Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Miss Kramer looked up from her grim work. Only the whites of her eyes were visible in her spattered face. Her masculine shirt was soaked with her own blood, but still she moved, functioned. She picked up the gun in her left hand. Her mouth opened wider, and a sound emerged like steam leaking from an old radiator.

  “Melanie …” I closed my eyes as the thing started up the stairs for me.

  Kathleen’s friend came in through the open door, her small legs pumping. She took the stairs in six jumps and wrapped her thin, white arms around Miss Kramer’s neck in a tight embrace.

  The two went over backward, across Kathleen, all the way down the wide stairs to the polished wood below.

  The girl appeared to be little more than bruised. I went down and moved her to one side. A blue stain was spreading along one cheekbone, and there were cuts on her arms and forehead. Her blue eyes blinked uncomprehendingly.

  Miss Kramer’s neck was broken. I picked up the pistol on the way to her and kicked the poker to one side. Her head was at an impossible angle, but she was still alive. Her body was paralyzed, urine already stained the wood, but her eyes still blinked and her teeth clicked together obscenely. I had to hurry. There were adult voices calling from the Hodgeses’ townhouse. The door to the courtyard was wide open. I turned to the girl. “Get up.” She blinked once and rose painfully to her feet.

  I shut the door and lifted a tan raincoat from the coatrack.

  It took only a minute to transfer the contents of my pockets to the raincoat and to discard my ruined spring coat. Voices were calling in the courtyard now.

  I kneeled down next to Miss Kramer and seized her face in my hands, exerting pressure to keep the jaws still. Her eyes had rolled upward again, but I shook her head until the irises were visible. I leaned forward until our cheeks were touching. My whisper was louder than a shout.

  “I’m coming for you, Nina.”

  I dropped her head onto the wood and walked quickly to the conservatory, my sewing room. I did not have time to get the key from upstairs; so I raised a Windsor side chair and smashed the glass of the cabinet. My coat pocket was barely large enough.

  The girl remained standing in the hall. I handed her Mr. Hodges’s pistol. Her left arm hung at a strange angle and I wondered if she had broken something after all. There was a knock at the door, and someone tried the knob.

  “This way,” I whispered, and led the girl into the dining room. We stepped across Miss Kramer on the way, walked through the dark kitchen as the pounding grew louder, and then were out, into the alley, into the night.

  There were three hotels in this part of the Old Section. One was a modern, expensive motor hotel some ten blocks away, comfortable but commercial. I rejected it immediately. The second was a small, homey lodging house only a block from my home. It was a pleasant but nonexclusive little place, exactly the type I would choose when visiting another town. I rejected it also. The third was two and a half blocks farther, an old Broad Street mansion done over into a small hotel, expensive antiques in every room, absurdly overpriced. I hurried there. The girl moved quickly at my side. The pistol was still in her hand, but I had her remove her sweater and carry it over the weapon. My leg ached, and I frequently leaned on the girl as we hurried down the street.

  The manager of the Mansard House recognized me. His eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch as he noticed my disheveled appearance. The girl stood ten feet away in the foyer, half-hidden in the shadows.

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I said brightly. “A Mrs. Drayton.” The manager started to speak, paused, frowned without being aware of it, and tried again. “I’m sorry. No one under that name is registered here.”

  “Perhaps she registered under her maiden name,” I said. “Nina Hawkins. She’s an older woman but very attractive. A few years younger than I. Long, gray hair. Her friend may have registered for her … an attractive, young, dark-haired lady named Barret Kramer—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” said the manager in a strangely flat tone. “No one under that name has registered. Would you like to leave a message in case your party arrives later?”

  “No,” I said. “No message.”

  I brought the girl into the lobby, and we turned down a corridor leading to the restrooms and side stairs. “Excuse me, please,” I said to a passing porter. “Perhaps you can help me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He stopped, annoyed, and brushed back his long hair. It would be tricky. If I was not to lose the girl, I would have to act quickly.

  “I’m looking for a friend,” I said. “She’s an older lady but quite attractive. Blue eyes. Long, gray hair. She travels with a young woman who has dark, curly hair.”

  “No, ma’am. No one like that is registered here.”

  I reached out and grabbed hold of his forearm tightly. I released the girl and focused on the boy. “Are you sure?”

  “Mrs. Harrison,” he said. His eyes looked past me. “Room 207. North front.”

  I smiled. Mrs. Harrison. Good God, what a fool Nina was. Suddenly the girl let out a small whimper and slumped against the wall. I made a quick decision. I like to think that it was compassion, but I sometimes remember that her left arm was useless.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the child, gently stroking her bangs. Her eyes moved left and right in confusion. “Your name!”

  “Alicia.” It was only a whisper.

  “All right, Alicia. I want you to go home now. Hurry, but don’t run.

  “My arm hurts,” she said. Her lips began to quiver. I touched her forehead again and pushed.

  “You’re going home,” I said. “Your arm does not hurt. You won’t remember anything. This is like a dream that you will forget. Go home. Hurry, but do not run.” I took the pistol from her but left it wrapped in the sweater. “Bye-bye, Alicia.”

  She blinked and crossed the lobby to the doors. I handed the gun to the bellhop. “Put it under your vest,” I said.

  “Who is it?” Nina’s voice was light.

  “Albert, ma’am. The porter. Your car’s out front, and I’ll take your bags down.”

  There was the sound of a lock clicking, and the door opened the width of a still-secured chain. Albert blinked in the glare, smiled shyly, and brushed his hair back. I pressed against the wall.

  “Very well.” She undid the chain and moved back. She had already turned and was latching her suitcase when I stepped into the room.

  “Hello, Nina,” I said softly. Her back straightened, but even that move was graceful. I could see the imprint on the bedspread where she had been lying. She turned slowly. She was wearing a pink dress I had never seen before.

  “Hello, Melanie.” She smiled. Her eyes were the softest, purest blue I had ever seen. I had the porter take Mr. Hodges’s gun out and aim it. His arm was steady. He pulled back the hammer and held it with his thumb. Nina folded her hands in front of her. Her eyes never left mine.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Nina shrugged ever so slightly. For a second I thought she was going to laugh. I could not have borne it if she had laughed—that husky, childlike laugh that had touched me so many times. Instead she closed her eyes. Her smile remained.

  “Why Mrs. Harrison?” I asked.

  “Why, darling, I felt I owed him something. I mean, poor Roger. Did I ever tell you how he died? No, of course I didn’t. And you never asked.” Her eyes opened. I glanced at the porter, but his aim was steady. It only remained for him to exert a little more pressure on the trigger.

  “He drowned, darling,” said Nina. “Poor Roger threw himself from that steamship—what was its name?—the one that was taking him back to England. So strange. And he had just written me a letter promising marriage. Isn’t that a terribly sad story, Melanie? Why do you think he did a thing like that? I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

  “I guess we never will,” I said. I silently ordered the porter to pull the trigger.

  Nothing.

  I looked quickly to my right. The young man
’s head was turning toward me. I had not made him do that. The stiffly extended arm began to swing in my direction. The pistol moved smoothly like the tip of a weather vane swinging in the wind.

  No! I strained until the cords in my neck stood out. The turning slowed but did not stop until the muzzle was pointing at my face. Nina laughed now. The sound was very loud in the little room.

  “Good-bye, Melanie dear,” Nina said, and laughed again. She laughed and nodded at the porter. I stared into the black hole as the hammer fell. On an empty chamber. And another. And another.

  “Good-bye, Nina,” I said as I pulled Charles’s long pistol from the raincoat pocket. The explosion jarred my wrist and filled the room with blue smoke. A small hole, smaller than a dime but as perfectly round, appeared in the precise center of Nina’s forehead. For the briefest second she remained standing as if nothing had happened. Then she fell backward, recoiled from the high bed, and dropped face forward onto the floor.

  I turned to the porter and replaced his useless weapon with the ancient but well-maintained revolver. For the first time I noticed that the boy was not much younger than Charles had been. His hair was almost exactly the same color. I leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  “Albert,” I whispered, “there are four cartridges left. One must always count the cartridges, mustn’t one? Go to the lobby. Kill the manager. Shoot one other person, the nearest. Put the barrel in your mouth and pull the trigger. If it misfires, pull it again. Keep the gun concealed until you are in the lobby.”

  We emerged into general confusion in the hallway.

  “Call for an ambulance!” I cried. “There’s been an accident. Someone call for an ambulance!” Several people rushed to comply. I swooned and leaned against a white-haired gentleman. People milled around, some peering into the room and exclaiming. Suddenly there was the sound of three gunshots from the lobby. In the renewed confusion I slipped down the back stairs, out the fire door, into the night.

  Time has passed. I am very happy here. I live in southern France now, between Cannes and Toulon, but not, I am happy to say, too near St. Tropez.

  I rarely go out. Henri and Claude do my shopping in the village. I never go to the beach. Occasionally I go to the townhouse in Paris or to my pensione in Italy, south of Pescara, on the Adriatic. But even those trips have become less and less frequent.

  There is an abandoned abbey in the hills, and I often go there to sit and think among the stones and wild flowers. I think about isolation and abstinence and how each is so cruelly dependent upon the other.

  I feel younger these days. I tell myself that this is because of the climate and my freedom and not as a result of that final Feeding. But sometimes I dream about the familiar streets of Charleston and the people there. They are dreams of hunger.

  On some days I rise to the sound of singing as girls from the village cycle by our place on their way to the dairy. On those days the sun is marvelously warm as it shines on the small white flowers growing between the tumbled stones of the abbey, and I am content simply to be there and to share the sunlight and silence with them.

  But on other days—cold, dark days when the clouds move in from the north—I remember the shark-silent shape of a submarine moving through the dark waters of the bay, and I wonder whether my self-imposed abstinence will be for nothing. I wonder whether those I dream of in my isolation will indulge in their own gigantic, final Feeding.

  It is warm today. I am happy. But I am also alone. And I am very, very hungry.

  VERNOR VINGE

  Gemstone

  Most stories about humanity’s First Contact with aliens have as dramatis personae the Movers and Shakers of the world—politicians, generals, famous scientists, philosophers, crack reporters, millionaires, astronauts—and are usually set against similarly big and busy backgrounds: the Pentagon, the White House, the Kremlin, UN Headquarters, Buckingham Palace; at the very least, the alien space ships have always shown a strong tendency to land in some crowded urban locale like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, preferably at rush hour.

  Here, instead, the setting is an old wood-frame Victorian house in a quiet neighborhood in a sleepy northern California town, and at the crucial moment Earth is represented not by a general or a politician but by a stubborn old woman and a bright and inquisitive young girl …

  Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Vernor Vinge now lives in San Diego, California, where he is an associate professor of math sciences at San Diego State University. He sold his first story, “Apartness,” to New Worlds in 1965, and since has become a frequent contributor to Analog; he has also sold to Orbit, If, Stellar, and other markets. His novella “True Names” was a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards in 1981, and has been optioned for a movie. Vinge’s books include Grimm’s World and The Witling. Upcoming are two more novels, True Names and Peace War, both from Bluejay Books. He is currently working on several sequels to Peace War, as yet untitled.

  The summer of 1957 should have been Sanda’s most wonderful vacation. She had known about her parents’ plans since March, and all through the La Jolla springtime, all through the tedious spring semester of her seventh grade, she had that summer to dream about.

  Nothing ever seemed so fair at first, and turned out so vile:

  Sanda sat on the bedroom balcony of her grandmother’s house and looked out into the gloom and the rain. The pine trees along the street were great dark shadows, swaying and talking in the dusk. A hundred yards away, toward downtown Eureka, the light of a single street lamp found its way through pines to make tiny glittering reflections off the slick street. As every night these last four weeks, the wind seemed stronger when the daylight departed. She hunched down in her oversized jacket and let the driven mist wash at the tears that trickled down her face. Tonight had been the end, just the end. Daddy and Mom would be here in six days, and two or three days after that the three of them would drive back home. Six days. Sanda unclenched her jaws and tried to relax her face. How could she last? She would have to see Grandma at least for meals, at least to help around the house. And every time she saw Grandma she would feel the shame and know that she had ruined things.

  And it isn’t all my fault! Grandmother had her secrets, her smugness, her ignorance—flaws Sanda had never imagined during those short visits of years passed.

  In the hallway beyond the bedroom, the Gemstone was at it again. Sanda felt a wave of cold wash over her. For a moment the dark around her and the balcony beneath her knees were not merely chill and wet, but glacially frozen, the center of a lifeless and friendless waste. It was funny that now that she knew the house was haunted and knew precisely the thing that caused these moods, it was not nearly as frightening as before. In fact, it was scarcely more than an inconvenience compared to the people problems she had.

  It had not always been this way. Sanda thought back to the beginning of the summer, trying to imagine blue skies and warm sun. Those first few days had been like the other times she remembered in Eureka. Grandmother’s house sat near the end of its street, surrounded by pines. The only other trees were a pair of small palms right before the front steps. (These needed constant attention. Grandma liked to say that she kept them here just so her visitors from San Diego would never feel homesick.) The house had two storeys, with turrets and dormers coming out of the attic. Against the blue, cloudless sky it looked like a fairy-tale castle. The Victorian gingerbread had been carefully maintained through the years, and in its present incarnation gleamed green and gold.

  Her parents had left for San Francisco after a one-day stay. The summer conference at USF was starting that week, and they weren’t yet sure they had an apartment. Sanda’s first night alone with Grandma had been everything she imagined. Even though the evening beyond the porch was turning chill, the living room still held its warmth. Grandma set her old electric heater in the middle of the carpeted floor so that it shone on the sofa side of the room. Then she walked around the book-lined walls pretending to search f
or the thing she so liked to show her grandchild.

  “Not here, not here. Oh my, I hardly ever look at it nowadays. I forget where …” Sanda tagged along, noticing titles where her earlier, younger self had been impressed only by color and size. Grandma had a complete collection of National Geographics. Where most families put such magazines in boxes and forget them, Grandmother had every issue there, as though they were some grand encyclopedia. And for Sanda, they were. On her last visit she had spent many an afternoon looking through the pictures. It was the only item she remembered for sure from this library. Now she saw dozens of books on polar exploration, meteorology, biology. Grandfather Beauchamp had been a great man, and Grandmother kept the library and its books, plaques, and certificates in honor of his memory.

  “Ah, there it is!” She pulled the huge notebook down from its central position. She led Sanda back to the sofa. “Too big to sit in my lap, now, aren’t you?” They grinned at each other and she opened the book across their laps, then put her arm across Sanda’s shoulders.

  The book was precisely organized. Every newspaper clipping, photo, article, was framed and had a short legend. Some of the pictures existed nowhere else in the world. Others could be found in articles in magazines like the National Geographic from the ’20s and ’30s. Rex Beauchamp had been on the “Terra Nova” expedition in 1910. If it hadn’t been for a knee injury he would actually have been on Scott’s tragic journey to the South Pole. Sanda sucked in her breath and asked the same question she had asked once before, “And so if his knee had been okay, why, he would have died with the others—and would never have met you, and you would never have had Dad, and—”

  Grandma slapped the notebook. “No. I know Rex. He would have made the difference. If they had just waited for him to get well, they could have made it back to the coast.”

  It was an answer she had heard before, but one she wanted to hear again. Sanda sat back and waited for the rest of the story. After World War I, the Beauchamps had emigrated from Great Britain, and Grandfather participated in several American expeditions. There were dozens of pictures of him on shipboard and in the brave little camps the explorers had established along the Antarctic coast. Rex Beauchamp had been very handsome and boyish even in middle age, and it made Sanda proud to see him in those pictures—though he was rarely the center of attention. He always seemed to be in the background, or in the third row of the group portraits. Grandma said he was a doer and not a talker. He never had a college degree and so had to serve in technician and support jobs. But they depended on him nevertheless.