Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “It isn’t those sidons I’m afraid of,” I said harshly. “You let a sidon loose in the house once before and look what happened.”

  She straightened up and looked at me, the scar as black and hot as lava against her red face. “A sidon is an animal,” she said. “It kin’t help itself.” She stood up gingerly, testing her unbandaged feet. “Taber’s going with me,” she said.

  She was not as blind as I had feared, but she still didn’t see. “Don’t you understand?” I said gently. “Even if he goes with you, he’ll still be here.”

  “Are you ready, Jewell?” Taber said. He had a lantern strapped to his forehead, and he was carrying a large red and green wrapped bundle.

  “I’ve gitta git another lantern from upstairs,” Jewell said.

  “There’s nithing left but town lanterns,” she said, and went upstairs.

  Taber held the package out to me. “You’ll have to give Pearl her Chrissmiss present from me, Ruby,” he said.

  “I won’t do it.”

  “How do you know?” he said.

  I didn’t answer him.

  “You were so anxious to get me my jacket when I went next door. Why don’t you get it for me now? Or do you think you won’t do that either?”

  I took the coat off the hook, waiting for Jewell to come back downstairs.

  “Lit’s go,” Jewell said, hardly limping at all as she came down the steps. I took the jacket over to him. He handed the package to me again, and I took it, watching him put the jacket on, waiting for him to pat the sparker inside the pocket to make sure it was there. Jewell handed him an extra lantern and a bundle of bandages. “Lit’s go,” she said again. She opened the outside door and went down the wooden steps into the heat.

  “Take care of Pearl, Ruby,” Taber said, and shut the door.

  I went back into the music room. Pearl had not moved. Garnet and Carnie were trying to help Scorch out of the chair and up the stairs, though Carnie could hardly stand. I took his weight from Garnet and picked him up.

  “Sit down, Carnie,” I said, and she collapsed into the chair, her knees apart and her mouth open, instantly asleep.

  I carried Scorch up the stairs to Garnet’s room and stood there holding him, bracing his weight against the door while Garnet strung a burn-hammock across her bed for me to lay him in. He had passed out in the chair, but while I was lowering him into the hammock, he came to. His red face was starting to blister, so that he had trouble speaking. “I shidda put the fire out,” he said. “It’ll catch the ither sidons. I told Jick it was too close.”

  “They’ll put the fire out,” I said. Garnet tested the hammock and nodded to me. I laid him gently in it, and we began the terrible process of peeling his clothes off his skin.

  “It was thit new tapper thit came down with Taber this morning. He was sotted. And he had a sparker with him. A sparker. The whole star kidda gone up.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be all right.” I turned him onto his side and began pulling his shirt free. He smelled like frying meat. He passed out again before we got his shirt off, and that made getting the rest of his clothes off easier. Garnet tied his wrist to the saline hookup and started the antibiotics. She told me to go back downstairs.

  Pearl was still standing by the pianoboard. “Scorch is going to be fine,” I said loudly to cover the sound of picking up Taber’s package, and I started past her with it to the kitchen. The blowers had kicked on full-blast from the doors opening so much, but I said anyway, “Garnet wants me to get some water for him.”

  I made it nearly to the door of the cardroom. Then Carnie heaved herself up in the white chair and said sleepily, “Thit’s Pearl’s present, isn’t it, Ruby?”

  I stopped under the blowers, standing on the sidon.

  She sat up straighter, licking her tongue across her lips. “Open it, Ruby. I want to see what it is.”

  Pearl’s hands tightened to fists in front of her. “Yes,” she said, looking straight at me. “Open it, Ruby.”

  “No,” I said. I walked over to the pianoboard and put the package down on the stool.

  “I’ll open it then,” Carnie said, and lurched out of the chair after it. “You’re so mean, Ruby. Poor Pearl kin’t open her own Chrissmiss presents, ivver since she got blind.” Her voice was starting to slur. I could barely understand what she was saying, and she had to grab at the package twice before she picked it up and staggered back to Pearl’s chair with it clutched to her breast. The sots were starting to really take hold now. In a few moments she would be unconscious. “Please,” I said without making a sound, praying as Pearl must have prayed in that locked room, ten years old, her hands tied and him coming at her with a razor. “Hurry, hurry.”

  Carnie couldn’t get the package open. She tugged feebly at the green ribbon, plucked at the paper without even tearing it, and subsided, closing her eyes. She began to breathe deeply, with her mouth open, slumped far down in the white chair with her arms flung out over the arms of the chair.

  “I’ll take you upstairs, Pearl,” I said. “Garnet may need help with Scorch.”

  “All right,” she said, but she didn’t move. She stood with her head averted, as if she were listening for something.

  “Oh, how pretty!” Carnie said, her voice clear and strong. She was sitting up straight in the chair, her hands on the unopened package. “It’s a dress, Pearl. Isn’t it beautiful, Ruby?”

  “Yes, I said, looking at Carnie, limp again in the chair and snoring softly.”It’s covered with lights, Pearl, green and red and gold, like a Christmas tree.”

  The package slipped out of Carnie’s limp hands and onto the floor. The blowers kicked on, and Carnie turned in the chair, pulling her feet up under her and cradling her head against the chair’s arm. She began snoring again, more loudly.

  I said, “Would you like to try it on, Pearl?” and looked over at her, but she was already gone.

  It took me nearly an hour to find her, because the town lantern I had strapped to my forehead was so dim I could not see very well. She was lying face down near the mooring.

  I unstrapped the lantern and laid it beside her on the ground so I could see her better. The train of her skirt was smoldering. I stamped on it until it crumbled underfoot and then knelt beside her and turned her over.

  “Ruby?” she said. Her voice was squeaky from the helium in the air and very hoarse. I could hardly recognize it. She would not be able to recognize mine either. If I told her I was Jewell or Carnie, or Taber, come to murder her, she would not know the difference. “Ruby?” she said. “Is Taber here?”

  “No,” I said. “Only the sidon.”

  “You’re not a sidon,” she said. Her lips were dry and parched.

  “Then what am I?” I moved the town lantern closer. Her face looked flushed, almost as red as Jewell’s.

  “You are my good friend the pianoboard player who has come to help me.”

  “I didn’t come to help you,” I said, and my eyes filled with tears. “I came to finish killing you. I can’t help it. I’m copying Taber.”

  “No,” she said, but it was not a “no” of protest or horror or surprise, but a statement of fact. “You have never copied Taber.”

  “He killed Jack,” I said. “He had some poor sotted tapper blow up the sidon so he could have an alibi for your murder. He left me to kill you for him.”

  Her hands lay at her sides, palms down on the ground. When I lifted them and laid them across her skirt as she had always held them, crossed at the wrists, she did not flinch, and I thought perhaps she was unconscious.

  “Jewell’s feet are much better,” she said, and licked her lips. “You hardly limp at all. And I knew Carnie was on sots before she ever came into the room, by the way you walked. I have listened to you copy all of them, even poor dead Jack. You never copied Taber. Not once.”

  I crawled around beside her and got her head up on my knees. Her hair came loose and fell around her face as I lifted her up, the ends of it c
urling up in dark frizzies of ash. The narrow fretted soles of my shoes dug into the backs of my legs like hot irons. She swallowed and said, “He broke the door down and he sent for the doctor and then he went to kill the man, but he was too late. My mother had let him out the back way.”

  “I know,” I said. My tears were falling on her neck and throat. I tried to brush them away, but they had already dried, and her skin felt hot and parched. Her lips were cracked, and she could hardly move them at all when she spoke.

  “Then he came back and held me in his arms while we waited for the doctor. Like this. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you kill him?’ and he said, ‘I will,’ and then I asked him to finish killing me, but he wouldn’t. He didn’t kill the tapper either, because his hands were broken and all cut up.”

  “My uncle killed him,” I said. “That’s why we’re quarantined. He and Kovich killed him,” I said, though Kovich had already been dead by then. “They tied him up and cut out his eyes with a sot-razor,” I said. That was why Jewell had let me come to Paylay. She had owed it to my uncle to let me come because he had killed the tapper. And my uncle had sent me to do what? To copy whom?

  The lamp was growing much dimmer and the twillpaper forehead strap on the lantern was smoldering now, but I didn’t try to put it out. I knelt with Pearl’s head in my lap on the hot ground, not moving.

  “I knew you were copying me almost from the first,” she said, “but I didn’t tell you, because I thought you would kill Taber for me. Whenever you played for me, I sat and thought about Taber with a sidon tearing out his throat, hoping you would copy the hate I felt. I never saw Taber or a sidon either, but I thought about my mother’s lover, and I called him Taber. I’m sorry I did that to you, Ruby.”

  I brushed her hair back from her forehead and her cheeks. My hand left a sooty mark, like a scar, down the side of her face. “I did kill Taber,” I said.

  “You reminded me so much of Kovich when you played,” she said. “You sounded just like him. I thought I was thinking about killing Taber, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even know what a sidon looks like. I was only thinking about Kovich and waiting for him to come and finish killing me.” She was breathing shallowly now and very fast, taking a breath between almost every word. “What do sidons look like, Ruby?”

  I tried to remember what Kovich had looked like when he came to find my uncle, his broken hands infected, his face red from the fever that would consume him. “I want you to copy me,” he had said to my uncle. “I want you to learn to play the pianoboard from me before I die.” I want you to kill a man for me. I want you to cut out his eyes. I want you to do what I can’t do.

  I could not remember what he looked like, except that he had been very tall, almost as tall as my uncle, as me. It seemed to me that he had looked like my uncle, but surely it was the other way around. “I want you to copy me,” he had said to my uncle. I want you to do what I can’t do. Pearl had asked him to kill the tapper, and he had promised to. Then Pearl had asked him to finish killing her, and he had promised to do that, too, though he could no more have murdered her than he could have played the pianoboard with his ruined hands, though he had not even known how well a Mirror copies, or how blindly. So my uncle had killed the tapper, and I have finished killing Pearl, but it was Kovich, Kovich who did the murders.

  “Sidons are very tall,” I said, “and they play the pianoboard.”

  She didn’t answer. The twillpaper strap on the lantern burst into flame. I watched it burn.

  “It’s all right that you didn’t kill Taber,” she said. “But you mustn’t let him put the blame for killing me on you.”

  “I did kill Taber,” I said. “I gave him the real sparker. I put it in his jacket before he left to go out to the sidons.”

  She tried to sit up. “Tell them you were copying him, that you couldn’t help yourself,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “I will,” I said, looking into the darkness.

  Over the horizon somewhere is Taber. He is looking this way, wondering if I have killed her yet. Soon he will take out his cigar and put his thumb against the trigger of the sparker, and the sidons will go up one after the other, a string of lights. I wonder if he will have time to know he has been murdered, to wonder who killed him.

  I wonder, too, kneeling here with Pearl’s head on my knees. Perhaps I did copy Pearl. Or Jewell, or Kovich, or even Taber. Or all of them. The worst thing is not that things are done to you. It is not knowing who is doing them. Maybe I did not copy anyone, and I am the one who murdered Taber. I hope so.

  “You should go back before you get burned,” Pearl says, so softly I can hardly hear her.

  “I will,” I say, but I cannot. They have tied me up, they have locked me in, and now I am only waiting for them to come and finish killing me.

  R.A. LAFFERTY

  Golden Gate

  R.A. Lafferty possesses a wickedly boisterous sense of humor, an enormous store of offbeat erudition, and one of the most outlandish imaginations in all of SF. Over the last 23 years he has drawn on these qualities to turn out a seemingly-endless string of mad and marvelous tall tales, including some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever published. In 1973 he won the Hugo Award for one of them, “Eurema’s Dam.” His books include Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive At Easterwine, The Flame Is Green, and the collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? His most recent books are the collections Four Stories, Golden Gate and Other Stories, and Ringing Changes, and the novel Annals of Klepsis.

  In the funny and lyrical story that follows, a typically Laffertyesque tall tale, he takes us to the stylishly rowdy Golden Gate Bar and introduces us to a black-hatted Villain in an Old-Time Melodrama who is just a little too convincing …

  When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively.

  In a way, the next move is up to him.

  And it can be a satisfying experience; the more so here, as many would like to have killed him. And now it is done under the ghastly light, just as that old devil’s tune comes to a climax and the voices have swelled to an animal roar.

  And afterwards an overflowing satisfaction compounded of defiance and daring; and a wonderful clarity born of the roaring excitement. Not peace, but achievement. The shadows prowl in the corners like wolves, and one glows like a lantern.

  But Barnaby did not shoot him till Thursday evening. And this was only Monday, and that state of clarity had not yet been attained.

  It was clear to Barnaby that Blackie was really a villain. Not everybody knew this. A melodrama villain is only black behind the lights. Off stage he should have a heart of gold. Whether of wrestling match, or afternoon serial, or evening drama or film, or on the little stage here at the Golden Gate Bar, the villain should be—when his role is finished—kind and courteous, thoughtful and big-hearted, a prince of a fellow.

  That is the myth. Here it was not entirely true.

  “I have always suspected,” said Barnaby, “that there is some bad in every villain. I would prove this if only I had proof. Why am I drinking cider?”

  “We always give you cider when you have had enough beer.”

  “It is a dirty trick, and you are a dirty Irish trickster. Tell Jeannie to play ‘Fire in the Cockleburs.’”

  “There isn’t any such song, dear.”

  “I know there isn’t, Margaret, but once I asked her to play a song that wasn’t, and she played it.”

  Barnaby was a confused young man. He was something of a rumdum as are many of the noble men of the world. And even with a broken nose he was better looking than most. He came to the Golden Gate because he was in love with three wonderful women there.

  The Golden Gate Bar is not on the Pacific Ocean. It is on another ocean, at this point several th
ousand miles distant. But if the name of that ocean were known, people would go there, and range up and down that coast until they found this wonderful place. And they would come in every night, and take up room, and stay till closing time.

  It is crowded here as it is. The most one can ever get is one wrist on the bar. All the tables are filled early, and no couple ever has one alone for long. The relentless and scantily dressed waitresses double them up. Then they double them up again as the crowd grows. Soon the girls and ladies have all the seats, and the men stand behind them at the tables. And later, as the drinking and singing continue, some of the men sit on the ladies’ laps. They do things like that at the Golden Gate.

  Clancy O’Clune, the singing bartender, began this custom. He sang ballads and love songs to the girls. He wandered as he sang, and picked out the plainest and shyest and most spinsterish creature he could find. He would sit on her lap and sing to her; and as soon as her embarrassment had faded a little, she would join in the fun and sing with the crowd.

  Group singing was what brought the crowds to the Golden Gate. For people love to sing if they don’t have to sing alone. Jeannie was marvelous at the piano, and with her, people would sing all the old ballads: “Tavern in a Town,” “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,”

  “When You Were Sixteen,” “Hot Time in the Old Town.”

  The Gate was a family place down on the old pier, and the only drinking spot along the beach where children were admitted. For them was cider in great steins. The motif was Gay Nineties. The bartenders wore moustaches and derby hats. The waitresses were scanty and seductive, and plumed and pretty in some old dance hall costume fashion. Even the customers liked to dress the part, and came in vintage gowns and old checkered vests from ancient trunks.

  “I know the evil of him is largely compounded of soot and grease,” said Barnaby who was still thinking of Blackie, the villain. “How do we know that the evil of the devil himself is not so compounded?”

  On the floor was sawdust, and the lights were gas lights. The cuspidors were old brass, and stood up in their glory.