The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "It's easy for you East-Coasters to be tolerant," the man said. "You don't have to live near them. I'll tell you this: If those weirdos ever decide to come out of the mountains, we're going to be ready for them. That is, if you liberals haven't taken away our guns by then, too."

  Galena would have gladly gotten into a scrap with the man, but there was no time. She ended up leaving a signed credit-card slip with him to cover the cost of retrieving the car, if necessary.

  Unfolding the map on her dashboard, she saw that south and west of Williston was nothing but blank space with anemic gray lines wandering through it. "Road condition unknown," the map said helpfully. "Hi ho Silver," Galena said to the Hyundai. Then she put on her sunglasses and prepared to cross the Great Plains in a Japanese rattletrap.

  "I hope you appreciate this, Thea," she said.

  "Galena Pittman," a rival columnist had once written, "is aptly named for a poisonous mineral." The phrase had amused Galena's colleagues so annoyingly that she had adopted it, mentioning it so often and laughing so hard that everyone began to realize it stung her.

  In fact, Galena had been stinging since she was born. Long ago she had realized she was the world's pincushion, a target for every petty mortification, every nettling slight the world could invent. She could chew her cuticles raw thinking of the condescensions she had to endure in a given day, the premeditated cruelties of cabmen and bureaucrats. The only defense was to attack earlier and more wittily, to wear a coat of banter thick enough to keep the pins away. It rarely worked.

  Her mother had a favorite saying: "If you make a bed of nails for yourself, you'd better lie on it, and like it." Galena had spent a lifetime casting barbs at that slogan, trying to find ways to disprove it.

  In college, she had wanted to be an artist; but she had soon learned that she couldn't bear to see others looking at her work, thinking thoughts she couldn't control. She had tried to explain herself so intrusively, and annoyed so many people, that it finally dawned on her that the explaining was all she was really good at. So, unable to be criticized, she became a critic.

  Galena had actually fallen in love with Thea Nadine's art several minutes before she fell in love with the artist herself. It had happened on a day when her landlord had decided to repair the plaster without any notice, and she had spent most of an hour calling everyone she knew to come help her move furniture, receiving only one recorded message after another. At last, where friendship failed money had to take over. The people at Hank's Hauling had been only too happy to help, once they had taken her Visa number hostage. By evening her apartment was in chaos and Galena was in a state of advanced disappointment with the world. She wouldn't have gone to the opening if she hadn't been paid to cover it for the North Side Review.

  Standing there in a haze induced by exhaustion, cheap chablis, and whatever nutrition came from brie on rice cakes, Galena saw her first frost painting. It was a feathery, crystalline abstraction on glass-almost an image, like an elusive memory. It had been taken from its refrigeration box and set in a wooden stand for display, and the overheated gallery air was beginning to melt it. She stood and watched as the painting slowly turned to water from the outside in. She couldn't figure out why she found it so moving till someone behind her said, "That's how I feel." Galena realized it was how she felt, too-like a fragile thing aging and perishing as everyone stood and watched. She stared until the painting was no more than a sheet of glass covered with tears, and all that was left was a memory of beauty that bad changed and passed on, like time and lost youth.

  She asked the gallery owner about the artist, and he said, "Oh, you've got to meet Thea. She's simply an angel. All her work is perishable, you know. She works with the craziest things-sand, smoke, ice, sparks."

  Thea was dressed in an oversized lumberjack shirt and jeans, her tangled brown hair falling around her shoulders. At first Galena wondered what kind of schtick this was-but a look at Thea's young face immediately told her that it was no schtick-the girl was simply unaware of the impression she made. Galena was suddenly seized with an urge to cherish this wisp of smoke, to protect it from all the winds that might dissipate it, to keep it young forever.

  She gave Thea a ride home that night. The artist was living in a squalid, firetrap loft with five others, sleeping on old mattresses and cooking on a portable grill. The next morning, Galena bustled to the rescue, transplanting Thea into her apartment. The girl came willingly enough, but without the gratitude Galena expected. She had yet to learn that Thea was oblivious to her environment, existing like an air plant with no soil, just on sunlight and inspiration.

  Galena made the nest, brought in the money, and kept out the world. Thea brought into her life almost-forgotten pleasures like scented soaps and silk pajamas, pearly Christmas ornaments and pomegranate seeds. Their relationship had all the hallmarks of permanence: an adopted cat, Chinese takeout in front of the television, Saturday morning errands, repainting the bedroom. Life was so normal, so trustworthy, it lulled Galena into forgetfulness. She almost became amiable.

  She missed the signs of Thea's restlessness at first. In hindsight, the whole shift to wind sculpture had been part of it-a yearning attempt to grasp impermanence again. In that sunny spring Galena would come home to find her staring at the vortexes formed in Plexiglas tubes by the wind machines. They were like miniature, multicolored tornadoes, made visible by smoke or sand or bubbles. They had never looked strong enough to sweep any Dorothys off to Oz. Or Montana.

  GAS-CASINO-ALIEN CURIOS, said the hand-painted roadside sign. Galena lifted the sunglasses onto her forehead; in the rearview mirror she saw they had left white circles in the dust on her face. Without the green tint of the lenses, the landscape looked bleached into shades of gray. Eroded hills, tufted with buckbrush and jackpine, cooked under the glaring sky. Ahead, hovering above the distant horizon, was a brush stroke of white-not clouds, but the snow capping unseen mountains.

  She turned the Hyundai into the gravel parking lot in front of the gas station. The air conditioner sighed wearily as she killed the engine. As she twisted to get out, a sharp pain caught her unawares. She waited, sweaty, till it was gone, thinking: Serves you right for growing up.

  Outside, the heat radiated off the yellow ground. In a dust-caked pickup by the gas pumps, a young woman waited with a child, her wispy blond hair blowing in the dry wind. The bumper sticker on the truck said, IF YOU DON'T WANT HEMORRHOIDS, GET OFF YOUR ASS. A Western sentiment, Galena presumed.

  A wiry, bowlegged man was buying cigarettes at the counter inside. Galena wandered down the aisle of dusty tourist trinkets: rubber tomahawks, dribble glasses, ashtrays with toilet humor on them.

  The door closed and Galena became aware of someone watching her. The woman stood motionless at the head of the aisle, not unlike one of the rock formations outside: a wind-scoured, lumpy shape with a cracked complexion that looked hard to the touch.

  "Where are the alien curios?" Galena asked, thinking that the woman herself looked a little like one.

  The woman pointed to a tabletop display case at the end of the aisle. Galena had to wipe the dust off the glass to see inside. She had expected plastic E.T.'s, but instead saw an assortment of lumpy concretions like fossilized organs. The shop's proprietor eased in behind the case, moving her bulk with uncanny silence. Without asking, she opened the case, took out one of the rocks, and handed it over. It was translucent, like onyx, and threaded through with redbrown veins. Galena suddenly had the feeling she was holding a giant eyeball, and put it down on the counter, a little revolted.

  "How do you know it's alien?" she said to play along. "It sure's hell ain't natural," the woman said. She had a breathy cigarette-voice.

  "So what is it? A transdimensional doo-dad?"

  "One of the things the Dirigo leave behind."

  Galena said, "I thought the Dirigo looked like strings of Christmas lights."

  That was how Unsolved Mysteries had it, at any rate. "No one ever said they left turds."
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  The woman drew another object from the case and cradled it in her palm. It was the color of a kidney, and shaped a little like one. Its surface was slick, as if wet. "The aliens didn't leave these. The people that let them take over did."

  So this was the much-publicized art created by the Windrow Mountain colony. It was not up to Thea's standards. Galena felt partly relief, partly anger that Thea could have been hoodwinked into participating in this travesty.

  The woman's mineralized skin did not show a flicker of emotion. "You going up there?" she said.

  "Yes. I've got a friend there."

  "You think. There's nothing human living up there."

  There's nothing much human down here either, Galena wanted to say; but she curbed her tongue.

  When she emerged from the shop, a wind brushed by, scented with sage. She turned to look south, where the Windrow Mountains still hovered like an unkept promise on the horizon. "Don't leave, kid," she whispered. "I'm coming."

  The reports from Montana bad fascinated Thea from the start. There were many versions at first: Remote Montana community taken over by aliens. Demonic possession in Montana wasteland. Mystery Montana disease baffles scientists. Galena scoffed at it all.

  After anthropologists at the University of Montana began to investigate, the explanations still metamorphosed to suit every paranoia. It was a type of mass hysteria. It was a scandalous case of environmental contamination. It was genetic inbreeding. It was a secret government experiment. One debunking journalist concluded that the "victims" were in fact members of a harmless New Age religious community who were being stigmatized by society as "ill" for their nonconformity. The explanation of the victims themselves never changed. The Dirigo, they said, were enabling them to create art of a type never before imagined.

  It was the art that riveted Thea's attention. As pictures finally filtered out, Thea bought all the magazines and pored over them. "Just think," she said, "I could work in real wind, real lightning, if I had their inspiration."

  "If you had their inspiration, you'd be in a looney bin," Galena said.

  But it did seem as if Thea's creativity was lagging that spring. Her studio was cluttered with unfinished work; it was over a year since she had held one of her famous shows that drew such crowds to see the self-destroying art. As her comfort increased it seemed her drive faded. Galena worried that her own happiness was poisoning the well from which it sprang.

  One morning when Galena, ready to leave for work, leaned over the bed to kiss her partner goodbye, Thea looked up out of the rumpled bedclothes and said, "I'm going to Montana." Galena laughed, brushed the scattered hair out of Thea's face, and said, "Ride 'em, cowboy."

  When she got home that evening, Thea's suitcase and backpack were waiting by the door. The truth smashed all the elaborate structure of Galena's security. Contentment had come to her so late, so unexpectedly, that she had never thought it, too, could be perishable. She followed Thea around the house, asking questions in a voice like a lost child.

  "How can I get in touch with you?"

  "What are you going to do there?"

  "How long will you be gone?"

  "Why are you doing this?"

  "When will you know?"

  "What about me?"

  "What about me?"

  To which Thea could only answer again and again, "I don't know."

  And that was all Galena had ever gotten out of her. She consented to drop Thea off at the airport, but wouldn't go in with her, and they didn't part with a kiss, or even a handshake.

  The road deteriorated as it began to climb. The shoulders were first to go, then the paint, till all that was left was a line of asphalt about as flat as a strip of cooked bacon. Galena's stomach was running on empty, but a touch of nervous nausea kept her from stopping to eat the granola bars she had brought. She didn't know how she was going to find Thea, and she didn't want to be wandering the Windrow Mountains all night.

  The mountains wore a skirt of pine forest. The road veered to and fro through the still trunks till Galena began to suspect it didn't know where it was going. Down under the canopy of needles the air was dark as twilight, though the sun had to be in the sky, somewhere.

  She rounded a corner and laid on the brakes. Ahead, the road was blocked by a fallen tree. A large yellow sign said, PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The sign was pockmarked with bullet holes.

  She got out to survey the problem. The air was surprisingly cool; she must have climbed in altitude. The tree turned out to be just a poplar sapling, more leaves than trunk, felled by a chain saw. She seized a branch and dragged it across the asphalt, out of the way.

  "If you want to keep me out, you'll have to try harder than this," Galena said to the unknown woodsman.

  The effort had winded her, and she sat sideways in the driver's seat a while, her door open on the chill, quiet air. At first she thought that her tired eyes were playing tricks; but no, the shifting points of light were real. Off in the forest, down the winding corridors of pines, some people were carrying candies, or flashlights.

  "Excuse me," Galena called out, getting up. "Can you give me some directions?"

  The lights winked out. Piney silence surrounded her. Only then did Galena remember the reports-floating strings of lights sighted; gauzy veils, unexplained. She realized she was standing with one arm outstretched, as if hailing a cab. With a nervous laugh at her own absurdity, she headed back to the car and the security of self-examination. One's first brush with the paranormal ought to have more dignity than this, she decided. In her mind she composed the headlines. CHICAGOAN TRIES TO CATCH RIDE ON UFO: "I THOUGHT IT WAS A CAB," CITY SLICKER SAYS.

  The road plunged down a ravine, then abruptly emerged from the trees into a barren valley. The setting sun touched the sandstone cliffs, a vivid orange. Lines of erosion made the rock face look like an ancient has-relief, so worn away that the original sculpture was barely visible. Galena stopped the car to study it. She could almost see figures in motion, an inscription in flowing characters. It reminded her vividly of something. It was on the tip of her tongue: she would remember in a second.

  It was just a cliff. Frowning at the illusion that had drawn her briefly out of herself, she put the car in Drive again and followed the winding road down into the heart of the valley. Rock formations rose on either side: twisted sandstone pillars that looked like figures hidden in stone cocoons, their protolimbs still obscure beneath the surface. They drew her eyes, as if subconsciously she knew what shapes lay beneath. The valley floor held an army of them in a thousand poses, straining to free themselves. Galena sped through them; they towered over the little car, their shadows lying like barriers across the road.

  At last the forest enclosed her again. It was dark now; she turned on the headlights. There was still no sign of any colony-no sign of humans at all. She had passed the last motel just after noon.

  At last, a light shoe through the trees. She slowed, then spotted the driveway-just a dirt track, really. As she drove up it, the tall grass swished against the car's undercarriage.

  It was a log house, probably built as a hunter's lodge. Leaving the headlights on, Galena skirted the stack of firewood and climbed three board steps onto the porch. The screen door creaked when she opened it to knock. It was several seconds before there was any response. Then, hesitantly, the door opened a crack and someone peered out.

  It was Thea. "Hi there, kid," Galena said, as if she'd known it was going to be her.

  Thea stood staring. "Galena," she said.

  Her long brown hair fell in curly tendrils, uncombed but fetching. She looked more thin and waif like than ever in a flannel shirt and jeans. Her feet were bare. Galena wanted to hug her to make sure that everything was all right, but there was something in her manner-a slight shrinking back, a wariness.

  Thea held the door open. "Come in."

  The kitchen table was soon strewn with the snapshots Galena had brought mostly their cat, Pesto, doing assorted c
atlike things. Thea stared for a long time at one where the flashbulb made the cat's eyes light up like headlights.

  "He's gotten to be a real sentimental slob," Galena said. "After you left, he wandered around the house and cried for a few days." So did I, she didn't say.

  She continued the patter she'd tried to keep up ever since entering, afraid of what silence might mean. "Mr. Garavelli at the dry cleaners told me to say hi to you. They've been repaving the street out front and it's been unbearable all summer: nothing but dust and noise. Workers leaving their shirts on the bushes. Manly sweat everywhere." She took a sip of the tea that was virtually all Thea could offer her; the refrigerator was almost empty. "I had to go in to Dr. Hamer for a biopsy last week. I find out the results Tuesday."

  At last Thea's eyes focused on her. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Getting old, that's what's wrong." Getting old alone, she thought. No one to tell how it feels, no one to give a damn. "Never mind," she said.

  At last silence fell. Inside the wood stove, a log settled with a brittle sound.

  "Galena, I can't come back," Thea said. Her voice sounded like a guilty child confessing. "I've made the commitment here."

  "Sure. I understand," Galena said, barely hearing the words. "What's important is your work. How's it going?" She glanced around the cabin. There was not a sign of artistry anywhere, just worn Salvation Army furniture.

  "I'm working outside now," Thea said. "I'll show you tomorrow, if you want."

  "Yes. I want."

  Silence again.

  "I'd better get my suitcase out of the car," Galena said. There was a twinge of pain as she rose, mocking her. Think you're brave, do you? It said. She took care not to react. She couldn't bear to seem vulnerable.

  "Sure. You can sleep on the couch," Thea said.

  Galena looked at her silently. Thea wouldn't meet her eyes. "What is this, Montana morality?" Galena asked.

  "No." Thea's voice was pleading. "I just can't, Galena. I don't want you to lure me back. It will be too hard."