“Yes,” Coyote answered, trotting on.
They ate the fox-scented salmon by a dried-up creek, slept a while, and went on.
Before long the child smelled the sour burning smell, and stopped. It was as if a huge, heavy hand had begun pushing her chest, pushing her away, and yet at the same time as if she had stepped into a strong current that drew her forward, helpless.
“Hey, getting close!” Coyote said, and stopped to piss by a juniper stump.
“Close to what?”
“Their town. See?” She pointed to a pair of sage-spotted hills. Between them was an area of greyish blank.
“I don’t want to go there.”
“We won’t go all the way in. No way! We’ll just get a little closer and look. It’s fun,” Coyote said, putting her head on one side, coaxing. “They do all these weird things in the air.”
The child hung back.
Coyote became business-like, responsible. “We’re going to be very careful,” she announced. “And look out for big dogs, OK? Little dogs I can handle. Make a good lunch. Big dogs, it goes the other way. Right? Let’s go, then.”
Seemingly as casual and lounging as ever, but with a tense alertness in the carriage of her head and the yellow glance of her eyes, Coyote led off again, not looking back; and the child followed.
All around them the pressures increased. It was as if the air itself was pressing on them, as if time was going too fast, too hard, not flowing but pounding, pounding, pounding, faster and harder till it buzzed like Rattler’s rattle. Hurry, you have to hurry! everything said, there isn’t time! everything said. Things rushed past screaming and shuddering. Things turned, flashed, roared, stank, vanished. There was a boy—he came into focus all at once, but not on the ground: he was going along a couple of inches above the ground, moving very fast, bending his legs from side to side in a kind of frenzied swaying dance, and was gone. Twenty children sat in rows in the air all singing shrilly and then the walls closed over them. A basket no a pot no a can, a garbage can, full of salmon smelling wonderful no full of stinking deerhides and rotten cabbage stalks, keep out of it, Coyote! Where was she?
“Mom!” the child called. “Mother!”—standing a moment at the end of an ordinary small-town street near the gas station, and the next moment in a terror of blanknesses, invisible walls, terrible smells and pressures and the overwhelming rush of Time straight forward rolling her helpless as a twig in the race above a waterfall. She clung, held on trying not to fall—“Mother!”
Coyote was over by the big basket of salmon, approaching it, wary, but out in the open, in the full sunlight, in the full current. And a boy and a man borne by the same current were coming down the long, sage-spotted hill behind the gas station, each with a gun, red hats, hunters, it was killing season. “Hell, will you look at that damn coyote in broad daylight big as my wife’s ass,” the man said, and cocked aimed shot all as Myra screamed and ran against the enormous drowning torrent. Coyote fled past her yelling, “Get out of here!” She turned and was borne away.
Far out of sight of that place, in a little draw among low hills, they sat and breathed air in searing gasps until after a long time it came easy again.
“Mom, that was stupid,” the child said furiously.
“Sure was,” Coyote said. “But did you see all that food!”
“I’m not hungry,” the child said sullenly. “Not till we get all the way away from here.”
“But they’re your folks,” Coyote said. “All yours. Your kith and kin and cousins and kind. Bang! Pow! There’s Coyote! Bang! There’s my wife’s ass! Pow! There’s anything—BOOOOM! Blow it away, man! BOOOOOOM!”
“I want to go home,” the child said.
“Not yet,” said Coyote. “I got to take a shit.” She did so, then turned to the fresh turd, leaning over it. “It says I have to stay,” she reported, smiling.
“It didn’t say anything! I was listening!”
“You know how to understand? You hear everything, Miss Big Ears? Hears all—Sees all with her crummy gummy eye—”
“You have pine-pitch eyes too! You told me so!”
“That’s a story,” Coyote snarled. “You don’t even know a story when you hear one! Look, do what you like, it’s a free country. I’m hanging around here tonight. I like the action.” She sat down and began patting her hands on the dirt in a soft four-four rhythm and singing under her breath, one of the endless tuneless songs that kept time from running too fast, that wove the roots of trees and bushes and ferns and grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock’s place and the earth together. And the child lay listening.
“I love you,” she said.
Coyote went on singing.
Sun went down the last slope of the west and left a pale green clarity over the desert hills.
Coyote had stopped singing. She sniffed. “Hey,” she said. “Dinner.” She got up and moseyed along the little draw. “Yeah,” she called back softly. “Come on!”
Stiffly, for the fear-crystals had not yet melted out of her joints, the child got up and went to Coyote. Off to one side along the hill was one of the lines, a fence. She didn’t look at it. It was OK. They were outside it.
“Look at that!”
A smoked salmon, a whole chinook, lay on a little cedarbark mat. “An offering! Well, I’ll be darned!” Coyote was so impressed she didn’t even swear. “I haven’t seen one of these for years! I thought they’d forgotten!”
“Offering to who?”
“Me! Who else? Boy, look at that!”
The child looked dubiously at the salmon.
“It smells funny.”
“How funny?”
“Like burned.”
“It’s smoked, stupid! Come on.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“OK. It’s not your salmon anyhow. It’s mine. My offering, for me. Hey, you people! You people over there! Coyote thanks you! Keep it up like this and maybe I’ll do some good things for you too!”
“Don’t, don’t yell, Mom! They’re not that far away—”
“They’re all my people,” said Coyote with a great gesture, and then sat down cross-legged, broke off a big piece of salmon, and ate.
Evening Star burned like a deep, bright pool of water in the clear sky. Down over the twin hills was a dim suffusion of light, like a fog. The child looked away from it, back at the star.
“Oh,” Coyote said. “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“That wasn’t so smart, eating that,” Coyote said, and then held herself and began to shiver, to scream, to choke—her eyes rolled up, her long arms and legs flew out jerking and dancing, foam spurted out between her clenched teeth. Her body arched tremendously backwards, and the child, trying to hold her, was thrown violently off by the spasms of her limbs. The child scrambled back and held the body as it spasmed again, twitched, quivered, went still.
By moonrise Coyote was cold. Till then there had been so much warmth under the tawny coat that the child kept thinking maybe she was alive, maybe if she just kept holding her, keeping her warm, she would recover, she would be all right. She held her close, not looking at the black lips drawn back from the teeth, the white balls of the eyes. But when the cold came through the fur as the presence of death, the child let the slight, stiff corpse lie down on the dirt.
She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit. Coyote’s people did not bury their dead, she knew that. But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff paws stuck out. The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also went to where the salmon had lain on the cedar mat, and finding the carcass of a lamb heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned thing. Then she stood up and walked away without looking back.
At the top of the hill she stood and looked ac
ross the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the town lying in the pass between the twin hills.
“I hope you all die in pain,” she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert.
V
It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening, north of Horse Butte.
“I didn’t cry,” the child said.
“None of us do,” said Chickadee. “Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother’s house.”
It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke she wove.
“Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person.”
“Grandmother,” Chickadee greeted her.
The child said, “I’m not one of them.”
Grandmother’s eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.
“Old person, then,” said Grandmother. “You’d better go back there now, Granddaughter. That’s where you live.”
“I lived with Coyote. She’s dead. They killed her.”
“Oh, don’t worry about Coyote!” Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. “She gets killed all the time.”
The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.
“Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”
“I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”
Chickadee shook her head once, silent.
“It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas…You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?”
The child nodded.
“They’ve been looking for you.”
“They have?”
“Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”
“Serves him right. Serves them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.
“Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement. Don’t kill me, or I’ll make it rain…”
“I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”
The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak.
“Will I ever see Coyote?”
“I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.
The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”
“Yes. You can keep your eye.”
“Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.
All My Darling Daughters
by Connie Willis
Introduction
Connie Willis holds the record for delivering the funniest Nebula Award presentation speech in history. She has also delighted many readers with her screwball comedies—has anyone else won a Nebula for a farce?—and it’s quite possible, meeting her, to come away with the impression that Willis is the most good-natured and kind-hearted, the wittiest writer ever to wear a Peter Pan collar at a convention.
And that impression is true—as far as it goes. The danger comes when you start to think that Willis is nothing more than that. Such a delusion can easily set you up for an experience rather akin to reaching out to pet a frisky cocker spaniel and getting your fingers bitten off by a snarling pit bull.
Connie Willis, you see, is more than what she seems in polite company. The razor-sharp vision that expresses itself as gentle barbs in her comedy can also come out as plain old razor blades. You never know what will happen to you when you put yourself in Willis’s hands—but you always know that the ride will be memorable, even if the scars take a while to heal.
“All My Darling Daughters” appeared in her first story collection, the only original story among reprints. Like many of her works, it is artistically challenging; it is also unbearably painful. Indeed, some might think I have chosen the least typical of Willis’s stories to represent her in this collection. But I chose this story, rather than some of her tamer, funnier, or more sentimental works, precisely because, like a rent in the side of a volcano, “All My Darling Daughters” reveals most clearly the hot magma out of which all her cooler stories are composed.
Willis knows that I disagree violently with the worldview that I think this story expresses. I said so once in print, at some length. What is often overlooked is the fact that I also admire this story, and stand in awe of the ability and the integrity that allowed her to create it.
Connie Willis, like most of the leading science fiction writers, broke into print in the magazines. I remember very clearly when her first story, “Daisy, in the Sun,” made quite a splash when it was published in an early issue of Charlie Ryan’s Galileo back in the seventies. In fact, it was partly because Galileo was publishing her work that it so quickly became a prominent magazine in the field. Magazines are never better than the authors they publish—and new magazines need terrific new authors in order to survive.
What? You haven’t seen Galileo on the stands lately? That’s because after a very strong start as a subscription-only magazine published by Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore in Boston, Galileo died ingloriously in the attempt to break into the big time as a newsstand magazine—taking the bookstore down with it. Charlie Ryan is back, though, as editor of Aboriginal SF, which started in 1986 as the first science fiction tabloid, and which seems to be going strong. As before, Ryan is open to new writers, which means that there are voices being heard in Aboriginal that have never been heard before.
A lot of science fiction magazines have come and gone over the years; only a few have had real staying power.
The long-timers?
Astounding, which first achieved greatness under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr., and which continues—as Analog—to be the largest-circulation fiction magazine in the field. The magazine broadened under Ben Bova to publish stories that Campbell would never have bought—my own first stories included. Under current editor Stanley Schmidt, however, Analog has focused on a fairly narrow range of fiction—primarily techno-fiction, in which hardware is the protagonist, and idea stories, in which the author uses characters primarily as tools to explain or “discover” a scientific or satirical idea.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, affectionately known as F&SF, with Edward L. Ferman as owner and editor. Long the bellwether of the field, F&SF is still noted for publishing some of the best and most original writers. F&SF is also noted for its nonfiction: Isaac Asimov has had a compulsively readable science column in F&SF since the deluge; Algis Budrys re-earns his reputation as the field’s foremost critic every month in his column; and for several years now, the pages have sizzled with Harlan Ellison’s science fiction film reviews. (Recently I was permitted to join that distinguished company with a column of short book reviews.)
Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine, founded by Hugo Gernsback, for whom the Hugo Award is named. It has been more than five decades since Amazing has been a significant influence in the field; for many years the magazine hovered on the brink of extinction, never quite going over the edge. After years of incompetent management and marginal editing, Amazing was bought by TSR, the Dungeons and Dragons people, where—first under George Scithers, now under Patrick Price—it stays alive—and lively—despite minuscule circulation.
Some new magazines have come along, two of them moving immediately into leadership roles in the field. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine was founded by Davis Publications in the seventies in the hope of echoing th
e success of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine by following the famous-name formula. Asimov’s name certainly helped, as do his best-in-the-field editorials. Under founding editor George Scithers, Asimov’s almost immediately became the largest-circulation fiction magazine. The lead didn’t last, and in years since then, as editors Shawna McCarthy and, later, Gardner Dozois brought the magazine into literary dominance, circulation has remained in second place behind Analog. (A few years ago, when Conde Nast was cleaning house, they sold Analog to Davis publications, so that today the editors of the two leading fiction magazines work only a few doors away from each other in the same building in Manhattan.)
Omni, founded by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, has another kind of dominance in the field. Though Omni is a science magazine, one of the most beautifully-designed popular publications in the world, Guccione’s longtime love for science fiction led him to insist on including if stories in Omni from the beginning, even though the fiction is almost irrelevant to the magazine’s wide circulation and financial success. Ben Bova, Omni’s first fiction editor, brought the same wide-ranging vision that he had shown at Analog, but later fiction editors have allowed the magazine’s sf to drift. It hardly matters—because Omni pays thousands of dollars for stories instead of the hundreds offered by the other magazines, most writers send all their short fiction to Omni first, so that even if you picked stories randomly from the Omni slushpile you’d end up publishing some of the finest short stories in the field. Yet despite the quality of the submissions, Omni’s fiction remains disappointingly uneven.
Omni and Asimov’s were launched by major publishers, with the financial resources to eat huge losses at the beginning of the venture. Other magazines have started much smaller—and the science fiction field is vital enough to keep some of them alive, too. Besides Charlie Ryan’s already-mentioned Aboriginal, the strongest small-circulation periodical is Jim Baen’s paperback “bookazine” New Destinies, in all its incarnations. Baen came up with the concept of publishing a magazine in paperback book form when he was an editor at Ace Books; the result was the quarterly anthology Destinies, complete with editorials, book reviews, and other features usually reserved for magazines. When Baen left Destinies, the magazine died; later, when Baen founded his own book publishing company, he revived the concept with Far Frontiers, co-edited by Jerry Pournelle. When Pournelle withdrew after a couple of years, Baen changed the name to New Destinies. Dominated by libertarian and militaristic stories and Baen’s pronounced political views, the magazine is thriving, but has little influence on the rest of the field.
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