The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “What are you doing, Tony?” Wynne said. Beneath her skin tint, she had gone pale. She must have suspected the stakes Cage was playing for.

  “What am I doing?” Cage stood, laughing. “I’m not really sure. That’s what makes it interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Okay, man.” Tod stood, too. “I’ll try it.”

  “Tony.” Wynne stared up at them.

  * * *

  “What’s that?” said Wynne, pointing at Stonehenge. Bolts of lightning forked through the darkness, illuminating the crowd which stood outside the dome.

  “It’s only the son et lumiere,” said Cage. “The holo techs from the Department of Environment put it on to soak a few extra quid from the tourists.” They kept walking up the A360 from where the Amesbury shuttle had dropped them. “Watch what comes next.”

  Seconds later two laser rainbows shimmered between the stones. “Stonehenge’s greatest hits,” said Tod with contempt. “Both Constable and Turner did major paintings here. Turner’s was full of his usual bombast, lightning bolts and dead shepherds and howling dogs. Constable tried to jack up his boring watercolor with a double rainbow.”

  Cage bit his lip and said nothing. He did not really need a lecture on Stonehenge, especially not from Tod. After all, he owned one of Constable’s Stonehenge sketches.

  Tod flipped down the visor of his VidStar helmet; he looked like a mantis with lens eyes. Cage could hear tiny motors buzzing as the twin cameras focused. “Is anyone else starting to feel it?” said Wynne.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of research on this place, you know,” Tod continued. “It’s amazing, the people who’ve been here.”

  “Yes,” Cage said. “It’s an oozy kind of coolness spreading across the back of my skull—like mud.” They had eaten the capsules of Share in the darkness on the ride over. “What time is it?”

  “It’s 4:18.” Tod slipped a fresh disk into the drive clipped to his belt. “Sunrise at 5:07.”

  Cage looked to the northeast; the sky had already started to lighten. The stars were like glass mites scuttling away into the grayness.

  “They come in waves,” said Wynne. “Hallucinations.”

  “Yes,” Cage said. The backs of his eyes seemed to tingle. He knew there was something wrong but he could not think what it was.

  They pushed past the inevitable Drug Temperance League picket line; luckily, none of them recognized Cage. At last they reached a barbed-wire corridor leading through the crowd to the entrance of the dome. Down the corridor marched a troop of ghosts. They were dressed in white robes; some wore glasses. They carried copper globes and oak branches and banners with images of snakes and pentacles. They were male and female, and they seemed old. They were murmuring a chant that sounded like wind blowing through fallen leaves. Dry old ghosts, crinkly and intent, turned inward as if they were working out chess problems in their heads.

  “The Druids,” said Tod. The words broke the trance and a shiver danced across Cage’s shoulder. He glanced at Wynne and could tell instantly that she had felt the same. A smile of recognition lit her face in the predawn gloom.

  “Are you all right?” said Tod.

  Wynne laughed. “No.”

  Tod frowned and linked his arm through hers. “Let’s go. We have to walk around the dome if we want to see the sun rise over the Heel Stone.”

  They began to thread their way through the crowd to the southwest side of the dome. The space between the shells was empty now and Cage could see that the procession of Druids had surrounded the outer sarsen circle. All turned to the northeast to face the Heel Stone and the approaching sunrise.

  “This is it,” said Tod. “We’re right on the axis.”

  The fat woman standing next to Cage was glowing. Except for knee-high studded leather leggings, she was naked. Her skin gave off a soft green light: her nipples and all of her body hair were bright orange. When she moved the rolls of fat gleamed like moonlit waves. At first he thought she was another hallucination. Something wrong.

  “Do you see her too?” Wynne whispered.

  “She’s a glowworm.” Tod made no effort to keep his voice down, and the green woman stared at them.

  Wynne nodded as if she had understood. Cage cupped his hand to her ear. “What’s a glowworm?”

  “She’s had a luminescent body tint,” came the whispered reply.

  Tod laughed as he pointed his lenses at her. “Do you know how carcinogenic that stuff is? Eighty percent mortality after five years.”

  She waddled over to him. “It’s my body, Flash. Ain’t it?” Cage was surprised when she slipped a hand around Tod’s waist. “Would that be a video you’re making, Flash? Me in it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Everyone gets to be famous for ten minutes. You know the camera loves you, glowworm. That’s why you got tinted.”

  She giggled. “You with someone, Flash?”

  “Not now, glowworm. The sun is coming.”

  Amateur photographers and professional cameramen began to jostle for position around them. Tod, using his elbows with cunning, would not be moved. The sun’s bright lip appeared over the trees to the northeast. Inside the dome Druids raised horns and blew a tribute to the new day. Outside there was inarticulate shouts and polite applause. A man with a long beard rolled on the ground, barking.

  “But there’s no alignment,” some fool was complaining. “The sun’s in the wrong place.”

  The sun had cleared the trees and crawled across the brick-colored horizon. Cage shut his eyes and still he could see it: blood red, flashing blue, veins pulsing across its surface.

  “Sun’s not wrong,” said a man with a camera where his head should have been. “Stonehenge doesn’t really line up. Never did. It’s a myth, man.”

  Although he did not immediately recognize the man, Cage knew he hated that mocking voice. When he opened his eyes again the sun had already climbed several of its diameters into the sky. After a few moments it passed over the Heel Stone at the opposite end of Stonehenge. And seemed to hang there, propped in the sky by a single untrimmed sarsen, five meters tall. His view was framed by the uprights and lintels of the outer circle. It was as if he were standing on the backbone of the world. He was spellbound: men in skins had built a structure that could capture a star. The crowd was silent, or perhaps Cage had ceased to perceive anything but his vision of sunfire and stone. Then the moment passed. The sun continued to climb.

  “Looks like a doorway,” said the glowworm. “Into another world.” She seemed pale in the light of dawn.

  Doorway. The word filled his mind. Doorway raised upon doorway. Someone said, “I make it about four degrees off.” Cage saw people crouching to help the barking man.

  “Tony?” A strange and beautiful woman had taken his hand. Her voice echoed and distorted: a baby’s inexact chatter, the joyful cry of a child. He blinked at her in the soft light. Blue-skinned, hair in spikes, she was dressed in silver: the setting for a sapphire. Her face, a jewel. Precious. Cage was falling in love.

  “Who are you?” He could not remember.

  “They come in waves,” she said. He did not understand.

  “He’s so far out he’s breathing space,” said the camera head with the mocking voice.

  “Who are you?” Cage held up her hand, clasped in his.

  “It’s me, Tony.” The beautiful woman was laughing. Cage wanted to laugh too. “Wynne.”

  Wynne. He said the word over and over to himself, shuddering with pleasure at each repetition. Wynne. His Wynne.

  “And I’m Tod, remember?” The camera head looked disgusted. “Christ, am I glad I palmed that stuff. Look at you two. She can’t stop laughing and you’re catatonic. How was I supposed to work? Do you realize how twisted you are?”

  Tod. Cage battered through yet another wave of hallucinations, trying to remember. A plan … force Tod … make Wynne see … Cage had known it all along. But it was no good if Tod were straight. “You didn’t take…?”

  “Hell no!” Tod t
urned. Cage felt the lens eyes probing him, recording, judging. “I’m not as gullible as you think, man. I decided to fake it, see how the stuff affected you first. If it looked like fun I knew I could always catch up.”

  There was a tiny red light flashing in the middle of Tod’s helmet. “Turn it off, you bastard,” Cage said. “Not me into your damn … your god damn…”

  “No?” Cage could see a smile beneath the visor. “You’re a public figure, man. We all own a piece of you.”

  “Tod,” said Wynne. “Don’t goad him.”

  The red light went out. He flipped the visor up and held out his hand to her. She let go of Cage and went to him. “Let’s take a walk, Wynne. I want to talk to you.”

  As he watched them walk away together Cage felt as though he were turning to stone. He had lost her. The crowd swirled around them and they were gone.

  “Aren’t you Tony Cage?”

  He stared without comprehension at a middle-aged woman wearing a mood dress. It changed from blue to silvery-green as she called to her husband. “Marv, come quick.” A paunchy man in isothermals responded to her summons. “You are Tony Cage, aren’t you?”

  Cage could not speak. The man shook his nerveless hand. “Sure, we’ve seen you on telelink. Lots of times. We’re from the States. New Hampshire. We’ve tried all your drugs.”

  “But Soar’s still our favorite. I’m Sylvie. We’re retired.” The dress lightened from lime to apple green. Cage could not look her in the face.

  “I’m Marv. Say, you look pretty twisted. What are you on, anyway? Something new?”

  Heads were turning. “Sorry.” His tongue was stone. “Not feeling well. Have to…” By then he was stumbling away from his manic fans. Luckily they did not follow.

  He did not remember how long he wandered through the crowd or how he felt or what exactly he was looking for. A terrible suspicion nagged at him … maybe something was wrong with the dose? Eventually the Druids finished their service and the dome was opened to the public. He drifted on a floodtide of humanity and at last washed up on the Slaughter Stone.

  The Slaughter Stone was a slab of lichen-covered sarsen about thirty meters away from the outer circle: a good place to sit and watch, away from the hurly-burly around the standing stones. The surface of the stone was pitted and rough. It once was thought that these natural bowls were used to catch sacrifical blood—both human and animal. Another myth, since the stone originally stood upright. Now they were two fallen things, Cage and the stone, their foundations undermined, purposes lost. They existed in roughly the same state of consciousness. Cage thought sandstone thoughts; his understanding was that of rock.

  The sun climbed. Cage was hot. The combination of body heat and solar gain had overloaded the dome’s air conditioning. He did nothing. The waves of hallucinations seemed to have receded. People had climbed the outer circle and walked along the lintels. One woman started to strip. The crowd clapped and urged her on. “Vestal virgin, vestal virgin,” they cried. A little boy nearby watched avidly as he squeezed cider from a disposable juice bulb. Cage was thirsty; he did nothing. The boy dropped the bulb on the ground when he had finished and wandered off. A bobby stepped out from beneath the circle to watch as the stripper removed her panties. The crowd roared and she gave them an extra treat. She was an amputee; she unstrapped her prosthetic forearm and waved it over her head. The world was going mad and trying to take Cage with it. He loaded a neuroleptic into his pressure syringe and poked it into his forearm.

  “Tony.”

  There was no Tony. There was only stone.

  “Hey, man.” A stranger shook him. “It’s me. Tod. There’s something wrong with Wynne! We need to know what you took.

  “In waves.” Cage started to laugh. “They come in waves.” Now he knew. Hallucinations. But not with Share. He was laughing so hard he fell backwards onto the stone. “Belotti!” Poor Bobby had finally struck—after all these years. The drug was pure but the dose … Too high. Hallucinogen. Dangerous, he had said. Unpredictable. That unpredictable old … “Bastard!” Cage was gasping for air.

  “He needs oxygen. Quick.”

  “Look at his eyes!”

  When the last wave hit him, Cage held on to the stone. The crowd disappeared. The dome vanished. The car park, the A360, all signs of civilization—gone. Then the stones awoke and began to dance. Those that had fallen righted themselves. A road erupted from the grass. The Slaughter Stone bucked and threw him as it stood. A twin appeared beside it: a gate. He wanted to pass through, walk down the road, see Stonehenge whole. But the magic held him back. In an overly explained world, only the subtlest and most powerful magic of all had survived. The magic that works exclusively in the mind. A curse. A dead and illiterate race had placed a curse upon the imagination of the world. In its rude magnificence Stonehenge challenged all to understand its meaning, yet its secret was forever locked behind impenetrable walls of time.

  “Lay him down here.”

  “Tony!”

  “He can’t hear you.”

  Suddenly they were all around him, all of those who had stood where Cage now stood. The politicians and writers and painters and historians and scientists and the tourists—yes, even the tourists who, in search of an hour’s diversion, had found instead a timeless mystery. All of those who had accepted Stonehenge’s challenge, and fallen under the curse. They had striven with words and images to find the secret, yet all they had seen was themselves. The sun grew very bright then, and the sides of the stones turned silver. Cage could see all the ghosts reflected in the bright stones. He could see himself.

  “Tony, can you hear me? Wynne’s having some kind of fit. You have to tell us.”

  Cage saw himself in the Slaughter Stone. What did it matter? He had already lost her. His image seemed to shimmer. He looked like a ghost; the thought of death did not displease him. To be as a stone.

  “Wake up, man. You have to save her. She’s your daughter, damn you!”

  “No.” At that moment Cage’s reflection in the stone shifted and he saw his mirror image. Wynne. In pain. He realized that she had been in pain for a long time, had hidden it behind a veneer of chemicals and feigned toughness. He should have known. Trapped within the magical logic of the hallucination, now he could actually feel her pain and was racked by the certain knowledge that he was its source. It was no longer the drug, it was Stonehenge itself that forced him to suffer with her, Stonehenge that created a magic landscape where the veil of words was parted and mind could touch mind directly. Or so it seemed to Cage. A Sound tore through the vision: a scream. “No!” Stones fell, disappeared, but Cage could not escape the pain. All the lies Cage had told himself fell away. In a moment of terrible grace, he realized what he had done. To his daughter.

  Tod had lost his helmet, probably lying on the turf somewhere, shooting closeups of blades of grass. He seemd very pale beneath his blue skin tint. Cage blinked, trying to remember what it was that he had asked. There were electrodes taped to Cage’s head and wrist. A medic was checking readouts.

  “What did you give her?” said the medic.

  Cage’s hands trembled as he fumbled the pressure syringe from his pocket. “This … a poke … neuroleptic. She needs it now. Now!”

  The medic seemed very young; he looked doubtful. Cage sat up, tore the electrode from his temple. “Do you know who I am?” The world was spinning. “Do it!”

  The medic looked briefly at Tod, then took the syringe and ran back toward the standing stones. Tod hesitated, staring at Cage.

  “What did you say to her?” Cage tried to stand up.

  He put his arm around Cage’s shoulders to steady him. “Are you all right?”

  “Did you say it to her? That she was my daughter?”

  “That’s what she thinks. We were arguing about it.”

  “She was my lover. You know that, I guess. She came to me one night. Three years ago. We were both twisted. I couldn’t … I couldn’t send her away.”

  Tod
looked straight ahead. “She said that. She said it was her fault. Then the fit hit her.”

  “No.” Cage could still see himself; he would never be able to stop seeing himself again. “I was lonely so I made sure that she was lonely too. And called it love.” The word almost shocked him. “Where is she? Take me to her.” They started to walk. “Do you love her, Tod?”

  “I don’t know, man.” He considered for some time. “Feels something like.”

  She was unconscious but the fit had passed and the medic said her signs were good. Cage went with Tod to the hospital. They waited all day; they talked about everything but what was most on their minds. Cage realized that he had made a mistake about Tod. So many mistakes. When Wynne at last regained consciousness, Tod went to see her. Alone.

  “I’m not here,” Cage said. “Tell her I’ve gone away.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Tell her!”

  They only gave Tod ten minutes. Cage kept worrying that Tod would call him in.

  “Is she all right?”

  “Seems to be. She asked about you; I told her you went back to your room to sleep it off. I told her you’d be in tomorrow. They’re going to keep her overnight.”

  “I’m leaving, Tod.” Cage offered his hand. “You won’t be seeing me again.”

  “What? You can’t do that to her, man. She saw something this morning, something that makes her feel guilty as hell. If you just disappear she’s going to feel worse. Do you understand? You owe it to her to stay.”

  Cage let his hand fall to his side. “You want me to be some kind of a hero, Tod. Problem is, I’m a coward—always have been. I saw something today too, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to forget it. She’ll … you’ll both be better off without me.”

  Tod grabbed him by the shoulders. “You’re damn well going to see her tomorrow. Listen to me, man! If you love her at all…”

  “I love her.” Cage shook free. “Like I love myself.”