The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He couldn’t hear anything other than the wind moving over the silent city. Not sleepy at all, he watched the shadows slide slowly across the lawn. Just after 2:00 a.m. a pair of coyotes trotted up the middle of the street. Their toenails clicked loudly against the asphalt. Carson finally rose, took two sleeping pills and went to bed.

  “The woman who stays with me is sick,” said Carson. He rested his arm against his truck, supplies requisition list in hand.

  The distribution center manager nodded dourly. “Oh, the sweet sorrow of parting.” He hooked his grimy thumbs in his overalls. Through the warehouse doors behind him Carson saw white plastic wrapped bales, four feet to a side, stacked five bales high and reaching to the warehouse’s far end. They contained bags of flour, corn, cloth, paper, a little bit of everything. Emergency stores.

  Carson blanched. “It’s not that. She just has a cough and a bit of fever. If it’s bacterial, an antibiotic might knock it right out.”

  “T.B. or not T.B. That is congestion, Carson,” he said, laughing through yellow teeth. Carson guessed he might be fifty-five or sixty.

  Carson smiled. “You’re pretty sharp today.”

  “Finest collection of video theater this side of hell. Watched Lawrence Olivier last night until 3:00 or 4:00.” The manager consulted his clipboard. “No new Pharmaceuticals in a couple months, and I haven’t seen antibiotics in over a year. I could have my assistant keep an eye open for you, but he hasn’t come in for a week. Lookin’ sickly his last day, you know?” The manager rubbed his fingers on his chest. “Could be that I’ve lost him. Have you tried a tablespoon of honey in a shot glass of bourbon? Works for me every time.”

  A car pulled into the huge, empty parking lot behind Carson’s truck, but whoever was inside didn’t get out. Carson nodded in the car’s direction. Evidently they wanted to wait for Carson to finish his business.

  He handed the manager the list. “Can you also give me cornmeal and sugar? A mix of canned vegetables would be nice too.”

  “That I’ve got.” The manager hopped on a forklift. “Tomorrow may creep in a petty pace, but I shouldn’t be a minute.”

  When he returned with the goods he said, “The quality of mercy is not strained here. I’m not doing anything this afternoon. I’ll dig some for you. Few months back I heard a pharmacy in an Albertson’s burned down. Looters overlooked it. Might be something there. I’ve got your address.” He waved the requisition list. “I could bring it by your house.”

  Carson loaded boxes of canned soup and vegetables into the truck. “What about the warehouse?”

  The manager shrugged. “Guess we’re on an honor system now. Only a dozen or so customers a day. Maybe a couple hundred total. I’ll bet there aren’t 50,000 people alive in the whole country. I’ll leave the doors open.” For a moment the manager stared into the distance, as if he’d lost his thought. Behind them, the waiting car rumbled. “You know how they say that if you put a jellybean in a jar every time you make love the first year that you’re married, and you take one out every time you make love after that, that the jar will never be empty? This warehouse is a little like that.”

  When Carson started the truck, the manager leaned into the window, resting his arms on the car door. This close, Carson could see how greasy the man’s hair was, and it smelled like old lard.

  The manager’s smile was gone. “How long have you known me?” he said, looking Carson straight in the eye. His voice was suddenly so serious.

  Carson tried not to shrink away. He thought back. “I don’t know. Sixteen months?”

  The manager grimaced. “That makes you my oldest friend. There isn’t anyone alive that I’ve known longer.”

  For a second, Carson was afraid the man would begin crying. Instead, he straightened, his hands still on the door.

  Tentatively, Carson said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever asked what your name was.”

  “Nope, nope, no need,” the manager barked, smiling again. “A rose by any other moniker, as they say. I’ll see what I can find you in the coughing line. Don’t know about antibiotics. Come back tomorrow.”

  It wasn’t until Carson had driven blocks away toward the river, as he watched the boarded-up stores slide by, as he moved down the empty streets, past the mute houses that he realized, other than Tillie, the manager was his oldest friend too.

  Sitting on his camp chair, Carson had a panoramic river view. On the horizon to the west, the mountains rose steeply, only a remnant of last winter’s snow clinging to the tops of the tallest peaks. Fifty yards away at the bottom of a short bluff, the river itself, at its lowest level of the season, rolled sluggishly. Long gravel tongues protruded into the water where little long-legged birds searched for insects between the rocks. A bald eagle swept low over the water going south. Carson marked it in his notebook.

  Across the river stood clumps of elm and willows. He didn’t need his binoculars to see the branches were heavy with roosting starlings. Counting individuals was impossible. He’d have to estimate. He wondered what the distribution manager would make of the birds. After all, they had something in common. If it weren’t for Shakespeare, the starlings wouldn’t be here at all. In the early 1890’s, a club of New York Anglophiles thought it would be comforting if all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays lived in America. They tried nightingales and chaffinches and various thrushes, but none succeeded like the 100 European starlings they released in Central Park. By the last count there were over two hundred million of them. He’d read an article in one of his bird books that called them “avian cockroaches.”

  He set up his camera on a tripod and scanned the trees with the telephoto. Not only were there starlings, but also red winged blackbirds, an aggressive, native species. They could hold their own against invaders.

  Carson clicked a few shots. He could edit the photos out of the camera’s memory later if he needed the space. A group of starlings lifted from some of the trees. Maybe something disturbed them? He looked for a deer or raccoon on the ground below, but couldn’t see anything. The birds swirled upwards before sweeping down river. He thought about invaders, like infection, spreading across the country. Carp were invaders. So were zebra mussels that hitchhiked in ships’ ballast water and became a scourge, attaching themselves to the inside of pipes used to draw water into power plants.

  It wasn’t just animals either. Crabgrass, dandelions, kudzu, knotweed, tamarisk, leafy spurge, and norway maple, pushing native species to extinction.

  Infection. Extinction. And extinct meant you’d never come back. No hope.

  Empty houses. Empty shopping malls. Empty theaters. Contrail-free skies. Static on the radio. Traffic-free highways. The creak of wind-pushed swing sets in dusty playgrounds. He pictured Tillie’s video, the endless runners pouring across the bridge.

  Carson shook his head. He’d never get the count done if he daydreamed. Last year he spotted 131 species in the fall count. Maybe this year he’d find more. Maybe he’d see something rare, like a yellow-billed loon or a fulvous whistling duck.

  Methodically, he moved his focus from tree to tree. Mostly starlings, their beaks resting on their breasts. Five hundred in one tree. A thousand in the next. He held the binoculars in his left hand while writing the numbers with his right. Later he’d fill out a complete report for the Colorado Field Ornithologists. A stack of reports sat on his desk at home, undeliverable.

  He couldn’t hear the birds from here, but their chirping calls would be overwhelming if he could walk beneath them.

  A feathered blur whipped through his field of vision. Carson looked over the top of his binoculars. Two birds skimmed the treetops, heading upriver. He stood, breath coming quick. Narrow wings. Right size. He found them in the binoculars. Were they the same kind of bird he’d seen yesterday? What luck! But they flew too fast and they were going away. He’d never be able to identify them from this distance. If only they’d circle back. Then, unbelievably, they turned, crossing the river, coming tow
ard him. The binoculars thumped against his chest when he dropped them, as he picked up the camera, tripod and all. He found the birds, focused, and snapped a picture. They kept coming. He snapped again, both birds in view. Closer even still until just one bird filled the frame. Snap. Then they whipped past, only twenty feet overhead. And fast! Faster than any bird he’d seen except a peregrine falcon on a dive.

  His hands trembled. Definitely a bird new to him. A new species to add to his life list. And the bird he’d seen yesterday couldn’t be a single, misplaced wanderer, not if there were two of them here. Maybe a flock had been blown into the area. He knew Colorado birds, and these weren’t native.

  He stayed another hour, counting starlings and recording the other river birds that crossed his path, but his heart wasn’t in it. In his camera waited the image of the new bird, but he’d have to transfer it to the computer where he could study it.

  Tillie was in bed. Beside her, on the nightstand, were packets of seeds. She hadn’t moved them since he’d brought them to her in the spring. The television was on. There were, of course, no broadcasts, so gray snow filled the screen, and the set softly hissed. Carson turned it off, darkening the room. Sunlight leaked around the closed curtains, but after the brightness outside, he could barely see. In the silence, Tillie’s breathing rasped. He tiptoed around her bed to put his hand to her forehead. Distinctly warm. She didn’t move when he touched her.

  “Tillie?” he said.

  She mumbled but didn’t open her eyes.

  Carson turned on her reading light, painting her face in highlights and sharp shadows. He knelt beside her. Her lips were parted slightly, and she licked them before taking her next rattling breath. He wanted to jostle her awake. She slept so poorly most nights that he resisted. The fever startled him. As long as it was just a cough, he hadn’t worried much. A cough, that could be a cold or an allergy. But a fever, that was a red flag. He remembered all the home defense brochures with their sobering titles: Family Triage and Know Your Symptoms. “Tillie, I need to check your chest.”

  His fingers shook as he pulled the blanket away from her chin. Her neck was clammy, and underneath the covers she was sweating. She smelled warm and damp. Clumsily he unbuttoned her nightgown’s top buttons, then he moved the light so he could see better. No rash. She wasn’t wearing a bra, so he could see that the tops of her breasts looked smooth. “Tillie?” he whispered, really not wanting to wake her. Her eyes moved under her eyelids. Maybe she dreamed of other places, the places she would never talk to him about. Gently he rubbed his fingertips over the skin below her collarbones. No boils. No “bumpy swellings” the brochures described.

  Tillie mumbled again. “Bob Robert,” she said.

  “I’ll get some aspirin and water.” He pulled the blanket back up. She didn’t move.

  “You’re nice,” she said, but her head was turned away, and he wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or continuing a conversation in her dream.

  As he poured water from a bottle in the refrigerator, he realized that it would be difficult to tell if Tillie became delirious. If she started talking sense, then he’d have to worry about her.

  The distribution manager had said to come back the next day, so there was nothing to do other than to give her aspirin and keep her comfortable. She woke up enough to take the medicine, but closed her eyes immediately. Carson patted her on the top of her hands, made sure the water pitcher was full, then went to his office where he printed the pictures from his camera. The last one was quite good. Full view of the bird’s beak, head, neck, breast, wing shape and tail feathers. Identification should have been easy, but nothing matched in his books. He needed better resources.

  Driving to Littleton library meant passing the landfill. Most days Carson tried to ignore it—it reminded him of Arlington Cemetery without the tombstones—but today he stopped at the side of the road. He needed a place to think, and the broad, featureless land lent itself to meditations. Last year swarms of gulls circled, waiting for places to set down. The ones on the ground picked at the remnants of flags that covered the low hills. The year before, wreaths and flags and sticks festooned with ribbons dotted the mounds while earth movers ripped long ditches and chugged diesel exhaust. Today, though, no birds. He supposed there was nothing left for them to eat. No smells to attract them. The earth movers were parked off to the side in a neat row. Dust swirled across the dirt in tiny eddies that danced for a moment, then dissipated into nothing. The ground looked as plain as his backyard. Not a tree anywhere or grass. He thought about Tillie searching for a geranium.

  He looked up. The sky was completely empty. No hawks. Could it be that not even a mouse lived in the landfill?

  What would he do if she left? He leaned against the car, his hands deep in his pockets, chin on his chest. What if she were gone? So many had departed: the girl at the magazine stand, the counter people at the bagel shop, his coworkers. What was it he used to do? He could barely remember, just like he couldn’t picture his wife’s face clearly anymore. All of them, slipping away.

  He slid his fingers inside his shirt. No bumps there either. Why not, and were they inevitable?

  A wind kicked across the plain, scurrying scraps of paper and more dust toward him in a wave. He could taste rain in the air. Weather’s changing, he thought, and climbed back into the car before the wind reached him.

  Skylights illuminated the library’s main room. Except for the stale smell and the thin coating of neglect on the countertops and the leather chairs arranged in cozy reading circles, it could be open for business. Carson saw no evidence that anyone had been here since his last visit a month ago. He checked his flashlight. Sunlight didn’t penetrate to the back stacks where the bird books were, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss any.

  On the bulletin board inside the front doors hung civil defense and the Center for Disease Control posters filled with the familiar advice: avoid crowds, get good sleep, report symptoms immediately. The civil defense poster reminded him that Patriots Protect Their Immune Systems and the depressing, Remember, It Got Them First.

  The cart he found had a wheel that shook and didn’t track with the others. It pulled to the left and squeaked loudly as he pushed it between the rows. In the big building, the noise felt out of place. Absurdly, Carson almost said, “Shhh!” A library was supposed to be quiet, even if he was the only one in it.

  Back at the bird books, he ran his flashlight across the titles, all his favorite tomes: the Audubon books and the National Geographic ones. The two huge volumes of Bailey and Niedriach’s Birds of Colorado with their beautiful photographs and drawings. He placed them in the cart lovingly. By the time he finished, he’d arranged thirty-five books on the cart, every bird reference they had. He shivered as he straightened the collection. The back of the library had never felt cold before.

  At the checkout desk, he agonized over what to do. When he was a child, the librarian filled out a card that was tucked in the book’s front cover. Everything was computerized now. How was he going to check the books out? Not that it was likely anyone would want them, but it didn’t feel right, just taking them. Finally he wrote a note with all the titles listed. He stuck it to the librarian’s computer, thought about it for a second, then wrote a second one to put into the gap he’d left in the shelves. He added his address and a P.S., “If you really need these books, please contact me.”

  Before going, he wandered into the medical section. Infectious diseases were in the 600 area. There wasn’t a title left. He took a deep breath that tickled his throat. It felt odd, so he did it again, provoking a string of deep coughs. It’s just the dust in here, he thought, but his lungs felt heavy, and he realized he’d been holding off the cough all day.

  Carson stopped at the distribution center on the way home. The parking lot was empty. He wandered through the warehouse, between the high stacks, down the long rows. No manager. No assistant. Last year Carson had hauled a diesel generator into a theater near his house. He�
��d rigged it to power a projector so he could watch a movie on the big screen, but the empty room with all the empty seats gave him the creeps. He’d fled the theater without even turning off the generator. The warehouse felt like that. As he walked toward the exit, his strides became faster and faster until he was running.

  As the sun set into the heavy clouds on the horizon, he accepted the obvious. Whatever Tillie had, he had too. She breathed shallowly between coughing fits, and, although the fever responded to aspirin, it rebounded quickly. The aspirin helped with his own fever, but he felt headachy and tired.

  Sitting beside her bed, he put his hand on her arm. “I’m going to go back to the distribution center tomorrow, Tillie. He said he might find some medicine.”

  Tillie turned toward him, her eyes gummy and bloodshot. “Don’t go,” she said. Her voice quivered, but she looked directly at him. No drifting. Speaking deliberately, she said, “Everybody I know has gone away.”

  Carson looked out the window. It would be dark soon.

  Tillie’s arm burned beneath his fingertips. He could almost feel the heated blood rushing through her. “I’ve got to do something. You might have pneumonia.”

  She inhaled several times. Carson imagined the pain; an echo of it pulsed in his own chest.

  “Could you stay in the neighborhood?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  Tillie closed her eyes. “When it started, I watched TV all the time. That’s all I did, was watch TV. My friends watched TV. They played it at work. ‘A Nation Under Quarantine’ the newscasters called it. And then I couldn’t watch any more.”

  Carson blinked his eyes shut against the burning. That’s where he didn’t want to go, into those memories. It’s what he didn’t think about when he sat in his camp chair counting birds. It’s what he didn’t picture when he bolted solar cells onto the roof, when he gathered wood for the new wood stove he’d installed in the living room, when he pumped gasoline out of underground tanks at silent gas stations. Sometimes he had a hard time imagining anything was wrong at all. When he drove, the car still responded to his touch. The wind whistled tunelessly past his window. How could the world still be so familiar and normal and yet so badly skewed?