Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I has a skiff much better than that,” Morris said, jerking his head contemptuously toward the skiff that Nick had been using. “I’ll be at Middle Cay tomorrow.”

  Morris showed up at Middle Cay and took Nick to places that he never would have found. Morris read all Nick’s reference books with great interest.

  And the webbing between his fingers kept growing.

  Nick bought a cold Coke in the grocery store and strolled back to his house. Morris was waiting on the porch, sitting on the rail and reading their article in the magazine.

  “I brought lobsters for dinner,” he said. Small scratching noises came from the covered wooden crate at his feet. He thumped on it with his heel, and the noises stopped for a moment, then began again.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out to the Hog Islands. Fishing mostly. I spend most of the days underwater now.” He looked at Nick but his eyes were concealed by the mirrored glasses. “When you left, I could only stay under for a few hours. Now, there doesn’t seem to be a limit. And the sun burns me if I’m out too much.”

  Nick caught himself studying the way Morris was holding the magazine. The webbing between his fingers tucked neatly out of the way. It should not work, he thought. This being that is shaped like a man and swims like a fish. But bumblebees can’t fly, by logical reasoning.

  “What do you think of the article?” Nick asked

  “Good, as far as it goes. Could say more. I’ve been watching them, and they seem to signal to each other. There’s different patterns for the males and females. I’ve got notes on it all. I’ll show you. The water temperature seems to affect them too.”

  Nick was thinking how painful this curiosity of his was. It had always been so. He wanted to know; he wanted to understand. He had taken Morris’s temperature; he had listened to Morris’s heartbeat and monitored its brachycardia when Morris submerged. He had monitored the oxygen levels in the blood, observed Morris’s development. But there was so much more to learn. He had been hampered by his own lack of background—he was a biologist, not a doctor. There were tests he could not perform without harming Morris. And he had not wanted to hurt Morris. No, he did not want to hurt Morris.

  “I’ll leave all my notes on your desk,” Morris was saying. “You should take a look before I go.”

  Nick frowned. “You’ll be able to come back,” he said. “Your father comes in to see you. You’ll come back and tell me what you’ve seen, won’t you?”

  Morris set the magazine on the rail beside him and pushed his cap back. The glasses hid his eyes. “The ocean will change me,” he said. “I may not remember the right things to tell you. My father thinks deep, wet thoughts; and I don’t always understand him.” Morris shrugged. “I will change.”

  “I thought you wanted to be a biologist. I thought you wanted to learn. And here you are, saying that you’ll change and forget all this.” Nick’s voice was bitter.

  “I has got no choice. It’s time to go.” Nick could not see his eyes or interpret his tone. “I don’t belong on the land anymore. I don’t belong here.”

  Nick found that he was gripping the rail as he leaned against it. He could learn so much from Morris. So much. “Why do you think you’ll belong there. You won’t fit there, with your memories of the islands. You won’t belong.”

  Morris took off his glasses and looked at Nick with dark, wet eyes. “I’ll belong. I has got to belong. I’m going.”

  The lobsters scratched inside their box. Morris replaced his sunglasses and thumped lightly on the lid again. “We should make dinner,” he said. “They’re getting restless.”

  During the summer on Middle Cay, Nick and Morris had become friends. Nick came to rely on Morris’s knowledge of the reef. Morris lived on the island and seemed to find there a security he needed. His curiosity about the sea matched Nick’s.

  Early each evening, just after sunset, they would sit on the beach and talk—about the reef, about life at the University, about marine biology, and—more rarely—about Morris and his father.

  Morris could say very little about his father. “My dad told me legends,” Morris said to Nick, “but that’s all. The legends say that the water people came down from the stars. They came a long time ago.” Nick was watching Morris and the boy was digging his fingers in the sand, as if searching for something to grasp.

  “What do you think?” Nick asked him.

  Morris shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. I think they must be native to this world or they couldn’t breed with humans.” He sifted the beach sand with his webbed hands. “But it doesn’t much matter. I’m here. And I’m not human.” He looked at Nick with dark, lonely eyes.

  Nick had wanted to reach across the sand and grasp the cold hand that kept sifting the sand, digging and sifting the sand. He wanted to say something comforting. But he had remained silent, giving the boy only the comfort of his company.

  Nick lay on his cot, listening to the sounds of the evening. He could hear his neighbor’s chickens, settling down to rest. He could hear the evening wind in the palms. He wanted to sleep, but he did not want to dream.

  Once Morris was gone, he would not come back, Nick thought. If only Nick could keep him here.

  Nick started to drift to sleep and caught himself on the brink of a dream. His hands had been closing on Morris’s throat. Somehow, in that moment, his hands were not his own. They were his father’s hands: cool, clean, brutally competent. His father, a high school biology teacher with a desire to be more, had taught him how to pith a frog, how to hold it tight and insert the long pin at the base of the skull. “It’s just a frog,” his father had said. His father’s hands were closing on Morris’s throat and Nick was thinking, I could break his neck—quickly and painlessly. After all, he’s not human.

  Nick snapped awake and clasped his hands as if that might stop them from doing harm. He was shivering in the warm night. He sat up on the edge of the bed, keeping his hands locked together. He stepped out onto the porch where Morris was sleeping.

  Morris was gone; the hammock was empty. Nick looked out over the empty street and let his hands relax. He returned to his bed and dozed off, but his sleep was disturbed by voices that blended with the evening wind. He could hear his former wife’s bitter voice speaking over the sound of the wind. She said, “I’m going. You don’t love me, you just want to analyze me. I’m going.” He could hear his father, droning on about how the animal felt no pain, how it was all in the interest of science. At last he sank into a deeper sleep, but in the morning he did not want to remember his dreams.

  Morris was still gone when Nick finished breakfast. He read over Morris’s notes. They were thorough and carefully taken. Nick made notes for another paper on the flashlight fish, a paper on which Morris would be senior author.

  Morris returned late in the afternoon. Nick looked up from his notes, looked into Morris’s mirrored eyes, and thought of death. And tried not to think of death.

  “I thought we could go to Middle Cay for dinner,” Morris said. “I has got conch and shrimp. We can take the camp stove and fix them there.”

  Nick tapped his pencil against the pad nervously. “Yes. Let’s do that.”

  Morris piloted the skiff to Middle Cay. Through the water, Nick could see the reef that ringed the island—shades of blue and green beneath the water. The reef was broken by channels here and there; Morris followed the main channel nearly to the beach, then cut the engine and let the skiff drift in.

  They set up the camp stove in a level spot, sheltered by the trunk of a fallen palm tree. Morris cracked the conch and pounded it and threw it in the pan with shrimp. They drank beer while the combination cooked. They ate from tin cups, leaning side by side against the fallen palm.

  “You can keep the skiff for yourself,” Morris said suddenly. “I think that you can use it.”

  Nick looked at him, startled.

  “I left my notes on your desk,” Morris said. “They be as clear as I can make them.”
>
  Nick was studying his face. “I will go tonight,” Morris said. “My dad will come here to meet me.” The sun had set and the evening breeze was kicking up waves in the smooth water. He drained his beer and set the bottle down beside the stove.

  Morris stood and took off his shirt, slipped out of his pants. The gill slits made stripes that began just below his ribcage and ended near his hips. He was more muscular than Nick remembered. He stepped toward the water.

  “Wait,” Nick said. “Not yet.”

  “Got to.” Morris turned to look at Nick. “There’s a mask and fins in the skiff. Come with me for a ways.”

  Morris swam ahead, following the channel out. Nick followed in mask and fins. The twilight had faded. The water was dark and its surface shone silver. The night did not seem real. The darkness made it dreamlike. The sound of Nick’s feet breaking the water’s surface was too loud. The touch of the water against his skin was too warm. Morris swam just ahead, just out of reach.

  Nick wore his dive knife at his belt. He always wore his dive knife at his belt. As he swam, he noticed that he was taking his knife out and holding it ready. It was a heavy knife, designed for prying rocks apart and cracking conch. It would work best as a club, he was thinking. A club to be used for a sudden sharp blow from behind. That might be enough. If he called to Morris, then Morris would stop and Nick could catch him.

  But his voice was not cooperating. Not yet. His hands held the knife ready, but he could not call out. Not yet.

  He felt the change in water temperature as they passed into deeper water. He felt something—a swirl of water against his legs—as if something large were swimming past.

  Morris disappeared from the water ahead of him. The water was smooth, with no sign of Morris’s bobbing head. “Morris,” Nick called. “Morris.”

  He saw them then. Dim shapes beneath the water. Morris: slim, almost human. His father: man-shaped, but different. His arms were the wrong shape; his legs were too thick and muscular.

  Morris was close enough to touch, but Nick did not strike. When Morris reached out and touched Nick’s hand with a cold, gentle touch, Nick released the knife and let it fall, watched it tumble toward the bottom.

  Morris’s father turned in the water to look up at Nick and Nick read nothing in those inhuman eyes: cold, dark, dispassionate. Black and uncaring as the eyes of a shark. Nick saw Morris swim down and touch his father’s shoulder, urging him away into the darkness.

  “Morris!” Nick called, knowing Morris could not hear him. He kicked with frantic energy, not caring that his knife was gone. He did not want to stop Morris. He wanted to go with Morris and swim with the dolphins and explore the sea.

  There was darkness below him—cool, deep water. He could feel the tug of the currents. He swam, not conserving his energy, not caring. His kicks grew weaker. He looked down into the world of darkness and mystery and he sank below the surface almost gladly.

  He felt a cold arm around his shoulders. He coughed up water when the arm dragged him to the surface. He coughed, took a breath that was half water, half air, coughed again. Dark water surged against his mask each time the arm dragged him forward. He choked and struggled, but the arm dragged him on.

  One flailing leg bumped against coral, then against sand. Sand scraped against his back as he was dragged up the beach. His mask was ripped away and he turned on his side to retch and cough up seawater.

  Morris squatted beside him with one cold webbed hand still on his shoulder. Nick focused on Morris’s face and on the black eyes that seemed as remote as mirrored lenses. “Good-bye, Nick,” Morris said. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Good-bye.”

  Morris’s hand lingered on Nick’s shoulder for an instant. Then the young man stood and walked back to the sea.

  Nick lay on his back and looked up at the stars. After a time, he breathed more easily. He picked up Morris’s cap from where it lay on the beach and turned it in his hands, in a senseless repetitive motion.

  He crawled further from the water and lay his head against the fallen log. He gazed at the stars and the sea, and thought about how he could write down his observations of Morris’s departure and Morris’s father. No. He could not write it down, could not pin it down with words. He did not need to write it down.

  He put on the red baseball cap and pulled it low over his eyes. When he slept, with his head propped against the log, he dreamed only of the deep night that lay beneath the silver surface of the sea.

  TANITH LEE

  Nunc Dimittis

  Tanith Lee is one of the best known of modern fantasists, and one of the most prolific, with well over a dozen books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung In Shadow, Volkhavaar, and most recently, the novel Anackire and the collection Red as Blood.

  Lee has made her reputation as a novelist, but, for my money, she is even more adroit at shorter lengths, and 1983 saw a half-dozen or more first-rate short stories by Lee popping up in places such as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing, The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror, and Whispers IV. Several of these might well have been worthy of inclusion in a “Best of the Year” anthology, but here’s my favorite of them all, the poignant and oddly gentle story of a servant devoted to the point of death … and beyond.

  The vampire was old, and no longer beautiful. In common with all living things, she had aged, though very slowly, like the tall trees in the park. Slender and gaunt and leafless, they stood out there, beyond the long windows, rain-dashed in the gray morning. While she sat in her high-backed chair in that corner of the room where the curtains of thick yellow lace and the wine-colored blinds kept every drop of daylight out. In the glimmer of the ornate oil lamp, she had been reading. The lamp came from a Russian palace. The book had once graced the library of a corrupt pope named, in his temporal existence, Roderigo Borgia. Now the Vampire’s dry hands had fallen upon the page. She sat in her black lace dress that was one hundred and eighty years of age, far younger than she herself, and looked at the old man, streaked by the shine of distant windows.

  “You say you are tired, Vassu. I know how it is. To be so tired, and unable to rest. It is a terrible thing.”

  “But, Princess,” said the old man quietly, “it is more than this. I am dying.”

  The Vampire stirred a little. The pale leaves of her hands rustled on the page. She stared, with an almost childlike wonder.

  “Dying? Can this be? You are sure?”

  The old man, very clean and neat in his dark clothing, nodded humbly.

  “Yes, Princess.”

  “Oh, Vassu,” she said, “are you glad?”

  He seemed a little embarrassed. Finally he said:

  “Forgive me, Princess, but I am very glad. Yes, very glad.”

  “I understand.”

  “Only,” he said, “I am troubled for your sake.”

  “No, no,” said the Vampire, with the fragile perfect courtesy of her class and kind. “No, it must not concern you. You have been a good servant. Far better than I might ever have hoped for. I am thankful, Vassu, for all your care of me. I shall miss you. But you have earned,” she hesitated. She said, “You have more than earned your peace.”

  “But you,” he said.

  “I shall do very well. My requirements are small, now. The days when I was a huntress are gone, and the nights. Do you remember, Vassu?”

  “I remember, Princess.”

  “When I was so hungry, and so relentless. And so lovely. My white face in a thousand ballroom mirrors. My silk slippers stained with dew. And my lovers waking in the cold morning, where I had left them. But now, I do not sleep, I am seldom hungry. I never lust. I never love. These are the comforts of old age. There is only one comfort that is denied to me. And who knows. One day, I too …” She smiled at him. Her teeth were beautiful, but almost even now, the exquisite points of the canines quite worn away. “Leave me when you must,” she said. “I shall mourn you
. I shall envy you. But I ask nothing more, my good and noble friend.”

  The old man bowed his head.

  “I have,” he said, “a few days, a handful of nights. There is something I wish to try to do in this time. I will try to find one who may take my place.”

  The Vampire stared at him again, now astonished. “But Vassu, my irreplaceable help—it is no longer possible.”

  “Yes. If I am swift.”

  “The world is not as it was,” she said, with a grave and dreadful wisdom.

  He lifted his head. More gravely, he answered:

  “The world is as it has always been, Princess. Only our perceptions of it have grown more acute. Our knowledge less bearable.”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, this must be so. How could the world have changed so terribly? It must be we who have changed.”

  He trimmed the lamp before he left her.

  Outside, the rain dripped steadily from the trees.

  The city, in the rain, was not unlike a forest. But the old man, who had been in many forests and many cities, had no special feeling for it. His feelings, his senses, were primed to other things.

  Nevertheless, he was conscious of his bizarre and anachronistic effect, like that of a figure in some surrealist painting, walking the streets in clothes of a bygone era, aware he did not blend with his surroundings, nor render them homage of any kind. Yet even when, as sometimes happened, a gang of children or youths jeered and called after him the foul names he was familiar with in twenty languages, he neither cringed nor cared. He had no concern for such things. He had been so many places, seen so many sights; cities which burned or fell in ruin, the young who grew old, as he had, and who died, as now, at last, he too would die. This thought of death soothed him, comforted him, and brought with it a great sadness, a strange jealousy. He did not want to leave her. Of course he did not. The idea of her vulnerability in this harsh world, not new in its cruelty but ancient, though freshly recognized—it horrified him. This was the sadness. And the jealousy … that, because he must try to find another to take his place. And that other would come to be for her, as he had been.