The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  Kaiser's frown was black as wrought iron, like the crosses they use to stop walls bulging, and his face was red as brick. The wind-snakes foamed against his reins. Behind him a wake was ravaged, and clods of earth thrown house-high. Before him hedges broke and corn scattered, torn aside by a thresh of metal and claw, and a flounder of hoof. He sounded the horn again, and the horse skull opened and screamed. The sun hid its face.

  Down the hill surged Ticket's butterflies. They came upon Kaiser with a whicker and a flutter, on wings made of tinfoil and TV dinner packages, of sandwich crusts and cellophane. Their limbs swiveled in joints of chewing gum, and they stared with bottle-top eyes. With metal-gash mouths they caught and bit.

  Eve's car veered crazily as its driver lost control. It floundered through thickets, snapping off bones, blades, handles and appendages against the low-hanging boughs. The butterflies followed. A wheel spun loose, and the vehicle careered over a bracken ridge to plunge and tumble down the scarp to ruin in the hollow below. The butterflies flitted overhead, looking for Kaiser. What did they find?

  A school uniform with the seams mended too many times, and a tie knotted beyond recovery. A little flesh-pink plush, and a black cross of iron. A paper bag of sweets that had glued themselves into one multicolored mass. A frog, a snail, and a furred something shorter than a finger. An empty packet of cigarettes marked "Kaiser Kingsize".

  The butterflies had weakened their frail fixings by their exertions. They tumbled loose and scattered. Now there was nothing moving on the slope but a handful of litter that rolled before the wind.

  Later Wolf found the pieces of Kaiser and collected them, weeping. He took them back to Eve the Maker to see if she could mend them.

  * * *

  Paul paused by a shop window and viewed his reflection with discontent. He yawned and rubbed at the blue of his jaw. Beyond his own image, the glass-eyed girl in the blue dress-suit tried to sell him soap from a thousand screens.

  The straw-blond girl with the folded hands still stood beside him. Had she been saying something? He had not been listening. She took his hand again, and he let her. He should be at work, but she was so insistent in her passive, quiet way. Perhaps he should humor her—she seemed a bit touched. Perhaps it would be nice to see that almost indiscernible pucker at the corners of her straight, little mouth become a smile.

  Where had she come from? Had he met her at that party last night? Had he. . .well if he had she would probably tell him sooner or later.

  Damn that party! He had woken that morning on a train with the girl's head resting against his shoulder, and his hand full of broken glass. Probably crushed a pint glass with his bare hand for a dare. He had bandaged it as best he could, and picked out the pieces. Nonetheless, his palm twinged sometimes, as if tiny shards had escaped his notice, had burrowed deep beneath his skin and remained within him.

  With his uninjured hand, he gave the girl's palm a squeeze. She looked up to meet his gaze with something akin to a smile.

  Ticket's eyes were blue-violet and blinding. Reflected in them he saw no trace of the grub-grey heaven that ceilinged his world. He saw wide mauve skies freckled with the flight of birds, and seas of corn and grass, down-grey in the dusk.

  THE BIBLE REPAIRMAN

  Tim Powers

  Tim Power's first novels, The Skies Discrowned and Epitaph in Rust, appeared in 1976, but his first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark in 1979. It was followed by The Anubis Gates, Dinner at Deviant's Palace, The Stress of Her Regard, Last Call, Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, and supernatural ''secret history'' Declare. His most recent books are collection Strange Itineraries and novel Three Days to Never.

  This subtle tale of loss, sin, and sacrifice, where everything comes at a cost, is Powers at his best.

  "It'll do to kiss the book on still, won't it?" growled Dick, who was evidently uneasy at the curse he had brought on himself.

  "A Bible with a bit cut out!" returned Silver derisively. "Not it. It don't bind no more'n a ballad-book."

  "Don't it, though?" cried Dick, with a sort of joy. "Well I reckon that's worth having, too."

  —Treasure Island,

  by Robert Louis Stevenson

  Across the highway was old Humberto, a dark spot against the tan field between the railroad tracks and the freeway fence, pushing a stripped-down shopping cart along the cracked sidewalk. His shadow still stretched halfway to the center-divider line in the early morning sunlight, but he was apparently already very drunk, and he was using the shopping cart as a walker, bracing his weight on it as he shuffled along. Probably he never slept at all, not that he was ever really awake either.

  Humberto had done a lot of work in his time, and the people he talked and gestured to were, at best, long gone and probably existed now only in his cannibalized memory—but this morning as Torrez watched him the old man clearly looked across the street straight at Torrez and waved. He was just a silhouette against the bright eastern daylight—his camouflage pants, white beard and Daniel Boone coonskin cap were all one raggedly backlit outline—but he might have been smiling too.

  After a moment's hesitation Torrez waved and nodded. Torrez was not drunk in the morning, nor unable to walk without leaning on something, nor surrounded by imaginary acquaintances, and he meant to sustain those differences between them—but he supposed that he and Humberto were brothers in the trades, and he should show some respect to a player who simply had not known when to retire.

  Torrez pocketed his Camels and his change and turned his back on the old man, and trudged across the parking lot toward the path that led across a weedy field to home.

  He was retired, at least from the big-stakes dives. Nowadays he just waded a little ways out—he worked on cars and Bibles and second-hand eyeglasses and clothes people bought at thrift stores, and half of that work was just convincing the customers that work had been done. He always had to use holy water—real holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne's—but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet. Still, it was better to err on the side of thoroughness.

  His garage door was open, and several goats stood up with their hoofs on the fence rail of the lot next door. Torrez paused to pull up some of the tall, furry, sagelike weeds that sprang up in every stretch of unattended dirt in the county, and he held them out and let the goats chew them up. Sometimes when customers arrived at times like this, Torrez would whisper to the goats and then pause and nod.

  Torrez's Toyota stood at the curb because a white Dodge Dart was parked in the driveway. Torrez had already installed a "pain button" on the Dodge's dashboard, so that when the car wouldn't start, the owner could give the car a couple of jabs—Oh yeah? How do you like this, eh? On the other side of the firewall the button was connected to a wire that was screwed to the carburetor housing; nonsense, but the stuff had to look convincing.

  Torrez had also used a can of Staples compressed air and a couple of magnets to try to draw a babbling ghost out of the car's stereo system, and this had not been nonsense—if he had properly opposed the magnets to the magnets in the speakers, and got the Bernoulli effect with the compressed air sprayed over the speaker diaphragm, then at speeds over forty there would no longer be a droning imbecile monologue faintly going on behind whatever music was playing. Torrez would take the Dodge out onto the freeway today, assuming the old car would get up to freeway speeds, and try it out driving north, east, south and west. Two hundred dollars if the voice was gone, and a hundred in any case for the pain button.

  And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece—just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn't have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked
to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus's promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.

  He pushed open the front door of the house—he never locked it—and made his way to the kitchen to get a beer out of the cold spot in the sink. The light was blinking on the telephone answering machine, and when he had popped the can of Budweiser he pushed the play button.

  "Give Mr. Torrez this message," said a recorded voice. "Write down the number I give you! It is important, make sure he gets it!" The voice recited a number then, and Torrez wrote it down. His answering machine had come with a pre-recorded message on it in a woman's voice—No one is available to take your call right now—and many callers assumed the voice was that of a woman he was living with. Apparently she sounded unreliable, for they often insisted several times that she convey their messages to him.

  He punched in the number, and a few moments later a man at the other end of the line was saying to him, "Mr. Torrez? We need your help, like you helped out the Fotas four years ago. Our daughter was stolen, and now we've got a ransom note—she was in a coffee pot with roses tied around it—"

  "I don't do that work anymore," Torrez interrupted, "I'm sorry. Mr. Seaweed in Corona still does—he's younger—I could give you his number."

  "I called him already a week ago, but then I heard you were back in business. You're better than Seaweed—"

  Poor old Humberto had kept on doing deep dives. Torrez had done them longer than he should have, and nowadays couldn't understand a lot of the books he had loved when he'd been younger.

  "I'm not back in that business," he said. "I'm very sorry." He hung up the phone.

  He had not even done the ransom negotiations when it had been his own daughter that had been stolen, three years ago—and his wife had left him over it, not understanding that she would probably have had to be changing her mentally retarded husband's diapers forever afterward if he had done it.

  Torrez's daughter Amelia had died at the age of eight, of a fever. Her grave was in the dirt lot behind the Catholic cemetery, and on most Sundays Torrez and his wife had visited the grave and made sure there were lots of little stuffed animals and silver foil pinwheels arranged on the dirt, and for a marker they had set into the ground a black plastic box with a clear top, with her death-certificate displayed in it to show that she had died in a hospital. And her soul had surely gone to Heaven, but they had caught her ghost to keep it from wandering in the noisy cold half-world, and Torrez had bound it into one of Amelia's cloth dolls. Every Sunday night they had put candy and cigarettes and a shot-glass of rum in front of the doll—hardly appropriate fare for a little girl, but ghosts were somehow all the same age. Torrez had always lit the cigarettes and stubbed them out before laying them in front of the doll, and bitten the candies: ghosts needed somebody to have started such things for them.

  And then one day the house had been broken into, and the little shrine and the doll were gone, replaced with a ransom note: If you want your daughter's ghost back, Mr. Torrez, give me some of your blood. And there had been a phone number.

  Usually these ransom notes asked the recipient to get a specific tattoo that corresponded to a tattoo on the kidnapper's body—and afterward whichever family member complied would have lost a lot of memories, and be unable to feel affection, and never again dream at night. The kidnapper would have taken those things. But a kidnapper would always settle instead for the blood of a person whose soul was broken in the way that Torrez's was, and so the robbed families would often come to Torrez and offer him a lot of money to step in and give up some of his blood, and save them the fearful obligation of the vampiric tattoo.

  Sometimes the kidnapper was the divorced father or mother of the ghost—courts never considered custody of a dead child—or a suitor who had been rejected long before, and in these cases there would be no ransom demand; but then it had sometimes been possible for Torrez to trace the thief and steal the ghost back, in whatever pot or box or liquor bottle it had been confined in.

  But in most cases he had had to go through with the deal, meet the kidnapper somewhere and give up a cupful or so of blood to retrieve the stolen ghost; and each time, along with the blood, he had lost a piece of his soul.

  The phone began ringing again as Torrez tipped up the can for the last sip of beer; he ignored it.

  Ten years ago it had been an abstract consideration—when he had thought about it at all, he had supposed that he could lose a lot of his soul without missing it, and he'd told himself that his soul was bound for Hell anyway, since he had deliberately broken it when he was eighteen, and so dispersing it had just seemed like hiding money from the IRS. But by the time he was thirty-five his hair had gone white and he had lost most of the sight in his left eye because of ruptured blood-vessels behind the retina, and he could no longer understand the plots of long novels he tried to read. Apparently some sort of physical and mental integrity was lost too, along with the blood and the bits of his hypothetical soul.

  But what the kidnappers wanted from Torrez's blood was not vicarious integrity—it was nearly the opposite. Torrez thought of it as spiritual botox.

  The men and women who stole ghosts for ransom were generally mediums, fortune-tellers, psychics—always clairvoyant. And even more than the escape that could be got from extorted dreams and memories and the ability to feel affection, they needed to be able to selectively blunt the psychic noise of humans living and dead.

  Torrez imagined it as a hundred radios going at once all the time, and half the announcers moronically drunk—crying, giggling, trying to start fights.

  He would never know. He had broken all the antennae in his own soul when he was eighteen, by killing a man who attacked him in a parking lot with a knife one midnight. Torrez had wrestled the knife away from the drunken assailant and had knocked the man unconscious by slamming his head into the bumper of a car—but then Torrez had picked up the man's knife and, just because he could, had driven it into the unconscious man's chest. The District Attorney had eventually called it self-defense, a justifiable homicide, and no charges were brought against Torrez, but his soul was broken.

  The answering machine clicked on, but only the dial tone followed the recorded message. Torrez dropped the Budweiser can into the trash basket and walked into the living room, which over the years had become his workshop.

  Murder seemed to be the crime that broke souls most effectively, and Torrez had done his first ghost-ransom job for free that same year, in 1983, just to see if his soul was now a source of the temporary disconnection-from-humanity that the psychics valued so highly. And he had tested out fine.

  He had been doing Bible repair for twenty years, but his reputation in that cottage industry had been made only a couple of years ago, by accident. Three Jehovah's Witnesses had come to his door one summer day, wearing suits and ties, and he had stepped outside to debate scripture with them. "Let me see your Bible," he had said, "and I'll show you right in there why you're wrong," and when they handed him the book he had flipped to the first chapter of John's gospel and started reading. This was after his vision had begun to go bad, though, and he'd had to read it with a magnifying glass, and it had been a sunny day—and he had inadvertently set their Bible on fire. They had left hurriedly, and apparently told everyone in the neighborhood that Torrez could burn a Bible just by touching it.

  * * *

  He was bracing a tattered old Bible in the frame on the marble-topped table, ready to scorch out St. Paul's adverse remarks about homosexuality for a customer, when he heard three knocks at his front door, the first one loud and the next two just glancing scuffs, and he realized he had not closed the door and the knocks had pushed it open. He made sure his woodburning stylus was lying in the ashtray, then hurried to the entry ha
ll.

  Framed in the bright doorway was a short stocky man with a moustache, holding a shoe-box and shifting from one foot to the other.

  "Mr. Torrez," the man said. He smiled, and a moment later looked as if he'd never smile again. He waved the shoe-box toward Torrez and said, "A man has stolen my daughter."

  Perhaps the shoe-box was the shrine he had kept his daughter's ghost in, in some jelly jar or perfume bottle. Probably there were ribbons and candy hearts around the empty space where the daughter's ghost-container had lain. Still, a shoe-box was a pretty nondescript shrine; but maybe it was just for traveling, like a cat-carrier box.

  "I just called," the man said, "and got your woman. I hoped she was wrong, and you were here."

  "I don't do that work anymore," said Torrez patiently, "ransoming ghosts. You want to call Seaweed in Corona."

  "I don't want you to ransom a ghost," the man said, holding the box toward Torrez. "I already had old Humberto do that, yesterday. This is for you."

  "If Humberto ransomed your daughter," Torrez said carefully, nodding toward the box but not taking it, "then why are you here?"

  "My daughter is not a ghost. My daughter is twelve years old, and this man took her when she was walking home from school. I can pay you fifteen hundred dollars to get her back—this is extra, a gift for you, from me, with the help of Humberto."

  Torrez had stepped back. "Your daughter was kidnapped? Alive? Good God, man, call the police right now! The FBI! You don't come to me with—"

  "The police would not take the ransom note seriously," the man said, shaking his head. "They would think he wants money really, they would not think of his terms being sincerely meant, as he wrote them!" He took a deep breath and let it out. "Here," he said, extending the box again.