The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I guess you’re thinking that there might not be a story here,” says The Man Who. “Least not the story you had in mind.”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that,” says the journalist quickly. He’s not sure if he hasn’t detected a note of sarcasm in the voice of The Man Who by now. “I’m sure we can work something up.”

  “Work something up,” parrots The Man Who. The Mother Of has his shorts down now, and she’s swabbing at his damp flank with a paper towel. The Man Who sets his mouth in a grim smile and trudges forward. He’s not here, really. He’s out on Io, making tracks. He’s going to be in the Guiness Book of World Records.

  The journalist sets the microphone back down in the dust and packs his bag. As he walks the scrubby driveway back to the street he hears The Man Who Is Walking Around The Moons Of Jupiter, inside the garage, coughing on cigarette fumes.

  IAN McDONALD

  Rainmaker Cometh

  British author Ian McDonald is not exactly a new writer anymore, but you probably haven’t heard as much about him yet as you’re going to hear in the next few years, as he is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. His other books include a novel, Out on Blue Six, and a collection of his short fiction, Empire Dreams. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

  Here—in a story with a kind of vivid imagery and cadenced verbal lyricism rarely matched in this field since the early days of Ray Bradbury—he paints an evocative and unforgettable portrait of a small Southwestern town caught uneasily on the grinding edge between wonder and despair.…

  Rainmaker Cometh

  IAN McDONALD

  Seven dry years lie like seven white scars scrawled across the shoulders of the dying town. On the downhill side long years before ever the rains failed, it crouches in the desert, a tangle of tracks and trailways and transcontinentals; always on the way to somewhere else. Only in the heat of the night does it uncurl to bare the neon tattoos along its belly: the bus depot, the motel, the barbershop, the gas-station; sweating, shocking blues and pinks you can feel hot on your face. Down at the end of the bar, where the dreams collect thickest because no one ever goes there to dust them away, Kelly By the Window watches neon fingers stroking the flanks of the Greyhounds and Trailways; people change direction here like they change their shorts. Blue Highways; abandoned luncheonettes; all she will ever see of the refuge of the roads is the reflection of her face in the eldorado bus windows, slipping past, out there lost in the heart of Saturday night. Up on the roof Desert Rose announces the best hot dogs in town in blushing cerises and ’lectric blues you can read all the way out at Havapai Point. And it’s true, as long as you understand that “best” means “only”. She’s smiling. She’s always smiling. She makes the law, you see. Graven into every sixty-watt rhinestone on her boots. Nobody gets off who doesn’t get on again.

  If he likes the tilt of your hat or the color of your luggage, if the smell of the cologne you’ve splashed on in the washroom reminds him of all those Oldsmobile days hung up with his jacket on the peg by the door, Sam My Man will solicit you with his magic never-ending cup of coffee. He’s a dealer in biography, paid for by the minute, the hour, however long it takes until the driver calls you on into the night. Sam My Man has whole lifetimes racked away under the bar where he keeps the empty bottles. He can tell a good vintage just by looking: given the choice between the kid in tractor hat, knee-high tubes and cut-off Tee-shirt, the bus-lagged pair of English Camp-Americas propping their eyelids open with their backpacks and coffee the strength of bitumen, and the old man with the precise half-inch of white beard and the leather bag like no one’s carried since the tornado whisked Professor Marvel off to the Emerald City, Kelly By the Window knows which one he’ll solicit with his little fill-’er-ups of complimentary coffee.

  Sam My Man always leaves the airco off. He claims it makes the chili dogs taste better, but Kelly By the Window knows that he does it because someone’s bound to comment that it’s hot as the proverbial, and that’s his cue. “It’s the drought,” he’ll say. “Rained everywhere else, but never here. You believe a town can be cursed?” Never failed yet.

  “I surely could,” says this old man. “Just how long is it since it last rained here?”

  “Seven years,” says Kelly By the Window. The last drop fell two days after her eleventh birthday.

  “You headed anyplace special?” asks Sam My Man, all chummy and pally-wally, like he’s known this old man years not seconds. He’s good, you got to give him that. Someone should have made him a lawyer long ago. Or a chat-show host.

  “Had planned on heading up north, over the dam, got a woman and a boy I want to see,” says this old man, “But then again, I may just stay around a couple of days or so. I think you may have need of my services.” He puts his bag on the counter, the Professor Marvel etc. etc., and something about it, something no one can ever call by name, makes Sam My Man step back; just a little. Even Kelly By the Window feels the something brush the fine downy hair along her spine. He opens the bag, takes out a thing that looks a little like a lightning rod and a little like a satellite dish and a little like a piece of Gothic wrought iron and not a whole lot like any. Afterwards, Sam My Man will swear by all the saints in Guadeloupe Cathedral he saw blue lightning running up and down the shaft, but Sam My Man, he’s never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

  “You want it to rain?” says the old man. “I can make it rain. I’ll bring the Rainmaker, if it’s what you really want.”

  And all those questions that have to be asked are stopped, suspended, because out of the night come six wheels and big blue silver: seventy more souls on the way from somewhere, to somewhere. Wiping night-sweat from his brow on the sleeve of his jacket, the driver is shouting: “Thirty minutes refreshment stop!” Better get hopping, Sam My Man. Get that coffee brewing. Time to stop dreaming and get on the beam, Kelly By the Window. There’s eggs to fry.

  Beyond the Blood of Christ Mountains rumors of dawn threaten Desert Rose’s sovereignty of the night, but she’s still smiling. She who makes the law is she who breaks the law, on those nights when the stars are low and close and intimate and the wind smells of something best forgotten before it leaves a scar of the heart, when her flashing golden rope may lasso a stranger.

  * * *

  You brothers of the blacktop, you sisters of the all-nite diners, think, you refugees of the highways; think, have you seen him before, this old man-of-the-rain with his Professor Marvel bag and his precise half-inch of beard? Think, did you meet him, on a hard plastic chair in the comer of some three a.m. Burger King, rattling a chocolate machine in a bus station, by the hot-air hand drier in the gents toilet, wrestling with that one problem key in a wall of left-luggage lockers? Did you glimpse him over the top of your foam-styrene coffee cup, your copy of Newsweek? What did you think? Did you think nothing of him, just another life briefly parallelling your own, or did he intrigue you enough for you to abandon your attempts to sleep in the coffin-straight seats of a Greyhound or Trailway and let yourself be bound by the social compact of night-talk; in those wee wee hours did he open his Professor Marvel bag and show you the things inside running with blue lightning, did he tell you that he could bring the rain? Did he tell you he was the Herald of the Rainmaker? Did you believe him? Did you say, “Crazy old man, lying old man, head full of crazy notions.” Or did you think of those times, those places, when the sky was blue as a razor, did you remember how it felt when your prayers were answered and out of nowhere the clouds gathered, at first only a shadow on the horizon, then a patch the size of a man’s hand,
then a great anvil of darkness bearing down on your town. Then as the sky turned black from horizon to horizon, how you went into your garden and turned off your lawn sprinklers because this time you knew it really was going to rain … Did you lift up your eyes to the sky and whisper the word Rainmaker to yourself, did you turn it over and over on your tongue until every last drop of cool mystery was drawn out of it: Rainmaker …

  Last person to actually spend a night at Wanda’s Motel was a location scout for a Levis ad. Anticipating coke-snorting directors and overmuscled men in startlingly white boxer shorts, Wanda built a cocktail bar and installed cable TV in all her “deluxe” chalets. Joes-on-the-go in the “economy” rooms had to provide their own entertainment but then that’s the whole idea, isn’t it? Films crews chose a Jimmy Dean gas station at the end of an air force bombing range two hundred miles away. The bar’s still popular but the only one who watches the cable is Wanda. She feels she has to justify the expense. She gets all the soaps.

  She’s not too sure about this one. It’s not him. It’s the things he carries in that bag of his. She sees them when she valets the room; weird things, odd things, not proper things. Things that don’t look like things in themselves but bits of other things stuck together. Things that don’t do anything, that are just for the sake of being things. She hasn’t a clue what he does with the things, but folk coming in for the odd cocktail say he’s been all around the town, holding those things of his up to his eye and pointing them at his feet, the sun, the Blood of Christ Mountains. Some say they’ve heard them make funny whining noises. Others say they’ve seen little gray numbers flashing up on them.

  Sounds to Wanda like the location scout all over again. She’s hoping she isn’t going to miss out this time on the overmuscled men in the startlingly white boxer shorts. Then the stories come back about things even weirder, things like television aerials stuck into the ground all around the town, things like luminous kites flying in the dead of night, things like a cross between a boom-box and a very large cockroach left by the side of the road or clamped to a hoarding with a G-clamp, and she knows things can’t go on like this any more.

  “What are they for?” (With all the incredulity of a man who’s been asked what a video remote control is for, or the little lamp in a refrigerator.) “Why, they’re my surveying equipment. I have to do a thorough geomantic survey of the location before Rainmaker can commit itself. Upper mantle standing wave diffraction patterns, earth, water and wind octaves, geomantic flux line nodes and anomalies: there’s an awful lot I have to do and not much time to do it in. Can’t read the flux density without this one here, the octave interface analyser. That one there, like the tripod with the black shutters on the top, that’s the node localiser. Without that, I might as well pack up and go home. It’s tough work. Fiddly, pernickety. You got to be inch perfect Any chance of a beer?”

  The location scout’s beginning to look mighty good again to Wanda.

  * * *

  Again: that word: Rainmaker. Try it out for size on your tongue, does it sit easy in your imagination? No? Then tell me: what do you think of when you hear that word: “Rainmaker?” Is it Tyrone Power in a bible-black hat? Is it a squadron of cloud-storming biplanes flown by leather-cat-suited blondes? Is it the ghost-dancing feet of your forefathers; is it something altogether more arcane and wonderful, some steam-driven wonder-worker all whirling vanes and blarting trumpet-mouths? If so, then think again. Rainmaker; the Rainmaker, is not a person, or a thing. Rainmaker is a place. A city.

  How it came to be cast loose upon the sky, this city-state of two hundred souls, is a mystery. As with most mysteries, hypotheses abound: as in form it most resembles a tremendous kite (or then again, an aerial manta ray, or then again a great glass ornament, or then again …) it seems reasonable to assume it was launched into the air by some means; though the imagination balks at envisioning the kind of tug necessary to launch a glider one mile across. But a second image haunts you, of a city of soaring glass needles atop which the citizens have built graceful, winged habitats that hum and sway, like reed-grass, in the jetstream, and it is not hard for you to imagine how one such building might, in its pride to outreach all the others, grow so fine, so slender as to one day sever its connection with the earth altogether and cast itself out upon the sky.

  * * *

  The Bureau of Endangered Indigenes has granted Chief Blumberg, last of the Nohopés, a reservation the exact size of one rocking chair on the barbershop porch. Any time of day you will find him there, snapping the necks off beer bottles under one of the chair rockers, but on those nights when the first stars shine like notes from a National guitar, he is especially present. On those nights when the air smells of burnt dust and used-up time, he and his cat, midnight Mineloushe, sit watching the meteors that come down way beyond the Blood of Christ Mountains.

  No one, not even Sheriff Middleton, knows what he does. It looks suspiciously close to nothing, but Chief Blumberg has the most important job in town. He prays for the town. Never despise the contemplative, the intercessor. You don’t know how much worse things would be without him. Town may be a long time throwing the dirt over itself, but while one soul remains to remember it to the Spirit in the Sky, it will not slip forgotten from the mind of God.

  Some men when they meet have no need to speak. Some men, when they meet, know that they can better communicate by silence. St. Dominic crossed the Appenines on foot to visit Francis of Assisi and neither spoke a single word throughout the entire meeting.

  Chief Blumberg rocks and rolls in his portable reservation. The man who has come to meet him sits on a bench just below the barbershop window. The cat’s Mineloushe-eyes shine with the light of meteors. Behind them, another Burma Shave lathers up while the radio announces fatstock prices.

  Had St. Francis offered St. Dominic a bottle of beer neatly decapitated with one lunge of the rocking chair, history might have spoken differently. Silence expresses our similarities. For our differences, we must use words.

  “So Raindog, you’ve come. Seven years I’ve been praying for rain, seven years arm-wrestling with God, and at last a verdict is announced. Seven years is a lot of praying, especially if God wants this place to go paws up, but you know something, prayer’s never wasted. Prayer’s got to go somewhere, like the rain; rain goes into the land and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until the land can’t hold it any more. So the land forces it out, and it changes, and becomes something else, but it always remembers what it was, and it always wants to be what it once was again. Something like you. You got a name, Raindog?”

  “Elijah seems as good a name as any other.”

  Whoosh! Big one! Little slitty-eyes, Mineloushe-cattie, dazzled and blinking. A white cockade in Desert Rose’s hat … and it’s gone.

  “‘And Elijah prayed that it would not rain, and there was no rain in the land for three and a half years. Again, he prayed and behold, the heavens gave forth rain.’”

  “It gratifies me, sir, to find a man knows his Bible these corrupt days.”

  “Mission music rocked my cradle, Raindog.”

  “So what is it you believe about me, sir?”

  “I believe I prayed for seven years and up there on the edge of heaven all my prayers came together and created you.” Under the enormous sky, Kelly By the Window comes out to stand in Sam My Man’s doorway and watch the moon rise. She shakes the heat and dust out of her hair and the two men and the cat can hear the treble beat of her Walkman. “I tell you something, Raindog, you better make the rain come soon, while she still has a chance. The drought’s too deep in us, but she still has dreams.”

  “I have the octave markers in position and the beacons are calling. The Rainmaker is coming, sir.”

  Little Mineloushe blinks; the moon has been obscured by a sudden small cloud, not much larger than the size of a man’s hand.

  * * *

  Time of the Tower, Time of the Tug, for generations beyond remembering Rainmaker has been a denizen of
pressure gradients and barometric boundaries, flexing and curving itself to the hills and valleys of the air. Only once a year does it approach the earth, on the summer solstice it descends over some obscure map reference in a forgotten part of the ocean to consign its dead to the receiving waters and replenish its vapor tanks. This day of approach is foremost among the city’s festivals; as it unfolds its tail from its belly and descends from the perpetual cloud of mystery, the rigging wires flutter with tinsel streamers and spars and ribs bristle a thousand silver prayer kites. Fireworks punctuate the sky and all citizens celebrate Jubilee. Flatlanders find it paradoxical that those who chose to live in the sky should celebrate their closest approach to earth, but those of you who have been a dragonfly snared by the surface tension of a pond will understand: it is not the closeness of the approach they celebrate, but the slenderness of the escape.

  * * *

  Sheriff Middleton and his stomach have enjoyed each other’s company for so long now they are best friends. A satisfyingly mutual relationship: he keeps his stomach warm, full and prominent in the community behind straining mother of pearl buttons and silver belt buckles; it supplies him with public eminence and respect, a rich emotional life of belly laughs and gut feelings; even a modicum of protection, the stomach totes a .44 Magnum and has seen several Dirty Harry movies.

  This stranger, stepping off one bus and not stepping on another, bag full of weird thangs, head full of weirder stories; stomach’s got this gut feeling about him. Stomach’s heard all about them on the evening news, these folk from the coast, there’s nothing they won’t do, and People are beginning to talk (the ones whose talk matters, the ones with the capital P), and once People start talking, time you started listening to your good old buddy, Sheriff Middleton, that’s been giving you nothing but heartburn and flatus all week, and Do Something.