The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Are you all right?”

  “Mmm.” She opened her eyes, saw his face inches away and was surprised that he didn’t appear unfamiliar.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “I was wondering who you were, and when I looked at you, it was as if I already knew.” She traced the line of his upper lip with her forefinger. “Who are you?”

  “I thought you knew already.”

  “Maybe … but I don’t know anything specific. Just that you were a professor.”

  “You want to know specifics?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was an unruly child,” he said. “I refused to eat onion soup, I never washed behind my ears.”

  His grasp tightened on her hips, and he thrust inside her, a few slow, delicious movements, kissing her mouth, her eyes.

  “When I was a boy,” he said, quickening his rhythm, breathing hard between the words, “I’d go swimming every morning. Off the rocks at Ayler’s Point … it was beautiful. Cerulean water, palms. Chickens and pigs foraging. On the beach.”

  “Oh, God!” she said, locking her leg behind his thigh, her eyelids fluttering down.

  “My first girlfriend was named Penny … she was twelve. Redheaded. I was a year younger. I loved her because she had freckles. I used to believe … freckles were … a sign of something. I wasn’t sure what. But I love you more than her.”

  “I love you!” She found his rhythm, adapted to it, trying to take him all inside her. She wanted to see where they joined, and she imagined there was no longer any distinction between them, that their bodies had merged and were sealed together.

  “I cheated in mathematics class, I could never do trigonometry. God … Catherine.”

  His voice receded, stopped, and the air seemed to grow solid around her, holding her in a rosy suspension. Light was gathering about them, frictive light from a strange heatless burning, and she heard herself crying out, calling his name, saying sweet things, childish things, telling him how wonderful he was, words like the words in a dream, important for their music, their sonority, rather than for any sense they made. She felt again the building of a dark wave in her belly. This time she flowed with it and let it carry her far.

  * * *

  “Love’s stupid,” John said to her one day months later as they were sitting in the chamber of the heart, watching the complex eddying of golden light and whorls of shadow on the surface of the organ. “I feel like a damn sophomore. I keep finding myself thinking that I should do something noble. Feed the hungry, cure a disease.” He made a noise of disgust. “It’s as if I just woke up to the fact that the world has problems, and because I’m so happily in love, I want everyone else to be happy. But stuck.…”

  “Sometimes I feel like that myself,” she said, startled by this outburst. “Maybe it’s stupid, but it’s not wrong. And neither is being happy.”

  “Stuck in here,” he went on, “there’s no chance of doing anything for ourselves, let alone saving the world. As for being happy, that’s not going to last … not in here, anyway.”

  “It’s lasted six months,” she said. “And if it won’t last here, why should it last anywhere?”

  He drew up his knees, rubbed the spot on his ankle where it had been fractured.

  “What’s the matter with you? When I got here, all you could talk about was how much you wanted to escape. You said you’d do anything to get out. It sounds now that you don’t care one way or the other.”

  She watched him rubbing the ankle, knowing what was coming. “I’d like very much to escape. Now that you’re here, it’s more acceptable to me. I can’t deny that. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t leave if I had the chance. But at least I can think about staying here without despairing.”

  “Well, I can’t! I.…”He lowered his head, suddenly drained of animation, still rubbing his ankle. “I’m sorry, Catherine. My leg’s hurting again, and I’m in a foul mood.” He cut his eyes toward her. “Have you got that stuff with you?”

  “Yes.” She made no move to get it for him.

  “I realize I’m taking too much,” he said. “It helps pass the time.”

  She bristled at that and wanted to ask if she was the reason for his boredom; but she repressed her anger, knowing that she was partly to blame for his dependency on the brianine, that during his convalescence she had responded to his demands for the drug as a lover and not as a nurse.

  An impatient look crossed his face. “Can I have it?”

  Reluctantly she opened her pack, removed a flask of water and some pellets of brianine wrapped in cloth, and handed them over. He fumbled at the cloth, hurrying to unscrew the cap of the flask, and then—as he was about to swallow two of the pellets—he noticed her watching him. His face tightened with anger, and he appeared ready to snap at her. But his expression softened, and he downed the pellets, held out two more. “Take some with me,” he said. “I know I have to stop. And I will. But let’s just relax today, let’s pretend we don’t have any troubles … all right?”

  That was a ploy he had adopted recently, making her his accomplice in addiction and thus avoiding guilt; she knew she should refuse to join him, but at the moment she didn’t have the strength for an argument. She took the pellets, washed them down with a swallow of water and lay back against the chamber wall. He settled beside her, leaning on one elbow, smiling, his eyes muddied-looking from the drug.

  “You do have to stop, you know,” she said.

  His smile flickered, then steadied, as if his batteries were running low. “I suppose.”

  “If we’re going to escape,” she said, “you’ll need a clear head.”

  He perked up at this. “That’s a change.”

  “I haven’t been thinking about escape for a long time. It didn’t seem possible … it didn’t even seem very important, anymore. I guess I’d given up on the idea. I mean just before you arrived, I’d been thinking about it again, but it wasn’t serious … only frustration.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s become important again.”

  “Because of me, because I keep nagging about it?”

  “Because of both of us. I’m not sure escape’s possible, but I was wrong to stop trying.”

  He rolled onto his back, shielding his eyes with his forearm as if the heart’s glow were too bright.

  “John?” The name sounded thick and sluggish, and she could feel the drug taking her, making her drifty and slow.

  “This place,” he said. “This goddamn place.”

  “I thought—” she was beginning to have difficulty in ordering her words “—I thought you were excited by it. You used to talk.…”

  “Oh, I am excited!” He laughed dully. “It’s a storehouse of marvels. Fantastic! Overwhelming! It’s too overwhelming. The feeling here.…” He turned to her. “Don’t you feel it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “How could you stand living here for all these years? Are you that much stronger than me, or are you just insensitive?”

  “I’m…”

  “God!” He turned away, stared at the heart wall, his face tattooed with a convoluted flow of light and shadow, then flaring gold. “You’re so at ease here. Look at that.” He pointed to the heart. “It’s not a heart, it’s a bloody act of magic. Every time I come here I get the feeling it’s going to display a pattern that’ll make me disappear. Or crush me. Or something. And you just sit there looking at it with a thoughtful expression as if you’re planning to put in curtains or repaint the damn thing.”

  “We don’t have to come here anymore.”

  “I can’t stay away,” he said, and held up a pellet of brianine. “It’s like this stuff.”

  They didn’t speak for several minutes … perhaps a bit less, perhaps a little more. Time had become meaningless, and Catherine felt that she was floating away, her flesh suffused with a rosy warmth like the warmth of lovemaking. Flashe
s of dream imagery passed through her mind: a clown’s monstrous face; an unfamiliar room with tilted walls and three-legged blue chairs; a painting whose paint was melting, dripping. The flashes lapsed into thoughts of John. He was becoming weaker every day, she realized. Losing his resilience, growing nervous and moody. She had tried to convince herself that sooner or later he would become adjusted to life inside Griaule, but she was beginning to accept the fact that he was not going to be able to survive here. She didn’t understand why, whether it was due—as he had said—to the dragon’s oppressiveness or to some inherent weakness. Or a combination of both. But she could no longer deny it, and the only option left was for them to effect an escape. It was easy to consider escape with the drug in her veins, feeling aloof and calm, possessed of a dreamlike overview; but she knew that once it wore off she would be at a loss as to how to proceed.

  To avoid thinking, she let the heart’s patterns dominate her attention. They seemed abnormally complex, and as she watched she began to have the impression of something new at work, some interior mechanism that she had never noticed before, and to become aware that the sense of imminence that pervaded the chamber was stronger than ever before; but she was so muzzy-headed that she could not concentrate upon these things. Her eyelids drooped, and she fell into her recurring dream of the sleeping dragon, focusing on the smooth scaleless skin of its chest, a patch of whiteness that came to surround her, to draw her into a world of whiteness with the serene constancy of its rhythmic rise and fall, as unvarying and predictable as the ticking of a perfect clock.

  * * *

  Over the next six months Catherine devised numerous plans for escape, but discarded them all as unworkable until at last she thought of one that—although far from foolproof—seemed in its simplicity to offer the least risk of failure. Though without brianine the plan would have failed, the process of settling upon this particular plan would have gone faster had drugs not been available; unable to resist the combined pull of the drug and John’s need for companionship in his addiction, she herself had become an addict, and much of her time was spent lying at the heart with John, stupefied, too enervated even to make love. Her feelings toward John had changed; it could not have been otherwise, for he was not the man he had been. He had lost weight and muscle tone, grown vague and brooding, and she was concerned for the health of his body and soul. In some ways she felt closer than ever to him, her maternal instincts having been engaged by his dissolution; yet she couldn’t help resenting the fact that he had failed her, that instead of offering relief, he had turned out to be a burden and a weakening influence; and as a result whenever some distance arose between them, she exerted herself to close it only if it was practical to do so. This was not often the case, because John had deteriorated to the point that closeness of any sort was a chore. However, Catherine clung to the hope that if they could escape, they would be able to make a new beginning.

  The drug owned her. She carried a supply of pellets wherever she went, gradually increasing her dosages, and not only did it affect her health and her energy, it had a profound effect upon her mind. Her powers of concentration were diminished, her sleep became fitful, and she began to experience hallucinations. She heard voices, strange noises, and on one occasion she was certain that she had spotted old Amos Mauldry among a group of feelies milling about at the bottom of the colony chamber. Her mental erosion caused her to mistrust the information of her senses and to dismiss as delusion the intimations of some climactic event that came to her in dreams and from the patterns of light and shadow on the heart; and recognizing that certain of her symptoms—hearkening to inaudible signals and the like—were similar to the behavior of the feelies, she feared that she was becoming one of them. Yet this fear was not so pronounced as once it might have been. She sought now to be tolerant of them, to overlook their role in her imprisonment, perceiving them as unwitting agents of Griaule, and she could not be satisfied in hating either them or the dragon; Griaule and the subtle manifestations of his will were something too vast and incomprehensible to be a target for hatred, and she transferred all her wrath to Brianne, the woman who had betrayed her. The feelies seemed to notice this evolution in her attitude, and they became more familiar, attaching themselves to her wherever she went, asking questions, touching her, and while this made it difficult to achieve privacy, in the end it was their increased affection that inspired her plan.

  One day, accompanied by a group of giggling, chattering feelies, she walked up toward the skull, to the channel that led to the cavity containing the ghostvine. She ducked into the channel, half-tempted to explore the cavity again; but she decided against this course and on crawling out of the channel, she discovered that the feelies had vanished. Suddenly weak, as if their presence had been an actual physical support, she sank to her knees and stared along the narrow passage of pale red flesh that wound away into a golden murk like a burrow leading to a shining treasure. She felt a welling up of petulant anger at the feelies for having deserted her. Of course she should have expected it. They shunned this area like.… She sat up, struck by a realization attendant to that thought. How far, she wondered, had the feelies retreated? Could they have gone beyond the side passage that opened into the throat? She came to her feet and crept along the passage until she reached the curve. She peeked around it, and seeing no one, continued on, holding her breath until her chest began to ache. She heard voices, peered around the next curve, and caught sight of eight feelies gathered by the entrance to the side passage, their silken rags agleam, their swords reflecting glints of the inconstant light. She went back around the curve, rested against the wall; she had trouble thinking, in shaping thought into a coherent stream, and out of reflex she fumbled in her pack for some brianine. Just touching one of the pellets acted to calm her, and once she had swallowed it she breathed easier. She fixed her eyes on the blurred shape of a vein buried beneath the glistening ceiling of the passage, letting the fluctuations of light mesmerize her. She felt she was blurring, becoming golden and liquid and slow, and in that feeling she found a core of confidence and hope.

  There’s a way, she told herself; My God, maybe there really is a way.

  * * *

  By the time she had fleshed out her plan three days later, her chief fear was that John wouldn’t be able to function well enough to take part in it. He looked awful, his cheeks sunken, his color poor, and the first time she tried to tell him about the plan, he fell asleep. To counteract the brianine she began cutting his dosage, mixing it with the stimulant she had derived from the lichen growing on the dragon’s lung, and after a few days, though his color and general appearance did not improve, he became more alert and energized. She knew the improvement was purely chemical, that the stimulant was a danger in his weakened state; but there was no alternative, and this at least offered him a chance at life. If he were to remain there, given the physical erosion caused by the drug, she did not believe he would last another six months.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, nothing subtle, nothing complex, and if she’d had her wits about her, she thought, she would have come up with it long before; but she doubted she would have had the courage to try it alone, and if there was trouble, then two people would stand a much better chance than one. John was elated by the prospect. After she had told him the particulars he paced up and down in their bedroom, his eyes bright, hectic spots of red dappling his cheeks, stopping now and again to question her or to make distracted comments.

  “The feelies,” he said. “We … uh … we won’t hurt them?”

  “I told you … not unless it’s necessary.”

  “That’s good, that’s good.” He crossed the room to the curtains drawn across the entrance. “Of course it’s not my field, but…”

  “John?”

  He peered out at the colony through the gap in the curtains, the skin on his forehead washing from gold to dark. “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s not your field?”

  After a long pause he said, “It�
�s not … nothing.”

  “You were talking about the feelies.”

  “They’re very interesting,” he said distractedly. He swayed, then moved sluggishly toward her, collapsed on the pile of furs where she was sitting. He turned his face to her, looked at her with a morose expression. “It’ll be better,” he said. “Once we’re out of here, I’ll … I know I haven’t been … strong. I haven’t been…”

  “It’s all right,” she said, stroking his hair.

  “No, it’s not, it’s not.” Agitated, he struggled to sit up, but she restrained him, telling him not to be upset, and soon he lay still. “How can you love me?” he asked after a long silence.

  “I don’t have any choice in the matter.” She bent to him, pushing back her hair so it wouldn’t hang in his face, kissed his cheek, his eyes.

  He started to say something, then laughed weakly, and she asked him what he found amusing.

  “I was thinking about free will,” he said. “How improbable a concept that’s become. Here. Where it’s so obviously not an option.”

  She settled down beside him, weary of trying to boost his spirits. She remembered how he’d been after his arrival: eager, alive, and full of curiosity despite his injuries. Now his moments of greatest vitality—like this one—were spent in sardonic rejection of happy possibility. She was tired of arguing with him, of making the point that everything in life could be reduced by negative logic to a sort of pitiful reflex if that was the way you wanted to see it. His voice grew stronger, this prompted—she knew—by a rush of the stimulant within his system.

  “It’s Griaule,” he said. “Everything here belongs to him, even the most fleeting of hopes and wishes. What we feel, what we think. When I was a student and first heard about Griaule, about his method of dominion, the omnipotent functioning of his will, I thought it was foolishness pure and simple. But I was an optimist, then. And optimists are only fools without experience. Of course I didn’t think of myself as an optimist. I saw myself as a realist. I had a romantic notion that I was alone, responsible for my actions, and I perceived that as being a noble beauty, a refinement of the tragic … that state of utter and forlorn independence. I thought how cozy and unrealistic it was for people to depend on gods and demons to define their roles in life. I didn’t know how terrible it would be to realize that nothing you thought or did had any individual importance, that everything, love, hate, your petty likes and dislikes, was part of some unfathomable scheme. I couldn’t comprehend how worthless that knowledge would make you feel.”