The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She served him cornbread on a plastic bucket lid, and he weighed the silence carefully before he asked them to what family the green-skinned girl belonged.

  “She is Lupe Hansen’s daughter,” the woman replied with a wary eye on him every moment, as though she knew why he was asking, though of course she didn’t.

  “You know she is a child of San Juan Demetrio?” he said.

  “We are all children of San Juan.”

  At this, Mendel thought it wise to say only “Indeed, así es.”

  None of the children had taken their eyes off of him. The smallest, with eyes like shining black olives, was the first who dared to speak. “Pero por why are you bloody?”

  “César!” the woman hissed, scandalized. But Mendel held up his hand to the woman to gesture that he was not offended.

  “I was in a fight.”

  “Did you die?”

  “No—if I had died I would not be sitting with you here.”

  “Were you hurt?” asked the oldest.

  “A little. But my body se compone muy quickamente.”

  “Who did you fight?”

  “An evil god,” Mendel answered. “A god who didn’t like people.”

  The answer seemed to awe the children. But the woman, who seemed too mortified to notice the children’s reaction, added for good measure: “Es un god muy malo, who will take you away if you don’t stop asking questions.”

  The next morning all seventeen children in the village had questions about the evil god. Mendel regretted a little his explanation of the night before, though of course someone was bound to have asked him about the blood stains and, as was typical of Mendel, he had spent the previous day telling himself that he would need a good story instead of actually coming up with a good story. He told them that the god he had bloodied had hated the natural people, had wanted all of the natural people to take on the bodies of demons and to fill their minds with the nonsense of dreams. The children seemed to regard this explanation quietly and utterly without skepticism, which suggested all the more to Mendel that what he said was strictly true. Yet on account of their pellagra they showed none of the awe that children of the other villages had; they sat stooped and downcast like feverish hallucinators, their crusted hands held out before them like barnacled flippers.

  The flawless green girl stepped up to the circle of children as artlessly as a little deer. Studiously Mendel continued his tale: he told how the evil god had stolen many children for his terrible purposes (pure fabrication, but Mendel could not resist their attention, even limp as it was). But Mendel loved the natural people so much that he risked himself to save them. The green daughter of Lupe Hansen watched him and he observed her without ever looking directly at her; he felt her watchful presence as though soon she would eat from his outstretched hand.

  But the children were called to school by a long cracked note from an old trumpet, and Mendel watched them all, from the green girl to the most encrusted lad, retreat to a cluster of four shipping containers at the edge of the houses, like a square bounded by the larger circle of the village structures. The one who blew the trumpet was a woman somewhat less slack than the rest, without pellagra, with a faint tint to her skin that announced to Mendel that she was Lupe Hansen.

  Mendel rose from the ground where he had sat cross-legged, and he noticed only then that not all of the children had quite retreated. The other girl, the one called Floribunda, stared at him still. He found her look a little hostile. Or perhaps terrified. But just when Mendel decided that it must be terror that made her look at him so, she held out to him a tiny green wisp of locoweed, which he took from her before she ran after the other children to the school.

  While he waited Mendel busied himself with helping around the village. The village technical council, three craggy-faced men, came to him like a humiliated embassy offering surrender. “Our molino runs poorly; we believe there is a short in the photovoltaic system.” The most venerable of them said.

  “Perhaps the film needs cleaning,” Mendel answered. “The village is very dusty.”

  “Perhaps,” the man said with pained courtesy. “But we have tried to keep the films clean.”

  The films were in fact scrupulously clean. The village technical council had guessed correctly about the short, which Mendel found buried in the adobe wall where the old man had thought it might be. He peeled the wire out like an intransigent root from barren earth, and he wondered why the old men had not trusted themselves enough to find the short themselves with their antique voltmeter.

  Mendel visited Lupe Hansen at the school after the children had cleared out to play Chihuahuan-rules football. “Do you know who I am?” Mendel asked her.

  She did not look up from stacking the children’s tablets. “You are a god.”

  “But do you know who I am?”

  She stopped to look at him. “No. I know only that you are a god.”

  Mendel approached from another tack. “Do you know that your daughter is hija de San Juan Demetrio?”

  “Sí. Así es.”

  “You are also one.”

  “Sí. Así es.”

  “Why did you never go to Phoenix?”

  “This is my village.”

  “Have you never thought to send your daughter there?”

  The woman said nothing. When she lifted the stack of tablets to put them away, Mendel saw a tension in her shoulders, what he took to be stubbornness, though he knew he was not so godlike as to be above projection.

  “Your daughter could be schooled in ways that you know you cannot school her here,” Mendel continued. “She could come back to Dessicant Wells as a god, and yet as one of you as well.”

  Lupe Hansen began scrubbing down the students’ tables with a dusty rag.

  “Your students could use those tablets to get to the real Internet, if you had a guide,” he said, pointing at the stack of tablets as though the woman was also looking at them, and not, intently, at the dusty tabletops. “It is the ones like your daughter that will bring reunification.”

  Lupe Hansen’s mouth was set as she scrubbed at the tables.

  “What is your daughter’s name?”

  “Chloe.”

  “Chloe would be a god,” he said, reverently as an evangelical missionary.

  Lupe Hansen said nothing but looked directly at him with a pain that seemed both powerless and impervious to reason.

  It offended his sense of dignity to wheedle for the girl. For every parent that handed over a child to him without flinching, seeing the benefit of entrusting a child to the care of the gods, there was another like Lupe Hansen, for whom there was no benefit Chloe might receive that would justify separating her from her mother.

  He stared back at her, and unlike so many natural people Lupe Hansen was not awed into looking away. But of course, she was no natural person, either—otherwise, why would Mendel be bargaining with her over her daughter?

  It occurred to him, with some relief, that he had not told Señora Coper the secret of corn nixtamalization. “If I could cure everyone in the village of their sickness, would you let Chloe come to school with me? Please consider it.” And with that he walked out of the little school and past the water troughs and the solar ovens, where he said to the headwoman that he would return the next morning to Dessicant Wells.

  He ran out into the desert a safe distance, back towards Old Mexico 45 where no one would have been shocked to find him. Safety was relative, of course: Perses had had friends, shedim and lilim who certainly would know of his death by now. And when their suspicions fell on Mendel, Old Mexico 45 was one of the places Perses’ friends would think to look for him.

  But he was safe at least from the villagers’ attentions for a moment. He closed his eyes and linked up with the satellite, got lost a few hours in his mails—mostly advertisements clouding up his neurons. He tried to get in touch with Handy, which had been his purpose linking up in the first place: did he have room for a little green girl, unusually quie
t and, so far as Mendel could tell, totally untrained? Mendel found it half charming and half infuriating that Handy, who could stay linked up the livelong day if he wished it, had an old-fashioned autoresponder on his account like some telephonical answering machine from another age.

  Mendel took a risk and accessed one of the PayPal accounts he had squirreled away. None of his acquaintances knew about the account, and he doubted any of Perses’ cronies had tried hacking into Mendel’s Internet history yet. Just over three hundred new dollars sat there beneath anybody’s notice. Lying on the baking hardpan in the flimsy shadow of the creosote he closed his eyes and moved, quickly and quietly, a hundred dollars to a terminal in Delicias. Then he logged off and delinked, and in the heat of the day ran two hours southeast down Old Mexico 45.

  In Delicias, at the Hotel Vieja Delicias, Mendel checked in as Conrado Hermés, paid with the N$61 from the terminal. Nobody asked him about the bloodstains. Delicias was one of those towns where the naturals had some exposure to the divines and treated them with deference but not awe. The hotel clerk, whose nametag said “César,” was young enough and beautiful enough that he might have passed for a god, but Mendel could tell by his genetic summary—or, more properly, his lack of a summary—that he was as natural as Floribunda and would be handsome a few years more at most. With the rest of the hundred new dollars he ordered a fresh tunic, six tacos de suadero, and three liters of Ambrosia beer, and he slept that night in a bed that bore some resemblance to the bed of a god.

  On waking he felt again the perfect confidence that he would walk out of Dessicant Wells with the child of Lupe Hansen. The night’s sleep, the revitalizing Ambrosias, the brilliant white tunic all convinced him that success was a foregone conclusion.

  Then, walking out of the Hotel Vieja Delicias, he saw a lilith snooping about as she came up the road, peering into windows, swiveling her half-snake head to and fro like a flashlight. Mendel had worried about the blood on the old tunic. It wouldn’t have hurt him to have worried about it a little more. But he had thought it unlikely for one like Perses to carry radio tags in his blood like a child or a criminal. Mendel’s main worry had been that the bloodstains would frighten the naturals.

  The lilith was a good way up the street, moving past a trio of vulgaris hauling an enormous handcart towards some market or warehouse. Mendel was the only other divine on the road; she would spot him for sure if he began to run. To his left a laundromat operated out of a family’s garage. He turned into it as though that had been his errand all along.

  A broad-faced natural with a thick braid of hair in the ancient style looked up at him from the pile of laundry her neighbors had left for her. Mendel wondered for half a second whether the old bloodstained tunic was in the pile, sent over by the hotel to be washed instead of incinerated as Mendel had demanded. He raised the back of his hand to her like a strange greeting; his fingernail, tapered and sculpted, began to grow out of his index finger into thirty fatal centimeters of talon.

  “Is there a bloody tunic in your laundry?” he asked in Spanish.

  “No, lord,” she answered, emotionless.

  He sheathed the claw back into his hand. “Is there a back door?”

  “It leads to our house, lord.”

  He asked if he could get to the roof by that way. He could. For a short, waddling woman, she moved in a hurry, and silently, and he followed her into a dusty cinderblock courtyard with a legion of geraniums growing in old rusted cans. The lip of the roof hung three meters or so above the ground; Mendel leapt, caught the lip, and vaulted himself up. He looked back at her only a moment to say in his antique Spanish: “From this day the gods bless your house.” Then, with the same finger that a moment before had been a blade of fingernail, he exhorted her to be silent. He stayed not a moment to see her bowing deferentially, but like a loon lifting off from the water he glided across the roof and leapt into the street behind, and then he ran faster than any lilith deep into the mirages of the desert.

  He took a roundabout way back to Dessicant Wells, running far to the west into the creosote and circling back southeast. It was nearly noon when he arrived, and a call went up when he came into sight of them. By the time he walked into the central courtyard they were arrayed in front of him in all their scabby glory like a choir. In the center of the formation, looking more desolate even than the day before, Lupe Hansen stood with her arms draped protectively over her daughter before her. Yet at the girl’s feet was a backpack, and she stood dressed and washed and combed like a lamb for sacrifice.

  The headwoman was the first to speak: “Will you, lord, cure us of our sickness?”

  He showed them the trick with the water and ashes that would soften the corn kernels, that trick which even the poorest village in Mexico would have known in the last age, that trick which in fact had been discovered not far from Dessicant Wells nearly four thousand years before. As far as the villagers were concerned, Chloe Hansen was a fair trade for such knowledge.

  During the celebratory dinner the little girl looked at him balefully and silently. If she had cried on learning that she would go with him, or if she was to cry about it later, she wasn’t crying now. Of course, Mendel had taken the other children whether they had cried or not. But it was always easier for him if they didn’t cry.

  The sun was low before they were ready to set out. The headwoman and others clamored for him to stay one more night, to leave in the morning—give the girl one more night with her mother. But the girl would be safe at night, Mendel assured them, and no marauder on the road would be so foolish that he would try to steal a child from a god.

  They relented at last, and as the sun was setting he hoisted the little girl with her backpack full of undoubtedly useless things. He left at a loping, gliding pace, not wanting to jar the poor child more than necessary as she wept silently on his shoulder.

  Or not so silently. Before he had run a kilometer he heard the child’s racking breathless sobs. Only, they came not from the girl on his shoulder: he looked back to see another child who had run after them, who had covered only half the distance and now stood alone on the empty mesa in the gathering night. The twilight had darkened so that he had to double back to see who was there. In her threadbare loincloth and dusty as an unearthed root, Floribunda stood wheezing and snot-nosed and miserable.

  “You have to go back to your parents,” he said to her. “I can’t take you with me.”

  “No tengo parents,” she gasped. “I am hija de San Juan Demetrio.”

  “Who cares for you in the village? They are worried for you right now.”

  “I am hija de San Juan Demetrio.”

  The gesture he made, running a hand through his hair while he looked down at the problem she represented, was the gesture any god, or any natural, might make in answer to a stymie. He might scoop her up and carry her back like a sack of meal, if he could put up with the indignity of returning, of appearing before the vulgaris like one of them, like some harried uncle with a kicking child under his arm. Or he could leave her. She might return to the village on her own.

  He considered the problem longer than he intended to, staring a full minute at the impediment before him. Floribunda looked neither at him nor at Chloe but rather kept her eye on the purple and green horizon with a grim intensity, like the captain of a little ship in the open sea.

  Then he saw another shape far off in the failing light. But moving quickly: low to the ground on four feet, head thrust forward like a jackal, limbs sweeping along double-jointed and implacable it came towards them. It was the lilith.

  He scooped up the other girl and ran. He moved like a gazelle even with the two under his arms, though he ran with an effort that was unfamiliar to him. He ran towards the line of mountains far in the west, a kilometer, two kilometers, three. But soon enough he could hear the lilith scrambling not far behind him over the hardpan, tearing the creosote from its roots when she juked to match his turns and scrambles.

  Both girls had fallen silen
t. With an instinct that had been honed in some ancestral mammal from a pre-human epoch, they had drawn in their limbs to make of themselves tight bundles which Mendel grasped, one under each arm, like two lean footballs. But he knew after a few minutes that the lilith was outrunning him, that any moment he would feel the shock of her jaws around his Achilles tendon and he would go down.

  He cast the girls to either side, into the creosote and tamarisk. They flew from his arms silently, but before they crashed into the bush Mendel had spun about with the blade of his finger spiking like a chitinous rapier.

  But she was faster than Perses had been, and she had known what to expect from Mendel. The lilith cast herself wide of his arm, wary as a dog, and from her fangy mouth she spit at him, something hot and corrosive which seared his arm and shoulder.

  She had scrambled past him and turned to face him again, just out of reach of his talon, and Mendel saw that when she spit at him her mouth contorted like one about to vomit, and the acid shot from beneath her tongue in two streams. He dodged and, spinning like a dancer, he leapt at her, throwing his arm wide to slash. But she too was fast, and she leapt back beyond his reach, and once more he felt the searing stream cross against the skin of his midriff.

  The pain blinded him, or would have. But he had been blessed with a divine measure of endorphins in times of agony. In that timelessness brought on by death whispering in his ear, Mendel considered what he might do differently to get at the body of this spidery woman, her elbows and knees all angles as quick as Mendel Hodios could manage, almost as quick as Mendel even at his strongest. It was he who dodged and leapt back now, keeping always her stream of venom from landing on his flesh.

  He did not know this lilith. Her hands and feet looked slender, not for crushing, though he had been fooled by slim hands before: he had seen more elfin hands than hers choke the life out of a full-grown vulgaris. Perhaps it was her jaw that would crush him, or her sinewy legs, when the venom finally wore him down. Her tactic would be the last thing he discovered, or he would never discover it at all.