The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Once in town, down one of the small side streets, he found it, the flower pot with the odd pink plant. He scooped dirt out of the base.

  The old woman shouted something at him. He held out money. “For the plant,” he said. “I’m a flower lover.” She might not have understood English, but she understood money.

  He walked with the plant under his arm. James had been right about some things. Wrong about others. Not a hundred Adams, no. Just two. All of Australoid creation like some parallel world. And you shall know God by His creations. But why would God create two Adams? That’s what Paul had wondered. The answer was that He wouldn’t.

  Two Adams. Two gods. One on each side of the Wallace Line.

  Paul imagined it began as a competition. A line drawn in the sand, to see whose creations would dominate.

  Paul understood the burden Abraham carried, to witness the birth of a religion.

  As Paul walked through the streets he dug his fingers through the dirt. His fingers touched it, and he pulled the lozenge free. The lozenge no evaluation team would ever lay eyes on. He would make sure of that.

  He passed a woman in a doorway, an old woman with a beautiful, full mouth. He thought of the bones in the cave, and of the strange people who had once crouched on this island.

  He handed her the flower. “For you,” he said.

  He hailed a cab and climbed inside. “Take me to the airport.”

  As the old cab bounced along the dusty roads, Paul took off his eye patch. He saw the cabby glance into his rearview and then look away, repulsed.

  “They lied, you see,” Paul told the cabbie. “About the irreducible complexity of the eye. Oh, there are ways.”

  The cabbie turned his radio up, keeping his face forward. Paul grimaced as he unpacked his eye, pulling white gauze out in long strips—pain exploding in his skull.

  “A prophet is one who feels fiercely,” he said, then slid the lozenge into his empty eye socket.

  Stray

  BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM DAVID ACKERT

  New writer Benjamin Rosenbaum has made sales to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Argosy, The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. He has been a party clown, a day care worker on a kibbutz in the Galilee, a student in Italy, a stay-at-home dad, and a programmer for Silicon Valley startups, the U.S. government, online fantasy games, and the Swiss banks of Zurich. His story “Embracing-the-New” was on last year’s Nebula Ballot. Recently returned from a long stay in Switzerland, he now lives with his family in Falls Church, Virginia. Coming up is his first collection, The Ant King and Other Stories. He has a Web site at: www.benjaminrosenbaum.com.

  New writer David Ackert is an actor whose credits include television shows such as CSI: Miami and JAG, as well as the films Suckers and Cool Crime, and a short film entitled Blue Plate that he also produced. He is currently producing and appearing in a documentary entitled Voices of Uganda.

  Here they join forces to demonstrate that sometimes the hardest thing about having power is not using it … .

  She’d found him by the side of the road: Ivan, who had been prince of the immortals, lying in the long grass. Ivan, against whose knees weeping kings had laid their cheeks; who had collected popes, khans, prophets, martyrs, minstrels, whores, revolutionaries, poets, anarchists, and industrial magnates; who could send armies into the sea with a movement of his hand.

  She’d stopped her Model T where he lay by the side of the road. He was shell-shocked, marooned at the end of one kind of life, an empty carapace, soul-dry. There were a million drifters and Okies and ruined men cluttering the gutters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s America, and Muriel had taken him for a white man at first. Colored doctor’s daughter stopping for what looked like a white hobo; the wild danger of that. On that improbable fulcrum, his life had turned.

  He’d told her what he was. She was a mortal; of course she was afraid. But she’d listened, and at the end of that long, mad tale, she’d gotten up from her cedar kitchen table, cleared the teacups, washed them in the sink, and dried her hands.

  “I believe you,” she’d said, and some strange sweet leviathan had moved through the dark water within him. He’d studied the grain of the polished cedar wood, not meeting her eyes. She was like a glass he was afraid of dropping. But even without looking, every creak of the floorboards, every clink of the dishes told him: stay.

  The wedding had been a long Sunday in June. The church was bright, with thick white paint over the boards. It seated forty, squeezed together on pine benches—two rows of out-of-town relatives and Muriel’s father’s old patients had to stand in the back. There was potato salad and coleslaw and grits and greens on the benches outside. The rich smell of the barbecue, the smoke from the grill. Mosquitoes dancing in the afternoon light.

  Muriel smiling and crying and laughing. With Muriel set into the center of his world like a jewel, Ivan was home; when she touched his hand, his enemies became God’s wounded children, his centuries of pain and crime a fireside tale to wonder at. In her embrace, Ivan’s bitter knowledge was refuted. He was a fool in a garden.

  Without her, the world was a desert of evil beings.

  And he was full of fear—full of fear, that she would go.

  Aunt Gertrude was saying, “No no no, the Monroes, from the other side of the family, you know—I think they out in Kansas. Very respectable. Well, let me tell you this, child—I knew that man was perfect for Muriel before she told me he was family. The moment I laid eyes …”

  The women fluttered about Ivan and fussed at him. The men tried out their jokes and stories on him. He nodded and laughed, and watched what their bodies told each other. Yes, he was an out-of-towner, strange, his past unknown; drifter, some said, the kind you want to keep on moving past your town. But that kind settled down sometimes—now look how hard he worked at the mill, when there was work. And she was so happy, look how happy she was. And you know that’s what Muriel needed to be satisfied: someone with an air of strangeness, like this green-eyed ageless second cousin who had probably been in the Great War.

  And he hadn’t pulled any of his puppeteer’s strings. Not one. All on their own, they had chosen him.

  Except Li’l Wallace.

  Li’l Wallace was polite. He complimented Muriel’s dress and he told the men the one about the sailor and the Dutchman. But to Ivan, the man’s thoughts were as loud as a siren: How had this stranger, this high yellow “second cousin” with city manners and slippery ways, won Muriel? Li’l Wallace was strong and good-looking and a steady day-shift man at the mill, and he was from around here. Sure, he was dark, but he couldn’t believe all Muriel wanted was a light-skinned man! After ten years of patient and chivalrous wooing, he had a right to the heart of the doctor’s daughter. He couldn’t fathom how the stranger had gotten by him.

  All through the reception, Li’l Wallace’s eyes tracked across Ivan’s face, hands, clothes, looking for a weakness. Ivan squirmed. It would be so easy: to shift the cadence of his voice to match Li’l Wallace’s; to hold his shoulders in a certain way that would remind Li’l Wallace of his dead brother; to be silent at the right moment, then say the words Li’l Wallace was thinking; so that Li’l Wallace would feel suddenly an unreasonable rush of affection for him, would grin, shake his head ruefully, give up his desire for Muriel and love Ivan.

  Ivan felt like a cripple. Like a man trying to feed himself with a fork held in his toes. And he was afraid. Eventually, Li’l Wallace would find something out of place. What if he found out enough to hate and fear Ivan? To turn these people against him? Part of Ivan seethed with rage that any human would look at him with those suspicious eyes. How good it would feel to turn that resentment and suspicion, in an instant, to adoration.

  But if Ivan was going to be human, to be here, he would have to leave the puppeteer’s strings alone.

  Ivan had been sitting on a picnic bench in the churchyard, smeari
ng his last piece of cornbread into the cooling dabs of gravy, when Li’l Wallace approached.

  “You smoke?”

  Ivan blinked up at him. What was this? “I have,” he said. He watched the resentment and mistrust brewing in the mortal, calculating its trajectory, aching to banish it.

  “Good,” Li’l Wallace said, and pressed something small, square, and cold into Ivan’s hand. Then nodded, and walked away.

  Ivan looked at the lighter. And up at Li’l Wallace’s retreating back, and in it, the decision, simple and sweet: that Muriel deserved to be happy.

  A shiver raced through Ivan’s body. He thought: this human has surprised me. This human has surprised me! Ivan’s heart beat large within him and he looked up at Muriel in her white dress, swinging a niece in slow circles in the air. How can this be?

  And then Ivan answered himself: because in ten thousand years, this is what you have never seen: what happens, what they choose, if only you leave them alone.

  There were moments when he suddenly felt lost in this new life. Sitting by the pond with Li’l Wallace, a checkerboard between them, throwing bread to the ducks, his heart would abruptly begin to race and he would think, what am I doing here? I am wasting time, there is something terribly important I must do, and first of all I must take this human—make sure he is mine, under my control, safe. He’d squeeze his eyes shut and wait for the feeling to pass.

  Or he’d be in a church pew singing David’s psalms and be overcome with a memory: walking through a walled city to the court of a hill-country half-nomad potentate, asses braying in the evening, a crowd of slaves falling onto their bellies before him. Scowling at the princes and lords in disgust—this one too passive, this one low and mean, this one dissolute, none of them souls he’d want pressed close to him. And then turning to see the hard eyes and wild grin of the minstrel boy sitting in the corner with a harp in his goatherd’s hands. Thinking: ah, yes. You. On you I will build an empire, and a path to God. Whatever you were before, now you are mine; now you are the arrow that pierces Heaven. And seeing the yearning begin in the boy’s eyes, the yearning that would never end, that only Ivan could fulfill.

  And in the middle of the mill floor, a fifty-pound sack of flour on one shoulder, Ivan would stop, remembering the shadow the roach cast. After he’d feasted on a hundred centuries of human devotion and need, when he was full of power and empty of fear, he’d forced his way past the Last Door of Dream. And beyond the door, where he’d expected answers and angels—in that terrible light, he’d seen a roach skittering across a wall. And he’d known that that automaton, that empty dead machine creeping on and on and on over the bodies of the dead—that insect was Ivan.

  He’d burned his castle. Burned his library of relics—the jade knife that killed this one, the lock of that one’s hair. Abandoned his living prizes to madness. He’d vanished into a Europe descending into hell: walked through fields of corpses amidst the whistling of shells, on dusty roads by the tinkling and bleating of starving goats. Stared at the blue walls of the sanitorium, seeing the eyes of all those he’d taken. A wall of eyes in darkness. Years that were all one long moment of terror and rage and shame, before he’d crossed the Atlantic.

  Now, when it came upon him, he shouldered the bag and moved his feet. One, then the other. Watched the men at their work of stacking, looked at each one, whispering their names. That’s Henry. That’s Roy. That’s Li’l Wallace. Thought of Muriel waiting at home. Of ham and collard greens. Coffee. Checkers. Lucky Strikes.

  The eyes still watched him, from their wall.

  Ivan loved positioning the checkers, sacrificing one to save another, cornering, crowning, collecting. He loved pretending to make a stupid mistake, giving his last piece to Li’l Wallace with a show of effort and disappointment. And if Ivan kept his eyes carefully on the ducks in the pond and hummed a song from the radio silently to himself, sometimes he could distract himself enough that Li’l Wallace’s moves would actually surprise him.

  The sun was touching the horizon now. Li’l Wallace finished his smoke and handed the lighter back to Ivan. “How’s married life?”

  “Can’t complain,” Ivan said, and looked over at Li’l Wallace. The question was guileless, friendly. But Ivan felt uneasy.

  “I guess y’all gon’ be working on children now,” Li’l Wallace said with an easy smile, his eyes on the lake.

  Blood rushed to Ivan’s face and he turned away. He closed his eyes and remembered Muriel crying in the kitchen. “Shush,” she’d said, pushing him away, “shush, Ivan, yes, I knew, I know what life I chose, now you just let me be, you let me be.” Her cheeks glistening, the bedroom door slamming. (And he could make her laugh again, make her happy again, instantly, so easily! He’d closed his eyes, knowing where that road led: a madman in an empty palace, a lock of hair in a ribbon, burning.)

  Ivan heard Li’l Wallace shift in his chair.

  So there you are, you bastard, Ivan thought. You were right all along. You are the right one for Muriel. You could have given her a real life, a real family. I can only give her a parody.

  He opened his eyes and saw, in Li’l Wallace’s, only compassion.

  And that was too much for Ivan to bear. He pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the woods. Li’l Wallace said something; Ivan kept walking. He didn’t speak, he didn’t gesture. He didn’t trust what he might do to Li’l Wallace if he did.

  Ivan pissed against a tree, buttoned up, and walked deeper into the woods, toward the abandoned graveyard at its heart. He slowed his heartbeat and watched the shadows among the leaves. Then, at the graveyard’s edge, he saw the girl.

  She had dirty blond hair and wore a dress stitched from old calico rags. She was about eleven years old. She knelt in the dirt, her eyes closed, framed in the sun’s last light filtering green through the trees. She was praying. Her lips moved, clumsy, honest. There were tears on her cheeks.

  Ivan felt her prayer, like a beam piercing through the veil. That veil that had been like a wall of stone for him, that door he had opened at such cost, was like a cobweb to her. She was whispering in God’s ear.

  Ivan shifted his posture to become a white man, made himself calm, comforting. He knelt by her and put his hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes but she was not startled. She smiled at him.

  “I’m Ivan. What’s your name?”

  “Sarah,” said the girl.

  She bit her lip. The question she was expecting was, what are you doing out in these woods alone? Instead he asked: “What are you praying for?”

  Sarah drew in a deep and shuddering breath, but she didn’t cry. “I live with my sick grandma. When she dies, I’ll be alone. Ain’t nobody else to take me in. But I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. God’s gonna send someone.”

  Ivan stroked his hand across her hair. This girl’s eyes were a speckled blue. And yet their shape was so familiar. Where had he seen them before? He wondered if a little manipulation in a good cause might be permitted him. Surely he could arrange for a family of whites to take her in. Maybe he would ask Muriel to bend their rules. Maybe—

  There was a crunch of boots on leaves in the forest behind him. “Ivan?” Li’l Wallace said.

  Ivan jumped up. Damn, damn, he’d been lost in the little girl’s eyes. Sarah looked wildly around. Li’l Wallace stared at them and frowned. They were both looking at him, and there was no time.

  Maybe he could have crafted a way to look that would have set them both at ease. In the old days, when he was powerful. But he was so tired now, and he couldn’t risk losing his new home. So he looked as Li’l Wallace expected him to—Negro.

  The girl screamed.

  “Oh my God!” she shouted. She stumbled back against a gravestone and grabbed at her hair where Ivan had touched it. “You’re a nigger! Oh my God, no, you’re gonna—”

  Li’l Wallace hissed in breath, and in it Ivan heard their future. The girl running, crying, found on the road, her imagination feverish. Torches. Guns. Dogs. Cro
sses of fire. Li’l Wallace’s feet kicking in the air, kicking, finding no purchase, nowhere to stand.

  Sarah drew another breath to scream and—

  Ivan took her.

  She ran to him and collapsed into his arms, buried her face against his stomach, sobbing. Ivan lifted her up gently, nestled her face against his neck.

  For Li’l Wallace’s benefit, he said, “Shush now, little miss, you know no one gonna hurt you here, we’re decent folk here, no one gonna treat you with any disrespect, come now, Ivan’s gonna take you back to your home.”

  And when he looked up into Li’l Wallace’s eyes, suspicion and fear were fading. Li’l Wallace blinked and smiled uneasily and let a breath out. His eyes said: you handled that well. I hope.

  Ivan nodded and walked back toward the pond. Li’l Wallace stood behind him, uncertain whether to follow, and Ivan said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, brother.”

  The brown duck quacked at him by the side of the pond. Wanting bread. But he had no bread left. Sarah’s little body was warm and light against his. He leaned his head back a little to look in her eyes. She would follow him anywhere. She didn’t care if he was white or black. He was her sent angel.

  Ivan felt the sting of tears.

  Could it be different, this time? What if there was no shaping, no manipulation, no harvesting; what if he gardened her soul, not for himself, but for her? She was his now: very well, he would be hers. His heart was racing; he felt her total attention, the silence in her mind, the way the collected clear themselves away to make room for the master’s will, and it sickened him. He could cherish her, like a daughter. Would it bring her back to herself? He’d freed prizes before, abandoned them to collapse into madness. Not this time. Too late to turn back. He steeled himself: this time there would be only love, a father’s love!

  He put Sarah on her feet as they approached the porch steps. She leaned in toward him, inhaled the scent of him as it breezed off his shirt, his jacket, his skin. He looked down at her, scratching his jaw, and opened the door.