The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I told you,” the turd muttered sulkily.

  “Dumb shit,” Coyote said. “Come on, Gal. Let’s go. Where to?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I know. Come on!”

  And she set off through town at that lazy-looking, rangy walk that was so hard to keep up with. But the child was full of pep, and came dancing, so that Coyote began dancing, too, skipping and pirouetting and fooling around all the way down the long slope to the level plains. There she slanted their way off northeastward. Horse Butte was at their backs, getting smaller in the distance.

  Along near noon the child said, “I didn’t bring anything to eat.”

  “Something will turn up,” Coyote said. “Sure to.” And pretty soon she turned aside, going straight to a tiny gray shack hidden by a couple of half-dead junipers and a stand of rabbitbrush. The place smelled terrible. A sign on the door said: Fox. Private. No Trespassing!—but Coyote pushed it open, and trotted right back out with half a small smoked salmon. “Nobody home but us chickens,” she said, grinning sweetly.

  “Isn’t that stealing?” the child asked, worried.

  “Yes,” Coyote answered, trotting on.

  They ate the fox-scented salmon by a dried-up creek, slept a while, and went on.

  Before long the child smelled the sour burning smell, and stopped. It was as if a huge, heavy hand had begun pushing her chest, pushing her away, and yet at the same time as if she had stepped into a strong current that drew her forward, helpless.

  “Hey, getting close!” Coyote said, and stopped to piss by a juniper stump.

  “Close to what?”

  “Their town. See?” She pointed to a pair of sage-spotted hills. Between them was an area of grayish blank.

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  “We won’t go all the way in. No way! We’ll just get a little closer and look. It’s fun,” Coyote said, putting her head on one side, coaxing. “They do all these weird things in the air.”

  The child hung back.

  Coyote became businesslike, responsible. “We’re going to be very careful,” she announced. “And look out for big dogs, O.K.? Little dogs I can handle. Make a good lunch. Big dogs, it goes the other way. Right? Let’s go, then.”

  Seemingly as casual and lounging as ever, but with a tense alertness in the carriage of her head and the yellow glance of her eyes, Coyote led off again, not looking back; and the child followed.

  All around them the pressures increased. It was as if the air itself were pressing on them, as if time were going too fast, too hard, not flowing but pounding, pounding, pounding, faster and harder till it buzzed like Rattler’s rattle. “Hurry, you have to hurry!” everything said. “There isn’t time!” everything said. Things rushed past screaming and shuddering. Things turned, flashed, roared, stank, vanished. There was a boy—he came into focus all at once, but not on the ground: he was going along a couple of inches above the ground, moving very fast, bending his legs from side to side in a kind of frenzied, swaying dance, and was gone. Twenty children sat in rows in the air, all singing shrilly, and then the walls closed over them. A basket, no, a pot, no, a can, a garbage can, full of salmon smelling wonderful, no, full of stinking deer hides and rotten cabbage stalks—keep out of it. Coyote! Where was she?

  “Mom!” the child called. “Mother!”—standing a moment at the end of an ordinary small-town street near the gas station, and the next moment in a terror of blanknesses, invisible walls, terrible smells and pressures and the overwhelming rush of Time straightforward rolling her helpless as a twig in the race above a waterfall. She clung, held on trying not to fall—“Mother!”

  Coyote was over by the big basket of salmon, approaching it, wary but out in the open, in the full sunlight, in the full current. And a boy and a man borne by the same current were coming down the long, sage-spotted hill behind the gas station, each with a gun, red hats—hunters; it was killing season. “Hey, will you look at that damn coyote in broad daylight big as my wife’s ass,” the man said, and cocked, aimed, shot—all as Myra screamed and ran against the enormous drowning torrent. Coyote fled past her yelling, “Get out of here!” She turned and was borne away.

  Far out of sight of that place, in a little draw among low hills, they sat and breathed air in searing gasps until, after a long time, it came easy again.

  “Mom, that was stupid,” the child said furiously.

  “Sure was,” Coyote said. “But did you see all that food!”

  “I’m not hungry,” the child said sullenly. “Not till we get all the way away from here.”

  “But they’re your folks,” Coyote said. “All yours. Your kith and kin and cousins and kind. Bang! Pow! There’s Coyote! Bang! There’s my wife’s ass! Pow! There’s anything—BOOOOM! Blow it away, man! BOOOOOOM!”

  “I want to go home,” the child said.

  “Not yet,” said Coyote. “I got to take a shit.” She did so, then turned to the fresh turd, leaning over it. “It says I have to stay,” she reported, smiling.

  “It didn’t say anything! I was listening!”

  “You know who to understand? You hear everything, Miss Big Ears? Hears all—See all with her crummy, gummy eye—”

  “You have pine-pitch eyes, too! You told me so!”

  “That’s a story,” Coyote snarled. “You don’t even know a story when you hear one! Look, do what you like; it’s a free country. I’m hanging around here tonight. I like the action.” She sat down and began patting her hands on the dirt in a soft four-four rhythm and singing under her breath, one of the endless, tuneless songs that kept time from running too fast, that wove the roots of trees and bushes and ferns and grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock’s place and the earth together. And the child lay listening.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Coyote went on singing.

  Sun went down the last slope of the west and left a pale green clarity over the desert hills.

  Coyote had stopped singing. She sniffed. “Hey,” she said. “Dinner.” She got up and moseyed along the little draw. “Yeah,” she called back softly. “Come on!”

  Stiffly, for the fear-crystals had not yet melted out of her joints, the child got up and went to Coyote. Off to one side along the hill was one of the lines, a fence. She didn’t look at it. It was O.K. They were outside it.

  “Look at that!”

  A smoked salmon, a whole chinook, lay on a little cedar-bark mat.

  “An offering! Well, I’ll be darned!” Coyote was so impressed she didn’t even swear. “I haven’t seen one of these for years! I thought they’d forgotten!”

  “Offering to whom?”

  “Me! Who else? Boy, look at that!”

  The child looked dubiously at the salmon.

  “It smells funny.”

  “How funny?”

  “Like burned.”

  “It’s smoked, stupid! Come on.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “O.K. It’s not your salmon anyhow. It’s mine. My offering, for me. Hey, you people! You people over there! Coyote thanks you! Keep it up like this, and maybe I’ll do some good things for you, too!”

  “Don’t, don’t yell, Mom! They’re not that far away—”

  “They’re all my people,” said Coyote with a great gesture, and then sat down cross-legged, broke off a big piece of salmon, and ate.

  Evening Star burned like a deep, bright pool of water in the clear sky. Down over the twin hills was a dim suffusion of light, like a fog. The child looked away from it, back at the star.

  “Oh,” Coyote said. “Oh shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That wasn’t so smart, eating that,” Coyote said, and then held herself and began to shiver, to scream, to choke—her eyes rolled up; her long arms and legs flew out jerking and dancing; foam spurted out between her teeth. Her body arched tremendously backward, and the child, trying to hold her, was thrown violently off by the spasms of her limbs. The child scramble
d back and held the body as it spasmed again, twitched, quivered, went still.

  By moonrise, Coyote was cold. Till then there had been so much warmth under the tawny coat that the child kept thinking maybe she was alive, maybe if she just kept holding her, keeping her warm, Coyote would recover, she would be all right. The child held her close, not looking at the black lips drawn back from the teeth, the white balls of the eyes. But when the cold came through the fur as the presence of death, the child let the slight, stiff corpse lie down on the dirt.

  She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit. Coyote’s people did not bury their dead; she knew that. But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff paws stuck out. The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned salmon carcass. Then she stood up and walked away without looking back.

  At the top of the hill, she stood and looked across the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the town lying in the pass between the twin hills.

  “I hope you all die in pain,” she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert.

  5

  It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening, north of Horse Butte.

  “I didn’t cry,” the child said.

  “None of us do,” said Chickadee. “Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother’s house.”

  It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke, she wove.

  “Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person.”

  “Grandmother,” Chickadee greeted her.

  The child said, “I’m not one of them.”

  Grandmother’s eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.

  “Old Person, then,” said Grandmother. “You’d better go back there now, Granddaughter. That’s where you live.”

  “I lived with Coyote. She’s dead. They killed her.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Coyote!” Grandmother said with a little huff of laughter. “She gets killed all the time.”

  The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.

  “Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”

  “I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”

  Chickadee shook her head once, silent.

  “It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas.… You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?”

  The child nodded.

  “They’ve been looking for you.”

  “They have?”

  “Oh yes. Ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”

  “Serves him right. Served them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.

  “Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there, too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement. Don’t kill me, or I’ll make it rain.…”

  “I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”

  The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak.

  “Will I ever see Coyote?”

  “I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.

  The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”

  “Yes. You can keep your eye.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope toward the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way, a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  The Pardoner’s Tale

  To forgive may be divine, but to pardon can be very costly … and sometimes very dangerous as well, as demonstrated by the story that follows.

  One of the most prolific authors alive, Robert Silverberg can lay claim to more than 450 fiction and nonfiction books and over 3,000 magazine pieces. Within SF, Silverberg rose to his greatest prominence during the late ’60s and early ’70s, winning four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award, publishing dozens of major novels and anthologies. In 1980, Lord Valentine’s Castle became a nationwide bestseller. Silverberg’s other books include The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Lord of Darkness (a historical novel), and Valentine Pontifex, the sequel to Lord Valentine’s Castle. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, and Beyond the Safe Zone. His most recent books are the novels Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, and At Winter’s End. His story “Multiples” was in our First Annual Collection; “The Affair” was in our Second Annual Collection; “Sailing to Byzantium”—which won a Nebula Award in 1986—was in our Third Annual Collection; and “Against Babylon” was in our Fourth Annual Collection. Silverberg received another Hugo Award in 1987. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Karen Haber.

  THE PARDONER’S TALE

  Robert Silverberg

  “Key sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” I said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.

  Software isn’t generally suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—I could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff.

  I stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.

  “Name, please,” the gatekeeper said finally.

  “John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon, ten-four-three-two-four-X.”

  The gate opened. I walked into Los Angeles.

  As easy as Beta Pi.

  * * *

  The wall that encircles L.A. is 100, 150 feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin, from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it’s at least 60 feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

  I suppose the walls around our cities were put there mostly as symbols. They highlight the distinction between city and countryside, between citizen and uncitizen, between control and chaos, just as city walls did 5000 years ago. But mainly they serve to remind us that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build us, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that. All the same, Chicago doesn’t have a wall 60 feet high and 150 feet thick. Houston doesn’t. Phoenix doesn’t. They make do with less. But L.A. is the main city. I suppose the Los Angeles Wall is a statement: I am the Big Cheese. I am the Ham What Am.

  The walls aren’t there because the Entities are afraid of attack. They know how invulnerable they are. We know it, too. They just want to decorate their capital with something a little special. What the hell; it isn’t their sweat that goes into building the walls. It’s ours. Not mine personally, of course. But ours.

  I saw a few Entities walking around just inside the wall, preoccupied, as usual, with God knows what and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were low-caste ones, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. I gave them plenty
of room. They have a way sometimes of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they study him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. I don’t care for that. You don’t get hurt, but it isn’t agreeable to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a 15-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles. Happened to me once in St. Louis, long ago, and I’m in no hurry to have it happen again.

  The first thing I did when I was inside L.A. was find a car. On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall I saw a ’31 Toshiba El Dorado that looked good to me, and I matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about 90 seconds to reprogram its drive control to my personal metabolic cues. The previous owner must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: Her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphines were wild.

  Not a bad car—a little slow in the shift, but what can you expect, considering the last time any cars were manufactured on this planet was the year 2034?

  “Pershing Square,” I told it.

  It had nice capacity, maybe 60 megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. I figured I’d set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three pardons to keep my edge sharp, get myself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. It was winter, a nice time to be in L.A. That golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons.

  I hadn’t been out on the Coast in years. Working Florida mainly, Texas, sometimes Arizona. I hate the cold. I hadn’t been in L.A. since ’36. A long time to stay away, but maybe I’d been staying away deliberately. I wasn’t sure. That last L.A. trip had left bad-tasting memories. There had been a woman who wanted a pardon and I sold her a stiff. You have to stiff the customers now and then or else you start looking too good, which can be dangerous; but she was young and pretty and full of hope, and I could have stiffed the next one instead of her, only I didn’t. Sometimes I’ve felt bad, thinking back over that. Maybe that’s what had kept me away from L.A. all this time.