The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?” She went back to him and pounded on his chest, her face twisted with anger and frustration. “You’re going to get us killed … just standing here.”

  Although the blows hurt, he let her beat on him, ashamed of his fear and incapacity. Even when he saw Nacho turn the corner, at his back a group of marañeros armed with machetes, he was unable to take a step away from the place where he had hidden from memories and pain and life itself for all these years.

  Expectacion, too, had begun to cry. “You really blew it, Papá! We had a chance, you and me.” She went a few faltering steps toward the highway. “Damn you!” she said. “Damn you!” Then, with her arms pumping, she fled along the street.

  In the other direction, Nacho was limping forward, holding his back with one hand, pointing at Arce with the other, while at his rear, like a squad of drunken soldiers, the marañeros whooped and brandished their machetes. Arce drew his knife, determined to make a final stand.

  At that moment, however, torrents of spores and insects and serpents and unidentifiable scraps of life exploded from the windows and the door of the hotel, making it appear that the building had been filled to bursting with black fluid. A whirling cloud formed between Nacho and Arce. At its core, Arce thought he spotted a shadow, an indistinct manlike shape with glowing eyes, but before he could be certain of it, the edge of the cloud frayed and streams of insects raced toward him and stung his face and neck and arms.

  Blinded, he staggered this way and that, harrowed by the insects, and then he ran and ran, the dark cloud sending forth rivers of tormenting winged things to keep him on his course. As he passed through the outskirts of town, a white pickup rocketed out of a side street and swerved to the side, barely missing him, coming to a rest against a light pole. Through the windshield, he made out Expectacion’s startled face. Without thinking, desperate to escape the insects, he flung himself into the truck, began rolling up the window and shouted at her to drive. She gunned the engine and, pursued by the swarm, they fishtailed out onto the highway.

  * * *

  They drove into the hills with the sky reddening at their backs, and after experiencing a flurry of panic on recognizing the course that had been chosen for him, it seemed to Arce that with every mile—in a process of self-realization exactly contrary to Mr. Akashini’s—he was shedding a coating of fear and habit and distorted view, as if a shell were breaking away from some more considered inner man. Not the man he had been but the man he had become without knowing it, tempered by years of solitary endeavor. He felt strong, directed, full of youthful enthusiasms.

  He would go to the capital, he decided, not to inhabit the past but to build a future, to make of it a temple that would honor the eccentric brotherhood that existed between himself and Mr. Akashini, a brotherhood that he had not embraced, that he could not have acknowledged or understood before, that he did not wholly understand now, but whose consummation had filled him with the steel of purpose and the fire of intent. He realized that they were both men who had lost themselves, Mr. Akashini to the persuasions of arrogance and wealth, himself to the deprivations of pain and despair, and how because of the fortuitous propinquity of a peculiar ambition and a woman of energy and strength and a magical jungle, he at least had been afforded the opportunity to move on.

  He could not take any such pleasure, however, in Mr. Akashini’s death, and when he looked at Expectacion, the lines of her face aglow with pink light, when he felt the tenderness she had begun to rouse in him and saw the challenge she presented, the potential for poignant emotion, for grief and joy and love, those vital flavors he had rejected for so long, the prospect of an adventure with her was dimmed by regret that he had been unable to do more than speed Mr. Akashini to his end.

  It wasn’t fair, he thought.

  He had done little, risked little, and yet he had won through to something real, whereas Mr. Akashini had only suffered and died among strangers far from home. This inequity caused Arce to think that perhaps he had won nothing, to wonder if everything he felt was the product of delusion. But as they climbed high into the hills, on glancing back toward Santander Jimenez, he saw there a sight that seemed to memorialize all that had happened: Trillions of insects and spores and things unnamable were spiraling above the miserable little town, a towering blackness that—despite a blustery wind—maintained its basic form, at one moment appearing to be the shadow of a great curved sword poised to deliver a sundering blow and at the next, a column of ashes climbing to heaven against the crimson pyre of the rising sun.

  MOLLY GLOSS

  Personal Silence

  Molly Gloss was born in Portland, Oregon, and lives there still with her family. She made her first sale in 1984, and since has sold several stories to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, and elsewhere. She published a fantasy novel, Outside the Gates, in 1986, and another novel, The Jump-Off Creek, a non–SF “woman’s western,” was released in 1990. She is currently at work on a new novel, this one science fiction. Her story “Interlocking Pieces” was in our Second Annual Collection.

  Here she gives us a thoughtful and thought-provoking study of one man’s personal commitment to his ideals, in the face of overwhelming odds, and how that commitment, without a word being spoken, can reach out to touch other lives and alter them forever.…

  Personal Silence

  MOLLY GLOSS

  There was a little finger of land, a peninsula, that stuck up from the corner of Washington State pointing straight north at Vancouver Island. On the state map it was small enough it had no name. Jay found an old Clallam County map in a used bookstore in Olympia and on the county map the name was printed the long way, marching northward up the finger’s reach: Naniamuk. There was a clear bubble near the tip, like a fingernail, and that was named too: Mizzle. He liked the way the finger pointed at Vancouver Island. Now he liked the name the town had. He bought a chart of the strait between Mizzle and Port Renfrew and a used book on small boat building and when he left Olympia he went up the county roads to Naniamuk and followed the peninsula’s one paved road all the way out to its dead end at Mizzle.

  It was a three-week walk. His leg had been broken and badly healed a couple of years ago when he had been arrested in Colombia. He could walk long-strided, leaning into the straps of the pack, arms pumping loosely, hands unfisted, and he imagined anyone watching him would have had a hard time telling, but if he did more than eight or ten miles in a day he got gimpy and that led to blisters. So he had learned not to push it. He camped in a logged-over state park one night, bummed a couple of nights in barns and garages, slept other nights just off the road, in whatever grass and stunted trees grew at the edge of the right-of-way.

  The last day, halfway along the Naniamuk peninsula, he left the road and hiked west to the beach, through the low pines and grassy dunes and coils of rusted razorwire, and set his tent on the sand at the edge of the grass. It was a featureless beach, wide and flat, stretching toward no visible headlands. There were few driftlogs, and at the tide line just broken clamshells, dead kelp, garbage, wreckage. No tidepools, no offshore stacks, no agates. The surf broke far out and got muddy as it rolled in. When the sun went down behind the overcast, the brown combers blackened and vanished without luminescence.

  The daylight that rose up slowly the next morning was gray and damp, standing at the edge of rain. He wore his rubber-bottom shoes tramping in the wet grass along the edge of the road to Mizzle. The peninsula put him in mind of the mid-coast of Chile, the valleys between Talca and Puerto Montt—flat and low-lying, the rain-beaten grass pocked with little lakes and bogs. There was not the great poverty of the Chilean valleys, but if there had been prosperity up here once, it was gone. The big beachfront houses were boarded up, empty. The rich had moved in from the coasts. Houses still lived in were dwarfish, clinker-built, with small windows oddly placed. People were growing cran
berries in the bogs and raising bunches of blond, stupid-faced cattle on the wet pasturage.

  At the town limit of Mizzle a big, quaintly painted signboard stood up beside the road. WELCOME TO MIZZLE! MOST WESTERLY TOWN IN THE CONTIGUOUS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! Jay stood at the shoulder of the road and sketched the sign in his notebook for its odd phrasing, its fanciful enthusiasm.

  The town was more than he had thought, and less. There had been three or four motels—one still ran a neon vacancy sign. An RV park had a couple of trailers standing in it. The downtown was a short row of gift shops and ice cream stores, mostly boarded shut. There was a town park—a square of unmown lawn with an unpainted gazebo set on it. Tourists had got here ahead of him and had gone again.

  He walked out to where the road dead-ended at the tip of the peninsula. It was unmarked, unexceptional. The paving petered out and a graveled road kept on a little way through weeds and hillocks of dirt. Where the graveled road ended, people had been dumping garbage. He stood up on one of the hillocks and looked to the land’s end across the dump. There was no beach, just a strip of tidal mud. The salt water of the strait lay flat and gray as sheet metal. The crossing was forty-three nautical miles—there was no seeing Vancouver Island.

  He went back along the road through the downtown, looking up the short cross-streets for the truer town: the hardware store, the grocery, the lumber yard. An AG market had a computerized checkout that was broken, perhaps had been broken for months or years—a clunky mechanical cash register sat on top of the scanner, and a long list of out-of-stock goods was taped across the LED display.

  Jay bought a carton of cottage cheese and stood outside eating it with the spoon that folded out of his Swiss army knife. He read from a free tourist leaflet that had been stacked up in a wire rack at the front of the store. The paper of the top copy was yellowed, puckered. On the first inside page was a peninsula map of grand scale naming all the shallow lakes, the graveled roads, the minor capes and inlets. There was a key of symbols: bird scratchings were the nesting grounds of the snowy plover, squiggly ovoids were privately held oyster beds, a stylized anchor marked a public boat launch and a private anchorage on the eastern, the protected shoreline. Offshore there, on the white paper of the strait, stood a nonspecific fish, a crab, a gaff-rigged daysailer, and off the oceanside, a long-necked razor clam and a kite. He could guess the boat launch was shut down: recreational boating and fishing had been banned in the strait and in Puget Sound for years. There was little likelihood any oysters had been grown in a while, nor kites flown, clams dug.

  Bud’s Country Store sold bathtubs and plastic pipe, clamming guns, Coleman lanterns, two-by-fours and plywood, marine supplies, tea pots, towels, rubber boots. What they didn’t have they would order, though it was understood delivery might be uncertain. He bought a weekly paper printed seventy miles away in Port Angeles, a day-old copy of the Seattle daily, and a canister of butane, and walked up the road again to the trailer park. Four Pines RV Village was painted on a driftwood log mounted high on posts to make a gateway. If there had been pines, they’d been cut down. Behind the arch was a weedy lawn striped with whitish oyster-shell driveways. Stubby posts held out electrical outlets, water couplings, waste water hoses. Some of them were dismantled. There was a gunite building with two steamed-up windows: a shower house, maybe, or a laundromat, or both. The trailer next to the building was a single-wide with a tip-out and a roofed wooden porch. Office was painted on the front of it in a black childish print across the fiberglass. There was one other trailer parked along the fence, somebody’s permanent home, an old round-back with its tires hidden behind rusted aluminum skirting.

  Jay dug out a form letter and held it against his notebook while he wrote across the bottom, “I’d just like to pitch a tent, stay out of your way, and pay when I use the shower. Thanks.” He looked at what he had written, added exclamation points, went up to the porch and knocked, waiting awkwardly with the letter in his hand. The girl who opened the door was thin and pale; she had a small face, small features. She looked at him without looking in his eyes. Maybe she was eleven or twelve years old.

  He smiled. This was always a moment he hated, doubly so if it was a child—he would need to do it twice. He held out the letter, held out his smile with it. Her eyes jumped to his face and then back to the letter with a look that was difficult to pin down—confusion or astonishment, and then something like preoccupation, as if she had lost sight of him standing there. It was common to get a quick shake of the head, a closed door. He didn’t know what the girl’s look meant. He kept smiling gently. Several women at different times had told him he had a sweet smile. That was the word they all had used—“sweet.” He usually tried to imagine they meant peaceable, without threat.

  After a difficult silence, the girl may have remembered him standing there. She finally put out her hand for the letter. He hated waiting while she read it. He looked across the trailer park to a straggly line of scotch broom on the other side of the fence. In a minute she held out the paper to him again without looking in his face. “You have to ask my dad.” Her voice was small, low.

  He didn’t take the letter back yet. He raised his eyebrows in a questioning way. Often it was easier from this point. She would be watching him for those kinds of nonverbal language. He was “keeping a personal silence,” he had written in the letter.

  “Over in the shower house,” she said. She had fine brown hair that hung straight down to her shoulders, and straight bangs she hid behind. Jay glanced toward the gunite building with deliberate, self-conscious hesitation, then made a helpless gesture. The girl may have looked at him from behind her scrim of bangs. “I can ask him,” she said, murmuring.

  Her little rump was flat, in corduroy pants too big for her. She had kept his letter, and she swung it fluttering in her hand as he followed her to the shower house. A man knelt on the concrete floor, hunched up at the foot of the hot water tank. His pants rode low, baring some of the shallow crack of his buttocks. He looked tall, heavy-boned, though there wasn’t much weight on him now, if there ever had been.

  “Dad,” the girl said.

  He had pulled apart the thick fiberglass blanket around the heater to get at the thermostat. His head was shoved inside big loose wings of the blanketing. “What,” he said, without bringing his head out.

  “He wants to put up a tent,” she said. “Here, read this.” She shook Jay’s letter.

  He rocked back on his hips and his heels and rubbed his scalp with a big hand. There were bits of fiberglass, like mica chips, in his hair. “Shit,” he said loudly, addressing the hot water heater. Then he stood slowly, hitching up his pants above the crack. He was very tall, six and a half feet or better, bony-faced. He looked at the girl. “What,” he said.

  She pushed the letter at him silently. Jay smiled, made a slight, apologetic grimace when the man’s eyes finally came around to him. It was always a hard thing trying to tell by people’s faces whether they’d help him out or not. This one looked him over briefly, silently, then took the letter and looked at it without much attention. He kept picking fiberglass out of his hair and his skin, and afterward looking under his fingernails for traces of it. “I read about this in Time,” he said at one point, but it was just recognition, not approval, and he didn’t look at Jay when he said it. He kept reading the letter and scrubbing at the bits of fiberglass. It wasn’t clear if he had spoken to Jay or to the girl.

  Finally he looked at Jay. “You’re walking around the world, huh.” It evidently wasn’t a question, so Jay stood there and waited. “I don’t see what good will come of it—except after you’re killed you might get on the night news.” He had a look at his mouth, smugness, or bitterness. Jay smiled again, shrugging.

  The man looked at him. Finally he said, “You know anything about water heaters? If you can fix it, I’d let you have a couple of dollars for the shower meter. Yes? No?”

  Jay looked at the heater. It was propane-fired. He shook his head, tried
to look apologetic. It wasn’t quite a lie. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the day fiddling with it for one hot shower.

  “Shit,” the man said mildly. He hitched at his pants with the knuckles of both hands. Jay’s letter was still in one fist and he looked down at it inattentively when the paper made a faint crackly noise against his hip. “Here,” he said, holding the sheet out. Jay had fifty or sixty clean copies of it in a plastic ziplock in his backpack. He went through a lot of them when he was on the move. He took the rumpled piece of paper, folded it, pushed it down in a front pocket.

  “I had bums come in after dark and use my water,” the man said. He waited as if that was something Jay might want to respond to. Jay waited too.

  “Well, keep off to the edge by the fence,” the man warned him. “You can put up a tent for free, I guess, it’s not like we’re crowded, but leave the trailer spaces clear anyway. I got locks on the utilities now, so you pay me if you want water, or need to take a crap, and don’t take one in the bushes or I’ll have to kick you out of here.”

  Jay nodded. He stuck out his hand and after a very brief moment the man shook it. The man’s hand was prickly, damp.

  “You show him, Mare,” he said to the girl. He tapped her shoulder with his fingertips lightly, but his eyes were on Jay.

  Jay followed the young girl, Mare, across the trailer park, across the wet grass and broken-shell driveways to a low fence of two-by-fours and wire that marked the property line. The grass was mowed beside the fence but left to sprout in clumps along the wire and around the wooden uprights. There was not much space between the fence and the last row of driveways. If anybody ever parked a motor home in the driveway behind him, he’d have the exhaust pipe in his vestibule. The girl put her hands in her corduroy pockets and stubbed the grass with the toe of her shoe. “Here?” she asked him. He nodded and swung his pack down onto the grass.