The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “He’ll make it back?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’ll take us most of tomorrow to walk back with him. Akela will probably run on back to Raksha. But me and him will take our time.”

  A good portion of the fallen elk was gone when we returned. The four wolves were lying near the carcass looking very pleased with themselves.

  I squatted next to it. There was nothing remaining of the bull’s haunting grandeur; he had become just another meal on the prairie. The air was thick with the smell of meat, bone and blood.

  “I didn’t think wolves attacked anything this big.” I said.

  “You didn’t like the show?”

  “I was surprised.”

  “Yeah, well, it was a little risky,” he conceded. I thought for a moment he was embarrassed. “But it’s still summer and we’re all in good health. Not like the winter.”

  “So you said.” I stood up. “So you said.”

  I pulled out my phone. I wondered how long I would have to wait for Sam to pick me up.

  After three weeks in Montana, my apartment felt very warm and small, a friendly sheltered spot in the middle of Manhattan. I took a long, hot shower, an even longer bath, and then another shower. I sat in my big stuffed chair and had Chinese food and drank Italian beer for dinner. New York was still hot but the air conditioning was quite cool. I slept under a light sheet for twelve hours dreaming of elk. After that, I was ready to start.

  The trick was to figure out the right tack for the story. There are a million events and tales but only a limited number of points of view. That’s how you manage a story. Every human experience is unique but the uniqueness prevents it from being usable. Like great art, the experience has to be brought down to a common theme that can be universally embraced: good versus evil, coming of age, man against nature, man for nature, conflict, resolution, corruption, purity. Once you connect one of these points of view to something that happened, you have a story. The closer the connection is to something with universal appeal determines the attractiveness and durability of the story, its legs.

  I checked and made sure Goldie had been fully downloaded and went over what I had. It was even better than I had expected. First, I knocked together a story just using some of the footage I had from Sam and Jack and some pictures of the puppies. A long shot of the hunt gave the sense of reality I was looking for. Then, I did the intro, the voiceover and the outtro. That would be for the human interest section for the news feeds. That took me a couple of days. I held off submitting it for the moment.

  Then, I contacted some anthropologists and psychologists and put together a nice half hour segment about Jack and the wolves. Something public broadcasting would like. Suitable for a segment of a larger show on something like human adaptation, for example. I reformulated some of the outtakes and made a second segment for the wildlife sites. That took a couple of weeks. Then, I submitted the news segment at a rock-bottom price as a teaser.

  Using the public broadcasting segment as a base, I built a stand-alone show on Jack himself. This was on spec. I wasn’t sure if Jack had the legs for that. I worked on that while I submitted the news segment.

  Two of the big feeds bought the same segment—unusual but not rare and the it took off. In an hour, Jack had a four percent share on the major discussion groups and seventy smaller feeds had asked for the segment and breaking rights—rights to cut the segment to fit around other segments. This was starting to be serious money. I put together a dozen or so tabloid articles and put them up for automatic purchase. Several hundred sales came from that alone.

  I finished the full hour show by the time Wildlife America and Environment Today asked for a more detailed segment to fit into their national feeds—the half hour segment I’d already made. They also asked for breaking rights so I wasn’t sure where the shows would end up. Jack had become the central topic for ten percent of the major discussion groups. He had become part of the national conversation.

  The major feeds are all international but most of the smaller feeds were local. Now, the small foreign feeds were asking about him. It had been a month since I had gotten back from Montana.

  National Data called for a single topic show and I had the hour segment waiting for them. This was the big time. The longer segments would be bouncing around for a while. I could stop right now with what I had earned on Jack and not work for the next two years. This didn’t include subsales and residuals that would still be coming in for at least another year after that.

  But staleness was already setting in on the original material. By October, I thought my part in Jack’s public career was over.

  I took a vacation in Greece. For two months, I lived in a small villa on the Adriatic. I filtered my news, learned to drink Turkish coffee and had an affair with a lovely, tanned, poverty-stricken artist named Gina. She liked the way my rented sailboat cut the water and I liked the way she looked sunning herself on the deck. For a month, she used a room of my villa to paint horrible clashing abstract portraits of nude historical dictators when we weren’t sailing, eating, or having sex. Then, on the first of the year she went back to her husband in Germany. I helped her on the train with her new paintings. Gina kissed me passionately, gave me an abstract Stalin miniature, and left.

  After that, I grew restless, so Stalin and I flew back to New York. I hung Stalin on the bathroom wall over the toilet and started going over the news.

  Jack was all over the feeds, which surprised me. I knew he had legs but I didn’t think he’d last this long. I started reviewing the news back just before I left.

  People liked Jack. More importantly, they liked his wolves. There were three segments of his constituency: those that found him and the wolves cuddly, those that found him a noble savage and those that found him dangerously erotic. There were seven official cameras hovering over him and his wolf pack twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Something like fifty or sixty temporary cams came and went, looking in on him regularly. Several articles and three books that had been written about him while I had been gone. None seemed to me to be as good as my work but perhaps I was biased. Jack dolls had become the Christmas toy of choice and came complete with a set of seven wolves. In a collateral event, interest in a twentieth-century figure, Wolfman Jack, escalated. Pop music started incorporating 1950s rock and roll into the sounds of steam engines and calliopes.

  I tuned into one of the cams. It was a howling blizzard in Beck-Lewis right then. The wolves were not in sight. I guessed they were in a den or something. For a moment, I thought I saw Jack’s face in shadow but it disappeared in the snow.

  Beck-Lewis also figured prominently in the feeds. Sam had gotten a good portion of the funding he wanted and B-L was getting new men and equipment. I smiled at that. Good for you, Sam, I thought.

  * * *

  The winter was cold out there. It sealed Jack and the wolves in and the rest of the world out. By that June, though, Jack was still a cultural item. The snow melted and tour groups started trespassing on Beck-Lewis looking for Jack. He wasn’t hard to find since eleven full-time cams were following the pack around. I watched them. They all looked lean. Jack himself looked haggard. The winter had not been good to them. Apparently, Sam and his people were able to keep most of these tour groups out but not all. Some of the groups were able to get through the mound of paperwork and some didn’t bother.

  In July I was still idle but I was looking into a story about a man in South Africa who had attempted to graft into his mind a simulation of the skill and compositional ability of Mozart. He had failed and there had been significant consequences to his family. While I was finding the right people to talk to, I received an article alert from one of the feeds about a trial in Billings. Jack had killed somebody.

  Tour groups attract three kinds of people: those that truly want to understand whatever it is the tour is about, those that just want to enjoy themselves in a new venue, and those who are complete idiots. It turned out a tourist, a man named Bernard, had broken away from
the main group of Full Moon Tours and tried to steal one of the Raksha’s pups. Raksha had, quite rightly, attacked and torn off a finger. Bernard managed to pick up a rock and knock her down. Then, instead of attacking Raksha the idiot had killed the pup out of spite. Jack ripped his throat out.

  National Data sent me to Billings to follow the trial. It wasn’t going to take long. All eleven cams had caught the killing, not to mention the cams carried by the tourists. Bernard’s father was a retired software engineer and his mother had been the financial officer of a Boston HMO. Environmental considerations aside, they were out for blood. On the other side, public sympathy was with Jack. The picture of Bernard killing the pup was everywhere. I found unofficial support funds for Jack’s defense that seemed to be legitimate and a lot of scams. With this sort of money, Jack could pull an O.J. and get off scot-free.

  The tours had stopped but I saw twelve more cams added onto the feeds. At least half of them were handhelds. Everything about him, everything about the wolves attracted attention. The publicity of the trial had generated more interest in the wolves but no one event drove the feeds any longer. The feeds drove the attention which then drove the feeds which then drove the attention. Jack and the wolves had become a self-perpetuating lightning rod.

  I checked into Billings the night before the trial. I was tired. I was by myself; I’d left Goldie at home. There were going to be enough cameras here. I was discouraged. The South Africa story wasn’t going anywhere. I’d taken the National Data job to get my head clear. I was watching the coverage of Jack’s impending trial when someone knocked on the hotel door.

  I know. I should have checked first. I can only say I was too tired to think. I opened the door and Sam Orcutt was standing there. He didn’t say anything. He punched me in the side of the head and I went down seeing things in different colors and mixed up. He yelled at me while I tried to uncross my eyes.

  After a minute or two, my own personal color separation came back into focus and I saw he was standing over me. Drunk, maybe, but certainly confused. “Why the hell didn’t you leave us alone?” He yelled as he stood over me. “Why did you have to stir things up? What the hell were you thinking?” I punched him in the balls.

  He went down, moaning. I staggered out into the hall and got some ice for my face. He was still moaning when I got back. I sat down on the sofa and watched him for a minute.

  “Nice to see you, too,” I said. My ear was hot and swelling and I heard a crack every time I worked my jaw.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” he whispered, holding himself.

  “You throw up, you clean it up.” I put the ice on my forehead. I still felt dizzy. “What are you doing here, Sam?”

  “He’s my friend,” he coughed. “That’s more than you are.”

  “You hit me out of your friendship with Jack?”

  He pulled himself onto his hands and knees and made his way to a chair. “I wanted to pay you back.”

  “What did I ever do to you?”

  “For what you did to him. To us. To me.”

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t surprised. I’d been in the business a while. “That’s the way it goes. You should have protected him better. Kept those nasty tour groups away from him. I could have helped if you’d dropped me a line.”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “I’d sure like to continue this great conversation but I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

  For a minute, he looked like he was going to try again. I picked up the table lamp and watched him. He thought better of it and staggered out into the hall.

  “If you’re ever in New York, look me up!” I shouted after him.

  I shut the door and leaned against it. I felt terrible.

  All bruises and bad feelings, I showed up the next day at the Billings Courthouse ready for a show. It didn’t happen.

  All across the feeds, Jack’s attorney had described their case. They were going for insanity. They had statements of several psychiatrists to prove their point. One of their doctors had modified himself to be eight feet tall. Not that it would have made much difference. Jack had spent nearly ten million dollars to look like the star of an old horror movie. Who wouldn’t be inclined to think he was nuts?

  Instead, Jack pleaded guilty.

  It dawned on me the prosecution was smarter than they looked: they’d plea-bargained with him. The trial was over before it began. I couldn’t figure it out. With the public sympathy and the money, Jack could have gotten a complete acquittal. Hell, he could have ended up suing the State of Montana for libel and won.

  Once he had entered his plea, the prosecutor, a hard-looking woman named Warburg, recommended the standard sentence of not more than ten years and not less than seven. The defense agreed. Agreed. Now I was really confused.

  Jack saw me on the way out of the courtroom. He ignored me. I didn’t try to talk to him. I’m not sure why. Certainly, it didn’t make National Data any happier. Instead, I interviewed the several disgruntled psychiatrists who would have been substantially well paid to get on the stand had the defense not caved. It wasn’t a total loss. I managed to cause an argument between the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Grid Systems Legal Affairs Correspondent. It made good coverage and when the Dean took a swing at the Correspondent I was there with the National Data cams. It made me think of Sam. The Dean hit like a girl.

  Jack was transported to Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge by the end of August. I spent a day or so setting up small segments for National Data and then the contract was finished. I didn’t see Sam again. I suppose he took his little floatplane back to some tiny lake deep in the heart of Beck-Lewis.

  For one reason or another, I didn’t go back to New York right away. Instead, I caught a plane over to Forsyth.

  Full Moon Tours operated out of an old and nearly abandoned strip mall. Wolf Pack Observation was only one of its many tourist packages. I wandered around in the office, checked out the brochures, the posters and the rough log walls and the soundproofed ceiling. Fishing trips, hiking trips, elk hunts—all in Beck-Lewis. I wondered if Sam knew about these people.

  A pretty young woman with perky breasts worked the counter. She smiled radiantly at me and I smiled back. It wasn’t hard to smile at her; she reminded me of Gina.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Not really. I just stopped in. What about this one?” The brochure had a close-up picture of Jack and his wolves on the cover.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she apologized. “We don’t do that tour anymore.”

  “Really?” I asked. “How come?”

  “It was too hard to protect the clients from the wolves.” She looked at the brochure. “I’m sure we’ll offer something like it next year. We just have to get the bugs out of it.”

  “Ah.” I nodded and left.

  Deer Lodge was three hundred and fifty miles away and I suppose somewhere in my mind I was always planning to get there. Not that a detour to Forsyth would necessarily indicate that. I had no reason to go. Jack had nothing left I could use. The contract with National Data was over. Still, a few days later I stopped at the Montana State Prison. It had been a week since Jack had been brought here. I found Jack in the prison hospital.

  I met Jack in the day room. He had the orange wrist brace of a possible violent offender, universal in this sort of facility. A sort of motion-activated tazer. I had done a story about brace abuse two years before. The guards at Riker’s Island had developed the nasty habit of tuning the braces down for inmates they didn’t like. Men were forced to stand like statues to keep from getting tazed.

  Jack was sitting in an old plastic chair watching the trees outside. He turned slightly as I approached him.

  I sat down beside him and looked at him. They had shaved him and the pigment of his skin was blotchy. His blue eyes were rimmed with red and he was gaunt and haggard and his hands shook. “You look like hell.”

  He laughed shortly. “They tried to drug me the first couple of days I was here because I’m s
o much stronger than the other inmates. But the modifications interfered and messed me up. Now, I wear this.” He held up the brace. He turned back to the window.

  I let the silence go on for a bit. “I wasn’t sure you would see me.”

  He shrugged. “Why not? What could you do to me now?”

  I ignored that. “You’re not a wolf anymore.”

  “I was never a wolf.”

  “Yes you were.”

  He looked at me.

  I spread my hands. “Not in shape, of course. But you had left people behind. You didn’t start coming back to civilization until I threatened you. Until you had something to lose.”

  He watched me a moment, then looked back outside. “Autumn’s coming.”

  “It does that.”

  He grunted and didn’t speak.

  Finally, I asked: “Why did you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Kill Bernard.”

  Jack held up his hands. “What else could I do? He killed Raksha’s pup. Raksha would have killed him if I hadn’t killed him first. Then, she would have been destroyed. Better me than her.” He turned back to the window.

  “You could have gotten off completely,” I said. “Did you know that?”

  He shrugged.

  “Was it Warburg’s idea?” I looked around the room, the antiseptic white and beige of the walls. Outside were the guards and the exercise field and the cells. “You can appeal. You can say you were given inadequate counsel. You were given inadequate counsel. That’s absolutely true. She should never have taken the deal. You could have been on your way back to Beck-Lewis that afternoon.”

  “It wasn’t Warburg’s idea,” he said softly. “It was mine. All of this was my fault.” He looked up at me for a long time, shook his head and turned away.

  And I understood.

  I looked out the window. The weather had become clear and the late summer light had changed character and taken on the soft golden glow of approaching autumn. The air looked cool, a sheath of velvet pleasantly covering a cold knife.