The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Taylor looked over his shoulder at the departing men. “You won’t be so glad when it happens,” he muttered.

  Noland rode up. “Jayhawked from Arkansas,” he said. “That’s a good one.” He spurred his horse, which set off at a trot. Taylor’s horse did likewise. Bixby, for once, took the cue and hurried to catch up.

  “I’m sorry if my lie didn’t meet with your approval,” Sam said as Bixby drew alongside Noland’s horse.

  “I said it was a good one,” Noland said.”I say what I mean.”

  “You may believe him on that score, Sam,” Taylor said. “John’s as honest a nigger as I’ve ever known.”

  Sam eyed Noland. “Well, then, tell me,” he said. “Where were you jayhawked from?”

  “I was born a free man in Ohio,” Noland said. “Same as Colonel Quantrill.”

  “I see,” Sam said. “And how is it that a free man of your race rides with a free man like the Colonel?”

  Noland turned to look at Sam for the first time. His eyes and face were like black stone.

  “He pays me,” Noland said.

  Sam had no response to that. But Noland kept looking at him.

  “So why do you ride with the Colonel?” Noland asked.

  “Might as well ask Fletch the same question,” Sam said.

  “I know all about Mister Taylor,” Noland said. “His house was burned, his property stolen. But I don’t know shit about you.”

  Taylor gave Noland a look of warning. “Don’t get uppity.”

  “It’s all right, Fletch,” Sam said. Fair was fair. He had asked Noland an impertinent question, so Noland had asked him one. “I was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, Mister Noland. I was a printer’s devil before that, but I wanted to be on the river, so I made it so.” He grimaced. “I was a cub for two years before I earned my license, and I was only able to follow the profession for another two years before the war started. I had to leave the river then, or be forced to pilot a Union boat. So here I am.”

  “How’d you come to be on this side of Missouri instead of that side?” Noland asked.

  “I was going to Nevada Territory with my brother,” Sam said, angry now at being prodded, “but the Red Legs killed him northwest of Atchison. I went back home after that, but eventually realized there was nothing useful I could do there. So I came back this way and fell in with one bunch of incompetents after another until I joined the Colonel.” He glared at Noland. “So here I am.”

  “So here you are,” Noland said.

  “That’s about enough, John,” Taylor said. He looked at Sam. “I didn’t know you were a printer, Sam, but I’m glad to hear it. It’ll make one of our tasks easier. Marshal Donaldson’s posse tore up the Lawrence Herald of Freedom’s press and dumped the type in the Kansas River back in ‘56, but the Lawrence Journal’s sprung up like a weed to take its place. So when we raid Lawrence, the Journal’s to be destroyed. But we’ll need to know how well the office is armed, so I suggest that you go there and ask for employment. You’ll be able to get a look at things without them wondering why. After you’ve done that, you can help me count Bluebellies, Red Legs, and Lawrence Home Guards, if we can find out who they are.”

  “What if the Journal wants to hire me?” Sam asked.

  Taylor grinned. “Tell them you’ll be back in a week or so.” He looked across at Noland. “John, you’re to fall in with the local niggers and see whether any of them have guns. You might also ask them about Jim Lane, since they love him so much. Find out where his fancy new house is, and how often he’s there.”

  Noland was staring straight ahead again, but he nodded.

  They were now skirting the base of a high, steep hill. Sam looked up the slope. “One of the boys at Blue Springs told me that the hill rising over Lawrence is called Mount Horeb,” he said. “It must be named after the place where Moses saw the burning bush.”

  Taylor chuckled. “If Moses is still here, he’ll see more burning before long, at closer range than he might like.” He pointed toward the southeast, at another hill that was a few miles distant. “That might be a safer place for him to watch from. The Colonel says it’ll be our last stop before the raid, so we can see what’s what before it’s too late to turn back.” He spurred his horse, which galloped ahead. “Come on, boys! We’ve reached Lawrence!”

  Noland spurred his horse as well, and he and Taylor vanished around the curve of the hill.

  “Now that I think of it,” Sam yelled after them, “he said Mount Oread, not Horeb. Moses doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  He kicked Bixby, but the horse only looked back at him and gave a low nicker. It was the saddest sound Sam had ever heard.

  “Do you have a stomachache?” he asked.

  Bixby looked forward again and plodded as if leading a funeral procession. Sam kicked the horse once more and then gave up. The sadness of Bixby’s nicker had infected him, and he felt oppressed by the heat, by his companions, and by his very existence on the planet.

  They followed the road around the hill, and then Lawrence lay before Sam like a toy city put together by a giant child. Its rows of stores and houses were too neat and perfect to be real. Small wagons rolled back and forth between them, and children dashed about like scurrying ants. Taylor and Noland were already among them.

  Sam closed his eyes, but then opened them immediately, crying out before he could stop himself.

  He had just seen the buildings, wagons, and children burst into flame.

  Sam shook himself. Here he was having nightmares while wide awake. The ride had been too long, the sun too hot. It was time for a rest.

  But maybe not for sleep.

  * * *

  Early Friday, Sam awoke in sweat-soaked sheets. He fought his way free, then sat up with his back against the wall. He had just spent his second night in Lawrence, and his second night in a real bed in almost three months. The dream had come to him on both nights, worse than ever. He was no more rested than if he had run up and down Mount Oread since sundown.

  The dream always began the same way: He and the other Marion Rangers, fifteen men in all, were bedding down in a corn crib at Camp Ralls, fourteen miles south of Hannibal. They had to chase the rats away, but they had to do that every night. Then a Negro messenger came and told them that the enemy was nearby. They scoffed; they had heard that before.

  But they grew tense and restless, and could not sleep. The sounds of their breathing were unsteady. Sam’s heart began to beat faster.

  Then they heard a horse approaching. Sam and the other Rangers went to the corn crib’s front wall and peered out through a crack between the logs. In the dim moonlight, they saw the shadow of a man on a horse enter the camp. Sam was sure that he saw more men and horses behind that shadow. Camp Ralls was being attacked.

  Sam picked up a rifle and pushed its muzzle between the logs. His skull was humming, his chest tight. His hands shook. The enemy had come and would kill him. The enemy had come and would kill him. The enemy had come and would—

  Someone shouted, “Fire!”

  And Sam pulled the trigger. The noise was as loud and the flash as bright as if a hundred guns had gone off at once.

  The enemy fell from his saddle and lay on the ground. Then all was darkness, and silence. There was nothing but the smell of damp earth.

  No more riders came. The fallen man was alone.

  Sam and the others went out to the enemy. Sam turned the man onto his back, and the moonlight revealed that he was not wearing a uniform, and that his white shirt was soaked with blood. He was not the enemy. He was not even armed. And his face—

  Was sometimes Henry’s, and sometimes Orion’s.

  But just now, this Friday morning in Lawrence, it had been someone else’s. It had been a face that Sam did not recognize. It had been the face of an innocent stranger, killed by Sam Clemens for no reason at all … no reason save that Sam was at war, and the man had gotten in the way.

  Fletch Taylor, in the room’s other bed, mum
bled in his sleep. Sam could still smell the whiskey. One of Taylor’s first acts of spying on Wednesday afternoon had been to hunt up a brothel, and he had been having a fine time ever since. He was counting Bluebellies too, but it had turned out that there weren’t many Bluebellies to count.

  Sam had visited the brothel with Taylor on Wednesday, but hadn’t found the girls to his liking. So he’d spent most of his time since then trying to do his job. He had applied for work at the Lawrence Journal, as planned, and had been turned down, as he’d hoped—but had learned that the Journal was a two-man, one-boy operation, and that they didn’t even dream of being attacked. A carbine hung on pegs on the wall in the pressroom, but it was kept unloaded to prevent the boy from shooting rabbits out the back door. The Journal’s type would join the Herald of Freedom’s at the bottom of the Kansas River with little difficulty.

  From the purplish-gray color of the patch of eastern sky visible through the hotel room window, Sam guessed that it was about five A.M. He climbed out of bed and went to the window to look down at the wide, muddy strip of the town’s main thoroughfare, Massachusetts Street. Lawrence was quiet. The buildings were closed up, and no one was outside. Even the Red Legs and Home Guards slept until six or six-thirty. If Colonel Quantrill timed his raid properly, he and his bushwhackers could ride into Lawrence while its citizens were still abed.

  The Union garrison shouldn’t be much trouble either, Sam thought as he looked north toward the river. The handful of troops stationed in Lawrence had moved their main camp to the north bank of the Kansas, and the only way for them to come back across into town was by ferry, a few at a time. Two small camps of Federal recruits—one for whites, the other for Negroes—were located south of the river, in town; but those recruits were green and poorly armed. The raiders could ignore them, or squash them like ladybugs if they were foolish enough to offer resistance.

  Sam left the window, pulled the chamber pot from under his bed, and took a piss. Then he lit an oil lamp, poured water from a pitcher into a bowl, and stood before the mirror that hung beside the window. He took his razor and scraped the stubble from his throat, chin, cheeks, and sideburns, but left his thick reddish-brown mustache. He had grown fond of the mustache because it made him look meaner than he really was. The dirt that had been ground into his pores had made him look mean too, but that was gone now. He’d had a bath Wednesday evening, and was thinking of having another one today. Lawrence might be a den of abolitionist murderers, but at least it was a den of abolitionist murderers that could provide a few of the amenities of civilization.

  When he had finished shaving, he combed his hair and dressed, then put out the lamp and left the room. Taylor was still snoring. Whiskey did wonders for helping a man catch up on his sleep.

  Sam went downstairs and out to the street, opening and closing the door of the Whitney House as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the Stone family, who owned the place. Taylor had told Sam that Colonel Quantrill had stayed at the Whitney when he’d lived in Lawrence under the name of Charley Hart, and that Mr. Stone had befriended “Hart” and would therefore be treated with courtesy during the raid. So Sam was being careful not to do anything that might be interpreted as discourtesy. He wanted to stay on the Colonel’s good side.

  The wooden sidewalk creaked under Sam’s boots as he walked toward the river. It was a sound that he hadn’t noticed on Wednesday or Thursday, when he had shared the sidewalk with dozens of Lawrence citizens. Then the predominant sounds had been of conversation and laughter, intermingled with the occasional neighing of a horse. But this early in the morning, Sam had Massachusetts Street to himself, save for two dogs that raced past with butcher-bones in their mouths. Sam took a cigar from his coat pocket, lit it with a match, and drew in a lungful of sweet smoke.

  He had to admit that Lawrence was a nice-looking town. Most of the buildings were sturdy and clean, and the town was large and prosperous considering that it had been in existence less than ten years. Almost three thousand souls called Lawrence home, and not all of those souls, Sam was sure, were bad ones. Perhaps the raid would succeed in running off those who were, and the city would be improved as a result.

  Sam paused before the Eldridge House hotel. The original Eldridge House, a veritable fortress of abolitionist fervor and free-state propaganda, had been destroyed by Marshal Donaldson in 1856, but it had been rebuilt into an even more formidable fortress in the service of the same things. It was a brick building four stories high, with iron grilles over the ground-floor windows. Quantrill might want to destroy the Eldridge House a second time, particularly since the Lawrence Home Guards would probably concentrate their resistance here, but Sam’s advice would be to skip it. A mere fifteen or twenty men, armed with Sharps carbines and barricaded in the Eldridge House, would be able to kill a hundred bushwhackers in the street below.

  “Hello!” a shrill voice called from across the street. “Good morning, Mister Sir!”

  Sam looked across and saw a sandy-haired boy of ten or eleven waving at him. It took a moment before he recognized the boy as the printer’s devil from the Lawrence Journal.

  Sam took his cigar from his mouth. “Good morning yourself,” he said without shouting.

  The boy pointed at the Eldridge House. “Are you staying there, Mister Sir?” he yelled. “You must be rich!”

  Sam shook his head. “Neither one. But if you keep squawking like a rusty steamboat whistle, I imagine you’ll be meeting some of the inhabitants of the Eldridge House presently.” He continued up the street.

  The boy ran across and joined Sam on the sidewalk. Sam frowned at him and blew smoke at his face, but the boy only breathed it in and began chattering.

  “I like the morning before the sun comes up, don’t you?” the boy said. “Some days I wake up when it’s still dark, and I ride my pa’s mule out to the hills south of town, and I can look down over Lawrence when the sun rises. It makes me feel like the king of the world. Do you know what I mean, Mister Sir?”

  “I’m sure I don’t,” Sam said.

  The boy didn’t seem to notice that Sam had spoken. “Say, if you aren’t at the Eldridge, where are you at, Mister Sir? I’ll bet you’re at the Johnson House, is what I’ll bet. But maybe not, because the Red Legs meet at the Johnson, and they don’t like strangers. So I’ll bet you’re at the Whitney, then, aren’t you, Mister Sir?”

  “Yes,” Sam said. “The Johnson was not much to my liking.”

  “The Red Legs seem to like it just fine.”

  Sam nodded. “I have made note of that.” And indeed he had. If the Red Legs could be punished for their crimes, he would be able to sleep a little better. And if the specific Red Legs who had killed Orion could be found and strung up, he would sleep better than Adam before the Fall.

  “Those Red Legs, they have a time,” the boy said. “I just might be a Red Leg myself, when I’m old enough.”

  “I would advise against it,” Sam said, gnawing on his cigar. “The profession has little future.”

  The boy kicked a rock off the sidewalk. “I guess not,” he said. “They say they’ll have burned out the secesh in another year, so there won’t be nothing left to fight for, will there, Mister Sir?”

  “Stop calling me ‘Mister Sir,’” Sam said. “If you must speak to me at all, call me Mister Clemens.” He saw no danger in using his real name. The self-satisfied citizens of Lawrence clearly didn’t expect bushwhackers in their midst, and wouldn’t know that he was one even if they did.

  “I’m sorry, Mister Clemens,” the boy said. “I listened to you talking to Mister Trask at the Journal yesterday, but I didn’t hear your name. Would you like to know mine?”

  “No,” Sam said.

  They had reached the northern end of Massachusetts Street and were now walking down a rutted slope toward the ferry landing. Before them, the Kansas River was dull brown in color and less than a hundred yards wide; hardly a river at all, in Sam’s opinion. But it would be enough to protect Quantrill’s
raiders from the soldiers on the far bank, provided that the soldiers didn’t realize the raiders were coming until it was too late. To assure himself of that, Sam wanted to see how active or inactive the Bluebellies were at this time of morning. If they were as slumberous as Lawrence’s civilians, he would be able to report that there was little chance of any of them ferrying across in time to hinder the raid. There weren’t many soldiers in the camp anyway. Taylor had counted only a hundred and twelve, and some of those weren’t soldiers at all, but surveyors.

  “How come you’re heading down to the river, Mister Clemens?” the boy asked. “Are you going fishing?”

  Sam stopped walking and glared down at the boy, taking his cigar from his mouth with a slow, deliberate motion. “Do you see a fishing pole in my hand, boy?” he asked, exhaling a bluish cloud.

  The boy gazed up at the cigar, which had a two-inch length of ash trembling at its tip.

  “No, sir,” the boy said. “I see a cigar.”

  “Then it is reasonable to assume,” Sam said, “that I have come to the river not to fish, but to smoke.” He tapped the cigar, and the ash fell onto the boy’s head.

  The boy yelped and jumped away, slapping at his hair.

  Sam replaced his cigar between his teeth and continued down the slope.

  “That wasn’t nice!” the boy shouted after him.

  “I’m not a nice man,” Sam said. He didn’t look back, so he didn’t know if the boy heard him. But he reached the riverbank alone.

  A thin fog hovered over the water and began to dissipate as the sun rose. The sunlight gave the tents on the far bank a pinkish tinge. The camp wasn’t dead quiet, but there wasn’t much activity either. At first, Sam saw only two fires and no more than five or six men up and about. As he watched, more men emerged from their tents, but military discipline was lacking. Apparently, these Bluebellies could get up whenever they pleased. That would be good news for the Colonel.

  Sam threw the stub of his cigar into the river and heard it hiss. The sun was up now, and the soldiers began emerging from their tents with increasing frequency. From old habit, Sam reached for his pocket watch. But he still hadn’t replaced the one that the Red Legs had stolen two years before.