The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The bartender’s free hand dipped down below the bar and came up with a small club. “Faggot!” he roared and caught Angel just over the ear. Angel slammed into me and we both crashed to the floor. Plenty of emotional kinetic energy in here, I thought dimly as the guys standing at the bar fell on us, and then I didn’t think anything more as I curled up into a ball under their fists and boots.

  We were lucky they didn’t much feel like killing anyone. Angel went out the door first and they tossed me out on top of him. As soon as I landed on him, I knew we were both in trouble; something was broken inside him. So much for keeping out of harm’s way. I rolled off him and lay on the pavement, staring at the sky and trying to catch my breath. There was blood in my mouth and my nose, and my back was on fire.

  Angel? I said, after a bit.

  He didn’t answer. I felt my mind get kind of all loose and runny, like my brains were leaking out my ears. I thought about the trade we’d taken the money from and how I’d been scared of him and his friends and how silly that had been. But then, I was too harmless to live.

  The stars were raining silver fireworks down on me. It didn’t help.

  Angel? I said again.

  I rolled over onto my side to reach for him, and there she was. The car was parked at the curb and she had Angel under the armpits, dragging him toward the open passenger door. I couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not and that scared me. I sat up.

  She paused, still holding the Angel. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I started to understand.

  “Help me get him into the car,” she said at last. Her voice sounded hard and flat and unnatural. “Then you can get in, too. In the back seat.”

  I was in no shape to take her out. It couldn’t have been better for her if she’d set it up herself. I got up, the pain flaring in me so bad that I almost fell down again, and took the Angel’s ankles. His ankles were so delicate, almost like a woman’s, like hers. I didn’t really help much, except to guide his feet in as she sat him on the seat and strapped him in with the shoulder harness. I got in the back as she ran around to the other side of the car, her steps real light and peppy, like she’d found a million dollars lying there on the sidewalk.

  * * *

  We were out on the freeway before the Angel stirred in the shoulder harness. His head lolled from side to side on the back of the seat. I reached up and touched his hair lightly, hoping she couldn’t see me do it.

  Where are you taking me, the Angel said.

  “For a ride,” said the woman. “For the moment.”

  Why does she talk out loud like that? I asked the Angel.

  Because she knows it bothers me.

  “You know I can focus my thoughts better if I say things out loud,” she said. “I’m not like one of your little pushovers.” She glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Just what have you gotten yourself into since you left, darling? Is that a boy or a girl?”

  I pretended I didn’t care about what she said or that I was too harmless to live or any of that stuff, but the way she said it, she meant it to sting.

  Friends can be either, Angel said. It doesn’t matter which. Where are you taking us?

  Now it was us. In spite of everything, I almost could have smiled.

  “Us? You mean, you and me? Or are you really referring to your little pet back there?”

  My friend and I are together. You and I are not.

  The way the Angel said it made me think he meant more than not together; like he’d been with her once the way he was with me now. The Angel let me know I was right. Silver fireworks started flowing slowly off his head down the back of the seat and I knew there was something wrong about it. There was too much all at once.

  “Why can’t you talk out loud to me, darling?” the woman said with fakey-sounding petulance. “Just say a few words and make me happy. You have a lovely voice when you use it.”

  That was true, but the Angel never spoke out loud unless he couldn’t get out of it, like when he’d ordered from the bartender. Which had probably helped the bartender decide about what he thought we were, but it was useless to think about that.

  “All right,” said Angel, and I knew the strain was awful for him. “I’ve said a few words. Are you happy?” He sagged in the shoulder harness.

  “Ecstatic. But it won’t make me let you go. I’ll drop your pet at the nearest hospital and then we’ll go home.” She glanced at the Angel as she drove. “I’ve missed you so much. I can’t stand it without you, without you making things happen. Doing your little miracles. You knew I’d get addicted to it, all the things you could do to people. And then you just took off, I didn’t know what had happened to you. And it hurt.” Her voice turned kind of pitiful, like a little kid’s. “I was in real pain. You must have been, too. Weren’t you? Well, weren’t you?”

  Yes, the Angel said. I was in pain, too.

  I remembered him standing on my corner, where I’d hung out all that time by myself until he came. Standing there in pain. I didn’t know why or from what then, I just took him home, and after a little while, the pain went away. When he decided we were together, I guess.

  The silvery flow over the back of the car seat thickened. I cupped my hands under it and it was like my brain was lighting up with pictures. I saw the Angel before he was my Angel, in this really nice house, the woman’s house, and how she’d take him places, restaurants or stores or parties, thinking at him real hard so that he was all filled up with her and had to do what she wanted him to. Steal sometimes; other times, weird stuff, make people do silly things like suddenly start singing or taking their clothes off. That was mostly at the parties, though she made a waiter she didn’t like burn himself with a pot of coffee. She’d get men, too, through the Angel, and they’d think it was the greatest idea in the world to go to bed with her. Then she’d make the Angel show her the others, the ones that had been sent here the way he had for crimes nobody could have understood, like the waitress with no face. She’d look at them, sometimes try to do things to them to make them uncomfortable or unhappy. But mostly she’d just stare.

  It wasn’t like that in the very beginning, the Angel said weakly and I knew he was ashamed.

  It’s okay, I told him. People can be nice at first, I know that. Then they find out about you.

  The woman laughed. “You two are so sweet and pathetic. Like a couple of little children. I guess that’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it, darling? Except children can be cruel, too, can’t they? So you got this—creature for yourself.” She looked at me in the rearview mirror again as she slowed down a little, and for a moment I was afraid she’d seen what I was doing with the silvery stuff that was still pouring out of the Angel. It was starting to slow now. There wasn’t much time left. I wanted to scream, but the Angel was calming me for what was coming next. “What happened to you, anyway?”

  Tell her, said the Angel. To stall for time, I knew, keep her occupied.

  I was born funny, I said. I had both sexes.

  “A hermaphrodite!” she exclaimed with real delight.

  She loves freaks, the Angel said, but she didn’t pay any attention.

  There was an operation, but things went wrong. They kept trying to fix it as I got older but my body didn’t have the right kind of chemistry or something. My parents were ashamed. I left after awhile.

  “You poor thing,” she said, not meaning anything like that. “You were just what darling, here, needed, weren’t you? Just a little nothing, no demands, no desires. For anything.” Her voice got all hard. “They could probably fix you up now, you know.”

  I don’t want it. I left all that behind a long time ago, I don’t need it.

  “Just the sort of little pet that would be perfect for you,” she said to the Angel. “Sorry I have to tear you away. But I can’t get along without you now. Life is so boring. And empty. And—” She sounded puzzled. “And like there’s nothing more to live for since you left me.”

  That’s not me, said the A
ngel. That’s you.

  “No, it’s a lot of you, too, and you know it. You know you’re addictive to human beings, you knew that when you came here—when they sent you here. Hey, you, pet, do you know what his crime was, why they sent him to this little backwater penal colony of a planet?”

  Yeah, I know, I said. I really didn’t, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  “What do you think about that, little pet neuter?” she said gleefully, hitting the accelerator pedal and speeding up. “What do you think of the crime of refusing to mate?”

  The Angel made a sort of an out-loud groan and lunged at the steering wheel. The car swerved wildly and I fell backward, the silvery stuff from the Angel going all over me. I tried to keep scooping it into my mouth the way I’d been doing, but it was flying all over the place now. I heard the crunch as the tires left the road and went onto the shoulder. Something struck the side of the car, probably the guard rail, and made it fishtail, throwing me down on the floor. Up front the woman was screaming and cursing and the Angel wasn’t making a sound, but, in my head, I could hear him sort of keening. Whatever happened, this would be it. The Angel had told me all that time ago, after I’d taken him home, that they didn’t last long after they got here, the exiles from his world and other worlds. Things tended to happen to them, even if they latched on to someone like me or the woman. They’d be in accidents or the people here would kill them. Like antibodies in a human body rejecting something or fighting a disease. At least I belonged here, but it looked like I was going to die in a car accident with the Angel and the woman both. I didn’t care.

  The car swerved back onto the highway for a few seconds and then pitched to the right again. Suddenly there was nothing under us and then we thumped down on something, not road but dirt or grass or something, bobbing madly up and down. I pulled myself up on the back of the seat just in time to see the sign coming at us at an angle. The corner of it started to go through the windshield on the woman’s side and then all I saw for a long time was the biggest display of silver fireworks ever.

  * * *

  It was hard to be gentle with him. Every move hurt but I didn’t want to leave him sitting in the car next to her, even if she was dead. Being in the back seat had kept most of the glass from flying into me but I was still shaking some out of my hair and the impact hadn’t done much for my back.

  I laid the Angel out on the lumpy grass a little ways from the car and looked around. We were maybe a hundred yards from the highway, near a road that ran parallel to it. It was dark but I could still read the sign that had come through the windshield and split the woman’s head in half. It said, Construction Ahead, Reduce Speed. Far off on the other road, I could see a flashing yellow light and at first I was afraid it was the police or something but it stayed where it was and I realized that must be the construction.

  “Friend,” whispered the Angel, startling me. He’d never spoken aloud to me, not directly.

  Don’t talk, I said, bending over him, trying to figure out some way I could touch him, just for comfort. There wasn’t anything else I could do now.

  “I have to,” he said, still whispering. “It’s almost all gone. Did you get it?”

  Mostly, I said. Not all.

  “I meant for you to have it.”

  I know.

  “I don’t know that it will really do you any good.” His breath kind of bubbled in his throat. I could see something wet and shiny on his mouth but it wasn’t silver fireworks. “But it’s yours. You can do as you like with it. Live on it the way I did. Get what you need when you need it. But you can live as a human, too. Eat. Work. However, whatever.”

  I’m not human, I said. I’m not any more human than you, even if I do belong here.

  “Yes, you are, little friend. I haven’t made you any less human,” he said, and coughed some. “I’m not sorry I wouldn’t mate. I couldn’t mate with my own. It was too … I don’t know, too little of me, too much of them, something. I couldn’t bond, it would have been nothing but emptiness. The Great Sin, to be unable to give, because the universe knows only less or more and I insisted that it would be good or bad. So they sent me here. But in the end, you know, they got their way, little friend.” I felt his hand on me for a moment before it fell away. “I did it after all. Even if it wasn’t with my own.”

  The bubbling in his throat stopped. I sat next to him for awhile in the dark. Finally I felt it, the Angel stuff. It was kind of flutterychurny, like too much coffee on an empty stomach. I closed my eyes and lay down on the grass, shivering. Maybe some of it was shock but I don’t think so. The silver fireworks started, in my head this time, and with them came a lot of pictures I couldn’t understand. Stuff about the Angel and where he’d come from and the way they mated. It was a lot like how we’d been together, the Angel and me. They looked a lot like us but there were a lot of differences, too, things I couldn’t make out. I couldn’t make out how they’d sent him here, either—by light, in, like, little bundles or something. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I guessed an Angel could be light. Silver fireworks.

  I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes, it felt like I’d been laying there a long time. It was still dark, though. I sat up and reached for the Angel, thinking I ought to hide his body.

  He was gone. There was just a sort of wet sandy stuff where he’d been.

  I looked at the car and her. All that was still there. Somebody was going to see it soon. I didn’t want to be around for that.

  Everything still hurt but I managed to get to the other road and start walking back toward the city. It was like I could feel it now, the way the Angel must have, as though it were vibrating like a drum or ringing like a bell with all kinds of stuff, people laughing and crying and loving and hating and being afraid and everything else that happens to people. The stuff that the Angel took in, energy, that I could take in now if I wanted.

  And I knew that taking it in that way, it would be bigger than anything all those people had, bigger than anything I could have had if things hadn’t gone wrong with me all those years ago.

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted it. Like the Angel, refusing to mate back where he’d come from. He wouldn’t, there, and I couldn’t, here. Except now I could do something else.

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted it. But I didn’t think I’d be able to stop it, either, any more than I could stop my heart from beating. Maybe it wasn’t really such a good thing or a right thing. But it was like the Angel said: the universe doesn’t know good or bad, only less or more.

  Yeah. I heard that.

  I thought about the waitress with no face. I could find them all now, all the ones from the other places, other worlds that sent them away for some kind of alien crimes nobody would have understood. I could find them all. They threw away their outcasts, I’d tell them, but here, we kept ours. And here’s how. Here’s how you live in a universe that only knows less or more.

  I kept walking toward the city.

  LUCIUS SHEPARD

  Shades

  Lucius Shepard began publishing in 1983, and in a very short time has become one of the most popular and prolific writers to come along in many years. In 1983, Shepard won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s best new writer, as well as being on the Nebula Award final ballot an unprecedented three times in three separate categories. Since then, he has turned up several more times on the final Nebula ballot, as well as being a finalist for the Hugo Award, the British Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the World Fantasy Award. In 1987, he finally picked up his first (though probably not his last) award, winning the Nebula for his landmark novella, “R & R.” His acclaimed first novel, Green Eyes, was an Ace Special. His most recent books are the novel, Life During Wartime, and the collection, The Jaguar Hunter. He is currently living somewhere in the wilds of Nantucket, where he is at work on two new novels, Mister Right and The End of Life as We Know It. His stories “Salvador” and “Black Coral” wer
e in our Second Annual Collection; his stories “The Jaguar Hunter” and “A Spanish Lesson” were in our Third Annual Collection; and his story “R & R” was in our Fourth Annual Collection.

  Here he gives us a grisly and unsettling look at one man’s eerie reunion with another veteran in postwar Vietnam.

  SHADES

  Lucius Shepard

  This little gook cadre with a pitted complexion drove me through the heart of Saigon—I couldn’t relate to it as Ho Chi Minh City—and checked me into the Hotel Heroes of Tet, a place that must have been quietly elegant and very French back in the days when philosophy was discussed over Cointreau rather than practiced in the streets, but now was filled with cheap production-line furniture and tinted photographs of Uncle Ho. Glaring at me, the cadre suggested I would be advised to keep to my room until I left for Cam Le; to annoy him I strolled into the bar, where a couple of Americans—reporters, their table laden with notebooks and tape cassettes—were drinking shots from a bottle of George Dickel. “How’s it goin’?” I said, ambling over. “Name’s Tom Puleo. I’m doin’ a piece on Stoner for Esquire.”

  The bigger of them—chubby, red-faced guy about my age, maybe thirty-five, thirty-six—returned a fishy stare; but the younger one, who was thin and tanned and weaselly handsome, perked up and said, “Hey, you’re the guy was in Stoner’s outfit, right?” I admitted it, and the chubby guy changed his attitude. He put on a welcome-to-the-lodge smile, stuck out a hand and introduced himself as Ed Fierman, Chicago Sun-Times. His pal, he said, was Ken Witcover, CNN.

  They tried to draw me out about Stoner, but I told them maybe later, that I wanted to unwind from the airplane ride, and we proceeded to do damage to the whiskey. By the time we’d sucked down three drinks, Fierman and I were into some heavy reminiscence. Turned out he had covered the war during my tour and knew my old top. Witcover was cherry in Vietnam, so he just tried to look wise and to laugh in the right spots. It got pretty drunk at that table. A security cadre—fortyish, cadaverous gook in yellow fatigues—sat nearby, cocking an ear toward us, and we pretended to be engaged in subversive activity, whispering and drawing maps on napkins. But it was Stoner who was really on all our minds, and Fierman—the drunkest of us—finally broached the subject, saying, “A machine that traps ghosts! It’s just like the gooks to come up with something that goddamn worthless!”