imagine her making shooing motions at him. Her voice was unsteady. “Please go. I have to think of my family. I can’t let them catch you here.” He sensed then that she had gone abruptly away. A moment later the back door of the house opened and closed. He wondered if she was still watching him through the glass half of the door. Somehow he hoped that she was.

  Rowan made his way around to the front of the house, and discovered that he was on Bridge Street, a mile or more from the factory area, although he had no clear recollection of how he had gotten there. That made it a fairly straightforward problem. He had to follow Bridge Street north another mile, cross the bridge over the estuary, and he would be there. He could hardly feel his body anymore, but that was probably a blessing. It allowed him to sit somewhere far removed from pain and drive his body like a car, coax it along like a beaten-up old heap being driven to a second-hand dealer’s lot, the owner swearing bitterly all the way and hoping he can get the thing there before it falls apart. He set out for Beverly.

  The world began to turn to mush again as he walked. After a few blocks he started to hallucinate, seeing brief vivid flashes of things that couldn’t be there, having long talks with people who didn’t exist. He would come back to himself as from a great distance, and find that he was talking to himself in a very loud voice and swinging his arms wildly, or else making hoarse grunting noises, huhn, huhn, like an exhausted bear harried closely by hounds. He no longer cared if he attracted attention or even if he bumped into people. He was no longer worried about pursuit; in fact, he had forgotten that anybody was after him. He only knew that he had to get to Beverly. Reaching that goal had become an end in itself; he didn’t remember what he was supposed to do when he got there, and he didn’t care. All his will was taken up by the task of keeping his body clumping leadenly along, while the world flowed by like porridge.

  He was on a bridge, suspended between sea and sky.

  Out there to the east was Great Misery Island, then Baker’s Island, and then nothing but water, an endless fan of icy water spreading on and out forever, turning into Ocean. There was freedom. To sail out and away forever toward the rising sun, with no restrictions, no boundaries, just infinite space and Rowan skimming the glassy white tops of the waves.

  There was a gusty wet wind coming in from the sea. For what seemed like a very long time it hit Rowan across the face, back and forth, back and forth, as methodical and unpitying as a manager bent on revivi
ng a heavyweight with a wet towel in the tenth round of a losing fight, until Rowan’s head finally began to clear. He was slumped against the railing of the bridge, cold metal biting into his armpits. He had hooked his arms over the top rail, and that had kept him from actually falling down, but he had no idea how long he had been hanging there in a daze, starring out into Massachusetts Bay. Sailboats and trawlers were moving back and forth in the deep channel, and the sight of them jarringly reminded him why he had to get to Beverly.

  Then he heard sirens in the sky behind him.

  Rowan started walking again. He had no reserves left—neither panic nor the imminence of death could prod him into running. He was physically unable to run, no matter what the provocation. So he walked away from his pursuers, trudging slowly across the rest of the bridge and up the hill on the other side. He was in Beverly now, perhaps a quarter-mile from his goal. The sirens were a thin, irritating thread of sound, just on the edge of hearing.

  They didn’t seem to be coming any closer. Perhaps the police were holding a search pattern over Salem.

  If only they would stay away for ten more minutes.

  Rowan forced himself to walk faster. But the extra effort involved began to jar him away from reality again.

  He fell into a walking dream of Bolivia, the rugged, sun-bronzed men welcoming him into the ranks of the insurrectionists, the trip to their remote mountain fortresses, the women waiting to welcome him, the important work waiting to be done. A new life. To be free of fear—for the first time in how long? Had he ever been free of fear? Had there ever been a day when someone wasn’t spying on him, prying and prodding and pushing him, wrapping him in gossamer that was as strong as iron, controlling him like a puppet? A spark of anger touched him then, and he blazed up like old dead wood. Let the insurrectionists give him a gun—that was all he’d ask for, that was all he wanted.

  His anger saved him. He’d been staggering down Rantoulle Street in a somnambulistic daze, and had nearly missed his turn. But rage shook him momentarily awake. He turned onto Edwards Street, past the school. He could hear children playing in the schoolyard, their voices rising and falling through the mellow afternoon air like the shrill calling of birds, but he could not see them as he passed—to his eyes, only leaves and paper-scraps moved across the asphalt with the wind, and he also moved on with it, alone.

  The sirens were getting louder. They were coming after him.

  But then he turned a final corner, and the sea spread out below him, glinting and silver and vast, opening the world to the horizon. This was Quincy Park. As he stood on the road above, his eyes followed the long slope down to the seawall, then beyond the beach to the ocean, and to the slim white sailboat that waited there, like a sign, like a dove on the water, like the fulfillment of all the dreams he’d ever known.

  Rowan started down the slope toward the ocean, his feet slipping on the grass, breaking at last into a ponderous trot. He was almost there. Hope opened like a wound inside him, molten and amazing.

  Something slammed into his ribcage like a white-hot sword, sending him staggering back, knocking the breath and the hope out of him. For a second, the incredible shock of the impact dissolved all illusions, and he remembered, and knew that again he had failed to escape. Someday! he shouted in a great silent puff of pain and rage and sudden terrible knowledge. Someday!

  Then another blow took him over the heart and drove him into darkness.

  The fat man worked the action of the tranquilizer rifle and ejected a gleaming metal dart. “My God!” he breathed, reverentially.

  Up the slope, the technicians were already reprogramming the mobile computers for the next run-through, using the stereo plotting tanks to set up a paradigm describing all the possible sequences and combinations of sequences that might apply, an exercise in four-dimensional topography and systems-flow. Of course, the computers did all the real work: controlling the sequencing, selecting among tables of alternatives as the real-world situation altered and reprogramming themselves on the fly, coordinating a thousand physical details such as the locking of doors and the blocking of certain corridors that kept the human subject restricted to a manageable spatial network of routes and choices, directing the human “beaters” who helped keep the subject “in the chute,” triggering previously implanted fantasy fugue sequences such as the car crash and timing them so that they melded smoothly with real-world action. And much else besides. Nevertheless, the human technicians considered themselves to be overworked, and all made a point of looking harried and rather ostentatiously tired.

  A small, foxy-faced man appeared at the fat man’s elbow. “Very nice,” he said briskly, rubbing his hands. “As good a show as I promised you, Senator, I think you’ll agree with that. And of course,” he added piously, “so valuable therapeutically.” He smiled. “Always so many possibilities! Will he get to Hamilton, or end up in Danvers? Will he kill the old man or not? Will he find the car or let me steer him to the tube? An enormous but finite number of choices; aesthetically it’s quite elegant. I’m always reminded of the medieval theologies. Free will operating within a framework of predetermination. Of course,” he said, smiling ingratiatingly at the fat man, “you realize Who that makes us.”

  The fat man wasn’t listening. His face was beaded with sweat. “That was fine,” he said. “My God, Doctor, that was very fine.” His eyes remained glassy for a moment longer, and then animation came back into his features. He broke the rifle and started to hand it to the foxy-faced man, then hesitated, and with an eager shy deference that was obviously foreign to so important a man, asked, “How long does it take to get him ready again? I mean, it’s hours yet until dark, and I was wondering if it would be possible?”

  The doctor smiled indulgently. “Always time for one more,” he said.

  A Cat Horror Story

  Introduction to A Cat Horror Story

  I’m not a fan of reality television, Jerry Springer or Ricki Lake, wrestling, soccer, Star Trek conventions, multi-volume fat fantasy . . . or stories told from the point of view of Cute Little Animals. That being said, I’ll fess up to being a cat lover (not that kind!) and having co-edited with Gardner not one, but two anthologies about cats in our Magic Tales series for Ace Books. (Okay, and one about dogs, too.)

  Gardner and his wife, author Susan Casper, usually have about nine hundred and seventy-three cats running around their apartment in any given year—well, that might be a slight exaggeration. I would usually have one to two cats in my household. So I suppose it was only natural that Gardner and I would eventually come up with the idea of editing the Magicats volumes. Our idea was to buy the best cat stories ever written in the genre, stories that would confront, unnerve, and also push all the cat lovers’ buttons. But being a pretentious intellectual, I was a bit embarrassed and thought of the volumes as being purely commercial endeavors. After all, would Gardner and I want CO-EDITOR, MAGICATS I & II etched onto our respective tombstones?

  I probably won’t be letting the cat out of the bag—oye and ouch!– if I tell you that Gardner has become one of the most important and influential editors ever to work in the genre. He has been as important to the growth of the field as John W. Campbell was before him. But Gardner is also one of the very best short story writers ever to have worked in the genre.

  And I chose his Cute Little Animal story to illustrate my point.

  The protagonists of “A Cat Horror Story” are indeed cute little animals, but you’ll soon forget about that because Gardner is doing an authorial tight wire act here. As you read, the familiar world will waver and begin to change as Gardner transmogrifies it into something gunmetal gray, deadly, and alien. Soon, you should be seeing yourself as the alien . . . soon doctors and toys; canned food and cars (you know, those fast dead things); the starry sky and the harvest moon, which Butler called “the lantern of the night,” will never seem the same again.

  Gardner has created—or perhaps reproduced!—a detailed and logical mindset for his “People,
” and all the details that define this “cute little animal culture” ring true. Yet dark as this story may be, it is moon-struck with humor, poignant irony, and satire.

  You should take the title of this story literally.

  Gardner also honors what has gone before in the genre. If you have read Clifford D. Simak’s brilliant classic City, a collection of “the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north,” you’ll see the homage in this story about cats.

  Gardner is a precise, lyrical stylist. He is a deep, humane writer who can tease the humor out of tragedy . . . and turn a story about cute little animals into something resonant and mythical, something you won’t easily forget.

  Now you be careful the next time you get into your fast, dead thing!

  Jack Dann

  A Cat Horror Story

  Darkness. The smell of grass, and wet earth, and fog. The night moved through the clearing like a river. A few distant pinpricks of stars overhead, faint and far and pale. Somewhere down the hill, the grass rustled as a mouse fled through it, but the People were not hunting tonight.

  Eyes gleamed in the night. Occasionally, a tail would thump the ground, once, twice, and then fall still. Very occasionally—an act of bravado—one of the People would slowly, ostentatiously, lick a paw. Then stop.

  You could smell the excitement in the wet air, the uneasiness, the fear.

  The wind brought the distant sound of a dog barking, and the ears of the People pricked forward instinctively, but, on this night of all nights, there was certainly no time for dogs.

  Somewhere down below, in one of the human lairs at the foot of the hill, you could hear a human1 calling for one of the People in that shrill mixture of human talk, strange wet noises, and oddly garbled and nonsensically out-of-context phrases of the True Tongue that humans used to try to summon the People who were lair-mates with them, but none of the People were interested in Food tonight, even the fattest or the hungriest of them, not even when the human made an enticing rattling noise with a Food-Opening-Stick against a Cold Round Thing of Food. After a while, the human ceased his plaintive calls, and there was silence again, except for the human sounds riding the night air: doors slamming, voices, the annoying clamoring and shrieking of the Noisy Dead Things with which the humans insisted on cluttering the lairs, the growling of the Fast Dead Things which the humans kept as slaves and actually encouraged to swallow them! (although they made the Things spit them up again later) . . . but the People were used to those sounds, and ignored them.