The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Maybe everybody knew it fifty years ago, John,” the editor said, “but it hasn’t been true for a long time. This is the most inept and outrageous thing that I have ever encountered. But it served my purpose. What better way to thumb my nose at the powers at this newspaper where I have spent so many happy years! What a flood of protests they’ll get when this silly thing appears!”

  * * *

  John T. Woolybear took his money and left the newspaper office with a touch of sorrow in his heart. Was it possible that the world was in the process of passing him by? Were flamboyance and garishness no longer wanted in the world? Could it be that even a true account like this one of the good giant at Talking Rocks was too garish and incredible to appear in a Sunday Magazine Section of a Newspaper?

  Woolybear felt bewildered. And in his bewilderment he experienced a sudden loneliness for his three wives, the one in Illinois, the one in Nebraska, and the one in Texas.

  4.

  STRANGE ACCOUNT OF THE PIKE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA, CLONINGS

  In the hamlet of Greeley Gulch in Pike County, Pennsylvania, there are authentic cases of cloning. In fact, cloning is the way of life there. In my forty years of checking out strange-but-true stories all over the country I have investigated more than one hundred accounts of cloning in various regions and found them all to be false. But now I am prepared to state that the clonings that emanate from Greeley Gulch are authentic.

  In another Pike County town of Lackawaxed there was the case of three different sets of triplets going to work in the mill. These nine persons (of the three different sets) were all good workmen and they received good paychecks. But one of the auditors at the mill smelled fraud.

  The auditor followed the nine workmen when they had finished work one evening. The nine of them walked behind some ornamental bushes at the front of the mill. Then only three men came out from behind the bushes. And the other six were not behind the bushes. They were nowhere. The auditor followed the remaining three to their boarding house. The three went in, ate their supper, opened their six-packs of beer and watched TV, and then went to bed. Well, the auditor was an adept at looking into windows; that’s how he knew just how they spent their evening.

  And in the morning the auditor was watching again. He saw the three rise, dress, eat their breakfasts, and then come out of their boarding house. He followed the three of them to the mill. Near the entrance of the mill, the three ducked for a moment behind some ornamental bushes. Then the full nine of them came out from behind the bushes, went into the mill, and went to work. It was sheer fraud. Three men were holding nine jobs and drawing nine paychecks.

  The auditor followed the nine/three men every evening. And they ate their three suppers and went to their three beds. But on Friday evening, the three basic men went to the station instead of to the boarding house. They got on a bus and went away on it. The auditor went to the ticket window.

  “Where did those last three fellows buy tickets for?” he asked the ticket seller.

  “To Greeley Gulch,” the ticket seller said.

  I found that in a dozen other towns in a sort of circle around Greeley Gulch the same thing was happening. The community of Greeley Gulch was guilty of fraud by means of cloning at the expense of all its neighboring towns.

  Then I went to Greeley Gulch myself, and I found——

  * * *

  “I have read enough,” the Editor of the Sunday Magazine Section of the Scranton Scanner told John T. Woolybear. “It’s drivel, John. No more, John. You’re not the man you used to be, John.”

  “But read on, Mr. Farmington. Read how I myself went to Greeley Gulch and how I became sure that all the people of Greeley Gulch could clone. Read how I myself—”

  “No. John, no,” the Editor of the Magazine Section of the Scanton Scanner said. “No more, ever.”

  * * *

  “What will I do now?” John T. Woolybear asked himself. “I have always been the best Sunday Magazine Section Feature Story Writer in the World, and I got to the best by following the adage that a Sunday Magazine Section piece cannot be too garish. I’ll not admit that I am wrong about this, but I must admit that the world has gone wrong about it. I’ve failed to place the last twelve Sunday Magazine Section pieces I’ve written. And all of them were amazing and all of them were true.

  “My STRANGE CASE OF THE UFO NESTS AT WILDCAT, WYOMING was shuffled off as fiction. Fiction? I was there; I learned everything, I even soloed in one of the Wildcat, Wyoming UFOs.

  “I know that the clonings of Greeley Gulch were real because I myself—

  “But what’s the use of arguing? My life is a bust. I am separated from all three of my wives and I miss them all uncommonly. I miss the one in Illinois. I miss the one in Nebraska. I miss the one in Texas. I must find a way to make things up to all three of them, but it’s against the law to make things up with all three of them.

  “It’s time I hit the road again.”

  John T. Woolybear went to his own boarding house and pulled his big heavy suitcase out from under the bed. Now it seemed to be bigger and heavier than ever before. He knew he would not be able to go hitchhiking with it again. It was as if he had become older and weaker in the four days since he had come to town and gone to work for the Scranton Scanner.

  “What makes the thing so heavy anyhow?” he asked himself, and he opened up the suitcase. “Oh yes,” he said. He took a bulky Fat Air suit out of it. He took a bulky folded-up man-carrying kite out of it. And a bicycle pump. It was still a pretty heavy suitcase. What to do?

  “I am, after all, a charming man,” he said. “At least three persons in this world have found me so. But how will my charm work now? I could go back to Blackberry Patch in Doniphan County, Kansas. I learned their tricks when I was there. I could get into my Fat Air suit, go up in my kite, and jump out. As I am getting to my last years, I would probably glide up instead of down. I could drift into that cloud with its silver lining and its running water and its green pastures, the cloud that is jokingly called the Elephant Graveyard in the Sky. It is exactly over downtown Kansas City, Missouri; two miles over it. And there I would be with all the Blackberry Patch people who have ever passed over to their glory. I would be with them, aye; but I’d be as dead as they all are. I’m not quite ready for that yet.

  “Or I could go back to Missouri and go to work with that friend of mine with the Zolliger Church Goods Company. I have heard that he is badly in need of an assistant to sell Saint Christopher relics. That big skeleton broke up into so many thousand genuine relics that there will be good business in them for as long as one can see into the future. But I know that I’d have a dog-faced feeling if I went into that line of work.

  “Or I could go back to Greeley Church and check in at the Outworker Agency. Then I would go to one of the nearby towns and get three jobs and draw three paychecks. But great howling thunder! I don’t want three jobs. I don’t want hardly one.

  “But what will I do? There must be something for me. I am, after all, a charming man.”

  He went out of his boarding house and to the variety store.

  “Let me see that small suitcase,” he said. “Fine, fine, it’s just what I want. Let me have three of them. No, no, what am I thinking about! Let me have just one of them.”

  John Woolybear took the small suitcase back to his boarding house and set it on the floor in his bedroom. Then the little suitcase seemed to become three little suitcases on the floor.

  “I am a charming man,” John Woolybear reassured himself again. “Three person in this world have found me especially so. It may be that I won’t have to work at all, not if I spread myself properly. And all three of those special persons are well-fixed now, so I have heard.”

  John T. Woolybear, who had once been the King of the Sunday Magazine Section Fabricators, began to fill the three little suitcases out of the one big suitcase. And, by leaving out the Fat Air suit and the folding man-carrying kite and the bicycle pump and a few other items, he made th
e transfer perfectly.

  * * *

  Just before dawn the next morning, three men took their places at a good hitch-hiking highway nexus just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.… The three men looked somewhat alike. Each of them had pale blue eyes. Each of them was flecked with large tan freckles, and each of the freckles had a slight blue ring about it as if it had been drawn by a cartoonist.

  The three suitcases of the three men were just alike, almost just alike. Each of the suitcases had a lettered sign on it.

  The lettered sign on one of the suitcases read TO ILLINOIS.

  The second one bore the sign TO NEBRASKA.

  And the third one had the sign TO TEXAS.

  LEWIS SHINER

  The War At Home

  Here’s a fierce and unsettling story by hot new author Lewis Shiner, showing us that ultimately war touches even those who stay at home …

  Lewis Shiner is widely regarded as one of the most exciting new SF writers of the eighties. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, Oui, Shayol, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. His first novel, Frontera, appeared in 1984, to good critical response. He served on the 1984 Nebula Award Jury, and is also a member (along with Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, Leigh Kennedy, and others) of the well-known Turkey City Writers Workshop. Shiner lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Edith. His story “Twilight Time” was in our Second Annual Collection.

  THE WAR AT HOME

  Lewis Shiner

  Ten of us in the back of a Huey, assholes clenched like fists, C-rations turned to sno-cones in our bellies. Tracers float up at us, swollen, sizzling with orange light, like one dud firecracker after another. Ahead of us the gunships pound Landing Zone Dog with everything they have, flex guns, rockets, and 50-calibers, while the artillery screams overhead and the Air Force Al-Es strafe the clearing into kindling.

  We hover over the LZ in the sudden phosphorus dawn of a flare, screaming, “Land, you fucker, land!” while the tracers close in, the shell of the copter ticking like a clock as the thumb-sized rounds go through her, ripping the steel like paper, spattering somebody’s brains across the aft bulkhead.

  Then falling into the knee-high grass, the air humming with bullets and stinking of swamp ooze and gasoline and human shit and blood. Spinning wildly, my finger jamming down the trigger of the M-16, not caring anymore where the bullets go.

  And waking up in my own bed, Clare beside me, shaking me, hissing, “Wake up, wake up for Christ’s sake.”

  I sat up, the taste of it still in my lungs, hands twitching with berserker frenzy. “’M okay,” I mumbled. “Nightmare. I was back in Nam.”

  “What?”

  “Flashback,” I said. “The war.”

  “What are you talking about? You weren’t in the war.”

  I looked at my hands and remembered. It was true. I’d never even been in the Army, never set foot in Vietnam.

  * * *

  Three months earlier we’d been shooting an Eyewitness News series on Vietnamese refugees. His name was Nguyen Ky Duk, former ARVN colonel, now a fry cook at Jack In The Box. “You killed my country,” he said. “All of you. Americans, French, Japanese. Like you would kill a dog because you thought it might have, you know, rabies. Just kill it and throw it in a ditch. It was a living thing, and now it is dead.”

  * * *

  The afternoon of the massacre we got raw footage over the wire. About a dozen of us crowded the monitor and stared at the shattered windows of the Safeway, the mounds of cartridges, the bloodstains and the puddles of congealing food.

  “What was it he said?”

  “Something about ‘gooks.’ ‘You’re all fucking gooks, just like the others, and now I’ll kill you too,’ something like that.”

  “But he wasn’t in Nam. They talked to his wife.”

  “So why’d he do it?”

  “He was a gun nut. Black market shit, like that M-16 he had. Camo clothes, the whole nine yards. A nut.”

  I walked down the hall, past the lines of potted ferns and bamboo, and bought a Coke from the machine. I could still remember the dream, the feel of the M-16 in my hands, the rage, the fear.

  * * *

  “Like it?” Clare asked. She turned slowly, the loose folds of her black cotton pajamas fluttering, her face hidden by the conical straw hat.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know. It makes me feel weird.”

  “It’s fashion,” she said. “Fashion’s supposed to make you feel weird.”

  I walked away from her, through the sliding glass door and into the back yard. The grass had grown a foot or more without my noticing, and strange plants had come up between the flowers, suffocating them in sharp fronds and broad green leaves.

  * * *

  “Did you go?”

  “No,” I said. “I was I-Y. Underweight, if you can believe that.” But in fact I was losing weight again, the muscles turning stringy under sallow skin.

  “Me either. My dad got a shrink to write me a letter. I did the marches, Washington and all that. But you know something? I feel weird about not going. Kind of guilty, somehow. Even though we shouldn’t ever have been there, even though we were burning villages and fragging our own guys. I feel like … I don’t know. Like I missed something. Something important.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. Through cracked glass I could see the sunset thickening the trees.

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure myself. “Maybe it’s not too late,” I said.

  * * *

  I walk through the haunted streets of my town, sweltering in the January heat. The jungle arches over me; children’s voices in the distance chatter in their weird pidgin Vietnamese. The TV station is a crumbling ruin and none of us feel comfortable there any longer. We work now in a thatched hut with a mimeo machine.

  The air is humid, fragrant with anticipation. Soon the plane will come and it will begin in earnest.

  S. C. SYKES

  Rockabye Baby

  Many people have longed for a fresh start in life, but how much would you really be willing to pay for one…?

  New writer S. C. Sykes was born in Florida, grew up in San Angelo, Texas, and now lives in North Wales, Pennsylvania, where, she tells us, she settled sixteen years ago “on a whim.” “Rockabye Baby” is her second published story. Her first sale was to Analog in 1981; that story was reprinted in a Best of the Year Anthology, adapted into a radio drama for National Public Radio, and later made into a short film. She is currently working on a novel, tentatively entitled Michael-By-The-Sea. She tells us that she likes to “backpack in Europe during the summer and I tend to write in bed, in longhand, late at night all winter.” Let’s hope these sessions produce many more stories like the remarkable one that follows.

  ROCKABYE BABY

  S. C. Sykes

  He could remember hearing his neck snap. In fact, Cody could remember every long minute after the accident, crumpled in a limp ball against the van’s roof. He remembered the immediate numbing sensation, as if everything from his Adam’s apple down had gone to sleep. He wondered if this was what death was like and felt cheated. Not a thing passed before his eyes, except a fly which had been in the van all afternoon in spite of his swipes at it with the road map. His St. Christopher’s medal, a gift from Jenny before he went into the Navy, had fallen across his right nostril and he was having trouble breathing. He decided it was somewhat ironic to be suffocated by the demoted patron saint of travelers. Okay, so he had no business heading down to Tijuana for the deliberate purpose of losing a weekend in hedonistic debauchery—a broken neck, he felt, was rather severe punishment for a sin only in the planning stages. He hadn’t even crossed the border yet. The blowout had sent the van through the guard rail and over the edge of the embankment. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it except watch the scenery go by sideways, tilt, then spin, just like in the movies. Only somehow the real thing was
much more impressive.

  The dumbest things occurred to him, and later he wondered how he had managed to have so much time to think about them. Like worrying about the case of beer in the back—if the ice chest would hold. It had. He remembered the letter to Jenny he’d forgotten to mail. It was still on the kitchen counter in his apartment because he couldn’t find a stamp. He remembered worrying that he should have gotten stamps. He worried that the paint job on the van was going to get scratched. Scratched. They showed him pictures of the van later. By then he didn’t care.

  Mac had been luckier, riding in the Death Seat. He had splattered his nose and cheek against the windshield and broken some ribs but he was able to crawl out through the side window, and kept talking to Cody until help came. Cody would rather have gone to sleep.

  The VA hospital became his home for a full year, and it would, he slowly realized, be something of an unwanted umbilical cord for the rest of his life. Jenny had come once, from Texas, to visit. He’d had to get nasty before she believed him when he told her to leave. It was one thing to have a nurse feed him. It was another thing entirely to have someone he loved spooning food into his mouth. He couldn’t even put his arms around her with any coordinated dexterity.

  He gave Mac his weight lifting equipment and his guitar and asked him to sell off or throw away everything else in the apartment.

  “What about the fish?” Mac asked.

  “Flush ’em down the john.”

  He’d been singularly proud of that fish tank. It was the central conversation piece in his first attempt at apartment decorating after getting out of the service. Most of his furniture was early Swap Meet but that 40-gallon cylindrical tank perched on a barrel was something to be admired. Mac asked if he could have it.

  “Take it. Take whatever you want. I don’t care.” And he didn’t care. He had difficulty trying to decide on the week’s menu whenever the nurse read it off to him, checking his choices. Choice implied a preference, as if life could still offer him one deal that was better than another. As far as Cody was concerned his future was a wide arid wasteland and whether he wanted chicken or veal next Wednesday wasn’t going to make much difference. Nothing was going to change the landscape.