Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “The driver of that boat claimed me as a friend and later took me home for the night, where I told to him—and to him alone—the whole story. He was Jorge Chuc.

  “Next day I found that the young couple, Harry and Ann, had taken only a brief look at the charming unspoiled area, and then started east, exactly according to plan, with me—or something very much like me—following behind them all the way. They had been a trifle surprised at my passivity and uncommunicativeness, and more so when, on meeting Victor, I was no longer to be found. But they had taken immediate action, even set a full scale search in progress—approximately seventy kilometers from where I then was. As soon as I came to myself I had to concoct a wild series of lies about cramps and heart trouble to get them in the clear and set their minds at ease. Needless to say, my version included no mention of diver-imitating fishlife.”

  He tossed the spark of his cigarette over the rail before us.

  “So now, my friend, you know the whole story of all I know of what is to be found beyond the Dead Reef. It may be that others know of other happenings and developments there. Or of similar traps elsewhere. The sea is large … . Or it may be that the whole yarn comes from neuroses long abused by stuff like this.”

  I had not seen him extract his flask, but he now took two deep, shuddering swallows.

  I sighed involuntarily, and then sighed again. I seemed to have been breathing rather inadequately during the end of his account.

  “Ordinary thanks don’t seem quite appropriate here,” I finally said. “Though I do thank you. Instead I am going to make two guesses. The second is that you might prefer to sit quietly here alone, enjoying the evening, and defer the mild entertainment I was about to offer you to some other time. I’d be glad to be proved wrong … ?”

  “No. You’re very perceptive, I welcome the diverse—the deferred offer.” His tongue stumbled a bit now more from fatigue than anything he’d drunk. “But what was your first guess?”

  I rose and slowly paced a few meters to and fro, remembering to pick up my absurd snorkel bag. Then I turned and gazed out to the sea.

  “I can’t put it into words. It has something to do with the idea that the sea is still, well, strong. Perhaps it can take revenge? No, that’s too simple. I don’t know. I have only a feeling that our ordinary ideas of what may be coming on us may be—oh—not deep, or broad enough. I put this poorly. But perhaps the sea, or nature, will not die passively at our hands … perhaps death itself may turn or return in horrible life upon us, besides the more mechanical dooms … .”

  “Our thoughts are not so far apart,” the tall Belézan said. “I welcome them to my night’s agenda.”

  “To which I now leave you, unless you’ve changed your mind?”

  He shook his head. I hoisted his bag to the seat beside him. “Don’t forget this. I almost left mine.”

  “Thanks. And don’t you forget about dogs and mothers.” He grinned faintly.

  “Good night.”

  My footsteps echoed on the now deserted muelle left him sitting there. I was quite sure he was no longer smiling.

  Nor was I.

  IAN WATSON

  Slow Birds

  One of the most brilliant innovators to enter SF in many years, Ian Watson’s work is typified by its vivid and highly original conceptualization, its intellectual rigor, and the sometimes Byzantine complexity of its plotting. He sold his first story in 1969, and first attracted widespread critical attention with his 1973 novel The Embedding—still one of the genre’s most sophisticated treatments of the theme of linguistics—which was the runner-up for the 1974 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His The Jonah Kit won the British Science Fiction Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1976 and 1977, respectively. Watson’s other books include Alien Embassy, Miracle Visitors, The Martian Inca, Chekhov’s Journey, Under Heaven’s Bridge (co-authored with Michael Bishop), the collection The Very Slow Time Machine, and, as editor, the anthologies Pictures at an Exhibition and (co-edited with Michael Bishop) Changes. Upcoming is The Black Current Trilogy, the first volume of which, The Book of the River, will be published by Gollancz in 1984.

  Here Watson shows us a future world that seems almost pastoral at first glance … but it is a world whose people live always on the brink of sudden extinction, a world haunted by one of the strangest menaces in recent SF, the ominous, slow-moving low-flying Slow Birds …

  It was Mayday, and the skate-sailing festival that year was being held at Tuckerton.

  By late morning, after the umpires had been out on the grass plain setting red flags around the circuit, cumulus clouds began to fill a previously blue sky, promising ideal conditions for the afternoon’s sport. No rain; so that the glass wouldn’t be an inch deep in water as last year at Atherton. No dazzling glare to blind the spectators, as the year before that at Buckby. And a breeze verging on brisk without ever becoming fierce: perfect to speed the competitors’ sails along without lifting people off their feet and tumbling them, as four years previously at Edgewood when a couple of broken ankles and numerous bruises had been sustained.

  After the contest there would be a pig roast; or rather the succulent fruits thereof, for the pig had been turning slowly on its spit these past thirty-six hours. And there would be kegs of Old Codger Ale to be cracked. But right now Jason Babbidge’s mind was mainly occupied with checking out his glass-skates and his fine crocus yellow hand-sail.

  As high as a tall man, and of best old silk, only patched in a couple of places, the sail’s fore-spar of flexible ash was bent into a bow belly by a strong hemp cord. Jason plucked this thoughtfully like a harpist, testing the tension. Already a fair number of racers were out on the glass, showing off their paces to applause. Tuckerton folk mostly, they were—acting as if they owned the glass hereabouts and knew it more intimately than any visitors could. Not that it was in any way different from the same glass over Atherton way.

  Jason’s younger brother Daniel whistled appreciatively as a Tuckerton man carrying purple silk executed perfect circles at speed, his sail shivering as he tacked.

  “Just look at him, Jay!”

  “What, Bob Marchant? He took a pratfall last year. Where’s the use in working up a sweat before the whistle blows?”

  By now a couple of sisters from Buckby were out too with matching black sails, skating figure-eights around each other, risking collision by a hair’s breadth.

  “Go on, Jay,” urged young Daniel. “Show ’em.”

  Contestants from the other villages were starting to flood on to the glass as well, but Jason noticed how Max Tarnover was standing not so far away, merely observing these antics with a wise smile. Master Tarnover of Tuckerton, last year’s victor at Atherton despite the drenching spray … . Taking his cue from this, and going one better, Jason ignored events on the glass and surveyed the crowds instead.

  He noticed Uncle John Babbidge chatting intently to an Edgewood man over where the silver band was playing; that was hardly the quietest place to talk, so perhaps they were doing business. Meanwhile on the green beyond, the band the children of five villages buzzed like flies from hoopla to skittles to bran tub, to apples in buckets of water. And those grown-ups who weren’t intent on the band or the practice runs or on something else, such as gossip, besieged the craft and produce stalls. There must be going on a thousand people at the festival, and the village beyond looked deserted. Rugs and benches and half-barrels had even been set out near the edge of the glass for the old folk of Tuckerton.

  As the band lowered their instruments for a breather after finishing The Floral Dance, a bleat of panic cut across the chatter of many voices. A farmer had just vaulted into a tiny sheep-pen where a lamb almost as large as its shorn, protesting dam was ducking beneath her to suckle and hide. Laughing, the farmer hauled it out and hoisted it by its neck and back legs to guess its weight, and maybe win a prize.

  And now Jason’s mother was threading her way through the crowd, chewing the remnants of a pasty
.

  “Best of luck, son!” She grinned.

  “I’ve told you, Mum,” protested Jason. “It’s bad luck to say ‘good luck’.”

  “Oh, luck yourself! What’s luck, anyway?” She prodded her Adam’s apple as if to press the last piece of meat and potatoes on its way down, though really she was indicating that her throat was bare of any charm or amulet.

  “I suppose I’d better make a move.” Kicking off his sandals, Jason sat to lace up his skates. With a helping hand from Daniel he rose and stood knockkneed, blades cutting into the turf while the boy hoisted the sail across his shoulders. Jason gripped the leather straps on the bowstring and the spine-spar.

  “Okay.” He waggled the sail this way and that. “Let go, then. I won’t blow away.”

  But just as he was about to proceed down on to the glass, out upon the glass less than a hundred yards away a slow bird appeared.

  It materialized directly in front of one of the Buckby sisters. Unable to veer, she had no choice but to throw herself backwards. Crying out in frustration, and perhaps hurt by her fall, she skidded underneath the slow bird, sledging supine upon her now snapped and crumpled sail … .

  They were called slow birds because they flew through the air—at the stately pace of three feet per minute.

  They looked a little like birds, too, though only a little. Their tubular metal bodies were rounded at the head and tapering to a finned point at the tail, with two stubby wings midway. Yet these wings could hardly have anything to do with suspending their bulk in the air; the girth of a bird was that of a horse, and its length -twice that of a man lying full length. Perhaps those wings controlled orientation of trim.

  In color they were a silvery gray; though this was only the color of their outer skin, made of a soft metal like lead. Quarter of an inch beneath this coating their inner skins were black and stiff as steel. The noses of the birds were all scored with at least a few scrape marks due to encounters with obstacles down the years; slow birds always kept the same height above ground—underbelly level with a man’s shoulders—and they would bank to avoid substantial buildings or mature trees, but any frailer obstructions they would push on through. Hence the individual patterns of scratches. However, a far easier way of telling them apart was by the graffiti carved on so many of their flanks; initials entwined in hearts, dates, place names, fragments of messages. These amply confirmed how very many slow birds there must be in all—something of which people could not otherwise have been totally convinced. For no one could keep track of a single slow bird. After each one had appeared—over hill, down dale, in the middle of a pasture or halfway along a village street—it would fly onward slowly for any length of time between an hour and a day, covering any distance between a few score yards and a full mile. And vanish again. To reappear somewhere else unpredictably: far away or close by, maybe long afterwards or maybe soon.

  Usually a bird would vanish, to reappear again.

  Not always, though. A half dozen times a year, within the confines of this particular island country, a slow bird would reach its journey’s end.

  It would destroy itself, and all the terrain around it for a radius of two and a half miles, fusing the landscape instantly into a sheet of glass. A flat, circular sheet of glass. A polarized, limited zone of annihilation. Scant yards beyond its rim a person might escape unharmed, only being deafened and dazzled temporarily.

  Hitherto no slow bird had been known to explode to overlap an earlier sheet of glass. Consequently many towns and villages clung close to the borders of what had already been destroyed, and news of a fresh glass plain would cause farms and settlements to spring up there. Even so, the bulk of people still kept fatalistically to the old historic towns. They assumed that a slow bird wouldn’t explode in their midst during their own lifetimes. And if it did, what would they know of it? Unless the glass happened merely to bisect a town—in which case, once the weeping and mourning was over, the remaining citizenry could relax and feel secure.

  True, in the long term the whole country from coast to coast and from north to south would be a solid sheet of glass. Or perhaps it would merely be a checkerboard, of circles touching circles: a glass mosaic. With what in between? Patches of desert dust, if the climate dried up due to reflections from the glass. Or floodwater, swampland. But that day was still far distant: a hundred years away, two hundred, three. So people didn’t worry too much. They had been used to this all their lives long, and their parents before them. Perhaps one day the slow birds would stop coming. And going. And exploding. Just as they had first started, once. Certainly the situation was no different, by all accounts, anywhere else in the world. Only the seas were clear of slow birds. So maybe the human race would have to take to rafts one day. Though by then, with what would they build them? Meanwhile, people got by; and most had long ago given up asking why. For there was no answer.

  The girl’s sister helped her rise. No bones broken, it seemed. Only an injury to dignity; and to her sail.

  The other skaters had all coasted to a halt and were staring resentfully at the bird in their midst. Its belly and sides were almost bare of graffiti; seeing this, a number of youths hastened on to the glass, clutching penknives, rusty nails and such. But an umpire waved them back angrily.

  “Shoo! Be off with you!” His gaze seemed to alight on Jason, and for a fatuous moment Jason imagined that it was himself to whom the umpire was about to appeal; but the man called, “Master Tarnover!” instead, and Max Tarnover duck-waddled past, then glided out over the glass, to confer.

  Presently the umpire cupped his hands. “We’re delaying the start for a half hour,” he bellowed. “Fair’s fair: young lady ought to have a chance to fix her sail, seeing as it wasn’t her fault.”

  Jason noted a small crinkle of amusement on Tarnover’s face; for now either the other competitors would have to carry on prancing around tiring themselves with extra practice that none of them needed, or else troop off the glass for a recess and lose some psychological edge. In fact almost everyone opted for a break and some refreshments.

  “Luck indeed!” snorted Mrs. Babbidge, as Max Tarnover clumped back their way.

  Tarnover paused by Jason. “Frankly I’d say her sail’s a wreck,” he confided. “But what can you do? The Buckby lot would have been bitching on otherwise. ‘Oh, she could have won. If she’d had ten minutes to fix it.’ Bloody hunk of metal in the way.” Tarnover ran a lordly eye over Jason’s sail. “What price skill, then?”

  Daniel Babbidge regarded Tarnover with a mixture of hero worship and hostile partisanship on his brother’s behalf. Jason himself only nodded and said, “Fair enough.” He wasn’t certain whether Tarnover was acting generously—or with patronizing arrogance. Or did this word in his ear mean that Tarnover actually saw Jason as a valid rival for the silver punchbowl this year round?

  Obviously young Daniel did not regard Jason’s response as adequate. He piped up: “So where do you think the birds go, Master Tarnover, when they aren’t here?”

  A good question: quite unanswerable, but Max Tarnover would probably feel obliged to offer an answer if only to maintain his pose of worldly wisdom. Jason warmed to his brother, while Mrs. Babbidge, catching on, cuffed the boy softly.

  “Now don’t you go wasting Master Tarnover’s time. Happen he hasn’t given it a moment’s thought, all his born days.”

  “Oh, but I have,” Tarnover said.

  “Well?” the boy insisted.

  “Well … maybe they don’t go anywhere at all.”

  Mrs. Babbidge chuckled, and Tarnover flushed.

  “What I mean is, maybe they just stop being in one place then suddenly they’re in the next place.”

  “If only you could skate like that!” Jason laughed. “Bit slow, though … Everyone would still pass you by at the last moment.”

  “They must go somewhere,” young Dan said doggedly. “Maybe it’s somewhere we can’t see. Another sort of place, with other people. Maybe it’s them that builds
the birds.”

  “Look, freckleface, the birds don’t come from Russ, or ‘Merica, or anywhere else. So where’s this other place?”

  “Maybe it’s right here, only we can’t see it.”

  “And maybe pigs have wings.” Tarnover looked about to march toward the the cider and perry stall; but Mrs. Babbidge interposed herself smartly.

  “Oh, as to that, I’m sure our sow Betsey couldn’t fly, wings or no wings. Just hanging in the air like that, and so heavy.”

  “Weighed a bird recently, have you?”

  “They look heavy, Master Tarnover.”

  Tarnover couldn’t quite push his way past Mrs. Babbidge, not with his sail impeding him. He contented himself with staring past her, and muttering. “If we’ve nothing sensible to say about them, in my opinion it’s better to shut up.”

  “But it isn’t better,” protested Daniel. “They’re blowing the world up. Bit by bit. As if they’re at war with us.”

  Jason felt humorously inventive. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe these other people of Dan’s are at war with us—only they forgot to mention it. And when they’ve glassed us all, they’ll move in for the holidays. And skate happily for evermore.”

  “Damn long war, if that’s so,” growled Tarnover. “Been going on over a century now.”

  “Maybe that’s why the birds fly so slowly,” said Daniel. “What if a year to us is like an hour to those people? That’s why the birds don’t fall. They don’t have time to.”

  Tarnover’s expression was almost savage. “And what if the birds come only to punish us for our sins? What if they’re simply a miraculous proof—”

  “—that the Lord cares about us? And one day He’ll forgive us?” Mrs. Babbidge beamed. “Oh goodness, surely you aren’t one of them? A bright lad like you. Me, I don’t even put candles in the window or tie knots in the bedsheets anymore to keep the birds away.” She ruffled her younger son’s mop of red hair. “Everyone dies sooner or later, Dan. You’ll get used to it, when you’re properly grown up. When it’s time to die, it’s time to die.”