The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Halfway down the stairs she was stopped again, this time by a near-subliminal noise. She cocked her head. It was almost like the vibration in the sanctuary the other day, or—she raced down the stairs, cut across the parish hall, and out to the 37th Street narthex. Someone was outside, leaning on the buzzer.

  “Who is it?” she called. Putting down her supplies, she peered through the peephole. There was a man outside, dressed in a suit. He was none of the nursery school parents. “You’ll have to speak up,” she yelled.

  “… from the hospital,” the man was saying. “We’re running a canvass of all the buildings—”

  “You’ll have to go to the church office,” she called back. “We don’t open this door during school hours.” She picked up her box and headed downstairs.

  Almost to her surprise, the man went away.

  * * *

  The acid was in the glue backing of a Mickey Mouse decal. Mickey was dressed as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, gesturing up stars, and you were supposed to lick off the LSD and then slap the decal onto your forehead. Too cute by half, Peter thought, and when he’d done up the tab, he crumpled the little mouse and swallowed it.

  While waiting for the drug to pass into his bloodstream, Peter did first some typing, and then some filing. When he found himself obsessively going back to each piece of filing to be sure it was retrievable and not placed away in some nonsensical drug-generated location, he quit and went up the stairs to the second floor.

  Hands behind his back, Peter stood before the hall window, looking down into the play yard. Children were scurrying about busily, swinging on the old tire hung from the oak tree, scrambling over the wooden monkeybars some parent had built years ago. Foam-rubber mattresses had been tied around the oak’s trunk, to protect the children.

  As he watched, a sudden wind blew through the tree and filled the air with yellow leaves. For an instant they hung motionless, defining the space between ground and sky, receding into infinite perspective. Then they swirled away.

  Years before he’d worked for an inner-city corporation, in a room with a window view of a church’s slate roof and nothing else. Ordinarily the roof was a barren, featureless stretch, but this one time it had snowed the night before, and the snow was loosened by a warm winter sun so that occasionally patches would let go and slide away in a puff of powdery white. Kim Soong—the only other typist in the room at that moment—leaned over her machine and stared, entranced. The room filled with silence.

  The acid was hitting. He felt a painful twinge in his stomach, from the minute trace of strychnine that was a by-product of the drug’s manufacture. Slowly he descended the newly challenging stairway and, remembering to lock up behind him, went outside and to the church door.

  Two men lay across the step, passing a paper-bagged bottle back and forth. The dark one beamed at Peter’s appearance, and they both scrambled to their feet.

  “This my friend Walter,” Ashod said. His companion, a sallow, half-shaven beanpole of a man, nodded several times. He had haunted eyes, with ring upon ring of darkness beneath them. “He’s come to meet the lady too.”

  Peter looked blankly first at the one man, then the other, and then away from both. He saw that there were a dozen or so more vent people—shopping bag ladies among them—scattered about the churchyard. Some wandered slowly, aimlessly about, and others sat huddled in decaying blankets and chunks of squashed-down cardboard boxes. One was pissing against the wall. It was a regular little Reaganville, and they looked as though they had come to stay. Fuck it, he decided suddenly, I’m on drugs, I don’t have to cope with this. He retreated into the church, slamming the door after him.

  The stone ribs of the sanctuary were still humming softly to themselves, but now—with the acid in him—Peter was not bothered by the phenomenon. Things were supposed to be strange on acid. And one way or another, Peter was determined to return things to the way they were supposed to be.

  The sanctuary was cold. Peter shivered, convulsively stared upward, and was shocked motionless by the wooden angels above. They glinted gold and then silver shards of ice. They multiplied, like the leaves had earlier, and filled the church, angel upon angel, as regular and unvarying as an Escher print.

  The empty spaces were angels too, and the images flashed from solid angels to negative angels and back in a flickering dance. The air was filled with music, words and notes transformed into a solid calligraphic tracery in an alphabet he did not know. There was something familiar about the music, and with a start, Peter recognized it as Vangelis’ Heaven and Hell. His Toshiba was still playing, and that realization was a jarring intrusion of reality.

  The thing over the altar was larger now, much larger, the size of a clenched fist, or of a coiled snake. The angels that intruded upon it were seized as if by overwhelming gravitational forces, crumpled to nothing, and swallowed up by it.

  The angels went on dancing. In a flash of insight, Peter realized that they were all mechanical. Identical, perfect—they were machines, creatures of a purely deterministic universe, entirely devoid of free will. They danced their machine dance in the air and it meant nothing.

  There were fewer angels now, as one by one they were devoured by the thing over the altar. They kept on dancing, though, and if they were aware of the thing—if they were even capable of awareness—it did not matter, for all was meaningless, all was a dance. Blind forces ground them down and, joylessly, they danced.

  And the thing over the altar continued to slowly grow.

  He fled—from the angels’ cold dance, from the acid-etched sense of total futility, but mostly from the horrible, nasty eating obscenity afloat in the church. Out of the sanctuary and down, into the basement, away from the light, into obscurity and darkness.

  When he had stopped, he found himself huddled into a cold, lightless corner. The ghost was there. He could feel her breath on his face, sense a near-visual glimmering of warmth from her body.

  * * *

  Sam was eating lunch. He sat with the makings spread out before him in the old chapel, by the unused chimney where the rat had taken up residence. He started with an apple, chewing it slow and thoughtfully as he considered the job he had done on the trap.

  The rat trap was dark and smoky. Rats were clever; they didn’t like new smells, chemical smells, human smells. He’d built a small fire of twigs and old leaves out by the trash cans in the play yard, and charred the trap over it, holding the trap in a clamp he had made of an old coat hanger.

  The apple finished, Sam unscrewed the peanut butter jar, plunged a knife in and stirred the oils around real good. He began spreading it onto a slice of Wonder Bread, paying close attention to the act, involving his whole mind in it, because the alternative was to think about what the doctors had told him that morning.

  He paused and smeared a dab of peanut butter onto the trap for bait, then returned to spreading the sandwich thick. Peanut butter made good bait because rats liked that kind of greasy stuff, oily and rancid.

  He was sitting in a patch of colored light from the south rose window, and for some while it had flickered gently, as if interrupted by the shadows of a lightly tossing tree branch. But there was no tree outside there, and Sam looked up automatically, puzzled, to see what was interfering with the light.

  There was a white girl in front of the window, glory light streaming about her, and she was sitting cross-legged in the air.

  Sam could not blink, could not look away. His sandwich was frozen in front of him. He knew this girl, had met her once before in the basement. She had been wearing the same denim jeans and jacket then, and her hair was as red as it had ever been.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Sam ignored them. But when the door slammed open, the suddenness of the sound made him glance without thinking back toward the hallway, and he saw Sheila enter the room. The light about him cleared, and he didn’t have to look up again to know that the girl was gone.

  “Sam.” The nursery school teacher was before him
now, and she peered into his face, concerned. “Sam, I’m very worried about you, about the way you’ve been acting today. Have I offended you in some way? Should I be apologizing for something?”

  He looked away, could not answer. But she would not go away.

  “Sam, what’s wrong with you today?”

  Sooner or later, he knew, he would have to tell somebody. “I think I’m cured,” he said slowly. And burst into tears.

  * * *

  The vent people were roasting a dog in one of the window wells. By pure good fortune they’d chosen one of the few that had been cinder-blocked up. The skinned carcass was hung on a spit, turned erratically by an enthusiastic, hunchbacked individual. The church wall was black with smoke and grease. They offered Peter a leg, but he shook his head and wandered away.

  There were over a hundred vent people in the churchyard, and their trash and scattered possessions made the yard as cluttered and filthy as a battlefield. One toothless old hag lifted her skirts and squatted, to the profound disinterest of her fellows. Her piss steamed as it hit the ground. A convulsive alky, looking like a skinny black spider, swooped great circles in the walkway dust with both hands, babbling of demons in his head.

  And all the while there were at least five radios playing, scavenged from trash bags and practically worthless, but with a good decade’s life left in their permablast batteries. They were tuned to three separate newscasts, and the fragmentary snatches of global hysteria tumbled and cascaded one over another.

  —warned that unless American troops withdraw from Burma—escaped from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal—survivors’ reports of CBW warfare were denied—troops called up from—martial law declared in five midwestern states—

  Peter stopped before an old scissors-grinder who had set up his cart on the sidewalk. It was an ancient thing, hammered together from scraps and pushed about by hand. The whetstone was run by a vintage 1922 electric motor in black-enameled housing, which fed off a tangle of car batteries hooked up in series.

  —reported shot down over Sinkiang—

  “You and I,” shouted the scissors-grinder, “HEEDLESSLY deserted God some MANY years ago to join vain Satan’s VAIN revolt against God’s TEMPORARY laws. All TRUTHS emanate from God and we will reap WHAT we have sown. This is WHY we are now in human bodies. TO REAP WHAT?”

  A fat woman waddled past, going “Quackquackquack” like a cartoon duck on amphetamines. She drew Peter’s eyes away from the orator, and he saw that the yard was as abuzz with divergent theologies as the Middle Ages were before the Inquisition.

  —meanwhile tensions escalated in the Middle East and Africa in a bizarre—

  A deadpan little man in very clean clothes stood on the steps and shouted, “The Bible tells of the SCARLET WHORE that is BABYLON that is the BEAST that has put her FOOT on the serpent! She has SWALLOWED UP the Seventh Seal and has loosed the horrors of the ROCKY MOUNTAIN ARSENAL. If you have FAITH the size—”

  And somehow in the babbling confusion of voices, Peter realized that he did not have to be here, did not, in fact, even know how he had gotten here, and went inside, to his office.

  —limited use of tactical nuclear—

  * * *

  There were three cigarettes afire in the ashtray by the time Sheila came into the office. One by one, Peter had lit them up and put them down, unsmoked. She cheerfully waved a hand in the bluish smoke and said, “Phew! It smells like a train station in here.”

  Her presence was an anchor he could hang onto. “Hi,” he said.

  “Peter, it’s wonderful,” she bubbled. “Have you heard the news? Sam’s doctors say he’s going to be okay. He’s had a spontaneous remission—isn’t that wonderful? It was a miracle, they said—a one-chance-in-a-billion miracle!” She banged her fists together, and bounced up on her toes in elation.

  “A miracle,” Peter said numbly. He should have felt happy for Sam, and yet he didn’t. All he could think of was the memo firing the old man, and that Sam wasn’t going to die in time for him to avoid receiving it.

  “Yes, but Peter—” her mood shifted again—“you have to do something about all these dirty, filthy vagrants that are hanging around the church. The parents are going to be coming by to pick up their children in a couple of hours, and they are going to have a fit. Really.”

  “They’re not really dangerous,” Peter said. “They’re none of them capable enough to be dangerous.”

  “Peter, I want you to get rid of them! Call the police or something. If we don’t get them out of here, we’re going to lose half our students!” She leaned forward, examining his face. “Are you on something?”

  “Not anymore,” he said, and belatedly realized that it was true. He was perfectly straight. Just tired—extremely tired, almost stunned with weariness. There was a strange blank area in his memory, where something flickered bright and ungraspable. He shrugged mentally. Chalk it up to the drugs and forget it. You could only go on as before.

  Taking a deep breath to settle himself, he picked up the phone, dialed, and when Alverson’s secretary refused to put him through snarled, “Listen, sister, this is Sergeant Blindwood of the Pennsylvania State Police and I am right in the middle of a fucking shootout. We have a psychotic individual holding this fucker’s wife and fucking kids and shouting slogans about the fucking Hard Anarchy Liberation Army, and you are holding me up. How’d you like to have your sex life investigated with a fucking crowbar?”

  A moment later a very small and hesitant voice said, “Peter … this is you, isn’t it?”

  Peter tossed the receiver to a horrified Sheila. “All yours,” he said.

  She held it as if it were a poisonous snake that would bite her if she let go. Then she said, “Peter, you can’t evade responsibility by having someone else say the words.” There was compassion in her voice.

  Slowly—reluctantly—Peter reached for the phone, closed his fingers about it, took it. “Harry?” he said into the receiver. “Listen, I’m sorry about all this. I dialed the wrong number.” He listened in silence for a time, said, “Yes, I know,” and listened some more. The outside door closed gently as Sheila left.

  When Alverson hung up, Peter jabbed down on the plunger with one finger, cutting the connection. He took a deep breath, and dialed the number for the police.

  “Hello,” he said, “I’m calling from the Church of the Covenant on Thirty-seventh Street…”

  * * *

  Time was short, and Jennifer was hungry again. She had scoured the church from top to bottom, passing by many things—cookie dough, Ivory Soap flakes, Brillo pads, clay—that she might normally have lingered over. But she could no longer spare the time to build from precursor elements.

  The chemical dump counteradvocacy group’s office was originally the choir director’s, a century ago when the position was full-time. It had a skylight through the slate roof (with plastic stapled to its underside to cut down on infiltration), and a row of narrow leaded-glass windows that looked out into the storage rooms of the top floor. Jennifer had climbed through one of these and was going through a carton of bumper stickers when the thing in the sanctuary stirred.

  The sense of its movement rose through shafts and vents left over from an early, unsuccessful attempt to retrofit a forced air heating system to the church. Jennifer shuddered as if a jolt of electricity had shot up her spine.

  For an instant she thought it was about to happen, and she was wracked by terror and bleak despair. It was too early. She was not ready. Then the movement ceased—there was yet a chance, however slim. She was on her feet and through the window almost immediately.

  Fear drove her down the stairs, running silently, wanting to hide but not daring to do so. Inspiration made her nab the key ring from the sexton’s closet. As sly and furtive as a shadow, she slipped back up the stairs through the narthex and into the parish hall.

  She could hear the sexton working in the chancel, but the connecting door was shut and he couldn’t see her. One key of the ring f
it into the communion cabinet. She opened the doors and found what she needed.

  There were a lot of linen napkins, which she shoved aside, and a tray with slots for perhaps a hundred tiny little glasses to fit into. The bread was carefully wrapped in white paper. It was half-gone from the previous Sunday, and stale and hard as wood, but it would do—it would do!

  Triumphantly she shoved the bread under one arm, and cradled the two bottles of communion wine in the other. She ran.

  * * *

  There was a dark storm gathering outside. The thunderhead piled up, charcoal blue, over the surrounding buildings. Faint lightnings shimmered within its heart. The vent people danced happily on the saturated-green lawn. To every side, the blind and featureless walls of the highrises blocked out large chunks of the sky. It felt like being enclosed in a box.

  Peter stared glumly out the window, waiting, all pretense of working gone. Once, the phone rang and he let it go until someone in the nursery school picked it up on their extension. He shifted papers to either side of his desk to make room for his elbows, and rested his chin on his arms.

  Fast flashes of red and blue light struck and rebounded off the church walls, and Peter saw that police cars were pulling up, blocking off the surrounding streets. There were more of them than he had expected, some twenty or so, and they arrived eerily silent—flashers on and sirens mute.

  Three cars—one civilian—nosed through the blockade and parked by the curb. Their inhabitants conferred, formed a party, and moved briskly up the walk. The civilian craned his neck interestedly as they passed by the scissors-grinder’s old cart, which had been pulled apart and made into an altar of sorts. What might have been a crucifix canted crazily atop it, with several broken plaster madonnas—scavenged from God knows where—lashed to its arms. Several attempts had been made to paint the assemblage, each abandoned to lack of paint or concentration. The result was an unpretty riot of mismatched color.