The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  It was a will which had survived even the loss of consciousness itself, somewhere in the long, stranded aeons: a relic of awareness long since transmuted to a deeper biochemical urge—a will to return home, still embedded within a once-intelligent species reduced by time to a mere parasitic infection.

  But it was a home which, surely, could no longer exist.

  The mercuric’s golden cilia twitched once more, in a great wave of motion which shuddered down its ice-flecked body.

  Then it was still.

  Larionova stood up; her knees and calves were stiff and cold, despite the suit’s heater. “Come on,” she said to Scholes and Dixon. “You’d better get your team off the ice as soon as possible; I’ll bet the universities have their first exploratory teams down here half a day after we pass Earth the news.”

  Dixon nodded. “And Thoth?”

  “Thoth? I’ll call Superet. I guess I’ve an asteroid to order.…”

  And then, she thought, at last I can sleep. Sleep and get back to work.

  With Scholes and Dixon, she trudged across the dust-strewn ice to the bubble shelters.

  * * *

  She could feel the Ice under her belly … but above her there was no Ice, no water even, an infinite nothing into which the desperate pulses of her blinded eyes disappeared without echo.

  Astonishingly—impossibly—she was, after all, above the Ice. How could this be? Was she in some immense upper cavern, its Ice roof too remote to see? Was this the nature of the Universe, a hierarchy of caverns within caverns?

  She knew she would never understand. But it didn’t seem to matter. And, as her awareness faded, she felt the Seeker inside her subside to peace.

  A final warmth spread out within her. Consciousness splintered like melting ice, flowing away through the closing tunnels of her memory.

  GOING AFTER OLD MAN ALABAMA

  William Sanders

  Are you your brother’s keeper? Or your neighbor’s? Here’s a clever, inventive, and offbeat tale that suggests that you are, or should be, even if you have to go to a great deal of trouble and travel a very long way, to some extremely odd places, in order to keep him—or keep him from making mischief, anyway …

  William Sanders lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where he is an active member of the traditional Nighthawk Keetoowah Society. A former powwow dancer and Cherokee gospel singer, he is the author of fifteen published books, many of them as Will Sundown, including Westerns and adventure books. As Sanders, he has published a few science fiction novels, including Journey to Fusang (a nominee for the Campbell Award) and The Wild Blue and Gray. His other books include the popular Taggart Roper mystery novels, The Next Victim, A Death on 66, and Blood Autumn.

  Charlie Badwater was the most powerful medicine man in all the eastern Oklahoma hill country. Or the biggest witch, depending on which person you listened to; among Cherokees the distinction tends to be a little hazy.

  Either way, when Thomas Cornstalk finally decided that something had to be done about Old Man Alabama, he didn’t need to think twice before getting in his old Dodge pickup truck and driving over to Charlie Badwater’s place. Thomas Cornstalk was no slouch of a medicine man himself, but in a situation like this you went to the man with the power.

  Charlie Badwater lived by himself in a one-room log cabin at the end of a really bad dirt road, up near the head of Butcherknife Hollow. There was nobody in sight when Thomas Cornstalk drove up, but as he got down from the pickup cab a big gray owl fluttered down from the surrounding woods and disappeared into the deep shadows behind the cabin. A moment later the cabin door opened and Charlie Badwater stepped out into the sunlight. ”‘Siyo, Tami, dohiju?” he called.

  Thomas Cornstalk half-raised a hand in casual greeting. He and Charlie Badwater went back a long way. “’Siyo, Jali. Gado haduhne? Catching any mice?” he added dryly.

  Charlie Badwater chuckled deep in his chest without moving his lips. “Hey,” he said, “remember old Moses Otter?” And they both chuckled together, remembering.

  * * *

  Moses Otter had been a mean old man with a permanent case of professional jealousy, especially toward anybody who might have enough power to make him look bad. Since Moses Otter had never in his life been more than a second-rate witch, this included a lot of people.

  One of his nastier tricks had been to turn himself into an owl—he could do that all right, but then who can’t?—and fly over the woods until he spotted a clearing where a possible rival was growing medicine tobacco. Now of course serious tobacco has to be grown absolutely unseen by anyone except the person who will be using it, so this had meant a great deal of frustration and ruined medicine all over the area. Quite a few people had tried to witch Moses Otter and put a stop to this crap, but his protective medicine had always worked.

  Charlie Badwater, then a youthful and inexperienced unknown, had gone to Moses Otter’s place and told him in front of several witnesses that if he enjoyed being a bird he could have a hell of a good time from now on. And had turned him on the spot into the mangiest, scabbiest turkey buzzard ever seen in Oklahoma; and Moses Otter, after a certain amount of flopping around trying to change himself back, had flown away, never to be seen again except perhaps as an unidentifiable member of a gang of roadkill-pickers down on the Interstate.

  That, Thomas Cornstalk recalled, had been the point at which everybody had realized that Charlie Badwater was somebody special. Maybe they hadn’t fully grasped just how great he would one day become, but the word had definitely gone out that Charlie Badwater was somebody you didn’t want to screw around with.

  * * *

  Now, still chuckling, Charlie Badwater tilted his head in the direction of his cabin. “Kawi jaduli’? Got a pot just made.”

  They went inside the cabin and Thomas Cornstalk sat down at the little pine-board table while Charlie Badwater poured a couple of cups of hell-black coffee from a blue and white speckled metal pot. “Ought to be ready to walk by now,” Charlie Badwater said. “Been on the stove a long time.”

  “Good coffee,” Thomas Cornstalk affirmed, tasting. “Damn near eat it with a fork.”

  They sat at the table, drinking coffee and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, not talking for the moment: a couple of fifty-some-odd-year-old full-bloods, similarly dressed in work shirts and Wal-Mart jeans and cheap nylon running shoes made in Singapore. Charlie Badwater had the classic lean, deep-chested, no-ass build of the mountain Cherokee, while Thomas Cornstalk was one of those heavyset, round-faced types who may or may not have some Choctaw blood from way back in old times. Their faces, however, were similarly weathered, their hands callused and scarred from years of manual labor. Charlie Badwater was missing the end joint of his left index finger. There were only three people who knew how he had lost it and two of them were dead and nobody had the nerve to ask the third one. Let alone Charlie.

  They talked a little, finally, about this and that; routine inquiries about the health of relatives, remarks about the weather, the usual pleasantries that a couple of properly raised Cherokee men will exchange before getting down to the real point of a conversation. But Thomas Cornstalk, usually the politest of men, was worried enough to hold the small talk to the bare minimum required by decency.

  “Gusdi nusdi,” he said finally. “Something’s the matter. I’m not sure what,” he added, in response to the inquiry in Charlie Badwater’s eyes. “It’s Old Man Alabama.”

  “That old weirdo?” Charlie Badwater wrinkled his nose very slightly, as if smelling something bad. “What’s he up to these days? Still nutty as a kenuche ball, I guess?”

  “Who knows? That’s what I came to talk with you about,” Thomas Cornstalk said. “He’s up to something, all right, and I think it’s trouble.”

  * * *

  Old Man Alabama was a seriously strange old witch—in his case there was no question at all about the definition—who lived on top of a mountain over in Adair County, not far from the Arkansas line. He wasn’t Cherokee; he cla
imed to be the last surviving descendant of the Alabama tribe, and he often gibbered and babbled in a language he claimed was the lost Alabama tongue. It could have been; Thomas Cornstalk couldn’t recognize a word of it, and he spoke sixteen Indian languages as well as English and Spanish—that was his special medicine, the ability to speak in different tongues; he could also talk with animals. On the other hand it might just as easily have been a lot of meaningless blather, which was what Thomas Cornstalk and a good many other people suspected.

  There was also the inconvenient fact that there were still some Alabamas living on a reservation down in Texas, big as you please; but it had been a long time since anybody had pointed this out in Old Man Alabama’s hearing. Not after what had happened to the last bigmouth to bring the subject up.

  Whatever he was—Thomas Cornstalk had long suspected he was some kind of Creek or Seminole or maybe Yuchi, run off by his own people—Old Man Alabama was as crazy as the Devil and twice as nasty. That much was certain.

  He was skinny and tall and he had long arms that he waved wildly about while talking, or for no apparent reason at all. Everything about him was long: long matted hair falling past his shoulders, long beaky nose, long bony fingers ending in creepy-looking long nails. He walked with a strange angling gait, one shoulder higher than the other, and he spat constantly, tuff tuff tuff, so you could follow him down a dirt road on a dry day by the little brown spots in the dust.

  It was widely believed that he had a long tongue like a moth’s, that he kept curled up in his mouth and only stretched out at night during unspeakable acts. That was another story people weren’t eager to investigate first hand.

  He also stank. Not the way a regular man smelled bad, even a very dirty regular man—though Old Man Alabama was sure as hell dirty enough—but a horrible, eye-watering stench that reminded you of things like rotten cucumbers and dead skunks on the highway in hot weather. That alone would have been reason enough for people to give him a wide berth, even if they hadn’t been afraid of him.

  And oh, yes, people were afraid of him. Mothers hid their pregnant daughters indoors when they saw him walking by the house, afraid that even a single direct look from those hooded reptilian eyes might cause monstrous deformities to the unborn.

  Most people, in fact, avoided talking about him at all; it was well known that witches knew when they were being talked about, and the last thing people wanted was to draw the displeased attention of a witch as powerful and unpredictable as Old Man Alabama. It was a measure of the power of both Charlie Badwater and Thomas Cornstalk that they were willing to talk freely about him. Even so, Thomas Cornstalk would have been just as comfortable if Charlie Badwater hadn’t spoken quite so disrespectfully about the old man.

  * * *

  “All I know,” Thomas Cornstalk said, “he’s been cooking up some kind of almighty powerful medicine up on that mountain of his. I go over that way pretty often, you know, got some relatives that call me up every time one of their kids gets a runny nose … anyway, sometimes you can hear these sounds, up where your ear can’t quite get ahold of them, like those dog whistles, huh? And people see strange lights up on the mountain at night, and sometimes in the daytime the air looks sort of shimmery above the mountaintop, the way it does over a hot stove. Lots of smoke too, that’s another thing. I got a smell or two when the wind was right and I don’t know what the old man’s burning up there but it’s nothing I’d want in my medicine bag.”

  He paused, sipping his coffee, his eyes wandering about the interior of the cabin. Lots of medicine men live surrounded by all sorts of junk, their houses littered and smelly, walls and ceiling hung with bundles of dried herbs and feathers and skins and bones and other parts of birds and animals. Charlie Badwater’s cabin, however, was as neat as a white doctor’s office, everything stowed carefully away out of sight.

  “I went up to see him, finally,” Thomas Cornstalk said. “Or tried to, but he was either gone or hiding. I couldn’t get close to the cabin. He’s got the place circled—you know? You get to about ten or fifteen steps from the cabin and it starts to be harder and harder to walk, like you’re stepping in molasses, till finally you can’t go any farther. By then the cabin looks all rubbery, too, like it’s melting. I had my pipe with me, and some good tobacco, and I tried every igawesdi I know for getting past a protective spell. Whatever Old Man Alabama has around that cabin, it’s no ordinary medicine.”

  “Huh.” Charlie Badwater was beginning to look interested. “See anything? I mean anything to suggest what’s going on.”

  “Not a thing.” Thomas Cornstalk pulled his shoulder blades together for a second. “Place made my skin crawl so bad, I got out pretty quick. Went home and smoked myself nearly black. Burned enough cedar for a Christmas-tree lot before I felt clean again.”

  “Huh,” Charlie Badwater said again. He sat for a minute or so in silence, staring out through the open cabin door, though there was nothing out there but a stretch of dusty yard and the woods beyond.

  “All right,” he said at last, and got to his feet. “We better go pay Old Man Alabama a visit.”

  Thomas Cornstalk stood up too. “You want to go right now?” he said, a little surprised.

  “Sure. You got something else you have to do?”

  “No,” Thomas Cornstalk admitted, after a moment’s hesitation. He wasn’t really ready for this, he thought, but maybe it was better to get on with it. The longer they waited, the better the chance that Old Man Alabama would find out they were coming, and do something unusually bad to try and stop them.

  Charlie Badwater started toward the door. Thomas Cornstalk said, “You’re not taking any stuff along? You know, medicine?”

  Charlie Badwater patted his jeans pockets. “Got my pipe and some tobacco on me. I don’t expect I’ll need anything else.”

  Going out the door, following Charlie Badwater across the yard, Thomas Cornstalk shook his head in admiring wonder. That Charlie, he thought. Probably arm-wrestle the Devil left-handed, if he got a chance. Probably win, too.

  * * *

  They rode back down the dirt road in Thomas Cornstalk’s old pickup truck. Charlie Badwater didn’t own any kind of car or truck. He didn’t have a telephone or electricity in his cabin, either. It was some mysterious but necessary part of his personal medicine.

  The dirt track came out of the woods, after a mile or so of dust and rocks and sun-hardened ruts, and joined up with a winding gravel road that dipped down across the summer-dry bed of Butcherknife Creek and then climbed up the side of Turkeyfoot Ridge. On the far side of the ridge, the gravel turned into potholed county blacktop. Several miles farther along, they came out onto the Stilwell road. “Damn, Charlie,” Thomas Cornstalk said, hanging a left, “you think you could manage to live further back in the woods?”

  “Not without coming out on the other side,” Charlie Badwater said.

  * * *

  The road up beside of Old Man Alabama’s mountain was even worse than the one to Charlie Badwater’s place. “I was here just this morning,” Thomas Cornstalk said, fighting the wheel, “and I swear this mule track is in worse shape than it was then. And look at that,” he exclaimed, and stepped on the brake pedal. “I know that wasn’t there before—”

  A big uprooted white oak tree was lying across the road. The road was littered with snapped-off limbs and still-green leaves. The two men in the pickup truck looked at each other. There hadn’t been so much as a stiff breeze all day.

  “Get out and walk, then,” Charlie Badwater said after a minute. “We can use the exercise, I guess.”

  They got out and walked on up the road, climbing over the fallen tree. A little way beyond, the biggest rattlesnake Thomas Cornstalk had ever seen was lying in the road, looking at them. It coiled up and rattled its tail and showed its fangs but Charlie Badwater merely said, “Ayuh jaduji,” and the huge snake uncoiled and slid quietly off into the woods while Charlie and Thomas walked past.

  “I always wondered,” Th
omas Cornstalk said as they trudged up the steep mountainside. “You suppose a rattlesnake really believes you’re his uncle, when you say that?”

  “Who knows? It doesn’t matter how things work, Thomas. It just matters that they do work.” Charlie Badwater grinned. “Talked to this professor from Northeastern State once, showed up at a stomp dance down at Redbird. He said Cherokees are pragmatists.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Beats me. I told him most of the ones I know are Baptists, with a few Methodists and of course there’s a lot of people getting into those holy-roller outfits—” Charlie Badwater stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. “Huh,” he grunted softly, as if to himself. Thomas Cornstalk couldn’t remember ever seeing him look so surprised.

  They had rounded the last bend in the road and had come in sight of Old Man Alabama’s cabin. Except the cabin itself was barely in sight of all, in any normal sense. The whole clearing where the cabin stood was walled off by a kind of curtain of yellowish light, through which the outlines of the cabin showed only vaguely and irregularly. The sky looked somehow darker directly above the clearing, and all the surrounding trees seemed to have taken on strange and disturbing shapes. There was a high-pitched whining sound in the air, like the singing of a million huge mosquitoes.

  “You were right, Thomas,” Charlie Badwater said after a moment. “The old turd’s gotten hold of something heavy. Who’d have thought it?”

  “It wasn’t like this when I was here this morning,” Thomas Cornstalk said, looking around him and feeling very uneasy. “Not so extreme, like.”

  “Better have a look, then.” Charlie Badwater took out a buckskin pouch and a short-stemmed pipe. Facing toward the sun, he poured a little tobacco from the pouch into his palm and began to sing, a strange-sounding song that Thomas Cornstalk had never heard before. Four times he sang the song through, pausing at the end of each repetition to blow softly on the tobacco. Then he stuffed the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe. It was an ordinary cheap briar pipe, the kind they sell off cardboard wall displays in country gas stations. In Cherokee medicine there is no particular reverence or importance placed on the pipe itself; the tobacco carries all the power, and then only if properly doctored with the right igawesdi words. Charlie Badwater could, if he had preferred, have simply rolled the tobacco into a cigarette and used that.