Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” For once I was glad to see her.

  A hand laser, I thought. A junior version of something on their ship that had cut that line through the desert. Like it or not, the aliens were as real as anything else in this version of 1961. Whether this was really my past or just some kind of metaphor, the aliens were a part of it.

  Jeremy staggered over and threw his arms around Carolyn’s waist. Even in the dimness of the playground I could see that her eyes were dry and clear. She looked at the gun in her hand. “This changes things,” she said. “This changes everything.”

  The words echoed in my mind. I thought of Thornberg and his Many Worlds. The smallest thing, he’d said, can change the entire universe. In time.

  “Back at the dance,” I said. “There’s more of … them.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “aliens.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “Take care of it? But you’re just …” I tried to stand up and didn’t make it.

  Gently she pushed Jeremy aside and knelt down next to me. “You’re hurt,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do to help anyway.” She took the peridot ring off her index finger and slipped it onto the little finger of my left hand. “Here,” she said. “This is for the twenty dollars you gave me. We’ll use it to find some people to help us. To fight. To change things. They’re just getting started and it’s not too late. We can change things.”

  She stood up, started to walk away, and then looked back over her shoulder.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  She was gone.

  I lay there a while and looked at the stars. I hadn’t seen that many stars in a night sky in a long time. When I tried to stand up again I made it, and got to the drinking fountain behind the baseball diamond.

  The same piece of gum was in the drain. I smiled and cleaned myself up as best I could.

  I stayed in the shadows just outside the door of the gym and watched for a while. I couldn’t see the third alien.

  She did it, I thought. She did it and she’s going to keep on doing it. And if she’s very lucky and very strong, maybe …

  No, I told myself. Don’t even think about it. Don’t get your hopes up. She’s just a girl and this may still turn out to be only a dream.

  LeeAnn was standing at the punchbowl, talking to a kid in rolled-up jeans and a tan jacket. The record player hissed and then Buddy Holly started “True Love Ways” and the strings answered him, high and rich, infinitely sad.

  The kid shuffled his feet and jerked his head at the dance floor. LeeAnn nodded and they walked into the crowd. He took her awkwardly in his arms and they slowly moved away until I couldn’t see them anymore.

  VII

  I came back to some kind of deserted warehouse. The cage was gone. So was the jail and so were the proctors.

  After the first couple of days I didn’t have much trouble finding my way around. Most of my friends were still the same, and they told me they were used to my being a little quiet and disoriented. They told me I’d been that way off and on since my wife LeeAnn died in a car wreck two years before.

  Thirty years were missing out of my new life, and I spent a lot of time at my computer, calling up history texts and old magazines and doing a little detective work on the side. I learned about a scientist named Thornberg at NASA, but he never answered the letter I wrote him.

  The past and the future invent each other; Thornberg taught me that, and the past I invented has given me a future without LeeAnn. But somewhere in this new future of mine there should be a woman named Carolyn, born in Arizona in the late forties, maybe a year or two younger than me. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say to her when I find her, or whether she’ll even believe me, but I think she’ll recognize her ring.

  LeeAnn is dead and Buddy Holly is dead, but people are walking the streets, free to make their own mistakes again. The sky overhead is filled with ships building a strange and wonderful future, and, in time, anything seems possible.

  LUCIUS SHEPARD

  Black Coral

  Here’s another riveting story by Lucius Shepard, whose “Salvador” appears elsewhere in this book—the gritty and compelling tale of a very Ugly American who has a strange confrontation with some ancient and otherworldly forces on a tiny Caribbean Island …

  The bearded young man who didn’t give a damn about anyone (or so he’d just shouted—whereupon the bartender had grabbed his scaling knife and said, “Dat bein de way of it, you can do your drinkin elsewhere!”) came staggering out of the bar and shielded his eyes against the afternoon glare. Violet afterimages flared and fizzled under his lids. He eased down the rickety stair, holding onto the rail, and stepped into the street, still blinking. And then, as he adjusted to the brightness, a ragged man with freckled cocoa-colored skin and a prophet’s beard swung into view, blocking out the sun.

  “Hot enough de sun duppy be writhin in de street, ain’t it, Mr. Prince?”

  Prince choked. Christ! That damned St. Cecilia rum was eating holes in his stomach! He reeled. The rum backed up into his throat and the sun blinded him again, but he squinted and made out old Spurgeon James, grinning, rotten teeth angled like untended tombstones, holding an empty Coke bottle whose mouth was crusted with flies.

  “Gotta go,” said Prince, lurching off.

  “You got work for me, Mr. Prince?”

  Prince kept walking.

  Old Spurgeon would lean on his shovel all day, reminisce about “de back time,” and offer advice (“Dat might go easier with de barrow, now.”) while Prince sweated like a donkey and lifted concrete blocks. Work! Still, for entertainment’s sake alone he’d be worth more than most of the black bastards on the island. And the ladinos! (“De dommed Sponnish!”) They’d work until they had enough to get drunk, play sick, then vanish with your best tools. Prince spotted a rooster pecking at a mango rind by the roadside, elected him representative of the island’s work force, and kicked; but the rooster flapped up, squabbling, lit on an overturned dinghy, and gave an assertive cluck.

  “Wait dere a moment, Mr. Prince!”

  Prince quickened his pace. If Spurgeon latched on, he’d never let loose. And today, January 18, marked the tenth anniversary of his departure from Viet Nam. He didn’t want any company.

  The yellow dirt road rippled in a heat haze which made the houses—rows of weathered shanties set on pilings against the storm tides—appear to be dancing on thin rubbery legs. Their tin roofs were buckled, pitched at every angle, showing patches of rustlike scabs. That one—teetering on splayed pilings over a dirt front yard, the shutter hung by a single hinge, gray flour-sack curtain belling inward—it always reminded him of a cranky old hen on her roost trying grimly to hatch a nonexistent egg. He’d seen a photograph of it taken seventy years before, and it had looked equally dejected and bedraggled then. Well, almost. There had been a spodilla tree overspreading the roof.

  “Givin out a warnin, Mr. Prince! Best you listen!”

  Spurgeon, rags tattering in the breeze, stumbled toward him and nearly fell. He waved his arms to regain his balance, like a drunken ant, toppled sideways, and fetched up against a palm trunk, hugging it for support. Prince, in dizzy sympathy with the sight, tottered backward and caught himself on some shanty steps, for a second going eye to eye with Spurgeon. The old man’s mouth worked, and a strand of spittle eeled out onto his beard.

  Prince pushed off from the steps. Stupidity! That was why nothing changed for the better on Guanoja Menor (derived from the Spanish guano and hoja, a fair translation being Lesser Leaf-shaped Piece of Bird Shit), why unemployable drunks hounded you in the street, why the rum poisoned you, why the shanties crashed from their perches in the least of storms. Unwavering stupidity! The islanders built outhouses on piers over the shallows where they bathed and fished the banks with no thought for conservation, then wondered why they stank and went hungry. They cut off their fingers to win bets that they wouldn’t; they smoked
black coral and inhaled gasoline fumes for escape; they fought with conch shells, wrapping their hands around the inner volute of the shell so it fit like a spiky boxing glove. And when the nearly as stupid ladinos had come from the Honduran mainland, they’d been able to steal and swindle half the land on the island.

  Prince had learned from their example.

  “Mr. Prince!”

  Spurgeon again, weaving after him, his palm outstretched. Angrily, Prince dug out a coin and threw it at his feet.

  “Dass so nice, dass so kind of you!” Spurgeon spat on the coin. But he stooped for it, and, in stooping, lost his balance and fell, smashing his Coke bottle on a stone. There went fifty centavos. There went two glasses of rum. The old man rolled in the street, too drunk to stand, smearing himself with yellow dirt. “Even de sick dog gots teeth,” he croaked. “Just you remember dat, Mr. Prince!”

  Prince couldn’t keep from laughing.

  Meachem’s Landing, the town (“a quaint seaport, steeped in pirate legend,” prattled the guidebook), lay along the curve of a bay inset between two scrub-thatched hills and served as the island capital. At midpoint of the bay stood the government office, a low white stucco building with sliding glass doors like a cheap motel. Three prosperous-looking Spanish men were sitting on oil drums in its shade, talking to a soldier wearing blue fatigues. As Prince passed, an offshore breeze kicked up and blew scents of rotted coconut, papaya, and creosote in from the customs dock, a concrete strip stretching one hundred yards or so into the glittering cobalt reach of the water.

  There was a vacancy about the scene, a lethargy uniformly affecting its every element. Cocals twitched the ends of their fronds, leaning in over tin roofs; a pariah dog sniffed at a dried lobster claw in the dust; ghost crabs scuttered under the shanties. It seemed to Prince that the tide of event had withdrawn, leaving the bottom dwellers exposed, creating a lull before some culminative action. And he remembered how it had been the same on bright afternoons in Saigon when passersby stopped and listened to the whine of an incoming rocket, how the plastic flags on the Hondas parked in front of the bars snapped in the wind, how a prostitute’s monkey had screamed in its cage on hearing the distant crump and everyone had laughed with relief. He felt less irritable, remembering, more at rights with the commemorative nature of the day.

  Beyond the government office, past the tiny public square and its dusty-leaved acacia, propped against the cement wall of the general store, clinging to it like a gaudy barnacle, was a shanty whose walls and trim had been painted crimson and bright blue and pink and quarantine yellow. Itchy-sounding reggae leaked from the closed shutter. Ghetto Liquors. He tramped heavily on the stair, letting them know within that the drunkest mother on the island, Neal His Bloody Majesty Prince, was about to integrate their little rainbow paradise, and pushed into the hot, dark room.

  “Service!” he said, kicking the counter.

  “What you want?”

  Rudy Welcomes stirred behind the bar. A slash of light from a split seam in the roof jiggled on his shaved skull.

  “St. Cecilia!” Prince leaned on the bar, reconnoitering. Two men sat at a rear table, their hair in spiky dreadlocks, wraiths materializing from the dark. The darkness was picked out by the purplish glow of black lights illuminating four Jimi Hendrix posters. Though of island stock, Rudy was American-born and, like Prince, a child of the sixties and a veteran. He said that the lights and posters put him in mind of a brothel on Tu Do Street, where he had won the money with which to establish Ghetto Liquors; and Prince, recalling similar brothels, found that the lights provided an excellent frame of reference for the thoughtful, reminiscent stages of his drunk. The eerie purple radiance escaping the slender black cannisters seemed the crystallized expression of war, and he fancied the color emblematic of evil energies and sluggish tropical demons.

  “So this your big day for drinkin.” Rudy slid a pint bottle along the bar and resettled on his stool. “Don’t you be startin that war buddy crap with me, now. I ain’t in the mood.”

  “Shucks, Rudy!” Prince adopted a southern accent. “You know I ain’t war buddies with no nigger.”

  Rudy stiffened but let it pass; he gave a disaffected grunt. “Don’t know why not, man. You could pass yourself Way your hair’s gotten all crispy and your skin’s gone dark. See here?”

  He laid his hand on Prince’s to compare the color, but Prince knocked it aside and stared, challenging.

  “Damn! Seem like Clint Eastwood done wandered into town!” Rudy shook his head in disgust and moved off along the bar to change the record. The two men at the rear drifted across the room and whispered with him, casting sly looks at Prince.

  Prince basked in the tension. It further fleshed out his frame of reference. Confident that he’d established dominance, he took a table beside the shutter, relaxed, and sipped his rum. Through a gap in the boards he saw a girl stringing up colored lights on the shanty opposite the bar. His private holiday had this year coincided with Independence Day, always celebrated upon the third Friday in January. Stalls would sprout in the public square, offering strips of roast turtle and games of chance. Contending music would blare from the bars—reggae and salsa. Prince enjoyed watching street dancers lose their way in the mishmash of rhythms. It emphasized the fact that neither the Spanish nor the islanders could cope with the other’s presence and further emphasized that they were celebrating two different events—on the day that Queen Victoria had granted the islands their freedom, the Honduran military had sailed in and established governance.

  More stupidity.

  The rum was sitting easier on his stomach. Prince mellowed and went with the purple lights, seeing twisted black branches in them, seeing the twilit jungle in Lang Biang, and he heard the hiss of the walkie-talkie and Leon’s stagy whisper, “Hey, Prince! I got a funny shadow in that bombax tree …” He had turned his scope on the tree, following the course of the serpentine limbs through the grainy, empurpling air. And then the stutter of automatic fire, and he could hear Leon’s screams in the air and carrying over the radio …

  “Got somethin for help you celebrate, Mr. Prince.”

  A thin hawk-faced man wearing frayed shorts dropped into the chair next to him, his dreadlocks wriggling. George Ebanks.

  Prince gripped the rum bottle, angry, ready to strike, but George thrust out a bristling something—a branch of black coral.

  “Dis de upful stuff, Mr. Prince,” he said. “Rife with de island’s secret.” He pulled out a knife and whittled at the branch. Curly black shavings fell onto the table. “You just scrapes de color off and dass what you smokes.”

  The branch intrigued Prince; it was dead black, unshining, hard to tell where each stalk ended and the room’s darkness began. He’d heard the stories. Old Spurgeon said it drove you crazy. And even older John Anderson McCrae had said, “De coral so black dat when you smokes it de color will rush into your eyes and allow you vision of de spirit world. And will allow dem sight of you.”

  “What’s it do?” he asked, tempted.

  “It make you more a part of things. Dass all, Mr. Prince. Don’t fret. We goin to smoke it with you.”

  Rudy and the third man—wiry, short Jubert Cox—sidled up behind George’s shoulder, and Rudy winked at Prince. George loaded the knife blade with black shavings and tamped them into a hash pipe, then lit it, drawing hard until the hollows of his cheeks reflected a violet-red coal. He handed the pipe across, a wisp of smoke curling from his tight-lipped smile, and watched Prince toke it down.

  The smoke tasted vile. It had a mustiness he associated with the thousands of dead polyps (was it thousands per lungful or merely hundreds?) he’d just inhaled, but it was so cool that he did not concern himself with taste and noticed only the coolness.

  Cold black stone lined his throat.

  The coolness spread to his arms and legs, weighting them down, and he imagined it questing with black tendrils through veins and arteries, finding out secret passages unknown even to his blood. Dr
ifty stuff

  … and dizzying. He wasn’t sure if he was sweating or not, but he was a little nauseous. And he didn’t seem to be inhaling anymore. Not really. The smoke seemed to be issuing of its own volition from the pipe stem, a silken rope, a cold strangler’s cord tying a labyrinthine knot throughout his body …

  “Take but a trifle, don’t it, Mr. Prince?” Jubert giggled.

  Rudy lifted the pipe from his numbed fingers.

  … and involving the fissures of his brain in an intricate design, binding his thoughts into a coralline structure. The bright gaps in the shutter planking dwindled, receded, until they were golden straws adrift in the blackness, then golden pinpricks, then gone. And though he was initially fascinated by this production of the drug, as it progressed Prince became worried that he was going blind.

  “Wuh …” His tongue wouldn’t work. His flesh was choked with black dust, distant from him, and the coolness had deepened to a penetrating chill. And as a faint radiance suffused the dark, he imagined that the process of the drug had been reversed, that now he was flowing up the pipe stem into the heart of the violet-red coal.

  “Oh, dis de upful stuff all right, Mr. Prince,” said George, from afar. “Dat what grows down to de root of de island.”

  Rippling kelp beds faded in from the blackness, illuminated by a violet glow, and Prince saw that he was passing above them toward a dim wall (the reef?) at whose base thousands upon thousands of witchy fires burned, flickering, ranging in color from indigo to violet-white, all clinging (he saw, drawing near) to the stalks and branches of black coral—a bristling jungle of coral, stalks twenty and thirty feet high, and more. The fires were smaller than candle flames and did not seem as much presences as they did peepholes into a cold furnace behind the reef. Maybe they were some sort of copepod, bioluminescent and half alive. He descended among the stalks, moving along the channels between them. Barracuda, sleek triggerfish … There! A grouper—four hundred pounds if it was a ounce—angelfish and rays … bones showed in negative through their luminous flesh. Schools of smaller fish darted as one, stopped, darted again, into and out of the black branches. The place had a strange kinetic geometry, as if it were the innards of an organic machine whose creatures performed its functions by maneuvering in precise patterns through its interstices, and in which the violet fires served as the insane, empowering thoughts within an inky skull. Beautiful! Thomas de Quincey Land. A jeweled shade, an occulted paradise. Then, rising into the murk above him, an immense stalk—a shadowy, sinister Christmas tree poxed with flickering decorations. Sharks circled its upper reaches, cast in silhouette by the glow. Several of the fires detached from a branch and drifted toward him, eddying like slow moths.