The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Yes, being her one parent left, mother-and-father now, staunch and adamant-true, I had fixed the other toys in the interest of Daphalene’s training—pins sticking out of the dollies, and fishhooks in the stuffed things to stick her, and a special strong spring on the jack-in-the-box to slap her head when she played. Also, over all toys was a syrupy stickum, light gum that would itch and burn slightly, and be on the hands black and adhesive, like handling the fresh-cut end of a Christmas tree. Yes, I wanted Daphalene to hurt early and well while playing, to learn that pain comes easily, flowing freely from Everything; she must form that hard crust NOW! Sometimes I thought of her as a fresh little wound in the world, so vulnerable to the harsh grains and grits, her freshness needing to be scabbed and grayed over. For her safety. Yes, I wanted her to be READY FOR THE WORLD.

  But I wanted her to know love too. Within these baby shells that go across our times of horror must be the seed of love still. Else what? Inside the tended scars we rear to walk more confidently across our planned damnation must be the heart of love kept back, but kept like some deep-buried seedlet ready to sprout, the debris being cleared from the ground, and the sun and rain coming right again.

  So the black dog—I wanted her to love the black dog. “He is my best toy,” she would say, giving Char a joyful squeeze and lugging him about the dust-balled two-room apartment, where no woman was, where the poor-housekeeper wife “had been briefly, briefly-and-long, to leave me with this challenge to the world, a wee thing to cherish and to train in my practical kindness. And my love.—She would carefully circle all the other toys while she hugged the huggable Char. She would laugh a gay chortle until I would glare at her from my dusty chair. She would know then that she had had her time with the easy dog. It was time to be going among harsh, useful toy lessons again.

  It was a cold spring night. There was a Good Friday moon, full and pale, through the cracked pane of my high-up northwest window. I was alone. I had read some in some dull work of ancient charmless stories that should never have been told and had turned sleepy in my chair. Daphalene I could hear in the other room, tossing and turning in her high crib as she slept. So this young spring tosses and turns and waits, I thought, waits high up and restless to flower black ice-flowers into the iceberg world, when the frost comes out of its time. So oh-how-many-millions of girl babies wait fitfully in their strange chemistry, to flower ice-hearted ice babies into this glacial age, with ice hearts of men, until sometime that heart coldness must surely freeze along all the world’s gray tubes until all is white and proper and dead stone. Unless the debris is cleared, and cleared quickly, for the seedlets ... of love. And the moon —a Good Friday full cold moon—aloof, maniacal orange-white eye... indifferent... meaning nothing... chill, dead ... ball... of light...

  I watched, hypnotized, and he moved! From where he lay on his side, just as Daphalene had piled him, with his red-felt tongue lolling at tie foot of a doll with ice-blue eyes, Char stretched one black leg. Then carefully, ominously, he rolled to a sitting position and sat eying the toys and me, his red tongue streaming out. Like flame, that tongue—flame turned to stone, I thought, and melting and streaming. I rubbed my eyes, and I shuddered at this black dog’s odd turn.

  Carefully, as I watched and could not clear this watching from my head, he circled all the toy pile. Three times. Then he walked among them, slowly, on great fur feet, the big scarlet tongue unrolling out of the caverns of the mouth and the caverns behind the mouth and flowing over all the toys until all the itch and burn had been quite lapped from them. Then with a sweep of a massive foot he crushed the jack-in-the-box until the leering face of jack lay nose-up, frightening without a home. And all the pins and the fishhooks and keen bright nails were carefully pulled from the stuffed toys and the dolls, and the sharp points soon lay together in a little heap on the floor. And the black dog grinned, a strange grin in the moonlight, before he moved ...on me...

  Like a wrecking ball swung at a stubborn structure of brick and masonry stone the sound was. And the harsh noise of my falling among the toys was followed by a chortle of morning grayness. She stood there holding the big black Char clutched fondly in her arms and her baby-girl hands. The little stomach ball-slight over the band of her training pants, the sleep squint yet in her baby-girl blue eyes, she was asking Char if he had been a good doggie and had slept well all through the night.

  The scream of winning was harsh and high when, the sleep squint gone, she saw that the box was broken. She was astonished at jack so strange and peeled looking outside his box and springs, and she must have known that he could not slap her now. She was concerned for the stuffed bears and cats and the dollies that I had fallen among. When I arose bleeding, I was surprised to leak two pins and a fishhook from my hands. The other sharp-pointed things from all the toys lay in a shiny small mound where I, standing or sitting or walking in a strange moonlit trance, had watched Char so carefully place them for the little girl who loved him... and whom he must have... greatly... loved...

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  * * * *

  THE TUNNEL AHEAD

  by Alice Glaser

  ...And yet another FPS—unless you are the cynical sort who would insist that an article on soldiering experiences In Laos, written by a lady editor who has never been east of Paris, France, is not truly non-fiction. (The men’s adventure magazine that published it said it was true.) Miss Glaser, Long Island born and bred, is an ex-expatriate now working as an editorial associate at Esquire magazine.

  * * * *

  The floor of the Topolino was full of sand. There was sand in Tom’s undershorts, too, and damp sand rubbing between his toes. Damn it, he thought, here they build you six-lane highways right on down to the ocean, a giant three-hundred car turntable to keep traffic moving over the beach, efficiency and organization and mechanization and co-operation and what does it get you? Sand. And inside the car, in spite of the air-conditioning, the sour smell of sun-dried salt water.

  Tom’s muscles ached with their familiar cramp. He ran his hands uselessly around the steering wheel, wishing he had something to do, or that there were room to stretch in the tiny car, then felt instantly ashamed of his antisocial wish. Naturally there was nothing for him to do because the drive, as on all highways, was set at “Automatic.” That was the law. And although he had to sit hunched over so that his knees were drawn nearly to his chin, and the roof of the car pressed down on the back of his neck like the lid of a box, and his four kids crammed into the rear seat seemed to be breathing down his shirt collar—well, that was something you simply had to adjust to, and besides, the Topolino had all the five-foot wheelbase the law allowed. So there was nothing to complain about.

  Besides, it hadn’t been a bad day, all things considered. Five hours to cover the forty miles out to the beach, then of course a couple of hours waiting in line at the beach for their turn in the water. The trip home was taking a little longer: it always did. The Tunnel, too, was unpredictable. Say ten o’clock, for getting home. Pretty good time. As good a way as any of killing a leisureday, he guessed. Sometimes there seemed to be an awful lot of leisuretime to kill.

  Jeannie, in the seat beside him, was staring through the windshield. Her hair, almost as fair as the kids’, was pulled back into pigtails, and although she was pregnant again she didn’t look very much older than she had ten years before. But she had stopped knitting, and her mind was on the Tunnel. He could always tell.

  “Ouch!” Something slammed into the back of Tom’s neck and he ducked forward, banging his forehead on the windshield.

  “Hey!” He half-turned and clutched at the spade that four-year-old Pattie was waving.

  “I swimmed,” she announced, blue eyes round. “I swimmed good and I din’t hit nobody.”

  “Anybody,” Tom corrected. He confiscated the spade, thinking tiredly that “swim” these days meant “tread water,” all there was room to do in the crowded bathing-area.

  Jeannie had turned too, and was glowering at her
daughter, but Tom shook his head.

  “Over and out,” he said briefly. He knew a car ride was an extra strain on kids, and lord knew he saw them seldom enough, what with their school-shifts and play-shifts and his own job-shift But his brood was going to be properly brought up. See a sign of extroversion, squelch it at the beginning, that was his theory. Save them a lot of pain later on.

  Jeannie leaned forward and pressed a dashboard button. The tranquillizer drawer slid open; Jeannie selected a pink one, but by the time she had turned around Pattie had subsided with her hands folded patiently in her lap and her eyes fixed on the rear seat TV screen. Jeannie sighed and slipped the pill into Pattie’s half-open mouth anyway.

  The other three hadn’t spoken for hours which, of course, was as it should be. Jeannie had fed them a purposely heavy lunch in the car, steakopop and a hot, steaming bowl of rehydrated algaesoup from the thermos, and they had each had an extra dose of tranquillizers for the trip. Six-year-old David, who has having a particularly hard time learning to introvert was watching the TV screen and breathing hard. David, his first-born son, born in the supermarket delivery booth in the year twenty-one hundred on the third of April at 8:32 in the morning. The year the population of the United States hit the billion mark. And the fifth child to arrive in that booth that morning. But his own son. The two-headed twins, Susan and Pattie, sat upright and watched the screen with expressions of great seriousness on their faces, and the baby, two-year-old Betsy, had her fat legs stuck straight out in front of her and was obviously going to be asleep in minutes.

  The car crawled forward at its allotted ten mph, just one in a ribbon of identical bright bubble cars, like candy buttons, that stretched along the New Pulaski Skyway under a setting sun. The distance between them, strictly rationed by Autodrive, never changed.

  Tom felt the dull ache of tension settled behind his eyes. All of his muscles were protesting now with individual stabs of cramp. He glanced apologetically at Jeannie, who disliked sports, and switched on the dashboard TV. Third game in the World Series, and the game had already begun. Malenkovsky on red. Malenkovsky moved a checker and sat back. The cameras moved to Saito, on black. It was going to be a good game. Faster than most.

  They were less than a mile from the Tunnel when the line of cars came to a halt. Tom said nothing for a minute. It might just be an accident, or even somebody, driving illegally on Manual, out of line. Another minute passed. Jeannie’s hands were tense on the yellow blanket she was knitting.

  It was a definite halt. Jeannie regarded the motionless lines of cars, frowning a little.

  “I’m glad it’s happening now. That gives us a better chance of getting through, doesn’t it?”

  Her question was rhetorical, and Tom felt his usual stir of irritation. Jeannie was an intelligent girl; he couldn’t have loved her so much otherwise. But explaining the laws of chance to her was hopeless. The Tunnel averaged ten closings a week. All ten could happen within seconds of each other, or on the hour, or not at all on a given day. That was how things were. The closing now affected their own chance of getting through not one iota.

  Jeannie said thoughtfully, “We’ll be caught some time, Tom.”

  He shrugged without answering. Whatever might happen in the future, they were obviously going to be held up for a good half hour now.

  David was wriggling a little, his face apologetic.

  “Can I get out, Daddy, if the Tunnel’s closed? I ache.”

  Tom bit his lip. He could sympathize as well as anyone, remembering the cramped misery of the years when his own body was growing and all he wanted to do was run fast, just run headlong, any place. Kids. Extras, all of them. Maybe you could get away with that kind of wildness back in the twentieth century, when there were no crowds and plenty of space, but not these days. David was just going to have to learn to sit still like everybody else.

  David had begun to flex his muscles rhythmically. Passive exercise, it was called, one of the new pseudo-sports that took up no room, and it was very scientifically taught in the playshifts. Tom eyed his son enviously. Great to be in condition like that. No need to wait in line to get your ration of gym time when you could depend on yourself like that.

  “Dad, no kidding, now I gotta go.” David wriggled in his seat again. Well, that sounded valid. Tom looked through the windshield. The thousands of cars in sight were still motionless, so he swung the door open. Luckily there was a chemjohn a few yards away, and only a short line in front of it. David slid quickly out of the car. Tom watched him start to stretch his arms over his head, released from the low roof, then sheepishly remember decent behavior and tighten into the approved intro-walk. “He’s getting tall,” Tom thought, with a sudden accession of hopelessness. He had been praying that David would inherit Jeannie’s height instead of his own six feet. The more area you took up the harder everything was, and it was getting worse: Tom had noticed that, already, people would sometimes stare resentfully at him in the street.

  There was an Italian family in the bright blue Topolino behind his own; they too had a car full of children. Two of the boys, seeing David in front of the chemjohn, burst out and dashed into the line behind him The father was grinning; Tom caught his eye and looked away. He remembered seeing them pass a large bottle of expensive re-claimed-water around the car, the whole family guzzling it as though water grew on trees. Extros, that whole family. Almost criminal, the way people like that were allowed to run loose and increase the discomfort of everyone else. Now the father had left the car too. He had curly black hair; he was very plump. When he saw Tom watching him he grinned broadly, waved toward the Tunnel and lifted his shoulders with a kind of humorous resignation.

  Tom drummed on the wheel. The extras were lucky. You’d never catch them worrying unduly about the Tunnel. They had to get the kids out of the city, once in a while, like everybody else; the Tunnel was the only way in and out, so they shrugged and took it. Besides, there were, so many rules and regulations now that it was hard to question them any more. You can’t fight City Hall. The extras would neither dread the trip, the way Jeannie did, nor... Tom’s fingers were rigid on the wheel. He clamped down, hard, on the thought in his mind. He had been about to say, needed it, the way he did.

  David emerged from the chemjohn and slid back into his seat. The cars had just begun to move; in a moment they had resumed their crawl.

  On the left of the Skyway they were coming to the development that was already called, facetiously, “Beer Can Mountain.” So far there was nothing there except the mountainous stacks of shiny bricks, the metal bricks that had once been tin cans, and would soon be constructed into another badly needed housing development. Probably with even lower ceilings and thinner walls. Tom winced, involuntarily. Even at home, in a much older residential section, the ceilings were so low that he could never stand up without bending his head. Individual area-space was being cut down and cut down, all the time.

  On the flatlands, to the right of the Skyway, stretched mile after garish mile of apartment buildings, interspersed with gasoline stations and parking lots. And beyond these flatlands were the suburbs of Long Island, cement-floored and stacked with gay-colored skyscrapers.

  Here, as they approached the city, the air was raucous with the noise of transistor radios and TV sets. Privacy and quiet had disappeared everywhere, of course, but this was a lower-class unit and so noisy that the blare penetrated even the closed windows of the car. The immense apartment buildings, cement block and neon-lit, came almost to the edge of the Skyway, with ramps between them at all levels. The ramps, originally built for cars, were swarming now with people returning from their routine job-shifts or from marketing, or just carrying on the interminable business of leisuretime. They looked pretty apathetic, Tom thought. You couldn’t blame them. There was so much security that none of the work anybody did was really necessary, and they knew it. Their jobs were probably even more monotonous and futile than his own. All he did, on his own job-shift, was to verify figu
res in a ledger, then copy them into another ledger. Time-killing, like everything else. These people looked as though they didn’t care, one way or the other.

  But as he watched there was a quick scuffle in the crowd, a sudden, brief outbreak of violence. One man’s shoe had scraped the heel of the woman ahead of him; she turned and swung her shopping bag, scraping a bloody gash down his cheek. He slammed his fist at her stomach. She kicked. A man behind them rammed his way past, his face contorted. The pair separated, both muttering. Around them other knots of people were beginning to mutter. The irritation was spreading, as it seemed to do from time to time, as though nobody wanted anything so much as the chance to strike out.

  Jeannie had seen the explosion too. She gasped and turned away from the window, looking quickly back at the children, who were all asleep now. Tom pulled one of her pigtails, gently.

  The skyline loomed ahead of them, one vast unified glass-walled cube of Manhattan. Light rays shot from it into the sunset; the spots of foliage that were the carefully planned block gardens, one at each level of the ninety-eight floors of the Unit, glowed dark green. Tom, as he always did, blessed the foresight that had put them there. Each one of his children had been allotted his or her weekly hour on the grass and a chance to play near the tree. There was even a zoo on each level, not the kind of elaborate one they had in Washington and London and Moscow, of course, but at least it had a cat and a dog and a really large tank of goldfish. When you came down to it, luxuries like that almost made up for the crowds and the noise and tiny rooms and feeling that there was never quite enough air to breathe.