The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Muriel?” he called in, escorting the girl inside. He sat Sarah down at the kitchen table and scooped generous curls of ice cream into a bowl. He heard Muriel coming down the stairs as he handed Sarah a spoon.

  Muriel stopped when she saw the girl. She had not expected a third person in the house. The two of them locked eyes.

  “This here is our new friend, Sarah,” Ivan said.

  “Hello, Sarah.” Muriel nodded, a nod of extreme politeness, a nod in which no one could find any insolence at all. Her spine was knotted tense. She looked around the room at the chairs, wondering if she should sit down. Smiled broadly. Tried not to wonder where this girl’s people were, if they were looking for her, what they would do if they found her here. Trying to trust Ivan. Just a little girl eating ice cream, Ivan saw Muriel tell herself, trying not to think of torches and dogs.

  Sarah shrank back a little. She glanced at Ivan, looking for some cue or instruction. She found it in his expression and put down the spoon.

  “I don’t mean to be any bother, ma’am. Your husband was kind enough to help me after I took a fall on the road. He kept saying nice things about you and so we thought I might like to meet you is all.” Sarah sparkled at her hostess. Her smile was warm and innocent, smudged with vanilla.

  “Oh,” Muriel said, relaxing a little. “Of course.” She stepped forward and opened the napkin drawer. “Well, you’re certainly welcome here.”

  Sarah flicked a look back to Ivan. He smiled to reassure her. Well done, little one. We will convince my Muriel. She needs a little time for these fears of hers, fears from the world beyond this house. They don’t belong in this house anymore; they don’t matter now.

  Sarah stroked her chin, mock serious.

  “Now if I had to guess, I’d say you made this delicious ice cream yourself, am I right, ma’am?”

  Muriel laughed and turned back to the girl. “Oh yes, and it’s kind of you to …” She stopped and looked at Ivan. He realized he was stroking his chin in exactly the same way, and jerked his hand from his face. Muriel handed the girl a checkered napkin. “Sarah, would you excuse us for a minute?”

  Sarah did not move. Not until Ivan dismissed her. Then she collected her bowl, flashed a jealous glance in Muriel’s direction, and went out to the porch.

  Muriel waited until she heard the screen door swing shut. “Ivan, what in Heaven’s name is going on here?”

  “I’m sorry, Muriel,” he said.

  Maybe Muriel hadn’t believed Ivan’s stories until now, not all the way. She’d listened attentively to all he told her about what he was, what he had been, while she fell in love with him. But for her it was just a bad old life he’d led, as if she’d married a man who had fought his way up from being a back-alley drunk. She hadn’t thought too much about the people he’d left behind. “You’re sorry?”

  “I just wanted to talk to her, Muriel—I was curious, and then—she was in a bad way, and I thought we could help her—” He gritted his teeth with the effort of leaving alone the tension knotting the muscles of Muriel’s neck, the panic in her eyes. A mortal man would soothe her, wouldn’t he? Li’l Wallace would soothe her. But where was the line? Did he err, in keeping his face flat, his movements drained of their power to unravel her fear? She turned her face away. “Li’l Wallace came up and I had to be Negro again. The child panicked, so I … I had to …”

  “How could you?” Muriel whispered.

  “Muriel, it ain’t like that. I don’t want a prize or a tool. It’s—it was just—the girl’s about to be orphaned. We could … she needs us.”

  “You promised me, Ivan,” Muriel whispered. It burned like a bullet through Ivan’s heart.

  “Muriel, I know it was wrong. But it’s done. We can do this with love, Muriel, as a family—”

  She whipped around to face him. “Ivan, how can you be what you are and be such a fool? Look in that little white girl’s eyes, look at how she looks at me. That’s not a daughter, Ivan. That’s a slave. Is that what you think I want?”

  It would be so easy, so easy. “Oh Ivan,” she would say. “You’re right, I’m just shocked is all—but that poor little girl—bring her back in. Let’s make this work.”

  And then he’d have lost her. He’d have two slaves.

  “This is what I am, Muriel,” he hissed. “Should I just abandon her? I’m responsible for her—”

  Muriel walked to the sink and held onto it, seeking purchase. “You’re responsible to me, too, Ivan. You chose me, too. You said ‘I do.’” She wiped at the corner of her eye a few times as if something were stuck there. “So what, then? Are we going to run away from my home and family? Set up a new life for you and your white daughter, with me as the maid?” She leaned forward at him, her face flushed dark as wine, her voice shaking. “Or are you just gonna change everybody so they don’t mind any that she’s white? Or so they don’t know no more? Are you going to just work some of your tricks on Aunt Gertrude and Li’l Wallace and the preacher and the police? Are we all gonna end up as your trained puppies?”

  He stood up from his chair, his hands at his sides. He put his ice cream spoon down on the table. If the others of his kind had been there, they would have heard volumes in the clatter of that spoon. Muriel just looked at him. So he said, “I can never give you what you want.”

  Muriel burst out crying.

  That surprised him, and for a moment he felt a little surge of terror from an ancient part of him. What was he losing, that mortals started surprising him? He hadn’t been paying attention. It had been easy to see them clearly, in the old days, like dangling string above a kitten, knowing how the kitten would jump. Now he’d fallen into a mysterious country.

  He put his arms around her, and she bowed her head to push her forehead into his shoulder.

  “You fool, you fool,” she sobbed, “I don’t need no baby, I just want you.”

  Like a fist, some kind of joy or sadness forced its way from Ivan’s chest up through his throat and out through his face. Its passage was sudden and unexpected, and Ivan sighed. He did not know who he was anymore.

  They held each other. Her tears cooled his shoulder, and he could feel the tremors dancing through her. And then he tasted his own tears, unbidden, cool on his cheeks.

  “Ivan,” Muriel said in a throaty whisper, “you tell me straight now. I don’t want your good intentions, I want the truth. Is there any hope for that little girl? Can you undo what you did?”

  It was safe here, in Muriel’s arms. In this safe place, he thought about the plan he’d made on the walk back home, and he could smell its stink of pride—the pride of princes. Muriel felt it in the silence, and she stiffened.

  “You mortals,” he said, the words muddy in his throat, “you walk around with this huge—emptiness in you, like wanting back into the womb. You think we’ll fill it. Once you get that hunger … you don’t let go. You’ll die for us, but you won’t leave us. Maybe I can make her forget, but the hunger stays.”

  “And if you keep her here? Or we go off with her?” She shook her head. “Or you go off with her alone? Is she going to get better?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Muriel pulled away. “Good Lord, Ivan! Guess!”

  He looked at his hands. “I think she’ll be something like a child, and something like a prize, and maybe that’ll twist her up.” He could feel his cheeks get hot. “No. She won’t get better. And I’ll have to be … what I was.”

  Muriel shook, her eyes closed. She put her hands over her face. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” she said.

  Ivan said nothing.

  She wiped her tears on her apron. “I can’t give you up willingly,” she said. “God forgive me. I can’t make you stay. And I can’t follow you into that.”

  “I know,” he said. He thought of Aunt Gertrude, of Li’l Wallace, of Henry, of the preacher, of Bob Pratchett the white foreman at the mill. How long before he damned them all? He was a fool.

  She saw it in his face. “Ivan. Listen
to me. You got to leave folks alone.” She reached a hand out to touch his cheek. “And you can, I know you can. You ain’t no demon, Ivan. You’re just a sinner like everybody else.”

  He kissed her and took her close. He squeezed his eyes shut and smelled the salt of her tears, mixed in with dish soap and sweat and vanilla and the spice of cedar wood.

  Then he blew his nose into the paper napkin and wiped the sweat from his brow. She looked away from him, down at the table, as he got up and left the kitchen.

  Sarah was sitting dutifully in the twilight, looking out onto the dark oval of water and the first eager stars that blinked above it. She heard the screen door swing open and turned, bright with anticipation.

  “It’s time to go home,” Ivan said.

  She shook her head, unsure if she had heard him correctly. He offered his hand and she took it. Her fingers were cold from the outside air and the ice cream inside her. They walked through the ragged grass over the hill.

  In her face was a wolfish joy—she was soaking him in with her eyes. Somewhere behind that need was that lonely little girl, brave enough to pray in a lonely cemetery. His chest throbbed with pain.

  Her lips shivered and her teeth clicked together. He wanted to give her his jacket, but how could she forget him then?

  They reached the road. He let go her hand.

  He stepped back from her and slouched, scratching his head. He spoke in a new tone that was neither paternal nor comforting, but like that green-eyed nigger who lived in the house by the pond.

  “Well, I hope you enjoyed your dessert. Now run along afore anyone sees you hangin’ round here.”

  He saw the arrow of panic as it stabbed through her. Where was her Ivan? Where was her angel sent? Who was this man? “No, no,” she said, looking around her. Her head was foggy. She wiped at her eyes. She looked at him: some harmless nigger standing with her under the cold night sky. She stepped away. “What—”

  Ivan forced himself to turn and wave respectfully, to walk away.

  When he glanced back, Sarah was hugging herself. Her thoughts burned the air. A moment ago she had been saved, she had had a father and a home. Had she been with Jesus? No, she’d eaten with some niggers—shame leapt burning to her cheeks.

  She pushed past a fence post and began to run. God had seen her, seen her naked soul, seen everything there was of her to love, and abandoned her. He did not love her at all.

  The lost soul fell into the night.

  Coldness made a fist in Ivan’s belly as he crossed over the hill to his house.

  He pulled his jacket around him and stared ahead. Muriel had turned the porch light on so that he would not stumble.

  Roxie

  ROBERT REED

  Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling many stories to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And—also like Baxter and Stableford—he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Decency,” “Savior,” “The Remoras,” “Chrysalis,” “Whiptail,” “The Utility Man,” “Marrow,” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “The Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the ’80s and ’90s; many of his best stories were assembled in his first collection, The Dragons of Springplace. Nor is he nonprolific as a novelist, having turned out ten novels since the end of the ’80s, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, and Sister Alice. His most recent books include two chapbook novellas, Mere and Flavors of My Genius; a collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys; and a novel, The Well of Stars. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  As the wistful, gentle, regretful story that follows explains, a man’s best friend should be with him until the end—whether it’s his own, or the end of all things.

  She wakes me at five minutes before five in the morning, coming into the darkened bedroom with tags clinking and claws skating across the old oak floor, and then she uses a soft whine that nobody else will hear.

  I sit up and pull myself to the end of the bed, dressing in long pants and new walking shoes—the old shoes weren’t helping my balky arch and Achilles—and then I stop at the bathroom before pulling a warm jacket from the front closet. My dog keeps close track of my progress. In her step and the big eyes is enthusiasm and single-minded focus. At the side door, I tell her to sit and hold still please, and in the dark, I fasten the steel pinch collar and six-foot leash around a neck that has grown alarmingly thin.

  Anymore our walks are pleasant, even peaceful events—no more hard tugging or challenging other dogs. A little after five in the morning, early in March, the world is black and quiet beneath a cold, clear sky. Venus is brilliant, the moon cut thin. Crossing the empty four-lane road to the park, we move south past the soccer field and then west, and then south again on a narrow asphalt sidewalk. A hundred dogs pass this ground daily. The city has leash laws, and I have always obeyed them. But the clean-up laws are new, and only a fraction of the dog-walkers carry plastic sacks and flashlights. Where my dog has pooped for thirteen years, she poops now, and I kneel to stare at what she has done, convincing myself that the stool is reasonably firm, if exceptionally fragrant.

  A good beginning to our day.

  We continue south to a set of white wooden stairs. She doesn’t like stairs anymore, but she climbs them easily enough. Then we come back again on the wide bike path—a favorite stretch of hers. In the spring, rabbits will nest in the mowed grass, and every year she will find one or several little holes stuffed with tiny, half-formed bunnies.

  On this particular morning, nothing is caught and killed.

  An older man and his German shepherd pass us on the sidewalk below. Tony is a deep-voiced gentleman who usually waves from a distance and chats when we’re close. He loves to see Roxie bounce about, and she very much likes him. But in the darkness he doesn’t notice us, and I’m not in the mood to shout. He moves ahead and crosses the four-lane road, and when we reach that place, Roxie pauses, smelling where her friend has just been and leaking a sorry little whine.

  Home again, I pill my dog. She takes Proin to control bedwetting, plus half a metronidazole to fight diarrhea. She used to take a full metro, but there was an endless night a few weeks ago when she couldn’t rest, not indoors or out. She barked at nothing, which is very strange for her. Maybe a high-pitched sound was driving her mad. But our vet warned that she could have a tendency toward seizures, and the metro can increases their likelihood and severity. Which is why I pulled her back to just half a pill in the morning.

  I pack the medicine into a handful of canned dog food, stinky and prepared with the senior canine in mind. She waits eagerly and gobbles up the treat in a bite, happily licking the linoleum where I dropped it, relishing that final taste.

  Before six in the morning, I pour orange juice and go down to my basement office. My PC boots up without incident. I discover a fair amount of e-mail, none of it important. Then I start jumping between sites that offer a good look at science and world events. Sky & Telescope has a tiny article about an asteroid of uncertain size and imprecise orbit. But after a couple nights of observation, early estimates describe an object that might be a kilometer in diameter, and in another two years, it seems that this intruder will pass close to the Earth, bringing with it a one-in-six-thousand chance of an impact
.

  “But that figure won’t stand up,” promises one astronomer. “This happens all the time. Once we get more data, this danger is sure to evaporate to nothing.”

  My future wife was a reporter for the Omaha newspaper. I knew her because in those days, a lot of my friends were reporters. On a sultry summer evening, she and I went to the same Fourth of July party; and over the smell of gunpowder, Leslie mentioned that she’d recently bought a husky puppy.

  Grinning, I admitted that I’d always been intrigued by sled dogs.

  “You should come meet Roxie sometime,” she said.

  “Why Roxie?” I asked.

  “Foxie Roxie,” she explained. “She’s a red husky. To me, she sort of looks like an enormous fox.”

  Her dog was brownish red and white, with a dark red mask across her narrow face, accenting her soulful blue eyes. Leslie wasn’t home when I first visited, but her dog was in the backyard, absolutely thrilled to meet me. (Huskies are the worst guard dogs in the world.) Roxie was four or five months old, with a short coat and a big, long-legged frame. Sitting behind the chain-link gate, she licked the salt off my offered fingers. And then she hunkered down low, feigning submission. But her human was elsewhere, and I didn’t want the responsibility of opening gates and possibly letting this wolfish puppy escape. So I walked away, triggering a string of plaintive wails that caused people for a mile in every direction to ask, “Now who’s torturing that poor, miserable creature?”

  Leslie and I started dating in late October. But the courtship always had a competitive triangular feel about it.

  My new girlfriend worked long hours and drove a two-hour commute to and from Omaha. She didn’t have enough time for a hyperactive puppy. Feeling sorry for both of them, I would drop by to tease her dog with brief affections. Or if I stayed the night, I’d get up at some brutally early hour—before seven o’clock, some mornings—and dripping with fatigue, I’d join the two of them on a jaunt through the neighborhood and park and back again.